“La Befana vien di notte
con le scarpe tutte rotte
con le toppe alla sottana:
Viva, viva la Befana!”
(“Old Befana comes by night
with her shoes from first twilight
with some patches on her skirt
Giving charcoal to naughty kids”)
The “Befana” traditionally comes the night of between the 5th and 6th of January. She is that old scary witch, who flies on a broom to reward with candies the children who have been good and punish the naughty ones giving them only just charcoal – well, sugar charcoal -. She usually leaves the gifts in the old sock, children leave hanging near their beds. Just like Santa, when we were kids, we used to stay awake till late, as we wanted to catch a glimpse of the horrible sinister woman, till exhausted, we fell asleep and so our parents could fill our socks.
Of course the morning we looked forward to seeing our treats and woke up early. Well, you have to know that this is exactly what I keep doing these days: I go to bed late at night and wake up early in the morning in all excitement to look for my surprise. Why? At my age am I still hoping to receive my deserved candies -as I know I’ve been extremely good and patient this year-? Nope. The treat I seek every day is named DPCM: the Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers. Such decrees are usually issued every couple of weeks, but in between, there the amendments of the amendments of the last DPCM which update the DPCM before. Our ministers are in the strange habit of meeting at night and only when it is dawn, like the Befana, they spread their treats. That’s why every morning as soon as I wake up, I grab my sock, sorry, my smartphone and if I see 276 WhatsApp messages, I understand before reading them that the treat has arrived.
To cut a long story short, till last night, we, high school teachers didn’t know when, if, how we would go back to school. During those days of uncertainties, we found ourselves doing the most unbelievable actions like: joining remote meetings during festivities and even asking form more, planning the most disruptive demonstrations and dropping the most disruptive demonstrations, fighting over new schedules according the guidelines of the last DPCM to find out that it was all eventually useless. We could have spent all this time, reading, cooking, redecorating, writing and whatever more, as this morning the Befana broke with the news that it is still unsafe for high school students to be in presence, event 50% presence.
Well, “you may go to sleep now, Tink”, I guess you would think. Not exactly, as there is the issue of the traffic light. Yes, the traffic light, that stuff with yellow, green and red lights. Yesterday night’s decision is only temporary: till next Monday. Now it is to be decided, what colour the 20 Italian regions are, according to the Covid data from the scientific technical committee. GREEN means GO: go to school, work, normal life; YELLOW/ORANGE, well, I know that abroad yellow means slow down and stop, but for us yellow sounds more like go as fast as you can, before it turns RED, hence, if we are in a yellow zone we may go back to school, normal life etc. yet, with some restrictions, so we have to do quickly what is needed as it might turn RED in a second. When you live in a RED area, well, you’d better subscribe Netflix as you are locked in.
Hence, here we are, our destiny will be determined by a color and then another color till this Covid question will come to an end and we could go back to normal. What a treat that would be, my dear Befana.
I often wonder what response I would get if I taught in the way I used to do at the beginning of my career. Because one thing teachers must learn quickly – and those who don’t will end their days behind a desk or screen bitterly disappointed – : the communication model has to be modified again and again to be effective and have a positive feedback. Generations change and necessarily we have to change with them. Any teacher’s repertoire, because we have one, has to be updated, refreshed, modernized in order to be appealing and above all, we always need to find new forms of expression to connect with our public. When I was a student, I was the one who had to find a way to connect with my teachers and if I did not, well, the problem was mine. Now it is just the opposite. If it was much easier to teach decades ago, I can’t say. What I know is that now we are mostly required to be entertainers, as adolescents cannot, must not be bored.
Hence, since it was time to deal with the theme of the double narrator in Wuthering Heights, I wondered how I could connect with my audience without being boring, but catchy and entertaining. My addiction to Netflix helped me in a way. Recently I have noticed that the flash forward device, for example, has become increasingly popular among series. Flash forwards are effective, if you want to create a certain suspense, which originates in the initial disorientation due to the lack of familiarity with the characters and the usual breathtaking event, of which we have only partial knowledge. We are given just the few necessary tiles to leave us confused enough to want for more. At that point the chronological, explicative narration begins. I also noticed that if the use of such device is not well calibrated, it may often result quite annoying, as in series I loved like “How to get away with murder” or “How I met you mother”, in fact, sometimes I found myself wishing to scream: “Enough!”
And what are the first three chapters of Wuthering Heights but one of the first experiments in using flash forwards in a narration? When the novel starts, 98% of the events have already happened. Emily Brontë chooses apparently the most unfit of narrators to introduce us to Wuthering Heights, in fact Mr Lockwood is a total stranger to the story. He has just arrived from London to go to Wuthering Heights and call on Heathcliff, the landlord whose house he has rented: Thrushcross Grange. In a way, he forces Heathcliff lo let him in, feigning to ignore his scarce sense of hospitality and due to adverse weather conditions, he is allowed to stay the night. Through the eyes of Lockwood we are introduced to the weird characters who inhabit Wuthering Heights, even those who are dead. The general atmosphere is unfriendly and scary. That place seems to be hiding secrets everywhere. When he reads some diaries he finds in the room he has been left, we are acquainted with a certain Catherine, who will be the other central character of the novel. That very moment something seems to be tapping at the window and suddently a sequence of unexpected events follow: a scream, a ghost, Heathcliff’s tears and desperation, till dawn arrives. 
I guess it has been 4 years, at least, since WordPress gave up sending the report with blog stats. Do you remember it? That one with fireworks for each post written, where the more you had posted the more enlightened your screen was. Yes, that one. The stats explanations were just pure genius. They had been conceived to make you feel a sort of Hemingway in being. Even if you had had just 100 readers in a year, family and unwilling students included, they put it in such a way to make you believe it a success, because, they said, if those 100 readers had been in line, they could have covered a length up to your bathroom.😳 True! I had never thought about it. 🤔 So, when the following year the number of readers increased, you found out eventually that that line had now reached Santiago de Compostela and God knows what distant country it would have touched now, if they had kept writing those stats. I miss them. They were so rewarding, after all.
Therefore, since WordPress has given up offering such precious service, if we want to make a final survey of our blogging activities, we have to do it on our own. Having read so many posts of this kind on the pages of fellow bloggers, I thought it was high time to give a look at my stats too. Believe me, I didn’t do it with a light heart, as I knew I was guilty of having been pretty inconstant last year for many good reasons: first of all, reaching level 7740 of Candy Crush takes a lot time and energy; and if I play, I cannot think or write. Actually, I play when I don’t want to think. That said, I have to confess, that I am lazy too. I don’t read as much as I should – and I blushed with shame and guilt, when I read on Chris’s page, who blogs as 
Giving a look at what these bored readers seem to prefer, the posts on Wilde win over my musings on pandemic and education, but even this year the top of the posts goes to what I could define that only lucky unrepeatable hit that often happens in an artist’s life, which, in my case, for the fourth time in a row is : “The Mythical Method” with 2,877 views; a post I wrote six years ago. Apparently, I am a world authority on this matter, as I find myself on page 1 of Google. I noticed that every now and then there are peaks of viewers of “The Mythical Method” coming from many different countries, as it recently happened from Denmark, Romania and Poland. I might even fancy myself quoted on some books one day: “The Mythical Method” by Tink. 🙃
As for the viewers, well, one of the things I love the most still is to check the countries they are from, even if I am well aware that very likely they just click on my blog, without reading a single word, well, I don’t mind, as they contribute to make the map of the world viewers more colourful. My readers mostly come from Italy, of course , U.S, U.K, India, Germany, Canada in this order, but from a closer inspection I have just realized that I lied to fellow blogger Emilio, who blogs as 
e-Tinkerbell 