What have I learned today? That abandoned children in Rome were traditionally given the surname 'Proietto' and in Florence 'Degli Innocenti'. I already knew in Naples it was 'Esposito'.Why couldn't they just have simplified everything by calling all those sprogs 'Bastardo'? Perhaps they were working by the principle of nomen omen and didn't want to curse the poor wee things any further.

Nomen omen - Burke, from the French 'De Burgh', of the city, or perhaps Cityson, which reads like a urinary infection. 'Townson' is better. Or perhaps 'Citizen' is the right version. I like the movement from 'son' to 'zen'. So, Sean A. A. Citizen, like John Q. Citizen. Nobody and everybody. But with a name like that, I'm never going to get out of these wretched places and be closer to natural things. The life of the city lived in repetitions of fragments. Up until last year I worked all over the place, every day in a different area, a different street. Since March 2008 I've been mainly in the one place just outside Milan. It's the first time in my life I've worked in one place for that length of time. I'm practically full time now, by teaching standards, but not really a part of the company, just tra coloro che son sospesi, amongst those who hang between. Between Scotland and Italy, between Italian and English, between the city and the country.

More things learned today: that the patron saint day of St. Cyrus in a town somewhere in the region of Lecce is celebrated very similarly to our Guy Fawkes, with an effigy of the saint placed on top of an olive-branch bonfire, presumably because he was burned alive. That in some places in India they fill a corpse's mouth with water from the Ganges before burning the body. That nobody knows how digital and print media are going to coexist in the future. That more and more people are writing 'should of' instead of 'should have', Lord help us.

Reading McCourt's biography of James Joyce, which goes to great pains to show us he probably knew the names of the local prostitutes and equally great pains to say he never went to a brothel. Legal issues with the Joyce estate, methinks. He does quite a good job of painting the Babel of languages in Trieste at the time and how that influenced Finnegans Wake. It's considerably more easy-going than Ellman's (with correlated disadvantages). Has anyone actually read the Wake from beginning to end?

Why don't people wear more colours? When I go down into the metro station in the mornings it looks like a funeral. When I think about all the colours my daughter puts on everyday, and here's me and everyone else in a variety of browns and blacks, occasionally blues. I'm going to buy a fluorescent yellow hat and scarf for winter - I may get mistaken for someone directing traffic but at least I'll have banished the air of mourning in the morning.