Cool customers
In the long hot summer of 2007, I was holidaying in the little Italian resort of Viserba near Rimini on the Adriatic Sea with my teenage daughter and friends. Every evening, along with hundreds of others, we participated in the famous ‘passegiata’, or stroll, during which we would always stop for a delicious Italian gelato, or ice cream. This, because of the intense July heat, up in the high 30s, had to be eaten quickly before it melted.
One occasion particularly sticks in my mind because, having bought our ice creams and eating them rapidly, I noticed a good-looking young couple, one male and one female and almost identical, sitting on a public bench enjoying theirs in a slow and refined manner, unlike everyone else frantically licking up the drips running down their fingers. What made them especially apparent was not only their close physical similarity but the fact that their own ice-creams weren’t melting at all. Given the ferocious heat, this was in comprehensible – and I have always wondered if they were aliens able to personally regulate the temperature of their delicious gelati? I suppose extraterrestrials take holidays too.
Maggie Ferrari
Petworth, West Sussex
Knickers mystery
I recently did some laundry, including a pair of my partner’s knickers, which I draped over a radiator to dry. The next day I placed them in a drawer. A few days later when she was at my place, my partner asked
