96 and Not Dead Yet: Dining Dangerously

by Reg Green (July 2025)

A few days ago, I was reading of a frightening incident that happened to Arthur Koestler, the ex-Communist author, that reminded me that but for a slip of the tongue I might have been named alongside him in that same history book. It happened when Koestler was on the run in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.
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As the net closed in, he found refuge with a famed Scottish zoologist, Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, who was living in retirement in Malaga and, in his besieged villa, ate what could have been his last meal, the only food available being sardines, jam, and a fine wine. Luckily, both escaped to eat many other, and more conventional, meals.
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In a small restaurant in Rome more than eighty years after that dangerous time in Spain, I pointed to an item on the menu. “What’s this?” I asked the waitress. “That’s spaghetti and jam,” she said in her best English. “It’s our speciality.” I nearly gagged but when else would I get the chance to be remembered as sharing the rigors of war with the likes of Koestler, Hemingway and Orwell, all of whom had built their literary fame in Spain?
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Alas, when she brought it, it was a routine plateful of spaghetti—and ham. That exasperating letter ‘j,’ whose pronunciation has been causing trouble since ancient Roman times, had deprived me of my place in the history books. I can think of only one appropriate curse: Oh, Jell!
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PS On second thought, it could have been worse. I often think of the migrant who, an Italian friend told me, sailed from North Africa to Sicily on a sheep. It turned out to be a cruise sheep. And just the other day an Italian editor asked me to write an article. A week from now, he said, was the deathline.
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So, although the room at home where I work has always seemed benign, maybe I’m living heroically after all.
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