Free Whatever it is, I Don't Like it by Howard Jacobson

machine installed in the snug. If you pressed a button saying LITERATURE you were asked to name the two cities in which A Tale of Two Cities was set (anagram clue: Nodlon and Ripas), the author of Pride and Prejudice (anagram clue: Enja Staune), and the personal possession beginning with h which Desdemona lost (was it a: her honour; b: her handkerchief; c: her handbag?). Get these right first time, without any further clues, and the machine would go beserk, ringing bells and flashing the word GENIUS for everybody to see.
    Until they changed the questions I found this a useful place to take company I was anxious to impress.
    It wasn’t only LITERATURE at which I excelled. I was a bit of a smash at CLASSICAL MUSIC as well. Who composed Carmen (anagram clue: Zibet)? How many Beethoven Symphonies are there (a: 9; b: 150; c: 0)? – I got them all.
    So here’s one for you. Which Neapolitan song – so popular that even Elvis recorded it – celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year?
    Your anagram clue is: O, I’m loose!
    Another? Me? Oslo? Oi!
    Still not got it? Not as easy as you think, eh? One more anagram clue only. Ooo, slime!
    Then I’ll have to tell you. ‘O Sole Mio’.
    I’ll come clean and admit I didn’t know ‘O Sole Mio’ was a hundred this year either until I saw an announcement of a party to be thrown in its honour by Melbourne’s Italian community at the Crown Casino Showroom. As a lover of all things Neapolitan, I had no choice but to put on a striped fisherman’s jersey and go along.
    I enjoy being the only non-Italian at an Italian gathering. It’s the one time I get the chance to be the tallest person in the room. And I like being given a wide berth, everyone stopping talking and scattering when I approach, for fear I might be Interpol.
    Half an hour after the birthday concert was scheduled to start it started; a labially liquid lady in evening wear taking the stage and explaining that ‘O Sole Mio’ wasn’t only a treasure of Neapolitan civilisation but ‘formèd part of European cultural tradition that has all but disappear’. My Italian being non-existent and her English being only so-so, I didn’t fully grasp what this cultural tradition was. Only that it had something to do with feeling homesick.
    Eduardo di Capua was handed the words of ‘O Sole Mio’ just before he left Naples for a tour of the Ukraine in 1898, that much I did gather, and set it to music two or three years later while he was stuck in Odessa, looking out of the window of his hotel and wondering where the sun had gone. So, if you want to be pedantic, this isn’t the hundredth anniversary of ‘O Sole Mio’ as we know it at all, only of the lyrics. And with respect to the lyricist, Giovanni Capurro, it isn’t really for the words – ‘What a wonderful thing is a sunny day / But who needs it? / My very own sun / Is on your forehead’ (my translation) – that we love it. But I didn’t stand up and point this out. Let’s party now and then party again in another two or three years. Some songs you cannot celebrate too often. Especially when, to quote a programme left on my seat, they come ‘straight from the heart in simple and direct words and notes like a hot pizza beaming out of a hot wood oven’.
    Now you know why a pizza is red and round. It symbolises the sun.
    What a wonderful thing is a sunny day / But who needs it? / My very own pizza / Is on your forehead .
    Once they’ve sorted out the sound system, stopped the elderly violinist from clapping himself on his lapel where his microphone is pinned, and got to the bottom of how come a massed choir of eighty men and women with round rigatoni chests is coming over more muted than a bashful kindergarten duo, the concert starts to be wonderful. I have always loved this stuff – sobbing tenors dreaming of Sorrento in high fluting voices,