I am too early to see my FfI. We agree that I should go to the café opposite which is really a cross between a café and a restaurant/trattoria. It is a vegetarian place and you don’t get so many of them in Italy.

It’s a largish place. The tables and chairs are mismatched and old but not in an antique way, just in an old and thrown out way. As such, it gives a certain ‘feel’ to the place. As I sit inside, I am reminded of the Granary or Oscars in Hay-on-Wye. Sort of countrified and somewhere where you would get really good food. This is certainly the case with Oscars in Hay.

We (that is FfI and I) have eaten there. The food was good. Although I am a lover of meat, I don’t object to veggie food if it has taste and is done well. And here, at Circolo Sassetti, the food is rather tasty.

It is about 11 or 11.30. Before the crowds come in for lunch. The tables, close together, in an unordered way, are being set for lunch. There are the paper placemats, the paper napkins, the menus – all already set on the tables.

I order a beer; I am on holiday, after all, using up some of the days from last year or I will lose them.

I sit at a table near the bar, folding my coat (it’s not really cold enough for the coat but, if it starts raining again I will feel very cold) and putting it on the seat of the chair next to me. My folder containing things to do with moving, are placed on the table. They don’t have birra alla spina (draught beer) so it’s a bottle. But, hey, I will only be here for a quarter of an hour, I suppose.

There is a girl (probably 30) behind the bar; an older woman (probably her mother) who takes the scruffy but cute looking dog out not long after I arrive and a girl, probably 25, who is laying the tables.

I am not taking that much notice but have nothing to read or do, really, so she and the girl behind the bar are the only entertainment available. I watch her as she goes to a heavy wooden drawer in a heavy wooden sideboard and gets out some forks.

She takes a handful. She then proceeds to walk to each table and place a fork on the napkin. She hasn’t got enough. She returns to the drawer and gets more forks. She searches for the place-settings without forks and places one down on each napkin. She runs out of forks again. She is, in my view, being rather slow.

She returns to the drawer. Takes out another handful of forks. At this point I am watching her more closely and realise that, whilst holding the handles in one hand, she strokes the prongs of the forks with the other. When she goes to put one down on the table, she carefully grabs the fork by the prongs and places it on the table.

Then, eventually, it is the turn of the knives. Again, one hand grasps the handles and the other strokes the blades; and the blades are used when placing them on the table; sometimes checking the edge with her thumb as if to check the sharpness.

I watch in amazement! Health and Safety, anyway not a big thing in Italy, skipped this place for certain I am also intrigued by the fact that she has not taken enough knives and has to return to the drawer many times.

And, then it dawns on me. At one point, she returns with knives from the drawer but seems to have a problem remembering where she left off and so, checks some of the tables she has already done. Later, when putting out water glasses, she has to count how many places there are without glasses and this is not easy for her. She is, most likely, slightly mentally disabled.

It’s one the things here. Disabled people, of any sort, do not seem to be treated badly nor, really, discriminated against. Please bear in mind that this is my opinion and I do not know the real circumstances, so I may be wrong. However, from an outsider’s point of view, they seem to look after people quite well (better than the UK?).

I think she may be the sister of the girl behind the bar. However, I think I would have told her not to use the prongs and the blades to hold the knives and forks. Certainly, I shall never eat there again as I do like to think I have clean cutlery. Of course, one can never know for certain. Judging by the places settings that they set, they were expecting a lot of people – all of whom would be ignorant of the careful way in which she caressed the eating parts of the knives and forks!