Here’s a piece of new news for our wily Italian

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem about experience, Advent, was probably really a poem about depression. Not everyone who has “tested and tasted too much” feels as bad about it as Kavanagh seemed to do.

Here’s a piece of new news for our wily Italian

Yet most of us can recognise ourselves in his lines about how much more fun it was to look on the world through the eyes of a child. We know what Kavanagh means by “the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked at it as children”, even if we don’t still pine for “the luxury of a child’s soul”.

Kavanagh might have been quite envious of Giovanni Trapattoni. Last week, a German journalist asked Trap how he felt about becoming the oldest man to coach a team at the European Championships. Trap replied with an aphorism he attributed to an unnamed general, that “the man is old who is not curious about the new news. I am curious about the new news.”

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