Codgerology

I love market day, it’s one of the few things about Italian country life that hasn’t changed at all since I was a kid, especially the day in Small Town 1, the only town within walking distance of where I live (internet reception: nil). It’s a market untroubled by knockoff DVDs or mobile phone accessory stalls, preferring to concentrate instead on the widest selection of tablecloths and kitchenware known to man, boxy shoulder padded blouses for elderly women, fruit, cheese, salami and agricultural machinery. And it’s here that I see one of my favourite examples of Italian wildlife: The Codger.

When he was alive, my grandfather was a codger par excellence. The moment he stepped off the plane from London, after kissing the ground and downing half a bottle of red wine that is, he’d kit himself out in the regulation codger uniform: bellywarmer trousers that would make even Simon Cowell shrink away, vest and/or shirt, braces (Nonno’s were a colourful red and green) and a trilby hat of dubious age and condition.

If you have a huge roman nose, no hair and no teeth, that helps complete the look perfectly. You then deposit yourself in the same bar you’ve been going to since 1927 with all your cronies, and proceed to argue in dialect, play cards for high steaks (or salami, or coppa, or other meat products) and gesticulate wildly at everyone around you. I have no idea what they talk about, but I think a lot of it involves the war, ogling young women and how nobody these days has any respect.

But I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently. The old-style Codger is dying out, to be replaced by Codger v2.0. These men have no respect for their traditional heritage. They flaunt themselves in polo-shirts and designer shades pushed up onto their heads. Their trousers, instead of skimming high over the pasta-belly, skirt under it. Some of them even have the effrontery to wear denim shorts.

I propose the founding of a SNPCI – Societa Nazionale per la Preservazione del Codger Italiano. This will involve special Codger Fridays in which every man over 65 is legally obliged to wear a vest and braces, tax incentives for people to let their teeth go, and a special discount on hats. Believe me, there are weirder laws in Italy.

But sadly I don’t think it’s going to catch on, and I can imagine years into the future when the boys I swooned over as a teenager become Codgers v3.0. They’ll still be gathered outside the same bar, but instead of trilby hats and toothlessness, the look will be all about wrinkly celtic armband tattoos, battered birkenstocks and gadgety watches. Occasionally they’ll break into an old-time tune: sono il Firestarter, twisted Firestarter and sigh with the nostalgia of it. Meanwhile young Italian twentysomethings will file past them on the way to the trendier bar in the square, shake their heads and swear: “I’ll never end up like that.”