From ‘Diplomatic Incidents. Memoirs of an (un)diplomatic wife’ by Cherry Denman

In Milan, traffic lights are instructions. In Rome they are suggestions. In Naples, they are Christmas decorations.

(Antonio Martino)

I have never seen such appalling driving as in Libya……. These normally jovial, beautifully mannered people turn into demons from the depths of hell when they slide behind the wheel. …..Bicycles and Libya do not mix.

Expectoration in China was universal: even Deng Xiaoping had a spittoon by his chair when he met Mrs Thatcher, into which he emitted intermittent projectiles with total accuracy.

……….train journey across China……During the night, having finally dropped off to sleep, she was awoken by a strange, glooping noise, only to open her eyes to see her neighbor enjoying a midnight snack of chicken’s brains, which he extracted by holding the chicken above his head, and sucking them through its beak.

Peking railway station is a great place to introduce visitors to the real China…….It is noisy, crammed full of people and chaotic. Everybody shouts. There are families asleep on the floor, people with chickens in their pockets and babies in their backpacks. The whole space smells of tea, garlic, nylon and old socks. There is always a lot of excitement around the escalators: many of the peasants arriving from the countryside have never seen one before, causing pile-ups at the top and bottom like skittles as they hesitate, or fall over at the top.

Orson Welles ……. ‘There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.’

The abominable sin of sodomy is tolerated here, and all over China, and so is buggery, which they use both with beasts and fowls, in so much that Europeans do not care to eat duck.

(Alexander Hamilton, 1727)

Meat behaves differently in every country I have ever been to. Eggs can taste of fish. Water has sometimes to be sterilized that it is like cooking with swimming-pool water…..Potatoes in Cyprus are better than I have had anywhere else in the world, and the vegetables in Libya taste of sunshine, even if it is hard to get the sand off.

The main problem with Bing [nanny from Philippines], and one which we never quite managed to cure her of, was her obsession with her insides, particularly her women’s bits. After years of living abroad I have discovered that it is only British women who keep their internal affairs private. Everyone else discusses them in graphic, no-holds-or-holes-barred detail.

Nothing is mixed in Libya. People never meet the opposite sex, except when they marry or have a car crash.

In China, hygiene is definitely a state of mind.

I have had moments in French bathrooms, where frankly, if the smell does not kill you, the décor will.

Nothing will ever beat the joy of standing in the wings listening to Pavarotti singing………He held the 10,000 Chinese spellbound. The Chinese, who would talk incessantly and loudly through any other artistic performance, sat in silence, erupting at the end into deafening foot-stomping applause and chants of ‘Pa La Lor Ti, Pa La Lor Ti’, bringing him back for encore after encore, until he finally gave up, exhausted.