Firstly, can I just say – re: the last chocolate in the box that I always manage to eat, as per my last post…Conveniently The Guardian just conducted its own survey – out of 6 boxes of quality favourites like Black Magic and Milk Tray, the one skulking at the bottom in 4 of the 6 were orange -themed.  A win-win situation for me.

I’ve been thinking about Perugia and the Kercher trial.  I spent a few months living in that small red city on a hill as a teenager in 1989, studying at the Universita dei Stranieri where my parents met in the ‘60s.  (Both Kercher and Knox attended it too).  When I was in Perugia I didn’t learn much Italian, largely because I rarely got out of bed to go to lessons, though I did get out of bed to attend numerous small discotheques, usually decorated in leopard-skin, to dance the night away to Madonna with other students: the majority of whom came from Seattle University, like Amanda Knox.  The Seattle kids were confident and frankly quite brash; they were large in number and so ran as a pack.  We English meekly slotted in where we were allowed.

Much has been written these past few weeks about poor Meredith Kercher not getting much press attention; it’s all been directed at Knox (far more so than co-defendant and sometime boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito).  But there are obvious reasons for this, no?  The first, and most obvious and tragic, is that Kercher died two years ago.  Knox, for all her being banged up for 20-odd years (though who knows what her future holds if Hillary Clinton does get involved), is vibrantly alive, an ultimately fascinating plaintiff – mainly because she is a/ very young, attractive & middle-class and b/ female – and that’s without the unknown quantity of true motive.

Meredith Kercher, doubtless a lovely girl both in nature and looks, became a memory the day she died, and hard as that must be for her family and loved ones, it is incontrovertibly intrinsic to being the ‘victim’.   As crime writers know, it’s generally the perpetrators who are the focus in stories, rather than the late victims.  Kercher died, so her voice cannot be heard.  Meanwhile, the world’s media keep interest in Knox alive by wondering about the sentence, the lack of DNA and the rather outlandish motive…

Perugia was an unthreatening place when I was there, except during large football games when the male population would literally go crazy; the one scary incident for me was the night friends and I got lost down a small alley, looking for – yep, you guessed it – a new discotheque.  There we were confronted by a couple of angry young Italians who shouted at us about the Heysel tragedy, when 37 Juventus fans died.  We didn’t know what they were talking about, I’d probably never even heard of Juventus – but this was just after Hillsborough and internationally, people still didn’t understand that that tragedy hadn’t happened because of rioting.  The English weren’t very popular in Italy that year…Still, Perguia is beautiful, surrounded by some of the world’s most historic sites, like Assissi.  I hope it can shake off its tarnished reputation; evil can happen anywhere, I guess.

RIP, Meredith.