The shopkeeper is always right, well, sometimes

I was in my local profumeria last Sunday. This particular profumeria is the size of a large provincial bookshop (in a town that doesn't have a bookshop), its walls and shelving units lined with exquisitely packaged small bottles containing liquids of no intrinsic value at prices that would make a homoeopath blush. I mention it because, on the way out, a radio announcement said that Berlusconi was due to be released from hospital that day. The shop-owner, a middle-aged woman, commented: 'As far as I'm concerned he can spend the next month in hospital.' Any demographic breakdown of Berlusconi's electorate would find a disproportionately high number of middle-aged female shop-owners in the centre-south of the country, so this was a very encouraging sign. What was even more encouraging was that she was prepared to share her view of the matter so freely with her customers in a town in which seven voters out of ten opted for Berlusconi in the last elections.