He's 45 now, and his career has been a curious hybrid.

Subtropical storms are curious hybrids that have some of the characteristics of a tropical storm, even though they develop outside the tropics.

This curious hybrid of a system (which also included, at one stage, a horse-drawn passenger wagon) could not last, and within a few years, traffic was restricted to timetabled trains.

And the corbezzolo was as strange as you would expect bitter honey to be - almost savoury, yet sweet and rich, another example of the curious hybrids that islands throw up.