Christmas in Suffolk.

Got back on Monday from a week in England. The UK had been pretty cold; but in Marche temperatures reached +20^o  while we were away. We left Italy on the 21st and I drove to Candy’s whilst Pat took a train to Deborah’s. Matthew and Charlie came to dinner  at Candy’s that evening.

  The following day I drove down to Suffolk. The roads weren’t as bad as I’d feared but had great difficulty in pinpointing Debbie’s house, despite the satnav. Managed to have difficulty in finding it again after I’d returned the key to the agent. Recuperated in the Randolph which not only had Adnam’s bitter but free wi-fi. When Pat and Sophy and Adam arrived around eight - they too had difficulty finding the house - we all went to the Randolph for dinner. 

   Wednesday was largely taken up with putting Quinn’s electric motor-bike together. Waitrose delivered the Christmas shopping - minus the turkey. Fortunately Pat noticed it was missing and the delivery-man ‘found’ it in his van. Highly suspicious we all felt. 

     Christmas Eve went in to Southwold, or Islington-by-the-Sea: hardly a non-RP accent to be heard or a black face to be seen. Even the corner shop in Reydon sells the Assam tea, smoked mackerel, and sliced pancetta so essential for a civilised life. Came back in the afternoon feeling poorly and spent most of the rest of the day in bed. Candy, Quinn and Deborah arrived in the evening. By then I had recovered sufficiently to make the stuffings for the turkey (Pat had done all the hard work by getting the membrane off the chestnuts - a task I detest).

   Christmas Day followed its immutable pattern. The Christmas pudding was particularly good this year as Pat had adopted my maternal grandmother’s practice of steaming a pudding she’d made the previous Christmas. It transforms it utterly.

   On Boxing Day we had lunch at the Anchor in Walberswick. Deborah and I walked there - or more accurately I trailed behind Deborah as she strode across the marshes at a pace which would have won gold at the Olympics. Sophy and Adam also walked - but separately from us. Pat, Candy and Quinn drove.

  The following day Pat and I drove to Candy’s to spend a freezing night after the warmth of Reydon. But there was wi-fi to console us somewhat.

   And on Monday, having scraped the ice off the car’s windscreen it was back to Stansted and home.   

   Click here to see a video of our Christmas.

Christmas Round-up.

Thanks to everyone who has sent Pat and me a Christmas round-robin. Being a cheap-skate, I’m saving on paper and printer ink by creating mine electronically! 

The highlight of the year was Sophy and Adam’s engagement: they’re getting married next November in Dubai. Sophy and Pat are off to Bond Street a week today to choose the wedding dress. The near miss of the year was the Abruzzo earthquake, which unfortunately turned out to cost far more lives than we knew when I posted the entry. The saddest event, the death of Pat’s Uncle Leslie.

  Pat made several visits to the UK to look after Quinn while Candy was away on business. I went rather less, but was there with Pat for Quinn’s third birthday in February, and  a week at Candy’s in June, and on my own for the OEs’ annual dinner. In April we made our annual visit to Dave and Sue’s at their holiday home in Burgundy; they came to stay with us in August. We made two trips within Italy: one in celebration of our wedding anniversary in July to Orvieto and Assisi, the other in late October to Prato, near Florence. Candy and Quinn visited us twice, once in February and again in September.

   We lead very sheltered lives in Montefalcone, although the village does spring into life in the second weekend in October when it holds its annual sagra. The most exciting things which happened to me personally were getting two letters published in the Guardian, failing to get two published in the Observer, and having dinner with the Moldovan ambassador to Italy. 

  The first heavy snow of the year having arrived yesterday we’re keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll be able to get to England next Monday, as planned, for a family Christmas with Sophy and Adam, Candy and Quinn and Deborah at Deborah’s holiday home in Suffolk.

If reading this hasn’t deprived you of the will to live, click here for a summary of what we got up to in 2008.

The Good and the Bad Pedant.

There are two sorts of pedants: those who are aware that they are are pedants, and those that aren’t. The former - the conscious pedant - is a harmless beast. He’s taken on board the essential triviality of his concerns: the world at large is either unaware of the whole issue of ‘correct usage ’ which so exercises him, or knows that there are more important things to worry about. (Or, as emended by the pedant, ‘about which to worry’.) Knowing himself, the conscious pedant uses his foible as a source of mirth. The unconscious pedant, however, is a humourless individual, who uses his knowledge to bolster his feeling of superiority and sense of self-importance, oblivious of the fact that in so doing he only succeeds in making himself look a pretentious tosser. 

   Today’s Observer contained examples of both sorts of pedantry: a witty article by Euan Ferguson (Man your apostrophes, my friends, and support the pedants' revolt) and a reader’s pompous letter reproduced below:

The big issue: The Kercher murder. The persecution of Amanda Knox goes on

While I share Barbara Ellen's concerns that the murder victim Meredith Kercher seems to have been forgotten by the press reporting of the trial in Perugia ("Meredith, not Knox, deserves our thoughts", Opinion, last week), it is a pity she accuses Amanda Knox of "flowery oratory" in her final statement to the court using a sloppy translation.

   "Ho paura di avere una maschera di assassina forzata sulla mia pelle" means she doesn't want to be branded a murderer, not to be "given the mask of the assassin". Having watched the whole speech in which she not only thanked her friends and family for their support but even acknowledged the job her accusers had to do, it certainly did not "sound like some ham mangling Shakespeare".

   My impression was of watching an innocent young woman, who'd already spent two long years in a foreign jail, feeling vulnerable but hoping she would receive a fair verdict – and judging from the more balanced reporting elsewhere in your paper, we may yet see the guilty verdict overturned on appeal.

Sue Newte

London SE7

                

The opening sentence’s subordinate adverbial clause of concession, as we pedants put it, makes one’s hackles rise. Just as one knows ‘While I’m not anti-semitic/homophobic/racist, some of my best friends are Jews/gay/black, …’ is always the prelude to some disgusting piece of prejudice, what follows the Newte’s opening remark demonstrates that she does not share Barbara Ellen’s concerns at all. Her ‘impression’ that Amanda Knox is innocent outweighs the verdict of the court. 

  But the real reason for the letter is her desire to demonstrate that her command of Italian is better than Barbara Ellen’s. It is not. ‘Given the mask of the assassin’, one slight quibble aside, is a literal not a ‘sloppy’ translation. Whilst it’s usual to translate assassina as ‘murderess’, a pedant should know that the English word ‘assassin’ simply means ‘murderer’. It’s only contemporary usage - and when has that carried any weight with the stickler for ‘correctness’ - which has conflated its meaning with ‘hired assassin’ - i.e. someone who carries out a killing on behalf of a political or religious idea, or  another individual or organisation. As Barbara Ellen says, the translation has preserved the floweriness of the original. A straightforward wish not to be branded might be expressed as: ‘Ho paura d’essere bollata’ or ‘d’essere stigmatizzata’. The same wish expressed figuratively might be ‘Non mi piace aver la parte d’assassina imporre a me’. Only a ‘ham mangling Shakespeare’ would complain of having a murderess’s mask forced upon herself. The Newte is confusing translating the idiom of one language into its equivalent in another (e.g. ‘poppet’ not ‘cauliflower’ when choufleur is used as an endearment) with preserving the original’s register. To translate Knox’s statement as  ‘branded as a murderer’ is as inadequate as flatly translating la Serenissima as ‘Venice’, The Smoke as ‘Londra’, or some twerpette writing to the Observer as  ‘la signora Newte’.

   That’s better: now I’m feeling superior and a lot more self-important - or would be if anyone read this blog!

Darwin and sanctity.

I was expelled from the first school I attended. The nuns told my mother that ‘James is a very naughty boy. We’d like you to remove him.’ 

   ‘Why don’t you smack him?’

    Unusually for the nineteen-forties, and remarkably so in the light of recent revelations about some orders’ behaviour in Ireland, they replied primly: ‘We don’t believe in corporal punishment.’ 

   Being expelled from kindergarten may explain why at my next school, when each child in the class was asked what he or she wanted to be when grown up I replied, ‘A saint.’ An answer greeted by general hilarity. But if one forgets canonisation and thinks instead of managing to grab a priest for the last-rites, followed by an extended stay in purgatory, not an entirely implausible ambition. 

  I was reminded of my Somerset infant school by an article about Darwin’s legacy I read a couple of days ago. Click here to read it.  Although I knew about the Nazis’ obsession with the pseudo-science of eugenics, and was vaguely aware that it had had a following in the western democracies, I hadn’t realised how widespread that following was, or how horrific its consequences. The activities of the British Eugenics Society led to ‘to the imprisonment without trial of more than 40,000 people. Many were detained for "moral imbecility" - having children out of wedlock, committing petty crimes, or displaying homosexual inclinations. Some would remain incarcerated for 20 years.’ 

   The real shock, though, came from reading:

‘Darwin's ideas have also fathered some of the most grotesque instances of man's inhumanity to man.
   Darwin's decision to represent as a scientific fact that the several races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary path - that white Europeans were, in short, more highly evolved than Africans or Australian Aborigines - has had appalling consequences. Today, Darwin's supporters frequently make light of his racial views, claiming that he was no more racist than the average upper-middle-class gentlemen of his day, and warning that we should not try to impose the politically correct attitudes of our own times on to the past. But Darwin's racism was very different from that of his contemporaries.

   Though any Victorian Englishman might have regarded himself as socially superior to the lawless, savage tribes he encountered throughout the Empire, only Darwin - as the man who discovered evolution by natural selection - could provide an underpinning for racial superiority in biology and evolutionary science. Only Darwin could establish the notion of a hierarchy of races as a scientific orthodoxy that would prevail through much of the following century.

   … Darwin's second catastrophic error was to promote the view that the poorest sections of society were genetically inferior to the educated middle class and that most, if not all, the traits that led to pauperism were hereditary. Darwin's analysis generated a fear that if the working class continued to breed faster than the middle class, then the society would continue down a spiral of genetic degeneration.’

Although I knew about Social Darwinism I’d always believed that it was a completely unwarranted distortion of the great man’s teachings rather than an integral part of them. I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised that the seamy side of Darwin’s theories should have been brushed under the carpet. We all like our saints made of plaster rather than flesh and blood. Think of the Whisky Priest, Graham Greene’s anonymous protagonist in The Power and the Glory. As well as being dependent on alcohol, the priest has an illegitimate daughter. The apostate priest, José, at his wife’s instigation, refuses to administer the last rites to the whisky priest before his execution. So he dies believing he is damned, though the theologically literate reader will know that his final emotion- ‘He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all’ -  is an act of pure contrition which will save him. And the common reader, of any belief or none, will know him to be a good man who, despite his many frailties, did his best to do what he believed to be right. But as soon as he is dead the pious turn him into a plaster saint:  

'And that one,' the boy said, 'they shot today. Was he a hero too?' 

'Yes.' 

'The one who stayed with us that time?' 

'Yes. He was one of the martyrs of the Church.' 

 'He had a funny smell,' one of the little girls said. 

'You must never say that again,' the mother said. 'He may be one of the saints.' 

'Shall we pray to him then?' 

The mother hesitated. 'It would do no harm. Of course, before we know he is a saint, there will have to be miracles ... ' 

'Did he call "Viva el Cristo Rey"?' the boy asked .. '. 

'Yes. He was one of the heroes of the faith.' 

'And a handkerchief soaked in blood?' the boy went on, 'Did anyone do that?' 

The mother said ponderously, 'I have reason to believe … Señora Jiminez told me … I think if your father will give me a little money, I shall be able to get a relic.'     

'Does it cost money?'     

'How else could it be managed? Everybody can't have a piece.’

             

One would have thought that it would be more inspiring to know that greatness or sanctity can be found in someone whose ideas or behaviour are in many respects deplorable. Darwin was wrong to propagate the belief that some groups of people are inherently inferior to others; the Whisky Priest was wrong to break his vow of celibacy. But they are both heroic figures, because of, rather than despite, their frailties.

Substance and Accidents.

Read an excellent article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian (click here to read it). Jenkins suggests that what makes a place attractive to us is the network of friends and associations it has for us rather than its objective beauty. I have the good fortune to live in a breathtakingly beautiful place, yet I’m rarely any longer consciously aware of its beauty: it’s simply my home. Something similar can be said of people themselves. It's often struck me that it’s much easier to describe the appearance of those we don’t know very well than that of our close friends and family. Their physical appearance changes over the years but unless we look at an old photograph we’re not conscious of the fact. And although when we have lost contact for years with someone who used to be a close friend we’re immediately struck by their changed appearance when we meet them again the shock soon wears off. Last week I met an old schoolfriend again for the first time for over forty-five years. He now bears a striking resemblance to George Bush senior . However, after a few hours the sexagenarian had melded seamlessly with the bluecoat boy I’d shared a dormitory with for seven years of my life. Not only do the changed accidents seem unimportant one soon ceases to be aware of them - only the substance remains.

   A critic - I think it was Walter Allen - remarked that it was untrue that Dickens created caricatures. What he did was to embody his creations with the vividness of perception which we have as children. Think of those larger than life eccentric masters who dominated your schooldays. If you meet them in later life they seem to be disappointingly normal. Allen suggests that as adults we subconsciously reduce everyone to the norm: we flatten their eccentricities and heighten their ‘normal’ features. We no longer see them as they are but what convention tells us they should be. But Dickens uses accidents to manifest his characters’ substance. However, in our close friends and family substance has no need of accidents: we apprehend their substance in the same way a mystic knows his God.

Lost in translation.

Until we had the kitchen modernised around four years ago it contained a small wood-burning cooker. The stove threw out a lot of heat, and when the central-heating broke down when we were over with Fabio, a year or so before we moved here permanently, it kept us warm over a couple of very cold December days. Pat has always hankered to have it replaced and today a new one arrived. The instruction manual was complete with an ‘English’ translation. But like too many translations here it hadn’t been done by a native speaker. Pat was trying to fit the control for switching the heat from the hot-plate to the cooker. The’English’ version read:

            “HOB COOKING: when the bar is pushed to the back of the cooker, the combustion gases flow around the oven [my italics] …

             OVEN COOKING: when the control bar is pulled out, the combustion gases flow around the oven [my italics] … “ 

which makes no sense at all. If you can read Italian you discover it should have read, respectively,  “flow above the oven …” and  “all around the oven … ” which does.

Such solecisms are pretty typical here, often with comical results. Guide books frequently mis-translate suggestivo [evocative or attractive]  inviting the reader to admire the suggestive views! One wonders why businesses are so reluctant to spend a few bob getting their translations checked by a native speaker and thereby avoid making complete idiots of themselves.

Roots and Routes.

Got back yesterday from a brief visit to the UK for the OEs’ annual dinner. Like last year I had a good time staying with Mike and his wife, Pam. Unlike last year I managed to get to Stansted in time to catch the flight home and Mike managed to book his ticket for the dinner in time. I got to Mike’s at half-past twelve on Saturday and Chris arrived around three. Fortified by Pam’s homemade soup and cake and Mike’s Irish whiskey, we were given a lift to School by Geoff (Dwarf) Beynon. Most people seemed to have had a reasonably ok time at the dinner, the food and company were good; one person had a very good time. We learned the following day that, having consumed four bottles of red wine, one of the OEs - not Geoff I hasten to add - was violently ill covering most of the first floor and staircase of his host’s house with vomit. Mike, Chris and I -  as befits those from forms a couple of years senior to the paralytic puker -  contented ourselves with sitting up till three having a heated but good-tempered political debate. It was very like arguing with Vic, my late father-in-law. Vic was somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan, and our discussions were similarly lubricated with scotch. Pat and her mother worried needlessly about our sitting up late disagreeing about every possible topic. Most people you like have similar views to yourself, which is comforting but a little dull; and most people who have opposing views are complete arseholes. But a political argument with someone you like and respect is altogether different: it’s a source of pleasure. 

   If going back to my roots was fun, the routes there were not. I don’t usually travel with check-in luggage, but needed to on this occasion because I had to transport a dress suit. Now that RyanAir make all their passengers check-in on-line I’d thought that depositing your baggage would be a much simplified operation. It is at Stansted but not at Ancona. I stood in a not very long queue for over half an hour before my bag was checked in, leaving me very little time to get back to the car-park to pick up my cabin luggage. By the time I made it through Security passengers were already boarding thereby making my priority boarding pass rather a waste of time. Coming out of Stansted I managed to take the wrong exit from a roundabout and found myself heading south to London rather than north to Candy’s. After a very pleasant evening with Candy and Quinn, I set off Saturday morning for Bristol. Everything was fine - in two senses of the word -  until I reached Birmingham. To get from the M6 to the M5 you have to travel along the M42 which happens to be the route to the NEC. It took over half an hour to cover two miles - and it started raining. However I thought I’d have no problems getting back to Candy’s - there shouldn’t be a hold-up on the M42 on a Sunday. There wasn’t - but it took half an hour to travel two miles in a queue of traffic when I came off the M6 at the M1/A14 junction. And it had been raining heavily since half way up the M5. The trip to Stansted from Candy’s was straightforward apart from the heavy rain and strong winds; and I got back to Ancona a little ahead of schedule. To a warm Italy still bathed in sunshine as it had been when I left. And people sometimes ask me why I live in il Bel Paese!

The Nutty Professor.

We’ve always been a credulous species, and I don’t exempt myself. Once a week I watch a man in a frock claim to make the body and blood of a Jewish criminal - executed many years ago by the Roman provincial authorities - appear ‘really and substantially’ on a table. Despite the fact that they look like bread and wine I believe him. Fortunately as a remarried divorcee I’ve been ipso facto excommunicate for the past thirty years so escaping the attendant cannibalism.

  In the Middle Ages credulity’s chief beneficiary was the organisation set up by the criminal I mentioned earlier. Today it’s the scientist. 

  Before going any further, it’s probably as well to make a few things clear. Firstly, I have no doubt at all that Darwin’s theory of evolution fits the facts. Anyone who thinks that Genesis is a scientific treatise is terminally stupid: the book says light was created before the Sun! One would have thought that even the dimmest evangelical would have noticed that there’s a certain causal relationship between the two and that the Bible inverts it. The fact that I smoke doesn’t mean that I’m silly enough to deny the link between tobacco and cancer, simply silly enough to carry on puffing. And I’m sure that human activity contributes to global warming; though, having studied Geology as a subsid at Keele, I know that the Earth has gone through frequent dramatic climate changes without any human intervention in the past. They made bugger-all difference to the viability of the planet though they proved very inconvenient for some of its species. So my beef isn’t with science but with our response to it.

   In Chaucer’s day the average layman knew as little about theology as s/he does today about astro-physics. But he knew someone who did: the priest. Accordingly anything an ecclesiastic said was authoritative: he lived on a superior intellectual plane. There’s currently an ad on Italian television in which a scientist from Rome’s Sapienza University scientifically ‘proves’ - using arcane terminology which neither I nor the majority of RAI’s other viewers understand -  that Gillette’s deodorant for men is superior to rival products. I’m about as impressed by this claim as I am by Chaucer’s Pardoner’s that:

 ‘…in his male he hadde a pilwe-​beer,

Which that, he seyde, was our lady veyl:

He seyde, he hadde a gobet of the seyl

That sëynt Peter hadde, whan that he wente

Up-​on the see, til Iesu Crist him hente.’

But advertisers wouldn’t pay a scientist to peddle nonsense if they didn’t think that many people would be taken in by him, just as their mediæval ancestors were by the Pardoner.

    Which brings me to Professor Nutt. The salient point to remember is that scientists are authoritative - unless they’re being paid to betray their calling - only when speaking about the area of their expertise. Outside that area their opinions carry as much or as little weight as that of  the man or woman in the street. At Keele the Professor of Physics was a leading proponent of evangelical Christianity. Note not Catholicism  - which at the time had a certain intellectual rigour - nor Anglicanism - where it’s possible to completely disavow the supernatural - or Quakerism - an eminently sensible sect - but evangelicalism, the refuge of the intellectually confused and sexually deprived. So when Professor Ingram spoke about Physics he was authoritative; when he spoke about God he wasn’t. Professor Nutt has gone on record as saying that Ecstasy is intrinsically less dangerous than riding, the implication being that if you allow people to ride to hounds then you should let them take Ecstasy. The fact that, because many more people take Ecstasy than ride horses, the damage done by the former - though statistically less dangerous - is much greater seems a logical step too far for the professor. Semantics don’t seem to be his strong suit either: he seems unable to distinguish between the meaning of the word ‘advisor’ and that of ‘legislator’. As a former English lecturer, speaking within my field of expertise, I can authoritatively state that their meanings differ.

   I would go further than Nutt. I think that the criminalisation of drugs probably does more harm than good. But that is not a point of view that would find much support in the popular press. The same popular press which is intent on turning Nutt into a martyr. The same popular press which loathes Brown and extolls Cameron. Cameron the leader of the Conservative party which solidly backed Johnson’s sacking Nutt. Conclusion? Science like religion is too often twisted to serve unworthy causes by those who have no understanding of or real interest in the thing they pervert.

The Fall of Rome.

There wasn’t a wide range of newspapers available to read on the screens (reading stands) at School.  The Times sticks in my mind - it introduced me to the word ‘brothel’ and its correspondence columns carried a fascinating exchange about ‘the abominable crime of buggery’. Apparently this had been put on the statute book by Henry VIII’s Reformation Parliament. Under Mary that parliament’s legislation was repealed en bloc, so having the accidental effect of not only removing her father’s anti-papal legislation but also the secular penalties for sodomy. In Elizabeth’s reign parliament restored the status ante quo: sodomy was once more a crime. I think the correspondence was engendered by the imminent publication of the Wolfenden Report. There was, of course, no Daily Mirror let alone the Daily Worker. The only concessions to the popular press were the Daily Express, which fervently espoused Beaverbrook’s ‘dynamic creed of Empire’ and the News Chronicle, a token concession to non-Conservative thinking. On Sundays anyone whose family home was within travelling distance of the school was given an automatic exeat from the end of Chapel to evening prep. Consequently there were no Sunday newspapers. 

   In the 1950s Anglicanism and Conservatism were givens at the sort of school I went to; I guess they probably still are. Between leaving school and going up to university I was received into the Catholic Church. Keele - referred to locally at the time as ‘the Kremlin on the Hill’ - changed my politics. And with that went a change in newspapers. I started reading the [Manchester] Guardian during the week and opted for the Observer on Sundays. Whilst there was no real weekday alternative to the Guardian for an educated leftie, the Sunday Times would have been a possibility for Sundays. This was long before the Dirty Digger got his hands on it:  the paper had a tradition of investigative journalism inspired by a strong sense of social justice. I think I went with the Observer because it had been founded in the 18th century - a period to which I’ve long had a romantic - or should that be an augustan - attachment.

    In 410 the world was rocked by Alaric’s sacking Rome. Although the Empire staggered on in the west for another 60 odd years, Augustine of Hippo was right to see it as an event of unparalleled importance. It marked the end of civilisation and the descent of Europe into its present day condition of squabbling Ruritanian statelets which the Americans quite rightly view with an incredulous mixture of amusement and contempt. On the 11th October I knew how St Augustine felt. The Observer published an article whose flouting of that newspaper’s liberal tradition was as violent as Alaric’s rape of Rome. Its headline - ‘I'll only be happy if smoking is banned. We should no longer tolerate the minority threatening the lives of the majority’ - says it all. [If your doctor has recently prescribed an emetic, click here to read Duncan Bannatyne’s smug self-satisfied piece.] Augustine wrote the De Civitate Dei in response to the sack of Rome. I wrote a letter to the Editor:

Sir

Duncan Bannatyne has hit the nail on the head: passive smoking is, at best, a deeply unpleasant experience for the non-smoker, and  the evidence that smokers  seriously, and often fatally, damage  their health is irrefutable. As is the evidence that the internal-combustion engine does enormous damage not only to the health of millions of humans alive today, but to that of generations to come. Damage not only to the human race but to every other species with whom we share this planet. Fortunately we can be sure that Duncan will have kicked the motoring habit. He will be advising the mothers of 12 year would-be athletes to make their sons walk to school thereby avoiding both obesity and poisoning the planet. To assume otherwise would be to accuse Duncan of the rankest hypocrisy: enjoying a feeling of moral superiority  from condemning the vices of others whilst continuing to indulge his own.

        

It wasn’t published. I thought that I’d possibly made a mistake in appearing to attack the motor car. When I was an FE lecturer I found that to do so was a real no-no. Whilst I am sure that students would have quite happily accepted such essay topics  as ‘Women are men’s natural inferiors. Discuss’, or ‘Write an essay supporting the idea that anyone with acne should be tortured to death’ - well it’s a view, they would have probably responded - when I set the topic ‘The motor-car is the curse of the twentieth century. Discuss’ they reacted with howls of rage. I was quite clearly mentally deficient. 

   The Observer did print a letter in response to Bannatyne:

Perhaps Duncan Bannatyne should be appointed the government's pensions tsar ("I'll only be happy if smoking is banned", Comment). Then he can explain how the baby-boom generation survived in the decades when smoking levels were over 70% and is now causing the government such a headache with their long, healthy lives, despite Prof Gerard Hastings stating that "few smokers live to collect their pensions".

  Perhaps, too, Mr Bannatyne can work out how to pay for all these pensions. In the old days, the chancellor would have simply whacked up tobacco duties, but not much point in that these days. A hefty tax on health club membership fees might do the trick.

Jeff Fendall

If I were a cynic, I’d imagine it was selected for publication because the weakness of its argument could only provide comfort to the Bannatynians. I therefore made a second attempt to  repel Alaric:

As an occasional smoker, I fear that Jeff Randall’s reply to Duncan Bannatyne’s article will only confirm the anti-smoking brigade’s belief that we are simpletons who need protecting from ourselves. When I was an undergraduate in the early sixties virtually all of my friends smoked; only one still does, the rest gave up decades ago. That is why they have lived to collect their pensions. 

  The problem I have with anti-smokers as opposed to non-smokers is their tone of moral superiority. Their pretence that they are motivated by a concern for the public good. If they were they would be campaigning vigorously against the motor-car which by any measure does infinitely more harm to the planet than smoking. But that would mean sacrificing their own pleasure rather than someone else’s. I write as a motorist but not, I hope, as a hypocrite.

Again the letter wasn’t published. So as far as the Observer is concerned John Stuart Mill might as well have never lived. As long as the nauseating Bannatyne is happy the misery of millions of smokers no longer able to enjoy their pleasure in private is of no consequence. And I think the word ‘happy’ is the key to it. Yes smoking is a fairly disgusting habit the world would be better off without. And the world was probably better off without the murderers on whom Lord Justice Goddard passed the death sentence. But, if his clerk’s account of the state of his lordship’s breeches is to be believed, the pleasure which the eminent judge received had little to do with the administration of justice. Given a choice between breathing a bit of stale tobacco smoke and listening to Bannatyne ejaculate in his trousers, I know which I’d opt for.

         

Lo Stile dello Zar.

Got back last night from a three day trip to Prato. The main objective was to see the exhibition Lo Stile dello Zar in the weaving museum in Prato which looked at the mutual influence on each other’s fashion of Tsarist Russia and 13th - 18th century Italy. Left Marche on Saturday in torrential rain. However, once we had crossed the Appennines we were in brilliant sunshine which lasted the whole of our trip  - temperatures in the 20s. Prato is known as the Italian Manchester, but unlike the English city still has a flourishing manufacturing base. The historic centre is attractive and the cathedral stunning. The hotel was diabolical - not cheap and boiling hot. The air-conditioning didn’t work and the only way we could sleep was to keep the window wide open. Breakfast - which we discovered later was an additional cost - was vile. But we dined well in the town: Italian Saturday, Indian Sunday, and Japanese Monday. On Monday we took the train to Florence to visit a weaving materials shop near the cathedral, and we stopped off in Arezzo on the way home on Tuesday. In the flesh Arezzo is even more beautiful than in La vita è bella - and mercifully free of fascists rounding up people for Auschwitz.

Click here for a film of the trip. Click here for photos of Prato.

Blanket approval.

Pat got back from England, yesterday, after a week looking after Quinn. In preparation for her return I tried to get the house looking presentable: hoovering, washing the floors and - finally - changing our bed-linen. The first of these tasks was quite fun: Pat bought a Dyson just before she left in attempt to save money on the exorbitant amount  she was being charged for disposable bags for her existing vacuum cleaner - a similar scam to that perpetrated by printer manufacturers, except that the previous machine was very expensive. Dysons look really cool and apart from having to empty them every five minutes are quite efficient to operate. The final task was anything but fun. 

   Although, unusually for the 16th century, my old school’s charter established it as an academically inclusive institution - … ‘educati et enutriti  deinde bonis moribus et litteraturis instituti si eruditioni et litteris [sic] apti fuerint literis [sic] opificiis et mechanicis artibus perite instructi … - by the mid-twentieth century it had long since ceased to teach any non-academic subjects. So for those of us who hadn’t joined the cadet corps and learned to shoot a 303 rifle the only practical skill the school imparted was how to make hospital corners. Beds were inspected every morning by the dormitory monitor and a sloppily made bed was a punishable offence.

   I like to think that I’m not a luddite or a technophobe. I’ve cheerfully embraced most advances in technology. Producing lecture notes on a computer and photocopier was so much easier than typing them - with a huge expenditure on correcting fluid - and then running them off on a spirit duplicator. And as for the iPhone - Che farei senza that little Eurydice? But the duvet is a completely different matter. Whatever induced the British people to abandon the crisp sheets and blankets I was brought up with for this Scandinavian monster? For a nurse or a public schoolboy making a bed with hospital corners gave a satisfaction akin to that felt by  joiner constructing a dovetail joint. A practical task completed with consummate craftsmanship. But stretching a fitted sheet over a mattress affords little satisfaction. And as for fitting a duvet inside its cover -  that’s a labour that would have Sisyphus screaming to have his rock back. The wretched thing has a life of its own fighting back as you struggle to get it to lie flat and rectangular in its cover. Thank God Pat’s back and I won’t have to try to cope with this modern ‘advance’ for another few months.

Dinner with the ambassador.

Like nearly everyone of modest talents and humble background, my contact  with the good and great is virtually non-existent. Apart from a very slight acquaintance with Stephen Fry when he was a student at the College where I taught - Wacko not Trinity, I hasten to add - and attending a party - when I was 19 - at which Dennis Waterman was a fellow guest, there is nothing to tell on a personal level. I suppose I must have shaken Margaret’s hand, or at least bowed to the always luckless but never fuckless princess,  when I received my degree - she was Chancellor at the time - though I remember nothing of the occasion, and I have listened to various literary worthies - Antony Thwaite, Beryl Bainbridge, Louis de Bernieres, George Barker and Thomas Blackburn among them - address the English students and staff at the College as an offshoot of their attendance at the King’s Lynn Literary Festival. But unlike a friend and colleague who unsuccessfully invited Rachel Cusk to spend the night with him in his dormobile, I was merely a face in a crowd.

  But although I’m a non-runner in the Drop-a-name Handicap, I know quite a few people who have actually met the good and the great, and the not-so-good. Ed Tonkyn must occupy the number  one spot. He was taught by Tom Sharpe at prep-school, introduced to Bobby Kennedy as an undergraduate in South Africa - the great man said ‘Hi, how are ya?’ - had one of the visiting poets - and his inseparable companion, an attache case containing a bottle of gin - to stay, and actually taught Stephen Fry, on the rare occasions when the future  luminary could be bothered to attend class. I had a friend at university who’d been to primary school with Christine Keeler and another on my postgrad. cert. ed. course who’d been to secondary school with Mick Jagger. And - prepare to be amazed - for the last 32 years I’ve been married to someone who once shared a doughnut with Vanessa Redgrave! But the jewel of my collection has to be Hans Joachim Koch, a mature student at Keele. As a 14 year old leader of the Hitler Youth he’d  travelled to Berlin to present Munich’s collection for the Winterhilfe fund to the Führer. The dictator asked him where he came from. ‘Ah my faithful Bavarians,’ he commented on hearing Hans’s reply.

   Imagine my delight then, gentle reader, on receiving an invitation to dine with the ambassador. 

   Perhaps I should explain. Montefalcone is twinned with a village in Moldova and for some reason I can’t quite fathom the Moldovan ambassador to Italy was invited to visit our village, the event culminating in a meal at Lupo’s Locanda. I guess that in most of the places the ambassador visits there is  a carefully selected guest list comprising the cream of local society. Montefalcone, though, is very small and cream is in short supply. I guess the town council were worried about having a sufficiently large gathering to meet him. They therefore sent a circular to every inhabitant inviting us to book a seat at the dinner for 16 euros a head. As Pat had gone off to England for a week yesterday to look after Quinn, I thought I’d go - it would save having to cook - always a depressing business when you’re on your own. 

   In anticipation of the event I googled Moldova. and  discovered its chief claim to fame to be trafficking  women sex workers to Western Europe. At the dinner, during the course of a very lengthy speech, His Excellency stressed the importance of strengthening commercial ties between the Marche region and his homeland. I hope, but this being Italy cannot be sure, that he only had in mind the wine to which he frequently referred and, even more frequently, imbibed. His speech also made several references to his country’s having once been a part of the Dacian province of the Roman Empire. The romanophile in me wanted to jump up and shout, ‘Civis romanus sum. My country too was once a province of the Empire (if you exclude Ireland and the north of Scotland which the Romans very wisely decided weren’t worth the expense of conquering).’ Fortunately my total lack of Moldovan, and erratic command of Italian restrained me. But the contrast between the two former provinces is, I think, instructive. Moldova is a very poor country and desperately wants to join the EU because it sees membership as a route to once again enjoying the peace and prosperity it had enjoyed under the pax romana. Britain is a country which, once very wealthy, is on an inexorable slide towards economic impotence. But because it was once the most powerful country in the world it imagines that it can still flourish as an ‘independent’ nation and resolutely opposes the greater european integration which could save it. However, if we look fifty years ahead when Moldova flourishes as an integral part of a federal Europe, it will no longer need to rely on its current staple industry. Could be an opportunity for the UK there!

Getting it up, Italian style.

For the last couple of weeks the village has echoed to the sound of hammers and power tools as it’s been getting ready for the annual sagra: Sapori d’Autunno. When we were still day-boys we enjoyed the sagra enormously: over two days around 10,000 visitors crowd into the centro storico- normal population around 100! The streets are more crowded than Oxford Street the week before Christmas. Since we’ve lived here permanently the shine has worn off: taking the dogs for a walk is a nightmare, the racket of the crowds goes on into the small hours, and the streets are filthy for weeks after the festa’s over.  However, it does bring money into the village, so I suppose it’s ‘a good thing’. On Sunday, after mass, Riccardo asked if I’d be willing to help get things ready on Thursday, to which I agreed. Yesterday lunch-time, whilst walking the dogs, I bumped into him and he asked if I’d help erect a gazebo that evening around 8 o’clock. At 8 I wandered the deserted streets - no sign of any-one, so I went home. Riccardo speaks thick dialect and I find him quite difficult to follow. Perhaps he’d been saying the 8th of the month rather than eight of the clock. Half an hour later, hearing a bit of a noise in San Pietro, I wandered downstairs to find Riccardo and another man wandering down the street. The latter was introduced to me as an Englishman, John, and we were told to wait in the still unopened mini-market (13) for Francesco. So John and I sat there for a good half an hour chatting until he arrived and we all went down to the Largo del Concordato (7) where together with a dozen other people, including the parish priest, Don Marco, we put up a gazebo. We then moved on to the Largo Felici (6) where we put up four enormous gazebos which cover the main eating area. We eventually finished just after 11. Oh how different from our own dear Britain as Queen Victoria might have said: starting work at a time some hours after it would have finished in the UK, and being organised in an utterly haphazard way. As I’ve said before: Italy is a foreign country, they do things differently here.

L’amicizia è fiducia e calma, l’amore una rischiosa fatica.

I was reading today’s Corriere della sera this afternoon whilst filling the water tank in the kitchen garden. The article below struck my fancy: it’s basically an elaboration of James Duffy’s reflections on friendship in A Painful Case. The reader may disagree, reminding me that Duffy wrote that love between men is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse whereas Alberoni ends his article by saying ‘L’amicizia … è amore.[Friendship … is love]’ Duffy’s lack of awareness of homosexual passion is a side issue, irrelevant to the present discussion. There is no real  difference between Duffy and Alberoni, merely one of semantics. Alberoni is talking about caritas as the Romans called it - ‘la componente morale, spirituale’ -, or ‘love celestiall’ in Middle English; Duffy about amor or what Chaucer called ‘love of kynde’. Unfortunately, in modern English we only have the one word ‘love’ to express two very different states. Blake defines them vividly in The Clod and the Pebble:

                                                                                                                                                                                                              "Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay,

Trodden with the cattle's feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another's loss of ease,

And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

   The Corriere is an excellent sheet, rather like an Italian Guardian. It’s left leaning though, like the Guardian, at too oblique an angle. Unlike the Guardian it refuses to provide a platform for the stupidity of the Europhobes. Although the Guardian is pro-EU, its liberal principles compel it to occasionally give space to the antis, This is about as justifiable as giving column inches to paedophiles. Worse perhaps. In his sick mind the child-molester thinks he doing no harm. The intelligent EU baiter, as opposed to those he misleads, is consciously betraying his country - encouraging it to reject the only path which can save it from sliding into third world impotence. But strong governments are not in the interests of the global companies to whom these ‘patriotic’ pebbles of the brook owe their real allegiance.

*_“Friendship is reliable and tranquil; love a hazardous labour. 

It’s a great thing to bump into a friend when you’re alone, when you’re troubled, when you have an important decision to make. By George, seeing him coming towards you smiling brightens up your day. Neither of you is effusive [unless you’re American], only a quick hug [or a handshake if you’re British] but your spirits lift. 

    You can be frank, saying anything you like, without having to worry or feel ashamed, knowing that he understands you, is on your side, and if you need something he’s already worked out what it is. Your friend won’t ask embarrassing questions, nor say something annoying. You can chat or be quiet, stop or hurry on. Not only that, if you haven’t seen each other for ages he won’t subject you to an interrogation about where you’ve been or what you’ve been up to. For friends time doesn’t exist, when you meet up it’s as if you’re merely  picking up the thread of a conversation, even after twenty years. You can talk about what’s in your heart and he will listen to you. You won’t have to make any effort. 

   Love - erotic passion - is a completely different kettle of fish. Lovers are fascinated - indeed obsessed - by each other’a past and even after the briefest of separations they want to know everything you’ve done or thought in the meantime. And they spend all their time talking about themselves, exploring the mysterious way the two of them have been recreated as a single entity. Friendship, however, helps us to be ourselves, to be unique. With our friend we talk about our own individual pasts our own individual futures not those of our friendship. Friendship is a given, not a problem. It was already like that when you were five: your bosom pal was the one you trusted, to whom you confided your secrets knowing he’d never betray you.

   But love was risky even then: the boy or girl you loved could say no, change their mind, reject you. Children and adolescents are often jealous because their friend is part of their daily life. But that’s not the case for adults. Lovers are like it because they want to be loved exclusively and suffer when they are separated because they need physical contact with the beloved. Your friend, on the other hand, has his own life, those he loves, other friends whom you may not even know. Because of that you can leave when you want to, go where you like with whom you like and remain far apart without either of you suffering for it. The important thing is that he remembers you, wishes you well, and that he opens his arms to you when you call. Friendship is affection, yes in a way it’s love, but love which simply lifts the spirits.”

I am Keith Flett.

Last night I received an email on my iPhone from Mike Farmer congratulating me on my letter on pedantry which he’d read in the Guardian. 

Unlike the last time they published one of my letters (see blog dated 20th May) the paper hadn’t let me know that they were going to do so; so if it hadn’t been for Mike’s email I would have missed my Warhol moment. But with two letters published within 4 months I’m beginning to fear that Keith Flett has become my incubus.

Water Rats & other surrealistic moments.

We took Candy and Quinn, who’d been staying with us since Wednesday, to Ancona today. On the way to the airport Quinn began chanting “Water rat, water rat” at motorists we overtook. Pat and I enquired what he meant and Candy explained: early in the journey - momentarily forgetting we had a child in the car -  I’d commented on an  incompetent and dangerous driver we’d overtaken, “What a twat!”. In -  fortunately -  mishearing the remark Quinn had given it a wonderfully surrealistic twist. From now on Italian drivers are Water Rats.

   We’d first stumbled into  Magritte World on Thursday when we went to the zoo in Falconara Marittima. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about it apart from the unaccountable absence of one of the commonest of earth’s species: homo sapiens. In a visit lasting several hours we didn’t see a single human being apart from ourselves and the zoo’s employees. If a zoo is a location which allows people to gawp at exotic animals, was the place we went to, in the absence of visitors, really a zoo? A question best left to the philosophers (over to you again, Dave), methinks.

   On Friday we went to the Frasassi Caves which, though it pains me as a west-countryman to admit the fact, dwarf Wookey Hole into insignificance. Owing to complications involving Jane and un-metalled roads whose details I will spare you, we were in danger of missing the tour so I dropped Pat, Candy and Quinn at the entrance before parking the car. Getting to the caves I rushed through the barrier, told the employee  who enquired if I were German that I was English, and was waved through to catch up the English tour. When I caught them I found the group consisted of a young American couple but no Pat, Candy or Quinn. In my panic I tried to hurry on to see if they were in another group ahead. The Italian guide wouldn’t let me and in my confusion I kept talking to her in Italian whilst she kept addressing me in English. ‘I don’t think he’s English,’ remarked the American man every time I replied in Italian to the guide’s questions. Suddenly Pat, Candy and Quinn appeared from behind us. Apparently I’d rushed past them when I arrived without noticing them leaving them to join the kraut tour. Upon my greeting them, the bemused American turned to his partner and the guide and cried, ‘Oh, he is English.’ It was then I finally realised I’d joined the world of Does He Take Sugar?

  Click here to see a video of the zoo and Frasassi.