UKIP to the rescue

English people here have been having a problem withdrawing money from Italian ATMs with English debit cards. Today, I decided to appeal to Caesar and finding a web-site for contacting MEPs representing the East of England I sent the following email:

‘Gentlemen.

I am a UK citizen who has been living in Italy for the past five years - the English address is my daughter's. Until December 2003 I lived in Norfolk. 

   My income is in sterling: my state pension being paid into the Italian Post Office Bank (BancoPosta) and my occupational pension into my Lloyds TSB UK account - registered to my Italian address. 

   Over the last year or so, as the Italian banks have updated their ATMs, it is no longer possible to withdraw cash from the new machines using an English debit card, though curiously it is possible to withdraw cash using an English credit card with all the additional costs which this incurs. My wife and I - and many other English residents - have contacted their banks without any result. The UK banks blame the Italians, the Italian banks, the UK. Meanwhile we are unable to withdraw cash from our own bank accounts although the debit cards still function in retailers.

   I should be most grateful for any pressure you could bring to bear on the EU to resolve this problem. I imagine that once the problem becomes widely known it will have a negative impact on tourism in Italy, making a resolution as much in Italy's interests as in those of UK citizens.

Yours faithfully,’

I found the site for the Italian Socialist MEPs and sent them a similar message:

<<Onorevoli signori

Sono un cittidano inglese residente in Italia da cinque anni. Il mio reditto proviene dal'Inghilterra - un pensione di stato, ed un pensione da lavoro. Il mio pensione di stato è versato nel mio conto BancoPosta. Comunque il mio pensione da lavoro è versato nel mio conto bancario inglese Lloyds TSB. 

Ecco il problema:  

    Da più o meno un anno i banchi italiani sono ammodernando i loro bancomat. Addesso si non può prelevare contanti dai nuovi bancomat con una carta di debito inglese. 

        Sempre si può le usare in negozio, e le carte di credito inglese     funzianano in bancomat. Ma usare la carta di credito per prelevare contanti è molto costoso. La moglie ed  

       io - e tanti inglesi conosciuiti da noi - ci abbiamo messo in contatto colli nostri banchi inglesi ed italiani. Contatti inutili! I banchi inglesi danno la colpa ai banchi italiani, i 

       banchi italiani ai banchi inglesi.

Sarei grato se possiate far pressione sul UE risolvere il problema. Secondo me, una volta che il problema sia conosciuto su vasta scala ci sara un impatto negativo sul turismo italiano. Quindi una soluzione sarebbe nell'interesse sia di Italia sia degli inglesi residenti in Italia. Finalmente, prego scusarmi il mio brutto italiano.

I miei più distinti saluti,>>

Within an hour I’d received a phone call from Tom Wise, an MEP who seems to have resigned from UKIP because it was too moderate! The phone call was followed up by a copy of his email to his Italian colleagues. So we have the irony that someone who detests the EU is the sort of chap who could change the public perception of the EU in a positive way. None of the other MEPs, Tories, Labour, LibDem, or the Italian PD, have responded at all.

Straps and bottoms.

On Wednesday I called in at the cobbler’s in Roccafluvione to have the clasp on a strap inside my carry-on suitcase re-attached: the stitching had torn loose. Before I went I needed to look up the Italian for ‘strap’. To my surprise this is what I found: on bag or case (the word I needed) ‘cinghia’, on watch ‘cinturino’, on handbag ‘tracolla’, on bus ‘maniglia a pendaglio’, on bra ‘bretella’ or ‘spallina’. Yet in English, which has a richer vocabulary than any other language we just have the one  word, ‘strap’. Now I know cultural need determines vocabulary - the Inuit it is claimed, apocryphically, have twenty different words for snow. But what possible cultural difference could drive the Italians to discriminate lexically between different types of strap? Perhaps Italian lovers need to reassure themselves that their mistresses are clear which strap they are about to undo: la sua bretella not the tracolla on her handbag. Other Italian coinages are easier to understand. Recently, I came across ‘consuocero’ in the Corriere della sera. It means your child’s father-in-law. Only the Italians with their emphasis on la famiglia would dream up such a word. But yet they have the same word for grandchild and nephew/niece - as L.P. Hartley might have said: “Italy is a foreign country. They do things differently there’.

    As is also the case with medicaments. This morning I woke up to find a tick buried in my leg. How it got there God only knows. The dogs pick them up frequently from the woods, but they’re not allowed in the bedroom, so how the devil one had managed to crawl up my trouser leg I have no idea. Because we have deer in the woods, ticks can be dangerous to humans - they can transmit lyme disease from deer to man. I therefore went to the chemist’s to get an antibiotic. When I got home I discovered to my horror that the packet I’d carried home contained a syringe - you had to inject the stuff. I went back to the chemist - a not unattractive blonde in her thirties - and rolling up my sleeve asked if she’d mind doing the injection as in England only doctors and drug-addicts use needles. ‘Certainly,’ she replied, at the same time  indicating that I should take down my trousers. Oh the embarrassment. If I were as uneducated as the Oxbridge graduates who write columns in the Guardian, I would say that I’d made an arse of myself. Being very old I remember the expression ‘You silly ass’, my headmaster was much given to using it. But because the Americans spell and pronounce ‘arse’ as ‘ass’ younger people think they are simply anglicizing an American pronunciation and spelling. In doing so they really are making a donkey of themselves.

An encounter with Jobsworth.

Got back yesterday afternoon from a week in England spent trying - ineffectually - to sort out some problems Candy has been having. Having successfully negotiated security at Stansted, I was approaching the gate when I was summoned by Jobsworth to fit my carry-on bag into the container used by RyanAir to check that your bag doesn’t exceed the dimensions allowed by the airline. It was a tight squeeze. ‘It’s too big. You’ll have to pay £20,’ he exclaimed triumphantly. 

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘Let me take some stuff out.’

  Having taken out my manbag, and hidden it under my jacket, struggled to put on a sweater of Pat’s which was several sizes too small for me, and removed a magazine from an outside pocket the case fitted. As soon as I got to the gate, I took off the sweater and put it and the rest of the stuff back in the bag. Needless to say the bag still fitted comfortably in the overhead locker. O the relief to get away from England. To quote Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria quartet:

‘Hail Albion drear

Fond home of cant

Pursewarden sends thee greetings scant.

Thy notions he’s turned back to front,

Abhorring cant, adoring ----’

Comings & Goings.

Laurie and Steve stayed with us from last Saturday until last Tuesday. They’d come over to put their daughter, Lizzie’s, house in Amandola on the market. Sunday lunch-time they treated us to ‘an excellent repast’ as Pooter would say - hang on, the whole business of writing a blog is pooterism for the 21st century:  I blog, therefore I am Pooter - at the Re Leone in Servigliano. Service as usual was lamentable but the food was good. It almost invariably is in Italy - even the shabbiest places turn out good nosh. The only exception we’ve ever found was on the Amalfi coast a couple of years ago. The hotel was quite posh - waiters in penguin suits - but they catered almost exclusively for the English. The owner’s grandfather must have gone over to the UK in the 50s and based the menu on what he found there. Tinned peas were prominent, drinkable coffee - in a land where,thank God, you won’t find a single Starbucks - absent.  On Monday Pat went over to England to babysit Quinn while Candy was away hosting her RNIB events. All went well until she got to Stansted yesterday and realised she’d still got Quinn’s car-seat in the back of the hire-car! 

However, this lapse was cancelled out by her managing to get us back on-line for the first time since the 6th. Hence I’m able to blog again. Ok, maybe she didn’t do so well.

Postmodernist Camilleri.

Have just got back from Leslie’s funeral. We went to England on Monday, staying at Candy’s. The funeral was on Tuesday at Southend and the wake held in Leslie’s second home, the Conservative Club at Leigh-on-Sea. A good service conducted by a South African Anglican priest, Father Bruce, with an address by Leslie’s solicitor and friend. Sophy flew over from Dubai, and Candy and Quinn drove up. As well as Leslie’s friends from the club, three of his late wife’s relatives came. On the plane over I finished Camilleri’s Il campo del vasaio. Camilleri’s protagonist, Commissario Montalbano picks up a vital clue to solving the crime by reading one of Camilleri’s historical novels. A postmodernist touch, I thought, but perhaps I’ve got the terminology wrong. Despite having taught two undergraduate modules on critical theory most of the jargon has faded from my memory. I was never very enamoured by theory, a reaction shared by most of my students and colleagues. I found Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel and dialogic discourse illuminating, Wofgang Iser on reader response theory was good, but Stanley Fish’s ideas from the same critical school seemed quite batty. On the other hand, Hilary Schor’s feminist article on Great Expectations led me to fundamentally re-evaluate my reading of Pip and Estella’s relationship. Structuralists, post-structuralists and psychoanalysts , however, with a few honourable exceptions seemed to have raided the emperor’s wardrobe. I think the following quotation from David Lodge’s introduction to an essay by Lacan makes the point: ‘… the present writer does not claim fully to understand everything in this essay.’As well as being a highly successful novelist, Lodge held the chair of English at Birmingham. If he couldn’t follow Lacan what hope was there for a hack FE lecturer like me. Or perhaps it’s simply that Lacan was writing bollocks!