Festa della Liberazione.

Despite having lived in Italy for five years, I still forget that they do things differently here. I knew that the 25th was a public holiday, but I forgot that unlike England it remains one even when it falls on a Saturday. It’s not transferred to the following Monday. Consequently, we drove to Battente, one of the two large out-of-town shopping centres in the county town, Ascoli, only to find it was closed. On the other hand, the supermarket in our small local market town, Comunanza, was open. La Festa della Liberazione is a controversial event, made the more so by elements in Berlusconi’s government. Fini, the Italian foreign minister and leader of AN, the former neo-fascist party, wants those who died fighting for the Nazi puppet regime, Mussolini’s rump Republic of Salo, to be commemorated equally with the partisans who fought against the  Germans. On the road between Montefalcone and Santa Vittoria there is a plaque fixed to the wall of a farmhouse. I stopped one day to see what it said. It commemorates a partisan shot on that spot by the Germans. On the other hand, another nearby village, Monte San Martino, has a plaque commemorating a fifteen year old  boy shot by the partisans. As was the case in France, the liberation provided a chance for old scores to be settled: people denounced to the authorities as pro-German by those who had a personal grudge against them when in fact they’d been nothing of the kind. If I had had to make a choice, I like to think I’d have been on the partisans’ side. Thank God, in England we never had to choose. Although Le Marche is a fairly left-wing area there are pockets of neo-fascism, the Ascoli ultras being a notorious example. One day the door to my wine-merchant’s storeroom was open. He’s a very pleasant chap, Umberto Eco’s doppelganger, who always gives me a discount, and a large one when I buy local wine to take to Dave and Sue’s in Burgundy. Imagine my surprise then, gentler reader, when I saw the ‘Mussolini Calendar’, sporting a large picture of il Duce, hanging on the storeroom wall. In his defence, Italian fascism was marginally less vile than its German counterpart - at least until Mussolini moved from being Hitler’s mentor to his puppet and enacted the  racial laws in 1938.

   We went to Lupo’s for a lunch celebrating not the Liberation but the first anniversary of his taking over the locanda. Sat with Maria the postlady, her husband, two sons, English daughter-in-law and small grandchildren. Even taking into account the calamitous collapse in sterling - thank you Blair, you sanctimonious git, for not joining the euro - the meal was still good value: four courses plus mineral water, wine ad lib, and coffee for 15 euros a head. And Maria’s family, despite having plenty of company of their own, were kind enough to include Stanlio and Olio in their conversation. Being out of practice at lunch-time drinking, after leaving the restaurant, the rest of the day was a bit of a blur!

It's a conspiracy!

 Hot on the heels of the oh so helpful letter from LibDem MEP Andrew Duff’s minion, the international banking conspiracy strikes another blow against  plucky Jim Richards, the battling pensioner from central Italy. Tom Wise, the erstwhile Ukip MEP who responded with alacrity to my missive to the European parliamentarians,  has been charged with fraud. Click here to read the BBC report. Clearly a move by the international bankers - who I’ve recently discovered are in fact a front for the Tem.... aaagh. 

Editor’s note: Dan Brown’s forthcoming novel Angles and Nutters will explain all.

Merchant Banker, LibDem: spot the difference.

As a devoted follower of this blog you will recall - yes, I know I’m talking to myself - we’ve been having problems using English debit cards in Italy, and I emailed both English and Italian MEPs to try to get something done (see entry for 30th March). One English MEP responded by phone the same day. Today I had a reply from a Liberal Democrat MEP’s ‘caseworker’:

Dear Mr Richards

Thank you for your letter.

I was not aware of this problem. As far as I can discover, it only applies

to banks in Italy.

I do not think there is a great deal that can be done at EU level, since the

problem seems to concern inter-bank systems and relations. It may be that

pressure from the Uk government could be applied, to which end I suggest you

contact the FO, or the Westminster MP for your previous address in Norfolk.

Yours sincerely

(Steve Marshall

Casework Officer )

On behalf of Andrew Duff 

Liberal Democrat MEP to the East of England

I  replied as follows:

Dear Mr Marshall

Thank you for your reply. You are correct in thinking the problem only applies to Italy. However, I should have thought this is exactly the issue which should be dealt with at EU level. Surely this affects the free movement of goods and services which it's the EU's function to promote? Recent experience has taught us that 'inter-bank systems and relations' are far too important to be left to bankers. 

  I had believed that  the Liberal Democrats - unlike New Labour and the Conservatives -shared my belief that only a strong and united EU will be in the position to meet the challenges posed by the rising economies of China and India. Or has the little-Englandism  fostered by the Murdoch press proved too attractive a vote-winner?

Yours sincerely

So here we have an MEP from an also-ran party who has a ‘caseworker’ to deal with the people he’s paid to represent - he’s far too important to reply himself - who seems to have no concept of what the EU’s about. I’ve never considered voting for the Liberals, especially after they aligned themselves with Doctor Death and the rest of the Gang of Four. But they did have some good ideas: local income tax, an hypothecated penny rise in income tax, a commitment to European unity. All abandoned, God knows why. Do they really think they’re ever going to be voted into government? Why not remain  a progressive force which might occasionally prick the consciences of Labour and Tories. Why not take a statesmanlike position on what is, with global warming and energy supplies, the big issue confronting the UK: if we don’t have a federal Europe we’re all fucked. Our grandchildren will scrape a living showing Chinese and Indian tourists around our quaint little third-world island. The US is big enough to survive, no European country is, with the possible exception of Germany. The rich of course will continue to do well as they do in today’s third world. It’s just the descendants of the ordinary decent majority of people, conned into thinking the EU’s their enemy, who will suffer.

No wonder the ‘caseworker’ thinks interbank systems should be left to the bankers. He may not share an occupation with the merchant bankers, but cockney rhyming slang connects them.

The Darling Buds of May meets Cold Comfort Farm.

Finished reading Giro di Vento by Andrea De Carlo last night. A cross between Darling Buds of May and Cold Comfort Farm but without the humour. An ok read, but not a book I’d go out of my way to recommend. Click here to buy an English translation. What I did find interesting was that contrary to what I’d always believed, Italians can be snobbish about accents. When things begin to get stressful, one of the characters, Alessio, an estate-agent, finds his country accent, which he’d worked hard to eliminate, breaking through: 

  <<“Non c’era architetto” dice Alessio. Il suo accento sembra danneggiato in modo serio: lascio spazio a un’inflessione da hinterland milanese o ancora peggio, da Prealpi varesotte o comasche.>>

   I’d always believed that in other countries your accent simply identified where you came from rather than acted as a social signifier. However, De Carlo’s book seems to suggest that if like Alessio you have the misfortune to have the Italian equivalent of a Birmingham accent it’s as well to disguise it if you want to get on in the world!

Jane goes mad in France.

 

Got back yesterday evening from a very pleasant week at Dave and Sue’s in Burgundy. Click here to see a video of our time there. Normally we have no problem finding our way there: I print out basic motorway directions on a piece of A4: 

and we take a French road atlas with us.

This time I took Jane and, fatal mistake, forgot the French road atlas. While Jane is invaluable for finding your way around an unknown town she’s pretty redundant for getting from one town to another - indeed she will try to send you along much worse routes than you would have worked out for yourself. In the case of our trip, round the Milan ring-road which I’ve always avoided: it has a 90 km speed limit and is infested with speed cameras. Where she really excelled herself was in at one point sending us back up the A40 in the opposite direction to the one we were supposed to be going! It cost us a good half an hour in time and a bucket of goodwill towards each other and the world. On Monday Dave and Sue, Pat and I decided to go to Dijon. None of us had ever been there before, so although it’s easy to get to, I decided to programme Jane to find us a car-park in the centre of Dijon. Unfortunately, when I came to plug her in I discovered that the connection on her charger had broken and as her battery ran down she stopped speaking to us. Therefore instead of being directed by those commanding tones so reminiscent of Matron at one’s old school. I had to squint at her display and interpret it as best I could to Dave who was driving. And finally I had to buy her a new charger in order for us to get back to Il Bel Paese yesterday. So she’s bossy, expensive, useless at giving you directions and you can’t even have sex with her. Thank God I’m not married to her.

   However, I can’t blame her for our other disaster in France. On our way to Dijon I stopped to fill up with LPG. Although it is possible if unusual to put petrol in your car yourself, in Italy the LPG pump is always operated by a petrol pump attendant. Life in England has made me a dab hand at putting petrol in a car, but GPL is a different kettle of fish. It’s not a simple matter of shoving a nozzle in a hole - which most men seem quite comfortable with - but a much more subtle coupling, involving a precise aligning of parts before the connection is made. How sensible the Italians are to employ someone to do this.  It runs completely contrary, of course, to the Anglo-Saxon way of doing things which is to go for ‘cost-saving efficiency’ and bugger the consequences for everyone’s quality of life. Anyway, I obviously have the typical Englishman’s inability to couple subtly, and it took a service station employee with a monkey-wrench to separate my car from the pump to which I’d maladroitly  attached it. I suppose I could have tried throwing a bucket of cold water over them instead!

The Earth Moves - but not for Pat!

I woke up in the night to a weird experience - it seemed as though I was in the middle of a whirlwind everything rushing around me in a blur. Within a split second everything returned to normal and I went straight back to sleep. In the morning I told Pat, not entirely sure whether it was a dream. Unfortunately it wasn’t - there had been an earthquake which at the time of writing has  killed 20 people in Abruzzo, the region immediately south of us. 10, 000 homes have had to be evacuated. No damage here, fortunately. Pat, meanwhile had slept through the earthquake - she puts it down to the earplugs she wears to block out my snoring. But I didn’t hear a noise, was just aware of movement. So why didn’t the earth move for Pat? Please don’t answer that question!