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.