The pantomime season.

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Unlike the English, the Italians don’t put on pantomimes at Christmas. With Berlusconi providing  an endless supply of corny gags, why would they? This year’s annual pantomime in Ambridge is proving unusually absorbing. The BBC itself has announced that Sunday’s episode will “change the Archers for ever” and everything seems to point to some catastrophic event at the Village Hall which will decimate the cast. Something along the lines of Tony Hancock’s The Bowmans.

   This morning Radio 4’s Today programme introduced its own edgy pantomime which inspired me to offer the following item to the spoof web-site News Thump (formerly known as Newsarse) which Sophy had drawn my attention to earlier this year:

     “Instead of a man dressed as a woman, this morning's featured Pantomime Dame was a  Dutchwoman born in Canada pretending to be British. ‘Dame’ Clara Furse wowed the audience with her insights into British culture and ‘foods’. Radio 4 listener Signor Grandicoglioni - ‘Hey you canna call me Don’ - here on a business trip from Sicily said, ‘Wadda fica. She no Breeteesh. Me, yes. Porca madonna, we Italians rulla your poxy little island for 400 years until those bloody English eemmigrants arrive and take alla da good jobs.’”

    

Don’t get me wrong, like Defoe I not only recognise that we’re a mongrel race but rejoice in the fact. When I read Hugo Rifkind’s article in today’s Spectator, ‘Nothing makes me feel as Scottish as an English New Year’s Eve’ I didn’t sneer and think ‘You’re not Scottish, you’re an Eastern European Jew’. Like his father, the former Scottish Secretary, Rifkind was born in this country which in my book makes him as British as any of the successive waves of immigrants - Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans - who’ve colonised or - Romans, Scandinavians, French, Dutch and Germans - ruled this island. Dame Clara, though, is a different kettle of fish.  Being naturalised, she’s technically British, but only someone with the complacent arrogance and lack of self-irony which this former head of the Stock Exchange displayed today would pick Britishness as a theme when invited to guest-edit Today. Like the banker she is, she thinks everything’s for sale in the globalised world she extolled in the programme. ‘Hey, I fancied being British, so I bought it!’ She’s no more British, than living in Italy for another twenty years and getting naturalised would turned me into Signor Grandicoglioni.

The nightmare journey.

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In my last post I wrote that Pat and I would be spending our first Christmas for thirty-two years without the girls. That seemed bad, but worse was to come: until yesterday afternoon I thought there was a very good chance of spending my first Christmas for sixty-seven years utterly alone. To explain:

Pat flew to England from Rimini last Tuesday. The journey was hazardous because the roads were covered with snow and ice, and, because we’re about to change the car and our snow tyres had worn out last winter, she was driving with ordinary treads. Despite this she got to the airport in time to catch her plane at 1.30. Unfortunately the plane from Stansted was half an hour late by which time it had begun to snow at Rimini. The pilot circled the airport until the runway was snow-ploughed. Whilst it was circling the plane was struck by lightning. Although it landed safely it couldn’t be used until it had been thoroughly checked which meant that Ryan Air had to send another plane from Rome. Meanwhile the snow continued to fall putting the runways out of action. Eventually the passengers were bused to Forli and from there eventually reached Stansted at 23.30 rather than 14.50 - almost nine hours late.

She was due to come home yesterday. I spent Saturday glued to the BAA web-site which reported the vast majority of flights from Stansted cancelled. At the same time the Met Office was forecasting more heavy snow. So I was virtually reconciled to spending Christmas trapped in Montefalcone - the car, of course was at the airport - sans turkey and sans Pat. But yesterday the gods smiled: Heathrow was virtually closed but nearly all the flights from Stansted took off. The plane got to Rimini on time; Pat managed to avoid crashing the car despite the snow and ice and lack of snow tyres and arrived home a nervous wreck but in one piece.

This morning I had an email from Jayne and Norman saying that the foul weather had prevented their getting to Stansted. So if Pat hadn’t made it I think I might well have died from loneliness.

End of year round-up.

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This year for the first time for 32 years we’ll be spending Christmas without the girls: Candy’s son, Quinn, wants to see his father, and Sophy and Adam have used up their annual leave. We spent Christmas in England last year for the first time since 2002, joining Deborah at her holiday home on the outskirts of Southwold.

  The highlight of the year has undoubtedly been Sophy’s marriage to Adam in Dubai on the 12th November. Being several thousand miles away we weren’t able to be as actively involved in the preparations as we’d have wished. However I did create a website for Adam and Sophy which enabled guests to keep up to date with information on the wedding and contains a link to their gallery of wedding photographs. As well as the wedding itself one of the great things about the trip to Dubai was seeing James and Gabrielle again for the first time for nine years.

  Pat’s been back to the UK virtually every month to look after Quinn when Candy’s away on business. I’ve only been across three times: for Quinn’s fourth birthday in February, in June and, finally, last week. We should have gone across together for Candy’s birthday in April but our flight was cancelled owing to the volcanic ash-cloud.

  Another of the good things about this year has been the number of family and friends who have come to see us: Warren in March, Dave in May, Sophy, Quinn and Candy in August, Mike and Julie and Richard and Jane in September, and Chris and Kate in October. Our social life has also been enhanced by Jane and David, Tony and Shona and John and Judy who have holiday homes in the comune.

  Last year’s success in getting two letters published in the Guardian was followed this year by getting one published in the Independent. However, I was completely overshadowed by Candy who had a whole article devoted to her in the Guardian in July.

   We followed this year’s election campaign in the UK with interest and weren’t surprised to see that, like Italy, the country continues to be run by an elderly media plutocrat with a fondness for much younger women. The Italians, at least, elected  Berlusconi; in Britain it doesn’t matter which party people vote for: Murdoch still pulls the strings. We noticed that Nanny England seems to be getting increasingly paranoid: not only was a chap fined for tweeting about blowing up Robin Hood airport  but a bloke from Stroud was imprisoned for having a political argument with his television set!

  I spent a lot of time this year preparing a course which didn’t run. I didn’t really expect it to: the fun was getting it ready. Apart from that, intellectual activity has largely been  confined to reading detective stories and a couple of Italian novels, one good, the other rather dull. 

  Pat’s off to England again on Tuesday, snow permitting: according to the weather forecast the sunshine and mild temperature we’ve been enjoying gives way tomorrow to snowfalls every day for the next fortnight. Unlike the UK, however, the country won’t grind to a standstill: Italy knows how to cope!

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Cap'n Jack Sparrow.

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Got back yesterday from ten days in the UK helping Candy and Quinn settle in their new labrador puppy, Cap’n Jack Sparrow, commonly known as Jack. On Friday evening I went to the Crown at Gayton with Richard and Chris Horwood. Monday afternoon was Quinn’s Nativity Play, and in the evening Matthew picked me up for dinner with himself and Charlie at their house in Dersingham. Tuesday evening I had dinner at Richard and Jane’s, and on Wednesday Candy, Quinn and I dined at the Crown Lodge.

The weather was cold but the snow held off while I was there and I got to Stansted yesterday without any problems. Unfortunately we’ve snow forecast here from Monday onwards for the foreseeable future. Pat is due to fly to the UK from Rimini on Tuesday to look after Quinn while Candy’s away on business. Whether she’ll make it is a moot point: we haven’t got snow tyres on as we’re about to change the car. Could be an interesting week!

On translation.

I have read very few texts both in their original tongue and in an English translation. Apart from cribs of O level Latin set-texts half a century ago, the only ones which spring to mind are Gil Blas in Smollett’s translation, Il gattopardo, and a few pages of Il cane di terracotta, before I gave up the English version in disgust. 

  A few days ago there was a discussion on Radio 4 between translators of The Little Prince. They had approached their task from different perspectives: one seeking to make the text seem the product of a twenty-first century Englishman, another to preserve its original tone. Although both positions have their merits, my sympathies lie with the latter. It’s sometimes true that viewpoints which strike the foreign reader as bizarre may well be normal for the culture which has produced the text, thus creating a case for finding an everyday equivalent in that of the reader; but if literature is to fulfil its function of enlarging the mental horizons of the reader that case needs to be dismissed. So while Smollett’s Gil Blas is great fun to read, it keeps the reader firmly within the digressive tradition of the 18th century English novel rather than conveying any sense of Le Sage’s tight structure and finely-chiselled prose. When Chaucer uses the word Bishop rather than High Priest  in Troilus and Criseyde or Shakespeare has clocks striking in Julius Caesar they’re writing from within a belief system that, viewing all societies as essentially the same,  has no problem with altering their accidents to conform to current practice - no longer a tenable position. As for the translation of Il cane di terracotta it somehow coarsened Montalbano, making him seem a hard-boiled American cop rather than a sensitive Sicilian commissario. Not from what he said - the translation was accurate - but from how he said it: the register was slightly out of kilter. And register is crucial. When I was translating Troilus and Criseyde into Italian, Ornella advised against Troilus addressing Criseyde as Lei rather than tu. But I felt it important to preserve the formality of the original (you rather than thou) which was so integral a part of courtly love.

   Which brings me to Wallander. Pat and I first met Mankell’s detective in the Swedish television series, then saw some of the BBC version starring Kenneth Branagh, and finally read a translation of the first novel featuring Kurt. The translation seemed fine and the plot was engaging if not as feverishly absorbing as those of Larsson. But  the Swedish television series was better. And better too than the BBC version. Now it’s not unusual for a film to be better than the book it’s based on: The French Lieutenant’s Woman was spoilt by Fowles’s self-consciously clever and slightly preachy tone- irritating the reader in the same way that Melvyn Bragg irritates the listener - which  Pinter’s film-script mercifully jettisoned. What I find difficult to pin down is why I preferred the Swedish to the English television version. Both series were made by the same company, Yellow Bird, and both were filmed on location in Sweden. Perhaps it’s because one felt that the Branagh version was merely a translation of the Swedish - although they shared no plots - rather than an imaginative reworking in the tradition of  Sturges’ treatment of  Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai  in The Magnificent Seven. Of course, if the Swedish version hadn’t been screened, I guess I’d have been perfectly happy with the English one. In the same way I’d have probably quite enjoyed The Terracotta Dog if I hadn’t previously read Il cane di terracotta.

The Truman Show

Got back from Sophy’s wedding on Sunday having been in Dubai since the 3rd. We had a wonderful time: Adam’s parents had arranged various events including a barbecue at their house on the Wednesday before the wedding, a desert safari on the Thursday and lunch at their house the day after the wedding. They also took Pat and me to lunch at the Desert Mirage on the day of the signing of the marriage documents.

On the 4th we got up early so that Pat could go riding with Sophy at the Desert Palm. I went with them and read The Reader, which Chris had lent me when he was over with Kate, while they rode. In the evening Adam and Sophy treated us to an Indian meal at Bab Al Sharm - it was Duvali. The following day Pat and I walked to Um Suqquiem Park and in the evening we went with Sophy to the Desert Palm: she rode, we sat on the terrace. On the Saturday, Pat and I went on the metro to Union station, then back across the Creek by abra, went round the Heritage House and lunched at the VVA café. In the evening we went to a barbecue given by a couple of Adam and Sophy’s friends, Stuart and Kate. The following day Pat went riding with Sophy again. I stayed in bed! Candy, Quinn and Debbie arrived the Monday before the wedding. On the Tuesday I went to the Atlantis aquarium with them. James and Gabrielle and Richard and Jane arrived on the Wednesday. I went up the Burj Khalifa with them (minus Jane) and James and Gabrielle came back to Sophy’s for a while. While I went to the Burj, Pat, Sophy, Candy and Quinn went camel cuddling.

Got to spend a lot of time with Candy and Quinn who were staying at Sophy’s, and saw a lot of James and Gabrielle at the events arranged by Adam’s parents and at the wedding itself. They also came back to Sophy’s after the lunch on Saturday. Click here to see my pictures of all these events plus the wedding. Together with photos taken by other people, they should also be appearing on Sophy and Adam’s Mobile Me Gallery.

This was our third visit to Dubai. It is certainly different. Somebody I met there summed it up as being like The Truman Show. I think she was spot on. The place is unnaturally clean. Everybody speaks English, even Asians who were born in Dubai and whose ancestors have never lived in the UK or the States use it as their first language. As James remarked, the buildings look as though they belong in Sim City. Each one is plonked down as an autonomous item in the way a child might place his lego constructions on a play-mat. It defies reality in the same way that an economy based on sub-prime mortgages does. On Sunday we flew into Fiumicino. There are certainly some parallels between Ancient Rome and Dubai. Both were the stupor mundi of their day. But Rome was sustainable because it was built in a fertile region not a desert, and its wealth came from running a huge empire, not from bubble economics. I hope for Adam and Sophy’s sake the bubble lasts a few more years before it bursts and the skyscrapers collapse back into the lone and level sands.

New Tricks Swedish style

Yesterday I finished reading the final volume of the Millennium Trilogy: The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. In some ways it was a gothick version of the BBC police series New Tricks, as both involve old codgers returning to active operations. With one difference: the BBC series is basically a comedy, Larsson’s is a nightmare. The BBC has three pensioners - played by Dennis Waterman, James Bolam and Alun Armstrong - recruited to a newly established section devoted to investigating cold cases. Larsson has just two geriatrics - Gullberg and Clinton - but they make Bolam et al seem positively sprightly. Gullberg is 78 and suffering from terminal bowel and bladder cancer, Clinton spends alternate days on dialysis. Unlike their English counterparts, they have returned to a long-established, sinister and highly secret organisation within Sapö, the Swedish security police, known to the very few who are aware of its existence as The Section. And they have returned not to right past injustices but to prevent those formerly committed by The Section being uncovered -  and to perpetrate fresh ones. Unlike the redoubtable Amanda Holman, their boss, Wadensjöö, is only nominally in control.

  Larsson’s novels have several irritating features. The main character, Blomkvist, like his creator  is an investigative journalist. A great deal of time is spent on telling the reader what a wonderful job his magazine is doing rather than simply letting him discover this for himself. Every other page tells us how Blomkvist is irresistibly attractive to women and is a wonderful shag. Unless Paul Newman was using ‘Larsson’ as a pen-name, the author’s wish-fulfilment is a fantasy too far. The prose is often leaden, not helped, one suspects, by an American translator whose grasp of English grammar is less than perfect.

  Yet none of this really matters. After around fifty pages of the reader’s feeling rather distanced by the author’s thinly-disguised self-congratulation the magic kicks in as the plot goes up a gear and one is completely swallowed by the story. Not great literature to feed the soul, but very effective entertainment.

   Unlike Kate Atkinson. Her plots grip, but she also leaves you feeling that you’ve gained fresh insights into human nature. Her characters have real inner lives and her portrayal of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s in Started Early, Took my Dog  was a frighteningly convincing forecast of a condition I’ve, statistically, a good chance of experiencing first-hand in the fairly near future. I’ve now read all four of her tales featuring Jackson Brodie and they just get better and better. I’m sorry that Larsson won’t be writing any more books; I’d be devastated if Atkinson’s came to an end.

L’ultimo legionario*

Chris and Kate went back to the UK yesterday after a ten day visit. They’d come to keep me out of mischief while Pat was at Candy’s (4th - 15th). Despite the awful weather - Chris seems to specialise in choosing meteorologically unpropitious times to come to Italy - we managed to get out and about, visiting Ascoli as well as the Smerillo chestnut festival. For me, the highlight of our excursions was the visit to Fermo. I thought Chris and Kate would be interested in seeing the Mappa Mundi and the ancient library which houses it. They were, but Kate also managed to get us tickets to the Roman cisterns. This is a monument which I’ve always wanted to visit but had never previously managed to.

   Built in the reign of  Augustus, the huge cisterns supplied water to Porto San Giorgio as well as Fermo. With the collapse of the Empire they fell in to disuse. In the middle ages two of the chambers were rediscovered by Dominican friars and used as a wine cellar. But the really interesting thing comes next. In the nineteenth century the whole complex was rediscovered and re-used as a cistern until the 1980s. But human knowledge and technology have advanced since the days of the Romans. Those primitive people had built huge chambers around twenty feet high but stupidly only allowed the water to fill them to a depth of four feet, the height of the waterproof concrete lining. So modern man being much wiser filled the chambers almost to the top. Oh dear! Too late he discovered that there was a reason for the vast amount of ‘wasted’ space. It had been full of fresh air in the precise proportion, relative to the water, required to keep the latter fresh. Lacking this fresh air, the water stored there in modern times became foul and unfit to drink.

   Most people are aware that, years after the end of the Second World War, Japanese soldiers were discovered on remote islands, unaware that the conflict had ended and still preserving their loyalty to the Emperor. Just as Italy has nothing to match the UK in the survival rate of aborted fœtuses, so the Far East cannot equal either the West’s longevity or its devotion to duty. I was able to photograph (see top of page), lurking in the bowels of the cisterns a centurion of  Legio XII, one Christophorus Bellum, and inform the startled creature that Romulus Augustulus had been deposed in AD 476, that the Roman Empire was no more and he was therefore free to resign his commission and return home to the bosom of his family. He refused to believe me, adding that  even if I were right, who would want to venture out and live in one of the petty squabbling statelets which I’d informed him currently occupy the territory of the Empire. I think he’s probably got a point.

With apologies to Manfredi.

Protagonists in peril.

The exam board we used in the seventies, when I taught O level English, required its candidates to write, inter alia,  a narrative essay. Every year someone would write himself into a corner: telling his story in the first-person and then deciding to kill off the protagonist. I would gently explain that it would be wise to recast the tale in the third-person. ‘O no,’ the authors would always cry triumphantly, ‘ I’ve got the perfect ending: John [or Alice or Ken] will suddenly wake up and discover it was all a dream.’ They were deaf to my declaration that it was the weakest of all possible endings: after all they’d seen it done in Dallas.

   If it’s a given that the narrator will survive in a first-person narrative, it’s a basic convention that the main characters in a television series will do so too. A convention that Spooks brilliantly flouts, for much of the excitement of a thriller is lost if you know at the back of your mind that the main character(s) however imperilled will survive. The knowledge certainly detracts from the pleasure I get from reading Diabolik, a monthly Italian crime comic. Since the ‘sixties Diabolik and his partner, Eva Kant, have survived death row several times, and each of them has had to cope, several times, with reports of the other’s death. Like that of Mark Twain the reports are always premature. Unlike the news about Twain, the reader knows that the it must be false: a plug for the next issue is always contained in the comic you’re reading.

    When Dave came over in May he was immersed in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy. Respecting Dave’s literary taste, I bought a copy of the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which both Pat and I enjoyed, and Pat subsequently bought the remaining two volumes. On Monday she went to the UK, her first visit since her trips from 13th to 22nd July  and I read the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which she’d just finished reading. Very near the end I was brought up short for it seemed that, Lisbeth Salander, one of the two main characters had been killed off. Now as Larsson writes in the third person this in itself presented no problem, merely a shock. The problem lay in the fact that despite having a bullet in her brain and being buried, Salander survives. On the whole it’s better for detective stories to avoid reminding the reader of the tale of Christ and the son of the widow of Nain. One can go further: when the story is part of a series featuring the same protagonist, it’s best to avoid trying to convince your reader that the character is about to die. We know that s/he isn’t; far better to save your energy for creating tension and suspense in other aspects of the novel.

   Yesterday I began reading Kate Atkinson’s third novel featuring Jackson Brodie, When will there be Good News. Atkinson also inflicts life-threatening injuries on her protagonist, though in his case it’s entirely plausible that he recovers from them. Nevertheless considerable space is devoted to his brain’s activity in a near-death state: the white tunnel and an encounter with his long dead sister. One wonders why. Perhaps the book will go on to furnish a reason. I certainly hope so.

   In the two Montalbano books published this year Camilleri, as usual, avoids the mistake found in Diabolik, and the stories by Larsson and Atkinson I’ve just referred to. But they were disappointing in other ways. In the first of them, La caccia del tesoro, Montalbano no longer suffers from the respectively ludicrous and repulsive traits he’d had imposed on him in the ante-penultimate and penultimate titles in the series. However the story had the most fundamental flaw of all for a detective story: I was able to guess the identity of the murderer little more than a quarter of the way through the book. The second novel, Acqua in bocca,  was written in collaboration with another Italian crime writer, Lucarelli and deals with Montalbano’s involvement in a case with Lucarelli’s protagonist, Grazia Negro. The book consists of correspondence between the two detectives and newspaper items regarding the case. It was disappointing.  One feels that Camilleri is merely going through the motions. A pity because the first thirteen Montalbano books were classics of the genre. Camilleri’s well into his eighties: it would have been better if he’d sold his typewriter and remained content with having created a memorable character and masterly plots. His last four novels have only served to muddy his achievement.

The Five Boys’ loop.

My more mature readers - and, let’s face it, none of the three people who occasionally glance at this site will see the sunny side of sixty again - may remember the pleasure they once obtained from their weekly Five Boys. Perhaps I should hasten to reassure any young person inadvertently stumbling across this site that I’m not accusing my elderly male readers of having been pederasts, or the females of having been nymphomaniacs. No I’m simply referring to the Fry’s chocolate bar which gladdened our youthful hearts.

   My experience of living in Italy has in some ways been reminiscent of the successive emotional states embodied by the Five Boys. To explain. When we moved here I thought that I wouldn’t lose the things I valued most when I lived in England: my friends and family. I foolishly imagined that they would all be eager to take advantage of a free holiday in Italy. Far from it: John McBride and family came over the first year we were here and Dave and Sue and Chris Bell have been over fairly regularly as have Candy, Quinn and Sophy; but apart from them visitors have been few and far between. So Desperation set in. Then a few weeks ago I had an email from Mike Farmer and his wife Julie that they were renting a house in Tuscany and would like to see us , followed by another one from Richard and Jane that they too would be in Tuscany and would pop over to see us. So Expectation was followed by Acclamation. Last Wednesday saw Realisation when Mike and Julie arrived. To be followed by Desperation as the weather took a severe turn for the worse. On Thursday, after a pleasant trip to Ascoli and a splendid lunch there we took the dogs out for a walk. And were caught by a thunderstorm which soaked the three of us to the skin. Meanwhile the weather forecast showed that Tuscany was still basking in sunshine. I felt enormous guilt at having been responsible for Mike and Julie forsaking the sunshine of western Italy for the cold and rain of Marche.  Click here for some photos Mike & Julie took.

   Richard and Jane arrived yesterday in the pouring rain. But today Desperation gave way to Acclamation as we awoke to glorious sunshine. The mountains had emerged from the gloom and all that was lacking was a view of the sea, still hidden by mist on the coast. So I’m now in a state of Expectation that this may herald further visits. Maybe John and Joy Simpson, Ed and Uschi, Graham, Mike and Pam Jefferies and Matthew and Charlie  will come to see us. But they probably won’t. So it’s back to Desperation again.

Et habitavit in nobis.

In my youth the English year was given shape by the great festivals of the Christian religion.  The build up to Christmas began in late November on the First Sunday in Advent. Once the Christmas season had ended on the 6th January, the next significant event was pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, followed around four weeks later by hot-cross buns on Good Friday and Easter eggs two days after that.

   Nowadays - in our post-modern age - all these events have been emptied of significance. Christmas begins in August and has lost all pretence of being anything other than a orgy of consumerism. Nativity plays have become an endangered species, and the festival itself is embodied by ‘Santa’, as Father Christmas is called these days, rather than the Christ child. Hot-cross buns can be bought throughout the year rather than only on Good Friday, and these days Easter-eggs have as much to do with Easter as that festival had to do with the Celtic goddess Eostre from whom it took its name.

   I’m not writing this in any particular spirit of nostalgia, or from any belief that the England of my youth was a more religious place than it is now. It’s simply that when I was  a child  I lived in a country which was still culturally christian; England - Italy is a different matter -no longer is. And that culture gave a shape to the year which it no longer has. The only festival still tied to a particular day is Hallowe’en, re-imported from the States a few decades ago. It was unknown in my youth. 

   However, for those of us who worship at the shrine of Cupertino the year still has a shape.  Whisperings amongst the Magi of the computer industry begin in February. They claim to have seen signs and portents that a wondrous new  birth is imminent in California. Then in June John the Baptist Jobs reveals the name of the saviour and announces the date of its birth. Like the Christian Advent there will a few weeks to wait and prepare for it to come and dwell amongst us. 

   This year, though, there was a difference. The Americans, British, French and Germans received the saviour on June 24th; the rest of the world had to wait  until July 30th. Now I can understand Britain being first in the queue: after all its government’s ‘special relationship’ with the States provided the pattern for the one between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. But the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the krauts? What did they do to deserve Apple’s special favour? And then things got even worse. Unlike the favoured four, the rest of the world was not allowed to pre-order. Instead one had to wait until the official release date, July 30th, to place an order. On the 30th I went to the shop where I’d bought my 3G two years ago, not really expecting them to have an iPhone 4. To my delight they did. Then delight turned to dismay as they revealed that they only had the 16 gigabyte version. So I placed my order for the 32 gigabyte model and went away dejected. It finally arrived yesterday. After four weeks of waiting I’ve almost lost interest. I hope the Three Wise Men didn’t feel the same way by the time they eventually made it to Bethlehem.

Leaking boundaries.

The inability to distinguish between fantasy and fact used to be the preserve of sufferers from senile dementia, readers of the Daily Mail,  and members of the right wing of the Republican Party (click here for a case in point). Not any more.

   Last year Ambridge gained a new resident: Jim. Like Lynda Snell,  he’s a pain in the butt most of the time, but like her is given the occasional redeeming feature - thereby distinguishing them from Jailbird Carter and the irrepressible !!Vickoi!! Tucker who have none whatsoever. As well as sharing my name and a vaguely similar pre-retirement career, Jim likes to drop the occasional Latin tag. Last week he used my favourite - sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt - in an egregiously inappropriate way. 

   A month or so ago the Archers’ scriptwriters killed off the character Sid Perks. Not, as in the case of Phil Archer, because the actor playing him had died, but because Alan Devereux had decided to retire. I’m sure he’s a good bloke - the amount of time the scriptwriters have devoted to the aftermath of his  character’s death suggests he was important to his colleagues. But here’s the rub: Sid Perks was boring. He had the barking laugh of those totally devoid of a sense of humour, his great passion in life was cricket, the most tedious pastime known to man. Yet week after week vast chunks of time have been taken up by people reminiscing about him and mourning his death. Far more than was spent on the aftermath of Phil Archer’s death - a character who’d been in the soap since its inception. And of all the over-the-top reactions that of his former wife, Kathy, takes the biscuit. People don’t usually take kindly to being dumped by their spouses; turning them into some recently deceased saint is unheard of. If the scriptwriters were doing their job of delivering a consistent character, Jim would have told her so. He’s not a man who suffers fools - other than himself - gladly. 

   There was a time when schools saw their job as educating pupils rather than using them as fodder to climb up  the meaningless league tables introduced by Snobby Roberts, and then enthusiastically adopted by the Blair Witch project. Those of us lucky enough to have been schoolchildren then know that Virgil’s words were spoken by a broken hearted Aeneas looking at the sack of Troy as depicted on the gates of the temple being erected in Carthage. At the utter destruction of his homeland and with it the loss of his wife and the death of all his friends. ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ is a sentiment which, alas, could be put in the mouth of a Bosnian muslim, a Rwandan tutsi or one of those millions of poor souls who have just lost everything in the floods in Sind. But to apply it to Kathy’s situation is ludicrously inappropriate, and if Jim were a real person he’d know it. But the scriptwriters have let the boundary between real life and fiction leak. They were fond of Alan Devereux, a real person, and seek to demonstrate this to their erstwhile colleague by inflicting months of boredom on their listeners: we miss Alan, therefore you listeners are jolly well going to miss the character he played. Why don’t they just leave Alan to enjoy his retirement and let the homophobic cricketer Sid slide into well-deserved oblivion?

The not so secret life of things.

Like most small children I was cruel to many of the other non-human inhabitants of the planet. Not to cuddly mammals such as dogs and cats, but to insects, particularly woodlice. In the West Country we called them grampuses and I would while away idle moments in the garden picking off the scales of the still living creatures. Now that I’ve reached the age when I realise my own life’s a gift that will soon be taken away, I’m increasingly reluctant to kill any living creature, even rather unpleasant ones such as scorpions, slugs and Tories. 

   But until recently objects were a different matter. Being inanimate one could treat them in the same way an eighteenth  century planter would his slave, or  one of Margaret Atwood’s Commanders would his Handmaid. They had no minds of their own, they were simply there to serve. Recently, however, they’ve begun to fight back. At first it was a simple matter: freshly-washed objects would suddenly slide off the draining-board back in to the sink, others would suddenly slither from your fingers and crash, suicidally, onto the floor. Now you may explain this by, in the case of my first example, the slight earth-tremors to which central Italy is subject, and, in the case of my second, to the general dodderiness of the over-sixties. But how about this, smartypants?

   For some years we’ve owned one of these all-in-one coffee machine. You simply press a button to tell the machine what size of coffee you want. It then proceeds to grind the beans, pre-infuse them, and finally, having discharged the grounds into a removable container,  deliver the drink to your cup complete with a thick crema. At each stage a message appears on a small screen telling you how far the process has gone. When the machine arrived, the messages were in Italian, but it was possible to change the language to English, which we did. Admittedly a slightly odd English. When the container holding the grounds needed emptying we got the message ‘Dreg drawer full’. I imagined Dreg Drawer as a slightly over-the-hill Australian porn star clutching a protruding belly, in his younger days the star of the ‘adult movie’ Skin-flick at Hanging Cock. Then suddenly this week the messages changed. Dreg Drawer had disappeared to be replaced by the much more respectable ‘Empty coffee grounds’. That was fine. Unfortunately ‘One small coffee’ now read ‘Single shot’. Now I’ve nothing against American English in its proper place i.e. the mouth of an American. But to find my coffee machine addressing me in a transatlantic dialect over breakfast was a step too far. I consulted the manual and set about re-programming the machine’s language. Being familiar with the Americans’ proprietorial attitude to the language we invented, I expected to find, in addition to the Italian, English, Spanish , French and German alternatives something labelled UK English. No, there was just English, an English which had started as the Australian variant, changed briefly to standard English and, having finally ended up in Central Perks with the cast of Friends, decided to stick with American English. I’ve re-programmed the machine’s language to Italian.

  So how does one explain the machine’s linguistic evolution? I guess a scientist might say that all matter is inherently unstable, that protons and neutrons don’t have to behave the way they do inside the atom, they merely do so the vast majority of the time. Alternatively, one can take the Wordsworthian view that there’s: 

                                            ‘  … something far more deeply interfused,

                                                Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

                                                And the round ocean, and the living air,

                                                And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,            

                                                A motion and a spirit, that impels

                                                All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

                                                And rolls through all things.’

I hope it’s wrong. Not only could I no longer be cruel to grampuses but I’d have to be respectful and considerate to the furniture, the cutlery and all the myriad dumb objects on which I rely for my daily well-being, or risk being pilloried in the Guardian for anima-centric insensitivity  - or even have bricks thrown through my window by the lunatic fringe of the Things’ Rights Society.

End of season.

It may seem strange writing this on Ferragosto, the climax of the Italian summer, but for us the holiday season’s over. The day-boys who constitute the major part of our social life have nearly all departed: Tony and Shona on the 31st of July, Judy on August 1st and Jane on the August 2nd. Only John remains ‘preparing research articles’ as far as his university is concerned. 

   Worst of all Sophy, Candy and Quinn left for the UK yesterday after what was, for their doting grand/parents, a wonderful week. We went to the beach at Pedaso on Monday, Madonna dell’Ambro on Tuesday and had a picnic in the mountains on Wednesday. All liberally interspersed with Quinn’s favourite activities: trips to the children’s playground at Tiro del Segno and to Luisa’s bar. Friday evening was particularly magical with a barbecue in the courtyard followed by Quinn’s playing on the panoramic terrace with Filippo and a host of other village children while Candy and I kept a watchful eye from Luisa’s. Click here for a movie of some of the week’s activities.

    So that’s it until September when Richard and Jane may pop over from Lucca and a visit from Chris and Kate in October.

Course (sic) material.

While Pat was away I completed and printed out the   libretto   for the Phantom Course. I began compiling the booklet in September with a view to offering the course last winter. However, for various reasons it took much longer than the module booklets I used to produce for my APU teaching. 

   Firstly, to avoid involving potential students in any expense I decided to include all the texts they’d need. In the case of The Canterbury Tales this meant buying a copy of an Italian translation, scanning the tales I intended using, running them through an OCR programme and finally creating a document with the translation running side by side with the Middle English original. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a translation of the passages from Troilus and Criseyde that I wished to use so I had to do the job myself. Then I had to find a native speaker who’d be willing to check my work. My friend Irish Paul who teaches ESOL to students from the Italian customs service found one who was prepared to take on the task. Needless to say, there were so many mistakes that Ornella virtually rewrote it. 

   As I’m doubtful that Montefalcone will have enough (if any) people interested in the course, I’ve created a web-site for it.  I’ll see if I can place a free advert in the Corriere Annunci  pointing people to it and  maybe that’ll pull in enough punters. But I’m not holding my breath.

The Night (sic[k]) of the Dolorous Return.

Pat came back yesterday evening from nine days in England. She visited Laurie and Steve on Friday and spent a night on their boat at Woodbridge. Deborah came down to Candy’s on the Sunday and  Dave and Sue in their camper van on Monday  for a couple of days. On Wednesday she went to Burnham Market to buy a hat for Sophy’s wedding. Apart from the TomTom iPhone car kit coming loose,  hurling her phone across the car and breaking its power cable, so far so good. 

   I was surprised not to have the usual texts from her yesterday detailing her progress to Stansted. Then I had one from Candy saying her mother had left her phone behind. So I was prepared to meet a pretty sick Pat at Ancona - she’s as addicted to her iPhone as I am -see the illustration above. My expectations were fulfilled in spades. But the sickness was literal: she’s been taken violently ill on the plane. So the bottle of prosecco I’d put in the fridge to celebrate her return is still sitting there.

Dimblebys move over.

A new journalistic dynasty is born. After the staggering success of her father having a letter published in the Independent this year, and two in the Guardian last year, Candy has got a whole article devoted to her, complete with picture.

All at sea with Sebastian Cabot.

It’s an article of faith for those of us fortunate enough to have been brought up in the Metropolis of the West, or its immediate hinterland, that Bristol is one of the world’s great cities. We dismiss with scorn the rival claims of  York or Norwich to having been England’s second city during the middle ages. For we know that  position was held by Bristol right through to the end of the eighteenth century. York may have been founded by the Romans but they were mere humans. Our begetters were the giants Ghyston and Goram. Norwich may have preserved its mediaeval architecture intact, but that’s only because, like York,  it was too unimportant for the Luftwaffe to waste bombs on its destruction. Our neighbour, Bath, may boast about its Roman heritage and Georgian townscape but we know it was merely a rest and recreation facility for the legionaries stationed in Bristol’s suburb, Sea Mills. And anyway we have Clifton. 

  As for Birmingham and Liverpool with their respectively  repulsive and comical accents who could take them seriously? The same, of course, goes for those other northern middens, Manchester and Leeds. When Edward III made Bristol a county they were mere villages. It’s a matter of regret that they later emerged from decent obscurity to sprawl  across a landscape which although vastly inferior to that of the West Country is not entirely devoid of charm.

   Amongst Bristol’s innumerable claims to fame - including Friese-Greene, Old Elizabethan and inventor of the moving picture; Hugo Weaving, Old Elizabethan and illustrious movie star; and Ashley  Pharoah, Old Elizabethan and writer  of  Life on Mars -  is its discovery of America. Bristolians know that the New World was named after the Bristol merchant,  Richard Ameryke not  the Florentine map maker Amerigo Vespucci. Ameryke was one of  John Cabot’s financial backers. And we know that it was John Cabot not Christopher Columbus who was the first European since the Vikings to land in America. The Genoan may have got to the West Indies first but it was the boy from Bristol who beat him to the mainland. 

   John Cabot and his son Sebastian loom especially large in the minds of Old Elizabethans for we spent seven years of our lives working and, if we were boarders, sleeping in the shadow of their commemorative tower. One of my form-mates managed to perform both simultaneously, falling asleep during one of Doug “Otto” Cropper’s French lessons. Unlike many other masters he was a kindly soul. Instead of  cuffing him around the head, Otto gently spread a handkerchief over the sleeping schoolboy’s pate and left him to his slumbers. 

    Shortly after moving to Italy I was amazed to discover that many Italians have never heard of Bristol. One winter I went to the baker’s muffled in my Bristol City scarf. To my horror Enzo asked me if  I were wearing Man United colours. I quickly enlightened him: the scarf proclaimed my allegiance to a football team from la gran città that Giovanni Caboto had sailed from to discover America. And like all Italians Enzo’d heard of Cabot. 

  All of the foregoing led me to break the habit of a lifetime. I recently came across a fictionalised account of the life of Sebastian Cabot, Memorie di un cartografo veneziano - ‘The Recollections of a Venetian Mapmaker’. I’ve never been keen on fiction based on real lives or on historical novels.  One of the things I like about conventional novels is not knowing how they’re going to end. And whilst a great novel will bear re-reading many times, I would hate to be deprived of the initial journey into the unknown. In the case of fictionalised biography, however, one knows the end before the first page has been turned. My beef with historical novels is their inescapable inauthenticity. However well researched the historical details it is impossible for the author to write from within the mindset of the period in which he’s set his story. Using ‘italiano corrente ma con l'inserimento di impurità, costruzioni desuete delle frasi e altri accorgimenti che lo fanno sembrare di un'altra epoca’ [using contemporary Italian intermingled with some linguistic corruption, obsolete grammatical constructions and other linguistic features to make the text  seem to originate from another age] doesn’t solve the problem. The difference between one of Fielding’s novels and an historical novel set in the eighteenth century, or between Ivanhoe and any of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is immediately apparent. A great writer - such as  Jorge Luis Borges in his short story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote - will exploit this creatively, but on the whole I find the historical novel best avoided. 

  Nevertheless, despite ‘The Recollections of a Venetian Mapmaker’ being both historical and biographical fiction I bought it. What interested me was how the author would handle the Cabots’ stay in Bristol. I cherished a wild hope that although they were there almost a century before QEH was founded the author might have written something along the lines of: ‘I couldn’t help being moved by the plight of the many orphans I found begging in the streets. Maybe some day a wealthier man than I will found an ospedale, such as we have in Venice, to succour  and educate these pitiful creatures. Perhaps he will name it after the sovereign of the day.’  Not only did he fail to include any such passage but there was worse: he  gives a speaking part to Robert Thorne, the blackguard who founded that unspeakable institution currently situated in Tindall’s Park. The Bristol Gutter Snipes - as we called them in my day - moved there from the brand new  buildings they’d stolen from QEH in the early eighteenth century, forcing the School to inhabit the picturesque squalor of  St Bartholomew’s - previously occupied by BGS - for the best part of a century. 

   All in all, the novel confirmed my prejudices about historical fiction. The author, Francesco Ongaro, has obviously done some homework. Old Bristol Bridge with its houses is described as are several of Bristol’s mediaeval streets: he locates the Cabots’ house in Temple Street and Wine Street is mentioned. But the attitudes and concerns of Sebastian Cabot, the first-person narrator, are those of today, not those of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The sense of alienation which underlies Sebastian’s self-perception wouldn’t be out of place in a novel by Camus. The narrator’s reflections on the religious upheavals  of the day -  ‘… l’inanità di siffatte beghe religiose. … ovunque un invocare  Dio a testimonio dei propri principi , ma Lui, in tanto sentirsi tirato da ogni parte, temo che abbia finito per partirsene da tutto e da tutti e non si riconosca  in nessuno di coloro che ritengono d’essere i suoi apostoli prediletti’ [the inanity of such bickering  over religion … everywhere  people invoking God  to  support  their particular religious doctrines  to the extent that I fear  the Deity, feeling himself pulled in every direction will end up leaving them to it, refusing to identify  himself with any of those who claim to be his beloved disciples] -  whilst admirable, reflect the sentiments of a Guardian or Corriere della sera reader rather than the outlook of someone living then. And there is a curious omission: when the Cabots move to Bristol they seem to have no difficulty communicating with the natives. In fact there’s no mention of their speaking a different language. So perhaps Ongaro has stumbled upon a hitherto unknown fact: in the late fifteenth century Bristolians spoke Italian not English. Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong: maybe Venetians of the period spoke Brizzle not Italian.

  In short, although the depiction of Sebastian’s character is interesting if unhistorical , if you’re looking for a book which brings Tudor Bristol alive I’d pass on this one in the unlikely event of its ever being published in English.

Stop immigration NOW!

Got back yesterday evening from a few days in the UK. We’d arrived there on Sunday evening. On Monday we took Quinn to the Play Today centre in Guyhirn. Because it was a school-day the place was empty apart from the staff and us which meant I got to be Quinn’s playmate.  

    On Tuesday we took him to the Sea Life Centre in Hunstanton and in the evening I went to see Richard and Jane.

    So a pleasant couple of days. On Wednesday, however, came my damascene moment. We went to King’s Lynn to have an eye-test and to meet Matthew for lunch. Suddenly the scales fell from my Guardian-reading lefty eyes and I realised that Nick Griffin, the Mail  and the Tories had been right all along: the country has been overrun by immigrants. Everywhere I looked there were enormous tattooed Michelin men, women and children. The land I had grown up in had been swamped by an alien invasion. And thanks to a recent court judgement the poor old BNP has been forced to allow many of these balloon-like creatures to join its ranks. Thank God I was able to flee back to Italy on Thursday.

   

My baby’s walked back home.

Pat got back yesterday from five days in the UK. On Thursday I at last succeeded in repairing my internal hard drive. Not that the patient seems much better for the operation.

A blast from the past.

The Posh-Boys’ Chancellor has clearly turned to the late Peter Sellers for advice on how to avoid committing himself to taking any action whatsoever about anything to do with senior bankers’ obscene bonuses.

For evidence listen to George Osborne interviewed by James Naughtie on the Today programme this morning.

Catch-22.

For some months my computer has been behaving in an increasingly erratic way. It’s now begun to crash with alarming frequency. 

   Yesterday I verified the hard drive and discovered it needed repairing. In order to do this I need to re-boot using the OS installation disk. Unfortunately, neither the computer’s internal or external DVD drives will recognise the  installation disk owing, I imagine, to the hard drive’s need for repair. 

   The forums suggest that problems with the internal DVD reader, manufactured appropriately enough by MatSHITa, are all too common. No one has found a solution. So basically I’m stuffed. At any moment the problem may become so bad as to make the computer unusable, so preventing me from updating this site. In such an eventuality, go to my  Google blog which I’m able to update vis an iPhone app.

Not just the Guardian!

On the 31st May I read an article in the Independent which revealed that the Posh-Boys’ government was considering abolishing the winter fuel allowance for ex-pats on the grounds that they all lived somewhere hot. I wrote to the editor pointing out that this wasn’t necessarily the case. I looked in the on-line edition of the paper the following day to see if my letter   had been published. It hadn’t. 

  This morning, however, I received an email from the Overseas Secretary of QEHOBS saying that he’d read the letter in yesterday’s paper so saving me from remaining ignorant of my Andy Warhol moment. 

    So having had letters published in the Guardian twice last year, and scored with the Independent this, watch out Times, Telegraph and FT: your readers, too, could  be suffering my wit and wisdom soon.

Two Romanesque churches, four real and two virtual birthday cards, and Apple WWDC.

An exciting day. Visited two magnificent Romanesque churches this morning:

Santa Maria a Pie’ di Chienti and San Claudio, and then had lunch in a Chinese restaurant. This evening Pat felt sick, and a few hours later so did I. We think re-heated rice may have been responsible.

   Had four actual birthday cards:

                           from Pat                                                                                                                from Sophy & Adam

                    from Candy & Quinn                                                                                        From Deborah

… and two virtual cards:

http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=2195398263181&source=jl999    from Pat

and

http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=2345295859265&source=jl999       from Maggie & Phil

Then at 7 pm, to round off the excitement, I followed the iLounge live blog with minute by minute news of Steve Jobs introduction of the iPhone 4! 

Update 9th June:

from John and Viv