End of year round up.

If I were honest, this post would emulate the BBC's 1930 Good Friday bulletin which famously consisted of the simple statement "There is no news"! Compared to last year we've been nowhere and done nothing. However, in this self-obsessed age which has given birth to Twitter  - thereby allowing twats, as Cameron judiciously labelled them, to broadcast their every bowel movement to their 'followers' - the distinction between the significant and the mundane has been largely abolished. So here goes. 

   Pat's trips to England to babysit Quinn have been slightly less frequent than last year but not without incident. Her flight home in January was diverted to Perugia because of fog which meant she got home four and a half hours late; the inconvenience was insignificant compared to her nightmare journey to the UK the previous month, but still irritating. In October, thanks to the magnificent service provided by England's privatised rail companies, she almost missed her flight, the situation only being saved by the good offices of BAA and Ryan Air's staff! I made three trips to the UK: the first with Pat for Quinn's fifth birthday, the second to be with her on our wedding anniversary, and the third to attend my Old Boys' Society's Bristol dinner. We had fewer visitors than last year: Candy and Quinn came in April and Dave and Sue in late June. However, in early June we had the delightful surprise of a visit from Matthew and Charlie, their first, but not I hope their last. And next August James, Gabrielle, Ruby and Olly are coming over from Australia.

  As usual, apart from our guests, our social life has been largely tied up with the day-boys, although we did enjoy going to one fellow-boarder's birthday party and to the opera with another. Like last year I've kept myself amused with writing letters to the Guardian -only one of which was published - and a project: this time translating a couple of accounts of the Sybil of the Appenines. I've finished the first draft, and after Christmas Pat is going to provide some illustrations. I think it might find a niche market: non Italian-speaking visitors to the area. Italian versions are on sale in museums and bookshops in the area and most tourists - not only the English but many Germans and Dutch - can speak our language. Christmas promises to be much more fun than last year as Sophy and Adam and Candy and Quinn arrive on the 23rd and stay until the 30th. 

   Other than the iPad, this year's technological addition to my life has been the eCigar. These ingenious devices deliver a nicotine shot without, it is claimed, the attendant cancer. Looking remarkably realistic - the end glows when you inhale and a smoke-like vapour is emitted - they have the added advantage of winding-up the anti-smoking brigade when you, perfectly legally, 'light up' in areas where smoking is prohibited. And the eCigar is proving a hit not only with dilettantes like Pat and me, but also with real smokers like Dave - although, being a grown-up with some aesthetic sensibility, he's not gone for the model which attempts to pretend it's an actual cigar. When I was nine I used to buy sweet cigarettes and, on a cold winter's day, lounge on street corners blowing out my frozen breath in the hope that a passing adult would mistake it for smoke and think my cigarette was real. And the grown-ups would walk past thinking, 'There's a silly little kid making a fool of himself by pretending his sweet's a cigarette'. No doubt the anti-smokers think the same when I'm smoking my eCigar. But if just one of the sanctimonious kill-joys is fooled I'm a happy man.
  As well as improving the quality of my life, my love affair with Apple has caused me a lot of heartache this year owing to their decision to stop hosting websites. Moving my site to another provider has been fraught with difficulties from whose ill effects I'm only just beginning to recover. Transferring all my posts here took weeks and I have had to jettison their audio.

   Although Pat and I have had an uneventful year, the same hasn't been the case for the world at large. The elderly billionaire media tycoons, with a taste for much younger women, running Italy and Britain have both had set-backs. Berlusconi resigned; never having been elected, that option wasn't open to the Wizard of Oz who cut a pathetic figure in front of the Select Committee after the Guardian had pulled back the curtain. How fortunate he had his very own crouching tiger, hidden dragon to protect him. And, as I write, the currency speculators are doing their best to bring down the EU, cheered on by a British government which defends the interests of the wealthiest one percent, and is supported in so doing by a population misinformed by the Sun and Mail as to where its true interests lie. Thank God I live in a country where europhobia is confined to the swivel-eyed supporters of the repulsive Bossi rather than being the default position of the nation. Over here people are all too aware of the truth of Guido Westerwelle's comment yesterday: "We think we have a common destiny. We think the EU is not only the answer to the darkest chapter of our history. It is also a life insurance in times of globalisation because no country – not Germany, not Great Britain, not France – no country is strong and big enough to face the challenges of globalisation alone."

   On a lighter note, 2011 seems to be the year we gerries finally took over Facebook. I subscribed to the network some years ago simply to find out what my kids were up to. For some years I was bombarded by requests - which I ignored  -  to become 'friends' with people I'd never heard of; many of them I subsequently found out were friends of friends of my children, eager to boost their number of Facebook 'friends'. This year, however, all the requests have come from people I know, and have accordingly accepted - and only one was from someone under fifty. I only hope Twitter doesn't catch on with the over-sixties, it would be even more undignified than dad-dancing.

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Fiction and myth.

In October, while Pat was in England, I weakened and bought an iPad 2 - the wifi-only model which is a bit  cheaper than the 3G model and can, in any case, access the internet when I'm out and about via the iPhone's hotspot. Although I'm still consuming paperbacks  - Andrea De Carlo's Mare delle verità is the most recent - I am increasingly reading virtual publications on the iPad. Pat has the digital version of the Guardian on her iPad - I make do with their website which has most of the content for free - whilst I've taken out a subscription to the digital version of the Corriere della Sera because, like the Times, its online content is locked behind a paywall.
   As well as saving me from buying yet more bookshelves - and the Library in any case has run out of room - I can download out-of-copyight books for free from Project Gutenberg. Most of the books I've downloaded are digital versions of books I already possess - handy if you're looking for a half-remembered quote as ebooks are searchable. But some are those classics which I've always meant to read but had never got round to doing. I started with Moby Dick - and the text came as something of a shock. I guess the book falls into that small group of novels which have outgrown their original fictional category and become myths: their basic themes becoming part of our general consciousness, familiar to those those who have never read the story, who indeed  may be unaware of the book's existence. Robinson Crusoe is the prime example - I guess many people think it began life as a pantomime rather than as an occasionally tedious hymn to protestant individualism. Back in the nineties Radio Rentals had a television advertisement featuring Heathcliff and Cathy. It showed a disgruntled viewer banging on the top of his set in a futile attempt to stop the interference which was ruining the film of Wuthering Heights he was attempting to watch. As he pounded the set Cathy turned to Heathcliff and said, "Not tonight, darling, I've got a terrible headache."  The ad clearly relied on viewers being aware of who Cathy and Heathcliff are; as a pair of fictional lovers their fame is second only to that of  Romeo and Juliet. But not on viewers having read the novel. Those of us who have, immediately spotted two glaring inconsistencies: the couple are in their thirties, but Cathy died in childbirth at the age of nineteen; more significantly Cathy and Heathcliff's love was never physically consummated. It wasn't just "not tonight" but "not any night at all".
   Like everyone else I've always known about Moby Dick: it's the story of one-legged Captain Ahab obsessively pursuing the whale who'd bitten off the missing limb. I imagined I was in for a tightly written psychological study combined with high drama on the high seas. How wrong can one get: the book is deliberately funny and - far from being tightly written -  has the bagginess of an eighteenth century novel: the author spending chapters indulging himself with a fanciful catalogue of the hierarchy of seamen serving on whalers or providing a quirky taxonomy of whales. So not at all the book I was expecting. Next up will be War and Peace: I hope my expectations will be similarly confounded.

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S is for Subjugation.

I suppose I've been aware of the gradual Americanisation of English, as spoken in the UK, for around half a century. I think 'radio' replaced 'wireless' in my late teens', it cannot have been much earlier. An OE writing in the 1955 edition of the school magazine commented as follows on the differences between Canadian and British English: 'I found that some care was required in speaking the language … such ordinary alternatives as wireless and radio, lift and elevator … are easily learned …' 'Train station' for 'railway station' is more recent and its usage at first was confined to the less-educated sections of society. Today it's virtually universal.
The North American influence has also affected the way most people pronounce our language: stressing the first syllable of 'research' rather the second, and the second of 'lamentable' rather than the first; pronouncing 'covert' to rhyme with 'overt' in defiance of the word's meaning, though I don't think anyone's yet started to mis-pronounce 'covert coat'. The other day I heard someone on Radio Four pronounce the first syllable of 'patent' as a homophone of my wife's christian name. No doubt in five year's time it'll be the norm.
The latest insidious change is the addition of the American 's' to words indicating categories: sport has become sports, bread breads, fruit fruits, and meat meats. Again, the change has spread rapidly from the lexically challenged to the educated classes: I caught Simon Hoggart using it in the Guardian a few days ago.
'So what?' you may ask. Language is in a continual state of flux, always has been, always will be. But this, I would argue is different: it is not about the adoption of words from a foreign language or a shift in meaning of a particular word. Rather it is the displacement of one language by another. And languages differ from one another not simply in their vocabulary but in the way they structure experience. To give a couple of simple examples: an Englishman will say, 'I miss you', an Italian 'Mi manchi' - literally 'You are missing to me'. An Englishman will say, 'He waited until the rain stopped', an Italian 'ha aspettato finché non ha smesso di piovere - literally 'he waited as long as it had not stopped raining'.
American English in speaking of 'fruits', 'meats', 'breads' etc emphasises the differences between the items in a category, traditional British English what they have in common. The former is an expression of individualism, the latter of civilisation. Although it is fashionable in this politically correct age to refer to the 'civilisation' of nomadic peoples such as the Australian aborigine or the native American the word is being misused. Rather, they have cultures, in many cases worthy of respect. 'Civilisation', as its root 'civilis' suggests, should be reserved for those highly complex societies which are organised around cities. They function through the interdependence of the individual and the common good. The shoemaker makes his living by selling shoes to the farmer who raises beasts whose hides are sold to the tanner who sells his leather to the shoemaker who sells his shoes to the haulier who transports the beasts from the farm to the tannery.

Whilst America is a continent of cities, its self-image is the frontiersman, dependent on nothing but his own resources and a Winchester rifle. In the US anything which smacks of collectivism is rejected by large numbers of those who in fact would be its beneficiaries: Obama's health reforms were demonised as 'socialistic'. Unfortunately this myopic rejection of state power has been fervently adopted on this side of the Atlantic too: the NHS is gradually being reshaped into a 'facilitator' of private provision; coherent educational provision by LEAs is being fragmented by the promotion of 'independent' Academies and 'free' schools; and any attempt to protect ordinary people's living standards through collective bargaining vilified.

And so the people of this once proud country wheel their trollies down the supermarket aisles shopping for breads, meats and fruits before going home to watch sports on television and dream of winning the lottery or an audition for The X-Factor. All the time vowing to resist the unelected bureaucrats from Brussels, and preserve their country's mythical independence. In reality they're simply unenfranchised Americans.

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Soixante-neuf for Italy.

How appropriate that Italy should be ranked sixty-ninth in Transparency International's  league table  - showing it to be more corrupt than Ruanda -  given its politicians' weakness for awarding contracts in return for sexual favours. Or simply enjoying them without paying anything at all! New Zealand took first place for transparency, the UK was fourteenth.

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Throwing in the sponge.

Having to move my website from MobileMe to MacHighway has proved a disaster (See November 21st and June 8th). The site is still unreachable from my domain name and, even worse, many of the pages are published minus their photographs or fail to appear on the site at all. So my posts will appear here in future, and I will gradually add the past posts which were on my website prior to the move.

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Update.

All the dayboys came over for the October sagra: Jane in late September, the Cairns on the 7th October and the Rogers a couple of days previously. The weather deteriorated on the 7th and the Saturday of the festa was cold. The Sunday was even worse with strong winds which blew over many of the stalls. As a consequence the festa was poorly attended.

Pat had an uneventful trip to England to see Candy and Quinn from the 17th to the 24th October. I went across to the UK on the 11th November to attend the Old Elizabethans’ Bristol dinner staying with Mike Jefferies. I met Winkle Perham (see photo above) and Umpter Northover again for the first time in fifty years. Unlike previous years, I flew directly to Bristol from Fiumicino rather than from Ancona to Stansted. The carrier was Easy Jet, a pleasant change from Ryan Air. The price quoted was the price charged - it included taxes and booking fee, rather than these being added to the theoretical fare; there was no weight limit on hand luggage; and the extra 5cm allowed enabled me to take a suit carrier, thus avoiding a checked-in case. The downside was having to drive to Rome: ok going there, but a nightmare journey back in the dark with the Sat-nav playing up.


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Reconstruction.

Apple having decided to scrap MobileMe and with it its web hosting service I had to find a new home for this site. After much research I eventually settled on MacHighway which advertises itself as Mac friendly. I signed up with them on the 14th October. Last night  - after almost six weeks of frustration - I finally managed to get some of the site loaded and accessible via Google using the site’s MacHighway address:

 http://terri.machighway.com/~jamesric/The_Pool_of_Narcissus/Welcome.html

However,  my domain name - www.jamesrichards.eu - is still not working.

   Even worse all my blog entries disappeared . I was able to recover them via Apple’s Time Machine but am having to reconstruct them and repost them - a job which will take several weeks.

   I read recently that Blaise Pascal claimed all human misfortunes come from man’s inability to sit still in a room. You’d have thought that Steve Jobs’s Buddhism might have encouraged him to do so, rather than scrapping MobileMe and thereby turning my life into a misery!

Narrow Squeak

Last Friday Pat returned from a week at Candy’s - thanks to the help she received from BAA and RyanAir staff at Stansted and their willingness to bend the rules. Now there’s a comment not often seen on this blog - or anywhere else for that matter. Her train to Stansted was twenty minutes late arriving at March. This was stressful but not fatal - it would still leave fifty minutes to get through Security and to the Gate. Unfortunately once the train reached Cambridge it was held up outside the station for forty minutes, meaning she arrived at Stansted an hour late with only twenty minutes to get from the platform to the plane. When she arrived at Security she asked an official if there was any point in trying to catch the plane. He immediately whisked her to the front of the queue. However, by the time she got to the Gate all the passengers had boarded  and the RyanAir staff  were preparing to leave. ‘I suppose I’m too late to board?’ asked a disconsolate Pat. But to her amazement, after a brief consultation, they waved her through.


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Missing Mojo.

Now that I’ve turned sixty-eight, I seems the Guardian no longer loves me. On Tuesday, mildly irritated by a reader’s patronising letter oozing smug, self-satisfied, and totally unjustified, cultural superiority I sent a pin to prick his bubble. It wasn’t published. Yesterday, rather annoyed by one of the semi-literate columnists the paper employs these days, I sent them another letter. Again it wasn’t published.

Yet only two Septembers ago they published one of my pomposity-pricking letters, and as recently as this April one of my literary aperçus. When I was young, I thought ‘over-the-hill’ was thirty. Once I’d reached that age I thought I was safe until sixty. Having passed that milestone I naively thought that seventy was the one to watch out for. No, my friends, it’s sixty-eight. Though, as a friend of my mine much given to risqué remarks commented, my next birthday should be something to look forward to.

Anyway, for your undoubted delectation, here are the letters the Guardian sought to suppress:

6th September: One shouldn't be too hard on the Waddington café (Letters September 6th). Double espressos, like deep-based pizzas, are an American invention, unknown in Italy. The proprietor was simply checking whether his customer wanted an Anglo-Saxon beverage - a double 'expresso' - or an Italian one, an espresso.

7th September: Reading Swift's account of Gulliver's last voyage might help Jon Henley (The f-word that's suddenly everywhere) to understand why 'feral' is the appropriate term to describe a hoodie looting a shop, or a banker wrecking the economy. Swift's belief that man is not a rational animal, but simply an animal that is capable of reason underpins the Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms. Unlike Orwell in Animal Farm Swift strips away the comforting delusion that we simply need to guard against the pigs taking over if we are to keep society safe. The real danger isn't Napoleon but the Yahoo lurking inside each one of us. When we fail to behave as moral beings - and, rightly or wrongly, morality was thought to be based on reason - then, like the Yahoos, we revert to our undomesticated state. We go feral.

On a happier note we went to see a performance of La Rondine last night at the Villa Vinci in Cupra Marittima. In Italy think stately home for villa, not Victorian terraced-house: the Italians have retained the word’s original Latin meaning. The pile, built in 1838 is the size of your average palace. But in Italy, of course, palazzi are only found in towns, and are usually blocks of flats, office buildings, or largish town houses such as the one we live in rather than palaces in the English sense. When we entered the room where the opera was to be sung I assumed it must be a concert performance as there was no stage and a grand piano occupied one corner. I was wrong: the singers were in costume and they acted as well as sang. The twist was that the recitative was condensed and spoken rather than sung. The result was a musical, so creating the work which Puccini had originally been commissioned to write rather than the opera which he actually produced!

It was well sung - I particularly liked Antonella Pelilli (Magda) who very obviously screwed herself up to hit the high notes. But hit them she did, and had a pleasantly rounded timbre free from wobble or shrillness.

The downside was the stifling heat. Apart from the last week in July the day-time temperature has been in the mid to high thirties since mid-July. Thankfully, we were casually dressed; but in a large room without air-conditioning and packed with people the thin cotton shirt and linen trousers I was wearing might as well have been a dress shirt and dinner jacket for all the help they were in keeping cool. Even so, to Pat’s infinite relief, I didn’t pass out - unlike the previous time we saw the opera four years ago at Torre del Lago.


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Two birthdays, four concerts and one art exhibition.

Ferragosto - the Italian summer bank holiday -  is upon us, and as was the case last year, it marks the virtual end of our social life and the beginning of the annual retreat into isolation .  Tony and Shona Rogers went home at the end of  July, John and Judy Cairns on the second of August and Jane Fineren and her guests Derek and Maddy on the 7th. With the exception of Norman & Jayne who arrived on the 4th and go back to England on Thursday, term’s over for the dayboys. 

   August was enlivened by two birthdays at the opposite ends of the age scale: Ruby’s first birthday on the 3rd and John Conway’s seventieth yesterday. We’ve been to four concerts in the Tronelli gardens in July and August. The one yesterday evening was packed out, but the others were only sparsely attended.  Last Wednesday and Friday we visited the Morandi & Licini exhibition taking place in Fermo and Monte Vidon Corrado.

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Update: Make that six concerts. Summerfest Live 2011 concluded with a piano-accordion recital on the 18th -  sparsely attended, alas  -  and on the 28th we went to hear the Guitar Orchestra in the Church of Santa Caterina in Smerillo. It attracted a decent audience.

Thatcher's Children

The Prophetess Thatcher - a curse be upon her -  famously remarked ‘There is no such thing as society’. And by abolishing capital controls the year she came to office she ensured her vision came to pass.

   The consequence of the lifting of controls on the export of capital was the de-industrialisation of Britain. Manufacturing was transferred overseas to take advantage of  cheap labour. With two results: a boost to consumerism as the cost of manufactured goods came down, and a systemic rise in unemployment. As Harold Macmillan commented in 1985: ‘Sixty-three years ago... the unemployment figure] in Stockton-on-Tees] was then 29%. Last November... the unemployment [there] is 28%. A rather sad end to one's life.’

   For the point about employment is that it gives the individual a sense of self-worth, of connecting to others as part of a larger structure. S/he has a personal investment in that structure, in other words is part of society. Where unemployment is systemic - not only have you never had a job, but neither have your parents or any of your friends - society is an ‘other’ and you have no other point of reference but your own real needs and the artificial ones created by consumerism. Why not smash a shop window and grab a flat-screen telly if you think you can get away with it?

   Thatcher’s other key policy, privatisation, was a second major contributor to driving up unemployment. To give two examples from personal experience: as an LEA maintained  FE College Section Leader in the early eighties I had 17 hours a week class-contact. When I regained the position in the late nineties, in the now independent  corporation, this had risen to 21. The consequence of raising lecturers’ class-contact hours was that you needed fewer of them, thereby saving the College money. And what were those savings spent on: better facilities for the students? Were they, buggery: they  were spent on hugely increased salaries for the Principal and the ‘Senior Management Team’. 

   The summer before we moved to Italy there was an eight hour daytime power cut  in the Fens. The length of time it took to restore the electricity supply  would have been understandable if it had occurred on a winter night when roads are treacherous and engineers are having to work in the dark in inhospitable conditions. But on a summer’s day? I rang Eastern Electricity to enquire whether the delay might be caused by the privatised company’s reducing the number of front-line staff in order to pay the inflated salaries and bonuses of the directors. The woman on the end of the line  replied that she couldn’t comment, but the warmth in her voice suggested I’d hit the nail on the head.

   Although it’s fairly obvious why we’ve landed in the current mess, it’s much more difficult to see how we get out of it. We can’t recreate our industrial base: those few ‘British’ manufacturers we have left - Jaguar, Range Rover, the Derby train manufacturer Bombardier - are mostly foreign owned. The unemployed mob, only kept quiescent by free bread and circuses, was a  perennial problem at the heart of the Roman Empire.And, alas, we all know what happened to that organisation, and the centuries of  barbarism and savagery which followed its collapse.


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School Trip.

Term started just before Pat went to England at the beginning of the month. The arrival of the dayboys has resulted in dinner at Janes’s on the 4th, a meal at the Taverna on the 8th with Tony and Shona, and lunch with them at San Ruffino on the 10th. Last Wednesday John and Judy invited me - together with fellow boarder, Gordon - to a barbecue. Yesterday evening I went to the Farfense with Jane and her English guests Will and Jill. Today was the school trip. I went with Tony and Shona on a guided walk to Monte Ascensione from Rotella. It was the typical Italian event: began half an hour after the scheduled start, didn’t depart from the advertised location, and the leaders got lost on the way back. Great fun all the same.

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The Hydra Loses a Head.

Looks as though Murdoch’s losing his grip. However, he’s only  one head of that monstrous hydra, globalised capitalism. Its other heads are busy attempting to devour the euro. International business has little trouble dealing with Europe’s mini-states; a federal Europe would present it with a much greater problem. Let’s hope that now that it’s push coming to shove the Eurozone will have the will to take the only steps which will protect it: fiscal integration, followed as soon as possible by political union.


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An Improvement.

Have just finished this year’s Montalbano novel. It was an improvement on the last four: unlike the last two - La caccia al tesoro and Il sorriso di Angelica - I didn’t work out who the guilty party was early on in the novel, unlike La danza del gabbiano Montalbano wasn’t behaving completely out of character, and unlike L’età del dubbio it wasn’t a vehicle for its elderly author’s sexual fantasies.

  Nevertheless, it was rather disappointing: Camilleri didn’t bother developing  his cast of regular characters, simply leaving them to display, mechanically,  the personal traits he’d developed in the early novels. Again, one felt the book was prompted by his accountant rather than any real desire to re-engage with the world he’d created in 1994 with La forma dell’acqua and developed so spendidly over the subsequent twelve novels and three collections of short stories. The last of the successful novels - Il campo del vasaio - was published in 2008. Since then it’s been downhill with a slight, but probably temporary, upward slope this year.


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Brief Encounter.

Made a surprise visit to the UK on Wednesday so that I could be with Pat on our wedding anniversary the following day. Candy booked us a meal at the Galleria in Cambridge which was enlivened by a punter falling into the Cam while we dined on the terrace. I flew back on Friday exchanging rain and 18 degrees for a cloudless sky and 36 degrees at Ancona. Click here for a video of Quinn at a park in Cambridge.

p.s. Excellent letter in the Guardian yesterday commenting on the News of the World scandal:

The banks gambled with ordinary people's savings and the nation's economy. News Corp abused people's privacy and damaged their lives. The common solution? Protect and reward those responsible and cut the jobs of ordinary people who had no part in their misdeeds.

Ian Roberts 

Baildon, West Yorkshire

Short and to the point.


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The Woodlanders meets The Wasteland.

The Woodlanders was Hardy’s favourite child and it’s not difficult to see why. 

    I first came across it when I ‘delivered’ (or ‘taught’, as we used to term it, before the academic equivalents of the morons running our banks poisoned English education)  the novel as part of an APU undergraduate module on the Pastoral. When the module was scrapped as a consequence of the move from terms to semesters I’d become so fond of the text that I incorporated it into the Access to HE 19th Century Literature module. It suited the interdisciplinary nature of our Access course well. Through Grace Melbury, Hardy dramatises the way so many of us today are torn between the familiar and rooted, embodied in Giles Winterborne and the village of Little Hintock, and the pull of the new and provisional, given flesh in Fitzpiers. Prior to the 19th century the dilemma wouldn’t have existed for the overwhelming majority of people: you were stuck with your roots whether you wanted them or not. Although Hardy paints Giles as a far better man than Fitzpiers, and his heart is with the world of Little Hintock, he knows that what it represents has had its day. The future is Fitzpiers.

     A couple of years ago I’d quite enjoyed reading  Giro di vento a novel by the contemporary Italian author, Andrea De Carlo. Partly prompted by the falling off of Camilleri’s powers,  I decided recently that I ought to get to grips with some serious contemporary fiction. So I sent off for a couple more books by De Carlo. I’ve just finished the first: Due di due. Unlike Giro di vento it didn’t immediately grab me: I found the first 100 pages tedious. And the title puzzled me: what did Due di due signify? I looked on Amazon to see what title an English translation might have, if one existed. It did: Two Out of Two, which didn’t help at all. Fortunately the answer to my question appeared on page 216. ‘Pensavo a quanto le nostre vite erano state diverse in questi anni, e anche simili in fondo, due di due [my italics] possibili percorsi  iniziati dallo  stesso bivio’  - I thought about how greatly our lives had diverged over the years and how at the same time they were fundamentally the same:  although we’d each followed  a different route, both of them were one of  the two possible directions which began at the same crossroads. 

    As grammar school pupils growing up in Milan both Mario, the narrator, and his best friend Guido had been disenchanted by the values which the City embodied and its unhealthy physical environment: Milan’s smog is notorious. It is Eliot’s ‘Unreal city’. Guido’s solution is to pursue the infinite possibilities which the world offers, hating to be tied to one place because that necessarily excludes all the others. He has a similar attitude to women. As Martina, the monogamous narrator’s partner puts it: 

   ‘… ogni donna era per Guido una chiave che gli permetteva di entrare in un’altra vita, sperimentarla nel suoi risvolti più intimi invece di immaginiarsela dal di fuori. … le donne gli piacevano come persone, e lui evidentemente piaceva a loro, ma doveva essere l’ossessione per le infinite possibilità parallele a rendere senza fine la sua ricerca’ - for Guido every woman was a key which allowed him to enter into another life, to try it out in its most intimate aspects rather than just imagining it from outside. … he liked women as individuals, and they obviously liked him, but he had to follow his obsession with the infinite parallel possibilities, which made his research endless.. 

    In other words he kept moving from woman to woman!

   Mario’s solution is to go for self-sufficiency in a remote spot of the Umbrian countryside, teaching himself -  from books he buys in Perugia -  how to start an organic smallholding .  He and Martina, an assistant in the  Perugian bookshop when he met her, have children together and slowly make a success of  their business,

   Like The Woodlanders, Due di due ends movingly. As a symbolic gesture, Mario commemorates his friend’s death by literally torching the adjacent house Guido should have occupied, but never did. Guido’s choosing  a different but complementary path had illuminated the narrator’s life. 

    Unlike Hardy, De Carlo ultimately comes down on the side of ‘returning to the land’ as the way forward. A nice idea, but - despite its popularity with some idealists here - until we’re forced into it by the collapse of western civilisation it’s pretty unlikely to have many takers I’d say! 


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Escorted from the premises.

Dave and Sue came over to see us last Saturday. Having collected them from Ancona airport, the four of us continued north to Urbino where we stayed overnight before travelling back to Montefalcone on Sunday. Today they went back to England escorting Pat from Italy. She’s Quinn-sitting for three weeks. However, as Tony and Shona, John and Judy and Jane are all in residence I don’t imagine I’ll die of loneliness.


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The end of the beginning.

As Churchill famously remarked in connection with Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel: ‘… this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ Yesterday I sent Monica Bruni, a local estate agent, details of our house, with a view to obtaining a rough estimate of its current market value. I have no wish to live in England again, especially in the Fens. I find myself increasingly out of sympathy with the UK’s zeitgeist: its Little Englander euroscepticism, its tolerance of the ill-mannered and overweight yobs who crowd its streets, its eager adoption of the values of the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail, and consequent failure to see where the interests of the vast majority of its inhabitants lie and who their real enemies are. On the other hand we have friends and family there and could possibly be useful to the latter for a few years. And given the terrible economic outlook which the UK faces owing to the bankers’ Gordon Brown’s [redacted by Cleggeroon  Undercover Net Total Surveillance*] criminal irresponsibility we may have to provide Candy with more support than occasional baby-sitting.

   In theory, we haven’t committed ourselves to selling, merely to seeing what we could realise if we did. However, I feel that it’s like one of those relationships where people are considering a trial separation. One knows that despite protestations to the contrary it won’t be long before one of them is screwing someone else - if indeed one of them hasn’t been doing so secretly for some time already. I see the downhill path stretched out before me: the Sibillini dissolve into the monotonous Fens, the palazzo shrinks into some dreary rabbit-hutch. For a few brief years we enjoy being close to our family and friends, and then, as physical and mental decrepitude gallop on apace, a living death incarcerated in some god-awful gerryhome surrounded by the stench of our own incontinence.That’s the end -  but I fear it’s beginning now.

*A wholly-owned subsidiary of  The Big Society©, a member of the NewsCorp group.


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Death Sentence*.

Yesterday I reached another milestone on the road to corporeal dissolution, speeded on my journey by the vast numbers of cigars I’d smoked, and the immoderate quantities of wine and brandy I’d drunk while Matt and Charlie were here. They arrived on Friday and went on Monday evening. I thoroughly enjoyed their stay.

 Not only am I rapidly running out of time, but Steve Jobs’s failure to mention on Monday what will happen to iDisk once Mobile Me is replaced by iCloud, suggests that iWeb’s days are likewise numbered. The computer press is unperturbed by this believing that Facebook and Twitter have made it redundant. This may be true for the acne generation, for the semi-literate who find 140 characters more than sufficient to express their half-baked ‘ideas’, and for the super-egoists who broadcast their every bowel movement to their moronic ‘followers’. But for us simple narcissists, who like to hone a phrase even though we know it’s purely for self-consumption, the death of iWeb will be a tragedy.

  On a brighter note this year’s card count is up: five* actual cards (plus an e card) including one each from three of my four surviving children: Eccoli:

Pat

  Sophy & Adam 

1. 

  Candy & Quinn

 Matt & Charlie

  Chris

*Stop Press: a sixth card, from Debbie, arrived  9th June

And an e-card from Maggie & Phil.


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Another inconvenient truth.

As a small boy in the late ’forties and early ’fifties I was an ardent imperialist, spending hours in the lending library devouring Arthur Mee’s Our Empire Story. Unfortunately, although Empire Day was still marked at my primary school, the institution it celebrated was rapidly joining Nineveh and Tyre. One thing puzzled me: why had the French labelled our nation ‘Perfidious Albion’? For Arthur Mee made it clear that England had heroically shouldered the burden of bringing enlightenment to the savage regions of the world.
    When I was a sixth-former I discovered the answer. Together with a group of classmates I attended a meeting of the Council for Education in World Citizenship held at a local girls’ day-school. The draw, of course, was the girls not any desire to become a world citizen. As a sex-starved teenager incarcerated in a boys’ boarding school any opportunity to be in the same room as a girl was eagerly seized. The main business of the meeting was a talk on the White Highlands given by an indigenous Kenyan. The speaker was a quietly spoken man who steered clear of passionate denunciations of injustice. His case was the more compelling for it. I left the meeting a changed man.
    At university I became aware of  aspects of Our Island Story other than those highlighted by Mee: strapping Indian mutineers across the muzzles of cannon and then firing them; going to war with China because their Emperor tried to curb his people’s addiction to opium. Opium grown very profitably in the jewel in our empire’s crown.
    Although the Empire, along with my youth, is long gone its attitude to ‘lesser breeds’ persists. Today’s Guardian carried the unbearably moving story of a severely injured  13 year old Iraqi boy ‘lost’ by the Army medical corps. After visiting the hospital for ten days, without being allowed to see his son,  his father was told that he was becoming ‘annoying’ and banned from making further visits. A year later he was told that the boy had been moved to Kuwait and the army had lost track of him. Unbelievably two and a half years later the army's chief claims officer said he could not offer any compensation for negligence “since I have been unable to find any such evidence of negligence by the British forces in this matter”. The letter ends: “Please accept my sincere sympathy”.
    And there you have it: we’re a decent civilised people, able to offer sincere sympathy even to an annoying Iraqi who’s unaccountably upset that his son has disappeared and has the impudence to accuse us of negligence.

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Modern Times.

The concluding sentence of an article by Katherine Whitehorn in today’s Observer puts its finger on the problem underlying the malaise affecting contemporary British society:

      ‘… what has actually been correct, politically in Britain from Mrs Thatcher to Tony Blair? Not an insistence on equality, just an insistence on the efficacy of profit and competition – not public service or honour or professionalism – to cure any failing or inefficiency in anything.’

   Underlying this new political orthodoxy is the false belief that people are chiefly motivated by money. On the contrary, as Bertrand Russell put it: 

    ‘Of the infinite desires of man, the chief are the desires for power and glory…When a moderate degree

of comfort is assured, both individuals and communities will pursue power rather than wealth : they may seek wealth as a means to power, or they may forgo an increase of wealth in order to secure an increase of power, but in the former case as in the latter their fundamental motive is not economic.’  

    Job-satisfaction has much more to do with an employee’s freedom to make his own decisions about the sensible way to carry out his role than with the size of his pay-packet. In other words, a degree of power over  his own working life.  And for most of us that’s enough. Some individuals, though, crave power over others which leads them to become - in the worst case scenarios - dictators, but in the majority of cases merely charge-hands, foremen, ward-sisters, managers, or chief executives. If  Bob Diamond were given the choice of continuing in post at a tenth of  his present salary or working as a counter-clerk with no loss of income (the option of transferring to another company being excluded )  can one doubt for a moment what his decision would be? 

    And yet our government is in thrall to the misconception that unless we pay senior executives silly sums of money  no one would take the job, so leading to the situation that whilst the overwhelming majority of people’s incomes are falling in real terms those of the highest earners are increasing substantially. 

  It’s not only morally obscene, but utterly unnecessary.


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Aloe and goodbye.

As usual I went on yesterday’s annual Aloe solidarity march from Smerillo to Montefalcone. I dipped out of the lunch as it was polenta - not a personal favourite. However on Friday Pat and I went to the Peruvian Supper at Le Logge  - part of the €25 cost went to support Aloe. It was supposed to kick off at 8.30 but didn’t actually get going until well after 9 which meant it was almost midnight before we got home and well past by the time I got back from walking the dogs for a brandy. Fra Mago had been at the meal going round the tables doing his card trick. Much to Pat’s relief he didn’t come to ours.

  I palled up with Valentino and Cecilia on the walk. Valentino said he understood the Peruvian dinner hadn’t been well attended. I agreed - there were about 30 people there and none from Montefalcone. He put this down to the relatively high price of the meal. I didn’t contradict him, but Pat and I are sure it was owing to the innate culinary conservatism of the provincial Italian. A few years ago we went to a fried food festival held in the Piazza Arringo in Ascoli. There were stalls from all around the world including Japan and South America as well as all the Italian regions and an English one selling soggy fish and chips.  They had few customers. However the one selling food from the Marche region had an enormous queue!

  Yesterday evening we went to Ancona  for Pat to catch the plane to England - she’s there until the 19th leaving me to take care of the host of plants she restocked the courtyard with the Saturday before last.


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