Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Bull in Montefalcone




I’ve commented before on the similarities between Montefalcone and Ambridge. Yesterday I learned that not only has Luisa closed her bar permanently but there’ll be no chance of anyone else taking it on as she is going to turn it into an apartment for her son to stay in when he visits. Unfortunately Matt Crawford’s vision for the Bull is taking flesh in Montefalcone. It would be sad if the Bull were to close - but this is happening in the real world, dammit , and it’s a tragedy.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Dark forces




The most interesting aspect of the Andy Gray affair is the revelation that he was suing News Corp for alleged phone-tapping by the News of the World. The man’s opinions are deplorable but they were only intended to be shared with a fellow neanderthal, not - as a consequence of being secretly recorded by someone within Sky News and leaked to the Daily Mail - made public property. 
  His fate is just another example of  the message we’ve seen delivered for years: don’t mess with Murdoch or something unpleasant will happen to you; co-operate, like the Metropolitan Police, and there’ll be a drink in it. Avoid promoting policies which you think  might upset the Dirty Digger, however close to your heart, and his media empire will swing in behind your party  whether you’re Labour under Blair or Tory under Cameron.
  The revelation, though, is the extent to which Murdoch has infiltrated his agents into rival news organisations. Because it’s no more in the Mail’s interests for Murdoch - posing as a champion of women’s rights -  to divert attention away from the threat posed by his taking complete control of  BSkyB than it was in the Telegraph’s to have Vince Cable neutered. To be replaced by a man whose take on Sky’s boss - ‘We … wouldn’t be saying that British TV is the envy of the world if it hadn’t been for him’ - is so patently absurd that I’m surprised the Tea Party haven’t offered him honorary membership. If Walter Shandy was right about their names determining people’s character one can only conclude that Naughtie and Marr succeeded in finding the name Hunt had ‘Before the World Was Made’.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The Nightmare Return/s


The previous time Pat went to the UK she had a nightmare journey from Rimini to Stansted. Last Monday her journey from Ancona to Stansted went smoothly, and yesterday I left a Montefalcone basking in 14 degrees of sunshine to pick her up on her return. By the time I reached the coast the temperature had fallen to 6 degrees and things were fairly misty. When I reached the airport at around 2.15 and checked the flight status I found that take-off had been delayed and the the plane wouldn’t arrive until 4.20 - an hour and a half late. At half past four, the plane still hadn’t arrived. It was then announced that owing to the fog at Ancona the plane had been diverted to Perugia and the passengers would be bused the rest of the way.
She eventually arrived at 7 pm. We set off at once for home, only to find the slip road on to the motorway blocked in both directions by an accident. After ten minutes we were once more on our way and all was well until we left the A14 at Pedaso. And found ourselves in thick fog all the way to Ortezzano. We eventually reached home at 9 pm, a mere four and a half hours late.


Wednesday, January 12, 2011

The Truman Show revisited.




OMG - as the tweeters, texters, Facebook ‘friends’ and other semi-literate creatures lurking in the world-wide web’s undergrowth would say- an article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian has rudely awoken me from the complacent dream-world I’ve been inhabiting for the past 67 years. The Truman Show isn’t located in Dubai as I thought last November; it’s here and I’m part of it.
Last year I naively described the plot of Larsonn’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest as a gothick version of New Tricks. How wrong. Jenkins revealed that the UK has its own version of The Section, one far more extensive and frightening than that described by Larsson. The Association of Chief Police Officers is no longer a benign trade union for Chief Constables: that sanctimonious blaggard Blair turned it into a private company which, in Jenkins’s words runs ‘a murky organisation called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU)’.
So the inhabitants of the UK are all unknowing participants in The Truman Show. Occasionally they’re shown glimpses of the real world in Spooks, which the poor deluded creatures are deceived into thinking is a television drama. On the contrary, it’s the reality; they’re the ones on the telly.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Winged Chariot’s brakes fail.



Never mind single men with money looking for wives, a more important truth, likewise universally acknowledged, is the fact that the older we get the faster time flies. Most people first notice this in their twenties or early thirties. I’ve yet to meet anyone in his forties who hasn’t. 
   Although nobody who’s made the acquaintance of  Swift’s Struldbrugs would want to live for ever, most of us elderly folk rather wish Shakespeare had put his brief candle in a holder bought from Ikea’s shop in Dubai (see photo above). We all seem to have different theories to explain time’s acceleration. My own is that  as we grow older each measure of time - week, month, year etc - represents an increasingly smaller percentage of our lives. And our life is our yardstick. When you’re five you have to wait a fifth of your life for Christmas to come round again. These days, though, as a proportion of your life relative to that infant self, it pops up again in less than a month!
   And this year, thanks to the Christian calendar, things seemed to be accelerating faster than Jeremy Clarkson having an orgasm in a Ferrari. Christmas Day was on a Saturday, but to all intents and purposes it was a Sunday: all the shops closed and compulsory mass for papists like me. To be followed immediately by the actual Sunday itself. It felt that a whole week had gone by so fast that I hadn’t noticed it. Yesterday we had New Year’s Day, again a Holiday of Obligation and all the shops shut. And today it’s bloody Sunday again. Stop, please brake before I break.





Saturday, January 1, 2011

The Festive Season.



As predicted last month Pat and I spent a very private Christmas: just us and a 151/2 pound turkey. We froze some to be used in curries later, and we ate our last turkey sandwich on Thursday. Not having the family here we didn’t bother with Christmas decorations other than a tree on the well, lights on the upper loggia and the crib pictured above, The village has gone crib-crazy this year. Acting on a suggestion from don Marco, teams have created cribs in the former petrol station, the former communal wash-house, the empty supermarket, the Tronelli Gardens and in a room next to the Pro-Loco. All this in addition to the usual crib in the parish church.
If Christmas was unusually solitary, New Year’s Eve, for the first time since the departure of Maggie and Phil, was spent with friends: John and Jean invited us to their party and fellow guests included Devid (sic) and Marsha and Gordon.