Quinn's adopted.

Pat came back on from a week in the UK on the 16th, accompanied by Candy and Quinn. Went to Pepe Nero in Porto Sant’Elpidio for lunch on Candy’s birthday, to Le Pietre di Drago in Matelica on Wednesday, to Ascoli on Friday and to San Benedetto on Monday. They went home yesterday. Click here for a film of their visit.

   Candy was rather bored but Quinn had a great time entering into Italian life with gusto. He even asked to come to mass with me on Easter Sunday and managed to stick it out until the sermon when he wanted to play outside. I took him home - the sermon, alas, was still going on when I got back to church. Candy went round to see Maria Grazia on Saturday to ask if Quinn could play with Filippo- they’d played together the previous summer. After that Pippo was more or less a fixture in the house - the photo shows them playing together on Easter Sunday. On Monday we thought Quinn should have an early night as his mother and he were flying back to England the following day. However when I went round to Maria Grazia’s to return a jacket Pippo had left at our house Quinn was invited to join them at Lupo’s for a pizza. Pat sent me off at 9.30 to pick him up. Just as well that I did as I met everyone else - Pippo, his mother and siblings plus Paul, Paola and Edward -  going home at 11.30 when I was taking the dogs out for their late night walk.

   Quinn spent all his time talking English to everyone and Pippo spoke Italian to Quinn, both blissfully unaware that their auditors couldn’t understand a word they were saying. But that, I’ve been told is the way small children approach language - there isn’t English and Italian, only speech. And after a time they understand the ‘speech’ they hadn’t previously and without knowing it can speak both languages. Wish it worked for me!


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Europe(an) matters

Read an interesting article in this month’s Red Pepper. It seemed to bear out what I’ve long suspected: behind their anti-European rhetoric British prime ministers, both Labour and Tory, know that European integration is essential if this country is to survive. Thatcher, seemingly the Daily Mail incarnate, signed up to the ERM, Major signed the Maastricht Treaty, and Brown the Lisbon Treaty. 

         Since Heath, there’s only been one overtly pro-European premier and he chickened out of joining the Euro, a policy in which he believed but was too frightened by Murdoch to carry out. Such a shame John Smith succumbed to a heart attack:  according to Francis Beckett things might have been very different if he’d survived. 

     The Red Pepper article points out that the fact that ‘the EU has signed up for … centralisation under the aegis of Brussels of national budgetary decision making for all member states as of 2011’ has received very little coverage in the British tabloid press. Instead they rouse their readers to fury with stories of  ‘how the EU allegedly wants to harmonise condom sizes, ban smoky bacon crisps because the woodsmoke seasoning may cause cancer, and rename chocolate “vegelate”.’

   Red Pepper, like many on the left, deplores the way in which the inexorable growth in Brussel’s power is hidden from the public. So do I, but for rather different reasons. Unlike Red Pepper I think the EU is our future. But like Red Pepper, Ukip, the BNP and the Daily Mail I’m opposed to rule by ‘unelected bureaucrats’. And there’s a simple answer: give the real power to the European Parliament not the Commission. But that, of course, wouldn’t suit those running Westminster whether they’re Labour or Tory. Far better to continually carp about the EU to keep the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail onside whilst in reality supporting rule by unelected bureaucrats because it’s the national governments who put them in post.

  There is an alternative vision: to rejoice in being European, to cherish that common culture, depicted in the map above, which gave us peace and prosperity for half a millennium. And to strive for the day when we once again have the political and economic union which might give us a chance of surviving in a world dominated by China, India and Brazil. As someone much more eloquent than I once put it:

“We British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation. Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history…Too often, the history of Europe is described as a series of interminable wars and quarrels. Yet from our perspective today surely what strikes us most is our common experience… It is the record of nearly two thousand years of British involvement in Europe, cooperation with Europe and contribution to Europe, contribution which today is as valid and as strong as ever…

Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.” [Margaret Thatcher, September 20th, 1988]


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Media Matters

TV

Last week the televisual feast I reported in my previous post came to an end as we finally caught up with the concluding episodes of The Killing on iPlayer and 24 on Sky FX. The only decent thing left is Madmen and that’s only on once a week. So great was our desperation that we watched an episode of Midsomer Murders with John Nettles’ replacement in the lead. It was dreadful. In Nettles’ day - although definitely Saga viewing - its picture-postcard alternative universe had a certain internal consistency. No longer so: the episode centering on a girls’ boarding school had all the gritty realism of Ealing Studio’s St Trinian’s minus the humour.

Only marginally more successful was the vintage production of Lakmé we watched on Sunday. I always have a problem with opera on TV: you see the leads in close-up. Listening to a CD your imagination paints the picture; in the opera house the cast are sufficiently far away from the cheap seats we can afford for their figures and faces to be blurred. The romantic leads are usually written for a tenor and a soprano, and tenors and sopranos tend to be hefty. And although in the real world fat people fall in love - America’s birth-rate provides evidence enough - watching them do it has all the allure of a fifteen stone lap-dancer. In this production the problem was compounded by Dame Joan Sutherland’s chin inescapably reminding me of Desperate Dan.

Radio.

Ambridge has started a book club. Shula’s father-in-law , Jim, with apparent predicability chose a classical text: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Except this turned out to be an April Fool’s joke: his real choice was a book by Richard Harris. I think the scriptwriters, encouraged by the batty Whitburn, have completely lost the plot. They slipped up earlier, compromising Jim’s self-consistency as a character with his improbable reaction to the lugubrious Kathy Perks. Now they’ve done it again. Jim may be a pompous ass with limited self-awareness but he is an educated and cultured man. I’ve found Metamorphoses to be thoroughly readable, though - unlike my namesake - being no classical scholar, I’ve only used it as an adjunct to English texts which refer to it - Chaucer makes particularly subtle use of the story of Midas and the ass’s ears. I’ve also read a Richard Harris novel, Fatherland. The writing was wooden, the plot ‘s great revelation - the Nazis were murdering Jewish people on an industrial scale - was something I seemed to have heard somewhere before. I’d like to study Metamorphoses in the company of a Classics professor. I’m sure Joe Grundy’s life would be enriched by the experience. To pick a piece of crap because Joe ‘would be able to understand it’ is patronising. And as a teacher of literature Jim would knows that great fiction can speak to anyone no matter his level of education or his social class.

Incidentally, I’m not belittling readers of crap fiction. I read it myself: if a book gives you pleasure that’s all that matters. But enjoying reading books and enjoying discussing them are two different animals: most people are only interested in the first. But a book club presupposes an interest in the second and for that you need a text that will repay discussion. Analysing popular fiction is the province of the sociologist or the cultural theorist not the literary critic.

Newspapers.

Prompted by me, Pat acquired an iPad2 on Lady Day, the first day they were released outside the US. Providentially we noticed a store selling Apple products had opened in the Battente shopping mall in Ascoli. One reason I’d encouraged Pat to buy the iPad was her subscription to the digital edition of the Guardian. I find that the paper’s website is easier to navigate on the iPhone than the digital edition which retains the print edition’s format. This holds true for the desk or laptop. But on the iPad the digital edition really comes into its own: easy to navigate, and just like reading the print edition minus the crumpled sheets when you turn the pages in a confined space.

And today she could have had the thrill of reading hubby’s letter about Wuthering Heights and foul language. Money well spent, I’d say!


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