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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