The Courtyard Circular: March and April

Last month, I wrote that we were beginning to emerge from our hibernal slumber and engage in some social interaction. We have built on those foundations and I am pleased to announce the following attempts to develop into normal human beings.

March 26th - 31st. Maggie and Phil stayed with us. They did their own thing during the day, visiting their friends and reacquainting themselves with the area, but we spent extremely convivial and well-lubricated evenings together. The evening before they left they treated us to dinner at the Farfense.

March 25th. Term began for the dayboys.
   Jane came for dinner on the 26th and the three of us had a walk together on the other side of the Aso Valley the following Saturday. Jane wanted to see her house in situ.

   John and Judy arrived on Good Friday and we had a meal withe them and Jane at Re Artù on Holy Saturday. John, being Scottish, was not amused by the reservation note on our table: "Gli inglesi'!
   Jane left on Easter Day as she had to be on flying granny duty in Dubai the following week
  Tony and Shona arrived on Low Sunday to a nasty surprise: three of their upstairs radiators and their shower had sprung leaks owing to the severe winter. A large flat radiator on the landing had been buckled into a curve by the frozen water.

   On the 17th April we had dinner at Lupo's with John and Judy - who were leaving for the Amalfi Coast the following day - and Tony and Shona. 

   Term ended with Tony and Shona driving back to England on the 26th.

House moving. On 4th April I helped Penny and Paul get their stuff into the removal van prior to their taking off for Liguria.

On Friday 13th April we had a follow-up meeting about tourism at Angela's house. I took along an English tourist guide I'd compiled  for non-Italian speaking visitors to the village. Pat brought along information on dye plants which could be planted in the proposed dye garden.

April 18th - 23rd: UK. Click here for movie of our visit.

   On the 19th we drove and walked through the rain to Jamie's Italian Restaurant in Cambridge for Candy's birthday lunch. 

Her previous birthday we'd also eaten Italian, but in a real Italian restaurant in glorious sunshine! Debbie joined us for lunch, a post-prandial wander around Cambridge, and afternoon tea at Patisserie Valerie. 

   On the 20th we got round to eating the birthday cake which we'd been too stuffed to eat the day before.

   On the 21st I went over to Leicester to see Dave and Sue. As I've mentioned before, Dave has taken up vaping in a very serious way. He has a vast array of devices, of which only a small selection is shown in the photo below:

Dave very generously gave me an electronic pipe - something I'd coveted for some time - together with a selection of 'juices' to vape.

  Having returned from Leicester on the 22nd, I went with Candy and Quinn to see Matthew performing at Old Hunstanton Social Club. To my amazement I found several fellow-vapers there, although like Dave they weren't  using devices which pretended to be real cigars.

   The following day at Stansted I was taken aside by a rather attractive security officer to have my case thoroughly searched. No doubt the various phials of 'juice' Dave had given me, which I'd placed in the regulatory plastic bag, combined with the large number of cables - to charge my electronic gadgets - which the scanner would have revealed to be inside my case, made me look a potential bomber. As we were in good time for the plane, the girl was pretty and affable, and I've no problem with genuine security measures as opposed to Ryanair's pointless rules I suppressed my inner-Meldrew.

Pat flew to England yesterday to resume Flying Granny duties. She returns on Sunday before going back again in June. But for me, there'll be no more social intercourse until July.

Ryanair update

Last November I commented on the contrast between the pleasant service and honest pricing offered by Easy Jet and the byzantine obfuscation, ritual humiliation and deliberate provocation to which Ryanair subjects its customers. An article in today's Corriere revealed that it's not just his passengers who are shafted by O'Leary. The airline has adopted various devices to avoid paying the Italian exchequer five hundred million euros. Easy Jet, it notes 'per onor di cronoca' [for the record], pays its taxes in full. If a government, as the French have discovered, seeks to crack down on the evasion, O'Leary simply closes the routes. You either play it his way or he doesn't play at all.

Just one more example of the impotence of national governments in the face of amoral oafs running international businesses. Of course if there were a Federal EU government, as a carrier whose routes are confined to Europe, O'Leary would have no option but to pay his taxes or go out of business. One can but dream!

 

Surprised by the media.

This month's Diabolik had two surprises in store, undermining two long held preconceptions. The first concerned the comic's language. Once I'd gained a basic grounding in Italian, I didn't expect to be lexically challenged by Diabolik, and until this month I wasn't. Then on page nine I had a repetition of the Corriere experience: words whose English translation was as foreign to me as their Italian originals. Diabolik comes across a safe 'di ultimissimo modello, in vanadio molibdeno'. I looked up the last two words and found their English equivalents were 'vanadium' and 'molybdenum', words which were utterly meaningless until I had read their definition in the Shorter Oxford. Now I suspect that my ignorance of the meaning of 'vanadium' may be peculiar to myself - as I was typing this post the browser's built-in spell checker tried to change 'vanadio' to 'vanadium'. But 'molybdenum', for God's sake!

   At school, comics went under the generic name of 'trash'. We were allowed half an hour before lights-out to 'swop trash', which we stored under our pillows. After that, to be out of bed was a beating offence. Although in my school's slang the term 'trash' was purely denotive, carrying no evaluative connotations, the fact remains that one doesn't read comics for their literary quality. Or so I thought.

   The plot in April's issue of Diabolik revolves around the collaboration of 'Il Re del Terrore' and his beautiful companion, Eva Kant, with an elderly Art Historian. They are attempting to unmask a criminal who is vandalising stolen works of art by stripping them of their jewels and substituting fake stones before selling them on. The elderly professor is a cultivated and decent man who is rather taken by Eva. Having decided on their plan to ensnare the art thief, Professor Ubold hands Eva a rose saying, 'Lady Kant, vi assicuro che se voi aveste anche solo una trentina d'anni in più, vi farei una corta spietata' [Lady Kant, let me assure you that if you were just thirty years older, I would court you remorselessly]. I was brought up short. One would have expected him to say, 'If I were thirty years younger' - it's certainly what I would have said under similar circumstances. Instead, the anonymous writer has not merely avoided cliché but has succinctly revealed Ubold's character. He appreciates Eva not simply for her outward beauty, but for her intrinsic qualities - qualities which will still be there in thirty year's time. This melds beautifully with the Professor's passion for art: he values things for what they are rather than for their superficial appearance, their cultural significance or their monetary value. The story ends with Eva sending the Professor a gift and his murmuring 'se solo fosse un po' più vecchia' [if only you were a little bit older] so demonstrating that his earlier words weren't simply for show. And so we have a story about Fine Art written with a touch of the literary art one expects in a great novel but which takes one aback when it appears in 'trash'.

    Pat didn't share my other surprise this month: the identity of the dead flatmate in White Heat which was only revealed in the final episode; she'd guessed it early on. Not that this mattered - unlike our normal TV fare White Heat wasn't a thriller or a detective drama. The series had a lukewarm reception from the critics writing in the broadsheets and, as one might expect, was universally panned by the intellectually challenged folk who contribute on-line vitriol to those newspapers' comments section. The programme was frequently compared unfavourably with Our Friends from the North. Having never watched the latter I have no opinion on its merits. As a West Countryman brought up to believe that the wogs begin at Gloucester, I was put off by its oxymoronic title. We know that north of Gloucester the country is infested by barbarians whom four hundred years of Roman rule failed to civilise. People who hideously disfigure the English language by swallowing their 'r's; untermenschen who wouldn't know what a dap was if one hit them on the head. On the other hand, we thoroughly enjoyed White Heat, so much so that angered by the sole review on IMDB I broke the habit of a lifetime and contributed an on-line comment of my own. Reviews written for IMDB have a longer shelf-life than on-line comments to newspapers and I thought it important that people shouldn't be put off viewing the series if it's repeated. I didn't attempt to counter the arguments offered by the original commentator: his limited understanding of dramatic structure and misuse of terms such as cliché suggested it would have been a waste of time. And in the end, unlike science, all opinions about literature are subjective. The only objective thing one can say of a novel, a poem, a play or a TV drama is 'I liked it' or 'I didn't'. I liked White Heat and I hope you might too.

Famiglia ladrona.

For the last three days the Northern League has been the lead story in the Italian media. It began with the news that the party's treasurer, Francesco Belsito, was being investigated for corruption, then it emerged that public money had been diverted from the League to pay the expenses of various members of the family of its leader, Umberto Bossi. Today the Corriere della Sera carried the news that Bossi had resigned yesterday at 4.30.
The ghastly Northern League is a xenophobic and racist organisation which prides itself on the north's self-proclaimed superiority to the feckless southern Italians running the country from Roma Ladrona (thieving Rome). I found it extremely gratifying, if unsurprising, that their claim to moral superiority has been so spectacularly and comprehensively exploded. Far-right parties attract people who - dimly aware of their own brutish appearance and limited intelligence - seek to comfort themselves with the belief that whole sections of the human race are even stupider and more repellent than themselves. As Fielding pointed out in his preface to Joseph Andrewes, this affectation makes these unfortunate beings an object of ridicule:
" Now, from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves ... but when ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or lameness endeavours to display agility, it is then that these unfortunate circumstances, which at first moved our compassion, tend only to raise our mirth."
Far-right parties draw support from those with a desperate need to believe that whatever their own personal inadequacies, collectively they belong to a superior group, identifiable by the colour of its skin or geographical location. The mainstream right, however, attracts those who, in defiance of elementary logic, identify themselves with their economic betters. They are happy for the Posh-Boys to cut the top rate of tax for the very wealthy whilst withdrawing benefits from ordinary working people, because they identify themselves with the first group though in reality they belong to the second. When Brenda Last, in A Handful of Dust, is worried that her husband's poor relations may think she's patronising them, Aunt Frances tells her: "Dear child, all these feelings of delicacy are valueless; only the rich realise the gulf that separates them from the poor."