The Courtyard Circular: June 2013

England 5th - 10th June

The main event of the month was my trip to England with Pat. We arrived at Candy's on Wednesday afternoon to be greeted by Matthew and Charlie and James who had come over to erect the marquee they had brought with them for my 'surprise' party on the 8th:

Candy, Matthew, Charlie, James and I repaired to the Five Bells afterwards.

  The following day, which was warm and sunny, James came with me to Peterborough to renew my passport. How fortunate that he did: I'd managed to leave my wallet in a phone shop in Wisbech and would have had no money to pay for it. Having ordered the passport we sped back to Wisbech, retrieved the wallet and had lunch in the courtyard of the Rose & Crown before returning to Peterborough to collect the passport.

  Friday - again warm and sunny - was my birthday, and we had a family supper at the Bank House in King's Lynn:

Pat's behind the camera.

   The party was held on Saturday, guests sheltering from the cold in the marquee beneath the wonderful plaque Matthew had constructed, referencing God's Wonderful Railway. 

As a boy, I used to  'spot' their locomotives at Temple Meads station, as an adult I bought models of their engines and rolling stock and constructed kits of its buildings. As a young man my maternal grandfather worked for the company.

   On Sunday several of the guests - including Dave and Sue, Chris and Di, and Maggie and Phil - who'd stayed in Wisbech overnight braved the cold to pop in to see us before returning home. Matthew, Charlie and James came over to dismantle the marquee and take down the lights.

  When we flew in to Ancona on Monday it was cloudy but warm - 25 degrees. However, travelling south down the A14 it became progressively colder and wetter. By the time we reached Force to pick up the dogs the temperature had dropped to 13 degrees and the rain had become a torrent.

Tempo inglese.

The weather picked up two days later and we enjoyed twelve days of sunshine with temperatures in the thirties, apart from a freak storm which shattered our window over the stairs.

 Unfortunately, the good weather didn't last and most of last week has been far colder - upper teens and low twenties - with lots of rain, not at all in keeping with the English stereotype of southern Europe. I blame the arrival of the dayboys: Tony and Shona and John and Judi.

And:

We had pizzas with Tony and Shona at Le Fate in Smerillo on the 1st and Jane came to supper the following day. We went to Le Fate again with Jane and her guest John on the 14th and dined at a taverna in Foce on the 19th with Peppe and Angiola. Norman and Jayne have invited us to supper this evening.

  

The Queen of Diamonds

The UK is still suffering from the economic crisis triggered by the greed and criminal ineptitude of American bankers and their European acolytes. It's only reasonable that all its citizens, apart from the most vulnerable, should bear their part of the consequent economic pain.  And that includes pensioners. I would have no objection to Osborne withdrawing the winter fuel allowance from those of us whose annual family income is above the national median. What sticks in the craw is his cynical exploitation of the ignorance of the average voter. Believing the continent to be bathed in perpetual sunshine, 365 days a year, most of the electorate regard withdrawing the fuel allowance  for  pensioners  living abroad  as long overdue. Sky News interviewed a councillor from Teignmouth who claimed that his elderly parents living in Madrid had told him they didn't need the allowance because "It's always warm here."  Maybe they are suffering from senile dementia: every independent weather channel I've been able to find states that in winter Madrid's temperature hits freezing, frequently becoming cold enough to support snowfall. 
  Even worse, The Daily Mash and NewsThump  two purportedly satirical websites, posted articles not only supporting Osborne's position but, in the case of The Daily Mash, seeing it as a self-evident truth. 
  NewsThump sells tee-shirts emblazoned with the legend "I think, therefore I am not a Daily Mail reader", thus unwittingly demonstrating that, although satire may be dead, inadvertent self-satire is not.
  I sent a letter to the Guardian:

I am a retired English lecturer living two and a half thousand feet above sea level in central Italy. Every winter we experience prolonged and heavy snow-falls. Electricity in Italy costs roughly twice as much as it does in the UK where I spent all of my working life. I pay UK tax on my modest pension. 

Although I will lose my winter fuel allowance in 2015, I draw comfort from the fact that once he's sixty, if he's living in the UK, Fred Goodwin will be able to claim the benefit, supplementing the £342,500 a year pension my taxes help to pay for.

It wasn't published.

   All of which shows Osborne's political nous. He could have saved money by removing the allowance from pensioners whose income was above a certain level. But that would have lent credence to the dangerous idea that the economic cuts should impinge on an individual in proportion to his means. That there was something unjust about the average joe having his modest salary frozen while the median total remuneration of FTSE 100 bosses rose by 8 per cent to £3.7 million. Instead the Chancellor played his Queen of Diamonds: the 'Europe' word. Instantly tens of millions of seemingly normal British citizens were turned into Manchurian Candidates, deprived of rational thought as, frothing at the mouth, they denounced the ex-pats sheltering in the bosom of the Anti-Christ's eurozone. 
  "Good boy, George. Job done," said the global financier, patting Osborne on the shoulder, before climbing aboard his limousine and disappearing into the distant shadows.

Jim's Apotheosis

In common with the other species of animals with whom we share this planet, human beings exist in time. Our bodies today differ from the ones we inhabited ten years ago, which again differ from those of each of the preceding decades we've been alive. And the 'we' inhabiting them changes even more rapidly. Not only do we add to our store of knowledge over the years, we modify the way we perceive external reality. When I was a small child my father told me that the world was round - he should of course have said spherical. Children are logical beings and I took him at his word, picturing the world as being like a dinner plate. In the summer we used to drive from Portishead to Weston-super-Mare at the weekends and stroll along the promenade. I imagined that all of Somerset's lanes and roads, like the ones we drove along, eventually ended up on the promenade which I envisaged encircling the world like the raised rim of a dinner plate. Finally, our emotions are in a continual state of flux, so giving the coup de grâce to our having a constant identity.

  The Deity, according to the theologians, is different, existing in an eternal present outside space and time. Thus in the Catholic take on the concept, because he is God as well as man, Christ's earthly actions also exist in an eternal present. His blessing bread and wine at the Last Supper and his crucifixion exist contemporaneously and eternally, and when a priest says mass he is connecting to those two events and transubstantiating the bread and wine into the flesh and blood hanging on the cross.

  And last Saturday at my seventieth birthday party I moved towards that godlike state of existing in an eternal present as all the stages of my life from the age of eleven were really, and substantially, and simultaneously present.

First there was Chris Vincent (pictured above), accompanied by his wife Di. I'd been at school with Chris for seven years from 1954 to 1961 - arguably the bleakest years of my life and only made tolerable by my close friends: Chris, his twin Roger, Mike Jefferies, and John Osborne. Roger and John, alas, never made their three score years and ten.

Then there was Dave, accompanied by Sue, who I first met when we were eighteen year old undergraduates at Keele - in stark contrast to school four of the happiest years of my life.

I moved to Norfolk in 1971 and first met Jeff (pictured above), who came to the party with his wife Helen and daughter Molly, when I was living in Hunstanton.

Having originally intended to stay there for three years I ended up working at the Tech in Lynn from 1971 to 2003. As the working environment deteriorated with the advent of Thatcherism, my friends Ed, Frank, John and Chris Bell (pictured above) helped keep me relatively sane. Ed, Frank and John were accompanied by their wives: Uschi, Daphne and Viv. Chris came with Glenda, his former partner, my former student and Candy's former teacher!

In 1975 I moved to the Fens' living successively in Middle Drove, Elm and Upwell. Richard with his fiancée Jane, John and Joy Simpson and Milshen (all pictured above) are friends we made then.

Finally, in 2003 we moved to Italy and soon made friends with Tony and Shona, pictured above, and Maggie and Phil, pictured earlier on with Chris Bell.

 Whatever our view of the prospect of an after-life peddled by the various religions - getting pissed on mead in Valhalla, getting laid at a bunga-bunga party in the Moslem version, or standing around in a nightie playing the harp in the distinctly tedious Christian heaven - we can all agree that our children and grandchildren confer a kind of immortality. Three of my five children and one of my four grandchildren were physically present at the party:

The Richards boys (minus Josh and Olly)

Candy, the hostess

Sophy

My elder daughter, Sophy, got as far as Dubai airport where some Emirati jobsworth prevented her leaving the country. However, she was still the life and soul of the party: she had very generously paid for all the wine we consumed. So although - thank heaven -she wasn't really and substantially present in the wine like God in the mass, she was symbolically present, like Christ in a Protestant communion service.

  And the party's other midwives were of course:

Pat

Pat's sister, Deborah

Matt's wife, Charlie

All of the seasons, covering the last fifty-nine years of my life are brought together in this glorious film of my apotheosis:

The photos of the party which don't appear in this post can be found here:

http://www.jamesrichards.eu/The_Pool_of_Narcissus/Seventieth.html