Gli alimentari di Ponte Am.

Many years ago, when we first bought the house here, Fabio jestingly referred to the village as Montefalcone Upwellnino. He had a point: whether they’re situated below sea-level in the Cambridgeshire fens, or two and a half thousand feet up the Sibillini foothills, rural communities have quite a bit in common.

   And not only real locations. At the moment life is once again imitating art: Ambridge is exploring the possibility of the community running the village shop - the driving force being Pat Archer. With startling synchronicity, my real-life Pat was invited to a meeting to discuss the future of the organic grocer’s in Servigliano, Ritorno alla Terra, the local equivalent of Ambridge Organics in Borchester,

   Although I didn’t have high expectations of last night’s meeting - and alas they weren’t disappointed - I went with her. And here any parallel with Ambridge ends. To kick off with, the meeting began at 9.30 in the evening. Because of the three hour Italian lunch-break days are structured differently here (see October 7th’s entry). You begin work earlier than in England and you finish much later: so, once you’ve allowed time for people to have supper, evening events begin at what seems to an Englishman an ungodly hour. The second difference, though, was less to do with national culture than the gulf between fiction and reality. In The Archers the meeting about the village shop was efficiently chaired by Pat and focused. In the real world community activists, particularly when they subscribe to ‘alternative’ life-styles are usually far less effective. We patronised an organic shop in Wisbech. The proprietor was a pleasant woman, if a little inclined to melancholy, and she stocked some otherwise unobtainable items. But it wasn’t awfully clean, and, unsurprisingly, she didn’t really have a business brain: to succeed commercially your main aim has to be making a profit not saving the planet. She ceased trading some years ago, despite holding a meeting of like-minded customers to try to save the shop. Ritorno alla Terra is cleaner, but the stock-control is worse. Pat’s often returned with items she found to be well past their sell-by date when she unpacked them. 

   The smell of joss-sticks as we walked into the meeting confirmed our worst fears. The shop’s  staff kicked off the meeting by introducing themselves and giving a brief history of the co-operative and its founding vision: a bucolic utopia in which people return to the countryside and recreate the close familial and community ties which modern society has lost. Although I’ve some sympathy with the pastoral vision, it’s not going to happen - I think Hardy probably had the last word on the subject in The Woodlanders. Montefalcone is surrounded by woods, but the trees stand on terraces and are relative newcomers. Until the late fifties these precipitous narrow strips of land were farmed.  Farming so back-breakingly arduous as to make the trials endured by Depardieu in Jean de Florette seem nothing. And outside Lombardy that’s what farming involves in Italy: scrabbling up a hillside, not placidly following a team of plough horses across an East Anglian plain.  Fat chance of most Italians wanting to return to that I’d say.

   But a popular dream with a certain sort of English person, the ‘let’s move abroad and renovate a ruin in the middle of nowhere’ reality-programme audience. And they were represented at the meeting, eager to participate in the next stage of the meeting. This seemed to be modelled on an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or a born-again God-botherers’ service. Everybody in turn made a statement - perhaps ‘gave testimony’ or ‘bore witness’ would be more appropriate terms - about why they were attracted to the organic movement. Pat and I declined, saying tactfully, ‘Siamo qui solo per ascoltare ed imparare’.

   And - after two and a half hours - that was it. Apart from a scheme to send youngsters to spend time on small holdings and introducing the co-op’s wares into hospitals there were no concrete proposals or sub-committees to implement them. But, a consoling thought,  the latter’s absence means you don’t have to worry about finding yourself on one with Susan Carter!

Jimminy Clarkson.

I must confess to rather liking Jeremy Clarkson. Or more accurately, as I’ve never met the man, to finding his television persona engaging. And all this despite my being a bearded, Guardian-reading socialist: the embodiment of all that Clarkson despises. Like Ken Clarke, Boris Johnson and the late Alan Clark he seems authentic - the opinions may be outrageous, but they’re his, and delivered with a bonhomie and self-irony which charms the listener. Although much of Top Gear is tediously repetitive, and filled with nerdish details which make train-spotting or cricket seem like fun, the interaction between Clarkson and the Hamster and Captain Slow is usually entertaining. But until yesterday I’d always been puzzled by the team’s ability to experience an orgasm whilst sitting in the front seat of a car, alone, and with both hands on the steering-wheel.

   To explain. Yesterday I took the car for its 100,005 km service. Our garage is on the coast, a good hour’s drive away and this being Italy, even minor services take hours. In the summer that’s not a problem: after a coffee and croissant in the nearest bar I buy a paper and wander down to the front to read it. This is followed by a leisurely lunch in a fish restaurant by which time Arnaldo rings my mobile to tell me the car is ready. Winter is different: there is nothing to do in Porto Sant’Elpidio apart from walking for miles along the Adriatica to the shopping centre, and even that’s out of the question when it’s raining. Accordingly my heart sank when Arnaldo explained that our Forester wouldn’t be ready until the evening. I therefore tentatively asked if it would be possible to borrow a car. Unlike England, courtesy cars are a rarity in Italy. In Norfolk our Subaru dealer delighted in lending Pat the latest model, in the hope no doubt of tempting her to buy it. Sometimes he was successful. To my surprise and delight Arnaldo rummaged through a pile of keys, took me outside and said, ‘The white one.’ The car was old and the radio didn’t work - but it was an Imprezza! And what a world of difference from a Forester. Taut handling, acceleration which pinned you to the back of the seat, and aaargh that throaty roar. And as I creamed my jeans, not having been so exhilarated since I traded in my Kawasaki half a lifetime ago, I suddenly saw the light. For a second I too became a believer in the four-wheeled gods of Jeremy Clarkson.

Jazzer, Fosca and Meg.

Last night I finished reading Fosca by the scapigliato [member of the 19th century bohemian group of writers centred on Milan], Igino Ugo Tarchetti, given to me by Irish Paul’s wife, Paola. It’s a first-person psychological novel about the self-destructive relationship of the handsome Giorgio with the extremely ugly, highly neurotic, and sickly Fosca. She throws herself at Giorgio despite his having no feelings for her, other than intermittent pity. Fosca accurately sums up herself in a letter to Giorgio:

        Io nacqui malata: uno dei sintomi più gravi e più profondi della mia infermità era il bisogno che  sentiva di affezionarmi a tutto ciò che mi circondava, ma in modo  violento, subito, estremo. [I’ve been ill from birth. One of the deepest and most serious effects of the sickness has been my violent, impetuous and abject need to  feel loved by everyone around me.]

She, at least, has self-awareness; Giorgio despite his penchant for introspection, has little. In this respect he resembles Emily Brontë’s Nelly Dean and Ishiguro’s Stevens: a narrator who is blind to the significance of what’s he’s narrating. In a masterly fashion Tarchetti conveys to the reader what the narrator is unaware of: his moral illiteracy  - revealed by his reaction to the letter from his beautiful mistress, Clara, breaking off their relationship. She’s done so because her husband’s finances have taken a sudden  and catastrophic turn for the worse. She rightly feels that she needs to stand by him and their child, despite her love for Giorgio. Rather than sympathy and understanding for her plight there is only fury;

    Tal cosa non poteva immaginata che da un essere mostruosamente ingrato, mostruosamente crudele. Io aveva amato questo essere. [One can’t conceive of    any creature that isn’t  monstrously ungrateful and cruel behaving like this. And I had loved such a one.]

He consequently decides that Fosca is the woman for him because:

    Quella donna mi ha amato, ella sola mi ha amato veracemente. [That woman has loved me. Only she has really loved me.]

And he goes off to consummate their relationship, demonstrating that for Giorgio love is not about giving oneself but satisfying his ego, even in the arms of a woman he finds repulsive. Fosca  dies three days later. Unlike Dobbin, in Vanity Fair, she wasn’t disillusioned when she finally won the long sought object of her affections, because for her,  as for Giorgio love is about self-gratification, not mutual affection. 

   Meanwhile The Archers is running a comic variant on the theme of unreciprocated love. Jazzer, who up till now thought love was a four-letter word beginning with s and ending with g, has decided that Fallon, the daughter of the local pub’s landlady, is the girl he wants to settle down with. They get on well, but as far as Fallon is concerned they are friends, not potential lovers, and she tries to tell him.  He hears the words but doesn’t get the message and thinks if he takes things slowly Fallon will come round. Fat chance I’d say.

   And finally to Meg. She’s on heat, so our walks are accompanied by a bevy of assorted swains, including two we normally like - Lupo’s dog, Rasta, and Valentino’s, Libero. Like Giorgio and Fosca they’re only interested in self-gratification - in their case carnal rather than psychological. The problem is that unlike Fallon and Jazzer both parties are up for it - the expression a bitch on heat has become disturbingly concrete. Trying to prevent access to her rear-end has made walks a nightmare. But once her season’s ended things will be back to normal - she and Libero will be good friends again with no psychological hang-ups or smouldering resentments. And a dog’s life is meant to be a deprecatory term!

Christmas in Suffolk.

Got back on Monday from a week in England. The UK had been pretty cold; but in Marche temperatures reached +20^o  while we were away. We left Italy on the 21st and I drove to Candy’s whilst Pat took a train to Deborah’s. Matthew and Charlie came to dinner  at Candy’s that evening.

  The following day I drove down to Suffolk. The roads weren’t as bad as I’d feared but had great difficulty in pinpointing Debbie’s house, despite the satnav. Managed to have difficulty in finding it again after I’d returned the key to the agent. Recuperated in the Randolph which not only had Adnam’s bitter but free wi-fi. When Pat and Sophy and Adam arrived around eight - they too had difficulty finding the house - we all went to the Randolph for dinner. 

   Wednesday was largely taken up with putting Quinn’s electric motor-bike together. Waitrose delivered the Christmas shopping - minus the turkey. Fortunately Pat noticed it was missing and the delivery-man ‘found’ it in his van. Highly suspicious we all felt. 

     Christmas Eve went in to Southwold, or Islington-by-the-Sea: hardly a non-RP accent to be heard or a black face to be seen. Even the corner shop in Reydon sells the Assam tea, smoked mackerel, and sliced pancetta so essential for a civilised life. Came back in the afternoon feeling poorly and spent most of the rest of the day in bed. Candy, Quinn and Deborah arrived in the evening. By then I had recovered sufficiently to make the stuffings for the turkey (Pat had done all the hard work by getting the membrane off the chestnuts - a task I detest).

   Christmas Day followed its immutable pattern. The Christmas pudding was particularly good this year as Pat had adopted my maternal grandmother’s practice of steaming a pudding she’d made the previous Christmas. It transforms it utterly.

   On Boxing Day we had lunch at the Anchor in Walberswick. Deborah and I walked there - or more accurately I trailed behind Deborah as she strode across the marshes at a pace which would have won gold at the Olympics. Sophy and Adam also walked - but separately from us. Pat, Candy and Quinn drove.

  The following day Pat and I drove to Candy’s to spend a freezing night after the warmth of Reydon. But there was wi-fi to console us somewhat.

   And on Monday, having scraped the ice off the car’s windscreen it was back to Stansted and home.   

   Click here to see a video of our Christmas.

Christmas Round-up.

Thanks to everyone who has sent Pat and me a Christmas round-robin. Being a cheap-skate, I’m saving on paper and printer ink by creating mine electronically! 

The highlight of the year was Sophy and Adam’s engagement: they’re getting married next November in Dubai. Sophy and Pat are off to Bond Street a week today to choose the wedding dress. The near miss of the year was the Abruzzo earthquake, which unfortunately turned out to cost far more lives than we knew when I posted the entry. The saddest event, the death of Pat’s Uncle Leslie.

  Pat made several visits to the UK to look after Quinn while Candy was away on business. I went rather less, but was there with Pat for Quinn’s third birthday in February, and  a week at Candy’s in June, and on my own for the OEs’ annual dinner. In April we made our annual visit to Dave and Sue’s at their holiday home in Burgundy; they came to stay with us in August. We made two trips within Italy: one in celebration of our wedding anniversary in July to Orvieto and Assisi, the other in late October to Prato, near Florence. Candy and Quinn visited us twice, once in February and again in September.

   We lead very sheltered lives in Montefalcone, although the village does spring into life in the second weekend in October when it holds its annual sagra. The most exciting things which happened to me personally were getting two letters published in the Guardian, failing to get two published in the Observer, and having dinner with the Moldovan ambassador to Italy. 

  The first heavy snow of the year having arrived yesterday we’re keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll be able to get to England next Monday, as planned, for a family Christmas with Sophy and Adam, Candy and Quinn and Deborah at Deborah’s holiday home in Suffolk.

If reading this hasn’t deprived you of the will to live, click here for a summary of what we got up to in 2008.

The Good and the Bad Pedant.

There are two sorts of pedants: those who are aware that they are are pedants, and those that aren’t. The former - the conscious pedant - is a harmless beast. He’s taken on board the essential triviality of his concerns: the world at large is either unaware of the whole issue of ‘correct usage ’ which so exercises him, or knows that there are more important things to worry about. (Or, as emended by the pedant, ‘about which to worry’.) Knowing himself, the conscious pedant uses his foible as a source of mirth. The unconscious pedant, however, is a humourless individual, who uses his knowledge to bolster his feeling of superiority and sense of self-importance, oblivious of the fact that in so doing he only succeeds in making himself look a pretentious tosser. 

   Today’s Observer contained examples of both sorts of pedantry: a witty article by Euan Ferguson (Man your apostrophes, my friends, and support the pedants' revolt) and a reader’s pompous letter reproduced below:

The big issue: The Kercher murder. The persecution of Amanda Knox goes on

While I share Barbara Ellen's concerns that the murder victim Meredith Kercher seems to have been forgotten by the press reporting of the trial in Perugia ("Meredith, not Knox, deserves our thoughts", Opinion, last week), it is a pity she accuses Amanda Knox of "flowery oratory" in her final statement to the court using a sloppy translation.

   "Ho paura di avere una maschera di assassina forzata sulla mia pelle" means she doesn't want to be branded a murderer, not to be "given the mask of the assassin". Having watched the whole speech in which she not only thanked her friends and family for their support but even acknowledged the job her accusers had to do, it certainly did not "sound like some ham mangling Shakespeare".

   My impression was of watching an innocent young woman, who'd already spent two long years in a foreign jail, feeling vulnerable but hoping she would receive a fair verdict – and judging from the more balanced reporting elsewhere in your paper, we may yet see the guilty verdict overturned on appeal.

Sue Newte

London SE7

                

The opening sentence’s subordinate adverbial clause of concession, as we pedants put it, makes one’s hackles rise. Just as one knows ‘While I’m not anti-semitic/homophobic/racist, some of my best friends are Jews/gay/black, …’ is always the prelude to some disgusting piece of prejudice, what follows the Newte’s opening remark demonstrates that she does not share Barbara Ellen’s concerns at all. Her ‘impression’ that Amanda Knox is innocent outweighs the verdict of the court. 

  But the real reason for the letter is her desire to demonstrate that her command of Italian is better than Barbara Ellen’s. It is not. ‘Given the mask of the assassin’, one slight quibble aside, is a literal not a ‘sloppy’ translation. Whilst it’s usual to translate assassina as ‘murderess’, a pedant should know that the English word ‘assassin’ simply means ‘murderer’. It’s only contemporary usage - and when has that carried any weight with the stickler for ‘correctness’ - which has conflated its meaning with ‘hired assassin’ - i.e. someone who carries out a killing on behalf of a political or religious idea, or  another individual or organisation. As Barbara Ellen says, the translation has preserved the floweriness of the original. A straightforward wish not to be branded might be expressed as: ‘Ho paura d’essere bollata’ or ‘d’essere stigmatizzata’. The same wish expressed figuratively might be ‘Non mi piace aver la parte d’assassina imporre a me’. Only a ‘ham mangling Shakespeare’ would complain of having a murderess’s mask forced upon herself. The Newte is confusing translating the idiom of one language into its equivalent in another (e.g. ‘poppet’ not ‘cauliflower’ when choufleur is used as an endearment) with preserving the original’s register. To translate Knox’s statement as  ‘branded as a murderer’ is as inadequate as flatly translating la Serenissima as ‘Venice’, The Smoke as ‘Londra’, or some twerpette writing to the Observer as  ‘la signora Newte’.

   That’s better: now I’m feeling superior and a lot more self-important - or would be if anyone read this blog!

Darwin and sanctity.

I was expelled from the first school I attended. The nuns told my mother that ‘James is a very naughty boy. We’d like you to remove him.’ 

   ‘Why don’t you smack him?’

    Unusually for the nineteen-forties, and remarkably so in the light of recent revelations about some orders’ behaviour in Ireland, they replied primly: ‘We don’t believe in corporal punishment.’ 

   Being expelled from kindergarten may explain why at my next school, when each child in the class was asked what he or she wanted to be when grown up I replied, ‘A saint.’ An answer greeted by general hilarity. But if one forgets canonisation and thinks instead of managing to grab a priest for the last-rites, followed by an extended stay in purgatory, not an entirely implausible ambition. 

  I was reminded of my Somerset infant school by an article about Darwin’s legacy I read a couple of days ago. Click here to read it.  Although I knew about the Nazis’ obsession with the pseudo-science of eugenics, and was vaguely aware that it had had a following in the western democracies, I hadn’t realised how widespread that following was, or how horrific its consequences. The activities of the British Eugenics Society led to ‘to the imprisonment without trial of more than 40,000 people. Many were detained for "moral imbecility" - having children out of wedlock, committing petty crimes, or displaying homosexual inclinations. Some would remain incarcerated for 20 years.’ 

   The real shock, though, came from reading:

‘Darwin's ideas have also fathered some of the most grotesque instances of man's inhumanity to man.
   Darwin's decision to represent as a scientific fact that the several races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary path - that white Europeans were, in short, more highly evolved than Africans or Australian Aborigines - has had appalling consequences. Today, Darwin's supporters frequently make light of his racial views, claiming that he was no more racist than the average upper-middle-class gentlemen of his day, and warning that we should not try to impose the politically correct attitudes of our own times on to the past. But Darwin's racism was very different from that of his contemporaries.

   Though any Victorian Englishman might have regarded himself as socially superior to the lawless, savage tribes he encountered throughout the Empire, only Darwin - as the man who discovered evolution by natural selection - could provide an underpinning for racial superiority in biology and evolutionary science. Only Darwin could establish the notion of a hierarchy of races as a scientific orthodoxy that would prevail through much of the following century.

   … Darwin's second catastrophic error was to promote the view that the poorest sections of society were genetically inferior to the educated middle class and that most, if not all, the traits that led to pauperism were hereditary. Darwin's analysis generated a fear that if the working class continued to breed faster than the middle class, then the society would continue down a spiral of genetic degeneration.’

Although I knew about Social Darwinism I’d always believed that it was a completely unwarranted distortion of the great man’s teachings rather than an integral part of them. I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised that the seamy side of Darwin’s theories should have been brushed under the carpet. We all like our saints made of plaster rather than flesh and blood. Think of the Whisky Priest, Graham Greene’s anonymous protagonist in The Power and the Glory. As well as being dependent on alcohol, the priest has an illegitimate daughter. The apostate priest, José, at his wife’s instigation, refuses to administer the last rites to the whisky priest before his execution. So he dies believing he is damned, though the theologically literate reader will know that his final emotion- ‘He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all’ -  is an act of pure contrition which will save him. And the common reader, of any belief or none, will know him to be a good man who, despite his many frailties, did his best to do what he believed to be right. But as soon as he is dead the pious turn him into a plaster saint:  

'And that one,' the boy said, 'they shot today. Was he a hero too?' 

'Yes.' 

'The one who stayed with us that time?' 

'Yes. He was one of the martyrs of the Church.' 

 'He had a funny smell,' one of the little girls said. 

'You must never say that again,' the mother said. 'He may be one of the saints.' 

'Shall we pray to him then?' 

The mother hesitated. 'It would do no harm. Of course, before we know he is a saint, there will have to be miracles ... ' 

'Did he call "Viva el Cristo Rey"?' the boy asked .. '. 

'Yes. He was one of the heroes of the faith.' 

'And a handkerchief soaked in blood?' the boy went on, 'Did anyone do that?' 

The mother said ponderously, 'I have reason to believe … Señora Jiminez told me … I think if your father will give me a little money, I shall be able to get a relic.'     

'Does it cost money?'     

'How else could it be managed? Everybody can't have a piece.’

             

One would have thought that it would be more inspiring to know that greatness or sanctity can be found in someone whose ideas or behaviour are in many respects deplorable. Darwin was wrong to propagate the belief that some groups of people are inherently inferior to others; the Whisky Priest was wrong to break his vow of celibacy. But they are both heroic figures, because of, rather than despite, their frailties.