The end of the beginning.

As Churchill famously remarked in connection with Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel: ‘… this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ Yesterday I sent Monica Bruni, a local estate agent, details of our house, with a view to obtaining a rough estimate of its current market value. I have no wish to live in England again, especially in the Fens. I find myself increasingly out of sympathy with the UK’s zeitgeist: its Little Englander euroscepticism, its tolerance of the ill-mannered and overweight yobs who crowd its streets, its eager adoption of the values of the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail, and consequent failure to see where the interests of the vast majority of its inhabitants lie and who their real enemies are. On the other hand we have friends and family there and could possibly be useful to the latter for a few years. And given the terrible economic outlook which the UK faces owing to the bankers’ Gordon Brown’s [redacted by Cleggeroon  Undercover Net Total Surveillance*] criminal irresponsibility we may have to provide Candy with more support than occasional baby-sitting.

   In theory, we haven’t committed ourselves to selling, merely to seeing what we could realise if we did. However, I feel that it’s like one of those relationships where people are considering a trial separation. One knows that despite protestations to the contrary it won’t be long before one of them is screwing someone else - if indeed one of them hasn’t been doing so secretly for some time already. I see the downhill path stretched out before me: the Sibillini dissolve into the monotonous Fens, the palazzo shrinks into some dreary rabbit-hutch. For a few brief years we enjoy being close to our family and friends, and then, as physical and mental decrepitude gallop on apace, a living death incarcerated in some god-awful gerryhome surrounded by the stench of our own incontinence.That’s the end -  but I fear it’s beginning now.

*A wholly-owned subsidiary of  The Big Society©, a member of the NewsCorp group.


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Death Sentence*.

Yesterday I reached another milestone on the road to corporeal dissolution, speeded on my journey by the vast numbers of cigars I’d smoked, and the immoderate quantities of wine and brandy I’d drunk while Matt and Charlie were here. They arrived on Friday and went on Monday evening. I thoroughly enjoyed their stay.

 Not only am I rapidly running out of time, but Steve Jobs’s failure to mention on Monday what will happen to iDisk once Mobile Me is replaced by iCloud, suggests that iWeb’s days are likewise numbered. The computer press is unperturbed by this believing that Facebook and Twitter have made it redundant. This may be true for the acne generation, for the semi-literate who find 140 characters more than sufficient to express their half-baked ‘ideas’, and for the super-egoists who broadcast their every bowel movement to their moronic ‘followers’. But for us simple narcissists, who like to hone a phrase even though we know it’s purely for self-consumption, the death of iWeb will be a tragedy.

  On a brighter note this year’s card count is up: five* actual cards (plus an e card) including one each from three of my four surviving children: Eccoli:

Pat

  Sophy & Adam 

1. 

  Candy & Quinn

 Matt & Charlie

  Chris

*Stop Press: a sixth card, from Debbie, arrived  9th June

And an e-card from Maggie & Phil.


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Another inconvenient truth.

As a small boy in the late ’forties and early ’fifties I was an ardent imperialist, spending hours in the lending library devouring Arthur Mee’s Our Empire Story. Unfortunately, although Empire Day was still marked at my primary school, the institution it celebrated was rapidly joining Nineveh and Tyre. One thing puzzled me: why had the French labelled our nation ‘Perfidious Albion’? For Arthur Mee made it clear that England had heroically shouldered the burden of bringing enlightenment to the savage regions of the world.
    When I was a sixth-former I discovered the answer. Together with a group of classmates I attended a meeting of the Council for Education in World Citizenship held at a local girls’ day-school. The draw, of course, was the girls not any desire to become a world citizen. As a sex-starved teenager incarcerated in a boys’ boarding school any opportunity to be in the same room as a girl was eagerly seized. The main business of the meeting was a talk on the White Highlands given by an indigenous Kenyan. The speaker was a quietly spoken man who steered clear of passionate denunciations of injustice. His case was the more compelling for it. I left the meeting a changed man.
    At university I became aware of  aspects of Our Island Story other than those highlighted by Mee: strapping Indian mutineers across the muzzles of cannon and then firing them; going to war with China because their Emperor tried to curb his people’s addiction to opium. Opium grown very profitably in the jewel in our empire’s crown.
    Although the Empire, along with my youth, is long gone its attitude to ‘lesser breeds’ persists. Today’s Guardian carried the unbearably moving story of a severely injured  13 year old Iraqi boy ‘lost’ by the Army medical corps. After visiting the hospital for ten days, without being allowed to see his son,  his father was told that he was becoming ‘annoying’ and banned from making further visits. A year later he was told that the boy had been moved to Kuwait and the army had lost track of him. Unbelievably two and a half years later the army's chief claims officer said he could not offer any compensation for negligence “since I have been unable to find any such evidence of negligence by the British forces in this matter”. The letter ends: “Please accept my sincere sympathy”.
    And there you have it: we’re a decent civilised people, able to offer sincere sympathy even to an annoying Iraqi who’s unaccountably upset that his son has disappeared and has the impudence to accuse us of negligence.

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Modern Times.

The concluding sentence of an article by Katherine Whitehorn in today’s Observer puts its finger on the problem underlying the malaise affecting contemporary British society:

      ‘… what has actually been correct, politically in Britain from Mrs Thatcher to Tony Blair? Not an insistence on equality, just an insistence on the efficacy of profit and competition – not public service or honour or professionalism – to cure any failing or inefficiency in anything.’

   Underlying this new political orthodoxy is the false belief that people are chiefly motivated by money. On the contrary, as Bertrand Russell put it: 

    ‘Of the infinite desires of man, the chief are the desires for power and glory…When a moderate degree

of comfort is assured, both individuals and communities will pursue power rather than wealth : they may seek wealth as a means to power, or they may forgo an increase of wealth in order to secure an increase of power, but in the former case as in the latter their fundamental motive is not economic.’  

    Job-satisfaction has much more to do with an employee’s freedom to make his own decisions about the sensible way to carry out his role than with the size of his pay-packet. In other words, a degree of power over  his own working life.  And for most of us that’s enough. Some individuals, though, crave power over others which leads them to become - in the worst case scenarios - dictators, but in the majority of cases merely charge-hands, foremen, ward-sisters, managers, or chief executives. If  Bob Diamond were given the choice of continuing in post at a tenth of  his present salary or working as a counter-clerk with no loss of income (the option of transferring to another company being excluded )  can one doubt for a moment what his decision would be? 

    And yet our government is in thrall to the misconception that unless we pay senior executives silly sums of money  no one would take the job, so leading to the situation that whilst the overwhelming majority of people’s incomes are falling in real terms those of the highest earners are increasing substantially. 

  It’s not only morally obscene, but utterly unnecessary.


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Aloe and goodbye.

As usual I went on yesterday’s annual Aloe solidarity march from Smerillo to Montefalcone. I dipped out of the lunch as it was polenta - not a personal favourite. However on Friday Pat and I went to the Peruvian Supper at Le Logge  - part of the €25 cost went to support Aloe. It was supposed to kick off at 8.30 but didn’t actually get going until well after 9 which meant it was almost midnight before we got home and well past by the time I got back from walking the dogs for a brandy. Fra Mago had been at the meal going round the tables doing his card trick. Much to Pat’s relief he didn’t come to ours.

  I palled up with Valentino and Cecilia on the walk. Valentino said he understood the Peruvian dinner hadn’t been well attended. I agreed - there were about 30 people there and none from Montefalcone. He put this down to the relatively high price of the meal. I didn’t contradict him, but Pat and I are sure it was owing to the innate culinary conservatism of the provincial Italian. A few years ago we went to a fried food festival held in the Piazza Arringo in Ascoli. There were stalls from all around the world including Japan and South America as well as all the Italian regions and an English one selling soggy fish and chips.  They had few customers. However the one selling food from the Marche region had an enormous queue!

  Yesterday evening we went to Ancona  for Pat to catch the plane to England - she’s there until the 19th leaving me to take care of the host of plants she restocked the courtyard with the Saturday before last.


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A big screw-up.

We called in at Ikea’s store in Ancona on our way back from taking Candy and Quinn to the airport the other week. Pat wanted to get an extra bed for her studio and I wanted some shelf extensions for the library. While there we decided to replace the dave-chairs yet again. The existing ones were uncomfortable for extended sitting - and in the winter thanks to Pat’s wood-burning stove we spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Putting the shelves together was pretty straightforward: like half the book-owning world practice has made me a bit of a Billy expert. 

The chairs didn’t present too much of a problem either:

Yesterday morning, however, Ikea delivered the bed. It took me from around ten until quarter to seven to put the wretched thing together. There were two major flaws with the instructions: telling you to put pieces together in a way which was physically impossible, and failing to warn you of a counter-intuitive location of an angle-iron. Not Ikea’s finest hour: I’d previously found their instructions clear and fool (or Jim) - proof as long as you paid close attention and followed them scrupulously. Still the bed looks very pretty now it’s assembled.

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Bankers: the final word!

Shona Rogers emailed Pat this video of me - minus my toupée, and speaking in my ancestral brogue.


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