Thatcher's Children

The Prophetess Thatcher - a curse be upon her -  famously remarked ‘There is no such thing as society’. And by abolishing capital controls the year she came to office she ensured her vision came to pass.

   The consequence of the lifting of controls on the export of capital was the de-industrialisation of Britain. Manufacturing was transferred overseas to take advantage of  cheap labour. With two results: a boost to consumerism as the cost of manufactured goods came down, and a systemic rise in unemployment. As Harold Macmillan commented in 1985: ‘Sixty-three years ago... the unemployment figure] in Stockton-on-Tees] was then 29%. Last November... the unemployment [there] is 28%. A rather sad end to one's life.’

   For the point about employment is that it gives the individual a sense of self-worth, of connecting to others as part of a larger structure. S/he has a personal investment in that structure, in other words is part of society. Where unemployment is systemic - not only have you never had a job, but neither have your parents or any of your friends - society is an ‘other’ and you have no other point of reference but your own real needs and the artificial ones created by consumerism. Why not smash a shop window and grab a flat-screen telly if you think you can get away with it?

   Thatcher’s other key policy, privatisation, was a second major contributor to driving up unemployment. To give two examples from personal experience: as an LEA maintained  FE College Section Leader in the early eighties I had 17 hours a week class-contact. When I regained the position in the late nineties, in the now independent  corporation, this had risen to 21. The consequence of raising lecturers’ class-contact hours was that you needed fewer of them, thereby saving the College money. And what were those savings spent on: better facilities for the students? Were they, buggery: they  were spent on hugely increased salaries for the Principal and the ‘Senior Management Team’. 

   The summer before we moved to Italy there was an eight hour daytime power cut  in the Fens. The length of time it took to restore the electricity supply  would have been understandable if it had occurred on a winter night when roads are treacherous and engineers are having to work in the dark in inhospitable conditions. But on a summer’s day? I rang Eastern Electricity to enquire whether the delay might be caused by the privatised company’s reducing the number of front-line staff in order to pay the inflated salaries and bonuses of the directors. The woman on the end of the line  replied that she couldn’t comment, but the warmth in her voice suggested I’d hit the nail on the head.

   Although it’s fairly obvious why we’ve landed in the current mess, it’s much more difficult to see how we get out of it. We can’t recreate our industrial base: those few ‘British’ manufacturers we have left - Jaguar, Range Rover, the Derby train manufacturer Bombardier - are mostly foreign owned. The unemployed mob, only kept quiescent by free bread and circuses, was a  perennial problem at the heart of the Roman Empire.And, alas, we all know what happened to that organisation, and the centuries of  barbarism and savagery which followed its collapse.


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School Trip.

Term started just before Pat went to England at the beginning of the month. The arrival of the dayboys has resulted in dinner at Janes’s on the 4th, a meal at the Taverna on the 8th with Tony and Shona, and lunch with them at San Ruffino on the 10th. Last Wednesday John and Judy invited me - together with fellow boarder, Gordon - to a barbecue. Yesterday evening I went to the Farfense with Jane and her English guests Will and Jill. Today was the school trip. I went with Tony and Shona on a guided walk to Monte Ascensione from Rotella. It was the typical Italian event: began half an hour after the scheduled start, didn’t depart from the advertised location, and the leaders got lost on the way back. Great fun all the same.

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The Hydra Loses a Head.

Looks as though Murdoch’s losing his grip. However, he’s only  one head of that monstrous hydra, globalised capitalism. Its other heads are busy attempting to devour the euro. International business has little trouble dealing with Europe’s mini-states; a federal Europe would present it with a much greater problem. Let’s hope that now that it’s push coming to shove the Eurozone will have the will to take the only steps which will protect it: fiscal integration, followed as soon as possible by political union.


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An Improvement.

Have just finished this year’s Montalbano novel. It was an improvement on the last four: unlike the last two - La caccia al tesoro and Il sorriso di Angelica - I didn’t work out who the guilty party was early on in the novel, unlike La danza del gabbiano Montalbano wasn’t behaving completely out of character, and unlike L’età del dubbio it wasn’t a vehicle for its elderly author’s sexual fantasies.

  Nevertheless, it was rather disappointing: Camilleri didn’t bother developing  his cast of regular characters, simply leaving them to display, mechanically,  the personal traits he’d developed in the early novels. Again, one felt the book was prompted by his accountant rather than any real desire to re-engage with the world he’d created in 1994 with La forma dell’acqua and developed so spendidly over the subsequent twelve novels and three collections of short stories. The last of the successful novels - Il campo del vasaio - was published in 2008. Since then it’s been downhill with a slight, but probably temporary, upward slope this year.


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Brief Encounter.

Made a surprise visit to the UK on Wednesday so that I could be with Pat on our wedding anniversary the following day. Candy booked us a meal at the Galleria in Cambridge which was enlivened by a punter falling into the Cam while we dined on the terrace. I flew back on Friday exchanging rain and 18 degrees for a cloudless sky and 36 degrees at Ancona. Click here for a video of Quinn at a park in Cambridge.

p.s. Excellent letter in the Guardian yesterday commenting on the News of the World scandal:

The banks gambled with ordinary people's savings and the nation's economy. News Corp abused people's privacy and damaged their lives. The common solution? Protect and reward those responsible and cut the jobs of ordinary people who had no part in their misdeeds.

Ian Roberts 

Baildon, West Yorkshire

Short and to the point.


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The Woodlanders meets The Wasteland.

The Woodlanders was Hardy’s favourite child and it’s not difficult to see why. 

    I first came across it when I ‘delivered’ (or ‘taught’, as we used to term it, before the academic equivalents of the morons running our banks poisoned English education)  the novel as part of an APU undergraduate module on the Pastoral. When the module was scrapped as a consequence of the move from terms to semesters I’d become so fond of the text that I incorporated it into the Access to HE 19th Century Literature module. It suited the interdisciplinary nature of our Access course well. Through Grace Melbury, Hardy dramatises the way so many of us today are torn between the familiar and rooted, embodied in Giles Winterborne and the village of Little Hintock, and the pull of the new and provisional, given flesh in Fitzpiers. Prior to the 19th century the dilemma wouldn’t have existed for the overwhelming majority of people: you were stuck with your roots whether you wanted them or not. Although Hardy paints Giles as a far better man than Fitzpiers, and his heart is with the world of Little Hintock, he knows that what it represents has had its day. The future is Fitzpiers.

     A couple of years ago I’d quite enjoyed reading  Giro di vento a novel by the contemporary Italian author, Andrea De Carlo. Partly prompted by the falling off of Camilleri’s powers,  I decided recently that I ought to get to grips with some serious contemporary fiction. So I sent off for a couple more books by De Carlo. I’ve just finished the first: Due di due. Unlike Giro di vento it didn’t immediately grab me: I found the first 100 pages tedious. And the title puzzled me: what did Due di due signify? I looked on Amazon to see what title an English translation might have, if one existed. It did: Two Out of Two, which didn’t help at all. Fortunately the answer to my question appeared on page 216. ‘Pensavo a quanto le nostre vite erano state diverse in questi anni, e anche simili in fondo, due di due [my italics] possibili percorsi  iniziati dallo  stesso bivio’  - I thought about how greatly our lives had diverged over the years and how at the same time they were fundamentally the same:  although we’d each followed  a different route, both of them were one of  the two possible directions which began at the same crossroads. 

    As grammar school pupils growing up in Milan both Mario, the narrator, and his best friend Guido had been disenchanted by the values which the City embodied and its unhealthy physical environment: Milan’s smog is notorious. It is Eliot’s ‘Unreal city’. Guido’s solution is to pursue the infinite possibilities which the world offers, hating to be tied to one place because that necessarily excludes all the others. He has a similar attitude to women. As Martina, the monogamous narrator’s partner puts it: 

   ‘… ogni donna era per Guido una chiave che gli permetteva di entrare in un’altra vita, sperimentarla nel suoi risvolti più intimi invece di immaginiarsela dal di fuori. … le donne gli piacevano come persone, e lui evidentemente piaceva a loro, ma doveva essere l’ossessione per le infinite possibilità parallele a rendere senza fine la sua ricerca’ - for Guido every woman was a key which allowed him to enter into another life, to try it out in its most intimate aspects rather than just imagining it from outside. … he liked women as individuals, and they obviously liked him, but he had to follow his obsession with the infinite parallel possibilities, which made his research endless.. 

    In other words he kept moving from woman to woman!

   Mario’s solution is to go for self-sufficiency in a remote spot of the Umbrian countryside, teaching himself -  from books he buys in Perugia -  how to start an organic smallholding .  He and Martina, an assistant in the  Perugian bookshop when he met her, have children together and slowly make a success of  their business,

   Like The Woodlanders, Due di due ends movingly. As a symbolic gesture, Mario commemorates his friend’s death by literally torching the adjacent house Guido should have occupied, but never did. Guido’s choosing  a different but complementary path had illuminated the narrator’s life. 

    Unlike Hardy, De Carlo ultimately comes down on the side of ‘returning to the land’ as the way forward. A nice idea, but - despite its popularity with some idealists here - until we’re forced into it by the collapse of western civilisation it’s pretty unlikely to have many takers I’d say! 


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Escorted from the premises.

Dave and Sue came over to see us last Saturday. Having collected them from Ancona airport, the four of us continued north to Urbino where we stayed overnight before travelling back to Montefalcone on Sunday. Today they went back to England escorting Pat from Italy. She’s Quinn-sitting for three weeks. However, as Tony and Shona, John and Judy and Jane are all in residence I don’t imagine I’ll die of loneliness.


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