Christmas Newsletter: The Second Coming

Apologies to all the faithful followers of my blog - two at the last count - who may have wondered why there have been no posts since December 2014. One reason was that most of my fading energy over the last two years went into my translation of Liverotto Uffreducci*; the other that I became tired of ineffectually brandishing my pen like a downmarket Lear and asking the winds to blow and crack their cheeks at the follies of ingrateful man.

   However, having received many Christmas newsletters from friends detailing the interesting things they've been getting up to over the last twelve months I felt it would be churlish not to respond with a brief account of how Pat and I spent 2016.

   I went to the UK three times:  in April during Quinn's Easter holidays, in early August to bring Quinn over for three weeks' holiday, and in September for Matthew's fiftieth birthday party. As usual, I managed to lose something. In April I left my jacket and wallet at Matthew and Charlie's and Matthew had to make a trip to Candy's the following day to bring them back. In September  I excelled myself by managing to lose my passport at Matthew's party. Fortunately, a friend found it in his car and I was able to pick it up the following day.  James and his son Ollie came over from Australia for the party. His daughter, Ruby, who is on a French exchange, was also there as was Matthew's son,  Josh. As Candy and Quinn were also at the party I was able to spend the evening with all four of my grandchildren.  James and Ollie came over to spend a few days with us before heading back to Australia. 

Although it was late September it was still warm enough for them to go swimming in the Adriatic. Candy came over for the last week of August to take Quinn home. He had a few riding lessons while he was here, but the undoubted highlight was the tree-walk at Ripatransone. 

  Pat went to visit Sophy and Adam in Dubai in March and Candy and Quinn twice: once in October and again in late November. 

In July, together with seven English friends who live, or have holiday homes here, we helped run a week's English course for a dozen of the local children. The kids were great and we all had a good time. Whether they learned much is another matter!  As always we've spent many an enjoyable evening with our friends who have holiday homes here although sadly, unlike last year when my old university friend, Mike, and my friend and former colleague, Chris, stayed with us, we haven't had any friends over from the UK. An English friend, Sue, who like us lives  permanently in Montefalcone will be sharing Christmas lunch with us. Sophy and Adam arrive on the 28th ready for Pat's seventieth birthday celebrations, followed by Candy, Quinn, Pat's sister Deborah, and our friends Tony and Shona on the 29th.

  In December, thanks to a very generous contribution at Christmas from Sophy and Adam, I bought an Apple Watch. Most purchasers are attracted by its fitness apps; I was interested in its enabling me to avoid pulling out my phone in situations - walking the dogs, shopping etc - where I'm likely to drop it. So I have my shopping list on my wrist, can control the music I listen to while walking the dogs from my wrist, and can set timers which vibrate on my wrist when I'm cooking: my increasing deafness means I rarely hear the inbuilt timer on the cooker. I can also send Pat a message from the watch asking her to put the kettle on when I'm about to return  with  the dogs from their afternoon walk. It also notifies me about major events and, on those rare occasions when they send one, about messages from friends or family. So I would recommend a smart watch to any of you who find advancing age brings advancing clumsiness. We also replaced the car this year. It was beginning to show its age, costing us almost €2,000 last year to have the clutch replaced. Although it's still a Subaru Forester, unlike its predecessor it has an automatic gearbox which took me some considerable time to get used to as, unlike Pat, I'd never driven an automatic before. I find it better than a  manual for negotiating hairpin bends when going up hill as there's no danger of stalling, worse when going downhill as you can't control the speed via the gearbox (well you can if you select manual drive, but that's a step too far at present).

  That's the good stuff; now for the bad. To begin with the trivial: in January I went to my GP to arrange a hearing test at the local hospital. When I arrived in Amandola the hospital seemed strangely deserted. On reaching reception I found a notice saying that the outpatient department was closed for the hospital's patronal festival! I returned in February and was told that the specialist wouldn't be available until March. I returned in March and was told the computer system for was down and it was therefore impossible to book a test. Foolishly, I gave up at that point. To move on to the serious:  on June 26th, Brexit - causing our income to depreciate by around 13% thanks to sterling's fall in value against the euro, and probably heralding the collapse of the EU, our one chance of security in an increasingly unstable world; on August 24th, woken up in the night by the house being  violently shaken by the earthquake which destroyed Amatrice  and other villages, damaged the local hospital and killed 297 people; on 26th October while I was watching television in the evening, Pat was in the U.K., the metal anti-seismic ties in the sitting room began to writhe violently as the house was shaken by another powerful earthquake; on 30th October we had just woken up when an earthquake struck again, this time destroying Castelluccio, our  local hospital  and Saint Benedict's Basilica in Norcia; November 8th, Trump wins the US presidential election. 2016 is undoubtedly the worst year of my life since the end of the Second World War. 

  Sadly, 2017 may well be even  worse, if not for me personally providing there are no more tremors and the pound stabilises, almost certainly for the world at large. In next year's elections France has a choice between Fillon, an avowed admirer of  Thatcher whose economic plans include sacking half a million public sector workers, and Marie Le Pen who wishes to take France out of the EU.; Italy's leading contenders for power are the foul-mouthed Grillo, who wants Italy to ditch the euro, and Salvini, who shares Mussolini and Putin's penchant for being photographed half-naked and wants Italy to leave the EU; then there's Wilders in Holland; a threat to Merkel from the extreme right and so on. Trump will have assumed office and may well renege on NATO, leaving Europe's collection of petty 'sovereign' states to Putin's tender mercies. As Yeats put it so presciently, this Christmas instead of the Prince of Peace we're waiting for the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem to be born.

* Also available from the Apple iBook Store. Royalties go to Montefalcone's cultural association, Pro Loco 2000

The Year of the Book: End of Year Review

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed, with relief, that I've posted far fewer items than usual this year. Paradoxically this is due to my logorrhea having increased rather than diminished. My translation of two texts about the Apennine Sibyl having been finally published this July, I've turned my attention to writing a history of Montefalcone and have got as far as 1849. As the market for this is even smaller than that for a book about the Sibyl I am intending to publish it as an ebook, using Apple's iBooks Author app. Once that's done, I'll think about doing a Kindle version for those sad souls who don't possess an iPad.
    Pat as usual visited the UK several times: in November she saw a performance by the Vienna Riding School at Wembley Arena. In September she stayed with Laurie and Steve at their home in Boston, Massachusetts. In contrast, I've steered clear of John Bull's island - and his former north american colony - completely this year, though I guess I'll have to venture over next year to get some new glasses. In July Pat and I went to Ravenna for a couple of days to celebrate our third-seventh wedding anniversary. The mosaics were marvellous, the ubiquitous cyclists a pain in the backside.
    However the lack of travel has been more than compensated by our having visitors. Chris Bell came over in June, lured by my promise that the month is always sunny in Italy. It rained most of the time he was here; maybe I should have gone into politics or advertising. Candy & Quinn fared better when they came over in August. Maggie and Phil came to stay in September, and kept me company while Pat was on one of her trips to England. As always, the day boys - Tony and Shona, John and Judy, and Jane - were entertaining company. Our neighbours Norman and Jayne have sold their holiday flat to another English couple, Keith and Elaine, who seem very pleasant. They both worked in FE - Keith ending up as principal of Bristol College, a large FE  conglomerate in the eponymous city.
  On a sadder note, our friend and builder, Peppe Alessandroni, passed away in July. And, as I write, Sophy and Adam, having spent a few days with us, are on their way to his sister's in England for Christmas. Candy, who has just started a new job as Marketing Manager for a housing association, and Quinn are unable to come over this year, so Pat and I will spend Christmas on our own for the first time for many years.
   This year we're having a traditional English Christmas dinner  - a goose, not a turkey as the semi-literate idiots who are currently writing and producing the Archers seem to believe. One of the soap's characters having stated erroneously that A Christmas Carol featured a turkey, I was interested to see how Carol Tregorran's reading from the story at the Grundys' Christmas Turkey Pardon would pan out. Obviously someone alerted them in time, as the reading stopped short before we got to Scrooge ordering a goose for the Cratchetts. Which, of course, made the reading pointless.
   And, of course, folly is widespread as this year's European elections showed. And the europhobic  poison is spreading to Italy. The potty-mouthed comedian, Grillo's, anti-euro Five Star Movement attracted a fair number of votes. The racist Northern League, under its new leader Salvini has changed from working for a federal Italy or an independent northern Italy within the EU, to wanting to withdraw from the EU. He's allied himself with Marie Le Pen in the European Parliament. Fortunately, anti-EU sentiment is not endemic in Italy and the pro-EU PD increased its share of the vote at the European elections. I note that Cameron has pulled a masterstroke in The UK by proposing that Scottish MPs should no longer have a vote on matters relating solely to England. So a Tory majority for ever: kiss goodbye to the NHS and the BBC as those two organisations, subject to constant vilification in the tabloid press, are sold of to his chums. At least in Italy corruption is out in the open, in the UK unless you subscribe to Private Eye you think it doesn't exist.
  On second thoughts, perhaps I'll pass on next year's visit to the UK.
 

Kiss Good-bye to the NHS

Although my heart quite liked the idea of Scottish independence, my head told me it would be disastrous for the interests of the ordinary Englishman or Englishwoman. Without its Scottish contingent Labour would never have sufficient MPs to form a Westminster government. 

    A few months ago some political commentators claimed that Assad quietly supported Islamic State terrorists infiltrating the Syrian opposition forces, counting on their presence to weaken American opposition to his regime. The volte-face has occurred, whether or not Assad was actually engaged in the machiavellian manoeuvres attributed to him. I naively wondered whether Cameron had a similar strategy: secretly working for Scottish independence, whilst publicly opposing it, in order to ensure a permanent Tory majority at Westminster. 

    His speech, this morning, welcoming the Scottish voters' rejection of independence, stripped the wool from my eyes as I realised that he was playing a far deeper game. One which involved Labour and the Lib Dems as his unwitting stooges. As part of the attempt to persuade the Scots to say no to independence, all three English parliamentary parties promised greater devolution of powers to Edinburgh. And the logical quid pro quo? Cameron revealed it this morning: acting to settle the West Lothian question. If the Scots are to control their internal affairs without English interference, justice requires that they can't interfere in ours. The undercover privatisation of the English NHS can continue apace without the Tories having to worry about Labour having sufficient English MPs to resist the process - ever. 

   My despair was complete when the BBC followed their broadcast of Cameron's speech by interviewing Farage, the leader of the "Turkeys, Vote for Christmas" party. My sole consolation: as it's still part of the UK, the English can always protect themselves from Dave and Nick's Brave New World by moving to Scotland.

Twisted logic.

Europhobes claim to be opposed to rule by 'unelected bureaucrats from Brussels'. In reality, of course, those bureaucrats are answerable to the European Commission and the European Council: the former made up of  commissioners nominated by the democratically elected governments of the EU's member states, the latter composed of the heads of those self-same governments. However the most directly democratic European institution is the European Parliament, elected by universal suffrage across the EU. And, after the 2014 election, it was the democratically elected parliament, rather than the European  Council, which was supposed to choose the next President of the European Commission. A step towards greater democratic accountability one would have thought.
   Here's David Cameron's take on the change as reported in Tuesday's Corriere della Sera - strangely, I could find no mention of his statement in the British press, so can't quote him in the original English. I guess its logical absurdity would have been apparent to even the dimmest eurosceptic:

… cedere potere al Parlamento europeo, riconoscendogli la possibilità di esprimere un suo candidato, vuol dire innescare un processo irreversible. [… to cede power to the European Parliament, allowing it the possibility of choosing its own candidate, means sparking off an irreversible process.]

One which would lead to greater democracy, but which is fiercely opposed by Cameron and the other self-proclaimed opponents of rule by unelected Brussels bureaucrats.
   A clue to what lay behind his topsey-turvey logic can be found in yesterday's Corriere which contained the following statement by the former Vice-President of the European Commission, Antonio Tajani:

Nell’Europarlamento non c’è mai stata una maggioranza precostituita, ma una la si è sempre trovata. E l’Europarlamento, come unica istituzione Ue eletta dai cittadini, ha una grande responsabilità: quella di consolidare appunto l’Europa dei cittadini, non dei banchieri, delle lobby.  [There has never been a pre-established majority in the European Parliament, but one is always found eventually. And the European Parliament, the only one of the EU's institutions to be directly elected by its citizens, has a great responsibility: that of strengthening a Europe which represents its citizens rather than  bankers or lobbyists.]

It's no wonder that Cameron, Farage, Le Pen and Salvini are opposed to a European Parliament which could threaten the interests they front.  The pity is that they have persuaded so many ordinary people to reject the one European institution which could possibly protect their interests.

The European Election 2014

Yesterday I voted for the first time since moving to Italy. I've never bothered registering to vote in the council elections and, as an immigrant, I'm ineligible to vote in national elections. However, given the rise of anti-EU sentiment, fomented by the far right in order to deflect people's attention from the real source of our economic problems, I felt it was a moral duty to vote in the European election. My reason for doing so can be summarised by the columnist Sergio Romano's succinct reply to a reader's letter  in yesterday's Corriere della Sera about why he felt it was important to vote in the European election:

Aggiungo una sola considerazione. Se gli Stati nazionali europei affrontassero in ordine sparso i problemi dell'economia e della sicurezza in un mondo ormai «globalizzato», saremmo tutti condannati a subire la volontà degli Stati Uniti e della Cina oggi, del Brasile e dell'India domani.

[I'd add one further consideration. If the nation states of Europe were to try to tackle the economic and security problems they face in a 'globalised' world  in an uncoordinated way , we would all be condemned to submit to the will of the United States and China today, and Brasil and India's tomorrow.]

A simple and basic truth which is never offered for consideration to those poor souls who naively believe that withdrawing from the EU would restore national independence.

  This morning David Cameron was interviewed by Evan Davis on the Today programme about Ukip's challenge to the Tories. His comment that people were protesting against the financial hardship they were suffering as a result of Gordon Brown and the last Labour government's mismanagement of the economy was left unchallenged. To have countered this by stating that the crisis was in fact caused by unregulated banks would not have been politically biased but a plain statement of fact. That Davis failed to do so was a gross dereliction of duty, although perhaps understandable in the light of Conservative claims that the BBC is biased against them.

  The anti-European parties made significant gains throughout the EU, but their triumph wasn't quite as sweeping as the headline to  Martin Kettle's article in today's Guardian would have us believe:

True, his article does include the adjective 'most' to qualify his statement that:

.... as they voted against Europe, British voters have never seemed more part of the European mainstream than they do this morning. Across Europe, in one way or another, voters in most countries did very much the same thing

but it scarcely impacts on the message his readers will take away: the whole of Europe is against the EU.

  For there is another EU state with only slightly fewer inhabitants than the UK, and occupying a similarly sized territory, which produced very different results:

The governing party, the pro-European left of centre Partito Democratico, got its best election result ever - over 40% of the votes cast - whilst Beppe Grillo,  Nigel Farage's potty-mouthed Italian twin, saw his party's share of the vote fall. If the result was surprising - Grillo had been boasting that his party would thrash the PD and as a consequence the government would have to resign - the irrelevance of the twitterati was less so. Only yesterday, 13,000 of Grillo's supporters were tweeting the hashtag 'vinciamonoi' [we're winning] whilst the PD's hashtag 'unoxuno' was tweeted by little more than 3,000. Clearly while fewer self-obsessed users of the 'social media' support the PD, it attracts more adults who interact with the real rather than the virtual world and actually make their way to the polling station.

Pedants' corner.

As we get our English news from Radio 4 and the Guardian and our Italian news from the Corriere della Sera we use television for entertainment rather than information. And in our case that means crime drama, ranging from gripping Scandinavian thrillers - The Bridge being the most recent -  to the lightweight Death in Paradise - Midsomer Murders with sunshine. Among them are two period dramas, Inspector George Gently set in the sixties, and chiefly notable for Martin Shaw's ludicrous attempt at a north country accent, and WPC 56 set in the fifties. Although a rather more engaging drama than Gently, last week's episode of WPC 56 contained two glaring anachronisms - and I think their presence says a lot about contemporary culture.
   First there was the repeated reference to the 'train station'. To anyone of my generation the expression sticks out like a sore thumb. I can't really remember when it replaced 'railway station', but I guess it can't have been before the early seventies. In my childhood one listened to the wireless rather than the radio, but the fact that I've never had an objection to that particular change of terminology  suggests it happened much earlier, probably in the late fifties when I was still young enough to see change as an unremarkable part of everyday life rather than as a threat to my known universe.
  The second, less glaring, error was finding a covertly gay man's  wedding ring in his pocket. In 1950s Britain men did not wear wedding rings. I first came across the practice when Ed Tonkyn got married in the mid-seventies. His wife, Uschi,  is German, and the fact that all my married male Italian contemporaries wear wedding rings suggests the custom was well established on the continent by then. However in the UK, even today, it is far from universal: my son-in-law was quite astonished when my daughter suggested they should both wear rings. He was only persuaded to do so because she claimed, erroneously, that I wore one.
   Why does all this matter? After all Shakespeare notoriously has a  clock striking three in the second act of Julius Caesar. I would suggest that was an entirely different matter: Shakespeare wrote for the public at large, and I would imagine the average Elizabethan was as ignorant of the fact that the ancient Romans didn't have clocks as I was of the fact that  horse chestnut trees only arrived in Britain in the 17th century. Accordingly, their appearance in Zinnemann's film of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons neither spoiled my enjoyment of the film when I first saw it, in blissful ignorance of its botanical anachronism, nor subsequently when a fellow pedant pointed out the error. For I wasn't alive in the sixteenth century and accordingly couldn't feel affronted by a false depiction of an experienced reality. More importantly, for Shakespeare and Bolt the period in which their dramas took place wasn't the central issue: they were both concerned to retell profoundly important historical events which simply happened to take place when they did. The focus in both dramas was on the character of those engaged in the events.
   However, following in the footsteps of my fellow OE, Ashley Pharoah's, Life on Mars, WPC 56 foregrounds the period in which it takes place: the setting is as important as the fictional events depicted. It aims to highlight the differences between the 1950s and the present day. Unfortunately a considerable proportion of the people viewing the programme were alive during the fifties and will immediately spot the errors I referred to earlier, because they relate to the everyday life of the time, not some area of arcane knowledge.
  It would have been very easy to have avoided the mistakes by simply running the programme past some seventy year olds before broadcasting it. Just as it would be easy for Italian firms to avoid publishing unidiomatic and inept English translations of their Italian guide books, apps or webpages  by asking a native English speaker to check them before inflicting them on the English-speaking world. England isn't short of seventy year olds, or Italy of English ex-pats.
   But today we live in a world where everyone is an 'expert', tweeting his half-baked opinion or sharing it through FaceBook or some other variety of social medium. And the traditional media in a desperate attempt at 'relevance' encourage the dumbing down by trying to 'involve' their public. So articles in the on-line version of the Guardian are followed by 'comments' in which the semi-educated favour us with their mis-spelled and ungrammatical invective. Every morning Radio Three poses a pointless 'brainteaser' to which their listeners are invited to tweet their solutions. Every Sunday a listener is interviewed about why a particular piece of music appeals to him. Who, apart from his family and friends cares? I listen to Radio Three to hear music and be informed about it by experts in the field. Just as I expect anyone producing a television programme purporting to show life in the fifties to avoid obvious howlers.
  But when you can find out all you need to know about the fifties by going online and looking at Wikipedia why bother to consult a real live person? Especially as it would involve consulting the elderly, and, as we all know, anyone over forty-five is past his sell-by date in our brave new world.

Two peas in a pod.

To adapt St Matthew's gospel: 'by their friends ye shall know them'. 

Blair famously enjoyed Berlusconi's hospitality:

and the support and friendship of the media tycoon Murdoch. Margaret Thatcher was another admirer, considering him 'probably the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. I see a lot of socialism behind their front bench, but not in Mr Blair. I think he genuinely has moved.' How right, she was. Like Renzi, Blair was adept at capturing the public mood, however asinine - 'The People's Princess' immediately springs to mind - a talent which led him to win three successive elections. This was good for the Labour Party but disastrous for the interests it was founded to represent. 

  Just as Tony Blair abolished Clause Four, so paving the way for Miliband to cut the direct link between trade union members and their former political wing, Renzi the 'Rottamatore' proposes to scrap the 'old-fashioned' socialist ideas associated with the Democratic Party.  To give one example, he intends abolishing article 18 of the employment law which prevents employers firing workers without good cause.  A provision which clearly has a stultifying effect on Italy's progress towards that brave new world we Anglo-Saxons so cheerfully inhabit, where any impediment to the interests of globalised finance is to be removed as speedily as possible.

  Not only were Berlusconi and Blair friends, the former Italian leader, according to one of his inner circle also has time for Renzi: 'Ha apprezzato lo stile del suo linguaggio, diretto, chiaro, comprensibile da tutti, manifestazione di un uomo dal carattere deciso, e si sa che Berlusconi è attratto da persone così.' [He has appreciated his way of talking - direct, clear, easily understood - characteristic of a someone decisive, and one knows this sort of person appeals to Berlusconi.] 

  Together, they have devised a new electoral system, the so-called Italicum, which is as undemocratic as the Porcellum it proposes replacing. In the Italian system, parliamentary candidates are imposed directly by party headquarters rather than being chosen by the constituency party from a list supplied by the party.  Each constituency is assigned a number of seats proportionate to its percentage of the total population of Italy. The winning coalition receives at least 55% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the Italian equivalent of the House of Commons, whilst the remaining seats are proportionally divided between the minority parties. The seats won by each party in the Chamber of Deputies are then allocated at constituency level. Candidates on each party's list are ranked in order of priority, so if a party wins for example ten seats, the first ten candidates on its list receive seats in parliament.

   In the UK it is possible to decide not to vote for a particular parliamentary candidate because, although you support his party, you don't rate the individual highly. In Italy you can only vote for the party, not the individual MP. Even worse, under the proposed change to the electoral system a party would need to obtain at least 8% of the votes cast nationally in order to have any candidates elected. This is a fundamental affront to democracy. Much as I despise their racist and xenophobic policies, the Northern League enjoys considerable support in northern Italy. Under the British system they would, quite rightly, elect representatives to parliament. However, as they enjoy less than eight per cent of the national vote, averaged across the whole of the country, under the proposed system they would not. If the Italicum operated in the UK I guess there would be no Scottish Nationalist MPs which, whether or not one agrees with that party's aims, would clearly deny their supporters a voice.

   Back in July an Italian blogger put his finger on the essential similarity between Berlusconi and Renzi. I would add Blair to their number:

'Quando si dice che il sindaco di Firenze è un Berlusconi traslato al PD si dice una cosa vera perché, esattamente come accade per il Cavaliere, alla gente non piace Renzi per le sue proposte; alla gente piace Renzi perché è Renzi, non un politico ma un prodotto: guascone, affabile e dinamico, studiato fin nei minimi dettagli, dalla camicia senza cravatta con le maniche alzate all’attenzione opportunista al cosiddetto “popolo del web”, …'

[It's absolutely right to say that the Mayor of Florence is the Democratic Party's Berlusconi because, as was the case with the former prime minister, the general public don't like Renzi because of his policies; they like Renzi simply for being Renzi - he's not a politician but a product: an affable and dynamic braggart, whose appearance and every move is studied to the last detail, from his open necked shirt and rolled up sleeves to his opportunistic attention to the so-called 'people of the web' …]

In the meantime, as an article in yesterday's Corriere della Sera pointed out, one in four Italian families is economically deprived, and inequality is growing with the ten per cent of wealthiest families owning 46% of the country's net wealth, while globally 0.7% of the world's population own 41% of its riches. Shelley pointed out that 'we are many, they are few'. If Renzi (and Blair in his day) really wanted to change things for the better they would harness the power of the many to realise the vision of the mother of the founder of the religion they both claim to practise:

He hath put down the mighty from their seat :

 and hath exalted the humble and meek.

 He hath filled the hungry with good things :

 and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Now that really would be a rottamazione worth seeing!