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An article by Jeremy Paxman in today's Guardian articulates the view I've long held that the West is heading for disaster.  We arrogantly assume that it makes economic sense to outsource manufacturing to the Far East, deluding ourselves that we are the only ones with the brains to invent the innovatory products which are made there. In Paxman's words 'western welfare states .... have sold their future for the sake of cheaper televisions and trainers'. To put it another way: Cecil Rhodes said that to be born British was to have won first prize in the lottery of life  - and we have sold that prize for a mess of pottage. 

   Is it possible to retrieve the situation? At a dinner last February President Obama asked the late Steve Jobs what it would take to make iPhones in the US rather than China. 'Why can't that work come home?' Apple's former chief laconically replied, 'Those jobs aren't coming back'. An article in last Saturday's New York Times explains why.  It's not simply that labour costs are lower but that the vast size of the Chinese workforce permits much greater flexibility than is found in the US. Unlike Britain, many of our fellow states in the EU still have healthy manufacturing industries. Although only around a third of the size of China's, the EU's population of five hundred million is large enough to create a manufacturing giant. To do so, of course, assumes that Euroland's woes can be overcome - and the only way to do so is by much tighter fiscal union, accompanied by a democratically accountable political union. Decent pay and working conditions would mean that the price of goods manufactured here would still be undercut by those from the Far East so there would have to be import controls. A small price to pay for an assured future, I'd say.

  Unfortunately the economic crisis is strengthening the appeal to the ill-informed of the xenophobic and fissiparous agendas pushed by idiots like the potty-mouthed Bossi, Marine Le Pen, and the Tory back bench.

  Welcome to The Return of the Dark Ages shortly to appear at a country near you.

The politics of shipwreck.

On Sunday, as part of its extensive coverage of the Costa Concordia foundering off the coast of Giglio, the Corriere della Sera published photographs of other ships which had come to a sticky end. The pictures were accompanied by brief statistics. I had always assumed that the number of lives lost in the Titanic disaster -1,523 - was by far the greatest to befall a passenger liner in the twentieth century. I was wrong. The Lusitania is the other liner whose disastrous end most people are aware of - 1200 lives lost thanks to a torpedo launched by a German submarine. Although the Titanic holds first place in public consciousness as the most tragic of maritime disasters one may well feel that the Lusitania's fate is even sadder. Its passengers' lives were lost not through human error but through human wickedness - the deliberate destruction of a defenceless passenger ship by the beastly Germans.
 Yet the Lusitania was not the only unarmed ship deliberately destroyed by an enemy submarine. On  the 30th January 1945 nine thousand people lost their lives when their ship was torpedoed in the freezing seas of the Baltic. Until I read about it in the Corriere this disaster had completely passed me by. And I wonder why: six times as many people perished as those who died in the Titanic. Part of the answer of course is that the Wilhelm Gustloff was a German ship which, in the words of the Corriere, was 'evacuando personale nazista in fuga' - evacuating fleeing nazi personnel -  though in fact many of them were civilians. I think the real reason for the Wilhelm Gustloff  being consigned to the scrapyard of history is not so much that some of its passengers were nazis but that the Americans weren't involved. Although the Titanic and Lusitania being British explains why we remember their fate, the truly significant fact is where they sailed to rather than where they sailed from. American culture dominates the world, so America's tragedies are projected by Hollywood to fill a global screen leaving those of other nations in the outer darkness of oblivion.





 

Not so full of beans.

Time is a concept whose outward and visible sign is change: without change there would be no time.  And on one level we twenty-first century folk are very conscious of its passing  with our calendars, our clocks and watches accurate to a nano-second thanks to their quartz crystals or radio signals from an atomic clock, and our New Year's Eve celebrations and tedious media retrospectives.

   The truly important changes, though, creep by without our really being aware of them. Without a mirror, I'd probably think that my outward appearance conformed to my inner image which hasn't been updated for some forty years. In my late twenties I shaved off the beard which I'd sported since leaving school and was deeply shocked by what I saw: a fresh-faced eighteen year old replaced by someone verging on thirty - the year at which I then believed senility began. The subtle signs of ageing had been hidden by the face fungus; I started regrowing my beard the following day. And even without the benefit of a beard our families and friends seem to be unchanging - when we see someone frequently the slight physical difference from the last time we saw them is undetectable.  Furthermore, our obliviousness of time extends to those we once knew well though many years have passed since the last time we  saw them: once the initial shock has worn off, the rupture in the space time-continuum repairs itself and the outward change no longer foregrounds itself.  Which brings me on to beans.

  When I was a schoolboy I was literally full of beans. Three times a week the school authorities allowed us to have our own food  cooked in the school kitchens - provided it was an egg or came in a tin. You sent your tin or egg, with the initial of your House and your boarder's number written on it, down to the kitchens where it would be boiled and then sent up by dumb-waiter to Hall at tea-time. I  sent beans. Beans in tomato sauce, curried beans, beans with sausages or, most often, the 'Family-Size' tin - but always beans, my passion  for them was boundless. 

   Strangely, baked beans do not form part of the Italians' diet although you can buy Heinz beans, at enormous expense, hidden away in the ethnic section of hypermarkets. Fortunately, they're also obtainable at a more affordable price from the Lidl stores on the coast which have sprung up to cater for the needs of the financially-challenged. A week before Christmas we went to the shopping mall in Civitanova Marche to buy our elder daughter's Christmas present and when we were coming out my wife asked me if I wanted to go on to Lidl's to stock up with beans. To my own astonishment I declined, and as I did so I realised Time was doing its stuff: my taste buds had changed. Since moving to Italy I have gradually lost my liking for filter coffee - I now find it unpleasantly insipid. For the first few years I cooked a roast dinner every Sunday: now it's a rare event whose resulting  mix of heterogeneous ingredients heaped on the same plate seems vaguely odd. I still look forward to fish and chips when I visit the UK, but almost invariably find they disappoint. English ex-pats rave about cheddar cheese and bemoan its unavailability here. I no longer know why - a decent cheddar is worth eating, but the stuff sold by a recently opened English Shop in a nearby town struck me as unpleasantly cloying with the texture of savoury fudge.

  So just as I have become gradually harder and harder of hearing, but only recently become aware of it, in a similar way my tastebuds have surreptitiously become Italianised by some mysterious process of osmosis. If only the same process operated with what came out of my mouth as opposed to what went in it, I'd be a happy man.