Pardons and Millstones Part 2

Last week, in my Pardons and Millstones post, I commented on our common humanity. I’d like to expand the point.
Although only American evangelists with stomachs for brains take Genesis literally, the doctrine of original sin has put its finger on a fundamental aspect of the human psyche: the conflict between reason and desire. At its most trivial it's reflected in my continuing to smoke though I know it may well give me an agonising death. As Swift said, people are not rational animals, but animals capable of reason. We are not houynhynms but yahoos and if we try to deny this fundamental truth we'll end up as crazy as Gulliver at the end of his travels. Unlike other eastern cults, Christianity stresses we've bodies as well as souls: Gulliver craps. So beautiful though Milton's description of paradise undeniably is:

So hand in hand they passd, the lovliest pair 

That ever since in loves imbraces met, 

ADAM the goodliest man of men since borne 

His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters EVE. 

Under a tuft of shade that on a green 

Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side 

They sat them down, and after no more toil 

Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic'd 

To recommend coole ZEPHYR, and made ease 

More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite 

More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell, 

Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes 

Yeilded them, side-long as they sat recline 

On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours: 

The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde 

Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream; 

Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles 

Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems 

Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League, 

Alone as they. About them frisking playd 

All Beasts of th' Earth, since wilde, and of all chase 

In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den; 

Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw 

Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards 

Gambold before them, th' unwieldy Elephant 

To make them mirth us'd all his might, & wreathd 

His Lithe Proboscis;

it's only after the Fall that you feel you’re in the company of human beings rather than some impossibly noble extraterrestial beings dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter:

Why comes not Death, 

Said hee, with one thrice acceptable stroke 

To end me? Shall Truth fail to keep her word, 

Justice Divine not hast'n to be just? 

But Death comes not at call, Justice Divine 

Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries. 

O Woods, O Fountains, Hillocks, Dales and Bowrs, 

VVith other echo farr I taught your Shades 

To answer, and resound farr other Song. 

VVhom thus afflicted when sad EVE beheld, 

Desolate where she sate, approaching nigh, 

Soft words to his fierce passion she assay'd: 

But her with stern regard he thus repell'd. 
 Out of my sight, thou Serpent,

And this is why once we've unfrocked and imprisoned the paedophile priests - which we unquestionably should - and the Pope's resigned - which, given that he seems to be the Goons’ Professor Moriarty inhabiting Kung Fu Panda’s body, would be a relief for us all - we shouldn’t then make the mistake of thinking the Church is still not fit for purpose. Unlike the smugly superior Hitchens and Dawkins, its founder knew that human beings are intrinsically weak and fallible, not weak and fallible as the result of priestly machinations. That an institution composed of the unswervingly righteous is about as likely as an altruistic banker or a self-effacing blogger. So, while, in the words of Swift’s self-composed epitaph, savage indignation should lacerate our hearts at the wickedness we Yahoos can descend to, we must avoid Orwell’s comforting delusion that our job is to watch out for the pigs trying to take over and ruin noble ideals. We are those pigs. The enemy is inside each one of us. The best you can do is to recognise the fact and, in Auden’s words, ‘love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart.’
Whilst I would agree with the existentialists that a man is the sum of his actions - after all the notion is merely an elaboration, some might say an obfuscation, of the catholic doctrine that faith without works is dead - I think institutions need to be viewed differently. An institution’s values have a life independent of its members’ behaviour. For example, I deplore the recent tendency to suggest there’s a moral equivalence between National Socialism and Communism. Yes, Hitler and Stalin were both megalomaniac bastards who were responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people. But, and it’s a crucial ‘but’, Stalin perverted a noble ideal - from each according to his ability, to each according to his need - whilst Hitler put into practice the core ideals of nazism: all non-northern europeans are racially inferior, Jews are evil and should be exterminated, and the same goes for gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally disabled. Stalin was in bad faith, Hitler was true to his beliefs. Beliefs repugnant to all but members of the BNP and their fellow-travellers amongst the euro-sceptics. Devoid of talent, charm, and in most cases basic literacy, these sad individuals valorise the only attributes they possess: occasional patches of white skin peeping between the tattoos, and a British passport. In contradistinction, the Church’s fundamental values are sound, although its members’ behaviour is often not.
Pullman, and those who’ve climbed aboard that particular coach, would disagree. They contrast the ‘real’ Jesus, who embodies a set of values corresponding pretty closely to those of the average Guardian reader, with the false Christ set up by the Roman church and worshipped by its deluded followers. Which is really just another way of saying, ‘I’ve decided which bits of the New Testament account of the guy fit in with my personal ideals: all the other bits were obviously made up by superstitious peasants and/or proto-Catholic power-freaks’. The problem is that while it’s perfectly reasonable to say: ‘I like certain aspects of the man’s teachings, but others - e.g. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father except by me - suggest a megalomaniac (or God) and repulse me, the Pullman position isn’t. True, it has a long history: Voltaire, and before him a line of protestant ‘reformers’ and mediæval heretics stretching back to New Testament times. But they all betray a monstrous arrogance: ‘I’ve discovered the truth which everyone else has been too stupid or corrupt to notice, and now I’m going to remake the Church in my image.’ And immediately another insightful person jumps up interjecting: ‘No, your ideas are completely wrong. But I’ve got the answer!’ Unfortunately Pullman doesn’t tell us who was behind tricking Peter and the rest of the disciples - no doubt with the kind of con-trick we’re familiar with from Jonathan Creek - into believing their dead leader had dropped in for tea. If we apply the cui bono test we’ve got a problem. The occupying Roman authorities? Hardly. The Jewish religious authorities? You must be kidding. The Catholic Church? A protestant would say the organisation wasn’t around at the time, a catholic would point out that the first pope got himself crucified: hardly a smart move for a con-man. So although the early christians may well have been deluded in thinking Jesus was the Christ it wasn’t as the result of a conspiracy, but merely from believing what their leader claimed about himself.
There are several intellectually respectable positions to hold on catholicism. One can say that it’s the organisation founded by Christ for humans, not Martians, and run by humans with all their failings. Alternatively one can say that it’s a tyrannical institution which feeds off human fears and weaknesses. Finally, there’s the via media: its an organisation which has done some good things, inspiring great architecture and music and helping the poor and the sick; has done even more bad things, burning heretics alive heads a long list; but in the end is pretty irrelevant in this day and age (cliché intended). What you can’t say, and retain your intellectual credibility, is that the Church is some alien body which twisted the teachings of some simple right-on guy for its own nefarious purposes.
But, I hear you cry: What about its fabulous wealth! Didn’t Christ tell his followers to sell all they had and give it to the poor? Yes, and he also rebuked his disciples when Mary Magdalene poured precious ointment over his head and they complained: ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.’ Jesus replied, ‘Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you.’ Again he was stressing that we’re bodies as well as souls. As humans we not only feel things with our minds but give them physical expression. It would be a pretty odd parent who didn’t kiss his children or give them presents on the grounds that the only thing which matters is the way you feel. So building beautiful churches and filling them with precious objects was an entirely natural expression of people’s devotion to their imaginary friend. In the middle ages it went side-by-side with the founding of innumerable charitable institutions. And, alas, side-by side-with the luxurious life-style of the higher clergy. For, if the poor are always with us so is ‘the robber rich man’ always ready to exploit any opportunity that presents itself. Bishoprics were either divvied out amongst themselves by aristocratic families or used by the king to reward his senior civil servants. Just as today the tax-payer or company shareholders have to support the outrageous greed of Sir Fred Goodwin and his like.
So denounce the wickedness done by individual catholics, remember that as a human being you have the potential to act as vilely yourself, and resist subscribing to Dan Brown’s or - for the more literate amongst you - Philip Pullman’s fantasies.

Pardons and Millstones

Early modern heretics finally got their hands on an Exocet with the scandal over indulgences. For, like John Webster, our 16th century forebears were ‘much obsessed with death’.

As anyone with a nodding acquaintance with Chaucer will know, sexual irregularity was rife amongst the mediæval clergy. For example, in 1397 seventy-two clerics from the 281 parishes which comprised the diocese of Hereford were accused of sexual incontinence by the parishioners. The difference between matters then and today is that the misconduct was on a vastly greater scale, that it involved consenting adults, was predominantly heterosexual, and was not considered a big-deal by anyone other than the Church authorities and the pious. Readers of Clochemerle will be aware that things weren’t vastly different in France in the 1930s; readers of The Power and the Glory, that being the priest’s mistress conferred a certain social prestige in rural Mexico.

But if the clergy’s sexual misbehaviour was tolerated, Luther eventually found a lethal weapon to attack the Church: indulgences. They were intended to reduce the time spent in Purgatory to expiate sins which had been confessed and absolved. They did not forgive the sin itself. But this distinction was blurred by the minor church officials responsible for distributing them, encouraging the uneducated to think that they replaced repentance, confession and absolution. And when people were alerted to the con by Luther they were very, very upset. For the average peasant the one consolation for his frequently miserable and harsh life was the hope of a happy afterlife. Where you went after death was the single most important issue in life. And to have coughed up money to buy an indulgence and thereby a place in heaven, only to find that - by the Church’s own teaching - it did no such thing was a step too far.

Today, if people believe in the afterlife at all it’s a vague hope that there’s a heaven. In the Middle Ages people knew there was an afterlife and unless you were very careful it was likely to be very warm and involve demons pushing red-hot pokers up your backside. But if we’ve largely lost a belief in a personal immortality, we know that we live on in our children, our grandchildren and untold generations of descendants. And just as some mediæval clergy betrayed their congregations’ hope of heaven by mis-promoting indulgences, so their successors’ vile behaviour towards defenceless children has defiled what we hold most dear.

If you’d asked Pope Leo X whether an indulgence forgave sin as opposed to remitting time in purgatory he’d have replied, ‘Of course not.’ But he was very happy to let the misconception that it did raise funds to build St Peter’s. If you asked Benedict XVI whether he concurred with Christ’s statement that ‘whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea’ he would reply, ‘Of course’. But he’s presided over a regime where the reputation of the Church was more important than making sure that these unspeakably vile clergy could never have the opportunity to repeat their crimes. The Church paid dearly for Leo X’s dereliction of duty, I fear the consequences of Benedict’s may be terminal.

And that, despite all, would be a pity. It’s not that the Church has suddenly become more wicked: arguably its members' behaviour has improved over the past two millennia. Of the twelve apostles, Peter - the rock upon which Christ built his church - denied him three times; I’m not aware of any subsequent Pope having done so verbally, although their behaviour may sometimes have done so in practice. Judas sold his saviour for thirty pieces of silver, and James and John spent most of the Last Supper arguing about who’d have the more important post in the Kingdom of Heaven. A hanger-on, Simon Magus, offered Peter money to acquire the power to transmit the Holy Spirit. Altogether a pretty unsavoury bunch, far removed from the protestant evangelicals’ mythical primitive church untouched by the wiles of Rome. What we all have in common is that we’re human beings: utopianism as any reader of Swift or Orwell knows is a dangerous delusion, and as Christ said, ‘They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ Also worth recalling is his saying, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone …’, and, as John remarked in an epistle, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’.

A good death?

Ever since Norman Painter died on October 29th, I’ve been waiting for Phil Archer to snuff it. And yesterday he did. Jill came home from an outing with Peggy and Christine to find Phil sitting by an empty teacup with some rather beautiful classical music playing on the gramophone.

It was a moving moment, particularly for those of us who’ve dipped in and out of the Archers since its inception in the 1950s. ‘I’m glad they gave him a good death,’ said Pat. And by today’s standards it was.

Our mediæval ancestors would have thought it the worst of all possible deaths:

‘A subita et æterna morte, Libera nos Domine,' they prayed.

And King Hamlet would have concurred:

‘Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head’

If this is the only life we have, the scriptwriters gave Phil a good death; if it’s not, I’m not so sure.

The Lisbon Earthquake (Part 2)

In Monday’s post I suggested that our mediæval ancestors’ reaction to a natural disaster would be different from ours. Yes, they would be horrified and grief-stricken but they wouldn’t have seen it as calling into question the benevolence of God. Amongst the dead the baptised infant below the age of reason would, ipso facto, be in Paradise; the decent adult in Purgatory; and the evil-doer in Hell, so saving potential victims from his attentions.

But this does not mean the more thoughtful would not have wondered why such events occurred. There were two answers - one of which, though it has its attractions, no longer holds water; the other might. The first stems from the concept of the Great Chain of Being made familiar by Tillyard to English undergrads in the sixties. Rattle any bit of the chain which links the angels and saints, humankind arranged hierarchically, animals, plants and inanimate objects, and the consequences are felt along its length. We are all too aware today how human greed and stupidity impinge on the animal kingdom and the material make-up of the planet. Unfortunately we are also aware of Darwin, so can’t really buy in to the idea that imperfections in the natural order - earthquakes and volcanoes - are a consequence of the Fall. We know that the tectonic plates began moving millions of years before the human race came into existence.

The second concept is memorably expressed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde:

… O, Fortune, executrice of wierdes,

O influences of thise hevenes hye!

Soth is, that, under god, ye ben our hierdes,

Though to us bestes been the causes wrye.

In other words, things only seem to happen arbitrarily because we don’t have the whole picture. In reality every event is a jigsaw piece and God’s got the box with the illustration! The idea is given flesh in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, and most poignantly of all in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

In Chaucer’s story, Dorigen, awaiting her husband’s return to Brittany from England, upbraids God for having created the dangerous rocks which could sink her husband’s ship.

'Eterne god, that thurgh thy purveyaunce

Ledest the world by certein governaunce,

In ydel, as men seyn, ye no-​thing make;

But, lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake,

That semen rather a foul confusioun

Of werk than any fair creacioun

Of swich a parfit wys god and a stable,

Why han ye wroght this werk unresonable?

For by this werk, south, north, ne west, ne eest,

Ther nis y-​fostred man, ne brid, ne beest;

Pestered by an amorous squire, Aurelius, Dorigen jokingly promises to sleep with him if he can get rid of the rocks. At vast expense, he hires a magician to create the optical illusion that the rocks have gone. Her husband, Arveragus, having returned, Dorigen reveals her rash promise. He tells her she must keep her word, otherwise she loses all integrity. When she arrives in tears to keep her promise Aurelius is moved by her distress to release her from her vow. He, in turn, begs the magician to let him pay him in instalments, or he will face financial ruin. Hearing what’s transpired, the magician waives his fee. God has answered Dorigen’s question: the rocks are the necessary cause of a chain of noble deeds.

Unlike Shakespeare’s other tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is not an aristotelean work: events are not the consequence of a tragic flaw. On the contrary, the protagonists’ innocence is stressed. Instead it embodies the mediæval concept of tragedy as an integral part of the human condition: once we step on the wheel of fortune it will for a time carry us aloft until inevitably its revolution plunges us into the depths. But although the lovers’ deaths are tragic they are necessary to bring redemption. Their:

… misadventur’d piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife

… And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove.

Today, only the lunatic fringe of the American evangelical right sees natural disasters forming part of any over-arching divine plan. According to Pat Robertson the Haitian earthquake was a punishment for a pact with the devil. One would have thought France, which until 1947 extorted ‘reparations’ from its former colony for the losses incurred by the expelled slave owners, might have been a more suitable target.

So, whatever he said, John Sentamu was stuffed. If he’d replied, ‘Stuff happens. But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, And their going from us to be utter destruction : but they are in peace,’ he’d be accused of insensitive escapism. If he dodged the issue, as he did, he’d be equally unconvincing. In an age of disbelief perhaps the only effective answer is to address the issue we can all agree on: the yahoo lurking beneath the surface in all human beings, though pretty close to it in the likes of Pat Robertson. To ask why the disaster in Port-au-Prince was so much worse than the one in L’Acquila nine months earlier. Perhaps the French being allowed to bleed dry a desperately impoverished country might supply part of the answer.

The Lisbon Earthquake (Part 1)

Exactly two weeks ago, whilst sitting enthroned in my bathroom I heard and felt, what I thought was a bang on the door. It wasn’t: it was an earthquake centred on Loro Piceno around 20 kilometres away. Fortunately it only measured 4.5 on the Richter scale and was about 20 km deep. There was no damage.

Today, our parish priest announced that the collection would be sent to aid the victims of the earthquake in Haiti - they hadn’t been so lucky: 7 points and near the surface.

In the interval between these two events I heard the Anglican Archbishop of York being grilled on the Today programme. The poor man was having to attempt to reconcile the Christian belief in an omnipotent and all-loving God with the devastation wreaked by his creation on the unlucky sods living in Port-au-Prince. Ever since Voltaire’s demolition of Leibniz after the Lisbon earthquake, that’s been a tough call. Inevitably John Sentamu made an embarrassingly poor fist of it, muttering platitudes about God being there suffering alongside the victims. Try telling that to mother’s whose baby’s just been crushed to death.

However, I suspect his pre-reformation Catholic predecessors would have had an easier job. These days we wander down a pick-and-mix counter of beliefs either selecting astrology, Buddhism, Islam or Christianity in any of its multifarious guises or, alternatively, deciding not to buy at all but to go down the road to Dawkins & Co who have a much more up-to-date selection. In the middle ages you had Catholicism and that was it. Everybody you’d ever met or even heard of was a Catholic, belief wasn’t an option, it was as much part of life as the sun coming up in the morning or going down at night. And the Church taught that this life was just a small and finite part of an eternal existence, solely important as a determinant of where you spent that eternity. The Archbishop of York may well believe this today, though, his being an Anglican, it’s difficult to be sure. Even some of the Today programme’s audience may share the belief. But what none of them will share is our mediæval ancestors’ experience of it not as a belief but an undisputed fact, a given. To have that you need the intellectual hegemony which the Church exercised 500 years ago. The nearest modern equivalent is the West’s belief in democracy. Apart from the odd BNP nutter, we instinctively share Churchill’s belief that despite its weaknesses parliamentary democracy is the best political system on offer. A mother whose son gave his life defending Britain against Nazi Germany would have felt the same anguish felt by the Haitian survivors today. But behind the pain would be the knowledge that his death was part of a larger pattern which gave it a positive meaning. And maybe that gave some comfort. Similarly, whilst the pain of bereavement was no less acute in the Middle Ages, behind the grief was the knowledge that the loss was not final. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli destroyed that world for ever. We may well feel the change was for the good. But in losing that world we’ve lost the only thing which could comfort us in the face of a natural disaster.

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 oh 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, loaned to me by a friend’s wife. 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!