L'ultimo legionario*

A couple of friends went back to the UK yesterday after a ten day visit. They’d come to keep me out of mischief while my wife was visiting our daughter in England. Despite the awful weather we managed to get out and about. For me, the highlight of our excursions was the visit to Fermo. I thought my friends would be interested in seeing the Mappa Mundi and the ancient library which houses it. They were, but they also managed to get us tickets to the Roman cisterns. This is a monument which I’ve always wanted to visit but had never previously managed to.
Built in the reign of Augustus, the huge cisterns supplied water to Porto San Giorgio as well as Fermo. With the collapse of the Empire they fell in to disuse. In the middle ages two of the chambers were rediscovered by Dominican friars and used as a wine cellar. But the really interesting thing comes next. In the nineteenth century the whole complex was rediscovered and re-used as a cistern until the 1980s. But human knowledge and technology have advanced since the days of the Romans. Those primitive people had built huge chambers around twenty feet high but stupidly only allowed the water to fill them to a depth of four feet, the height of the waterproof concrete lining. So modern man being much wiser filled the chambers almost to the top. Oh dear! Too late he discovered that there was a reason for the vast amount of ‘wasted’ space. It had been full of fresh air in the precise proportion, relative to the water, required to keep the latter fresh. Lacking this fresh air, the water stored there in modern times became foul and unfit to drink.
Most people are aware that, years after the end of the Second World War, Japanese soldiers were discovered on remote islands, unaware that the conflict had ended and still preserving their loyalty to the Emperor. Just as Italy has nothing to match the UK in the survival rate of aborted fœtuses, so the Far East cannot equal either the West’s longevity or its devotion to duty. I was able to photograph (see top of page), lurking in the bowels of the cisterns a centurion of Legio XII and inform the startled creature that Romulus Augustulus had been deposed in AD 476, that the Roman Empire was no more and he was therefore free to resign his commission and return home to the bosom of his family. He refused to believe me, adding that even if I were right, who would want to venture out and live in one of the petty squabbling statelets which I’d informed him currently occupy the territory of the Empire. I think he’s probably got a point.

*With apologies to Manfredi.

Protagonists in peril.

The exam board we used in the seventies, when I taught O level English, required its candidates to write, inter alia, a narrative essay. Every year someone would write himself into a corner: telling his story in the first-person and then deciding to kill off the protagonist. I would gently explain that it would be wise to recast the tale in the third-person. ‘O no,’ the authors would always cry triumphantly, ‘ I’ve got the perfect ending: John [or Alice or Ken] will suddenly wake up and discover it was all a dream.’ They were deaf to my declaration that it was the weakest of all possible endings: after all they’d seen it done in Dallas.
If it’s a given that the narrator will survive in a first-person narrative, it’s a basic convention that the main characters in a television series will do so too. A convention that Spooks brilliantly flouts, for much of the excitement of a thriller is lost if you know at the back of your mind that the main character(s) however imperilled will survive. The knowledge certainly detracts from the pleasure I get from reading Diabolik, a monthly Italian crime comic. Since the ‘sixties Diabolik and his partner, Eva Kant, have survived death row several times, and each of them has had to cope, several times, with reports of the other’s death. Like that of Mark Twain the reports are always premature. Unlike the news about Twain, the reader knows that the it must be false: a plug for the next issue is always contained in the comic you’re reading.
When a friend came over in May he was immersed in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy. Respecting his literary taste, I bought a copy of the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which both my wife and I enjoyed, and she subsequently bought the remaining two volumes. On Monday she went to the UK, and I read the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which she’d just finished reading. Very near the end I was brought up short for it seemed that, Lisbeth Salander, one of the two main characters had been killed off. Now as Larsson writes in the third person this in itself presented no problem, merely a shock. The problem lay in the fact that despite having a bullet in her brain and being buried, Salander lives. On the whole it’s better for detective stories to avoid reminding the reader of the story of Christ and the son of the widow of Nain. One can go further: when the story is part of a series featuring the same protagonist, it’s best to avoid trying to convince your reader that the character is about to die. We know that s/he isn’t; far better to save your energy for creating tension and suspense in other aspects of the novel.
Yesterday I began reading Kate Atkinson’s third novel featuring Jackson Brodie, When will there be Good News. Atkinson also inflicts life-threatening injuries on her protagonist, though in his case it's entirely plausible that he recovers from them. Nevertheless considerable space is devoted to his brain’s activity in a near-death state: the white tunnel and an encounter with his long dead sister. One wonders why. Perhaps the book will go on to furnish a reason. I certainly hope so.
In the two Montalbano books published this year Camilleri, as usual, avoids the mistake found in Diabolik, and the stories by Larsson and Atkinson I’ve just referred to. But they were disappointing in other ways. In the first of them, La caccia del tesoro, Montalbano no longer suffers from the respectively ludicrous and repulsive traits he’d had imposed on him in the ante-penultimate and penultimate titles in the series. However the story had the most fundamental flaw of all for a detective story: I was able to guess the identity of the murderer little more than a quarter of the way through the book. The second novel, Acqua in bocca, was written in collaboration with another Italian crime writer, Lucarelli and deals with Montalbano’s involvement in a case with Lucarelli’s protagonist, Grazia Negro. The book consists of correspondence between the two detectives and newspaper items regarding the case. It was disappointing. One feels that Camilleri is merely going through the motions. A pity because the first thirteen Montalbano books were classics of the genre. Camilleri’s well into his eighties: it would have been better if he’d sold his typewriter and remained content with having created a memorable character and masterly plots. His last four novels have only served to muddy his achievement.

Et habitavit in nobis

In my youth the English year was given shape by the great festivals of the Christian religion. The build up to Christmas began in late November on the First Sunday in Advent. The Christmas season having ended on the 6th January, the next significant event was pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, followed around four weeks later by hot-cross buns on Good Friday and Easter eggs two days after that.
Nowadays - in our post-modern age - all these events have been emptied of significance. Christmas begins in August and has lost all pretence of being anything other than a orgy of consumerism. Nativity plays have become an endangered species, and the festival itself is embodied by ‘Santa’, as Father Christmas is called these days, rather than the Christ child. Hot-cross buns can be bought throughout the year rather than only on Good Friday, and these days Easter-eggs have as much to do with Easter as that festival had to do with the Celtic goddess Eostre from whom it took its name.
I’m not writing this in any particular spirit of nostalgia, or from any belief that the England of my youth was a more religious place than it is now. It’s simply that when I was a child I lived in a country which was still culturally christian; England - Italy is a different matter -no longer is. And that culture gave a shape to the year which it no longer has. The only festival still tied to a particular day is Hallowe’en, re-imported from the States a few decades ago. It was unknown in my youth.
However, for those of us who worship at the shrine of Cupertino the year still has a shape. Whisperings amongst the Magi of the computer industry begin in February. They claim to have seen signs and portents that a wondrous new birth is imminent in California. Then in June John the Baptist Jobs reveals the name of the saviour and announces the date of its birth. Like the Christian Advent there will a few weeks to wait and prepare for it to come and dwell amongst us.
This year, though, there was a difference. The Americans, British, French and Germans received the saviour on June 24th; the rest of the world had to wait until July 30th. Now I can understand Britain being first in the queue: after all its government’s ‘special relationship’ with the States provided the pattern for the one between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. But the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the krauts? What did they do to deserve Apple’s special favour? And then things got even worse. Unlike the favoured four, the rest of the world was not allowed to pre-order. Instead one had to wait until the official release date, July 30th, to place an order. On the 30th I went to the shop where I’d bought my 3G two years ago, not really expecting them to have an iPhone 4. To my delight they did. Then delight turned to dismay as they revealed that they only had the 16 gigabyte version. So I placed my order for the 32 gigabyte model and went away dejected. It finally arrived yesterday. After four weeks of waiting I’ve almost lost interest. I hope the Three Wise Men didn’t feel the same way by the time they eventually made it to Bethlehem.

Leaking boundaries

The inability to distinguish between fantasy and fact used to be the preserve of sufferers from senile dementia, readers of the Daily Mail, and members of the right wing of the Republican Party (click here for a case in point). Not any more.
Last year Ambridge gained a new resident: Jim. Like Lynda Snell, he’s a pain in the butt most of the time, but like her is given the occasional redeeming feature - thereby distinguishing them from Jailbird Carter and the irrepressible !!Vickoi!! Tucker who have none whatsoever. As well as sharing my name and a vaguely similar pre-retirement career, Jim likes to drop the occasional Latin tag. Last week he used my favourite - sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt - in an egregiously inappropriate way.
A month or so ago the Archers' scriptwriters killed off the character Sid Perks. Not, as in the case of Phil Archer, because the actor playing him had died, but because Alan Devereux had decided to retire. I’m sure he’s a good bloke - the amount of time the scriptwriters have devoted to the aftermath of his character’s death suggests he was important to his colleagues. But here’s the rub: Sid Perks was boring. He had the barking laugh of those devoid of a sense of humour, his great passion in life was cricket, the most tedious pastime known to man. Yet week after week vast chunks of time have been taken up by people reminiscing about him and mourning his death. Far more than was spent on the aftermath of Phil Archer’s death - a character who’d been in the soap since its inception. And of all the over-the-top reactions that of his former wife, Kathy, takes the biscuit. People don’t usually take kindly to being dumped by their spouses; turning them into some recently deceased saint is unheard of. If the scriptwriters were doing their job of delivering a consistent character, Jim would have told her so. He’s not a man who suffers fools - other than himself - gladly.
There was a time when schools saw their job as educating pupils rather than using them as fodder to climb up the meaningless league tables introduced by Snobby Roberts, and then enthusiastically adopted by the Blair Witch project. Those of us lucky enough to have been schoolchildren then know that Virgil’s words were spoken by a broken hearted Aeneas looking at the sack of Troy as depicted on the gates of the temple being erected in Carthage. The utter destruction of his homeland and with it the loss of his wife and the death of all his friends. ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ is a sentiment which, alas, could be put in the mouth of a Bosnian muslim, a Rwandan tutsi or one of those millions of poor souls who have just lost everything in the floods in Sind. But to apply it to Kathy’s situation is ludicrously inappropriate, and if Jim were a real person he’d know it. But the scriptwriters have let the boundary between real life and fiction leak. They were fond of Alan Devereux, a real person, and seek to demonstrate this to their erstwhile colleague by inflicting months of boredom on their listeners: we miss Alan, therefore you listeners are jolly well going to miss the character he played. Why don’t they just leave Alan to enjoy his retirement and let the homophobic cricketer Sid slide into well-deserved oblivion?

The not so secret life of things.

Like most small children I was cruel to many of the other non-human inhabitants of the planet. Not to cuddly mammals such as dogs and cats, but to insects, particularly woodlice. In the West Country we called them grampuses and I would while away idle moments in the garden picking off the scales of the still living creatures. Now that I’ve reached the age when I realise that my own life’s a gift that will soon be taken away I’m increasingly reluctant to kill any living creature, even rather unpleasant ones such as scorpions, slugs and Tories.
But objects were until recently a different matter. Being insensate one could treat them in the same way an eighteenth century planter would his slave, or one of Margaret Atwood’s Commanders would his Handmaid. They had no minds of their own, they were simply there to serve. Recently, however, they’ve begun to fight back. At first it was a simple matter: freshly-washed objects would suddenly slide off the draining-board back in to the sink, others would suddenly slither from your fingers and crash, suicidally, onto the floor. Now you may explain this by, in the case of my first example, the slight earth-tremors to which central Italy is subject, and, in the case of my second, to the general dodderiness of the over-sixties. But how about this, smartypants?
For some years we’ve owned one of these all-in-one coffee machine. You simply press a button to tell the machine what size of coffee you want. It then proceeds to grind the beans, pre-infuse them, and finally, having discharged the grounds into a removable container, deliver the drink to your cup complete with a thick crema. At each stage a message appears on a small screen telling you how far the process has gone. When the machine arrived, the messages were in Italian, but it was possible to change the language to English, which we did. Admittedly a slightly odd English. When the container holding the grounds needed emptying we got the message ‘Dreg drawer full’. I imagined Dreg Drawer as a slightly over-the-hill Australian porn star clutching a protruding belly, in his younger days the star of the ‘adult movie’ Skin-flick at Hanging Cock. Then suddenly this week the messages changed. Dreg Drawer had disappeared to be replaced by the much more respectable ‘Empty coffee grounds’. That was fine. Unfortunately ‘One small coffee’ now read ‘Single shot coffee’. Now I’ve nothing against American English in its proper place i.e. the mouth of an American. But to find my coffee machine addressing me in a transatlantic dialect over breakfast was a step too far. I consulted the manual and set about re-programming the machine’s language. Being familiar with the Americans’ proprietorial attitude to the language we invented, I expected to find, in addition to the Italian, English, Spanish , French and German alternatives something labelled UK English. No there was just English, an English which had started as the Australian variant, changed briefly to standard English and, having finally ended up in Central Perks with the cast of Friends, decided to stick with American English. I’ve re-programmed the machine’s language to Italian.
So how does one explain the machine’s evolving language? I guess a scientist might say that all matter is inherently unstable, that protons and neutrons don’t have to behave the way they do inside the atom, they merely do so the vast majority of the time. Alternatively, one can take the Wordsworthian view that there’s:

‘ … something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’

I hope it’s wrong. Not only could I no longer be cruel to grampuses but I’d have to be respectful and considerate to the furniture, the cutlery and all the myriad dumb objects on which I rely for my daily well-being or risk being pilloried in the Guardian for anima-centric insensitivity - or even have bricks thrown through my window by the lunatic fringe of the Things’ Rights Society.

All at sea with Sebastian Cabot

It’s an article of faith for those of us fortunate enough to have been brought up in the Metropolis of the West, or its immediate hinterland, that Bristol is one of the world’s great cities. We dismiss with scorn the rival claims of York or Norwich to having been England’s second city during the middle ages. For we know that position was held by Bristol right through to the end of the eighteenth century. York may have been founded by the Romans but they were mere humans. Our begetters were the giants Ghyston and Goram. Norwich may have preserved its mediaeval architecture intact, but that’s only because, like York, it was too unimportant for the Luftwaffe to waste bombs on its destruction. Our neighbour, Bath, may boast about its Roman heritage and Georgian townscape but we know it was merely a rest and recreation facility for the legionaries stationed in Bristol’s suburb, Sea Mills. And anyway we have Clifton.
As for Birmingham and Liverpool with their respectively repulsive and comical accents who could take them seriously? The same, of course, goes for those other northern middens, Manchester and Leeds. When Edward III made Bristol a county they were mere villages. It’s a matter of regret that they emerged from decent obscurity and sprawled across a landscape which although vastly inferior to that of the West Country is not entirely devoid of charm.
Amongst Bristol’s innumerable claims to fame is its discovery of America. Bristolians know that the New World was named after the Bristol merchant, Richard Ameryke not the Florentine map maker Amerigo Vespucci. Ameryke was one of John Cabot’s financial backers. And we know that it was John Cabot not Christopher Columbus who was the first European since the Vikings to land in America. The Genoan may have got to the West Indies first but it was the boy from Bristol who beat him to the mainland.
John Cabot and his son Sebastian loom especially large in the minds of people who went to my old boarding school for we spent our teenage years working and sleeping in the shadow of their commemorative tower.
Shortly after moving to Italy I was amazed to discover that many Italians have never heard of Bristol. One winter I went to the baker’s muffled in my Bristol City scarf. To my horror Enzo asked me if I were wearing Man United colours. I quickly enlightened him: the scarf proclaimed my allegiance to a football team from la gran città that Giovanni Caboto had sailed from to discover America. And like all Italians Enzo’d heard of Cabot.
All of the foregoing led me to break the habit of a lifetime. I recently came across a fictionalised account of the life of Sebastian Cabot, Memorie di un cartografo veneziano - ‘Recollections of a Venetian Mapmaker’. I’ve never been keen on fiction based on real lives or on historical novels. One of the things I like about conventional novels is not knowing how they’re going to end. And whilst a great novel will bear re-reading many times, I would hate to be deprived of the initial journey into the unknown. In the case of fictionalised biography, however, one knows the end before the first page has been turned. My beef with historical novels is their inescapable inauthenticity. However well researched the historical details it is impossible for the author to write from within the mindset of the period in which he’s set his story. Using ‘italiano corrente ma con l'inserimento di impurità, costruzioni desuete delle frasi e altri accorgimenti che lo fanno sembrare di un'altra epoca’ [using contemporary Italian intermingled with some linguistic corruption, obsolete grammatical constructions and other linguistic features to make the text seem to originate from another age] doesn’t solve the problem. The difference between one of Fielding’s novels and an historical novel set in the eighteenth century, or between Ivanhoe and any of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is immediately apparent. A great writer - such as Jorge Luis Borges in his short story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote - will exploit this creatively, but on the whole I find the historical novel best avoided.
Nevertheless, despite ‘Recollections of a Venetian Mapmaker’ being both historical and biographical fiction I bought it. What interested me was how the author would handle the Cabots’ stay in Bristol. All in all, the novel confirmed my prejudices about historical fiction. The author, Francesco Ongaro, has obviously done some homework. Old Bristol Bridge with its houses is described as are several of Bristol’s mediaeval streets: he locates the Cabots’ house in Temple Street and Wine Street is mentioned. But the attitudes and concerns of Sebastian Cabot, the first-person narrator, are those of today, not those of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The sense of alienation which underlies Sebastian’s self-perception reminds one of Camus. The narrator’s reflections on the religious upheavals of the day - ‘… l’inanità di siffatte beghe religiose. … ovunque un invocare Dio a testimonio dei propri principi , ma Lui, in tanto sentirsi tirato da ogni parte, temo che abbia finito per partirsene da tutto e da tutti e non si riconosca in nessuno di coloro che ritengono d’essere i suoi apostoli prediletti’ [the inanity of such bickering over religion … everywhere people invoking God to support their particular religious doctrines to the extent that I fear the Deity, feeling himself pulled in every direction will end up leaving them to it, refusing to identify himself with any of those who claim to be his beloved disciples]- whilst admirable, reflect the sentiments of a Guardian or Corriere della sera reader rather than the outlook of someone living at the time the novel is set. And there is a curious omission: when the Cabots move to Bristol they seem to have no difficulty communicating with the natives. In fact there is no mention of their speaking a different language. So perhaps Ongaro has stumbled upon a hitherto unknown fact: in the late fifteenth century Bristolians spoke Italian not English. Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong: maybe Venetians of the period spoke Brizzle not Italian.
In short, although the depiction of Sebastian’s character is interesting if unhistorical , if you’re looking for a book which brings Tudor Bristol alive I’d pass on this one in the unlikely event of its ever being published in English.

Stop immigration NOW!

Got back yesterday evening from a few days in the UK. We'd arrived there on Sunday evening. On Monday we took our grandson to the Play Today centre in Guyhirn. Because it was a school-day the place was empty apart from the staff and us which meant I got to be his playmate.
On Tuesday we took him to the Sea Life Centre in Hunstanton and in the evening I went to see friends.
So a pleasant couple of days. On Wednesday, however, came my damascene moment. We went to King’s Lynn to have an eye-test and to meet my elder son for lunch. Suddenly the scales fell from my Guardian-reading lefty eyes and I realised that Nick Griffin, the Mail and the Tories had been right all along: the country has been overrun by immigrants. Everywhere I looked there were enormous tattooed Michelin men, women and children. The land I had grown up in had been swamped by an alien invasion. And thanks to a recent court judgement the poor old BNP has been forced to allow many of these creatures to join its ranks. Thank God I was able to flee back to Italy on Thursday.