To hell in a handcart.

Three interesting articles in yesterday's papers throw light on the current economic crisis. The article by Antonio Puri Purini in the Corriere della Sera, Dalla Finanza all' Antipolitica i Nemici della Moneta unica, identifies the two enemies of the single currency: international finance and the far right. The former object to the EU 'perché unica a mantenere un sistema non interamente dominato, grazie all’ economia sociale di mercato, dalla logica del profitto' [because it is the only one to maintain a system not entirely dominated by the logic of profit, thanks to its social market economy]. The leaders of the latter are the agents of international finance and their followers its dupes, driven by ignorance and fear.

An article by Philip Inman in the Guardian dissects the failures of Monetarism. Although its proponents' recipe for growth is cutting workers' terms and conditions it 'is alarming how easily monetarist ideas have prevailed …monetarists have convinced working people they are the reformers and that social democrat parties are a conservative barrier to recovery. Social democrats only seek to preserve the privileges and outmoded practices that got us into trouble, they argue.' And so the turkeys vote for Christmas, repeating Cameron's cry that it woz Gordon Brown wot got us in this mess, when in reality his mistake like that of 'Hank Paulson in the US and finance ministers across Europe of all political colours was to believe in the low regulation story and watch, with regulators at their side, as banks went on a lending spree.'

The third article, by Dominic Rushe JP Morgan investment boss Ina Drew quits over bank's $2bn losses, reminds us that the spree isn't over. The only block would be strong EU institutions opposed to 'una parte della finanza internazionale dominata da hedge funds aggressivi e insofferenti verso regole e freni, è inesorabilmente attratta verso la prospettiva del guadagno immediate' [the section of international finance dominated by aggressive hedge funds, intolerant of rules and restraints and inexorably attracted by the prospect of short-term gains]. No wonder they want to destroy first the single currency and the EU itself and reduce its workers to the miserable condition of Chinese coolies or Indian untouchables.

No country for old men.

Yeats may have been right in thinking that Byzantium, or the New Rome, was no country for old men, but the same does not apply to what was once the heartland of the Western Empire. Italy's former priapic premier is far from being the country's only elderly politician.   

   Today's Corriere carried a news-item  about the 95 year old retired doctor, Mario Spallone, currently standing for election as mayor of Avezzano in the Province of L'Acquila. Although he was the late leader of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti's, personal physician he is not, as one might have expected, standing as a candidate of the left. "Io sono communista … Io non ho niente a che fare con quella robaccia del PD!" [I'm a communist … I've nothing in common with that rubbish in the Democratic Party]. I guess he feels the same way about the PD as I do about New Labour. 

   His interviewer expressed astonishment at the unrepentant Stalinist's claim that he would be helped in his electoral campaign by the late Padre Pio. "E certo! Padre Pio morì tra le mia braccia, e io sono suo figlio spirituale. E lui mi aiuterà a vincere queste elezioni. Lui può …" [It's a sure thing! Padre Pio died in my arms and I'm his spiritual son. And he'll help me to win these elections. He really can …]

    And so, dear reader, you can see why I like living in Italy so much: it's full of crazy old men just like me.

Surprised by the media.

This month's Diabolik had two surprises in store, undermining two long held preconceptions. The first concerned the comic's language. Once I'd gained a basic grounding in Italian, I didn't expect to be lexically challenged by Diabolik, and until this month I wasn't. Then on page nine I had a repetition of the Corriere experience: words whose English translation was as foreign to me as their Italian originals. Diabolik comes across a safe 'di ultimissimo modello, in vanadio molibdeno'. I looked up the last two words and found their English equivalents were 'vanadium' and 'molybdenum', words which were utterly meaningless until I had read their definition in the Shorter Oxford. Now I suspect that my ignorance of the meaning of 'vanadium' may be peculiar to myself - as I was typing this post the browser's built-in spell checker tried to change 'vanadio' to 'vanadium'. But 'molybdenum', for God's sake!
   At school, comics went under the generic name of 'trash'. We were allowed half an hour before lights-out to 'swop trash', which we stored under our pillows. After that, to be out of bed was a beating offence. Although in my school's slang the term 'trash' was purely denotive, carrying no evaluative connotations, the fact remains that one doesn't read comics for their literary quality. Or so I thought.
   The plot in April's issue of Diabolik revolves around the collaboration of 'Il Re del Terrore' and his beautiful companion, Eva Kant, with an elderly Art Historian. They are attempting to unmask a criminal who is vandalising stolen works of art by stripping them of their jewels and substituting fake stones before selling them on. The elderly professor is a cultivated and decent man who is rather taken by Eva. Having decided on their plan to ensnare the art thief, Professor Ubold hands Eva a rose saying, 'Lady Kant, vi assicuro che se voi aveste anche solo una trentina d'anni in più, vi farei una corta spietata' [Lady Kant, let me assure you that if you were just thirty years older, I would court you remorselessly]. I was brought up short. One would have expected him to say, 'If I were thirty years younger' - it's certainly what I would have said under similar circumstances. Instead, the anonymous writer has not merely avoided cliché but has succinctly revealed Ubold's character. He appreciates Eva not simply for her outward beauty, but for her intrinsic qualities - qualities which will still be there in thirty year's time. This melds beautifully with the Professor's passion for art: he values things for what they are rather than for their superficial appearance, their cultural significance or their monetary value. The story ends with Eva sending the Professor a gift and his murmuring 'se solo fosse un po' più vecchia' [if only you were a little bit older] so demonstrating that his earlier words weren't simply for show. And so we have a story about Fine Art written with a touch of the literary art one expects in a great novel but which takes one aback when it appears in 'trash'.
   My wife didn't share my other surprise this month: the identity of the dead flatmate in White Heat which was only revealed in the final episode; she'd guessed it early on. Not that this mattered - unlike our normal TV fare White Heat wasn't a thriller or a detective drama. The series had a lukewarm reception from the critics writing in the broadsheets and, as one might expect, was universally panned by the intellectually challenged folk who contribute on-line vitriol to those newspapers' comments section. The programme was frequently compared unfavourably with Our Friends from the North. Having never watched the latter I have no opinion on its merits. As a West Countryman brought up to believe that the wogs begin at Gloucester, I was put off by its oxymoronic title. We know that north of Gloucester the country is infested by barbarians whom four hundred years of Roman rule failed to civilise. People who hideously disfigure the English language by swallowing their 'r's; untermenschen who wouldn't know what a dap was if one hit them on the head. On the other hand, we thoroughly enjoyed White Heat, so much so that angered by the sole review on IMDB I broke the habit of a lifetime and contributed an on-line comment of my own. Reviews written for IMDB have a longer shelf-life than on-line comments to newspapers and I thought it important that people shouldn't be put off viewing the series if it's repeated. I didn't attempt to counter the arguments offered by the original commentator: his limited understanding of dramatic structure and misuse of terms such as cliché suggested it would have been a waste of time. And in the end, unlike science, all opinions about literature are subjective. The only objective thing one can say of a novel, a poem, a play or a TV drama is 'I liked it' or 'I didn't'. I liked White Heat and I hope you might too.

Famiglia ladrona.

For the last three days the Northern League has been the lead story in the Italian media. It began with the news that the party's treasurer, Francesco Belsito, was being investigated for corruption, then it emerged that public money had been diverted from the League to pay the expenses of various members of the family of its leader, Umberto Bossi. Today the Corriere della Sera carried the news that Bossi had resigned yesterday at 4.30.
The ghastly Northern League is a xenophobic and racist organisation which prides itself on the north's self-proclaimed superiority to the feckless southern Italians running the country from Roma Ladrona (thieving Rome). I found it extremely gratifying, if unsurprising, that their claim to moral superiority has been so spectacularly and comprehensively exploded. Far-right parties attract people who - dimly aware of their own brutish appearance and limited intelligence - seek to comfort themselves with the belief that whole sections of the human race are even stupider and more repellent than themselves. As Fielding pointed out in his preface to Joseph Andrewes, this affectation makes these unfortunate beings an object of ridicule:
" Now, from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves ... but when ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or lameness endeavours to display agility, it is then that these unfortunate circumstances, which at first moved our compassion, tend only to raise our mirth."
Far-right parties draw support from those with a desperate need to believe that whatever their own personal inadequacies, collectively they belong to a superior group, identifiable by the colour of its skin or geographical location. The mainstream right, however, attracts those who, in defiance of elementary logic, identify themselves with their economic betters. They are happy for the Posh-Boys to cut the top rate of tax for the very wealthy whilst withdrawing benefits from ordinary working people, because they identify themselves with the first group though in reality they belong to the second. When Brenda Last, in A Handful of Dust, is worried that her husband's poor relations may think she's patronising them, Aunt Frances tells her: "Dear child, all these feelings of delicacy are valueless; only the rich realise the gulf that separates them from the poor."

Flying grannies.

Although there are times when we need to feel that other people share our ideas and beliefs we still have a sneaking feeling that we're unique. And we are, but not in as many ways as we like to think. We chose our children's names carefully, each one having a purely personal significance - only to discover they're in the current top ten. My startlingly original insights are instantly recognised as tedious commonplaces by the unfortunates on whom they are inflicted. Which brings us to child care.
   For the past few years My wife has travelled to the UK to look after our grandson when our younger daughter has to go away on business. We're well aware that many grandparents help look after their grandchildren on a daily basis. Although we feel guilty that we don't do more, living in a different country makes things difficult, and we rather fancied that my wife was pretty unique in flying in to babysit our grandson as often as she does. Wrong. An article in today's Observer 'based on a survey of 1,413 parents across Britain ... found that in a typical week 7% used relatives who normally live outside the UK to provide childcare, and 5% used it as their main form of childcare'.
   So, once again, we find that rather than being interestingly different we're boringly normal.

Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.

Southern Europeans are kind to children and cruel to animals; the reverse is true of their cousins stuck across the Channel - or so the old adage would have us believe. I think there are differences between the way the Italians and the British relate to dogs, but they're rather more complex than folk wisdom would suggest. And this is illustrated by two horrific cases which hit the Italian press this week
   On Wednesday the Corriere carried a report of a lorry driver being ripped to pieces by a pack of stray dogs in a layby near Leghorn. From today's paper I learned the same fate had befallen a pensioner on the outskirts of Milan. I cannot recall having ever read of a similar event in the UK. In England the victims are nearly always small children attacked by a single dog. The Pit-bull or Rottweiler usually belongs to a young man attempting to compensate for the diminutive size of his brain and penis by parading the streets with an animal almost as repellent as himself.
    For the Englishman's dog is an integral part of his self-image. The middle-classes favour Labradors, their origins as gun-dogs complementing the Range-Rover parked outside on the Chelsea street. I've had Border Collies since I was fifteen: no doubt I subconsciously hope that the breed's intelligence and good looks will have a halo effect. In Britain dogs live as part of the family, receiving titbits from the table and purloining the most comfortable armchair. All of which is incomprehensible to Italians: they like a clean home and allowing a dog inside would fill it with hair and muddy paw-prints. It's an animal, not a linguistically-challenged four-legged person and its proper place is in the yard on the end of a chain.
    But this doesn't mean that Italians don't like dogs. Luisa still weeps when she talks about her dog who died several decades ago. Our neighbours opposite encourage Meg to jump up and lick them. The husband, Mimi, is clearly fond of his own dog, but when it misbehaves he'll beat it so savagely that he'd be reported to the RSPCA by indignant neighbours if he lived in England. A corollary of the Italians viewing dogs as animals rather than surrogate children is their readiness to abandon them if they prove inconvenient. We frequently see stray dogs. Some look terrified and half-starved, running recklessly across the road; I guess they don't survive long. Most, though, look happy enough even when they're limping, presumably from being grazed by a car. I imagine they know a number of people who feed them. One of them, who'd been wandering around the countryside for several years was eventually taken in by Valentino and Cecilia who've named him Libero to reflect his being a free spirit. Lupo and his new girlfriend have recently adopted a rather unpleasant corgi who appeared in the village a few months ago, and a fellow boarder, Gordon, has taken pity on a dog who was thrown out of a car just outside his house.
    Whilst dogs are abandoned in England it's in far fewer numbers and the authorities quickly round them up. On the whole I like Italy's relaxed take on life, but in relation to stray dogs it can be fatal. As the Corriere put it last Wednesday: 'Il branco. Che trasforma cani abbandonati in predatori' [The pack. The instrument which turns abandoned dogs into predators]. If abandoned dogs meet others in the same situation they change from being harmless objects of compassion into potential killers.
   So in Italy dogs kill people because Italians don't think through the potential consequences of their actions when they abandon their animal. In England - in many cases - they kill people because their owner has trained them to be violent. All the deaths are tragic, but at least in Italy they're the result of human fecklessness rather than human wickedness.

Down the tubes.

Yesterday I was brought up short whilst reading a review of a book about Prato, a city near Florence which we'd stayed in three years ago. Once again I was reading something which seemed to make no sense:

Dei Professori Nesi scrive che «usano il telescopio e non il cannocchiale e così non vedono le persone» [Nesi writes that because academics use a telescope rather than a telescope they don't see individuals.]

I was familiar with the word 'cannocchiale', meaning 'telescope', and its similarity to the English word seemed to suggest that 'telescopio' was a synonym. But then the sentence would be meaningless. Perhaps 'telescopio' was a false friend, analogous to 'libreria' which - contrary to one's natural assumptions - means 'bookshop' not 'library'? So I looked it up in an Italian-English dictionary and found that although the word did indeed mean telescope its use was limited to the type used by astronomers rather than the sort Long John Silver carried in his pocket. That was a cannocchiale! So, as in the case of straps, where English makes do with one word, Italian has several.

Then I recalled the archaic word 'spyglass' used to denote the seafarer's instrument. Perhaps we, too, once had words to discriminate between an optic looking at the stars and one helping you to spot whether the ship bearing down on you was flying the Jolly Roger? Only up to a point. To my surprise, the OED revealed that 'spyglass' didn't enter the language until 1705 and dropped out after 1875. 'Telescope' which I'd assumed to be the more modern coinage entered the language in the early 17th century - in the Italian or the Latin form - and denoted the astronomer's instrument. The Italians on the other hand - according to the Devoto-Oli dictionary - have been using both 'cannocchiale' and 'telescopio' since the 17th century: Lo Zingarelli says the former entered the language in 1608 and the latter in 1611.

So in the end I'm none the wiser as to why the Italians have different labels for the two types of telescope while we rely on context to distinguish them. Maybe there's some profound psychological reason, but I'm buggered if I know what it is.