Whether we’re in a red, orange or yellow day in Italy may matter little to today’s five big points for me:
First, it’s a beautifully sunny day,
It’s one of the last such days we’ll be having before Christmas, for soon the real below-freezing winter will start and our plants will have to be protected if they are not to die.
Second, it’s going to be a rerun of the Star of Bethlehem as seen by the three Wise Men in AD zero. Jupiter and Saturn are in conjunction and it will be a treat to see such a bright light in the sky tonight. Let’s not miss this sight since another eight hundred years may pass before we get a similar chance.
Third. It’s the year’s shortest day…and the longest night. As John Donne writes in that quintessentially sad poem ‘A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’ “this both the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is”.
Fourth. If the UK has shut the door on Europe, Europe has done the same on Britain. But this time it’s not because of a misplaced political choice but because of a very real health emergency. The Continent (and the rest of the world) do not wish to be invaded by mutants, especially if they originate from Dover or Heathrow.
Fifth. For many people (like us) it’s going to be a zoomingly whatsapping Christmas with virtual lunches (but some real conversations at least). Yes we’ve been marooned: Sandra in the UK and I in Italy. All those cancelled flights, all those false hopes etc. It’s only the fourth time we’ve not spent Christmas together since we married over forty years ago. This is pretty good going, however, and for so many of us Christmas can be any day we wish. Like Miss Havisham with her cancelled wedding party I’ll keep the decorations up but will refrain from having rats on the dining table rushing about eating the panettone and may even do a bit of dusting to wipe those cobwebs away.
I will also not continue to wear my Santa Claus hat when going out. And as for those Christmas carols…
If anything this Christmas season will teach us many things. We are all refugees in our own countries and all in need of that little extra piece of love and humanity from others. Let’s trust we all receive that as a present at least.
When towards the end of his life the philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked what he thought the most important axioms were he replied:
“I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say. The moral thing I should wish to say…I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more closely and closely interconnected we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”
It would certainly be lovely to be able to tolerate other people’s views without question even if one believed that the facts they were based on were largely fanciful. After all, that other great philosopher Voltaire is said to have uttered:
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.
We are about to end this year with a double whammy, at least as far as the UK is concerned. The first is the unending saga of Brexit. I voted to remain as I felt the devil one knows was better. Certainly the EU is full of imperfections but it still adheres to the ideals of its original founders and has preserved us from the worst forms of worker exploitation and, above, from the threat of an endemic state of war which has tortured the European continent since the fall of the Roman Empire. Yet I continue to receive these messages from persons I not only tolerate but still respect:
“Ibelieve that the EU which is a corrupted organisation and involved in the most dishonest financial and political crimes will be dismantled, once lots of truths will be coming out in the near future.
I do believe it from the bottom of my heart. What we have been living for the past nine months is the most important time in history in a long time. It is a time of awakening to the false truths and that we have been fed for a very long time. It is not political. But I would say biblical.
It is literally the third world war. It is a fight between The Dark and the Light. And the Light will win.”
The other thing I find hard to take is the conspiracy theories of those who believe that Covid-19 is a tool of a carefully engineered totalitarian scheme to reduce us to obedient servants of an oppressive world government. Like this other message I received:
“Listen to the true scientists – Nobel Prize medical scientists. People that have actually been involved in making them for military purpose like Montanari and Gatti.
There are two kind of science. One is the corrupted science that has been giving us all lies up to now and that has the monopoly with giant pharmaceutical companies. The other is an independent science that has been squashed and silenced by the ones in power.”
Another message on this same theme comes from someone I used to play chess with before covid concerns entered into the equation. I certainly could not accuse good chess players of lacking logic:
“The masks are the symbol of the muzzle and the gag to silence those who are not in line, just like dog- owners, to prevent them from barking or biting. Nature has taught us to breathe pure air and we pollute it. Just use appropriate masks where the air is not pure, but outdoors and above all it is more harmful to use them. Furthermore, as indicated on the packaging, they only serve to protect our interlocutor from any Covid transmitted by you, not the other way around. The virus is a millionth part of a millimetre and a normal tissue is not able to stop it. It can only stop a drop that contains it by fixing it on the mask but then it is not enough. On the other hand, you breathe in the carbon dioxide you emit. So when in doubt it should be used in closed places in contact with others, not to defend you but them and in the shortest possible time.”
The problem is that the quotations I have printed above are all from people I have considered friends and in some cases worked alongside in artistic projects. Have they been brainwashed rather like the way Winston was by the end of Orwell’s ‘1984’? Or is it I who is the brainwashed victim?
Does ‘doublethink’ really exist? As Winston, in ‘1984’, mused in front of the telescreen while doing his morning exercises as instructed.
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic”
Now what am I supposed to do? Refuse to talk about religion and politics and stick to safe subjects like what will the weather be like tomorrow or what is the best way to cook lasagne?
Of course, we are all entitled to our opinions. That surely must be the basis of a democratic and balanced civilization. However, there is this significant difference. There is a tone of almost messianic ranting, of belief that unless we believe the messages’ viewpoint we are all doomed to enslavement and eventual extermination.
I look forwards to two world developments once I have tried to forget all these tantalizing thoughts during Christmas: the state of the UK after New Year’s Eve and the covid vaccination programme. Will we still have to continue double-thinking for long after that I wonder?
As I wake up to the following gloriously expansive view from my bedroom window with its clear blue Mediterranean sky and autumnally tinged forests it’s easy to momentarily forget that the world is living through some cataclysmic crises: climate change, species extinction, covid-19 for starters, and that so many countries, in addition, are having to face wars whether they be arms or trade ones.
As I write this large areas of our planet are being devastated by fires, by sea level rises, by military destruction and…by a new Kentish lorry park, digging into the idyllic landscape of the North Downs, in preparation for the impending brexit deadline of January first 2021. (To be suggestingly named, according to some wags, the ‘Nigel Farage Memorial Park’).
I just wonder how many New Year’s eve parties will be celebrated at the end of this year what with the strictures imposed by pandemic rules and the growing doubt among believers that what they voted for might have all been a con and that they were sold a pup.
I have sadly come to the view that there is a close relationship between those people who still deny climate change, those who are against any form of vaccination, those who affirm covid-19 is a hoax and those who believe that brexit is the best thing since sliced Hovis. Of course this is not to say that these belief systems completely tally one with the other but there is a far more intense overlap between them than between their opposites.
OK, we have earned the essential privilege, after centuries of feudal oppression and crass totalitarianism, of individual freedom as encapsulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have evolved considerably from being the huddled masses exemplified in the hierarchical ideology of so many societies – from the caste system in the Indian sub-continent to the class system still prevalent in the British Isles – towards the individualism which has arisen out of it.
However, if we all continued to behave in a highly individual manner as before – refusing to wear face masks in prescribed areas or failing to differentiate our household waste – then many of us will be in the same position as those inhabitants of German towns, just after World War 2 had ended, who were escorted into the remnants of concentration camps to witness their own country’s version of man’s inhumanity to man on a scale never before seen. I doubt there could have been any holocaust deniers left after these visits to their local extermination camp.
Yes, regretfully there’s also a connection, in my mind, between pandemic deniers and holocaust deniers. Perhaps visits to the local intensive care unit (where I was a denizen earlier this year) might be organized to dispel this belief if health restrictions did not permit it.
In Bagni Di Lucca I have come across people who blatantly remain mask-less in the middle of the Saturday morning market. They don’t even seem to carry one on their arms. I just wonder if they ever step into a store for their shopping; shop-keepers would never let them in for they too are subject to hefty fines for breaking anti-virus regulations. Other people have asked me ‘do you know anyone who has died of Covid-19?’ Sadly I do now and tell them so. They still appear to remain unconvinced, however.
The conspiracy theorists spread far and wide into that dark area of persons known as members of Q-anon who apparently are now considerably influencing the forthcoming US elections.
How does one relate to those who believe in these conspiracy theories? Bertrand Russell said that tolerance is necessary in any human relationship. All well and good but then are we to tolerate FGM, Suttee or legalised lethal injections? The other thing Russell said was ‘confirm the veracity of the facts’. That is clearly more difficult to handle and that’s where conspiracy ideology finds an easy way to worm itself into the collective subconsciousness.
Whatever happens in all this mess one thing is clear. Unless British residents in Bagni Di Lucca confirm their residence permission documents, obtain their Italian medical cards, exchange their UK drivers license for an Italian one and ensure their now European-citizenship-less passports are up to date they are going to find that discovering any brexitian benefits will be as difficult as locating the proverbial needle in a haystack. I just hope they will at least wear their ‘mascherine’ (as sanitary masks are called in Italy.)
One of the most extensive pandemics in Italy’s past, the Great Plague of 1630 harvested its maximum number of victims in northern Italy. Milan lost over a quarter of its inhabitants to ‘la peste’. Verona was the worst affected with over half of its citizens dying in horrible agony. The pandemic started with French and Austrian soldiers marching into Italy as mercenary garrisons for the main towns of the Po valley. Another factor was the extreme poverty of the population reduced by years of austerity under governments who failed to provide basic services in food production and medical facilities. Over a million perished in the great plague: around a quarter of the population.
The pandemic spread to other parts of Europe and may have been instrumental in causing the Great Plague of London in 1665.
The ‘Peste’ was graphically written about by Italy’s great writer Alessandro Manzoni in his novel ‘I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed).
Like many other plagues its origin was eastern and may have been related to the Mongol invasion which almost conquered the Hapsburg empire. Special wear was developed to enable improved survival rates. Here are some examples.
The beak-like mask enabled lavender pomanders to be inserted to protect the wearer from infection and combat stench from decomposing corpses.
With the medical knowledge of the age it was impossible to halt its progress although isolation centres known as Lazzaretti (the church of the Milan lazzaretto was recently restored) were set up. A certain Doctor Giuseppe Daciano did write an interesting treatise, however, on the pandemic and the methods of not catching it or curing it:
What is most disturbing is the fate allocated to Lucca described in the prophecies of Nostradamus. In one of his quatrains he mentions a “great plague” and the Italian city of Lucca.
(Century III, Quatrain 19) “In Lucca it will come to rain blood and milk”.
It would be a simple matter to quarantine many of the inhabitants of Lucca since they live in a city surrounded by massive walls should the prophecy ever come to be realised.
On the bright side the great plague of northern Italy of the seventeenth century claimed many fewer victims than the 15th century pestilence known as the Black Death. That was one of the most devastating pandemics in history and killed off an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Europe and Asia.
(Any similarity between 1630 and 2020 are now not purely coincidental. Indeed, all inhabitants of Lucca, as all inhabitants of Italy, are under quarantine with all non-essential journeys banned.
PS Many of you may know that the nursery rhyme quote which titles this post alludes to the Great Plague of London in 1665.)
It’s a truism to say that every country has its own characteristics. That’s part of the joys of travelling. I love the diversities of our planet – I certainly don’t try to find a McDonald’s in Amsterdam if I’m hungry (like someone I know) or seek out a pint of Abbott in Madagascar if I’m thirsty. Occasionally I might have longings for baked beans on toast in Tuscany, only to find that ‘fagioli a l’uccelletto’ presents a much worthier alternative. At its worst our facing of different ways other countries have of doing things leads to that indefinable phenomenon of ‘culture shock’.
When my mother came from a war-ravaged Marshall-plan-aided northern Italy to a post-war United Kingdom drizzled in unprecedented depths of austerity and greyness she was clearly culturally surprized by the diversity and characteristics she encountered in the former Roman Empire’s province.
My mother’s visit was ostensibly a study one – to learn one of the world’s supremely illogical but most widely spoken languages: English but it soon ended in her pregnancy, her marriage and….me.
The things that struck Vera about the UK were both positive and negative. The most noticeable related to children’s upbringing. In Italy ‘mammismo’, or being tied to mum’s apron strings until well into one’s thirties (and often beyond), is still the trend (although more rapidly changing now since young people have resigned themselves to travel further from the family nest to find jobs – London remains a particularly sought-after destination and Italian is regularly heard spoken by passengers on many bus routes, the 176 and the 12 in particular. My mother greatly admired the independence English parents gave to their children. Sadly the situation has changed considerably from my own childhood when I could cycle freely around London in my early teens not only going to school but swanning to locations far from South London’s Forest Hill such as Waltham Abbey and Saint Albans – only to be ticked off if I arrived home late.
Although my mother came to enjoy the gentle landscapes of the North and South Downs she greatly missed the mountains of Italy. I remember one late afternoon with her in Lewisham high street when she suddenly became very emotional, confounding the formation of clouds for alpine peaks. (My mother had been a lover of the Alps, so easily within reach of her birth town, Milan, in particular the Bernina range which she had climbed from the rifugio Marinelli, an area I myself visited when barely a teenager.)
(The Bernina Range a few years ago. I wonder if the summer snows are still there)
This longing for mountains, this yearning for their ecstatic profiles of empyrean heights is something I wished for and something which I re-encountered when lunching with some of my Italian ex-students from City University. On that occasion we both praised and trashed the UK: from the ‘Daily Mail’ reader to the absence of mountainous landscapes to the poor sartorial tastes of so many of the island’s denizens to inferior quality of buildings to the absence of reliably acceptable eateries.
There has always been a time of my life when I have had a need to get to the top of hills and mountains, whether they be in Italy, Switzerland, Wales or Ireland.
(The Quirang and Stac Polly)
Perhaps that’s why I’m living in the most mountainous area of Tuscany.
As a social worker for the first part of her working life in the UK (mainly in the field of mentally disturbed Italian emigrant workers) my mother naturally involved herself in the dynamics of everyday social life. I recall an instance when there was a fight in the yard of my primary school (Dalmain Road). Two boys, beating and kicking each other to the ground were surrounded by a circle of mums coming to collect their children. My mother was horrified by the fact that the parents appeared to be just gazing at the event without anyone stepping in to stop the fracas. She reacted, angrily exclaiming ‘will no-one stop this?’ At this stage the other parents did react, the boys were separated and the fight stopped.
As someone brought up in the Roman Catholic religion my mother was not a particularly devoted practitioner but she absolutely detested what had happened to Catholics under the apostate reign of the loathsome Henry VIII. She carried sentiments akin to those wonderful lines in that Shakespeare sonnet which ruefully describes ‘bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’.
(A family visit to Tintern Abbey)
The site of the dissolved monasteries of so many parts of Britain, in particular the abbeys of Yorkshire and Canterbury with its associations with Saint Augustine (my mum’s own middle name was ‘Agostina’) filled her with both wonder and sadness. She happily sought out religious fraternities re-established as a result of the nineteenth century Catholic emancipation act; I evoke visits to the Verona fathers (formerly at Tulse Hill) and other associations. In particular, Vera followed with the greatest interest the refounding of Aylesford friary which we saw from a derelict ruin with a handful of monks to the flourishing centre of religious devotion it has become.
Most of all was my mother’s long-term relationship with the former Italian Hospital in Queen square founded in 1884 by a prosperous Italian business man Commendatore Giovanni Battista Ortelli in and originally manned (or nunned?) by the The Sisters of St Vincent de Paul.
(Sadly the hospital closed in 1990 but happily the building is currently undergoing major remodelling and refurbishment to bring it back into clinical use and will reopen in spring 2020 as the Great Ormond Street Hospital Sight and Sound Centre, accommodating out-patient clinics for ophthalmology, audiology, ENT and related services).
I suppose these interests have continued with me. The English reformation remains an event of immense Taleban-like horror to me: its wanton destruction of magnificent gothic architecture, its burning of great polyphonic music, its obliteration of holy sites, its list of martyrs of both sides of the great divide all point to a particular malign manifestation of the disassociation of sensibility which the poet T. S. Eliot avers descended upon the UK during the succeeding century. It was then that the superb artistic flair of mediaeval Britain, the celebrated ‘opus anglicanorum’ was severed from its association with continental Europe and largely disrupted, vandalised and destroyed in the British Isles. Indeed, it’s paradoxically in places like Pisa museum and the Uffizi that some of the finest English pre-reformation art may still be admired for it was exported to all areas of Europe and therefore survived in a similar way that the great monuments of Nineveh have survived the wrath of iconoclasts by being exported to places like the British museum…
Who sensibly cannot help thinking that the present maniacal foreign policy being pursued by the United Kingdom’s government as a response to an outdated and unfair electoral system is another re-incarnation of the love-hate affair with those living on the other side of ‘La Manica’ (the ‘sleeve’ – the name Italians – and other continentals – give to what is generally known as ‘the English channel’) and particularly encapsulated in the personality of my mother and continued in my own beliefs.
The intensity of the split between those British citizens who still wish to remain within the European Community and those who are gladly leaving it will, in my opinion (despite a so-called ‘democratic referendum which actually showed that the majority wanted to remain) only increase in its force after this January 31st 2020.
There can be no wait for another general election: the referendum result – although it was merely advisory and although no legitimate quorum was allowed – is speciously moulded in stone; indeed sculpted in Carrara marble for that stalwart band of brits (some even resident in Italy (!!!)) who gladly leave a club from which they felt they never got free drinks, or even any nibbles, a referendum ‘result’ which is truly cast in already rotting concrete mocking all those who care for a Europe that has the integrity and force to stand up and be counted before the mega-economies of China and the US of A.
I can only be grateful that I have chosen to become a member of the European community as my area to live, work and love in and never relinquish my European citizenships. I don’t think I would psychologically last very long in the burgeoning eruption of false economic, trade and social promises which an utterly dishonest quasi-totalitarian police-state regime (labelled ‘airstrip one’ in 1984) is now foisting on an island which our greatest poet once described as ‘This other Eden, demi-paradise’.
Don’t forget Brexit has not been done today …it has barely begun! The worse is yet to come…it will NEVER be done.
The really awful thing is that the leavers are ever more believers in the fatuous righteousness of their decision (just like the cult members of Guiana’s Jonesville – remember that one?) while the remainers are now taking shelter either by leaving the country or by seeking pockets of sanity (like my city of birth and breeding, London).
I am reminded of the harsh criticism in a sonnet by a poet who really cared for his country, William Wordsworth:
England … is become a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
Meanwhile, leavers do enjoy yourselves this Friday night at 11pm!
After forty seven years in which the UK has been lifted from the doldrums of British Leyland-style strikes, power cuts and much else that was grey and loathsome and embraced almost half a century of increasingly successful membership, the sceptered isle leaves the European Union.
You injudicious Brexiteers enjoy your party in college green! There will be fireworks, Big Ben bonging and a rousing address from your beloved leader (sorry….our prime minister). Wonderful speeches are promised by stars like Ann Widdecombe, Tim Martin and Julia Hartley-Brewer all bathed in the Uk’s traditionally forecast drizzle.
As George Orwell wrote in his essay ‘England your England’ (note no ‘Scotland’, ‘Wales’ or ‘Ireland’) – an essay which still has immense value especially that part centred around the word ‘hypocrisy’, especially aptly featured in those brexiteers who have become residents in Italy and deluding themselves of having their cake and eating it.
“…as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’, would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being called a sleep-walker.”
That ‘nation of sleep-walkers’ sums it up quite brilliantly. Will you accept one of those newly minted ‘celebration’ fifty pence pieces? Will you sleep walk off the white cliffs?
Happily if I ever return to my birthplace, it will be to the inimitable, cosmopolitan and glorious metropolis of London, the city that has given shelter and hospitality to the world’s greatest defenders of freedom (Mazzini from Italy, Ho Chi Min from Vietnam and Marx from Russia just to name three). I would, in my dreams, make London into a free city, Hanseatic league style: a city that stands apart from that crass diminutive mentality so aptly described by Orwell; a city that on a genuine day of sunshine rises proudly astride the great river Thames. As Joseph Conrad (another foreigner, this time from Poland, made welcome by the great Wen) wrote:
What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men and the seed of commonwealths.
I return to Wordsworth who, on Westminster Bridge, wrote:
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
This end of January is truly a day of dark foreboding but we believers in the Community of Europe will never give up, never surrender that which is God-given, the beating heart and unity of one of the world’s great continents. Long live the European Community!
