Category Archives: Media

Adapting to On-Line Life?

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Of the various adaptions that have had to be made as a result of the on-going pandemic one having the greatest currency is that of home-working, especially in the field of education. In Italy, as in many other countries, friends who are in teaching have had their work cut out in preparing on-line lessons, marking distanced homework and ensuring that the technology can be accessed by all of their pupils. Most teaching staff have admitted that it is rather more exhausting to teach this way than in a traditional classroom!

(Lucca’s ‘Fosso’ near Porta San Jacopo where one of my teacher friends lives)

Home-working has also diffused itself in many occupations normally conducted in office blocks. Indeed, the UK government’s new encouragement for employees to return to their offices and give up home working has been met with a largely unenthusiastic response, almost as if it were a retrograde step. After all if one looks at the industrial revolution the original trend used to be home-working. It was only when, for example, Hargreaves invented his ‘spinning Jenny’ that factories began to be built and concentrated workers into one space and set up strict timetables.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was found that it makes better economic sense for many jobs to be more productive at home than in some skyscraper? Commuting on crowded and unhealthy public transport systems and traffic pollution could be greatly reduced and the time saved on often considerable journeys would be able to be spent on the work itself. Young families could spend more time with their children and pets. Work could also be rearranged to suit meteorological conditions. For example, if it’s a fine morning why not take a walk and make up for work-time when it’s raining cats and dogs?  For me, however, one of the greatest benefits of home-working would be that those ghastly office skyscrapers disfiguring the City of London, like the ‘gherkin’ and the ‘cheese grater’, could be demolished and the urban sky-line restored to its former proportions where historic buildings could finally find their proper places again.

The same arguments would go for shopping. In London during the pandemic we’ve availed ourselves of on-line home deliveries of groceries from the likes of Tesco’s and Iceland and non-food items from such concerns as Amazon. This clearly saved journey time, queuing time and greatly reduced health risks when shopping in stores, especially when we found Covid-19 regulations were applied in some stores with disturbing flexibility.

The use of social media has also considerably expanded during this pandemia. If one is unable to visit friends because of Covid-19 strictures or organise a social gathering then technologies like Zoom can provide an alternative. In particular, Facebook has delivered a life-line for many people.

Which leads me to the question: how much does FB reflect our real-time social environment? How many of our real friends are FB friends and how many of our FB friends are our real friends? In my case I can say that the greater part of my FB friends are not my real friends meaning people I would take the trouble to arrange to visit and enjoy some activity (mainly eating!) together. Obversely, a significant part of my real friends do not use FB or, if they are on FB, do not use it from one year to the next.

FB is, however, useful in helping to select those on-line ‘friends’ one would actually want to meet in real-life. Of the many FB ‘friends’ I have in my list who spend part, if not all of their time, in Bagni di Lucca, it is the majority I have never actually met and am unlikely to meet except by accident. This is because I feel that I could take exception to many comments they make especially those on politics (particularly those two chestnuts, Brexit and Covid-19) or religion. (I will not say here what my views on these subjects are, except that if anyone wishes to know what they are they can refer to my own FB page…)

(An On-Line Lucca Fountain)

Are we then heading towards a world where our contact with work will be mainly via broad-band and our social relationships mainly via media like FB or WhatsApp? Who knows? If it has been difficult for us to adapt to an environment of face masks and (anti)social distancing it could be even more difficult for us to return to a world where we do not have to automatically cover our noses and mouths and where we will actually be able to shake hands, hug and maybe kiss that handful of real friends. After all, my dad would tell me it was much more difficult for him to return to civvy street life after six years in the army than to adapt to a world at war in the first place.

How Italian News Media Regard UK Society

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British items on Italian RAI TV and newspapers are few and far between. Certainly the brexit fiasco is causing the UK to feature more on Italian TV media. Brexit is, of course, a heaven for all Euro area inhabitants as they can get a good twenty per cent more for their money as the pound sinks lower into the abyss created by misinformation and British pig- headedness.

Is it no coincidence that the epic ‘Dunkirk’ film will be on general release by the end of August? Brits seem to glorify in good losers rather than extol winners – Scott over Amundsen, for example – and it’s not just their own losers they praise: witness the Queen’s special medal given to Italian Olympic marathon runner Dorando Pietri in 1908 for losing on a technicality. This is perhaps because Italians are not good losers. It’s in their nature to be first in everything possible – rather difficult during the country’s continuing economic doldrums. That’s why Federica Pellegrini’s win in the 200 metres free-style in the recent world swimming championships was an occasion for triumph, even triumphalism. (It was a pretty sensational win, I have to admit).

Other Italian news items from a group of northern islands they consider highly eccentric (and now highly masochistic) involve the British royal family. Just wait in your doctor’s surgery here and you can easily pick up a magazine with enough stories from her Maj, William, Kate and Will and the rest of the post Saxe-Coburg bunch to fill a year’s regal gossip. That’s also thanks to the Italians’ narrowly missing keeping their royal family in the referendum in 1946. (54% percent for a republic against 46% for a monarchy – almost Brexian in closeness.)

Last night yet another news item cropped up on RAI and it was a subject very close to Italians – that of the wearing of crucifixes on one’s persons and the display of Christ on the Cross in schools and public institutions. This was the case of a white baptised Christian five-year old girl placed in foster care with a Muslim family who immediately stripped her of her crucifix neck chain.

She was then told her that her religious feasts, Easter and Christmas, were rubbish and they even denied the poor girl her favourite dish of spaghetti ‘alla carbonara’ because it contained bacon.

Things became worst when the poor girl couldn’t understand a word her Muslim foster family was saying to her and was told to learn Arabic.  Being taken out for shopping with a fully burkhaed foster-mum didn’t help either.

When finally rescued from being ‘converted’ within a strict orthodox Muslim family the girl was said to be in a state of extreme distress

The authority in charge of the fostering, Tower Hamlets, hasn’t a very good record in its social services but surely it must have realised that the little girl should have been adopted by a family closer to hers in culture and ethnicity. Tower Hamlets refused to comment on the situation. That’s not surprising from a body that is incapable of realising that multi-culturalism is dead and that integration involves more a situation of ‘when in Rome do as the Romans do’ (or, as St Augustine stated in 390 AD ‘… Romanum venio, ieiuno Sabbato; hic sum, non ieiuno: sic etiam tu, ad quam forte ecclesiam veneris, eius morem serva, si cuiquam non vis esse scandalum nec quemquam tibi.’)

The questions to be asked in this abysmal case – which in some respects must be regarded as child-abuse by the health services of a local council – are these:

  1. How can Tower Hamlets have enrolled a strict orthodox Mohamedan family as fosterers? Fostering families should have firm standards but certainly not strict dogmas. And surely is there a not- negligible connection between the extremer forms of that religion and enrolment as a jihadist.
  2. What were the circumstances that led the five-year old girl to be fostered? And did the girls’ parents have no say in the choice of the family to foster her?
  3. There are many more white family fosterers than black family fosterers in London. In fact, there is a majority of black children being fostered in white families. So why, in this case, did Tower Hamlets choose to foster a white child with a black fosterer who is supposed to be in the minority?
  4. There are further cases involving giving daily help and care to the elderly in the UK. A friend told me that her mother actually refused to open her front door when confronted on the other side by someone she described as a bundle of black cloaks and hoods. Why don’t health workers wear a defined uniform and display a badge which clearly defines their work status so that older people, not used, like younger people, to exotic clothing, are not alarmed? I was further informed that the carer wore her clothes for religious reasons. Carers should wear clothes for professional purposes, not for religious display. Is the UK really a secular society?

The little girl’s case was reported extensively both in Italian RAI TV and on the talk-shows which predominate on the Italian medium. All the case did was to encourage fear of mohamedanism as a religion, add fear to those brought up in western cultural and religious values, especially Roman Catholicism which, while not as extensively practised as in previous times is part-and-parcel of Italian cultural values, and, ultimately, to ridicule not only the inefficiency of Tower Hamlets but also the weirdness and misdirection of British society.