'Le recite'
To recite. To say something from memory without necessarily understanding it. Recite. Comprehension an optional extra.
I agree it's lovely to see your children strugggling against their natural shyness and diffidence to produce something as a group.
I have serious doubts about what they've achieved while they've been preparing for this thing. (And I have even more serious doubts about the effect on their general understanding of science.)
They've been preparing 'religiously' for this one hour event since Christmas. I couldn't quantify the number of hours taken from the normal curriculum (given the embargo, given the embedded nature of the work) but around 20% at least.
'God created the world for you.' Fine. (But explain a mosquito to me then.) I know sending them to a church school was a mistake of montrously hypocritical proportions but I hadn't expected them to be espousing creationism in their end of year show.
To say nothing of the contradictions of lines like 'I know we haven't been invented yet but...' and 'This is the fourth day and I would be a fish but...'
And then they're going to study biology and they're going to learn about Evolutionary theory. And?
Wouldn't it be possible to make life a little less complicated for them? Isn't it possible to teach some coherence? (See note above about hypocrisy. Ah.)

The benefits of these 'recite' are much less significant than the damage.

I got there ten minutes' late, I missed what Giacomo and Davide had been preparing for over half their school year, and ended up watching something I found so objectionable that it made me want to take them out of the school.

The boys are going to play with their friend Filippo after school. His mum’s going to bring them back some time after half six. Brilliant. She’s checked that I can write the note in their diaries for the ‘delega’ so that she can take them away. I didn’t tell her that I would have three people dictating the note to me and arguing about the selection of words. I almost forgot to tell them to behave properly as I took them up to school.
A day of grey-suited work and I head home in plenty of time to pick up Marta and get back to the translation work. I stop off at Esselunga to get the brioches for tomorrow. Valentina’ll be back. There’s the Campestre that she’ll have to take the boys to (because I’ll never finish this translation and because I vowed never to go to one of those farces again last year). So the least she’s due is a croissant. Although they’re not as good as the ones from Waitrose we used to have in bed - they leave that sort of film across the roof of your mouth that she talks about when she describes American food. The supermarket’s been transformed into some scene from a Vietnam film. People are queueing up to redeem their loyalty card points like people tried to get on the last helicopter out of Saigon. Customers are waving their green loyalty cards like threats under the noses of the cashiers, like escape visas.
Please, just let me buy this stuff and get out in time to pick Marta up.
Humanity seems to have gone for a walk lately. I weave my way past a lot of sets of traffic lights during my working day. There seem to be more and more beggars, and fewer and fewer limbs on average, at the lights. The scam of selling the free newspapers appears to have been dropped - shoving the paper through the window and holding on to it til you got a coin back.
‘Squeedgies’. Do they still exist in Britain? They were very aggressive and hard to avoid in London in 1996. They worked out if you were going to pay them in an instant. But now, in Milan in 2007, they don’t care if you’re going to pay or not - they start their work regardless. Then curse your refusal to pay. The only distance Milan drivers ever leave between their cars is when they’re parked at lights and want to get away from beggars. I guess they hear a little whoosh of the air-con as they move on, or a squish of the windscreen wiper. Or a crunch of an artificial limb as they drive over the windscreen washer.
When you’re on a scooter you hear words and you see people. I’m not saying it makes what they do better or more easily understood. It makes it all a bit more vivid though. I see the mutilated limbs, smell the stench of the fat one-legged man who trawls the fifty metres of the lights at the Ford dealer at Sesto, hear the calls from one woman to another from one side of the road to another. But there’s always something worse.
I caught some unusual shape in the corner of my eye as I left a light yesterday. I slowed down, I stopped I think, to check that I had seen what I thought I’d seen. One woman carrying another on her back - piggy-back. Walking somewhere. Head down. Why? No feet. She hasn’t got any feet. Her legs just finish above the ankles. I can’t make out any more.
Carrying someone on your back. What image does that bring back to you? Fun, probably. Not necessity. Your children. Your childhood. Beaches. Hillsides. Laughter. Falling over and feeling an idiot. Getting back up again.
If you’re a bleak Latinist then you might remember Aeneas and Anchises and Troy. Necessity. Your father. Your exile.
Where is she carrying her to? A different set of traffic lights. Why? Family. What would she have been doing at home? Nothing. She would have been a burden, unable to work, an extra mouth to feed. Here, at a traffic light, crippled, she has more value than the healthiest in the village. The cripples become the village wage-earners. Tell me I’ve got it all wrong. Please.
Giacomo had a stiff neck yesterday afternoon. I looked at his face with its discomfort and nearly went into tilt. Marta and Davide excused him table-clearing duties. I rubbed his shoulders. Tonight he’s been to play with Filippo and he says he’s much better. Thank you Paola.

Sexual politics between Tweenies

I think I received my first complaint of home-place harassment this evening. It should send me spinning to reassess my whole attitude to child-rearing but I’ve done that once today already.
Davide in his pyjamas, still, muttering about boxers. I lose it when he does that thing of talking without parting his lips.
-Davide, speak! Just tell me what it is!
He backs off as if I’ve just hit him. Or raised my hand as if I was about to.
I walk off. To the radiator where I’d put a supply of non-boxer pants last night. I bring them back to him. He smiles, I brush his cheek with the outside of my fingers and go to brush my teeth, feeling like shite that I’ll never manage to clean away.
He took a step back.
On the other hand, I might try to console myself, I take more than one step back when he launches into some of his stuff. We’re in the corridor and he tells me to get ready to catch him. I look at him with his feet positioned to spring into my arms. He’s like two suitcases about to be thrown off a baggage conveyor belt. Catch them and you’ve got your luggage, drop them and…
-Davide, there isn’t the space to do this.
At least that’s an excuse, given. I’m not giving enough explanations. He took a step back.

At dinner we talked about the birthday party Giacomo and Davide had been to this evening. There was talk of the football the boys had played while the girls did their dancing inside. And something about boys peering into windows to make fun of the girls.
It’s as if the mystery gift inside one of the ultra-cheap weekend Easter eggs was a machine-gun that has gone off without anyone even near it. Giacomo keeps his head buried in his mum’s shoulder (where it was before the sexism incident) but Davide’s got nowhere to hide and he gets hit by the glowers and the glances full on. He bears up very well.
Marta’s desperate to say something and Giacomo’s even more desperate for her not to say it.
The boys get ready for bed. Marta comes to tell me what I’d asked her to tell me later. I’ll have to think about this a bit more but he either offends her or irritates her by making comments during films along the lines that she might not like to watch the next bit in case she gets frightened. Girls are weaker than boys. Etc. Davide sticks up for her but Giacomo just bamboozles on.
There are explanations (“he’s in a class with completely moronic boys whose parents leave porno films in the dvd player”) which are more of a question than an answer (they go to a nice church school), but Marta’s right. She’s right to be offended by the way her brother talks about women.
I’m upset because it’s going on and because I didn’t know it was going on.
I saw Davide step back and I saw things I’d done that were wrong. I listened to Marta and heard things I hadn’t imagined at all.
This is a less cheery start to things than I’d envisaged. Ah well, it’s Monday.
Things will get back to light-hearted mood soon.

Oh what an agonising decision that phantom dealt me!

I’ve always thought that Google Analytics presumably had something that allows people who visit the site to hack the thing and then find out who else’s been there. I mean, that would be more ‘community-based’, wouldn’t it? Someone knows you’ve been there so you should know where they were when they found out where you were.

Not doing evil surely starts with not being slightly sneaky about finding out who’s reading you? But we’ll let you find out as long as you just sign a couple of things which won’t really concern you at the moment. Remember, ‘Don’t do evil’ is our…. motto? slogan? mission? vaguely stated wish that we might change later?

But I may well have get the wrong end of the technological stick here. It’s 50-50, isn’t it? You throw a stick up in the air and eventually you get the ‘wrong’ end fifty times out of a hundred.
Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tossing the coin at the start of Tom Stoppard’s play. And the throwaway, ‘There is an art to the building of suspense’.

Sorry, I got distracted. That decision. My Hamlet moment, if I wasn’t at least twenty years too old for it. (And twenty kilos too heavy.) Should I carry on with what Valentina was writing, or just ignore the fact that she’s closed her blog?

Well, I can’t ignore it because I see the Analytics stuff that tells me that 60% of you reading this, at least, have come here from mamma per sbaglio. So I’ll transcribe the things I’ve scribbled on my desk at home so that the children won’t suddenly reappear in some other location as fully grown creatures you can no longer recognise. You’ve been so kind about them that I owe you at least that.
And also because they themselves could get really pissed off with us if we don’t carry on with this home movie. (I don’t think anyone’s commented on that.)

Day Zero. Giacomo has decided to speak in English with me. The pauses would be painful if they weren’t the same as the ones I remember with my own father. Things aren’t necessarily down to language - that’s often just an excuse.
Valentina tells me she's closing her blog.

Day Ten. Giacomo tells his English aunt that he’s been speaking in English with his dad so that he can speak in English better with her.
Mmm. I have a couple of doubts about that but I won’t express them.

Day Eleven. Davide’s quite happily chatting away in English with his aunt and uncle the day after Valentina’s fortieth birthday party. I didn’t invite you? Ooops. You didn’t come? Double ooops for you. (People with double oo in their names excepted.)

Day Fifteen. Davide: Laura (ndr sua bellissima maestra, inammorata di lui) whispered to matteo that it was her birthday the next day and would he get her a cake.

V: But did she say that just to Matteo?
D: Matteo’s brilliant at keeping secrets.
Exit stage left V and G, leaving D with me and Marta.
Me: Davide? What does Matteo’s daddy do?
D: He works with Matteo’s mummy.
Me: Really? That's nice, isn't it? And where’s that?
D: In a cake shop.
Marta: Mummy!
Me: Davide, you’re never going to get a job as a detective like this! And did Laura whisper loud enough for you to hear?
G: What you say to Davide? I didn’t hear, sorry.

The world starts seeming less straightforward to my laughing-his-head-off back-row forward. No less reassuring, just a bit less easy to interpret.

The world has become something mediated for Marta. There’s a leaflet on my desk that I’m supposed to have passed on to Valentina. But I haven’t.
(I’m sorry but there are things that we have to talk about ourselves; our life together can’t just be a set of bullet points to get through before we go to bed. We need to sit and just talk and find where the conversation takes us.)
She’s worked out that the week of post-school horse-riding would actually represent a massive cash-saving for the family because she would do x hours and the normal rate is y and so... If I really wanted her to be a lawyer I would witheringly say, ‘But you haven’t mentioned that this is an expense ON TOP OF your normal equine expenditure and ...’
Apart from the leaflet there’s a powerpoint presentation (don’t worry, I’ve shown her what keynote can do - she’ll get that sorted tomorrow).

So, dear reader, rest assured that life is carrying on as normal. You’re just getting our version of it, shall we say, diversely.

Thank you for all of your kind, kind comments on Valentina's closure.

To M, and M, her brother, with thanks

The lightness and dark notebooks

It started here. September 1983. The modern and the ancient. Somehow my university in Wales had found money for me to go to Greece. I had to come back and finish my degree but still, they paid for all the travel, the course and my food. What else was there that I had to cover? And so I arrived from Aberystwyth at the British School at Athens.
March 2007. I’m translating the script of a film about Herculaneum. I read the script again and again. I watch the film. I’m not a translator, I realise that, because I’m actually watching the film. I’m not an archaeologist either, I know that, because I was never interested enough in the mute stones. I’m watching the mute stones being transformed by an artist, by someone who has the strength of his own view of the world to transform the mute stones into words, or film, or art, which I find discomforting. With sheer admiration. Someone who’s able to decide what he’s looking at.
The instructions said, ‘Arrive at the British School after 4 p.m.’ I found that my flight arrived at 4 a.m. This was pre-RyanAir. The same people but less compliant: they’d paid less but expected more. (Now, in this post-RyanAir epoch, we pay the same and expect much less, and get even less than that, and shamefully put up with it.) The Japanese guy who pulled out his duty-free whisky and drank it from the bottle. ‘I’m sorry sir, but you have to wait to land.’ The couple who seemed to want to do the noisiest fuck ever on a charter flight in row 43. It was all a bit out of my provincial world.
The week before I’d been in Newcastle. I was there, making sure I didn’t touch the money the university had given me. Everyone is away. Even my brother is somewhere else. Reading everything I could. Listening to whatever there was. The radio. Radio 1. And lo and behold there’s The Smiths. There’s this man who’s saying the most outrageously funny things anyone’s ever heard, who really doesn’t seem to care what people think about him. And they’re on tomorrow at the HoffbraHauss. Down at the bad end of the city, at the wrong end of the year.
So I touch my savings. ‘Hand in Glove’ - if I’m going to see him perform that then it’ll be worth walking back from Athens. ‘The good life is out there somewhere so stay on my arm you little charmer…’
How to explain to my mum though. Am I borrowing a fiver off her to go to a strip joint or to see a man the Daily Mail classifies a potential child abuser? I go, there are about two hundred of us. They’re brilliant beyond that first record. Reel around the fountain.
And I go home and I can’t really explain to my mum the next morning what I’ve seen.
‘There was this singer with gladioli in the back pocket of his Levi’s. And he pretended to be deaf.’
I head off for Greece not really sure she’s convinced that’s where I’m going either. She doesn’t know what to tell me to do. We stand there for a moment. She wants to tell me something and I want her to have something to say. Too many uncertainties. I just go.
I read The Magus in a park in central Athens and then take a taxi to the school.
I’ve never thought that I was attractive, but during those weeks in Greece I began to think there might be a relatively inoffensive side to me. I thought it must be that all the other men were so helplessly swotty that I remained the only option. If a woman’s willing to make love with you on the shores of ‘sandy Pylos’ then it’s probable that you’re not the last resort, that she wants to. Well, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to in enormous retrospect.
I fell in love with the place and the people in it too. Coffee in the morning, hungover, eyes acknowledging suffering. So many stories. ‘The oldest fan in the country.’ ‘This is where the gypsies started…’ ‘Where they plotted the overthrow in 19.. .’ I started talking to men, but I found I could talk to women too. The country became my own growing up.
I went from one archaeological site to another and the more that I went to the more I learned about the country itself, or so it seemed to me.
There we were, the final day’s summing up. The day after the party.
-What do you think the major aspect of the course has has been? Philip?
Aargh, fuck.
-Well, you know, what I think is, well, the way I see it is, that there’s no separation between the ‘polis’ and modern day Greek life and I think really, well, we have to learn something from that.’
-Thanks for that, Philip. Alexander, would you like to take that a step further?
I watch the film and translate the text. Is the film about Italy today or Herculaneum? Rain falls on the site. The skeletons extend their hands.
Herculaneum is Italy.

- I remember waking up on my tenth birthday.
- Really?
- Yeah. We were in Scotland. My birthday used to be in the middle of a school holiday and we were there in the cottage. I woke up hearing the cows and the sheep and the goats. And then the woman in the cottage next door scraping the black off the toast she'd burnt. And I thought, I'm ten, wow. Anyway, I hope you wake up and hear the goats. Happy birthday, Marta. I love you.

Happy birthday, Giacomo and Davide.
The morning after your birthdays I went running - the usual course that maybe we’ll do together soon - but as soon as we do I think you’ll be looking over your shoulders for me behind you - and as I cycled round I noticed the early-morning couples with their first children, stopped, fixing something, checking something, just looking at something that was happening for the first time. I almost felt like stopping a couple of times to tell them what the answer to the problem was. And sometimes I felt like stopping to tell them how much easier it was two-parents-to-one-child, rather than one-parent-to-two-children.
You must have been seven or eight months old. Your mother was somewhere with your sister; I insisted on taking you out. Some cold damp Sunday afternoon. You needed fresh air, you needed to see things. I’d brought yoghurts for you to have as a merenda. But I think it must have been before I started taking anti-flu vaccine. Just after we started back (you were in the long pushchair, not the side-to-side one) I started feeling ‘feverish’, not knowing where I was. I wasn’t really sure of how I was going to make it. When I got home (you were still small enough for me to carry you up the stairs together) I’d lost my gloves. Bits and pieces I remember; it’s not as distinct as I’d expected. That’s kind of how it was - a struggle, not an overwhelming laugh. Always close to some sort of physical or psychological limit.
You’ve reached seven. You can’t keep all those toys, each and every car you’ve ever been given and played with for thirty minutes. You both know it too and you’ve been talking about charities and the poor and other children. This weekend you’ve had to give up, give away things from your pasts, and you’ve done it with great good grace and judgement.
Now it is a laugh. All your jokes, your acts. Davide the Samurai is the current favourite routine and Giacomo is working on something to displace it.
We needed to do this tidying up and I suppose we needed some sort of signpost to start it (your sevenths). But it leaves me with a sense of foreboding.
‘Give it away - they never liked that book.’
‘Keep this for our grandchildren?’
We close up boxes, cases, and I carry them down to the cellar that I’ve put in some sort of order. Am I really not going to read the Gruffalo again until I have grand-children?
I don’t want to put things in order. I like the anarchy we’ve had over the last seven years in the same way I enjoyed the bewilderment of the three years before with Marta. The dust flies around the flat and I sneeze and I almost have to take an anti-histamine. I stop sneezing; I get ready to take a deep breath. We’re moving towards the ‘permanent period’.
I look back into the room that’s been the scene of so much of your chaos. Now there’s space on the shelves, on the floor, between cupboards. It’s amazing that you can see individual pieces of furniture, that you can walk to the window and push it open without half-climbing over a fire engine.
What’s going to happen next?