It was the day Ferenc Puskas died. I never saw him play but I knew that he was important.) I’d forgotten to set the alarm clock but I was awake anyway because I’d heard Davide getting up just after seven. (One day will the pair of you explain to me why one of you would take on characteristics like ‘the early riser’ at the exact moment the other dropped it?) I went to get the breakfast stuff ready knowing that I was already behind schedule, without spotting Davide anywhere; ah well, I thought, I must have been dreaming, he must still be in bed. I went back to look at his bed but he wasn’t there. I know I misplace things with a certain uncomfortable regularity, but to misplace a son is just sheer carelessness. Back to the living room: one of the windows is open and the undefined weather is seeping through, wetting the changed air. I catch sight of a blanket and go to look at it; out pops Davide with a boo and a smile. ‘How long have you been there?’ ‘About ten minutes. I was hiding.’ (Last night’s game, and the big thing at the moment.) ‘Come and have your breakfast.’
The weather isn’t any easier to define from the kitchen. There’s no wind, I can tell that, and the ground is soaking. It’s not dark but there’s almost no light. Everything’s covered in tightly-woven blankets of late autumn miserableness. Marta comes, eventually so does Giacomo and I can go to shave. I’m getting later. By the time I’m on the vespa I need a clear run into the heart of Milan, to Loreto and then along Buenos Aires and Venezia right up to San Babila and I can be just about on time. What do I get? The horrible realisation that there’s a transport strike today, which, with the likelihood of rain, means even more traffic than normal.
I’m carrying an article from the Economist and a back-up one from Business Week. I’m going to a bank to meet the head of ‘new business’. I’ve known him, he thinks, for more than ten years. In fact it’s just over five, but our lessons must be very boring, or else his progress has been painfully slow. His office and all the others on this first floor of senior management have been completely refurbished over the last 18 months. His has come off best, I think, since he appears to have his admin assistants in one annexe and then a meeting room in another annexe with video conference screens in the walls while his own office, in the middle, is the hub of an autonomous authority beyond the power of the bank itself. It’s always been like that: his work always seems to have kept him on a distant parallel to the bank’s rather than an integral part of it. From what he tells me he’s not even trying to keep it parallel anymore. I don’t really want to know the details and we start the article.
As we struggle through the contortions of the Economist the bank’s President arrives. ‘I have nothing to offer you but my name,’ he had said introducing himself to his new colleagues three years ago. It seemed a weak starting position to me but it shows you how wrong I can be because the share price continues to go up all that he has to offer is enough to get my (richest) student to leap and close the door behind him and start talking like he’s a used-car salesman. ‘It’s an Audi 6 which has done practically no kilometres…’, I hear.
This is what the Economist can’t cover. Why one name is worth so much more than another.
And it’s not worth thinking about that.
I’m heading around the castle. In another world Leonardo da Vinci turned up here to meet his patrons. The road in front of the Castello Sforzesco must be one of the widest in Milan city centre. Normally you bomb round it; today you’re stuck in front of the clock tower and there isn’t even the space to squeeze through the rows. The lines of traffic continue past the turn for Cadorna and on past the Triennale. As we stagger towards Corso Sempione, there are the whistles and megaphoned voices of a demonstration, the reason for this part of the delay. The school students march towards their destination without much apparent enthusiasm. There isn’t any chanting and not even many whistles. Most of the noise is from the music they’re playing from the back of a truck. ‘Ah, it’s not like the student protests of my day,’ I think for an instant before I manage to laugh at myself.
(It was quite easy to protest when I was at university though, in retrospect. Maybe it wasn’t exactly Paris 1968 but Aberystwyth 1984, marching down the hill from the campus to the town where there were buses heading off for a national student demonstration in London, felt quite revolutionary. ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!’ ‘Out, out, out!’ There was a photograph taken that ended up in the local paper and I was in it, on the edge, walking very purposefully, my hair wild and curly and definitely belonging to a protester. Truth be told I was going to a pub in the town, not to the demo. I’d just finished some work in the library and my exit coincided with the march’s progress. I didn’t want to stick out so I gave a few ‘out, out’s and veered off to the pub as soon as I decently could. I can’t remember what the protest was about now. Education reforms, I think, rather than the miners’ strike. It was easy to protest because there were so many objectionable things going on - you were spoilt for choice. There were so many targets that being in opposition was overwhelming, and ineffective. And so I headed off to the pub.)
I look at the students and wonder what subjects they’re doing and what they’re like at languages. The protest movement is globalized in its anti-globalization and English must be pretty essential for the globe-trotting G8 protester. The demonstration brings back to the front of my mind a rather politically incorrect thought I’ve been having recently. Men and women use language differently, ok, we’ve all read Deborah Tannen. But I’m gradually coming to realise that men and women learn foreign languages differently too. As I think back to my lesson with the banker I recall him looking at the phrase ‘Yet, for all that,...’ and getting completely stuck in the traffic of the story, unable to go forward or backwards or even turn into another street. I think of a group of women - the same level - who never get held up by the odd word or phrase. Why is that? Because they’re already trying to do something else with another part of the text, or it’s reminded them of something else and they go off on that strand, or they’re making a note about another phrase they want to talk about. It comes down to the cliché of multi-tasking and mono-tasking. It’s quite a neat thought, one that’ll make Mafe and Luca laugh over coffee, and by the end of Corso Sempione I can see a research project. As I turn the corner into Monte Ceneri and head towards Bovisa I’ve already realised how much more research the project would take to be valid.
This leads me to two pieces of advice. One is not to start analysing every foreign language errors people make. The other is not to start thinking about academic research unless you you can think your way through to its delivery.
I turn left at the lights onto via degli Imbriani. There are some lethal lumps in the tarmac here and you have to concentrate as you turn. I almost hit one of the lumps as I start to think about one of the exercises your religion teacher got them to do. ‘Think of one of your vices and one of your virtues.’ I’m furious and I think of the line from Richard Dawkins about teaching children religion being a form of child abuse. He’s perfectly right. The only possible result of this task is to instil a sense of guilt in the children. I could give you a list of my flaws but I’m not sure I could tell you what my ‘vices’ are. What’s a six-year-old to do? Invent something, quick. As honest as you are, you came up with, ‘I tell lies’. (Which naturally isn’t true, thus proving the truth of your statement, I suppose.)
Advice is almost always forgotten, and I would expect you to forget all of this. I remember my mother telling me not to write and send letters late at night, which I’ve repeatedly found to my cost to be very good advice.
But Giacomo, I hope that if you read this (I’ll have told you already) you remember that I told you it’s not worth thinking about your ‘vices’; just be happy with who you are. You’re a wonderful person. You don’t need a religion to realise that.
(Yes, yes, I know, you’re all wonderful - it’s just that Giacomo’s been having a hard time of it at school recently.)
The weather isn’t any easier to define from the kitchen. There’s no wind, I can tell that, and the ground is soaking. It’s not dark but there’s almost no light. Everything’s covered in tightly-woven blankets of late autumn miserableness. Marta comes, eventually so does Giacomo and I can go to shave. I’m getting later. By the time I’m on the vespa I need a clear run into the heart of Milan, to Loreto and then along Buenos Aires and Venezia right up to San Babila and I can be just about on time. What do I get? The horrible realisation that there’s a transport strike today, which, with the likelihood of rain, means even more traffic than normal.
I’m carrying an article from the Economist and a back-up one from Business Week. I’m going to a bank to meet the head of ‘new business’. I’ve known him, he thinks, for more than ten years. In fact it’s just over five, but our lessons must be very boring, or else his progress has been painfully slow. His office and all the others on this first floor of senior management have been completely refurbished over the last 18 months. His has come off best, I think, since he appears to have his admin assistants in one annexe and then a meeting room in another annexe with video conference screens in the walls while his own office, in the middle, is the hub of an autonomous authority beyond the power of the bank itself. It’s always been like that: his work always seems to have kept him on a distant parallel to the bank’s rather than an integral part of it. From what he tells me he’s not even trying to keep it parallel anymore. I don’t really want to know the details and we start the article.
As we struggle through the contortions of the Economist the bank’s President arrives. ‘I have nothing to offer you but my name,’ he had said introducing himself to his new colleagues three years ago. It seemed a weak starting position to me but it shows you how wrong I can be because the share price continues to go up all that he has to offer is enough to get my (richest) student to leap and close the door behind him and start talking like he’s a used-car salesman. ‘It’s an Audi 6 which has done practically no kilometres…’, I hear.
This is what the Economist can’t cover. Why one name is worth so much more than another.
And it’s not worth thinking about that.
I’m heading around the castle. In another world Leonardo da Vinci turned up here to meet his patrons. The road in front of the Castello Sforzesco must be one of the widest in Milan city centre. Normally you bomb round it; today you’re stuck in front of the clock tower and there isn’t even the space to squeeze through the rows. The lines of traffic continue past the turn for Cadorna and on past the Triennale. As we stagger towards Corso Sempione, there are the whistles and megaphoned voices of a demonstration, the reason for this part of the delay. The school students march towards their destination without much apparent enthusiasm. There isn’t any chanting and not even many whistles. Most of the noise is from the music they’re playing from the back of a truck. ‘Ah, it’s not like the student protests of my day,’ I think for an instant before I manage to laugh at myself.
(It was quite easy to protest when I was at university though, in retrospect. Maybe it wasn’t exactly Paris 1968 but Aberystwyth 1984, marching down the hill from the campus to the town where there were buses heading off for a national student demonstration in London, felt quite revolutionary. ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!’ ‘Out, out, out!’ There was a photograph taken that ended up in the local paper and I was in it, on the edge, walking very purposefully, my hair wild and curly and definitely belonging to a protester. Truth be told I was going to a pub in the town, not to the demo. I’d just finished some work in the library and my exit coincided with the march’s progress. I didn’t want to stick out so I gave a few ‘out, out’s and veered off to the pub as soon as I decently could. I can’t remember what the protest was about now. Education reforms, I think, rather than the miners’ strike. It was easy to protest because there were so many objectionable things going on - you were spoilt for choice. There were so many targets that being in opposition was overwhelming, and ineffective. And so I headed off to the pub.)
I look at the students and wonder what subjects they’re doing and what they’re like at languages. The protest movement is globalized in its anti-globalization and English must be pretty essential for the globe-trotting G8 protester. The demonstration brings back to the front of my mind a rather politically incorrect thought I’ve been having recently. Men and women use language differently, ok, we’ve all read Deborah Tannen. But I’m gradually coming to realise that men and women learn foreign languages differently too. As I think back to my lesson with the banker I recall him looking at the phrase ‘Yet, for all that,...’ and getting completely stuck in the traffic of the story, unable to go forward or backwards or even turn into another street. I think of a group of women - the same level - who never get held up by the odd word or phrase. Why is that? Because they’re already trying to do something else with another part of the text, or it’s reminded them of something else and they go off on that strand, or they’re making a note about another phrase they want to talk about. It comes down to the cliché of multi-tasking and mono-tasking. It’s quite a neat thought, one that’ll make Mafe and Luca laugh over coffee, and by the end of Corso Sempione I can see a research project. As I turn the corner into Monte Ceneri and head towards Bovisa I’ve already realised how much more research the project would take to be valid.
This leads me to two pieces of advice. One is not to start analysing every foreign language errors people make. The other is not to start thinking about academic research unless you you can think your way through to its delivery.
I turn left at the lights onto via degli Imbriani. There are some lethal lumps in the tarmac here and you have to concentrate as you turn. I almost hit one of the lumps as I start to think about one of the exercises your religion teacher got them to do. ‘Think of one of your vices and one of your virtues.’ I’m furious and I think of the line from Richard Dawkins about teaching children religion being a form of child abuse. He’s perfectly right. The only possible result of this task is to instil a sense of guilt in the children. I could give you a list of my flaws but I’m not sure I could tell you what my ‘vices’ are. What’s a six-year-old to do? Invent something, quick. As honest as you are, you came up with, ‘I tell lies’. (Which naturally isn’t true, thus proving the truth of your statement, I suppose.)
Advice is almost always forgotten, and I would expect you to forget all of this. I remember my mother telling me not to write and send letters late at night, which I’ve repeatedly found to my cost to be very good advice.
But Giacomo, I hope that if you read this (I’ll have told you already) you remember that I told you it’s not worth thinking about your ‘vices’; just be happy with who you are. You’re a wonderful person. You don’t need a religion to realise that.
(Yes, yes, I know, you’re all wonderful - it’s just that Giacomo’s been having a hard time of it at school recently.)
