To the Mouse, who turns ten today

Ten years.

A lot has changed for me since you turned up, dear Mouse. 

I led a busy life but without love, then, and assumed it would be forever thus. In fact the night you were starting the journey into the world I was on a blind date, having dinner with a chap so dull that regular sorties for fags and telephone updates about your mother's contractions from my mother were definitely the highlights of the evening. 

You finally made it out and I got to meet you. And a weird lightbulb went on in my head: suddenly there were children everywhere, babies, toddlers, first graders. This is the new batch, the new model, the world renewing itself, I would say to myself, while gazing at them in wonder, like I didn't know. But I didn't, hadn't known. 

It is impossible, when you are young, to look at children and see your replacement, the next generation, the future bosses, the future creators, consumers, patients, victims, criminals, poets and fools.

So when you arrived the things I did and my place in the word started to matter a little less but the stuff that happened in the world, the sorry state it was in, started to matter a lot. 

I lay in bed, stared out of a plane window into the night thinking about this, willing it, the world, until then just a badly lit stage for my brilliance, to be a better, juster, more gentle place, so it would be safe for you. 

You who were suddenly in it, so perfect and so complete, like you had always belonged to us, been part of us, your atoms and our atoms the same matter, launched at different speed across the universe. So that, all of a sudden, I couldn't look at my father without seeing you, or look at you without seeing your mother, or look in the mirror without seeing you staring back at me. 

Ten years. So, how was it for you?

Let me guess (shall I guess? You always want me to guess something these days..)The first ten years were a dream, not too unlike the slumber of the unborn. 

You are awake now - just. Everything is new and absorbing and yet you're often bored and time takes an age and a half to arrive, pass, go anywhere.

The next ten years and the ten after that will be an eternity, a lifetime, spent on a dizzying roller-coaster which suddenly mutates into the slowest of the slow slow slow-boats going nowhere, at all, ever, and then you are back climbing, climbing, climbing in the air -gasping, gulping- then barreling down again, wind in your hair, tears in your eyes, relief, exhilaration, laugher. Enjoy the ride, the fast bits and the slow, I beseech you.

Then the heavy decades begin, years will slot down with a dull thud, like £1 coins in the dark slit of time, faster and faster.

I'm not there yet but I suspect, or rather I surmise - from experience so far and observation - that towards the end there will be much kicking of the machine, to get scarcer and ever more inferior candy until the last coin is spent. 

Before you know it, before you know that it's the last, before you've had time to take the time to think (as you will have promised yourself a million times) about your life. Curtains. Silence. Discarded wrappings and no change left behind.

I realise how completely meaningless this would sound to a 10 year old boy like you. So let me recap and put this in a language you can understand:

Guess who my favourite little person in the world is? By what percentage? (50 per cent? 85 per cent? What do you say? 100 per cent?). Can you list any or all the ways in which I love you, can you? And finally, and for oh, the fourteen thousandth time, guess who's auntie's sweet Mouse?

In which I get my groove back. Lightly grilled, with a side of steamed broccoli.

So I'm on the 5:2 diet.
I know. I KNOW! But why don't you try to:

a) stop smoking a pack a day and shortly after
b) marry an enthusiastic cook affected by portion size blindness, at a time in your life when
c) your metabolism has reached the menopause and next thing you know you've gone and
d)buggered your back so that for months all exercise is excruciatingly painful.

Why don't you go and do that before you roll your eyes at me and give me the 'fad diets' talk?  At least I'm not on on diet pills (they are bloody expensive and the side eff... anyway, they're bloody expensive).

Thoughts so far:

For
Not at hard as I thought. You are doing this literally one day at the time. Today you fast (that means 500 calories or less) but tomorrow you get to eat normally - you are not on a diet diet.

Increased energy (arguably a rather manic energy at times but that's my favourite type anyway). In my case that has lead to increased creativity - I write more, get some interesting ideas, make interesting connections on the fasting days. (I feel quite sluggish on normal days- so now there are only 5 sluggish days a week when it used to be...always).

As I have said before, I have always held onto the meringue-chomping feminist high ground that dieting or thinking about food is an obscene waste of time and energy, holding  women back from the serious business of running the world. 

I still hold that view but I'm a pragmatist - a pragmatist who was staring size 16 in the face. Mildly obsessing over food twice a week (you have to, like, weigh carrot sticks and everything) beats obsessing over food, then consuming it, then obsessing over the food you have just consumed seven days a week.

It's totally true what they say, that you weirdly do not overeat on normal days. If anything, sporadic famine reboots your appetite and re-calibrates your sense of how large a portion should be, including the whole important basic notion that two helpings are twice as calorific as one. Yes, you read that correctly. Even if you were not particularly enjoying it and were just spooning it in your face in a half-hearted way while watching TV.  Yep, turns out that's still calories going in- who knew, right? 

But if you spent yesterday in a state of acute watchfulness, aware that a small cup of coffee with a small spoon of Splenda is 2 cal and an avocado a whopping 90, today you'll find it harder to shovel stuff in quite as mindlessly even though it is a 'normal day'.

Ultimately I guess the trick is to realise how abnormal it is - on any given day- to gobble a whole bag of jelly babies in one sitting if one has not in fact just completed an ultra marathon. The body doesn't have a chance to cope with that amount of sugar - it's simply cruel and unfair to put it through it just to give your taste buds a 15 minute thrill.

Stuff to watch out for
As my new science crush, the gorgeous Prof Robert H.Lustig, Chair of Charm and Twinkling at the University of Loveliness would say, a calorie is not a calorie, or rather - a calorie from a sprout does not do the same things to your system as a calorie from refined sugar.

So all this feverish calorie counting (on two days a week, granted, not seven) ends up producing questionable lapses, or even mini-breaks, from reason. Like when, thrown by an unexpected social engagement on the evening a 'fasting' day you find yourself muttering "How many calories in a small glass of red? A hundred? Fine, I'll have four!" and misinterpreting the shock on your friend's face you explain : "Well, I have splurged the other 100 on 180 gr of broccoli at lunch, so shoot me!"

But on the whole, actually you drink less.

Against
I suppose the only thing I can think of is sometimes, on a fasting day, when I lean in to kiss a friend goodbye I find myself thinking how totally appetising ear lobes look. Rosy, plump and yummy. Lightly grilled, with a side of steamed broccoli perhaps.

But as long as I don't bite that's not WEIRD weird, right?

My Family Values

Last week my take on the US sitcom Modern Family drew over a thousand readers and I managed to enrage most of them, or so it felt, by being WRONG about their favourite programme.

This makes me not a little apprehensive as I publish the second chapter of my memoir, exploring the family ties I had left behind in Italy to start a new life in the UK in 1989.  This time only a tiny minority of readers (three in all) are in any position to tell me I have got it wrong – but, believe me, they are articulate and vocal.

This chapter offers just a first glimpse into my family's dynamics. We were a small, ferociously matriarchal unit run with Stasi-like efficiency by mother. It was a busy, loud, demonstrative place in which my dad, the gentle slightly deaf professor, was always a little lost.

In subsequent chapters we learn why it is essential to ring the doorbell even if you have got keys, we find out why dad and I can never get served in an Italian shop, (which will in turn explain my love of queuing), see my sister get married, meet my nephew, the Mouse, and get all sorts of glimpses into my parents' childhood memories (father’s are rigorously historical, mother’s are a riot of magic realism). There will be more, much more, on family lore and prophetic dreams.

Loving, suffocating, maddening – isn’t what most families are like, the happy ones? Perhaps there is nothing unique about mine except that I always felt I’d have to leave them to become myself, a proper human, only to then spend two decades and counting missing them.

Towards the end of the book there will be a whole chapter imagining how wonderful it would be if I hadn’t left, if I had done what was expected of me and I could now see my sister every day and argue with mother about something as banal as the best way of getting a stain out of a towel.

The trick is not knowing any better. Not being able to imagine a different life, in a different place. But there you are, and here I am. And now, dear reader, meet the family.

Modern Family's values : they suck. (Ok, stop shooting now, I'm only on Series 1)

Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband and I are greedy gobblers of US tv box sets and have recently had our first taste of Netflix. Having devoured the last few episodes of Breaking Bad (isn't it amazing when Walt wakes up at the end and it's all been a dream?*), and waiting for the new House of Cards, Game of Thrones or  Boardwalk Empire to come out (why is it taking you so long TV-making people?!), we decided to settle in for a few hours a night of Modern Family. 

This sitcom was sold to us as funny (it is) and daring, in American terms, for representing unconventional family units as equally loving and worthwhile. So rotating around the central traditional family made up of mum, dad and three kids we have a gay couple who have just adopted a Vietnamese** baby and a May-December interracial second marriage, with a step-kid thrown in. 

As I said the script is funny, or at least funnier than the standard family themed fare but the values are straight from1950, minus homophobia and racism. Let me put this another way: when you cannot be nasty to queers and brown people anymore, the unapologetic and often default sexism really, really stands out.

In Modern Family no adult woman holds a paid job, aside from invisible but often referred to maids and cleaners, and predatory, career-obsessed, childless ex girlfriends. 

Adult women protagonist are- basically - stay at home moms who can't operate remote controls or anything 'too technical', or gold-digging and hysterical ladies who lunch. Teen-aged daughters are all but labelled by their own parents as the 'pretty/stupid one' and the 'homely/clever' one, and it is repeatedly advertised that unpopular-boffin daughter is headed for college whilst popular-bimbo daughter is not. In one episode we are told by her loving parents that realising her full potential will consist in "marrying someone destined for great things".

For avoidance of doubt, let me clarify that we are talking upped middle class families here, living in huge houses, replete with the latest creature comforts, driving multiple, huge cars. I guess in this economic stratum you'd have to be the actual family dog to NOT go to college, even in the sexist real world.  But the on-screen world is actually worse. 

While sons are encouraged to be different, to ignore bullies, to not be dictated to by the pubic perception of them and to be themselves, daughters are constantly kept in line with the warning that their reputation will suffer or that - this is my favourite on the creepy scale - this or that behaviour, aspiration or personal style is "how girls end up dead".

Boys are told to love who they are and to live without fear. Girls are told to police and change who they are and to live in fear - for their own good, of course.

Boys (and male friends and boyfriends) are never told not to harass, harm or molest their female counterparts. Girls are constantly given hints to 'not get raped'.

Like a picture hanged askew or the base thump from someone else's personal stereo, once you notice the sexism, (and it takes a while because - remember?- all the other values are so inclusive and liberal and because male protagonists do send themselves up and are made fun of all the time), it is impossible to ignore it and not to be annoyed by it. 

MMIH disagrees ("You are crazy"), which tells me that the sexism is indeed nicely calibrated to be undetectable by the average nice guy, distracted by the shiny baubles of racial and sexual tolerance. Heck, the writers themselves are probably unaware of it - or they might argue if pushed that they are describing the world as it is. Pretty girls are popular, slutty girls get raped. 

Except, you see, they are patently not describing the world as it is. A comically mismatched homosexual couple raising a child still raises more than eyebrows. Latina trophy brides don't generally have such an easy a ride, I'd argue, among the monied whites. 

But even in a fictional landscape where those things are possible, transcending sexism - the expectation that women should be policed and controlled, stick thin and beauty obsessed, confined to raising children and spending money, never earning it, the saintly yet saucy helpmates of their bumbling but well-meaning menfolk - well, that's a leap of the imagination too far.

Have these considerations stopped me from watching several more episodes of Modern Family? Hell, no. Will I watch more? It's winter, people. I'm broke. 'War and Peace' isn't grabbing me. So yes, of course I will.

Would I have it banned, burnt, or whatever other form of medieval barbarism is ascribed to us feminazis this week? Of course I wouldn't.

But I can't help noticing, that's all, and what saddens me is that any teenage girls who might be watching will probably not notice. They will assume that you can be an irrational, self-centred, loud gay man and be completely acceptable, a fat, weirdly precocious boy and still fit in, a childish, irresponsible dad and still be lovable, whereas straying from size 0, falling out with the popular crowd at school or being seen kissing a boy "is like girls end up dead". 

* No, that's not what happens. Anyway: gotcha!   
** My original post mistakenly stated this character is Cambodian. I have been alerted to my mistake by one of the comments and have amended accordingly.

Captain Europe, or, How my British Adventure Began

As threatened promised last week here is the first chapter of my memoir, entitled Captain Europe. I've uploaded it onto the My Memoir page as well.

  

The year is 1989. I am 20 years old.  It’s a September morning (rainy, no doubt) and I have just arrived in Edinburgh where I have transferred to the second year of a Sociology and Politics degree course.

I’ve spent my first few days wondering up and down the city’s cobbled streets, beaten into a trance of ecstatic submission by the gothic fairytale of its dark buildings, like a foreign princess lost in a petrified forest.  I’ve spent Freshers’ week not descending into oblivion down smoky beer cellars but climbing dusty staircases to introduce myself to tutors with messy offices tucked away in the recesses of old buildings.

I’ve joined the library and experienced the shock of seeing my first computer ever. I’m supposed to search for the books I need on this machine and the wild impossibility of this task temporarily defeats me. For the first and only time I concede to myself I might have made a huge mistake.

I’ve sat in silence and in awe in the massive lecture rooms where professors deliver their lessons from a lectern, with the unheard of (to me) accompaniment of projectors and slides. Finally I have gathered what is left of my courage and my energy and climbed one more set of stairs, to reach the office of the student newspaper - which is economically called ‘Student’….Dum Dum DUUUM! What do you think will happen next?

Anyway, I’m actually heading back to Edinburgh later this week, as it turns out, for a business trip which will segue into a week-end with old friends from Uni, many mentioned in this very chapter, sometimes under their real name. Who knew then that the rest of my life would be spent in this country and that they would very much be part of it still, nearly a quarter of a century later? Not I.

I came for a year, people!

A year is all I intended to stay for. I can’t think what can possibly have stopped me (aside from happiness, freedom, friends, plentiful jobs opportunities and generalized good-time-having) from fleeing these drizzly shores and returning to the sunshine and blue skies of home.

Still, I’m incredibly grateful that Scotland was my gateway to what turned out to me a whole new life in the UK. 

I'm following the independence debate from down south, witnessing the earnest conversations about what kind of country Scotland wants to be, how it wants to position itself in the world and towards its own citizens and my heart swells with pride. 

Martin Kettle put this very well in his Guardian piece last week. To paraphrase: whilst the existence of a distinctly Scottish social democratic consensus is up for debate, it's hard to challenge the fact that a lot of Scots believe their political culture is very different (from the Westminster toff-dominated waffle-fest). I believe they are right. I think it is.

Nowhere does this different political culture manifest itself more starkly, in my opinion,  than in the way Europe and 'abroad' are viewed and discussed. Down in London I increasingly feel like one of those EU scroungers the Telegraph and the Express hand-wring about. You know, the ones who came over here, paid student fees, bought a house and paid tax all their lives and then have the audacity to want to see an NHS dentist. 

But in Edinburgh I always felt and still feel welcome, with no need to intermittently justify my existence and right to be here. I’m not a foreigner – or at the very least I’m not English, which is all that matters really.

And every time I step off the train at Waverley station and look up at the gothic fairytale of the city's dark building (to coin a phrase) I am 20 again, and hopeful, and fearless and strong again, and the world is smiling at me even as the rain and the gale force winds bitch-slap me in the face.

Culture as Cosplay

This is a real, actual job, advertised in the Guardian a few weeks ago: 

"Head of Explorer Programme

Location: Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey KT8 9AU

Salary: £48,557 - £49,801      plus other benefits.

This is an exciting new role that has been created following the endorsement by HRP’s Board of new strategy for Learning and Engagement to 2016. The Explorer Programme Team is one of three main cross-palace learning strands." 

I don't know what a Head of Explorer Programme does or indeed what the other 'main cross-palace learning strands' might be. I'm not even sure I understand all the words in that sentence.

I haven't set foot inside Hampton Court Palace for a few years now. My husband and I  walked there from Richmond on a sunny Saturday afternoon only a few weeks ago, as it happens. But by the time we got there we had neither time nor strength left in our legs for a quick tour. I can confirm that it looked exactly as I remembered it from the outside but, boy, things much have changed within.

Had we joined the crowds of visitors, would we have been instructed to don stiff pleated collars 'for him' and velvet over-gowns 'for her' and drag ourselves around a themed 'cross-palace' itinerary? 'Cooking with Swans', perhaps, or 'Off With Their Heads!'? Would we have been goaded into courtly sing-alongs and lavender cushions-sewing tutorials?

This reminded me of the Beatles-style hotel in Liverpool called The Hard Day's Night. We are not talking about some old Viennese guest house making a fuss about having been patronised by Mozart, once. Nor are we talking about the Hannah Montana Pink Lodge of Hotness at Disney World (I'm sure it totally exists). This is themed accommodation for Beatles enthusiasts, commemorating a group of people half of whom are still alive and whose fan base is significantly older than 12 years of age.

I stayed at that hotel the last time I went to Liverpool, to see the Gustav Klimt exhibition. Had Tate Liverpool offered punters Secession-style ottomans inside the gallery itself -and a Sachertorte Breakfast -as part of the package I have no doubt I would have opted for that instead.

We live in a (still affluent, despite five years of rece/depression) society which increasingly mediates every cultural experience through the personal.

If you are a Star Trek fan who loves turning up at special conventions dressed up as a KIingon they call it cosplay.  It sounds like fun, if that's the sort of thing you like and, after all, pop culture is entertainment.

The question that occurs to me is: should all culture be cosplay? Should every cultural experience be 'immersive'(as the BBC jargon goes), a form of entertainment in which we must actively participate and experience in first person- wear the costume, sing along, bake-it-at-home?

It's a question worth asking, I think, if nothing else because, what with the cuts to everything, the worsening education system, the dwindling numbers going to university and the commodification of academic learning itself, we are headed towards a point where only the culture that can be served up as entertainment will survive.

Goodbye philosophy, ancient Greek, lengthy but wizard-free books of any kind, symphonies without short, famous bits that can be harnessed to do a honest day's work as mobile ringtones.

And maybe that's ok. I myself studied ancient Greek for five years at secondary school and I can't remember a single word of it. It hasn't done me any good, particularly, and I don't miss it now it's gone. I actively dislike most classical music and War and Peace is still gathering dust on the back pile by my bedside - the pile of books I should want to read but curiously don't want to read.

That said, 'Culture' is probably a bit more than 'stuff that's interesting to me' or 'stuff I personally want to know about'. It's a piece of DNA of our shared humanity. Knowledge of it is an end in itself, a vessel carrying it forward into the next generation, ensuring it is preserved and, in time, improved upon.

Maybe by giving up on it altogether unless I can 'explore' it through an interactive 'leaning strand' or knit it from a pattern is not such a good idea.

Goodbye Dante. You should have cheered up, mate!

Leaving Azzurro Behind – the journey of a reluctant Brit

In 2003 I was at a crossroads as a writer. 

I had written two novels and for each I had dutifully found, and subsequently lost, an agent after each, in succession, had tried and failed to find a publisher. Precisely two people, beside my minuscule family and my smallish circle of very good friends, had taken the time to read the hundreds of pages I had spent years writing and rewriting. 

I loved writing and believed I had something to say, a little something to add to the centuries’ old recorded human conversation, something that wouldn't be missed if it weren't there but wouldn't make the world a worst or duller place for being in it either. But the thought of subjecting myself to another two years of solitary confinement, for the entertainment of maybe ten people over the course of a week or two was too dismal too bear. 

That's when a sympathetic agent-to-be suggested I use my foreignness and familiarity with storytelling to pen "one of those travelogues about people who have moved to another country with hilarious results". Why didn't I, in other words, do a reverse 'Year in Provence'-job, chartering the agony and the ecstasy, the freedom and the foolishness of abandoning sunnier shores for the grey and the drizzle of this Sceptered Isle? Reader, I did just that, with hilarious results indeed. 

By the time I had finished the third draft no publisher could be cajoled into taking an interest in ‘Leaving Azzurro Behind’. What was fashionable now, I was told, were tales of third generation immigrants from far flung Commonwealth outposts. So there! I had lost another agent but by that stage I had found my future husband and domestic bliss lessened the disappointment and my appetite for rejection in the publishing killing fields. Besides, I had now one more reader on tap, increasing my net readership by about ten per cent at a stroke.

Years went by. People, even people I knew, started publishing their writing online and I myself dipped my toe in the shallow end of the blogging paddling pool. That got me thinking. Whilst I'm not ready for the full blown Amazon-turbo-self-Kindling thing yet, I have lost faith in traditional publishing being the sole arbiter of what deserves to be out there. Thus my lack of success through traditional routes is less inhibiting these days and can no longer repress my desire to share my writing with other people, including those not related to me, not sharing my bed and not invited to my birthday parties, you know, people out there in the world, people I do not know. People like you. 

So I have decided to publish my memoir on this website, a chapter at a time, storing the various chapters as I go on the handily named 'My Memoir' page. I shall alert you with a short post every time a new chapter is uploaded and you can offer your comments and observations at the bottom of the post in the usual way. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. So, here is the introduction to the book. 

Bear in mind, as you read, that although the writing itself has been much revised subsequently, the events described are still seen from the perspective of my 2003-2005 self, the self at the time of writing. I was a TV reporter, single and occasionally lonely in the big foreign city, often still pining for the azzurro sky of home. Little did I know what was to become of me a decade on. I am the perfect unreliable narrator, talking about ‘my life so far’ from a present which is now in the past. Mind-boggling, wouldn’t you agree? 

On a more mundane level the book concerns itself with the stuff of real life anywhere – student friendships, family lore, first jobs, flat-shares, house hunting, cowboy builders, bastard boyfriends, nights out, gym visits, other people’s weddings. I was too young for funerals but if the print version ever comes out there’ll be a chapter on those, I can assure you. You also get to peek into more unusual places : newspaper offices, TV sets, parliament buildings. I take you with me secret filming in Meditarranean zoos, UFO-hunting in Canada’s snowbound wilderness, to citizenship ceremonies and residential writing courses. 

History’s low hum sometimes becomes thunder, the Wall comes down, bombs explode in Madrid, then in London and I wonder what I’m doing with my life, my precious yet meaningless life, so far away from home. But the great financial crash of 2008 and subsequent recession and depression, the Euro crisis, the Arab Spring are not yet even glints in the typesetter’s eye. (I notice now that 9/11 is curiously there and not there, wallpaper already by the time of writing. I didn’t witness it, not even on TV, as I was travelling through Turkey by coach at the time, and it was clearly so huge and all-encompassing an event to have become a fact of life by the time of writing, not worth re-describing by me). 

Last but not least I try to decode Englishness from Britishness, I offer handy tips on how to dress like an Italian and I muse about how language maketh the man, indeed the people. You will discover why you literally cannot patronise an Italian and why taking a shower, instead of having one can be so, so much more invigorating than you thought possible. Have a read and tell me what you think. I hope you like it – even just a little bit.