Winter in Italy

Official clarification: yes, winter it's 'a thing' here too....

Venn Diagram of rodent-related affection

Abercrombie Hell

I'd only ever heard of Abercrombie & Fitch, the ugly brand for pretty people, because of their unfortunate but unapologetic determination to discriminate against both employees and customers who do not fit into their standard of beauty.

I have lived a long and happy life without ever feeling the need to darken the doorstep of one of their shops. Unfortunately Lil' Sis decided she really wanted us to buy a A&F sweatshirt for dad: he had once borrowed one and looked good in it, it knocked a couple of decades off him and so on. 

There are no A&F shops in our home town. Lil' Sis has taken care of parental Xmas presents and much else besides since time immemorial. It was my turn to step up to the plate.

The London main store resembles a latter-day Aladdin cave, dark with spotlights shining on jewel-coloured piles of distressed apparel, and perfumed oxygen and very loud music aggressively pumped into the air.

Models/assistants of either gender (that’s what they call themselves), tall, lissom & Bambi-eyed bat their long eyelashes at you uncomprehendingly whatever your request then lead you through a guided tour of the premises, languidly pointing at shelves like sleepy children, hoping, you realise eventually, that you yourself will end up spotting what you were looking for.

At the slightest provocation they then offer to strip to their innermost layer to try on a garment for you, if you are buying something for the opposite gender, that is. Although it's entirely possible that if I'd been looking at a lady's sweatshirt a 16year old girl might have also approached and offered to show me what it looked like 'on her'. It doesn't bear thinking about, really.

In the course of the next 40 minutes I made the following discoveries:

1) I'm old - it's official.  

Not only did I find the music too loud, the bizarre sprayed perfume too strong; not only was I Madam-ed throughout by the model/assistant who served me. I also found I could flirt with him without blushing, like a grandma beyond reproach, without even a whiff of MILF-ery about it.  At one point I heard myself say that the elderly father I was buying  the sweatshirt for "is not as muscly as you". Random, random horrors.  

He, in turn, could hear this stuff without blushing - just a polite laugh and the gentle expression of someone who fully expects you to launch into a  description of your aches and pains next. Which, in a way, I was.

2) Shops aimed at the young, monied brain-dead only seem to stock L and XL for men and S and XS for women. It's the law. I suspect in all cases the range of sizes is the same: 0 to twig. But men are encouraged to think themselves as big, women as small. My un-trendy dad is an unfashionable 'Medium' and that turned Mission Unpleasant into Mission Impossible, but with a Greek chorus of  gorgeous kids wishing me happiness and an 'awesome day', rather than villains stroking cats.

3) Un-stitched, distressed designs and artificially faded fabrics are in. In fact you can buy little else.  But it still costs a packet. For more background analysis of my take on the style, I refer you back to point 1)

Women policing it for themselves

So the wretchedly misguided Clare's Law is going ahead after all. A proposal so barmy it looked made up is actually going to become law in England and Wales.

Here were my thoughts at the time this was first mooted, and let me tell you, I haven't changed my mind.

It seems it's now accepted practice that if women want anything done at all they have to do it themselves - like second class citizens who are not fully entitled to the protection of the state. Hence the campaigns to take down violent misogynistic content on FB, or to fight back violent trolls on Twitter, hence the battle to force police to take rape seriously, to even record complaints made, to protect children against grooming  (with desperate families, in one recent case, told to sit it out and wait till the girls are too old to be of use to their groomers).

But asking women to consult a register to find out of their perspective boyfriend has a history of being a violent thug is a step too far. For one thing it seems to fully outsource the responsibility for women's protection to the potential victims themselves. For another, the logic of the initiative fails at the first hurdle: if enough were done to identify and neutralise violent men in the first place they'd be behind bars, where they cannot pose any risks, not out there luring new victims. Who, in other words, is going to be on this register?

And when are we going to go full circle, give women a gun and a pair of handcuffs and wish them good luck?

To Breed or not To Breed? How to make a drama (well, a play) out of a very recent female dilemma.

You know that image of a clock showing that if Earth has existed for a day 'man' has only appeared, in evolutionary terms, at five minutes to midnight?

Well, the subatomic watch hasn't been invented yet that can accurately record the infinitesimally short time in the history of the world in which women have had some say in reproduction. 

For most of human history women got children like they got arthritis or tapeworm: no choice at all in the matter. In a lot of places they still don't have any. 

I guess by the early 60s the invention of the pill gave some women (those from relatively affluent backgrounds living in relative affluent countries) a fairly accurate technique to avoid pregnancy - we're talking a window of the last 50 years or so.

As for permission to decouple sex from reproduction, and have sex for the sheer hell of it, we need to wait till the sexual revolution proper - 1968/69 say - although even that would have been news to my mother, who was still busy being a virgin and planning a big white wedding right then. 

In other words, in the great scheme of things women have had a choice as to when they want to become mothers for mere nanoseconds. After that, for a few years we called it 'family planning' and left it at that, happy enough to be allowed to keep our brood down to manageable proportions, provided you didn't tell the priest, of course.

And yet, right on cue like the first gay divorce following the first gay marriage (and proof to conservatives everywhere that there's no pleasing people), the existence of this choice has generated a fresh dilemma and accompanying agony galore, namely whether we want to have children at all.

How will it change our lives? Do we want our lives to change? What happens if we don't want to? Is motherhood too high a price to pay for bringing children into the world? If so, can you lead a worthwhile life without putting reproduction at the heart of it? Will we regret not doing it? Or worse, will we regret ignoring our gut feeling if we do do it?

Let me specify that I am very much talking about being child-free i.e. the choice not to become mothers, instead of the tragedy of being child-less for women and couples who desperately want parenthood. 

The choice is there, you'll say at this point: why are you still yakking on about this? Because, my friend, it is the choice that kills you. 

Let's consider the data for a second. There aren't yet any large longitudinal studies that I'm aware of highlighting specifically the number of women who have chosen to remain child-free. 

But a 2002 study on Childlessness in Europe by the Economic and Social Research Council showed that in Britain 7 to 8pc of 42-year-old women identified themselves as voluntarily childless, with that figure raising to 12 pc for 30-year-olds. Astonishingly, another third of women aged 30 said they were ambivalent/uncertain about having children in future. 

In 2010 a widely reported US study found that one in five women in their early 40s are now childless, compared to one in ten in the early 1970s. The report found that women with more education were more likely to be childless.

And earlier this year the Office of National Statistics released 2011 figures for England and Wales, showing that one in five women at the age of 45 are childless.

They can't all be infertile or unlucky in love, right? It looks as if women, particularly educated ones, are voting with their feet against motherhood.

I came across those figures when I was agonising over this myself, a few years ago, after meeting my Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband and having therefore run out of excuses of the 'Bridget Jones' variety. 

I found the figures but no debate whatsoever, no literature, no art of any kind addressing the dilemma itself. Lots of Western women, women of my generation and background, were quietly dropping out of reproduction without saying a word about it or leaving any explanation behind.

Recently the issue of non-reproduction has had its fair share of publicity and discussion: stories in the Atlantic magazine, covers of Time, anguished BBC documentaries about nations like Japan quietly driving themselves to extinction rather than address the problems that make the idea of motherhood so abhorrent to many of its women.   

But the dilemma is still not talked about, the internal struggle some of these non-mothers by choice will go through before allowing themselves to make that choice.

As I couldn't find anything informative and inspiring to read on the matter I did the next best thing - I decided to write about it. More specifically I wrote a play exploring that dilemma from a number of angles - six to be precise, one for each of the six colleagues who struggle to their office in central London the morning after a huge snowfall. 

Dylan is bringing up two kids on her own.

Bowie is a cheating dad of three.

Drake might have liked a child but now it's too late.

Jones has all the time in the world ahead of her to think about it.

Conte has finally met a guy would make A Great Dad. So what's wrong with her that  the idea of motherhood seems so grim?

Cohen hopes to grow into a good man and a good father one day.
But no one, apparently, is interested. 

There is no singing, no nudity, no gory scenes of childbirth. No ancient pistol appears on a drawing room wall in the second scene of act one, only to go off in a totally predictable way at the end of act three. There is, however, a lot of swearing.

Beyond that, let me be honest here and admit that my qualifications for writing a play are the same as for flying a plane: I have sat through hundreds of plays and on hundreds of planes, but I've never been in charge of either. The hope, with play-writing, is that I shouldn't cause anybody to actually die, and serious damage to buildings and infrastructure should be minimal. That is the hope anyway. 

To find out for sure I've decided, with the encouragement of my amateur dramatic director friend Antonia, to get this play performed. Unfortunately she's leaving London soon so I need another passionate director and six brilliant and committed thesps to make this happen.

If theatre is in your blood and you live in the London area please get in touch with me on Twitter (@Peebi). 

C'mon baby, let's make a drama out of a crisis!

Are you man enough to take the Sock Challenge?

The Brits have grown incredibly fashion-conscious in the years I’ve observed them close up, but they remain, how shall I put it, endearingly inconsistent about clothes. So I decided to devote a whole chapter of my memoir, (chapter four, no less) to the phenomenon.

    I started by noticing that despite the ubiquitousness of everything, the sameness of everywhere, despite the fact that countries and people are all slowly merging into one pulsating, digital, grey soup and we all shop in the same shops and buy the same stuff and listen to the same music and aspire to the same virtual dreams, despite all that, it is still possible, walking down a British high street, to pick an Italian man from 20 metres away, and before they’ve opened their mouths.

    There are potent and telling details – the fluorescent Invicta rucksacks and scuffed Superga trainers of the under 18s, the beautiful leather shoes and dark blue quilted jackets the over 50s, the stylish eyewear, the layers of jumpers and padded waistcoats and scarves even at the height of summer. But this is easy, I hear you protest.

    I’d be prepared to accept a much tougher challenge: pick a British and an Italian man who have the same colourings, clothe them in exactly the same suit and shoes and I can still tell you which is which the minute they sit down. If you can discern a strip of bare hairy flesh between the trouser leg and the edge of a Bart Simpson sock, there’s your Brit. The Italian will have subdued dark woollen socks reaching up all the way to the top of his calf and firmly held in place there by an elasticised edge. 
    
   Nothing can prepare an Italian adult woman for the sartorial mess that is the British adult male. Before arriving on these shores the only instances in which I’d seen grown men in short socks emblazoned with cartoon characters was on tennis courts and at visiting hours on hospital wards (psychiatric wing). 
    
   So how about you, or the man in your life? Could you, could he take the sock challenge? For more on this and other tips on urban camouflage to unleash the Italian in you (deep, deep inside you, somewhere) you can read the whole chapter here.

Where have all your manners gone?

There used to be a time, as Italian correspondent Beppe Severgnini famously wrote, when it took no fewer than six ‘thank you’s to purchase a bus ticket in London. Those times, they are a-changing. In fact they’ve gone and a-changed and, to be frank, they are no more. 

The other  day, coming back from a hospital visit on a bus full of ill, old or otherwise infirm people I personally witnessed a driver/conductor eject an 8-year-old school kid after a screaming standoff over an expired bus pass, with much horrific language deployed on both sides.

“The English are so fake!” my visiting Italian friends used to moan, mistaking a) Britain for England and b) basic civility among strangers for canning duplicity, never having actually witnessed it at home. When those friends visit now they need no longer fear nuanced interactions, fraught with baroque circumlocutions of courtesy. The civic space here is now as joyless, pushy and downright brutal as anywhere else. 

This was already true when I started writing my memoir and this is what chapter three, which I've uploaded today, is about among many other things, things that include queuing, accents, holiday homes, answering machine messages, nepotism and mobile phones. A mixed bag of reminiscences if you like, about how your country has changed in all the time I’ve been here and what was happening meanwhile to my own.  

I hope you’ll have a giggle. The usual proviso applies: this was written in the years between 2003 and 2005, and although I've been doing much refining and rewriting since, I have not updated the actual experiences described.

To be sure the print edition will have to have a special post-scriptum dealing not just with the death of manners but with the messy, bloody autopsy to follow.  Internet trolls, twerking starlets, wall to wall porn will be the dismal Greek chorus of the tragedy of all once-great British institutions slowly collapsing into disrepute, scandal, corruption, ineffectiveness or simple decline, from the BBC and Fleet Street to the Metropolitan Police and the NHS, from expense-claiming MEPs to tax-dodging corporations, via a whole new low level of political discourse dominated by poor-people-kicking, immigrant-bashing and victim-blaming.

Although, come to think of it, I will probably not want to write that book. It's just too sodding depressing.