You're not the Pope of me!

Over the years I've read with trepidation in a number of women's magazines, (those caring, nurturing begetters of useful information and self-affirmation that play such an important role in making sure the female gender remains the most politically powerful and economically successful), that once a woman reaches middle age she becomes invisible. Incredibly, (because they are normally so accurate and objective, don't you find?), this is in fact not true at all.

Having recently-ish crossed to the other side of 40 I can state that - if anything - there tends to be, well, much more of you to meet the eye -let's say a third more than your highly visible but whippet thin 16 year old you.

Secondly, just as you achieve the bank balance to buy decent clothes they stop producing decent clothes for the likes of you but - cheer up! - because in turn everybody but everybody develops an opinion about what you should wear.

Shopping with my sister these days is like shopping with Jiminy Cricket - a slender, pocket-sized conscience who, when summoned, pops her head through the curtains of the changing room, appraises you with a calm, even stare and only ever says one syllable: No. You know she is right - nothing fits you and you can save yourself a lot of money and burn some serious cals by trying on a lot of stuff and then just buy the occasional handbag.

Mild mannered intellectual husband would have me in a burka but for quite opposite reasons. Unaccountably, he thinks I'm so damn attractive that showing any part of me, wearing any colour or pattern, not to mention make-up, would send other men into a lustful frenzy. That's not how he puts it, of course, being English and reserved and rather shy. His standard phrase is something along the lines of :"Gowd! That eye-shadow/blouse/boots makes you look like a Neapolitan stripper!"

On my visits home my mother starts excavating through the geological layers of her wardrobe and comes up with - in no particular order - elasticised black trousers, ankle length brown velour skirts, the odd faux-Pucci miniskirt dress from her youth, moth eaten furs, safari jackets, pink towelling turbans (they were fashionable for about 6 minutes in the late 60s apparently), lays them down on her bed and offers them to me indiscriminately. She has either "just bought it for me at the Piazza Palermo market" (that would be the elasticised stuff) or "kept it for me" from her well dressed signorina days. She is adamant I should wear floral patterns and shorter hair. She actually likes me in lipstick and is indignant that my husband "won't let me" (although that also subtly reassures her about him being "a real man").

Weirdly it is me who cares less these days. I don't need other people's approving gazes to feel that I exist, that I take up space in the word (too much space, you could argue, but then I don't care what you think, remember?), that I am of (some) consequence.

My body will never be "bikini-ready" ever again - so I can save myself at least two months and several thousand pounds of extra detoxing/liquid diets/algae wraps/anti-cellulite creams every year. Last year's swimming costume will do.

I could not care less what platformed/fake-furred/transparent/paisley-infested monstrosities are gracing the catwalks this year, soon to trickle into pret-a-porter must-haves in every woman's magazine (Biggest Ever Issue! Bumper Style Section! All The Latest Trends!!!).

No-one can possibly walk in what passes for high heeled shoes today. They are a modern day form of feet-binding pure and simple and uglier than callipers. I mean, really? No one can possibly look anything else but stupid in "harem pants" and, guess what, if my aspirations hadn't stretched beyond the harem I'd never have left Italy, saving myself a lot of hassle

Incidentally, is this what being a man feels like? Quiet self-acceptance, dignified anonymity, comfortable footwear? No wonder they have more time and stamina to get that promotion/launch that new business venture/fight that election. Not caring about what men think of me, what other women I might once have competed with for male attention think of me or whether I am sufficiently visible and attractive to men, I have become, weirdly, more like a man myself. (I like it!!! Now, who do you have to screw around here to get rid of periods too???)

If anything I think it is younger women who are becoming/made to feel increasingly invisible. Like their male counterparts they struggle to find meaningful employment - so far so equally crummy. But once they have paid their dues in a succession of low-paid jobs or unpaid internships, just as they are about to reap the rewards they start getting overlooked for better positions in case they decide to have children. Then the whole of society starts yelling at them about their 'biological clocks' till they start hearing the - often imaginary -clocks themselves and the desperate rush begins to find a suitable, not too ape-like man-child with whom to stumble into motherhood .

Needless to say the men in question are never ready, never sure, keeping their options open and so on. Hence the fake tan, fake (now exploding!) tits, and the scrubbing, the shaving, the starving. They are literally erasing their selves to become acceptable, impregnate-able, to be seen.

It isn't getting better, it's getting worse.

While once young girls might have been patronised with the reassurances that "one day" women would be doctors and airplane pilots and , who knows, even astronauts, if they tried very very hard and played by the rules, nowadays being playthings, pretty dolls who take 'ironic' pole-dancing classes, then becoming unpaid milk maids and cleaners is all young girls are being told they should aspire to. No, not by their parents or teacheers necessarily, but by just about every form of marketing, media, advertising - by the - for lack of a better word- The Culture.

Sure, in the dream scenario all this comes with money into the bargain, international travel, iPads, breathy blogs about being domestic goddesses for the posh ones, stardom on reality TV for the trashy ones. It's not like they are being oppressed. Not like they are in chains in a cave (well, not very often - and mainly in Austria).

Still. We have a Republican candidate for the US presidency who thinks that not just abortion, but contraception should be made illegal. If he wins and this vision comes to pass New York City girls might have to stock up for condoms in Vatican City, where contraception still puts you in hell after death but not yet in jail in this life. If this is the level of debate in the free world- with women's bodies used as those plastic scale battlefields models- surely the institutionalised, normalised cave, Afghanistan with air-con, cannot be that far behind.

The truth is that the kind of 'visibility' middle-aged women are supposed to lose- the visibility of being pleasing to another's eye, the visibility of the harem - has no real power attached to it. It's all a sad, shabby illusion. The power remains firmly with those who do not have to totter on ridiculous heels to business meetings and who do not spend their money having potentially carcinogenic implants sewn into their bodies. Those who do not lactate, don't wipe snot all day long and still have full control of their bladders.

And if you think this is harsh you'd better give me a very wide berth when I'm premenstrual. Assuming you can actually see me, of course.

The impossibility of queuing in the mind of the Italians

Remember that pretentious piece of Young British Artists’ crappery, the pickled-shark-in-a-tank entitled “The Impossibility of death in the mind of the living”, back when Lord Saatchi didn’t think it too vulgar to buy dead animals and stained bed sheets ? Well, I don’t know about death but it turns out Damian Hirst’s creation perfectly captures the Italian state of mind when faced with the concept of queuing.

I had this realisation last week, travelling home to spend New Year with The Family. We have Christmas with His Family, during which enough mini sausages wrapped in bacon are consumed that if you lined them up ....well, you’d be ashamed of yourself. After the Holy Porkathon, a spell with The Family is part detoxing spa (meals at my sister’s), part Seventies pre-cooked Neapolitan feasts (meals at my mother’s). But I digress.

Waiting to catch our plane at Stanstead I observed the behaviour of the mostly Italian crowd: it was  comical in its attempt to not form an orderly line. I’m not talking about queue-jumping here, average rudeness, sharp elbows. No, these were peaceful and courteous enough family groups spreading themselves as widely as possible or condensing in impenetrable little clusters in the narrow corridors, blocking the passage to other gates and the pilots' and staff’s own progress towards our plane, seemingly out of a freakish distaste for the appearance of queuing, while in fact, to all extent and purposes, actually queuing.

 It was a fascinating spectacle. It’s as if even once they had accepted they had to wait and by and large their place was behind other people, who had annoyingly, you know, arrived earlier, they couldn’t quite give up the hope that somehow, someone would lift them from the scrum and deposit them at the front of the queue or indeed directly into Genoa’s passport control lounge, as long as no one was looking or paying too much attention to where one ought to stand. A sort of spatial magical thinking, if you like.

 Another, more irritating type of Italian walked straight past us in the doubling up queue as if everybody else was a little dense and they were the only ones to have worked out a secret way in, a safe passage halfway through. They were all, invariably sent back as said safe passage failed to materialise and had to squeeze their way past the above mentioned families, again. The vast airport was at times nearly brought to a standstill by these slowly moving gluts of Italians unfamiliar and/or unresigned to the concept of standing in a straight line.

This would just be one of those things and wouldn’t matter so much if I didn’t have the sneaking suspicion that it’s the self same mentality which afflicts otherwise quite reasonable people and infects them with the illogical delusion that it is possible for most of them, the clever ones, not to pay tax and yet still expect functioning schools and hospitals (it’s those dense other Italians who insist on paying you see...). That it’s better to elect time and again a buffoon who tells us all is wonderful and entertains us with his frat-house behaviour at foreign summits rather than face the uncomfortable fact that we have priced our children out their own lives. So that even now the talk is that after a year of Mario Monti’s bitter (and many fear regressive and growth-choking) austerity Berlusconi may actually win another turn by promising another magical million new jobs and several more magical tax cuts – the same he has promised before and, you guessed it,  never delivered.

Would it be so terrible to... face the shark, so to speak, to feel the fear and queue anyway? Renaissance paintings and marble cathedrals are all very well but,  bar for a spot of stylish Vespa-riding in the heady 60s of the economic boom, we have actually achieved fuck all that’s worthy of note in the past 500 years,  busy as we were pretending to be smarter, richer, further up in the line than other people. 

We are funny but not that funny. The food you can get anywhere these days. We soon won’t be able to afford the clothes. Global warming is giving even England a lovely Mediterranean climate. We are not that special any more, just extremely screwed. Might as well absorb some basic rules of civilised behaviour – say queuing - and purge ourselves of the philosophical fallacy that rules must only be obeyed in the presence of an authority figure  ‘making you’. (Yes, taxi-driving morons of my home town, I am talking to you :  the passenger behind you can in fact kill you in a crash if they are not using the rear seat belt even if no policemen are present or bothered about tenforcing that particular law. It’s called momentum and it’s a physical force you cannot bargain with, unlike the vigili urbani).

Might as well elect people who can conjugate verbs and have no previous convictions, and elect them on the basis of what needs to be done and what we think they can actually deliver (not what sounds lovely and they say convincingly and often enough). And maybe we should hold them accountable for the decisions they take and check on the delivery of the promises they make. That of course would imply a professional and competent press which wasn’t organised and run like a medieval guild crossed with a mafia family. And while we are at it we should perhaps look into utilising the 52pc of the population which currently does so well at school only to disappear in the kitchen, like the 70’s was something that happened to other women.  

We have delayed the plane long enough- soon it will leave whether we are on board or not - what more have we got to lose? Let's get in line people!

Old Age - a preview

It started last year with a pain in my foot. After much hobbling and cursing, slight improvements and much relapsing I was finally diagnosed with something that sounded like a right-wing regime in a southern US state: Plantar Fasciitis.

Not for me delicate, feminine afflictions, say tension headaches or anorexia. No, Sir! Extrapolating from the GP's vague words I had been hit by what fat people get when they pathetically decide to exercise while still carrying around their huge, flabby hulk.

After getting expensively fitted with special insoles for my shoes (one type for the running shoes, one type for flat city shoes etc ) the pain got better and eventually disappeared. I was able to resume the regime of huffing and puffing and sweating profusely in lycra garments that keeps me looking so good (what is your secret??).

Now the pain is back. Having just finished a wonderful non-fiction book about cancer, The Emperor of all Maladies, I'm keeping my options open but on balance I think it might be the Fasciitis again.

I'm back to shuffling slowly and wincing visibly with pain whenever I get up, sit down, shift weight from one foot to the other, walk or stand still.

The pain makes me tired and the slowness means I do only a fraction of what I would normally (although mild-mannered intellectual husband claims that most of my kinetic activity generates more heat than light, I still consider this a result! in these times of precarious energy supply).

I find myself calculating the cost effectiveness (or pain/slowness to accomplishment ratio) of any activity - the extra three steps to look into a colleague's office, the walk to the cafeteria - and obsess about how long it will take me and whether I will have the sheer strength to go from A to B.

Your thoughts turn inwards - piloting your body like a battered battleship is all you have energy for. You look at people running up a flight of stairs, jogging, kids skipping down the street with fascination and nostalgia. Oh, yes, you remember that....but you live in another country now.

I have the sneaking suspicion this is what old age will feel like, but applied across the board, from hearing to sex , to digestion - a great huge list of stuff you cannot do anymore, can do but slowly and painfully, could do but it's hardly worth the bother these days. Plenty of wincing and moaning. A creeping bitterness and annoyance at the rest of the world: everyone else seems so strong, brash, loud and in a hurry- what's the hurry? Where is everyone going?

This is it, I've reached the base camp of old age. The long ascent towards oblivion and death begins. Fascist southern foot permitting,

The Second Coming (pace William Butler Yates)

What is the poem you wish you had written? (What do you mean you've never thought about it? What are you doing here?? This blog is not for you, weirdo. The Top Gear Fans Facebook page is over there.)

As for the rest of you lot - let me tell you mine.

When I was young and unrequited love (they hadn't invented any other type yet) occupied 97pc of my thoughts , I would have said the stanzas about Paolo and Francesca, the romantically doomed lovers in the 5th canto of Dante's Inferno. It's soooo much better sounding in Italian:

"Amor che al cuor gentil ratto s'apprende,

prese costui della bella persona che mi fu tolta,

e il modo ancor m'offende.

Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona,

presemi del costui piacer si forte,

che come vedi ancor non m'abbandona...."

Bear in mind they were cast in hell for having kissed - without tongues or anything - and that seemed mild compared to what your average Catholic priest promised in confession if the matter of sex was ever raised (normally by him).

These days, with bad news, anxiety and dark premonitions dominating 97pc of my thoughts I find the first eight lines of Yates's The Second Coming beautifully prescient of whatever new horror happens to be obsessing me at the time. Damn, how I wish I had written that!

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

the falcon cannot hear the falconer"

A versatile verse, if you'll pardon the alliteration, alluding to anything from rampaging youths to out of control mice infestations.

"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.."

Where to even begin here??? It's, as they say, pure poetry, but so practical too. All office politics is in this sentence (particularly my office's politics), as well as generic inner city riots, marital squabbles, family feuds, the messy demise of geriatric relatives, one's own middle-aged aches and pains suddenly taking on epic dimensions: you name it, this verse caters to it all.

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere,

the ceremony of innocence is drowned."

Ok, this starts as ANY front page of the FT these days, then it transitions into tabloid-land and ends on notes of reality TV. Incredibly succinctly, too.

Finally, the masterstroke:

"The best lack of conviction while the worst

are full of passionate intensity."

From the UK veto to the ineptitude of opposition governments in any of the main democracies, from the warnings of recent history to the behaviour of your nearest and dearest (not to mention colleagues), all human life is here.

So what is the poem you wish you had written? Your turn now.

(Or we could forget all about it, save some energy and go back to sobbing under the duvet.)

New, improved nostalgia!

Everybody used to be so much younger, have you noticed that? These days whenever you switch the TV on you find yourself staring at only vaguely recognisable, grotesquely aged people you used to fancy. On Facebook you are stalked by an army of bloated, and semi-canute zombies you last saw as fresh faced 18 year olds....what on earth happened to everyone?

I was reminded of this when I woke up this morning and found we were now living in a two speed Europe, with Britain seemingly marooned on the hard shoulder of the slow lane, pretty much on its own. You see, the last time Britain appeared so isolated in Europe was nearly 20 years ago (over Mad Cow Disease, of all things); my hair didn't need dyeing and I had a discernible waistline - happy days!

I was young but it didn't matter as I was A) very single, and B) not very cool. All the cool stuff happened later. I had never used a mobile phone and knew nobody who did. I had never been on the internet or sent an email. I filed for the paper I worked for from my Brussels office using a temperamental modem which sang a little atonal song dissolving into static and was so slow you practically had to crank it up by hand.

The Brussels press core was the largest in the world - eurosceptics were at the very least kept well informed, (not least by the BBC which had a huge, humming bureau there), if somewhat largely restricted to the UK (and a few Danes agitating for more environmental protection and more labour rights).

While I was busy growing older, plumper, married and internet savyy, with not one but two mobile phones in my briefcase, successive governments appear to have spent the best part of twenty years failing to make the case for Britain's place in the EU while refusing to take the country out of it.

This latest showdown it is not about the status of offal or the danger levels of tallow and bulls' semen, (oh, yes, we had a ball in that press room all those years ago...) but private equity funds, credit default swaps and the sacred right of the City to do whatever it wants, no matter how poisonous it might turn out to be.

Just for the record it might be worth remembering the context in which Britain's recent refusal to play came into being:

The single market, which the PM was determined to protect, very much includes financial services. Decisions in that field are taken with Qualified Majority Voting, a game in which it actually helps if you have allies prepared to scratch your back occasionally.

By contrast the feared Financial Transaction tax needs unanimity to be approved, so Britain already had a veto on it. As for paying for the sins of others, Britain will continue to contribute to the IMF, whose funds will presumably also be used to clean up the mess in the Eurozone.

David Cameron has spent the past two months lecturing the others ever more shrilly about the need to get their house in order and to sort out the eurozone before a catastrophe there takes his country down too. Yet Britain's contribution to the process at this crucial time was the petulant shrug of a six year old who's not playing anymore.

I hope he has a clever secret plan we don't know about, because what this looks like is he was bounced into a position of impotence and irrelevance by a desire to appease the unappeasable back home, to no discernable extra benefit for the country as a whole.

I would go back to tallow and the status of offal any day. But then who wouldn't like to be 22 again?

It's my country and I'll cry if I want to!

Italian ministers weeps while announcing austerity drive. Meanwhile pensioners, high on cocaine and clutching absinthe cocktails, are too busy with their bunga bunga parties to notice. Only one of these statements is true. But they both sound unlikely, right?

Take a look at the extraordinary footage of Elsa Fornero, new welfare minister in Mario Monti's technocratic government and erstwhile tough-cookie-banker-person, who burst into tears at the thought of the sacrifices she was about to exact from above mentioned pensioners. Who, you guessed it, were not drunk and bunga-ing at all at the time. More likely, pissed off and shivering in their homes.

People back home don't know what to make of blubber-gate and nor, I confess, do I.

I feel mildly irritated that as soon as a woman of substance, the highlight of whose professional career is NOT a Pirelli Calendar, is allowed to the to table she ends up making a feeble spectacle of herself.

Come to think of it, I feel extremely irritated by the self-pitying subtext of her quote, that this is taking a psychological toll on her and her colleagues.

Most of all, I'm puzzled at her apparent shock and surprise. Are we to presume that when Monti called he didn't mention the small difficulty of cash flow experienced by the state at the time and relative need to slash and burn in manner of marauding Huns? (What on earth did he say?? "Yo, Elsa? Fancy a spin in ma motor? Gonna Pimp My country, cos shit is going down, you feel me?" I mean, did she think it would just be bit of naughty fun ?)

But also...

I feel strangely moved by her un-political, un-manly, profoundly human surge of empathy and despair.

I feel sad that we've been so badly managed and ruled that we are on the brink of this strange, (war-less, famine-less, bomb-less) silent catastrophe and the wrong people as ever will pay. And those left to clean up the mess they didn't cause have to act like butchers rather than surgeons. And those who were in power in the last ten years can relax and sit back on their plush padded parliamentary seats, shouting and jeering from the sides, eating pop corn while they watch the drama unfold, as if it had nothing to do with them, eyes and ears sharply trained on what will look and sound good in terms of re-election.

Most of all I feel ashamed of myself that forty year of the same hopeless cliches, four years of recession and four months of bad/scary headlines is all it took to drive me to the verge of an unspeakable thought, namely: when it comes to Italy why bother at all with elections, ever again? When is the last time that our parliament wasn't run like an exclusive private club, a career in politics not used as a straightforward cash machine?

BBC Trolls

I'm sure the first anguished prediction of the BBC's impending demise and/or the collapse of its unique stature and quality was issued within 15 minutes of its first radio broadcast, most probably from a disaffected insider.  I do not claim to be either original or necessarily right in issuing my own wail of sorrow now.

Full disclosure: I used to work for the Corporation, I have not for a while and the following comments are my own and do not represent the views of my current employer.

I no longer have to deal with the dismal staff morale, the daily mortifying round of patronising bilge from overpaid bosses, the slow erosion of standards and ambition. Still, every time I talk to former colleagues or switch the TV on (and increasingly the radio too) it breaks my heart what's happening to it.

I fell in love with the Beeb like an early 20th century immigrant might have fallen in love with the statute of Liberty - at first sight and with a devotion that spoke more eloquently of the horrors of home than of what the American dream really could deliver.

At home I had left RAI - imagine pre-regime change Libyan  state TV but with a lot more naked women than  camels.  The promised land turned out to be nearly a decade of freelance half-life followed by a few short years of a proper job before they started getting rid of everyone again. But the insecurity, the fairly low pay for at least a decade of that, the overwork and antisocial hours, the constant stress of having to prove yourself as there were always others, (younger, cheaper, less mouthy), queuing behind to take your place - none of it mattered: at least they weren't shooting on you and there was plenty to eat (yes, yes  we are back to the metaphor here, do keep up!).

But it was more than that - there was the pride of working for a global cultural and journalistic brand, and a force for good: a beacon of erudition, freedom and common sense for many, the world over. It was our job to be creative, tolerant, un-bigoted, intellectually curious - it was out job to question, to challenge, to experiment and to dream, yes, it was our job to dream of a life, a society, a culture which was more than just the dismal sum of its lowest impulses,  prejudices and needs.

Heather Peace describes eloquently here what has happened with the cultural side of things. I can only report on the journalism side of things but wherever you look it's the same depressing trend.

The whole place is run by Trolls, overstuffed with then, and I don't mean this kindly , as in slightly deranged juvenile weirdos leaving aggressive anonymous messages on online forums. I mean the dangerous types: 40 something middle management maggots who all want their once great programmes- be them about gardening or foreign affairs -to be "more like Top Gear", eager to appease the upper echelons, viciously indifferent to the quality of what the are in charge of, or what it's for, as long as their careers progress apace.

The troops below meanwhile, tenderised by years of reforms (dumbing down) and quality reviews (cuts), and terrorised by the spectrum of job losses (which would not have to happen at all if those paid millions to do one thing only, negotiate the licence fee settlement, hadn't done such a hash of the job this last time) soldier on, a plastic badge detailing the 'core BBC values' dangling forlornly from her necks. They are some of the most amazing, committed, qualified people this country produces and they are being treated like shit by an institution paid for with your money.

Clarkson's contemptuous comments on the public sector strikers this week (but also remember Jonathan Ross' insistence he was worth 6000 journalists?), Paxo joining in with the bullying of an EU officials (Mr Idiot from Brussels) - these aren't blips on the chart - this is the BBC giving its viewers what it has decided they want.

Lucky for the Trolls, offensive comedy panel shows, indiscriminate euro-bashing and laughing at the proles, (which is what all reality television amounts to, structured or otherwise), do not cost very much. Nowhere near as much as ground breaking or even just informed journalism, nurturing new talents and taking cultural risks.

They can do this with less money while charging you exactly the same for the Licence Fee. And they can still afford Mr Clarkson - which is what really matters.