Les mots pour le dire (aka, le parole per dirlo, aka the words to say it)

Sassy/street:

Talk to the booty 'coz the hand's off duty and the face don't wanna hear ya!

Answering machine:

Hello, you have reached the face. I don't wanna hear ya right now. Please relay your message to the hand. Should the hand be off duty, the booty will get back to you as soon as possible. Goodbye.

Corporate:

At Bank Of Daylight Robbery we are always looking for ways to Create Value for our Clients and Stakeholders. We are full of exciting Ideas for further uptake of our Listening-in Mode. However, recent restructurings in our Teams have lead to the Face being unavailable to hear you. So, going forward, please refer all matters to the Hand. Should the Hand also be unavailable, please escalate to the Booty. And remember: we really care.

  

Passive aggressive work email:

From: The Boss

To: The Gullible Employee

Dear Booty,

When Hand went off duty/ on maternity leave/ checked himself into rehab he/she handed over his/her tasks to Face.

However, it has become very clear from Face's attitude both at our team meeting and during the visio-conference that she just does not want to listen.

But there is an upside: I'd like to offer you what I think is a great opportunity to step up, stand out and make yourself indispensible.

Do you want to be our team hero and take up the challenge of helping us deliver our stretch goals at this difficult time? Do you, Booty, do you?

Little boy lost and the Italian Mammas

Last week-end Little Sis came to town with a bunch of female friends. Because they had mainly met at the school gates Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband, who thinks he is witty, dubbed them "the yummy mammas".

The group was a vivacious, gregarious bunch - much fun was had, drink taken, criticism and blame apportioned on the male half of the human species - you get the picture.

In between we also had some pretty sobering conversations about the state of Italian politics (dire), economy (appalling) and levels of gender equality (ghastly and getting worse, since you ask).

Here was a group of articulate, intelligent working women with their fair share of deadbeat husbands, appalling employers and so forth, shouldering the lion's share of childcare (although at the age of nine their children seem to need social secretaries rather than babysitters), sometimes counting on grandparents, rarely on the actual fathers, who after all, as they never tire of reminding them, go to work, (a protestation growing ever more poignant the less they actually fulfil the role of main breadwinners).

But I digress.

Initially the mammas seemed to me, a childless harridan, the living proof of how motherhood really does not pay : you get to do what they do but backwards and in high heels, so to speak. You get to slave at school for better grades and work hard at those first jobs for careers that melt or stall as the first sign of maternity leave, part time and so on.

Later when even the children start getting a life they still struggle to go back to the lives they once had as  autonomous individuals, say the ability to make plans for an evening out or a week-end away that do not involve gargantuan organisational efforts and  Faustian pacts with other halves, mothers, in-laws and so on.

Caring sucks, you say to yourself. It doesn't pay.

Then one afternoon a few of us were sitting in one of Harrods' 27 cafes/restaurants waiting for a couple of the others who were on a last-ditch souvenir shopping mission.

A little boy of 6 or 7 was sitting by himself at the table facing us, surrounded by jackets and bags, an untouched salad cast to one side, an iPad in front of him.

I saw the mammas clocking him.

A few minutes went by, we tucked into our hot chocolates, I tried to engage them on the important subject of dinner. But I could tell my sister was tense, she is the one I know best after all, and I realised they all were. They were watching the boy. The boy was still by himself.

All along the mammas had kept a discreet watch for the absent parent - but by now an innocent bathroom sortie was out of the question. The boy had been left alone while the adult(s) with him went shopping.

By now even I could see the little boy was bored and distressed. He was wriggling in his seat, looking up and around from his iPad and at one point he seemed to ask a waitress for directions to somewhere. My sister and her friends were white faced, thin lipped, fuming, ready to spring into action if the boy had started wondering off on his own.

The other two mammas arrive, sit a table nearby, blissfully unaware of the little drama. They order and settle in. My sister says: "How long till they notice?"

Two minutes later discreet but eloquent Italian gesticulation from their table: what is this boy doing on his own???  I shuttle between the two tables, as they both begin to simmer with indignation and palpitate with concern.

As I move about I lean towards the boy's table and make an important discovery: the writing on the Ipad is in Russian. The little boy probably doesn't speak English. The mammas are ready to burst.

At this point addressing the boy is out of the question: they don't want to alarm him further. But they are determined to stop him wandering off, routed to the spot till a parent appears and should some peadophile try his luck and attempt to lure him away I would not rate his chances of actual physical survival. These mammas are ready to kill.

Forty five minutes later ("Forty five!!!!" they will tell each other for the rest of the evening, still incredulous), Russian dad appears, muttering something apologetic, to the son's obvious relief. If looks could petrify and if men ever noticed any social signals the guy would be a sodding oligarch statue by now.

I look at my little sister and her friends and can feel my heart swelling. Women are great but mothers are special - they marry all the superior qualities women have ( aversion to conflict, ability to work as a team, reasonableness, desire of good outcomes, not just selfish ones, ability to spot the butter in the fridge without sat nav) with the ability to care - not just for their children but other people's, instinctively, reflexively, whether it pays or not, the hell if it doesn't pay.

That caring, it now seems to me, cannot be controlled, modulated, switched on and off as convenient - this is the end of my shift, this is your child, not mine. It's like the ability to hear an impossibly high note - a talent, a blessing and, yes,  a curse.

And it seems to me that this means women, the vast majority of whom are mothers, will never really have a shot at ruling the world, or even getting on in it, the way the world works now. It also sees to me that if they weren't there, or turned into tone-deaf men, the world would go to hell. Not at a glacial, global warming kind of pace. I mean tomorrow.

The abyss between these two extremes is our room for action.

Capitalism isn't broken, it just doesn't give a shit

This is for fellow long-suffering Virgin Media customers but also for anyone who might one day have to rely on Richard Branson for their health care if the pirate ever succeeds in getting his hands on the bits of the NHS this government is putting up for sale.

Our "package" with Virgin media comprises TV (including on-demand services), telephone and broadband , and costs us nearly £50 a month before we make a single phone call or rent out a single film. Since the summer we have had a really poor (slow and intermittent) internet connection and no on-demand at all.

At first we phoned customer service, following the instruction on the error message on the screen. It's always nice to chew the fat with someone in Bangalore who is reading mechanically from a script - don't you find?- so we kept calling, and kept being told to "switch it on and off again". We did each time, because you could not progress through the phone call without abiding with this ritual first,  and nothing ever changed, apart from the explanation for the fault: sometimes there was a fault in the entire area that was being dealt with and sometimes it was just...our fault.

Eventually the Indians must have got tired of speaking to us and agreed to book an engineer's vist.

The chap duly turned up last Saturday and competently enough diagnosed that the strength of the broadband signal was too low because a box outside our house (shared by many other subscribers) needed to be upgraded by " a network team". He said that he would pass it to the team and expected the issue to be dealt within two business days.

When nothing happened on the Tuesday we called the chap again and he put us in touch with Keith Best, who apparently deals with complaints once they have been escalated all the way up from Bangalore to the office of the CEO, Neil Berkett.

Keith Best fobbed off my husband several times : he said the work would be carried out on Wednesday, then on Friday, each time promising to phone him back to keep him in the loop and never doing so.

So far so grimly familiar and banal.

But here's the kicker people: when you call Keith Best at the work number he gives out to customers, permanently switched off of course, he invites you to "please leave a message and I will get back to you at my earliest convenience".

This illiterate chump who, let us not forget, works for the CEO of Virgin Media, is the highest authority figure the humble engineer who came to our house can escalate our problem to.

So we have now gone full circle: we are currently paying for hot air (what else do you call non-flowing internet juice?) and, after months of conversational niceties with Bangalore,  having managed to get someone round to diagnose the problem, are now in the hands of British-based but unavailable customer service chumps who may call us back at their earliest convenience but on the whole do not.

Believers in the magic fairy dust of the free market would at this point encourage us to switch to a different operator but there is no other operator covering our area. We were with the dismal NTL because there was no choice and we are now with the dismal Virgin Media (which took over from the dismal NTL) because there is still no choice, bar getting SKY involved (huge dish, money to Murdoch, nah...).

Should there be two operators, or even three, you can be sure that, like with the energy companies, they would only ever be inspired to be as expensive and as bad as each other, not  a penny more, not a fruitless call to Bangalore less. Another note for those innocent fairy dust believers: there is no meaningful competition when there is little choice, untransparent price structures, impossibly complex 'packages' and, under any circumstances, no redress.

All of this means that there is no incentive whatsoever (given that pride in a great product and customer satisfaction  are alien concepts for these empty corporate suits) for Virgin Media to shape up, improve its service or even just provide the service they so efficiently take our money for.

They will call us back at their earliest convenience - when you actually think about it, it's not a Freudian slip, it's an unapologetic statement of fact, the only time in fact we have been told the truth.

Please reflect on this and join whatever campaign you can find, write to your MP etc etc to avert a situation when, in a not too distant future, as a patient whose cancer is metastasising and whose operation has been put off three times, you might find yourself at the receiving end of one such phone messages from the chimp put in charge of the Virgin NHS Customer Service, ooops, I mean Patient Care team.

Please also note that there is nothing broken with this model of capitalism. It does what it says on the tin. It delivers huge profit margins to shareholders and grotesque salaries to its CEOs. Just don't trust it to ever run anything you care about or on which your life depends. Whether you are a paying customer or a patient the cost of whose treatment still comes out of the taxpayer's pocket, you do not count. It doesn't care about you. It doesn't have to. No one and nothing is making it do so and it will never change if left to its own devices.

Where has all the magic gone?

Lucky J K Rowlings. The talented, multi-millionaire writer is currently everywhere as her new novel (written for an adult audience and distinctly wizard-poor by the sound of it ) is about to be published and the media are salivating about a possible flop.

But lucky J K Rowling , nonetheless.

Here is one detail of the interview I heard on Radio Four this morning that struck a particular chord. She said, (I summarise), that now that she can pay her bills she does not need to put out any work that isn't to her complete satisfaction. So she took her time and wrote the novel she really wanted to write and published it when it was good and ready. Had inspiration not struck she would not have bothered. And she ruled out wringing any more spurious sequels to Harry Potter's story just for the sake of publishing more books. She is done with Harry, she said

J K Rowling's own life story is extraordinary enough: from (metaphorical) rags to (very real) riches through talent and hard work as well as amazing luck. No lottery winner she. So when luck struck and she was given the opportunity of not having to worry about her bills this freed her not to do nothing but  to work better.

I hope she spares a thought for the many millions of us who do not have such luxury - and I don't mean the luxury of dropping out and eating caviar with a soup spoon from the sculpted navel of a (male, in my case) supermodel but the luxury of being able to work (whatever it is we do do) to a standard that can make us proud.

The reality of the world of work today (for those lucky enough to still hold down a job) is a constant, near total, de-spiriting, life-sapping battle between shrinking means, often absurd or ill-defined ends and megalomanic or incompetent bosses/ organisations/ bureaucracies,.

We'd love to be professional, competent, to show what we can do, to make a tangible difference, to concentrate on ends/results but we are constantly pushed back (often after enduring the daily commute in animal crates on rails) into undignified scrambles against time, mediocrity, office politics, chair-warming, face-saving, back-stabbing and process, endless process.  

Maybe it was ever thus - or at least since we stopped hunting animals and killing them with our bare hands. And this might explain why, despite work being the activity that absorbs most of everyone's time (unlike, say, falling in love, or exotic travel or being the caught up in a jewellery heist)  there are so few novels telling the story of work. It is, sad to say, for the most part an un-heroic little tale of daily mortifications to our intelligence and diminishing returns for our energy and time on this earth when it could be the triumph of humanity over death, destiny and raw matter.

In praise of Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband

MMIH often jokes that there is a comfortingly predictable template to my blog posts. Whether I'm talking about diets, diamonds or dead playwrights, the typical structure of any piece goes something along the lines: I was thinking about X the other day and it reminded me of yet another way in which men are shite.

My 20 readers will forgive me the indulgence of devoting a brief post just to him, to put some things in context.

By the time I bumped into MMIH, or rather, shopped for him online on a highly reputable and suitably intellectual internet site, I had been 'dating' for about 20 years, as our American friends say, 15 of those in Britain.

Teenage dating in Italy was bad enough: emotionally abusive AND suicidal boyfriends and the mothers who loved them, the near-date rapes in every conceivable type of parked car (who needed kickboxing to keep fit then? Happy days..), the struggle to conform to the silent simpering girlfriend stereotype.

But it was dating in Britain that really honed my survival skills: 15 years of invisibility to men folk who did not ever make eye contact, made a pass only when staggeringly drunk, talked all over you to other men at parties.

Then it all got virtual anyway, as people stopped meeting, talking and, you know, calling, in favour of oblique texts about their expected presence at some bar 20 minutes from now.

The last five years were just brutal: sexual politics having escalated into a sort of cold war, with men deeply reluctant to even have a casual fling in case you wanted to impregnate them with a mortgage and five kids. My last boyfriend (admittedly an Italian) even refused me a bed in central London the night the of the 7/7 attack in case "I should get ideas" about our status as a couple.

That's when MMIH entered the story. A guitar playing, orc-slaying philosopher prince with a floppy fringe and a lovely smile. Loving, sincere, demonstrative, generous. Tigger-esque, Muppet-y, benign, a force for good. I have never felt lonely, neglected or unloved for a single minute since. *

We talk non-stop: mainly we discuss completely theoretical stuff: Obamacare, the chances of Labour ever returning to power, that kind of thing. Often you will find us in restaurants arguing animatedly about nuances of tone in an editorial or who actually said what in an interview - without breaking our eating stride at all.

In between we bicker incessantly about just about everything:

his illogical thinking (Reader, you be the judge: is the set of keys marked "Ines and Dan" in our kitchen drawer more likely to A) belong to Inez and Dan, next door or B) be a spare set our key which we had, at some point, intended to give to Ines and Dan for safe-keeping but have since thought the better of it? Yes, you are right, I do have the patience of a saint.), 

my irrational and debilitating fixation with bella figura, which to an Englishman translates roughly as a' hypocrite's etiquette manual',

who's doing any job in the house,

who should be doing it,

who did it last week,

where to go on a mini break

who should book the mini break,

who booked the last mini-break,

whether that lipstick/skirt makes me look like a Neapolitan stripper (it does),

whether he should buy another ukulele (he shouldn't),

why he should be throwing away socks with holes and under no circumstance wear them in places where we shall be taking our shoes off (doh?!)...

You get the gist.

Together we have travelled a good portion of the safe, clean, non war-torn, civilized world; eaten several hundred times our body weight in lovely food, spent several months hugging like hibernating moles, watched about a year of phenomenal films, walked hundreds of miles, holding hands, singing silly songs, shouting at each other, and occasionally crying. 

My nephew, the Mouse, born two years before we met, doesn't remember a time without him and I'm beginning to forget those 20 years out in the cold myself.

Yes, I've struck some sort of (forgetful, clumsy, timid) gold and it's those other men who are crap but here's the cherry on the cake: his love has made me safer and therefore louder and angrier.  

Instead of counting my blessings I look around and see the shameful way some men still treat some women (and society treats all women) and it makes me want to shout.

And he not only 'lets me' but kind of enjoys it too, a little bit.

* Exasperated yes, often.

.

RIP Nora Ephron: a reflection on death, romance and southern European politics.

At the risk of turning this infrequently written blog into an obit column, I wanted to reflect on the sad news that Nora Ephron has died.

Her films played in the background of my life as I became a woman , peopled by unforgettable female protagonists who were old enough to get served alcohol in a US bar and had three dimensions, at least one career and a string of sassy repartees.

That was before the soft patriarchy of low expectations (to coin a phrase) set in and screen women were turned into simpering semi clad perpetual teenagers, mainly playing the starved and joyless aspiring girlfriends of the Real Characters.

When Harry Met Sally in particular is one of my favourite films- I watch it every five years or so and I measure my reactions to it through the prism of different ages. It never gets old.

The wholesome, tiresome, quirky Meg Ryan (pre-surgery, pre joyless rictus grin of the compulsory teen ager) sobs inconsolably at the news of her ex' engagement: "And I'm going to be forty!" Billy Crystal replies: "Yes, in eight years' time!" You are totally with her when she shoots back: "But it's sitting there, waiting for me..."

Here is the gender war in one unassuming little exchange.

Men have no 'future gene', their inability to even imagine the future insulating them from fear, prudence, inhibitions. (My brother in law believed becoming a father would give him "time to write" on top of a full time job, if you can believe it. And off to the study he shuffled to write several novels while my sister's idea of time out became going to the loo sans enfant.)

Women, on the other hand, live with their sexual/reproductive/societal sell-by-date tattooed on their soul. There is nothing but future (calculations of how long it will take to accomplish things, sort stuff out, put on another washing, gestate, find another suitable male, how bloated will you be for the party in two days' time if you eat this muffin now, whatever) from the moment you open your eyes in the morning. Grim realism making us forever cautious, self defeating and prone to sacrifice ourselves preventively, whether someone has asked or not.

Ephron's movies were refreshingly about love, friendship, family stuff and not so much about status, money, material aspiration. Her characters got on with their generally fulfilling jobs and no one obsessed too much about ensnaring a millionaire. That was not the point. Although society was changing at that very time and becoming conspicuously more unequal Ephron reflected the sunny aspirations of a previous age. Wall Street did not seem to dominate everything and being a banker's wife was not yet the codified posh alternative to high class hooker.

But let's go back to death for a minute, lest I should be accused of excessive jollity. When I heard the announcement on the radio this morning they simply said she had died, aged 71. I immediately wondered: but what has she died of?

That got me thinking. What is the cut off point for death not having to be explained, contextualised in the language of lost battles with cancer and so on? Seventy one seems awfully young to simply leave it at old age being the cause of death, don't you think? I mean, seventy one is positively JUVENILE in Greek Cabinet or Italian tecnocrats' terms.

Why did she have to go and die like that? Who signed the memo, who processed the request? How can Nora Ephron, a woman who was writing about her worries about a lined neck only two or three years ago, be expectde to...you know...decompose? How can one go from wondering if she can still 'get away' with wearing a polo neck to being old enough that death deserves no further explanation in that space of time?

Perhaps the truth is much more terrifying: people do die at 70, left right and centre and at the same time half of southern Europe (the insolvent half) is being run by male geriatrics who could keel off at any moment, yet remain unable to visualise the simple fact that death is indeed sitting there, waiting for them. Summit or no summit.

Passing

Even though I do nothing all day but "communicate" and consume news, newspapers scattered everywhere, computer blinking at me, Twitter tweetering and the telly permanently on BBC News in the background, I managed to completely miss the sad news of my former colleague David Walter's death.

I was told by another ex-colleague in a sweet email inquiring if I was aware of David's "passing".

Death is so hidden in today's world, we speak of it so rarely, that I'm struck each time by how gentle and tentative the language is. Passing seems to be a lithe, playful, transient way to describe something so definitive, so final .

I once went to Naples with David on a story and we arrived a day early to recce (I imagine none of the words in this sentence make any sense to a young BBC reporter today ). The phone rang while we were tackling an ice cream and I remember the twinkle in David's eye as he replied to our boss: "Oh yes, everything is fine. We are working ever so hard!".

David was superbly sympathetic, warm and believable on screen but also - uniquely in an industry mostly populated by egotistical monsters - managed to be the same person off air. He was as English as they come but keenly interested in Europe, not in the stereotypes so much but in the real story. Again, look away young journalistic bucks.

He was very good to me when I had nothing but a strong accent and grating levels of naivety and enthusiasm. Years later he was very good to me again when I was on the verge of leaving the BBC -downcast, scared and with my sanity hanging by a thread.

He came (and seemd in great form) to my leaving do but when I saw him next, at an event I had organised in my new job, I could tell he had been ill. He was the same sweet self, unassuming, friendly, yet right about most things he commented upon in our chat.

Turns out that right at the time when I thought my life was over he had begun to die for real.

I don't really know what to make of this realisation. The cliches don't actually help. Life, I find, doesn't seem any sweeter now I know for sure that I too will be passing some day, just a little bit more pointless. The deaths of other people weirdly fail to make me feel more alive - just a bit more alone.

Boy, what a treat old age is going to be, should I be lucky enough to get there.