annafdd

When you are an expat and somebody from your country dies, there is a special loss, that equals no other. Even in a time of Twitter and online papers, you mostly grieve alone: no wall to wall coverage, no tributes, and even if I were - as they are suggesting - to open my windows this coming Sunday, 4 March 2012, when Lucio Dalla would have been 69 and will be buried, and let his music out, there would be no immediate recognition, no common celebration.

When somebody you grew up with, who shaped moments of your life, dies, you not only lose a bit of your past: you lose another of your roots. Other musicians, and singers, and poets, and strangely hairy short bald men who never quite seem to grow up will take his place in the story of my country, but I won't be there to know it.

I am becoming, bit by bit, like those old Italians who live in New York or Buenos Aires or London, who don't quite speak the language any more, and if they do speak a language that isn't spoken any more in Italy, and the country they come from is not the same that is living its continuing, real life. Their roots are in a vanished nation, a country that only exists, faintly, in their memories.

He was a very likeable man, cheerful even when he wasn't happy, and besides some memorable songs, he seems to have left behind a slew of protégées, and people younger or his age that he helped, dragged back into the business, gave time and energy to, or just was a generous, good-hearted friend to. Unlike many of his friends, he was a serious, undemonstrative believer: so you can if you will say a prayer for him.

Italy being the country that it is, despite the fact that he never married, that he was known to have many loving male friends, only one journalist dared mention his private sentimental life: and was duly told off because you don't out somebody who very clearly chose not to out himself. Which is good and true, although, as one of my friends commented, homophobia would end tomorrow in Italy if all Italian gays told their mom the truth. Sadder it is that some people were outraged at the slanderous rumours disseminated about the great man so close to his death.

The new year that is to come is still some time off in Italy.

1. I convinced myself that I needed to invest a considerable sum of money on some new sunglasses, because the light in the office bothers me and my eyes are tearing up all the time. Also, these particular glasses are identical to my beloved wayfarers but unlike them they are polarised.

Well, who knew: while all sunglasses are polarised horizontally, most LCD monitors are polarised vertically. Result, I can do a pretty cool demonstration of how polarisation works by turning my glasses in front of a monitor. I can also work very comfortably, if I turn my head by 90˚.

2. Apparently there is a crowd sourced project that looks at galaxies to classify them. There emerged a group amongst them called the Peas Corp that noticed some weird small circular green blobs that turned out to be, yes, Pea Galaxies.

I suddenly and fondly thought of Douglas Adams, and how happy he would be to hear that.

(There is also a crowd sourced project for gathering data from Royal Navy ship's log. The leading scientist confessed to a great fondness for a certain Lt. Farnell, who not once, not twice, but three times got into serious trouble for having given alcohol to the crew at Christmas.)

And yes, I am still sick as a parrot.

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I don't know why, but I have been hearing a lot about education in the UK lately. Well, it's always a subject bubbling under the surface, really, so no mystery about that.

The last thing that made me grumpy was a discussion about grammar schools. Grammar schools, for those of you not from this fair island, are schools that are a) very good and b) you can access only if you pass a rather tough exam at 11 years. They are free, if I understand correctly, and have been historically a way for people of working class extraction to gain an excellent education, and have been seen as a generally good thing by many.

There are less of them around these days, which is seen, again, by many as a bad thing.

They also seem to me to highlight the fallacy that the UK almost always falls into when talking about inequality.

The point is, this is a very, very unequal society. And this has a whole lot of consequences, for which I will send you off to read The Spirit Level, among other things.

Now the problem with an unequal society is not that it keeps bright minds from shining. That too, of course: but that it not the main problem. Grammar schools are seen as a good thing because, if you overcome poverty and lack of education in your background to pass an exam at 11, you are afforded the same privileges of those who are sent to good private schools.

And that's a good thing for those individuals who do go to them, but it doesn't fix the problem. The problem is that if you aren't exceptional, you are stuck in your pigsty where apparently you belong.

I have just read a nice piece on the selection process to Cambridge. Well, the selection process is as fair as can be, in a completely unfair society. Oxbridge seems the hated symbol of all that's wrong in the disparity of opportunity in this country, but it's not - they demonstrably go out of their way to redress the balance. The problem is not that state schools send enough pupils to Oxford and Cambridge.

The problem is that state schools are bad.

The problem is not that bright students are not sifted away and nurtured specially.

The problem is that inferior students are not nurtured and made into bright minds.

Which, I am sure, the vast majority of the public here doesn't believe possible or even right. Some people are smart and deserving and some are dumb and undeserving and this is the unchangable way of the universe and always will be and always has been, and no amount of hard evidence is going to make a dent in the great Downton Abbey mind of the English public.

This country has always done meritocracy right, something that I appreciate coming from Italy. But there is more to justice than meritocracy. The truth is that is it perfectly possible to improve the general education level of a country - Finaland did it - by caring about the general level of achievement instead of nurturing only exceptional talent. Exceptional talent is a great thing, but a nation of average achievers is much better for many things - including democracy - than a nation made up of a few bright things and a mass of Daily Mail readers.

I don't have kids, but what would I want for them? I'd want them not to have to measure themselves against their peers all their life, really, and I'd want them to live in a nation that didn't let the voters get stupid with a shrug and a roll of the eyes.

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In the physical sense, although since I ran out of antidepressants, and the last time I was so sick I also ran out, and went could turkey, and it was not good, it might progress to the other kind of awful.

I can't afford to stay off work, but if tomorrow I need to go out and fight for my medication that might well be all that I will be good for. I'm ok as long as I am on plenty of fluid and paracetamol. For reduced expectations values of ok.

Well, vitamin D is not infallible is all I can say.

Not a fantastic way to get back on LJ, but hey, that's what gives me enough time: being miserable in front of a keyboard.

Yesterday I was sick with the beginning of a cold that my immune system seems, luckily, to be fighting off really well, but it meant that in the morning I was too ill to even move around and all I could do was plant myself in front of the tv. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Oh yeah baby.

I'm not so stupid or naive that I couldn't have anticipated that it was not going to be a deeply affecting, sensitive and thoughtful day of programming, but it left me feeling both deeply depressed and angry.

Most of the time, when you see some horrible disaster unfolding on TV there is excitement that goes with the horror. I remember feeling that excitement being so overshadowed by the horror that it might as well not have been there that day. I have lived a sheltered and lucky life and that was by far the most awful thing my eyes have ever seen.

A lot of people I think in the immediate afterwards tried to find some comfort in the idea that at least, the horror we had all witnessed would have drawn us sharply back to our common humanity, to the minimum denominator we all shared, and force us in a way we would not have wished to have compassion forced upon us.

Boy, were we wrong.

Being stuck in front of the tv I saw a lot of tackiness. It takes a lot of effort to turn people reading the names of the dead, including their own, into tackiness, but tv managed it. You think: it's been ten years. Those people are still grieving - in some cases, they are forced to go on grieving - but the rest of us are trying to dredge up feelings for strangers. It is forcing us to feel a compassion that is, in this case, fake. We are intruding on their grief, like emotional vampires, to keep alive that little flame of excitement that was so small back then.

There are heroes and villains, and victims, here. The guys who rooted with bare hands in the rubble to find bits and pieces of corpses, I did not realise until today what they were doing. In many cases they knew they were putting their health at risk, and not even for saving lives, but in a heroic act of respect for the dead and the grieving.

The villains, well, we know who they are. And one of the things they did is besmirch the feeling of common humanity, of compassion and heroism, and now every time there is a remembrance of the dead you know that most of them are not celebrated and reading their names out loud would take just too fucking long:



As I said on twitter, the nadir for me was the montage of footage of the day with saccharine soundtrack. James Taylor's song was also pretty bad but hey, that's a matter of taste. It could conceivably have been remedied by adding, to those appropriate choir as the national anthem and Amazing Grace, some of the other tunes America is famous for, I don't know, This Land Is Your Land, or maybe Born in The USA.

Eventually, I turned to Poirot and started working to fix my polka dots shirt to fit me better. It felt like a better use of my time.

1. I am feeling a tad annoyed at people who wag their fingers in the general direction of Other People and preach Personal Responsability (tm) but hurry in the next breath to deny vehemently and with outrage that any of their choices might perhaps have ultimate consequences they might not like. Personal Responsability sometimes also means contemplating the possibility that you are wrong.

2. I know a certain number of single mothers. Working class, non-white single mothers. The first person that even *thinks* ill of them gets punched in the nose.

3. People always learn the wrong lessons. Sigh.

I am as shocked as anybody else. What's going on is horrible, and I am afraid it's only a matter of time, if this goes on, before somebody gets burned alive.

But a very disturbing shade of racism is emerging in the coverage I am watching (yes, I know, BBC News 24 is not the best the BBC has to offer, and the Today program was A BIT better.)

For example, the pub manager last night, whom I felt a lot of sympathy for, still felt it necessary to say that the old and fragile woman in his pub was "white".

I have seen only one non-white people being interviewed. He was upset and emotional, but he was treated with far less respect than the jolly good ol' boy Tory MP from Lincoln.

Of course they are thugs and thieves. The problem is, why do we have so many thugs and thieves? I don't find it all that surprising that people with no jobs and no future - black or white - and who keep being stopped and searched by police every time the get out the street (overwhelmingly non-white) might be cheered by a sudden carnival of smashing and grabbing.

One of the thing the elderly black gentleman was saying was "my nephew thought he was coming on age when he was stopped and searched by the police for the first time. He asked his father: Dad, how many times have you been searched by the police? His dad said that he had lost count a long time ago."

How many of us have ever been stopped and searched by the police? And how would we feel about them the third time it happened, especially if we had done nothing wrong? Understanding and sympathetic?

Subject: racist coverage of riots

Every white person interviewed was treated with respect and listened to without challenging, with the possible exception of Ken Livingstone. The one black person, an elderly gentleman, was constantly interrupted, accused of being a rioter himself, not listened to, and cut off hurriedly. The time spent listening to him was about 1/10 of the time spent by anybody who advocated the use of water cannon or blaming Political Correctness Gone Mad (tm).

I have heard a member of the public saying that if arrested the rioters would "invoke the race card" or "sue for police brutality". He was not challenged.

The whole coverage is disgracefully one-sided, with anybody pointing out that there are causes to this outbreak challenged and told off.

Shame on you. You are a public service, not white people's spokesmen

I'm fine, and in sleepy Kilburn, miles away from any riot. I live in a residential street that's unlikely to see any looting anyway. (This is for general reassurance of far away friends.)