Keynes and National Socialism

Recent fisticuffs  over what Keynes meant, would have done, said,  have raised past sins.  When the Complete Works came out it was noted that in the Introduction to the German edition of  the General Theory Keynes's expressed approbation of the Nazi economic proposals for dealing with the Slump - counter-cyclical spending, a raised degree of economic nationalism etc. -  had been silently suppressed either by Richard Kahn or the nominal editor.

Which calls into question the worth of supporting  present-day political viewpoints with sacred texts, and just how much those texts have been fiddled with.

Disbelief

Awful silence in Monculi.  "We deserved to be out," being muttered bravely, followed by the eerily unreal, "It's only a game, anyway."

Going about remarking "Forza Kiwis!" has been strongly advised against. 

Ripeness Lost To Rain

The heavens opened on Friday and remain so.  Not camparis by the pool then, but lasagne al forno and the red.  The fire has been lit for two evenings so it's also been bruschetta and grilled sausages on skewers with bay leaves in between (and more of the red).

Finishing Blood's A Rover has been aided by rivers of water pouring off every path and way through the woods, which is the only way over 600 pages of  Ellroy  inimitable prose style could have been downed  (or drowned) as walks and outings are under drizabone and in wellies.  Reading Ellroy does lead to disjointed conversational speech  and hearing too.

A particularly posh conversation on the merits of various sherries became more surreal (after all, discussing sherry is not the norm, is it?  Though norms are easily lost in walls of water advancing across the valleys) as provenance - which was OK-ish -  moved on to a consideration of  types of trees.  Trees?  Sherry?  I'll down a glass of dry fino with the best but obviously there was more to it all for afficionados who even used plurals for the stuff.  When  talk of colour turned to blackness and visions of a kind of sherry stout tried to form, Ellroy interference with modes of communication had to be set aside.

"What are you all talking about?  And why are you all suddenly so fogeyish about sherries?  And how do you all know this stuff?"

"Cherries?  Well this part of the world is famous for them.  We were comparing the various sorts and flavours, and which we can still find - given the hail and difficulties with the downpours."

Oh.

Choice Cuts

The removal of twenty four billion euros from Italian public expenditure has had no effect whatsoever in Monculi.  Zilch.  Everyone is out and about as usual, working gold, making clothes, gardening the countryside, entertaining paying guests in farms (agriturismo is a huge wealth creator) as far as the eye can see.  And speaking of sea, everyone has spruced-up their mobile home or renovated their seaside flat/villa  in time for the annual mass migration to the coast at the end of the school year.

They are also tending their tomatoes.  We are to have four sorts this year, up from three last: large, ribbed salad; small, on-the-vine, salad and posh cookery, for those who can be bothered; smooth round, and smooth elongated (sort of soccer and football really) for bottling.

I am well on the way to bottling already - not the sterilising of the jars and lids, scrubbing out of giant brushed steel vats, checking-through of outdoor gas rings variety; more the familiar bottling of British political cowardice variety. My kitchen garden is very like the European Union: I supply land, seed (well, little plants), water, and the men grow what they want and ignore pleas for radishes, carrots,  jerusalem artichokes,  brussels sprouts, and potatoes.  Not even spinach will they grow, they prefer rape.

My lovely apple tree (planted, nb, by an Australian) flourishes; all  other proposals (other than the loving pruning and feeding of scattered, ancient figs) for fruit and nut trees have been nixed on the argument that the birds/deer/boar/scrumpers will get them. 

Mr Cameron does not begin to grasp the mountain of immovable cultural obstruction he must climb.  What was once grown here has not been forgotten, despite the half-century hiatus, and folk wisdom reigns over modern decision-taking.  Meanwhile, as Prime Minister Berlusconi knows, no-one gives a hoot about so-called cuts.  They aren't cuts, they're just using a different model for allocating resources. 

Cultural Behaviour is Often Wrong For Political Health

The aging of the political class in Italy is getting embarrassing.  All of a sudden the entire lot of them are over seventy.  (Well, they are completely worn-out and used-up, even if some might manage to squeeze under the class of 1940 bar).  While keeping down the generations below is a national pastime - the socio-legal structure is given over to holding back the oncoming generational tide - the slippage into dotage is becoming marked again.

There has been some improvement, insofar as not actually gunning-down the under-forties and fifties is much practiced any more; and the two most impressive politicians of the centre-right and centre-left are both middle-aged women with lots of business and political experience, and lots of money  (always such a blessing -lots of money).   But the mano morta    rests still on the Italian body politic.

The slow death of social democracy because of its contamination by infiltration from elderly communist, socialist  and fascist personnel - what you might call the Former Party -  is devastating for the achievement of quite basic aspects of social justice: land redistribution, access to capital, support through advanced intellectual and technical training, access to elites various,  and must be interrupted.

We need rid of old authoritarian men.  

And if we really insist on having them, then at least let's have Giulio Andreotti  (who puts England's Peter Mandelson into  withering context).

 

Tripe

All this talk of the collapsing euro is tripe.  Tripe was the standard word for an argument or thing without value, in my father's usage of the word.  You'd be surprised how many aircraft are airborne tripe, how much German philosophy (borrowed from the library in English translation in  pursuit of understanding 'what made them do it?') is tripe.  

Disgusting tripe ended up in the kitchen boiler:  The Grapes of Wrath got it;  but that was nothing to The Red Room - a small misunderstanding had led me to Francoise Mallet-Joris instead of H.G.Wells - and its fate as unnatural disgusting tripe.

Here  we see that the kitchen boiler is possibly the best place for all the tripe being printed in the Sunday papers about the end of the euro and European Union as we know it.

Travelling Sensibly

People carrying lots of luggage on European flights are weird, so I  was taken by this site.

After all, wherever you go there is all that is needed already there - other than your own clothes (and even those can be replaced in Germany.  Well, Paris too but that's very expensive.  Moscow was disappointing - no valenkis, despite all those Russian novels where people tramp through the snow with felted-up feet; they even denied they understood what I was talking about  - though that's not unusual.)

 

 
So, while returning from London involves filling a case with ginger cake from Waitrose (which means arrriving with spare capacity in the first place) for every other European  destination one small bag is enough. 

The Knight Bus

Leaving late from Rome and arriving only an hour later near London, the Knight Bus carries Mr HG this evening to a conflab  on this'n'that tomorrow.

Costing only 11 euros it charges extra for amenities such as hot-water bottles, toothbrushes, and hot chocolate, not to mention large suitcases, and portmanteaux stuffed with entire lives and fear of flying.

Lots of Muggles resent flying Ryanair, they say it spoils the pleasures of travel.  Well, that depends on what you want, with respect.   If you want to get somewhere else reliably, fast, on or before time, and cheaply -

Go Knight Bus! 

Russia Revisited

The villages of the Don were portrayed in pen and ink sketches by my father-in-law, taken by their rural loveliness, as he led his small band of soldiers  to disaster nearly seventy years ago.  At least, unsually,  he led them out again, most of them.

Now we see the President of Europe, the President of the European Commission and the Prime Minister of Russia (someone else is having a turn at being President of Russia at the moment)  in Rostov-on-Don  sorting out further relations between Europe and Russia  more amicably.

Perhaps we too will soon be able to board a train and set off for Russia without a visa ( and without an artillery unit)  wave from our sleeper car at Monculi, glowering on its hill in its long outworn defences across the Giotto landscapes, as did my dear father-in-law from his troop train, and on through a Europe that must hold fast to the vision of no more fighting.  Russia is as much part of Europe as it is part of the East and, indeed, part of the Mediterranean. 

Big, Russia is, as Field Marshall Montgomery noted.  And not an enemy, as perhaps he didn't. 

Forza Ireland!

The Irish aid ship Rachel Corrie continues on course to break the Gaza blockade.  The Prime Minister of Ireland has called upon neighbouring powers to allow the aid ship free passage.

Italian citizens dragged from other aid ships by piratical state action in international waters and falsely imprisoned are demanding to be charged with any known offence under law.

Italian television and media continues to decry the behaviour of rogue elements of the state of Israel in their assault upon the lives of others.    

Australian journalist Paul McGeough (56), an Irish-born journalist and chief correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, who  has reported from the Middle East for two decades, is among those held in a detention camp in the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva.

Republic Day

2 June is a great day here.  Not surprising really - how many places have real live centaurs in their celebrations?

Not the kind of person you'd fancy meeting in a dark alley though

Muddy Waters

The well-digging is going slowly because the ground is solid earth; if it were solid rock I expect it would be going slowly but with another set of explanations.   The men are having to shore up the sides, or something.  This is a whole new vocabulary so understanding of what is going on is one of those exercises in pragmatics where the listener has to make a real effort to read every possible sign and sound but the whole undertaking is limited by a profound lack of interest in the mechanics of what the communication is about, and the mechanics themselves.  I find I don't care about wells.

Oil wells, Somerset, paintings of men being hauled in and out of by the hair by chaps in outrageous pink leggings, treacle, truth at bottom of, rising-up of emotions..., I turn away from them all when the word appears.  Imagery for wells is too obvious, used too often.  Wells are deeply boring.

Redistribution, Redistribution, Redistribution!

Digging a well sounds so biblical, at least to me, from a place where water comes out of taps connected to the Water Board's supply system.  And really I had thought the spring was enough.  But if the ecohouse is to be truly and reliably self-sufficient then springs are not enough.  In part it's technical and in part it's bureaucratic - obtaining permissions to drill and build is possible now but might not be as restrictions tighten round a scarce resource; and when there are lots of people the spring-fed water supply is too close to the edge for our water-consuming habits.

There used to be a family of fifteen living at the ecohouse when the farm was a full-time occupation and source of income;  but they didn't have three bathrooms.  They didn't have any bathrooms, or electricity, or heating other than the open fire in the central kitchen and the beasts stabled on the ground floor under the living quarters.  We forget how close such deprivation lies, the family were there until 1953 and the great abandonment of the land lasted for twenty years, from the early 'fifties.  It's all been put into reverse now and, as usual, it's the rich that gets the credit and the poor that gets the blame.

The poor get the flat-bound periferia  of the towns and cities, not even the beautiful, historic centres, and that's it.  The isolation, the silence, the views, the woods and  pastures, the dawns and sunsets, the groves and gardens   - all the compensations for the cold, the dark, the loneliness the deprivation, are taken by the owners cocooned by modern technology (and bathrooms.)  The classes who kept these landscapes for centuries couldn't begin to afford them.

Everyone can walk and picnic through our woods; the hunters are welcome to cull the deer and boar (but not kill the birds and hare), keeping it functioning costs far more than it yields in output of wood and oil (and terrible tomatoes), but there remains an immense social and economic disjunction.   Without the rather miserable modern world there cannot be the (rather miserable) modern populations.

It worries me: if anything goes wrong, even by narrow margins, individual opportunity to act effectively in straitened circumstances is minimal to non-existent.  Notions of 'fairness' and 'aspiration' are irrelevant politico-economic categories except in the current settlement. 

Something, and someone, has got to give. 

Pink Always Precedes the Perfect Tan

Pink!  As the scaffolding came down, floor by floor, the colour of the palazzo emerged.  There was no way of pretending - it was pink.  Pink may be   fine in Portofino but it is, shall  we say, unusual,  two hundred metres from Brunelleschi's  dome.

The architect arrived in a  hurry (or do I mean flurry?)  Pink?  We all looked at the palazzo and at him, in turns.  Accusingly.  A long explanation of the chemical interactions that take place between the various layers and composites of  the intonaco  and its colour was listened to with respect - and  disbelief.  Even the architect didn't believe the sound of his own  voice; and the only thing holding the tongue of the representative of the Sovvrintendenza was the knowledge that he had accompanied the  restorers to the  colorists and approved the final layer of the building, himself, in person.  It's an important piece of renaissance Florence streetscape, after all.

Blushes all round, from the palazzo outwards.  Putting back the scaffolding would cost a fortune and insurrection from the neighbours, and from users of central Florence.   And if what the architect said was correct, who knows what these complex chemical interactions of air,  and layers of building-cover, and colour might produce at the next attempt.  So we all gave our palazzo one last chance and a stern  warning - turn glowing, apricot blushing cream by the day after tomorrow or .....or what?  Else, we said firmly.

This morning the sun rose on  an apricot confection of total loveliness - shutters coated in a very best quality dark chocolate with a dash of milk colour, walls glowing golden in the dawn.  Phew.

Debt and its Nature

The Eight O'Clock News has warned us all and reassured us all (this News is Prime Minister Berlusconi's personal News, you should understand):

we are going to have tens of billions of euros cut off public expenditure debt to meet the requirements of the eurozone but, mysteriously, there will be no reductions in services and pay-outs, or tax rises.

So that's all right then.  

Of course there is the slack of tax evasion continuing to be taken up - as it has been for the last few years, during which we have all learned to be punctilious in keeping our bits of paper and handing them over to the accountant regularly (no-one in Italy is without an accountant, it's not the avoiding so much as the claiming and allowances that are so easy to lose track of); but equally, we have all now agreed that  we don't want to be unable to show our innocence of ducking and diving.  The ending of mass evasion alone is yielding most of what is needed - as Mr Berlusconi,  himself a member of the masses, at least in his heart, knows.  And then there is the rectitude of so many Italians who don't do debt:  not  personal debt on credit cards and for, or from, silly behaviour.  They do private debt, very private debt  over generations and extended family; but that sort of debt is really private and, as it glues society together,  behaves differently and exists under wholly different rules from just the rules of economics.

So despite the ill-mannered acronyms and expressed derision of Anglo-Saxon journalists and financial commentators, Italy only  has public debt, which can be readily covered if the government insists, which Dr Tremonti and Dr Draghi do, without much embarrassment and certainly without any of the bad behaviour displayed in Greece recently.  And without the discomfort of the English and Americans who have covered themselves in all and every kind of debt.  So we were probably told the truth this evening.  But then, though perfectly capable if lying serves,  the Prime Minister isn't a liar by nature, whatever else he may be.

And the bank at the bottom of the hill is ready and willing to lend - to the credit-worthy. 

Keeping an Ear Out for The Door Bell

Employment and unemployment are states with shifting boundaries here.   This is because everybody has multiple jobs.  There is the posto that carries insurance and employer and employee contributions to pension rights; then there is the self-employed job, usually agricultural or highly-skilled tradesman that carries another set of rights guaranteed (and paid for) from within a trade union protection set that is more like a medioeval guild; then there is the casual, but often fixed for years,  service with a local firm or individual doing a relatively unskilled task; and finally there is the contribution to the household economy - self-build, gardening up to and including market gardening,  deliveries locally, etc.

Frankly how they all manage to have dined and turn themselves out round about nine in the evening, bathed and dressed in fresh clothes, for a stroll to the bar, a game of cards, a chat, an ice cream  a piece of skulduggery, is amazing.  I think that they rely  on what could be called recession-in-turn to manage to get everything done.  No-one is ever sacked except for personal action that asks for it, it's just that attention shifts to another part of the individual and family undertakings as economic tides wash in and out. 

The secret is to keep a close eye on the person whose skills you wish to command, let them know a touch in advance, make sure you have all the permissions, supplies, tools, seeds, clarity of thought lined up, and be ready to take up the offer of some hours of work when it comes.  I've let it be known there are a couple of trees that died of the cold (sigh) to come down and be cleared away from the garden now I'm back.  And then all the external woodwork on the ecohouse is due for a revarnish; it was a dreadful winter. 

Early Start

Peas, I wrote blearily, carrots, beetroots, mangetout, radishes, Brussels sprouts (surely they come later?) different sorts of lettuce,  endive, gooseberries, red currants...

The phone had rung as I drank my tea and stared at the plain, and the city on its hill.

"Signora, buon giorno!"  Sunday morning, quarter to eight!  Right, this was not my call, and its real recipient could get out of bed and discuss tomatoes forthwith.  But it turned out it was my call after all; if I wanted more variety in the vegetable garden up the hill a list was needed.

The mind goes completely blank when threatened with nothing but a tide of tomatoes unless a list is produced now.  Trying to imagine a summer table all that came up was lettuce - absolutely pathetic.   So this year it will be my fault  - celery, peppers.... but they're off, gone in that uncomfily early morning way people do things here.  By a more Godly hour I'll have thought of all sorts of things - spring onions, basil..   

Slash and Burn

The olives are pruned.  They look very fine with their perfect shapes and neat plough furrows filling with the Spring grass and flowers.  An executive decision was taken to burn the olive prunings.  After all, there is a limit to how many can be waved and blessed in the processions around Easter.

Yes, it's been made the wrong thing to do, burning the olive branches and raking the ash around the trees.  Tuscan slash and burn has triumphed though.  What are they going to do  - send in Cathy Ashton's army to fight the entire Mediterranean?

Queue Jumping in Monculi

The dentist is obsequious.  I'd be obsequious if I planned to inflict fear and pain on willing victims.  Anyway, I walked through signorina Borri's olive groves, down to the  appointment with doom, at the bottom of the hill, just like the bank.  A filling efficiently consigned to target in one of the finest departments of dentristy in the UK  had yielded to the finest of Tuscan meat.  Chewed out, I suppose.

With Lillian Hellman's  'An Unfinished Woman ' jiggling in my hands (why did a small HG give me a book with such a title,  jiggling about in my mind) I sit in the waiting room.  Silence, apart from the musak, reigns; no screams, no urgent, barked orders.  Perhaps it will be all right?  Then a little old lady of the petit bourgeoisie enters.  Nothing could direct the adrenaline better.

'O, Signora,  thank Goodness it's you.  I need to see the dentist. You know how it is. Cold March, I've come out without my scarf and gloves, though I have my umbrella, I was in such a rush.   Do you find this a cold March?  Mind you, I expect you are  cared for, though of course you deserve to be, the wages being asked these days, and by people from who knows where.  (By this time I am frozen wordless: with outrage that I am being queue-jumped; by the implication that I am the kind of person who condones this behaviour; by the implication that I have slaves; by the identification of her values with my own; by the fact that the door to the dentist is closing behind her and I am still in the waiting room with my book. I wish I could speak Italian like my aunties-in-law. Or at least display their calculating, extensive, local knowledge.  She wouldn't have dared do it to one of them - the vengeance eaten cold would have been casual and deadly.

But my teeth are back in eating form (never try to eat with teeth out of action, I have lost pounds in the last few days);  and it's a very interesting book; and books are as good a read in one place as in  another.

I suppose. 

No Blackout

Earth Hour came and went without a flicker of conformity from the Comune or the Monculisti.  The floodlights aimed at the church and next door buildings (ie us) flooded on,  into  rooms that never know darkness now unless the scuri are fastened tightly inside and the shutters closed without.  Not a hope of walking through the place by moonlight, or looking from darkness out at the night sky, at least in the front of the building.

Looking from the back, the whole of the valley was lit up with towns and villages glowing on their hilltops and hillsides, roads lined orange; night was made day, as usual,  from all the street lights in the village itself,  just in case a danger might hide behind the newsagents, or lurk near the fountain.

People resent the dark; it's a loss of control, a return to a not very distant past when being in the dark meant poverty and over-simplicity of life-style.  Or external threat.

The greenies are on a loser trying to bring the dark back.

Utterly Uteless

The mechanical collapse of two of the runabouts (both over ten years' old so that's not a surprise, they've lived a hard life) and their exclusion in the near future from entry into any city as they passed into the categories condemned by greenery, meant buying a car.

It has to be with sufficient ground clearance to go off-road - or at least on to roads that are a bit off; it has to have carrying space for trees and wine casks and bits of furniture and thus be able to be swilled out with a hose, near enough.    It has to drive quietly and fast enough along the motorway.  And have the latest eurogreen number. 

This is it, I thought.  The perfect foil to my Driza-Bone.  My Ute!   I was foiled at the last hurdle (which, come to think of it, was also a requirement for fitting into this wonder vehicle). 

It has to carry at least five people.

That would be a Tardis, I argued.  Anything less than a Tardis and it's just Ute-discrimination.  AND NO GENERAL MOTORS (unless Mandelson is handing them out free, which he is until the English elections).

But lots of car-makers offer Cubes that meet these requirements which is nice - I suppose.  I'll trade in the Lanci for the Ute.  Once I've got the dog.

New Mac

Driza-bone day!  Chocolate brown and smelling of waxed cloth, it has arrived.  It had its first outing in Florence teamed up with choccie-brown suede flat boots with thick crepe soles, and longish black underskirt with soft grey cashmere over-dress, so that the skirt swirls a bit at the hem; then the drizy - I've got the shorter one as evidently you need to be quite strong to carry the full length around particularly when wet, and you have to tie it to your legs,  so it would have been hard to manage it without a horse really.

Mr HG had received a hat (but has conceded it on a long-term loan) in the same stuff.  It didn't actually rain, but I didn't actually want it to get wet, just be a day when I could wear it justifiably, which it was.  Galloped into Cibreo for lunch and eyed everybody who got up to leave fiercely to ensure they were in their own coats.

Many women are wearing dear little embroidered damasky coats with contrasting panels of flowers let into the back, very tight and long-sleeved then flaring from waist to hem.  But you could see the thought forming  that a drizy is essential for the well-dressed latest.  

For the Public Defender and the Prosecutor

This isn't quite as good as stealing a path, or painting a chicken, discussed over dinner on the summer terrace, but going off piste in your ute must surely be a personal choice?


It’s not often health and safety law is big news – but it has been in Australia this month, as a result of the judgment of the High Court of Australia in the Kirk case.
Graeme Kirk was director of a company that owned a farm in New South Wales, but left the management to an experienced farmer, Graham Palmer. One day Mr. Palmer was transporting some steel on a off-road vehicle, when for no reason anyone can explain he drove the vehicle off the gravel farm road, and down a steep hill. The vehicle turned over – and Mr. Palmer was killed. As a result, WorkCover (the Australian equivalent of our Health and Safety Executive) prosecuted Graeme Kirk, who ended up being convicted under New South Wales’s Occupational Health and Safety Act 1983. Section 15(1) of that Act states that

Every employer shall ensure the health, safety and welfare at work of all the employer’s employees

while section 53 provides defences:

It shall be a defence to any proceedings against a person for an offence against this Act or the regulations for the person to prove that:
(a) it was not reasonably practicable for the person to comply with the provision of this Act or the regulations the breach of which constituted the offence, or
(b) the commission of the offence was due to causes over which the person had no control and against the happening of which it was impracticable for the person to make provision.

Stopping at this point, it’s difficult to see what any employer can do to stop an experienced worker from literally going off-piste and, in a moment of uncharacteristic madness, taking an unacceptable risk at work. What was Mr. Kirk supposed to do? How could any training or workplace rules have prevented the accident? Surely, you’d think, one of the other of the section 53 defences would have helped Mr. Kirk – but no.
The Industrial Court saw the section 15(1) duty as absolute in nature. An offence under that section was charged without any real identification of anything Mr. Kirk or his company could or should have done to prevent the accident – the charges skirted that issue by referring vaguely to inadequate training and an unsafe system of work, without saying what a safe system might have consisted of, or what training could have prevented the accident. Even though it was subject to the section 53 defences, viewing section 15(1) as absolute distorted the Industrial Court’s approach, as the High Court of Australia explains (para. 38)

A consequence of the matter proceeding to conviction on the charges as stated, absent the identification of measures the Kirk company should have taken, was that it was denied the opportunity to properly put a defence under s 53(a). Instead, the Kirk company was required to show why it was not reasonably practicable to eliminate possible risks associated with the use, or possible use, of the ATV. The guarantee against risk, seen as provided by s 15, was treated as continuing, despite a defence under s 53(a) being raised. The operation of that defence was treated as largely confined to an issue of reasonable foreseeability.

In practice, therefore, section 15(1) was applied as though it were absolute, so that an employer would be guilty of an offence almost automatically whenever an accident happened.
The High Court of Australia has now roundly criticised that approach, and has quashed Mr. Kirk’s conviction. Charges under section 15 must specify what risks the employer should have addressed and how he or she has failed to reduce or eliminate those risks. ABC Radio National interviewed Mr. Kirk earlier this month on its excellent show Counterpoint – you can read the transcript and may still be able to listen to the interview here.
The World Socialist Website sees this as a victory for capitalism at the expense of workers’ health and safety – but I disagree. I’m not the sort of person who shares the Fox view of law according to which employers should probably be released from all and any legal burdens. But I do think interpreting the legislation in such a way as to impose criminal liability on someone without any factual basis for holding them responsible for Mr. Palmer’s death was oppressive. Health and safety at work is a serious matter: it should not be brought into disrepute in this way, and laws aiming at securing it should not be used as as instruments of arbitrary oppression.
Nor do I think imposing absolute liability was good policy. If employers are faced with a reality in which no amount of sensibly-targeted expenditure on training and equipment can hold them safe from litigation, then it becomes economically irrational to invest in safety. Instead, you’d be better off buying insurance to enable you to meet legal bills and fines in case one of your workers is injured when something happens that you could never control. Absolute liability is the enemy of health and safety, in truth. Law and regulation ought to focus on practical precautions – on what employers can and should do now to reduce risk – not on the steamroller of perfect legalistic hindsight, a blunter and less effective way of trying to improve workplace standards.
Which is why I’m glad that a few years ago the UK fought and won in the European Court of Justice when the European Commission argued for an “absolute” interpretation of the equivalent EU health and safety legislation.

So anyone returning to the ecohouse, olive-picking assistant or no, had better watch out for the terracing.  Once past the bar, you have to get to dinner without mishap, or it's no dinner!

Bless

Adorned with a reproduction of the lovely fresco of the Annunciation taken from our house  in the  settecento  (grrrr, the ancestors handed over a large part of the garden too, on which the 'new' church now stands;  before that the village church was further down the hill and the room from which the fresco was moved was a dear little chapel, part of this building) the parish priest has sent out his leaflet on the dates and times when we should be at home to be blessed.  The parish priest barely clears the bar for blessing, in my book.

Where I grew up, Hatfield, our parish priest had a DD from Rome plus various other minor Oxford-conferred degrees, and movable teeth.  These last were watched by an enthralled congregation as, the tenor of his sermons being well above our heads, their positioning indicated how close we were to the resumption of Mass and,  mutatis mutandis, Sunday dinner.  We would reel home, our senses blurred by clouds of incense both intellectual and from the vigorously wielded thurible, eyes with dancing patterns of lace feet-deep on cottas and altar, and candles ranked like angels in burning rows.

Here they play guitars and have ragged singing in local dialect.  Confession here would be an act of desecration to all the subtleties of sin learned (though not necessarily practised - a considerable lack of opportunity reigned in Hatfield to sin in the ways our parish priest was able to envisage) as an interested frequenter of Sunday School. Nope, this parish priest opens the Easter blessing batting with this:

"Every year, in preparation for Easter, we undertake Lent and think of the poverty of the human spirit, not always adequate to the demands of our life's journey [il cammino della vita is an obligatory hat tip to 'our cultural heritage, we all know our Dante', which we don't but who's checking?  ed.]
We feel reassured, thinking our times of poverty long gone, never to return [this village has one of the highest per capita incomes in the country, ed.] as we enjoy our place among the world's richest countries (at least from  published classifications) [a point must be given for suspicion of statistical data presentation there, ed.] and view from our plenty the miseries of the so-called Third World.

BUT THERE WILL BE NO BUTTER IN HELL!  [all right, he didn't write exactly that, but he would have done if his literary excursions had extended beyond Dante to Joyce, ed.  What he actually wrote was]:
"But we have woken up one of these mornings and found ourselves impoverished and alone!
Today being alone is a great burden for many; and when it is taken with economic uncertainty, which only yesterday was so reassuringly absent, it makes us feel really poor, as human beings. [mmmm, that's not quite the Christian message from the Hatfield perspective; being alone but compensated by being rich was not an objective as I recall. After all do we admire Cardinal Siri of Bologna with his ringing endorsement of the local view:

Homo sine pecunia, imago mortis. ed. ?]

"So, this time of the year  is particularly suitable for rediscovering the measure of our real wealth, which no-one can take from us. Our dignity as children of God who partake in the resurrection of Christ. [now what kind of rallying cry is that to the multiculti hordes? And he presses on! ed.]

"We cannot walk alone and, though nothing can stop us illuminated by the light of  God's word, the  difficulties could provide paths other than those  paths designed by human kind  [does he mean the paths of Angels? ed.] to return to  vigour, strength and hope for tireder and weaker members [or a hint at viagra? ed.]

With God's help we shall rise again!"

Gosh.  Should we be at home on 12 March?

Diversity

Would you be able to pop out into the village (or your local Waitrose) and buy a stick of sealing wax?  The joys of shop diversity where brought home today along with half a dozen drinking eggs,  a new salami, the dry kind not the wetter sort from the North, teeny-weeny lamb cutlets for deep frying like Mars Bars (the result of the slaughter of teeny-weeny male lambs, baaah), and 20 litres of white@a euro a litre with a convenient little tap on the front.

No kings but cabbages are piling up downstairs from up the hill.

(Disappointingly it's not that the entire population is flinging back  the velvet sleeves of its doublets and mantles and stamping rolled parchments with rings and seals, they use it to double-secure the corks of wine bottles.)

Lunch in One Gulp

'Lovely fire, Why are you adding more wood?"

"....few people... on way to conference in Siena.... passing by from Rome.....might call in."

"What time?"

"One-ish."

I set off to put clean towels in the bathrooms, and dust the more obviously undusted - Philip Pullman should have set the novels here, we have dust for universes unknown to man, which is where it all must be coming from.

"What should I get from the butcher?"

"Meat."  This is the tight-lipped, growly bit of discovering that a salad with a prosciutto pannino isn't the menu for lunch, you understand.

Enthralled I unpack half a cow and most of a pig's insides variously stuffed into skins and casings.

"Did you tell him how many?"

"Oh yes.  He said he'd be able to send over more if that seemed insufficient."

So I put a bowl of fresh pasta with  Australian-bottled tomatoes and parmesan on the front end;  laid out the fire in a bed of coals and the meat (plus my hands and face) on grids and griddles over it; boiled the latest greenery from up the hill (that, at least, was an uplift to the heart), and stood in front of the shelves where the tablecloths are contemplating the likely damage.  People get carried away eating barbecued meat, even when it's indoors -  no, particularly when it's indoors in the middle of winter.  So it was a deep red, robustly woven linen, and large paper napkins.  Well you try getting tomato sauce followed by barbie off cloth ones.

Noticing a touch of fluster, Mr HG picked up a stray umbrella queueing to go downstairs with one pair of pruning shears, and some bright green plant ties that had settled in on the fireplace,  began refurling it correctly, and asked what else he could do to help.  I eyed him as he neatly pleated the edges of the refurled umbrella:

"You go into your study and earn lots of money after you've popped that umbrella downstairs."

"Right - they've just rung to say they've left the motorway, but everything looks under control now."

Burned

The 12 days may have passed but we are still coping with the enthusiastic stocking up for Christmas.  This evening (a Friday - oh, the guilt) we are having roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.  Blithely I opened the oven door, oven glove on one hand, took out the pot of roasting carrots in ginger and caramel, and helped it onto the work surface by grasping the handle with the other, bare, hand.

Then I threw it across the kitchen.  Hot?  I didn't know such pain.  Fortunately, after shoving poor hand under the cold tap till it all calmed down, I remembered where the anti-burn is - I know, I should keep it all in the first aid box but things move about ON THEIR OWN here.

God bless the St John's Ambulance and modern medicines.  Hand and fingers are feeling stiff and glisten with unguent, but  they were treated in time.

Serving dinner with one hand is a feat.

Covered in Icing Sugar

Great generosity and hospitality has been shown over the holidays by friends and relations.  So the annual ceremony of opening the Bauli only happened today.  A Bauli is, as it says on the outside, il pandoro di Verona.

So I swathed-on a clean pinny, took  a short vegetable knife in one hand and the Bauli in the other and started hacking into the bottom of the carton.  Fail.  I ended ripping it out with tooth and nail.  Inside the Bauli sat smugly encased in see-through, the tightly sealed packet of icing sugar and the refastener coyly out of sight.  But I just tipped the lot out onto the table, stood the B on its head and sliced open the inner wrapper.  Hah.  Pass.

I readied the cellophane, rolled down to half way, and opened the icing sugar packet - just the corner, of course, otherwise it comes out too fast.  Pass.

Icing sugar tipped in, sides rolled up over Bauli, opened end of cellophane closed and seized tight.  Shake.

The trouble with triumphant shaking is it's too violent.  It only takes a little split, the slightest loss of total grip on the neck, and the icing sugar is out and all over.  Fail.  Again.

I will get it right in 2011 - or  2012 -  or?

Buon Anno

           Happy New Year to you all, in all the lives you are leading now.