Bad manners

It might not have been the most stomach-turning thing I saw this year, but it came close. Travelling to Rome by train a few weeks ago, I watched the youngish smartly-dressed woman on the seat opposite me carefully twist a lock of hair into a strand and then use the strand, with considerable vigour, to floss her teeth.

Words are also actions

I saw two films on TV over Christmas that touched me deeply, in different ways. The first was The Motorcycle Diaries by Walter Salles, based on the journals kept by Che Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado during a life-changing epic motorcycle ride round South America. It’s a directorial tour de force, drawing on genres for what they can offer, discarding them when they no longer serve the purpose. It’s not a buddy movie, however much the film examines the changing relationship between the two friends, their affections, their differences – both emotional and political. It’s not a road movie, despite the essentially picaresque narrative structure: this happens, that happens, they move on, they meet new people, they fall in love and out of it. What makes it more than a collection of episodes is the cumulative effect the episodes have on the two main characters, particularly Ernesto, a sensitive asthmatic who can’t tell a lie for the life of him, or anyone else. The clearest signs of the ruthlessness that enabled him to become the Che of legend are when he simply can’t not tell the truth, however painful to others, and to himself, it might be; it’s a feature of revolutionaries that the individual sensibility can be sacrificed for the larger notion, and it’s to the credit of the wonderful Gael Garcia Bernal that he makes this seem an entirely admirable characteristic.

Quite by chance, I saw Papillon a few weeks ago, for the first time in over thirty years, and it’s interesting to compare how the two films dealt with leprosy. In Papillon, the lepers are not only people with a problem, but also – if not primarily – a testing ground for the hero’s courage. For this to work, the head leper is suitably monstrous. In The Motorcycle Diaries, on the other hand, the lepers are seen as an opportunity for compassion, and solidarity. (Interestingly, both films see nuns as hypocrites). What the film left me with was a sense that one life can change many lives and that the quality – and consequence – of those changes might be utterly unpredictable, but that maybe we shouldn’t be put off by this. Maybe there is a case for the kind of struggle Che continues to represent. Perhaps the real hero, though, was Che’s friend, who set up the Santiago Medical School (I think), creating the one thing for which Cuba can wholeheartedly and unreservedly be praised, and that might never have existed without the work of Che and Castro.

The other film was The History Boys, based on the Alan Bennett play, with the extraordinary Richard Griffiths as Mr Hector, the ‘general studies’ teacher, preparing a group of sixth-formers for Oxbridge entrance in the early 1980s. Hector’s a charismatic teacher but of a curiously low-key sort, as far removed from the character portrayed by Robin Williams in The Dead Poet’s Society as is humanly possible.It’s always interesting to me to see how much most genuine teachers loathe DPS and how much it’s adored by students (in Italy, at least). It’s as though teachers recognise how easily the kind of power Williams portrays can be misused and understand that it is, essentially, no different from that of his less hip colleagues. He’s still just telling people how to behave. Which, of course, is exactly what students want: to be told what to do by someone who seems to be providing some kind of cool alternative, both to the other teachers and to what the world has to offer. What makes Hector such a wonderful creation is the extreme modesty of his tyranny (he is not, after all, a facilitator). To all intents and purposes, he lets his boys get on with it, as they improvise scenes in a French brothel or act out the final scene from Brief Encounter. They’re fond of him, more than they realise, but not enchanted, which is as it should be; enchantment is the last thing a teacher should be up to.

The other theme of the film, of course, is what we do with being gay. Hector is gay, as is Irwin, the new-broom-sweeping-clean teacher and one or two, maybe three of the boys, which made me wonder, with some regret, why my own school days should have been so resolutely straight. I found Hector’s plight as a frustrated ephebophile touching and couldn’t rebuke him for the delicacy of his solution to it – gauchely groping his pillion rider as the lollipop lady halted the traffic (the motorcycle connection?). But I also wondered why Posner, his star pupil, whose attitude to his own gayness seemed stoically matter-or-fact rather than self-reproaching, should have wanted to take the same rather Edwardian path of sexual self-sacrifice that his teacher/mentor had. The film often seemed to be lurching between two quite incompatible worlds: one of caution and evasion, in which EM Forster – and possibly the young Alan Bennett – might have felt at home; and an altogether more contemporary one in which sixth-formers swore in front of their betters, offered themselves up for oral sex and saw learning in terms of its providing access to Thatcher-era success.

The best part for me, despite all the sexual, and sexy, undertow of the film, was towards the end, when Hector explains how much he hates those people who say they ‘love words’ and ‘literature’ (you have to hear his lugubrious enunciation of these terms to get the full contempt), as though genuflecting to high culture were a way of not having to think about its implications.

Father(s) Christmas

A little disturbing to see the sleigh-born benefactor himself accompanied by his smaller, but otherwise identical daemon, rather like Austin Powers with Mini Me. Still, at least he isn’t dangling from a glittering rope outside the bedroom window, like most Santa Clauses these past two or three years. I wonder how parents explain to their children how Santa Claus is capable of reproducing himself in this indiscriminate fashion. It must be as hard to make sense of as – I don’t know – the virgin birth.

Christmas roast

The British press has been titillated these past few days over the pre-Christmas party organised by Manchester United players. It started off chastely enough, with drag queens and lap dancing, but subsequently adjourned to a hotel, entirely booked for the occasion, in the company of a hundred aspiring WAGs. As one journalist pointed out, you don’t book a hotel unless you intend to use the rooms. Six footballers (or five, according to your source; the actual number may or may not be academic) and one young woman did indeed use one of the rooms, apparently to their mutual satisfaction. It’s thanks to their sexual antics that large swathes of middle Britain are now acquainted with the more exotic meaning of roasting.
Marina Hyde, in the Guardian, commented, quite rightly in my opinion, that the footballers weren’t driven by passion or even lust – one in six is actually not that hot a ratio if you’re one of the six – but by their desire to emulate the internet porn that has taught them all they know about what men do with women. And yet. And yet.

I’ve also been on the receiving end of a group of men, fluidly numbered but at no time fewer than four. In my case, it wasn’t so much roasting as microwaving saveloys, but I don’t recall feeling humiliated or exploited, or even dirty. What I recall is being up for it in an eager, undiscriminating – OK, drunken – way. I was thirty, not seventeen, and the men I was with, in the loosest sense, were almost certainly not professional footballers, so my motives were almost certainly purer and more pondered than those of the aspiring Victoria Beckham in Room 101 (or whatever). Almost certainly. After all, I didn’t give head (or anything else) for a recording contract or the newest quilted handbag, the one that looks more like a shrunken anorak than an iconic fashion object (but what do I know?). I didn’t expect to be interviewed by Hello, or snubbed by Lindsay Lohan, or have my ‘life’ filmed for a Channel 4 documentary (though I wouldn’t have minded). I wasn’t after anything much beyond the moment, some time around 3 am on a Friday morning if I remember rightly, on my knees behind a laurel bush and, well, lapping it up in the most literal sense. I was happy, more than happy, to be there.

Maybe I had to be self-hating to find it fun, by which I mean radically naughty and thrilling and life-enhancing, but I did. And that’s the problem. Because I don’t think she did, the girl who was roasted in some hotel in Manchester and was happy because they’d said she was a good fuck. And I don’t think they did either, the would-be Jeff Strykers and John Holmeses, queuing for their go at whatever bit of her was free. And that’s a pity. Because if it isn’t fun, it’s not much more than a career move in a very crowded profession. It’s bags and shoes and interviews, assuming you can find your knickers.

Health

There’s an interesting piece today by Peter Popham, the Independent’s Rome correspondent, about his experiences with the Italian health system. Under an unnecessarily gloomy headline (Thinking of travelling to Italy for treatment? I would think again), the article kicks off by praising the country’s emergency services for being fast, efficient, non-discriminatory and, above all, free. This echoes my experience. I’ve taken innumerable visiting friends with the most unlikely ailments and found humour, diligence, precision and drugs. On one memorable occasion, a stoutly devout New Yorker (by adoption) who’d tried to jump the queue by claiming to have a dodgy heart (rather than the less urgent sciatica) thanked the doctor who’d just pumped painkiller into her bottom with a macaronic Dio benedire tua famiglia (God to bless your family). Che Dio benedica la sua schiena invece (I’d rather God blessed your back), he replied.

He’s less impressed by the care offered to less urgent cases. I think he’s a little unfair here. After all, the Italian health system has just been judged, by WHO, the second best in the world (after France); the UK came 27th. Still, he could have a point. You may remember the problems I had with insurance after breaking my shoulder in Britain last year. Now where was I? Oh yes, I’d just arrived at the casualty department of an English hospital with an oddly dead arm. I was diagnosed within half an hour as the bearer of a humerus with a compound fracture and told to come back on Monday. Today was Friday. I have to fly back to Italy on Monday, I said. Oh well, they said, and gave me a scrap of cotton to use as a sling. You’d better go to hospital in Italy then. I was prescribed painkillers for the weekend. I queued at the hospital pharmacy, my dead arm in its scrap of cotton, and paid up for some codeine. I took them back to where my mother was waiting, distraught, in casualty and asked for a glass of water. I’m sorry, the woman said, we don’t do water. You can get a bottle from the café.

Three days of excruciating almost sleepless pain later I was in Italy. Home. I went to my local hospital. They were shocked that so little had been done, with a sort of patriotic pride that the famous English national health had sent me away with nothing but a bottle of pills and a knotted handkerchief, but themselves did nothing; they didn’t have an orthopaedic department. I was sent ten miles away to Terracina, which did. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, it was closed for lunch. I waited, sitting in the car, accustomed by now to the throb of my right arm as it wobbled in its paltry sling, wondering what would happen next. More x-rays, for which I had to beg (they should have been done at Fondi), and a prescription for an authentic two part, padded sling. Plus odd little injections into the stomach that Giuseppe had to do for me because I couldn’t reach down to pucker the skin and jab at the same time.

In many ways, Popham’s right. There was bureaucracy to deal with and the cost of ‘tickets’, as they’re known here, with that fondness Italians have for concealing unpleasantries beneath the language of others. So why don’t I agree with the article? Because I didn’t feel dismissed, as I did in Wolverhampton. I didn’t feel as though I had to pay for the water I needed to take my pills. It isn’t the money as such, but the mean spiritedness of it that shocked me. There’s something perverse about prescribing pills and denying the water that’s needed to take them. Unless you buy a bottle of pure spring Malvern water, or whatever the label says it is you’re drinking to ease the pain.

Starving Makes it Fat

If you’re feeling peckish for something throught-provoking and slightly creepy, try Kay Sexton’s fabulous new story on East of the Web. It’s called Starving Makes it Fat and it’s a cracker (a high-fibre, low-fat cracker, naturally).

More of the same old religious shite

It’s barely worth commenting on the fact that the centre-left majority on Rome was yesterday unable to approve either of two motions to grant some sort of legitimacy to civil unions. Neither would have made any difference but, given that we live in a world of political gestures as much as of acts, every litle helps. The left-left proposal, to establish a register for civil unions, was thrown out by Vatican groupies in the centre-left. The centre-left proposal (if such a feeble almost lifeless creature can be considered such), to ask the government to have another little think about the whole business, was also summarily thrown out, this time by the left (and everyone else). Once again, it’s a case of Vatican 1, Italy 0.

It wouldn’t be worth commenting at all if someone called Elio Sgreccia, archbishop and president of the pontifical academy for life (you couldn’t make it up), hadn’t decided to gloat. This grotesque old porker has announced that homosexuals shouldn’t be discrimated against, but simply steered as rapidly as possible into the arms of a psychologist for the necessary therapeutic help (presumably the kind undergone by crystal-meth-and-male-massage addict, Ted Haggard).

Let’s assume the bigoted toad isn’t being merely cynical, but actually believes what he says. Let’s give him the benefit of that doubt. In which case, it might be pertinent to ask ourselves whether a man who has almost certainly never had a meaningful relationship in his adult life with another human being (I’m being generous here), who has never engaged in any useful activity other than telling people what they should and shouldn’t do, who has never paid a penny in tax or known what it means to worry about a bill, who has evidently sublimated his healthy sexual instincts into the pleasures of the table – a man, in other words, who has served no useful biological or social purpose of any kind might not be a more suitable case for psychiatric treatment than, say, me. Or millions of others.

Physician, heal thyself.

Combs, poodles, sunglasses, white silk scarves

Franco Zeffirelli, ageing film director, thinks the Pope needs a makeover, according to a short but sadly riveting piece in today’s Independent. Apparently, Eggs Benedict is too cold and too showy. Unlike cuddly, downbeat Franco.

Borges described the Malvinas war as two bald men squabbling over a comb. I wonder what he’d have had to say about this potential tiff. Two toothless poodles fighting over a boner? Of course, the pope of fucking everything might, just this once, have the dignity to not respond.

I’m expecting an official statement from the Vatican as I write.

Wigan says no to wingnuts

It’s not often I feel like applauding Wigan Council (or even mentioning it, despite my being half Lancastrian). But the news that it’s refused permission to a group of wealthy wingnuts who wanted to build a creationist theme park on the site of an old B & Q store brings joy to my heart. The promoters, AH Trust, apparently think that multimedia displays of the world being whipped up out of nowt in six days will stop young people from binge drinking. Well, it’s a fond, but foolish, hope. In the meantime, the Trust is still looking for somewhere that wants its “two interactive cinemas, a cafeteria, six shops and a television recording studio, allowing it to produce its own Christian-themed films and documentaries.” I can’t wait. (Thanks to the Guardian for this.)

Peter Jones, one of the trustees, said: “Wigan council slammed the door in our faces. You mention the C [Christian] word, and people don’t want to know.”

I wonder if the Guardian supplied the gloss. After all, Christian isn’t the first C-word that springs to mind.

Red bull? Papal bull? Plain bull…

Thanks to the efforts of one humourless Sicilian priest (Father Marco Damanti, if you care), who’s played the blasphemy card and scared Red Bull into compliance, you’ll no longer be able to see this harmless advertisement on Italian television.

Never mind, you can see it here.