Whatever can be said, can be

Glancing at recent keyword activity (instead of doing something profitable with my time) I see that someone from the United Kingdom has reached my blog this morning by typing into Google the following:

men nakid holding each others winky and sucking each others winkys.

Worryingly, this blog was the first site to appear, despite the fact that I’ve never – before now – used the word winky (or, for that matter, spelt naked with an ‘i’). I’m followed by the blog of someone called The Jaded Skeptic, which looks rather interesting. And 47 other sites, none of which look remotely titillating. Clearly, a frustrating morning for our intrepid Googler.

Oh God, I remember now. Tinky Winky, the sexually ambiguous Teletubby. Why? Why?

Pope duck

Tempted? If making your own holy water (just immerse pope duck in bath!) doesn’t grab you, try some of the other goodies Miss Poppy has in stock. (The Handzoff anti-masturbation cream looks like a real bargain.) Go on! You won’t regret it!

And if you do, it’ll be too late.

Italy rules OK. OK?

Two reminders yesterday that the autonomy of the Republic of Italy isn’t a given.

One. Rome’s court of assizes decided that there was no case to be made against the murderer of Nicola Calipari, the Italian secret service agent who was shot while helping kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena leave Iraq. Who was the murderer? An American soldier called Mario Lozano. Whatever the truth behind the events of that night (and without a trial it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what happened), it’s hard not to see this as an act of capitulation to the United States government.

Two. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican’s secretary of state, announced that people should ‘stop it’. He was referring to Curzio Maltese’s inquiry in la Repubblica into how much the Vatican costs the Italian state. The most recent instalment, published a few days ago, looked at the ora di religione, obligatory in all Italian state schools although not for students, who can, if they or their parents wish, opt out. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. The hour of religion (i.e. catholicism) is always timetabled mid-morning, rather than at the start or end of the school day; those students who choose not to take part – some of them as young as six – are usually told to ‘wait in the corridor’. Alternatives? There are no alternatives. Comparative religion? Stop it!

This is already bad enough, in a country which now has half a million children from other countries and cultures in its public educational system, not all of them catholic. What’s worse is the way the teaching of the hour is financed. Religious teachers are chosen by the local bishop, side-stepping the time-consuming and exhausting obstacle race of national competitions all other teachers have to undergo. They’re paid, though, by the state, and their salaries cost something like €1 billion a year; in terms of occult financing to the catholic church, this is second only to the otto per mille scam I’ve posted about before. Not only that – they have tenure in a country where a significant part of the teaching is conducted by precari, teachers, often in their forties or fifties, who struggle from short-term contract to short-term contract, their holidays unpaid, their pensions rights undermined, their chances of a mortgage or bank loan seriously restricted.

Finally, as salt in the wound, they’re actually paid more than their equivalent non-religious teachers, as a result of laws passed more than 25 years ago, laws that are still being contested in Italian courts by their lay colleagues.

No wonder Bertone wants Maltese to shut up.

Happy birthday to whole universe! And me! (Two days late)

Tom Raworth has just reminded me that, according to Archbishop James Ussher, I share my birthday with Heaven and Earth, created on 23 October 4004 BC.

Other people whose birthdays coincide with mine and the entire caboodle include Diana Dors, ‘Weird’ Al Jankovic and Ned Rorem. For a complete list (and further proof that astrology is a distinctly inexact, er, science) click here.

What it says on the packet

Suffering from what is almost certainly post-party flu, I’ve been a recent visitor to our local chemist’s and I’ve been struck, as always, by the subtle, and not so subtle, cultural differences between the UK and Italy. In England, medicines are stocked and shelved, named and labelled, in much the same way as any other consumer good might be. The packages are designed to catch the eye, the names to suggest what good the medicine is designed to do. In England, I’d probably have wandered around the colds and flu section of my local Boots and ended up buying a box of Lemsip. Lemsip. Sounds good, Tastes of lemon, made to be sipped. The box has a tick to emphasise positivity, rich, cosy colours, a gleaming yellow mug with some warming steam rising from it and a human hand around its tummy. In the TV commercial, arms and legs spring out of the box’s corners and, before you know it, the medicine is not only making you feel better, it’s physically caring for you. It actually makes itself.

In Italy, an almost identical product in terms of active ingredients (paracetamol) is called, wait for it, Tachifludec. Apart from the middle syllable, the name tells you nothing except that the stuff inside the box is medicinal. It doesn’t coax or comfort; it doesn’t do anything but distinguish what’s in this box from what might be in the one next to it. It is not, in other words, a publicist’s dream. Granted, there’s a silhouette of a mug on the front and a picture of half a lemon, but the general look is 1960s clinical; you can see that, whoever designed the box, their heart wasn’t in it. Interestingly, neither the box nor the sachets inside have any information on how to use the stuff. For that you need to read the closely printed four-paged sheet of information inside, which I no longer seem to have. Even there, the how is lost in columns of what that might mean something to a specialist, but leave an everyday flu sufferer woefully uninformed.

And that’s the other difference. Chemists’ in England are, essentially, supermarkets. In Italy they’re more like designer boutiques. No other kind of Italian retail outlet has quite the same aura of wealth. My local chemist’s, until recently lined in sumptuous prestige hardwoods with satin glass shelves in eau-de-nil and touches of burnished aluminium here and there, has just been made over. All surfaces are now protected by heavyweight slabs of marble, it has a multi-layered false ceiling Borromini might have designed, and bullet-proof automatic doors that slide open with an affluent hiss the minute you approach them. Money’s been thrown at it, and thrown again, until it won’t stick any more. In the heart of this shrine to conspicuous expenditure, like serving vestals, are the chemists in their starched white coats, their voices low, their origami skills exquisitely honed as they take the box of Tachifludec and wrap it in a pre-cut rectangle of paper, and fold in both ends, and apply just a touch of sellotape. Voilà.

A normal country

The problem with talking about events in Italy, particularly political events, is that, as they move forward, often at a great rate and with considerable fluster, they nonetheless drag their significance behind them, fanning out into an endless murk, so far behind them and in such confusion that what we are faced by is nothing, a bagatelle, a minor scandal, and so we don’t know where to start, which thread to begin to unpick, which rumour to substantiate or set aside, which name to name, which reputation to save or besmirch. In other words, they’re rather like the previous sentence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you were tempted to give up and wonder why I hadn’t just posted a photograph of my dog again. So thank you for getting this far.

The event that triggered this post is the news that Clemente Mastella, Italy’s minister of justice, is being investigated for a series of crimes, including the abuse of his office and membership of secret associations (read: masonic lodges), in connection with an inquiry into the activities of one of his chums, a certain Antonio Saladino, a powerful entrepreneur, connected to the world of politics, the church and, it’s said, organised crime, as well as being ex-owner of a temping agency called Why Not. Why not indeed?

In a normal country a minister of justice who found himself under investigation would, at the very least, remove himself until the investigation was concluded. But Italy isn’t a normal country. Mastella’s first reaction was to attempt to remove not himself, but the investigating magistrate, Luigi De Magistris. In a normal country, De Magistris would have sought redress within the structure, and probably found it. In Italy, he went on prime-time television to defend his position. In a normal country, this would have been seen as inappropriate. In Italy, it’s absorbed into political discussions of a Byzantine complexity as to how long the Prodi government can survive. Because, of course, if Mastella goes, or is forced to go, he’ll take his 1.4% (yes, that’s right – 1.4%) with him and the government will fall. At this point, his innocence or guilt is irrelevant. In a normal country, a man whose party contrives to win 1.4% of the popular vote and whose attitude towards the morality of the state and its representatives is notoriously elastic, would not be minister of justice in the first place.

In Italy, he is. In the meantime, De Magistris has been taken off the case.

Red

I know I should get worked up about this dreadful act of vandalism at the Trevi fountain, but I can’t. The red stuff thrown into the water is harmless, the man responsible claims to be a futurist, which these days is merely touching, and the act coincides (almost) with a massive demonstration to defend workers against punitively liberal labour legislation. Red flags in the streets, red water in the Trevi fountain. It’s the October revolution all over again.

And I think it looks fabulous.

Do you know what it means?

More wine, fewer roses

Clench, dean, clench…

Remember the auto-erotically asphyxiated pastor a few posts below (click here)? The one with a condom-sheathed dildo up his, er, revealed truth? It turns out he was once the dean of Jerry Falwell’s ‘university’.

Probably gave out straight ‘A’s in rubber technology.