Wake up before it's too late...

Hang on a sec, I think I may have just woken up. The needle must have slipped out of my arm by accident. I’m awake, alright, I smell coffee. The friendly buxom botox nurse who was administering me a veil of morphine has disappeared. I open my eyes, the dreamscape slides away - those gorgeous Tuscan landscapes lightly toasted by the summer sun with, here and there, splendidly turned out decent upright folk or gente per bene, discussing politics and sport in a lighthearted playful way over some Chianti have gone.

Taking their place now, the lesser-known streets of the sordid rampant sprawling city that is modern Rome (that’s what is known as an oxymoron), yards away from the tourist sights, with its pavements dipped in turd and littered with collapsed drunks, staggering tramps and exotically dressed gypsies with their heads in the cassonetti (big street-side rubbish bins) sifting through people’s garbage.

How about that for a less romantic urban landscape? This isn’t the bella vita that we read about in the press, is it? Where in God’s name am I again? Oh yeah, just off viale di Trastevere, a stone’s throw (a due passi) from the historical centre of Rome, la città eterna, modern day Italy. Did I say ‘modern’ again? Apologies.

So I’m still stuck in this no man’s land between enemy trenches, a willing prisoner, still unable to wriggle myself free in this purgatory that Dante overlooked, still screaming with frustration (in-between doses of the good life that is) in this lawless Wild West where, whatever illegal activity you’re involved in, you’re unlikely at any time of day or night to feel the strong arm of the law on your shoulder, sending a chill down your spine. Even if you begged to be arrested, they’d probably ignore you. It’s the cops who’ve got their hands tied, not the bleedin’ criminals! And you’d think the government had been formed by David Lynch.

And yet I try to be upbeat, I try to ignore the bad and focus on the good, I try, please don’t think it’s a lack of effort on my part, I’m trying my best. Even now. And while I’m trying to summon up some optimism in this topsy-turvy land, some filthy street urchin relieves himself against a dustbin in the street outside and waves up at my window. Ahhh, that’s better. That’s lightened the load. Now I can get my head back down to work. In the bin.
It turns out that I’m not the only one who was privy to the spectacle but that one of my neighbours, unimpressed, retained enough optimism and faith in the system to call the police. “Call the police?”, my students repeated in a chorus of incredulity as I relayed the story a few days later, “Capirai!” – which means “As if!” but literally translates, cunningly enough, as “You will understand”. As if to confirm everyone’s cynicism about police impotence, they turn up an hour later (my students, days later, would nod knowingly), at which point our sprightly Oliver Twisted character is probably somewhere on the Tiburtina. The boys in blue, cigarettes hanging off their lips, shrug their shoulders and say “Ma! Che possiamo fa’?”. “But!” just about says it all.

“Ah, però…” begin the inevitable protests, “the police have a lot on their plate, they have terrible salaries, they have to put their lives at risk every day, it’s complicated, it requires 1000s of hours of endless, useless discussion on 1000s of endless, useless discussion programmes on tv to even begin to comprehend even vaguely the enormity of the subtleties of the issues and the sensibilities of those who….” and oh I can’t even be bothered to finish the sentence. What I say (soap box, anyone?) is if you don’t fancy the salary, look for another job. Punto.

In the complete absence of objective information, it’s difficult to know how serious the crime problem is in Italy. Our fun-loving lad with loose manners is probably the least of our worries. That Rome, unlike other European capitals, isn’t becoming a better place to live is tangibly true, although difficult to prove. The feeling you have is that the fabric of society is held together by a fair number of Italians’ desire to behave well and to look out for each other and not by any fear of the potential consequences of breaking the law or any universal sense of civic duty. Whereas elsewhere, in England for example, random or gratuitous acts of violence or vandalism are probably more prevalent, there is at least a tangible sense of what will happen to you if you commit a crime and are caught. I won’t do that, people think to themselves, because it’ll ruin my future. Here, it’s the opposite. Upside down. Mulholland Drive.

The perverse logic goes like this: if you catch me, unlikely in itself, with my hands around some defenceless OAP’s throat or at tea with some mafia boss, the trial, the retrial, the appeal, the second appeal and the final absolute, this-time-it’s-for-real appeal will probably take so long that the original charge will no longer be valid. Every charge has a eat-by date. That’s the beauty of the system. You couldn’t make it up.

In recent months, we have again found ourselves in the midst of a growing sense of national outrage, fuelled by newspapers (right-wing, probably) who neglect to provide any detailed evidence, about the number of crimes actually committed by extra-comunitari and gupsies. Not the number of crimes committed by persone per bene or politicians, God forbid, we wouldn’t want to waste any column inches on these trivial matters.

While the sandstorm around gypsies and illegal immigrants distracts everyone’s attention, great crimes are probably being committed by the very people who govern us. Probably I say, I don’t want to fall foul of any legal action against me. Any reference here to reality is purely coincidental. Having said that, you wonder why crowds scatter whenever a merry band of gypsies happen to walk down the road with their shopping bags and kids in tow.

Italians are as racist as the rest of us, sure, but the swell of opinion against these people can’t be explained away that easily. It can’t all be manipulation. There’s smoke so there’s fire, right? What is it that they do for a living anyway? Apart from beg and steal, that is, ho-ho-ho. I could dress that up as a joke I guess but no-one’s gonna fall for it. Hold up, wasn’t there a bleedin’ gypsy on United airlines flight 9867? And that Bin Laden character gets about a bit - are we sure he isn’t some kind of NOMAD??????? Wherever the truth lies, it’s all good news for petty criminals who don’t happen to be dressed like ancient Romans (ironic, right?).

Anyway, getting back to the ineptitude of the system, everything happens for a reason, right? The law isn’t enforced as much as it could be and when it is, the painfully slow justice system will always provide a spanner for the works. So why is it so slow? Not because no-one has ever come up with a solution but because every professional body or trade union represents a powerful lobby in Italy – you tamper with people’s livelihoods and they’ll get their revenge at the ballot box.

Even if what they do serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. You take away work from lawyers, albeit useless paperwork and redundant procedures that serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever, and they’ll come out in hordes to protest. How dare you modernise Italy!!! How dare you drag us into the 1980s!!!! If you’re unlucky enough to witness first hand the civil courts here in Rome, it’s like being, well, to be frank, in a public office in India in the 1980s. The only thing missing are the police with their sticks (hang on, police with sticks, I may be onto something here).

Lots of commotion and noise but 90% of the people there are just standing around waiting for something to happen. Tell me about it, I hear you say. If you whisper into the ear of an unsuspecting fag-smoking vigile urbano (traffic cop) that there’s this new breakthrough invention called ‘a traffic light’ (it’ll never catch on), they’ll scream to high heaven that they have the right to earn a living even if the job they do serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. It’s a Monty Python sketch basically, with this as its punch-line. But the canned laughter ain’t fooling anyone.

So once we’ve established that wholesale change is necessary in the legal set-up in Italy across the board (and in the collective consciousness we’re about as close to this as the England football team are to winning the World Cup, or even getting to the semis, let’s be honest), the next step is to entrust this process of change to - ah, slight snag this – the state.

The Italian state, represented by politicians who live like Hollywood celebrities. Is it really in their interests to force the police to enforce the law every day or make the justice system efficient? Well, the jury’s still out on that one and God knows when they’ll be back. There’s one Forza Italia MP who part-owns a nightclub in Sardinia called Billionaire with that Bennetton Formula One chap - you can imagine how interested she is in the fact that some kid, who’s probably an illegal immigrant, has mistaken the street for a public toilet or that some drunk (no offence intended) with no legal right to be in Italy at the wheel of his van killed four teenagers earlier this year and got a miserly six years (of house arrest, poverino) as a result.

When they’re not faking passionate anger or indignation on TV, Italian politicians live in the lap of luxury, eat in top restaurants with enormous discounts they don’t need, fly for free (even using state aircraft to go to watch Grand Prix), and buy cut-price accommodation in the centre of Rome (while most Italians dream of being able to afford a house in a market that has seen prices go up by up to 150% in four years) because they are privy to information the poor public have no idea about.

Italian politicians are far too busy sorting themselves out to worry about the rest of us. Not to mention their stratospheric salaries (something like 15,000 euros a month) and the minor detail that they have the right to a pension that’s equivalent to 80% of their salaries after only three and a half years of service. Three and a half years. Every ordinary sap of an Italian has to pay INPS for thirty-five years, these clowns only have to do it for three and a half. That bill flew through parliament like a hare with its arse on fire, as you can probably imagine. They probably didn’t even bother to go through the motions of debating it. Whos’ watching anyway?

What do they care about the law or anything for that matter? They’re too busy living it up or breaking the law themselves - how many convicted criminals are there in the Italian parliament? Twenty? Thirty? It’s natural, we’re told by the guilty parties, most magistrates in Italy belong to some bizarre baby-eating communist cult that worships at the foot of Lenin’s statue, so any convictions made by them have to be taken with a pinch of salt, surely? And after occasionally making statements of this ilk, they wave and walk back into parliament to vote on new legislation. Oh, happy day!

Even local administrations have a flexible opinion on the usefulness of consistently enforcing the law – parking fines are issued in Rome on an improvised basis to give people the impression they can get away with things most of the time. So instead of teaching them not to break the law, they are allowed to continue and end up getting and paying the occasional fine. Which is the whole point. Not to make parking on the pavement a thing of the past, not to make double parking anachronistic, not to stop pedestrians being run over on zebra crossings, God no.

You’ve probably noticed how faded zebra crossings are in Rome. Some hard-nosed loveless cynics claim that this is because the council deliberately uses poor quality paint in order to keep the guys who paint the strisce in work. Every zebra crossing in Rome has to be repainted every three months, according to these commie-fascist cynics, and so that means lots of work for lots of council employees, who would otherwise be uselessly employed doing other less useful work elsewhere. What an outrageous claim!! The reality of the matter is quite different and has more to do with magic realism and Gabriel Garcia Marquez than corrupt policymakers: the stripes, like a wife ignored by her husband for years on end, simply fade and disappear because they’re not wanted. Simple as that.

I feel I’m working myself into a corner here but stick with me. If politicians can’t be trusted to introduce real and meaningful change to benefit ordinary citizens and not themselves, then what options are left to us? What are we supposed to do? Look out for ourselves? Take justice into our own hands? Stop reading the papers in order to avoid these explosions of frustration? Stop voting at general elections as a sign of protest? Well, that wouldn’t be a bad idea for a start. I have all the sympathy in the world for Italians but when 80% turn up on election day to vote, I lose my rag a tad.

One day, Italy will stop languishing in the past. One day, Italians will get so miffed with the lack of return on the taxes they pay (and the state has the balls to tell them off for not paying all of them), that change inevitably will ensue. One day, one bright beautiful day, an Italian politician will propose a bill to cut their salaries that are offensive to all fair-minded Italians. It would get thrown out amid derision like a bum from a fancy restaurant but it would be a start.

Capirai! I hear you say. I seriously wonder whether I will, one day, somehow, understand.

Whoops, I’m in trouble, too much talk, too much talk. Been watching too much TV. The powers that be have been earwigging. I’ve been snagged. The nurse has just come back in with my medicine. Sorry, nurse, I was just letting off steam. No harm intended, it was all tongue in cheek, promise! “Smile,” she says, “you’re on Candid Camera”.

Pin prick. Darkness.

In search of lost time

I'm gonna try and be logical about this. I have a vague idea about what I wanna say but a relatively brief timeframe in which to express it. It's already gone 10 and the kitchen conspiracy stacks up against me yet again - plates, mess, disordine that seeps in from the maelstrom of smoke, dogshite and emotions outside. The door shakes as the tram rattles and squeals past, in pain almost, as it runs over an unsuspecting OAP, oaf, tramp or floosie.
I'm lying really, I have no idea what I want to say. A kind of belated diary entry. It's been over 20 years since I kept a diary in actual fact, that self-indulgent search for identity in the lonely pits of teenage terror. I don't even know what the fook that is supposed to mean.
Reach for your glass, I just have.
Time rattles on and my book drafts remain just that. Who's got the time to revisit old manuscripts written by a former self? We don't change that much from 18-20 onwards I guess but life gets in the way. The mind gets jaded, the memories fade, the indulgence of inadequate words becomes less tolerable. You write and rewrite some clown with a pen in his hand. Endlessly. I read some of that stuff and I think "Jeez, did I write that?". Some other stuff ain't bad, it's forgivable, even with the critical glance of the intervening years.
Now my brother has just texted me. It's taken days to organise a phone appointment. He's ringing in half an hour. Am I going to be free? I'll have to be. The nipper's birthday is coming up so he wants to know about presents. He's coming over and we don't know whether his hand luggage will be enough to fit everything in. There's a metaphor in their somewhere. Pay for a suitcase I'll say. Just to make sure.
Did I answer him? I scramble to the phone. Technology confirms I did. My short term memory is shot to fook. I repeat myself, I do something, I go back and check that I have. Like some old dozy bird. People joke that it's the onset of Alzheimer's. In the words of the late great Walter Matthau: "I fail to see the humour."
The minutes slip by. 22.22 and counting.
Is there any way to retrieve this time lost? The repetition of life that erases all before it. One day slips into another, the seasons slip by in a way that I thought was just poetic licence. It ain't. A dark, mind-boggling winter comes to an end with early evening light and some warmth. My nose clears after 3 months, miraculously, almost overnight. I'm left to reflect on the damage the lack of sleep I've experienced has had on me. Not that I'd want it any other way. Having kids is the only meaning of life: everything else is just straws and ash. Dustbowls. Keep your fancy job, your car, your holiday home.
This deterioration has legs now, it has momentum, pace. Insidious, frenetic, its anxiety seizes me, toys with me, has me frantically checking my existence on the world wide web. I'm fooking everywhere. Just in case you wanted to look me up.
10,000 tweets in 9 months is a slight exageration I feel. Or perhaps, perhaps, it's an attempt to defeat the passing of time. Perhaps I tweet to keep a record of who I am. As my memory slip slides away.
Fourteen years as a foreigner in a foreign land do not necessarily help in maintaining an idea of self. I could be wrong. The inability to accept certain aspects of life here leads to a rampant rage that keeps me young at least. I'm in fantastic shape, aesthetically. Inside I'm falling apart and my brain is gruffalo crumble but I look like a 25 year old. Apart from the telltale grey hair.
When the phone rings I'm gonna cut this shit out.
Deceptively though, I gatecrash my forties thinking I'm still in my 20s. The child inside still has a voice. Helps on the dad front.
Where did all the years go though? I can't really be closer to 50 than 30, can I?
Shelved projects, stale but entertaining enough professional life, parenthood you never enjoy as much you thought you would 'cos you're shattered. Don't get me wrong, it's the essence of life itself.
I'm becoming progressively more stressed out, more obsessive, more explosively intolerant of certain things. I'd like to pause time for a bit, take a breather to reflect on where I am, who I am, outside of this whirlwind.
You know what I mean.
And deep down there remains a gut wrenching desire to run away, from this place while that prize c*°t is in power, disturbing my sleep with that bald, grinning, shortarsed existence of his. Yes, despite the food, the weather, the beauty, the architecture, the cities. Or maybe I should just stop overestimating my role in society. Maybe I should just be keeping my head down and I should ignore what drives me fooking crazy. Hmm, dunno if I can do that.
A random succession of totally random events bring all of us to where we are. The same will be true when we are snatched away. Maybe that's all there is to it.
But where did all the time go? All those lives we imagined we'd lead, those endless heady romantic experiences. I've had my fair share, I ain't complaining.
Does any of this make any sense, does any of this mean anything?
I look into her eyes and I feel calm, just for a second, assured in the knowledge that I at least got one thing right.
Ring, ring, ring. I await your response.