A shaming admission

It’s worrying how irritated I can become when I’m tired.

That struck me after I’d travelled to Italy to do a presentation. Though it wasn’t that which made me tired.

Do you know Padua? I didn’t. It’s a surprisingly short distance from Venice – it took me longer to get from Venice airport to the railway station than by rail to Padua. It’s a beautiful city, with arcaded streets, a glorious central square whose water features and grassed areas make it half a park, and narrow streets leaping across picturesque waterways or opening up onto great romanesque churches. I walked miles around the city in the evening, getting to know quite a bit of the centre.

But it wasn’t that which got me tired either.

Although I’ve been doing presentations for years, I still get stage fright before every one. Which is ridiculous. I know what I’m doing. I know my material. But I hate the prospect of speaking to an audience unless I’ve entirely mastered my brief, which I seldom find the time to do, and certainly hadn’t on this occasion.

What made it worse was that the presentation was in Italian. That shouldn’t really have worried me, since I was born in Italy, and I’m perfectly happy to chatter away in Italian with people I know. However, I feel that a presentation should be given in faultless language, and it’s only in English that I can get even close to that ideal.

That’s a silly concern. Italians are generally delighted with any foreigner who makes the effort to speak to them in their language. You make a few mistakes? You sometimes can’t find a word and the audience has to help you out? No problem. They enjoy helping. And they’re happy you’re making the effort to be understood, instead of expecting them to make the effort to understand you.

I, however, was anxious. That stopped me sleeping well, so I was up at 5:00. Which, given that I’d flown form England the day before, felt like 4:00. At 6:00, I was out for another inspiring, but long, walk through the cool of the near-deserted streets of Padua as they filled with morning sun.

Early morning sun on one of Padua's many canals

Now that did get me tired.

Still, it didn’t irritate me.

The presentation was shared with a colleague. I’d met him several times but never really got to know him, and working with him was a great opportunity to put that right. I quickly discovered someone who was both likeable and competent, making the experience highly rewarding.

So none of that irritated me either.

After the presentation, he and I decided to have lunch together, before he drove home and I headed to Venice airport. Two people independently recommended us to a restaurant on the wonderful central square, but that was at the opposite side of the city and we didn’t feel like walking that far. Still, we decided to head that way; we were bound to find a restaurant that attracted us before we got there. Or so we assured each other.

Well, we didn’t. But again, there was nothing particularly irritating about the experience. Padua was as lovely on my third long walk through its streets as it had been on the first two. And the restaurant, when we got there, proved to be excellent. The temperature – we seem to have moved, across Europe, from a painfully long winter straight to summer – was uncomfortable for a walk, but that made it an even greater pleasure to eat under a canopy outside the restaurant and enjoy a moment of calm after the stress of the morning.

Even though we then had to walk all the way back across the city to the car.

By the time I reached the airport, I really was pretty worn out. The lack of sleep. All that walking. The simple adrenalin drop I always experience after a presentation. That made it all the more painful that I’d only found a late flight home and would have to wait three hours before taking off.

But not even that got me particularly irritated.

By the simple trick of announcing ‘last call’ just as soon as the gate opened, the staff on my flight managed to get us all on board fifteen minutes ahead of time. A cause for celebration. The plane pushed back almost immediately and off we went.

Except that we didn’t. After quite a while, it was announced that we might have noticed that we’d been taxiing a long time (we’d noticed). Apparently, a passenger had been taken ill and we had to return to stand. Eventually, paramedics took her off the plane, so we have to wait again while her baggage was removed from the hold. So though we’d been early, we were now going to be late.

To make it worse, another passenger mentioned that he’d seen her inside the terminal building, drinking beer after beer until she could hardly make it to the plane. It seems the illness wasn’t even a genuine misfortune but a self-inflicted injury. Inflicted on all of us.

Now that really irritated me.

Another half hour struggling with fatigue in here?
Unbearable

I hardly dare admit what shamelessly ungenerous thought came to my mind. I genuinely toyed with the idea that instead of returning to the terminal, we could just have pushed her out of the plane and let her walk back herself. As for her baggage, we could have sent it after her once we’d got back to London.

A cruel unworthy thought. Revealing the very intolerance I criticise in others. But that’s what tiredness does to me.

It seriously limits my capacity for compassion and fellow-feeling.

Trainers for deviance

Overheard on a London bus: one mid-teen schoolgirl  saying to another, ‘do you think it’s weird for a boy to buy his trainers from Topman?’

Topman is, of course, a shop which among other things sells trainers.

Now buying trainers from Topman may show a canny eye for a bargain, or it may be a proof of bad taste. It may simply be an indication of laziness in a boy who never goes further than the shop next door. But weird? How can it be weird?

Enough to get you booted out of your group?

Weird would be buying your trainers from a butcher’s. Weird is sinking a well in the Sahara. Weird is claiming earthquakes are a divine message to politicians and still thinking you’re a suitable candidate for the White House.

What I'd overheard was identification of the boy’s behaviour as deviant from social norms to which the girl felt her group should cling. So she was providing further proof of how powerful the pressure to conform is in childhood.

That pressure is overwhelming in our teenage years. You don’t like the trainers some unfortunate boy has chosen so you shun him. At least that has the merit of focusing on something that doesn’t really matter very much. But then the mentality rolls forward into adulthood when race, creed or sexual orientation become wonderfully fertile ground for identifying forms of behaviour to categorise as deviant.  Attention switches from an insignificant item of clothing such as shoes to a much more potent one, such as a hijab. Those who get their values in these areas wrong by our standards, those who behave ‘weirdly’, are diminished in our eyes. And the crucial, final step is taken by those who decide that any action is legitimate against such diminished people, even if it leads to suffering or death.

Is it completely fanciful to suggest that this idea of weirdness lies behind the 9/11 attacks or the mayhem unleashed on Iraq in response?

So maybe I need to review my own thinking. Perhaps we ought to get back to associating weirdness only with a choice of trainers. At least no-one dies that way.  

Persecution - pass it on

It’s fascinating to examine the way human tolerance, or perhaps I should say intolerance, pans out. For instance, I used naively to think that people who’d been victims of intolerance would be more sympathetic to other victims and would not behave intolerantly themselves. What an illusion. The reverse is the case. It’s as though someone who’s been regularly kicked around likes nothing more than to find someone else they can kick in turn.

An example. Back in 1848, the Hungarians got very fed up with being pushed around by their overlords, the Austrians. They rose in revolt and were fairly ferociously put down for their pains. The Austrians, however, got the message. In 1867, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was set up and the Hungarians were made more or less equal partners in the Empire. Celebrations all round? Not quite. The Slovaks, the Croats, the Galicians, the Rumanians – they had nothing to be cheerful about. In fact, the Hungarians were pretty much as nasty to them as the Austrians had been to the Hungarians.

Then came the First World War and the Empires were broken up into the so-called Successor States. At last an opportunity to satisfy national aspirations. But again there were lots of dissatisfied people: the Slovaks, again, weren’t happy about being absorbed into Czechoslovakia, the Croats, again, weren’t happy about being a part of Jugoslavia. The Jews were recognised as a minority more or less everywhere but got their own state nowhere.

Then the Nazis came to power. When they invaded Czechoslovakia, that was pretty bad news for that new little nation. Or at least for the Czech part. The German-speaking Sudeten people were only too pleased to be absorbed into Germany. And the Slovaks, believing that the ‘independent’ state they were going to be given would actually be independent, were pretty pleased too.

Czechoslovakia was one of the nations reconstituted after the end of the War, so the Slovaks lost their illusory independence again. But then in the nineties, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, they got it back and for real this time, when the Czech Republic had its reasonably peaceful divorce from Slovakia. At last there was cause for celebration, or so you might think. I met a young Hungarian-speaking citizen of Slovakia at the time, very worried about being part of a minority in the new country – previously his people had enjoyed some protection against the Slovak majority, from the government of the unified nation in Prague.

So it seems it doesn’t matter how bad a time you’ve had as part of a minority yourself. When you finally get to be the majority, you’re likely to be just as ghastly to other minorities. Perhaps it’s just like most child abusers being people who were abused as children themselves: the victims become the perpetrators.

So when I see Israeli soldiers firing on schools where civilians are sheltering, I have to learn to stop saying ‘how can they, of all people, behave that way?’ Instead, I have to learn to ask ‘how is it that we all, humanity, persist in behaving that badly?’