What makes a summer

One swallow, they say, does not a summer make.

It’s pretty hot here, in Valencia as in most of Spain, and yet it doesn't seem to be just the heat that tells me it’s summer. There’s something else, and for some time I couldn’t make up my mind what. 

So I’ve been wondering just what does make a summer.

Not the swallows, I’d say. They turned up here in their masses – I never got a chance to spot the one that didn’t make a summer. Besides, my wife tells me they were swifts not swallows anyway. The swallows showed up a while later and, confusingly, looked exactly the same to me. In any case, one swallow or one swift certainly didn't make our summer, and even the huge numbers that eventually arrived affected our comfort much more than the season.

For a few days before they arrived, we were being irritated by flies coming into the house when we had the windows open. But then the swifts showed up in their hundreds, flying around behind our flat at sunrise and sunset, like vacuum cleaners of the air, scooping up any insect with the temerity to come anywhere near them. The fly problem vanished.

I have a lot of affection for the swallows. Indeed, I’m delighted that the house we plan to move to shortly has a pair in residence and they even have fledglings at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that it’s they who make my summer.

Swallow fledglings in our new place

So, I kept asking myself, what does?

Certainly not the date. How many British residents, including me when I still was one, have enjoyed a glorious, sunny, warm May only to shiver through a dank and cold June?

It wasn’t really the temperature either. It gets hot in Spain. We’ve even had temperatures in the low thirties in Valencia (no, no, that isn’t freezing cold, you poor benighted users of that outdated temperature system), despite the nearness of the sea and the breeze blowing off it. But it’s far worse in Madrid, where I go fairly frequently to visit my sons and their partners (and soon my second grandchild), where the high thirties or even low forties are not unknown.

It took me a while to work out just what it was that made a summer for me. And the enlightenment came in the form of a memory from my distant childhood.

For my first thirteen years, I lived in my native city, Rome. Throughout my childhood, I’d always felt profoundly English, to the extent of experiencing nostalgia for a country I’d visited frequently but never lived in. I remember catching my breath, and feeling a flood of emotion, over a geography book in my (English) school in Rome, when I came across a picture of a typical London street with a sodium streetlamp. My nation. In some sense, my home. Spiritually.

Then my parents sent my brother and me to boarding school in England. One evening some months after that wrenching move, I was at my grandparents’ house, watching TV with them. You know, black and white, and we felt at the cutting edge of technology because we had three channels instead of the two we’d got used to.

The programme was about an archaeological expedition in Greece. I remember nothing about its findings. All that sticks in my mind is a sound. Like the picture of the sodium lamp, it brought a lump to my throat and made me catch my breath.

Cicadas. Grinding away. I could almost feel the heat and smell the pine needles.

That’s summer. Hear that sound and you know you’re out of the grip of the winter and the cold. You know you’re safe in shirtsleeves, and short ones at that. Sunset doesn’t mean a chill that forces you indoors, it means the warmth becomes comfortable and that, even at night, you can sit outside with a drink and enjoy the smells and the easy living.

Just a few minutes’ walk from where we live at the moment (before we move in with the swallows) is the long park that winds through Valencia in what used to be the bed of the Turia river. Right now, it's full of that beguiling sound day and night. Reminding me again and again that summer is here. Just like when I was a kid.

Summer floods the Turia park
Just imagine the cicadas providing the accompanying sound track

It’s as nostalgic as it’s wonderful to hear the cicadas telling me I’m back in a land of real summer again…

That scrapbook reminder of an assassination

The other day I came across a scrapbook that I started at the start of the sixties. It was proudly marked ‘File = 1’. Number 1. Clearly, I’d resolved to make this the first in a series of documents that would track my passage through life. But, alas, my character is one that views resolutions, like rules, as made to be broken. File 1 remains to this day the only one created.

First step in a lifelong commitment to documentation
which never reached the second step

At that time, my father was in an administrative position with the United Nations. More specifically, he was in finance. Those were the days when you could still get jobs without a degree. In the years when many today would be studying, my father was helping to fight a war instead, and he never did go to university. He learned accounting on the job, working his way from position to position until he gravitated into the UN, first with UNESCO in Paris and later with the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome.

That was where my brother and I were born and eventually started our schooling. Which explains why when I started my first, and ultimately only, scrapbook it was inside an exercise book from the English school in Rome, St George’s.

It was an extraordinary place. It was run by a character who’d been a housemaster at Harrow School, one of the great British ‘public’ schools – i.e. hugely privileged, exclusive private schools. He brought with him all the wonderful sense of entitlement and snobbishness such an institution breeds. It was touch and go whether my brother and I would be admitted, because my father was a Professional grade 3 in the UN and, as a general rule, the school took only children whose parents were at grade 5 or above.

Certainly, being in the school was a wonderful lesson in reward being entirely unrelated to merit. I fell out pretty badly with the authorities there. I assign my lack of ability in football to having missed all sport sessions at a critical time, because I was on detention every single Wednesday afternoon for two years. Indeed, the school briefly made me a fan of corporal punishment: this was the day when the head called me in to his study to tell me I had achieved a unique distinction.

“Out of a school of 500 pupils, you are the only one on detention this week.”

Imagine my pride.

But he hadn’t finished.

“I have no intention of keeping a teacher back to supervise you, so instead I’m going to cane you.”

What relief! My heart sang for joy. I took six strokes of his cane and – at last – could join my class on the playing fields.

As for my father, he too had fallen out with those in authority. His boss loathed him and denied him promotion for fifteen years, a fate he put up with exasperation but stoically, in order to guarantee us a minimum of stability. He then transferred to the United Nations Development Programme, where he was promoted three times in little more than the same number of years, so he ended his career at pretty much the level he would have reached had he been granted some reasonable promotions over his time in Rome.

Sadly, however, while he was able to get into the finance and accounting world without either a degree or an appropriate qualification, he was never able to get out of it. Organisations always need people who’ll keep an eye on the money, and it was known that Leonard Beeson was good at it. Wherever he went, he was cheated of his ambition to move into the running of aid programmes, and found himself spending most of his times with the account books. In the Congo, then called the Zaïre, he did get a programme or two to run, but his main task was still looking after the money.

Talking about the Congo brings me back to my scrapbook.

The Congo was the scene of a major emergency in 1960. The UN sent troops to quell a civil war and large numbers of civilians to put in place a full programme of support and aid. Volunteers were called for and Leonard Beeson was one of just three from the FAO headquarters in Rome. As a married man, he was only required to serve nine months (it was eighteen for those without a family). My mother took it badly, but he felt that it was a duty to step forward when the organisation that paid him needed help dealing with an emergency.

My father's friend
As it turned out, a dead man walking

He took plenty of photos and some of them I included in my scrapbook. One that has always stuck in my memory was of a young man in a security guard’s uniform. My father liked him and took pleasure chatting with him. But then he was sent as a guard on a plane taking the UN Secretary General of the time, the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld, to Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia). The plane never made it and an outstanding Secretary General was killed, along with everyone else on the plane, including my father’s friend.

That event was back in the news a few weeks ago, when it was finally confirmed that, as had long been suspected, the plane had been deliberately shot down by a Belgian pilot working as a mercenary.

Dag Hammarskjöld
Iconic Secretary General assassinated in 1961.
Along with my father's friend

It was odd to read that story and remember my father’s time in the Congo. It sent me back to my scrapbook and to that photo. I’m glad I still have it and that, even if I couldn’t make it last, I stuck to my resolution long enough to produce one scrapbook at least.

Allowing me to write this post, as a bit of a tribute to my father, the UN security guard who became his friend, and of course to Hammarsköld, probably the best Secretary General the UN has had.

Another homecoming abroad

One of the things I like about my job is that it gets me to places I like. In particular, it has taken to two cities that I hadn’t seen for decades but which are deeply rooted in my life.

The first was Rome, where I was born. And now it’s New York, where my parents lived from 1969 to 1977. If you add up all my visits to them over that time, it comes to pretty much two years. So, just as when I went to Rome for the first for a couple of decades and felt as though I’d come home, so returning to New York – or rather, Manhattan – was like a homecoming, though I’d not been back for 24 years.

My hotel, the Free Hand, is on Lexington Avenue. I was a little sad to see that the avenue, which used to be full of shops selling exotic spices or clothes of the kaftan variety, was now much more staid and duller. But the hotel itself was almost as surprising for its fidelity to that tradition, with its dimly-lit idiosyncratic decor and its colourful rooms offering Argan-based shower gels and shampoos.

The Free Hand hotel - very Lexington Avenue. In the old sense

Just being in the city was an odd sensation. I knew my way around. I went straight to the Caffe Reggio, haunt of my adolescence, for breakfast with a friend. She wanted to go to the 9/11 museum, so I led the way there too. I spent the day wandering the streets, without ever having the sense of not knowing where I was or how to get where I was going.

It was like slipping a comfortable old glove on and enjoying the sensation.

It was also a pleasure to chat with some of the locals. I’d forgotten how easy it is to get into conversation with strangers in New York. Three young men were having a discussion about whether or not it was legitimate to hit a brother (well, one brother was telling the other, ‘stop hitting your brother’). Having a brother myself, I couldn’t resist the temptation to join in, pointing out there seems little point in having a brother at all if you can’t hit him. However, we established that there had to be limits, and breaking a brother’s nose and leaving him bleeding on the ground was perhaps going just a little too far.

No one confirmed it, but I think the young man who raised this particular issue was the younger brother and had suffered just that fate. Certainly, the other brother was looking defensive, suggesting that his conscience wasn’t entirely clear.

We also came across a woman with a woolly hat to which she’d stuck a label with the single word ‘Impeach’. We had a brief exchange about just who she had in mind for impeachment, in the course of which neither of us felt any need to mention his illustrious name. Illustrious, that is, in the sense of notorious.

In the evening, I visited friends for dinner and went by boat. That was a new and breathtaking experience. The lighted skyline along the riverside provided a spectacular view so, like a child with a packet of sweets (or maybe I should say candy), I stayed up on deck watching it the whole time, so I turned up enchanted but frozen.

Manhattan skyline (with the Empire State Building in the background)
from the East River at night

At dinner, one of my friends pointed out that she felt that the Brexit process – which, apparently, many are following with fascination, and horror, over here – had only one benefit: at least Brits like me could hardly turn up in the US and poke fun at the country for its Trumpisation. It was a question of pots and kettles.

‘You have the advantage over us,’ I said, ‘you could get rid of Trump in 2020. We shall be stuck with Brexit for at least a generation.’

To my surprise, she replied, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen.’

An interesting point of view. It would make some sense: since there’s clearly no majority for any Brexit formula, the logical conclusion would be to drop Brexit altogether. Someone on Twitter told me recently to cut the ‘whataboutery’ (whatever that means) because the ultimate principle is simple: ‘Out is Out’.

One of the most comical aspects of Brexitism is its capacity to reduce complex issues to such simplicity. I did point out to him that if there are several doorways to choose from, and no agreement on which to use, it’s hard to leave even something as simple as a room, however much out may simply mean out.

Still, it makes little difference that cancelling Brexit would be a logical outcome. Experience so far suggests that no presumption of logic can be made about the process. And I’m not quite sure how the cancellation would happen. Neither Theresa May nor Jeremy Corbyn wants to be the leader who tells the electorate ‘we’re dropping the policy you voted for back in 2016’.

Still, there are moves towards first blocking a no-deal exit, and then perhaps to a second referendum that might, just might, put an end to the whole sorry business. It’s encouraging to have crossed the wide Atlantic to hear people who believe that it may yet happen.

In the meantime, it’s been a joy to be back in a city that feels as familiar to me as it’s full of surprises.

Visiting the Infant Jesus

As you can imagine, I’m sensitive to the privilege I’ve just enjoyed. I’ve been visiting the Infant Jesus. Or, as they say in Rome where I’m writing these words, il Bambino Gesù. English or Italian, it’s an honour.

The colleague who met me there drove into town. That’s never easy. First, there are the dreadful traffic conditions (I saw two small accidents in just an hour – it made me almost nostalgic: clearly, Roman driving hasn’t improving since I was a child in the eternal city). And there’s the parking: as in most major cities, spaces are scarce.

My colleague solved the first problem by leaving home far earlier than one might have thought necessary. And she solved the second by leaving the car in the Infant Jesus’s own car park. That seemed fine to me, since why would a child need a car park? After all, children aren’t even allowed driving licences.

It felt particularly appropriate to be making the visit the day after Twelfth Night. That’s the feast of the arrival of the three kings to worship the Infant Jesus, in the manger where he lay. I wouldn’t have wanted to get there before the kings – that would have been disrespectful – so the day after felt about right.

Adoration of the Magi by Gerard David
Nothing like my visit

Still, there was no ox or ass, no manger with a baby, no Mary or Joseph. I didn’t even see any gold, frankincense or myrrh, however hard I looked. Not that I’d have a lot of use for frankincense or myrrh, but a little gold never goes amiss. But, given the financial pressure on hospital budgets, I wouldn’t expect gold to last long in any of them – it would be immediately invested in more care, or for paying down debt (certainly the latter, in the UK).

In fact, we saw no child at all. The place was full of them but none, to my knowledge, made any pretence to possess messianic qualities. Those are only claimed by the present occupants of the White House or Kremlin. Or, I suppose, the holder of the post of leader in the British Labour Party, though in his case the claim is only made by his worshippers, Corbynism having done away with the milksop notion of mere supporters.

No, Bambino Gesù is a world-class paediatric hospital. For very ill children. Which means the staff frequently have to deal with distraught parents too. So it was still a privilege to be there. As it was invaluable to meet some of the people who have to deal with those harrowing difficulties.

We weren’t there to sell them anything. They weren’t buying. We were listening and learning. About how they’re trying to involve patients in decisions concerning their care, though often that means the parents rather than the patients themselves. It means informing them of the options before them, the risks of each and the possible benefits, to help them reach a choice. Sometimes it means making every effort to disabuse them of certain alternative-medicine notions: no, for instance, cancer really can’t be fought by using the patient’s own energy.

It was a good meeting. Though I was amused by the name of the hospital. In England, we tend to be less inclined to wear a religion on our sleeves. Yes, there’s St George’s in London but the Pope doesn’t even regard George as a saint any more. Even in England he’s more of a figure in exciting tales for kids, riding around and fighting dragons.

And no one calls St Bartholomew’s that any more – it’s plain Barts. Like St James’s in Leeds, fondly known as Jimmy’s. More secular, you see. Perhaps more detached.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the visit. And, in any case, I was pleased to be in Rome again. What a great city, what a joy to have an hour to wander around it in the winter sunshine…

Rome: always a delight to visit

To Rome - by broomstick?

My Italian colleague Paola has asked me to meet a friend, who is also a business contact, at a hospital in Rome.

That was an easy decision. Rome is where I was born and one of my favourite cities. I agreed without hesitation. On the other hand finding a time all three of us could make proved significantly more difficult. In the end, we settled on Monday 7 January. But, since my confidence in the ability of airlines to run to schedule is strictly limited, I decided to fly in the day before, 6 January, and told Paola so.

‘Ah,’ she replied, ‘will you be coming by broomstick?’

At first, the allusion struck me as obscure. Or possibly offensive. Was she referring to my age? To my looks? To my inclination to transform perfectly innocent people into field mice and feed them to the cat?

On the other hand, I get on well with Paola. Perhaps she meant it in a more complimentary way. Was she referring to my wisdom? My constant willingness to help out the virtuous needy? My ability to find a positive way through any dilemma, however difficult?

But then I remembered the Befana.

The Befana’s on her way.
And so am I. Though probably by plane. And without the gifts

She’s a witch who pops into children’s houses, with gifts and sweets for the good ones and lumps of coal for the others. It has to be said that as a general rule, Italians being Italians and doting on children, kids are pretty automatically deemed to have been good. 

The Befana shows up in time for Twelfth Night, on 6 January. Strictly speaking, that means she makes the trip on the 5th, but the kids enjoy the presents on the following day. Even so, it’s clear Paola was assimilating my arrival to the Befana’s.

That’s really quite flattering. It suggests my visit is welcome. Which is preferable to the alternative.

Interestingly, the myth says that one of the things the Befana does is sweep the floor before she heads off again. That may be a metaphor for clearing away all the problems and the bad events of the previous year, so that we can start the new one with a clean slate. Curious, isn’t it? Is that the source of the association of witches with broomsticks? Of course, generally we think of witches as travelling on their broomsticks, rather than using them to sweep stuff away.

It has to be said that the idea of brooms for sweeping, rather than flying, is at least rather more plausible. Though I’m not sure whether, in a story about witches, plausibility really comes into it.

In any case, and I hope this won’t come as a major disappointment to Paola, I’m not travelling by broomstick but by British Airways. My hope is that BA will make the trip less cold. Quicker and more reliable would be good too, but I don’t want to ask for too much.

The other thing is that I shan’t be bearing gifts. Just a presentation of a hospital information tool, which may be useful – I hope it will be – but rather lacks the allure of presents from a witch. And there’ll certainly be nothing there that’s good to eat.

Oh, well. It looks as though my friend Paola may have to swallow quite a bit of disappointment. I just hope she can take some comfort from the fact that I won’t, at least, be bringing her a lump of coal. Unless she decides that my presentation is worth no more than that.

Oh, the pressure, the pressure.

Leatrice: hankering for more

When I last wrote about my mother, Leatrice, I mentioned the strange circumstance that my parents’ wedding took place in Genoa.

Nothing strange about that for the Genoese, of course. Just unusual for a young English couple. Except that they’d met in Paris and were travelling to Rome, where Leonard, my father, was about to take up a new job with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Genoa was on the way. So maybe getting married there wasn’t really that odd after all.

July 1951: my parents get married in Genoa

It was a moment of transition for Leatrice. Years later, she wrote several letters to contacts from the forties, asking for testimonials of the time when she’d worked for them. John Parker, Labour MP and leading member of the Fabian Society, one of the oldest progressive organisations in Britain, wrote one of them. He explained that she had worked for him from 1942 to 1945, when he had been General Secretary of the Fabian Society and MP for the seat of Romford in Essex:

… then the largest Parliamentary Constituency in Britain … which was divided into 4 Parliamentary seats at the time of the 1945 General Election… She also assisted me in the work of the Fabian Society… In particular she did a very useful job in our India Committee at a time when [India’s] future was very much in the melting pot… Much useful organizing work was also carried out for the Fabian Society particularly in connection with the running of the Summer Schools.

She already had a testimonial from August 1947 by Woodrow Wyatt, later an admirer of Margaret Thatcher’s but back then a Labour MP in his first term. He worked with the British Commission in India and in particular handled relations with the Muslims, who were preparing not only for independence from Britain but also independence from India, as Pakistan.

Wyatt had known Leatrice for two years and she had:

…acted as Minutes Secretary of the Indian Affairs Group of the Fabian Society when I was Secretary of the Group and during that time she was most energetic and capable, and showed a high sense of responsibility.

Another of the testimonials she collected in 1974 came from David C. Williams, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action. He’d been sent to London in July 1946 on behalf of the Union for Democratic Action, its predecessor organisation.

One of my first actions was to engage Miss Leatrice Bannister, now Mrs. Beeson, as my assistant. Her knowledge of the principles and programs of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and of many of their leading personalities proved invaluable to me… It enabled me to get into the swing of things much more promptly than I would otherwise have done.

She had worked with him until January 1948, when she left for Paris.

It must have been quite a heady atmosphere for a woman in her twenties. The India committee of the Fabian Society must have been particularly gratifying: Labour’s Clement Attlee was in office and, in foreign affairs, overseeing Indian independence remains his most significant achievement.

1951, the year of her wedding, definitively closed that period of Leatrice’s life. I was born in 1953, my brother in 1956. Leatrice, who’d worked for her own living since becoming an adult, became a wife and mother with no job of her own but dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Leatrice with my brother Nicky in 1956

One of my lasting memories of our time in Italy was the yearly summer holidays in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. At the time, the place was a small fishing port, where my brother or I could wander off, and local people would be able to tell my parents where we were. Today, it’s a heaving mass of tourists. But what remains is Feniglia, outside the town, with its kilometres-long golden beach, where we’d spend hours in the warm water and then roll in the baking hot sand to get warm again, with barely another person in sight.

Nicky on the rocks (literally not metaphorically)
at one end of the Feniglia beach

Me on the edge of beach

My father would join us when he could

Leonard would come up and join us at weekends, and generally spent a week or two at some point. Eventually we’d head back to Rome, where we lived in a converted farm building on the edge of the city. It was part of a baronial estate which still had a large cement-walled pond where two local families would do their washing, the wives using bars of soap and cold water, wringing and beating the clothes in a sink fed from the pond.

Nicky on the edge of the pond at Via Casale San Pio V in Rome
Not the first place we lived in but the last
and where we stayed the longest

Leatrice in the garden
We lived on the top floor of the building beyond the gate

My father had work. My mother had us. Those long summers at Feniglia – did she enjoy them as much as we did? Or did she miss the intellectual stimulation of her English life? John Parker mentioned her role in organising the Fabian summer schools, at Dartington in Devon, where my parents eventually sent my brother and me to school. Another of the testimonials she solicited in 1974 came from a close friend from those times – I suspect they’d had at least a fling – and he wrote as a Professor from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

Did she ever wonder wistfully whether that was the world to which she should have belonged? That all the international travel had been exciting, but that she might have been more at home in academe or politics – or possibly both? Did she ever entirely recover from her pain at not getting the university education she had wanted in 1942 but passed up to go straight to work?

There’s a hint in the reason why she was asking for all those testimonials.

In 1974, Leonard was working at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. Leatrice decided that this was the opportunity to undertake the studies she’d missed before. She enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York. The testimonials won her some credits for her course, but she hardly needed them: she took A grade after A grade, disappointed on the rare occasions when she fell as low as a B.

She was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and arguably the most prestigious of the American academic honour societies. That was something of which she was profoundly proud, and for many years she would wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck.

Badge of pride: Leatrice's Phi Beta Kappa key

One of her papers was graded by a Professor Zvi Yavetz at Tel Aviv university. A Holocaust survivor, he was one of the founders of the university and a major figure in history studies in Israel for several decades. He wrote to her to say:

The following cable has been sent to the department of History, Queens College: ‘Grade Beeson Leatrice’s superb paper A+…

I would also like to tell you that only students like yourself can make a course interesting, because only they can stimulate a teacher to prepare his class.

It’s ironic today, with the Labour Party embroiled in a long drawn out dispute over antisemitism, to read this forty-year old praise from an Israeli academic for a lifelong, Jewish Labour supporter.

In June 1976, at the age of 52, she graduated in History with the top class of a US degree, Summa Cum Laude.

Leatrice's degree certificate
A proud achievement. But - three decades late?

It must have been a valediction for her. But perhaps also a source of regret. 

There’s no doubt that my mother took great satisfaction from most of her life and wouldn’t have wished to change much in it for anything else. On the other hand, her results in 1976 demonstrated just how much she could achieve. She must have wondered at times whether she’d missed the opportunity to fulfil her potential. Had she won such success three decades earlier, when she’d wanted to, how much more might she have accomplished?
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Italy: African, Austrian, neither or both?

Africa, Northern Italians tell me, starts at Rome.

Ah, my native city. English though I am, I always feel a certain sense of homecoming when I return to Rome. But I can see what the Northerners mean. The streets are potholed, the pavements are filthy, the traffic noisy and congested. There are certainly aspects of Rome that feel more appropriate to, say Lagos.

Of course, Romans say that Africa starts at Naples. I don't know what Neapolitans say. I can't really say I know that noble city. Perhaps, with no obvious metropolis south of them, they say that Africa starts at the African coastline, which would be less amusing though it would have the merit of displaying more geographical sense.

For my part, I'm always inclined to say that Austria starts at Milan.

Just to clarify, I realise that Austria is a fine country, with glorious Alpine scenery and gem-like cities set in it at one end, the majestic if slightly ponderous city of Vienna at the other, with the Danube - not, to be honest, really all that blue - flowing through it. But my comment about Milan is more about certain other characteristics: a degree of self-satisfaction, a shortness of self-deprecatory humour or, to put it another way, an inclination to take oneself too seriously, to say nothing about a somewhat impersonal efficiency a little short of warmth.

Of course, Milan's a lot further south. So in a sense, it's rather like Austria with better weather, the same remark I frequently make about Australia and England. Not that the Australians thank me for it, and I don't expect the Milanese would either.

Passport queue at Milan's Linate airport
As seen by Gianfranco Repetto (@gfr70)
who suffered even longer than I did

My latest trip to Milan challenged both my beliefs about the city. In some respects, it's very much in Italy. Though, on this occasion, I found the weather far from Italian: I turned up to cold under grey skies, with rain bucketing down. Honestly, I could have stayed in England and it would have been no worse. It was a relief to get inside the terminal building at Linate airport, though that's where the city began to show itself to be far more Italian - or perhaps African - than Rome ever is. Fiumicino airport outside Rome works well. Passengers move rapidly from plane to passport control to baggage retrieval. It's a smooth process. The Austrians would be proud.

At Linate, I found myself in a twenty-five minute queue to get through passport control. Now, that's partly my own country's fault: if Britain in its xenophobia hadn't refused to join the Schengen area, we would have been able to enter Italy without even showing a passport, so I'd have sailed through to the baggage area.

But even without the Schengen benefit, there are other European nations which have passport-reading machines in place. In a rather wonderfully African way - I've had some epic adventures trying to cross African frontiers - we just stood in a queue that was glacier-like in its movement, while the two policemen on duty methodically, systematically and ponderously checked two or three hundred passengers' passports one by one.

The baggage hall was a mess, too, with much of its ceiling down and a great deal of scaffolding up, all part of a major refit, apparently. I wonder if they're going to instal passport readers?

Several carousels were out of service. It came as no surprise when I couldn't find my case on any of the few still running. I went to one baggage information counter, only to be told to go to another. Where I stood and waited for a further unconscionable time, even though there was only one person ahead of me in the queue. The woman behind the counter was full of goodwill, but her computer system wasn't that functional, and she seemed to have to record much of the information on paper.

What made it worse was that the man in front of me was Norwegian. Neither he nor she spoke particularly good English, which made it particularly entertaining to listen to a long conversation about just how to record one of the letters in his name, the distinctly Scandinavian ø.

Fortunately, however, she turned out to be friendly and helpful, as I discovered when it was finally my turn to be helped. In fact, after a few questions to establish the basic facts, she asked me, "are you sure your bag's not there? The system shows that it was on the plane."

I went back to the carousels and - picture my joy - there was my bag at last! It was a matter of moments to go back and thank the lady for her help, before getting a taxi to whisk me through the sodden streets to my hotel and a meeting for which I was, in the end, only a few minutes late.

The scene outside the hotel - as wet as England

The hotel was full of strangely dressed people. Elaborate hairstyles. Eccentric clothes. Heavy makeup. I wondered for a moment what sort of a hotel I'd drifted into. But it turns out that it was Milan fashion week. What I was seeing wasn't people preparing for a Halloween-themed fancy-dress party but the chic classes in what I suppose one has to call creations.

An elegant lady heading out into the rain
of Milan Fashion Week

Since fashion, like football and the English hallmark warm beer, is something that has rather passed me by, the elegance left me more than a little cool. I just felt sorry for anyone who, having spent so much time and probably no insignificant amount of money to make themselves look that way, had to go out into the rain to get to the next show they were visiting. It was amusing to see how difficult it could be to get through a revolving door with an open umbrella. I hoped for their sake that they'd find their taxi journeys more Austrian than African (I've had some memorable taxi trips in Africa too), since I had now seen how Milan, as I had now learned that Milan as well as being Austrian in weather, could also be African in service efficiency.

Although, to be quite honest, I do have to qualify what I said about my missing case. It does occur to me, in retrospect, that it may have been on the carousel the whole time. That I just didn't see it in my flustered state after the frustration of the passport queue.

But, hey, I'm not going to admit that. It'd spoil the story.

A brief encounter, a long friendship

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, but he'll remember with advantages what feats he did that day.

My wife tells me that I've reached an age where I should start writing my memoirs. Or at least my memories: my life so far is, in many ways, made up of a series of pieces. So what better way to account for it than in blog posts?

The day in question was in September in 1964. My parents, my brother in I were on our way back from a memorable holiday in a country that no longer exists: Yugoslavia. Two events in particular stick in my memory.

Plitvička Jezera: an extraordinary place

One occurred at an idyllic spot, called Plitvička Jezera, a glorious mountain lake. I took a rowing boat out on it alone although I was only eleven - perhaps because I was only eleven - and once well away from the shore, I dived in over the side and then swam back to the boat. It was bracing and exciting: bracing because the water was far colder than I'd ever dip more than a toe in today, exciting because there was always a chance that a current would whip the boat away from me and I'd be left confronting an interesting challenge.

My mother knew nothing about my little joy ride and I count on you not to tell her now. After all, nothing happened. I got safely back and if she hasn't worried about the event for 54 years, what's the point of her worrying about it now?

The other event that left a particular trace in my memory stronger than many others involved my brother Nicky, after whom my younger son is called. In a coastal town called Sveti Stefan he managed to get separated from the rest of the family and, after having searched for him fruitlessly for nearly an hour, we went to a café on the other side of the causeway that links the island to the mainland and waited for him to reappear on it.

Sveti Stefan and the causeway that saw the confrontation
between my brother and my mother

Since there was no other way off the island, he inevitably did come into sight, an hour or so later. The image forever ingrained in my memory is of my mother stalking down to the bridge to greet him. She was looking highly business like, about as business like as I've ever seen her and, while I couldn't hear her words to him when they met, I think few were of a kind generally associated with the notion of endearment.

The odd thing is that my son, the one called after him, also managed to get spectacularly lost on more than one occasion in his childhood. So whenever I hear people using the Shakespeare line, "what's in a name?", I'm inclined to reply, "if it's Nicky, then a tendency to get disastrously lost as a child".

At the time, my family lived in Rome. On the way home, we stopped in Perugia. I imagine my mother took us to see the Raphael frescos, but I have to say that, wonderful as they no doubt are, I have practically no recollection of them. At 11 - my brother wasn't quite eight - my fascination for the great elements of our cultural heritage wasn't quite as powerful as I believe my mother imagined.

What does stand out was the arrival in our camping site of an Austin mini-van with a hand-made wooden box lashed to the top, and crammed with people: two adults in front, two children and a six-month old in a carry-cot behind. What made it even more remarkable that they'd travelled in such a confined space, was the realisation that both adults were unusually tall.

A 1960s Austin Mini van of the kind our friends showed up in at Perugia
Though theirs had British plates and a wooden box on top

"Good Lord," said my mother, "how did they all get into that?"

"They're Brits," said my father, who'd spotted their registration plates, "and they look hot, bothered and dusty."

So as one put the kettle on to boil, the other wandered over to suggest they might like a cup of tea. That's the offer no Englishman can resist, especially in their state.

This was the beginning of a friendship that has endured over half a century. Over that cup of tea, my parents issued and they accepted an invitation to come and see us in Rome. A week later they showed up and we got to know them better: Hazel and Michael, the parents, Richard, Charles and William the children - the last the six-month old in his carry cot.

Later, when my brother and I joined a boarding school in England, Hazel and Michael agreed to be our legal guardians, adults resident in Britain who agreed to take charge of children with parents abroad in case they were orphaned.

We were close through many years. While I was a student in London, I saw them regularly, and I was a student there for ten years. As often as not, Michael and I would have long debates on political, social or philosophical matters which at my age I found fascinating though ultimately frustrating - he was good at dodging my arguments, shifting his ground or slightly deforming my words and throwing them back at me - and I'm sure everyone around us, not least long-suffering Hazel, found them immensely dull. However, once children came along and in particular after work took us into Continental Europe, we drifted apart to some extent. We never lost contact entirely but it became infrequent to the point of sparseness.

But then we returned to England. Not long after, we got back in touch with Hazel - I rang her to wish her a happy birthday, and easy one to remember since it had also been my father's. It was then we learned that Michael was dying. It's a relief I feel to this day that we were back and in touch soon enough to see him one last time. It was a moment of warmth and also of poignancy: he could say little and had trouble staying awake but it was easy to see he was as happy as I was that our paths had crossed again.

Since then we've seen each other several times. It's amusing that the baby in the carry cot is now a man in his fifties. Well, not that amusing: it reminds that for me too over half a century has gone by.

Still, we're back in touch with some close, warm friends. And it's invaluable to have such friends. Proving that a random encounter in an Italian campsite can have wonderful consequences.

As it demonstrates a truth that will come as no surprise to an Englishman: the offer of a cup of tea can be extraordinarily potent.

Don't do as the Swedes do

When in Rome, I'm frequently told, do as the Romans do.

I've never fully understood why. I mean, I don't change character just because I change city. I actually like letting cars out of side turnings and not trying to overtake them on the inside in narrow city streets. As with quite a lot of received wisdom, the notion that we should do as the Romans do just leaves me asking, "why?"

This turns into something even stronger if someone tells me that when in Sweden, I should do as the Swedes do.

Especially when if the thing they want me to do is to sit in a sauna and then rush out and plunge into a frozen lake. That word "why?" suddenly strikes me as even more apposite than usual. Though even more than "why", other words spring to mind such as "masochism" and "downright insanity".

Hellasgården. Attractive enough.
Viewed from a distance. Not as a good place for a swim

I mean, don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against a sauna. I quite like the heat, the sense of pores opening and all sorts of stresses flowing out. The heat I'm fine with. It's the freezing cold of the water with the ice floating on it that sends shivers up my spine. Metaphorically and literally, though in my case mostly metaphorically, since I go a long way out of my way, as a general rule, not to get into a position where it could happen literally.

That policy, wise and prudent in my view, was challenged this week. At a meeting with three colleagues in Stockholm, one of them came up with the bright idea of using a free moment between a meeting and dinner, to sample the delights (I use the word "delights" here in a loose sense, you understand) of the Hellasgården sauna and lake outside the city.

I didn't respond at first. It was perfectly obvious that the idea was so manifestly barmy that one or both of the other two would quickly put paid to it.

Talk about being hoist on my own petard.

Having failed to express my polite refusal of the lunacy, I found myself cornered by the oddly enthusiastic acceptance of the suggestion by the other two colleagues. I made my point of view clear but was merely declared officially "chicken" for my pains. I suppose that if insanity is equated with courage, that makes some sense. In any case, I was painted into a corner and saw little choice: three of us were in favour of the sauna and icy dip; I could hardly hold out alone against such a majority.

Well, the sauna was fine. The kind of deep warmth that goes through to the bones. A fine cleansing experience.

Then we stepped outside. There was a knife-edged wind off the lake which would have made sweaters and fleece-lined jackets appropriate, and swimming costumes little short of unbelievable, but I barely noticed it. All my senses would take in was the thin strip of liquid water at the shoreline, beyond which there was ice. A coating to the water which was an attractive sight but an unappealing prospect.

We were getting into that? Really?

Well, my colleagues did. Right up to their shoulder. Right up to the top their heads even, for two of them. I went in to just above my knees, and not for long at that. I admired their courage. They mocked my timidity. I was perfectly happy to admire others, and their mockery meant nothing compared to the relief of getting out of that (barely) molten ice.

In any case, one of the advantages of reaching my advanced age, is that I no longer feel any need to prove anything to anyone. Not even to my colleagues. And least of all to myself.

Good humour and relations were quickly re-established in the evening, which was spent in a traditional Swedish restaurant, all wood panelling and mouldings with curious and intriguing paintings scattered around. Again, I avoided the truly traditional dishes - such as reindeer - though my colleague from Oslo went for it. Once more, I saw no reason to do as the Swedes might do, especially as the duck dish looked excellent - and was delicious when I got to eat it.

Now that was the way I wanted to spend my time in Sweden. Not as a Swede. But as myself, enjoying some of the best that Sweden offers.

When in Rome, do as you feel. As long as you avoid offending anyone, you'll be fine. And you can avoid frostbite too.

Postscript. The Stockholm city hall has a glorious room where the Nobel Prize banquet, attended by 1400 people, is held. It's called the Blue Room. Which is curious when you visit it since there's nothing blue about it. It turns out that this is down to the fact that the architect changed his mind about painting it blue but by that time the name had been adopted and it stuck. 

The Blue Room. Glorious. Just not blue.

This is splendidly English. In Oxford, there are two streets, known as North Parade and South Parade respectively. Paradoxically, though perhaps unsurprisingly for England, South Parade is to the north of North Parade. There's a lovely explanation of this based on where the opposing sides paraded their troops during the siege of Oxford in the Civil War, but it seems highly unlikely to be true. The real explanation is uncertain and much duller, so I'm not going to repeat it here. 

But it does feel like the same kind of phenomenon as the naming of the Blue Room in Stockholm. I can't help thnking that the Swedes have shown a wonderfully English way of doing things. 

So, when in Sweden, I feel entirely justified in doing as the English do.