Industrial farming; stealing the good to give us fake "perfection"

There's so much wrong with the way we Modernians do agriculture, it's hard to know where to begin. One thing he mentions is the poverty of varieties in most Anglo countries that have gone big into industrialised ag-business. You have one kind of broccoli, one kind of cauli, one or maybe two kinds of carrots, if you're VEry lucky, four kinds of apples. And as he says, what is grown have to be "perfect" crops, even for the gigantic and hugely expensive, highly specialised machines to work. And of course, produce sellers won't touch "imperfect" goods, so huge amounts of what is grown gets thrown out because it's not sellable. So when you go to the shops, you're presented with a tiny fraction of the food varieties - and of course, an extremely narrow range of food nutrients (not forgetting that these highly hybridised varieties ALWays sacrifice nutrient-density for appearance and pest/disease resistance and other purely producer-oriented advantages). So, honestly we're just not getting nearly the food value we used to from fruits and veg.

This has been countered a little bit by the fad for "organic" produce, but most regular people don't shop at Whole Foods or whatever the equivalent is. There are very few farmer's markets, and none at all if you live in a city. Urbanisation, industrialisation, Henry Ford's mass production mindset, has left us in a state of poor health and cultural poverty.

But I know that in Italy, small scale farming - a lot of family farms doing mixed growing - is still a pretty strong thing. It's being strangled by government interference and EU-based agri-industrial gerrymandering, but one of the reasons Italy is still famous for food is this national growing culture. Everyone has a little orto, everyone grows veg and is accustomed to a much wider array of varieties. I don't know how many times I've had to explain that the "weird" stuff I'm growing in my garden is actually perfectly normal for Italians. (And everyone knows what to do with them. Today I snipped off the flowerets off my Cavolo Nero, sauteed them with some shaved carrots in olive oil and garlic for dinner.) Being only one or two generations away from an agricultural economy - in Norcia they only "modernised" the farming practices in 1950! they were still using oxen in 1965 - people are a lot more accustomed to the realities of farm life. People expect the vast array of brassicas every year because they grew up with Nonna pulling it out of her orto for them. There are little mini-farmer's markets in the city centres - a dozen in Rome, some of them no more than three tables worth, but everyone knows where they are and goes to them.

The other thing that survives here is what I call the "housewife culture" in which women generally get married and stay at home. The shopping is done several times a week, early in the morning (all public markets are closed by one pm) and does the cooking for the family who come home from work for the national mid-day break. Feminist politicians complain about women not being in paid employment, but I htink there's still an awareness here that the nation's economic and social health rests on the well-being of the home. And that's where women rule. Food is at the centre of that culture.



~

By the time we discover we need it, it's gone, and we can't ever put it back...

This deserves a separate post. I have always liked this about HRH Charles. He seems to grasp that Modernity has destroyed so much to give us so little. The appearance of material wealth - but a wealth composed of objects that have been drained of their value - in exchange for an authentic cultural wealth that can never truly be regained.


"People are yearning for that sense of belonging and identity, and meaning."



~

"They know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong..."

Blessed fellowship of likemindedness.

John, a longtime reader, sent me a link to a blog by a guy who is doing what I'm doing, and apparently for much the same reason. Brian Kaller is apparently trying to raise a daughter in a way that is not in keeping with the mainstream. It seems like a pretty good idea to me. I don't have a daughter, but I have got latent maternal instincts. I feel the urge to teach people the things I was taught. I'm more glad than I can say that I'm not the only one.

Let’s say we've lost most of the self-reliant skills and classical education that our forbears posessed. Let's say we have replaced them with a culture of buying and discarding things we don't value, and staring at glowing screens. Let's say you want to try to rediscover an older way of life, believing we will need such things again. And let’s say you have a daughter.

Restoring Mayberry

When I ask most modern people to remember a particular decade, they usually remember the television shows and video games that took up much of their young life, or the clothes and hairstyles that were fashionable. They remember what Hollywood celebrities were doing at the time more than their own lives. They don’t typically remember what my elderly neighbours do, like the wildflowers that grew in a particular meadow, or peeking as children into the nests of herons and listening to the eggs. They don’t remember playing children’s games, or exploring the woods, or swimming to an island in the middle of the pond, or declaring themselves kings and princesses of their newfound lands. Most of them never had the friendships to even have such adventures – people moved around too much, or were always playing video games - even if they had been allowed to roam, and even if there were any woods to explore.

Most people my age spent 20,000 hours of their best years warehoused in a school that looked like a prison, but few remember anything they learned. Most remember spending many more hours in the backseats of cars, but never rode a horse or sailed a boat as children, or did anything that depended on skill and subtlety. Most modern people grew up with enough toys to fill an orphanage, but remember few of them, no more than their own children can remember the fifteenth toy they received last Christmas.

Perhaps most importantly, most people my age don’t remember ever having done anything useful. As children they might have been indulged or ignored, but when I ask if they ever contributed to the family, most are confused even by the question. A few cleaned their room or raked leaves outside. But few people my age grew up feeling necessary, or learning any skills, or feeling alive.

As working adults, most people I know spend their waking hours moving electrons around a screen, but they are still not necessary, and they feel it. Most depend entirely on electricity, but have no idea where my electricity comes from. They depend on pressing a button to keep warm, but don’t know what the button does. They need purified water from the tap, but have no idea where it comes from, or how pure it really is, or how it could be cleaned.

They know the president, but not their mayor or councilman, and know more about their favourite movie star than the old lady down the road. Most, I expect, have spent far more time watching others make love than they have making love themselves, and have spent thousands of hours watching actors feign death but have never bathed a body for burial.

Many Americans these days see family only on uncomfortable holidays, have no traditions to pass down, and little knowledge of songs or stories older than their parents. Most have spent their lives drifting across an ocean of strangers, committed to nothing and no one. No wonder suicide, which was once rare, has become a common cause of death. Most people don’t kill themselves in any identifiable way, of course – but when I return to my native country, I see many people who have ballooned in size, or require drugs of one kind or another to get through another day.

Even those who are nominally successful – who live in houses the size of barns, drive trucks the size of school-buses and have enough toys to stuff an orphanage – remain deeply unhappy. One way or another, they grow angrier every year; they know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong.

~

Glad I'm not the only one to have noticed.










The more I think about the Beguine idea, the more I think if it is going to be useful, it has to encompass some kind of educational and hospitality aspect. The idea keeps coming back of having people to stay, receiving guests, according to the Holy Rule, is receiving Christ:

All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35). 2 Proper honour must be shown to all, especially to those who share our faith (Gal 6:10) and to pilgrims. 3 Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the brothers are to meet him with all the courtesy of love. 4 First of all, they are to pray together and thus be united in peace...15 Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received...

And helping them reconnect with a more authentic way of life.

As this gentleman has pointed out, even the very materially wealthy people of Modernia are culturally impoverished to the point of absolute penury. As he says above, children are given toys and told to go away and stop bothering their parents. Anaesthetised by video games and screens, they are raised by machines who can teach them nothing useful, nor teach them how to be useful themselves. And I know young people feel this lack. I have friends younger than I who can't sew on a button or make a pot of tea.

There simply must be way not only to preserve this kind of life, but to help others discover and grow in it as well.



~

Strength and virtue - a good place to start again

DAY-um!

I knew I sort of liked this guy. (And no, not for the obvious reasons.)


He's actually a lot like many of the people I grew up around. In the 70s, the hippie movement on the West Coast hadn't morphed into the solipsistic leftist political stuff it is today, and there was room in it for genuine masculinity, and the general gist of rejecting the Modernian lies about how we are supposed to live was still there.

I wish we could do something to make these kinds of people Catholic. We could do with some of this. It's not entirely gone, that old virile, pagan, filial piety, virtue. The kind that was Christianized in the early centuries and went on to build an entire civilization.

Yesterday Annamaria was telling me what sort of fertilizers to put on the tomatoes, and we were in the big garage under my flat where they keep all their contadini stuff. She pointed to a big round basket-y kind of thing hanging on the wall and asked if I knew what it was. In fact, there were two, hanging up together, one made of a big round wooden frame with one side closed in with metal mesh, about 5 feet in diameter; the other smaller made of wicker, looking like giant flour sieves. I said no, and she said, "My father the contadino used it when I was growing up." Then I realized.


I'd seen it on television and in the movies; it was for winnowing grain by hand, a winnowing fan.

You put the grain in the baskety thing, and on a breezy day, you toss it up in the air, and allow the wind to carry away the chaff while you catch the grain again, to throw it all up again, and again. People had been using them since the agricultural revolution began.

One generation away. Annamaria is probably old enough to be my mother, maybe in her early 70s. She dug out five rows of ground, three for her and two for me, to plant our tomatoes, zucchini, beans, peppers and melanzane. The rows are about ten meters long, and she did it by hand with a long handled iron mattock, a job I could not possibly have done myself.

They've given me a huge patch of land to do whatever I want with, and I'm a little overwhelmed. Frankly, I haven't been terribly strong, physically, since chemo, and after 15 years of sitting down to work, but I remember when I was 19 or so, redoing an entire garden alone one spring. A little house I'd rented with some friends hadn't been seen to in a couple of decades, and I took to it like a duck who'd never seen water before.

I rented an electric trimmer, and cut and pruned, and trimmed and dug and turned over beds that hadn't been dug in a long time. I found the old compost bed that someone had dumped an entire sack of potatoes into some time in the past and that had therefore become the potato bed, and produced the best potatoes I'd ever eaten before or since. I did carrots and beets and broccoli. I cut back the wilderness of Himalayan blackberries that had grown to fifteen feet deep, and of course - being roses - they loved the pruning so much they produced an enormous summer crop of berries. Someone had planted climbing white roses right next to the hedge and they had grown right into it, so when I trimmed the hedge I also pruned the roses, which then sprouted huge white blossoms all along its length. The pink clematis had turned into a huge tangled wall and I cut it down into an arch that became a mass of flowers in the summer.

That spring and summer in that little garden - that we lost again the following winter when the landlady sold the property to developers - will stand in my mind as one of the happiest periods of my life. I remember it in a kind of pink and green and golden glow. I'm not 19 anymore, but maybe we can do something like it again.

I've been here three weeks and it's been busybusybusy, so it only occurred to me the other day that there's a good chance here, perhaps even better than in Norcia (where flat land is hard to come by). Unlike the city, where rotting, corrupt Modernia is still reigning supreme in the last days of its wicked glory, here, only a few miles away, a much older kind of life is still lived, and remembered. I think Annamaria likes me because I so obviously value it, and so clearly want to live it myself (I think her daughter wasn't that interested). Even though our ability co communicate the details is still a bit limited, we've become friends because we both discovered a similar kind of soul, the same sort of priorities.


I've mostly finished organising the house. The books are all out of their boxes and arranged in the cases, and the oratory is set up. I sang Compline in it on Sunday night. The only thing that's missing now is someone to share it all with.

A bit of what will be the flower garden, with the oldest fig tree I've yet seen.

But I'm also happily anticipating the arrival of a friend from the US. (Note to self; order sofa-bed from Ikea.) She's a young lady who found that her ordinary life - with good, morally praiseworthy work, good, believing friends, a large and loving Catholic family - wasn't enough. She is thinking thoughts of bigger things, as you do, and her spiritual director suggested she come to Europe.

Annamaria's doves. In the big shed behind it are chickens and rabbits.

So I invited her to come to think them here, to stay and use my place as a home base to look for answers to her vocational yearnings, (there's no more centrally located place in Italy than Perugia.) and meanwhile, eat a lot of good Umbrian food and drink a lot of tea. There are monasteries on the continent where the Faith is preserved, though not many. And there are plenty of other things going on. She says it's a funny sort of urge, to leave where she is and come to Europe to look for something. How well I know that urge! Say a prayer that we can help her find what she's looking for. She will come in September.

San Fortunato, the church on the hill behind the house. 

Annamaria's chair in the orto, where she has a rest and a smoke and can just sit and look at the view.

Last night I went down to the bottom of the garden with a pair of kitchen scissors and cut the remaining wild chamomile to start drying. It grows very abundantly all over the place here, usually twined up together with the brilliant scarlet poppies that are just coming into bloom now in the fields and along the edges of the roads.

Her patch, and mine on the top right, which we planted the other night. 

The other night I took a bit of a stroll around as the sun was going down and the opening chords of our next stormfront was starting to really blow, and stood watching three kestrels wheeling and spinning and riding the wind like acrobats.

This weekend, I'm going to start building my flower beds, and I've got a bucket of seed packets and jars of wild seeds I'd collected from Norcia. We're a bit late in the season to start seeds but I don't mind.

The growing season here is very long. Who knows what we can grow here, given enough time.



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___k the Innernet!

Hey it's me!

I've been doing research on the internet about why the internet is bad for you.

When I was a kid, my elders called the television a number of derogatory nicknames, “the gogglebox,” “the idiot-box.” I remember that serious parents took to heart the warnings of the documentaries and books that children’s TV time should be strictly rationed. They were worried about kids sitting in front of the screen all day while Leave it to Beaver was still being made. What would Ward and June have thought of kids taking the TV with them wherever they went? I know an orthodox Jewish rabbi in New York who has nine children and still refuses to get an internet connection at home. I asked him about it once, and he said it wasn’t the porn, he just didn’t want his children growing up to be idiots.

Yeah yeah...shut up.

What, you think I didn't notice?



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Natural building primer

A friend in the UK has expressed an interest in building her own house, and we were talking about our shared ambitions to not live in the standard middle-class type of dwelling that most people in our culture take for granted as "normal". I have been a member of various internet groups that talk about "natural" or "sustainable" building techniques that are starting to grow in popularity around the western world.

They take their inspiration mainly from ancient, pre-industrial techniques that were used nearly everywhere in Europe for thousands of years. Most significantly, they were used by the people who wanted to live in the dwelling. In other words, it used to be normal for people to build and maintain their own housing. The idea that the only way to own a home is to buy one ready-built, the suburban model, seems to be a product of Modernia that really took off after WWII and the great suburbanization of our populations. Which is itself an outgrowth of the post-Industrial Revolution thing of packing everyone together into cities so they can take a "job" working for someone else. It is, in other words, the final defeat of the old Catholic feudal/agricultural model, and one that I believe is perhaps the single most morally, socially and physically destructive development of human history.

Back in the day, and not too long ago, it was considered unremarkable for people to acquire a piece of property and build a house on it. My grandparents did it. Back when Vancouver Island was a remote backwater hardly anyone wanted to live on, they bought a 1/4 acre for $2000, high up on a cliff above the sea, with a fantastic view of the Nanoose inlet off the south side of the property. They built a small but beautiful two-bedroom house and a garden, mainly on the flat part in the front of the property, and a rock garden and container vegetable garden on the little bits of flat at the back of the house. They lived there until my grandfather's death, and it is still to this little pocket of paradise that my subconscious goes when I am anxious about the world or about life.

My friend agrees that the mass-produced, cookie-cutter, suburbanised direction our societies' domestic architecture has taken since the War has been gravely damaging. The idea of getting "on the housing ladder," that is, "buying" a "starter-home" by locking yourself into a titanic morgtage for the rest of your life is a thought that fills me with horror. Because the reality is simply not what we are being told. You do not become a "homeowner" this way; you become a mortgage-slave to a bank, who are the ones who really own your home and rule your life. This seems to me to be like voluntarily enslaving yourself to an evil macro-culture that is bent on the destruction of everything I love and hold dear. When my friend told me that she and her husband were considering "just getting on the housing ladder" I felt depressed and a little suffocated at the thought.

One of the "hippie" things my mother instilled in me that really stuck was a horror of debt. I would rather have a ball and chain attached to my ankle than be in serious debt, either with credit cards or student loans or a mortgage. When I was a kid, my mother got a bill from Visa that had attached interest at a rate of 22%. My mother, being ahh... somewhat less reserved than I... wrote a very elegant letter to Visa along with the cheque that said that if we were in biblical times, the entire pack of them would be stoned to death for the capital crime of usury. Along with this, she included the tiny little pieces of plastic that were all that was left of her Visa card.

But I want my own home, and am starting to want it more and more each year. My friend feels the same, and she is currently living in a beautiful old house that, through various happy accidents, she and her husband live in rent-free. But this situation could be taken out from under them at any moment, and she doesn't like the idea of pouring money down the bottomless rent-hole either. She said, however, that she was open to the idea of building, and I said I was looking closely at this new "natural building" trend that seems to be going around the world among people who also don't want to opt into the evils of the modern macro-culture. I said I would poke around and find some information for her.


Here is a video interview of one of the guys who started this movement, Ianto Evans, a Welshman who feels as we do about it all. "Any kind of loan for something you can't afford is asking for trouble. If you're already in that situation, get out of it. And if you're not, for heaven sake, don't get into it."

I've already posted this video, but it's worth looking at again:

"As an architect who spent five years years in school and at the end of it couldn't build a house, had you told me this fifteen years ago, I would never have believed you, I would never have believed that you could learn to build your own house in a ten-day workshop. But the proof is there by the dozens of people who have now gone out and done that. Once you don't have to be paying a mortgage on your home, then maybe you don't need to have two cars for each of you to get to work... and then maybe you don't need so much income. And then maybe you can keep your kids at home and grow a big garden. And do thngs together as a family..."

There seem to be generally three categories: straw bale, "cob" and, less often, "cordwood". Personally, I am most attracted to "cob,"


which seems to be a reiteration of the ancient wattle and daub technique.

There are a lot of groups in Britain and elsewhere that help people learn how to do this and, as with all these alternative living movements, the internet is the best way to find them and get in touch with them.

Here is the website of Cob Cottage Company, that gives people workshops in Oregon.

Here is the iLoveCob website where there are a lot of quite inspirational photos of the extremely charming houses that are possible to build using this technique.

Here is This Cob House which has more of this stuff.

Here is the blog of This Cob House.

Here's one in the UK, The Natural Building Centre


And this is the little cottage a guy in the UK built for ₤150. This is is his blog: Michael Buck

Here's more


From what I have seen, there is a movement in the same alternative building community, to turn back to other traditional building work, like the use of whole-timber for framing, found timber, recycled and salvaged materials.

And I really see no reason at all why all of these could not be combined to create a home like this:


I will mention only one more thing. I take the occasional look at the boards at the local realtors' offices and there are regular postings of agricultural properties. One of them was 7000 square meters, up on the lower slopes of the Norcia valley, and was selling for €22,000.

I'm just sayin...



~

Under Pressure

Got a shiny new pressure cooker for Christmas, and it's awesome. The biggest one they make, 9 litres, and took it out for the first test drive.

Pressure cooker rabbit stew:

It's the simplest recipe you can imagine: you cut up the coniglio into big pieces, chop two carrots, an onion and four cloves of garlic. Dredge the bunny bits in a little flour with a little salt and curry powder, (used the plastic bag method). Brown the pieces in a bunch of butter, then put it all together in the pot with the veg. Add a soup cube and some sage and water just to cover, then bring the water to a boil, put on the pressure lid, and turn the heat way down. Seriously, it'll be done in 20 minutes. It's amazing. And the meat is perfect, tender and done all the way through, and the broth is fantastic. The only thing that could make it better is a little white wine which I didn't have.

What I couldn't believe was the speed. I figure it's basically what a microwave was before microwaves.

Totally get a pressure cooker.



~

The title of this interesting documentary is perhaps not the best. It's not so much about getting "off the grid". I would have called it Downsizing. The idea of downsizing your life on a personal, individual level, has always seemed like a good one to me. But not only getting rid of stuff, most especially consumer debt (credit card debt) but of getting rid of the desire for consumption, curbing the appetite for Things.

I've seen so many people try to climb up into that strange model of living that involves huge ownership of material things in opposition to huge commitment to people, to truth or knowledge or spiritual benefit. And I think a lot of people are quietly starting to understand that these things are not only largely out of reach (mainly by design) but unworthy of our commitment and personal resources. We have been sold a mess of pottage in the form of the lies of people who want to sell us a lot of useless things, and a great many people are starting to give it a serious re-think.

The hippies had a pretty good idea at the foundation of their "drop out" doctrine, but they ended up getting distracted with the urge to indulge other appetites. In many ways they made an accurate critique of Modernity and their exhortation not to participate in it was much in line with some home truths that can be found in the Bible and in a lot of other religions.

Things are not what life is supposed to be for. We all know it. It's hard to live this truth, but we do all know it.

~

This is Passion Week, and I've resolved to consider doing things a bit differently, perhaps radically differently (though perhaps not). I realise that despite having been a moderately serious Christian for a while, I've really never approached the Bible in any systematic way. While I was doing the housework this morning, I ran another interesting documentary about a group of Amish teenagers being taken to Britain to experience the outside world. I was impressed with the sincerity and seriousness of mind these young people displayed, even though none of them were over 17. They were, as the Proddie saying has it, "Bible believing Christians" but the first thing they were, clearly, was Bible-knowing Christians. I could do with a bit of knowing what they know.

How about some Passion Week homework: what one thing do you all think you would do well to add or subtract from your life?

I think I might try reading the Bible.



~

So, I finally caved.

I finally got the internet full speed in my new place. I had no other choice. I had to work and my internet stick - which was very helpful at rationing my internet time - was out of juice and could not be recharged for another two days. With Little Winnie sick, I felt I couldn't be away from home working down the hill for hours at a time, so I gave in and registered for the Telecom Italia account that came as part of the package with my landline.

I only got the stupid landline because it came as part of the package with the Telecom plan I bought for my cell phone, so I didn't have to keep ricarica-ing my phone. Of course, now I really don't remember why I wanted to get a full time mobile plan, except that for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to give an international telecommunications conglomerate my home address so they could bother and pester me at home any time they wanted. Because I clearly needed more utilities bills in my life, along with all the joy utilities companies bring to our days. (With the added extra-special joy of it being Italy, so you're more likely to get hit by lightning than for your bill to arrive at your house in the post. This probably the only country in the world where getting a phone bill is actually cause for rejoicing.)

Now, not only have I got a landline I will never use myself, or give anyone the number for, I've got Big Brother Internet invading my home like an obnoxious encyclopaedia salesman.

Because, Modernity! Shiny, shiny Modernity! It's the BEST!

But on the upside, I can finally get back to my old TV show and YouTube addictions and stop going outside so much and getting all that exercise in the fresh air and sunshine.

So...

Yay.



~

How to go to the beach

When I was a little girl, my grandma, who was English and born in 1903, taught me that only a certain sort of lady (you could almost hear her putting the quote marks on "lady") allowed her skin to turn colour in the sun. I never asked what sort of lady, exactly, but got the idea she wouldn't be very nice.

Grandma taught me, more through example than words, that it is a kind of feminine duty to maintain one's looks, and that the foundation of that was to care for one's skin, especially face, neck, chest and hands. I wore hats a lot as a kid, even while playing in the garden.

Grandma and I went to the beach together regularly, and she taught me to swim in the sea, but she was quite strict about the proper way to dress outdoors. One covered up. I put my swimsuit on, and then we each had a "beach wrap" of a light dress to put over top, (when I was quite small she made mine by recutting one of Grandpa's old cotton shirts) and then a hat to keep the sun off our faces. I remember hers particularly, it was black straw. Mine was pink with blue flowers.

When we got to the beach, grandma would lay out our towels and sit down, and I would take off my dress and run over the flat black shale pebbles and splash madly into the water. She always made me wear canvass sneakers in the water for fear I would cut my feet on the stones and barnacles. The best thing was to get a log off the beach and roll it into the water and use it as a canoe.

She would sometimes "take a dip," and always walked sedately into the water up to about waist deep, and would swim solemnly and deliberately across the little bay several times.

When I got out - and the water in the north Pacific around Vancouver Island is always icy - grandma would help me towel down straight away, and I would put my dress and hat back on. She usually brought a bit of a lunch with us, a thermos of tea and her sketchbooks with a stump or two of charcoal. I would sit drying off in the sun and watch her sketch the trees and mountains around us.

Sometimes I would lie down on the pebbles and let their heat dry me. You could almost hear them sizzling slightly as they boiled off the water, and then you could lie on them for a few minutes while they warmed you up. Then when you sat up, they'd be stuck to your skin. Then it was off to climb around on the rocks and poke my fingers into the velvety green sea anemones, pry the purple star fish off the rocks at the tide line, and see if there were any octopi caught in the pools. The beach always yielded fossils, tiny imprints of unimaginably ancient clam shells caught in the lava flow 300 million years before and turned to stone. I had a large collection.

That was how Grandma and I went to the beach.

This ugly business of displaying as much of your oily hide as possible, laying it down on a rented lounge chair and attempting to turn it the colour and texture of old saddle leather, along with about 10,000 other people doing the same thing, strikes me as unnatural and distasteful in the extreme.

Unsanitary.

Common.

I'm always happy when The Season is over in Santa Marinella, and the regiment of umbrellas comes down and the beach starts being cleansed of the summer detritus by the first storms of autumn.

It is true that Italian women are some of the most stylish and style-conscious in Europe. Their taste isn't really mine, (or at least Roman taste isn't; I was gobsmacked in Florence and have vowed never to shop for clothes anywhere else in Italy again) but in their own way they always take care to look good and they spend a lot of money on clothes, shoes, handbags, hair styling and whatnot. The shops are full of skin care products and cosmetics and there is always a crowd at Sephora.

Which is why I have never understood why they all want to roast themselves in the sun. It simply isn't possible that they don't know what the rest of the world knows about the damage the sun does to you. Quite apart from skin cancer, it simply ruins you. The science is done on this: the two things that most harm your skin, and therefore your appearance, are sun and smoking. And Italian women all deliberately roast their skin all summer and puff away while doing it.


When the doctors told me at the end of my first chemo treatment that, pretty much from now on, I was going to be extremely sensitive to the sun, that I must wear 50 spf sunblock every time I went out, wear long-sleeved tops and hats, and even carry an umbrella, they were a little surprised to hear that I already did all this. I was already well-resigned to walking around Italy looking like one of the little old English ladies in Tea with Mussolini. (I always hoped that I would turn out to be more like Maggie Smith's character, rather than that insufferable nitwit Judy Dench. No chance at all of turning out like the kindly and sensible Joan Plowright.)

Shortly after receiving these encouraging instructions, I was in the station bar buying a train ticket and a bottle of water, and there were two old chaps there having a coffee and a chat, as you do, and I noticed they were teasing me about my white, white skin. Not in a mean way (they're Italians, after all,) but they obviously thought it peculiar. I think they thought that because I was a straniera I wouldn't understand them, so they seemed surprised when I turned around and asked how old they thought I was.

The looks on their faces were priceless when I told them.



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Phone fear

I agree, these are all excellent reasons to hate talking on the phone, and I also hate talking on the phone for these reasons.

But I have a previous problem, I don't just hate talking on the phone, I hate answering the phone. The phone ringing can never be a good thing.

Very simply, if the phone rings, it means someone wants to talk to me, and since there are really only about two or at most three people living on planet earth who do not scare me, I mostly don't really ever want to be talked to.

The problem is that you can never predict what other people will say or do, and it's nearly always something bad. They want to yell at you for something you've done, or written, or they want you to do something that you don't want to do, like leave the house ... or talk on the phone.

And even if it's the best thing in the world, like they've made you king of a tiny European nation and the job comes with a really great free house and a butler, it is always going to be interrupting my train of thought, and I hate that.

Also if the phone rings, I have to open it up to see who it is, and if it's someone scary (nearly everyone) I am now stuck with a conundrum: do I wait until it finishes ringing (nine or ten rings) so the Scary Person on the phone will think I'm not home or maybe have left my phone somewhere, or some other innocuous thing and doesn't think I'm standing there wishing he/she hadn't phoned me; or do I just hang up by closing the phone, thereby cutting the rings off early and giving away that I am hanging up on him/her? The longer I sit there letting the phone ring, the worse I feel, but if I look and it's someone scary, I am afraid to make the Scary Person mad by hanging up.

It's kind of like squashing a spider. You don't actually want to squash the spider, because what if you miss or what if you squash it and it springs back to life and takes some kind of horrifying zombie-spider revenge?

I have a landline that I never use. The service came as a package with the internet, and my mobile phone is a separate thing that costs me about double the cost of the phone I never use. The phone itself is a treasure, a beautiful black 1937 bakelite art deco job, converted to a modern wall jack. It weighs about ten pounds. I know because I hauled it all the way here from Toronto.

Sometimes it rings, and I feel great about ignoring it because I've never, ever given out the number to anyone, so if it is ringing I know for sure it's telemarketers. Every now and then I make a call out on my beautiful antique landline just for the pleasure of dialing the wonderfully machined dial thing.

Someone once asked me, in a very forceful way, for my landline number, and I almost told him that the fact that he was demanding it was the reason I was certainly never, ever going to give it to him. A person like that might do anything. He might even phone you on your landline! I didn't tell him that though, because I thought it would make him mad and start yelling at me.

This fear of the ringing phone is very much like my more generalised fear of the outside world, and has to stem from my childhood, when I was in constant terror of being abandoned by my parents who never did anything but scream at each other. I never knew what horrifying disaster was coming, but I knew it was going to be bad. I remember I used to hide in a cabinet when they were going at it. Then, when they actually did abandon me, (several times between seven and 15) I guess I figured that the thing you fear the most is actually the thing that is most likely to happen, because it did.

It's subsided in recent years, like most of my general fears. I guess just having been functional as a grownup for a couple of decades will do this. (It's really awful being young, thank God it doesn't last forever). I used to jump whenever the phone rang, and just stare at it like a bird at a snake, until it stopped making that horrible noise. Caller ID helped a little, but it still makes me jump still if it shows a Rome number the phone doesn't recognise because for a couple of years, that meant a doctor was calling me, which was always bad news. Really bad.

In general, I think the phone was a bad idea. I wish we could have moved straight from letters to the internet. Which I like a lot. But probably for bad reasons.



~

Being "poor," having "enough," and being grateful: the gross personal happiness index

A personal hero of mine, the 5th and current reigning Dragon King, Druk Gyalpo, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, of the Kingdom of Bhutan, the happiest place on earth.

Kathy writes today on a theme of hers:

People are ‘poor’ because they are dumb, lazy or both — and many of them LIKE being ‘poor’

Yep. Pretty much.

In fact, I am (kind of) poor because I've chosen to be. I don't have a credit card, and never will, because consumer debt is a bad, bad, BAD thing. I don't own a car because I have always lived in places with good public transit and where it is perfectly feasible to walk to everything I need to go to.

Suburbs are stupid and bad for people and no one should live in them. Live in the city where you can walk to the things you need, or live in a village where people cluster, so you can interact in a human way with people outside your immediate family, so you can live in a real community. Or live out in the country where your work is right outside your kitchen door. Pick one.

Suburbs, where you need a car to get a carton of milk and a newspaper at the "corner store," but aren't allowed to grow your own food or raise livestock, where you don't know the names of more than two neighbours and do everything you can to avoid seeing them, are an evil invention of Modernia.

I do wish I could own a house, but with house prices what they are everywhere, and with my profound aversion to debt of any kind, that is so far out of the question as to be the equivalent of saying I wish I could live in a magic airship and never set foot on earth again. Wishing is just fantasizing, and all the world knows how I feel about that. All my working-class English and Irish relatives and ancestors, until this last generation, paid rent all their lives.

I also recognise that just being white and having English as my first language, and having been born Canadian/British, makes me automatically richer not only than nearly every other person on earth, but than nearly every other person who has ever lived on earth. I'm insanely rich, if for no other reason than I can turn on a tap and have hot water come out of it, or flick a switch and have light after dark. I'm literate, and own hundreds of books. I have more than two pairs of shoes. Get the historical perspective, and you'll begin to see how rich you really are.

I know full well that if I wanted to be more wealthy, financially, I could just work a little harder, take on more jobs, do the effort it would take to go all the way as an entrepreneurial free lancer; I could make a lot more money. Maybe not enough to ever be "rich" or even "well off" by modern standards, but certainly waaay better off than my immediate ancestors ever could have hoped to be, (post-war Manchester was a place where "rich" and "poor" were more or less meaningless).

I have chosen, quite freely, to be in a profession and position in life where money and things are not the highest priorities. And I LOVE what I do. It makes me happy (or at least, as happy as a chronic depressive, choleric/melancolic can reasonably expect to be in this life). And I'm aware that I can make this choice because I come from two of the richest nations the world has ever seen. I live in the modern, developed world, and just this fact alone makes me wealthy and gives me choices very, very few people have ever had.

For this "suck-it-up-and-own-it" attitude, I can really thank my hippie mother. She taught me something that I still think is true, that being happy is the real goal of the material aspect of what you do in life, and that while it is certainly possible to make loads of money, the two things aren't (necessarily) the same. And in my case, my personality, tastes and objectives have simply placed financial wealth pretty low on the priorities list. I think too much to be in a creatively dead-end, well-paid, crap-job. I wouldn't last five minutes.

My hippie mother also taught me how to be poor efficiently. She taught me the financial priorities of sensible, working-class northern English people: keeping a roof over your head is the first priority, so if you have to starve and bundle up in the winter because you can't afford to pay the electric, absolutely always pay the rent, in full, and on time. Maintaining a home as a safe and as-comfortable-as-possible haven is the most important thing you can do with your money. After that, her most important lesson was the deep fear of debt, that I'm sure also comes out of her early upbringing in working-class Manchester.

She also taught me how to eat poor effectively: get the biggest nutritional bang for you buck. I was told by the doctors during the Cancer Thing that the reason they were willing to go with the extended treatment was that my general health was amazingly good, especially for someone my age. And that came from a lifetime of eating nothing but fresh fruit, veg, chicken, fish and liver. Never, ever packaged, processed foods, (no matter how much I begged for them as a kid).

It's totally possible to be both poor, dignified and healthy, but this is mostly by choosing to own it, to realise that it's a choice and be a fricken' grownup about the decisions you've made in life.

So, maybe a good thing to do would be to talk and think about the concept of "enough". We hear all the time about the "divide between rich and poor". But maybe there is, or could be, a third category: just fine. Because I think there are very few people in the developed world who can genuinely qualify, in absolute terms, as "poor". "Poor people" in the developed world in the 21st century, whatever their source of income, often own flat screen TVs, drive cars, talk on their cell phones and have fridges full of food. In fact, in Britain and the US, the number one health problem for poor people is obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Maybe we should talk more about "enough". I have enough. I'm content, materially. I have most of the things I've always wanted; quite a bit more than I expected to have when I was younger, in fact. If I were to die tomorrow, in terms of "he who dies with the most toys wins" I'd say I would have come in at a pretty respectable position.

Moreover, I have what I need in the non-material realm too to get on with the really important task of saving my soul. I've got work I can do, that's well-suited to my temperament and abilities. Work that gives me a lot of scope for growth and development and has a good future. Work, indeed, that I'm probably going to be able to do, and want to do, up to the day before I die.

I also have strong relationships, good friends, who don't let me sink too far when I let myself sink a bit, and who keep me responsible to the community at large.

The Kingdom of Bhutan has an interesting take on success. The previous King of Bhutan decided not to go along with the standards of national success that the rest of the world adheres to. In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, invented a thing called the "Gross National Happiness Index" for his country, and based all his plans for reform and "modernisation" on it.

The assessment of gross national happiness (GNH; Wylie: gyal-yong ga'a-kyid pal-'dzoms) was designed in an attempt to define an indicator and concept that measures quality of life or social progress in more holistic and psychological terms than only the economic indicator of gross domestic product (GDP).

"He used this phrase to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values."

And it's working out pretty well.

Why don't we try something like that?


~ * ~

Homework assignment:

Think about the concept of "enough", then write down in the commboxes five things you're grateful for and five things you could do comfortably without, with maybe a few personal adjustments.



~

Ghosts

Wow, if you want to get a cute Budgie like Disco, you've really got to be prepared to commit.

Budgie 10 -15 yrs
Cockatiel 15 -20 yrs
Conure 25 - 30 yrs
African Grey 50 - 60 yrs
Amazon 50-60 yrs
Macaws 50 - 80 yrs
Cockatoo 60 - 80 yrs

I was just enjoying once again that lovely glimpse of Old Britain, just before it all ended forever, one has in the old Ealing Comedy films. The Ladykillers remains one of my all time favourites, and always reminds me happily of the ladies who lived near my grandparents' house where I spent a lot of time as a child. (Two of them, Mrs. Helen MacDonald and Miss Dorothy Black, a widow and a spinster, lived in separate but adjacent houses where they allowed me to play, very carefully, with the antique - and I now realise extremely valuable - porcelain figurines of ballet dancers. But never let me win at Scrabble.)

It always gives me a terrible case of nostalgia and it occurred to me again today, rather sadly, that everyone in the film (which was Peter Sellers' first screen appearance) are long since dead, starting with the darling Katie Johnson as little Mrs. Wilberforce who was so wonderful she stole the show from no less a person than Alec Guinness (not yet "Sir" at the time).

Then I realised that not all the actors are necessarily gone. The cockatoo and Amazon parrots could very well still be with us.



And the internet has astonished me again by bringing my distant personal past, that I now think of as semi-mythological, into the present.


Here are the little ballerina figurines, made in Ireland, that were in Mrs. MacDonald's glass cabinet. Not the exact one, of course, and she had quite a few, but this is the exact style. It gave me rather a strange feeling looking at all the photos of the Dresden figurines. I suppose there were quite a lot of them floating about the world in old ladies' knick-knack cabinets, but now I imagine they are priced out of the range of normal people by these monomaniacal loons we call "collectors".

So much has changed, with me and in the world since then, that I sometimes wonder if my memories are really memories. So far away and so utterly vanished are all the figures from my past life that I often have the odd feeling that my memories are just my imagination. Virtually nothing remains of my childhood and life before my twenties, neither people nor artifacts. My life now is almost entirely recently constructed, and no one I currently consort with has known me more than five, or at most, ten years. It really does contribute to the feeling I have always had that I'm really just a replicant with implanted false memories. Am I haunted, or am I really a ghost from the past who's doing the haunting of the modern world?

Now and then, something physical bobs up from the depths to the surface and I am left with a strange shocked feeling. Who are we, really, other than our pasts?



~

Lloyd and Dianne

Apparently, young people don't know about this.

Weird, huh?



~

Every man for himself

People are talking about the Concordia disaster. I noted it at first because it happened about 20 minutes train ride from where I sit.

The other thing I noted almost immediately is the news about the behaviour of the captain, Francesco Schettino, and the other men on board.

Rich Lowry comments in the National Review:

"“Every man for himself” is a phrase associated with the deadly Costa Concordia disaster, but not as a last-minute expedient. It appears to have been the natural order of things. In the words of one newspaper account, “An Australian mother and her young daughter have described being pushed aside by hysterical men as they tried to board lifeboats.” If the men of the Titanic had lived to read such a thing, they would have recoiled in shame. The Titanic’s crew surely would have thought the hysterics deserved to be shot on sight — and would have volunteered to perform the service.

...

Another woman passenger agreed, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats.” Yet another, a grandmother, complained, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

I note that Michael is doing a series this week on the emasculation of men and the effects of feminism on the Church. Today he mentioned the type of men who are feminist-approved in today's media. Men are routinely depicted as weak, stupid and ineffectual and lorded over by strong, hip intelligent women. After watching today's offering, I sent him a note asking that he not forget to talk about feminism's vilification and demonisation of strong men. The flip side of feminism's hatred of men is to denounce them as violent, evil and terrifying. Monsters.

I think it is also worth commenting on the effects on men in the real world of feminism, and her strumpet child, the Sexual Revolution. Feminism has killed the cultural priority of men protecting and being responsible for women. A male who has overcome adversity and grown from a child protected by women into a man, an adult who protects women and children. Our feminist-inspired anti-culture, coupled with a soul-deadening consumerist materialism, has tossed these concepts out and by telling women they don't need men, by demonising the strength of masculinity, it has at the same time told men that they never need to grow up.

If feminism has taught women they can sleep around "like men," it is to be remembered that this means it has also given men permission to do the same. Instead of insisting that men behave responsibly, marry a woman and protect and care for her and his children, it has offered men women as toys and offered women the Pill and abortion as the back-up plan.

I read an interesting, though deeply frightening, website that claimed to be in support of men against the feminist world. One of the points that the clearly angry men made was that they were often held to a grossly unjust double standard. The legal system, now held firmly in the feminist claw, holds them financially responsible for the children they father. The article on the site pointed out however, logically enough, that since effective contraception was available for free, and women are now allowed to use men sexually as easily as men use them, no man should ever be held responsible for fatherhood. The argument was even more chilling as it addressed abortion. Why should any man ever be financially ruined by family courts when abortion is legal, a lot cheaper and easy to get?

Why indeed? Feminism, because it is essentially dishonest, childish and self-serving, will never own up to the logical conclusions of its premises.

The culture-wreckers made divorce easy to get in the 1970s but it took a few decades for feminism, having now gained monstrous political strength, to catch up. It was not until about ten or twenty years ago that they realised that easy divorce and "free sex" left women and children without protection. When my parents divorced in 1971 or so, there were no laws protecting women from total abandonment. It is true that at that time, many, if not most post-divorce women were left in desperate poverty, often relying on welfare handouts, when the man ignored court orders for child support.

But in the last 20 years, feminism has caught up and now a man who divorces or leaves his family is often completely wiped out. Feminist family lawyers are known actively to discourage reconciliations in favour of totally ruining the man. In Canada, with the stereotype of the despicable "deadbeat dad" conveniently kept alive by the media, family court judges think nothing of ordering a man to turn over nearly his entire income. One man I know of, who had lost his job and was facing eviction from his apartment, was told by a judge, "I don't care if you don't have the money. If you don't pay, you go to jail." Canadian family law has revived the Victorian institution of debtor's prison.

Recently, the popes have written against the kind of feminism that promotes abortion and contraception, for hammering a wedge of hostility between men and women. Universal promiscuity, contraception, legal abortion, easy divorce, together with a youth-worshipping, madly consumerist culture, they have said, has created the perfect storm. A cultural disaster that tells women they don't need men, and men they can remain happy, care-free adolescents their whole lives.

This message seems to have come through especially loud and clear in Italy where it is only too easy to find men who are the embodiment of the self-indulgent man-child stereotype. Feminised men are a plague in Italy: vain, self-important, shallow and self-seeking mamma's boys who think nothing is wrong with living in their parents' house in their thirties and forties. One of the things I have written about recently is the drop in marriage rates in Italy. I think one of the best reasons for it is the terrible dearth of grown-up men. (Not forgetting that their skinny, shrieking, tarted-up, painted-claw, artificially endowed females are not anyone's warm ideal of wife and motherhood either.)

I'm happy to say that I am not the only one to have noticed this. It is a common cultural self-criticism of Italians.

Rosaria Sgueglia writes in the Huffington Post (somewhat ironically) that the master of the Concordia is one of those Italian men who match the stereotype point for point.

The average Italian man is said to be narcissist, egomaniac, coward, selfish, unable to follow basic procedures and unable to follow the rules. True or not, it's a stereotype, a stereotype which is strongly proved by the latest, tragic events in Italy.

But I'm also happy to say that I've liked and admired most of the Italian men I've met. The cultural stereotype is easy to observe in Rome, but it is not universal. I've certainly been the recipient of a great deal of careful assistance from a lot of good Italian men lately. (I've also observed that the grown-up Italian men I've met are also almost always Catholics who take their faith seriously.)

These would be men like the Coast Guard Captain Gregorio De Falco who repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, ordered Schetino back on board after the creep had fled the ship and abandoned his charges.



Sgueglia voices the frustration of Italians at the common shortcomings of their own post-Catholic culture, "Today Captain De Falco is the voice of Italian People; an angry voice, angry as every single Italian is."

Yes, today we are furious and we are because a human accident, a stupid accident, caused the death of people who didn't deserve to end their life in such a horrible way. We are because a five-year-old girl was left on board and is still missing; as are more than 20 people. We are because it took Mr. Schettino an hour to call the Mayday. We are because pregnant women, elderly and people who needed assistance were left without any coordination from their captain.

And we are because someone who was clearly incapable of doing his job was made responsible of more than 4,000 people. And, yes, we also are because people like Mr. Schettino do nothing but compromise the already damaged image the rest of the world has of Italian people.

~

And now, back to what's really important

Clothes.

We just started watching Downton Abbey tonight, with episode one. All sorts of interesting characters and plot and whatnot, all very engaging, but of course, the thing I was going nuts over were the clothes. The 1912-1920 period is my all-time number-one top-favourite for women's clothes (for men, it's easily 1802-1820 ... can't resist a tall white collar, crisp cravat and black cutaway).

A few months ago, I splurged on a lovely bit of 60 inch wide robin's egg blue blouse weight linen and have been planning on using it to make a blouse along the lines pictured above. I saw Elizabeth McGovern wearing something like it in the 2007 ITV version of Room with a View.

This blouse was a very common pattern for the time. Variations include raglan sleeves, long shawl collars and a square neckline. Must have it.

Must also have this brown coat with the velvet revers

Men, dress like a grown up

Put this on

And shave every day. Make sure your hair and fingernails are short and clean all the time.

Don't go getting all Italian on us, mind you. There's nothing more revolting and effeminate in a man than physical vanity. A man who cannot pass a mirror or plate glass window without glancing into it, is no man. But do make the effort to be neat, clean and properly dressed. The right sort of woman will notice. Trust me.

Also, I recently had occasion to compliment a young man of my acquaintance on his corduroy trousers.

I didn't realise that there is such a corduroy following out there...

An Address to the Corduroy Appreciation Club

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak to the fifth annual Grand Meeting of the Corduroy Appreciation Club on November 11th, the date which most resembles corduroy. Below is the text of my address. Hail the wale...

I came to this beautiful hall in a soiled subway car, but I might as well have travelled in a grand carriage. As I walked down the street I drew sidelong glances. “Who is this man,” they seemed to say. “A man at home where-ever he travels. A man of refinement. A man of elegance. A man of corduroy.”

...

This is not some fabric reserved for oily diplomats, or gentrymen of questionable morality. Corduroy is not weak! It is not effete or innefectual or elitist. Corduroy is a fabric built to take on the world. Tuck your corduroy trousers into your boots and feed the pigs. Roll up your corduroy sleeves and bring in the harvest. Put on a corduroy field jacket and go outside to build something.

...

We join together because there is one danger so clear, so present that without the efforts of those tonight assembled we might be subsumed by evil. Consumed by that inky darkness.

While I am hesitant to even speak this evil’s name, I must, and I will.

Tonight, friends, we join together to battle velvet.

Velvet is the fabric of evil.

Confidence men and crooked bankers join together nightly in velvet-fueled bacchanalias, laughing at their latest swindles. Sickly courtesans don velvet codpieces and drink champagne toasts to their dominance of the common man. Third-world dictators rub themselves with velvet swatches while firing squads execute dissident leaders.

Louche, lude, lascivious velvet is our enemy, and there is no one to fight against it but us.

~

Gramophones

I've always wanted one of these things. They sell them quite regularly at Porta Portese market, for between 90 and 120 Euros. I've been meaning to save up for one.

I have a friend who is in the middle of some kind of Steampunk frenzy. She'd go nuts.

An ethical conundrum for you

You are doing your work in the evening, minding your own business and enjoying the last of the evening's sunshine when along come a handsome pair of young people, about 20 or so, who proceed to sprawl in the doorway of the greegrocer across the street from your window in the small, quiet respectable English country village in which you have chosen to make your home to escape this sort of thing.

The girl is obviously out of her head with drink and she and the boy are all over each other in an unchaste manner.

You are tempted, you are sorely tempted, to take a few photos with your digital camera and then go across the street to inform the young duo that they can either cease and desist or find themselves posted to the internet in this condition for all the world to see by next morning.

What do you do?

The Queen of Style

An entire page dedicated to Audrey Hepburn. Lots of patterns here.