About summer

Summer is a time to relax.

Summer offcially lasts from late June to late September but I can’t help associating it in my mind with my long summer holidays which last from mid July to the end of August. I am fortunate enough to be able to take a month of unpaid leave and with my regular two weeks of annual leave on top of that I stop working for six and a half weeks in the summer. This long period of leisure is for me the characteristic feel of summer. This soon disappears once I get back into the swing of things in September, even if in a lucky year there may still be plenty of fine weather yet.

Over the summer I slow down to a different routine and find plenty of time to exercise, walking, cycling and swimming. With the long days and warmth, summer is the time for living outside, for getting closer to nature. There’s time too just to sit and contemplate, even get the water-colours out for a sketch to absorb the scene.
With the heat and the freedom the siesta also becomes a regular feature of the day as the healthy urge to sleep off lunch need no longer be disobeyed.

I don’t miss work. I’m not short of things to do. In fact during a good summer I don’t get round to reading half the books I take with me.

Summer is the time for summer clothes, not having to wear a tie, living in shorts, wearing sandals, feeling light.

Most of our summers follow a similar pattern, some time in the Alps, some in my wife’s home town in Italy and some time by the sea. Summer also means a long time away from home then, with the necessary changes to habit which that brings.

Summer is a special time in the mountains when the snow is at its least extent making it possible to climb many peaks merely by following paths. The flowers are in profusion, the weather relatively clement and the vistas smiling. Gera in the Dolomites is our usual stomping ground (see “About mountains”). It is a simple place at once beautiful and peaceful where my body and mind immediately feel at ease. Somehow familiarity doesn’t breed a blasé feeling but one of receptive appreciation.

Summer is also the time of year when it becomes possible to swim in the sea for a long time and it is not unusual for me to stay in the water for up to an hour.
Our destination of choice for enjoying crystal clear warm water over recent years has been the Croatian coast and in particular the island of Hvar (see “About the seaside”).

The downside of spending the summer in the South of Europe, though, is that it actually gets too hot. August in Monfalcone can be insufferable. In principle it would be great to get up really early and do things before the temperature gets back above 30°, around 10 am. Only in practice, having gone to bed late, because finally the cool of the evening offers pleasant relief to be enjoyed to the most, and then having nonetheless slept badly through the night as it is too hot, getting up early becomes difficult. There are days when merely sitting still I start to sweat. I am left gasping waiting for the next dip in the sea or the arrival of a cooling thunderstorm - oh the joy of rain! This heat tends to sap away my desire to do anything. In practice the hours of 12 to 4 pm have to be written off, spent in the shade and siesta. Some say that in countries like England the rain prevents you from doing certain outdoor activities, well the same is true for me of the sun in the South. I feel a certain frustration at losing a large chunk out of every day. Blue skies and soaring temperatures are much over-rated in my opinion. As an escape an outing to the Julian Alps offers a nice alternative to periodically jumping in the sea.
I keep saying I should spend more of the summer in the Notrth and perhaps next year I will, I certainly enjoyed my brief and, yes, wet spell in Scotland this year.

But wherever I spend it, as long as it continues to be long, summer will be the special time to recharge my batteries and rediscover myself, above all to live a more outdoor and less hurried life. Every season has its charms but summer, perhaps for the change in routine it brings, more than others.

About rock concerts

When you go to a classical music concert, you know what you are going to get. You know from the programme what pieces are going to be played. If it’s a piece you’re familiar with from a recording you will hear all the same notes, as the whole point is that the composer wrote them all down for the performers to play them all back to you. You know what the instruments will sound like, as their sound reaches you directly without having to be amplified and mixed. Performances do actually differ at the margins on points of interpretation, intonation, timing etc. In the main you get the music you expected only it sounds better than on the recording because it is fuller in the flesh and certainly with an orchestra you hear more detail.

When you go to a rock concert, you don’t know what you wil get. You’re gambling on the set-list being a reasonable choice of material you’re going to recognize. Then you don’t know what version it will be served up in, even if you do know it. I appreciate that with studio multi-track recording techniques often quite simply there are not enough musicians on stage to reproduce all the sounds you’re familiar with from the recorded version. Let me reassure you: I am quite happy to enjoy a simplified, indeed different version of a song that still gives you its essence with perhaps a few good solos added. Indeed, a degree of improvisation and spontaneity is the soul of this kind of music. Sadly though, to be frank, the musicianship of some bands is rather aproximative, the ability of certain stars actually to sing in tune limited and the sound engineers’ idea of what is a balanced mix frequently deficient, with the interesting instruments and voices drowned out by over-miked drum-kits.

Musically then, a rock concert is a bit of a pig in a poke, and often a very expensive one. Incidentally, quite why it shoud cost more to see a handful of musicians in a huge crowd than to see a hundred playing a symphony to a smaller audience has always mystified me. Maybe the electricity bill is big; or maybe some of these guys are just overpaid for what they actually do. I suppose in the end, it’s all about supply and demand and what the punters are ready to pay for. I have read that in this age of cheap or (illegally) free downloads of music off the internet, rock musicians now have to make their real money by touring. That can only be good news, as music is really about performing not recording. However, I suspect that most people go to a concert because they like the recorded music, not because they know the band plays well live.

I guess the reason I continue to go occasionally to big rock concerts is curiosity to see what the great and good are up to live: can they (still) cut it ? Ultimately it’s worth it because I believe that live music has always got something over recorded music: you go for the excitement of the direct human contact, albeit mediated by huge amplification systems and, in the worst extreme of stadium concerts, cinema size TV screens, but you’re still participating in a transient shared event, and that is an essential dimension to music that you ignore at your peril. It’s the encouragement of the audience that makes the musicians want to play better and put more into their music, which in turn leads the appreciative crowd to encourage them more, and so on in a virtuous circle So it may be rough and ready, but it grabs you and thrills you. However, if it is rough and ready and doesn’t actually move you, then it makes for a pretty boring evening, where the only plus point is the kudos of being able to say “yeah, I saw so and so the other night”.

We went to see Bob Dylan the other week.  It must be thirty years since I saw him last.  We were somewhat disappointed, not least because of the sound mix.  I go to a Dylan concert to listen to the words, and if I can't hear them that rather diminishes the experience, because to be honest instrumentally there are better rock bands out there.  Still one goes to pay homage to the great man, and I suppose at his age, pace Johnson, it's not that he does it well but that he does it at all.  
Having said that, two years ago, at the first night of their tour concert at Werchter, I thought the Rolling Stones really rocked, and last year Paul Simon produced a really entertaining evening, whereas old Bob was strictly average.  So we played spot the song, and without the benefits of the occasionally recognizable lyrics we certainly wouldn’t have realized it was "It's all over now Baby Blue" or "Blowing in the wind" from the tune (?) actually you get the melody more from the harmonica than the voice.  I guess I'm not helped by being unfamiliar with his more recent material.  Still if I could have made out the words I might have warmed to it.  Interestingly enough he did four songs from "Highway 61" which in a way I personally regard as his best album.

So whose concerts have I rated over the years?

The first rock concert I went to was by Pink Floyd in about 1974. It was in a theatre in Liverpool and I had to persuade my parents to drive me there and back. In a first set they played previously unheard work-in-progress that would eventually emerge on “Animals”, in a second set all of “Dark Side of the Moon” with accompanying images and in an encore the whole of “Echoes” which in many ways is my favourite piece by them and in which they ingeniously used Dick Parry’s saxophone to do one of the solos which is done on the record by double tracking the guitar. It was generous and good and in the first set was still in keeping with their early method of working out pieces live before recording them.

In the sixth form I often went to see bands at Leeds University Students’ Union and remember enjoying the Electric Light Orchestra complete with electric violins.
I’m not sure if it counts strictly as a rock concert , but the best concert I saw as a student in Oxford was by Weather Report, which featured several quite outstanding jazz musicians (Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius) playing accessible music you could bop to.
During my year off in Germany I managed to see Bob Marley in a large hall in Dortmund: a really feel good concert, where given the amount of weed being smoked even passive smokers were high.
In Cologne I saw an amazing doube bill of Santana and then Frank Zappa. Santana was a bit hit and miss, whereas Zappa was immensely professional as a musician; his band was so tight. But he did a cruel thing: he got his band to play a typical Santana two chord riff and then parodied a Santana solo before doing his own take on it which just blew Santana away. For all his quirky sense of humour, Zappa was an incredibly good guitarist and a total musician.

As my interest in music turned more to classical music, I didn’t go to any rock concerts by famous names for years. It was when Julia and Thomas were teenagers and needed accompanying/driving to them that I started to go again.
The thing that struck me most was that in 25 years or so nothing had really changed. The essence was still lead and rhythm guitar, bass and drums playing in 4/4 rhythm very loud with distortion through variations on the twelve bar blues. I think we can speak of an art form which has as many conventions as classical sonata form or Indian ragas. So I actually found a lot of what they wanted to go and listen to perfectly accessible and, as always, found that some bands played really well live while others were rather average.
The one act I saw twice with them that I would really rate is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. They are mainly in their 40’s with a lot of experience and are very good musicians. They record their music in a fairly simple way which transfers well to live performance, and they play well live, so you really get good rock stripped down to its essence.

In many ways, as rock (however we define the contemporary popular music of the West) is a relatively simple form of music that can be mastered easily by amateurs, many of the most enjoyable rock concerts I have been to have been by unknown bands in bars. Being close up to musicians who play well and are clearly enjoying themselves and generating energy that you want to get up and move to, is really what it’s all about. In this way, over recent years I have always enjoyed the concerts given by my friend Alex and his band About Time Two.
This kind of rock concert is a direct, pretension-free, low-expectation but high-satisfaction happening that probably will never be repeated: a far cry from the experience at a distance which is the famous band in a stadium circus that so often disappoints. I should also mention here the three gigs given by my children’s now defunct band, Mostly Harmless.
I often find that non-commercial rock music for fun is just more rewarding as a musical and human experience.

Having said that, we really enjoyed a great entertaining evening of music by Crosby, Stills and Nash this week. Yet another outing of past it sixty-year-olds you may have thought, but no actually it was an unpretentious concert by experienced professional musicians. We were fairly close to the stage and didn’t need binoculars to see them. The sound mix was ideal: you could hear first and foremost the voices and guitars of the three, with the backing musicians precisely that - discreet in the background. They played two sets in the old way, with a proper break for a beer and a pee in the middle. The first set was more acoustic, the second more electric. Their harmony singing is still exquisite and guitar playing excellent. There were plenty of familiar songs including some by others (eg “Ruby Tueday”), and the audience was even invited to join in (eg on “Teach your children”). There was constant variety in pace and instrumentation that kept you interested. After all, big name rock concerts can be good in the right circumstances.

In short this is all you want from a rock concert: good live music in a good atmosphere.

ps 18.12.2009

I saw Paul McCartney last week. He was on stage for two and a half hours with a small tight band who played well and could all sing harmony. He played 35 songs, 22 of which were old Beatles numbers. I guess that's the closest you can get to hearing the Beatles live these days, and let's not forget that they never performed their late material live. So I must admit that hearing McCartney sing these songs that I know and love so well (partly from playing them myself) was a really moving experience for me.

About Vietnam

I have recently returned from a trip for work (and pleasure) to Vietnam and Cambodia. I have been to South East Asia before but this was my first time in these two countries.
I shall write this time about Vietnam, where I spent eight days.

I was working in the capital, Hanoi and apart from there visited only one other place, the ravishingly beautiful natural site of Halong Bay. As I did not have too much free time, it was a deliberate decision of mine to concentrate on only these two places. As I get older I prefer to dawdle and soak up impressions rather than to rush around: quality rather than quantity. My visit fell into three parts: a pure tourist visiting one of the most popular locations in the country for three days; a visiting teacher training young Vietnamese interpreters and in turn being their guest for three days; and a visiting official come to interpret at a high level international meeting for two days.

In such a short time I wouldn’t claim to have won any deep insights into the country, but would like to share with you some initial impressions.

Halong Bay is quite simply one of the great natural wonders of the world. Hundreds of Karst limestone small islands jut up out of the calm waters of the bay, covered in lush vegetation, worn away into strange shapes, providing constantly changing scenery as you cruise among them, in all their myriad colours of grey, sometimes black stained rock, the many shades of the greenery creeping over them, the turquoise sea, the never ending receeding fading green-blue silhouettes of distant islets, while In amongst small fishing boats are rowed by locals in conical hats. You couldn’t devise anything more picturesque.
As this is what everyone wants to see, the tourist industry has geared up to meet the demand so there are numerous boats, some quite luxurious, to take the punters cruising; and let’s face it, it’s the only way you’re going to get to see something. When I was there it was low season so many boats were moored up, but I could imagine it getting very busy. I opted for an up-market “junk” with twenty-eight berths, though not all full, operated by Indochina Sails and I found myself in good company and well looked after by a very pleasant and efficient crew. The whole operation ran like clockwork without seeming rushed.

On the middle day, as I had chosen the longer two nights aboard option, just three of us transfered to a smaller boat from which we were later able to do some kayaking. This was for me the highlight as we slipped away from the chugging of the engines and were able to paddle through caves into hidden lagoons, over which echoed birdsong and shrieks of monkeys. It was quite majestic. There are also plenty of caves with stalactite formations, though the smaller ones you explore with a torch in hand squeezing through narrow passages are more exciting. than the larger floodlit ones.

Quite a few fishing families live in the bay, not on the islands but in floating villages, one of which we visited as locals rowed up offering us sea-shells for sale. Our guide was keen to show us a floating school, to demonstrate that the villagers were being well treated by the government. Ho Chi Minh smiled out from over the blackboard.

With all the tourists and boats there are some parts of the bay where the water has washed floating rubbish together in an unseemly reminder that man has the capacity to mar any earthly paradise. The Vietnamese need to be careful that over-exploitation doesn’t spoil this world heritage site. One of my students in Hanoi also remarked that twenty years ago it was much quieter and the water was much cleaner. I didn’t go in the sea to swim nearly as much as I would elsewhere - there were also some mean looking small jellyfish. So instead I sat on the deck admiring and painting the scenery.

It’s a three hour white-knuckle minibus ride back to Hanoi from Halong Bay. I’m not surprised that it’s illegal for foreigners to rent a car in Vietnam: I certainly couldn’t cope. On the two lane main road, there are push-bikes and motor-bikes everywhere on both sides in both directions and slow moving lorries are overtaken in the face of oncoming traffic in a game of brinkmanship . It’s better to look out of the side window at the passing paddy fields worked by hand, with Asian cows and buffalo standing around.

And so I returned to Hanoi which I had left early in the morning three days before for the peace of Halong Bay, jet-lagged and without really having seen it on arrival. The capital of Vietnam has officially 3.4 million inhabitants but probably anything up to nearly twice that. It’s a big sprawling bustling modern Asian city.
I had chosen to treat myself to the old French colonial grandeur of the Hotel Metropole which is conveniently located near the central Hoan Kiem lake.
I checked in and then sauntered out, crossing a square pausing to watch some men playing a version of badminton where the shuttlecock is kicked, teenagers practising dance moves to a ghetto-blaster and children playing while their parents chatted on benches. I then wanted to cross over the road to the lakeside.
As a Westerner the first thing that strikes you about Hanoi is the sheer profusion of motorbikes. There are not many private cars, but most people have graduated from push bikes, so that what you have is a sea of countless small motorbikes carrying anything from one to four people and loads of all shapes and sizes. They come in a constant stream; it’s pointless waiting for a break in the traffic: you just have to take your courage in your hands and set off undaunted across the street at a steady predictable pace. Miraculously they see you and avoid you, though it’s a little unnerving at first. In fact the amazing thing in this fluid anarchy is that there appear to be no accidents and no one loses their temper. We in the West could all learn a thing or two from the Vietnamese about how to keep cool in traffic.
After this initial excitement a contemplative sit at the Ngoc Son temple on an island in the lake seemed appropriate, acquainting myself with the omnipresent fragrant “frangipanier” tree which the French brought from the West Indies and watching old men playing Chinese chequers.

Hanoi is actually quite a pleasant city once you get used to the motorbike traffic. There are lots of trees, lakes and parks, with people strolling about, though shops and eateries spilling out onto the pavements sometimes make it difficult to get by.
The old town is quite fascinating. I was initially disappointed at its tattiness and lack of interesting historic architecture, but it more than makes up for that in its liveliness. Every street has its own particular trade and once you get beyond those catering for tourists hunting for souvenirs and cheap clothes, you stumble into a genuine oriental world of thriving enterprise and craftsmanship. I particularly liked the street of lamps at night and by day the street of bamboo canes and ladders, of metal workers with fancy bird-cages aloft, of florists, of dried food shops, to mention but a few as any merchandise you can think of seems to have a dedicated street. This is also the case further out where more modern shops vie with each other selling the same wares side by side all displayed outside - fans, sinks, televisions, shop-window dummies etc.

In the evening I took in the entertaining show at the national water puppet theatre. The beautifully made wooden puppets appear to glide across the surface of a water “stage” and are in fact operated by long underwater poles moved by the puppeteers who stand behind the curtain in the water. A series of short vignettes accompanied by live traditional music illustrate everyday scenes of rural life and legends.

Then in the morning it was time for work. First though I had breakfast across the street as it wasn’t included at the hotel. This took the form of “pho”. “Pho”, or noodle soup, is the national dish and it comes mainly in beef or chicken versions. The taste is in the stock of course and you can put in extra fresh flavourings such as coriander, lemon grass and spring onion. Pho is simple, tasty and nourishing giving you plenty of liquid which you need in the heat: it makes for a great breakfast.
The other ubiquitous dish is “nem” or spring rolls, both fried and fresh with a variety of fillings and sauces to dip in. In Brussels, especially in my neighbourhood, there are a lot of Vietnamese restaurants, but as always once you’re in the country the food is not quite the same. Most of the food I had in Vietnam was simple and enjoyable, but for gourmet treats it was necessary to move up market to more fancy restaurants, which I guess is the same in most countries.

A driver then picked me up to take me to the Vietnamese Diplomatic Academy which is where the new interpreting course is run. The SCIC has in the past trained Vietnamese interpreters in Brussels, but now they have people who have been trained they are running their own course in Hanoi. Since I was going to be working in a meeting in Hanoi and I do quite a bit of teaching in European schools of interpreting, I had been asked to visit the school in Hanoi for two days.
There are eight students on the course, seven women and one man, who has since married one of the women! The students are all civil servants in their twenties who work in various ministries and government offices and are released a few half days a week to attend the course. They then have to do their regular job on top of that. I had at first been taken aback at having to work on the Saturday, but it was the only way they could fit in the extra hours while I was there.
In the end it was a hugely positive experience as they were all hard-working and enthusiastic. It was interesting for me to have to adapt my speech material to make sure it wasn’t too euro-centric and accessible to people from a significantly different cultural background. Of course, I don’t know any Vietnamese, so we mainly worked by sending one student out during the original speech by me in English, who would then come back in to listen to the Vietnamese consecutive interpretation and then put that back into English for my benefit. We could then analyse together with some amusement how far we had come from the original by the second version and what the causes of deviation were. It’s a surprisingly effective way of teaching.

For lunch we walked along to a buffet at a nearby hotel (I declined a ride postillion on the teacher’s motorbike) after which I was in serious need of a coffee.
One thing I hadn’t expected about Vietnam is that you can get a really good cup of coffee there. Vietnam is in fact the world’s second biggest coffee producer after Brazil, though most of it is robusta not arabica. It is served in dinky little aluminium filters over your cup and you wait for it to drip through. The result is a very strong espresso which has a full earthy taste and a kick like a mule.
As for Vietnamese tea, I found it too strong unless drunk iced diluted and unsweetened - when it is very refreshing. The Vietnamese also drink plenty of beer, spelled “bia”, some of which is bottled and some a light draught ale from small breweries called “bia hoi”. It’s made from rice but you wouldn’t know from the taste.
It was after several beers by the lake next to the academy after our final class on the second day, that four of my students decided what they would do with my Sunday.

First I was taken by Trang to the Temple of Literature which is not only Hanoi’s prettiest old monument but actually also a place where locals go of a Sunday. As its name suggests it was not only a temple but as it were Hanoi’s first university from the 11th century where would-be mandarins were schooled in Confucianism. So today it is a place where students go to pray for good luck in their exams and classes of schoolchildren come for end of year ceremonies. It was very busy and there were many activities going on including Chinese caligraphy on red good luck scrolls and demonstrations of traditional music. I was quite fascinated by one instrument, the single string monochord which is played with one hand plucking with a plectrum and the other operating a lever which is like the whammy-bar on a Fender electric guitar varying the tension on the string. The resulting eerie wailing is not dissimilar.
We then met up with Duc who had brought along her six year old son who was interested in many things and especially the big ceremonial bell you could stand inside.
We progressed to near the immaculately kept Ho Chi Minh mausoleum which we merely observed from afar sipping fresh sugar cane juice, and thence at my request to the One Pillar Pagoda, another popular shrine with locals.
We were joined by Vinh and Phuong, the married couple, for fast pho and a welcome cool sit inside.
In the afternoon we went to a silk village some way out of the centre where we looked at some silk-worms and looms before browsing the shops. I was the only foreigner here among Vietnamese shopping for clothes.
It was a lovely day out doing the kinds of things those who live in Hanoi might do on a weekend. It was nice to have the little boy along too; he gave the proceedings a family outing kind of feel. I felt there had been an exchange between us which gave my visit a much deeper human dimension than that of the mere tourist buying a service. By teaching them for two days I had given them something and in return they had shown me something of their city and way of life. Everywhere around us people seemed friendly, relaxed, talkative and to be enjoying the simple pleasures of life on a sunny Sunday.

That evening it was back into official work mode. First I had to transfer out of the centre to the more anonymous Intercontinetal hotel. My three colleagues and I learned at a late evening briefing the good news that we would not have to work until the next afternoon and the bad news that we would be taken early in the morning to sort out our tickets for the onward government charter flight to Phnom Penh, which we discovered we now had to pay for by ourselves. This involved being taken to the Viet Com Bank (!) to make a transfer and on to the Vietnam Airlines office in the centre. At least once that was done I was free to resume strolling around the lake and into the old town, for once during the hours of daylight when the central market was also open.

We were duly ferried in the afternoon to the National Convention Centre along streets lined with police, for once disciplining the unruly motorbikes, so that official motorcades could pass unimpeded. The NCC is a vast recent modern building which due to its size had to be built miles from anywhere. Its scale can only be described as pharaonic, though it is not unattractive. The government here is seeking in classic state socialist mode to impress the visiting foreigner. It certainly is impressive, but also quite impersonal. There was no chance here of getting a good Vietnamese bar coffee. The air-conditioning in the well appointed but windowless office we had been given was positively icy.
This was the stuff of big international meetings: men in suits delivered to enormous out of town AC conference centres in AC limousines from AC 5 star hotels; barely coming into contact with the local weather, let alone the local people. It's all very polite and efficient but as I say quite impersonal.
There was one nice moment when one of the students, Anh, who works for the Foreign Ministry sought me out and we had our picture taken in our smart clothes in the main meeting room standing in front of the 46 flags and the grand inscription "ASEM 9th Foreign Ministers Meeting".
The Asia Europe Meeting brings together the EU countries and all the major Asian countries.
The meeting itself was quite fun as these things go, what with North Korea having tested a nuclear weapon that very morning and Burma having put on trial Aung San Suu Kyi to the general embarrassment of its neighbours.
When it was all over at the press conference on the second day, I was struck by the total absence of any prying questions from the media – a far cry from what we're used to in Europe.
For all its economic vibrancy and contented population, Vietnam remains a single party state. I guess in many ways it is not unlike its huge neighbour China in granting much economic but little political freedom to its people.

The country is clearly dynamic and going places. The Vietnamese seem busy and purposeful, but not aggressive. Things work and run on time, there are no apparent shortages of anything. There are already 84 million Vietnamese and the population is young and growing fast. Vietnam is definitely a member of the South East Asian tigers club and on the way up.
People ask if I noticed any sign of the war. The answer is no: that's all a long time ago, most people were born well after it. You get the impression that it's a peaceful, hard-working country where people are quietly proud of their recent history: they threw out two colonial powers, France and the USA, beating their superior forces by their patience, ingenuity and resorcefulness. The Vietnamese have a certain can-do, stand-alone dignity, glad to help if asked, but not there to beg.

So from this brief visit to the capital and one of their places of great natural beauty, I am left keen to return to Vietnam.
Above all, I am glad to have met and spent time with my young Vietnamese colleagues.

About Tuscany

Tuscany is quintessential Italy.
“And where is there, other than Italy ?” - to quote a friend.

Tuscany is where Italian was born as a language, in the sense that of the many Italian successor dialects to Latin, Tuscan was the one that came to impose itself as standard Italian not least because the great city states were Tuscan.
Dante, the greatest Italian poet was, after all, Tuscan.

Tuscany is perhaps the Italian region with the greatest wealth of historic artistic towns and cities, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo - to mention the most obvious. It also has some of Italy’s most striking landscapes, the beautiful hills often topped with old villages and castles, the characteristic tall cypress trees punctuating the vista, a landscape shaped by man over millenia, yet still with wild wooded areas. Tuscany also boasts excellent food and fine wines such as Chianti or Brunello di Montalcino.
Tuscany deserves its reputation as one of the best regions of Italy to visit.

I first explored Tuscany in the summer of 1977 when, while hitch-hiking, I was fortunate enough to fall in with a young man from Antibes as I was trying to get from Pisa to San Gimignano. He was also there to explore but had wheels in the form of a Renault 4 and he had a tent. As we were both glad of a travelling companion we ended up staying together for five days. This was when with his help I first started to learn some Italian.
You really need a vehicle of your own to make the most of Tuscany and get to some of the places off the beaten track.
Clara and I took my parents on a week’s driving tour of Tuscany over twenty years ago, that time staying one night in San Gimignano in style in a fine hotel on the main square, not to mention also Siena and Bagno Vignoni.

My oldest Italian friend, Umberto Cini, who I did my interpreter training with, is a Tuscan from Livorno.
His sister-in-law runs an agriturismo, that is farm-based holiday rooms and flats with food if required, near Volterra. So this seemed a natural choice for a destination, when my father asked me a couple of years ago to come up with a place for a gîte-style holiday for my parents, brother and sister and partners. The project took some time to come to fruition but was finally realized last week.

The farm at Statiano turned out to be in the deepest and most picturesque countryside. Everything is still lush and green at this time of year with a profusion of wild flowers. The buildings are very tastefully renovated and comfortable while preserving their rustic character. Our host Tina was very helpful with advice on excursions and, when we ate in, the local home-cooking food and the farm’s wine were of high quality, including even wild boar one evening.

Sadly the weather wasn’t up to much, confirming that even in the Mediterranean one should “ne’er cast a clouth before April’s out”. It rained at some point every day except Friday when we could finally do some serious sitting about outside in the sun in the grounds around the house admiring, and in my case painting the views. Even so, with the exception of a planned evening stroll around Volterra where we ended up sheltering in a café from a grim 9°C downpour, the weather didn’t prevent us from getting out and about.

Driving up from Pisa airport on the Saturday we struck lucky at a roadside bar/family restaurant in the countryside which hadn’t really intended to serve any customers but did the eight of us proud at a table parallel to their own family’s with a lunch of local prosciutto, wild boar salami, their own pecorino cheese, pickled wild mushrooms, shell your own fresh beans and other delicacies. This rather set the tone for a week of gastronomic Tuscan eating. After arriving at the farm and sleeping all of this off, we took a walk to explore the immediate vicinity, seeing a wealth of cyclamens and finding porcupine spines, though the animal itself was to elude us all week.

Umberto and Silvia (Tina’s sister) came up from Livorno to see us on the Sunday. Umberto, ever a mine of local information, showed us the nearby hill villages of Micciano and Montegemoli, where another ourstanding lunch was had and we later strolled ourselves around Montecatini VC. In a way being off the tourist track seeing these delightful villages is every bit as satisfying as visiting the more famous, and objectively more beautiful, yet in practice overcrowded Tuscan destinations.

This proved to be the case on Monday when we revisited Volterra (where twenty years ago we had seen the square occupied by colourful flag throwers and thunderous drummers) in the morning and San Gimignano in the afternoon. San Gimignano with its elegant towers is still as pretty as always but it has really got very busy.

So instead on Tuesday we did a bit of a Carducci trail to the 4km long avenue of old cypress trees leading up to Bolgheri and the hill town of Castagneto where it was very quiet and also very wet, so we sheltered in a wine bar to sample some local products. Later down at the coast where we had a light fish lunch in a place overlooking the sea, it stopped raining and we visited Populonia climbing the fortress tower for the view towards Elba and up the coast., before a brief look over the fence at the Etruscan burial mounds down by the sea.

Wednesday saw the younger generation more active on a beautiful 8km walk along the track that mainly follows the ridge from Micciano to Querceto where we had left a vehicle to get us back to the farm. It was easy going with some great views. The highlight was an astonishing encounter with a heavily pregnant semi-wild pig that wandered up the track towards us where we stood stock still for ten minutes, as she approached us, sniffed us and then decided it was safe enough to walk past us.

On Thursday we took quite a long drive to revisit Siena. While just strolling about the large old town is rewarding in itself, as too the experience of a leisurely lunch on a terrace in the glorious PIazza del Campo, some of Siena’s geatest glories are indoors in the many renaissance frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico, the Cathedral and the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala.

On the finally warm and sunny Friday the younger ones strolled around the hill village of Libbiano, which while appearing to be a stone’s throw across the valley from Micciano is actually a 12km tortuous drive from it, before doing a three hour walk along the track into the Monterufoli nature reserve, though sadly no wild animals bigger than squirrels were forthcoming this time.

And so all too quickly a varied and enjoyable week in rural Tuscany was at an end, leaving only a desire for more in better weather.

But as with any holiday, what really counted was the company and it was a great experience to have the whole family together for a week in such a pleasant and amicable atmosphere.

About history

History may at first seem a strange subject for “about being here” which seeks to describe and interpret here and now. However, our present is infomed by our past. We are what we were; the sum total of our experience. Regular readers of “about being here” will have noticed how I often give a brief history or biography of my past life in leading up to describe my present one.
Likewise our society is the sum total of its past. To understand where we are today it is helpful to know where we came from. So history is a valuable subject.

I have been prompted to write about history by having just read Graham Swift’s exccellent novel “Waterland”. Its main charcter, Tom Crick, is a history teacher struggling to come to terms with his own past and at the same time puzzling about the very nature of history. One of the root meanings of “history” he says is “an inquiry” (as in “natural history”): we delve into the past seeking explanations. At the same time history as we like it presented is a “story” (the same word etymologically) a narrative that takes us from A to B. History is one way of satisfying our craving for stories - and what happened next?
In Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” there is a memorable moment in a mock Oxbridge entrance interview where the student is asked “What is history?” and gives the answer of unintended profundity: “It’s just one f***ing thing after another”.

All history is related with the benefit of hindsight and from the point of view of the victor or survivor. Today, for example, post cold war, the narrative of the Western world describes Communism as a failed experiment. All societies devise their own more or less official history to explain why they are where they are and to justify themselves, looking backwards from a very specific point in time. So the Communist sates’ history described in Marxist terms how human progress inevitably led to their ideal society. Often societies then indeed prescribe the teaching of that history to their schoolchildren so that they will fit into that society. Even if in our “western democratic society” the teaching of history is less prescriptive, it still embodies a consensual view of our present society’s interpretation and explanation of its origins.

History is by its very nature selective. The historian selects the facts that best explain where he is now. E.H. Carr’s “What is history?” is very good on what is a historical fact. Every day there are countless events but only some will later turn out to have had relevance in deciding the future. Obviously, our own lives are just the same, at one and the same time routine and utterly chaotic, it is only many years down the line that we can attribute importance to an event: I met so-and-so, who later became my wife, as opposed to I met so-and-so whom I never saw again. A logical order is only read into what happened afterwards. Our own invented biography and society’s invented history represent an attempt to make something meaningful out of life. The exercise is at once artificial and reassuring. Above all it tells the story which we like to hear.

History was my third subject at A-level at school. Actually I had wanted to do Art, for which I like to think I have a certain flair, but it was deemed to be not academic enough for a boy aiming to get into Oxford. At our first A-level lesson our teacher, Mr Kilty (who was later to appear on Mastermind on the TV, special subject hagiography), gave us the good news that “history is a slog subject”. There would be mountains of books to read. And so it turned out: I think I spent the same amount of time working on history as on French and German put together. In class we were given the factual outline and then encouraged to read widely. We soon found out that different historians had different views, explanations and interpretations of the same facts. Some of their names I can still remember: A.J.P. Taylor, E. Hobsbawm, E. Thompson, J.H. Plumb,, A. Cobham, R. Blake, to name a few. It was a good education because we were taught to analyse, compare and take what was useful to write an essay.
History like many other subjects is vast and boundless, so you have to specialize. We did 18th and 19th century British and European, (usefully supplemented by the American Revolution), stopping at the causes of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In retrospect it was a very useful area as it immediately preceded what was on our general knowledge radar about the twentieth century. It is a period that covers the building of the modern nation state and I have found that very useful as a background to working in contemporary European politics. I certainly feel that I could not do my job safely without an awareness of history and consequent sensitivities.

I went on to study literature at university, which is now predominantly what I read, but I still enjoy the occasional history book.

I think my favourite is Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. I hasten to add that so far I have read only the first three of the six volumes and even then some of the chapters in abridgement. The point is that Gibbon’s massive opus takes us from the apogee of the Roman Empire, as he saw it, at the time of Augustus all the way through to the fall of Constantinople, or the Empire in the East, in 1453. Writing as a European in the late 18thC, that is for his time almost a universal history. Gibbon is to be relished for his Augustan English prose, which is an absolute delight. He is also very funny in his irony. The historian is always present and we learn as much about Gibbon and his Enlightenment age as we do about his subject. I think that is fine as it is clear that it is his view, something which some historians try to avoid, dressing up their account as the only objective version. Gibbon also has an over-arching vision, he knows where he is going. His is the story of a gradual undermining of the old Roman civic virtues, not least by the introduction of Christianity. I like my essayist to have a clear argument, I can always disagree with him if I want to.
Above all, Gibbon has the good historian’s knack of telling a good story, with an eye for the kind of detail that captures the reader’s attention, the anecdotal and outrageous that illustrate character. He is good at what all readers of history relish alongside the story, that is information that gives some insight into daily life, the human element.
As the title tells us “Decline and Fall” is a story of decay, human failings, baddies. This is the kind of thing that readers of history (and literature) are really interested in.

The kind of history that would have us believe in relentless progress towards an ever better society is a bore and rings false. Life just isn’t like that. Things go round in cycles. Mankind does not really progress. We don’t actually learn from history. We make the same mistakes, because each generation has to learn from experience for itself. History repeats itself; some say, first as tragedy, then as farce. It’s recognizing ourselves in the recurrent cycles that brings history to life for us.

History tells us how we got where we are, but at the same time that we have not really come that far.

About languages

I am a linguist by training and profession, so languages, learning them and using them, have played an important part in my life.
For someone who as a boy grew up in Yorkshire in the 1960’s that may not seem an immediately obvious outcome. Yet paradoxically in today’s age of greater globalization, communication and international travel with potentially greater exposure to foreign languages, language learning is actually taken less seriously in England now than it was then.

I didn’t really encounter a foreign language until I started learning French at grammar school when I was eleven, and even then it was taught by an Englishman as a somewhat academic exercise, not that different from the Latin I started at the same time. Then at thirteen, in the rather odd way that schools are organized and curriculum options are offered, I had to choose between German, Ancient Greek or biology as an additional subject. I chose German, which is why I am where I am today.
My choice was inspired by the fact that we had some new neighbours in Ilkley who were Dutch. Willy and Evert spoke Dutch to each other and their dog, but English to us. They knew other languages too. They had a son who was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. We all watched the news footage from there in May 1968 with some trepidation. Their house was full of strange and different smells (Dutch cooking, coffee and other things no doubt that I couldn’t place) and objects from the many different countries where they had lived. It all seemed very exciting to me, so I decided modern languages was for me.
After all, I was already precociously good at French; about the same time I got my teacher, Tony Kingham, to explain to me the tenses we had not yet come across in class so I could read Astérix books.

The first lessons of the new subject, German, were an intimidating experience. We actually had a native speaker. Dr H.E.H.A. Krips had been a brilliant young judge in Vienna at the time of Anschluss and decided to get out while he could. For his sins, he ended up for the rest of his life trying to foster an interest in German in young schoolboys in Bradford. He was the oldest teacher in the school in my day and his nickname (for all masters had nicknames) was “Daddy” which spoke volumes, as he was well loved. Daddy Krips actually had a radically modern approach to language teaching and spoke to us only in German for the first three classes - to our total bewilderment. He then relented and taught us what it all meant in English.
Later, in the sixth form, for our cultural improvement he once brought along a record of some Schubert settings of Goethe (which I later learned he used to sing himself as a young man). By then we were a small group of eight long-haired 70’s teenagers interested in progressive rock music. Unfortunately, at the melodramatic piano flourishes that open “der Erlkönig” my good friend David Berry subsided into a fit of wild laughter. “Ach! You know nossing!” Dr Krips burst out deeply disappointed.
It was a privileged way to learn German and we got very good at it.

In the meantime French continued apace and we had also been given an opportunity (which we were not allowed to refuse) of learning Russian from scratch to O-level in one year with Mr Lloyd. Sadly in those Soviet days there was little opportunity of contact with Russians and the printed matter that issued from the USSR was diabolical, though I did treasure a copy of “Ogonyok” which had a rather fetching woman tractor driver on its cover. So my Russian lapsed. I periodically try to revive it, it’s a kind of seven year itch; but we tend to part company when I get stuck on verbs of motion. I’ve not given up on the idea totally and a schoolboy knowledge of Russian has often helped me out in spotting key words in countries.where other Slav languages are spoken.

I won my scholarship to Oxford to read French and German in the autumn of 1976, which in those days left me with what would now be called a short gap year from January to September during which I went to live in France. I had been given a teaching job until the summer in a lycée in a town called l’Isle-Jourdain in a department called the Gers somewhere in the South - it took a lot of finding in the atlas. Although only 30 km from Toulouse, it was in fact spiritually miles from anywhere I had known.
My cousin Sheila had married a Frenchman a few years before and I had once spent a fortnight with them based in Clermont-Ferrand. I had also interrailed for a month partly in France with a friend from Bradford one previous summer. However, nothing had prepared me for the total immersion I was about to get into deepest France and the reality of French as she is spoken there.
Spending a lot of time initially with my pupils, some of whom from repeating years were actually older than me, I eagerly relearned a parallel language of “argot” and idiomatic expressions. I’m sure I learned far more French from them than they ever learned English from me. Moreover, all of this was in a strong twangy Southern accent. I remember my first friendly encounter with the school chef who was to give me left-overs from school lunches (actually quite good food) in a metal container or “gamelle” - a new word to start with - that I had been given lest I starve in the evening. He asked “Tu es venu avec le traing? Tu veux du paing? Tu veux du ving?”
South-Western French was all I spoke for weeks on end and people talked a lot. At the end of our first translation class at Christ Church that autumn, Dr Robinson tried to make some French coversation and the whole class was taken aback by the torrent of what sounded like a French peasant that issued from my mouth.
I have lived for more than half my life in French speaking countries and speaking French comes as second nature to me, though without the Southern accent these days. However, out of a certain snobbery I have never gone the whole hog on the Belgian accent. Since I had the grammar thrashed into me from a young age I also have no trouble writing French, probably with fewer spelling mistakes than the average Frenchman. The difference between spoken and written French is huge and to learn to write it after having learned to speak it is a major effort the progress of which I followed with curiosity in my own children. Given how I was taught it though, I learned to speak it after having learned to write it.

I’ve never felt as inside German. I lived in Germany for ten months in 1979-1980 in a small town called Kamen on the extreme edge of the Ruhr. I travelled about the rest of West Germany a lot at the weekends as there wasn’t much doing there (“tote Hose”), though often to see other student friends from England. I was never as utterly immersed in German as I had been in Fench in l’Isle-Jourdain. My spoken German has never been as good as my spoken French and I always find reading German a bit of an effort. It is, however, a language I enjoy immensely because of the way it builds up words out of clear components of meaning. I love signs like “Verkehrswidrig abgestellte Fahrzeuge werden kostenpflichtig abgeschleppt” (illegally parked vehicles will be towed at the owner’s expense - though the sheer poetry is lost in translation). Interpreting from German is great fun, an intellectual challenge syntactically and usually something the audience is interested in given Germany’s importance.

It was while in Kamen that I started Italian evening classes for something to do and by way of preparing to visit that Easter Simon Porter who was working in Naples. The level in the group was not very high. After six weeks the teacher suggested I move up to year two. For two years after that I did no Italian, but when I came to train as an interpreter in Brussels, there were people working with Italian in my group, so I started to pick up a lot hearing it interpreted during exercises. I made Italian friends who talked a lot among themselves in Italian and who were always very encouraging if I tried to join in with my rudimentary Italian. Eventually I came to marry an Italian. So I now speak Italian more spontaneously than I speak German, but my knowledge of it is not so deep or literary. As I mainly learned Italian by listening to it and speaking it, I cannot write it without having to look up every other word to check its spelling.

Given the large number of languages we work with at the SCIC (the European Commission’s interpreting service - see “About interpreting”) there has always been considerable pressure, both spoken from management and unspoken from my peers, to learn new languages for professional purposes. When I rejoined the staff in 1992 I was very keen to learn Spanish properly. I had a passing acquaintance with it from numerous holidays in Spain and also more recently Cuba and Mexico and it had always attracted me as an important world and literary language. Since I already had French and Italian it was not going to be too hard. However, non-linguists may be surprised to hear that there is one hell of a lot of vocabulary to learn if you’re going to use Spanish (or any other language) professionally, even if you’re on relatively familiar ground gramatically. I was also very motivated by the prospect of having three months off work living in Spain, a country I like very much; I find there is a human and social side to life there that is very appealing. Needless to say Spanish remains to this day the least strong of my professional languages and I am somewhat diffident about speaking it because of lack of practice.

Speaking a language is really like playing a musical instrument: you only get and remain good at it by constant practice. However, if you’re going to get anywhere you just have to get stuck in, no matter how inelegantly at first.

Since my addition of Spanish in 1995, I have not sought to learn another language for professional purposes.
Without a strong personal motivation (eg partner’s language) I can’t seem to find the time and energy for what is such a huge task. Also I guess I just feel like doing different activities after a day of working with languages.
Moreover, I have little professional motivation to learn another language as I know it would make little real difference to my career (and pay) given my present seniority; it could potentially affect adversely the range of meetings I do in the light of the language combinations required for them, if I were to become “too useful” elsewhere; and the obscurer the language, the less it is actually spoken and the less you get to practise it, while the higher the responsibility that goes with it as colleagues depend on you for relay (double translation).
Having said that, when I’m actually in a country where the language is new to me I’m brimming with curiosity and want to learn as much of it as I can to be able to read what’s around me and try out phrases on the locals, if only the standard pleasantries of everyday life. I have a shelf full of Teach Yourself books and various accompanying recordings on my iPod. But it’s strictly for pleasure, not business. In this way I have a smattering of Dutch and Catalan and know a few words of Greek, Portuguese, Croatian and Turkish among others. When I say a few words, that is what I mean, a few words. As a language professional I know only too well what the different levels of proficiency are.

For those of us who are actually fluent in other languages it is interesting to observe objectively how we use our different languages.
I’m writing this blog in English because English is my native or mother tongue. Engish will always be and can only ever be the language I know best and therefore my language of choice for expressing my thoughts.
The top level of my consciousness can be occupied by another language, most easily French, as the phrases and words may in that way be ready to be released spontaneously to interact with my environment and those I speak to. In that sense I may “think” in other languages.
Although I rarely remember my dreams, I know I dream in a variety of languages too and have been heard in my sleep to speak in them.
However, I believe I am only capable of deep and original thought in English. I know this because when engaged in a more profound conversation in another language I become aware of the fact that I start having to translate my new ideas from English rather than being able to draw on a ready to use stock of phrases in the other language.

I also do mental arithmetic in English. That is not because it is deep thought, but because as a boy I learned the word patterns for it in English. I don’t actually have a mathematical mind but a literary one: in my head I hear “four plus six is ten”; I don’t see 4 + 6 = 10.

English is the language I prefer to read in and the only one in which such careful use of language as in poetry can have its full resonance. I understand the words in other languages, but they don’t carry the same emotional charge. Words do not exist in isolation but have acquired from shared use over many centuries endless connotations and cultural references that the foreigner is incompletely aware of.
This insufficient awareness of the baggage of a language is why it is very easy to sound rude in another language. It is very easy to pick up swearwords in another language and be quite foul-mouthed, but it is really a very bad idea, because you can never really know the force of what you are saying. I admit I often sin myself in this respect.

In fact we speak other languages at our peril and to our disadvantage, as we lose precision in conveying our thoughts. This is why, at a negotiating political level, interpretation remains important, even if the exchange could take place in simple English as a lingua franca.
However, the fact that we are ready to venture into someone else’s linguistic terrain is usually perceived as a gesture of good will by the listener because of this readiness to expose ourselves and to get closer to them (which is why in some meetings delegates prefer not to use the interpretation even if it is available).
There is also a converse argument that using a language other than your own forces you to reformulate your ideas in a more direct way which can improve their clarity, which has been a choice made by some writers (Beckett, Conrad). However, I don’t think it’s my case.

The readiness to learn other languages, to transcend barriers, to penetrate other cultures and to understand other human beings, their context and motivations, can only enrich one’s experience of life.
Often once you have learned the language of the country you felt so attracted to and actually manage to understand the overheard conversation at the next table, it will remove the romantic verneer of the place, as you realize that these people share the same ordinary everyday concerns as those at home. Yet that in itself, the realization that we are more alike than different, is a discovery of great value which sadly many people never make. because of their reluctance to learn languages.

Speaking another language so you can join in with a group of people from another background, best of all when you are in their country, is a liberating experience that allows you not just to discover other people and cultures but also to discover new aspects of your own personality.

I may be a linguist by profession, but I also find languages essential to my personal enjoyment of life.

About winter

Winter always seems to end for me rather suddenly with the contrast of returning from skiing in the snow-covered Alps to find incipient Spring budding in my garden at home. This year is no exception. I can’t remember when I last saw as much snow at Sölden as last week, while today in Brussels the temperature got up to an incredibly mild 13°. After all, Spring is officially only three weeks away now.
So I have stowed away in the cellar again the salt that it is my duty as a good citizen in Belgium to strew on the pavement in front of my house when it snows and freezes, lest I be held liable for some fellow citizen slipping and breaking a leg in front of my house. The salt was actually needed on quite a few occasions this winter, but I don’t expect to get it out again till the next one... although you never know, a further cold snap is always possible, but I have the inkling it would not be a long one.

Generally it is with a feeling of relief that I see that Winter is on the run. My spirits start to rise already with the lengthening of the days, no longer having to stumble around in the dark in the morning or having to cycle home from work in the dark. I don’t like the darkness of winter. However, during the hours of daylight, winter light can be exquisite with the low sun really bringing out unexpected colours and the sharp contrasts between light and shade. On a clear day in the winter the visibility in the mountains has a quality all of its own. Even in Belgium a walk or ride out on a sunny winter day bring their own bracing satisfaction. Sadly in Brussels though I have to admit there are also a lot of grey, damp and cold days during Winter when I really don’t feel the urge to go out and am anxious to see it pass.

This Winter has been the hardest in Belgium for quite some years: a proper Winter. On the whole I prefer my seasons to be distinct, so I welcome that. Having been through some hardship during winter, especially by going outside regularly, my body and soul feel more exhilarated at the arrival of Spring.

So how does this year’s return to a proper Winter chime with global warming?
There are, I suppose, ups and downs, cycles within cycles and underlying long term trends. I have to recognize that we haven’t had real winters for some time around here, so I won’t deny the long term gradual rise in temperature. Global warming exists; I have seen the glaciers melting. However, I do think that we should be a little bit more humble when it comes to predicting nature; there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the climate and just how it may be changing. While admitting that man-made pollution is a contributive factor, I can’t help thinking also that there is an over-weaning arrogance in assuming mere human beings have total influence and control over such a huge and complicated system as the global climate which we do know has been through long term extreme cycles generating both ice ages and sweltering conditions even far north. After all, if it turns out that we’re staving off the next ice age, however inadvertently, then that’s not at all bad. Or maybe, we’re doing something really terrible. Or maybe, whatever we do, the world will continue as it was going to do anyway and we will have to adapt or die.
I’m not sure I’m going to obsess about how I behave personally given the profligacy I see around me approved by the establishment.: entire buildings left illuminated when empty; security concerns at work that force me to take the lift instead of climbing the stairs for only one storey; people who will take the car everywhere when they could walk or bike there; meeting goers who jet around week in week out and then suggest I shouldn’t use the plane for my holidays etc. My carbon footprint ? - show me yours first.
And don’t get me started on emissions trading: it’s tantamount to allowing criminals to pay someone else to serve their jail sentence for them. It’s simply immoral but that’s ok evidently, as supposedly it’s sound economics.   Just how this wet dream of some now doubtless discredited futures trader could ever make a real difference in practice is a mystery to me.

I’m sceptical about to what extent global warming is solely caused by man and can therefore be reversed solely by man, and even more sceptical about the alibis for action that are touted these days when it is blatantly obvious that no one seems really serious about making any genuine changes to the ways we run our economies. The truth is that tangibe climate change will come slowly enough for man to adapt to its undesirable consequences as he muddles along.

Every age has its own doomsday scenario. In the 60’s and 70’s we were all about to go in a nuclear armageddon. Now we’ll all be drowned by rising seas or burned to a frazzle because of global warming. In previous centuries people were always equally certain that “the end of the world is nigh”. But we are all still here, having adapted.
It flatters the vanity of mankind to believe that we are potentially the last generation ever. If you work on the naive assumption that each generation is, thanks to progress, the most perfect ever, then it is gratifying to believe that you are the highest form of life ever to have existed, as nobody will come after you.
I actually believe though that man does not progress from generation to generation, even if material conditions change. Each and every man and woman in every age faces the same basic fundamental problems of life and has to resolve them to their own satisfaction by trial and error and their own personal experience. I don’t believe I’m any better than 19th, 17th, 15th or whatever century man.
The current obsession with disaster scenarios is fuelled by a misplaced human sense of self -importance. Our ancestors in the North survived the ice age. We will just have to relocate our cities and economic activities and grow different crops elsewhere. The ingenuity of man is boundless. We are not about to disappear, nor is the earth. Adaptation will always be painful: hell you may not be able to use your car as often, but so what!

I appear to have digressed somewhat from my consideration of the eternal recurrent phenomenon that is Winter for those men of the North that we Europeans are. And believe me there is also winter in the Mediterranean: even if it’s not as cold, it is also miserable at times.
It is the rotation of the seasons and the need to survive winter that has produced the highy organized civilizations of the North, the European, Chinese, Japanese and others. These are peoples who have to organize and plan in order to get through the year. Winter instils virtues.

I guess that’s how I see Winter, a necessary inconvenience that is part of life’s rich tapestry. Most of it is miserable, but at the right times it has its charms: especially when it is really cold and sunny. And of course, without the winter snow there would be no skiing.

Still, I’m glad Winter is almost over.