January 27, 2005

Coffee Anyone?

This morning I got up as usual and switched on our coffee machine. It’s a Gaggia Classic. Apart from a couple of times I’ve descaled the thing, and cleaned its accessible innards-not many- it’s not been through the machine’s equivalent of the M.O.T. No annual service. Despite my lack of care, it must have produced pints of wonderful espresso without complaint in the three years since it arrived. My lack of attention caught up with me this morning. A few drops of water fell from what I think is called the “brew head”, the pump made an unusual groaning noise and the water flow stopped abruptly. It was clear none of that unctuous brown, caffeine-laden liquid, was destined to lubricate the Rambler’s tonsils this day. So it’s to the telephone- first-stop the shop where it was purchased. Anyone agree that one of the most irritating of today’s inventions is the automated telephone answering system? After ten minutes pressing various keys and being assured my business was valuable, down went the phone. Second stop, and I have now little difficulty in a bit of boosting here, was Fenwick Limited , one of the oldest department stores in Newcastle. A real operator on the phone and a transfer to someone who seemed to know what she was talking about. “ Yes sir we can send it back to Gaggia for you” and “yes, they will give you an estimate before they carry out any work”. And the most surprising offer of all “ yes we have a machine we can lend you whilst yours is away”! On a roll like this, I wondered whether I should break the habit of a lifetime and buy a lottery ticket this week! Within the hour a steaming espresso had dribbled into a cup, mingled with a large amount of granulated and the caffeine in the resulting mixture was undergoing separation within my inaccessible innards!

Cheers

t

January 15, 2005

The Final Exit

In “ On Liberty”, John Stuart Mill wrote “ The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral is not a sufficient warrant.”

Mill’s quote is particularly relevant when you examine the dreadfully sad case of Brian Blackburn.

Mr Blackburn was given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to an offence of the unlawful killing of his wife Margaret. She was terminally ill and clearly in great and unrelieved pain. Rather than seek their own doctor’s help they decided on a suicide pact. Mr Blackburn agreed to cut his wife’s wrists and then as part of a suicide pact, tried to kill himself by the same gory, and in his case unsuccessful, means.

You can read a report at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4174155.stm. Blackburn was very lucky that the prosecution accepted his plea to manslaughter.

In recent months courts have refused to stop people flying off to Swiss clinics where they can be helped to kill themselves. And no doubt in time the Netherlands will become the destination of choice for those who wish to ensure their unbearable suffering is ended.

It’s about time some sense was injected into this area. There are patients who cannot be given sufficient opiates to keep them pain free. In those circumstances some doctors are forced into the fiction of giving a fatal dose of morphine they know will end their patient’s life, but it is given, and written up, to relieve pain. In a recent poll, nurses have confirmed that euthanasia is being carried out in many hospitals.

Although euthanasia is still, I think, not lawful in the Netherlands, a protocol has been established under which doctors report medical decisions resulting in euthanasia to the public prosecutor who will examine each case. No prosecution will follow if the prosecutor is satisfied that the killing was carried out following the patient’s express wish.

The Royal Dutch Medical Association considers euthanasia permissible under the following conditions.

  • Only a medical practitioner should carry out euthanasia.
  • There should be an explicit request from the patient which leaves no room for doubt about the patient’s desire to die.
  • The patient’s decision should be well informed, free and persistent.
  • The patient must be in a situation of unbearable pain and suffering without hope of improvement.
  • There must be no other measures to make the patient’s suffering bearable.
  • The doctor must be very careful in reaching the decision and should seek the opinion from another independent doctor.

The patient does not need to be in a terminal condition, merely that his pain unbearable with no hope of improvement.

At the moment Lord Joffe’s Bill To enable a competent adult who is suffering unbearably as a result of a terminal illness to receive medical assistance to die at his own considered and persistent request; and to make provision for a person suffering from a terminal illness to receive pain relief medication.” is before the House of Lords.

You can download an Adobe Acrobat version of the bill from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200405/ldbills/004/2005004.pdf

and read Lord Joffe’s speech introducing his Bill at http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds03/text/30606-01.htm

t

January 13, 2005

Windsor in the Soup

On the front page of today’s Sun is a rather grainy photograph of someone described as “Harry the Nazi". "Harry" is third in a queue to acquire one of the largest fortunes in the world. Yet the photograph shows him wearing an armband displaying the swastika. We are told “Harry” was at a private party where guests were expected to arrive in fancy dress. He decided, one can only presume befuddled by drink, to dress up as a member of Rommel’s Africa Corps. The uniform included the optional ceremonial armband.

Another party guest took the picture. Though we are not told what fancy dress clothed the snapper.

“Harry’s” media advisers were quick to draft an apology. And it seems that they consider the matter closed.

Sections 98 to 112 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003- the so-called “bad character provisions” now click in. So it’s fair to point out that “Harry’s” got form. He’s been caught smoking dope, underage boozing, and seems to have what my mother would call “ a bit of a short fuse”. He has recently tried to thump a photographer plying his trade outside a London nightclub from which the lad was exiting looking a tad worse for drink.

What must give him the pip is that he’s been caught out. Does anyone really imagine him going to his dad and confessing? And is it believable that the first in line to the Windsor fortune would tell the boy to get a photographer round at the double, get a picture of “Harry” in the uniform, and fire it off to the Press Association for publication?

God alone knows what else is going on within this family.

Cheers

t

January 03, 2005

Corriere della Sera International

Alberto Sordi
Why don't people in Italian films eat any more?
This apparently futile question springs to mind as you leaf through Spaghetti&Stars, a collection of photographs, dating from the days of the Dolce Vita, that show actors and actresses tackling a plate of spaghetti. The 164-page volume, published by Damiani, costs 28 euros. There are full-page photos of Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Aldo Fabrizi, Totò, Alberto Sordi, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masini, as well as David Niven, John Wayne, Rock Hudson and Jean-Paul Belmondo, immortalised mouth ajar before a waiting forkful of spaghetti. Movie stills? Breaks between shooting? Photos snapped in a restaurant on Via Veneto? The odd thing about the book is that there doesn't seem to be a very clear distinction between work and play, or between shooting and an evening out with friends. It is as if the one flowed seamlessly into the other, and there were no real distinction between what was being filmed and how people lived. Of course, Totò in Miseria e Nobiltà (Poverty and Nobility), slipping spaghetti into his pocket in case someone steals it, is a scene that would not have taken place in a private home, but the Alberto Sordi wolfing spaghetti in Un Americano a Roma (An American in Rome) is not very different from Federico Fellini or Eleonora Rossi Drago at table, as we can see in the book. The truth is that in those years, let's say the 1950s and 1960s, there didn't seem to be much difference between the cinema and real life. What anthropologists call material culture, comprising our behaviour when dealing with the concrete facts of existence and of which our relationship with food is one of the most important, often ended up in cinema screenplays precisely in order to make the characters more believable. Sordi's Moriconi Nando giving milk to the cat and yoghurt to the mouse, and then "destroying" the macaroni that had provoked him has become part of Italy's collective consciousness, but there are endless comparable scenes. Anna Magnani in Onorevole Angelina (The Honourable Angelina) snatches packs of pasta from a black marketeer (the book's opening photograph). A tureen of steaming pasta greets Vittorio De Sica as Maresciallo Carotenuto at Sagliena in Pane, Amore e Fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams). It is a plate of pasta with butter - and a generous helping of grana cheese - that Peppone prepares for Don Camillo, returning famished from his enforced exile in the mountains in Il Ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo). And there are the numberless brimming plates of spaghetti that Aldo Fabrizi faced throughout his career. Fabrizi was a genuine expert, who published a book of recipes for pasta, and on film, he judged the professional expertise of housemaid Elsa Merlini by quizzing her on Amatriciana sauce, in Cameriera Bella Presenza Offresi... (Position Wanted). Then there is Chelo Alonso at table with his future in-laws, who own a restaurant in Naples. He asks for a pair of scissors and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, calmly snips the spaghetti hanging off his fork, or out of his mouth, thereby solving at a stroke the eternal dilemma of the diner who is unable to wind pasta properly, in Guardatele Ma Non Toccatele (Look But Don't Touch). That is why the photos in Spaghetti&Stars have an appeal that transcends their value as documents or curiosities. Take, for example, the previously unpublished images of Sophia Loren on the set of La Ciociara (Two Women) straining pasta for the cast and crew. They are emblematic of a cinema whose films were able to interpret with passion, and above all coherence, the issues that were closest to the public's heart. In these films, the people on screen mirrored the ones sitting in the audience. That empathy seems to have faded over the years , in films where midday or evening meals may have a metaphorical value but have lost forever the concrete, everyday quality that prompted audiences to identify with them. Even at table. Paolo Mereghetti English translation by Giles Watson www.watson.it

January 02, 2005

Dr Pangloss reporting

Voltaire wrote this letter shortly after the Lisbon earthquake. This “Act of God” killed an estimated 70,000 out of a population of 185,000, many of whom were attending the mass. It occurred on All Saints Day 1755.

Les Délices, November 24, 1755

This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds-- where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath débris from which it was impossible to extricate them, families all over Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of a hundred merchants -- Swiss, like yourself -- swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a game of chance human life is! What will the preachers say -- especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us from earthquakes.

This is a extract from his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster; Or an examination of the Axiom, All is well.”

But how conceive a God supremely good,

Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,

Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?

What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?

From that all-perfect Being came not ill:

And came it from no other, for he ’s lord:

Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!

O wondrous mingling of diversities!

A God came down to lift our stricken race:

He visited the earth, and changed it not!

One sophist says he had not power to change;

“He had,” another cries, “but willed it not:

In time he will, no doubt.” And, while they prate,

The hidden thunders, belched from underground,

Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns

Across the smiling face of Portugal.

God either smites the inborn guilt of man,

Or, arbitrary lord of space and time,

Devoid alike of pity and of wrath,

Pursues the cold designs he has conceived.

Or else this formless stuff, recalcitrant,

Bears in itself inalienable faults;

Or else God tries us, and this mortal life

Is but the passage to eternal spheres.

’T is transitory pain we suffer here,

And death its merciful deliverance.

Yet, when this dreadful passage has been made,

Who will contend he has deserved the crown?

Whatever side we take we needs must groan;

We nothing know, and everything must fear.

Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it;

The human race demands a word of God.

’T is his alone to illustrate his work,

Console the weary, and illume the wise.

Without him man, to doubt and error doomed,

Finds not a reed that he may lean upon.

t