Lechery

In Britain, the focus has been on Berlusconi romping back to power a few weeks back. Much more interesting is the progress made by the Northern League up here in the Po Valley.

A foamingly right wing party, they captured 10% of the national vote, and much more than that here in Piemonte and the surrounding regions. They're anti-immigration (most Italian parties are anti-immigration, but they go further by being anti-EU immigration too), anti-gay, pro-death penalty and support the partition of Italy into a rich north and poor south. If they stood in the Home Counties of England, they'd win every seat by a landslide.

Anyway, the rather spurious point to all this is that Italy, particularly small town Italy, is a remarkably conservative country, especially when it comes to matters of society.

In the ideal Italian household, the man would go out and work, whilst the woman tended the house and spawned heirs. In the evening, the husband would come home and take the family round to Mamas (always, note, his mamas), where they'd be fed and have their laundry lovingly washed and pressed.

In the youth, this is reflected in a bazaar relationship between the sexes, in which your perfumed, flouncing, Italian Manchild spends his days leaching fiercely at anything even remotely female. The girls buy into this with the kind of rampant 'don't ask me, I'm just a girl' twittering that would have Germaine Greer reaching for her revolver.

I had this explained to me by a charismatic young vineyard owner (who had seduced one of my colleagues by pumping her full of premium Barolo ). "God gave me eyes! I'm Italian, I use my eyes to look at every woman! It means nothing, it is just for pleasure". Italian women don't so much wear their hearts on their sleeve as their aspirations on their arse. 'Slut', 'Goddess' and, the starkly blunt, 'Rich' are just three of the slogans I've seen pumping plumply up the Vias of Knockers this week.

This attitude is fairly alien to the British (at least the southern English, for whom the fear of social embarrassment means we need to twat down at least a bottle of wine before we'll talk to anyone who wasn't introduced to us by a member of our family) and it does have an enticing air of freedom and liberation about it. Until you realise that the whole shallow dance continues a culture in which men are (effeminate) men and woman are in the kitchen.

The Big Italian Momma stereotype is alive and well. And cooking and cleaning. Because, after all, that's all she's good for.

The Italian Job (oh, shhhh)

After three weeks with nothing to do but read the English papers (all of them) I was ushered into my bosses room for a meeting.

Scary Boss: "So Chris, here is the project for you"

Me: "Oh great!" (the thundering hooves of misplaced optimism echoing in my ears)

SB: "What we would like you to do is contact everyone in the world working in education and ask them what they're doing"

Me: "Ok, sounds interesting... uhhh, give me the contacts list and I'll get cracking"

SB (arching eyebrow): "Oh no. There is no list, you'll have to find them yourself. Here's a list of countries for you to contact"

(hands over a sheet of A4 with a list of countries printed on it... and nothing else)

Me: "Oh! Oh. Well I wouldn't know where to..."

SB: "Don't worry. It's ok, you'll have help"

(hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!)

As anyone who's done a Graduate Internship will tell you, we're pretty much the bottom rung of the employment ladder (even the cleaners outrank us, because they know where the booze is hidden).

So cue several weeks of me sending out plaintive emails to regional co-ordinators, begging for ten minutes of their time, if they'd be so kind, to please help this project before it crashes headfirst into a rocky chasm.

No joy.

8 weeks later and, all things considered, remarkable progress had been made. I'd talked to Aborgines in the outback, fishermen in Nova Scotia and a peculiar woman in Germany who kept calling me 'Sir'.

A follow up meeting was called.

SB: "So, the project is now finished?"

Me: "Well... no, because"

SB: "But it says here on my plan (produces plan that bears little relation to reality as we know it) that you should be done by now"

Me: "Well in an ideal world it would be. An ideal world where people replied to my emails, sent things when they said they would and answered their phone"

SB: "This is... disappointing"

Now, my boss is Russian and, therefore, already quite terrifying. My dreams are haunted by a recurring vision of being shipped out to Kamchatka for letting the side down.

So, I've adopted a new strategy. I simply walk into peoples offices and talk to them until they give me the info I need, in a desperate bid to make me fuck off (all except one chap who, on offering me a drink at half ten in the morning, produced a whiskey bottle from his draw [I like him]).

I've also taken to producing reams and reams of print outs, in a vain bid to make myself look more productive than I really am.

The net result? I have to interview 20 people in the next week or we're buggered.

Salute!

Fucking salute...

My most Italian moment

Today was a beautiful day in Knockers. Naturally I spent most of it lying in bed, sun streaming through the window, surfing the net.

However, at 4 o'clock I strolled out for coffee, which turned into two, a slice of pizza and a small beer. I sat in the park in the early evening reading Tom Jones (better than I thought it would be, not enough sex though) and watching the Italians promenade past in their Sunday best (they do this, taking to the streets on weekend evenings to walk around, stopping to chat to each other, it's all very surreal).

Suddenly one of the boys playing football across the park lashed a wild shot miles off target and in my direction.

Now, those of you who know me well (which is all three of you who read this) know my sporting prowess is not, perhaps, on a par with my contemporaries. I once played rugby for the House in school (yeah, yeah, we bummed each other afterwards, happy?); we lost, badly. When I play tennis, half the time the ball doesn't reach the net, let alone clear it; badminton, I swish vainly at the shuttle-cock trying to hit the stupid nipply end (and, of course, failing).

So, not the strongest of foundations. But... but!

As the ball sailed over I lept from my bench (sunglasses, freshly trimmed beard, casual jacket, looking for all the world like Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita) and, in one fluid motion, powered the ball back with the side of my foot in a perfectly straight, beautifully judged, arc right across the park, aimed directly at the boys head.

It was, without question, the coolest thing I've ever done.

They asked me to join in!

I should point out, at this juncture, that they were ten year olds.

They waved aside protestations that I was foreign and couldn't speak the language. And so, for ten minutes I filled the role of Cool Foreign Uncle, deftly sheparding the ball out of defence and punting it upfield in the vague direction of an attacking player (I am, after all, English).

We won!

I think. It was hard to tell.

I'm not a fan of Knockers, and I loathe my place of work with a passion, but Italy?

Yeah, I could live here.

European Politics

Here's a (faintly surprising) thing.

The Italians hate the French.

This puts them in that exclusive world club: "Everyone who isn't French".

Using World Wars as an example (and I'm British, so I enjoy doing that):

The Germans and the British fight on, pointlessly, until everyone is dead.

The French build big, futile walls to cower behind. Throw down their guns at the first sign of trouble, and spend the rest of the war sneering at the occupying force whilst plying them with Champagne and coffee.

The Italians, when outnumbered on one side, simply turn around and start firing the other way.

You have to admire their pragmatism.

I am, to all intents and purposes, employed by the EU. I enjoy this state of affairs; it appeals to my hand-wringing, limp-wristed, Guardian reading side (and lets face it, I'm fairly one dimensional).

However, the Italians also hate each other. There's a term for it, Campanilissimo, which means, vaguely literally, bell-tower lover. They're wedded to their region far more than they are to Rome or the other states of Italy. It's been less than 150 years since Garibaldi, Cavour and Vittorio Emmanuelle II (and trust me, in Piedmont you're never more than 5 inches from a street, piazza or monument dedicated to one or all of them) united Italy into a bunch of slightly resentful provinces hell bent on hating each other.

In recent years this has boiled down to a North v South thing. In the South the economy is built on tourism and crime; in the North it's built on proper things like the manufacture of coffee grinders and high fashion.

The North views the South as little more than idle scroungers too bone idle to do more than fleece the occasional tourist. The South see Northerners as little more than wannabe Germans.

The government takes a pragmatic (natch) line and deals with this by collapsing into anarchy every few months.

So we have an election coming!

This boils down to no more than 'which corrupt tycoon do you want to rule you for the next few months until their inevitable downfall'.

Sylvio Berlusconi, famed through-out Italy as a man able to hold on to power for more than 10 days, is hotly tipped by the media as the man most likely to win the next election. He's got a proven track record, they say, and he enjoys widespread support from almost every TV pundit and newspaper editor in the country.

Silvio Berlusconi happens to own almost every TV station and newspaper in the country.

Go figure, eh?

The First Three Weeks

This then was my life for the first three weeks in Italy.

1) Wake up at ten to 9. Adopt grimly optimistic frame of mind. This was it, this would be the day that something interesting happened, that the ice finally broke and things started to work normally.

2) Run into work at 9.15. Sit at desk expectantly for 10 minutes. Sag slightly. Shuffle books around. Learn a bit of Italian. Read some propaganda pamphlets. Not check Facebook, not check Facebook, not check Facebook.

3) Facebook.

4) 1pm. Sit in a cafe for two hours eating a panino and drinking coffee.

5) 2.50pm. Sigh heavily. Make my way back to office and repeat the morning performance.

6) 7pm. Haul myself off to the supermarket and wander listlessly between the shelves wondering what shape of pasta I would eat that night. Leave at 7.30 and realise I'd forgotten milk. Well, no milk til tomorrow then. It's half 7 now and shops opening any later would be madness, madness, pure and simple.

7) Cook a meal for one. Watch an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Pine rentlessly for some great angel to sweep down, pint of ale in each hand, and carry me back to the UK. Listlessly hack into the unsecured wireless router located somewhere in the vicinity, despite knowing full well that it wasn't connected to anything, just for something to do.

8) Bed.

9) Repeat.

You know it's bad when, despite being bored to tears at work, you spend your weekends waiting for Monday to roll around, just to relieve the monotony.

(I'm aware I'm not coming across as particularly exciting, thrusting or dynamic, but it gets better [a bit] eventually, trust me).

Meet The New Boss

I woke bright and early.

This was a terrible start.

I fell asleep again and woke up late and irritable. Ahh, here was familiar territory. This was to be a day of discovery and new beginnings. The first of which was finding the shower jauntily duct taped to its own rail, the silver metal snaky thing that protects the grubby plastic tubing having disintegrated some time before. Never mind, few things make me happier than cheerily calling inanimate objects: 'You vicious, bastard, cunt' early in the morning; it very nearly compensated for arriving (late, naturally) at work smelling of second-hand Mayfairs with an oil slick of unwashed shower gel in my hair.

Still, that was yet to come. I left my flat, confidence buoyed to unrealistic heights by the fuzzy ink jet Multimap scrag in my hand. I walked for 5 minutes before realising I should have made a note of my bosses name. Still, we're British, and muddling through is what we do. I would just make use of my encyclopaedic French and cunning hand gestures until they gave me what I wanted (and possibly a cup of tea too).

"Bonjour! Je suis Anglais! Je suis travaile ici! C'est vrai?"

Didn't work. Luckily she spoke English and was blessed with a bottomless well of pity. I trotted off to the right building and spent twenty minutes blundering into every room I came across shouting: "Questo e... uhhhh... il ufficio di ?". I would greet the inevitable negative, followed by incomprehensible Italian instructions, with a cheery "Ah! Grazie mille!", then resume my grim trudge through the labyrinthine halls.

It's always best when meeting your new boss to project a confident air that you know exactly what you're doing and are unquestionably the right man for the job.

If you're in Italy, working for a rabidly ideological company hell bent on changing the world. A company whose leader is regarded as a sort of living saint by the population, lauded by intelligentsia and peasantry alike. Well, you really, really shouldn't forget that guy's name in your initial interview. Particularly not if you mentioned how much you admire his work in your covering letter.

Fuck.

She didn't say as much, bless her, but my new boss couldn't hide the feelings of shattered disappointment she so evidently felt; that the new guy might not, perhaps, be up to the standards of the long line of phd candidates that proceeded him.

Never mind, I thought as I scuttled off to my desk, I'll restore her faith in me with some top notch work...

You know me too well.

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Italian office euphemisms:

1) "You won't find us looking over your shoulder all the time, checking up on what you do"

means

"Don't ask me what the fuck you're meant to be doing, penis face"

2) "A quick meeting tomorrow morning"

is

"A grim, 6 hour death march that will last til 3 in the afternoon, almost certainly involving at least one German who will break down and weep bitterly over the Italian concept of 'deadlines".