November 29th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
On Sunday evening, BBC Four broadcast an 80-minute documentary entitled “Naples ’44: A Wartime Diary” [if you’re in Britain, you can find it on iPlayer]. I recorded it and watched it last night and I’m still haunted by it.
The documentary has a powerful personal resonance for me because my Italian mother was born in Naples in 1920 and lived there until she met and married my father – who was then serving with Britain’s Royal Air Force – in 1946 and soon after left Italy for the first time to start a totally new life in the UK. She was the oldest of four children living with a widowed mother; her sister married a member of the British Army; while her two brothers remained in Italy.
The documentary is based on the memoirs of a British intelligence officer named Norman Lewis and uses his words, narrated by the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, together with amazing archive footage. It tells a harrowing tale.
Following the Allied invasion at Salerno and the capture of Naples from the Germans, the local citizens faced an immediate crisis of no water followed by chronic shortage of food and clothing, a huge black market, rampant prostitution, and casual violence. The Wehrmacht left delayed-action bombs; then there was an outbreak of typhus; then Vesuvius exploded.
I don’t know how much of this my mother experienced personally. She barely spoke of her wartime in Naples and I was too young to ask. But it must have been an immensely challenging time for her, her family and all Neapolitans. She always insisted that we never waste food.
Many, many years later (when she was dead), I wrote a short story very loosely inspired by my mother. It was less about the life I think she led and more about the life I would have liked her to live. She had a very tough time and I owe her so much.
You can read the story here.
Posted in History, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
November 27th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
1. You will receive a body.
You may like it or hate it but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
2. You will learn lessons.
You’re enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.
Growth is a process of trial and error: experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works.”
4. A lesson is repeated until learned.
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end.
There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. “There” is no better than “here.”
When your “there” has become a “here” you will simply obtain anther “there” that will, again look better than “here.”
7. Others are merely mirrors of you.
You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate in yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you.
You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you.
The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this!!
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
November 26th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
“Nutshell” (2016) is McEwan’s latest and 14th novel in a distinguished writing career and it is the sixth that I have read (“Atonement” was the most impressive). The word of the title never appears in the text but only in a preliminary quote from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” which makes it clear that this story is a kind of reworking of that of the Prince of Denmark. While Hamlet’s mother was called Gertrude and his uncle was Claudius, the narrator of “Nutshell” has a mother called Trudy and an uncle Claude, so the allusions are obvious.
The big difference between Hamlet and this narrator is that the latter is a male foetus in third tremester. This might seem rather limiting for the point of view of a novel, but Ewan enables his unborn child to hear everything his mother hears including a lot of radio and an extensive range of podcasts. Now this is a device I have myself used for a short story, but McEwan takes the notion much further by enabling his foetus not only to understand and remember all he hears but to talk about it with literary style and vocabulary that would exceed the talents of a university graduate in any subject except English Literature (phrases like “his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque” and “a poem of four stanzas of trochaic tetrameters catalectic” and words such as “aubade” and exequy”). Most notably, the author shows off his erudition regarding wine and poetry.
If one can forgive McEwan this literary conceit and accept the limited confines of the narrator (always in the womb of a mother who is always in a £ 8M north London house), this is a beautifully-written and entertaining read with not just the outline of a crime but expositions on the state of the modern world. The narrator may inhabit a “nutshell’ but,as Shakespeare would put it, he is “king of infinite space”.
Link: my own short story using the same kind of narrator click here
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
November 25th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This week saw the departure from power of Robert Mugabe after his 37 years leading Zimbabwe and the departure from Africa of my son Richard after his two years working in the continent.
His most recent blog posting for his Kenyan employer Well Told Story comments on his work in Zimbabwe and you can read it here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
November 25th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This is a movie which has divided the professional critics and the general public with the former being hard on the work but the latter generally enjoying it. I confess that my feelings fall somewhere between the two. It seems that DC Comics just cannot replicate the success of Marvel Universe’s Avengers.
Superman is dead but the Earth is under great threat and so Batman and Wonder Woman put together a league of superheroes, adding Aquaman, Cyborg, and the Flash to the team facing somebody called Steppenwolf. The movie has considerable visual appeal with a whole variety of locations and worlds and lots of crashing action, but the plot is weak – yet again a small number of objects of great power which must not be brought together – and the characters (too many of them) are of variable impact.
Ben Affleck is dull as Batman, never achieving Christian Bale’s convincing portrayal of the role, and it is Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman – fresh from her success in her stand-alone appearance – who is the most appealing character, not least because we know so little of the back story of the other three league members. As for the huge and ugly villain Steppenwolf, he is just like so many other sci-fi bad guys and his entourage of flying warriors looks too much like the monkeys in “The Wizard Of Oz”.
The film had a troubled production with original director Zack Snyder – who helmed “Man Of Steel” and “Batman vs Superman” – having to step aside and leaving the final shooting to Joss Wheldon. This mixed heritage is combined with a confusion of tone with the work unsure whether it wants to be as serious as the previous two films or more comedic in the vein of “Guardians Of The Galaxy”. There are extra scenes at the very beginning and the very end of the credits.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
November 24th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
In current usage, the word decimation has come to mean something approaching annihilation achieved by one force against an opposing force. In fact, the term originally meant the death of ‘only’ one in ten of a group and was actually a punishment imposed by the Roman army on its own soldiers for an assumed lack of discipline or valour.
As the relevant Wikipedia page explains:
“A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten. Each group drew lots, and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing. The remaining soldiers were often given rations of barley instead of wheat (the latter being the standard soldier’s diet) for a few days, and required to camp outside the fortified security of the camp. As the punishment fell by lot, all soldiers in a group sentenced to decimation were potentially liable for execution, regardless of individual degrees of fault, rank, or distinction.”
And why am I writing about decimation? Well, I recently viewed a television documentary by the British historian Bethany Hughes who described the famous slave revolt led by Spartacus and I learned that the Roman leading the soldiers against the slaves used the act of decimation against his troops. This was before Spartacus was killed in battle (the “I am Spartacus” scene was just an invention for the film) and the surviving slaves were crucified along the Appian Way. Brutal stuff.
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)
November 23rd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Nearly half of Britons would support giving all citizens a cash allowance, regardless of whether they were employed, according to a recent survey.
Once considered a policy belonging firmly to the radical left, polling by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath found that 49 per cent of 18 to 75-year-olds supported the introduction of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). If UBI were to be established in the UK, it would drastically overhaul the welfare state by providing a set payment to cover the basic needs for every citizen.
You can learn more here.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
November 22nd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I’m currently watching the wonderful new BBC series “Blue Planet II” and the latest episode highlights the issue of plastic in our oceans. Consider these facts – compiled by Plastic Oceans – on plastic pollution:
The proliferation of plastic products in the last 70 years or so has been extraordinary; quite simply we cannot now live without them. We are now producing nearly 300 million tons of plastic every year, half of which is for single use. More than 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into our oceans every year.
Plastic is cheap and incredibly versatile with properties that make it ideal for many applications. However, these qualities have also resulted in it becoming an environmental issue. We have developed a “disposable” lifestyle and estimates are that around 50% of plastic is used just once and thrown away.
- Plastic is a valuable resource and plastic pollution is an unnecessary and unsustainable waste of that resource.
- Packaging is the largest end use market segment accounting for just over 40% of total plastic usage.
- Annually approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide. More than one million bags are used every minute.
- A plastic bag has an average “working life” of 15 minutes.
- Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century.
You can check out 7 ways you can help here.
Posted in Environment | Comments (0)
November 21st, 2017 by Roger Darlington
The electoral system in the German political system means that coalition governments are very common. The Social Democratic Party was in coalition with the Greens – the Red/Green coalition – from 1998-2005 and then, from 2005-2009, there was a ‘grand coalition’ between the Christian CDU/CSU and the SPD. Between 2009-2013, the CDU/CSU was in a coalition with the FDP. In the election of 2013, the FDP failed to win representation in the Bundestag, so Germany went back to a ‘grand coalition’.
Following the federal election of September 2017, the Social Democrats will not serve in a government, so the CDU/CSU will have to form a coalition with other smaller parties in order to secure a majority in the Bundestag. Negotiations have taken place over the past two months in an attempt – which has now failed – to form a “Jamaica alliance”, so-called because the colours of the three intended partners – the CDU/CSU, the FDP and the Greens – are the colours that make up the Jamaican flag. Another general election in early 2018 is now possible.
As this short comment piece in today’s “Guardian” concludes:
“Yet even if there were to be new elections in spring next year it is possible that Merkel could run again. Seventeen years after she took charge of Germany’s conservative party, there are still no credible candidates for a coup at the top, nor candidates with her blessing that look ready to take over the helm. For now, the only party in Germany calling on Merkel to go is the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. The end of Merkel may be closer than it has ever been. But when it comes, it will still be because she has decided to jump, rather than because she was pushed.”
If you would like to understand more about the German political system, you can read my short guide.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
November 20th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
As has recently been underlined by the Paradise Papers, the super-rich live in a world of their own, financially, geographically, and morally. An example of this is Monaco. This is one of the few European countries that I’ve never visited – it has nothing to interest me.
But it attracts the super-rich big time. Less than 38,000 people live in this city-state, but almost 35% of them are millionaires.
The problem is that there’s not enough space for all the super-rich who want to live in this tiny nation. So they are going to build out into the sea. You can read more about this project here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)