Badly Behaved Children

No less than 6 weeks have passed since we rolled off the ferry in Porto Torres and officially began to call Sardinia 'home'. The last 2 of those weeks I've spent back in Cork for work. My complete inability to blog in the 4 weeks in Sardinia is an indication of how completely and quickly I've settled in. I find that I can blog when I'm on the road (I'm writing this from Cork airport on my way back, erm, home, to Cagliari), but I haven't yet found a place in my normal life's routine for this activity. I will, though. Promise. In the meantime, I'll catch up where I left off.

We left peaceful Brittany and made the 4-hour drive (in five-and-a-half hours) to Paris, a place that by contrast manages to make an awful lot of noise. New York might be the city that never sleeps, but Paris is the city that never shuts up. It even snores. Certainly the Quartier Latin where we were based, has a variety of auditory expressions that would rival a philharmonic orchestra. The morning is announced by rubbish trucks and delivery vans, emptying the detritus of the previous night's excesses, and stocking up for the reprise. They are kept company by the bells of nearby churches, each with a slightly different opinion as to when the hour strikes, and how it should best be announced. The Greek restaurants start their plate-smashing from around 6 in the evening, competing with all the other tourist restaurants for the cobble-weary, knapsacked footfall. The buskers kick in on every corner with a different instrument and genre, which mixes into perfect dissonance by the time it reaches our window on the second floor of Rue Saint Severin. The final movement of the day's symphony includes a clutch of beer-soaked choristers, shouting instructions to each other from distance of 1 meter or less, before rolling in to passing taxis, or passing out in hotel foyers. The curtain goes down. You may sleep now. You have 4 hours before the garbage collection begins again.

Paris was our first city together. Letizia and I met in Dublin, but shared our first address in Paris. We stayed there long enough to know it as a living city rather than a collection of monuments. Paris is one of our horcruxes - we embedded a little splinter of ourselves here. Every time we come back, we experience a familiarity that disarms the foreboding of its features and facades. But we know its disadvantages too. I associate Paris with fatigue. It is a place that sucks the energy out of you - though of course you may enjoy the experience. Paris (within the peripherique) is a relatively small city when compared to say London, and it has a public transport system that works well. But somehow, inexplicably, everything you want to do takes a lot of time, and every joule of energy you spend seems to attract a hefty tiredness tax. (This isn't just me showing my age - I remember the very same effect 15 years ago as a - sigh - young man.) The street drains you with every footstep. It surely didn't help that for our three days there, most of those steps led from one clothes shop to the next or from one Disney attraction to the next.

For those readers who followed us around the world on this blog, I can tell you that my duties as a shopping companion correspond very closely with those of Assistant to Official Tour Photographer. In both roles, the most frequent instruction (by now unspoken, but completely understood) is 'hold my bag and keep out of the way'. Such is my expertise on the matter, I can offer tours of Paris' most authentic shopping experiences, complete with an explanation of where to find a place to sit down in even the most minimalist of shop interiors.

One thing that surprises a lot of visitors is how well and how *cheaply* one can eat in Paris. The high price of beer no longer leaves the Post Celtic Tiger Irishman breathless, but the low price of food - if you go to the right place - still has the power to shock. One of the most enjoyable was a fresh noodle restaurant recommended to us by our Sardinian friend Silvia who came to live in Paris around the same time we did and lives there still. Paris isn't the only thing Silvia and we have in common. Silvia also has a daughter called Nina - though much younger than our own. When dining together with friends and their children, sometimes a little patience is called for from all parties, and the younger the child, the more patience is required. In such circumstances, I would not normally complain about the behaviour of a friend's offspring, and certainly not on such a public forum as this (Silvia is a reader of this blog). But I have to make an exception in little Nina's case, when we met up with Silvia for noodles one lunchtime. Perhaps it was the heat of the day, perhaps the noise of the waiters shouting at each other in French and Mandarin, but this young lady did nothing but irritate her mother from the dumpling starter to the final sip of coffee. At one stage - I'm not making this up - she actually kicked Silvia. I did my best to look the other way, and pretend that nothing had happened, but obviously it was a very awkward moment. All I can hope for is that her behaviour gets better after she is born.

Afloat Again, Happily

We have just spent our 5th night on the road: one night on the ferry to France, one night in Brittany with our friends the Crowleys (who we believe might still be our friends after our departure - though I might be misinterpreting the nature of their enthusiasm on the morning of our departure as something more substantial than relief), and three nights in my sister-in-law's apartment in Paris (one of which the said sister-in-law was brave enough to spend with us before leaving for the South). Now is as good a time as any to recount some of our travels so far. But in keeping with tradition, it's late and incomplete.

Perros-Guirec is a beautiful resort town on the Northern end of Brittany. It's where Parisians come to unwind, and where our friends Elizabeth and Andrew and their two beautiful and delightful daughters came to live after many years in Cork (Elizabeth is a Breton - or should that be Bretonne?). We woke them up at some unspeakable hour which my watch doesn't even register, and instead of hurling insults and other, heavier, items from their upper windows, they called us in, fed us, and even listened to me drone on and on about how the world was still bobbing up and down after the boat trip. We had driven for an hour to get from the ferry to Perros-Guirec, passing through some very sleepy towns along the way, one of which had a name that demands some attention: Saint-Michel-en-Greve. I happen to know for a fact that this means "Saint Michael on Strike"*. If this kind of stereotypical town-naming is allowed to continue, what's next? An Irish town called Saint Patrick Goes On The Piss. Or somewhere in Essex called Saint George Pines After The Empire?

I digress.

Andrew and Elizabeth took us down to the beach that is the focus of Perros-Guirec, where the girls began to play together in that happily un-selfconscious way that kids of that age still manage. The sun was pleasingly warm without actually hurting, an occasional passing cloud bringing some welcome shade. It was almost perfect. The fly in the ointment was the coefficient, which stood at a disappointing 55 - very low for this time of year, I think you'll agree.

What's that? You don't know what coefficient I'm referring to!? Well, if you ever come to France, and in particular Brittany, you'll want to bone up on this matter, as apparently it forms the basis of some 82% of all conversation you are likely to have with the locals. In fact the best thing you can do, pretty much as soon as you get off the ferry, is make your way to the whiteboard that will be on display somewhere near whatever beach you find yourself on, and memorize the 8 or so meteorological statistics that will be written there. Time of high tide, low tide, air and water temperatures, and of course, the coefficient. It is a very French thing, you will find, to encode all possible facets of daily life into Cartesian co-ordinates. I suspect that the meaning of most of these numbers is immaterial - it is the mere fact that they exist that gives them a sense. They give comfort in an unpredictable world. They tell you that somebody somewhere has a formula, that measurements are being taken at regular intervals, and that answers are being arrived at which eventually find their way onto whiteboards on Breton beaches. And that surely means that the rest of us can relax, or at least restrict our worrying to those results that lie outside seasonal expectations. The other 18% of the time, we can find something else to worry, and converse, about.

After Perros-Guirec we drove to the nearby Ploumanach, a gorgeous coastal town with a particularly unusual setting thanks to the pink granite that forms its border with the sea. Andrew and I settled into an easy dialogue where I would bang on about how, even now, the scenery continued to bob about thanks to my sea-legs, and he would keep mentioning the pink granite. This is the kind of conversational direction that can take hold when two men who don't know much about sports, or indeed tidal coefficients, attempt small talk. As the day wore on, we were forced to abandon the shallow-end chit-chat, and head for the deeper waters of philosophy, software and comparing the Irish with the Bretons. I fear that it is the lot of the ex-pat to continuously compare his homeland and its people with the adopted country of residence. No matter how urbane and well travelled we think we might be, there are some things that will be forever foreign. For Alan, it might be the stuborn French habit of pronouncing 'j' like 'g' and vice versa. For Andrew, the irrational absence of pub-quizes will probably always offend his Irishness. For me? Well, I have my suspicions about what the pebbles on my windscreen will be as I drive towards a new life in Italy. But let's just wait and see, shall we?

Despite their early start the next day, Andrew and Elizabeth kept us company until late, when we all retired to the utter silence of the Breton night. I fell asleep instantly, and slept deeply, rocked to sleep by the last internal eddies of the Atlantic tide.

*Alright - not entirely true. A greve, as well as being a strike, is also the word for a stoney beach. This blog will never let the truth get in the way of a mediocre story, but will at least endeaver to present it as a footnote.

Casting Off

It's our last evening in Ireland.

Yesterday, the cut-rate courier arrived at our address to relieve us of 8 boxes of our worldly goods. He arrived late - hours late - emitting, as one English politician famously said of another, "something of the night about him". It appears that his journey was taking him to West Cork after our house so it may very well be that our 8 boxes, packed and prepped for their new Mediterranean home, will make it no further south than Bantry. This is the risk you run when you go for the cheapest bidder - the suspicion, no, the expectation, of disappointment.

And if we lose the boxes? What of it! According to Nina, we'll just go look for them. It will be an excuse for another round-the-world trip, hunting down the boxes. A global treasure hunt where the prize is a few copper pots, cookery books, stuffed toys, jigsaws, and the occasional old friend.

In managing the move, we have done a triage: What do we need on the road or immediately on arrival? (Packed in car.) What do we need soon after arriving? (Boxes by courier.) What do we need once we have established ourselves in Cagliari? (Removal company.) There is a fourth category, into which I suspect most of our 'stuff' belongs. But it has been years now that making bonfires on one's own back garden has been against the law, so it'll just stay here indefinitely. Perhaps I can get NAMA to take it on?

The trip itself can be broken into three sections (and easily reassembled, one hopes). Brittany, where we impose ourselves for the night with our friends Andrew and Elizabeth, formerly of this parish. Paris, where we impose ourselves for 3 nights with Letizia's sister Giovanna (our New Zealand fellow traveller). And Piedmont in North Italy, where we will impose ourselves on the Biaggi family, who we are accustomed to meet on the beaches of Sardinia (I wonder if we'll recognize each other with our clothes on). If this trip had a theme it could be "How to travel long distances without forking out for a hotel room". Simon and Leah in Brisbane will attest to our ability to make ourselves at home in a place that somebody else already made theirs (guys - I wish your place was on the way too - I could really do with an evening on your couch, drinking your beer, and hogging your conversation.)

In total, we're looking at around 1600km of driving - that's a little less than Santiago de Chile to Iquique, or a little more than Canberra to Melbourne and back (raising the obvious question, why would you go back to Canberra?) But I can't wait to get on the road. The emotion of motion is already clouding my thoughts, to the point where I almost don't care where we end up. A wrong turn could take us anywhere. And that's OK by me. All roads lead to Home.

Even if it turns out to be Bantry.

Cardboard Boxes and Metal Hearts

Over the last few weeks, I've been asked 'Are you packing?' more often than a buyer at a drug deal. The answer until now has always been 'no' (leading naturally to a quick frisk, just to make sure). And now, all of a sudden, 8 cardboard boxes are waiting silently in the hall this morning, ready for collection and transport. Tomorrow we'll prepare what is to go in the car with us. The day after, we sail.

Nina and Sara are on a disturbingly even keel. They've had their last day at school, their last art class, and a few other 'lasts', and so far they have kept their heads (when many others around them were losing theirs). I'd like to think that this indicates they are emotionally balanced young ladies, but I have to allow for the possibility that Letizia and I have reared two titanium-hearted sociopaths. Or perhaps more tellingly, that Letizia and I are two titanium-hearted sociopaths, and the two girls never really stood a chance.

The last 2-3 months since Easter have been probably the most socially active time we've had in 9 years in Ireland. There wasn't a weekend where we didn't have somebody to see or something to do. And the weekdays weren't slack either. But this oddly enough makes it easier to say goodbye to Ireland (and the mid-Summer rain that's been dampening spirits over here last week doesn't hurt either). Decorum would demand some regret, some sense of loss. But the only effect that the packing has had on me is to give me bags under my eyes.

It might just be that though we've lived here for 9 years now, we never really unpacked.

Life Part II: Back on the Bus

I'll regret this. Probably not as much as you, but I will regret this. I'm going to open this blog up again.

It has been more than eight months since we got back from our around the world trip. That is, we've been back in Ireland longer than we were ever away. The memory of those times is cataloged with all the others of our family life. They weave through the fabric of our family life as easily as we dip in and out of them. Unexpectedly, the memories are sometimes painful. No feelings of regret, just the bruising that comes with seeing how quickly time has gone by. Things happen quickly.

Since our return, I've been to three funerals, one christening and a Holy Communion (that's a lot of church for a heathen like me). My boss nearly got wiped out mountaineering in the Italian Alps (one of his climbing buddies didn't make it). Two uncles, an adoptive grandmother, and a primary school contemporary are no more. And I have finally hit 40. What can I tell you. If mortality were any more in my face, I'd be holding my nose. 

But while I am officially in the second half of the game, there is still everything to play for. If there is one thing I know how do well, it's change. Moving. Starting again. (Running away?) And so we're getting back on the bus. We are leaving Ireland and moving to Letizia's home town of Cagliari, Sardinia. (My long-suffering employers have agreed to let me continue working for them from there.)

This move is the excuse I've been looking for to open fire again on this blog. Sardinia is a place I know well, but have never really lived in. It is a place that I have loved and hated for different reasons and in very unequal measure (on balance it is a place that I believe we can safely call home - for a while at least). For what it is worth to you, and for as long as it might last, I propose to offer a view of life on another island, a diary of a relocated family, and whatever else a brewing midlife crisis will provide. I will avoid, unless humour and a good story demands otherwise, the cliche'd rants on overpaid Italian bureaucrats, crazy driving and endemic gangsterism (in any case, my Irish readers won't find anything novel enough in that). 

If truth be told I'm not sure where this blog is going. But if you enjoyed following us around the world, tune in and follow our latest attempt to escape from reality. 

In Defense of Optimism

The first political idea I ever remember absorbing, when I was very young, was that history moves in cycles. The idea came straight from my mother, and because it became so deeply ingrained, I've looked at both history and current affairs though that assumption ever since. When you look at particular episodes of human history, they really do come across as variations on eternal themes. In fact I'd go as far as to say that theories to explain our past are only credible if they take into account these themes. Human history is, after all, build on human nature. And since history began, human nature has changed very slowly, if at all.

I blogged about this while in Arequipa, comparing the Incas' ambitions of empire with those of the Spanish. Later in Cusco I returned to the theme, trying to explain why I couldn't trust our guide Natalie's portrayal of an entirely benign Inca culture. It occurred to me then that what I was saying about human nature probably came across as fatalistic, and even pessimistic. I'm neither of those things, and so for my own peace of mind I can't leave it there. I need to explain myself a little better. For your own peace of mind, you are better off ignoring me.



Fine - stay. But I did give you fair warning.

I said that I was damn glad that Nina and Sara were not born into Juanita's time, or the time of the Santa Catalina nunnery. I am happy that they will have the chance to live beyond a brutal and premature end as a human sacrifice (assuming they behave), and beyond the confines of the cloisters. Of course I should have said time and place. There are parts of this planet where humans, and especially female ones, have strict limits imposed on their aspirations. In the small villages of Peru, like Akorakai, adolescents depend on missions like the Medical Centre of Belen for sexual education, but they are usually delivered, unfortunately, without any reference to artificial contraception because of the Catholic sensibilities of those staffing and running those missions. Early pregnancy is, unsurprisingly, very prevalent in such communities. Today, girls in places like North-East Africa are more likely than not to have their genitalia mutilated in the name of religion or culture. Child labour and soldiery are rampant, and make a mockery of all our fine century's worth of legislation. Nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed. The incubus of medieval superstition and faith-driven barbarism seems to sit on the chest of our pretenses to progress in the industrialised world. We continue to make the same historical mistakes. Today's empires use different instruments to achieve the same ends as
Cortes, Pizzaro, the British admiralty and the Sons of Heaven. And yet - here am I writing about this from the comfort of my kitchen table, with my un-firewalled access to the internet and my uncensored bookshelf to refer to, in a country that less that a century ago was a dominion and now enjoys autonomy. A country that a century ago was ruled as much from Rome as from London, but now respects the necessary gap between church and state. Sitting at the edge of a continent that a century ago was about to descend into bloody civil war, but now has learned the error of its ways. Something surely has changed.

Something has changed, but what? Not human nature. The situation has changed. According to Philip Zimbardo, designer of the Stanford Prison Experiment and author of The Lucifer Effect (how good people turn evil), the situations in which we find ourselves have more of an influence over our behaviour than the kind of person we are. It's obvious that the situations in which we find ourselves are dictated by the systems in which we live, and those in turn are built by history. The way we live today is shaped by the memory of the accumulated mistakes and successes of our planet's past, and as such, it has the capacity to improve.

If you want to fall asleep how do you go about it? (Try to get to the end of this blog entry, I hear you say). You close your eyes, lie down and breathe deeply. In short, you pretend. Sooner or later, depending on how much coffee you've swilled that day, your pretence turns to reality. How does a society shape itself into what it wants to be? It pretends. It makes laws that may or may not be well enforced, may or may not be well supported, perhaps representing merely a cynical ploy from cynical legislators. Give that law a generation or two to bed in, and it becomes the norm, the starting point for the generation of legislators. The abolition of slavery, the introduction of universal suffrage, the abolition of capital punishment (where that has happened) are examples of building society from the facade inwards.

It's ironic that the central argument in the Zimbardo's book, which at first blush seems pessimistic, is actually a great relief. We don't all have to be heroes or saints - this would be impossible. As a group, we just need the right structures in place to keep us civilised. (The subtitle of the book could just as easily be how evil people turn good.) It's possible to see this aspect of our human nature as a reason in itself to be downbeat, and point out that civilization is just a veneer over the beastly truth. But what a veneer! Nobody scoffs at Everest because it's just part of a thin Earth's crust. Nor should they undervalue the veneer of human civilisation. It did not have to come into being. It didn't come about by accident. It arose from our nature as a species. And while we do keep repeating the same mistakes, as our civilisation gets older, and our our various national histories get woven into one international story, we are getting just a little better.

Half a World Away

Today I was trading notes with a friend who spent some time in New Zealand. Before ever we left, he and I had talked a little about his time there, spent exclusively on the South Island. Interested though I was back then, it was an entirely different conversation this second time. Once again, being there makes all the difference. The abstract concept that I had mentally filed and labelled 'New Zealand' a year ago has been erased, and in its place are memories of a real country.

I never did find the time in South America to come back to the topic of New Zealand on this blog, so I hope you'll indulge me in a little reverie and soapboxing now.

Two images come immediately to mind when I think back on our time in NZ - especially on the South Island - that were constants in an otherwise ever-changing landscape. Firstly, the braided river systems. Wide stretches of rockstrewn flatlands through which trickled a few inches of water. Every time we drove over a bridge, we saw another one. The second, was the permanent company of birds of prey which hovered over every road we travelled like an Unholy Spirit. Both of these images bring me back immediately to the sensation of motoring though thousands of kilometers of breath-taking New Zealand beauty, and I once again experience the sense of mission and common purpose that seemed to travel with us during those weeks and months.

I'm happy to say, once more, that nostalgia plays no part in these memories, because nostalgia suggests some element of regret. And we regret nothing about NZ - not even saying goodbye when the time came. We had an unforgettable time there, made some new friends (I will email Dee - I really will!), and in 12 weeks we got to almost every angle of those amazing islands. We got, if I can be so mercenary, what we came for.

That said, I can't pretend to really understand New Zealand in any profound way, because I didn't get to understand any New Zealanders very well. They are a welcoming, hospitable people who nevertheless retain a degree of reserve that differentiates them from Australians. This is emphatically not a criticism, just an observation from somebody who has acquired the Irish habit of assuming everybody wants to be his best friend. 'Reserve', to an Irishman, is something one does to a hotel room.

It could be that the difference between Australians and New Zealanders (and in a very tenuous way the difference between the treatment meted out to the Aboriginals and the Maori) can be partly explained by the kind of people who travelled from these islands to those ones, around 150 years ago, to populate the new colony. If Australia was the dumping ground for the criminal class, New Zealand was the Ark that would carry those who wished to leave the iniquities of Britain and found a new Better Britain in the south seas. Christchurch, for example, was founded by an association presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury and whose advertising...

(taken from here)

...sought diligent labourers who could be vouched for by their local clergy. It was altogether a different way of making up the numbers than the policies that were been pursued in Australia. And this goes some way towards explaining why the percentage of Irish in New Zealand has always been much lower in New Zealand than in Australia, English and Scottish being the two dominant colonising cultures. Many generations have come and gone of course, and gold rushes in particular must have changed the composition of the population, but I feel that something of that original conservative and religious character remains around the South Island in general and Christchurch in particular (remember those absurdly long school uniform skirts!?).

But here's the kicker: I suspect that it was because of that streak of religious conservatism that New Zealand established practices that today would be considered the work of liberals. New Zealand was famously the first country in the world (yes, the whole world) to give women the vote. It was also the first, as far as I know, to set up something like social security. It was, in short, a great big open-air social experiment, and Kiwis knew it and were proud of it. They were driven not by a modern radical spirit, but out of a modern application of widely-shared christian values. That coin's other face showed itself too, for example in a relatively late acceptance of legalized homosexuality (1986) - seven years before Ireland, it should be noted, but still tardily at odds with NZ trail-blazing in other matters.

And of course I can't help but wonder whether this deliberately worthy approach to social mores, informed as it was by christian charity, might not have shielded the Maori from some of the worst excesses seen in Tasmania and mainland Australia. Don't get me wrong - the Maori had it bad and for a while it looked like they and their culture wouldn't last. But since 1867 New Zealand provided for Maori representation in parliament. It was only four seats to be sure, a sop with little political power, but it was four more than in any Australian colony, and these crumbs were enough to feed the political ambitions of certain sections of the Maori community, Apirana Ngata perhaps the most famous of these, his bust on prominent display in the foyer of the House of Parliament in Wellington. Mere gestures like those four seats, even if made cynically and in a paternalistic spirit, are made in any case because there is public support for the ideals that they feign. And once institutionalized, they can grow in significance over generations until they finally become what they first only pretended to be.

Today in New Zealand Maori culture is strong. There are problems for sure, but the situation is incomparable to that of the Australian Aboriginal. Anne, whom we met at a Wellington Bookcrosser meeting, told me that Maori in Australia (and there are many) find communicating with Aboriginals there to be as hard as talking with Martians. Some Maori idealists of Anne's acquaintance returned from missions in the Oz outback bitter and even racist.

As I suggested in an earlier blog entry, the Maori themselves were certainly better prepared for Europe's arrival, thanks to their agriculture and all that it led to in terms of social structures and complexity. This social and cultural similarity with Europeans meant that in times of war the Maori were able to fight back and in times of peace there was a great deal of intermarriage. But it was the nature of those who came to settle their lands too, which had an influence on the fate of the Maori, cushioning what might have been a mortal blow.

---

Back in Europe now, and trying to cushion the blow of returning to normal life (a term I can't take seriously), we can't help but look for signs of change and growth in ourselves but especially our kids. Yesterday, Sara demonstrated her new ability to pick things out on our globe here at home. She found all the countries we had been to with relative ease, immediated heading south of the equator, and generally showing a certain ease with the planet that she simply didn't have before we left. Letizia told her to put one index finger on New Zealand and the other on Ireland. Wow! She couldn't get over how far away these two points were from each other - they couldn't possibly be further. It's half a world away. And yet for as long as those braided rivers continue to trickle through my thoughts, and the birds of prey haunt my memory, it will always feel very, very near.

Now, before I disappear up my own artistry, here's a demonstration of how NOT to perform the haka, which I made to the collective embarassment of my family and the combined ridicule of three tables of Japanese tourists in a Rotorua hotel:



Em - that's me on the right, in case you weren't sure.