Modus vivendi

There is no modus vivendi.
Life is an antelope pursued by a lion.
Unavoidable the jaws that sink
Into the sweet flesh,
Gouge the dappled skin,
Tear the rippling sinews.
Inveterate spasms, muscles that
Writhe and turn with the desperate
Struggle to be free,
Vainly twisting,
Doomed to die,
Consumed in the hot blood that
Pulses over the muscular jaws.

Antonio del Pollaiolo
Etched a stag
That has been torn apart
By the slavering jaws
Of pack dogs:
Intestines festoon the landscape
Billowing guts slide
Around beneath the trees.
Passive desperation is
Writ on the animal's face
As it waits to die;
And the hunters arrive,
Slipping silently through
The dark, anonymous forest.

Curiously arresting it is:
Paolo Uccello's hunt for
A girl's favour, darkened
Into bestiality;
A scene of death made
Ordinary: the lithe quadruped
Messily butchered
In the pristine forest,
The hunter's primal thrill:
Violence to be sanctified
By the need to kill food
Earthly, elemental,
Power-stricken.

There is no modus vivendi:
We are all the hart in the forest.
Dogs and lions, men with steel
Honed to cut and pierce,
They are after our hearts,
Ready to open us and
Let out the steaming life
In one last, elemental,
Dwindling surge.

The Thatcher Funeral

The extraordinary situation that directly followed the death of Princess Diana shows that in the UK certain kinds of event generate their own momentum. Floods of publicity on the mass media act as the driving force, and public attitudes firm up by accretion or repetitive suggestion. So it was with the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. This time we do not have what Ian Jack called "the grief police", but we do have an epidemic of revisionism--the selective use of historical fact to create interpretations which bear little relation to how things really were at the time.

She was a grocer's daughter who had pretensions to grandeur: in fact, "Queen Margaret" was a common appellation during her "reign". Thatcher is credited with modernising British society and striking a great blow for the emancipation of women. She is also credited with a Churchillian resolve in the face of adversity. I would question all three achievements.

In the confrontation with the miners she brought to bear the entire resources of the British State. She was bound to win, much in the way that in 2003 overwhelming US military forces were bound to conquer Baghdad. Breaking the power of the unions may have ushered in the age of a more "flexible" workforce and a freer labour market, but it did so at appalling cost. Communities were damaged beyond recall, the ranks of the underclass were swollen with new members, and a process was set in motion of redistributing income from the poor to the rich. Under the banners of individualism and enterprise Thatcher laid the foundations for casino capitalism and in the end the struggling families of the working and lower middle class are having to pay for that legacy.

No British politician has been so divisive over the past 100 years. One disturbing consequence is that, far from withering away, class distinctions have remained and become even more ingrained in British society. On the face of it, Thatcher represented upward social mobility. Sadly, the controversy over her funeral has seemed to pit a tawdry working class against an articulate, self-satisfied oligarchy. Rather than freeing people from the constraints of their class, Thatcher condemned them to it.

She was a "conviction politician", one of a long line that included Genghis Khan and Hitler. Never a subtle person, her lingering presence has annihilated any subtlety in the debate about her legacy. Her acquired, artificial patrician accent always sounded phoney. This may have been a small matter, but it, too, contributed to the fossilisation of the class culture. She was an arriviste in the ruling class, not a leader who suddenly empowered citizens of humble origin.

Her election as the first female prime minister in British history did very little for the rights of women, as it represented playing the political game according to men's rules, rather than creating an equivalent for women.

British culture makes much of the Churchillian spirit and this aspect was shamelessly played up during the Falklands/Malvinas war. The case for British possession of these islands is probably slightly stronger than that for returning them to Argentina, but it is far from unassailable. It does not represent a huge moral imperative on which to sacrifice British and Argentinian lives. Granted, in 1982 the Argentine Government's attitudes and actions were even more reprehensible than the British Government's, but adding yet more ethical failures does little to alter the moral case.

Margaret Thatcher governed the people of Britain with minority support. People admire the hardness of her attitudes under pressure, but let us remember that Hitler and Mussolini had the same kind of allure and it did not make them admirable leaders. Two of the great characteristics of "iron leaders" are their insensitivity and inability to recognise the drawbacks of their policies.

In Europe, the Left has become weakened and fragmented by its failure to assert moral principles over economic ones, coupled with bickering, infighting and a reluctance to modernise its ideas. It gets its residual support by feeding off the remnants of the class system, not by offering to try and dismantle it. Under Blair and Brown, Britain continued its Thatcherism and even in the dreadful aftermath of the banking crisis resources have continued to be transferred from the poor to the rich. Hence, not only has the class system survived, but it has gained the precariat, a massive underclass.

Carried away by the maudlin gravitas of the occasion, the BBC commentator at the Thatcher funeral said "We are all Thatcherites now" What a gratuitous insult! On the contrary, we damn well are nothing of the sort. Britain has steadily become the most capitalist country in Europe, a place where communities of people struggle to preserve some sense of humanity and solidarity in the face of a thousand forms of exploitation. The social tensions are palpable and ubiquitous. For decades, Government policy has done nothing to alleviate this misery. As a consequence, quality of life surveys place Britain well down in the ranks of European countries.

Industrial transition could and should have been achieved by other, less destructive means. The Falklands/Malvinas should be seen for what they are. I do not wish to belittle the actions of those who fought and served, but there is a huge moral difference between their sacrifice and the decision making processes that put them in the position that they were compelled to make it.

Thatcher's very public funeral, with its opulently militaristic ritual and gathering of the rich and powerful, did much to consolidate the Severn-Trent line in British culture--and to marginalise those who live north of it. Moreover, it was the triumph of the establishment, the folks who brought you taxpayer bail-outs, service cuts, the presumption that the unemployed are scroungers, along with higher prices, lower benefits and the concentration of wealth in tax havens. This is a return to Victorian values, but not the values of Samuel Smiles or Charles Booth. Instead the values are those of the bigots and self-made men who looked upon poverty as a threat and a sin just as they contributed to creating it. We have come a long way back to where we were.

Conquering the Known World by Dash-8

What image does the name "Alexander the Great Airport of Macedonia" conjure up? For me, it is a lofty marble hall with brightly painted columns and at the end a gilded throne, occupied by a tall, imposing man in a white toga, who booms "Take the next flight to Outer Mongolia, and from there proceed to conquer the known world!"

In reality, Alexander the Great Airport of (Greek) Macedonia is down the end of a farm track off a minor road in the countryside somewhere not very well signposted between Xanthi and Kavala. The only thing that towers over it is the distant mountain range that divides Greece from Bulgaria. Yet the Greeks have a flair for giving one-horse places desperately imposing names, such as the villages of Megalopolis and Marathon, and the towns of Drama and Olympia.

Our arrival on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in June did not disturb the airport dog, which continued to slumber at the terminal entrance. In fact, even the arrival of our aircraft did not cause it to do more than raise a sleepy eyelid, snuffle briefly and replace its jowls onto its folded paws. Inside the terminal, we learned that we could check in at desk no. 1 and then pass through security and depart from gate no. 1. Gates 2 and 3 had a forlorn air of abandonment. After the departure of the solitary afternoon flight to Athens, the airport was due to close until the following morning. Meanwhile, the car hire official had dutifully trouped in to reclaim our vehicle, and he rapidly disappeared into the undergrowth.

Our aircraft was one of Olympic Air's Dash-8 turboprops, which relieved me, as the only other plane in the vicinity was a pensionable Boeing 727 that looked somewhat derelict. I suppose all Boeing 727s are by definition pensionable, but a fair number of them are still lumbering around the skies of the developing world--or falling out of them, as they have an appalling safety record.

Athens was reached without incident, possibly because the other passengers were Greek Orthodox and elaborately crossed themselves as we took off. More memorable was the flight out, from Athens to Thessaloniki (accent on the 'iki', please). Cyprus Airways carried me there and felt it necessary to include in the safety briefing the fact that "the Turks invaded Cyprus in 1973". Perhaps it was intended to hasten one's departure in the event of an on-board emergency--fear and loathing of the Turks, and all that. I wondered if there were any Turkish Cypriots aboard, and whether they would be unloaded without a parachute as soon as we reached our cruising altitude. But it all seemed good humoured enough. I was relieved that Olympic Air did not tell me that the pesky ex-Yugoslavs had no right to call their homeland Macedonia. But then, Alexander's empire fell apart quite quickly, and all the air travel in the world would not put it back together again.

In Memory of Eric Ernest Alexander, 21 October 1923 — 7 June 2011

[funeral oration] There is much to celebrate in the life of Eric Alexander. How shall we recall him? A man of absolute integrity, an idealist, a shrewd interpreter of politics, a loving husband, a conscientious father, a likeable person with a boyish sense of humour, popular with his colleagues and friends. There are so many good things to say about him.

One day not long ago, before strokes impaired his ability to speak, he paused and suddenly looked pensive. "I've had a long life," he said musingly, "such a long time, and yet it all feels like yesterday." His eyes, milky blue-grey with age and infirmity, clouded over as he looked back across eight and a half momentous decades.

The deprivation and hardship of his early life stimulated him to look for a path to a better world, which he found in the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin. His vision was of a world ruled by humane principles, not cruelty, greed and arrogance, in which there would be shared abundance, and crime and social deviance could be dealt with perfectly adequately by giving the culprits a fatherly talking to (he explained his political beliefs to me when I was just about old enough to understand them).

I remember striding across the Derbyshire Pennines with him on a warm, hazy summer's day as he sang "There's a place, Comrade, for you, in the ranks of the working man."

I also remember visits from Bob Wotton, a fellow socialist and his friend for life. They would sit together in the living room, puffing away at their pipes until the air was blue with smoke, wearing portentous expressions and discussing the last crisis of Capitalism. "They're not going to get out of this one easily," one would say, and the other would nod sagely. He realised, however, that it would be a very long last crisis, and he never expected to live to see the dawn of that promised new era.

As my mother said, the world has never needed idealists as much as it does now, in this trough of history in which we live.

He had a natural affinity for the Russian soul, with its weighty sense of the past, its love of deep, sonorous melodies. He never went to the Soviet Union and was somewhat disconcerted by the impressions that I brought back when I finally visited it. But his beliefs survived the upheavals of 1989, for he was more a man of principle than of ideology. He was always a clever analyst of current affairs, adept at drawing the inner truth out of the distortions and obfuscation that the mass media feed to a hapless public every day.

Sadly, his academic qualifications amounted to a school certificate and a meagre two 'O'-levels acquired in later life. There was never a clearer case of educational deprivation. He was a man with a love of physics and cosmology. He was perfectly capable of getting his mind, untrained though it was, around the complexities of matter in the Universe. Indeed, he had the mental discipline and the imagination to be able to set his sights well beyond the solar system and gain his inspiration from discoveries in outer space.

He was a convinced atheist, who would not allow that people make God in their own image. Instead, he believed in humanism, the power of the human spirit to make a better world. If individual people were bad, violent or greedy, he attributed it to their social environment, not their genes or any other inexorable factor. If we all made a concerted effort to improve the social environment, he felt, then greed and badness would disappear. Thus he had an essential faith in humanity. He also practised what he believed in, and in his last years would stop on his daily walk to exchange a few kind words with the down-and-outs in the shelters on the seaside front. During the Gulf Wars he marched down to the town centre with his placards and demonstrated, alone and unthanked, against the iniquity of human lives wantonly sacrificed to ensure the continuity of oil supplies to rich countries. No one could call him a cynic. In fact, he was very much the model citizen, a man with a conscience whose integrity made him a shining example in this age of feckless amnesia.

I have a small but sharp photographic print of my father taken in 1944. He wears a neat, starched naval rating's uniform. He stands upright, pipe in hand, a stern but relaxed expression on his suntanned face. Very handsome he looks. In the foreground are the ornate cast-iron railings of a balcony, in the background, the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. I sometimes tell acquaintances from Naples that he was imprisoned in that formidable pile of masonry that stands on the waterfront at Santa Lucia, Castel dell'Ovo. The impression of heroic resistance to persecution is somewhat dispelled when I add that he was put there, "in the cooler", by the Military Police for drunk and disorderly conduct. But after all, it was wartime and he was only 19 years old. The only other occasion I can remember when he overdid the drink was 40 years later at his retirement party--not a bad record of sobriety, one must admit. On that occasion, he staggered out of the taxi that brought him home and couldn't find the front door of the house. It had been snowing, and next morning his footprints were in circles all over the front garden.

Much more characteristic was his rumbustious sense of humour and his love of puns. This must have been a devastating weapon in the Italian peninsular campaign. It accompanied him right into old age. Many of his friends and acquaintances remembered that high-pitched cackling laugh--for he was always the first to appreciate his own jokes--usually emitted while the listener was still wincing at the excruciating play on words that it followed. He was the very embodiment of that excellent British propensity not to take oneself too seriously. Young and old people alike appreciated his infectious humour and his enthusiasm for life and good conversation. On a deeper level, he believed wholeheartedly in the healing power of humour.

He took his photography very seriously. At family gatherings he would line everyone up and stand out front fiddling for ages with his camera (usually of Soviet make, and quite unreliable), studying the shot from all angles and gesticulating with his lightmeter. As a result we have albums and albums of pictures of groups of family members looking fed up and at a loose end! But we all took it in good humour, of course.

Many memories come crowding back as I think of him. When I was a child he made all of my bedroom furniture and many of my first toys. They were robust, well-designed pieces of woodwork, fit for a lifetime. He made them in his green garden shed, which always smelled of the Erinmore Mixture that he put in his pipe. When his hammer hit his thumb, or the tenon saw grazed his fingers, his language was remarkably moderate, especially by modern standards. Later, his second vocation as an amateur car mechanic surprised us all, but he was amazingly good at it and enjoyed what he was doing. Paradoxically, although he was slightly clumsy in manual work, he was a light fingered and gifted musician with a superb ear for music. He derived deep pleasure from the very finest classical music, which he listened to with infectious gusto, perhaps hopping from foot to foot and conducting the family stereo, which he made himself from a remarkably complicated electronics kit.

When I was quite small, he made me a sled. One Saturday on a snowy winter afternoon, we took it to the nearest slope but we soon ended up in a ditch full of muddy water. He took it in his stride rather more than I did!

When I was even smaller he took me for long bicycle rides through the Hertfordshire countryside. I sat on a small saddle fixed to the crossbar of his bike. We shared a love of nature that reached its acme in the annual summer holiday trek to the mountains of the Peak District or Snowdonia. Although essentially a city man (he was, after all, a quintessential Londoner), he was spiritually refreshed by close contact with the beauties of nature. With a sunny day and a good panorama of hills and dales shimmering in the heat, he was at peace with himself and the world.

His other formative influence was the sea. Although he was only in the Navy for a few years, it left a permanent impression on him. He saw Canada and the Mediterranean--and the sinking of a U-boat. He experienced life in the crew, even the Italian crew when he was seconded to the convoys. Many years later he would sit in front of the 1953 film of Nicholas Monserrat's peerless book The Cruel Sea, a stern expression on his face, his alert eyes surveying an imaginary horizon for signs of enemy shipping. I never liked his suet dumplings, a relic of his turns of duty as ship's cook. But the impression of the old salt was reinforced by his lurching gait, which made him look as if he has spent his life on a heaving deck. In reality, this was the result of a simple physiological fact--one of his legs was slightly longer than the other. But once a sailor, always a sailor.

As the years wore on he gradually became imprisoned within himself. Macular degeneration curtailed his sight, deafness did for his hearing, and then strokes tragically rendered his conversation a travesty of the thoughts that he sought to express. This long decline was nature's greatest cruelty to a man who deserved nothing of the sort. He remained a good person, with a moderate, kindly nature, throughout.

When he spoke to my mother, there was always a special tenderness in his voice, and very touching it was. However, I do recall that when flowers were delivered to their house on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary he relished in saying to the delivery man "the first fifty years are the worst!" Even such a loving husband can occasionally enjoy a gentle joke at the expense of his wife.

So now he is finally gone--tempus abire tibi est. But we will carry him with us in our own hearts for the rest of our days. And then there is the impression of his young grandson following him to a kite-flying expedition one afternoon. They were both--quite unconsciously--lurching slightly and flapping their fingers as they walked in that very characteristic way that was his. Now that in its way is a sort of immortality!

Kathmandu, November 2009

From Patna the aircraft makes a diagonal bee-line north-northwestwards to Kathmandu. This orientates for the runway scores of kilometres in advance of landing. With the Himalayas as a gorgeous backdrop it touches down and deposits its passengers in the terminal, a dull red-brick structure with low roofs and an air of neglect. Outside is the great, sprawling city, or rather the city that has become great and sprawling as a result of the fear and dispossession that have driven people from the hills and mountains into the metropolis. In such cities, airport terminals are transitional places, the point of entry but also a small means of acclimatising oneself to the sharp shock of contact with what lies outside.

Once through the doors of the customs exit, the city starts. It is a welter of small Suzukis, beaten-up buses, drivers touting for custom, and people emigrating who are towing in their wake vast boxes of possessions tied up with string and tape. A car ferries me into the city centre along dusty roads and dirt tracks lined with scenes of frenetic activity. On mounds of rubbish bullocks graze and tiny children search for cans and bottles to recycle. Women in saris trudge through the dust, trucks blast their horns; garishly adorned shops spill out their wares like shoe-boxes full of trinkets. The air is warm but not hot. The sun is veiled by scraps of cloud, but its rays are penetrating. The thin atmosphere hangs heavy with moisture and dust.

Kathmandu has many of the attributes of the typical Asian city. Advertising slogans in English and Nepali blaze and blink from tall buildings: "buy Elegant Whisky and impress your girlfriend", 'fashion parade', Savings Bank, Toyota, an endless series of gaudy commercial messages. The urban landscape is wildly variegated, the streets clogged with people, vehicles and motorcycles. It hums and buzzes with frenetic activity. The urban profile is copiously detailed: no two buildings match each other, indeed no two square metres are the same. It makes impossible demands on the western eye, trained as it is to appreciate spareness. What must it do to the emigres from the mountain hinterlands who have known nothing but the Spartan landscapes of the high peaks?

My hotel is a venerable guest house encapsulated in the heart of the old city, where the streets are hardly wide enough for a Suzuki taxi to pass a Honda motorbike without one knocking the other into some wayside shop. My room is Spartan but clean and it smells heavily of floor polish in a rather institutional way. The ceiling lights glow feebly and the plumbing unleashes a tintinnabulation that no amount of juggling with the taps can suppress. On the washstand there are tiny bars of black Indian soap that smell of carbolic acid.

I am in Thamel, the heart of old Kathmandu but a place that has sold out to international tourism. This is hippy-land, and the hippies are now sexagenarians who are nostalgically reliving their past. For most of them the intervening forty years have taught them nothing about aesthetics and their scruffiness is everywhere apparent. In a self-aggrandising little shop called the Pokhara Embroidery Company I buy a tee-shirt with the logo 'Hardrock Café Kathmandu'. I don't believe there is such a place, but in any case the Thamel quarter lives on its illusions.

Kathmandu city hall is an imposing white building in the Asian colonial style, the motifs part Doric and part reverse curve, thus giving a nod to both the Classical antiquity of Europe and the Mughal dynasties of old India. It is surrounded by a rising tide of modern commercial buildings and apartment blocks, all crammed in around the surviving vestiges of its ornamental park. The flower beds are awash in water, but the muddy yellow colour and powerful smell proclaim that it comes straight from the drains. Amid this miasma the plants are dying dramatically, a herbal version of Custer's Last Stand.

Inside there is dust and decay. The corridors are long and crammed with broken desks, chairs with red leatherette seats, faded notices in Nepali script. The offices are sparsely furnished and electrical wires loop from the ceilings. Girls in saris carry trays of teacups from one office to another. A workman gravely chips plaster off a wall. I sit in an empty office with a faded grey carpet and three broken down sofas. I discuss the city's seismic hazard with the five members of the local government who are responsible for emergency planning. In 1934 Kathmandu had a magnitude 8 earthquake, and this is expected to repeat itself after an interval of 70-80 years--in other words about now. In the 1930s it was a vasty different city, with huge open spaces and a population that was tiny by modern standards. It is now a vast, high-density collection of buildings waiting to collapse into the narrow streets and it is growing bigger by the day. My five colleagues have sophisticated plans, written by foreign consultants, but all they seem to have in the way of equipment is a megaphone with which they will try to direct the activities of 1.6 million citizens.

We walk back to Thamel through the city centre and the squares full of pagodas, temples and stupas. There in the midst is the city fire station. It has three relatively modern fire trucks and three that are museum pieces which would be roundly coveted by western collectors, were they for sale rather than still being used to fight fires.

I walk along the streets pick-up trucks overladen with Maoists pass noisily by with their occupants hanging over the sides and shouting noisy political protests. Going the other way is a wailing motorcade of government ministers, grim-faced bearded men in suits and sack-like Nepalese hats. Today it is safer to sit in a hotel bar and drink bottles of cold Everest beer.

The aircraft takes off from Tribhuwan International Airport and circles around to gain height. The sun glints off Anapurna, a magnificent spectacle. Asia is a continent of sharp contrasts and here is one of the sharpest: the serene, pristine beauty of one of the world's highest mountains in contrast with the grubby stain of human activity that spreads up the Kathmandu valley in a long heterogeneous carpet of urban development topped by a low-lying tobacco-yellow pall of pollution.

So many deep impressions to carry with me: the fierce territoriality of the monkeys on Swayambhunath Stupa hill; the deep red of the blood of animals butchered in the mud next to the heaps of rubbish; the grey skin of the street children who have never washed, and the thinness of their limbs.

The Large Sky

On certain days the sky is unbearably large.
Cloudlike ships of state cleave through the firmament,
Milk-white forms incise the crystal blue,
Swept clean by cold, persistent wind,
Purified by shafts of glinting platinum light,
Life on earth, purpose in heaven, luminous, numinous.
The enigma of why we are here,
Insignificant beneath this strident paean.

Elizabeth died on a day like this. Hearing the news
We stood by the window, looked into the puffy clouds
Conscious of each other, of larger realities,
Projecting ourselves into the endless, fathomless sky,
Holding hands and sliding through immense spaces,
Drawn along, torn and helpless as the wisps of vapour.

Elizabeth, beautiful with long black hair and brown eyes,
Luminary skin, graceful body, feminine voice;
The illness racked her, ravaged her body,
And finally, when she was yellow and wasted,
It claimed her, dust to dust. Monstrous affront,
Who were we to carry on living and stand there
Looking so ardently at the sky's brilliance,
Becoming every detail of that momentous day?

The Overloaded Ark

I had some spare time after I had finished work in Siracusa and so I decided to visit the Archaeological Museum. The historical centre of the city is one of the closest approximations to "a rose-red city, half as old as time". The archaeological remains of Magna Graecia appear suffused with the Mediterranean sun, especially the faces of the terracotta maidens, perpetually fresh and young.

The Museum was full of teenage girls in dark blue suits. Apparently, they had some custodial role, but what it was could only be guessed: a dozen of them patrolled the museum's corridors and I was the only visitor, hopelessly outnumbered. Made up like juvenile filmstars, very much in the Southern manner, they simpered at me and followed ma around with their eyes, wistfully. Romantic notions of a rich foreigner ready to bear the lucky winner away to a new life of luxury and experience--definitely not me!

Industry and commerce are at a low ebb, unemployment is rife, and so public institutions are stuffed with employees until they appear like an overloaded ark. Nowadays, the fashion is for temporary contracts and starvation wages--the precariato. The teenage employees of the museum were too young and inexperienced to have realised the irony of their situation, but that cannot be said for their older counterparts who have weathered the temporary contracts and achieved the miracle of being taken on as 'proper' employees, not mere "collaborators". Perpetual job security and unattractive salaries have left many of them with a "world-owes-me-a-living" mentality and a marked reluctance to change anything for the better, even human relations, or perhaps especially that. These are the people who turn their backs and pretend to be busy as soon as you walk into their office. A book that purported to explain Italian culture to foreigners stated that in every office in Italy there are six people. Five of them do absolutely nothing and the sixth does the work of all of them combined and is referred to by his compatriots as "il fanatico".

If there is not enough to do--and how could there be with so much overstaffing?--then shear boredom dictates that some form of work must be invented: self-justifying work, that creates its own raison d'etre. Recently, I did a day's teaching. A modest sum will be paid to me after a majority of my earnings have been taken away in tax and social security deductions. When preparation and travel time are included, the remuneration is far from generous. To obtain it, I had to fill in eight forms. On these, I stated my date and place of birth four times. I signed eight times. I wrote my address four times and I gave my taxpayer identification number four times. I wrote my bank details three times on one form alone. I filled in an extra form on a government web site, and, strictly following instructions, I repeated my bank account details three times on the same form. Given my qualifications, in terms of labour costs the whole exercise was worth something more than a third of my net earnings. I also had to purchase and affix an administrative stamp--the cherry on top of the bureaucratic cake.

A Tuscan who went to work in the USA once said to me, I think with some justification, that "in American one works well and lives badly; in Italy one lives well and works badly". A Swiss pathologist whom I met at a conference opined that Italy is the country where genius is closest to madness. "In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce...? The cuckoo clock." Orson Welles was wrong about the cuckoo clock, a German invention, but what sort of Renaissance would modern Italian bureaucracy produce?

Now it can be told

A quarter of a century has passed and at last the story can be told. As it is still "politically radioactive", and its half-life has definitely not passed, I have changed the names of the people, places and organisations. It is as well to do so, as some heavy accusations are involved. Naturally, the following account is absolute fantasy--of course it is! What else could it be?
In December 1982 several hundred hectares of land slid into the sea on the northern fringes of a city with a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants. It was Europe's largest urban landslide, and it left two people dead and thousands homeless. Almost 300 buildings were left completely unserviceable, including two large hospitals and a significant part of the local university. The main arterial road and railway lines were pushed into the sea.

I arrived in January 1983 and spent the next five years studying the landslide and its many physical, political and social ramifications.

The national scientific research council instituted a research programme with the objectives of finding out the exact causes of the landslide. It was co-ordinated by Don Giuliano, Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Terravecchia. In the South of the country civil engineering is one of the few professions to be constantly lucrative. To be a full professor of the subject is to be in an undeniable position of power with respect to the contracts for the planning, design and management of large projects. In fact, Don G. had cornered the market in this field. No professional geotechnical engineer or applied geologist in the southeast could work without Don G's tacit or explicit permission. There was an unwritten agreement that the bosses at the University of Terranova would have absolute control over the projects in the west. Terravecchia would control the east, and contracts relating to places in between would be shared between the two fiefdoms. At his own university, Don G. had his minions write his scientific articles for him. This was a no-risk strategy, as the authors were far too in awe of his power to confess publically. In fact, the only drawback was the occasionally at conferences a foreign academic would ask Don G. what he had meant in one of his articles and he couldn't remember having published it, or perhaps he had not even read it. In any event, an international society awarded him a gold medal in recognition of his "extraordinary scientific productivity". Indeed!

For Don G. and his followers, it was a major coup to be able to shift activities to a lucrative area further north, an achievement that had much to do with Don G's alliance with the Rector of the University of Miramare, who would later move down the coast to preside over a seat of higher learning closer to Terravecchia (where he would eventually be indicted for nepotism).

Given the scale of the emergency in Miramare, the national government invested significantly in the scientific effort to study the causes and mechanisms of the landslide. Although the sums were paltry by the standards of many Western countries, earth sciences in Italy had been starved of funds to the extent that the Miramare landslide project was a sudden, unexpected windfall that stimulated many researchers' appetites for funded work.

Of course, to preserve the existing power structures, the available funds had to be divided up between all parties, and universities, that exerted some influence in the area. The result was a free-for-all that led to a very heterogeneous scientific effort. When large landslides occur it is opportune to study the subsoil by sinking a number of borings. At Miramare more than 110 were drilled, but in a completely haphazard pattern that contributed very little to the general picture of the causes and mechanisms of the movement. One painful consequence of this was that when a meeting was held in the Great Hall of the University of Miramare's Rectorate to present the results of the scientific enquiry to the public, the researchers had no answers to the practical questions posed by the association of people made homeless by the landslide, such as could the damaged buildings be rehabilitated? and was it safe to rebuild in the area?

The Miramare landslide had been a political question for more than two centuries. It had inherited a heavy political baggage in terms of the decision to expand the city northwards into an area that had suffered major landsliding in the 1770s and 1920 (although not to the extent of the later disaster). From the morning after the 1982 landslide functionaries and politicians scrambled energetically to avoid the political responsibility or deflect it onto their colleagues, and any attempt to understand the aftermath has to take account of this tendency.

One of the aspects of the scientific enquiry that is most difficult to understand is its sheer amateurish irrationality. Nevertheless, if the framework of analysis is changed, it suddenly springs into focus and becomes eminently explainable. Let us see how and why.

Although the landslide was perforated like a sieve with boreholes, only one of them, located right in the middle, penetrated deeper than a few tens of metres. At 240 metres below the surface there appeared to be a hiatus in the continuity of the sediments that were being drilled through. It was taken to indicate the presence of a plane of movement that had caused the entire landslide to rotate in a deep axis with a perfect curvilinear movement. Justification for this model was taken from a case in Alaska, which, however, was much smaller, had occurred in very different sediments, and was caused directly by a major earthquake (the Miramare landslide may have had some long-term connection with earth tremors, as the area is seismically active, but no quakes occurred in December 1982 and the landslide was undoubtably caused by prolonged rainfall). The rotational movement hypothesis quickly assumed the status of orthodoxy and it made a rapid transition to "established fact" (Don G. vigorously promoted it), even though in mechanical terms it was ridiculously unsuited to the case at Miramare and there was plenty of evidence to support a flatter, shallower movement that was more a sort of conveyor belt than a rotating bowl.

For many years it was not clear to me why such an unsuitable model had been adhered to so enthusiastically. Indeed, a dozen years after the landslide, one of Don G's senior collaborators took me aside in the coffee room during a national conference and confidentially pulled some borehole logs out of his pocket: one seemed to point to the rotational model but the other 19 roundly disproved it.

Not that it was easy to acquire information. Don G. and his team did not want an independent expert buzzing around their investigations. This was made very clear to me when in 1986 I was invited to an international conference in Don G's home town and systematically prevented from speaking at it. In truth, I had prepared an utterly innocuous 12-minute talk on something quite unconnected with Miramare, but the organisers decided to be prudent: who knows what I might have revealed ad libitum?

For two field seasons I was the guest of the Mayor and City Council of Miramare. They provided accommodation while I conducted my research and in return I was asked to write confidential reports containing my evaluation of the developing situation regarding the landslide. Clearly the Mayor did not regard any local or national authority as sufficiently independent to give him an unbiased assessment taken from an impartial viewpoint. As Professor at a large American university I was the only foreigner to make my presence felt in scientific circles at Miramare at that time.

Eventually, a large geotechnical engineering report on the landslide was compiled. With all the tests, simulations and compendia of data, it filled a series of boxes that reached a metre and a half above the floor. I found it extremely disappointing. The data had been collected in such an unsystematic manner that it proved impossible to evaluate alternative models of the landslide mechanism beyond a few minor variations. The report struck me as shallow and inconclusive, but at the time it did not cross my mind that this might be a deliberate strategy. The report concluded that a substantial infill of rock and sediment on the downslope, seaward side of the movement would stabilise it and permit redevelopment of the slope. This struck me as ridiculous in mechanical terms, but I was unaware of the motives that led to such a conclusion.

My reports to the Mayor of Miramare were written with great care and attention. I stuck rigorously to general principles and observations, said nothing specific about any existing document or ongoing study and made sure that I separated the facts from my own opinions. In short I tried to keep out of the political minefield. While this strategy avoided any direct criticism of other people's work--which would have been dangerous under the circumstances--the sheer vagueness of my observations made them amenable to a wide variety of possible interpretations amid the political currents of the time.

One day in December 1988 the regional newspapers all carried the headline "U.S. expert throws out landslide plan". My reports had been stolen from a locked desk in the regional government headquarters and leaked to the press. There was an immediate political firestorm. It hinged on the question of whether it was a good idea to spend $40 million on the projected infill at the base of the landslide. Whether or not this would have done any good, the stated justification for it (i.e. stabilising the movement) was patently wrong. The regional government abandoned the plan and was forced to convene a high-level commission of enquiry. I later found that its first task was to enquire into me and my motives, but as I had received no payments from anyone in Italy there was nothing I could be indicted for. The commission ratified the decision to abandon the infill project.

Two decades later I found out that Don G. had planned the infill as a means of disposing of the waste from gypsum quarrying in his home region. Two groups of people would have enriched themselves on the basis of a gigantic and wasteful engineering project that would probably have caused more problems than it would have solved, and would have created some extremely dubious environmental modifications. The people of Miramare got out of that, although they had other concrete-steel-and-earth-moving projects of debatable utility foisted upon them. The geological fraternity in Italy closed ranks against me and I thus failed to get a chair at an Italian university. And Don G. suffered one of the very few setbacks that have interrupted his long and brilliant career.

In any account such as this the writer will add a measure of self justification. Judge for yourself, gentle reader, how close to reality this story is. I repeat that it is pure fantasy--of course!

San Casciano in Val di Pesa

Night
Go to the roof of the house and look at the sky,
Capacious, luminous, portentous,
The inside of a great, blue, steel bowl, mixing
Watercolour violet, indigo ink, tincture of cobalt,
OmarKhayyamesque in its glory.
The transparent walls contain us,
Far away from whatever lies beyond:
Infinite space, unimaginable vastness,
The great seas in which the imagination coasts,
Punctuated by stars, illuminated by moonbeams,
Edged by the hills and towers and roofs
Of the black landscape in which we live.
Indistinct are the wavering lines of lights
That zigzag up the hill to Fiesole, under
The black shroud of the northern mountains,
Candles held by an expectant throng,
Silent and waiting in the distance.

Day
The view is sharper in the pearly light of a winter's day.
Pervasive but restrained, it etches out the detail,
Transforms the landscape into green and grey,
Garnished with silver in the sprays of olive leaves
That grow in clumps among the fields; brown
In the serried ranks of vines, Spartan, pruned back,
They endure the winter cold to sprout again
In the warm weather, ridiculously green.
Church bells peal casually and the sound carries out
In endless permutations of clangs, percussive
It rolls around the hills and floods back to us,
On its back the devotions of centuries, for
The Convent bells of the Clarisse have pealed
For twenty-one generations, inexorably
Marking cycles of life and death, death and life.
This land resounds with patience and endurance,
The jugular surge of life, pain and pleasure mixed.

So, wondrously, does the mundane become the sacred.

The Siege of Scarperia

The Florentines were worried about the lawlessness of the Apennines and the potential for invasion from the north. Hence in 1294 they chose some sites and started to build new fortified settlements on the road to Bologna: Scarperia and Firenzuola, its northerly neighbour. The former took its name from the scarp foot at which it was built, with the Mugello Apennines as a backdrop. By 8 September 1306 the construction of the town was sufficiently advanced that a ceremony of inauguration could be held. The commemoration of the diotto, 'eighth day', has been repeated each September ever since. By the middle of the 14th century the expansionist policies of Archbiship Giovanni Visconti, Duke of Milan, fully justified the Florentines' fears, for his army was marching south, sacking and pillaging towns and villages as it went.
In 1351, when the Milanese arrived, Florence was in a pitiful state, its resources depleted by a recent war against Lucca. In the Mugello the Ubaldini family of nobles was exerting tyranny from their mountain castles. The Florentines needed to take the Mugello by force and subdue its rebellious inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Pisans pretended to be neutral but secretly sent 200 knights to join forces with the Milanese. Pistoia, under the Panciatici family, wavered and threatened to betray Florence. On 26th March it surrendered without a fight to the force of 800 knights that the Florentines had sent to threaten it. A show of force was needed, because the previous strategy, based on the Trojan Horse principle, failed when the Florentine notary Piero Gucci woke up too late to infiltrate Pistoia and get his sympathisers to open the gates to the Florentine troops. Meanwhile Giovanni Visconti da Oleggio, distant cousin of the homonymous Milanese leader, led the march on Florence. Firenzuola, too distant to defend adequately, fell immediately, and so the Florentines concentrated their resistance on Scarperia.
Visconti and his troops were disorganised and in eight days of siege failed to take Pistoia. On 7 August 1351 they left it alone and instead sacked Campi Bisenzio, Brozzi and Peretola, all perilously close to Florence. However, Visconti had neglected his supply lines, so he turned to Calenzano in the hope that by taking this town, on the northern side of Florence, he could re-establish dominion over the Apennine route to Bologna, which was well-guarded by the Florentines. Iacopo del Fiore and his guards in Calenzano took fright at the advance of the Milanese army and fled to the relative safety of Florence. He was quickly sent back into the mountains to defend Scarperia at the head of a force of 200 knights and 300 infantrymen (many of whom were, however, German mercenaries).
Scarperia was by no means completely fortified. It had been under construction for less than 60 years and building works were slow in those days. Part of the town's wall had yet to be built and all there was in their place was a palisade of stakes about two metres high. The defenders rapidly reinforced this and dug two concentric ditches on the outer side. By September the Milanese were camped in the neighbouring fields and Scarperia was under seige.
Inside the defences there were 600 soldiers. A force of 1800 knights and 3000 infantrymen was on its way, but many of these were coming from Siena and Perugia and they were being harried in the Arno Valley by troops from Arezzo. The defenders looked out with trepidation upon Visconti's 2000 knights and 600 infantrymen, fearing that yet more would arrive from the direction of Bologna. The situation seemed hopeless.
On the first Sunday of October 1351 the Milanese attacked, despite the prevailing taboo against fighting wars on Sundays. They swarmed over the two ditches that surrounded the town and began to scale the walls. At first the Florentines held their fire, but when the Milanese started to climb the walls and palisade the invaders met with a hail of arrows, crossbow bolts, stones from ballistas and torrents of boiling water. They were beaten back but tried again at dawn the following day. This time they attempted to tunnel under the defences. Iacopo del Fiore reacted by ordering his troops to dig a ditch inside the walls, so that the defence would continue if they collapsed. He organised a sally and for two days his men fought with swords and maces on the open ground until eventually they reached the entrance to the tunnel and destroyed it.
After two months of marching and hard fighting the Milanese troops were beginning to lose heart. As an incentive Giovanni Visconti da Oleggio promised them double pay if they could take Scarperia and he organised a surprise attack at midnight. Fortunately for the Florentines, their sentinels had not relaxed their guard and the attack was beaten off. At dawn on 17 October 1951 the Milanese could be observed retreating towards Bologna. The overjoyed Florentines gave each of the mercenary horsemen 500 golden florins and the title of knight, while the foot-soldiers received a double-month's pay. The inhabitants of Scarperia were compensated for their privations with ten years' exemption from taxes.
For the fortitude and courage of its inhabitants, Scarperia received the honour of being the only town in Florentine territory that could adopt the white flag emblazoned with the red lily bearing pistils, which is still widely displayed there with pride.
All this my little house has seen, for the building appears on the map of Scarperia made at its founding in 1306.

My life as a palagi

In 1985 I spent a brief period as Visiting Professor at the University of the South Pacific on the Fijian island of Viti Levu. These are some of my recollections. 'Palangi' is a somewhat contemptuous term for a Caucasian white man.
The South Pacific is indeed a pacific place. I was there in August, in deepest mid-winter, and the weather was warm, sunny and pleasant. White, puffy clouds graced the serene blue sky and green waves whelmed in a lulling rhythm on the sandy beaches.
Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian islands, is covered in island rainforest on the 'wet' side and straw-yellow savanna on the 'dry' side, where sugar cane is grown in extensive plantations. The University of the South Pacific serves nine island nations and the campus at Laucala Bay (a converted British Army barracks) is a restful place. Parrots sharpen their beaks on the guttering and the windows are made so that they cannot be shut: there is practically no need to close them.
The population of Fiji is almost evenly divided between Melanesians and Indians. The latter were brought there from South India in the nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. They proved to be much better entrepreneurs than the Melanesians, but despite their economic success, they cannot own the land, which is held in tribal trusts by the indigenes. When I was there, USP had a student population that was more varied than this simple distinction implies. There were Polynesians and various outer islanders, as well as some Chinese and Japanese. But the most spectacular were the Indian women: the long, silky black hair, the electric blue tunics and clinging pants, the glittering anklets, the flowing scarves. There were times when a walk around campus felt like a journey through the Arabian Nights.
Viti Levu is served by buses that have the characteristic "Fijian air conditioning"--meaning no glass in their windows. This is a good thing, as the weather can be unbearably hot and humid. It also stops the windows rattling on the uneven tracks that are the only roads into the interior of the island. Bus drivers are great stars in Fiji, as they are the only men that Indian women are able to meet, such is purdah. And they live up to it by dressing like Bollywood film stars, shirts open to the waist, gold chains swinging at their necks.
And then there are the Melanesian women. On the surface they are submissive and welcoming. Beneath that beguiling exterior they are out to snare a man: any man who has a guaranteed stipend of more than 15 Fijian dollars a month will do. Their strategy is deceptively simple. Attentive, appreciative, available and affectionate, they offer themselves in the most disarming way, but once the offer had been accepted the only possible outcome is marriage. Patrick, the Englishman who was my host, was much taken by these tall beauties with their curly black hair and regal features. A year after my visit he sent me a photograph of his wedding to a tall, straight-backed Melanesian girl called Fipe. And six months later his daughter was born. I can imagine how he must have felt when he found she was pregnant and her family came to see him with long-bladed sugar-cane knives in their hands to persuade him to "do the decent thing". He ended up with two children and a messy divorce.
Unaware of this, on my first night I went to a disco. Before going in, my two companions, Melanesian stalwarts, stopped at a bush. Each of them clipped off a sprig of foliage and put it behind his ear, so I did likewise. They laughed and playfully punched me on the shoulders. Only later did I realise that the sprig of foliage was symbolic of an unattached man looking to mate an unattached woman. Fortunately, none of the ladies in the discotheque took me seriously enough to make an offer. I later found that when one met these girls socially their opening gambit was usually "are you married?" (I wasn't) and then "do you have a job?" (I did, and by their standards a stratospherically good one). Later during my stay in Fiji I was particularly taken by a young girl with a complexion the colour fo milky coffee and spectacular bosoms who was part of a dance troupe that entertained the tourists. She clearly registered my interest. But by then I was ready to go home to America and was not going to allow myself to fall into the trap. So when she asked me "Are you married?" I said "Yes!"
The highlight of the disco was a dance by a troupe of brown-skinned Melanesian men dressed in nothing but grass skirts and war paint, who wielded spears and bamboo shields. Under strobe lights and to the sound of pulsating disco music the impression they left was quite unforgettable, and their ability to do break-dancing with spears and shields in their hands was the stuff of legend.
Then we went back to Patrick's house and sat in his living room drinking small glasses of Fiji Bitter, the dark, potent beer of the islands, sitting there in a silent revery watching the geckos fight each other on the ceiling above our heads and listening to them cluck menacingly. At intervals the guttering outside would rattle as yellow-crested galars strutted along it, and all the time the leaves of the banana trees in the garden rustled in the breeze like soft, intense rainfall.
We went to Wainimala in the centre of the island. We took some gifts with us: a few tins of pilchards, bags of tea; some yaqona, the root of the kava plant. We stayed with the local school teacher, who very kindly gave up his house to us and spent the night sleeping on the floor of his kitchen, a building made of bamboo and banana leaves. I had the pleasure of sleeping on a damp, termite-proof piece of plywood, which I suppose was his bed. In the morning I got up and put on my sulu, a brightly coloured skirt. This reminds me that in Fiji it is the men who wear the skirts. The male soldiers of the Fijian Army who guard the Governor's Palace, the home of the chief Ratu, wear leather skirts. The typical Fijian businessman wears a jacket, waistcoat, old school tie and elegantly tailored pin-striped skirt, and he carries a briefcase. Ordinary people wear a piece of cotton, wound round their waists and stretching to just below their knees, which for modesty's sake must be covered.
I went into the kitchen and sat down on the floor next to the red-and-white checked tablecloth. On this, food was spread out for breakfast, mostly food left over from the night before. Fortunately there was no boiled tapioca, which I found could not be swallowed below the level of the Adam's apple. In the corner of the table cloth there was a hen which was laying an egg. To be honest, I had never seen a hen lay an egg and I did not realise it was such a painful and traumatic process. The hen clucked and crowed in a crescendo of sound that ended when the egg rolled out and the hen disappeared out the door of the kitchen in a flurry of feathers after running desperately across the tablecloth and plunging her claws into all the food on it as she went. Then we proceeded to eat the egg.
Walks in the forest were most elevating. The old, spent volcanoes of the centre of the island towered above it, slate grey in the distance. The foliage was an intense green, the leaves of some of the forest plants were as large as a sheet, a green sheet with deep, translucent veins in it. Dragon flies buzzed around them with their wings shimmering brilliantly. I picked up a seed that was the size of a medal, it gleamed a rich mahogany brown. Although the Melanesian Fijians are nominally Christians of various denominations, in the fields of yaqona plants I found a pagan idol carved out of that curiously dense and fibrous mass of roots that can be found on tropical islands. Its eyes were blindfolded.
At night the villages echo to the rhythmic thump of yaqona being pounded to dust so that it can be infused with river water to make 'grog', the drink of the ethnic Fijians. Yaqona (pronounced "yangona") is mildly soporific and has very little taste (most of that comes from the mud in the river water). It is drunk in half a coconut shell with much ritual clapping and cries of "Mahther!" ("down in one"). Yaqona is the root of life, and in fact it looks like a human figurine, rather as does the Ginseng root or the mandrake. Fijians are addicted to ceremony and as such a hundred years ago they found an unexpected affinity with their British colonists (the Fijian Islands annexed themselves to the British Empire in 1870).
Many protocols and conventions must be observed when entering a village: backpack lowered in the name of humility, knees covered in the name of modesty; never sit higher than you host. And take your gifts straight for the house of the village chief. Even if this is only one room, it will be divided into four parts: public, semi-public, semi-private and private. One enters, of course, into the public part. There will be furniture, but Fijians will not use it, for they are much more comfortable squatting on the floor, and that is what their visitors must do, however agonising it feels. Yaqona is infused in a carved dish of tropical hardwood called a tanoa. Coconut shells are filled and passed around, cupped hands are clapped, "Mahther!" is said (with feeling) and speeches are made. This is sevu-sevu, the Fijian welcoming ceremony. At one sevu-sevu I ended up drinking twelve helpings of yaqona and I must admit it had no effect on me whatsoever.
During a lull in one of these ceremonies, a tribal elder turned to us and said, reflectively, "You know, a hundred years ago.... we'd have eaten you!"--a comforting thought. Officially, the last person to be eaten on Viti Levu was the English Methodist minister the Rev. James Baker. He was an insufferable zealot and to some extent must have deserved his fate. His body was dismembered and pressure cooked in a hole in the ground. A thigh garnished with steamed spinach was presented to Matanitu, the chief of the islands. But Matanitu had by then obtained a B.A. from Oxford University and affected to be disgusted by the offer. "Take it away, old boy!" he said in his affected Oxford accept. On the way to the dump the thigh disappeared. This was somewhat strange, as the meat of the white man was considered inferior to that of the Melanesians: no one wanted to absorb the spirit of such a person. However, it was the end of an era, so perhaps this macabre gastronomic theft reflected nostalgia for an earlier way of life. But not quite the end, apparently, as I heard rumours that someone had been eaten, deep in the mountains, in 1957.
One day we went down to Nausori airport to catch a plane to Levuka. Patrick spent most of the waiting period trying to chat up the loquacious Fijian girl who sold newspapers in the terminal, but before he could get around to asking her for a date along came a farm tractor towing our aircraft. At $9.50 Fijian for a one-way ticket it was not an expensive flight, nor was it a very long one. We got into the plane and, as I was sitting with my knees pressed into the small of the pilot's back, I said to him "Do you realise you have a flat tyre?" He replied in a broad New Zealand accent "Nah nah mate, these tyres are low profile. If they were fully blown up we'd dig a trench in the runway."
The take-off went well enough and we soon reached our cruising altitude of 90 metres above sea level. This afforded a good view of the mangrove coasts of Motoriki Island and shortly after that we landed at a clearing in the rainforest of Overlau, the chief island of the Lau Group. The landing was bumpy, and I assumed this was because the runway was effectively a ploughed field, but when I climbed down from the aircraft it was immediately apparent that the right tyre was blown up and the left one was not. Before I could say anything the pilot had turned the plane around and taken off, with a rolling diagonal gait, for the next island on his itinerary.
Our first port of call was the Chief of Police's house. He proved to be quite welcoming and his house was remarkably western in style, with modern furniture and fittings. His wife invited us into the kitchen for a cup of tea, but as Melanesians do not like sitting on chairs we sat down under the kitchen table and looked up at the lady as she brewed the tea above our heads.
The guest house on Overlau was pure colonial in style. Most of the guests were mosquitoes, with whom we had quite a battle as they tended to get trapped in the acres of netting that we rolled into in a vain attempt to get to sleep. In recompense there were fresh papayas for breakfast, and they were as tangy as mangoes.
But Overlau was the first place in the South Pacific that I saw really poor people. Families of Indians lived in houses made out of flattened-out oil cans. The local restaurant had no furniture, no cutlery and only the smallest number of bowls: chapatis and chicken curry, balanced on one's knees, eaten with the hands, crouched in the corner of a large, empty cement room. We walked up a dirt track into the centre of the island, the ancient crater of an extinct volcano. The track wound its way through clamps of nicotine-yellow coconuts that gleamed in their giant husks. The road surface was pitted with the flattened bodies of frogs that had been run over and tanned by the midday heat. The island rain forest with which the crater walls were garlanded was a gorgeous deep green and the huge leaves of the plants dripped with sweet sap and crystal clear rainwater.
Back on Viti Levu I was introduced to Emosi, the Chief of one of the outer islands. I had hired a tiny car in the hope of driving right around the island. Emosi said he would come with me. He had no experience of travelling by car, as his island had no roads on it, only four fishing villages connected by boat journeys. We set off in grand style, whooshing past the colonial villas surrounded by palm trees and pineapple plantations. But after several hours of wrestling with the steering wheel, I had to give up. The road was too rutted to be travelled along in a Suzuki 800. On the way back we stopped at a local restaurant, a typical bamboo and banana leaf eatery, and Emosi ordered a plate of eka vaka lolo (fish with coconut sauce). It was made in the traditional way by boiling the fish, shaking the coconut down from the tree, splitting it open with an awl, throwing the juice away and grating the flesh onto the fish. The cook then added a garnishing of potatoes and large lumps of tapioca, the world's most indigestible vegetable. Emosi sunk his teeth into this shining example of Melanesian cuisine and said "Ah! That's real food!" He looked disparagingly at my chicken curry and added "I can't stand that fancy stuff you're eating."
Shortly before I was due to leave Fiji the Methodist community decided to celebrate its centenary on the cricket pitch outside the Ratu's palace. In the Pacific Grand Hotel the ceiling fans stirred up the moths and mosquitoes and the rattan chairs creaked much as they had in the colonial era. Crowds dressed in mud-daubed bark-skin licked at 'Tip-Top' ice-creams (whatever Tip-Top made its ice creams with, there was certainly no milk or cream in them). And outer islanders came by in troupes and phalanxes, designer glasses and grass skirts--real grass skirts, not the fluorescent plastic ones that were being sold down by the port for $2.95 Fijian.
My last night in Fiji was idyllic. I sat cross-legged in a bamboo and banana leaf hut drinking coconut-half after coconut-half of yaqona, clapping with cupped hands and listening to the members of the Viti Levu Rugby Club strum their ukuleles and sing in that sonorous harmony that is so hauntingly characteristic of the South Pacific (their team had just lost a match against Vatulele, the second island). The moon hung large in the tropical sky, the waves burst rhythmically on the shore nearby, fireflies shimmered in the night air, and next to me a tall, straight-backed Fijian maiden with frizzy black hair smiled at me in that disarming way that they have and looked beautiful in the moonlight.
Palangis are not often welcomed into island society in Fiji. In fact, the tourists, most of whom are brash Australasians, are rigidly segregated from the real Fiji. I was privileged to be allowed into the villages of the Wainimala and Levuka districts. I was perhaps not a perfect guest, but I tried to act with humility and show sensitivity to local traditions and a sincere appreciation for the hospitality that was given to me.
A year later there was a minor civil war on Viti Levu. The Govinda Hari Krishna restaurant in Suva appeared on television screens around the world with smoke and flames pouring out of it. That was such a pity as it was the cleanest and best restaurant in the country and the food was cheap and very good. It was more of a pity for the ethnic hatred and unrest that it symbolised. By demographic force of numbers the Indians had won the general election. The Melanesian Fijians induced the Army to stage a coup d'etat in order to ensure that the Indians did not dismantle the tribal trusts that held the land. It ushered in an uneasy period of partial and awkward political accommodation that unfortunately is still going on.

Universities I have known

There is a species of academic known as the 'gypsy scholar'. He or she is generally a competent teacher, perhaps an adequate researcher, but for reasons of character, personal history or something else the individual is unable to secure a permanent post and thus must move from one temporary job to another. Seldom is this a matter of choice, but it is instead dictated by cruel necessity. In the worst cases the scholar remains in this academic limbo for an entire career, but in any case most of us have had the experience, for there is often a gap between finishing one's studies and finding a suitable place to develop one's career.
As I currently lack continuity of employment I suppose I am close to returning to gypsy scholar status. If that is so, I can only blame myself, for I voluntarily left a comfortable, permanent position as a tenured full professor. It is hard to see any professional justification for this self-inflicted penitence, as I have already done my stint of moving from one university to another, and I have done it in more than one country.
As an unemployed PhD graduate I managed to garner some temporary work in various English universities. One of these was Cambridge. I started on a humble level teaching a short course at Homerton College, a nondescript establishment that trained teachers and was hardly considered authentic by the ancient and famous colleges of the University federation. Later, I gave a lecture at Emanuel, which was very different, especially when they invited me to evening dinner. This took place by candle-light in an oak-panelled hall that was constructed by the Puritan founders in 1584. We sat their in our gowns and ate with silver cutlery that dated from 1747 and is in the national historical register. The college staff served us cutlets of venison and glasses of vintage wine. It was all rather overbearing and, although it was picturesque, it left me feeling lucky that I did not have to socialise in that way every Friday evening.
Next I did some tutoring that was split between two sites: the Geography Department in Downing Street and Fitzwilliam College. The latter, known locally as 'Fitz', was founded in 1860 but housed in a modern version of the old monastic-collegiate arrangement created in 1970 by the architect Denys Lasdun. Though obviously monied, the students were no more brilliant than I had been used to in London (where as fate decreed, I worked in another of Lasdun's buildings, an overbearing pile that the University had insensitively built in place of one of the famous Bloomsbury squares). Yet in the breakfast room there were sketches by Picasso. At lunch there was an entire Stilton, king of cheeses, and the servants were deferential in a manner that made my skin creep.
Waikato was an entirely different kind of university. Situated in verdant countryside next to a small town on North Island, New Zealand, it was a haven of peace and contemplation. The students were a mixture of Kiwis, Aussies, Polynesians, Melanesians and Japanese, but all of them very deferential. Everything, from the buildings to the atmosphere in the common room it radiated conservatism. At this point I began to miss the vitality and confusion of my alma mater, the London School of Economics and Political Science.
For one term, while on sabbatical from the University of Massachusetts, I taught in the Geology Department at the University of Urbino. The town of Urbino, situated deep in the hills of central Italy, is spectacularly picturesque. Its cobbled streets lead to the crest of a hill, upon which is situated a stupendous ducal palace, a sixteenth century fairy castle, packed with art treasures and visited in large numbers by those tourists who venture away from the main cities of Italy. Urbino is a small town and the university is hidden away inside its close-knit urban fabric. But it is a desperately provincial temple of learning. Its horizons extend no further than Ancona and southern Romagna, but a few tens of kilometres away.
When I was there, Carlo Bò was Rector. In Italy the rectors of universities accede to the title of 'Il Magnifico'. Many of them are far from being magnificent, but Carlo Bò at least had the advantage of being very tall and straight-backed. He was also very a well-known intellectual with a long history of participating in the nation's affairs. His university, at the time one of only four private institutions of higher learning in Italy, lacked a place where the academics could congregate and socialise. It was a typical "mordi e fuggi" university ('teach and flee'). Virtually none of the staff deigned to live in Urbino or the surrounding villages--too isolated. Instead, they came from Rome, Bologna, Ferrara and such places, taught, saw their students and rushed back home as soon as possible. But at lunchtime they needed a place to go, and by default it was the Ristorante da Franco, situated off the main square of the small town. Table no. 1 in this establishment was strategically reserved for the Magnificent Rector. On the rare occasions when Carlo Bò graced it with his presence, the academics would all rise and stand to attention as he strode in. The atmosphere was positively surreal and the menu was something I soon got to know by heart (the waiter, however, was Iranian, although Carlo Bò would be served by Franco himself, bowing and scraping his way back to the kitchen and muttering about what an honour it was).
I recall little of my contact with the Bangladesh universities. In one of these institutions, in Dhaka, the fierce tropical heat of summer had caused the brickwork to bloom with a picturesque efflorescence of precipitated salts. The facilities were adequate but rudimentary and the books were all printed on that curious pink paper that abounds in the Indian subcontinent and disintegrates as one turns the pages. The agricultural college at Comilla had this much in common with the institutions in the capital, but at its centre it had a huge lake, which steamed in the heat and wreathed the groves of mango trees with silky mist. There were armed soldiers in the corridors, even in the cafeteria, but whereas in the capital they would have been deployed to quell student riots, which are frequent there, in Comilla they were there to protect the students against the incursions of brigands which lived amid the jack-fruit trees in the surrounding rainforest.
At the University of the South Pacific I was briefly Visiting Professor. It was very difficult to teach the students, a mixture of Indians and Melanesians, about my experience, as this had mostly been garnered almost exactly on the other side of the world--to be precise 177 degrees away. I set myself to study Matanitù, the last of the great tribal chiefs, whose reign ended gradually with the annexation of Fiji to the British Empire in 1870. During the course of my studies I learnt much about Fijian traditions, for the people of the Pacific islands are enamoured of formality and are adept at blending it with ancient beliefs about spirits, ancestors and life-forces. Some of this was acted out in front of me while I was there, as the USP campus hosted a meke-meke, a tribal gathering. As the University was jointly owned by nine island nations (Vanua Atu, Samoa, Western Samoa, etc.) this traditional festival was colourful and varied. Much spear waving and dancing took place, with the men in grass skirts and the women attired in bark-cloth with traditional brown and black designs printed in it.
I visited the University of Kazan' in one of the Russian Republics of what was then the Soviet Union in Autumn when the weather was cold and snow had already fallen. The room in which Lenin had attended lessons was preserved exactly as it had been in his time and one could sit in his usual place--the third row of benches, on the extreme left (prophetically, perhaps?)--and absorb the atmosphere. The University was dusty and overheated, and it had more of an eighteenth-century feeling to it than one connected with October 1917. When I was there it had only two computers, both IBMs, which were jealously guarded in a small room.
I have known many other universities and all of them have had some essential characteristic that made them unique and particular, sometimes in a pleasant manner, sometimes in one that was difficult for an outsider to accept.

The last days of the Soviet Union

It was 1990 and the Soviet Union was crumbling. I had the privilege of seeing it during its last days, when old conventions were falling by the wayside but the new market orthodoxy had not yet caught Russia in its iron grip.
When I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport, I smiled at the passport official, a young lad who appeared to be about 17 years old, and he smiled back, involuntary, as he was obviously quite unused to people smiling at him. This exchange of joy was premature, as my luggage failed to arrive from Milan. Outside, the temperature was minus one degree and my coat was in my suitcase. Friends rallied around and managed to lend me a jacket that someone had acquired on a visit to Jugoslavia. It kept off the snow but did not keep out the cold.
The University Hotel was a classic piece of Soviet architecture. The rooms were Spartan and old fashioned, the lift creaked alarmingly, and the red plush in the lobby appeared to be suffering from mange. The dining room was spectacular. On acres of dark brown carpet stood 120 dark brown tables and 480 brown chairs. The ceiling was dark brown and there was a huge, furry brown wall hanging. When food arrived, it too was dark brown; presumably soup and stewed meat, it was difficult to tell. It was served with cavalier disdain by a group of young girls who evidently suffered from a chronic superiority complex. Upstairs, such was the soundproofing that when I sang Neapolitan songs in the shower I was applauded by other guests along the whole corridor
We retrieved my luggage a day later from the airport. As there was a shortage of cars (in fact, there was a shortage of everything), I had to borrow a 47-seater bus--and of course its driver--to get to the airport and back. We celebrated by eating in one of those exclusive restaurants near the Bolshoi Ballet where they served sturgeon and wild mushrooms--but to foreigners only.
There is a sort of brotherhood among academics and it soon had me invited to the house of two of the senior fraternity, Professor Sergei Myagkov and his wife. They lived in a tiny apartment at the end of one of the metro lines, an opportunity to find out that, although the central metro stations were very grandiose, the periphery was much like any other urban jungle, a wilderness of concrete and graffiti. The Myagkovs did not have enough space for two desks, and so Sergei gallantly let his wife have the study and did his work in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with a board strapped around his neck to serve as a desk. He was fortunately a man blessed with a keen sense of relativism and an equally strong sense of humour. He had great need of both. We sat down in their tiny dining room and they served us delicious food, but they had collected most of the vegetables and fruit in the woods around Moscow, for there was little to buy in the shops. It was an emotional celebration, as they gave us what they could and we appreciated it all the more for the depth of their generosity when they had so little to give.
One evening we set off for Kazan', the capital of the Tatar Russian Soviet Republic. The station was pleasingly oriental in design and the Tatarstan Express stood at the main platform with the steam heating hissing gently in its ornate, royal blue coaches. We bedded down in a 'soft' class sleeping compartment and the resident Babushka brought us tea in Delftware china cups from the samovar at the end of the corridor.
In the Soviet Union people married very early, often when they were barely out of childhood. This was apparent on a Saturday morning in Moscow when the weddings were being celebrated and the couples lined up on the heights above the city for photographs. They were all teenagers and probably had little idea what they were getting into. Our guide, Alsu Fedorovnaya, was one of those who had married absurdly young. She was a raven-haired beauty, at 24 more ravishing than she must have been at 16. But clearly there were pacts of conjugal non-interference, for on the train she disappeared for the night into the same sleeping compartment as Kostia Petrovski, a muscular Tatar, himself married to a girl in Moscow and the father of a small brood of children.
The railway line to Kazan' is anything but well-engineered. In fact the journey, only a few hundred kilometres, takes between ten and 13 hours and the train never exceeds 80 km/hr. There is constant jolting and grinding as it sways and rumbles over the poor quality track. Night came before we had reached the outer suburbs of Moscow and we slept fitfully, as the swaying, irregular rhythm of the train was anything but lulling. In the morning we pulled up the blind to see the pine trees of the Ural Mountains outside covered in crisp, white snow, which twinkled in the moonlight. We crossed the River Volga at dawn and it was an unforgettable sight: Mother Russia, freezing and brilliant in the pearly light; sentries with bayonets fixed to their rifles stamping up and down the bridge to warm their feet, their breath forming clouds in the still, cold air.
Kazan' gave a kaleidoscope of impressions: ancient wooden housing subsiding into the muddy land on the banks of the Volga, the Grecian splendour of the Opera House, the green onion domes of the churches, many of them abandoned. The Orthodox crosses on the cathedral glinted in the pale golden light of autumn. The lanes and fields next to the river looked exactly like something out of a 19th century Impressionist painting; indeed, the resemblance was uncanny. I visited an Orthodox wedding (somewhat insensitively, as my presence irritated the congregation, but I was too curious to leave). The sonorous and impassioned singing and clouds of incense wafting among the icons were unforgettable.
One morning I sat in Lenin's seat at the University of Kazan', a place with a remarkable 18th century atmosphere and ferociously tropical central heating. In the afternoon I was taken for a walk in the Taiga. There amid the majestic pines was an ancient monastery, used as a reform school for juvenile delinquents, whose shaved heads appeared over the parapet and stared angrily at me as I passed. Looking back, the towers and onion domes of this complex were outlined against the pale sky in the failing light of dusk, surrounded by a frame of pine trees. As darkness fell the taiga appeared to be suffused with infinite mystery and age-old dignity.
We ate dinner one night at Kostia Petrovski's parents house in the new quarters of Kazan', a cubist wilderness of Soviet new-age buildings. Like most other Soviet families they lived in large numbers in minimal space. In deference to we foreign guests they all retreated behind a screen in the corner of the room and refused to come out when we begged them to come and enjoy the food with us. In fact, we had paid for the food: it had to be purchased on the black market and only we had the funds to do that. The Georgian-style profiteroles in confectioner's custard were particularly excellent.
In the auditorium of the Lenin Museum, then still just about dedicated to Vladimir Illich Ulianov, I stood up and gave my speech to 360 delegates from the assorted parliaments of the Soviet Union. Having studied the language I managed to recite some of it in Russian, which they seemed to like. I was, however, somewhat hampered by the loss of my lecture notes, which I had used as toilet paper earlier in the day, as that particular commodity was practically non existent in Soviet conveniences. I was also disconcerted by the sudden departure of my translator in the middle of my speech. Tatars generally do not deserve their reputation for harshness and ruthlessness. She was a beautiful, black-haired girl with a soulful expression and large, dark eyes that positively oozed tenderness. But she was useless as a translator and on being stood down from the podium she disappeared for ever out of my life, before I could finish my speech and say a tender goodbye to her.
One morning we visited the Kazan' department store, but in its cavernous halls there was very little to buy. I came out with a Russian Soviet flag and a Tatar fez, and that was all. On walking around Kazan' at lunchtime we soon found that it was useless to look for a place to eat. Restaurants were open, but they did not have any food in them. As the satirical magazine Krokodyl wrote, the very best that was on offer was Soviet multiple choice: meat and potatoes or potatoes and meat.
Yet the Tatarstan hotel had a restaurant that we were invited to in the evening. Dinner started early and their was a band and dancing. The band played in a variety of styles, New York rap, Latin American rhythms, bossa nova, and so on, but with the words to the songs rigorously in Tatar, a Turkic language that sounded vaguely familiar from my time spent doing fieldwork in central Anatolia.
On the other side of the room lurked a bevy of Soviet academic women. They were massive battleships and gave the impression of being as strong as oxen. In short, they were the intellectual equivalent of the typical Soviet road-mending crew, which invariably consisted of beefy, muscular women. As soon as the music started they launched out, grabbed the nearest man, and steered him around the room with his hands firmly grasped in their huge fists. One in particular, a tall, powerfully built lady in a powder-blue dress, so scared me that I hid under the table.
The dinner consisted of an endless alternation of bottles of Georgian champagne and Stolichnaya vodka. About half way through the evening a bun was served together with a plate of watery broth, but that was all. At a certain point I went back to my room in the hotel to relieve myself and when I came back to the restaurant I witnessed a curious scene. In Kazan', a city of a million inhabitants, good quality alcohol was only to be had at the Tatarstan Restaurant. The only people who were allowed entrance to that establishment were foreigners, military officers, members of the Communist Party and people who were wealthy enough to bribe someone substantially. The entrance door was manned by an old war veteran, his chest covered with medals, who put a metal clamp on the handles to stop the hoi polloi from coming in.
But it was the end of the Soviet era. As I stood outside an Ordinary Citizen came up. He was dressed in standard issue Ordinary Citizen clothes: the regulation black leather jacket and baggy jeans with turn-ups (did they, I wonder, have a central stores where they issued Ordinary Citizens with these garments?). Angrily he rattled at the door, which was clamped shut. Suddenly the door flew open and there was the manageress, elegant in a navy-blue tailleur and awe-inspiring in her rage. Her foot was about level with the Ordinary Citizen's stomach and without hesitating she drew it back and delivered him a massive kick. He clutched his torso, retched and staggered back down the steps, whereupon two ex-KGB operatives delivered a well-aimed professional right-hook that laid him out until an ambulance could cart him away to hospital. I felt very sorry for him, but I must admit that since then I have dined out many times on the story of how the manageress of the restaurant kicked the customer in the stomach.
There were many things in the Tatar Republic that had not changed for at least a century. Perhaps one of these was the exploitation of ordinary people and a contempt for their welfare. The signs were everywhere. They were particularly apparent when we visited a mosque (the Tatars are predominantly Muslim). We were introduced to a young nuclear physicist who had been at Chernobyl on the fateful day of the meltdown four years previously. He was obviously dying of radiation sickness. It was a salutary and chastening experience to talk to him. Despite his obvious poor health he had received no official help whatsoever, not even with evacuation from the Ukraine. Only his brethren at the mosque had helped him, and there was little that they could do.
So we returned to Moscow and eventually I arrived back in Italy. I carried with me many memories. The mists coming off the Moscow River and swirling through the graveyards on its banks, fingers of vapour wrapping themselves around the Orthodox crosses and caressing the walls of the monasteries with their stacked towers and polished onion domes. Tatar music blaring out of the radios of dilapidated Lada taxis in Kazan'. The snow on the cart-tracks and sliding off the fir trees in the Urals, the reformatory-monastery dark against the indigo sky in the taiga. The sense of tragedy and exploitation in the people we spoke to. The dumpling-shaped Babushkas, with their hair tied up in spotted scarves, who ruled with rods of iron the landings and corridors of public buildings and hotels.
On one occasion in the Moscow University hotel we were sitting at a table, alone in the deserted restaurant when two friends of Kostia Petrovski came in. As there were 477 empty chairs, Kostia fetched two of them over so that the couple could sit at our table. But this broke the unwritten rule: only the waitresses were allowed to move the furniture and they marched out and snatched the chairs back. Kostia was furious at this absurdity and grabbed them again. There followed a protracted tug of war. Kostia pulled for all his might, his face black with rage. But although he was muscular enough to win prizes at weight-lifting, he lost the contest against these Soviet waitresses and was humiliated. So perhaps it is clear who really ran the mighty Soviet Union, in its day the world's second superpower. Even if we ignore the battle of the sexes, the different between capitalism and Soviet socialism was manifestly clear: under capitalism, man exploited man, while under Soviet socialism, it was the other way around.