That’ll be just A in Milan, now, I guess

I’m not the only one but, still, I feel guilty. It’s been 10 days since my last post! And, as a result, traffic is down. Not that traffic is so important, but it’s nice to know that there are people that read my blog (and I’m talking about the regular readers, here).

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He’s sitting 2 inches from the television, watching ‘Stuck on you’. And reading Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. It’s Saturday afternoon.

Where did you get the book?, I ask, knowing he has no books.

It’s not the latest one, he retorts.

If only I had asked the question - Is that the latest one? - maybe I would have had the answer I wanted.

“….it was the multicultural aspects of the developed [countries] that fostered this mutual distancing [state from state]. By creating a culture in which the international media and entertainment industry had more influence than the national political class of any state, the states of the twenty-first century had also created a powerful weapon that destabilised other societies and, even in their own societies, brought forth violent reactions that sought to restore the cultural values that were apparently being cast away. International communications at first made famines in faraway countries moving and tragic; eventually, these events seemed tiresome and inevitable. International communications initially made the prosperity and liberty of the developed states alluring; eventually these qualities came to seem vulgar and addictive. The national political class was powerless to either lead a state’s people toward compassion or insulate a state from cultural invasion. The fragmentation that then occurred in these developed states was only an inner reflection of the alienation their peoples felt toward the outer, foreign world; the contact with other cultures had reinforced the intractability of cultural differences and the felt need to avoid the frustration and danger of such encounters. “

This book is great but just so heavy. It’s taken me a year to read and, if I’m honest, I couldn’t really tell you the salient points. Sometimes I had to re-read pages over two or three times as I found I was reading it without actually taking anything in! It’s not a light read. However, it is interesting. As a speaker, the guy is fantastic and his lectures must be some of the most interesting.

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Don’t you just hate it when you have busy-bodies as friends. You know the sort. They come into your house and surreptitiously wipe their finger over a table to see if the house has been dusted properly. Or, maybe, as they sit down to dinner they pick up the glass and peer through it towards the light, looking for fingerprints or greasy smears.

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Persistence is the key here, in Italy and, in particular, Milan. This is true especially when it comes to bureaucracy. It comes down to the big, age-old problem of ‘taking responsibility’.

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