Pica Pica

You need hunger and thirst to go.

Filatiera as about 15 minutes in the car away. It would be quicker, but it’s on the other side of the Magra river. The town’s Festival of Hunger and Thirst went on for four evenings. Basically everybody eats and drinks in the town square and off a couple of streets to this side. Very relaxed.

I thought that as I have already written about some of the problems that go along with moving to a new place, it was only right to put a few pictures on to show something of just what a great place this is. Nothing complicated. Just a couple of the animals sitting around:

Nougat and Tashi sitting around – as you do

Now if you look through the “Juliet” window just past Tashi, you see the vines and vegetable allotments in the middle of the village.

The view to the north

Turning a little to the right, you see “our” pond, where rugs and the like are washed:

Village pond

You must go to the other side of the house look down to get a view from above of the lower terrace and the meadow:

Lower terrace and meadow

It really is as good as it looks!

I rather doubt if I will ever have time (and I doubt if you would be interested) to describe the whole process of getting here, so here are just a few pictures to give an impression.
First of all, here is the container being filled up in Sydney with the possessions, some of which are dear to our hearts, and some of which we will wonder why on earth we bothered bringing:

Where will it all go when it's here?

Along with the two terriers, Tashi the cat gave every sign of having taken the journey well. At any rate, she saw that it would be good to make the best of it:

Things could be worse – I suppose!

Surprisingly, the weather was wet and grey when we arrived, and had been for some time. Here is the village, looking wet and grey:

Village looking wet and grey

A slightly different view, showing the village washing trough. In terms of the map the trough is “ours”, but it would be a false move to restrict access:

The trough

Then, with the sun shining, I started to scythe the “meadow”. Vegetable growing is taken very seriously here, and I will be unable to rival many of the village plots, partly because of experience (which I lack), but above all because of time: some of these allotments are looked after by retired people whose hobby, and indeed life, revolves around the hoeing, weeding, seeding, supporting, twice-daily watering and everything else involved in looking after a top class plot. In any case, it is too late in the year to start much here, but it does need to be kept under control:

Working on the meadow

Oh, really finall, the skyline from the terrace:

Skyline

What to say? There are hunting dogs here.

The one really bad thing if that happened on the journey was that Nougat - the greyhound - became extremely ill.  Because he, as an ex-racer, was very used to being transported in crates, and because he has such a relaxed personality, he was the last one we expected any trouble from.  We actually now believe that the crate he was given was not big enough for him.  When he arrived in Milan, the vet thought that he was urinating blood, and was only willing to release him to come to Pontremoli on the condition that he went straight into an animal hospital (not an ordinary vet).  As it happened, the animal transport people in Milan found a clinic in Pontremoli on the Internet, and it turned out to be extremely good.  So a lot of tests were carried out, and the poor thing had to spend quite a few days and several nights with intravenous drips and on oxygen. When he was allowed home he had to have the cannula kept bandaged in his leg ready for the next treatment, but he was so exhausted, disoriented and stressed that I’m not sure that he noticed. First of all the vets found that there was no blood in his urine, or at least no blood cells, and it was thought that his kidneys were processing blood cells and passing out the haemoglobin. Further tests showed that the red colour wasn’t haemoglobin either, but myoglobin from his exhausted muscles; they came to the conclusion that he had stood and trembled for most or all of the journey.  Without expert treatment there is no doubt he would have died, so we are very happy that he is now well on the mend.

The crate he was in was indeed large:

…and the price we paid for his transport was not insignificant. I am sure that the pet transport people who shipped him off acted in good faith, but what is clear is that if you ever want to transport a greyhound a long way you really, really must make sure that his crate is large enough for him not only to stand up and lie down, but also to turn around easily. The greyhound has to be able to turn round, otherwise he cannot go through the awkward process a greyhound needs to get down on to the floor. This will make it even more expensive, of course, and if the price is too much then he or she should stay home. Anything else is cruel and dangerous, sadly.

So this is the first post from Tuscany.  The last month was hard work!  Getting the Internet connection to work at all took time, although now that it is working it seems to be very good.  Getting the computer here took even more time, largely because it was difficult to make contact here.  My Vodafone from Australia has, for mysterious reasons, failed to “top up”, and the shipping agent had given the people here in Italy the number of our fixed line back in Sydney.  So the Italian authorities (perhaps quite rightly) had reason to wonder whether we were real people, or just dummy identities being used to pick up contraband of some description.  Anyway, it arrived in the end, and – apart from a little screwdriver operation inside to put the CPU fan back on – it seems to be OK. 

If you thought the Germans were keen on bureaucracy, come to Italy.  Just as an example, take the number of our house.  It does not have one. The bank manager was shocked, and felt sure that the bank would not attempt to post a bank card without a house number.  The post office, however, was adamant that the houses here have no numbers, so we gave it a name (“Casa Leslie”), and then he was happy.  But we urgently need to buy a car.  In Italy, you can’t buy a car without, amongst other things, a residence permit, though it might be possible to get away with a copy of the application for a residence permit.  So at the council (“commune”) offices I presented the pile of papers that they requested to apply for a residence permit.  So far, so good, but the registrar cannot accept the application without a proper address, and a proper address includes the number of the house.  He tells us that in an office upstairs we can obtain it.  With a couple of visits over two or three days to the office upstairs it is explained that there are no house numbers, but the planning officer will visit on Monday and invent some.  He will then inform our surveyor, who will inform us, so that we can apply for the residence permit.  We are still waiting.  A copy of the application for the residence permit is also needed to clear the shipment through customs when it arrives, so hopefully something will be done before too long.

Update to this story: on Monday, we heard nothing. On Tuesday we tried to get hold of people but couldn’t. On Wednesday there was a public holiday. On Thursday our helpful estate agent, Lois, got on to the surveyor and the council to discover that nothing did happen on Monday, but the person concerned has now gone on holiday and will not be back till next Monday. I think that Lois spoke to them a little firmly, as we have now been told that someone will be out tomorrow to assign numbers. I have a suspicion (now why would that be?) that this will not happen early enough for the council worker to dream up numbers, for him to contact the surveyor, for the surveyor to contact us in time for us to get down to the council offices (again) and tell the man in the registry office downstairs what the man in the planning office upstairs gave us for a number, so that the man in the registry office downstairs will now accept our application for a residence permit, give us a receipt for our application, and allow us to buy a car and also make the applications we need to receive the goods and chattels that are coming by sea.

When I have a bit more time I will write more about what has happened so far – in particular, I want to comment on the risks of transporting a greyhound.  But for now, here is a picture to “set the scene” – the red arrow points to the house, as you might guess.

Yes, things have been very slow here. I’ve been preparing to move across the world again, and the move is now due to happen in the next few days. I should resurface in the “land of the moon”, Lunigiana, the northern tip of Tuscany, in one or two weeks time, and I hope that things will liven up then.

This is the coda to our visit to the Opera Bar. The management had been sufficiently disturbed by our experience on that occasion that they sent us a voucher for $100! The other day we saw a couple of visitors to Sydney, which was the last leg of their half-world cruise.  We decided to take them (voucher in back pocket) to the Opera Bar, and the experience was just as it should be.  Good atmosphere, extraordinarily good view and acceptably good food.  Oh yes, good service too.  Yes, we would go there again, and I felt that we owed it to the management to say so.

A finance spokesman who can’t tell millions from billions – good grief!

See it on youtube.

I hold no brief for Oliver Stone, I find those who would deny the Jewish holocaust to be stupid to the point of evil, and I am no moral relativist.

Nevertheless, Dvir Abramovich’s rant in the SMH is surely missing the point. He quotes Oliver Stone as saying, with reference to Hitler, Stalin and Mao:

“You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate.”

Abramovich then goes on to ask:

“So let us understand: The director of films such as Wall Street and Platoon wants to empathise with Hitler, and thinks the mass murderer was an easy scapegoat who needs to be put in context?”

Well, yes, if that’s what Stone wants, I support him. Empathy is (I quote the OED) “The power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.” It is vital that we attempt to do so.

What is the alternative? We might want to rest with Abramovich’s simple view that “When you have killed millions as Hitler did, you are going to be judged as bad and be vilified”. I would add that both Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao were involved in even more deaths, but the point is that none of these people acts in a vacuum; they do not spring out of nowhere as self-existent, singular generators of evil. They come into the world as babies, grow up in societies and operate in contexts. If we don’t empathise, if we make no effort to understand, then we will maintain the conditions that give them form.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if these people were “just” incomprehensibly evil! We could then just kill them, and all would be well! Let’s kill the evil bad guys! No need to worry about why they came to be like that, no need to care about the oppressed groups like Chinese or Russian peasants, Irish peasants, Palestinians, Jews, or about manipulation by the “military-industrial-financial complex”… Kill a few evil guys, and everything will be hunky-dory!

I recently came across a famous quote from Solzhenitsyn:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”