Cooling things down

We had a storm here in Milan and it took the edge of the incredible heat. I was melting, as usual and even started to do my ‘Rambo’ thing of taking the waistband from my bathrobe and wrapping it round my forehead in an attempt to find some way of soaking up the sweat which literally pours from my forehead.

Today I actually managed to get two thirds of my way to work – a twenty minute bus journey – without sweating profusely, which was great, I can tell you. I saw a temperature gauge, many of the chemists/pharmacies here have them incidentally, and it read a ‘mere’ 29 degrees C, at about 8.45 in the morning. That’s quite cool for Milan in summer.

Even now, at around eleven in the evening things are still reasonable, even though I’ve got the fan wafting coolish air over me, which is still necessary.

I slept last night, or so it would seem, seeing that I felt almost human in the morning, which is more than can be said for how I felt when I got up on Wednesday morning. I think that your average zombie would have appeared more alive than I was. This is not good when you have to stand in front of 15 people you have never seen before and give them the impression that you know what you are on about. By about 11.30 or so on Wednesday I was feeling just about sentient, and may even have given this impression, too. I hope.

That’s the thing about teaching, you cannot just hide yourself in an office when you go to work, you have to be there in front of everybody and able to deal with lots of questions and stuff. In my old office job it was quite easy for me to find myself something quiet to do on theoccasionss that I was not feeling 100%, with teaching, this is just not possible. I have to say, though, that experience does seem to help. And I have plenty of that, luckily.

Tomorrow, yet more storms areforecastt and these may help to break the back of the heat for a while, until it, er, gets back up to steam, which does not, alas, take too long.

Grin, (and sweat) and bear it is what I’ll have to try and do, although it’s difficult not to get a bit tetchy sometimes and my other half gets the brunt of it. I’m not sure whether she appreciates just how much of a torture the heat is for me, she grew up here and for her the heat is very much normal. Hell, she doesn’t even sweat.

I’m still not fullu acclimatised, even after all this time. Phooey.

A messy incident

Last night, in the north of Italy, a group of heavily armed police SWAT team types invaded the house of a guy who had decided to shoot at all and sundry as they passed by. Result: 3 dead and nine injured. This guy, or so it turns out had debts of around 360,000 Euros and was worried about losing his house and belongings. No excuse for taking it out on other innocents. The man also had a number of guns and more than enough ammo to keep himself going for some time (over 2000 rounds). However, despite the killing and all the rest, the Italian press has not yet contained any reports demanding that the capacity of private individuals to possess guns be limited in any way. Oh how different it is here from the UK.

Indeed the politicos here have been encouraging self-defence and the courts have been taking a lenient stance with regard to those who shoot others who were trying to rob/assault them. This, for one thing, would make it difficult for a total ban on guns to be introduced here.

What many do not realise is that it is quite easy for people to get hold of guns here and many professionals and shop owners do possess weapons. Defending yourself is not yet considered the wrong thing to do – provided that you don't go too far. As far as I know, the Italian legal system has not found itself full of claims from burglars who have been injured while going about their dishonest business, unlike back in the UK, where the line between criminal and victim seemed to be becoming ever thinner. Under English law, woe betide you if you should actually, and successfully, try to defend yourself. At least here the law seems to be a little bit better weighted in favour of the victim. Unless that is you happen to be from a rich and powerful family, in which case you can pull enough strings to allow you to get away with murder and the victim may not count at all.

Funny old world.

Rape

It’s not nice and is probably one of the worst crimes anyone can commit, next to being a paedophile that is. However, whereas back in the UK stories about such crimes were quite common place, here in the living museum, such events seemed to be few and far between, or at least did not catch the attention of the media, or, which is more likely, just were not reported. While the last scenario is probable, I have to say that I’ve met a number of women from the UK/Ireland/States that have said that they do not really have any fear of walking home alone late at night. I can understand this feeling, OK, so I am a bloke, but even so, I’ve never seen a punch up in a bar here or had any hassle while walking home from the pub, which is something I can’t say about the UK, where two kind gentlemen once decided to break my nose for me. Considerate fellows. Don’t misunderstand me, punch ups and worse do occur here, only not as often as back home and women, rightly or wrongly, seem to feel safer too.

So, having said all of the above, I’ve got to say that the news this evening contained at least three stories about rapes, and those doing the raping were not Italians, but immigrants. Strange. Does this herald a sad downturn in Italian society? Has the media found out that rapes are newsworthy and will thus sell more ad space (yucky, but sadly very likely true)? Or does someone have it in for immigrants and want to use a few rape and pillage stories to get people to take it out on anyone not obviously Italian? The truth is that I don’t really know. But I’m going to keep an eye on things and see what transpires.

Rape is a serious crime and one which should not be trivialised by the media – heightening awareness and encouraging rape victims to report such incidents is, on the other hand, a good thing. We shall see.

The football season is over…….so news is a bit thin on the ground………

Proud to announce…..

…..that, finally, a real, and Milan based, Italian has left a comment on my blog. This is great – I really wanted some Italians to react in some way to my blatherings. This real Italian has a blog, here, and goes by the name of ‘bread stick’ – OK so he uses the Italian name which is ‘grissino’, which sounds much better than ‘bread stick’ IMHO. So, if you fancy brushing up your Italian, wander over there. I have and I shall.

Monday, Monday.

I started the day by drifting on down to the company I had done some urgent translation work for and seeing as everything was OK, I wandered off to meet up with my other half for lunch, only it was a bit too early for us to go off when I arrived, so I decided to go for a little walk, with the vague intention of looking at palm top/pocket PCs, bad idea. No not looking at palms etc, going for a walk. I came back after about half an our dripping in sweat and feeling drained – which I probably was seeing just about all the liquid in my body had sweated itself out of me.

Eventually we went to lunch in the bar which is part owned by my other half’s boss. She had bresaola with rocket and Parmesan cheese and I had the same, except I had the English roast beef instead of the bresaola. Yummy and all washed down with a cool beer. By the time lunch was over it was about time for me to head (sweat) off for home. Baby is doing ‘summer nursery’ which means the nursery closes at 4 instead of the usual 5.30. I was only babysitting duty so off I went, but not before going home to check mail and change into a pair of shorts, sandals and a lighter shirt.

Having picked up baby, who does not seem to suffer from the heat as much as my good self, we wandered off through the park, to grab an ice cream and, for me, yet another beer and so I could go and have a chat with the lady who runs the stall which we often go to. Lovely lady, she always gives baby a cone and often fills it with a little ice cream. Today she was a little bit unhappy about the dust in the park, which, so she says, gets everywhere. In the past the local council used to pay someone to drive around in a tractor spraying all the paths and this seemed to keep the dust at bay. This year, apparently, budgets are tight, so no water spraying tractor, which means dust everywhere. This is not helped by the fact that most of the paths in the park seem to be made of something which closely resembles sand, with one or two pebbles thrown in for good measure. Anyway, the net result is that if noone sprays water around, dust goes everywhere, making life hall for those who work in the park. I fell sorry for the lady who runs the stall, she is there throughout the summer and is one of the few places that does not sell things at rip-off high prices. The stall is located in front of a well known club called ‘Old Fashion’ (Yes, that’s ‘Fashion’) in case you ever find yourself in need of an ice lolly or a nice cold bottle of water while you are walking around Milan’s Parco Sempione.

Baby got his ice cream and I decided to head for the city centre to have a look for more palms. This was not a brilliant idea, seeing as it was still as hot as a bakers oven, although I managed to get to the shops I wanted to go to and baby was very good indeed. The heat finally got to me and for the trip back I decided to hop on a tram – they have just introduced some new big long and low green super tram things to Milan and they are well air conditioned. They also happen to follow a route which takes me close to my house. Good I thought, I’ll take one of the new trams. Only none of the trams which came were of the modern variety, so I ended up folding the push chair and carrying both it and baby up the 3 or four steps into one of the older non-air conditioned trams. I pity any mothers or others who try to do the same. It is quite obvious that when they built these things they did not think for a second about mothers with pushchairs, prams or disabled people.

When we arrived a nice man help me to get the pushchair down, so I didn’t drop baby, who is not too keen on being dropped, incidentally. Got home and baby cried for the next half an hour or so, demanding, first to go to the playground and then having failed to get his wish, he demanded mummy and could only be placated by being stuck in front of ‘SharkTale’ after the usual trick of playing ‘Rayman’ on the PS2 failed to have its usual effect. Crying babies, biting mozzies and sweat inducing heat do not make me feel a happy bunny.

It is a shame we don’t have a walk in fridge, because I would seriously consider sleeping in it tonight, come to think of it, for the whole summer. That’s it, I’m off to point a fan at the bed and hope, vainly, that I might get some sleep.

An interesting week

In one of the forums I participate in from time to time I go by the user name of ‘Jakofal’, and this is probably pretty accurate. I am a dabbler, have always been a dabbler and probably always will be. I not only like knowing how to do things, but also understanding how to do them well. Lots of things, too many, some may, possibly, and quite rightly, say. Still, I’m getting too advanced in years to start trying to change what I am, so I’ll have to live with it, as will others.

So, why has it been such an interesting week? Well, it started with my redesigning an art dealer’s website, which was fun. I am quite familiar with CSS and the way in which you can apply site wide changes with it is truely magical, although my er, client, probably did not understand just how quickly and conveniently things took place. CSS is good. HTML is no more than the bare bones of a website.

Then on Wednesday evening I was told about a guy who needed a thirty page legal document translating asap. Not having much to do on Thursday and Friday, just as well as it turned out, I decided to accept the challenge and got stuck in. Result: I worked from 9.30am to about 1 am on Thursday, with a brief break between 7.30 and about 9ish to get home and eat something and then worked from 9:30 to 9:30, plus from about 11 in the evening until around 3am on Saturday morning. Yes, as is often the case, things were not as straight forward as they initially appeared. And the 30 pages turned out to be ‘only’ twenty one or so. Anyway, I’ve done it and I’m reasonably happy with the results. I can, at times, be a perfectionist and this slows me down, which is a slight problem for me. Oh and I also taught for 3 hours on Saturday morning and surprisingly seemed to be feeling OK.

Once in a while one can get up to such things, but I think doing it regulary would probably do bad things to my health.

Still very hot and sweaty here. The heat is not giving up: 35°C+ and humidity levels are pushing that to ‘felt’ levels of around 45°C I think. Hot, it is.