Our son’s insertion

September 28, 2006 · Filed Under Italy, Milan, My son · 2 Comments

Insertion? Insertion into what, I hear you ask. Although it may sound painful, and in a sense it is, our son is not suffering physically, you will be pleased to note. The insertion, or rather ‘inserimento’ is a system employed by certain day nurseries and nursery schools here. In simple terms it is a period that allows young children to become used to being at school.

This may sound like a good idea, and it probably is for kids who have passed the last 3 years in the company of their mothers, but for our little lad, who has been attending some form of nursery since he was about 8 months old, it is not that necessary. Indeed, he was suffering during the initial part of the process which involved his being at school for 1 and a quarter hours, from 10 to 11:15 over a period of a week and a half. Initially one of us had to be there, and then we did not need to be there, but still had to collect him at 11:15. Now he is doing a 9:30 to 1:45 session, alone, well, without a parent. He’s doing fine and from Monday he can even stay until 3:45. It may sound like a long day, but was he does mainly is play, with toys and other children and he loves it, being a sociable little soul.

The only other problem with this ‘ever-so-gentle’ entry into nursery school is that someone has to interrupt their work day to pick the little fellow up. Sometimes this someone is me, other times it is a babysitter. A friend of ours, who also has a young son actually raised the subject of this requirement to pick up kids with someone at his son’s nursery school, because he was finding that it was disrupting his work day. The ‘educator’, as they now call themselves, looked at him blankly, as if to say ‘Problem, what problem?’. You see it is assumed here that either the child’s grandparents will collect the child from school or a babysitter will. If both parents work, very common nowadays, and they do not have grandparents nearby or cannot afford the cost of a babysitter, they have a bit of a problem. Does the Italian system take this into account? Does it fiddle. If affected, you just have to live with it. It seems inconceivable to the powers that be that families do not have, strong healthy, grandparents on call. I find this a bit odd coming from a country where most people live miles away from their grandparents, but it’s not at all odd here.

The truth of the matter is that if a woman wants to stay at home, and fewer do nowadays I believe, then her partner needs to be earning a damned high salary, but not everyone has jobs which bring in enough to allow a parent to stay at home. In Italy this is just not taken into account. No wonder the birth rate is so low here, they do nothing to encourage having kids, apart for the Roman Catholic church which persists in its opposition to the use of contraception and thus, indirectly, attempts to influnence the birth rate, although Italians have been ignoring the RC church’s silly rule for a long time now.

If you are going to encourage people to have children, then you need to give them an infrastructure that allows them to do this. Politicians, incidentally, are paid more than enough to allow their wives to stay at home, or pay a full time nanny. This is possibly why their feet are nowhere near the ground.

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Tags: Italian, Italy

Milan and some photos of Italy

September 28, 2006 · Filed Under Italy, Milan · 11 Comments

It is a lovely day today. Warm and sunny, but a little cloudy. I needed some books so I hopped on the bus and headed for the centre. While walking from the castle along Via Dante towards the centre I noticed the outdoor exhibition of photographs, I saw the same photos, I think, last year, but they were worth looking at again. These images have all been taken from the air and show some well and not so well known areas of Italy. Living in Milan, it is easy to forget just how beautiful a country I am lucky to live in. These images reminded me of this fact and made me feel happier too.

The images show landscapes which have been enhanced by man, or rather by Italians. I don’t know exactly why, but Italians seem to have the wonderful ability of being able to ‘blend’ buildings in with their surroundings, to the extent that the environment is enhanced. Of course, this is not always the case and much modern architecture does not sit well in the magnificence of the Italian countryside, however more often than not older villages and towns seem to have been designed to compliment their environments, not just to fill space with accommodation. Now, I say ‘designed’, but this may not be the case, it’s probably a case of the Italian way of seeing things which tends to be more in harmony with the natural environment than that of the old English habit of constructing masses of anonymous terraced houses just about anywhere and everywhere, for example. While there is a lot to be said for planning, there is also a lot to be say for fitting buildings in with their surroundings. Using materials which are light in colour seems to make a great difference too. The dull greyness of English stone can be depressing to say the least.

If you happen to find yourself in Milan over the next few days, then take a walk along Via Dante, as I mentioned before it runs from the castle towards the centre. I do think you will like the photos, with descriptions in English. They may even give you a few ideas for planning a tour of this spectacular country.

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Tags: Italian, Italy

End - a short story

September 28, 2006 · Filed Under Writing · Comment

Jake put the book he had just been flicking nostalgically through down. How things had changed he thought. He had been looking through one of those large so called coffee table books containing few words, but many large glossy photographs. This particular volume was called ‘Images of rural England’ and the photographs it proudly displayed showed a varied collection of lush green undulating hills, leafy woodland, peacefully intimate valleys and various idyllic villages. The cover of this tome had seen better days, which was not surprising to Jake who knew that it was well over one hundred years old.

It was the year 2150 and Jake, his wife and young child lived, or rather survived in a solar powered habitation. Inside the habitation unit a constant temperature of 25°c was maintained, which was just as well as average daytime temperatures in that area regularly exceeded 50°C. And during the night the temperature could fall to below -30°.

Jake’s home was located in an area which had once been featured in the book he loved to glance through. Fingest, as the village had once been known, now formed a minuscule part of the massive desert which covered the whole of the plant’s surface. In short the Earth’s climate had changed, radically. Fresh water could only be extracted by means of wells which penetrated more than 2000 meters into the ground. The ground through which the wells reached was hard arid desert and with the exception of a limited number of extremely resistant desert species there were no plants. The animals too had all but died out. Fish and aquatic mammals were nothing but a distant memory for the limited and dwindling number of humans who remained on the forlorn planet. And now the water supply which had managed to keep Jake and a small group of others going for the last five years was drying up. Planet Earth was dying.

It all started in the latter half of the 21st century. Man had been exploiting his environment to the maximum and ignoring the fact that both Polar icecaps were melting. After the oil reserves finally dried up, a new form of energy had been developed to power just about everything on earth. The only trouble was that this new form of energy was not as friendly to the environment as the corporations had had the earth’s populous believe. Despite the widespread adoption of alternative forms of energy the levels of harmful green house gasses had started to, not just increase, but sky-rocket . By 2080 the poles had disappeared completely. No problem claimed the politicians and the corporations. More space for towns and cities, more food can be grown. We do not need polar icecaps they gleefully exhorted. However some scientists noticed that the planet seemed to be orbiting closer to the sun. Inland seas began drying up and the level of the world’s seas and oceans began falling to levels seen while the icecaps were still intact. At this point the scientific community split into two very clear camps. One side held that the shift in the earth’s orbit was no more than something that many planets do from time to time, and yes, they said, temperatures would rise and the climate would change, but it would be nothing that should cause undue worry. The other camp disagreed and claimed to have evidence which proved that the planet was moving closer and closer to the sun. No-one believed the second camp and they were labelled as crackpots.

By 2100 the levels of the earth’s oceans had dropped by thirty metres and people had stopped referring to the crackpots as such ten years before. The planet was on the brink of catastrophe. What had happened? Studies showed that the melting of the icecaps had actually reduced the weight of the planet by a massive amount and this combined with the extraction of oil and other minerals had literally tipped the balance and had increased the effect of the sun’s gravitational pull on the earth. It certainly appeared as though the planet and all the life on it was being slowly and surely dragged into a fiery grave. Several respectable planetologists stated that the new orbit would stabilize and although the climate would change drastically life could still be supported by the planet.

Jake got up and looked out of a smoked glass window. He could see nothing but sandy coloured dust everywhere he looked. How long ago was it, he asking himself. The announcement which he was trying to recall had come 10 years previously and it had been a solemn one. It reported that the latest studies indicated that the earth was moving towards the sun at a constant rate and that by 2170 the planet would become utterly uninhabitable, due partially to the compete absence of moisture in the atmosphere and also to the fact that all water supplies would be exhausted by this date, not to mention extreme levels of heat on the planet’s surface. It was indeed, Jake reflected, a dire situation. He remembered how many millions had died as a result of the evaporation of the planet’s oceans, seas, lakes and rivers. The pointless wars that had been fought over the remaining sources of water that had done nothing to postpone the inevitable, he reflected. He knew that it had been the greenhouse effect that had started the deadly ball rolling and that the blame for the destruction of the planet, Jake knew only too well, could be laid squarely at the foot of humanity, whose greed and short-sightedness had precipitated the planet into this cataclysmic catastrophe.

‘Daddy’, cried his three-year old daughter happily, ‘It’s lunchtime’. Jake’s head dropped, he could not bear thinking about his daughter’s non-existent future. What was he going to go? What could anyone do? The tears started welling up in his eyes and he turned quickly away from his child’s innocent young face.

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