The whores of Naples

“the value of a life doesn’t consist of its length but in the use made of it; often people live a long time without living very much. Consider this, my friends, as long as you are on this earth everything depends on your will-power, not on the number of years you have lived.”  – Raffaele Cutolo 

 

Piazza Garibaldi is a seething splutter in the throat of an 80 a day former nightclub hostess long past caring.  An abyss of concrete, noise and fake handbags.  Umbrellas hawked to tourists tumbling from the station, bouncing luggage through puddles, staring at dissolving maps.  This is the agony of birth, the explosion of sound and movement compressed between grey hospital walls and routine efficiency.  This is the inauspicious start to all adventures, the dead weight of the airport lounge, the 3am taxi.  

 

The whores of Naples, or at least the white whores, stand strung out along the top of Corso Giuseppie Garibaldi.  The Carabinieri glide by, occasionally stop to chat.  Diagonally opposite, across the Piazza, the more exotic whores straddle Corso Novara.  Southern Asian, Chinese, transgender.  Here the police are less hospitable.  A girl, maybe Sri Lankan, crouches behind a dumpster as the squad car pauses, bright white skirt and heels mingle with leftovers from a nearby trattoria.  It could be a scene from a film, a tragic life story beautifully realised, a whole existence summed up in one hasty but graceful movement.  She looks terrified, bored.  

 

Beyond Garibaldi lie the claustrophobic streets of the Centro Historico, underground streams bubbling to the surface in well appointed piazzas.  The darting vespas, best pizza on earth, clothes drying on lines strung high above narrow streets.  The tranquillity of the gardens of Santa Chiara, the buzz of Piazza Bellini.  This is the Naples tourists come to see, political slogans daubed on ancient churches, shrines to Maradona, beauty and poverty etched onto every surface, onto every face.  

 

Via Tribunali cuts through it all, emptying, through the basin of Piazza Dante, on to the shop lined via Toledo.  Toledo is the thin vein that connects the two centres, the two worlds, of the city.  To its west lies the densely packed 16^th Century Quartieri Spagnoli, a maze of tiny streets, poverty and alleged Camorra influence.  It sits noisily at the base of middle class, almost Parisian, Vomero, perched on a hill crowned by the Certosa di San Martino.  This is a different city altogether, one of light and space, opportunity and contentment.  It is here, and down on the alternative centre of the waterfront, around Castel Nuovo and Castel dell’Ovo, that the city opens up to reveal itself.  

Vesuvius, invisible amidst the tangled web of streets in the centre, sits quietly across the bay.  Italy’s oldest opera house, the Teatro di San Carlo, sits next door to the uninspiring Palazzo Reale and the sterile expanse of Piazza de Plebiscito.  Beyond lies the alleged glamour and boutiques of Chiaia, and Villa Comunale, the nearest thing to an expanse of green.  Message scrawled padlocks sit like blossoms on the seafront railings of Via Caracciolo looking out towards Capri, watching the waves that washed up Parthenope, that now crash against grafitted rocks. 

Far to the east lies Poggioreale, poverty without beauty.  The largest prison in southern Italy faces off against the shiny new civic centre of the Centro direzionale.  Poggioreale Market, high fashion overspill encased in an old meat market, pulsates in the shadows of a motorway flyover and the carcass of a large modern building abandoned unfinished.  This is the nearest we get to the Gomorrah of Scampia and Secondigliano, though is still a world away.  A place where billboards advertising the Communist Party and latest designer perfumes sit side by side, where the gothic hulk of a decaying tram station basks under the same stupefying sun as the boutiques to the west. 

Naples is full of sound and fury, conversations shouted from the street to the upper floors, the constant beeping of the constant traffic, a city of never ending movement.  Yet beneath it lies something quite different, something quiet and disciplined.  Youths stand around everywhere smoking, talking, leaning against vespas.  Stylish, attractive, superfluous.  ‘Youths’ is not quite right, many are a good deal older.  At home they would crowd into pubs, here they stand on the street, enjoying freedom away from home, away from the parents they still live with.  Civilised, sober, polite.  The sophistication we northern barbarians lack.  Yet there is something infantilised about all this, hanging around on street corners, Ice creams and pastries.  There is something stifling, repetitive, empty, something that reminds me of Summer in Algiers.  Cutolo’s willpower seems largely absent. 

Yet maybe this is just what it means to be surrounded by beauty, by sunshine, the finest food and coffee.  Is the famed ‘backwardness’ of the south, that has so frustrated those with grander ideas further north, just contentment?  What do flags and grand schemes matter when you can sit in the sun with the most sublime coffee devouring fresh Sfogliatelle?  The history of Naples, as of Italy, is much more complex and ambiguous, of course, as the refusal to remove the shiny lettering declaring that the monumental main post office was constructed in the glorious fascist era attests to.  Political posters and slogans abound.  The overall impression though is that Naples is Naples, coffee and Camorra, Ice Cream and churches.   History and ideas wash over it rather than decide its fate.  

Vedi Napoli e poi mouri they say.  As for us, we are the whores of Naples, we take what it offers, we move on.

At the Cenotaph

“…and with the going down of the sun…”

 

Beneath a clear autumnal sky, pierced by cold granite, by silence, by memories.  The glorious dead, eternal, etched into stone, fill the air.  Our silence cannot match theirs, cannot tear steel from flesh, earth from graves long since dug.  The fields remain stained white, row after orderly row of names carved above manicured grass, carefully tended. 

 

The trenches have been filled, the bayonets rust beneath the surface.  Fragments of uniforms lie scattered amongst the poppies.  The machine is silent, it hums no longer.  Its pistons lie still, its oil, its lifeblood, long since drained into the soil.  Yet it will not die.  Its children whirl on beneath desert skies far from here.  Flesh still warm to the touch lies stilled, as it did then, as it will tomorrow.

 

The fallen are remembered, though we never knew them.  They are mere vessels.  They have become tragedy itself, they are its metaphor, its very meaning.  Only four remain, the memory is retreating, decaying.  Autumn leaves once green as Verdun now yellow as Helmand.              

 

The silence falls as the great bell rings out across Whitehall.  The men in green salute, dress uniforms and medals pristine.  They turn as the band subsides, back to the ministry, back to etching new names.  The memorials march across the land unheeded.  The dead will not rise in judgement.  Bullets and missiles will not stop in their tracks and drop from the sky.  We will bury our dead, as will they.  We will call them heroes and carve their names, as will they.

Bigger than Jesus (the famous Mexican dancing midget)

‘The smallest hair throws its shadow’ – Goethe

 

The girl from the island is four inches taller than Queen Victoria.  She is superior on the vertical axis to the tune of two inches when compared to Andrea Corr, the shortest and most iconic of the Corr sisters.  It is worth noting that Yuri Gagarin, Ghandi, Voltaire and Martin Scorsese all clock in at the same height as this most sublime child of Dundalk, who’s last solo single ‘was deceptively upbeat while masking its heavier message about conscription and war’.  I’m not aware of the height of the much maligned Corr brother.  To give some more perspective, the girl from the island is three inches shorter than both Martina Hingis and Audrey Hepburn.  Although, her hair (which owes much to Simon Amstell) may be said to be responsible for a reasonable percentage of her stature.  I think this paints a very clear picture of her appearance.

 

She is a successful actress in the world of musical theatre and was once the third most famous person in Trinidad.  She claims to be very bad at tennis but does an excellent line in self-depreciation, underpinned by a level of self-love rarely seen beyond the locked bedroom of a newly adolescent acne ridden gent confined to live out his formative years in Swindon.  She is rather exceptional (and she knows it).  It would be difficult, and inappropriate, to attempt to tell her back-story through flashback or dream sequence.  It warrants an entire episode, or possibly an ITV4 mini-series going out over three consecutive nights.  It would probably feature a cameo from Martin Clunes as a retired musical Director, now living in a small village in Norfolk, who is persuaded to return to the West End for one last show.  The theme tune would be by Chas and Dave.  I have no idea who would play her.

 

We met in unusual circumstances, in the south west of Mexico.  I’d been called in by the local Mayor to help free his village, which had been held to ransom by the scourge of a particularly viscous ensemble of marauding bandits.  She was there teaching its children to sing, inspiring them to fulfil their true creative potential in the face of opposition from the most austere of Catholic Priests (who she later won round by her sheer charm and who went on to open a successful paragliding business in Hawaii).  Having saved the village through some considerable cunning, I was forced to flee in a hurry after the Mayor took offence at my refusal of his eldest daughter’s hand in marriage.  Our heroine from the island joined me, having similarly been forced to make a hasty exit for reasons too grotesque to dwell upon here.

 

Despite her protestations to the contrary, her wit and intelligence are top-notch and she is far more interesting and entertaining than almost everyone I have ever met.  Her mischievous humour channels all that is best about Les Dennis and the late Bobby Davro, yet has the grace of Monkhouse.  She is to good company what Paul Daniels is to magic.  She is also an exceptionally talented writer and really must do a good deal more with this than her legendary laziness and fondness for a tipple or two before breakfast have hitherto allowed.  She knows this, but like myself prefers to have the potential to do something rather than to actually do it.  This is not out of fear of failure, but a conscious rebellion against the expectations of others underpinned by a very short attention span and suspicion of those who actually achieve anything (haven’t they got better things to do?)  She is, in any case, too busy these days being infatuated, gingerly stepping out once more into those oft charted waters that threaten to rise up even the most morbidly obese and dwarf even the most statuesque.  She will go on to great things whatever may happen.  Andrea Corr is the proud owner of an MBE, I think our friend from the island could do considerably better than that (if she could be arsed).   

 

And so we amble around the Southbank, marvel at Sainte-Chappelle while in Paris after downing two bottles of Champagne at 5am, and engage with the world through a heady mix of childlike wonder and blistering cynicism.  She would end such a musing with some beautifully woven prose, placing such things within a profound statement about the nature of her life and existence.  I can’t compete with that so will end with a non-ironic full stop.  

Fragments of summer’s end

‘Life isn’t about finding yourself.  Life is about creating yourself.’

– George Bernard Shaw

 

Rescued french girl covered in cherries from a boring Euro horde, drowning in Pimms beneath the summer’s last day of sun.  A quick turn through Portobello market, talk of German Doctors and girls from the BBC, as stalls were packed and shoppers morphed into drinkers.  John Cleese, in a Tesco Metro, dressed all in blue, taking an age wandering round but seemingly not actually buying anything.  Everyone studiously ignoring him, in the finest British tradition, while we amassed a picnic under the sterile glare of florescent lights.  There then followed an epic trek to find the nearest park, or rather to fail to find anything that remotely hinted of park in even the most off-hand of gestures.  This took some doing for two people with good senses of direction and an A to Z, but, as with many things, it was the random exploration rather than the destination that mattered.

 

Finally ensconced in a park, somewhere between a game of football that owed much to laconic enthusiasm but little to style or skill and a couple who seemed to flinch whenever they touched each other, yet wandered off into the sunset arm in arm with a quiet air of fatalism.  The world was discussed, beer consumed and the usual mix of play fighting and random photography ensued.  French girl (who lives in a castle and is besotted with a horse) revealed her hatred of geese (apart from her pet one) and an endearing love of squirrels, as the police cars slowly cruised through the park lest it suddenly erupt into insurrection and the rangers office be looted by marauding Radio 4 listeners fuelled by Châteauneuf-du-Pape and sunstroke.  Popcorn and misuse of tea in Wood Green followed.

War and truth

“Peace is such a precious jewel that I would give anything for it but truth’ – Matthew Henry

 

South Ossetia had been an autonomous region within the Soviet State of Georgia since 1921.  When the USSR went pear-shaped the Georgians were keen to establish their new country in their way and not best pleased to have an autonomous region within their midst.  Queue lots of tension, the result of which was South Ossetia declaring itself a Democratic Republic within the USSR, claiming full soverignty for itself in 1990.  The South Ossetians held elections, which were declared illegitimate by the Georgian Government.  The Georgian Government abollished South Ossetia’s autonomous status altogether in December 1990.  Conflict followed, with a ceasfite agreed in 1992 that left South Ossetia still decidedly autonomus. 

 

Now lets leave aside the question of whether successive Georgian Governments came to power through western-backed coups and their far from ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal’ credentials.  Such governments have been pro-western and the USA has been funding, arming and training the Georgian military for years.  Georgia was one of the ‘coalition of the willing’ that invaded Iraq in 2003 and currently has the third largest military presence there.  There are various other things to do with oil pipelines and attempting to establish a US satellite state on Russia’s border, but this isn’t an essay.  Bottom line is that much of this is about the eastward march of NATO, the intent of which is to surround Russia with NATO members whose armed forces have been trained and armed by the west.  This is hardly allowing these countries to determine their own futures.  In the old days this sort of thing was called imperialism.

 

On 7 August 2008 Georgia attacked Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers.  The reasons for this aren’t clear, the Georgians mumble about ‘provocations’ but its difficult to think of anything that might have justified such a disproportionate and indiscriminate response.  Georgia, no doubt, felt able to do this with its newly improved armed forces and on the understanding it had already been promised membership of NATO so was not on its own. 

 

The rest is fairly straightforward.  The Russians counter-invaded, drove out the Georgians (and did a bit more besides).  Their pushes into Georgia proper have largely focussed on occupying the nice shiny new military bases the USA has built for Georgia, presumably with the intent of dismantling them.  The key point, is that Russia has made no attempt to annex South Ossetia or to impose regime change on anyone, but to simply return things to where they stood before the Georgian attack, having made a very strong point in the process.  The parallel here is with the first Gulf War.  Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and its liberation by the west. 

 

How then does all this result in western media and politicians denouncing Russia as some kind of aggressive monster hell-bent on destroying all the principles that govern international relations?  And who has any right to even comment on this?

 

The two key principles of western diplomacy, the sovereignty of the nation state and the right to self-determination, have historically been applied (as all principles are) when it suits national interests to do so.  George Bush denouncing Russia for ‘invading a sovereign neighbouring state’ seems a very strange choice of words following so soon after his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Maybe these were ok because they weren’t his ‘neighbours’?  And why is it that the US supports the ‘self-determination’ of the Kosovans and yet not of the South Ossetians?

 

Since the end of World War Two (why do we measure everything from the end of World War Two?)  The USA has bombed, or invaded, China (1945-46), Korea (1950-53), China (again, 1950-53), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), Guatemala (again, 1960), Belgian Congo (1964), Guatemala (again, 1964), Dominican Republic (1965-66), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Guatemala (for the fourth time, 1967-69), Lebanon (1982-84), Grenada (1983-84), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1981-92), Nicaragua (1981-90), Libya (1986), Iran (1987-88), Libya (1989), Panama (1989-90), Iraq (1991-2002), Somalia (1992-94), Croatia (the Serbs therein, 1994), Bosnia (again the Serbs therein, 1995), Sudan (1998),  Afghanistan (1998), Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001-02) and Iraq (2003 – who know when?).  This list, of course, ignores all the US backed coups in central and south America and wars fought through others, such as Afghanistan in the 1980s.

 

I can’t find a similar list for the USSR/Russia, but to my knowledge it would only include Afghanistan (1979), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Hungary (1948).   You could add Chechnya but it’s hardly a ‘sovereign territory’.  George Orwell appears to have been right all along, the truth isn’t really the point.

Absurdist Olympics

 “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” – Douglas Adams

 

According to Camus, there are three possible responses to the existential conundrum that the universe is utterly meaningless yet we have an inescapable drive to find meaning in it:

 

1. Suicide.

2. A leap of faith that invents meaning.

3. Acceptance.

Ruling out the first two as mere escapism, our erstwhile former goalkeeper concludes that accepting the absurdity of it all is the only viable option. With that acceptance of meaninglessness comes the ultimate recognition of individual freedom, as we are free to create our lives and make our own decisions without appeal to anything else, such as gods or any other bearded nonsense.  Of course, there are limits to individual freedom, and reality is unavoidably a social creation, but the enormity of our own freedom is inescapable.

The question this inevitably leads to is that, given that we possess unlimited freedom to create our own existence and to become whatever we want to be, why on earth do people dedicate their entire existence to seeing if they can run around in circles a bit quicker than someone else or throw a stick a bit further? Why on earth do athletes control and limit all aspects of their life on an ongoing basis in order to do what others would consider only acceptable when a bus is about to pull away or when bothered by a dog to play fetch? Is it just some obsessive-compulsive disorder reinforced by the widespread acceptance of the Olympics? Is the whole thing one giant public outlet for mindless repitition of mundane activities we would otherwise just about tolerate in a child, providing it didn’t get in anybody’s way or stab anyone? Why do we endorse this bizarre festival of these stifled and repressed people, in the same manner that well-to-do Victorians once paid to visit lunatic asylums and mock the inmates as they rocked back and forth in their own faeces?

Is athletics a form of suicide, a negating of life through constant control of diet and activities to the point of barely existing? Is it a leap of faith, a pseudo-religious belief in spiritual reward for physical prowess? Is it actually an act of acceptance through the embracing of even greater absurdity? Or are we going to have to rely on Sartre and put it all down to a severe case of Bad Faith and the flight from the anguish of choice through the extreme limiting of horizons?  Which, I suppose means there are four and not three responses to the existential conundrum. Though, to be fair, I can think of at least eight , which makes me twice as pretentious as Camus and Sartre combined. But at least I’m not an athlete grinning away in a teetotal muesli drenched hell.  I just sit in an office all day excercising my unlimited freedom to do nothing at all.

 

 

The small adventures of summer

‘I find no meaning in the happiness of angels.  I know simply that this sky will last longer than I.’  – Camus, Summer in Algiers.

 

Call from french girl, who loves horses, seeking assistance in certain matters of import.  Trip to Camden to meet a chap with glorious hair, bordering on beehive, and a stripey t-shirt that spoke of Primark and days spent in shade rather than sun.  Bar on the canal, cider to the fore.  Two lads, early twenties, claimed the sofa opposite with an energy out of keeping with the coma inducing heat.  White boy with dreads excitingly explains he’s half Austrian, a question no one asked and to which there is no real response other than a simple ‘well done’ or ‘sorry to hear that’.  It wasn’t clear which was expected.  Shaven headed friend in green t-shirt, with recently purchased multicoloured leggings for German girlfriend, explains that he’s been on ‘ketamine for three days man, mixed with valium and coke’.  By profession an ‘international man of leisure,’ he is a fan of Mr Oscar Wilde.  ‘You have to come out with us tonight, it’ll change your life.  It’s all on dad’s credit card, he bought me a Golf GTI for my 16^th birthday, man.  I do five grams a week.  You have to come out with us.’  Subtle piss taking went so far above their heads it ricocheted off the sun, which was busy sucking away all the air, leaving a stale smell of human sweat and spilt beer in its wake.  We, french girl pretending to be irish yet continuing to speak in a heavy french accent without raising any questions from our two friends, depart, already late for meeting imaginary friends for an imaginary dinner in Chalk Farm.  Delightful impromptu picnic on Primrose Hill follows, watching the lights blink into life across the city and counting the stars as the darkness beckoned them forth.  There were five, one of which may have been an aeroplane.