View across the lake from Varano Borghi

Sentimental Journeys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgbKXWcDuOA

Using one of the magic facilities of the telly which I don’t understand, Linda is catching up on a previously aired Channel 4 drama series called Before We Die. I got an old-fashioned look when I asked if it was a musical. So I will have a go at this month’s blog.

In two weeks, I am booked to give a lecture in the city of my birth, Glasgow. It will be nice to visit Glasgow, but in fact I have never really felt that it was my home town. My family left Glasgow when I was pre-school age and I grew up, so to speak, in Fife. I have lived in England for the last forty-two years. However, whenever I have been to Glasgow in recent years, I have enjoyed myself and have always been impressed at this vigorous, characterful and tough-minded city. So we shall see how I get on.

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Last night a very old episode of Rumpole of the Bailey, Rumpole and the Younger Generation, was shown on Talking Pictures Channel on the television. This particular story was set in the 1960’s, written and televised in the late 1970’s, but produced for radio in the 1980’s. I recall when Linda and I were first courting in the late 1980’s, I spent a lot of time driving between my home in Cambridge and Linda’s in North Shields, and listening to the radio versions of Rumpole in the car.

Some of those stories are jolly romps, but this one packed a punch. Rumpole defends a teenage member of the Timson family, a criminal clan for whom he has acted as defending counsel since time immemorial. The story has the theme of keeping it in the family, Following in Father’s Footsteps. Towards the end of the story, when his son Nick rather nervously announces that he is not going to follow his father and study law at university, Horace Rumpole observes, ‘That’s very good indeed! For God’s sake. Let’s stop keeping things in the family,’ and continues, ‘They’re all being born around us all the time. Little Mr Justice Everglades… little Timsons… little Guthrie Featherstones. All being set up to follow in father’s footsteps. No more.‘

That is fine and powerful stuff. And I wonder who was that young man listening to these stories on the stereo as he whizzed up and down the A1? He didn’t depart all that radically from his dad’s job as a maths teacher. If I met him today, what would I think of him?

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I have mentioned before that since 2015 I have been a member of an EU Guidelines Development Group. We used to meet every few months at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Lombardy, before the pandemic. Then, for three years from spring 2020, we only met online. The last meeting before the lockdowns was in February 2020 and the week after my return I was rather perturbed to see on the television news the roadblocks going up around the area I had just visited.

Then we were confined to online meetings, peering at our fellow committee members on laptop screens. But last month, we met again face to face. It was lovely to see the colleagues again, although the group has been depleted by time. We were put up in Varano Borghi, a village in the Italian Lake district, on the edge of the Lago di Comabbio. The meeting lasted two days and most members flew home on the second night. Five of us were left, however, who were leaving on the third morning. Our hotel had an extremely posh restaurant (very expensive and not particularly good) in the main old building and a more rough and ready place across the car park. We had planned to eat in the latter, but they were booked out with a large private party. They sent us to the only other restaurant in the village, the Europa, but when we got there it was closed. So the five of us went back to the place across the car park, where we purchased pizzas to take away and a couple of bottles of Montepulciano, which we consumed in the hotel lobby. This was actually quite good fun.

Then we went to the village’s only bar, which was lovely. In one room it was all old geezers like us, and we could see through a glass door to another room full of young people playing table football, pool and so on, and SMOKING. Apparently that’s allowed in Italy if it is a reserved private party. But anyway, the bar was fun and although bustling, was run with terrific efficiency by one fellow, single-handed. On previous stays, before the pandemic, I have visited there pre-dinner, and if you buy a beer at six in the evening, you get the most delicious assortment of bruschetta and little delicacies to eat with it.

So it ended up being a fun evening, despite the inauspicious start. By the end of the night there were only three diehards left, myself, a breast care nurse who has worked in Cardiff for the past 40 years but is originally from Lochgilphead, and a German radiologist, and a great gentleman, who was a bit of an inspiration for a character in a story I once had published about star-crossed lovers separated by the Berlin Wall going up. It’s in an anthology called Coronamas, excellent value from Amazon. Anyway, at the risk of sounding like a pompous berk, it inspired me to write a poem. I am currently revising it following suggestions from my old trade union colleague David Bleiman, a very successful poet himself, but here is the uncut version.

Varano Borghi, May 2023. Tribute to Lampedusa

The lake is ringed with wooded hills; a town

Slumbers on the far bank, no traffic noise.

The water oscillates, the grebes dive down.

The bulrushes sway with becoming poise.

 

For years and years in fly-blown corridors

We met and did our jobs in Lombardy.

In draughty chambers, meetings took their course,

But in the evenings we were family.

 

We ate and drank like kings in central squares

Of Lake Maggiore towns. Stayed up too late

And woke in hotel rooms with hangovers.

We pressed on with the work in fragile state.

 

And then the wind of plague scattered our souls.

Lives were ruled by wireless, screen and cable.

Three years of headphones, emails, online polls.

But now we eat again at the same table.

 

Green from the rain, Lombardy carries on.

Older and balder, we’re almost strangers.

Still, let’s ignore our age, we’re not yet gone.

“Everything changes and nothing changes”