Scribbles of an Endeavouring Spectator

It's time for rebranding!

Yes, I have decided to change the name of my blog, and so it is goodbye On the Right Side of the Street and hello Scribbles of an Endeavouring Spectator. Why the change? You may or may not (but I hope you do) ask.

Well, I think, the previous title was too mono-dimensional, and the political terms Right and Left are becoming so entwined nowadays that sometimes you cannot differentiate a Dave from a Gordon, really, can you do it? So, even though I am still identifying myself with most of the ideas belonging to the political Right, I don't want my blog to become a monolithic point of view, and I think the new title is a better reflection of my way of dealing with the world I live in.

I chose the word scribble because diary is too Anne Frank (or call girl) and notes too office. Scribble instead is a very understated way to say that I write things, and understatement is a very British trait, and although I am not British, I have lived so long in this country that I have acquired the worst habit of Britishness, but I still don't and never will add milk to my tea!

…But, why endeavouring? Why spectator?

The writer, or blogger, is a spectator of his times and reports what he sees, like a nosy neighbour watching out of the window to see what’s going on out in the street. But I don’t just want to observe, I also want to raise my opinion about the world I live in, and hopefully out there, in the big wide world, someone is interested in what I have to say.

Endeavouring and spectator are also two words in conflict, one active and one passive, one in process and the other static, and I like contradictions, I am a walking and writing one.

So, to summarise, I scribble away while being a spectator in a world I endeavour to understand and change a little.

I also hope to make enough money one day so I can make a living by writing my blog (preferably from some beach hut in Thailand)… donations are welcome!

Life, death and Saint Anthony

Sometimes life is a matter of minutes… and death too.

Last Saturday, I was with my wife in our kitchen, cleaning, when all of a sudden we heard like a rain of something hard falling near us, on the roof at first I thought, or maybe outside; somewhere anyhow very close to us.

Both of us didn’t know what to think for a moment. We froze, like if what had happened did not make sense. I bizarrely thought one of the blinds in the living room or in the bedrooms, recently put up, had collapsed, and I ran into every room to check, but the blinds were all there.

My wife was in the meantime outside in the garden, looking puzzled at some stones, egg size, approximately twenty of them, scattered all around.

The flat where we live is a two-floor maisonette in a building of three floors, and our kitchen is an extension covering part of our garden. The rocks could have only had fallen from one of the two floors above us, and we both looked above to the higher floors for some understanding, but nobody came out.

It was absurd. Nothing had really happened but everything could have. Often we eat outside during the weekend when it is sunny. The rocks could have fallen on us when we were outside, and just one of them falling two sets of floors above on anybody’s head would have been enough for a one way ticket to the afterlife.

My wife and I were damn lucky to have been inside at that moment. I was actually expecting a guy to come around my place to buy some CDs racks that afternoon, and later on a masseur was visiting us. The guy arrived no more than five minutes after the rocks fell into the garden, and the masseur twenty minutes later.

Nobody came out from the higher floors, so I went up the communal stairs, still shaken, trying to find an explanation. I knocked at the neighbour directly above us a few times, but nobody was inside.
I then walked to the next floor above and knocked at the flat door. A man came out, and I asked him if he had seen any rocks flying into my garden. He said no, but then, speaking with his wife and daughter next to him, he told me they had an owl, and this owl did some trouble in their patio, and somehow the stones must have had fallen from the vase into my garden.

I was still shaken, and I don’t know why I was so calm. The scene looks to me so absurd. The three of them were there acting like the accident had almost nothing to do with them, and I was there, unhurt, but with the feeling that these three bloody stupid idiots could have had terminated my life or the life of the people close to me, or any people at the wrong time in my garden.

The thing is, they looked so pathetic and dumb, that I couldn’t even hate them.

When I came back to the flat, I told my wife the conversation with the neighbours and hugged her. I was immensely pleased the rocks had not hurt us.

While in the kitchen, I looked at the statue of Saint Francis of Assisi standing on top of the door and felt a true believer once again, and then, looking at the Italian calendar (where every day has a patron saint) I was reminded that Saturday 13th June is the day of Saint Anthony of Padua. The saint was born in Portugal but spent the last part of his life in Padua, near my town, and it is probably the most famous saint in the region. Funnily enough, a month ago, in Madeira, I had bought two statues of the saint: one for me and one for my grandmother.

Saint Anthony’s statue is in my living room now.

I don’t know if the rocks had fallen by coincidence on his day (out of all the days in the year), and if the saint had made a miracle or not, but I’d like to think that he did, and so I thanked him for that.

I also think, I should probably buy a net to put over my garden.

Election times

I am always surprised how elections are run in the UK. There is not much of a campaign of any party going on, apart for some leaflets sprouting up a couple of days before the actual election, and then, the most bizarre thing is that the election day is on a Thursday!

That’s an odd thing to me, being an Italian. In my homeland, elections are generally always been on a Sunday and half a day on a Monday. This means Italians have one full day when the vast majority of them are not working and, being the polling stations are not far from where they live, this makes it rather impossible for them not to go to vote. Even when Sunday happens to be a sunny day, and most Italians have spent all day at the sea or in the mountains, they still have time to go to the polling station on Monday morning.

Running the elections on Thursday means that, if you are working (shame on you if you do!) you either go early in the morning or late in the evening. Some people, who commute a long way to go to work, often end up not voting because they are too busy or stuck in traffic. I wonder: does the British government encourage people who do not work to go to vote?

In this year’s European election I could have voted either for the UK or Italian representatives and, although I wanted to vote for the UK ones, I sent my request too late and I ended up in the Italian register.

The election for the British was, as usual, on a Thursday. The Italians residents in the UK instead had a half a day to vote on Friday plus the whole of Saturday. So, the whole nation of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had one working day to go to vote, and the Italian community in this country (minus of course the Italians who have decided to vote for the UK representatives) had one and a half day. I can only guess the Italians had more time to vote because the polling stations were not as many as for the British.

My polling station was in Lewisham Town Hall, and checking the bus planner route from Elephant and Castle, it occurred to me that it would had taken me more than one hour to go there, so I decided to go by bike. I can’t believe I did that, 40 minutes cycling each way, and getting lost uncountable times on the way just to cast my vote!

My wife was waiting for me at home, rather happy to see me finally back in time for dinner. She finds elections rather amusing, being that she has never voted in her entire life. She is from Russia, and she left her homeland when she was nineteen.

She never minds though.

After Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin and now Putin, democracy for Russians is still an alien word.