dead birds and a worm turning

It’s not often I can say I’ve done a ‘first’ but I have today and I’ve really surprised myself. I don’t know how many times I’ve read blogs that express opinions that I totally disagree with, sadly they probably outnumber the ones I’ve empathised with but I accept that we all have different views, I never comment, I just click back and away and leave it. Today on Multipy I read the most absurd blog that made me so angry that suddenly the cowardly polite worm in me not only turned but got quite savage. In a heartbeat I left a comment that expressed a view totally opposite to that of the writer and her other commenters, and fiddle dee dee it was the most cathartic thing I have done in a long time. It really doesn’t matter who it was and what it was about but she is on my contacts list and I’m sitting here wondering why on earth I should bother. I’m all for celebrating difference but I sometimes think social blogging causes me a lot of subconscious stress because of how much and how often I self censor. I hope this silly woman really takes offence at what I’ve said. I’m not even prepared to debate the issue, I am so heartily sick of being ‘accepting’ and ‘understanding’ and ‘tolerant’. I’m actually a very strong willed, strongly principled, strongly opinioned woman and the strain of being nice all the time is driving me round the bend. I realise I love this blog far more than my Multiply page, I could care less about some of the commenters I get  there ( not all, there are a few I do care about) because it’s all a self-feeding carousel, but I really appreciate and respect anyone who takes the time to come and comment here.

I had a lovely surprise yesterday. A note from the postman told me a ‘voluminous’ parcel was awaiting me at the post office. After indulging in a few hopeful fantasies - had I in some comatose moment entered a competition and won at least a new divan, if not a car? Had some unknown benefactor sent me their life’s collection of books? Did I have an internet stalker who reads everything I write and has nothing better to do in life than make all my wishes come true? 500 tablecloths? 4 ton of novelty yarn? Prada shoes? No, of course not, but what a treat it was anyway. My uncle and aunt had sent me a book of David Hockney posters that they found in their local charity shop - what a bargain, it’s the loveliest book and contains many reproductions that I have never seen. I have a few blank and accusingly white canvases hanging around the house, I think I might have a Hockney Homage session and try to imitate the Master so not only is this a lovely book to sit and look at, it’s inspiring and motivating too. I love you P and L.

I’m also thinking about giving up smoking again. I am like those people who blame everything awful in their lives on the fact that they have a big nose and how cosmetic surgery would change their destiny. I tend to think that everything negative in my life and myself stems from my smoking. If I stop I now imagine that I will somehow morph into a superfit, 10 years younger looking, content and yet dynamic person - if I could be as strong willed about this as I am about other things I could beat this addiction, but really it’s my nemesis. Only a heavy smoker knows about the demon voice in the head that takes over when one is trying to quit - the patches, the gum, the herbal stinkers, none of them work- what I need is the Exorcist to stop me impaling myself on a pack of Mulboro Lights and speaking in vile tongues, especially on social blogging networks.

Goodbye January I hate you……

Thank god January is nearly done with, I loathe it to bits and wish it could be wiped from the calender. I really should just go to bed on New Years Eve and not get up till February 1st.

As soon as I had commited to virtual print my big cathartic blow about Italian politics and life in general I was over it. I have lost the drift of latest developments and had to check on BBC world to get the latest news, as news programmes here aren’t to be relied on and I’ve been glued to digital terrestrial anyway. We are waiting on a decision - whether to go to the polls now, which is what Berlusconi and a few others want because they want to capitalise on what they must perceive as the publics stupidity, cynically assuming that everyone will vote for the ‘other’ side; or whether to form a caretaker government representing all parties ( what all 25+ of them??) which will tackle electoral reform so that we don’t end up with the same casino as last time. The President of Italy ( yes we have one of those as well) is in meetings with the major political leaders  and again I ask myself why. Napolitano is the President, why doesn’t he decide what to do instead of consulting all these people who have their own agendas? Well, that’s what we are waiting on anyway.

On a personal front we had a bit of a disaster Monday. I turned the TV on and it was really dark across the top two thirds of the screen. OK we have a flat LCD screen and I had previously read on the net that they have tricky bulbs in them that dim and die and cost a  lot of money to replace. On Monday I read a ton of forums and was convinced that this was our problem. I rang the 24 hour a day, 365 days a year LG hotline ( makers of our tv) and no-one was available, haha, so we instead called out an engineer. He said either the convergence or the bulb, the convergence can be fixed fairly easily but, here’s the rub, if it’s the bulb we need a new screen. Why mince words, he means a new TV. Now what do I do? I’ve been reading everywhere that the bulbs can be replaced, albeit at great expense and some difficulty, but the engineer told me they cannot because they aren’t ‘accessible’ So, do I shut up about this and accept what they say? Pfffft.  I need to stop railing against perceived cons in this country, just because it’s happened so many times in the past, doesn’t mean to say everyone is a cowboy, right? They have taken the TV away for tests and this lead to some good fortune, Stef went and got our little old one back from his Vile Nephew. It seemed so tiny and strange in place of the other, but I got it all set up ok and the picture is excellent, which makes me think our newer one might have been on the blink for sometime. We have only had the LG for about 3 years and it’s Stef’s most beloved object. I don’t want to think about the worse case scenario so I won’t, not today, fiddle dee dee.

The sun is out today and if I stand at the back door  with the sun full on me, I can really feel the heat - elsewhere and it’s a little chilly. It’s making me feel more hopeful though and my thoughts are turning to our holiday in Sicily. I still haven’t booked the flights, I still can’t find an easy way of getting from this island to that one without going via the UK first.  With so many cheap flights coming in and out of Alghero and Olbia I just can’t bring myself to accept that this won’t be possible, so the search continues………..

Crisis - personal and political

It seems that we have some kind of political crisis at least twice a week, and votes of confidence/no confidence have been a regular feature of our current government’s administration. Today I fear we shall see Prof Prodi sent home and I feel physically ill at the thought of Berlusconi crowing all over the news programmes. My feeling is that democracy in this country is just a sham, all smoke and mirrors. If this government goes down there will be a general election. But where is the democracy when there are no choices or alternatives. Who will someone like me vote for? I voted for this government and I think had Prodi been given a chance he could have done something for this country. As it was, not being aligned to a party of his own, all he had to back him were a bunch of turncoats, who as soon as they had ridden in on his gravy train, turned around and stabbed him in the eye. Propaganda on the Berlusconi controlled TV channels has undermined the situation here to such an extent that to an outsider like myself, it borders on anarchy.

I”m thinking now that Berlusconi will gather up a coalition of wanna be but let’s not admit it fascists and be back in the house before you can say Mussolini. I feel like I’m living in a right wing dictatorship that took a short holiday. To think that scum like Lega Nord are going to be worming their way back into having a say is shocking and frightening. One wonders what Garibaldi would be thinking if he could see these people..’Why did I bother’ springs to mind.

On a personal level, I’m finding it harder and harder to live here. I’m looking at ways in which I can get a bolt hole in the UK, I’m seriously thinking about buying a cheap mobile home there , it’s that bad. It isn’t just the politics, it’s the general ugliness of life here. I can no longer buy anything in a shop without thinking I’m being cheated. I don’t take any pleasure in the small things I used to enjoy because I now see through them. We were driving to the market yesterday and I found myself remembering how much I used to love going there, pottering amongst the stalls, enjoying the sights and smells - I so wished I could recapture that feeling but I knew that it existed only in another time frame, one of roseate naivety. I can hardly bear to look at the news on TV or read the paper, there are days when there is nothing but a constant flow of stupid murders motivated by either vendetta or greed, and inhumane treatment of children, old people and animals.

I know it’s probably the same wherever one lives, I certainly have to remember that I left the UK for reasons other than good weather; I think I’m just waking up and finding that not only is the honeymoon over, I always knew that would happen of course but what worries me is that the entire love affair might be over too.

Eroticism and Literary Adaptation

Yesterday evening I caught the second part of last year’s BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre. I was sorry to have missed the first because the BBC have always produced such fabulous adaptations of classic literature, but what I did see has bought up a dilemma which I am no closer to working through. Is it right or acceptable to sex up adaptations of literature that contain only very subtle intimations of sexuality because of the social and literary contexts of the period in which they were written?

What is sexing up? Is it dumbing down? When the most recent version of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightly was released it blew up a storm of controversy mainly because a scene was added in to show confirmation of the love between Darcy and Elizabeth, they meet and kiss in a field at dawn. The BBC version starring Colin Firth also blew up the same thing because we see Darcy and Elizabeth kiss at the end. Austen omits any intimacy in her book which is a device that she often uses - we don’t see her lover’s more intimate moments, they often occur off-scene as it were, she respects their privacy and draws a veil, even over marriage proposals ( as in Persuasion). In P and P Darcy and Elizabeth come to their ‘agreement’ during a very public walk with other members of the family, so a big display of kissing and groping would have been socially unacceptable.

The Keira Knightly P and P was objectionable on many counts. I found the representation of the Bennet family as scruffy and dirty really unacceptable, and to show a male acquaintance enter the bedroom of a female guest was beyond absurd. The kissing was allegedly included for ‘The American Market’ - yes that old chestnut again, because the film was made primarily to make big bucks and was released in the US before it was released in the UK ; allegedly the producers were rather fearful of the UK reaction and while there were old luddites like me who loathed the whole thing, there were others that liked to see a bit of snogging.

The current BBC version of Jane Eyre was also sexed up and I have to admit that the interaction between Eyre and Rochester was very erotic indeed and to give credit, a subtle eroticism which wasn’t offensive even to me and was acceptable within the framework of the story. When the marriage fails to happen we know that Rochester becomes demented and Eyre finally lets him in to her room because she is concerned about his mental state. The scene is shown as a flashback ( not very well signposted and confusing to anyone who doesn’t know the book) with the couple laying on her bed, him leaning over her caressing her neck while proposing that they could run away to Europe and live together platonically. The fact that sexual desire is exuding from every pore in both their bodies demonstrates to the viewer that this would never happen - it’s that knowledge that drives Jane to run from Rochester, living in sin is totally unacceptable to her morally and she feels that Rochester, in time, may cease to respect her. However, that doesn’t come across clearly here - is it avoided because the contemporary view point is so morally different?

This is a real problem with adaptations. From our viewpoint today it’s not easy to relate to the strict morals of another era, nor the absolute social conventions. Nor it seems, is it easy for people to understand that there is a powerful sexual attraction between two people without
having it proven to them with a physical demonstration. This is an strange dichotomy because the viewer of tv/cinema today is a far more sophisticated reader of visual symbols than he/she was even 10 years ago. I find it hard to believe that the viewer cannot tell Darcy and Elizabeth are in love without seeing a big full on french kiss and part of the proof of that comes with the Jane Eyre adaptation. I was surprised while reading comments on IMDB how people picked up on another very slight but erotic moment - near the resolution of the story, Eyre and Rochester are reunited and discussing the future. She teases him a little but finally accepts his marriage proposal. This time however, it’s Jane on top, they kiss and the camera slowly pans down - Rochester’s hand slides down Eyre’s back to below her waistline and we see his leg lock over hers to keep her in position. No skirts raised, no underwear ripped off, no rumpy pumpy, just this sexy little caress which actually isn’t unacceptable on reading the passage where the conversation takes place, of course in the book nothing is spelt out, all we know is that Jane is sitting on his knee and that there are caresses.My immediate reaction was to bridle, but then I had to acknowledge that I really liked the erotic nature of it and it didn’t take anything away from the story. I did have other issues with the adaptation, as usual the writers original words don’t sit well with new dialogue particularly if that dialogue expresses something that would never have exisited in the original. In this scene for example Rochester starts with the Bronte words’ Jane, I want a wife’, then continues to say ‘ I want a wife in my bed every night and in the day too if I choose..’ Eeerk! See, we can get that from Eyre’s writing without the word ‘bed’ ever appearing. I was also sorry to see that two of the great dramatic moments of the novel - Rochesters first proposal to Jane, and Jane ‘hearing’ Rochester’s voice calling to her totally lacked drama.

I’m debating this with myself because part of me reacts very strongly against classic literature being messed with, I see it as corruption, dumbing down for the lowest possible denominator and offensive to the author’s memory. On the other hand I am prepared to recognise and accept that as far as classic lit is concerned I am a total unbending luddite who refuses to accept innovation and change. I’m working on that!

On a final note I’m thinking about Emma Thompsons adaptation of another Austen - Sense and Sensibility. Thompson wrote the screenplay and takes the lead role. She is such a gifted writer and actress that not only did she strengthen the weak parts of Austen’s story but she delivered Austen dialogue more naturally and effortlessly than any other performer that I’ve seen. And to take that further catch her and Brannagh in Much Ado About Nothing, they ’speak’ Shakespeare as if it’s the language they were born to, wonderful stuff.

New Year New Beginnings New Ends

Well I’ve finally closed down my 360 page - not deleted it, I can’t do that because I use the mail account for everything, but I have just left a basic profile up and even closed the QC’s. Why? Because it is time. I’ve been faffing back and forth between 360 and Multiply and I realised today when discussing 360 over on Lina’s page that I don’t really want anything new at the moment, especially as offered by Yahoo. I can imagine the entire transition cock up without having to witness it thanks and the people I keep up with and who keep up with me are all on Multiply or Facebook or I have them on my blogroll here.  I feel much the same about Multiply now as I used to about 360, a lot of the time it’s a bit of a chore but there again it’s nice to fall back on for some fun. But dividing my time between that and 360 was to the detriment of this blog, which I have really neglected. I still don’t feel that I can say a lot of the things I want to say and I have to make some decisions about this. Either I take this link off of my Multiply page or I just get a bit more real on Multiply too. I sometimes look at what I write and wonder if people just think I’m a fluffy housewife with a Jane Austen fixation. I seem to have lost something of who I am in the process of social blogging, surprisingly it’s only on Facebook that I really feel relaxed.

Another reason that I had to get away from 360 was that I was getting increasingly annoyed about plagiarism. I noticed on one blog that the writer used something I had mentioned to write a poem of all things and on another someone had listed most of my interests and favourite films, this isn’t a coincidence, I know this person is an internet sponge without an original idea in their head who reads everything their contacts write and then reappropriates it( sp?)  Then there was Lina’s Art Sunday which was taken over by someone else who didn’t even have the grace to contact her and ask if it was ok to do that - and people kicking off as if Art Sunday was a public service or 360 module rather than part of Lina’s blog content.

And then there were the Astronuts, those misguided twats who kept banging on about how we should all help Yahoo by clicking on the ads on our pages and how we should be eternally grateful for the wonderful opportunity of having a 360 page and not even having to pay for it. I don’t pay for this, or Multiply or Facebook or Spout or Flixter or Shelfari, or my Google or Hotmail accounts, or Skype, Aol, or Google chat, or Firefox, or anything else and hey guess what, they all work fine. These same people then started the most infantile and embarrassing flame war, yes a flame war, despite the fact that we are all supposed to be over 18 on 360, and one of these guys was a lawyer ( the type who put in his blast a big woo hoo that he was dealing with a bankruptcy case, yeah that type of arsehole) These guys went into multiorgasm mode when Matt Warmbottom or whatever his name is contacted them, bragging about having his phone number, it was hilarious. This Mr W also got round to me eventually, what a farce - a proforma email proposing we speak on the phone about 360 ( get someone else to blow your trumpet mate) and then when I saved him the price of a call to Italy by emailing my thoughts, I got back another proforma email, exactly the same one we all got, which did not address one single comment in mine. Pffft.

What has surprised me is how hard I found it last year to let it go. I kept fussing over it and putting it away, then taking it out and dusting it off, what was I thinking? If Yahoo’s next all singing all dancing profile  is  the best thing since the Monica Belluci bra ads then I’ll take a look butI’m not holding my breath on that one. I have this twitchy feeling that they may be up to something with WordPress, the Y groups blog has already moved here and apparently some of the exec’s have moved here too. I don’t wish to be mean but I hope fervently this platform isn’t going to be deluged shortly with people asking where to put their Yahoo avatars because frankly my dear, I might just have to tell them.

is it December yet?

One of the nice things about living in Sardinia is that we don’t get that Christmas overkill. The shops are only now beginning to stock Christmassy stuff and starting to look festive even though it isn’t December yet. I’ve been used to seeing and hearing Christmas everywhere from September onwards and in some areas of Bristol, people start decorating the outside of their houses straight after Bonfire Night on November 5th. The first year I was here I don’t remember seeing anything very festive until a couple of weeks before Christmas ; for example there are no Christmas lights up in the streets yet and no Christmas Tree near the public gardens, they will all come later in the month.

The effect of this is just the opposite to what you might imagine. I feel far more in the festive mood here than I ever did in the UK. By the time the big day arrived, I was so sick of it all, the crowds in the shops, that bloody Slade song, the pressure to buy ridiculous amounts of food. Another reason why I enjoy Christmas more these days is because I can afford to. That doesn’t mean I can go out and buy as an Olympic sport, we aren’t rich, not even well off, but we aren’t in debt and we get by as long as we don’t go crazy. My memories of Christmas during my first marriage are all about the sick feeling I would get for weeks before hand because I knew we just couldn’t afford Christmas without a lot of worry and being horribly broke for a couple of months afterwards. And I mean broke. I would usually have to wait right up until Christmas Eve to buy presents as that’s when my paycheck arrived. Caught up in the whole ghastly financial nightmare, most of it would go that same day. And those of you who are paid monthly know just how long January can feel when you have already blown more than you can afford. I hated it all. I hated the fact that my husband and I could never afford to buy each other anything, let alone spend a Christmas together in our own home - you know the first time we did that was when we had seperated! We had to wait that long - 23 years- to be free of family pressure. This is one of those small hidden disadvantages to not having kids - nobody would accept that we had a valid reason not to be somewhere else on Christmas day - why would we want to be on our own at home? Added to that, my ex’s family were all teachers - they all had three weeks holiday so spending three days with the family was no sacrifice. The fact that we had only three days to spend together was insignificant.I can’t bear thinking about it, even as I write I’m finding it really distressing. I loved my ex dearly and while they say ( and in part I agree) that money can’t buy you happiness or love, it sure can go a long way to making things easier. Looking back now, it needn’t have been that way, but there are so many if’s to that. If he hadn’t had this problem with alcohol, if we had been more sensible, if we had been firmer, if we had been more adult…but I can’t go back and change the past, all I can do is learn from it. I suppose that’s something we all bring to second marriages, knowledge of the mistakes we made in the first one. I have a different relationship with S, different problems, different pleasures. There are times when I want to scream, times when I think wtf was I thinking, but then I look back and realise how lucky I am now.

We can look forward to a nice Christmas this year - we have been invited to his cousins and we will probably go but there isn’t any pressure on us. We will be buying presents but nobody goes mad here, small thoughtful gifts are a pleasure to shop for. We shop for food nearly every day anyway so there is no need to do that awful supermarket run for half a ton of mixed nuts that never get eaten, piles of fruit, all those boxes of chocolates ( which for some reason we never opened before Christmas Day then had to scoff the lot) food enough to feed the 5,000 without requiring a miracle - oh and yes that reminds me, we do think about the religious side of the holiday here and what we are actually celebrating.

One thing I’ve always loved doing is decorating the tree - I can’t wait to get those tree lights out- and a couple of things I shall be missing as always this year - Christmas Crackers and those gift stockings for the cats. I guess that means I’ll be wrapping up tins of Whiskas again this year.

TV news

The STB is still looming large in my life, the novelty is about to wear off any minute now, so I’m making the most of it. First up, I’ve spent a ludicrous amount of time this week watching BBC World- just because it’s in English. I’m now officially all newsed out, there are after all only a limited amount of times that I want to watch the same news reports  and besides I’m breaking my golden rule of not having the TV on during the day.

Secondly, this box gives me the function to watch some TV shows in the original language. I say some, because it all seems a bit arbitrary at the moment. Poirot yes, Veronica Mars and Scooby Doo no. And films not at all so far. Boh! I’m reminded  - for lo I can remember this far back - when colour TV first came out and we would go to our neighbours and watch any old rubbish as long as it was in colour. I seem to remember my love of snooker stemming from this time. At the moment I’m watching anything non Italian to see if I can have it in English. This week CSI Miami and NY are being screened on Wednesday and Friday, so last night we saw them on the Box for the first time in the original language. Oh. And. Dear.

Now all of our imported TV shows are dubbed, and think of that what you may, I have to say that the Italians have dubbing down to a fine art. I don’t have a problem with this at all, although I must admit that understanding the language has a lot to do with that because you tend to rely much less on looking at what  people are doing with their mouths to understand what they are saying.  I have a tremendous respect for the actors who do this work, it really is a specialised skill.Sometimes the actors sound very like the original actors - the dubbed Tom Cruise and George Clooney for example sound exactly like themselves as they would speaking Italian. And sometimes they are nothing like.

The voice that I know as that of Callie in CSI Miami is deep and rich. It’s an unusual voice and gives her character a certain maturity and playfulness. It’s totally her. Except that it isn’t because when we heard her real voice last night we almost switched back to Italian. There is nothing wrong with that light lilting drawl but it was such a different sound that she almost took on a new physical presence. I was really disconcerted, totally thrown. I couldn’t recognise her character at all. The worst was yet to come though. You know I love David Caruso in this show.  The Horatio I know has a gentle, soft, inquisitive voice that creates an aura of enigmatic calm and empathy.  The real David Caruso came across as something else entirely.  It seemed that  every line he delivered was like he just walked onto the set, delivered a kind of punchline and walked off again. Pretentious and at times bordering on comic, the absurdity of his performance really started to grate on me and ruined the entire show.

I suppose the moral of this is to be careful what you wish for. I had longed to see CSI in the original language, now I have and I’m sorry.  It remains to  be seen whether I’ll give in to temptation and try to adjust or just go back to the Italian again. A strange dilemma that I didn’t expect.

This week I’ve also been getting into winter mode  -  our home is wonderful in the summer, but an ice box in the winter and I cannot bear to be cold. I get so sick of people saying to me ‘Oh but you’re British, you must be used to the cold’. Er, yes,  outside, but not in the house! This time of year always makes me whingy and bad tempered so I’ve started another blog over on Blogger especially for little downtime rants and odd bits and peices because sometimes I just want to write a line or two and that way I can hopefully concentrate on other things elsewhere. It’s nice and dark and doomy looking and because I haven’t put that much thought into it, I’ll probably really enjoy keeping it up. Who doesn’t just love a good moan now and again?

rca, jack, stb and then what?

“Connect one end of RCA cable to the RCA jack on the back of the STB and the other end to a RCA jack on your TV”

 

 

And that’s all there is to it. I’m really sorry to be following one black art blog with another but for goodness sake, who writes these User Manuals? No-one as stupid as me, that’s for sure. It took me 15 minutes to work out that STB was the Set Top Box that I was trying to install. And why? Sardinia is in the advance party for the conversion to Digital Terrestrial TV and from Friday two of our channels, the state owned Rai 2 and Mediaset’s Rete 4 will only be available on DTV, so we needed the decoder - yes we’ll refer to that as the STB from now on. The people in the shop assured us this would be easy to install, they did mention we might need a feminine jack but that we probably had one already… my first big mistake was not asking why we might need that , but onward and downward we go.

 

And actually it wasn’t that difficult to install, per se. The problem is that the manual assumed I would only have one devicebesides the TV to connect up - either a VHS player or a DVD. I have both and that’s where the trouble started. I had a choice of stereo on the DVD but not on the TV or VHS, or the other way around. At the moment it’s the other way around and no stereo for DVD’s. This, I hasten to add is due to my ineptitude with the big scart swapping nightmare, not to do with the equipment. I get so confused! I can’t keep track of what I’ve tried and what I’ve put where. And it’s so difficult putting it all together. We have a Flatron lcd TV which at least means it’s easier to work on, but it’s so bloody fiddly getting the scarts to connect. I did at least find my feminine jack and realise what I had to do with it .

The other problem is my dearest significant other. He just stands there doing that critical silence thing  and then when something is in the - ahem - experimental stage he starts yelling ‘what have you done, what did you touch, what are you going to do now?’, like I’ve just accidently set off a stray atomic bomb or squirted  nerve gas over Europe. I have to grit my teeth and tell him everything is under control rather than  ‘ I’m now getting a large hammer which first I shall use on this f*cking TV and shortly afterwards on your head’.  No wonder I need to blog.

 

 

 

Last night I watched Platoon and I have to say even without the stereo it was stunning. Tonight we plan to watch Apocalypse Now Redux which I recently bought and come hell or high water there will be dolby stereo. I figure what I have to do is disconnect the VHS from the STB, connect the DVD to the STB and maybe swap……..oh never mind, this is boring enough..

let’s get to ramming…

Expect a lot of tearing of hair and raiment being rent asunder tomorrow. The 2GB of ram that I ordered earlier in the week has arrived, I’ll be picking it up in the morning and then I, yes I, will be installing it. The woman that scorned compressed air in favour of the vacuum cleaner when removing dust from the inside of the computer. The woman who can’t insert a tiny weeny bit of css code on her multiply theme without screwing the entire page up. The woman who checked out Yahoo pipes and sat there open mouthed for 5 minutes then slunk away. I have all the computer know how of a gnat but this has never deterred me from giving it my best shot. Apparently to insert one of these sticks of ram requires about 30lb of pressure. I’m not entirely sure how much pressure that is. The same as opening a jar of pickles? Ripping the wrapper off a new DVD? Belabouring someone about the head with a blunt object? Pulling along a 747 attached to a bit of string with my teeth?

There’ll be tears before bedtime then.

Update 

It all went very well, much easier than I thought, the hardest thing was getting the sticks out of the packets and keeping the cat out of the computer’s innards. In fact I’d say I have an advantage in that I have small hands, it was pretty fiddly slipping the sticks under all the wiring and whatever all that stuff is that hangs in there. Not much pressure required, just enough for it to click in, not enough to break anyone’s windpipe . I think I’m all that now, heh.

I’m sorry Signora, my mother isn’t home…

We had a letter today reminding us that we haven’t paid our phone bill. This is now a regular occurence because I once registered on Telecom Italia’s website and they now do the conto online, email me to say it’s due - but they no longer send a proper paper bill. The thing is I tend to read the mail and then forget all about it, so a couple of months ago I tried to opt out of this arrangement.The pop up screen wouldn’t work - until today. Fingers crossed that in future we will get a nice paper bill and with it sat in front of me, hopefully I’ll remember to pay it. Telecom Italia ring us probably once a week to try and sell us something, or worse, get us to take advantage of a free offer which isn’t free at all. Like the time someone rang and offered me a cordless phone. She told me it would cost us nothing. Talking on the phone in another language is probably the ultimate test of language skills. With no body language to watch and no facial expressions, it can be very tricky.Obviously anyone talking to me knows immediately I’m not Italian and I have had to deal with some very rude and impatient people who have gotten exasperated when I have asked them to repeat something. And they are trying to sell me something, for goodness sake. I was very interested in this phone but because I’m not the account holder, the woman rang back the next day to speak to Stef. He was very suspicious of this offer and after some debate it turned out that the phone was ‘free’ in the respect that we didn’t need to pay for it for three months, but the overall cost was €100 —pffft, I can pick one up for €15 here in town. This saleswoman just profited from the fact that I wasn’t Italian and was economical with the truth.

My other nemesis is Sky. I admit we are probably the only people in Alghero without Sky TV, but I am adamant that I am not paying to watch crap when I can watch it for free - thanks. Sky ring virtually every other day. I’m not kidding. When I tell them I’m not interested they run the emotional gamut from astonishment, shock and finally to disbelief. How can you not be interested Signora? You watch TV don”t you Signora? What is there to not be interested in Signora?? And I can’t tell you how much the insistence on punctuating ever other word with this obsequious use of Signora really gets to me. It goes beyond politeness into a kind of sarcasm, a kind of defence and attack mechanism, It infuriates me. I was talking to a friend about this and she just laughed. She had some good advice. When ever a salesperson phones she tells them her mother isn’t home and they will have to ring back. She is my age and she doesn’t put on a voice, she just says it deadpan. Her husband does the same. She pointed out that I have an even better defence, which I have now adopted. I say, in heavily accented italian, that I’m sorry, I’m English and I don’t speak Italian. If they continue - asking if someone else is there, for example, I say I’m sorry I don’t understand.And then they hang up. But. They then try again the next day until one of us finally talks to them and says NO.

Sometimes I think I should just forget completely the phone bill: A day without Sky would be lovely.