The Authorities Upset My Dinner

We went to Patricia’s birthday party last Saturday (22nd). Arriving at the Indian restaurant in smart West Jesmond in Newcastle at shortly after 7pm we found that in addition to our party of fifty-odd people the restaurant was full at its remaining tables on two floors and there was a constant milling around the bar area of people coming to collect takeaways. It was busy.

And coming and going through and among this multitude, eight or ten po-faced people in blue onesies and bovver boots with a label on their jacket saying ‘Immigration and Border Control’, repeatedly walking up and down the stairs and asking things at the bar, giving the evening a kind of Gestapo flavour. It turned out that this was not a jolly wheeze organised by Patricia, this was the authorities seeking out illegal immigrants.

Patricia found a moment to ask the owner of the restaurant, whom she knows, about it. They had been there since five o’clock, he said, opening every cupboard and fridge door, wanting to see into everything. It was difficult when the restaurant is so busy and he was having to apologise to everyone for slow service and what is more if they find anyone who is working there illegally he could be fined £10,000. ‘I do my best, but how can I know whether what someone tells me is true? How do I know if papers they show me are genuine or not?’ He seemed to be taking the stance that if you get caught then it’ll be a business expense of the type that is out of your control, a bit like something getting broken and er. . . would he be able to claim tax relief on the expense? Looking this up it seems that he might, though I guess he would have to argue the case. And of course Ahmed the restaurant boss is right, if someone gives him a dodgy NI number he would not find out it was a made up one or one belonging to someone else for quite some time.

Anyway the Gestapo all marched out at around 9pm, having found no Bangladeshis hiding in the fridge, and Ahmed shrugged his shoulders, it seems these days to be one of the things that, if you are of Bangladeshi origin and running a restaurant, you have to put up with periodically.

I felt outraged. There is a French restaurant next door and an Italian one next door to that. Do they get raided? Admittedly French and Italian people can work here without needing anything more than an ID card, but the staff waiting on and in the kitchen – they could just as easily be Australian. Could it be the black faces that are the ones that get hassled?

It may be that the immigration officers raid Indian restaurants because there is a greater chance of finding illegal immigrants there than there would be in an Italian restaurant, but then Ahmed is well known in the area, people will know that he is running a successful business and wants to stay on the side of the law and get on with running his business.

Patricia somewhat disagreed with my rantings, arguing that immigration needs to be controlled and by raiding a restaurant when it is busy they are more likely to find someone as all hands will be on deck. Which may well be so, but British policing has a tradition of being low-key, of using intelligence and focusing on identification of where the problems are, before charging in with truncheons flying (metaphorically). It all seems a bit too foreign for my liking.

And there is the cost-effectiveness. Eight people for four hours on a Saturday night – to arrest at most a cook and a waiter. And in reality no one at all. Taxpayers’ money. There may be a problem of illegal immigration but this sort of behaviour by the authorities gives the distinct impression that whatever problem it is they think they are tackling, it isn’t that one. Or perhaps I am wrong there, perhaps the intention is to give the impression that the problem is being dealt with through visible presence, a kind of sop to what the authorities believe the people want to see, but if it is that then they are misjudging that too, as follows:

In Nazi Germany, when this sort of thing was more widespread, nastier and more extreme, one reads that the ordinary people mostly said: but what could we do? We did not see this most of the time! And curiously this event is an example of that. Apart from Patricia and the staff of the restaurant, I did not find anyone who had seen any immigration officers. They just didn’t notice them! One man, when I pointed out who they were, said he had half registered them and guessed they might be VAT inspectors. He is a retired vet.

If you happen to bump into the Home Secretary, perhaps you would suggest to her that there’s a problem with illegal immigration out there that needs dealing with. A number of them!

Distinct Impression of a Lunatic Asylum

While shopping centres have a car park fit to accommodate a deluge of immigrants from Romania, many hospitals don’t seem to have woken up to the idea yet that people might need to drive to their offerings. I’ve heard a number of stories of hospitals where there isn’t anywhere near enough parking. I have an image of people sitting around in committees and arguing that there’s a perfectly good bus service, we should be encouraging people to travel by public transport. Which is all very well, but in many cases there may be a good bus service to some places, but not everyone who needs to go there lives in those places.

Last week Hilary had an appointment at Lancaster Royal Infirmary – one of the two main hospitals covering north Lancashire and south Cumbria, and Lancaster hospital has a car park that is far, far too small for the number of people who need to use it – people such as us, who cannot go on the bus, for there is no bus. We were aware of this so I drove Hilary and dropped her off while I circled round and round trying to find somewhere to park, among all the other cars doing much the same thing. Eventually, after about half an hour, I found a spot in what I thought was a two-hour parking bay.

Hilary was to have an injection and then a hour-and-a-half wait followed by a scan. She was told it would be a good idea to go and get a cup of coffee in the canteen during the wait time and maybe take a bit of fresh air, but to try and stay calm. Don’t do anything that might make you hurried or stressed. We went outside to find that I had a parking ticket! I had failed to spot, in my near desperation that there would ever be anywhere at all to park, that I had parked in a disabled-only bay. I don’t get too bothered by this, I just pay the fine on the basis that the meaning and purpose of life is to play silly practical jokes upon a person, and there’s no point in trying to fight that. Hilary, by contrast, was brought up middle class. She was brought up to to believe in fairness. That life for the virtuous should be fair. So she gets peeved that the hospital is failing to provide sufficient resources for its patients to attend their appointments.

We went to the hospital canteen where there was a self-service coffee machine. Whatever button I pressed, including one marked ‘expresso’, I seemed to get a coffee with milk in. I called a member of staff over: ‘Everything I press seems to give me a coffee with milk; I want a black coffee’.

‘You have to press ‘Café Creme’, that gives you a black coffee’. And sure enough, it did! Well of course, how silly of me!

We detected five staff on in the canteen, doing what, was not entirely clear. Needs outsourcing, Hilary and I agreed. Or if not then properly managing but then why should a hospital be putting all its management effort into the canteen? But I suppose outsourcing would cause ructions and uproar; destroying a perfectly good service for the sake of faceless profit, the arguers would categorically shout. The Danish pastry I bought to go with my coffee was stale. But I decided we’d had enough aggro this morning, especially for someone who was supposed to be staying calm for health reasons, so I ate it stale.

Walking back to the ‘nuclear medicine’ unit there was a group of people partly blocking the hallway. An elderly woman had fallen and cut her head, there was blood on the floor and all over her hand where she had held it to her head after falling, and people were milling round trying to get her upright and bandaged. The place gave the distinct impression of a lunatic asylum.

Anyway, Hilary had her scan while I watched daytime telly in the reception area, and then we drove home without further incident. And I paid the parking fine, £35, online.

Pigs’ Willies and Hungarians

In Manchester we ate our lunch in a Carluccio’s restaurant, in the banking and commercial district of Manchester called Spinningfields. A special on the menu was Lenticchie e Cotechino, which was subtitled in English a traditional Italian winter dish of Umbrian lentils and Italian sausage. I was a bit unsure about it, as the finest lentils come from the plain of Castelluccio, which is indeed in Umbria, though not the part of Umbria that people tend to go to on their hols. It is a rather particular place, a bleak plain high in the mountains which gets very harsh weather; the people who live there look more like Cumbrian farmers than Italians, all permanently ruddy-cheeked from exposure to the biting winds, and many of the front doors in Castelluccio town – which sits on a steep mound at one end of the plain – have reinforced metal shutters to try and keep the weather at bay a bit. We take visitors there sometimes when they stay at our house in Italy, you drive up and up beyond the tree line and then over a ridge and down into this plain, which is probably still above the tree line – there certainly aren’t any trees there. In the summer the lentils are harvested by what look like gangs of itinerant workers, possibly gypsy. It can be very hot and exposed there in the summer. So just describing the lentils as Umbrian sounded a bit doubtful.

And also cotechino. That is not really a sausage, it is the bits of the pig left over when the village has feasted on all the meatier parts; it is the ears, noses and willies and trotters. If you buy cotechino in a supermarket in Italy it has a picture of a pig’s trotter on the box. It comes as a sort of soft sausage about three inches in diameter and you slice sections off to eat it.

I was delighted to find, having decided to take a risk on the lenticchie e cotechino, that it was Castelluccio lentils (brown lentils that stay firm with cooking) and it was cotechino of the type you see in supermarkets, typically gelatinous, and in among the lentils were some sliced leaves of cavolo nero: black cabbage, which is actually dark green. But I thought: no doubt they can’t describe the dish as Castelluccio lentils with pig’s-trotter pâté and black cabbage as no one will have heard of the lentils and cabbage and they’ll say ooh, I can’t be eating pigs’ trotters, so they wouldn’t order it. They’ve heard of or been to Umbria, and Italian sausage sounds innocuous. These bloody Brits! Knowing what it was and having had it before in Italy, though never with cabbage, I found it very good.

I wondered what the nationality was of the waiter. At first I guessed French because of his somewhat sour countenance and offhand manner, but his accent did not sound French. I puzzled over it during lunch and then it came to me. When the waiter brought the bill I said ‘I’d like to guess at your accent is that OK?’ He looked a bit resigned and uninterested so before he got a chance to refuse I said, ‘I think you’re from Hungary’.

‘Yes!’, he exclaimed, ‘How did you know that?’ He was delighted. Apparently I am the first person ever to have got it right. People ask him if he Slovakian, Austrian, German; all manner of things but no one before has correctly identified his country of birth first time. Suddenly he was very excited and wanted to know how I knew, ‘Do you speak Hungarian? Do you have Hungarian friends?’ I just said that I was as delighted as he was as it’s always nice to be proved right. How could I tell him the real reason? That it was a process of elimination, someone with all the French characteristics of stroppiness and disconnection, but without a French accent. How could I tell him that it was because he was so characteristically humourless?

Hungarians have good reason to be dour; as good if not better reasons than any other nation in Europe. I wished him good fortune and gave him a moderately good tip.

Famous Italian Naked Statue

We were travelling to Manchester to do some shopping. On the busy train on that line – trains on the line into Manchester are always jammed to the doors – sitting behind us, were three young women, one of them said she was thirty. Another of them had a baby, not with her at the time though, that the other two made the mistake of allowing her to get onto the subject of. Mostly the women talked about boyfriends, mothers, brothers and sisters. The girl who had a baby reported that someone – a great aunt or something –- had sent a congratulations card to the hospital when she was having the baby, with a picture of Michelangelo’s David on the front, which she thought was a bit inappropriate, for a new baby, though at least the baby was a boy. Except she did not know that the statue was by Michelangelo, she said some Italian bloke, famous, was it Leonardo? Leonardo da Vinci? ventured one of the others. Yes, that Leonardo, I think it’s that Leonardo.

But then one of them had the bright idea of getting on her tablet computer and typing, at the others’ suggestion, ‘famous italian naked statue’ into Google and in that way they got the information they were looking for, complete with picture which, as one of them said, really, when you see that, where’s the first place you are going to look? Dunnit though? They then got into a discussion about how small the penis is of the boy in the statue, and whether his dick really was that small and if so why Michelangelo chose him as a model.

These three women were not, I would say, intellectuals. They were what you might call ordinary, middle of the road, verging on the uneducated. But their tablet computer helped them along that day, just one little rung further up the knowledge ladder. Young people a low standard of reading? Less so than in the past I think. And a discussion on the motivations and proportions of Michelangelo’s David on the shopping trip? Can’t complain about that for the hopes and future of the world.

The girls then managed to steer their conversation away from penises and onto boyfriends – not a very great leap – and the one who is thirty said she wanted to be sure she had her first child by the age of thirty-five, but her boyfriend – we almost were going to get the size of his penis but she managed to bite her lip – all he seemed to want to do was lounge in front of the telly. You might say well find another boyfriend then, but I can understand that she might think that is not so easy.

Westmorland Names

First names from the Little Cuties 2013 competition, vote for your favourite little cutie, a bonny baby competition in the Westmorland Gazette, 31 October 2013. Interesting to note that very few of the names are shared by more than one baby, and that in contrast to just a few years ago, there are very few what might be called traditional names. I have put an asterisk, *, by the traditional names.

There aren’t too many ‘eee’ names, names ending in the eee sound, not as many as there would have been a few years ago I think. I have marked the eee names with (eee).

Babies
Alianneah	middle names:Jaicey Amanda, surname: Moore
Amber		*
Aria	middle name: Farah surname: Ali
Austin		*
Ava
Ben-William		*
Cameron	surname Batty – that’ll be why they called him Cameron!
Ebony	middle names: Helen Dorothy, surname: Robinson (Ebony is white!)	(eee)
Ellie		(eee)
Emily		* (eee)
Emily		* (eee)
Felix
Finlay		*
Heidi	middle name: Louisa, surname: Knowles	(eee)
Holly-Mae	surname Woods – is it wise, if your surname is Woods, to name your daughter after a tree?	(eee)
Hope
Jacob		*
James		*
Jamie		(eee)
Joseph		*
Kacey	middle names: Hazel Tracy	(eee)
Kyla
Latoyah	surname Wheawall, Latoyah is white English-looking
Leyla
Lian
Lily		* (eee)
Louis		*
Macie		(eee)
Matilda		*
Max		*
Noah
Oscar		*
Paige
Poppy		(eee)
Rafe
Riley		(eee)
Ruby		* (eee)
Ryleigh		(eee)
Sonny		(eee)
Tilly-J	middle name: Brenda	(eee)
Walter		*
Will		*

Toddlers
Alexandra		*
Ava
Cody	middle name: Lee – what else, to follow Cody? Surname Wheawall, the same as baby Latoyah	(eee)
Dylan
Evie		(eee)
Harley	middle names: Derek Alan. Surname Overend, the same as baby Tilly-J Brenda	(eee)
Jack		*
Kayla
Kristi-Louise		(eee)
Layla
Lexi	surname Grace, same as baby Kacey	(eee)
Lily		* (eee)
Mia
Thomas		*
Toby		* (eee)

Among the children, none are black. Macie could be from a dark-skinned mother or father – possibly.

Of 57 names, then, 22 are what I have classed as ‘traditional’. 38 per cent. Possibly the name Ava might be called traditional too, that would make 42 per cent.

Of the 57 names, 23 are eee-sound names, 40 per cent.

Food for False Promises

In a way it doesn’t matter, you expect to get offered rubbish in a motorway service station café don’t you? Well, yes, but in 21st-century Europe I would like to think that you expect an accurate description of the rubbish you are being fed. And it seems an especially British failing, to be expected to gladly accept something different from what it says on the label. Charnock Richard Services on the M6 in Lancashire, 7 October 2013

The label said ‘Cheese and Onion Toastie’. Subtitle: ‘Cheese and onion in thick-sliced bloomer bread’.

And it wasn’t what it said. The sandwich filling was a milky vinegary substance with a small amount of cheese mixed in, and an even more minuscule amount of onion. Where’s that trading standards officer? What’s he doing, sitting on his backside in an office somewhere. Is he being paid for that?

 

Looks like vomit. Tastes not a million miles from what you might imagine vomit tastes like if you think about it. Which I couldn’t help but do, as I drove away up the M6. Couldn’t get the sickly taste of the little that I ate of it from assaulting my nostrils.

The bigger yukkier picture.

Collecting Signatures in Support of a Bizarre Idea

The idea that Silvio Berlusconi might make a suitable president of Italy after the present one, Giorgio Napolitano, retires. Signatures being gathered, in Red Bologna, of all places. 7 September 2013.

 

Preparing the table for the collection of signatures from passers by. A somewhat thuggish-looking man in purple shirt and grey gilet; a frowning man in dark glasses and dark-grey sports shirt with white fringe on the collar and cuffs; and a bespectacled youth with loo-brush hair and wearing two-tone trainers. And whose is that expensive BMW? In the pedestrian-only area.

 

 

A few people come by to offer their name and address such as the blond woman with red-framed glasses. The youth duly logs her details.

I stood watching this near to a man who was sitting on the street flagstones begging, with his dog on a string. Some people stopped to give him a few coins, and sometimes offer his dog a biscuit or a piece of chocolate. The begging man looked puzzled by what it was I was so interested in. Looked at me quizzically.

I was not going to get into explaining to the begging man that from a foreigner’s perspective, the idea of a man who is recently convicted of tax fraud and who is notorious for putting his own needs above those of his nation, while loudly protesting his innocence and his devotion to his beloved country above all else, gaining support for mediating matters of state objectively – as Giorgio Napolitano has consistently and impressively shown his ability to do in a very statesmanlike manner; indeed the very concept of Silvio Berlusconi acting in a statesmanlike way – just seems so absurd that it challenges belief that anyone would even consider lending their support.

But in Italy there are people prepared to do that, clearly. People who believe that Berlusconi will work to uphold the moral fibre of the nation and will behave in a fair and balanced manner. The blond woman with red-rimmed glasses for example.