And for the truly brave......

Day One

There were no screams. His mother bit her lip until the blood was flowing but she did not scream. She was a tall and humble woman, and as the membranes broke she pushed him into the world gently, with much love, like you would push a child across the classroom door on his first day of school.

And so he came into the world without much fanfare at dusk, on an unmemorable autumn day. No wind outside, no thunderous rain, no bright sun shining, no major headlines on the news, just a mundane and rather grey blanket of shapeless clouds.

They say the obstetrician lost composure when she pulled him out to realise the chord was knotted halfway through its length. She talked about a death sentence in waiting and a miraculous escape.

His father was a humble and shy man, wounded by things much greater than he ever was, who held his wife’s hand tight with glossy eyes, while feeling out of place as he saw his son come into the world.

Those last few days, just before he was born, the handles of the clock had turned erratically, faster at times, slower at others. They jumped from line to line as in a game of leapfrog, disorderly, collapsing over every minute in less than ordinary fashion. And as disorderly as the handles of the clock was the wealth of masks, pipes, sensor, cold medical paraphernalia and crowds of lights and blankets, white coats and faces, all attentive and all courteous. All clinically concerned.

Momentous tears and screams always accompany moments of anguish and pain. They are man’s expression of rage against a distant god that cannot hear the whispers floating between lovers. But composure is often the manifestation of suffering so deep that it finds no outlet. Real tragedy is orderly and quiet. And so his mother listened, attentively and understood the words, each one of them as a separate set of well distinguished sounds. She heard the words, all of them kept repeating in her mind in constant loop: “syndrome”, “hypoplastic”, “heart”, “left”. But like the words of a language unknown to her they made no sense. They made no sense because stopping a mother from holding a new-born child cannot make sense to a mother. They made no sense because deprived of proximity and love the word mother made no sense, they made no sense because, removed the mother, the word child had no meaning anymore.

That first night was a long night of tiredness and reddened eyes. His father was composed but somewhat distant. Like every man he felt the duties of a man bearing upon him: to be strong, to be lucid, to offer support and comfort to the people around him. And it was not the first time that he had found himself cast in that unseemly role, a weak and gentle man carrying the weight of life upon his shoulders, and trying to shelter others from the storm with the unseemly cover of his own body. That night he told his wife that he was in good care, that she need not worry, that everything that could be done was being done. That she should be strong and show no fear, that fear and grief destroy, but produce nothing. That they should think of their other beautiful child, who was alone right now, and who would need, somehow, to understand.

Day Two

His father got home late, and walked through the door with muffled steps, until he reached the kitchen door. He stayed away from light switches and windows and enjoyed the darkness for a while, the world in black and white, for a moment much easier to read than the real one in full blast colours. He reached out for a glass and poured some water in it, than sat down. He was tired and brought the glass up to his dry, chapped lips with the last ounce of energy that he could master. He drank avidly, and as he did, tears started choking him, and flowing on his face, as water flowed out of the glass onto his neck and shirt. After he put the glass down, he leaned back his head cast back slightly, and cried quietly until he heard a noise upstairs.

The baby sitter had walked out soundlessly, no words spoken, just as he slipped through the door a few minutes earlier. The sound could only come from up the stairs – his daughter was awake. He wiped the tears off his face and managed with great strain to stand up. In the darkness he saw his own reflection in the window, anything but the composed and sober fatherly figure he’d always aspired to be. He straightened his shirt, run his hand through his hair, blinked once or twice, than like a fully loaded lorry, with great strain, he moved towards the door.

As he approached the staircase, at the top of the first flight of steps, he saw a little girl of five or six standing still in her pyjama. That was his daughter. She looked at him with eyes full of sleep and spoke no words. She was skinny, with long hair covering some of the features of her long face. She was not worried, or strained, or panicked. She was just there, a sleepy child waiting to be comforted.

He climbed up the stairs two steps at a time and grabbed her in his arms and as he held her tight, he climbed the remaining steps leading to her bedroom. He lay her on the bed and lay next to her, curled up in a bed clearly too small for his size. The little girl lay there, now half awake, between his mass and the radiator, still. She asked how her mother was. “she is OK. Your brother is a bit sick, though.”

They fell asleep without another word, father and daughter next to one another. The girl kicked him in the night, for many times. It had annoyed him in the past, but that night he enjoyed it, even treasured it, like he did every moment in that small bed.

He woke up in the morning, smelling his daughter’s hair. It was a smell that he knew well, but it overwhelmed him on that sunny day to see her hair glittering in the rising sunlight. They ate breakfast sitting next to one another. He normally enjoyed looking at his daughter finishing her cornflakes bowl, with eyes half opened quietly, but somehow he found the quiet that morning daunting. He told her they’d go off to see her brother in the afternoon.

On his way to the bathroom he stopped for a second to look at the stack of clothes, still in their plastic wrappings, that him and his wife had spent so many weeks in choosing. Winny the Pooh, winked at him from a Pyjama top. Winny the Pooh was always ugly he thought quietly, and today that look of naïve stupidity infuriated him.

As the water started running cold down his chest, he resolved he would go past the office that morning. His job was tedious just like his colleagues, the office tower in which he worked, the morning journey full of grey faces, the long and repetitive days. It was a day, however, on which he felt a need to see the world was still afloat, with its grey faces, people running, women stressed, children screaming, cars driving by, buses beeping, colleagues yawning, his boss pretending to be important. The illusion of purpose helped him in some way to push the door open that morning, even though it felt so heavy.

Some types of grievance do not show on faces, and some men, made stern by their own nature or by the accidents of life, are less prone than others at showing their emotions. He did not spend long in the office that day, an interminable half an hour of unconcerned and unaware faces that stared at him without much purpose, deprived of all desires. Leaving the office, he walked alone for miles across crowded streets, his sense of discomfort growing with every tired step. He tried to keep his thoughts at bay and focus, but they kept leaping back at him, forcing themselves into his mind with every breath and every heartbeat.

He wondered, in total silence, what if anything could be fair in this whole affair and as he realised no answer was forthcoming he concluded that no explanation could be given. Eventually, he found himself staring at the bronze doors with a mixture of provincial fear and hate. He was a man grown up in hardship who had learnt to expect little of other people and even less of those he could not see. And yet that morning he walked in, his step forced by the notion that falling to one’s knees is the last resort of any man and that there’s no shame in it. He prayed with fervour unbecoming to the truly faithful, totally devoid of habit and contrition. Unlike many others overwhelmed by unintelligible cruelty, he did not beg for explanations but genuinely pleaded for deliverance.

That day his mother felt drained and panicked and confused. She tried within the confines of that room to imagine something different, but alone with thoughts of what confronted her, she was unable to make sense of any of it. She longed to see her husband. She longed for him to do the only thing she knew was well beyond his powers, to take her far, far away from those four walls, to a place of peace and quiet and tranquillity.

As she struggled up from the bed and to the bathroom, she spent long minutes staring at her reflection in the mirror. She was not beautiful, with the same long face her daughter had taken from her, she had nice eyes of a deep blue colour and full lips, her forehead was broad and her skin still soft. And she was still quite young, with fresh memories of the shy glances that male colleagues would cast at her in spring, when pastel coloured dresses re-emerged from her wardrobe.

Her eyes were bulging from a sleepless night and she would have wanted to touch up her make-up for no purpose but to hide behind it. But in that bare, functional bathroom she had taken little, no makeup, no pincers, no nail filer, just some shower gel, a toothbrush, a comb and some perfume, which she received at Christmas months before, but never wore.

They told her it would be another hour until she would be allowed to climb up to the neonatal ward, and having exchanged a hospital gown for an old pyjama she went back to lie in bed. She leafed through a magazine that she had purchased days before, to look at during the long hours in that room, before regaining strength to move around and go about her daily life as normal. The pages fluttered in the draft coming through the open window and as they did she caught a glimpse of refined homes and carpets and lamps and fireplaces and proud parents standing on the thresholds of country villas, their smiling children right beside them. She got little pleasure from looking at the ordinary dreams that had generated a somewhat muted sense of envy in her until two days before. And after a few moments, she put the magazine away to look out of the window into an inside courtyard, which was the only thing besides high, concrete walls, that she could see if she looked out. The sun was shining, and the tiny triangle of sky was blue and occasionally crossed by small white clouds. It must be windy outside, she thought to herself.

Her husband and the girl arrived in the early afternoon, just after the doctor had quickly shied away from her room after delivering more bad news. They walked in unexpectedly and it was only after they came through the door that she realised the muffled laughter down the corridor must have come from her daughter. As she heard the hinges of the door creak, she was awoken from the dream that seemed to have taken hold of her, even though she was well awake. Her daughter barged in with as much energy as a puppy, eager to see her mother after a separation, that to her must have seemed long.

She saw her daughter approaching her bed as in slow motion, waving her hands, with a big smile and felt uncomfortable at so much exuberance imprisoned in such a tiny room. The little girl was quite amused by her mother’s presence for a while, but soon she grew impatient with little of interest to amuse her in a rather plain hospital room. She asked about her brother in a rather disinterested fashion, clearly unable to imagine someone she had not seen, or touched or heard before. To her he was a distant, remote and abstract concept that would maybe gain some meaning in time, but which was nothing more than an amusing thought at that point, much like the stories of the amusement park her father promised to take her to one day.

Impatience was becoming palpable when the nurse came in to announce that they could go upstairs to see him. His father wondered whether it was worth to turn a fantasy into a real memory for a little girl that age, but then remembered he’d been told some time ago that the best policy was to be transparent and explain and to help children understand what happens in the world around them. And to comfort them and let them know that they’re not to be blamed for any of it, that life will take its course no matter what, that outcomes are neither good or bad or right or wrong, they just are, like all of us, there for a certain period, until time wipes out any memory of them and until those who remember them leave this world taking with them any trace of their passage.

He was alone in a room that could host more than just one child. Next to the window he lay there in glass cage, too fragile to be allowed out. The buzzing sound of respirators and medical paraphernalia of all sorts conferred the room an intimidating feel that did not go unnoticed by the little girl. For a while she clung to her dad and walked around quietly, looking at her hands, so clean and humid after she was forced to wash them.

Her father held her up in his arms so she could take a look at her brother. She could see his hands, his feet but little else. She was quite troubled by the bluish colour of his skin and curious of why he had to stay in a glass case. However, her discomfort was short lived and, after a short while, she struggled from her father’s arms to tiptoe to the window and look outside.

Her parents looked at her with a mixture of joy and overwhelming sadness at the thought she could not understand what was going on. Her mother passed a hand over her cut lip and felt her eyes getting moist as she watched her daughter ask what all the cables were there for. They had intended to explain what was going on. But neither of them could find the strength to explain what they themselves could make no sense of. And so they stood there looking at the girl with forced smiles every time she turned their glance at them, until the nurse said it was time for them to head back downstairs. The doctor was about to start his round. Again.

Day Three

Black marks had appeared under his father’s eyes, unshaven he had spent the night shivering on a chair. His mother’s mind was empty as she sat right besides him. Despite the misery of little sleep and the fatigue of childbirth, she looked beautiful that morning. Beautiful with her broken features like a Picasso, beautiful like every woman whose mask has unexpectedly come off.

There wasn’t much confusion or commotion, only a white gown, and a long tail of grey hair. She didn’t need to say, she did not need to talk. Much as there are no instructions needed for a first kiss, no footnotes were required in this case. They slowly stood and walked over to the glass box, to see themselves inside a case. So precious and so fragile a treasure that even air and cold could blow it all away ever so quickly.

He stood there, on an altar of pipes and blankets, breathing, slowly. The modern version of the sacrificial lamb. A crucifiction with no anticipated resurrection. They looked at him for one last time, unsure for the first time, of what exactly they were looking at. And finally, with great regret and inconsiderate relief they said good-bye. Not to the boy they never knew, but to the dream of the child they had imagined for years.

And so he fell asleep, the blissful sleep that only children know. And as he left this world, too young to leave a mark of his passage across the sand, his parents cried the simple tears of simple people of even simpler means. They cried the tears accompanying the end of something that never was, so full of longing, wonder and regret.

Legacy Information

Dear All,

It has been months since I last published anything on this blog.

I guess it is something related to my legendary laziness and general apathy.

As on previous occasions, I have decided to inflict upon you a few more pieces of (as always untitled) poetry that I composed several months ago and that I have recovered today from the wreckage of an old hard drive.

And without further ado:

POEM1
And as the ocean ruptured through my lips,
her face was crushed by gold and grey
black butterflies broke free
like bats out of a cave, in silence
our arms tangled with ivy
thin cloth like blades shimmering in the summer light.
And as the beast unravels from your chest
please have some mercy on us
tear me to pieces.

POEM2
And as the fire spread like panic,
through grass and trees and the whole forest
you run across the empty rooms with your with your eyes closed
distorted images of agony and pain
sit in the mirror that you cannot see.
And as you tear your skin,
washing the blood off,
please be gentle it's our blood,
and it's so precious.

Fortuitous encounters

It has been several months since I last found the time, patience and inspiration to write on this blog.

The ambitous nature of the post I was going to publish has somewhat subsided, largely as a result of the fact that the overwhelming clarity of thought, that had possessed me for a few long weeks at the beginning of this year, has largely disappeared.

However, a few weeks ago, possessed by boredom, depression and an overwhelming sense of lack of purpose, I found myself leafing (figuratively of course) through the pages of the BBC's website and reading of the imminent departure of Mark Randell, the BBC's Brussels correspondent, who is relocating to the USA.

Mark published a very interesting and informed article on his impressions of Brussels (largely positive) and placed it in stark contrast to the one that Justin Webb published in 2002 before relocating to the US.

Mark's piece was mellifluous and complimentary of the city's many virtues, while Mark's was a scathing endictment of its limitless inadequacies and idiosyncracies.

Both Mark and Justin (though he did his best) failed to raise any serious controversy, and for that reason, I felt entitled to play my well rehersed role of 'agent provocateur' and contribute to the debate.

Below the comment I left on Mark Randell's blog.

'As somebody that relocated to Brussels at the end of 2004 and is about to reach the ominous 5 years threshold of being based in the capital of Europe, I can recognise myself in almost everything that both Mark and Justin have written in their FOOCs.

Bureaucracy in Belgium is infernal, customer service non-existent, taxes prohibitive, and dog fouling as much of a national sport as mussels and beer.

But it is a city I have learnt to love becuase of its size, the beauty of its architecture, the quality of the public services you can access (both hospitals and schools are excellent), the gentlemanliness of (some) of its inhabitants, its low key charm and, of course, its multi-culturalism.

I have plenty of friends who have lived in Brussels throughout the nineties and the memories that they carry of the place very much echo Justin's 2002 piece. But from what I see and hear (from many of those friends as well), the city has moved on and the refreshing inflow of 1000s of young people from the new member states has not only increased the availability of Milla Jovovich lookalikes in the streets, but also generated a very vibrant night and cultural life.

The only issue that still angers me about every day life in Brussels, and which both Justin and Mark have failed to mention, is the pathetic and petty infighting between the french and flemish communities to which you are constantly and invariably exposed - even as a foreigner - the second you step outside the ghetto of the European quarter.

I am sick and tired of people stepping out of lifts and responding to my well meaning 'bonne journee' in sneering flemish, and I am getting increasingly irritated at having to walk out of restaurants, when in the company of Flemish colleagues, if they do not provide a menu in Flemish.

Two years ago, I attended a political meeting organised by various political parties trying to promote their policies to the expatriates from the EU living in Brussels (yes as an EU citizen in another EU country, you can vote in in local elections).

Within a few minutes, a discussion on public services in Brussels degenerated into a war of insults between flemish and french speaking parties. Trying to capture expat voters by telling them how good bus services are in Ghent was one of the most absurd circus acts I have ever seen.

On that occasion, I was tempted to scream from the back of the room 'just let me know which one of you guys will get rid of the dog S**t'. Sadly, I just decided to leave instead.

Alessandro Fazio'

Nothing exceptional so far. I think my piece reflects the feelings of a vast majority (or minority) of the members of the Brussels expatriate community. And I was not expecting that it should have any consequences. In fact, I feared it would be largely dismissed as an outpoor of frustration and anger generated by a disgruntled octagenarian.

So much for assumptions, I thought to myself on opening my linked in profile the day after posting. A message from a guy that I had not heard from in years was sitting in my inbox, waiting to be read. I hastily opened it, assuming that it would be yet another message from somebody who has lost their job and is eagerly trouping the colour around friends and acquaintances in search of a new challenge (aka job).

To my surprise, however, here was a message from somebody who had read my post on the BBC's website and was visibly disturbed by it. I was reprimanded for the content of my post which apparently provoked a great injustice to Brussels and its inhabitants.

Guess I hit a nerve there. The first sentence that comes to mind: "excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta".

Alex

If we want to say how we want the men of future generations to be, we should say: let them be like Veltroni

As energetic as all bran for breakfast

To those of you erudite enough (unlike me) to recognise in the title of this post words borrowed from the 18th October 1967 eulogy delivered by el comandante after confirmation of Che Guevara's death in Bolivia the paradox is obvious.

Walter Veltroni was, is and will always be to Che Guevara what Dan Quayle was to jack Kennedy as Lloyd Bentsen so elegantly reminded him (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWXRNySMW4s).

He has and should be relegated to the dustbin of history. So why have I decided to write about this character that is little known outside of il belpaese?

The answer is simple. Like every intellectual, I serve a prince and did not have the privilege of freely choosing the topic for this post. In other words, I was asked (in rather peremptory terms) to write this one.

And so for those of you not accustomed with Italian politics: who is Walter Veltroni? Pirandello once said that each one of us has three personas: the person we think we are, the person others think we are, and the person we truly are. The third, I guess, being halfway between the first two.

And so it is with this consideration in mind (and obviously some personal variations on the theme) that I shall try to present Walter Veltroni.

Like every politician with an oversized ego, a long list of dubious publications is appended to his name. Any respectable library (in any part of the world) should be capable of furnishing you all with at least one copy of notable topical scripts such as:

• Il PCI e la questione giovanile (The PCI - Italian Communist Party - and the Youth Issue)A dieci anni dal ’68.
• Intervista con Achille Occhetto (Ten Years since '68: Interview with Achille Occhetto)
• Il sogno degli anni sessanta (The dream of the Sixties)
• Il calcio è una scienza da amare (Football is a science to be loved)
• Io e Berlusconi (e la Rai) (Berlusconi and me (and RAI))
• I programmi che hanno cambiato l’Italia (Programs that changed Italy)
• La sfida interrotta. Le idee di Enrico Berlinguer (The interrupted challenge. The ideas of Enrico Berlinguer)
• Certi piccoli amori (Certain small Loves)
• La bella politica (interview book) (Politics, the beautiful)
• Certi piccoli amori 2 (Certain Small Loves II)
• Governare da sinistra (To Govern from the Left)
• I care
• Forse Dio è malato. Diario di un viaggio africano (Perhaps God is sick: Diary of an African journey)
• Il disco del mondo. Vita breve di Luca Flores, musicista (The disk of the world. Short life of Luca Flores, musician)
• Senza Patricio (Without Patricio)
• La scoperta dell'alba (Discovery of the dawn)
• Preface to Barack Obama, L'audacia della speranza (The Audacity of Hope)
  

As I do not want to come across as an arrogant and overtly critical person, I am not going to deny that my four working papers pale into comparison with the length of this guy's bibliography.

The real issue is: what has he written? What would you think this list refers to, were you to recover it on a deserted island? I would think that it is either a section of the library catalogue of a provincial section of the communist party or the bibliography of a rather pathetic apparatchick.

And I guess that the direction of this post has finally been uncovered.

Still, I hope you will forgive me if, I continue in providing additional details about the life, death and miracles of Walter Veltroni.

Ali G once questioned the conventional wisdom of "you are what you eat" with the famous words "if that is true than how come I ain't a giant chicken with Mcmuffin eyes, and cheeseburger hands".

I never really believed that food determines so much of who a person is, but I am firmly convinced that you can tell a lot about anybody by looking at their friends. So, let us get started. Once again, the list is long and to all extents and purposes impressive. Starting and remaining (for the sake of brevity) with two entries at the letter A.

Architects: Gae Aulenti, Renzo Piano e Massimiliano Fuksas

Artists (he is a former minister for culture): Stefania Sandrelli, Laura Morante, Claudio Amendola, Francesca Neri, Giobbe Covatta, Carlo Verdone, Bernardo Bertolucci and, from among the departed, it is probably worth mentioning PierPaolo Pasolini.

Long and impressive as the list may be, it does not stray much from the names of the well known components of the Italian Intelligentsia of the last 4 decades. Walter Veltroni's list of acquaintances, like his list of publications, places him firmly at the centre of the network of personalities that have influenced, driven and shaped the Italian left for decades.

His direct political associations are no more original. A long term member of the politburo running the Italian communist party, his key credential as a reformer is to have acknowledged the direction of events taking place on planet earth and supported Achille Occhetto in shifting the posture of the party from communist to social democrat (and a monumental shift it was, which even preserved the hammer and sickle as a central element in the logo of the "new party").

And when he did look beyond his traditional pool of contacts and acolytes, he opted for launching an 'entente cordiale' with Berlusconi that Beppe Grillo described as reminiscent of Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II in Teano.

Last but not least, I shall give the word to the man himself, in hope that we may be able to understand who he is and what he stands for.

"I have always had an idea of politics as a civil mission, a mean and not an end." Fine By me

"As many authoritative international observers have noted, Italy has taken, unexpectedly, the role of a laboratory of political innovation. " That might be true, and I would love to know who they are!

"Millions of Italians have voted in the name of a new politics, a politics more somber in the use of public resources and more efficient in administering them, a politics more humble and more competent." said the former mayor of Rome and 'Politburo' member

"We are therefore in the presence of a new concept: that of the citizen-voter, who is also the true protagonist of the creation of the democratic party: and it is in full respect of the primacy of this new figure that we have to construct the organisational model of the new party. A model in which participation does not depend on affiliation. A model in which the greatest energy is born from the greatest liberty. From the union of autonomy and direct responsibility. It is an innovation challenge and it is something that needs to start from us, something that needs first and foremost to make its way into our heads." Would the above involve a resolution of the crisis at Alitalia? If yes, I fail to see how.

"A party in which, every political position, will be assigned by reference to the personal qualities of candidates and not by reference to the affiliations of old, to oligarchic or current related logics" Said he before distributing secretarial posts to representatives of the various factions in his 'party'

"But altogether the democratic party is interested in fostering the evolution of aggregational processes and programmatic (as well as value) innovations in the whole Italian political system......Therefore programmatic and institutional innovation. And Political innovation." Anybody recognise the familiar arcane and indiscernible way of speaking so typical of old guard politicians in Southern Europe?

Many of you might ask after bearing with me for the full length of this post: what is my point?

My point is very simple. Italy needs radical reform and that cannot be delivered by an insider that has been a protagonist of Italian politics for four decades. That much I am SURE about.

The thing I am not sure about is something I discussed with a friend, on a recent trip to Valencia.

His theory is that modern systems of democratic governance were not invented in southern Europe. Italians playing democracy are like football players playing cricket.

The modern democratic system is an Anglo-Saxon creation. Democratic government is to Italian and Spaniards what eating 'al fresco' is to the British: exotic, very demanding (not natural and effortless) and generally associated with BAD results (or food).

As for Veltroni he is just another sour element of democracy all'Italiana - and thank god he's gone!

Alessandro

• Italian Opposition Leader Says He 'Failed' (nytimes.com)
• Has Italy's Left Found its Own Obama? (time.com)

Poetic justice

Inspiration is male, not female. A tormented demon, not a man.

And the martial and triumphant tone of my first posting, so reminiscent of the soviet national anthem's powerful opening C, shall now give way to the charged sentence openings so typical of Ernst Hemingway.

As some of my (by now) numberless accolytes have pointed out, my first post read like a declaration of war to the world, but was not necessarily followed by an appropriate sequel. The lion of the sea triumphantly emerged from the water, only to retreat in disorderly fashion, terrified at the sight of a penguin (or any other clumsy and perplexing animal that you prefer to imagine).

So, and despite all my initial good intentions, this post has been neglected for about a month.

Part of the reason is that I had selected an extremely topical subject for my second posting (details of which I shall not disclose).

However, as i started grappling with the complexities of the subject matter, it became quite clear that, had i stuck to the original topic I selected, my second posting would not conjure a vision of Leonardo elegantly committing the world to canvas with an effortless stroke of the brush, but would most likely bring to mind the image of a rather clumsy and chubby teenager trying to kill a fly, annoyingly intent on landing on his nose.

In other words, the subject I picked is one at which, i soon realised, i could do no more than take rather unprecise and ineffective jabs, running the risk, with every twist and turn, of punching my own face, or even worst, of loosing my balance and ending up with my face in the mud.

And so the agonising process of identifying a meaningful subject matter begun, over and over again, for more than four weeks. As explained in my first post, there is no subject about which I have no opinions that the world should be aware of, but, i shall take the liberty on this occasion, to beg for mercy and share with the readers of this post a few lines crafted in a style I have rarely used. And if poetic justice really exist, I hope that you will all be lenient, and condemn me to the dustbin of history, rather than committ me to the executioner, or even worst the local asylum.

At times the wind blows hard on our helpless bodies,

we're often forced like grass, to bend in a direction we don't like.

Great, wonderful and the same time terrible are our lives, always we can but follow turbulent waves and flows.

Like reckless ships,

the winds push us away from our best known shores and from the ports in sight,

towards new lands and ventures.

Dust shaken off we unleash our wings and raise towards new heights

follow the stars to end up melting in the sunset, tired of flying and eager to start living.

It's hard however leaving for the unknown when time runs out.

The sun starts burning hot, the sea suddenly is dark and evil.

The only consolation, unlike those men who left their homes and friends under a sky of war brightened by fear alone,

the fact that bridges will not fall.

Yes, but the fear that they'll grow old unused is greater.

And the wind blows and pushes us away,

forgets to leave us time to choose the words,

forgets to leave us time to say adieu, maybe goodbye.

good night,

Alessandro

In my humble opinion...

Nothing to say about the album but the title seems fitting....

Dear All,

The date is 5th of February 2009 and the time is 00.02....and i hope, with this preamble, to have lent some gravitas to the first opening lines of this post.

I have no precise idea, to be honest, of exactly what sort of information I will be publishing on this corner of the web (if any) and even less of a clue of who (if anybody) will ever be bothered to read my scribblings.

The reason why I have decided to start the ambitious endeavour of becoming a world renowned opinion leader is quite simple. As I become older, more and more set in the ways of corporate life (and in my own deluded mind) more successful (and hopefully mature) my ego has reached dimensions such that it now feels constrained within the realms of my body and everyday environment and suffers an impulse to conquer the rest of planet earth.

I do not quite know, in all honesty, whether the world around me is becoming progressively (or maybe I should say regressively) more stupid every day, or whether it is me that is turning more and more into the sort of opinionated bastard that feels the right to comment and have opinions (not ideas but OPINIONS) on pretty much everything, from the way flowers should be arranged in my living room to Barack Obama's policy towards veterans of the war in Iraq.

The above is not a question that has featured prominently in my mind in the recent past if truth be told, were it not for the fact that i have acquired a habit of commening on current affairs in The Economist. It all started as little more than a joke, an attempt to make the sort of witty and apparently insightful remarks (that are in most cases ill informed and simplistic) so typical of readers of The Economist and Woody Allen lovers. Over the weeks, however, what started as a self surfing exercise in the art of sounding articulate and informed became not only a regular habit, but also a trigger of very interesting exchanges and a way of feeding my ever expanding ego (yes, my posts in The Economist have been receiving reccomendations by the bucketload).

And so here I am, determined to make a difference or die a heroic death (my ego again) in trying to do so. What, why or for whom I will make a difference i have no idea, but i will try nonetheless.

I shall not make this first blog topical in any way and will only make a passing comment on an over dinner conversation I had with my wife tonight.

Rumour has apparently spread within the European Commission that Barroso may not,after all, be reappointed as president of the college of the Commissioners. Whether that will actually be the case, or whether the rumour is simply an indication that his political fortunes have turned (if he ever had any) towards the oblivion that belongs to any politician is not the object of my reflections. The interesting question in this affair is the reason why the guy has suddenly found his head (or some more intimate parts of his anatomy) on the chopping board.

My wife answered that question without any hesitation: his handling of the financial crisis. HIS handling of the financial crisis? Are we talking about the same financial crisis that has paralysed credit markets world wide, pushed America into the deepest recession since the great depression, thrown the federal reserve into disarray, sparked talk of a potential UK default and even saw Alan Greenspan having to explain himself in front of a congressional commission of inquiry? Now we turn around to a shy, miserable and unimaginative former prime minister of Portugal (who happens to be the totally powerless president of the Commission) and say "shame on you for not fixing this mess"? Now that is RICH! or may be it is just politics.

Good Night,

Alessandro