WHAT, NO BAGS?

When I first moved to Sicily, it was virtually impossible to purchase a simple shopping bag of the kind you can buy in any supermarket or indoor market in the UK.   When I was out I never saw a man or woman carrying  a shopper, unless it was by Gucci.  Indeed, when I ventured out armed with my faithful British shopping bag Rosa, in particular, used to tell me that a woman carrying two bags looked odd. 

Well, all that may be about to change as  Italy introduced a blanket ban on plastic carrier bags in stores from January 1st.  Whilst environmentalists have welcomed the ban, store managers have been predicting chaos and warning that the country's environmental crisis will worsen, as people will no longer be able to recycle store plastic carriers as rubbish bags and will just go out and buy lots of oversized black bags.

Italy is responsible for 25% of the plastic bags used in the EU each year or approximately 300 bags per person annually and, whilst I appreciate that the ban has been introduced partially to avoid scenes like the one below, I personally  regard the ban as a nuisance:  It is not always possible to know how many bags you will need before you shop and paper bags disintegrate in the rain - not a concern for those who shop by car but a problem for the rest of us.

It is true that local councils in Italy have been trying, with little success, to get people to separate their rubbish but it is hard to keep a check on this in a country where most people live in flats and take their rubbish to communal containers.  In my view an education campaign is needed to raise awareness about the consequences of not recycling while Napoli-style bag mountains can best be avoided by paying refuse collectors their salaries on time!

So far I have seen no chaos in my local supermarket and neither have I seen any alternative to  plastic bags but this may be because stores are being allowed to use up their current supply of carriers provided they do not charge for them.

Cloth bags are on sale in some stores but I have not seen any durable, PVC bags of the type you can buy cheaply in Britain.  But then, I have never seen a wipe-clean PVC apron on sale here either and I am sure this is because Italian women prefer aprons that they can iron.  So now I am waiting to see if they will start washing and ironing their cloth bags.  I wouldn't put it past the perfectionist Sicilian housewife!

FATTI DI CRONACA - 10

I will start with my very own fatto di cronaca, for I, at least, deem it newsworthy: I am late posting because I have spent the last 3 hours having a fight with the glass doors in my bedroom. These, for some reason known to glass-door-gremlins, are resolutely stuck and will not open – and you need them open in the evenings in this heat [still 36 C at lunchtime and 30 C as I walked home from work last night at 7]. This could not, of course, happen during all the weeks when I had a man, in the form of James, staying with me – oh, no! The doors had to pick their moment. Yes, I have made with the screwdriver, had the lock off and back on but nothing will budge the things! I am reminded of some lines by U A Fanthorpe:
"There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it."
["Atlas"]

Let us move on:

The Agrigento water shortage continues and the splendid woman mayor of the town of Naro has, in the company of law enforcement officers, visited the water plant herself, to find that the gate had been tampered with. It has now been sealed. The townsfolk, it seems, have now been without running water for 2 weeks.

In June, I mentioned the initiative in Castelbuono [Palermo province] to have rubbish collected by a team of donkeys, now numbering 5. They collect the different types of rubbish from door to door and the town has achieved the national recycling target and saved money. I am delighted to tell you that now that comune has won a government prize.

Finally, just to reassure you that the credit crunch is hitting everywhere, there was this in the Telegraph the other day, informing us that the Mayor of Salemi [Trapani] is offering houses for 1 euro. So why aren’t I at the front of the queue? [1] I’m sure Salemi is charming but it is not the area in which I wish to live. [2] I might be able to come up with the 1 euro but I do not have the many more thousands of euros that it would take to restore such a dwelling. [3] Even if I did, I can’t sort the bedroom doors, let alone supervise a team of workmen on a restoration project!

A SICILIAN SOLUTION ...

.. to refuse collection.

Back in March, the inspirational and aptly-named Mayor Cicero of Castelbuono [Palermo] had the idea of using mules to collect the refuse in this town of 10,000 inhabitants. The scheme seems to be a great success, for, as the Mayor says, this way they are cutting down on pollution whilst saving their historic heritage; the mules also have names and are popular with the town's children.

"National environmental concerns" is an oral examination topic so I was discussing this with students yesterday. Then I read more about it here .

Hat tip to my student Luca.

DAILY DOINGS - 11

I felt such a fool at work today, sitting there with an ice pack [topped up periodically by the kind manager of the Altro Posto] on my foot, but it was the only way to cope.

Much fun with a business student as we were tackling a unit entitled “How to Compromise” and working out how to compose a letter to a valued client who has not paid for services recently provided. “If you do not pay me next week we kill you”, suggested the student cheerfully. “Well”, said I, “that may be the direct Sicilian approach but what we need here is a bit of British indirectness”. Finally we got there, producing a round-the-gasworks epistle full of “woulds”, “shoulds”, “coulds” and phrases like “Please be so kind as to…” The student was amazed to learn that such a mild letter can seem quite threatening to the recipient!

We have rubbish piling up in the streets again: what a welcome for the tourists who are starting to arrive!

Ladies, as I replied to a commenter yesterday I haven’t espied Mr Gorgeous or Mr Elegantissimo at the Altro Posto recently but one of the regulars today was a sight to gladden your heart. Let me describe his attire: snappy black suit, pink and white large-checked shirt, pink and maroon silk tie [with gold tie-clip] and the most elegant white pointy shoes you ever saw on a man. When he dashed in with an unlit cigar in his mouth everyone looked more than twice!

DAILY DOINGS - 9

We had a Scirocco storm on Friday and ever since then the weather has been cold for Sicily in mid- May. Everyone is still huddled in their padded jackets, no one has made the transition into short-sleeved or sleeveless garments and none of the women is yet tightless. Indeed, I gather it has been warmer in the UK than in Sicily today!

I am glad to be able to report that the rubbish has been collected [for now].

The via Sacro Cuore has been delightfully quiet today as there are roadworks there; at least, I hope it's the road they are dealing with. Someone said they are working on the water system and that idea fills me with horror, lest "modernisation" render the system even less reliable than it is now. Talking of water, we had a delivery on Saturday morning and clever Simi now not only knows when the truck is on its way from the main road, but whether or not it is bound for our condominio! [She has a "special" bark for each case.]

A student came in this evening wanting an "emergency lesson" to help him prepare for a test tomorrow. "I have to study a tense.. quello con [the one with] had.. or maybe it's quello con have", said he, helpfully. As the former could be any of 4 and the latter any of 8, I was a little perplexed, reader. Then I decided that it was unlikely that he would be tested on the English perfect tense if he had not yet been tested on the present perfect, so that's what I plumped for. I hope his regular teacher at day school doesn't have too bad a time day to day, that she has had a rest tonight and had had a rest before that. I also hope that she has not been working too hard recently and had not been doing so prior to that period. I trust that she will have finished her marking by tomorrow and that she will not have been finding it too hard. If I had known exactly which tense was needed today I would have done a better job. I hope the lady has been comforted if she has read this, that she has been reading it as a light article, as was intended and that she will have had a laugh by now. She won't have been offended, will she? Auguri, fellow-professoressa!

So come on, CAE students of mine: which tense is which, then?!

ROSES AND CAVATIEDDI

My "fairy godmother" friend, who always knows what to say and do, arrived today, bearing roses [the pink one at the back smells sublime] more grapefruits and lemons, the very thin, leafy celery that we get here and lettuces from her garden.

I love Cavatieddi pasta and this plate of the wonderful stuff, served with a tomato, cream and ham sauce was just what I needed at the Altro Posto at lunchtime. Somehow a dish of this pasta smells so inviting and homely. Such a pretty dessert again, too ; the arrival of anguria [water melon ] has always symbolised summer for me in Italy.

Sadly and shamefully, another kind of smell greets one in the streets these days; the refuse collectors are on strike - for the quite valid reason that they have not been paid - and so the bins are overflowing. Let's hope we avoid a Napoli situation!

This week - what's new? - the Water Office are not answering the phone again!

Here's hoping you all have a "fairy godmother" friend in your lives, readers.

SPERMALINKS

The Sicilian male, you'll be glad to know, is alive, well and raring to go, according to recent studies which have sadly proved that sperm counts in Italian men have dropped drastically since the 1970s. There are, however, great regional variations in the figures, and men in Sicily, Puglia and Tuscany seemed to have fared best. The worst results have been found in the Campania region, including Naples, where environmental factors such as the current rubbish crisis are believed to have had an impact on the situation.

TALKING RUBBISH

Update, 17.1.08: Just saw this in Telegraph online.

Domestic rubbish continues to pile up in Naples, where the landfills are full and promised new incinerators have not been built. The background to this story is here and for the past two weeks things have become nastier and nastier, with effigies of Prodi and the Mayor of Naples having been burnt and left hanging from trees last week. Finally the problem has impacted upon Sicily, where there have been some scuffles between protestors and the authorities as the island has been asked to accept some of the Campania's refuse. With 250 tonnes of the stuff being bound for the Agrigento region last weekend, many Sicilians have declared that they do not see why their beautiful island should become the "wastedump of Italy". On Sardinia the protests have been violent.