Mountain Pass #5 - The Final Chapter of Stupidity

We returned to Milan 2 days later as bonafide maniacs - intent on trackingthose daughters of whores down. However improbable it was.

After a steadying glass of red in the hotel, we headed back to the statzione in the darkness of late evening. We searched round a couple of streets looking for the vendors where we had met them and passed a gang of around 8 people outside an internet café. My heart skipped ten beats as I turned round for a proper look …… Matt - it’s them’. Matt turned and unbelievably, we found ourselves stood directly in front within touching distance. God, they were young and there was fear etched on the little plump one’s face. The taller smelly one (as Matt had remembered) seemed to be contemplating whether to have chips or a kebab, she had not a care in the world.

They retorted that they didn’t have the laptops when we demanded them back. ‘We’re not f*** stupid. We want them back’. (Really we’re not F*** stupid, honest). The rest of the gang - who worryingly were also within touching distance of us looked on. The girls bolted and we set off in pursuit across to the statzione. As we caught them they cleverly split, one going into the statzionne itself and the other turning completely, heading back down the street.

They problem was we couldn’t bring ourselves to touch them to attempt a restraint, they were after all just teenage girls. We followed the young plump one because she was slower on her feet. I noticed that we in turn were being followed by the gang the girls had been standing with. They were perilously close and there was some big looking lads. We were in danger of both being clobbered. So I made a sensible decision to run across the road out of harm’s way so they couldn’t strike out at us both. You see, this action meant they could only clobber Matt. ‘Matt’, I shouted. ‘There’s five of the F**** behind you. Watch Out!’ I added considerately.

Someone had to help us surely. 'Carabinieri, excusi, carabinieri!'. I found myself running across some tram tracks shouting at two respectable looking people. An older guy close to pensionable age ran towards Matt and flashed a badge at the girl. Thank F***. The gang moved back and the girl was shouting frantically at this old fellow who we can only assume was a civilian policeman. To our disbelief the fellow allowed the girl to walk off after a few minutes, shrugging his soldiers as we lambasted him. Was it that unlikely this little girl had actually robbed these two big Englishmen?

We set off in pursuit again and a street on, Matt stood to prevent the girl from walking further. I ran in to a hotel to call the police. The receptionist was disinterested and fobbed me off, saying she couldn’t understand me. An American guest finally came to my rescue and angrily told them that they knew exactly what I was saying. She finally rang the police but Matt and the girls had already disappeared off in to the night.

After an arduous task of trying to explain to the two carabinieri what had happened, I found myself in the backseat of a police car touring the murky Milan streets, looking for my good friend. ‘Quick back there’ The police car reversed back up the street. ‘Ah, No, No, Sorry. Sorry’. It was obviously going to be a fruitless search and the police soon got bored and dropped me off - so I could get a taxi back across town to my hotel!

My thoughts were with Matt. I had left him. Was he lying, bloodied and battered in a Milanese backstreet or worse? And more importantly, had he got those F*** laptops back. The hours ebbed away but the receptionist steadfastly refused to ring the police to report him missing. I had consumed the equivalent of a full bottle of red when and was slightly incoherent when he finally returned. He was alive but empty handed (he later told me that I had been unable todisguise my disappointment that he was indeed laptop-free).

It turned out Matt had had an adventure all of his own. The girl had screamed she was being attacked, some man had come down to look, she ran off and jumped on to a tram. Matt followed and just made the jump on to the tram as it pulled away and chased her up a packed carriage. They got off after a couple of stops, the girl finally buckled and matt accompanied her to an internet café where she rang for someone to bring the laptops. Matt asked the staff in the café to help but they ignored him, the girl set off again and Matt was forced to peruse her down a couple of backstreets. A guy appeared and said he would go get the laptops from a flat for 50 Euros. What? Surely Matt you didn‘t pay the thief to give you back your computer? No, no, no!! . The guy gleefully accepted the 50 Euros before telling Matt he hadn’t pinched them and it was nothing to do with him. Matt punched him in the face and retrieved his funds. Another guy appeared, and a big one according to Matt. Matt retreated and the girl seized her chance to make her final escape, disappearing off in the direction behind the big bloke from which Matt was fleeing.

Back upstairs in the hotel I lamented how stupid we had been to have miraculously found the girls and let them slip away. ‘We’re stupid. F**** stupid. Idiots!! Utter w**** we are’. ‘Matt, I know your way of dealing with something is to just try to shut it out and go to sleep, but me - Ineed to dissect it and persecute ourselves’. Even in all the turmoil I recognised our different mindsets, ignored his wishes and ploughed on, ‘honestly, we’re 30 this year f***** idiots’....

My incessant chastising of us through the early hours had left Matt bewildered, tired and beaten. My insistence to find the internet café he had been to the night before, call the police, check the CCTV and then goto the Milanese press pushed him too far. ‘RAARGGHH. I can’t deal with this bloody crusade any longer!’ he cried. The silence was only punctuated an eternity later when he had to borrow 5 Euros for a coffee.

To while away the hours until the return flight we did make it to the internet café and then to the police station. Unfortunately the ‘CCTV wasnot working last night’. We finally made it home later that day, disillusioned at our own stupidity and filled with recoiling anger at the seemingly endless injustice we had initiated.

On reflection now - the events in Milan were helpful. It taught us the hard way of the importance of: PLANNING / CONTINGENCIES / BACK-UPS and BACK-UPS. It also made us stake stock, improve the site, deliver a much better body of work and launch a year to the exact weekend later. So hopefully for anyone starting a business, there maybe something to draw on to avoid a near catastrophe - even if it is only not to go nightclubbing with your suitcase, laptop, passport and digital cameras...

Mountain Pass #4 - I Blame Matt

I returned from the toilet. Where are they? Where’s Matt? Deviant – Is he off dancing with the pair of them? I wandered round the dance floor.

It was dark, loud. Where are they? Ahh at last, here was one of the girls. Hi, where’s Matt? She looks concerned and gestured for me to hand over my phone to make a call. She’d lost them too. I passed the phone in to her hand. She looked at me and ………slipped it effortlessly in to her bag. Hang on???

I leaned forward with both hands. As I did, my wrists were grasped tightly by a small stocky guy to the side of me. The girl reached in to my other pocket and took my wallet. (I realised at this point that these were definitely not the nicest girls in the mundo!) What the F***? She removed the 100 or so Euros, calmly sifted though my cards, taking one, before putting the rest back and returning the wallet to my jeans pocket (A caring thief! There is a semblance of good in everybody - is there not?).

Suddenly my wrists were free but by the time I turned they had disappeared into the throng. The search was useless and so I switched to finding Matt which took a good half hour. He was dazed and slumped on a chair. ‘Where is everyone?’, his slurring voice asked. ‘They’ve gone, robbed us!’ I replied. To my increasing annoyance - he was struggling to comprehend the gravity of the situation, in fact he didn’t even known there was a situation.

We looked desperately round the club again, outside, back inside again. The crumb of comfort we found in seeing our suitcases, towering proudly over a small round table almost instantly receded when we realised the laptop bags were not in accompaniment.

Matt was still drunk and he slept most of the way on the train to Firenze, leaving me to contend with a conductor requesting 80 Euros - given that we had completely forgot to buy a ticket back in the early Milan dawn. He finally took pity on me as I explained the situation and did not charge us on the proviso we got off at the next stop, Piacenza. He also provided me with the useful advice to get on a train to Firenze - as the one we were on didn’t!!!

This gesture was tempered by my increasing fury at Matt. He was leaving me to deal with all the S*** yet he spoke the better Italian. I erupted.... MAAATT’. I shook him. ‘F**in hell, 6-months, working all hours on the business, and we’ve lost f**** everything!’. Matt was incredulous. He smiled smugly and casually told me there was nothing to worry about - everything was saved on backups back in Newcastle.

Arrggghh. I had reached my tipping point and screamed back at him, demanding he shared my pain. ‘Have we, have we. We’ve got the website, but the artworks, the F*** artworks. We haven’t got the F*** artworks saved.’ This for me was the best part of the entire trip. The forlorn, despairing look which enveloped his face, instantly banishing his conceitedness, did at least unload a miniscule part of my heavy burden. Haha you twat. We‘re both F***d!

We stood on the Piacenza platform in the biting cold, reflecting on what had happened. We had been done like kippers. The girls helped us to get drunk, and separated us while the other went to the toilet and made off with... Well, only 2 laptops, 2 digital cameras, 2 ipods, 2 mobile phones (Matt was just realising he didn’t have his) and 1 passport, (typically mine). We had kindly hand-packed all of that in to the laptop bags and trusted two girls who we had met on the street 1 hour earlier with them. Some might say naïve, others preposterously stupid.

6-months of intense hard-work had just disappeared. We may have still had a website but we had no product - you cannot print canvasses from small jpeg images and our only back-up of the real images was on each other’s laptops.

Our 2 days in Florence were taken in up in British consulates and police stations. We even tried to convince ourselves that a very expensive meal was beautiful, when all either of us could manage was a couple of mouthfuls of a steak that had already drowned in a rich dark chocolate textured sauce. ‘It might not be for us, but what a restaurant, you cantell it’s quality’ I salvaged. Matt agreed.

The Unbearable Being of Likeness

Best to move on swiftly from that mangled title I feel. I suffer from random passions and preferences for things. I'm not sure if other have the strange outlook as I do. I know people all like different things, but it usually for a reason. For example, people like the phrase 'life's rich tapestry', which would aptly fit what I am trying to describe. But I don't like that twee comment at all so I wont use it. I can't for the life of me think why I like Canada, Russian Literature of the town of Narbonne in France. True, there are likeable things about all of them, but that isn't why I like them. I sense I have lost you already. I am myself.

Canada is a fantastic place, friendly, scenic and bewilderingly vast. I've been lucky enough to visit a small fraction of this country and see it for myself. There's nothing strange about liking it. Except that I liked it before I'd been, before I knew anything about it other than what the flag looks like. I've been across North America and my favourite place is the pleasant but unremarkable Halifax, Nova Scotia, rather than Boston or New York. I drink whisky and I like Canadian Club more than better quality, tastier brands.

Russian literature has many classics, but everyone would agree there are equals from other cultures. But I haven't read a serious book by a non-Russian for years. I seek out obscure ones now that I've done the big names. And I forcibly enjoy them, denying myself the opportunity to criticise them even if I don't enjoy them. I rank Bulgakov's Master and Margarita in my top twenty books, and I just don't like it. Talking cats indeed.

I love France, have been many times and am comfortable in why I developed this opinion. But Narbonne, a small provincial city in Languedoc is my favourite place of all. It is surrounded my Montpellier, Perpignan, Sété, Toulouse and Narbonne. But I prefer to all of those other places. It boasts an impressive unfinished cathedral and a pleasant, compact centre. It also has a history of race riots but that doesn't put me off. I only went the first time because I had to change trains there, and had such a hangover I couldn't face the ongoing journey. I spent my stay there stuck in the hotel watching the Champions League final, rather than any great social or cultural pursuits.

I'm not sure how I can recognise the failings in the things that I like and like them all the more for them. Perhaps I'm odd. Sometimes this thought worries me. And then I realise people out there laugh at Rob Brydon, watch Holby City and read Dickens. And then I relax, as there's nothing rational about enjoying those things either. I realise, I'm not alone.

Mountain Pass #3 - Clubbing with Suitcases

Ahh so the girls!!!! Well it went something a little like this.

They were very nice to us. They put us at ease as we chatted in fragmented sentences - in a hybrid of English, Italian and French. We asked them if there was a bar we could find refuge in. They disappeared for a minute or two and returned, politely ending their calls to tell us there was the taxi was on its way. They got in the taxi with us to take us there.

The chills and anxieties that arose in us around the statzione were obliterated to another lifetime, as we sat relaxed on the back seat laughing and chatting – making friends. Were these the most helpful, friendly girls in the mundo? A few minutes on, the taxi swung around a corner and pulled to a halt. The scene that greeted us - big groups of late teen / young 20 something’s, all dressed ‘street casual’ in training tops and chunky white trainers was a little disconcerting.

But thankfully the girls were there beckoning us up to the nightclub steps, briefly muttering a reply to one of the hostile looking gang members. One of the girls even came back to help me negotiate the steep steps after I struggled to haul the suitcase up. This would be a difficult manoeuvre at the best of times not least when clutching a laptop in the 'free' hand.

Inside the packed club, the throng of people parted a path before us in amazement as we dragged our suitcases through to a small seating area. One of the girls was busy; repeatedly disappearing and returning every few minutes whilst the other sat with us drinking. A couple of more double Jack Daniels set our heads spinning once again and then it happened...

Spare a Thought for the Bankers

I'm about to present a social commentary for which I have no qualification whatsoever. The ground on which I will touch is far beyond my intellectual capacity. Much like sudoku in that respect. In fact, even during the planning for this article, I realised the flaws in my logic. At the same time i will present an egalitarianism where everyone is treated equally, as individuals. So all equal, but different. Not a great start. And if that appears too uplifting I'll go on to blame all the world's economic woes on everyone, as humans. Fantastic, so the world is doomed because we are who we are.

And as if that wasn't enough, I will also fail to offer any alternatives or solutions. The only thing I'm good as seems to be downplaying expectations. If only there was a career where I could be as critical as I like of society - yet offer no ideas on how to make it any better. Oh hang on, jut let me make a note to join the Conservative Party as soon as I finish this.

The reason I have chosen to defend bankers is twofold, both based on personal experience. For a start it isn't really clear what a banker is. Is it all bank workers, city bankers or just the bosses of big investment banks? Whichever of these groups is being blamed, that blame is unlikely to lie at the door of every one of them. For the best part of a decade, until last year, I was a manager at Northern Rock. During the crisis which saw the bank run and a third of the workforce axed (myself included), I experienced similar generalisation first hand. 'Northern Rock's Incompetent Management' cried every MP, newscaster and journalist. If you take that description literally then I'm one of them. Was it my fault, a manager in the complaints department? I don't think so but after hearing that every day for 12 months it was hard to believe that wasn't what other people thought.

Obviously I'm being too sensitive here, but it can affect you. Just as it affects people in groups of other popular news phrases of the moment. Asylum seekers are spongers. Iran is part of the axis of evil. The media is responsible for the sexualisation of young people. Bankers are stereotyped just as much. Having said that, I've a lot more sympathy for any Iranian TV producers currently seeking political asylum.....

Aside from the issue of stereotyping, bankers (however you define them) are only doing what the majority of people would do given the chance. A friend of mine from university (where I clearly didn't study sociology) is a hedge fund manager. He's a perfectly nice man, generous and intelligent. What he did was get into a career where he could use that intelligence to make lots of money. There will be some amongst those judging bankers who wouldn't have done the same, but most would. I know I would.

Everyone can talk about the perfect job, living the dream and the like. The sad fact is, the vast majority of us don't ever get them. It shouldn't stop you striving, but most people just do a job because it pays the bills. How many estate agents, truck drivers or complaints managers dreamed of doing that job when they were young? There's nothing wrong with them and some people get some enjoyment out of them - but if you ask whether you would have been a banker and earned ten times as much? In most cases human nature dictates that you would.

It is human nature that has created a society driven by status and possessions. With notable exceptions we are all part of it. And we'd have managed a hedge fund and made our millions over the last ten years if we could have done. So it's not just the bankers fault, it's mine and yours.

Fit For Parenthood?

No - not me. This morning however it was harrowingly obvious I wasn’t alone.

As I settled in to my seat on the metro and unfolded my paper, there was a slight commotion. Two teens, shaven headed but reassuringly suited and booted, prised the doors back open and bundled on to the carriage.

‘Eehhhh, man. Mam man, a cannit here you man. Am on the Metro’. The reassurance was fleeting. It was quite clear that opposite me were - as we say in Newcastle - two ‘charvers’. The conversation went on.

‘I’m on me way for an interview. Eh? - Aye this morning. Aye. I’m F*cked though. The bairn’s been bad aal neet’. A pause. ‘Naar, just coughing an that like and being sick'. A further pause. 'Naah she’s in the hoose. I’ll only be an hoor’. A longer pause. ‘Aye the dogs in in aal’. An even longer pause. ‘Divin’t worry mam man, it if gans for her, I’ll f*ckin smash it’.

I instinctively peeped above the paper and then upward to the route map, averting prolonged eye contact. The conversation wasn’t over though and it didn’t get better. ‘Hahaaaaa. She was deed funny like. She was farting this morning and it F*ckin stunk’. There was no indication as to whether this was the ‘bairn’ or the dog.

Fortunately, I was only travelling one stop. As I walked to my destination it still troubled me though. I just couldn’t comprehend what I’d heard, nor put it out of my mind. To leave the dog in the house with the young child in the logic that you’ll ’discipline’ the dog should it have attacked the child. Perverse beyond belief.

I don’t have children, but how can anyone treat them with such contempt? Even as I write this, it still disturbs me. Does a childhood of neglect, beatings and dog bites await? Or miraculously did this thing, masquerading as an adolescent human being somehow attract a loving, doting young mother who will shower her with the love and care afforded to myself and
that deserved by any child.

It would seem as unlikely as her father succeeding in this morning’s job interview, the very one for which he had left her. We can all only hope...