Intelligent Parenting?

Tags

arras, Artem, Denmark, eBlaster, Hamlet, intelligent parenting, Laertes, Machiavelli, Montalbano, Ola calendar, Ophelia, paranoia, Pasha, Polonius, Rainbow portrait, Reynaldo, Rosencrantz and Guilderstein, spyware, surveillance

Carrie was eager to spill the beans, and I don’t mean the caffeine

variety, though we were in our favourite haunt, post-Hallowe’en.

Tiger-Lily told me that Juniper’s mother has been spying on her daughter

via eBlaster, she whispered, looking over her shoulder.  Juniper discovered

that her mother was monitoring her every keystroke and was downloading

her e-mails.

Maybe that’s why her daughter can be so aggressive, I replied.  No one

takes kindly to having their privacy invaded.  I mean, take Hamlet..

Hamlet? Carrie looked confused.

Yes, he put on an antic disposition to cover up his anxiety at living in a

surveillance state.

I’d hardly call the Boothroyd-Smythe’s residence a temple to

totalitarianism!

No, I continued, but you take my point about Hamlet being annoyed when

people started influencing his girlfriend and manipulating his best mates?

Well, it’s years since I read the play, stated Carrie.  But, apparently Gisela,

Juniper’s mum contacted a company called SpectreSoft and ordered a

product, which she then had installed on Juniper’s computer.

Well, they used to say that people who eavesdropped never heard

anything good about themselves, I remarked.

The thing was that Juniper had only been Googling stuff for her

coursework and was using Twitter to gossip about a Housemistress called

Miss Fotheringay, who is apparently seeing an older man, to the delectation

of all the girls in her year, Carrie expatiated.

So, it has all been relatively innocent trivia?  But did Juniper find out that her

mother was turning into Elizabeth 1, all ears and eyes, like in that Rainbow

portrait?  

She was furious and ran away to her father’s house.  He supported her

human right to privacy and all sorts of nonsense was raised re/ access.

Sounds over-inflated, I opined.  It’s half term.  I wonder if things will cool

down and she’ll return before school starts?

Well, her trust has been shattered and she says she would prefer to board.

If the school allows it.  Her brother didn’t seem too upset. He just threw out

all her yarn and needles and took over her room, as it has much more space,

Carrie added.

Isn’t John- that’s his name, isn’t it?- worried that his mum may spy

on him?

No.  He says he could disable anything that she tried to attach to his

equipment.  But he considers her cool for trying.

An obnoxious little Polonius-in-the-making!  Someone will spear him

through the arras one day! I ventured.

If Juniper’s put into Miss Fotheringay’s house, then she can spy on her

teacher’s comings and goings for the rest of the girls, Carrie predicted.

St Vitus’ is probably as rotten a state as Denmark!  Girls can be so

Machiavellian!

It’s all about trust and, sadly, human relations were ever thus! I

pronounced. Even Rosencrantz and Guilderstein were traitors and

Ophelia was relaying information about her lover to her father.

Reynaldo was keeping a check on Laertes.  Everyone’s paranoid!

Carrie bit into a piece of shortbread.  I wonder if anyone is spying on

me? I shred all my receipts, but what if Gyles is intercepting my accounts

and he discovers how much I am spending in Costamuchamoulah each

month? What if he sees how many times I have clicked on ‘Artem’, or

‘Pasha’?

Or ‘Montalbano’? I teased.  Just be upfront.  That’s the secret.  Don’t

hide behind an arras.

What’s an arras?  She looked puzzled.

According to the guys, it’s the curvy bit of her anatomy that Ola wiggles

on ‘Strictly’, I informed her.

I shouldn’t worry about Gyles uncovering your secret passions.  All the guys

will be too busy clicking on Ola’s Calendar, by all accounts, so it’s touche and

you can bet that male viewings won’t come in single spies, but in battalions. 

I think your tiny peccadilloes are relatively innocuous and will be below the radar. 

If you’re worried, though, I’d just buy Gyles Ola’s calendar for Christmas.  That’ll

keep him off your tail!

Some Animals Are More Equal

Tags

Animal Farm, Botticelli, Cheryl Cole, commissario, Davide Camarrone, Golding, greasy pole, Jessie and Bluebell, Lolita, Lord of Flies, Michel Riondino, Montalbano, Napoleon, Old Major, Orwellian, Russell Group, Snowball, Sophia Loren, Squealer, totalitarian

Mum!  Tiger-Lily raised her voice.  Mum!

Oh, eh, what is it, Tiger?

Mum, do you think you could stop salivating over The Young Montalbano

and tell me where you put my lacrosse shirt?

Carrie replied, In the utility room, I think, without taking her eyes off

the screen.

Duh! expostulated the teenager.  And dad…

Mmm? Gyles made a kind of non-committed non-verbal response.

There was a rather attractive girl, a cross between Cheryl Cole and the

young Sophia Loren, being fed forkfuls of food in a prison cell by the

eponymous hero of the programme.

Though she appeared to have learning disabilities and had tried to shoot

the nouveau inspector, or commissario, he of the Botticelli curls did not

look as if he was deterred.  In fact, he had given the girl the dress his

girlfriend had asked him to buy her from the local market.  It seemed to be

an incentive to talk, or do something else.  It wouldn’t earn him any

promotion with his enamorato, you wouldn’t think!  But somehow he

seemed to get away with it, though the girlfriend recommended the

recipient for a cleaning job.

Gyles was riveted.

Carrie thought being banged up in a cell with Michele Riondino would

be anything but a punishment.  Where could she get a gun?

Dad!  Did you hear me?  Have you got a spare battery?

Gyles reluctantly raised himself from the sofa and interacted with his own

Lolita-in-the-making.

Glad to have some parental attention, Tiger became fairly chatty.

Dad, you know John Boothroyd-Smythe, or B-S, as Mr Snodbury calls

him?

The naughty boy?

Yeah.  Well, he is in Big Trouble this time.

What’s he been up to now?

He set up a website called Squealer’s Trash Blog and criticised the

management of St Birinus’ and said that Mr Snodbury was Napoleon

and Mr Poskett, the choirmaster, was Snowball.

Did he say the Headmaster was Old Major? laughed Gyles.

How do you know, Dad?  Tiger was amazed by her father’s acuity.

John used big words like ‘totalitarian’ when discussing the first rugby

team and how it was chosen.

Sour grapes then? Gyles remarked.

He said the places on the team were allocated by a nepotistic dictator.

So the headmaster’s nephew is in the First team then?  The rugby coach

stole Bluebell and Jessie’s prime puppies for himself?!

Dad, John defaced the sports fixture list on the criss-cross board and

when the class were challenged to admit who the culprit had been, six

boys confessed and had to run round the sports field at break.

Excellent!  Just like the hens in Animal Farm!

Tiger didn’t understand her father’s Orwellian comments.  She was

going to be studying Lord of The Flies this year instead.  Let’s just hope

that John, or B-S, isn’t in a group that is going to study Golding for GCSE.

On the other hand, that particular author had been a schoolmaster himself,

so there wouldn’t have been any flies on him either.  Tiger is sure to be

enlightened as to human nature and political systems and their hierarchies.

V

Well, a bit of exercise is better than having your neck wrung, I suppose,

quipped Gyles. I’m amazed that Old Snod hasn’t been sent to the knackers’

yard by now.  He’s been doing something in Education for aeons and must be

past his sell-by date.  He’s probably constructed more metaphorical windmills

than I have had hot dinners.  He would produce a fair bit of glue, I am sure,

given that ample paunch.

Tiger thought her father was slightly mad.

Dad, Castor and Pollux confessed just to get the Headmaster to leave

everyone alone.  They were accused of being anarchists.  The Headmaster

wrote to their parents and said that they would never get into a Russell

Group university if they continued to misbehave.

Hah! I don’t think he went to one himself, grinned Gyles.  His eyes strayed

to the screen again.  He didn’t think that the young Montalbano was doing

too badly, in spite of his waywardness and unorthodox approach to crime

detection and force discipline.  Probably B-S would triumph in life, in spite of,

or indeed because of, his individualistic approach.  After all, some animals are

simply more successful than others.  Even in a police cell, some folks will

manage a dalliance with a dumb goddess. Jammy devils!

He watched the credits go up.  Politics is ubiquitous, he mused.  And human

nature involves getting one over the Joneses.

How daft of the Headmaster not to recognise that the jockeying for position

and fight to get to the top of the greasy pole is par for the course of any

aspiring bratlet and its progenitors.

It was then that Gyles noticed that the lyrics to the programme’s

theme music had been accredited to a Davide Camarrone.

Case proven.  Politicians get into everything!  Some animals are simply

more versatile and more equipped than others.  Especially if they have

had the benefit of a private education, such as Jessie and Bluebell’s

puppies!

Remembrance of Things Past

Tags

Argentinian tango, Carcassone, Carrie, Don Giovanni, Duncan Bannatyne, extra vergine, Glasgow, Leporello, Liguria, Montalbano, Olive, Petruchio, Pino Grigio, Proust, Salva, Souleiado, Suttonford, Tesco

Carrie settled back on the sofa in the snug.  The kids were in bed and her husband, Gyles, was upstairs on the computer.  Bliss!  She was going to watch Montalbano, which she had recorded for such a moment.  It was so helpful for her conversational Italian, though she was picking up a Sicilian accent, she had been told.  All her girlfriends had noticed, though they were speaking in the same way.

It was Tuesday.  She was just about to reach for her Pino Grigio when she had a Proustian moment.  She remembered that she hadn’t seen Salvatore for a couple of weeks.  He used to come to the town markets regularly and had a stall shaded, or sheltered, depending on the weather, by a bright gazebo-type canopy, under which he spread out his wares- olives and suchlike.

Buon giorno!  Carrie would say in her Sicilian accent, re-discovering her Italian roots.  (Her full maiden name had been Carissima Pomodoro, but she had been brought up in Glasgow, where her great-grandfather had opened one of the first ice-cream parlours, long before Duncan Bannatyne had been a glint in his father’s eye.  Ginevra, her mother-in-law, had also been brought up in Glasgow by her parents, the Piccolalivernas.  The Glasgow connection was how Carrie had come to meet her husband, Gyles, but that is another story..)

Yes, Tuesday was Suttonford’s market day, but the stalls tended to deflect business from the regular shops. Frankly, they did not offer anything very enticing that was an obvious bonus to the town, nor did they compensate for the loss of parking spaces on High street.

Vans filled with house clearance detritus or car boot leftovers mingled with vehicles of suspect exhausts and noisy generators that spewed forth olagineous fumes and dealt in butterless baps with slabs of indeterminate material squidged with a squelch of pseudo-ketchup from an array of plastic dispensers.  All of this was profferred to townspeople who largely monitored their own chlorestrol levels and ordered their organic veggie boxes bi-monthly.

Once or twice, Carrie had dared to interrupt a stall-holder who wore fingerless gloves and who was demolishing a pasty whilst talking to the neighbouring vendor.  They’d be discussing grandchildren, golf handicaps or ferry crossings.  Having broken in with a discreet cough, Carrie would point to some ceramic item and enquire:

Excuse me, what is it?

(She was referring to its make, age, composition or provenance and she felt sure that the misunderstanding could not be attributed to her Sicilian accent, since that was restricted to her alternative linguistic mode.)

The stall holder would take a deliberate additional bite and, with her mouth full of pastry, would look her up and down, assessing her status and then pronounce:

What is it?  It’s fifty quid, innit.

Carrie, unsure as to whether this tag was an interrogative or a statement, would immediately slink away, completely ignored by the original addressee.

Off she’d go, past the stall which displayed Mediterranean tat-ie/ 100% polyester tablecloths and napkins in fake Souleiado patterns, whose sunny colours looked entirely out of place in the cold, relatively northern light of Suttonford, but which might have glowed jewel-like in the inner sanctum of Carcassone’s shopping fortress.  She would pass the Spanish ceramic house number plates (so useless in Suttonford, where each house has a name, darling,) and would walk beyond the abandoned trestle tables, where one had to look around for a keeper who had given up hope and had scarpered to Tesco’s for a pack of sandwiches.  No haggle margin, as nobody with which to haggle.

And then there was the effulgent aura coming from the final stall which was like the clichéd candle flame to moths and that was manned- and oh, so manly- by Salvatore, the olive seller. He was not only a babe magnet, but he drew in all the female phagocytes (cells which are capable of absorbing foreign matter) with complexions like sun-dried tomatoes and natures to match, ie/ who would give you the pip, but who giggled like pre-teens, even after half a century, when Salvatore greeted them like long-abandoned exes.

Salvatore’s alluring success owed itself to the fact that he dealt in hope, misplaced meteorological optimism and remembrance of things very far back in the past.  Never mind that he traded in over-salty olives and his stall was probably a Mafia franchise.  (Hey, Carrie had noticed two empty violin cases on the adjacent stall.  Maybe they were for the machine guns.)  For, it was possible that he was being subsidised to create addiction in the way Brits had engendered craving for opium in China, in order to gain trade control.

Carrie could observe his modus operandi- oily flattery, overt grooming, courtship and finally, seduction.  Yet, she was not immune.

First there was the fore-play of the inviting sample, temptingly waved in front of the customer on the end of an olive wood ladle.  Then there was the caring concern shown in the provision of a clean polystyrene cup to contain the poubelles and the sensitive handing over of a paper napkin to wipe the excess oil which dribbled down most matrons’ chins.

Each lucky lady had been selected to taste a particular flavour which was skilfully matched with her character and personality: the reserved and shy could try green olives with mild almonds cheekily protruding, perhaps in a basilica or coriander dressing.

The more fiery characters were tamed by this Petruchio via glistening orbs, coated in chili, or jalapeno-flavoured oils.

Those who considered themselves cosmopolitan- such as the members of Carrie’s Italian group-had plenty of garlic garnish and the acerbic and twisted had citrus zest on black globes.

Salvatore- she had subliminally taken to calling him Salva after the detective- would lick his fingers while maintaining eye contact and then she and others in his fan club would come away laden with little tubs and paper carriers and a determination to lobby the local council for an Argentinian tango class for beginners.  Ciao and prego crept into Suttonford vocabulary, especially when the besotted customers  met up in Costamuchamoulah.

Buon giorno, Carrie!  He raised an expressive eyebrow, in lieu of a question.

She tried to maintain a certain froideur.

Commissario!

Try some with lemon, rosemary and thyme, he suggested.  (100% on the oleometer.)

No, I’ll just have some foccacio, she resisted.  Maybe that was the wrong word?

Extra vergine? he persisted, lubriciously.

A little flutter like a breeze playing lightly over the strings of an Aeolian harp reminded her of her hormones.  I’m not frigid after all, she thought.

By the time he had finished with her, she had a till receipt the length of the list of Leporello’s conquests in Don Giovanni.

She heard a tread on the stair, which brought her back to the present.  Salva was probably basking on a verandah in Liguria- sounds a bit like a ligature, but let’s not go there.  Or, subsidised by Carrie and other victims, he was, in all likelihood, wining and dining some Loren-lookalike on his balcony over the sea, canoodling in Calabria, like Montalbano, only with hair.

Gyles popped his head round the snug door:

I thought you were watching your programme? he said mildly. Do you want some olives with your Pino Grigio?  He placed a tub of Tesco’s best on the nest of tables.

But somehow the little love grenades had lost their charm.

No thanks, love.  I’m just coming up to bed.  I’ll watch it another night.

Gyles went ahead.

Hello, wall!  she said to herself.

Tuesdays were never going to be the same. 

Arrivederci, Salva. Adieu, adieu.