SCHOPENHAUER, BOHEMIANS AND FARCICAL TITS

"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that, when they occurred, had seemed accidental and of little moment, turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot."
(Quoted The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers)

It is indeed a fascinating theory, though one not altogether backed up by my own floundering experience. When I look back on my life, I see less the consistent plot of a novel and more the outline of an episode of the BBC’s early-nineties soap opera fiasco, Eldorado. Most of my big life decisions have been made on a whim, guided by a desire to achieve the most pleasurable and pain-free result. Whilst my contemporaries were carefully choosing their higher education subjects based on future earnings potential, employability, and making Stalinist five-year plans for their lives, I resolved to read the largely useless Italian language at university whilst sipping a chilled lager outside a seafront café in Finale Ligure on a teenage Inter-railing jolly.

I have in a previous missive poked fun at my colleague E, who spent a year in Germany developing a profound and all-pervading loathing of everything Teutonic, for reasons unexplained, and yet my own experiences with gli italiani produced similar, if less rabidly frenzied, results. Before venturing to the tiny hillside city of Urbino for my Erasmus-sponsored sabbatical, I had infantile fantasies that I would be greeted in local bars as lo scrittore inglese, who, following in the footsteps of Hemingway and countless other hellraisers, would spent the entire time being drunk and fascinating. Indeed, in the first few weeks I found I did attract quite a bit of attention, as Italians, perhaps intrigued by my unique blend of cravats and corduroy, would approach me and strike up conversation. I would do my best to be as profound as possible with my rudimentary foreign language skills, before grabbing another beer from the canteen bar as a marker as to the extent to which I was spellbindingly bohemian. I was widely considered “strong” for my ability to down numerous cans of Peroni, and generally keep them down.

However, I soon discovered an ulterior motive for the captivation I held over the residents of Le Marche. Conversations inevitably followed the same, discernible pattern:

Italiano: So, where are you from?
Inglese: Britain. I say Britain because my father’s English, but my mother’s Wels…
Italiano: I was in London once. Biggy Ben, wonderful clock.
Inglese: Indeed. Have you ever heard of the Bloomsbury Grou…?
Italiano: And this gorgeous blonde next to you. Is she your girlfriend?
Inglese: What? No, no. She’s from another university in England. I met her yesterday.
Italiano: Can you introduce me to her?

Thus I would be left tapping my new found friend on the shoulder to continue my explanation of the twentieth-century London literary scene whilst he stared deeply into the seducee’s soul and declared his undying love for her, just as he had to a steamed up German girl twenty minutes earlier whom he was now strategically leaving to “settle”.

If there’s one thing that irritates me it’s Italian men’s utter conviction that it’s always open season sniff-wise. They are trained from a young age to tell a woman, any woman, “you will always be in my heart” and such preposterous flannel. I once had a fifteen-year-old Italian in a class who, when asked to describe the characteristics of his countrymen, pronounced with a stupid, self-satisfied and utterly straight face, “We are-a the best-a Latin lowvers,” to which I blurted with genuine venom, “Oh shut up, you farcical tit!”, at least mentally. The one romantic tryst I became involved in with an American colleague during my year abroad was snow-ploughed into oblivion after a couple of weeks by a dewy-eyed Calabrian with impossibly healthy hair and a verbosity full of the maudlin promises of primavera. He probably did the mambo like-a crazy too – there was simply no competing with his dusky southern ways…

I’m over it now, though.

Has an Italian ever stolen your girlfriend, or boyfriend? Have you ever stolen an Italian's girlfriend or boyfriend? Did they cry? Do you know any farcical tits? The TEFL Graveyard is a place to share your experiences, and your stories about tits .