My first encounter with Irish travellers

I was out with some friends I meet quite regularly, at one of our usual pubs. 

I thought that England-Uruguay is what would make it different from the standard night out. I guess I was wrong...

Walking into the pub, I noticed a big table outside with a number of loud and rough looking blokes. They seemed already drunk at 6:30 pm. 

Very unusual, I thought, given the quiet atmosphere normally experienced at this old English pub near the Barbican. 

Sitting at our table inside we couldn't help but notice the girls at the table next to us. 

Some of them very attractive, wearing kinky clothes, loads of make up and unusually flashy wigs. They looked like they were from a trashy TV show.

"It's a hen do" we thought. But why in this Italian-managed English pub the night of World Cup football?

More and more of them kept coming, giving us a much more interesting show than Gerrard, Rooney & co..

At some point, while at the bar waiting to be served, I could not help but notice that we were surrounded by the above mentioned loud aggressive blokes. 

"English hooligans" I thought. 

Though they did not seem to be following the game at all. 

Not long passed until we started to see that a group of these guys outside were starting to get very rowdy. Excitement turned into something a bit bigger and before we knew it, the manager was on the phone with the police.

No more than five minutes later a police lorry pulled up outside the pub and a few cops came out. And then a few more. And a few more.

Word spread quickly that it was a group of "pikes". I didn't know much about them at that point, other than from what I'd seen on Snatch and My big fat Gypsy wedding.

Before we knew it, the pub was packed with cops, heading towards the above mentioned half naked ladies with their flashy wigs. 

 

It was only at that point that we realised the connection between the two groups. 

The girls were there with those guys that were outside.

They were all a large group of Irish gypsies.

They are very different from the gypsies we get in Southern Europe, Italy included. The ones we have in Italy you would never find in pubs drinking. If anything they would come in to try and steal a wallet or two.

And the women are not dressed anywhere as "fancy" as the Irish gypsies we saw. Can you tell who is who? 

The ones you find in the UK and Ireland  are a very different breed.

Nevertheless they can be trouble. A lot of trouble. I guess that explains the 20+ cops that were sent to escort them out of the pub.

Thanks to an Irish friend (and google) I learnt that they are often referred to as "travellers". Other terms like "tinkers", "itinerants" or, pejoratively, "knackers" are also used. Some of these terms refer to services that were traditionally provided by them.  "Tinkering", for example, being the mending of tinware such as pots and pans, and "knackering" being the acquisition of dead or old horses for slaughter.

Their culture these days consists of having no sources of verifiable income and yet being cash rich, fighting, making youtube callout videos for said fights (one of the many, here http://youtu.be/wL6aDrzs3Fs)... and a bit of more fighting.

It was a very different first half of the game, which I'm sure my English friends appreciated since it distracted us from the game and Suarez's successful attempt at the English goal.

Apparently they wouldn't be let into pubs in Ireland, at least according to my Irish friend. 

I guess after last night there is at least one place in London where they will no longer be welcome!

I heard the manager has just ordered this sign, for outside his pub:

 

Planning an event with friends in London

I have been living in my garden flat since January and although I have had people over and had the occasional BBQ, I have not had a proper party yet. It's a pity since the garden has "BBQ and drinks with friends" written all over it!

So the other day I had a quick chat with my partner, selected a few dates and sent a message with the proposed dates to a group of friends. 

An initial "sounds good" was followed by a "I can't mate, I am off to xxxxx that weekend" and a "cheers but I have plans already".

"But I could on DD/MM if you guys are around then?" one of them added.
After checking my calendar and double checking with my partner, Happy with that new date I proposed it. But this time around somebody else could not make it. So I proposed one more... And an additional one.

When it came to the point that the date I was about to propose would have been more than 2 months away, I got frustrated and gave up, thinking that it was just not meant to happen. 

I'm not saying that all plans in London are unsuccessful like this one, but they are similar in the sense that they require consulting a calendar and they seem like people are trying to schedule a business meeting, not a social event with friends.

Planning an evening with friends in  Rome was quite different. All it took was a text suggesting meeting up the coming weekend (the following weekend at the latest), or even a message the day of.  And if you pulled out a phone to check your calendar when planning a dinner or an evening at the pub, people would make fun of you for months.

Back home the only events which require planning well in advance are weddings, graduation ceremonies, baptisms or holidays. And it makes complete sense. If you want to plan a trip somewhere, then you need to book the flight, the hotel and all sorts of things that require advance planning. But again, these are rare events!

When I first moved to London, since I was new to the city, I was eager to do things and had loads of time on my hands. 

However I noticed right away that even planning a simple night out for a few beers would work out to be a super complex negotiation. 

Initially I thought I would just "play the game", as I couldn't force people to meet me sooner than their busy schedules would permit. But I really intended to try to be as available as possible for "spontaneous evenings", as I was in Rome. 

But then things started to change. I started to meet more and more people... from work, from football, friends of friends, etc. And with all the people came more plans.

I started using the calendar on my phone more and more and before I knew it, I had become one of them... The same ones I initially criticised!

These days I often receive an invitation for the coming weekend and while there are still times when I can go, I have to take a rain check more often than I would like. I really hate it when I have to counter-propose a date that is more than a month away. 

Why does this city change people like this? Is it just because London offers a lot more than most cities? Or because the high concentration of people means that events book up quickly and you need to plan far in advance? Or maybe people in London tend to be more sociable, ending up with multiple groups of friends?

I don't have an answer to this. 

All I know is that although I disapprove of this madness, I ended up adapting to it and, if anything, I'm even contributing to it! Oh London, what have you done to me?

Facciamoli Azzurri!

Thursday's Gazzetta dello Sport was blue in colour (as opposed to the usual pink) and had a fascinating title: "facciamoli azzurri". 

"Facciamoli azzurri" or "let's make them blue" is a play on words which is based on the Italian saying "facciamoli neri" (let's make them black, meaning let's beat them) but replacing the colour black with blue, which is azzurri in Italian, since that's the colour of our football shirts and also the nickname of our national team ("gli azzurri").

Let's make them black could be interpreted as a racist statement, but it is not. It simply refers to making your opponent black with bruises.

Yet, this did not stop Tuttosport, an Italian sports newspaper, from using that same expression in a different contest, after Balotelli's two goal vs Germany in the 2012 European Championship.

We made them black, read the title, with a picture of our world class player Mario Balotelli. 

I remember seeing this on twitter and thinking "Oh my god, this is a fake surely".

In a country like the UK, a title like that would probably lead to people protesting in the streets, the newspaper receiving a massive fine and the top management of the newspaper having to resign. 

Not in Italy though. Here there were some talks, some people thought it was a bit extreme, some labelled it as racist, but overall the reaction was relatively mild.

Is that because Italians are racist then? 

I could write pages and pages on this topic, but in a nutshell I would say that surely there are some who are. But they are a relatively small proportion of the population (at least I want to hope).

Unfortunately those idiots exist everywhere.

We then have another category of people, who are the result of ignorance. People who grew up surrounded solely by other Italians and who had very limited exposure to people of other ethnicities. These kind of people sadly represent a very large part of the country. These are people who simply do not know any better. They grew up in a country where people with a different background are the ones illegally selling you necklaces and bracelets at the beach. The ones who bother you trying to sell you a €1 rose every time to dine out.

Sadly they just live in their small world.

I could be one of them today, if it wasn't for some evolutions in my life which brought me to different places, made me meet very diverse people who opened my eyes and made me a better person.

Part of the reasons why we have the above situation is our lack of colonial history, which didn't make our population diverse enough. However things are slowly changing and more and more foreigners are starting to integrate in our society. Thanks to them, hopefully one day not too distant from now things will change and we will not see such titles in our newspapers and our country will be a lot better!