From one populist hero to another; today I at long last watched Kusturica’s biopic of arguably the world’s greatest ever footballer, Diego Maradona (with apologies and thanks to E for the loan!). Kusturica clearly idolized Maradona but his somewhat self-indulgent documentary is far from being a hagiography. To understand Maradona’s modest origins is to understand why he is so venerated by the Argentine and Neapolitan working classes and also, I suspect, explains his friendships with Castro and Chavez. One of the most touching moments in the film is when Maradona goes back, for the first time in fifteen years, to the tiny south Buenos Aires shantytown house where he grew up. In the voiceover commentary Kusturica theorises that Maradona doesn’t like being reminded of the grim reality for many of his impoverished compatriots. But the images come to life when Maradona’s eyes light up as he shows the tiny courtyard where he played football ‘day and night’ (clearly where he developed the skill to play in small spaces while tightly marked) and the wall against which he endlessly headed the ball.  The light fades a little as he remembers his exhausted father, a porter, encouraging his children to walk on his back as a sort of primitive massage…

I am reading a wonderful account of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s extraordinarily rich life. The biography, by Alfonso Scirocco, was very generously given to me as a present by his nephew, who carries the same name and is a colleague in the EESC. In England, every village has an ‘Elizabeth I slept here’ panel. In Italy, its Garibaldi. His name is everywhere. And now I understand why; he got just about everywhere! I knew about his exploits in Latin America but confess I never knew he stayed in New York or that he was accorded a hero’s welcome in Newcastle. What I had also forgotten was that Garibaldi, like Mazzini, was a European patriot, supporting the creation of a European federation. They believed that a unified Germany could play a leadership role in that context. I am closing this post with an extract from a 10 April 1865 letter Garibaldi wrote to the German revolutionary Karl Blind which, it seems to me, has some uncanny echoes for the present day:

‘The progress of humanity seems to have come to a halt, and you with your superior intelligence will know why. The reason is that the world lacks a nation which possesses true leadership. Such leadership, of course, is required not to dominate other peoples, but to lead them along the path of duty, to lead them toward the brotherhood of nations where all the barriers erected by egoism will be destroyed. We need the kind of leadership which, in the true tradition of medieval chivalry, would devote itself to redressing wrongs, supporting the weak, sacrificing momentary gains and material advantage for the much finer and more satisfying achievement of relieving the suffering of our fellow men. We need a nation courageous enough to give us a lead in this direction. It would rally to its cause all those who are suffering wrong or who aspire to a better life, and all those who are now enduring foreign oppression.

‘This role of world leadership, left vacant as things are today, might well be occupied by the German nation. You Germans, with your grave and philosophic character, might well be the ones who could win the confidence of others and guarantee the future stability of the international community. Let us hope, then, that you can use your energy to overcome your moth-eaten thirty tyrants of the various German states. Let us hope that in the center of Europe you can then make a unified nation out of your fifty millions. All the rest of us would eagerly and joyfully follow you.’

We are holidaying for a few days in a spectacularly beautiful part of Northern Italy. As the photograph shows, even walking the dog this afternoon treated us to wonderful views out over the Lago di Como and the beginnings of the Valtellina. An important year lies ahead, with Presidential elections in France (April/May) and the US (November), the Rio+20 UN Conference on sustainable development in June and a new Treaty to be negotiated and signed for the eurozone (March?). Still closer to home, the EESC’s President, Staffan Nilsson, will begin the second half of his mandate in February. There is still much to be done. But when I am up in the mountains, following ancient paths and gazing down over ancient settlements, I get a sense of timelessness.

We have at last started to watch the American TV series, The Wire. Wow! Although the series won no major awards it is easy to see why many critics consider it one of the greatest series made. Already in the dense first episode the viewer is flung headlong into a gritty and all-too-believable depiction of West Baltimore’s dystopian urban sprawl. The series’ primary author, David Simon, said that he wanted to show what institutions did to individuals. In the first series there are two such institutions: the illegal drugs trade, on the one hand (and particularly that part of it dominated by the fictional Barksdale family), and the Baltimore police department on the other. The realism extends to dialect and slang, which sometimes renders the dialogue almost impenetrable – at least, on a first viewing. But it doesn’t really matter, for the sense of the characters and the relationships is perfectly conveyed and we can already see that D’Angelo “D” Barksdale has problems with his conscience – surely never a good thing for a villain.

Today I finished the third volume of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain (1998). John Grady Cole, the protagonist of the first volume, All the Pretty Horses, and Billy Parham, the protagonist of the second volume, The Crossing, are brought together as cowhands on a ranch threatened by drought and possession by the military. The atmosphere (the Old West, threatened by the new) and the landscape (the Mexican frontier) are by now familiar. In-between the horse/ranch action, the ‘boys’ visit the brothels of Ciudad Juárez and John Grady Cole, who has a sort of fascination with the afflicted, falls madly, and fatally, in love with a young prostitute, Magdelena, who is also the object of the jealous passions of her pimp, an expertly knife-wielding Eduardo. The latter has Magdelena murdered as she tries to cross into the States and the two suitors subsequently kill one another, leaving the surviving Billy to hobo on into meditative old age. For me, this was the least satisfactory of the three volumes. There are some wonderful descriptions – of a wild dog hunt, for example – but the passages are disjointed and the text is not as highly polished as usual. For example, a cooling stove ticks and a few pages later another cooling stove creaks; water is frequently beading on surfaces (glasses, windows); and lightning flickers just a little too frequently over Mexico’s distant mountains. At the very end of the book, and thus of the trilogy, Billy shelters under a bridge with another tramp, a philosophising dreamer. His observations are profound, but if this was intended as the author’s closing soliloquy I searched in vain for the binding thread. Still, the trilogy is a magnificent achievement and a fantastic read. McCarthy’s literary and geographical territory is as much his own as Graham Greene’s Greeneland.

This afternoon (with thanks and apologies to PP) I at last got around to watching Roberto Benigni’s 1991 cult classic, Johnny Stecchino. Benigni plays a sweet dupe, Dante, and a gangster-turned-grass, Johnny, whilst Benigni’s real life wife, Nicoletta Braschi, plays the gangster’s scheming wife, Maria. A series of comic riffs are derived from the plot’s central deceit – that Dante is the spitting image of Johnny. Maria schemes to have Dante, mistaken for Johnny, assassinated, so that she and Johnny can then escape to Latin America and live happily ever after – or does she? There are some great gags but, basically, this film’s all about Benigni and if you happen not to like him then this isn’t for you. For those who do, though, Benigni is in a long line of comic actors, starting with Chaplin, who can make you laugh without saying a thing. I was trying to think of a British nearest-equivalent. No, not Rowan Atkinson, whose Mr Bean creation has an unredeeming mean streak but, rather, the far more lovable Norman Wisdom and his endearing creation, Norman Pitkin. And that’s why, in the end, this film doesn’t quite work for me. Benigni has spent a whole career developing the image of the gentle, lovable, talkative clown (think Bob in Down by Law for a start) and no matter how far he deepens his voice, his depiction of the evil Johnny just isn’t plausible. Italians would probably tell me that that is precisely the point. It’s good fun, anyway.

Our Christmas Eve film was Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Tom Hanks. The film fairly faithfully follows the extraordinary but true life story of Frank Abagnale Jr who, before he was even nineteen, had earned himself millions of dollars as a confidence trickster, posing variously as an airline pilot, lawyer and doctor. He made most of his money through fake cheques and it was his skill as a forger that would both see him imprisoned and later reincarnated as a multi-millionaire adviser to the FBI and the banking sector. Di Caprio turns in a strong and utterly believable performance as a young man who, as Hanks’s detective realises, is still really a lonely boy who wanted to impress his father and bring his divorcing parents back together again. The father dies and there is no home to go back to. But the film, as the real life, nevertheless ends on an upbeat note.

For some reason, Christmas mass in a packed church, with a lot of comings-and-goings at the back, reminded me of the Christmas Eve ritual of my teens. We’d tank up in several pubs before heading out to sing carols in the estates (poor them, but the money raised went to charity), then head back to the pubs that had licences to stay open later before getting to church (the church in the picture) for midnight mass. There was a fine art to this. You had to be there before the gospel reading and stay for the eucharist. In fact, I’d head home after the end of the mass but every year there was a large contingent at the back of the church that started heading home just as soon as the priest was giving communion. One year this so incensed Father Martin that, having given a fire-and-brimstone sermon from the pulpit (as the usual suspects crept in), he strode to the back of the church and locked everybody in until he’d given the blessing at the end – strictly against fire and safety rules, of course, but there was more than a hint of Don Camillo about Father Martin. A Merry Christmas to you all.

A quick in-and-out to London for a spot of Christmas shopping (Oxford Street and Regent Street), a few galleries (some masterpieces at the National Gallery and a wonderful Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Tate Modern), lacquered duck in Chinatown (Soho), fish-and-chips in the shadow of the Globe theatre, the obligatory English breakfast and, to cap it all, a West End musical, Thriller Live. Whilst I have never been a fanatic Michael Jackson follower I have grown up admiring his music, from the Jackson Five through to the likes of Thriller and Bad.  This musical celebration of his life, with a brilliant dancing troupe and wonderful singers, convinced me that he was indeed possessed of a sort of show business genius, capable of adapting to successive musical fashions and writing and performing major hits. Above all, this show is fun. Of course, it has taken on additional significance since Jackson’s untimely death. Apart from the video recordings, this is now the closest you’ll ever get to the Michael Jackson experience. Catch it if you can!

It’s a cliché, but that’s more-or-less what I did; worked, that is, down to the wire. Having long ago perfected the art of making lists and then prioritising, I have been jogging (at times, literally) around the office and the corridors, ticking off tasks and obligations. Being British, the Christmas card ritual has been in there as well – at least for close family and friends. And it is of course a time of friendship and good cheer, so there have also been a series of most enjoyable but seriously waist-challenging midday and evening events. Then, suddenly, this evening, that was that; no more office. It is the metaphorical equivalent of the moment you dive under water. Suddenly, everything is different and, at first, a little strange. Smartphones mean that one is never entirely away from the office anymore, but that exhilarating realisation is always special.