Italians make me an offer I can refuse

My wife was caught speeding in Rapallo. Why should I pay her fine?

matthew norman

With etiquette experts among you in mind, I begin with a delicate question.

When is it acceptable, if ever, deliberately to open someone else’s mail?

Etiquette apart, I suspect this is a criminal offence. Had I as many as seven seconds to lavish on research, a Google enquiry would confirm this.

Sadly, owing to the cocktail of lethargy and arrogance that has for so long propelled this writer’s work towards, if not over, the borderline with unreadability, I do not.

But even if it is a crime knowingly to open another’s post without permission, is there any circumstance in which even the hangiest and floggiest of penal enthusiasts would shrug, and mutter, ‘Mm, well, he probably doesn’t deserve a stretch in Belmarsh for that’?

Ladies, gentlemen and non-binaries of the jury, I submit to you that there is. When the letter is addressed to someone who, while technically still the missus, hasn’t dwelt at the marital home for more than a decade, it can surely offend against neither the law nor decency to open it on her behalf.

In that possibly misguided belief, I opened such a letter a few days ago.

As mentioned here only last month, I love Becca greatly, and hope she at least partially reciprocates. But the Beatles weren’t always right about love, and this relationship has been exponentially improved by the 106-mile buffer zone between my west-London slum and the picturesque Dorset cottage in which she and her four dogs reside.

This letter lacked the warmth that envelopes our long-distance wedlock.

from CLI International Debt Collectors, ‘to act on their behalf in the recovery of the unpaid Italian Motorway tolls detailed above.’

Detailed above were not only the amount outstanding (£61.09: £31.09 in toll fees; £25 collection costs, and the VAT thereon), the location (Rapallo), and the genesis of the problem (‘card payment failed’).

For all the intrigue inherent in that, it was this line that commandeered my attention: ‘Date: 07/07/13 @ 12:17’.

Now, we all adore Italy for so many things. The scenic beauty, the cuisine, Rome’s rich imperial history, the Sicilian culture that brought us the Godfather trilogy and The Sopranos, and the blessed memory of Marco Tardelli’s insanely wild-eyed goal celebration after putting his nation 3-0 up against the Hun in the World Cup final of 1982.

It now appears that we must also worship her debt-related politesse. To anyone miseducated by the abovementioned screen dramas, that comes as a surprise. The soldiers of the Corleone and Soprano families not merely levied extortionate, compounded weekly interest (the ‘vig’). The genteel likes of Luca Brasi and ‘Paulie Walnuts’ Gualtieri broke limbs, at the absolute least, if a debt went unsettled for a matter of months.

Yet the capi di tutti capi of Italian motorway toll booths adhere to the notably unSicilian axiom that minuscule debt is a dish best collected old. God spare their bones, they don’t even ask for their money for almost an entire decade.

Yet why, in the name of all the saints, would they come for it now?

‘We remind you,’ explains the CLI missive, ‘that unpaid tolls are enforceable up to 10 years after the date of the offence…’

Although grateful for the reminder, I was alarmed to need it. You could put it down to the familiar ravages of middle age, but it might be something more sinister.

Perhaps hospitals should bolster their traditional psych assessment questions: ‘Now then, dear, can you tell me who the Prime Minister is? OK, not to worry – they do come and go all the time. But do you remember for how long unpaid Italian toll-road fees are enforceable? No? Nothing? Nurse, call the dementia ward and see if they have a free bed.’

Anyway, this time with Becca’s permission, I rang CLI International Debt Collectors in Faversham to inform them that the debtor had left the address to which they sent the demand even before she accrued the debt.

‘And, before you ask,’ I said, ‘owing to data-protection legislation, I cannot give you any information about her current whereabouts.’

An incongruously charming and good-humoured guy, who bolstered the firm’s international credentials by revealing that he comes from Côte D’Ivoire, said he quite understood.

I asked if he thought Becca should go on the run until 7th July, when the enforceability period elapses.

His chuckle implied that he did not.

DEBT RECOVERY NOTIFICATION,’

‘FORMAL it began, the capitals in red, in lieu of any such intimacy as ‘Dear Mrs Norman’.

‘We have been appointed by Nivi SpA, Special Attorney of Autostrada Per L’Italia Spa,’ continued the communiqué

Apparently answering the questions about both etiquette and criminal law posed at the start, Becca sounded less delighted than I’d hoped when apprised of this.

‘If they come for me, I’m taking you down with me,’ she said with a hint of that cotton-wool-in-the-cheeks Brando murmur. ‘You didn’t show no respect for the name on the post. You always gotta respect the name on the post.’

what was a bottom drawer?

A bottom drawer was the term used to denote the gradual accumulation of bedlinen, crockery, cutlery and other household goods that would be useful to a girl when she got married.

It wasn’t always an actual drawer. In America, it was known as a hope chest.

Embroidered tablecloths and the like would be handed down from previous generations and lovingly folded in the bottom drawer as heirlooms.

The phrase arose in the Victorian era, when the bottom drawer of a chest was not only the largest, but also the least used and least accessible. It could be used to store items that weren’t immediately needed.

The concept goes back much further. In 15th-century Florence, marriage chests, known as cassoni, were commissioned to celebrate weddings between two noble families and used to store clothes and textiles. Unlike the modest bottom

what is a beg?

A beg is a people-pleaser. It’s defined in the Urban Dictionary as a ‘suck-up’.

The word ‘beg’ started being used by young people in about 2010. I first became aware of the term two years ago when I was accused of ‘begging it’ by my 16-year-old daughter. I had laughed at a man’s unfunny and oft-repeated joke, and she knew I was doing it because I was about to ask him a favour.

For a young person, a classic example of a ‘beg’ would be someone who ‘doublemessages’. A girl can initiate communication with a boy she likes by sending him a message. But if she sends a second message before the boy responds, that constitutes ‘begging it’ in the extreme.

Were I to use slang around a young person, I’d be perceived as the ultimate ‘beg’. I’d be an oldie committing the crime of being desperate to appear hip, muscle in and be accepted.

Still, there is no reason we oldies can’t drawer of Victorian days, these pairs of chests were lavishly decorated with precious metals and intricate paintings and intended to be on show.

If I asked my 20-year-old granddaughters what a bottom drawer was, they would have no idea what I was on about. When I was young, it was common for mothers to put together a bottom drawer for their daughters.

My own mother wanted to start one for me and offered to give me a set of silver cutlery for when I was a married woman. I was horrified and asked for books and clothes instead, presents I could actually use. After all, I might never get married, and the idea of collecting posh cutlery was anathema to my bohemian ideas at the time. It was unlikely I would ever have a butler to keep them polished, for one thing.

Some girls, though, were happy to receive such presents as they thought of little else but getting an engagement and a wedding ring on their finger.

The term bottom drawer was still in use in the 1950s and ’60s and went across all social classes, although it was beginning to sound quaint and oldfashioned. Girls increasingly had other things on their minds besides getting married, such as an education and a career.

These drawers constituted a kind of dowry, as in the past most women had to stop work on getting married and were unlikely to have or earn money of their own. The contents of the drawer would mean they would be able to bring something to the marriage.

Nowadays, we can buy our own bed linen. And today’s young lovers are more likely to move in with each other rather than waiting until marriage to set up a joint home.

The term bottom drawer had nothing to do with the corresponding term top drawer, which denotes an object or person of high status. This expression comes from the top drawer of a chest, used to keep valuables such as jewellery.

There is no corresponding symbolism, though, for poor old middle drawers.

Liz Hodgkinson

use this exquisitely accurate little word amongst ourselves. The other day, a friend in her sixties was describing the lengths her on-off boyfriend had gone to in order to reignite her waning interest. He’d wangled an invitation to an event where she was chairing a panel, and travelled hundreds of miles to it, on the pretext that he was interested in the panel’s subject matter.

‘What a beg,’ I said, and my friend immediately grasped that this was exactly the way to describe the situation.

Another friend received five lengthy texts from a woman, declaring her attraction to him, even though she knew he was married. She justified her forwardness by adding, ‘I just can’t help it!’ Now that’s begging it.

A boy who constantly texts a girl is likely to be considered a persistent romantic or a pest, depending on whether his advances are welcome. But a girl is still expected to play hard to get or be demoted to a ‘beg’. Rules for the young are as rigid as ever.

Strangely, we start ‘begging it’ more as we age, on the self-deceiving grounds that we’re grown-up enough to stop playing games and start communicating sensibly. In fact, it behoves oldie women to stay very cool indeed, given that older men find ‘begs’ repellently pathetic.

Yet be cool in the wrong way, and you’re also ‘begging it’. The young are far more confrontational than we are, and ready to challenge bad behaviour. One girlfriend was subjected to two years of hurtful negligent arrogance by her boyfriend. Yet she continued to tiptoe around him, keeping her diary empty just in case he deigned to include her in his plans. The less she berated him, the more of a ‘beg’ she was and the more carelessly he treated her.

We should be grateful to the young for pinpointing the error of our peoplepleasing with this precise little word, armoured by its hard consonants.

Though the word ‘sycophant’ has a nice onomatopoeic serpentine slither, nothing packs a punch quite like the brutally economic ‘beg’. I am delighted to have discovered and adopted it.

Charlotte Metcalf