The most idiot of the stupidities
A welcome walk in the Apennines
The most idiot of the stupidities.
Don’t worry, this isn’t yet another person telling you why Trump’s tariffs are absolutely bonkers. This is actually about getting back out on my feet and up into the mountains again. But first a digression: the whole tariff episode does bring to mind the most memorable phrase that I ever encountered in my years as a journalist: the most idiot of the stupidities.
Back in 1999 I was making an Analysis mini-documentary for the BBC World Service about how tuberculosis was making a comeback. I was towards the end of interviewing a charming French expert from the WHO when he started getting worked up and angry about the daft policy choices that were allowing tuberculosis this comeback tour. In exasperation he blurted out the line. It is the most idiot of the stupidities!
Fantastic. No native English speaker could have come up with that. It’s now my go-to phrase for something so inexplicably and infuriatingly dumb that proper English cannot cope. So, step forward Mr Trump and your tariffs. You are the most idiot of the stupidities. You really are.
So, mountains. I was back up in the mountains in my walking boots a few days ago, and knew that this was my cue to start writing this Substack again. It’s been a while – I was left a bit burned out over the Christmas period after working on a couple of intense writing projects, and I was in pain where I’d had my facial operation last year.
Incidentally, one of the projects was finishing the first draft of my new book, Orange Sky, Rising Water. It’s now available for pre-order, at least in Europe/Britain, eg on Amazon and Waterstones, and will be published in September (the US version a bit later). I urge you to buy it, or at least enjoy the cover:
I’m not going to write a tonne about this latest hiking trip up into the mountains. It was foggy and drizzly, and the Apennines can be extremely jagged and steep, absolutely carpeted with trees (and snow), and I was not in the mood for wandering off and having my corpse found by a wolf or wild boar. So I didn’t venture far, and simply enjoyed the eerie atmosphere of the forests
What was worth writing about, however, was the extraordinary remoteness of the mountains. I live on the edge of Genoa, on the coast. The mountains rise up behind here with astonishing rapidity. Drive two kilometres in and straight away it feels remote; go 20km from the sea, as I did, and you’re in another world. You drive over a pass, switch-backed over precipitous drops, and when you look back you have no idea how the road clung on to the slopes. At one point I heard the siren of an ambulance for twenty minutes, fading in and out as it disappeared behind outcrops of rock, the sound going, then coming then going, and then reappearing again just below me. It took me 2.5 hours to drive up to the rifugio where I was staying, despite being 37km as the crow flies from my house.
It is a world dominated by spindly and ancient Fiat Panda 4x4s and scooters held together with duct tape, of vandalised speed cameras and half empty villagers dotted with permanently shuttered windows. This is not just a product of modern demography: several villages boasted statues of men carrying cases, heading off to find their fortunes in Genoa and Buenos Aires, while their wives dabbed their eyes in the background. Life here has often been short of opportunity.
This was a great time to visit the hidden valleys that have already been kissed by spring, with blossoms on the trees and the grass studded with yellow primroses and purple crocuses (it reminded me of Bosnia). I saw a couple of beekeepers gingerly taking the hives from the open back of a truck to place in their summer positions. Piles of carefully graded firewood were stacked neatly in clearings. Everybody owns a chainsaw up in these mountains, even the kids.
Italy can feel remote in a way unmatched by few other European countries. If my car had skidded off the road I might not be discovered for months. The Apennines in these borderlands between Liguria and its northern neighbours – Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont – look inconsequential on the map, a rim of mountains between the coast and the Po Valley. But standing on one of those slopes they felt anything but.
(Incidentally the mountains are the setting for one of the great Second World War memoirs, Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby, who hid near Parma after escaping Nazi captivity. He wrote about roving bands of charcoal burners and lost water mills, and bumping into a German officer who just wanted to concentrate on chasing butterflies. Recommended.)
It was a neat reminder taht although Italy is beautiful, that comes at a cost. Its fearsome geography gets in the way of everything, from building houses and motorways to growing crops. It’s fiendishly difficult, and that’s before the seismic activity and violent turns of weather! Here in Genoa you can’t connect much without building soaring bridges and endless tunnels – something that the terrible bridge collapse a few years ago brought home.
So yes, I enjoyed my short walking trip up into the Apennines. It filled me with excitement for more hiking trips to come, more oddities to see, and – most of all – a welcome break from that orange-skinned most idiot of the stupidities.