ROME

My wife and I spent five days in Rome last week. I haven't blogged on it before now, since I have spent most of this week digesting it.

It was amazing, "stupenda", "incredibile". If you are remotely interested in history, which I am, then it is very special to be in a city which has a continuous history of more than 2,750 years, 1,000 of which were spent at the heart of an empire which has brought so much to my culture, and 2,000 of which have been dominated by perhaps the most continuously successful organisation in the western world, namely the Catholic church. Indeed, those two things are related, since much of the church's success came from appropriating aspects of the imperial past which suited it. Not least its buildings; mediæval popes didn't have much time for pagan ancestors, but they appreciated a good bit of marble when they saw it. Pope Sixtus IV built the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican using bricks nicked from the Baths of Caracalla; while Benini's famous marble columns in St. Peter's Square came from the Forum and other Roman places. Many, though not all, of the Roman ruins, including the Coliseum, are in brick, since the marble cladding and niche statues that would have adorned them were pilfered long ago. As our entertaining guide at the Coliseum put it succinctly, the only well-preserved Roman buildings in Rome are ones that have a cross on the top. They include the Senate building; but that was because it became a church (though it no longer is).  

The original Roman settlement was on three of the seven hills, and the obvious place for everyone to meet was in the valley between them, in what eventually became the Forum. At the time it was a marshy swamp. But that didn't deter them; they simply dug a canal down to the Tiber and drained it. When the population of Rome fell drastically during the Dark Ages, the canal filled with silt, and backed up, covering the original ruins and leaving them deserted, except for enterprising builders looking for bits of old marble. It took Napoleon to recognise their potential value, and he was the first to organise their systematic excavation. The work has been going on ever since.

The Romans were a clever lot. They had invented water-resistant cement, and knew how to build arches in brick and stone, thereby allowing them to build huge buildings and decorate them. Aquaducts and underfloor heating (take note, British housebuilders) were a piece of cake, as were straight roads. Of course, it helped to have a lot of slaves around to do the heavy lifting - of an estimated population at its height of 1-1.5 million, up to 500,000 were slaves - but if you were not one of them, then life must have been pretty cushy. A free trip to the baths every day, followed by free entertainment in the Coliseum (animal or gladiator fights) or at the Circus Maximus (chariot racing), all the while eating free food paid for by the state. Money was so unnecessary that some people were paid in salt (the origin of the English word "salary" and Danish word "salær"). Yet the system contained the seeds of its own destruction. Having built his colossal baths, bigger than a modern football stadium, Caracalla disastrously extended Roman citizenship to everyone in the Empire. Not surprisingly, lots of barbarians on the outside wanted to get in; and since it was difficult to find enough auxiliaries to keep them out, the whole system was doomed to collapse.

Out of that collapse, the Jesus cult headed by the Bishop of Rome managed to restore the city to its former glory. At the start, its assets seemed unpromising; the Emperor Constantine donated the land used to build the church of St. John Lateran, still the cathedral church of the city, before haring off to found Constantinople, and Rome had a prestige associated with being the place of martyrdom for St. Paul and (especially) St. Peter. But there were hardly any people around - the population fell to between 50,000 and 70,000 - Italy was a political mess, and the early Popes had none of the military resources needed to succeed.

However, like the Chinese Communist Party, the Popes were masters at taking a long view. Claims were never abandoned, even if they could not be supported for hundreds of years. An ever increasing number of people found that it made more sense to worship one God than many, bringing new customers. Islam helped by removing competing centres of religious supremacy such as Jerusalem, Anitoch and Alexandria from Christian control. A succession of tough men hammered out a consistent message, which stressed imperial ideas such as hierarchy, and unswerving obedience to the man at the top. A thousand years later, Rome was again one of the great cities of the world.

Going round some of those splendours, such as the Sistine Chapel, the church of St. John Lateran, and the 23,000 sqm basilica of St. Peter's, I couldn't help being impressed. Side chapels that are as large and imposing as a whole church in Denmark, huge organs, fantastic works of art by some of the world's most famous painters. And yet. Somehow, it didn't feel any more holy than (say) the tiny Saxon church that I once visited on the shore of Essex. Indeed, it seemed less a tribute to the glory of God and more a tribute to the glory of the individual Pope that had built it. No wonder Martin Luther, an austere monk from a cold, northern climate, got annoyed at the Papacy when he visited Rome. All those wasted economic resources.

With three whole days to explore, we spent the first in the Vatican and the second in the Coliseum and other ruins. On the third day, we did a mixture of both. Rome is easy to get around, and we had plenty of stops for coffee, and plenty of cheap meals in family restaurants in the evening. Thinking back on it, I suppose I have merely whetted my appetite for a return visit.

Walter Blotscher

CHILD BENEFIT

Most countries with a welfare system have some form of child benefit. Children, by definition, are judged not capable of looking after themselves, so there is broad agreement that this is a group that the state should support. Sometimes the benefit is taxed in the hands of the recipient; more often it is not. In most countries, it is paid to the mother, on the grounds that mothers more often look after children than fathers.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, Danish politicians of all stripes are terrified (or, perhaps more truthfully, pretend to be terrified) of welfare tourism, whereby workers from other countries come here simply in order to take advantage of the country's generous benefits. Child benefit is not in fact huge, by Danish standards, the maximum for a 2-year old is kr.17.616 a year; but it is quite large by (say) Romanian standards. So there need to be restrictions on who can get it, otherwise hordes of Romanians and other undesirables will come here to sponge off the state and send money back to Romania, thereby impoverishing Denmark. I have never bought this argument, not least because it ignores completely how much the Romanian worker contributes to the Danish state (all studies show that there is a net positive benefit to Denmark); but it seems to go down well with the Danish public. So from 1 January 2012 it has been the case that child benefit had to be earned over a 2-year period. Only after that time could a foreign worker have the right to 100% child benefit, before that it would be earned gradually (25% after 6 months, 50% after 1 year etc).

Into this domestic decision stepped the E.U. Commission. Last summer it wrote to the Danish Government, saying that the "earn" principle was against E.U. law. In order to protect the concept of the free movement of labour, foreign workers had to be able to have the same rights in a foreign country that they would have in their host country. So if a Romanian had the right to child benefit in Romania, then they should have the right to child benefit from day 1 in Denmark, even if the child in question remained in Romania.

On receipt of the letter, the current Government immediately changed its administrative policy, and with retrospective effect, all the way back to 1 January 2012. However, that still left Danish law out of kilter with what the Commission had said the law should be. So this week the Government tabled a change to bring Danish law back into line.

This was the equivalent of hitting a wasps' nest with a stick. For although the total amounts are quite small, a lot of people, and not just politicians, have an interest in using the "money flowing out of the country" argument to pursue another agenda. Anybody against the E.U., for instance; trade unions against foreign workers; anybody against the Government; and so on. Even more sober folk such as the opposition Venstre say that the Government should test the Commission's argument in an E.U. case, despite the legal advice's being that the Commission would win hands down. They know that such a case would take at least two years to come to a decision, by which time the next Danish general election will have been decided and they will (it is hoped) be in power.

This incident is part of a trend that is becoming increasingly prevalent in Europe; the E.U. is a good thing, but only if it brings benefits for me. The Commission is trying desperately to point out that if everybody carries out cherry-picking, then by definition the whole point of the E.U. falls apart. But in Denmark, as elsewhere, a lot of people don't appear to be listening.

Walter Blotscher

CHAMPIONS' LEAGUE (3)

The Champions' League is where you see the difference in style between English and continental football. Although the Premier League is an exciting affair played at 100 mph, it is not always that technically skilful. Continental football teams often make the Brits look like oafs.

Judging from this week's last-16 matches, it's the continentals that have the upper hand. Manchester City and Arsenal both lost at home, and Manchester United away, in all three cases well beaten by Barcelona, holders Bayern Munich and Olympiakos respectively. Only Chelsea, whom I'm watching as I write, seem to have the match of Galatasary.

I watched the last 20 minutes of the Arsenal-Bayern match in a hotel room in Rome last week. Arsenal were admittedly a man down at that stage; but even so, they hardly touched the ball. My prediction for this year's World Cup is that it won't be Ingerland that win it.

Walter Blotscher

INTERPRETING

I have a part-time job as an interpreter. My son used to work for a company that finds and organises the interpreters for the likes of social authorities, and he asked me if I wanted to do it from time to time. So far I have done a Danish-English job and translated a Latvian English letter into Danish. Today was going to be a Danish-French job; but the French people concerned turned out to be able to speak Danish, so all I had to do was sit around and partake of the excellent coffee and cake. Easy work!

Walter Blotscher

UKRAINE

What is one to make of the goings-on in Ukraine? It does seem incredible that things can happen today in Europe - political unrest, violent demonstrations, killings by security forces - which are more normally associated with Egypt, Thailand, or Libya.

I think that the key word in that paragraph is Europe. For while the northern, southern and western borders of Europe have been settled for a long time, the eastern one has always been, and (crucially) remains, much more fluid. The word Ukraine itself means border, a big wodge of land between two even bigger blocks of land, namely the E.U. and Russia. Indeed, a large part of the conflict there seems to be between the Ukrainian-speaking population, who want to move closer to, and eventually become part of, the E.U., and the Russian-speaking population, who look to their fellow-speakers even further east.

At the moment, it seems that the pro-E.U. forces have won. Politically, I think that that move is decisive. However, Russia can still cause a lot of problems economically, notably by cutting off the gas supply, on which Ukraine depends. The price of not doing so may be the secession of the eastern part of the country to be swallowed back into Russia.

The splitting up of a European country? Well, Czechoslovakia did it. So too did Yugoslavia, and then Serbia. Scotland is trying to do it as we speak. Ukraine may merely be the latest.

Walter Blotscher

SPEED SKATING

Some countries are naturally good at certain sports; Norway at cross-country skiing, for instance, Britain at rowing, Denmark at handball. But the title for absolute world domination must surely be the Netherlands at speed skating, as the just-finished Winter Olympics in Sochi clearly demonstrate.

In speed skating, there are six disciplines for each of the men and women, so 12 events in all. The Dutch won 8 of the 12, and 23 of the 36 medals on offer; the next best country was Poland, with 3. In four of them, they won all three medals, and in three others they won two; indeed, there wasn't an event in which they didn't win a medal. They also set five of the six Olympic records during the week.

In reality, it was 23 out of 32 medals, since two of the events were team pursuit competitions, where each nation fielded only one team (the Dutch won both). They would probably have won all three medals if they had been allowed to have B and C teams, such is their strength in depth.

I suppose it helps if you live in a cold northern climate, where half the land area is below sea level. Even so, it was a crushing performance, which is unlikely to be repeated in any sport, ever.

Walter Blotscher

RICHARD MØLLER NIELSEN

Richard Møller Nielsen died this week. Not many people outside Denmark know who he was, everybody in Denmark knows who he was.

As you ask, he was the trainer of the national football team when they won the European football championships in 1992.

I met him once, at a football camp for my son, where I was a trainer. He was a very nice man.

I am off to Rome tomorrow for a romantic week with my wife. Back blogging next weekend.

Walter Blotscher