Maxx is 74 and her children and our partners met in Hampstead on Saturday to celebrate with a big family dinner, the garden full of tents.
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There are real marble columns in the bedroom. The two walk-in wardrobes boast three clothes hangers between them, and in the bathroom a sign in Italian and dialect warns against using the toilet if the electricity fails. Welcome to Venice.
(Photos by Miki Yamanouchi. Click for larger images.)
Venice is an excellent place to confront your doubts about being a tourist. No matter what you have heard or read beforehand, a visit always has something to teach. I learned it's not true that Venice looks like Disneyland. Quite the reverse, in fact: Disneyland looks like Venice. The city on the lagoon is the original.
This is a notorious treasury of architecture. All phoney. Everywhere you look: fake Greek, fake Roman, everything copied, adapted or reborn from something else. But, as Tarantino said, you can borrow anything if you make it your own. The reference to Tarantino is perfectly apt; Venetian architects poured it on.
Not that their merchant patrons objected. Venice was about wealth and power, and its rulers weren't passionate about art, they were passionate about art treasures. Like the rich have always done, they started buying art and architecture when they ran out of other things to buy. There's only so much you can eat and drink in a lifetime. If you want serious street — or canal — credibility, have a hole dug in the ground and start pouring in money.
Better yet, do it in the middle of a lagoon. In the Quattrocento, this built Venice; and as their art collection grew, the Venetians attacked and sacked their ancient protector, Constantinople, to help fill it out.
All that during Venice's expansion. The money pit is now the rescue commedia. Having run through their own money some centuries back, Venetians now exercise this talent with other people's. Astronomical sums are recruited to the cause of keeping Venice slightly above sea level. From time to time a daring and ingenious engineering plan is approved and trumpeted by the Italian government. There is a flurry of contract letting, a few years of ponderous silence, then another plan is announced. This is showmanship of a high order.
In the meantime Venetians get rarer. They leave, not simply to escape rising waters, but also numbing taxation, and civic services crippled by corruption. Awaiting them on the mainland are gardens, cars and supermarkets. You can spot Venetians among the swarming tourists: they carry shopping bags: no weekly shopping trip in the Fiat for them. As Venetians walk instead of driving, they walk as other Italians drive; so don't dawdle in their way. And as they are crowded together in a city blessedly free of traffic noise, and rich in noise-reflecting surfaces, they talk more quietly than other Italians do. You can also see the threat of acqua alta in every ground-floor room: nothing valuable rests on the floor.
The first Venetians fled the mainland fifteen centuries ago to escape barbarian hordes ravaging the remains of empire. A hundred years ago, on learning how few Assyrians were left after the recent massacres in the Near East, William Saroyan wrote the short story "Seventy Thousand Assyrians". By a meaningless coincidence, that's how many Venetians are left in the city now. It's a massacre.
Each year, millions of visitors arrive to wonder at the remains of empire. Ravaging is done differently these days. In the piazza S. Marco, guides hold flags aloft, like Roman standard bearers followed by columns of tourists armed with Handycams. Open mouths attest to it: something is being consumed here.
With legions of us descending on only seventy thousand of them, Venetians don't see it as primarily their problem that the city is sinking into the Adriatic. The world has their city as a favoured playground, so it's only right that money to fix it should also descend.
Venetians might do best simply to sell the town outright. Perhaps that's their plan, and they're craftily holding out for a deal for the whole place. As the city empties, eventually that offer must come, probably from a consortium led by Disney and the Guggenheim Foundation. Until then, expect the locals to keep taking the rescue money.
While Venetians remain, there are pleasures to be shared with them. Right by the lagoon on the piazza S. Marco, hidden from the invading hordes by a café orchestra pouring out sugared film music, is the Bibilioteca Marciana. The library is not open to visitors, but I blagged my way to a ticket to its reading room. Europe's first press was set up in Germany, but the Aldine Press, founded here in 1495 by Aldus Manutius, designed and used type in ways that still inspire book and type designers. Geek heaven. Travel, you; and find your own beauties.
The city has humbler pleasures too, especially if you enjoy walking, and streets where people stop and talk. You do not have to get far from the tourist honeypots to find working neighbourhoods and modest prices. Venice is famously safe, and unaccompanied children play in the streets. Tourism has long been the city's main business, and most Venetians can manage some English, but away from the trails, conversations in broken English and toilet-and-restaurant Italian require attention. Is it just my fantasy that Italians are more willing than the English to be surprised by strangers?
On the second morning of our visit, we and our local cafe owner discovered a shared enthusiasm for a French band. She had heard them recently in Treviso, we in London. At an outside table we breakfasted on her coffee and pastries while blended Argentinian tango and Jamaican dub floated along the narrow street to where a small child danced solo. When I went inside to pay, I carried in the empty cups, at which her husband protested. Our new friend waved him to silence: "They're regulars."
The world can still be strange and beautiful, the future a secret.
NOTES
Panini and prosecco at Da Lele, campo dei Tolentini, Santa Croce 1503
Cappuccino and pastries from the small café opposite the bakery on salizada Sant'Antonin, Castello
Budget accommodation at Casa Linger, Castello 3541, salizada Sant'Antonin, +39 (041) 528 5920
Budget flights between Stansted and Treviso from Ryanair
Pictures by Miki Yamanouchi at www.mikiy.com
Hats off to Fasthosts A rare pleasure in this naughty world: telephone help so good I wrote to Cynthia Nourse who runs front-line support at Fasthosts:
Dear Ms Nourse
You were thoughtful enough to include your email address in a routine acknowledgement of a support request, and you asked for comments on your support service.
I've been working in IT for thirty years. I have run front-line support services for (among others) Logica. Yours is the best phone support I have had from anyone, in any business, ever.
I'm prompted to write after being assisted this morning by James, who spotted what he thinks a discrepancy between his rulebook and a previous answer I'd received. So he's re-opened the earlier support ticket and is resolving it. I couldn't ask for more active, helpful partnership.
This is only the most recent example. I know you can't just hire people to work like this; you have to create a team and an ethic. So I particularly appreciate what you've done at Fasthosts.
First class — please keep it up, and please feel free to quote me.
Ray's Pajama Party A geek weekend camping in a church hall in Hertfordshire with a score of programmers and their computers, an improvised network, an espresso machine and ample beer. Learned lots, taught some, and created some new Farscape addicts. Illustrated report coming at Vector Online.
Hats off to Lamy and Selfridges too. After snapping off the clip on my beloved Safari fountain pen, I went in to buy a new part, a new cap or a new pen. Selfridges pen counter simply replaced the cap free of charge.
Late Junction is always good, and some nights they excel themselves. Check out Monday night's broadcast.
Last rites for Software Engineering? Finished Ed Yourdon's Death March, a book about 'impossible mission' software projects.
Yourdon is one of the founding fathers of Software Engineering, along with Barry Boehm and Tom DeMarco. Their ideas had a profound effect on me and many other programmers when they appeared in the 1980s. Alarmed by projects that had slid relentlessly over time and budget, I was enchanted by the prospect of formal methods bringing certainty to software development.
Death March was published in 1996, the same year as Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. It's interesting to compare the two. The sloppy typography of Yourdon's book is the perfect complement to its content. Yourdon's long writing career seems to have enabled him to knock out a new book without very much trouble. He draws heavily on his correspondents, as Darwin did, which is reassuring: we have had a great deal of theory and should distrust ideas not grounded in a natural history of software development. We know how close to his sources Yourdon stays because much of his material is repeated word for word in extensive chapter notes, as if the author doubted his ability to paraphrase his correspondents.
In contrast, Beck's book is a model of lucidity and vigour, and follows the author's recommended practice: he wrote the simplest book that could possibly work.
Yourdon's book should be read though, for it is a testament to the failure of formal methods in software development, by one of SE's strongest advocates.
Yourdon says death-march projects have become the rule, not the exception. So what he has to say about them is what he now thinks about normal software development. This alone is extraordinarily interesting. In his view, normal software development is in a permanent state of emergency.
How does this emergency relate to Software Engineering's formal methods? What Yourdon does not say is at least as interesting as what he does. His book is largely about the dialogue between the project manager and his 'customers'. He says that the predictions of formal methods will be of little value to the project manager, because the customers reject them. Someone is out of touch with reality here. If SE's methods predict the right answers, then the customers are a pack of moon-crazed wolves.
And that's how they appear in Death March, which is mostly about how to negotiate with them, and when to resign. It's a desperate tale.
But what if the customer is right? Software Engineering promised to reduce uncertainty in software development. It was devised to make workable the dialogue between developer and customer. The breakdown of this dialogue that Yourdon testifies to is the breakdown of Software Engineering itself. A quarter century of SE has instilled in IT's customers a wary distrust of its predictions. The customers have every reason to howl.
SE did reduce uncertainty in software development — some, but at huge cost in resources and flexibility. The customers might be unreasonable, but they're not stupid. They can see when lots of work is being done and not much delivered. SE advocates might insist theirs is the only way to produce software, but customers are desperate for a better way to have software developed.
Death March is a tombstone for Software Engineering. SE was devised to make software development predictable and reliable. It failed, and the 'normal' state of software development projects is a doomed death march. This, mind, not an attack from one SE's critics, but from one of its founders.
To steal from Tom Wolfe: Software Engineering is dead; call in the cops.