Last Tuesday, after giving my maiden speech at my new place of employment, UNAM, and proving they have not hired a dud, at least for now, I dropped James at the airport. Happily, we found a last-minute puerile double entendre on a sign for him to photograph, only slightly contrived in nature. I enjoy this ritual immensely. Then I worked for the rest of the week. This does not make good print, so we move right along.

One may recall that one of the unexpected delights of northern Italy was the museum of Puccini in Lucca, which, looking back, I wrote pitifully little about. On Saturday I had the opportunity to see his last opera, Turandot, as performed live by the New York Metropolitan Opera. How? The magic of sending HD on them satellites to Mexico. The lesson of the day is that neglect has caused my Italian to atrophy, but my Spanish is good enough to follow the plot from subtitles.

Tomorrow I get a day off, due to industrial action. Some weeks ago, the federal government dissolved the state run power company, stating gross inefficiencies. They probably intend to privatise it, and while normally such actions send me into a red flag waving diatribe, the experience here is the opposite of at home. Here, it seems that when public utilities are privatised, costs actually go down and services actually go up (even within the banking sector!). This is because here, often workers aren’t the proletariat, but the lumpenproletariat in disguise. In order to be a worker, one has to, you know, work. But, to come to the point, as a show of solidarity with the electrical syndicate (yes, this is the apt synonym for union here), the education syndicate is blockading the campus tomorrow, and this isn’t like a NTEU picket line where they ask you not to cross, you inform them you have an exam in three weeks, and they shrug, look sad and let you through, this is proper closure.

So, now that I’ve come to a realistic withdrawal from my political philosophy for certain sociological situations, will a certain Italian crystallographer do likewise? Probably not, though the rumoured revision of stance on bike helmets is satisfying enough.