AIBU to hate these things about England vs Italy?

[ItalianPoster]

As an Italian who has spent the last decade in England, I have grown fond of the country, but there are also a few bugbears which totally drive me nuts. Clearly a light-hearted rant, not a profound economic, sociological and anthropological analysis!

1.  No bidet. I. Will. Never. Get. It. You don’t clean your hands, or a baby’s bottom, with a dry towel, right? You wash the parts! Ideally with water, or at the very least with a wet wipe. Why should an adult’s bottom be any different?
   

2. No ID cards. I will never get it. You are opposed to ID cards because you don't want a compulsory document but you have made the passport practically compulsory. Don't say you don't need a passport - Windrush proved you wrong. Note that a system of ID cards, like in most of the civilised - and developing - world, would have avoided the Windrush scandal.

3.  Leasehold. The middle ages are over. Ius primae noctis has been abolished. Why does leasehold persist?
   

4.  Carpets. I understand them in offices. I understand them in flats with no noise insulation. But in houses? Whether you like them or not is subjective. That they are filthy and almost impossible to clean effectively, compared to wooden or tile floors, is not – that’s a fact.
   

5.  Separate hot and cold faucets. Why, oh, please someone explain why!
   

6.  Rodents. No, they are neither normal nor harmless. They carry diseases. In many continental European countries, having rodents is shameful and dealt with swiftly – here they are just accepted passively. Councils don’t seem to conduct periodic exterminations like abroad, and most homeowners seem happy living in properties full of rodent-friendly holes, or just accept with a shrug that, when a house is being refurbished, mice will move to the neighbours!
   

7.  State schools. Admission by distance, ie by whether you can afford to live close enough. Faith schools funded by the State! It would be outrageous to have hospitals for Christians only but funded by all taxpayers, yet this is what happens with State schools.
   

8.  School uniforms. Why are you so obsessed with them? While they might have some merit, the obsession with which some schools apply their dress codes is shocking. Every September there are stories about repressed,  control-freak headteachers who check whether pupils are wearing the right shade of grey etc.
   

9.  Construction standards. Even without bringing up the Greenfell tragedy, construction standards are incredibly low compared to continental Europe. Is there maybe a tax for building stuff straight, not crooked, and for sealing holes? I had never seen crooked angles or ceilings in Italy, Germany or Spain – here they seem to be the norm. And doors? Why do your doors almost never seal the entrance properly? Having an energy performance certificate which looks at whether there any energy-saving light bulbs, but ignores that the front door is all bent and allows lots of draught in, makes no sense at all! Ancient Greece used to build straight stuff - why can't modern England, too?
   

On the plus side:

1. English mother-in-laws don't seem as overbearing as the Italian ones. Extended families are, in general, less "suffocating". Italian families tend to give more financial support, but that support tends to come with huuuuge strings attached. English kids are brought up to be independent, unlike their Italian cousins.

2. Work. There's much more of it, and the country is incredibly more open and meritocratic. In Italy, you'll struggle to find non-white non-Italians who have progressed in their career and are heading teams of white Italians. Not here. Foreigners for very high-profile jobs (Carney)? Forget it.

3. There is no concept of "concorso", these huge, theoretical exams which are needed to hire people in the civil service, and which, idiotically, totally disregard soft skills. A job "concorso" typically involves thousands of applicants locked in a huge gym answering mostly irrelevant and theoretical written questions.

4. The immigration bureaucracy is shameful (Windrush), but, in general, English bureaucracy is miles ahead the Italian one (I know, it doesn't take much!). Receiving a new driving licence, for free, in a few days, or receiving a tax refund 3 days after filing your tax return are unthinkable and cause the envy of our friends in Italy.

5. Green spaces and kids' activities. At least in London, there are so many, mostly well-kept gardens, parks, green spaces and play grounds; the difference with the large Italian cities is shocking.

6. Free motorways. Privatised railways have been an utter failure (Govia/Southern Fail), but at least you didn't privatise the motorways and gave too good a deal to a bunch of well-connected local entrepreneurs like we did (by the way, the fact they are the key investors in the Italian motorways is one reason why I never buy Benetton).

My main problem with Italy is the amount of birds that get butchered every year (not every Italian and not just Italy) Berlusconi I think was a fan. Over here Ime more people feed, water and shelter birds than try to annihilate them.
I do love Italy and our holidays there have been lovely and memorable.
About a fifth of our family are Italian they all have carpet and no bidets!

Even without bringing up the Greenfell tragedy, construction standards are incredibly low compared to continental Europe

I'll read the rest - but this is ridiculous (as I sit in a flat in Rome with no enclosed fire escape, not even a smoke detector, and barely attached waist height guards on the 3rd floor windows), with bare wires downstairs in the electrical cupboard, normal light fittings in the (newly refurbished) bathroom's wet areas, and plug sockets, face up, next to the sink.

I've lived in 4 other European countries, and building and safety standards are no better - in fact, lip service is barely paid to them in my experience (one flat had 2.5 high metre high, brand new, double-glazed windows - AND THEY WEREN'T SAFETY GLASS as we found out when a chair knocked into one - in the UK, the glass place wouldn't even sell me a small plain glass panel for a back door - it had to be safety glass - let alone then the fitters fit it and the building control sign off the building using it!)

Zebra crossings. In the UK if you stand at a zebra crossing the traffic will stop to allow you to cross. Italian drivers just ignore them.

BitOutOfPractice
the use of very inflammatory language like “revolting” and “filthy” and “shit” belie the fact that this thread is just a lighthearted musing on differences between two cultures

same very words are used here daily and liberally to describe someone's house/habits and no one bats an eye lid... Just an observation.

As a Brit who has lived in Italy for over twenty years I agree with some of your points (bidets and ID cards are very useful!) I think you are wrong about construction - there are plenty of bad examples of housebuilding where I live and a lot of that is down to corruption, bad townplanning etc.

For me the negative points regarding Italy are:

The driving!! OMG it is dreadful. We just drove back from the UK, through France and into Italy. As soon as you get over the border there are so many drivers on their mobiles. My children have all had close shaves with drivers not stopping on pedestrian crossings or not even looking at the road because they are looking at their phones. Plus so many people don't bother with seatbelts for their kids which drives me mad. We share lifts with other parents for afterschool activities with other mums and even though I stress that they MUST wear seatbelts, they often don't bother as it is "just around the corner". I end up having to do all the driving to enforce this basic law.

Concorsi - I agree. What a rubbish system. My children's school has teachers who are from the other end of the country but who don't want to actually move here so aren't really invested in the school which brings me to..

Schools - nurseries and scuole materne are generally good but the school system is outdated, boring, badly run and not parent or child friendly. My son's school itself is falling apart and is dirty. Any efforts by parents to change this are brushed off.

Green spaces - I agree. Our local park is so sad, my kids can't believe how lovely British parks are in comparison.

Public toilets - grim, grim, grim. And what is it with Liguria that they still have loads of those awful holes in the ground??

Health system - good and bad. Some of the drs are actually very good but accessing them is hard! The bureacracy for getting a blood test is ridiculous: go to your GP and ask for the prescription, go and book the blood test in another office, go and pay in another office, go and do the blood test, go back and collect the results, take the results to your GP. In the UK - I asked my GP and she did it then and there. There is so much running around to do - don't even get me started on the palaver of getting a medical certificate if you are off work!

Positive points:

Mother in laws - I have to disagree with you as mine was lovely. Sadly no longer with us. I know lots of people who have problems with theirs though.

Food - obviously!

People - generally friendly, but sadly noticing more racism lately.

Green spaces and kids' activities. At least in London, there are so many, mostly well-kept gardens, parks, green spaces and play grounds; the difference with the large Italian cities is shocking.

Yes - this is an issue for me right now - not even a swing-set in walking distance. Softplay is miles away (and tiny), parks are more designed for walking in than playing in - I just don't really know what Italian kids actually do with their time outside of the home!

Also state schools in Italy are basically catholic. Yes, you can opt out of religion at school but thanks to the cuts, this means just being put in the corner of another overcrowded classroom - not really an alternative. Also some of the teachers I have come across in Italy would have been sacked long ago in the UK - instead they are just shuffled around to other schools where they continue to do damage.

TomPinch said exactly what I was going to say!

" PigletJohn - Thanks for one of the very best posts I have ever read on Mumsnet."

British plug sockets are much better too! We have THREE different sockets in our small flat so have loads of adaptors all over the place - not a great advert for construction standards!

PigletJohn

ha, that's a rather scientific and convoluted way to explain why something is such a goddamn pain in the arse, which sounds as if it is justifying it. While the rest of the world has managed to avoid all this palaver. How about shower pressure being shit when someone installs combination boiler? The fuck at all, in the name of everything sane in the world, should this happen? It simply mustn't.

I came to think that UK is a rather unsanitary country, comparing to the rest, simply because washing is made more difficult, as if you have to overcome some medieval obstacles. People were heating water and washing hair wit jugs in fucking 50s of the 20th century. To this day folks don't rinse foam off the plates; it never occur to anyone to wash under a running tap. Washing hands in a basin with a plug - the hell?

It's a beautiful place in terms of human rights. But washing/taps/hygiene ... forget it.

I think Asian style bum guns are more hygienic than bidets.

@pigletjohn, thanks for that explanation of the history of British plumbing. Fascinating!

I live in a part of London where a mostly Muslim ethnic minority is if anything bigger than the "white British" group. (Think they are actually roughly equal in number.) Of the five local schools we had on our list, the top three (high-performing) schools discriminate on religion. To the extent that though being baptised might help, you often needed to be parents who actually go to church to get your children in. For one of the three schools, it was quite important that you were catholic. There are schools in this area with less than 10% children from the ethnic minority, and other (non-discriminating) schools that are more then 90% from the minority. If there were no religious discrimination then every school would have somewhere in the region of 50% children from the minority.

Yes I forgot the driving. I was in Rome for two weeks this summer, and was reminded how bad it is. Dangerous to the point that I feared my dc would get run over. For that reason alone I am glad we don’t live there.

You'd be surprised at how well some buildings are constructed to withstand earthquakes here.

I've 'witnessed' two earthquakes - for both, there was no more than a slight waving of the open door, and I only found out that it was an earthquake online later. Both times in newbuild properties, when older properties without modern construction rules were properly shaken - things falling off the walls.

A bidet seems like a ridiculous amount of faff. I don't spend my day with my fingers in my bumhole, so cleaning it to a shower-fresh state after a simple poop seems like a redundancy.

And people park anywhere and everywhere with zero consideration for pedestrians. Pavements generally are in an appalling condition.

Been to Naples anyone?

It's a falling apart shithole from what I can see.

It's dirty

Graffiti everywhere

Traffic is insane

Petty crime outside the station and on public transport.

Beggers

But.............

I love it for the people and food alone, and that's before you throw into the mix world class museums, culture, history, a stunning coastline, coffee, value for money, food markets, catacombs, the oldest working opera house and decent weather.

It's a rough diamond.

I don't understand why in lovely restaurants/bars in Italy (and in France I should say) there is usually only one toilet which is often grotty for all of the customers.

PigletJohn

A nerd-tastic post.

One day I shall give you a brief history of the offshore oil industry as a thankyou.

I hope no one took a light-hearted rant too personally or seriously!

You have lived outside your country for at least 10 years and you don't know that you can't have a "lighthearted" thread criticising the host country? It's not possible. That's not a specific British thing btw. Somebody will take offence and that would happen just the same on an Italian site if a British (or any other nationality) resident would make some criticism, no matter how lighthearted.

British plug sockets are much better too! We have THREE different sockets in our small flat so have loads of adaptors all over the place - not a great advert for construction standards!

Oh God yes - the three pin ones, the two pin ones and the round ones, and none of them fit in each other, and they seem to be randomly put in places (so sometimes it'll be a 3 pin and a two pin, sometimes it'll just be a 2 pin, sometimes it'll be one of each) - I have a carrier bag full of adaptors (having lived a few places, I have a mix of UK/Euro/round Euro devices)

I actually do like the more relaxed parking - I mean, the parking threads from Rome would be a whole new level of crazy - but that means that if I do need to pop somewhere, I can just squeeze the car somewhere it technically shouldn't be for a few mins, and no-one will make a fuss - whereas in the UK all hell would break loose.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Ita,y as a holiday destination. As a place to live, UK every time.

@PigletJohn
Genuinely fascinating
Makes total sense

I am from Spain. Italy and Spain are very very similar in nearly every way.
Give me the UK before Spain or Italy anytime please...

The level of corruption in politicians and how this is accepted by the population is There are some corrupt politicians here as well, but at least they've got some decency and they resign if they are caught! I mean, you had Berlusconi as your president!! you are not in a position of criticize another country for silly things after that, not even in a lighthearted way .

I sooooo wish I had a british MIL (my partner is also spanish)

We got bidets in Spain too but I am yet to know a person who uses it after using the toilet. You surely wash your hands in the hand wash basin?