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Brochure-blue skies, beaches and gastronomy are not the only pleasures on offer in Sardinia. The flaunting of wealth, which on mainland Italy seems the essence of the elegant and the stylish, is largely missing from this island. Not much use if you enjoy looking expensive but great if you want to taste life in the raw. "None of the suave Greek-Italian charms, none of the airs and graces, none of the glamour," rejoiced D.H.Lawrence after a visit in 1921. Look at the landscape, the architecture and the way of life, and what you still see is lack of style. But glossy literature about Sardinia doesn't tell you this.

Image versus reality

Like most tourist publicity, the focus is less on what a place is and more on what the imagination desires it to be. The problem's not dishonesty but too much imagination, too much fantasy. It's sometimes difficult to recognise a gush of contrived lyricism as being only that. "Sardinia, the land of magic, is exoticism close at hand," claims an article in a recent in-flight magazine. The vital ingredients of magic and exoticism are surprise and difference respectively. Would you really expect the jolt of surprise, the throb of difference from a landscape which this article describes as "full of 'designer views'"? No. Designer views are like the photograph of fresh carrots growing in manure which you find on a bag of frozen carrots. If you really want magic and exoticism, avoid clingfilm and packaged hyperbole.

Early morning in spring: newspaper's blowing aimlessly round my heels in Cagliari's Piazza Papa Giovanni XXIII. Bland apartment blocks, parked cars and screening trees enclose a space which looms blank. Hardly magical or exotic but still better than promises of ecstasy in a place that's only fantasy. Only in dreary old reality can something happen.

It does: a coach, hired by Club Alpino Italiano, arrives. It's taking us to Alghero on the north-west coast for a weekend escursione naturalistica. "Nature" is a hot word these days but let's cut the hype. I'm out looking for raw horizons, the wind howling.

City outskirts: in limbo

It begins: "Eurobusiness!" yell "Softing", "Casa In", "Big Bon" and other hybrid names of light industries we pass on the outskirts of Cagliari. But Sardinia, a traditionally poor and isolated sheep-rearing community, doesn't fit easily into safe platitudes from Brussels or Masstricht about free markets, common agricultural policy and democracy in true belief-in-progress style. Walter Benjamin argued that whilst new technology shakes up the material world, society lags behind in a kind of dream consciousness. He could have been talking about the periphery of Cagliari. Ragged sheep huddle round pylons, a Senegalese sells imitation portable telephones at the traffic lights which don't work, parabolic aerials gaze at the sky from the flat roofs of homes where architectural style is a breeze block. And on TV, politicians phrase their manovre around the imperfect subjunctive whilst Pipo Baudo says "ciao!" to show he's an ordinary guy.

Calcium stone and dirt tracks throw harsh white light. A sun-stricken wilderness? Hardly; despite recession, subsidy cut-backs and unemployment, a mantle of benessere remains intact. Rather, the classic scenarios of a developing country: the modern that's come too suddenly, apparent prosperity that isn't balanced by productivity. Unable to harness the full potential of new technology, people direct their expectations to consumer fantasies. A world of video shops and ragazzi revving their motorini with the front wheel up in the air.

Hard road, hard contact with Sardinia

Cagliari disappears from view as the road descends into the Pianura Campidano. By 4 BC, the Carthaginians had turned this forest-covered plain into cereal fields. As late as the eighteenth century, Sardinia was one of the largest exporters of grain in the Mediterranean. Many of these fields now lie fallow. Thirty years ago, the Italian State and the regional government of Sardinia were convinced that only industry, not agriculture, could connect this island with the hub of Europe. Today, common agricultural policy pays farmers for not growing crops and families still squabble over land inheritance. Produce that could be cultivated here is now imported. "God makes drought, man makes famine," goes an old saying in Somalia. But how many Europeans want to look at their continent from the outside?

Air slams the coach from the left. A TIR truck edges past and the rosary hanging from the coach driver's windscreen swings from side to side. Strada Statale 131 offers little shoulder to duck from the drift of passing vehicles. It's worse when you do the overtaking, especially at night. Carving a ravine between a truck's sway and the blizzard of reflector lights on the central reservation, your head swirls like a drunk gambler returning home on a Las Vegas boulevard. Then you wonder why you bothered. The answer's simple: on SS 131 everybody keeps pushing - fast. Service stations are scarce and the non-electrified single-track railway, the only other north-south artery, is a tortoise. 131 draws you on.

But my mind hangs back: views from the coach window provoke memories of places nearer home. D.H.Lawrence likened Sardinia to the moorlands of Cornwall and Derbyshire. Then he changed his mind. Lacking the cosiness of climbing roses, lilac trees, cottage shops and haystacks, Sardinia was "harder, barer, starker, more dreary." Today, wind-battered plateaus still stretch as far the eye can reach - desolate, uninhabited, dangerous, magnificent.

Mid-morning stop at Abbasanta service station. Cappuccino with UHT milk, outside queue in the rain at the toilets. We drive on. You always do on 131.

Brooding clouds ahead clash with open skies pointing to Africa behind us. This immensity of dark and light is a perfect setting for an Old Testament tale of justice. Justice in rural Sardinia was Old Testament till recently. A loss brought upon an individual or community had to be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. Farmers and shepherds entered a maze of recriminations. The theft of animals as vendetta was viewed as an action worthy of man, and evidence of hostile worlds still marks the landscape. Walls - millions of stones meticulously placed one on top of the other - were built in hope of peace. Today, leaning against one of these walls, the only sound you hear is wind. Unless, of course, one of the stones rolls down and clatters like a skull.

Passing time

Arrival at L'Arca di Noe', a nature reserve on the Capo Caccia promontory with sea, cliffs and mighty clouds still before the wind. Breathing the sea-spray air is like drawing in a vital assurance - a gift to hasten the passing dregs of winter. Griffons, falcons and seagulls crest high on the thermals or wedge their way into cracks in the calcium cliffs. Erosion of rocks, nesting birds, rare flowers that take the gusts with pride: nature is the unfolding of millennial, seasonal and momentary time.

We reach Alghero, the most heavily patronised tourist resort on the island. Uninspired urban planning encloses a centre still tied to Catalan language and Iberian culture. You can gauge a civilisation from its architecture, and what architecture there is! Here, at last, is Sardinia without an inferiority complex. Ceramic tiles and wrought-iron balconies gleam proud in sun. Yet nothing equals the Roman, Gothic-Catalan and late Renaissance architecture of the church of San Francesco. Neither mechanical nor examples of virtuosity for their own sake, these different styles forge a space that exists for the glory of God rather than as a chamber for his go-betweens.

Early-afternoon arrival at hotel and time, at last, for the siesta. A city busy in the morning is now in a repose that only an occasional motorcycle disturbs. Sonorous heartbeat in a silent world. Different from that day in 1541 when Alghero jostled with voices welcoming Charles V, Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor. The Golden Age for a Spain fed by booty from the Americas. Just another conqueror for a Sardinia that was nearly always someone else's prize.

Light and sound

Early evening bicycle ride on a long straight road to Le Bombarde and Lazzaretto beaches. Sunlight streaks through poplar trees that line the road and cast tall shadows.

The change of seasons affects the mind in strange and subtle ways. Winter, though colder and darker, is the time to light fires, play games and dream of summer. The winter night, falling like a shroud in late afternoon, brings a security which makes the world glow from within. Keep warm! The same simple thought occurs to everyone. Spring, on the other hand, is when you stand on the outside. Being the first light imposed from without, spring sets in motion a kind of dissent. It's unfair that there's now no recoil from the light, no way of leaving an evening that's too long. Winter seemed frozen in time but the new light shows that time passes. Mortality reigns. Questions about living bud open. Spring puts you on trial.

On the beach there's nothing except a shabby bar and the lapping sound of small waves coming, falling and going back. Hardly sound at all. Rather, a deafening silence of an unceasing movement of an invisible will. A strong, uncanny feeling that's captured in a short story by Yukio Mishima: "a lyrical transformation of the waves, not waves, but rather ripples one might call the light, derisive laughter of the waves at themselves."

These lapping, self-mocking waves; those solitary drones of motorcycles: why are certain sounds so uncanny when heard in isolation? Perhaps because they suggest the insistence of the self against all odds. Perhaps because, like a mountain echo, these sounds rebound in empty space. Perhaps because this insistent self and this emptiness are the same thing.

Returning to nature

Nature in Sardinia as a set of cliches, or nature as a sounding board for introspection? My attack on the former has become an exposition of the latter. But musing upon the real emptiness of the landscape is better than padding the scenery with "designer views". Tourist brochures lure us with images of an idyllic Mediterranean resort without the irritations of real life. No raucous noises, no litter, no graffiti. Sometimes, these images do indeed correspond with a place. But such places are usually overwhelming in their artifice: a yachting marina that's a child's playground, a fishing village that belongs to everyone except fishermen. An artifice which, on the Costa Smeralda, is over-civilised to the point of being barbaric. People the world over are happy to lie on sequestered beaches or to play on railed-off golf courses. But as in Venice (another vision on water that's paralysed by its own myth), the unique, spontaneous, free-of-charge experience is becoming impossible to find. Like gondola-and-velvet Venice, sun-and-sea Sardinia may one day sink forever into its narcissistic reflection.

We live in an age which projects nature as an origin to which we should return. Going back to your roots is good; it's modern civilisation that ruins us. But this craving for rustic simplicity is sometimes reminiscent of Marie Antoinette's preference for her little country folly to her husband's palace at Versailles. Only the former supported her fantasy of being the peasant she wasn't. White stuccowork houses that sentimentalise a peasant lifestyle of wretchedness and purity are built on Sardinian coasts for people with four-wheel drives. Terracotta pots, miniatures of unshaven men riding donkeys and other parodies of a less materialistic age fetch good prices in the shops. Almost anything evoking our "natural state", our lost innocence, can be exploited commercially. We invariably return to nature as consumers.

Is the search for authentic experience thus doomed in the modern world? No. Just remember that romantic memories are sometimes contrived images of things which never existed. Perhaps, one day, we shall see the emptiness of our saccharine vistas and kitsch replicas - and what a horrid sight that will be. Meanwhile, you can keep your glamour and style. I'll stick with the way Sardinia looks on the map - a sheepskin stretched taut without fat or embellishments. Envy me.

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British newspapers speak of a "drought" back home. People living in chunks of negative equity in the Home Counties are being asked to sprinkle their green lawns only once a week, not nightly. Right now, the very idea of garden hose-pipe culture makes me dribble saliva with envy. Long shadows on the cricket pitch of an English country village... this is my fantasy. Deprived of effective plumbing for twelve hours a day, I'm also fed up with the sound of "muratori" banging away on nearly every building in Cagliari that's more than fifty years' old.

As you can see, I enjoy telling you about my discomforts. That's because I belong to Western culture. Without experiencing the obscene horrors of drought which stalk parts of the Third World, most of us believe that we suffer unduly when gallon after gallon of water isn't constantly and readily available in the home.

The strange thing about Cagliari is that life continues as though lack of water were not a problem. Obsession with "l'igiene intima", psychological dependency on the bidet and the compulsion to feel beautiful at all times are still as prevalent here as in any other part of Italy. Television and the local newspapers are suspiciously quiet about why this water crisis has occurred. When I ask people, I invariably receive two types of answer. Some speak about irreversible changes of climate. Others start from the premise that despite this island's distance from the mainland, it's still embroiled in all the problems which flow from Italy's revolving-door style governments and Machiavellian system of favours for short-term benefit. It's important to consider both of these views without conflating them: lack of rain doesn't necessarily entail water shortage. As well as examining changing weather patterns, one must also ask whether the precious water that there is in Sardinia is collected, stored and distributed in the most efficient way.

"LA DESERTIFICAZIONE DEL SUD"

I discussed the first of these issues with Stefania, a friend with global environmental interests who has always lived in this city. Average temperatures in Cagliari throughout the year have, she said, increased by one degree centigrade in the last ten years. One of the reasons for this is that soil erosion, forest fires and over-grazing have exacerbated a phenomenon she calls "la desertificazione del sud". The dust bowls and treeless mountain tops around Cagliari are comparatively recent features of what was once a thickly wooded landscape. The encroaching desert conditions in southern Sardinia are, she alleged, a continuation of what happened in North Africa. The Western Desert, which forms part of the Sahara belt, was once a lush savannah that was reduced to its present state not only by winds but also thanks to overgrazing by Stone Age pastoralists.

Stefania's words were bold and many of them are probably true. Yet I remained sceptical: she was vague about whether these changes are irreversible or whether science and political will can still give us a second chance. I was also apprehensive about her fondness for the phrase "la desertificazione del sud". It certainly had potential as a captivating headline. An image of Sardinia as a vast expanse of sand dunes filled my mind. Instead of having spent my recent free time frigging around with my 740 tax form, perhaps I should have been out with my Nikon, preparing an article for the National Geographic on how this island is becoming part of the Sahara in all but name.

On balance, I felt Stefania was offering a fashionable and rather too hasty view of environmental "doom and gloom", of a future that is always beyond our control. The main difficulty was that I liked her too much and knew her too well. She had a sensuous, animated energy - the kind of thing the Brits think is endemic to Mediterranean culture - and a predilection for sensationalism. Despite her global concerns, she was, I concluded facetiously, still living in a cosy state of "fanciullezza" that extended no further than the geraniums, watered twice daily, on her parents' balcony.

"UN BEL DISCORSO"

The next day, Ignazia, another friend, told me about the political aspects of this water shortage. A journalist by profession but a political animal by nature, she has a lethal sharpness of judgement which turns most of our conversations into the following syllogism: since A equals B and B equals C, I'm definitely wrong and my ego needs a good bashing.

On this occasion, Ignazia reserved her malice for "politicians" - a term she extended, no doubt correctly, to cover anyone responsible for running public services. She began by describing present-day Israel, a desert that was turned into lush and fertile areas thanks to technology and human resolve. Sardinia, she argued, can and must follow this example. Alternative sources of water such as the sea and melting snows in spring should be explored far more seriously. At present, we have to depend almost exclusively upon an inadequate number of reservoirs to collect occasional rainfall. Some of these cannot be used to full capacity because the dams that contain the water have never been thoroughly tested. Tirso, one of the biggest reservoirs in Sardinia, has never contained more than approximately one third of the water it was originally designed to hold. Furthrmore, intent on making a correct political impression, the ruling powers prefer to use money for extravagant new projects rather than for repairs to existing pipes and structures that leak water. Only one half of the water pumped from Flumendosa, a reservoir situated some 85 kilometres away, arrives at its destination in Cagliari.

According to Ignazia, then, the real cause of this water shortage is incompetence on the part of politicians. Chronic lack of rain has been on the cards for some time; preparations could have been made. Yet nobody really expected the politicians to do anything more than just talk. The abstractions and rhetoric of a "bel discorso" are, after all, the substance of their trade.

ON REFLECTION

Climate change and/or the ineptitude of those with power: each of these views expresses a partial truth but neither gets to the root of this mess. Science could, as in Israel, be used to stretch the earth's bounty a little further here and politicians with greater integrity can presumably be found. Yet these improvements would not in themselves confront a more fundamental predicament which is sustained by three pernicious myths: that Sardinia is a "natural" wilderness; that its terrain is intrinsically poor and infertile; and that its only hope of prosperity lies in selling up-market packages of sun and sea to stressed-out Milanesi or other jaded city-dwellers.

There's something galling about living in a region - whether it's the Dolomites, the Sardinian coast or the Scottish Highlands - which exists in the minds of most people only as a remedy for the ills of living in the metropolis. In the case of Sardinia, this lack of consideration for the region as place rather than image, and for the real people who make their lives here, has produced short-term colonial-style exploitation, first for wood, then for the occasional chemical refinery and now for the annual two-month burst of elite tourism. Most of the profits made from holiday-makers pass into the hands of people who rarely see, let alone live, on this island.

The present water scarcity, the desolate landscape and the history of exile and pain which lives on here are as man-made as the rice fields of Vercelli and Novara. Things don't have to stay this way. But little will change unless the people of Sardinia manage to develop lives of their own, instead of continuing as characters in someone else's fantasy.

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Jimmy sniffed Italian air. It smelt dolce and different from the damp shires of breakfast and embarrassment he'd abandoned yesterday. It was his first day in his new job. He'd never been to Italy before and didn't speak the language. Yet he was already Italianised; he knew the country by image and by instinct. Olive oil, constant sun and loose living: he wanted to experience Italy's magic power to weaken a foreigner's resistance to temptation. Would the temptress be a tall, graceful Venetian or a dark-eyed starlet from Magna Graecia?

SMALL WORLD

Ten years later, Jimmy's still living in the bel paese. Have his existential expectations been fulfilled? In a sense, yes. For he's quickly learnt the Italian way of life. He says vediamo un po' instead of no, he makes sure his signature on any official document is illegible and he considers lead-free petrol to be an eccentricity for German tourists.

Something's wrong though. Jimmy keeps having nasty visions of arriving in his mid-forties with nothing at all to his name: neither wife, children, property nor mind. He aspires to normality - the charms of a regular existence - but he still hasn't found it. Far from having lost himself in a lust-drenched breeze of anonymous promiscuity, he's discovered that southern sensuality is pretty much the same as sensuality elsewhere. It's necessary to insert yourself in an intimate and socially complex code of manners and practices. (He'd been rather too forward on the first occasion; he'd misunderstood the meaning of the word nubile on her identity card.) Yet he continues to encounter those sneers of self-sufficiency which tell you to keep your distance. Love doesn't happen like a collision in the dark. Making friends is slow, difficult, ambiguous... .

Gravity's starting to weigh Jimmy down. He'd hoped to defy the changes that come with age by going footing everyday. Yet things are moving at their own pace, not his. In spite of having made pots of money, he's living in a void of darkness. Will he become a ranting bigot, a moaning Minnie or just a happy Joe? Jimmy's jaw's throbbing. Perhaps his wisdom teeth are showing through.

A SATURNIAN INTERLUDE

Some games are played for high stakes. Living in Italy as an expatriate is one of them. We fluctuate between days when we love our adopted country and times when our humour is black. A particular problem for expats in Italy is that many of us arrive here with higher expectations that we would have had in, say, Belgium or Finland. Before you ever set foot on Italian-airport tarmac, you were probably buffeted by waves of envy, wonder and even downright condemnation of the very special "ambience" in which Italy is supposed to be bathed. The danger is that when expats don't find this promised land, they become as disillusioned as Jimmy.

Yet what exactly is this special ambience? In his perceptive work, The Italians, Barzini examines a range of possible motives for moving to this country: food, climate, nature, art, ancient monuments and even tax evasion are considered. He concludes that it's not the Italians' sheer superiority - their being better at something or having more of something - which attracts foreigners. Instead, people come to seek "a certain quality in Italian life", a quality that "quickens their blood" and "gives them a Saturnian feeling of liberation".

Saturn, as you may or may not know, fled from Mount Olympus to the area that now surrounds Rome. (He was, you could say, Italy's first expat God.) In memory of his beneficent rule, the annual feast of Saturnalia was held. During the week-long celebrations complete licence was given; slaves could insult their masters, the poor commanded the rich and the shy charmed conceited women. According to Barzini, "immortal and mortal foreigners, armed and unarmed, alone and in vast numbers, have sought a Saturnian interlude in Italy as far back as men can remember."

RAPTURE

It would, of course, be a massive generalisation to extend this argument to readers of The Informer. An unknown proportion of them may well have found that Italy is a pleasant milieu for a legal or illegal honeymoon, affair or escapade. Yet it's unlikely that they are presently playing nymph and faun on solitary beaches, or are consorting with contadini in some bucolic setting where the twentieth century is unknown. Nevertheless, this generalisation nurtures a grain of truth. Foreigners from Europe and North America tend to think of Italy as a place that will transform them, that will transport them far from themselves and give them the illusion of having cheated fate. And if the experience is aphrodisiac in the bargain, so much the better.

Many passages of purple prose, penned by past and present writers, describe Italy thus. As Barzini shows, not only second-rate thinkers but also some of our acknowledged masters must have been in a right old fix to have said some of the things they did. "The charm of Italy," stated Stendhal, "is akin to that of being in love." "At last, for the first time, I live," wrote Henry James when he visited Rome for the first time. What did he mean? Perhaps Heinrich Heine can shed some light: "Simply letting yourself live is beautiful in Italy. In these marble palazzi sighs have a more romantic echo than in our modest brick houses; in the shade of these laurel bushes it is more pleasant to weep than under our gloomy fir trees; it is sweeter to day-dream following the shapes of Italian clouds than under the ash-grey dome of a German sky."

DEBAUCHERY

The raptures recorded by these and other writers were not pure. They were tainted by a belief that general debauchery was rampant in Italy. As early as 1570, Roger Ascham in The Schoolmaster cautioned innocent youth against the irresistible seductions of this country. And reading between the lines of Milton's reasons for visiting Italy, one recalls the Freudian truth that the more one doesn't want to admit something, the more vigorously one denies it: "...I knew well, and have since experienced, that Italy, instead of being, as you suppose, the general receptacle of vice, was the seat of civilisation and the hospitable domicile of every species of erudition." Even if Milton didn't get up to any hanky-panky, there were plenty of foreigners who did. Reading some of the eighteenth-century works of Winckelmann and Goethe, you'd think that they came to Italy only to write about control over excess and passion with sentences that are more inert than your average plank. Don't you believe it. We have it from Barzini that during his Italian trip Goethe "left no petticoat unturned" whilst Winckelmann died, "a victim of his proclivities," in a tacky hotel in Trieste. Sometimes, in the works of other writers, the feeling of being ennobled by history, contempt for ordinary people and just a hint of kinky desire are combined in the same formulation: "See where that wretch is strumming his mandoline. It is perhaps the place where a virtuous father killed his child rather than see her handmaid to an Emperor's lust!"

MORAL SUPERIORITY

These quotations indicate the types of entrenched beliefs about Italy which some of us may have tacitly accepted even before arriving. True, in more recent times such libidinal fixations and hypocritical denials are not voiced so fervently. Yet the assumption that Italy is a country of easy pleasures and adaptable morals still prevails. The desire to indulge in Italian enjoyments and the moral superiority gained from condemning them are still at work.

D.H. Lawrence's writings, for example, are occasionally flawed by a tendency to turn the Italians into facile emblems of the human condition: "Their minds were not developed, mentally they were children, lovable, naive, almost fragile children. But sensually they were men: sensually they were accomplished." And in a work published in 1994, Eric Newby says that he was left "wondering how Italy could survive at all and why, in spite of doing all the wrong things economically and not paying tax on a grand scale, the Italians not only seemed to enjoy themselves more than we did but appeared to live better." Newby has a point. Yet he ought to acknowledge the vast number of law-abiding Italians who are taxed to the hilt.

TURNING THE TABLES

In short, we should be wary of judging or projecting onto other cultures whilst remaining unable or unwilling to see our own culture from the outside. Indeed, it's interesting to turn the tables to see how the Italians describe the experience of living in our countries. The British, the Italians will tell you, are addicted to wars, rain, alcohol and queues; they keep the parks clean whilst leaving their houses dirty; and they've only just woken up to the reality that they're no longer an imperial power. Even being told that I drink tea at five rather than four o'clock, that my main concern in life is what the Royal Family's doing at this moment, or that London has more fog than Milan can prove particularly tedious at times. No doubt I feel slightly threatened. Italians, I tell myself, make hasty generalisations about the Brits and most of us are the exception. However, when I read the penultimate sentence of Beppe Severgnini's Inglesi, I discover that he's already pre-empted me with a superb justification: "Gli inglesi meritano di essere esaminati in fretta e giudicati impietosamente: per secoli hanno fatto lo stesso, in Europa e altrove." Boy, that hurts. Why? Because it's true.

Instead of kidding ourselves that the dolce vita still flows freely in Italy, and instead of bickering about the superiority of one nation over another, we should be more attentive to present-day similarities between Italy, Britain and possibly the United States. For unless you're a regular guest at the Aga Khan's residence on the Costa Smeralda, it's here that you'll find the hard core of the problems we shall all have to face.

FROM FIXED TIME TO FLEXITIME

In Britain, Italy and elsewhere we're witnessing a change from an industrial time culture based around fixed timetables and a clear division of labour to a new culture based around flexibility, customisation and rapid flows of information. Banking and 24-hour shopping on the home computer, time-share holidays and prepackaged, complete meals in the supermarket are going to arrive. Fixed jobs and the idea that life consists of learning, marriage, work and retirement in roughly that order are on the way out. And the things that matter most to us - the way we deal with the personal, the passionate and the intimate - are in a state of flux.

It's sometimes said that this new system will allow more time for people's needs and interests. Frankly, I don't believe it. The new order will be accompanied by a deterioration in the quality of life. The state will become increasingly reluctant to pick up an ever mounting bill for health care and pensions, and the gap between those who've got too much work and those who've got none will widen. There will be a greater acceptance of our apparent impotence in the fields of politics or combating evil and hardship, and a steady indulgence in fantasy without realising the consequences of our being voyeurs who watch the spectacle whilst numbed to its impact and pain.

We are, in other words, going to become subject to greater means of surveillance and powers of normalisation. Rather than being controlled by a central power, we shall be subject to more subtle and inconspicuous means of force. Hidden or deeper meanings will become harder to support as we become more watchful and more acquainted with the paranoia of being watched. Narcissism and shame will increase as we become more conscious of our appearance, and more worried about being a lousy advertisement for ourselves. And the growth of such disciplinary societies will be enhanced by the privatisation of prisons, the armed forces and the judiciary. Why not? They're all potentially good businesses.

A NON-FUTURISTIC FUTURE

Before you tear up this death knell, I'd just like to say that I hope I'm wrong. I really do. But let's face it: the next century is covered with fear of worse things to come. Gone are the days when the future was the place of space-age ideas wrapped in shiny silver foil. That transcendent moment when a human being landed on the source of the sea-tides has already become banal.

If, then, at the fag end of the millennium in a so-called transition period between a First and a Second Republic, there's anything to learn from Jimmy, it's this: have realistic expectations. Jimmy's problem is that he isn't prepared for ordinary, mundane existence, or for the possibility that one can still find "paradise" on dull days. After all, we can still enjoy home-made spaghetti alle vongole while it lasts.

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