Selling souls for nothing

Here are words you wouldn’t expect the Prime Minister to utter: ‘migration represents 25% of our per capita GDP, 10% of our social security revenues and only 1% of our public expenditure’. 

Extraordinary, right? A full-throated defence of immigration. So different from the denunciations we’re more used to. 

Surprised? Doesn’t sound like Keir Starmer? Don’t worry, it isn’t. Those were the words of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. The words are admirable not just because they show so much more courage than Starmer ever does, but also because they’re right. Immigration isn’t a burden. It’s vital for the survival of Britain and Spain as nations offering their citizens a decent standard of living.

If you’re in your forties in Britain and would like a pension when you reach the appropriate age, stop and think that, according to the Office of National Statistics, by 2047 without immigration, the population will drop by nearly 10 million, and in a swiftly ageing society, the working-age population which pays for pensions, will fall by 6-7 million. You want a pension? Make sure immigrants keep showing up, because most of them are of working age and you need them working for you. 

No one in the Labour leadership is saying that.

Instead we get the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, making the regulations governing the treatment of asylum seekers even more severe than they already are. 

Let’s not forget that asylum seekers, less than 15% of total immigrants anyway, are mostly people fleeing some of the most awful circumstances on earth, including war, torture and rape. One of the nastier of the new proposals is to extend the time it takes for an asylum seeker to win the right to remain permanently in Britain, from five to twenty years. If at any time the government decides that the country from which the refugees fled is now safe again, they could be forced to return. That’s even if they have kids, who have been educated in Britain, who may speak English better than their parents’ language, who are in effect in all but the technical sense British.

When Mahmood was criticised in the Commons for her proposals, she replied with passion. It’s refreshing to see that kind of intensity, but a shame to see it so badly directed. She pointed out how deeply divisive the problem of immigration has become, and that she, unlike her white fellow MPs, was frequently the target of vicious racial slurs, as were many of her constituents. She shocked the Commons by repeating one of those slurs, and the language was so offensive that the Deputy Speaker called on her to apologise for it.

Well, she’s right. I also agree with Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Opposition – not something I say very often – who supported Mahmood on that point. She has also had to face racist insults.

What I can’t go along with is Mahmood’s conclusion that the answer is to make asylum seekers, some of the world’s most vulnerable people, pay for British divisiveness. Someone flings a racist insult at you, and you respond by adopting their policies? Isn’t that just rewarding their bigotry? Where’s the sense in that?

If you doubt that it’s what she’s doing, just look at who’s welcoming her proposals. Kemi Badenoch, though a victim of racist attack herself, is another hardliner against immigration and has pledged Conservative support for Mahmood’s measures. Nigel Farage, of the far-right Reform UK Party, invited Mahmood to become a member after hearing her proposals. Worse still, Tommy Robinson, a figure from the hardest of the hard right, a man who has served prison terms for his behaviour in support of his policies, a man endorsed by Elon Musk, welcomed Mahmood’s proposals and congratulated ‘patriots’ for having legitimised the views that made them possible. 

It happens so frequently. Faced with a surging, loudmouthed far right, the centre left caves and throws them red meat, in the hope of outflanking them and winning back their voters. ‘You want the vicious policies of the far right?’ they seem to be saying. ‘Don’t worry. We can implement them for you. Just keep voting for us.’

This is selling your soul to chase electoral gains. The worst of it? It’s not just immoral, it’s bad politics. It doesn’t work. In France, President Macron has tried to prove that he can be as hard on immigrants as the far-right National Rally led by Marine le Pen. What has the result been? The National Rally is closer to winning the presidency than it has ever been.

I recently heard the former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, being interviewed by Emily Maitlis. Sturgeon described the position perfectly:

If you basically say Nigel Farage is right then people are likely to vote for Nigel Farage, not you…

Maitlis herself brilliantly summed up the policy that Keir Starmer seems to be pursuing as:

‘Nigel Farage is right. Don’t vote for him.’

Left: Pedro Sánchez, courageous on immigration
Centre: Mette Frederiksen, architect of a failed model
Right: Shabana Mahmood, passionate to follow that model

The irony is that Labour has based Mahmood’s latest ideas on what people call ‘the Danish model’. That’s the equally harsh approach to asylum adopted by the current government in Denmark, run by Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, the equivalent of Britain’s Labour Party. On 18 November, Denmark held local and regional elections. The Social Democrats took a hammering across the country. They even lost the mayoralty of Copenhagen, for the first time since the first elections for the post in 1938.

And this is the model British Labour wants to follow?

Labour became established in Britain as a party of government in the 1920s. Its worst electoral result since then came in 1931, after its leader, Ramsay MacDonald, set up a coalition government with the Conservatives and split the party. At the 1931 election, the Labour Party that broke with MacDonald took 30.6% of the vote.

In more recent years, under the appalling leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour took 32.1% of the vote.

And according to the most recent YouGov poll, Labour today now stands at 19%. Far worse than in either of those two disastrous elections.

I don’t know what it takes to make Labourites who favour the latest proposals understand that they are morally wrong, economically damaging, and even politically counter-productive. Isn’t the evidence clear enough?

Of course, there is a crucial difference between the Danish and British experience. The Social Democrats lost Copenhagen to parties to their left. I wish I could at least be confident of something similar in Britain, where it looks as though Labour is far more likely to lose to the extreme right.

And what about Spain, the country I was talking about at the start? Well, the signs aren’t good. The traditional right is dropping in the polls. Sánchez’s Socialist Party is climbing. But the far right is also gaining ground. Sánchez has proved in the past that it’s unwise to write him off too soon, but it does look as though he’s likely to lose the next election to a coalition of the centre right and the hard right.

Still, if he does lose, at least he’ll go down fighting for a position that’s defensible morally and right in practice.

British Labour looks increasingly likely to lose to its opponents of the far right while defending the very positions they take.

The worst of all possible worlds.

MAGA? Don’t you mean MACA?

It was touching, wasn’t it? Literally as well as metaphorically. You know, the joyous handclasps. Holding each other’s hands. All with smiles to underline the intimacy and good fellowship.

The scene was Tianjin in China. Present were the host, Xi Jinping, Chinese leader and the world’s most powerful autocrat. With him was Vladimir Putin, Russian leader and the world’s most brutal autocrat. Joining them was Narendra Modi, Indian leader as Prime Minister of the world’s biggest democracy and its second most powerful would-be autocrat.

Modi’s presence was the most remarkable. Less than three years ago, in December 2022, Chinese and Indian troops were attacking each other with, of all things, nail-studded clubs across their common border. Now, though, it’s all friendship and good cheer between the two nations.

Putin, Modi and Xi Jinping

Best of buddies. All thanks to Trump

In theory, this ought to please the world’s top would-be autocrat. Donald Trump’s always quick to trumpet – Trump-et? – his role as peacemaker. The man who’s going to bring peace to Ukraine or Gaza in a single day hasn’t yet found the right day on which to make that happen. To compensate, he might take some satisfaction from having promoted peace between those two Asian giants.

Sadly, though, it’s not clear to me that he brought them together intentionally. There may be people who regard Trump as a champion of subtle strategic thought. I’m afraid that I’m not one of them. He slapped tariffs of 25% on Indian exports to the US and then, when India persisted in buying Russian oil, doubled them to 50%. That drove Modi towards Xi Jinping, to see whether China could become a sufficiently significant trading partner to make up for some of the lost business with the US.

Was Trump motivated by an altruistic desire to improve Sino-Indian ties even at the cost of US relations with the subcontinent? As I say, some may believe he’s capable of such ingenuity. They may be right, but I can only say that I find it hard to believe.

To be honest, even the pretext for increasing the Indian tariffs is hard to swallow. I mean, Trump is always proclaiming his admiration for Russia and for Putin. I reckon he envies Putin and would like to imitate him in the US. Putin, of course, has no intention of imitating Trump. Still, given Trump’s apparent deference towards Putin – Trump regularly talks tough about his Russian opposite number, but Putin only has to meet him to twist him around his little finger again – it’s odd that Trump reckons his tariffs on India are about Modi buying Russian oil.  

The journalist John Sopel, now co-hosting the podcasts The News Agents and The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis, has a different explanation of Trump’s behaviour. India and Pakistan had their own border conflict between 7 and 10 May. It involved missile firing and air raids, so it was a tad more serious than the 2022 clash between Indian and Chinese border troops armed with clubs.

The incident eventually ran out of steam, with both sides apparently feeling they’d done enough damage and killed enough people to satisfy that strange beast, national honour. Trump though had rung the two sides and that, he has convinced himself, made him the engineer of peace between the two nations.

Pakistan, apparently keener than India on being obsequious towards Trump, nominated him for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. India, instead, argued that peace happened independently of Trump’s minimal efforts. Modi refused to back him for the Peace Prize.

Sopel’s suggestion? The different attitudes of the nations over the Nobel prize cost India its penalising tariffs, far higher than Pakistan’s. It seems hard to credit, doesn’t it? But should anything surprise us anymore when it comes to Trump?

Let’s not stop at India, though. Another nation that has had punitive tariffs inflicted on it is Brazil, the second biggest democracy in the Americas, and the nation that is making its previous would-be autocratic president answer for his illegal attempts to hold onto power. Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on it. Which is curious, since his general justification for tariffs is to hit back at nations with which the Americans are running a trade deficit. That is, nations so devious that they produce goods Americans are keener to buy than their own people are to buy US products.

Curiously, Brazil is one of the minority of nations with which the US has a trade surplus – it sells Brazil more than it buys from it.

Still, it doesn’t take long to find the real reason for the tariffs on Brazil. It’s precisely because it’s holding its ex-President to account. He tried to raise an insurrection to prevent his opponent, who’d beaten him in the election, driving him from office. Having tried the same trick himself, Trump clearly opposes any move to make the author of an attempted coup face retribution for his action. 

Hence the tariffs.

So where is Brazil turning for help? Why, to China.

Funnily enough, South Africa is doing the same. Trump has swallowed the entirely fictitious story of an anti-white genocide in that country (evidence isn’t a Trump requirement for anything he has chosen to believe). Ironically, while Trump is deporting as many migrants from the US as he can, he’s opened the door to one category of refugees – white South Africans. And he’s imposed 50% tariffs on South Africa too, driving them into Chinese arms alongside the others.

The original five members of the group of nations known as the BRICS were Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Isn’t that curious? Precisely China and the four nations now turning to it for help in the face of Trump’s aggression. What help China can provide is far from certain. But even if the help is limited, the realignment of the nations is clear and no doubt lasting.

In other words, Trump’s actions are powerfully assisting the Chinese playbook for world leadership. And that’s on top of moves to cut investment in such technologies as Electric Vehicles, leaving the field open to China to dominate.

So should MAGA continue to call itself MAGA at all or produce its nice red baseball caps proclaiming that ‘Trump was right about everything’?

Since he’s clearly not making America great again, maybe it’s time to change the movement’s name to MACA. That’s ‘Make America China’s Agent’. The caps could be marked ‘Xi Jinping’s getting it right’. 

At least that would be a lot more accurate.

Summer grandparenting: penguins, fish and dragons

We’d been talking about penguins, Elliott and I, as one does when breakfasting with a four-year-old.

‘And you know,’ he solemnly announced, ‘they live near the North Pole.’

‘Near the pole,’ I agreed, but adding a gentle correction, ‘but the South Pole. There are no penguins near the North Pole.’

‘Oh, yes, there are.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I continued, as gently as I could.

‘Have you been to the North Pole?’ he countered.

He’d spotted the weakness in my argument.

‘No,’ I admitted, but then added, ‘Have you?’ 

I’d found the weakness in his.

‘Yes,’ he assured me, putting paid to my trivial objection, ‘for my birthday.’

Well, what could I say? It wasn’t, after all, completely inconceivable that his parents had taken Elliott to the Arctic for his birthday. Unlikely, it’s true, but not beyond the wildest of assumptions. After all, his parents like to make his birthdays special, and what could be more spectacular than a polar expedition as a celebration of turning four? And if he’d been there and seen penguins, I’d look pretty damn silly to be denying their existence, wouldn’t I? Empirical experience trumps learned belief. 

It’s true that discovering penguins in the Arctic would strike a serious blow to the beliefs of ornithologists, but why should we care for ornithology anyway? It’s all for the birds, I reckon.

This illuminating conversation took place at our home near Valencia, and during the third grandparenting session of the summer. 

First Matilda had come on her own. Well, perhaps I should say stayed with us on her own. I took a train to Madrid, collected her from her dad at the station, and travelled straight back to Valencia. At the end of the stay, her mother did the reverse, jumping on a train to Valencia’s main station, and travelling straight back with Matilda. It may sound like a painful waste of time, nearly four hours in trains with barely a pause at the destination, but Sheena and I agree that it’s a glorious way to get a rest and do a little reading.

Trains are the luxury form of travel of our era.

Less luxurious, it turns out, were the sleeping arrangements for Matilda. We’d decided to replace the old sofa bed which converted into two single beds for her and her brother. It wasn’t a particularly good sofa and, it turned out, it wasn’t a particularly good pair of beds either: it coped badly with three or four years’ use by young kids. That, I suspect, was at least in part due to its not being even adjacent to the top of the range from Ikea.

So we got a new one from further up the Ikea range. It’s a much better sofa. Sadly, as a bed it wasn’t half as successful. At least, not initially. It converts into a bed by lowering a hinged back to join the sofa seat, but of course it doesn’t join seamlessly. There’s a bit of a gap between the two, and Matilda made it clear that she was less than pleased with this new arrangement.

‘My old bed,’ she told us sadly, ‘was a winner.’

By contrast, the new one, with the gap down the middle, was a loser. 

The solution? A memory foam mattress that we lay across the bed to cover and neutralise the gap. And the reaction from Matilda? None at all. Which is excellent. No news is good news and no complaints means a satisfied granddaughter.

There are things that grandparents – well, grownups generally – say that they should perhaps learn to stop saying. I remember when I was a kid I loathed it when people asked me ‘shall I keep you here? Shall we send your parents home and you stay with me?’ I never knew what to reply to a suggestion that ludicrous.

Less ludicrous but perhaps not less futile are the questions that probe affection.

‘Who loves Matilda?’ Danielle asked.

‘Mamama and Granddad,’ Matilda immediately replied, correctly identifying Danielle and me, in that order.

‘And who loves Mamama and Granddad?’ Danielle pressed on, asking one more question than necessary and opening the door to a potentially regrettable response.

‘Elliott,’ said Matilda, providing one. 

Following her solo visit in June, Matilda was back the following month with the whole family. It was damn hot. But Elliott had no problem about pursuing the unconventional solution, demonstrating to us all what the elegant young man wears to breakfast in hot weather.

Elliott well-dressed for summer

He also showed us a fine way to spend the time in such conditions.

In the summer, just chill

Not that resting was an activity for him alone. He and his sister were both occasionally exhausted enough to need some recovery time.

Recovery time

What put them in this state was, above all, the pool. This was the summer for swimming. The pool we share with our neighbours offers two equal pleasures: meeting friends when they’re there, or ‘having the pool to ourselves’ as Matilda would put it, every time we arrived to find that they weren’t.

It's been a summer of rapid progress. In June, Matilda wasn’t yet ready to get rid of her aids – flotation vest or mask – but by July she was striking out without them and on this, the latest visit in August, when the two of them came with just their Dad, she’s been swimming full widths of the pool unaided. She’s even jumping in with complete confidence and without having anyone to hold her hand or catch her in the water. She hasn’t quite reached the stage of swimming a length – she still has to overcome her fear of the deep end – but that’ll come soon.

And just yesterday, as I write these words, Elliott too passed a new milestone. Without aids, he swam between his Dad and me, repeatedly. There are some small technical matters to overcome – like trying to get his body horizontal in the water instead of staying vertical with his nose just above the surface – but he was afloat and, most of the time, moving towards a goal.

They may not be quite ready to rival the fish, but they’re both on the way.

No wonder they got tired. But at least they could relax whenever they felt like it, watching their new favourite series, all about Vikings who tame dragons and have wonderful adventures with them. Truly relaxing, since each episode seems to follow exactly the same structure as every other – humans and dragons go somewhere that proves less safe than they think and find themselves battling with nasty villains, or the nasty villains come after them even when they stay at home – things go badly wrong until it looks as though disaster is unavoidable – and then, to our ever-repeated astonishment, things all work out just fine after all. Immensely enjoyable. 

Apparently.

So it’s been a summer of successful visits all around. With much to remember them by. Though, to be absolutely fair, I’m still not convinced that there are penguins at the North Pole.

I mean, I checked with ChatGPT which assures me there are none. But, hey, which is a more reliable source of information? Today’s halfbaked Artificial Intelligence or the natural intelligence of a four-year-old grandkid?

It’s a tossup, I’d say.

And another rite of passage:

Matilda dumping her milk teeth

Mike Huckabee: right by accident, wrong intentionally

There are some remarkable characters in the gang surrounding Donald Trump. Most recently, I’ve found it fascinating to catch up on Mike Huckabee. 

Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel
Innovator in his approach to diplomacy

Huckabee used to be governor of Arkansas, a post to which his daughter has now ascended. One of the great things about republics as opposed to monarchies, is that they pass on power by election rather than by inheritance. The US is a case in point, as long as you ignore such presidential cases as the George H.W. Bush-George W. Bush father-son pair or, rather earlier, the William Henry Harrison-Benjamin Harrison grandfather-grandson pair and the even earlier John Adams-John Quincy Adams father-son pair.

The Huckabees are at least progressive, in that they’ve allowed the father's inheritance to pass to a daughter rather than insisting that it go to a son.

In any case, Huckabee continues to occupy a key position on the political stage, nearly twenty years after ending his time as state governor. Today he’s the US Ambassador to Israel. Now rather a lot of people – a growing number – around the world are becoming increasingly upset at the behaviour of Israel in Gaza. 

Why, some have gone so far as to talk about genocide.

Huckabee, though, has the answer to all that. He seems to have been annoyed, in particular, by the decision of the UK government to recognise Palestine as a state. On social media, Huckabee told the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer where to get off. In no uncertain terms:

So Israel is expected to surrender to Hamas & feed them even though Israeli hostages are being starved. Did UK surrender to Nazis and drop food to them? Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer? That wasn’t food you dropped. If you had been PM then UK would be speaking German!

Is it just me or is there a bit of what-aboutery there? You know, as in, ‘hey, you want to criticise what Israel’s doing in Gaza? You want to have a go at Israeli forces killing civilians? What about what you did to Dresden?’

Still, he clearly thinks that the fire-bombing of Dresden was a good thing, not a bad one, presumably including the fact that it caused a firestorm so intense that it sucked the oxygen out of the air and many people died of suffocation. And what he’s doing is drawing a parallel between that atrocity and what’s happening in Gaza. Which, presumably, he regards as equally justified.

I wouldn’t disagree. It seems to me that it’s precisely as justified to do what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza as it was to set fire to Dresden. I suppose it’s helpful of him to highlight the equivalence. Mind you, I don’t think that he’d agree with my view that the Dresden raids constituted a major, unacknowledged and unprosecuted war crime, and Israel’s violence in Gaza and starvation of its population is another. The parallel he draws has merit, but not the way he meant. He’s got it right, but only by accident.

But are the two atrocities really equivalent? The four raids on Dresden may have been ghastly but at least they only lasted from 13 to 15 February 1945. The Gaza incursion has lasted 22 months and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Unsurprisingly, it has caused more deaths: the best estimate for Gaza is some 60,000 and rising, while most commentators agree that the Dresden raids killed around 25,000. But, worse than that, the Gaza action is threatening an entire population, believed to be about 2.1 million today. 

Israel is targeting an entire people, and that whole people is in danger of death. Mostly by starvation, though Israeli Defence Forces are helping the process along by bombing or firing on people, in particular when they come looking for food. War on a people is pretty much a textbook definition of genocide.

It's never been really clear to me where to draw the line between a war crime and a crime against humanity. However, I can’t help feeling that it’s somewhere between Dresden and Gaza. That, though, isn’t anything Huckabee’s ever going to admit.

And if he’s right, without meaning to be, to categorise Gaza and Dresden as similar events, he’s wrong to draw a veil over the difference in scale and in genocidal intent between them. What he got right, as I suggested before, he got right by accident. What he’s getting wrong, I suspect, he’s getting wrong on purpose.

The hallmark of the Trump regime.

Graduation granddaughter

It’s never too early to be thinking of a potential marriage. I mean, Catherine of Aragon was engaged to be married at the age of three. I know that ultimately didn’t work out too well but, hey, emulating her precocity doesn’t necessarily mean following destiny.

Our grandson Elliott is four and the subject of his marriage came up during a visit by Danielle (my wife, his grandmother) to his house late in May. 

The question was whether he should marry his closest, oldest friend Cora.

He thought about this for a moment before reaching a decision. 

‘No,’ he announced, ‘she’s much too bossy. She’s just a friend.’

So who would he marry?

He thought for a while again. ‘Maybe Lola. She isn’t bossy at all.’

But a while later, having had the chance to reflect on things, he thought better of that too. Lola, too, it seems is just a friend.

Matilda, in the meantime, had announced that she didn’t want to get married at all, or have kids. 

‘Then you can babysit mine,’ Eliott told her, ‘because you’ll be their aunty.’

Matilda’s developing her own fine way with words. On the occasion when Elliott fell asleep on the floor only to wake up crying, Matilda had her judgement ready.

‘Oh,’ she declared, ‘somebody got up from the side of the carpet today.’

Later, Danielle and I travelled back to the grandkids’ place, this time together, for a flying visit to attend a major event, a rite-of-passage marker. It was scheduled for 6 June 2025, which for some people might seem significant as the eightieth anniversary of the D-day landings in Northern France. Matilda had a different view. 

She showed me the pile of clothes she’d prepared days before and topped with a handwritten note. ‘6’ it proclaimed, for the date, followed by the word ‘Graduación’. In Spanish, of course, since we were talking about a notable event in the life of a Spanish school.

Now I’ll confess that in my naïve way, it seemed to me that graduation was something that turned you into a graduate. In other words, something that closed a period of undergraduate study at university (from undergraduate to graduate – all seems logical enough, doesn’t it?). I’d previously only been to one graduation event. A friend of mine had asked me to attend hers, when she received her University of London degree, a year before I did. 

As I’ve grown older (it’s true that at the time I was only 25, but that was still as old as I’d ever been up to then), I’ve become increasingly intolerant of boredom. And those three hours in the Albert Hall in London, while I watched Elizabeth the Queen Mother handing out degree certificates to a long line of new graduates, were so utterly monotonous that I didn’t attend my own ceremony the following year.

The Americans don’t in any case wait to become graduates to have a graduation. They graduate at the end of High School. In other words, those who are going on to university, have to graduate to become undergraduates. Well, each to their own I suppose, but I can’t help feeling that a nation whose citizens keep telling me how much more logical their approach to things is than mine (you know, why do we put a ‘u’ in ‘colour’, or how can we play a game like cricket that can last five days and still end in a draw), I find that one a little odd. 

Well, the Spanish have gone further. Far further. They graduate, as Matilda did on 6 June, from Infant School on their way to Primary School. They graduate twelve years before there’s any chance of becoming an undergraduate. 

Still, at least there was nothing in the least bit Queen-Mother-ish, or Albert Hall-ish, about the ceremony. It was all song and dance and celebration. And Matilda, I think I can say in all objectivity and not simply because she’s my granddaughter, danced with more verve, commitment and panache than any of the others. 

They must have worked for hours over many weeks to prepare all the songs. And it all went off without a hitch. The music played the right songs at the right time. The graduating kids sang and danced as rehearsed throughout. And they came up in groups to address the audience at the right moment, saying the right things without a flaw. Matilda made her announcement in English, adding a fine flavour of multiculturalism to an otherwise entirely Spanish hour: ‘thank you for coming,’ she told us all, ‘this is a very special day’.

If I can be allowed a small – perhaps nit-picking – objection, it would be that although it was great idea to put all the kids into identical black tee-shirts, it seems a pity that they were marked ‘we’ve reached the goal’. Personally, I’d like to think that such a bright bunch might well pursue rather higher goals than simply making it into primary education. On the other hand, I don’t want to allow my cynicism to cloud in any way an event that was charmingly marked by joy and enthusiasm.

Matilda, her teacher Alicia, and her certificate

They all got certificates at the end, as is only appropriate, and all received – and in most cases gave – a hug to their teacher.

A quick word for Elliott, too. He was there to support his sister and gave that support unstintingly. What’s more, his behaviour was exemplary, much to his credit.

The same can’t be said about what happened later that day, when the father of another child approached Elliott and me with his son.

‘You hit my son with a stick,’ he accused Elliott.

‘He lied to me,’ Elliott countered.

‘That’s not a good reason to hit him with a stick. You have to apologise.’

Well, Elliott had the grace to apologise and I insisted the two boys shake hands at the end of the process, which was terribly English, I suppose. The other dad insisted that they fist-bump too, which gave it a bit more of an American flavour.

I found the whole event slightly risible. Elliott had actually given me a ‘stick’ to hold for him (there were plenty of sticks around so I have to admit I just threw it in the bushes). I think it was the weapon in question and, to be honest, it barely deserved the term stick. It was more of a large twig with a few side twigs. I don’t quite see how anyone could hurt anyone else with it, especially not with the strength of a four-year-old, even a strong four-year-old. Well, perhaps if they forced the victim to swallow the damn thing, but there’s no suggestion that this is what happened. 

But in any case, I do have a bit of a moral issue with this. Physical violence is, of course, a terrible scourge in the world today. But then so is lying – look at how fake news is undermining our democracies.

With hindsight, I wonder whether the apology was given by the right party in this minor altercation. Which is more serious, a minor blow or a lie? Perhaps it’s the supposed victim who should have apologised to Elliott for his mendacity. Or, at any rate, should they perhaps have apologised to each other?

Still, I don’t want to end this account on a moral quandary. This supposed aggression had occurred at a time when a bunch of kids were spending an afternoon playing together. One was Cora who, you’ll remember, is a little too bossy for Elliott’s taste in a wife. There’s clearly a bond there, however. When we first turned up to drop Matilda off with the group, Elliott was fast asleep in his mum’s arms. When she walked off with him, Cora was distraught, weeping and shouting out her disappointment and anger. 

Fortunately, Elliott’s naps don’t tend to be long, and he didn’t get out of bed the wrong side on this occasion. Cora was soon consoled, no longer distraught (does that make her traught?) and delighted to get the chance to play with him. Indeed, it wasn’t long afterwards that another grandparent approached me to communicate an important moment she’d just witnessed.

‘Elliott has just asked Cora to come with him to Valencia,’ she told me with some delight, ‘and Cora said yes.’

Valencia is, of course, where we live and where the grandkids regularly come to visit us. Not usually with potential life partners, however. 

I’m not quite sure what I should say. Should I encourage this kind of intimacy? Is it OK for a four-year-old boy to have his girlfriend – or at any rate girl friend – holidaying with us such a long way from home? Would it have been better if he’d decided that he did want to marry her and therefore made clear his honourable intentions towards her?

Or would that have made it worse?

A life worth celebrating

It must have been a pretty formative experience for an eleven-year-old:

I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment ... frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings... So with this vision I ran and ran and ran

The running took the writer of these words to Paris. There, according to a French scholar, Pap Ndiaye, she made an unexpected discovery:

When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time…at the absence of institutional racism. There was no segregation … no lynching. (There was) the possibility to sit at a cafe and be served by a white waiter, the possibility to talk to white people, to (have a) romance with white people

Much later in her life, she took part in the 1963 March on Washington and spoke from the same platform that Martin Luther King used to make his ‘I have a dream’ speech. Among other things she told the quarter-million strong crowd:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

So there you have it – her name. Josephine. Josephine Baker, in fact, as she’s best known, from the surname of one of her husbands, though originally she was Josephine McDonald.

She was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1906. A singer and dancer, she got into the chorus line at a couple of New York shows before travelling to Paris in 1925 and getting a real break. She starred first in the ‘Revue Nègre’, the Black Review. The very title reveals that France was hardly free of racism. Baker danced near-naked there and in other reviews, including the Folies Bergères night club, playing to, but also poking fun at, stereotypical white views of black women. Still, at least the racism, as Ndiaye makes clear, didn’t expose her to violence or deny her service in restaurants and hotels.

Josephine Baker, 1930
She really did have a pet cheetah

In any case, those performances turned her into an international superstar and the first black woman to land a starring role in French films. ‘I became famous first in France in the twenties,’ she would say, and the country that made her feel safe and allowed her to shine became her home of choice. Her best-known song, ‘J’ai deux amours’, ‘I have two loves’, was dedicated to her love of her country and of Paris. She took out French nationality, renouncing her US citizenship to do so.

Nor was her relationship to her adopted country a one-way arrangement. During World War Two, she served France just as she’d benefited from it: she worked as a spy, passing information about troop movements and military preparations that she was able to gain thanks to her freedom to move, as an international celebrity, in some elite circles. When northern France was occupied, she moved to the southern, unoccupied area, living in a chateau where she stored weapons for the French resistance, provided shelter for its fighters and for Jews escaping persecution, and continued to collect and pass on any intelligence she could.

When that part of France fell too, she moved to North Africa, where she provided entertainment to troops at concerts to which she offered free entrance.

Her wartime service won her the Resistance Medal awarded by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre from the French military and the Légion d’Honneur, France’s top honour, awarded to her by Charles de Gaulle.

Baker in French Air Force Uniform, 1948

She also adopted twelve children from around the world, bringing them up in different religions, to prove that kids could live together harmoniously despite ethnic and religious differences.

She never gave up fighting for the rights of black people back in the United States, as her presence at the March on Washington shows. But she could never live there again, infuriated as she told the crowd that day at the contemptuous behaviour to which the colour of her skin exposed her. She fell on hard times at the end of her life, but was taken in by her friend Grace Kelly, the film star turned Princess Consort of Monaco.

She died in 1975 and was buried in Monaco. In 2021, she became only the sixth woman to be honoured by a tomb in the Panthéon in Paris, reserved for the greatest figures France produces. Her grave remains in Monaco, but a casket containing earth from places where she’d lived, including St Louis, Paris, the south of France and Monaco, was brought with full honours to the Panthéon, and a plaque set up to her.

Why am I writing all this today?

Because she was born on 3 June. So today I’ll raise a glass to what would have been her 119th birthday. And I thought I’d share that moment with you.

The thrills of Easter grandparenting

Ah, Easter, Easter. The great feast of the Christian year. When the followers of Christ eat chocolate to celebrate his sacrifice to redeem mankind from original sin.

As it happens, this year wasn’t just about chocolate. It seems that rocket ships are part of the Easter festivities too. As apparently are games played with Velcro rackets and Velcro balls that stick to them. At least, judging by what the grandkids found when they went looking in the woods for the gifts left for them there by the Easter Bunny (a curious figure for which, in my admittedly rather cursory reading of the New Testament, I’ve not found any scriptural basis).

Even the date on which said hunt in the woods took place was (how shall I put this?) a little unorthodox. I mean, there was a time when the dating of Easter was the kind of question over which accusations of heresy might fly, in circumstances when such accusations could prove seriously career limiting. Terminally career limiting. 

It seems this isn’t a problem in our times when entertaining grandkids of five (Matilda) and three (Elliott, though he was all but four). Church authorities all agree that, however controversial the actual date might be, Easter would always fall on a Sunday. In 2025, however, that was the day their parents would be taking Matilda and Elliott home. So instead we celebrated Easter Wednesday for which, to say the very least, there is no liturgical authority.

The kids had been with us for some days. We’d been to the woods several times, walking the dogs or just playing hide-and-seek. That’s a game they love, though I have to confess I’m still not convinced that Elliott has fully grasped the notion of ‘hiding’.

Matilda counting for hide-and-seek

Elliott still needs to do some work
on the notion of being ‘hidden’

While in the woods, whenever we reached the place where the Easter Bunny had done its work in previous years, Matilda would explain to me that ‘this is where we’ll be looking for the Easter Eggs’. Indeed, on the Tuesday she even explained to me that it was where we’d be looking for the eggs ‘tomorrow’.

Old traditionalist that I am, I patiently and, I hope, compassionately, explained, ‘no, it can’t be tomorrow. Don’t you mean Sunday?’

‘No, it’s tomorrow. Mummy and Mamama said so.’

Well, I wasn’t going to argue with a decision backed up with the authority of a mother and a Mamama (the usual name for grandmothers in Danielle’s native Alsace) and, indeed, it turned out that Matilda was right. The very next day, the annual mystery repeated itself. Mummy and Mamama disappeared into the woods and, coincidentally, it was during that brief disappearance that the Bunny did its work. They must have been keeping that busy rabbit under close observation because they phoned to tell me its work was done the very moment it was.

Out we went, the eager search party, ready to find treasure. And boy were expectations fulfilled. There was lots of chocolate, most of it apparently Swiss, another one of those curious coincidences because Danielle (Mamama) had been to Switzerland only the previous week. 

Matilda, Elliott and Mamama hunting for Easter eggs
Elliott’s holding the Easter rocket toy

It was there that we also found the rocket toy I mentioned before (in the photo, Elliott’s holding it upside down, a stance with which I imagine Elon Musk would seriously disagree). Not far away was the Velcro racket and ball set. 

The Hello Easter book

Also in the vicinity was an Easter book, with the proud title ‘Hello Easter’ in English, a thoughtful gesture by the Easter bunny, given that the hunt was taking place in Spain. As it happens, Elliott and Matilda are equally at home in Spanish, but we like to think of our family – their family – as being primarily English-speaking, so it was good of the bunny to provide the book in that language.

Max ‘helping’ with the Easter egg hunt

I was also pleased to see that Max, our Podenco dog, got into the mood of things, wandering around with the kids on their search. Although I can’t swear that this actually provided what you could strictly call help, at least in terms of finding eggs or toys, it was a great way of confirming the continued improvement of relations between him and the grandkids. You may remember that when he first joined us, his apparent disquiet with them, sometimes leading to rather sinister growling, had made us wonder whether we could keep him at all. It’s wonderful to see how well they’re all getting on now: Matilda and Elliott have taken to giving Max treats (just for the record, let me quickly add that they give them to Luci and Toffee, the toy poodles, too). They even like to keep Max supplied with food or water, a task they undertake with great dedication. That, you can imagine, is a sure way of winning a dog’s deep attachment.

Matilda providing Max with water

Elliott too has made a friend of Max

Just to wrap up their stay with us, we even took the kids to the beach the day before they left. It was April and a little cold for swimming. Elliott, however, was happy to wander into the water at least up to his knees, as long as he could keep a firm hold of Granddad’s hand. He also returned to his earlier pastime of trying to transfer sand from the beach to the sea as though, like Lewis Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter, he was inclined to weep ‘to see such quantities of sand’, and felt like them that ‘if this were only swept away, it would be grand’. 

Elliott happy to take to the water
as long as he had hold of a hand

Elliott transferring the beach to the sea

Matilda transferring water to the beach

What’s more, there was a good stiff breeze, and that provided plenty of fun, since we’d brought kites for both grandkids.

Let's go fly a kite: Matilda leads the way

All in all, I’d say, the day went well and provided a fitting conclusion to a highly successful visit.

Sheena (‘Mummy’) has also been
adopted by the dogs (Luci here)