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)

Starmer and the writing on the wall

The trouble with having your back to the wall is that you can’t read the writing on it.

I’m not sure whether the British Primer Minister Keir Starmer and the rest of the Labour Party leadership has its back to the wall or not. Either way, it certainly has trouble reading the writing. For anyone with the eyes to see it, the message was written unambiguously on 1 May, when the far-right Reform UK party won a sweeping victory in local elections and, more worrying still, captured the previously safe Labour parliamentary seat of Runcorn and Helsby in a by-election. Although it won by only six votes, that overturned a previous Labour majority of nearly 15,000.

Keir Starmer (left) and Nigel Farage
Composite photo: Daily Mirror

And what was the message? That the Reform UK leader and demagogue Nigel Farage, a man who demonstrated in the Brexit referendum his happiness to use lies to gain his political objectives, can no longer be casually ruled out as a contender for the position of British Prime Minister. A ghastly prospect that has just taken a big step towards realisation.

Curiously, we’ve recently seen two other elections, one in Canada and the other in Australia, where disgust over the views of the US equivalent of Farage, President Donald Trump, led to huge swings towards parties of the centre left and secured their victories. The Canadian Liberal Party was languishing so low in the polls that commentators were beginning to write its obituary, but the Trump effect saw it sweep back and win a fourth successive term in office. 

The Australian Labor Party was little better off and expected to lose power, but again with the assistance of the aversion Trump has excited, it surged back into office with an increased majority.

Actually, with a landslide victory.

And what did Australian Labor present as a vision for the future? Quoted in the Guardian, Jim Chalmers,  Treasurer (Finance Minister) in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government, summed up the difference between the party’s first term and the one just starting:

The best way to think about the difference between our first term and the second term that we won last night [is the] first term was primarily inflation without forgetting productivity, the second term will be primarily productivity without forgetting inflation

There was also talk about housing and student debt.

And what did British Labour put front and centre in its reaction to its rather different election results? Immigration. It was going to crack down on people in Britain on student visas who applied for political asylum.

Now, I don’t know how serious a problem those students represent. But I suspect that in the scale of issues Britain faces, it probably doesn’t make the top ten. Does it really matter more than the state of the health service? The problem of homelessness or unaffordable housing? The cuts to social security? High prices? Overcrowded prisons? I haven’t even mentioned the problems in defence and international trade that our betrayal by Farage’s friend Trump has created. And there are many more.

So why did the government focus on immigration? Well, whipping up anti-immigration feeling is central to the campaigning stance of Reform UK. Labour is obsessed with winning back voters who have deserted it for Farage’s party. It has somehow managed to convince itself that persuading those voters to come back to the fold would be best achieved by showing it can treat immigrants with at least the same brutal severity as Farage promises.

Setting aside the dubious morality of rounding in this way on an often vulnerable community and scapegoating it for all our ills, there are some massive practical objections to this thinking.

The first is that far from being an evil, we desperately need immigrants. The whole world is suffering from falling birth rates. One answer, much loved by the far right natalists especially in the US, is to increase the number of children being born (and, incidentally, this would also help advance another prized goal of the far right: rolling back what gains there have been for women by having them return to their supposedly ‘natural’ role of rearing children rather than pursuing careers). 

The trouble with trying to increase birth rates is that it only generates economic benefits twenty years later, when the children reach adulthood. If you want to start filling labour market gaps immediately, you need immigrants. Far from being a problem for the receiving nations, immigration creates difficulties for the nations they leave, which are being drained of their young and dynamic people. It solves population shortages for the nations to which they move.

When it comes to politics rather than economics, harping on about immigration is dangerous. Opposing migrants is the Faragists’ big issue. By talking about it so much, we in Labour ensure that public attention remains focused on the theme that most favours Farage’s party. Churchill once said that a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the conversation. Turning that notion around, it’s clear that to combat fanaticism, we have to change the conversation. How about talking about housing, healthcare, productivity or growth instead?

In any case, if we’re trying to win back people from Reform UK, why on earth are we trying to do it by suggesting we’re not much different from them? Why would anyone wanting to attack immigration vote for the lite version, the imitation – Labour – when they can vote for the fully caffeinated version, the original – Reform UK?

Perhaps we can focus, like Australian Labor, on the reforms that would actually change the lives of our lost voters for the better. Increased productivity to grow the economy, generate more jobs and improve incomes. More housing to tackle homelessness and make house prices accessible. Rescue the health service. Fix education. Give us proper defence not reliant on Donald Trump.

That approach seems to be working for the Australians. And what we’re doing isn’t working for us. If you doubt it, just take a look at the Runcorn by-election result.

Let’s learn to read the writing on the wall.

Blackout

There’s no better way to understand how dependent we are on electricity than to spend half a day without any. That’s what happened on Monday, when the whole of the Iberian Peninsula – Spain, where we live, and Portugal – and part of France suddenly lost power. For several hours.

Monday 28 April 2025: Blackout in Spain, Portugal and part of France

There’s an unverified anecdote – you know, one of those stories which may not be true but ought to be – about Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century scientist, being asked what use electricity was. The story has him replying ‘what use is a baby?’

Well, electricity may have had merely a baby’s potential back then, but today it has the strength of a powerful adult, the kind on whom we’ve all learned to depend. 

When we came to replace our kitchen stove, Danielle, my wife, insisted on a hybrid, with two induction rings and one gas. That means we can still cook even during a power cut – or we can as long as we have matches, because in normal times the gas lights with an electrically generated spark. 

Fortunately, we had matches.

What, of course, we didn’t have was any connection to the internet. I had been due to play bridge online with a friend but, without power, I could neither play nor let him know I couldn’t play: my only means of phoning people depends on a mobile network, and it was down.

That’s on top of the obvious issues of lack of light (remedied with candles), lack of refrigeration (fortunately mitigated by the relatively short duration of the blackout) and lack of TV or other forms of entertainment that we’re used to enjoying (compensated by reading). 

Fortunately, since we didn’t have to go anywhere or get to the upper floors of tall buildings, we didn’t suffer the difficulties of so many who were caught in trains or even trapped in lifts. Nor were we stuck in massive jams on the roads and streets, made worse by the lack of traffic lights. The most we suffered was a little irritation, although some people – I think the total number is still in single figures – died as a result of using faulty medical equipment or generators.

There were people who were shouting about a national emergency (most of them members of the political persuasion that also felt inclined to condemn our moderate social democratic government for it). I think Gaza, or South Sudan, or immigrant communities, in the US are suffering emergencies. We suffered some inconvenience. 

Well, a bit more than an inconvenience for the ones who died, I admit, but for most of us, it wasn’t that bad.

I do have to confess that my first instinct was to think the problem must be the result of an attack. After all, it was daytime, warm enough to require little heating, not hot enough to require air conditioning, but all the same the entire nation’s power grid was knocked out. Surely that was sabotage. And, of course, I had a chief suspect: Vladimir Putin. That, inevitably, also led me to criticise his pal, the man responsible for so much going wrong in the world today, that fine Mr Trump.

As it happens, with Trump’s second first hundred days just coming up, it felt that plunging a few million people into darkness and confusion was in many ways a perfectly appropriate symbol of our times.

It turns out that the cause of the blackout probably wasn’t deliberate, but simply a technical malfunction. That means it’s fixable and the government is rightly insisting that the organisations responsible fix it. I hope that’s confirmed, because I find a fault a lot easier to come to terms with than an attack.

There are also a few things that we, as individuals, need to do. One of the funnier sights of the blackout was the people, ourselves included, who had to keep nipping out to their parked cars to listen to the radio, only working source of news. How many of us have any means of hearing the news these days that doesn’t depend on a connection to mains power? 

So I’m going to get a battery-operated radio. As well as battery-operated lights. Not perhaps at once, since there’s bound to be a spike in prices. But soon.

And, of course, I’m going to make sure we have plenty of matches.