When Valencia met Strasbourg

It was a great success, our trip to Strasbourg. Despite the logistical challenges of putting together a trip involving sixteen people. And despite the best efforts of French Air Traffic Controllers, ably assisted by Ryanair, to make those challenges insuperable.

It all started way back in February. Two friends from our time living in Strasbourg, capital of the Eastern French region of Alsace, came to visit us in our present home in Valencia. Danielle took them to a session of her dragon boat club. Dragon boats, as I’ve mentioned before, are a Chinese invention and the paddling action required to drive them through the water is particularly beneficial for people who have had surgery for breast cancer. Not all the club members are Breast Cancer Survivors, though many are. 

Having met the Valencian dragon boaters, one of our Strasbourg visitors announced, “why don’t you all come to see us in Strasbourg?” The suggestion was greeted with a level of enthusiasm which more than astonished us. Within days, sixteen had signed up for the trip.

Dragon Boaters with a Strasbourg Dragon

The feeling was that it would be good to show them as much of Strasbourg and the region around it as possible, during the week they would be there. There were visits around the city itself, including the opportunity to try various Alsatian delicacies (in particular, tarte flambée – the Alsatian answer to pizza – and choucroute, the superior French version of what the Germans call sauerkraut). There was even a guided tour of the wine cellar in the hospital. Yes, the huge and prestigious teaching hospital in Strasbourg has its own wine cellar, and the wines are superb. One of them, perhaps one that wouldn’t be deemed superb if anyone ever tasted it, is the world’s oldest white wine still in a barrel, where it’s been since 1472. 

The guide to the hospital cellar (left)
with his interpreter into something like Spanish (that would be me)

There were also visits to nearby Germany, including a swim in the famous baths of Baden-Baden, followed by a typical meal (everything ended with a meal: it was a blessing to have no access to bathroom scales while we were there) – up in the Black Forest, and on another day, back in another part of the Black Forest, to the picturesque town of Gengenbach.

Walking in the Black Forest

In addition, we visited a couple of towns in Alsace itself. Colmar provided us with a boat ride along canals between medieval houses, but Sélestat offered far more still.

Valencians enjoying a boat trip around Colmar

No dragon boat club in Alsace answered requests for an exchange. Not so, however, the ‘Pink Ladies’ of Sélestat. With them, the reaction to the Valencian visit was as enthusiastic as the Valencians’ reception of the suggestion of travelling to Strasbourg. They offered coffee, tea and cakes to greet the visitors’ arrival. They provided a canoe trip down the local river (the pinkness of the ladies is also about breast cancer, but dragon boating doesn’t really work on a fast-flowing river, so they canoe instead). 

Canoeing down the River Ill

Since by happy coincidence we’d planned the trip for the same weekend as France was having a Heritage Day, at the end of the canoe trip they laid on a visit to the monastery church of Ebersmunster, which we’d seen many times from outside when we lived in the area, but never previously visited. Sport and culture combined with a fine meal afterwards: it’s a combination to die for.

Valencian visitors listening to an organist
in the monastery at Ebersmunster

In addition, back in Strasbourg, there was an outing with the rowing club to which we’d belonged (on the same river, as it happens, as in Sélestat, just a lot further downstream), so the group got plenty of opportunity to enjoy different types of water sport.

Dragon boaters out rowing in Strasbourg

Still, it wasn't all plain sailing (or even rowing). As I said before, the expedition did face some logistical problems. They came to beset it right at the start of the trip. 

On the eve of the Valencians’ departure to join us, everything was set up and ready to roll. That’s when the Air Traffic Controllers decided to take a hand in proceedings. 

At 11:30 at night, with take-off due at a depressingly early hour the following morning, Ryanair announced that the French controllers’ strike meant they’d be cancelling the flight. We were already in bed when we received the anguished message, with the question, “is there anywhere else we can fly to?”

The answer to that question was, fortunately, ‘yes’. The joint French and Swiss airport of Basel is almost as convenient a point from which to get to Strasbourg as the airport (near Baden-Baden) to which Ryanair flies. My admiration is boundless for the determination of the Valencian travellers, fully equal to their enthusiasm, which allowed them to rebook sixteen seats, at remarkable speed, on the Easyjet flight to Basel. That meant waking people up to get their passport details, but it was all done within less than an hour.

Of course, things weren’t entirely solved even then. Two minibuses were due to collect the visitors from Baden-Baden; now they had to go to an airport nearly twice as far away, and at a completely different time of day. Indeed, we couldn’t even say at what time, since the Valencians spent three hours in the plane stuck on the tarmac, presumably while Easyjet tried to negotiate itself a flight path avoiding French Air Traffic Control (eventually, the passeners got a wonderful view of the North Italian lakes, as they went a long way around). At one point, our friends sent a photo of steps being brought to the plane, suggesting that this flight too might be cancelled, but it turned out it was only so the doors could be opened to let in air.

Negotiations with the minibus company proved tricky. Not quite at the level of Northern-Ireland protocol of the Brexit Agreement, but not far off.

In the end, though, it all worked out. Choucroute was eaten. The canoe trip and visit to the Church went well. The evening was outstanding, with tarte flambée providing diners a lot of pleasure and the Valencians teaching the Pink Ladies how to dance flamenco. The visits to Colmar and to the Black Forest were highly enjoyable. And getting out on the water with the Rowing Club of Strasbourg was an experience described by the participants as encantadora.

Lots of new friends were made, across borders, which always strikes me as hugely positive. That, of course, was inevitable given that the welcome offered to the Valencians was so warm-hearted. And the Valencians, not the kind of people to pass quietly and unnoticed along a street or in a restaurant dining room, responded boisterously, with laughter and fun. Who could want more?

Launching plastic ducklings

Yet there was more. The Pink Ladies had a fundraising exercise, involving the launching on to the river of 7300 little plastic ducks, each of which could be bought, like a raffle ticket, to win a prize. Two of our ducks came home for welcome prizes, as a fine bonus to a great visit.

It was a tiring week, but it will leave us unforgettable memories. To be added to, no doubt, when the Pink Ladies come back to visit us in Valencia. For dragon boating and paella, beach walks and lentils, flamenco and rich red wine.

Something for us all to look forward to.

Saying goodbye to each other

Fortune favours the bold. But the reckless?

Fortune favours the bold, they say. Which sounds terribly exciting. Daring, even.

Here’s the problem. It’s sometimes difficult to tell the point at which boldness turns into recklessness. The man English historians tended to refer to as ‘Charles the Bold’ is called something more like ‘Charles the Reckless’ in French. He had decided to conquer territory between his lands in Burgundy and his other holdings in the Low Countries – present day Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. A bold stroke to give his possessions territorial integrity. Brilliant if he could pull it off.

It turns out he couldn’t. He was killed fighting tremendous odds – all very glorious, all entirely useless – at a battle which brought a sudden, shuddering end to the ambitions of the House of Burgundy. Ultimately, his unfortunate subjects found themselves transferred to the less than gentle hands of the Spanish crown.

Bold or reckless? I leave it to you to judge.

Kwasi Kwarteng, Chancellor of the Exchequer
and his boss and leader, Liz Truss

Britain has these days seen a fine example of boldness in its own politics. The country today is massively indebted, facing soaring inflation and with an economy in recession. In response, Kwasi Kwarteng, Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) in the new government led by Liz Truss, a woman setting new records in deafness to advice, has decided that the right thing to do was to provide tax reductions to the richest in the country and to corporations, as well as (something much more welcome) help with energy bills for everyone, but with no funding for any of these things (far less welcome).

This is all being done in the hope that it will stimulate growth and get Britain out of the hole it’s in.

It’s bold. It’s a gamble. Fortune may help and, as with most gambles, help’s needed.

Here’s another saying, that an Irish friend introduced me to. In his view, the problem of relations between England and Ireland were caused by Irish memories being too long, and English memories too short. 

If supporters rally to the Conservative Party now, it will certainly show how short English memories truly are. Back in 1963, another Conservative Chancellor, Reginald Maudling, tried this same trick, cutting taxes as a way to create ‘expansion without inflation’, as he claimed. It failed. Fortunately, Labour won the 1964 general election and consigned the Tories to Opposition where they could do less damage.

Then in 1972, another Tory Chancellor,, Anthony Barber, tried again, in what he called a ‘dash for growth’. A year later, Britain was forced to adopt a three-day working week, and the following year, Labour returned to office.

Will Fortune favour this latest example of Tory financial boldness? Again, I leave it to you to decide what’s most likely. And then we can watch how things go over the coming months.

Meanwhile, there’s another side of English shortness of memory that needs to be addressed. The Conservatives have been in power for twelve years. Many may have forgotten, but I remember as though it were yesterday the way they attacked the then Labour government for the extent of public borrowing. That debt, they kept telling us, was unacceptable as it would be dumped as a huge burden on the shoulders of future generations to pay.

They also claimed that the NHS was safe in their hands.

Back then, the Tories were screaming about how desperate it was that national debt was becoming unacceptable. And how bad was it? Why, it was approaching 70%.

And how have the Tories done in the intervening twelve years? It’s an interesting picture. The government committed to bringing debt down has, in reality, increased it, so that by 2021/2022 it had reached nearly 95%. The latest moves, splashing out on tax breaks and energy subsidies, can only increase the debt still further.

It seems that the Tories have been more spendthrift than Labour. And what have they achieved with all that money? Let’s take one example. Labour left the NHS in the best state it had enjoyed in its entire history, with better resourcing and lower waiting times than ever. And how is it now? Why, on the point of collapse.

That’s the NHS. Education is suffering. The police are under-staffed. The court system is falling apart. Care is facing disaster. And those who lose their jobs in the recession will find how much the benefit system has been hit.

The majority – the vast majority – of Brits who depend on public services are seeing no benefit from all these changes. All that spending has done nothing for them. It has helped the kind of people who contribute to the election of Conservative politicians, though I’m not sure how much consolation this will provide for the others, the kind who may find themselves waiting for an ambulance that never comes.

My advice? Time for us English to improve our memories and demand that the Conservatives live up to the promises they made, as we should remember, back in 2010. And, above all, to remember that while fortune may well favour the bold, nothing assists the reckless.

As happened with Charles of Burgundy, it’s always everyone else who pays.

When Memory Lane gets closed for alterations

The feature that most struck me about the railway station in the city of Basel, northwest Switzerland, when I first went there, was its restaurant. Or perhaps, for a place that grand, I should say dining hall. A wonderful place, with wooden panelling, a high ceiling, and massive paintings of Swiss scenes on the walls. 

One of those places where you might go – and I did, on more than one occasion – just for the pleasure of eating there, even though you weren’t actually travelling to somewhere else. Even back in the early eighties when I first discovered the place, it had a sense of nostalgia to it, one of the last of the grand dining rooms out of all those that once adorned the great railway stations of Europe and America.

I’ve written about it before. I told the story of my mother’s discovery of the place. It came soon after the Second World War, when she was able to leave England for the first time as an adult, and indeed for the first time since she’d been a small child, after the nearly six years when Britain was isolated by the fighting. 

Arriving there from a night train early one morning, she went to the dining hall and ordered breakfast. For someone from Britain, still suffering from food rationing, what she was served was extraordinary. An entire basket of bread. Heaps of butter. Milk with cream floating on top of it. 

It was a great way to mark the start of a holiday from suffering Britain. And, when I last wrote about it, I pointed out that it was still just as it had been seventy years earlier when my mother visited it. That, though, was then. In February 2017. Not when we popped in this week, on our way to our old home and to our many friends in Strasbourg, in Eastern France.

A major part of moving to a new country is learning a different set of customs. One of the things the Spanish authorities, or at any rate the authorities in Madrid, do in a way I can only describe as idiosyncratic, is closing roads. You may be driving along a Madrid street in a relaxed way, turn a corner and find a couple of crash barriers drawn across the road, with the word ‘cortado’ (cut or closed) on them. Maybe there’s some work to be done on the street. Maybe there’s just something or more likely someone more important that requires it. Usually there’s a cop or two standing by and, as a naïve Englishman already surprised by the lack of diversion signs before I got to the closure, I might ask one how I’m supposed to get to where I’m going.

“By a different route,” he’s likely to tell me.

If I press the matter, he might add.

“You’ll have to go around.”

That’s bad enough when you’re talking about a physical road on a physical journey. It’s so much sadder when the closed road is Memory Lane.

Glory and grandeur gone

The dining hall in Basel station is no more. The great Swiss supermarket chain Migros has taken it over. Now it’s a central stand selling the traditional Basel open sandwiches surrounded by benches and functional tables around the outside. Not a shade on the genteel and relaxed atmosphere of an old-style railway dining hall with its uniformed waiters and glistening cutlery, now replaced by harassed counter staff who didn’t even know what the place had once been, and by little plastic forks and knives in cellophane wrapping.

All that’s left of the old grandeur is the paintings on the walls.

Pomp and Pleasure of the Past

The open sandwiches are wonderful, but that doesn’t even begin to make up for the loss of the grandeur of the past. Memory Lane closed for alterations. And those alterations were to its very soul.

Fortunately, I was able to indulge in a far more satisfactory visit to Memory Lane when we arrived at the station in Strasbourg. Apart from its being the evening rather than the early morning, the atmosphere was identical to a memorable previous occasion I’ve described before. The same high cupola of glass. The same dusty platform. The same sunlight flooding the place.

Memento of a memorable moment

It was early in the century. My son Michael was on his way to a military base to fulfil his duty on behalf of the great nation to which Strasbourg now belongs, France, despite all the efforts, in earlier and worse times, of its neighbour, Germany.

Danielle and I had made sure our second and third sons had British nationality. This was so that they wouldn’t have to do French military service. By the late nineties, it lasted ten months and was a waste of time when it wasn’t positively dangerous (even without a war, there are always casualties, most of them avoidable, in organisations as chaotic as armies).

With British nationality safely acquired, we could arrange for them to have French nationality too, without exposing them to the risk of being called up in France. 

I’d taken out French nationality as well, as anti-Brexit insurance, which I’m glad to have, now that I live in Spain. I, however, was well past military age. Our sons, on the other hand, needed the protection that British nationality provided.

“If called, I’ll do my military service in Britain,” they could have said, as their elder brother had. That seemed to satisfy the French authorities, even though they knew there was no peacetime conscription in Britain.

Michael was going though, all the same. Mostly because a lot of things became easier in France once you’d done your service. Mainly, though, it was because the ten months for which military service had lasted in the nineties had been reduced after 1998 to just a single day of training in 'defence and citizenship’. Still a waste of time, but at least it wasn’t a lot of time.

As we stood on that platform in Strasbourg station, waiting for Michael’s train to come in, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of tradition, of an age-old custom between fathers and sons. I turned to him and shook his hand.

“Son,” I said, “remember that what you are doing today you are doing for France. Do nothing that will bring dishonour to our beautiful colours.” 

He shook my hand back.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” he assured me, “I’m sure it’ll all be over by Christmas.”

It was too. He was home that evening.

Lovely to be able to pop up Memory Lane, mercifully still open in Strasbourg station, and relive that moment.

Caroline, victim of oppression, champion of rights.

Caroline Sheridan was both a society beauty, and a young woman of fine breeding, at a time when breeding mattered even more than today, and looks just as much.

Caroline Norton, née Sheridan, in 1832

She was one of three sisters nicknamed “the three graces”. In 1827, when she was eighteen, her particular grace was snapped up by a barrister and Tory MP, George Norton. Unfortunately, he was no use, as well as being a drunkard and violent. If you’re thinking, “wow! Just like a few MPs I could think of today,” well, you’re entitled to your thoughts. 

At least he didn’t hold his parliamentary seat long.

She used her connections to get him a job, but his performance was lousy and his behaviour reprehensible.

Eventually, his drunken abuse led to the breakdown of their marriage. He decided to sue for divorce. What’s more, he saw an opportunity to make some money. He could petition for divorce on the grounds of adultery. He started casting around for a good person to accuse of being his wife’s partner in adultery.

Now Caroline had many male friends. I don’t know whether that word ‘friends’ ought to have inverted commas around it or not. One of those friends, certainly of the inverted-commas type, was William Lamb, Second Viscount Melbourne. The historian Boyd Hilton says, “It is irrefutable that his personal life was problematic. Spanking sessions with aristocratic ladies were harmless, not so the whippings administered to orphan girls taken into his household as objects of charity...”

Well, at least Caroline Norton was no orphan, and probably aristocratic enough to avoid the whip. But was her friendship with such a man entirely innocent? It’s hard to say these days. Melbourne’s biographer David Cecil says it was, but Cecil seems blinded by hero worship of his subject. So, who knows?

Norton thought he knew, anyway. He sued Melbourne for ‘criminal conversation’, the legal expression for what was then the offence of adultery. Clearly, he hoped he’d make a packet out of the suit since Melbourne would want to avoid the embarrassment of the case coming to court. You see, the Viscount wasn’t just any old aristocrat, he was the Prime Minister of the day.

Sadly for Norton, Melbourne decided to stick things out. He did offer to resign, but the king – also quite a womaniser – told him not to. Even the Duke of Wellington – yes, the same one, of Battle of Waterloo fame – who was by then a leading Conservative politician, told him he saw no reason for the government to resign, and he certainly wouldn’t join a successor government, if this one fell due to the scandal. Then again, Wellington also enjoyed quite a reputation for his sexual conquests. He was particularly proud of having had affairs with not just one but two women (though not at the same time) who’d previously been lovers of Napoleon’s.

When the case came to court, on 23 June 1836, Norton came massively unstuck. The jury cleared Melbourne without so much as leaving the jury box. George Norton failed to get any money, and he’d even lost his petition for divorce.

And that’s what makes it so appalling that Caroline benefited not one jot. He’d taken her kids, but she couldn’t do anything about it. Her husband’s suit for divorce had failed, but she had no right to petition for one herself, so she remained stuck with him as her husband, even though they were living apart. 

Indeed, she couldn’t even sue him, because a married woman’s identity was subsumed by a legal fiction into her husband’s. Suing him would be tantamount to him suing himself.

She was still writing and earning money by it, but another weird provision of the law meant that all her earnings, as a married woman, belonged to him, and he enforced his rights. She was left dependent on any funds that he could bring himself to share with her. I’m glad to say that while she and Melbourne couldn’t renew their former intimacy, he did help her financially.

She also came up with a smart way of avenging herself of George. She ran up debts and had the collectors demand settlement from her husband. If he could take her earnings, well, he could damn well pay her debts.

When her husband learned that Melbourne had left her an annuity in his will, he simply stopped paying her a sum they’d finally agreed on and guaranteed in a contract he’d signed. She did try to sue him on this occasion, to make him honour his commitment, but lost the case on a technicality. His signature, as she pointed out, was clearly no bond.

The kind of abuse she had to put up with might have crushed many people. But Caroline had steely courage. Far from being broken by his behaviour, she rose to it as a challenge, becoming a champion of women’s rights. Politics, then as now, were dominated by the wealthy and powerful, so making any headway towards reform was extremely difficult. What progress she could obtain, however, she certainly achieved. Small steps, but important ones.

George Norton’s suit against Melbourne was heard in 1836. But already by 1839, Caroline’s campaigning had succeeded in getting the Custody of Infants Act passed. It was a small reform, but symbolically crucial. It gave divorced women custody of children up to the age of seven and guaranteed them rights of access beyond. It would prove hard to enforce, particularly by women who couldn’t afford the legal expense. It would also do Caroline no good, since it didn’t apply in Scotland, which is where her husband had taken her kids.

What made the measure important was only the recognition that women too had rights that needed to be respected.

She was also instrumental in getting the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act passed. Again, it was far from satisfactory, which failed to change a great many discriminatory provisions against women, but it was another first step towards necessary reform, in this instance of the law on divorce, beginning to make it a little more equitable. 

Caroline Norton was a gutsy woman. She was appallingly treated in a society dominated by the desires of men. And she reacted by working hard to reverse some of the worst abuses that she knew so well from having suffered them herself.

That’s the kind of person we need as badly today as we did back then.

Grandparenting, grand training

It wasn’t just a granddad day, it was a grand training day. Or perhaps a granddad training day.

To be honest, it’s not entirely clear just who was being trained. The dogs, perhaps. The grandkids, more likely. The granddad, undoubtedly (and, for the avoidance of doubt, the granddad is me).

The moment Matilda saw me with the dogs’ leads, and the dogs, she remembered her favourite job from last visit, which was taking charge of Toffee’s lead. 

“Me, too,” she said. 

Matilda watching Luci, and
Elliott hitching a ride on grandfatherly shoulders

But it was late, and she had to go to bed. The next morning was a different story, though. Out we went into the woods. Grandparents, grandchildren, dogs.

Matilda’s an expert at walking Toffee these days

Matilda, naturally, wanted to take the role she’d made her own on the previous occasion. She took Toffee’s lead. Both seemed perfectly happy with the arrangement and the group progressed just fine.

But then Elliott spotted what was happening. Now the thing about Elliott is that at sixteen months, he’s twenty months younger than Matilda. At least, that’s what it looks like from the calendar. In his heart, a different reality reigns, and in that reality, they’re the same age.

That means that anything Matilda can do, Elliott can do just as well. I draw the line at saying ‘better’ because I see no sign of his harbouring that pretension. But ‘just as well’ seems to be very much his thinking.

That’s why he got himself walking at ten months, catching up physically as well as metaphorically with his big sister (“not that much bigger,” as I’m sure he’d tell me if he could). He’s working hard on language too, and I’m delighted to say that ‘granddad’ is one of his clearest, most finely articulated words. Given his efforts in those areas, how could he possibly allow himself to be left behind in something as simple and straightforward as dog walking?

Elliott let it be known that he was not satisfied with an arrangement that had Matilda walking a dog while he was confined to his Granddad’s shoulders. And when Elliott’s dissatisfied, he makes sure you don’t spend long in any doubt about it. Down off my shoulders he came. He had to have a lead to, with a dog at the end of it. With Toffee already spoken for, that had to be Luci.

Success as dog walkers

The problem is that, though both dogs are small (well, toy poodles, you know – what can you expect?), Luci is the bigger of the two. And, however, huge in spirit Elliott may be, he remains small in body. Even with the best of intentions, Luci can pull him over. And did from time to time.

Down but not out:
Elliott overthrown by Luci

That’s when Elliott got his chance to display his huge spirit to the full. Because he wasn’t going to let some tedious detail like having been pulled over conflict with the exciting new experience of walking a dog on a lead. He might need help getting up. He might even have to dry a few tears on the occasion when he scratched his cheek in a fall. But nothing was going to stop him achieving his aim of walking a dog just like his sister was.

Imagine the thrills. The emotions. It was an exciting time, watching a new learning experience play out before our eyes.

So exciting, in fact, that both kids decided they needed a rest and Granddad could carry them. Which was fine until he needed a rest too. That only became possible when we found a fallen tree trunk on which the children could sit.

A convenient means of transport
For two of the three people involved, at least

That’s not a trunk on the ground or anything dull like that. This one’s still more than a metre above the ground. So the kids didn’t so much sit on it as perch. Which was another learning experience, as Matilda, having reached her perch with the help of grandfatherly hands, then had a nervous chuckle before letting go of one of them, another such chuckle after letting go of the other, and then a huge guffaw of joy and triumph, as she realised she was sitting, unsupported, on a trunk more than her height off the ground.

A rest on a conveniently fallen tree trunk

“Look, no (supporting) hands!”
Matilda perching unaided on the fallen tree trunk

Everyone had fun. But above all, everyone learned a lot. And what more can you ask for of a training day?

Though, as far as training is concerned, I reckon that whatever anyone else was taught, I learned more than most.