Tackling the epidemic

My good friend Fabio is Milanese. As a native of the great city of Rome, I tend to think of Milan as South Austrian. You know, things happen on time, the streets are clean, and where there is bustle there is also a sense of purpose. None of these charges can be levelled against Rome.

Rome to me is the essence of Italy. Milan is northern Europe.

Still, I suppose technically Fabio is, nonetheless, Italian. And as a resident of the region of Lombardy, he was already subject to the coronavirus lockdown even before the Italian government extended it to the entire country. The “situation,” he wrote to me, “is surreal. Unimaginable.”

Top left: deserted arcade in Milan. Bottom left: Fallas crowd in Valencia
Right: two women fighting over toilet rolls in an Australian supermarket

Certainly, if Milan maintains its sense of purpose – as I’m sure it does – the bustle is gone. Places usually thonged by crowds of both locals and tourists are now deserted. The atmosphere must be eerie, to say the least.

Most recently, Fabio has gone still further, calling for the deployment of the army. Why? People have been breaking curfew rules, kids have been getting together out of doors to have drunken parties, the lockdown isn’t being respected.

I have to say that this doesn’t entirely surprise me, and it may strengthen the sense that the Milanese are, after all, truly Italians. One of my college lecturers was Catholic and she told me of a conversation she once had with an Italian bishop.

“Why,” she asked him, “does the Pope issue instructions that are so strict it’s almost impossible for English Catholics to follow them?”

“Ah,” he replied, “The Pope is Italian.”

This was the time before we started to get Popes from other parts of the world.

“The problem with England,” the bishop went on, “is that its culture is Puritan. This even affects the Catholic community. They try to follow Papal instructions to the letter. But the Pope’s Italian, and he knows Italians will ignore 90% of what he says. So he deliberately makes his decrees particularly strict. I can see how this makes for problems in England.”

As with spiritual instructions, so it seems with government ones: total compliance isn’t the first reaction of all Italians.

Still, it seems Fabio’s plea didn’t fall on deaf ears. He tells me the army is indeed being deployed. Maybe, with bad grace, and under the baleful stare of men with guns, more Italians will now begin to take the lockdown seriously.

Meanwhile, where we’re living, near Valencia in Spain, we’re in the runup to the great fiesta of the Fallas. Celebrations are already under way, with thousands of people thronging the streets. Rather like the marches for International Women’s Day at the weekend. It’s hard not to admire such a tenacious attachment to traditions, particularly to joyous ones. On the other hand, we’re now up to 1600 infections across the country, 10% of the total in Europe. That’s still far behind Italy, with over 9000, but we’re catching up…

Some are beginning to question just how responsible our devil-may-care attitude may be.

Interestingly, it was announced only today that the Fallas would, even at this late stage, be cancelled. Or at least postponed. I haven’t asked Fabio, but I suspect I know what his reaction would be… For my own part, I wasn’t going to be going to any of the major events.

It strikes me that we need to take the epidemic seriously. Which isn’t the same as panicking about it. The women fighting over toilet rolls in an Australian supermarket strikes me as at best an over-reaction. At worst, it’s a reversion to the worst instincts of man.

But claiming that nothing much is happening, as Donald Trump has? Or not cancelling major public events? Or simply not keeping contact between people to the minimum absolutely necessary? That doesn’t strike me as healthy either.

The Italian government’s action may, as Fabio says, create a surreal atmosphere. But I really can’t see how else you limit the spread of a virus.

The saddest aspect of all this? It’s the lack of an internationally coordinated response. In a time of nationalism, individual countries seem to have decided that they must simply do their own thing.

That’s a pity. Although I was encouraged to see a suggestion that the virus itself might provide a solution to the problem. Will Hutton, in the Observer, the sister paper of the British Guardian, argued that the infection might drive us to improve what globalisation means.

Meanwhile, Fabio, hang on in there! This won’t go on for ever. And, unimaginable though the short term results are, the actions of the Italian government may well turn out to be the most effective response to the problem.

I certainly hope so.

More on the life of Immigrants in Valencia: cleaning the woods, revelling with the ‘Chinese’

It has been quite a learning experience, since we became immigrants in Spain and moved to a house near woodland. 

I had no idea how much work it takes to keep it clean and tidy. We’d been out once before, with a bunch of volunteers, picking up litter. On Saturday, we were in the La Vallesa woods near where we live, shifting branches and small trees.

Tidying up the woods at La Vallesa

Professionals had been in before us, with their chainsaws, thinning and pruning. Now we were doing the grunt work of shifting the branches down to paths where they could easily be reached by trucks with equipment to turn them into chips, to be fed back into the ground. Which sounds like a good plan.

Taking some of the trees out lets the others grow more strongly, with less competition for the scarce resources in this not hugely fertile soil. Then, using the felled branches to provide further feed, strengthens them still further. Besides, and this is one of the main aims, the organisers reckon that thinning the woods reduces the danger of disastrous fires. These woods have had plenty of them, even if nothing on the scale of Australia, but then that’s just the fate we’re trying to avoid.

The relatively small fire at La Vallesa in 2014

As has been the case every time we’ve joined a group around here in Valencia, the people we met were immensely welcoming and friendly. One of the organisations, of the six behind the initiative (which naturally meant six, mercifully brief, speeches at the beginning, as each had to have its say), one was an association providing mental health support for young people. Some of their users were there, and it was a great pleasure to see how much they enjoyed being out with the group and doing work that was so useful.

Some were helping us, but others were with the group of children who'd come with their parents and who were planting other trees, oaks and chestnuts, in the hope of introducing a little more diversity in the woods. 

That was the start of the day. In the evening, we went to see the celebration of the Chinese New Year in Valencia city itself. There’s quite a large Chinese community in the region, including a small but growing Chinatown with some excellent restaurants and shops, and an area out by the airport where Chinese companies line up along the road with their warehouses.

The Chinese New Year parade
working its way through the Valencia Chinatown

Still, the parade was by no means exclusively Chinese. I wouldn’t even say that Chinese people were in the majority. But the celebrations involved letting off firecrackers and fireworks around a parade which included at least a dozen groups of drummers, hammering their drums with tremendous energy and enthusiasm. Nothing could possibly appeal to Valencians more. Their great festival each year involves wandering the streets and letting off firecrackers, in two varieties: one that sounds like machinegun fire, and the other like heavy artillery.

The streets in which they do that are decorated with large sculptures in highly inflammable material. So, if it’s inflammable, what do you reckon they do with it? Yep, that’s right. On the last night they set fire to them, while filling the sky with fireworks and the ground, naturally, with yet more crackers.

A sculpture burning at the Valencia ‘Fallas’

With that background, Valencians were bound to take to the Chinese New Year with unbounded enthusiasm. As we discovered when we stood in the crowd in the little Chinatown to watch the parade go by. “Let’s get ourselves some Chinese costumes,” they must have said, “join an appropriate association and go out to beat our drums.” And they did just that, with obvious and infectious joy.

Valencian drummers in Chinese costume, enjoying the parade

A fun way to spend a day, in the woods in the morning, at the parade in the evening.

Afterthought

There were a few, very few, face masks being worn by people in the crowd at the Chinatown parade. I’m not quite sure what they were trying to protect themselves against. Did they think that merely being at a Chinese New Year event would expose them to coronavirus?

At any rate, I’m glad to say that, to my knowledge, there wasn’t a single case of infection from Wuhan at the celebrations in Valencia.

Anglos of the World Unite!

Donald Trump approaches the end of his first hundred days with no achievements to boast for them. He tried to undo Obamacare and failed (fortunately). There’s no sign of the improvement in employment or earnings he promised for the poor. He has, however, managed to indulge in some mean-spirited xenophobia with his travel bans. Now he’s running the risk of shutting down the government of the US altogether because he can’t raise the funds to build his wall along the Mexican border. That’s because he has apparently failed in his stated aim to get Mexico to pay for it. The wall is, of course, another measure against the dreaded foreigner.

And yet his supporters remain firmly wedded to him: 81% of Republicans in a recent poll say they are mainly excited and optimistic about his presidency.

Meanwhile in Britain, it becomes increasingly clear that Brexit is going to deliver few if any of the benefits expected of it. Already inflation is edging upwards and, with austerity policies keeping earnings down, that means living standards are being squeezed. Well, squeezed for the poor: the wealthy have seen their incomes and wealth grow impressively since the 2008 crash. In society generally, growth is slowing except in the opening of food banks, for which the demand keeps trending upwards. In spite of all that, much of the population seems convinced that all that matters is to control immigration, to keep out the foreigner.

That desire apparently sustains continued support for Brexit, though it’s far from certain that leaving the European Union will even lead to a reduction in immigration.

Meanwhile, Australia has won itself quite a reputation for its handling of illegal immigrants and refugees, holding many of them in detention centres, some outside its own territory and administered by a private-sector company. Conditions in some of these camps have led to serious controversy, with allegations of beatings, insults and sexual assaults. One of the most controversial, in Papua New Guinea, is slated to close. Meanwhile, attempts to get information out about the centres are blocked by the Australian government.

It seems that Australia too dislikes foreigners.

The Manus Processing Centre on Papua New Guinea
slated to close, but leaving an image to awaken sad memories

It has now been reported that there is debate within the British Conservative Party about withdrawing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention has nothing to do with the EU. British lawyers played a leading role in its drafting and it was enthusiastically endorsed by Winston Churchill. It predominantly guarantees rights to citizens but, because it can be used by foreigners, sometimes unappealing ones like the Islamist cleric Abu Qatada, many British citizens would like the country to withdraw.

They’d rather see their own rights curtailed in order to deny them to foreigners.

The French talk about the “Anglo-Saxon” world, embracing such countries as the US, UK and Australia. They believe the Anglos have a culture distinct from their own. It’s hard not to feel they have a point. After all, France seems set on barring the far right from its Presidency, while many in the English-speaking world are intent on declining further into xenophobia and the protection of privilege at the cost of rights.

It feels to me as though the Anglo-Saxon world needs a new slogan. I have a modest proposal. How about:

“Anglos of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your rights. You have an elite to feed.”

Catchy, isn’t it?

That’s it. I’m not putting teeth under my pillow any more

It’s enough to make me lose faith in fairies.

The Rugby World Cup’s been a strangely unsatisfactory competition, especially from the point of view of anyone English. Despite the tournament being held here, England failed even to get out of the pool stage and into the quarter finals. I’m always pleased when an English team sets a new record, but I wish it hadn’t become the first ever host nation to fail to qualify.

Still, one could as an Englishman switch one’s allegiance to one of the other Northern Hemisphere teams. Four of them had made it into the quarters, along with with four from the South: France, Ireland, Wales and Scotland joined Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina.

Of the four Southern teams, Argentina looked the weakest. It has been steadily improving for a couple of decades, but it’s only recently made it to the big time. On the other hand, among the European teams, the one that has performed the best in the last year or two was Ireland, which won the premier competition here, the Six Nations, in both 2014 and 2015.

As it happened, Ireland was playing Argentina, so that looked like about our best bet for getting one Northern team through to the semis.

South Africa looked vulnerable, beaten in their first match by Japan, a nation which looks like Argentina a decade or so ago: improving but still not a major side. Wales, one of the stronger European sides, might just beat them.

As for New Zealand and Australia, their performance had been spectacular throughout the competition. There was little chance of off-colour France beating the former, or Scotland, near the bottom of the Six Nations, beating the latter.

So what happened?

South Africa avoided the mistakes that cost them against Japan, and beat Wales.

New Zealand did a demolition job on the French, leaving them bloodied and bowed.

That took us to Ireland-Argentina, our best chance. Within thirteen minutes, Argentina were 17-0 up. Ireland fought back, but were well beaten in the end.

The only hope left was for Scotland to beat Australia. But Scotland is one of the weakest of the Six Nations. Australia have been magnificent throughout this tournament. Surely only a miracle could give Scotland the victory.

A miracle or a fairy tale. One of those great sports stories, beloved of Hollywood, where the unfavoured underdogs come good on the day and beat their fancied, powerful opponents.

Well, it nearly happened. With three minutes to go, Scotland was two points up. Then Australia was awarded a penalty, worth three points if successful. Which it was. So in the end Australia went through by a single point.

Scotland came so close to beating Australia
And making a fairy tale come true...

The fairy tale was not to be. 

It’s enough to shake my belief in the Walt Disney World. It’s enough to cast doubt on the existence of Father Christmas, even if you call him Santa Claus.

Anyway, the result is that we go into the last two weekends of the Rugby World Cup with not just the host nation eliminated, but the host hemisphere. The English often complain that we invent sports for the rest of the world to beat us: football (what everyone but the US call football, anyway), cricket, now rugby.

Indeed, as far as rugby’s concerned, it isn’t just the country of its invention that disappoints, it’s the whole continent.

Hey, Australia! Happy birthday to us

I can’t remember meeting an Australian I didn’t like. Fine people and a joy to know. 

Not that I like facing them on a sports field. I can’t imagine that any fellow Englishman does. In a bar, however, on a beach, in a dining room – all the ones I’ve had the pleasure to spend some time with have been excellent company.

They’re open, warm-hearted, cheerful, generous, amusing. I’ve been out there on a couple of occasions, at a time when I was living in France. The banter I encountered in Sydney was so like what I was used to in England that it felt like a homecoming. But with more heat and sunshine.

In fact, ever since that experience, I’ve found that an excellent opening gambit to a conversation with an Australian is to tell him that his country is ‘just England with better weather.’ I always find it gets things off on just the right note.

England with better weather

But that’s not the reason I want to pay tribute to the Australians today.

It’s because the entire nation has had the goodness of heart to celebrate my birthday. I appreciate it deeply and thank all those fine people warmly. It strikes me as great generosity on their part to hold Australia Day on the 26th of January.

Now some might think that my daughter-in-law has a better deal than I do: born on the 14th of July, she has the whole of France celebrating her birthday with her. There are nearly three times as many people in France as in Australia. But I say it again, I like the Australians, and I’m more than satisfied that is they who’ve chosen to celebrate with me.

I’m off out shortly to mark the event. I’ll raise a glass to you, Australia. Many happy returns to us both.

Abroad? It's not all bad

‘Abroad’ is an important concept to an Englishman, who generally sees it starting a lot closer to home than one might imagine.

For most people in the South East of England – which people who live there like to suggest is crowning glory of the nation, while others think of it as the bottom of the country – the wild lands start north of Watford, which is practically an outer suburb of London. By that measure, my home in Luton, is definitely foreign though it’s only forty miles from the capital; then again, the curry houses and Sari shops of Bury Park make it easy to believe we’re in another country, but I rather like that.

Once you get up to what we often simply call ‘the border’, the one between England and Scotland, then you really are reaching another country, culturally for now, but perhaps even technically in a couple of years when the Scots hold their referendum on independence.

One of my sons, my daughter-in-law and my granddaughter live in that uncouth land. Strictly speaking, the word ‘step’ should be in there, but ‘step-daughter-in-law’ just sounds stupid so daughter-in-law she will remain.

They came down to spend a night in the relative civilisation of Luton the other day, on their way to take a holiday in that even more foreign part, France. They’re spending a couple of weeks near Bordeaux, where the locals believe July should be sunny and warm, something we’ve rather lost sight of over here, where we spend our time digging out jumpers and looking for shelter from the latest downpour.

They got to their destination on Saturday, the 14th of July, which was excellent timing. It is of course the French national day, celebrating the fall of the Bastille prison to the ragged poor of Paris in 1789. As you’d expect, it’s now a holiday where all that is rich, together with all that is mighty including the army, decks itself out in its pomp and parades around for the simple populace to gawp at.

Happy birthday to my daughter-in-law
And, accessoirement, joyeux anniversaire to France. Of course

Curiously, it also happens to be my daughter-in-law’s birthday, so she had the wonderful experience of being in a country all of which was marking her day with parties and fireworks. She could watch what must have been the most spectacular celebration of her birthday she’d ever witnessed, sipping one of the world’s finest wines and enjoying a glorious summer evening.

Funnily enough, I too could have a whole nation celebrating my birthday, but I’d have to go to Australia. Still, Australia’s not really abroad. On the two occasions I’ve been there, I’ve taken great pleasure in informing the natives that Australia was just Britain with better weather.

Strangely, it wasn’t clear to me that they appreciated the extent of the compliment.

Even so. Britain with better weather? In January? And the wine’s not bad either.

I could perhaps be tempted.