Prim, and weird people

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the human race. It’s just people that are sometimes a bit weird.

That was confirmed by a visit to the fine old Catalan town of Reus. It’s rather an attractive place, as it happens, with a pretty centre. But it also has a curious history, as we learned from an old friend, Rosa, someone I’d mistakenly let drift out of contact for many years until last year, when we had a great reunion during which Danielle at last met her.

Rosa lives in Reus, which is why we made a stop there, on our way to Perpignan in southwest France. I’ll explain in a later post why we were heading for Perpignan. Probably.

Danielle and Rosa are leading the way into the
great restaurant and Vermut maker Vermuts Rofes

Reus is a great centre for vermut, which is what Spain calls vermouth. My visit allowed me to confirm that the city deserves to be proud of its production of this fine drink. I liked both the red and the white I tried, the latter in a vermut maker's which is also an excellent restaurant, where we had a great meal with Rosa.

The city's only 16 km from Tarragona, which is the capital of the province to which both belong. Now, the way Rosa tells it, Reus was for a long time the more commercially successful of the towns. It had a much more dynamic business sector and that allowed it to finance a thriving cultural life.

But, she explained, Reus rested too much on its laurels. For instance, local businesses, including shops, liked to shut at 1:00 in the afternoon and open again at 5:00. Not convenient for the people who travelled into town to buy supplies and equipment, or perhaps to see a doctor,, and might have liked to make a day of it, with lunch thrown in. Apparently, the good merchants of Reus didn’t care. Clients simply had to adapt their expectations to the way Reus businesses liked to operate.

As a further example of their outlook, Rosa also pointed out to us one of the most fashionable shops in the town. Perhaps the most fashionable. Rosa went there once, just once, and never again. She was dressed casually, though well. That didn’t stop the shop assistant she turned to for help finding an item she wanted, telling her she doubted the shop had anything to offer her.

This strikes me as the kind of arrogance that underlies the story told about many high-end shops where, if you ask the price of something, the assistant will answer, “if you need to ask, you can’t afford it”.

Faced with either of those types of snootiness, my inclination would be to do what Rosa did, and walk out of the shop, never to return.

Now whether this kind of attitude was the only cause of the relative decline of Reus or whether other factors came into play, what happened is that as the decades rolled by and turned into centuries, Reus faded while Tarragona blossomed. Eventually, the upstart on the coast overtook its rival, adding wealth and dynamism to the privilege it had enjoyed since Roman times, of being the capital of the province that includes both, and which has always carried its name. 

You can imagine how Reus felt. Even the university has its faculties split between the two centres, and rather than be called after either, has given itself the name of a person instead (Rovira i Virgili, if you must know, who was president of the Catalan government in exile from 1940 to 1949, in succession to Luis Companys who went into exile in France after the end of the Spanish Civil War but was handed back by the Nazis, to meet an unpleasant and quick end, though not quick enough, given how unpleasant it was).

We enjoyed one particular facet of the rivalry between Reus and Tarragona. This is associated with the name of General Juan Prim. If you’ve never heard of him, let me assure you that nor had we until we got there.

He was a nineteenth-century general, born in Reus, who made a name for himself in, among other things, civil wars devastating Spain in his youth and later in colonial warfare in North Africa. A couple of generations later, another Spanish general, Francisco Franco, would win prominence by his North African campaigns. The difference, however, was that Prim remained surprisingly liberal, not something anyone could say about Franco, who was just prim. And nasty.

Prim in particular spent ages scouring Europe for someone who could be brought into Spain as constitutional monarch, replacing both the warring branches of the existing royal family (literally warring). That would mean accepting a crown offered by democratic election. Prim is reported to have said that looking for a democratic monarch in Europe was like looking for an atheist in heaven. 

Eventually though, Amadeo of Savoy accepted the role. In fact, he only lasted, as King Amadeo the first (and only) of Spain, for just over two years. After an attempt in 1873 on his and his wife’s lives, he decided that, quite frankly, it was too much like hard work trying to rule Spain, a nation as deeply divided then as it is now. He stood down and told the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, that Spain was simply ungovernable. 

Prim, though, didn’t see any of that. In December 1870, as he left the Cortes, of which he was a member, just a few weeks after voting for Amadeo to be given the throne, he was gunned down in the street and died soon after.

Prim and his horse
Seen from the direction of Tarragona

Reus decided to give its glorious son a suitable monument. It takes the form of an equestrian statue of Prim in the saddle, brandishing his sword.

Now there’s a story told in Reus, that the statue is so oriented that the horse’s back end and, I suppose, therefore Prim’s too, are facing Tarragona. I’ve not been able to confirm that but, hey, it’s telling that the tale is even told, isn’t it? Whether it’s true or not.

It’s great to celebrate your favourite son. But if you can do it in a way that also abuses your despised neighbour, isn’t that just win-win?

See what I mean? The human race may be absolutely fine. But think of Prim. Of what happened to Companys. Of the behaviour of Reus shopkeepers. Or of the rivalry of that city with Tarragona.

Surely you’ve got to agree that people are weird.

Tragic Trenches, Brilliant Banter, Blazing Bonfire

The woods behind our house are one of my greatest sources of pleasure from living where we are in Spain. And I’m finding myself fascinated by my reading about the Spanish Civil War, when a struggling and democratic Spanish Republic was overthrown by a Fascist dictatorship that lasted nearly forty years. Finally, Danielle and I have developed a love for the sport of Nordic walking, where one goes stalking along with a stick in each hand, like skiing without skis or, come to that, snow, and watch walkers unencumbered by sticks go streaking past us.

What better pastime could there be than an activity that combines all three?

Our Nordic Walking group met in our village, La Cañada, the other day. Wonderfully convenient. We went striding through my favourite woods, to a spot adorned with the melancholy remnants of low cement constructions linked by trenches. We’d seen them before without identifying them for what they were: the final line of defence before Valencia of the beleaguered Spanish government, facing the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco.

Blockhouses and linking trenches
from the final line in Valencia's defeated struggle against Fascism

That terrible, literally last-ditch defence never took place. The decisive battle of the war, which lasted for nearly four months between July and November 1938, took place far away, on the river Ebro. The Fascist forces, with their Italian and German support, won a decisive victory and inflicted huge losses on the Republic. So when it came for Franco to move on Valencia, the fighting was all but over and the city surrendered without a last stand.

It was poignant to see those final, desperate defences that in the end proved futile, especially given what we know came next.

Fortunately, from there we headed for a place with far more cheerful associations: the ‘Three Oaks’ (‘Tres Robles’) restaurant in our village, La Cañada. We were served a fine paella, of the Valencian variety (with meat, not seafood), Valencia being the home and origin of that great dish. The company was good, the conversation lively and the atmosphere entertaining.

The Nordic Walking group in the Tres Robles

I particularly like the restaurateur himself. Danielle had bought some fish from the fine local fishmonger, one of the assets of La Cañada, and asked the restaurateur whether he would keep it in his fridge for us while we lunched.

This he agreed to do though, when I came to ask for it back, he carefully explained that, under Spanish law, anything left in a restaurant owner’s position for over an hour without being claimed back, was legally his. Since this is precisely the kind of banter I enjoy, I told him that I naturally assumed he’d already eaten the fish, or at any rate served it to his clients. At that point, he confided in me that he had not, since we were foreigners, and needed to be treated with unusual kindness.

Instead, he told me how I ought to cook it: in coarse salt. That’s something I’m keen to try next time, though on this occasion Danielle had already chosen the recipe and the ingredients for a traditional Spanish sea bream dish. Which was delicious. 

The restaurateur wished us every enjoyment of the fish, but on one condition: that we send the bones to Puigdemont.

For those who may not be following the debate over Catalan independence from Spain too closely, Carles (to give his name in its Catalan form) Puigdemont is the former president of the Catalan region (or nation, as campaigners for independence would describe it). He is currently living in exile in Belgium, since he faces trial and, given what has happened to those of his collaborators who weren’t lucky enough to get out, probably a long prison sentence if he returns.

In Valencia, the Catalan separatists are not much admired. In fact, I might go so far as to say they’re roundly loathed. Resented too.

“They view us as Southern Catalonia,” they tell me.

Indeed, it only surprises me that the restaurateur wanted Puigdemont sent so much as fish bones.

Puigdemont's share of our excellent sea bream

In the evening, we headed for a different village, up in the local mountains. It’s called Olocau, so the fact that I accept its existence proves conclusively that I am no Olocau denier.

They were due to celebrate the feast of Saint Anthony with a bonfire and fireworks on the main square. Actually, we’d earlier seen the wood piled up ready for lighting, and it was clear that what was going to happen there was going to be about as much like what I think of as a bonfire, as the Battle of the Ebro was like a bar brawl.

Which is why we went to see how it turned out.

We were there early and spent a while wandering around the village. Many of the houses have huge main doors, the kind you could drive a carriage through or at least a horse and cart, as I’m sure many used to in the past. You know, the kind of door which has a human-sized one set into it. As we wandered around in the night, we found several of them open, allowing us to see in to the brightly lit interiors. At several, we asked if we could take photos.

To our amazement, one family suggested we come inside to admire the tiled walls, the wooden beams, the homely fireplace and, in particular, the cellar with its oak wine barrels, the last trace of the occupation of the present owner’s father as a wine maker. The barrels are now empty.

“All but one,” he explained, “we top it up every year with the same wine from the same grape and enjoy it greatly.”

The Olocau house we visited
With a family member in one picture, and barrels in another

It struck me as typical of this region, with its warm-hearted openness to us immigrants, that they invited us into their home in this way. It made for an attractive end to a great day.

Spectacularly topped by the bonfire and fireworks. Which were just as dramatic as we were expecting.

Fireworks and the bonfire in Olocau

Spanish politics wishing us all a Happy New Year

Two pieces of news, out here in Spain, have struck me as the old year dies. They provide insight into how to form governments and just how much, or how little, we need them.

The first is that the country is about to have a fully constituted government again, rather than one that is in office merely in an acting capacity.

Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias
Eight months to learn that compromise works better than intransigence

This is a bigger achievement than you might at first think. There were elections back in April, which led to the Spanish Socialist Party, the PSOE, winning 123 parliamentary seats under its leader Pedro Sánchez. That made it the biggest single party while leaving it well short of the 176 required for a majority, but then the left wing Unidas-Podemos (UP), the party that broke spectacularly onto the scene a few years ago under the leadership of the charistmatic radical Pablo Iglesias, also had 42 and the centrist Citizens Party had 57. Surely a majority government could emerge, even without having to call on Catalan or Basque nationalists, some of whom would be inclined to favour the left.

That was not to be. First the Citizens Party made it clear that it was centrist in name only. Under no conditions would it support Sánchez into office. So if there was any sense in which it stood in the centre, it was with a powerful inclination to the right.

Months of negotiations between PSOE and UP made little progress, as neither side was prepared to budge from its entrenched positions. The result was that just seven months after the first election, a second had to be called, in November.

The results were highly educational.

The Citizens Party, which had been so outspoken in its refusal to work with the PSOE, was crushed. Its tally of MPs fell from 57 to just ten. Clearly, voters felt that if the party was going to ally itself only with the conservative Popular Party (PP), then it was just another conservative party and they might just as well vote directly for it. And indeed the PP went from a historic low of 66 to 89 MPs, although the collapse of the pseudo-centrists also had a far more serious consequence: the far-right Vox went from 24 seats to 52, making the third biggest group in the new Parliament. That’s a worrying development for the future.

As for the PSOE and UP, the two parties who couldn’t agree a programme after the April election, clearly voters didn’t like their behaviour. Both lost seats, though the PSOE not that many, falling from 123 to 120. UP, on the other hand, lost 7 which, considering they held just 42, is a much more serious blow.

The punishment handed to the two main parties of the left seems to have had the desired effect. Sánchez and Iglesias have at last found a way of agreeing a programme, including some interesting measures such as increased taxes on high pensions, legislation on euthanasia and climate change, and a reduced role for religious studies in public education.

With the abstention of the left-wing nationalists in Catalonia, which seems highly likely, it now appears that Sánchez will at last go from being acting Prime Minister to being confirmed in the role some time next week.

The message is clear. Pull together on the left and you can achieve some things. Reject all compromise and the voters punish you.

What about the other piece of news?

It seems that the Spanish stock market index, Ibex, ended 2019 up by more than in any year in 2013. Now I know that the position of the stock market is far from a perfect indication of the state of an economy, but it’s nonetheless generally the case that if the economy does badly, stocks and shares fall too. So the news about the Spanish index does somewhat suggest that the economy’s not doing too badly.

So my first bit of news teaches me that a compromise is worth making to get a government that can do some good, a lesson we’d do well to learn on the British left. The second shows that an economy can do fine even without a government for eight months, a lesson, in relativising the importance of government itself, it wouldn’t be bad for every nation to learn.

And on that note, I wish you all a great New Year.

Metro lessons in understanding. And misunderstanding

There are times when I wonder why I ever take the car into central Valencia. It’s not so much the traffic, though that can be a pain (it’s sad how few cars around here seem to be fitted with working indicators), but more a matter of finding a parking space once there. That can take practically as long as the drive in.

Our metro station. A sight worth seeing in its own right

Besides, our local metro station is in a forest. Not a pleasure to pass up, is it? That’s why when I picked up two Croatian friends who were coming to stay, I went by metro instead of by car, even though it meant hauling a case through the woods afterwards. It was a chore, but a small price to pay for a woodland welcome…

“So,” said one of the friends, “what’s the name of the final destination of this train?”

The station is called ‘Lliria’. That initial double-l always intimidates me. It’s as worrying in Spanish as it is in Welsh. For the Spaniards, it seems to be a cross between the ‘j’ in ‘you’re joking’ and the ‘y’ in ‘you’re kidding’, but quite where in between I have trouble deciding.

Still, I’d heard the name many times. I had an answer to the question.

“Liria,” I told him.

Was that right, though? A double ‘l’ pronounced as though it were single?

On the train, as in most countries, a small minority was absorbed in conversation, another reading, another just staring blankly into space. The vast majority were glued to their phones.

One woman had been separated from her friends by the arbitrary emptying of seats. She’d shifted from absorption in conversation to blank staring. She started to pull out a phone, but before she could get focused, I seized my opportunity.

“Excuse me,” I asked, “how do you pronounce the name of this train’s destination?”

She looked momentarily shocked. A stranger? Talking to her? In a metro? But she gathered her thoughts quickly.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“No, no. I don’t want to go there. I just want to know how to pronounce it.”

“You want to know how to pronounce Liria?”

That was quite helpful. A question that contained the answer to mine. Clearly I’d got it right.

Then, however, her friend, two seats away intervened.

“Jiria?”

Of course, she may have said ‘Yiria’. But I heard ‘Jiria’. And, either way, I was back at square one. Was the town called ‘Liria’ or ‘Jiria/Yiria’?

The first woman, now smiling as she understood that I was just a foreigner trying to come to terms with the language, came to my rescue.

“Liria in Castilian. Jiria in Valencian.”

That may have been ‘Yiria’, but I’d got the message. The town’s name was different in Castilian (the Spanish national language) or Valencian (the regional language).

“Don’t worry,” she went on, “we’re not racists in Valencia. You can talk Castilian to us and we’ll answer in the same language. We’re not like the Catalans.”

Valencians aren’t keen on being confused with Catalans. Their language, Valencian, many like to point out, is absolutely not Catalan. For the record, one Valencian friend we asked quickly checked that no one was listening, before telling us that, in all honesty, Valencian really is Catalan.

The reference to Catalans made the conversation more general, as people dived into the current hot topic in Spain, the campaign for independence in Catalonia and the demonstrations, some with outbreaks of violence, that followed stiff gaol sentences handed out to some of the leaders. In Valencia and, I suspect, in most of Spain outside Catalonia, there’s not a lot of sympathy for the independence movement, and the people in the metro were no exception. One woman spoke up for the notion that the national government could, perhaps, use velvet gloves a little more, rather than mailed fists, but she didn’t get much support.

I used to be quite keen on the Catalan case, since they seemed to be something of a different nation, with their own language and traditions, but since the Brexit torment started, I’ve rather cooled on the idea of people walking away from the wider organisation they belong to, just because they can’t be bothered to help reform it.

My Croatian friends had just come from Barcelona. We shared their news that while there was indeed some violence in the city, it was localised and most places were quiet. Everyone nodded at that and made some comments about journalists always focusing on the bad news, but they quickly got back to the more interesting topic of how annoying the Catalans were.

Some Catalans making a point
Not all Spaniards are wholly in favour, though

That didn’t last long, though. The women noticed the young lads across the carriage were eating some kind of multi-coloured hoops, out of a plastic bag. Cereal perhaps, but as one of the women said, it looked like the kind of thing she might feed to her cat. I’d just be thinking that it could have been dog food, but that was close enough.

The lads were courteous and offered the bag around. There were no takers, though. Perhaps we all felt that we didn’t really belong to the right species for the stuff.

The woman I’d first spoken to got off the train before us. She waved as she left and wished us a good evening.

“The language lesson was free,” she said. “A Catalan would have charged for it.”

With those words she left me amused at how easy it was to break down the barriers between fellow travellers on a train, at how friendly relations could be between people from three different countries with three different languages, and at how that contrasted with the animosity on display towards people from just up the road who spoke a language practically identical to their own.

Metro trips are much more fun than car journeys. And so much more instructive.

Distrust the man who talks of freedom

It always seems wise to distrust anyone who claims to be striving to set you free.

“Setting me free? You’re really interested in my freedom, are you?” strikes me as the good question to ask.

For example, the US likes to celebrate the Mayflower pilgrims, the refugees from religious persecution in England who created the first successful European settlement in Massachusetts. Their admirers tell us the pilgrims struck a blow for freedom of worship. Which in a sense they did – a blow for their own freedom of worship. But they were members of a particularly harsh Protestant sect, and they weren’t interested in establishing freedom of worship for Muslims, Jews or – still worse – self-styled fellow Christians such as Anglicans or, even more abominable, Catholics.

Indeed, these fine apostles of liberty were far from above doing a bit of energetic persecuting of their own. They regarded it as a duty to God, even. Extirpating heresy and all that. Within a lifetime of their arrival, some of the descendants of the Pilgrims were conducting witch trials in Salem and other local towns, that led to the hanging of nineteen people for the perfectly fictional offence of witchcraft. In some instances, the cases turned on ‘spectral’ evidence, testimony provided by spirits in apparitions to some of the witnesses.

Contemporary denunciation of the use of
‘spectral’ evidence in the Salem trials

Or take the example of Hungary. 

It was part of the Austrian Empire into the nineteenth century. A movement for equality with the German speakers led to revolution in 1848. For a brief spell, power fell to Lajos Kossuth, outspoken and internationally celebrated liberation leader. Counter-revolution eventual crushed the uprising. He had to flee his country and spent the rest of his life in exile, where he was lionised and feted in many nations. Why, he even has a bust in the US capitol building.

Bust of Kossuth in the US Capitol building

And yet. While in power he showed little sympathy for the national aspirations of non-Hungarians, including the minorities inside Hungary. He did nothing for the Slovaks, for instance, though his own father was one. Indeed, Kossuth lost some support in the US when he showed himself unable to back either Catholics or the anti-slavery movement.

His keenness to liberate downtrodden communities clearly didn’t extend to all such minorities. Just to his own.

This all came to mind for me when I saw a piece of graffiti in Valencia. “Valencia is not Catalonia,” it pointed out, in English, “Valencian language is not Catalan”.

Will Catalonia work for freedom for Valencians too?

It’s certainly true that the Valencian language, although similar to Catalan, is a different language. More generally, there is little appetite in Valencia, either the city or the region, for independence from Spain. Let alone for absorption into Catalonia.

A few months ago, I heard the story of a public servant in the Balearic island of Menorca. As well as what most of us call Spanish – Castlilian – he’s a native speaker of the local language, Menorquí, which like Valencian is closely related to Catalan, but different from it. So imagine his annoyance when, in pursuit of promotion, he had to sit an examination that was written in Catalan and required answers in the same language.

The leaders of the fight for the independence of Catalonia are outspoken in their advocacy of Catalan rights. They have less to say about the rights of other, smaller minorities. Indeed, they’re happy to treat those minorities with exactly the same insensitivity, or even arrogance, that they claim they suffer at the hands of the national Spanish authorities.

Just like the Massachusetts Puritans, or the Hungarian nationalists, they’re long on their own freedom, much less concerned about anyone else’s.

Which is why I tend to distrust anyone who proclaims his commitment to liberty from oppression. I think a few follow-up questions are always in order. Like, “yes, but would you stand up for my rights against oppression by you?”

Or, to put in other words, “are we talking about freedom for me, or should I be more concerned about freedom from you?”

Nationalism: toxic generally, but it has a lighter side

After a great month in Valencia, in Spain, we’re driving back towards England. That’s Danielle, the two toy poodles and me. The first stage of the journey took us into France. That meant travelling through Catalonia.

Or rather not through Catalonia, but into it, because even when you get over the border to France, you’re still in a bit of Catalonia, north of the Pyrenees. Even the French refer to the region as ‘le pays Catalan’ (note that the expression is in French, not Catalan).

Separatist feeling is nothing like as strong as on the Spanish side of the mountains. You hear far less Catalan being spoken on the streets. But there is still a strong attachment to the region’s Catalan roots. Town and street names often appear in Catalan as well as French, and the Catalan flag – gold and red bars – proudly flies everywhere.

The flag of Catalonia flying from a small surviving part of the
battlements of Perpignan (French) or Perpinyà (Catalan)

Indeed, when I ordered an ice cream in fine old town of Perpignan (Perpinyà in Catalan), the waiter who served me was full of congratulations of my choice of mandarin and raspberry as it produced a serving in the Catalan colours.

An excellent ice and in the appropriate colours for Catalonia

It took us a while to drive to French Catalonia. As we approached the border, we discussed where we might get dinner. One of the more attractive aspects of French towns – including, we assumed, the Catalan ones – is that they tend to offer a wide range of restaurants where one can eat well, and not always for a lot of money.

‘I’d like a crêpe,’ I announced.

Crêpes are sold in crêperies. They’re usually Breton and offer both savoury and sweet pancakes, and they can often be delicious. Sometimes not so much. But I’m forever hopeful. They usually sell wines and beers but the drink of choice to wash the crêpes down is Norman or Breton cider, served in pitchers and drunk out of vessels that look like nothing so much as tea cups, even down to the handles.

It was a shock when we got to the village where we were spending the night, just on the edge of the Pyrenees. There were far fewer restaurants than we’d confidently expected, and most of them were closed. With autumn on us and shorter days, we soon found ourselves wandering dark and gloomy streets in, even at 9:00 at night, in an apparently hopeless quest for somewhere that would serve us food.

It was beginning to seem to me that we would just have to come to terms with not finding anywhere open. We’d have to settle for a night without a meal. Given my weight, that might well be a lot better for my body, but it would be a lot less fun for my soul.

Danielle hadn’t yet accepted the grim truth that weren’t going to find anywhere. She was leading the way confidently ever upwards through the village streets, into the top levels where the streets were all streets and it was perfectly obvious we’d find no restaurants.

And then we came around a corner and saw light flooding out onto the pavement. A pool of good cheer. And – it was coming from a crêperie. We received a new burst of energy and new strength to our legs, as we made at speed towards the vision of delight, even though the street became even steeper for our last few steps.

It was not just a crêperie, but a genuinely Breton one. With a real Breton as owner and chef. It was open, we weren’t too late to order, and it let us in with the dogs. We had an excellent savoury crêpe each followed by one with caramelised apple, drowned in calvados and flambéd. 

Washed down with cider, of course.

On the wall alongside us was a large Breton flag. But, to my amusement, next to it was a Catalan one. I remarked on the fact to the proprietor.

Breton (left) and Catalan flags

‘Well, what do you expect?’ he asked, ‘if I hadn’t put a Catalan flag up, the people here would have lynched me.’

French Catalonia is about as far southwards from Brittany as you can get without leaving France. But Danielle is from Alsace, which is as far eastwards as you can get without landing up in Germany. But she’s always been struck by the number of Breton-Alsatian couples she knows.

She told the proprietor. ‘It seems that whenever a Breton meets an Alsatian, they both say, “what a shame that France comes between us.”’

France of course would deny that vile allegation. The nation brings these disparate regions together, its leaders would claim, it doesn’t separate them. A great notion, though somewhat belied by the staunch spirit of independence expressed in so lively a way by regions such as Alsace, Brittany or Catalonia.

Symbolised by the two fine flags we could admire while enjoying the excellent crêpes Danielle’s persistence had earned for us.

Catalonia: an appeal for peace with simple words to say it

It was good to see Catalans, or at any rate a great many people both Catalan and non-Catalan, demonstrating on behalf of dialogue in Catalonia this weekend. That’s to get out of the crisis brought on by demands from the Catalan government for the independence of their region. The marchers wore white, the colour of no party but of peace, they carried no national flags, and they had only one demand: let’s talk. Hablamos in Spanish. Parlem in Catalan.

Marching for peace and dialogue in Barcelona

The absence of flags was a good move. Flags stand for nations and nations stand for far more than just the good. You can point with pride to a Dalí or a world-cup winning football team? Just remember that you also have to take on board the persecution of Jews and Muslims and nearly four decades of Fascism.

Instead they sought communication. “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” Winston Churchill said, and the words ring particularly true at a time when the Catalan leadership has pushed its case to the brink of conflict, and the Spanish government has stepped right over the line into violence which, if it wasn’t lethal in its police action against a referendum on independence deemed illegal, was nonetheless brutal.

So “let’s talk” sounds like an eminently sensible response. Watching people demanding it was heart-warming. It left me feeling hopeful for once, as few political developments do.

Though I have to admit it wasn’t just the sentiment that touched me. The words themselves struck me. They awoke memories from decades ago, memories of an amusing discovery during my student days.

It may seem odd that of the two great languages of antiquity in Europe, Greek and Latin, only the former is still spoken. There is apparently no “modern Latin” as there is a “modern Greek”. That is, however, only an appearance. The only reason there’s no modern Latin is that there are, in fact, multiple modern Latins.

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, even French are all in fact the descendants of the language spoken across the Roman Empire at its height, altered by the successive waves of incomers that have affected some regions far more than others. French, for instance, has come a long way from the original language, heavily influenced by the Germanic speech of the invaders from across the Rhine – Burgundians, Goths, and of course the Franks, who gave the country its modern name.

The Latin from which those languages developed, however, wasn’t the elevated language spoken from the Senate. “Latin’s a dead language, as dead as dead can be,” goes the schoolboy doggerel, “it killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.” Even those ancient Romans realised it was far too complex a language. Pliny the Elder admitted he spoke a different language in the market than in the Senate.

The language of the marketplace was, above all, far simpler. For instance, the word for ‘to talk’, loqui (think of ‘loquacious’ or ‘eloquent’), is particularly painful. Its form is called ‘deponent’ so it looks passive when it’s actually active (so a classical Latin scholar would say ‘I have been talked’ when what he meant was ‘I have talked’).

The more sensible kind of people who would sell you a water melon or repair a broken shoe don’t speak that way. So they looked around for different words to us.

Two are particularly simple. To tell a parable – ‘parabulare’ – and to tell a fable – ‘fabulare’ – are nice, easy, first conjugation verbs that are entirely regular and therefore behave predictably. The common people chose one or other of those two to mean “to speak’ in preference to loqui

The Italians, the French and the Catalans chose ‘parabulare’, shortened to ‘parlare’ (the word in Italian), giving the Catalan ‘parlem’.

The main branch of the language in the rest of Spain chose ‘fabulare’. The Spanish have a way of replacing the initial ‘f’ by an ‘h’ – smoke, for instance, which is ‘fumo’ in Italian is ‘humo’ in Spanish. The Spanish for ‘to speak’ morphed into ‘hablar’ and hence ‘hablamos’.

The marchers in white were therefore demanding that the two parties tell some fables or some parables to each other. What they meant was that they should speak. Any of those would be great.

Isn’t it great that they chose to say it with a particularly easy word – not a derivative of the ghastly Latin ‘loqui’?

In the end, chatting to each other instead of fighting isn’t all that difficult. It just takes a simple word. And a bit of goodwill.

Catalonia: another simple solution sure to fail

In the early part of last century, the American commentator HL Mencken pointed out, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong”.

In Spain, elements in the troubled region of Catalonia have felt for a long time that they would be better off outside the Spanish state.

I say ‘elements’ because a great many Catalans are far from convinced that this is the right solution for their region – even if it is, in fact, a nation. Many on the left, for instance, are concerned by a separatist movement they see as xenophobic and conservative; many in the centre of the political spectrum see themselves as Spanish as well as Catalan, feel there’s no contradiction between the two and believe Catalonia would enjoy a more secure future linked with the other Spanish regions than on its own.

So which side commands a majority of Catalan opinion?

Opinion polls are only worth so much, as we have learned to our cost in numerous elections around the world. Even so, they’re about the only indication we have of where an electorate’s view stands, outside an actual election. The Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió (Centre of Opinion Studies) is a body that is run by the Catalan regional government, so one wouldn’t expect it to be biased against the views of that government, and yet even it has found a majority against independence in every poll bar one since late 2014, and in three of the last four, including both polls carried out in 2017.

The regional government is currently held by nationalists. They have decided that they wanted a referendum on independence in the hope that it would endorse their separatist views. In response, the central government in Madrid made it clear that it regarded such a referendum as illegal and ordered the Catalan government not to hold it.

Let’s pause a moment at this point.

Here’s one approach the Madrid government could have taken. It could have announced that it would not regard any referendum result from Catalonia as binding. That would have laid down that in no circumstances would a vote for independence have had any effect on the central government or lead to any change in the law concerning Catalonia.

The referendum could have gone ahead. If the opinion polls had proved accurate, the result would have been a rejection of independence, massively discrediting the separatist movement. The regional government might have fallen; the question of independence would have been off the table for many years to come.

Had the referendum delivered a vote for independence, the Spanish government would simply have confirmed that it was non-binding. They would have faced a reinvigorated separatist movement but, having made their own position powerfully clear beforehand, they would have had a strong, pre-declared position from which to build a new view of the Catalan situation resulting from the vote.

That’s a complicated solution to a difficult problem. It leaves many issues undecided, requiring the government to come up with solutions later, pragmatically, in the light of circumstances. Instead, Spain decided that it wanted a well-known, neat and plausible solution.

So it opted for repression. It sent in the police. On the day of the referendum, they were shown battling with protestors in the streets, inflicting some serious injuries. The optics, as marketing people call them, were terrible: here were Spanish police, acting on orders of the Spanish government, using often violent power to prevent people voting.

When you’re acting in the name of democracy, that’s a pretty lousy image.

Unarmed civilians in fear of the police
Not a great advert for democracy

Governments seem to like resorting to the use of force. It can be domestic, as in Catalonia, or foreign, as in Iraq, Libya or Syria. It’s always a simple solution, easy to reach for, close to hand. And it usually ends in tears, as it did in Iraq, Libya or Syria.

In Catalonia, the bloodshed on the streets will have only one effect. It will unify and galvanise the opposition to Madrid. Those who opposed Catalan independence before, will come under increased pressure to change their view. If they refuse, they will be accused of treachery, of betraying the sacrifice of the dozens who suffered injury from police violence, all in the name of Catalan freedom. Some at least who opposed separatism, will change sides and back it.

Blood shed in Catalonia:
shameful behaviour to would-be voters, a boon to the separatists

In other words, from the point of view of the Madrid government, the situation will be as would have followed a referendum result backing independence. Or, rather, far worse: whatever the result, the separatists will claim they have been cheated and will draw additional strength from the powerful emotional cohesion that the spilling of blood gives to a cause.

The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy chose a solution, police repression, that was well-known, neat and plausible.

And, as Mencken could have told him, wrong.

The Holy Grail and other aspirations. LIke European unity.

My wife points out that we face the possibility of moving, for the first time in our lives, to a place where we’ve chosen to live.

That doesn’t mean that we’ve always lived in places we dislike, just that in the past we’ve always moved to them because we’ve had to. It’s either been to take up a new job or, worse, to respond to having lost an old one. Buffeted through life by the whims of redundancy, a tedious fate.

That makes it a pleasure to be in Valencia, in Spain, where we hope to retire at some as yet distant date in the future. As it happens, it won’t just be the first place we’ll have moved to entirely voluntarily, it’ll also be the first place we’ll have chosen before we even knew it.

That’s why we’re out here now, discovering the place.

My first impressions have been excellent. I mean, the city has a town beach of golden sand a kilometre or two long. A beach inside the town? Hey, that alone gives it full marks right off the bat.

But then I discovered more. For instance, I had to make a visit to the cathedral as soon as I learned that it houses the holy grail. I kid you not: the holy grail. They call it the holy chalice but, hey, that’s what the grail is. The thing’s in a side chapel, in a display case, for all to see.

The hunt for the Holy Grail is over:
look no further than this display case in Valencia cathedral

Seems a real pity that no one told the Arthurian knights. Think of the trouble, the desperate quests, the lives truncated that might have been saved. All they had to do was hop on an Easyjet flight in the morning, pop into the Cathedral at lunchtime to take a look at the grail, and they’d have had time to spend the afternoon on the beach with an ice cream. Or a mojito if they preferred.

On the way to the cathedral, I was struck by another sight which was almost as moving. More, to be truthful, if you see things the way I do. The symbol of an aspiration almost as unattainable as the holy grail seemed to be until we found it hidden in plain sight.

Wandering up a Valencia street, I was struck by the sight of three flags flying from masts over the entrance to a court building.

Three Flags in Valencia

On the left was the flag of the country and city of Valencia. It consists of the Senyera, the banner of gold and red bars that marks Catalan nationhood. To it, Valencia adds a blue strip with gold leaves. The whole thing is a proud and attractive statement of local attachment.

In the middle was the flag of Spain, representing the national state to which modern Valencia belongs.

And to the right was the familiar pattern of gold stars on a blue ground of Europe, the free confederation of which Spain is a member, by its own will and with pride.

It struck me as an interesting collocation of local, national and supranational adherence. It says, my roots are here, but I realise I belong to a wider community and, through that community, to something beyond even the old and timeworn concept of the nation, source of so much needless conflict, pain and death down the centuries. Indeed, I belong to an evolving union designed to end all that bitterness and slowly, painfully build something better.

It was encouraging to see that the people of Valencia seem capable of reconciling those three levels of attachment. But it was a little disappointing to think that my own countrymen, back in England, are apparently unable to show that generosity and breadth of vision. They prefer the parochialism of Brexit over the internationalism of Europe.

Ah, well. It’s enough to drive you back to the beach and another mojito. It would have been fun to drink it out of a grail, of course, but hey, a glass will do. The setting and the drink itself are just as good, whatever the container.

A glass is perfectly appropriate to salute the generous courage I saw symbolised out here, and drown the memory of the petty-mindedness back home.

Slaying dragons, or perhaps dinosaurs

It took a message from Catalan friends to remind that today is the Feast of St George, the pretext for a huge party out there. And it’s the day of our patron saint, too, back here in England (not Britain – England).

Barcelona's going to be having fun tonight

At first sight, it’s a curious coincidence that Catalonia and England share a patron saint, but a lot other places share him too, including Greece (and they really need a patron saint right now) and, naturally, Georgia.

St George has become a bit of a thing in England over the last couple of decades. The flag, red cross on a white ground, has begun to rival the Union Jack, that mish-mash that’s supposed to represent the whole of the United Kingdom: it’s made up of bits from the flags of England, Scotland, which is in the throes of an independence campaign, Ireland, most of which has long since gone, but not poor old loyal Wales. 

More about Wales later.

You see the flag of St George flown quite a bit these days, above all from church steeples. Church of England steeples, I suppose.

Flag of England on a Church steeple

The flag’s growth in popularity seems to be a reaction to the increasing nationalism of the Welsh and the Scots, which is a bit of a cheek, when you think that Welsh and Scots nationalism has grown in reaction to English nationalists lording it over them for centuries.

In any case, the most attractive aspect of St George is nothing to do with nationalism, but with his legendary exploits in slaying dragons. Now that’s something that we badly need again today. Or if not dragons, at least a few dinosaurs.

• The dinosaurs that inhabit the clubs of London, including the big one that meets in Parliament, and runs the Tory Party on the basis that the measure of a man is his wealth, and the greater his wealth, the better qualified he is to run the show.

• The dinosaurs in the US senate who’ve decided to react to the killing of twenty kids in Newtown by doing precisely nothing, even blocking the most limited control on guns, though they’ll doubtless react to the three deaths in Boston by clamouring for a war somewhere.

• The dinosaurs on both sides of the Atlantic who feel that the rights of an embryonic collection of cells in a uterus trump those of the grown, sentient, suffering woman to whom it belongs.

• The dinosaurs everywhere who think there’s a lot too much love in the world, so that any that occurs in couples of the same sex really ought to be locked away in the dark somewhere or, better still, banned.

• The dinosaurs who think that the best thing the poor can do is suffer a bit more to make sure that the fine people who run the place, can add a bit to their wealth. Maybe that’s just restating the first entry in this list but, hey, sometimes I feel it can’t be said loud enough or often enough.

So, come on St George! Show us what you’re made of and slay a dinosaur or two.

Which brings me back to Wales. That’s the country that’s not even significant enough to warrant inclusion on the Union Jack, but just when England, proud bearers of the flag of St George, were about to clinch the triumph of a Grand Slam in the Six Nations rugby championship – victory over every one of the other nations – who stepped up to deprive them? Wales, of course.

In the words of an Irish friend of mine, who adds insult to injury by living in Wales, they didn’t just beat England, they trashed England. I phoned to check whether he’d perhaps misspelled ‘thrashed’, but no, ‘trash’ was what he meant. And a trashing was what it was.

So, St George. If you don’t fancy taking on a dinosaur for us, let me point you towards Cardiff. There’s a dragon there on whom you might like to wreak revenge.

Welsh Dragon.
A target for St George if dinosaurs aren't his cup of tea

And, in the meantime, have a great party, my friends in Catalonia. And you Georgians too. As for the Greeks – see if you can at least drown your sorrows for one night.

And everyone else – happy St George’s, even if you don’t celebrate it.