How a chat with a child led to a 43rd anniversary

Dinosaurs. Planets. Two subjects that have fascinated kids for at least a couple of generations. What’s surprising is how impactful a conversation about either can turn out to be.

In my case the subject was the planets. I was in France and a nine-year-old boy, by curious coincidence sharing my name, David, visited the house where I was staying. We got into a chat about the solar system, and I ended up drawing a diagram with him showing all the planets, right out to Pluto – this was 1980 and we hadn’t yet learned to exclude Pluto from the list of true planets. 

How we thought of the planets in 1980

Please don’t think that the illustration here is a faithful copy of the diagram we produced back then. That’s long since been lost. This is a ChatGPT-generated reproduction, and far more sophisticated than anything either of us could have drawn. ChatGPT is just far too skilled (at least at this kind of thing) to lower itself to our level.

Still, unimpressive though our drawing was, it seems it impressed David enough for him to go home and tell his mother, Danielle, all about this curious Englishman he’d met. Curious enough to make her feel she’d like to see what he was like.

Jumping forward a couple of years, Danielle had thrown in her lot – and David’s – with mine and we were all three living together in England. Nor were we going to be just three for long. There came a dramatic day when I rang Danielle – from a public call box to a landline, you understand, mobiles still being a long way off – to tell her about some incident in my day that I obviously thought so important that I told her about it before she could give me her news, though now it seems so inconsequential, particularly compared to what she had to tell me, that I’ve forgotten all about it.

‘Don’t you want to hear my news, then?’ she asked. ‘About the result of the test?’

Memory flooded back. She’d been due to have a pregnancy test that morning. With the memory came certainty, given the solemnity with which she mentioned the test, about what its result had been.

‘It was positive,’ Danielle confirmed.

That was the starting pistol for a race. Those were the days of the Thatcher government, which had recently changed the laws concerning British nationality. If we were married, and the child was born in Britain, he or she would automatically inherit my nationality as well as Danielle’s, though I’d been born abroad (in Rome, since you ask) and Danielle was French. Otherwise, it would be down to the Home Secretary’s discretion. And I didn't know how discreet he was.

There was less of a practical consequence if the child was a girl. If however it was a boy and he received only French nationality from his mother, he would – as the law then stood – have been liable for military service in France when he turned 18. At the time, that represented 12 months out of a young man’s life which struck me as an appalling waste of time. Since there was no compulsory military service in Britain, getting him British citizenship would free him of tiresome obligation.

Shall I confess that I also rather liked the idea of my child sharing my nationality? I already shared a name with the lad who would become my stepson and, later on, precisely over the military service issue, would share a nationality with him too. I preferred it that my other children should not be technically foreigners to me.

Now, you may be thinking, ‘what was the problem? All you had to do was get married, right?’

Sadly, it wasn’t that simple. Danielle still had a husband back in France. As it happens, he was willing to grant a divorce, and there was no technical problem with getting an English divorce to a French marriage. There was just a linguistic one: her then husband spoke no English and the divorce papers would include no French.

He tried to be helpful. He signed the papers the court sent him on every page, but not in the one place where he had to, in the signature space. Danielle had to explain to him exactly where he had to sign and the court sent them back. By then time was getting very tight indeed. 

In the final stages of the exercise, the judge called Danielle, David and me in to see him in chambers. He checked with David that he was happy with the custody arrangements (term time with us, holidays with his dad); he said he was. The judge then looked at Danielle’s distended belly and said, ‘I expect you’d like me to reduce the delay between decree nisi and decree absolute’. 

Usually there’s a six-week gap between nisi and absolute, the provisional judgement for a divorce, and the definitive one that allows remarriage.

The judge reduced the time to one week.

As a result, when I started a new job on 4 January 1983, I had a request to make of my new boss.

‘I apologise for having to ask for a day off on the very day I’m starting work.’

His face fell. I could see him thinking, ‘What kind of guy have I taken on here?’

‘We’re about to have a baby and the only day my local registry office can marry us is 11 January, next Tuesday.’

He gave a roar of laughter and threw himself back in his chair.

‘David,’ he said, ‘there are few excuses I could have accepted, but that’s definitely one of them.’

So on Tuesday 11 January 1983, Danielle and I were married. And just eighteen days later, Michael was born – safely a British citizen – to join Danielle, David and me. 

incidentally, by the time Michael was eighteen, obligatory military service in France had been replaced by attendance at a one-day ‘citizen’s day' workshop.

Yesterday was 11 January 2026. Danielle and I joined a bunch of people with whom Danielle used to go out dragon-boating (check it out – it’s the Chinese answer to canoeing and good for health). They were there for their annual get-together.

Our 43rd wedding anniversary became a subsidiary factor in the general good cheer.

Celebrating our 43rd

We promised them all invitations to our golden wedding anniversary. We just have to survive another seven years. We’ll give it our best shot.

In the meantime, isn’t it fun to see where a casual chat about the planets can lead?

The thrills of Easter grandparenting

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

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

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

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

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

Matilda counting for hide-and-seek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hello Easter book

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

Max ‘helping’ with the Easter egg hunt

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

Matilda providing Max with water

Elliott too has made a friend of Max

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

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

Elliott transferring the beach to the sea

Matilda transferring water to the beach

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

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

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

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

Grandparenting: when Matilda gave me an art lesson

On my latest visit to her house, there came a moment when Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, thrust an etch-a-sketch at me and said, ‘what should I draw?’

Like an idiot, I said, ‘a horse’.

The look she gave me conveyed many things, but enthusiasm wasn’t one of them.

My suggestion had been obviously crazy. Far too difficult. Nervously I racked my mind for some easier alternative.

‘What about a house?’

Odd, isn’t it? Change one letter and a challenging drawing option turns into an elementary one. I always find that kind of linguistic oddity amusing.

‘A house?’ said Matilda, now with a smile. And got drawing.

What I was expecting was a box with the top split to form something like a roof, two windows as though they were eyes and a tall rectangle as a door, in the position of a mouth. Or possibly a nose. To complete the picture, there might be a chimney at the top with a spiral of smoke coming out of it.

A House. As one might expect a five-year-old to draw it

What I got was different.

A House. As Etch-a-Sketched by Matilda

Not everybody agrees on what we’re looking at here.

Matilda’s uncle, my middle son Michael, assures me that what I see as a bed inside the house is in fact a pair of steps leading to a door. That strikes me as far-fetched. Or should I say far-sketched?

Matilda’s grandmother Danielle agrees with me that it’s a bed, with a pillow at one end and someone’s head lying on it. However Danielle qualifies her view: ‘but it would be a cut-off head’.

It’s true that the head looks a bit bodiless. It may well be this apparent decapitation that led to Matilda herself being dissatisfied with the picture. ‘My drawing’s bad,’ she assured me, before deleting it. A deletion which suggests that she hadn’t spotted me making a more permanent record of it on my phone.

Why did I take a photograph of her drawing? 

Because I was impressed that, the way I interpret it, what she’d chosen to show was something from inside the house rather than a dull exterior. She’d presented the life within and not just the structure without. In other words, more than a house, she’d drawn a home.

I think that’s impressive.

Obviously, I could check out whether she agrees with my interpretation. ‘You could always ask her what she drew,’ Michael urges me. 

He’s right, of course. But I’m not sure she’d tell me. And I’m not sure I want to know anyway. I rather like the uncertainty. Is it just a door? Is it a decapitated individual in a bed? Or is it just someone lying down to rest from the stress of outside life?

I don’t know and I like it that way. It means we can choose our own interpretation. And that strikes me as the richness of art.

Postscript

Talking about art, here’s another Matilda story.

The most celebrated painter from Valencia, where we now live, is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station, to which I’m heading today after my visit to Matilda and Elliott, is even called after him. No year seems to go by without some new Sorolla exhibition in the city, if not two or three, and the top floor of the  Museum of Fine Arts is dedicated to Sorolla and his contemporaries.

Among the paintings by Sorolla’s contemporaries on show is one that always gets me smiling. It’s called La Mosca, The Fly, and it was painted in 1897 by the artist Cecilio Pla. A commentator I’ve read calls the smile in the painting ‘contagious’, which is just how it feels to me. 

La Mosca by Cecilio Pla

I find the work playful, humorous, and quite simply fun.

Now in Matilda’s parents’ kitchen the curtains, though I suspect of a slightly less expensive fabric than in the house of a late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class family, nonetheless make me think of the painting. So for a while now I’ve been trying to get Matilda to emulate the whimsical pose of the painting in her own kitchen. On this visit, I was finally able to do so. 

The result was at least as playful, humorous and fun as Pla’s piece. Though with a distinctively Matilda touch to it. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Pla to have his model stick out her tongue – that was all Matilda. 

But, hey, doesn’t that just make it all the more playful?

Matilda as La Mosca, by me

Happy birthday, happy mistake

Not all mistakes are bad.

That was something I learned from a documentary I watched years ago, which introduced me to two people who struck me as highly likeable. 

They were Japanese mathematicians who started their careers in the years after World War II, not a good time for anyone Japanese to be looking for recognition on the world stage. Memories of all that bloodletting were simply too fresh. These two, though, did some maths that was so striking that whatever the reputation of their country, they couldn’t help but win an enviable one for themselves.

The one interviewed for the documentary was Goro Shimura. He was by then a highly respected mathematician working in the intellectual powerhouse that is the Instituted of Advanced Studies at Princeton University in the States (the place once graced by no less a person than Albert Einstein). He was talking about his friend and collaborator in maths, Yutaka Taniyama. You could feel his grief in talking about Taniyama who committed suicide in 1958, something which clearly still saddened Shimura several decades on. 

In the interview, what he said of his him was curiously revealing, touching and, I’d say, uplifting:

Taniyama was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes, but he made mistakes in a good direction. So eventually he got right answers, and I tried to imitate him but I found out, it is very difficult to make good mistakes.

Well, I agree that it isn’t easy to make good mistakes. Which is why I want to pay tribute to a good friend of ours, Oana. She regularly comes for walks with us along the sea or in the hills around here in the Valencian community in Spain. It’s good, however, to do other things with friends than just go on walks with them, and Danielle invited her, for a change, to join us in the joint celebration of her birthday (Danielle’s) that neatly falls on the same day as our grandson Elliott’s. He was turning three, but Danielle a little more.

The latest in our series of walks was a couple of weeks before the birthday, and Oana had been on it with us (it took us along the remains of an extraordinary Roman aqueduct cut through solid rock and, at one point, leaping a gorge on the back of a bridge – well worth the visit). As we parted company at the end of the day, Oana said, ‘see you next week, then’.

That worried me, so in the car home I asked Danielle what she thought.

‘Oana has got the date of the birthday right, hasn’t she? I mean, she said “see you next week” though it’s not till the week after.’

‘Oh, yes, she has the date,’ Danielle reassured me, ‘I sent her all the details.’

The following Saturday, we were invited to the house of another friend, Celia, for a paella. Home-made, and home-made is always the best. It was excellent.

We were chatting over a few drinks before lunch when my phone rang. It was Oana. I answered in some trepidation, fully justified as it turned out.

‘I’m at the gate,’ she told me, ‘I rang the bell and I can hear the dogs, but maybe you didn’t hear it.’

‘At our house?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Just waiting for you to let me in.’

An error had been made. One worthy of a Taniyama. But fortunately it turned out to be just as inspired as one of his. 

‘Tell her to come here,’ said Celia.

‘Oh, no, I can’t do that,’ Oana replied, when I’d passed that on to her.

‘Of course you can,’ I assured her, ‘these are great people, you’ll enjoy meeting them, they’ll enjoy meeting you, and we’ll all have a better time for your being here.’

It took a couple more exchanges to persuade her but, eventually, she let me talk her into coming over.

And it was as I’d said. She enjoyed herself and everybody else enjoyed meeting her. The food was excellent and the conversation joyful.

What more could one want?

Oana enjoying the birthday(s), with Danielle

As for the following week, Oana joined us for the joint birthday. A happy birthday following a happy mistake. Enjoyed by Elliott. Enjoyed by Danielle. Enjoyed by everyone who was there. Elliott successfully turned three. Danielle successfully turned somewhat more.

Elliott successfully turning three

So what had happened to Oana a week earlier was, in fact, the best kind of mistake. A real Taniyama. Much to everyone’s satisfaction.

Refuge from toxicity

One of the great things about living in Spain is that the weather here is, generally, a lot better than anywhere else I’ve lived.

I say ‘generally’ because, around here in Valencia, when it rains it really chucks it down, for days at a time. But when it’s fine, it’s really fine.

Trouble with that is that it appeals to more than us humans. For instance, this is a nation in which there flourishes a particularly dynamic race of masonry ants. Now, I’m strongly in favour of learning to share our planet with other species. Call me prejudiced if you like, however, but I’m really not keen on having the bricks our house is built of reduced to long, thin trails of red dust.

This means getting the pest control man in. In what feels delightfully paradoxical, he helps keep our house free of pests by using thoroughly pestilential products. One of them, as well as being lethal to unwelcome creatures, would undoubtedly not do our health any good either. We had to get out of the place for a couple of hours.

Ah, this is the life.
Just the retirement earned by a long mousing career

That was no problem for Misty, the cat. Of the four countries we’ve obliged him to live in, Spain seems to be the one he likes best. A fine place for his retirement, he seems to feel. Especially in the summer, when he shows no reluctance at all to staying outside, even overnight. During the day’s even easier. He just had to choose which particular patch of sun he felt most comfortable lying down in.

That just left us and the dogs. What we needed, we felt, was a bar or café, with a garden where we could spend an hour or so, nursing a drink, in pleasant surroundings.

Not as simple as it sounds, though.  It was like when someone asks us to recommend a hotel near where we live. I don’t know any hotels where I live. I live there, after all.

When we were in town, with loads of cafés or restaurants nearby, we knew plenty of places to go to. But we moved out here to be somewhere quieter. There just aren’t any cafés around the corner, and we don’t know that many even a drive away. After all, being out here, and this was one of the aims of the move, means that if you want a drink in an attractive setting, you can have one at home.

Which, as I’ve explained, wasn’t on just then.

Fortunately, we did know one place not that far away, a restaurant with a bar and a garden. It’s lovely once you’ve arrived, but getting there’s not much fun. In particular, one of the places you have drive down is in a such a state that you have to worry whether your car’s axles will stand it. Or, even more worrying, your neck. Really, I think of that stretch as a series of potholes with a few bits of roadway mixed in.

Still, it was just the place for us. Except for the sign we saw as we drove in. “Strictly no dogs”.

I suggested we drive on, looking for somewhere else. But Danielle thought I should go in and ask first. I realised she was right – after all, the worst they could say was ‘no’, which would leave us no worse off than if we left.

And this is another thing I like about Spain.

It may be down to Catholicism. Or perhaps to the Mediterranean way. It’s an attitude I’ve met in Italy and France as well. Regulation is seen as a guideline. Something to be approached, but not to be adhered to slavishly.

It can be irritating, as when people don’t respect social distancing or drive down our street at twice the speed limit. But it can be a joy at other times. Especially as a contrast to the “more than my job’s worth, mate,” I’ve met all too often in England.

You see, Protestants, or possibly Northerners, follow a harsh, unforgiving God. The “vengeance is mine” kind of God. Not so much the more broadminded God of “why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

“Ah, yes,” they told me in the bar, “dogs are strictly not allowed. But that’s because the owner has a large dog that wanders around here off the lead. But he’s away right now. So, just for once, and on a completely exceptional basis, you can have your dogs here while your house is being fumigated.”

A pleasant place, good company, a large G&T
make for a fine place of temporary refuge

Given that on top of that, they poured the gin for Danielle’s gin and tonic by eye – none of those cheapskate measures or anything – this place turned out to be just what we needed to pass the time of our exclusion from home.

Luci found the place perfectly satisfactory

And the dogs liked it too.

It takes a child

The thing about kids is the way they can amaze you.

To be honest, I’ve never been terribly good with children who can’t yet speak. 

‘Yes,’ I tend to feel, ‘I can see that you have something terribly important to tell me, but what exactly is it?’ 

Or, just as exasperating: 

‘I really do want to tell you everything I can about that fascinating [delete as appropriate] puddle/stretch of sand/breaking wave/odd looking insect/open flame/other (please specify), but I have no language to tell you it in that you’ll understand.’

The philosopher Wittgenstein once claimed that, ‘whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent’. A writer I far prefer, the playwright Tom Stoppard turned that around, into ‘whereof we cannot speak, thereof we are by no means silent’.

During her recent visit to us, my new granddaughter Matilda demonstrated clearly that Stoppard was right and Wittgenstein mistaken. It’s easy to be highly communicative without words. She had no difficulty at all letting me know how she felt about things (or people, including me) or what she wanted to do next.

Danielle is my wife but during that visit, it was much more relevant to think of her as Matilda’s grandmother (or Mamama, as she’s called, this being the customary name for ‘grandma’ in her native Alsace). Mamama has a laugh one can only call explosive. At one time, in a cinema in Strasbourg, a student of hers approached us at the end and said, “I was at the other end of the cinema, but I thought it must be you laughing like that”.

Matilda gives us a laugh
as her Granddad gives her a shoulder ride

Matilda has now picked up Mamama’s laugh. And she’s decided it’s something to deploy at every possible opportunity. For instance, when both of them went to the local baker’s, she started laughing at the woman behind the counter, who found it so irresistible, that she laughed back. Delighted with her success, Matilda laughed still harder. That got another client going, so Matilda turned her attention to her. Before long, the whole shop was laughing with the baby in her pram.

It was when she started using that laughter on me that I first noticed its seductive power. And, in an excellent example of communication without words, I quickly realised that she wasn’t laughing at me, but with me. Or, at least, since I wasn’t actually laughing when she started, inviting me to laugh with her.

It worked. Of course.

Slowly, I began to pay a little more attention to her other expressions. I discovered that even when she wasn’t laughing at me, she was often smiling. This slightly astonished me. After all, what with being so uneasy with a child I couldn’t talk to, I’d tended to hang back a bit. I mean, her parents and her Mamama were paying her plenty of attention. I rather assumed she didn’t need me to do much.

The occasional hug. A kiss or two from time to time. Maybe a bit of a walk or a shoulder ride. That felt like probably the appropriate level. I hoped Matilda would be pleased with the little I was doing, as a kind of bonus to the real attention she was getting from everyone else, but didn’t expect any particular further acknowledgement of my role in her life. Or, indeed, even of my presence.

And then I realised that she was turning a dazzling gaze on me from time to time, followed by a brilliant smile if I made any kind of response. A wave. A word. Frankly, even a smile back.

Amazing. I suddenly realised I could, after all, establish a relationship with this young girl. One that we could both enjoy.

Matilda telling Granddad she likes the playground

So I started doing other things. Making odd sounds. Hiding behind a chair and suddenly appearing. Planting noisy kisses on her legs, her belly or her neck (which always produced a wonderful, if whimsical reaction: she would turn her head away, but press herself closer to me so I could do it again). 

I even found myself sharing my orange juice with her.

Matilda sharing Granddad's orange juice

The reward was smiles. Occasionally, I even got that newly mastered trick of hers, an outright laugh. Or even better, a chortle, which was much funnier.

Ah, yes. Non-verbal communication. It works all right.

An astonishing insight. Hidden from me only by the veil of adulthood.

It turns out it’s child’s play.

Matilda makes it clear:
just have fun and the smiles will follow

Release for some, jeopardy for others

We’re emerging here in Valencia. Slowly. With a little optimism.

We’ve moved into phase 2 of the Lockdown relaxation process. With some justification. According to the Health Ministry, Spain has just had two days without a single Coronavirus death anywhere. Friends of ours from a few doors down the street tell us that their daughter, a nurse in the major local hospital, is being redeployed to Oncology after a couple of months in intensive care. The ICU beds are empty at the moment.

The only jarring note is that the Ministry has also warned that there are signs of an increase in infections as the restrictions relax. We’re clearly not quite out of the woods yet. It’s going to be face masks and social distancing for a while yet. Maybe even rubber gloves.

Still, we needed to celebrate our entry into phase 2. And what better way to do it than to go back to the sea? Especially if we took advantage of the new regulations to go there with friends. So we drove to a lovely spot south of Valencia, El Saler, with Maria José and Santi, our near-neighbours and the parents of the no-longer-ICU nurse I mentioned before.

The beach at El Saler

The day started relatively grey, but that meant the temperature was ideal for walking, warm enough for tee shirts, cool enough to be comfortable. We started in an almost jungle-like nature reserve before heading for the beach where we could walk with our feet in the surf.

The Nature Reserve at El Saler

A forest dweller we met

The company was great, the place was glorious, and as we walked, so the clouds cleared and we finished the outing, back in the woods, with bright sunlight filtering through the tree cover.

Danielle and Maria José wandering into the sunlight

It was a fine way of celebrating our emergence into a freer life. And it lifted my mood which had been rather depressed by a Tweet I saw in the morning from Trisha Greenhalgh: “I’ve never been so scared. There. Is. No. Plan.”

When I first heard Trish Greenhalgh, she was giving a conference presentation of remarkable brilliance. So brilliant that I wrote a post about it at the time. She is one of the leading Public Health specialists in England and one of the most convincing experts on evidence-based medicine I’ve ever heard.

If she is worried about the government simply having no plan, it seems to me a lot of other people should be too.

There’s much to criticise the government for in Spain. It was painfully slow in recognising the seriousness of the crisis about to hit the country. As a result it did far too little to prepare for it and reacted far later than it should have. But when it awoke to what it had to do, it acted fast, decisively and effectively. The results are obvious, as we've been slowly emerging from lockdown for a month now, and have had two days without a death.

It won’t necessarily benefit the government. Its vote seems to be more or less holding up, but it certainly isn’t improving, and the Conservative opposition is progressing. Given how well the government’s performed, that hardly seems just, but politics is an unkind game.

Meanwhile, Britain has a government which, as Greenhalgh puts it, simply has. no. plan. It never has had a strategy, but has stumbled from crisis to crisis since the pandemic hit, making up policy on the hoof, inventing commitments out of thin air and then failing to honour them.

Now it’s relaxing a lockdown that was never as strict as Spain’s, and doing so far too early. Spain, with its slow start, long had a far worse record in deaths per million than the UK, but the gap is now so small that it looks as though Britain will move beyond Spain in a matter of days.

The hasty relaxation is happening only in England, I should say. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with better governments, are being more prudent. The fear, and it’s certainly Greenhalgh’s, is that the Cummings/Johnson English administration is opening the UK up to a second wave of infection. The population certainly doesn’t deserve that fate, but I fear that can only be fixed when it chooses itself a better government.

Meanwhile, over here we’re slowly moving towards a new normal. There’s no reason for complacency, so it involves a lot of use of face masks, of hand gel, even of gloves. But we can go out more, we can meet friends, we can even get our hair cut or go to the dentist.

The dentist, in fact, was the downside of our first day in Phase 2. After the visit to El Saler, I had to head into town – my first metro trip since March, with gloves and mask and an empty seat next to each seated passenger – to visit the dentist. Who proceeded to beat the daylights out of my jaw, far longer in my view than strictly necessary, since it never offered him the slightest resistance.

Still, it was a small price to pay for another step out of lockdown. I just hope it doesn’t lead to a surge of disease. As I hope there’s no new peak in England either. 

Let’s hope Greenhalgh’s fears prove unfounded.

Danielle and Maria José collecting seashells

Getting carried away by the community spirit

I get these enthusiasms, sometimes. I really ought to learn to resist them. They only ever get me into trouble.

Our neighbourhood meets nightly to applaud healthcare workers

In my defence, I’ve been impressed by the way the lockdown has brought out the best in our neighbours, in the little group of houses where we live just outside Valencia. We’ve had gifts of oranges and lemons (no, nothing to do with St Clements) from one neighbour, and we’ve had full meals from others – a paella from one, lentils from another, from a third a rice dish which we were told was absolutely not a paella though to my untrained eye it looked exactly like one (apparently it was made from mountain rice, not rice from the plains where we live, which makes it absolutely, definitely and undeniably not a paella).

From a neighbour: a rice dish (definitely not paella)
and home-made turón (nougat) as a dessert

Danielle responded in the Marie-Antoinette spirit, letting them eat cake. On one occasion she made a lemon drizzle cake, from some of the lemons we were given, and on another an orange cake, from the oranges. Both were delicious and well received.

And that’s when the enthusiasm grabbed me.

“What can I do?” I thought. Followed by a brainwave. “I know! I can cook for everyone.”

“Not for everyone,” said Danielle, incredulously.

“Well, why not?” I replied. “I can do something easy.” And, as an afterthought, I added, “easy and not too expensive.”

That was because I’d first toyed with the idea of doing a smoked salmon kedgeree, one of the dishes I most like preparing, but which costs a small fortune (I’m still paying off the last one).

“I know,” I went on, “given my Italian roots, I’ll make a pollo alla cacciatora.”

I was born in Rome, you see. Still, I guess you can call the dish ‘hunter’s chicken’, given where I got the recipe from. That’s how I cook, by the way. Always from a recipe. I lack the genius to just sort of invent dishes, or improvise them. And in this instance, I was going to use a recipe from the Guardian newspaper.

Well, as the Guardian itself keeps reminding me, ‘trust has never mattered more’. If I turn to the Guardian for reliable information, I might just as well turn to it for my recipes, too. After all, I only have to swallow the information metaphorically; cooking I have to swallow literally.

Got to be sure you can trust the source when you’re going to eat the product.

The sauce too.

Danielle kindly did the shopping. We pretend that’s because I need extra protection from potential carriers of the Coronavirus – men are more inclined to die of it than women, and we suspect Danielle’s already had it anyway, so she may be immune. 

The reality is that her going instead of me has little to do with the pandemic. It’s more that she picks all the things she wants from one supermarket aisle before going into another aisle. I, because I can never remember where anything else is, pick up things from coolers at one side of the supermarket, next go over to the far side to get some fruit, then come back to the freezers, before remembering that I needed vegetables as well as fruit, and they’re right next to each other.

This means that it takes me three times as long as it takes her, and usually I come back having failed to find at least two items from the list.

Finally, the day dawned for my great act of community service. The cooking time was only three-quarters of an hour. I called it an hour to allow for slippage. Another hour would cover chopping carrots and celery and garlic. And then I built in an extra hour just for leeway.

Given that I was preparing a lunch for Spaniards, so for 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, I started work at 11:00.

Do you know, chopping stuff for 16 people takes far, far longer than chopping for three or four? Who knew?

I raced the clock. But when the time got to 2:05 with the 45-minute cooking time still not started, I had to acknowledge the inevitable. Lunch was going to be late even by Spanish standards. It was a depressing realisation. I’d made a commitment. I wasn’t going to keep to it. Honestly, it made me feel like a politician. Really bleak.

That’s the thing with my enthusiasms. I set myself up for failure.

Still, late as it was, in the end the lunch wasn’t a complete washout. Normally you should serve a cacciatora with rice or polenta, but I’m not cooking rice for the connoisseurs in the Valencia region, and I’ve never even tried my hand at polenta. They got mashed potato instead. Well, I fancied it. And it’s not something that gets served much around here.

“Mashed potato!” said one of the neighbours, “just like my mother used to make.”

My Guardian-based pollo alla cacciatora.
And definitely not polenta

I can’t be sure that’s a compliment, but I’ve decided to take it as one.

They all said they liked the meal, anyway. I tried it myself, and it seemed OK, so perhaps they weren’t just being polite. After all, it was made with Danielle’s ingredients, a ridiculous amount of work by me, and the backing of the supremely trustworthy Guardian.

There was no good reason for it to go wrong, right? It just represented a lot more work than I’d hoped.

Me and my bursts of enthusiasm.

Coronavirus: fighting the war and facing an enemy together

So it’s going to be war.

Soldiers from the Spanish 'Military Emergency Unit' (UME)
deploy outside the main station in Valencia

The leaders of nation after nation have assured us that what we’re going into now is war against Coronavirus. Which neatly covers two of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, War and Pestilence. Coronavirus itself provides us with Death, but since shops are still being restocked at the moment, Famine hasn’t put in an appearance yet. Long may it stay that way.

Curiously, that was a remark made by one of Danielle’s aunts, who lived through the Second World War. 

“We have enough food, but otherwise, it’s just like back then,” she told Danielle.

War. Both my grandfathers had their lives profoundly affected by World War One. Both served, in different ways: my paternal grandfather in the artillery, my maternal grandfather in gaol, as a conscientious objector. Both displayed admirable courage and both paid a high price – my paternal grandfather carried shrapnel in his hand until the day he died.

My mother Leatrice, my grandfather Nat and, well, me (a while back)
Nat served two years in Dartmoor Prison as a pacifist

Leaders have taken to using the vocabulary of war too. Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of our adopted nation, Spain, declared the other day that “we shall leave no one behind”. It’s an encouraging thought, especially in the light of the idea that Boris Johnson was toying with in the UK, of letting people become infected to build ‘herd immunity’, though his experts calculated this might leave up to 500,000 dead.

Rather a lot not merely left behind, but left in the ground.

It’s ironic, too, that the US is dragging its feet over combating the epidemic. The notion of ‘leaving no one behind’ is one I associate with the US marines. Odd to see that nation having to be dragged into awareness of the threat, against a spirit of denial to which Trump clung as long as he could.

The Spanish Prime Minister’s commitment to leave no one behind reminded me of my parents’ description of life during World War 2. My father served in the air force, my mother was secretary to a Labour MP. She told me how moved, and how strengthened, she was, by a speech of Winston Churchill’s. It included the words:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

He made the speech in May 1940 at a time when the possibility of surrender was very much in the air. Hearing the Prime Minister declare that “we shall never surrender”, she said, stiffened her resolve and that of most of her compatriots. There were, of course, the profiteers and the black marketers, but overall the nation pulled together. A sense of solidarity for a time overcame extreme individualism.

My father Leonard, with his mother and his father, also Leonard
My father is in his RAF uniform for service in World War 2.
My grandfather served and was injured in World War 1.

The spirit of war. With grandparents who experienced World War One and parents who lived through World War Two, I had always expected as a child that I would, on reaching adulthood, have to face it myself. It’s been not just a pleasure but a relief that I never have.

Until now, at any rate. It’s a bit of a surprise, and not without a grain of excitement, to be facing my own war this late in my life. And, at least, it isn’t one in which man is being called on to kill man.

Which doesn’t mean it isn’t lethal. As with any war, we go in not knowing how many will die. We don’t even know whether we ourselves will make it through – any more than my father did. It took him a long time to understand how he survived when so many of his friends didn’t. 

This war, like any war, is a harrowing experience.

On the other hand, if we can recapture the spirit of solidarity, it won’t be entirely bleak. If we all pull together, if we show we can serve a common goal with at least patience and some courage, what a welcome change that will be in societies more divided than they have been for decades.

It strikes me that Italy, Spain, France and a number of other countries are beginning to get things right. Social distancing, unnatural and painful though it may seem for a species that thrives on social contact, is probably the best way to beat the epidemic.

We’re going into battle with an intelligent strategy. We’re going in together. We’re going to suffer losses, but may be uplifted by our sense of common purpose.

Because that too is part of war, probably the best part, as well as an essential ingredient of our top shared objective.

Beating this damn thing.