England's shameful conquest of itself

Nearly three decades ago, Danielle and I saw a remarkable production of Shakespeare’s Richard II. Slightly over three decades before that I saw the same play, as a special treat offered to us schoolkids, at a remarkable place: the Minack Theatre in Cornwall, which is outdoors and cut into the rock above a sea cliff. That means you get a stunning view of the sea in the background and gulls occasionally swoop over the stage, which is wonderful.

However, the special treat was neither special nor a treat to me. Because one of the things about the Minack is that we had to sit on seats cut into the granite of the hillside. I guess people who’ve been before bring cushions, but we had no such comfortable accessories. The performance, at least as I remember it, and to be fair I should underline that fourteen-year-olds aren’t the most patient of audiences for classical drama, was slow and tiresome. Well before the play had ended, my backside was telling me that it had been far too long. 

The experience left me anything but well-disposed to the play.

But then came that second and outstanding performance, at the National Theatre in London, in 1995. What made it so outstanding? 

First and foremost, it was the casting of Fiona Shaw in the part of the king. A woman playing a king? It was an inspired choice. I think one of the central concerns of the play is the contrast between the king, seen as effeminate and weak, and the character of his rival, Henry Bolingbroke, strong and manly. One of the things the great directors of Shakespeare can do, with writing of that quality, is turn some of the messages around, so The Merchant of Venice, for instance, becomes the tragedy of Shylock rather than the triumph of Portia, or The Taming of the Shrew turns from a celebration of husbandly authority to teach an uppity wife a salutary lessons, into a shocking presentation of male abuse of a woman whose only offence was to show a little spirit.

Fiona Shaw’s portrayal of Richard showed him as feminine rather than effeminate, while Henry came across as macho, not manly, as a bully, not a figure of strength.

Fiona Shaw as Richard II
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings

That was breathtaking. But it wasn’t the only aspect of the performance that has stuck with me. One of the great speeches of the play is the dying soliloquy of John of Gaunt, in which he describes England as ‘this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle’. It’s one of those Shakespeare speeches like ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet which has an audience listening to it in silent awe, and I imagine puts massive pressure on the actor to bring new life into what might otherwise come across as clichéd.

Gaunt had just got going and tomblike silence had settled on the place when, suddenly, a mobile phone started ringing somewhere in the audience.

I don’t know whether its owner has recovered from the PTSD with which the experience must have left him. All I know is that Gaunt paused while the owner scrabbled in his pockets with the eyes of the entire audience on him, tracking the phone down to silence it. And then Gaunt went on.

Now the thing about that speech is that it sounds at first as though it’s going to be a hymn to England. Indeed, if it’s ever quoted at all, it’s always just the bit about the ‘sceptred isle’ that gets trotted out. If you go on to the end, though, you find it’s quite the opposite. What Gaunt is saying is that England has been brought low, and its decline is down to corruption and pettifogging officialdom. Above all, it’s something England has done to itself. 

That England that was wont to conquer others  
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

It conquered itself. No one else is to blame. The wound was self-inflicted.

That all came to mind when I came across a recent poll that showed that a clear majority of British voters now understand that Brexit has done the UK harm.

Overall, only 22% still think that Brexit has been good for the economy, while nearly 50% think it has been damaging. Only 9% believe that it has done any good for the National Health Service while over 45% think it has been harmful, which is particularly ironic, since the snake-oil salesmen that championed Brexit, especially Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, promised that it would provide an extra £350 million a week for the NHS. Perhaps more telling still, while many voters backed Brexit not for any high-minded principle, but out of simple xenophobia and against immigration, 53% now believe that Brexit has made it more difficult rather than easier to control British borders.

Brexit, it seems, no longer has any redeeming features for most British electors. And yet who gifted that poisoned chalice to Britain? Why, voters themselves. 

Predominantly English voters.

Well, if the bard’s to be believed, that was upholding a long tradition. England imposing a shameful conquest on itself. Which leaves only one question.

If it inflicted the wound on itself, does it have the spirit, now voters have recognised the mistake, to find its own cure too?

Corona: not just the problems we knew about

Corona just means crown. We use the word for things that have, or seem to have, a crown. There’s a corona around the sun. There’s a corona around the particularly nasty virus we talk about so much these days. And, of course, there’s a corona on every crowned head, by very definition.

So spare a thought for poor Spain. Like England, it’s struggling with both the health and the financial impact of the virus. Its strict lockdown to protect public health worked a lot better than the weaker measures in Britain, but the damage to the economy has been painful. Though, oddly, England has damaged its economy even more seriously, while controlling the pandemic less well. But then, England has Cummings and Johnson.

Today, however, cases in Spain are increasing once more at a depressing rate, and lockdown measures are having to be reintroduced. Just as they are in England. Although in England they seem to be targeting the Midlands and the North first of all, as though the Conservatives want to punish traditional Labour areas for having the audacity to vote for them instead.

Spain has an additional element of suffering. It’s also having to cope with Corona problems of the other, more ancient variety. The ones associated with the Crown. Especially since its previous occupant, Juan Carlos I, erstwhile King and now King emeritus, decided to do a bunk, fleeing abroad to some destination that has yet to be made public.

Juan Carlos I: ex-King who did a flit, and who knows to where?

His flight was precipitated by the ongoing investigation of his financial affairs. In particular, the judicial authorities find that his bank accounts in Switzerland raise a number of questions they’d like answered (yes, the understatement is deliberate).

This is sad, because Juan Carlos was the designated successor to the dictator Franco but, instead of maintaining the dictatorship, he oversaw an orderly transition to democracy. A referendum adopted the new constitution, still in force today, less than three years after the dictator’s death.

What’s more, not three years after that, when a coup against the new regime was launched by disaffected members of the paramilitary police and the army, Juan Carlos spoke out powerfully against it, rallying the nation to the cause of legitimate government. That ensured the coup’s failure.

Guardia Civil Colonel Antonio Tejero invading Parliament

Now, I’m a bit of a cynic and I share the misgivings of many over the length of time it took the King to come out with that statement. The initial attack against the Parliament took place just before 6:30 in the evening and the King’s broadcast went out at 1:14 in the morning. He recorded it around an hour earlier, but even that was six hours after the coup was launched.

There are those who say he knew in advance that it was going to happen, and only came out firmly in opposition once it became clear not enough of the army supported it. I don’t know how true or false that is. It is interesting, however, that there are those doubts, and that even as long ago as 1981 there were therefore some suspicions clouding the admiration felt towards the King by the Spanish people.

Which may have been a harbinger of what has happened now.

Even so, there are over 600 streets and squares called after Juan Carlos I across Spain. I am, indeed, in one of them now, as I write this piece from the flat near Madrid my one-year-old granddaughter inhabits and kindly shares with her parents (and, right now, us).

Today, a number of councils are facing motions from the Left suggesting it may be time to change the names of those streets and squares.

The government, too, led by Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist but on the Right of his party, is having to fight off moves from his coalition partner, from parties on whose parliamentary support he relies, and even from Socialist colleagues, to review the legal position of the Crown in Spanish politics. It is an offence, for instance, to insult the King, though that could be changed simply by new legislation. More problematic, the King can’t be held accountable for his acts either, and to change that would require a constitutional amendment.

Not the moment, Sánchez argues.

Ah, yes. He has a lot on his plate. Spain is closing down discos and bars again as the scourge of the virus builds again. The country has a shattered economy to rebuild. And now it has the distraction of a monarchy with a former King who’s beginning to look as toxic as the virus.

It amazes me that in today’s world we still have regimes led by men entitled to deference by right of birth. That strikes me as something to fix, so I’d like to see all three questions addressed at once. And perhaps in Britain as well as Spain.

But I can see how it makes the uphill struggle that Spain already faces even steeper and longer than it already was.

So spare my adopted nation a little sympathy…

Postscript: when the military knows how to respond to a coup

On the night of the coup, 23 February 1981 (so the event is referred to as 23F), the only city that was taken over by the military was the one where we live now. Let me quickly say that the two things aren’t causally connected. It’s just that the military region of Valencia was commanded by the general who supported the coup most actively.

Things went reasonably smoothly for him, until he sent tanks out to the airport at Manises, to get the air force unit there to join in. He got a dusty reply from the colonel in charge, according to the story a minister of the time later told:

“I have a Mirage on the runway with its engines running and armed with air to ground missiles. If the tanks heading for the base don’t turn around and pull back I’ll order it to take off and attack them. And I have another Mirage fighter ready on the runway just in case.”

The tanks retreated.

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.

Not marking a death but celebrating a life

Getting to know my father, in the mid-1950s

It’s a strange sensation to wake up and discover it’s the 24^th of May, as happened to me this morning. Or at least, it has been a little odd for 37 years now (and it amazes me to realise it has been that long). 

It was on that day in 1983 that my father died.

For 35 years, it was particularly difficult because my mother always took it badly. She had the terrible misfortune of being a widow longer than she was married: she survived my father for 35 years, having been married for 32.

Each year, I would ring her and wonder how to broach the subject. Should I bring it up? Should I let her raise it? If I spoke first might I upset her by reminding her, or if I waited to let her mention it, might I upset her by seeming to have forgotten?

Yes. She wasn’t easy, my mother. Many fine and attractive qualities but being simple to know and get along with wasn’t one of them.

I would always suggest to her that we shouldn’t fixate on the 24^th of May, but rather concentrate on the 15^th of September, his birthday, which was always a good day in the family. A day to celebrate rather than a day to mourn. But poor woman, she grieved all the same.

Well, she died nearly two years ago. So this year, I am going to mark the death of my father not with a lament, but with a celebration. A brief overview of his life in photos.

Here he is in his first year. This would have been late 1921 or early 1922.

He was brought up in Brussels, and here he is at four walking up one of the main streets with his mother.

In 1936, he was 15 and in the boy scouts.

By the early 1940s, he was in uniform again, but for war service in the Royal Air Force.

In 1951, he married my mother in Genoa. And why not Genoa? The obvious place to get married, for an Englishman raised in Belgium and who met his wife-to-be in Paris.

They stopped in Nervi, near Genoa, before honeymooning near Naples. He then took up a position he held for sixteen years, at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome (which is where both my brother and I were born).

In 1960, he posed rather well, I think, by the River Congo, while serving with the UN Emergency mission. He returned to that country with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1967, after his stint in Rome.

In 1964, we had a rather good holiday in what was then Yugoslavia, and stopped at various places on the way back to Rome, including Venice where you can see him feeding the pigeons in St Mark’s Square with my brother.

In 1977, he was approaching retirement, still with the UNDP but at its headquarters in New York.

He retired to France, to Michauroi, a hamlet lost in the countryside of the Charente Department. He loved being there, though he and my mother would also travel to England regularly, staying in a flat they rented in Bromley. Here he is (at right) with my mother (at the back near the centre) and some friends. At that time, he only had two years ahead of him.

He had a rich and varied life and did a lot of things that mattered to him – his war service, his work for the UN in the Congo Emergency, his work on projects for the UNDP. He died far too young, at 61. His style of life had done nothing for his health, however satisfying it was in other ways.

Even if he hadn’t died then, I don’t suppose he would have made it till today. He’d have been rising 99 now. But I still miss him. He was an excellent father and a lot of fun.

Which is what I prefer to mark on the 24^th of May.

Christmas day without my mother: something of a relief

Christmas. So many memories.

Not all of them bad.

The tradition in English-speaking households is to have presents, at least for the kids, on Christmas morning. I’ve no idea who came up with that terrible idea: it means the children are up at 5:00 or 6:00, waking their parents to demand gifts.

My family was no different. We’d wake up at the crack of dawn and find a Christmas stocking stuffed with goodies at the bottom of our beds. That would hold our attention for the best part of two minutes, by which time we would have reached the obligatory mandarin at the bottom, and then we’d take off to wake up the parents and find our “real” presents.

An early foray into empirical experimentation tested his existence

There came a time when I began to suspect that the gifts weren’t really being brought by Father Christmas. But I was a child interested in evidence and prepared to carry out carefully designed experiments to test any hypothesis.

So, one Christmas Eve, I propped a bongo drum between a chair and my bedroom door. The outcome was spectacular. When the door was pushed gently open some time after I’d fallen asleep, the drum fell to the floor, with a highly satisfactory, indeed nearly explosive, noise followed by a volley of cursing. That was not the kind of language I’d expect any saint to use, and the voice was in any case unmistakably my mother’s. That left me freed of an old deception but also, as I discovered in the morning, denied a Christmas stocking.

Danielle is from Alsace, in Eastern France, where they have a different approach. Like so many on the Continent, they celebrate Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. The tradition in her village was for a father to take his kids out in the afternoon, so that in his absence the mother would set up and decorate a tree – never done earlier – and assemble presents around it. The kids would be greeted by an apparently magical transformation when they returned.

The family would have their Christmas meal, after which presents would be opened. In the evening, not at the crack of dawn the next day. Indeed, if families go to Midnight Mass – usually held at 10:30 or 11:00 these days, as a more convenient approximation to midnight – the kids get home tired and unlikely to wake up early on Christmas Day. The parents enjoy a lie-in.

That strikes me as far more civilised than the Anglo-Saxon way. I have no idea why English speakers don’t adopt it.

My mother was one who never could. To her, Christmas was a sacred fixture in the Calendar, inextricably linked to the 25th of December. This was a little odd, since she was Jewish and, therefore, technically not expected to celebrate Christmas at all.

That may only further underline the tenuousness of the link between Christmas and Christianity. Today, for all but a diminishing band of true believers, it’s a feast of the family and of commerce, not a celebration of the birth of Christ. There’s no reason why members of other faiths, or none, shouldn’t celebrate it.

This, however, created difficulties. Christmas Day in England is the day when nothing happens. Public transport virtually stops and more or less everywhere is shut. My mother absolutely wanted to go for a meal with us, but there are few restaurants open and the ones that are either offer a special Christmas meal at an eye-wateringly special price, or they’re indifferent places hoping to cash in on the general absence of anywhere to eat out.

Once we ate in a Turkish restaurant opposite the Synagogue. Run by Muslims, it was ironic to see it fill up quickly with Jews, all known to my mother. The spectacle of Jews being served by Muslims on the day of a great Christian festival certainly tickled my sense of irony, which went some way towards making up for the mediocrity of the food.

On another couple of occasions, we went to a Thai restaurant near her home, where the food was frankly even worse than in the Turkish place. It really only had geographic convenience going for it. Our first attempt to eat there was a fiasco, because my mother told us that lunch was being served after 3:00. It was only when we showed up that we discovered that the correct information was that they were serving until 3:00. So we missed out on food altogether.

I could never persuade my mother to have our Christmas meal on the 24th, French style, when there would have been a huge range of restaurants to choose from. It had to be the 25th. To be fair, I suppose she knew that all around her people would be celebrating with family on that day, and she’d have felt miserably lonely if she hadn’t. I sympathise and I’m happy we helped her avoid that fate. But it was exasperating to go out on the hunt, each year, for a restaurant that could accommodate us, serve us a reasonable meal and not require us to take out a new mortgage on our house. A hunt that failed every time.

My mother wasn’t always an easy person to get on with. Even so, I often miss the things we did together. When I watch something good on TV, I want to tell her about it. When the Labour Party does something avoidable and self-destructive, I want to bemoan our fate with her. When the kids do something particularly admirable, I want to share the pleasure with her. But the Christmas day meal?

Not so much.

Ah, the tradition. The joy. The terrible food.
Have a great Christmas, everyone. Christian or not

A touch of Arab genius to perfect a multicultural experience

It’s not especially fashionable any more, but I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy, so I still feel attached to the idea of multiculturalism.

Carlos Bonell binding his spell
With an Alhambra guitar and RC strings. And an Arab wall behind him

The other day, Danielle and I travelled into Valencia, the Spanish city on whose outskirts we now live, for a guitar concert in one of University’s buildings. The city offers these, and many other cultural activities, free to anyone who cares to show up. Plenty do: the room was packed. Coming from austerity England, where fundamental necessities – such as a police service, refuse collection or adequate healthcare – are increasingly rare, it’s refreshing to be somewhere that still values culture enough to offer it free to citizens.

That’s especially striking since the national income per head in Spain is a third lower than in Britain.

Nor, I should say before anyone decides I’m making a partisan point, was the funding entirely public: two companies, one making guitars and the other the strings, had subsidised the concert. Long may Spain maintain that kind of collaboration between sectors of the economy; let’s hope that Britain can, some day, find it again.

What made the concert particularly satisfying for an unreformed multiculturalist like me, was that it was given by an outstanding guitarist, Carlos Bonell, of Spanish parentage but born and trained in England, where he still lives. Among other more highbrow pieces by contemporary or nearly contemporary composers, he also played his own arrangements of two Beatles songs. He explained that a guitarist brought up in England has that music ingrained in him, though he also played some classic Spanish music to restore the balance.

What’s more, the concert took place in a room where one of the walls was built by the Arabs, at the time of the Moorish occupation. The room is in a basement now, but the wall was clearly at ground level during Moors’ rule: that’s what happens with old cities, they get built on top of themselves, as new houses are built over the wreckage of old ones.

One of the reasons that the organisers selected that room for the concert was that the acoustics are particularly good. And they are. You could hear every note, follow every melody, with perfect clarity, and without any echoing or reverberation. It was an ideal setting for such a concert.

English, Spanish, Arab, all combining to give a glorious cultural experience. It’s hard to imagine what could be better.

Though it does leave one question that still puzzles me: how did those Arabs, a millennium ago, work out that building that wall, in that place, with those materials, lend itself to such a superb musical experience a thousand years later?

Arab wall built of just the right stuff, in just the right place,
for superb acoustics

Of pyrotechnic maniacs, modern-day troglodytes, the purpose of castles and Spanish bureaucracy (redux)

Although we live in Valencia these days, our house isn’t in the city itself. We live away from the centre, within the administrative area of the town of Paterna. This is a place with quite a few remarkable features.

The Cordà: when Paterna goes crazy

Probably the most unusual is the Cordà, the local annual fiesta. Fireworks loom large in it. Now, those who have followed my comments on our Spanish life won’t need to be told that fireworks are central to many celebrations in Valencia. In particular, when I found myself having to live through the city’s biggest fiesta, the Fallas, ironically pronounced to rhyme fairly closely with ‘Fires’, what struck me most was that an otherwise attractive city was turned for several days into a war zone. Firecrackers of normal dimensions sounded like small arms fire in Beirut, whereas every now and then the detonation of crackers the size of rocket-propelled grenades suggested that Israel had sent its heavy artillery to join in.

Well, Paterna goes one step further even than Valencia. Their tradition is to dress up in heavy, more-or-less fireproof clothing, including a helmet with a metal gauze mask at the front, and go around throwing fireworks at each other. This got so dangerous that eventually a mayor set up a large cage in the middle of town and only allowed people inside its wire mesh, surrounded with water hydrants ready to extinguish anything too awful, to engage in this terrifyingly threatening pastime.

The cage in Paterna to which a sensible mayor decided to banish
all the insane firework throwers

Monument to madness?
Paterna's statue of a Cordà reveller
He has a cracker in his right hand and
his metal gauze-fronted helmet under his left arm

As well as the lunatic fiesta, Paterna also has the distinction of having hundreds of inhabitable caves. These days, most have been abandoned, but there are a few that have been converted into often quite desirable housing. Their chimneys and ventilation shafts still form a strange environment of eerie structures in one of the central squares.

Entrance to the desirable home of a modern cave dweller
Note the castle tower in the background

Weird landscape of cave chimneys and ventilation shafts

The caves were an answer to problems of homelessness that, fortunately, are now long behind the local population. They might be worth considering in England where homelessness, far from being long gone as it should be, is growing daily. With a government that seems to care little about the poor as long as they’re out of sight, holes in the ground could be just the solution.

Another cave entrance and the Castle Tower
with its flags proudly fluttering

Dominating the square with the ventilation shafts is the city tower, initially built by the Arabs at the time of Moorish rule in most of Spain, later used by the Christian regimes that followed the reconquest. I’m always amused by these military structures. As a child I was taught that they existed to protect the town below. It was much more recently that I learned they were there to keep an eye on those towns and make sure the residents weren’t getting uppity. If anyone was being protected, it was the powerful who employed the garrisons.

All those fine Norman castles in England? Put in by Normans to make sure turbulent Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t trouble their overlords. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why they’re all ruins these days, it isn’t because of the effect of the weather or because they were badly built. It’s because many became centres of royalist resistance to parliamentary rule during the English civil war, and Oliver Cromwell made sure they were ruined afterwards to stop that ever happening again.

Just like the lake I talked about last time, the most interesting aspect of some of these places is below the surface, and pretty different from the superficial beauty.

Why am I writing about Paterna now? Because I had to go there for the latest round in our ongoing battle with Spanish bureaucracy. The local Social Security office is handling some of my pensions matters, and they wrote to me recently. The address they use started out just fine but, halfway through the street name, they switched to part of the address we left this summer in Valencia itself. The postcode, which came next, they got right, but the town was wrong.

“You need to sort this,” the postman told us, “it was difficult to find where we had to deliver the letter.”

Sensible advice, I thought. So I went to see the people in the office, on the basis that the only reliable way to solve a problem with the Spanish administration is, as I’ve said before, face-to-face. Phone? Forget it. Online? Not a chance.

The woman I saw first pronounced the dread words ‘cita previa’, suggesting I needed a ‘prior appointment’. But then she looked at the address on the letter, and the address I actually live at. To her credit, the struggle between her better and more bureaucratic demons was short.

“No,” she said, “this was our error. Just fill in this form and I’ll get you in to see someone immediately.”

It all went smoothly. So quickly, in fact, that I nearly missed the appointment. I was third in line so thought there was plenty of time for what these days we quaintly refer to as a ‘comfort break’. However, I was already being called when I came out.

This was because to get into the toilet in the Social Security building, you need to ask the security guard to unlock it for you. And to do that, he has to take a note of your residence card number. I’ve heard of providing identification to get into a country, or onto a plane, but into a toilet? Spain is the first place where I’ve had to do that.

And the real beauty of this particular incident? When the guard came to unlock the door, he found it was already open. A fact he recognised with a winsome smile.

Ah, yes. It’s one of the great lessons of life. Things are seldom as you think they are but, greeted with a smile, it often doesn’t matter.

The cat who travelled to Spain

I thought it would be hell.

Back in March, when we moved from England to Spain, we took our dogs but not our cat Misty. We were moving into a flat and, the poor chap, he’d never lived in a place he couldn’t get in and out of easily – and boy he’s lived in a lot of places: as of today, eleven addresses in four countries, not the kind of existence a cat generally finds congenial.

Misty in Luton
where, sadly, we left him behind for far too long

Fortunately, we sold our house to friends and they agreed to look after him until we had a more suitable place for him. A great arrangement: he was with people he liked, in a house he knew, with the same easy garden access as ever.

But then the months rolled on. We began to feel guilty towards our friends – they said they were enjoying having Misty with them, but how long can you really demand that other people look after your cat? – and we began to feel guilty towards Misty himself, after losing contact with him so completely for such a time.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, all the circumstances aligned. We’d moved out of the flat and into a house, with a garden at the back and a bit of parkland beyond that – just the kind of place likely to appeal to Misty. We’d opened a gap in the fence at the front so he could get out easily and visit the neighbouring cats if he wanted. And I had a business trip to England which I could combine with fetching him.

That’s when I began to dread what I foresaw to be a likely trip from hell.

First, I had to get from London to Luton, where we used to live. That wasn’t a big deal and I completed that stage without much difficulty.

In the BA Lounge at Heathrow
Misty hates the carrier...

Second, I had to get Misty into a zippable pet carrier, which he loathes. The vet had given me something to calm him, which I had to scatter over some of his food, but he’s too savvy for that: he took one smell of the meat, realised it had been adulterated, and wouldn’t touch it. I also had some sprayable happy-cat pheromones with which I liberally anointed the inside of the carrier, and that may have worked: he didn’t complain too much once inside it.

Stage 3 was getting from Luton to the airport. That was OK because we went by cab, which cost a fortune but at least was comfortable and relatively quick. The good thing is that the driver asked whether I had his passport. He thought he was joking, but there really are pet passports, and other documents he needed to fly, and I had indeed forgotten them. The driver’s irony rather saved the day for me, or more to the point, saved the trip.

On the way to Heathrow, Misty peed on me, but I couldn’t hold that against him. He was, after all, badly pissed off so it was probably entirely appropriate. A little emergency washing in an airport toilet dealt with the worst of the problem.

Stage 4 started at check in. Carrier and pet together had to weigh under 8 kilos, but Iberia, one of the only airlines that allows pets in the cabin, has a beautifully Spanish view of that kind of regulation: “8.2 kg,” the man said, “that’s close enough,” and through I went.

Then came security which was where I was terrified that things would fall apart. Fortunately, thanks to the cab driver, I had all the papers. They checked them carefully. They had me take Misty out of the carrier while they searched it – he wasn’t pleased, because I held him firmly and he wanted to wander off – but at any rate, everything turned out to be in order. So I got to the other side of security, breathing a sigh of relief. The most worrying part of the trip was behind me.

I took him out in the plane, briefly
He wanted to go wandering, so had to go back in the carrier...

All that was left was stage 4, the two and a quarter hour flight to Madrid, followed by stage 5, the three and a half hour drive to Valencia. Which turned into something more like five hours because of the storm that lashed us nearly the whole way.

Taking a look around the new place and taking possession

But finally we were home. Misty explored the place with great enthusiasm and slept on our bed that night, since he had us to himself. The next day, we picked up the dogs from where they’d been looked after, and at last all the animals could get together again. There was some slight awkwardness as they got used to each other once more, but they knew each other at once and realised that they were going to be sharing a house again.

Reunited with Toffee and Luci

So the household was complete after a long gap. Misty has settled in straight away and seems to enjoy the place, just as we do. Cat, dogs, humans: we’re set for a life together in Valencia which I hope we’ll all enjoy.

Misty fully settled in

Getting him here hadn’t been anything like the hell I’d feared.

What makes a summer

One swallow, they say, does not a summer make.

It’s pretty hot here, in Valencia as in most of Spain, and yet it doesn't seem to be just the heat that tells me it’s summer. There’s something else, and for some time I couldn’t make up my mind what. 

So I’ve been wondering just what does make a summer.

Not the swallows, I’d say. They turned up here in their masses – I never got a chance to spot the one that didn’t make a summer. Besides, my wife tells me they were swifts not swallows anyway. The swallows showed up a while later and, confusingly, looked exactly the same to me. In any case, one swallow or one swift certainly didn't make our summer, and even the huge numbers that eventually arrived affected our comfort much more than the season.

For a few days before they arrived, we were being irritated by flies coming into the house when we had the windows open. But then the swifts showed up in their hundreds, flying around behind our flat at sunrise and sunset, like vacuum cleaners of the air, scooping up any insect with the temerity to come anywhere near them. The fly problem vanished.

I have a lot of affection for the swallows. Indeed, I’m delighted that the house we plan to move to shortly has a pair in residence and they even have fledglings at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that it’s they who make my summer.

Swallow fledglings in our new place

So, I kept asking myself, what does?

Certainly not the date. How many British residents, including me when I still was one, have enjoyed a glorious, sunny, warm May only to shiver through a dank and cold June?

It wasn’t really the temperature either. It gets hot in Spain. We’ve even had temperatures in the low thirties in Valencia (no, no, that isn’t freezing cold, you poor benighted users of that outdated temperature system), despite the nearness of the sea and the breeze blowing off it. But it’s far worse in Madrid, where I go fairly frequently to visit my sons and their partners (and soon my second grandchild), where the high thirties or even low forties are not unknown.

It took me a while to work out just what it was that made a summer for me. And the enlightenment came in the form of a memory from my distant childhood.

For my first thirteen years, I lived in my native city, Rome. Throughout my childhood, I’d always felt profoundly English, to the extent of experiencing nostalgia for a country I’d visited frequently but never lived in. I remember catching my breath, and feeling a flood of emotion, over a geography book in my (English) school in Rome, when I came across a picture of a typical London street with a sodium streetlamp. My nation. In some sense, my home. Spiritually.

Then my parents sent my brother and me to boarding school in England. One evening some months after that wrenching move, I was at my grandparents’ house, watching TV with them. You know, black and white, and we felt at the cutting edge of technology because we had three channels instead of the two we’d got used to.

The programme was about an archaeological expedition in Greece. I remember nothing about its findings. All that sticks in my mind is a sound. Like the picture of the sodium lamp, it brought a lump to my throat and made me catch my breath.

Cicadas. Grinding away. I could almost feel the heat and smell the pine needles.

That’s summer. Hear that sound and you know you’re out of the grip of the winter and the cold. You know you’re safe in shirtsleeves, and short ones at that. Sunset doesn’t mean a chill that forces you indoors, it means the warmth becomes comfortable and that, even at night, you can sit outside with a drink and enjoy the smells and the easy living.

Just a few minutes’ walk from where we live at the moment (before we move in with the swallows) is the long park that winds through Valencia in what used to be the bed of the Turia river. Right now, it's full of that beguiling sound day and night. Reminding me again and again that summer is here. Just like when I was a kid.

Summer floods the Turia park
Just imagine the cicadas providing the accompanying sound track

It’s as nostalgic as it’s wonderful to hear the cicadas telling me I’m back in a land of real summer again…

Hospitals: the burning question

There was a time – back in the early 1990s – when I used to make frequent visits to Arrowe Park Hospital in the Wirral. 

That’s the peninsula opposite Liverpool.

Arrowe Park Hospital
Scene of many a visit of mine back in the early 1990s

The company I worked for back then had supplied the hospital with a remarkable system to support healthcare staff. To this day, it remains the most powerful Hospital Information Support System or HISS, as we called them then, that I’ve ever come across. Healthcare staff could quickly, reliably and accurately, enter requests for tests or treatments, record test results or the delivery of treatment, or simply consult a patient’s record. It was a great system, and I would take pride showing groups around the hospital to see it in use. Many of the groups came from abroad.

Often, the then Chief Executive, Frank Burns, would meet the group and give a brief, and usually witty, talk. In one remark has always stuck with me, he told a group:

“The problem that keeps me awake at night isn’t a patient falling off an operating table. It isn’t a patient receiving the wrong blood in a transfusion. It’s car parking.”

It’s not hard to see why. There’s only so much car parking space. So who gets priority? Staff without whom no patient would be treated? Patients without whom there’d be no point having the staff? Visitors to patients without whom they’d recover so much more slowly?

And, at a time when hospital budgets are under terrible pressure, do you charge or do you not? And if you do, how much do you charge?

That last point reminds me of another hospital that I’ve visited quite a few times, the Royal Free in Hampstead, north London. I’ve mostly been there for work, but also for personal reasons: it’s where my grandmother died, for instance.

On one work visit, I was shocked by the charge being made for the car park. I couldn’t resist mentioning it to one of the people I saw in the hospital. I didn’t mention it until after we’d dealt with the business, of course; it seemed imprudent to raise the matter until I’d got to know him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t take it badly. Which, as it happens, he didn’t.

“Ah,” he said, “the costs are exactly the same as on Hampstead High Street.”

The High Street is only a few minutes’ walk away.

“The used to be much cheaper,” he went on, “but people kept parking here and then heading up to the High Street to do their shopping. We had to introduce the charge to stop them doing that.”

It’s not that simple a question, you see, hospital car parking charges. There needs to be some way to make sure that limited parking spaces aren’t being abused for purposes other than visiting the hospital or going in to work.

Obviously, a system could be put in place to allow people to pay less, or nothing at all, if they’re patients or visitors to patients. But that costs money and takes staff time. And neither of those are in abundant supply in the British NHS today.

All that becomes particularly relevant today because hospital parking charges are the latest scandal to hit the news. And it seems dead easy: there should be no charge in England as is already the case in Wales and in most of Scotland.

But, as the Royal Free proves, that’s not that simple. After all, we really don’t want to offer Hampstead shoppers an inexpensive parking opportunity so they can do their shopping more cheaply. After all, with some of the most expensive properties in London, Hampstead isn’t a district for the poor or underprivileged.

The Royal Free Hospital
Too close to Hampstead High Street to provide free parking

No wonder Frank Burns was kept awake by hospital car parking. Rather than any of the other issues you’d expect to be troubling a busy Chief Executive.