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

The grandparenting chronicles: carnival

Granddad’s glasses! What a joy for Elliott

February saw me back in Hoyo de Manzanares, visiting the grandkids in their home. It was carnival time, which meant cheerful celebrations by the kids in their respective schools. It also meant pressure on Sheena, their mother, to produce outstanding costumes she could feel proud of when she sent the kids to school wearing them.

Pollo Pepe arrives at Elliott’s school

As it happens, in the event, only one child celebrated carnical at school that week. That was Elliott, who went as Pollo Pepe, perhaps better known to English-speaking readers (and children) as Charlie the Chicken, aka Charlie Chick, the creation of one Nick Denchfield. Pollo Pepe is his Hispanic version and he’s gone down big in this country, as was forcefully illustrated by the sheer number of kids in chicken costumes. To be fair, one of the best was the one put together by Sheena. And, in any case, you can’t have too many Pollo Pepes, now can you?

And what about Matilda, I hear you cry? Well, she was disappointed, naturally, at being left out of the festivities on the day when we shepherded them to their respective schools, her in her day-to-day school clothes, him proudly dressed as Pepe. But, fear not: her disappointment was only temporary. She’s a big girl now – why, she’ll be five this summer – and her big school, much bigger than Elliott’s, was pulling out all the stops for carnival. It was going to involve the whole of Hoyo in the celebrations, by having the kids parade through the town, in costume. The weather forecast for the day itself, however, was highly unfavourable, and weather forecasts are often right in Spain as they are far more seldom in Britain (indeed, it chucked it down). So the parade had to be postponed. Only postponed, though, not cancelled.

Matilda got her festivities the following week (which sadly meant I missed them). In a costume at least as wonderful as Sheena prepared for Elliott. Hers was on a woodland theme and it worked beautifully. 

Matilda in her carnival procession

Matilda got a kick out of parading around her village in it, with all her schoolmates.

The kids and their bikes

Bikes, you may remember, are a key factor of the kids’ lives. And these days they just seem to get keyer and keyer. During my February stay, Matilda and Elliott were frequently on bikes on our school runs. That was pretty impressive. And it would have been even more impressive had they entirely mastered the process. The problem is that getting to school is mostly uphill, and mostly pretty steep. 

We, the grandparents, cheat. We have electric bikes. With them you can sit at the bottom of the steepest, longest hill you can imagine, and feel entirely undaunted. You know that you can sail up it, pedalling with minimal effort, as your source of external power takes the strain from your legs.

Now, I discovered that the grandkids cheat too. Well, Elliott especially. To be fair, he’s still not three, which is the manufacturer’s specified minimum age for his bike. So he’s doing extremely well to be riding to school at all. Perhaps it’s not unreasonable that he, too, relies on an external source of power to help get him to the top. Unfortunately for me, however, that external drive is grandad-powered. That brought back to me all the horror of the long, steep slope that I believed I’d put behind me thanks to my electric bike.

The way back down, at the end of the school day, is a lot easier. Matilda handles that just fine. At the time of my visit, however, Elliott still had a little progress to make. He understands how brakes work. He’ll even slow himself with them from time to time. But the use of brakes hasn’t yet become instinctive. So when there was a need to stop quickly, he still tended to rely on scraping his shoes along the ground. That worked, I grant him that. But when holes started to appear in his shoes, the technique lost any appeal it may ever have had for the parents (or the grandfather, come to that).

Children like rituals. Or at any rate habits. One of Elliott’s is to hide each time we get to his house.

Now the notion of ‘hiding’ is still a work in progress for him. He always goes to the same place. Well, I suppose that rather underlines the ritualistic aspect of the exercise. Nor has he entirely grasped the notion of ‘hiding’ as ‘making yourself invisible’. He gets most of himself behind a pillar but then peeks out to make sure that we’re all ready to react appropriately.

This happens when he leaps out with a bit of a shout. Nothing too intimidating. A lion’s roar, but more on the cub scale than that of the king of the Savannah.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I always react with startled shock, throwing up my hands in horror and shouting, ‘so that’s where you were!’. My reward is a beaming smile which never fails to make its appearance.

Nor was cycling the only form of exercise in which the kids indulged while I was there. Nicky, their dad, has returned to rock climbing, a sport to which he was devoted in his teens. Already back then, his devotion excited my admiration, as he cycled half an hour each way through dark, cold streets in the winter, to get to a climbing gym in the south of Strasbourg, where we lived at the time, after a full day’s school and school days are full indeed in France (often he got out only at 6:00). That happened three times a week, a level of commitment I haven’t seen in a great many teenagers.

Daddy back with an old passion

Well, he doesn’t go so often these days. Family man, and all that. And the presidency of the Hoyo chess club also makes its demands on his time. But he goes and sometimes he even takes the kids.

Elliott enjoys himself, but he tends to spend most of his time on a climb which, as his dad rather dismissively but far from inaccurately put it, is a bit like a ladder. The fun thing about it is that you get to the top and then come back down by a slide. You can imagine the attraction, an attraction felt by Matilda too.

She, however, has now graduated to proper climbs. I watched her more than once struggling up one of them, helped on her way by her dad, and felt she wasn’t doing badly. But imagine my astonishment when, a while later, noticing that she wasn’t near me, I went around the corner to where the climb she’d struggled with was located, to find her on it again – and not at the bottom, but right at the top. She’d climbed it on her own and without assistance. 

Matilda reaches the top. Unassisted

Naturally, I fetched Nicky at once while she waited, and when we were together, we saluted her achievement with suitable applause. She seemed pleased. As for us, we were downright impressed.

Especially Granddad. 

And a postscript

Matilda’s very attached to the mug she was given by her friend Eduardo at his third birthday party. So when it came to leaving a cup of milk for Father Christmas’s visit, back in December, and Sheena suggested using that mug, Matilda was a little concerned.

‘Let’s not,’ she said, ‘he might steal it.’

Too precious to risk

Wise girl, I say. Why trust a guy who sneaks into your house at night? A little caution seems fully called for.

It’s all in the timing

It must have been sixty years ago that I started to learn French. That was at a weirdly English school, even though it was in Rome. Its Englishness was above all in its spirit and in the teachers it recruited

Our teacher was English and one of the few things I remember of her teaching, was when she told us earnestly that we had to learn to distinguish between the French words ‘ay’ and ‘ay’ (that’s the same sound as the ‘ai’ in ‘pain’ and would have been deeply painful to anyone who knew more French than I did).

She meant the words ‘et’ and ‘est’ and neither is pronounced ‘ay’.

The only other thing I remember from those classes was the tale of a sign seen outside a French teashop early in the twentieth century. That was a time when the custom of tea drinking was being adopted from the Britain where, French people then and, indeed, in many cases now, see it as a long and deep-rooted tradition.

As a quick digression, that’s a misleading belief.

Back in 1652, in that strange period when England was a republic and Puritans were a lot too powerful, the first coffee shops opened. They served a drink that we would probably regard as an undrinkable sludge today. But people back then liked it, especially for the buzz it gave them. The Puritans, who abhorred alcohol though they never actually banned it, were happy to see people going for this alternative, which contained no alcohol and didn’t leave them drunk.

Coffee houses proliferated over the next few decades. They became favoured meeting places, with many developing a specific character of their own. Some focused on people in business – Lloyds of London, the insurance operation, was founded in a coffee house which gave it its name (it was Lloyds Coffee House). Others were political, with supporters of different factions gathering in different establishments. Others might cater to artists or writers or journalists, and so on.

This was before tea had become a national beverage. Though it wasn’t long before. Just eight years later, after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, who’d developed a taste for this infusion of leaves from the far east, began to drink tea in England.

The fashion spread rapidly, in the upper circles of English society, where ladies would serve each other this delicate drink when they met in the afternoon. So note two things about that: it was a drink taken at home, not in an establishment outside like a coffeehouse. That made it a drink fit for women, or at least ladies, who would not have liked visiting a coffee house, with its male-dominated, rowdy atmosphere. And it was a drink people preferred to take in the afternoon.

As the price fell, so the custom of drinking tea extended into ever broader circles of society, ceasing to be exclusive to the very wealthiest (or ‘best’ as they liked to think of themselves, and still do). Gradually England, and later Britain, became the temple to tea drinking that it’s reputed to be today. That’s even though it was a coffee-drinking nation earlier and, to this day, drinks more coffee than tea.

Now there are many times of day when a Brit might drink tea. With breakfast. During the morning. In the afternoon. With the evening meal which, by continental standards, Britain tends to take early (at around 6:00) and is often called ‘tea’. Classically, though, just as in the time of the restoration, tea is a drink for the afternoon, at about 4:00.

‘Four o’clock tea’ therefore became something of an institution.

And the sign outside the French teashop?

My class learned that it read ‘Ici on sert le four o’clock à cinq heures’ – here we serve the ‘four o’clock’ at five o’clock.

We all chortled.

I was reminded of all that when I saw an old flapping notice on a board in Valencia, where we live.

The municipal authorities had decided that there was some benefit in reproducing, in the city, the Oktoberfest made famous by the German city of Munich, in Bavaria. You’ve probably seen pictures of buxom German women in traditional dress carrying handfuls of those massive stone beer tankards the Germans call ‘Steine’ (which means ‘stones’). Clearly, Valencia had concluded that having their own Oktoberfest would be both fun and, probably, a money spinner, both of them attractive characteristics. So they’d organised one.

What I was looking at was a publicity poster for it.

Advertising Valencia’s Oktoberfest

It read:

IMPORTANT

The official Valencia OKTOBERFEST 

will start on 15 September.

An October festival in September? Yep. Just as much fun as the four o’clock served at five.

Making the Ninth of October go with a bang

The ninth of October is a big celebration for the Valencian Community in Spain, where we live. It marks the day in 1238 when good king James I of Aragon liberated Valencia from the cruel oppression of the Moors. Had we forgotten, we’d have had a reminder early in the morning from the distant sound of firecrackers being let off. 

Celebrating the Valencian day by
carrying the Valencian flag through the streets

The big difference between a firework and a firecracker is that the first combines explosive din with the beauty of bursting colours. A firecracker leaves out the colours and therefore the beauty, leaving only the noise. I’ve pointed this out to Valencian friends (I know, I know, I missed a vocation as a diplomat) and my remarks are, I suppose I’d have to say, somewhat contentious. Valencians divide into two sharply differentiated camps. There are those who find the racket as disagreeable as I do, and there are those who go into raptures over the rhythm achieved by a well-orchestrated firecracker display. For the latter, the firecracker fans, those who fail to appreciate this fine and subtle point are philistines, a group to which I, unrepentantly, belong.

It may be that this joy from what to me seems merely to be racket, is associated with a key event which, legend has it, occurred during James I’s campaign to take Valencia from the Muslims. An Arab prophet had apparently declared that the city would remain in the hands of his people as long as the lord’s bat survived. One night, however, the Christians encamped outside the city that they were keeping under siege, discovered that a bat had made its home on the crest of the king’s tent. He ordered that it be left in peace and treated with reverence.

Sometime later, again at night, while the Aragonese troops were sleeping, the king heard a loud drumming noise. He awoke his men and the alert was sounded. Rightly, it turned out, as the Arabs from besieged Valencia had made a sortie and were about to attack the camp. King James’s men being ready for them, they inflicted serious losses on the Arabs and forced them to retreat to the city.

“Who sounded the drum?” the king wanted to know.

To his astonishment it turned out to have been the bat, by flinging itself repeatedly against the sides of the king’s tent.

Perhaps that’s what the Valencians celebrate when they enjoy the rhythmic detonations of the firecrackers. I hear only din. They hear a distant echo of the bat’s warning all those centuries ago. Something still commemorated in the crest of the city and even the logo of the Valencia football club.

A bat dominates the Valencia football club logo

Of course, what happened on 9 October 1238 was a major and significant achievement. It put an end to the long and harsh rule of the Muslim rulers. And what did the Arabs ever do for us, after all?

They inflicted their cultural values on the good people of Christendom, in such barbaric acts as decorating the palace in the village of Anna.

Cultural tyranny: inside the Arab palace in the town of Anna

They took advantage of good Christian water by forcing it to flow through unnatural irrigation channels into the fields, using methods which even Christian farmers continue to impose on themselves to this very day.

Arab irrigation channel at Almiserà, Valencia
A legacy of the yoke of Moorish rule

And they enforced a terrible regime of coexistence, in which Christians, Jews and Muslims lived side by side under Muslim rulers. Multiculturalism, right? Woke before the term had even been invented. Who wants that?

Strangely, some people apparently do. Or did. One of the finest Spanish poets and playwrights, a man of massive international reputation, Federico García Lorca, said in 1936 that the expulsion of the Moors was “a very bad moment… what was lost was an admirable civilisation, a poetry … an architecture and a subtlety that were unique in the world”. 

On 18 August of that same year, he was murdered by nationalists who knew better than to say things so subversive of national values. To be fair, even more than his views on the Moors, the fact that Lorca was gay probably made it all the more certain that he would meet a swift, violent end at the hands of an insurgency of the far right. His killers threw the body into a grave whose location has to this day still not been discovered.

Oh, well. The ninth of October is just a pretext for a party these days, anyway. And there’s not so much to get joyful about in our times to turn down any opportunity the calendar gives us.

Though I prefer to celebrate a long way from the firecrackers. And remembering Federico García Lorca. A man – dare I say this? – rather more to my heart than even good king James I. 

Lorca, who liked the Arabs in Spain,
and was terminally disliked by Spanish nationalists

The keys to an unsolved mystery

After a few weeks, I feel the trauma of the experience has receded enough for me to tell this story.

It all started a little while before the lockdown. Remember those times? When we thought we could handle objects on supermarket shelves with no threat to life? When we used to shake people’s hands? Chat to them without masks? We were in the little town of Manises, not far from our home outside the fine old city of Valencia.

We were there to complete the latest round of formalities that Spanish residents have to go through, in order to obtain some document, whose precise nature I can no longer clearly remember, though it was doubtless immensely important and an essential ingredient for a happy life in 21st century Spain.

On the other hand, it may have been to pay some tax or other. That’s another activity that’s popular with the Spanish bureaucracy.

We took the opportunity to wander around the place a little and find out what it offered in the way of exciting amenities. This was useful, because we had only been there in the evenings to play badminton (another receding memory, still banned in these Coronavirus times). We hadn’t seen much of the rest of the town.

Then we returned to the car. Only to discover that the keys had vanished. Both of us had seen them go into Danielle’s bag. Neither of us had seen them come out. We’d been to few places where they could have been expected to fall from the bag. In fact, really the only place was the tax office (yes, I think it was that). We went back, but there was no sign of the key. We tried the police, but they hadn’t had anything handed in either.

So we had to accept the inevitable. Neither of us had ever lost a key before, but now we somehow had. It was a sad record to break but, hey, life is full of things that just happen.

Getting the car back was a little awkward, involving a return trip home by taxi to collect a spare car key, with the help of our neighbour, who holds a copy of our house keys. But it was done in time, and we quickly ordered another key for the car.

Two weeks later, it still hadn’t arrived, but the lockdown had. The garage shut down. We couldn’t collect the new spare key even when it did arrive.

Fast forward 100 days to the end of the strict ‘confinement’ we crawled though in Spain.

The glorious day eventually came when we could return to the beach. And with friends. Things weren’t quite back to normal, so if we had travelled in the same car as the friends, we would all have had to wear masks. So we took two cars. Which turned out to be quite fortunate.

Because after a seven or eight kilometre walk through a nature reserve and along a beach, we got back to the cars, only to discover again that the keys were no longer in Danielle’s bag. We all searched. We took everything out of the bag, turned it upside down and shook it. No keys fell out.

We went back over the walk, with no greater success.

It seemed extraordinary. Having never previously lost a key in our lives, we had now managed to lose two in just over three months. I won’t hide it from you: it was a pretty depressing discovery.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, to lose one key may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.

Our friends were immensely kind. They took us first to the garage. The new key was available, but not usable, since it has to be programmed first. We had to find a way to get the car to the garage, which isn’t easy without a working key. While there, we ordered yet another key, to make sure we had a spare again.

Then our friends took us home, which at least didn’t take them too far out of their way: they live just half a dozen doors away from us. We walked disconsolately indoors. Danielle decided to get something out of my bag.

And found – the car keys.

It remains a complete mystery how the keys moved from her bag into mine. But somehow they did. We’ve decided that this is an enigma we’re never going to solve. Any more than the mystery of how it never occurred to any of the four of us on that walk to look in my bag for the keys, after not finding them in Danielle’s.

Another lift from our friends enabled us to collect the car. And the very next day, we had a call from the garage. The new key had turned up just 24 hours after we’d ordered it, unlike the previous one which took at least two weeks. So we couldn’t cancel it.

Three of a kind: an insurance policy

I’ve been back to the garage and got both new keys programmed and usable. So we now have three keys for the car.

Which may be just as well. With our track record, a bit of an insurance policy against key loss feels like a good investment.

A tour that revealed so much by showing us so little

It was a curious guided tour we went on through the old city centre of Valencia. In two ways.

The first curious thing was the reception we twice received from locals, as we stood listening to our guide, Marisa, talking to us through her loudspeaker. In English.

“Welcome back, tourists!” the first cried.

The second even went so far as to applaud us for returning to the city.

Valencia is as beautiful as ever, of course. But it is strangely quiet. Despite the hot weather, and the profusion of tables outside cafés and restaurants, they had few clients.

We heard one frustrated restaurant manager swearing, “this is complete shit”. A glance inside showed food ready for ordering, and no one ordering it. The main problem isn’t that locals are afraid to eat out, though there may be some of that. It’s that the influx of tourists we would expect at this time of year has simply not turned up.

The Coronavirus restrictions are gradually being lifted, but there’s still only a trickle of visitors from abroad. That’s throttling a lot of the business the city depends on.

Hence the applause on seeing us.

We hadn’t the heart to tell them that we all lived here. We might be on a tour, but we weren’t tourists. We didn’t want to spoil their celebration, brief as it was likely to be.

The other thing that made the tour strange was what we were visiting. It was the ‘Judería’, the Jewish quarter of the old city. What made it strange was that it is, physically, all but non-existent.

There was once a thriving Jewish community in Valencia. Many of its administrators and financiers were Jews. When James I took the Kingdom of Valencia from the previous Moorish rulers, he used Jews to help him run the place. In return, he gave them a large chunk of the city to be their own. They prospered so much that before long the Jewish quarter had to be extended still further.

It wasn’t just in administration and finance that the Jews distinguished themselves. In the course of our tour yesterday, we stopped to admire the (modern) bust of Luis Vives, one of Valencia’s most significant scholars, a contemporary and friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Luis Vives, descendant of Jews, 
not honoured in his own land

His major contribution was to the foundation of what we now know as psychology. However, he did that work not in Valencia, but in the Netherlands. An inscription behind the bust explains that the honour he couldn’t receive in his own land was afforded to him in another. Why? He was from a family of converted Jews, most of whom fell to persecution by the Inquisition. He was wise to get out.

A fine building in its own right
But it rather disguises the Jewish cemetery underneath it

Most of the tour was like that. We saw the rather fine palace built on part of the site of the main Jewish graveyard, but we saw no graves. We looked at where the principal Synagogue once stood, but not a trace of it remains. The closest we came to any physical sign of the previous Jewish presence was at the site of a major restoration project on the Valeriola Palace in the centre of the city. An old street runs through the site to the remains of a wall that marks the limits of the Jewish neighbourhood. A recently discovered oven too probably belonged to it.

Shoemaker Street in Valencia
A restoration project revealing a rare trace of the Jewish quarter

It’s extraordinary to see how utterly the community, and even any trace of its previous existence, has been wiped out.

It’s not just the Jews. Valencia was Arab for five centuries. There are more remains of that time than there are of the Jews, but still they’re rare and in ruins – odd stretches of wall, for instance, mostly underground.

And yet Jews offered some of the most important intellectual skills that Spain enjoyed, in administration, finance and even, as we’ve seen, philosophy, science and medicine. Meanwhile, the Muslims provided equally powerful intellectual contributions (one of the key figures leading to the European Renaissance was Averroes, a Moor from the Spanish city of Cordoba) and also some of the most sophisticated agricultural techniques the country possessed. Getting rid of these communities might indeed have made Spain more religiously homogeneous, but what was the price?

Judge for yourselves. In 1492, with the Columbus expedition to the Americas, Spain was launched on an adventure that would make it Europe’s, possibly the world’s, most powerful and wealthiest Empire. In that same year, it expelled its Jews. Twenty years later it was the turn of the Moors.

Within little more than a century, it was being challenged by France and the upstart Protestant powers of northern Europe, the English and the Dutch, the latter of whom won their independence from Spain in a long and bitter series of revolutionary wars.

By the early eighteenth century, Spain’s fate was being dictated to it by fighting between other countries to decide who would be its King, in the so-called War of Spanish Succession. By the start of the next century, it lost its dominance at sea at the Battle of Trafalgar. And by end of that same century, another upstart nation, the United States, had relieved it of its last major colonial possessions.

Perhaps it would have been the same even if it had kept its Jews and its Arabs. But I think they could have held their position a lot longer by drawing on those talents and applying them wisely, rather than driving them out. Accepting a little religious diversity might have done them a lot of good.

And that was the object lesson we drew, from the very fact that our tour showed us how little remained that we could actually look at...

Coronavirus lockdown release: phase 2 cotinued

We continue our slow climb out of lockdown here in Spain. It’s a relief, but tinged with anxiety, since there are signs of an increase in infections, and in daily deaths, as the restrictions are lifted.

The other uptick is in Opposition attacks on Government over its handling of the infection in the early stages. The Opposition claims that the government knew a lot earlier about the seriousness of the crisis than it has admitted, making its failure to take action sooner intolerable to the Conservatives.

Personally, I like the administration led by Pedro Sánchez and his Socialist Party. Its handling of the crisis since that early stage has been outstanding. However, I suppose as a supporter of democratic process, I can hardly object to an Opposition holding Government to account for its earlier errors, however much I may prefer the latter to the former.

Otherwise, how could I possibly demand that the Labour Opposition in Britain hold the Cummings government, and its figurehead leader Johnson, to account there? That’s a demand that needs to be made all the more strongly, now that Britain has officially racked up a performance worse than Spain’s, in deaths per million, despite having had the examples of both Italy and Spain to learn from.

At least in Spain we’re continuing to emerge from lockdown. Now, it may not last if infections keep climbing. So we’re taking advantage of freedom today, for fear that it might be curtailed by a new lockdown tomorrow. That means doing as much as possible, as soon as possible.

Museo de las Bellas Artes, Valencia

For instance, after having our first haircuts in three months, we headed for the Valencia Museum of Fine Arts, now visitable again. That’s an opportunity that hadn’t been taken up by many, so we met only one other visitor during our time there.

I’ve been there a couple of times before. However, I realised on this visit that I’d seen only a small fraction of the collection. That’s because previously I started, as one might expect, on the ground floor, which is just room after room of religious art from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Obviously, many people whose opinions I respect love this stuff. I’m afraid I quickly find I’ve had a surfeit of nativities, even more quickly of Mary weeping over Christ’s body, most quickly of all over martyrdoms, flagellations of Christ and crucifixions. In fact, three or four pin-cushion Saint Sebastians are usually about as many as I can stand before I head for the exit.

Why on Earth, in a religion like Christianity, focused as it’s supposed to be on loving one’s neighbour and turning the other cheek, are so many of its followers quite so obsessed with suffering, torture and death?

Still, there were a couple of paintings in this part of the Museum that I enjoyed.

Saint Sebastian cared for by Saint Irene
by Vrancke van der Stockt

I liked a Saint Sebastian who, far from being a pin cushion, seemed to be dying – or, more likely, already dead, given the shock and grief of Saint Irene who was looking after him – from a single arrow wound. A tribute, I felt, to the lethal power of even one arrow. No tribute at all, though, to the shooting accuracy of the Roman legion, a whole execution squad of which had been assigned to dealing with him. Did the rest all miss, then?

Adam and Eve by Matthias Stom

The other one I liked was of a strangely stylised – almost surreal – painting of Adam and Eve holding a fruit, oddly elongated upwards. I wondered whether the artist was perhaps a member of a strange heretical sect of which I hadn’t previously heard, which believed that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree from which they weren’t supposed to eat, was a pear and not an apple?

Was it a pear they tasted?

Look at it. It’s obviously a pear.

Incidentally, while on the subject I can’t resist passing on this thought from the outstanding eighteenth century thinker, Denis Diderot, who commented that the Christian God is a father who attaches great importance to his apples, and very little to his children.

But back to the Museum of Fine Arts. For the first time in three visits, rather than giving up and leaving after having a glut of the religious paintings, I let myself be persuaded by Danielle to take a look at the other floors. And what a joy that was. On the upper floors, I discovered the collections of more recent paintings, that were far more to my taste.

Perhaps the most famous painter from Valencia is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station in the city is even called after him. And the Museum has some excellent examples of his work. One, I thought at first glance was of a cricketer, given his all-white clothes.

Sorolla's painting of a cricketer?
Not, the son of a friend

But cricket has never really caught on in Spain, and this turns out to be a rather eye-catching portrait of José Luis Benlliure López de Arana, son of Sorolla’s friend, the sculptor Mariano Benlliure.

The Fly
A charming surprise to discover it

Even more striking was a painting by a contemporary of Sorolla’s, Cecilio Plá. It’s called The Fly and includes a smile that charms by its cheekiness, within a pose that mystifies by the way it reveals all the more by being partially hidden.

So, all in all, it was a rewarding visit. What can I saw about Phase 2 of our lockdown release? Just ‘so far, so good’.

Of course, that’s what the man said as he passed the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building, having fallen from the top. Let’s hope we’re heading towards a better fate than awaited him.

Beach walking out of the lockdown in Valencia

One of the things about emerging from Lockdown is that things you once took for granted now feel special.

Today, that was a visit to a beach near us, south of Valencia. It was the first since the lockdown began to the ease. Indeed, it was the first since just before the lockdown started.

Striding along the beach at El Saler

Taking people to that beach with its miles of golden sand is pretty much a fixture on our list of things to do with visitors. On Saturday 14 March, we went there with friends who’d been staying with us for that week. We enjoyed the visit though, already, the atmosphere was turning tense. 

We’d booked a table for lunch in a nearby village, for paella, since both the beach and the village are in the middle of rice fields. That means that rice-based paella’s a specialty.

The restaurant had, however, had to cancel our reservation. All cafés, bars and restaurants had been ordered to close in response to the coronavirus epidemic. So the shared paella, another item that appears high on our list of things to do with visitors, was off the table. Literally.

What was worse, we knew that the day after next Spain was going into full lockdown. France, where our friends were from, was talking about lockdown and already considering quarantining anyone arriving by air. Indeed, it wasn’t even certain that air travel would be allowed to continue, which was bad news since they were due to fly back the day after our beach walk.

So there was apprehension in the air. It didn’t stop us enjoying our time on the beach, but it did introduce some worrisome notes.

Even sadder, once our friends from France had gone, two friends from England were due to follow them to our place. They, intelligently, had already cancelled, however. Had they set out they might have found themselves trapped somewhere between their home and ours and, at best, having to make a difficult emergency return to the UK.

Unfortunately, however, that meant they didn’t get a beach walk at all.

Should we have gone out this morning? Well, the authorities differ on the matter. The leading local paper claims that, in phase 1 of emergence from lockdown, and Valencia is in phase 1, you can drive to different places in the same province to have some exercise there.

Others say no, you can only travel to specific places, such as restaurants, to meet small numbers of friends and have a coffee or a meal with them, outdoors and strictly respecting social distancing. I can see how that makes sense: if people all travel to the same place, there’s a risk that they’ll end up congregating in unsafe numbers.

The fear at the moment is that the end of lockdown will lead to a new surge in Covid cases and deaths.

Well, we decided to choose the interpretation of the regulations which suited us best. And it worked out fine. There were people in the nature reserve behind the beach, and on the beach itself, but few enough of them for distancing to be easy. Everyone seemed to understand that, as people approached each other, one or other would swerve away from the sea – a beach walk, naturally, involves being barefoot in the surf – and exchange polite greetings from a safe distance as they passed.

The nature reserve behind the beach,
with a black-winged stilt (I'm reliably told) flying over the water

Two of the people we met were in official uniforms and carrying guns. Since they said nothing, we decided we clearly weren’t committing any desperately serious offence.

And it was glorious out there. The air warm enough to be a delight but not yet hot enough to be uncomfortable. Miles of sand disappearing southwards to a distant town. Limpid water we could paddle through, which reached out to deep blue at the horizon.

Just as we remembered it when we were there with our French friends back in March. Except warmer. Just as we would have enjoyed it with our English friends had they been able to make it. And a joy after ten weeks deprived of the pleasure.

So today’s walk, and this post, are dedicated to Marie-Line and Bernard from France, who were there on 14 March, and to Sue and Tim from England who had to cancel their trip, but we hope will join us soon.

At least we’re all safe from the Coronavirus so far. That makes the sacrifice a price worth paying. Let’s hope things stay that way.

So that we can indulge ourselves in other beach trips and, who knows, a wonderful local paella again, before too long.

Lockdown disappointment, or why the truth is sometimes hard to bear

What a terrible disappointment those of us who live near Valencia had to suffer on Friday night.

We’re near the end of the eighth week of our lockdown in Spain. Reputedly the toughest in Europe.

As it happens, we’re now in phase zero of lockdown relaxation. That means we’re allowed out for exercise once a day, at specific times, alone, or for walks with one other person from the same household. You can get your hair cut, though only with an appointment. Chlldren can go out with their parents and dog owners can walk their dogs, close to home. Otherwise, we’re only allowed out to shop for food or medication, or attend healthcare centres.

Phase 1 is due to start on Monday, 11 May. That would allow us to travel together by car, and to go anywhere within the three provinces that make up the Valencia Community. We could go to the mountains! Or to the sea!

Cafes and restaurants and more shops would also reopen, with strict social distancing restrictions, and groups of up to ten people could even get together.

It was something to look forward to. We felt sorry for the other Communities, in particular Catalonia, which had decided not to ask for permission to move to phase 1, because they didn’t feel their health situation warranted it yet. As we were astonished to discover that the Madrid Community had asked to transition, despite being the place worst hit. The Madrid director of Public Health even resigned in protest over the local government’s drive for further relaxation.

Then the lightning bolt struck.

Ultimately it was up to the Ministry of Health at national level to decide which areas might be allowed to move to phase 1 and which would have to wait. In the end, only 51% of Spanish residents will be making the transition. Madrid certainly won’t. But even within the Valencian Community, only a few smaller regions will be allowed to, but most won’t, including the city of Valencia itself. That covers us.

Why won’t we be allowed to move to the next phase?

The Health ministry has looked at the trends in infections and compared them with the number of general and intensive care unit beds in the hospitals. They’ve looked at testing and infection monitoring facilities. They’ve looked at a range of factors. Their conclusion? Like Madrid, we’re not yet ready to manage the risks, or to handle a resurgence of cases if one occurs.

That’s not a popular decision. A lot of anger, above all from the Conservative and hard right opposition, has been directed at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and the Left-leaning coalition government. Even with two parties, it’s in a minority in Parliament and has to depend on smaller groups to get its measures adopted.

That includes the continuation of the state of emergency that’s being used to impose the lockdown. They had the guts to back him when it came up for renewal this week.

Pedro Sánchez battling for his strategy in the Spanish Parliament

It’s not quite clear what his critics expect. Presumably they realise he doesn’t have a magic wand to end the pandemic. Have they perhaps decided that the economic damage of the lockdown isn’t worth the health benefit it’s delivered? That benefit has been considerable, with new cases and deaths both dropping steadily. So do the critics think that money matters more than lives?

The strategy seems to be working

They’re not alone. State after state in the US is opening up. Some, like Nebraska, are doing so at a time when it’s obviously extremely risky. Not only are infections and deaths in Nebraska not falling, they’re rising steeply. But the governor is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, who wants the economy going again to strength his chance of re-election, whatever the cost in lives.

Last week, I wrote about the way lies flourish when people choose to believe them.

The attacks on Sánchez show the reverse side of that same coin. When the truth is unpalatable, people prefer to reject it and attack the bearer of the message. In my earlier piece, I quoted the American journalist H L Mencken. Here’s another view of his which applies just as well outside the US:

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

The truth is that a lot of Spain isn’t ready to move from phase 0 to phase 1 of lockdown relaxation. At least, not without putting far too many lives at risk. Our disappointment is real, but we just have to swallow it.

Otherwise we simply run from the truth. And we belittle human life, like Pete Ricketts, the governor of Nebraska. A far more enlightened governor, Andrew Cuomo of New York, asked recently, “how much is a human life worth?”

Those backing Trump and Ricketts, or attacking Sánchez, probably won’t admit it, but I suspect their answer would be pretty low.

At least, for any life but their own.

Light at the end of the lockdown tunnel

Sunday was a great day.

(Nearly) summertime and the living is easing

It wrapped up week 6 of our lockdown here in Spain and, boy, it’s been (and still is) a tough lockdown. People not absolutely obliged to travel to work are only allowed out to go the shops, the banks, a pharmacy, a healthcare centre or (it may just be me, but I find this amusing) to the newsagent to get a newspaper. Could this be the triumph of the much-maligned Mainstream Media? Of those institutions Trump denounces as purveyors as fake news? Here they have special status.

There are a few exceptions to the lockdown rules. We, by sheer good luck, fall into one of them: dog owners are allowed to walk their dogs, though only close to home. But what exactly is ‘close’? At one time, the suggestion was just 50 metres but, outside the cities, there is slightly more leeway in the definition.

In a spirit of complete compliance with the strict letter of the regulations, I can firmly state that we never go far.

And in strict compliance with the spirit of the regulations, we never meet anyone anyway, so we’re exposing neither ourselves nor them to any risk.

Besides, the smaller dog – Toffee – has developed a certain indolence recently. Since we’re only allowed to walk on the streets, and not in the woods, and she doesn’t like the streets, she’s more than capable of lying down suddenly at the end of her lead – we’re not allowed to take them off the lead – and making it quite clear that she intends to go no further.

That really can happen within 50 metres of home.

The option then is to head back or carry her. And, small though she is, I certainly do not enjoy carrying her far. That too helps to keep the definition of ‘close’ to within pretty tight bounds.

The only people allowed out under any of these arrangements were, in any case, adults or kids of 14 or over. The only exception were children with a single parent or carer: when the adult went out, the kids necessarily went with them. But all other kids were stuck indoors. Which is pretty soul-destroying if you think that the lockdown was just coming up to the end of six weeks.

Lovely weather AND the kids are out again

That’s what made Sunday so great. The Spanish government decided that the downward trend in numbers of Coronavirus cases and, above all, of deaths was sufficient to allow a little slackening of the rules. And the big deal was that kids up to 14 would now be able to go out, for an hour a day, to play as they wished, with no particular destination in mind. They could take toys, scooters, skates or even bikes. A single adult could accompany them, taking care of up to three kids.

What made things even better was that the weather had just turned glorious. To me, still retaining British criteria, it felt like summer, with temperatures in the mid-twenties (OK, OK, high seventies if you insist on using that old-fashioned Fahrenheit). No one from around here would call that summery, of course. They’d just say, “just you wait. You’ll see what real summer is like. You’ll be regretting the rain.” And I know they’re right: we were here last summer. Even so, Sunday felt good and raised my spirits, for both the weather and the unusual sight of families out walking.

People did cheat a bit. There were a lot of family groups out, with what looked distinctly like two parents with the kids. And at times different families met up and chatted, not always, as far as I could tell, respecting social-distancing requirements.

In our local city, Valencia, things were worse. The council, unlike its opposite numbers in Madrid, decided to reopen the parks for the first time. A flood of humanity descended into them. The police were nice, though. They announced in the evening that they’d gone round that day telling people what they should be doing and, above all, what they shouldn’t, without fining anyone. But that was a one-off ‘pedagogical experience’. From Monday on, it would be fines again. And they’re not cheap here.

The weekdays have seen a return to something more orderly. People are still out, and the weather’s still good, but social distancing has become the norm again.

Now we’re waiting for the next step. The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said that the exit from the lockdown will take up to eight weeks, until the end of June. That’ll make 14 weeks in all, which sounds a bit right: Wuhan in China is approaching three months.

The exit will happen in steps, making it a lockdown stepdown, I suppose. The stages will be timed differently in different regions. The first step, however, has already been announced. As of the coming Saturday, we adults will also be allowed out, for the first time since the whole business started, for an hour’s exercise or walking a day. And we don’t even have to go out alone but can walk with others from our household. In my case, that means that I can enjoy Danielle’s company, though if our cat Misty wants to join us, I dare say we won’t object to his coming along too.

That’s subject to things continuing to go well. But yesterday saw the lowest number of new cases registered since the lockdown began, so I’m feeling a little optimistic.

There could be light at the end of this particular tunnel.