Iftar, or enjoying a Muslim breakfast

Breakfast with friends has to be fun. And that’s true even when it’s in the evening. In fact, it’s better in the evening, if just for the novelty.

The occasion was an Iftar. That’s the ceremony of breaking the Ramadan fast – a rather special breakfast, in fact – at the end of daylight. Ramadan and its fasting is one of the five pillars of Sunni Islam.

Just for the record, another is the declaration of faith, so ‘Allahu Akbar’ isn’t some kind of terrorist slogan, as some might be led to believe by its handling in the Western media, but the key assertion of belief of Muslims everywhere (close to a quarter of the world’s population). It means God is greatest.

A further pillar that Britons ought to value particularly is the obligation to give alms. This is generally done quietly, without ostentation; there is a similar principle in Christianity, ‘do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing’. Unfortunately, the left hand of Muslim charity keeps things so quiet that it took the right hand of a parliamentary investigation to reveal just how much good it does.

A Muslim friend – and not just any friend but a Badminton partner, so someone pretty special – and her husband invited us to join an Iftar in one of our local parks. There’s a tradition that non-Muslims should be invited to at least one such occasion during Ramadan, and many Luton mosques had extended similar invitations.

The friend who invited us
With two non-Muslim guests (Danielle to the right)

The Ramadan fast lasts from sunrise to sunset. Since it’s based on a lunar calendar with four-week months, over the years the celebration falls at different seasons. It’s particularly tough when it happens in the summer. Right now, daylight lasts nineteen hours in Britain. A Muslim friend – this time special not because of badminton but because he’s a colleague – tells me that in Norway, where he lives, the day is currently 22 hours long. In the two remaining hours, it must be hard to fit in two meals. Our British friends just about pull it off, by eating at 9:15 at night and before 3:30 in the morning.

In fact, there are some regions where summer days are so long, with barely any night at all, that a special dispensation has been made for them: they keep the same hours as Mecca. It strikes me as only fair that a similar arrangement ought to apply everywhere. After all, when Ramadan falls in the winter, my friend in Norway would have to fast for only two hours of daylight, which makes it rather an empty gesture, doesn’t it? I mean, even I can go two hours without eating.

It seems that there may be increasing pressure among younger Muslims to adopt generally the notion that the fast period should always last as long as it does in Mecca. That would make sense to me and I wish my friends luck with pushing this reform through.

As for the event itself, it was charming. We sat on a blanket under an awning and waited for daylight to end.

“The last minutes are the worst,” our friend told us.

At 9:14, with the fast due to end at 9:15, her husband added that the very last minute was worse than any other.

Then came the longed-for moment, when the sun dipped below the horizon. We ate dates, the traditional start of the breakfast. Then we turned our attention to the chicken, bhajis and spiced rice, which was astonishingly good – astonishing because there must have been 200 or so people there and it’s rare, in my experience, that food prepared for that many people is good at all, but this was delicious.

It had to be eaten quickly since prayer – another of the pillars – started only a few minutes later. But, in any case, after nineteen hours of fasting, I doubt many people there minded getting on with the food.

While the prayers were going on, we chatted with some of the other non-Muslims or, indeed, the Muslims who’d stayed behind to look after the young children. Danielle joined in with that task, knocking a balloon backwards and forwards with two of the kids. She’s the perfect grandmother to any child who needs one, while she waits for some more of her own to come along.

Danielle as stand-in grandmother

All in all, it was a warm-hearted, pleasant, and enjoyable experience. It was encouraging to see the far more widespread and far more attractive side of Islam than the one we tend to get from the press. Above all, it was just great to be there.

Trump playing Napoleon? It could end in tears

Is it to be war, then?

Not, thank God, the shooting kind. But something almost as damaging. The enlightened Trump seems to have decided that the best way of dealing with the economic problems of the United States is a trade war with his allies. He’s poised to impose tariffs on imports from his two neighbours, Mexico and Canada, and on the world’s biggest trading bloc the European Union, which still includes Britain for now.

Trump: a latter-day Napoleon?
Without quite the genius...

By coincidence, I’ve just finished reading a biography of Napoleon, recommended to me by a French friend because, though written by an Englishman, it provides a superbly balanced view of the man. Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon the Great is well worth reading, whichever side of the Channel your sympathies lie, since its meticulous research and lucid analysis punctures a lot of myths, of Napoleon as either the greatest of leaders or as a tyrannical monster.

As the Napoleonic wars progressed, both sides attempted to use economic weapons against the other. Britain, then undisputed master of the seas, used the Royal Navy to blockade the ports of France and the nations it had occupied, and even went so far as to wage war against the United States to try to enforce its embargo.

Equally, Napoleon tried to impose the Continental System on France and its occupied territories, to keep out all British trade. He was prepared to go so far as to invade Russia to impose respect of the embargo, a move which would lead to the catastrophic retreat from Moscow and ultimately the loss of his throne.

Describing the impact of these two competing trade boycotts, Roberts writes:

The year 1811 saw the start of a continental economic crisis that lasted two years and that also engulfed Britain, which was beset by bad harvests, wage cuts … and food shortages. Mulhouse in eastern France saw two-thirds of its workforce of 60,000 unemployed, and over 20,000 were unemployed in Lyons. Napoleon needed to stimulate economic growth, but his [adoption of eighteenth-century economic views], which rejected the idea of competition and free exchange as positive phenomena, sent him back to attempting to enforce ever more strictly the Continental System, even if it might eventually mean fighting Russia again…

By 1812 Napoleon believed that the Continental System was working, and cited the bankruptcies of various London banks and commercial enterprises to support this…

The system was, indeed, causing considerable harm to Britain’s economy.

Napoleon was not wrong in assuming that Britain was suffering very seriously as a result of his Continental System… Trade declined rapidly… the bad harvests of 1811 and 1812 led to food shortages and inflation, and war expenditure increased budget deficits from £16 million in 1810 to £27 million in 1812. Some 17 per cent of Liverpool’s population was unemployed during the winter of 1811/12, and the militia had to be deployed against potential rioters … across the Midlands and North of England, with ringleaders sentenced to transportation to Australia, or even in some cases death.

The parallels are striking, aren’t they? We can be sure that Trump will be as convinced as Napoleon that his trade measures are working. But the only certain consequence they’ll have is hardship on all sides – the eighteenth-century rejection of ‘the idea of competition and free exchange as positive phenomena’ is a dangerous illusion, a truth that both Trump supporters in the US and Brexiters in Britain would do well to learn.

The big difference is that, though he came badly unstuck at the end, Napoleon was a political genius as well as a military one. Even if we bend over backwards to be generous towards him, it’s hard to classify Trump as a genius of any kind. Indeed, I find it hard to believe that he has the mental capacity to learn the lessons of Napoleon’s final failure.

Retreat from Moscow
Crushing, immensely costly defeat - not least in lives

Because ultimately, Napoleon’s attempt to impose his system took him to war with Russia, leading to a crushing defeat and his downfall. That Trump suffers the same fate as Napoleon may seem highly desirable. However, Napoleon led an army of 500,000 into Russia and returned with just 50,000. Let’s hope that this isn’t the kind of price we pay for Trump’s failure to learn that adventures with trade weapons are as dangerous as the adventures with firearms he seems so keen to defend in the US.

Especially as the damage done by any such disaster in the twenty-first century is likely to be far greater than even on the retreat from Moscow in the nineteenth.

Atlantis in the City of Serendipity

Alone in the fine old Swiss city of Basel, I felt I needed to find somewhere a bit different, perhaps even a bit special, to spend my evening.

As it happens, Basel’s a city I know well. It’s because I needed to consult documents in the university library here that I came to stay for a weeks in Hegenheim, just across the border in the French province of Alsace, way back in 1981. It was because I was in Hegenheim, that I met a pleasant nine-year-old who wanted to talk about the planets, and ended up spending the evening with him drawing a map of the solar system. It was because of that boy and that map that I met his mother. And, 37 years and two sons on, that boy’s my stepson and that mother’s my wife.

There was a place that did rather wonderful open sandwiches I knew, but it’s shut up shop and been replaced by a slightly garish bar. There was a sushi restaurant that tempted me but, hey, they’re two a penny around Europe now. Nothing special there, certainly. But then I saw a sign, on the door of a restaurant that looked definitely closed (lights off, chairs piled on tables): ‘roof terrace this way’.

Door to the sun terrace

I walked ‘this way’, following several more signs. Eventually I reached a door marked ‘Sun Terrace’. Now, that sounded special. Particularly to an Englishman, in other words someone from a country where, as a general rule, there’s far too little sun to encourage anyone to build a terrace.

I climbed a flight of stairs, then another, then a third. The encouraging signs kept urging me upwards. I emerged on a kind of high courtyard that would have been completely open to the sky had a large portion of it not been covered by canvas awnings. Another set of steps took me to the very top, close enough to the canvas to touch it, and where I could see out to a narrow vista of three or four roof tops and typical Basel house walls, plastered and moulded and painted attractive colours.

Hardly had I placed my order and wondered whether the awnings would actually hold out the rain, when the elements provided me with a conclusive answer. 

They wouldn’t.

The sun terrace turning into a rain terrace

Not much makes me proud of being British these days, since a small majority of my compatriots decided that what the world most needed was a country that turned its back on its neighbours. But I have sufficient pride in my British stoicism, and the resistance it gives me to the weather, to want to stay put despite the downpour that gradually developed above – a few drops, a shower or two, then rain, then a true summer storm, lightning and all.

The waiter was good enough to rub down my table from time to time, even wiping the surface of my increasingly moist Kindle – if I have to eat alone I do find being able to read while I do it is the only way to make the experience pleasurable. But I ate my way stoically through my excellent first course despite the increasing evidence that the position was becoming untenable.

Excellent first course.
Note the raindrops in the background

“It won’t last long,” a waitress told me, expressing what was – as I told her – my firm conviction too. Though I suspect conviction didn’t really come into it, so much as a willingness to encourage each other’s denial of the evidence.

Things finally came to a head when that same waitress wondered whether I really needed another bottle of water, but couldn’t instead just leave my glass on the table a while to see it fill up all by itself.

I retreated, Brit or no, to the slightly better shelter offered by the roof courtyard below. And there enjoyed my equally excellent second course.

It was over the chocolate mousse that I heard the waitress explaining to another client that the lease on the building was being terminated and within a few weeks the restaurant would close. She seemed unfazed by the knowledge – ‘it was very badly run,’ she announced – but to me it seemed sad that a place I’d discovered after 37 years was only going to last a short time longer. It was called Atlantis, oddly enough, and it seems I’ve merely caught a glimpse of it before it’s swallowed up by the waves.

Pity after serendipity, I suppose. But at least Basel gave me my wife and she’ll still be there when I head home the day after tomorrow. With a story about a certainly rather different – perhaps, indeed, special – dinner experience to tell her.

From Hard Labour to London Transport

Bureaucratic records are dry to the point of dullness.

Record of a condemnation

Some poor fellow, 27 years old, appeared before a court martial on 13 April 1917. He was resisting mobilisation on the grounds of conscientious objection (in other words, pacifism); he was condemned to two years gaol with hard labour.

From 16 April to 14 July he served at Wormwood Scrubs, still a high-security prison in West London. My work involves hospital visits and I’ve frequently been to Hammersmith Hospital. It’s right next door to ‘the Scrubs’ and seeing that huge wall would make me think of Oscar Wilde, “all that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong”.

But this prisoner didn’t stay long at the Scrubs. In July 1917 he was transferred to an even grimmer destination, Dartmoor prison in England’s South West. I was at school near Dartmoor and one of my best memories of my time there was walking on the moor, which occasionally led us to Princetown where the prison stands.

This story all sounds a little dire, doesn’t it? What makes it more powerfully personal is that it happened to one Norman Bannister – also known as Nathaniel Bernstein – who was my grandfather.

Nor does the record wholly reflect his experience, as he would tell it, about the transfer to Dartmoor. They went by train and with him were an officer and a private soldier, both armed, with a uniform laid out on the bench beside him. All the way down, and the train trip took some four hours then, they threatened him with their weapons and demanded he put on the uniform.

He refused. It’s a decision for which my admiration only grows each time I think of it. And it all came back to me again the other day.

No need to ask a policeman
Poster promoting the classic Underground map

The object that reminded me of the story may seem wholly unrelated to it. It came from a book we rescued from clearing out our former flat in Germany. It was a collection of London Transport posters put together by an architecture historian, Harold Hutchison, in the 1960s. Not, in itself, a particularly significant book, you may feel, but it includes a dedication from its author:

To N. Bannister who has served London Transport so well and so long

My grandfather left school at the earliest moment after the end of the obligatory (and free) period of schooling – at 13. He was apprenticed to a lithographer and, by the time he was 24, when the First World War broke out, he was a fully qualified master of his trade. But war interrupted all that, taking him eventually to prison.

Striking view of Charing Cross station

However, with peace he was released and returned to his career. The skill he had developed was an ability to look at a painting and determine, by eye alone, how many colours it would take to print a good copy of it. He spent the majority of his career as a salesman for a lithography company one of whose major customers was London Transport.

The Underground to greenery

I don’t imagine my grandfather contributed much to society with his hard labour at Wormwood Scrubs or Dartmoor. But he did defend a principle that matters as much today as it did then. On the other hand, in peacetime he contributed to the production of art – popular art but art nonetheless – that brightened the lives of millions of commuters and produced some iconic images.

Glorious sketch of Chiswick to the west of London

Which I was delighted to leaf through when I came across the book.

Mañana, mañana

There’s an old joke – my family who’ve heard it far too often would say a very old joke – about a linguistics conference where a Spanish delegate approaches an Irish one with a question.

‘Is there an equivalent in the Irish language of the Spanish word mañana?’

The Irishman thinks for a while before replying:

‘Well, I can think of 32 equivalents in Irish of the Spanish word mañana but somehow none of them conveys the same sense of urgency.’

The joke is aimed at the Irish, of course, but it’s based on a stereotype of Spaniards. The suggestion is that they’re always putting off till tomorrow - mañana - what they ought to be doing immediately. That’s curious because our experience of Spain, or at least that bit of it that constitutes Valencia, entirely contradicts that image.

As I write this, we’re on a train travelling away from Valencia. With some regret: Danielle and I were only too ready to stay on indefinitely in that charming city, and our sorrow is reduced only by the knowledge that we’re travelling towards Madrid where our sons (and their partners) live.

Jacarandas in the Turia Park

What makes Valencia so charming isn’t just the physical beauty of the place, though that’s great enough. Apart from some glorious buildings ranging in antiquity from the middle ages right through to the last decade, it also has the old bed of the Turia river, now a magnificent park, cutting a circular arc through the city. Walking about the place, especially in the kind of weather we had last week, is truly a delight.

At the other end of the Turia and in different weather, last year:
the modernism of the City of Art and Science

What’s still more heartening is the attitude of the people. They have a warmth and approachability that constantly astonishes us. At one point, I was struggling up a street with one end of a double mattress (rolled up but still heavy) on one shoulder (the other was on the shoulder of one of my sons – without it he’d have been sleeping in great discomfort, if at all, that evening). As I tried to balance the weight on my shoulder while trying to bend down and pick up a bag, I suddenly heard a woman’s voice, ‘Wait! Wait!’ She rushed over and put the bag handle in my hand.

That’s a woman I’d never met and don’t expect ever to meet in the future. Such a gesture of friendliness from a complete stranger is deeply heartwarming. As Tennessee Williams would assure us, it’s always good to be able to rely on the kindness of strangers.

But as well as being kind, Valencians are also remarkably efficient.

The flat we bought needed some work done on it. The architect we commissioned to see to it, and who also acted as project manager, brought the work in on time (which mattered: we had furniture arriving from Germany), to budget and to an excellent standard.

While we were staying there, Danielle decided that she wouldn’t wake me when she got up in the night for the usual sort of visit, so she didn’t put on the light. As a result she managed to break her little toe against a table leg, letting out a scream which I suspect woke the whole building and not just me. My interrupted sleep was as nothing compared to hers: she spent he rest of the night awake and only got relief from the pain when she visited a pharmacist who (a) spoke beautiful English, (b) recommended a pain-relieving dressing and (c) applied it to her toe for her.

Just yesterday, we decided that the front door lock was simply too fiddly. You had to insert a key and then pull it out again just far enough, but not too far, to get it to turn. It could take minutes to open the door which was horribly frustrating. But we were leaving at lunchtime today. No problem: the locksmith recommended to us last night showed up this morning at 8:30, and ten minutes later the job was done.

So I can safely say that, whatever the position elsewhere in Spain, in Valencia mañana doesn’t mean ‘at some indefinite date in the future’. It just means ‘tomorrow’ and that can be at 8:30 in the morning if necessary.

Ah, it’s a shame to be leaving that place. We’re already counting the days until we go back. Especially as we’re returning to England, where in building work in particular, the watchword genuinely seems to be ‘never put off until tomorrow what can possibly be left to the month after next.’

As we learned while having work done on our house last autumn, when it comes to mañana, England has nothing to learn from Spain – or Ireland either.

Not woman's work

We have no dishwasher in our new flat in Valencia.

I’m using the word ‘new’ to mean new to us. The building is, in fact, nearly a century old, which is hardly ancient by Spanish standards, but certainly doesn’t qualify as recent either. So it’s our new flat in a relatively old Valencian building.

In any case, we haven’t put a dishwasher in. So I’ve just finished washing some dishes, making it all the more appropriate that I write this post, for reasons that will become increasingly clear as you read it.

Hanging washing out to dry in England is something of a gambler’s exercise. You have a reasonable chance that within a few hours – it seldom takes less than that – it’ll be dry. But you have as good a chance that it will be dripping wet again, indeed possibly wetter than when you took it out of the machine in the first place. England, it has been rightly pointed out, is a country without a climate but plenty of weather.

Valencia, on the other hand, has the kind of climate that makes it a joy to rely on. For most of the year, the temperature is neither uncomfortably hot nor unpleasantly cold. When the rain falls, it tends to be seen as a pleasant change and a welcome refreshment for plants, rather than yet another annoyance. Leading to a washing line full of clothes being drenched.

We haven’t been in Valencia long enough to have become used to our new state of affairs. Danielle still takes delight in hanging washing out on our pocket-balcony, and even more at being able to take it back in, bone dry, about five minutes later.

In fact, she enjoys it so much that she couldn’t resist saying so on FaceBook.

Danielle's FaceBook pic of our balcony washing line

Monica is a friend of ours who is Spanish herself but living in Eastern France. That's where we met her, during our time in or near Strasbourg. She replied to Danielle’s post to point out that hanging up washing should not be regarded as woman’s work and that I, too, should pull my weight.

Trying to show willing

Photos can’t lie, can they? So I’m delighted to include one of me fiddling with the buttons on the washing machine. I admit that this does not absolutely prove that I took charge of doing that load of washing, but at least it shows that I was interested in understanding the process. Which counts for something, doesn’t it?

Besides, I did try to pull my weight in other ways. For instance, when it came to the IKEA assembly tasks, it was I who undertook the bulk of them. Readily I might add. With pleasure even.

The joy of IKEA assembly

One of those tasks was particularly satisfying, though I’m not sure I should be admitting as much. What it led to was the kind of chair that led my stepson David to point out that, since I was now a granddad, it was time I had one. My view is that, since I’ve been a granddad for thirteen years now, it’s actually long overdue that I should be able to relax in a rocking chair.

Granddad’s delight. And Grandma’s too

Not, of course, that I expect to spend much time rocking. There’s work to do, and no reason to suppose that it’s specifically female. As Monica would no doubt point out, if ever I suggested otherwise.

Kehl to Valencia completed

Another milestone…

Some weeks ago, we cleared out our old flat in Germany, in Kehl on the frontier with France at Strasbourg. We hung on to some of the furniture from that clearance. Today, we took delivery of it in Valencia, in Spain. 

That means we feel as though we really have moved into this place. A flat we took as a shell now feels like a home. Indeed, in many ways a familiar home: we’ve been joined by my grandparents’ dinner table, their Welsh dresser (hand built by a joiner friend for their wedding in the 1920s), Danielle’s parents’ antique wardrobe (bought in Versailles before it moved to Eastern France and Germany before coming here), my parents’ desk (built of teak, no longer legal today, and which has now travelled from the US to England, France, Germany and finally to Spain – truly a cosmopolitan piece of furniture).

Our much-travelled desk in place

The fact that the furniture was brought to us from Germany led to an interesting linguistic problem. I can’t say that I truly master German and Spanish, which I speak to a level that can at best be described as passable. So dealing with German removals men at the same time as the Spaniards who were helping us, proved more than my grasp of the languages could handle: I found myself saying ‘Danke’ to the Spaniards and ‘Gracias’ to the Germans or, worse still, getting hopelessly confused and producing sentences even more incoherent than usual. I’m glad to say, however, that they were all friendly and polite, and smiled and nodded at me, as if to say that while they had no idea what I was trying to say, they could tell I was attempting to be friendly and they appreciated it.

Our two sons and our daughter-soon-to-be-in-law from Madrid came to help us and provide company, so the process was a great deal easier than the ghastly stress of the Kehl clearout. It’s also fun to have them around for the weekend. In fact, we’re due to go out with them soon for a meal – just as soon as we’ve finished our celebratory drink and I’ve finished this blog post.

The living room furnished and populated
by son and soon-to-be daughter-in-law

So I raise my glass to your health and our move. And drain it. And post this brief expression of relief for a tiring move successfully completed.

All but drained, to your good health