Ukraine and the long, dark tunnel waiting for us

Back in 2011, I travelled to the city of Kharkiv in Ukraine, to work with colleagues based there.

My main memory was of the people I met there. To an astonishing degree, they were bright, welcoming and friendly. No one could ask for better colleagues.

Being there, though, was an eye-opening experience. Kharkiv is only 30 km from the Russian border, and it’s a fundamentally Russian-speaking city. One colleague told me that, though she was a Russian speaker, with relatives living inside Russia, she was working hard to learn Ukrainian.

‘You see, I’m Ukrainian,’ she explained, ‘and I should be able to speak my national language.’

She was by no means alone in her attitude. Among my colleagues, the feeling was widespread that, Russian speakers though they might be, they were Ukrainian. Putin’s claim that these are ethnic Russians longing to be reabsorbed into their mother country has only the flimsiest basis in truth.

You can imagine how my old friends reacted to the arrival of Russian forces on their national territory.

Kharkiv during my visit in 2011
and after the Russian army’s in 2022

Recently, I’ve been thinking of them more than usual. That’s following Donald Trump’s decision to open negotiations with Russia over peace in Ukraine. Negotiations that exclude Ukraine itself, which one might be forgiven for suspecting had more than a passing interest in any agreement reached.

In turn, that got me thinking about Czechoslovakia. That’s a country that no longer exists. It, indeed, had a pretty brief existence. Up to the end of the First World War, the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia had been Austrian possessions within the Austro-Hungarian empire. Slovakia had belonged to the Hungarian bit. Just that fact will give you an idea that there were serious differences between the two sides.

Despite those differences, they were pushed into a single country, Czechoslovakia, which existed with only a break bestowed on it by Nazi Germany, until the last day of 1992. On the first day of 1993, following what has been called the velvet divorce, they peacefully separated into today’s Czechia and Slovakia.

It's the time of Nazi rule that I keep thinking of.

Now, let’s be clear. History doesn’t repeat itself exactly. What it does is produce circumstances with major parallels to something that happened before.

In the early phase of Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy, he focused on Germans living in other countries and therefore deprived of the blessings of his personal rule. The first group he focused on was the Austrian German-speakers, and in April 1938, he annexed the country to his German Reich (Empire).

Next on his to-do list was the German-speaking community of Czechoslovakia, the so-called Sudeten Germans. They lived all along the northern, western and southern borders of the country. Hitler, like most autocrats of his kind, loathed all acts of persecution, unless he was imposing them himself. He so hated persecution applied to friends, like the Sudeten Germans, that he was even prepared to invent instances of it if no real ones were available.

He made such a fuss about alleged Czech bad behaviour towards its Sudeten citizens that other nations began to worry that Hitler was about to intervene. Militarily. This was particularly worrying in Britain and France which both had alliances in place that obliged them to defend Czechoslovakia against foreign aggression.

When the German army conducted manoeuvres close to the Czech border in May 1938, it looked like things were about to turn nasty. The British Foreign Office went so far as to let it be known that France would honour its commitment to Czechoslovakia if necessary, and in those circumstances, Britain wouldn’t stand idly by. Even more impressively, the Czechs ordered a partial mobilisation of their army and quickly had 175,000 men under arms.

When no German invasion took place, the democracies made the mistake of crowing a bit about how a show of force had made Hitler back down. That was unfortunate. It got right up Hitler’s nose. The manoeuvres really had been manoeuvres and he hadn’t planned on invading just then. But the fact that other nations were apparently gloating over what they thought had been a humiliation for him made him all the more determined to teach the Czechs a harsh lesson. 

Despite what the Foreign Office had said, not everyone in Britain was keen on backing the Czechs. One Conservative MP and junior minister in the government, George Tyron, declared that it was nonsense to ‘guarantee the independence of a country which we can neither get at nor spell’.

It was only twenty years since Britain had emerged from the First World War, the bloodiest it had ever fought. Most people regarded the prospect of another with dread. That was certainly the view of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. When Hitler’s aggressive talk over Czechoslovakia flared up again, Chamberlain flew to see him on 15 September. On his return, he made the extraordinary comment that the Nazi leader was ‘a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word’.

On 22 September, Chamberlain flew to Germany again to find out just how much Czech territory the Nazis intended to take.  When he got back to England, he talked about how incredible it was that Britain should be contemplating war with all it implied, ‘because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’.

On 29 September, Chamberlain was back in Germany, accompanied by the French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, and the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, for a final round of negotiations with Hitler in Munich. Edvard Beneš, the Czech Prime Minister, wasn’t invited and no one represented Czechoslovakia. 

What emerged is known as the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938. It handed over a huge swath of Czech territory to the Germans, far more than the areas where there was a Sudeten German majority. With that territory, Czechoslovakia lost a large proportion of the defensive fortifications that protected the country. The French and British made it clear to Beneš that no changes were possible to the agreement and that he either had to sign or face the prospect of fighting Germany alone if it chose to invade, since France and Britain were washing their hands of their obligation to guarantee its independence. 

That meant that if Hitler chose to push again, Czechoslovakia would collapse and be overrun. That’s what happened on 15 March 1939, less than six months after the signing of the Munich Agreement. What’s more, after less than six further months, on 3 September, Britain and France would find themselves at war with Germany in any case.

And yet, when Chamberlain returned to England after the Munich negotiations, he declared that what he had brought back was ‘peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.’

That Czech story is one of terrible waste. There were moments in the 1930s when the western powers, principally Britain and France, might have stopped Hitler. The Czech crisis was the last. Perhaps by then it was already too late but it’s just possible that a show of strength might still have worked.

What the Czechs had shown in May, while their fortifications were still in their hands, was that they were prepared to fight for their independence. They needed help, certainly, but the two historically great powers of Europe, the French and the British had promised that help. But then Britain had ensured that those powers pulled the rug from under them.

They opened negotiations directly with the aggressor nation, Nazi Germany, and behind the backs of the Czechs whose fate was being decided. They agreed terms that made it impossible for the Czechs to defend themselves if there was another round of aggression.

I said before that history doesn’t repeat itself exactly but simply throws up parallels between periods. Ukraine’s history today isn’t identical to Czechoslovakia’s then. But aren’t the parallels striking – and frightening?

And the worst parallel? Throwing the Czechs under the bus didn’t even do the west any good. Throwing red meat to a land-grabbing autocrat like Hitler didn’t appease him. It just made him hungry for more.

Maybe Europe can step up and neutralise the damage that Trump’s causing by preparing to surrender to Putin. Some recent statements suggest they might. But will they really find the guts to resist both Trump and Putin? It’s hard to imagine, given their track record.

If they don’t, however, we may be opening a door to a long and very dark tunnel. 

Grandparenting: on life and death, on myths and art, on grateful dogs and kids with presents

Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, has developed an ability to come up with startling statements.

To be fair, and just to maintain the character of this series of posts as a true chronicle of our grandparenting experience, I should mention that she's not my only granddaughter. I have another but she, Aya, is twenty now. In my book, that means she's no longer a grandkid but a grandadult.

What's more, I have to confess to a bit of a gap in this chronicle of mine. We saw a lot of the grandkids last year but I failed to keep a proper record of their visits (or our visits to them). There were, however, some memorable moments.

There was Matilda's visit to us during which, as well as the many other activities we organised for her, she attended a horse riding class. It was a pleasure to see her again when her class crossed the road in front of me as I was driving to a supermarket soon after dropping her off.

A diminutive Matilda crossing in front of me with her riding class

Then there was the time when we and the grandkids’ family travelled independently to Ireland, to meet up in Donegal. That’s the county in the Irish Republic, sometimes referred to as Southern Ireland, that extends further north than the six counties still in the United Kingdom, often called Northern Ireland. Still, there are so many ironies in Irish history that the fact that the South extends further north than the North, barely registers.

Matilda and Elliott on a beach in Donegal

Elliott in the Emerald Isle

Matilda ditto

They came to see us in La Cañada early in August. We provided presents, of course (grandparent-esse oblige), and to make them more fun, we had the kids look for them in the woods.

Present hunt in the woods

Then I visited Elliott and Matilda in their home in Hoyo de Manzanares, near Madrid, later the same month. It was fiesta time in the village and there was plenty to entertain the kids. The activity that looms largest in my memory, perhaps because it was practically daily, was face painting.

Getting their faces painted during the Hoyo Fiesta

In October, they came to us to celebrate Halloween.

Matilda and Elliott enjoying Halloween
with their mother and grandmother

It was during a summer visit to us that Matilda came up with one of her startling statements. It seems that she and Elliott had discovered death. Obviously, that’s a traumatic event in any child’s life. It was in mine, I know. I don’t remember the exact moment but I do remember the horror with which I realised that my parents would die. And then it dawned on me that it was going to be my fate too, a discovery that struck me then as deeply annoying, as it still does today.

Matilda felt it was important to explain what this all meant.

‘When I’m older,’ she assured Danielle and me with earnestness, ‘you’ll be dead.’

Elliott (aged three) was of the same opinion. 

‘Yes,’ he confirmed, ‘you’ll be dead when we’re older.’

Well, they got no argument from us. That’s how we hope, and expect, things to go. 

Elliott is also good at producing breathtaking statements. Out for a walk with me, he pointed to what looked to me like a length of black plastic tubing discarded by someone on the street. Elliott saw it in a much more interesting way:

‘Look! It’s the frame of a rainbow.’

When a rainbow’s frame falls to earth
Like me you saw something duller? 
Time to break with prosaic realism

After all those exciting visits in 2024, the kids came back to us, with Nicky, their dad, in the week before Twelfth Night. That’s 6 January, an important date in Spain, since there are more presents for children at this, the Feast of the (Three) Kings. That was important for Matilda and Elliott, since they’d spent Christmas in Belfast, with their other grandmother, and they naturally needed gifts from us too. Or rather from the Kings, or perhaps I should say Reyes, this being Spain, after receiving what Santa had for them in Northern Ireland. 

Opening Reyes presents

When I say ‘Christmas’ I’m using the word deliberately, not just being non-woke and failing to describe the season in specifically non-specific religious terms. They were in Belfast explicitly for a Christmas celebration. It apparently went well, but left some important questions in Matilda’s mind. Sitting in our house and looking at the fire burning in the grate, she asked me:

‘How does Santa get down the chimney if there’s a fire burning?’

Well, I know that Nicky doesn’t particularly approve of maintaining the Christmas story for the kids. But far be it from me, I thought, to incur the wrath of Sheena, their mother, by undermining it.

‘Well…’ I said doubtfully, until inspiration came to me, ‘you have to make sure that the fire’s out on Christmas Eve. Otherwise Santa gets pretty annoyed and he comes to the front door to ring the bell, which wakes us up, and then he tells us off for not leaving the chimney ready for him to come down. Which is even more annoying for us as it is for him.’

I thought it was a pretty good explanation, but I have to say that Matilda looked at me quizzically, as though she wasn’t sure it really stood up. But she (and Elliott) have decided long ago that Granddad was silly (the silliest Granddad in the world, in fact), and she clearly felt that there was little purpose in pressing the point with anyone in that sad state. She dropped the subject.

One of the things that Matilda has decided she likes is foot massages. It took her a while to convince herself that if she put a foot of hers into my care, I wouldn’t just tickle it, but since she’s decided that she could trust me on that, she’s started not just waiting for a massage, but demanding one even if I’ve not offered it. That seems to be a genetic disposition. It’s something Danielle expects as a matter of course if we’re watching TV, and Sheena tells me she enjoys foot massages too and doesn’t get half as many as she’d like. Personally, nothing could persuade me to undergo one, but clearly there is an inherited predilection in their favour running down the female line of the family.

A development milestone it’s my pleasant duty to record here is Matilda’s progress in art. In the summer, she did a fine Etch-A-Sketch of a house. Now, most kids, including me in my own childhood, draw houses with a chimney, a door and two windows. Matilda went deeper into her picture. Deeper into the house, in fact. She left out the purely superficial features, such as doors and windows, to show us the bed inside. There’s a pillow on it too, and possibly the suggestion of a head on the pillow. Either way, what she seems to have produced is a sketch not so much of a house, as of a home. 

A bed inside the house? That makes it a home

That impressed me. Just like Elliott’s identification of the frame of a rainbow, a fine example of an artist's view of life. So much more interesting than a mere scientist's.

More recently, Matilda’s turned to portraits. She even did one of me. I know that it could be argued that she has perhaps marginally exaggerated the extent to which I can be regarded as slim. And I suppose, if we’re picky, it could be said that she needs to work a little more on getting a likeness absolutely spot on, but hey, when you’re five, you’ve got plenty of time to do that work. In any case, as she pointed out, she gave me a beard which is an important feature of the likeness.

Portrait by Matilda alongside a more photographic treatment

Incidentally, talking about that beard, in the summer she pronounced it irritating, and I dutifully shaved. I kept shaving for some weeks but the daily process started to get on my nerves, especially as I kept cutting myself. So eventually I let the beard grow back and, as the portrait shows, Matilda has accepted it.

That’s a win-win, I’d say.

In passing, let me say that I like the way she’s put a Spanish N with a tilde above it – what they call an ‘enye’ out here – in the label ‘Grañddad’. True, a pedant would argue that it isn’t right. But I like the way it underlines the fact that she was born in Spain and it’s her home. The enye’s a subtle wink to her Spanish-ness.

Max (left); larger and more intimidating than Toffee and Luci

One of the best things about the grandkids’ most recent visit to us is that Max, our largish dog (as opposed to Luci and Toffee, our toy poodles) who seemed somewhat ill-disposed towards Matilda and Elliott initially, now seems to have adapted to them completely. It no doubt helps that they both now give him treats from time to time. On one occasion when Matilda had given him one, I explained to her that the appreciative look he was giving her was his way of saying ‘thank you, Matilda’.

‘You’re welcome, Max,’ she solemnly told him.

Another high point of their visit was when the kids burst into our bedroom early one morning, when Danielle and I were fondly imagining we might get a lie in. They made a bee line for me.

‘You’re always up early,’ Matilda told me.

‘So you can take us downstairs,’ Elliott concluded for her.

So, of course, I did.

What does a clueless granddad need?

In my experience nothing helps a clueless granddad as much as a bright granddaughter. Matilda may only be five but she’s bright enough to be a lot better informed than he is, and highly responsible with it. That’s responsible enough to take things in hand when her granddad gets them wrong.

Bright girl in bright surroundings,
on a visit to us earlier this month

My problem is that I hadn’t been to the grandkids’ place for several months. Not since August, in fact. I mean, I’ve seen them several times in between, but always at our place. Now, in January, I'm on my first visit since last summer to theirs, making it the first time I’ve been here since Elliott started attending the school where Matilda is already in her third year.

Now one of the chief responsibilities I take on when I visit is walking them to school each day. I fetch them after school too, but that’s less of a problem: heading home’s easy since I know where we’re going.

The trouble with going to school is that the arrangements for dropping off kids keep changing. That’s partly because the kids themselves get older, partly just because the school, in what I presume we have to regard as its wisdom, decides that previously perfectly workable systems need to be changed for something they feel, for no reason that I can fathom, would work better.

Also, when I say that I walk them to school, you should understand that I’m the one that always walks. When it’s chucking it down, we all walk, just because you can do that under an umbrella, which is hard on a bike. If the weather’s good, they cycle and I walk along behind them, getting out of breath on steeper climbs, either because they zap up them more quickly than I’m comfortable with, or because Elliott has decided that he’s had enough of pedalling uphill and wants me to push him.

Anyway, on Monday of this visit we decided that we could probably take bikes. It turned out to be a mistake. When I picked the kids up in the afternoon, I was told that cycling through such a downpour had left the authorities no choice but to change their trousers since the ones they’d arrived in were soaked. 

Still, we got to school safely and in one piece (each). I’d been given clear instructions about what to do with the bikes. I was pleased to see that Matilda stood by my side while I was locking them up, making sure I did it right. I was less pleased when she then vanished. No one had told me that she knew the way to her classroom and took pride in getting there unaccompanied. 

Then I had to deal with Elliott. That’s when I discovered that the kids didn’t enter their school building through the front door anymore. I mean, why would they? Why use what’s obviously an entrance door when you can fool the clueless granddad by going up that little path there, to the right of the building, leading to the playground behind it, and go in through the back door? I mean, why wouldn’t you go for that arrangement?

Well, I could see that the front door was locked. Then I saw Elliott going up the path to the right of the building. He turned around, and gave me one of his most charming smiles, waved and strode on confidently. Since I still hadn’t got my mind around the vanishing Matilda mystery, I waved back and kept looking for her.

It was only in the afternoon that I discovered what had happened. Matilda hadn’t gone straight to her classroom, which was just as well. She saw Elliott, took his hand and led him to his teacher herself, explaining – very maturely I’m sure – what had happened. The teacher apparently thanked her and took charge of Elliott, saving me my blushes. 

And leaving me both relieved and grateful.

P.S. That rain: 

Matilda and Elliott live in a village up in the hills above Madrid. At a good height, as it happens, 1000 metres above sea level. And that’s taught me one thing at least: whoever came up with the idea that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain had no idea what he was talking about. More clueless than Matilda and Elliott’s granddad.

The rain in Spain gets everywhere, it’s plain

P.P.S. The best or the worst? 

Elliott is someone whose views are firmly held. Which doesn’t mean they don’t change. On the contrary, they can swing violently, through 180 degrees depending on circumstances, actions (mostly mine) and mood (mostly his). I once listened to Ronnie Scott doing a standup session at his eponymous jazz club in London and he told us at one point that, while we may not be the best audience in the world, we were certainly the worst. Well, this week Elliott has solemnly informed me that I was the best granddad in the world and a surprisingly short time later, that I was the worst (well, strictly speaking, the baddest). I put this to the test at one point, asking him, ‘who’s the best granddad in the world?’. 

‘You,’ he replied unhesitatingly and with complete conviction.

‘And who’s the baddest granddad in the world?’ I went on.

‘You,’ he replied with as little hesitation and equal firmness.

Ah, well. I’ve never liked mediocrity. Being both the best and the baddest? That strikes me as a great improvement over being merely average.

Elliott, equally bright, and with good answers

Grotesque on Pennsylvania Avenue: Season 2 review

There’s no honour, they say, among thieves. Criminals, in other words, can’t be expected to be loyal even to each other. So I suppose it does Donald Trump some honour that, a convicted criminal himself, he’s declared that he’ll release the criminals convicted for attacking Congress on 6 January 2021.

This shouldn’t, however, trouble anyone who believes that Trump’s loyal only to himself. He believes those criminals acted out of loyalty to him and that’s the only kind of he really appreciates. So he responds with loyalty to them. 

As he moves back into the White House, we need to review one of the major criticisms he faced during the election campaign. It seems clear that he isn’t going to overthrow democracy, if by that we mean some kind of violent overthrow, like Benito Mussolini’s 1924 March on Rome in Italy, or Francisco Franco’s mutiny of 1936 and the three-year Civil War that followed in Spain.

Instead, following the recent fashion explored in Hungary and Turkey, the trick Trump’s likely to adopt is to keep chipping away at democracy until all its substance has been sucked out and the empty shell collapses. His allies have already started that process, with moves to undermine republican values.

You do it my way

The specialist in mediaeval history Jay Rubenstein talks about the 12th century English politician, John of Salisbury. Rubenstein tells us:

John wrote that a king is ‘a law unto himself’ but that at the same time he was ‘a servant of law.’

The thinking was that the king was the fount of all law and therefore could not be made subject to it but, precisely because of his privileged position on the law, he was its servant, the man charged with making sure it was preserved and obeyed. 

Since that time, Britain has moved a long way down the road towards democracy, and towards establishing an essential element of such a democracy, the rule of law. A great part of the process was limiting the power of monarchs. One king, Charles I, was even executed for trying to assert his power over Parliament. He was, indeed, condemned by a court which, he pointed out, was a legal contradiction in terms: courts sat by the king’s authority, so how could a court sit in judgment on the king?

Gradually, parliament took increasing power to itself, reducing the authority of the monarch. Even within parliament itself, the elected part, the House of Commons, increasingly dominated the House of Lords, which had initially been more powerful.

The process still has a way to go, however. As far as the rule of law is concerned, and the power of the monarch, there’s more work to do. As the jurist Catherine Barnard points out, even today ‘the monarch is immune from prosecution, even for parking offences’.

The British monarch’s immunity from prosecution is hard to reconcile with the democratic principles the country aspires towards. But that kind of thing would be even stranger to discover in a republic, like the United States, which fought a war to free itself from Britain and its attachment to that all that stuff.

That’s what made it so shocking when, on 1 July of last year, the US Supreme Court decided, by a majority made up entirely of Trump appointees, that Presidents have immunity from prosecution for any ‘official act’ carried out as part of their duties. That includes, for instance, acts relative to command of the military, to the execution of law, or control of the executive branch of government in general. What would happen if Trump used his entirely legal control of the military to illegally kill political opponents? Would he be covered by this immunity?

One result is that the federal cases pending against Donald Trump for criminal behaviour, for instance for inciting the insurrection on 6 January 2021, were dismissed. What would be the point of proceeding with them? They would be thrown out anyway, because of his immunity from prosecution.

In other words, the United States embraced, through that decision, an old principle of monarchical and not of republican government, turning back towards a long-outdated attitude from which Britain ought to have, but still hasn’t quite freed itself.

That’s no coup d’état. But it’s certainly a step towards hollowing out democracy.

The process didn’t stop there. The next stage has turned out grotesque to the point of appearing comic. In a grim way.

Back in 2020, at the end of his previous presidential term, Trump decided that the amount of data being collected on individual Americans by TikTok made it a potential threat to the US, because of its Chinese ownership. He issued an executive order to force it to sell to an American or close down.

This was a pretty dubious action to take for at least two reasons. The first is that if there’s one constitutional right Americans defend with almost as much passion as the right to own guns, it’s free speech. Now TikTok wasn’t being attacked for its contents. Even so, removing a vehicle for self-expression by a community now 170 million strong, does kind of feel like a limitation of free speech.

In addition, the use of the executive order is hardly democratic. It feels like a royal decree. It depends on the personal whim of the president.

The incoming Biden administration withdrew the order. Instead, it had Congress enact actual legislation to achieve the same goal. That was challenged in the courts and the case went right up to the Supreme Court, which decreed that it was legal.

The anti-TikTok legislation went into effect on 19 January 2025.

Trump should have been over the moon, right? What he’d tried to do by executive order had now been achieved by legislation endorsed by the Supreme Court. But strangely enough he wasn’t.

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, said the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Most aspects of Trump’s mind suggest littleness, but certainly not its consistency. He changes view like a kaleidoscope. He discovered in the election campaign that TikTok offered him a vehicle to communicate with young people. That’s something he found useful. Therefore his hostility towards TikTok for its role in allowing Chinese manipulation of personal data sank into secondary importance. 

You see? What serves Trump trumps anything else.

So now Trump is talking about simply not applying the law against TikTok. The Constitution explicitly requires the president to execute the law so he can’t choose not to. But hey, if he can’t be prosecuted for any official act as President, how can he be forced to apply a law he no longer finds convenient?

Let’s summarise. He tried to ban TikTok, by Executive Order, one of the more monarchical and least democratic of the powers available to US Presidents. Now he wants TikTok back and is willing to save it by ignoring the duty laid down for him by the constitution, and resorting to the tactic of simply not applying a law that doesn’t suit him – though it once did.

Confusing? Well, that’s the way Trumpworld always is.

So we have Trump planning to pick and choose between laws. That’s just the kind of thing a powerful monarch does. But not the President of a democratic republic.

See what I mean about chipping away at democracy? How long will the US be governed by truly democratic, republican principles? Or, to put it another way, how can such principles survive if the Trump people keep accumulating power in an increasingly monarchical presidency?

Valencian floods: the ugly

After two days of severe weather warnings from the meteorological service, the alert level moved to red on the third day. The president of the Valencian community, the region on Spain’s Mediterranean coast embracing the provinces of Castellón in the North, Valencia in the centre and Alicante in the south, cancelled classes for 20,000 schoolkids, upped staffing on the 112 telephone emergency service, and strengthened support for dependent people and the homeless.

It's the regional Justice Minister who has direct responsibility for emergency services. She decided that, though the region was still on a lower level of alert than would have made it mandatory, she would summon the Integrated Centre for Coordinated Operations, the CECOPI, ‘given the gravity of the situation’.

That meant that regional and national resources were activated and coordinated when rivers began to burst their banks. Just three lives were lost. Three too many, for sure, but given the severity of the flood, about as low as one could hope.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ I hear you cry, ‘I thought there’d been more than 200 deaths.’

Ah, yes. But the 200+ deaths were in the floods last month in the province of Valencia. I was talking about the 2019 floods, in Alicante. That flood was less bad than this year’s, but even taking that into account, the contrast is appalling.

The Alicante floods

What changed? Well, it was all down to how the Valencian government handled the crisis. In 2019, the President was the Socialist Ximo Puig, but this year it’s Carlos Mazón, from the Popular Party, the PP, Spain’s Conservatives. A comparison between their reactions is instructive (here’s a Spanish account).

When a journalist asked him to name the worst problem besetting a senior politician, the former British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, replied, ‘events, my dear boy, events’. Harold MacMillan and Ximo Puig apparently had the bandwidth to deal with events, such as the Cuban missile crisis (MacMillan) and the Alicante floods (Puig). Mazón, however, simply has much too much on his plate for such matters.

Where in 2019 peparations begans four days before the floods, when they hit this year, on 29 October, nothing was ready. A meeting of the Valencian government took place at 9:00 in the morning, but the subject of a possible flood didn’t even come up.

By contrast, the representative of central government in the region, Pilar Bernabé, cleared her diary. At 9:30, she starting contacting the mayors of the towns most at risk to warn them of what might be coming, though that wasn’t her job.

At midday, Mazón had another crucial task to deal with. He gave a presentation of the Community’s digital health policy. A flood, you see, is a momentary event, even if clearing it up can take months, and it only affects a minority of the region’s population, whereas a digital health policy is for years and affects everyone.

Bernabé, the central government representative, made four phone calls offering help to Salomé Pradas, the Valencian Justice Minister and therefore, as in 2019, the politician most directly responsible for handling emergencies.  Pradas turned down the offer three times. Later, she would deny this, but the records reveal that her denial wasn’t (how shall I put this?) entirely accurate.

It was on the fourth call that Pradas finally accepted help, but only for the Requena-Utiel area within the Valencian Community. 

At 14:30, with the floods under way, the first report came in of a missing person. The Interior Minister decided to summon the CECOPI, which had happened in 2019 on the day before the storms struck. In 2024, the meeting was summoned with the flooding already underway, and given the difficulty of getting people together, it only started at 17:00. Even then, no decision could be taken because Mazón, the President, was missing.

He'd been obliged to absent himself for a crucial lunch appointment. Since it, oddly, didn’t appear in his diary, he’s had to explain it since. The soul of discretion, he at first said it was a private appointment, no doubt out of discretion towards his guest, before announcing that it was a working lunch, and only admitting under pressure that his guest was a journalist, Maribel Vilaplana. He wanted to see her take over the regional TV service, À Punt. She says that it was a relatively brief meal, as lunches go in Spain, lasting only from 15:00 to 17:15. She has also said that he made no mention of any kind of difficulties in the region, which may be a tribute to an essential quality of a leader, to stay calm in a crisis. Or it maybe not.

She also says she turned down the À Punt job.

Mazón and Vilaplana

Incidentally, after he heard about her lunch, Vilaplana’s ex-husband put up a tweet saying ‘seven years happily divorced’. I’m not quite sure what that means. Somehow, though, that enigmatic quality makes it feel amusing to me.

Mazón clearly had other urgent concerns, because he only made it to the CECOPI meeting at 19:00 or, according to other reports, at 19:30. By this time, the authority managing the Jucar river basin in which the flooding took place, had sent 198 messages to the CECOPI, so I imagine Mazón wisely felt he had enough information to take urgent action. Especially since the emergency phone service 112 had collapsed under the weight of calls for help.

Mazón issued the first alert at 20:11. You may remember that in my last post I talked about a driver telling a journalist that he received it in his car, with water already up to his chin.

As it happens, 95 soldiers from the Emergency Military Unit (UME) had gone into action earlier in the day, without waiting for orders. Those were small numbers, but I imagine the people they saved from drowning were grateful to see them.

Now, with Mazón finding the time in his busy schedule to issue a call for national help, the central government began to mobilise far more people. Of course, that takes time, and, with the late start, numbers only reached their maximum level by 4 November. By then there were 7800 soldiers working in the affected areas, backed by 5000 more in logistical and coordinating roles. This was the largest ever deployment of Spanish troops in peacetime. Some 9000 police were also at work, along with firefighters and other emergency service people from all over Spain and even from abroad: Italy and France sent help, and I also saw teams from Morocco and Mexico.

The UME at work in one of the worst-hit areas, Paiporta

At first, Mazón expressed his heartfelt thanks to the central government, headed by the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. This is no more than you’d expect from someone with any kind of sense of decency. However, it sadly reveals how little he’s used to the demands of party politics. A Conservative politician saying nice things about a Socialist Prime Minister? It wouldn’t do at all.

Fortunately, Mazón’s party, the PP, has leaders who understand the subtleties of political work. They quickly knocked Mazón into line. He then showed that he’s a quick learner, when tutored, by launching some well-honed attacks on such national bodies as the Meteorological Service and the Jucar River authority. Red alerts? A hundred and ninety-eight messages? How’s that in any way an adequate response to a crisis when the man responsible for dealing with it is as busy as Mazón?

And he certainly is the man responsible. Indeed, he’s jealous of that responsibility. It’s true that in a moment of weakness, the national PP leaders made the mistake of criticising Pedro Sánchez for not taking direct control of the response to the flood, something he has no constitutional authority to do. They soon dropped that criticism, however, when they realised it meant that they were implicitly criticising their own man in charge of Valencia, and they certainly didn’t want to do that. They need him there, not least because following the floods there are lucrative reconstruction contracts to be awarded. 

This is especially important because, given the emergency, contracts can be awarded without any kind of competitive procurement process. Competitive tendering is so tedious, a bureaucratic process which stops you just awarding contracts where you want to. Which means you can’t hand them out to your friends, and your friends are the people you trust most, aren’t they? And people you trust are vital in a crisis like this one.

Since he doesn’t have to go through a competitive process, Mazón has been able to award some contracts to people he feels he can count on. For instance, two contracts, worth 12.9 million euros, have gone to a company called Ocide Construcción. It’s the subject of a corruption probe by the police at the moment, concerning bribes paid to a lawyer working for a former Mayor of Valenica, Rita Barberá. She’s been dead for nearly eight years, making it all sound a bit like ancient history, for a busy man with problems to deal with in the present and no time for the past, or for mere allegations of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, the campaign against central government keeps ticking along. Why, that interesting semi-trade union, Manons Limpias (Clean Hands), brought cases against the national meteorological service and the River Jucar Authority for negligent homicide in the floods. Manos Limpias have been doing a great job on the Prime Minister’s wife, Begonia Gómez, pursuing her through the courts even though the police and various judges have said the allegations against her are groundless. Just keeping that kind of thing going creates an atmosphere in which voters wonder whether there can be smoke without fire. And isn’t it sophisticated to go after the Prime Minister’s wife rather than the Prime Minister himself? It gives him much less chance to respond and may well cause him more grief.

Sadly, though, the judge hearing the case against the Meteorological Service and the Jucar authority, threw out those suits on the basis that there was no case to answer. Since Manos Limpias had also brought cases against Mazón himself, and those have been allowed to stand, I imagine he has serious doubts about how unbiased the judge is.

Still, overall the campaign’s not going too badly. It’s focused on the late arrival of the army, and the army is a national body and not a local one, so it’s easy to build on the understandable anger of the victims of the floods and turn it against the central government. Focusing on the delays for which the Mazón administration was responsible could distract from the attack on the Sánchez government. And that’s what matters.

Of course, some might feel that after the good of the floods (the pouring in of volunteers) and the bad (the destruction and deaths) that I mentioned last time, the political fallout is the ugliest side of this dismal business. But that’s to misunderstand right-wing politics in our time.

After all, as Trump has shown in the States, it’s getting to power that counts. Not how you get there.

Floods in Valencia: the good and the bad before the ugly

It was strange to wake up to eery stillness. Outside the city of Valencia, our place is usually quiet, but all the same there’s always a slight background noise of traffic, on the distant main road. But this time, there was practically nothing. 

It felt like the Covid lockdown, when muted mornings were standard. And indeed we were in a sense locked down. The government of the Valencian region had decreed that no cars should take to the roads until the evening. Why? There’d been a warning of heavy rain and the authorities were taking no risks.

The English proverb is ‘the burned hand fears the fire’. The French equivalent is more to the point, ‘the scalded cat fears cold water’, suggesting that once we’ve suffered harm from something really dangerous, we learn to fear even what isn’t. And then there’s the saying about locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. 

Because, though there was some heavy rain that day, there was none of the heavy flooding that sweeps cars away, fills houses with mud and drowns people. No, that happened over two weeks earlier, on 29 October. Then, when warnings really were needed, the regional authorities, whose duty it was, failed to issue any. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. They did issue a warning. At about 8:00 in the evening. One man later told journalists said that his mobile rang with an alert from civil protection when he was in his car and the water was already up to his chin. The first that friends of ours in Paiporta, one of the worst-hit areas, knew of what was about to happen was when they heard sirens and voices shouting, ‘the water is coming, the water is coming’. 

It's like Paul Revere, isn’t it? ‘The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming’. Only British soldiers trying to maintain colonial rule over insurgent American patriots are a lot easier to stop than a wall of water.

Our friend’s husband reacted as many do to a flood, if their car is an underground garage. He ran to it and drove it up to the street, before it could be submerged. That could have turned out very baldy. Many of the dead were trapped in their cars. Our friend was lucky and survived, although by the time he got home he was already up to his knees in water. As for his car, they still haven’t found it – parking it on the street was no safer than leaving it in the garage.

At least our friends had a few minutes to rescue possessions, and the good luck to live in a two-floor house, so they had somewhere to retreat to. 

Some of the moments that followed had a comic quality. They struggled to disconnect the TV from the wall, only succeeding in getting it upstairs once someone had found a screwdriver. They proudly, and laughingly, told us they’d saved their coffee machine. That may sound trivial, but once electricity had been restored, it was a boon to be able to make coffee. Above all, they avoided one of the losses that causes great grief in this kind of disaster: they got their family photos upstairs and saved their memories.

They heaped towels and cloths around the front door, but the water came in around the back. Once it reached them, it took minutes for it flood to a metre and a half up the walls of the ground floor. As it flowed in, they could do nothing but head upstairs.

We took them a Kärcher high-pressure water cleaner (that’s a devices that uses high-pressure water for cleaning, rather than a device for cleaning high-pressure water. Just saying. To avoid confusion). We were able to get within four kilometres by car but had to walk the last stretch.

And as we walked we began to see not only what’s bad about crises like this one but what’s good too. 

Volunteers on the Paiporta road

On the same road were thousands of volunteers, some heading home after a good job well done, some going in to take a turn themselves. Mostly they were young, carrying shovels or brooms, masked and in boots, sometimes with plastic bags wrapped around their legs too, since the mud in the streets was becoming increasingly infectious: sewage had mixed with it and there were also rotting bodies, principally 2950 farm animals but also, estimates suggest, several hundred pets.

Diseased sludge

The mud quickly turned toxic.

Deeper and wetter in some places than others

As we walked further into Paiporta, the mud got deeper, until we had to be careful where we stepped to avoid it flowing into our boots. There were also cars everywhere, piled up two or even three deep, where the water had simply tossed them. We saw an office which had filled with cars. Ironically, it belonged to an insurance company, though sadly it was in no state to deal with the claims the owners of the cars might make.

A different kind of traffic pile-up

Our friends live close to the waterway that burst its banks on the night of the flood. We crossed it on a bridge without parapets, as they’d been washed away. It was a strange experience, looking down into the bed of the river, now quiet and with only a residual stream of water, and think of the damage it had wreaked days earlier.

The Barranco del Poyo
In spate, it broke its banks

All around us, there were people at work. Many were volunteers. But there were also huge numbers of professionals. There were soldiers, many from UME, the military unit for emergencies, but reinforced by many more ordinary soldiers drafted in for rescue and recovery and then the cleanup. There were similar numbers of police, firefighters and other emergency service staff.

The army at work with heavy equipment
Note the (police) cavalry keeping an eye on things

Police cavalry

A great many weren’t even from Valencia. We saw fire vehicles from Barcelona, Navarra, Toledo, but that’s just what we came across. I understand there were teams from all over Spain there and even from other nations, from France and Italy, and even, as we later discovered, from Mexico.

Firemen from Toledo, near Madrid

Which takes me to uglier matters: the bitterness that has followed the flood.

Army bucket chain at work

One complaint I can understand, to be fair. Many victims felt it was taking too long to get basic services going again. It’s painful to be without drinking water or electricity for two or three days. However, for the vast majority (and that includes our friends) that’s all it took – two to three days. Another friend, from Florida, pointed out that two to three weeks without services is not unusual after hurricanes there.

Downright ugly have been the lies that have been told. Even two weeks on, we’re seeing people ranting online, ‘where is the army? Why aren’t they helping?’ Well, I can tell you where the army is. It’s on the ground helping. We saw a dozen soldiers outside our friends’ house, in a bucket chain, shifting mud out of the splash pool in their garden, which had naturally filled up with sludge.

Army helicopter above our home,
ferrying soldiers and supplies in or out of the affected areas

There were soldiers at work all over the affected areas, sometimes even with heavy equipment to clear the streets. Every day, we see large helicopters flying over our house, bringing troops or equipment in or out of the damaged zones. Statistics are dull, but just in brief, 8500 soldiers have been deployed. One of the iconic events in US history is the Battle of Yorktown, where American forces with their French allies definitively defeated the British army. The American army there was 8000-9000 strong. So the Spanish army working to help flood victims is of about the same size. Then there are 9700 police plus firemen and, of course, the hordes of volunteers for the cleanup.

If Washington’s army was big enough for that battle, the resources now deployed in the flood-damaged areas are enough for this one.

The most telling complaint is that warnings were issued too late. A lot too late, given the story of the man receiving an alert when already up to his chin in water. That was down to the regional government, specifically to its president Carlos Mazón. Initially, as ministers sent in national forces to assist, he thanked the central government for sending them. Since then, though, he’s changed his tune and taken to attacking the central government, trying to switch responsibility for the calamitous response to the floods, from his shoulders to theirs.

That’s been the ugliest reaction to the disaster. I’ll return to it shortly. This post has focused on the bad – deaths, damage, disease – and the good – volunteers and national or international health. The ugly has been the political reaction.

That deserves its own post.

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