Portrait of a thin-skinned man

When Oliver Cromwell visited the studio of the man who painted his portrait, Samuel Cooper, and saw how the artist had ‘enhanced’ his sitter’s looks, he instructed him that he wanted nothing of the kind, but his portrait as he really was, ‘warts and all’.

Cromwell had one thing in common with Donald Trump: he believed in rule by a strong man who wouldn’t put up with irritating opponents trying to prevent him doing what he’d convinced himself was right. He dismissed a parliament that got in his nerves, at gunpoint, and with the words, ‘It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately … In the name of God go’.

That’s as far as the resemblance extends, though. Cromwell, like Trump, believed himself superior to most of his opponents, but with the difference that in his case, and despite his many faults, above all his tendency to authoritarianism, he was generally right. Trump’s a mirror image: he regards himself as superior to most of his opponents but is generally wrong.

If I started with a story about portraiture, it’s because a teacup storm over a portrait reveals just how little Trump has to feel superior about. Indeed, his behaviour over a portrait of himself in the Colorado state capitol building has led to his being called an ‘insecure baby’, a judgement with which I’d only disagree because it seems unfair to babies. And to the insecure.

I’ll admit at once that I don’t think it’s a great portrait. It’s not even a good likeness of Trump. In reality he’s far uglier. But when I see him whingeing about what an awful painting it is, that he ‘would much prefer not having a picture than having this one’, that it’s ‘truly the worst’, it strikes me it’s not just inadequate as a likeness, it’s also far kinder to him than he deserves. 

He also blames the governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, whom he accuses of belonging to the ‘radical left’, for putting up the picture. He ‘should be ashamed of himself’, Trump bleats.

The truth is that Polis is on the right of the Democratic Party. Perhaps it’s because he’s openly gay that to Trump he seems radical. He was also elected governor after the painting was commissioned. In any case, it had nothing to do with anyone from the governor’s office. It was a group of Republican supporters of Trump who commissioned it. 

I never know with Trump if his trotting out untruths of this kind reflects his disinclination to say anything much that isn’t a lie, or whether it reflects his simple ignorance: he knows nothing about the real provenance of the portrait but likes to throw slurs around whether he knows anything about the matter or not.

Compare his behaviour with the requirement of Cromwell, a far greater man, to be painted ‘warts and all’.

Samuel Cooper’s ‘warts and all’ portrait of Cromwell
and the Colorado portrait of Trump that caused him to wail so loudly

A curious anecdote casts a different light on the same issue. A while ago, Trump said of the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, that she was a ‘very nice woman, very fine woman’. He even called her ‘tough’ which is high praise in Trump’s mouth.

Sheinbaum has rather set the bar for the world in managing Trump. She has rushed to do things that Trump would appreciate, many of them planned anyway, others not particularly useful, like rushing 10,000 soldiers to the border to try to stop Fentanyl smuggling. Given how Fentanyl gets smuggled in tiny quantities that are easy to hide, it’s not clear what a lot of troops are going to be able to do to stop it. In any case, Fentanyl flows into the US were slowing down before the troops went.

What’s more, she’s engaged in just the kind of gesture that touches Trump’s heart. For instance, she sent the White House a graphic showing a steady drop in Fentanyl quantities crossing the border, marked with the words ‘Since Donald J. Trump came into power’. Wonderful. The opposite effect of the Colorado portrait. It made Trump feel good about himself and that’s all he needs to feel good about the person flattering him.

Obviously, we don’t know how much this will help Mexico in the longer run. Tariffs may come crashing down on the country next week. Who knows? Trump’s unpredictable. But at least Sheinbaum’s managed to get him to be nice to her, and he’s pretty nasty to most of us outside the US. 

These stories tell us little about portraiture or about Mexico. They’re much more eloquent on Trump. He gets irate over an insignificant perceived slight but he’s malleable by a flatterer. 

And this is the man who’s going to Make America Great Again?

Grandparenting a philosopher and a budding secret agent

Last week, spent with the grandkids, was as much of an eye-opener as my time with them always is.

I enjoyed watching Elliott, now soon to turn four, working on his skills at hide and seek. It’s particularly amusing in the kids’ bedroom hiding from their dad, my son Nicky. Matilda is effective at this, as she crawls under the bed or into some such well-protected place. Elliott, on the other hand, just moves beyond bits of furniture but without hiding behind them. So the furniture becomes a series of obstacles to get to him but doesn’t prevent anyone seeing him. In fact, he’s in full view, if inconvenient to reach. 

Elliott hidden in plain sight
Perhaps a tad too visible?

This reveals one of two things. Maybe he needs to think a little harder about the notion of ‘hiding’, perhaps considering that it means moving to a place where you can’t be seen. On the other hand, however, he’s possibly revealing a remarkable sophistication in one so young and beginning to work on the paradoxical concept, particularly developed by secret agents, that there’s no better place to hide a thing, or oneself, than in plain sight. 

I admit, though, that if this is the case, it still means that he needs to refine his approach a little – perhaps hiding in plain sight doesn’t work all that well when you’re the only person visible and you’re hiding from your dad – but even so, I reckon that his willingness to handle such challenging notions at all, shows remarkable precocity.

The most striking aspect of my visit concerned none of this, however, but Matilda’s ever-deepening exploration of philosophy.

The outstanding sixteenth-century French philosopher Montaigne once wrote that to do philosophy is to learn to die. I mentioned before that the kids have become aware of death, even to the point of understanding that they too have an ultimate appointment with the grim reaper.

Matilda is coming to terms with all this. By no means with casual acceptance. In fact, she seems to share Dylan Thomas’s view, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.

‘Mummy,’ she recently told Sheena, ‘I’m mad at you because I didn’t want to be born, because I don’t want to die.’

Yes. It’s the great predicament of humanity, or any species that is aware of death. Even an otherwise rather inferior novel I recently read referred to it. A character announced that no one deserves to be born, but once born, no one deserves to die.

Ours is a cruel and incomprehensible destiny. 

    Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
    Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing 

wrote Edward Fitzgerald in his extremely loose but brilliant translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. 

Since our fate makes no sense, it’s up to us to try to find some sense in it. It seems that Matilda’s working on that too.

‘We’re born to get our turn at life,’ she recently announced, ‘and when we die, we let other people have their turn.’

Once we’d absorbed this pronouncement, she asked us whether we perhaps get another turn later. Sheena tried to provide some comfort by explaining that there are people who believe in reincarnation. I said nothing, because I don’t think there’s any comfort for what strikes me as the fundamental discomfort of being.

Fortunately, not every moment of the visit was quite that profound or challenging to the soul. I was mainly there to help get the kids to school, pick them up again and entertain them some of the time. This was to allow Sheena to visit her own family in Belfast without Nicky having to take a whole week off work.

Entertaining Elliott and Matilda:
enjoying the river made in the park by three weeks of rain,
where no river existed before

Entertaining the kids:
when all else failed, watching The Lion Guard for the nth time,
where n is a large positive integer

Entertaining the kids:
Daddy did his bit whenever he had the time

Now I have to say that I’m not a natural when it comes to looking after young kids. I tend to be impatient. I don’t always exercise the level of control I should. Elliott rather proved that point on this trip by ignoring my plea not to cross a road on his own. He ran across in front of a bunch of cars and then, having reached the other side, turned around and ran back. He emerged from the experience unhurt, I’m glad to say, and entirely unruffled, but I was left a nervous wreck.

Because none of this comes naturally to me, I find myself constantly trying to find ways to amuse the kids when I’m out with them. Take the walk to school, for instance. There’s a last steep climb up a hill to reach the school grounds. Each time we got there, I would push the kids up, or for variety, pull them up, making heavy weather of the exercise, panting loudly and stopping from time to time as if to get my breath back. This was deemed to be high comedy.

The last hill to school
Where a granddad to push or pull comes in useful

The best occasion, though, was the morning we walked to school with each of them holding one of my hands. This meant we formed a unit too wide for the pavement (OK, OK, transatlantic friends: the sidewalk). The solution, whenever we reached one of the (adult-)waist-high bollards that line the pavement, was that one child or the other (depending on which side of the street we were on) would pass to the outside of the bollard while I lifted our conjoined hands over the obstacle. This, it turns out, was highly enjoyable (I confess that even I found it fun). To enhance the enjoyment, I accompanied the action with a sound effect – ‘wheeee-yoop’ – each time. Both the action and the sound were well received.

Even better were the moments when we hit (in my case literally) a lamppost or signpost. I’d walk into it. Then we’d go through a pantomime of stepping backwards and working our way round the obstacle till we could walk on without letting go of our hands. This wasn’t just amusing, it was, apparently, hilarious.

‘It’s such fun going to school like this,’ Matilda told me.

I’m sure you can imagine what a joy it was to me, diffident as I am about my ability to look after the kids, to hear such high praise.

It leaves me quite optimistic. I tend to get on better with kids as they get older. If I can amuse them now, who knows what might not be possible later?

For the Ides of March: new Caesars and old

There’s a story about three outstanding figures from the past, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon, visiting Russia. Putin’s crowd is obviously delighted to receive such distinguished guests and lays on a phenomenal visit to all that Russia offers. In the evening, Putin asks all three what they thought.

‘With such an army,’ says Alexander, ‘I would indeed have conquered the world.’

‘With such logistics,’ says Caesar, ‘I could have ensured the Roman Empire lasted a thousand years.’

‘With such media,’ says Napoleon, ‘nobody would ever have heard of Waterloo.’

Originally, that story was told about the Soviet Union. But, hey, apart from the army being a lot less effective, not much has changed in Russia between Soviet times and Putin’s. And certainly, Napoleon would have had the same reaction today.

As it happens, it isn’t Napoleon or Alexander I want to focus on today, but Julius Caesar. Why? Because he was the bugbear of America’s founding fathers. 

There’s another story, this one more closely based on fact (note that I’m not admitting that my first story was fiction) about a dinner hosted by Thomas Jefferson and with his great rival, Alexander Hamilton, among the guests. Hamilton saw three portraits on Jefferson’s wall and asked who they were.

“They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced,” replied Jefferson, “Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke.” 

That’s two scientists and one of the great exponents of Enlightenment philosophy.

Hamilton supposedly retorted, “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Casar.”

That sounds clever and there are those who feel that it sums up the different attitudes of the two men. That, though, isn’t the view of the historian Jeffrey Rosen. It was listening to him in an interview on the New Yorker podcast The Political Scene that got me thinking about all this. Rosen quoted fellow historian Ron Chernow who reckons that Hamilton was joking. 

I think that’s right. 

Like most of the leaders of the early American republic, Hamilton was extremely concerned about the possibility of a wealthy man backed by the people setting himself up as a dictator, as Caesar did in Rome. For instance, John Adams writing to Thomas Jefferson in November 1813, disagrees on the virtues of an ‘artificial’ aristocracy – that is to say, one that wasn’t born into that station, but made itself wealthy and powerful by its own endeavours. He says:

this artificial Aristocracy can never last. The everlasting Envys, Jealousies, Rivalries and quarrells among them, their cruel rapacities upon the poor ignorant People their followers, compell these to sett up Caesar, a Demagogue to be a Monarch and Master, pour mettre chacun a sa place [to put everyone in their place]

As for Hamilton, the reality is that he was just as concerned about the rise of a strong man to power, in effect overthrowing the republican form of government to return to what would be, in all but name at least, another monarchy. He wrote as much to George Washington, in August 1792:

the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.

Why was the New Yorker talking to Jeffrey Rosen about these exchanges of views from 250 years ago? Well, I think the answer is obvious. ‘Flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion’. Isn’t that exactly what Donald Trump has been doing? 

History repeating itself?
As Karl Marx said, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce

He plays to the worst instincts of a great many people, convincing them that it’s legitimate to hold their basest views, and appropriate to express them, even to elect a government that will act on them.

He makes them jealous of others they see gaining more success, and convinces them it’s simply the injustice of a broken system that denies them the pleasures those others enjoy.

He makes them afraid of what ill-defined enemies may to do them, so that they turn to him to protect them from those threats.

And the aim of all this is to have them carry him to unfettered power, just as the man he apparently admires so sincerely, Vladimir Putin, did in Russia. 

Jeffrey Rosen argued that it was precisely to guard against this kind of usurpation of power that the founding fathers adopted a constitution that provided checks and balances on the executive branch. But those checks and balances only work if the counterbalancing powers exert their authority. Congress, however, now has a spineless majority in both houses that, by conviction or intimidation, will never challenge Trump. And the Supreme Court has yet to show whether it will stand up for its prerogatives – and Trump has still to demonstrate whether he’ll recognise their authority if they do.

The checks and balances are at best fragile now. The Caesar is there. All that remains to be decided is whether he’ll get away with making the final push that gives him the power he craves.

Why am I writing about this now?

Because today is the 15th of March. The Ides of March. So 2068 years ago today, the original Caesar was murdered in the forum of Rome.

Now don't think I’m advocating the same approach to solving the Trump problem. I’m absolutely not. Even setting ethical considerations aside, it worked out extremely badly for the people who tried that way of defending the republic back then. They found themselves in a civil war with Caesar’s supporters, who built a cult around the death of a man presented as a martyr. It was the followers of Caesar, enemies of the republic, who went on to win that war.

So assassination is no answer to the present problems in the US, in spite of Jefferson’s famous – or infamous – comment that ‘the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants’. There are at least three excellent reasons why this would be a lousy way to go:

1. Assassination is the tool of autocrats, as Putin has shown. We don’t defend  democracy by adopting autocratic means

2. We’d be turning the would-be Caesar into a martyr and the retaliation from his followers would be appalling

3. In the specific case of Trump, one of the best arguments for hoping against hope that he lives through his time in office (and let’s not rule out a third term yet) can be summed up in two initials and one name: J. D. Vance.

As a French senator, Claude Malhuret, rightly pointed out in a recent speech, the fate of the American people has to be decided by the concerted political action of the American people. If Americans want to avoid falling under the brutal power of a new Caesar, they must organise to prevent that fate. And that simple truth really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

After all, isn’t that exactly what the founding fathers had to do?

Donald and the Dragon

Let’s start with a bit of a quiz.

See if you can work out which statesman told a journalist from the Economist:

‘Relations with China are excellent.’

When asked by the journalist what the Chinese demanded in return for such excellent relations, he went on:

‘Nothing. That’s what’s so marvellous. They’re a fabulous partner. They ask for nothing in return. All they ask is that we don’t bother them.’

This is an unfamiliar picture of the Chinese dragon, isn’t it? What a mild-mannered, gentle dragon it seems to be. Not at all the picture painted by many in the West, and above all by Donald Trump, the would-be dragon slayer.

Trump and Xi Jinping

The odd thing is that the man who spoke so warmly of China isn’t someone you’d expect to make that kind of judgement. He’s a head of state and, in his campaign for election, he spoke much more dismissively of China, telling Bloomberg News, ‘We do not make agreements with Communists.’

Strange inconsistency, wouldn’t you say? In office, he’s taking a stance that is the opposite of where he stood while a candidate. What’s particularly odd about his judgement of China now, so contrary to Trump’s, is that he’s an outspoken supporter of the US President. He told the international meeting of the allegedly great and the good in Davos that Trump understands geopolitics very well (not a view I share) and uses tariffs as a strategic tool. He told the meeting:

It’s not that he’s protectionist. If you fail to understand the playing field that Trump is playing on, it will be hard to understand his vision. But the guidelines he is putting forward will create a much better world.

If you still can’t place the speaker, it may help to know that the last quote came from the Buenos Aires Times.

Yes, that’s right. This character is Javier Milei. That’s the very Trumpian president of Argentina. Which makes it fascinating that he has expressed such highly un-Trumpian, even contra-Trumpian, views of China.

Trump has just fired the first shot in a new round of a trade war with China. He’s just raised tariffs on Chinese exports to the US from the 10% he initially imposed to 20%. That’s alongside the 25% tariffs he’s now applying to imports from Canada and Mexico, even though it was he who negotiated a free trade agreement with both nations last time he was in office. Not exactly consistent between his two terms...

What’s more, during his campaign he claimed he would reduce prices. Applying tariffs will, however, raise them. Not exactly consistent in his promises. He’s been warned repeatedly that higher tariffs mean higher prices. Unfortunately, he doesn’t listen to people who tell him things he doesn’t want to hear. 

He also proclaims that applying tariffs to Chinese goods is the action of a strong man, putting Beijing in its place. But, as Milei’s comments make clear, the softly-softly approach of China – acting as a good partner and making no demands – works better than Trump’s throwing his weight about.

What’s more, Trump seems to be opening the door to China doing a lot more of that kind of quiet accumulation of influence. Cutting international aid to save a small proportion of US government spending will leave millions around the world in desperate need of help. It seems that, in South Africa alone, 500,000 lives are at risk from the withdrawal of US aid from the UN programme against HIV and Aids.

That’s a glorious opportunity for China to step in and buy itself some more clients, at little cost, by replacing the aid the US has cut off. It doesn’t even need to replace all of it, since replacing even a part will make the Chines look like generous donors and the Americans look like cheapskates. 

So far at least (and Taiwan may in the future prove an exception), China has extended its worldwide influence not by war but by investment. It’s funny to see how western capitalism has reacted with horror, since making investments and reaping the benefits is exactly what capitalism is about. I see plenty to object to in China, above all the fact that it’s a brutally repressive regime, to the extent of taking a genocidal approach to its Uyghur citizens in the west of the country. It’s headed by a man who has made himself dictator for life and surrounded himself with a personality cult. What I can’t see is how the West can honestly criticise it for working to extend its international reach by using the very tools of the capitalist free market that western politicians themselves promote.

Far from acting as a block to China’s continued and stealthy progress, Trump is giving it new opportunities. So it was fascinating to read an article reporting on the views of a former colonel in China’s army, Zhou Bo. Since the Chinese state seems to tolerate his expressing his ideas, I imagine they can’t be too different from those of the political leadership. He’s clear that America is a declining power. That decline, he suggests, is being hastened by Trump’s behaviour:

By the end of his second term, I believe America’s global image will simply become more tarnished, its international standing will just go down further

On the Ukraine war, Zhou said:

The US really holds the key to resolving this issue. China is definitely indispensable … China’s role will be there when it comes to the time of a ceasefire or armistice.

China as the indispensable power? Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What seems certain to me is that if it’s even on the way to becoming indispensable, then it’s with Trump’s help.

Russia and China are both ugly dictatorships. In the past the US always opposed such regimes. Today, Trump seems intent on cultivating them and helping them advance. Far from Making America Great Again, he appears to be determined to abase America to make Russia and China great. Or, perhaps, the key to his behaviour is the belief that to be great, America needs to have just the same kind of dictatorial regime as they do.

Donald likes to preen himself as the man fighting the Chinese dragon. But is he just someone who fancies he could become a dragon himself?

Anniversary for Max

It’s been a year!

Eleven months ago, on 2 April 2024, I wrote to celebrate what I called the first Mensivary of the day that Max came to live with us, a month earlier. Today, 2 March 2025 and eleven months on, we’ve reached the first anniversary of that happy event.

Max, you may remember, is a dog of the classic Spanish hunting breed, the Podenco. Having a Podenco living with us is a pleasure in itself. It also underlines our integration into the life of our adopted country.

In the woods. Max in the light
Luci (left) and Toffee in the foreground

It’s been quite a year since he moved in. I mentioned last year that it was a week before we even heard Max bark. But he quickly learned from the fellow members of his new pack, our toy poodles Luci and Toffee, that barking is an essential part of greeting anyone who has the gall to walk past our house, front or back. When that happens, all three tear down to the appropriate gate and warn the potential intruder not to get too close to their territory.

At first, Max wouldn’t come upstairs. An internal staircase seemed to be an alien concept to him, which it may well have been, since he’d probably previously been a hunter’s dog. These days, he unhesitatingly comes upstairs to push my arm to stop me typing if, say, I’ve got too wrapped up in something on my computer to remember that it’s time to serve the dogs some food.

He also had no idea what to do with a couch. For a time he would only lie on the floor. But eventualy he decided that maybe he’d climb up onto one of the couches in our living room, the one at right angles to the longer one Danielle and I use to watch TV. Indeed, within a short time, he’d made it his own. Not that he’d aggressively stop other people sitting on it. It was simply that if they did, he’d leave. A couch, he seemed to think, wasn’t something to share.

But that soon changed. So he’d lie on the couch with, say, one of our sons if he was visiting. He’d apparently discovered that lying next to someone and sharing warmth with them was quite pleasant.

But that was still only a stage. The next step was to move onto our couch. At first he occupied one end, on his own. Sometimes with the girls.

Max masters the couch and shares it with his pack sisters

Then gradually he moved closer until he could lie pressed up tight against one or other of us.

The final stage, which he’s now reached, is when he moved right up to our end. Now, indeed, he likes to do what Luci does, and lie between us, touching one of us on each side. It’s been great to see him evolve like this, except that he represents rather more of an obstacle than, say, Luci, who’s significantly smaller. We just have to move him away, to maintain the tradition of foot massages for Danielle while we’re watching TV.

Moving close to us feels like a good thing. But getting between us is a step too far. It’s a further illustration of the principle that you can have too much of a good thing.

Out of doors, his assimilation to his pack has been just as good. As I said eleven months ago, he turns out to be that rare creature among Podencos, one that doesn’t run away. He hates being separated from us, in fact. 

There was one memorable moment when he did wander off into undergrowth in our local woods and, on returning to the path, mistakenly decided that Danielle and the other two dogs had walked on down it, as they usually did. At that time, we used to put a GPS on him, so Danielle could track him running faster and faster, down the path, getting further and further away. Then it must have dawned on him that his assumption had been incorrect. Danielle tracked him turning around and racing back up the path towards her. When he got close enough to hear her calling, he accelerated still further, charging through the woods to the place where she was waiting for him. He was obviously delighted – and no doubt relieved, for a dog abandoned by his earlier owner in the countryside – to have found his pack again.

Since that time, he’s been very careful not to get so far away from us that he doesn’t know where we’ve gone. In fact, even when off exploring, he dashes back now and then to make sure he can still find us. That generally works, though a couple of weeks ago his system broke down and he lost track of me and the poodles while we were walking in the woods. I spent some time looking for him while he, no doubt was looking for me. We’d stopped using the GPS on him and, for the first time for many months, I regretted it.

But then Danielle rang me from home.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘I’m fine,’ I replied, ‘just looking for Max.’

‘You can stop looking. He’s here. I was worried that something had happened to you and he’d come to warn me.’

It turns out that once home he’d rushed around the house, looking, Danielle reckoned, for the poodles and me. When he realised we weren’t there, he ran back to the garden gate and stood there, looking pitifully at Danielle, as though he wanted to be let out again. It was as though he felt bad at having left us behind.

When I got home, we had a fine celebratory reunion. I was pleased to find him again, but even more because he’d shown he knew the way home. What better proof could there be that he’d entirely integrated into his new home and family?

Sorry, I mean pack.

We’re celebrating the anniversary of his arrival. 

The enjoyment is all the greater because it’s that wonderful time of year again, here in the Northern Hemisphere, when the days get longer. And in our house, which is oriented east-west, that means that the front garden starts to fill with sun – well, on sunny days – in the afternoon. We had sun in December and January too, but it still wasn’t high in the sky. It warmed us if we were sitting on chairs, so we could have lunch outside in the depths of winter – a delight for Northerners like us – but it didn’t reach the dog beds we’d laid out on the ground.

That’s changed. The sun now gets high enough to shine in over the neighbour’s hedge. And, boy, are the dogs happy. Well, happiest of all is Max, who like most Spaniards, has the sun in his blood. Give him a chance to lie around in it, and he won’t wait to be asked twice.

Contented sun worshipper

Toffee, on the other hand, is English bred. From Lowestoft, in Suffolk, on the east coast. Like so many of the English in Spain, she’s excited by the sun and makes a beeline for it, like Max, when it appears, only to decide after a few minutes that maybe a little shade would be preferable. She too seems to realise that you can have too much of a good thing. 

Toffee too enjoying the warmth, but in the shade

Well, whether it’s Max’s revelling in sun worship or Toffee’s ‘so far but no further’ approach, for my part I’m simply comforted to see these signs of returning light and warmth. A fine way to greet Max’s first anniversary with us. And a huge boost to good mood after the (relative) cold of winter.

And in the world as it is today, any boost to good mood is to be treasured.

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.