Transient's diary, weeks 11 and 12

So close and yet so far…

The house is nearly ready. The new bedroom has painted walls as well as a floor and a view.

Blue walls, wooden floors, and a view:
our bedroom just needs a bed

The new bathroom upstairs has bathroom fittings.

New bathroom looking good
If they can replace the leaky toilet
and turn the water back on

Fresh paint is on the walls of the new staircase.

Great pale green staircase
Just needs a carpet

What more could we ask for?

Well, I suppose water in the upstairs bathroom would be good. In the new shower room downstairs, too, come to that. But, hey, we’re nearly there. The stair carpet’s ordered. The new carpet for the living room has already been delivered. And the kitchen was finally finished this morning.

We’re sticking with the removal van’s arrival on Saturday, and that’s that.

Anyway, a rite of passage has occurred. For the first time since we moved out in August, the whole household gathered in the old place, indoors, in daylight, this Sunday. Ever since he’s been on his own in the place, our cat Misty has been most chary about coming indoors: it was a mess and often full of strangers, and few people are stranger than builders. He preferred to keep out of the way, hanging out, we suspect, in a neighbour’s house and only appearing at night, in the garden, when we came to feed him.

But on Sunday, the toy poodles Luci and Toffee were able to get together with him, share the joy of reunion, and start exploring the place.

Gathering of the clans.
Note the new pet flap in the background, being examined

The joy didn’t last too long for Misty. He quickly remembered why he’d always found Toffee an annoyance: she followed him everywhere, pushing him around when she could to try to get him to play with her, or smelling him in inappropriate places. Eventually he retreated behind a ladder and had to defensive action with a paw to keep her away.

Misty chastises Toffee
“Great to see you, but clear off now you irritating little tyke”

Still, at least that too is part of normal life, now close to being re-established. Indeed, it was because of normal life that we were there at all on Sunday: a house must be cleaned and when it has had builders in it for twelve weeks, it needs cleaning on a massive scale.

We were there for ten hours on Sunday (though I would slope off from time to time to walk the dogs). But for Danielle that took her total to 32 hours in three days (the first two of which, sadly, I had to be away on business. In Sicily). And we’ve had two wonderful Polish women put ten hours each. But the pace still isn’t clean.

Ah well. I’m looking forward to moving back in. But I suspect there’ll be a fair dose of purgatory mixed in with the pleasure, at least initially.

Good combinations

Certain pairings just seem to work, don’t they? Fish and chips, for instance. Or spinach and egg. And, of course, gin and tonic.

The same is true, or ought to be, about kids and dogs. It isn’t always. Our dogs, Luci and Toffee, are toy poodles, which means they’re smaller than our cat. He’s a big cat, admittedly, but hey, he’s a cat. The domestic kind. Not a leopard or anything.

Providing my readers with a sense of scale:
Toffee with our cat, Misty

And yet I saw a child – and not the tiniest but a seven or eight-year-old – burst into tears the other day and rush into his dad’s arms when he was approached by Toffee, the smaller of the two. She thinks that kids were only placed on earth for her entertainment. She balances that apparently egotistical view by the belief that her only purpose in life is to entertain kids. So if she sees one she runs joyfully over and tries to leap all over them.

Leading in some case, most strikingly in the one I mentioned, to deplorable results.

So when three kids came rushing up to us in the park today and asked to play with Luci and Toffee, I explained carefully that Luci was timid and wouldn’t want to play, but that Toffee would be only too pleased.

“If you run away from her,” I told them, “she’ll run after you but she’ll never catch you. Basically, she’ll run with you. She won’t bite you but, if you let her, she might lick you to death.”

The joy of being chased by Toffee
Potentially never-ending as she never catches up

To my delight, and even more to theirs (and I’m including Toffee here), these kids were bolder than some, and quicker on the uptake than most. They took off and let Toffee chase them. They screamed a bit, much like the screaming you get on a school playground at break time – with nerves certainly, but with a lot more pleasure mixed in – which only added to the fun.

One of them even worked out a way to persuade Luci to play a little – by chasing her, rather than expecting Luci to do the chasing.

Go about it right and even Luci can be got to play

And, as I warned them, the only real danger with Toffee was being licked to death. A danger heightened when your big brother (I assume that’s what he was) is egging Toffee on.

Toffee being over-affectionate
And is that a failure of sibling protection?

W C Fields may once have said (or it seems it may have been said about him) that, “a man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad”. Oh, well. At least children and dogs can get on just fine if they learn to overcome their fear.

And have a lot more fun with each other than Fields ever gave either.

Healthcare: doing the right thing and finding the right words to say it

Every now and then a conference – and I’m at one now – is enlivened by masterful presentation, brimming with insights on vital matters, the whole sharpened and enhanced by intelligent use of humour.

Such was the talk given by Walter Ricciardi, President of the Italian National Institute of Health. It was entitled From evidence to action in health policy making: a mission impossible? His subject was how senior clinicians concerned with the strategic direction of health, and convinced of the value of practising evidence-based medicine (the theme of the conference) could work with politicians in government to take the necessary decisions.

Walter Ricciardi
Witty, insightful and spot on about the need to get it right – and say it right

I’m keen on evidence-based medicine. That may sound like a trivial statement: who wouldn’t be? Well, you might be surprised how often medical decisions are taken on the basis of a clinician’s gut feel, or confidence that years of experience are enough, rather than evidence. Worse still, they’re often taken on the basis of politics: for instance, the UK government has made funds available to allow GP practices to stay open later, without putting in place any kind of process to check whether the move leads to any of the desired effects – most notably reducing attendances at Emergency Departments of hospitals.

The reason why Ricciardi feels this kind of discussion is vital now is the well-known observation that demand for healthcare seems to keep climbing uninterruptedly, as the population of the advanced economies ages and the technology available for care increases in sophistication (and cost). As he suggested, there has to be a limit to the amount society can sensibly be asked to invest in healthcare.

That reminded me of a presentation I attended some years ago, when one of the speakers pointed out that, on present trends, the USA would be spending 100% of its GDP on healthcare by the end of this century. That’s clearly impossible – something has to go into schools and roads and things, to say nothing (this is the USA we’re talking about, after all) about defence. So what is the maximum US citizens will accept? 50%? Surely that’s too high. 30%? It’s hard to imagine. 20%? If so, things are urgent indeed: they’re already spending 18%.

That’s without even providing full healthcare coverage for the whole population.

Limiting healthcare expenditure, wherever the limit lies, means that at some stage we’re going to have to start denying care. That’s where evidence-based medicine comes in. There are a great many treatments that could be denied without doing patients any harm – indeed, where the denial would do them good.

At one end of the scale, prescribing antibiotics for viral conditions harms us all and does no good to the patient.

At the other end, intense and highly expensive interventions for a patient with a fatal condition can wreck the end of a life and incur huge waste.

We have to start finding a way to avoid this kind of wasteful, if not downright harmful, way of practising medicine.

That’s where Ricciardi turned up the humour a notch or two. He suggested that the people who understand the issues have a vocabulary of 140,000 words; the general public, and he included politicians in that category, a mere 7000.

I don’t know where those numbers came from. Frankly I find them highly questionable. In fact, I’m inclined to ask, where’s the evidence? However, the underlying point is worth making: specialists in medical information need to find a way of communicating the case for some of these notions more effectively to the population. They need to persuade politicians of the need for action, and help the politicians find the words to express their decision in a way voters will accept.

At this point he made a point I found particularly amusing, though he may have meant it seriously. He referred to Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, as intelligent and honest. It was wonderful to see how the English in the room all started in their seats and shuddered: Juncker is viewed as a figure of derision in England. He’s disliked in a great many countries, but it was striking how much stronger the English reaction was.

He went on to quote Juncker as saying, “we know what to do. We just don’t know how to get elected afterwards.”

Jean-Claude Juncker: a smart and honest politician?
Not according to the English, but are they right?

Now, that really is both honest and true. The things that need doing are tough to make popular. A politician that does them may indeed find it hard to win office again.

There’s an excellent example in Ricciardi’s own country, Italy: the Italian government has taken an extraordinarily courageous decision, to make childhood vaccinations compulsory. The anti-vax movement has reached dangerously high levels, with herd immunity being lost and long-vanished diseases like measles and mumps making an appearance again. The government took the action necessary, based on the mass of evidence available: the potential harms of the vaccinations are less serious and less common than those of the diseases they eradicate.

But will they have persuaded the voters that the decision was right? Popular anger in response to the measure was intense and widespread. We’ll see in next year’s elections how well the government has done in taking popular opinion with it.

It’s important to practise evidence-based medicine. But it’s just as important to find the words to explain what you’re doing. The former is what we have to do but, without the latter, the politicians who do it will be unable to stop their achievements being unravelled by their successors.

The joys of simplicity, revealed in the blessings of universal credit

Simplicity is so much to be preferred to complexity, isn’t it?

Britain had a real mess of a system for providing benefits – what other people call social security – to people who need them. To mention just the main ones, there was housing benefit and invalidity benefit and unemployment benefit and, just to confuse everything, even tax credits in employment, to boost the earnings of the low paid.

Who had a right to which? For how long? And under what conditions?

So it made sense to put an end to this chaotic mess. Replace this whole raft of multiple criss-crossing benefits and replace them with just one, tailored to the individual. Why, we could call it universal credit and have it replace all the rest.

Iain Duncan Smith
A remarkable track record. To which he keeps adding

It was the brainchild of one Iain Duncan Smith. He made his name as leader of the Tory Party, taking over after its disastrous general election defeat by Labour in 2001. However, in 2003 he lost a vote of confidence of his MPs, convinced as they were that he could not lead them to success, and resigned. But he refused to go into his long goodnight as he might have done, instead reappearing as the minister responsible for benefits under David Cameron.

You don’t remember Cameron? Don’t worry. He was immensely forgettable. He enjoyed a brief and ill-deserved moment in the limelight as British Prime Minister before returning to the far more merited obscurity from which it’s unfortunate he ever emerged.

In the meantime, Duncan Smith got his chance to introduce universal credit.

A brilliant idea, as I said before.

Except that a brilliant idea in the hands of a Tory Minister, in a government wedded to austerity, is unlikely to look as generous on closer scrutiny as it sounds on the surface. So it turned out with this one. As this enlightened minister made clear in an article for the favourite paper of the Tory party, the Daily Telegraph (or Torygraph as those of us of another persuasion like to call it):

By restoring the incentive to work and ensuring that work always pays, universal credit is the strongest statement of this Government’s commitment to helping people get the security of a good job.

See the sleight of hand? “Incentive to work” is Tory doublespeak for “we’re going to make this so mean that no one could possibly live on it so they’ll be forced to take a job, however dismal”. A “good job” in this context is Toryspeak for “a reduction of one in the unemployment figures”.

Just to avoid any possible doubt, Duncan Smith also explained that “our reforms are forecast to save a total of nearly £50 billion cumulatively across this Parliament.”

Saving money. Always a welcome message for the recipients of state benefits, who know it means a major effort of generosity on the part of government.

Duncan Smith brought to the task of designing universal credit all the flair he’d shown in leading his party.

It’s taken five years to build the system. It’s being trialled right now in several local council areas. The results have been eloquent: there’s been a huge increase in dependence on food charities and in rent arrears. One food bank, according to Patrick Butler in the Guardian has reported a 97% increase in demand.

Meanwhile with that pesky housing benefit out of the way, councils are reporting huge increases in rent arrears. One council, the Guardian again tells us, reports dramatic figures:

Southwark said that although just 12% of its social housing tenants were on universal credit, they have built up £5.8million in rent arrears. The average universal credit household £1,178 in arrears, compared with £8 credit for the average council rent across the borough.

That’s why they call it universal: it spreads joy everywhere. Not just the tenants who can enjoy piling up rent arrears, and celebrate the fact down at their local food bank, but the council who sees its rent income falling.

As Duncan Smith so eloquently put it, he was building “a system that supports people to secure independence for themselves and their families.”

The wonderful thing is that, although he was sacked by Theresa May, our soon-to-be-former Prime Minister who replaced David Cameron (remember him now?) he keeps popping up and speaking out on the subjects he cares about. Most notably, he’s terribly keen on Britain getting out of the European Union. Just the other day, I heard him on the BBC explaining why Britain had nothing to fear from Brexit and everything to hope for.

It’s extraordinary, with his track record, that there are still people out there prepared to listen to him.

And, still more difficult to understand, believe him.

Transient's diary, weeks 9 and 10

It may be time to start counting differently. To think “day -12” rather than “week 10”. Our transience is really feeling transient now. Why, we’ve gone so far as to book a removals lorry to get us back, for a week next Friday. We were promised completion by last Friday, but OK, we never really expected that target to be hit. In the end, we’ll be moving back a couple of weeks late. 

What’s more, the project’s a few thousand over budget, but hey, we got a lot more done than we were planning.

Like new floors everywhere. That wasn’t in the original plan, which was a mistake. A design flaw, you might say, not to design for replacing the floor. Now that’s done. The guys even fixed the squeaky floorboard by the door, which turned out to be a squeaky floor joist, which turned out to need one of them to climb down into a gap where he could barely breathe and do whatever you have to do when you replace a squeaky joist by one that doesn’t squeak any more.

Before you become casually judgemental about my utter inability to explain any of the things that they were doing, let me just point out that I’ve made quite a lot of progress in the course of this whole business. If nothing else, I now have some idea what the difference between a joist and a beam is, even if I still don’t know how to fix one. Either one.

Love the green. Shame a lot of the dark shade will be covered by our couch
Sorry – Luci and Toffee the dogs' couch. And the cat Misty's

As well as floors, we now have newly-painted walls. In tasteful colours, too: none of your “white with a touch of primrose” or “white with a touch of sea spray” or what have you. These are proper colours. It means that when people come and stay with us, we’ll be able to say “shall we put them in the brown room or the claret room?” like the gentry of yesteryear. It’ll still be the front room or the back room, but it sounds so much better, doesn’t it?

One of the nice things about the claret room, incidentally, is that it’s the room where we keep our wine – so it’ll contain claret as well as being painted claret (note to self: go out and buy some more claret). That might make it not the best room for our more bibulous friends; or perhaps, on the contrary, absolutely the best.

The other good thing about the colours is the clever strategy we adopted for choosing them. Danielle picks them. She asks me whether I like them. I tell her “yes”, and we’re all happy.

The kitchen’s nearly done now. We actually have water there, and with proper pressure. It was worth having the road coned off again and again for two or three weeks while the water company made up its mind to come and do the work. Well worth it, I say, though I’m not sure the neighbours agree.

Units, sink, stove, tiles, a door - even a cat flap (small-dog flap)
See it down there to the left of the door?

As well as water, we have a stove and an oven and tiles and units and a door to the garden and – I can just picture the delight of the animals – a small dog/large cat flap too. Everything’s really coming together.

That includes our new bedroom. Blue paint on the walls. A lovely view from the wide window, with no scaffolding to block it (did I mention the scaffolding had gone?) and delicate led lights in the ceiling. Which are on all the time, as it happens, since the switch, although firmly installed, doesn’t actually have any effect on the lights. But, you know, an electrician must be allowed the occasional mistake, and he’s superbly qualified to fix it.

The bedroom's starting to look like one. With a view on more than scaffolding
And notice the led lights - permanently on for the moment

We’re looking forward to getting there. In less than a fortnight. My only regret is that the flat we’re renting has one of those pay-as-you-go metres for gas. I put a lot too much money on it. It’s all very well keeping the heating on as much of the time as possible but this is turning out to be a mild autumn, and there’s only so much sweltering we can stand.

Oh well, I suppose leaving rather more gas credit to our successors than I planned, is a price worth paying for getting back home as soon as possible.

I’m looking forward to it. Impatiently.

New Zealand an antidote to a toxic trend still sadly topical today

There’s a striking frieze inside Milan Central station, a relief that has a certain attractive quality at first glance. It’s only when one comes to look at it more closely that one notices details that are far less attractive. And it’s no relief at all.

Elaborate carvings look down on the entrance lobby of Milan station

At either end of the frieze is a symbol that it’s hard not to recognise. The symbol of magisterial authority in ancient Rome: a bound bundle of rods with an axe projecting from the middle. It symbolised power, the axe underlining that it went as far as life and death.

Striking detail: a symbol we might have hoped behind us

And what was the bundle called? Why, a fasces. It gave its name to the movement that adopted it as symbol in twentieth-century Italy, Mussolini’s Fascism.

In a sense, that’s not inappropriate. Mussolini built the Central Station (well, to be accurate, he got some other people to build it for him). He put his party’s symbols among the decorations. If we look at the entire frieze again, we can see that there’s a blank space in the middle, clearly designed for lettering. Presumably once it contained some uplifting slogan of the Fascist state, urging the people to sacrifice to the glory of the nation. That might possibly be in war, that most glorious of all Fascist actions, as long as, like station-building, you could get other people to engage in it for you.

The words have been expunged. But presumably the cleaners of Fascist symbolism didn’t feel the fasces themselves could be removed without damaging the entire frieze, so they remain in place. Which is particularly apt, since it underlines a fundamental point: there are certain lethal viruses that simply cannot be entirely wiped out but lie dormant for decades or even centuries, before bursting forth again in some new and terrible contagion.

That’s certainly the case of Fascism. Around the world, we have seen that phenomenon of the thirties emerging once more: the impoverished, the left-behind, the disappointed entitled, rally around the providential man who voices their hatred of others – above all, of the Other – and promises them quick fixes to their suffering which they can never deliver. And they get elected.

We’ve seen it in Trump. We’ve seen it in surge of support for the far Right in Germany and Austria. We’ve seen it in the move or Brexit in Britain.

Brexit’s a particularly striking case. Its essence is xenophobia, fear of the foreigner. Some defend it as a way to protect jobs or wages; all the evidence is that the damage to both has been done by British forces not foreigners. Others defend it as a means to protect workers against a club of capitalists; all the evidence is that workers have gained more rights through EU membership than they’ve ever lost.

It even creates strange bed fellows, or perhaps I should say boatmates. One of the more remarkable photos of the Brexit campaign showed Kate Hoey, left-wing Labour MP, literally in the same boat as Nigel Farage, like her a leader of the Brexit movement, and a worthy heir, if ever there was one, of the men who proudly made the fasces their symbol in the 1920s: nationalistic, Islamophobic, a hater anything that deviates from a strict interpretation of the white, English-speaking mainstream.

All in the same boat? Or getting on swimmingly while making the country sink?
Far left and far right together in the toxic mix that Brexit made

How did she end up in the boat with him? That’s the toxic nature of Brexit. More broadly, it’s the toxic effect of all those nationalisms now spreading their tentacles around the world. Again.

Curiously, I saw the Fasces in Milan last week. The next morning, I discovered that the centrist, moderate Labourite Jacinda Ardern would be leading the next government of New Zealand. Here are a few predictions I make with absolute certainty:

• The same people who would climb into a boat with Nigel Farage will criticise her for forming a coalition with New Zealand First, an unpleasant nationalistic party. I agree with their concerns, because she’ll surely have to meet its leader Winston Peters on some unpleasant anti-immigration measures. I can only hope that as a small minority in the coalition, New Zealand First will have its worst poison drawn. I’d also remind those who like to walk shoulder to shoulder with Kate Hoey that pots have to be careful what they say about kettles, and Farage was far more than a minority partner in the Brexit coalition.
• Ardern will set out to do some good, as she’s told us: she wants to build “a country where our environment is protected, where we look after the most vulnerable, where we support our families, where we make sure people have the most basic of needs, like a roof over their head.” Her goals will be far more limited than many of us would like, and she’ll achieve far less than even she wants, but she will do some good. That’s because she’s in government, and government can do things, when oppositions can only proclaim them.

Her arrangement with Peters means that Ardern is at best containing right-wing populism rather than blocking it. However, in a world where a Trump can win the White House, that feels like a welcome change. 

It was particularly welcome to me after seeing the Fasces, still hanging on, inside Milan station. 

When the family shows up

“The family, that cage with living bars,” wrote the French novelist François Mauriac. There must be families like that, just as there are families which are pleasant holiday chalets with open doors to let the air in with the visitors, and the residents in or out as they want. Equally, I suppose many families mix their open rooms and their cages, often right next door to each other.

For my own part, I’m always pleased when my family comes to see us. This weekend, it was the turn of my youngest son Nicky and daughter-out-law Sheena to add considerably to the pleasure of the household. We did lots of things which might not otherwise have done, some highly successful (a walk in Ashridge Forest, for instance), some less so (a Motown concert which we left early, after raising my understanding, if only of the question why I had never attended one before).

Inevitably, we ate too much. Somehow, whenever we do anything for the sheer pleasure it seems to lead to a series of meals, many of them far too big.

In any case, it didn’t much matter what we actually did or how well it went, since what made it most fun was the fact that we were doing it together. I even took pleasure from going bowling, a game I usually delight in because I play it well, though on this occasion – when I notched up some historically abysmal scores – I could only enjoy the simple fact of participation. .

It was ironic playing such a quintessentially American game with my family. Not a week before, my American boss had been in town, and I enjoyed introducing her to that fundamentally English game, snooker. American games with an Englishman, English games with an American: the simple symmetry’s a joy in itself.

Nicky leading the way in the Wardown Park run
but the threat's on his shoulder...

A more successful sporting event took place on Sunday when Nicky decided to take part in a park run in one of Luton’s pleasanter places, Wardown Park. Some 300 people took part; he led for a short time and eventually came in second, behind a worthy winner (“perhaps I should have tried harder to catch him,” he however claimed). With several friends among the runners, it was good to be there, and the dogs enjoyed it too – they’re keen fans of Wardown Park, where there are ducks, squirrels, kids to play with and, if they’re quick and we’re not watching, occasionally the opportunity to gobble up some ghastly piece of food discarded by a careless eater (or possibly an eater more discerning than they are).

Watching those runners got me checking my phone for the records of the days when I used to go running regularly. It shocked me to discover that at the peak of my performance, I was achieving speeds that would have hardly have got me out of the bottom half of the field in the park run. My son achieved over twice that. No wonder I gave up running, switching instead to badminton: at least it’s a game that allows me to take out my frustration at my ineptitude by occasionally viciously punishing the shuttle and smashing it beyond my opponents’ reach (worth it, even though they do the same back to me even more frequently). .

As it happens, not only do I not have the energy these days to do any running (except over the narrow distances of a badminton court), I find it effort enough just to keep walking. I remain under the dominion of my fitbit, obsessively piling up the steps each day. That can be painful, but it does have one advantage.

Like a great many people – even another French writer, Proust – I’m neurotic about remembering to undertake routine tasks. He talks about having to turn off the gas very consciously, so that later on he can remember having done so. With me, it’s locking doors. “I’m locking the front door, now,” I have to think to myself, or “I’m locking the car,” so that when I get a sudden rush of anxiety I can remember clearly having done so.

Of course, that means having to remember to think consciously about those tasks, and I don’t always. Often I have to go back to check. With the car, that isn’t so easy: I can’t test the door handle because, with the clever new technology we now have, if I do that the car unlocks anyway. So instead I just look at the wing mirrors: has the car tucked them away? If it has, then it’s locked.

Still, just being obliged to go back to check is a pain. Except that – now it isn’t. Because it’s steps. I’ve actually found myself deliberately walking all the way around the car to lengthen the process. Because it’s all steps towards the target, all grist to the mill.

No good for my fitbit obsession. But maybe good for my body.

When it comes to my soul, it was the family visit itself that did me good – there was no cage there, no bars. Well, except the kind where one might celebrate over a drink. As is only appropriate when family shows up.

None of the above, when October feels like November

October in England this year has had many days that felt like September at its best, but a few that resembled November at its gloomiest. That’s how today dawned. Grey, dull, wet, not exactly cold but far from inviting. The kind of day that makes you want to pull the covers back up and pretend the day’s not yet begun, or perhaps wallow in a bath till you outwrinkle a prune while you read the paper.

Except, unfortunately, the news in that paper only adds to the November feeling of such a day.

Honestly, the state of British politics is enough to make you want to turn to the sports pages instead. Personally, I find the underperformance of the grossly overpaid on the pitches of the English so-called premier league (more of a might-have-been league these days) more edifying than the political news these days, and Lord knows the self-styled premiership’s pretty dire.

We now have a glorious spectacle in the Tory Party entirely divided against itself. It continues to rule in this country, if only by its fingernails. The parliamentary party seems split between two groups.

On the one hand, stand the archi-Brexiters who’d like to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, sacked for pushing a ‘soft Brexit’ approach. This would involve trying to maintain the best possible relationship with the EU after Brexit, especially as concerns trade, even at the cost of accepting some continued EU influence on British affairs.

On the other hand, the ranks of Brexit-deplorers are calling for the sacking of the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, for an altogether too cavalier attitude towards Brexit. Convinced that the British lion can emit a roar to be heard around the world, he wants the country out of the EU at the earliest possible moment with no deal for the future if necessary.

Between these two groups stands the Prime Minister, Theresa May, herself. She must at least feel a certain relief that the talk of sacking is concentrated on her two most senior ministers instead of herself. Ever since the disastrous General Election she called in June when, instead of increasing her Party’s majority substantially, she lost it and found herself heading a minority administration, she’s been beset by calls for her to go. It must be a pleasant change to see others the target of such calls, for the time being.

For a great many of us, this is all a little ironic. Because the issue isn’t getting rid of Johnson, Hammond or May. The Brexit question needs solving and needs solving urgently. A hopelessly divided government can’t do it, so why don’t we just sack the lot of them? Someone has to come up with some kind of coherent negotiating stance to try to limit the damage to Britain after the country leaves the EU. Sadly, however, there’s a sense that the Opposition may well be as heavily, if more discreetly, riven on the issue.

Labour is, in principle, committed to remaining in the EU. If we absolutely must leave, Labour should therefore be seeking the softest of soft departures, perhaps even remaining in certain structures such as the Single Market or the Customs Union. However, it’s far from clear that the leadership, and in particular the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, entirely buys into that scenario. And he’s not saying.

The Don't Knows in the lead
Really feels like November in October

That may be why, for the first time since pollsters YouGov started asking, it has found that the most popular answer to the question “who would make the best Prime Minister” is “Don’t Know”. That feels a bit like “none of the above”.

A dismal state of affairs.

Enough to make you want to pull the covers up and snuggle down for another hour or so. Except that now it’s the evening and the last of the day – which has, unexpectedly, turned pleasantly September-like. I think I’ll take the dogs out.

That at least I can be sure of enjoying. As will they.

Transient's diary, weeks 6 and 7

At last, it’s really happening. Things are on the up. There’s beginning to be a glimmer of a hint of a chance of a hope of a prospect of our moving back into our house before long.

The new kitchen has tiles on the floor. It has some kitchen units in place. Why, it even has a new boiler. No water to the boiler (or taps or anything else). No electricity to light the boiler. No gas to light, indeed. But, hey, that can all come in time.

A kitchen taking shape
Note the boiler. Not that it’s working yet or anything

And it’s not just in the kitchen that we have tiles. There are even tiles on the walls of the shower room, and very fine they look too. Of course, no water, electricity or, indeed, water heated by the boiler that’s not yet working either but, again, hey, we shouldn’t ask for too much too soon.

Besides, there’s no shower head.

The shower room has great tiles
Though no shower yet...

xThere’s been even more progress upstairs. The loft no longer looks like a loft at all. It’s beginning to look like a bedroom. As well as the window with its great view (well, OK, mostly of scaffolding for the moment but one can picture the view beyond it), we now have plastered walls and a proper floor.

New room emerging with a fine view of scaffolding
But – en suite doesn’t really mean a bath in a bedroom, does it?

There’s a bath too. I like to think it’s not in the right place – I don’t think ‘en suite’ means actually in the bedroom. Some time they’ll no doubt move it into the little kind of cubile they’ve fashioned next to bedroom – yes, it’s going to be more en-cubicle than en suite, but there’s no room for a real suite under our roof.

It’s all happening, though, isn’t it? The end of the vagrancy beckons. To be capped by a place I’m keener and keener to get back to…

The end is in sight.

Catalonia: an appeal for peace with simple words to say it

It was good to see Catalans, or at any rate a great many people both Catalan and non-Catalan, demonstrating on behalf of dialogue in Catalonia this weekend. That’s to get out of the crisis brought on by demands from the Catalan government for the independence of their region. The marchers wore white, the colour of no party but of peace, they carried no national flags, and they had only one demand: let’s talk. Hablamos in Spanish. Parlem in Catalan.

Marching for peace and dialogue in Barcelona

The absence of flags was a good move. Flags stand for nations and nations stand for far more than just the good. You can point with pride to a Dalí or a world-cup winning football team? Just remember that you also have to take on board the persecution of Jews and Muslims and nearly four decades of Fascism.

Instead they sought communication. “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” Winston Churchill said, and the words ring particularly true at a time when the Catalan leadership has pushed its case to the brink of conflict, and the Spanish government has stepped right over the line into violence which, if it wasn’t lethal in its police action against a referendum on independence deemed illegal, was nonetheless brutal.

So “let’s talk” sounds like an eminently sensible response. Watching people demanding it was heart-warming. It left me feeling hopeful for once, as few political developments do.

Though I have to admit it wasn’t just the sentiment that touched me. The words themselves struck me. They awoke memories from decades ago, memories of an amusing discovery during my student days.

It may seem odd that of the two great languages of antiquity in Europe, Greek and Latin, only the former is still spoken. There is apparently no “modern Latin” as there is a “modern Greek”. That is, however, only an appearance. The only reason there’s no modern Latin is that there are, in fact, multiple modern Latins.

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, even French are all in fact the descendants of the language spoken across the Roman Empire at its height, altered by the successive waves of incomers that have affected some regions far more than others. French, for instance, has come a long way from the original language, heavily influenced by the Germanic speech of the invaders from across the Rhine – Burgundians, Goths, and of course the Franks, who gave the country its modern name.

The Latin from which those languages developed, however, wasn’t the elevated language spoken from the Senate. “Latin’s a dead language, as dead as dead can be,” goes the schoolboy doggerel, “it killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.” Even those ancient Romans realised it was far too complex a language. Pliny the Elder admitted he spoke a different language in the market than in the Senate.

The language of the marketplace was, above all, far simpler. For instance, the word for ‘to talk’, loqui (think of ‘loquacious’ or ‘eloquent’), is particularly painful. Its form is called ‘deponent’ so it looks passive when it’s actually active (so a classical Latin scholar would say ‘I have been talked’ when what he meant was ‘I have talked’).

The more sensible kind of people who would sell you a water melon or repair a broken shoe don’t speak that way. So they looked around for different words to us.

Two are particularly simple. To tell a parable – ‘parabulare’ – and to tell a fable – ‘fabulare’ – are nice, easy, first conjugation verbs that are entirely regular and therefore behave predictably. The common people chose one or other of those two to mean “to speak’ in preference to loqui

The Italians, the French and the Catalans chose ‘parabulare’, shortened to ‘parlare’ (the word in Italian), giving the Catalan ‘parlem’.

The main branch of the language in the rest of Spain chose ‘fabulare’. The Spanish have a way of replacing the initial ‘f’ by an ‘h’ – smoke, for instance, which is ‘fumo’ in Italian is ‘humo’ in Spanish. The Spanish for ‘to speak’ morphed into ‘hablar’ and hence ‘hablamos’.

The marchers in white were therefore demanding that the two parties tell some fables or some parables to each other. What they meant was that they should speak. Any of those would be great.

Isn’t it great that they chose to say it with a particularly easy word – not a derivative of the ghastly Latin ‘loqui’?

In the end, chatting to each other instead of fighting isn’t all that difficult. It just takes a simple word. And a bit of goodwill.

Spoil the child - and get an adult you don't want at the top

When a young person commits a crime, we’re often told about the way he – it usually is a he – was moulded by his upbringing into the criminal he became. The parenting was too harsh, or too lenient, or too neglectful or simply too lacklustre. It was inevitable that a child brought up this way would turn into an adult who went off the rails.

Think of this upbringing.

You are born into a household of considerable wealth and a globalised lifestyle – indeed, though British and born of British parents, you enter the world in New York. You attend arguably the most prestigious school in Britain, Eton College. Attending the school costs £32,000 a year, a third more than the median earning level in Britain of under £24,000 – for a household of two people.

Let’s get this clear: half of parents in Britian are on less than a level of income which, if they paid no tax, and avoided spending on luxuries such as food, drink or a roof to shelter under, they’d still be £8000 short of the cost of a year at Eton.

I confess that I attended a down-market version of the same kind of school. The teachers keep telling the kids that they need to remember how privileged they are. The ostensible aim is to teach the kids some humility; the reality is that it just teaches them that they’re special, that they deserve colossal sums of money to be spent on them.

In other words, kids who go through this kind of education are taught to believe themselves entitled to special treatment.

Now let’s return to our hero. After Eton, he went to Oxford university, where he became a member of the Bullingdon Club. This is one of Britain’s fine traditional institutions. Its members are Oxford students from the richest families. Even the club uniform costs around £3500 – nearly a sixth of median income.

The most charming characteristic of the club is the way it entertains itself. The members like to book whole restaurants, spend an evening eating and drinking to excess, and then trashing the place. The next day, someone’s Daddy pops around with a chequebook and covers the cost of the damage.

Boys will be boys, won’t they? And who wants to spoil a good evening? Aren’t those of us who might regard this behaviour as anti-social and even criminal just puritan wet blankets?

The Bullingdon Club just underlines the message about entitlement. It says that such young sprigs can do what they like, with impunity. They’re taught that whatever they want, they can take, and no one will ever hold them responsible for the consequences of what they do to get there.

Our hero is, of course, Boris Johnson. Now not everything in his life went smoothly. He was fired from the Times newspaper for falsifying a quotation. That must have come as a terrible surprise: he had been held accountable for an action of his.

BoJo: trained to believe in his entitlement
And he likes to be seen as a lovable buffoon

It didn’t hold him back much, though. After all, he is now Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom. However, what he isn’t is Prime Minister, and he wants to be. What do you do when you’re denied something you want and have been told throughout your life that what you want, you can have?

Over the last few weeks, he’s infuriated members of his own, Conservative, party by constantly making statements pushing a line on Brexit different from his party leader’s. And that party leader, Theresa May, is the Prime Minister.

Clearly, he has been positioning himself for a potential leadership bid against her.

The effect has been to give publicity to Tory divisions, shake the authority of the party and weaken its chances against a resurgent Labour opposition. This has so irritated Johnson’s colleagues that it has even got through to him at last. He knows he needs his colleagues if he’s ever to achieve his ambition of winning the leadership, and if his constant manoeuvring to win the leadership puts them off, it’ll be counter-productive. So he’s gone so far as to appeal to Tory MPs to rally behind Theresa May and against Labour, even though no one was doing more to damage that position than he was himself.

None of that gives me any distress. The Tories divided? The Tory image undermined? The Tory grip on power shaken? Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch, I say.

As for BoJo himself, I suppose one has to feel a little sympathy for a man so spoiled by his unfortunate childhood and young adulthood.

On the other hand, the idea that BoJo might get anywhere near Downing Street turns my blood cold. If we have to put up with a Tory government, that’s bad enough. But that champion of entitlement, of privilege, of belief in his own impunity heading it?

An appalling prospect...

Catalonia: another simple solution sure to fail

In the early part of last century, the American commentator HL Mencken pointed out, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong”.

In Spain, elements in the troubled region of Catalonia have felt for a long time that they would be better off outside the Spanish state.

I say ‘elements’ because a great many Catalans are far from convinced that this is the right solution for their region – even if it is, in fact, a nation. Many on the left, for instance, are concerned by a separatist movement they see as xenophobic and conservative; many in the centre of the political spectrum see themselves as Spanish as well as Catalan, feel there’s no contradiction between the two and believe Catalonia would enjoy a more secure future linked with the other Spanish regions than on its own.

So which side commands a majority of Catalan opinion?

Opinion polls are only worth so much, as we have learned to our cost in numerous elections around the world. Even so, they’re about the only indication we have of where an electorate’s view stands, outside an actual election. The Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió (Centre of Opinion Studies) is a body that is run by the Catalan regional government, so one wouldn’t expect it to be biased against the views of that government, and yet even it has found a majority against independence in every poll bar one since late 2014, and in three of the last four, including both polls carried out in 2017.

The regional government is currently held by nationalists. They have decided that they wanted a referendum on independence in the hope that it would endorse their separatist views. In response, the central government in Madrid made it clear that it regarded such a referendum as illegal and ordered the Catalan government not to hold it.

Let’s pause a moment at this point.

Here’s one approach the Madrid government could have taken. It could have announced that it would not regard any referendum result from Catalonia as binding. That would have laid down that in no circumstances would a vote for independence have had any effect on the central government or lead to any change in the law concerning Catalonia.

The referendum could have gone ahead. If the opinion polls had proved accurate, the result would have been a rejection of independence, massively discrediting the separatist movement. The regional government might have fallen; the question of independence would have been off the table for many years to come.

Had the referendum delivered a vote for independence, the Spanish government would simply have confirmed that it was non-binding. They would have faced a reinvigorated separatist movement but, having made their own position powerfully clear beforehand, they would have had a strong, pre-declared position from which to build a new view of the Catalan situation resulting from the vote.

That’s a complicated solution to a difficult problem. It leaves many issues undecided, requiring the government to come up with solutions later, pragmatically, in the light of circumstances. Instead, Spain decided that it wanted a well-known, neat and plausible solution.

So it opted for repression. It sent in the police. On the day of the referendum, they were shown battling with protestors in the streets, inflicting some serious injuries. The optics, as marketing people call them, were terrible: here were Spanish police, acting on orders of the Spanish government, using often violent power to prevent people voting.

When you’re acting in the name of democracy, that’s a pretty lousy image.

Unarmed civilians in fear of the police
Not a great advert for democracy

Governments seem to like resorting to the use of force. It can be domestic, as in Catalonia, or foreign, as in Iraq, Libya or Syria. It’s always a simple solution, easy to reach for, close to hand. And it usually ends in tears, as it did in Iraq, Libya or Syria.

In Catalonia, the bloodshed on the streets will have only one effect. It will unify and galvanise the opposition to Madrid. Those who opposed Catalan independence before, will come under increased pressure to change their view. If they refuse, they will be accused of treachery, of betraying the sacrifice of the dozens who suffered injury from police violence, all in the name of Catalan freedom. Some at least who opposed separatism, will change sides and back it.

Blood shed in Catalonia:
shameful behaviour to would-be voters, a boon to the separatists

In other words, from the point of view of the Madrid government, the situation will be as would have followed a referendum result backing independence. Or, rather, far worse: whatever the result, the separatists will claim they have been cheated and will draw additional strength from the powerful emotional cohesion that the spilling of blood gives to a cause.

The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy chose a solution, police repression, that was well-known, neat and plausible.

And, as Mencken could have told him, wrong.