War, emigration and some fine silk socks

In 1940, my father, Leonard, volunteered to join the Royal Air Force. At his interview, a Wing Commander looked at his application and asked what must have seemed to him to be the crucial question.

‘So, young man, you were born in London, but moved to Brussels at six weeks?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And why did you do that?’

My father was English to his fingertips, even though he spent his childhood in Brussels and spoke French like a native – indeed, it became the preferred language of communication between him and his four siblings.

He left Brussels with his mother, on the last train before the German army moved in.

‘It was just as well we caught the last train,’ he told me, ‘the one before was strafed by German fighters and a lot of the passengers were killed.’

He arrived by boat in Portsmouth.

‘It was great to see all the warships in the port, lined up and sleek in their battleship grey. It made me feel that we weren’t defenceless, that I was home and among powerful friends.’

This was the start of the only extended period he was to live in England: from 1940 until he was demobilised in 1946. When he headed back to Francophone territory, specifically Paris.

Propping up a wheel of his bomber
- Leonard while doing his bit in WW2

My mother, Leatrice, on the other hand, had only been out of the country once in her life, on a family holiday in France. When she was three.

She was still in her late teens when war broke out. She spent one term away from London and the dangers of bombing, at a school in Windermere in England’s North West. She hated being away from home and decided she preferred to risk the bombs and came back. That occasionally meant cowering with her mother in the broom cupboard under the stairs until the all clear had sounded.

‘Under the stairs was the safest place. When you saw bombed-out houses, the stairs would often still be standing. But it was horrible crouching in there in the dark.’

No bombs fell in their neighbourhood anyway, in Hampstead Garden Suburb in outer North London, home for many Jews who’d made enough to be comfortable, though not quite enough to join their wealthier co-religionists in nearby Golders Green.

As the war went on, both my parents became blasé about the bombs.

‘I hated shelters,’ my father told me, ‘the atmosphere was dank and full of fear. So, when I was on leave in London, I just stayed up above and watched the raids. Once, I was walking home with a packet of eggs – precious at the time – and I could hear the shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells falling back to earth and tinkling on the ground all around me. All I could think of was how to keep my eggs safe.’

My mother even played a memorable tennis game with a friend, ignoring the air raid warnings, only to discover when they’d finished and climbed to the top of the hill where they could see the view, that the whole of the City of London was ablaze.

On leaving school, she took a shorthand course and went to work for Finchley Council, in North London.

‘The anti-Semitism was unbearable. I couldn’t wait to get out.’

Always a sympathiser of the political left, her next job was with Albert Inkpin, formerly the first general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. When they met he’d been demoted to running the Friends of the Soviet Union. She helped him with its paper, Russia Today. The publication recounted the glorious achievements in the Soviet Union and the triumphant advance of the working class everywhere under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. In other words, it was a propaganda sheet. If it existed today, we’d call what it purveyed fake news.

Come to think of it, it does exist today and that’s exactly what it purveys.

My mother found the diet there a little too rich. She moved on to an organisation that was more congenial to her, the venerable social democratic movement –Inkpin might have described it as bourgeois liberal – the Fabian Society. She worked half time for the Society and half time for one of its leaders, the Labour MP John Parker.

One of her more vivid memories was of lying in the grass in St James’s Park, between the government offices in Whitehall and Buckingham Palace, watching German V1 flying bombs coming over.

‘You listened for the motor to cut. If it did when the bomb was close, it might drop straight out of the sky towards you. I once heard a V1 motor cut while I was in a Lyons Corner House restaurant. All the clients, including me, flung ourselves to the ground under the glass-topped table – hardly likely to give us much protection. Fortunately, the bomb didn’t hit us.’

The V1 'doodlebug'
The time to get really worried was when the engine stopped

She stayed in the job after the war. That meant she was there on an evening in 1946 where a diminutive, humble figure walked through a crowd of Labour staff members in the Headquarters building, with only a smile and an occasional wave in an acknowledgement when they stood to give him an ovation. The man was Clement Attlee, and the staff had just had the confirmation he would be the next Prime Minister, having beaten the legendary and apparently unbeatable Winston Churchill. He would be one of Britain’s most effective Prime Ministers.

My mother hankered, however, to get away. She found an ill-paid job in Paris and moved there. She didn’t realise it, but it would be the last time she lived in England for four decades.

Meanwhile, my father had started working with a British railway body and had done well. So well, indeed, that his boss called him in one day to congratulate him on winning a more senior appointment back in Britain.

‘But… I didn’t apply for the job,’ my father told him.

‘No. I put in the application for you. And you’ve won! It’s a great honour.’

‘Maybe. But it’s not a job I want.’

He eventually gravitated to working with UNESCO, based in Paris. He was young, well-paid with few responsibilities. He indulged in some luxuries, one of which was silk socks. In all the time I knew him, I never saw him in silk socks, which is perhaps a measure of what it cost him to accommodate my brother and me.

Meanwhile my mother moved on from the ill-paid job and joined the UNESCO typing pool –not the most fulfilling work but it allowed her to live far more richly than she ever had before.

One day she was invited to a party with a bunch of her colleagues and found herself on the floor with her back against a sofa, on which a young man was sitting. What she saw of him first was, of course, his shoes and his socks.

‘Good Lord,’ she said, ‘you’re wearing silk socks with little clocks going up the sides.’

‘Yes,’ he said. Thus they took the first step towards a life containing my brother and me, and far more cotton than silk.

Hell's just some people

‘Hell is other people,’ wrote Sartre.

My own feeling is that in reality it’s only certain other people that are hell. And some of them one can adapt to.

For instance, crying babies in planes used to drive me crazy until I had my own children, at which point my attitude went through a complete reversal. Now, when I hear a child crying I just feel sorry for the parents. I know how embarrassed, upset and impotent they feel, as they struggle with an impossible task, quietening an unhappy child. Or an angry one.

I was reminded of that today when I heard a baby wailing in a flat next door to us. It didn’t last all that long, but while it was going on it was clear that the parents were completely unable to calm him. He wanted something, he wanted it now, they weren’t able – or perhaps willing - to supply it, and he was making his displeasure fully known. Not to just to them but, as in our case, to the neighbours too.

He knows he wants something and he knows he’s not getting it.
That annoys him. But at least he has the potential to learn

Still, the noise didn’t irritate me. I’ve been there, held a wailing child, wandered around in the moonlight with him on my shoulders at 2:00 in the morning. I know what it’s like and can’t work up any annoyance, just some fellow feeling and a trace of ‘thank God that’s not me any more’.

In any case, it’s easier to forgive noise from babies because they are creatures of pure potential. Who knows what they may turn into. And, above all, they could well learn self-control.

It’s far sadder when the noise is being made at the other end of life, when there’s so little less to hope for. Visiting my mother in hospital, where she’s struggling against a battery of conditions that tend to afflict a 93-year old, is pretty depressing and not just because of her state. On one visit, when I arrived in the ward I could hear a woman down the corridor shouting quite as loudly as the baby next door today.

‘Help me! Someone help me! I need help! I need it now!’

I was there for nearly two hours and the shouting never stopped. People in the nearby beds must have found it insufferable. She was surrounded by nursing staff who were, clearly, helping her, but her problem wasn’t physical, it went far deeper, to an area within her well beyond their reach. Like the child, she knew she needed something, and knew that no one was providing it, but had lost the capacity to comprehend that they could do nothing so that continuing to clamour was ultimately pointless.

What made things worse was that before I even left the four-bed bay where my mother was sleeping, the woman diagonally opposite her also started to cry out.

‘I need help. Now. Urgently. I need to see a doctor. Straight away. Bring me a phone. I’m going to phone a doctor. I need a doctor. Come now and get me a doctor. I need a doctor now.’

The litany went on and on. At one point she spotted me.

‘You there. Yes, you. The man sitting in the corner. Bring me a phone. I’ll phone for an ambulance. They’ll get me into hospital.’

‘Err…’ I replied, ‘you’re in hospital.’

Not useful, I know, but I’m not much good in these situations. But simple pragmatism? It clearly wasn’t going to put her off.

‘I need a doctor. Bring me a phone. I’m going to phone a doctor. I need a doctor. I need a doctor now.’

Then she decided to adopt a new tactic.

‘I’m getting out of bed now. I’m going to look for a doctor.’

She made ineffectual moves towards leaving her bed.

‘Now, Sylvia,’ said a nurse, ‘you stay in bed. You might fall down and hurt yourself.’

‘I need a doctor,’ replied Sylvia.

‘A doctor will come and see you. But the doctors are busy just now. They’re in the Emergency Department.’

‘Well, I’ll get up and fall down. Then they’ll have to see me.’

She may have been not entirely conscious, but I have to say, her logic was impeccable.

The sad thing about these older women was that, unlike the child, there was little hope of their getting better. Of developing new self-control. Like the child, they wanted gratification immediately, and they’re unlikely to learn what the child may, that there’s much to be said for deferring gratification. If only, to avoid immediate disappointment.

That makes their protests harder to bear than a baby’s. Though they’re still not the least bearable of all. Those are the wailing cries of entitlement that come from people who are technically adult and who have neither the excuse of the child who hasn’t yet learned, or the older person who’s losing the lesson.

One of the saddest aspect of the world today is just how many of such people are in positions of power. Supported, apparently, by growing movements, in nation after nation: nationalists in Italy or Hungary, backing Brexit in Britain, voting for Erdogan in Turkey, supporting Trump in the US.

Now those adult babies really are insufferable.

He wants gratification. He wants it now.
And there’s no prospect of his learning better.

There's good emergency service triage. And then there's the other kind

It came as a bit of a surprise when the French Emergency Department doctor (‘urgentiste’) I was talking to asked if we could postpone for a week the webinar we were planning.

‘You may have picked up that there’s a bit of a controversy in France around emergency services right now, and we’re even more crazily busy than usual.’

Well, I hadn’t picked that up. But two friends were with us from the glorious Eastern French city of Strasbourg where we used to live. One of them was a nurse, so I reckoned she’d know. Though actually both of them were fully up to date, and for a good reason.

‘Yes, a terrible scandal,’ they told me. 'In Strasbourg.’

The problem had arisen on a call to the emergency services. Rather than describe what happened, I’ll just translate the transcription of the call, between a frightened caller and a triage clerk:

‘Miss, I’m in pain…’

‘OK, so you phone a doctor, OK, got it? You understand, phone SOS Médecins [the primary doctor emergency service].'

‘I can’t.’

‘You can’t? Oh, really, you can phone the ambulance service but you can’t…’

‘I’m going to die.’

‘Yes, you’re going to die, without a doubt, some day, like everyone else… Ring SOS Médecins, OK?’

‘Please, help me, Miss.’

‘I can’t help you. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.’

‘It hurts, it hurts…’

It’s hard to disagree with the Enquiry finding that the clerk’s tone was harsh.

That was at 11:30. At 12:32, a relative rang again and, by sheer bad luck, was dealt with by the same clerk. Again, the call wasn’t put through to a physician, although two were available.

At 13:47, SOS Médecins itself called the emergency service. This time a different clerk answered. She put the call through to a physician who immediately sent an ambulance. It arrived at 13:58. Some two hours twenty minutes had been wasted by then, and that proved critical: although the patient was immediately hospitalised, she died at 17:30.

She was 22.

This tragic litany proved career-limiting for the first triage clerk, who has been suspended pending dismissal. It did no good to the emergency service director either, with the report of the Enquiry recommending that his resignation, already offered, be accepted.

It’s a classic case of rare – or hopefully rare – ineptitude. A fine object lesson in how not to run triage. Triage is the process by which healthcare staff decide what level of care a patient might need. Clearly, it failed in this case.

However, that there’s one other aspect of these events which casts a still deeper shadow over them. The woman who died was called Naomi Musenga. As my French friends point out, even on the telephone, her accent would have revealed her sub-Saharan African roots.

Naomi Musenga, in a photo from franceouest.fr
Would she have been treated differently if she’d been white?

Would the clerk have reacted differently had the caller’s voice identified her as white? Who can say? But the way things are in the world today, how can we immediately rule it out?

At any rate, it’s no wonder my French ED physician was too busy for a webinar this week.

A cautionary tale for our times

Imagine the United Kingdom sheltering behind a customs tariff wall. Inside, there is great suffering as food prices rise. Worst of all, in some areas the suffering has reached the point of starvation. There, thousands are dying and thousands more are emigrating by whatever means they can, as unemployment and poverty rise inexorably. The worst hit areas are depopulating.

Not everyone, however, responds to this catastrophic situation in the same way. Some of the very wealthiest strongly support the tariffs, because they protect their businesses by eliminating foreign competition to them. 

More strangely, as well as this right-wing resistance to any attempt to take down tariff walls, there is also vociferous and powerful opposition from the left. These activists believe that tariff reform will expose elements of the working class to competition too. To protect them from it, they are prepared to stand by the tariffs, even though they know that the price is terrible suffering and even death among a far broader section of the poor. Odd, most commentators would feel, since the left should above all speak for the poor – all of the poor and not just a relatively small section of them.

Does this sound like a Brexit dystopia? A UK after leaving the EU, with tariff walls in place partly to protect itself, partly to retaliate to the wall put up by others. A UK receiving a painful lesson in the non-existence of the Brexit dividend.

Funnily enough, that isn’t what I’m describing here. This isn’t a picture of the future. It’s a picture of the past, of the time in the early 1840s when British agriculture was being protected by the corn laws, even though they caused major hardship for much of the working class and the poor dealing with high food prices.

The region where the hardship became actual starvation, and which began to depopulate, through death and emigration, was Ireland, then a part of the UK.

Irish poor reduced to starvation
all in the name of protectionism and resistance to free trade

The landed interest on the right of the political establishment favoured the preservation of the laws. Much of the rest of the right wanted them abolished, partly because it would favour the development of business, partly because if food prices fell, there would be less pressure to increase wages for workers.

The elements on the left who oddly sided with the hard right were the Chartists. This was a movement for political reform and for working class rights in the middle of the century, but it apparently couldn’t grasp the basic principle that the corn laws kept food prices high and inflicted huge damage to the very people the Chartists set out to defend.

The past, not the future, then. But something similar is happening again in the present. That, of course, simply confirms the principle that people are unwilling to learn lessons from history.

The left-wingers in the role of the Chartists are the Brexiters of the left in the Labour Party. Their concern is that the EU is an organisation wedded to market economics and preventing any kind of development towards socialism. That seems to imply that Britain on its own, freed of the liberal economic shackles of the EU, would suddenly embrace socialist principles, as though there was a colossal and currently muzzled desire for pure socialism in the British people.

This is not a view of Britain that it is easy to reconcile with reality.

What is oddest about the people who take this stance is that it makes them some strange bedfellows. They find themselves working with some of the least savoury elements of the hard right, such as UKIP. It’s hard to explain why, given that they see themselves as socialists and internationalists, they don’t question how they can be in partnership with xenophobes and extreme nationalists.

Just as the Chartists found themselves working shoulder-to-shoulder with the toughest of Conservatives but never apparently wondered why.

What’s certain is that the damage the corn laws did before their repeal in 1846 – too late for Ireland – is likely to be caused by Brexit too. Businesses are beginning to threaten ending their investments there – Airbus and BMW just in the last few days – and prices will inevitably rise as the country leaves the free trade area that has guaranteed it cheap produce for forty years.

Which proves another principle: if you refuse to learn the lessons of your mistakes, you condemn yourself to making them all over again.

Bride of Belsen

It takes a lot to survive a concentration camp, so to survive three is practically miraculous. All the more so if you live through a death march as well. If, finally, you turn that experience into a life-enhancing event, rather than a crushing blow, then you’re a remarkable person indeed.

That was the case of Gena Turgel who died earlier this month.

Gena Turgel meets the Queen at Buckingham Palace
on 28 May 2015

She was born Gena Goldfinger, on 1 February, in Krakow. That’s a wonderful, vibrant, exciting Polish city even today. Back then, it was little different, though in those days some of that vibrancy was doubtless supplied by the city’s large and active Jewish community – then some 60,000 strong but down to 500 today.

When the Nazis occupied the city, Gena’s family was forced to give up its textile business and move into the newly designated ghetto. One of her brothers was shot there and another escaped, but no one heard from him again. From the ghetto, the survivors in the family were moved to Plaszow labour camp, made famous – or infamous – by the film Schindler’s List.

Her sister and brother-in-law were caught by the Nazis trying to smuggle food into the camp and executed by them.

From there, Gena was marched in 1944 to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but instead of being gassed was sent on a death march to the camp at Buchenwald. She survived that too, and was finally moved to Bergen-Belsen.

There she nursed Anne Frank through the typhus that killed her.

Appalling experiences that no human should suffer, especially when they are completely unnecessary and merely inflicted by other humans. That is, humans who have lost their humanity.

Fortunately, she didn’t lose hers. Among the first allied soldiers who liberated Bergen-Belsen was a young Jewish sergeant in the British Army, Norman Turgel. I assume he was really a Nathan, like my grandfather, who was also often called Norman by his gentile friends (or non-friends). Norman met Gena in the Infirmary. He apparently found her attractive enough to want to invite her to dinner.

The dinner was in a British Officers’ mess. The tables were covered with crisp white linen, shining cutlery and vases of flowers. For someone who had spent over five years in concentration camps, the sight was difficult to take in. But Norman had an explanation ready. 

‘This is your engagement party,’ he told her.

As Gena would tell the story, he had decided on first meeting her that they would marry. As indeed they did, within six months, and, by special permission, inside the Bergen-Belsen camp. That won her the title she kept ever after: the Bride of Belsen. She even had a silk wedding dress, made from a British army parachute.

Norman and Gena Turgel
He in battledress, she in the parachute-silk wedding dress

She spent the rest of her life working constantly to spread awareness of the Holocaust, its causes and its victims.

She died on 7 June this year, at the age of 95. Having lived a long life marked by early and terrible suffering. But which she turned to great value.

My thanks to the BBC, via my wife, who heard it on the radio. At a time when we have an Italian Interior Minister prepared to leave people to drown in the Med rather than let them land, and a US President who sees nothing wrong in forcibly separating children from parents and keeping them in cages, we badly need to be reminded of humans who kept their humanity.

It’s a wonderful relief.

The parachute-silk wedding dress
Preserved in the Imperial War Museum, London

By strange twists of fortune to relief for the soul

There are times when we just need to let the stress out. Little does that as well as music. Especially music in good company. Especially when part of the good company is provided by the musicians.

My family’s going through a stressful time. Well, the worst stress is for my mother. At 93, things can go wrong quickly, and they’ve been going pretty badly wrong for her just recently, as she bounces between a hospital and an intermediate care facility, a step down from acute care but still a medical establishment, not home.

She’d done well to get to 93 still able to live in her own flat. There was a part-time manager in her building but no medical care. Until a few weeks ago, my mother has coped with her own cooking, shopping and washing, only drawing on the help of friends when it was offered. Now, though, the pain she has suffered for some years has become worse and a series of other problems have led to her transferring in and out of different forms of medical care, and the sight is a sad one to see.

It’s the harrowing paradox of human existence: none of us wants to die young, but reaching advanced old age is no fun either.

The stress is worst for my mother, but the rest of the family has suffered from it too. So it was wonderful to find relief from it at another concert in the museum in Luton. These take place, as I’ve mentioned before, in the lovely surroundings of Wardown House. On this occasion, the concert involved two violinists playing a series of pieces; an unusual, and attractive, aspect of the event was that they stopped regularly to talk about the music they were playing or their composers. That was fun and it established a friendly rapport between the players and the audience.

Let me quickly indulge in what will feel like a digression, though it isn’t really.

Back the late 90s, a scandal hit the papers. It was a financial matter but not confined to the financial pages. Nicola Horlick was that rare creature, a woman who was a highly successful player in the financial services market. She was managing director of UK investments for Morgan Grenfell Asset Management, until she was suspended in January 1997 and resigned two days later. She was accused of preparing to move to another company, which was the excuse for her suspension; there was, however, widespread suspicion that she had irritated her employers by being far more successful than any woman was expected to be in that profession (or, it was felt, had any right to be).

In 2005, she set up Bramdean Asset Management. One of the partners there was Enrico Alvares. Now, he had a most unusual background to be a financial manager. The son of a professional violinist in Nairobi, he had been more or less obliged to take up the instrument at the age of three. He studied music at prestigious schools in London and eventually joined (by invitation) the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, where he played for ten years.

But then he decided that he wanted to make a little money. So he joined Nicola Horlick and made, in his own words, hundreds of times more than he ever could from music. Hs initial passion, however, never deserted him and in time he decided that money could only go so far. He returned to the violin.

Meanwhile, Stephanie Waite had done something not dissimilar. She had played the violin from the age of two. At eighteen, she went to Cambridge to study English literature and moved into teaching after graduating, including several years teaching English and Music at Pentonville prison.

One night, however, she attended a string quartet concert at London’s Wigmore Hall. She remembers neither who was playing nor what they played. Her principal recollection of that evening was the overwhelming feeling that this was what she wanted to be doing. She had to get back into music.

By different routes, both Enrico and Stephanie found themselves playing in one of the major orchestras, she with the violins, he as first viola. The orchestra was too big for them to meet but, by what turned out to be a happy coincidence, they got to know each other on the homebound train. Soon after, they were married and since then they have frequently given violin duo concerts together.

Stephanie and Enrico: wonderfully performing glorious music
in the beautiful setting of Wardown House

One of those concerts was in Wardown House, which is where we met them.

Two odd and serendipitous paths to that place. Where, by further serendipity, we listened to them at just a time when we most needed the balm they provided.

Life, as my mother’s experience shows, often gets things badly wrong. Sometimes it does them exactly right. And this was one of those occasions.

For that, at least, I’m grateful.

Poor old Jezza - he just doesn't get it

Poor Jeremy Corbyn. He really is completely out of his depth, a man promoted far beyond his level of competence. He flounders and flails and sadly sinks.

Greeted like a pop star at the Glastonbury Festival, he went with his advisers’ instincts and organised his own festival in London, Labour Live. In the end, by dint of slashing ticket prices, they were able to attract a turnout of 13,000, way below expectations.

At ‘Labour Live’: a voice Corbyn should be listening to

Why was the turnout so poor? For the same reasons as he is still trailing the Tories in the opinion polls, even though Theresa May’s government is divided, unpopular and distrusted. He simply doesn’t know how to build a majority.

What threw many of his critics, including myself, at the general election of 2017 is that he won a huge surge of support from young voters. That fooled opinion pollsters who expected that the 18-24 age group would be the one with the lowest turnout, as in most previous elections. But, inspired and mobilised by Corbyn, they confounded that expectation and gave him a far more healthy score than we’d predicted for him.

His supporters presented this as some kind of victory, even though he did in fact all the same come second, and there are still no silver medals in elections. Fail to come top and you’ve lost. What he achieved was a more honourable defeat than had been forecast, but it was still a defeat.

However, there’s something else about that 18-24 age group. It is massively pro-European: 71% voted to stay in the EU. Indeed, even the next age group up, 24-49, voted 54%-46% to remain.

In other words, to hold on to the youth vote, Corbyn needed to adopt a Remain stance. That shouldn’t have been hard since it is, after all, the official policy of the Labour Party he leads. But he has two problems that have led him to make no unequivocal statement on the issue: the first, is that a large proportion of Labour MPs represent constituencies with a Brexit majority and they’re frightened of alienating them; the second, that he has traditionally belonged to the anti-EU group on the left of the Labour Party.

All I can say about the fear of Brexit supporters is that leadership does sometimes involve challenging the views of voters. The greatest fear of working class Brexiters is immigration. Labour will truly sell its soul if it tries to accommodate that kind of xenophobia for electoral considerations.

But when it comes to the Brexit left, I have to say that I’m bemused. The central tenet espoused by these people is that the EU is a neo-liberal institution forcing casualisation of the labour market and poor wages on the working class. This vision seems to suggest that Britain is a nation thirsting for radical change, held back only by the vicious free-market ideology of the EU. The reality is that Britain usually leads the charge towards deregulation. You have only to compare worker rights and labour regulation in France or Germany with Britain to see how much further Britain goes in this direction.

Indeed, many of the rights enjoyed by British workers are protected by the EU against serious objections from entrenched interests in the UK. Unsurprisingly, it is the very people who want to tear up regulation and rights that most strongly back Brexit. The Brexiter left has therefore found itself in bed with some strange people, perhaps most strongly symbolised by veteran left-winger Kate Hoey campaigning in a boat on the Thames alongside the hard-right Nigel Farage.

A shameful moment: left-winger Kate Hoey (right)
with ultra-right winger Nigel Farage (left) campaigning for Brexit

In this context, it’s interesting to see that some of the small band of young people who attended Labour Live hoisted a banner calling on Corbyn to ‘stop backing Brexit’. The truth is that he dodges and evades rather than openly backing Brexit, but I share the suspicion of the banner-holders that he does, indeed, secretly back leaving the EU, lacking only the courage and honesty to say so.

It was interesting to discover from the Guardian’s Tim Adams, that a group who wanted to raise a pro-Remain banner during Corby’s speech were bundled away and prevented from protesting. So it seems that the Corbyn regime is not only as ready as Blair’s to evade and fudge, it’s also happy to block the freedom to oppose its views. I know I’m in a minority in this view, but it has often struck me how much more Blair and Corbyn have in common than is generally admitted, at least in the way they operate.

Meanwhile, the anti-Brexit voice was gagged at Labour Live (suggesting that ‘Live’ is a bit of a misnomer). But even more striking than the young people who were silenced is the number of young people who stayed away. It seems to me that they too suspect Corbyn of favouring Brexit, and therefore diametrically opposing them on the biggest question of the day.

He doesn’t get it yet, but maybe it’s time Corbyn worked out this was why he couldn’t get young people to a festival, or to back him again in the polls.

Dogs, kids and powerful people

The thing about dogs is that they’re often just like kids.

Sometimes it’s their most endearing characteristics that are the most irritating. Take, for instance, Toffee, our apricot toy poodle (she’s called Toffee because she’s toffee-coloured, unlike her older and slightly bigger black companion, called Luci, who is of course Luci-coloured). One of Toffee’s favourite pastimes is to have us throw one of her soft toys across the room so she can scamper over to it, skidding and sliding on the floor, to retrieve it and bring it back to us.

She then sits on the sofa next to us with the toy at her feet. I mean paws. She waits for a while. Then she starts to whimper discreetly. Then the whimper becomes a lot less discreet. Finally, she starts to bark. And, if none of that works, she gets up on her rear paws and scratches my shoulder with her fore-claws.

That’s fore-claws, not four claws. There are actually eight of them.

‘So I’ve got the toy and I’ve got it subdued. Now throw it again.’

They’re painful. Besides, they’re not good for concentration. At least, not on anything else, which I suppose is Toffee’s point. But it’s not helpful if you’re watching, say, one of those incredibly dense Nordic thrillers, where you miss one subtitle and you’re struggling to catch up for the next twenty minutes. Worse still, you may have been distracted at just the moment when one of the 87 characters – that feels like something of a minimum for a Nordic noir – has been introduced, so you spend the next two episodes asking ‘is he the boyfriend of the photographer, then? Or the father of the little boy who went missing from the playground?’

This is the point where I make my error. What I should do is tell Toffee to settle down. 'No, Toffee,’ I should firmly say, ‘that’s enough. No more playing now.’

But what I actually do is throw the toy again.

You see the mistake? By throwing her toy I’m doing exactly what she wanted. I’m rewarding the very behaviour that annoyed me so much. So, naturally, she’ll do it again. To buy myself a few seconds of peace – and it really is a few seconds, because it doesn’t take her long to return with the toy – I’m condeming myself to hours more of the same exasperation.

Well, kids are often just like that.

Though the reason they’re like that is that all humans, adult or child, are like that. Reward a form of behaviour and you encourage its continuation.

Take, for instance, three generations of a family of hereditary Korean autocrats. I suppose the fun to be got from generally oppressing, frequently imprisoning and occasionally torturing your unfortunate subjects doesn’t last too long. So you long for something else. Namely, recognition. You want a seat at the big boys’ table.

Imagine how wonderful it must be for such a man to have a US President, no less, invite him to sit down with him at a conference table. As equals. With the same number of flags for each of them. With great imposing motorcades to get to the venue and back from it. And, on top of all that, to have that same US President saying nice things about him, even declaring what a tough job he has, keeping his people starving and downtrodden, and how well he’s doing it.

And all he has to do to get all that is develop a missile and a nuclear warhead that can hit the United States. To get all that applause and smiling recognition. All the delightful baubles that eluded both his daddy and his granddaddy.

Wow! A Kim like a big boy! A proper politician!

Now, here’s the question: will he, as a result of all this fuss, decide to do away with his nuclear arsenal? Or will he, Toffee-like, just keep right on going, perhaps doing away with a few little bits but keeping enough to make sure that he keeps being glad-handed by the US President?

I leave you to answer that for yourselves.

All this might naturally change when there’s a new president with working neurons. But for now, with his own personal Trump to play with, I can’t see what could possibly stop Kim Jong-un carrying on with the fun.

Just like Toffee keeps on wrapping me around her little finger. Or claw, at least.

Pleasure, and a timely lesson, from the Hamburgers

There are more bridges in Hamburg than there are in the whole of Venice and Amsterdam. Taken together.

How do I know that? I was told by a taxi driver. And the word of a taxi driver is not to be doubted, is it? Like the word of a US President. So I haven’t checked. I have to admit, though, that if I haven’t looked, it’s partly just because I wouldn’t want to find out that it wasn’t true.

The Elbe in Hamburg

In any case, it’s highly plausible. The city has water everywhere. It’s a great port, after all, at the mouth of the river Elbe, and with many channels of its tributary, the Alster, flowing through parts of the city centre. Water, hills and parks make a city, in my view, and Hamburg has the first and last of these.

Water, water, everywhere

Many of the waterways are lined with old warehouses, a reminder that the city was once one of the chief centres of a great trading association of northern Europe, the Hanseatic League. Most German cities like to have their car number plates identified by a single letter – B for Berlin or F for Frankfurt, for instance – because a short abbreviation indicates a great city. Hamburg insists on two – HH for Hansestadt Hamburg, recalling its long commercial traditions.

Hamburg warehouses. And more water, of course.

‘England is a nation of shopkeepers,’ Napoleon once said. I realised just what he meant, and just why he said it, when I was recently reading some material on Britain in the eighteenth-century. In the Napoleonic wars, Britain tried for as long as possible to avoid getting involved in fighting on land in Europe, preferring to limit its military commitments to the sea (trade needed the sealanes kept open, after all). Instead, it offered subsidies to its allies to do the actual fighting. It could offer those subsidies because it was a powerful trading nation, though as I argued here recently, even Britain suffered as embargoes and counter-embargoes were imposed.

Hamburg, like Britain, prospered by trade. A message Brexiters and Trumpistas would do well to remember. Erecting barriers makes nations poorer. Knocking them down makes them richer – all of them: this isn’t a zero-sum game, both sides gain from trade. And war damages them.

Alongside parks and waterways, spires help a city too. My eye was caught by a tall church tower as I was walking between meetings, but I couldn’t get to it just then – I was in the city for work, after all. However, later, having seen a colleague off at the station, I found that my route back to the hotel took me close to it. “I could take a look,” I thought.

The ruined church of St Nikolai in Hamburg

It turned out to be the tower of the St Nikolai church. Only the tower and the chancel survive. The main part of the nave was destroyed in 1943 when the Allies bombed the city, in the aptly – and vengefully – named ‘Operation Gomorrah’. The Royal Air Force bombed at night, the US Air Force by day; the RAF carpeted the city indiscriminately, the USAF targeted military works (such as a submarine factory); a fire storm engulfed the city, leaving a number of dead that has never been precisely determined, some of the corpses having been completely incinerated in the flames.

Picasso evoked the terror of the Nazi bombing of Guernica

The museum in the crypt of the ruined church makes it clear that the chief blame for the horror belongs to Hitler and Nazism, that none of this would have happened had they not set Germany on a vain road to world power, and that the Nazis indeed had pioneered the use of mass bombing of civilians before the Allies did: the museum mentions Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Warsaw, Coventry and, indeed, London, all bombed long before 1943.

That’s generous of the German historians.

However, it hardly lessens the guilt of the Allied strategists. The exhibition quotes Air Chief Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris saying ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried… and we shall see.’

Let’s be clear: the bombing of civilian targets has only one aim. In World War 2, the Allies called it ‘breaking the morale of the population’. Today we call such attempts by a single and simple word: terrorism. The destruction of Hamburg by fire was absolutely clearly an act of state terrorism, something we would do well to remember whenever we throw up our hands in horror at state terrorism practised by our enemies today.

Hamburg ablaze during Operation Gomorrah

St Nikolai has been left ruined, like the Memorial Church in Berlin or Coventry Cathedral in England. There is a quiet, stately mournfulness about these monuments to those moments when we get things wrong and build walls instead of bridges. 

Salutary in this city of so many bridges and which has suffered so much.

Are you listening, Trumpistas and Brexiters?

I suppose it would have been appropriate to have had a hamburger
among the Hamburgers. But I resisted the temptation

When Britain turns crappy

Our street’s a bit crappy at the moment.

I don’t mean that’s it’s not particularly aesthetically pleasing, even though it’s not really much to write home about. But then, I’m not sure why I’d write home about it. After all, it is home, so there’d be little point in writing.

The sewage flowing past our doorstep

In any case, in this instance my judgement is meant much more literally. The street’s crappy because it has sewage running down it. Not a torrent or anything, not a flood, but a fairly constant trickle, filling the gutter and spreading a vile, malodorous miasma around.

You’ve got admit that ‘malodorous miasma’ is good, isn’t it? I hope it means what I want because I’m not changing it. I’m pretty certain you know what I mean, anyway.

We’ve spoken to the people in the house from which the sewage is flowing. They’re tenants. They tell me they’ve spoken to the landlord but nothing’s happened yet.

Luton Borough Council kindly provides an out-of-hours number to report such emergencies. After all, it’s a serious public health problem. Think of all the cholera epidemics in cities before proper sanitation was introduced.

Sadly, no one actually answers the number. Nor does it provide a voicemail function so we can leave a message.

I don’t blame the council. They’d do something if they could. But eight years of austerity have pared staffing levels down to the minimum, and then pared more.

Nor is Luton council the only service to have suffered this way. Most recently, such problems have been much discussed in the media in connection with the railways. Trains have been repeatedly cancelled, so there are fears that students won’t be able to get to school in time to take their end-of-school examinations.

The school buildings themselves are increasingly dilapidated, teacher numbers are down, and people are leaving the profession in increasing numbers, leading to a vicious cycle: they leave because understaffing is making the stress unbearable, and by leaving they increase the understaffing.

We have another personal example of this kind of thing just recently. My 93-year-old mother has been admitted to hospital. The care she is receiving is excellent – we were there when she was examined and advised by a consultant (a senior physician) who was admirable in his gentleness, reassuring good humour and kindness. But what struck us most about the place was the tiredness of most of the staff: the faces are drawn as they struggle to cope with a huge workload, never able to devote more than a few minutes to any one patients.

Many of the voices we heard were distinctly foreign. It’s well-known that the National Health Service depends heavily on foreign staff to keep operating. There’s nothing wrong about that. What’s wrong is that since the Brexit vote, there is a feeling that foreigners aren’t welcome in this country. Like the teachers leaving the profession, immigrants essential to the health service, to catering, to hotels, to agriculture and to many other sectors are leaving the country.

That hostility to foreigners is grounded in a sense that Britain is somehow superior to other nations. That pride seems misplaced in a country with failing railways, schools or hospitals. Or, indeed, on sewage running in the streets.

Curiously, our street here contrasts starkly with the street where we’ve recently taken a flat, in Valencia.

In my youth, Spain was a nation made painfully inward-looking, closed to the outside world and, frankly, poor – rather as Brexit is likely to make Britain – by its stultifying dictatorship under the last of the declared fascists, Francisco Franco.

But he died and Spain returned enthusiastically to democracy. It became one of the first European countries to allow same-sex marriage. It has been leading the way in moving towards gender equality – indeed the new government has, for the first time, a majority of women. And now El País, the leading Spanish-language newspaper in the world, is just about to appoint its first woman editor.

When we were last there, I was struck by the level of public service. I got chatting to the woman who cleans the streets around the flat we recently acquired in Valencia. She cleans them – ‘the same streets’, as she assured me, ‘every day’ – since they always need cleaning. That’s principally because a significant proportion of dog owners are highly irresponsible.

Now, I’d like it if dog owners always picked up after their dogs. But failing that, it’s wonderful to know that there is someone who’ll be along within the next twenty-four hours to clear up anyway. That seems particularly desirable when you live in a street made crappy by sewage flowing down it.

What’s more, Spain seems a lot less unfriendly towards immigrants than Britain does right now. That’s not to say that racism is unknown there – it isn’t – but at least xenophobia is less rampant than here. Which is just as well, since we plan on moving there just as soon as we can. Emigrating from a nation hostile to immigrants to become immigrants in a nation that is less unwelcoming to them.

Besides. The weather’s a lot better.

Return to normality

It gets tiring being away from home a lot, even if some of the time it’s for pleasure – such as visiting our sons – rather than for business.

Putting it another way, it’s good to get home. You sleep better, it seems to me, in your own bed. It’s good to have the things you need close to hand. It’s good to get up in the morning and find a coffee machine you know how to use, and a fridge containing the things you want for breakfast.

That kind of normality is even more attractive for the non-human members of our household. Disruption of their accustomed lifestyle is something they find deeply disturbing. The sooner it’s over, the happier they are.

The problem with the disruption is that it recently became more radical than it used to be. Our good friend Suzanne used to move into our place, so the animals – Luci and Toffee, the toy poodles, and Misty the masterful cat – could stay in their normal environment while we were away and still enjoy the presence of someone they’d come to know and love.

In fact, I’d noticed that the poodles – the girls, as we like to think of them – made more of a joyful fuss about Suzanne’s arrival at our place than they ever did about mine, when I came back from a trip.

However, sadly for them though happily for her, Suzanne recently became a grandmother (congratulations, Suzanne, and even more to the new parents). This means that she’s still happy to look after Misty and the girls while we’re away, but she needs to do it at her place rather than ours. That’s fine, but moving somewhere else is always a bit more of a jarring experience to dogs than staying in the place they’re used to, and Misty of course, who stays at home, misses out on Suzanne’s company, as she only comes round to feed him and spend a little while talking to him and stroking him.

So our return now represents a much bigger change for them all than it once did.

What amazes me, though, isn’t the extent of the change, it’s the speed with which they adapt. Within minutes, Toffee had picked up her old habit of demanding that I throw a soft toy across the room for her in the evenings. The trick is that she drops it beside me while I’m trying to watch the TV and whines until I pick it up and throw it again. If I fail to, she scratches my arm in what she no doubt thinks is a gentle gesture to remind me of my duty, but in reality is pretty painful – those claws aren’t as sharp as Misty’s, but they’re quite sharp enough.

I can tell you, the gesture works. One scratch and I’m throwing the toy again. Anything to avoid another reminder, even though I know that I’m rewarding her for doing it and she’ll only be even more inclined to do it again.

What tells me even more powerfully that things have got back to normal is when I see the pets relaxing. They have a capacity for total resting that never ceases to amaze me. So I was delighted to see that Misty was once more in his favourite place for a morning snooze – the middle of our bed.

Nobody relaxes so well as a cat at peace

Meanwhile, Toffee and Luci had also settled straight back into their relaxing place of choice: next to each other at one end of our sofa.

Resting's even better when you can do it with a friend

Those pictures of domestic calm, bliss even, said more strongly than anything else could, that all was back to normal.

What I haven’t yet told them, though, is that we’re off again at the end of the month. For under a week, but still it’ll be another cycle of disruption. Poor things.

It’ll be good, though, to see them getting right back to normal again just as soon as we return home.