Leatrice in Beirut

It’s strange how much certain things can change in seventy years. It’s even stranger, and rather sadder, to see how certain other things have grimly resisted every attempt at change. Or got worse.

In 1948, my mother Leatrice was living in Paris and working for UNESCO. In November, she travelled to Beirut for a conference and she wrote to her parents on the 16th, soon after arriving:

… I hope you have already received my cable. I didn’t want to let you know until I arrived that I was travelling by air, knowing that you would worry, but we had a most uneventful trip…

Flying was still an adventure seventy years ago. It’s true, I tend to phone Danielle after a flight to say I’ve arrived safely, but I do the same after a train journey or even a car trip. As it happens, I find the prospect of travelling any great distance by car far more daunting than catching a plane. I have more confidence in the pilot’s ability to fly his plane than in my own driving – or that of other drivers on the road.

As for a cable – a telegram – I don’t even know who still provides a service these days. Certainly, I don’t remember the last time I sent or received one. In the ages of text messages or emails, does anyone use telegrams?

Leatrice (third from left) enjoying a moment's relaxation in Beirut, 1948

The trip to Beirut marked Leatrice for life. She mentioned it frequently down the years. And looking at her letters home, it’s easy to see why.

The mountains now have snow on them, she wrote on 20 November. It is cold, clear and sunny. This country grows on one. The colour on the hills mixed with the brilliance of the Mediterranean is unbelievably lovely. I have come to like the Lebanese very much. After the coldness of the Parisian, it is heart-warming to meet people who laugh with their eyes as well as their mouths.

The people may have been great, but apparently Leatrice was concerned about the sanitary conditions:

… if we drink any water, we put chlorine in it. It tastes exactly like a swimming bath, but is at least disinfected.

Personally, I’d prefer to take my chance on the infection. On the other hand, it took me a week to recover from the Cairo belly I brought back from Egypt ten days ago, so maybe Leatrice was right.

But she hadn’t finished with the subject of the people.

… it is quite obvious that they are a pure Semitic race. Olive skinned, long heads, black hair, large black eyes, curly mouths.

The racial comments I’d probably avoid, personally, but I like the underlying message, one Leatrice would repeat throughout her life: ethnically, there’s no difference between the Arabs of the Levant and Jews. The idea that there should be racial tension between them, far less conflict, is simply indefensible.

But, and this is one of the things that has not changed in seventy years, or if anything has got worse, that conflict is proving agonising and irresolvable.

We touched down in Damascus and came by taxis over the border into Lebanon… We saw some truckloads of soldiers in Syria, but there isn’t actually much military activity there. Lebanon isn’t actually at war, although Syria is.

The Israeli-Arab war of 1948 had already broken out.

Isn’t it curious that at the time Syria had been relatively untouched by war? To the extent that it was regarded as safe enough to bring staff through to Beirut? That wouldn’t be the case today.

In any case, these days we’d fly directly to Beirut.

I am, of course, very tactful about myself, but discover there is practically no feeling at all about the war. After all Lebanon is not officially engaged in it. The people I know are all Christian, and they feel themselves in very much the same position as the Jews in the Middle East. A few hundred thousand (about 600,000 surrounded by 40 million Moslems, who hate their guts). They generally feel that there is a slight bond in having another minority just over the border as some slight protection. In 1860 there was an awful pogrom of the Christians here, and the ones left fled to the mountains, and hence most of the people living in the hills are members of the Greek Orthodox church [I think she meant the Maronite Christian church]. There are actually about twenty different sects getting on fairly amicably, including a Jewish community. I had my hair washed by a woman who spoke Russian, and then burst into Yiddish with another customer.

Some things have changed, others have stayed the same. The underlying tensions have continued and, if anything, hardened. And the communities that got along reasonably well have broken out into full-scale combat, especially in Syria. The fighting Lebanon was spared in 1948 has spilled over its borders. Indeed, the links between the Christians and Jews that my mother spotted, took a particularly ugly form in 1982. That was when Israeli forces stood back and let Maronite Christian militia carry out a massacre of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Sabra neighbourhood and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.

A deeply moving representation of this terrible event is in the excellent semi-autobiographical Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir. The sense of horror is made somehow even more intense by the film being made as a cartoon. Until the last few scenes, at least.

Leatrice left Beirut on 15 December, after around a month. With many fond memories. As early as in her letter of 16 November, she had written:

Have now seen the cedars of Lebanon. A very lovely tree. Tall, graceful and a very bright green.

What a pity that Lebanon isn’t primarily known for its cedars any more.

And as for the effect of war on a peaceful nation, what more pitiful example could be provided than Syria...

Oh, how I wish I could live in Cloud Corbyn Land

The weather’s glorious in Cloud Cobyn Land today. Well, the weather’s glorious there every day.

Some day my Jez will come

It’s a wonderful land where Jeremy Corbyn, or the Blessed Corbyn to give him his correct title, uses his magic wand on behalf of us all.

Only one wave of the wand is enough to convince twenty-seven EU nations to give Britain the same benefits as members, without all the boring hassle of having to stay in the union or accept any sort of obligation towards it. That’s despite the EU saying repeatedly and firmly that they never would concede so much.

Pouf! One wave and all those tiresome obstacles just melt away.

A second wave of the wand and, lo and behold, here’s £250bn to fund the most exciting, radical and transformative programme of social change Britain has ever seen. All being brought in by a blessed government, elected because having done better than the polls last time round (and lost), Jeremy’s obviously going to do better than the polls next time (and maybe do something that viewed in the right light looks a bit like winning).

It must be a fabulous place to live. Which, no doubt, is why there are so many Corbynistas living there.

Of course, it isn’t always easy. There are sometimes stresses when reality unpleasantly impinges on the inhabitants. But that doesn’t depress them for long. A glance at a photo of the blessed visage is usually enough, or repetition for as long as it takes of the sutra, J-C-4-P-M. If necessary, with the word ‘hashtag’ in front of it.

Sadly, I’m an incurable addict to reality. I’m not enchanted by the prospect of the economic abyss towards which Britain seems to be heading next March. And I look with never-diminishing astonishment at polls that show that Labour is level-pegging, or behind, the least popular government in my lifetime. And mine has not been a short lifetime. It would be so comforting to make the leap into faith. But I just can’t bring myself to. It’s probably a curmudgeonly habit cultivated ever since I stopped believing in Father Christmas.

Still, that doesn’t stop me envying the Corbynistas their ecstasy in living in Cloud Corbyn Land. It’s got to be nice. 

What with all that lovely weather and all.

The four-stage strategy for dodging a bullet

In ‘A Victory for Democracy’, one of my favourite episodes of that excellent series from the eighties, Yes Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby, Cabinet Secretary, and Sir Richard Wharton, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, outline the standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis. 

This takes the form of a ‘four-stage strategy’.

In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

In stage two, we say something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

In stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

Donald Pickering as Wharton and Nigel Hawthorne as Appleby
explaining the Foreign Office Four-stage Strategy

I’ve always found this one of the best pieces of writing in the series, a hard-hitting satire on British politics, cynical but somehow believable.

What makes it believable is that it’s a great way for people who are more comfortable sitting on a fence to avoid being forced off it. That’s happening right now in Britain. Just look at the top of the Labour Party, over the question of Brexit. The top of the party is made up of lifelong Eurosceptics, almost certainly in favour of Brexit, but who don’t dare say so. After all, they lead a party that is massively anti-Brexit, to the tune of nearly 90% of the members. These leaders claim to want to give power over policy back to the membership, so they can hardly admit to wanting to override their wishes on this key question of our time.

So instead they just try to avoid taking a position. Their resolution is beginning to crack, with two close Corbyn allies, the trade union leader Len McCluskey and the MP John McDonnell, both saying that any new referendum on the EU should exclude the option of remaining a member. Even so, they would rather not have to say openly that they back Brexit.

What this does for their claim also to represent a new, refreshing and honest approach to politics I leave it to you to judge.

Honest or not, they need a way out of their conundrum. I humbly submit that they are, in fact, following their own four-stage strategy.

Let them to allow nature to imitate art and adopt a four-stage strategy of their own. Keir Starmer, the Party's Brexit spokesman, has come up with six tests for any Brexit deal the government negotiates. He’s made it clear that they will not back any deal that does not meet those tests.

Let’s leave aside for now the minor objection that it’s not quite clear what ‘not backing’ a deal means. Will they propose an alternative? No one has said yet.

The tests includes this one:

2. Does it deliver the “exact same benefits” as we currently have as members of the Single Market and Customs Union?

I’ve quoted it as it always appears, with quotation marks around “exact same benefits”. What’s that about? Quotation marks usually suggest that the statement within them is open to suspicion. So are we saying that we don’t really mean exactly the same benefits?

Because if we do mean exactly the same, we already know that no deal the EU will accept can meet that test. The EU has been absolutely unambiguous on the subject: the only way to enjoy the exact same benefits as conferred by membership is by remaining a member.

Maybe that’s why the leadership doesn’t want to be drawn on what it would propose as a deal that would meet its tests. Because the only realistic proposal would be to remain in the EU. That’s hardly a position Eurosceptics can adopt.

What they may therefore want is that Theresa May comes up with a disastrously bad deal so late that Britain is forced out on lousy terms, at which point the government falls and Labour wins the the general election that follows. That way Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and co get to form a government without ever having to address the thorny issue of Brexit, because it’s already done.

Without their ever having to get off the fence.

Smart, isn’t it? They could then pursue the radical agenda of massive public investment and job creation that they propose. The only circle they would still have to square is how they could fund such a programme after the British economy has tanked following Brexit. They may not yet have cottoned on to the fact that far from creating new jobs, in government they would be spending all their time minimising the job losses Brexit will entail.

Ignorance is bliss. They’re clearly enjoying their moment of denial. So, in the meantime, they gaily pursue this four-stage strategy:

In stage one, we say we have our six tests and we will not support any Brexit deal that doesn’t pass them.

In stage two, we say this deal may not pass the six tests but we should do nothing about it for the moment.

In stage three, we say that maybe we should actually propose a deal that passes the six tests, but since we’re not in government, there’s no point so there’s nothing we can do.

In stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done even in opposition, but it’s too late now that Brexit has already happened.

Most amusing. If only it weren’t for the victims who’ll be left picking up the pieces for the next generation or two.

Entitled racing and how to avoid it

It’s been years and years – around half a century in fact – since I spent any amount of time involved in sailing. And even then it was absolutely the bottom of the range in sailing – dinghies, with no deck, where your feet are a plank’s thickness away from the water. Nothing to do with yachts and large crews and state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology or anything like that.

Funnily enough, even a half century on, it’s left me with a yearning to have another go one of these days. I did like that feeling of being so close to the water and whipping along on its surface. I liked the playing with the sails and the tiller and feeling the boat react and race, and I’d be delighted to enjoy those sensations again.

But not yachts or large crews or any of that state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology sort of stuff. Oh, no.

Now there’s an organisation known as Internations that operates in a number of cities across Europe. It brings together locals and foreigners who enjoy meeting each other and maybe speaking a little of the others’ language. Usually it’s quite fun.

Danielle and I have joined the local branch, here in Valencia. She’s been to more events than I have, but I have to say that the ones I’ve attended have been good. So when she said ‘there’s an Internations event to watch a sailing race’, the association between an organisation I find fun and an activity for which I still have a hankering felt too good to pass up. So we went.

Now this wasn’t dinghy sailing. It was the ’52 Super Series Valencia Sailing Week’. The crews represented each of eleven nations. And it was absolutely one of those state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology competitions. At least, as far as I can tell, though I have to admit that to me most of the boats looked pretty much the same as each other.

Now, I’m not denying that there’s skill in this kind of sailing. My own experience of sailing those dinghies back in the sixties left me with a clear picture of just what lack of skill looks like, so I have a vague idea of what it must be like to sail with real intelligence and aptitude.

On the other hand, when I see the ludicrous figures people spend on their boats, I can’t help feeling that the cash register must weigh heavily on the outcome. At a different, much more recent epoch of my life I spent some time rowing and one of the things I like about that sport is that, in competition (and I was never at competition level) there are strict limits on what one can do to boats. They have to be at least so heavy, the hull has to be a certain shape, etc. So it isn’t the technology that determines winners, it’s entirely the skill and strength of the individual rower or crew.

It’s not like that in sailing. As far as I can tell. Though I admit that to my untrained eye, it looked as though the state-of-the-art technology stuff was all under water...

Anyway, when I got down to the port I was rather dreading being a spectator at a sport for which I was finding it hard to work up much enthusiasm. It felt too much like money racing money. But I needn’t have worried.

The meeting place was in a bar. Or a restaurant. It depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Most bars out here serve food and most restaurants serve drinks. 

It wasn’t obvious which bar was meant, since each successive email gave a different name from each of two alternatives. In one email it would be the Arribar, in another the Marina. Fortunately, those were the only two mentioned and they’re right next door to each other, so it wasn’t difficult to go to one for a while and then check out the other.

Eventually we found the group, and it was as with all Internations events. A lot of interesting people speaking any of four or five languages at different times (though predominantly English: Europe is becoming very English, even if England refuses to be European). We got chatting over drinks and it all went well, as it usually does at these gatherings.

Eventually, Danielle asked ‘what about the race? When do we see the boats?’

‘Oh, they’ve been coming in for the last hour or so,’ the organiser assured us, ‘I’ve seen a couple. But you’d have had to turn around to see them yourself.’

I asked how the race had been going. She didn’t know exactly, but said she’d been pleased to see that there was at least one female participant.

‘In the South African boat. One – only one, but still one – of the crew was a woman.’

‘Good for them,’ I said, ‘and how many were black?’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s true that while they may have taken a small step forward against sexism, they’ve taken none against racism. They were all blond.’

Then she smiled. ‘Good looking, though,’ she said and grinned at her husband.

An hour or so later we left the place. As we walked to the bus stop, we came past the line of boats all carefully docked and waiting the next day’s competition.

All lined up and raring to go for the next day’s racing
But they all look pretty much the same to the unpractised eye

We didn’t see any of the actual racing. But then, with a sport of wealth and privilege, maybe that was just what suited us best. We enjoyed the company of pleasant people from Internations, and left the entitled to race against the entitled. 

They do these things better in the private sector

A new timetable was introduced for many of Britain’s railways back in May. And most of the system affected promptly fell apart. Trains were delayed, many were cancelled, and passengers who depended on the service were left stranded.

Now the Office and Road and Rail, the regulator for the railways in Britain, has published a report identifying the train companies primarily responsible for the disruption, but also blaming the Minister of Transport, Chris Grayling. He, however, has immediately declared himself blameless in the matter – Trumpism is becoming commonplace – since it was not for him to overrule the opinions of professionals.

Chris Grayling: 'trouble on the railways? Nothing to do with me, pal.'
He only heads the Ministry responsible

Railway professionals are, of course, the people that railway companies employ. If they’re employed by a public body, then they’re civil servants, and civil servants haven’t the faintest idea what they’re doing. They tend to be classics graduates from the older universities, and while Homer holds no secrets from them, running a railway is a closed book.

That’s true even if they’re actually the same people.

Why is this so?

Essentially, the private sector, because it’s oriented towards the making of profit, has to be driven by efficiency in a way that the public sector simply isn’t. That’s why things go so much better when they’re privatised than when they’re nationalised. Like, for instance, the railways in Britain.

To illustrate this point, I want to give a glowing example of how much more effective the private sector is, based on an experience of my own some years back.

This is a true story. I’ve made nothing up. All I’ve done is hide some of the details: I need to protect the guilty, and particularly to protect myself from vengeance which, in this case, would be harsh indeed.

My manager in this particular company was undoubtedly an expert in the field. We knew that – after all, we knew his background and we knew his qualifications. Trust me, they were outstanding.

As it happens, had we not known it, he would have told us pretty fast. In fact, he did tell us. He took the whole team, at least a dozen strong if I remember, for an awayday conference, but not just in the English countryside – we had to go abroad. There he pulled us together in a windowless room and regaled us with a detailed account of his talents.

‘I’m very good at what I do,’ he started off by telling us.

Well, how could anyone doubt it, once he’d made it so explicit?

For the next couple of days – yes, it was a an away-day-or-four – he ran us through a list of all the major orders he was about to take for our product. I don’t remember exactly how many there were, but there were certainly more than ten though probably under fifteen.

Some of them, to be quite honest, seemed a little dodgy. I mean, I couldn’t help feeling he was being a trifle optimistic. And, well, you know, you have to tell truth to power. So I mentioned that I had some reservations about a few of those prospects.

Sadly, I was already not very popular with my manager. A troublemaker was how he saw me. And that was before I’d had the gall to contradict him in front of his faithful followers. With that, the guillotine fell. It was only a matter of time before he and I parted ways.

When that happened, I’m not sure which of us was the more satisfied. I’ve never been terribly impressed by people who have to tell me how good they are at what they do – I’ve often felt, naively, that it ought to be obvious from the way they do it. As it happens, of all the ten or fifteen orders he was hoping to win, his count of success could be summed up by a nice round number. Not one had come in.

I’ve worked in the private sector for 35 years. I’ve had great experiences, with excellent managers and outstanding colleagues. I’ve also had some real nightmares.

The result? When I see things failing lamentably in the private sector, I’m not surprised. Just as I’m not surprised when things succeed gloriously. It’s all down to the people working on them, and there are people in the private sector who are very good at what they do, as there are people who only tell you they’re very good.

Just like the public sector, in fact.

Cairo curiosities

It’s been a merely surface-scratching whirlwind of a visit, but after slightly under forty-eight hours in Cairo, and a little more than twelve hours before I leave, I feel I can give a bit of a balance sheet of my first contact with Egypt.

The Sphinx, the the Pyramid of Cheops

The truly unique and third most memorable thing was the collection of pyramids and the Sphinx out at Giza. We went twice, once by night when the light and sound show turned out to be far less cheesy and much more pleasant than I’d snobbishly assumed, and once by day to get a clear sense of the scale of the monuments. It is powerfully moving to stand before the great pyramid of Cheops and think that it has been there, regally looking down on the passing ages, for over twice the time that separates us from the launching of the Roman Empire.

‘From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us,’ Napoleon is said to have told his soldiers in Egypt. And even he was out by three centuries.

There are also those wonderful mysterious tales about the great pyramid. I don’t remember them exactly, but it’s something like if you multiply the height of the pyramid in metres by the square root of five, a number someone who knows about these things tells me is terribly significant, though I can’t exactly put my finger on why, you get pretty close to the distance in miles between Luton and Paris. Well, within 5% anyway.

Now, some sceptics may think this is arises by mere chance. But is that really likely?

The second most memorable thing about my brief stay in this city is the traffic. Like the United States where there is a gun for every human, Cairo feels like there’s a car for every inhabitant, and they all get out on the roads all the time, at any time of day. It seems that the use of the horn is a key element in the assertion of identity, which means that I get woken up by it even in my hotel room on the ninth floor with its double glazing.

Traffic regulations are also clearly a kind of general guideline towards which drivers make an occasional small gesture of reverence. Take the Uber driver who got us to the pyramids this morning. He carefully entered the destination into Google but nonetheless managed to miss the ramp up on to the bridge he needed to take across the Nile. So he decided the best thing to do was to reverse back up the main road, against the dense flow of fast-moving traffic. He nearly made it too, only cheated in the last few metres by finding his way blocked by a police car.

So he went straight on towards the next exit from the main road, meaning to leave and return on the other side. But again he missed the turning. This time, he had less far to reverse and there was no police car. So we made it, a little later than planned and with frayed nerves, but none the worse for wear. Physically at least.

I shall remember this experience each time I’m caught in traffic in London and amazed by some of the awful driving around me. At least I now know that things can be far worse.

The most memorable experience was the visit we made for professional rather than tourist reasons.

This was a hospital, possibly Egypt’s most prestigious. It delivers care to children with cancer. Like hospices, where terminally ill patients go, its mission might lead you to expect it to be a dismal place. But, like a hospice, which after all focuses on making sure patients enjoy the best possible life for as long as they can, it needs to be a pleasant, quiet and cheerful place.

Certainly, the Cairo Children’s Cancer hospital achieves all that. Patients have their own rooms – no multi-bed wards or even bays as is common in most British hospitals – and throughout the place, bright, joyful colours predominate, even in the chemotherapy suite. There’s an art therapy room, decorated with children’s paintings and pottery, and where they can also be taught music. The accent is on the need to build the morale of the patients, to help them fight the disease.

The hospital is private and lives by donations on the one hand and, to a far smaller extent, by selling some services. However, for the main target group, children with cancer, the care is entirely free. Many of the patients are from poor backgrounds; they pay nothing for the treatment they receive, and parents are sometimes even helped financially to be able to visit their children if they’re kept in as inpatients.

It’s an inspiring and encouraging place and a joy to visit.

Even the origins of its name had me smiling. It’s called hospital ‘57357’. I often wondered where that came from – it sounds slightly Stalinist, like the name of a labour camp, or at least rather boringly nerdish, like some geographical coordinates.

In fact, the founders had terrible difficult choosing a name. At the end of a long an fruitless day of debates, they were looking at a table covered with documents. One was from the hospital’s bank.

Its bank account number was 57357.

‘If we use the bank account number as its name, at least benefactors won’t have any doubt where to send their contribution,’ they decided.

The Cairo Paediatric Oncology Hospital, 57357

And so the hospital was named. A fine place, delivering a great service. And an atmosphere as joyful as the origin of is name is amusing.

Step by step towards the exit

Slowly the ties to what I’m beginning increasingly to think of as ‘the old country’ are being loosened.

It’s a slow-motion version of the existence of any immigrant. It’s not out of solidarity with immigrants that I’m doing it, though God knows in today's world they need every act of solidarity they can get, but I am going through the same process as other immigrants. Gradually, I'm leaving the country of my passport for another.

We haven’t actually left the UK yet. Our main home is still in Luton. More important still, so’s our cat. What we’re engaged in is a trial, for the month of September, of life in the place we feel we should move to, Valencia. That involves checking out what it’s like to travel from there, since my job involves being somewhere else quite a lot of the time.

That’s what loosens the ties to Britain. Travelling between third countries, without passing through Britain, delivers a useful object lesson: the UK is not the indispensable nation we Brits, even among us anti-Brexiters, sometimes think it is. Most of the world can live just fine without it.

My first trip involved a flight directly from Valencia. It went smoothly. That encouraged me for the next, rather more complex because it involved travelling to Madrid and catching a plane from there.

Because I wasn’t too sure of how each stage would go, I decided to take an early train – 8:00 am which, on a Sunday morning, feels like the crack of dawn. I’m glad I did, because it left with half an hour’s delay. I assumed it would catch up some of that on the trip but, on the contrary, it added significantly to it. Nearly doubling it, in fact, and that ‘nearly’ is crucial: an hour’s delay would have meant a partial refund. 29 minutes means no refund at all.

It was on arrival at Madrid that I received the first real shock of the journey. Heading quietly towards the exit I eventually found a door with a sign over it reading ‘Exit to city of Barcelona’.

Exit to the city of Barcelona

I have to confess that my first reaction was one of sheer terror. Had I somehow managed to get on the wrong train? It made no sense. As far as I know, there’s no high-speed railway connection between Valencia and Barcelona. Besides, hadn’t I heard the announcements and seen the information displays confirming that we were heading for Madrid?

The explanation was simple. It was bound to be. The exit I was taking led onto a street called ‘Ciudad de Barcelona’. But – well, eight o’clock on a Sunday is a tough time to be at work. I wasn’t entirely conscious, I think, which is why the sign nearly precipitated a heart attack.

At least, my early start meant the hour’s delay had no serious effect. On the contrary, it made it possible to have a coffee and another glorious fresh orange juice (one of the delights of being in Spain) with my charming daughter-out-law for nearly the last time: I’m unlikely to see her more than once more before she becomes my (equally charming) daughter-in-law, an event planned to happen in less than two weeks’ time.

A second daughter-in-law? An event to be celebrated. As we shall, in proper style, in the hills near Madrid, the weekend after next. In the meantime, conversation, coffee and orange juice were a more than adequate interim pleasure.

And getting to the airport was no problem. Proving again that living in Valencia won’t reduce my capacity to do my work. Further loosening my ties to the Brexit state I barely recognise any longer as the nation I’ve always thought of as my own. 

Like any migrant.

Hair today, gone by lunchtime

‘It’s beginning to grow on me,’ Danielle told me the other day.

She was talking about my hairstyle. My Spanish hairstyle. It’s the product of a Valencian stylist working under time pressure, and it shows.

I’d turned up for my haircut a few minutes ahead of time. A client was paying for his cut, so I assumed I’d be next. I couldn’t work out what the other guy in the waiting area was doing. Expecting a friend, perhaps? I was about to find out otherwise.

When the hairdresser got back to the chair, I stood up ready to be shorn – it always strikes me that any man who’s just had his haircut should be known, at least temporarily, as Sean – since it was by then nearly five past eleven, and my appointment was for eleven.

‘Ah, I’m sorry, no,’ said the hairdresser, pointing at the guy who’d been sitting patiently on one of the chairs, ‘he’s next. I’m afraid I’m running late.’

Well, it was a Saturday, and I wasn’t in a hurry.

‘Shall I pop out for a coffee?’ I asked.

‘Please. That would be so helpful,’ he told me, pathetically grateful that I wasn’t getting annoyed.

I returned twenty minutes later.

‘Perfect timing,’ he told me with pride, ‘I’m just finishing.’

He wasn’t. It took another ten minutes, what with faffing around over payment. It seems the credit card machine wasn’t working particularly well.

By then, there were two other men waiting. They didn’t look too pleased when I stood up to get my hair cut before them.

‘I’m sorry,’ the hairdresser told them, ‘he was here first. And his appointment was for earlier.’

He asked me how I wanted the hair done. This was perhaps where things went wrong. All these conversations were taking place in Spanish. It would be generous to describe my command of the language as limited. I’m not sure he fully understood what I meant. Or that I fully understood what he explained he was going to do.

The next thing I knew was that he’d taken a set of clippers and mown the hair off the left-hand side of my head.

‘Is that OK?’ he asked me.

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. How was he going to get the hair back on if I said that it wasn’t? Information is only as good as any action that can be taken on it, and I could see none that could usefully flow from the truth in this instance.

So he took the hair off the right-hand side of my head. I suppose that at least had the virtue of establishing a kind of symmetry. Not perhaps the balance I’d been seeking, but a balance nonetheless. Which I suppose at least has the merit of being, in some sense, preferable to the opposite.

This only left a sort of forlorn clump in the middle.

That he worked on with scissors, which is rather what I’d hoped he was going to do with most of my hair.

It was all done in about ten minutes and, in my view, the result reflected the time taken. Don’t get me wrong: I hate sitting around making empty small talk while some character fiddles around with my hair, so I prefer the session to be quick. But even so, I appreciate that there’s a bare minimum needed to make a better than botched job of it.

He hadn’t taken that minimum.

The problem with my hair is that it has a mind of its own and a deep sense of the rights free-born hair is endowed with. Discipline? It wants no part of it. Especially if it’s merely regimentation, imposed by me with a brush, usually supported with liberal use of strategically applied water.

This means that it tends to stick up all over the place. Now, the reason I’d come back to this place is that the previous time the hairdresser – a different hairdresser – had done a great job of cutting my hair in a way that meant that the most unruly bits tended to behave in a marginally more respectful manner. It would lie down relatively quietly under the strokes of the brush. I didn’t end up with bits sticking skyward at the back of my head, like a Native American’s feather headdress.

Alas. With this new style, that’s a much-regretted memory of things past. Bits stick up everywhere. Out at the sides. Up at the top. While the sides have all the aesthetic allure of stubble in a recently harvested field.

It’s growing on my wife? Great. Unfortunately, it’s also growing on my head.

My Spanish hair.
Growing on my wife.
Growing on my head. As it chooses

Which is the only redeeming feature of the whole sorry tale. My hair grows fast – no doubt part of its rebellious desire to be taken seriously as an autonomous being – so it won’t be long before I can start to get it to lie down a bit more. Simple length translated into weight will have the desired effect.

At which point I can take it back to be cut again. In the same place maybe. But certainly not by the same hairdresser.

Uneasy but necessary bedfellows: history and politics

A book I read in the old East Germany, by a dissident called Heinz Knobloch, had a catch phrase running through it, ‘mistrust the green spaces’. A green space was often a spot where once a building stood that represented something the regime would rather not publicise, but which was too important to be built over completely. A major office of the Nazi regime, or of the Weimar Republic it overthrew, or even of the German Empire that preceded both.

Perhaps the best example of this fiddling with historical monuments concerned not a building but a statue. The imposing equestrian statue of Frederick the Great of Prussia, with its frieze of significant people of his time around the plinth, originally stood on the grand boulevard of Berlin, Unter den Linden.

The Frederick the Great statue in 1920

The Socialist Unity Party (SED) that ruled East Germany weren’t going to have that symbol of royalist and aristocratic elitism standing in the capital’s most prestigious avenue. For a time it vanished altogether. But, hey, Berlin was the capital of Prussia, and Prussia was the heartland of East Germany. After a while, the statue reappeared, but not in the capital, instead in the Charlottenhof Palace in Potsdam. On display, but not in too public a way.

Then came another rethink. In the 1980s, the SED changes its historical memory policy. East Germany was a state but not a nation. To make it a nation, it needed cultural roots and therefore a history. Frederick II was one of the greatest figures of its past, and the SED decided that, after mature reflection, and taking all things into consideration, it was important to bring him out of his relative obscurity and set him back up somewhere with a bit of class about it.

So the statue reappeared on the Unter den Linden. Where it stands to this day.

Politics makes history. And history matters to politics.

That’s as true in Spain as it is in Eastern Germany. Around the corner from where we’re living in Valencia is a thoroughfare that proclaims itself to be ‘Democracy Street’. However, the sign also tells us that it was formerly ‘Castán Tobeñas Street’.

Democracy Street. Formerly Castán Tobeñas

‘Aha,’ I thought when I saw it, ‘might this be a leading figure of the Fascist period deemed better forgotten than commemorated?’

So it seems. He was a jurist who rose to the position of President of the Spanish Supreme Court, a post he held for nearly 25 years under Franco, until just before his death. Seems open and shut. A major figure of Franco’s regime, far better consigned to the dustbin of history than commemorated by a street in Spain’s third city.

The reality is far more complex. But when is reality anything but complex? Why else does Donald Trump avoid it altogether?

Pascual Marzal is a Professor of the History of Law at Valencia University, and served as a member of the City Commission on the application of the Historical Memory law under which the street name was changed. He says he’s fully on board with the law, but opposes its application to Castán Tobeñas.

He points out that Tobeñas was also a leading judge under the second Republic, the one that Franco overthrew. He was, indeed, tried by a court martial of the Fascist regime, which acquitted him on the grounds that the previous government had appointed him exclusively for his legal skills, not for any particular political position. Such were those skills, indeed, that they decided to make use of them too. Hence his promotion to the Supreme Court.

Apparently, Tobeñas wrote some seminal texts on civil law and is regarded to this day as a major scholar in the field.

As Marzal asks, who can say with certainty that they would have behaved better under an autocratic regime? Would we resist? Or would we, like Tobeñas, come to terms with the regime and accommodate with it in order to make a living?

It’s an excellent question.

My wife comes from Alsace, in Eastern France. With the adjoining department of the Moselle, it is the region of the country that lost most men during the Second World War. The problem is that, because Germany regarded Alsace not as occupied France but recovered national territory, young men were subject to German conscription. So those Alsatian dead were above all wearing German grey not French blue. Few wanted to serve, but the consequences of a refusal were dire, not just for the individuals but for their families too.

These were the ‘despite ourselves’ (malgré nous) and a lot of them died in Russia. France has little reason to be proud of what they did, but Alsace has every reason to mourn their loss. So the region has its war memorials, though they say little about what uniform the men they commemorate were wearing when they died.

Tobeñas seems similar. He was unfortunate to live under a regime he could not serve with honour.

Unfortunate indeed. But though he couldn’t serve it with honour, he chose to serve it anyway. Why then should he be honoured today with a street name? After all, he was a judge. An authority of the law. And he served a regime that came to power illegally and ruled with little legal restraint. A jurist, above all others, must have found that particularly lamentable.

I’m glad the malgré nous have their monuments in Alsace. But I’m equally glad that the law on historical memory has deprived Tobeñas of his street. And I love the fact that it’s become Democracy Street instead, a lovely dig at Fascism.

History is complex. Sometimes it makes judgements that are perhaps too black and white. But they have to be made.

This one strikes me as have got more right than wrong.

Settling in. And the ups and downs of public services

So far, our Brexit exit to Valencia seems to have worked well. On the human side, Danielle and I both like the city and the way of life there. On the canine side, enthusiasm seems unbounded.

The local park has been well received, particularly the bit of a lake at the top end. The beauty of the lake is that it contains slow-moving water – it doesn’t do nasty things like suddenly rise up in waves and attack you, like the Atlantic kept doing in France. The lake just lies there quiet and inviting and lets you swim around in it without any sense that it might suddenly take it into its mind to sweep you away.

The latest development is that Toffee and Luci have taken to the local habit among dogs of getting out on the balcony and barking at passers-by. That’s mostly dogs, of course, but hey, if there aren’t any dogs, nothing stops you having a bark at humans instead. As Danielle puts it, ‘oh, yes. Everyone knows we have two assault poodles’.

Assault poodles keeping the street in order

The place generally just appeals to us all. It’s an easy-going city, with a party spirit (which is great most of the time, though I have to admit, less so at 2:00 am) and plenty to do, from park walks to sea bathing, and from excellent restaurants to jazz concerts (note to myself: you really don’t like jazz; don’t go again).

I like the commitment to public service, too. It reminds of earlier times in Britain, when so much more was provided as a public service than today. For instance, the local public transport service is still provided by city council. We haven’t mastered the bus network yet, though it seems pretty comprehensive. And the underground service, the Metro, is a pure pleasure to use – airy, comfortable, quick, affordable.

In fact, it’s even better than that. There’s a special arrangement for people over 65 – and I hope that includes people who actually are 65, though I confess that’s only for personal motives – whereby you can get a month’s pass, for Metro and bus, for only eight euros or so.

Sadly, all these wonderful aspects of a public service come with some of the less attractive aspects too. Nothing’s ever all one thing or all the other, is it? The less appealing bits are just as reminiscent of the British past. They simply excite rather less nostalgia.

There are only certain offices on the Metro that can sell you one of those senior-citizen passes. So we went to one. Turns out there was only one counter and about 15 people waiting for service. Valencia – or possibly Spain – has a special way of handling these situations. Each person on arriving calls out, ‘who’s last?’. That person holds up a hand. The new arrival knows who to follow. So there’s no formal queue but people get served in turn all the same.

We waited for ours to come around. It felt like about an hour though it was probably less than half that. But, you know, with nowhere to sit, even 25 minutes feels like a lot too long.

Eventually, we got to the desk. We told the friendly looking man behind it what we were after.

‘Have you brought photocopies of an identity document with you?’

‘We’ve brought our passports,’ we told him.

‘But no photocopies?’

‘No,’ we said, ‘can we make photocopies here?’

‘No,’ he told us, clearly with regret, but equally obviously with absolutely no intention of doing anything whatever about it.

‘So you can’t do us the tickets?’

‘With all these people waiting? I could hardly stop to make photocopies, could I?’

He didn’t actually say, ‘it’s more than my job’s worth’ but you could feel the sentiment was there, behind the words pronounced.

‘It would have been nice,’ I told him, ‘if there’d been some information displayed here to say that we couldn’t get the tickets without the photocopies.’

‘Yes,’ he said. And turned to deal with the next customer.

We left without the tickets. We have to get photocopies and go back another time. There are rules about how you buy the tickets. And no way around them.

Which reminds me of the long-lost days of British Rail. Though when its jobsworths declined to serve you or gave you inaccurate information, they were mostly surly as well as unhelpful. At least the Valencian was nice as he stonewalled us.

But stonewalled we nonetheless were. A great object lesson in the fact that public services can be just as inadequate as private ones. Which is a lesson worth remembering at a time when people keep telling me that the solution to all our woes is re-nationalisation.

It actually doesn’t matter who the services are run by. What matters is who they’re run for. Clearly, on this occasion at least, the Valencia Metro wasn’t being run for us.

Still. It remains a wonderful city. And the dogs love it, which says a lot.

The making of Eurodogs

It’s been a tough rite of passage, for Toffee and Luci, being turned into European toy poodles. A process not without its bright moments – indeed, there have been quite a few – but difficult all the same. Adaptation to change is never easy, is it?

Still, I’m sure it’s done them good. Neither had previously been out of Britain. In Toffee’s case, one could feel a certain incipient xenophobia, perhaps an infection from the toxic effect of Brexit. Certainly, where in Luton she’d always been prepared to be friendly towards selected dogs (small, unaggressive, with a certain je ne sais quoi, though I don’t know what that is), in France she barked at every passing dog, irrespective of size or attitude.

Which isn’t wise when you weigh not much more than a Great Dane’s evening meal and are barely shoulder high to a Pomeranian.

Luci, I’m glad to report, behaved in exactly the same way to the foreign dogs as to English ones: she backed away from them all, as she does with any people or dogs she doesn’t know. At least she was consistent across the Channel. So it seems she can’t be accused of xenophobia – she’s scared of everyone equally.

Exploring the Loire at Tours
When it comes to water, Luci still leads the way

What went better was that we visited some places they liked. They went bathing, at least at the paddling level, in the river Loire at Tours. They went paddling in the Atlantic at Mimizan, where Toffee developed a glorious technique of sideways jumps whenever the sea, in a devious and brutal manner, sent a larger wave than most to sweep her from her feet. Luci just enjoyed the water but Toffee, less brave with waves, preferred to keep out of the way.

Luci enjoying the Atlantic with Danielle
Toffee had decamped...

What they enjoyed least was the actual travelling bit. Twice we had to lift Toffee bodily into the car. In fact, the only thing that prevented her making a break for the long grass was, I suspect, the dread that we might actually leave her behind, a fate even worse than being forced into the car yet again.

She made her desire for freedom particularly clear when we stopped overnight in Lumpiaque, a town of 900 souls outside Zaragoza in Spain. It’s surrounded by fields and orchards – we were invited to help ourselves to figs, there were huge fields full of tomato plants that made Danielle sigh with envy, and excellent long walks along country paths. Toffee felt that we’d found a place after her own heart and could see no purpose in further travel in that nasty, smelly, wobbly thing we call a car.

Lumpiaque was fun for the humans, too. We had a meal in one of the three restaurants in the town. They weren’t really restaurants so much as bars that also did food. The kind of place where the proprietor proudly shows you her menu and then tells you which three of the fifteen or so dishes on it she can actually provide.

So the trip was a rite of passage for both dogs. But I think it coincided for Toffee with a coming of age, too – not always in the best way. For a long time, she has been a fierce defender of what is hers: Misty, our cat, or Luci were not allowed anywhere near her food, for instance. It was quite amusing watching that tiny bundle of fluff seeing off the massive Misty, twice her size and with claws as deadly as his teeth, whenever he had the gall to approach her bowl.

Now, though, she’s become a fierce defender of not just her own, but also of things that certainly aren’t hers. These days, when two bowls go down on the floor, she likes to move to the one that’s closest to Luci and start eating. If Luci then approaches the other one, Toffee moves back to it. She’s clearly worked out that making sure of your bowl is great, but having two to yourself is even better. I imagine she’d be blocked by a kind of glass kennel roof, but otherwise I could see her enjoying a glittering career on some board of directors in the City of London.

To be fair, she often leaves Luci her stuff. Say if they have a chew each as a treat. But then what she often does is to wait for Luci to finish while Toffee just toys with hers. Then, as soon as Luci’s finished, she’ll deliberately, ostentatiously and slowly nibble her way through hers with every sign of pleasure.

It’s cruel but so refined in its cruelty that I find it hard not to admire. Guiltily.

Luci does get her own back. The best way to get her to pee on a walk is to wait for Toffee to relieve herself. Then Luci will hurry to the spot and pee on top of it. I think she feels this gives her a certain superiority. I believe Toffee, who by then has generally gone off to look at something more interesting, doesn’t give a damn, and who could blame her? Still, if it makes Luci happy, who’d begrudge her that?

There are lots of things on which they see eye to eye, of course. They like Valencia and they like the flat, into which they’ve settled admirably. They enjoy defending it, too, against the Yorkie next door and the other Yorkie downstairs. They seem to have no linguistic barrier over communicating with Spanish dogs – both sides have a great time barking at each other.

Not that this kind of territorial defence had to wait until we got to Valencia. They were both engaging in it on the way. Though, honestly, it was a little hard to understand what they hoped to achieve. Defending a café terrace as their territory? A patch of beach? The space around a picnic table? I don’t see it.

So it’s great they now have something of their own to protect. Their flat. What’s more, it has a couch, just like the place in Luton. They’ve settled down on it and that makes it home. Doesn’t it?

Well on the way to being Eurodogs, both of them.

Settled

The key is in the lock you choose

Moving house is never easy. Especially if it takes a car trip a couple of thousand kilometres long. With two dogs.

Don’t get me wrong. It can be a lot of fun. Especially as the many stops we had to make, given that we had two dogs with us, were in wonderful places. Still, it’s tiring, and tiredness takes its toll.

We’re back in Valencia for a longer trial of life in Spain. I’ve even planned a couple of business trips away from the city, to see how well things go if I base myself here for work. And, of course, we have the dogs to see how well they take to life in Spain. They’d never been out of Britain before, so we’re keen to see how they cope with the change of culture. Environment. Language.

But the first failure of adaptation was my own. As I said, the trip, though fun, had been tiring. Then, on the morning after our arrival, we went out for a five or six kilometre long walk in the Turia park, that follows the bed of the river that formerly flowed through the city. At the end, Danielle sent me home with the dogs and the two loaves of bread we’d bought.

As I turned into our street, I saw a man fiddling with a street door lock. It’s been a while since the system that allows us to buzz people in from upstairs has failed, so I thought he might be working on that. I tried to ask him in my broken Spanish.

‘Someone broke the lock,’ he told me.

Now, I remembered having trouble with our front door lock before and having to call a locksmith out. I assumed the problem had returned. A bore, especially if it meant replacing keys, but it was good of this neighbour to be doing the work himself.

Getting into the building wasn’t straightforward, as he’d laid all his tools on one of the steps. Getting past with small dogs was a daunting task, but he kindly pushed things aside to let us through.

I climbed up the two floors and stood at the front door of the flat. It has two locks. But on going out, I’d deliberately locked only the lower one. I tried to insert the key. Imagine my bewilderment when I couldn’t even get the key into the lock.

There were several keys on the bunch and I tried them all. None fitted. I could get the key for the lower lock pretty well into the upper lock, but it wouldn’t turn. There was no way of getting into the flat.

I noticed that a towel I didn’t recognise was hanging over the bannisters behind me. Had someone turned up to return a towel for us and found the same problem? Or even, got in and changed the lock, leaving the towel outside?

I know that such an explanation made little sense but nothing was making sense to me any more.

Eventually, I gave up and went looking for Danielle at our local supermarket. I waited patiently outside, and the dogs waited impatiently, whimpering occasionally, until Danielle eventually appeared. I explained my predicament.

‘What? The key doesn’t work?’ she said. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘Nor do I,’ I replied.

‘And what’s all this business about the towel?’

‘No idea. It’s just hanging there.’

‘I hope we haven’t been burgled.’

So did I.

But I had another cause for anxiety. I’d asked for some important papers to be sent out to us, to the address Danielle had given me for the flat (I keep forgetting it).

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘you told me we lived at number 6.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we do.’

‘No. It’s clearly marked 4 outside.’

‘What? All the papers for the purchase of the house must be wrong, then. The deeds. The whole lot.’

She stopped and gave me a long, hard look.

A terrible realisation was beginning to dawn on me.

On the way back, we stopped outside number 4.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘the door doesn’t even look the same. And surely you’ve noticed that we don’t have the same tiles along the corridor.’

I had to confess that I hadn’t. But it’s true that when I looked at the entrance hall of number 6, there weren’t any. And, to my immense relief, when we got to the second floor, the key slid easily into the lock and turned without a problem.

I never did work out what the towel on the bannister was for, though. There wasn’t one at number 6.

Toffee and Luci on their new couch-from-home

Meanwhile, the dogs seem to be settling in with far fewer problems. But more about that in the next post.