A road more travelled

It wasn’t just fun to visit our friend Ana in Zagreb over the weekend. It was also highly entertaining. I particularly enjoyed learning a little of her history. And felt one bit of it at least deserved to be shared here.

Ana was born in Podbila, Herzegovina, now a constituent part of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Podbila was a mountain village which had one shop, a church and a primary school.

Podbila, nestling in the mountains

‘Sometimes you’d see the men outside the grocery having a beer.’

‘Because there was no bar or café?’

‘Oh, no. There was no bar or café. Just the shop.’

Most of the men worked holdings that took the form of patches of land scattered across wide distances, sometimes as much as a kilometre apart.

In such villages, intellectual society consisted of the teacher, the doctor and the priest. But Podbila was too small even for that: the doctor was in the next town and the priest only came to hold services.

‘In a little church surrounded by a cemetery. You have the same in England. I saw one in the middle of Birmingham, right in the centre of the city. It looked very strange. We had the same, but it was in the country.’

Ana’s father Jakov was a joiner and building worker. He moved to Germany to make a better living. It was a temporary arrangement but, as Ana pointed out, most of those who went abroad stayed there. Jakov was no exception, living out his life in Frankfurt.

There came a time, however, when Jakov and Ana’s mother Mara decided that Podbila might not offer the most glittering opportunities for a truly world-class education. Which was what they wanted for their two daughters and their son. So Jakov set out to find them a new home.

Ana (left) with Mara and Jakov and her siblings
A little while before she became an eminent research scientist

Mara was clear. She wasn’t prepared to give up growing her own vegetables. She made it clear he was to look for a place in one of the villages outside Osijek, in eastern Croatia, an area known as Slavonia, which was then quite wealthy.

Jakov caught the local bus to the small town of Posusje, where the farmers of the outlying villages used to bring their produce to market. There he mounted the intercity coach travelling to Osijek.

Everything went to plan until the coach reached the town of Okučani. Here it was to turn right, eastwards, and head for Osijek. And here Jakov was seized by doubt.

‘Osijek?’ he thought. ‘We want to educate our children? Osijek’s a great university city, but it isn’t the capital, is it?’

Now in those days there was no such state as Croatia, but there was a nation. Croats, even the ones in Herzegovina, felt a bond to it. And Zagreb was its capital. True, it was only the capital of a constituent republic of the uneasy federation of Yugoslavia, but the Croat capital it nonetheless was.

It was the work of a moment. Jakov changed his ticket. He made for Zagreb. Not a village nearby, but the city itself, as close as possible to the schools and universities.

Except for several visits abroad, Ana has been living in the capital ever since 1979. Now a research chemist and a professor at the University of Zagreb, she’s living proof that her father’s strategy worked out.

The eminent chemist today

On the other hand, Mara never got a proper field to cultivate. Jakov ultimately built the apartment block in which we stayed with Ana, and in which Mara has had a flat ever since she returned from Frankfurt. True, she has a back garden which she can cultivate; true, too, that her brother living in another house Jakov built has a garden and her son-in-law has an allotment both of which Mara has taken over; but it’s urban market gardening rather than anything like real farming as she’d hoped.

As for Jakov, he bought himself a plot in a Zagreb cemetery.

‘This will be my apartment when I return,’ he told his family.

When they asked whether he wouldn’t prefer to be buried back in Herzegovina, he couldn’t see the point.

‘Why? Zagreb’s our home now. This is where my coffin will go.’

And it has.

Jakov a little while later than the previous photo

How might things have been if Jakov had stayed on the bus to Osijek? It’s hard not to believe that they would have been different. But we shall never know.

That puts me in mind of the Robert Frost poem The Road Less Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Just like Jakov. Though he took the road more travelled. And, because we could visit Ana, we – like chemistry – have profited by his decision.

A lovely city. An excellent meal. Great conversation. And some invaluable insights

The soft glow of gaslights in Zagreb's Upper Town

It’s curious being back in a country I haven’t visited for over half a century. 

A lot has changed. Starting with its name. Back then, it was just a constituent republic of a state called Yugoslavia. Today, it’s the independent republic of Croatia.

My first visit was in 1964. Among the few memories that have remained with me was the port of Dubrovnik, with three US warships docked in it. Even at eleven years old, it struck me as fascinating to see a ‘Communist’ nation hosting the US navy. It was testament to Tito’s wit in playing off the great powers against each other, as it was to a more intelligent side of US foreign policy, cultivating better relations with a supposedly enemy power, rather than going to war with it as in Vietnam.

After all, the US won the game in Yugoslavia. Vietnam inflicted their first ever defeat on them.

Flower market in Zagreb's old centre

We did get to Zagreb in 1964, but only to the suburbs. I remember a good lunch and little else. That made it all the more pleasurable to discover how much the city has to offer, as our friend Ana showed us around it on this visit. A beautiful old centre with a huge market offering every imaginable ware, streets offering fine prospects at every turn and glorious views from an upper town whose streets are still lit by gas in the evenings.

Roofs and spires, seen from the Upper Town

It’s a fine, and above all European, city. And the lunch was as good as back then.

With Danielle (left) and Ana
And Marija Juric Zagorka, Croatia's first female journalist

But our conversation was even more interesting than the city.

I’d already discovered in Valencia than when people talk about ‘the war’ they don’t mean the same thing everywhere. In Britain, France or Germany, it generally means the Second World War. In Spain, it’s the war against Franco’s Fascists in the late 1930s. But with a chill up my spine, I realised that when Ana speaks of ‘the war’ she means something that she suffered directly herself, where she saw and heard air raids coming in over the city in which she lives.

She’s talking of the war the Serb-led Yugoslav army waged against Croatia to prevent its becoming independent.

‘Not a civil war,’ she assures us, ‘because Croatian forces never set a foot on Serbian territory. It was a war started by the Serbs and fought in self-defence by the Croatians.’

We first met Ana in Strasbourg. She reminded us of the quaint habit there of sounding air raid warnings at noon on the first Wednesday of every month, as a test of their civil defence readiness. The first time she heard it, she froze with terror at hearing the familiar wail with its blood-curdling associations. Only when a colleague realised what was happening to her and explained that it was only a test of equipment, was she able to regain her composure.

To me, such memories belong to my parents’ generation, not mine. And certainly not to Ana’s: she’s significantly younger than we are.

‘For years,’ she told us, ‘I wasn’t allowed to be Croatian. The state tried to force us all to be Yugoslavs, but we never were and never wanted to be.’

The right to self-determination was asserted for all peoples after the First World War. In Yugoslavia, as in Czechoslovakia and other nations, it was never truly applied. Only now can Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins and even Kosovans at last begin to live their own lives, free of the authoritarian tutelage of Belgrade.

Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a mess, of course. Something Ana feels particularly strongly, as she was born there – only 200 metres from the Croatian border, but still inside Herzegovina. For now, there’s a fragile peace, but it’s hard to know whether it will strengthen in the future or break down into renewed conflict.

And what about Croatia itself? Doesn’t Ana fear a new outbreak of hostilities?

‘I don’t think so. After all, we’re members of NATO now.’

At a time when it’s fashionable to write NATO off as the work of the devil – a position shared by Donald Trump and the far left – it’s a salutary reminder that there are people who rely on it for the defence of their freedoms. Maybe the organisation, for its many faults, isn’t entirely without redeeming features.

Nor is it the only international organisation to which Croatia belongs. Another, as important as NATO, is the EU. Coming here is a useful reminder that one of the major purposes of the EU, far greater than its economic role, is to begin to put an end to violence between states, at least in Europe. That’s a continent that has seen more than enough blood flowing from its internal strife down the centuries.

Right up to as recently as the 1990s in former Yugoslavia.

Croexit? No thanks
The Croatian flag flies with pride next to the EU’s

Croatia’s proud of being in the EU. I wish more people in the UK could understand that. Before they undermine the organisation and deprive themselves of its benefits by an intemperate, ill-thought out and self-harming Brexit.

Walking no dogs

The thing about dogs is that they get you out of doors. Which is just as well, because indoors they’re good at interrupting, or at least restricting, your work. You don’t believe me? Try typing with a dog resting her head on your elbow.

Luci being endearing. But making it hard to do much work

Getting me out of doors is a fundamentally good thing. I’ve taken to heart the injunction to take 10,000 steps a day, even though I’m far from convinced that this limited form of exercise does me all the good that’s claimed for it. In fact, because when I get one of these fixations I generally go way over the top, I try to do 15,000 steps. Even though, in my heart of hearts, I know that even that level is unlikely to be that beneficial.

Still, if you set yourself a target, the least you can do is try to hit it. For that the dogs are invaluable. Rain or shine, summer or winter, day or night, they have to go out. And when you’re out, well you’re racking up the steps. Great.

But what happens if you’re deprived of the dogs, even temporarily?

This happened when my wife, now happily retired, decided to take them to Ashridge Forest the other day. When lunchtime came around and I realised I was terribly short of my daily step target, I felt strangely embarrassed at the notion that I might go for a walk without the dogs. It felt as though I was proposing to go out naked.

How could I justify my presence in the park without Luci or Toffee?

It was only at the price of some serious soul-searching and internal debates that I convinced myself that people do, after all, often go out on walks. Admittedly, mostly they’re with friends, or family, or indeed dogs, but some of them walk on their own. ‘You’ll never walk alone’ the song proclaims, but the most enthusiastic singers of that song are fans of Liverpool Football Club, among whose number I have to admit I’m not to be counted.

What was there to stop me getting out there? Even alone?

So I went.

At least I could walk more quickly than I usually do with the dogs. I feel no inclination to keep my nose on the ground, or to dart off into the bushes in pursuit of a squirrel, the remains of a mouldy sandwich or, quite often, as far as I can see, absolutely nothing at all. That makes for significantly better forward progress.

It meant I could even see a few things that I hadn’t counted on. In Wardown Park, surely the most prestigious of the parks which are Luton’s best feature, I popped into the museum and, specifically, the room in which we attend occasional Sunday concerts. On this occasion, there were no musicians, but an artist, Nicola Moody working on a loom, creating a piece to be called Running with Thread.

Nicola Moody working on her jack loom
in Wardown House

Every Saturday, there’s a 5 km Park Run in Wardown Park. One of my sons, Nicky, has taken part three times, winning once and placing in the top three on all those occasions. A number of my friends also run, though they tend to place less far up the leader board, especially when pushing a buggy around with a child in it. It’s a great illustration of the joy of simply taking part. That’s something to celebrate, though I don’t participate myself as it happens, preferring to watch the illustration and celebrate it from the finishing line.

Nicola Moody’s weaving will produce three pieces incorporating the length of stride, heart rate and running time of three participants. She tells me that her kind of weaving is now recognised as a true art form. Indeed, the Tate Modern is running an exhibition of one of its major exponents, Anni Albers, right now.

Back outside, I went on to the old cricket field nearby. This was where, nearly a quarter of a century ago, I came to watch that same son Nicky playing a match against a team which, if I remember, consigned them firmly to the position of second best. But I was as always simply pleased to see the place, with its stone banks of seats on two sides and a pavilion on the third, and a perfectly even, smooth surface for this noble game between them.

For my recent dogless walk, I had chosen a fine day, with a clear sky and bright sunshine. There was however a touch of sharpness to the air that made me grateful I’d chosen to take a jacket. Autumn was definitely on us, summer was no more.

That was an impression confirmed by the sight that greeted me when I reached the field. In the winter, it’s given over to football instead of cricket. And, indeed, a game was in progress when I got there.

The cricket ground in its winter manifestation as football pitch

Ah, well. The tougher time for the walks is coming fast. But the thing about dogs is that they make you go out. Rain or shine, summer or winter, day or night. Soon it’s going to be a lot more rain than shine, a lot more night than day. The dogs won’t mind, because they just like to go out. For us? Not so much fun. But at least they’ll ensure we do our steps.

So my walk without dogs made clear what awaits me with them. Far, far too soon. But that didn’t stop me enjoying it.

The people spoke, and I spoke with them

It was the second biggest march in Britain this century.

670,000 people filed through the streets of London to say ‘no’ to Brexit and demand a second referendum – well, the third really, counting the one that voted to stay in in 1975. Why? So that people who voted Brexit in 2016 without knowing what it would look like, would have a chance to reconsider now that it’s become painfully clear.

The march stretches down London’s sun-filled streets

The march was cheerful and friendly under warm autumn sun. There were people of every age – grandparents pushing grandchildren in their buggies, the middle aged, young adults, students. There were people from every party, even the Tories – I talked to a couple of them and they seemed a little embarrassed, I suspect because they’d never taken part in a demonstration before.

It was uplifting just to be there.

There were also absences. The police presence was almost invisible: these weren’t people who were going to make trouble. Those weird fringe cults from the far left weren’t there either – Class War or the Socialist Workers Party or the Labour leadership. It seems they have trouble with the notion that leaving the EU will cost jobs and depress wages, and this isn’t generally an unmixed blessing for the working class the claim to represent.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, was missed by some.

A good question. With a sadly predictable answer

He couldn’t be there. As at the last March, he was abroad, this time in Geneva. Though he hadn’t lost sight of the cause, as he assured us by tweet: he was talking to the former President of Chile Bachelet, now a UN Commissioner, telling her about workers’ rights and human rights. I’m not fully convinced that, as a former victim of the Pinochet regime, she really needed a tutorial from Jeremy but he provided one anyway.

Jeremy Corbyn: talking to a UN official about the harm of Brexit
rather than actually opposing it
In Geneva, too. Somebody had to go. And it's a safe distance from London

And while I don’t want to be picky, I can’t help feeling that doing something to stop Brexit might be more constructive than talking to a UN Commissioner about how awful the Tories are going to make it. But he clearly believes that he could make a far better job of Brexit than Theresa May is, which is odd considering that the other 27 countries of the EU are unlikely to change their position just because he takes charge.

What’s odd is that anyone still thinks Brexit is going to deliver benefits. In the nearly two and a half years of negotiation since the Brexit vote, no one has come up with a formula that might actually work. That’s ‘work’ in the sense of delivering Britain benefits greater than membership does.

Nor have they found a formula for which they can build majority support.

There’s a form of wisdom which it’s hard to master. Part of the difficulty is that it requires the courage to admit to a mistake, one of the rarest forms. Here’s how it goes.

You have a pet plan. It might be Brexit. It might be a challenging new plan at work. You build a case for it, but it doesn’t work – sometimes it doesn’t even convince you. So you compromise a bit and try again. You still can’t make a case that’s really persuasive, even to yourself who wrote it. Now you can keep on going, from rewrite to rewrite, tweaking the assumptions, changing the approach.

The wisdom is to accept at a certain point that the problem isn’t in the way you’re building the arguments. It’s that your pet project, however attractive it seemed to you initially, really wasn’t that good. That the only intelligent conclusion is that you have to drop the idea altogether and try something different.

Now, I know that it would be hard for Brexiters, like May or Corbyn, to admit they got it wrong. Neither has shown the guts to accept that they sometimes need to question even their most cherished opinions. There’s an easy solution: put the question back to the people. If the people vote for Brexit again, we have no choice. We accept it for better or for worse (and there’s little chance it’ll be for the better). If they vote against, the politicians are off the hook.

Jacob's crackers are cheese biscuits and Jacob Rees-Mogg,
leading Brexiter in the Tory Party, certainly seems crackers

670,000 people gave them that opening on 20 October. If that many turned up for a march – and only 1200 took part in the pro-Brexit event in Harrogate – it says there’s a far larger reservoir of such feeling across the country. That’s an opportunity for a party to step forward, take the leadership of a growing and dynamic swell of opinion, and lead it to victory. Victory as much for itself as well as for the movement. What an opportunity for Labour if it chose really to oppose the current government. And we saw on the march that there are plenty of Labour figures prepared to take that leadership – just not the current leader who preferred to be in Geneva.

The People’s vote march was the second-biggest of the century. The biggest of all mobilised something between 750,000 and 2 million people, depending on who you believe. It failed to stop the Iraq war. If none of our politicians has the guts to step forward in response to this one, it too will fail.

And a lot of people, mostly the people Labour should be representing, will be paying a high price for that failure for at least a generation.

Tee-shirt on the march
Yes. Labour has had better times

My remembrance of things past

Objects sometimes bring back many lost memories, don’t they?

In Proust, it was the flavour of the little cake known as a Madeleine that – he fictionally claims – brought back his Remembrance of things past. With me, it has been two much more solid, and far less edible, items.

One of my most painful characteristics, certainly from adolescence into middle age, was fecklessness about money. I don’t entirely regret it – my boys had some memorable holidays as children – but I remember with horror the struggle to cope with a mountain of credit card debt and the harrowing conversations with bank managers about badly-managed overdrafts.

That only ended when I was made redundant for the second of the three occasions in my career. Fortunately, because my boss (and friend) had persuaded me to come back from abroad to take the job from which he later dismissed me, I’d negotiated myself a long notice period, as an insurance policy that served me well when I now had to call it in.

This meant that my redundancy pay was substantial. Indeed, it covered not just the seven weeks for which I was out of work (unlike my third and last redundancy, this one led to a very short gap in employment) but also enabled me to pay off all my debts. Since then, helped by Danielle who was always much more effective at managing our affairs, I’ve learned to live within my means and avoid new debts.

Redundancy, a hurtful experience, turned out to be beneficial in this instance.

Looking back on the period before I learned that lesson, I can see that I had mistakenly modeled myself on a misinterpretation of my father’s behaviour. He was generous and he cultivated an appealing air of carelessness towards money. The reality, I now realise, was different and he managed his affairs far more wisely than I understood. He had a good income but I’m sure, now, that if he avoided debt it was because he combined it with intelligent self-control.

But that’s not the image he liked to present. On the contrary, he affected a devil-may-care, big-spender image. I’m not blaming him for my own poor behaviour, but I admired him and may well have been influenced by his supposed attitude, which he buttressed with tales of his youth.

He told us, for instance, of the occasion during his life in Paris when he decided he fancied a little smoked ham. He popped out to his local charcuterie, but once there he let the silver-tongued shopkeeper talk him into buying not merely a few slices, but an entire ham, at huge cost. He convinced himself that if made it last two months, buying the whole ham instead of the occasional slice, would save him money. But, with ham readily available, he couldn’t prevent himself popping into the kitchen, at any time of day or night, to cut just one more slice. Again and again. In the end, the ham lasted only a few days.

Something similar happened when he caught sight of a Russian Orthodox cross in an antique shop. He simply couldn’t resist the impulse to buy it, though it took a big chunk out of his salary.

My father's Russian cross

Today, it hangs on a wall at home. And very attractive it is too. It moves me to see it and remember that it was something my father valued. Though I’d have to question whether anyone else would value it as highly: Danielle checked it out on eBay, and you’d have to be on a pretty poor salary for the price of such a cross to make a significant dent in it, even in a single month.

Might he have paid a little over the odds for it?

Seeing the cross also inspires other memories. Of the day when, though he’d told me not to touch it, I couldn’t resist and brought it tumbling to the ground. My father was a man of exceptional equanimity but he had an effective way, without raising his voice, of making it clear when he was displeased. I’ve never fully recovered from his careful explanation of just how displeased he was on that occasion.

Honest, guv. A genuine ancient Roman oil lamp

Another powerful reminder comes from a second object we have on our shelves today. It’s a little clay oil lamp. No genie emerges if you rub it – I’ve tried – but it does make me smile. Wryly.

It was sold to us as a Roman antique during a family visit to Pompeii. I was around eight and we were living in Rome. We visited Pompeii on a Saturday before driving home. A guide attached himself to us and gave us a rather good tour – including, inevitably, some obscene graffiti – before, as we were about to leave, offering my parents the exceptional of buying this antique oil for a knock-down price.

Maybe it was genuine. I’ve never checked, and nor did my parent. Neither of my parents believed that it was anything but a fake, but they also felt that it was a way to offer the guide a bit of tip and leave him convinced that he’d pulled off rather a brilliant trick. Which would make it ironic if it ever turned out to be a priceless antique after all.

Unfortunately, cheap though it was, it left my parents with too little cash to pay the motorway fees for the drive home. Credit cards weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. There were no automated till machines yet. On a Saturday, there was no way to get any money out.

So we drove home on ordinary roads. Which was fine. It was a pleasant trip in good weather. But I was gnawed the whole way with anxiety over my parents having allowed their reserves of money to dip so low they couldn’t even afford motorways.

It strikes me as shameful today that, young as I was, I’d allowed middle-class values to take so firm a hold of me that I suffered anxiety over such a trivial cause.

Perhaps that was another factor that influence me into spending too much as soon as I could – disdaining money to overcome my fears of not having any.

Either way, the modest little oil lamp provides me with an even more chilling warning against my illusions than the Orthodox cross.

So I’ve inherited two objects that produce a powerful and salutary effect on me. Good to have them around. Among many other things, that’s another cause of gratitude towards my father.

England: the redeeming features

It was a wonderful day on Saturday, and we took advantage of it to go walking with a friend in one of most charming places we know: Ashridge Forest, about a forty-minute drive from where we live.

Ashridge Forest: lovely in autumn, lovely in any season

Our return to England, after five weeks of warmth and sunshine as well as clear roads, was made painful by the lousy weather and appalling traffic. Fortunately, England does have many glorious aspects to compensate. Saturday’s weather was one. As for Ashridge, where one can walk for miles though woods and fields, with occasional glimpses of deer, it’s right up there with the best of them.

These are the aspects of England, along with the friends we shall be leaving behind, that I shall miss when we complete our Brexit exit before the axe falls at the end of next March.

After Ashridge, our friend suggested we might like to head for the nearby market town of Tring, where there was an apple festival that day. That sounded like a good plan. I could already picture myself eating a sausage washed down with a pint of cider – I was planning to ask for pear cider, just to be perverse – at what I assumed would be cheerful, bustling fair.

Sadly, it was not to be. There’d be an apple parade in the morning, but by the time we showed up in town the festival was all over. Indeed, pretty much all that was left was to watch another friend and her Morris dancing group perform outside the Church.

Morris Dancing: more appealing than I'd expected

I’ve never been a great fan of Morris dancing, the rather strange custom mocked by many foreigners – indeed, by many English people – in which the dancers wear elaborate costumes decorated with bells, so they tinkle through the complex steps of the dances, accompanied by folk music played on traditional instruments, such as fiddles, guitars, squeezeboxes and tambourines. All a little weird. And yet, I have to admit, the group we saw was pretty impressive, the dancing spellbinding and highly skilful.

I think I could develop a taste for it, a discovery I’ve perhaps made a little late given that we’re about to leave the country where it has its roots.

The Morris dancing was outside the church, and it was inside it that I discovered the only trace of the apple festival: large sheets of paper on which people – children, I assume, for the most part – had glued cutouts of apples which they’d then coloured. I suppose it was gratifying to find some reminder of the festival, though it hardly made up for the brimming pint I’d promised myself and, in the absence of the sausage stand I’d been sure to find, it left me feeling hungry.

The closest we got to any apples. Let alone cider

The church smelled of incense, which suggested to me that it was probably High-Church: the Church of England isn’t content with being merely Protestant, it has currents running from the most Protestant Low-Church at one end of the spectrum, through Middle Church to the quasi-Catholic High Church at the other end. Fortunately, they don’t burn each other’s adherents anymore, so all these distinctions are now just part of the quaintness of English life.

Along with activities like Morris Dancing, festivals that are over so fast that you can miss them if you blink or pretty little market towns like Tring, which means places for the prosperous Middle Class to live and cultivate its charm.

The Church of St Peter and St Paul, Tring

I shall miss them all. Though perhaps not the church, fine though it was. If there’s one thing we’ve already found Spain isn’t short of, it’s Churches. Catholic, of course, almost without exception, but then the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Tring, with its scent of incense, isn’t really that different.

As for apples, well Danielle has plenty from her allotment. She'd turned a whole bunch of them into apple stew which we had with yoghurt when we got home. Pretty well made up for the lack of cider...

Sunshine in an oddly artificial but strangely attractive spot

Some curious places can be surprisingly appealing.

Take the Buttes-Chaumont park in Paris. For a long time, it was a refuse and sewage dump, a place where the bodies of executed criminals were put on display and, in one part, a gypsum and limestone quarry The gypsum was used to make plaster, so it was an important substance in building, which at least makes the purpose of that part of the site constructive – in the most literal sense – and that’s more than can be said for the other bits.

Eventually, though the city of Paris decided to make a park of the place.

I don’t know whether the presence of all that gypsum played a role in how they set about it, but they used a lot of concrete in modelling the park to their design. A waterfall, outcrops of boulders, a stream running between rocky banks – they were all built, not found, laid out by man not nature.

That’s what makes the place so odd. Little or nothing about it is natural, the landscape itself is artificial.

Natural it may not be, but the lake’s an attractive spot for all that

And yet, oddly enough, it manages to be attractive. The waterfall is worth a visit, and the lake is beautiful, especially with the rocky crag in the middle of it, crowned with a belvedere from which one can just glimpse the distant Sacré Coeur in Montmartre. So it’s fun to go to.

OK, I admit, it’s a bit remote, but that is the Sacré Coeur there

Danielle and I hadn’t been to Paris for years, though we lived on the western edge of the city for three years back in the nineties. My brother and his Danielle live now, and it was good to visit them for a couple of nights. Especially as the day before he left was his birthday so we took them out for a pre-birthday celebration.

During the day, while they were both working, we popped down to the Buttes-Chaumont to enjoy the park again. Which turned out to be wonderful. It helped that the weather was glorious, even well into October. What helped the day less was that it had been cold in the morning, so we ended up having to carry coats and sweaters as soon as the clouds cleared.

We even had lunch in a little restaurant opposite one of the gates. We could have eaten outside but chose to go inside, because it was simply too warm in the sun. So it was a fine way to enjoy the last day of our nearly six weeks in Continental Europe.

Of course, by the time we got home to Luton, it was chucking it down with rain. But, hey, it wouldn’t be a welcome home, would it, if it didn’t feel like home?

The waterfall’s fake too
But I like it anyway

Health warning to parents: recognising the signs of Personalitycultoma

A new and insidious condition is affecting growing numbers of children today. It has hit epidemic proportions in the United States and Britain. It is a malignant and highly resistant form of cancer which, unusually for this kind of disease, primarily affects the mind rather than the body.

That makes it no less serious, however. Indeed, in many ways its detrimental effect is all the greater for being essentially psychological.

A Personalitycultoma reveals itself as an irrational and groundless belief that a particular individual is endowed with special powers, making him (or far less frequently her) a man (or woman) of destiny. Where in the past, policy or concrete achievement has been what matters, with a Personalitycultoma sufferer, merely being who they are is enough for the object of the cult to attract the reverence of sufferers from the condition.

Since it isn’t particularly difficult for people to be who they are (most of us manage it most of the time), and sufferers sees that as a sufficient basis for worship, you can imagine just how serious a condition Personalitycultoma is.

Interestingly, the objects of the personality cult generally share the view of the worshippers around them. In many ways, they may be the most afflicted victims of the disease.

So Donald Trump can change his position every few months, sometimes by as much as 180 degrees, and his worshippers, afflicted with Personalitycultoma, will simply follow. He has achieved nothing? It doesn’t matter. The worship is directed at the Donald for what he is not for what he does.

Similarly, it doesn’t matter that Jeremy Corbyn – the British Labour Party’s answer to Trump – has nothing to say on key matters, his silence itself must be evidence of his commitment to principle. This is not because sitting on the fence is principled – it clearly isn’t – but because Corbyn being the very embodiment of all honesty and principle, any position he takes – however obviously opportunist – must be a shining example of integrity.

What are the signs of Personalitycultoma? It’s vital to recognise them if any kind of action is to be taken by parents to effect a cure in their children.

Look out for the use of rules that apply only to people other than the object of worship. For instance, if a sufferer argues that any Labour MP should be discipline for lack of loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn, but believes that Corbyn should not have suffered the same fate for lack of loyalty to previous leaders, suspect Personalitycultoma.

Then there’s loyalty itself. A fixation on it, and on a far higher level of loyalty than most people would expect, is another sign of this pernicious condition. Donald Trump is known to value unquestioning loyalty above all other qualities, far ahead of competence, intelligence or know-how. Which is why his staff either screw up big time or let him down, in his own estimation, lamentably.

Similarly, Corbynistas make loyalty to Jeremy the keystone of any political position in British Labour. The notion that members, and above all Members of Parliament, should hold a leader to account is shelved. What is due is unqualified support. ‘Back the leader or shut up’ is the key slogan. Telling truth to power? Forget it. Outmoded. Not left wing enough. The true believer takes truth from power, where ‘truth’ is what the leader says.

Finally, there’s the wild claiming of success and denial of failure. Corbyn, with a little help from others, achieved a huge increase in Labour’s vote in the last general election. That’s a triumph for him. 

Did he win? No. That’s an indictment of those who questioned him.

Similarly, Trump achieved a major diplomatic success in his talks with Kim Jong Un. By doing so, he ensured the nuclear disarmament of North Korea. Personalitycultoma sufferers will celebrate the breakthrough. 

Has North Korea actually disarmed? No. That’s the fault of the fake-news brokers in the media, who spread this kind of uncomfortable news.

Truly an insidious and debilitating condition. Sufferers lose all capability to reason critically. With their heads in the dust by his feet, they can no longer see the glaring faults of the object of their reverence. His failings are invisible to them, however obvious they are to the rest of us.

What’s the cure?

Absolutely not the right treatment for Personalitycultoma
However tempting it may sometimes seem

Sadly, treatment options are unclear at the moment. The best hope seems to be regular dosages of reality. Unfortunately, it’s unknown how long the treatment would have to last to bring a sufferer out of the delusion. Would a defeat for Trump be sufficient? Or a second defeat for Corbyn? We fear that it might take far more, so parents should persist in delivering doses of reality over an extended period, until it is quite clear that the patient is beginning to return to sanity.

And, in this context, ‘parent’ means anyone with their feet on the ground. Because although the condition particularly affects children, those children are not necessarily young. Why, I know one sufferer well into his seventies.

Childish, certainly. A child, not necessarily.

Nationalism: toxic generally, but it has a lighter side

After a great month in Valencia, in Spain, we’re driving back towards England. That’s Danielle, the two toy poodles and me. The first stage of the journey took us into France. That meant travelling through Catalonia.

Or rather not through Catalonia, but into it, because even when you get over the border to France, you’re still in a bit of Catalonia, north of the Pyrenees. Even the French refer to the region as ‘le pays Catalan’ (note that the expression is in French, not Catalan).

Separatist feeling is nothing like as strong as on the Spanish side of the mountains. You hear far less Catalan being spoken on the streets. But there is still a strong attachment to the region’s Catalan roots. Town and street names often appear in Catalan as well as French, and the Catalan flag – gold and red bars – proudly flies everywhere.

The flag of Catalonia flying from a small surviving part of the
battlements of Perpignan (French) or Perpinyà (Catalan)

Indeed, when I ordered an ice cream in fine old town of Perpignan (Perpinyà in Catalan), the waiter who served me was full of congratulations of my choice of mandarin and raspberry as it produced a serving in the Catalan colours.

An excellent ice and in the appropriate colours for Catalonia

It took us a while to drive to French Catalonia. As we approached the border, we discussed where we might get dinner. One of the more attractive aspects of French towns – including, we assumed, the Catalan ones – is that they tend to offer a wide range of restaurants where one can eat well, and not always for a lot of money.

‘I’d like a crêpe,’ I announced.

Crêpes are sold in crêperies. They’re usually Breton and offer both savoury and sweet pancakes, and they can often be delicious. Sometimes not so much. But I’m forever hopeful. They usually sell wines and beers but the drink of choice to wash the crêpes down is Norman or Breton cider, served in pitchers and drunk out of vessels that look like nothing so much as tea cups, even down to the handles.

It was a shock when we got to the village where we were spending the night, just on the edge of the Pyrenees. There were far fewer restaurants than we’d confidently expected, and most of them were closed. With autumn on us and shorter days, we soon found ourselves wandering dark and gloomy streets in, even at 9:00 at night, in an apparently hopeless quest for somewhere that would serve us food.

It was beginning to seem to me that we would just have to come to terms with not finding anywhere open. We’d have to settle for a night without a meal. Given my weight, that might well be a lot better for my body, but it would be a lot less fun for my soul.

Danielle hadn’t yet accepted the grim truth that weren’t going to find anywhere. She was leading the way confidently ever upwards through the village streets, into the top levels where the streets were all streets and it was perfectly obvious we’d find no restaurants.

And then we came around a corner and saw light flooding out onto the pavement. A pool of good cheer. And – it was coming from a crêperie. We received a new burst of energy and new strength to our legs, as we made at speed towards the vision of delight, even though the street became even steeper for our last few steps.

It was not just a crêperie, but a genuinely Breton one. With a real Breton as owner and chef. It was open, we weren’t too late to order, and it let us in with the dogs. We had an excellent savoury crêpe each followed by one with caramelised apple, drowned in calvados and flambéd. 

Washed down with cider, of course.

On the wall alongside us was a large Breton flag. But, to my amusement, next to it was a Catalan one. I remarked on the fact to the proprietor.

Breton (left) and Catalan flags

‘Well, what do you expect?’ he asked, ‘if I hadn’t put a Catalan flag up, the people here would have lynched me.’

French Catalonia is about as far southwards from Brittany as you can get without leaving France. But Danielle is from Alsace, which is as far eastwards as you can get without landing up in Germany. But she’s always been struck by the number of Breton-Alsatian couples she knows.

She told the proprietor. ‘It seems that whenever a Breton meets an Alsatian, they both say, “what a shame that France comes between us.”’

France of course would deny that vile allegation. The nation brings these disparate regions together, its leaders would claim, it doesn’t separate them. A great notion, though somewhat belied by the staunch spirit of independence expressed in so lively a way by regions such as Alsace, Brittany or Catalonia.

Symbolised by the two fine flags we could admire while enjoying the excellent crêpes Danielle’s persistence had earned for us.

The dancing was inspiring, but the revolution never happened

Flamenco music and dance – it just gets your pulse racing.

That was the feeling that came over me the first time I went to a concert. That was in Paris, oddly enough. I was there on a school trip, the first time I’d failed to spend a holiday with my parents, making it an important rite of passage in itself. 

The music captures the soul of Spain and the musicians were, indeed, Spanish. The setting, on the other hand, was pure French. And it was a curious time in French history: the Easter of 1969. 

Less than a year earlier the city had seen the great events of May-June 1968. Many had then believed that the very foundations of the French state were under attack, that a new French revolution was taking place. Students in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the main university area, were out on the streets daily, battling against riot police.

Paris May-June 68: a student flinging cobblestones at police lines

The students’ weapon of choice was the cobblestone, dug out of the roadway and used as a missile against the police lines. When I first saw one of those stones close up, I have to say I was amazed by the strength some of those students must have had. I couldn’t have thrown one far.

Many Paris streets were still cobbled at that time, but that was changing. For me, the most striking legacy of those events, was seeing the heaps of cobblestones piled in the courtyard of the youth hostel where our party stayed. Clearly, the authorities weren’t going to be caught out again: they were removing a far too easy source of ammunition for future rioters.

Do you remember the start of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Butch, played by Paul Newman, casing a bank which he’s beginning to realise now has too much security for his gang to raid again, asks ‘What was the matter with that old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful.’

A security guard replies ‘People kept robbing it.’

‘Small price to pay for beauty,’ says Butch.

Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy,
regretting the disappearance of the beautiful old bank

For as long as the cobbled streets of Paris were only causing havoc to car suspensions, the beauty seemed worth the price. But when they provided the fuel for revolution, the price was deemed too high.

Not that there ever really was a revolution. Years later, I heard a radio interview with Maurice Grimaud, Paris Police Chief at the time, and he said that it was a strange revolution that didn’t cost a single life – two people died on the fringes of the fighting but none at all in the fighting itself. And, as he pointed out, the conflict was entirely contained within the Latin quarter – he never lost control and never allowed it to spill out of the small area where it began.

That didn’t stop Charles de Gaulle, then President, running off to the French garrison in Baden-Baden, ready to form a government in exile and prepare for a new triumphant return in arms to the fatherland, just as he’d done in 1940. But by 1969, he was back in the Elysée Palace. Though not for long: he resigned as I was travelling back to school.

So it was in a slightly febrile atmosphere, the jittery climate of Paris in 1969, between the May-June days and de Gaulle’s departure, that I saw my first Flamenco concert. An oasis of pleasure in a desert of tension. And it marked me. It left me with an ineradicable love of Flamenco. What’s more, whenever I hear Flamenco again, I think of that strange moment in Paris half a century ago. 

As I did the other day, as we approach the end of our stay in Valencia. It was another great performance, full of verve, dynamism and beauty. There are moments whenever I watch Flamenco when I wonder how they manage to do it. The boots hit the stage with such force. The singing is so powerful. The guitar playing so frenetic. The dancers are full of passion while maintaining such dignity.

The performance also gave me a sense of political wistfulness. Because the audience was made up of French and German and Dutch as well as Spaniards. And even a group of English people.

Brought together in joint enjoyment of an exciting evening.

Passion and dignity combined

It was clear that the groups had a great deal in common, bound together by a shared culture. How could one of them be about to sever its links with the others? Why was Brexit going to force those Englishmen to break their bonds with their fellow Europeans?

It’s a strange, incomprehensible state of affairs.

It’s clear that more and more people in Britain are turning against Brexit. It is tearing the ruling Tory Party apart. It has caused major divisions within the Labour opposition too, divisions that would doubtless explode if ever the party came to office and had to deal with the issues of leaving the EU.

No one seems set to gain from Brexit, and yet no one seems to be able to do anything to stop it. Britain seems bound, inevitably, for a great leap backwards. A change against progress and towards a world that prefers walls to bridges.

Ah, well. Another good reason for going to a Flamenco concert. Get the blood stirring, the feet tapping, the hands clapping. And take your mind off the sheer cussedness of the world. 

I met Flamenco soon after a revolutionary movement that reverberates still today. And now I’ve enjoyed it just before a reactionary step of equal moment. Sadly, while the revolution never really happened, Brexit I fear most certainly will.