Tense about language, easier about life

Ah, Valencia. Charming city. Full of surprises – the convent that has become a bar and restaurant where you can eat Asian street food and drink a glass of wine under the stars and the palm trees, for instance, or the park that’s kept so clean that it can be hard to find a stick to throw for the dogs.

Valencia gets Spring going

It’s not all magic, of course. There are downsides. One is that Spain works at a higher volume than Britain. People don’t simply meet and have a discreet chat in subdued tones. They seem to feel that they haven’t fully demonstrated their joy at being with friends unless they talk loudly enough to be heard three blocks away. That can be a little tedious in the street during the day, but at 2:00 in the morning in the flat next door to ours, it can be a real bane.

But the benefits vastly outweigh these minor inconveniences. If nothing else, it was sheer joy to be enjoying Spring there, a point driven home to me here in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire), where I’m looking out on a cold winter’s day under grey, rain-laden skies.

Danielle and I both feel that, to fit into our new life, we need to master the language. As it happens, I already speak a little Spanish, so my new tutor’s first action was to assess my level (far from high). She came up with some curious conclusions.

One was that I sometimes drift into an Italian accent. Not altogether surprising, since I was born in Italy. But, to be honest, I have no idea what an Italian accent sounds like in Spanish. To my tin ear, both accents sound Mediterranean. Which is perhaps a measure of just how much I have to learn.

What’s more, it’s a little exasperating. To sound Italian when I speak Spanish might be more acceptable if I didn’t sound so English when I spoke Italian. Why can’t I have an Italian accent in Italian?

But my tutor’s major concern was over my mastery – or rather lack of mastery – of the past tenses. I keep using the wrong one, she tells me, in rather a random way. It’s not as though I always use the imperfect when the simple past would be more appropriate, say, which would be a far more comprehensible error, and far more easily corrected.

The truth is that I can never remember how the verbs work in the past, so I just use whichever form comes to mind first. I make an approximate stab at the tense, in the hope that the person I’m talking to will translate it to what I actually mean, understand me, and make allowances. 

For an Englishman who sometimes sounds Italian.

Since my command of the future tense in Spanish isn’t a great deal better, that leaves me comfortable only with the present.

This is ironic since a character flaw of mine is always trying to get ahead of events, planning what I’m going to do and what steps I have to take to make it happen. This sort of hankering for the future is what the French call fuite en avant and the Germans Flucht nach vorn, both of which mean a flight – in the sense of escape – forwards. It’s odd that there’s no real term for it in English, since Anglo-Saxon nations are no more immune to this sad disorder than anyone else.

Equally, I have a tendency to live too much in the past, for instance spending too much time concerned with a period, within my own lifetime, when the Brits were rather more open to others and generous in their tolerance than they’re proving right now. So forwards or backwards I go, to the serious detriment of the here and now.

The Rubáiyát of Ommar Khayyám
Lots of good advice, not always easy to follow

“Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet?” asks Edward Fitzgerald’s version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Excellent advice, but I’m not good at following it.

Except, it seems, in Spanish. Apparently that’s a language in which I truly live for the moment. Poor mastery of the future, none at all of the past.

It’s almost enough to make me wonder whether I really should pursue my studies of the language. If my current limited skill allows me to tackle a deeprooted character flaw, is that perhaps a price worth paying? Maybe I should just learn to live with being a foreigner who sounds English and occasionally Italian, and can’t account coherently for what he was doing yesterday. And stop constantly planning for a future that may never happen, or regretting a past that’s gone for good anyway.

Curious what language learning can tell you about yourself.

Nations divided against themselves

Have you read Robert Harris’s novel An Officer and a Spy?

Great book. From an idea suggested by Harris’s friend Roman Polanski, who’s about to release the film, to be called J’accuse, with a screenplay also written by Harris.

Imagine a young man, married with two children under three, from a wealthy background and pursuing a military career full of promise, thanks to his intelligence and devotion to duty. This is Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French Army.

J'accuse:
the novelist Emile Zola's ringing denunciation of the Dreyfus scandal
Now the title of Polanski's film from Harris’s novel

Without warning, he’s arrested for treason. The accusation is that he sold his country’s military secrets to its sworn enemy, Germany. The major piece of evidence against him is a handwritten note reconstituted from a waste paper stolen from the German embassy by a cleaner who is also a French agent. One handwriting expert says it wasn’t written by Dreyfus, another that it was. This is enough to condemn him in light of the most damning testimony of all: the captain is a Jew.

This is the story that Harris tells. He’s written a novel but sticks closely to the historical events. The protagonist of the book, and the hero of the story, is Colonel Georges Picquart. He wasn’t unduly fond of Jews, but he hated the idea of a traitor at large in the French Army, as he hated the idea of an innocent man suffering a terrible sentence in his stead.

Because that’s the cruel twist of this tale: Dreyfus had nothing to do with the treason. Picquart discovered the real spy and denounced him. But the establishment couldn’t bring itself to admit its error, far less when the innocent victim of its miscarriage of justice was Jewish. So they preferred to let Dreyfus rot on Devil’s Island. Why, they even ensured that the real culprit, a Major Esterhaze, was acquitted at his court martial.

Picquart, meanwhile, faced persecution nearly to the point of death: I don’t want to spoil the novel for anyone who hasn’t read it, but the French Army went so far as to try to send Picquart on a mission which would almost certainly have led to his death. But he fought on for a cause which must often have seemed hopeless.

Harris is an excellent writer of gripping novels, in particular of the spy or thriller variety, and And Officer and a Spy is in my view his best. So I’m enjoying rereading it. But it isn’t just a good read. It’s also a curious mirror to our own time.

France was torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. The nation was divided into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. The debate was long and often vicious, with anti-Semitic riots and even some deaths in (then-French) Algeria.

There have been no riots in Britain over Brexit, but the divisions are as heartfelt as in the Dreyfus Affair. The two sides are as diametrically opposed, the hopes of unity are as forlorn, the chances of compromise are as vanishingly feeble.

Compromise? What compromise could there have been over Dreyfus? Could he have been exonerated but left in gaol – perhaps under slightly less inhumane conditions – in order not to upset the anti-Dreyfusards? Surely he was either guilty and rightly condemned, or innocent and needing to be released (as he eventually was).

And how’s Brexit different? Britain either stays inside the EU or it leaves. There may have been endless debate over what kind of Brexit might be adopted, but any form means the country leaving the EU. Like Dreyfus being left in gaol: whether under softer or harder conditions, and for a longer or shorter time, it would still have left an innocent man being punished for someone else’s offence. Ironically, the argument for a softer kind of Brexit is often presented, often by no less a person than Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, as a way to avoid upsetting the Brexiter, or more exactly anti-Immigrant, vote – just like keeping Dreyfus in gaol would have been a way of appeasing anti-Semites.

The big difference between the two conflicts is that the Dreyfus case is over 120 years old. We know today that no compromise would ever have made sense between the two sides. One side had the issue broadly right – Dreyfus was innocent and needed to be released – and the other was deeply and perniciously wrong – it couldn’t bring itself to believe that the Jew wasn’t a traitor to France.

And a century from now? I suspect people will be looking back and wondering how Britain could have been so misled as to leave the EU for a generation before rejoining on less favourable terms. The Brexiters, like the anti-Dreyfusards, will be seen as bigoted and profoundly deluded.

But what a pity if it takes so long, and at the cost of so much damage, for that truth to be recognised.

Failure: nothing to fear in it. As long as you don’t deny it

When I was a teenager, I read some books about playing chess, in the mistaken hope that I had it in me to learn to be a good player. Only one lesson from that time sticks in my mind: the advice never to play out a losing game. If your position is hopeless, the book told me, concede and start a new game, since that will give you more useful practice.

I never got any good at chess but the lesson stayed with me forever: if you’re getting nowhere at what you’re doing, stop and try something else. That way you’ll have learned something from a failure and, far from being a blow, it will have become a precious lesson.

Probably one of the most frequently quoted sayings about failure comes from the American basketball star, Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot, and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.

My view is that there are two principles in what Michael Jordan’s saying: the first is the same as mine with chess, that there are lessons to be given by failure, maybe indeed lessons that can only be learned from failure; the second, that fear of failure makes success impossible – if you’re not prepared to run the risk of failure, you can never win.

What is essential, though, is to be prepared to recognise your failure. Otherwise, there’s no chance of learning from it.

I played the piano for thirty years. At the end of that time, I realised that my two sons were taking three weeks to learn to play pieces more competently than I had in three decades. It finally came home to me that my talents, such as they were, lay in a different direction – and I embarked on that direction.

These are issues of burning importance in Britain today.

Theresa May once pulled a parliamentary vote on the deal she had negotiated with the EU to cover Britain’s departure, because she feared she would lose. How justified her fear was became clear when she finally did put it to the vote, and lost by the biggest majority ever inflicted on a government in a British parliament.

Even then, though, she didn’t recognise that she’d got nowhere and submitted the same deal to parliament again. This time she lost by a majority not quite as huge as the first time, but still a crushing one.

She seems completely fixated on her deal. Nothing will deter her from it. Indeed, she’s talking about submitting it for a third vote, not apparently prepared to admit that doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity. I sometimes think of May as a visionary, if that term can be used for a tunnel-visionary: someone who simply can’t see out of the sides of the extremely narrow blinkers she’s wearing.

She clearly hasn’t the self-awareness to recognise her own failure. But others in her Conservative Party clearly have. It’s up to them to remove her from office as quickly as possible before she does much more damage.

Still, it’s not the Conservative Party that’s my concern. I’ve never voted Conservative in my life and have no intention of changing my mind now. A much more serious worry to me is what’s happening in the Labour Party.

The dismal faces of British politics
Their failure would matter less if their followers recognised it and acted on it

In Jeremy Corbyn, we have a man whose whole life has been about mobilising mass movements to achieve political ends. And, boy, does he have the opportunity to do that now. The petition to revoke article 50 – to cancel Brexit – has now attracted more signatures than any previous petition on Parliament’s site. A million turned out in London for the latest anti-Brexit march, but as usual Jeremy wasn’t there. Indeed, as usual on these marches, one of the chants was “Jeremy Corbyn, where are you?”

Even his deputy, Tom Watson, who apparently can recognise a mass movement when he sees one, was there and showing he could both walk the walk and talk the talk. Among other intelligent suggestions, he offered Labour backing for May’s plan on condition it was made subject to a new referendum with Remain as an option. Jeremy, meanwhile, was canvassing for local elections in Morecambe Bay, about as far from the march as he could get without leaving England.

It’s true, as Corbyn recently said, that problems such as poverty and climate change are more urgent than Brexit. What he doesn’t seem to recognise is that both of those problems will be made worse by Brexit. And, most important of all, Brexit is the question that faces any British politician now. 

Clement Attlee, who had the task of rebuilding the Labour Party as leader in the 1930s would, I’m sure, far rather have been dealing with creating a National Health Service or nationalising some key industries (as he did in the government he led after 1945), but right then, the key issue was the rise of Hitlerite Germany and how Britain would address it.

Attlee rose magnificently to the challenge.

Corbyn, faced with his challenge, ran away to Morecambe Bay.

Like May, he’ll never recognise his failures. But it’s time that Labour members did. And drew the glaringly obvious conclusion that Corbyn just isn’t up to the job.

Never play out a losing game. Call a halt and make the necessary changes. The most necessary of all? Part company with both Corbyn and Corbynism.

And time’s short, so do it fast.

Déjà vu, or a little touch of globalisation

Déjà vu is, of course, a present experience. It isn’t generally a true memory of something that has previously happened, but a false memory of familiarity from the past of something one has, in all likelihood, never seen before.

Unless, of course, it’s a perfectly genuine sense of realising that a scene encountered apparently for the first time, genuinely corresponds to a true memory.

That’s what I experienced recently. Danielle and I went into a supermarket on the outskirts of Valencia, a city that is already beginning to feel truly like home but which we’d abandoned for a fortnight, to avoid the sleeplessness that accompanies the glory of the annual ‘Fallas’ festival.

I’d never been in that particular supermarket before. And yet as soon as I entered it I recognised the place. The entry was near the rightmost end of the huge roomful of shelves. All that was further to the right was the electronics section, with a limited range of computing and games accessories as well as music players. The wine was where I expected it, about two-thirds along the shop to the left of the entrance, up against the back wall; bottled water in front of it and a little further along; at the far left-hand end was the fresh produce, meat and fish.

The tills, too, were up at that end of the shop, and most of them, as usual, unmanned. The whole effect was of a place somehow flyblown. Slightly unappealing. It seemed to have everything one might want without quite creating an attractive atmosphere in which to find it.

I knew this place. Though I’d never been there before.

But, of course, there was nothing supernatural or even mildly spooky about the experience. The phenomenon, far from being otherworldly, was quite the reverse. It was merely one of the minor effects of globalisation.

The pronunciation of the name of the French supermarket chain Auchan really isn’t ‘Ocean’, as preferred by many British expatriates. The way it’s pronounced, it sounds like the words meaning ‘in the field’, ‘au champ’. Translated into Spanish, that would be ‘al campo’. Those words could also mean ‘in the countryside’, which has attractive associations, of leisure and pleasure and the open air.

So when Auchan opened its Spanish subsidiary, it called it ‘Alcampo’. A clever international play on words.

Auchan. Not to be confused with Alcampo

Well, not that clever I suppose. But hey, this is the world of commerce, not the theatre of Oscar Wilde.

And the Al Campo on the outskirts of Valencia was laid out in exactly the same way as the Auchan on the outskirts of Strasbourg. We did a lot of shopping there when we were living in that fine city, because if the interior appearance was a tad short of especially inviting, the produce was always good. Just like the Alcampo where we did our shopping in Valencia.

So the experience wasn’t so much déjà vu as plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Or, as we might say in English, another supermarket may be just one more drop in the Auchan.

In Russia too. And, boy, they look exactly the same there

Hey, New Zealand: couldn't you lend us Jacinda for a while?

It’s a tale of two accidental leaders…

Jacinda Ardern was never meant to be Prime Minister of New Zealand. Or at least not yet, not so early as to make her the youngest in a century and a half. She was serving as Deputy Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party when, just seven weeks ahead of the 2017 General Election, the then Leader, Andrew Little, stood down in the face of the dire poll standing of the party.

That’s not an issue for the British Labour Party under its present leadership. It trails a thoroughly discredited Tory government in the polls, at a point when it needs to be well ahead to stand any chance of winning the next election. But Corbynists shrug such matters off. There’ll be a surge, they say, as there was last time. They ignore the fact that the surge wasn’t enough to win and only produced a defeat less drastic than had been feared.

Funnily enough, Corbyn was an accidental leader too. He only stood for the leadership because no one else on the left was prepared to throw his name into the hat. He had no expectation of winning and, indeed, only made it onto the ballot because political opponents within Labour agreed to nominate him as a way of giving the left a chance to be in the game. They didn’t think he’d win either, and how they must be regretting it now.

As it happens, Ardern didn’t win the General Election. She came second with 46 parliamentary seats to the National (conservative) Party’s 56. But coalition negotiations allowed her to assemble a government and she took office. Since then, she’s impressed again and again, including in her personal behaviour: giving birth while in office in a way that charmed the nation.

At no time has she been more impressive than in response to the dire events that took place last Friday, 15 March. A new and far more dreadful Ides of March than those that marked the assassination of Julius Caesar. In Christchurch, a terrorist opened fire in two Mosques killing 50 worshippers and injuring many others.

Her statement to Parliament moved me to tears. She found an extraordinarily powerful way of expressing her total solidarity with the victims and their friends or relatives. It was a moving statement that said that these Muslim immigrants belonged to New Zealand and New Zealand belonged to them. It was a highly effective way of rejecting the views of anyone who might be inclined to nurse  xenophobic feelings towards the victims, a sense that it was tragic but nonetheless, they were somehow wrong to have come to New Zealand, that they were in some sense responsible for the attack on them.

She said:

We cannot know your grief, but we can walk with you at every stage. We can. And we will, surround you with aroha, manaakitanga and all that makes us, us. Our hearts are heavy but our spirit is strong.

Jacinda Ardern with the victims
Showing aroha, manaakitanga and ... leadership

She spoke of “us”, embracing all New Zealanders. And she underlined the message by using the Maori words for love and a much deeper sense of hospitality. The Prime Minister was saying categorically and clearly that the victims belonged in New Zealand and deserved its welcome.

Talking of the presumed perpetrator who, following her example, will not be named here, she said:

A 28-year-old man – an Australian citizen – has been charged with one count of murder. Other charges will follow. He will face the full force of the law in New Zealand. The families of the fallen will have justice.

He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety.

And that is why you will never hear me mention his name.

He is a terrorist. He is a criminal. He is an extremist.

But he will, when I speak, be nameless.

And to others I implore you: speak the names of those who were lost, rather than name of the man who took them.

He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing. Not even his name.

I find it hard to read these words, courageous, outspoken, resolute, without feeling a pricking of tears in my eyes.

Compare them with what Jeremy Corbyn said when asked whether, in a second referendum, he might vote for Brexit:

It depends on what the choice is in front of us. If we’ve got a good deal in which we can have a dynamic relationship with Europe which is all the trading relationships and so on that might be a good way forward that unites the country.

“It depends”. A prevaricating, vacillating reply. And why does he make it? Because he thinks there is a Brexit deal that can unite the country. Which means he wants to pull in the xenophobes who voted to leave the EU out of a dislike of immigrants. Where Ardern tells xenophobes that New Zealand stands for different values, Corbyn tries to appease them.

He must know he can’t. Any deal that he would call ‘good’ would involve a softer Brexit that leave voters would regard as a betrayal. He’s making the same error so many others have made before him, not least David Cameron who called the Brexit referendum: he’s throwing raw meat to people who will only demand more, when they see that pushing their demands gives results.

Ardern stood firm and she’ll be admired for it. Corbyn yielded and he’ll be despised. Two accidental leaders, but only one is truly a leader, showing that accidents can turn out well on some occasions and pitifully badly on others.

How I wish we could borrow her for Britain, to lead Labour, and eventually the country. And send Corbyn back to his allotment to tend to his vegetables. He’d be much happier. As would Britain.

Alas, New Zealand wouldn’t let her go. But can we perhaps can find her like ourselves? At least she’s shown us what to look for.

The heart of Spain: it may be emptying but it still beats warmly

Our gradual introduction into Spanish life continued this weekend. Indeed, we went for a deep dive to the very roots of Spain: a visit to a mountain village on the border of Castille and Aragon, right in the Spanish heartland.

I say Castille although the official title of the region to which it belongs is Castilla-La Mancha. The place is full of wind farms and I made a weak joke about where was Don Quixote, the man of La Mancha, when we really needed him among all those windmills. All I got in return was a faint smile and the tired reply: “this isn’t La Mancha. Here, we’re in Castille”. The region may embrace two historical provinces, but the old attachments die hard.

The comment was from our host, Teo, in the village of Tartanedo. He and his wife are dear old friends, but that didn’t stop us failing to catch up with each other for 25 years. In many ways, it’s a real test of friendship when one meets someone after that kind of a gap, and the conversation simply starts up again as though it had never been interrupted.

The first connection between us had come when Ernestina, his wife, had travelled to England with their daughter Leticia as part of a teacher exchange. Although Tartanedo has a great spiritual pull on them, especially on Teo who was born there, they actually live down in the plain at Guadalajara, a proper town just about within commuting distance from Madrid. Ernestina had been teaching in Guadalajara back in the eighties and she swapped with a teacher from Luton for a year.

Now Guadalajara is warm and sunny, with a lovely centre and deep cultural roots. Why, at our first visit to our friends after that long gap, Ernestina took us to an inspiring flamenco concert in the town’s well-appointed and attractive theatre.

Luton, on the other, has all the joys of English weather, a depressed and depressing town centre, and only a middling-sized room in the library to act as a theatre.

This made it amusing to learn that Ernestina had happily returned to Guadalajara as soon as her year was over. On the other hand, the teacher she’d exchanged with met and married a man from Guadalajara and, to the best of our knowledge, never went back.

In a Tartanedo street, looking at St Bartholomew’s Church

As for Tartanedo, it’s a lovely if embattled place. The houses are mostly built of sandstone and many are beautiful: in excellent repair with fine façades and an air of permanence. But many of these are holiday homes, uninhabited most of the time. Around the edges of the village, there are buildings, many agricultural, but some residential, that are falling into decay, with caved-in roofs, glassless window and doors falling away from their hinges.

Tartanedo is suffering from the same phenomenon that affected many British villages in the past: rural depopulation. The work opportunities are in the cities, as are the bright lights, the restaurants and the main sources of entertainment. Tartanedo had 500 inhabitants at the start of the twentieth century; today there are only 50 permanently living there. 

It has to be said that those who remain, and even many of those who return at holidays, are from the village and have strong roots there. But there were once two shops and a bakery; now there are vans in the summer that come to sell fresh produce but otherwise there is only a bar and a church. It does have to be said that the church is remarkable: it is crammed with breathtaking works of art, in an architectural setting that mixes styles from several centuries of Spanish development. But even the church is struggling. We were there on Sunday and the congregation was just five strong.

Superb baroque altar. But there were only five worshippers

As Teo explained, Tartanedo is part of “España vacía” – empty Spain. In Tartanedo’s case, that has helped a little: the emptiness around it makes it an excellent area for wind farms, and the taxes they pay have provided a much-needed financial boost. But still, emptying is never easy for a village, and leaves it trying to define what kind of future it might have.

Empty Spain: the surroundings of Tartanedo - big sky, big space
With the ubiquitous windmills and no Don Quixote
Oh, and our poodle Toffee in the foreground

Some of the other aspects of life there are familiar to an Englishman. Of the 50 permanent inhabitants, 25 are from Morocco. Why? One of the few businesses still flourishing there is sheep breeding. There are 4000 sheep, providing work for five shepherds and a living for their families. All of them are Moroccan. It seems the Spanish, like the English, aren’t attracted to certain jobs which have to be carried out by foreigners instead.

As in Britain, Spain sees some racism directed against such immigrants, who come over to take “our” jobs even though “we” don’t want to do them. The Spanish, however, are managing to keep such xenophobic feelings mostly in check for the moment. Spain remains a far more welcoming place, generally, to foreigners than Brexitland has become. There’s no talk, certainly, of Spexit – or perhaps, in España, I should say no talk of Espexit. In Tartanedo, there is far more: there is a warmth between all the inhabitants, displayed in hugs and handshakes, whether the individual’s roots are in Spain or in North Africa. The Moroccan children are even being educated, by volunteers, in the old school house which had long been closed.  

A degree of openness, a level of tolerance, and a willingness to work with her neighbours. They make Spain a refreshing place to live in after Britain. And it was encouraging to come across much of that spirit even in a small place like Tartanedo, which has to find a future for itself.

It’s particularly encouraging because, in Tartanedo, we were deep in the very heart of the nation.

Brexit: what a brothel

It’s amusing how often you get quizzed about Brexit, as a Brit abroad. In fact, I’ve so often been asked “Brexit? What on earth’s that about?”, that I now deliver my stock response with the pat monotony of long repetition.

“No idea,” I say, “but if you ever find out, do please let me know.”

Brexiters always told me that the whole point of leaving the EU was to take back control over our own affairs. In a highly interdependent world, where no country, not even the most powerful, has full control of its future, let alone a middle-ranking power like Britain, that always struck me as a questionable notion. But today, with both main parties having lost control of themselves and the government having lost control of the country, my inclination would be to paraphrase Gandhi: asked for his opinion of Western Civilisation, he replied that he thought it would be a good idea. Well, in that same spirit, I think some measure of control would be suit Britain admirably. But that’s an aspiration, not a reality, and it looks a long way from being reached while the Brexit chaos continues.

Look at the current situation. May has negotiated a deal of some sort. The EU has made it clear no other deal is on offer. Parliament has rejected that deal. It has also voted against leaving with no deal. It has voted not to have a second referendum. It hasn’t, however, come up with any alternative deal.

It seems Britain has shown great skill in saying ‘stop’ but has yet to develop the ability to find a path along which it might say ‘go’.

It strikes me that we’re in the situation of three friends who have gone on holiday together, say to Southern Spain. When they get there, they find it’s not quite as they’d hoped: the accommodation isn’t that comfortable, the sea’s a long way away, restaurants and bars serve food with a distinctly foreign flavour to them.

So one friend suggests heading home. Another suggests they stay a while but cut the holiday short. A third wants to go somewhere else. But no one can agree with either of the others.

Mightn’t the most sensible thing be to decide to make the most of where they are? To try to enjoy what the place they chose might have to offer despite its failings? To learn, in other words, to like what they’re doing, if they can’t work out what they’d like to do?

It seems Britain still hasn’t come around to reaching that rational conclusion.

I’m told that it’s wrong to refer to voters, even Brexit voters, as stupid. Of course, my first reaction is to think “if voters don’t want to be thought of as stupid, they shouldn’t vote stupidly”. But, OK, I can see how it might be counterproductive to say so out loud. So I will not refer to Brexiters as stupid. However stupid their behaviour. Instead, I’d simply ask, “how smart can it be to wish for Brexit if no one can agree on what Brexit they want?”

Foreigners have little difficulty answering that kind of question.

The Spanish daily El País points out that, given the “wicker” she has to work with, it’s absolutely no surprise that Theresa May’s Brexit basket is empty. She has nothing to offer. But more than that, the paper is adamant that the Brexit mess is entirely of Britain’s making. The country, it claims, is incapable of agreeing with itself. It feels the EU has already been far too generous in its concessions. Certainly, El País is clear that the EU should concede nothing more.

El País illustration for a leader article headlined ‘Moribund Brexit’

That, however, is a well-constructed, carefully argued case. A much more succinct view was offered to me in Italy.

“Brexit? Che casino.”

That literally means “Brexit? What a brothel.” Though these days ‘che casino’ has just become a familiar way of saying “what a mess”.

Personally, I think a brothel, with its implications of questionable behaviour, outright deception and the meretricious pursuit of financial benefit through behaviour dubious to the point of corruption, sums up Brexit perfectly.

Even better, though, is the smile or chuckle that tends to accompany such comments. It should be a matter of pride that Britain amuses the world these days. However, generally we want people to be laughing with us, rather than at us. Unfortunately, Brexit has reduced our once-proud nation to a laughing stock. Even if the laughter is sometimes accompanied by tears.

Oh, dear. Brexit. What a brothel indeed.

A detail underlining tragedy. But with a smile

It’s going to take me months, if not years, to finish going through my late parents’ papers. But however long the task may be, it’s alleviated by some of the findings I make. Sometimes, they’re amusing, sometimes more serious, and the best are both.

As I’ve mentioned before, my father, Leonard, served in the Royal Air Force in World War 2. One trace of this service that I recently discovered in his papers was a card prepared to help airmen escape capture if they were shot down over Nazi-occupied territory and, somehow, managed to survive.

Airmen, phrases for the escape of,

It was marked ‘Not to be Produced in Public’. Clearly, this was sensitive material. Someone had decided that it was important for the general public in Britain not to know that the German for “I am in a hurry” could be “Ich habe es eilig”.

Personally, I have trouble imagining a situation in which a British airman would have used that expression. Faced with a platoon of German soldiers, he would have explained “I’d love to stay and chat but…” and pulling out his escape card, added “ich habe es eilig”. I suspect one of his captors might have replied, “oh, don’t worry. You’ve got plenty of time. You’re our guest now.”

Perhaps the top levels of the RAF thought that it would be harmful to civilian morale to know that their airmen might ever find themselves in such a situation in the first place. Presumably, they assumed that Brits were too short of imagination to guess that RAF crews faced any risk of being shot down or captured. Seeing the escape card might have created panic among them.

That strikes me as pretty farfetched. It would be like believing that a majority of British voters could be fooled by shifty politicians into swallowing the patently preposterous proposition that they might be better off outside the European Union. Can you imagine that ever happening?

I also liked the fact that the card provides translations for the expression “Will you please get me a third class ticket to…” which the RAF rendered in French as “Voulez-vous me prendre un billet de troisième classe pour… s’il vous plait”

Get out of Nazi Europe free card

You’ve got to admire the thriftiness of the air force, haven’t you? Even for an airman on the run from Nazi forces, their men were expected to travel economically. I can just picture an airmen who somehow managed to dodge the German troops across half of Europe and then smuggle himself across the Channel to England being hauled in for a grilling by an irate squadron leader in Finance.

“What’s this in your expenses claim? You travelled from Düsseldorf to Brussels in second class? You know the rules. Only third-class travel’s authorised. You’ll have to pay the balance out of your own pocket, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps the US air force was more generous. Maybe they were taught to ask for first-class tickets for officers and second-class tickets for the others.

Still, the card doesn’t only evoke amusement. After all, the mere fact that it was produced underlines the danger airmen faced. Within Bomber Command, for instance, for every 100 who served, 45 were killed, 6 were seriously wounded and 8 were captured. Only 41 out of every 100 escaped any of those fates.

Leonard was among those shot down. But that happened in September 1944, when Allied forces already controlled a great part of Western Europe. So when his plane was hit, on the way back from dropping supplies to the paratroops caught at Arnhem in the ill-fated Operation Market Garden (made all the more infamous by the film A Bridge Too Far), the pilot was able to keep it in the air until well behind the Allied lines. As a result, instead of being captured they were simply evacuated to Brussels.

There Leonard had a wonderful time. He had no need of the silly phrase card. He’d spent his childhood in the city and spoke a beautiful, fluent French. Fortunately, the RAF had had the foresight to provide airmen not just with useless lists of phrases but also with escape currency to spend if they were shot down (presumably so they could buy third-class rail tickets). Leonard enjoyed himself immensely spending his escape money in the city of his childhood, before being shipped back to England and the rest of the war.

Ah, well. Even when I try to get serious about my father’s war, I notice the story ends up light-hearted. I think that was something of a hallmark of that generation. They’d seen things that weren’t that edifying and saw no benefit in reliving the horror. Instead, they focused on the things that made them laugh, and finished conversations about the war on a smile.

Which strikes me as a good note on which to end this blog post too.

Immigrants: the problems

One of the most difficult tasks an immigrant faces is adapting to a new culture.

For instance, since we’ve arrived in Valencia, we’ve had to learn about shop opening times. Shopkeepers like to open in the morning until a late lunch, of impressive length, followed by a second opening in the evening.

That wasn’t a problem, in principle, until we discovered that the reality doesn’t always correspond to the theory.

It’s particularly confusing with restaurants and bars. You look them up on Google. It tells you comfortingly that the place is open right now. You walk thirty minutes to get there only to find a firmly locked door. You look at the sign next to it. “Open”, it says, “from 10:00 till 22:00 without interruption”. You check your watch. It’s 15:00. But the door is indisputably locked.

Sometimes you’ll find a little handwritten sign saying something like “we’ll be back at 19:30” which at least tells you what’s happened – the staff needed a break and, hey, who’s going to let a mere notice of opening hours dictate their lives? I mean, such notices aren’t posted under oath. They’re not a commitment or anything.

I particularly enjoyed the visit to a pet shop I made. I wanted some chews for the poodles who’d been looking at me pathetically all morning. What did they want? I’d wondered. And, since we were out of chews, I decided that this mght be what they were missing.

At the pet shop, I pushed at the door but it wouldn’t yield. I looked inside. It was a bit dim but there were lights on. Alongside the door was a sign proclaiming that the shop was open from 10:00 till 14:30 and from 17:30 till 20:00. My watch was unambiguously clear: it was 11:30. The shop should have been open.

And then my eye was caught by a large sign in the middle of the door, one it was hard to believe I’d missed before. “ABIERTO” it proclaimed in letters that filled an A4 page. “OPEN”. No mistaking it.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but having read the word I tried the door again. I suppose unconsciously I assumed it was enough to have read the statement that the shop was open for it to prove, indeed, open.

Unsurprisingly, the door remained locked.

A terrible picture of two disappointed poodles was beginning to form in my mind. In my desperation, I looked around again and saw – oh, joy! – a doorbell. I rang. Moments later a woman appeared from the back of the shop and, smiling at me through the glass, opened the door, let me in and sold me some chews. She didn’t apologise or even explain what had happened. But I noticed as I was walking away that she was busily locking the shop door again.

The poodles were happy, anyway.

Fallas sculpture on a Valencia street

As it happens, we’re not just immigrants, but refugees. And, at the moment, twice over. Firstly, from the whole sorry mess of Brexit, where Britain has given in to its worst xenophobic instincts to inflict a terrible wound on itself. But secondly, we have taken refugefrom the Fallas in Valencia.

The Fallas are probably one of the greatest fiestas in Spain. Men, women, children, the old and the young, parade through the streets in glorious traditional costumes. Great sculptures appear on many street intersections, only to be burned in a huge series of bonfires accompanied by fireworks on the final night. And, throughout, the city is filled with firecrackers being let off in all sorts of places by all sorts of people.

I don’t just mean the ordinary firecrackers that sound like a cap gun. Oh, no. In Valencia, one kind of cracker sounds like a pistol being fired. And then there’s the other kind, in the form of a tube about as long as a coke can and a half, which explodes with the sound of a heavy artillery piece. And it wouldn’t be so bad if there were only one of these at a time, but Valencians like to hang up garlands of the damned things so that ten or twenty of them fire in rapid succession.

Did I say they were let off by all sorts of places by all sorts of people? I should have added “at all sorts of time”. There is no quiet moment, day or night. Oh, no. This goes on 24 hours a day. The firecrackers turn Valencia from a pleasant, welcoming, friendly city into a simulation of Beirut at the height of the Lebanese civil war.

I have to confess to a certain wimpishness over these matters. While some people travel great distances just to take part in the Fallas, I do appreciate having a certain amount of sleep each night. Valencia in the Fallas is not a place to encourage such ludicrous aspirations.

We suffered the Fallas experience last year and decided that once was enough. So this year we’ve taken refuge in the Madrid area. We’ve rented a flat. That proved an interesting exercise when we first arrived.

Danielle told me to approach the porter at the gate into the complex and explain which flat we were taking, so he would hand over the keys and raise the barrier.

“We’re looking for the Radinslov place,” I told him.

He looked at me completely blankly.

“The Radinslov place?” I tried again, hesitantly.

How was I going to explain this in my broken Spanish? After all, the name suggested something Slavic, and how many Slav families could there be in an apartment complex outside a small village some kilometres from Madrid?

“Do you mean the Radins?” he asked.

It turns out I did. When I explained the misunderstanding to Danielle, she showed no sympathy with my predicament.

“We’ve rented the Radin family’s loft,” she explained, and to rub the point in, “Radins’ loft not Radinslov.”

The whole business particularly tickled her. On two nights in succession, she’s woken up laughing at the memory of my discomfiture. I don’t see what’s so funny about it myself but, hey, I suppose it’s better to spread laughter than tears.

Even unintentionally.

Daisies shine in the NHS

It’s not often that there are good news stories about the NHS. They’re particularly rare when the patient at the centre of the story dies. So I thought this one was worth sharing.

My mother, as you may know if you follow this blog, died on 11 July last year. That was the day she turned 94, and I remain impressed by her having lasted long enough to make the day of her death the same as the anniversary of her birth.

She spent the last eighteen days of her life on ward 7D, an Acute General Medicine ward, of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. A great many people seem to delight in criticising the level of care provided by the NHS, either because they feel that the service hasn’t the resources it needs, or because they feel the staff and the system don’t focus enough on quality.

All I can say, based on those last eighteen days of my mother’s, is that the service is indeed horribly under-resourced, but in that hospital and on that ward I met a team of people who weren’t going to let any amount of stress prevent providing the best care they system would allow them to deliver. And that care was outstandingly good.

Doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals worked far harder than they should ever have to, in order to be as good as the patients deserved. They respected my mother’s wishes on treatment, and on what treatments she didn’t want; they protected her dignity; they kept her comfortable and at peace, and – as far as we could tell after she lost consciousness – free of pain.

Their professionalism was admirable, but they were far more than professional. They were respectful. They were concerned. And above all they were kind.

Before we left the hospital for the last time my wife, Danielle, pointed out to me that the hospital run a system for recognising outstanding nursing care, called the ‘Daisy Awards’. I would have liked to recognise others as well as the nurses, and there was no one in the nursing team I didn’t feel deserved the highest possible praise. But we couldn’t nominate everyone, so we nominated two.

Both, as it happened, were foreigners. That’s not to say there weren’t excellent English nurses in the department – there certainly were. However, it is a truth that can’t be repeated often enough, that the NHS depends on its foreign nurses to keep running. The anti-immigrant sentiments that fuelled Brexit, for instance, would wreck the very healthcare system on which everyone in Britain depends.

Liezel Ermitanio is from the Philippines, as are so many nurses in European hospitals.

Sara dos Santos Oliveira is, in our memory, from Spain but the name is Portuguese. Perhaps I should simply say she’s from Iberia. And she’s certainly one of those EU citizens being driven out is from Portugal, an EU citizen of the kind Brexiters want to stop coming to work in their country.

They both worked long hours, often staying on after the shifts ended. And, despite the pressure of their workload, they always found the time to talk to us if we had a question to ask. Just as they always found the time to help my mother whenever she needed anything.

So I put in my recommendations, one for each of them. And heard nothing.

Until, that is, three weeks ago. When I received an email from Professor Dickon Weir-Hughes who runs the Daisy Awards programme. It turned out that both Liezel and Sara had been honoured. I was delighted that they’d won the award. It seems that they were too.

Liezel and Sara with their awards

The ceremony was on 7 March, on the ward, with all their colleagues around, and in the presence of the Chief Nursing Officer, Sam Foster. It seems there were tears, but tears of pleasure must have been a welcome change from the stress of their work. All in all, it’s a good news story.

And, as Danielle pointed out, my mother would have been pleased that her nurses had won awards.

Sam Foster, Chief Nursing Officer, with our two nurses

3-D Corbyn: fiddling with anti-Semitism while Labour burns

The wonderful thing about faith is that it can never be wrong. If the world doesn’t end on the day the true believers announced, it’s only because they misinterpreted the Lord’s words or because they were unworthy of having their beliefs so spectacularly confirmed.

So it is with all cults. They can never be in error, and above all their guru is infallible. Consequently, if they begin to fail, there can only be one of two explanations: nefarious behaviour by traitors within, or vicious plots by conspirators from outside.

It’s happening inside the British Labour Party. It’s losing members, losing money and above all losing electoral support. Up against a hopelessly divided and discredited government, Labour is at least six points behind in the polls where normally the Opposition would be several points ahead.

That can’t be down to the leader. He is faultless, a man of unimpeachable integrity, remarkable courage and unsurpassed wisdom. So if the movement is failing under his enlightened hand, it can only be because it is being undermined by unconscionable elements doing the devil’s work.

Saint Jezza - incapable of only one thing: error

The internal traitors are numerous. They are red Tories or Blairites – frankly, the terms are interchangeable – and they have nothing better to do with their time than undermine the Labour Party and its revered leader. They are working for the return of a Tory government even if, as is the case of many of them, they have spent half a lifetime campaigning for Labour governments.

There is no contradiction here: those weren’t true Labour governments, merely Tory administrations in disguise. All these renegades were in fact sabotaging true Labour, infiltrating the party to poison the wells of untainted faith now running true thanks to the great leader.

But Labour isn’t only beset by internal enemies. There are powerful outside foes too. Chief amongst them is the government of Israel.

Were you so naïve as to think that Israel might be principally preoccupied with such nations as the United States or Russia? Or perhaps those, on its doorstep, which have threatened its very existence in the past, such as Syria or Egypt?

You are so wrong. What keeps Netanyahu awake at night is the prospect of a Labour government in Britain led by the sainted Jeremy Corbyn. His diplomatic service and intelligence agencies have bent their scheming minds to the most urgent of their tasks: preventing Corbyn ever entering No 10 as Prime Minister.

Some voices in senior government circles in Israel might be tempted to say “Stop Corbyn? Why bother? He’s sinking himself quite fast enough on his own”. They don’t last long. They too are the internal enemies, in this case of Israel, blind to the true threat posed by a minor nation on the edge of Europe, from which it is currently struggling to isolate itself still further.

Fortunately, Israel has friends it can count on in Britain. I, of course, am one of them, as is every British Jew. We do Israel’s bidding, even those of us who speak out against that state and denounce its behaviour as shameful. That’s just a smokescreen to disguise our true and devious aims.

Let’s be clear, by the way. These Corbynists who denounce what is, in fact, an international Jewish conspiracy against their man, are not anti-Semites. It’s true that the trope of international Jewish conspiracies has, in the past, been a hallmark of anti-Semitism, but it isn’t in this case. Because the international Jewish conspiracy denounced previously was a fraud, made up by anti-Semites; the one denounced by Corbynists today is real, and they have TV programmes from Al Jazeera to prove it.

What this all means is that everything Corbyn’s doing is precisely right, and exactly what is required to take Labour back to power. Only these vicious conspiracies stand in his way. Fortunately, he continues, imperturbable, to pursue what I have come to think of as his 3-D strategy.

By that I don’t mean that Corbyn is particularly 3-dimensional, except in the most trivially physical sense. There are times he strikes me as not even two-dimensional but one-dimensional, a man following a straight line leading nowhere – or, at least, nowhere useful. In fact, given his tendency to vanish whenever the going gets tough, it might even be sensible to think of him as a single point, vanishing over time.

No, when I say 3-D I’m referring to his preferred approach to any crisis, based on three Ds:

• Denial: he starts by claiming that there isn’t a problem
• Dithering: he takes as long as he’s can to avoid reaching a decision
• Delay: if finally forced to take a decision, he makes every effort to delay its implementation

It has, indeed, been the case of his approach to anti-Semitism. He started by pretending there was no problem (and many of his followers still do); he then spent months taking no decision about what to do about it; when finally he set up an organisation to take some action, he let time slip by ensuring that the gentlest measures possible were adopted as slowly as could be managed.

It’s the approach he prefers. His attitude was identical when it came to Brexit: he sat on the fence as long as he could until forced off it by the membership. Now he’s following along behind those he’s supposed to be leading, in the hope that the whole thing might blow over without his every being obliged to do anything meaningful.

However, please don’t imagine that this might have anything to do with Labour’s dire standing in the polls. Oh, no. The leader’s got it right.

It’s the traitors who are stabbing him in the back. They and they alone are responsible for the failure of the project. Especially thanks to the backing they have from a major international conspiracy.

Based, of course, in Jerusalem.

The Brexile starts: so far, so good.

“So far, so good” are the words of the man plunging past the 50th floor of the Empire State Building towards the ground. Which makes the expression a little limited in value. Still, with all the caveats that implies, I can say that our Brexile in Valencia has got off to a good start.

Not that getting here was all that easy. Blanche du Bois always relied on the kindness of strangers. We always rely on the kindness of friends. In this particular case, our thanks would go to our friends Bruno and Jose who provided us with breakfast before we left, after which Jose took us to Gatwick airport, supervised the process of getting our dogs through security and our luggage onto the plane, and then headed back so that he and Bruno could repair to our old house in Luton (which they are buying) to keep our cat Misty company.

Because Misty, sadly, has stayed behind for now. He’s a cat who’s always been used to going outdoors or coming back in when he pleases. But, until we can find a suitable house (where suitability is a compromise between desirability and our budget), we’re living in a flat. Misty’s 12 now and I think it would kill him to be locked in all day.

So he waits in his old home until we can provide him with a new one. With Bruno and Jose to look after him, he’ll do just fine. And we’ve tested to make sure that he gets on swimmingly with their dog Nina, too.

The dogs, on the other hand, came with us. Which wasn’t pleasant for them. They had to go into carry cases which they hated, and at the airport security officials took them away from us to put them through various checks before returning them to us at the departure gate. The dogs took a very dim view of that. Indeed, Toffee, the more devilish and nimble, went so far as to open one of the zipped-up ends of the case and get out, making a beeline for the baggage conveyor belts. Who knows where in the world she might have ended up had the border staff not caught her, stuffed her back and tied up the openings with string.

The dogs had to go into the cases in the plane, too, which they didn’t like either. I travelled with Toffee, Danielle with Luci. Toffee gave me such a pitiful look that I took her out and put her on my knees. But then I saw that Danielle had done the same thing with Luci, which made me feel less guilty. And the cabin crew, being Spanish and sharing the Latin sense that rules are merely guidelines, markers for aspirations rather than descriptions of behaviour, made no comment until we began to land at Madrid.

Toffee fed up in the plane

We were happy to take the dogs, because they can cope with apartment life for a few months, even if it means that we’re popping out with them four or five times a day. A small price to pay for the benefit of leaving Brexitland before the xenophobia there turns even more toxic. I hope Brexit may yet be avoided but, if it isn’t, I’m glad we got out when we did.

Not that we’re really refugees, here in our rather pleasant self-imposed exile. We didn’t have to pay money to people traffickers, unless you count the airlines. We didn’t have to climb onto overloaded inflatable boats and attempt a dangerous crossing with only an inadequate life jacket between us and drowning.

Why, we didn’t even face the same difficulties as my grandmother. Her father travelled from Vilnius to London in 1902, so he had a job and accommodation for them before she, her mother and brother followed him the next year. And we weren’t fleeing pogroms in the deeply anti-Semitic Russian Empire.

Instead, we were able to find a flat here, equip it properly, and even try it on for size last autumn, with the dogs, so that our departure into ‘exile’ felt more like a homecoming. Comfortable refugees rather than desperate ones.

All the more so as I’ve always preferred warm weather to cold. I was glad to cast aside last night the jumper I wore from London. And this afternoon, it was the long-sleeved shirt and cords. And that was after having breakfast out of doors this morning.

Breakfast out of doors

The dogs, too, seem to be doing well. Pretty much fully recovered from the trauma of the trip. But then, they’re back on the couch they came to know and love when we were last here.

Sofa so good, as I’m sure they’d say.

Toffee and Luci: sofa so good