The immigrant in Spain: the joy of officialdom

In our continuing exploration of the exciting experience of being immigrants, we are discovering – or rather, rediscovering – the joys of dealing with public authorities. Because, you see, their procedures differ significantly from one country to another.

The ticket for your turn
Vital whatever you're after

For instance, when we moved to France, we knew we were going to be dealing with one of the most bureaucratised nations in Europe. The “village postmistress” is the iconic representative to the French of the worst kind of public service: she’s rude, dismissive and profoundly unhelpful. You know, the type who tells you that you needed Form 31B completed and signed by a doctor and then, when you return with Form 31B duly signed and completed, that it had to be the version in green not the version in buff.

So imagine my surprise when we moved to Strasbourg. I knew we had to register with the local authorities but didn’t know how soon. In the end, I went four months after we arrived. The interview went well, the young woman dealing with my case being polite, good-humoured and apparently efficient.

I know one should never offer anyone in authority any information for which they haven’t asked. For instance, like an experienced border crosser, I never show my passport unless told to produce it. But somehow on this occasion my conscience was bothering me, so I asked a question I never should have.

“Oh, by the way, just how long does one have to register? Is it three months or six?”

She looked up from the paperwork with an expression as cool as it was level.

“You have a week,” and paused dramatically. “But did I ask you when you got here?”

Later we moved just across the border into Germany. That’s the country of ‘Ordnung muß sein’, perhaps best translated as ‘order is to be respected’. So we were a bit worried about how the authorities would react when we decided we wanted a wood-burning stove.

“You need a chimney sweep to give your chimney a safety certificate and you can go ahead.” I had visions of complex inspections, failed on technicalities, and mountains of paperwork. But she went blithely on. “Here’s a list of local sweeps; personally, I was always find this one least demanding when it comes to the certificates.”

Now we’re in Spain. The land, we were told of ‘mañana’, where everyone prefers the easy life, where “laid-back” is a national pastime.

The first shock was to discover the punctuality of the people we’ve met. Not just for business meetings, either. We’ve found that friends are always on time simply to go out for a walk – and punctual not because they’re on time, but because they turn up ten minutes early to be sure they’re not late.

And then there are the authorities.

To be fair, despite a small number of exceptions, they’re uniformly friendly and kind. Even one who wasn’t to start with, ended up wreathed in smiles at the end of our interview. It was either that she’d had a lousy client just before us and it took a while for her to recover her equanimity, or that she was charmed by my delightful selection of Dad jokes – a little laboured in my halting Spanish but still up to the same remarkable standard as I achieve in English (OK, please resist the comment, it’s much too obvious).

The problem isn’t the people, it’s the process. I’ve already remarked that you can never do anything in a single visit in Spain. The first visit is so that you can be told that, although you followed the steps outlined on their website pretty well exactly, you failed to take one crucial step, or failed to bring one crucial document, or possibly failed to go to the right building in the first place, so that you have to plan for another visit. Or possibly more than one.

Most recently, it was the payment of a duty. We’d followed the online instructions carefully, including printing the document and taking it to the bank to make the necessary payment. But it turned out that, had we ticked another box (for, so the form claimed, a ‘supplementary’ payment, and we thought we only need the basic service), we’d have been charged a couple of euros more, and that was the sum we should have paid. Fortunately, they told us that this time we wouldn’t need a new appointment, but should just bring in the reprinted form with the bank’s certification that we’d paid the correct sum.

That was good news. Because this was a police office and if you showed up without an appointment, you had to take a ticket and wait your turn. But when your turn came around, all it enabled you to do was to make an appointment – and for two months down the line, the pressure on that service being so intense. To go through that again would have been soul-destroying.

As it happens, even with an appointment, we weren’t seen at the allotted time. Instead, just after the specified time, someone came out and gave us – a ticket. So we had to wait for our turn to come up on the display just like anyone who didn’t have an appointment.

You had an appointment? So what?
Wait your turn like anyone else.

So what was the point of having an appointment, you may well ask? Well, it meant that this time around, we actually had a proper interview. The one when they told us we’d paid the wrong level of duty.

But, hey, the man who told us did it politely and with a smile. Which makes all the difference, doesn’t it? A cold, unsmiling bureaucrat, of the kind we have in England, is so much harder to deal with.

So I can now confidently say that, of the countries I’ve had to deal with, Spain certainly has the most complex and time-consuming of administrative systems. But ironically, it’s quite pleasant.

Because the people are.

BoJo: a sight probably best left unseen

A statement generally attributed to the outstanding German Chancellor of the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck, declares that “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made”.

The same is true of democratic decisions. Or perhaps I should say semi-democratic, or even partially democratic, decisions, since I’m thinking of the ‘election’ of the UK’s new Prime Minister, Britain’s buffoon Boris Johnson, or BoJo as we like to think of him, without affection.

Would you buy a used car from this man?
(with apologies to the campaign against Richard Nixon)

He was elected leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore Prime Minister, by 92,153 members of his party. Rather fewer than 100,000 people, mostly male, mostly elderly, mostly white inhabitants of South-East England, chose the man to fill the most powerful post in a nation of 67 million. Over half of them women. Mostly far younger than the Tory Party average. Many of them non-white. The vast majority living outside South-East England.

There was a time when I shared the view that many of my fellow Labour Party members still hold, that a party’s leader should be elected by its members. I’ve begun seriously to doubt that idea.

Jeremy Corbyn was elected by 303,209 Labourites. Some of them were councillors, representing around 5500 people. Most of them were simply individuals, representing no one but themselves. Unknown, self-selected, not subject to any kind of public scrutiny, they chose the leader of the Labour Party.

Just as 90,000 odd Conservatives have just chosen our Prime Minister.

Each Member of Parliament represents around 70,000 voters, since it is the duty of MPs to represent all their constituents, whether they voted for or against them, or didn’t vote at all. We know our MPs. They’ve been through a public vetting process.

It’s beginning to feel to me as though we’d be serving democracy better if we let them take the decision on who should lead their party or the country.

Especially as we live in what we like to think of as a parliamentary democracy.

Still, I have to admit that my view may be coloured by the choices party members have made in recent years. There was a time when the British system could point to a couple of virtues alongside its many faults. One was that it tended to produce stable governments. The other was that it produced able leaders.

Well, stability is a fading memory. In this decade, only Theresa May held a parliamentary majority for her own party, until she threw it away in an unnecessary and disastrously-run election. Apart from 2015-2017, government has been a cobbled-together business since 2010, made of coalitions or inter-party agreements.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Plenty of countries are run all the time by coalitions. It’s just that Britain seems not to cope with them well, and the governments we’ve had over the last ten years have seemed to be always on the brink of tearing themselves apart.

So much for stability. What about the ability of the leaders? In the past, this came from people serving years in parliament, then for a while as hangers-on of government, then junior ministers, then in Cabinet. The process turned them from neophytes into experts, able to get the most from the system because they knew how it worked.

From time to time, there’d be people who shortcut this process. William Pitt the Younger, in the eighteenth century, Prime Minister at 24. Or Tony Blair, who became Prime Minister without previous ministerial experience, but then Labour had been out of office for 18 years and had precious few experienced people of the right kind of age to call on.

Pitt and Blair were exceptionally talented, think what you like of their policies. They rose to the challenge. But look who we have now.

In the red corner, we have Jeremy Corbyn. 32 years as a backbench MP, never having to deliver anything. A man who could limit himself purely to words, since no one with a sense of responsibility would let him anywhere near the authority to take action. He talked long and eloquently about a range of worthy causes which fascinated Islington dinner tables or Luton pub bars, but touched no one in the mass of the electorate. The results were predictable: unable to take a position on Brexit, he has put off voters from both camps; incapable of taking an intelligent position on antisemitism until just a few days ago, and then only under huge pressure, he has lost the trust of all but the shrinking band of his true believers.

In the blue corner, we have BoJo, who’s worse. Why, he has actually been through the experience mill. He was Mayor of London, with a tenure probably best summed up by his purchase, against expert advice, of second-hand water cannon from the Germans, no doubt with the intention of quelling resistance to his high-handed rule; they were never used and were finally sold for scrap at a massive loss, covered by taxpayers.

His most recent government experience, as Foreign Secretary, was even more deplorable. His ignorance of his briefs meant that officials were constantly having to correct his errors (“cleaning after him was quite a full-time activity,”, according to a Foreign Office colleague); he was rude to his hosts in a number of countries; he imperilled the life of a British subject imprisoned by the Iranians, and certainly extended her captivity, by his mishandling of negotiations with the Tehran regime.

In other words, he’s been tested. But far from making him any better, it just found him wanting. That, however, hasn’t stopped him being elected Prime Minister.

By 92,153 people.

Not an edifying sight. In fact, like the making of sausages, probably best left unseen.

There are immigrants and immigrants

It’s curious being an immigrant again.

Queuing to get into Valencia

I mean, it’s not the first time. That’s not counting my childhood in Rome, where I wasn’t an immigrant but an expat. If you don’t think that’s an important distinction, think again. Expats are people who never really belong. They’re usually in the country for a relatively short time, maybe on a limited contract, often with an embassy or a research institution or some kind of international organisation.

They tend to congregate with others of their kind, talking their own language, and have the sense that they’ll be gone within a while anyway, once their tour of duty is up. They tend to talk about the local people with a definite article, as in “the Italians do such-and-such”, where such-and-such is usually something that the person talking about it doesn’t like much.

The first time I was a real immigrant was when I moved to France in the late nineties. I was on a French contract with a company incorporated in French law. In fact, when it all fell through, it was great to have French law to fall back on with its generous approach to unemployment benefit. A lot more generous than, say, Britain’s. You can actually live on French unemployment pay.

Still. France was a bit special. As the husband of a Frenchwoman, I had a right to French nationality. Once I’d started work again, I set about securing it as quickly as I could. When it came through, I wasn’t an immigrant any more, but in my home country. My second home country, indeed, but a home country nonetheless.

But then we moved just across the border – a short car drive from the superb eastern French city of Strasbourg – into Germany. There we were truly immigrants once more, and it was fun. Discovering how things were done. Struggling, in my case (Danielle is a fluent German speaker), with a different language. Learning to enjoy different foods and pastimes. A great experience.

And now we’ve started all over again. Immigrants to Spain. Without Spanish citizenship or any right to claim it. Truly foreigners making a new home for ourselves in a different country.

It’s proving just as enjoyable as Germany. It helps, I suspect, that though our Spanish is execrable, we let ourselves go and speak it anyway. Far from reacting with horror at the way we’re massacring their language, they seem pleased, relieved even at not having to struggle with English to communicate with us.

So they just talk Spanish at us and, if we only understand two words in three, it doesn’t matter because they’re more than happy to explain what they meant. Making friends has proved surprisingly easy and, even among those who haven’t become friends, we’ve found people gratifyingly friendly.

There have naturally been a few problems. Civil servants tend to be a pain. Some of them take a perverse delight in telling you that you haven’t got the right document and need to come back in six weeks’ time when you’ve got it. However, in some cases we’ve found that even those can become quite pleasant if we persevere, trying to talk Spanish, until smiles eventually replace the frowns and rudeness.

We’ve also discovered that there’s no point thinking you can do anything in a single meeting. It will always take two or even three. The first may be where they tell you’ve gone to the wrong place. But even if that isn’t the case, it’s where they tell you that you don’t have the right documents. Generally, though, when you get there for the final meeting, having booked the appointment correctly, with the right papers, it all goes smoothly and even cordially

Nor is it only in the public sector that it all takes so long. Any big institution seems hopelessly sclerotic with bureaucracy. The banks, for instance, as well as ministries or local councils. Most organisations here have websites these days, and online procedures for doing administrative jobs. But again and again, you get to the final stage, when you’ve filled in page after page of information and uploaded half a dozen scanned documents, and you press the ‘Submit’ button, only to get an error message that tells you helpfully that ‘there is an error with your application’.

The only solution seems to be to go to the place in person, because they certainly don’t answer emails or return calls in response to voicemail. That’s what I generally do these days, without even attempting the online route. It may take a little longer but, in the end, you get smiles and your case dealt with – even the people in the bank are charming if you go and see them yourself – and that was the aim of the exercise, wasn’t it?

So we’re enjoying our status as immigrants.

Still, I know we’re immigrants who get an easy ride. We’re not Muslim or dark in skin colour. We’re not the ones who get told to go back home. I can’t begin to compare my achievements with those of Ilhan Omar, who has risen from refugee roots to become a US Congresswoman. That only makes it all the more shocking that she has been the target of racist attacks from her president.

And think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps one of the most impressive performers in the US House of Representatives, agree with her or not, also called on to go back home – though she isn’t an immigrant at all, but US born and bred.

The 'squad' of awkward women of colour in Congress, attacked by Trump
Ilhan Omar is speaking. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is next to her in black

No. There are immigrants and immigrants. Some are treated gently. Others are the butts of aggression from people who draw encouragement from such as Trump. They face attack even if they are merely descended from immigrants (and how many of us aren’t?) and only distinguished by the colour of their skin or their faith.

We’ve seen that there can be joy in being an immigrant. Oh, how I wish we lived in a world where that was true for all of us.

What makes a summer

One swallow, they say, does not a summer make.

It’s pretty hot here, in Valencia as in most of Spain, and yet it doesn't seem to be just the heat that tells me it’s summer. There’s something else, and for some time I couldn’t make up my mind what. 

So I’ve been wondering just what does make a summer.

Not the swallows, I’d say. They turned up here in their masses – I never got a chance to spot the one that didn’t make a summer. Besides, my wife tells me they were swifts not swallows anyway. The swallows showed up a while later and, confusingly, looked exactly the same to me. In any case, one swallow or one swift certainly didn't make our summer, and even the huge numbers that eventually arrived affected our comfort much more than the season.

For a few days before they arrived, we were being irritated by flies coming into the house when we had the windows open. But then the swifts showed up in their hundreds, flying around behind our flat at sunrise and sunset, like vacuum cleaners of the air, scooping up any insect with the temerity to come anywhere near them. The fly problem vanished.

I have a lot of affection for the swallows. Indeed, I’m delighted that the house we plan to move to shortly has a pair in residence and they even have fledglings at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that it’s they who make my summer.

Swallow fledglings in our new place

So, I kept asking myself, what does?

Certainly not the date. How many British residents, including me when I still was one, have enjoyed a glorious, sunny, warm May only to shiver through a dank and cold June?

It wasn’t really the temperature either. It gets hot in Spain. We’ve even had temperatures in the low thirties in Valencia (no, no, that isn’t freezing cold, you poor benighted users of that outdated temperature system), despite the nearness of the sea and the breeze blowing off it. But it’s far worse in Madrid, where I go fairly frequently to visit my sons and their partners (and soon my second grandchild), where the high thirties or even low forties are not unknown.

It took me a while to work out just what it was that made a summer for me. And the enlightenment came in the form of a memory from my distant childhood.

For my first thirteen years, I lived in my native city, Rome. Throughout my childhood, I’d always felt profoundly English, to the extent of experiencing nostalgia for a country I’d visited frequently but never lived in. I remember catching my breath, and feeling a flood of emotion, over a geography book in my (English) school in Rome, when I came across a picture of a typical London street with a sodium streetlamp. My nation. In some sense, my home. Spiritually.

Then my parents sent my brother and me to boarding school in England. One evening some months after that wrenching move, I was at my grandparents’ house, watching TV with them. You know, black and white, and we felt at the cutting edge of technology because we had three channels instead of the two we’d got used to.

The programme was about an archaeological expedition in Greece. I remember nothing about its findings. All that sticks in my mind is a sound. Like the picture of the sodium lamp, it brought a lump to my throat and made me catch my breath.

Cicadas. Grinding away. I could almost feel the heat and smell the pine needles.

That’s summer. Hear that sound and you know you’re out of the grip of the winter and the cold. You know you’re safe in shirtsleeves, and short ones at that. Sunset doesn’t mean a chill that forces you indoors, it means the warmth becomes comfortable and that, even at night, you can sit outside with a drink and enjoy the smells and the easy living.

Just a few minutes’ walk from where we live at the moment (before we move in with the swallows) is the long park that winds through Valencia in what used to be the bed of the Turia river. Right now, it's full of that beguiling sound day and night. Reminding me again and again that summer is here. Just like when I was a kid.

Summer floods the Turia park
Just imagine the cicadas providing the accompanying sound track

It’s as nostalgic as it’s wonderful to hear the cicadas telling me I’m back in a land of real summer again…

When good people do too little...

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Though often attributed to Edmund Burke, we don’t really know whose the saying is. But it’s an important idea. And it’s particularly apt today.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s outbursts against four Democratic Congresswomen were deeply racist: when you tell Americans of colour, living in the US, to go back where they came from, you’re saying that the country is no home for them.

The Congresswomen Trump told to go back where they came from
They are all American. Only one was even born abroad.

Of course, as Hillary Clinton pointed out, in telling the Congresswomen the government in their home country was lousy, Trump was exactly right. Their home country is, after all, the US, and Trump heads its catastrophically bad government.

However, what’s worrying isn’t so much that Trump made his comments, but that a lot of people sympathise with him. They may not want to voice such opinions publicly, since racism for the moment still carries a stigma. But in private, or to themselves, they share his view. As he countered, when charged with racism, “many people agree with me”. As long as many people agree, it can’t be racism. The reality is that the fact that many agree doesn’t alter the racist nature of his views, it only makes them more dangerous, making it more likely that a racist might be re-elected to the White House.

What makes the quotation attributed to Burke so apposite is that there are many who dislike racism but still plan to vote for Trump. They may not be bad people, but they haven’t grasped that no good person can give racism a pass. Good people not acting will allow the evil of racism to triumph.

In Britain, too, the situation is dire. The government is in the hands of a party in which Islamophobia is rampant. But 70,000 or 80,000 members of that party are about to inflict on the whole country a Prime Minister who has expressed Islamophobic views himself in the past, and certainly has no intention of combating them today.

In particular, he refuses to denounce the toxic bilge coming out of the White House as the racist slander it is. Boris Johnson claims to speak for British independence, in his support for Brexit, but he’s so anxious to dance to Trump’s tune that he can’t bring himself to condemn his most poisonous pronouncements.

Opposite him stands a Leader of the Opposition who has just been rightly told by some of his party members in the House of Lords that he had failed the leadership test. And why? Because instead of addressing the problem of antisemitism in his own Party when whistle blowers warn him of it, he’d prefer to deny the truth of the message and then denounce the messengers.

You have failed the test of leadership

This isn’t his first offence. Ever since the Brexit referendum, he has refused to endorse a pro-EU stance, for fear of alienating those xenophobic voters who backed the Leave camp. Here was a chance to denounce racist thinking and back an internationalist position, and he refused to endorse it.

Another failure of leadership.

Ever since I first saw it, I’ve loved Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. At one point the protagonist, an artilleryman who’d commanded a machine gun battery under attack from cavalry at a recent battle, describes how they’d laughed when they first saw unprotected horsemen attacking their powerful weapons:

… but when the sergeant ran up as white as a sheet, and told us theyd sent us the wrong cartridges, and that we couldnt fire a shot for the next ten minutes, we laughed at the other side of our mouths. I never felt so sick in my life…

[Those aren’t typos, by the way: Shaw didn’t like apostrophes…]

Unloaded guns won’t defeat an enemy. Labour has at the top a man who has failed the leadership test. He’s a gun that can’t fire. And with this we are to confront a racist and puppet of a racist, in the most powerful office in the land.

Corbyn may well not be an antisemite. But he’s soft on antisemites. Why? Sadly, because many of them are keen supporters of his anti-Israeli stance. And to retain their support, he’s prepared to backpedal in his fight against racism. Just as he was prepared to accommodate xenophobic leave voters to keep them on side (an approach which, as it happens, has failed).

So in both main parties in Britain, as in the United States, some of the most evil ideas to have poisoned human life down the ages, culminating in the terrible racist atrocities of the twentieth century, are allowed to grow from strength to strength. Merely because good people won’t stand up against them. “Corbyn’s a man of principle,” they say, “he has some great ideas on the economy or foreign affairs. Let’s pretend there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party.”

And the corrosive effect spreads further. Evil moves towards its triumph. Because the good do too little to stop it.

The great question of unquestioning animals

Had an interesting conversation with my son David (no, that’s a complete coincidence: we didn’t meet until he was nine and I was 28, by which time we’d both been called David for nine and 28 years respectively) (yes, yes, he’s my stepson really, but the distinction’s not really worth making: I got to do the important part of his rearing, like teaching him to do the washing up, and he learned really crucial things from me, like doing the washing up is a lot less painful than the consequences of not doing it).

Is that all clear now? Can I get on with the story?

Anyway, it’s been a while since either of us was either nine or 28. In fact, it’s about 38 years. And for a long time now, he’s been teaching me at least as much as I’ve taught him. Fortunately, he’s tended to focus on subjects of more interest and less tedium than washing up.

The latest concerned animals learning language. He’d recently heard a podcast on the subject, from The Infinite Monkey Cage.

David. One of the philosophers
I'm privileged to have as sons

We’ve taught certain animals quite a lot of language. I remember reading some years ago about a Chimpanzee who’d mastered 800 words. Not using voice, of course, but sign language. It had learned words such as ‘ice’ and ‘box’ and had revealed a creative streak when it combined them into ‘icebox’ for refrigerator; ‘water’ and ‘bird’ it combined into a single word for a duck. Pretty smart stuff, don’t you agree? OK, sonnets will have to wait for a while, but still not bad, I reckon.

“Ah,” David told me, “but what the podcast was telling me was that the animals never learned to ask questions.”

Now, that had me fascinated. Is that really what separates humanity from other animals. Is it our capacity to think in terms of “what?” or “when?” or even more important “why?” To say nothing of “what the hell?”

We’re always questioning things, aren’t we? As Edward Fitzgerald put it, in his original masterpiece that he insisted was nothing but a “translation” of Omar Khayyam’s Rubayiat:

Into this Universe, and why not knowing, 
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

We’re constantly concerned about where we came from, and where we’re going to, and why. Other animals sensibly focus on whether they’re comfortable now, in which case they enjoy it, or not, in which case they go somewhere else. And where they’re going to find food. Or possibly sex. But without asking “why?”

Still. At least David and I had some fun trying to imagine the kind of questions other animals might ask us if they ever asked any at all.

Such as:

“What makes you think learning to speak is such a big deal anyway?”

Or

“Why the hell do you want to train me to ask questions? Do you think you’re likely to have any satisfactory answers?”

Though the one we preferred was:

“Is there any way I can ask you without offence to just fuck off, leave me alone, and let me get back to the peace I was enjoying before you came along and disturbed my tranquillity with all this nonsense about speech and questions?”

Sorry about the bad language. I can’t help feeling it probably best expresses the way other animals would think about our obsession with teaching them things.

If they ever bothered to think about it at all, that is.

Leatrice: a life well-lived, if perhaps not fully

The benefit of dying on your birthday is that the people you leave behind can celebrate your life, on the day you were born, rather than lament your departure, on the day you died. Even though they’re the same day.

My mother Leatrice pulled off that trick. As I pointed out at the time, although she may have been unconscious, she managed to survive until 11 July last year, her 94th birthday. That makes today, which would have been her 95th, a good time to remember her life rather than mark her death.

Leatrice in Italy in about 1964

Last year, I wrote several pieces about her – her childhood in Britain and her adulthood during the war years, her departure from England and her travels eventually leading to meeting my father in Paris, their move to Rome, their time together in Africa and New York, including her degree studies there, and lack, perhaps, of entire fulfilment she had from her life.

I’m not going to pretend that my mother was always easy to be with. She was a difficult mother, as both her sons can testify, and often a prickly friend, as her friends could no doubt confirm.

Should I have tried to do something about her faults while she was alive? Perhaps, but I think it would have precipitated some unpleasant rows and done little good. Is it worth dwelling on them today when it can make no difference at all? No, it isn’t, and I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to focus on the varied life she lived, because as most who came into contact with her will gladly point out, it made her excellent company.

Both sides of her family were Jewish. Her mother’s side was reasonably well off, as her father had been a skilled artisan (he made shoe uppers for people with damaged feet). Her father, on the other hand, had been born into terrible, grinding poverty. The evening meal was a loaf of bread for the boys, half a loaf for the girls, and they had soup once a week, on Friday night, at the Sabbath. The tragedy was the day that his father returned home, tipped out the contents of the cauldron because it was where the family washed as well, and only realised afterwards that he’d just thrown away the soup.

My mother’s father set out to make sure that he would never suffer such poverty again nor inflict it on his family. He became a typographer, and a good one. Later in life, he was able to look at a picture and say how many ink colours would be needed to print from it, and therefore estimate any job. 

Inevitably, he gravitated towards Sales.

Long before that, however, he had been drawn to the left. He spent two years in Dartmoor Prison as a conscientious objector, in excellent company including Bertrand Russel’s. Meanwhile, the woman who was to become his wife had moved further left still, into the new Communist Party of Great Britain. He never joined but he attended some meetings, and it was seeing her chair one that attracted him to her.

At that time, she was recovering from the terrible blow of losing her fiancé, who had survived the War but had died in the flu epidemic that followed. She agreed to marry my grandfather but it was a stormy engagement, which she broke off at least once.

My mother was born in the poor Jewish East End of London, on 11 July 1924. From there, the family moved to Stamford Hill, where a slightly more prosperous Jewish community lived. From there, they went to Hampstead Garden Suburb, not the wealthiest Jewish area but not far from one of them, at Golders Green. Here my grandfather bought his first, and only, house, clearing the mortgage in just two years. That was where my mother grew up.

She went to a school whose praises she sang throughout her life, Henrietta Barnet, even though she was unhappy with the passive anti-Semitism: Jewish students were excused Christian activities, but nothing else was laid on for them, so they spent the time kicking their heels in a separate room and getting royally bored.

It was worse when she took a job with Barnet Council where, she said, the anti-Semitism was active and vicious. What made the job still worse was that she had hoped to go to Art College, but the family decided that wasn’t possible, and she went to work instead.

She flirted briefly with Communism but eventually joined the Labour Party, for which she went to work eventually, in a post shared between the Party and one of its think tanks, the Fabian Society. That’s where she was for the Second World War, and she stayed around long enough to witness Clement Attlee’s triumphant election at the head of Labour’s first majority government.

But the girl from middle class Jewish London had had enough of that world. She wanted out. In 1948, she went to Paris on what would eventually be nearly four decades of residence abroad. 

In Paris she eventually found a job in UNESCO. It was there that she met a colleague, a young financial expert who’d served the war in the Royal Air Force; in 1951, they married. Oddly, the married in Genoa as they were travelling to Rome, my father having moved from one UN agency, UNESCO, to another, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) headquartered in the Italian capital.

My brother and I were both born and had our early schooling there. But then our parents moved to what was then called the Zaïre, today the Democratic Republic of Congo, when my father, frustrated after fifteen years without promotion, suffered for our sakes, moved to another agency, the UN Development Programme. My brother and I went to boarding school in England, and stayed there when my parents moved again to New York.

That was where my mother at last realised her ambition and had a university education. She graduated with the equivalent of a first-class degree – Summa Cum Laude – and was admitted, in what she always felt was one of her most significant achievements, to the top academic fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa.

Leatrice, at the front, with Leonard to her left
In retirement in France in 1982, the year before he died

When my father retired, they came back to Europe, buying a house in the French countryside and renting a flat in Bromley, outer London, so they could split their time between the two countries. But my father only managed six years of retirement before dying in 1983. That’s when my mother decided that she’d travelled enough and would return to England.

However, she chose a city with which she had previously had no contact, much against the advice of many of her friends. “Who do you know in Oxford? You’ve no roots in the place. You’ll be lonely.”

She wasn’t. She took a course in Oxford history and qualified as a city guide. It gave her a circle of friends, many of whom attended her funeral, and a job she loved and continued with, well, rather longer than her health really allowed.

That was just one of her circles of friends. She had a French conversation class. She would go to the theatre or the Ashmolean museum with other groups. She remained an active member of the Labour Party right to the end, the activity only limited by her health. Indeed, the Labour Party was a home to her as it turned out to be for me which is why neither she, who had suffered anti-Semitism, nor I could understand how the modern Labour Party could fail to rid itself of that toxin.

She loved Oxford and was happy there. Or as happy as she could be. I believe, as I’ve said before, that she was cheated of something for which she was eminently suited: a career of her own, perhaps in the academic world. I think the loss of that opportunity meant she could never be entirely fulfilled.

Her health too let her down, though perhaps not quite as badly as she often thought – and said. Her constitution was clearly much better than she allowed as she was still able to live a reasonably independent life up to just a few weeks before her death.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of her life, though, was the loss of my father. She was a widow longer than she was a wife. And he had been a remarkable support to her.

Leatrice on her last garden stroll,
less than a month before she died
She enjoyed having Toffee on her lap

Still. Despite increasing ill health, her missed opportunity, and a long widowhood, she had a remarkably varied and rich life. Not entirely fulfilled but certainly well-filled with wonderful experiences.

That’s something to celebrate. If you knew her, please join me in raising a glass to her memory. Or you could raise that glass even if you didn’t know her: what’s wrong in celebrating a life well-lived, even you never met the person who lived it?

Painting from memory

Memory. It’s a curious organ. And one that we don’t use anything like enough.

For outsiders visiting Spain, it’s often hard to remember that the nation isn’t that far from a fascist past. Francisco Franco, dictator for nearly four decades, only died in November 1975. A great many Spaniards living today still remember his times. 

That always strikes me when I hear a Spaniard talk about “the war”. That doesn’t mean the Second World War, as it would for a Brit or a Frenchman or a German. Generally, it means the Spanish Civil War, which brought Franco to power.

Equipo Crónica in the Reina Sofía museum

So close are the events of that terrible time, that reminders keep emerging. One that we found particularly moving was in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid: a series of six paintings by an artistic collective, called Equipo Crónica. The group was set up in the early sixties by three artists from Valencia, Rafael Solbes, Manuel Valdés and Juan Antonio Toledo. Toledo, however, was called up for military service soon after and, when he returned, he found the collaboration between the other two had grown so close he could no longer fit in.

Within the collaboration, they used simple, plain colours, not merely to underline messages that are often intense to the point of brutality, but so as to avoid the touches and undertones of paint that would distinguish one painter from the other. They are truly collective works.

Franco remained a brutal authoritarian right up to his death. That release, for Spain and beyond, as much as for himself, came on 20 November 1975. But less than two months earlier, on 27 September, five young men were murdered – ‘executed’ is just a euphemism – by firing squad, on the orders of a court martial, countersigned by the dictator.

A salute to the last victims of Franco’s killing machine

Equipo Crónica decided to record the event in a series of ten paintings, six of which we saw in the museum. They chose not to make the paintings strictly documentary, depicting the actual event of the execution. Instead they made them “symbolically documentary”: each shows a wall (since the victims were stood up against a wall to be shot), a leaf from a desk calendar showing the date of the murders, a face with eyes blacked out to depict what happened to the young men or perhaps the blindness of the world, and a black strip for mourning across the top left.

The walls are, apparently, each in the style of an artist admired by the collective, but I can’t identify them.

In the foreground is a painter’s palette, broken into five pieces, one for each of the victims and perhaps a symbol of the impotence of art in the face of such criminality.

Palette broken into five pieces
Face with eyes blacked out
A wall for the victim to stand against
Mourning stripe at top left
The date at the top

It’s a strong and striking memorial not just to the victims of a specific crime, but of the dangers the hard right and nationalist movements represent for all of us (Franco adopted the label ‘nationalist’ for his side in the Civil War, against the ‘Republicans’ he eventually defeated with help from both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). It was moving to see it in one of Spain’s most prestigious museum. Long may it serve as a reminder to Spaniards of what it means to accommodate the far right.

A reminder many of us outside Spain badly need, too. In Hungary. In Poland. In Italy, for pity's sake. And, far from least, in Brexit Britain.

Our memories of the dangers of fascism are over 70 years old, from the Second World War, rather than little over 40 as in Spain. And we’re becoming forgetful. Toying with notions that should have been consigned to the history books.

At our own serious peril.

The starting point is where you are

After a month of June in which I had to spend some part of every week away from home, it’s a relief to have a month of relative calm with minimal travel.

In fact, the first time I’m going to have to take a flight again is only at the beginning of August, when I plan to fly back to England from Spain. So I decided to call up the British Airways app this morning and see about booking the trip.

What amused me is that the default screen came up with the option of flying from Glasgow to Austin (Texas) this very day, flying back tomorrow. Across the Atlantic and half of the United States one day, and back the next? Gracious living that certainly isn’t.

Can we make sure you’re at least taking me
from where I am, to where I want to go?

But I found the selection of route most amusing because I’m nowhere near Glasgow. Indeed, I’m in Spain, not in Scotland at all. As for Austin, it would leave me a lot further from where I need to go than I am now.

Indeed, since I want to get to London, I’d be a lot closer if I stayed in Glasgow than if I went to Austin. If, that is, I were in Glasgow at all. Which I’m not.

In fact, I loved the idea that I would even struggle to get to Glasgow in the first place, in order to catch the flight to Austin. I mean, if I wanted to get to Austin, (which I don’t), why wouldn’t I start from where I am now, rather than travelling somewhere else first?

All of which put me in mind of one of my favourite stories, one I’ve told more than once before right here. It’s the story of the tourist in an Irish village who asks a local if he’s going the right way for Dublin.

“Dublin?” replies the old man, “if I were going to Dublin, I wouldn’t start from here.”

It’s mainly as a metaphor that I like that joke. Every time someone starts a sentence with the words “If only…” I think of it: “If only we’d invested in the product last year…”; “if only we’d taken out insurance sooner…”; “if only we’d reserved a table…”

We are where we are. If we still want to get where we were planning on going, we’re going to have to start from here. An invaluable piece of wisdom which isn’t always immediately obvious to us.

But my experience with BA today suggested that the story’s has its value at the literal level too.

If I’m going to book a flight, I’d rather it took me where I actually wanted to go.

And it would help if it suggested I start from where I actually am.

Just a thought, BA. Maybe a small enhancement to the app?

Have a happy Independence Day. But maybe remember what it means too

Twelve score and three years ago, the fathers of our cousins across the Atlantic, brought forth on their continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Well, all men in the strictly limited sense of the word ‘man’. Women weren’t given the vote or anything radical like that. And even amongst men, it wasn’t really every man. The main author of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was a slaveowner himself and able to live with the notion that anyone black amongst men created in supposed equality, could be held in slavery, his rights being pretty much equal to those of livestock.

Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the USA
who denied African-American any rights a white man was bound to respect

The fact that slavery existed at the same time as the founding fathers issued the Declaration of Independence, suggested to many that its lofty sentiments were only ever intended to apply to whites. This led, as I’ve pointed out before, to what today is a shocking claim at the conclusion of the Dred Scott case in 1857. Chief Justice of the United States, Roger Taney, declared in his judgement that from the earliest days of the nation, ‘negroes’ were seen as inferior and, indeed, “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

There have been many cases, for instance of police shootings of black men, which rather suggest that some still feel that African Americans have no rights a white man is bound to respect.

Nor were all white men precisely equal. Most of the states of the time applied fancy franchise rules, with the vote only available to those who held certain levels of wealth. There was a widespread feeling around the western world at the time that those without property had nothing to lose from political decisions, and might therefore act recklessly if they were given a say in them.

But none of that really matters. Or rather, it matters a great deal, but only to show the way humanity makes progress: through compromise, through half measures, through what may sometimes seem nothing less than hypocrisy. Despite all the contradictions and equivocations, the Constitution that was written based on Jefferson’s powerful words, has stood the test of time remarkably well, surviving a devastating civil war that led to the abolition of slavery; the often brutal measures to repress the women’s suffrage movement; and the authoritarian attempts to hijack the Constitution during the McCarthy era.

Senator Joseph McCarthy:
tried to distort the US Constitution into authoritarianism

Through its existence, it has been a beacon to millions around the world. When that Constitution was launched, ‘democracy’ was a derogatory term in Europe. It implied chaotic rule by the masses, by their nature incapable of rule and opening the door to anarchy. When Lincoln claimed, in the Gettysburg address, that the aim of his war was to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”, he wasn’t exaggerating. Precious few parts of the Earth allowed the people much of a say in government; Lincoln’s efforts ensured that rather more of the US people had such a say; the enfranchisement of women half a century later extended that for the first time to a majority of the people. The other nations we now think of as democracies followed in the wake of the United States.

It is, therefore, hard to overstate the importance of the event the US celebrates on 4 July, not just for Americans but for the world. Certainly, it took a lot longer to come even close to recognising that all men, and women, should be seen as equal, and we’re still far from realising that equality in practice. But at least the aspiration has been there since 1776 and we’ve slowly moved towards it.

Sadly, the vision Jefferson and his contemporaries championed, flawed and contradictory as it may have been, but still profoundly invigorating and freeing in the long term, is now more under threat than ever. Donald Trump is once more trying to distort the Constitution in an authoritarian direction, as Senator McCarthy did in the fifties – but this time with the power of the White House behind him.

So perhaps today’s celebrations need to be a little muted. Among the festivities, Americans need to realise that a man elected under the provisions of the Constitution is undermining it. And, to adapt Lincoln’s words once more, they should highly resolve that those who preceded them shall not have struggled in vain, and continue the fight to ensure that a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all and not just some people have an equal right to freedom, can indeed endure.

Donald Trump:
trying McCarthy's trick again, but with the power of the White House

Where did winter go?

It seems apt enough to see the back of winter in July, up here in the Northern hemisphere. Especially in Spain, where the temperatures are now regularly in the thirties (no, no, in real money, none of that Fahrenheit stuff). So it was perhaps a good place to watch the end of Game of Thrones, and with it the end of that glorious, sonorous threat that became synonymous with the series, “winter is coming”.

And I should warn anyone who hasn’t seen season 8 that there are spoilers ahead.

Ironically, it was that early catchphrase, “winter is coming” that kept coming back to my mind as I watched the last few episodes. Not because winter was coming, but because I kept wondering “where’s winter gone?” There was snow in the North, but hardly the deep drifts I was expecting. Little more than a powdering on the ground. Elsewhere, any skiing would have been the water kind rather than downhill.

The Queen on her dragon: perhaps not as nice as we thought

This happens in long series. They lose the plot, metaphorically and literally. The first season got some dread going through its vision of the far North with its strange, fierce inhabitants, the Wildings. And there were worse: there were reports, disbelieved by many, that White Walkers were abroad, though they’d not been seen for centuries. It seemed that the coming winter would bring with it not just terrible, freezing weather but fearsome invaders, storming across the Wall built to keep them out and invading the southern lands beyond.

That was all the worse because the implication was that seasons were far longer in that world than in our own. Rather like Ursula le Guinn’s Planet of Exile, where the planet took sixty Earth years to go around its sun, the implication seemed to be that in Game of Thrones land, winter would last years or even perhaps decades. Truly something to fear.

The problem is that the unknown is far more fearful than the familiar. White Walkers were far more chilling while they just shadowy figures we knew little about. But Game of Thrones is TV and eventually its makers felt we had to see what these hideous figures poised to cross the wall looked like. And what were they? Well, walking dead. One of the oldest, tiredest tropes in fantasy writing.

What’s worse, they turned out to be pathetically easy to defeat. All it needed was to take out the chief and his tens of thousands of followers simply broke apart and vanished. All that dread built up from season 1 simply evaporated in anti-climax.

Indeed, the danger from the far north turned not even to be the principal peril facing the main characters towards the end. That’s why the battle against the forces of winter wasn’t the climax of the series, but one battle on the way to a far more devastating one against an enemy in the deep south.

And here’s where the series broke a key rule in this kind of fantasy writing. That’s the rule that you have to be consistent in the way you present characters and their powers. Sure, you’re inventing creatures, but once invented they have to stay the way you invented them.

We’d been told repeatedly that dragons were an irresistible force that would burn up all foes. And yet, after defeating the army of the dead, their Queen flying way high above the boats taking part of her forces south, somehow fails to spot the fleet waiting to ambush them. That’s though the weather is clear and pleasant (“winter has been delayed”). The enemy has massive deck-mounted crossbows known as ‘scorpions’ to shoot down dragons with super-sized arrows, and successfully downs one of them.

What do the Queen and the other dragon do? Well, they look dejected. Especially when most of her boats are also destroyed and one of her closest friends is taken hostage (and, yes, this being Game of Thrones, the chances of survival of someone taken hostage by an enemy are negligible to non-existent). I understand their depression. I find their failure to take any action harder to grasp. Hardly consistent with my view of what a dragon represents in the Game of Thrones universe.

It made me wonder whether dragons were perhaps no good over seawater.

Well, no. Because it wouldn’t be long before the same dragon successfully destroyed the same fleet at anchor, even though by then there were far more of the scorpions ready to defend against dragon attack, both on ship and on land. Indeed, the dragon systematically burns every one of the huge devices to ashes, before going on to burn the entire city.

It could do nothing about the fleet when it had fewer of the weapons but proved invincible when there were far more?

That same lack of consistency governed the character of Arya Stark, who had turned over several seasons from a proud, strong-willed, gutsy girl into a young woman of ruthless determination, the ability to look like anyone she chose, and all the skills of a supremely effective assassin. By season 8, she’s just a brave and resilient warrior, but all those extraordinary abilities have apparently vanished. Arya’s still an interesting character but hardly the redoubtable one she’d become earlier.

To give the series credit, it does subvert the simple good and evil dichotomy which it seemed to be building towards. Indeed, the dragon Queen, leader of the forces of good, ends up doing far more evil than the evil Queen, in the battle to overthrow her. In the end, she too has to die, and at the hands of her lover. That sets up an ending which has the realism of being grounded on compromise. No one gets quite what they wanted, and the sense is not of the launch, Tolkien-like, of a new golden age, but the start of a time to adjust to terrible loss and to set out to rebuild what was grievously damaged.

Still. It feels a little anodyne, a little twee. For once, prisoners are not murdered but are released unharmed, if not to their rightful place. And it all happens under blue skies in pleasant weather. Winter’s gone.

So I ask myself, where did it go?

Oh well. It was a long and entertaining ride while it lasted. Good on surprise, to the point of shock. Good on retaining interest. But a little weak on plot.

Four out of five for fun. On the other hand, three out of five would be generous when it comes to structure. And two out of five for development. 

But hey, that’s a small price to pay for fun.