A touch of Arab genius to perfect a multicultural experience

It’s not especially fashionable any more, but I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy, so I still feel attached to the idea of multiculturalism.

Carlos Bonell binding his spell
With an Alhambra guitar and RC strings. And an Arab wall behind him

The other day, Danielle and I travelled into Valencia, the Spanish city on whose outskirts we now live, for a guitar concert in one of University’s buildings. The city offers these, and many other cultural activities, free to anyone who cares to show up. Plenty do: the room was packed. Coming from austerity England, where fundamental necessities – such as a police service, refuse collection or adequate healthcare – are increasingly rare, it’s refreshing to be somewhere that still values culture enough to offer it free to citizens.

That’s especially striking since the national income per head in Spain is a third lower than in Britain.

Nor, I should say before anyone decides I’m making a partisan point, was the funding entirely public: two companies, one making guitars and the other the strings, had subsidised the concert. Long may Spain maintain that kind of collaboration between sectors of the economy; let’s hope that Britain can, some day, find it again.

What made the concert particularly satisfying for an unreformed multiculturalist like me, was that it was given by an outstanding guitarist, Carlos Bonell, of Spanish parentage but born and trained in England, where he still lives. Among other more highbrow pieces by contemporary or nearly contemporary composers, he also played his own arrangements of two Beatles songs. He explained that a guitarist brought up in England has that music ingrained in him, though he also played some classic Spanish music to restore the balance.

What’s more, the concert took place in a room where one of the walls was built by the Arabs, at the time of the Moorish occupation. The room is in a basement now, but the wall was clearly at ground level during Moors’ rule: that’s what happens with old cities, they get built on top of themselves, as new houses are built over the wreckage of old ones.

One of the reasons that the organisers selected that room for the concert was that the acoustics are particularly good. And they are. You could hear every note, follow every melody, with perfect clarity, and without any echoing or reverberation. It was an ideal setting for such a concert.

English, Spanish, Arab, all combining to give a glorious cultural experience. It’s hard to imagine what could be better.

Though it does leave one question that still puzzles me: how did those Arabs, a millennium ago, work out that building that wall, in that place, with those materials, lend itself to such a superb musical experience a thousand years later?

Arab wall built of just the right stuff, in just the right place,
for superb acoustics

Boris Coup: Day 59 (yawn)

He came in with a roar, and is going out with a whimper.

Benito: an autocrat who kept Parliament and judges under control
But, in the end, it didn’t work out for him either

Boris Johnson, in his autocratic ambition, wanted to dominate British politics like Mussolini dominated the politics of Italy. He gaily suspended parliament, and only discovered afterwards that he didn’t have the judges on his side (Benito was much more careful in ensuring he could count on the judiciary), so his bold and splendid Trumpian act was ruled illegal by the courts.

No sooner had the suspension been overturned than it became clear how necessary it had been to him. He has yet to win a substantive vote in the Commons. Every time he pushes for something, the MPs push right back…

This has enabled him to present himself as the people’s representative blocked at every time by those pesky MPs trying to flout the people’s will. A latter-day David taking on the Goliath of the Establishment.

This is amusing. What can be more British establishment than a man who was educated at Eton and Oxford and has lived the life of an entitled grandee ever since?

There are, however, people sad enough to fall for this tale. But then there are people out there sad enough to believe that Britain will be better off outside the EU than in. Basically, there are a lot of sad people.

They’re also misled. By blocking Boris, MPs are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. They’re holding government to account. Those who feel they should let Boris do just what he wants are endangering the very basis of our democracy. I hope we never see governments that can do what they want whether our representatives like it or not.

Now Boris has come up with a new Brexit arrangement rather worse than the one Theresa May agreed. He tried to force it through in just a few days (coup habits die hard) and was told by Parliament that they weren’t having that. So now he’s proposing a deal to MPs themselves: if they’ll let him have a General Election on 12 December, he’ll give them more time to scrutinise his bill.

This is a curious and interesting approach to compromise.

MPs are taking the extra time anyway, whether or not he concedes it to them. So it’s hard to see how Boris is offering them anything they couldn’t take for themselves. In return, he wants them to do him a favour. Poor Boris. He needs to take a few more classes on the art of the deal, which usually involves both sides offering the other something they couldn’t get any other way.

He should certainly take those classes from someone other than Donald Trump, who, like Boris, seems much better at claiming he’s made deals than actually concluding them. As he’s shown with North Korea.

Why does Boris want a general election? Well, he’s tired of being defeated in the Commons. He thinks an election would give him a majority. With a ten-point lead in the polls, that makes sense. Unfortunately, plenty of people even in his own party aren’t so sure. Boris has always liked to play the buffoon, but unfortunately a lot of voters now seem him as a buffoon. That lead might vanish in the campaign.

To get an election, Boris needs a two-thirds majority in Parliament. For that, he needs Labour MPs to agree. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been demanding an election, long, loud and frequently, pretty much since the last one. Why? He thinks voters love him and he can win. A ten-point poll deficit? He reckons he can turn that around.

His supporters agree, because last time he came from even further behind and came a far better second than anyone had expected. They seem to forget that coming second is of no value. There are no silver medals in parliamentary elections. Come second, and you’ve lost.

A lot of Labour MPs are beginning to wonder whether a general election right now’s such a good idea. After all, Corbyn did better than expected when he was barely known to the electorate. He was also up against a dismal campaigner, in Theresa May. This time, voters have had plenty of chance to see how he dodges the difficult questions, how he dithers in reaching a decision – why he’s even dithering now, over an election – and he’s up against a far better campaigner in Boris.

The net result of all this? We have no idea of how things will turn out. Will Boris get his deal through Parliament? Will he get his election? Will he win or will he lose?

Looks like we have further exciting times ahead. Rather like the last three and a half years since the referendum. Yawn.

Brexit started as a spectacular catastrophe. It’s morphing into a boring disaster. Alas, poor Britons.

Metro lessons in understanding. And misunderstanding

There are times when I wonder why I ever take the car into central Valencia. It’s not so much the traffic, though that can be a pain (it’s sad how few cars around here seem to be fitted with working indicators), but more a matter of finding a parking space once there. That can take practically as long as the drive in.

Our metro station. A sight worth seeing in its own right

Besides, our local metro station is in a forest. Not a pleasure to pass up, is it? That’s why when I picked up two Croatian friends who were coming to stay, I went by metro instead of by car, even though it meant hauling a case through the woods afterwards. It was a chore, but a small price to pay for a woodland welcome…

“So,” said one of the friends, “what’s the name of the final destination of this train?”

The station is called ‘Lliria’. That initial double-l always intimidates me. It’s as worrying in Spanish as it is in Welsh. For the Spaniards, it seems to be a cross between the ‘j’ in ‘you’re joking’ and the ‘y’ in ‘you’re kidding’, but quite where in between I have trouble deciding.

Still, I’d heard the name many times. I had an answer to the question.

“Liria,” I told him.

Was that right, though? A double ‘l’ pronounced as though it were single?

On the train, as in most countries, a small minority was absorbed in conversation, another reading, another just staring blankly into space. The vast majority were glued to their phones.

One woman had been separated from her friends by the arbitrary emptying of seats. She’d shifted from absorption in conversation to blank staring. She started to pull out a phone, but before she could get focused, I seized my opportunity.

“Excuse me,” I asked, “how do you pronounce the name of this train’s destination?”

She looked momentarily shocked. A stranger? Talking to her? In a metro? But she gathered her thoughts quickly.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“No, no. I don’t want to go there. I just want to know how to pronounce it.”

“You want to know how to pronounce Liria?”

That was quite helpful. A question that contained the answer to mine. Clearly I’d got it right.

Then, however, her friend, two seats away intervened.

“Jiria?”

Of course, she may have said ‘Yiria’. But I heard ‘Jiria’. And, either way, I was back at square one. Was the town called ‘Liria’ or ‘Jiria/Yiria’?

The first woman, now smiling as she understood that I was just a foreigner trying to come to terms with the language, came to my rescue.

“Liria in Castilian. Jiria in Valencian.”

That may have been ‘Yiria’, but I’d got the message. The town’s name was different in Castilian (the Spanish national language) or Valencian (the regional language).

“Don’t worry,” she went on, “we’re not racists in Valencia. You can talk Castilian to us and we’ll answer in the same language. We’re not like the Catalans.”

Valencians aren’t keen on being confused with Catalans. Their language, Valencian, many like to point out, is absolutely not Catalan. For the record, one Valencian friend we asked quickly checked that no one was listening, before telling us that, in all honesty, Valencian really is Catalan.

The reference to Catalans made the conversation more general, as people dived into the current hot topic in Spain, the campaign for independence in Catalonia and the demonstrations, some with outbreaks of violence, that followed stiff gaol sentences handed out to some of the leaders. In Valencia and, I suspect, in most of Spain outside Catalonia, there’s not a lot of sympathy for the independence movement, and the people in the metro were no exception. One woman spoke up for the notion that the national government could, perhaps, use velvet gloves a little more, rather than mailed fists, but she didn’t get much support.

I used to be quite keen on the Catalan case, since they seemed to be something of a different nation, with their own language and traditions, but since the Brexit torment started, I’ve rather cooled on the idea of people walking away from the wider organisation they belong to, just because they can’t be bothered to help reform it.

My Croatian friends had just come from Barcelona. We shared their news that while there was indeed some violence in the city, it was localised and most places were quiet. Everyone nodded at that and made some comments about journalists always focusing on the bad news, but they quickly got back to the more interesting topic of how annoying the Catalans were.

Some Catalans making a point
Not all Spaniards are wholly in favour, though

That didn’t last long, though. The women noticed the young lads across the carriage were eating some kind of multi-coloured hoops, out of a plastic bag. Cereal perhaps, but as one of the women said, it looked like the kind of thing she might feed to her cat. I’d just be thinking that it could have been dog food, but that was close enough.

The lads were courteous and offered the bag around. There were no takers, though. Perhaps we all felt that we didn’t really belong to the right species for the stuff.

The woman I’d first spoken to got off the train before us. She waved as she left and wished us a good evening.

“The language lesson was free,” she said. “A Catalan would have charged for it.”

With those words she left me amused at how easy it was to break down the barriers between fellow travellers on a train, at how friendly relations could be between people from three different countries with three different languages, and at how that contrasted with the animosity on display towards people from just up the road who spoke a language practically identical to their own.

Metro trips are much more fun than car journeys. And so much more instructive.

Scargill and Corbyn: sad memories and disturbing premonitions

An old friend came to visit us recently, and it was a delight to have her with us. Among many other conversations, we remembered many of our early experiences together, including the time when her husband, whom I shall call Alan, and I would travel in and out of work with a third friend, and talk at length in the long commute through appalling traffic.

The Miners’ strike
Great courage defeated by brutal opposition and lousy leadership

It was 1984, and in England the great miners’ strike was raging. Alan was something of a champagne socialist: from a wealthy background, he’d attended one of the great (and expensive) schools and had never lacked the money to indulge his sense of social conscience. He stood hard and fast on the left and one of his fundamental stands was unqualified and entire support for the miners.

“I support the miners too,” I would assure him, “just not their union leader.”

The union was the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the leader Arthur Scargill.

Many years previously, I’d spent some time in one of the mining villages, Conisbrough, of one of the great English coalfields, South Yorkshire. I’d come to know a few miners and when they struck in 1972 and 1974, I was overwhelmed by their courage, their determination and their superb organisation. They won both strikes and I was delighted with their victory.

In 1984, their courage and determination were as powerful as ever. Not so, however, the organisation.

Firstly, the strike started in March. You don’t have to know a lot about the economics of the energy sector to guess that the time of greatest demand for any kind of fuel would be the winter. In March, the peak period of demand was just passing and the country was about to enter the time of lowest need for coal. In other words, there could be no time better selected for the opponents of the miners to be able to weather (literally) any strike. In fact, to wear the strikers down until, exhausted, they could carry on no longer.

In addition, the 1972 and 1974 strikes were so effective because the miners were united across the country. The NUM had a strict rule book and it explicitly specified that a national strike could only be called with a 55% majority of all those voting in a ballot of the entire union. Scargill knew he wasn’t going to get that majority, so he resorted to a cunning plan. He would have the regions strike, one by one, which only required a simple majority in each of them.

Naturally, like most such devious plans, it failed. Some regions refused to strike and, in particular in the Midlands, a large number of miners kept working throughout.

With support for the strike split even within the NUM, other unions didn’t come out in support themselves. That meant that the strike became a struggle between some of the miners – a majority but still too few – and the government of Maggie Thatcher. With the miners so weakened, the timing so poor, and up against an enemy so strong-willed, there could only be one outcome to the strike.

The miners struggled on but, almost a year to the day after the start of their great battle, they were beaten and went back to work, unsuccessful, defeated. Over the next few years, the government took apart coal mining in Britain, shutting down nearly all the collieries. It was one of the worst defeats the working class movement has suffered in the country.

Alan, of course, didn’t see things that way. He saw the miners as right and anyone who dared to criticise the timing or leadership of the strike, as a backsliding reactionary enemy of the noble working class. So I was entirely wrong and Arthur Scargill deserved our unqualified support.

The commute in that car began to feel even longer than it actually was.

Curiously, after the strike was finally lost, Scargill did two things which, in my mind, mark him for the kind of man he truly was. He had himself named President of the NUM for life, so no one else could ever take over from him at the head of the shadow of a union he still nominally led. And he moved into a luxurious home the NUM owned in London, which he occupied until the remnants of the union finally to took him to court to drive him out.

In other words, he had all the sense of entitlement of any man of the right (think Boris Johnson), while claiming to belong to the radical left.

Why do I mention all this today? Because within Labour I’m up against a huge number of people who could be Alan’s heirs. They demand total, unbending, unquestioning allegiance to the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. This is because they believe him incapable of ever being mistaken, just as Scargill was sure he could never be wrong. 

In my view, however, Corbyn’s as poor a leader as Scargill was. Up against a deeply unpopular government, he has led the party into a poll position that is constantly behind, possibly by as much as ten points.

In other words, it feels to me as though this man of the radical left is intent on doing to Labour exactly what Scargill did to the NUM. And now, just as then, those of us who don’t share the enthusiasm of his supporters, are regarded as traitors.

I can’t end this without mentioning one particular irony. Corbynism is keen on taking Britain into an era of socialism. A key element on that journey is nationalising major industries. The belief seems to be that a nationalised industry is owned by the public. That was a belief that was pardonable before we’d really tried nationalisation, back in the forties. Now, though, we know that a nationalised industry belongs to the state, not the people. What therefore matters is who controls the state.

Against what body do today’s Scargillites or Corbynists think the NUM struck? It was the NCB, the National Coal Board, the nationalised coal extraction industry. It proved itself just as vicious and forceful an enemy of organised workers as any private company. In its final victory over the NUM, it proved itself even more effective.

Nationalised industries are a stepping stone to socialism? If you can still believe that after what happened with the NCB, I’m afraid you’re as prone to self-delusion as Alan was, as Scargill’s admirers were and, sadly, as Corbyn’s are today.

Of pyrotechnic maniacs, modern-day troglodytes, the purpose of castles and Spanish bureaucracy (redux)

Although we live in Valencia these days, our house isn’t in the city itself. We live away from the centre, within the administrative area of the town of Paterna. This is a place with quite a few remarkable features.

The Cordà: when Paterna goes crazy

Probably the most unusual is the Cordà, the local annual fiesta. Fireworks loom large in it. Now, those who have followed my comments on our Spanish life won’t need to be told that fireworks are central to many celebrations in Valencia. In particular, when I found myself having to live through the city’s biggest fiesta, the Fallas, ironically pronounced to rhyme fairly closely with ‘Fires’, what struck me most was that an otherwise attractive city was turned for several days into a war zone. Firecrackers of normal dimensions sounded like small arms fire in Beirut, whereas every now and then the detonation of crackers the size of rocket-propelled grenades suggested that Israel had sent its heavy artillery to join in.

Well, Paterna goes one step further even than Valencia. Their tradition is to dress up in heavy, more-or-less fireproof clothing, including a helmet with a metal gauze mask at the front, and go around throwing fireworks at each other. This got so dangerous that eventually a mayor set up a large cage in the middle of town and only allowed people inside its wire mesh, surrounded with water hydrants ready to extinguish anything too awful, to engage in this terrifyingly threatening pastime.

The cage in Paterna to which a sensible mayor decided to banish
all the insane firework throwers

Monument to madness?
Paterna's statue of a Cordà reveller
He has a cracker in his right hand and
his metal gauze-fronted helmet under his left arm

As well as the lunatic fiesta, Paterna also has the distinction of having hundreds of inhabitable caves. These days, most have been abandoned, but there are a few that have been converted into often quite desirable housing. Their chimneys and ventilation shafts still form a strange environment of eerie structures in one of the central squares.

Entrance to the desirable home of a modern cave dweller
Note the castle tower in the background

Weird landscape of cave chimneys and ventilation shafts

The caves were an answer to problems of homelessness that, fortunately, are now long behind the local population. They might be worth considering in England where homelessness, far from being long gone as it should be, is growing daily. With a government that seems to care little about the poor as long as they’re out of sight, holes in the ground could be just the solution.

Another cave entrance and the Castle Tower
with its flags proudly fluttering

Dominating the square with the ventilation shafts is the city tower, initially built by the Arabs at the time of Moorish rule in most of Spain, later used by the Christian regimes that followed the reconquest. I’m always amused by these military structures. As a child I was taught that they existed to protect the town below. It was much more recently that I learned they were there to keep an eye on those towns and make sure the residents weren’t getting uppity. If anyone was being protected, it was the powerful who employed the garrisons.

All those fine Norman castles in England? Put in by Normans to make sure turbulent Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t trouble their overlords. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why they’re all ruins these days, it isn’t because of the effect of the weather or because they were badly built. It’s because many became centres of royalist resistance to parliamentary rule during the English civil war, and Oliver Cromwell made sure they were ruined afterwards to stop that ever happening again.

Just like the lake I talked about last time, the most interesting aspect of some of these places is below the surface, and pretty different from the superficial beauty.

Why am I writing about Paterna now? Because I had to go there for the latest round in our ongoing battle with Spanish bureaucracy. The local Social Security office is handling some of my pensions matters, and they wrote to me recently. The address they use started out just fine but, halfway through the street name, they switched to part of the address we left this summer in Valencia itself. The postcode, which came next, they got right, but the town was wrong.

“You need to sort this,” the postman told us, “it was difficult to find where we had to deliver the letter.”

Sensible advice, I thought. So I went to see the people in the office, on the basis that the only reliable way to solve a problem with the Spanish administration is, as I’ve said before, face-to-face. Phone? Forget it. Online? Not a chance.

The woman I saw first pronounced the dread words ‘cita previa’, suggesting I needed a ‘prior appointment’. But then she looked at the address on the letter, and the address I actually live at. To her credit, the struggle between her better and more bureaucratic demons was short.

“No,” she said, “this was our error. Just fill in this form and I’ll get you in to see someone immediately.”

It all went smoothly. So quickly, in fact, that I nearly missed the appointment. I was third in line so thought there was plenty of time for what these days we quaintly refer to as a ‘comfort break’. However, I was already being called when I came out.

This was because to get into the toilet in the Social Security building, you need to ask the security guard to unlock it for you. And to do that, he has to take a note of your residence card number. I’ve heard of providing identification to get into a country, or onto a plane, but into a toilet? Spain is the first place where I’ve had to do that.

And the real beauty of this particular incident? When the guard came to unlock the door, he found it was already open. A fact he recognised with a winsome smile.

Ah, yes. It’s one of the great lessons of life. Things are seldom as you think they are but, greeted with a smile, it often doesn’t matter.

Distrust the beauty spot: it may have something to hide

This weekend, we went walking up in the mountains at a place called Loriguilla, near Valencia. It overlooked a glorious lake reflecting both the encircling hills and the clear blue skies which we still get around here, with amazingly warm temperatures, even in October.

The lake and hills at Loriguilla

But while you can enjoy the beauty, it’s no bad idea to distrust the appearance…

The place has a few ruined houses, along with some new holiday cottages, clustered around the wreck of a church. Paths lead up to the high hills where one can walk along water courses rushing across the hillside and disappearing into tunnels, taking drinking water to the city. The other way, one can walk down to the lakeside and a dock for rowing boats or canoes or, indeed, for swimming from.

Mountain lakes? Even in a hot October I distrust them. “Come on,” said Danielle, and two friends who were getting rid to leap in. But I didn’t share their enthusiasm.

Besides, they didn’t actually leap in. They felt their way tentatively from rock to rock at the lake’s edge, as the water gradually came further and further up their bodies. To, I should say, an accompaniment of screams and exclamations, all of them on the subject of cold.

“Yes,” thought I, “sounds delightful. Enticing even. I might just stay here.”

The three of them eventually got in and all assured me that it was “wonderful once you’re in.”

“It’s wonderful once you’re in.”
I was happy to believe them. And observe. From a distance

What kind of statement is that? It means it’s horrible getting in, but not quite as awful once you’ve done it. They may be right, but what I loathe is the awful transition between pleasant warmth and dryness and blood-chilling wetness before you can get used to it.

“Come on, you’ll enjoy it.”

But I chose not to trust that kind of reassurance. I’ve been exposed too often to “try it, you’ll like it,” claims. Often, they’re about various kinds of particularly revolting-looking food. Long, long years of experience have taught me that if food looks unappetising, it generally is. Equally, if water looks bitterly cold, that’s generally exactly how it is.

I was enjoying being able to wear shorts and a tee shirt in October (in England, my friends have already broken out winter pullovers). So I stayed put and revelled in the feel of the dock underneath me and the sun above, while the others swam around claiming I was missing a wonderful experience. Frankly, I was happy to believe them, just as long as I didn’t have to put it to the test. Belief, sure, but trust, no.

Much more my style, to lie about on the dock

The temperature of the water wasn’t, however, the only thing to distrust in that idyllic spot.

Why, you might wonder, were there only ruined houses and an abandoned church near that lovely lake?

It turns out that the church had been the place of worship of a village further downhill. Downhill? The lake’s downhill from the church. And, yes, you guessed it, the village is at the bottom of the lake.

It was the lake itself I ought to have distrusted.

It may be beautiful, but it isn’t natural. It’s made up of valleys flooded by a dam. It is, in effect, a reservoir. It holds some of the water Valencia needs. Which is, of course, a good thing. Though not a lot of fun for the people who used to live in the old village of Loriguilla.

A ruined church: monument to a lost village

It was in the late fifties that they had to go. At the time, Spain was under the rule of the last of the West European fascist dictators, Francisco Franco. People didn’t get much of a chance to object to his decisions. Or at least, not to do it twice.

To be fair, they were moved to new houses. But did they want to go? Who knows? And if they didn’t, it barely mattered to the people who ran the place at that time.

That’s the thing about so-called ‘strong men’, and Franco liked to be referred to as ‘El Caudillo’, roughly translated as ‘the strongman’. They can make things happen. They do that because they don’t have to worry about how other people feel. It’s effective but it isn’t necessarily pleasant.

Something we ought to bear in mind when anyone expresses admiration for strong and decisive leaders today. Like Trump. Or Boris Johnson. Or Erdogan. Or Putin. Or Bolsonaro. Or rather too many people around the world for comfort.

Come and enjoy the lovely lake at Loriguilla, in or out of the water. But spare a thought for the village it hides. And then ask yourself: is this the way I too want to be treated?

Treason in the White House

The price of not being prepared for war can be an end to peace
Syrian Kurds flee the fighting as Turkey invades

Oh, say can you see,
By the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed,
At the twilight's last gleaming?

The words of Francis Scott Key’s poem, which became the lyrics for the US national anthem, refer the American flag flying over Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, after a night’s bombardment from ships of the British Royal Navy in September 1814. The image of the flag still flying proudly in the dawn, despite such a battering from what was then the world’s leading naval power, is a tribute to the pluck of a still small nation standing up to the oppression of a far more powerful one.

I don’t believe that war is glorious, even less that it should be fought for glory. It should be fought as a last resort, and only because the principle at stake is so vital that even deliberately killing others is a price worth paying to protect it. That was the case in Fort McHenry, for instance.

Even better, however, is to be able to use the threat of military force to protect the principle, without actually activating it. The Principal of my first college was a former General, Sir John Hackett. He once told me that a military commander who has to give the order to open fire has already failed. The perfect military engagement, in his view, was one where the winning side deploys such overwhelming force that the other backs down without firing a shot.

Sometimes, indeed, the mere presence of a powerful nation’s soldiers in a potential war zone can deter other nations even contemplating military action.

These are principles known well in the United States. Let’s see what a few presidents have said on the subject.

George Washington declared that “being prepared for war is one of the most effective ways of preserving peace”. It wasn’t an original thought. The Romans had a similar saying, “si vis pacem, para bellum”, “if you wish for peace, prepare for war”, and the Greeks and Chinese voiced the same idea earlier still.

To be a great nation requires certain qualities. “We must dare to be great; and we must realise that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage”. That’s true even without war, but it’s certainly true of war in particular. Being prepared for war requires being ready to engage in toil, to make sacrifices and to display high courage.

That was Teddy Roosevelt.

There’s another quality that great nations, like great individuals, enjoy and display. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” as another President put it. And he’s right: without loyalty, high courage, toil and sacrifice will produce little worth having.

Who was that President? Why, Donald Trump. Interesting, isn’t it, that he talked about “I need loyalty”? He needs it from others. He doesn’t need to show any himself.

Which is why he’s suddenly pulled out of Syria, leaving his allies, the Kurds, at the mercy of Turkey. Which has prompted invaded.

The American presence was the classic case of simply being present. They weren’t there to fight the Turks. But their mere presence meant that an invasion couldn’t be launched – it might have led to American losses and a massive American retaliation. Trump could have preserved peace by being ready for war. Instead he claimed:

WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN. Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out…

Figuring the situation out for the Kurds sounds like getting themselves massacred by the Turks. Which, incidentally, means they won’t be able to guard prisoners from the ISIS terrorist movement, now poised to escape and start their campaign again. After three years of US effort against them. That doesn’t sound like “FIGHT TO WIN” but much more like “FIGHT TO LOSE”.

The loss will be down to a failure to show precisely the loyalty Trump himself demands.

Let’s end with some other words from a US President, on the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

We can add another date to the roster of infamy: 8 October 2019.

The day Donald Trump decided to pull out of Syria, without notice, betraying his Kurdish allies to the invading Turks.

When the head dick's a dickhead

It was great to read Michael Lewis’s book Liar’s Poker. 

Michael Lewis: Liars Poker  is a great read, if slightly mystifying to me

The book tells the story of Lewis’s brief passage through the world of the financial markets, and describes the ludicrous amounts of money to be made there (even by him, and he was at the bottom of the pile). The trouble is that the financial transactions he talks about are so opaque to me that I remember almost nothing about them. That means that the book has left me with a sense of having half grasped the story as I read and enjoyed it, though today I have little understanding of the strange transactions it described. 

One thing, however, that has stuck with me was the term Lewis popularised in this book, “big swinging dick”. He used it for the most successful traders. These were the men who found people prepared to sell bonds or shares at a little below what they were worth, and then sell them on to others who paid a little more, so that from marginal differences, over huge volumes, a “big swinging dick” could make a fortune, for his firm and for himself.

Note that at each end of the transaction, was someone who had lost out, by accepting too little or paying too much. In between, a dick who made a lot of money by doing absolutely nothing valuable at all.

What attracted me about the “big swinging dick” idea was firstly that it perfectly expressed the almost wholly male nature of this world. Not just male but assertively so, revealed in its highest accolade being a metaphor based on genitalia.

Next, it felt exactly right because if there’s one things you can be sure of with a dick, it’s that it isn’t the seat of man’s intellect. That doesn’t mean that men don’t think with their dicks. On the contrary, they certainly do, as Bill Clinton can testify and Donald Trump can deny.

I’ve never worked in the world of finance. I’d like to claim that this is for moral reasons, that I refuse to play those particular and profoundly unethical games. Sadly, that’s not the case. I don’t think I would every even have been considered for a position in that exalted world of high earnings and low morals. In any case, I found the environment nothing short of scary.

On the other hand, even in my somewhat gentler world, I’ve worked with plenty of dicks. In fact, some of them seemed to have adopted forms of behaviour which I could only describe as being designed to make them feel better about their dicks. In some cases, it was a matter of the cars they drove (the most spectacular was, in fact, driven by a woman, but she was just as dick-oriented, in my mind as most of the men).

One of the most striking aspects of the behaviour of these men was that they seemed to measure their significance in business by their behaviour towards subordinates. They would treat them as heroes until things turned bitter, at which point they would become the objects of their wrath. Sometimes, it would be disciplinary action – minor offences would be dealt with final warnings of dismissals – sometimes it would be actual dismissals, in the form of redundancies, for failures which ought much more properly to be put at the doors of the dicks themselves.

A common feature of these characters is that they would always say how dismissing employees in these circumstances was the most difficult decision a businessman could take. They suffered at letting these fine people go. Not quite as much as the people who been let go. Nor quite as much as if they were to admit that they’d screwed up themselves. But still, they suffered.

Or so they claimed. Because the way they told me about the pain they underwent over firing people always left me unconvinced. It sounded much more to me as though, in truth, their suffering was considerably mitigated by the sense it gave them of their power over others.

And power is what turns these people on. A big swinging dick wants above all to get his way. Indeed, even the money he makes is about being able to do what he chooses – to get the restaurant tables he likes, buy the wine off the bottom right-hand side of the list where the prices are highest, wear the suits that aspiring dicks can only envy him for.

That’s why it isn’t just in business that you find dicks at the top of organisations. They’re right up there at the top of politics too. Exercising power to make themselves feel that they have huger dicks than anyone else.

Although, as Trump and Boris show, the reality is that they’re just huger dickheads.

Big swinging dickhead. And our Prime Minister now...

Dates

By ‘dates’, I don’t mean the kind of meetings that people have which may lead to a romantic entanglement. Nor do I mean the fruit that grows on palm trees. No, I’m talking about a number of key moments in my life that have fundamentally moulded its shape and direction.

The first of these I can’t even specify exactly. It was some time in September 1981. Staying with friends in Eastern France, I met a nine-year old boy with whom I got chatting about the solar system. As one does. We even drew ourselves a diagram of the planets circling the sun, naming each of them.

One of the odder aspects of this meeting was that we shared a first name. That was unusual for France, where ‘David’ is mostly a name used by Jews though I, from England, where the name is far more common, was the Jew and he wasn’t.

They say that the quickest way to a woman’s heart is through her child, and it certainly worked in this case. David’s mother is Danielle and, 38 years on, our marriage has lasted since 11 January 1983.

The second date was 29 January 1983. That was the day David’s first half-brother, Michael, was born. If you’ve just compared those two dates, yes, there wasn’t much of a gap between Danielle and I getting arrived and Michael being born. 18 days, in fact. Danielle had to get divorced first. The judge who saw us commented, looking at her belly, that we would probably want him to reduce the time between decree nisi – the first stage of divorce – and decree absolute, the final stage after which one can marry – to the shortest possible time.

Michael deeply appreciative of my show of fatherly affection

He was right. At the time, there was no guarantee that the child (we didn’t know Michael’s sex before he was born) would inherit my British nationality if we weren’t already married. That was important if it was indeed a boy, since the French still had compulsory military service, a horrible waste of nearly a year, while the British didn’t. We did just manage to get married on time, sparing him that terrible fate. As it happened, however, the French had done away with military service by the time he reached eighteen.

Not that we regret having got married for all that.

The third date was 27 July 1984. That was when David’s and Michael’s brother Nicky was born. That completed that generation of our family.

Anyone who thinks that having a child doesn’t change your life clearly hasn’t had one. I always joke to new parents that they only have 25 years of anxiety ahead of them, but the real joke is that it isn’t a joke at all. There was a time when I was out every night at 2:00 in the morning walking around the estate where we lived, with Michael on my shoulders, while I pointed out various items of interest: the hedge, the lawn, the tree, the moon, all in the hope that he might eventually fall asleep.

Nicky was far less of a problem in the early years but developed a fairly rebellious character later. Somewhere, I still have the Post-It note from him, announcing that he was leaving us for ever, because he was sick of being treated unfairly, and he didn’t care how much we might be worried about his disappearance. And that was one of the lesser crises in our relationship.

One aspect of his rebellion that I particularly liked, however, was that he decided to grow his hair long. His brother followed suit. But when Michael changed his mind and had it cut short, Nicky stuck to his principles and kept it long. That meant that for years he’d be taken for a girl, right into adolescence when the loss of his childish looks left no one in any doubt that he was male, long hair or not.

What has never ceased to astonish me is that while most kids would resent having their gender mistaken, Nicky simply took it in his stride. When waiters in France asked “et pour Mademoiselle?” he would simply give his order, feeling it entirely unnecessary to correct their misapprehension.

And what of David in all this? Well, he’d grown from being “little David” until he stood significantly taller than me. Switching the names around seemed inappropriate, and “young David” as opposed to “old David” wasn’t an attractive option. As a result, he became Davide (pronounced like the French David, roughly Daveed in English), which he remains to this day.

He was an extraordinary asset, right up to the time he left for university. He was the best kind of big brother, so we could leave him in charge whenever we chose to go out, and it created a great relationship that has lasted to this day between the three brothers. On the other hand, in a moment of injustice towards him, we took a gift of our first ever dishwasher from my mother just three or for months before he moved out. So, for pretty much eight years, he had to do a colossal amount of washing up, and only got to enjoy a few months of a dishwasher before he left the household.

The next date of note was 11 January 2005. Now, if you remember the dates from the start of this piece, you’ll have recognised that date as Danielle’s 22nd wedding anniversary (by curious coincidence, mine too). Ironically, Danielle managed to forget that date every single year, rather refuting the common belief that it’s husbands who forget. A boss of mine once told me that the sure way not to forget your wedding anniversary was to forget it once. In my experience, I would turn up each year with a bunch of flowers and Danielle would say, “Oh, lovely! Is it our that time of year again, then?”

David(e) like to take a balanced approach towards parenting

Well, since 2005 she’s never forgotten. Why? Because our first grandchild was born on the day of our anniversary in that year. Thanks to Senada, his wife, and David, we’ve enjoyed the company of Aya for the last fourteen – now nearly fifteen – years. 

David(e), Senada and Aya
Enjoying the pleasures of Valencia, though not its best weather

She’s reached that painful stage where she has answers for all my wit (I think she regards most of it as little more than half-wit), and as often as not, she’s not just giving as good as she gets, but rather better (not an admission I find it easy to make…)

Nicky with Matilda

And the final date in this glorious list? Well, it’s Sunday, 18 August 2019. The previous evening, we had a text message, “Sheena’s waters have broken”. Twenty-four hours later, we’d dumped the dogs with our friend Begonia, who is always threatening to dogknap them anyway, and driven to the hospital in Madrid. It was great to see our second grandchild Matilda on the very day of her birth.

Sheena entertaining her new child's grandfather

David, Senada and Aya are travelling soon to see her. Michael, with our daughter-out-law Raquel, live in Madrid too so they’ve seen her many times already. And we, of course, have been up several times.

Danielle appreciating Raquel's display of daughter-out-law's affection

The next occasion will be the end of this month. I’ll be in Madrid to say goodbye to the company that has just decided to let me go (curious expression, that, “let me go”: I wasn’t trying to escape). I have to admit that seeing Matilda will go a long way towards making me feel less annoyed by the redundancy. Particularly as she’s learned to smile since last time I saw her.

Matilda's now smiling

And isn’t that what family’s for? Infuriating they sometimes may be, but overall family members are what make even annoying moments pleasurable.

Which is why those six dates matter so much to me…

Boris and the damning letter

Our character is set young and isn’t likely to change much as we grow older.

Rory Stewart speaking at the ‘Letters Live’ event

Rory Stewart is an MP who, in the recent contest to become leader of the Conservative Party, showed himself to be surprisingly civilised. For a Tory. A problem, of course, since it was quite impossible for a man with any kind of pretension at being civilised to remain inside the Tory Party, once Boris Johnson became leader.

Johnson kicked him out for the capital offence of opposition to the boss. It’s curious that both parties are now run by men, and by factions, for which loyalty to the leader is now the only test of political reliability: anti-Semites are allowed to remain inside the Labour Party, as long as they demonstrate slavish deference to Jeremy Corbyn. Why, Corbyn even tried to drive Tom Watson, his deputy, out of that position, even though he had been elected to it by the membership, for having had the temerity to oppose his views on Brexit.

Personally, I think it shows real courage to oppose Corbyn’s Brexit views. Indeed, it requires acute powers of observation to discover what they even are, he goes to such lengths to hide them.

Fortunately, Corbyn’s attempts failed, but then he’s not particularly effective. Indeed, the full extent of his achievement in politics, as his supporters never tire of pointing out, is that he did a lot better than expected in the 2017 general election. He didn’t do anything drastic like actually winning, but he lost relatively honourably. A loser who doesn’t do too badly? Yes, that’s probably as high as he can aspire.

Boris, on the other hand, is just as nasty but a lot more effective. So he kicked out 21 Conservative MPs who had the gall to vote against him on 3 September 2019, including Stewart. The 21 have therefore been sitting as Independents in Parliament since then.

Stewart has, however, now gone a step further. He has chosen to leave the Conservative Party altogether and announced he would not stand in the next General Election, ending his Parliamentary career.

He seems reasonably likeable, and I wish him a long and happy retirement, or indeed some new and rewarding career. He has, however, announced that he would not be leaving politics, but would run for Mayor of London. That’s not something in which I can wish him any joy, however, since I think London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is the best politician Labour has and the only way I’d like to see him stop being Mayor is if he returned to Parliament to take over the party leadership.

It will certainly need a figure of his ability to rebuild the party after the Corbynists have finished wrecking it.

No good wishes, then, for Stewart’s run for Mayor. But congratulations, on the other hand, for the way he announced his resignation. He was taking part in an event at the Albert Hall on 3 October. Called ‘Letters Live’, it involves various celebrities reading out letters of historical or other importance. Stewart chose to read out two from Martin Hammond, a housemaster at Eton, the super deluxe public (i.e. private) school both Stewart and Boris Johnson attended. They were addressed to Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father. One pointed out:

Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half). I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.

The letter about Boris Johnson,
first made public by a Letters of Note tweet

Boris was not yet 18 when these words were written. But we’ve seen, in the way he simply fired his colleagues for resisting him, and prorogued (suspended) Parliament when it seemed disinclined to comply with his wishes, that he really doesn’t believe he should be held to the same standards as others.

Indeed, that prorogation has been found to be illegal, so it’s clear he feels the law itself needn’t constrain him.

Nothing has changed. He felt entitled to whatever he desired back in 1982, he feels the same entitlement today. His character was fixed then. All that has changed since is that he now has far more power to inflict his wishes on others.

It’s another point on which Johnson and Corbyn resemble each other. The Labour leader, too, is convinced that entry to 10 Downing Street is now his entitlement, and (so far) refuses to stand aside for anyone else, even if that’s the only way of getting Boris out. To our sorrow, it seems Britain is going through an era of entitled leaders.

But, again, Boris is a lot more effective. And therefore a great deal more dangerous.