Hamburg after Bologna, or glimmers of hope when prospects are dire

With the far right dominant in so many countries, we need to take what pleasure we can from the glimmers of hope that show up every now and again in certain places.

I wrote recently about the surprising but heartwarming achievement of a popular movement called the ‘Sardines’ in keeping the hard populist right out of power in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. That’s the area that includes Bologna and Parma, and I’d learned to respect it already as the home of Bolognese sauce, Parmesan cheese and Parma ham.

“Also the best mortadella,” my wife Danielle admonished me, when I made the mistake of buying some of the Spanish variety in our local supermarket.

Emilia-Romagna doesn’t have a coastline, so I wouldn’t have expected sardines from there. The human variety, however, so-called because their rallies are so well attended they have to squeeze into public squares, have proved even more appealing than the mortadella.

Their impact? Matteo Salvini, homophobic and xenophobic leader of the far right League movement, was denied a much anticipated victory in the region despite having personally devoted significant time and prestige to the campaign. A rare upset to a rampant right, still in the ascendancy across a world where even someone who has done as much as Donald Trump to torpedo his own prospects, nonetheless stands a good chance of re-election.

This week produced another glimmer of hope to set alongside Reggio Emilia. Another regional election, this time in the great German city and federal state of Hamburg, on 23 February.

SPD members celebrating the Hamburg results

Curiously, the standard party of the centre left, the Social Democrats or SPD, lost four seats. They were left with 54 out of 123 seats in the state chamber, eight short of a majority.

That, however, was more than made up for by the Greens gaining an extraordinary 18 seats, more than doubling their representation to 33.

The party of the far left, simply called ‘The Left’ (Die Linke) also increased its presence by two seats to 13.

If you’ve been adding up these numbers as we go, you’ll have seen that the three parties of the Left between them accumulated 100 seats, a huge majority of the Chamber. So what happened to the Right?

The traditional conservative party, the Christian Democrats or CDU, lost five seats to emerge with just 15. That was the CDU’s worst-ever result in the city. It was probably being punished for having flirted with the far-right Alternative for Germany party or AfD in another State recently. 

The party that likes to present itself as liberal, the Free Democrats or FDP, was reduced to a single seat. 

But the best result of all was what happened to the hard-right AfD itself.

Far from making any advance, it lost a seat to just seven and its vote share fell to 5.3%. The threshold for a party list to win any representation is 5%, so it is teetering on the brink of exclusion from the State Parliament. That was the price of having maintained unremitting anti-immigrant rhetoric which was rightly seen to having contributed to a right-wing terrorist attack in Hanau a few days earlier. 

Mourning the ten victims of right-wing terrorism in Hanau

That made the slap in the AfD’s face all the more deserved. And all the more welcome. Couldn’t have happened to a better bunch.

Two such results so far this year. It’s not much. Straws in the wind and no more. But they’re encouraging straws in a wind blowing in the right direction.

They show it can be done. Which means we can do it again.

Preparing for the pandemic

A crisis! A crisis! It’s a time to rise to a challenge, to show your mettle, to confront and overcome whatever life throws at you.

Of course, the first thing is admitting that there’s a crisis at all. I’ve always preferred what might be called the Jim Callaghan approach, after the Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain, who in 1979 is said – wrongly as it happens – to have declared, “Crisis? What Crisis?”

The nice thing about that kind of denial is that it allows you to show your mettle by returning to the sofa and having another glass of wine.

The problem with denial, unfortunately, is that while comfortable, it doesn’t actually solve any problems. Jim Callaghan discovered that to his cost a few months later when Maggie Thatcher gave him a drubbing in the 1979 General Election.

Danielle and I decided that it was time at last to treat the Coronavirus threat with a little respect. I have to admit that a part of me still says that it’s what an Italian Minister called an ‘infodemic’ rather than an epidemic. That’s a spreading pool of anxiety, if not panic, caused by the sheer volume of information, and mostly rather shrill information, swilling around all the conceivable media today.

Still. It’s certainly true that many communities are already facing the tedious inconvenience of quarantine. So it struck us that, while we can’t do much about the disease itself except cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t get us, we could at least take some steps towards preparing ourselves for isolation, just in case it happens to us too.

We are, therefore, beginning to build up some stocks. We’ve got quite a lot of water, though I do feel we ought to add some beer, preferably Corona, if only out of a sense of appropriateness. We’ve also bought a lot of flour, so Danielle can make bread, and a lot of pasta and rice, plus various tins, so we can cook some basic meals if the need arises.

Flour, rice, pasta, tins: our Coronavirus quarantine survival kit

It seems to me that we’ve probably assured our survival. Surviving isn’t quite the same as living, though, is it? I suppose I can still pop out to buy some more wine. Or I might just have to reconcile myself to the idea that the idea isn’t to have a good time, it’s just get through it.

We can live on pasta with tomato sauce, alternating with rice with tomato sauce, with a tin of something thrown in from time to time for variety. And bread for breakfast, since we have enormous stocks left of Danielle’s excellent marmalade, made just a few weeks ago.

Overall, I’m reasonably satisfied that we’ve made some adequate preparations.

It’s true, though, that we’ve only got enough for about three weeks. That may not seem long. On the other hand, on such a diet, I can’t help feeling that it might seem more than long enough.

Beyond three weeks, I’m not sure whether Coronavirus infection might not start to seem the lesser evil.

Jesus: how do you play him at badminton?

How on earth do you play badminton against the redeemer of all mankind?

The Spanish have an idiosyncratic system of forenames. Or perhaps I should say Christian names, since that term, rather frowned on in England now, does literally apply in this case.

How do you take him on at badminton, let alone with a hope of winning?
That's not a photo of my opponent. It’s a detail from Cornelis Massijs’ 
Christ driving the merchants from the temple

The other day I found myself on a badminton court about to play against a man who warmly shook my hand and introduced himself as ‘Jesus’.

Now, I have to confess, I hope without causing offence to my many Christian friends, that I am no Christian myself. It’s not at all clear to me that the Lord has redeemed us all, by sending his son to Earth to suffer and die for us, or in any other way. After all, had we been redeemed, I can’t see how Trump could possibly be sitting in the White House.

Even so, Jesus is quite name. A prestigious name. A name of power. How on Earth could I be expected to win a badminton game against Jesus? Why, it felt almost sacrilegious to attempt it.

In the end, the problem didn’t arise. He won. Not by a lot, but in a two-person game, there are no prizes for coming second, as Jeremy Corbyn has discovered. At least it was more Corbyn 2017 (a close defeat) than 2019 (a thorough thrashing).

One of the other players is called Maria Jesus. You might think that would make her still more unbeatable, with the virgin Mary on her side as well as the redeemer. As it happens, she’s a relatively weak player, so if Mary is full of grace, it reveals itself in the good feeling her partner enjoys on the rare occasions when they win.

The administrative side of the club is managed by Maria Jose. This name tactfully avoids calling on the redeemer himself. Instead, the allusion is to his parents. But then again, perhaps not. His mother certainly, but Joseph actually wasn’t the father, was he? The husband of the mother but not the father.

That kind of thing happens in ordinary human society too but as a general rule, the Church takes a dim view of it. Not though in the case of the holy family. It’s a complicated religion, Christianity, which is why its greatest theologians have been such subtle thinkers.

All this came to my mind when I was stopped by a man I didn’t know from Adam, or indeed from any other Biblical character, in the street just outside my house. One of the great pleasures of moving to Valencia has been the extraordinary friendliness of the locals. He was no exception.

He turned out to be a neighbour, if ‘neighbour’ is the right term for someone who lives in the same street but 51 houses away. The Spanish term means something more like a ‘nearby’, which feels more accurate. This man was a nearby of ours.

He started off by welcoming us to the area. I always wax lyrical about the place whenever anyone does that. Much the most pleasant neighbourhood we’ve ever lived in, lovely people, beautiful surroundings, etc. I try to avoid mentioning the weather because that seems so trivial. But they always home right in on it themselves.

“And the climate,” he said, “isn’t the climate wonderful?”

Well, having moved her from England which, proverbially, has no climate, only weather, the answer to that question was pretty obvious.

Before we parted, I thought I ought at least to introduce myself.

“I’m David,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Santiago,” he replied vigorously shaking it.

Santiago? That’s Saint James.

“Ah,” I said, “I’ve never met a saint before.”

“Well,” he said, “there’s a first time for everything. Now you have.”

Curious. I wonder whether he plays badminton?

Romans, Arabs, Fascists and hard drinks

Organising events is something a great many of us have done at some time. 

It might be a bring-and-buy-sale. It might be some worthy public meeting, or a concert, or a festival stand, perhaps raising money to defend women’s rights, or protect the polar bear, or prepare the overthrow of capitalism. It might just be an amateur dramatics evening.

What I think few of us are likely to have done is organise a stand at risk of being attacked by Fascists, or to make a major archaeological discovery as we do so. But that’s what our friend Marisa did.

The thing about Marisa is that she’s extremely bright and frighteningly well-informed. She also happens to be a Valencia City guide, by which I don’t mean that this is what she really is in any essential way, only that among the many things she does is act as an official guide around Valencia. In either English or Spanish, naturally, as monolingualism would be far too limiting.

Her brightness and depth of information make her tours particularly fun, so we join them whenever we can.

Regular readers of this blog will know that Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite writers. Ankh Morpork is the biggest city in his fictional Discworld. In Men at Arms, he says of it:

Technically Ankh-Morpork is built on loam, but what it is mainly built on is Ankh-Morpork; it has been constructed, burned down, silted up, and rebuilt so many times that its foundations are old cellars, buried roads and the fossil bones and middens of earlier cities.

As with most of Pratchett’s comments about the Discworld, this one is equally true of a lot of the world we inhabit. Especially its older cities. What the centre of the city of Valencia is built on is Valencia. Or, more accurately, Valentia.

The baths of Roman Valentia
Underneath the present city. Naturally

Valentia was founded by the Romans and, as Marisa explained, it was used to settle former soldiers of the legions that had fought the Lusitanians under their iconic commander Viriathus. Those Lusitanians had been too benighted to appreciate that the Romans were there to liberate them from their primitive way of life and initiate them into the wonder and glory of life as Roman citizens.

The Romans were prepared to go to great lengths to help them attain civilisation, even if that meant massacring them in large numbers to attain that noble goal.

To be fair, the Romans were enlightened enough to settle quite a few of Viriathus’s soldiers in Valentia. After all, they were veterans too, weren’t they? Besides, as a boss of mine once told me when I mentioned we were buying our first house, “the best way to make a man a conservative, is to give him something to conserve”.

It didn’t work with me, I’m glad to say. We sold that house, anyway.

It didn’t work that well for the early Valentians either, or at least not for that long. 75 years later the city was razed in the Civil War that raged throughout the Roman possessions, to decide which of two power-hungry autocrats, backed by big money and large armies, should rule over them.

Can you imagine? A state of the world in which ordinary people have their lives wrecked because plutocrats are fighting each other for power. How sad it would be if the same kind of thing happened today.

It took half a century, but eventually the city was rebuilt, on top of the Roman ruins and sometimes using stones from them, as is traditional. Eventually it morphed into Spanish Valencia.

Which is just as well, as we might have found it difficult to live here otherwise.

In between, it spent a time under Arab rule. After Marisa had shown us some of the Roman remains under the modern-day city, she asked whether we’d like to visit the fragments of Arab wall that can still be seen in certain basements.

Well, we decided we would, so we did. In particular, she took us to the place where, back in the 1980s, there was a patch of wasteland with a slowly collapsing house at the back of it. At that time, Marisa was a student at the art school, then called the Royal Academy of Saint Charles.

The Fallas are the great festival of Valencia
They're about to come around again
A latter-day Valencian tries the traditional costume

One year, when the great annual festival of the ‘Fallas’ came around, she and some of her friends decided to organise a drink stand to raise a little money. The Council gave them permission to use the wasteland.

It was full of rubbish that people had been throwing there for years, if not decades. The first job was a long and tedious clean-up of the whole site. In particular, they had to clear the stairs that led down into a basement where they were planning to sell their drinks. When they got there, they found that one side of the basement was made of what looked like old, strongly cemented and thick walls.

They thought little of it and went ahead selling soft drinks, along with Agua de Valencia, which looks like orange juice but isn’t, and is certainly not soft. It all went well, in general. Their only problem was that this was the eighties and there were still a lot of unreconciled Fascists around, who hadn’t accepted the return to democracy after the death of the dictator Franco.

Sadly, some of these people are making a comeback again today, with the hard right surging in the polls. That’s one of the biggest issues that Spain, like many other countries, now has to face.

Back then, some of these Fascists identified, correctly as it happens, the students on the drink stand as left-wing and decided that they would make a great target for violent attacks. Ultimately, the students had to hire a security guard to protect them.

I’ve worked on drink stands before, but I’m glad to say I’ve never needed to protect myself from physical injury.

What was most remarkable, however, was the wall. Eventually, the students decided that it might be rather more significant than they had originally imagined. They mentioned it to the council.

It turned out that what they’d stumbled across was one of the best-preserved segments of the old Arab wall around the city, significantly bigger in Arab than in Roman times, lying under the newer buildings.

Marisa, with the Arab wall she helped uncover, behind her

It was a privilege to have one of the people responsible for its discovery showing us that stretch of wall, now well-preserved and set up for visitors to admire. Especially as they’d uncovered it in order to sell Agua de Valencia, a drink it strikes me as particularly apt for celebrating such a find.

It just goes to show. Facing down Fascist violence can have some remarkable consequences. Though this has to be one of the least expected.

Almond hunt

Never heard of hunting for almonds? It’s an excellent pastime.

A burst of almond blossom stands out amongst the olive groves

It’s true that almonds don’t dodge around like animals do, but then you don’t have to stalk them for hours, you don’t have to carry a gun, and there’s no killing involved. Which I feel more than makes up for the lack of suspense a wilier and more evasive quarry might provide.

Besides, to be strictly accurate, we weren’t hunting almonds, but almond blossom. ’Tis the season. Nearly the end of it, in fact, since global warming has brought the season forward a bit. 

I know, I know. I keep being assured by authorities as authoritative, or at least authoritarian, as the White House, that no such warming is happening. But hey, I’m a bit old fashioned, and stick with theories I’ve come to be familiar with, even if that does mean disagreeing with that fine Mr Trump.

Sunlight strikes through the clouds on the almond groves
at Famorca, in the hills above Alicante

We travelled down from Valencia, where we live, to near Alicante, a couple of hours by car. Which would have been tedious alone, but fortunately we had two American friends with us, and they were – are – excellent company, so there was no boredom. We even had the dogs, who made us proud by quietly lying on the back seat, each with her head in the lap of one of the passengers (one of them being me).

The higher we climbed into the hills, the better the display of almond blossom became: the non-existent global warming phenomenon may have advanced the season in the plains, but in the hills the it was still in full swing.

Almond tree near the village of Quatretondeta

We even found a bee visiting one blossom-laden tree. A sight, sadly, that is becoming increasingly imbued with nostalgia these days. Oh, to see the bees come back…

Bee at work among the almond blossom
Bottom right if you can't spot it.
I tried to get it pose for me so I could focus properly but it was too busy
(or do I mean buzzy?)

By way of a change from looking at blossom, we also had fun looking around the village of Millena, which had kindly crocheted winter coverings for some of its trees. I’ve seen that before in other places in Spain, but it always makes me smile when I see it again.

Keeping the trees wrapped up warm

The same town had a sculpture at its entrance, as do many around this region. In most cases, they’re pretty unprepossessing, but at Millena it was rather better than most. It seemed to be concerned with trees, though quite what's going on in it I can’t work out: it looks like villagers are trying to set up a tree without its roots. Commendable to want to put trees back up again but, hey, guys, without its roots, I wouldn't bank on its longevity.

Villagers raising a (rootless) tree at Millena

Still, the sculpture’s also quite curious for the way it echoes the iconic photo of US marines raising a flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima.

Marines raising the US flag on Iwo Jima

Eventually, we became hungry. One of the pleasures of driving around the Spanish countryside is that every little town has its little local restaurant where you can get a set lunch – ‘set’ in the sense that the choices for each course are highly limited: two, perhaps three options at most. It goes for a song and usually the cooking is anything between acceptable and good.

We decided to have lunch in Millena, the village with the pampered trees. The set mean was certainly more than acceptable, and we enjoyed it. Especially in the company which was, as I said, excellent. In an unnecessary move, but one that was as kind as it was unexpected, our friends even insisted on covering our lunch.

Of course, we then had the two-hour trip back home, but the conversation was as good as ever. All in all, it had been a great day. We’d seen some attractive places and some lovely blossom. And enjoyed the company.

Which is what I regard as a successful almond hunt.

The Skwawkbox, or master class in writing fake news

“The TV News is lying to us. I get my information from Facebook, friends and social networks.”

An interesting comment. Many people in the England, the US or other nations might well share the sentiment. In this instance, it came from Spain.

It could also have come from the left as plausibly as the right. The BBC has been upset by the attacks on it from the left, just when its very existence is coming under threat from a right-wing government. We might soon see a great public broadcaster muzzled by the right while the left does nothing to defend it.

In this case, the speaker was from the right. He was a supporter of the far-right Spanish party, Vox. The left-leaning paper El País was interviewing him for a study of where Vox gets its support.

He prefers to get his news from Facebook, his friends and social networks. Which is another way of saying that what he wants isn’t information, it’s confirmation. He will find those groups and posts, or friends, who believe what he believes, and always strengthen rather than challenge his views.

That’s much more comfortable. It’s also how fake news spreads. That’s true whether the fake news is generated by a propaganda mouthpiece of the right, such as Guido Fawkes in the UK or the White House in the US, or the left, such as England’s Skwawkbox.

Purveyors of fake news
A rare photo of publicity-shy Skwawkbox founder Steve Walker (l)
Paul Staines of Guidow Fawkes (c) and the White House ranter

In answering a recent FaceBook comment of mine, a critic pointed me to a link to a Skwawkbox page which had the headline:

EXCL: NCC FORCED TO REJECT UP TO 90% OF ANTISEMITISM EVIDENCE AS UNFIT – MULTIPLE DEATHS FOLLOW EXPULSIONS

The claim, right at the start of the headline, to exclusivity is clearly a source of pride to the writer. To me, it just says, ‘no reputable journalist has picked up this story’. Clearly, the poster of the link was, however, entirely disinclined to wonder about the item’s reliability.

The story itself opens with:

A Manchester woman has died within days of her expulsion from the Labour Party under a new disciplinary system.

The woman, whose identity has been confirmed to the SKWAWKBOX, is understood to have died on Tuesday as a result of a brain haemorrhage that locals are linking to stress brought on by her summary expulsion under a new ‘fast track’ process in which the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) is expelling members against whom antisemitism complaints have been made.

It seems the person who pointed me to this piece had confidence in it. But all it’s saying is that someone, unnamed to us though the Skwawkbox claims to know who she is, is said by some anonymous source and their equally unnamed friends, to have died within days of being expelled from the Labour Party.

Given the headline with its reference of the lack of validity of ‘90% of Antisemitism evidence’, the implication is that the evidence against this woman was weak.

However, we can check none of this. We don’t know the name of the woman. We don’t know the names of the people living locally who commented on her death. We don’t know what evidence was brought against her, let alone whether any proportion of it, or none at all, was deemed invalid.

In fact, we don’t know whether the 90% figure is accurate. Any more than we know whether evidence rejected by the disciplinary bodies of the Labour Party ought in fact to have been admitted.

The piece is written in such a way that it’s impossible to verify any of its allegations. It may be that I’m too cynical, but I believe that anyone who makes claims that can’t be verified, is afraid of any kind of questioning. That’s likely to be because they’re afraid the case will fall apart if it’s examined too closely.

The naivety of certain commentators, such as my critic, lies in the refusal to see this obvious truth.

As a result, I thought the best response was to write a piece of my own, applying exactly the same journalistic standards as the Skwawkbox.

A reliable source leads me to understand that the woman who died in Manchester soon after being expelled from the Labour Party, had faced multiple charges of antisemitism backed by overwhelming evidence.

While a proportion of the evidence submitted was found to be too circumstantial or too weak, more than enough was both conclusive and believable, in many cases confirmed by multiple, independent sources.

Her death soon after the expulsion was a tragic coincidence. 

The same source confirms that the woman had a serious and long-term circulatory condition which was both inoperable and likely to lead to life-threatening trauma if triggered by, say, an external shock. My source confirms that she had such a shock, unrelated to the expulsion, before suffering a massive and tragically fatal aneurysm.

My heartfelt sympathy goes to the woman’s loved ones in this terrible moment for them. However, it has to be stressed that her death, while tragic, was not associated with the disciplinary action Labour had taken against her. Her expulsion was inevitable, given the incontrovertible evidence that she made antisemitic statements, repeatedly, over a long period.

There is no place for anti-Semites in the Labour Party.

Now here’s your challenge: prove that any of what I’ve said is untrue.

Ephemeral art and the pursuit of chromatic expression: the Fruit Salad diptych

Still Life 1: Fruit Salad, a paler shade

The artist restricts his palette, generating a sense of calm from delicately merging near-white tints. Note the single eccentric (ex-centric), starkly white apple piece to the lower left, breaking and therefore somehow underlining the quasi-symmetry of the whole composition.

Still Life 2: Fruit Salad, a chromatic explosion

With the careful addition of new chromatic elements (note the red of strawberries crying out for attention, the dark tints of the blueberries recalling a sense of bleakness), the artist attains a full sweep of colour values.

Taken together, these two pieces make a clear statement of the artist’s – any artist’s – search for full expression, starting from the limited and subdued, and extending to the comprehensive and dramatic.

Of course, the art is ephemeral: you can eat it too.

A book of verse and thou. For Valentine's

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Just for once, I thought I’d do a post for Valentine’s day. Normally I’d avoid it, since I think that Valentine’s Day, like Easter, Christmas or, indeed, the Eve of All Hallows (OK, OK, Halloween if you prefer), have all become little more than excuses for commercial exploitation.

But the words above, from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, happen to pop into my mind today, and they struck me as somehow appropriate for St Valentine’s. The words are really Edward Fitzgerald’s, since his ‘translation’ is in reality his own composition, a fine poem of the English language, inspired by the Persian Khayyam.

A loaf of bread beneath the bough
As seen by Edmund Dulac

That quatrain seems particularly apt when accompanied by the Edmund Dulac's illustration, reprinted in the edition my grandmother owned and, according to the inscription, gave me in September 1980.

There’s plenty wrong with the illustration. The man holds the book, and he’s lying down with bread and wine next to him. The woman is standing, ready apparently to serve, and offering nothing but herself and her looks.

On the other hand, there is a haunting quality to the picture that touches me all the same, a peace, a stillness, as well as the elegance and stylisation – just look at the overdone crescent moon in the background, its horns stretching far further than is natural. It creates an effect that is otherworldly, while it makes one think, and above all admire.

It all seems to fit with the poetry. A little sustenance to feed the body; a little wine to lubricate the soul; a little verse to charm the mind; and the company of two people with all the qualities to enjoy them. Yes, even on their own, on the edge of the wilderness, as the previous quatrain proclaims:

With me along the strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown

There we can create our own little morsel of Paradise against all the annoyance of everyday life. That strikes me as a better way to celebrate Valentine’s day than any card, or even a bunch of flowers.

Danielle and I will probably watch a little TV rather than read any poetry. But we’ll raise a glass to each other anyway. And then I might raise another to my grandmother. It’s in the copy of the Rubáiyát she gave me that I keep a drawing of her when she was thirty.

My grandmother, Yeta Bannister
At 30 years of age, in 1930

To be honest, I enjoy it as much as the picture. Or the verse.

Have a great Valentine’s.

A watercourse, a poet and a lot of persecution

There’s a piece of doggerel most schoolkids learn by heart:

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Rather fewer people, outside Spain anyway, know that 1492 was also the year that the last Moorish – Arab and Muslim – part of Spain fell to the Christian reconquest of the country. Ferdinand and Isabella, the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, captured the Emirate of Granada that year, making the entire Iberian Peninsula Christian once more.

The Alhambra in Granada
Fell to Ferdinand and Isabella when they defeated the Moors
And gave its name to their decree against the Jews

It was barely two months later that they issued the Alhambra decree, named for the great Moorish palace in Granada, expelling all practising Jews from Spain.

One of Spain’s, and indeed the world’s, greatest poets was Federico García Lorca. He was gay, in the early part of the twentieth century, when that was hardly a safe thing to be. He was also from Granada, and replying to a reporter in 1931, he said:

I think being from Granada gives me an inclination towards sympathetic understanding of the persecuted: the Gipsy, the Black, the Jew…, the Moor, that we all have within us.

He might have added “the homosexual” but that might have been dangerous.

Lorca. Outstanding poet. Champion of the oppressed

By the summer of 1936, it had become dangerous simply to be Lorca. That was when the military uprising, against the Republic that then ruled Spain, began.

The rebel leader was Francisco Franco, who would hold Spain in a rigid dictatorship for nearly four decades. His regime had no time for a gay champion of underprivileged minorities.

The Nationalists Franco led also believed that the revolt was a crusade for Christian values. So they were particularly ill-disposed towards Lorca for the comments he made during an interview in June 1936, just weeks before the military rebellion started. Asked for his view of the Christian reconquest of Granada, he replied:

It was a very bad moment, though they say the opposite in the schools. We lost an admirable civilisation, a poetry, an astronomy, an architecture and a delicacy unique to the world, and replaced them with a poor, cowardly city, a land of piety in which the worst of the Spanish bourgeoisie operates today.

Unforgivable words for the Nationalists who, just two months later, caught up with Lorca and murdered him.

All this came to back to me while walking in the hills above Valencia the other day.

This region is remarkably fertile. Far more so than the relatively poor country around Granada. It doesn’t rain often, but when it does, the rain comes down like a waterfall, in storms that usually last three or four days.

That means there’s all the water agriculture around here needs. The trick is to manage it well, so that it doesn’t all seep away to the sea in between the storms. And, to this day, the locals are happy to acknowledge that the irrigation systems they use are based on techniques their ancestors learned from the Arabs.

Irrigation water flowing in the Sierra above Valencia

That made it poignant to walk along watercourses guiding irrigation water from the mountains to the fields and orchards. Every few metres there’s a side channel, with a small sluice to let water into the adjoining fields or keep it out. These structures are modern, not Moorish, but they use the same principles.

My mother had a refrain when talking about Spain. The two great errors of that nation’s history, she maintained, errors which ensured its long-term decline, were defeating the Moors and kicking out the Jews. With them, they lost their best agriculturalists (to say nothing of the cultural wealth Lorca listed) and their most skilled financiers and traders.

So walking along a watercourse in the hills above Valencia isn’t a simple, innocent exercise. It’s redolent with historical meaning. In the Moors, Spain had an outstanding civilisation, which it defeated and overthrew, to its own lasting harm.

In the Jews, it had another great minority with much to contribute, persecuted for merely being other.

And centuries later, Spain produced a magnificent poet, who understood and empathised. Who knew what it was to be oppressed. Who, finally, fell to that very oppression at the hands of a dictator certain he was acting for his white, Christian and Spanish nation.

And who, by doing so, inflicted further damage on that nation, just as the earlier persecutors had.

The saddest aspect of all these memories? The descendants of those self-harming oppressors are ready to do it all again. The Trumps, the Johnsons, the Leaders of the Italian League or of Spanish Vox. They learn nothing and keep making the mistake of thinking that homogeneity is the way to greatness.

Whereas, as Lorca knew, it’s stultifying and ultimately fatal.

Water, water everywhere. All for the land to drink

The Media: be careful what you wish for. Or complain about

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist. 
But, seeing what the man will do 
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Journalism attracts a lot of criticism for its seamier side. 

Just as ferocious as this verse by Humbert Wolfe from the 1920s is the powerful 1931 denunciation by then Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, of the press barons who were, in his view, seeking:

…power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages

Clearly, the British press has had a lousy press for a long time.

For a contrary view, the journalist Guthrie in Tom Stoppard’sNight and Day tells us:

I’ve been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.

The Press: even the best can be irritating or infuriating
but would we really be better off it without it?

Information is light. Indeed it is. If you want a counter-example, just take Saudi Arabia. There too there was annoyance with a journalist, Jamal Kashoggi. So he was assassinated inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Five Saudis have been sentenced to death and three to long prison sentences for the crime, all of them junior figures.

The suspicion is that they are scapegoats for a crime ordered far higher up in Saudi government, quite possibly by the Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman himself. But with strict censorship in place in Saudi, there’s no way those suspicions can be tested there by public debate in the media, any more than they can by the government-controlled courts.

In Britain, there have been two significant events concerning the media this week. First, the government excluded certain outlets from a press briefing, a move which at least was met with resistance by other journalists, who walked out. The British journalist can, it seems, also behave in a principled way.

The second significant event was the announcement that the government is looking at changes to the licence fee system that finances the BBC. Whatever those changes are, and however plausibly they may be justified, it’s clear they will lead to a reduction in funding.

Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, has made it clear that:

As the world around us changes, our laws must change too. It will require the BBC to be innovative and to move with the times.

When the government starts telling the BBC that it needs to move with the times, it’s hard not to suspect that what it’s asking for is a move towards considerably less scrutiny of what government is doing.

That suspicion would be less strong if the government hadn’t already done so much to reduce scrutiny in the past. In the autumn, with the debate over Brexit raging in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson decided that Parliament should be prorogued. Suspending it in that way would indeed have greatly reduced the inconvenient oversight of government that Parliament was insisting on. Fortunately, the move was eventually judged to be illegal in the courts.

Today, with a more than comfortable majority in the House of Commons, Johnson no longer has to worry about parliamentary scrutiny. So now he’s rounding on the Press and the BBC.

Anyone interested in preserving an open society based on democratic values, should be opposing his moves. But there we have a problem of our own creation. The Left has been vociferous in its denunciation of the BBC and of the Press generally, contemptuously written off as the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media). That only plays into Johnson’s hands.

There’s no doubt that the BBC could be improved in many ways. That’s even truer of the Press: things certainly haven’t progressed much since Humbert Wolfe penned his lines and Stanley Baldwin denounced the Press Barons.

But “they say things I disagree with” isn’t a good enough basis for attacking the media. Especially when the effect isn’t really to drive them towards reform, but merely to reinforce attempts to muzzle them completely. When a right-wing government with autocratic inclinations is preparing a hole for the media, it would be a good idea for the Left not to help dig it any deeper.

Just remember: “Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”

Things are a lot worse in the dark.

Travelling with a storyteller on a night train from revolution

If I remember, I had to run for the train. Miss it and I’d be travelling through the night, or waiting until the following day. This train would get me there after midnight, but at least well before breakfast time.

I was heading for Hull, in Yorkshire, from London. If I was late, it was probably because this was the time, forty years ago, when I was heavily involved in activism for the far left, and I’d been busy forwarding the revolution. A revolution which, in case you hadn’t noticed, didn’t happen despite my efforts. I was convinced it would, but in a top-down Cult, you can convince yourself of anything.

It was a time when I read quite a few books of Lenin’s. I remember almost nothing about them, just that they were stiflingly boring but had sonorous titles.

Far from difficult to put down
And eminently forgettable

One title I liked was The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Few people today have any idea who Mr Kautsky was, and fewer would feel it worth spending thirty seconds on Wikipedia to find out. But Lenin wrote ponderously against him, itself a characteristic of the hard Left: it spends far more time denouncing its ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors’ than its enemies.

When it comes to wiping those backsliders out, I reckon a cruel but effective method would have been to start reading them Lenin’s works. They’d be begging for the firing squad in no time at all. Or at least for a pen to sign any confession put in front of them.

Another title that sticks in my memory is Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. I remember not a word of the contents, but the title remains relevant today: there is something infantile about the far Left, to which I then belonged. But, like St Paul, when I became a man, I put away childish things. Then, however, I saw things as through a mirror darkly, and felt sure, as do so many today who should know far better, that wishing for change yourself was enough to make it happen.

I was on my way to Hull to see a fellow wishful-thinker of the Left. However, since she was also my girlfriend at the time, I don’t think the activity for which we were getting together was exclusively the advancing of socialism. Which was another reason, I suspect, why I was anxious to get there before tonight had become irretrievably tomorrow morning.

In my hurry, I’d taken no reading material with me. Not even Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which wouldn’t have been the best way of passing the time on the journey (what on earth does the title mean, anyway?), but might have been better than just looking out of the window. Fortunately, a fellow passenger in my compartment took pity on me.

“I’ve just bought two books. You can read this one, if you like.”

Practically impossible to put down
and far more memorable than Lenin

It was Nevil Shute’s The Chequerboard. I’d never read any Shute before. I’d probably never even heard of him. But within minutes, I’d fallen for the story and simply couldn’t put it down. In fact, handing the book to the generous passenger when he left the train, was a painful experience. It took me a while – well, I had a revolution to organise and more Lenin to read – but within a few months I found the time to pop into a bookshop and buy a copy of the book, to finish it.

The thing about Shute is that whatever you think of his writing, he was an extraordinary storyteller. And in The Chequerboard he gives that skill plenty of scope: as well as the protagonist’s own story, the framework for the novel, we get the stories of the three men he sets out to track down. They’re finely constructed, compelling tales, a pleasure to read at any time, especially in a train running through the featureless landscape of night-time England.

The kindness of the stranger in my compartment is a memory I treasure. So is my pleasure in reading Shute. I’ve consumed a great many of his novels since then, and re-read several of them many times, though none so much as The Chequerboard.

My daughter-in-law Sheena, knows how much I like the book. She also knows that I’m working to improve my Spanish. So, when she saw a copy of Tablero de Damas, the 1951 Spanish translation, she snapped it up for me.

Found for me by Sheena in Madrid
where she lives with my son and new granddaughter

As she says, there’s something to be said for reading a book you already know, in a language you’re trying to learn: you don’t have to struggle to understand the story and can concentrate on the words. Since they’ve been written by a native Spanish speaker, I’m sure they’re good enough to help me with the language.

Although what gives reading the book additional spice is seeing how awful the translation is: librero (bookseller), for instance, for ‘bookmaker’ (someone who takes bets, for instance on horse races), of ‘cutting corns’ (removing calluses of dead skin) rendered as selling agricultural products.

But that just makes re-reading the book all the more fun. As does the memory of the strange times, and the kind circumstances, in which I read it for the first time. Especially as it was so much more entertaining than my usual reading.

Thank you, Sheena. Thank you, Spanish translator. Thank you, stranger on a train.

And thank you, of course, Nevil Shute.