Girl in the spotlight

Occasionally, things work out well even if by pure accident. Serendipity, I think they call it.

In 1996, I was working for an American company, based in Baltimore, Maryland. A group of us travelled to the company headquarters, where we were met by a woman who remains a friend to this day. Let’s call her Peg, since that’s her name.

Peg had laid on a stretched limo to take us to Washington DC, which isn’t that far away, on a free day during our stay. That didn’t suit most of our party, who wanted to go shopping or, in one notable case, find the restaurant where ‘the waitresses serve you topless’.

In the end, Peg cancelled the limo and drove just two of us to DC herself. It was a brief trip and we couldn’t see much of the city. But we visited the National Gallery of Art where I was introduced for the first time to the work of the remarkable American painter Winslow Homer, but that’s not what I plan to talk about here today.

The other show we visited on that day was an exhibition of Vermeer paintings. It had previously been in London, but it was booked solid. So it was something of a surprise that we could just turn up in DC, buy tickets, and go in with minimal waiting time.

The work we did on that trip has left no trace in my memory, as it fades into the dusty history of business. But getting to that exhibitions has left an indelible mark on me. As well as providing me with a good friend.

Girl with a pearl earring

If I remember, I knew very little about Vermeer at the time, so it was staggering to visit an exhibition of 21 of his paintings, given that we only know of 35 in all. And, naturally, I was bowled over by Girl with a pearl earring, the painting which blows away most people who see it. Why, it’s even been turned into a novel by Tracy Chevalier from which a successful film was made. Starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth, it’s not at all bad, by the way, in case you haven’t seen it.

The painting is extraordinary in many ways. Look at the earring – it really isn’t one, is it? The pearl is just a drop of white paint and there’s no hook attaching it to the ear. Again, small drops of light moisten the eyes and lips. The girl’s nose, too, isn’t separated from the cheek by anything – there’s no line. In fact, there isn’t a line anywhere in the painting. It’s all done by planes and, above all, by light, which is what Vermeer did best: play with light and use it to convey shape and mood.

There’s one thing about the painting, though, that has worried some people. There’s no background. That’s not Vermeer’s style. He would usually do extremely detailed paintings which filled the canvass with walls and windows, people, plants, again all working with light to produce the same haunting effect. Look at Woman holding a balance and you’ll see the complexity of the background, including more pearls shown just through drops of light, as well as the characteristic way he has the sunlight from the window play on the woman’s face.

Woman holding a balance

The background to Girl with a pearl earring is dark and without features. So is the painting by Vermeer at all? Or, to put it in other terms, just who was Colin Firth playing in the film?

It was a great pleasure to discover, therefore, that the Mauritshuis musem in Delft, Holland, Vermeer’s home town, which owns the painting, had just completed a project called Girl in the spotlight. Experts have used recent technology to take a closer look at the picture. Scanning techniques have allowed them to see lost details and even the way the building was built up.

They discovered that there was a background to the picture initially: a green curtain but, down the centuries, the pigment has faded to give us the featureless background we see today. And the project concludes:

Vermeer signed his artwork in the upper left-hand corner with IVMeer.

Good to know it’s by him. Not that I seriously doubted it. After all, how many artists have worked with pure light with such mastery? But it’s helpful to have it confirmed.

And it’s fun to be reminded of a great day, in fine company, in lovely surroundings nearly quarter of a century ago.

Light at the end of the lockdown tunnel

Sunday was a great day.

(Nearly) summertime and the living is easing

It wrapped up week 6 of our lockdown here in Spain and, boy, it’s been (and still is) a tough lockdown. People not absolutely obliged to travel to work are only allowed out to go the shops, the banks, a pharmacy, a healthcare centre or (it may just be me, but I find this amusing) to the newsagent to get a newspaper. Could this be the triumph of the much-maligned Mainstream Media? Of those institutions Trump denounces as purveyors as fake news? Here they have special status.

There are a few exceptions to the lockdown rules. We, by sheer good luck, fall into one of them: dog owners are allowed to walk their dogs, though only close to home. But what exactly is ‘close’? At one time, the suggestion was just 50 metres but, outside the cities, there is slightly more leeway in the definition.

In a spirit of complete compliance with the strict letter of the regulations, I can firmly state that we never go far.

And in strict compliance with the spirit of the regulations, we never meet anyone anyway, so we’re exposing neither ourselves nor them to any risk.

Besides, the smaller dog – Toffee – has developed a certain indolence recently. Since we’re only allowed to walk on the streets, and not in the woods, and she doesn’t like the streets, she’s more than capable of lying down suddenly at the end of her lead – we’re not allowed to take them off the lead – and making it quite clear that she intends to go no further.

That really can happen within 50 metres of home.

The option then is to head back or carry her. And, small though she is, I certainly do not enjoy carrying her far. That too helps to keep the definition of ‘close’ to within pretty tight bounds.

The only people allowed out under any of these arrangements were, in any case, adults or kids of 14 or over. The only exception were children with a single parent or carer: when the adult went out, the kids necessarily went with them. But all other kids were stuck indoors. Which is pretty soul-destroying if you think that the lockdown was just coming up to the end of six weeks.

Lovely weather AND the kids are out again

That’s what made Sunday so great. The Spanish government decided that the downward trend in numbers of Coronavirus cases and, above all, of deaths was sufficient to allow a little slackening of the rules. And the big deal was that kids up to 14 would now be able to go out, for an hour a day, to play as they wished, with no particular destination in mind. They could take toys, scooters, skates or even bikes. A single adult could accompany them, taking care of up to three kids.

What made things even better was that the weather had just turned glorious. To me, still retaining British criteria, it felt like summer, with temperatures in the mid-twenties (OK, OK, high seventies if you insist on using that old-fashioned Fahrenheit). No one from around here would call that summery, of course. They’d just say, “just you wait. You’ll see what real summer is like. You’ll be regretting the rain.” And I know they’re right: we were here last summer. Even so, Sunday felt good and raised my spirits, for both the weather and the unusual sight of families out walking.

People did cheat a bit. There were a lot of family groups out, with what looked distinctly like two parents with the kids. And at times different families met up and chatted, not always, as far as I could tell, respecting social-distancing requirements.

In our local city, Valencia, things were worse. The council, unlike its opposite numbers in Madrid, decided to reopen the parks for the first time. A flood of humanity descended into them. The police were nice, though. They announced in the evening that they’d gone round that day telling people what they should be doing and, above all, what they shouldn’t, without fining anyone. But that was a one-off ‘pedagogical experience’. From Monday on, it would be fines again. And they’re not cheap here.

The weekdays have seen a return to something more orderly. People are still out, and the weather’s still good, but social distancing has become the norm again.

Now we’re waiting for the next step. The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said that the exit from the lockdown will take up to eight weeks, until the end of June. That’ll make 14 weeks in all, which sounds a bit right: Wuhan in China is approaching three months.

The exit will happen in steps, making it a lockdown stepdown, I suppose. The stages will be timed differently in different regions. The first step, however, has already been announced. As of the coming Saturday, we adults will also be allowed out, for the first time since the whole business started, for an hour’s exercise or walking a day. And we don’t even have to go out alone but can walk with others from our household. In my case, that means that I can enjoy Danielle’s company, though if our cat Misty wants to join us, I dare say we won’t object to his coming along too.

That’s subject to things continuing to go well. But yesterday saw the lowest number of new cases registered since the lockdown began, so I’m feeling a little optimistic.

There could be light at the end of this particular tunnel.

Time for more women leaders?

Two impressive performances have left me wondering whether we need more women at the top of politics. Not just because equality of rights is desirable, which it is, but also because they seem to be doing a lot better than most of the men.

That’s not all women leaders. Theresa May was convinced that she was right and, impervious to all calls to change course, steered her government straight onto the rocks. And Margaret Thatcher set a new benchmark in the kind of sociopathic government that has no compassion for the victims of the suffering it inflicts. No. Some women leaders are admirable, others anything but.

The two women who impressed me this week did so because the greatest measure of a politician’s worth is how they react to a crisis, and they have risen strongly to the challenge Coronavirus presents.

Neither of them is Jacinda Ardern. As I’ve written before, Ardern may be the most outstanding leader the world has today. My only regret is that, in New Zealand, she leads a country of just 5 million people. Imagine if she were leading the country of 330 million, currently mismanaged by the overgrown toddler in the White House?

So here are the two other women I feel are handling things well.

One was Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister. I was impressed by her quiet, firm and yet encouraging way of delivering bad news. She tweeted:

I know lockdown gets tougher as we head into the weekend, and the weather gets better (even by Scottish standards). But it really matters that we stick with it – we’re seeing some progress but it will be quickly reversed if we ease up. So PLEASE, #StayHome – it will save lives.

A little humour helps communicate a message – we all know the (not entirely undeserved) reputation of the weather in Scotland. As for the message itself, it’s firm but optimistic. It’s what one expects from a true leader.

She reminds me of a particularly potent speech by Churchill. He made it after the British victory at the battle of El Alamein, significant because it was the first time the German army had been defeated on land in World War 2, but still minor because the North African theatre was something of a sideshow compared to the titanic clashes that were taking place in Russia.

Churchill knew how to present the success in a way that was encouraging without exaggerating its importance:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Isn’t that what Sturgeon was saying? The lockdown’s getting tougher, but we’re seeing progress. It isn’t time to relax, but there’s reason for hope.

Merkel, Ardern, Sturgeon
Good to have more of them

Funnily enough, the other woman leader who impressed me used words even closer to Churchill’s. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, told her Parliament:

We are not in the final phase of the pandemic, but still at the beginning. Let us not now gamble away our achievements and run the risk of a setback.

Now there’s a tough statement. Germany’s not even at the end of the beginning, but still at the beginning itself. I’m sure she’s right. I wish some of the men we have leading major nations were prepared to be as open about where we stand.

Donald Trump, for instance, keeps trying to undermine the lockdown restrictions, even supporting demonstrators who (rashly) turn out to protest against them. We know that he believes he needs the economy humming again if he is to have a chance of re-election in November, and to achieve that, he seems willing to sacrifice more lives. That’s despite the US already having more Covid-19 deaths than any other, country in part because of his delays in launching counter-measures.

In the UK, Boris Johnson also worked hard to undermine social-distancing steps. On 3 March, he boasted that he was still shaking hands, even in the hospital he’d just visited where CVid-19 patients were being treated. Providing a useful demonstration of how irresponsible that was, he fell sick with the virus himself. Since he refuses to hand over to someone else even temporarily, but hasn’t been able to work for the last three weeks, the UK is now facing this crisis with no one to exercise the authority of a Prime Minister.

Not that I’m calling on him to hand over to a woman. That might mean the present Home Secretary, Priti Patel. If anyone could make Maggie Thatcher look like an exemplar of gentleness and empathy, it would be Patel.

Thatcher, May, Patel
No need for any more of them

No, not all female leaders are admirable. Just as not all male leaders are as lamentable as Bush or Boris: Sánchez in Spain or Conte in Italy, among others, have shown guts and determination in dealing with the virus, even if they were late getting started. But the women have been more uniformly impressive.

I’m not alone in noticing this. Jon Henley and Eleanor Ainge Roy in the Guardian, for instance, point out that only some of the male leaders, but all of the women, have handled the epidemic well.

That sounds like a lesson we ought to learn.

Better to correct your course than keep steering wrong

It takes courage to admit an error. After all, it’s likely to attract scorn from others. Especially others who start out ill-disposed towards you.

Not admitting an error, however, only leaves you open to repeating it. That’s why I find it particularly admirable when a political leader holds up his hand to accept a criticism and changes tack. Admirable and rare: have you ever seen Donald Trump admit he got anything wrong? Vladimir Putin? Boris Johnson?

Salvador Illa, Spanish Minister of Health
His second thoughts were good

Do you know the play What Every Woman Knows? It’s by J.M. Barrie, the same man who wrote Peter Pan. It’s a bit of a pseudo-feminist work, in that it seems to be extolling the greater intelligence of women, but only by having her engage in some devious and highly skilled manipulation of her husband to forward his career. He takes the limelight and the credit; she does the work he needs to puncture his arrogance and teach him a little self-awareness. At all times, she remains in the background.

Still, it’s an amusing and curious play, worth seeing or reading. One of the characters is a senior politician, who says:

I have always found that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.

It’s an excellent notion. Anyone who thinks that a politician will be right every time and, in particular, right first time every time, is only setting themselves up for disappointment. Worse still, the fear of ridicule means that most politicians suffer from a terrible reluctance to accept that they can get things wrong, which forces them to stick with a mistaken policy long after it has already failed.

Here in Spain, we have perhaps the strictest Coronavirus lockdown in the world. The hidden victims are the younger children. Anyone over the age of 14 enjoyed the same privilege as adults, though it’s not much of a privilege: they can visit shops or a bank from time to time, or even, funnily enough, a newsagent to buy a paper. At the last, that way they can get out of doors from time to time, though infrequently and not far.

But from birth to age 14, there was no release, unless they had only a single carer: a lone mother, for instance, was allowed to take her children with her to do the shopping, so that she would not be obliged to leave them home alone. Most kids aren’t Macaulay Culkin, after all, though I suspect most parents wouldn’t want a child who was.

So the vast majority of kids have been drifting deeper and deeper into cabin fever as the lockdown persists, now into its sixth week.

The numbers of cases and deaths in Spain have been falling for ten days now. The government has already begun to relax the restrictions a little, allowing non-essential work to start again, after a two-week interruption. But now, Ministers have decided, it’s time to do something for the kids.

The proposal they came up with was – how can I put this delicately? – not perhaps the one most likely to enhance their reputation for competence. Or, frankly, sanity.

They announced that kids up to the age of 14 would be allowed to accompany their carers on the kind of trips adults were already allowed to take. In other words to the bank. Or the supermarket. Or the newsagent.

The outcry was immediate and loud. What, kids weren’t able to do what the relaxation was intended to achieve – get some air and some exercise? Instead of doing something healthy, they were to be permitted to engage in highly risky activity, going to enclosed places that are visited by more people than any others?

It wasn’t just the political opposition. It was doctors, in particular paediatricians and paediatric psychiatrists. It was public health experts. It was journalists. And above all, it was parents. 

So it was encouraging to see Salvador Illa, the Health Minister, come on TV with a modification to announce. He pointed out that his was a government that listened. And then he told us that from next Sunday, children will be able to go out, up to a kilometre from home and up to an hour, anytime from 9:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night, with up to three kids per adult. They’ll be allowed to do that simply for the sake of exercise and fresh air, taking toys or scooters or even bikes, without having to combine the outing with going to any specific place.

That’s in addition to being permitted to accompany an adult going to the bank, newsagent or supermarket, as originally proposed.

The government didn’t actually say, “we got it wrong”. But they changed their position and admitted they’d done so in response to the objections. 

That takes guts. They will, of course, be ridiculed by their opponents. But I hope enough people will see that what they did was the right thing to do.

After all, there’s a lot to be said for a politician, or a government, whose second thoughts are good.

The pathetic fallacy, or not the weather we hoped for

It was forty-five years ago, but I still remember as if it were yesterday a pronunciation exercise I was given in language classes as part of my French degree.

It proclaimed that if a Frenchman talks about the weather, that means he’s incapable of talking about anything else. But to be a good Englishman, you have to be able to talk about the weather, whether that’s the weather as it is today, the weather of the past or the weather we might have in the future.

I was reminded of this today by a piece of news Danielle mentioned. She’s a member of several groups of expatriates living in the Valencia region. It seems the associated websites are being inundated by regrets from foreigners who have recently moved here.

Certainly, the weather’s giving us plenty of material for English conversations.

My way home from the shops this morning
The heavens weeping at our sad condition?

“We came for the glorious weather. And it just keeps pourng,” they complain.

To which the locals reply, “we love it! You don’t know what you’re wishing for. We know the heat that’s coming. Enjoy this while you can.”

On the more literary side of my degree course, we also studied the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’. This is the belief that inanimate objects, even the whole of nature itself, can sometimes reflect human moods or events.

One of the most powerful examples is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. On the day before the Ides of March, a terrible storm strikes Rome. The character Casca is awestruck by it:

I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th' ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threatening clouds,
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.

Yep. Not quite “A deep depression has moved over the East coast of Italy from the Tyrrhenian Sea, bringing high winds and potentially electric storms to Rome.” 

No, this isn’t meteorology. This is the sauciness of humans (got to love that way of putting it) getting right up the noses of the Gods. And, indeed, Rome’s in for a bad time the next day, the Ides, when Julius Caesar will be assassinated.

Windswept moors, as in Wuthering Heights

There are plenty of other examples. Why, the very title of Wuthering Heights uses the pathetic fallacy: ‘wuthering’ is the howling wind worrying away at the people and the buildings it encounters. Again, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, the protagonist Pip comments on the weather just before things turn a bit hairy:

Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs… Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.

Not exactly “turned a bit blowy and wet”, is it? Not “are we ever going to get a Spring?”, either, or “bet Wimbledon gets washed out”. Rather more intense than the usual comments Englishmen tend to make, however expert they may be at talking about the weather. Also rather more portentous, rather more wrapped up with human events than I generally look for in my weather reports.

Well, with all due respect to Shakespeare, Dickens and Emily Brontë, I always took a bit of a supercilious view of all this kind of stuff. “What, the weather reflects moods on Earth? Pull the other one,” I’d tend to say.

Now, though, I’m less sure. Is it simply a coincidence that the weather’s been atrocious for over five weeks now, which is just as long as the Coronavirus lockdown’s lasted in Spain? As any good conspiracy-theorist would say, I think not.

No. With my apologies to those who moved to Valencia for the lovely weather and have found nothing but disappointment so far, I have to say that you may have been caught up in something much bigger than any of us.

This could be the very heavens weeping over our lack of preparedness for the pandemic. Over our terrible and constraining lockdown. Over the illness and death sweeping the world.

Still. At least you can share the awe. This may be the first time that we’ve ever been privileged to see the pathetic fallacy actually borne out in reality.

Something to remember with pride, I’d say, and rejoice in while it lasts.

Love and bingeing through the lockdown

Lockdown, I’ve discovered, is a good time for a Love binge.

No, no, not that kind. I’m talking about bingeing on TV series about Love. And there are three we’ve been enjoying recently on that theme. One of them goes so far as to take the remarkably original title, Love.

Only one of them is new, so you may know them anyway. But just in case, here are my recommendations.

Johnny Flynn and Antonia Thomas in Lovesick
Having fun (left) and not so much (right)

Let’s start with Lovesick, a British series, jointly produced by Channel 4 and Netflix. It’s based in Glasgow (though you have to work that out for yourselves, and the accents are almost all English). It’s still available on Netflix.

The premise amused me: a young man (Johnny Fynn) diagnosed with chlamydia has to contact all his sexual partners of the last several years, of whom despite his obvious emotional clumsiness and ineptitude in relationship-building, it turns out there are a large number.

He’s surrounded by a diverse crew of friends, including the would-be gigolo (Daniel Ings) who’d rather not be (OK, you have to watch the series to get that), the friend (Joshua McGuire) for whom every relationship is long-term until it blows up in his face, and the young woman (Antonia Thomas) whose attraction for one particular young man (no, no spoilers here) is veiled by a series of attachments that could never prove as satisfactory.

Around them is a string of secondary characters with their idiosyncrasies and their peculiar stories which keep the series moving nicely through its 22 episodes in three seasons (originally released between 2014 and 2018). Cleverly, all the characters occasionally do things that are off-putting, but then win their way back into our affections in other, more attractive ways. 

Overall, there wasn’t a character I didn’t feel I liked, at least most of the time. Which is a great relief, since I’ve seen – and abandoned – plenty of series where I feel that no one appeals to me.

Mae Martin and Lisa Kudrow in Feel Good
Charlotte Ritchie is behind them

The second series is new (released in 2020), with only one six-episode season so far. Feel Good is also British, and made jointly by Channel 4 and Netflix. There’s no confirmation of a second season yet, though it would surprise me if there weren’t one (though perhaps delayed by coronavirus).

It’s a semi-autobiographical look at the life of the acting lead and co-writer (with Joe Hampson) of the show, Mae Martin. She’s a Canadian-born stand-up comic, based in Britain since 2011.

Martin’s a good standup and we got some amusing comedy scenes (not quite as many or as extended as in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, but nonetheless of the same general kind). She’s also an attractively complex individual, who resists being categorised as either bisexual or lesbian, and identifies as either non-binary or a woman, using the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘they’. No problem there, as I’ll use whatever pronoun about them that she wants.

From the first episode, Mae gets into a new relationship with a straight woman (Charlotte Ritchie), ironically called George, and the rest of the season takes us on a roller coaster ride of their relationship, mixed in with the problems of coping with addiction (or with an addicted friend) and of handling the stereotypically awful British family of George’s friends.

Everything’s treated with a deft and light touch, making the even some difficult scenes beautifully comic. There’s also a wonderful performance by Lisa Kudrow as Mae’s mother (she says her own parents are nothing like the depiction in the series, and I can only say, just as well). An unusual, quirky and beautifully funny series.

Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust in Love
Their roller coaster has troughs as well as peaks

Finally, there’s that series with the startlingly distinctive title, Love. That name’s so distinctive that, for the first time ever, I couldn’t use the title to track the entry down on IMDB.

You don’t know IMDB? It’s the best, most comprehensive internet movie database there is. Funnily enough, that’s what IMDB stands for, by the way.

The only way to search for it, I found, was to look for the name of Paul Rust, and then pick the series title from the list of his filmography. That’s quite appropriate, as it happens, since Rust is a highly talented individual, who’s both an accomplished scriptwriter and a fine actor. He’s the co-creator, one of the producers and a star of the show.

His co-star is Gillian Jacobs as the wacky non-conformist with the addicted personality (yep, we get some addiction in this series too), who has a bit of a rocky ride with Rust’s character. Like Lovesick, there’s a large collection of secondary characters, each funny in his/her/their way (see? I’m learning about personal pronouns). And, again like Lovesick, the behaviour of the main characters makes them absolutely unbearable at some moments, though at others they redeem themselves, so you can’t help sympathising with them generally.

I have to confess that we’ve only watched season 1 so far, but we’ve enjoyed it enormously. It’s a Netflix series that ran from 2016 to 2018, with 34 episodes over three series. My suspicion is that when we get to the end, I shall feel as many others have, that it was cancelled too soon.

Still, it has all the qualities one needs to get through some more of the Lockdown with sanity undisturbed…

Getting carried away by the community spirit

I get these enthusiasms, sometimes. I really ought to learn to resist them. They only ever get me into trouble.

Our neighbourhood meets nightly to applaud healthcare workers

In my defence, I’ve been impressed by the way the lockdown has brought out the best in our neighbours, in the little group of houses where we live just outside Valencia. We’ve had gifts of oranges and lemons (no, nothing to do with St Clements) from one neighbour, and we’ve had full meals from others – a paella from one, lentils from another, from a third a rice dish which we were told was absolutely not a paella though to my untrained eye it looked exactly like one (apparently it was made from mountain rice, not rice from the plains where we live, which makes it absolutely, definitely and undeniably not a paella).

From a neighbour: a rice dish (definitely not paella)
and home-made turón (nougat) as a dessert

Danielle responded in the Marie-Antoinette spirit, letting them eat cake. On one occasion she made a lemon drizzle cake, from some of the lemons we were given, and on another an orange cake, from the oranges. Both were delicious and well received.

And that’s when the enthusiasm grabbed me.

“What can I do?” I thought. Followed by a brainwave. “I know! I can cook for everyone.”

“Not for everyone,” said Danielle, incredulously.

“Well, why not?” I replied. “I can do something easy.” And, as an afterthought, I added, “easy and not too expensive.”

That was because I’d first toyed with the idea of doing a smoked salmon kedgeree, one of the dishes I most like preparing, but which costs a small fortune (I’m still paying off the last one).

“I know,” I went on, “given my Italian roots, I’ll make a pollo alla cacciatora.”

I was born in Rome, you see. Still, I guess you can call the dish ‘hunter’s chicken’, given where I got the recipe from. That’s how I cook, by the way. Always from a recipe. I lack the genius to just sort of invent dishes, or improvise them. And in this instance, I was going to use a recipe from the Guardian newspaper.

Well, as the Guardian itself keeps reminding me, ‘trust has never mattered more’. If I turn to the Guardian for reliable information, I might just as well turn to it for my recipes, too. After all, I only have to swallow the information metaphorically; cooking I have to swallow literally.

Got to be sure you can trust the source when you’re going to eat the product.

The sauce too.

Danielle kindly did the shopping. We pretend that’s because I need extra protection from potential carriers of the Coronavirus – men are more inclined to die of it than women, and we suspect Danielle’s already had it anyway, so she may be immune. 

The reality is that her going instead of me has little to do with the pandemic. It’s more that she picks all the things she wants from one supermarket aisle before going into another aisle. I, because I can never remember where anything else is, pick up things from coolers at one side of the supermarket, next go over to the far side to get some fruit, then come back to the freezers, before remembering that I needed vegetables as well as fruit, and they’re right next to each other.

This means that it takes me three times as long as it takes her, and usually I come back having failed to find at least two items from the list.

Finally, the day dawned for my great act of community service. The cooking time was only three-quarters of an hour. I called it an hour to allow for slippage. Another hour would cover chopping carrots and celery and garlic. And then I built in an extra hour just for leeway.

Given that I was preparing a lunch for Spaniards, so for 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, I started work at 11:00.

Do you know, chopping stuff for 16 people takes far, far longer than chopping for three or four? Who knew?

I raced the clock. But when the time got to 2:05 with the 45-minute cooking time still not started, I had to acknowledge the inevitable. Lunch was going to be late even by Spanish standards. It was a depressing realisation. I’d made a commitment. I wasn’t going to keep to it. Honestly, it made me feel like a politician. Really bleak.

That’s the thing with my enthusiasms. I set myself up for failure.

Still, late as it was, in the end the lunch wasn’t a complete washout. Normally you should serve a cacciatora with rice or polenta, but I’m not cooking rice for the connoisseurs in the Valencia region, and I’ve never even tried my hand at polenta. They got mashed potato instead. Well, I fancied it. And it’s not something that gets served much around here.

“Mashed potato!” said one of the neighbours, “just like my mother used to make.”

My Guardian-based pollo alla cacciatora.
And definitely not polenta

I can’t be sure that’s a compliment, but I’ve decided to take it as one.

They all said they liked the meal, anyway. I tried it myself, and it seemed OK, so perhaps they weren’t just being polite. After all, it was made with Danielle’s ingredients, a ridiculous amount of work by me, and the backing of the supremely trustworthy Guardian.

There was no good reason for it to go wrong, right? It just represented a lot more work than I’d hoped.

Me and my bursts of enthusiasm.

'Official Secrets' and getting the perspective right on Blair

“I think we were lied into an illegal war,” says Katharine Gun, excellently played by Keira Knightley in a film well worth watching, Official Secrets.

Back in 2003, Gun was working at Britain’s communications spying centre, GCHQ, when she was included in the distribution of an email from the States, asking for blackmail material against a number of UN Security Council delegates, to push them into backing a resolution authorising war on Iraq.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun about to take a life-altering step
Sadly, it didn’t stop the war

Gun, appalled that the resources of GCHQ were being used merely to provide cover for the UK and US governments, leaked the email. To keep the spoiler small, let me just say that the film includes a particularly telling exchange about her role.

“You work for the British government,” she’s told.

“No, not really,” she replies.

“No?”

“Governments change,” she explains. “I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.”

The film was an excellent way of spending a lockdown hour or two. It also brought back memories. Not particularly cheerful memories, accompanied as they were by a sense of disappointment and even betrayal.

Huge demos against the invasion, in London and around the world
Also couldn’t stop the war

Huge numbers, up to a million, had demonstrated in London against the war. Dubya Bush, US President, and Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, had flopped from one unconvincing source of authority for war to another. They claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but weapons inspectors on the ground had found none. Blair went for a United Nations resolution because British legal opinion said he needed one. When he couldn’t get that authorisation, he asked his Attorney General to provide a different opinion, which he duly did.

Dubya had clearly decided to go to war in Iraq however weak the justification, and Tony Blair had decided to go along with him, with or without authority.

They went in, toppled a deeply unsavoury dictator, but at huge cost: as well as six-figure casualties in the fighting, the war spurred the emergence of ISIS, leading in time to its blood-chilling dictatorship and many more years of war to break it.

No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And, when the legal advice offered to the government was finally published, it confirmed all our suspicions: the Attorney General had warned that invasion would be illegal and potentially lay Ministers open to prosecution as war criminals, unless a covering resolution was obtained from the UN. He only changed that view when it became clear the resolution had failed.

Nothing people could say or do would change anything. Not the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Not Katharine Gun laying her job and liberty on the line. Not even the law would restrict its behaviour: it was going to war even if the action was illegal.

It was all deeply depressing.

That’s why I find it ironic now to be labelled a ‘Blairite’, as I have been by many on the far Left of the Labour Party. Far from an enthusiast for Blair, I felt betrayed by his behaviour over Iraq. And there were other issues on which I felt his government behaved reprehensibly. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has left public sector bodies, in particular hospitals, still struggling today. Blair even repudiated one of his best initiatives, the Freedom of Information Act, when he realised it could be used to force him to reveal information he would rather hide.

No, I was never a Blairite. And today, the committed supporters of Blair are few indeed. But the difference, in assessing Blair, between those of us who refuse the label ‘Blairite’ but don’t belong to the hard Left, is that we’re not prepared to write off his governments’ achievements as though they never happened.

Among others, they include the major assault on child poverty. The minimum wage. The Human Rights Act. Devolution of powers to the nations of the UK. Freedom of Information. The Good Friday Agreement. Huge investment in the health service.

The latter is particularly topical, given that the health service is today struggling so pitifully to cope with Coronavirus. Had the investment started by Blair continued, instead of being reversed in the name of austerity, how much better-placed would the NHS have been to cope with the present pandemic?

Lives have been lost due to austerity. Thousands of lives. That’s worth bearing in mind when we assess the Blair legacy.

Without being a Blairite, I’m in no doubt that the governments he led were infinitely to be preferred to the one we have now. And, in arguing for a return to a Labour government, that’s something we need to proclaim loudly. Things would have been better without the last ten years of Tory government.

What’s more, he achieved far more than those who followed him as leader, and who lost power to the Tories or failed to win it back. He achieved far more than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. Whether their policies were good or bad, they were unable to enact any of them.

You can only do any good at all if you get into power. Which Blair powerfully demonstrated. And you don’t have to be a Blairite to understand that. 

I reject that label. But I also refuse to belittle the good he did among the harm.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a good way to spend a lockdown evening, you could do a lot worse than watch Official Secrets.

A bunch of swallows may make the spring

With Spain moving into week 5 of the coronavirus lockdown, we’re counting our blessings here near Valencia. The chief of which is that spring seems to have come at last.

As the lockdown started, so the weather broke. For the first two or three weeks, Valencia seemed intent on making sure that the reservoirs were all full and the new growing plants well-watered. Hardly a day went by without some rain, and in many cases, several hours of the wearisome stuff.

It was as though the very heavens were weeping out of sympathy for our sad, locked-down state.

The reality, of course, is that nature is entirely indifferent to the disruption to our lives. The first hint of that was when we came downstairs one morning to a veritable racket of birdsong. Honestly, if it wasn’t deafening, it wasn’t far off.

“The housemartins are back!” I called to Danielle.

The housemartins return. And that's their nest under our porch

We went out to check, and there they were. Not just one pair, but two, apparently in some rivalry over the tidy little nest in the porch over our front door. By the end of the morning, one pair had established their property rights over it, though oddly enough they were the smaller birds of the four.

They, it seems, are going to be our guests this summer.

Well, I say our guests. I suspect from their point of view, we’re the lumbering irritants who keep coming out of the great unknown space behind their home, disturbing their peace of mind each time we do so. Still, we like to think of the nest as attached to our house, and of them as our housemartins.

They’d been there to greet us when we first moved in last year. We’d been anxiously awaiting them this year, since the beginning of March, wondering each day what had become of them. After all, the nest was right there where they’d left it, just as the architect who was overseeing the work we had done before we moved in had made clear to us.

“You can’t remove the nest,” he told us earnestly, “it’s against the law.”

We had no intention of removing it. The birds were more fun to watch than some of the TV series with which we fill our lockdown evenings. We saw the pair who were staying with us bring up not one, but two clutches of fledglings. Every time we came in, we’d see the heads sticking out of the nest, until eventually they flew off, only to be replaced within a couple of weeks by some more youngsters.

Eventually, they left us again in the autumn. Which, I feel, rather makes the point of their being guests. After all, we’re here the whole year around. They just turn up when it suits them, treating the place as a motel. I’m surprised they haven’t asked us to do their washing for them.

Anyway, they’re back. It’s said that one swallow – and housemartins are swallows – doesn’t make a summer. But there’s a whole bunch of them now, because it’s not just our house that’s received its visitors, but several of our neighbours too. And the warm weather turned up bang on cue right after them.

Which has come as a great pleasure not just to us, but to the other animals we share this house with.

Misty, now a venerable cat, who takes what pleasure he can from just watching birds and dreaming of the past when he would have quickly converted them into pleasant snacks, enjoys lying on the sun-warmed grass. Luci, the black toy poodle likes the sun too. But of all three, none is a more shining example of what it is to be a fully committed sun worshipper than the apricot toy poodle, Toffee.

She’ll share the pleasure willingly with either Misty or Luci if they care to join her. But if they don’t, that’s fine too. She just flops down on the grass in complete contentment, giving us all an object lesson in what it truly means to relax.

Toffee really understands what it is to bask in the spring sunshine
But she's happy to share it with others if they feel the inclination

Like the swallow, Toffee’s a true herald of the coming summer. Which is a welcome break from all that rain. Why, it may even make the lockdown bearable.

An exceptional woman taking on the pandemic

A great many nations must be looking at New Zealand and envying that country its outstanding Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.

Jacinda Ardern after the Mosque shootings
Exactly the right mix of kindness and steely firmness

You may remember how well she reacted to the Islamophobic shootings at two Mosques in Christchurch. She came through with exceptional tenderness, hugging survivors and the bereaved, but also with all the firmness needed. She said of the killer “we will give him nothing, not even his name” when she reported on the incident to Parliament and, indeed, did not name him.

She followed up with tightened firearm regulations, proving that she has real steel in her when necessary, achieving more than Trump ever even attempted (Obama tried but was denied) in the face of the terrible shootings in the US.

How much we yearn for an Ardern in other countries.

Take the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, hospitalised for CVid-19 infection. I’m glad he no longer needs Intensive Care, and he has my sympathy while he remains hospitalised. However, that’s neither more nor less sympathy than any of the other 16,000 or so patients admitted to hospital in the UK for Covid-19 treatment.

The Romans used to say that you should say nothing but good of the dead. In Johnson’s case, people have been quick to point out to me that I should say nothing but good of the sick either.

This reminds of the time, over four decades ago, when I was working in the British Civil Service, and one of my jobs was to track down fraud on National Insurance benefits. In a training class, I listened to ways of tracking down such nefarious behaviour by, among others, pensioners.

“We go after pensioners?” I asked, surprised.

“You don’t think,” the trainer replied, “that someone who’s spent half a century being a rogue is going to mend his ways on his sixty-fifth birthday, do you?”

Yes, I feel sorry for Boris. But the fact that he got sick hasn’t stopped him being a self-serving, narcissistic liar. And I feel a little frustrated by the general consensus out there that I should stop saying so until he’s fully recovered.

Fintan O’Toole, an excellent journalist who usually works on the Irish Times but also contributes to the Guardian, sums up the situation perfectly in a piece about ‘British exceptionalism’ has been exposed as a myth by Coronavirus. As he points out, Boris delayed for far too long in addressing the Coronavirus outbreak. He also seemed to apologise for imposing the partial lockdown now in place in the UK. In particular, he seemed concerned about restricting the fundamental right of British citizens to go to pubs, as though there were such a right.

As O’Toole suggests, it’s clear that his real worry was that the measure would prove unpopular. So he was anxious about losing votes, as though that mattered more than saving lives. Which, for him, perhaps it does. Certainly, lives have been unnecessarily lost because of his reluctance to take the required action.

I don’t pretend that the Prime Minister of my new home country, Spain, was faultless in his handling of the crisis. On the contrary, he was far too late off the mark. But once he grasped the full import of the crisis, he introduced a far stricter lockdown than in Britain.

The lockdown has been painful, but it seems to be working. For nearly a week now, we’ve seen the numbers of new cases and new deaths falling day by day. Boris could have seen how Italy and Spain reacted (but was he looking?) and learned the lesson (but is he open to being taught?)

Obviously, Donald Trump is a far worse case still. In denial for weeks, pretending that the epidemic was of little importance, taking the wrong action (such as banning flights from China) when he took any action at all, repeatedly trying to belittle the significance of what was going on. Why, he’s even appointed as ‘Coronavirus Tsar’ one Peter Navarro, who has no medical expertise whatever.

And there are plenty of other examples of utter failures in positions of leadership around the world.

How did Ardern react to the pandemic?

She has gone for an ‘elimination’ strategy, as explained by two epidemiologists, Michael Baker and Nick Wilson, also writing in the Guardian. The aim is to stop all transmission of the disease within New Zealand. Returning travellers are being stopped at the borders and quarantined. The whole nation is under lockdown. Meanwhile, the authorities are tracking the cases that remain in the community, with a view to treating those patients before others are infected.

That’s what it means to have a leader in charge. She has the steel to impose a full lockdown. She has the determination to apply the strongest possible approach to the virus – elimination rather than mere containment. It may, of course, still not work, but it’s looking good at the moment: case numbers are falling and so far, there have been just four deaths.

Some will say that New Zealand has the advantage of being an island nation. That’s true enough. But then what’s the UK’s excuse? Cases and deaths are both still rising fast there.

The example set by New Zealand depends on having a Jacinda Ardern in charge, and they’re sadly rare. Most of us are stuck with a Trump or a Boris. But that only underlines how important it is for us all to grasp what might seem a truism: we need to focus on finding leaders capable of leadership. Because for some time now, we seem to have selected our top politicians on other criteria.

And how well would you say that’s going?

As the lockdown starts to fray

Necessary though it certainly is, the coronavirus lockdown starts to become painful after a time. Especially when the weather turns good.

One of my favourite places for walks
A nostalgic old photo. The place is out of bounds now

We live just three or four minutes’ walk from a stretch of woodland where, at one time, I took great pleasure going for walks, with or without the dogs. In these days of lockdown, however, it’s strictly forbidden to do so. Verboten. I look at it longingly as I take dogs past it – yes, Spain still allows us to walk dogs, though only a short distance from home – but I don’t dare go in.

Not everyone does the same. We’re into the fourth week of lockdown here, and we’ve noticed walkers sneaking in, some – oh horror! – even without dogs. Runners too. Even mountain bikers. The lockdown may just be starting to unravel.

When I say that I personally don’t go into the woods, I don’t mean that I never have. I did take to interpreting the ‘short distance from home’ condition on dog walks a little liberally. But one day I was caught by a forest ranger on one of the main paths through the woodland (oh, why didn’t I stick to the small paths?) and he told me, politely but oh-so-firmly, to stay out.

Well, get out first. Then stay out.

I’m British, with the Brit’s respect for the law. In case you’re from some less enlightened country and don’t know our customs, that means understanding that the crime isn’t actually committing it, it’s being caught. If you get away with it once then, hey, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll get away with it again, so you keep trying your luck.

But having been caught once, you don’t try again. A warning the first time? A lucky break. But the next time? That could mean a fine. And the prospect of that fine ratchets up the Brit’s famous respect for the law in me.

Anyway, the little breaches of the rules in our neck of the woods are pretty minor. If you want a real infraction, you just have to go down the coast a bit of a way from here, to the lovely seaside resort of Dénia. It seems 70 families have quietly moved in to their second homes there, no doubt in time for the Easter break.

Dénia and its many charms. Some, apparently, irresistible

That, naturally, is entirely against the lockdown regulations. It must have taken them quite a bit of ingenuity too, especially any coming from Madrid. The police are patrolling the motorways pretty intensively – there are even helicopters out – so they must have come by back roads, to dodge the checks.

They’re there now, anyway. One can imagine that it would be quite a task to chuck them all out and get them back to where they came from. With appealing pragmatism, the mayor has said they can stay, though possibly with a touch of vindictiveness, he’s added that they can’t go to the beach. But then, nor can anybody, so they’re hardly being discriminated against.

Police checking the authenticity of shopping

Much the best case I came across, though, was the little old lady who the police saw walking along a street. She was carrying a shopping bag with a loaf of bread sticking out of it. OK, fine, the cops thought, she’s been to the bakers. But then they saw her again a couple of hours later, again with her shopping bag and a loaf. Did she perhaps not get enough bread first time and have to pop out again? They let the matter pass.

But when they saw her a third time, with bag and loaf, they decided that this really was going over the top. They stopped her and took a look at the bread. 

You could have hammered nails with it, it was that hard.

Poor thing. All she wanted was to get out for a walk from time to time. I just hope the fine wasn’t too painful.

The lockdown’s necessary, as I said. But it can start to get on your nerves after a while. And it certainly feels, here in Spain, that it may just be beginning to fray a little at the edges.