World beaters in the coronavirus death stakes

These are exciting times.

Three nations are competing hotly for position in the Coronavirus stakes. Italy, where I was born, led all three in deaths per million of the population for a while, but Spain, where I now live, overtook it, while Britain, and I am a loyal subject of Her Most Gracious Britannic Majesty – well, relatively loyal – was always lying third.

Top places in Europe for Coronavirus deaths per million

But a week ago, Britain caught up with Italy, and since has moved ahead. And now it’s closing fast on Spain: just 18 deaths per million behind today. First place in Europe is within reach. But, of course, the UK has an unfair advantage: it’s led by mini-Trump, Boris Johnson.

With a Trump, a Johnson or a Bolsonaro in charge, a nation is a guaranteed world-beater in the Coronavirus death stakes.

These leaders are special. 

Bolsonaro, Johnson, Trump
Swamp dwellers competing in the virus death stakes

Bolsonaro’s devil-may-care attitude towards the virus has even earned him the title ‘Killer’. He’s got his nation into second position behind Trump in infections and is moving strongly up the deaths-per-million field.

Trump is, of course, exceptional. His outstanding skill in invective is only rivalled by his capacity for non-delivery. He promised a wall between the US and Mexico, but apart from a few short stretches, it’s just not happening. It’s hard to choose between relief at the failure of a lousy idea, or scorn at his failure to honour his pledge.

Twitter has now started issuing a few warnings about whether Trump’s Tweets can really be entirely relied on for accuracy. He’s turned livid against the social media giant. He wants the law changed to prevent this kind of uppity behaviour. To him, saying what you like – correction, what he likes – is freedom of expression, but pointing out that it’s false is treacherous bias.

Interestingly, mini-Trump in England has many of the same traits.

For instance, he too has a remarkable track record of failures. As Mayor of London, there was his Garden bridge across the Thames, now cancelled at great cost to the taxpayer. There was also his ingenious plan for new buses, now terminated, because they too were excessively expensive. Then there were the three water cannon bought second hand from Germany, eventually sold unused for scrap.

His behaviour in the pandemic has been the same. He plucks commitments out of the air – so many tests per day by such-and-such a date, achieved only on the deadline, for one day, with fiddled stats; now there’s the track, trace and isolate system to be in place by 1 June, which few experts believe will happen.

But he’s going ahead with further relaxation of the lockdown, even though case numbers are still growing at far too high a rate.

Like Trump, he’s sure his entitled group has an inherent right to be treated differently from the rest of us. It’s an attitude he’s had since childhood, as a letter home from his school housemaster makes clear: “I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.”

This has led to the ongoing scandal concerning his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who broke the very lockdown rules he was instrumental in drawing up.

Cummings and his wife drove their child 260 miles up the country when she was ill with Coronavirus and he was likely to be carrying it, as was later confirmed to be the case. Their explanation is that with both of them potentially ill, they were worried about childcare for their son and wanted to get him to where Cummings’ parents lived.

But plenty of others have faced similar childcare problems and suffered the difficulty of dealing with them, without breaking the lockdown rules.

Let’s be clear how he broke those rules: they might have infected any number of people on the way. They might have infected their son. And when they got there, they might have infected his parents, who as older people were in a high-risk group.

It’s no surprise that many MPs, including Conservatives, have been deluged with furious letters from voters demanding that Cummings be fired.

Instead, Johnson and several of his Ministers defend his actions as the behaviour of a loving parent. So is a parent facing childcare problems who doesn’t break the rule insufficiently loving of his child?

Indeed, isn’t anyone who follows the rules, just a mug? After all, it’s clear the rules were made to be broken.

Sadly, what not everyone realises, is that they’re only made to be broken by the Johnson coterie. Dominic Cummings, yes; the rest of us, no. So Johnson and his government have closed ranks around Cummings. Why? Is this great loyalty from Johnson? One of his fellow Conservative MPs had a different explanation for the Guardian: “This is a cabinet of fools led by a hollow narcissist who is nothing without his Svengali.”

Yep. We’ve seen Johnson’s track record of ideas as Mayor of London. He’s not good at coming up with any that work, is he? Cummings was key in winning the Brexit referendum for the Leave side. And his brilliantly simple slogan, ‘Get Brexit Done’, took Johnson to a landslide victory over a Labour leader who could only waffle on the Brexit issue.

Remember Trump claiming he wanted to ‘drain the swamp’? It strikes me the swamp has never been so murky as since he took office in Washington. As in Brasilia with Bolsonaro. Or in Westminster with Johnson.

Perhaps it really is time to drain the swamp. But starting with the man who dreamed up the slogan, Trump, and his disciples, led by Johnson and Bolsonaro. After all, given the way the US, Brazil and the UK are performing in the Coronavirus mortality stakes, it’s a matter of life and death.

And I’m using that hackneyed expression literally.

The Spanish fighters again: liberation achieved. And denied.

When we last saw our gutsy Spanish Republican fighters in the French Foreign Legion, they were rather twiddling their thumbs in North Africa waiting for something to change.

Well they did eventually change. And in a big way.

Men of the Nueve with their halftrack Guadalajara

In 1943, the Americans landed in Morocco and, together with British forces, in Algeria. The local French military was still ostensibly supporting the Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain and serving under its orders, which meant Nazi orders. They put up a bit of a fight but soon caved, though not before some three thousand men had been killed and a lot more injured.

At that point, the local leadership, specifically the commander of the French forces, Admiral Darlan, suddenly realised they had always been lifelong democrats and switched to the Allied side. They required little in return, except being kept in office, which might have led to some friction with the Free French and in particular with de Gaulle.

Fortuitously, a young royalist decided the best way to secure the return of the rightful King to the French throne was to assassinate Darlan, which he duly did. It turned out he was wrong, as far as getting the King back was concerned, but he certainly removed a major irritation for de Gaulle.

Meanwhile the Allies, advancing from Morocco in the West and Algeria in the East, eventually drove the German army to defeat in Tunisia. The French, having switched sides, fought with the Allies, and that included the French Foreign Legion, who saw some tough battles, in which its Spanish Republican forces played a key role. And lost many men.

Not all the French forces had had to switch sides. Some soldiers had been with the Free French right from the start. In particular, one idealistic young officer had raised a small force in the French colonies south of the Sahara, marched it across the desert and joined the British effort against General Rommel in Libya.

Leclerc with his Armoured Division, during the liberation of France

His name was Leclerc (well, it was Philippe de Hautecloque, really, and Leclerc was just a nom de guerre which he’d adopted in the hope that it would deflect the attention of the authorities from his family back in occupied France). De Gaulle made him a major general and gave him the Second Armoured Division, the iconic Deuxième DB, to command. It was selected to be the only French unit to be included in the Allied landings in Normandy when they eventually came.

Unfortunately, he only had 4000 men and he needed 15,000. He set out to recruit new soldiers. One group from whom he found it easy to recruit were the Spaniards, who transferred in droves out of the Foreign Legion and into his Deuxième DB. Manuel Fernandez, whom I quoted yesterday, summed things up:

“The ideas of de Gaulle corresponded more to ours than those of the others who’d stayed with Pétain. The officers of the Legion considered us as red Spaniards, as revolutionaries… The senior officers would say to us, ‘you’re not in Spain here. You’re not going to make a revolution here.’ We’d keep quiet. The officers with de Gaulle, on the other hand, said ‘oh, did you fight in Spain? Good…’ The men the officers wanted were Spaniards. We had a certain experience, not just in Spain, but in the campaign in Tunisia too.”

Spanish recruits to the Deuxième DB
parading on the beach in Morocco

From the many Spaniards mobilised into Leclerc’s division, one company, the ninth, was almost exclusively Spanish: 146 out of 160 men. Commanded by a Frenchman, Raymond Dronne, and his number 2, the Spaniard Amado Granell, from Valencia, who had commanded a division in the Civil War, it passed into legend as ‘La Nueve’, ‘The Nine’.

The Deuxième DB landed in France in August 1944. The American high command had committed to allowing French troops to lead the Allies into the French capital.

On the 20^th, an insurrection broke out in Paris, with Resistance units taking action against the Nazi occupiers. De Gaulle asked for and obtained authority to press on to their support as quickly as possible. On the 24^th, Leclerc told Dronne and the Nueve “leave and go to Paris”. They left at 7:30 that evening and by 9:30 the company, supported by a squadron of tanks from the French 501^st armoured regiment, arrived at the Paris Town Hall. There, the first ‘French’ soldier to make contact with the Resistance forces that had taken control was Lieutenant Granell, the officer from Valencia who had held general rank in the Spanish Civil War.

The next day, as well as attacking several key points around the City, Spanish soldiers also accepted the surrender of the German Commander and took him into custody, before handing him over to French authorities.

The men who had fought so hard to keep Spain free, at least had the satisfaction of leading the liberation of France’s capital.

One of the halftracks in the parade down the Champs-Elysées
celebrating the liberation of Paris

The action in Paris wasn’t the Nueve’s last. They fought on through the rest of the war, even reaching Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s hilltop eerie, the Eagle’s Nest. By then though, only 16 of the 146 Spaniards of the combat were still fit for combat. They had lost 35 dead and 97 wounded.

Captain Dronne, their commander, said of them:

Some of them are experiencing a clear moral crisis due to the losses we've suffered and above all to the events in Spain.

The Spaniards who fought with the French had hoped that after overthrowing Fascism in Italy and principally in Germany, the Western Powers would turn their attention to Spain and finish it off there too. It wouldn’t happen.

The best slant to put on that decision is that the Western Powers had bled enough in the war and they didn’t want to fight another. That may be partly true. But Franco was no Hitler, the Army he led no Wehrmacht. Overthrowing his regime would not have required anything like the force or the losses that the battle against the Nazis had cost.

The less honourable explanation is that the West was already turning its attention against the Soviet Union. Far from wanting to take on Franco’s rather eccentric brand of Fascism – he was always more of a Franquist than a Fascist – they preferred to concentrate their efforts against Communism. In that fight, Franco could if anything be something of an ally, just as soon as he could be brought out of his pariah state. Which happened in the fifties, when the easing of measures against his regime was the price paid for stationing American forces in Spanish territory.

Ultimately the thousands of Spanish Republicans who fought and died for France and for the freedom of their own country, would be let down. “We weren’t fighting for a flag,” Manuel Fernandez would tell the 2017 documentary makers, “we were fighting for ideas”. They were fighting for freedom, in their country as well as France.

Well, they were cheated of that goal. But at the very least, we owe it to them to remember their sacrifices and their courage.

The lesson for me? Even in Europe, the Second World War didn’t start on 1 September 1939. It began on 17 July 1936, with the nationalist uprising against the Second Spanish Republic.

Nor should it have ended when it did. Once they’d finished off Hitler and Mussolini, the Western Powers should have seen off their ally Franco. Which means the war would not have ended in Europe on 8 May 1945.

But it did. With the work not quite done. Sadly.

The Spanish fighters who changed my views

After four years of Nazi occupation, Paris was finally liberated by Allied armies on 24 August 1944. Units of the mythic French force, the ‘Deuxième DB’, the Second Armoured Division, led the way into the city. They had raced there to support the population that had risen against the occupying forces.

In the evening, the first half tracks pulled into the square outside the Paris town hall. As in all such units, the vehicles had all been given names by their crews, names that were painted on their sides:

Gudalajara

Brunete

Ebro

Santander

Teruel

If you’re thinking “those don’t sound like French names”, you’d be right. They were great battles of the Spanish Civil War. And the language the crews were talking was Spanish.

These were the men of the ‘Nueve’ (‘nine’ in Spanish), the ninth company of the Deuxième DB, almost exclusively Spanish. Their commander, the French Captain Raymond Dronne, wrote of them later:

The Spaniards fought remarkably. Commanding them is a delicate matter but they have enormous courage and experience of combat.

That ‘delicate’ is a glorious piece of French understatement. It chimes with what Dronne was told when he was first given command:

Everyone’s afraid of them. They’re good soldiers. They won’t give you any problems.

The halftrack Guernica of the Nueve in Paris in 1944

Moving to a new country certainly gives you a new perspective on many things you thought you knew.

For instance, I’ve had to rethink some of the most elementary facts I felt I knew about the Second World War. I’ve long accepted that it didn’t start on 1 September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland, as is generally taught in schools. The first shots were fired on 19 September 1931, when Imperial Japanese forces invaded the Chinese territory of Manchuria.

OK, you might think, but that was the Pacific Theatre. In the European theatre, the war started in September 1939, surely? Well, that too is an idea I’ve had to revise, under the gentle guidance of Marisa, a friend we’ve met out here in Spain, who’s frighteningly well-informed on history.

My view was always that the Spanish Civil War, which started in July 1936, was a sort of preamble to the World War. In reality, however, with the Soviet Union supporting the Spanish Republic, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the military uprising that brought Franco to power, it offered a first opportunity for three of the major powers of the coming World War to test each other’s strengths and weaknesses and, indeed, to expose some of their forces to combat.

That feels more like the first Act of the wider war rather than merely a preamble to it.

In any case, it wasn’t just the Germans and Italians, or to a smaller extent the Russians, who emerged from the Spanish Civil War with trained and battle-hardened veterans ready for the next stage of the conflict. There was also quite a lot of the Spanish Republican army. The Republic itself had been defeated and overthrown, but many of the soldiers survived.

Large numbers joined the flood of over 450,000 refugees fleeing across the Pyrenees into France. They rightly feared the retaliation that Franco’s victorious regime would exact from them if they were caught. The regime proved they were right by what it did to those it did in fact catch.

In France conditions were, however, not particularly better. They were held in what the French called “internment camps”, but the Spanish, especially the ones who were there, unequivocally referred to as “concentration camps”. Lack of food, poor sanitation and inadequate housing led to huge numbers of deaths. This was 1939, after all, when France and Britain still hoped that their policy of appeasing Hitler might avoid war. That desire, combined with the xenophobia and right-wing beliefs of a significant current amongst Frenchmen, conspired to ensure the refugees were shockingly badly treated.

Offered the option of returning home, about 100,000 chose to go, mostly women and children. Few of the combatants, understandably, took up that offer, however. Some paraded in front of French officers hoping to be taken into the army, but the generals, who were to be humiliatingly defeated the following year, decided they didn’t need these experienced troops whose political loyalties they weren’t sure of (they were generally left wing, some extremely).

Some 10,000, however, were recruited into the Foreign Legion. And, once war with Germany broke out, others were taken into ‘Foreign Labour Companies’ who were set to work on the Maginot line, the great string of bunkers and fortresses along the border with Germany. Life there was certainly preferable to the camps, though in the end it worked out little better. After defeating France, the Nazi authorities captured many of the Spanish workers. Refusing to treat them as prisoners of war, and working with the Franco government’s agreement, they transferred them to concentration camps. Over 7000 were sent to the Mauthausen camp and fewer than 2500 were released at the end of the war.

Chillingly, some of the survivors later said that their experience in the French camps helped them to prepare for the Nazi ones.

Those who were able to avoid capture, joined the resistance. And among those who had taken part in the fighting, many decided to carry on the battle. One Spaniard in the Foreign Legion, Manuel Fernandez, described his feelings on the defeat of France to a 2017 television documentary:

“It was the greatest disappointment of my life. There were moments when I cried like a child. I’d fled Spain and here I was going to fall into the hands of the Germans.”

One answer was to join General de Gaulle who was setting up Free French forces in London. Of his initial 2000 men, 300 were Spanish.

Alternatively, those who were in the Foreign Legion could cross the Mediterranean with their units. In North Africa, however, they were under the orders of the government in Vichy, a puppet regime of the Nazis, set up after the defeat of France. There they were left to wonder how they’d managed to escape Franco, only to find themselves in a military unit whose orders were dictated by a government collaborating with Franco’s most powerful ally, Hitler.

It would take over two years. Though then things would change dramatically.

But more of that in another post. Just click here...

Not marking a death but celebrating a life

Getting to know my father, in the mid-1950s

It’s a strange sensation to wake up and discover it’s the 24^th of May, as happened to me this morning. Or at least, it has been a little odd for 37 years now (and it amazes me to realise it has been that long). 

It was on that day in 1983 that my father died.

For 35 years, it was particularly difficult because my mother always took it badly. She had the terrible misfortune of being a widow longer than she was married: she survived my father for 35 years, having been married for 32.

Each year, I would ring her and wonder how to broach the subject. Should I bring it up? Should I let her raise it? If I spoke first might I upset her by reminding her, or if I waited to let her mention it, might I upset her by seeming to have forgotten?

Yes. She wasn’t easy, my mother. Many fine and attractive qualities but being simple to know and get along with wasn’t one of them.

I would always suggest to her that we shouldn’t fixate on the 24^th of May, but rather concentrate on the 15^th of September, his birthday, which was always a good day in the family. A day to celebrate rather than a day to mourn. But poor woman, she grieved all the same.

Well, she died nearly two years ago. So this year, I am going to mark the death of my father not with a lament, but with a celebration. A brief overview of his life in photos.

Here he is in his first year. This would have been late 1921 or early 1922.

He was brought up in Brussels, and here he is at four walking up one of the main streets with his mother.

In 1936, he was 15 and in the boy scouts.

By the early 1940s, he was in uniform again, but for war service in the Royal Air Force.

In 1951, he married my mother in Genoa. And why not Genoa? The obvious place to get married, for an Englishman raised in Belgium and who met his wife-to-be in Paris.

They stopped in Nervi, near Genoa, before honeymooning near Naples. He then took up a position he held for sixteen years, at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome (which is where both my brother and I were born).

In 1960, he posed rather well, I think, by the River Congo, while serving with the UN Emergency mission. He returned to that country with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1967, after his stint in Rome.

In 1964, we had a rather good holiday in what was then Yugoslavia, and stopped at various places on the way back to Rome, including Venice where you can see him feeding the pigeons in St Mark’s Square with my brother.

In 1977, he was approaching retirement, still with the UNDP but at its headquarters in New York.

He retired to France, to Michauroi, a hamlet lost in the countryside of the Charente Department. He loved being there, though he and my mother would also travel to England regularly, staying in a flat they rented in Bromley. Here he is (at right) with my mother (at the back near the centre) and some friends. At that time, he only had two years ahead of him.

He had a rich and varied life and did a lot of things that mattered to him – his war service, his work for the UN in the Congo Emergency, his work on projects for the UNDP. He died far too young, at 61. His style of life had done nothing for his health, however satisfying it was in other ways.

Even if he hadn’t died then, I don’t suppose he would have made it till today. He’d have been rising 99 now. But I still miss him. He was an excellent father and a lot of fun.

Which is what I prefer to mark on the 24^th of May.

Beach walking out of the lockdown in Valencia

One of the things about emerging from Lockdown is that things you once took for granted now feel special.

Today, that was a visit to a beach near us, south of Valencia. It was the first since the lockdown began to the ease. Indeed, it was the first since just before the lockdown started.

Striding along the beach at El Saler

Taking people to that beach with its miles of golden sand is pretty much a fixture on our list of things to do with visitors. On Saturday 14 March, we went there with friends who’d been staying with us for that week. We enjoyed the visit though, already, the atmosphere was turning tense. 

We’d booked a table for lunch in a nearby village, for paella, since both the beach and the village are in the middle of rice fields. That means that rice-based paella’s a specialty.

The restaurant had, however, had to cancel our reservation. All cafés, bars and restaurants had been ordered to close in response to the coronavirus epidemic. So the shared paella, another item that appears high on our list of things to do with visitors, was off the table. Literally.

What was worse, we knew that the day after next Spain was going into full lockdown. France, where our friends were from, was talking about lockdown and already considering quarantining anyone arriving by air. Indeed, it wasn’t even certain that air travel would be allowed to continue, which was bad news since they were due to fly back the day after our beach walk.

So there was apprehension in the air. It didn’t stop us enjoying our time on the beach, but it did introduce some worrisome notes.

Even sadder, once our friends from France had gone, two friends from England were due to follow them to our place. They, intelligently, had already cancelled, however. Had they set out they might have found themselves trapped somewhere between their home and ours and, at best, having to make a difficult emergency return to the UK.

Unfortunately, however, that meant they didn’t get a beach walk at all.

Should we have gone out this morning? Well, the authorities differ on the matter. The leading local paper claims that, in phase 1 of emergence from lockdown, and Valencia is in phase 1, you can drive to different places in the same province to have some exercise there.

Others say no, you can only travel to specific places, such as restaurants, to meet small numbers of friends and have a coffee or a meal with them, outdoors and strictly respecting social distancing. I can see how that makes sense: if people all travel to the same place, there’s a risk that they’ll end up congregating in unsafe numbers.

The fear at the moment is that the end of lockdown will lead to a new surge in Covid cases and deaths.

Well, we decided to choose the interpretation of the regulations which suited us best. And it worked out fine. There were people in the nature reserve behind the beach, and on the beach itself, but few enough of them for distancing to be easy. Everyone seemed to understand that, as people approached each other, one or other would swerve away from the sea – a beach walk, naturally, involves being barefoot in the surf – and exchange polite greetings from a safe distance as they passed.

The nature reserve behind the beach,
with a black-winged stilt (I'm reliably told) flying over the water

Two of the people we met were in official uniforms and carrying guns. Since they said nothing, we decided we clearly weren’t committing any desperately serious offence.

And it was glorious out there. The air warm enough to be a delight but not yet hot enough to be uncomfortable. Miles of sand disappearing southwards to a distant town. Limpid water we could paddle through, which reached out to deep blue at the horizon.

Just as we remembered it when we were there with our French friends back in March. Except warmer. Just as we would have enjoyed it with our English friends had they been able to make it. And a joy after ten weeks deprived of the pleasure.

So today’s walk, and this post, are dedicated to Marie-Line and Bernard from France, who were there on 14 March, and to Sue and Tim from England who had to cancel their trip, but we hope will join us soon.

At least we’re all safe from the Coronavirus so far. That makes the sacrifice a price worth paying. Let’s hope things stay that way.

So that we can indulge ourselves in other beach trips and, who knows, a wonderful local paella again, before too long.

Boris Johnson second rate? No way.

When I look at the behaviour of the Johnson government, the thought “second rate” always springs to mind. Only to be replaced by, “that’s so unfair”. Followed by a swift reassessment.

Gentle humour, charmingly readable

Decades ago – oh, it was probably the seventies – I discovered the books of George Mikes. Most English speakers pronounce the name as though it were the plural of the nickname ‘Mike’. Or rather, since practically no English speaker even remembers him, perhaps I should say that they used to pronounce the name that way.

He was Hungarian by birth, though he lived most of his life in England. Strictly his name ought to be pronounced something like Mick-esh or possibly Meek-esh. But I like to think of him as Mikes.

He wrote a whole series of books commenting on the different nations he visited, starting with his adopted country, Britain. Just the title of the first of those books gives a feel for his style: How to be an Alien: a handbook for beginners and more advanced pupils. His books were light-hearted, humorous reflections on the behaviour and attitudes of various countries.

In one of his books, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to find the passage now, he mentions that a critic had called his writing second rate. He rejected this notion as a wild exaggeration. By way of explanation, he gave a ranking of authors, which again I don’t remember, but here’s a similar, if partial and entirely personal, ranking of my own.

In the ‘first rate’ I’d want to include Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Harper Lee, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett.

So in the ‘second rate’ I’d have to have Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, Joseph Heller, John le Carré and Hilary Mantel.

I’m not going to bore you by going down a whole list, but simply point out that the second rate is made up of outstanding writers, whose names will ring down the ages, and who produced extraordinary books.

Mikes reckoned that he was at best tenth rate, which is probably about right. He’s down there with other writers who entertain and help you wile away a dull hour – you know, John Grisham and Nevil Shute – good writers (well, Shute was a lousy writer but a great story teller) who hit the spot but are a long way behind the best.

Now we can take the same approach to government. We need to be careful, however, because there are more factors to take into account. Competence is crucial, but competence applied to do harm is a defect, not a virtue.

On those grounds, while Abraham Lincoln in the US, Clement Attlee in the UK or Pierre Mendès France in 1950s France, were all first rate, we’d have to say that Tony Blair, whose government might have been first or second rate without Iraq, tuned out at best third rate in the end.

Because they were competent and did more harm than good, I’d have to put the Wilson governments up into second rate. Equally, the Callaghan government didn’t do too much wrong, entitling his time in office to be viewed as third rate.

Maggie Thatcher was extremely able and powerful, but did huge harm, wiping out whole communities (a few years ago, I revisited a village in Yorkshire which was once thriving when it its mine was running, to find it run down, shrunk in population and with 40% of the population on either unemployment or invalidity benefit, victims of Thatcher’s vandalism).

Twelfth rate at best.

When the amateur burglars pay a call
A fine metaphor for the inept playing at Thatcher

I remember an advert from a long time ago for an insurance company. It showed a devastated living room, with books and records all over the floor, amongst the ruins of broken furniture, devices and pictures. The catch phrase was something like, “If you think professional burglars are a threat, wait until the amateurs pay you a visit”.

Well, if we think that the competent Thatcher was a damaging presence, we now need to absorb just how much damage an incompetent version of the same can do. Think of a government that stumbles from crisis to crisis with no plan or guiding philosophy except its own self-aggrandisement, that takes its decisions too late and applies them too weakly, that sacrifices lives to profits in cruel indifference to the suffering and bereavement it causes, and then seeks to blames its advisers for its shortcomings. Yep. You’ve got it. That’s the Johnson government. Thatcher redux, without the ability.

Second rate, this lot? Way beyond their reach

Shall we say twentieth rate for the Johnson government? Or, OK, let’s be generous, maybe nineteenth. But second rate? Nah. They’re nowhere near that good.

As Mikes made clear, second rate is pretty remarkable.

The Johnson crowd comes way, way down below that on the Mikes scale.

By the rivers of Babylon

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we

remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

It was way back in 1978 that Boney M covered a song, By the Rivers of Babylon, originally from the Jamaican group The Melodians.

Boney M covered the The Rivers of Babylon

The lyrics were based on words rather older. They come from the 137^th Psalm, from what Christians think of as the Old Testament.

I recently finished a biography of Frederick Douglass, which was fascinating if, perhaps, a tad too long. There are times when I ask myself “why doesn’t someone who writes such good stuff get better at editing?” Still, it was worth ploughing through.

Douglass was extraordinary. Born a slave in Maryland, he saw and suffered horrible abuse as a child and young man. Eventually he escaped to the North. There he became a leading figure in the fight to abolish slavery in the US. That took courage, because he could have been caught and sent back at any time, until some admirers, ironically in England and not the States, raised the money to buy him from his ‘owner’ and free him.

He preached, rather than merely speaking, against slavery. For one of his speeches he drew on this deeply moving Psalm. It’s about the time when the Jews were taken into captivity in Babylon and there, in bondage and a long way from home, they find it hard to sing the songs of their homeland and their faith.

All the anguish of the exile is there. Something that might be remembered when those who call themselves Christians round on people, from Syria or Libya, or Central America, struggle to their countries to escape persecution or terrible suffering.

I have to admit, though, that when I came across the reference to the psalm in the biography, it was the song that came to my mind. Along with some vague memories of the time when every café, car or canteen was playing it.

I was due to spend the New Year in France and I was, as usual, broke. A friend put me in touch with a family who could drop me not too far from where I was going, for no more than a contribution to the cost of their fuel. I leaped at the chance.

I loved those people. They were a Jewish family from North London, very much my own background. They were my favourite types of Jews. They were practising, unlike me, but deeply involved in secular life, and they were fun to be with.

Sadly, I’ve failed to keep in touch with them (well, they’ve also failed to keep in touch with me), and I can’t do anything about it now as I don’t even remember their names. I just remember the clattering trip in their shaky VW camper van, to the constantly repeated strains of By the Rivers of Babylon (the kids insisted). I also remember we talked all the time, though I don’t remember what about, except for one sad story: they shared the enthusiasm of many Jews for music and their elder daughter was a budding but competent clarinettist. However, they had recently lost a court case brought by a neighbour to stop her practising in their flat. A small but ugly victory for philistinism.

I remember little about the holiday either. It was up in the Alps above Grenoble, in one of those confusing places, either Villard-de-Lans or Lanslevillard. Who does that? Just call one place by the name of the other, back to front?

The parents of one of the people at the party were retiring and selling up the school they had run there for years. It was for kids with respiratory conditions, allowing them to study in clean mountain air. The parents were about to vacate the place and, since it was full of bedrooms, they’d allowed their son to invite a bunch of friends to enjoy a last New Year’s Eve there.

All I remember of the festivities is that it was perishing cold outside.

“The temperature’s down to -10,” one of the revellers announced with glee.

“How much is that in Fahrenheit?” one of the others asked me, having identified me as the only benighted Anglo Saxon present.

I worked it out for him. “About 14,” I said.

“Oh, right. Is that cold?”

You can picture for yourself the delight with which I answered, “Pretty much as cold as -10 Centigrade.”

It was only when I got back to England that I looked up the Psalm. Which was when I made the shocking discovery that as well as the sorrow of the exiles, it also celebrates their lust for revenge. The last two lines are:

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Ah, well. Dashing the little ones against the stones? Not quite as pretty as the opening. I don’t think Frederick Douglass quoted those words in his speech.

The Melodians and Boney M left them out too. I’m not sure they’d have contributed much to the success of a pleasant little pop song, with a touch of gentle melancholy about it.

Not sure they contribute very much to improving the outlook of mankind generally, to be honest.

Coronavirus: the Immortals have spoken

Académie Française
Preserving a legacy. If necessary, in aspic

“Don’t put your elbows on the table.”

“Don’t chew with your mouth open.”

“Use the right spoon.”

Ah, the making of the middle class. All those rules. All those do’s and don’ts.

With rather more don’ts than do’s, of course.

And in language too. Never start a sentence, let alone a paragraph, with a conjunction. Never split an infinitive, a stricture I’m trying hard to learn to finally stop being ruled by. Oh, and never end sentences with prepositions, of course.

I’ve recently been listening to an American linguist, John McWhorter. He points out how little sense many of these rules make and how they vanish in time anyway.

For instance, in German today, ‘there’ isn’t the same in ‘stay there’ (‘bleib dort’) and ‘go there’ (‘geh dorthin’). That distinction, between ‘dort’ and ‘dorthin’, used to exist in English too, between ‘there’ and ‘thither’.

“I want to go there,” infant tells mother.

“Now, my dear,” replies mother, “you know that should be ‘go thither’.”

Yes, well, it wouldn’t happen now, would it? But I bet late Renaissance parents would have said something like that, as they tried to make their kids speak English proper, like.

Why do these things vanish? Chiefly, McWhorter claims, when many people start learning the language as adults. Up to the age of twelve or fourteen, children have a capacity to master a language with all its weird peculiarities; beyond that age, they lose it. Imagine foreigners arriving in England and having to learn the language. Viking invaders, say, who settled, ‘married’ local women (the quotation marks are because such arrangements weren’t always consensual) and realised they had to speak English if they wanted to communicate with their kids or most of the people around them.

“Runnest? Runneth? You expect me to learn to say that? Screw that for a game of soldiers. If you insist I’ll add an ‘s’ in the third person singular, though beats me why I bother, but all the rest will just be ‘run’. OK, pal? Happy with that? If not, just remember which one of us came in awe-inspiring boats sweeping across the North Sea, with a bunch of the most fearsome warriors of the Middle Ages. With fire and sword to make it clear to you that we were staying. Come to think of it, I’ve still got the old battle axe somewhere. Should I fetch it? Ah, now you see the sense in the way I conjugate verbs. Good man. Sensible fellow.”

A good basis for protecting middle-class values: use the right spoon

And in German, the basis for a little gender conflict too

One of the niceties of language that vanished from English over those centuries was grammatical gender. As McWhorter points out, it’s somewhat laughable that German treats spoons as masculine, knives as neutral and forks as feminine. I challenge any German to provide a logical reason for the distinction. What, items of cutlery might have gender clashes?

English has done away with all but biological gender. Houses, truth, postboxes, knives, forks and spoons are all genderless. One less useless thing to learn…

But Old English, as a good Germanic language, did have grammatical gender. I’m sure rigid grammarians tried to get speakers of the language to remember the gender of lots of nouns for genderless things. The Vikings, speakers of Old Norse which had its own somewhat different genders, basically couldn’t be bothered to learn a new system and discarded it.

All this to show that languages change. The rigid rules are senseless. Eventually, they go.

But in French, they don’t go easily. A valiant rearguard action will always be put up to prevent their loss. And there’s a prestigious national institution to lead the fight.

It’s called the Académie Française. It was founded by the Cardinal Richelieu who gave the Three Musketeers such a bad time. Its forty members are so important they’re referred to as the ‘Immortals’. My father liked to quote a film I’ve never been able to track down, in which a character is elected to the Academy and, gazing at his reflection in his new uniform, declares “me voilà donc immortel jusqu’à la fin de mes jours” – “so here I am, immortal until the end of my days”.

The Academy issues regular decrees on the French language to ensure that it isn’t allowed to decline into ignominious pauperisation or, as the rest of like to say, change. If it means mummifying the language or preserving it in aspic, then they’re the ones to do it.

Years ago, they announced the verb for to land, ‘atterrir’, literally to come to earth, could be used for the moon too, so you didn’t have to say ‘alunir’, to come to the moon.

Though you could.

Similarly, an ‘Alpiniste’ could go climbing in mountain ranges other than the Alps. You weren’t an ‘Himalayiste’ or ‘Caucasiniste’ depending on which mountains you tackled.

The Immortals have issued a decree on the Coronavirus related disease. It is permissible to refer to it as ‘Covid’, even in French. But it’s important to understand the word’s feminine. Apparently, too many French people have been treating it as masculine, as with most loan words from English. Think of those quintessentially French terms such as ‘le parking’, ‘le brownie’ or ‘le weekend’, where the form ‘le’ for ‘the’ is masculine.

So why is Covid feminine? Because the gender of a compound term, and Covid is a compound of ‘Corona’, ‘Virus’ and ‘Disease’, takes its gender from the principal component. And that principal term, according to the 7 May issue of the Academy’s ‘Dire, ne pas dire’ (‘Say, don’t say’) collection, is the word ‘disease’. Disease in French is ‘la maladie’, where ‘la’ is feminine. 

So the whole term must also be feminine.

La Covid, then, not le. The Immortals have pronounced.

Vive la France, I say. Vive le français too, come to that. But I’m so relieved those Vikings decided they couldn’t be bothered to learn Old English grammatical gender.

Coronavirus Contrasts

It was a great start to the day to read a piece about the behaviour of a group of parents and teachers in Madrid. Not in a Spanish paper but in the Guardian. And it’s a story that deserves to be known in other countries.

The parents recently ran a confidential survey of the whole parent body, to identify who was suffering the worst economic effects of the lockdown. Then they raised money from amongst themselves and the teachers to help out those most affected.

That included a woman who had lost her job as a cleaner and could no longer afford to feed her daughter. The help of the group meant that they could eat again. What’s more, the group supplied the daughter with a tablet, so that she could follow online teaching and therefore start following the virtual classes her school was providing.

In Britain too people are helping out
A food bank in Bury

This is by no means a unique example. Many of these groups to help the most vulnerable are emerging in response to the epidemic. And there are other examples of strangely community-related behaviour. Taking another example from Spain, I was astonished to read that Juan Roig, owner and Chief Executive of the supermarket chain Mercadona, has decided to take no salary or dividends this year, and to give 70 million Euros to relaunching the Spanish economy.

There’s nothing like a crisis to bring out the best in people. Sadly, it can also bring out the worst.

A US protestor against lockdown
Isn't freedom from fatal disease pretty essential?

There are actions that contrast starkly to this kind of community kindness and mutual support. In particular, in the US there are those groups who are turning out, sometimes heavily armed, but in thankfully small numbers, to demand lockdown restrictions be lifted. They claim to be speaking in the name of freedom. However, since they are clearly not interested in protecting vulnerable people who might be struck down by the virus, they’re only concerned with their own personal freedom.

Presumably, they calculate that they won’t fall victim to the virus.

As it happens, theirs could turn out to be a shortsighted outlook. The virus may disproportionately affect the elderly and those with underlying health conditions, but it has also killed plenty of healthy, young people. In pursuit of one kind of freedom, these protestors are jeopardising another: the freedom to live in safety from a killer disease.

So we see two profoundly different attitudes by individual people. One is community-oriented and altruistic. The other is an affirmation of individual concern and without empathy for others.

What’s true of individuals is true of governments.

The Madrid school group may well find its burden reduced before long. The Spanish government plans to start paying a minimum basic income so that, at least, no one should face homelessness or hunger as a result of the measures it has taken to combat the virus.

The German government, and with even greater success, those of South Korea and New Zealand, acted on time against the virus and applied highly intelligent measures. They seem to have brought the epidemic under control or to be close to doing so, and they have heavily limited deaths.

A nation like the UK, on the other hand, has stumbled from crisis to crisis within the pandemic. The Boris Johnson government was unforgivably slow to react to the growing signs of the scourge about to be unleashed on the nation, and hopelessly inept in its response once it finally woke up. Even today, care workers have insufficient protective equipment and testing is way behind schedule.

Now the Johnson government is trying to force citizens back to work even though little has been done to ensure the safety of workplaces. In other words, it is acting with indifference to human life and it’s no surprise that the death count there is now the highest in Europe and growing.

Worst of all, of course, is Donald Trump in the US. Utterly uncaring of the lives of his fellow citizens, he drives on towards reopening the economy for no better reason than to enhance his hope of re-election. Anyone who questions his views is dismissed as dangerously wrong and a purveyor of fake information, while the greatest disseminator of such information continues to turn his once great nation into an object of pity, and ridicule, internationally.

With the highest coronavirus death count in the world.

When this crisis is over, we shall have to start making some choices. The biggest will be between starkly opposed views of our societies.

Do we prefer the kind of community-oriented approach of the Madrid school group, and the attitude of governments that make protecting the lives of their citizens their first priority?

Or do we prefer the attitude espoused by Trump and the US protestors who place their own desires above those of the society in which they live?

If crises provide a great test of personality, that applies to all of us. Not just occasional heartwarming groups, or even governments whether heartwarming or not. Each of us will be called on to choose between two such profoundly different attitudes towards human life and collective needs.

A lot will ride on the choice we make.