The keys to an unsolved mystery

After a few weeks, I feel the trauma of the experience has receded enough for me to tell this story.

It all started a little while before the lockdown. Remember those times? When we thought we could handle objects on supermarket shelves with no threat to life? When we used to shake people’s hands? Chat to them without masks? We were in the little town of Manises, not far from our home outside the fine old city of Valencia.

We were there to complete the latest round of formalities that Spanish residents have to go through, in order to obtain some document, whose precise nature I can no longer clearly remember, though it was doubtless immensely important and an essential ingredient for a happy life in 21st century Spain.

On the other hand, it may have been to pay some tax or other. That’s another activity that’s popular with the Spanish bureaucracy.

We took the opportunity to wander around the place a little and find out what it offered in the way of exciting amenities. This was useful, because we had only been there in the evenings to play badminton (another receding memory, still banned in these Coronavirus times). We hadn’t seen much of the rest of the town.

Then we returned to the car. Only to discover that the keys had vanished. Both of us had seen them go into Danielle’s bag. Neither of us had seen them come out. We’d been to few places where they could have been expected to fall from the bag. In fact, really the only place was the tax office (yes, I think it was that). We went back, but there was no sign of the key. We tried the police, but they hadn’t had anything handed in either.

So we had to accept the inevitable. Neither of us had ever lost a key before, but now we somehow had. It was a sad record to break but, hey, life is full of things that just happen.

Getting the car back was a little awkward, involving a return trip home by taxi to collect a spare car key, with the help of our neighbour, who holds a copy of our house keys. But it was done in time, and we quickly ordered another key for the car.

Two weeks later, it still hadn’t arrived, but the lockdown had. The garage shut down. We couldn’t collect the new spare key even when it did arrive.

Fast forward 100 days to the end of the strict ‘confinement’ we crawled though in Spain.

The glorious day eventually came when we could return to the beach. And with friends. Things weren’t quite back to normal, so if we had travelled in the same car as the friends, we would all have had to wear masks. So we took two cars. Which turned out to be quite fortunate.

Because after a seven or eight kilometre walk through a nature reserve and along a beach, we got back to the cars, only to discover again that the keys were no longer in Danielle’s bag. We all searched. We took everything out of the bag, turned it upside down and shook it. No keys fell out.

We went back over the walk, with no greater success.

It seemed extraordinary. Having never previously lost a key in our lives, we had now managed to lose two in just over three months. I won’t hide it from you: it was a pretty depressing discovery.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, to lose one key may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.

Our friends were immensely kind. They took us first to the garage. The new key was available, but not usable, since it has to be programmed first. We had to find a way to get the car to the garage, which isn’t easy without a working key. While there, we ordered yet another key, to make sure we had a spare again.

Then our friends took us home, which at least didn’t take them too far out of their way: they live just half a dozen doors away from us. We walked disconsolately indoors. Danielle decided to get something out of my bag.

And found – the car keys.

It remains a complete mystery how the keys moved from her bag into mine. But somehow they did. We’ve decided that this is an enigma we’re never going to solve. Any more than the mystery of how it never occurred to any of the four of us on that walk to look in my bag for the keys, after not finding them in Danielle’s.

Another lift from our friends enabled us to collect the car. And the very next day, we had a call from the garage. The new key had turned up just 24 hours after we’d ordered it, unlike the previous one which took at least two weeks. So we couldn’t cancel it.

Three of a kind: an insurance policy

I’ve been back to the garage and got both new keys programmed and usable. So we now have three keys for the car.

Which may be just as well. With our track record, a bit of an insurance policy against key loss feels like a good investment.

The thing about lying is that it works

The very people who most complain about lying politicians, seem to be the most inclined to believe their lies.

Trump’s supporters, in particular, went along with his slogan about ‘draining the swamp’. That suggested that it was Washington DC that was the breeding ground of all the ugliest and most dangerous lies. Now, since Trump has been in place, with a mandate of sorts to drain that swamp, he has massively raised the level of mendacious toxicity of the very swamp he occupies, which is clearly his most suitable habitat.

Hardly a day goes by without his coming up with some new lie. The latest was to nearly double the number of attendees at his Oklahoma rally, and to claim he was satisfied with the outcome, despite his obvious expression of crushed dejection.

Trump defeated by the poor turnout in Oklahoma
Hope for us all in November

Despite all that, some people keep on backing him. They swallow the lie.

The same is true in Britain.

In my view, Keir Starmer, as leader of the Opposition, had much the better of his exchanges in Parliament with the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) on the 24 June. Above all, Starmer took the approach so many of us have demanded from our politicians for years or decades: calm, well-informed, moderate. He offered praise for where things had been done well in combating Coronavirus, and then focused on a genuine problem on which he called for clarity from the government.

Keir Starmer, on his feet, questioning
Boris Johnson, left

In other words, like the American voters who wanted the swamp drained, he rose to the challenge many UK voters have set politicians.

He asked:

Yesterday, the Government announced the next stage of easing lockdown restrictions. If that plan is to work—and we want it to work—we need an effective track, trace and isolate system. The Prime Minister promised that a world-beating system would be in place by 1 June. The latest figures from yesterday’s press conference hosted by the Prime Minister show that 33,000 people are estimated to have covid-19 in England. The latest track, trace and isolate figures show that just over 10,000 people with covid-19 were reached and asked to provide contact details. I recognise the hard work that has gone into this, but if two thirds of those with covid-19 are not being reached and asked to provide contact details, there is a big problem, isn’t there?

Did the Prime Minister respond in kind? Did he heck. Here’s what he said:

On the contrary. I think that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has been stunned by the success of the test and trace operation. Contrary to his prognostications of gloom, it has got up and running much faster than the doubters expected. They are getting it done—Dido Harding and her team have recruited 25,000 people and so far they have identified and contacted 87,000 people who have voluntarily agreed to self-isolate to stop the disease spreading.

In other words, he gave a purely old-style politician’s answer: on the attack, and dodging the question altogether. As Starmer pointed out:

The Prime Minister just has not addressed the question I put to him. I was not asking about those who have gone into the system—the 10,000—or those who have been contacted; I was asking about the two thirds of the 33,000 with covid-19 who were not reached. That is a big gap.

Clear, simple and focused on the key matter. If only 10,000 are being tested then, on the government’s own figures of 33,000 infected, two-thirds are not being reached. This is bad news. And Johnson’s response? He went back on the attack: “I hesitate,” he claimed without hesitation, “to accuse the right hon. and learned Gentleman of obscurantism. He is misleading on the key point.”

The accusation of misleading is serious in Parliamentary terms and the Speaker had to call on him to withdraw it.

The exchange moved on to the matter of the tracking app, promised for 1 June, then abandoned, now promised again, using commercial software, perhaps some time after September.

Boris Johnson was having no criticism on that front:

I wonder whether the right hon. and learned Gentleman can name a single country in the world that has a functional contract tracing app—there isn’t one.

Strangely enough, the right honourable and learned Gentleman Keir Starmer certainly could name one:

Germany. It had its app working on 15 June and it has had 12 million downloads—I checked that overnight.

So now the decks were cleared for Johnson to move from the lie circumstantial to the lie direct:

I am afraid that the right hon. and learned Gentleman is completely wrong, because no country in the world has a working contact tracing app.

Faced with a clear, verifiable fact, Johnson merely resorted to denial. A blatant, easily refuted lie.

And here’s the sad thing. He won’t be called on it.

Many have demanded that politicians find more honest ways of doing their job, for instance denouncing Blair for lying over Iraq.

They claim to want them more straightforward and thorough.

They called for less aggressive exchanges between them, more focused on solid, reliable information.

Yet a large number of them will rally to Johnson now. They will claim he bested Starmer. They’ll praise his style instead of denouncing his lies.

My only hope? That in neither the United Kingdom nor the United States will they constitute a majority.

So we really can drain the swamp and move to a healthier brand of politics.

A tour that revealed so much by showing us so little

It was a curious guided tour we went on through the old city centre of Valencia. In two ways.

The first curious thing was the reception we twice received from locals, as we stood listening to our guide, Marisa, talking to us through her loudspeaker. In English.

“Welcome back, tourists!” the first cried.

The second even went so far as to applaud us for returning to the city.

Valencia is as beautiful as ever, of course. But it is strangely quiet. Despite the hot weather, and the profusion of tables outside cafés and restaurants, they had few clients.

We heard one frustrated restaurant manager swearing, “this is complete shit”. A glance inside showed food ready for ordering, and no one ordering it. The main problem isn’t that locals are afraid to eat out, though there may be some of that. It’s that the influx of tourists we would expect at this time of year has simply not turned up.

The Coronavirus restrictions are gradually being lifted, but there’s still only a trickle of visitors from abroad. That’s throttling a lot of the business the city depends on.

Hence the applause on seeing us.

We hadn’t the heart to tell them that we all lived here. We might be on a tour, but we weren’t tourists. We didn’t want to spoil their celebration, brief as it was likely to be.

The other thing that made the tour strange was what we were visiting. It was the ‘Judería’, the Jewish quarter of the old city. What made it strange was that it is, physically, all but non-existent.

There was once a thriving Jewish community in Valencia. Many of its administrators and financiers were Jews. When James I took the Kingdom of Valencia from the previous Moorish rulers, he used Jews to help him run the place. In return, he gave them a large chunk of the city to be their own. They prospered so much that before long the Jewish quarter had to be extended still further.

It wasn’t just in administration and finance that the Jews distinguished themselves. In the course of our tour yesterday, we stopped to admire the (modern) bust of Luis Vives, one of Valencia’s most significant scholars, a contemporary and friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Luis Vives, descendant of Jews, 
not honoured in his own land

His major contribution was to the foundation of what we now know as psychology. However, he did that work not in Valencia, but in the Netherlands. An inscription behind the bust explains that the honour he couldn’t receive in his own land was afforded to him in another. Why? He was from a family of converted Jews, most of whom fell to persecution by the Inquisition. He was wise to get out.

A fine building in its own right
But it rather disguises the Jewish cemetery underneath it

Most of the tour was like that. We saw the rather fine palace built on part of the site of the main Jewish graveyard, but we saw no graves. We looked at where the principal Synagogue once stood, but not a trace of it remains. The closest we came to any physical sign of the previous Jewish presence was at the site of a major restoration project on the Valeriola Palace in the centre of the city. An old street runs through the site to the remains of a wall that marks the limits of the Jewish neighbourhood. A recently discovered oven too probably belonged to it.

Shoemaker Street in Valencia
A restoration project revealing a rare trace of the Jewish quarter

It’s extraordinary to see how utterly the community, and even any trace of its previous existence, has been wiped out.

It’s not just the Jews. Valencia was Arab for five centuries. There are more remains of that time than there are of the Jews, but still they’re rare and in ruins – odd stretches of wall, for instance, mostly underground.

And yet Jews offered some of the most important intellectual skills that Spain enjoyed, in administration, finance and even, as we’ve seen, philosophy, science and medicine. Meanwhile, the Muslims provided equally powerful intellectual contributions (one of the key figures leading to the European Renaissance was Averroes, a Moor from the Spanish city of Cordoba) and also some of the most sophisticated agricultural techniques the country possessed. Getting rid of these communities might indeed have made Spain more religiously homogeneous, but what was the price?

Judge for yourselves. In 1492, with the Columbus expedition to the Americas, Spain was launched on an adventure that would make it Europe’s, possibly the world’s, most powerful and wealthiest Empire. In that same year, it expelled its Jews. Twenty years later it was the turn of the Moors.

Within little more than a century, it was being challenged by France and the upstart Protestant powers of northern Europe, the English and the Dutch, the latter of whom won their independence from Spain in a long and bitter series of revolutionary wars.

By the early eighteenth century, Spain’s fate was being dictated to it by fighting between other countries to decide who would be its King, in the so-called War of Spanish Succession. By the start of the next century, it lost its dominance at sea at the Battle of Trafalgar. And by end of that same century, another upstart nation, the United States, had relieved it of its last major colonial possessions.

Perhaps it would have been the same even if it had kept its Jews and its Arabs. But I think they could have held their position a lot longer by drawing on those talents and applying them wisely, rather than driving them out. Accepting a little religious diversity might have done them a lot of good.

And that was the object lesson we drew, from the very fact that our tour showed us how little remained that we could actually look at...

Boris Johnson, latter-day Churchill. In all the worst ways

Boris Johnson famously likes to see himself as a latter-day Winston Churchill. But he may be emulating only the worst aspects of his role model.

“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”

Winston Churchill may have said that himself, but if not, it was certainly said of him.

He was originally elected a Member of Parliament as a Conservative, in 1900. But in 1904, he joined the Liberals, just in time to take part in their electoral triumph of 1906. He enjoyed considerable political success with his adopted party until, once they were a spent force, he returned to the Conservatives in 1924.

Ratting and re-ratting meant that for nearly quarter of a century, he enjoyed a glittering career with each of the two main parties of his day. Among many ministerial appointments, he was a Liberal Home Secretary and a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer within a fifteen-year period.

There is an argument to say that both of Churchill’s defections reflected deep-seated convictions. In the circumstances of the two different times, he may have been closer to one party in 1904 and the other in 1924. But many saw his swinging back and forth as no more than rank opportunism.

Indeed, doubts about his trustworthiness were expressed early in his career. His first party leader in the Conservative Party, the Prime Minister at the time of Churchill’s first election win, was Arthur Balfour. He said of him, “I thought Winston Churchill was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.”

Now, it’s not clear to me that Boris Johnson has ever taken any political position as a matter of principle. Indeed, the only purpose I can see he has for taking any kind of stance is to further his career prospects. We know that as he prepared to take part in the campaign over Brexit, Johnson prepared three draft articles, two in favour of Brexit, one against.

He wanted to see the arguments before deciding which would play best. Which position most served the national interest was no concern of his. Which would be better received most certainly was.

Isn’t that just the kind of readiness to switch position, depending on where the main chance lies, that can lead to ratting and re-ratting?

As for men of promises, it’s hard to imagine anyone who has made as many promises as Johnson has. At the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis, he promised Personal Protective Equipment for health and social care staff, which he conspicuously failed to deliver. He promised 100,000 tests a day by the end of May, a promise only achieved by sending out 120,000 tests to 70,000 people, only on 31 May itself, falling back immediately afterwards.

Finally, he promised a track and trace system based on a bright new app backed by a heavily staffed manual service, by 1 June. That deadline too was missed and now the app itself has been abandoned.

Promises, promises. But no delivery.

Winston Churchill
A smile to go with the iron will

The difference between Churchill and Johnson is stark, in any case. Nothing reveals the nature of a leader so powerfully as their handling of a crisis. Churchill rose to the challenge of the Second Word War with conspicuous brilliance and courage. It is that which gives him his stellar reputation today, allowing most people to forget the ratting and re-ratting, the missed promises, the many blunders.

Johnson’s crisis was Coronavirus. And it has revealed him to be as weak and mendacious as the Second World War showed Churchill to be courageous and endowed with an iron will to win. 

It really does feel as though Johnson has only the capacity to imitate what was least creditable in Churchill. Both men relied on their sense of humour. But in Johnson, it is the clowning of a weak-willed and ineffective buffoon, whereas in Churchill, it was the wit of a man who could smile while he deployed the leadership his nation needed.

Boris Johnson
Self-deprecating because there's so much to deprecate

It makes me want to slightly adapt a remark of Karl Marx’s and say, “history repeats itself, the first time as drama, the second time as farce”.

Upsetting the neighbours

For a few weeks now, we’ve been sharing our house with another family.

To be honest, I’m not sure they see it as ‘sharing’. I think to them, our presence is a thoroughly unwelcome intrusion. “What are they doing here, in our place?” I’m sure they say to each other. Certainly every time, we appear they chatter very loudly to each other about the matter and, though I understand not a word of what they’re saying, I know it isn’t complimentary.

This is all a bit awkward, because we can hardly avoid disturbing them. Every time we step out of our front door, in fact. This is because they’ve built their nest right over that door.

Ah, sorry. I see. You thought I was talking about a human family. No, no. It’s the house martins, the ones I’ve mentioned before.

Three fledglings living above our front door

They have three fledglings now. As it happens, we’re far from convinced that they’re all the offspring of the original pair of inhabitants, the ones acting as parents. This is because we twice found broken eggs lying on the ground. It seems it’s not unusual for house martins who don’t find a nest, or who are too lazy to build one, to make space in someone else’s and lay their eggs there instead.

That hasn’t stopped the parents bringing up all three of the young as their own. They’ve worked tirelessly – and, boy, it must have been tiring – to keep them fed. And now all three are flying and on the brink of adulthood. In other words, unbearable to their parents.

Danielle's great photo of a parent returning to the nest

Danielle saw all three on the telephone cable outside the house, loudly demanding food. And the parents were bringing them what they wanted. Honestly. Too bloody soft, in my opinion.

“Old enough to fly up here,” they should be saying, “you’re old enough to catch your own mosquitoes.”

Danielle can testify that there are more than enough mosquitoes around. She has the infuriatingly itchy bites to prove it.

But the adults keep feeding the three kids. Ah, well, young parents. With adolescent kids. Always a difficult combination.

Today there was even a bit of a crisis. We were sitting outside on the patio, having just had lunch. Danielle was sleepy and ready for a rest.

Suddenly there was some heavy fluttering behind us, inside the sitting room, followed by a couple of dull thuds.

Danielle was suddenly out of her torpor and rushing indoors. There were two house martins flying around the sitting room, one of them banging head first into the picture window between the room and the patio. Like a shot, Danielle collected the young bird – the one doing the head banging – and then pushed Misty, our cat, outside.

Misty, I should point out, is a venerable pensioner of a cat. Now fifteen, he thinks our move to Spain was the best we’ve made. He likes to spend some of his time in the front yard, lying on the couch out there. From time to time, he summons us to let him in so he can have a snack. And then he heads out into the back garden to lie on the warm grass in the sun. Until he decides he needs another snack.

A fine retirement, in fact.

But a little bird knocking itself out in his sitting room? And falling to the floor? That’s enough to return him to his best three-year old form. A snack with a difference, he sees.

But Danielle got him out of the way. Then headed for the front door, the head of the small bird poking out of her hand. She released him and off he flew, loudly proclaiming his relief. Immediately, the adult that had followed the prodigal into the house, flew straight out to take a look at the newly freed child.

So, all’s well as end’s well. At least, as far as we know it’s ended well. Let’s hope the whole family (related to each other or not) is doing well and they’ve recovered from the trauma.

Meanwhile, we’ve learned to keep the front door shut. And, of course, apologised for springing such a dirty trick on one of the family’s children. Talk about disturbing their peace…

One of our neighbours in flight 

Small reminders of lost friends

It’s curious how little things can be heavily loaded with memories.

For instance, back in 1964, my family was camping in Italy, on our way home from a holiday in what was then Yugoslavia, to our home, at that time in Rome. I’ve already described the arrival in the same campsite of an English family, travelling in a tiny Minivan, two adults, two young children and one baby, all of them hot and tired. My parents offered them a cup of tea and a friendship was born that has lasted till today.

Well, it’s lasted with Hazel, the mother of the children, and the children themselves. It would have lasted with Michael, the father of the children, but he died a few years ago. He certainly lives on in my memory, however, and in particular whenever I make ice cubes.

Michael during a beach visit with us in Italy

After that first meeting on the campsite, our new friends came to visit us in Rome. And at one point during their stay, I was putting water in an ice tray and decided, with all the superiority of an eleven-year old, to explain that I wasn’t filling it up entirely because water expands on freezing.

As I was providing that explanation, so helpful to a research scientist, I managed to spill some of the water.

“Ah,” said Michael, “and now you’re demonstrating that water always finds its own level, right?”

I still spill the water sometimes, but I always think of Michael when I do.

Alasdhair, my school contemporary

My oldest friend in my generation was Alasdhair. I met him at school when we were both thirteen. We lived together, with a bunch of other students, in a chaotic shared house at university. Later, our paths parted somewhat – having the Atlantic between us will do that to a friendship – but we never lost contact with each other until his death nearly four years ago. At a ridiculously early age.

I think of him whenever I’m washing up. There was an occasion when his mother had taken the two of us away, when we were fourteen or fifteen, for a few days, and had set us up to washing the plates and cutlery one evening. I was washing, he was drying.

“That doesn’t look quite clean,” she pointed out about one of the plates.

“No problem,” said Alasdhair, wiping it with a tea towel, “a good drier-upper will get what a good washer-upper misses.”

The memory makes me try harder to make sure things are properly clean. Or to dry what I wash, and correct any bits I missed.

Sometimes when I’m washing up, I’ll be cleaning a skillet. That reminds me of the dearest friend I’ve had without ever meeting him. His name was Bob and he lived in Kansas and we met online, through Facebook, though I can’t for the life of me remember how. For several years, we regularly exchanged messages, jokes or advice.

Bob, the best friend I never met

One of his pieces of advice, shared with Danielle who also became his friend, was on the use of a skillet. The beauty of that instrument, you see, is that because it has a metal handle it can be put in an oven, though it looks like frying pan. Danielle bought one after that discussion and has become an expert in his use, as she always does with anything to do with cooking, as with so much else.

So from time to time I find a skillet to wash up and it brings up gentle memories of a kind and excellent man. It’s a lasting regret that we were never able to act on our plans to meet, in the US or in Europe, before he too died far too young, five years ago.

It’s a pleasure that such simple acts can bring good friends to mind. They’re poignant moments, of course. But welcome too.

The history is bad enough, we don't need the monuments

Pulling down statues? Oh, it’s a controversial question in Britain today.

The Prime Minister has said that removing statues of celebrated men of the past is in effect lying about our history. But, like so much that Johnson says, that’s simply false. The history is there with or without the statues. No one is suggesting rewriting it. Statues aren’t about recording history, they're about honouring people who helped make it.

Why honour those responsible for some of its most shameful moments?

The demand to rid the country of statues to our most discreditable historical figures comes chiefly from the Black Lives Matter movement. I support their general aims, and in particular their desire to free ourselves of those blots on the urban landscape, though I would like to see it go a little further.

Edward Colston's statue drowned
Black Lives Matter protestors dump slave trader's monument

Would I have backed the tearing down and dumping in Bristol harbour, of the statue of Edward Colston? I don’t know. It might have been better to have the City Council remove it by democratic decision. But, in purely pragmatic terms, it’s probably easier for Councillors not to put it back in place, than it wold have been to take the initial decision to get rid of it.

Maybe the protestors did the Councillors a favour.

Certainly, the streets of Bristol are cleaner for not having the statue there. I remember clearly the shock I had on seeing it for the first time. I hadn’t previously known anything about him, far less that he had a public monument. Discovering that he did left me speechless. How, I thought, could we honour a man who was a major figure in the Transatlantic slave trade? He may have been a benefactor to Bristol, London and other places, but some at least of his wealth came from slavery. Doesn’t that mean that whatever worthy cause he funded, and however much he gave, what he was handling was the filthiest of dirty money?

Let’s be clear. The slave trade in which Colston prospered believed that men and women could be treated as cargo. It took 12-12.8 million free men and women, captured either in slave raids or as a result of African wars in which Europeans had no legitimate interest, and transported them across the Atlantic. Between 1.2 and 2.4 million of them died on the voyage, the conditions were so inhuman.

Once in the West Indies or Americas, they were reduced to they status of cattle. They had no protection against rape, torture or murder. A white slaveowner had the legal right to do what he liked to a slave with whom he was dissatisfied, or with whom he wanted to satisfy a desire.

The justification for slavery was that the enslaved, for the most part black Africans, were less than human. So the institution set out deliberately to dehumanise them.

How can anyone who played a leading role in this business deserve a statue, simply because he endowed some schools, hospitals and almshouses? Should Berlin erect a statue to Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, on the grounds that he put up some fancy buildings?

The Black Lives Matter movement exists precisely because whites have still not fully emancipated themselves from the attitudes that legitimised slavery. The slogan  is needed because at some fundamental level, we live in societies which don’t think black lives matter enough.

Getting rid of statues of slave traders, of those who resisted the end of slavery, or of those who felt they could treat some people as inferior to others, will contribute to emancipating us all from those shameful attitudes. So I support the movement wholeheartedly.

However, I would like to see the movement go further still, at some time, without distracting from the top priority today, bringing to an end the undervaluing of black lives. I have longed for years to see at least one additional statue removed. It shocked me the first time I saw it just as much as the Colston statue later did. And I saw it a lot, as I was a student for four years at King’s College London and the statue is in the Strand, not far from the College.

It is the statue of Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris who headed the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command during World War 2.

Bomber Harris's statue in the Strand

The principal actions of Bomber Command were mass air raids on German cities. They were sometimes masked as aimed at ‘military targets’, but it’s hard to see how carpet bombing the whole of Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden, could possibly be necessary to hit the few, if any, legitimate military targets they contained.

Dresden after the bombing
A legitimate military target? Seriously?

More honestly, if still euphemistically, the raids are sometimes defended as action to ‘break the enemy’s morale’. In other words, it was hoped they would batter the German population into withdrawing its support from Hitler. That’s military action to obtain political change. And that means action directed against a whole population, and therefore against civilians. 

There’s a name for that. We call it terrorism.

My father served in the Royal Air Force during that war. Indeed, he was a Navigator in a bomber. But he was never in Bomber Command, serving instead in 101 Squadron, which dropped supplies to resistance fighters, towed gliders or dropped paratroops.

Leonard Beeson
Bomber Navigator but never a terror bomber

He often said he was relieved that he’d never taken part in any of the raids on cities. He was forever grateful that he had, by good fortune, avoided being involved in terrorism.

So it shocks me that we still have a statue to the main architect of that terrorism in one of the great streets of the British capital.

The key issue today is to teach us all that Black Lives Matter. So let’s get rid of the statues of the slave trade traders and deniers of freedom, today.

But tomorrow? Perhaps we can move on and learn to stop honouring our terrorists either. After all, we need to remember the role these people played in history, but we don’t need to honour them with monuments.

Cummings and Johnson: how Oscar Wilde got them exactly right

It’s a harrowing balancing act that governments have to carry out in combating Coronavirus.

Let’s not forget that the economic effects of a strict lockdown are devastating and can even lead to disease and death themselves. So a government has to ask itself “how many more lives do we save from the virus by maintaining a lockdown, than we are losing to that lockdown’s impact?” If the answer is that the lockdown is saving fewer than it’s losing, then the choice is obvious: the lockdown must be raised.

But what if the numbers are close to each other? Which way should one jump? Or, to put the choice more starkly, how many lives is it reasonable to put at risk of CVid death, to avoid deaths through poverty and lack of care – or even lack of food?

This is particularly difficult given that it is often the same groups who are at jeopardy. The poorest are the most vulnerable to economic disruption, just as they are the virus itself. That makes it an extremely difficult balance to reach, a particularly delicate judgement call.

What makes the calculations even more fraught is that questionable motivations are often also at play.

In the US, for instance, Trump was anxious to avoid a lockdown and has done all he can to keep it as short and as lax as possible. Is that because he thinks the lockdown will cause more deaths than the virus? Well, with 114,000 dead and counting, that’s clearly not working out.

No. He has calculated, correctly I’m sure, that in order to stand a chance of re-election in November, he needs the economy to be booming. This strikes him as so desirable a goal that he feels that a few tens of thousands more deaths are a price worth paying. He’s trying to get the lockdown relaxed as quickly as possible to start restoring his much-damaged electoral chances.

Dominic Cummings, UK head of government (left)
with his sidekick Boris Johnson, nominally Prime Minister

In Britain, the situation is still murkier. The government there, led by its Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings but fronted by Boris Johnson, faces no election for four years. But it’s true that its marionette strings are pulled by some pretty large fortunes, and the sight of the economy crumbling with those fortunes suffering, must cause considerable pain.

As a result, it’s rushing to release people from lockdown long before it’s safe to do so, just as it got into it go far later than it should have done, and in far too relaxed a way.

Sadly, that’s where we hit the very nub of the government’s difficulties. Because its dilatoriness in getting going, and its hurry in getting out, have as expected given the UK one of the highest rates of Covid death in the world: 602 per million.

You might feel, “well, at least they saved the economy”. Except they haven’t. We read now that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of the richest nations, expects the UK to suffer the most severe impact of the pandemic on its economy.

Cummings and Johnson claim they want Britain to be world-beating. But they probably didn’t mean that it should rack up record numbers of deaths. Especially if they’re also running up the worst record of damage to the economy. That sounds like lose-lose.

Of course, the OECD might be wrong. Perhaps that’s what Cummings and Johnson are pinning their last hopes on. Because if it’s right, the outlook seems dire indeed.

Oscar Wilde defined a pessimist as “one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both”.

Oscar Wilde: as apt today as in his own time

It looks like anyone still backing the Cummings government is fully a Wildean pessimist. It has delivered both evils, in spades. And these oddly trusting people continue to choose them…

Reminders of a wedding, nearly a century on

As I keep going through old photos, in my long, slow task of getting them sorted and, eventually, digitised, I keep coming across some I’ve never seen before or, having seen them, have forgotten all about.

That was the case of some pictures of my grandparents’ wedding. That’s my maternal, Jewish grandparents.

My grandparents on their wedding day
8 September 1921

There’s the standard wedding photo, with the two of them in their finery. They’re looking a bit stern though. Might that be just the way people posed back then? Or Jews, at least, at their wedding? Or was there something to feel a little stern about?

Another photo shows the rest of my grandmother’s family (but I have no photo of his, or at least none I’ve found so far. I’ll keep looking). Shmuel, the paterfamilias, is seated. He was the shoemaker who specialised in making shoe uppers for damaged or deformed feet and could, apparently, make the right shape of upper for a foot that he'd merely felt with his hands. It was a valuable skill and it enabled him to make a home for his family in England, one in which they could live modestly but in comfort.

From left: Edie, Shmuel, Jonny, Blume

He was a smart character, who in 1902 had seen the Russo-Japanese war coming, as it did in 1905. He’d already served seven years in the Tsarist army and knew that, as with black Americans two or three generations later, Jews would be the first called up to fight and the first chosen as cannon fodder. So he left Vilnius for England.

To his far right was my great-grandmother, Bluma. Those who follow this blog may remember that she travelled to join him a year later. My grandmother remembered them standing on the dockside in St Petersburg. In Bluma’s arms was my great-uncle Jonny, who in the photo appears between his father and mother, while my grandmother, then three, was holding onto her with one hand and a potty for Jonny with the other. At far left of the photo is my great-aunt Edie, the youngest and the only one born in England.

Jonny later became a musician, composing a little and also producing arrangements of Jewish music. My last conversation with him was when he rang me at my grandmother’s to ask if I could help a young man he knew who was being charged with inciting British soldiers to mutiny. I forget what political cause he was trying to serve, but it was one I agreed with. Jonny knew I was with the radical left at that time and thought that would help, although I reckon a lawyer might have been more useful.

Emigrating saved the lives of the Sonnscheins. The relatives who stayed behind were all wiped out in the Holocaust.

As for the wedding itself, it nearly didn’t happen. I’ve already told how my grandmother had been engaged to a soldier who somehow managed to survive the First World War, only to be carried off by the flu epidemic of 1918 to 1919. That was a far worse pandemic than today’s.

My grandmother’s name was Yetta Johnson (properly Sonnschein). She may have been a founder member of the British Communist Party, or at least a member from its early days. She apparently became quite a fiery speaker on its platforms. One day, a young man – 28 or 29 – variously known as Nathan Bernstein, or Norman Bannister to anglicise both names, or Nat Bannister as I always think of him, who had recently been released from Dartmoor Prison where he had spent that last two years of the war as a Conscientious Objector, attended a meeting where Yetta was speaking.

He wasn’t inspired to join the Party though he was inspired to join her. She was less enthusiastic, and even broke off the engagement at one point, leading to one of the iconic scenes of our family history: she threw the ring on the ground in the street and Nat, rather than go after her, got down on his knees to find it.

Eventually, she let herself be persuaded to go through with the wedding, on 8 September 1921. Those were the photos I found.

The marriage lasted nearly 60 years, until his death in 1980. On the face of it, that’s a highly successful marriage. But the reality I think was less easy.

I remember him with great pleasure. An image that has stuck with me is of him running for a bus one morning, when he was already 70. He had a great shock of white hair, which I think I’ve inherited, and I remember seeing it stirred by the breeze of his run as he covered the ground like an athlete, calling to me, “you can get home alone all right, can’t you?” 

That trust in my ability to steer myself back, which was fully justified, appealed to me as much as the sight of his running.

However, I don’t think my grandfather can have been an easy man to be married to. He did well in his chosen profession of lithography, eventually becoming a salesman who could visit clients, such as London Underground, and tell them at a glance how many colours it would take to reproduce a picture as a publicity poster. So he was able to provide them with a reasonably comfortable life, but he never lost his instinct for economy. My mother remembered long arguments at home in which her mother had to plead for some small addition to the allowance he gave her for housekeeping, in weeks when she had run short.

He also had quite a temper, though when he died, my mother did admit that he may have been in some pain for the many years before, as the cancer that eventually killed him grew within his body. Still. Living with him can't have been easy.

Is the sternness in the photos perhaps a presentiment of that life to come? Certainly the bleak expression reappears in the picture of Yetta on her own in her bridal dress. Somehow, she doesn’t look over the moon, does she?

Yetta at her wedding
Somehow, not my picture of the ecstatic bride

Alongside the difficulty of life with Nat, I wonder how completely my grandmother recovered from the loss of her first fiancé. He died in 1919, I assume, and she was married in 1921, so she may have met my grandfather within a year or eighteen months of that loss. Did she settle for him on the rebound?

It’s all speculation now, of course. But I find it intriguing to think about. So it’s a pleasure to have the photos to remind me.

Governments losing against Coronavirus: it's no coincidence

“One of the things that makes novels less plausible than history, I find,” says a character in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day, “is the way they shrink from coincidence.”

We do try to reject coincidence. “This happened after that other thing happened, so it must have been that other thing that caused this one.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc, the Romans used to say, after that so because of that.

And yet there really are things that are simply coincidence, in the sense that they happen together, or after each other, purely by chance.

London had a population climbing towards seven million over the decade I was a student there (yep: I was once the proud owner of ten University of London student cards). And yet I hadn’t been there many years before I had my first experience of meeting people I knew, without arrangement, on the street. It happened to me several times over the period I lived there.

What? The chances of meeting any particular person out of 6.5m is, naturally, 6.5m to 1. And yet I several times met individuals I knew?

We are not intuitively good at handling statistical reasoning, as the psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman has pointed out. I had a wide network of acquaintance, which immediately increased the chance of meeting any one of them by chance. And it was not as though I only ever crossed the path of one other person in any one day – on the contrary, commuting from home to work or to college brought me close to hundreds or even thousands of people (hence the difficulty of maintaining social distancing today).

Take that into account, and the probability of meeting someone I knew was significantly higher than I might have imagined. Certainly, high enough for it to be perfectly reasonable that it should happen several times over a ten-year period. Particularly when you consider that most frequently the encounters were in places which act like people-funnels, such as the main railway stations.

In fact, the most surprising such event I witnessed was just last year, as I was catching up with a Turkish friend, Muharrem, who was about to enter Victoria Station ahead of me. I found him in lively conversation, in Turkish, with a woman. After she had left, Muharrem explained to me, “she’s one of the most famous novelists in Turkey, and I met her when I was working at a library where she came to give a talk”.

Despite this kind of experience, we do shrink from coincidence. Indeed, that shrinking becomes a weapon in the armoury of people trying to build certain kinds of argument. They might, for instance, say:

“My friend Sally took that medication. And exactly two years, five months and 17 days later, she had a series of terrible migraines. Coincidence? I think not.”

It’s a great debating trick, because it establishes in advance that only the most naïve and credulous people could possibly respond, “well, actually, yes, I reckon it probably is a coincidence.” As, of course, it is.

After all, Sally probably took other things than that medication before getting her migraines. If anything that happened before them could be regarded as a potential cause, might it not have been the chocolate she had the day before, or the overindulgence in wine, or the fact she drove through a polluted neighbourhood? After that so because of that isn’t an argument, it’s a sloppy and unreliable way of reasoning.

To establish that there’s more than chance at play, we have to show some causal connection between the two incidents.

To take a different example, naturally chosen entirely at random, consider lousy government. Faced with a major and fatal pandemic disease, a lousy government fails to take it seriously. It may attempt to put in place measures to protect its healthcare workers, and even promise to do so, and then take far too long and under-deliver. It may, rightly, identify track-and-trace as the best way to combat the virus, promise to put a system in place and then fail to meet its own deadline.

Or lousy government might just be far too glib in attitude. It may be scornful about simple and effective measures like wearing masks. It may pay lip service to other measures, such as social distancing or quarantining, while flouting them itself and turning a blind eye to infringements by friends or supporters. It may be halfhearted about its lockdown measures and end them too soon.

Now which governments around the world have been most guilty of some or all of these kinds of behaviour?

Why, the governments Trump’s United States, Johnson’s UK and Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Which makes it fascinating to look at the latest figures published by Worldometers. Imagine which are the governments with the highest numbers of deaths due to Coronavirus:

The three nations with the worst Coronavirus death totals
Note that Johnson's UK has the worst death rate per million

A coincidence? I think not.