Wine tasting or drowning in sophistication

There’s something tremendously exhilarating about a wine tasting session. I mean, apart from being able to drink some rather good wines, it also gives you the opportunity to bathe in apparent sophistication even if, like me, you really need water wings to stay afloat in such a rarefied medium. 

I do generally know when I’m drinking a good wine. I’m a bit hazier on the difference between a good wine and a superb one. As for all that stuff about a touch of raspberry or peach, let alone hints of vanilla or liquorice, it’s all completely beyond me. But I like to sit listening to people who apparently know what they’re talking about and nod my head as if I had the faintest idea what they meant, especially if I have a glass in my hand from which I can keep confirming that I don’t.

Now, I won’t pretend that I knew absolutely nothing about Spanish wine before moving to this country. I used to drink the odd glass of Rioja, which I enjoyed, but which I also felt might help establish that veneer of sophistication that, as I said, I rather aspire to. Two of my sons, who have been living in Madrid so long that their move there more or less disappears in the mists of time, then introduced us to the Ribera del Duero wines, which do have a certain je ne sais quoi, even if I don’t know what it is.

Valencian wines, however, I’d never really tried. That’s despite the fact that, as well as rice and oranges, the Valencian region is a leading producer of wine. And it was to that region that we moved.

Danielle and I had been to wine tastings in France and Germany before, but until just now, never in Spain. I felt this was remiss of us. Fortunately, we have two excellent friends, Pamela and Ian, who know more about wine than Boris Johnson knows about mendacious politics. Pamela, indeed, taught people about wine and would take them on wine tasting tours of Spain.

The modern style of the outside of Chozas Carrascal

When they suggested we might like to join them at the Chozas Carrascal winery in the town of Requena, just three-quarters of an hour’s drive from here, we jumped at the chance to get to know the heart of the Valencian wine-producing region at last.

The visit was all we’d hoped for. The company was excellent, of course. The wine was uplifting (perhaps a little too uplifting: we weren’t spitting it out, and by the time I got home, I felt rather too uplifted to do anything much else that day). And, of course, we got all the sophistication I could possibly wish for.

It turns out that Chozas Carrascal is a recent ‘bodega’. Founded in 1990, the land was bought by a family which took over and restored a fine old farmhouse, and then added much more modern but equally attractive buildings around it. 

We were shown around by a friendly and well-informed guide. She turned out to be from Venezuela, like rather a lot of people we meet in Valencia. But then around a third of that sad country’s population has fled abroad. Fleeing what some friends of mine persist in calling Socialism, though I like to think that Socialism might be a tad more attractive than that.  

Our guide Chahua, from sad Venezuela,
with a joyful bottle of 'The Eight'

The family spent a couple of years studying the soil and decided that they could plant eleven grape varieties, each to their own patch of particularly suitable land. They then decided not to follow the vogue set in Anglo-Saxon countries, of having wine from only a single grape variety – a Merlot, a Chardonnay, a Pinot Noir, whatever – but take the individual varieties, each fermented in its own way and then blended for the best possible effect.

So they served us a sparkling wine, a Cava, made from two varieties, a white wine known as ‘las tres’, the three, and to crown the whole session, a red made from eight grapes, ‘las ocho’.  

It might surprise you to learn that I could distinguish all eight varieties and the specific flavour of the soil in which each was grown. At least, I assume it would surprise you, because it would have astonished me. 

I enjoyed it all, though, which I guess puts me into the same category of sophistication of the art lover who tells you “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”.

Well, I know what I like. I liked the wine. I liked the company. I liked the setting. What’s more, we came away with some bottles for us to enjoy later.

Great company, a lovely setting in the old farmhouse's cella
With Danielle, Pamela and Ian

One we’ll be enjoying later this evening, as the old year ends and the new begins. A bottle of two-grape Cava to celebrate the start of what we hope will be a better year. With a touch of sorrow for one event it marks, Britain’s final departure from the EU.

Still, to the rest of us: Happy New Year!

Roxanne Cava from Chozas Carrascal

When I met Purification. With some thoughts on unusual names

Today I met Purification.

That may sound like a curious ritual of a far eastern religion. Think monks in flowing robes, lots of chanting or humming, accompanied by ponderous music on instruments unknown in the West. With, naturally, the result that your soul emerges from the experience cleansed, purified and ready to enjoy greater fulfilment from interactions with the outside world.

All that – especially the result – might have been invaluable to me. But it wasn’t what happened. Purification – or, more properly, Purificación – turned out to be a lovely grandmotherly lady who was walking up our street as I returned from a walk in our woods. I think I may have seen her before, but we hadn’t spoken. That was about to change. 

I think she must have heard me speaking French at some time with Danielle, because she asked whether I was a French speaker. It’s possible, though, that she just thought I spoke Spanish with a French accent. It wouldn’t surprise me. My accent in Spanish is bizarre. I’ve been accused of speaking it with an Italian accent, which always strikes me as ironic: why can’t I speak Italian with an Italian accent, instead only managing an English one? Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised by any description of my accent in Spanish.

It turns out that Purificación learned French as a child. But then, she told me, she’d been sent to London where she’d taught Spanish in a language school. After 14 years in England, she came home to Valencia and got herself qualified as a teacher of English. But instead of being posted somewhere to teach English, she was sent to Ghana to look after young children. She spent 11 years there.

Now, she told me, she helps look after abandoned little children in a home just a few minutes walk away.

“Young children, abandoned by their parents, come to us from the hospitals. And we look after them. Just listen for the sound of children and you’ll know where we are.”

After a while, we introduced ourselves to each other. That’s when I learned that her name was Purificación. The name struck me as unusual, but then I’ve met so many names in Spain which sound strange to an Engish ear. Most of them are religious. 

I’ve already mentioned the two men named Jesus I met recently. As well as the  men named José Maria and the women named Maria José. But there are plenty more such names, mostly for women. Yesterday we made a new friend, called Ascención (irrelevant note: she’s invited us to pick oranges at her farm in a couple of weeks). 

The name I like the most is Inmaculada Concepción. We’ve met several women called that. Obviously, it’s pretty much impossible to use in normal daily life. So the name gets shortened. We know several Inmas but we’ve also met an Ada, who’s kept only the end of her name. Using the other word from the name, Concepción, we also know a Conchi, though she’s actually English, with a Spanish mother. 

So Purificación isn’t a particularly surprising name. At least, in itself. It surprised me because, given what I know the kind of thing babies do, and above all what they produce, purity isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Still, other parents may have felt differently about their newborn, I suppose, and decided that purification was just what best summed up their newly arrived daughter.

The Saint Anne home for six children under six
just down the road from us

In her case, though, it may not have been a name given as a child. What she said about her postings is the give-away. She was wearing no kind of uniform, but she could well be in a religious order, and Purificación may have been the name she was given when she entered it. Because there is an order in this story. The Congregation of Sisters of Charity. It runs a home for children under six, near where we live.

It's not quite an order of nuns, though it lives by the standard monastic rules that govern most orders. The big difference is that they take annual vows, so they can leave if they wish, without ecclesiastical permission. A sister who stays does so voluntarily, out of vocation not obligation, and they dedicate their lives to working with the poor, the suffering, the abandoned. 

The home was founded by three sisters in 1988, when it took in six children who were HIV-positive. Today, they’re just kids who need looking after, for various reasons. In most cases, it’s because their parents can't cope.

What amazed me is that Purificación looked older than I am. In her seventies, maybe, even her late seventies. Her eighties? That seems likely.

And that age she’s still helping to look after kids under six?

It seems to me that she deserves her name. Or something even more elevated. Saintliness, perhaps.

Brexit: he got it done

Boris Johnson said he’d get Brexit done. And he has. With just seven days to go (after four and a half years), he’s agreed a new trade deal with the European Union. Britain can leave with a deal in place, avoiding the mess of a no-deal Brexit.

The deal has a great title. “The Christmas Eve deal”. That has a fine ring to it, like “The Good Friday agreement”, that brought peace to Northern Ireland. But does it do as much good?

Johnson hails the deal
A typically modest and self-effacing gesture

Johnson is trumpeting the outcome as a major success, but then, who would expect otherwise? The problem is that Johnson has, as the police would say, form in this kind of thing. Remember when he was asked in November 2019 whether businesses in Northern Ireland would have to complete paperwork to send goods to Britain? He announced that if anyone was asked to fill in such a document, they should phone him, “and I will direct them to throw that form in the bin”.

To preserve the benefits of the Good Friday Agreement, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic has to be kept open. But that has implications, as the BBC reported on 9 December:

Northern Ireland will continue to follow many of the EU's rules, meaning that lorries can continue to drive across the border without having to be inspected.

However, there will be a new "regulatory" border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales). That's because, unlike Northern Ireland, Great Britain won't have to follow EU rules in future.

This means some checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland will be needed.

If nothing else, that divergence between the Prime Minister’s promises and what actually happens, ought to teach us some caution. So we might do well to be a little sceptical when he tells us: 

This European question’s been going on for decades. I think this gives us the platform, the foundation for a really prosperous new relationship.

What the agreement has given us is the right to keep on trading with the European Union without tariffs or quotas, but with a bit more in the way of bureaucracy and checks. In other words, things won’t be much worse after Brexit. But a “really prosperous new relationship”? It sounds like a relationship a tad less prosperous than the old one.

Besides, it only concerns trade in goods. Everything is still to be negotiated when it comes to services, which represent some 80% of British GDP. All the present deal does is create an atmosphere in which those negotiations can take place without too much bitterness. But what reason is there to suppose that an eventual deal will be better than what we have now?

Meanwhile, the sticking point for many months, according to many of the principals involved (but can they really have meant it?) was fishing. It represents 0.2% of British GDP. Truly insignificant. But this became the key question on which negotiations might founder? It seems extraordinary.

Johnson claimed that he’d come back with a great outcome for fishing. Sadly, the British fishing industry doesn’t agree. Barrie Deas, Chief Executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, said:

In the endgame, the prime minister made the call and caved in on fish 

Doesn’t sound as though Johnson has much to boast about, even on a question that had somehow been promoted far beyond its real importance.

The key question for Brexit, though, was ‘taking back control’. Johnson followed his claim about a new and prosperous relationship with another: 

We have taken back control of laws and our destiny … We have taken back control of every jot and tittle of our regulation in a way that is complete and unfettered.

Well, perhaps, up to a point. Tariff and quota-free access is dependent on maintaining a ‘level playing field’ between British and EU industry. That means Britain has to stick to regulatory standards and state subsidies that don’t give it a competitive advantage against the EU. Johnson’s success was only to have a British enforcement body judging whether Britain is in breach. Either side can, however, apply punitive measures if it feels there has been non-compliance. How is that “complete and unfettered” control of “every jot and tittle of regulation”?

What goes is freedom of UK citizens to move anywhere in the EU. Professional qualifications will no longer be automatically recognised. UK citizens will need visas to stay over 90 days. What’s more, the Erasmus student-exchange programme is closed for British students, because the last thing we want is for our most educated young people to have spent any time living amongst, and getting to know, their fellow Europeans.

The least one can say for the Christmas Eve Agreement is that it isn’t as disastrous as we might have feared. Sadly, that’s also about the most one can say for it. It does no one any good, just a little less harm in certain areas than might otherwise have been the case.

Le Carré: wisdom as well as brilliance
We’re going to miss him

Just a couple of weeks ago, we received the bad news that John le Carré had died. This Brexit deal reminds me of what one of his characters, a fisherman, says in A Perfect Spy, about material that seems promising at first, but is disappointing when viewed more closely.

[It] looked good on the plate, but when you came to chew it over, nothing really there… Same as trying to eat pike. All bones.

A description that perfectly fits any statement made by Boris Johnson, for whom the expression “overpromising and underdelivering” could have been invented.

Let’s see how this Christmas Eve deal plays out.

On the way back up

The winter solstice is behind us! We’re on the way back up. 

Well, we’re on the way up here in the Northern Hemisphere. I say that with all sympathy to my friends at the other end of the world, who are just heading into winter as we start our long climb out of it. I suppose that’s just turn and turn about. My sympathy for the South won’t hold back my pleasure in the North.

It was quite a solstice, as it happens. It was the night of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, which Danielle and I went out into the countryside to watch. With binoculars, we could see how close together the two planets were, which was impressive. Close, that is, in appearance. They remain 730 million km apart. But, hey, plenty of people go for appearance not substance (Trump or Boris Johnson supporters, for instance) so I felt I was entitled to my own flirtation with illusion. 

At least mine was brief.

The conjunction visible on my phone
Well, just visible

That conjunction was an important one. For the last couple of centuries, they have been mostly happening in constellations associated with Earth signs. The next two hundred years will be an Air period which, I’m told, will favour “the renovation of hierarchies, decentralization, shifting orders, rapid translation, mass mobility, trade networks, and rampant spirituality”.

It may just be me, but I’m not sure that the last two hundred years haven’t seen the renovation of hierarchies, shifting orders, mass mobility or trade networks. And spirituality seems to have been pretty rampant, too. Still, who am I to question the validity of astrology in a world where people believe that Covid vaccinations will give Bill Gates control over their minds?

The big deal about getting past the winter solstice is that we’re on the way back towards spring again. That’s not to say that the weather will get warmer straight away. On the contrary, I always remember the words attributed to a Russian general who was asked, at the time of Napoleon’s invasion, which general would defeat the French. He replied “generals Janvier and Février”. Yep. January and February are the merciless months.

Still, there is a compensation. Which is that the days are now starting to get longer again. It’s irritating to be caught out if I’m just a tad slow in the afternoons – and, you know, we pensioners can be slow – and discover that it’s already dark when I take the dogs out for their pre-dinner walk.

So it completely alters my mood to know that the days are lengthening again. It just feels hopeful. It’s the main reason I like to get past that shortest day. 

The best explanation I’ve ever heard of why Christmas is celebrated on 25 December came from a Swiss pastor I once listened to at a midnight mass. It’s obvious Christ wasn’t born that day –there were lambs in the fields, for pity’s sake – so the priest maintained that the midwinter date was the right one for symbolic reasons: it’s the darkest point of the year when we celebrate a light that pierces through it, and that, he reckoned, was the core of the Christian message.

Yes. It does feel right to celebrate that rebirth of hope. Which is no doubt why the Romans held the pagan rite of the Saturnalia on – oh, what a coincidence – the 25th of December…

The temperature is a factor for me too. Not perhaps in the obvious way, not here in Valencia, with its weather made still milder by global warming. Temperatures have dropped below 20 Celsius several times in December, but what’s most surprising is how often they’ve been above that level, at least in the afternoons.

Toffee and Luci coping with the winter temperatures in Valencia
Down, drastically, to the low twenties

Even so, the air’s no longer warm. So I have to dress a little for winter. No coat, most of the time, perhaps. But still more clothes than in the summer. I just love being able to dress in about 30 seconds – pants, shorts, tee shirt, done. But now it’s socks as well, fiddly things for each foot separately. Proper shirts, which need buttoning up, including at the cuffs since I now have to use long sleeves.

All rather tedious.

“Why bother with shirts that need buttoning?” you might ask.

It’s a good question. The answer is that while I’m enormously enjoying being retired, my entry into retirement wasn’t voluntary. Propelled by redundancy, in fact. So I have lots and lots of work clothes left.

That includes shirts with buttons. And I’m going to wear them till they’re worn out. Then I’ll switch to the kind of shirts that don’t need buttoning. 

In the meantime, the buttons, like the socks, are a daily reminder of why winter’s annoying. Which underlines my delight at being on the way back up again at last. 

So, to all of us in the Northern Hemisphere – Season’s Greetings! Have fun! 

 

Preaching to the choir: comfortable but not effective

Projecting, that was what we were talking about when I last posted about Donald Trump. The process by which a weak and vindictive person accuses others of having the very faults they constantly display themselves. In Trump’s case, it’s particularly fun, because what he’s most inclined to attack others for is lying and being abusive, and he does it by throwing untrue insults at them.

What we also found, though, is that the tactic doesn’t particularly work. A lot of people are simply turned off by it. Those who aren’t are his core supporters, and there weren’t enough of them to win the election for him – too many for my liking, but too few to stop him becoming that thing that he hates most, a Loser.

Trump the loser

Just how badly that’s the case is revealed by the fact that, as a whole, the Democrats didn’t too well, and the Republicans did far better than expected. Trump underperformed his own party, so there were many voters who went for Republican candidates in other races, but not for him. Similarly, Biden was saved by being able to attract support from outside the Democratic base.

It’s that failure to win backing from anyone but a core that I want to talk about now. It’s the phenomenon of preaching to the choir. Trump is one of its major exponents, and has the self-inflicted wounds to show for it, but he’s by no means alone in behaving this way. Why, it isn’t even the exclusive preserve of the right.

Trump loves his rallies. Indeed, he loves any gathering of his faithful. You may remember his motorcade making a point of driving past cheering supporters outside the White House, campaigning to reverse the results of the presidential election. 

That’s the thing about preaching to the choir. It makes you feel good, all that adulation. But it doesn’t get you far. It gives you a false notion of your real standing. Trump can emerge from a rally with the applause still ringing in his ears and deluded that he has such backing that, if he lost the election, it can only have been because it was rigged against him.

I believe he really has that delusion, that he isn’t lying when he says he won the election, but genuinely believes it, because the notion that he might have lost strikes him as genuinely unthinkable.

That comes of having failed to listen to anyone but his core supporters. He makes sure he never hears a contradictory voice by simply firing anyone who offers him a word of caution, by never listening to anyone who opposes him, and by writing off as fake any report that he dislikes in the media.

The result is that he loses an election by 7 million votes, thinks he can overturn it by appealing to judges only to discover that even the ones he appointed won’t help, and finally toys with turning to a military who won’t back him either: some of his advisers have been talking about proclaiming martial law as a way of hanging on to power. They feel he can ignore the fact that many elements from the military are committed to upholding the Constitution (which Trump, despite his oath of office, clearly isn’t) and have little time, in any case, for a draft dodger who never misses an opportunity to abuse them.

Preaching to the choir and ignoring everyone else. It gets you nowhere. In Britain, we had the same experience with Jeremy Corbyn, from the far left of the Labour Party and its previous leader. Many of us felt that he was so poor a leader, he would inevitably lead the Party to crushing defeat. But anyone who said anything along those lines was viewed as a traitor, the same charge Trump brings against any of his fired staff who speak out against him. 

Corbyn and his supporters listened only to themselves, consulted only their own wishes. When told he was unelectable, they would point to the over 300,000 Labour members who’d elected him leader and the adulation offered him, as to Trump, at his rallies. They couldn’t bring themselves to understand that a majority of the Labour Party was never more than a nice-to-have, when power requires ten or eleven million votes from the national electorate.

Jeremy Corbyn
loved by the few, defeated by the many

The result was the same as in the US. A crushing defeat, worse even than Trump’s. And just like Trump, Corbyn’s supporters continue to claim that the defeat was down to enemies and traitors, and media smears, rather than the candidate’s own ineptitude. Because the choir knew Corbyn or Trump (delete as applicable) was the saviour of his nation, it was obvious that the whole nation must know it, and if he lost, it can only have been by dirty tricks.

Try to listen to no bad news, and learn nothing from it when you can’t avoid it. That’s the way of the deluded who can’t see beyond the cheering of core supporters.

The present British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is in much the same boat, with a subtle difference. Trump and Corbyn believe that everyone shares their high opinion of themselves, and endorses their particular views. Johnson is just as convinced a narcissist, but he has no views. He just wants to be loved. He’ll choose any position that he thinks will win him that love.

On Brexit, the great question of recent times in Britain, he drafted articles for his then employer, the Spectator magazine, both for and against leaving the EU. He plumped for the leave position because he felt it would gain more traction.

Now, however, after four years of constantly playing to that particular sector of opinion within his Conservative Party, he has painted himself into a corner where he looks set to emerge with no deal to ease Britain out of the EU. That position is supported by under 20% of the British population.

So intent has he been to preach to the hardest of Brexiters, that he’s got into a position where he’s loved by far too few people, and despised by a great many more. His days as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister are probably numbered, as Conservatives don’t like being saddled with vote-losing positions.

The irony is that he may not even really believe in the position he’s forced himself into, and only chose it because he mistakenly convinced himself that it would win him affection.

Boris Johnson: losing control?

His story provides further evidence of the painful truth: preaching to the choir may feel comfortable, but it’s dangerous. Whether you’re Trump, Corbyn or Johnson, when the bill is presented, as it inevitably will be, the price may be painfully high.

Wokers of the world unite

What a joy to come across a good news story. They’re few and far between these days. Well, apart from the defeat of Trump, of course. But that’s something to celebrate over the next four years, just like we grieved over his 2016 victory for the last four. In the meantime, we need some other light moments to reduce the gloom, and it was a joy to come across one.

It was provided by France.

These days, the word ‘woke’ has begun to sound like an insult. People are ‘woke’ if they back causes such as equality for LGBT+ people, for minority ethnic groups, or for that odd minority (odd because it’s actually a majority), women. Backing such causes makes many on the right feel uncomfortable, probably because they hate them but know that’s shameful, so they take out their bitterness and ambiguity on those more liberal than they are.

‘Liberal’, of course, being another pejorative term. At least in the US.

With Trump beaten, though, I think it’s a good time for those of us who do think that people are people, and they all have rights that deserve to be respected, to stand up and throw the abuse back in the face of the right-wingers. Perhaps we can take up the word, embrace for ourselves what our opponents use as a term of abuse, and make the word ‘woke’ or own, and proclaim: wokers, stand up!

So what’s the story I was talking about?

Anne Hidalgo, first female and first immigrant mayor of Paris

Anne Hidalgo is the first female mayor of Paris. And the first immigrant mayor, the daughter of Spanish parents. She won the position in 2014 and was re-elected, as a Socialist, this year, at a time when the French Socialist Party was in deep doldrums. There’s talk of the Socialists running her for President next time, and it does seem to me that she’s probably the only candidate that party could put up who would stand a chance of beating Emmanuel Macron and, more to the point, the ghastly far-right Marine le Pen.

Hidalgo’s just been fined 90,000 Euros, in her capacity as mayor. How did she react?

“I am happy to announce that we have been fined,” she told the City council.

Why was she so happy? Because the fine was imposed as punishment for her behaviour in 2018, when she filled sixteen senior positions in the council, eleven with women and just five with men. That meant that 69% of the appointments were to candidates of one gender, contrary to a 2013 law requiring no more than 60%. 

It’s lost on no one that the motivation for the law was to protect women’s employment rights, not men’s.

Also ironic is the fact that had this happened a year later, there would have been no fine. The law changed that year to make it not illegal to exceed the 60% threshold if the result was a more equal distribution of posts between the genders. Since the 2018 recruitments left women holding 47% of senior posts, clearly the exemption would have applied had it already been law.

So, really, the penalty was all down to bad timing.

Hidalgo has no intention of abandoning her feminism. Apart from needing to adjust the gender balance in recruitment, there is also a problem of pay inequality: women in senior positions in the Paris council are, on average, paid 6% less than men. 

What’s more, as she told her fellow councillors, the lag in gender parity in France is far too great for any relaxation in efforts to close the gap. Which is true around the world. The woke agenda hasn’t been exhausted yet…

So how about the fine itself? Anne Hidalgo told the Council that she would take the cheque down to the Ministry of Public Services, which imposed it, accompanied by all her female deputies and divisional directors and, indeed, any female group leaders in the council, whether from the mayor’s group or the opposition. That should make for quite a deputation.

That’s where we reach the attractive sequel to the story.

The Minister for Public Services, who also happens to be a woman, Amélie de Montchalin, responded to Hidalgo’s tweet on the subject.

I want the fine paid by Paris for 2018 to be used to finance concrete steps to promote women in public services. I invite you to the Ministry to discuss them!

The Minister’s tweeted response to the Mayor

Like I said, the whole story is a glimmer of light in a generally gloomy political world. Two women, from different parties, equally committed to tackling one of the major problems of our day. And showing how they can explore ways of doing so together in an exchange of views that warm, supportive and polite. In the waning days of Trump, that politeness alone is a breath of fresh air, isn’t it?

And what a great call to all of us wokers to stand up for our values.

Projection may feel good, but does it work?

Before he disappears into well-deserved oblivion, let’s spare a moment for William Barr. Remember him? You probably won’t for long. He’s soon to be Donald Trump’s former Attorney General. 

Within the bunch of obsequious sycophants Trump surrounded himself with, Barr was one of the most obsequious and sycophantish. But then he made a mistake. He briefly allowed reality to intrude on his stream of flattery to his lord and master, and admitted that there was no evidence of any significant fraud in the 2020 Presidential election. He told AP on 1 December:

To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.

“So what?” you might say. “That’s blindingly obvious and Trump’s the thing he most hates, a loser.”

Ah, yes. It’s obvious for all who have eyes to see. But that doesn’t include Trump. Indeed, he’s not prepared to allow others to see the self-evident truth, even for an instant. Barr had to go.

Barr and Trump, before their ways parted

Gone he has. But his contact with reality has proved brief indeed, lasting just under two weeks, before he reverted to full throttle sycophancy. In his resignation letter of 14 December, he told Trump:

Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless, implacable resistance. Your 2016 victory speech in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds.

Now that’s a fascinating statement. Because when it comes to being abusive it’s hard to think of any politician who has outperformed Trump. Take his 7 September 2020 tweet about John Bolton, the man Trump appointed as UN Ambassador and then National Security Adviser before falling out with him catastrophically, as he has with so many of the staff he’s brought on board:

Just heard that Wacko John Bolton was talking of the fact that I discussed “love letters from Kim Jong Un” as though I viewed them as just that. Obviously, was just being sarcastic. Bolton was such a jerk! 

“Wacko” and “jerk” hardly seem to be terms of endearment. Nor do they seem to be the terms of adult political discourse. But at least it’s not as bad as what he said about a man whose election he celebrated two years ago, Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State in Georgia. 

On 26 November, he suggested to reporters that Raffensperger had reached an agreement with the Democrat and voter registration activist, Stacey Abrahams, on “harvesting”. This is where a person completes an absentee ballot and it’s delivered by another. In reality, Abrahams has merely been registering huge numbers of voters – which is both legal and highly democratic.

Trump saw things differently:

You're not allowed to harvest, but I understand the secretary of state, who is really an enemy of the people, the secretary of state, and whether he's Republican or not, this man, what he's done, supposedly he made a deal and you'll have to check this, where she is allowed to harvest but in other areas they're not allowed.

An enemy of the people? That’s far worse than “Wacko” and “jerk”. It invites “people” to take action against their “enemy” – in other words, it’s an incitement to violence.

But this comment takes us into another area too. The reality is that there was no such agreement between Abrahams and Raffensperger. What Trump was doing was sowing the seed of a lie. He said “you’ll have to check this”, but those are weasel words, because the idea is now out there.

Abuse and deceit. They’re Trump’s hallmarks. So what does Barr mean by denouncing “a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds”?

Well, what he’s doing is projecting. He’s accusing his opponents of precisely the offences which his side repeatedly committed. And still is.

Perhaps the most striking of the examples of this projection is the most recent campaign being run by Trump and his supporters. The slogan is “Stop the Steal”. And it’s a slogan I wholly support: it’s nothing short of unconscionable to allow a defeated candidate to try to steal an election that he didn’t in reality win.

Which is exactly what Trump has been trying to do.

I can imagine that projecting in this way must give the Trumpians a sense of comfort. The problem is that it hasn’t really worked, has it? Trump has thrown abuse and lies around for four years, but it hasn’t delivered the election he wanted to win. It has, in fact, left him as what he most hates to be, a loser. And why was that?

The problem is that those lies and that abuse worked, but only with a minority of the electorate. A worryingly large minority, but still only a minority. However good it may have made Trump feel, it failed in its main objective, which was to sweep him back into office. Far too many people just saw him as untrustworthy and brutal.

What he has done, in fact, is take an approach that appealed only to the people who were already his convinced supporters. And that’s part of a wider and ineffective strategy, of preaching to the choir. That’s an approach not limited to Trump – it’s happening in Britain too, with Boris Johnson and the Brexiter movement.

Nor is it limited to the right. On the left, Britain saw the same delusion being pursued by the former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. Trump, Johnson, Corbyn. They couldn’t see the need to reach out beyond their base.

But that’s something I’m going to look at in my next post.

As I walk with Jesus, Misty copes with winter

As Christmas approaches, what could be better than a walk with Jesus?

The context to that perhaps strange statement is set by the changes there have been recently in the non-human members of our household. 

You only have to look at our cat Misty, when he’s lying in the sun in summer temperatures we would find unbearable, to realise that even a cat as hard to please as he is, finds life in Spain not entirely unsatisfactory. His body language says, “of all the four countries you’ve dragged me to, this one isn’t too awful. It just about meets my exacting standards for a self-respecting cat’s retirement”. 

Misty enjoying the summer

He spends nights outside, too. But as soon as he hears me moving around indoors, he makes it clear – “very vocal, isn’t he?” Danielle says – that it’s time to let him in and feed him. Then, once the sun hits the grass in the back garden, he’s keen to get outside once more. “Never put off till tomorrow the lazing around in the sun you can do today,” he seems to feel.

A good place to spend the day in summer

A better place to spend the day in winter
(Luci to the left, Toffee in the middle)

With the arrival of the cooler weather, though, his behaviour’s had to change. He finds that out-of-doors isn’t such a good place to spend the nights. He still insists on being let out, but is back within minutes demanding to be allowed in again. Which would be fine, even though it involves me having to interrupt whatever fascinating and massively important activity I’m trying to focus on, except that half an hour later he’ll want to head out once more. It’s as though he expects the weather to have turned milder in the meantime.

Possibly the central heating leaves him a little confused.

The worst of it is that, with all his in-out-shake-it-all-about behaviour, sometimes I get confused and can’t remember whether he’s out or in. This happened the other night. I left him outside when I headed to bed. Oh, boy, was he fed up with me in the morning. Not only did he complain loudly to Danielle (it was she who let him in), but he came upstairs just as soon as he’d had some breakfast and mewed furiously at me through the bedroom door.

“Particularly vocal this morning,” Danielle remarked.

Oh, yes. Very vocal. And I know just what he was saying.

“What kind of a moron, are you? It’s December, you incompetent fool. And you left me outside for the whole night. Don’t give me any of that ‘this is Spain’ stuff, it won’t wash. How would you like to spend the whole of a December night in the garden? Even in Spain? What makes you think I’d like it, then? Now just open the door and let me get on the bed to warm up.”

Very vocal, indeed.

You may say that the problem would be resolved if we had cat flaps. Well, we do. But we can’t leave them open, because of the Siamese next door. To him, an unlocked cat flap’s just a standing invitation to come in and go after Misty’s food. Or even just after Misty. They met just down the street the other day, and had a heck of a fight. It made me think of T S Eliot’s fine epic, Growltiger’s Last Stand:

But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed;
To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed.
The Persian and the Siamese regarded him with fear –
Because it was a Siamese had mauled his missing ear.

Misty may not have had a Growltiger mauling, but he came out of that last battle bleeding from the ear. It took a lot of comfort, including plenty of comfort food, to get his equanimity back. 

The dogs have taken far more enthusiastically to the cooler times. Where before I sometimes had to carry Toffee into the woods to get her to walk with me, these days they both run ahead of me to go out, and give every sign of enjoyment while we’re out there.

It was just after the contretemps with Misty that I had my encounter with Jesus. 

I took Toffee and Lucy out for their walk, partly as a way of soothing my bruised ego, after Misty’s rebukes to me. A short walk, I felt, just to get a little fresh air, and then back home. But we’d barely been in the woods a few minutes before I heard someone calling me. 

“Cavalier, cavalier,” he was saying. It’s the Spanish word: “Caballero, caballero”. 

I felt like replying, “Yes, I’m Sir David,” except that it would have been a lie, since I’ve not been a beneficiary of the fine British Honours system, with all its excellent qualities, such as self-promotion for the privileged elite or borderline corruption (not always merely borderline).

“Where are the trenches?” he went on.

The trenches? During the Civil War, the Spanish Republic moved its capital to Valencia, just twenty minutes’ drive down the road from where we live. And it built trenches in what are now our local woods, to defend the approach to the city. As it happens, the Republic was defeated before a last stand could be made in those trenches, so they were never used. But their remains are mouldering in the woods, a reminder of the bitter defeat of a democratic regime by a military uprising.

“They’re two or three kilometres from here,” I told him.

“That’s all right. We’re looking for mushrooms and we’re told the best ones are out that way.”

I barely had a chance to wonder why he’d said ‘we’ when his companion – his brother-in-law, it turned out – showed up.

“I’ll show you the way,” I told them.

They wanted to know my name, so I told them. And then the first one I’d met told me, “And I’m Jesus.”

I absorbed that. Names are funny in Spain. There’s plenty of Jesuses. As well as Immaculates and Conceptions (I keep hoping to meet an Immaculate Contraception, but haven’t yet). You even get amusing combinations: María José (Mary Joseph) is a woman’s name, while José María is a man’s. 

“He’s Jesus too,” added the man I now think of as Jesus 1 (I hope that’s not blasphemous), indicating his companion. “I’m afraid we have the same name. Pure coincidence.”

“Ah, yes,” I replied, “to avoid confusion,” but he didn’t react to that.

So I got my walk with Jesus. Or rather, all three of us did, since Luci and Toffee shared the blessed moment with me. And not with just one Jesus, but with two. Who could ask for a better preparation for Christmas? 

I hope they found plenty of mushrooms.

Slippery Jack mushroom
Our woods are full of visitors picking them

Show me the (Christmas) gold...

The three kings, I’m told on authority it would be presumptuous of me to question, brought the infant Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. 

Frankly, I reckon you can keep the frankincense and myrrh, just show me the gold. Which, I’m glad to say, is in line with mainstream thinking in most allegedly Christian societies. As the approach to Christmas shows.

The idea of exchanging gifts at Christmas has to be one of the smartest marketing ploys I’ve ever come across. What a boon for retailers, selling everyone presents to give to everyone else. It does indeed transform the celebration of the birth of Christ into the great feast of gold – the feast of Mammon, one might say – of the year.

Or at least, so it was until Covid hit us. 

Christmas craft fair near the old Valencia City Hall

Our local city holds a Christmas craft products fair. This year, with the need to avoid enclosed places, it’s on the square outside the old City hall. It’s just twenty stands or so, with no mulled wine or sausage with sauerkraut. The arrangements are Covid-sensitive, with masks obligatory, signs everywhere calling for social distancing and a guarded entrance to keep numbers below a prescribed maximum.

The items on sale are genuine artisanal products, locally made and of good quality. One of the stands is held by a friend, one of our neighbours, so we mainly went to see her and her delicately hand-made sliver jewellery. Though we also visited the other stands, of course, while we were there.

Our friend, with the welcome assistance of her daughter, 
on her jewellery stand at the craft fair

It was cool, by Valencian standards, but the sky was clear, the winter sunlight strong. Wandering the stands was pleasant, and we even bought a couple of things that we were pleased with. But it was sad to see how few visitors there were. The Valencian Community – that is to say, the entire region of 5 million people around the city – has closed its borders to all but essential travel, to keep Covid out. But that means there are no tourists. There haven’t, in particular, been any cruise ships for months, and they used to make a major contribution to the local economy, disgorging large numbers of visitors into the city, all with money to burn and an anxiety to take mementoes home with them.

Not any more. Which made the whole thing feel slightly like a feast of Mammon with no worshippers. A strangely sad experience.

We were there on 6 December, St Nicholas’s day, which seemed appropriate. A Christmas visit on the day of Santa Claus sounded about right. 

It turns out, however, that 6 December is also a Spanish national holiday, the day of the Constitution. The Town Hall Square is often the venue for political demonstrations and, indeed, one got going while we were there. There were Spanish flags, and a message probably best translated as ‘hands off the constitution’.

“Hands off the Constitution”:
the Right takes to the street on Spanish Constitution Day

Defence of the constitution sounds like the right kind of concern for Constitution Day. The day celebrates the referendum in 1978 when the Spanish people, by a large majority, voted for the present constitution. That marked the definitive end of the previous regime, the hard-right autocratic dictatorship of General Franco. It was the moment when parties of the Left, including the Communist Party, would at last re-emerge from the shadows, be legalised and take part in political debate again.

All those Spanish flags, however, suggested something somewhat different. Isn’t it odd how, these days, national flags which belong, in theory, to every citizen of a nation, have been taken over massively by parties of the right? That demonstration was no exception. These were right-wingers who, if they were defending the constitution, were doing so against alleged attacks from the centre-Left coalition headed by the current Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. Supposed attacks that mostly take the form of instructions requiring sensible precautions against Covid, interpreted by many on the right as intolerable attacks on individual rights.

An interesting dilemma. A debate, in fact, that is dividing all the democracies at the moment. There’s a positive view of rights, which says “I have the right to do this thing and no one’s going to stop me”. That would include, for instance, going out of doors without a mask. And there’s a negative view, which says “I have the right to be protected against the threat you pose to me”. That would include obliging everyone to wear a mask, to help others avoid infection.

I wandered among the demonstrating group – it wasn’t really big enough to be called a crowd – saying nothing about my inclination to go for the negative view of rights, as opposed to their more positive inclination. I wasn’t looking for a debate, and I didn’t know how they might react. After all, it’s only a few weeks ago that several retired senior army officers were found to have exchanged WhatsApp messages in which they advocated executing 26 million Spaniards – the ‘reds’, by which they mean anyone to the left of Genghis Khan.

The demonstrators outside the Town Hall may not have shared that remarkable ambition. But I noticed some of them with badges of the Vox party, the inheritors of the Franco tradition. He didn’t murder 26 million, but he certainly despatched many tens of thousands. I can’t help imagining that the commitment to a democratic Constitution of some of those demonstrators extends, like Donald Trump’s, only as far as their interests go.

Difficult times, we live in, even in the Christmas season. Which clearly no longer has much to do with the celebration of Christ or with spreading goodwill to all mankind. Or even with the worship of Mammon to any significant level, given how few customers are heading to the shops these days.

No frankincense, no myrrh and, sadly, it seems, precious little gold either.

A monumental error with a terrible cost

7 December. It’s a date I tend not to forget because it’s the birthday of a schoolfriend of my sons'. Ironically, he’s half Japanese.

That’s an irony because it’s also the date of the Empire of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. That has to be one of the greatest cockups in history. And it reflects a problem that’s with us again, in some strength, today: excessive admiration of patriotism. My country right or wrong, and all that. 

Well, the Japanese who went to war with the Americans that day tended to subscribe to that kind of patriotism. And on that occasion, it was their country deeply wrong.

Aftermath of the raid on Pearl Harbor

The fundamental mistake was to think that Japan had the power and the men to defeat, or at least fatally weaken, the US in a single blow. They had, after all, become seemingly unstoppable in their invasions of Korea and China. A similar mistake would be made in Europe by Adolf Hitler when, made overconfident by his lightning advances (Blitzkrieg literally means lightning war) against Poland, and France, he threw the German armies against Soviet Union, expecting a victory as complete and rapid there.

But at Pearl Harbor, Japan did a lot of damage, but nothing that the US could not recover from. None of the US Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers had been in harbour that day, so they escaped damage. But the Japanese had made a far more serious error still: they had failed to understand the sheer depth of industrial and financial muscle of America, and its resolve to fight back against attack. When the US switched much of its industry to war production, it could outbuild the Japanese in such critical equipment as warplanes, ships and tanks, many times over.

What I find far more telling, however, is the difference between the two nations in the assessment of simple, human manpower. The US could turn out planes quickly, but it could took a long time to train a pilot. So they rightly valued their pilots far more than the planes they flew. 

The most stirring example of that attitude was given on 20 June 1944, when US planes were sent against Japanese ships in late afternoon, and at extreme range. Everyone knew that this means that surviving pilots would be returning at night and with their fuel practically spent. 

In one of the more moving moments of the Second World War, Admiral Marc Mitscher ordered all the fleet’s lights turned on. On the face of it, that’s a crazy decision: any Japanese submarine in the neighbourhood would see the lights and close in for some easy wins. 

But Mitscher wanted to do anything he could to save his airmen.

Even so, 100 planes were lost, as many as 80 trying to land back on their carriers. But because many of the planes that had to ditch got close to the fleet before they went down, destroyers searching the area next morning picked up a lot of men from the water. 

Overall, despite losing 100 planes out of the 200 sent on the mission, the US fleet lost only 16 pilots and 33 crewmen, most of them in the battle itself. The planes could be replaced relatively easily, the men couldn’t.

Japan had a profoundly different view. The culture saw it as honourable to die in battle. Men were supposed to put their loyalty to the Emperor above the preservation of their lives.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan probably had the most skilled air force pilots in the world. Over the next year or so, they lost them with extravagance, as though they could be replaced with ease. By the end of the war, they were sending barely trained pilots into action, with the obvious results.

By then, of course, they couldn’t replace their lost planes any more either, with all their ports blockaded and their convoys of vital raw materials, most of which had to be imported, sunk by US naval action. So it no longer made any difference. But the casual loss of their people was always a mistake in any case and certainly helped destroy their war effort.

The Japanese had relied on their cultural traditions and their deepseated views of man and Empire, and both traditions and views had failed them. Other nations ought to learn that lesson. The British or Americans are inclined to be a little lazy in expressing pride in country and certainty that their underlying characteristics will ensure their success. 

That kind of attitude led Japan to its crushing defeat.

Curiously, if we come back to that fateful day, 7 December 1941, one extremely well-placed figure on the Japanese side, had it entirely right. Isoroku Yamamoto was the Japanese admiral in overall command of the fleet that launched the attack on Pearl Harbor. He said of it:

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

He was right. Indeed, that giant got him before the end of the fighting. He died when US fighters, guided to the right point at the right time by codebreakers, intercepted a plane he was travelling in and shot it down.

His country got it wrong, and he paid a heavy price for that error.

A Guy, a Bubble and a great Hospital

One of the things I liked most about the work I did for 35 years was that it involved visiting a lot of hospitals. Some of them were prestigious and often they were housed in remarkable places.

Take Guy’s Hospital in South London. It’s not the oldest. But the eighteenth century, when it was founded, is one of the high points of British architecture. The original buildings certainly give the impression that you’re entering one of the high temples of medicine. A place dedicated to the best in patient care. An institution in constant pursuit of excellence. 

The quad at Guy's Hospital

Curiously, though, it wasn’t just the pursuit of excellence that got Guy’s Hospital built. It was also something much baser. Something much more common and which has, arguably, driven the evolution of human society, far more powerfully.

That was the greed for riches.

You don’t know the story? Oh, let me tell it to you.

The South Sea Company was a brilliant scheme. One of those superb ideas from which everyone can get rich quick. Which means it was pretty much bound to end belly up.

The initial idea seemed good. By the early eighteenth century, Britain was becoming one of the major world trading powers. That meant it could afford to fund the wars it was fighting, one after the other, in monotonous succession.

That didn’t mean the British government had the funds it needed. Its credit was good, because the country’s economy was strong, but it had to borrow again and again. The burden of its debts began to be hard to bear.

Along came the South Sea Company with an extraordinary offer. They suggested they could shoulder a large portion of that debt. Unsurprisingly, government leapt at the chance. 

In particular, the company took over a great many government annuities. These were yearly payments to individuals throughout their lives. The government had raised significant funds that way, but as their needs had increased, so had the interest rates they had to pay, peaking at 6%. Fine if the beneficiaries died young, so the annuity stopped, but if they lived into ripe old age, the cost could be massive.

The company took a lot of annuities over. Then it set out to swap as many as possible for company shares. Since the shares were growing quickly in value, that proved easy. In fact, people were dying to exchange their boring if reliable annuities for shares, since their rising value meant they could multiply their stakes several times over in just a few months. Shareholders could make a fortune.

On paper.

The enthusiasm spread. New companies were launched, ready to cash in on the buying frenzy. There were companies to improve gardens, to convert mercury into a malleable metal, to build a perpetual motion machine (which is a physical impossibility). Best of all was a company “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage; but nobody to know what it is”. 

It more or less didn’t matter what your company was set up to do. If it was a company, and if it was offering shares for sale, people bought them.

Where they didn’t have enough money, they borrowed to fund their share purchases. And they found borrowing easy, since lenders were happy to advance them the loans for such a fine purpose.

But what about the South Sea Company itself? What was it in business for? What did it get in return for taking on so much government debt? 

The government had granted it the exclusive right to trade in ‘the South Seas and West Indies’. That, above all, meant trading in slaves. And the South Seas were South America and its islands.

Unfortunately, South America was the possession of Spain and Portugal. I don’t know whether anyone in Britain thought that those two nations would say, “Hey! The Brits want to come and trade here? In particular, they want to get into that great act, trading in African Slaves? We’d better just give up our monopoly on trade with our possessions and let them in.”

Neither Portugal or Spain decided to do Britain or the South Sea Company any such favours, except at a minimum level as a result of war or under its threat. But then, the Company wasn’t intended to do much trading. It was intended to keep growing its share value. Once the shares had started climbing breathtakingly, the conviction spread, as it does in all bubbles, that it would go on growing forever. 

Why, after all, should it stop?

Well, what makes it stop is when big investors decide that it isn’t going to go on much longer and decide to take their profits. They sell, others follow their example, share values dip, start to slip, and finally crash. When that happened with the South Sea Bubble, a lot of people went broke. First the ones who’d borrowed to fund their share purchasers. Then those that had lent to them. And of course the ones who’d traded annuities for shares found themselves without their regular income, and holding a bunch of near worthless paper instead.

The shareholders who sold in time did very well indeed. Isaac Newton, not just an outstanding physicist but also a good financial mind (he ended his career running the Royal Mint), made £7000, over £1.6 million in 2020 terms. Most staggering of all, Thomas Guy made £180,000, equivalent to over £40 million.

You wouldn’t get a hospital for £40 million today. Not with the operating theatres, the MRI scanners, and all the kit a modern hospital needs. Especially not for the size of hospital we build today. But back then? Well, you could set up quite a centre of medical excellence without spending all your money. 

That’s what Thomas Guy did. 

So Guy’s hospital is an impressive monument to human endeavour and professional excellence. But also to the greed for easy money that drives a bubble. And to the ingenuity of the small number of people who actually do well by one.

See why visiting hospitals can be so interesting?