The unhelpful hermit, or a Scarborough tale retold

There are plenty of sad stories around in this time of pandemic and economic misery. So it came as no surprise when my friend Rosemary recently told me a sorry tale of  her own.

Now Rosemary had been going through troubled times of her own, the details of which we don’t need to go into for the sake of this story. Let’s just say that as she flailed around seeking a solution to her difficulties, she came across a friend of hers who suggested that she might do worse than to consult a guru who lived up a nearby mountain.

“A terribly wise man,” she explained, “who always seems to have just the advice you need when you’re facing a serious problem.”

Well, Rosemary trusted her friend and, besides, she was running out of options. She decided it might be worth giving the suggestion a try. 

“Where does he live?” she asked.

“In St Margaret’s hermitage, up at the top of that mountain,” her friend replied, pointing out of the window.

Where this was all happening isn’t terribly relevant to the story either, but you might have guessed from that last remark that it wasn’t central London.

A hermit’s hut
For a hermit with taste and the means to satisfy it

“A hermit in a hermitage?” said Rosemary, “sounds appropriate.”

“Oh, appropriate is his strong suit. The right word at the right time.”

And then her friend gave Rosemary a crucial piece of advice.

“The one thing to bear in mind is that, while he doesn’t charge for his services, he does expect a gift. It’s barren around the hermitage so he needs people to bring him supplies. Don’t bring food though – that’s what most people give him and he has plenty. What he needs is things to season the food he has. Salt, pepper, herbs, spices. Anything of that kind. He’ll be delighted if you bring him those.”

So Rosemary put together a large collection of every kind of herb and spice and seasoning she could think of, and stuffed them in her rucksack. Then she shouldered it early one morning and set off to climb the long track to the hermitage.

It was quite a trek. At first the path was clear and she followed it with ease. But later it became steeper and wandered from side to side. There were many others on the way to see the wise man, and sometimes she just followed them, but they didn’t always know the way either, so she would just find herself lost in company, which is a little better than being lost alone, but not a lot.

Eventually, she got to the hermitage, which was little more than a hut. It was already mid-afternoon, and she had to wait in a queue to be seen. Eventually, she was let into the hut, just as the sun was setting, knowing that a long return hike awaited her in the dark.

“Come in, my daughter,” said the hermit. “And what have you brought me?”

She proudly laid out her wares. Salt and pepper. A range of herbs. Many spices. Curry leaves. Coriander (OK, OK, my American friends, cilantro). Chillies. Enough to stock a fine kitchen.

“Where’s the parsley?” he asked

Alas, she’d brought no parsley.

“Parsley’s the one thing I long for,” he told her, obviously disappointed. 

“I didn’t know.”

“Errors, my child,” he told her, in his wise way, “are merely moments crying out for correction, turning them into opportunities for improvement. Just come back another day with the parsley and I’ll answer any questions you may have.”

Her heart sank. A struggle back down the mountain in the dark lay ahead. Then a struggle back up again once she’d bought the parsley. With no guarantee that the wise man’s answer would, in fact, solve her problems.

You see what I mean about a sad story? Poor her. The hermit was adamant that until she’d brought him what he wanted, he wouldn’t pay any attention to her difficulties.

As she had no parsley for the sage, he gave Rosemary no time.

And here ends my little tribute to Simon & Garfunkel.

The good bureaucrat, or the way out of the labyrinth

If you’ve paid into a pension plan, you expect to get a pension back. In time. It turns out that, with French state pensions, ‘time’ can be rather long.

Danielle and I worked in France from 1996 to 2008. The French pension system is notorious for being ludicrously complicated. Indeed, one of the main things President Macron campaigned to do was reorganise it and, he hoped, inject a little more rationality into it. Ours was especially complicated as we spent some time as employees and some time self-employed, so we ended contributing to a bewildering number of funds.

That didn’t prove too big a problem for me, but only thanks to Gregory.

Who was Gregory, I hear you ask? Well, he was that rare creature, the bureaucrat with a human heart. I never met him, I never even had a telephone conversation with him. But I developed a picture of him just from our email exchanges. I always thought of him as a ‘lad’, which was probably unfair, especially as I realise that my mental image of him is of someone in his thirties or forties. Although I have no basis for even believing that.

What I know about him is that he actually wants to solve problems and help the people he’s dealing with. 

The pension system had warned me that it would take up to six months – actually, six months and two days – to sort out my entitlement and start paying me. I don’t know where they got the two days from. They make the estimate sound terribly accurate, don’t they? It’s like ‘seventeen minutes’ sounds like a time precise to the minute, whereas ‘quarter of an hour’ sounds like anything between twelve minutes (less would be ‘ten minutes’) and eighteen (more would be ‘twenty minutes’).

The impression of accuracy was just that. An impression and no more. It was more like twelve months and several attempts at communication by phone or email before, oh joy!, Gregory got involved.

To give you a sense of the kind of help he provided, when he asked me whether I was happy to backdate the payments to when I first submitted my application, I asked him whether it was better to take the extra value of the pension that had been added by the delay. He came back to me within a few hours – not a few days, let alone a few weeks – saying that he’d run a calculation and it would take seventeen years for any delay to add extra value greater than the payments lost by the delay. 

That certainly helped me choose the backdating option instead.

Unfortunately, poor Danielle wasn’t as lucky as I was.

One of the greatest honours for writers is to have their names used to form an adjective. You know, like Dickensian or Orwellian. One of the best is ‘Kafkaesque’. It describes the kind of nightmarish process that can suck you into an apparently endless labyrinth of bureaucracy where however far you go, your goal never seems any closer, while nothing seems meaningful and no one can tell you what you need to do to get out.

That’s what happened to Danielle over her French pension.

Kafka’s The Trial
or the nightmare of a bureaucratic maze
with no way through and no way out

She started, as I did with an online application to an organisation in Paris. Which referred her, as it referred me, to an office in Bordeaux. But that’s where our paths diverged. It was Bordeaux that put me in touch with Gregory. Danielle, on the other hand, was told that no, it wasn’t Bordeaux who was dealing with her case, it was Strasbourg. In Strasbourg they hadn’t heard of her. Back to Bordeaux she went. The papers were being sent across, it seemed. In Strasbourg they hadn’t received them. Then they had but they needed some more documents, even though Danielle had already submitted them. She sent them again. They lost them. She sent them again. Then they lost the whole file. She had to start again in Bordeaux and, once she’d prepared all her papers, they told her that she had to deal with Strasbourg.

The French are generous with ‘familles nombreuses’. You get a bit more of a pension if you have three kids or more. We have three boys. Well, sons – their ages range from 36 to 49 so ‘boys’ may be a misleading term. Danielle had to submit birth certificates for all three. She applied for them, received them and sent them in. Then they got lost. So she had to apply for new ones. Which also got lost. So she obtained a third set which, miraculously, no one lost.

She had to go through the process of officially applying for the birth certificates because copies won’t do. Nor will old certificates. Why on earth do bureaucracies need recent birth cerficates, not more than three months old? What do they expect to change? They think the date of birth might be revised, or what?

Still nothing happened. Danielle went online to Paris again. That was no good because her case was in the hands of the people in Bordeaux. Who told her to contact Strasbourg.

I may not have got the order of all those steps right, but you get the general picture.

But then, out of the blue, she got an email from the Bordeaux office. And it was signed by – Gregory.

He started off by pointing out that she seemed to have been mucked around dreadfully by his organisation. She agreed. He remembered having dealt with my case, and suggested he could perhaps handle hers. She agreed with that too. He then asked her whether she might like to have her first payment backdated to the day when she originally asked for a pension. She agreed again. Finally, and it was as if celestial choirs had broken into song, he asked for her bank account details.

With Gregory in charge, the process took two weeks. Within that time, the arrears of pension showed up in Danielle’s account followed by the monthly payments, regular as clockwork, without a hitch (so far, at least).

Leaving us thanking whatever powers run the universe for the existence of such as Gregory. The bureaucrat with the big heart. Who goes such a long way to make up for all the others. 

Bridging the decades

An unexpected pleasure of my retirement has been that I’ve been able to start playing bridge again.

That’s a game I enjoy. It isn’t as intellectually challenging as chess, but it’s a good deal quicker. If I ever play chess once more, it has to be outdoors, so that if I need something faster moving, for a little excitement between moves, I can watch the grass growing.

Besides, bridge combines competition with collaboration, since you play with a partner. That’s much more fun. It also gives you someone to blame for your errors.

Generally, it’s just more social. And, indeed, when we started playing here in Valencia, Danielle and I travelled into town several times for games with two people who have quickly become good friends. They’re both older than us, but impressively young at heart. He’s Hungarian by birth though, after a childhood mostly spent in Britain, speaks a beautiful English that would pass as an Englishman’s. 

She’s from eastern Switzerland and is the first speaker I’ve come to know personally of that country’s fourth official language, Romansh, spoken by maybe 50,000 people in the world. Since they’re so few in number, most of its speakers, and this includes her, also speak German or Italian, and she has both. The couple live part of the year in France (pandemic permitting), and she speaks French too, as well as the English she uses with us. And now she’s mastered Spanish, naturally, while she’s been living here. There may be other languages she’s learned, but I don’t know about them yet.

They have a fund of great stories to tell, and we used to enjoy spending time with them. As often as not we’d have lunch, which was also better for conversation, once the cards were out of the way.

Of course, Covid restrictions have done away with all that. Now we play online, which is OK, though it suffers from two problems. The first is that we use an internet service, whose software doesn’t always work, so on one occasion my partnership was awarded a lot of points we hadn’t won. I prefer winning to losing but prefer to do it with points I’ve actually earned. As well as software problems, we’re all of us dependent on various bits of hardware to access the service, and they can’t always be relied on either, leading to irritating interruptions.

But the worst thing is not meeting face to face. I did so enjoy it when we could. It was a pleasure in itself, but it also reminded me of the days when I was playing in England in the 1970s. 

Great Aunt Rene, second from left
Great Uncle Reg, third from left

I used to play with a great aunt and a great uncle of mine. I was a callow student at the time. Having screwed up one attempt at a degree, I was having a second go while working as well. I was also playing squash and tennis (despite smoking like a chimney – why on Earth did I do that?), I was in an amateur dramatic group and I was conducting an immensely complex and unnecessarily dramatic emotional life (hey, I was in my twenties).

Sometimes, it makes me feel tired just to think of those days.

Bridge sessions with my aged relatives (I can still say that: I’m not yet quite as old today as they were then) offered brief moments of gentility as a respite from the roller coaster of my daily life. There would always be a break for tea halfway through, served in china cups and accompanied by cake or biscuits, sometimes even both, and gentle conversation. At the end of the game, we might get a glass of sherry to wrap up the day.

Reg had won the Military Cross for valour in the Frist World War, when he had single-handedly attacked and captured a German machinegun nest. This was a surprising discovery, since when I knew him, he seemed inoffensive, cheerful and pleasant, but not at all the kind of man capable of such daring aggressiveness. Perhaps he used up a lifetime’s worth in one burst of reckless frenzy.

Rene was remarkable. She was a sister of my paternal grandfather, who was only fifteen when his own father had died. This was in the early years of the twentieth century, at a time when a family had to be headed by a ‘man’, so it fell on his shoulders to play that role, though his mother was still alive.

Rene was clever and wanted to make something of it. When it came to the right time, she broached the subject with her brother. 

“I want to go to university,” she told him.

That simply wasn’t going to happen. I’m sure money was tight, but I suspect means would have been found had she been a boy. As it was, she had to be satisfied with being a wife and later a mother, making ends meet in difficult circumstances for several decades, but always maintaining a quiet dignity and the kind of refined gentility I enjoyed so much on the occasions we met to play bridge.

Such gentility every day would have been too rich a diet. From time to time, it was a delight and a restful change from the hurly burly. Being reminded of it has been a pleasure, as I’ve returned to bridge here.

But not online. That gentle pleasure, and the memories of my great aunt Rene and my great-uncle Reg, really need face-to-face play to start again. Something to look forward to when these tedious restrictions finally end.

Still. In the meantime, I can at least continue enjoying the game itself. Even online, it’s better than chess. 

Whatever The Queen’s Gambit may suggest.

Officials, the joy of border crossings

It was fun to read a story recently about the pleasure of dealing with border officials.

Getting into the US: always a delight

I liked the story because I’ve come across several experiences of that kind. Some faced by me, others by relatives. Some bad, a few good.

Let’s start with how my grandmother got her surname. She was a Lithuanian Jew, making it odd that her maiden name was Johnson. That came about when her mother turned up with her and her brother at border control in England.

“Name?” barked the official.

My great-grandmother spoke barely a word of English but she understood that.

“Sonnschein,” she said.

“Johnson it is,” said the official.

My grandfather, the husband-to-be of the newly renamed Johnson girl, was called Bannister. Just like Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. Both men were in reality called Bernstein.

That puts me in mind of the old joke of the Jew who appears before a judge, wanting to change his surname from Blumstein to Watson.

“Very good,” says the judge, authorising the change.

Six months later, the same man appears in front of the same judge, wanting to change his name again, to Richards.

“I understand your wanting to change your name from Blumstein to Watson, but why Watson to Richards?” he asks. 

“So,” explains the Jew, “when people ask me ‘yes, but what were you called before you were called Richards?’ I can say ‘Watson’.”

A less amusing border crossing came when I was leaving the US from Washington International airport back in the nineties, with a couple of clients. They were surprised at how cursory the checks on baggage were. Even the questioning was brief to the point of negligence.

“Don’t you carry out more serious security checks than that?” one of them asked.

“The bombs don’t get placed on planes here,” said the official, “that only happens in your countries.”

My client wasn’t ready to give up.

“But surely you have a responsibility for our safety, don’t you?”

“Well, I’m not the one who’s going to be flying,” she replied.

Ah, the age of innocence before 9/11.

I had a somewhat brusque welcome into Canada once, at Toronto. The official asked me what I was doing there.

“Business,” I explained.

“And what is your business?” she asked.

At the time I was working on systems for benchmarking hospitals against each other. It involved identifying examples of best practice and then seeing how close a client was getting to it. So maybe one hospital might be getting a particularly low rate of readmissions after a particular operation. If our client was doing less well, we’d try to find out why, and help them improve. That’s a fascinating but difficult challenge, especially given that one hospital might be seeing patients in a more serious condition than the other.

It’s not that easy to explain all that in a sentence or two. It isn’t like “my company hopes to launch a new brand of baked beans in your country”. It’s particularly hard when you’re jetlagged after a transatlantic flight. I rather stumbled and stammered through my attempt at an explanation.

“I can take you down the hall to an office where you’ll spend the next three hours being questioned, if you like,” she courteously explained.

A much more pleasurable experience happened when my wife Danielle and I were leaving San Francisco after our hugely delayed honeymoon. It happened about ten years after our wedding, mainly because Danielle was about ten months pregnant when we got married.

Danielle had added both boys (the one about to pop out at our wedding and the one who came eighteen months later) to her passport, so their photos were in it. 

The official gave us a beautiful and winsome smile.

“Where are these guys?” she asked Danielle.

It was a pleasure to explain to her that friends had taken them in and that we missed them, so that despite having enjoyed our visit to California, we were looking forward to getting home to them again.

Now to the story I read the other day. 

Tomás Navarro Tomás was a leading Spanish philologist and librarian. He ran the Spanish national library from 1936 to 1939, and also published a number of significant works on the language.

Tomás Navarro Tomás when times were good

This was the time of the Second Spanish Republic. It was the legitimate government that had appointed him, but to have supported it, as Navarro did, was a serious black mark in the eyes of the hard right military officers who rose against it in 1936, fought a bitter civil war, and eventually seized power across the country in 1939. In January of that year Navarro fled to the US with his family, since he might have faced execution if he’d stayed behind. 

More accurately, he might have faced assassination, since he’d committed nothing we’d regard as an offence, in a democracy.

He had his suitcases engraved with his initials. Which, of course, were TNT. 

You can see where this is going? Yep, that’s right. As he stepped onto US soil, he found himself summoned to an interrogation room where he was questioned about whether he was carrying high explosives. 

Wouldn’t it be helpful if terrorists always labelled their weapons to make it easier for officials to identify them?

Anyway, I found it particularly amusing to discover how terribly alert to terrorist threats US border people had been in 1939, over sixty years before 9/11. Isn’t it odd how they seemed to have lost all that seriousness by the time I was flying out of Washington International back in the 1990s?

Divine right of Cummings

The latest revelations about Dominic Cummings and the awarding of large public contracts to his friends, tells us little we didn’t already know about his toxic influence on public affairs during his time as Boris Johnson’s chief adviser. It tells us a lot, however, about the way the Johnson regime sees itself. Sadly, that’s also the way a lot of its supporters see it.

A company called ‘Public First’ was paid £564,393 to research public understanding of Coronavirus. The company is run by James Frayne and Rachel Wolf, both former colleagues of Cummings and Michael Gove, the minister for the Cabinet Office. Gove is a long-time political ally of both Cummings and Johnson, though Gove showed himself capable of stabbing Johnson if he thinks it serves his purposes, when he declared himself a candidate for the Conservative Party leadership in Johnson’s first and unsuccessful run for it. 

Loyalty, however, isn’t a necessary requirement to work in these circles. As proved by the fact that, without much of it, Cummings, Gove and Johnson have frequently collaborated, notably in the Brexit campaign, where they achieved a success for which the country is already beginning to pay a seriously high price.

Civil servants were worried about Public First being awarded its contract, since being so close to the Johnson clique was likely to bias its findings. What’s more, there’d been no competitive tender, so no one else had been able to bid for the work. Had a Labour politician behaved this way, the press and the Tory Party would be denouncing the practices as obviously corrupt, or at least open to corruption. 

Where the revelations become really telling is when we see how Cummings replies to criticisms around these events. The High Court is carrying out a judicial review of the award. The Guardian reports that, in his submission to the court:

Cummings described Frayne and Wolf as his “friends”, but added: “Obviously I did not request Public First be brought in because they were my friends. I would never do such a thing.” He said he “requested” civil servants hire the firm because, in his experience, it was the only company with the expertise to carry out the required focus groups urgently.

“The fact that I knew the key Public First people well was a bonus, not a problem,” he said, “as in such a high pressure environment trust is very important, as well as technical competence.”

Nothing corrupt, you see, because people like Cummings vouch for the integrity and professionalism of the company involved. If people of such stature are prepared to trust these characters, then who are we to question that judgement? Cummings, Gove, Johnson: these are all characters beyond suspicion. Their decisions aren’t corrupt and shouldn’t be questioned.

That assumption of unquestionable authority flows from the nature of these men born, as they believe, to rule. When they condescend to rule us, we should be pleased, perhaps even honoured, certainly grateful that they choose to do so. That way we don’t have to bother our heads (for women, they might say pretty little heads) about weighty matters of policy, best left to them. 

Boris Johnson, Charles I and Dominic Cummings
Regal figures, entitled to rule by their very nature,
beyond challenge by mere mortals

This kind of self-belief is by no means new. Charles I is the only King of Britain to have been executed. He too knew that he was born to rule, specifically selected by God for the throne, and therefore ruling as he chose, by divine right. He signed agreements with his opponents and then casually broke them, because he was answerable only to God, so no human authority could hold him to account. Like Johnson, Gove or Cummings, whatever he did was necessarily right, because it was he who was doing it.

But the justification for this kind of high-handed behaviour doesn’t have to be religious, as it was with Charles. Lenin was convinced that the great sweeping force of history had put him in power in what became the Soviet Union. In Hitler’s case, it was the race and its necessary striving to superhuman status. 

For Johnson, Gove and Cummings, it’s simple entitlement. These are special people. Lesser beings can only trust them, thank them for their guidance and move on. So if it was to their friends that they handed a contract without a tender, that “was a bonus, not a problem”.

It’s only cynics like me who say that if we allow government to award contracts without a tender, we’re just asking to be ripped off. A true believer in the cult of Johnson told me recently that the fact that Britain had got so much further than the rest of Europe in vaccinating its citizens against Covid, was down to the agility of a government that avoided all that tedious and unnecessary red tape to get agreements in place fast. Nothing corrupt about that, you see. It’s simply more efficient. These fine people demand trust, because “in such a high pressure environment trust is very important”.

Clearly, Johnson and his coterie feel we have no basis to try to hold them to account. And, from my friend’s comment, it’s clear that this kind of thinking permeates deep into society. Their fans are steeped in it.

That at least gives us an idea of the measure of the problem we face to free ourselves of this baneful influence…

Romans, Jews and tastebuds

What a Roman doesn’t do to an artichoke, isn’t worth doing.

That’s actually an adaptation of what I used to say about Alsatians. That’s ‘Alsatians’ not as German sheepdogs, but as people from Alsace, that glorious area of eastern France. It’s so far east within France as to be practically in Germany. So practically, in fact, that over a seventy-year period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, Germany made three forceful – violent, indeed – attempts to ensure that it was fully under its administration.

That means that my wife, Danielle, who is an Alsatian (yes, yes, bark worse than bite and all that), had a grandfather whose identity papers are marked ‘French by re-incorporation’, since when he was born, his province was German.

I always used to say that anything an Alsatian didn’t do with a pig, wasn’t worth doing. I appreciate that the saying is susceptible of an unfortunate misinterpretation. But, as you’ll probably have guessed, that was entirely intentional.

Anyway, it’s true that Alsatians really knew how to make full use of the unfortunate pig, in the other, more everyday sense, eating almost everything on it, usually prepared in some outstandingly delicious way, and using most of the rest to make things, such as items of clothing.

Artichokes are rather less big and seriously less versatile than pigs. So I suppose there are fewer things that Romans can do to them. In fact, there are just two things that spring to my mind, but they’re both entirely to my taste: carciofi alla romana and carciofi alla giudia. And, yes, ‘alla giudia’ does mean ‘in the Jewish style’. I’m sure I must have tried both during the thirteen years I spent in Rome following my birth there, but only became conscious of them again when I went back there, for work, around four years ago.

It was Fabio, a colleague but much more to the point, also a good friend, who met me and helped me rediscover the joys of my native city. He knows it well, despite being Milanese himself. It should also be said that he's a fine appreciator of good food. In fact, the only time I know for certain that I got up his nose was when I insisted that we had a rather inferior snack before a client meeting, when there wasn’t time for a proper meal. He didn’t say it in so many words, but his body language and above all his expression, told me with unambiguous clarity how much he resented being forced to eat so badly.

So there could hardly have been anyone better to organise me some fine dining in Rome. Except that for a while, whenever he said, “there’s a great restaurant I want you to try,” it always turned out to be the same restaurant. After this had happened three or four times, I tried to communicate to him tactfully that I was convinced there was more than one good restaurant in Rome.

“Oh, no,” he said, except that ‘no’ wasn’t the word he used, “do I keep taking you to the same place?”

Wryly, he accepted that there were indeed other good restaurants in Rome. He booked us tables in a few of the others on my later visits and, in one of them, we had carciofi alla giudia. It was an explosion of taste and an explosion of nostalgia. A truly memorable experience.

So I decided today that it was time, now that I’m retired, to try cooking these great dishes myself. I wanted to start with carciofi alla giudia. That wasn’t just because of my Jewish roots (yes, yes, I know I shouldn’t enjoy Alsatian pork dishes but, hey, to backslide is human). It was mainly because while deep frying is terrible for you, it also happens to produce some extraordinarily delicious results.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough oil and, this being a Sunday in suburban Spain under Covid restrictions, there was no way we could get any more. So it had to be carciofi alla romana instead. 

Trimmed and ready

I stripped the outer leaves. I cut, peeled and trimmed the stems. I carved out the ‘beard’ at the centre of the artichokes.

Steeping in water and lemon juice

Still steeping, but covered to stop them getting out

I left them all to steep in water flavoured with lemon juice. I prepared a stuffing of roughly chopped mint with finely chopped garlic. I seasoned the stuffing with salt and pepper.

Mint and garlic stuffing

I stuffed the artichokes and rolled them in some more salt and pepper. Then I cooked them in oil mixed with the water in which they’d steeped.

Ready to eat

It was a lot of fun. Exciting to be producing a prestigious Roman dish myself for once. But to be utterly honest, it wasn’t that brilliant. Good, but hardly special. Not really worth the effort. Either I screwed up or I chose the wrong recipe. Or it really isn’t that that wonderful a dish.

So, in the end, I enjoyed eating the things far less than I enjoyed preparing them. Or writing about them. Or wallowing in the nostalgia. Those things were all great, so the experience worked out fine, but not for the reasons I was hoping.

Oh, well. I’m just going to have to buy some more artichokes. And a lot more oil. 

The Jewish way gets my vote for next time.

Johnson and von der Leyen: the bad and the ugly, with no good in sight

It’s wonderful to see Boris Johnson rising to the challenge of new Covid variants by imposing far stricter regulations on entry to the UK (as brilliantly described by that superb journalist, Marina Hyde). 

I know there are quibblers out there who argue that, as he’s been talking about it since early January, it’s a tad overdue. I say late’s always better than never. And to those (like Marina Hyde) who say it should have happened not this January but last, when it could really have prevented the virus turning up, I say “let’s just be grateful that he’s thinking about these things now. After all, he doesn't often show much evidence of thought, so let’s appreciate it when he comes up with some.”

Boris Johnson trying out an  interesting new experience:
thinking about solutions to problems

That being said, I do think that as well as the regulations and the penalties for breaches (a 10-year gaol sentence, and death for a second offence, or did I make that second one up?), he ought also to publish the list of exemptions. After all, he’s good at exemptions. Look how he protected Dominic Cummings, despite his flagrant breaches of the rules, until he couldn’t defend him any more. In fact, he’s proved good at immunity, with the vaccination programme going well, but he showed ages ago that he does nothing better than impunity.

Those to whom the regulations won’t apply might include:

• His closest advisors and colleagues
• His wife. I’d like to add his children, but that would need him to identify who they were, something he seems to find difficult
• His donors
• His friends
• His friends’ friends
• A small circle of his closest colleagues. That would exclude anyone likely to plot against him, so the circle might be extremely small indeed.

Anyone on that list can fly in and out of the country, from wherever they like, and whenever they like.

I’m not quite sure whether former advisors should also appear on the list of people enjoying impunity, since that might mean making a concession to Dominic Cummings and while for a long time, in Johnson's book, Cummings could do no wrong, the rather peremptory way he was sacked suggests that poor Dominic may have rather lost the favour Johnson previously granted him. Among ex-advisors, Johnson will just have to pick and choose, separating the deserving (anyone who helped him advance his career) from the hopeless (those who may have injured his credibility). 

It would be good, at any rate, to have the list. It would help the police, too. After all, it can be quite embarrassing to have the police arrest someone for what in others would indeed be an offence, only to discover that he – or she, since it often is a she – enjoys special Johnson crony status and should not, therefore, be inconvenienced in any way by the hoy polloi (or hoy police).

The other encouraging development this week was the admission of error by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. That’s the commission that presided over dangerously slow processes to authorise vaccines against Covid, followed by late ordering of the doses for the whole of the EU, and made such a pig’s ear of negotiating the supply contracts that they’re not expecting delivery on time of even going what they did manage to order. A small error which, rather like many of Boris Johnson’s, are going to cost a number of people their lives, as they fall victim to a Covid infection which they might otherwise have avoided.

Ursula von der Leyen is sorry for a fiasco
As are a lot of other people around the EU

“We were late to authorise,” Von de Leyen announced. “We were too optimistic when it came to massive production, and perhaps too confident that what we ordered would actually be delivered on time. We need to ask ourselves why that is the case.”

It’s refreshing, a politician prepared to admit an error of judgement, and apologise for it. The whole of the EU is now way behind the curve on vaccination, so the apology hardly goes the whole way to making up for the Commission’s errors , but it does go some of the way.

Certainly, it would be a great step forward if other politicians in other places adopted the same approach. Hard to imagine, though. 

Trump admitting he got something wrong, rather than just blaming someone else? Not going to happen. 

Jeremy Corbyn accepting that the prime responsibility for losing the last election stops with him, and can’t simply be blamed on the Mainstream Media or the treachery of those inside the Labour Party who didn’t share his elevated view of himself? It would require a change of personality. That’s if he can be said to have had a personality in the first place.  

And what about Johnson? 100,000 dead on his watch. Oh, well, it could have happened to anyone. Admitting that, as Prime Minister, the responsibility for the fiasco rests with him? Never in his entitled universe could the idea dawn on him.

Von der Leyen could learn from him how to order supplies. He could learn from her how to behave when you get things wrong.

A murdered woman who gives us hope

The thing about falling down a hole, is that it feels a lot less bad if you’ve been down it before and know the way out.

I spend most of my time these days preparing episodes for my podcast, A History of England (you don’t know it? You should check it out). Right now, I'm dealing with Charles I. He was a man entirely convinced that he’d been specifically selected by God to be King, so it was up to him to say what, if any, rights his subjects enjoyed, and he could withdraw them whenever he damn well chose.

That’s a pretty nasty hole and it took a dozen years of civil war to get out of it. But at least we know we found a way out. 

That matters today, because we’re surrounded by men – I think it’s all men – who are certain it’s their calling to rule, and anyone who tries to stop them, must be guilty of treason or of rigging elections, or both.

Vladimir Putin knows that Russia’s welfare is his to protect. In his case, he’s the one rigging the elections, but that’s no betrayal, because he knows it’s only producing the right result anyway.

In Myanmar, General Min Aung Hlaing knows his country’s salvation is down to him, so when elections show otherwise, it’s obvious they’re rigged. Seizing power by force, as he has, isn’t just legitimate, it’s his duty.

In the United States, Donald Trump was just as certain that his nation needed him and him alone. Fortunately, the United States has a Constitution, and the will to preserve it, so Trump couldn’t in the end hold on to power by force, as the general has in Myanmar, though he certainly tried.

Applying Stalin’s principle that one death is a tragedy but a million is just a statistic, I thought I’d illustrate another of these dark holes with a story of one woman from one nation. A nation that fell badly but rose again.

María Dominguez Remón

María Dominguez Remón was a poor peasant's daughter, born in the Spanish province of Aragon, in 1882. She was brought up to be illiterate, not the best start in life for someone whose ambition, it later turned out, was to be a poet, a journalist and a teacher.

To overcome these disadvantages, she taught herself to read. In her mother’s view, that meant too much time devoted to a non-feminine activity. 

When she was eighteen, her parents married her off to a man twenty years older, who revealed a penchant for beating her up. Again, not the environment most propitious to achieving her life goals.

After several years, she escaped to Barcelona. It really was an escape: the law gave her husband the legal right to demand her return, and the police set out to look for her. But Barcelona’s big, and they didn’t find her.

Working as a servant, she was able eventually to put enough money aside to return to Aragon, with a machine that allowed her to earn a living making stockings. Somehow, she found the time to prepare for a teaching qualification, though she started work as a teacher unofficially, before qualifying.

Her husband eventually died, and she was free to remarry. She chose a far more congenial partner this time.

As Spain emerged from dictatorship and moved towards its second republic, she and her husband increasingly immersed themselves in left-wing politics. She submitted an article to the prestigious national newspaper El País, which duly published it. Before long, she was publishing journalism regularly in various political or local papers too. And she wrote poetry.

Although this had never been an ambition of hers, she also set a new record, as the first woman mayor in Spain under a democratic regime. It was only for a few months, but it gave her the opportunity to work on what she felt mattered most, extending education and reducing unemployment.

Her political ideas still resonate today.

Peoples become greater as the desire for conquest lessens in them.

The greatest deeds of the kings are written in history with the blood of their subjects.

Delete the word ‘patria’ (fatherland) from all dictionaries and you save humanity a great deal of blood.

Geography teaches that there are no fences marking the limits of the world’s circumference and yet man, in his pride, sets fences to his freedom.

Whites and Blacks are born under the same sun, so none should consider themselves superior to the others.

In 1936, a group of senior officers launched a military coup followed by a civil war that put Francisco Franco in power. She and her husband were both arrested, and some time in captivity – one dreads to think what captivity – they were murdered. She was shot in the cemetery of the town she’d served as mayor.

Franco, like Putin, Min Aung Hlaing, Charles I or Donald Trump, knew he had the right to seize power, and was prepared to torture and murder to take it.

María Dominguez disappeared into that particular hole of history. But, though the Franco regime lasted forty years, it too eventually end. Franco, like Charles I and Donald Trump, is now a bleak episode from which the country ultimately escaped.

Why do I mention Dominguez now? 

Female remains have been found in that cemetery. The skull has been broken by a bullet from the back. DNA samples are being analysed, but it looks pretty certain that the remains are hers. 

Today she’s honoured. A street has been named for her in Zaragoza, capital of Aragon. Documentaries and studies are being devoted to her.

Things were grim, but they can better. Not always for the individual, like Dominguez. But for the society which can at least remember her and relish the memory.

There’s some hope in that thought.

Wrapping ourselves in the flag? Why would we do that?

Like that outstanding journalist, the Guardian’s Marina Hyde, I agree that “not hating your country isn’t the category-five alarm bell that Jeremy Corbyn’s OnlyFans subscribers seem to think it is”.

Sodium glow:
the light that said ‘England’ to me when I was a child

Indeed, I know that tug on the heartstrings that one’s own country can sometimes exert. As a child – a deeply, intensely English child – in Rome I remember my eyes watering when I saw a photo in a textbook, of one of those yellow sodium streetlights from a London street at night. The photo wasn’t even in colour, but I could see the yellow, just as I could smell the damp of the pavement at night and feel the chill of an autumn evening. 

Later, I took joy when the English general, Mike Jackson, told his American NATO commander, Wesley Clark, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you”.

I love the fact that the Northern Irishwoman, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discovered Pulsars, one of the stranger kinds of bodies in space and, though she was denied the Nobel prize (which went to her PhD supervisor), she won the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics fifty years later. 

It was a delight to see the Englishwoman (with a Jamaican dad), Jessica Ennis-Hill, wrapped in a Union Jack on winning yet another heptathlon gold medal. 

She had every right to wrap herself in the flag. She had competed for Great Britain and in British colours. It made sense that she celebrated in the flag.

Jessica Ennis-Hill wrapping herself in the flag
to celebrate another gold medal

But the rest of us wrapping ourselves in the flag? That’s what the Labour Party is proposing to do. Promoting patriotism and flag wrapping. That’s not just about feeling affection for the country, it’s about a lot more. There is, for instance, an element of pride. Indeed, patriots often denounce the lack of pride in nationhood displayed by others.

But what’s there to be proud about?

If I’d contributed to General Jackson’s cool command and powerful leadership qualities, I could take some pride in his achievements. If I’d helped Bell Burnell working through the night listening to strange radio signals from deep space – even if it had only been to make her coffee – I could have felt some pride over her success. If I’d contributed to Ennis-Hill’s training programme, I might have had pride in that.

But pride in no more than the fact that we’re nationals of the same country? All three of those people owe their nationality, as do I, simply to birth. And frankly, being born is something most of us have proved capable of, haven't we?

“Patriotism is not enough,” Edith Cavell claimed, when she was about to be executed as a spy for having nursed wounded men from both sides of the First World War fighting in Belgium. Not enough? I’d say it’s a great deal too much.

In fact, I’d say patriotism is just nationalism in its best party clothes, with face and hands well-scrubbed, to charm the grown-ups. Give it five minutes in the field at the back of the garden, and it’ll be as filthy and repulsive as ever.

That union flag that Ennis-Hill wrapped herself in, the flag under which Mike Jackson served and the flag of the nation that sponsored Bell Burnell’s research, was the same flag that flew when:

• Indians who fought for their independence were fired (literally) from canon as mutineers;
• Kenyans who were sick of being colonised were locked in concentration camps and subjected to torture;
• Thousands of British ships carried Africans across the Atlantic to slavery in the West Indies and North America

‘Sepoys’ - native soldiers - about to be fired from guns
for ‘mutinying’ against the British Empire

Now, why exactly should we all be wrapping ourselves in that rather bloodstained and badly worn cloth?

Of course, the reason the Labour Party wants to sound more patriotic is that it thinks that will win it back some of the voters who’ve swung nationalistic, in the old ‘Red Wall’ constituencies that went Conservative in the last election. That’s a hiding to nothing. These people have swung right-wing because they want right-wing. We can’t compete with the Tories at being nationalistic. They’re much better at it. It’s their natural territory; it’s alien for Labour, which is internationalist or it’s nothing.

Rather than following the voters to the right, we need to develop a will to lead, showing that there’s a preferable alternative on the left. That means fighting nationalism, not accommodating it. And, boy, do we need to fight nationalism.

Look at the gloating that Brits engaged in after it emerged that the UK had taken a huge lead in vaccinating its citizens against Covid, leaving the EU far behind. So many seem to feel that there’s something to celebrate in this ‘win’, rather like Jessica Ennis-Hill on taking gold, justifying an orgy of wrapping up in the flag.

What this ignores is that if the whole of the UK is vaccinated but Europe is not, new variants will still be able to develop on the Continent. If they are, and they spread out of control, it is inevitable and only a matter of time, that they’ll appear in Britain. At some stage, one of those variants will prove resistant to the vaccine.

It isn’t just Europe that suffers if Europe, or indeed the world in general, doesn’t get vaccinated. It’s the UK too.

You’d perhaps like to believe that this kind of gloating nationalism isn’t that prevalent in Britain and doesn’t need fighting. Sadly, it is, and it does. That’s why it’s so important to refuse flag wrapping. The most worrying aspect is that the temptation to go along with it is as strong on the left as on the right - another reason Labour may be tempted that way, and another reason it needs resisting.

Here are two comments on the so-called British victory in the alleged vaccination race, one a Labour voter, the other from a Tory:

I sound like a Brexiteer here which I really am not, but as far as the EU is concerned, what goes around comes around.

I’m not a Brexiteer... far from it.... but well done to Britain as a direct result of Brexit that we are putting Europe to shame with the number of vaccinations. 

Note how important the word ‘but’ is in both comments. How it’s used to admit embarrassment at the nationalist sentiments, while going on to espouse them.

Most important: which is the Labourite’s remark? which the Tory’s?

Possession’s fine, but armed occupation’s still better

Possession, they say, is nine-tenths of the law.

That’s always seemed to be our cat Misty’s philosophy. After all, he’s the oldest of the three legitimate animal inhabitants of our household (I’m not including the various infuriating insects, against whom the never-ending war will start up again in the next few weeks, as the temperatures continue climbing). 

Misty’s been here longer than any of them. It’s true that there was a dog called Janka when he turned up, smelly, large (compared to the two toy poodles in the household today) and lovable, but she’s long since disappeared to that place where animals go when they don’t come back. The poodles, first Luci and later Toffee, black and orange respectively, turned up since. Making them interlopers.

One of the consequences of their being johnny-come-latelies (or jilly-come-latelys, I suppose, since they’re both female) is that they have to settle for a lower place in the pecking order than Misty’s. He gets first dibs on things.

Toffee and Misty generally get on just fine

This rightful and legitimate arrangement of things is reinforced by the fact that Misty is significantly bigger than the dogs. Pretty close to twice Toffee’s weight, for instance. They get on just fine most of the time – best of friends, even – but occasionally, Toffee gets just a tad aggressive. If Misty tries to jump up on the couch, for instance, and claim his due, a place on a convenient lap, Toffee has a tiresome habit of barking and even moving aggressively against him. Just jealousy, we know, but it can be irritating and as a general rule Misty, who doesn’t go looking for fights, backs off, and lets her get away with her insufferable behaviour.

That pursuit of the less aggressive way has often cost Misty dearly. For instance, we’ve more than once found Toffee hoovering up the last few crumbs of some particularly desirable food from Misty’s bowl, having driven him away and left him watching plaintively as she ingests at speed what was meant for him. That’s despite her being such a titch compared to him.

Sometimes, though, Misty’s patience cracks. Then he rounds on the impudent little tyke, and quickly reduces her to quivering subservience. 

Sometimes Misty just has to take action

And at other times he just claims for himself what is rightly his. Even if, strictly speaking, it really isn’t.

Danielle bought the dogs rather a comfortable cushion they could lie on indoors, if they get tired of occupying the couch they usually like to sprawl on, whether we’re there or not. That cushion has been a major success. The dogs take great pleasure from lying on it.

When they can, that is. Because Misty has decided that it is indeed a fine thing to lie down on, and he sees no reason why it shouldn’t be him who lies on it. He moves in, and they stay out.

Misty in occupation on the dogs’ cushion

It’s probably not correct to say that for Misty possession is nine-tenths of the law. Occupation, he seems to feel, is 100%. Particularly when backed by armed force. He has some fine teeth and claws, as well as a considerable weight advantage, to protect his claim.

Danielle decided that this wouldn’t do. If Misty wanted the dogs’ cushion, she’d just go out and buy another. A double cushion. With space for both dogs, so Misty could have the original cushion all to himself.

A fine plan. I expect you don’t really need me to tell you that it didn’t work. “A double cushion?” Misty said to himself, “that’s twice as good as a single one, twice as attractive to a cat who understands what having a real rest means.”

The humans foiled!
Misty in occupation of the new cushion

So he’s taken over the new cushion just like he previously took over the old one.

We’ve had to take further steps. We took advantage of the weather which is warming up nicely, out here in Spain. It’s reached the point where, during the day, it’s warmer outside than in, so leaving the doors open warms the house up rather than cooling it down. This means that we’re pretty much back to where we were last year, when Misty preferred spending the night out of doors rather than in the house.

So we’ve found the solution.

We’ve built him a doghouse in the garden.

Since he kept nicking the dogs’ cushions, we thought, let’s give him a dog kennel to enjoy the balmy nights in. He seems to like it: he keeps rubbing himself up against the entrance, clearly marking it as his. Which is a relief.

Misty’s new palace
Deemed acceptable by the owner, it seems

This way, the dogs might get a chance to use their cushions. Not that they seem all that bothered, however. Given the choice, they apparently prefer lying on the couch.

Ah, well. At least we tried. It’s the dogs’ reaction that’s trying.