Are we letting the greedy boys play with matches again?

Archegos. Given that an archbishop is a super bishop, doesn’t that just sound like hugely inflated self-importance? You know, as in “people with arch egos tend to overestimate their own talents and get a lot of others into trouble”? 

Well, it’s hard to imagine a better name for the latest hedge fund to crash.

Bill Hwang, the man who would be prince
and, apparently, overreached

It turns out that Archegos is a biblical Greek word for prince or leader, which perhaps underlines the point: the man who runs, or perhaps we shall soon be saying ran, the hedge fund Archegos, Bill Hwang, clearly saw himself as a prince of finance and world leader, destined to show the world how fortunes are made.

He certainly made himself one, but now, like so many who over-indulge in hubris, seems to have lost it. Spectacularly. Bigly, if I can make use of the one contribution Donald Trump has made to English culture.

What’s worse, the discreetly-placed bets that Hwang has now lost are also exposing some leading banks to serious losses. The trick in an operation like his is that you do your business on borrowed money. When it all goes belly up, you can’t repay your debts, and the banks that backed you end up taking a hit. Japan’s Nomura Bank may have lost some $2 billion. Crédit Suisse may have suffered even more.

This is all a bit painful, but by no means the first time that financiers greedy for still further billions have come unstuck. A pain for Archegos employees, of course, and for the exposed banks, but not perhaps a serious problem for the world. If, that is, it’s an isolated event. 

Which makes it a bit worrying that, actually, it isn’t. As Crédit Suisse can testify. The Swiss Bank was sadly implicated in the previous debacle, just a few weeks ago. This is when the Lex Greensill’s bank, Greensill, got into trouble.  

Lex Greensill with one of the high-level contacts
so key to this rag-to-riches (and now to rags) character

The bank’s business was centuries old. Imagine a company owed significant sums by its clients, who are paying too slowly, which is preventing the company making necessary investments. A bank steps in and advances the company loans available immediately, to be covered by the expected payments, in return for a cut. The company gets the money it needs now, for a small reduction in its payments later. For many, the loss of revenue is a price worth paying for not having to wait for the investments it wants to make today.

That was Greensill’s game. But it unfortunately got things wrong. It tried to grow too fast, didn’t maintain sufficient transparency to manage its business intelligently and made itself far too dependent on a small number of major clients. The French have a lovely expression: trying to go faster than the music. Both Greensill and Archegos had tried to dance faster than the music was going, and both came unstuck.

Crédit Suisse, apparently reputed to be far too relaxed about risk, came unstuck in both failures, facing serious losses in both.

Some of this may sound familiar to you. It was the kind of thing that happened back in 2008. The fast-car, fast-buck, high-octane set got high on its own sense of importance, decided that the mortgage market would never stop growing, and invested far beyond any sensible assessment of risk would allow. The crash when it came was devastating, and it didn’t by any means affect only the people responsible for it – many of whom emerged unscathed – but did lasting damage to lots of others around the world.

That seems to be a lesson we haven’t learned.

These two cases are also linked by their relaxed approach to behaviour that is criminal or at least unethical. In 2012, Bill Hwang of Archegos pleaded guilty to criminal charges of insider trading and agreed to pay fines and civil damages to the tune of $60m. Apparently, that isn’t enough to bar you from returning to this world and playing for high stakes again, with other people’s money.

In many ways, the Greensill story is still less appetising. Lex Greensill was a close adviser to David Cameron, when the latter was UK Prime Minister. Greensill had an office inside 10 Downing Street. And, when Cameron lost office, he was quickly appointed to a senior position himself within the bank.

Then as things began to unravel, Cameron bombarded Rishi Sunak, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer with text messages to his private phone, pleading for government aid to the bank to bail it out. Now Cameron held large numbers of option shares in the bank, so if the government had intervened, he might have gained substantially himself.

There is a shady process known as the ‘revolving door’, whereby people in government help out one or more companies and then, when they return to private life, join those same companies on good salaries and use their residual influence to help them again. It isn’t illegal, but it doesn’t smell good. And when the bank the former politician has been helping goes under, it smells still worse.

Excessive greed. Unfounded belief in oneself. Behaviour that floats around the unethical to the downright criminal.

Yes, there are echoes of 2008 here. As Nils Pratley points out in the Guardian, we’d better just hope that these are one-offs. If it’s the greedy boys out again with the matches, there could be a conflagration ahead.

A flask full of memories

One of the great things about living where we do, outside Valencia in Spain, is that there are some great walks around. Along the beach. Through extensive woodlands or wetlands. Up in the hills.

At the moment, the Covid regulations allow us to go for such walks with at most two other people, as long as they both live in the same households. So, of course, we tend to meet one other couple at a time for any one walk. On a recent occasion, the two good friends who joined us were a Scotsman, Bill, from Glasgow, and his English wife, Suzanne, from Essex.

Now, I’m a little afraid that it’ll seem almost racist to suggest that as a Scotsman, Bill would necessarily like the occasional dram of Scotch. But as it happens, this particular Scotsman does. So I thought it would be fun to bring a little along.

It wasn’t in fact Scotch. Whisky, certainly, but not from Scotland. It didn’t take Bill and Suzanne long to work out its origins. It was Japanese, and excellent.

Still, that’s not the point of the story here. The real point was how I was able to take it with me. We didn’t need much, after all – we were going on a mountain hike. And in any case, I didn’t want to carry any unnecessary weight.

The answer was a hip flask. And, fortunately, I had one to hand. My father’s pewter flask, which he’d carried during World War 2. Battered and full of memories, but still entirely serviceable. Though, I was sad to notice, the chain that held the stopper to the flask, had parted. Fortunately, we have another friend, one of our neighbours, who is a jeweller, and she fixed it for me in a couple of minutes, which made me very pleased. I know my father – Leonard – would have appreciated seeing the flask as near new as possible, apart from the dent in the side, which is precious in itself, as a testament to its use.

Before and after
My dad's hip flask, broken and mended

Leonard, as regular readers of this blog will know, was in the Royal Air Force during the war. He flew as navigator in Stirling bombers. The Stirling was by no means one of the great attacking weapons used by Bomber Command for flattening German cities, the most notable of which was the Lancaster, but that was a source of satisfaction to Leonard.

“I’m so pleased I never took part in the mass attacks on civilians in the raids on cities,” he told me.

Instead, he tended to fly on specialised missions. Dropping paratroops. Taking supplies to soldiers in combat, like the flights he made towing a glider with equipment for the airborne soldiers who were pinned down, trying to capture the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem. A Bridge Too Far tells the story, and it cost a lot of men their lives, and even got my father’s plane shot down on the way back from one of those missions. 

But the missions he told me about the most was taking supplies to resistance units, in particular the ones in France. Leonard had been brought up speaking French in Brussels, and he felt particularly close to the Maquis resistance fighters. 

Those were single plane missions, and he would say that he’d never felt lonelier. Up there in the night sky with no one else around. Even the crew had been cut back to allow a relatively small air force to fly more planes: there were just six of them, rather than eight.

His two most touching experiences came while overflying France at night. On one occasion, someone flashed a V for victory sign in Morse (dot-dot-dot-dash) to them with a torch; on another, someone pulled back blackout curtains to make a V shape of light at the top. In both cases, someone was taking a serious risk to say to the airmen up there, ‘you may feel alone, but you’re not’.

He was 22 when he flew his first combat mission. It still takes my breath away that half a dozen men that young could be put in charge of such a powerful device, capable of killing hundreds of people. As it takes my breath away to think that Britain put them in harm’s way, up there, alone in the dark.

What did Leonard take with him for company?

I know of two things, both of which I now have. 

Flying copy of the Rubáiyát

One was a pocket sized copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. I suppose there must be consolation while up there at night, in verses such as:

Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays

if only because it suggests that you’re not alone in being moved around the checkerboard, to be taken or slain, and laid back in the closet when Destiny’s had enough of playing with you. 

Hence the book.

But I suppose sometimes you needed something a little more life-affirming. As Bill and I both appreciated, that might be a drop of the water of life, which is what the word ‘whisky’ means. 

Hence the flask.

Still, I assume regulations about flying must have been a little less strict than they are today, if having a sip or two of whisky while aloft was regarded as permissible. It certainly wouldn’t be now, at least in civilian pilots. Perhaps rules are, or were, bent a little for the young men whose lives were on the line.

Anyway. It’s great to go on mountain walks around here. And all the better for taking memories of my father with me.

The Return of the King. Such a joy. Isn’t it?

The Return of the King… 

Boy, do I remember Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I read it in its entirety to my boys when they were 6 or 8 or something. Well, if either was six when we started, he’d have been eight by the time I finished anyway. It took a good two years, especially with the younger one dropping off to sleep each evening after I’d read about fifteen minutes, so I could never make much progress. 

For bedtime book reading, it was a kind of Everest. Everest without rest.

The last of the three books is called The Return of the King and it culminates with joy and celebration when the rightful heir to the throne finally ascends it. Years ago, I found it all terribly poignant and gripping. Later, though, I read Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms. He has a different take on all this. Throughout the book, there are repeated hints that a certain Corporal Carrot, of the City watch (the police) is, in reality, the last descendant of the kings of Ankh Morpork, the great city of Pratchett’s Discworld, where the throne has stood empty for centuries.

Debunking the the myth

Carrot eventually wins promotion to captain. He and the city's autocratic but benign dictator, the Patrician, have a conversation near the end of the book, which is one of the best moments in this entire spellbinding story. The Patrician, who knows that Carrot is a potential rival for power, asks him:

‘Tell me, captain… this business about there being an heir to the throne… What do you think about it?’

‘I don’t think about it, sir. That’s all sword-in-a-stone nonsense. Kings don’t come out of nowhere, waving a sword and putting everything right. Everyone knows that.’

The return of the king might seem a matter to celebrate when it first happens:

‘But what will he do the next day? You can’t treat people like puppet dolls… a man has got to know his limitations. If there was a king, then the best thing he could do would be to get on with a decent day’s work…’

As always, Pratchett is the champion of sanity, decency and good sense. Yes. Why should it be so wonderful to have a long-absent king return? What makes monarchs so great? Looking at the present royal families of Britain, where I have my roots, or Spain, where I live, I can’t help feeling it would be a great improvement if they got on with a decent day’s work instead of engaging in the tiresome behaviour they seem to enjoy far too often.

These thoughts all came back to me as I was working on my podcast, A History of England, which does me a lot of good, if only because I have to learn, or re-learn, so much English history.

On 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday, Charles II rode into London looking terribly fine on his horse, to take the crown which had been removed from his father’s head, not long before that head was removed from its shoulders. 

It’s a pity we don’t have a photo of the son’s arrival in London. I imagine that his expression might have been a little solemn at first, if only to cover both self-satisfaction and apprehension. He had reason to be worried, since he didn’t have much force with him, and couldn’t be sure that the London population would receive him well.  A little later, when he saw his welcome, I expect he was all smiles, with perhaps even more self-satisfaction to hide.

His accession to the throne ended the period of the English republic, or Commonwealth, and Britain has been a monarchy ever since. For better or for worse. And, in my opinion at least, mostly for worse, especially over the last thirty or forty years (Di, Prince Andrew, Meghan).

Charles II's return was met with great feasting. That was perhaps in part because the collapse of the Commonwealth had looked to many as though it might degenerate into renewed civil war. The last one had ended only ten years earlier, and people had vivid memories of its horrors.

Nell Gwynn
Best known mistress of Charles II

Then, as Carrot suggested, there was the next day. Charles has come to be known as the Merry Monarch. And there was, indeed, plenty of merriment. He had a string of mistresses, the best known probably being the orange seller Nell Gwynn (she had other professions earlier, possibly including the oldest) and, at the diametrically opposite end, Louise de Kéroualle, the French noblewoman sent by the King of France to be his mistress, and made Duchess of Portsmouth by the grateful Charles.

Louise de Kéroualle
sent by the king of France to be
mistress of the king of England

The French had sent money, too, and such was the gratitude Charles felt to them that he took the country to war alongside Catholic France against fellow-Protestants in Holland. That didn’t go down well in England, steeped as it was in anti-Catholic sentiment. Indeed, prejudice later grew into a frenzy so fierce that, for three years, it became a perfectly McCarthyite witch hunt against Catholics, after Titus Oates launched his entirely fabricated conspiracy theory, known as the Popish Plot, to whip up hatred against them. 

Why, not even the king could resist it, but had to accept the fall of his own government and its replacement by people he found far less congenial.

Nor was it only Catholics who suffered during this supposed golden age. Things were just as bad at the other end of the scale, with radical Protestants – Presbyterians, Baptists, even Quakers – facing persecution. In deeply Presbyterian Scotland, there was what came to be known as the ‘killing time’, the persecution was so fierce. Why, thumbscrews would even be displayed in court, to show offenders what treatment awaited them if they were found to be uncooperative.

A wonderful thing, the Return of the King? Well, writing that episode convinced me that, while for some it might have been, for many it wasn’t.

These days, I’m more than ever convinced that Pratchett got it far more right than Tolkien did. All that sword-in-a-stone nonsense? It’s for the birds.

The English abroad

When events seem to time themselves to match each other and reinforce a fine impression, that’s what we call synchronicity.

We got some of of that on the first day of spring, here in Valencia. It dawned clear and fair, and kept on going in the same vein, warm, under blue skies. Quite a change after the rain we’d had for several days before.

It was just as well, since it was also the day we’d booked to join a bird-watching cycling tour, through the orchards and market gardens north of city, running down to the coast with its kilometres of golden sand behind low dunes.

A spring day to enjoy. And we did

Our guide was Virgilio, which was just splendidly apt. Decades ago, as a student, I found myself having to get a bit acquainted with the work of Dante. You know, ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here’, and all that cheerful stuff. Powerful and splendid, but not a bundle of laughs. Dante’s great work is an account of his guided tour of the afterlife, through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. And his guide at the start? The great Latin poet Virgil.

Our own Virgil skipped Hell and Purgatory and took us straight to the countryside outside Valencia, heavenly on that day, especially the beach.

The tour was hardly strenuous, since we kept stopping to look at the birds. In fields. On roofs. On electric cables. In a watercourse.

The watercourse also had a tortoise sunning itself, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of that, since we weren’t on a tortoise-watching tour. On the other hand, our rate of progress was slightly tortoise-like, but no one cared – the atmosphere was much too pleasant to be in a hurry. 

Down on the beach we got to watch several types of bird which, to my untrained eye, were just ‘gulls’. It seems ornithologists like to be slightly more discriminating than that. They insisted on distinguishing different types of gulls. I nodded and tried to look intelligent as they pointed out the difference.

I was more struck by the people walking their dogs on the beach (it made me want to bring ours some day soon) and the size of the waves – there were even surfers out, an unusual sight in the Mediterranean.

Surf’s up (the two dots in the distance are surfers)

After the tour, we went for lunch with a couple of friends in one of the local towns. The place we chose for our meal was more of a café than a restaurant, but then we weren’t after a five-course gastronomic delight. Basically, just a snack, which was what we got. 

It was on the main square of the town, and the place was flooded with sunlight and warmth. It was a wonderfully comfortable to be eating outside again, something we hadn’t been able to do for a couple of weeks. The end of winter hadn’t been kind around here: it had seemed to promise us something mild, only to turn wet and a lot colder while we weren’t looking.

The pleasure of basking in the sun over lunch, in thoroughly congenial company, meant that, snack or not, we took a couple of hours over it. No problem with that. The Spanish approve of enjoying a meal, however simple it may be.

Then they brought the bill. It was wonderful to see that they’d identified our table not by a number or anything that dull, but by the description ‘Ingleses’, ‘the English’. They’d heard us talking, identified the language, and put us down as English, even though Danielle, to be strictly accurate, is actually French.

A bill for the ‘Ingleses’

Anyway, we settled up and started, slowly – there was no rush – to think about going. Until one of our friends made a remark on the bill.

“You know – I don’t know whether we ought to say anything now – but I think they’ve undercharged us quite a lot.”

We examined the items listed. She was right. There was only one glass of wine shown (we’d had two) and only two meals (we’d had four).

So we did something which did the reputation of the English no harm at all.

“You know,” I told the woman who ran the place, “I think we’ve paid you too little.”

She looked at me as though I was crazy. Ours was clearly not the kind of complaint about a bill she was used to getting. She stammered her thanks, as she checked and confirmed that we were right: we’d been undercharged.

“My husband…” she said, and didn’t need to say any more.

We paid the extra, which converted our meal from ridiculously cheap to just plain cheap. And she was so pleased that she even served us a round of little liqueurs.

Which left a pleasant glow. Brought on by the drink, no doubt. But also by the sense that it was important to help small businesses like cafés, which have suffered so much in this time of Covid. And also by the pleasure of having done something for the reputation of the English.

The English haven’t been much admired around here since Brexit. We’re not perceived as particularly honest or smart. 

I suspect we’ve done our standing some good as far as the honesty bit’s concerned. But as for smartness, or at any rate wiliness? Perhaps less so.

Hello and Goodbye, cultural differences

There’s a woman living across the street from us who often walks her two little papillon dogs around here. We don’t really know her, and we’re unlikely ever to be friends. She’s cordial enough but her house suggests a rather higher income bracket than ours, and that’s never a distinction it’s easy to bridge.

A papillon, like the one of the dogs our neighbour walks

Still. When we meet her with her dogs, while we’re out with ours, we always have a brief but pleasant conversation. And, inevitably, it starts with a courteous exchange of greetings.

Recently, I came across her as I was returning from the last dog walk of the day, at about 10:00 at night.

“Buenas tardes,” I said to her, because in English I would have said “good evening”. Since this is Spain, I simply translated the English greeting into the nearest expression I knew in Spanish.

“Buenas noches,” she corrected me, with firm emphasis on the second word.

It was dark, so it was night time. It seems that the correct greeting, for a Spaniard, is “Good night”.

That’s not easy for me to adapt to. “Good night”, as far as I'm concerned, is what you say when you’re parting company, or at least when one of you is about to fall asleep (which is a kind of parting, after all). Here it seems it’s a greeting too.

I had a similar problem in French, years ago. “Good evening” in English can be both a greeting and a parting. In French, “bonsoir” is the same. But “bonne soirée”, which would translate literally as exactly the same thing in English, means “have a good evening”, and you’d only say it on parting company.

French also doesn’t have a “good morning” or a “good afternoon” either, so it’s “bonjour” all day, until a slightly indeterminate time, usually when it’s starting to get dark, when you move to “bonsoir” instead. 

We English speakers shouldn’t get too superior about the French lack of those two greetings. After all, unlike French, Spanish, Italian, German or even Japanese (we'll be returning to that), English doesn’t really have a “good day”. I mean, it does, but anyone who actually used the expression “good day” would be indelibly marked as a foreigner, and probably one who learned the language from a book.

I have to say, that I don’t know when “buenos días”, “good day” in Spanish, glides into “buenas tardes”, though I think my experience of the other night has made it pretty clear that “buenas noches” takes over once it gets dark. But since “tarde” can also be translated as afternoon, I’d like to know when it starts, given that I now know when it ends.

I’ll get there some day. Or possibly some afternoon.

I’m confident of that because I carried out a similar research exercise once before. 

In preparation for a visit to Japan, for the wedding of two friends, I put a lot of effort into learning some Japanese. It was an exciting challenge which I took on with enthusiasm. Sadly, I now remember practically nothing of all I learned.

However, I do still remember that “Good morning” in Japanese is “ohayo gozaimasu”. “Good day”, on the other hand, is “konnichiwa”. 

So here was the problem I set myself to solving: when does “ohayo gozaimasu” meld into “konnichiwa”?

Danielle and I travelled to Japan a few days before the wedding. On our second night, we were in Hiroshima – all very moving, and seeing the A-bomb dome really sent a shiver up my back.

The Hiroshima A-bomb dome
One of the only buildings to remain standing after the blast

We wanted to visit Miyajima, which isn’t that far away. It’s an island the whole of which is considered a temple. So it has a temple gate set in the water, which is nothing short of magical. Or, rather, it’s set in the water when the tide is in. At low tide, it’s set in mud, which is rather more prosaic.

I checked the tide tables and high tide the next morning was going to be at 7:00. Which was disappointing, since we’d never be up in time to get there. But then, for the only time in my life, jet lag proved a blessing. We were both awake at 4:00. We got dressed in a hurry and rushed to station. We arrived in time for a boat which got us to the island just as the sun was rising.

And dawn was flooding the gate, with its feet washed by the sea, in light.

The Otorii or temple gate at Miyajima

It was truly magical.

We spent the next few hours walking around the island, spellbound by all we saw. As time went on, more and more people turned up. The Japanese tend to exchange greetings with others, even complete strangers, when their paths cross.

For two or three hours, it was “ohayo gozaimasu”. But as 11:00 am approached, I started to hear the first instances of “konnichiwa”. As my watch hands crept past 11:00, “ohayo gozaimasu” vanished and we heard nothing but “konnichiwa”.

So in Japan, for greeting purposes, day starts at 11:00. Before that it’s morning.

I enjoyed that small research success. Though, of course, what’s most interesting is what it demonstrates about the differences between cultures. We English speakers probably have a fairly clear notion of morning, afternoon, evening and night. But it’s fascinating to discover others don’t see things quite the same way.

And doesn’t it just show how terribly unreliable literal translation can be?

More happy memories: St Patrick's day, Ian Paisley and a US visit

Well, St Patrick’s day has come and gone. 

The Irish take St Patrick's day seriously
Well, for some value of the word ‘seriously’

Its arrival always reminds me of the time, oh, three decades ago, when I spent it in California. A memory I treasure. 

Let me tell you about it.

At the time I was working for the UK end of an American Hospital Information System company, then called TDS. On one occasion, I took two doctors from Belfast City Hospital out to the States to visit some of our best implementations, including a bit of a showcase, El Camino hospital in Silicon Valley. 

My American colleagues had prepared name badges for our guests. Those for my two showed them as being from ‘Belfast City Hospital, Ireland’. Now, that was strictly true. On the other hand, the single word ‘Ireland’ did rather blur the distinction between the Republic of Ireland, an independent nation, and Northern Ireland, still part of the UK, despite feelings about that status which I suppose could best be described as ‘mixed’.

The distinction, I admit, is the culmination of nothing more significant than about nine centuries of struggle, dotted with massacres, pitched battles, bomb blasts, tortures and assassinations. Some might regard those events as sufficiently important to deserve recognition. Others, apparently, weren’t even aware of them.

In passing, I should say that the blindspot isn’t specifically American. Before travelling to the States with these guests, I’d visited them in Belfast with a colleague from London. The day before we travelled there, she’d come to see me.

“Will I need a passport?” she asked.

These were the innocent days when you could still travel on domestic flights without photo ID.

“And do I need to convert some money?” she went on.

I carefully explained that this was technically a domestic flight and that the pound sterling was legal tender in Northern Ireland, seeing as it was still within the United Kingdom. I resisted the temptation to ask whether she might have noticed that this issue had been widely covered in the press and on TV, with occasional reports of bomb blasts or of heavy-handed police (if not army) action in response. She clearly hadn’t made the connection.

Anyway, if an understanding of Norther Ireland’s position had slipped right past a citizen of the nation that had spilled so much blood, some its own, more of it Irish, to secure its status, how could I criticise Americans who’d missed the information too?

“Never, never, never, never”
To be fair, Paisley got nicer later

One of my two guests was a Protestant from North Antrim. That meant his local Member of Parliament was none other than the famous, or infamous, Ian Paisley. He was the man who’d made the word ‘Never’ a statement of political doctrine (have you never heard his “Never, never, never, never” speech? It’s worth listening to). In the end, he mellowed, accepted that the Irish Republic would have some say in the affairs of Northern Ireland (that’s what all that never-ing was about) and established excellent working relationships, even a close friendship, with Martin McGuiness, formerly of the enemy sworn to the destruction of what he believed in, the IRA.

My guest in California was far less strident (I’m glad to say – my eardrums couldn’t have taken it) than Paisley, but had the same accent.

Neither of us was particularly interested in St Patrick’s day, he as a Protestant, I as – well, as me, I suppose. So we had no idea in advance that our visit to El Camino was happening on the day itself.

He, unaware that the date meant the action was particularly rich in symbolism,  unthinkingly put on a green sweatshirt that morning.

El Camino hospital
Visited on the wrong day for one of the guests I took

Now, on St Patrick’s Day, it seems that practically every American is Irish. People whose names, and sometimes even their accents, betray Italian or Central European roots, are Irish for the day. And here in front of them was a man wearing a name badge proclaimed him to be Irish, and a green top to boot.

Everywhere we went in El Camino that day, we’d be constantly distracted from the software and medical wonders before us, as people came up to him and warmly wished him, “Happy St Patrick’s Day”.

And each time he would respond, in a tone more gentle but just as forceful as Ian Paisley’s, “we don’t celebrate it”. 

If you can, please read those words in Paisley’s accent, for the sake of authenticity.

Never before or since have I seen as many people wandering away, bemused and uncomprehending, from what they’d expected to be a cordial exchange of good wishes, bruised by so surprising a reaction.

It’s too late to wish you a Happy St Patrick’s Day this year. Can I can get away with just hoping you had a good one? Perhaps you can forgive me since, as it happens, we don’t actually celebrate it.

The surprising success of a mediocre series, the 'Liz and Meghan Show'

You may remember that, back in the eighties and nineties, Britain and even much of the world was held enthralled by a long-running series, season after season after season, the Liz and Di Show.

It ended badly with the death of one of the protagonists, and the appalling behaviour of the other in response to it, but it was immensely successful. It occupied huge amounts of TV time and generated commentary across the media, for far longer than the actual quality of the show seemed to warrant.

Di and Meghan
Leading figures in two horribly similar shows

It seems odd to me that the makers decided to reprise the series, as the Liz and Meghan Show, over twenty years on. It has a new protagonist, Meghan, to replace Di, but the rest of the cast is practically unchanged. It’s just older.

Liz is still in place and still dictating the behaviour of those around her. That’s her family, or the ‘royal’ family, a family that constantly demonstrates that ‘royal’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘regal’. Her husband is now too old to be the figure of fun he once was, and indeed by overturning another driver’s car when he insisted on continuing to drive himself long beyond the age where it was safe, you could even argue he’s become positively unfunny. Not that everyone thought he was that amusing before.

The eldest son remains as strangely weird, with attitudes that are both reactionary and new age (in an outdated way), just as lost as ever, and just as incompetent.

One of the other sons has, however, plumbed new depths. He’s now accused of rape and paedophilia, which he denies, though he refuses to account for his behaviour to the relevant authorities, the American FBI. In effect, that makes him a fugitive from justice, but in plain sight, as one of the strange things about the non-regal family is that it still believes itself untouchable because it’s above the law.

And, since no one challenges that belief, it’s probably true.

Liz has been head of the family for nearly seventy years, which many seem to regard as a matter for celebration. Which is slightly odd, seeing as in our aspiringly democratic societies, one wouldn’t normally expect anyone to hold a position of quite such authority for anything like that long. And, since we also like to think of ourselves as meritocratic, it’s odd that she can count on such wealth and privilege by birth alone. I appreciate that being born is a heck of an accomplishment, given the countless numbers of human spermatozoids and eggs that don’t make it, but still there are nearly 8 billion out there who’ve pulled off the same trick. Not sure what merit the royals gain just from having managed to get born.

What might seem even more odd is that the makers of the show have gone for such a similar story arc to last time. 

Di was a pretty young thing, perhaps not too bright, who married into the royal family. To her disappointment, she discovered that it gave her the cold shoulder, while the publicity she rather craved turned into press hounding. The combined effect was to drive her into mental ill-health. When she cried for help, she found that the family had no support to offer, leaving her to sink still further.

Twenty years later, the replacement for Di, Meghan, is another pretty young thing who married into the royal family (one generation on). She’s rather brighter, more mature and more experienced (a successful career of her own, and a previous marriage that ended in divorce). That probably explains why she got out more quickly than the Di character did, before being destroyed by the coldness of the family and the persecution of the press as Di was. 

Exactly like Di, the character of Meghan also complains of anguish, depression and receiving no help from the family. 

And here’s the really surprising thing: the very same people who believed every word Di said in her series, and seem ready to shed a tear over her story to the present day, refuse to believe Meghan’s. They find her story unconvincing, even though it’s practically the same and involves the same characters in the family.

It may be that the crucial difference is that Meghan’s character is mixed-race. Let’s hope that the disbelief directed at Meghan isn’t because the audience of the two shows finds it easier to believe a white character than a mixed-race one.

Racism, as it happens, is one of the themes of the new series. Again, though, there seems to be a general desire to reject as false any accusation of racism by anyone in Liz’s family. Which is odd. After all, until someone definitively disproves the suspicion that the family contains a paedophile rapist, why should we write off as impossible the suggestion that it contains a racist?

Personally, I find the show boring and I’m only catching occasional extracts. It’s the reaction of the British audience I find curious. And that certainly has caught my attention, for its weirdness, and by its over-the-top deference to those who claim to be superior to others, without ever proving that they are.

When I paid my five farthings

Keeping in touch with old friends is one of life’s great joys. That’s made less easy by Covid, of course, but fortunately we do have email and all sorts of social media tools to help us along. In particular, it’s always a great pleasure to receive an email from one of our dearest friends, Gerda.

Gerda’s Swiss, but you’d hardly know it, given the number of decades (far more than any of us want to remember) she’s lived in England. The Swissness comes out most (or used to, before his career started to wind down) whenever Roger Federer was playing competitive tennis somewhere.

I wanted to write that watching Federer win, was her greatest joy, but that isn’t true. It was certainly an experience she savoured, but she does have other joys that are even stronger. Watching her granddaughter grow, for instance, and it was fun to see a couple of pictures of her attached to Gerda’s latest email, along with a video of the two-year old feeding the family dog. It was a systematic process, one piece of food at a time, laid carefully on the ground for the dog to pick up, or occasionally fed straight into his mouth. Almost as touching as seeing the little girl so busy was to see the dog so patient, quietly waiting for the next piece of food and, if he was taking it from her hand, doing it with exquisite gentleness.

However, it wasn’t the gorgeous girl, enchanting as she was, who provided the incentive for writing the email. 

St Martin’s: one of London's most charming churches
Immortalised in song, and the site of much singing

Gerda had received, and decided to forward, a message from St Martin’s in the Fields about their forthcoming concert programme. Do you know the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons?

Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of St Clements

The second verse is

You owe me five farthings
Say the bells of St Martin’s

That St Martin’s. Probably the finest eighteenth-century church in London. In keeping with Protestant tradition, it’s quiet and understated as well as beautifully elegant.

Its concert programmes usually feature choral pieces accompanied by small instrumental ensembles. Well, obviously small, since a full 60-piece symphony orchestra would have trouble fitting into the interior of the finest, but understated and restrained, eighteenth-century church in London.

Gerda was reminded of the time when we went to one of those concerts together. “I think one of your sons joined us too,” she reminisced. She’s right. And that was another story.

I’m a fan of Mozart’s Requiem. Nothing original about that, lots of people are. It’s a key element in Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus. The film presents it as written under the urging of Antonio Salieri, Mozart’s envy-ridden and mediocre rival, as part of a plan to drive the greater composer into his grave. I can’t imagine that Peter Shaffer, who wrote both the screenplay and the play it’s based on, didn’t know that story was almost certainly false. I imagine he decided to go with it anyway because the dramatic potential of a man writing one of the world’s great pieces of music, as the requiem for his own funeral, was just too good to pass up.

Tom Hulce as Mozart dictating his Requiem to
F. Murray Abraham as Salieri in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus

While we were living in Strasbourg, in the early years of the century, a friend of ours mentioned a forthcoming performance of the piece. My elder son, Michael, accepted my invitation to join us, so I set it all up.

On the day of the concert, however, Michael was late home. I waited until what I judged to be the latest possible moment I could but eventually, despairing of his arrival, headed for the concert without him. I enjoyed the performance but was upset, on my return, when both Michael and my wife Danielle pointed out to me that he’d got home just a minute or two after I left. Had I waited a few moments longer, I could have taken him with me and we could have enjoyed the music together. 

Strangely, the memory of that missed opportunity rather tormented me over the next decade or so. 

Well, I don’t want to overstate things. I didn’t lie awake night after night torturing myself with guilt and self-reproach. It wasn’t the Ancient Mariner with the albatross around his neck or anything like that.

Sorry to disappoint.

No. It was more a recurring niggling anxiety. “I promised to take Michael to hear Mozart’s Requiem, and I failed.” That kind of thing.

So it was great that one day, when we were back in England, he happened to be visiting us just when St Martin’s was putting on the Requiem. I ordered tickets. Everyone was ready on time when we travelled to central London, and we took our seats at our leisure well before the concert was due to start. 

As a bonus, Gerda also joined us. 

In the immortal words of Robert Service in his remarkable comic poem The Cremation of Sam McGee, “a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code”. 

Well, that’s how I’d felt all those years. Now at last I could settle my debt, and lay down that burden. It was as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

The performance was fine. Perhaps a little light, with so few instruments. But the voices were good. And the setting was, as ever, magnificent.

As, of course, was the company. 

Thanks, Gerda, for having contributed to it. And for reminding me of it now. 

A MeToo delight: Schoolgirls

It’s a pleasure to see a new figure taking a leading position in the field of cinema. Especially if she wins a prize or three doing it. And it’s especially satisfying if, as you’ll have spotted from that pronoun, she’s a woman in what is still very much a man’s world.

From the poster for Niñas or Schoolgirls
Andrea Fandos, as Celia, is fourth from left

Pilar Palomero has just burst onto the Spanish film scene, at 40, with her captivating film Niñas or Schoolgirls. It really was quite an explosion. The Goya prizes are the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars, and her film took four, three of them with her as the main recipient: best film, best screenplay (by her) and best new director. It also took best cinematography.

The film deserves all those prizes.

I had no idea what to expect when we started watching it. I knew it was about an eleven-year old girl, Celia, at a convent school in the city of Zaragoza, in 1992. A new girl joins her class and, almost as though the event was a catalyst, Celia moves from childhood to adolescence over the next few weeks.

What I discovered is that little happens in the film, physically. But a hell of a lot emotionally. That’s its power and its strangely appealing charm. 

We see girls dealing with the oddities of relations with their schoolmates, including at one point an appalling example of the kind of vicious bullying children often inflict on each other – again, not physical but emotional, and no less devastating for that.

We see the stilted atmosphere of a Catholic convent school for girls, not presented as brutal and shamefully retrograde, but as rough and ready, well meaning but poorly administered, staffed by teachers who are well-intentioned but less than breathtakingly effective.

We see children on the edge of adolescence, which opens the way to dangerous but exciting new experiences, involving alcohol, tobacco, even sex, all to be tested or at least toyed with.

Above all, and this is the genius of the film, we see a child’s eye view of a confusing and incomprehensible adult world, which Celia tries to explore, finding many questions but few answers, and increasingly suspicious that she is being lied to by the person who matters most to her in the world. That’s her mother, who seems to be hiding far more than she reveals – to be honest, she reveals almost nothing. One of the most telling moments comes when her mother tells Celia that she’s no longer a little girl, and that she has both questions and doubts – and then cuts short the conversation without having resolved, or even addressed, any of them.

There are some male characters in the film – a group of boys, a priest, for instance – but they barely impinge. It’s essentially a film full of women, the vast majority of them young girls. A film about women, by women. And yet a film that speaks to us all, since it deals with problems of the passage to adolescence we all have to face. 

There’s an outstanding performance by the twelve-year old Andrea Fandos as the eleven-year old Celia. And there’s tight, insightful, economical direction without a scene of even a minute too many, by Pilar Palomero, from her own impressive script.

Pilar Palomero, a great new directorial talent

Women making films about women is a great answer to the problems that led to the #metoo movement. Palomero told the newspaper El País:

Mine was a late vocation. I’ve liked films and writing stories since I was a girl, but I was 24 when I started at the Madrid film school. I didn’t expect to be a director. That was something that in my generation we hardly thought about.

Well, it was the fact that the industry was so male dominated that led to the squalid events that made #metoo necessary. Other industries are little better, and many are as bad or worse. But if people like Palomero can break in, and break in so well, to this particular closed world, we’ll be on the way to finding a solution.

The film has a certain quality about it that said to me ‘autobiographical’. So I looked up Palomero’s biography. Born in 1980 in Zaragoza, she would indeed have been about the age of Celia at the time the film is set. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, whether the film’s events actually happened in Palomero’s life, but it’s clear that part of its power is that it speaks directly, and therefore compellingly, to us of what she knows from having been there herself. 

An excellent investment of a couple of hours of your time, if you ever feel inclined to try it out.

Boris Johnson, cheapskate champion

Just how much can he get away with? It’s extraordinary what Boris Johnson can do and still not lose the support of his voters.

People I know who were quick to condemn Tony Blair for lying over Iraq, or Bill Clinton for his extramarital dalliances, put up just fine with Johnson who won’t even say how many children he’s fathered, and who seems only to breathe to lie. Take the way that during the campaign over Britain leaving the EU, he posed in front of a bus painted with the message that Brexit would deliver £350 million a week for the NHS. Now, less than three months into full Brexit, he claims the exchequer can’t afford more than a 1% increase in salaries for NHS staff.

The big lie: Boris Johnson by the Brexit bus
with its suggestion that leaving the EU would free
£350m a week which could be used for the NHS

A 1% increase represents a cost of some £10m a week. So what happened to the other £340 million?

There’s been much talk recently of the Peak End Rule proposed by the Israeli-American psychologist and philosopher Daniel Kahneman. This suggests that in a series of experiences, the one that matters is the last. 

By way of example, imagine a British government committing a string of unprincipled and grossly incompetent errors, such as taking inadequate action against a pandemic, failing to order enough equipment to combat it, and dismally under-delivering on promises to provide adequate testing. Those errors lead to the nation having one of the world’s highest death rates from the disease, and suffering the worst damage economically of any G7 country. 

In the Kahneman hypothesis, that lamentable sequence matters not a jot if it’s followed by one good decision, such as launching a successful vaccination campaign ahead of other nations.

That’s what seems to have happened in Britain. The vaccination programme went well and voters who were turning away from Johnson, have flooded back. Even though the mortality from the disease is still at a record level globally. 

Rather than the Peak End Rule, it sometimes seems to me that we’re looking at another principle, possibly first proposed by the US journalist H L Mencken, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”.

Replace “American” by “British” and you have a possible explanation of the behaviour of many Johnson voters. 

The other phenomenon here is simple cheapskatery. The British, and in particular the British Conservative Party, do sometimes want to do the right thing. But they  always want to do it on the cheap.

When David Cameron came to power in 2010, many of his supporters told me that it was quite impossible to keep carrying the level of public debt the previous (Labour) government had accrued.

The conclusion was that what was needed was a period of austerity. Public spending cuts. Putting government finances back on a sound footing.

The trouble is that cutting spending puts people out of work, it eliminates money-earning projects, and it reduces the government’s tax take. Paradoxically – the great economist James Maynard Keynes called it the paradox of thrift – reduced expenditure can lead to increased indebtedness.

As has happened. Even before Covid struck, the UK’s public debt had more than doubled over the period of austerity. Its effect hadn’t been at all to reduce the burden being left to future generations, as Conservatives had claimed, it was merely to leave public services dangerously under-resourced. One of the results was that the NHS had to fight the pandemic with far too few people and too little equipment. Reports of exhausted NHS staff, sick NHS staff, even dead NHS staff, became commonplace.

It’s no surprise that most people now want to see them generously rewarded.

The cheapskates in government, however, have come up with that 1% figure, claiming as the austerity fans used to, that it was as much as they could afford. With inflation, it represents a real-term pay cut.

In the end, the salary increase probably won’t be quite that awful. A hallmark of this government, alongside lying, is making screaming U-turns, completely reversing a previously announced policy. Polls show that 72% of people are against the skinflint offer made, and the Tories are above all good at getting elected, so they won’t want to offend that many voters.

Still, the fact that they could come up with the suggestion at all shows they remain true to their old, mean-spirited selves. It also suggests they remain as clever as ever at sleight of hand: while opposition focuses on the NHS, far too few people are recognising how mean their other recently announced financial policies, dressed up as generous, really are. 

There are some sops thrown to business, but they are too little to repair the damage of the pandemic. As for individuals, proposals on tax and benefits will mean that most people will find their real incomes falling over the next few years, and the poorest will suffer the most. I wonder whether the Tories are hoping this slips through unnoticed as the row centres on nurses’ pay?

They may be playing a long game. Betting on the lack of intelligence of the British electorate. A bet, as the saying suggests, that no one ever lost. Champions only of cheapskatery, Boris Johnson’s Tories, but undisputed champions all the same.

Voters need to wake up. Or the Opposition must at last find a way of waking them. Otherwise, Johnson will just keep right on getting away with ever more actions that are ever more unforgivable, right up to re-election next time around.

Triggered thoughts: gentle sailor, exasperating poodle

We’ve finally been able to move what is, perhaps, our most distinguished piece of furniture into our home: an eighteenth-century wardrobe inherited from Danielle’s mother. It’s a fine addition to our living room.

A grand old wardrobe

Still, it could only be added at the cost of losing some shelving. That meant careful reorganisation, in particular of our books. I like to keep them in roughly alphabetical order by author (I don’t bother with ordering the titles within each author). ‘Roughly’ means that I’m a bit careless and I’m sure that over the next few weeks I’ll be moving Taliaferro in front of Tremain, or Austen after Armstrong (not those specific errors – obviously I checked immediately after writing these words and, no, I hadn’t got them wrong – they’re just illustrations of possible errors, rather than ones I’ve actually made).

It was while I was doing this work that I was struck by the letter combination ‘Sh’. Partly that was just because I was surprised, as I am every time I look, by the sheer number of books by Nevil Shute that I’ve accumulated down the years. You see, while I’d be the first to admit that he was a lousy writer, he has to have been one of the world’s great storytellers. If you don’t know The Checkerboard, you have a joy awaiting you – one of the great stories (four stories, actually, though well connected with each other) with a fine ending, including an excellent last line.

Ssh in our library, where Sh is well represented

But as well as Shute, there was Shreve and Sheridan and Shields. That’s without even including Shakespeare (shelved elsewhere) and Shelley (only included in anthologies). Or, for that matter, Sherlock Holmes, who’d be under ‘C’ if we had any.

That simply underlined for me the difficulty learning our language must present to Spaniards, amongst whom we now live. They just can’t cope with the ‘Sh’ sound, which doesn’t exist in Spanish (Spaniss? Or, since they dislike ´Sp’ or ‘St’ without a leading ‘E’ either, perhaps I should say Espaniss). 

Only a few weeks ago, Danielle and I went for a snowshoe walk in the mountains. Today it’s hard to believe there was snow around such a short time ago, as the sun’s back out in a clear blue sky, but then it was definitely winter. 

In the list of people due to take part, I noticed one person called ‘Sheila’. 

“Ah,” I thought, “must be an Englishwoman. It’s such an English name.”

Nothing of the kind. Spanish to her core. It turns out that the name is pronounced – or perhaps I should say she pronounces the name – ‘Sailor’. 

Still, what’s in a name, as our great playwright Ssakespeare once asked? Sailor turned out to be extremely kind, as did her husband, and stuck close to Danielle and me, helping us out as necessary, no doubt as the oldest people on the walk. It’s a good sailor who helps you through rough seas, and she and her husband were two of the kindest.

Back in our sitting room, once I’d finished dealing with the books, a job that takes a lot longer than one might imagine, I decided I needed a rest. A siesta, perhaps? I know siestas sound terribly self-indulgent, but what on earth’s the point of being retired if you can’t indulge yourself from time to time? 

That idea triggered another thought.

One of the more endearing habits of our toy poodle Toffee is to accompany me each time I decide to have a siesta. If I start walking upstairs to our bedroom in the afternoon, I’ll soon hear the click-click-click of her claws on the stairs behind me. She’ll jump up on the bed or, better still (from her point of view) look at me meaningfully until I pick her up and put her on the bed myself. As soon as I’m lying down, she’ll scratch the duvet a bit, spin around a few times, and then lie down next to me, usually with her head lying on my knee.

Toffee has developed a taste for sharing my siesta

Like I said, endearing.

On the other hand, she likes to keep an alert ear out for any kind of unusual sound. If she hears the neighbour’s dog, she’ll start barking her heart out, with all the ferocity a toy poodle can muster (just imagine just how frightening that is).

Her hearing’s just as acute upstairs. And her instincts as lively.

So what happens is that after twenty minutes or half an hour, she’ll hear a sound, deliver herself of a volley of barking and then disappear downstairs at speed to deal with a supposed threat to her territory.

However ineffective a tiny dog’s bark may be when it comes to intimidating invaders, it’s highly effective in bringing a siesta to a sudden and conclusive end. So I get up again. To be fair, rested enough, even if I’ve not had as long as I might have liked.

Recently, though, I’ve become a little suspicious of Toffee. After all, it always takes twenty to thirty minutes for this to happen, each time. That’s too systematic, I feel, to be down to mere chance.

Is the reality that Toffee herself has decided that, though there’s pleasure to be had from the companionship of a shared siesta, it really mustn’t be allowed to last too long? That would explain why she always does the same thing, bringing the pleasant interlude to a juddering end, after just so long on each occasion. Certainly, she’s quite diabolical enough to have worked that one out for herself.

Useful, I suppose, in that it keeps my siestas short. Infuriating, though, in its brutality. Endearing perhaps, that Toffee, but a little devil all the same.

Still, it’s the kind of thought that’s fun to play with. Which makes it a pleasure to be reminded of such moments. Especially when it’s in the course of sorting and shelving books, a mundane task badly in need of lightening up.

Words and using them to resist dictatorship

It’s the murders, the tortures, the imprisonments we mainly think of when it comes to dictatorships. There is, however, another form of oppression which is less dramatic but more pervasive. That’s the suffocation across every area of society, of all independent or creative thought.

It takes a special kind of person to find a way to resist it.

María Moliner was born in Spain in 1900. She became, more by force of circumstance than by deliberate choice, an archivist and librarian in the 1920s. That gave her an excellent platform to work on ideas learned from a progressive schooling as a child, to contribute to the spread of education and, in particular, the written word throughout her country.

Her career peaked in some significant national appointments, under the Second Spanish Republic in the 1930s. It was during this period that she worked on building a nationwide network of libraries, and summed up her philosophy in a set of instructions to librarians. While long-established libraries are easy to run, much more commitment is needed to launch new ones: 

That will not be possible without enthusiasm, and enthusiasm requires faith. The librarian, to inject enthusiasm into the task, has to believe in two things: in the capacity for improvement of the people the librarian is serving, and that the library’s mission can effectively assist that improvement.

She claimed that people sense their need for culture, because “there is no authentic liberation” without culture, and they feel:

… that the culture denied to them is another privilege conferred on certain persons with no inherently superior value… merely through society’s consideration, their economic position, etc. 

These were exciting times, for those who wanted to see education drive back the limits of ignorance and literacy growing to widen access to culture. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t last. A group of senior military officers rose against the Republic, backed by just the kind of privileged individuals who enjoyed exclusive access to culture (whether or not they’d taken advantage of it). In 1939, after  a three-year civil war, won with the backing of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, one of those officers established a new dictatorship across Spain.

His name was Francisco Franco, and his harsh rule would last until his death in 1975.

His first step was to purge the country of all supporters of the previous regime. For a large minority, that meant physical elimination. Some 200,000 people may have died at the hands of the Franco regime. Half a million escaped abroad but some later returned, in many cases to a reception far less humane than the regime had promised. In addition, there were more than quarter of a million political prisoners, some only released on Franco’s death.

But there were also less extreme forms of purging. Moliner lost her multiple senior jobs, and before she could even return to her original posting as an archivist with the tax service, she was subjected to repeated interrogations. She’d had glowing reports from her superiors under the Republic. Did that make her a sympathiser, a ‘red’? She had not only to answer the accusations but find references from people of standing, to back up her claims, such as that the congratulations she’d received were for her professional performance, not her political sympathies. She had, indeed, protected many right wingers from persecution by the more extreme left-wing elements that came to power towards the end of the Republic.

Ultimately, she avoided arrest or imprisonment, but she knew her career was irretrievably damaged: she would always be marked down as ‘red’, so senior appointments would be out of the question, and national roles unthinkable.

Indeed, she was demoted eighteen points on her profession’s scale of seniority, and was eventually given charge of the small library of an industrial engineering college in Madrid, with no other staff and a minuscule budget for the purchase of books. Any hope of helping to advance an ambitious national plan for education was, of course, gone for good. 

This is where Moliner showed her real strength of personality. Inmaculada de la Fuente recently published a biography of Moliner, entitled Exilio Interior, internal exile (sadly, I know of no English-language edition). That’s where her subject went. Not into physical exile. She was, after all, living and working in the national capital. No, the exile was metaphorical. She turned inwards for resources, and found plenty. None were so plentiful as the raw materials used by this champion of education and the written page: words, words, words.

María Moliner working on her dictionary

She spent fifteen years putting together a dictionary of Spanish. She drew, naturally, on the prestigious work already carried out by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). But hers was a fresh approach. She produced a Dictionary of Spanish Usage, based on the true, living use of the best Spanish.

It was received with great enthusiasm. It became the essential reference work for anyone writing in Spanish or using the language as a tool of their trade. The Nobel-prize winning novelist Gabriel García Marquez (he of A Hundred Years of Solitude) said it was “twice the length” of the RAE’s dictionary, and “in my judgement – more than twice as good.” 

That led to her name being put forward for election to the RAE when a vacancy opened up.

That was an exciting moment. Franco, though close to death, was still in power. Until 1975, a married woman in Spain still needed her husband’s permission to sign an employment contract. And yet here was a woman in serious contention for a seat in the country’s most prestigious Academy. 

But, you’ll have guessed, it didn’t happen. The seat went to a man. A deserving nominee, but no break with the past. As Moliner’s biographer puts it, “the lexicographer wasn’t proposed as a woman, but as the author of the Dictionary of Spanish Usage. But for being a woman (or for not being a man), she was denied.”

Or as the (female) columnist Josefina Carabias exclaimed, “… had María Moliner been a man, she would have been in the Academy for quite some time.”

So Moliner remained in her internal exile. Which soon closed in still further, as Alzheimer’s hit her. She had no second chance to try for a seat in the Academy. She never knew that Franco had died. She missed out on Spain returning to the democracy that he’d overthrown.

María Moliner’s monument:
her Dictionary of Spanish Usage

But she left a remarkable monument all the same. A tool still widely respected today: the latest edition was issued in 2016. A significant contribution to that task she set herself in the 30s, to advance the cause of access to culture.

Because culture makes one free. A message that needs to be shouted again and again from the rooftops in our day, when so many seem to lack the understanding to stand up for their own rights rather than back the privileges of an elite in no way morally superior to them. A message you can count on the little dictators, like Franco, doing their best to crush to death. 

While people like Moliner find ways to advance the cause despite them.