The tousled imp in Downing Street sets the record straight

I've no basis to claim that this is what it purports to be, a verbatim account of an outburst by Britain's eccentric Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but it ought to be and I thought that made it worth publishing.

Everyone’s favourite tousled imp
Well, OK, not everyone’s...

“What on Earth’s the fuss about? It’s my own business, isn’t it? I mean, the place I live in? For Christ’s sake, I’m only in Downing Street because the voters sent me here. You think I’d choose to live in this shithole otherwise? If that moron Starmer thinks it easy, maybe he should try it some time.

“No, no. Scratch that. No need for him to try the place. But he could shut the fuck up, seeing he has no idea what a shithole it is to live in.

“I mean. Bloody taxpayers give me only £30,000 a year to keep refurbishing the place. That’s hardly enough for one of our ‘red wall’ (ha, ha) voters to live on. Well, OK, maybe it’s as much as most people live on. Or, OK, if you insist, a bit more than most people live on. But to make Downing Street a home for someone with standards? £30,000 a year for redecorating’s just chicken feed.

“So, OK, I made my own arrangements. Without bothering the taxpayer. Which they ought to thank me for. And since I’m not bothering them, I don’t see why they should be bothering me. 

“Actually, they’re not. I mean, most of the ‘red wall’ (ha, ha) voters aren’t saying a word. They may not like the way jobs are vanishing, or that salaries are heading southwards, and I haven’t done anything about all that levelling up rubbish Dom used to spout (serves the little shit right), but they look at my tousled hair and my impish grin, and they know they can’t hold anything like that against me. So they’ll vote for me anyway.

“After all, if they had my kind of connections and they thought they could get away with it like I always do, they’d do the same thing. They know that. I know that. They know I know it. We understand each other, in a way the middle-class Londonites in Labour can’t, and that makes a bond.

“So it’s only the gutter press making a fuss. Like the Guardian. The Independent. The Financial Times. And some opposition weaklings, though God knows I’m surprised they’re making so little of it. And those pinko so-called intellectuals at their Hampstead or even (yuck) Islington dinner parties.

“So what that I may have borrowed the money from the Tory Party? And it came from a named donor to the Party? I haven’t confirmed any of that. In fact, I’ve denied it. What gives anyone the right to doubt my word?

“Besides, even if I had done anything like that – and I’m not saying I did, mind – how’s that wrong? You think it might give that donor, if one existed, special access to me? Do you think I would have given him my private number, which I’m not confirming I did? What gives anyone the right to say that he might get privileged access to government, just because other people have got privileged access that way in the past? How can they claim that I’d do him any special favours, just because I’ve done special favours to people with my number before?

“You see why I don’t want to talk about any of this, like the chattering press keep demanding? ‘Transparency’? Who wants transparency? All that would achieve is to reveal that I’d engaged in some shady dealing, and I’m not confirming I did, which might lead people to question my integrity, and where’s the mileage in that?

“I mean, voters wouldn’t. I mean, not my voters. They never question anything. I can even shout and yell about letting their bodies pile high, by the thousand, and they don’t change they minds about voting for me. Why would they? After all, if they’re in a position to complain, they’re obviously not dead and with the body piles. So why should they care? 

“Besides, the dead don’t vote. And there’ve only been a bit more than 100,000 British Covid deaths on my watch. Well, OK, quite a lot more than 100,000. But not quite 150,000. So even if you took all the bereaved into account, that can’t be more 500,000 people. With the kind of majorities we’re getting in the ‘red wall’ (what a joke), I can spare 500,000 votes. So, stuff it, I say.

“Voters don’t care about my wishing so many of them dead. Any more than they care about my dodgy dealings. Listen, we’ve just imposed anti-corruption sanctions on another 22 lousy foreigners. You want to do something about corruption? There you go. We’re doing it. That ought to be enough for anyone, without bothering about my own private arrangements.

“What’s that you’re saying? Anti-corruption ought to start at home? Like hell, my friend. Drives for standards start abroad. It’s charity that starts at home, and it’s charity to make sure that I live in decent comfort while I’m doing this job.

“You want to toss someone to the wolves for corruption in England? Help yourself. Throw that oik Cameron. Let him carry the anti-corruption can. He’s a perfectly unspeakable shit anyway, and he was stupid enough to get caught. He’s obviously the one to go down for it.

“Meanwhile, let’s just make sure I can live in the kind of dignity I’m entitled to. My loyal voters (ho, ho) in the ‘red wall’ (oh, I love saying that) would expect no less.”

You don’t need to be working to enjoy a break

It’s funny how easy it is to get out of some habits, and how hard to get into others.

I’m talking about habits, mind, and not addictions. Habits like packing for trips, something I used to do most weeks and had got down to a fine art. Not just clothes, not just toiletries, not just papers, but phone charger, computer charger, plug adaptors, all the things that small differences between countries make necessary.

That effort was just so I could attend meetings which, I only realised after I’d stopped, it had become an effort to approach with enthusiasm. Even after 35 years, I hadn’t grasped that I’d had enough. Or perhaps after 35 years, it had become so habitual, I’d stopped noticing how monotonous it had become.

Then, with the assistance of redundancy and retirement, I lost that habit. So when I packed last week, I had to remind myself consciously of every item I was taking. And, even then, I left without my wallet or any kind of personal documentation. We live in Spain and I do find that I have to be able to prove who I am from time to time, so having no papers might have been a problem. It wasn’t, though, up in the mountains where we went, far from any great population centres or any of our fine bureaucratic institutions.

So how about the habit I haven’t yet learned? That’s holidays while retired. It wasn’t my first, but it still feels strange to go on holiday when I’m not actually taking a break from work. And even stranger, though certainly very pleasant, to come back from holiday without feeling I have to start work again the next day. Odd, but I suspect I’ll get used to it fairly soon. Come to think of it, I hope you too get the chance to develop that habit in the not too distant future.

Jérica from our room in the ‘Sharíqa’ B&B opposite

The place we went to is called Jérica and, like so many fine towns in Spain, it owes its origins to the Arabs that ran most of the country for seven centuries. What a power they then were, expansive, dynamic, open. They could rule over an essentially Christian population without persecuting it, they could work hand in glove with the Jews without tormenting them, they could absorb culture and add to it in many spectacular and exciting ways. All that went when, from the twelfth century onwards, inward-looking bigots began to take power in western Islam, and were then overrun by a terrible, obscurantist Christianity that, after a brief moment of glory as a world power, condemned Spain to decline and pain.

We stayed in a wonderful bed and breakfast house on the hillside opposite the town. It was called ‘Sharíqa’, a reasonable transliteration of the town’s Arabic name, from a word possibly meaning ‘eastern slope of the mountain’, which sounds like a really dull and implausible name to give the town, or possibly ‘castle of the sheriffs’, which sounds much more likely. Especially since the town is crowned by a castle.

Of course, the name just made me think of Jericho. So it was with a sense of aptness that I found the town walls had indeed come tumbling down.

Jérica: and the walls came tumbling down

It’s built on a high bluff, surrounded on three sides by the river Palancia, including some attractive weirs as the river reaches the town. Indeed, that was one of the things that we particularly enjoyed during this trip: everywhere we went, we heard the sound of running water, with anything from irrigation channels, to streams to rivers everywhere we went. That’s not so common in Spain.

A weir at the entry of the river Palancia to the town of Jérica

Indeed, one aspect of the trip that was marginally disappointing was that the weather tended towards the English. A lot of grey. Cool temperatures verging on the downright cold. Even outbreaks of drizzling rain, though not generally for quite as long as we learned to enjoy in England (for some value of the word ‘enjoy’). Why, at one point, we even found ourselves caught in fog.

That reminded me of an acquaintance I once made in the English Lake District. 

‘People always complain to me about the rain up here,’ he told me, ‘but I keep saying, it’s the Lake District. What do you think those lakes are full of?’

Anyway, we’d taken bikes with us (electric ones, I’m glad to say, so cycling in the mountains became a pleasure rather than a back-breaking chore), and cool weather was a lot more pleasurable than heat would have been (even with a motor to help, cycling can be hot work at times, up there in the hills).

The bikes meant that we got to see a lot more than just Jérica. Certainly, the town wasn’t by any means the only sources of striking or beautiful sights we came across, to say nothing of a few frankly weird ones. 

One of the weirder sights: a congress of cairns

A stream near Viver, the next town to Jérica

We rode mostly along the ‘Vías verdes de ojos negros’ which translates, a little literally, as ‘black eyes greenway’. I’m glad to say we neither gave each other black eyes, nor suffered any in accidents. The track mostly follows the route of an old railway line, which means the slopes aren’t bad, and you get some great bridges and tunnels along the way.

Quite a striking pine. And a fine bridge on the Ojos Negros

Some of the tunnels are impressive

There's also a lot of bird watching to do, if that’s your thing. It’s certainly Danielle’s, and she got some great photos. Incidentally, she calls that pastime ‘shooting birds’, though I felt that was a somewhat misleading, or at least ambiguous, term for her innocent hobby. The high point was a series of pictures of bee-catchers* and, though I thought bees needed all the protection they could get these days, apparently seeing bee-catchers is one heck of a thing for a bird watcher (at least in Europe). 

Danielle with her camera, ‘shooting’ her birds

Personally, I just see dots flying across the sky, but Danielle’s getting really good at this stuff, and will call out things like, ‘look, look! A lesser black-backed whippersnapper’, where I only see a little smudge of grey. I’m frankly impressed.

It was a fine short break away. Not necessarily all that relaxing, given all the cycling, electric motor or not. Still a break, though, and no worse for not being a break from work or ending with a return to it.

In fact, I reckon in time I could get used to that kind of thing.

* Since I first published this piece, a good friend pointed out to me that I might have meant bee-eaters, not bee-catchers. She was entirely right. Note to self: work on your ornithology.

Hope springs eternal in the canine heart

Hope is such a fundamental human trait, isn’t it? And not just human. As I hope to show now.

It’s hope of spring that gets us through the toughest winter. It’s hope of happiness that drives us into marriage, even to the point that, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, a second marriage like my wife’s to me, demonstrates the triumph of optimism over experience. In the same way, it’s hope of a better deal from society that has us voting for people who offer the promise of an improvement.

Which rather shows how double-edged hope can be. Hope drove voters to go for Donald Trump or Brexit, and though both have not just failed to deliver on their promises, but even made most of the people who backed them poorer and less happy, many still persist in hoping for a great dawn yet to come.

That’s the thing about hope. A great hope can lead to a deep disappointment. Still, it’s the thing that keeps us going when we might be inclined to give up. That makes it fundamental to all human endeavour: who’d educate a child, after all, except in the hope that things can be better for those who learn?

It’s why we have all those fine sayings about hope. 

“Hope springs eternal in the human heart,” is a saying that rings down the ages.

“While I live, I hope”, the Romans said. The English, the French and the Spanish all have identical variations on that theme: “while there’s life, there’s hope”. Of course, the French and the Spanish say those things in their own languages (“tant qu’il y a de la vie, il y a de l’espoir”, or “mientras hay vida, hay esperanza”). Nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid. Foreigners do insist on continuing to speak foreign. Sadly, one of the many hopes yet to be realised, is the Englishman’s that one day the whole world will see sense and start talking English.

What’s interesting, though, is that however essential hope is to humans, it’s just as crucial in other species. And in none so much as in dogs. And in no dogs more powerfully than in our two, Toffee and Luci.

Luci’s a strangely omnivorous dog. Yes, she likes all the things you might expect. Not just obvious dog food, or even cheese or yogurt and the many other things most dogs like. She’s also a fruit bat, banana being far and away her favourite.

Luci collecting yet another piece of banana

She can be upstairs lying on an armchair in one of the bedrooms, but if I peel a banana – why, if I even start peeling a banana – down in the kitchen she will, miraculously, appear by my side a moment later. And it’s hope that drives her, the hope that might perhaps be persuaded to share the precious thing with her. Although, I have to admit, that in this case it’s more of a certitude than a hope, since it’s now become my invariable habit, whenever I decide to eat a banana, to cut some slices off either end to feed her.

Luci will also appear under any table we happen to be eating at. After all, she knows that there’s always a chance that we might be unusually careless, and something might fall off our plates on to the floor. Then it will be up whichever is better placed out of Luci and Toffee to grab it first.

Did you see that lovely message that was circulating on the web some time ago, “the five-second rule [covering the time it’s allegedly safe to pick up and eat food that has been dropped on the ground] doesn’t count if you have a three-second dog”? That’s Luci for you.

Toffee is the one more committed to pure hope, even when it’s far less likely to be realised. I’m forever impressed by how far she’ll go to persuade us to throw a toy for her, even if we’ve already thrown in ten times and told her that, “no, that’s it now, lie down.” She’ll spare no effort to appear endearing. Sometimes, I just chuck it for her, if only to get her to leave me in peace, even though I know it buys me at most a minute or two, until she runs back with the toy and a demand that I throw it again.

Toffee hopeful that endearment will get the toy thrown again

Even more remarkable, she can be apparently fast asleep when I walk into the kitchen, but within seconds she’ll be by my side. Kitchens, you see, are good places. They contain loads of food. A particularly soft human might just be persuaded, by especially sad soft eyes, to send some of it her way. That, to be fair, works less well. I’ve had too much experience clearing up after her when she’s eaten the wrong kind of food (I’ll spare you the details) to keep giving her any of it.

That’s a bit of a Brexit-hope: strong and fervent and ultimately disappointed.

“I was just passing, and heard you were in the kitchen.
I thought I'd take a look and see if I could help with anything.”

“It’s a dog’s life,” we say for an existence that is miserable and painful. I’m sure there are plenty of dogs out there condemned to such lives. Not ours. Their existence is highly enviable, as comfortable or even luxurious as that of a Boris Johnson. In fact, they have something that poor old Johnson can only aspire to for now, though he’s working to achieve it: no one holds them answerable for anything. The Johnsonian ideal.

Still, the dogs keep hoping for more, just like him. Hoping is as much a doggy preoccupation as a human one. It seems that where there’s dog’s life, there’s hope. 

Hope, you see, springs eternal in the canine heart.

Not so super for the sport

Shocking news, right? Twelve of Europe’s top football clubs, six English and three each from Italy and Spain, are threatening to form a ‘Super League’ of their own. They hope to attract eight others to give them enough teams to run a good tournament, to showcase the sport.

Sorry, let me correct that. To make huge amounts of money. Mostly from television rights, though obviously the revenue from overpriced tickets to the matches themselves is not to be sneezed at

Two of the six teams, Real Madrid and Arsenal
battling it out

It’s not quite clear whether this is really going to happen or not. It may just be a bit of bluff, to force the Union of European Football Associations to reform the existing Champions League in a way that suits the top companies – sorry, clubs – better. We shall have to see.

The most wonderful aspect of the new proposal is that the twelve clubs currently involved, plus three more yet to join, would be guaranteed places in the Super League. That is to say, they couldn’t be relegated, even if they had a disastrous season. Only the five others would enter the competition by way of qualifying tournaments each year.

One of the things that companies most long for, and it seems football clubs too, is the elimination of competition. It’s a superbly comfortable arrangement, to know that whatever you do, you’ll be back next year, able to count on exactly the same revenue. It allows you to escape from that boringly old-fashioned system whereby you can be promoted or demoted based on your merit, which makes financial management so damned difficult, with the future not quite as certain as an accountant might like.

Not, in a sense, that there’s much that’s all that meritocratic about the present system. The wealthiest clubs can buy themselves the most expensive players, which are often the best. That means they tend to perform better than most and attract the biggest audiences.

Audiences matter, especially when it comes to TV. There are huge sums at stake. The teams that attract most viewers ultimately attract the biggest share of TV deals. And, with all that extra money, they can afford to keep buying the best players.

And round goes the cycle again…

Personally, I don’t watch football. Partly it’s because I’m not that enthusiastic about the game. Partly, though, it’s for something close to the reason a French friend gave me for not wanting to watch the Tour de France cycling race any more: “I’m not interested in watching an event which only establishes which team is taking the most effective and least detectable performance-enhancing drugs”. I’m not so keen on a game whose outcome is so massively dependent on a bank account.

I’d like to see clubs forced to take their players only from the region where they’re based. You know, Liverpool made up only of Liverpudlian players, Barcelona fielding only Catalans, Milan entirely Lombard. At least that would mean the clubs would have to train and cultivate local talent, which would anchor them far more tightly to their local populations and to the amateur games from which they’d draw.

It’s the reason that for a time I watched international rugby with a lot more pleasure. The Welsh team was made up of Welshmen. French players spoke French. The English fielded Englishmen. Well, more or less. The system was frittering at the edges, with England adopting players who were essentially, say, New Zealanders who couldn’t get picked regularly for the All Blacks – yes, a second rate All Black is generally pretty much up there with leading English players – accepting them as qualified to play for England on the grounds that one of their grandmothers knew the traditional pronunciation of the placename Tewkesbury (Chuksberry).

Still, Football’s never going to abandon the system of buying players. There’s far too much money in it. And money isn’t just wealth, it’s power. That’s something we’ve been discovering in recent weeks, or rather confirming, since deep down we knew it ages go, that the system of power in England (the nation providing six teams to the Super League) is about a series of distasteful associations between politicians (well, Tory politicians at least), senior civil servants fatally drawn to the main chance of enrichment, and private companies prepared to use their money to buy both in order to chase still further gain.

If that’s the way we organise our politics, why should sport be any different?

If I mean sport. The way things are in football, the game seems nothing more than an adjunct of the business. With business the main concern.

That makes the European Super League a perfectly apt symbol for our times. In turn, that would give it all the ingredients it needs for a long and successful existence. Financially successful, that is, the only kind that counts.

But that really has little to do with sport.

Tories don’t take bribes (mostly)

‘Nostalgia’, one of my favourite pieces of graffiti proclaims, ‘isn’t what it used to be’.

Ah, nostalgia, nostalgia. It’s supposed to give you a warm feeling about a past you remember with affection, as better than the present. In reality, though, the past was often no better at all. Or even very different.

Take Britain today. It makes me feel I’m reliving the nineties. That was the last time the Tories had been in power for over a decade, and the place was drowning in sleaze. A friend with a collapsing company once told me, ‘everything’s fine. I’m keeping my nose just below water. It’s great, as long as I don’t try to breathe’. 

That was John Major’s Conservative government. The sleaze was over its nose, and it was failing to swim to the surface again. To what extent that eventually led to its fall, and its replacement by Tony Blair’s New Labour, is hard to say – there are always multiple factors at play when a party loses its grip on power – but it certainly can’t have helped.

Why did we call the scandal merely sleaze? Because Tories don’t go for outright corruption. They don’t take bribes. 

As a rule.

As with any rule, there are exceptions to prove this one. Take Neil Hamilton. With a mate of his and fellow Tory MP, Tim Smith, he accepted brown envelopes of banknotes to ask parliamentary questions on behalf of people rich enough to buy influence in the House of Commons. The Guardian exposed the behaviour, and Hamilton sued. But eventually, realising he had no hope of winning, he dropped the case. In response, the Guardian then published a famous headline, branding him ‘a liar and a cheat’.

He never challenged that description. Which rather confirms it.

The problem with Hamilton is that he’d been in too much of a hurry. He did things which were not actually criminal – he escaped prison – but which weren’t just unethical, they were far too obviously unethical. It became undeniable – literally, since he couldn’t deny it – and that meant he’d gone too far.

If you’re in less of a hurry, and more subtle in your approach, you can get away with plundering the system for far longer and never be exposed. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, the French political philosopher Frédéric Bastiat explained:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Which takes us neatly to the scandal engulfing today’s Conservative government. 

The Bullingdon Club, finishing school for entitled vandals
They would trash restaurants knowing their parents would pay
Two future prime ministers appear in this picture:
David Cameron, second from left, back row
Boris Johnson, on the right of the three sitting down
(confirming that he stands for nothing) 

David Cameron, the Prime Minister before last, and Boris Johnson, the current one, were both trained from early days to believe themselves entitled to the best they could help themselves to, from British society. They were together at Eton, the most privileged school in Britain, and their paths crossed again in the Bullingdon club for entitled and vandalistic rich kids at Oxford University, before both being elected as Conservative MPs in 2001. 

Boris Johnson recently claimed with glee that Britain’s Covid vaccine success had been spurred by ‘greed and capitalism’. He was joking, but there’s many a true word spoken in jest. Greed, regarded by some as a mortal sin, is a way of life for him (he even complains about struggling to get by on a Prime Minister’s salary).

His tribute to greed is just the kind of thing Bastiat meant, when he talked about glorifying plunder. Johnson has plundered with great gusto, funnelling taxpayers’ funds to a lover, or awarding contracts to friends who will, in turn, help finance his next election campaign. They’ll no doubt also provide him with a much more substantially remunerated private sector post once he finally leaves office.

That blurring of the lines between public sector and private is at the heart of the latest scandal. While Prime Minister, Cameron employed the founder of the now insolvent bank Greensill as an adviser in Downing Street; at least two senior civil servants moonlighted for Greensill; after he left office, Cameron became a director of Greensill himself and has now been caught lobbying government on behalf of the company. Had he succeeded, he’d have benefited to the tune of £60 million. Plunder, then, on a grand scale. And all within the rules of the system he and other Tories had created.

As Bastiat put it, they build a legal system that authorises plunder.

Johnson, proving that there’s no loyalty even between thieves, has decided to throw Cameron under the bus. There are now six enquiries under way into his behaviour over Greensill. Like so many enquiries, they may just delay things until the public lose interest, and bury the truth in thousands of pages of verbiage, but they’re clearly at least causing Cameron some discomfort. 

Some may say, “it isn’t only the Tories who plunder”. Maybe. Peter Mandelson, close adviser to New Labour’s Tony Blair declared, “we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, an extraordinary statement from a Labour politician, apparently indifferent to the fact that celebrating filth only makes everything filthier. Labour failed to clean up the system. However, with so much more time in power, the chief architects of that system were certainly the Tories. 

That’s why they (generally) don’t take bribes. Why would they need to? It was once said of journalists:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, 
Thank God! the British journalist. 
But, seeing what the man will do 
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.

The Tories will plunder, without scruple, and unbribed. What would they need bribes for? And the worst of it is that people vote for them anyway.

After all, look at what happened to Neil Hamilton. He never made it back into the British parliament. But he’s a member of the Welsh Parliament. A plunderer caught but back in elective office anyway.

Let’s face it, if we vote for plunderers, we can only expect to be plundered.

Not bitching about a name

Citadel of the town of Bitche

There was something I knew about Spanish culture before we moved to Spain, but it still astonishes me every time I come across it. That’s how often the name ‘Jesus’ is still used in this country. Most nations that regard themselves as Christian seem to avoid the name, perhaps thinking that it would be a little sacrilegious to use it, but not Spain.

It’s used for both men and women (in the latter case, preceded by a more obviously female name). So, for instance, the present Minister of Finance is a woman called María Jesús Montero. I read recently that, as part of her drive to reform the Spanish tax system, she’d appointed a commission to look into what needed to be done, to be headed by a prestigious economist and university professor, Jesús Ruiz-Huerta.

An initiative blessed, not just once but twice, by the name of the man seen by Christians as the redeemer of all mankind? Well, I may not believe in all that, but I admit it does sound like a fine way to commend your endeavours to divine protection. Let’s hope it works.

Still, that wasn’t the story about names that appealed to me most this week. The other one concerns a small town in the Eastern French department of the Moselle. A Guardian article entitled ‘Life’s a Bitche’ had me laughing out loud while Danielle was driving the car, and had her smiling when I passed on the news, especially as it reminded her of a pleasant experience from years ago.

When we were living in Strasbourg, Danielle and I once travelled into the Moselle to help out a friend, who wanted her son driven to his father’s house for a few days. The father was Stephan Balkenhol, a sculptor who had recently achieved real breakthrough in the artistic world. We were happy to have the chance to see his workshop and chat to him about his work, and weren’t disappointed: he sculpts wood and his workshop, with an unusually high roof, was dominated by what looked like the best part of a pine trunk hanging from a pulley, so he could rough-shape it with a chain saw. 

It was quite an eye opener to see how how technology and art blended.

One of Stephan Balkhenol's hallmark wooden sculptures

To get to his place, we had to go through the pretty town of Bitche. We liked the place with its historic centre dominated by its citadel. But what makes the recent talk about the place amusing is that it wasn’t for its prettiness, but because of its name, or more specifically, the problems its name had caused with Facebook.

In its wisdom, that fine organ of social media had decided to shut down the town’s page. ‘Bitche’, you see. Not the kind of language Facebook can tolerate. The town got blocked.

Valérie Degouy, spokesperson for Bitche, said she tried sending messages Facebook up to ten times a day, without success. Eventually, she created a page called ‘Mairie 57230’, or ‘Town Council 57230’ where 57230 is Bitche’s postcode, and that worked, even though there are plenty of references to Bitche on the page.

The Mairie 57230 Facebook page

Eventually, the fuss in the media, and social media, finally got through to Facebook and the page has been restored. Bitche has its footprint in social media once more. And, of course, has enjoyed a great deal of free publicity.

Which it deserves. It’s a lovely little town. Worth a visit.

When sense prevailed: the Ville de Bitche page restored

Particularly apt was the comment from the town's mayor, Benoît Kieffer, who thanked Mark Zuckerberg and paid tribute to: 

...our American friends who under the flag of the 100 Infantry Division came from South Carolina to liberate our town: liberators who called themselves, with pride, the ‘sons of Bitche’

Incidentally, the car trip when I came across the story and shared it with Danielle was taking us to the town of Jérica. Another name full of potential ambiguity. You can imagine that, as soon as I could, I went to take a look at the state of the walls.

The walls of Jérica have come tumbling down
But the views are stunning

I can report that, though it was never as far as I know visited by Joshua, its walls have certainly come tumbling down. Just like Jericho’s. 

Which doesn’t stop it being as pretty as Bitche, and as worth a visit.

Jérica as seen from our bedroom window

The passing of a fine Englishman. Who chose not to be

One event has dominated the British media for days now: the death of Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth.

Personally, I have a lot of trouble understanding the apparent outpouring of grief. After all, the man enjoyed a life full of variety, interest, and extraordinary privilege. And more than any of those things, it was remarkably long. He died at 99. OK, so he missed the milestone of 100 by weeks. But that’s hardly the stuff of tragedy, is it?

Another loss on 12 December 2020 moved me far more. That was the death of David Cornwell, though you may know him better by his pen name, John le Carré.

Some horrible literary snobs regard ‘genre fiction’ as somehow inferior. A genre is something like thrillers, or romance, or historical novels. Le Carré shone above all in his spy novels. 

What a giant he was when he wrote them. They were great books in their own right, as well as being highly entertaining. In fact, it was his attempts to write different books that were disappointing – try The Naïve and Sentimental Lover if you want to see le Carré at his weakest – whereas A Perfect Spy and The Little Drummer Girl are right up there with, say, the best of Graham Greene and Salman Rushdie as outstanding works of English fiction. 

Peter Egan in Le Carré’s highly autobiographical
A Perfect Spy

And ‘English’ is certainly the right word. Le Carré, despite the French sounding nom de plume, was quintessentially English. He spoke for the country with a far more intelligent and elegant voice than the Duke of Edinburgh ever did, even though the Duke was consort to the Queen. 

Le Carré had the background for it. He attended Sherborne, one of those expensive, privileged and unpleasant private schools we English like to call ‘public’. He didn’t attend Eton, the most exclusive and snobbiest of the public schools, which has produced so many of our Prime Ministers, including two of the last three (David Cameron and the present caricature, Boris Johnson), but he did teach there later.

From Sherborne, he did something admirable and daring, clearing off on his own to study in considerable poverty at Berne University in Switzerland, where he sowed the seeds of a lifelong devotion to what he came to call the German muse. He apparently spoke German well enough to pass for a native.

On returning to England, he flowed back into the more normal channel of English upper class character building, Oxford University. Fortunately, he never had the money to emulate Cameron and Johnson, who joined the ranks of the university’s Bullingdon club for entitled and privileged vandals. Le Carré didn’t spend evenings trashing restaurants, expecting his Dad to pay for the damage the following day.

Indeed, his Dad was the other factor that marked him out as different from many in his class. Ronnie Cornwell was a conman, who cheated victims out of their savings and had several spells in prison for his pains. Of course, plenty of others in the English establishment have felonious fathers, though their actions aren’t always of a kind that the law actually classifies as criminal. 

Le Carré spent time in MI5, the British security service tasked with protecting the country from threats to its security, before moving on to MI6 which poses the same kinds of threat, at least at the level of intelligence, to other countries.

This background meant he was ideally placed to write about spying, and about the disillusion of many in the British ruling class who haven’t adapted to having no empire to run. The wonderful, betrayed, disappointed, slightly crazed character Connie Sachs sums it up in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for le Carré’s greatest creation, George Smiley:

Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. Englishmen could be proud then, George. They could... All gone.

Beryl Reid as Connie Sachs in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Le Carré deeply understood the agony of that class, of those people who perhaps more than any others represent England to the rest of the world, and who can’t cope with the loss of empire. They led the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, promising that it could be a great global power once more. Now, as the reality of Brexit sinks in, the millions who gullibly followed them are beginning to discover how toxic a deception that was.

Le Carré entirely understood that. A character in Agent Running in the Field declares:

It is my considered opinion that for Britain and Europe… Britain’s departure from the European Union… and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States… is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none.

And Le Carré told John Banville, in an interview for the Guardian:

Mob orators of the sort we have, the Boris Johnson sort, do not speak reason. When you get into that category, your task is to fire up the people with nostalgia, with anger. 

England has taken to looking back with nostalgia on a world that never truly existed, and certainly never served the people who turned out in their millions, and in anger, for Brexit and for Johnson. Men like him have pulled off the trick, the hallmark of populists, of passing themselves off as men of the people, deeply encrusted in the establishment though they are. It’s a con trick worthy of le Carré’s father. 

That kind of unscrupulous behaviour is typical of such men, on both sides of the divide over the ‘clusterfuck’ that is Brexit. David Cameron, pro-EU, has been engulfed in an ethics scandal concerning a company called Greensill, for which he lobbied the government he used to head, seeking help that would have made him a great deal of money. Boris Johnson, pro-Brexit, channelled public funds to a mistress and has, since becoming Prime Minister, created an atmosphere in which it is normal to award public contracts to friends or political contributors.

Le Carré knew and understood that world and wrote about it with outstanding skill. Which makes his death far more of a loss than that of a Duke of Edinburgh who took much more than Le Carré in the course of a long life, and gave back far less. 

But what struck me most about Le Carré’s death was my recent discovery that he took Irish nationality just before he died. Just as I took French nationality, and for the same reason, to maintain our links to the European Union. 

The consummate Englishman died Irish. A wonderful irony. And entirely appropriate for a fine man whose loss is certainly worth mourning.

Whispers from the stone age

It can send a tingle up the spine to hear the voices of our ancestors speaking to us across a gap of 7000 years. 

It’s one-way communication, of course. Try to talk back and it’s not so much a tingle you need, as counselling.

The voices aren’t spoken, either. You hear them with your eyes, not your ears. And it’s a whisper not a shout, in faded paintings on rock walls. But still touching, still poignant and, above all, still eloquent.

Where we went was in the ‘crooked valley’, Valltorta, in the north of the Valencian region where we live. We visited two places with Neolithic wall paintings, not so much in caves as in what are called ‘rocks shelters’. These are relatively shallow indentations in a cliff face, but with overhanging rock providing something of a roof.

Think of it as a stone-age bus shelter, and you won’t be far off. Though ancestors hopeful of a bus showing up would have been in for a long wait.

What I found most striking was how similar those ancestors were to us. Or should that be the other way around? How little we’ve changed since then.

That was moving but also chastening.

First of all, among all the dozens of figures there was only one that was possibly a woman. I did wonder why it was that we assume that the ones in trousers were all men, but the astonishingly well-informed and infectiously enthusiastic guide, provided the answer before I could even ask: it’s all to do with how you have a pee. 

You can work out the rest for yourself.

And what were all these men doing?

The Cave of the Horses as my camera captured it (left)
and in a reproduction in the Valltorta musem (right)
See the faintness of the drawings?
But it's moving to pick them out at all

The first place we visited has a name which is a wonderful monument to our capacity to jump to entirely mistaken assumptions: its modern discoverers called it the ‘cave of the horses’. Not a single horse appears in the paintings. The animals they took for horses are deer. 

To be honest, the antlers are a bit of a giveaway. 

What’s happening in the dynamic and fast-moving scene? A group of men armed with bows is chasing the deer from behind towards another group waiting to ambush them. Several of the deer already have arrows in their bodies; one indeed has three, has dropped behind the others, and is clearly not long for this world.

It’s a remarkable painting to be able to narrate a whole story so dramatically and yet so economically – the artist used a limited palette of paints and showed figures only, no background. But it’s also wonderful for what it reveals of social attitudes. 

The guide explained that we have a good idea of the diet of the people of the time and, while meat certainly figured in it, large animals like deer only contributed about 2-3% of the total. We’ve found the bones of animals eaten for meat. Predominantly, they’re from rabbits or birds, probably trapped rather than hunted.

So what the artist has chosen to depict is something unusual. A major, special event, and it’s likely only an elite took part. In other words, Neolithic society had a celebrity culture just like ours: it didn’t focus on the humdrum activities of daily living. The whole ‘gatherer’ side of hunter-gatherer life, mostly carried out by women, or the trapping of small animals (I wonder whether that wasn’t at least in part women’s work too?), was probably just too dull to figure in a self-respecting cave painter’s art. He (I suspect it was a he) celebrated a self-perpetuating entitled elite, just as our gossip magazines do today.

The other rock shelter was the ‘Civil Guard’ cave which, at least, has the merit of being accurately named, in that its discoverer was a Spanish policeman, a Guardia Civil. What does it show? Again, lots of men. Lots of bows. Lots of arrows, including a quiver or two. 

Part of the scene from the Civil Guard cave

At first, there was some debate about whether it depicted some kind of ritual. That’s because while there were a lot of men progressing right to left (plenty of movement, again), there were few going the other way. But then sensitive instruments were brought in and the faint traces were found of a lot more figures going left to right.

So it seems we’re witnessing a battle scene. Which makes sense. Down to today, men are respected over women, and warriors over other men. The mere possession of the means to inflict lethal force is seen as precious, whether or not it's ever used or even needed. Just take a look at the US gun lobby. 

Writing hadn’t been invented yet, but if it had been, you could imagine the figures in the paintings wearing caps proclaiming, ‘Make the Neolithic Great Again’. Or, perhaps, ‘No Neanderthals here’.

Talking about caps, their headgear was a thing too, as it happens. Several of the figures we saw were wearing feathers in their hair. Not in a hat or a headband. There’s only one kind of hair that will hold a feather, and it’s the tightly curled hair we associate with black people today. Curiously, DNA analysis shows that Europeans of the time were indeed dark. Probably with blue eyes, a striking combination.

A fine-looking fellow
Cheddar Man, an early Briton
Reconstruction from a skull found in England’s Cheddar Gorge,
with the support of DNA analysis. Photo by Paul Rincon for the BBC

Perhaps anyone who could write back then might have carried the message ‘Black Lives Matter’. Or possibly not, since all lives around there were black anyway. A useful thought for white supremacists. The uninvited immigrants, the interlopers who violently invaded these lands were the whites. They seized ancestral lands from the black forefathers of any of us who claim European heritage today.

The ancestors’ voices may be faint. They may speak to us in little more than a whisper. But, boy, the message is loud and clear, isn’t it?

Déjà vu: fake news and the Popish Plot

The thing I enjoy the most about my podcast on England’s story is that, as I read around the subject, I keep confirming that wherever we are today, we’ve been there before. Somehow, it’s consoling to know that even if things are pretty awful today, they were just as bad before, and often worse. 

After all, we survived then, however painful the times became.

Playing card celebrating the execution of five Jesuits
on the basis of the false Popish Plot denunciations 

There was something very special, wasn’t there, about the way Donald Trump kept proclaiming that he’d won the presidential election?

It didn’t matter how often judges said, “no, actually, you didn’t”. It didn’t even matter that they were judges he’d appointed. It didn’t matter how often election officials, even Republican ones, declared the election fair. None of that would stop him insisting that he’d won, and not just won, but won in a landslide, after which the election had been stolen from him.

That’s the way fake news works. You keep repeating the lie. You get your followers to keep repeating it too. The aim is that, it it’s said often enough and loud enough, eventually people will believe it’s true. It seems that plenty of people in the US believe the election was rigged against Trump – fortunately not a majority, but still a large number – showing that a falsehood, however blatantly untrue it is, can seem believable by those anxious to believe it.

The most wonderfully contradictory aspect of all this process is that you denounce, as liars, the very people who expose your lie as untrue.

Actually, that’s the worst part of fake news. It’s when you’re not just pushing a lie, but using it to whip up anger, even violence, against others. Trump called those in the media who criticised his untruths as ‘enemies of the people’, which made them targets of violence. Most shamefully of all, he spent time on 6 January whipping up hatred against Congress, before sending a mob down there, with the nearly inevitable result that it assaulted the Capitol building violently.

All deeply depressing and ugly. But, you may or may not be glad to know, not new. My latest podcast episode is about Titus Oates. He was never head of state, thank God, but in all other respects, he was the Donald Trump of the reign of Charles II.

A curious character, he got kicked out of Cambridge University, but that didn’t stop him claiming he had a degree so he could become an Anglican priest. He was kicked out of his parish for stealing and blasphemy. He then decided he wanted to become a schoolmaster, but there was already someone in the position he coveted, so he invented some fake news against him, claiming he’d sodomised one of the pupils. 

When that was shown to be a complete fabrication, he had to escape before he was prosecuted himself for the slander. Despite his track record, he talked himself into a job as a chaplain with the Navy. And, in what’s becoming a bit of a pattern, they kicked him out. Funnily enough, for sodomy, just what he’d accused the schoolmaster of. In a decision with echoes in our own times, the Navy took no further action against Oates, because he was – a priest.

Next he apparently converted to Catholicism. That was a hell of a step back then. The atmosphere in England towards Catholics was exactly like the atmosphere in 1950s America towards Communists. They were seen as agents of a foreign power (the Pope), ready to undermine everything right thinking people stood for, overthrow the king and set up a ‘Papist’ tyranny in England.

Of course, later he’d claim he hadn’t really converted, he just selflessly penetrated Catholic ranks to discover what evil plots they were concocting.

Meanwhile, he managed to talk the Jesuits – and, for the conspiracy theorists, Jesuits were to the Catholics what the KGB would be to Communists in modern times – to send him to their college for English candidates in Spain.

Which kicked him out.

So he went to the equivalent college in France.

Which kicked him out too.

Back he came to England, ready to tell anyone who’d listen that he’d uncovered a terrible plot by ‘Papists’ against dear old (Protestant) England. And not a plot that was going to happen at some time in the future. One that had already got started.

The ‘Popish Plot’, as it came to be known, was a conspiracy to murder Charles II to put his brother James, a Catholic, on the throne instead. Several attempts had been made and had only failed due to misfortune – things like a gun misfiring. 

Oates next had a stroke of luck. He swore his testimony before a magistrate. Shortly afterwards, that magistrate was murdered.

Clearly, the conspiracy theorists would believe, it was because he now knew too much, so the ‘Papists’ had assassinated him. As it happens, we still don’t know who killed the magistrate.

The beauty with Oates’s fake news was that he had such an excellent memory that he could repeat the story he’d invented in exactly the same detail every time he was questioned. He told his lies consistently, without contradiction, and that made him all the more believable.

So Oates achieved an impact like Trump’s in sending his loyal supporters (the ones he’s betrayed since) to attack the US Congress. But worse. Catholics were fined or banished from London. Twenty-four were put to death. Seven more died in prison. Overall, the atmosphere, already tough against them, became even more harshly toxic towards Catholics.

That lasted three long years, before Oates was finally exposed. He’d made everything up. He spent some time in gaol, and some time in the stocks (when people threw unpleasant things at him), and he was even whipped across London twice, which must have been pretty nasty. But he ended up with a pension voted him by the state and, having  been an Anglican priest and a failed Jesuit seminarian, he spent his last years as a Baptist Minister (like his father).

The Popish Plot had simply been a series of poisonous falsehoods designed to whip up hatred against a small and powerless minority of the nation. Like Trump whipping up hatred against supposed ‘Antifa’ people, or Joseph McCarthy whipping up hatred against alleged Communists.

Horrible. Vicious. And when you know what kind of a man Oates was, unbelievable that he should have had such success.

Just as it’s unbelievable that either McCarthy or Trump found supporters.

Goodbye to a man of God, and of deep humanity

The thing about our cat Misty is that he’s a pretty good judge of character. The character he likes is one that exudes warmth, and kindness, and calm. In Antoine, he found all those qualities.

Misty makes his feelings forcefully clear. He would lie on my knees for a while, if I begged him to, but if he felt my stroking becoming casual or inattentive, he would reach a languid paw around and scratch me. If I still didn’t mend my ways, he would eventually bite a finger and, though he was never so vulgarly brutal as to draw blood, nonetheless when he bit me, I knew I’d been bitten.

Eventually, he would simply leave my lap and look for something, or better still someone, more congenial to lie on.

With Antoine, during the several days he and his wife Lilly spent with us in England nearly ten years ago, it could hardly have been more different. Misty would jump up, not just once but evening after evening, and lie on his lap for hours at a time. Imagine my astonishment. Imagine my jealousy.

Antoine effortlessly established the relationship
with Misty that has forever eluded me

“What do you expect?” my wife Danielle would say. “You get distracted. You fidget. You’re too damn neurotic.”

She was right, of course. But understanding the problem didn’t make me feel any better. Especially as I knew that the only way I’d get Antoine’s easy relationship with Misty was to be more like him. And that would need a personality transplant.

Because Antoine was a pretty special man.

He was born in 1940, in south western France. His parents were from Alsace in Eastern France, but war was raging at the time, and Germany viewed the region not as French but as occupied national territory. Many of its inhabitants had fled westward ahead of the invading German armies.

They came back after the fighting, however, and Antoine was brought up in Saint Louis, a little market town just on the border with Switzerland, near the great Swiss city of Basel. Danielle comes from Hegenheim, one of the small villages dotted in the countryside around the town. We are in fact related and, as they say, blood’s thicker than water though, to be honest, in my case, that’s more metaphorical than literal. Antoine was my wife’s uncle’s wife’s sister’s husband.

Still, I’m proud to think of him as family.

The bond that made us relatives was formed in 1965, when he married Lilly. A 55-year marriage of loyalty and mutual support. A precious achievement and one that isn't that common in our days.

Antoine’s first choice of career was as a teacher. But he was also from that minority of Frenchmen who are Protestant, from what they call the ‘Reformed Church’. These were originally the followers of John Calvin, the rather tougher version of Protestant than Luther, whose views are more to the taste of, say, the Church of England.

So when he did his teacher training, he did much of it in institutions of the Reformed Church. Which is a curious phenomenon, in secular France, proud to stand independent of any church, and where, consequently, teachers employed by the state are strictly neutral with regard to faith. 

That’s one of the things that makes Alsace so particular.

Napoleon, a man who liked to keep things firmly under his own control and resented the Church – the Roman Catholic Church – being a bit of an alternative pole of power, signed a so-called Concordat with the Pope. Under it, priests would be paid by the state – they would, in effect, be civil servants. Similarly, religious education including the training of priests, would be provided by the state.

This sounds like a great deal for the church, which would be freed of a huge burden of cost. But Napoleon was also establishing his control over this huge and powerful institution. Wily fellow, he knew what he was doing.

Then in 1871, following a short war which ended disastrously for France, Germany took control of Alsace and the department of the Moselle in nearby Lorraine. In a fit of generosity, it agreed to respect local law. So the Concordat remained in place under German rule. 

The rest of France, on the other hand, did away with it in the coming decades, as it moved to its modern, secular existence.

In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Alsace and Moselle were reincorporated into France. Which, like Germany in 1871, also agreed to respect local law. 

This means that Alsace and Moselle are the only parts of France where state and church are not separate, and priests are still civil servants. A status that has been extended to Protestant pastors and Jewish Rabbis. Imams are not the equivalent in Islam to priests or rabbis – they’re more like learned men who lead prayers – or they too would be offered the same status.

That means that Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, has the only faculty of Theology in a public, state university in France.

As Antoine progressed in his studies, he felt increasingly drawn towards faith itself and not simply general education. He eventually signed up in the faculty of Theology and did his degree there. The experience taught him a lot, not least that there were other kinds of Protestants: “I discovered in Strasbourg,” he would write, “that there were also Lutherans!”

He became a pastor, and “my first pastoral position in Bischwiller a few years later would plunge me into Reformed Church-Lutheran cohabitation”. This would become the guiding principle of his approach to faith. When, in 1988, he was elected President of the Council of the synod of Reformed Churches in Alsace and Lorraine, in effect head of the Reformed faith in Eastern France, he would preside over the move of his branch of the Church into the glorious red sandstone Church of St Thomas in Strasbourg, joining the Lutherans there.

Re-elected three times, he remained president of the council until 2000, notably extending his inter-faith work to create a joint organisation of Lutherans and Reformed Church followers, and ultimately to co-sign, with Catholics and Jews, the agreement proposed by the then mayor of Strasbourg to build a huge new mosque in the city. Where there’s room for one faith, there’s room for many faiths, seems to have been his philosophy.

During their visit to us in England in September 2010
Above with Lilly, walking with our dog Janka, in Stafford
Below, with me in Dovedale, on the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border

Long before he came to visit us in England, it was in St Thomas’s Church that our paths crossed. An close Italian friend of ours there, Raffaela, was due to be visited by her parents. Her father had been organist in residence at the legendary opera house of La Scala in Milan and in the Duomo. St Thomas’s has a wonderful old organ that was played by Mozart during a visit to the city. Danielle was able to arrange for the Milanese organist to spend a little time playing the same organ, letting his fingers run over the same keys that the great composer had touched.

That too was all thanks to Antoine.

During the final years of my mother-in-law's life, both he and Lilly offered precious help to her, and to us, by visiting her and looking after her in ways that were beyond us, living as we were in England while she was in Strasbourg. Another case of their unstinting kindness. Another reason to feel both pleasure and gratitude towards them both.

No wonder a man like that won a way to the heart of Misty, in a way I couldn’t. But, much more to the point, a way to the hearts of so many men and women throughout Eastern France and beyond. Like so many others who knew him, I shall feel a gap in my own life created by the end of his. He died in February of this year.

A remarkable man. A man of God and a fine man for humanity. One I’m sorry to have lost, but who I shall continue to be proud to call a relative – however tenuous that relation may be – and, above all, a friend.

Antoine Pfeiffer, 27 February 1940, Périgueux – 19 February 2021, Strasbourg.