Boys will be boys

“Boris will be Boris” seems to be the watchword for the depressingly large number of admirers of Boris Johnson, only too ready, it seems, to re-elect him as British Prime Minister if given the chance. 

It seems they feel that indulgence is due to him because his behaviour merely reflects his character. That, to be honest, doesn’t strike me as specific to Johnson alone. Nor, frankly, does it seem to add up to any good reason for putting up with what he does.

I mean, think “Bolsonaro will be Bolsonaro”, “Kim Jon Ung will be Kim Jon Ung”, or even “Adolf will be Adolf”. All true statements but surely not enough to excuse their outrageous behaviour. Not for me at any rate.

But we live in a time of cults. We had that in Labour under the sainted Jeremy, who we were constantly assured was walking on water, even when to the rest of us it looked like he was wading through mud. If ‘mud’ isn’t too kind a metaphor for his evasions and deceptions about Brexit.

We had it with Donald Trump, whose supporters reckon their tribute to him was just a little tourism in the Capitol building in Washington. Perhaps not gentle tourism. Tourism all the same, they assure us, which just happens to have left a few dead and a lot of damage.

Tourists will be tourists, after all.

Now it’s the Johnson cult in England, far more powerful than anything that the poor lost soul Corbyn could manage. After all, it’s secured him a parliamentary majority, never in Jeremy’s short reach. As in the other cults, the worshippers simply can’t see, or they choose to ignore, the guru’s flaws, however glaring and shocking they are to others.

So this very week, for instance, we’ve been given more evidence of Johnson’s incompetence and dishonesty. 

The incompetence was in his slipping out restrictions on eight areas of England where Covid is becoming worrying again, simply by naming them on a government website, but without a specific announcement, far less any consultation with authorities in the places affected. And, almost inevitably for a government for which the U-turn seems to be an art form, they were reversed as soon as they were discovered and made public.

The dishonesty was in the announcement that a number of companies that contribute to the Tory Party had failed to deliver supplies to fight the pandemic, despite signing contracts, which they were awarded without a proper tender procedure. Jobs for the boys, it seems, and the boys didn’t deliver.

Ah, well. Boris will be Boris. Or so I’m sure his fans will assure us.

That’s why I don’t expect the charges levelled against him to two parliamentary committees by his former henchman, Dominic Cummings, will do him much harm. Cultists, as we found out in Jeremy’s Labour Party, are impervious to mere evidence.

Hell hath no fury like a Cummings scorned
Testifying to Parliament, his gesture is an accurate assessment
of Boris Johnson’s aptness for government

Of course, it being Cummings, eventually sacked by Johnson (apparently on his fiancée’s demand), a lot of people will say these are the rantings of a disappointed man who is a known liar. They’re not wrong, since he is clearly embittered by his former boss’s treatment of him, and we know that he’s perfectly happy to lie if it serves his purpose. Remember the promise of £350 million a week for the NHS if Britain left the EU? That was Cummings at work. Remember his explanation of why he broke the Covid lockdown he now claims he was so keen on? To test his eyesight, he said.

Still, there’s plenty in the Cummings testimony that seems highly believable. Johnson failing to take the pandemic seriously at first – we certainly saw that. His constant flip-flopping and U-turns – we saw plenty of them. His lack of planning and the tens of thousands of deaths it led to – only blinkers can hide them from you.

Above all, though, there’s one statement Cummings came up with that I find profoundly convincing, above all for the lucidity it shows about himself:

The problem in this crisis was very much lions led by donkeys, over and over again. In any sensible, rational government it is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position, in my personal opinion. I’m not smart, I’ve not built great things in the world. It’s completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just the same as it’s crackers that Boris Johnson was in there, and that the choice at the last election was Jeremy Corbyn

Lions led by donkeys, the way British soldiers and their inept commanders were described in the First World War. Yes, that fits. And it’s crazy that a man like Cummings should ever have held the senior position Johnson gave him. He’s not smart, he’s never built anything. Certainly, his track record suggests a streetwise scrapper rather than a man of insight, and someone more gifted for destroying than for construction.

To crown it all, there’s that powerfully precise assessment of Johnson. It’s ‘crackers’ that Johnson should hold the position he occupies. As it is that the only alternative to him at the last election was Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s astonishing that out of 70 million people, the best Britain could come up with at that election was Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. It’s depressing, but maybe not irredeemable. After all, Corbyn has gone and now Cummings too. That leaves only one of the over-promoted trio of still in place.

Sadly, he’s the one with the power to do most harm. And he’s the one who’s hardest to get rid of. He’ll only go when the people themselves finally decide that they really deserve better than so much rottenness and ineptitude.

But that means they’re going to have to stop believing in “Boris will be Boris”.

Distraction

You get tired, you get distracted. You get distracted, you make mistakes. This is a tale of sad errors from which I should learn, though I probably shan’t.

It’s also a bit of a counterweight to my previous post in which I guiltily admitted to an act of theft from twenty years ago. The dishonesty was minor, and inadvertent, but I never put things right and that may have left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. So let’s have a story about some honesty instead. 

Danielle and I live outside the fine Spanish city of Valencia, but we had to go into town a few days ago. I was tired and finding it difficult to think clearly. As I got ready, I couldn’t make up my mind whether I needed any money with me. 

Should I take my shoulder bag? A waste of time, I decided, just an additional weight to carry and, besides, something I could lose.

The shoulder bag

But perhaps I should take the wallet from inside it? Yes, that might work. But I couldn’t button the hip pocket with the wallet in it. Carrying the wallet in an open pocket, partly sticking out? Not a smart move.

So I put the wallet back in the shoulder bag and decided to take neither with me, as I planned initially. Less cluttered. Less to lose. Less to worry about.

The wallet

Then, at the last moment, I grabbed the shoulder bag after all.

Well, I was clearly in no fit state to rely on my decision processes. I wasn’t thinking clearly or I wouldn’t have kept changing my mind. But when you’re not thinking clearly, you stop thinking clearly about your lack of clarity of thought. Unaware of how distracted I was, I had no idea how little I could count on myself to behave without distraction.

After we’d done the things we went into town for, Danielle and I took a break at for a coffee. Well, in my case, what I had was a blanco y negro, since we were in my favourite ice cream shop. A blanco y negro is crushed iced coffee with a ball of vanilla ice cream. An excellent variant on the standard coffee, and a great way of combining the kick of the coffee with the indulgence of the ice cream. Particularly suitable on a hot day.

Blanco y negro

It was when I came to pay for the drinks that I found my wallet wasn’t there. 

That’s a funny way of putting it, isn’t it? I mean what I found was that I couldn’t find my wallet. Or, you might say, I found my wallet unfound.

Well, I’d been so vague and undecided that morning that I wondered whether my memory was betraying me and that I had, in fact, not put the wallet back in the shoulder bag before I left. We decided not to panic and went home. Both of us then searched the place in turn. Thoroughly. There was no sign of the wallet. It remained as unfound as ever.

So I went back to town and went to the various places we’d been. Nothing doing. Unfound as ever.

At that point I decided that it had been stolen, and that made me feel strangely easier in my mind. Theft can happen to anyone, after all. Pickpockets are skilful. Pick-shoulder bags too, no doubt. This wasn’t down to my stupidity, it was all about petty crime and petty criminals will always be with us.

I started out on the task of cancelling cards. That went well until I got to an English credit card that I still, for reasons I can’t readily explain, hang on to.

“Yes, sir,” they said to me, “could you give me the number of the card, please?”

Well, no, actually, since the whole point was that it had been stolen.

Fortunately, I eventually found a statement with the number, and was able to block that card too. At least I couldn’t be ripped off for large sums of money.

On the other hand, the wallet also contained two vital bits of documentation. One was my ‘NIE’ declaring me officially resident in Spain. The other was my ‘SIP’ card confirming my access to the Spanish health service. That was particularly vital since I was about to have my second Covid shot and would need the card.

Not irreplaceable, but damn difficult to replace

Neither is irreplaceable. Neither is easily replaced. Especially the NIE card. It can take months just to get an appointment to sort it out, and in my experience, it can never be sorted out with just one appointment. 

But then, joy and delight! I got a call from the police. Not generally a cause for celebration (e.g. if you’re Donald Trump). But it was in this case.

Someone had found my wallet. And they’d handed it in.

I shot into town to collect it and nothing was missing. The now useless credit cards were there, but much more important, so was my NIE, so was my SIP. Why, even the couple of banknotes and the few coins were there, along with my metro cards and other less crucial things.

What a relief it was to have them back. And, I hope you agree, a pleasant anecdote to the tale of my dishonesty over the bread knife. Although, to be fair, I have also myself found lost wallets a two or three times and always ensured they got back to their owners.

Once that meant standing in front of St Pancras station to meet the owner and missing my own train home, though I was happy to do so, just to see the relief on her face. 

Another time, when the lost piece of property wasn’t a wallet, but a Filofax, turned out to be less of a success. I found the owner’s phone number and rang it.

“Oh, thanks so much for finding it and letting me know!” she said.

“A pleasure,” I replied, and went on to the obvious next question, “how do you want to collect it?”

“Could you bring it to me here?”

She lived in West London. I was in Central London. I lived in Luton which is north of London. I loved the gall of even suggesting I was going to add a couple of hours to my trip just to give her back the property she’d carelessly mislaid.

“I’ll leave it at the ticket office,” I told her, as I’d found the Filofax in a station, “and you can collect it from there.”

I hope she got it back. And was as pleased about it as I was about being reunited with my wallet. 

I do, however, have one remaining concern. If the wallet wasn’t stolen, I have no easy explanation of its disappearance and can only blame my own distraction. And how on earth am I going to make sure I don’t suffer that again? 

A twenty-year guilt.

It was twenty years ago, but it still gives me conscience pangs. Or, you might say, it cuts me to the quick, which is an even more appropriate description. As will become clear later.

It was some twenty years ago. We were living in Strasbourg, jewel of a city in Eastern France. You can understand why Germany and France contested control of it so often down the centuries. Water everywhere, with a mediaeval centre on an island, if a slightly artificial one, between the river Ill – a tributary of the mighty Rhine just minutes outside the city – and a man-made moat, once part of the defences.

Outside the city was a prestigious life sciences institute which attracted scientists from many countries, not all of whom spoke French (the local language, France having been on the winning side on the latest, and I hope last, occasion it fought against Germany with possession of the city one of the issues at stake). Others among the researchers spoke no English, the language of international science just as, three centuries ago, it was Latin.

Danielle speaks both (Latin not so much) and is a qualified teacher of English. So she gave language lessons at the IGBMC, the research institute in question. This was a time when I was working hard in yet another small business – on this occasion one I part owned – and falling out with my colleagues, something that seems to have marked every step of my long but patchy career. Danielle, on the other hand, was making friends at the IGBMC, setting me an example from which I should certainly have learned, but failed to.

One of her students remains a good friend to this day, though we don’t see her anything like as much as either of us would like. She used to describe herself as a professional ‘ball breaker’, or ‘spacca-palle’, in her native Italian. This was because she’d developed a technique, of some ingenuity I’m assured, for extracting DNA from the crushed testicles of mice. 

The mice weren’t alive when the crushing took place, which I suppose makes the process somewhat less horrible to contemplate.

One of the things Danielle made a speciality of doing during her years of teaching was organising great trips for her students. Several times while we were in Strasbourg we went out with groups of students cross-country skiing or canoeing down the local rivers. A lot of good memories.

The Sudltal with the mountains in the background

One of our trips was into Switzerland, into the Bernese Oberland, the Alpine region south of the federal capital Bern. We went up the Suldtal, above the glorious town of Thun on its lake. We stayed right at the end of the road – down to the status of dirt track in its final stretch – beyond which there was only a bowl of meadowland flowing towards the wall of the mountains. Our accommodation, in a farmhouse was, well, basic. We’d brought sleeping bags with us and we slept in straw in the barn (on the right of the picture). 

Alp Mittelberg Latreje Suldtal, where we stayed

The toilet was a wooden hut at the end of a balcony on the side of the barn. The toilet seat gave on to a three or four metre drop into a trench which, even that far away, didn’t smell savoury. Open to the breeze, it could lead to lots of strange sensations on sensitive parts of the anatomy.

Two of the more elegant members of the group who were with us seemed distinctly uncomfortable with the whole arrangement. At this distance in time, I can’t remember if they gave up and went home. I know they certainly wanted to.

In the morning, we had breakfast just a few metres away from a huge machine into which members of the family would pour freshly-collected milk, and from which they would later extract newly-made cheese. The breakfast consisted mostly of such cheese, along with home-baked bread and home-made jam. 

All very idyllic, if you could put the toilet facilities out of your mind and get the last straw out of your hair, while being reconciled to the absence of showers.

On the second day, before returning to Strasbourg, a group of us decided to go for a picnic. We bought the supplies from the farm, including loaves of bread. But then we realised that we didn’t have a bread knife.

The woman who owned the farm came to our rescue. 

“You can borrow this one,” she told us, “but mind you bring it back. I need it.”

I don’t remember how the picnic went. But I’m regularly reminded of the trip itself. Pretty much any time I cut myself a slice of bread. Because we completely forgot to give back the knife, which we still have, and use most days.

At least we still use it regularly, two decades later. Which I suppose ought to be some consolation. But it isn’t really.

I still feel guilty about it. Not guilty enough to be kept up at night, you understand. But guilty enough to sense that I ought to feel more guilty than I do.

Still in use in our kitchen today:
the knife that cuts me to the quick

Now that the dust has settled...

There’s a lot to be said for focusing a little more on the glimmers of hope than on the enveloping darkness. 

It was a great pleasure to read that a spectacular change had taken place in Oxfordshire. I lived in the county at one time, and it felt entirely unchanging, politically. The City of Oxford, with one of the higher concentrations of brainpower in the country, voted Labour. The County, with its much higher proportion of the self-satisfied rich and the unnecessarily deferential poor, voted Conservative. There seemed no likelihood of any change soon.

Witney, where I used to live in Oxfordshire

Well, it turns out that I was being too pessimistic. At the local elections on 6 May, Labour retained a huge majority in the City, and the Conservatives the excellent result of no seats at all. Meanwhile, and this is the extraordinary thing, at County level the Conservatives lost nine seats. The Liberal Democrats gained eight seats, Labour gained one and the Greens gained three.

The Conservatives ended up just one seat up on the Liberal Democrats. And even that may not last: the Council has admitted an administrative error in one ward where Labour votes were assigned to the Conservatives in error. Correcting that error would return the seat to its previous Labour holder, and reduce the Conservatives to equality with the Liberal Democrats.

That’s not just an election result. It’s an earthquake.

Even better, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Greens have decided to work together. Between them they hold a majority in the Council, so it falls to their group’s control. Unseating the Conservatives from control of the Council is a first since 1973.

Now, on its own, this doesn’t reduce the significance of Labour’s poor performance overall on 6 May. But it’s one more element of success, and it’s by no means the only one. Andy Burnham, Labour Mayor of Manchester, took 67% of the vote and won every single one of 217 wards. Labour increased its representation in Wales, to equal its highest ever. And, out of 13 mayoralties contested, Labour won 11, including in formerly Tory areas such Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and the West of England. It also held London, where Sadiq Khan was re-elected with a slightly reduced vote.

Indeed, even overall, the results were hardly catastrophic. Labour lost the last parliamentary election by 80 seats. Projections of the local elections to national level – in other words, treating them as a massive opinion poll – would suggest that the Tories would win again but with a majority of just 48. Overturning an 80-seat majority was always going to a huge task, one that could take more than one election. It’s good, at least, to see the government’s standing on the wane.

What’s more, all of this has to be set alongside the atmosphere in which the elections were fought. There was clearly a strong surge in favour of incumbency: in many parts of England, as well as in Scotland and Wales, the governing party did well. That feels like the result of relief in many voters as they feel the Covid pandemic may be ending.

That’s not a sentiment with a long-term future.

There was also a heavy Brexit effect. Labour did particularly badly in areas which voted heavily to leave the EU. That included the parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, which voted 70% for Brexit, and where Labour lost the seat for the first time since it was created half a century ago. It suffered far less, even though it lost about 1% on average on previous elections, in areas where people voted to remain. 

That Brexit gets associated with Toryism strikes me as entirely appropriate. We’re seeing inhumane behaviour towards EU citizens who arrive in England with minor errors in documentation – they’re not merely deported, they can even be interned without access to lawyers or relatives. That strikes me as revealing the true nature of Brexit and it seems to me that the Tories are far more appropriately tarred with that brush than Labour is.

It takes a while for economic phenomena to work their way through. These things don’t happen overnight. But in time it will become clear just how hare-brained a move Brexit was. At that point, it will become far less of an asset to the Tories and may, indeed, become a liability that they are so closely associated with it.

With the dust now settling, it’s clear that things were nothing like as bad on 6 May as they might at first have appeared. Labour needs to learn to hold its nerve. It needs to learn from places like Manchester, or Wales, or now, it seems, even Oxfordshire City Council.

The future need not be bleak. Indeed, learn to play our cards right, and it could even be rosy.

A pox on anti-vaxxers

Picture the scene. It’s freezing, with snow on the ground. A bunch of young men – well, more than a bunch, more like 2000 of them – are standing around, cold, wet and hungry: food’s in short supply, they’ve got little money to buy any from nearby farms, and though they’re armed and have threatened people with their weapons for food, it doesn’t always work too well.

Why are they armed? Because these lads, most of them farmboys until only a few months ago are, in principle, an army. Far from home, with little training, badly provisioned and inadequately equipped but an army nonetheless.

They’re camped outside a city which they’re besieging. Without much luck so far. Actually, with little hope of success in the future either. The city’s well-protected by walls and reasonably well garrisoned by troops, a core of them professionals, with more on the way. They, unlike the besiegers, have enough food and ammunition.

And then, to make things worse still even though they were already bad enough, disease strikes the besieging army. A horrible disease, that kills 20-30% of the people infected, and leaves others disfigured. One more scourge for these young lads, nearly half of whom fall sick, alongside the weather and the enemy. 

It’s no wonder they had to abandon the siege even before the enemy’s reinforcements arrived. Much diminished, by losses to disease as well as to battle, they had to slink home, beaten and demoralised. And with that, the most comprehensive defeat suffered by American forces during their War of Independence, the history of Canada was determined. It would remain an independent nation, never absorbed into the United States.

The city was, by our standards, basically a market town. The population was about 14,000, at a time when London counted 650,000. By North American standards of the time though, Quebec City was a major centre, only a thousand or two behind, say, Boston, one of the great cities of the thirteen revolting British colonies that later formed the US.

My apologies. I meant, of course, one of the thirteen British colonies then in revolt.

Smallpox (variola) virus

What about the disease? It was smallpox. It caused ravages among the besiegers because few if any of them had immunity. Many of the British defenders of the city, on the other hand, were immune. Partly this was because the disease was much more common in Britain than in North America, leading to many catching the disease as children, leaving the survivors protected against the disease. Partly it was due to the increasing use of inoculation in Britain.

That’s inoculation with smallpox itself. Pus would be taken from a smallpox patient and rubbed into scratches made on a healthy person, giving them a dose of the disease that, it was hoped, would remain mild while still generating immunity. Mostly, that worked, though occasionally people got seriously ill and might even die. In addition, inoculated people had the disease, so they could infect others. 

Indeed, it seems that the defenders of Quebec City sent out prostitutes infected with smallpox, possibly through inoculation, to the American lines, where they spread the disease widely, boys being boys, especially a long way from home.

Handled with care, however, inoculation with smallpox – variolation, as it was called – generally worked well. Thomas Jefferson travelled from Virginia, where the practice was discouraged and heavily restricted by law, to Philadelphia to get himself inoculated. His fellow Virginian, George Washington, himself a smallpox survivor, insisted on his soldiers being inoculated to avoid a repetition of what had happened in Quebec. 

Jefferson and Washington had to fight for variolation against determined and sometimes violent opposition. There were anti-variolation riots in Virginia, in response to inoculation campaigns, in both 1768 and 1769. The same sentiments espoused by anti-vaxxers today were in evidence back then, even before the first vaccine had been developed.

That didn’t happen until 1796, when Edward Jenner inoculated a patient with material not from a human smallpox victim, but from a cow with cowpox. Cowpox is far less severe than smallpox, making the procedure almost entirely safe, but the protection was as good. Based on the Latin word vacca for cow, this procedure came to be known as vaccination.

So anti-vaxxers could at last earn their name.

But anti-inoculators had already launched the tradition. The results were obvious at Quebec City. It cost a lot of American young men their lives, and inflicted a serious defeat on the cause they served. There will be two schools of thought as to whether that served Canadians well or badly, by keeping them separate from the United States. Either way, the impact was substantial.

What’s certain is that the movement against inoculation did a lot of people a great deal of harm. It cost a lot of lives. And the latter-day heirs of that movement are doing the same today.

Anti-vaxxer sentiments? Just say no. They’ll kill your health, and possibly you.

Fruitful meeting of driven talents

The best thing about retirement is that it enables you to do lots of other things that you’ve wanted to do for ages, but never had the time for while work was still getting in the way.

I have a son called David. The fact that his name is the same as mine is entirely coincidental. He was born, and given the name, nearly ten years before we met and he introduced me to Danielle, his mother, who later made the inexplicable decision to become my wife. That means David was a founder member of our household, and we just coped with the confusion caused by our sharing a forename. 

He’s a smart cookie. He made some clever investments and managed them well. That has meant that he could say goodbye to all those boring interruptions to the life of his aspirations – or, as most of us refer to it, work – far sooner than most of us. 

Clever lad.

That’s ‘lad’, for a fellow retiree, only from the point of view of the 68-year-old writing this piece.

One of the things David most wanted during the many years he found himself forced to devote time to an external taskmaster, was to do much more photography and get a lot better at it. I should say ‘even better’, since his photos have always struck me as remarkable, especially compared with my own efforts, obtained by pointing my phone at a subject and hoping for the best.

So, on retirement, David signed up for a couple of photography courses. No harm in mastering the technique, he felt. Rightly, in my opinion. I’ve always believed that a little learning is a bloody useful thing, as one blags one’s way through life. I know, however, that there’s an opposite school of thought suggesting that knowing what you’re doing can be useful if you’re going to try your luck doing it.

It would be good if someone explained that to Boris Johnson.

David’s latest course has been focusing on portraiture. It was while he was down at a boatyard that he made the acquaintance that would guide him through this part of his studies. That was Roddy. 

Now Roddy’s another man who’s following a calling. He decided, a decade ago, that what he really wanted to do was build a boat. But not from a kit, or even from components. He found a design he wanted to follow, and after that, apart from a few sheets of plywood, he relied on his own dexterity to work with simple, raw wood. He cut it and bent it and moulded it into the shapes he wanted, to turn the design on paper into the physical boat he yearned to launch.

As the years rolled by, the dream took shape. Now it’s reached the point of being recognisably a boat, with a deck and cabins and everything. So far advanced, indeed, as to possess both an inside and an outside.

Roddy at the boatyard

“Hey, this is great,” said David. “I wonder… would it be too cheeky? I’m doing a photo portrait project. Could I take pictures of you around your boat? You can have as many as you want for yourself as well.”

“Wow,” Roddy replied, “no one’s ever asked me anything like that before. But, hey, why not?”

So David took 800 photos, of which he’s selected a handful or so for his project. And I’ve chosen three to include here.

I like the rather arty silhouette of Roddy passing a window, brightly lit by the sun outside. Amusingly, it turns out that it was the result of a technical slip by David: he tried to adjust the exposure to show Roddy more fully, but in fact adjusted it the other way, making the silhouette even more silhouette-y. Sometimes chance does things well.

Then there was Roddy striding along the deck of his fine new boat. As David says, you can practically imagine it butting its way through the waves. Out, perhaps, to the fishing grounds.

Nearly ready to launch

But I said Roddy’s boat had an inside and an outside, and David wasn’t going to pass up the chance to get photos of both. In one, Roddy strikes a glorious if unplanned pose that, as David rightly remarks, is reminiscent of the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio harbour in Brazil.

Roddy reviewing his creation and finding it good

Appropriate, given that Christ’s background included carpentry, essential for the kind of boatbuilding Roddy went in for.

This all goes to show what pursuing your interest can do. David has made a new friend. That friend introduced him to the extraordinary task to which he’s devoted a decade. There’s something infectious about enthusiasm that strong, for a project that’s pretty unusual, but which has produced such a fine result.

Above all, what I like most about these photos, is that they represent a glorious encounter. Two people getting the chance to realise a longstanding aspiration. And finding that each can enhance the other.

A winning combination all round, I reckon.  

Old? These neighbours of ours are ancient. Literally

It was surprisingly exciting, meeting some old – really old – neighbours. 

Well, we didn’t exactly meet them. But at least we found the place where they used to live.

The woods near our home are the most precious feature of our district of Valencia. They were, for instance, our invaluable escape valve during the worst of the Covid confinement. The restrictions were pretty tough here in Spain, and the valve provide a real balm for our souls.

Slowly, we’ve been getting to know the place. It’s taken months, partly because it’s pretty large, partly because once I’ve found a place I like, I tend to want to go back there again and again. Eventually, though, we started exploring the reaches of the woods furthest from our home. Which is how we found another home, far more curious than ours. The ancient neighbours’ one.

To be honest, it’s two or three kilometres away. Practically neighbours.

It’s on a hill. Ninety-nine metres above sea level. Instinctively, I wished they’d piled on a few more stones to reach a round hundred. That’s not really fair, though, seeing they built the place the nearly four millennia before the metre was invented.

Reconstruction of how the Lloma de Betxi
must have looked when it was still lived in

It’s a fine house. Just one storey high, but strongly built of good, solid stone, cut from the sides of the hill the residents terraced to grow their food. They’d even faced the stone with plaster made from mud.

It’s a good spot. The height kept it free from humidity and well-ventilated by breezes. It’s only a couple of hundred metres from the Turia river, the mighty local waterway we enjoy as they did. 

For the kids or, probably, the women, that must have been a pain, however. For anyone who had to schlep the heavy buckets to the river, and struggle back with them full of water, to pour into the cisterns by the house. 

“Why me, again?” you can imagine a boy saying, “why can’t he do it for once?” pointing at one of his brothers.

“He’s too young,” patiently explains – who? Grandma, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

It’s easy to picture the look of disgust on the faces of the kids stuck with that chore, isn’t it? I know I hated it on camping trips with the family as a kid.

I may have exaggerated slightly in my description of the house. It’s been well restored by archaeologists, but much of the plastering has come off the walls down the years. Well, the millennia. And the roof’s gone. As have the people. Apart, that is, from the two whose graves have been found nearby. One of them was tied up into a foetal position and buried with a dog, presumably because he was a man (yes, it was a man) of honour in the family. 

Personally, I felt it looked a lot more uncomfortable than honourable.

I say family because that’s what it almost certainly was. There were maybe 15 or 20 people living there, in an extended family grouping. When Danielle and I first found the place, we thought it was a fortress of some kind. The archaeologists have stuck up information panels all around the place, so we learned that it was built in the bronze age, but when we went back with a guide, he quickly knocked down the idea that it was military in any way.

“Too low,” he told us, “good views but nothing like the field you’d want for a hill fort. And, above all, there are no walls.”

It’s probably just our prejudices that made us think of it as defensive. We’re so used to people imposing their will on others by force that we assume that was the motivation of the people back then too.

Sadly, that isn’t entirely wrong. A while back, I wrote about the Neolithic peoples of our region, and the wall paintings they made. These were dark-skinned hunter gatherers. But the ones who built the hill settlement near us were the descendants of at least a couple of waves of colonists later.

The wall-painting guys met their fate when a bunch of pale-skinned people showed up from the Steppes, probably from present-day Ukraine. They became early agriculturalists, but they certainly had swords – or at least spears and bows – before they had ploughshares. You can see it in the DNA records. Scientists can distinguish inheritance on the male and female lines of descent, and the Neolithic heritage dies out within a few generations from the male line.

What does that tell us? Invaders wiped out most of the males who were already there. Then they ‘married’ the women, insofar anything that involved so little consent can be called marriage.

All this rather makes a mockery of people ranting on about immigration today. They are descended from people who immigrated, wave after wave of them, and many in far nastier ways than the present ones. The poor characters struggling across the Mediterranean in their open boats aren’t led by powerful, well-armed warriors.

The inhabitants of the settlement near us, the Lloma de Betxí, were probably pale skinned. They were agriculturalists, growing crops and cultivating cattle. Poor guys. Work, solid back-breaking labour, was invented with the agricultural revolution and has kept going right down to the present day. And these guys were doing it.

They were there from 1800 to 1300 before our era. What stopped them living there in the end? We know that too. There are clear marks, still, of a terrible fire. It looks like most of the people left, though there are signs of continued inhabitation by a small number of people, in a reduced area of the house, after the fire.

Some older inhabitants, I can’t help imagining. Not prepared to move elsewhere. Who clung on in an outbuilding of the burned structure that had been their home. Gradually they died out, in a place abandoned since their time.

The Lloma de Betxi today

Leaving us a moving sight to wonder at, hundreds of generations later.

Tame both wings if you want to fly

The left, like the poor, will always be with us. As will the right. And both wings, like poverty, are crying out for intelligent management. 

The successful Labour leader finds the tenacity – because it’s damned hard work – to control both wings. One who can do that will channel a lot of energy into useful directions. One who can’t will see the party implode yet again.

Clement Attlee, Labour’s best leader, perhaps Britain’s best Prime Minister, found the magic formula to hold Labour together, in spite of the heavy hitters in each wing, such as the two with soundalike names: Ernie Bevin on the right, Nai Bevan on the left. It’s said that Bevin, told that Bevan was his own worst enemy, replied: “not while I’m alive he ain’t”.

For the best part of six years, Attlee held the battling wings together, and apart. In fact, it was Nai Bevan, his energies channelled by the PM into constructive channels, who oversaw Attlee’s greatest achievement, launching the National Health Service. 

In his last major public speech as Prime Minister, at the Labour Party conference in October 1951, with a general election looming, Attlee outlined his vision:

We want a Society of free men and women, free from poverty, free from fear, able to develop in full their faculties in co-operation with their fellows, everyone giving and having the opportunity to give service to the community… a society bound together by rights and obligations, rights bringing obligations, obligations fulfilled bringing rights; a society free from gross inequalities and yet not regimented nor uniform… 

How that resonates today, in a Britain – and above all an England – more divided than ever, with greater inequalities, and a spirit of service still strong only in areas like the health service, applauded but neglected and underpaid. 

Just as topical is Attlee’s denunciation of the other side:

Our opponents, on the other hand, regard the economic process primarily as giving an opportunity to the individual to advance his own interests… Their motto is: ‘The world is my oyster; each one for himself.’ The result of that policy can be seen by all. There was the army of the poor; there were the slums; there was beautiful Britain defiled for gain; there were derelict areas. 

‘The world is my oyster; each one for himself’. It’s the central tenet of a Prime Minister whose concern is his own career rather than anyone else’s, who even believes his indoor furnishings should be paid for by someone else. Sadly, the attitude is shared by far too many voters, who seeing him with his nose in the trough, only think “is there space for me there too?” 

It’s sad that they imagine he will ever let them in.

Things had come to a head in Attlee’s government, in April 1951, a few months before his speech. Hugh Gaitskell, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had demanded that, to keep NHS spending within budget, charges would have to be introduced for dentistry and prescriptions. The saving was less than 6% of the total. In Bevan’s view, it was too small a gain for such a major breach of the principle of free care. 

He resigned.

Out of government, he engaged in a series of attacks on his former colleagues which showed his differences went far wider and far deeper than prescription charges alone. Attlee wrote to his brother Tom, “the real miracle is that we kept him straight for so long.”

 Bevan (left) did well while controlled by Attlee (right)

Attlee had lost control. He was tired, he was ill, he was even absent, in hospital, from the Cabinet meeting where the prescription charges were discussed. He’d worked far harder than his frame could stand, keeping Labour’s wings from each other’s throats. He could do it no longer.

And it was both wings that were at fault. Gaitskell, who proposed the prescription charges, was on the right of the party. He was talking about £23m out of £400m. It’s hard not to feel he was deliberately provoking the Bevanites. Bevan had risen to the bait, and with the master no longer in control, the two wings were at war again. 

Labour won the popular vote in the 1951 election, but the Tories won a healthy majority in Parliament. Attlee’s government was over. The Tories were at the start of 13 years in power.

Why is this so relevant today?

Keir Starmer has yet to form a government. But he resembles Attlee at the end of his. He keeps being sniped at from the left and pushed around by the right.

Labour did badly in elections on 6 May. Starmer came up with a response that was swift, decisive and completely wrong. He fired Angela Rayner as chairman of the party and campaign coordinator.

Rayner’s roots are to the left. She has, though, shown impeccable loyalty to Starmer, in a way Bevan never did to Attlee. She’s from a working-class background in the North of England, at a time when we badly need to reconnect with working class voters, especially in the North. She’s also an outstanding communicator, when Starmer seems to think that what matters is to outperform Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, forgetting that hardly anyone cares and even fewer watch.

There’s also a suspicion that if he made her his scapegoat, it was to protect his own people, since Rayner never had real authority over the campaign, which was run from Starmer’s office.

Rayner (left) could have been a more loyal Bevan
to a new Attlee played by Starmer (right) until he sacked her

He may have forfeited a great deal of support, as well as losing an asset, by driving Rayner out. That’s not leadership. And it’s far from likely to be effective.

Labour has had three hopeless leaders in a row. Starmer’s better than the last one, Corbyn, but that’s a low bar to clear. But is he just the fourth in a poor run?

We need an Attlee. I’m not sure we’ve found one.

The quotations are form Citizen Clem, John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee

Of grandmothers, a warrior, and a revered Argentinian. As well as the Holocaust

Of all my departed relatives, the one who’s been most frequently coming to my mind recently, has been my grandmother. My maternal grandmother. The one who once stood on a freezing dockside in the Russian empire, on her way to refuge in England, when she was three.

It helps that we’ve had the sketch portrait of her framed and it’s now up on our sitting room wall among our other pictures. It shows her when she was thirty and I had it for years, loose, inside the pages of a book she gave me.Whenever I saw it, I was struck by it, because of the way it caught her personality so well.

Portrait of my grandmother, properly displayed at last

That may seem an odd thing to say, because when I think of her, I think of her smiling. She didn’t smile all the time – that would have made her look dotty, and the picture shows her in a more serious, though not sombre mood, which I knew well too. I think she just always had a smile ready, and would turn it on, full of unfeigned affection, whenever it was appropriate.

Another reminder of her came when I was listening to an audiobook the other day. As an immigrant to Spain, I feel I have to work on my Spanish, and work on it I do. It progresses, if far more slowly than I might have hoped, and so far has left me speaking the language far less well than I’d wish. One of the things I try to do, especially when I’m out walking the dogs, is to listen to books in Spanish, and right now I’m working my way through the complete short stories of that great Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges. 

If you picked up a nuance behind the word ‘working’, you were absolutely right. I’m fully prepared to believe that Borges is outstanding, especially as there are moments when I find my breath taken away by a sudden burst of insight, but a lot of the time – well, in my lack of sophistication, I have to confess I find him hard going.

Still, let’s focus on the positive. One of the (many) moments when I’ve been struck by this collection was listening to The Story of the Warrior and the Captive. Borges bases this story on a brief account by a medieval churchman, who talks of the barbarian warrior Droctulft.

He, it seems, was a Lombard. Now most of us, these days, think of Lombards, if we think of them at all, as the inhabitants of Lombardy. That’s the region around Milan in northern Italy. But the name of the region comes from an invading tribe of Germanic warriors, since that’s what the Lombards were, before they settled down, started growing rice, became powerful bankers and learned to dominate the world of design and fashion.

Of course, people of my generation, if they hear the word Lombard, might well think of its use in 80s slang – L.O.M.B.A.R.D. meant Lot Of Money But A Right Dick. 

Now, one of the things Borges liked to do was write stories as though they were academic studies. He’d even do things like talk about an event, and then add a phrase along the lines of “however, many authorities doubt the veracity of this account” or “the evidence for this is thin”. And then you discover that the whole things was made up from start to finish anyway, people, events, the lot.

Which, I suppose, does make the evidence for it fairly thin.

Now, I started off pretty suspicious, especially because of his reference to a medieval church scholar, since that’s the just the kind of character he likes to invent (and write material for). Rather a lot of these stories have that kind of character in them, or a Jewish scholar, or a Gaucho. Those seem to be among his favourites to people his writing.

With Droctulft, though, he really is talking about a historical figure. He was one of the Lombard warriors laying siege to the city of Ravenna, then a possession not of the Western Roman Empire – Rome had fallen to the Goths – but to the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. 

The way Borges tells the story, Droctulft had never seen a city before. He’d come directly from the woods and hills of Germany to besiege this one.  So when he saw it, he was overwhelmed by the experience, blown over in admiration of all that beauty and sophistication, and immediately convinced that this was something that had to be defended, not destroyed. So he switched sides and fought with the inhabitants, ultimately dying in the defence of Ravenna, which honoured his sacrifice with a monument.

That’s the first part of the story. The second part, the one about the captive, is presented as told to him by Borges’s English grandmother. I haven’t checked, but I assume she existed too. She married an Argentinian and lived with him for many years in a desert region, far away from cities and from anyone else from England. 

Or so she thought.

One day, she was introduced to a woman living as a Native American, married to a tribal chief, mother of his children. It turns out that she’d been captured as a child and had lived with her captors ever since. Borges’s grandmother offers to rescue her and her children, but she says ‘no’ and tells her she’s happy to stay where she is.

The writer presents both cases – and perhaps even his grandmother’s – as illustrations of the way someone can be entirely assimilated into a culture that was initially alien to them. At the end of the process, they identify with their new rather than their old people, and feel they have roots among those they live with (the captive) or are even prepared to make great sacrifices, even the ultimate sacrifice, on their behalf (the warrior).

The reference to a grandmother was obviously a first trigger to think of mine. But then I also thought about how she had been entirely assimilated by the English culture her parents took her to. She was quintessentially English. You might say, “well, she came at three”, and you’d be right. But her mother too was completely absorbed by her new country, even though she never really mastered the language completely – like me with Spanish – and spoke it with a strong accent – ditto.

The point is, though, that they came and they stayed. And that reminded me of something else. A photo, in rather a poor photocopy, but one annotated in my mother’s handwriting. It showed my grandmother’s grandmother, her aunt, and I assume two cousins. In Vilna, today’s Vilnius, where they stayed when my grandmother’s immediate family left.

They were all murdered in the Holocaust.

Relatives from Vilna
As my mother notes, they all
died in the Holocaust

It struck me that these were ideas worth thinking about. Immigration is a hot topic again today, as it apparently ever is. To those who condemn immigrants as scroungers or a threat, I would say, “hold on a moment to think of what they’re escaping and find a little sympathy for them, if you’re capable of any.

“And perhaps you could think of the warrior and the captive in the Borges story, or my grandmother in England. They can assimilate. And their commitment to the country they chose may be astonishingly strong.

“Perhaps even stronger than yours?”

Negotiating the perils of a Covid vaccination

Well, that’s it. The deed is done. I’ve been shot.

Perhaps I should rephrase that. The words I used may be a little misleading. 

I’ve had my first shot of anti-Covid vaccine.

This means I’ve exposed myself to the ominous threat of suffering a blood clot. I believe the risk may be as high as 4 per million, so you can imagine how worried I am. Maybe some of that looming peril is compensated for by eliminating the risk of getting a blood clot from catching Covid, which I think is running at around 15,000 per million for unvaccinated people here in Spain. It strikes me that 15,000 is a bigger number than 4, but I expect a conspiracy theorist with a good grasp of the arithmetic could explain to me why that isn’t so.

I must admit that it was a bit of a relief to have the shot, since I’d been waiting a while. I explained before that Danielle and I are in a bit of an unfortunate age group in this country: we’re too young to fall into one priority group, but too old to fall into the other. It seemed as though we were going to be left dangling between two stools for quite a while. 

You can imagine how encouraging it is to be out of that uncomfortable and embarrassing position.

The process itself was remarkably rapid and efficient. 

It all went quickly in the end. A text message turned up on Monday, inviting me to have the shot itself on Wednesday. The instruction was to present myself at ‘C. DEPORT. MUNIC. PATERNA, POLIGONO INDUSTRIAL NORTE, s/n, PATERNA’ without any of those boring things such as postcodes let alone a map reference.

What was the ‘C'. for exactly? Clearly not ‘Calle’, Street, so was it ‘Centro’? It turned out that it was ‘Ciudad’, ‘City’. So, along with ‘DEPORT.’ for ‘deportiva’, it meant ‘Sports City’.

With little certainty that my GPS would get me to the right place, I turned up dead early, in case I had to go somewhere else. Imagine my relief when I found the desks set up and ready to receive arrivals for vaccinations. As so often in Spain, I should simply have shown a little more faith.

A relief: the reception desk for vaccination. I was at the right place

The place was a ‘vacunódromo’ (a ‘vaccine-o-drome’). Our local one, in the town of Paterna, was, as you've doubtless guessed, in a sports centre. Spain has set up a chain of these across the country, to deliver the treatment as quickly as possible to as many people as possible. That’s the nation’s response to a painful delay caused by the failure of the EU, and the manufacturers, to provide doses in the quantities expected earlier in the year. 

That delay is used, curiously enough, by that strange breed of Englishmen, the Boris Johnson supporter, to crow about the superiority of their country, and above all of their corkscrew of a man Boris Johnson, over things Spanish. I keep trying to point out to them that Spain’s catching up: Spain carried out twice as many vaccinations in April than the UK, suggesting that the British lead is rapidly disappearing, and Johnson’s one claim to success is reducing just as rapidly.

We were processed at heartwarming speed. One desk checked our identities. Another asked us about allergies and possible medical conditions. The final one recorded our arrival and sent us through to little plastic sheeted booths where the doses were administered.

I particularly enjoyed the desk where we were asked the medical questions. 

“How old are you?” one of the staff asked

“Sixty-eight,” I told her.

After checking on any allergies I might have, drugs I might be taking and diseases I might be suffering from, they were ready to move me on. But I’d read the information sheet we’d been given and knew there was one question they hadn’t asked me.

“I’m not pregnant either.” 

I wanted that on the record. I particularly enjoyed making the point because, as an adjective, in Spanish the word for pregnant agrees with the noun. So I was using it with a masculine ending.

“Ah,” said the nurse, without missing a beat, “not that either, then?”

“No. At my age, it’s not really possible,” I explained. Helpfully, I hope.

I’d arrived twenty-five minutes early. But they saw me at once. The result was that it was still ten minutes before my appointment time when they sent me through into a kind of recovery area, where we were asked to sit for quarter of an hour to ensure we had no serious reaction to the vaccine.

Into the area of the vaccine-o-drome set aside for recovery
from the stress of vaccination
Note the time on the clock: still nine minutes ahead of my appointment

I didn’t, so fifteen minutes later I was on my way. I had a dose of the Pfizer vaccine in my arm. I’d taken a big step forward towards protecting myself and the people around me from a most unpleasant and harmful disease.

Now we just need Danielle to be called too.

There’s one thing, though, that may still be a cause for anxiety. Have I, by accepting this vaccination, made myself simply clay in the hands of some diabolical figures leading a massive international plot against mankind? In support of the anti-vaxxer claims, I must admit that I emerged from having the shot, thinking that both George Soros and Bill Gates had done some admirable things during their long careers.

Gates and Soros: am I just clay in their hands now?

Still. I felt the same way on the way in. So perhaps that doesn’t make the conspiracy theorists’ case all that well for them, after all.

 

So Spain really is human...

The really great thing about Spain, you see, is just how far it’s come in a surprisingly short time.

When I was a kid, even a young adult, it was still a nasty little dictatorship run by a nasty little dictator. Francisco Franco’s regime regarded homosexuality as an abomination and (naturally) forbade it; it treated women as wards of their menfolk; it allowed only one political party (Franco’s) and had a pervasive secret police to spy on any attempt to build up an opposition, with draconian punishment for infringements: why, the last executions were carried out, by firing squad, just two months before Franco’s death.

But the country Danielle and I live in today is right up there in the forefront of progressive behaviour in Europe. Divorce and abortion are legal. It was one of the first few countries to legalise gay marriage. And, just a few months ago, it legalised euthanasia for the terminally ill too.

Madrid Gay Pride march in 2017

Even the way the country has handled Coronavirus has been impressive. They didn’t go into all the hysterical whingeing that the poor lost soul Ursula von der Leyen gave way too. So Astra Zeneca weren’t providing enough doses? Well, too bad, Spain would just keep vaccinating as many people as it could with all the doses it received.

“Don’t moan. Just do the job in hand with all the resources available to you.” Quiet, dignified and effective: it strikes me as an excellent approach to any challenge.

The results speak for themselves. Only in a few regions has compliance with Covid restrictions failed to control the pandemic. One of the most notable is Madrid, run by Isabel Ayuso, who comes straight out of the same hard-right mould which gave us – sorry, inflicted on us – both Trump and Boris Johnson. But in most areas a lid is being kept on infections. Indeed, the region where we live, the Valencian Community, is doing better than any other, with just 49 new infections per 100,000.

Even across the country as a whole, the new wave that is wreaking such devastation across most of Europe, has had led to only a relatively small increase in cases. And now, with 25% of the population – of the whole population, not just the people at high risk – having had at least one dose of one or other of the vaccines, the death rate is beginning to drop again.

Covid cases: a rise by no surge and signs of flattening off

So Spain impresses me. So much so that it’s actually quite a relief to find one area where it could perhaps do a little more, one area where it shows itself liable to the same human frailties as other countries, one area where Spain hasn’t perhaps quite caught up with the 21st century yet. 

Its Achilles heel is the internet.

Funnily enough, this story starts with the vaccination programme. Danielle and I belong to what was, for a while, called the ‘sandwich generation’ here. It was all tied up with the Astra Zeneca problems. I can’t quite remember where we’d got to, since the whole business was highly confusing: at one point, it wasn’t to be used on the old, and another not on the young, and at a third, not on anyone. But I’m damned if I can remember in which order the different limitations came.

All I know is that we reached a point where whatever vaccines were available in Spain were being used on people aged 70 or over, and then, a little later, other vaccines – or possibly the same ones, that’s how confusing it all was – on people aged 65 or under.

You can see the problem, right? Danielle and I belong to forgotten group, the people aged between 65 and 70. For the time being, we weren’t scheduled to get any kind of vaccination at all.

Fortunately, the authorities became aware of the problem – well, it was pretty much in their face, and had they even wanted to ignore it, the press made sure they couldn’t – and it was announced that people in our age group would begin to be vaccinated soon.

And, indeed, not long after, friends of ours started to be called in for their shots.

And then more friends.

And then others still.

But we had no news of when we might be called. So Danielle and I decided I’d look into it. 

Now, I think some time ago all government departments must have received a directive to set up a web page for public access to their services. Unfortunately, I see no evidence to suggest that there was follow-up memo recommending to them that the web pages should actually work.

I logged on to the local health ministry’s page. No problem at all. “You want to check whether we have the right phone number for you?” 

Calls for vaccination are issued by text message – yep, when it comes to anything based on phone, whether WhatsApp or just ordinary texts, Spain copes fine. 

“Just click here.”

So I clicked. There’s a secure online service here called Cl@ve (a clever web-savvy adaptation of a word for key code). You can have a permanent one or one that generates a one-time Pin for you. It seems I could use either of those, or I could just enter identity details.

I chose the last option, because I couldn’t remember whether I’d actually registered for Cl@ve. “Certainly,” I was told, “we’ll send you a letter by ordinary mail with a form you can fill in and send back to us to request the information you need.”

So I tried Cl@ve instead. I thought I’d better register first and filled in various pages of information until I got the message, “You stupid idiot. You’re registered already”. 

The first part of that message might have been implied rather than explicit.

Good. I tried the permanent Cl@ve service. “Enter your password here,” it requested. Ah, I thought. I have no password.

Perhaps I need the one-time Pin instead. “Download the app” the message instructed. So I did that. And – amazing! Oh wonder! It worked. I clicked on the app and, lo and behold, a Pin turned up on my phone in a text message.

Back I went to the website, ready to enter it and get the information I needed. Only to discover that, unlike the other options, there was no Submit button for the access-by-Pin service. Just nothing you could click on. No way of getting to the required screen.

So I gave up. I decided to phone my health centre instead, dreading what that would mean. Usually, you can’t get through for at least 20 calls.

And – another wonder! They answered on my first call, after three rings. 

“Yes, sir,” they said, “and what is your social security identifier?”

“You are David Leonard?” 

That’s what they call me. You can’t have a second forename in Spain, but you are supposed to have two surnames, the second one of which you tend to ignore, though not always – that’s how exciting it is. For instance, the Boris Johnson hard-right look-alike woman in Madrid is actually Isabel Díaz Ayuso but, Díaz being terribly common, she prefers to use her second surname.

David Leonard Beeson is clearly Mr Leonard, with a second surname of Beeson.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s me.”

“Nothing to worry about,” she assured me, courtesy and good service personified, “you’ll be called for a vaccination next week.”

She was right. I had the text message today. My vaccination is on Wednesday.

Just goes to show. In Spain, don’t rely on the internet. Speak to a living person instead (if you can get through to them).

The opposite of England, where the Web (generally) works, and many services no longer even offer a phone number to call instead…