Overthrowing the grammar fascist

Oh, Lord. It’s stronger than me. I found myself correcting the television screen, much to my son Nicky’s amusement, when a character in a series solemnly declared, “he did it for you and I”.

“You and me,” I said automatically.

It happened yesterday again in a swimming pool. The only way I can swim lengths is to use a waterproof mp3 player and listen to podcasts. One of the speakers in yesterday’s episode informed us that, at the time he was talking about, “there were vast amounts of petitions”.

“Vast numbers of petitions,” I couldn’t help myself telling him. Petitions are countable. You don’t get amounts of them, you get numbers.

Of course, what I really said was something like “burble, burble, bubble, bubble” because I was under water at the time. But you get what I mean.

My reaction, in both cases, was stupid in at least two ways.

Firstly, no one in the TV series or the podcast could hear me, and nobody would have cared if they could.

Secondly, the meaning of what was being said was entirely obvious on both occasions. Who cared that there is a ‘rule’ somewhere, far more significant for a small number of grammar autocrats than for any real speakers of the language? 

Well, I suppose the answer is that I’d care, but that only means I’m one of those ghastly grammar fascists people often, and rightly, rail against.

Grammar fascists: time to say no

After all, what I should have been upset about wasn’t the grammar of the two statements, but their triteness: “he did it for us?” That sounds like as bad, and threadbare, an excuse as, “it isn’t you, it’s me”. And “vast amounts of petitions”? What he means is that people were resorting to petitions, because parliament wasn’t doing what they wanted – or thought they wanted – on its own initiative. But I’m sure the number would be more like several, rather than vast.

That same son, Nicky, and I fell out – not in any major or long-term way, you understand, only for a matter of minutes – over “didn’t use to”. I’ve always preferred “used not to”. Far too pedantic for Nicky. And he’s right. After all, if I’m going to get so uptight over that construction, why not go the whole hog and say “usen’t to”? I mean, apart from the fact that I’d get some weird reactions.

After all, I accept plenty of questionable constructions. I’d always say, “I’m eating the last slice of cake, aren’t I?”, not “I’m eating the last slice of cake, amn’t I?” I suppose the second form (which is, obviously more correct, since we say “I am” not “I are”) would at least get people to focus on my grammar freakery rather than my greed in eating the last slice of cake.

I’m trying to train myself out of these terrible habits (well, not the cake one). Soon I’ll no doubt be able to casually split infinitives, with barely a wince. And I have no trouble ending my sentences with a preposition without my hair standing up. But I’ve clearly got a long way to go.

Funnily enough, one of my favourite Guardian columnists raised the problem today. Nesrine Malik learned English as a child at school, but as her second language, after Arabic. She says her English will never be “perfect”, but when she drops words like “am”, which she points out don’t exist in Arabic, in sentences like “I tired” or “I hungry”, she’s still fully understandable,  isn’t she? 

Nor has her allegedly less-than-perfect English stopped her being an outstandingly good columnist.

But as well as her example, I have an excellent model in my own wife, Danielle. We’re both slowly learning Spanish as we settle into our lives as immigrants to this kind country. Spanish has lots of fine word endings, for instance to identify the past or future of verbs, to say nothing of more subtle distinctions that we would make by just chucking in another word – a had, or a could, or a would, or a might, or a may. So a sentence like:

“I had hoped you might write the document she would read”

Becomes:

“Esperaba que tú escribieras el documento que ella leería”

That string of “-aba”, “-ieras” and “-ría” just seems hopelessly tortuous for the (adult) foreign learner of the language. Especially as there’s an alternative form for one of them: “-ieras” can be replaced by “-ieses”, and even if you don’t learn to use both, you need to recognise them when you hear or read them.

My wife is mastering these things slowly as she goes along, as I am. But when she can’t remember, she has a simple solution. She just uses the present tense. 

Imagine how that works in English.

“I see him yesterday”

Well, it’s unambiguous, isn’t it? The verb form may be wrong, but there’s no problem understanding what’s being said, is there? 

Certainly, she has no trouble communicating with people in Spanish, while I’m struggling to find the right verb form and getting left behind by the conversation. 

It’s only ambiguous when you hear something like:

“Certainly, I talk to him.”

Easy to solve. A quick question:

“You have talked to him or you’re going to talk to him?”

“Yesterday” or “tomorrow” as an answer clears up any uncertainty.

My favourite linguist, John McWhorter, is strong on this subject. As he points out, there must have been a time when an annoyed Anglo-Saxon grammar fascist must have said to a kid, “you can’t tell your brother to ‘come here’. You mean ‘come hither’. With movement, it’s ‘hither’. He can stay here but he can’t come here.”

That would still be true in modern German. “Komm her” is “come here”. “Bleib hier” is “stay here”. That difference between “her” and “hier” is the difference between “hither” and “here”.

Similarly, I picture another pedantic Old Englishman telling his son, “what do you mean by ‘do you know?’ ‘Do you know?’ What sort of English is that? What’s your question got to do with doing? What you mean is ‘knowest thou?’”

Well, I’m certainly not going to start saying “knowest thou”. So if I can cope with the “do” in “do you know?”, why can’t I cope with the “did” (or “didn’t”) in “didn’t use to”? Clearly, with the gentle (or, in Nicky’s case, not so gentle) guidance of John McWhorter, Nesrine Malik, Danielle and Nicky, it’s time I learned to fight the grammar fascist.

That’s not a grammar fascist out there, but the one irritatingly occupying my head. 

Grandparenting again

There were things that went right, there were things that went wrong.

It was my second spell of more intense grandparenting. I've already described the first. It took the form of a pleasant stay for nearly a week at my son and daughter-in-law’s place outside Madrid, to help a little with their family, now that the number of grandchildren has doubled to two. Direct help meant taking Matilda to school or out to a playground, or it meant providing Elliott – fully seven weeks old when I got there – with a comfortable chest to lie on and sleep, neither of which proved too taxing in general and mostly went fine (more about when it didn’t later).

Proving I'm up to acting as a mattress for Elliott

Indirect help was washing up after most meals. Easy, mindless work, well within my skill set. On a couple of occasions, it even meant preparing the meal itself, and that’s when things really came apart at the seams.

It’s an elementary piece of kitchen wisdom that you never, but never, put water on a pan in which oil is burning, or even on one in which the oil is overheated. As my son kindly pointed out, this is so basic that one learns at about the age of six. My excuse is only that six is a long time ago for me (62 years) and that’s given me long enough to forget even the most basic of wisdom.

I was trying to finish a simple meal quickly. I put the oil on to heat while I finished chopping ingredients, specifically (though I don’t know why you need to know this, since it isn’t particularly relevant to the story), some garlic. I was listening to a gripping audible book on my phone while I chopped, and I confess that I didn’t notice the pan overheating. By the time I realised what had happened, the oil at the bottom of the pan was swirling around in an ugly way and beginning to smoke.

With hindsight, I know that all I had to do was take the pan off the ring and let the oil cool down. But everything’s easy with hindsight. What I actually did, not having completely emerged from the absorption in my book and in the soporific action of chopping garlic, was rush the pan to the sink and run water onto the oil. 

There was a great gushing noise and the kitchen quickly filled with acrid smoke. Seconds later it had spread into the hall where it set off the smoke alarm. So to the unpleasant fumes was added the shrill piping of the alarm, to make the whole experience even ghastlier. Soon after, the smoke had spread into the sitting room where it left my daughter-in-law Sheena gagging and, above all, worried about Elliott (who, as it happened, in the end slept through the whole incident).

Of course, everything died down quickly. I managed to turn off the alarm. We went round opening windows so that the fumes dissipated. I was even able to resume preparing the meal.

The only lasting effects were to write off the pan (rather a good wok we bought for them and now have to replace) and the injuries to my pride, mostly self-inflicted, though sharpened by comments like my son Nicky’s, to the effect that even a six-year old would know better than to behave as I had.

My wife was helpful. “It’s just age,” she told me. A consoling thought: it wasn’t simply imbecility, as Nicky was suggesting, it was incipient dementia.

I don’t know if this will surprise you, but that isn’t really all that comforting.

As I said, taking Matilda out mostly went well. Right up to the last day when I was about to take her to school. She’s nearly two and has decided that it’s time to start exploring the limits of her abilities to explore the universe around her. She particularly likes climbing up on chairs to get things off the table. Generally, I catch her when she’s trying to do that and stop her before things go wrong, lifting her gently down from whatever height she’s reached, though to be honest that only means she generally starts again.

On this occasion I was, however, trying to finish a little washing up (you’ll remember that this is one of the things I didn’t generally get wrong). Trying to do it fast, which is when things go wrong, just like with the oil during the meal preparations. I suddenly heard a bump, followed by a wail. Turning round, I saw Matilda on the floor, to which she’d fallen from a chair when it slipped while she was reaching for some delicacy or other on the table. She’d bumped her head and was now letting us all know that she was displeased. 

She has good lungs, so when she tells us things, we know we’ve been told.

Fortunately, a minute or so in Sheena’s arms (we could only spare a minute since it was time to head to school) followed by songs on my phone for her ears and blueberries for her mouth, calmed Matilda back down over the next quarter of an hour. She reached school in good humour again.

Swings are fun, Granddad

The only other time when things might have gone wrong, they in fact turned out rather special. I took her to a playground to enjoy a little time on the swings and slides, despite there having been a few drops of rain already. My optimism proved unfounded, as the heavens opened just as we’d reached the playground, with sheets of rain coming down, soon to be replaced by hail.

By then, we were already moving at speed back towards home, when a car drew up alongside us.

“Are you going to the town centre?” the woman driver asked us.

We were. It turned out that she was the mother of a young girl, so she even had a child seat in the back. It was a matter of moments to strap Matilda in, while I jumped into the passenger seat. So we braved the hail and made it home pretty well dry anyway.

A good outcome and a heart-warming example of how Spanish strangers can be extremely thoughtful and kind.

There was one last moment of minor adventure before I returned home. I spent the last night with my other son, Michael, and his partner Raquel. He warned me that I should not roll onto the back of the sofa bed, as it wasn’t terribly stable. Sadly, at 6:00 in the morning, I was in an even less alert state than when I overheated the oil. I rolled too far, the bed tipped up and closed on me.

It’s a curious sensation.  As though you’re being devoured by a piece of furniture. It certainly isn’t particularly restful.

Still, like the other minor mishaps of my stay, it was over quickly. There was no lasting damage done. Indeed, I even slept another hour perfectly peacefully.

Just one more thing to make a rewarding trip all the more memorable.

Boris Johnson: another chance to prove his worth

Isn’t it exciting, that confrontation between the Royal Navy and the Russians off Crimea in the Black Sea?

HMS Defender making its way through Crimean waters
much to Russian annoyance

The Russians say they fired a couple of warning shots at the British ship, HMS Defender, and even dropped some bombs ahead of it, to force it out of waters it claims as its own. The British government says nothing of the sort happened. So we immediately hit a bit of a quandary.

It’s often said that the first casualty of war is the truth. But what if the truth’s already dead? Vladimir Putin isn’t known to be entirely reliable in every statement he makes, and Boris Johnson, I sadly have to admit, may not be the poster boy for strict adherence to the truth amongst politicians. Who knows what really happened?

A BBC journalist, Jonathan Beale who just happened to be aboard (it’s almost as though someone in Britain expected the ship to provoke confrontation) reported that “increasingly hostile warnings were issued over the radio,” by the Russians, “including one that said ‘if you don't change course I'll fire’. We did hear some firing in the distance but they were believed to be well out of range. As HMS Defender sailed through the shipping lane it was buzzed by Russian jets.”

Like I said, exciting, right?

I mean, Russia only claims those waters because it has occupied Crimea, previously Ukrainian territory. Most western countries, including Britain, don’t recognise that occupation. So one can imagine that sending a western warship through those particular waters might indeed lead to a little ratcheting up of tension.

The big question is, therefore, is Britain now at war with Russia? Ukraine could certainly do with the help, though whether it would expect Britain to be up to providing much must be a bit moot. From Britain’s point of view, there’s a lot to be said for such a conflict.

That’s because, apart from the fact that we’d obviously be thrashed, and quickly, there’s much to say for a war just there. After all, we’ve got a good track record fighting Russians in the Crimea. We had a war against them there, in the middle of the nineteenth century. We even won. OK, that was with the French on our side, and they sent more troops, and did more than their share of the heavy lifting, but hey, it was still a victory for our lot, wasn’t it?

Getting the French on board again, though, might be a bit difficult this time around. I’m not sure they’re all that well-disposed to Johnson and co. right now. Not enough, at least, for Mr Macron gamely support him wherever he leads.

Still, think of all the wonderful things we could do, even on our own. We might be able to persuade the Russians to lay on a rematch of the Battle of Balaclava. That way we could send another charge, like the famous one by the Light Brigade, directly at Russian guns, to get practically everyone wiped out and gain nothing. Remember Tennyson’s ringing words?

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

   Someone had blundered.

   Theirs not to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

   Theirs but to do and die.

Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava
Renowned instance of British confusion and incompetence
An ideal monument to the Johnson premiership

It’s practically perfect. That charge of the Light Brigade was all down to ineptitude and political infighting among the top commanders. What better metaphor could one imagine for the Boris Johnson government? “Someone had blundered”. There’s another three-word slogan Johnson could adopt, alongside “Get Brexit done”. 

And when it’s over, with Britain well beaten, pulling out the small number of survivors, worn out and broken men and women, Boris Johnson will have the satisfaction of having carried out another futile and highly expensive mission ending in disaster. To lay in his trophy cabinet, alongside the other fiascos – like the Thames garden bridge, when he was Mayor of London, “world-beating” Covid testing that never happened, the Dominic Cummings saga and, of course, to cap it all, Brexit.

Surely not an opportunity Johnson ought to pass up.

Promise unfulfilled

It was a highly European day for us, Danielle and me, five days ago today, on 23 June 2016.

We’d spent the night before in our house in Luton, in South East England, and stayed just long enough in the morning for me to cast my vote in the EU referendum. It may not surprise anyone familiar with this blog that I voted to remain a member. Danielle didn’t vote, as a Frenchwoman with only limited rights to vote in Britain.

As soon as I’d cast that vote, we headed for continental Europe ourselves. We were travelling to Kehl in southwest Germany, where we’d previously lived, just across the Rhine from the city of Strasbourg in France (and sometimes Germany, in the past: putting an end to those Franco-German conflicts was a major motivation for building the EU in the first place). 

It was a tough campaign
Though, as to who runs the country, it feels like the same people

The campaigning I’d done around Luton for the Remain cause had left me feeling pessimistic about the result. Still, I slept reasonably well during the night of 23 to 24 June. Danielle, on the other hand, kept waking up and couldn’t resist the temptation to check her phone for news from the BBC. So by the time I woke up, she was even more depressed from reading the results than I had been from my unsuccessful canvassing (Luton voted to leave the EU by a large margin). 

That morning we had to travel into Strasbourg, which meant crossing the French border. The crossing had been open for most of the time we were living in the area, with at most the occasional spot check. Terrorist attacks in France had put paid to that. By 2016, there were French police guarding the bridge across the Rhine most of the time.

We stopped with the rest of the queue of cars. Policemen were walking up the line checking vehicles and travellers. One, a slightly older man than most of the others, approached us looking displeased. Almost menacing. Imperiously, he waved us over into the lane where cars were being stopped to allow closer questioning of people attempting to breach the defences of France.

Remember that we were driving a car with British plates.

He walked over to us and I wound down the window. I wasn’t driving – Danielle’s a far better driver, and I’m a far better passenger (I feel far less inclination to step fiercely onto an imaginary brake pedal) – but, of course, British cars have the wheel on the right side, the wrong side from a French policeman’s point of view.

He approached my window, still looking grim. 

“Brexit ou pas Brexit?” he demanded to know. Brexit or not Brexit.

“Oh, entièrement pas Brexit,” I assured him.

The grimness vanished. A huge smile replaced it. It was amazing how he suddenly looked properly human.

“Allez, passez,” he told us, waving us through.

It’s been five years since that date with destiny. A recent Ipsos Mori poll, that 58% of Brits think that Brexit has changed nothing whatever in their lives. Only 39% thought it had made any impact at all. Out of that group, 28% (rather over two-thirds of those who reckoned they’d seen any change at all) thought the effect had been negative, while just 11% thought it had been positive.

Curious, isn’t it? I suppose it wouldn’t have made much of a slogan on the Brexit side. “Vote leave! It may not make much difference, but things shouldn’t be too much worse. At least at first.” It’s not quite as snappy as “Take back control” or “Get Brexit done”, is it?

In any case, it’s early days. It’ll be interesting to see how views change as the effects start to accumulate. After all, big economic phenomena don’t happen fast. Or, more accurately, they build up slowly until they happen fast. The 2008 crash burst on us after a quarter century of unregulated bankers behaving like unruly teenagers.

What about the EU itself? 

Losing a major economy, financial centre and even, among non-superpower nations, significant military force is a blow to the EU. Britain was also a valuable counterweight to the Berlin-Paris axis that tends to dominate the Union. For countries like the Netherlands, that provided precious support. That’s all gone now and the EU is weaker for having lost it.

On the other hand, Britain was always an awkward member. It was always demanding special treatment, rebates on contributions, exemption from certain measures. It also developed a nasty habit of blocking important initiatives.

For instance, we now live in Spain (yep, our Europeanism runs deep) and this country is about to benefit to a startling level from EU financial assistance, running to a likely total of well over 200 billion euros. To finance such support, the EU nations had to agree to take on debt together. Shared debt? As Jennifer Rankin points out in the Guardian, EU leaders are far from convinced that it could ever have happened had Britain still been around to veto it.

Rankin quotes Georg Riekeles, of the European Policy Centre think tank:

“There are different states of sorrow,” he told her. “We miss the British, but probably less than we thought.”

Time will tell how things work out. But my view is that, if the EU is missing Britain less than expected, Britain may end up missing the EU far more than Leavers liked to claim.

It’ll be interesting to see how things stand on the tenth anniversary of that gloomy 23rd of June.

No lesson learned

There are places it’s just more sensible for your well-advised conqueror to stay well away from.

Last week, I put up a post about my father’s 1961 trip to Afghanistan. He’d visited the town of Istalif, peaceful but full of the bustle of a centre of crafts and commerce. At least, it had been back then, sixty years ago, but it has taken a hell of a beating since, as a consequence of the latest failures of the ill-advised refusing to keep well away from the long-suffering country.

US forces in Afghanistan. For now.

More news about the latest failure there brought it all to mind again today. As the US stumbles on towards failure in Afghanistan, it’s clear that all we are preparing for is the recognition that their twenty-year long conflict has been as futile as its predecessors. Including Britain’s own.

The British Empire was a rather ugly institution built on the hugely questionable notion that, the Brits being so good at running their own affairs, they had an obvious right, if not a duty, to run those of as many other peoples as they could possibly conquer. When you see what sort of a job they were doing of managing their own country – and still are, come to that – you’d have to doubt the suggestion that they were in any way qualified for their self-assigned task. More to the point, the way things went when they tried to carry it out makes it hard to believe that their self-assurance had anything at all to back it.

The Brits had a go all the same, though.

So, in particular they invaded Afghanistan from their base in India, when that was an imperial possession, not just once, not just twice, but three times. The first time, in 1842, ended in disaster. The second and third times, in 1878 and 1919, achieved very little. Afghanistan never fell to the British, and the best they could point to was that the Russians didn’t get a foothold instead of them.

The Russians didn’t give up, though. Under the alias the temporary alias of Soviet Union, they invaded in 1929, 1930 and 1979. None of the attempts achieved anything much, and the last of the three was a real disaster. The Soviets lost nearly 15,000 soldiers killed and almost 54,000 wounded. But those figures are as nothing compared to the civilian losses, which may have been anything between half a million and 2 million killed, without counting the several millions displaced inside the country or forced to flee into exile.

And did the Soviets do any better than the Brits? They didn’t. They were eventually driven out in humiliating defeat by Islamist insurgents, in those days receiving serious covert assistance from the US. The regime the Soviets had supported promptly collapsed and the insurgents, soon to be renamed the Taliban, took over. 

Just to underline the danger of not being careful enough in choosing who to back, the US soon found itself fighting the very same Taliban whose earlier incarnations it had supported.

Pretty soon, showing a monotonously familiar pattern of learning nothing from anyone else’s previous experience, the United States was sending military forces into Afghanistan, accompanied by a few from various allies. Those allies included Britain, having a fourth, if this time subsidiary, go at bringing the nation under control. 

That all happened twenty years ago. All you can say in its favour, compared to the Russian conflict that preceded it, is that it killed fewer people. The Americans have lost some 2300. The Afghan forces had lost 45,000 by 2019. Civilian losses have been about 64,000, with some 47,000 more injured.

The Russians spent the equivalent in today’s terms of about US$115 billion on their war effort. The US spent nearly a trillion, without counting aid projects, including on the Afghan army.

What makes the US action similar to all the others, though, is that it has achieved only limited and, above all, temporary success. Taliban action continues to intensify. Negotiations are going nowhere, with the Taliban conceding nothing, say on civil rights or women’s education. Why would they? Once the Americans are gone, they know they can sweep back into power. And the Americans are going, with the final withdrawal due on 11 September, to coincide with this year’s anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.

That may mean that Afghanistan becomes a radical Muslim state on the borders of Xinjiang province in China, where millions of Muslim Uighurs are suffering Chinese state persecution. That could be explosive. Might China be the next to intervene? Despite this long track record of failure by foreign power after foreign power? Human stupidity knows no borders, so who can rule it out?

My father used to smile wryly about the futility of the British invasions of Afghanistan. If he’d lived, he’d have been able to add Soviet and US futility too. Because nations don’t learn from mistakes. 

So they keep making them.

Ancestors behaving badly

Our ancestors fascinate me. And I don’t mean just my grandparents or great-grandparents. I mean the ancestors who moulded my native continent, Europe, and turned Spain into the place that I now call home.

Some time ago I visited the site of some Neolithic rock wall painting not far from where we live. They were seven thousand years old but still spoke to us about a life which wasn’t wholly alien to us.

Far closer to home is another place, far closer to our age. A Bronze Age settlement from just three and a half thousand years ago. There we saw no art, but the remains of a small farming community, with its water cistern, its grinding stones for grains, its oven for baking bread. 

The earlier people had been hunter-gatherers, or forages as many archaeologists seem to prefer calling them. The Bronze Age settlement belonged to farmers. That’s a huge change. Farmers have to work a hell of a sight harder, the downside of a move to an economically more enriching existence. 

But there’s also a massive psychological development that has to take place. A forager collects food to eat at once. A farmer, however, has to keep some of his harvest as seed for next year. That means that, even if hungry, farmers have to refrain from eating some of the food that’s just in front of them, so they can sow for the next harvest or to keep livestock alive. 

It’s hardly instinctive to defer the satisfaction of needs in this way. 

The other big difference between these two communities was that the painters of the rock walls were black. Their successors were white.

So, what happened between the two?

Agriculture, which so transformed life, arrived. People turned up from the Middle East, where farming had been pioneered. Some of the foragers, amazed by the newcomers’ celebrity status – the Neolithic equivalent of a New York cabby marvelling at the splendour of a Trump Tower, and probably with no better basis – decided to see whether they too couldn’t make a success of this superior way of life, and switched to farming. Agricultural communities sprung up among the foragers.

It’s likely that quite a lot of them spoke languages rather like Basque, unrelated to any other in the world today. Somehow, the two groups coexisted in what I like to think may have been peace, although all those rock paintings with their clouds of arrows and bands of foes marching towards confrontation, suggest that I’m probably being naive.

Meanwhile, far, far to the East, in a blood-chilling real-world echo of The Lord of the Rings, a dark force would soon start to build. In time, it would spell the end of these farming and foraging communities. Though, when I say ‘in time’ I mean something like a millennium or two, so it wasn’t a prospect that should have kept many of the intervening generations awake at night.

Herders living on the Steppes of southern Ukraine and Russia some 4000 kilometres away, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, were about to be introduced to some significant technological changes.

There was the horse, initially as food. Horses are cheaper to keep than cattle, because they use their hoofs to scrape away snow to get at the grass underneath and will even break ice to get at the water. Ideal for an environment with cold winters, like the Steppes.

Later, the herders learned to ride them, which meant they could herd even further into the grasslands, in bad times when fodder was scarce. What’s more, if you got fed up with herding, the nice thing about a horse is that it could get you quickly to a farming community to raid it, carrying you away quickly afterwards before the pursuit could get its act together.

After that, they learned about the wheel. And boy, were they good with it, developing the extraordinary skill you need to build a wheel out of wood, especially difficult when they switched to the spoked variety, so much lighter than solid wheels. With wagons, they could go further into the Steppes, and manage even bigger herds.

They didn’t stop at wagons, though. They also built the war chariot. In fact, they probably invented it.

What’s more, they had several good sources of metal ores, just as people were waking up to the fact that it was time for a copper age, and then a bronze age. Not only did they get immensely rich, they also got some great metal weapons, which went well with the horses and the chariots, to turn them into a terrifying force.

Reconstruction of the head of a Yamnaya man

These characters, the Yamnaya people, were relatively pale skinned. They spoke the forefather of the Indo-European languages. This blog post is written in one of its descendants. When these rich, powerful and well-armed warriors broke out of their Steppe homeland, they sent people both East (taking Indo-European into Iran and the Indian sub-continent) and West, into Europe. The whole continent now speaks languages descended from theirs, with few exceptions, such as Hungarian, Finnish and, of course, Basque.

Eventually they reached Iberia, present-day Spain and Portugal. And their impact was massive. Genetic studies show that some 40% of the DNA of today’s Iberians is from the Steppe herders. But practically 100% of male DNA is from them.

Compare this with what happened in Britain when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes showed up. Today, British men owe about 4% of their genetic material to them. Women owe nothing. So, like what happened with the Yamnaya in Spain, it was men who showed up, not couples, and they bred with the local women. But most of the locals survived.

I said ‘bred’ because we’re not talking about marriage. I can’t imagine the Yamnaya in Spain sought any kind of consent. The men were murdered or, at any rate, prevented from fathering any more kids. Instead, the invaders set to work on the women to father the race that would populate Iberia. 

That would include the inhabitants of the Bronze Age settlement near us. They probably spoke an Indo-European language, though it wouldn’t have been Spanish: that derived from the Latin which the Romans brought with them. It may well have been a Celtic language. 

Their settlement is unfortified, so their existence was probably peaceful. However, they were descended from the people who turned Spain from racially black to racially white. That probably took the form of a mass extermination. Followed by mass rape. 

It seems that even the most innocent-looking prehistoric remains can hide some much more difficult back stories.

Istalif

We drove along the course of a river, between regal lines of trees ablaze with autumnal colours. 

For my piece about my father’s experiences on the night before the D-Day landings in Normandy, I spent some time looking through some of his old photos and documents. That’s how I stumbled across his account of a day in a mountain village which had clearly marked him.

We drove along the course of a river, between regal lines of trees ablaze with autumnal colours. Vineyards stretched out on either side of the road with patches of grapes which looked like purple carpets laid out to dry in the sun. Criss-crossed irrigation ditches divided the land into neat geometrical squares and oblongs, and farmstead sheltered behind curtains of poplar and silver birch.

Well, we could be in Europe still, though you’ve probably guessed, not in England.

The last leg of the journey was along a dirt track winding upwards in a long series of hairpin bends. We approached Istalif through doorlike gaps in several massif walls and parked the Land Rover in the shade of a long line of eucalyptus on the edge of the gorge.

Right. So we’re talking about Istalif. Quite possibly not somewhere you know or have even heard of. I certainly hadn’t. So where is it? 

Helpfully, my father provided the answer: 

Istalif is in Afghanistan. It clings to a mountain flank some 35 miles north of Kabul, at almost 7000 feet… On the far side of the plain in the hazy distance, the Hindu Kush snow-capped peaks tower into the sky. On all sides as far as the eye can range, the horizon is circumscribed by mountains, rugged, arid and inhospitable.

As far I can establish, Istalif is a little closer to Kabul, the Afghan capital, than that, and not quite as high. But it seems to be a remarkable place, as his photos showed.

Istalif is topped by a mosque backed by a stately copse from which the houses tumble down in a jumble of whitewashed cubes scattered haphazardly in a pattern disciplined only by the configuration of the mountainside.

Istalif, topped by a mosque, backed by a stately copse
One of my father’s many photos from his visit

My father was struck by the way age-old crafts, long-vanished from so much of the world, were still carrying on in the village as though he was in the land “where time stands still” – the title he gave his piece about the town.

Here in the bazaar all the ancient crafts were practised. Cotton material was being hand-blocked… 

Leather was tooled into colourful shoes, camel saddles and garments. Woven split cane produced … lampshades, baskets, table mats and many other objects… Gold and silver chiselled into filigree were transformed into glittering assortments of brooches, rings, many-stranded necklaces, pendant earrings and any number of trinkets…

Istalif main street bustling with crafts

He was struck by the craft for which the village was best known, the production of is characteristic blue pottery.

Potters moulded clay into the perennial classic shapes, later to be glazed in traditional shades of blue varying from peacock to turquoise.

It felt to him as though he was witnessing a scene not from the autumn of 1961, when he was there, but from biblical times:

As I stood watching the vistas of the teeming bazaars, the men with their flowing robes, turbans and sandals, the asses bending under their loads, the supercilious camels and the shapeless dogs lying in the sun, I was reminded of an illustrated copy of the Bible I saw many years ago.

Istalif main street with supercilious camels

A lot has happened since 1961, and time certainly hasn’t stood still in Istalif. My father watched the news of the Russian wars in Afghanistan with horror, since he retained great affection for the country. But he died long before the worst disaster was inflicted on the village he’d enjoyed visiting so much. 

Serious fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan ravaged much of the area around Istalif, destroying crops and livestock. Then, in 1998, the Taliban occupied the town. They burned much of it and forced large numbers to flee. Lives were lost and livelihoods destroyed.

As the new millennium opened, Istalif would not have displayed the same kind of scene my father witnessed nearly four decades earlier.

People have begun slowly to return. Some trades have resumed, including the blue pottery. But once again, Afghanistan faces an uncertain future. 

American-led troops are still in Afghanistan. They join a long list of foreign forces that have tried to control the country over nearly two centuries. Back in the nineteenth century, it was Britain that tried to tame the Afghans. The British Empire believed that it carried, in Rudyard Kipling’s words, “the white man’s burden”, the duty to bring to peoples of darker complexion the benefits of civilisation only the white-skinned truly appreciated. 

Those who were to be enlightened often failed to appreciate the advantage of having the British telling them how to live, and might even fight back. Indeed, the Afghans resisted so hard that Britain sent an Army of Retribution to teach them a lesson (the lesson presumably being that no inferior people has the right to resist British invasion). Among other actions, that army sacked Istalif pretty effectively in 1842, killing rather a lot of people in the process, including civilians.

In the late twentieth century, the Russians had a go at invading Afghanistan. The Taliban then tried to impose their version of enlightenment on a population as sceptical of them as their ancestors had been of the British. Finally, the Americans are leading the way and have apparently made as much progress as the Taliban, the Russians or the British before them.

Today, the Americans want to cut their losses and get out. It’s hard not to imagine that the Taliban will sweep right back in as soon as they’re gone. And Istalif will, in all likelihood, find its slow road to recovery blocked again.

All that made reading my father’s short description poignant. He painted a picture, not of an ideal life, but at least of a peaceful and productive one. Wouldn’t it be uplifting if outsiders got the heck out of the place and let people there go on living their own lives and progressing at their own rate?

Perhaps even towards whatever version of enlightenment they feel is appropriate for them...

Grandparenting

Let me say at once that Elliott has an impeccable sense of timing.

He managed to delay his emergence into the world perfectly to share a birthday with his grandmother. That’s my wife, Danielle. He was born on the same day as she was. Just a few years apart. 

He only just pulled it off. It was twelve minutes past midnight. Thirteen minutes earlier and he’d have missed giving her that special birthday present.

You’ve got to admit that’s smart work by someone who at that stage wasn’t even a minute old.

Impeccable timing

His arrival meant that his parents would welcome some help from the grandparents.

Well, I say grandparents. I really mean grandmother. She left the very evening when he announced his arrival, the eve of her birthday, turning up at what was soon to be his home in the hills north of Madrid (after a mad drive through the night and through Covid travel restrictions from our home in Valencia), in the early hours of the birthday itself.

She has skill and experience. She had a real contribution to make. This is less true of me. My ignorance may not be total, but it’s close to it. I know which end of a baby is up. Why, I can walk up and down a room making rocking motions with the best of them. But dealing with any kind of crisis? I wouldn’t know how to start. I’d freeze.

That’s a bit like the plant I drowned. Because Danielle left me with clear and simple instructions on how to deal with various plants in and around the house. I think when it came to the large thing in the living room, once impressive enough to command even my admiration – and I don’t usually notice plants – I must have misunderstood the quantities and watered it at twice the level needed. 

The poor thing’s struggling now. I think Danielle gives it about the best chance of survival of any plant so badly mistreated, but it’s touch and go all the same. I’m torn between hope and anxiety.

When it comes to Elliott, I feel that if I were called on to provide any actual help things would be scarcely better. I’d end up doing far too much or far too little, even if I got the thing to do right in the first place. I’m happy to be the affectionate granddad, but it’s probably wiser not to ask for anything too concrete from me in the way of actual practical help.

I showed up at Elliott’s ten or twelve days after Danielle. Let me say, as an aside, that one of the reasons for the delay was that I was waiting for my first Covid vaccine shot. Which raises the question of whether my decision to travel to the Madrid hills was my own, or  the result of sinister manipulation to suit the wicked ends of Bill Gates. I have my own answer to that question, but I leave you to come up with your own.

It was with a profound and humbling sense of my own inadequacy that I joined the Elliott grandparenting team. All the more humbling given the superb quality of the parenting team itself. I wish I’d shown the same nurturing spirit towards my kids as these parents show to theirs. Since the father in this young family is one of the kids I subjected to my parenting skills, I imagine he too might feel that way.

Like I said. Humbling.

Still, however little I usefully contributed to the Elliott effort, it was by no means beyond my capacity to walk my granddaughter Matilda, Elliott’s big sister (now nearly two) to school and back. Or, more accurately, push her there and walk her back. With a stop on the way home to eat bread and marmite. She and I are on opposite sides of the great marmite divide, between those who are wildly enthusiastic about the stuff and those who can’t stand it. Matilda seems to like it. 

She got blueberries or bananas too, and on those at least we see eye to eye.

A little quality time for Granddad with Matilda in the park

We’d either stop in the park, where she could scramble over rocks or run down paths, leaving me behind on one occasion as she made a determined dash for freedom, or in a playground where she could slide or swing (the latter under granddad power) or, just as in the park, make a determined dash for freedom.

Self-assured young lady, she is, with a clear focus on liberty.

The school, incidentally, is an extraordinary place. It takes kids from the age of six months, though Matilda joined at one. Her class may not yet have made a great deal of progress on higher mathematics, or tackled the great classics of either Spanish or English literature, or grappled with the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht that left Britain holding the Spanish territory of Gibraltar to this day. But the kids do seem to have a wonderful time there. That became particularly clear when, during my visit, Matilda had a memorable moment at school, when the teacher and class covered each other with flour in the garden, to everyone’s joy.

Great for socialisation, great for language-learning and, if the video clips shared with us are to be believed, great fun too.

Matilda started off wildly enthusiastic at the arrival of a granddad she hadn’t seen since late last summer (well, you know how it is, Covid and all that). That was gratifying. However, I quickly faded into a routine presence, of course, just someone who was there each day and pushed the buggy to school and picked her up later. Safe and familiar but a little dull.

She, at any rate, was anything but dull. That will. That sense of adventure. That clear drive to achieve firm purposes. She’s impressive. And the smile, when it bursts out, is entirely seductive.

It was a joy to get to know Matilda better. And to meet Elliott too. But I think it may be a little while before I get to know him as well as his sister – Matilda’s age is one I find it easier to relate to.

But thanks to my experience with Matilda, I know that means I have another pleasure to look forward to.

Matilda getting to know Elliott

Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride

We’ve put our cat, Misty, through the wringer a bit. Poor chap. It makes me feel guilty just to think of it.

He was born in France, but we took him to Germany. From there, we moved him to England, with a few return journeys between the two countries during the process, each of which he loathed. And now we’ve moved him to Spain.

What’s worse, we twice abandoned him. He spent several months with friends before we could bring him to England; later, we did the same in Engalnd, until we were ready for him to join us in Spain. He did well on both occasions – we only left him with good friends – but it was still traumatising to be deserted in that way.

It changed his character. We first met him at dinner with friends. We’d promised each other we wouldn’t come away with a kitten, but the one who would soon become Misty charmed us by his overwhelming affection. It even drove him to climb all over us. That was painful, as you can imagine, since he used his claws to climb our legs, but it was seductive all the same. We took him home that evening.

After our first abandonment of him, however, the easy affection turned into something far warier. He’s become more sensitive to slights. He’s inclined to show his displeasure with tooth and claw.

Who can blame him? He was the victim of treatment bordering on abuse, for which I can only hang my head in shame.

On the positive side, our second separation was followed by a last move, just as soon as we’d moved from a flat to a house with a garden he could feel at ease in, and it has been a success. Like us, he’s finding Spain a wonderful place for a retirement. He fitted straight in, finding his favourite places, on a bench in the front garden, on a bed indoors, on the lawn at the back, on a sun-drenched balcony, within a few hours of moving in.

Misty’s decided Spain’s just the place for a senior cat

But nothing’s ever an unmixed blessing. He’s just had an unpleasant experience, a reprise of an equally traumatic moment ten years ago. I made a record of the incident at the time, but let me give you a quick summary here too.

We were surprised one day to see Misty, on the roof of a garage, engaged in some kind of strange game, or sinister dance, with two crows. They were taunting him. One would land in front of him and tempt him to attack and, when he did, fly off. The other then landed behind him, making him turn and start the process again.

Why were they doing this, we wondered?

We discovered a few days later, when we were woken one morning by a storm of cawing from the street outside our bedroom. A crow fledgeling had fallen from the nest. Too young to fly back, he was stuck on the ground and easy game for a cat in his prime. When we looked, Misty had the fledgeling in his jaws, ready to turn him into breakfast. 

It wasn’t proving easy, though. It wasn’t the young crow that was cawing but the parents. They were both attacking the cat, with beak and talons, and giving him a terrible time. So terrible, in fact, that in the end he dropped the fledgeling and fled back to the house. 

He never troubled the crows again, even though the young one spent several more days on the ground before developing the strength to fly out of danger.

Well, the same thing has happened again here, ten years on. Not with crows, though. This time it was a far smaller and apparently less menacing bird. These are the ones who have made their nest above our front door. I had thought they were house martins, but it turns out they are in fact common swallows. But there’s nothing common about these fine birds, so small and yet so valiant.

One of the things this couple did was extend the nest they took over, and we soon discovered why. Like a young suburban couple, they were getting ready for a large family. As far as we can tell, there are five fledglings in the nest. They certainly needed some extra space.

Busy, busy swallows. And watchful too.
Note the nest extension, at the top, for their large family

Of the five, one is now big enough to try flying around a bit. That makes him vulnerable. He could fall to ground, leaving him easy prey even for a cat like Misty, rather slower in his retirement than he was when young.

Now the space by the front door is where he likes to spend a few moments before wandering to his bench. So the other day he was resting quietly on the doorstep. Presumably taking his time as he contemplated a few hours’ leisure in the sun. 

The swallows were having none of it. They went straight onto the attack.

Poor chap. It must have felt like déjà vu. Under vicious airborne attack by two aggressors. Even though, this time, he’d done nothing to merit such treatment. Why, these days, ten years on from his prime, his eyesight’s not so good, and he’s a bit rheumatic in his movements. The hunting instincts may still be there, but the performance is lacking.

The parents, however, weren’t prepared to make any allowance for his pensioner status. He was too damn close. He had to go.

The persecution got through to him fast. Now he doesn’t hang around when he leaves the house by the front door. He heads straight to his favoured resting place without pausing anywhere near the swallows. 

There’s no peace for the wicked, they say. Even when, as on this occasion, he hadn’t even been given the chance to be wicked. A humbling experience, having to swallow his pride, when he hadn’t even tried to have a swallow.

Idiosyncratic hiking

One of the issues we face in the Spanish hiking group we belong to, is how to describe the urge, that all of us experience from time to time (me, at my age, perhaps more than the average), to disappear for a moment into the bushes.

Most of the Spaniards we walk with call that a visit to the ‘baños publicos’ which, strictly speaking, means the public baths. But since it’s not unusual for us to refer to the ‘bathroom’ in English too, even though we mean a place in which there is no bath, and indeed in which we have no intention of plunging ourselves into a large tub of hot water, we should perhaps be a little indulgent towards that euphemism.

Talking about euphemisms of that kind, the one I really like is the American ‘restroom’. With Americans or, even better, in the United States, I like to announce that, “I’m going for a rest”. They don’t generally seem to have any idea what I mean, even though ‘restroom’ is their own term for the destination I have in mind.

But back to ‘baños publicos’. I always suggest to my Spanish friends that this is perhaps a little vulgar. That we should use an expression that’s somehow more clinical, even more professional, in tone.

My suggestion? “I need to treat a minor urological condition.” 

I feel that has a much better ring to it. Unfortunately, it’s my impression that my fellow walkers think I’m just taking the piss.

I like our fellow walkers. Especially the leader of our group, one Javi (pronounced – roughly – Habi, with the ‘a´ a bit like, though not a lot like, the ‘u’ in ‘cut´). That’s short for Xavier, a fairly common name here in Spain. He works on building or maintaining footpaths all around the Valencia region and, as a hobby, takes groups like ours out Nordic walking, with never a charge for the privilege. And a privilege it certainly is.

Javi with his trademark smile

Now one of the things that Javi likes to do, apart from keeping everyone amused with his humour and his lively smile, is navigate – perhaps I should just say find our way – without reliance on boring modern innovations like the internet. He uses some electronic device that he holds in his hand and consults from time to time, but I have no idea how it works. Or whether it works. It seems not to be internet-connected, because whenever Danielle suggests to him that we use an application on her phone, he refuses saying that, “part of the pleasure is the discovery”.

This means that it’s not entirely unknown for us to have to backtrack occasionally, to take a different path than the one we’ve spent a few minutes going down in error. But what does that matter? He’s entirely right about the pleasure of the thing. What are a few minor digressions among friends? We go on those hikes for fun, not to engage in some kind of scientific exercise. We can keep the science for managing our affairs at home. The walks are for amusement, and even the digressions contribute to amusing us.

Our hikes: fine places, occasional challenges, and Patxaran

They are, in any case, quite a good thing, because it means we walk rather further than planned and, after all, the whole idea of the walk is to get exercise. This way we get more than we’d bargained for. And at no extra charge, except in energy and shoe leather (or, in my case, shoe rubber).

Actually, he also has another nice trick for getting us to walk further than we thought we were going to. It happened the other day, when he took the group for a reasonably short walk, of nine kilometres. After nearly two kilometres, he  announced, “that was a present from me to you all. We've reached the start of the walk. We're doing nine kilometres from here”.

Good for the body. Perhaps, in some weird way, good for the soul too.

Besides, he always gets us to some pretty remarkable places, every time, without fail. Places that take our breath away by their beauty, places that challenge our agility by making us do things we probably wouldn’t have done otherwise or, as on one memorable occasion, places that allow us to collect the ingredients for that wonderful intoxicating liquor, Patxaran.

This all makes Javi’s methods of navigation highly effective. On the other hand, they are, shall we say, somewhat idiosyncratic. So, as I’ve come up with my own description of those little dashes into the bushes, I’ve come up with a word for Javi’s approach to route finding: Javigation.

When I launched the new term on our most recent march, it was greeted with laughter – OK, OK, chuckles, but I’ll take whatever I can get – though he didn’t seem that charmed by it himself. To the point where I worried that I might have offended him. Which isn’t something I’d willingly do.

So it was a great relief that, when we parted company at the end of the walk, he called cheerily after me, “See you soon, when I can be your Javigator again”.

A man after my own heart. One who can take a tease and make it his own. Who can turn a potentially upsetting label and make it into badge to wear with a smile. The smile that’s his trademark.

Definitely a good guy to lead our hikes. However erratic his Javigation..

The day before...

The things we make our young people do…

I write these words on the 5th of June. That means that on this night, 77 years ago, my father, then aged 22, flew his third combat mission as navigator on a Stirling bomber of the Royal Air Force’s 296 Squadron. A laconic entry in his flying log tells the tale.

4.6.44 No. 3 Operation - Invasion France - 18 Para
3 hours and no minutes, night time
All in a handwriting that remains deeply familiar to me

That entry isn’t the only trace of what happened that day. He also kept a reconnaissance photo of the Normandy coast near the coast of Ouistreham. That’s the nearest coastal town to the city of Caen, which was soon to become the target of fierce fighting. The mission on which my father was flying that night was to drop paratroops who were to hold bridges over a canal and a river, in the opening move of that campaign. The log entry shows that his plane was carrying 18 of them.

Reconnaissance photo composite of the French coast at Ouistreham

I visited the University of Caen in the early 1980s. It’s housed in a fine, if slightly soulless, modern building. The original university, founded in the fifteenth century, was completely destroyed by Allied bombing during this particular phase of the fighting. The French may have been allies, but the Germans held the city. So it was bombed. Something like 35,000 people were made homeless and some 3000 civilians died.

An account I found of the 5 June mission say the first plane took off at 23:19 that evening. My father’s log entry shows he was in the air for three night hours, so he returned in the small hours of 6 June 1944. That’s the morning of D-day, the allied invasion of France, the first action against Nazi occupation of Western Europe. 

Soviet armies were moving from the East. Soon American and French troops would land in southern France. Together these offensives end the Hitler regime.

My father’s logbook records the operation as being part of the “invasion of France”. I can imagine how exciting that must have been. Brought up in a francophone neighbourhood of Brussels, he was deeply attached to France, and it must have been a great feeling that he was now helping to liberate the country, after four years of Nazi occupation.

According to the account I read, however, while all the planes completed their task, some were hit by anti-aircraft fire, some of the airmen were injured and one plane was lost with its crew. My father’s made it home unscathed: it wouldn’t be until the autumn, during the operation to secure a bridgehead across the Rhine in Holland, that my father’s plane would be shot down.

Unscathed he may have been in the small hours of 6 June 1944, but he clearly flew through the same anti-aircraft fire that brought down one of his friend’s planes and killed the crew. I can’t imagine what it must have been like, flying at night through gunfire of people who want you dead. He wasn’t even the pilot, so any evasive movements they could make weren’t in his control. Besides, although I don’t know much about it, I assume you can’t do a lot of swerving around if you’re trying to drop paratroops at a specific place. 

All in all, I imagine the excitement of taking part in the liberation of France might have been just a tad tempered by the terror of that moment.

The young man on the wing of his bomber is my Dad

After the 5th of June 1944, my father would fly another 24 missions, including the one when he was shot down. He survived that with only a minor injury. But a lot of young men like him, in the air or on the land, wouldn’t make it. The war had just over 11 months to go and the Allied forces on the Western Front alone would lose going on for another 200,000 killed. 

It never ceases to appal me that my father did all that when he was 46 years younger than I am today. Or that a lot of other kids his age were asked to do the same. In my childhood, I expected to have to face the same horrors too, and I’m profoundly grateful that I never did.

Frighteningly, there are lots of young people, even today, who aren’t going to be that lucky. 

Sticks and chains may tax my brains

“You can’t do as much as you approach 70,” people trying to be kind like to tell me, “as when you’re approaching 17.”

Well, I suppose that’s consoling. But only insofar as it’s a consolation to be reminded that 70 is nearly upon me, and 17 a remote past (however vividly still remembered). Some years back – possibly decades – I heard someone saying, “it was a shock to discover that my glorious future was all behind me”. 

It’s worse for me. It isn’t even a shock anymore.

This all came to mind on Sunday, when we went for a walk with a local hiking group, for 16 kilometres (ten miles if you prefer). When I was seventeen, I used to walk with teams of my colleagues for 20 to 30 miles in a day and once, memorably, 35 miles overnight. Sadly, Sunday’s effort left me about as tired as the 35 miles did. 

Still, at least we were in the mountains on Sunday. That’s my excuse.

These mountains were down at the southern end of the Valencian Community, the region around the Spanish city of Valencia. We were walking near the town of Alcoy, in the province of Alicante. One of the first places we saw was the ‘Seven Moons Bridge’. You might wonder whether this was a case of locals thinking that “one moon is good, so why not have seven?”. The reality’s more prosaic. It’s just that the bridge runs over seven arches.

The Seven Moons bridge stretching across the valley by Alcoy

It’s a fine structure and now part of a well-maintained cycling and walking route. On the other hand, you might wonder whether a viaduct 46 metres high and 230 metres long is overkill for a leisure path. Originally, it was designed to carry a railway, and though the line was completed, including the tunnels and the viaducts, the plan was eventually dropped. No train ever ran across it.

Remember Boris Johnson’s plan to build a garden bridge in London when he was Mayor? It was a bit like that. Probably even more expensive, though I’d never want to belittle Johnson’s capacity for wasting public funds on failed prestige projects.

Cataract and pool where we stopped for lunch

We had lunch by a stream flowing from some cataracts. A lovely sight. But the scene, alas, of a senior moment for me. 

I’m useless at Nordic Walking but I still often take sticks with me on this kind of outing. Sadly, however, I left them near where we had lunch. Fortunately, I noticed pretty soon and shot back to collect them. 

This is a fine bunch of people to walk with, and four of them decided they’d wait for me so that I wouldn’t be left alone struggling to catch up with the main group. Unfortunately, however, although it only took me ten minutes to collect the sticks and get back to the others, that was enough for the rest to have struck off down a side path we decided, mistakenly, not to follow when we reached the turning.

The result? The five of us spent the next hour adding a kilometre or two climbing up the valley in completely the wrong direction, struggling to maintain some form of communication with our guide on crackly and broken calls in the patchy cell phone coverage up there. 

To my amazement, and underlining what great friends they are, the four who’d stayed with me and the main group all claimed repeatedly and loudly that the fault was theirs. I’m not quite sure how it could have been, since I was obviously the one who’d forgotten the sticks. My apologies, however, were simply brushed aside.

The lesson I learned was that it’s all about sticks and stones. Forget your sticks, and you’ll be walking over a lot more stones. Or, to put it differently, if you take sticks, then stick with them, or get stuck with more miles.

Getting seriously stuck is what might have happened after we caught up with the main group. We had to make our way along a cliff face along a river pool. The local council had thoughtfully hung a chain along the cliff, to cling to as we sidled across.

Clinging to the chain and my rescued sticks,
and surrounded by three of the walkers who stuck with me

I have to say that, as it was pretty hot, there was a temptation to let go of the chain and fall into the water just to cool off a little, but I suppose the walk back when soaking wet might not have been much fun.

The best thing about the chains was that there wasn’t just one set. Soon after the pool, we found another lot helping us climb up a cliff. With apologies to Rousseau, and only a small distortion of his words, I couldn’t help feeling that “man is born free, but around here he’s dangling from chains”. 

The second chain. For the uphill climb

We have mountains closer to our home too. They’re called the Sierra Calderona. There’s a much-repeated story, retold by our guide on Sunday, according to which María Inés de Calderón, known as la Calderona, was a seventeenth-century Madrid actress who was married at sixteen only to become the mistress first of a duke and then of the king himself. She gave birth to the only illegitimate son (of many illegitimate children he had) that the king recognised (though to this day we don’t know whether he was the duke’s). 

His habit once the king decided he’d had enough of a mistress was to send her off to a convent. The tale has her escaping from hers and holing up for the rest of her life with a bunch of bandits in the mountains near Valencia. The legacy of her life of crime is that the name ‘Calderona’ has stuck to mountains, as a memorial to her, ever since.

La Calderona.
In her days as an actress and mistress to the powerful

It’s a fine story, so I wouldn’t try to spoil it by pointing out there is a far less interesting one, based on boring things like documentary evidence. It suggests that after the birth of her son, removed from her by the ghastly king, la Calderona spent fourteen years in her convent, before rising to the rank of abbess. She ran the place for the next two years before dying.

That’s dying in the convent, not the mountains. Surrounded by nuns. Not bandits.

That’s a much less uplifting story, isn’t it? And how would it explain the name of our closest mountains? The other story must be the true one.

Just not correct, perhaps, in terms of dull facts.