Raising a glass to a breakthrough woman

“Three be the things I shall never attain,” according to Dorothy Parker, “Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”

Well, Irene Rodriguez isn’t going to provide me with sufficient champagne, or sparkling wine (‘champagne’ being a protected name), at least for now. Not, in fact, until she can replenish her stock. What she did give us, on the other hand, was one of the more magical winery visits I’ve ever enjoyed, as well as the tasting of a wonderful wine, not just good in itself but also reminiscent of my wife Danielle’s home region of Alsace, in Eastern France. That may not seem that extraordinary, until you consider that the visit took place in Northern Spain.

What’s more, that visit also gave us another insight into how the world of winemaking may at last be changing in its gender mix. It’s a hard world to break into, even for men, but far harder for women. It was a pleasure to read a recent article in the Guardian about how women are beginning to move into top positions in the highly conventional domain of Spanish bodegas (wineries).

The women in the article admit that success still depends a lot on contacts. You need to be born in that world or, like two of them, to have married into it. That made Irene’s case all the more encouraging, since she’s making her way in that field, without either belonging to or marrying into an established bodega family.

Irene welcoming Danielle to her bodega

We met her while on holiday in Cantabria. That’s a province of what’s called Green Spain, between the Cantabrian mountains to the south and the freezing cold Bay of Biscay to the north. The position creates something of a micro-climate. I remember a friend from Northern Ireland who introduced me to the notion of “a softness in the air”, which meant that if there was no threat of imminent rain, then it must be raining already.

Cantabria is a bit like that, except that it quite often doesn’t rain as much as it threatens. But it rains quite enough to ensure it deserves the epithet ‘green’. As a result, it’s a wonderful place to spend a holiday if you’re beginning to find that you can have too much of a good thing, with sun beating down and temperatures in the mid-thirties, as those of us who live elsewhere in Spain eventually do each summer. Cantabrian conditions make it ideal for white wine production, though getting a decent red with that much rain and relatively little sun, would be more of a stretch.

The region has been producing wine down the centuries, at least for as long as they only way of getting it from other places required haulage by horse and cart, which was excessively expensive. People who wanted wine drank Cantabrian until modern means of transport allowed wines from elsewhere to undercut local production, leading to its decline.

Lately, though, there has been a resurgence, mostly down to those courageous pioneers driven by their passion, who have made it their profession. 

Irene Rodriguez
Fine oenologist, with one of her bottles

Irene is from the village of Guriezo, lying between the coast and the start of the hills. She signed up with the University of Rioja to study oenology. That’s the science of wine which, with my apologies to all the biologists, chemists and physicists I know and admire, sounds a lot more fun than most science. She also worked in Rioja for ten years, mastering the trade. But in 2014, she decided it was time to apply those skills at home.

As she points out on the web page of her winery, in the nineteenth century, every kitchen garden of her family’s village was planted with vines. Little by little, however, the vines were ripped out and replaced by other crops. Irene’s family chose to see if they could bring back the older practice and help revitalise the region’s traditions.

Riesling grapes at Hortanza

What they now have is something any wine-lover would envy: a vineyard in their back garden. It’s small – just 0.4 hectares, which will support the production of only some 2000 bottles a year – but it’s a real gem of a place. In any case, a garden could hardly accommodate more, and she calls her bodega Hortanza, the big kitchen garden. It’s breathtaking with its rows of vines, Riesling on the flat below, Gewürztraminer on the slope at the back. These are two of the major grape varieties of Alsace so, thanks to Danielle, we’re highly familiar with them. 

The vines are immaculately maintained, with hydrangeas and plots of lavender to add a touch of colour and complete a pleasing picture. The garden lies behind the modern and attractively designed winery and a row of three or four houses, one of them stone-built and belonging to the family too. They let it out to holiday visitors to help finance the operation.

Dream back garden
The holiday rental house is the stone building at the far right,
the bodega building to the left

From those grape varieties, Irene makes a wine that is rich in fruit flavours but with a refreshing edge in its dryness. While reminiscent of Alsace wines, it has its own strikingly distinctive character. A cousin rather than a sibling, and well worth savouring. We bought a couple of cases to enjoy with our friends and family.

She’s also started making a sparkling wine, but has sold out of her first year’s production. Such was the quality of the still wine that we’re looking forward to coming back again and trying the next batch of sparkling. A pretext, if any were necessary, to enjoy the cool of Cantabria in the summer next year too.

What’s more, the family has taken over another hectare of land a little distance away, already planted with Albariño grapes, the main variety of Galicia. That’s the province in the far west of northern Spain, best known for being the end of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, but also as the source of a great many excellent wines. So that’s another pleasure to look forward to.

It was a lot of fun being shown around the bodega by Irene, who is as pleasant and easy to get along with as she’s passionate and knowledgeable about her profession. Tasting the wine just crowned the process. 

Above all, though, we were delighted to meet a woman who has found her way into the exclusive world of Spanish wine production. And has done it with her own skill and dedication, starting small and building from there. I’m convinced she’ll do well, and it’ll be fun to watch her building on her success. 

A great instance of a woman breaking through a glass ceiling by her own merits. 

Ready for sampling

That’s an achievement to raise a glass to.

Raising a glass in the Line of Fire

It’s a quarter past midnight with no moon.

Crouching in the dark, motionless and silent, the eighteen women of the communications section are watching the dense crowd of shadows filing past towards the riverbank.

Not a voice can be heard, not a whisper. The only sound is of footsteps, hundreds of them, on the earth dampened by evening dew; and occasionally, the light sound of metal on metal, from rifles, bayonets, steel helmets and water bottles.

It’s the moment, on 25 July 1938, 83 years ago today, when 18 women and 2890 men of the Eleventh Mixed Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army are about to cross the river Ebro, to establish a bridgehead in the village of Castellets del Segre. They don’t know it, but the operation is only a diversion from the main lines of attack across the river, in what is to become the longest battle ever fought on Spanish soil. It was the last, massive and tragically doomed attempt by the Republic to defend itself against the uprising being led by Francisco Franco. He, supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, is about to instal a personal dictatorship which will last until his death in 1975.

The words I quote are the opening of Linea de Fuego (Line of Fire), a novel by Arturo Perez Reverte. As he points out, in reality there never was an Eleventh Mixed Brigade and there’s no such place as Castellets del Segre. Like the nationalist forces he describes confronting them, they are pure fictions. But, speaking to his Spanish readers, he points out that:

… though the military units, the places and the characters who appear are all fictitious, the events and names that inspired them are not. It was exactly like this that the parents, grandparents, and relatives of many readers of this book fought on each side during those days and those tragic years.

Republican soldiers crossing the Ebro on a pontoon bridge

Perez Reverte, who was a war correspondent for 20 years (and, yes, there are war correspondents in the book), knows what a war is like. He repeatedly describes the filth and the smells, often the sewer smell of fields where large numbers of men are penned for days on end. And he understands that everyone underwent the same suffering and terrors, whatever side they were on.

We see men – and on the Republican side, mere boys, the teenagers who were called up in the government’s dying days – whose commitment goes from the enforced service of the compulsorily mobilised to the dedication of the driven ideologue. With all the gradations in between: the professionals for whom fighting turns out to be a vocation, perhaps even to their own surprise, the Moroccans with the Nationalists fighting for their living as well as their beliefs, or with the Republicans, the men (and women) who believe they’re fighting for the proletarian revolution under the leadership of the Soviet Union, or the convinced Democrats who believe in a nation where many tendencies can live together and peacefully contest for power.

That last group, by the way, is very much on the wane. Perez Reverte brings powerfully alive the sense in which the Republican side is losing its democratic character, falling increasingly under the control of highly disciplined and effective Communist cadres. Indeed, one of the most sympathetic characters (he struck me as Perez Reverte’s projection of himself into his novel) is a battalion commander who knows he’s in trouble with the (Communist) Political Commissar of the Brigade. Even if he survives this fighting, it may only be to face a firing squad of his own side’s.

That’s one of the saddest aspects of the Spanish Civil War. By the end, with only the Soviet Union backing the Republic and the democracies – Britain, France and the United States in particular – staying well out of the way, the choice was only going to be between dictatorships, of the Right or the Left, whichever came out on top.

In the end, it was the Right that won. Soviet aid was niggardly and came with a huge price tag (financial as well as political). Germany and Italy poured in resources. Franco, who turned out to be a terrible general, throwing men at Republican positions in this final battle with no thought to their safety and losing tens of thousands for no gain in the process, would win because he could afford the losses, knowing they would always be made good. That wastage of lives is another powerful theme of the novel.

Above all, though, what the novel makes clear is the harrowing nature of civil war itself. In the words of the sympathetic battalion commander:

There’s a complicated moment when you discover that a civil war isn’t, as you initially believed, a struggle of good against evil… It’s just one horror confronting another horror.

Arturo Perez Reverte: an excellent novelist, well worth reading

A remarkable novel. Now, because I’m desperate to master the language of my adopted nation, I’ve taken to listening to books or reading them in Spanish. Linea de fuego is available on Kindle and Audible in Spanish, and that’s how I got to know the book (the translations here are my own, so blame just me for any shortcomings). However, the novel was only published in 2020, so I suspect the absence of an English translation is only a matter of the time it takes to produce one.

But, whether you can enjoy it now or have to wait a little longer, I strongly recommend Line of Fire to you. In the meantime, on the 83rd anniversary of the start of that terrible battle, why don’t we raise a glass this evening to the memory of those who suffered through it? With an added wish that none should ever have to suffer that hell again.

Levelling up: a transparent policy

Whatever flaws he may have, Boris Johnson really goes for transparency in a big way. Not always deliberately. But most usefully.

Boris Johnson launches his Levelling Up initiative
A man of transparency. That we need to see through

I’m thinking of the news that the Health Secretary Sajid Javid has sadly tested positive for Covid. The rules are clear, and the government itself has spelled them out, to avoid any possible confusion. Anyone who has been in contact with someone infected with the disease must go into self-isolation.

Johnson had spent some hours in a meeting with Javid. There should have been no question what he had to do. Just as, in the minds of those of us who’ve got used to him, there was no doubt what he actually would do.

Yep. He announced he wouldn’t be isolating.

There was an entirely predictable response of fury to this announcement. “One rule for us,” people said, “another for them.” Well, yes, that’s true, but how is that news? He’s had a spectacular and public falling out with Dominic Cummings, but at the time Cummings was his chief adviser, Johnson turned a blind eye to mind-blowing breaches of Covid restrictions. In the same way, he did nothing when his Home Secretary, Priti Patel, was found to have bullied staff, or his then Health Secretary Matt Hancock had gone along with major contracts being awarded to a personal friend of his (and not fulfilled).

The fury over Johnson trying to avoid self-isolation had its effect, however. He will now isolate. Because he saw that not doing so might hurt his popularity. If there’s one thing he hates even more than inconvenience to himself, it’s the prospect of potentially losing votes. He saw the way the wind was blowing, and quickly tacked to take advantage of it.

Back in 1982, I travelled to Berlin to consult some documents held in what had once been the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences. An accident of history had left that building, and its archives, in the Eastern Sector of the city, the sector under Soviet Control, and the capital of what was then (laughably) called the German Democratic Republic. Everyone else called it East Germany and knew it was a puppet of the Soviet Union.

While there I made friends with people of my age or thereabouts. When they knew no one listening was likely to denounce them to the authorities, they were outspoken in their criticism of that mean-spirited, autocratic state run by authoritarian incompetents in which they lived. They had no time for their rulers, hacks sure they were entitled to a privileged life, living in gated communities with better accommodation than most, and with a higher standard living than their compatriots.

Sound familiar at all?

After one evening with them, one that had gone on into the small hours, I found myself walking towards my hotel at 2:00 in the morning. I was struck by how entirely the place corresponded to the ideal of social control pursued by Margaret Thatcher, then British Prime Minister. The streets weren’t particularly brightly lit, but I felt no sense of threat at all. Well, they were almost deserted, with only the occasional police patrol car cruising past.

This was a world where you were unlikely to be mugged, where any drug taking was out of sight of decent citizens, where there was no homelessness or begging. Why, there wasn’t even any prostitution, I was told, which meant that doctors seeing women with certain types of infection, would mark their medical notes “frequently changing sexual traffic”, just as a hint to how they might be earning their living.

A population cowed into silence and submission, an elite living the good life, and a veil of hypocrisy over any troubling truths.

Again, doesn’t that ring some bells?

Why do I mention all this now?

Well, in the late eighties, under so-called Communist rule, the GDP per head of East Germany was a little under US$38,000 a head in 2020 terms. 

Today, in Yorkshire and the Humber, in Northern England, where Labour traditionally won most parliamentary seats but has been losing them at a depressing rate to the Conservatives, GDP per head is just under US$37,000, in those same terms. 

The North of England is doing even less well than that basket case of a country, East Germany in the last years of its existence.

Maybe that’s why people have been turning away from Labour, after being so poorly off after generations of voting for them. Especially with Johnson promising them “levelling up”. That makes him sound committed to ending the disparities between their region and others (GDP per head is over twice as high in London as in Yorkshire and the Humber).

However, they need to take advantage of Boris Johnson’s transparency. Look at his behaviour, for instance over the Covid isolation: his first instinct was to duck the obligations of regulations he’d introduced himself. Only when he began to fear that he might lose popularity did he backtrack and agree to comply.

It’s the same with levelling up. Has he done anything to change the position of the North of England? A few million for new football pitches or to tidy up high streets is not going to reverse East German style decline in the North.

Don’t you think he might just be talking about levelling up because he knows it wins him votes in the former Labour seats he needs to hold at the next election?

As with following regulations, his heart isn’t in it. Especially since his party isn’t sold on the idea. After all, it has just lost a parliamentary by-election in Chesham and Amersham, one of those areas of wealthy people who believed the Conservatives were there to keep them rich. If levelling up means switching serious funding to the North, Boris Johnson may find himself in serious difficulty in the South.

Remember. He’s easy to see through. Look carefully and ask yourself, is he really interested in helping anyone who isn’t rich already?

Churchill, light and dark

It was fun watching the film The Darkest Hour again recently. 

In case you don’t know it, it’s about Winston Churchill becoming Prime Minister of Great Britain, when the country was facing its worst moment in World War Two: Hitler’s German Army had moved at speed through Holland and Belgium, both of which were about to surrender, and pinned the British Expeditionary Force – the bulk of Britain’s professional army – and a French Army against the Channel at Dunkirk. 

The prospects were the surrender of France, which was soon to follow, and the loss of the bulk of British land forces, leaving it terribly exposed to German invasion.

All the ingredients, as you’ll imagine, for an exciting story of the triumph of the spirit over adversity. Which is exactly what the film is. Indeed, at times it even drifts somewhat into the realm of fairy tale rather than strict history. It belittles the role of Admiral Ramsay, who played a key role in rescuing the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches at Dunkirk (and quite a few of the French too), though he’s shown in the film as slow to act, with Churchill having to berating him: “the request for civilian boats was not a request, Bertie. It was an order!”.

Equally, it’s unfair to Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, who proved himself ultimately far more competent than Churchill in managing government affairs. That does allow a moment of comedy, however. Churchill appointed Attlee Lord Privy Seal in his first coalition government. In the film, Churchill is sitting in the toilet when the message is brought to him that the Lord Privy Seal wants to talk to him. He replies:

Tell him I’m sealed in the privy and I can only deal with one shit at a time

Still, the most fairy-tale-like of all the scenes is, in many ways, one of the most powerful of the film. Churchill, having mentioned that he’d never taken a trip on a bus or the London Underground, takes a tube train, not just for the experience, but as an opportunity to gauge the views of ordinary people. The conversation teaches him that, whatever leading politicians, even in his own party, may think, there’s no stomach for surrender among the British people generally. 

That’s a view he gets, incidentally, from an only relatively random sample of about a dozen people, which actually feels a bit like modern politics, where so much is decided by focus groups. 

At the end of the discussion, Churchill recites from Macaulay’s Horatius. The verse he chooses tells how Horatius steps forward to defend the city bridge against the entire might of the Etruscan host. The decision will cost him his life. 

It’s not a bad passage for Churchill to recite, since his most brilliant insight was to see in Hitler a man whose word could never be trusted in any peace negotiations his colleagues might want to open, and a thug so brutal that the only option was to overthrow him. Churchill, in reality and not merely in a fairy tale, made his greatest contribution to British history by refusing to bow to the Nazis and by standing firm even when things were as bad as they ever got. In Britain’s darkest hour, indeed. 

Macaulay writes and Churchill quotes:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds…”

At that point, as he’s starting the seventh line, he’s interrupted by a young black man, who completes the verse, as Churchill listens appreciatively:

“For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his Gods.”

Churchill reaches out and pats the young man on the shoulder.

A moment of human contact for Churchill
A fine scene. But sadly more fairy tale than reality

It’s a touching image. But one that’s hard to reconcile with the Churchill whose post-war government ran a systematic campaign of imprisonment, torture and murder against the Mau May in Kenya, against people Churchill thought of as “blackamoors” and “brutish children”. One of them, who never recovered from his treatment, was Hussein Onyango Obama. He was the grandfather of a later President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

The film’s kind touch of anti-racism feels more than a little overstretched. Just a tad too kind on Churchill. However admirable his courage and firmness in other contexts.

Equally, I also feel uncomfortable about the poem itself, beautifully constructed though it is. Certainly, Macaulay captures the Roman attitude towards death in war. They had the saying, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”, “it is sweet and fitting to die for your country”. 

The best answer to that was provided by the giant of English war poets, Wilfred Owen. He describes a First World War gas attack in which one man isn’t quite quick enough getting his gas mask on. He’s poisoned and spends a time dying in agony with his eyes blinded and his lungs eaten away from the inside.

Owen tells us:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

It’s a lot less pretty than the lines about Horatius from the film. It’s chilling. But, though I’ve been fortunate enough never to have been to war myself, I find Owen’s message more convincing and closer to the emotional truth than Macaulay’s.

Still, Owen’s bleak words wouldn’t lend themselves to much of a fairy tale. And the fairy tale makes for a much more pleasing film. 

 

England (self-)defeated

Next to a match lost, to misquote the Duke of Wellington, there’s nothing sadder than a match won. But England didn’t even win. How sad is that?

Wellington was talking about battles. Football, on the other hand, is just a game. Win, lose, who cares? 

Well, a lot of people seem to care. A lot. So let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that England’s disappointment in the final of the 2020 European football cup wasn’t just a game lost to Italy, but a national disaster. Shouldn’t Englishmen be able to rise above all that? After all, many of my compatriots like to think of themselves as the embodiment of Rudyard Kipling’s hymn to manhood, If. The poem tells us that you’ll be a man:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same

If we’re true to ourselves, we English should simply take this result in our stride, congratulate the Italians and move on. That, of course, rather leaves one question hanging: how true are we English to ourselves?

That’s the very thing that made me sad about the game. I didn’t watch it, as I don’t like football and hate the tension of this kind of match. Would I choose root canal treatment in preference? Probably not, but it’d be a close-run thing. 

In the dying minutes of the game, I was out with the dogs for their final walk of the day, a pleasure in the tee-shirt temperatures we’re currently enjoying in my adopted home country of Spain. I knew the match had gone into extra time, with the sides tied at one-all. 

Suddenly, a groan went up from the house I was passing, which I knew was inhabited by an English family. Simultaneously, from several houses around, came the sound of cheering and whistling.

“Ah,” I thought, “sounds like England’s been beaten on penalties.”

It was the overwhelming pleasure at the result that seemed sad. There was such backing for Italy. Or rather, such ill-will towards England. 

That wasn’t limited to Spain, but felt across most of continental Europe.

That reminded me of another match I hadn’t watched, but had admired for the intensity of the fans’ emotion. Fifty-five years earlier, the only other time England had appeared in the final of a major international tournament. That was the 1966 World Cup final.

I was thirteen and living in Italy. I came across Italian neighbours glued to their radios and the commentary on the match. Things could hardly have been more different from last Sunday.

“What’s happening?” I asked one of the neighbours.

“England’s winning, but West Germany is fighting back hard,” he told me.

It was clear that it was the fightback that was making them anxious. To a man, they were backing England.

1966: England wins the World Cup
With widespread support across Europe, in particular in Italy

Well, it was only 21 years since the end of World War 2. A lot of Italians had been forced to take part on what many felt was the wrong side. Italians saw the British as natural allies. They loathed the autocratic and condescending way the Germans treated them. Many had died fighting for people they disliked, against people they felt drawn to. Others had died fighting against the Italian Fascists and German Nazis in the resistance. And they knew that the eventual defeat of the Nazis had only been possible because Britain had battled on until the Soviet Union and the United States could be persuaded to join in.

The memories were very much alive, since a young man at the end of the war would be in middle age at the time of that final.

There was a huge reservoir of goodwill towards Britain. It was by no means only in Italy that neutral fans were backing England. I think most of Europe was pleased to see Germany defeated.

It’s the evaporation of that goodwill that’s sad. And it’s a self-inflicted wound. Worse, and far more serious, than a missed penalty.

Brexit is seen by many on the Continent as a kick in the teeth. A contemptuous, disloyal, arrogant turning of the back on other Europeans by a nation that once showed such courage in defending our common destiny. A display of arrogance and condescension as bad as Hitler’s Germany showed to Mussolini’s Italy. 

It’s also perceived as a deluded action that is bound to backfire, a betrayal of something in Britain itself, with its long reputation for pragmatic good sense.

Britain is viewed with sorrow. Both for its perceived betrayal. And for its apparent loss of capacity for sound judgement.

That all came out on Sunday night. The match was between good Europeans and lousy ones. Inevitably, other Europeans backed the good ones.

I don’t know whether that loss of goodwill is likely to do any concrete, tangible harm to Britain in the future. Maybe, as the Brexiters claim, Britain can live perfectly well isolated from Europe. Even perhaps as the object of its pity and dislike.

Still, I can’t help feeling that goodwill is something to treasure if you can. I can’t see how life will be easier without it. We may regret having lost it.

In the meantime, I’m struck by the irony that it was Italians who displayed such enthusiasm for England back then in 1966, and Italians who denied England victory on Sunday. 

How the wheel of fortune turns…

2021: England denied in the Euros
By Italy, and to widespread joy across Europe

Birthday, deathday

This morning, Facebook reminded me that 11 July is my mother’s birthday. They failed to point out that it’s also the anniversary of her death (three years ago, when she’d just turned 94, thanks for asking). I imagine Facebook doesn’t know she died, as I suspect no one told them – I certainly didn’t. Probably I wouldn’t have got a birthday reminder if they’d known.

As it happens, I hadn’t forgotten. How could I? Especially since the two anniversaries fall on the same date. That’s a symmetry she might have found amusing.

She was born in 1924. England was struggling to recover from the battering it took to emerge on the winning side of the First World War. “A land fit for heroes”, the men coming back from the front had been promised; what they found was a land of unemployment, poverty even hunger: in 1936, when she was 12, she’d have heard the news of the Jarrow Hunger Marches, to ram that point home.

Where did she hear that news? Most likely, on what was still called the wireless: the radio. My mother was to watch the media world change again and again. My parents only gave in to having a TV in the sixties. She found video tapes a great innovation, and when that technology was overtaken, she switched smoothly to DVDs. On the other hand, she never quite made the move to streaming. A third technology? She was feeling her age and couldn’t cope with such a radical new shift.

At one point, my family was living abroad but I used to spend a few days working in Britain most weeks. I’d stay with her some of the time, so I saw more of her then than after we moved back to England. With her, we regularly watched films or series, on TV or video or DVD, and I owe a lot of that side of my education to those visits. A key moment was when she introduced me to, and got me hooked on, The West Wing.

But back to the days of wireless. That was how, when she was fifteen, she heard the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announce in sombre tones:

This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

Just under 21 years since the end of one terrible bloodletting in war with Germany, her country was about to plunge into another.

Less than a year later, with the British Army rescued from the jaws of disaster by the extraordinary flotilla of small boats at Dunkirk, there was a speech from a very different Prime Minister. Churchill declared:

… we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

“We shall never surrender”. Even in Churchill’s Conservative Party, there were leading figures who favoured opening peace negotiations with Hitler. 

“Those words sent a tingle up my spine,” my mother told me. “They stiffened the backbone of everyone in England who heard them.”

“In God’s good time,” Churchill had said, about the US joining the war. When I was young, my mother could still not quite forgive the Americans for taking so long to come to Britain’s aid. But in the end they did, and the Empire, as Churchill said, gave the country far more strength than it could ever have summoned alone.

She might have felt her backbone strengthened by Churchill’s speech, but she joined the other party, ending the war as private secretary to a Labour Member of Parliament. So she witnessed an extraordinary occurrence. Voters, and especially the returning soldiers, decided that they weren’t going to be fooled again as they had been in 1918, with all the talk of a land fit for heroes. They voted Labour.

Labour woman in war time
My mother in, I believe, Hyde Park

My mother was with her colleagues in Labour headquarters watching the results come in, slowly, especially as many of the soldiers’ votes were cast far from home. The atmosphere was tense as they waited for a victory they hadn’t expected but now seemed possible. It was as much a relief as a joy when the result came in that meant that Labour had won a majority.

“The door opened, and this little figure walked across the room. He was quiet and modest as ever, doing nothing to attract attention. But people saw it was Clement Attlee, who’d just been elected as the next Prime Minister. And everyone stood and started applauding. He just looked around and waved and smiled.”

So began the premiership of arguably the best Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Under him, the National Health Service was set up, so at last people could get the healthcare they needed, not the healthcare they could afford.

And the Empire Churchill had spoken of so warmly began to break up. Attlee made sure, in the teeth of dogged resistance from the Conservatives, in particular Churchill, that India won independence from Britain. After it had, the other colonies began to follow, until by the sixties only a small residue of that sad and oppressive institution, the British Empire, still remained.

In Capri in 1949
She was on a holiday with her future husband,
my future father

By then, my mother was living abroad herself. She watched from afar as Britain, an imperial power no more, struggled to find itself a role. Without much success. Just as it struggled with its declining industrial base, its rising unemployment, its weak international trade.

She was delighted when the country joined what was then the European Economic Community, later the European Union. At last, it seemed Britain had found a niche for itself, in another international body, but one that unlike the Empire was freely constituted by willing participants. 

You can imagine how sad she was to see the country decide to leave it in 2016. 

By then she was 92, and she was living back in England, as were we. She was lively and alert right up to the day she lost consciousness in hospital. Just before she was admitted, she and I went for the last of our regular lunch outings in Oxford where she lived. We bemoaned the behaviour of the Theresa May government, and the petty-mindedness of Brexit England, with its fear of anything unknown, and especially of foreigners.

I didn’t tell her at the time, but I was already keen to get away from all that myself. I couldn’t leave while she was alive and needing a little care, or at least the assurance that someone who cared wasn’t far away. But then, in 2018, she slid away quietly from her coma, on her 94th birthday. 

That freed me twice over. We could go and, with the inheritance she left, we could afford to go. It’s sad that she had to die for that to happen, but I suspect she might have taken some satisfaction from making it possible.

There’s plenty wrong with Spain. There’s a hard right here as unpleasant as Boris Johnson. There is, however, also a generosity towards others which I once felt characterised England too. It’s still there in England, of course, but sadly swamped by the mean-spiritedness that runs the show today.

That all means I live now in a kinder country where I feel strangely at home, foreign though it may be. Something for which I thank my mother repeatedly. 

With no need for a reminder from Facebook.

Do a right and a wrong make a right or a wrong?

It can happen to anyone: thinking you’re in one place when you’re in another. 

Yesterday, I walked into a car park ready to drive home, walking purposefully and confidently towards the spot where I’d left the car, only to discover that there was no sign of it, indeed no sign of the spot I remembered, and no sign of the payment machine being even moderately interested in the ticket I presented it with.

“Ah, it’s the car park next door,” the friendly attendant told me, and to demonstrate that he was kind as well as friendly, he took me back up to the street level to show me how to get to the right place.

Now, I’ll admit that Christopher Columbus’s error was more serious than mine. Landing in the Bahamas and thinking you’re in India is a pretty serious navigational inaccuracy. Nearly 15,000 km. Still, in a sense his mistake was essentially like mine. After all, I couldn’t imagine that there’d be two car parks, each with its own entrance, in the same street, just as he had no reason to assume that anyone would have been so careless as to put another continent on his way to Asia.

Poor guy. He was trying to get there because Europe, for ages terribly backward compared to the great Empires in the Far East, India and China, nonetheless had a relatively wealthy elite – much like today – and it liked a bit of luxury to improve its lifestyle and mark its superiority over mere mortals – a lot like today. 

One of the things that your European fatcat found essential for the kind of life to which he felt entitled was a range of spices for his food. The spice of life. And spices had to come from the Far East.

For centuries, that hadn’t really been a problem. They came overland and through that huge commercial centre, Constantinople, or Istanbul as it’s called these days. That took a long time, but it didn’t matter: as long as the supplies came in regularly, it didn’t matter how long they’d been on the road.

But in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks. West Europeans decided it would be good to find a different route to the far East, and an independent source of those spices. In 1492, as the rhyme has it, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That’s 39 years later, but communications weren’t good and the logistics weren’t easy.

So off he went and turned up at the wrong place.

Six years later, the Portuguese Vasco da Gama decided to have a go too. He was a nasty piece of work, doing things like capturing ships, cutting off everyone’s hands, noses and ears and sending them to the Emperor of India, to make the point that he wasn’t to be trifled with. 

He went the other way around from Columbus, down the African coast and into the Indian Ocean, and making for India from there.

Curiously, while it was Vasco da Gama’s trip that opened the new source of spices for Europe, Columbus’s exercise in getting globally lost proved vital to its success.

You see, those Asian Empires, India and China, and the various Spice Islands and other exciting places around there – today’s Indonesia, Malaysia and so on – were wealthy. The whole of Western Europe had a GDP in 1500 that has been estimated at about three-quarters of India’s, although its population was only 10% less. 

More to the point, Western Europe had little to offer at the time, and certainly nothing that India wanted to buy. Trade, therefore, was horribly one-sided. Europe had to pay in gold and silver – bullion – for all the spices and, indeed, the superb textiles India produced.

This had been going on for ages. Right back in the days of the early Roman Empire, the historian Pliny the Elder complained that Rome’s bullion was being drained away to India to buy textiles. Rome was running itself ragged financially, he complained, to satisfy the fashion desires of its (wealthy) women.

Nothing had changed by 1500. Europe would need bullion to pay for what it was buying in India. And that’s where Columbus came in. Because, though he hadn’t found India, he had found a way to pay India for what Europe wanted. Spain and Portugal would spend the next couple of centuries draining the Americas of bullion. Historians have calculated that a third of the silver mined in America over that period went to pay India for the trade there.

So Columbus got it wrong, where Vasco da Gama got it right, but then what Columbus got wrong provided a way to put right the thing that Vasco da Gama had forgotten about, and might have gone hopelessly wrong had Columbus not been able to put it right.

Got that?

Of course, that’s not quite the end of the story. Because draining the Americas of their bullion wasn’t a gentle process. A lot of people were enslaved to dig the metals out of the ground. A lot of people died to ensure European control over the product of their forced labour.

Robert Clive accepting the right to collect taxes
in Bengal and Bihar on behalf of the East India Company
The real event was much less grand

And what about the other end? When a British corporation, the East India Company, took control of most of the subcontinent, that was the end of the splendid independent wealth of the country. The booming textile industry that had served the Romans in Pliny’s day came under the control of the British, who learned from India how to manufacture cotton cloths alongside the more traditional wool that had been its stock in trade for centuries. Within a few decades, 50% of the textiles being sold in India were British-made.

Besides, the British had control of taxation. So, like the Spanish in Latin America, they drained India of bullion. Smart trick, right? They needed bullion to pay for what they took from India. So they taxed the Indians to get the bullion to pay them.

Within ten years of establishing British control in Bengal, a famine there killed between 1.2 million and 10 million people.

If in 1500, India had a GDP one-third higher than Western Europe, today Western Europe’s is nearly two and a half times higher than India’s.

So in the end it’s hard not to think that actually what Columbus and Vasco da Gama did wasn’t one of them going wrong, the other going right, and the first then putting right what the second had wrong.

Actually, what they opened the door to, was one of the great abuses of history. They laid the groundwork for reducing huge numbers of people across America, as well as India, then one of the world’s great economies, to misery.

Proof that a right and a wrong, in this case, certainly didn’t make a right.

Novel crimes, or serial criminals

If you enjoy reading crime novels, or watching thriller series, as much as I do, you must have been struck by a deeply suspicious pattern.

Wherever the super sleuth goes, there murders occur. Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s favourite detective, has only to show up somewhere, even for a holiday in Egypt or on a train travelling across Europe, for someone to suffer a grisly, violent death. Of course, the detective then solves the whole mystery with extraordinary insight and convinces everyone, with apparently overwhelming evidence, that it’s all the work of someone other than himself.

Poirot: crime sticks to him like unpleasant matter to a shoe sole

But surely it’s occurred to us that there’s a much simpler and obvious explanation, isn’t there? I mean, what is the single common thread linking all of Poirot’s cases together? All those crimes have different supposed perpetrators, but there’s one person who’s always present at all of them. And who’s that but Poirot himself?

Lock him up and the homicide rate would drop like a stone. Though that would mean there’d be fewer novels and series for us to enjoy. To say nothing of the reduced royalties for the writers.

It isn’t just the private detectives who worry me in crime stories. The police are no better. I mean, these guys are trained. They work to policies and protocols. So how come they ignore them so often?

A cop is standing outside a dark warehouse, at night, in a bleak and deserted district. You know what’s going to happen, right? Especially if the cop’s a woman, to get us feeling particularly stressed because we see her as somehow more vulnerable, though a cosh, to say nothing of a bullet, is just as damaging to a man as a woman.

Yup. She’s going to go in. Alone. And wander around in the dark with only a rather feeble torch to guide her. At some point, either she’s going to stand in a wide-open area with nothing protecting her back, so an assailant can take her by surprise from behind, or at some point we’re going to hear the clatter of booted feet running along a wrought-iron catwalk, and like a moron she’s going to go after the noise rather than sitting tight until backup shows up. Which surely her training would have dinned into her.

In fact, you only have to hear the words, “shouldn’t we wait for backup?” to know that she (or he) certainly isn’t going to. “I’m going in,” they say, or they go in anyway, jaw set, saying nothing at all.

Alone in a sinister setting at night?
Why wouldn’t she go in alone?

It’s just as bad with innocent people who get caught up in a terrible homicide. Like in the novel I’m reading right now. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say which it is, only that it’s by one of the world’s great novelists.

There are certain set phrases. Practically cliches. Conventional statements that never mean what they seem to mean.

For instance, “we ought to phone the police”. 

My thought is always, “yep. Good plan. You’ve just stumbled across a dead body that might incriminate you. Tell the police right now before things get a lot worse.” 

But do they ever? Do they heck. Have you ever seen a series or read a book in which people come across a dead body in their house, their office, their car, and actually do phone the police?

Related to that one is the claim, “we have no choice”. No choice? Of course there’s a choice. You really could phone the police, you morons, before converting yourself into accomplices after the fact.

But, I suppose, the novelist – even some pretty good novelists – see no fun at all in that. So when someone suggests, “we need to get rid of the evidence”, don’t you just know that someone’s going to sigh and say “yes, well, I guess we have no choice”.  So they’re going to do have a go, aren’t they? 

You know, though, that it doesn’t matter how hard they try. A deep lake soon to freeze over in midwinter. A landfill site under thousands of tons of refuse. A mine deep in the mountains. It doesn’t matter, the cops will find the body.

Ah, well. I suppose the crime genre has its conventions, like all the others. Those narrative devices, used and re-used until they’re as threadbare as ancient traditions, are just their stock in trade.

What’s more, though I laugh at them, they clearly don’t bother me too much. After all, I keep reading and watching. And being just as entertained as ever.

Still, there’s crime and crime. And trying to get the reader or the audience to swallow this kind of implausibility is a bit of a fraud and a crime itself, isn’t it? Novel crime and serial crime, I’d be inclined to say.

2021 and memories of 2008

It was always a mystery why our son Michael chose to live in Madrid. 

As a family, we had no contact with the city and, indeed, the only part of Spain he knew was Barcelona, where we’d sent him to stay with a friend of ours for a week or two when he was nearly at the end of his school years. But Madrid? Neither he nor even we had ever been there. 

A couple of years after he’d moved to Spain’s capital, his brother Nicky was approaching the end of his degree.

“What are your plans for the autumn?” Michael asked him.

“I don’t really have any,” Nicky replied.

“You do now. You’re going to get yourself qualified as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, I’ll get you a job in the school where I’m teaching, and we can get a flat together in September.”

That was all some fifteen years ago. Both still live in or near the city. And we, of course, had to get to know it quickly and thoroughly. Why, these days I can practically find my way across it. Another few visits and I shall be out of what Michael tells me is called the “archipelago syndrome”: I know the area around various Madrid metro stations pretty well, but still have a way to go to connect them all up in my mind – islands of acquaintance for the moment, separated by seas, though shrinking seas, of ignorance.

It was a joy getting to know Madrid. The Casa de Campo, for instance, once the king’s private backyard, behind the palace, now a public park nearly big enough to be regarded as a full forest in its own right. We got to know the Corte Inglés, Spain’s upmarket department store – it would be beneath Boris Johnson’s contempt, of course, since he despises its English equivalent John Lewis, even though most people view shopping there as a luxury. 

The Casa de Campo as I saw it from the cable car in 2011
Once the King's private backyard, now fortunately a public park

At first I believed the name meant the ‘English court’, but it turns out to be the ‘English cut’. That’s all to do with tailoring, from a time when English suits were the envy of gentlemen everywhere. That’s an important distinction to make: the English cut doesn’t, in this case, refer to a tool of government so heavily used by successive Tory governments, with their constant reductions in public services, impoverishing the nation, and above all huge numbers of individual people.

We also saw Picasso’s Guernica beautifully displayed with a selection of related artwork and documentation around it to support the central message of the piece. 

We ate Senegalese food on lively restaurant terraces, or Spanish breakfasts in a hidden gem of a café in the writers’ quarter, and drank wine everywhere.

Nothing, though, gave us as much pleasure as getting to know the Madrileños themselves. And no moment was more powerful in that learning process than the evening of 22 June 2008. A strange and dramatic evening, indeed.

Danielle and I were struck by the silence of the streets. They’re never quiet in Madrid, but on this occasion, they were practically deserted. Only when we penetrated inside a café did we see people: the place was heaving and getting served proved difficult. That’s not because it was too crowded, but because the waitress found it hard to drag her attention away, even for a moment, from the TV screens scattered around the place, and which were equally capturing the full attention of all the other customers.

In faraway Vienna, a football game was taking place. An international. Between two closely balanced sides, producing a nail-biting match. After ninety minutes, at full time, neither side had been able to score. The teams moved into extra time. But that further half hour produced no goals either.

So the match moved to that terrible and agonising phase of the penalty shootout, to determine a winner.

We had left the café by then and were wandering the still deserted streets. We could hear the groans and cheers from the bar entrances or open windows as each side in turn kicked and, generally, scored or occasionally missed. 

Finally, the tension grew almost palpable. We’d reached the point where one of the sides, though we didn’t yet know which, only needed to score once more to win the match. There was a terrible ominous hush in the air. And then – a roar, a veritable explosion of joy, as the doors opened, the bars emptied, the streets filled and the noise grew deafening.

Spain had knocked Italy out in the quarter finals of the European Championship.

It went on to win the whole 2008 tournament. Indeed it won the following World Cup in 2010 and then the European championship again in 2012, the first side ever to win the championship twice in succession. But those later triumphs barely mattered back then.

Because, while Spaniards explained to me that the great rivals were the country next door, France, second only to the French was the country just beyond, Itlay, a relatively short hop across the Mediterranean. To beat Italy was triumph enough, and to do it with such suspense, in a penalty shootout, was extraordinarily satisfying.

Spanish crowds celebrating the win over Italy in 2008

We weren’t staying in Madrid on that occasion and had to drive back to our hotel. That proved difficult. It took us an hour just to get out of the city, the streets were so full of celebrating crowds. But it didn’t matter. I’ve never known a crowd so cheerful, so full of good spirits, so well-disposed to everyone. There was plenty of drink going around, but not sign of the vile alcohol-fuelled aggressiveness I’ve often seen in England. The mood was celebratory, and open to anyone to join in.

That’s when I realised the boys had chosen their country well. The experience contributed to my own readiness to move to it myself when Danielle proposed it eleven years later. We settled in Spain, though in Valencia rather than Madrid – well, the sea, the mountains, and the more affordable house prices were all factors – and so far, we certainly haven’t regretted it. Especially as we’ve found the Spaniards we’ve met around here as cheerful and well-disposed as those who took over the streets on that night in June 2008.

Why am I reminiscing like this now? Why, because Spain and Italy are due to meet again in a European Championship. One round further on, this time, in the semi-finals rather than the quarter-finals.

I don’t know how the match will end. But I suspect it will be fun to see, again, how the people around us react when it’s over.

Especially if Spain wins. 

Chivalry in the time of Covid

Who said the age of chivalry was gone?

Well, it was Edmund Burke, actually, in his 1790 booklet Reflections on the Revolution in France. He got right up the nose of the leading feminist of his time, as it happens one of the great pioneers of feminism of all time, Mary Wollstonecraft. She found his whole nostalgic and, above all, male-centred tone hard to bear.

Still, there’s a side to chivalry that needn’t be that tiresome. The courtesy. The thoughtfulness towards others. I’m not sure that kindness is traditionally associated with chivalry, but you could mix it in and it wouldn’t do any harm.

Nothing particularly macho, or even masculine, about that. 

So it was good to discover that the most recent example of chivalry I came across, this very afternoon, was provided by a woman, rather than a man. The kindness was certainly well mixed in with it. What’s more, and amusingly, it took place in a Spanish setting.

The spirit lives on in Spain. In women as much as in men

Spain, like most of the EU, had a bad start to the Covid vaccination programme for its citizens. Bad, at least, compared to the UK, where it is indeed the only success to which Boris Johnson, technically the country’s Prime Minister, has any right to lay claim. Not that it will stop him laying claim to anything else he thinks he can get away with. I imagine it won’t be long before he starts to attribute the England football team’s victory over Germany, the first in a major knockout competition in 55 years, at least to Brexit, if not to himself.

In the meantime, Johnson just keeps droning on about the vaccine success. Cato the Censor was tiresome politician in ancient Rome who would finish every speech he made in the Senate with the words “and, by the way, Carthage must be destroyed”. Eventually, perhaps just to get him to shut up, Rome sent an expedition across the Mediterranean which did, indeed, destroy Carthage.

Johnson seems to have adopted a similar strategy. After all, he’s classically trained and has even written a history of Rome. A rather dull and uninformative one but, hey, let’s not ask too much of him.

These days, he seems to answer most questions in the House of Commons with the words, “have you seen how fast the vaccination programme is going?” I suppose it’s just as well, really, but we can’t even destroy a city to get him to put a sock in it. 

Anyway, the countries he stole a march on are all catching up on the UK. Give it a few more weeks and the small advantage he started with will be gone. In Spain, in particular, the vaccination programme’s going great guns.

They’ve started on the 35-39 year-olds now. My sons in Madrid can get their shots. So can my daughter-in-law, Sheena. In fact, she went today.

Now, in Valencia where we live, we were all given appointment times, accurate to within two minutes. As it happened, my wife and I turned up early for both our shots, but it didn’t matter: with such precise timing, they were able to send us through straight away without queues building up.

In Madrid, on the other hand, the culture’s different. When Sheena showed up, the queue was at least 100 people long. It was hot, with the sun beating down, and no shade. But Sheena, brought up as all good UK citizens are, to respect the queue as a fundamental element of our culture, stood there quietly if uncomfortably hoping against hope that our new grandson, in a sling around her neck, wouldn’t wake up and start expressing his dissatisfaction over the temperature.

Which is when the chivalry, in its kindess-as-an-added-bonus presentation, burst on the scene. The woman in front of Sheena turned to her and said, “you shouldn’t stand there with a baby. Go to the front of the queue and, if they send you back, don’t worry, I’ll be keeping your place for you.”

Now it’s a funny thing about the Spanish. They – or perhaps I should say quite a lot of them – drive like maniacs. A driver will overtake me as I draw alongside a motorway exit, se he can cut dangerously across the front of my car to take the exit himself. Presumably because he would regard it as a humiliation to his manhood to slot in behind me and leave the motorway at his leisure and in safety.

But a woman standing in the son with a baby? “Send her to the front of the queue, for God’s sake! What can we be thinking of?”

It’s like the woman who stopped for me when my granddaughter Matilda and I were caught in the rain, and gave us a most welcome lift home. To two complete strangers. As I said when I told that story, an uplifting tale of humanity beyond the call of duty.

In the queue for vaccinations today, when Sheena walked to the front, she was waved straight to the first available station for her shot. She wasn’t alone in being looked after this way –  everyone who had a child with them received the same treatment. In Spain, the age of chivalry certainly isn’t dead, it seems, whatever Burke may have thought.

But, I add quickly to mollify Ms Wollstonecraft, the kind form of chivalry. Which can be practised equally by women and men. Something to be welcomed, surely?