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?