The discovery of teenagers

Some people – doubtless cruel and heartless people – have told me that “teenagers ought to be drowned at birth”. 

Now that seems a little excessive. But I do understand the irritation that lies behind the sentiment. The noise and mess that teenagers make can be deeply irritating, but what can be truly infuriating is their truculence, their refusal to take no for an answer, and their conviction that their way of doing things is (1) startlingly innovative and (2) far better than anything their parents have ever done before.

Still, there’s something comforting about knowing that there’s nothing new about that behaviour. That there have been teenagers for millennia. And that, in all probability, they have always behaved in pretty much the same way.

Just as annoying as the behaviour of teenagers is the behaviour frequently engaged in unthinkingly by adults. For instance, it grates on me whenever people talk about the great European voyages of exploration as ‘discovering’ other lands. Honestly, do they really think that the Chinese didn’t know where China was? Did they need European explorers to show up and tell them? Did they say “so this is China, where I live, is it? Thanks so much for discovering us”?

There’s an even stronger inclination to treat North America as ‘discovered’ land, as the indigenous peoples there sometimes seem to be regarded as having barely existed. No writing, few buildings, not too many artefacts. Compare the District of Columbia today with pre-Colombian civilisation then and it’s perhaps understandable that some people think the land was all but uninhabited in the earlier period.

Understandable but not necessarily forgivable.

All this made it particularly satisfying to find out about the people who really did discover America. They didn’t get there in the Renaissance half a millennium ago, or from Europe. They’re far likely to have reached America from Asia, when there was still a land bridge between the continents, in what is now covered by the bitter waters of the Bering Straits. And it looks like they got there rather more than 23,000 years ago. 

Fossilised footprints in New Mexico

That’s because in a place called White Sands in what is now New Mexico, archaeologists have discovered fossilised footprints in the sands that give the place its name. The prints, at some depth below the surface, are between layers which include seeds that can be carbon-dated, making it possible to get a rough idea of how old the tracks are.

The fact that it’s New Mexico is pretty amazing. The dating says the people who made the prints got there in the middle of the latest ice age. Most of the North American continent was covered in ice, though the area that is now White Sands was pleasant and green with a lake in the middle. There would have been plenty of plants to eat, and lots of megafauna to hunt, such as giant sloths and mammoth.

To get there, though, from the north of what is now Canada where the Bering land bridge was, the people who settled the area must have crossed between two ice sheets, facing some frightening hardships on the way, or else they came by boat, travelling down a long, frozen and inhospitable coast.

Tough guys. And gutsy. Fine explorers in the best of human traditions. 

Curiously, a large proportion of the footprints are of kids or teenagers. One commentator I read on the subject reckoned it might have been like the school gates in our times. The parents were standing around chatting while they waited for the kids to come out. As for the kids themselves, they were racing around all over the place in the equivalent of the school yard, leaving loads of tracks for palaeontologists to discover thousands of years later.

Another explanation was that they were made by teenagers roped in to help with a hunt. They would have been standing around doing very little, or perhaps making a noise, to drive the game towards the real hunters. Standing around doing very little? Making lots of noise and frightening anyone within earshot? Yep, sounds like teenagers to me.

I can imagine the conversations.

“What are you doing here? I thought you were on hunt duty last week.”

“Damn punishment chore.”

“Oh? Did that girl complain like I said she would?”

“Like heck she did. She said the least I could do was take her down to the downstream village next time I went.”

“You still go there? To another tribe’s territory? Aren’t you scared?”

“Scared? Hey, no. They’re great. You should hear what they do with their drums. You think we have musicians? Ours are so ancient-tradition-y. Their guys, why, they’ve developed a whole new idiom for the drums.”

“So what went wrong?”

“We got caught sneaking back. And like an idiot, I did the honourable thing. Let her slip into the bushes and round the back of the village and took the rap myself. What a moron I am…”

“So an extra week’s hunt duty?”

“An extra week? I wish. It’s the whole summer. A real bummer. And, you know what? I bet we get more sloth again. It’s been sloth every week, when it hasn’t been beans, beans and nothing but beans. For months now. Oh, for a bit of mammoth just for once.”

“Maybe we should move to the downstream village. Sounds like they’re more fun than old folks here.”

“Yeah. I bet the food’s better too.”

Teenagers being teenagers. In all ages.

Still. The teenagers’ prints weren’t the part of the story that I liked most. The best bit was the story of the woman’s tracks. I’m not sure how they worked out they were a woman’s but, hey, I’m not a palaeontologist. What was amusing – touching really – about these prints is that every now and then they were accompanied by those of a young child. Presumably a toddler.

It seems she was walking along and carrying the child until she got tired. Then she’d put the child down, to toddle along next to her, presumably holding her hand, until they got tired too and demanded to be picked up again. At which point, there was just one set of footprints, a little deeper from the extra weight, and with more marks of slipping where the ground was wet.

Isn’t it wonderful that what’s really fundamental changes so little with the millennia?

I mean, what parent hasn’t been there?

 

Challenges and the can't-do-can-do mentality

One of the things that attracted me to my wife before we married was that she’s very much an “in at the deep end” kind of person.

I like the boldness. I like the challenge. I like the sense of achievement.

There have been moments that this can-do attitude has faced me with challenges I wasn’t sure I could handle. Starting with the first occasion I met it. Danielle decided it was time to make a skier of me. I could by then just about get down a nursery slope with only a couple of falls.

“Let’s try this slope,” she told me.

“Not too hard?” I asked

“Nothing you can’t cope with.”

The start was great. Skiing down pleasant slopes, perhaps just a tad too steep for me, but with pine trees on either side and the crisp snow under my skis, it didn’t matter. The pleasure was memorable.

Not that I was skiing well or anything. I was skiing fast, but I hadn’t yet worked out that this is the easiest part of the sport. Put your skis parallel with the slope, and you’ll soon find yourself skiing fast. Very soon. The problem arises when you want to stop or even turn. Difficult enough at the best of times if you’re not much of a skier. Impossible if as well as being incompetent, you’re travelling at speed.

The result was that I would keep overtaking the young lad who would soon be my stepson and who knew what he was doing. I’d zap past until the next curve, at which point I’d fall over. I’d pick myself up and drag myself around, as he shot ahead of me, and then, with my skis lined up once more with the slope, set off at speed and sail past him again, until the following curve.

That was fine until we hit the last stage of the course, and I at last understood why it had been classified black, marking it as hard. It ended at an ice face. It clearly wasn’t actually vertical, but to my terrified eye, that’s how it looked.

The mind’s response to trauma has blanked from my memory how I got down it. All I can remember is that it involved using my backside a great deal more than the skis. And eventually I was back at the bottom, on my bottom.

Forty years on, things haven’t changed that much, except that we’re all a lot older. One of the sports we engage in a lot is walking, especially along the many excellent trails in the hills around Valencia where we live. Now, in the high summer we do rather less of that, because of the heat. But we’re about to go out with a group for a three-day hike in a couple of weeks, and it’s clearly time to get back in shape. 

I hadn’t realised how out of shape I was. It’s one thing to go out for walks with the dogs locally, even for a couple of kilometres or three. It’s another to tackle fourteen kilometres up in the mountains.

That’s about as far as we generally go. Long behind me are the days when I used to sail through 25 or 30 miles on Dartmoor, tough terrain in southwest England. Those days were over half a century ago, and today my energy won’t take me much beyond fourteen or fifteen kilometres – not even ten miles.

“I’ve found a walk we should try,” Danielle announced. And off we went. Danielle, our son Michael who’s visiting us and I.

The river Turia at the start of our walk

It turned out to be a seventeen-kilometre walk.

By the end, I was in no doubt of how out of shape I was. I knew just where the flabby muscles were. I knew just which parts of my feet would suffer from a relatively long walk, which was every inch. I knew I needed practice before tackling our planned hike.

We got back to the starting point of our walk in mid-afternoon. That was a village called Bugarra, close enough to “bugger off” for me to think the name was giving me a warning I should have heeded. 

We decided it was time to have a drink, perhaps even a bite, before travelling home.

That turned out to be a wonderful way to wrap up the day. The café owner gave us a telling display of what I think of as a key element in the Spanish psyche. The Americans are justly proud of their can-do approach to life. In my experience, many Spaniards go for a can’t-do-can-do attitude.

“We’re closing,” he told us. “Well, in twenty minutes.”

“That’s fine,” we said, “we just need a drink.”

“Perhaps a sandwich?” asked Michael.

“I’m afraid we have no sandwiches.”

We settled for drinks alone.

“Well,” said the owner, “I could do you a sausage, perhaps.”

“A sausage would be fine,” Michael and I chorused.

“OK,” said the owner, “two sausage sandwiches coming up.”

“Sandwiches?” we asked.

“Or would you prefer them on a plate?”

No, no, we were happy with sandwiches if he could prepare them that way. 

The café owner with can’t-do-can-do attitude

I won’t describe the sandwiches in any detail, for fear of offending any vegetarian who might be reading this piece. Let me just say they were copious and delicious. And they contained several sausages each, of three different types. Plus a little green pepper, as a nod to a healthier kind of diet. A small nod.

We ate and drank quickly, in order to be out of the place before it closed. As we were about to pay and head for the door, the café owner surprised us again.

“A coffee before you go?”

So we had coffee.

The whole thing was a telling demonstration of the Spanish can’t-do-can-do attitude I appreciate so much.

Truly, one of the charms of life out here.

The global poodle

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of poodles. We have two of them at home and they’re a constant source of delight to us. Affectionate, intelligent, obedient and yet mischievous too, whenever they think they can get away with the mischief. They’re excellent company and a wonderful contribution to our quality of life.

A lot of fun. in dogs.
But a country needs less yap and a little more bite

They yap a lot, but that can be quite funny, seeing how excited they can get about the most trivial events – a ring at the doorbell, somebody walking past the back garden with a dog, the cat getting attention they feel should be reserved for them.

They’re affectionate, always looking for company or better still a belly rub. But they’re never so affectionate as when they want something, especially if they think we’re late with their dinner. Then they can be irritatingly insistent, though their attempts at ingratiating themselves can also be quite comic.

All of that has a certain charm, and certainly a lot of humour. At least, in the dog variety of poodle. It’s much less endearing when countries engage in that behaviour. Especially the country of my roots. And, sadly, it seems that country is only too inclined to be a poodle.

It was disappointing when Tony Blair, a Prime Minister for whom I had great hopes, many of which he fulfilled, rather blotted his copybook by deciding that it mattered so much to Britain to gratify the US that he would follow Dubya, the second-worst president of all time (we hadn’t had Trump yet), into war in Iraq and Afghanistan. A war based on false premisses, and which achieved nothing for the west, only contributing to further undermining our credibility by involving us in several more defeats and generating a lot more terrorist activity against us.

It makes me nostalgic for Harold Wilson, the last Prime Minister – again from the Labour Party – to have stood up to US pressure. He refused to join the dismal failure that was war in Vietnam, much to the anger of then President Lyndon Johnson. A true bulldog. But since then, it’s been poodles all the way.

But none have been as bad as our current Prime Minister. I’m not quite sure what Boris Johnson meant by his speech about how Kermit the Frog got it wrong when he said it was hard to be green. Is this what passes for sophisticated humour in the Johnson household? It’s particularly wonderful that he included this reference soon after calling on the other nations at the UN to “grow up”.

I used to think that he deliberately acted the buffoon
Now that I've seen his attempt at wit, I realise it was no act

His attempts at wit are about as impressive as the poodles yapping. Meanwhile, his fawning ingratiation is no more convincing, and a lot less amusing, than theirs.

He tried to line Britain up with the US and Australia in the AUKUS military pact in the Pacific. Again, it was Harold Wilson who had the guts to announce over fifty years ago that Britain had no further interest East of Suez. Now Johnson in his “Global Britain” mood is trying to re-establish Britain as a power in the region. He’s even sent an aircraft carrier there. One imagines that both moves are intended to prove that Britain still has a global role to play, though it’s interesting that the deployment of the carrier only provoked the US defence secretary to comment that Britain could perhaps “be more helpful in other parts of the world”.

It looks like we’re having trouble getting the US to take us as grownups. Which, if we present ourselves to the world as people whose idea of sophistication is to quote Kermit the Frog, is perhaps not altogether surprising. 

What makes this all sad, rather than merely laughable, is that being seen as increasingly irrelevant does have serious consequences.

One of the major promises of the pro-Brexit campaign was that the loss of business with the EU would be compensated for by a major new free trade deal with the US. Presumably that’s one of the main reasons for trying to be the US poodle these days. Sadly, it’s not working, with even the irrepressibly over-optimistic Johnson having to admit that no trade deal is coming our way any time soon.

Brexiters also promised us that a trade deal with the EU would be as easy as pie. There’s no sign of anything like that on the horizon in the short term either.  That’s not helped, naturally, by the fact that Johnson is threatening to renege on the Northern Ireland protocol he signed with the EU before Brexit was completed. He seems unable to understand that if you break one deal with people, they’re far less likely to sign another. 

Again, though, the EU doesn’t just see as shifty and untrustworthy. They too see us as poodles. It was interesting that France, in anger over Australia’s breach of its contract to purchase French submarines because of that AUKUS pact, recalled its ambassadors to the US and Australia. It didn’t bother with the UK, seen as the “fifth wheel on the wagon”.

For the avoidance of doubt, the fifth wheel isn’t the one used for steering.

Dodgy, falsely ingratiating, a supplicant at various tables where once Britain had a place at the EU top table, Britain looks sadly diminished on the international stage. Britain is only global as an international laughingstock rather than a world power. A sad sight to behold for those of us who have our roots there.

Was this what Brexiters were hoping for when they voted to “take back control”?

Grandkids: the angelic and the calm

It was a joy to have a visit from our two youngest grandchildren recently.

Not on their own, you understand. They were kind enough to have their parents come along too. Which is just as well, considering that Matilda’s two, and Elliott, at the time, was just four months.

Now, it’s a bit of a crazy game to try to predict the future personality of a four-month old child. But just because a game’s crazy has never been an obstacle to my trying to play it. Elliott, as well as developing a charming smile, had by the time he got to us begun to show a refreshingly unusual character trait in my family: he has all the makings of a strong silent type. He smiles often but complains little. And, generally, when he does complain, all he needs is a little feeding. 

That’s what we look like
The cool, calm, quietly observant types

The rest of the time he seems perfectly content with watching the goings on around him – particularly his sister’s – making the odd comment from time to time, but little else. Since he doesn’t yet speak any known language, I can’t be absolutely sure what he’s saying, but something about how he holds himself tells me those remarks are full of wisdom.

While here, he learned how to roll himself over from front to back, and since he got home, he’s been making huge efforts to do a bit of crawling, so it’s clear that progress is happening at speed. So it won’t be long, I’m sure, before we can test my claim that his future character will calm and self-controlled. I say “test” although, of course, in reality I’m certain he’ll confirm it.

Part of the reason that I see his character that way is, no doubt, the contrast with his sister. There are many adjectives to describe her: bright, self-assured, affectionate, amusing. Quiet wouldn’t, however, appear near the top of the list. Any more than contemplative or self-effacing. When Matilda’s in the room, you know it.

In the village near Madrid where Matilda and Elliott live, in a home they have generously agreed to share with Sheena, our daughter-in-law, and Nicky, our youngest son, there’s a school – a state-school, not fee-charging – that admits children from the age of three months. Elliott will be starting there shortly, to my astonishment. But Matilda has already completed a year at the school, being taught entirely in Spanish. With English at home and Spanish during the day, she has been a little slower at leaping into actual articulate language than some, even though she did master a few words some time ago. One of the first was, in fact, in Spanish: ‘agua’ for when she’s thirsty.

Well, she’s now moved on significantly, and the latest progress, over the school holidays and therefore principally in an English-speaking environment, has been in English. When she wants something to drink but not ‘agua’, she can now make it clear that what she’s after is ‘juice’. There’s also a favourite form of food, ‘cheese’, and to my horror, ‘marmite’.

Naturally, like most kids, her understanding of language is well ahead of her ability to speak it. We took great pleasure in asking a series of questions of her at one point during her stay.

“Where’s Mummy?”

She pointed at Sheena.

“Where’s Daddy?”

She pointed at Nicky.

“Where’s mamama?” That’s what we call my wife, Danielle, because of her origins in the eastern French province of Alsace.

Again, Matilda pointed in the right direction.

“Where’s granddad?”

My turn to have the finger directed towards me.

So I decided to take the test to another level.

“Where’s Matilda?” I asked.

She looked at me for a moment as though I were crazy and then pointed triumphantly at herself. Self-awareness! A breakthrough, in my view.

She coped well with identifying her nose, her eyes, her ears, her feet. In fact, the only one she got wrong was when we asked her to point to her tongue. She pointed at her belly instead. But that’s a perfectly pardonable confusion, isn’t it? ‘Tum’ sounds so similar.

It’s a pleasure going out with her. In pursuance of her anything-but-strong-silent character, she shows apparently boundless energy in the playground. She runs everywhere, climbs what she can, slides down the slides, bounces up and down on the seesaws (that’s with Granddad’s help), and generally has a fantastic time, wearing me out a lot faster than she tires herself.

It’s never too early to set out
on your way to the top

In all this she displays another striking aspect of her character. The one for which I named this post. She has an angelic disposition.

Take tidying things away. We have a shoebox near the front door, made up of little compartments closed by plastic flaps. We were amazed to see her at one point, sitting on the ground next to the shoebox, and carefully loading three pairs of her shoes into an empty compartment she’d found. It was wonderful to see that she’d worked out how the system worked, and as surprising as it was gratifying that she felt it would be a good idea to use it for its intended purpose.

Given the progress she’s made in understanding English, she no longer has any difficulty grasping the instructions we give her. “Don’t go there”, “come over here”, “sit down a moment”, she understands them all and is very good at obeying them. And underlines her angelic disposition by doing that nearly all the time.

The only exceptions? She obeys every instruction we give unless she doesn’t feel like it. At which point she turns entirely impervious to the language that she seemed to master so well only seconds before.

A live wire. A delight to spend time with. Though it will be a wonderful complement to her, and a relief to the rest of us, if Elliott does indeed turn out to be the strong silent type I predict.

Of course, there are times when Matilda really is as angelic as one might wish. I said before that her energy was apparently boundless. It became clear that the boundlessness was indeed an appearance when I got her home from the playground on the last day of the visit she and Elliott paid us.

In her father’s arms, she proved that there were bounds to her energy after all. She showed how truly angelic she could really be. In repose, at least.

Angelic in Nicky's arms
and proving the energy isn’t boundless after all

It's the little things

Often, it’s the details that give our life here in Spain its charm.

The other day, the woman on the till at our local supermarket asked me the standard question, “do you need a bag?”. I gave my standard answer, “no, thanks, I have my own”. But then I realised that I was wrong. My basket was entirely free of any trace of the fine bag I thought I’d put in it, a lined one for refrigerated goods which we’d brought from England, wittily printed with the cheery words “Keep cool and carry”. 

My first thought was that someone had stolen it. Of course. Who likes to think that they’ve stupidly mislaid something they need?

Still, at least I had the decency not to voice that thought. Instead, I simply exclaimed “I seem to have lost my bag”.

At which point, to my amazement, a woman who’d joined the queue behind me, spoke up.

“A blue bag?” 

I nodded.

“You put it in my basket,” she went on, “along with a bag of vegetables you’d weighed. I left them by the weighing machine.”

I dashed back and there, indeed, they were. I don’t know whether a bag can wear an expression, but somehow this one managed to look reproachful. It seemed to be saying “What on earth are you up to, abandoning me here on my own? Honestly. If they hadn’t screwed it on, you’d be leaving your head lying around somewhere one of these days.”

Mislaid and recovered
The blue bag restored to me by a stranger in Spain

At any rate, I was simply pleased to have my bag back. As I was delighted that when I carelessly put my bag down in the wrong place, the one I chose was the basket of a person as helpful as the one who’d carefully set it to one side for me. Not to mention the fortuitous accident of being right in front of that same woman in the queue for the same till. 

Of course, you may feel that was a matter less of chance more of fate or providence. If such is your bent, who am I to question your choice of belief?

The other detail of Spanish life that has me smiling, if perhaps a little wryly, is the strange habit the authorities have of closing roads, usually without the slightest warning. I first became aware of this in Madrid, in the days when I had a job and was therefore important, so could travel around by taxi. Again and again, I’d find myself with a driver cursing the police as he found himself facing a barrier across the road, guarded by burly and well-armed officers you wouldn’t want to tangle with. What was most frustrating was that there’d be no kind of sign beforehand that the road was closed ahead, or any kind of diversion signposting us to an alternative route.

It’s almost as though the people who close the roads are saying “our job is to close it, and we’ve closed it, so stop complaining. We’ve done what we were required to do. You don’t like it? You should have stayed at home or gone somewhere else entirely and you wouldn’t have had this inconvenience.”

The other day, Danielle and I visited the castle in Alicante. You don’t know it? A fine, impressive place. Quite a climb, though, to get to the top. Draining enough to leave us with no desire to do any further climbing later.

Indeed, for the return down the hill, we chose the route that runs along a spur of castle wall down to the city. A pleasant slope, by which I mean one that’s not too steep, and above all, one that runs downhill. Until we came around a corner and found a barrier with a sign saying, “path closed”.

No explanation of why. No warning near the beginning of the path. No helpful suggestion as to alternative routes down which didn’t first involve climbing back to the top again. Out of energy as we were, the idea of heading back up filled us with deep gloom.

Fortunately, we’ve been in Spain long enough not to get too upset about that kind of thing. Someone had kindly moved the barrier back a little way, so stepping around it would represent no inconvenient exertion of any kind. After a brief hesitation, we did just that, and carried on down the path.

Here are the various things we didn’t meet:

• Any sign of work being done on the path

• Any suggestion that any part of it was unsafe in any way

• Anything else that might have justified closing the path in the first place.

Down we went, to the barrier that had been thoughtfully erected at the bottom to stop people starting up it. Again, someone had kindly pushed it aside a little, making it a comfortable and easy to step around.

That’s something I enjoy about Spain. The country can do immensely irritating things, like closing roads or paths. But there is a fund of good sense in the people that says, “if there’s no logic to a restriction and we can get away with ignoring it, why, we ignore it”.

Fill up my glass of Ribera del Duero. I’ll drink to that.

Centenary searches

September the 15th is a special day for me. This year, it was my father’s 100th birthday. Though perhaps I should say the centenary of his birth since, sadly, he didn’t make it past 61. 

I keep thinking about the gaps in my knowledge of his past. You know how it is, while people are alive there’s always plenty of time to ask the necessary questions, and then they aren’t anymore, and you haven’t.

My father in uniform:
as a Belgian boy scout in 1936

I know that in May 1940, the family was living in the Belgian capital, Brussels, where he’d spent his childhood. By then, there had been eight months of ‘phony war’, during which France and Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany, but fighting had been local and limited. Then on the 10th of that month, a Friday, Germany changed up a gear, giving the allies a taste of the real thing, no phony fakery.

Its troops moved over the borders of Belgium and Holland. That was a smart trap, into which France and Britain promptly fell. They moved forces to confront that move, and missed Nazi preparations for the real thrust further south, aimed at France itself. The French commanders refused even to believe their airmen when they reported huge traffic jams of German tanks and other vehicles ready to come straight at them.

Still, from the point of view of my father’s family it didn’t make much difference that the northerly attack was a diversion. When German tanks bore down on their home in Brussels, it must have felt just as serious as if it was the main offensive.

My father was the youngest of five siblings. He was still eighteen when the Germans came knocking. I don’t know whether he was still at school, but I do know he and his mother were alone in the Brussels house. I suppose the two brothers and two sisters had already left home to pursue their own interests. As for my paternal grandfather, he’d chosen to travel to England for what must be right up there with the least fortunately timed golfing weekends ever.

Military traffic meant there was no way for civilians like him to get back to Belgium.

Brussels fell to the German forces just a week after the start of their assault. That was 17 May, the Friday following the initial invasion. My father and his mother were on the run by then. They caught the last train out of Brussels. He reckoned that made them lucky, as the previous one was attacked by a German fighter that inflicted a lot of casualties.

He used to talk of an attaché in the British Embassy in Brussels who’d always amused people by announcing he was a spy. My father saw him again, on the dockside at Calais, in uniform with the green band of Military Intelligence around his cap. So, it turned out, his claims hadn’t been a joke at all.

In a conversation about all these events, my mother assured me that he hadn’t travelled to England from Calais but from Bordeaux. That makes sense. We’re now into late May 1940, and with the Germans rapidly moving across France, the French army collapsing and the British in full retreat, I imagine that the route was still reserved for military traffic. My father could no more travel to England that way than his father could travel back in the opposite direction. 

My father and his mother escaped across France to the southwest. In Bordeaux, they were met by British ships that took them home. I can entirely understand my father’s relief after days on the run for their lives, at seeing the Royal Navy warships lined up when they arrived in Portsmouth. At last, he had the feeling that Britain wasn’t entirely without resources to defend itself.

The French government surrendered in June 1940, ending the Battle of France. As Churchill pointed out, that only meant that the Battle of Britain was about to begin. Germany would certainly count on air superiority, one of the major elements of its victory in France, so my father decided to join the Royal Air Force.

Technically that meant joining the Voluntary Reserve of the Air Force. He wasn’t planning on following a military career. By enlisting in the ‘RAFVR’ he was joining up for the period of the war, with the aim of being discharged once it was over. 

It seems that, despite the urgency of the times, it could take months for a volunteer to be called in. That meant that my father, having found a flat in London’s Earl’s Court, had a front row seat to the Battle of Britain as it was fought out over the capital. That was raging as he turned 19 on 15 September 1940.

Making the capital the battleground hadn’t, originally, been the Germans’ plan. They started off bombing airfields in southeast England, to prevent British planes attacking a German force crossing the Channel. Had they stuck to the plan, things might have gone very hard for the British, since airfields were being put out of action more quickly than they could be repaired. 

Unfortunately for Germany, and just as unfortunately for the civilian population of London (and Berlin as it happens), but fortunately for Britain’s prospects, a unit of German planes bombed the outskirts of London by mistake. Churchill decided to hit back, launching a bombing attack on Berlin. Hitler, in his fury, switched the German campaign against the British capital. And my father got a ringside seat to the battle that followed.

He told me about watching a British fighter chasing a lone German bomber across the city. The pursuit ended with a terrible crash and a column of smoke, and he said to himself, “I don’t think that’s the bomber”. Next day, near Victoria Station, he saw the wreckage of the fighter spread across the front of an apartment block.

On another occasion, he had a fine view of what he believed was the same German bomber return on three days in succession to bomb Battersea Power Station, on the south bank of the Thames. Each time the bombs fell closer and closer to the power station, causing huge damage to the civilian housing in their path, but without ever quite reaching the target itself.

This nineteen-year-old watched the London Blitz play out while the RAF took its time calling him up. According to the War Office’s records, he was formally recruited into the RAF some time “after November 1940”. At least six months had passed since he and his mother had fled Brussels, but now it was time to get serious and into the war himself, as a participant, not a spectator.

My father, enlisted some time after November 1940

A subject I’ll come back to in a while. Because I’m beginning to get a picture of how things went, though it remains a bit fragmentary. If only I’d asked more questions while I still had the time…

My father in uniform again
With his parents during World War 2

Is it 700 years already?

I managed to turn my first attempt at getting a university degree into quite an experience. Rewarding, except in the sense of actually obtaining the qualification. Ostensibly, I was studying Maths and Physics, but convinced myself that it was irrelevant, since the working class would rise in socialist revolution long before I reached finals.

It wasn’t a time without achievements. I managed to get myself elected president of the student union, the first and, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover, the only left-winger to hold that position in King’s College London, a college famously right wing in its very being.

As well as politics I also enjoyed an active leisure life. You know what they say, subvert hard, play hard. It’s probably best to draw a veil over the details of my pleasures, but you can probably guess what a young man gets up to, and little of it was salubrious.

Anyway, as you probably know, the revolution didn’t happen before my final exams. So I found myself facing the baleful (if metaphorical) glare of the examiner without having adequately prepared for the ordeal. To tell the truth, my preparations weren’t so much inadequate as, frankly, non-existent.

Surprisingly, I got on well with the college principal. He, who had been the youngest brigadier in the British Army in World War 2, was no left winger. He told me that he enjoyed our chats, because he knew that either of us would gladly sign the death certificate of the other if the circumstances arose. Would I really have signed the warrant, though? I think I liked him too much. He probably would have, on the other hand: he’d had the training.

In response to the results of my exams, he told me:

“Well, David, you did well to fail the degree altogether. Better to do that and be thought an idiot than get a lousy result and confirm it beyond doubt.”

Still, I wasn’t happy about things. I really rather wanted to be a graduate. An appropriate response might well have been “You should have thought of that earlier, while there was still time to do something about it”, but by then that ship had well and truly sailed. There was only one solution: I had to sign up for another degree course. And this time I had to qualify.

On the other hand, I was tired being a financial drag on my parents. As were they. I needed a job. That ruled out a full-time course. Fortunately, London’s Birkbeck College offered degrees by evening classes. I applied there.

My mother had always told me that I should never have gone for the sciences, so I decided to go for a French degree this time. That, however, meant I needed a subsidiary subject. I chose Italian.

I was called for an interview in the Italian department. As I was about to enter the office where it was to take place, I heard the Professor exclaiming “hold on! This chap doesn’t even have Italian A-level.” 

It was true. Because I’d decided to go for sciences but kept my options open a bit, I’d taken an A-level (Advanced level, school leaving exam) in French, but nothing else in the humanities.

“I lived there for a time,” I told them.

They nodded but took the subject no further. I decided to wait for an opportunity to add a little more to my statement later. It came eventually.

“So how long did you live in Italy?” asked the Professor.

“Thirteen years,” I replied.

There was a stunned silence for a moment until we all said simultaneously:

“The first thirteen years.”

So I got onto the course.

That led to some new challenges. One of them a challenge that was new because it was so old. I learned with dread that my Italian reading would include Dante. 

He’s one of those characters who are so famous they can be referred to just by their forename, like Rembrandt, Napoleon or Madonna.

The present British Prime Minister would like to pull off the same trick, but there’s no place in such rarefied company for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Dante with his guide in Purgatory, 
the Roman poet Virgil, as imagined by Gustave Doré

Dante was born in Florence in the thirteenth century. He’s best known for an extraordinary poem which remains the great classic of Italian literature. It includes a full book describing his pilgrimage through each of the realms of the Afterworld, Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. 

We were going to study Purgatory.

I bought a copy and opened it with trepidation. Was I going to be able to get into this at all? Wouldn’t it be just too heavy?

Then I read the first few lines. It starts with the image of a sailing boat scudding across water. Dante’s mind is lifting its sails to run across better waters and leave the cruel sea of Hell behind it. He will now sing of that second realm, where the human soul purges itself and makes itself worthy of rising to heaven. 

Instead of the dull winter street scene in London, my mind’s eye filled with Dante’s painting. A perfectly flat sea, where a soundless breeze is filling the sail of a boat travelling quickly but calmly from dark behind it with the brightness of a sunrise alongside it. It’s the scene I picture every time I think of the opening of Purgatory, as strangely I do from time to time. Not many writers have written so clearly and indelibly in my mind.

I was hooked. Our lecturer claimed magnificently that he’s one of three ‘altissimi poeti’, highest of poets, in Western Culture (the other two being the Roman poet Ovid and Shakespeare). It’s an honour as well as a pleasure to have dipped a little into his astonishing work, hard though it was to study.

It amazes me that today, 14 September, is the seven hundredth anniversary of his death. He seems strangely alive still. His voice echoes on.

This evening, I’ll raise a glass to his memory, and to the memories he gave me, as I struggled from the cruel sea of failure to the pleasanter waters of success in my second attempt at a degree. 

Because, with Dante’s help, I achieved my wish and did indeed become a graduate.

Cowboys, shysters and the Brits

Isn’t the British cowboy builder a delight to behold?

We had one do some work on our house while we were still living in England. His colleagues, or partners in crime as they're known technically, destroyed bits of our furniture they’d promised to protect, they left the place in a ruinous mess, and they even broke new accessories that they were installing.

“Nah, nah,” the cowboy-in-chief – I’ll call him Terry – assured us, “my dad was doing the work and he’s been a builder for forty years. He’d never break a part like that.”

Yeah, but it wasn’t broken when he started work on it, we’d not been near the place, and it was broken when he finished. Hard to think of any other explanation of how the damage was done.

“I know where your sons live,” Terry snarled at me, “you want to watch it. Also tell them to keep looking over their shoulders.”

That took my breath away. I’d heard that kind of line in TV series before but never in real life. I didn’t think he’d make good on his threat, but I was still gobsmacked that he’d even spat it out at me.

After the cowboy builders have been through

Ah, yes, the cowboy builder. Most Brits laugh at him but loathe him. 

Or do they? 

The truth is that an awful lot of Brits seem to encourage just that kind of behaviour.

Imagine this (fictitious) scenario. Harry’s had some work done by Terry (it may be a different Terry). He’s added an extra room and bathroom to a house which Harry’s subdivided and lets out, room by room, for income.

“He told me that in the end it would cost me nothing or next to nothing,” Harry tells his friend Steve in the pub, “because there’s a grant that covers practically the whole cost of the work. And the extra income would be pure bonus and great to have.”

“And did the grant come through?” asks Steve.

“Well, not yet. He did put in a request for it but it doesn’t seem to have happened. And maybe it won’t ever happen, to be honest. Recently he just hasn’t been talking about it anymore.”

“What a shyster!”

“No, no. He’s a great guy. Really reliable and trustworthy.”

“So he did a good job on the building work, at least?”

Harry shakes his head with a wry smile.

“Well, no, actually, not really. There’s some major work to be done still. Including some repairs to the original build.”

“I suppose that’s covered by the guarantee though, right?”

“To be honest, that’s what I thought too, but it’s true that I never got a signed guarantee and there’s nothing that obliges him to cover that kind of work for free. But not to worry – I’ve got some savings and I can pay the extra fee.”

Laughable, right? No one would do that. Except – compare that story with this piece of non-fiction.

During the Brexit referendum campaign Boris Johnson had himself photographed next to the campaign bus on whose side was prominently painted the promise that Brexit would produce an extra £350 million a week for the National Health Service. So that’s the equivalent of the grant Terry promised Harry. And like Terry, Johnson’s stopped talking about it ever since.

Brexit was also going to produce a huge boost to the British economy with brand new trade deals around the world. So that’s like the extra income Terry claimed Harry would earn. And like that income, that still hasn’t materialised. To be honest, it seems highly unlikely that it will ever amount to any significant amount, and certainly not enough to compensate for the income lost due to Brexit.

Brexit and the Covid pandemic on top of ten years of funding cuts have left the NHS gasping for resources. That’s like the extra work that Harry has to carry out. Since the promise of £350 million a week extra thanks to Brexit hasn’t been kept, which is like the guarantee Harry failed to obtain from Terry, the extra funding is going to have to come from new taxes.

The fact that a large number of Brits continue to trust Boris Johnson and, apparently, want to vote for him again, is just like Harry’s continued faith in Terry. Which makes me question whether all Brits really distrust and dislike the cowboy shysters as much as they sometimes claim. After all, they elected one to the highest office in the land, and apparently intend to again, which means they’re telling him “We liked being deceived by you before so much that we want you to do it once more, and don’t worry, we'll reward whatever lies you come up with by giving you your heart’s desire – fame and recognition – all over again.”

Do you think they’re worried that he might know where their kids live?

9/11 twenty years on

It’s been twenty years since Al Qaida launched the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Twenty years in which the response has been for the US, with most of the West behind it, to fight war after war at huge cost in lives (a particularly heavy cost among the civilians of the nations invaded) and wealth (especially for the US).

And what did all that expenditure, all that destruction achieve?

In Iraq, we brought down the government of Saddam Hussein because he possessed weapons of mass destruction, which it turns out he didn’t. After several years of war, what has emerged is a puppet government whose strings are being pulled by Iran, ostensibly our major enemy in the region.

Iraq: soldiers and civilians, who bore the brunt of the destruction

Out of Sunni resistance to the Western forces in Iraq emerged ISIS. It carried out further terrorist attacks around the world, including the Bataclan concert hall atrocity in Paris. It murdered Western hostages, including people bringing aid. It destroyed people it found distasteful, such as the Yazidi community, adding rape of the women and slavery to its arsenal of weapons for the purpose. The West had to engage in huge further military effort to break the movement.

Civil war in Syria: won by the dictator and his allies

In the meantime, the fighting had spilled into Syria, where it merged with the existing civil war. The West got involved for a while but later withdrew, granting victory to the bloodthirsty dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus and his Russian allies. Iran further strengthened its hand there.

France and Britain, with US backing, then went to war in Libya, which has been overrun by civil war and banditry ever since.

Libya: the cheering over Gaddafi's fall didn't last long
(photo by Associated Press)

Finally, and spanning all the other wars, the US fought for the whole twenty-year period in Afghanistan. That effort ended recently in the humiliating and damaging withdrawal of Western forces from the country. That meant that the Taliban, initially driven from government, have now returned to power and are once more imposing the vicious, authoritarian regime which we spent twenty years fighting.

Destruction in Afghanistan:
in this instance, the aftermath of a car bomb

That regime will be taking reprisals against its fellow Afghans, especially any who worked with the Western nations and were left behind to face their fate. Plenty have been left behind, despite a major evacuation effort. For instance, out of 125 embassy guards the British employed there, just one was evacuated. 

Chaotic, bungled, incomplete:
the evacuation of refugees from Afghanistan

Even those Afghans who have been evacuated are, in many cases, finding their welcome in the West cold if not positively hostile.

As for Afghan women, the gains in terms of education and career opportunities have been seriously set back and are likely to be wiped out altogether.

The saddest aspect of the Western collapse in Afghanistan is that US President Joe Biden, who is under severe criticism for it, in reality deserves considerable admiration. The ‘one more push’ school would have had the US continuing the ‘forever war’, already the longest it has ever fought, still further into the future. It takes guts to look reality in the face, recognise failure for what it is, and cut one’s losses despite the certainty of being reviled for doing so.

When we look at this long list of failed efforts, the word that first springs to mind might well be ‘futile’. But that’s probably too weak. It would have been futile if all this military effort had merely failed. But it’s far worse than that. The cause of the West, and certainly the cause of democracy, have been seriously set back. We emerge from this long string of wars looking weak, cowardly and disloyal.

Al Qaida could hardly have wished for a better outcome to its murderous action than to discredit the West in this way.

Back in 2001, many warned our governments that simply to plunge into unthinking action simply because some response was necessary, would only lead to disaster. People like Dubya Bush, slavishly supported by allies such as Tony Blair, plunged anyway. They rushed into war without even pausing to clarify their objectives.

• If we were acting against governments that supported terrorism, why didn’t we attack the nation that spawned Al Qaida, Saudi Arabia? 
• If we were acting against the terrorists themselves, why didn’t we pull out of Afghanistan as soon as we’d disrupted the Al Qaida network there?
• If we were trying to impose democracy on people who’d shown little stomach for it, weren’t we overreaching ourselves, and making an open-ended commitment without an exit strategy (as has proved the case)?

On the twentieth anniversary, my greatest fear is that we are only going to treat is as a moment for remembrance, and not ask the questions that matter.

How did we get into this mess?

How do we make sure we never get into it again?

Without some answers, we're just going to keep playing straight into the terrorists’ hands. As we have through ill-considered action throughout the last twenty years. 

Repeatedly.

Benign bureaucrats, and the others, online services that sometimes work, and murderous entertainments

The weather suddenly broke. With terrible timing. 

Well, the timing was mine, but it was the weather that made it terrible.

Good time for a bike ride (left)
Not so good (right)

We hugely enjoy living in Spain. The best thing about it is how well the people here have received us. Warm-hearted, kind, friendly. Even the bureaucrats tend to be less painful than in most places. With exceptions, of course. Like the bureaucrat who wouldn’t let Danielle in for an appointment that she’d had to make by phone, because the web service was down.

“You haven’t got the email confirming your appointment.”

“No. Because your colleague made it by phone, since the online service had failed. He’s on the phone now and can confirm it for you.”

“We don’t accept telephone confirmations of appointments.”

“But I couldn’t get any other. Your system was down. That’s not my fault.”

“Sure. But it’s not my problem either.”

Generally, our experience has been far better. Like the woman we met in a tax office. She carefully read the confused and confusing correspondence the central office in Madrid had been sending us, sending letters to our old address in the UK from which they had to be forwarded to us, and then blaming us for the delay. There were threats of all sorts of dire consequences, only to be avoided if we paid a large sum or appeared in person at an address in the capital. Which is 350 km away from where we live in Valencia. 

“Yes. I see the problem,” said the civil servant we were with. “I need to make a call or two. Would you please wait here?”

She went to her desk and had a couple of earnest phone conversations. When she returned she gave us a freshly printed new tax demand for a much reduced figure, for the kind of sum we were expecting to pay.

“That’s sorted,” she explained. She even had a smile for us. “just pay that and the matter will be closed. Sorry you’ve had such a bad time.”

They’re mostly friendly and helpful when you get in front of them. So the problem is to get in front of them. A problem not eased by the move to online services.

Online services are usually good but, sadly, not always. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone through a multi-screen process of completing information about myself only to be told, “sorry, your data could not be saved due to a system error”. 

I’ve recently had to register some information about the car. Everything went swimmingly, as I entered my foreign resident’s ID number. I went through a bit of security, and up came a form already partly, and correctly, completed. I filled in the rest and pressed ‘Submit’, thinking “wow, that was easy”. 

I was celebrating too soon.

Another screen appeared asking me to include images of various documents. A utility bill. No problem, I get those online anyway. Scans of my resident’s card. No problem, I’d already saved them on my laptop. The document certifying that I’m registered as a resident of my local council area.

Whoops. Mine was way out of date.

Fortunately, there’s another online service for this document, run by the council in Paterna, the nearby town into which our neighbourhood falls. So I started a second, different online process.

Again, it started smoothly. ID, security, and up came a near completed form. I was a little thrown by a panel labelled ‘Description’. What did they want? Was I supposed to say “it’s paper, A4 in size, black print on white, with the Council’s logo”? I didn’t think so, since I suppose they already knew what their certificates looked like.

So should it be “short, grey, overweight but nonetheless winsome”? I wasn’t convinced of that either, if only because not everyone considers me winsome, however hard I try. 

It was a mandatory field so I had to find something to write. In the end, I just put in a brief explanation of why I needed the form and hoped that would work. Then I pressed ‘Submit’.

We still weren’t quite there. “Click here to sign your document”. I did. An hour glass turned, the system considered things with care, and finally reached a decision.

“The database is unable to verify your signature. We regret the inconvenience.”

I tried several times, always with the same outcome. Was it my signature that didn’t work? Was it the database that was failing? Who knew?

In the end I decided to go and see the council myself. No problem. There’s an online system for appointments too. So I asked for one.

“There are no appointments available for this service,” I was told.

I gave up. I’ll go and see them without an appointment in the morning, I decided. If only to make an appointment.

That’s where the mistiming started. 

It had been hot for weeks. Blue skies with bright sun, which were excellent. Broiling heat, not so much. It was sunny when I started cycling towards the Council offices.

Then the weather decided to change. The heavens opened. The rain flooded down.

Except in the autumn, when they can go on for hours or days, our rainstorms tend to last no more than fifteen minutes. I was fifteen minutes from home. If I headed back, I’d more than likely get there just as the rain stopped.

I decided that I’d find a café where I could wait for a while. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I was in the middle of an industrial estate. But the Spanish don’t like to be too far from a café, even when there are factories and warehouses around for miles. A few minutes more of water cycling and I found a place where I could get a coffee and take a little shelter.

Not shelter from getting wet, of course. That ship had sailed. I was dripping. But at least I could steam a little and start the process of drying.

A few minutes later the rain stopped, and I rode on towards the council offices. I was a little worried about walking into an office in my state of soaked dishevelment. But I needn’t have worried.

The council offices were shut. Not something they’d marked on the website. Not something, what’s more, they’d bothered to put on a notice on the office door. Apparently, I should simply have known that it was a public holiday in Paterna. 

So what was it? The feast day of some obscure saint, Ildefonso perhaps or Hortensia, that no one else has ever heard of but who matters hugely to Paterna? Or something even more wonderful and weird?

Turns out that it was the wonderful and weird.

The great festival in Valencia is called the Fallas. One of the things that marks this festival is people wandering the streets and flinging firecrackers around, with little concern for who else may be nearby. Some of the crackers are like what most of us are used to. Others are, shall we say, of rather higher calibre. The heavy artillery version of ordinary, boring firecrackers.

This creates an atmosphere remarkably evocative of such places as Grozny, in Chechnya, when Chechen rebels were taking sniper shots at Russian tanks, which were firing back with their canon. Not really my kind of party but, hey, who am I to judge the fun of others?

Paterna goes a step further. There people like to throw the firecrackers at each other. In fact, in their version of this feast, the Cordá, the main players wear protective clothing, making them look like bomb disposal experts. Then they throw apparently lethal explosives at each other, with great mirth and, apparently, to general enjoyment. I’ve never been, but I’m told it’s exciting.

Personally, I feel the atmosphere must be rather like a First World War trench under artillery bombardment. That was, I’m sure, exciting. Perhaps, though, not in the way most of us would actively seek.

All the fun of a war zone at the Paterna Cordá
And fewer of the participants die

Fortunately, or perhaps I should say mercifully, the Cordá lasts only a day. But Paterna has to take the following day off. Recovering from the hangovers I suppose, or getting discharged from Emergency. Or they may simply need the time to collect the bodies from the streets.

A Paterna householder’s protection from the Cordá
Wire mesh against the explosives

Sadly, I’d tried to get into a council office the day after the Cordá. They were probably closed while triaging the injuries. I went disconsolately, and squelchily, home. And pondered the consequences of mistiming one’s actions.

There I discovered that it’s no good asking for an appointment in just any one of the three Paterna council offices that offer documentation services. They each offer different services. There’s no way of knowing which office does which services – or at least I’ve found no way – but having tried each of the other two at random, I was eventually able to make an appointment in the one that did the certificate I needed.

A couple of days later, I turned up for may appointment. My tribulations weren’t quite over. It turned out that the office had moved. The kind lady at the old office told me “go straight down the road and then keep going downhill, taking the second on the left”. I went straight down the road and then found myself facing a choice of three streets, all of which ran downhill. I turned up late of the office in an obscure side street no one I asked had ever heard of, but they weren’t bothered about the delay and saw me anyway. The document took about a minute to produce.

When I got home, I went back to the original task I’d set out to do – you may vaguely remember that it was an administrative procedure concerning the car – and tried again, with my nice new certificate scanned and ready to go.

I was dreading being told that my signature had been refused. But no! Everything went through on the nod. The process took about ten minutes.

So between the process for the car and the process of obtaining the certificate, the whole thing had taken say 20 minutes of actual, productive time. In elapsed time, however, it had taken five days. And within that time, including two trips to Paterna and back, I’d spent five or six hours on it.

Computerisation can save a lot of time. When it works. And when it doesn’t, you’ve got to get the timing right.