Stereotypes: they can be right

It’s immensely satisfying when things live entirely up to expectations.

There was a figure in the middle of the twentieth century who was destined to have what I think of as firework fame. For a relatively short time, he enjoyed a great and widespread reputation. But since his death, he’s faded from sight and today few, I imagine, even know his name.

He was the journalist and writer Claud Cockburn. I once read his autobiography, which had a beguiling title based on a novel by another of those writers now fading into obscurity, Robert Graves. The Graves novel was I, Claudius and Cockburn’s autobiography was I, Claud.

He talks at one point of the intense satisfaction of experiences that fulfil expectations. In his case, it was an interview with the larger-than-life mobster Al Capone (a name unlikely to fade from general consciousness anytime soon). When Cockburn was allowed in to interview him, a door to the room was kept ajar and behind it he could just make out the figure of a man carrying a sub-machinegun. 

Perfect, right?

Of course, living up to expectations can also be another way of saying conforming to stereotype. Have you read Daniel Kahneman’s extraordinary book, Thinking, Fast and Slow? It’s a brilliant and surprisingly readable account of human psychology and, above all, of the biases that guide our instinctive thought (that’s the ‘thinking fast’ bit, where careful rational analysis is slow). 

His attitude towards stereotyping is, in his words, neutral. When we lack information, stereotyping can help us make judgements, even if there’s a good chance they might be wrong. The tall, wiry athlete is more likely to be a basketball player than a rower, and until we’re able to get more information, that may be a reasonably good working assumption to make.

On the other hand, to take one of his examples, although someone with a doctorate is more likely to subscribe to the New York Times than someone without a university degree, that doesn’t mean that the person reading the New York Times opposite you in the New York subway is more likely to have a PhD than to be a non-graduate. There are so many more non-graduates than holders of PhDs that it is immensely more likely that the person will not hold a degree.

The failure to take into account how many more non-graduates there are is known as the base rate fallacy. It’s where we fail to consider the numbers of people in the two categories of people, independently of whether they happen to be reading the New York Times at any particular moment. Where one of the groups is hugely larger than the other, it’s simply far more likely that an individual belongs to it, whatever their reading habits.

None of this matters much when we’re talking about basketball players or New York Times readers. It becomes a lot more toxic when we’re applying this kind of stereotyping to, say, blacks, or gays, or women, and trying to decide what they’re likely to do, or may already have done, from the category to which they belong.

Fortunately, my most recent stereotyping experience was much more successful and much less fraught.

I caught sight of a man in a group of people with whom we were having lunch. I turned to Danielle to say, “wow! He could be a French artist from the nineteenth century.”

Stereotypically a 19th-century French painter

Well, I decided that he was unlikely to be from the nineteenth century. He was also not that likely to be French, since we were in Spain with a lot of Spanish people. But an artist?

“Excuse me,” I said to him, “are you by any chance a French painter?”

He laughed.

“No, a Spanish painter.”

I was delighted to have got that close to the truth. A fine illustration of a Kahneman principle. Stereotypes can be innocent. And even accurate.

You just have to learn not to avoid the ones that are wrong and malignant.

Vigil for a submarine plot

Do you know about closed-circle plots for thrillers?

These are detective novels where the crime – usually a murder or murders – occurs within a small, isolated group of people. That means that the perpetrator, generally the murderer, must be someone within that group. Well, within the group of survivors, since the murderer isn’t often – ever? – his or her own victim.

The leading proponent of the genre must be Agatha Christie. The murderer is one of the passengers on the Orient Express, or on the Nile pleasure cruise, or on the island only reachable by boat, or whatever.

I’ve always thought of this genre as a ‘submarine plot’. I’m sure I didn’t invent the term. I think I heard it used in a radio broadcast, or read it in a newspaper. ‘Submarine’ strikes me as a good word, because it sums up neatly the sense of an enclosed, even claustrophobic place, where any threat is magnified ten times over.

My father’s war service was in bombers for the Royal Air Force. That has always struck me as pretty scary. I mean, even when I was a frequent flyer for work, I’d sometimes feel a twinge of apprehension when I boarded a plane. All that weight taking to the air? It’s so unnatural. 

Add the prospect of being shot at while you’re up there, and the whole experience strikes me as frankly terrifying.

But even my father used to say that there was something far worse, something he could never have brought himself to do. That was join the submarine service.

“Locked up in a floating coffin?” he used to say. “Not on your life.”

Suranne Jones as DCI Amy Silva and 
Adam James as Lieutenant Commander Mark Prentice
in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the submarine 

That’s what made the series Vigil such fun to watch (made by the BBC, we saw it on HBO Max). I’m not claiming that it’s outstanding, just that it’s highly satisfying. Even its faults are positives: the ‘submarine plot’ thriller generally has subplots which can be highly predictable (you know, the pair that’s bound to become a couple, for instance), and Vigil sticks firmly to that well-worn but comfortable tradition.

It also sticks to another far more vital convention, that the outcome should not be obvious, and suspense is maintained. What’s more, there should be a good few red herrings along the way and, boy, Vigil provides plenty of them. Above all, though, I liked it because it’s a submarine story mostly set on a submarine. Isn’t that just how things should be? I mean, love stories always involve love, and superhero stories always star superheroes, but this is the first submarine-plot story I’ve come across actually featuring a submarine.

You can imagine the way that setting allows the suspense to ratchet up, along with the sense of claustrophobia, of impending doom, of general threat hanging over everything and everybody. Vigil does that all superbly well.

Suranne Jones being winched aboard the sub
Not the least tense scene

On the other hand, as well as the submarine setting, much of the case investigation takes place on land. While Detective Chief Inspector Amy Silva, played with great skill by Suranne Jones, is on the sub (perilously winched aboard by helicopter, not the least tense of the scenes), she has left her colleague, Detective Sergeant Kirsten Longacre, to pursue leads ashore. She does that well, guided and above all supported by their common boss Detective Superintendent Colin Robertson, played by one of my favourite Scottish actors, Gary Lewis (the Dad in Billy Elliott).

Rose Leslie as DS Kirsten Longacre
leading the enquiry on land

But I was particularly pleased about the actor cast as DS Longacre. She’s Rose Leslie. I liked her character, the wildling Ygritte, in Game of Thrones. I particularly liked the fact that, back in reality, she married one of the show’s stars, and her on-screen love interest, Kit Harington (Jon Snow). After Game of Thrones ended and Leslie had been rather unceremoniously, and in my view unnecessarily, kicked off the show The Good Fight, I was sorry to read an interview in which she expressed her concern that both she and her husband were simultaneously out of work.

It was both a pleasure and a relief to see her playing a reasonably substantial part again, a starring role in a six-part series.

So I had plenty of reasons for enjoying Vigil. And you might find some more, if you give it a try. Not a classic, I admit, but a tense, compelling show and a good way to pass the time on dark winter evenings.

Café Culture

“To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late”, according to the American writer Elin Hilderbrand.

It’s an excellent principle, but like so many, one I aspire to rather than generally attain. Something I know I ought to do rather than something I achieve. A bit like Boris Johnson and telling the truth.

The reality of my life is much more like the wall clock in our kitchen, which sums up rather well the chaos in which I live.

Our kitchen clock sums me up rather well

Still, a while ago, while staying with one of my sons and his family, I decided to do better. They live in the hills outside Madrid. I say ‘hills’ but they’re at a 1000 metres, an altitude which in Scotland would earn the proud title of ‘Munro’ (a ‘mountain’ over 3000 feet high).

One day, I went into Madrid itself to meet my other son Michael and our daughter-out-law Raquel for lunch. 

Spain often ignores the calendar (though the Spanish are less inclined to – more of that later) when it comes to the weather. It may have been a November day but the sun was bright and the temperature appropriate for shirtsleeves rather than jackets.

For once, I went in good and early. That meant I could satisfy a craving I had for a coffee at a terrace table in the Plaza Mayor. That’s a square, as I’ve found in a small number of cities, which creates a magic environment by being perfectly proportioned, and surrounded by stone buildings high enough to enclose the space gently, but not so high as to be claustrophobic.

The Plaza Mayor in Madrid. A lovely place
Sadly, I’m not alone in thinking that

It has to be said that the square owes its attractive qualities to some fairly nasty history. One king decided that he wanted a large square and kicked a bunch of people out of their houses, which were then demolished; his son decided it wasn’t big enough, so he repeated the exercise. The inhabitants were collateral damage to the pursuit of aesthetic excellence, an aesthetic excellence we still enjoy today, but at their cost.

The trouble with such places is that plenty of people appreciate them as much as anyone else, so thousands of visitors are constantly flowing through. That means that the cafés mostly rely on passing trade only. The staff have no incentive to build up a long-term loyal customer base, or therefore to provide a level of service as impressive as the setting.

I sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally a waiter within what a sailor might call hailing distance of my table, so I called out that I was after a coffee. 

“No,” came the reply.

What? I thought. And, indeed, said.

“No coffees now.”

I’d had this experience before in certain Spanish café-restaurants, though only those that target tourists. Come midday, they decide lunchtime is nearly on them, and refuse to serve coffees anymore. It’s odd, since they’ll serve other drinks without a meal. Indeed, though a few tables were set for lunch, most of them weren’t.

I ordered a sparkling water instead, or a “water with gas” as the Spanish rather unappealingly call it (they don’t generally like the stuff.) That allowed me to spend an hour in the inspiring setting, tapping away on my laptop, as I rushed on to completing my book of extracts from the diaries surprisingly kept our cat and our two toy poodles, Paws for Reflection. With some relief, I can announce that the effort was worth it, since I’ve finally managed to publish it on Amazon. And the time in the Plaza Mayor was a reward for my being so timely, just for once.

When Michael showed up to collect me for lunch, I proved just as problematic to attract the waiter’s attention long enough to pay for my water. In the end, I simply walked right up to him, as he was standing in a doorway doing nothing. I asked for the bill. He refused to make eye contact, but after I’d asked twice, he sighed at my rudeness and called into the interior of the café for a colleague to charge me the excessive price of my drink. 

All this reminded me of other notable table waiting experiences I’ve had. 

The best, I think, was in Paris, which is notorious for its rude waiters, though this one wasn’t. The café was a few doors away from the old French national library, where I was ploughing through eighteenth-century books and manuscripts (mostly letters) as part of a PhD study on the thinker and scientist, de Maupertuis. I was alone and lonely. Like most students, I was also broke. Some kindness was what I needed, and the waiter provided it by dropping off on my table the unemptied baskets left by customers when they finished their meals. That added helpfully to my cheese omelette, the only dish on the menu I could afford.

Michael also worked as a waiter, during his summer holidays in Strasbourg, where we lived while he was a student. He developed his own characteristic style. of waiting. When one customer snapped his fingers at Michael, a gesture most waiters loathe, he responded by barking at him (yep, like a dog).

The reaction earned him a great tip. It seems that sometimes facing down arrogance is a great response, appreciated even by the arrogant.

So now back to the excessive respect for the calendar I mentioned before many Spanish display.

Puerta del Sol
Left, in La Cañada; right, in Madrid

The main square in the village of La Cañada, where we live, is called the gate of the sun, Puerta del Sol. It’s tiny, many times smaller than the rather better-known square of that same name in Madrid. But it does contain a lovely little café which makes remarkable ice creams. That’s a major asset for me, ice cream fan that I am.

I have to say that my relationship with the café owner got off to a rocky start, as I knocked a glass bowl full of sugar packets off the counter while I was waiting to pay. The bowl, naturally, smashed into a thousand fragments. He took it well, assuring me that I really didn’t need to keep apologising, though every time he sees me now, he does point out that he’s quickly going to move all glass objects out of my reach. 

I happened to be in our Puerta del Sol the other day and thought I’d like one of his excellent ice creams. Imagine me already looking forward to enjoying some more of Spain’s rightly famed café culture. Now imagine my disappointment when I discovered that November for this café means no more ice cream. Indeed, the tubs in ice cream counter have even been removed and replaced by turron, Spanish nougat, and similar things.

What, no ice cream?

Ice cream? There’ll be none before spring.

Café culture’s wonderful. But even it, sometimes, lets you down. Which, I suppose, is a useful object lesson in the nature of life. 

Who will speak for Britain?

“Speak for England, Arthur!”

It’s one of those iconic moments in the long life of the British House of Commons. It was nearly eight o’clock in the evening, on the second of September, so night was falling outside, with the lights coming on in the Commons chamber. However, a much deeper night was falling across the whole of Europe, indeed most of the world, since the year was 1939 and the day before, Nazi German troops had crossed the border into Poland.

“Peace in our time”: a PM duped by Hitler
or how Neville Chamberlain proved unfit to speak for Britain

The then Prime Minister, the Conservative Neville Chamberlain, had just made a statement which was, above all, ambivalent. Britain, like France, had a treaty in place with the Poles which obliged both countries to go to war in Poland’s defence if it was invaded. Well, the country had undoubtedly been invaded.

Chamberlain was clear that if German troops were not withdrawn, war would follow. But he focused on a last attempt at a peace conference, possibly on an Italian initiative, to resolve the differences between Germany and Poland by peaceful means rather than by force. It sounded horribly as though the British government was trying to find a way of not honouring the Polish treaty.

Cheers had greeted the Prime Minister when he first rose to address the House. Gradually, though, as it became clear that the government was dodging around to find a way duck its commitments, the cheers gave way to jeers, especially loud on the benches occupied by MPs from the Prime Minister’s own Conservative Party (well, there were a hell of a sight more of them: the Tories won 429 out of 615 seats in the most recent general election, of 1935).

The leader of the Labour Party and therefore leader of the Opposition, Clement Attlee, was ill and in hospital. So his deputy rose to reply to the Prime Minister. Arthur Greenwood started by stating he would speak for the Labour Party.

“Speak for England, Arthur!” came the cry, not from the Opposition benches but from the Tory side of the House. 

Most people attribute the words to the veteran Conservative, Leo Amery. Some though think it was Bob Boothby, another Tory MP, and he shouted “Speak for Britain”, which would at least have the merit of including the Welsh and the Scots.

Either way, what matters is that it was clear that evening that few any long believed that the Prime Minister spoke for Britain, or even just for England. His apparent reticence to honour an agreement freely made, to rise to a challenge despite its difficulty, meant that he was standing back from values most Brits regard as fundamental to their image of the country. It meant he was no longer someone who could be trusted to represent or lead the nation.

I like to think it was Amery who shouted out. Because eight months later, on 7 May 1940, he gave what he admitted himself was the best-received speech of his parliamentary career. He attacked Chamberlain pitilessly and ended with the words Oliver Cromwell threw in the faces of the Rump Parliament three centuries before: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” 

The next day, Chamberlain resigned, opening the door to the wartime leadership of Winston Churchill.

It’s curious to think back on those times today. It feels to me as though now too we have a Prime Minister who’s lost all touch with the values that make Britain a place worth cherishing. 

• We know he’s provided a shortcut to the front of a queue for government funds, to a mistress who wanted a commercial hand. 
• We know he introduced shortcuts to Covid-related contracts, in principle to make for more efficient provision of needed supplies, but most contracts went to businesses with contacts with the Conservative Party and not all of them, by any means, represented any gain in efficiency. 
• We know that he bullied and coerced his own MPs to back a measure that would have spared a colleague found guilty of breaching Parliament’s code, and then had to backtrack when it became apparent that the scandal was too big for even him to brazen out
• We know that he’s accepted gifts about which he refuses to be transparent, in at least one case, from a man to whom he has granted a peerage prior to making him a minister
• And we know so many other shameful actions in which he’s taken part

Britain is now a nation described by a former Australian Prime Minister as an ‘old theme park sliding into the Atlantic’. China now refers to it as ‘Little Britain’. This Prime Minister has turned the country into an international laughingstock, and only Brexiters can still claim it’s becoming ‘Global Britain’.

On top of all this, just like Chamberlain, he seems intent on refusing to honour an international agreement into which he entered freely and, indeed, persuaded Parliament to back. He signed the Northern Ireland protocol himself, but it’s clear today that he never had any intention of being bound by the commitments it implied. Or possibly, and this is scarcely less honourable, he never understood them.

Buffoon on a zip wire
or how Boris Johnson proved unfit to speak for Britain

Time to call again on someone to “speak for Britain”. And why not, again, turn to the Labour Party? Because the Tories, mired in sleaze, certainly can’t.

Above all, there’s no way Boris Johnson can.

Toffee Anniversary

Another week with an anniversary. And I don’t mean the solemn, even mournful one, when we remember the Armistice at the end of the First World War. This one, a couple of days later, was much more cheerful.

It marked the end of five years that Toffee has been with us, keeping us perpetually amused and occasionally exasperated.

Toffee coming home, back in 2016

It was all my fault that we got Toffee. Back then in 2016, I’d decided that what we needed to complete our household, which already contained Luci, our black toy poodle, was an apricot one.

Danielle kindly did the searching, and it took a while. There was a severe shortage of apricot toy poodles across the length and breadth of the kingdom (that’s the kingdom we still think of as united, at least for the moment). But then we discovered one, down in Lowestoft.

Lowestoft. Lovely spot,
but we weren’t there for the sights

You don’t know Lowestoft? Nor did I. It’s a little seaport on the Suffolk coast, looking out over the North Sea. I always think of that coastline and its beaches as being wonderful for walks, since when it comes to swimming, you really have to be a special character to think its barely molten ice offers anything remotely like pleasure. Certainly, it’s hard to see how anyone can maintain that illusion after having tried North Sea bathing once. 

In any case, we weren’t there to admire the sights or enjoy the bracing beaches. We were there to collect a puppy. A task that nearly failed before it had started.

The pleasant and cheerful couple who bred the dogs opened their front door to us, welcomed us in, and I went to step inside.

“Watch out!” came a chorus of voices.

I looked down and saw a tiny ball of orange fluff racing towards just the point where I was about to swing my leg. The fluff was clearly entirely unconcerned about the fate descending towards it – she’d have been projected right across the room, no doubt, at the cost of who knows what injury. Fortunately, I was able to interrupt my step just in time, at the cost of nearly sprawling on the floor and, instead of delivering Toffee a terrible blow, was able to start to get to know her by having my hand licked as I tried to stroke her.

Which was clearly what she was after. It wasn’t difficult to read her thoughts: “New people! New people! How exciting, how exciting, I must get to know them, they might stroke me or even better play with me!”

That excitement grew even more intense when she realised we had Luci with us.

“Play with me, play with me!” Toffee was obviously saying, as she leaped up at Luci, trying to lick her face (as she still does to me to this day).

Toffee was delighted to meet Luci
Luci was less enthusiastic

Luci was a lot more reticent. She’s always been, and remains even now, far less relaxed about making new acquaintances. Noisy, fast-moving bundles of concentrated energy worry her more than most. One of the better images of that day is of Luci backing away as far as she can while Toffee, on her hind legs, tries to persuade her that nothing could possibly give her (Luci) more delight than playing with her (Toffee).

We didn’t realise it, but the shape and style of our joint existence was set that day. 

Toffee’s the smallest of our three animals. Misty, the cat, has lost a little weight recently but at one time was close to twice as heavy. Luci too is significantly bigger and stronger. But Toffee makes up in size of character for what she lacks in physical dimensions. I like to think of her as a dog that has no reservations about cultivating her internal rottweiler. We have to keep her out of the kitchen while Misty’s attempting to eat a meal because, unsupervised, she’ll just push him aside and hoover up his food.

To be honest, occasionally she pushes him too far, and then he makes effective use of his extra weight against her.

That’s quite enough, thanks, young Toffee

Luci, because she’s stronger, finds it easier to keep going for relatively long walks. Toffee has to be picked up from time to time. On the other hand, I’m not certain that this reflects greater weakness on her part or quite the opposite: an eerie ability to impose her will combined with a total certainty that she knows what she feels like doing and what she doesn’t, with “walking a lot further” firmly in column 2.

Far enough, thanks.
You want to go further? Then carry me

As I’m trying to type this, she’s scratching my arm to get me to throw a toy across the room for her. She knows I will, as it’s the only way to get a momentary relief from the scratching (she’ll be back with the toy in no time. Yep, here she comes). Of course, deep down I know that I’m only making a rod for my own back, and that by giving in to her scratching, I’m only encouraging her to scratch more. 

“Ah, scratching his arm works,” she’s undoubtedly telling herself, “so I’m just going to keep on working it.”

To this day, of the two poodles, Toffee’s the one who knows what she wants while Luci’s much clearer on what she doesn’t. Toffee loves to meet new people, and even new dogs. Luci prefers to keep out of their way. 

To be truthful, Toffee’s become a little more careful about large dogs, ever since one or two of them, without any ill intent, have stepped on her – playing, perhaps, or just informing her, with attempted gentleness, that they have reached an age where boisterousness such as hers is a little more than they can cope with. Having received that weight a few times, she’s learned to be a little more circumspect.

At least that wasn’t a lesson she had to learn at the tip of my shoe five years ago. For that, I raise my glass in relief. And I raise it once more to the fine times we’ve had together and which, I hope, we’ll continue to enjoy for many years to come.

She found her niche in the household quickly enough

Show time and a time for words

It was an evening of firsts.

The minor one was my first theatre visit in Spain. We used to be keen theatregoers in London years ago, but rather lost the habit after moving abroad. And, certainly, given how slow our progress towards mastery of the language (mastery! I’d settle for mere competence), we haven’t been at all since arriving in Spain.

But the really important first was Matilda’s. It was this granddaughter’s first time in a theatre anywhere. In any language. 

Matilda luxuriating in her theatre seat

Now, since Matilda’s two, you can probably guess that we weren’t there for one of the great classic plays of the Spanish renaissance. No rolling cadences, no rhyming couplets. Which is just as well, since I’d have probably understood even less of it than Matilda. Instead we got an excellent performance, with a wide range of characters even thought there were only two actors. Highly talented actors, both of them, but just two.

It was curious. There was plenty of what I suppose one can think of as entirely transparent marionette play. You could see the actors holding the marionettes and moving their hands or heads around with little rods in their back, but they did the voices and the movements so well, that it was easy to suspend belief and accept that we were really watching the characters represented.

The story conveyed a universal and important message. The central character, played by the woman actor as human not a puppeteer – and she was a woman, not a girl, though again it was easy to believe in her as a girl – had lost the capacity for excitement. She spends the day hunting for excitement in all sorts of places, meeting all sorts of other characters, but never tracking excitement itself down.

On the other hand, at the end of this day of questing, she realises that she’s had a tremendously exciting time. So clearly she’s found plenty of excitement in the process of failing to find excitement. A clever, witty paradox, full of subtle meaning and intelligent reflections on life. An excellent lesson to communicate to young kids – I think Matilda was the youngest – which the show did particularly well for being performed so skilfully. 

Matilda’s attention wasn’t held the whole time. But it kept coming back to the stage. And I think the magic of sitting with an audience in a large, darkened area while everyone focused on the brightly-lit stage – the magic of the theatre, in fact – communicated itself to her. It helped, too, that though the action of the story lasts a day, the performance lasted an hour. Intelligent writing by people who understand the concentration span of young children.

The fascination of the theatre

How much did Matilda understand? Well, it’s long long been known that kids understand language far, far sooner than they can produce it themselves. This is now entirely clear with her in English. She’s so good at doing what we ask her to do, and with alacrity, that we’ve smartened up to the fact that when she doesn’t, it’s not because she hasn’t understood the instruction – I’m sorry, this being Matilda, I should have said request – but that she has chosen not to comply.

I don’t know, by any direct means, how well her Spanish is advancing. Probably a lot better than mine (see above). In term time, on weekdays, she spends six hours at school and, while for part of that time she’s asleep, for most of it she’s active and focused, in an entirely Spanish environment.

That school strikes me as an extraordinary institution. I suppose many in England would be inclined to see it as merely child care. And so it is, in a sense. But it’s childcare provided by qualified teachers, doing intelligent work: the kids work with plants to learn about the environment, they draw, they paint, and of course they work on language. Immersion language teaching. And all for free.

Indeed, some of Matilda’s first words were Spanish. ‘Hola’ is what she says to strangers in the street, generally causing them to dissolve in delight when she does. To this day, and even with her English-speaking family, ‘agua’ is the word for water and what she asks for when she’s thirsty. On the other hand, when she wants a drink with more flavour, the word is ‘juice’.

There was no doubt she was saying ‘more’ when she felt we hadn’t given her enough food, even though the word came across more as ‘mare’ or even, a little, as ‘may’. But just a couple of days ago, a clear, definitive ‘more’ emerged. Not only is she learning the language, she’s learning to to produce it correctly. 

She’s also beginning to combine words as well, as so ‘no agua’ tells us clearly that the thirst is quenched, thank us very much, and it’s time to move on to catering to her other requirements.

That’s quite interesting, as it happens, because ‘no’ in Matilda’s vocabulary is clearly English, with a nice round ‘o’ to rhyme with ‘sow’. ‘Yes’, on the other hand, is ‘si’.

Now I know I shouldn’t read too much into any of this, but you know how it is with humans. We see symbolism of deeper truth everywhere we look. I’m no exception.

Affirmation in the language of a proud nation that has nonetheless understood, after a horrible civil war and 40 years of dictatorship, that its future of peace and democracy is best secured in association with its neighbours in the European Union. And that the small loss of national sovereignty is a small to pay for the benefit.

While negation is expressed in the language of sad little Brexitland, sure that it’s still a global power though that slipped through its hands over half a century ago. The voice of a declining nation that is only now beginning to contemplate the wretched consequences of its 2016 decision. The nation that left the very Union to which Spain contributes and from which it benefits.

At two, Matilda seems to have got all that pretty much right.

Anthem for an anniversary

For today’s anniversary, I thought we needed a poem. So here’s one that seems to work. It’s called Anthem for Doomed Youth.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Manuscript of Anthem for Doomed Youth
held by the British Library in London

It’s one of Wilfred Owen’s powerfully moving pieces against the horror he experienced fighting in the trenches of the ‘Great War’, which wasn’t great. It was also known as the First World War, though it wasn’t really the first either (but I’m not going into that here).

Why do I think it’s remarkable? Well, to start with, it strikes me as one of the most finely built poems I’ve ever come across. It has the classic structure known as a sonnet, fourteen lines, often divided – for instance in French – into two quatrains (four-line bits) and two tercets (yep, that’s right, three lines each). This one follows the more English format of an octet (eight) and a sextet (six), but I’m not sure I like the term sextet, because it may seem to suggest something else.

I meant a six-instrument jazz ensemble, of course. What were you thinking of?

The first line of each section is a question, with the rest providing an answer, which is neat. But then Owen, in parallel, has a second structure that splits the poem into equal parts: the first seven lines are about the front line, the last seven about the home front, introduced by the reference to sad shires – the counties of Britain grieving their losses.

Overall, the poem is about the barbarity of the special kind of death meted out in the trenches, which receives none of the solemn ceremony of church services. There are no passing bells, no candles held by boys, no traditional prayers. Indeed, what prayers there are – he uses the word orisons – are pattered out hastily by the stuttering rifles and the monstrous anger of the guns.

In any case, Owen rejects all those ceremonial gestures as mere mockeries, in the face of the reality of the war. It makes no sense. It’s worth nothing. So all those lives snuffed out will be marked only by the holy glimmers of goodbyes in boys’ eyes, in the pallor of girls’ brows, and in the tenderness of patient minds.

And every time evening slowly falls, it will be like the drawing down of window blinds, traditionally a sign of mourning in English homes. 

Even the words he uses underline the pity of his message. The first line ends with the word ‘cattle’. In a war poem, you might expect it to rhyme with ‘battle’, but battle is about strategy and maybe glory, and Owen wants nothing to do with either. Young men who die as cattle aren’t doing it for honour, nor are their deaths providing honour to anyone.

It’s just like the bugle. The bugle can be the instrument that calls soldiers on to the glory of war. In Owen’s poem, it merely provides a sad lament from unhappy homes to men who can never hear it.

I’ve barely scratched the surface. If you spend a few minutes looking at the sonnet, you’ll probably find more richness concealed in those mere fourteen lines. It’s that wealth that makes Owen outstanding, It also makes me think of the preface he’d begun to write, for a collection of poetry that was never published before he died, but was found in the papers he left behind. In it he claimed:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.

The poetry is in the pity. And the savage pity of this poetry is that on 4 November 1918, which is why today’s the anniversary, Wilfred Owen was killed by the monstrous anger of guns. Another week and he’d have survived until the armistice, on the 11th.

“My subject is War, and the pity of War.” Could he have found poetry in peace? We never found out because he never got the chance to show us. 

All he left us with was poetry filled with the pity of war to remember him by.

All Hallows, or a monster for the day after Halloween

I had an unusual experience on All Saints’ Day. Or All Hallows day, to give it its older name, which at least has the merit of explaining why the day before – the eve of All Hallows – is called ‘Halloween’. 

All Hallows is the day for all saints, or rather all other saints, the ones that haven’t been officially recognised by the Catholic Church. Which means, in Christian theology, anyone who died in whatever the Church regards as a State of Grace. 

Most Catholics are pretty certain that this goes for all their dead relatives. Even when they were rotten crooks, bullies and serially cheated on their partners throughout their lives. Nothing but good of the dead, is the old saying, so we all know, or at least claim, that the dead – well, our dead anyway – were uniformly good.

In many Catholic countries, All Hallows is when people visit cemeteries to pay their respects to dead relatives. Here in Spain, the day is a public holiday. So nobody has any excuse for not popping down to the cemetery and showing Granddad José María or Auntie Inmaculada Concepción that they still care.

With me, my visit to a dead man happened by accident, without a plan. I know they say, “fail to plan, plan to fail”, but the other saying is “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” I know that comes from the Gospel according to Woody Allen, but it has an air of sanctity about it (unlike Allen himself), so it seems more appropriate to All Hallows.

I was out with the dogs, up near where we’re staying in the hills to the north of Madrid. This area does autumn much more seriously than our home region near Valencia. So we’d had three days of rain and dropping temperatures.

But on the morning of All Hallows, the sun came out, the clouds cleared, and the only traces of rain were ephemeral streams criss-crossing my path, and they only made the landscape, usually so dry, more attractive than ever.

At a junction of two paths, I had an experience worthy of the poet Robert Frost. Should I go down the road less taken, as he did? Well, I decided I would. Especially as, unlike Frost, I’d been down the other one before, had the chance of trying the second one, and felt like a change.

Palacio Canto y Pico
Also known as ‘Franco’s House’

Soon I saw an imposing building on a hill ahead of me. Which I recognised. It was what I’d always thought of as ‘Franco’s House’. So it turns out I was, indeed, remembering a dead man on All Hallows. Unfortunately, that wasn’t one of the dead I might have wished to respect, but the man who’d been dictator of Spain for nearly forty years. The caudillo as he liked to call himself. That translates roughly as ‘chieftain’, a fine expression of the primitive and brutal nature of his regime.

The house was a villa in the hills to which he could retreat, if he needed a break from the cares of office and the stress of despotic rule. I’d never seen it close up, so I walked towards it.

I got relatively close. Half a kilometre away or so. But there was a fence and I decided not to go through it. I could have, since it was a holy fence – not in the sense of sacred, just in the sense of containing many holes – perhaps the right word is hole-y. I decided I’d walked far enough – the dogs agreed – and was as close as felt appropriate for a man with such bloodstained hands

Back at home, however, I discovered that the full story is, as so often, more complex. The house is called the Canto y Pico mansion. It was built by a Spanish nobleman, the Count of Almenas, in 1922. He wanted somewhere to hang his extensive collection of paintings. He’d married money and could afford the gesture, though things turned tougher when his wife died. He even had to sell some pictures.

He lived in his mansion for twenty years, except for the three years of the Spanish Civil War, which he spent in London – oddly, the city of his birth (not that he’d lived there long). However his son, a politician of the right, didn’t get away, and was murdered by his enemies in the early months of the war. The father was distraught. There was still a granddaughter to whom he could have left the house, but he chose instead to bequeath it, on his death in 1947, to the caudillo.

I don’t think Franco ever lived there. I suspect he would have visited the place at least once, if only because he was the kind of man to gloat over his defeated enemies, and the house had for a while been the command headquarters of a Republican army fighting the Franco rebels. 

Franco’s granddaughter and her husband lived there for some years from the end of the seventies. I say ‘granddaughter’ but she may not have been. Franco took a wound to the groin during colonial warfare in Morocco, and it’s possible he no longer had the equipment to father a daughter: the gossip is that her natural father was Franco’s brother with a prostitute, who later died.

The house was eventually sold to a company that may be about to turn it into a hotel, after twenty of years of disputes about the licences needed in a protected region. It’s empty now and in a bad way. It’s been looted – I mentioned that the fence is holy or hole-y. A fire destroyed any works of art that still left.

A sad place with an unfortunate history, with Franco as only a minor element. The association for the protection of heritage in the Madrid region rightly points out that referring to it as ‘Franco’s House’ doesn’t do justice to the ups and downs of its misfortunes. So, to my relief, I hadn’t really been paying my respects to a rotten old dictator. Instead, I simply needed to revise my view of a building I knew well as a landmark but whose real nature I’d misunderstood. 

A valuable lesson from a casual walk on All Hallows.