Matilda's special Christmas gift to me: how to be a better grandparent

Our family has abandoned the practice of handing out Christmas presents between adults. After all, there’s something slightly tedious about putting so much thought into buying a gift for someone who probably won’t like it, and who’ll be under the same pressure to buy me a present that I’m just as unenthusiastic about.

Matilda enjoys walks in the woods

So it was wonderful to have my granddaughter Matilda, now two, offer me an absolutely priceless present on Christmas day. That’s the invaluable gift of better knowledge of myself. Accompanied, inevitably, by better knowledge of her.

Christmas morning was the time the lunch was being cooked, a nut roast to accommodate the vegetarians present. A long challenging process for which Danielle needed peace to concentrate. The results, incidentally, were impressive.

The best offer of help I could make was to take Matilda out to our local playground. An offer I made with trepidation. I’m hopeless with little children. It’s true that it may be, at least in part, my very fear of being hopeless that makes me so hopeless. Knowing that, however, doesn’t make it easier to be any less hopeless.

Still. A playground visit’s a pretty straightforward thing, and I’d taken her to playgrounds before. The trepidation was far from the worst I’ve felt. 

Let me tell you about our playground. We’re terribly grateful to our local council for having put it in. Although we’re less grateful for taking from the end of June to the early of autumn to get the thing built at all. And then to leave it without a proper barrier to separate the children from the road ever since. All that keeps the kids from the traffic is the usual thin wire fence builders set up, and it’s still in place. 

Fortunately, a gap has been made in it, either by the builders themselves or by local residents sick of having a perfectly serviceable playground in plain sight without being able to get access to it.

Matilda and I found the gap and entered this wonder world of slides and swings and climbing frames and a thing that spins round and round. In fact, it was that last thing that caught her fancy first. It’s a bit like an office swivel chair but firmly anchored to the ground. You can get it spinning pretty quickly, as she did, until she was twirling so fast she got flung off it. 

A swivel chair made for fun

Fortunately, the ground is that nice rubbery stuff which rather cushions a kid’s fall. Even so, I was amazed by the completely cool way she took things. She was happy to have a hand getting up, but she didn’t cry and, in fact, only asked to be dusted down. Nasty dust on her knees? That had to be removed. Pain? That would pass and, in the meantime, there were other wonders to explore. That slide, for instance. Or the thing you could walk along to test your sense of balance.

The only long-term effect of her fall seemed to be that, though she still liked to go on the swivel-chair thing, she kept her speed down. Wisdom learned from a less than successful experience? I wish more adults behaved with such maturity.

I could feel the bonding process deepening between us as time went on. I’d help her up stairs, I’d follow as she walked along narrow raised walkways, I’d be waiting at the bottom of the slides. But it was all going swimmingly. Trust and warmth was growing between us.

Balance? Child’s play for Matilda

So it came as no surprise that, later on Christmas day, when I put the dogs on their leads for a late afternoon walk, Matilda grabbed Toffee’s. You see, she’d already established that she took some pleasure, some pride even, in walking Toffee, the smaller toy poodle, and she made it clear that, if there was dog walking about to happen, she was going to be part of it.

Walking Toffee is our new thing

We had a long walk. She had Toffee on her lead until we got into our woods. Then I let both dogs run free, and I have to say I was impressed by their behaviour. Toffee usually demands to be picked up every few hundred metres – she’s very small and her back’s a little weak – but clearly they’d both understood that with Matilda along, I had other responsibilities to take care of.

Matilda came up on my shoulders, and the dogs trotted along with perfect behaviour next to us. 

The night slowly fell. And suddenly – I don’t know whether it was the darkness that made her think that way – Matilda decided it was time for a lead again. Not for Toffee this time, though, but inexplicably for Luci.

“Not until we reach the end of the wood,” I told her, “it’s too soon to put her on the lead now.”

Matilda, who has developed a real skill in saying the word ‘no’, has still not wholly mastered hearing that same word when pronounced by other people.

But her granddad has learned not to argue. For the next ten minutes, Matilda chased around after Luci, trying to put her lead on. Luci can look after herself, so she kept darting away each time Matilda got close. It exhausted me just watching the way Matilda was running after her, with an energy born of determination, cheated though it always was.

By now it was fully dark, with only a glow reaching us from the streetlights beyond the metro line we were following towards the end of the wood. Matilda was unfazed by the darkness. What was there to be afraid of? In fact, when the first metro train passed us, she was so preoccupied with trying to put Luci on the lead that she barely noticed. She merely glanced, in a slightly irritated way, at the noisy thing rattling past, and only when it was at its closest and noisiest. Then she refocused on Luci.

Inexplicably, however, she gave up on the Luci chase, for no obvious external reason and without warning, as suddenly as she’d started. It was like the swivel-chair thing in the playground. Wisdom had dawned. It was what Granddad had been saying all this time. The time for leads hadn’t yet come. She stopped insisting.

Instead, she came over to me and raised her arms. Time to be carried. And that provided for another display of wisdom. She now weighs 15 kilos, far too much for what we’ve come to know as ‘cuddle-carrying’, in my arms. If I’m to carry her, she has to go on my shoulders. She’s adapted to this initially unwelcome variation, even learning to duck left or right if we pass under low-hanging branches.

She’d recovered her equanimity. 

We left the wood soon after, and put both dogs back on their leads, with Matilda once more proudly in charge of Toffee. That’s when the second metro train went rumbling past, and this time when I said, “look, Matilda, the train. With people inside”, she looked at it properly. And laughed at this strange, noisy sight. All part of the oddness that marks walks with Granddad. As odd as having them last into night time.

The fun of a night walk

It was all lots of fun or both of us. And a real eye opener for me, above all, because I learned how fascinating a two-year-old can really be. And how much easier it is to look after one once you’ve realised that.

All of which made for a heck of a Christmas present.

The Challenger and the anti-vaxxer

It always makes me smile when I see a writer using the word ‘arguably’. 

I’ve done it myself, and I know what it means. ‘Arguably’ is a neat way of suggesting that there is a great case for what I’m about to say, but I’m not actually going to make it here. That may be about not feeling that secure about the case, and therefore preferring not to state it openly and expose it to scrutiny.

I came across it recently in a book about the close relationship between two thinkers of the eighteenth-century enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith. ‘Arguably the greatest of all philosophical friendships’. Well, yes, maybe. But was it greater than, say, Plato and Socrates? Russel and Wittgenstein? Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir? Arguably it was. But he doesn’t make the argument.

Well, he doesn’t make it in the preface, which is where I found the comment. That same preface starts with the words “David Hume is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher ever to write in the English language”. 

That’s another fine trick. 

“Widely regarded”? How widely? Who are these wide guys? 

What the author’s really saying is that he thinks it possible – you might say arguable – that David Hume is that great a philosopher. But he believes we’re more likely to believe it if he can convince us that a lot of other people agree.

The Challenger exploding

Do you know the film The Challenger Disaster? Originally entitled The Challenger,  a better title, since it isn’t just about the Challenger space shuttle which blew up on take-off, killing everyone on board. It’s much more about the scientist who challenged the authorities by insisting on finding out the reason why the shuttle exploded. Made for TV by the BBC, it’s a gem of a small story of a terrible event and a brilliant man’s refusal to be prevented revealing the truth.

The man was one of my favourite physicists, Nobel-prize winner Richard Feynman. William Hurt plays him superbly. The thing about Feynman is that, once he was brought into the enquiry into the disaster, much against his initial reluctance, he refused to be brow-beaten or diverted from finding out what went wrong. By his own admission, he was no expert on rocket design – he was a theoretical physicist – but he insisted on asking the right questions, of the right experts, Until he managed to extract the right answers.

William Hurt as the challenger Richard Feynman

Certainly, the United States owes it to him that it knows why the Challenger exploded. The challenger Feynman made sure of that.

The film shows Feynman explaining his attitude towards science.

Science teaches us what the rules of evidence are. We mess with that at our peril. 

He didn’t just say that. He lived it. He came to conclusions only as they were revealed by the evidence and advanced them only once the evidence was sufficient. Then he reached judgements that were solidly based. 

Earlier, the film quotes him saying:

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Science lives with doubt. Scientists know that today’s theory is as good a description of reality as they have managed to construct so far, and therefore they’ll use it because there’s nothing better. But tomorrow it may have to be replaced by something more reliable. That’s a good reason for not getting too certain about any one theory: it may close your mind to the next theory just around the corner. 

That though isn’t how the human mind likes to work. It wants certainty. It wants to know a few things for sure.

That’s why we have, for instance, an anti-vax movement. Robert Kennedy, Junior, a lawyer with no medical or scientific training at all, has come up with some statements about vaccinations that he proclaims with total certainty. There is no doubt about them in his mind. There’s nothing to question there.

That’s so much more satisfying than the Feynman approach with its accommodation of doubt and uncertainty. So people follow Kennedy, because what he’s saying belongs to the realm of what is ‘widely regarded’, that useful expression suggesting something must be true because so many believe it. Which is sad, considering that this Kennedy is the lesser son of a great father, the assassinated Robert Kennedy, brother and Attorney General to John F. Kennedy, and arguably the best President the United States never had (see? I can do that ‘arguably’ thing too).

Anti-vaxxers really are unable to handle doubt and relative truths. Anti-vaxxers react with mock horror to news of fully vaccinated people becoming infected with Covid. But no one ever argued that the vaccination gave absolute protection to absolutely every variant of the disease. It only protects a high percentage. But understanding that means accepting statistical truths. They’re not intuitive. So some feel it easier to write them off as lies or damned lies.

I’m glad to see that the anti-vax movement seems to be losing momentum. Feynman’s preoccupation with following the evidence may be getting through at last. Hundreds of millions have been vaccinated and only tiny numbers have suffered ill consequences. On the other hand, vaccines are clearly protecting, to a high degree against infection, and even in cases of infection, against serious symptoms.

Even anti-vaxxers we meet are coming around and agreeing to get themselves vaccinated at last. As we queued for a booster, we were impressed by the number of people going for their first shot, converted vaccination sceptics.

They’ve seen that despite the doubt and uncertainty, the approach of scientists like Feynman offers a better and safer way forward than the dogmatic certainties of the likes of Robert Kennedy.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to reading the book about Hume and Smith. There may have been some curious expressions used in the preface, but a preface is just an accessory. The main act is the book itself, in this case, The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen, and i suspect it will be compelling reading.

I’m looking forward to it.

Wrong about vaccination passports

Our new home country, Spain, has reacted more sensibly than many to the Covid-19 pandemic. Broadly speaking. And for now.

We do have some fringe elements who are reacting to new restrictions brought in to cope with the latest outbreak of the disease, with cries of ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ A curious cry, as though the right to infect others with an unpleasant and potentially lethal disease, is a freedom for which we ought to be fighting.

That’s the same in other countries, but in some of them, such as England or parts of the US, those cries are more widespread and a lot louder.

Overall, most Spaniards are coping fine with the renewed requirements to wear masks in more places than just a few weeks ago. Equally, they don’t seem too upset about the need to show documentary evidence of being vaccinated, before they can get into most enclosed public places. It’s possible that they’ve understood that sacrifices of small freedoms of little benefit are well worth it for the far greater freedom of removing the threat of Covid.

In our region of Spain, the local government has made it obligatory to show a vaccine passport on entry to most enclosed public places, including cafes and restaurants. Most of us have been vaccinated, a growing number three times. I have to report, and I hope the anti-vaxxers won’t hold it against me, that the process wasn’t particularly unpleasant, nor has it left me, as far as I can tell, controlled by Bill Gates, George Soros or Darth Vader.

Covid passport for the Valencian region
A major assault on human rights? Or supporting the right to safety?

When a good friend from Japan invited us to a Japanese restaurant the other day, we turned up ready to show our vaccine passports. After all, we feel that having to produce a document proving we’ve taken steps to reduce the threat of infection we pose to others, isn’t too high a price to pay for the knowledge that everyone else in the restaurant has done what it can to reduce the threat they pose to us.

That’s a position that I strongly support. At least in principle. It turns out that, in practice, I have slightly more trouble with it. 

You may have picked up that I recently published my second novel. Well, not a novel really. It’s extracts I’ve stolen from the diaries kept by the cat and the two toy poodles who tolerate our presence in their home in return for sufficient food and large quantities of attention. I leave you to decide to what extent that makes it a work of fiction or not.

I’ve sent a few copies out to friends and relatives, including one to a friend in the US. Never again. The postage cost two and a half times the price of the book.

Since I was spending that much on it, I decided to get the delivery tracked. That meant that the friendly person in the post office printed out a receipt for me, on a sheet of A4 paper, which I carefully stored away in the shoulder bag where I keep such precious documents.

Meanwhile, since I still haven’t worked out how to download my vaccine passport and store it on my phone, I also printed that out. On a piece of A4 paper, which I carefully stored away in the same shoulder bag for documents that precious.

Well, you can see where this is going, can’t you? When asked in the restaurant for my vaccine passport, what I pulled out, with a bit of a flourish of pride in having ensured I had it on me, wasn’t the vaccine passport but the post office receipt.

“I can’t find the QR code,” the friendly waitress told me.

“There’s a bar code,” I pointed out. Patiently I thought.

She scanned the other people’s passports, which actually had QR codes. And then turned back to me. In the short delay, I was able to take stock of what I’d actually shown her. It had very clearly been issued by the post office.

I looked through my shoulder bag again and found the vaccine passport. I passed it over to the waitress, and apologised.

“Sorry,” I said, “what I gave you before was a post office receipt.”

She smiled. The Spaniards tend to be tolerant of minor errors. They also often have a pleasant sense of humour, and she certainly did.

“If you like,” she assured me earnestly, “I can check when I get home, and let you know where your package has got to.”

Words, words and Spanish words

If you scratch me, do I not bleed?” asks Shylock, the Jew, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Essentially, we are all the same, with much the same fears and hopes and joys and sorrows. Though naturally there are also differences. For instance, here in Spain, I’m amused to hear people talking about the lovely scent of cooking in Northern Europe, so rich in butter, while we wax so enthusiastic over the Mediterranean diet and all its olive oil.

Still, in most ways, we behave the same way, we experience the same things, and we even express much of all that in similar words. With exceptions, though, some of them surprising. Finding out about them is one of the joys of learning a foreign language. That’s one of my main preoccupations these days, as I work to master Spanish, the language of my adopted country. And marvel at its idiosyncrasies.

The Spanish, it seems, are wary of discussions. They’re apparently afraid that once we start discussing something, we can end up falling out over it, a fear they express by using the same word, discutir, for discuss and quarrel. My experience suggests that they’re often right.

Then there’s existencia which can mean stock, as in stored goods, but also existence. I suppose it makes sense, though. I mean, since there’s not a lot of use in storing anything that doesn’t exist.

The same is true is of competencia. It can mean competence, but it can also mean competition. That also strikes me as reasonably sensible. It pays to be competent if we’re going to plunge into some kind of competition.

Those are cases where Spanish has one word while English has two. On the other hand, they use different words for knowing people rather than knowing facts. As do the French, the Germans and the Italians, to my certain knowledge. Curiously though, that word I just used, ‘knowledge’, is conocimiento, obviously from conocer, which is the kind of knowing that applies to people, as opposed to saber, which is for facts. And yet, at the same time, acquaintances are conocidos, also from conocer. It seems the distinction between the kinds of knowing only lasts while we’re dealing with verbs, but gets lost when we move to the derived nouns.

That doesn’t happen in French. In that closely related language, knowledge is savoir while an acquaintance is a connaissance.

Not that I think any English speaker confuses knowing their friends with knowing that Normans came into England without knocking in 1066 or the Americans kicked the English out in 1776.

The destination of any romantic encounter in Spain?
Or its fate?

Much more fun still is the word novia (or novio) for a fiancée (or fiancé) or even a bride (or groom). But it can also be a girlfriend (or boyfriend). Now, they do have other words for the various levels of relationship, because the Spaniards aren’t dumb, and they know that not every romantic attachment leads to marriage. And yet the multiple meanings of novia/novio do rather suggest that, in Spain, once you’re in a romantic relationship of any kind, the expectation is that you’re on the way to a destination in marriage. Or possibly an inescapable destiny. 

Those are two more words that Spanish again doesn’t distinguish: your destination is your destiny. That makes a GPS fun to listen to. “You have reached your destiny” always strikes me as a fine way to announce that we’re at the end of the road. Full of sinister threat. I’m retired now, but there were certain trips I used to take during my working life, when arriving felt just that doom-laden.

I particularly like the word desgraciadamente. It’s linked to desgracia which can be translated as a disgrace, but also a misfortune. Which it certainly is, because it represents, as the form of the word suggests, a loss of grace, the quality of mercy and purity which Christians see as a gift of God. 

Serious stuff.

Disgrace and misfortune linked. That’s another idea I find it easy to go along with. Danielle and I were on the brink of winning a hard-fought badminton match the other day. All I needed was to pull off the smash the opposition had teed up for me.

The easiest of shots, and I put straight into the net. The other side went on to win. That was a terrible misfortune.

But my playing was a disgrace.

Getting an icon wrong

There are intellectual giants that have left their mark on Western thought right down to the present day. When their ideas have had political implications, they have often been taken up as icons of either the left or the right. Not always with justification, not always by remaining really true to what the iconic figure’s teaching.

I’ve always loved the fact that Karl Marx said of himself that he was no Marxist. Many who claimed to follow him had, he felt, entirely deformed his thinking. But then look at Christ’s teaching and rather a lot of those who claim today to be Christian.

It’s interesting to look at some of the more insightful statements from the legendary figures of our intellectual past. For instance, here’s an interesting remark on what happens whenever a group of businessmen gets together:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

A conspiracy against the public? A contrivance to raise prices? Tough words, tough words indeed.

And what about this for an indictment of British businessmen (‘merchants’) and how they use their capital (‘stock’)?

Our merchants frequently complain of the high wages of British labour, as the cause of their manufactures being undersold in foreign markets; but they are silent about the high profits of stock.

And finally here’s another insight into the behaviour of business people and, above all, into what happens if we allow them to use the power their wealth gives to influence legislation governing business:

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

What? Business people have an interest to deceive and oppress the public? And they frequently have? 

What radical of the left is this? What Marxist? What New Age revolutionary?

Well, you may know who made these statements. Even if you don’t, you may not be surprised to discover that all three come from the same person. What may perhaps surprise you much more is that he was a man who has become something of a darling of the right, the iconic believer in the free market, unhampered by government intervention and regulation.

He was the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith. 

The quotations are from his great book, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Usually referred to as The Wealth of Nations, it was one of three books that Maggie Thatcher said everyone should read. But I’m not sure she read it all or, if she did, whether she absorbed anything she didn’t already agree with.

The Wealth of Nations
Recommended by Maggie Thatcher.
But did she read only the bits she liked?

Politicians of the right, like Thatcher, embrace him because he was an apostle of the free market. It’s true that free markets often work effectively. Day by day, for instance, even a colossal city like London receives about the amount of goods its citizens consume. In fact, the market only breaks down when some external factor disrupts it. That could be a political change, such as the decision of Britain to get out of the European Union, leaving the country with a shortage of lorry drivers and therefore a crisis of logistics. That’s when deliveries to London, or anywhere else, begin to fail.

That’s Smith’s point. Free markets work if they’re free. That doesn’t just mean free from government intervention, it means free from corporate intervention too. Business often believes that what serves its interests, serves the general interest of society. But business likes to eliminate competition, and ideally to hold a monopoly in its sector. A monopoly, or even a reduction in numbers of suppliers, limits customers’ ability to choose a new provider freely if their current one fails. 

This type of action in markets, by corporations, distorts them just as much as government intervention ever would. But the right tends to play down its role. 

Above all, the right with its love of putting people representing corporate interests in power, ignores what Smith said about the need to be wary of guidance from that kind of person:

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

Representatives of corporate interests have often both “deceived and oppressed” the public? Hardly a view you’d expect from a man the right has made its darling. Though one with great relevance today, when business lobbies exercise such sway over governments, especially governments of the right.

No wonder the right prefers not to focus on this side of their master’s thought.

Stupid Anniversary

Something you can count on, with absolute confidence, is human stupidity. We all share it. I’m no more immune than anyone else, but fortunately I’ve never held a position of power. Sadly, those who wield power are as much victims of the universal stupidity as the rest of us.

The seventh of December is an apt anniversary to remember an act of rank stupidity by a powerful and sophisticated nation which, unfortunately for its people, had fallen under the control of a government it didn’t deserve. 

Roosevelt addressing the joint session of Congress
the day after Pearl Harbor

Eighty years ago, Japan launched a surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet’s port at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. On the eighth of December, President Franklyn Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress. His words have rung down the decades since:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

In the original draft of his speech, he’d planned to say ‘live in history’. Overnight he replaced what might seem a banal expression by ‘live in infamy’, which is far more powerful. No stupidity on his part…

No, the stupidity was all down to Japan. 

There was a school of thought in Japan that suggested that, after its successes in China, the country should turn its attention northwards and invade Russia (the Soviet Union at the time).

Imagine how that might have been! I know one shouldn’t go in for ‘what if’ speculations about history – counterfactuals as they’re called – but sometimes it’s hard not to indulge one for a moment.

The Soviet Union was already involved in a desperate struggle with Nazi Germany, which had invaded just under six months earlier. And it truly was desperate, a life and death conflict which had started out looking frighteningly bad for the Soviets. Nazi forces had occupied most of Stalingrad (today Volgograd), they had besieged Leningrad (today St Petersburg) and were close to Moscow (today, perhaps surprisingly, Moscow).

An invasion from the East would have diverted forces from the fight against the German armies, seriously weakening Soviet defences. Germany would fight on for three and a half years after Pearl Harbor, but in effect it lost the war at Stalingrad that winter. If the Soviets had been forced to send forces eastward, things might have turned out far less well for the democracies. 

What’s more, the attack on Pearl Harbor completely altered public attitudes in the US. Up till then, there had been massive opposition to involvement in the war and most voters were firmly committed to maintaining the existing attitude of strict neutrality. After the air raid, there was widespread revulsion at the act and a sense that it wasn’t so much a matter of the US declaring war as of the war having, in effect, already started. As Roosevelt put it, “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.”

In a second act of stupidity, Hitler also declared war between Germany and the United States. That ensured that the Americans would be as heavily involved in the war in Europe as in the Pacific.

In other words, Japan’s raid, far from advancing its war aims, ensured that it, as well as its Axis partners, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, would ultimately be defeated. As the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, in overall command of the Pearl Harbor operation, neatly summed it up, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”.

Yamamoto feared Japan had merely
woken a sleeping giant

Roosevelt said as much.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

It was true. Both Germany and Japan would be driven to surrender unconditionally. The process would be painful to the US, with close to 300,000 deaths, but it would be far worse for the Japanese with close to ten times that number. Japan would also suffer the only atomic bomb attacks suffered by any country. 

So far, at least.

The eightieth anniversary fell on 7 December 2021. It was an act of massive stupidity by the government of Japan, which made an Allied victory in World War 2 a certainty. You’ve got to wonder how people that dumb could make it into positions that senior.

The lesson, of course, is never to let it happen again, anywhere else. Sadly, though, Britain seems to have done it already and not yet to have seen the error of its ways. As for the US, it had done it up to January of this year, when it kicked out its most lamentable president ever.

The sobering thought for this strange anniversary, however, is whether stupidity has taken root so deeply in the US electorate, as to allow him back in again.

 

Mother of mine

Most languages about which I know anything seem to take their swearwords from two main areas of the human experience, the religious or the sexual and lavatorial. 

Depending on the language, one is regarded as less acceptable than the other. In French, for instance, the word ‘merde’ has become so mild that it can be used by the most proper of proper ladies from districts of Paris perceived as the best (which, as in most cities, means the most expensive). And yet the word literally refers to a malodorous substance we generally try to consign to sewers, and the equivalent term in English is regarded as definitely vulgar.

On the other hand, the French generally avoid terms related to the religious experience. I’ve heard ‘Bon Dieu’, literally ‘Good God’, but ‘hell’ or ‘Jesus’, for instance, simply aren’t used as they are in English.

Funnily enough, French Canadians do have some choice swearwords related to the faith, though they seem to be associated more with the ritual than with key figures of their religion. ‘Hostie’ is a communion wafer, and ‘tabernacle’ is, well, a tabernacle. Maybe feeling so easy with blasphemy is an effect of rubbing shoulders with the English for so long, or maybe it merely reflects the separate development of a colonial settlement long separated from the mother country.

The Spanish seem to be closer to the English in their swearing than to the French. Blasphemy is mild, the rest stronger and to be avoided. ‘Joder’ refers to an act that multiplies the human race, and ‘jodido’ means that this act has been inflicted on the speaker, though without generating much pleasure.

The word is one that rings around the courts where we play badminton. It may be that sport brings out the stronger terms in swearing and, of course, badminton is an exasperating game, especially on missing an easy shot. The player may be correctly placed to play the shot, has the racket well positioned, knows exactly what stroke to play, and then somehow screws it up. Well, joder!

In a calmer environment, where the general feeling is that the proprieties need to be more fully respected, swearers will tend to use something more blasphemous. The Spanish, like the French Canadians, have ‘hostias’, again a reference to those inoffensive little wafers. But the one I like the most is ‘madre mía’.

Literally that means ‘my mother’. But it isn’t in fact referring to the speaker’s biological mother. Rather, it’s an appeal to a far more universal mother, the one who gave birth to Jesus, the virgin Mary. Still, to a mere foreigner like me, it sounds like an appeal to an earthly mother.

This became particularly relevant when we had a Spanish group around to lunch. It was a highly successful event, as one of our guests pointed out: in his view, “a lunch that lasts from 2:00 till 9:00 and still feels short has to have been a success”. 

Aftermath of the seven-hour lunch
Please note the fruit salad. Yes, we’re health conscious

That friend and his wife came out to our place outside Valencia, from the city itself, by metro. Our local station is splendidly picturesque, since it’s right in the middle of the woods; at night the arrival of the brightly lit train into the patch of softer light formed by the station, surrounded by the dark pines, is a sight to behold. Especially as, in their case, we cut it a little fine to get to their train home. We ended having to pelt down uneven paths and run across the tracks as the train bore down on us. That’s especially exciting since it doesn’t stop at the station unless you flag it down. So it was literally bearing us down until we waved frantically.

Our local, rather special, metro station

A seven-hour lunch tends to attract a fair amount of lubrication, and we certainly emptied more bottles than is our wont. My Spanish is still far from adequate, but I’m glad to say that I can now pick up certain nuances of tone. So when one of our guests, the friend I quoted before, reacted to my leaving the table to fetch yet another bottle of wine by saying “oh, no, don’t open another bottle”, I was able to interpret the tone in which he said it correctly. He had no intention of preventing me fetching the next bottle.

Even more amusing, however, was the guest on the other side of me. She was unusual among Spaniards in being soft spoken and even relatively quiet. I hope this won’t offend any of my Spanish friends, but I think most would agree that ‘soft spoken’ and ‘quiet’ are not terms frequently applied to their compatriots.

However, quiet though she was, there was one expression she kept repeating. We’d open another bottle of wine. “Madre mía,” she’d say. We’d top up her glass. “Madre mía”. We switched to something a little stronger. “Madre mía.”

These repeated appeals to the mother amused me. Not just because the refrain was quite funny itself. But above all because her own mother was sitting next to her, another of our guests. 

But that was only amusing to someone like me. As an outsider who doesn’t use the expression himself, I’m not instinctively attuned to what it really means. I still respond to it as meaning what it literally says.

“Mother of mine” she seemed to be saying. With her mother next to her. That’s the kind of oddity I treasure.

It only added to my enjoyment of our lunch.