Tiredness and language-learning choices

“We are approaching Madrid, Puerta de Atocha, Almudena Grandes.”

That’s the announcement we hear whenever we travel by train from our home near Valencia to Madrid. That reference to ‘Almudena Grandes’ moves me every time. Not only because it recognises an extraordinary person who deserves it more than many honoured by statues or other tributes, but also because it was by no means a given that she would get the recognition.

I got to know María de la Almudena Grandes mostly while walking through our local woods, usually with our dogs. Well, her books. I sadly didn’t get to meet her in person. That was all part of my long and, so far, only partially successful effort to learn the language of my adopted country, Spain. It’s been nearly four years since we moved here, and I still sound like a tourist.

In language learning, an important threshold is when you can at last read a newspaper or a book with pleasure. Not necessarily with ease or complete accuracy. But without having to look up so many words, or skip over so many you don’t understand, that the whole process becomes unrewarding or a chore.

I learned some Spanish at school, over half a century ago. As a result, with living here and being exposed to the language every day, I was able to get to that important threshold reasonably quickly. And because I like listening to audiobooks, as well as because my worst problem wasn’t so much understanding the written word in Spanish as the spoken, I took to listening to novels in the language.

As in any language, there are different types of novels in Spanish. There are those with a claim to a place in the hall of literary fame, and those that would never get past the turnstile at the entrance. That second type is the kind of book you might buy in an airport terminal, or perhaps to read on a beach. 

I like both types. Within the pulp fiction category, my favourite is thrillers. If they’re reasonably good, they can be compelling, but they use a rather simpler vocabulary than their more literary equivalents, their plots are generally quite simple because they’re essentially predictable, and overall they’re less challenging to the tired mind. 

These days, my mind is easily tired.

Recently I came across a writer called Juan Gómez Jurado. He wrote a three-novel series (it wouldn’t surprise me if more came along later) called Red Queen, Black Wolf and White King. You can maybe see some sort of pattern in the titles. 

I listened to the first two quite quickly. They were fun. I liked the character of the cynical and masterful chief of the Spanish section of the shadowy European crime-fighting organisation at the centre of the plot; I enjoyed the main character, the brilliant but tormented young woman who is the Spanish representative of the shadowy European crime-fighting organisation; I particularly liked the character of the somewhat overweight (“not that he’s fat” is a repeated refrain) middle-aged policeman, in trouble for his repeated breaches of procedure and haunted by the fear that his colleagues will discover he’s gay, who has to look after the young woman. He’s my favourite, because he introduces some moments of humour. 

Overall, the first two books of the series were fun and unchallenging, just what I needed. But then I started on the third book. And suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was by now becoming clear that though the organisation had come up against various malefactors, they were all really controlled by one great villainous figure, sworn to destroy the brilliant young woman. 

The master criminal is the White King, who provides the title of book 3. With a sinking feeling, I could picture the shape of the book to come. Up against this monster of evil, she would make mistake after mistake, leading to a peak of disaster, perhaps where her very life, or that of people close to her, would be at threat – you, know the equivalent of her or her friends being in a deep well gradually filling with water, or bound to a bomb whose timer is moving with deadly slowness towards zero – and then, by an extraordinary feat of intellect, she would find the one way of defeating the evil genius she’s battling and, metaphorically, with one bound (of hers) everyone would be free.

All just too Marvel comic, too much superhero and supervillain stuff.

I may be wrong, and the whole thing may turn out to be far more subtle than that. When I get back to it. But just then, I found I could go no further and laid it down.

Instead, I needed something a little more stimulating. “What about Almudena Grandes?”, I wondered.

I’d read her five novels (the sixth unfinished because of her tragically early death) on people living through the Spanish civil war and the years of dictatorship that followed, resisting as best they could the terrible oppression of Franco’s far-right authoritarian regime. 

When I add that she identified, not without justification, the Communist Party as the main spearhead of that resistance, you’ll probably understand why getting her the recognition she deserved wasn’t easy. Madrid, although celebrated for its indomitable will and the courage with which it resisted Franco’s fascist onslaught during the war, is today strangely right wing, both within the City itself and in the Autonomous Community around it. It’s those organisations that set the names of squares and streets, and there was no way they were going to give that great Madrid native, the powerful voice of the left Almudena Grandes, one of them. That’s why it’s the station that has been renamed: the great stations are managed by the national government, not the city or region, and the national government is currently led by Pedro Sánchez, a man of the centre-left.

Great book, great writer

This time I turned to Los Besos en el Pan, Kissing the bread. It follows a wide group of people living in an unnamed district of Madrid at the time of the 2008 crisis. The title comes from a custom of an older generation, which demanded of its children that they kiss any piece of bread that fell to the floor before putting it back in the basket. At a time of acute poverty, when hunger was widespread, no food could be wasted. The message is very much that the older people have the experience to cope with the difficulties their kids and grandkids are struggling with. “Crisis? You call this a crisis?” they seem to be saying, “you don’t know what a real crisis looks like.” 

Indeed, some of those characters say it explicitly.

The book abounds with different people, with different concerns and different approaches to making their way despite the difficulties of the time. It’s marked by two of Almudena Grandes’s most striking characteristics: her hatred of the injustices inflicted by the elite on the poor who deserve better – the hardworking individuals thrown onto the scrapheap of unemployment in middle age, the kids who can’t find jobs or afford their studies, the public services including healthcare being starved of funds or even closed down – and its counterpart, her immense love of people. The stories aren’t all happy, and two or three end badly, even tragically. But they’re all ultimately about affection and warmth and kindness. That makes the book a delight to read. Or to listen to.

But it’s a lot more complex than Red Queen. Delightful, lovely, compelling but not easy. In fact, because it was so good, and because I missed some of the details first time through, I read it again this week, having finished it only the week before. 

Because it is compelling. Despite the challenge, far more gripping than something like Red Queen. Perhaps indeed because it’s so challenging.

Rather proving that the best things in life aren’t necessarily easy. They do require effort. But the effort’s worth making.

At least, when I can find the energy deep inside my tired soul.

As the light comes back

We’re on the way back up again!

With the solstice, and our shortest day, firmly behind us we in the Northern Hemisphere, can start to enjoy days getting longer again. The worst misery of the long nights is done. While officially winter has just begun, in reality we can start to feel that spring is on its way. 

As it happens, here in Valencia, there’s been little sense of anything like real winter. It’s no doubt down to global warming, sadly, though I have to admit we’re enjoying it for now. While the nights have been cold recently (well relatively), the days have been positively hot, into the low twenties.

That’s Celsius, I swiftly add, for the sake of my Transatlantic friends.

Bleak midwinter in our woods

The warmth was something we were well aware of, Danielle, our son Michael and I. Our back garden is far from big. In its layout it’s moderately long, and thin. What made it even less far from big was that both sides were lined with thirty-year-old cypress hedges, impressive when it comes to securing privacy but, boy, so invasive. They turned the garden from long and thin to long and thinner. At certain points they grabbed two and a half or three metres of our space.

We decided it was time to do away with them. Simple fences would be fine instead, with climbing plants to decorate them. We got a couple of quotes to have the work done by professionals and, frankly, they seemed ridiculously excessive. Why not, we thought, do the work ourselves?

Well, we have. The job’s done. But the effort it cost explained why the quotes were so high.

Having Michael around to help was a blessing. Because it wasn’t just a matter of cutting down the old hedges. Quite a lot of the cypress had grown into the fence on one side, so that meant cutting out metal wire from old, thick trunks or branches. Then the cut material had to be bundled up and tied with twine: the local council is great, because it will collect garden waste for free, but only as long as it is left out by the side of a street in bound bundles below a certain size. Tying the stuff up and carting it to the street was a lot less easy than you might imagine.

Fortunately, once the hedges were more or less gone, we tackled a much pleasanter task. To get ready for the forthcoming visit by our grandkids, soon after Christmas, we set up a children’s playhouse in the newly widened garden. That initially meant preparing a base of gravel to rest it on and extending the existing crazy-paving path to lead the kids to the house.

In the unseasonal warmth, the hedges and the playhouse had us working in shirtsleeves and still complaining about the heat. Well, not complaining that plaintively, to be honest. Blue skies and sun might mean higher temperatures than strictly comfortable but it was preferable to rain or freezing cold.

Anyway, it’s all but done now. All that’s left is a little more clearing up and another stone to lay. Then we can sit back and wait for Matilda and Elliott to arrive and, I hope, be wowed by their gift. 

Should be fun.

December sunshine on the grandkids’ playhouse

And, of course, we can just enjoy the warmth and clear weather in the meantime. Knowing that, with the solstice passed, we’re now on the way back up towards springtime. Plenty to look forward to.

So, for now, season’s greetings to you all. However unseasonal the season is. And, of course, to my friends in the Southern Hemisphere, all my sympathy.

Unseasonal season’s greetings

Meghan and Harry: the long running royal soap goes on

It’s fun to see the storm that Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary has provoked.

Netflix promotes Meghan and Harry

Just to be clear, it’s the storm that’s fun. Not the documentary. If I spend six hours watching a TV show, I want it to be something a little more compelling than a self-justification by a couple, against their victimisation by the British royal family and media. Even if the complaint is true. Which it is.

What makes it even less interesting is that the couple is made up of a minor star whose claim to fame is a competent performance in a middle-ranking, entertaining but essentially superficial show, Suits. Her support is provided by a husband whose major claim to fame is his birth. Unless I’m much mistaken, birth is something that has been achieved by every one of the eight billion humans living on the planet.

So why all the fuss?

Well, I think Jonathan Freedland, one of my favourite Guardian journalists, got that about right. The real purpose of the royal family, since it doesn’t rule or do anything much else that’s useful, is to provide entertainment. Or, as he puts it, distraction.

How does this work? 

Well, the trick is to play on our emotions, like the writers of the best shows. They pull you one way – getting you to loathe a character, for instance – and then the other – painting them in sympathetic colours after all. And the British public loves this roller coaster of sentimentality. 

That public’s good at it too, since it’s nothing if not astoundingly fickle.

It happened with Diana. After her death, the upsurge of sympathy for the fairy-tale princess amazed the world. The Queen, on the other hand, and the family were seen as cruel, self-absorbed, and out of touch. 

Charles, many felt, should never inherit the throne, which should bypass him entirely and go to his son (or, more importantly her son), William. And Camilla, the scheming other woman who’d caused so much suffering to Diana, on no account should she ever be Queen Consort.

Funny to think back on all that now, isn’t it? Charles is on the throne and Camilla, naturally, is his Queen Consort. All those certainties have simply melted away, like snow in the spring. And the Queen’s death in September was mourned by millions, the outrage over Diana’s treatment simply washed away. 

Elizabeth II did her duty, we were breathlessly told. Well, she certainly did. But with taxpayers funding the monarchy to the tune of over a £100 million a year, I’d say doing her duty is pretty much the least we ought to expect.

Still, at least she and her family laid on plenty of the kind of distraction Freedland talks about. Not least with Harry and Meghan. She was initially welcomed with enthusiasm. Beautiful and a wonderful demonstration of how diversity is becoming anchored in British life, right up to the royalty. Until the racism started to come out, as well as the media persecution of the kind that had literally driven Harry’s mother, Diana, to her death. 

Harry and Meghan are just the latest episode in the long-running soap opera that is the British royal family. To see how long running, we don’t even need to go back to the time of Henry VIII and his six wives (two of whom he sent to the scaffold). A fine example is George IV, one of Queen Victoria’s uncles, entirely untouched by the kind of respectable and straitlaced morality we associate with the notion ‘Victorian’. 

He was a spendthrift, a heavy drinker and a womaniser. At 21, he fell for Mary Fitzherbert, a Catholic widow, and secretly married her, though it was against the law for the spouse of a Catholic to become king, and indeed against the law for the heir to the throne to contract any marriage without the monarch’s consent – which he certainly didn’t have.

Despite an income of over £6million a year, in modern terms, which most of us would probably find it possible to scrape by on, he needed a Parliamentary grant, out of the public purse, of the equivalent of £20 million. In addition, he received nearly £8 million to do up Carlton House, where he lived in London. 

Well, you know how expensive home improvements can be.

Caroline and George
An earlier episode in the soap

Eventually, he gave way to pressure from his father and married Caroline of Brunswick. This was possible because the previous marriage was illegal and therefore not binding. 

George and Caroline detested each other, and both continued to have lovers. For George, that included a long-lasting on-off relationship with Mary Fitzherbert, but it was by no means limited to her.

He and Caroline lived apart for years. She moved to Italy, living and travelling extensively with a servant, Bartolomeo Pergami. Few were in any doubt that he was her lover. There was even a rumour that she’d had an illegitimate child.

Like most husbands who’ve behaved badly themselves, George took a dim view of his wife’s alleged misdemeanours. He set up a commission to investigate her alleged adultery. The investigation concluded there was ‘no foundation’ to the rumours against her, but still he curtailed her access to their daughter Princess Charlotte.

That princess proved as self-willed as her father. She refused to marry the husband he’d found for her, instead choosing the man who later – much later – would become King Leopold of the Belgians. But then she died while giving birth to a stillborn son. That piece of devastating news only reached her mother from a passing visitor, as George hadn’t felt it necessary to tell her. 

When George IV mounted the throne after the death of George III, he decided that what he really, really wanted, more than anything, was to divorce his Queen. He demanded that parliament pass a Pains and Penalties Bill that would annul the marriage and strip her of the title of Queen. There was a public outcry over this suggestion. Eight hundred petitions were raised in her support, with over a million signatures between them. 

Even so, shocking evidence of adultery was submitted to the House of Lords for the debate on the bill, which became in effect a trial of the Queen. The Lords passed the bill, but such was the support for Caroline in the country that it was never even submitted to the Commons, since there was no prospect of its passing there. 

Meanwhile, Caroline decided that she rather liked the idea of being Queen. So she came back to England to claim what she saw as her own. This led to a lamentable scene, fully worthy of the finest traditions of soap opera, where she tried to get into Westminster Hall, where guests were gathering before the coronation ceremony. She was kept out by soldiers with fixed bayonets until a senior official slammed the door shut in her face.

With a wonderful sense of timing, wholly in keeping with the melodramatic character of the whole episode, she died just three weeks later. 

A few months earlier, the French emperor Napoleon, against whom Britain fought a long and bloody war, had died. The king was told “Sir, your bitterest enemy is dead”. 

“Is she, by God!” he replied.

The British public loved Caroline. Just like they loved Diana. Just like they would love Meghan. But with Caroline, as with Meghan, the love evaporated quickly.

It soon emerged that after the King’s extraordinary behaviour in excluding her from his coronation, she had accepted a government offer of £50,000 a year (close to £6 million today) to leave the country permanently. Many of her former fans decided that she was just another hypocritical money-grubber after all. So they went off her.

But, boy, they’d got their money’s worth in the meantime. Loving her. Going off the king. Going off her. Who could want more from a soap?

Like the Diana story. Like the Harry and Meghan story. The show just goes on.

And on. 

When it's positive to be negative

“Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative” says the old song. And don’t we always have a friend who comes around, if we’re feeling low, attempting to cheer us up by telling us to stay positive? Ah, for the days when that was good advice. 

Like so many things, Covid has changed all that, hasn’t it? 

Danielle and I both had colds in the last couple of weeks. Mine came first, so it sounds like I passed it on to her. And that wasn’t nice of me, since I didn’t get too bad – short of energy and with a bunged-up nose (what the Spanish, among whom we live, call ‘constipado’, not at all to be confused with the English ‘constipated’). 

Poor Danielle, on the other hand, was truly laid low, with headaches, a sore throat, a terrible cough as well as all the ‘constipado’-ness. Why, she even ran a temperature and had to take to her bed, which was particularly unfortunate since we were visiting our grandkids at the time and it cut down the time she could spend with them.

As she was feeling just as bad after we got home, she decided she might be suffering from something a little less benign than a mere cold. We could hardly believe that it might be Covid, after having escaped infection throughout the height of the pandemic, and having had a further vaccination – our fourth – just at the end of November. But we took tests and, sadly, in both cases the result was the opposite of what we’d hoped for.

Yep. Our Covid tests had accentuated the positive. Which, far from eliminating the negative, let it in with all the force of a major irritation.

The bug: it’s negative when it’s positive

As so often when one receives bad news, my first reaction was denial. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” I thought. “I feel just fine”.

Old friends, not seen for years, were due to turn up from France the very next day. Surely they could come anyway? After all, feeling this well, how coud I possibly be transmitting a disease? 

But then saner thoughts (saner though negative) prevailed. It would be no act of friendship to renew our acquaintance by passing a Covid infection on to them. We wrote to warn them and they, sensibly, decided to postpone their visit. That’s despite having already checked in for their flight the next day.

Fortunately, they were able at little cost to rebook for January. If we can stay infection-free then, I’ll be happy to re-accentuate the positive after all. Which I suppose would be a celebration of the negative test status.

We’d arranged various things for our visitors. That all had to be undone. The lunch in our favourite local restaurant had to be cancelled, and the friends who were going to join us there put off. We had to pull out of the flamenco concert for which we’d booked four tickets, and find four friends who could take the tickets instead of us (fortunately not something that proved too difficult). And our exasperation was only deepened when the heavy rain that had been forecast for the time our visitors were due to be with us failed to materialise, and we had some glorious weather which would have made their visit all the more enjoyable.

Instead we sat around at home isolating ourselves or, at most, going for walks in the woods with our dogs, since social distancing there’s pretty easy: you can walk kilometres without getting within ten metres of anyone else.

And, of course, we kept testing ourselves. After all, I felt fine and Danielle was clearly on the mend too. The symptoms had been relatively slight, especially for me, and hadn’t lasted long. I reckon that’s down to the way the bug has evolved, making it less nasty these days, though I suspect having four vaccine shots helped too. 

Our recovery made it feel bizarre to have to behave as though quarantined when there seemed to be nothing the matter with us. But the grim two-line display that kept appearing on the test strip told us we just had to put up with our isolation.

Until finally it didn’t. We both got tests that showed us clear. We could return to normal life. Which was a relief, even though it deepened our frustration: we were infection-free once more, at a time when our friends would still have been with us, had they been able to stick to their planned visit.

Oh, well. At least we were negative at last.

Which meant we could be positive again.

Russian thoughts on Russian failures

Remember that lightning campaign that was going to lead to the fall of Kyiv and give Russia control of Ukraine in three days? Well, we’re heading towards 300 days with no sign of victory yet. Indeed, the unstoppable Russian Army has been not just stopped – repeatedly – but pushed back again and again.

Extraordinary, isn’t it?

Deserted and captured Russian tanks
Russian 'special military operation' in Ukraine, 2022

It struck me that it would be interesting to find out what the poor benighted soldiers at the bottom of the Russian army think of their experiences. This blog is, of course, entirely dedicated to public service, and it’s in that spirit that I here record some perceptive remarks, by Russian soldiers, on their misfortunes in combat.

Let’s start with one soldier’s comments on how the ranks of the army behaved as they crossed into foreign territory during the offensive phase of an operation:

We did not think of anything, we knew nothing. We let our commanders think for us and did what they told us.

Just what we pictured, right? Individual soldiers had little idea of what they were doing. Or even of where they were. Let alone of why. 

When they were forced back onto the defensive, you won’t be surprised to learn that all sorts of questions about their supposedly powerful army came bubbling to the surface. Here’s another young officer’s remarks:

The 10th and 11th divisions attacked the enemy’s left flank … The enemy put forward 6,000 riflemen – only 6,000 against 30,000 – and we retreated, having lost about 6,000 brave men. And we had to retreat, because half our troops had no artillery owing to the roads being impassable, and – God knows why – there were no rifle battalions. Terrible slaughter! It will weigh heavy on the souls of many people! Lord, forgive them. The news of this action has produced a sensation. I’ve seen old men who wept aloud… Many political truths will emerge and evolve in the present difficult days for Russia. 

Impassable roads. Lack of appropriate weaponry. Soldiers unable to stand up to an enemy attack. Oh, yes. Just what the Western Press has been saying too.

And what about that reference to the political truths that will emerge? Doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing to set hearts trembling in the Kremlin? To shake the throne of tyrants?

That same officer later had the opportunity to meet some wounded enemy soldiers and was struck by the difference between their attitude and that of the Russians. In fact, he paints such a flattering picture of the other side that it’s hard not to think it’s a tad overstated. Still, these are his words, and he was there:

Every soldier is proud of his position and respects himself, for he feels himself to be an effective spring in the army machine. Good weapons and the skill to use them, youth, and general ideas about politics and the arts give them an awareness of their own worth. With us, stupid foot and arms drills, useless weapons, oppression, age, lack of education, and bad food and keep destroy the men’s last spark of pride, and even give them too high an opinion of the enemy.

He didn’t just write acerbic comments in articles or letters home, he also raised his concerns with the authorities back in Moscow:

My conscience and sense of justice forbid me to keep silent in the face of the evil being openly perpetrated before me, causing the deaths of millions and sapping our strength and undermining our country’s honour… We have no army, we have a horde of slaves cowed by discipline, ordered about by thieves and slave traders. This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland – words that have been so much misused! – nor valour, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, on the one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption.

“Hold on!” you may be saying now, “what’s that reference to the Tsar?”

Well, of course, he might have been referring to Tsar Vladimir III, which would be a far more appropriate title for the man who likes to impersonate the President of a Republic, Vladimir Putin. But I’ll come clean and admit my subterfuge. I’m not really an intrepid war correspondent who’s been out amongst Russian troops in Ukraine, collecting their views.

No, the tsar in question was Nicholas I. The comments I’ve been quoting don’t come from Putin’s wittily named ‘special military operation’ of 2022, but from the Crimean War of 1853-1856. I found them in a highly useful study, the historian Orlando Figes’s Crimea. 

The first quotation was from Teofil Klemm who served with the Russian army as it invaded, not Ukraine, but the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, in the area where the Danube reaches the Black Sea, in what is now Romania. 

A Turkish counter-attack forcing back Russian troops
Russian siege of Silistria, 1854

The remaining quotations are from a Second Lieutenant, a rank from which he was never promoted, doubtless because he was so outspoken in his criticisms of the Russian Army. Not that he or we ought to complain about his lack of a military career. He had far greater and more valuable success, as one of the world’s outstanding novelists, penning in particular War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

He was Leo Tolstoy.

What makes these criticisms striking is that they apply so powerfully to the current Russian Army, as well as that army nearly 170 years ago. It is run by incompetent, brutal and dishonest officers, commanding poorly educated men, cowed by pitiless discipline and oppressed into silencing any thought about what they are doing. Together they form an unsurprisingly mediocre fighting force, serving a cause about which they know little and understand less.

That’s not all. Tolstoy talks about the useless armaments. The Russian infantryman of his day was armed with a long-outdated weapon, the musket. His French or British enemy used a rifle instead of a musket, giving him several times the range, accuracy and effectiveness. Thousands of Russians would be mowed down long before they were close enough to have any hope of doing the enemy any harm at all. 

Today, the imbalance of weaponry is once again a key factor in Russian failure.

The most striking parallel between the two wars is, however, that in 1812, just over three decades before the Crimean War, the Russian Army had destroyed the colossal Grande Armée with which Napoleon had marched on Moscow. That had made the defeat of Napoleonic France inevitable. Curiously, though unsurprisingly, the Western powers had been immensely grateful to the Russians for using their huge force that way, while at the same time more than a little terrified that they had such force available to them.

Less than seventy years ago, Russia, in the form of the Soviet Union, had crushed Hitler’s attempt to overrun its territory. That made the Nazis’ eventual defeat inevitable. And, once more, the Western powers were both immensely grateful to the Russians for that use of their force and a lot more than a little terrified that they had such force available to them.

Doesn’t history repeat itself?

There is, however, another lesson to learn from that parallel. Russia’s military power is massive and impressive when it’s used to save its homeland. It showed that when it fought Napoleon and when it fought Hitler.

When it launches its own invasion, however, whether in Moldavia and Wallachia, or in Ukraine, and finds itself fighting well-armed opposition, it’s woefully inadequate.

If anyone ever learned any lessons from history, that, I suggest, is one that whichever Tsar is occupying the Kremlin at any time would do well to learn. He'd be doing himself one hell of a favour. And the rest of the world too.

I didn't expect the Spanish inspection

It was that time at last. For over three years, I’d been able to avoid thinking about it. But now it was upon me, unavoidable, irreversible, unstoppable.

Our car had been registered for the first in November 2018. Here we were in November 2022. Under Spanish law, it had to undergo its Technical Vehicle Inspection (ITV) and there was no way to duck that duty.

At first, I thought I’d done well, even got ahead of the game. When the letter showed up (yep, snailmail) telling me that the car had to go to the ITV before the end of the month, I smiled with self-satisfaction. I’d already been online (yes! Some of these things are available online these days) and booked in for an inspection.

Sadly, my self-satisfaction was premature and unjustified. It was only on the day of the appointment itself that I realised that, despite having a huge wad of papers for the car, I was missing one crucial document. I didn’t have a certificate for the car issued by the ITV.

But could they really expect one? After all, I was taking the car in for its first inspection. How could I have a certificate before getting it inspected? It was time to leave, so I chose to assume the requirement for the certificate was wrong, or at least incorrectly applied to a car that had not yet had an inspection.

It turns out I was the one who’d got it wrong.

“Where’s the ITV certificate?” the receptionist asked me. 

She was polite about it – I’d specifically chosen that ITV office in the hope that they’d be a little kinder towards a foreigner and non-native speaker of Spanish than the one closer to us, where I’d had an unpleasant experience on a different matter – but, polite or not, she was firm. My explanation that I didn’t have the certificate and maybe never had, cut no ice at all.

“Every car in Spain is issued with one. Otherwise, it isn’t authorised to be driven on Spanish roads.”

How could I get one?

“You have to contact the DGT.”

That’s the Directorate General of Transport. My heart sank. Another bureaucracy? How long would that take?

“Can they issue one at once?”

She shrugged.

“I think they might,” she said, with a total lack of confidence which inspired absolutely no confidence in me. 

A department of the Spanish state that would see me immediately without an appointment? And that would issue the necessary document at once? About as likely as a British Prime Minister announcing that the country got it wrong about Brexit and doing the sensible thing of requesting readmission to the EU on whatever conditions the other members set.

“Do I need a new appointment with you?” I asked.

She smiled, which was pleasant and confirmed I’d been right to choose this office over the other one.

“If you get back anytime today, we’ll do the inspection.”

Back home I went. Danielle went through all our papers looking for the wretched certificate, unsuccesffully. I went online to see what if anything the DGT offered as a possible solution. And that’s when things started to look up.

Well, look up slowly. Very slowly. I clicked on the button for ‘issue a new copy of the ITV certificate”. It asked me for a username and password.

That meant going to the clever and ostensibly secure system I use to store passwords (God knows what I’ll do if it ever gets hacked). Armed with the username and password, back I went and typed them in.

“Your password is out of date. Please create a new one,” the system told me. I’m not sure it actually said ‘please’.

I went through the password change function and discovered that I needed the ‘activation code’. Fortunately, I had a record of that too, also in my secure repository of passwords and the like. Back there I went and found the code. I typed it in, not without apprehension: what if they said that it too was now out of date?

It turns out it wasn’t. I created a new, secure and totally unmemorable password. Instead of logging me in straight away, however, the system then took me back to the login page, so I entered my (memorable) username and my (unmemorable) new password. I was in.

And what did I learn? With the app ‘miDGT’ (‘myDGT’) I could download a copy of my ITV certificate anytime I wanted.

Over to my phone I went. I found the app and downloaded it. It also wanted a username and password. “No problem,” I thought, “I can use my memorable username and my nice, new unmemorable password”.

Of course, that meant looking up the password again, but I did that and typed it in.

“Incorrect access data,” I was told. Peremptorily, I thought. I tried several times, but without success. I then tried the old, tired password, but that didn’t work either.

So I created the second new password of the day.

That worked.

I downloaded the certificate and printed out a copy, in case the ITV person wanted a hard copy.

Back I went to the office.

She did indeed prefer the hard copy.

“But,” she said, “where’s the white sheet that goes with the certificate?”

I showed her my phone (before I got out of the car, I’d logged in again, against just this eventuality). She looked at various functions offered by “miDGT”. None provided what she wanted.

“Look,” I pointed out, “both the app and the printed versions of the certificate include a QR code. Maybe that would give you what you want?”

“Maybe it would,” she agreed, “if we had a QR reader.” 

Ah, well. The DGT and the ITV are related but separate branches of government. No reason to suppose that just because one of them starts using QR codes, the other will be able to read them.

I didn’t say that, though. It occurred to me that it might not be tactful. And not being tactful was, I reckoned, a sure way of not getting the cooperation I wanted.

I was right.

“Hold on,” she said. 

Choirs of angels began to sing in my mind. When a Spanish bureaucrat tells you to hold on, it means they have a potential solution in mind. If they didn’t, they’d just send you away.

Indeed, she had a solution. After tapping away at her computer keyboard, she printed out a copy of the form she needed, to go with the certificate. I paid my fee. And, at last, the process was under way.

It still took an hour – 45 minutes sitting in a queue, fifteen minutes for the actual inspection – but now I’m the proud possessor of a windscreen sticker saying that our car is OK for another twelve months.

The car. With its ITV sticker. A badge of pride.
Which proved less easy to obtain than I might have hoped

Imagine my relief.

At least next time, I’ll have a better idea of what to do. Plus, I’ve had further confirmation of the fact that Spain is moving firmly into the twenty-first century. The bureaucracy is getting web-enabled. 

And it works almost smoothly.

Grandparenting: bikes and meals and stories

One of the benefits of grandparenting is that it gives you the chance to learn some of things you never mastered as a parent.

I’m at the grandkids’ home as I write this. And, as always, there’ve been plenty of learning experiences for me. 

For instance, there’s the extent to which kids like rituals. Elliott and I established a new one in my first three days here. Every evening when it comes to time for bed, he grabs one of my fingers, and leads me towards the stairs. Then I jump him up the stairs, two at a time, with him making a little grunt of pleasure at each jump.

It's not as though he expects me to do anything once we get up there. He’s living proof that often it isn’t the destination that matters, it’s the journey. And, boy, he enjoys that journey.

Having said all that, he didn’t want any of it last night. A healthy attitude towards ritual, I feel. Do it when it feels right, but don’t let it dominate you.

He also seems to appreciate my cooking. As, I’m glad to say, does his big sister, Matilda. That may not be unrelated to the fact that I tend to cook simple things that are easy to prepare, and likely to appeal to a child’s taste. Like spaghetti. 

Elliott and Matilda enjoying Granddad's fine cuisine

What’s best about a child enjoying a meal is that their behaviour leaves you in no doubt of their appreciation. And I have the photos to prove it. 

They both continue to make stunning progress with their bikes, now their biggest source of outdoor amusement. It’s a joy watching them getting so much pleasure from them. As long as you’re not alone, that is. I soon discovered that being the only adult with the two of them on bikes is a recipe for a heart attack. 

There’s always one that rides off in front, while the other decides that it’s really, really important to take a look at something a long way behind. That’s usually a shop where chocolate might be bought, if it’s Matilda. With Elliott, it can be something far simpler but a lot odder. He likes to find a place with two or three steps in front of it. Picture the entrance to a house, say. No one, he seems to believe, knows what true happiness is until they’ve pushed their bike up three steps. 

“It’s a huge effort,” he seems to be saying, “but, boy, it’s worth it to get to the top.”

Of course, that only means that he has to get back down again. It seems, however, that this is fun too. Now I can understand it if there is, say, a short ramp next to the steps, down which he can slide. And, indeed, he will always take the ramp if there is one. But it doesn’t matter if there isn’t. Struggling back down, supporting the weight of the bike, is almost as satisfying as struggling up.

It seems a weird pastime but, hey, mountaineering’s no different really, is it? Just the same thing on another scale.

He makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s suggestion that you shouldn’t do to others what you would have them do unto you. Their tastes may be different. In this instance, at least, Elliott’s tastes and mine differ significantly.

That’s not always the case. Elliott has become a keen fan of the Cars films. And I freely confess that I get a sight more pleasure watching them for the n-th time (where n is a large number) than I do from practically any other show or film I’ve been obliged to rewatch that often as part of my grandfatherly existence.

But back to the bikes. Having one grandkid on a chocolate hunt or a three-step climb, while the other bikes off into the distance, is a real problem, especially since the ‘distance’ inevitably involves reaching a street at some stage. With cars. That one has to be stopped at the kerb, while the one hanging around at the back, has to be spurred into movement. That requires me to be in two places at the same time, a trick I still haven’t mastered. 

Matilda and Elliott setting a metaphor for life
Going round and round at speed and getting nowhere
Uncle Michael filming the whole for posterity

The moral is to maintain a one-to-one adult to kid ratio if the kids are on bikes.

Talking about tricks I have or haven’t mastered brings me back to what I said at the beginning, about learning as a grandparent what I never learned as a parent.

My Dad was excellent at inventing stories for my brother and me. They were long, rambling and wholly engrossing. The protagonists were always the three of us. We were forever getting into scrapes, generally by launching ourselves into massively ingenious criminal endeavours, which always ended up being less ingenious than they seemed at first, leaving the three of us in jail. From which we would, of course, escape. There was never an ending, which meant we could go right on next time from where we’d got to the time before.

The stories were terribly unfair to my brother. It was always him who got into the most laughable scrapes that left him complaining, “why is it always me?” while the two of us chuckled at his discomfiture. It always amazed me that my father would do that, because there was no question of his preferring me to my brother, and certainly my brother always remained hugely attached to him.

Anyway, I never managed to invent stories to amuse my boys the way he amused us. I just read them books. However, since one of those books was The Lord of the Rings, I can assure you this wasn’t an easy option.

With Matilda, I decided it was time to start making up stories. When she asked for a bedtime book the other day, and had trouble choosing one, I started telling her a great story – I thought – about how she had gone back a long, long way in time, to visit the dinosaurs. She had carefully avoided falling into the claws of a Tyrannosaurus, and instead had established a friendship with a Diplodocus (if the two species don’t belong to the same era, please don’t bother to point it out. After all, that’s hardly the least plausible part of this story).

Matilda (in my account) ended up taking a trip around the prehistoric world on the back of her friendly Diplodocus and even saw a Tyrannosaurus from a distance, in perfect safety, since the Diplodocus was far too big for the predator to attack it.

You can see that this was a different style of story from my Dad’s. It even had an ending, when Matilda heard her father calling her home to go to bed, said goodbye to the Diplodocus and headed back. Different from his kind of stories but, I fondly believed, a success all the same, judging by the way she immediately came to sit next to me when I started, and sat with her eyes as wide as she could get them while it lasted.

Alas. I had been fooled by appearances. As soon as her Dad told her it was time for bed, she complained.

“I want a book!”

“You’ve had a story,” he replied.

“I don’t want a story!” she objected, “I want a book!”

I had to get out of the room while he read her a book (a shorter one than Lord of the Rings).

Oh, well. You learn more from your failures than from your successes, and I suppose that’s as true in storytelling as in any endeavour. And at least my apprenticeship has got under way at last.

Though, judging by Matilda’s reaction, I’m still far from reaching a point that would have made my Dad proud. 

Postscript 

Matilda and Elliott’s Dad, Nicky, tells me I’m talking nonsense.

“Of course you invented stories for us,” he assures me. “Stories in which we were characters, where you tried to put us in situations that were embarrassing for us.”

Oh, well. I have no memory of that. And I reckon my story, here, is better for forgetting it.

Good news for once. With a little bad in its slipstream

Good news never seems to come untarnished, does it? There’s always some accompanying bad news to take the sheen off a bit.

Still, my feeling is that while there is some good news around, let’s celebrate it. It doesn’t matter that it’s not unalloyed. It’s just so welcome after such a long time of depressing events.

They’ve mostly taken the form of moves towards ugly autocratic regimes in country after country, toxic in themselves and desperate for the future of the planet, as they generally deny that anything’s going wrong with it. We’ve had the re-election of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. We’re witnessing the rising power of the far right in France. And most recently there’s been the actual formation of a government of the extremist right in Italy. 

All very depressing.

That’s why it’s been such a joy to see a few authoritarians getting a bloody nose recently. Bolsonaro defeated in Brazil. Putin’s army forced to abandon the Ukrainian city of Kherson. And now the US electorate burying Donald Trump. 

The American mid-term elections weren’t just a balm to the soul because of the right’s failure to deliver the tsunami it had promised. Or threatened. It was immensely satisfying above all for the way Trump-endorsed candidates, or any candidate who upheld Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, generally underperformed expectations. And the loss of reproductive rights, because of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, worked against anyone associated with him, since it was his appointees that made that happen. The faithful stuck with him, but they’re losing numbers, while in the meantime, independents turned out against him.

Being endorsed by Trump seemed like a sure road to electoral success in the not-so-distant past, but at these elections it turned into a millstone, costing candidates votes, and in many cases victories that looked all but in the bag.

Rob Jesmer, a former Republican strategist, commented that, “it's not a question of whether it was a negative, it's a question of how negative it was”.

This kind of conversion of a vote-winner into a vote-loser is by no means unprecedented. It has even happened in Britain in recent years. Twice.

Yesterday's men; Corbyn, Johnson, Trump
Vote winners who turned into vote losers

The first time was on the left. Jeremy Corbyn, from the hard left, was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015. An inspirational figure, he seemed at first to be a major electoral asset but, in 2019, he took Labour to its worst defeat since 1932.

The man who beat him, the Conservatives’ Boris Johnson, had the same experience. After leading his Party to an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons in 2019, his unethical behaviour and blatant lying punctured his balloon, until his own party finally ditched him earlier this year, as the only hope of mending its electoral chances. Vote winner to vote loser, just like Corbyn and Trump.

All of them men of the extremes. None able to keep the support of moderates.

But, as I said, good news doesn’t come unqualified. While it looks as though Trump has been struck a fatal blow by his underwhelming performance, the elections were clearly not won by the Democrats. Doing less badly than expected, even a lot less badly, isn’t the same as winning. The House of Representatives is slipping from their grasp, even while they take pleasure from retaining control of the Senate.

If there has been a clear winner, alongside Trump as a clear loser, it has been in the state they both call home. In Florida, Ron DeSantis romped home in his bid to retain the governorship, drawing Republican candidates on his coattails to unprecedented success across the state. He emerges from the election greatly strengthened in his own bid for the presidency and, while he’s at least as right wing as Trump, he’s less of a buffoon, which makes him more dangerous.

I just hope that he’s going to have trouble winning support for his particularly extreme brand of politics outside his state. What’s more, Trump has rounded on him, giving him one of his trademark nicknames, though rather a clunky one, Ron DeSanctimonious: even his touch in inventing nicknames seems to have abandoned him. It’s just possible that the two of them will tear each other apart, undermining the credibility of both and handing the next presidential election to the Democrats.

Still, that may be too optimistic. The right has done the left a favour in these mid-terms, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be as helpful in the run for the presidency. Besides, Democrats would have to find a candidate people can believe in, which there’s little sign of now.

Oh, well. Let’s wait and see. After all, as the Hungarian and Italian elections showed, electorates have trouble learning lessons. Take Britain, again. The Conservatives were elected to power in 2010, on a promise to bring debt down and wipe out deficits in government spending. The price would be some years of austerity, but they claimed the prize was worth the suffering. 

Twelve years on, debt has grown and there’s no sign of a balanced budget anytime soon. The Conservatives even elected a leader, Liz Truss, who in the shortest time in office of any Prime Minister in history, cost the British economy a further £30 billion. Meanwhile, austerity has torn the public services apart, particularly the National Health Service, buckling under the load on it and with its nurses about to strike over their appalling, and deteriorating, pay and conditions. 

And what’s the government promising? Why, more austerity again.

Fool me once, they say, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. As Conservative poll ratings tick up again, it looks as though many British voters – with luck, a minority – plan to vote for them again, allowing themselves to be fooled twice, and without an ounce of shame.

See what I mean? We’re beginning to get some good news. But always with a nasty streak of bad news close behind it.

Grandparenting again: words and silences

The grandkids have been back. And with plenty of progress with which to dazzle their grandparents, not least this one. Above all because most of it was in the area of language, and I’m particularly keen on how we use words.

Matilda and Elliott enjoying a picnic in the woods

Let’s start with Elliott, who reached eighteen months while he was with us. I once had to contend with the mockery of a couple of sceptics, whose blushes I’ll spare by not naming them here, though his grandmother and mother know who I mean. They used to laugh when I suggested that Elliott had the makings of a strong silent type.

“What do you mean?” they scoffed, “can’t you hear the noise he makes?”

Well, that was true enough. He certainly wasn’t backward in making his voice heard. And it’s equally true that our family has been notably short of strong silent types in the past: my stepson, who shares my forename, David, but not my inability to stop talking, is the only one I can think of. But that only means it’s time for another.

Elliott’s behaviour this time fully vindicated me. Strong he certainly was. Bravely he kept pushing his balance bike along (they are without pedals, which help kids learn how to move around on a bike, and how to keep their balance, in the hope that they can skip the training-wheel stage later). Despite pushing himself along so far and so long, he didn’t lack energy and strength to go clambering up and down things in the playground where we eventually turned up.

The indefatigable cyclist
Elliott on his bike in the woods

And with strength came silence. In fact, at first he barely said anything. That may have been in part because he was sucking on a dummy (US trans: pacifier) which does rather limit speech (it would certainly limit mine), but even after he’d taken it out, he kept his verbal communication to the necessary minimum. Little cries of interest or annoyance, depending on whether he approved or disapproved of what I was doing, but interspersed with the occasional word – his vocabulary’s growing, though the word I remember him using most was ‘car’. He likes cars and has a generous disposition to share the pleasure with me, so he likes to point to any that go past, or indeed that we go past when they’re parked, in case I missed them.

But there was never a wasted word. Classic behaviour of the strong silent type. He’d demonstrated both strength and silence.

Things were different with Matilda, now well into her fourth year. She’s really getting places now with language. Two of them, what’s more. Good, fluent sentences too. She will, like most kids, refer to herself in the third person – “Tilly wants….”, “Tilly is…”, but that’s rare. Mostly she’s mastered the vertical pronoun. “I want…,” she’ll say, and quite often, “I don’t want…”

She’s also reached a stage I remember from my own childhood. This is the discovery of the word “why?”. What I like about her use of it is that she seems to be earnestly trying to learn from the reply, which she often repeats in part (the key part).

“Don’t put the chair there,” I might say.

“Why?” she might ask, a perfectly reasonable request, in my view.

“Because it might fall over.”

“It might fall over,” she’ll repeat. Apparently absorbing the lesson. And not just in appearance, I hope, but in reality, too.

As I said, she’s progressing in two languages. Her Spanish has been coming along a treat since she started ‘big school’ – kindergarten – having left behind the nursery school Elliott still attends. Her mastery of the language only became apparent to me when I took her to the same playground I’d visited before with Elliott. There, a big girl – Sofía, who was five and told me so, even using the English word, since she’d heard Matilda and me talking – decided she wanted to play with Matilda. That led to a conversation at length and at speed in Spanish.

I was most impressed. Especially when Matilda responded to my suggestion that we head home. Usually she’s very good at deciding which language to use with which adult, and she clearly has me categorised under ‘Anglo’, but on this occasion, her firm and unambiguous response to my gentle English suggestion, came out in Spanish (maybe because of the conversation with Sofía):

“No quiero ir a casa.”

I was impressed by the use of “quiero”, the right form of the verb to want, in the first person of the present tense – so correctly meaning “I want” or, in this case, “I don’t want”. And “ir a casa” is precisely “to go home”, so she’d heard the words in English but had no trouble responding in Spanish.

Of course, the mere fact that she could make her wishes so clearly known was no surprise. That had been the case long before she used much language, just as it is with strong, silent Elliott, words or no words. 

Incidentally, only minutes afterwards – it may have been no coincidence that we heard a bell ring in the meantime – Matilda announced to me, in English, “it’s late”. It turned out that this meant that we were, after all, going home, as became clear by her picking up her bike and clearing off while I tore around at speed picking up the other belongings and racing after her before she could put herself in harm’s way, on a cycle track separated only by a kerb from the road (fortunately, nothing had appeared that would have had Elliott calling out ‘car’).

The trouble with mastering language is that words can also be used to slander or denounce. And, I’m sorry to have to announce, Matilda has learned both. 

One of my favourite actions with the grandkids is to attack them with loud roaring noises and pretend to bite them. They both seem to enjoy this and react with gales of laughter. 

Now I know that seems silly, but it’s hurtful to say so. Matilda, however, does.

“Granddad’s silly,” she says. Sometimes she goes so far as to say “very silly”.

I like the use of the word ‘granddad’ by the way, though I do slightly miss her earlier name for me, ‘Dad-dad’. But ‘silly’? It’s odd that I don’t find it offensive. Possibly because it’s true. More likely because it’s Matilda saying it.  

The charm of Matilda
Offering her silly granddad a flower

Even worse was the moment when I gave her two little chocolate buttons.

She knows that’s not allowed, and I hoped it would be our little secret. But she immediately, with her most charming style, told her mother and grandmother.

“Granddad gave me chocolates.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. Two pieces.”

Language is great. But, boy, it marks the end of keeping things quiet, doesn’t it? 

Ah, well, I suppose the just confirms that nothing in life is an unmixed blessing. That’s just as true of the kids’ communication skills as it is of anything else. But at least those developing skills provide a lot of fun.

What the Tories get right

It’s another record for the British Conservative Party! 

The Conservatives, or Tories as we call them, more or less affectionately according to our standpoint, have stolen another march on Labour, electing themselves as their leader and UK Prime Minister, a man of Indian extraction. The first one. You may like or dislike Rishi Sunak, but there’s no denying that it’s quite an achievement, in a country still not comfortable with multiculturalism (especially, ironically enough, among Tories).

Nor is it the first such march the Tories have stolen over Labour. They gave the country its first ever woman Prime Minister, in Margaret Thatcher. And then they twisted the knife by providing us with the second, Theresa May. And then really put the boot in by giving us the third, Liz Truss, though perhaps Conservatives won’t want to talk much about her.

A commentator I heard recently went still further, pointing out that the Conservatives gave Britain its first Jewish Prime Minister. First and only, so far. Benjamin Disraeli was technically Christian, but only by conversion. He was born Jewish. 

Dizzy, Maggie, Rishi: Tory firsts

That’s an honourable record for a Party not known for its commitment to diversity.

Some of the details, though, aren’t quite as honourable as the overall picture. I mean, take the case of Disraeli. The Conservative Party split over customs duties on imported grain, in 1846. A majority wanted to preserve the duties, but the minority included nearly all the leaders, in particular all those with ministerial experience. The other lot may have been larger, but it was desperately short of men of talent or proven track record.

Disraeli was one of the few who stood out from the crowd. He was an excellent speaker, a hard worker, a man who mastered his subject and out-debated most of his opponents. And yet, and yet, when the party needed a leader in the House of Commons – the overall leader, Lord Stanley, later to be known as the Earl of Derby, was in the House of Lords – Disraeli was passed over for appointment.

Not once. Not twice. Three times.

And even then, Stanley decided to hand the role of Commons leader, usually held by one man, to a committee. Disraeli would be just one of three members, alongside two nonentities.

It would take three years before the committee fell apart and Disraeli finally won the appointment for himself. And then another seventeen, ending with the death of Derby, before he won the overall leadership of the party and became Prime Minister himself. The Tories gave Britain its first ever Jewish Prime Minister, but not with what you might call enthusiasm.

Even Maggie Thatcher wasn’t exactly a shoo-in. She stood for the Conservative leadership following a general election defeat for the incumbent leader and Prime Minister, Edward Heath – his third defeat out of the four elections he fought. Many of his fellow Conservative MPs were fed up with his record, but there was no obvious successor, so most expected him to be re-elected leader despite his defeats. Most of the Conservative-leaning press backed him as, according to polls, did the members of the party around the country.

Thatcher’s campaign was brilliantly managed by her fellow Tory MP Airey Neave.

She was little known, an Education Secretary who’d hardly covered herself in glory in the post and had little to qualify her for the top job. What Neave did was talk to groups of disaffected MPs who really had no time for Heath anymore, and suggest that, even if they weren’t keen on Thatcher, they should vote for her to force Heath out and precipitate a second ballot in which they could choose a candidate they really wanted.

That worked. She beat Heath, not by enough votes to be elected at once, but enough to force Heath out and trigger a second ballot, which several other candidates then joined. The front runner was a party heavyweight, Willie Whitelaw. Many expected him to walk the election, but many had expected Heath to walk the previous one.

What had happened in between was that Thatcher had picked up momentum. Now that she’d beaten Heath, Airey Neave could go back to the MPs he’d canvassed before, but this time to say that she was no longer a rank outsider, only up to collecting protest votes. Now she was looking like a winner.

And win she did. The rest is history. The history of a woman who’s a saint for some, something else for others. The first woman in the post.

Again, though, it wasn’t a pushover. It took effort. It took some clever footwork, under the direction of a fine campaign strategist.

Even Sunak’s arrival in the top job wasn’t straightforward. It took him two bites at the cherry. He had a go in the summer but was cheated of the prize when the Tory Party membership chose Liz Truss in preference to him. There are suspicions that, though solidly right wing himself, he wasn’t quite right wing enough to satisfy the appetite for raw flesh of an electorate – Conservative Party members – that likes to think of itself as one of the most sophisticated in the world but is in reality just one of the most reactionary.

Of course, there’s also a suspicion that these characters preferred Truss for her rather lighter skin colour than Sunak’s.

It turned out to be a disastrous decision. Truss tanked the economy in a matter of days. She had to go, and this time the Parliamentary Conservative Party managed to arrange things so that the members around the country wouldn’t get another chance to spoil the show. Sunak was the only candidate backed by his fellow MPs, and was therefore elected unopposed. He was in, but at his second time of asking.

Truss did at least give the Tories another record. Previously, the shortest tenure of any British Prime Minister had been that of George Canning in the late 1820s, who clocked up just 119 days. But he died in office. His immediate successor, Viscount Goderich, set the record for the shortest tenure of a Prime Minister who survived his term. He hated being Prime Minister, and wept when he went to see the king to stand down, or to be dismissed as he surely would have been had he not resigned. The king had to offer him a handkerchief to dry his tears.

Goderich managed 144 days.

Truss didn’t just beat those two, she crushed their records, lasting just just 50 days as Prime Minister.

Ah, well. It seems the Conservatives are at least good at setting records (both Canning and Goderich were Tories too, by the way). And it also seems that the records aren’t always quite as commendable as they appear at first sight. Still, they represent significant achievements.

Let’s hope Labour can start to emulate them soon. Maybe the current leader, Keir Starmer, could hand over to a woman or to someone from an ethnic minority after his own long, successful term in office.

That would be fine new record to admire. And just great for the country.

Halloween and the McDonald's effect

So that’s another Halloween behind us. 

It always strikes me as a bit of a bizarre celebration. Though, to be fair, the way Christians celebrate most feast days seems pretty bizarre these days. I mean, just think about it.

Easter is supposed to mark the execution and resurrection of Christ, as the redeemer of mankind. I’m not quite sure who feels redeemed these days, given the state of the world. In any case I’m not sure how that has anything to do with chocolate eggs, rabbits or chickens.

If Easter is about the death (the temporary death) of Christ, Christmas is about his birth. You’d think that might be a matter of some reverence and solemnity. Nothing to do with a large laughing fellow in a red suit and a white beard, or with eating and drinking far too much.

So it is with All Saints Day, or All Hallows as it’s sometimes called. 

Many religions go in for ancestor worship. The closest Christianity gets to it is All Hallows, when the idea is to remember those who went before us. In most Catholic countries, many do indeed pop down to the cemetery to do a bit of remembering.

But the night before, the eve of All Hallows or Halloween, which might be the moment to start getting into the mood for the quiet reflection of the day after, has evolved (or possibly declined) into a rather strange pantomime when kids, not all of them all that young, go wandering the streets dressed up to look faintly worrying, and go demanding unhealthy foods from strangers’ houses. What’s more, they do it with the time-honoured phrase ‘trick or treat’, suggesting that a failure to comply with the request could have undesirable consequences. It may just be me, but doesn’t that sound terribly like extortion with threats? 

This curious custom comes to us from the US, and it seems to be working its way into the culture of more and more countries where it was previously foreign. I suppose that’s what come of having the biggest economy in the world and the most powerful armed forces. People tend to follow your lead.

Terrifying Halloween Figures on Cruz’s terrace

To be honest, it can be rather more attractive than the ‘trick or treat’ menace suggests. Cruz, a nearly-neighbour of ours (that’s not to be confused with ‘near neighbour’: this one lives several streets away) in our little district on the outskirts of Valencia in Spain, likes to do up her garden and front terrace for Halloween (she does the same for Christmas, though with different decorations, of course). She then invites anyone who’s so inclined to come in and look around. 

We had our grandkids with us, so visiting her house went down a treat (no trick) with them.

Matilda displaying the appropriate level
of terror before a Halloween horror

It seemed a kind, generous and open-hearted way of marking this strangely alien event. I congratulated her on the initiative. She explained that she did it purely for the fun of it and because the children enjoy it.

Cruz with some of her frightening figures

The funny thing is that the Valencia region – formerly a kingdom in its own right – has its own tradition of faintly frightening figures, and it’s a little sad to see them being swamped by the diminutive ghosts and luminous skeletons of Halloween.

The Kingdom was ruled by Arabs until the 13th century. Then, in 1238, it was ‘liberated’ by King James I of Aragon. The quotation marks around ‘liberated’ are there because it’s not at all clear that there was much of a liberation. It may just have been the replacement of one ruler by another, and the newcomer may have been rather less sophisticated than the one he kicked out.

Indeed, the man who many regard as Spain’s finest poet and playwright of all time, Federico García Lorca, was murdered by followers of General Franco in 1936, his body disposed of in an unmarked grave still not discovered today, for having said that the worst thing that happened to his native Andalusia was to have the Moors kicked out of it. No doubt his cause wasn’t helped by the fact that he was gay, not an inclination likely to win him friends in Franco’s movement, but the comment about the Arabs seems to have been the immediate cause of their being irritated with him. 

Fatally irritated. 

That’s despite his probably being right.

So one of the figures used to frighten kids in the Valencia region is ‘the Moor Mussa’, presented as a former Arab king of ‘Balansiya’ as Valencia was known when it was Moorish, seeking revenge on the dastardly Christians by preying on their children. Only the badly-behaved ones, however.  

The Moor Mussa
I wonder whether the smile makes him
more or less frightening?

This reminds me of the Latin-American friend who told me that in her childhood, adults would try to frighten her with the warning that “el pirate Draque” would come for her if she didn’t mend her ways. I love it that England’s revered sea captain Sir Francis Drake is seen in South America as a bogeyman.

The Butoni might have upset me as a child

The Valencian horde of monsters contains many more characters. There’s the Butoni who comes for kids who leave their meals unfinisehd, cry too much or refuse to sleep (thank God I wasn’t brought up in Valencia: I wouldn’t have lasted a week). 

Quarantamaula: oh wow! A shapechanger
Particularly fiendish

Quarantamaula is still worse, because he’s a shape changer. He’ll take the form of whatever animal the child he’s after finds most frightening. That way he can use the fear he inspires to get the behaviour he (or, I suppose, anyone trying to look after a disobedient kid) requires.

And there’s a whole host of others, as my good friend Ana Cervera, always an invaluable source of information about my adopted city, assures me.

A host of scarekids...
Thanks, Ana, for sending the picture through

The tradition, since the middle ages, is that on the night of 31 October to 1 November, Valencians come together to tell each other horror stories with these creatures as protagonists.

Now, I’m not claiming that they’re particularly wonderful. Or that they aren’t. They seem a tad more frightening than most Halloween figures, but I leave it to you to judge whether that’s a good or a bad thing. As for making a bogeyman of an Arab, does that feel more than a little politically incorrect? But I do like the idea that different regions have different traditions, and it seems a pity that they should be lost in a tedious homogenisation across the world. Especially as there’s nothing specifically appealing about the Halloween celebrations that we all seem to be switching to.

Even if they’re interpreted through the warm heart and kindly intentions of a generous person like our nearly-neighbour Cruz.

Oh well. The US is top dog, at least for now, and preferable to some of the other possible candidates. Xi’s China? Putin’s Russia? Spare us. I’ll put up with Halloween rather than have them dictating my way of life, even at the cost of giving up on the variety of local traditions.

And even if it does mean putting up with the dull conformity of what I think of as the McDonald’s effect…