Playgrounds on my mind. Or the strange experience of vicarious grandparenting

Elliott: young but already a connoisseur
of the finer things, like playgrounds

Remote grandparenting is a new experience to me. Perhaps I should say vicarious grandparenting. Because Danielle is in the hills above Madrid visiting Sheena and Nicky and our grandchildren (OK, OK, their children), Matilda and Elliott, while I stay at home.

Elliott and Matilda keeping Danielle entertained

This is because we’re doing a week a month each, in alternate months. Next month it’s my turn. For now, I just get updates from Danielle.

It seems, for instance, that Matilda’s hand’s getting better. And why did it need to get better? She got over-excited at the idea of helping making some porridge and received a rather harsh application of the lesson we all have to learn as children, that hot pots hurt.

Much more fun to drink from your hand at a public fountain
Note that she's wisely not using her poor bandaged right hand

Elliott too is getting better, but from a lot less painful experience. That’s the thing about schools: they’re perfect infection exchanges for children. Especially young ones who like getting close to each other, if not on top of each other, so if yours has just got over the infection he was suffering from last week, he’s practically bound to be playing with a kid who has a new one to pass on today.

Still, he’s back at school again now. I can never quite get over that. He’s still only ten months old. But in the village where he kindly shares his house with his parents, they start their schooling young. A good way, I reckon, to launch people on that lifelong learning experience that makes existence so enthralling.

Not, of course, that it’s all work and no play. There’s plenty of fun at their school. As Danielle pointed out to me after helping dress them both for carnival celebrations.

Dressed for carnival

School’s also a great way for kids to socialise. The way Danielle describes things, it’s practically impossible now for her to walk past a playground with Matilda without a sudden cry of ‘Lucía!’ or ‘María!’ or some other name. That means a stop at that playground, so that Matilda can try an exciting and entirely novel experience. She may be completely used to playing on all the swings and slides and seesaws of that playground. But they feel totally different when she can play on them with a friend.

And that’s even better when it’s not just a friend but multiple friends who are with her, especially if some of those friends are her uncle, or her ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’.

So what’s the difference between an uncle without quotes and an ‘uncle’ with quotes? I’ve no idea whether Matilda and Elliott will adopt the same convention, but when I was a child all the adults my parents introduced me to were ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’. The nice thing about the ones with quotes is that there are so many more of them. I mean, judge for yourselves: Matilda only has two uncles, and only one of them lives in Madrid. But she has lots of ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’, at least three of whom came to see them a couple of days ago: ‘Uncle’ Jerome, ‘Uncle’ Alfie and ‘Auntie’ Emma.

Which was brilliant, since they revealed a capacity for playing around and making idiots of themselves far beyond anything she could have imagined. In a playground. 

Another intriguing enhancement to the playground delights.

Mum and Dad and Elliott and Matilda
And ‘Uncle’ Alfie

Elliott had just as much fun as she did. As you can see, while ‘Uncle’ Alfie was having trouble maintaining his balance in the middle of the seesaw, Elliott was at one end enjoying the experience with Sheena, my daughter-in-law (OK, OK, his, and Matilda’s, mother), while Matilda was at the other with Nicky, my son (OK, OK, her, and Elliott’s, father).

The rather older kids also enjoyed the playground for themselves, proving that the inner child is always there, whatever your calendar age.

Dad (Nicky), ‘Uncle’ Alfie, ‘Auntie’ Emma and
Uncle Michael, proving that just because you’re
an adult doesn’t mean you have to stop being a kid

Anyway, one way or another, it sounds like a lot of fun is being had by all concerned. Extremely tiring fun – second to parenting, grandparenting is one of the most exhausting of occupations – but a lot of fun all the same. I’m looking forward to my turn next month.

In the meantime, I at least had a remote hug. That was when Matilda, instead of talking to me on a FaceTime call, flung her arms around the phone. That was remote grandparenting at its best.

Apart from that, I keep being reminded of good playground times when I walk past our fine, spanking new one. Which is just sitting here waiting for Matilda and Elliott to come back and enjoy it. “Where have you two got to?” it seems to be saying, “it’s lonely without you.”

Lovely and lonely: our nice, new local playground

I suspect it won’t have too long to wait.

Tribute to Losers

There’s a moment in Jerry Maguire when his ex-fiancée forms two fingers into a letter ‘L’, to tell Maguire just how little she thinks of him. How little, that is, since he became a loser. Because, it seems, that nothing is worse than a loser.

Preston Kelly telling Tom Cruise he’s a loser
in the film Jerry Maguire.

Well, the only trouble with disliking losers is that you end up having to admire winners. They include some pretty unappetising people. Vladimir Putin, say. Or Boris Johnson.

Personally, I prefer the underdog and losers are pretty much by definition underdogs.

Living in Spain has taught me a lot about living with losing. The Spanish lost a lot. Within living memory. 

They set up a Republic in 1931. There was plenty wrong with it but, boy, was it better than the dictatorship that preceded it. And immeasurably better than the far harsher dictatorship that followed.

A group of army officers decided in 1936 to overthrow the Republic. They launched what they hoped would be a coup to bring them to power. What they got instead, to their astonishment, was a three-year civil war. With most of the officers on the side of the rebels, they hadn’t expected the Republican side to put up much of a fight.

The rebels, or nationalists as they liked to be called, were led by Francisco Franco, who held dictatorial power over Spain until his death in 1975. During their uprising, they quickly attracted the support of Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy and Hitler’s Nazis in Germany. That was a huge boost to Franco, since they provided not just soldiers (mostly from Italy) but also tanks, artillery and powerfully equipped and skilfully flown aircraft (mostly from Germany).

The Republic received help, but far less of it, from the Soviet Union. The democracies, notably Britain, France and the United States sat on the sidelines. Instead of helping, they bleated about non-intervention, even though Franco’s supporters were intervening the hell out of the war effort. 

That was a first betrayal of Spanish democracy.

With most of the officers deserting to the other side, the Republic had a problem building a disciplined and effective army. The Republic had to depend on people like Anarchists and Trotskyists who were committed to overthrowing it, from the left, and only fought on its behalf to prevents its overthrow from the right. Not the most reliable of allies…

What’s more, how do you organise an army on Anarchist lines? You can imagine the indiscipline that reigned and the damage that caused.

One organisation, though, had just the discipline needed. That was the Communist Party of Spain, or PCE. It also drew strength from the fact that the only nation helping the Republic at all was run by its political masters, in the Soviet Union.

The most effective units of the army were led and organised by the PCE. Gradually, the sheer necessity of having to depend on them, gave the Communists increasing sway on what happened on the Republican side of the fighting.

And how it used that sway is the second betrayal of democracy in Spain. After all, PCE behaviour was driven by Stalin in Moscow, and he was as committed to democracy as his predecessor, Ivan the Terrible. Besides, just like the Anarchists and Trotskyists, the Communists knew they had a monopoly on the truth, so anyone opposing them was obviously a living lie and deserved to be crushed. 

The Soviet Secret Service came in with the aid from Russia. To give you a sense of how they operated, they tortured to death Andreu Nin, leader of the Spanish Trotskyist POUM, even though it was in the front lines and fighting as hard as anyone for the Republic (one of its soldiers was the English volunteer, George Orwell).

The historian Anthony Beevor argues that the Republicans, with their inferior military resources, should have opted for guerrilla war. Moscow and the PCE were having none of that, and insisted on conventional set-piece battles. Having lost the last of these, the Battle of the Ebro, in 1938, they went on to lose the war in April 1939. Imagine. Had they been able to hang on another five months, i’'s likely that the outbreak of World War 2 would have deprived Franco of some or all of the support he was receiving from Italy and Germany. That would have made the fight more even. But insistence on the impossible task of defeating the Nationalists on the battlefield killed that possibility. 

That was the third betrayal of Spanish democracy.

Hundreds of thousands of anti-Fascists, whether Republican soldiers or civilians, fled Spain for France. There they were interned in what were little more than concentration camps. 

Betrayal number four.

The PCE leaders fled too, some to Mexico, others to Moscow. They decided to leave control of the PCE organisation in France, where many of its members were stuck, to a young woman hopelessly unprepared for the task, a former party typist called Carmen de Pedro. Perhaps they hoped she’d just keep things ticking over through the bad times, which got a lot worse when the Nazis rode their tanks into France. Once the leaders could return safely, they’d simply take back control. 

Betrayal number five.

Enter onto the scene an extraordinary man, highly intelligent, massively ambitious and above all colossally seductive, turning women into lovers and men into devotees. He was Jesús Monzón. He quickly made Carmen de Pedro his lover, and had her willingly release the reins of the PCE into his hands.

He reorganised the PCE in France, turning it into a highly effective fighting force, thousands of whose members joined the French resistance. Then he headed back to Spain and reorganised the Communist Party there, making it a mass clandestine organisation which operated against the dictatorship clean through to the death of Franco and the return of democracy that followed. It did that despite the many members who were tortured, imprisoned or even executed. 

Then in 1944, with German forces in France reeling and heading for defeat at the hands of the Allies and the French resistance with its Spanish fighters, Monzón took a gamble and launched an invasion of Spain. There may have been as many as 7000 resistance fighters involved, moving into the Val d’Aran, the only part of Spain north of the Pyrenees. Monzón had claimed the civilian population would rally to the invaders, and a general strike would spread throughout Spain.

Neither thing happened.

The fighters’ objective was the regional capital of Vielha. Had they captured it, a provisional government might have been formed there, and possibly, just possibly – though it’s a long shot – the Allies, who were winning a war against German and Italian Fascism, might have supported it against Spanish Fascism too. But faced with 50,000 soldiers advancing to destroy them, the Republican soldiers decided they hadn’t the strength to capture Vielha. Within eight days, the invasion was over and the Allies could breathe again, freed of the need to move against Franco, whom they could instead make into a friend for the coming Cold War against the Soviet Union.

The sixth betrayal of Spain.

Finally, the exiled leaders of the PCE returned to France, taking back control of the movement. Had the invasion of Aran been a success, they would doubtless have claimed if for themselves. But it had failed. One of Monzón’s allies was murdered in Spain on the orders of the party leadership. Monzón himself was summoned to answer before the party in Toulouse. He was however arrested by Franco’s police before he could get out of Spain, and that probably saved his life: it seems that the PCE leadership planned to murder him too, as soon as he reached France. 

Monzón was the black sheep of a strongly right-wing and wealthy family. It was able to prevent his execution. Even so, he spent fourteen years in Franco’s prisons. While there, funnily enough, he remarried by proxy his first wife. They’d divorced years previously and she, indeed, had since married and divorced a second husband. After his release, he joined her in Mexico. They spent some time there and in Venezuela, and then moved back to Spain where, of all things, he became a Professor of Business Studies.

Monzón in his prison days

As far as he was concerned, he was still a communist, and eventually died one. But he no longer had a party card. Because the party tried him, in absentia, in France, found him guilty of treason to the PCE, and expelled him. It was an extraordinary charge to level at the man who built its organisation, the very organisation that the old leaders had taken back and were now using against him.

Some of the testimony against him was provided by his ex-lover and ex-leader of the party in France, Carmen de Pedro. The leadership, who’d decision to have her run the organisation was a major act of irresponsible misjudgement, subjected her to a barrage of psychological torture – and I’m sure, had they got her to Moscow it wouldn't have been psychological only – until she broke down, confessed to whatever they wanted from her, and implicated Monzón in whatever charge they wanted to bring against him.

The seventh and final betrayal in this cheerful little story.

Well, I don’t know if I would have had the guts to stand by Monzón, working in the clandestine organisation inside, but against, a Fascist dictatorship. Or whether I’d have it in me to stand up on his behalf when his own party turned against him. I was never put to that test and it’s perfectly possible I’d have failed it.

All I can say is that from my distant, and safe, vantage point I find him a strangely attractive figure. Overall, at any rate, despite the many reprehensible moments in his past. But what human has none? So not just my sympathy but my admiration goes to one of history’s great losers.

It wasn’t just him, of course. There were millions of losers in Spain, including people who’d backed Franco and found later he delivered none of what he’d promised them. A bit like the victims of Britain’s Brexiters.

I realise we’re all supposed to admire winners. But I find them often pretty toxic. I prefer to line up with their victims, the losers.

They can be a great deal more attractive.

Electrified by mystery and mystified by electricity

A sense of the mystery the world is a fine thing, isn’t it?

It’s most common in children. That’s why they’re always asking how things happen and, even more disconcertingly, why. Questions it isn’t always easy to answer. 

To be honest, I find plenty of things highly mysterious myself. I’m not sure whether that’s because, at my advanced age, I’m entering a second childhood, or simply because I’ve done nothing about my monumental ignorance in many areas. Either way, it leaves me wondering what’s going on whenever something I find inexplicable happens in my life.

One of these is power cuts.

We seem to be getting rather more of these than I would normally expect. Certainly a lot more than we used to get in England. I don’t know whether that’s to do with being in Spain, though I have to say that my sons who live in Madrid or nearby don’t seem to have the same problems. It may just be to do with the particular neighbourhood where we live. That’s La Cañada, in the suburbs of Valencia, and it includes some pretty spectacular houses (not ours, I hasten to add). 

The presence around here of some wealthy characters gives the place an unusual character. For instance, we have our own private water company. It’s a cooperative, but still very clearly private and separate from the utility that supplies the city of Valencia. I’m not sure whether that’s supposed to be a sign of privilege or what. To be honest, it seems to me that the only striking feature this arrangement has, is that it leads to frequent cuts to our water supply on the flimsy pretext that, yet again, they have further maintenance or repair work to carry out. On the other hand, and to be fair, they generally reconnect the supply reasonably quickly, leaving me as bemused as ever as to why they had to cut it in the first place.

I’m not sure whether the same kind of arrangement has been made for our electricity supply. I just know that it’s about as reliable as the water. Just the other day, we had three power cuts, none of them long (the first for about three-quarters of an hour, the second and third just for a few minutes), but all of them irritating.

The only good thing about that kind of experience is that it serves as a useful lesson in just how dependent we now are on technology. God forbid that it ever suffers a genuinely catastrophic collapse.

When the power fails, my first reaction is to check our own fusebox. There was a time when we could be pretty sure that our main circuit breaker would have broken the circuit (which does at least suggest that it’s fully understood its function in life). The reason would generally be that we had too many devices taking too much electricity for our rather old wiring, dating from a time when people’s requirements for power were more modest than ours today.

That hasn’t happened for a while, suggesting that we’ve established a better balance between the number of devices we run at any one time and the capacity of the wiring to manage them. But when it was the circuit breaker, it was only a matter of pushing a switch back up, once we’d ensured that we didn’t have too many power-hungry systems running.

This is the start of mystery I was talking about earlier. 

When I discover that the cut isn’t down to anything in the house, but something to do with the electricity company, the image that comes to my mind is of a switch, like mine, which needs to be pushed back up. Only I see it as much larger than my switch, once of those old-fashioned lever types, which has to be lifted with great care and not a little muscular strength by people with a special understanding of the delicacy of the task.

How I see our power controlled

Then my knowledge of Valencian customs adds a new dimension to the picture. You see, in my experience, workers in Valencia all seem to share a certain series of habits concerning mealtimes. They have breakfast before they arrive on site, then work until about 11:00, and then head off for what they call ‘almuerzo’. This is generally translated as ‘lunch’ but in Valencia, and even if we’re not in the city of that name, we’re in the province, it’s more like what in England we’d call elevenses (and you’ll have noticed, appropriately timed). They then come back for a couple of hours before heading off again for lunch and maybe even a siesta, before starting work again and going on into the evening.

Now I see the main switch in the power station being the responsibility of two large men, similar to the point that one might almost take them for twins. Now, if the power failure occurs while they’re off for their almuerzo, or worse still if they’re away having lunch and a siesta, why, it could be an hour or more before they get back and grunt and sweat against the resistance that high tension produces (or at least so I imagine) to get the power reconnected.

That would explain why it sometimes takes so long for the power to come back on. Though not why it goes off so often.

It’s perfectly possible that things are nothing like that, of course. Control in the power station may be far more sophisticated with simple little buttons to press. But I find that far less satisfactory as an image of what’s happening. And my image feels much more appealing.

Especially as it leaves so much of the mystery as intact and unexplained as ever. Which, surely, is all the fun of a mystery.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Words, words, words. Just how much do they matter?

The importance of words can be overstated, can’t it? I say that as someone who loves playing with them. But playing means not getting too serious about them.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” claimed the philosopher Wittgenstein. A statement Tom Stoppard, one my favourite playwrights, twisted into “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we are by no means silent”. There are ways of communicating which have little or nothing to do with words.

That’s our theme for today, with a return to my neighbour Nacho’s stories.

Spain, as you probably know, went through a terrible Civil War nearly ninety years ago. Plenty of Spaniards alive today had grandparents who were caught up in that awful conflict, and the deadly consequences that flowed from it. 

One story I heard was of a woman approaching a local businessman, after the war. He’d invested in a number of local businesses, including one for which he needed women  – it was always women – to do sewing work

She was the widow of a fighter for the Republican cause. That was the defeated side, and the winners were the followers of Franco, the dictator for nearly forty years, who was a strong believer in reprisals. A lot of men, and not a few women, were shot. Always in the nicest way, of course: one senior officer who was given charge of a prison full of republicans, liked to announce the names of those to be executed on a particular day, with a long pause between the forename and surname.

“José…” he might say and then let everyone in his audience who had that forename wait in dread for the surname, before finally announcing it.

Franco (hand raised) with his most important ally
Hitler hated Franco, a man he regarded as contemptible
(one of the only issues on which I agree with him)
but his assistance was crucial in getting Franco into power

Families of republicans – of ‘reds’ (‘rojos’) – might not be executed or imprisoned themselves, but they were kept in a state of subjection, often denied employment of any kind, with pressure on potential employers not to take them on.

The businessman seemed prepared to hire the widow. But she didn’t want to take a job on false pretences and be exposed later.

“You know I’m the widow of a rojo?” she asked him.

“Can you sew?” he asked in turn, and when she told him she could, “then you’re hired.”

Some people were above pressure and had a certain generosity that transcended political differences. The latter’s a quality we could do with seeing more of today.

Nacho’s father was from a family that suffered the deprivations the dictatorship heaped on its opponents. But he was clever. Extremely clever. His teachers told his parents that he was so bright that they really had to do whatever they could to help him get into university. And they did, at the cost of great sacrifices.

He became an agronomist. But he couldn’t afford to do the full four-year course that would have given him the title of ‘engineer’. Instead he did just two years and emerged as a ‘perito’, which roughly translates as ‘expert’ and is a less senior grade.

He was given a position in the Valencian region. Now that region has its own language, which its defenders are always keen to point out is not Catalan. And it’s true that the accent of its speakers is different from those of Catalonia (or so I’m told: I know next to nothing of the language and couldn’t tell). It’s also true that there are words that are different.

Well, it’s also true that Yorkshireman speaks with a different accent from a Cornishman, and probably has a number of different words too. But the language both speak is undoubtedly English. I’m afraid that Valencian and Catalan seem to stand in about the same relationship to each other. But you don’t say that to a keen Valencian speaker unless you want a long argument on the subject, which you’re extremely unlikely to win.

These days, all public servants in the Valencian region have to pass an exam in the language before being appointed. Nacho’s father probably wouldn’t get the job today that he held successfully back then. Because he was living proof that whereof we cannot speak, thereof we are by no means silent.

Nacho’s father was from Madrid. He never learned Valencian. But what he did learn was Valencia. He travelled up and down the region, with its three provinces, visiting farmers on their land and finding out what they did, how they did it and what problems they faced.

He was also completely straight. Many of the engineers expected bribes. Nacho’s father didn’t and never took one. 

The result was that when a farmer turned up in the regional capital, the city of Valencia, and asked the Agriculture ministry for help, he knew what he wanted.

“We can offer you the services of Engineer such-and-such,” an eager young administrator might say.

The farmer would shake his head.

“No,” he’d reply, “I want him.” 

He’d point at Nacho’s father.

“Him? But he’s not even an engineer. And he doesn’t speak Valencian.”

“It doesn’t matter. He understands what I do. And that means we can understand each other.”

See what I mean? It doesn’t always take words. Communication is about understanding, and understanding can go a lot deeper than language.

And I say that even though I enjoy words so much.

Strange Engagement

It’s those curious, weird events, that defy all logic and expectation, that make history most fun. 

Just as resetting those same events in a saner, more realistic context than the myths created about them, makes investigating history so amusing.

It was my father who first told me about the extraordinary moment when French cavalry defeated a Dutch fleet. Yep, you read that right. Dutch ships captured by French horsemen. Though it may make the event slightly less extraordinary when I mention that the Dutch vessels were icebound. The horsemen came across the frozen surface to seize them. 

You can probably imagine the picture that this conjured up in my mind. The gutsy French cavalry charging across the ice at the ships, like Don Quixote against the windmills but to far greater effect. The frantic Dutch sailors trying to depress their guns far enough to defend themselves, and cursing their loss of the freedom of movement that would have allowed them to aim their cannon at their tormentors.

Charles Louis Mozin’s depiction of the
capture of the Dutch fleet by French cavalry
Note the canon firing and the general
sense of battle joined

My father may have been the first to tell me this story, but he was far from the last. Why, I vaguely remember reading it in some kind of ‘educational’ comic for kids, complete with garish picture of icebound ships trying to fire on the charging cavalry. That’s the image that might have stayed with me, were it not for my podcast A History of England.

In the podcast, I’ve now reached the time of the War of the First Coalition, which was the first of the series of wars which pitted Britain and a varying configuration of allies initially against Revolutionary France and then against Napoleon’s Empire. It was as I was reading up this exciting time that I discovered that the truth of this esceptional incident was somewhat more prosaic, but also strangely more intriguing, than the story I’d learned (or imagined).

At the end of this first phase of that series of wars, the French revolutionary army took advantage of a severe winter to march across frozen rivers into the Dutch Republic. French armies had become pretty well unstoppable by this time, so Holland fell, and a new so-called ‘Batavian’ Republic, little more than a puppet of France, was set up on its territory (minus some bits France had carved off for itself).

Not all the Dutch military units had surrendered, however. The French decided to send out detachments to call on the holdouts to fall into line, give up any resistance and accept the authority of the new, pro-French government.

One such expedition was sent to secure the obedience of a naval force of some fourteen ships – possibly fifteen: the accounts I’ve consulted don’t always agree – thought to be near the town of Den Helder. The French forces were under the orders of Brigadier General Jan Willem de Winter. He was Dutch himself and, indeed, a former sailor in the Dutch navy. He’d had the misfortune to back the pro-French Patriot party when it tried to seize power in the Dutch Republic some years earlier and, after the revolt was crushed by the Prussian Army, he’d fled to France where he’d served ever since as a soldier.

When his men turned up, they found that the ships were indeed there. And, what’s more, icebound, so incapable of moving. The hussars – light cavalry – didn’t however charge across which, thinking about it, could have been disastrous – can you imagine iron-shod hooves trying to move fast across ice? Instead a small group, with a few infantrymen to back them, rode out slowly and gingerly to the ships. 

One account I read had the horsemen wrapping their horses’ hooves in fabric first, presumably to stop them skidding around on the ice, like incompetent skaters.

At the ships, a representative was invited cordially aboard. He explained the new authorities were keen to ensure that the ships remained in the service of the Batavian Republic and, above all, that they didn’t try to slip away to Britain to join the Royal Navy.

The most senior officer in the squadron agreed to those terms and the two sides parted without a shot being fired or a soldier – or sailor – being hurt.

Léon Morel-Fatio’s rather more realistic and
significantly less martial view of the Den Helder incident

A couple of weeks later, when the ice thawed, the ships rejoined the main navy, by then Batavian. And, amusingly enough, the Admiral commanding it was none other than Jan Willem De Winter, who’d left his posting as a Brigadier in the French army, to return to his original, naval service and take over the fleet of his nation.

He took it to sea a few months later and tackled the Royal Navy at what we now know as the Battle of Camperdown. A massive and comprehensive victory for the British. Much more violent and a lot less satisfactory than the incident at Den Helder.

The principal of the first College I attended as a student was General Sir John Hackett. I got on well with him even though, as he told me, if the situation arose, we would either of us have been more than ready to sign the death warrant of the other, for the good of society and perhaps even for our own good. He was a firm upholder of the system in Britain at the time, and I was in my far-left phase.

A former Major General, he once told me that in his view the best kind of military engagement was one where not a shot was fired. 

“The trick,” he explained, “is to bring up such overwhelming force that the other side simply retreats without fighting. The moment you open fire, you’ve already lost.”

I suppose he would have approved warmly the engagement at Den Helder. No shots. No casualties. A victory gained with no pain.

Less glorious than my imaginary picture of that incident. But a lot more satisfactory too, I’d say. Certainly compared with what happened so soon after at Camperdown.

Oven baked the Alsatian way and washed down as the king might

Here we are in Spain, but I’m glad to say that neither Danielle nor I have completely lost our connections to our roots. In her case, they go deep into the rich soil of Alsace, in far eastern France though, on more than one occasion in history, others have disputed that claim and argued with some force – literally – that it is in fact in Western Germany.

One of the great culinary traditions of Alsace, at least the equal of the better-known sauerkraut, is the Bäckeofe. Anyone familiar with the German language might wonder about the origins of that word. Might Alsace not be just a bit German after all, whatever the French might claim?

Literally, the word could be translated as ‘oven bake’. A bit of a tautology. But not perhaps a bad description for a dish whose main characteristic is that it is slow-cooked in an oven.

The principal ingredients of the most traditional version are lamb and beef, mixed with potatoes, carrots and leeks. There’s garlic (hey, whatever the Germans may say, it’s a French dish) and white wine (ditto), and the seasoning includes cloves and bay leaves and thyme.

Nearly ready for the oven
Note the dough ring being put in place

I’ve seen a recipe that adds pork, which strikes me as a bit over the top, and in any case runs sharply counter to the deep origins of the dish (see below).

The whole thing is cooked for ages in the oven. And when Danielle made one the other day, our guests were delighted with the results, as were we.

The roots of the tradition go back to a standard practice in relatively poor communities, way back in time. That’s the ones that were wealthy enough to have meat, but not so wealthy as to be prepared to waste any ingredients. Whatever you hadn’t used in other dishes, you threw in a great pot at the end of the week and turned into stew. 

The Jewish version of this was called ‘Hamin’.

But Jews weren’t supposed to cook between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday. That’s the Sabbath or Shabbat. 

Besides, in the middle ages and renaissance, owning a large oven was a bit of a luxury and certainly not within the means of everyone.

Someone who did have an oven was the village baker. So the local Jews would prepare their dish and take it down to him before sundown on Friday. He’d bake his bread next morning and when that was done, but the oven was still hot, he’d pop in the pots that had been brought to him. They’d slow cook away for the rest of Shabbat and be ready and delicious by the evening.

The Christians quickly caught on to this idea. After all, they were just as likely not to own ovens. And they too had a religious obligation over the weekend, even if theirs came on Sundays. So they started taking their pots down to the baker’s too, before going to Mass.

They may have been the ones who introduced the slightly excessive, and certainly not kosher, variant, of adding pork.

They’d collect their dishes on the way home from church and have a fine, filling and highly satisfying meal.

Ready to cook in its traditional Alsatian pot
and with the dough seal in place

A final touch was that it was a bit risky to leave a pot of your food, turning into an excellent meal, unsupervised with the baker. What was to stop him or his mates helping themselves to a spoonful or two?

So another tradition was born: a ring of dough would be set around the top of stewing pot, and the cover then pressed down into it. That would form a seal during the cooking. If you turned up and that seal hadn’t been broken, at least you knew no one had nicked any of your fine Bäckeofe.

Well demolished
Note the broken dough seal

We served ours with a wine we particularly enjoyed, a red called ‘Dehesas del Rey’, or ‘The King’s Meadows’. I guess it’s more likely to come from a vineyard than a meadow but, hey, we have to allow some artistic licence in the labelling of wines.

I’d love to be able to say that we found this wine by tracking down some lonely vineyard in a remote corner of Spain, which produces just 800 bottle a year of the stuff. I’m afraid that isn’t how it happened. I saw the wine in a local supermarket and thought, “that’s about the price I’d expect for a wine I’d enjoy, and it comes from a region I trust, so let’s see what it’s like”. 

In other words, there was nothing clever or intelligently guided by our discovery of the wine. It was pure serendipity. But that didn’t stop us enyoing it.

The experience did remind me of a story of a friend of mine. We’ve got a few minutes, so let me tell it here.

I’ll call him ‘Frank’, since that’s his name. He lived and worked for many years in Hong Kong. While there, he and his wife discovered a Spanish restaurant which served a wine they decided they very much liked. It was expensive – the equivalent of 40 euros a bottle.

They now live in Valencia, in Spain, our local city, which is how we came to meet. 

On an early restaurant visit after they moved here, they were delighted to discover the same wine on the menu, and found it as good as they had in Hong Kong. It added to their pleasure that it was a lot cheaper: just 20 euros a bottle. 

That set Frank thinking. Might he not be able to buy the wine himself? He checked out the supermarkets and found it in one of them – at just eight euros a bottle.

But you don’t just buy wines in restaurants or shops. As often as not you can go direct to the winery and buy it there. Which he did.

At four euros a bottle.

So just ten per cent of what he was paying in the Hong Kong restaurant. 

Which says something about the premium different distributors add to the cost of the products they sell. To say nothing of the financial impact of geography. 

And on that note, let me just raise my glass and wish you all the best of health. 

Your very good health
from the King's Meadows

Lies, damned lies, and the Tory Party

Benjamin Disraeli said that there were lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Well, fortunately statistics can sometimes expose a lie. The British Prime Minister, currently mired in scandal, has fallen back on a variety of defences. One is to point to one or two achievements of his government (there haven’t been many, after all).

One he particularly likes to point to is Britain’s anti-Covid vaccine rollout. It got going impressively fast. Faster than anyone else in Europe.

The trouble is, and this is very much this Prime Minister’s way, the claim isn’t wholly true. After all, getting a quick start in a race is only useful if you can build on it to get across the finishing line faster than anyone else. In other words, it isn’t the start of the race that matters, but the end.

Imagine that Britain was one of eight finalists in the middle-distance Olympic Covid-vaccination race. Here’s how those eight European nations fared:

Final positions in the Covid-vaccination race

Johnson may have got Britain off the blocks fastest. Finishing seventh, however, is hardly impressive.  But then, that’s typical of the man – spinning the truth, or downright lying, to make his inadequate performance look better.

He makes me think of another man in his party, from the time of my childhood.

Men behaving dishonourably: Profumo (left) and Johnson
One ended up doing the honourable thing
Guess which didn't

John Profumo had the ideal upbringing for a member of the British elite. He attended one of the most expensive schools and then Oxford University. There he was a member of the Bullingdon, the rich boys’ club that regards vandalism as a legitimate form of entertainment. They will, for instance, trash a restaurant, confident that the Daddy of one or other of the boys would come round the next day with his cheque book to cover the damage. Perfect training for people destined to believe that success is something to which they’re entitled, rather than something to work for. Also that rules are for the little people – the rest of us – and not for them, who only make them.

It's no accident that both David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015, and Boris Johnson, Prime Minister from 2019 to, possibly, sometime quite soon, are also former members of the same club.

In the 1930s, Profumo had an affair with a German woman who, it was later established, had some kind of working relationship with the inteligence service of her home country. As we’ll see, that was a bit of a model for Profumo’s later life.

He had a distinguished career in the Second World War, at one point rising to the rank of Brigadier General (starting as a Second Lieutenant, so a spectacular rise). When he became a Member of Parliament, inevitably for the Conservative Party, he had a similarly rapid ascent, peaking at Secretary of State for War. There was already talk of him as a future leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister.

Then, unfortunately, he had an affair with the model Christine Keeler. Perhaps I should have put some quotes around ‘model’. 

That might have been something he could weather. But it turned out she’d been having a simultaneous affair with the military Attaché at the Soviet Embassy. That, too, Profumo might have survived, but then he denied the affair in Parliament. The lie was eventually unmasked and that was the end. It was unforgivable to lie to the House of Commons. Profumo had behaved dishonourably and he’d been caught. He retained enough residual honour to resign.

Now let’s compare that with our present Prime Minister and alumnus of the Bullingdon Club.

Parties held at 10 Downing Street and other government locations have been investigated for whether they breached Covid lockdown regulations. Johnson attended some of them and is accused of knowing about others. Some of the gatherings are now the subject of a police enquiry into potentially criminal behaviour.

There are two issues here. One is that a lot of people followed the regulations, often at great personal cost. I won’t describe the resentment Johnson’s behaviour therefore caused. That’s been done far more effectively ty the leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer, in what must be one of the most powerful speeches he has given. He told the House of Commons:

Over the last two years, the British public have been asked to make the most heart-wrenching sacrifices, a collective trauma, endured by all, enjoyed by none. Funerals have been missed, dying relatives unvisited, every family has been marked by what we’ve been through. And revelations about the Prime Minister’s behaviour have forced us all to rethink and relive those darkest moments. Many have been overcome by rage, by grief and even guilt. Guilt that because they stuck to the law, they did not see their parents one last time. Guilt that because they didn’t bend the rules, their children went months without seeing friends. Guilt that because they did as they were asked, they didn’t go and visit lonely relatives.

But people shouldn’t feel guilty. They should feel pride in themselves and their country, because by abiding by those rules, they’ve saved the lives of people they will probably never meet. They’ve shown the deep public spirit and the love and respect for others that has always characterised this nation at its best. Our national story about Covid is one of a people that stood up when they were tested. But that will be forever tainted by the behaviour of this Conservative Prime Minister. By routinely breaking the rules he set, the Prime Minister took us all for fools, he held people’s sacrifice in contempt, he showed himself unfit for office.

The second issue is how Johnson responded to the revelations. On three occasions, he categorically stated to the House of Commons that the gatherings either had not taken place or had not breached the lockdown regulations. For the record, that was at Prime Minister’s Questions, once on 1 December and twice on 8 December.

Profumo lied once to the House of Commons. When caught, he resigned. Has Johnson lied? It looks increasingly as though he deliberately misled the House, a resigning offence in the Ministerial code. In theory, he’s bound by that code, but then in theory he was also bound by the Covid regulations he’d made. 

Will he resign? I wouldn’t count on it. He’s likely to go full Bullingdon, living by the standards of a club that acts as finishing school for those who view themselves as entitled to grab what they want, and that rules apply to others, not to them. 

Profumo worked for the rest of his career for the charity Toynbee Hall, devoted to the elimination of poverty. He worked for it unpaid – he could because he had inherited wealth, but at least he chose to use that privilege in a way that helped others. Many feel that he rehabilitated himself by that behaviour.

Can you imagine Johnson ever doing anything as commendable or altruistic?