A grandparent played by his granddaughter

Well, I’m at the end of another grandparenting week. It was fun, and a lot easier than before. Perhaps I’m getting better at it, perhaps the grandkids are. 

Maybe both.

In any case, I said ‘easier’. That’s not the same as ‘easy’. It’s still a tricky business.

Let’s start with Matilda. She’s still nearly half a year away from her third birthday. That means she’s still two, the age, I now realise, that marks the real transition between baby and young child. ‘Terrible twos’ the English say, and now I understand more clearly the special reason why.

Matilda setting new fashion trends
What are curtains for, if you don’t wear them?

Way back in the sixteenth century, the French poet Joachim du Bellay described the man who would, in his view, fulfil his ideal of a poet in the French language.

“The man who will truly be the poet I am seeking in our language, will fill me with indignation, calm, delight, pain, love, hate, admiration, astonishment, in short, will hold the reins of my emotions, turning me here and there as he wishes.”

I’ve got news for him. To do all those things, you don’t need a poet of the French language. You just need a clever two-year old who’s trying out her emotional muscles. And Matilda doesn’t need the French language, or any other, to do it. Like a great many children being brought up in a bilingual environment – English at home and Spanish at school – it’s taking her a little longer for her to get going fully in either, though that barely limits her capacity to communicate her views and desires.

One of the desires that dominated this week was watching a show called CocoMelon. Apparently, it’s the world’s second most watched YouTube channel. It sometimes felt like that status owed quite a bit to Matilda.

And when it comes, Du-Bellay-like, to playing on her grandfather’s emotions as though they were her personal instrument, she’s emerging as an expert. You want poetry? There’s pure poetry in the power she deploys and how she deploys it. 

She can push me away one moment and the next climb on my knees for a cuddle. She can demand that I take her out for a walk one day, leading me with complete determination to some of her favourite places – the bakery where they give her free breadsticks, the supermarket where she gets a kick out of riding the lift from street level down to that of the main entrance (pressing the buttons herself, of course) – while the next day she snatches her coat out of my hand to get her Mum to help her on with it instead. But then, in a new contrast, I even got a kiss, leaving me completely confused.

An aperitivo after our walk
Note the free breadsticks

What I’m not confused about is who’s in charge. She’s a dominant figure even though she barely reaches my waist. It’s impressive how she pulls that off.

Matilda taking charge of our walk

Dealing with her brother Elliott, who’s now less than a month from his first birthday (and a rather higher one of his grandmother’s, on the same day – yes, he’s the kid who managed to time his birth to share her birthday). He’s taken to saying ‘dad-dad-dad-dad”. Matilda used to call me “dad-dad”, though these days she opts more decidedly for granddad. Now, instead, it’s Elliott I can sometimes convince myself is saying “dad-dad”, though in reality I suspect I’m out by a generation. 

Anyway, Elliott hasn’t yet reached the stage where he starts playing on my emotions like a skilled harpist with a yielding instrument. That’s probably still over a year away. No more than that, however, if Matilda’s example’s anything to go by.

What big eyes you have, Elliott
All the better for surveying the world

For now, he’s still in that glorious state where he’s mostly either coolly observing the world around him or beaming his smile on anyone who cares to make eye contact with him. It makes taking him for walks, with him sat in the buggy facing me, a particularly rewarding experience, as we regularly smile at each other.

Of course, he does also cry from time to time. Mostly it’s if something unfortunate happens, like a clash of heads with his sister, or an attempt on my part to put him in his buggy for the return trip from school, if I’ve failed to make clear that he will receive a piece of bread the very moment he’s settled. Frankly, I’m astonished anyway by his satisfaction with a piece of dry bread, a part of the charming character that makes him (relatively) low maintenance.

That ‘relatively’ is because of the other circumstance that causes him to cry, and that’s when people try to inflict on him the wholly unreasonable demand that he sleep when he chooses to be awake. It’s frustrating that people can’t grasp that 2:00 in the morning is a perfectly good time for a little human interaction, and frustration is something he expresses in loud objections. 

The other thing that makes him cry, but only briefly, I’m glad to say, is a consequence of one area of remarkable progress he’s achieved. He was walking before he hit ten months, and he’s running now. This can sometimes lead to mishaps, like when he went down onto his nose on a gravelly basketball court. That left him with some fine scars, which reminded me of my own childhood, during which whole years passed – perhaps from age six to age eleven – when my knees and elbows were never free of scabs.

Elliott charms with his smile when we make eye contact
Note the traces of his mishap on the basketball court

Elliott doesn’t cry for long when this kind of thing happens. He’s far too busy preparing to run towards his next objective. Life’s clearly too short for crying over spilled milk. Or grazed noses.

Just for the record, Elliott didn’t score a basket while suffering his accident. But then it probably didn’t help that he lacks the strength to shoot the ball. Or, quite frankly, even to lift it.

More worrying, his mother couldn’t put the ball in the hoop either. She doesn’t have his excuse. Though, to be honest, I wasn’t there so wasn’t put to the test – I doubt I’d have done any better.

Anyway, it was an exciting week. Mostly with those two, so in a good way. Not so hot when I had to spend a night in hospital in the middle of the stay, but I’m glad to say that I was picking them up from school again within hours of being discharged from my bed of boredom. 

I’m looking forward to my next visit. To see what new abilities Elliott has developed. And how Matilda has further honed her skill at playing on my emotions as though she were deftly plucking a stringed instrument.

Even Elliott accepts there are times for a sleep
And a granddad's chest's no bad place for one

When the grim reaper tinkled my bell

ECG. Or possibly EKG depending on your taste

The tinkling of the mortality bell is an eerie sound. Neither frightening nor consoling. But certainly sobering.

For me, it came while I was thinking about something that occupies us all these days. That’s the devastating war being wreaked by Russia on an Eastern European country. What worried me most was that I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of that country. 

I tried some other thoughts. My consternation deepened. I couldn’t remember the name of the great city in the east of the country being heroically defended against the invaders, among others by a friend of mine, whose name I’d forgotten too.  

I started testing my mind, like a man with a back injury testing his legs – “knees OK, ankles OK, but can I feel my toes?” 

There was information I could recall. I remembered Germany and its capital Berlin. But the name of the little town on the Rhine that had served as capital during the Cold War? Blowed if I could remember its name. 

I grabbed my phone and ran a search on ‘Russia at war’. There were lots of results, unsurprisingly, but what was this place that kept being mentioned? Ukraine? Never heard of it. 

Had I?

Could Russia have somehow got itself sucked into another war?

And yet, and yet, I had a nasty feeling that ‘Ukraine’ wasn’t really an unfamiliar word. Instead, it felt as though a great hole had opened in my mind and sucked in my previous familiarity with it. 

Which, obviously, was worrying.

But things were worse than I imagined. Talking a few minutes later with the daughter-in-law whose home near Madrid I was visiting on grandparenting duty, I realised that while I knew who she was, I couldn’t remember her name. Then my son started talking and, though I could recognise the sounds as English, I had no idea what he was saying. That wasn’t unprecedented, but this time I couldn't even understand the language. And when it was my turn, to speak, the horror deepened: I was producing words, but the wrong words, in the wrong order.

I’ve often been told I talk nonsense, but usually I’m accused of being incoherent in my thinking, rather than in my sentences. This time they were incomprehensible.

I still had enough presence of mind left to guess what was happening. You know the Stroke mnemonic? ‘FAST’? Face-Arms-Speech-Telephone? I checked my face in a mirror, I knew my speech wasn’t slurred, and my limbs were fine. So everything was fine on the first three letters, and I didn’t feel the need to use the fourth to call an ambulance. Which was just as well, since I’m not sure I could have made myself understood, especially in Spanish.

Then things began to improve. The words started to flow back. This daughter-in-law was Sheena. The son was Nicky. Bonn was the previous capital of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was indeed in Ukraine that the Russian Army was doing so much harm. Kharkiv was one of the cities putting up a valiant resistance. Among the many civilians helping that effort was my friend Alex.

The word ‘stroke’ was receding from my mind. In its place, though, I was thinking ‘Transient Ischemic Attack’ or ‘mini-stroke’. As the name implies, it passes leaving little or no permanent damage. But it is a powerful warning. 

One not to be ignored, my wife told me, in stern terms, when I phoned her later. The idea of several hours in a hospital emergency department, into the small hours of the morning, didn’t appeal. But she persuaded me that it wasn’t something I could sensibly avoid. So Nicky took me.

Badge of (hospital) confinement

I really can’t fault the Spanish public health service. The hospital gave me an ECG (which they annoyingly insisted on Americanising as EKG), a blood test, and a CAT scan. And then they flung still more resources at me. The Emergency doctor called me in and explained that she’d spoken to a neurologist and his view was that my symptoms strongly suggested a TIA. Not that they said ‘TIA’. This being Spain, they called it an AIT, for Ataque Isquémico Transitorio.

The upshot was that they kept me in overnight. The four-hour wait I’d dreaded turned into a fifteen-hour stay.

Stuck in a bed I didn’t want to occupy

I still can’t complain. A neurologist popped in next morning and ordered an ultrasound of my neck, to check the state of my carotid arteries. For good measure, they threw in a PCR Covid test. 

The neurologist popped back. Everything was clear – ECG (OK, OK, if you insist, EKG), CAT Scan, blood work, Ultrasound. He and his boss decided that I’d had indeed suffered a TIA (or AIT, if you prefer) but was at low risk of recurrence. They prescribed medications, including good old aspirin, to reduce the risk still further.

All this work was massively impressive, and I’m hugely grateful. Everywhere I met high professionalism and great dedication. What’s more, in this public hospital, I had nothing to pay.

On the other hand, the process was horrifically boring. I reckon that out of my fifteen hours in hospital, I spent thirteen waiting or, for too short a time, sleeping (boy, hospitals are noisy places). 

Bedside equipment including the monitor

They hooked me up to a monitor and a saline drip. It meant I couldn’t even get out of bed. Which was frustrating. I mean, after all, the transient attack had long since transitioned. It had revealed a long-term condition that needed managing, but right then, as I lay bored in bed, I was fine and there was no good health reason to stop me getting up. 

So I got up. When I couldn’t wait any longer for a toilet, I detached myself from the monitor and the drip and headed down the corridor. 

Now I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent. It really disappoints me when I do something particularly stupid. Especially when I don’t even have the excuse that I was undergoing a dysfunction of the brain at the time, so instead it was all down to dysfunction of the mind.

I mean, those drips are called ‘intravenous’, right? I know that. That means they get stuck into blood vessels. So if you detach one without closing it off, and walk down a corridor, you’re going to leave a trail of blood the whole way. Fortunately, there was a cleaner working nearby, and she kindly agreed to clear up the mess. 

What a mess

That was the last time I got up on my own initiative. The nurse who hooked me back up to everything made that bountifully clear. Even when I went for the ultrasound, a short stroll down the corridors, a porter had to push me there and back in my bed.

But, hey, once you’ve been admitted, that’s it, you’re a patient in a bed, and in a bed you’ll stay, until a doctor says you can leave it. It doesn’t matter if you tell a nurse you’re fine. You have no authority over your inpatient status – or in-a-bed status – and nor does the nurse.

You can imagine the huge relief I felt once I was medically discharged and could get out of bed, officially and with permission. It was almost as good as emerging from the original TIA. 

Free at last

Not that things went back to the way they had been. Something had changed forever. From now on, I’m on medications to avoid a massively disabling attack. More generally, they help me cheat the grim reaper a little while longer. 

Ah, yes. That feels strongly like a premonition of mortality. That little tinkling bell, now ringing a little more insistently. An undoubtedly sobering sound.

At least, in better news, my PCR Covid test came back negative.

Grandparents are parents too

This week I’m granddad again. 

I started taking the kids to school on Monday, and it all went smoothly enough, except when I tried to push the buggy up onto a low kerb. Not low enough, apparently, as the kerb stopped us dead and the shock provoked a sharp reprimand from Matilda, who sits in front, looking forward. Elliott is on the upper level, looking backwards at me, and therefore observer of the author of this incompetence. Matilda’s reproach and Elliott’s look were more than enough to make it clear that my ineptitude was not appreciated.

Matilda goes in front
In case you’re wondering what she’s eating,
cheese is a favourite (for now).
And it has to be Cheddar if she can’t get Comté: 
Her English and French ancestry runs strong

Elliott sits at the back, up high, from where
he keeps an eye on his granddad’s blunders

Anyway, all’s well as ends well, and it ended well enough. We got to school in one piece – well, three pieces, one each – and in good shape to face the day. What’s more, this little dose of grandparenting had one curious by-product: it got me thinking of what came before it. That’s the time before I was a grandparent, and instead did a bit of parenting. 

The thing about kids is that they can be a source of great joy. Note that I didn’t use either of the words ‘constant’ or ‘unalloyed’. There are moments when the joy is temporarily suspended. Quite a few moments. And not always all that temporary.

But let’s start this little trip down photographic memory lane with a picture of one of the boys, Nicky, father of Matilda and Elliott, in 1986 when he was pretty much Matilda’s age. It shows him at his most adorable. Or at any rate least diabolical.

Nicky in a moment of (temporarily) suspended mischief

His brother, Michael, a year and a half older, could be bearable too, at that time, just as long as he was in that same state.

Michael equally angelic, equally briefly

Sadly, this wonderful state of sleep never lasted long. Most memorably, it was interrupted a year later at a particularly early, and particularly painful, time of day. This was the moment they decided to get creative.

Now, creativity is great. Art is wonderful. And there’s no reason, naturally, why fine painters shouldn’t focus their art on a room’s walls. Why, look at how many magnificent murals have graced the history of art.

Diego Rivera self-reflecting: a mural about painting murals

Still, Michael and Nicky’s efforts didn’t entirely match Diego Rivera’s for artistry, though I suspect they must have rivalled him for sheer energy. And for extent. Because, once they’d sneaked the powder paints from the cupboard where we thought we’d hidden them safely, they didn’t stop at the walls. The carpet and the furniture got its fair share of creative passion too.

No comment necessary

Now, if you’re thinking that we must have spent hours clearing all that happen, think again. Very little of the content of their room was recoverable by mere cleaning. Oh, no. We hadn’t planned – or budgeted – for the complete redecoration of the boys’ room. That, though, is what we had to go for.

Ah, that was 1987. A vintage year. In August, we went to lovely Lake Como, in Northern Italy, with these two (David, the eldest of the three, was already on the brink of adulthood and far better at looking after himself). They dressed appropriately for playing near a lake in the Italian summer. Enjoy the sight of the image cultivated by the well-dressed canoeist that season.

Nicky (above) and Michael enjoying the lake near Como

By the autumn, though, they were back to their old ways. We had a day at the seaside in Hastings and, of course, the boys wanted to go in. But this time there was no question of dressing appropriately for the occasion. Dressing appropriately? What’s wrong with the clothes we’re already wearing? Good enough for the land, they’re surely good enough for the sea, aren’t they?

Nicky (left) and Michael enjoying the sea near Hastings
Well, it was an English autumn and far too cold to undress

Ah, well. Prudent parents carry changes of kids’ clothes, and they can be washed (the kids and the clothes). Michael and Nicky were obviously enjoying themselves, and isn’t ensuring that the children are having fun a far more important part of parenthood than teaching them sensible, disciplined behaviour? And doesn’t that apply in spades to grandparenthood?

To those who answer ‘no’, discipline and good sense are vital at any time, I’d just point to some of our most successful men today and ask, did they ever learn those things? I leave you to provide the names – whoever you choose is more than likely to make my point for me.

The boys were three (Nicky) and four and a half (Michael) back then. We clearly have all this to look forward to with delight, or possibly trepidation, in the near future from Matilda and Elliott.

And, Elliott and Matilda, if and when you get to read this, your Dad, Nicky, is the one on the left. Download a copy of the photo and keep it around you. Just for those moments when he tells you to stop misbehaving.

Look how much fun he (and your uncle) got from misbehaving.

Fallas: upsides and downsides of Valencia’s great festival

As I write these words, I can hear a distant rattling that sounds like gunfire, as though I were on the edge of a war zone. 

That feels odd, to the point of inappropriate, at a time when 40 million people in Eastern Europe (less the three million who’ve fled) have seen their country turned into a real war zone. Or perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate, since it provides a constant reminder of those brave people, including friends of mine,  battling to defend the freedom of Ukraine. 

The other sound, as well as this bizarre simulation of small arms fire, and quite frequently heavy artillery (about which more later), is the patter of rain on the roof. The two things are not unrelated. But more about that in a while too.

So, what’s this all about?

Well, we’re in the middle of the great annual festival of the Fallas, in the fine Spanish city of Valencia. A Falla is a large monument, a sculpture, covered with figures known as ninots, which can be human (sometimes satirical, perhaps mocking known political characters – I remember some wonderful Donald Trumps) or fish or animals or whatever. 

Originally, they were built of wood. The story is that the first ones were built by carpenters out of their surplus wood, and then burned in a great festival that saw in the arrival of spring. The burning itself is called the cremà, which I believe just means ‘burning’ (sensibly enough) in the Valencian language. The Catholic Church, always good at taking over old pagan feasts, recovered this one, making the last day, the day of cremà, fall on the feast of St Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters.

These days, with the use of modern materials such as polystyrene, the monuments can be twenty metres tall, with two rows of figures. They can be surprisingly impressive, so that one pleasure of the festival is wandering the streets and being amazed by the sculptures.

Modern materials make tall sculptures possible

The other is to see the people who dress up, often at enormous cost, in traditional costumes and stroll around admiring and being admired.

“No Fallas without a kiss”
Traditionally costumed falleros proving the point

There are also fireworks which can, like all fireworks, be spectacular.

That though is about where the pleasures end. Like most street festivals, this one features packed streets through which it can become impossible to force a way, and which act as a major pole of attraction for pickpockets from across Spain – and, who knows, maybe beyond – for whom this is one of the highlights of the year. It cost me a mobile phone at my first Fallas, though I confess that putting the phone in an outside coat pocket was perhaps not the smartest move I made that day.

Also less than delightful is what the cremà has become since the introduction of modern materials. Using polystyrene may well be a wonderful improvement as far as sculpting is concerned, but when 700 of them go up in flames simultaneously, the result may be spectacular but it’s also toxic. There are moves to ban the use of polystyrene, but they’ll be resisted.

But let’s come back to the theme I announced at the beginning, the production of noise reminiscent of a war zone. Like most people, I enjoy a good fireworks display. The noise of the fireworks exploding is, however, merely a side-effect of the main objective of the event, which is to enjoy the glorious colours. Why, the noise can even be an irritant, a bit like the stone in an olive, or pips in a grape.

One of the traditions of the Fallas, however, is to let off huge numbers of firecrackers. These can be the usual type, producing a noise rather like the distant crackling of small arms – as the great First world War poet put it, the “stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle”. But then there are the far bigger ones, which sound like heavy artillery going off – “the monstrous anger of the guns”, to draw on the word master Owen again.

It can be bad for anyone with a weak heart, or anyone who’s suffered the effect of living in a real war zone. A friend of ours who’d lived through air raids was shocked speechless by one of these crackers going off and told us that, much as she liked Valencia, she could never live in a place with such awful reminders of the worst time in her life. 

People keep telling me that it’s traditional, as though that’s enough to justify it. To me, it’s fireworks without the beauty. In other words, it’s like serving up olive stones without the olives, grape pips without the grapes.

The other thing that’s less than satisfactory about the Falllas is the timing. The middle of March. Not the best time for weather in Valencia.

The region is highly fertile. That means, among other things, that it has plenty of water. The bulk of the rain falls in November and March. But last year, November was dry. We entered the new year with reservoirs reaching dangerously low levels. As we hit March, however, it was as though the memo about dry November finally hit the desk of whoever runs the rain desk for Valencia.

“Whoops,” he seems to have said, “we seem to have screwed up . No water in the autumn. That’s not good. We’d better make up for it now”.

And he – whoever this fictitious character is, I’m sure he’s a man – turned the tap full on. This March seems to have been the wettest in the five we’ve seen here.

A fallero couple
Friendly, pleasant - and sadly a little damp

That hasn’t done much good for the spirit of the Fallas. It hasn’t completely stopped people enjoying themselves. Or prevented some of them turning the place into a mock-war zone. But it has made the whole show rather less of the splendid party it’s intended to be (at least, for those who don’t mind the noise).

Poor guys. I may not like the noise much, and feel delighted that we’ve moved out of the city where we aren’t be kept awake all night by it, but it seems a shame to deny people their fun. And I rather think unking March hasn’t done anyone any favours.

Which, on after two years of pandemic-spoiled Fallas, does seem a little harsh.

Yep. They can get quite elaborate...

Caesar and Putin, on the Ides of March

The Ides of March are come!

Uncanny, right? 
Putin (left) and a reconstruction of Caesar’s face
The resemblance isn’t just physical...

2066 years ago today, a grisly murder took place in the Roman forum. At the feet of the statue of his great enemy Pompey, Julius Caesar, the man who had done so much to make himself autocrat of Rome, was struck down by the daggers of a group of conspirators led by Cassius and Brutus. He was stabbed 23 times.

He’d seized power by force. Obviously, that meant he’d broken the law. But the authority he’d taken meant he could duck any attempt to hold him accountable for his crimes to any court of law. 

In these enlightened days, and with 2000 years of civilisation behind us, none of these things seem likely to happen again. These days, if a man wants to abuse his power, he doesn’t avoid the courts, he just tries to appoint sympathetic judges to them. At least in the US. And then he uses expensive lawyers to browbeat his opponents into submission. 

As for attempts at assassination, a couple of millennia of progress have made it hard to get anywhere near enough to a would-be autocrat to do him any serious harm. Take the example of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 

His background was far more appropriate than Caesar’s for a would-be autocrat. 

The Roman had been cursed with an education and a military career that inculcated values in him which, in a later age, might be called chivalric. So, for instance, both Cassius and Brutus had fought against him in previous civil wars. He decided to act with magnanimity. He let them live and even occupy senior positions in the Roman administration. Where they could prepare the conspiracy that ended his life.

Putin was a middle-ranking secret policeman in the KGB. That taught him the value of beating information out of suspects and bumping them off when he was finished with them. In other words, while he would be the Julius Caesar of Russia, making himself the autocrat, he’d use the methods of Cassius and Brutus to get there, but more successfully: the Roman conspirators were later crushed in war by the heirs of Caesar. Bumping off opponents works far better.

Not of course that Putin killed anyone. It’s just that there’ve been several convenient accidents, precipitated by unknown assailants, while he’s been in power.

Boris Nemtsov was deputy prime minister of Russia under Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. He died in an unfortunate accident involving four bullets fired into his back, a short walk from the Kremlin in Moscow.

Several Russians have accumulated immense wealth in the post-Communist era, turning them into oligarchs, men of enormous power based on their wealth (like Caesar, Brutus and Cassius). Some of them, though, turned against the boss, (like Brutus and Cassius). It was seldom good for their health. Boris Berezovsky, for instance, was found dead at his home in England. He’d apparently committed suicide, though his inquest couldn’t say for sure.

Autocrats need to build themselves an image of the great benefactors of their nation, the irreplaceable father- (or occasionally mother-) figure caring for their people. Undermining that image, character assassination as opposed to physical assassination, isn’t something the prudent autocrat can allow. Trump loathed criticism, but under Putin something can actually be done about it.

So, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who criticised Putin, was murdered by contract killers though, unfortunately, the Russian police don’t know who paid for the contract. Natalia Estemirova occasionally worked with Politkovskaya, and she also met an accident involving bullets, this time to the back of her head.

One of the things that the KGB could never forgive, was going over to the other side. Alexander Litvinenko defected to Britain, and was poisoned with radioactive Polonium, condemning him to a long and painful death. His accident occurred on British soil, suggesting that whoever wanted him dead didn’t feel at all limited by such tedious conventions as international borders.

And there are more. Far more.

One thing that hasn’t changed between Caesar and Putin is the use of military power. Caesar owed his wealth and his heroic reputation to his campaigns in Gaul. Contemporary accounts suggest he inflicted a million casualties among the Gauls, with a further million reduced to slavery, and some 800 towns or villages destroyed.

Most modern historians regard these figures as wildly exaggerated. The suggestion is that he was a bloodthirsty commander, but also one of the earliest spin doctors, controlling the message Romans received, by overstating the effect of his arms.

When it comes to controlling information, Putin’s from the same mould. He spins the information to say what he wants, shutting down any voices that might question him (where those voices don’t meet unfortunate accidents).

The difference between his spin and the Roman’s is that Putin wants to understate, where Caesar exaggerated. Putin claims there is no war in Ukraine. A nation, like Britain, whose borders can be ignored. In that Ukrainian non-war, it’s by no means impossible that his forces will destroy 800 town or villages. A million dead? Well, we’re a long way from that yet, but it’s hard to believe he’d be upset.

As for enslavement, he’s trying to bring the whole of Ukraine under his control. That would be 40 million people. I suppose that’s progress of a sort after 2066 years. 

Something to salute on these Ides of March.

A striking band

A municipal brass band, I discovered the other day, can be quite striking.

The city of Arts and Sciences

We’d seen an announcement for a free concert by Valencia’s ‘Banda Municipal’ in the city’s wonderful and modernistic City of Arts and Sciences. I hadn’t realised that because it was called a ‘banda’, the group giving it was a brass band. I suppose the clue’s in the word, but I’m still not sensitive enough to the subtle distinctions of the Spanish language. A band is a ‘banda’, an orchestra an ‘orquesta’. I must remember not to confuse the two.

That, though, wasn’t the last of my surprises. Another awaited us as we approached the hall, to be greeted by the unmistakable sounds of a brass band playing. First, it wasn’t yet time for the concert to start. Second, it seemed to be happening out of doors, and in my experience the point of a concert hall is that concerts take place inside it, not outside.

Still, as we climbed the stairs onto the fine esplanade in front of the entrance to the building, there was no doubting what we were seeing. There was the banda municipal, playing out of doors. A small crowd had gathered around it to listen, and we joined it.

The band was good. I’ve always liked brass bands, especially since the film Brassed Off, with its remarkable and poignant story of a coal mine’s brass band struggling to keep on playing after the mine was closed, and the miners thrown out of work, during Maggie Thatcher’s scorched-earth war against the most powerfully unionised of British workers. The banda municipal was just as striking, with its trumpets and its trombones, its clarinets and its horns, its snare drums and its saxophones. 

Of course, it has every reason to be good. It’s been going for nearly 120 years. It’s had all the time it needs to lay down some pretty strong traditions and to build a reputation for quality. That’s a reputation grounded on its ability to recruit and train the musicians to its high standards. 

They played several pieces. Their sound was naturally very like the English brass bands from the film, but it was also distinctively Spanish, in its rhythms and even in its tunes. And one thing was strikingly different from what I was used to. Each piece started with one of the drummers coming to the front to beat time until the music was under way, but after that he went back to his place among the other musicians, and the band as a whole kept itself going just fine with no conductor to guide it.

Also, the other striking thing was that there was a large banner at the front of the band. “Save the Valencia municipal band – forever with the Council”. 

It dawned on me that this wasn’t just a concert, it was a protest meeting. This striking band was on strike.

Striking and on strike

Now, I don’t claim to have fully mastered the details of the grievance. It seems it was the city council – the Ayuntamiento – that set up the band back in 1903. Ever since, it had played under its auspices. What’s more the individual musicians were employees of the Ayuntamiento, and that gave them the status, coveted by so many in Spain for the rights it conveys, of ‘funcionarios’, civil servants.

There are 65 of them. 21 of that total are interim musicians, and in some cases they’ve held that temporary position for over 20 years. That’s how strong the aspiration to gain funcionario status can be.

Now there’s a plan to move them over to the autonomous – semi-private – organisation the ‘Palau de la Música’, the Palace of Music (in case that doesn’t look like standard Spanish to you, it’s because it isn’t: as befits an organisation in Valencia, the name is in Valencian). 

The Ayuntamiento has assured them that they’ll retain their status as civil servants and with it, all the associated rights. The Council claims that the musicians’ fear that the move will threaten their employment, making their positions precarious, are completely unjustified. The musicians wonder, as a result, why the move is being contemplated in the first place.

It’s because, the other side counters, all the musical activity of the Ayuntamiento is associated with the Palace of Music. Sounds appropriate, doesn’t it? The clue’s in the name, you might think.

Except that there’s another name with a clue in it too. The Banda Municipal. Surely the municipal brass band ought to be closely linked to the municipal authority?

In any case, they add, they don’t trust the people trying to sell this message to them. Starting with the band’s conductor. He was previously the director of the municipal bands in Bilbao and in Madrid. He left both places under a cloud and his opponents claim he ‘destroyed’ their bands. They also point out that, while he’s a highly qualified saxophonist, he holds no kind of qualification as a conductor.

All of which presumably explains why they were playing without a conductor. 

What was particularly attractive, though, was the way they chose to strike and protest. They had cancelled the concert – well, a strike is a withdrawal of labour, isn’t it? But they didn’t want to disappoint their audience entirely. So they played anyway, for a little while. Just outside. And without their despised conductor.

And what we both loved most was when the group with the banner decided that the music of Paquito el Chocolatero, a paso doble, needed to be accompanied by dancing. And so the banner-holders danced.

Good luck, Banda Municipal, I say. We missed a concert but, boy, you gave us an evening to remember. Long may you live and prosper and keep entertaining us all.

Sheila opens the way to a day for women

It’s International Women’s Day on 8 March.

A good day to reflect on the drive for a still elusive gender equality. Obviously, that’s not a matter for a single day, but for every day of the year. Still, a single day to refocus our minds for the everyday is no bad thing. 

There’s nothing particularly original about what I’ve just said. I know it’s not original because I stole the thought from a remarkable woman, talented, intelligent and insightful, well worth spending an evening with.

Sheila Blanco surrounded by nine of her favourite poets

Her name is Sheila Blanco. Now, ‘Sheila’ seems to be a popular Spanish forename. However, as I’ve said before, it’s pronounced pretty much like the English word ‘sailor’. At least, that’s how the person introducing Blanco pronounced it, though I don’t know how she pronounces it herself.

The ‘sh’ sound disappeared from Spanish, I’m told, in the sixteenth century. As for ‘ei’, that’s pronounced like English ‘ai’, which in Spanish is pronounced like ‘I’. You know, the vertical pronoun. 

Gosh, international linguistics can get complicated.

Now, Sailor Blanco is a remarkable singer and songwriter. She’s a lot less well-known abroad than she (see?) deserves, probably because she writes and performs for a niche audience. To give you a flavour of what she does, she’s worked through a series of extracts of the music of great classical composers – that’s classical in general rather than for a particular period, distinct from say baroque or romantic – and written her own ultra-short biographical notes as songs to accompany them. So she sings her notes to their notes.

Her favourite seems to have been Bach, and her tribute to him is one of mine. It’s fun to listen to, and it’s helpful to find English subtitles on YouTube.

Now for what may feel like a brutal change of subject, but fear not, it isn’t, as will become clear shortly. 

Spain is rightly proud of its ‘generation 27’. This was a group, or at any rate a loose grouping, of artists that came together for a forum in Seville in 1927. Filmmakers like Luis Buñuel or painters like Salvador Dalí were associated with it, but its main members were poets. It pains me, as an adoptee of Spain, to admit this ignorance, but the only one whose work I know at all is the best-known of the group, Federico García Lorca.

Now the group thrived in the thirties and the thirties were the decade which saw the brief gleam of the Second Spanish Republic, quickly snuffed out by the 1936 uprising of a bunch of Putinesque generals and the three-year civil war, followed by 36 sombre years of fascism, into which they plunged the country. Indeed, one of the brightest lights snuffed out was Lorca’s. He was gay and had the gall to describe the fall of the Arab rulers of his native Andalucía to the Christian Reconquest, as a catastrophe for Spain. He was murdered by the rebels in the first weeks of the war and, so far, not even his grave has been identified.

What tends to be far less well-known, and Sheila Blanco is working hard to right this wrong, is that there were also women poets of this generation. They were called the ‘sin sombreros’, the ‘hatless’, for their temerity in going out of doors without hats in bold defiance to convention.

One of the central tenets of the Nationalist Catholic dictator Franco’s regime was that women belonged in the home, bringing up the next generation and looking after the men of this one. When he overthrew the Republic, he upended these poets' lives. Though many kept writing, mostly from exile, the curtains drawn by the dictator denied them the visibility they deserved.

So Sheila Blanco has taken to setting some of their poems to music and singing them to any willing to listen. Cantando a las poetas del 27 she calls the collection, Singing of the women poets of the group of 27. Here’s a poem that makes up part of one of her songs. It’s by Ernestina de Champourcin, who had to flee Spain as the Republic fell, as did hundreds of thousands of others. The Spanish is far better than the translation, but I hope this image of flight into exile amid the destruction of defeat retains some of its power.

Ernestina de Champourcin, singer of exile

Road on the run,
how the children cry 
next to that trunk, a world
standing open in the gutter.
There’s no room left in the house, 
the only one tonight?

A horse has died
by the side of the road
and not even the flies
have devoured it.

Soon the day will come
with its uncertainties,
when some will return 
to the unknown.

Others follow paths
that no one points out to them.

There on the border
a dark line rises up.

The image of the border as a dark line struck me as particularly moving. As did the notion of the exile following a path with no signpost. Or indeed the allusion to one who returns to a place once familiar but now unknown.

Can you take another brusque change of subject which you’ll soon see isn’t one?

Olocau is a village on the edge of the mountainous region known as the Sierra Calderona, in the province of Valencia. It’s tiny, with just 1800 residents. But town councils in Spain have resources (in England, they’ve been squeezed until their bones squeak), and Olocau has a dynamic mayor. Or perhaps a resident who knows Blanco. Or both.

So the town invited her to sing her songs for the Sin Sombreros as part of its lead up to International Women’s Day. We live 25 minutes away so drove across to hear her sing, at a concert which to my astonishment turned out to be free. The priceless, it seems, is sometimes costless. Blanco sang as beautifully as ever, to poems that were wonderful in themselves, but all the more so for the way she gave music to each, perfectly appropriate to its content.

Sheila Blanco in Olocau,
with another of her poets, Elizabeth Mulder

It was a memorable evening in a remarkable town. An excellent tribute to women who deserve to be better known, something to be promoted every day of the year but, why not, most particularly on International Women’s Day. And the whole performed by a conspicuously talented artist who opens eyes as well as hearts.

Who could ask for more?

Russia or the centuries-long paranoia

Kharkiv devastated by the Russian war machine

On the way back from a visit to Japan, my wife fell asleep only minutes after we crossed the coastline of the main landmass of Asia. Well, she’d taken a pill to help her cope with the stress of the flight. 

She woke seven hours later. To her astonishment, the window showed her a featureless landscape of rock and earth and snow indistinguishable from what she’d seen before drifting off to sleep. Seven hours earlier.

Many Russians are proud of the sheer vastness of their country, the biggest on earth. Its size does, however, lead to problems. Second only to China, Russia has the longest borders to defend of any country in the world. Down the ages, it has again and again fought wars protecting those borders. 

You may be surprised to know that they fought the invading Swedes, defeating King Charles XII in 1709 at the Battle of Poltava, ironically enough, in Ukraine.

Battle of Poltava, between Russians and Swedes, 1709
painted by Denis Martens the Younger in 1726

More famously, they fought the French in 1812, leading to Napoleon¡s terrible retreat from Moscow.

The Russians defeated the German army, at huge cost, at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1941-1942, the turning point of World War 2 in Europe.

Russia fought many more wars, including in the Far East, most famously against the Japanese in the early years of the twentieth century (they lost). 

That’s the kind of experience that can leave a country paranoid. Russia is one of the most paranoid countries on earth. But though the paranoia may be justified, it’s a lousy basis for decisions in foreign policy.

One way to relieve pressure on borders is to ensure that it’s lined with buffer states between your country and a potential enemy. That means neutral nations that offer an obstacle to an aggressor intent on attacking you.

Russia, whether under the Emperors – the Tsars – or the Communists or in its post-Communist phase, has always sought such buffers. Remember the satellite states around the Soviet Union? Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland? They formed a cushion between the Soviets and the perceived enemy, the Western Powers in NATO. 

The satellites, though, weren’t truly neutral powers. They were run by puppet governments without popular support (in none of them were the former leaders re-elected once voters could express their views freely). So instead of offering a true buffer, what they really became was an extension of Soviet territory, requiring armed force to keep them subservient and protect them, in turn, from invasion. The military burden had increased rather than lightening. In the attempt to make it easier to defend long and distant borders, Russia ended up with more borders to defend, still further from its heartland, enclosing more people to keep in line.

That seems to be an irresistible compulsion. You see, you can’t trust a truly neutral country. Why, they might someday decide that they want to join NATO themselves. And where would that leave Russia? With the threat of having another NATO member on its border, instead of a neat buffer between itself and that unfriendly alliance.

So Russia invades Ukraine to prevent that happening. And history repeats itself. If it’s ultimately successful, and there’s still hope it won’t be, Russia will find itself in the same situation as the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia, having to clamp down on a restive population, and with new borders to defend still further from home.

What’s worse, if it’s true that the key concern for Russia was to avoid having another NATO power on its border, then if it does ultimately annex Ukraine, all it will achieve is to avoid having a neighbour that might at some remote date become a NATO member, at the cost of having four neighbours – Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania – that already are.

Meanwhile, although Putin has warned Sweden and Finland off from joining NATO themselves, there is a sense in both nations that they should join now, to make sure they don’t suffer the same fate as Ukraine.

You see what I mean? Paranoia leads to a decision that avoids one perceived perceived evil and leads to several far greater ones. 

Of course, fear of NATO may not be Putin’s main concern. It certainly isn’t his only concern. He’s taken to proclaiming repeatedly that Ukraine and Russia are one nation. That’s another longstanding Russian obsession: to be the champion of the Slavic peoples. A champion whether they want one or not – ask the Poles, the Slovaks or the Czechs how happy they were to live under Russian ‘protection’. 

Indeed, the only Slav country that perhaps welcomed Russian backing, was Serbia, never actually occupied by Russia. And only while it was being run by Slobodan Milošević, a man who plunged the former Yugoslavia into a terrible and bloody series of wars. He died in prison during his trial for war crimes. 

Milošević, left, died in prison accused of war crimes
Putin, so far, has only committed them

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian people above all others, but also the Russian people involved in a war they didn’t choose, are the victims of these age-old paranoid obsessions and their associated readiness for violence.

Sarajevo during the war provoked by Milošević
Struck by the similarity to Kharkiv in Putin’s war?

Now it’s true that the West hasn’t handled its relations with Russia at all well. Suggesting that Ukraine and Georgia might join NATO was bound to anger Russia. But the suggestion never became reality. And Russia invaded Georgia first and Ukraine now anyway. Clearly, there was no actual fear of NATO to justify his action. Instead, Russia seems to have been driven by its age-old paranoia to a new outburst of brutal, unprovoked aggression. A war crime, followed by a till worse one, as Putin, like Milošević, targets civilians.

Let’s be clear. Putin alone is responsible for the decisions that he, now holding autocratic power in Russia, took entirely on his own authority. Whatever the errors of the West, the war and the crimes to which it has led, are his to answer for.

He’s behaving like Milošević in ex-Yugoslavia. Invading his neighbours who chose not to welcome his hegemony. He’s doing it in response to the same ancient need to defend the land of his people, however badly this way of doing it has worked out in the past, and however high the price he’s forcing others to pay for it.

I hardly dare hope for it, but it would strike me as entirely appropriate if he were to share Milošević’s fate.