A birthday squared

We’ve held the first of our family’s new series of double birthdays.

The place was the hills north of Madrid, in the home that our grandson Elliott generously shares with his sister Matilda and his parents, Sheena and Nicky. Just as generously, or perhaps I should say graciously, he was sharing his first birthday with Danielle, while his sister, his parents, his uncle Michael and I were all there to join in the celebrations. 

Brand-new one-year-old

This openness to sharing is very much a hallmark of Elliott’s personality. Regular readers of this blog may remember that, a year earlier, he had judiciously delayed his exit from Sheena’s womb just long enough to ensure that the calendar had ticked over to the Danielle’s birthday. By a matter of minutes.

Up till then, as far as the family was concerned, the date was significant only for being Danielle’s birthday. Now it would be his too. Hence the double celebration. 

Birthday pair. One aged one.
The other a little more

On the day itself, I faced a problem. I’ll spare you the details, but the present Danielle had first thought of turned out not to be a good idea after all (OK, since you insist on knowing, it would have been a paddle for the sport she’s taken up with enthusiasm, dragon boating, but it turned out that her club captain wanted everyone rowing with matching paddles anyway, so individual ones were out). 

You’ll be glad to know that she’s since announced that what would be a far better gift would be more items for a different but equally fulfilling pastime, doing water colours of trees, but right then, on the morning of the birthday, I was faced with the painful prospect of showing up empty-handed at the double celebration.

So I’d headed to a local branch of the great up-market department store here in Spain, El Corte Inglés. The biggest such chain in Europe, apparently, and third biggest in the world. That name translates as ‘the English Cut’. It dates from a time when English tailoring was seen as the world’s most elegant, so it may not surprise you to discover that its roots lie in a tailor’s shop founded in the nineteenth century.

Well, an extensive search hadn’t led to my finding anything in this splendiferous store that would meet my needs. It would have been a terrible fiasco to go home with nothing to show for the trip, so I decided to buy some pet products we needed for the dogs (yes, they came for the celebration too). As usual in Corte Inglés stores, that department is in the bowels of the earth, so down I headed. Then, to my joy, as I approached my goal, I saw that the Corte Inglés had a florist as well.

So here was a solution to my problem. An interim solution at least. On the way back from buying chicken strips and poo bags, I stopped at the florist’s. There were two types of roses that struck me as particularly wonderful, so I asked for a dozen.

“Oh, no…” I interrupted myself, “you can’t order a dozen, can you?”

“Oh, but these are roses,” she replied, “an even number of flowers is OK if you’re ordering roses.”

I quickly organised the mortgage to pay for them and she made me up a bouquet. That’s always a delight to watch and, I suppose because it was, after all, the Corte Inglés, she did a particularly masterful job of it. It even included a little sprig stuck to the outside of the wrapping, which Danielle later removed and wore on her dress.

The birthday pair with her interim present

Home I went, the birthday present quandary at least temporarily solved. Thanks to the poodles, as it happens. Not a benefit of dog ownership I think would occur to most people.

Entrance to a magic world,
the realm of the birthday party

Meanwhile, preparations for the main party had gone much more smoothly. There were balloons, there was a door decorated with streamers, there was an excellent cake. We all wore hats, we all sang 'happy birthday', not once but multiple times. There were sparklers on the cake, to make it even more fun. 

Finally, to make sure we got a real party spirit going, the adults drank Cava, the Spanish sparkling wine, and Matilda joined in with a cup of apple juice. She takes great pleasure in a skill she’s mastered recently, of toasting everyone’s health and clinking glasses with them (though, in her case, using a plastic beaker as she does, it’s more of a thud than a clink, but the thought’s the same).

At one, Elliott hasn’t yet mastered that ritual. But it’ll come, it’ll come. 

Something to look forward at future double birthdays.

Matilda got presents too
This one from friends in England, no less

A bullet dodged, but what’s next?

Danielle and I jumped on our bikes on Sunday, for the twenty-minute ride over to the nearby town of Paterna. That’s the seat of the local council to which our own neighbourhood, La Cañada belongs. By sheer good luck, it just happens that it’s where the authorities in Paris decided to place the French school – the lycée français – for our local city, Valencia. 

That’s highly convenient, since it’s to the lycée that we were summoned to vote in the recent French Presidential elections. 

We both have votes. Danielle was born French and I took advantage of living in the country, around the turn of the century, to use our marriage to get French nationality myself – I had a terrible fear that Britain might in time fall for the temptation to shoot itself in the foot by opting to leave the EU, and I wanted to make sure that I retained the right to live elsewhere in Europe if I chose. 

So, Danielle and I have votes and we exercised our rights. We showed up at the lycée armed with proof of identity. And, as in the first round, I was amused by the posters outside, which contained only pictures of the candidates, with not a mention of a policy and a rather banal slogan with each: ‘nous tous’, ‘all of us’, for Macron, ‘pour tous les Français’, ‘for all French people’, for Le Pen. Both seemed concerned to speak for everyone, but Le Pen couldn’t resist a hint of nativism too, no doubt to appeal to her core supporters.

Posters for the Second Round of the Presidential Election
Little more than a beauty parade?

A picture and a slogan. I suppose there’s a kind of honesty there. An admission that most political campaigns are little more than a beauty parade.

I have to say that, by the time of the vote, I was feeling a lot less worried than I had been. The opinion polls might be wrong, but showing a ten-to-twelve-point lead for Macron as they did, they’d have to be catastrophically out, if the result was going to be a win for the far-right Le Pen. Far right in reality, that is, not in her words. She’d been softening her message as the ballot approached, but her plans for setting up alliances of states within the EU and for legislating against respecting certain EU laws in very much a Boris-Johnson way, would have been deeply damaging – a ‘Frexit by stealth’, as her critics pointed out. In addition, her party’s voting record in the European Parliament told a different story from the words she spoke, as her MEPs opposed measures protecting women or upholding gay rights.

As it happens, the opinion polls had indeed been wrong, but in the other direction. Macron’s majority was significantly higher than they’d been predicting. A great relief.

Only a relief in the short term, though. France has dodged the far-right bullet again. But it feels to me as though there’s a lot of ammunition still out there.

Here’s one of the problems. Back in 2017, when he won the presidency for the first time, Macron declared “I will do everything so that there’s no longer a reason to vote for the extremes”. Just the kind of thing many of us wanted to hear.

However, if you look at the first round of the latest presidential election, Le Pen and her even harder far-right opponent Eric Zemmour, scored just over 30% between them. That’s rather more than Macron took.

In any case, the right isn’t the only wing of politics to have an extreme. There is also a dangerously unrealistic far left – dangerous because that kind of unrealism often leads to authoritarianism, to prevent challenge by realists – and its French standard bearer, Jean-Luc Mélenchon took just under 22%. So far right and far left together took over half the total votes cast in the first round.

It seems that we’re a very long way from having persuaded people there’s no longer a reason to vote for the extremes.

The second problem is related to the first: the complete collapse of the moderate parties, of left and right. Between them, the two traditional parties that dominated French politics for decades, took under 7% of the vote in the first round. That means the only representative of the centre ground is Macron himself.

The constitution means he can’t stand in 2027. But he heads a personal party, The Republic on the March or LREM, in its French abbreviation (it may not be a coincidence that the last two initials are his own), with little or no presence on the ground, and with few other significant figures than his. 

Who will stand when he can’t?

Within the collapse of the old centre, it’s the Socialists who’ve fared worst, collecting under 2% of the vote in the first round. The lack of a moderate left-of-centre party strikes me as particularly painful, and not just because that’s where my inclinations lie. It’s more because Macron seems to have preferred to focus on winning votes from the right, neglecting the left, and winning himself a reputation for being the President for the rich, reinforced by being seen as arrogant and elitist.

What that means, above all, is that there’s no social democratic party for the young to turn to. And it’s striking that in this election, the young have been the most inclined to vote for the extremes, the anti-system parties. Which isn’t altogether surprising since, as in other countries, it’s the young that are bearing most of the burden of the pandemic, of the effects of the Ukraine war and of the beginnings of moves towards combating global warming, as jobs vanish, wages fall and prices rise.

So, we seem to have dodged a bullet for now, but only for now. If a party of the moderate left doesn’t emerge fast to start addressing the difficulties of the young, we’re not going to see the attraction of the extremes diminish. And, given his track record, I’m not sure Macron is the man to do that.

Besides, he won’t even be a candidate next time around.

Contact between face and road surface: the case against

It may seem a bit of a long shot, but just in case you’re considering rubbing your nose on the surface of a road, I thought it might be helpful if I shared the result of my own experience. Which convinced me that it was not to be recommended.

I was on my way to an appointment with a dentist. This was only my second appointment with my new dentist, and I have to say that I like her. She’s the first dentist I’ve come across who seems to be able to deliver treatment without a nurse to order around.

That’s quite a contrast to most dentists I’ve known. Most of them seem to regard it as a professional requirement to maintain a commanding style towards their assistants. You know, issuing brusque orders – barking them even – such as ‘suction’, or ‘torture instrument number 3’ or ‘no, I need it more painful than that’.

This new dentist does it all herself, which I found impressive. She seems capable of placing a suction tube herself and even go so far as not merely to suggest rinsing but even seeing to it herself that I have the liquid to rinse with. So I was hurrying along, intent on not being late. Hurrying along not on foot but on my bike.

Cycling, I’m told, is good for the health. 

“Yes,” a Spanish friend later told me, “but only if you stay upright on the bike.”

Things would certainly have been better had I lived up to that notion.

It’s probably less good for my health, though far better for my psychological wellbeing, that we have bikes with electric motors. Sitting at the bottom of a long, and even worse steep, hill was always enough to prevent me feeling any attraction towards cycling. But now we have little motors that can mitigate such awful climbs, I feel much more inclined to use the bike.

I was only minutes away from the dental surgery. Travelling along a street climbing towards the centre of town, but keeping up a highly respectable speed, thanks to the assistance generously offered to my legs by the makers of the bike. Then I heard an ambulance siren behind me.

I moved over to the right to ensure that the ambulance had all the space available in that narrow street, to get past me.

They say that virtue is its own reward. That means, of course, that there is no other reward for doing good. But I’d go further and say there’s often punishment for doing the right thing.

As I pulled over to the right, virtuously, I got a lot too close to the parked cars. As I said, I was batting along at a reasonable speed. Moving that quickly makes hitting a wing mirror a spectacular occurrence. As I can personally attest.

My bike decided it was time to stop and lie down. There are laws, elaborated by men of great genius like Sir Isaac Newton, that make clear what happens to the body travelling on the bike when said bike reaches an unplanned decision to stop that way. I naturally obeyed those laws. Pausing only briefly to stroke the handlebars with my ribs, to ensure that they too would carry a reminder of this important event for the next few days, I kept on travelling into dramatic (and no doubt clownish) contact with the ground where, somehow, I managed to scrape the road surface with both my chin and the bridge of my nose. That’s the bridge, not the tip. The tip avoided damage. I have no idea how that happened, and I certainly couldn’t do it again if I tried, which I suppose underlines the accidental, as opposed to deliberate, nature of the whole experience.

Noses don't do well, scraped along a road

The upshot of it all was that I turned up at the dental surgery with blood gently flowing down my nose. I have to say the people there rose admirably to the situation. Before long, I’d been cleaned up, disinfected and provided with an icepack to hold against my nose. I was so impressed that I even asked whether medical training was part of the course followed by dentists, but apparently not. They just know how to deal with minor injuries in their patients, which I find both impressive and, on this occasion, convenient.

And the dental treatment took place despite all this drama. It was just a hygiene session, so involved little complexity and no pain. And, to complete my sense of awe at the service provided, it was the dentist herself who did the work.

Overall, I’d had a most valuable experience. I’d learned still more about my self-reliant dentist. And, above all, I’d learned, as my friend later suggested, that a bike is best if you stay upright on it.

Noses aren’t really built to do well scraped along a road surface.

The right station for a fine woman

Spain is a nation haunted by a traumatic nightmare.

That’s the Civil War in the 1930s and the 36 year dictatorship to which it led. The conflicting beliefs and emotions of those times drove a chasm through the country, and have left it divided still.

María de la Almudena Grandes

One of the finest chroniclers of that trauma is María de la Almudena Grandes, an outstanding novelist who died depressingly early, at 61, of cancer just at the back end of last year. She wrote a series of six novels, the last started but sadly unfinished, which she calls her Episodes of a Never-Ending War. 

The word ‘episodes’ refers to one of the emblematic figures of nineteenth-century Spanish literature, Benito Pérez Galdós who, as she explains at the end of Ines and Joy, the first novel in her series, she profoundly admired. He wrote a series of National Episodes, in which he relates the lives of fictional characters against the background of the major episodes of Spanish history in his century.

Almudena Grandes does the same kind of thing but, in my view, having read two of his novels and having started on the third of hers, she does it incomparably better. His characters feel like cardboard cut-outs, either good or bad but never mezzo-tints, which he simply parades against his background of historical events.

In Almudena Grandes, on the other hand, the characters live and develop, occasionally driving, or at least leaving their imprint on, the events around them, and always moulded themselves by their experiences. Even the historical sequences, sometimes quite long in the first book, sparkle along as she turns the figures she talks about into story characters in their own right, without distorting the history.

So what is this never-ending war? Why, it’s the long bitter struggle against Franco’s style of Fascism. Her characters are born in the time leading up to the Second Republic that Franco overthrew and live on into the dictatorship, going from open war against it into a clandestine fight that is even more dangerous. Or they’re born after the war and live with its legacy, coping with the dictatorship around them. 

They’re the living embodiment, in the world of the novels, of the way that terrible time divided Spain, and left it divided still.

The characters come to life because of the vitality of her writing. On occasions it can even be poetic. She uses a technique of repeating the same set of words as a kind of refrain. It can happen in several short passages close to each other – a set of paragraphs, for instance – or it can be scattered through a book. In Ines and Joy, a recurring sentence is “immortal history does strange things when it crosses the loves of mortal bodies” which, as well as being a striking thought, also sums up the book: the loves of the characters are moulded and driven by the events around them.

Why did she choose the title Episodes of a Never-Ending War rather than, say, New National Episodes as a tribute to her admired Pérez Galdós? Well, she explains that, too. Franco, by calling his uprising against the legally constituted Republic a National-Catholic movement, tainted the word ‘national’ for anyone who doesn’t share his views. And Almudena Grandes decidedly doesn’t.

In fact, running through the books is her admiration of the Spanish Communist Party or PCE, even though she tells its tale with all its warts. She tells us how the iconic figure of ‘La Pasionaria’ ran away to Moscow after the Civil War and left the party, in its French exile, in the hands of an entirely unqualified young woman who’d never been more than a typist in the organisation. She also tells about La Pasionaria’s sidekick, Santiago Carrillo, organising murders of party comrades who’d strayed from the Moscow line. 

On the other hand, she’s impressed by “the only political party that actively opposed Franco’s dictatorship from April 1939 [date of the end of the Civil War] when it was declared illegal [throughout Spain] until April 1977, when it was legalised again…”. The characters in her novels who are resisting Franco are in or close to the PCE.

That did Almudena Grandes no favours in certain circles in Spain. Because the national trauma divided the nation into warring camps, and left it divided still.

She was one of the major literary figures of her time and of her city, Madrid. But both the city of Madrid and its Province are controlled by the conservative ‘Popular Party’, PP. Neither the City Mayor nor the Provincial President saw fit to honour her at her death.

The government, for now still run by the Socialists, the PSOE, saw things differently. It couldn’t change the name of a street or a square in the city to honour her, because that was up to the PP leadership. On the other hand, the great railway stations are under the control of the national government.

The biggest station in Madrid is Puerta de Atocha. The name Atocha became a symbol of sorrow around the world in 2004, when it became the target of a terrorist attack. The PSOE government of Pedro Sánchez has decided to change its name in a smart way, by leaving it intact – Atocha is too deeply embedded in the culture – while adding the writer’s name to it. 

Madrid’s main station is to be renamed ‘Puerta de Atocha Almudena Grandes’.  

But Spain has been divided by the very events that Almudena Grandes describes so vividly, and has been left divided still.

The station of Puerta de Atocha Almudena Grandes

Many have applauded this naming of a major Spanish landmark not simply for Almudena Grandes herself, not simply for a great novelist, but for a woman, a gender woefully under-represented by Spanish memorials. On the other hand,  the President of the Madrid Province, the hard-right Isabel Díaz Ayuso, reacted to the renaming with sarcasm. 

“I thought the Virgin of Atocha was already a woman.”

Well, she was. I’m not however convinced that the station was called after her. And, unless I'm badly mistaken, I don’t think she wrote novels that can hold a candle to the Episodes of an Endless War. 

Oh, well. There will be those in Spain whose heart is warmed, as mine is, by the change in name of the station. And those who are pained by it.

Because Spain is a nation divided by its trauma. And it has been left divided still.

For my part, I’ll just offer this small tribute to a fine writer who understood the need to fight an endless war against the virus of dictatorship. And, for my own pleasure and amusement, I’ll include a little nod to that touching and poetic way of hers of repeating a phrase from time to time as though it were a refrain. If only in honour of a nation divided by a traumatic war, and divided still.

RIP Misty

It was back in the autumn of 2007, while we were living in Germany but near Strasbourg in Eastern France, that Danielle and I went to dinner with our friends, Anne and Materne. They lived in a majestic converted farmhouse in the country outside the city.

On the way, Danielle told me that one of their cats had just had kittens.

“They’ll try to foist one on us. We’re saying no, OK? I don’t want another cat now.”

It hadn’t been that long before that we’d said goodbye to Chalky, a black cat as you’d expect from the name, one of the best we ever had. He’d come out for walks with us and, if we’d been out without him, would be waiting for us on our return, with a cat smile – dipping his eyelids. 

But then he developed an inoperable cancer on his tongue. We kept him as long as possible, but there came a time when he could neither eat nor drink. Just to be merciful, we had to have him put down. He was young and, in every respect other than the tumour, entirely healthy. 

We’d been devastated. We felt no inclination to start over again with another cat for a time.

At dinner that evening, I suddenly felt a terrible scratching on my lower legs. Startled, I looked down, only to see, to my astonishment, a kitten scrabbling up my trouser leg, using his claws for purchase, until he got to my lap. When he did the same thing with Danielle, he didn’t stop at the lap, but climbed right up to her shoulder.

Inevitable, wasn’t it? At the end of the evening, we drove home with the kitten in the car. That’s how Misty became part of our family. And suffered his first international move, across the border from his native France to our home in Germany.

Early days. Young and happiest in small places

Unluckily, it was a bad time to join our household. We soon had to move back to England for my job. Misty was too young to have had the treatment for rabies the UK required. Since that treatment came in two rounds six months apart, it was quickly clear that he was going to have to remain at least half a year longer on the Continent after we’d gone.

Early days: Misty with our dog at that time, Janka

Neither of us has ever forgotten the howl of anguish he let out the evening before we left. Somehow he knew. It was anguished and it rent our hearts.

We had, as it happened, made some good arrangements for his time away from us. He would stay with our friends Félicie and Yannick. The arrangement proved such a success that Yannick was won over to the idea of having a cat, and their family hasn’t been without one since then. 

He won his way into their hearts by such endearing acts as rolling her engagement ring off her bedside table and around the room until it went down a crack between two floorboards. They eventually gave up looking for it, and Yannick gave Félicie a new one.  But then, not long before they moved out, they found the old one again.

At any rate, as that story shows, it was a good home-from-home for Misty. On the other hand, I don’t think he ever forgave us. He’d been one of the most affectionate kittens I’ve known, but after this abandonment, he developed an angry side to his character, so that he would sometimes respond even to being stroked by biting the hand that was stroking him.

Why, he did it last night, as if to underline how deeply ingrained into his soul this trait had become.

Nor was that abandonment the last of the disturbing experiences we inflicted on him. For a time, we travelled frequently backwards and forwards between England and France, and to avoid a further separation, we would take him with us. Which he hated. Before the end of any such trip, he would start walking around the car, moaning softly but by no means inaudibly.

Even within England, his third nation of residence, we imposed four homes on him. He adapted reasonably well, but I’m sure he must have found so many moves trying. After all, even I did, and I was responsible for them.

Misty focused on his objectives

Then came another separation. Again we arranged it well. We’d sold our house to our friends, Bruno and Jose. And they agreed to keep him for some months. That meant that while we were looking for a permanent home in our new country, Spain, he at least could live on in a comfortable, familiar environment with people he knew and liked. And who liked him.

Misty enjoyed his last home in England

Then, once we had moved to where we now live outside Valencia, I took advantage of a business trip to England – my last, before my fourth and final redundancy led to my retirement – to collect him and take him to his new home. 

Misty and Toffee exchanging views

He took this last international trip well. He peed on my feet in the taxi on the way to the airport, but I didn’t feel I could really complain, given all I was putting him through. And he took the flight without complaint, and only started some eloquent growling for the last twenty minutes or so of the five-hour car trip to Valencia.

Friends Reunited
As seen by Senada Borcilo, in her cover design for
Paws for Reflection

Once he arrived he set out to explore the house thoroughly. He smelled the dogs carefully, reviving an old friendship that had been dormant some months. In the morning, he got to know the gardens, front and back. That’s when he discovered just how wonderful the weather in Spain, his fourth country of residence, can be.

Spain: a good place for a cat to retire to

Just the place, he decided, for a discerning cat to take his retirement.

He would lie out on the table in the back garden, or on the couch in the front one. Sometimes, if he wanted some real heat treatment, he’d have us let him out on the first-floor terrace, an excellent sun trap with tiles to catch and retain the heat.

That was two and a half years ago. And, despite minor irritations such as the tedious Siamese next door, and the occasionally over-boisterous behaviour of the poodles, it was a great retirement.

But then he went into decline. His movements slowed as he developed a range of pains. He found it increasingly difficult to eat. He had once weighed twice as much as our poodle Toffee (“not twice as much – only nearly twice as much,” he always growled if I said that), but now he came down to little more than her weight. Even with strong painkillers and treatments prescribed by the vet, for a condition she couldn’t fully identify, he grew steadily worse as his appetite vanished until he could only absorb liquid.

“There’s nothing further I can do,” the vet eventually told us.

Which meant that there was one thing, and only one thing, she could do. And so, on 12 April 2022, we did it. An untreatable condition leading to increasing suffering had to be ended, and so we ended it.

Misty, we’ll miss you. It was nearly fifteen years. I wish it had been longer.

Last hours

At least, as Jose points out, his biography is out there in print.

Chasing the dragon

No, no. Not that chasing the dragon. I know the expression is usually about serious drug abuse, but that’s absolutely not what I mean here. This is about my becoming a camp follower to a bunch of dragon boaters. 

Boatless dragons

Do you know about dragon boats? I didn’t just a few weeks ago. They’re a Chinese invention, a variant on the notion of a canoe, with a dragon’s head and dragon’s tail for ceremonial occasions, and large crews. I’ve seen crews of ten or twenty. 

Our Dragon Boat on the Mar Menor

The crew doesn’t row. It uses something like a single canoe paddle, not the double-headed kind the kayakers use. You paddle on just one side or the other, you don’t swap sides.

It turns out that because the exercise is good for upper-body strength, the sport is beneficial in particular for breast cancer survivors. Fortunately, it can also be enjoyed by many others, including my wife Danielle.

We live near Valencia in Spain, and south of here, in the province of Murcia, there’s a wonderful lagoon called the ‘Mar Menor’ – the ‘minor’, or perhaps I should say ‘smaller’, sea. Protected from the main Mediterranean by a long sandspit, you can imagine it provides a wonderful area for all sorts of sports involving boats or boards. Winds can get strong, but generally they’re manageable, so windsurfers and leisure sailors can have fun. As for the swell, it’s practically non-existent most of the time, making it ideal for rowing, canoeing or, indeed, dragon boating.

Some years ago, a woman called Jan Collins (not Joan), breast-cancer sufferer, who was described to me as English, but I think may have been Canadian, discovered the Mar Menor. 

“What a place for dragon-boating,” she exclaimed, or so I’m guessing (I wasn’t actually there).

Pink Flamingo

There are flamingos on the lagoon. They’re pretty much entirely white but our  Spanish friends just seem to regard the word ‘pink’ as part of the bird’s name (flamenco rosa) whatever its colour. Anyway, the dragon boating group Collins set up is called ‘the pink flamingo’. 

Our dragon boaters with the Pink Flamingos coming to dock

This was the first ‘BCS’, Breast Cancer Survivor, dragon boat group in Spain. It’s thriving. So our local group in Valencia naturally wanted to visit them, to have some training from their coaches, try out the pleasure of paddling on the Mar Menor and meet some women who, according to our association’s team captain, were pretty damn good company.

Joint Pink Flamingo and our dragon boaters: guard of honour

And they were.

The thing about dragon boating is that it’s hard work, and I say that as someone who’s only ever been out for a trial session. People like Danielle have real intensive workouts. What that means is that, once they’ve done an hour or two, they’re wrecked and need to stop. 

Leaving them with, I don’t know, maybe sixteen hours of the day to fill up. We had to find some leisure activities. Fortunately, these weren’t the kind of people for whom that was a difficulty. Indeed, if anything, keeping up would be more our problem.

Some of our dragon boaters on Tabarca

It started on the way down, when we took a break from the travelling to visit the island of Tabarca. It’s under 2 km long, so we walked around it – well, strolled– in little over an hour. A good walk, since one end of the island is a nature reserve. The other end, I reckon making up more than half of it, is built up. Properly built up, with houses, streets, squares and everything though, bliss, no cars. I believe the permanent population has reached the staggering level of about 70, but it grows significantly during the day, as staff come out by boat – there’s no other way to get there – to staff the shops, cafés and restaurants.

One of those restaurants introduced me to the delicacy of ‘gallina’. That means ‘hen’, but this one wasn’t going to lay the kind of eggs you scramble or fry. It’s a particularly hideous looking fish. though, to be fair, it tasted far better than it looked.

Gallina: ugly fish, fine meal

Once down on the Mar Menor, the enterprising dragon boaters quickly identified a bar which served excellent mojitos. That place saw us rather a lot over the weekend. As did the café that served its own home-made, freshly baked Madeleine (or Magdalena) cakes with its coffees. 

Mojitos on the Mar Menor

We also enjoyed a great lunch at a place that claimed to be run by a Portuguese (’Domingos El Portugués’) though I noticed nothing specifically Portuguese about the cooking – it was fine but definitely Spanish. One especially enjoyable Spanish aspect of the lunch was that they’d closed off the street outside the restaurant, so they could set up tables for us in it. Traffic? It could find another way around. And it was a delight that we could eat out of doors, after the appalling weather we’d had recently, whose only merit, as far as I could see, was that it filled up our reservoirs after a drought lasting some months.

Lunch in the street at Domingos El Portugués

In the evenings, Danielle and I slipped out on our own, to a small gastro-bar. It served good food and boasted that all its main dishes, desserts and even waiters were home made. The last claim was mind-boggling. I didn’t ask for the recipe.

Why did we slip out? Because the rest of the company, excellent company though they were, just showed more energy than we could follow. That mojito bar also had a disco area upstairs which attracted a lot of interest from the other dragon boaters. Well, I don’t just have two left feet, but two cloth ears too, and far too little stamina for any of that. Our gastro-bar provided a sanctuary from activity beyond our strength (or my ability).

But I was impressed by the dynamism of the group. Especially as some of them were seriously ill. They had a depth of merriment that left me (sometimes literally, for instance after our hike along the landspit at the edge of the lagoon) breathless.

Above all, it left me laughing a lot. Good food, good drink, even better company. That, I feel, is very best kind of dragon chasing.

Who could ask for more?

When things nearly turned sour over sourdough

Talk about domestic disaster narrowly avoided!

One of the delights – far from the most important, though still a source of great pleasure – of being married to Danielle is the constant supply of sourdough bread. The stuff is great. Far better than anything you can buy in shops.  

One of Danielle’s fine loaves

The story of how she got to be so good at it is a good one. Let me tell you about it.

Danielle learned to make sourdough before we last left England (our second exit, and I suspect this one will be permanent). She’d taught herself and was moderately satisfied with the results until, one day, she came across some exceptionally good loaves in a local café-cum-bakery. She asked repeatedly for the baker’s contact details, but they wouldn’t budge: they took the journalist’s stance of never revealing their sources.

So Danielle had to go on line, scouring the internet with every combination she dream up of words like ‘Luton’ (where we lived at the time), ‘sourdough´, ‘bakery’, ‘specialist’ or just plain ‘special’.

It took her a while, but eventually she struck gold. One of her searches took her to a Facebook page for ‘Jo’s Loaves’. The photos of the loaves were enough for an expert eye like hers: this was the bread she had liked so much. 

Danielle got in touch with Jo through Facebook, asking just one question: “I already bake sourdough bread but would like to spend a short time as an assistant to you, before we leave for Spain, so I can learn to do it properly.”

At first Jo wasn’t keen. She really didn’t want an apprentice. But Danielle talked her into it. After all, at the very least, she would be an extra pair of hands. For free. Jo could try it out for a couple of days and then decide whether she could keep Danielle on or not. What was there to lose?

Nothing, as it turned out. In fact, when Danielle had to tell her a few weeks later that their collaboration was going to have to come to an end, it was Jo who asked whether she might not reconsider and stay on working with her. Danielle brings a lot of innate skill and a great deal of commitment to the jobs she takes on (including in this instance the daybreak start to the day), and it makes it hard for people to part company with her. 

As well as learning a lot more about the art of sourdough – “I was much better after working with Jo than before,” she assures me – she also came away with a gift from Jo, of some of her starter, the essential ingredient, as the name implies, in getting a sourdough bake going. 

Sourdough starter is a bit like an attractive plant, which allows you to take cuttings from it without suffering irreparable loss. Danielle could take some starter from Jo, without reducing her capacity to keep on making bread.

Danielle brought it with her to Spain. Here, she has in turn passed on portions of starter to other people. In effect, they too are now using Jo’s starter. Or, as Danielle assures me, not really Jo’s, because each person imprints their own personality on their sourdough. Their hands, perhaps even their breath, the flour they use, the way they treat the dough, all change the bread in their own distinctive way. 

Everything was now perfectly satisfactory on our sourdough front. Until, that is, Danielle headed to the Madrid region for a week or so’s grandparenting. I was left at home alone (well, if you don’t count a cat and two toy poodles). And, as if to prove how risky that can be, I proceeded to screw up. But bigly, if I may use Donald Trump’s fine term.

The fridge was well stocked. Which meant that if I wanted to get at anything in it, I had to take various things out first. Obviously, the idea was to put them all back again afterwards. But on one occasion I forgot to put one thing back, and it was a pretty damn important thing.

Sourdough starter, where it belongs between bakings,
in the fridge, where I failed to leave it

It was the Danielle-Jo starter.

Danielle tried to put a brave face on it when she got back. 

“Perhaps I can still resuscitate it,” she said, looking at the rather sad white substance at the bottom of a jar, clearly none the happier for having been kept at room temperature for several days.

She tried. She tried hard. She tried making two batches of bread from the starter I’d killed and, though they turned out to be bread of sorts, they were dull, lifeless things, that had barely risen from when they were first formed into shape.

I felt terrible. I mean, let’s not got over the top. It didn’t feel like I’d killed a child. But certainly I felt as bad as if I’d killed a pet. The starter was a living thing which only needed looking after, and in return provided us with excellent bread. And I’d killed it through sheer negligence. 

Imagine my sense of guilt.

But then, thanks to my daughter-in-law Sheena, a solution appeared. Danielle had provided a starter for a friend of hers. Starter, therefore, from the same genetic line. The friend had then passed Sheena a part of it.

That meant that, when on my own grandparenting visit I told Sheena my shameful story, she had an answer at hand. She gave me a new batch of starter to take home with me. 

She explained to me that starter needs feeding, just like a living thing. I ensured it was well fed, working with meticulous attention to deliver the exact quantities of flour and water it required. I gave it all the love and care it could possibly wish for. No second batch of starter was going to die on my watch. Not now, not ever.

Starter starting a loaf

The results were all we could hope for. We got the starter home. Danielle was delighted. And sourdough production is back up to pre-starter-destruction days. Indeed, now that I feel so personally involved, I’ve even been helping. Stretching the dough, for instance, where you grab it from underneath and literally draw part of it out and then drop it back into the mass. It’s a pleasant and comforting activity. 

I also enjoy being able to declare that sourdough needs no kneading. 

Anyway, it was a massive relief. I’d ducked a domestic disaster. We would not now see all hope of sourdough dashed from our nerveless fingers. 

Of course, nothing is ever simple these days. We may still be cheated of our loaves. Shops are running out of what’s known as strong flour, an essential ingredient. Apparently, much of it came from poor, suffering Ukraine.

At least that’s not my fault. It’s Vladimir Putin’s. And, one of his offences – far from the most important, though still a source of great displeasure to me – is that he may be about to deprive me of my sourdough bread. Maybe we could get that crime added to the list of charges against him, if he ever gets hauled before the International Criminal Court.

As he richly deserves. 

MSM: just say no

Those damned Mainstream Media. Or MSM as the more dismissive term has it. Always telling things the way no one wants to hear them.

Take the MSM in the United States. They’ve been claiming that Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential Election. Extraordinary. All they have to back them up is dozens of court decisions, huge numbers of legal opinions and the reports of even more election officials. What’s more, some of those officials come from Trump’s own Republican Party, so they’re not just lying scumbags, they’re traitors too.

In Britain, the MSM used to keep warning the Labour Party that it couldn’t win an election under its hard left leader Jeremy Corbyn. Such lies. I mean, it’s true that he didn’t win. In fact, he was defeated twice, the second time massively. But here’s the thing: that doesn’t prove the MSM were right, just that their cynicism denied him the easy victory he would otherwise have won. Helped, again, by traitors, inside the party, who lacked the fervour of the true believers.

Then there was vaccination. The MSM kept coming up with all that stuff about Covid vaccines being low risk and far less dangerous than the disease. What a load of rubbish. I mean, it may be true that there’s no evidence they did any harm, and lots of evidence that they did a great deal of good, but what does that matter? With important people like Robert Kennedy Junior on your side, who needs evidence?

Some people, of course, rise above all that MSM propaganda. Take the Hungarian electorate, for instance. It’s just returned Viktor Orbán to power for an unprecedented fourth term. That’s despite the MSM pointing out that he’d spent his first three undermining the country’s democracy. Actually, he really has been undermining its democracy like they say, but hey, he was re-elected in a democratic election, so what he does must be democratic, mustn’t it?

It's curious, isn’t it? People who believe in democracy seem to want to oppose it when a people democratically chooses to do away with democracy. It’s sort of a paradox of democracy. Like back in the 1920s, when Mussolini’s Italian Fascists launched a coup d’état. It could only be stopped by a state of emergency for which the decree had to be signed by the then King. And he refused. What should the democrats do? Uphold the state of law by breaking the law with an illegal state of emergency? Makes no sense, right? So they let things go. That only cost Italy 20 years of dictatorship, half a million war dead and rather more foreign victims killed in various overseas adventures.

Talking about overseas adventures, the author of Europe’s latest invasion of foreign territory, Vladimir Putin, was one of the first to congratulate Orbán on his success. The two are old friends, you see. The English expression is “birds of a feather flock together”. The French put it rather more forcefully: “tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are”. As well as Putin, Orbán’s best friends apparently include England’s Nigel Farage, France’s Marine le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini. By curious coincidence, all these fans of democracy belong to the hard, far right.

Aftermath of Russian occupation of Bucha in Ukraine
But the Kremlin assures us the pictures are all faked

Curiously, Putin’s congratulations to Orbán coincided with the MSM’s latest nefarious outburst. They’ve been writing at length, with pictures in support, about atrocities against civilians allegedly carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine. Can you imagine? They persist with these accusations, despite Moscow’s denials. Just as they apparently reject Moscow’s denial of any involvement in the murder of a Russian defector by Polonium poisoning in London, the attempted poisoning of another with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, the carpet bombing of Syrian cities or the massacre of civilians in Chechenia. 

You can imagine that the MSM’s insinuations might make people who had the vision to vote for Orbán or, indeed, back Putin, feel uncomfortable in their choices. Most people don’t like to be associated with war criminals and genocidal tyrants, or even with their more supportive friends.

Fortunately, they don’t have to feel uncomfortable. They can just ignore the MSM with their tedious insistence on getting independent confirmation of facts before publishing them, their obsession with making statements backed by evidence, and their attempts to offer people the chance to challenge any assertion they quote. 

Instead, they can insist on getting their information only from sources acceptable to the politicians they support. So they can wait for any criticism of Putin until some appears in RT, the former Russia Today, the mouthpiece of the Kremlin in general and of Putin in particular. It could be a long and peaceful wait.

It’s so much more comforting only ever to read what you want to be told. It’s Putin’s wish. Apparently, it’s the wish of most MSM critics too. Because those MSM pests keep telling them things that challenge their fondest prejudices.

And who could possibly want that?