Nature’s sculptures

Orgues d'Ille-sur-Tet, in the Pyrenees

Art and nature. They’re opposites, aren’t they? 

That’s a statement that often takes a more specific form, as in the debate over nature versus nurture. To me, trying to present nurture and nature as simply antithetical alternatives is all wrong. You’re interested in knowing how a personality is formed? Well, I’m certain that it’s nurture that shapes and moulds it. But it works on something that was already there, something with which we were born, and that has to be nature.

In other words, we inherit some of the things that make us what we are. And then those things get moulded by our parents, our teachers, our peer group until we get turned, for better or for worse, into the adults we become.

Still, that wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about here. In this post, I’m concerned about nature producing art. That’s art in the strict sense, the creation of objects that inspire joy or awe or simply astonishment. Normally, they’re human creations, which is why we tend to oppose art and nature. So it was a remarkable experience to be in a place where nature had built an extraordinary work of art.

Danielle and I spent a few days in France a week ago. She’s French and was missing her country, though Southwest France, the nearest bit to where we live in Northeast Spain, is about as far as you can get while staying in France, from her homeland in Alsace, way to the East, on the border with Germany and Switzerland.

As for me, well, I’m French too, though only thanks to marriage to her. My roots lie deep in England, disappointed though I am at the mess England is making of itself, hanging on to a corrupt government and turning its back on its neighbours by choosing Brexit. But, English or not, going to France was a big deal for me too, since it was the first time I’d crossed an international border for nearly three years: the end of a career which had involved this stone doing a lot rolling, left me more than happy to gather moss for a while.

The first thing I liked about going to France was being in a place where I could speak the language, foreign though it remains to me, with a lot more ease than I can speak Spanish. French is undoubtedly my second language and there’s a tremendous sense of ease in speaking it instead of constantly having to wonder what the next word should be or, worse, even after having found the right word, which of a plethora of possible forms it should take (Spanish verbs! What a pain. And to think that 12-year olds in Spain can handle them…)

So there we were in Southwest France. Which meant near the Pyrenees. It was lovely to see the peaks in the distance, still with some snow clinging to the tops. Not like the Alps, of course, since they’re nothing like as high, but with a real snow covering nonetheless.

Orgues d'Ille-sur-Tet,
with Pyrenean summer snow in the background

Danielle had discovered that there was a place called ‘les orgues d’Ille-sur-Tet’, ‘the organs of Ille on the Tet’, the Tet being the river that flows through the fine town of Perpignan. We decided to drive up there to take a look.

Wow. What a place. Millions of years ago the whole of it had been under water. At that time, sand had piled up at the bottom and then got compacted. I’m no geologist, but from what I’ve gleaned, if the process goes for long enough, what you get at the end is a sandstone tough enough to be used as a building material.

Well, these formations didn’t get long enough. In a relatively short time – in geological terms, which means a hell of a long time for us, like longer than it feels when you're waiting for a bus, or longer even than it feels waiting for the Trump presidency to end – the sea level in the Mediterranean fell and various upheavals left this area quite literally high and dry.

Well, high all the time, up in the Pyrenees. Dry only in good weather. And, when it comes to the art, it’s the rainy weather than matters.

Rain simply washes away the relatively uncompacted, and certainly uncemented, grains in these sand deposits. But less so in places where there happens to be an area of harder stone at the top. That protects the sand underneath, while everything around it gets washed away, leaving tall columns of sand with a bit of a cap on top (I don’t think ‘cap’ is the technical term used by geologists).

Just rain erosion on compacted sand 
– and yet so much more too...

Hence the naming of the places as ‘orgues’, from the slightly organ-pipe-like shapes of the structures. Though the people who run the site do admit that the word is usually only used in French for structures, like the Giant’s causeway, made of basalt.

The Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland

But let’s leave the science (what little I have of it) to one side. The striking aspect of the place is its sheer beauty. Delicate carving of extraordinary shapes. As though carried out by a fine sculptor. Someone like Giacometti, perhaps.

Sculpture by Giacometti

It left me feeling that setting art up against nature was a bit of a false dichotomy. After all, this wasn’t art imitating nature. It was nature making art, wasn’t it?

Sculpture by Nature

There's silly, there's crazy, and there's mass gun ownership

The never-ending grief
Mourning murdered kids after the latest US school shooting

There are moments that are permanently seared into your memory.

For me, one of them was hearing a radio interview, years ago, with Judy Murray, mother of the Scottish tennis star Andy Murray. It was during that interview that I learned that Andy had attended Dunblane Primary School as a child. Specifically, that he’d been in the school on the day in 1996 that Thomas Hamilton burst into it with a gun and killed 16 children and a teacher.

Judy Murray described the time she spent in a room at the school, waiting for information about whether her two sons had been shot, indeed whether either was still alive. Another mother was with her, and just as stressed by fear. Judy Murray eventually had good news, but the other mother had the worst a parent can receive.

It was an interview that made my blood run cold.

Let’s be clear. The British can be extraordinarily inept. Not to say self-destructive.

Britain currently has the only Prime Minister in its history to have been found guilty of a crime: he was fined for breaking the Covid lockdown rules that he was imposing on everyone else. What’s more, that hypocrisy seems to be reflected in the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police, which fined him only for one attendance at a lockdown-breaching event, though it has been confirmed that he attended others for which more junior people have been penalised. It’s galling to admit, but it appears that Britain’s premier police force is as guilty of double standards, and incompetence, as the Prime Minister.

The latest sorry step in this sorry saga is that Johnson has now amended the rules governing the behaviour of Ministers, so that if the current parliamentary investigation into his behaviour comes up with an unfavourable conclusion, he won’t have to resign. An offender changing the rules to duck punishment? Sadly, if you’re the Prime Minister, it seems you can.

What’s truly sad is that a huge minority of the British electorate simply wants to move on from all these shameful stories. As though, somehow, having a crook in your top job is just something you can complain about for a while but, if nothing changes, you should stop complaining once it gets boring.

Even more powerful testimony to the extraordinary mindlessness of many Brits is what’s happened with Brexit. The writer Anthony Horowitz recently told a literary festival that he is “still waiting to see the benefit” of Brexit. So am I. And I saw the other day that the Bank of England now calculates that Brexit is costing the country £440m a week. That’s a weekly cost. The leaders of the campaign to get Britain out of Europe promised us a saving of £350m a week.

Despite that, there’s no sign of any kind of apology from the campaigners who spun us that story. Nor is there much sign of many Brexiters ever admitting their error.

All this to show that Britain is fully capable of responding in a brainless way to events. In its reaction to the Dunblane school massacre, however, it didn’t. There it showed immense good sense and responsibility.

John Major and his wife pay their respects at Dunblane
But then he did more and brought in legislation against handguns

With across-the-board support, the government of the day moved quickly to ban ownership of high calibre handguns across Britain. More lethal guns were already illegal. A few months later, following a change in government, the ban was extended to all handguns.

The measure was truly draconian, a word I know is generally used pejoratively, but I mean it here as a positive. Draconian enough to give the American National Rifle Association apoplexy which, in my view, is just draconian enough. As the event has proved.

Guess how many school shootings Britain has suffered since Dunblane in 1996.

If you guessed zero, you’d be right.

Guess how many there have been in the United States since Sandy Hook in 2012.

If you said 948, you’d be right on the money.

So, here’s the thing. Gun control clearly works. It’s just like vaccination. It, too, clearly works. But there are people out there who deny both these obvious truths, despite mountains of evidence. Funnily enough, they’re often the same people. 

There is still gun crime in Britain, of course. But, according to the Washington Post, UK homicide by firearm so far this year is running at 0.23 cases per 100,000 people. The equivalent figure in the US is 12.21. And, let’s say it again, no school shootings since 1996.

I’m pretty certain that the NRA people don’t actually favour killing kids. After all, many gun fans are terribly keen on protecting unborn children. Presumably they’d also  like to do something for the ones that have been born. But by blocking the adoption in the US of the kind of measures Britain took in 1996, they’re ensuring kids will keep right on dying.

They’re always telling us that gun ownership makes you safer. But where do they think kids live in greater safety? In the US or the UK?

You have to be pretty dumb not to see the evidence. That leaves me wanting to adapt a fine old North Country saying: in my view, there’s none so daft as folk. 

Sorrow and joy with the dragons

My last weekend reminded me of an important lesson, which is that the trick isn’t to avoid tears, it’s to keep smiling anyway.

It was another dragon weekend. Fortunately, the dragons in question didn’t burn me to a frazzle with their fiery breath, or trample me underfoot with their viciously-clawed paws. On the contrary, these dragons were boats, and crewed by some of the warmest, kindest and most uplifting women it has been my pleasure to be around.

A dragon awaits its prey

What, you may in fact be wondering, was I doing hanging around them, if they were all women?

Well, as I explained once before when talking about dragon-boating, an aspect of this curious sport, an import from China and right up there with hot and sour soup or fireworks, is that its action, using paddles, is immensely therapeutic for Breast Cancer Survivors. That’s BCS in the parlance, by the way, and that abbreviation is heavily used in the sport. Now there are male BCS as well (men get breast cancer too), but inevitably most are women and so are many of the friends and supporters who enjoy the sport with them.

That’s certainly the case with the Valencia club to which my wife Danielle belongs and which allows me to tag along occasionally.

Initially, I wasn’t going to be the only man there for the weekend. In passing, let me say that ‘there’ was the Olympic canoe and kayak lake from the 1992 Olympics, which is a little way south of Barcelona, site of most of the events. About three hours’ drive from Valencia.

The other man due to attend, like me the husband of a paddler, as I believe they’re known, is a keen photographer. As I understand it, he was bringing at least three camera bodies, five lenses and a video recorder, ready to provide a top-notch service documenting the weekend. It was while he and his wife were on their way that they received a call to say that people they’d spent time with a few days earlier, had come down with Covid.

Now, everyone knew, including them, that they were most unlikely to be infectious. Especially as they’re fully vaccinated. But, as highly responsible people, they showed up, only to explain to us that they couldn’t stay, and then turned around to drive the three hours back.

It was an extraordinarily selfless gesture. And when they discovered, once the incubation period was passed and they could run a test, that they were both negative for Covid, it only underlined the scale of their sacrifice.

Their absence didn’t only mean that I was the only man there. It also changed my role, or so I thought. I’d believed that I’d just be a ‘zero-to-the-left’ to translate the excellent metaphor used by Spanish speakers for people whose usefulness to any undertaking is nil. But now, suddenly, I had a role. I’d be taking photographs. Without five lenses or a video camera, and only on a phone. But still, it was for me to do my best, and I felt the stress.

In reality, of course, lots of other people had phones, so there was no real pressure on me, but I couldn’t help feeling both the privilege and the strain of responsibility.

It was gratifying to see how well maintained the venue was, and how heavily used. When we turned up at 9:00 on Saturday (9:00 am? On a Saturday? Sport is a cruel activity) the place was alive with rowers (who’d obviously been there a while already, demonstrating that rowing’s even less civilised than dragon-boating). Single sculls, coxless pairs, coxless fours, even an eight. And they weren’t happy to leave the water, let me tell you, to make way for the dragon boaters.

Our Valencia club has a good mix of BCS and other paddlers, like Danielle herself. So, the club took part in a range of events, BCS and non-BCS.

A Valencia boat sets out

Well, our club didn’t take a lot of medals, but it confirmed the fine old Olympic philosophy that it isn’t the winning or losing that matters, but the taking part. Like me with my phone, they gave of their best, at the price of a lot more effort than I ever made, and were breathtaking in their commitment to the sport. I was, as always, impressed.

Besides, there was one heart-stopping moment, and I was delighted to be there to record it, when the club’s BCS women snatched victory in the heat that qualified them for the finals of the competition. And by ‘snatched’ I really mean ‘snatched’: they took it at the line.

Victory snatched on the line

They may not have done quite so well in the final itself but, hey, getting that far was triumph enough. 

It wasn’t just on the water that the club’s women were outstanding. It was a joy to spend the evenings with them, walking around an attractive area of Southern Catalonia, and enjoying not just the meals but the time spent chatting at the tables in the various restaurants we visited. The Spanish have a lovely word for that: ‘sobremesa’, ‘over-table’, for the chat around a dinner table, whether with food or just with a few glasses of wine afterwards. 

What’s more, even during the days, while not paddling, it took little – a bar or two of music, say – to get people with a disposition that sunny singing and dancing. And above all smiling.

Dragon dancing

The thing about breast cancer is that not everyone survives and becomes a BCS. And, sadly, many BCS don’t stay that way forever. Even within the club, we’ve had people who seemed to be surviving and doing well, only to relapse later. It’s an undertone of sadness for a sport undertaken for fun.

The festival marked that side of the sport too. A simple ceremony had BCS competitors, in their boats, remembering those who are paddling no more. They scattered pink carnations on the water as a tribute.

For those who didn’t make it

There were tears. There was grieving. But there were smiles too and joy as well as sorrow in their memories.

In memory of absent friends

So it was a weekend of fun, but not of fun alone. When cancer’s present at the feast, there’s grief in the air. But that needn’t stop the feasting.

Uneasy lies the head that would free itself of a crown

Our pool filling
Houses of ‘Los Sauces’ beyond
Part of the repaired handrail to the right

That photo. A swimming pool nearly full. Pretty anodyne, right? Nothing exciting about it. 

Well, the apparent calm and banality of the scene hides something far more stressful, but also far more instructive, than you might imagine. At least for me.

The pool belongs to what out here in Spain we call a ‘community’. This one, in the fine neighbourhood of La Cañada, includes our house and is called ‘Los Sauces’, which means ‘The Willows’. An excellent name, except for the fact that there isn’t a willow to be seen for miles around.

It’s a bit like that great British dessert, plum pudding. Famous for containing practically every kind of fruit known to mankind, except for plums.

There are sixteen houses in the community. That’s an ideal number for the size of pool. It means that much of the time, we can use it undisturbed by anyone else. Or, if there’s someone else there, it tends to be one or two neighbours, and we like them all. That makes it as good as a private pool though it’s larger than most.

Sadly, though, the community fell into a trap a few years ago. It was the result of a tragic accident. An accident that left one of our neighbours in a wheelchair. Spending time in the pool is good therapy for him, and the community rallied around to put in some new steps that he could manage.

What, you may be wondering, was the trap?

It was a classic. They went for a cheap option. And, like so much cheap work, it ended up costing a lot more in the longer run. 

The steps were badly built. The handrails, in particular, were soon loose and needed strengthening. The builders also did a lot of damage to the tiles at the bottom of the pool, causing more and more of them to lift.

That’s not just an aesthetic problem. Chlorinated water in contact with the concrete lining of the pool can cause it to rot, until the whole structure is damaged and suddenly you’re looking at having to replace the pool altogether. 

This all meant that last year we had to decide to do some major work repairing the pool, costing considerably more than the new steps had. Such is karma.

What, you may now be wondering, has any of this to do with me personally?

Well, our little community has a paid, professional administrator, and an unpaid, unprofessional president. The president is chosen not by election, but nonetheless democratically. The honour and privilege of the presidency goes from house to house along the row of sixteen, with each houseowner in turn holding the post for a year. 

As a rule, the President has practically nothing to do. He or she attends a meeting at the start, where the investiture takes place to the acclamation of the assembled multitude – I may be slightly enhancing the pomp of the event – and another at the end to hand the privilege on.

But that isn’t quite the same when the Community has a major investment to make. Then there is work for the President to do. Especially since the administrator is a strictly part-time position and isn’t paid anything like enough to make it much less part-time.

Now can you see where this is going?

Yep. It was my turn to be president in what I’m sure I shall forever think of as the Year of the Swimming Pool Crisis.

My first aim was to try to build consensus in favour of whatever solution we adopted. I used to prefer that way of doing things at work too. It isn’t always possible and sometimes you have to lay down the law. Or, and the difference is only one of tone, throw your toys out of the pram. Which was the case with this project.

In the first place, we came up with two possible firms to do the work. Both sent a representative to a meeting of the Community. Unfortunately, the slightly more expensive one sent an expert, who explained in rather a dry and unadorned way just what had to be done and the possible problems. The other sent its CEO, who was a pure salesman. Full of charm, and jokes, and a Boris-Johnson way of sounding like he could easily be the best friend of everyone present.

It was a highly effective object lesson in the power of salesmanship. The majority, including me, fell for it.

Naturally, we gave his company the job.

To be fair, he hit some problems that were beyond his control. We’ve just had the wettest March and April since local records began. While it was chucking it down, his guys couldn’t do much. 

On the other hand, there was some serious soldering to be done on the defective handrails of the staircase. That had to be done indoors. There’s no good reason why it couldn’t have been completed while the rain was lashing down. But it wasn’t. 

At one point, a small number of neighbours started to complain rather more vehemently than I felt appropriate. Toys, I decided, had to be thrown out of the pram. In the calmest possible way. I told the Community’s WhatsApp group that I understood that someone else, a native Spanish speaker, rather than a foreigner with only limited mastery of the language, could do a much better job of putting a slow contractor under pressure. 

I was more than happy for one of them to take over.

That shut the complainers up. No doubt, the fact that I was completely sincere helped. You may not be surprised to learn that there were no volunteers.

The complaints started again when the weather turned good, and swimming became desirable, but progress on the pools still seemed stalled. 

Gradually, my phone calls with the company went from being roughly weekly, to two or three times a week, to daily and then several times a day. I kept being told that things were on the brink of completion. And then they didn’t complete.

We ended up with a constantly repeating cycle, of Promise-Hope-Disappointment.

Eventually, though, the job got done. Perhaps not 100%. Maybe 90%. But that included the tiling and the handrails. I probably need to be satisfied with that. Or at least resigned to it.

And now comes the important moment: it’s time for me to step down as President.

It turns out I’m nothing like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. I feel absolutely no inclination to cling on to the top job at all costs. Besides, I never used my position to invade a neighbouring community, or to attempt to undermine the constitution of mine, or even to break its rules, not something they can say. Or at least not without lying.

I admit their offices may be slightly more prestigious and powerful than President of the Community of The Willows, in La Cañada, Valencia, Spain. But still, you know what I mean. I can’t wait to dump the responsibility of the job on my unfortunate successor and next-door neighbour.

We love her dearly, but it’s her baby now.

Support for Truss? It may be too soon

It’s always curious when someone starts to get talked about a lot in the news. 

It used to be said of the old dictator of what we now call ex-Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, that his will opened with the words “if I should die”. Well, he did eventually die. And while he was dying, no other subject mattered in the Yugoslav media. A citizen of Tito’s fine republic is alleged to have complained, “I open the paper – it’s him. I tune in the radio – it’s him. I turn on the TV – it’s him. I’m afraid to open a can of dog food.”

Truss: the conqueror?

Well, these days in the English media, it’s the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s name that’s on every lip, page and screen. I don’t think it’s usually an accident that a leading politician suddenly starts to hog the limelight this way. Which gets me thinking about what might be behind all the publicity.

Truss looking for support, perhaps?

To be fair, there’s enough to talk about in things that actual fall within the remit of her present job. As Foreign Secretary, she’s responsible for Britain’s stance over the Ukraine war (sorry, Vladimir, special operation). Or at least responsible for it to the extent that her boss, Boris Johnson, lets her get a word in edgeways. He’s now decided that with a tanking economy after a bungled pandemic, he needs to build a new profile as a world statesman, and leave the mess of domestic politics to someone else. 

Truss also handles the Brexit brief, which means the tricky negotiations around the Northern Ireland Protocol. It’s no wonder Johnson wants to keep well away from this one, since he described it as “A good arrangement… with the minimum possible bureaucratic consequences”, back in October 2019 when he freely, even enthusiastically, signed it.

For anyone who’s not too sure what the Protocol is about, it’s allows Northern Ireland to remain inside the EU Single Market, to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, which remains an EU member. But that means that there has to be a border, with checks on good, between Northern Ireland and Britain

The Prime Minister’s grasp of this awkward reality is made clear by his statement in December 2019. He said, “There will be no checks on goods going from GB to NI, or NI to GB”.

Presumably he’s read what he signed since, as he now wants out of the Protocol just as fast as it can be arranged. Truss has been charged with renegotiating it or, if that fails, simply opting out of it unilaterally. That’s something entirely in Johnson’s character, since he likes to act as though law doesn’t apply to him. However, he’d rather someone else took the blame.

Which is also entirely in his character.

Dealing with Russian warmongering or turning Britain into a nation that breaks international law – rather like Russia – was always going to attract press attention. But now she’s taken to talking about key matters outside her own brief. 

As British inflation hit a 40-year high, she told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News:

We are in a very, very difficult economic situation. We're facing some very very serious global headwinds. Inflation is extremely high. What we're doing is working to increase growth in our economy, attract investment to the United Kingdom, to face down these global headwinds.

Now that sounds like she’s muscling her way into the economic arena, more properly the domain of her colleague Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the quaint title Britain still uses for its Finance Minister).

A few months ago, when it looked like Boris Johnson might be forced out of office quite soon, the favourites to take over from him were these two big-hitters, Foreign Secretary Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Sunak. But then Truss mysteriously faded, leaving Sunak as the clear front-runner.

As he remained until some nasty stories about his and his and his wife’s tax arrangements started to circulate. Naturally, I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that anyone close to the Prime Minister was responsible for the leaks, but they certainly removed Sunak, at speed, from the ranks of potential challengers to him. Here one day, gone the next, that was Sunak. 

Now Truss is back in the news. Practically every day, as far as I can see. And even sounding off about matters that are properly Sunak’s area of expertise.

Like I said, I don’t think that kind of thing happens by accident.

Sadly, for Truss at least, she’s probably on a hiding to nothing. She can only seriously contemplate taking over from Johnson if he shows any sign of stepping down. And for the moment, he doesn’t. 

Nor is he likely to be under any pressure to anytime soon. Britain is blessed – if that’s the word – with a seriously large number of electors who like to moan endlessly about dishonesty in politicians, if they’re Labour politicians. If they’re Conservatives, they’re much more indulgent.

Most people know that Johnson’s as bent as he’s incompetent (and, boy, he’s incompetent). But they don’t seem to care. They’re happy to leave a known inept crook in charge.

That’s bad news for Liz Truss. Unless she knows of an imminent scandal that’ll scupper Johnson, she probably needs to bide her time before bidding for the top job. Which might make all that talk about her right now just a little premature.

Careful, Liz. It isn’t smart to peak too soon. Especially up against someone like Johnson, who may be no good at governing, but is a past master at defending what he sees as his due. 

Just look at what happened to Sunak. 

The rain in Spain again

It’s been a weird spring, here in the Valencia. 

The region of Valencia is fertile and often surprisingly green. It’s only really in the height of summer that things start to turn yellow. But greenness and soil fertility come at a price.

It reminds me of what a friend from the English Lake District once said to me. He found it funny when visitors complained about the rain. 

“It’s the Lake District,” he would reply, “and it’s full of lakes. What do you think they’re full of? And where do you think it comes from?”

In Valencia, we tend to have two periods of serious rain a year, in about November and about March. It can be as little as a week, it can sometimes be as long as three. It isn’t generally longer.

Well, last November we didn’t get the heavy rain. When I say ‘heavy’, I mean heavy. It comes down in huge floods, so that if you go out without a raincoat, you’re soaked in seconds, and even if you go out with one, it only takes ten minutes for the water to seep under your protective garments. Then imagine that going on for hours and hours, and the same thing happening every day or two, for a couple of weeks.

Well, it didn’t happen in November. So we started the year with our hydrographers frankly worried. Reservoirs were down to 30%. Things were close to critical.

Then came March. And it was followed by April. They were the rainiest since records began. On and on for week after week. I’m told that, officially, we had 27 days of rain in the two months. That’s practically every other day. You can probably guess that with heavy rain every other day, it actually feels as though it never stops, and there isn’t a dry day ever. 

It even extended into May. On Tuesday 3 May, over 232 litres of water fell per square metre in a single 24-hour period. The paper where I read that startling fact, quoted a local saying, “that’s a lot of water”, which sounds about right to me, if not particularly insightful.

Well, the reservoirs are full now. Why, they’ve even had to release water into the Albufera, the huge freshwater lake south of Valencia, where the great rice-growing areas are. That’s a boon because the lake has been appreciably shrinking for the last few years.

But you can have too much of a good thing. And while I’m happy the weather decided to make up for its failure to deliver water in November, I can’t help feeling it slightly overcompensated for its initial negligence. By the beginning of May, everyone was beginning to feel a bit fed up with it all. Hell, we were feeling that way by the middle of April.

In low-lying areas, the effects were disastrous. Buildings damaged, cars washed away, roads and railways closed. Basically, quite dramatic conditions.

Where we live is a little higher up. I mean, I’m not claiming it’s mountainous or anything. We’re at about 100 metres above sea level. But that’s been enough, so far, to protect us reasonably well from flooding. How long it'll last I don’t know, of course. I realise there are still climate change deniers out there, but if our experience of this spring is anything to go by, they’re looking increasingly unconvincing with every day that passes.

One of the best resources of our neighbourhood is the woodland nearby, where I go walking with the dogs most days. It’s typical Mediterranean countryside: lots of pines, scrubby grass, plenty of sand. But there’s a distinct and general lack of water features. Streams? No. Lakes? I’m told there’s one but I’ve yet to find it. Waterfalls? Don’t make me laugh.

So one of the more exciting sides of the rain this year was the sudden appearance of lakes and rivers in the woods.

Toffee inspects with scepticism our newly-minted mighty cataracts

Now, mind, I’m using the words ‘lakes’ and ‘rivers’ in rather a personal sense. I appreciate most people might prefer ‘streams’ and ‘ponds’. Or even ‘rivulets’ and ‘puddles’. But I like to take a more romantic view. 

Lake and Torrent in La Vallesa woods

The same place today.
Back to normal, except for the extra fallen tree

Calling them lakes and rivers made them even more enjoyable.

Though I don’t suppose we’ll be rivalling the English Lake District anytime soon.

Lake Windermere

A woman of courage

Do you know the story of Laura Secord? She rose to a difficult challenge with both courage and determination. Hers is a curious story, and I find it valuable both for the things I like about it and for the things I don’t.

If you’ve never heard of her, or you’re a Canadian who only associates her with a brand of chocolate (with which, incidentally, she had nothing to do), don’t worry. I certainly knew nothing about her until I started work on episode 90 of my podcast, A History of England, due to go out on Sunday. It deals with the War of 1812, which very few people know anything about, and even fewer care.

It was one of those completely senseless wars, where nobody gained anything from the other side (although the Americans did end up putting an end to any organised Native American resistance to their westward expansion, so as far as those two were concerned, there was a clear winner and a catastrophic loser).

It was the second and last war between Britain and the United States. So far, at any rate. Neither the British nor the Americans did well in trying to capture territory from the other side, which in the Americans’ case meant in Canada. Both did, however, develop quite a remarkable line in burning each other’s towns and cities. 

Among other places, the Americans burned York in Canada, a town which later grew (a lot) to become today’s Toronto. 

Among the many such depredations by the British, the most notorious was the burning of Washington. The soldiers took over what was then called the Executive Mansion, apparently eating the dinner that had been prepared for the US President (James Madison, since you ask) and then torching the place. When rebuilt, it was also repainted in a colour I leave you to work out, from the new name of the building, the White House.

One of the less significant attacks on a town was the American assault on Queenston, on what’s known as the Niagara peninsula, between Canada and America. That’s where Laura Secord lived.

She was the daughter of an American immigrant from Massachusetts, and she’d married a local man. He was wounded in the fighting to defend the town, and the story has it that she intervened with two American soldiers who were intent on beating the injured man to death. This story, however, is questioned these days, and may have been an embellishment by a grandson of hers, especially the part of the account where he claims she begged the soldiers to kill her instead.

Either way, when she got home, she found it had been systematically looted.

American officers were then billeted on her, so she had to provide them with bed and board for as long as they stayed there.

Whether it was from overhearing their conversation or in some other way, she learned of a planned American attack on a British encampment at a place called Beaver Dams. So she set out to walk the twenty miles on unfamiliar paths through dense woods to warn the British. Before she got there, she stumbled on a group of Mohawks who guided her the rest of the way.

Laura Secord guided by Mohawks
A somewhat romanticised view from a lot later...

The British may also have been warned by their ‘Indian’ – i.e. Native American – allies. In any case, they were ready for the attack when it came and were able to score a decisive victory over a superior American force.

Not a bad story, right?

What I don’t like about it is that back in 2012, the then Conservative government of Canada decided to make a big deal of the War of 1812. Even among Canadians, few have heard of it and still fewer care. But Stephen Harper’s government wanted to forge a new identity for the country, and identity for so many on the right, means something manly and warlike.

Secord only represented a small part of that story, as the government told it. She was little more than a footnote alongside just one other woman they chose to include. And she was very much the supporting player. She, the loving wife who tended her husband’s injuries, walked to the British, only because her husband was wounded, with the implication that he would have gone instead if he could have. 

What’s more, it feels distinctly artificial to make this a kind of foundation myth for Canada. There were certainly many Canadians fighting the American invaders, and many French Canadians were among them. But they weren’t fighting for Canada, which wouldn’t be invented for several decades yet, they were fighting for Britain, in British units, wearing British uniforms, under British command. 

If they fought against an invasion, they certainly weren’t fighting for independence, but for the right to remain a British colony.

What I do like about the story is what it says about people storming into someone else’s country without knocking. Thomas Jefferson, famed as the main drafter of the American Declaration of Independence, and the third President of the United States, reckoned that all the US army had to do was march, to take control of Canada. The local population would welcome the Americans as liberators and rush to their side.

Well, no, that didn’t happen. Laura Secord had seen her home looted by her so-called liberators. And that pushed her to undertake a difficult and dangerous task, which she successfully accomplished, against them. 

At Beaver Dams, as in most battles in that war, it was the defending side that won. People fight harder when they’re protecting their homes than when they’re attacking someone else’s. That makes them far more difficult to overcome.

What a pity Vladimir Putin wasn’t aware of that before he launched his ill-advised ‘special operation’ against Ukraine. It turns out that there are a lot of Laura Secords in that country. Amongst the men as well as the women.

Unintended consequence

According to Maya Angelou, “when we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed”.

Well, yes. Except when things go wrong.

Here’s what happened when my good friend Nigel gave his wife Sheila a new bike (I’ve changed the names, since I believe in protecting the guilty). A wonderful idea as he also got them two kiddie bike seats, so they would be able to go out for bike rides as a family, each with one of their two children (obviously, the system would break down if they ever had a third).

Sheila decided she ought to try her bike. She took it outdoors for a ride around the village where they live. It seemed a good idea at the time.

The problem is that Sheila likes to document key moments in their family life. 

“Nigel,” she called out, “come and take a picture.”

Nigel was reluctant, but eventually allowed himself to be persuaded. Out he came with his phone, ready to record what would be a rite of passage for his family. Later, all of them would enjoy the photos, as they looked back on this important moment in their family history.

“Here’s when your mother first went out on a bike after not having used one for, oh, several years,” they’d be able to say, and all of them wonder at the implications of this key event, the point at which they truly became a cycling family. And ‘key event’ is the right way to describe it, as you’ll soon discover.

In his hurry to get his task as official recorder done, Nigel came out in his socks. They prepared to take the picture as they wanted it. Sadly, as they were getting ready, there was a brief gust of wind and the front door blew shut.

It was only then that they realised that neither had brought any keys.

Fortunately, they both had their phones. Unfortunately, both phones were nearly out of charge. They were going to have make calls quickly and keep them short.

A friend of theirs had a spare key. But she was half an hour away. With mobile phone batteries down to the 2 or 3% level, it seemed best to waste none on contacting her. Luckily, their helpful and obliging landlord lived nearby and also had a key.

They rang him. He said he’d pop around at once. And he was as good as his word. 

Sadly, that was where they made their next depressing discovery.

Key error

One of them had left a key in the lock on the inside of the door. With a key in it, it couldn’t be opened from outside. They were as stuck as ever.

It was time to try the local locksmith. He, too, was more than happy to help. And, he assured them, since he wasn’t far away, he could be with them within half an hour.

That was good news. In the meantime, though, Nigel’s feet were beginning to show the first signs of frostbite (I may have exaggerated that a bit). So, while they were waiting for the locksmith, Sheila and Nigel popped to a local corner shop, one of those fine establishments that will sell you anything from brooms to bin liners, from toilet brushes to tablecloths. They were able to pick up a pair of shoes that might not make much of a fashion statement, but at least had the merit of being cheap and protecting Nigel’s toes from falling off.

The locksmith arrived soon after their return, with what he called his X-ray machine for opening locks. At first, it looked like it wouldn’t work, that the door would resist even his highest of high tech, and they would have to smash a window to get in. But then, suddenly, there was a satisfying click and the lock turned. A push on the handle and the door swung open. They were in.

You can imagine the gratitude they felt to the locksmith. Only enhanced when he told them his charge, which was not a lot over 10% of the normal price that they had expected to pay. “I’m a neighbour,” he told them, “and I have a special price for people who live nearby.”

Sheila and Nigel were delighted to be back indoors, before the kids came back from school. It was only once they went into their sitting room that they realised that the sliding window to the balcony had been open the whole time. A small scramble from the front of the building and they could have been in an hour earlier.

Ah, well. At least everything had worked out OK. And they’d learned a useful lesson. That’s that even the most welcome of gifts needs to be handled with care, if the giving isn’t to turn from a blessing to a curse.

What’s more, it’s no bad thing to take a key with you when you go out. And not to leave one in the lock inside.

As for the trial bike ride around the village, well, I have no idea how that worked out. Or whether it happened at all. Other events rather overshadowed it.

What we celebrate. Or don't

Such a lot of nations have national days, don’t they? You know, the kind of thing that’s celebrated with flags and bonfires and fireworks, generally with too much to eat, and washed down by far too much to drink.

Switzerland’s national day is one of the most venerable. In fact, no one’s really sure that the anniversary falls on the right date: the Swiss celebrate 1 August because some time ‘early in August’ in 1291, the men of the original three cantons – Uri, Schwyz (which gave its name to the country) and Unterwalden – came together on the Rütli meadow and swore the oath to spring to the aid of any of their number who came under attack.

1 August is, of course, as early in August as you can get, so it’s probably not a bad choice. A choice made, incidentally, in 1891, the 600th anniversary, and the first time it was celebrated nationally. The event is venerable, the celebration far less.

Then there are the Americans. Oh, what a day the fourth of July is. Huge celebrations for the moment that the American colonists declared their independence from the overbearing rule of Britain. A historic assertion of the rights of man. Rights of man, that is, not necessarily woman. And the subtext that the man’s white. A legacy the country’s still living with today.

And the French. Celebrating the fourteenth of July, when the people rose from poverty and oppression, and stormed that hateful symbol of royal and aristocratic authoritarianism, the Bastille prison in Paris. A glorious moment when the citizens of France declared themselves forever attached to liberty, equality and fraternity. They then spilled a lot of fraternal blood to prove it, and ultimately proclaimed themselves subjects of an Emperor who led them to disaster in the country’s longest conflict since the hundred years’ war.

Other countries have no such day. Britain does have its bonfire night, which also includes fireworks, and generally sausages washed down with large quantities of intoxicating liquor. That’s Guy Fawkes Night when kids join together, up and down the land, to celebrate the death by torture of a Catholic fanatic who wanted to blow up Parliament. That’s an act a great many Englishmen today would see as more appropriate to celebrate than Guy Fawkes’s burning.

But Guy Fawkes Day isn’t really a proper national day. Burning a Catholic? Not uncommon at the time. Not exactly glorious. No, Britain hasn’t found itself a unique day of glory to mark, a rival to the Rütli meadow oath, the Declaration of Independence, or the Storming of the Bastille. You can attribute that to Britain’s history being so glorious that no single day stands out above any other, or to Britain never having done anything glorious enough on any one day, to justify turning it into a particular celebration. You choose the explanation you prefer.

And then there are countries where there is, frankly, confusion. That’s the case, for instance, of the country in which we live today, Spain. Specifically, we live in the Community of Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast. That matters in this context, as you’ll soon discover if you read on.

Goya's Fusiliamentos del 3 de Mayo

Spain does have a date it might choose to mark nationally. It has been burned into national, indeed international, consciousness by one of the country’s greatest artists, Francisco Goya. Although, strictly speaking, his great painting, the Fusilamientos del 3 de Mayo, the Executions of the 3rd of May (strictly, the ‘shootings’, but that doesn’t really work in English, does it?) shows the aftermath of the event itself.

What was that event?

Well, Spain had been an ally of France, locked by then in 15 years of bloody war with most of the rest of Europe, and above all with Britain. 

Yep, that’s the war I mentioned before, that followed the storming of the Bastille.

That alliance had done Spain no good at all. It lost most of its fleet when, together with the French fleet and under the command of a hopeless French admiral, it was destroyed by a British fleet under Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. That was a tragedy for a nation proud of its huge overseas Empire. That kind of thing made it a less than wholly enthusiastic partner of France.

Then, when France decided it had to invade Portugal, it marched its troops straight across Spanish territory to take on this new foe and ally of Britain. Aware of Spain’s lack of enthusiasm for their joint cause, the French chose to peel off troops as on their way across the peninsula. These turned themselves into an army of occupation.

This got right up the noses of the Spanish. The people of Madrid rose on 2 May 1808. The thing about armies of occupation is that, once they’re in place, they reckon they have every right to be there. They view the people who rise against as criminals. Even terrorists. So they feel themselves justified in executing them.

Britain did the same with those who had the gall to resist its rule in India, or Malaya, or Kenya or pretty much anywhere else where Johnny Foreigner failed to grasp the benefit of British rule. The French did it in Indochina or Algeria. The Americans did it Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.

Well, back then in 1808, the French did it in Madrid. On the day following the uprising, the 3rd of May, they executed a bunch of men they viewed as criminals, because they had had the gall to attack them. Providing Goya with the subject matter of one of his most famous paintings.

Goya also did a painting of the uprising itself, El Dos de Mayo en Madrid,
with the people attacking French Mameluke soldiers

That makes the 2nd of May a key date in Spanish history. Glorious enough, you might imagine. Bloody enough. And the start of what Spain still refers to as its War of Independence. 

You’d think the whole nation might celebrate it. But, it turns out, it doesn’t.

On the 2nd of May, we were in the Madrid Community and travelling back to our home in the Valencian Community. At the Madrid end, everything was shut. We drove quickly, worried that as we reached home, we’d be caught in the homebound traffic of holiday makers. But there was nothing of the kind. Far from it, the traffic we saw was what we’ve come to expect at the end of a working day, as people leave the colossal industrial estate near us. Fortunately, that traffic tends to be mostly in the opposite direction.

Why was there that traffic?

The answer came when I greeted a neighbour of ours, as she climbed out of he car.

“Hi,” I said, “all well?”

“Great, now that work’s over,” she replied.

“Work? On the 2nd of May?”

“Oh, we don’t celebrate it here.”

It turns out that in Spain, with its highly federal structure of Communities, some take the 2nd of May off, and others don’t. Valencia is one that doesn’t. 

That’s a fine reflection of the somewhat confused nature of the Spanish national soul.

Making our trip home quite an illuminating experience.

P.S. Spain does have a national day, incidentally. The 12th of October. But, boy, is that confused too. Perhaps I’ll come back to the theme nearer the day.

What Putin didn’t learn

What makes history both interesting and galling is the way it confirms the philosopher Hegel’s view that, “the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

Washington in Valley Forge, the spirit of American resistance
Canadians and Brits resist an American invasions
A Vietnamese resister captured by US forces awaits his fate

Take the Brits in the 1770s. They’d fought three wars against France in the century and, with allies, won all of them. They’d built the world’s greatest navy. A bunch of colonists with little in the way of military equipment and less training were clearly no match for their power.

And yet, those North American colonists held Britain at bay for ten years. They even won a few set-piece battles. What’s more, British victories were never conclusive, but only bought them a little time while the colonists prepared for their next encounter.

Britain had also made the mistake of saddling itself with a cost-cutting government, which had run down its military power. When France, Spain and Holland joined the war against it, resources were stretched to breaking point. For the first and last time in the last four centuries, enemy fleets sailed in the English Channel unchallenged.

That meant that Britain couldn’t stop France coming to the aid of the colonists and winning the battle that ended the war as an American victory. Britain could certainly have fought on, but far too many people at home had decided that it was pointless. They were battling a whole people, with a huge landmass at its back, and deep resources, human as well as material, from which it could replace whatever losses Britain could inflict on them.

Britain might have been able to win army-to-army, and certainly fleet-to-fleet, battles. But army-to-people? Not a chance.

It was a harsh lesson America had inflicted on Britain. It seems, however, that it didn’t learn it itself. Just three decades later, the two nations came to blows again, in the War of 1812. This time, the Americans were sure they only had to step over the border into Canada, in particular the nearest part, then called Upper Canada, which was predominantly settled by English-speaking Protestants, to win that territory from Britain. The population would greet them with joy, as liberators. 

To their astonishment, not to say shock, the Americans discovered that the Canadians weren’t that keen on being absorbed into the United States. Instead, they took arms to fight alongside British troops and drive the Americans back out. Meanwhile, though the Brits could certainly invade US territory and do some harm – like burning Washington DC – they couldn’t hold anything or defeat the much less experienced American forces. Who, indeed, inflicted several painful defeats on them.

There are plenty more such examples. But let’s fast forward nearly a century and a half. The Vietnamese have just won a stunning victory over the forces of their colonial masters, the French. But, instead of gaining their independence, they find their country divided artificially in two, with the Americans pouring in men to try to protect the unpopular regime in South Vietnam.

The Americans fought on for 20 years. There were going on for 1.5 million deaths, 58,000 of them American soldiers. The scale of the Vietnamese deaths reveals that this was again a war by an immensely powerful nation against a people. The powerful side, America’s, could win battle after battle and inflict huge casualties. It could never win the people round, and they would always step forward to replace their losses.

A lesson repeated down the ages. You can be a powerful nation. You can kid yourself into thinking that the people of another nation will welcome your invasion with open arms. You can rightly believe that it hasn’t the forces to defeat you in conventional battle. And you can then come unstuck when the people who were supposed to welcome you in fact resist your invasion, and keep replacing the gaps you’ve made in their ranks.

It’s even worse if the country is geographically huge, like the North American colonies Britain tried to bring to heel. Or if, again like the Brits, you’ve allowed your armed forces to decline in strength. Especially if, like them, you find that other nations rally to your enemies’ support.

So here’s the question. What on earth was Putin thinking of? With so many examples to learn from, with his constant calling on models from history, how could he have been so short-sighted as to go to war against a geographically colossal nation, Ukraine, kidding himself that the population would welcome his forces, and using an army that is woefully below par? And hopelessly underestimating the West’s readiness to support his victim?

Ukrainian resistance, Russian losses

That’s the first lesson from history, that people like Putin don’t learn lessons from history. But there’s a second lesson. Which is that there are no bounds to human stupidity. And it isn’t a disqualification from getting into positions of enormous power.

As Putin so strikingly shows.