Careful with the nostalgia

Be careful what you wish for, people say. Good advice, I reckon. But I think it needs to be extended.

Be careful what you’re nostalgic about, I’d recommend.

Julio Cervera in 1886.
A suitable object for nostalgia?
Not for everyone, perhaps

Nostalgia can be quite a pleasant emotion. It has you remembering a time when you liked life better. Sadly, though, the rosy picture may be a tad mythical. I’ve been around for pretty much three generations now, and in each of those generations I’ve constantly heard people complaining about how the young are more uncouth, ruder and less perceptive than the speakers were at that age.

In my experience, young people in any generation can be pretty unbearable. I’ve often wondered how my parents put up with me at all, given the arrogant, self-righteous and self-satisfied attitudes I adopted and proclaimed to anyone I could force to listen when I was in my late teens or early twenties. 

So when I hear young people today behaving in precisely the same way, I just think, “right, good, they’re no better than I was”. I feel no hostility towards them. But equally I feel no nostalgia for those far less than rosy times.

Nostalgia becomes far worse when it seeps into politics. There seems to be a longing in many quarters for a supposedly better time when powerful leaders simply didn’t put up with intolerable behaviour. That’s using ‘intolerable’ to mean what the speaker wouldn’t tolerate.  Although, if the speaker is, say, Boris Johnson, it means intolerable in anyone but himself, his friends, his numerous families (including, I imagine, the kids he refuses to acknowledge) or anyone who’s providing him with money to advance his career or redecorate his flat (if you don’t know about Boris Johnson’s redecorating of Number 10 Downing Street at huge cost and in the worst of taste, just search for ‘Wallpapergate’).

Faced with the intolerable, the leaders for which so many are nostalgic responded with the hard smack of strong government. It’s funny, these people generally hate big government, but when it’s beating up people they dislike, they want it to have all possible power.

So we have support for the likes of Boris Johnson, or Donald Trump, or, in Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who only the other day was denouncing the terrible mixing of races in Europe. I suppose that must be important for the nostalgists. I don’t think we’ve had a European leader denouncing racial mixing explicitly since the days of Hitler.

In Spain, where I live, the nostalgia takes the form of wistfulness for the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. This was a time when those who opposed his brand of Catholic Nationalism wouldn’t just be defeated, in elections (there weren’t any) or in war (the regime started with nearly three years of bitter fighting), but had to be exterminated. And watching Trump sending an armed mob to attack the US Capitol, or Putin dealing with his opponents, one can see the same pursuit of extermination is alive and well today.

I went hunting for Franco’s last speech recently, and I was fascinated by some of the comments on a transcript of it. 

“And this was by far the best period in Spanish history…” claimed one.

“What a pity you’re not here now, we need you!” wrote another.

“I feel very proud of this and of our Spanish past” was a comment that particularly caught my attention, since it’s that past I want to talk about today.

But first: why was Franco giving that speech, on 1 October 1975, only six weeks from his death?

Well, just four days earlier, five men convicted of terrorism by summary military courts, had been executed by firing squad. Franco’s regime executed some 200,000 people – you know, not just defeating but exterminating opposition – but almost all of them during the Civil War or immediately after it. Those final shooting on 27 September 1975, as I’ve pointed out before, were a reminder that he still had the power to order them and was still willing to exercise it.

A painting by Equipo Crónica marking the executions
Note the date, the wall, the eyes blanked as by a blindfold,
the broken palette of the artist

The executions were met by demonstrations in many cities. In the Portuguese capital Lisbon, they turned violent and the Spanish Embassy was invaded, gutted and set on fire. Franco’s last speech was a response to these events. I was particularly struck by one sentence in it. The troubles, he reckoned, were:

… all due to a left-wing conspiracy of freemasons in the political class in collusion with communist-terrorist subversion in the social sphere which, though it is all to our credit, brings shame on them.

Franco really loathed the masons. Now, I’m no fan myself. My father was the first male in three generations of our family not to be a mason, and my brother and I followed his example. But if other people want to join the masons, well, as long as they behave in a law-abiding and ethical manner, I say good luck to them. 

Remember that Franco-nostalgic comment about being proud of the Spanish past?

Well, our great friend, Ana Cervera, has written to me about Julio Cervera Baviera, the uncle of her grandfather (check my working, but I reckon that makes him a great-granduncle).

He was an engineer and a military man, who used the time of his service in North Africa to write about the military geography of the region, publishing two books on the subject. In 1898, during the Spanish-American war, a moment of glory for the States but of profound disaster for Spain, when it lost its last overseas colonies from an Empire which had once been the envy of all its rivals, Cervera served with distinction in Puerto Rico.

The following year, he spent three months working with Guglielmo Marconi. That’s the man generally credited with inventing wireless communications. Cervera took out several patents, including one for a predecessor of the remote control. 

More striking still, he developed radio communications eleven years before Marconi. What’s more, where Marconi only sent coded signals, Cervera set up equipment to send and receive voice messages between the Spanish mainland and the island of Ibiza, 85 kilometres away.

That doesn’t give him absolute priority in the invention, since someone else got there even earlier: that was Nikola Tesla, after whom Elon Musk’s electric car is named. Tesla eventually established his precedence in a case against Marconi that went all the way up to the US Supreme Court.

All in all, it seems to me that Cervera is a man who contributed significantly to the honour of Spain. He enhanced that past, that history, that Franco’s supporters seem to like so much. They ought to feel nostalgically well-disposed towards him.

Well, you can see where this is going, can’t you? Yes, Cervera was a Republican, the kind of man Franco fought his war against and executed in droves. Cervera even served as a Spanish MP promoting Republican values, in 1909-1910.

And would you believe it? He was a freemason.

Not every anchor's safe

My friend Fabio, from Italy, tells me an interesting story.

For many years, his father, as well as being physically unwell, suffered some mental ill health. So Fabio took him to one of the best neurological departments in Italy.

“One of the best?” he corrects me. “It’s in the main teaching hospital in Italy’s most advanced city, Milan. It’s not one of the best. It’s the best.”

That may be right. And if it really is Italy’s best neurology department, then what happened is still more striking. And worrying.

“It all went wrong,” Fabio explained, “when they took his family history. They discovered that his sister had died of myopathy. That was it. They knew that must be the problem with him too. Same genes, same disease.”

“But,” I wondered, “wouldn’t a test confirm or undermine that diagnosis?”

“For years – years and years – they did test after test. None of them showed any indication of myopathy. But they’d had the idea and they weren’t going to change it.”

That lasted until Fabio’s Dad had to be hospitalised in another city. Where they decided an MRI scan might be useful, something that had never occurred to the Milan neurologists, because it wouldn’t have been relevant to myopathy. 

What did the scan show? Wait for it. Imagine a drum roll. Fabio’s Dad wasn’t suffering from myopathy all. The problems was hydrocephalus. That’s a build-up of fluid in the skull putting the brain under pressure. 

Italy’s best neurologists had missed that.

That reminds of the old saying that the difference between God and doctors is that God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.

Neurologists: not to be confused with gods

However, there’s something more fundamental at stake here, as Fabio, who collects examples of bias like a connoisseur, patiently explained to me.

“What misled the neurologists is what’s known as the anchoring bias.”

Now bias is a concept with which we’re all familiar, in the everyday sense of a prejudice, usually based on self-interest.

My mother only ever told me one joke. It was about a medical student at the prestigious London medical school of St Bartholomew’s, generally known as Barts. He was a good footballer, and the peak of his sporting career came when he turned out for Barts against their great rivals from King’s College Hospital Medical School, in a crucial match, the final of a cup competition.

In the dying moments of the game, with the scores tied, King’s gave away a penalty. Our young man stepped forward to take it. He placed the ball on the spot, stepped back, eyed the goal and the keeper, and then ran up and drove the ball with stunning precision, straight past the keeper, into the top left corner of the net.

He’d given Barts the victory!

Sadly, however, his pleasure in the win was tempered by a doubt that, just before he struck the ball, it had rolled off the spot. It was a doubt that would haunt him right through his life. A blameless life, otherwise, that of a fine General Practitioner and family man.

Eventually, he died to the great grief of his family and friends, and turned up moments later at the pearly gates. There he was received, as you’d expect, by a tall figure in a long white robe and with an equally long and equally white beard.

“Come in, come in, my son,” said the saint, “it’s a pleasure to welcome into heaven a man who so manifestly deserves it.”

But the doctor hesitated.

“I have a problem on my conscience,” he admitted. “Years back, I took a penalty in a match against King’s, and to this day I’ve never been sure whether the ball didn’t roll off the spot before I scored the goal and won the match.”

“Nonsense,” says the saint, “it was an excellent strike and a wonderful win. Well deserved. Beautifully played.”

The doctor sighs with relief.

“Ah, you don’t know what a weight you’ve lifted off my mind. I'm so grateful to you, St Peter.”

“St Peter?” comes the reply, “I’m not St Peter. I’m St Bartholomew.”

Now that’s bias in the everyday sense of the word. But there’s another more technical sense. That’s an obstacle to reasoning which leads to conclusions against logic. The anchoring bias is one such (confirmation bias, where someone only sees evidence that seems to confirm their own view, and simply dismisses any that suggests the opposite, is another and even more common one).

Anchoring occurs, say, when you go out to buy something on which you’re prepared to spend a certain amount of money. Let’s call that sum 100. You see something which really attracts you, but it costs 200. You reject it as too expensive. But then you see something else for 150 and you decide that you could afford to buy it instead. You feel that way even though it’s still way above your original budget

That’s anchoring. The figure 200 has shaped your thinking, setting a new benchmark for you to assess prices against. That reasoning makes 150 sound OK to you. Your initial decision to stick to 100 gets lost in the process. 

Isn’t that what happened to those fine neurologists? They might have checked for a number of conditions, carried out a wide range of tests. But then they heard of the myopathy. That in effect took control of their thinking. Everything they did afterwards was guided by that first idea. Their reasoning was trapped, as it were, inside the myopathy rails and nothing could budge it.

It happens a lot more often than one might imagine. 

It happened in Britain, when the Brexit campaign announced that leaving the EU would save £350 million a week to invest in the National Health Service. The claim was entirely untrue, as has become bitterly clear since Brexit, but the lie became the anchor point of debates on Brexit. There were savings to be had. Brexit would make Britain richer. The premise was false but it framed the debate.

The same thing happened in the US, with Trump’s claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. It’s as false as the claims about Brexit or the myopathy diagnosis for Fabio’s Dad. But it too set the terms for the debate, making it an argument about individual accusations of electoral irregularities, not about the disgraceful behaviour of Trump in refusing to concede.

Why, it seems it may be about to happen in Italy itself. Giorgia Meloni is the leader of the hard right Brothers of Italy movement, now leading the polls for a snap election due in September. She too has been framing the debate. Appearing at a congress of the far-right Spanish party Vox, she declared in a splendidly Trumpian way, “Yes to the natural family! No to LGBT lobbies!” 

Russia using force to impose its will on other nations? The globe relentlessly heating? A pandemic which may turn out to be only the first of a series? No, none of that matters. What’s at the core of our problems is that abortion is freely available and some of us believe that LGBTQ+ people have the same rights as anyone else. And, of course, in Meloni’s world view, there are too many immigrants. She wants to frame a debate towards those non-problems and duck the real ones.

The trouble with bias is that, as with alcoholism, to solve the problem you have to start by admitting you have one in the first place. We all have our biases – I do, Fabio does, you do. And we can pay a serious price for them if we don’t arm ourselves against them.

The world’s still paying for Trumpism. It infected Britain through Johnson. It looks set to infect Italy through Meloni. Such infections can become deadly serious if they’re not treated.

As Fabio’s Dad’s case shows.

A US President's kind words to suffering Brits

Ukrainian soldiers helping civilian evacuees

What a kind gesture it is, by the President of the United States, to write to a group of blue-collar workers on the other side of the Atlantic, impoverished through no fault of their own by the effects of a war in which they, and their country, have no direct part, to congratulate them on their sacrifices and encourage them in their devotion to the cause of freedom.

“I know,” wrote the President, “and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men of Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis.”

The sufferings were indeed intense, and widespread. Lack of raw materials had caused factories to close or move onto short-time working. Around 440,000 workers in Lancashire were out of work or on reduced pay. Add in all the support industries and the number rose to nearly a million. With dependants, nearly four million people were suffering terrible economic pressure because of the war.

A tight-fisted benefits system meant that assistance to the affected families was miserably inadequate. So the President was right: there was plenty to deplore in the sufferings of those working-class families.

“It has been often and studiously represented,” the President went on, “that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the working-men of Europe have been subjected to severe trials, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth, and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.”

“Ah,” you’ll be saying, “we’re not talking about President Biden or the war in Ukraine. This is Beeson dipping into history again.”

Well, yes. Guilty as charged. The letter was written by Abraham Lincoln. The war wasn’t in Ukraine but within the United States itself. And, though it hadn’t started that way, it would end up being about whether slavery was an acceptable way of treating people in that country.

To Manchester, and the cotton industry workers of Lancashire generally, it wasn’t. And, following a mass meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, they’d adopted a resolution urging the US President to stick to his guns and defeat the rebellion in the Confederate States. That’s despite the pain of 4 million people, one in five of the total British population which, at the time, was just 20 million.

The cause of that pain was a glorious case of people who ought to know better taking an appallingly ignorant decision. The president of the so-called Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, had spent nearly ten years in the US Congress, eight of them in the Senate, and had served as Secretary of War for four. His Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, had spent sixteen years in the House of Representatives.

Despite all that experience, however, they turned out hopelessly unprepared for the subtleties of international diplomacy at the head of what they hoped to make an independent nation.

Convinced, like many from the Southern states, of the slogan ‘Cotton is King’, they believed that cutting off supplies would cause enough economic mayhem to force the European nations, and in particular the then superpower Britain, into the war on their side. That’s what Lincoln meant by “forcing their sanction to that attempt”.

So at a time when the Union still couldn’t impose an effective blockade on the Southern ports, the Confederate leadership kindly put an embargo on themselves. The blackmail worked amongst some in Britain, who urged the government to break the embryonic Union blockade and secure cotton supplies from the South. That would, indeed, have dragged the British into the war on the Confederate side. 

But far more people were having none of it. Britain had banned the slave trade over half a century earlier. It had abolished slavery in its possessions thirty years before. There was a deep-seated hatred of the institution.

So the Lancashire cotton workers, despite their desperate condition, called on the US President to keep up the war against the Confederacy and slavery.

Lancashire cotton workers looking for relief from their plight

“I do not doubt,” Lincoln’s reply to the Manchester appeal concluded, “that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained by your great nation; and, on the other hand, I have no hesitation in assuring you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people. I hail this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.”

Well, the parallels with today’s world aren’t exact, but they’re there.

Putin has shown himself as ignorant as Jefferson Davis. If he wanted to reduce Ukraine to dependency on Russia, he could have done it far less expensively and without losing a single Russian (or Ukrainian) life, by turning Ukraine into a client for his gas and his manufactures. In fact, that would not only have cost far less, but would also have earned much needed income for his own country. 

Unlike the US Civil War, this war hasn’t led to unemployment in Britain. The poverty it’s causing has come through a cost-of living crisis. But, just like in the 1860s, the benefits system, embryonic then, savagely cut by the government today, is wholly inadequate to alleviate it. Despite all that, there’s no sign, yet at least, of the victims withdrawing their backing for Ukraine. Just as back then the Lancashire cotton workers didn’t withdraw their backing from Lincoln’s United States, throughout a war that lasted four years.

And there’s a parallel to another historical event. Or perhaps a counter-parallel, if there is such a thing. The suffering today is caused by the West standing with Ukraine and arming it against illegal, brutal aggression. Back in the 1930s, the Western Democracies stood back and let the Spanish Republic go to the wall. They stuck to a policy of non-intervention blatantly flouted by Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, spelling doom for Spanish democracy for the next four decades.

Well, it’s good to see that’s not happening this time around. Just as it’s good to see that so far people are taking the pain without losing heart. They’re living up to the example of their predecessors among the Lancashire mill workers.

An example rightly appreciated by the US President back then.

Memorial to forgotten bravery

What chance did they have, those young men who marched into harm’s way in their vain attempt to free their Spanish homeland all those years ago?

It was in the hope of finding some trace of their brave but doomed venture that I originally suggested we take a holiday in the Val d’Aran, the only bit of Spain that lies on the northern, French, side of the Pyrenees. That’s where the UNE, the National Union of Spain, attempted to invade Spanish territory in October 1944.

Republican soldiers entering the Val d’Aran

The men who went in were former soldiers of the Spanish Republic, who’d recently been fighting alongside the Resistance in France, in exile after they’d been defeated in a Civil War precipitated by a mutinous uprising led by senior officers in the army. One of the early leaders of the rebellion, before Franco came to power, was General Emilio Mola, who declared:

We need to sow terror… We must leave a sensation of dominion by eliminating without scruple or vacillation all those who don’t think the way we do.

These really weren’t nice guys.

Now, the men who invaded the Val d’Aran were organised by the Spanish Communist Party, which was very much under the thumb of Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union. Many of the principal leaders of the Party were in exile in Stalin’s capital Moscow and weren’t, therefore, necessarily particularly nice guys either.

The UNE soldiers, though, seem to have been a rather different crowd. They saw what they were doing as a genuine fight for liberty in their country, for a restoration of the old Republic. Their main objectives were to seize the administrative capital of the Val d’Aran, the town of Vielha, and invite what was left of the Spanish Republican government in exile to return there, giving it more status through its presence on Spanish soil.

The other main objective was to seize the then still incomplete tunnel which was the main link between the Valley and the rest of Spain, to prevent Franco sending forces through it.

The invasion was the brainchild of a remarkable man, Jesus Monzón, who’d managed to get control over the Spanish Communist Party when its previous leaders had cleared off into exile. Highly charismatic and an excellent organiser, he rebuilt the Party, both in France where many of its members were living in exile, and in Spain itself where it became the most significant clandestine opposition to Franco throughout the time of his dictatorship. 

After the Allied landings in France in June 1944, Monzón thought Spain’s chance had come. If the Republic could re-form in Aran, maybe the Allies who were now clearly winning the war against the Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, might turn their attention to Spain next, using a government in Viehla as a spearhead.

He ordered the UNE to cross the border. Which it did, on 19 October 1944.

It seems to me that he may also have been in a hurry because he rather suspected that once the lot in Moscow got back, his time in the leadership would be over. If he did think that, I have to say that I reckon he was right.

At first, the invasion went well. A number of villages fell quickly, as well as the town of Bossòst, where the little army set up its command post. 

That was one of the first places we visited in my hunt for traces of the invasion. We found absolutely none. In fact, a man I spoke to in the Tourist Information Centre, told me, “they came, then they went, and we don’t want them back.”

There were two major disappointments awaiting the invaders. The first was that, despite Monzón’s promises, there was no national general strike across Spain in support of the operation. The second was that he was proved completely mistaken in his belief that the local people would greet the soldiers with open arms as liberators. On the contrary, they were sullen. It’s likely that after three years of bitter Civil War, they had no desire to start again, and might even regard a regime like Franco’s as a preferable alternative.

That may be the root of the kind of view the man in the Information Centre expressed to me. It may also explain why, when we went looking for a plaque on the wall of a building in the village of Les, we found nothing, though there was a blank space, discoloured in a way that suggests that it may once have held one. And a panel we found on a mountain path, marking a point through which the men had passed, had been defaced.

Forgetfulness: where a plaque once hung?

There is, however, in the cemetery of the village of Es Bòrdes a plaque over a mass grave. It names five of the fighters who were buried there and pays tribute to others who have never been identified. And it expresses the thanks of the French resistance to those men who’d fought alongside them in France, before dying in the Val d'Aran. There is even a yearly ceremony over the grave.

In the cemetery of Es Bordès
The former fighters of the FFI [French Resistance]
to their comrades who died in combat for liberty
19 October 1944.
Adalberto Torres
Mauricio Moga
Francisco Urzay
Pablo Ulldemolins
Miguel Paredes
and to the unidentified

The church steeple in the village is also still pockmarked with bullet holes, from the firefight the UNE soldiers waged against military police in the tower. Where I suspect some at least of the men in the cemetery fell.

Bullet holes in the church tower at Es Bòrdes

The commander of the operation was a smart cookie, Colonel Vicente López Tovar. He’d always had his doubts about the viability of Monzón’s plan. He decided that, at all costs, he would keep his lines of retreat well protected, so that he could get his men back to France if necessary.

Sadly, it did indeed prove necessary. When they got to Viehla, they found it strongly defended. As for seizing the tunnel, which is beyond the town, that was entirely out of the question. In fact, within a short time, Franco had built up his forces in the valley to 50,000 men, and they had tanks and heavily artillery, which Colonel López’s 7000 men certainly didn’t.

On the 27th of October, López ordered his men back out of the Valley. In the end, the boldly named ‘Operation Reconquest of Spain’ lasted nine days. It cost the invaders nearly 500 dead, wounded or prisoners (many of the prisoners were executed) and the defenders nearly 300.

It was over and it had failed to achieve any of its goals. The Allies, far from enthusiastic about getting into another fight, saw no reason to intervene in Spain. Which suited them, since they could already see that the coming conflict would be against the Soviet Union. It soon emerged as the Cold War, in which Franco became a willing collaborator.

As for the Communist leadership, Santiago Carrillo, soon to emerge as the new strong man of the Party, initially talked of it as a glorious example of anti-Fascist resistance. He then changed his tune and denounced the organisers as traitors who’d worked to undermine the Party. Carrillo was undoubtedly behind the murder of three men close to Monzón. Ironically, Monzón himself was only saved from murder when the Franco regime arrested him. He served thirteen years in prison. While there, he renewed contact with his ex-wife in Mexico; on his release, he joined her there and they remarried. He played no further part in politics.

The Communist Party purged itself of those involved in the invasion. Even Vicente López was expelled, poor reward for his intelligent command of the doomed operation. Not nice guys, like I said, the Communist leadership.

To many, especially the powerful, the invasion was an embarrassment. 

The operation failed and the men who took part may have been misguided. But they put their lives on the line to try to end a dictatorship. I may be over-sentimental, but I feel they deserve more of a tribute than they’ve received. 

Hence this blog post.

The eyes of the Jew

It was a little sad to leave a glorious place where we’d just spent five excellent days on holiday. 

Holiday is, of course, a strange notion when you’re retired, as we both are. But I suppose it just means a major break in day-to-day routine and, as in this case, travel to somewhere very different. Which the Aran Valley certainly is.

It’s the only part of Spain on the northern side of the Pyrenees, which means it opens northwards, towards France. That, I’m told, gives it an Atlantic climate, explaining why the place abounds in greenery. Unsurprisingly, the great constant for centuries in the Aranese economy was agriculture, and above all cattle rearing.

One of the things that means is that roasting is a core part of Aranese cooking. Traditionally, that’s over wood fires. And what’s mostly roasted is red meat. With a lot of vegetarians in my life and having moved decidedly away from red meat in recent years, it was oddly fun, in a taboo-breaking kind of way, to rediscover a taste for it in a place where it’s more or less expected of you.

We did go to a vegetarian restaurant one evening and had some delicious vegetarian dishes. But we noticed that the place had a beef-based hamburger on the menu. We asked the proprietor how he explained that.

“Around here?” he exclaimed. “The place would be burned to the ground if I didn’t offer at least one beef dish.”

Technically, the valley’s part of Catalonia, and there’s a lot of Catalan spoken there. But its own specific language, Aranese, isn’t a branch of Catalan, but of the Occitan languages of southern France. Which is hardly surprising, given that until the tunnel opened in the mid-twentieth century, the only way into the Valley from Spain was across high passes, often closed by snow in winter, whereas France was – and is – accessible by easy road. It follows the course of what becomes one of the great French rivers, the Garonne, which flows into the Atlantic near the iconic wine-growing area around Bordeaux.

Grey slate roofs under a mountain sunset in Aran

Aran is full of grey-slated houses and Romanesque churches (the style we’d call Norman in England). And a huge majority of the houses are stone-built, so the villages look prosperous from below, and distinctive from above – in a mountain valley, a lot of the views are from above – with their glittering grey roofs.

The air of prosperity is by no means illusory, though the wealth of the place no longer comes exclusively from cattle rearing. These days, what makes the Valley rich is tourism, especially in the winter, with its ski slopes.

Wealthy, mountainous, lush with greenery, with cattle wandering high pastures, it’s hardly surprising that people like to call the Valley ‘Little Switzerland’. It certainly has a distinctly Swiss feel to it. That can even take the form of a degree of self-satisfaction, not entirely unjustified since, like the Swiss, the Aranese have quite a lot to be satisfied about. 

In common with the Swiss, they pride themselves on their track record of helping refugees. During the Second World War, when official Spanish policy under the dictator Franco, was to hand back escaping Jews, resistance fighters or Allied prisoners of war to the tender care of the Nazi occupation authorities in France, it seems that many individual Aranese, if they could get hold of those escapees before the authorities caught them, helped pass them on to safe escape networks. 

As the descendant of a family that lost a lot of people in the Holocaust, I warmed to those stories. And that made it all the more pleasurable to visit a splendid place where water bursts out of the ground, in a series of waterfalls, to flow down into the river Joeu, which later joins the Garonne on its way to France.

The waterfalls at Uelhs deth Joeu
The water surging to the surface after 4 km underground

That water comes from the melting snows of the Aneto, the highest mountain in the Pyrenees, still snow-capped in the summer. The water then seeps into the ground, and flows through dark channels for four kilometres, before it breaks out to the surface again. 

In this July with its record-breaking temperatures, walking up there was hard work, but it was worth it. It’s spectacular to see the water forcing its way out of the ground and falling, white-crested, into the river below.

And what was the icing on the cake of this splendid sight? The name of the river, the Joeu, means the Jew, in Aranese. And the place of the falls? Uelhs deth Joeu. The eyes of the Jew.

Boringly, some authorities – in my view, the less authoritative kind – like to claim that the name means ‘the eyes of Jupiter’ or even ‘the eyes of the Devil’. That only reminds me of one of my favourite Jewish stories.

It’s about a Jew, Shlomo, who attends a Catholic Mass with his Irish friend, Seamus. 

A few minutes in, a little bell rings, and a collecting plate comes around. Seamus puts in a five euro note and Shlomo does the same. A little while later, there’s another ring on the bell and another collecting plate. Seamus puts in a second five euro note, but Shlomo doesn’t have another, so he puts in a twenty. When the bell rings a third time, he doesn’t have a twenty left and has to put in a fifty.

At the end of the Mass, Seamus asks Shlomo, now 75 Euros lighter, what he thinks.

“Very interesting,” he says, “but I’d like to ask your priest a few questions, if that’s OK with him.”

“I’m sure it is.”

Seamus explains to the priest that Shlomo’s not of their faith but would like to ask some questions.

“By all means,” Father Donnelly replies.

“That Jesus,” says Shlomo, “wasn’t he a Jew?”

“Why, yes, a good God-fearing Jew all his life.”

“And those disciples, weren’t they Jews too?”

“Why, to be sure they were.”

Shlomo shakes his head and smiles wryly. 

“We started a business like that, and let it get out of our control?”

Well, we’re not letting our Aranese falls out of our control. Eyes of Jupiter? Eyes of the Devil? Forget it.

Eyes of the Jew they are, and eyes of the Jew they’ll remain.

The marvels of mountain masochism

There’s a joke I’ve never really understood. It’s about a man who’s repeatedly banging his head against a brick wall. Asked why he’s doing it, he answers, “because it feels so good when I stop”.

Except it wouldn’t, would it? 

Likewise, I don’t fully get a comment made to me when, as a teenager, I was riding my bike up a long and gruelling hill in Devon. 

“Arr,” said a farmer watching me, “cycling. That’s killing your legs to save your arse.”

Really? I mean, sure, it kills your legs. But it leaves your arse in a lousy state too. That’s even if you have a foam saddle and the kind of especially padded (or is the correct term “armoured”?) shorts my stepson David uses when he goes biking. 

Talking about David, it was he who kindly offered us a day out on bikes in the glorious Valle de Aran, the only bit of Spain north of the Pyrenees, where we’re having a week’s holiday. He joined us here for a couple of days.

We accepted his generous offer. A real treat, we thought, until the man in the bike rental place started describing the wonderful route he was proposing to us.

“You climb up the mountain here,” he said.

“You climb up a mountain?” I interrupted.

He dismissed my implied wimpishness with a shake of the head and a half smile, before continuing to describe the glorious sights we’d discover.

Now, I’ll come clean at once. We weren’t renting normal bikes. These were electric. As it happens, we have a couple of those at home, and they have a wonderful device I believe is called a “boost button”. You press it, and the bike responds as though it were saying, “a bit too steep, sir? Not to worry. Just let me handle the climb for you and you can take over at the top when you’re ready. Just release the button when you no longer need me.”

These weren’t like that, though. No boost button. Instead, they merely help.

“Just leave the bike on this setting,” the sadistic fiend in the shop assured us, “and you’ll get just the level of assistance you need.”

Just the assistance you need? It turns out this basically means you do the work and it will grudgingly help out a little if you press the pedals hard enough. Help you generally most need when you no longer have energy to press the pedals at all.

Unlike my own kind and respectful bike, this one seemed to be saying, “what? what? You need help again? Whatever’s the matter with you? Are you some kind of wimp? Oh, Lord. Well never mind. I’ll give you a bit of a push. But you just keep pedalling. You know, just dig down a bit, find a bit of willpower, and you can make it.”

Got to love a mountain stream

Well, we made it. In the end. With lots of pauses. Including one at a wayside restaurant and café to rest and recover a little. 

I must grudgingly admit that it was worth it. 

We kept crossing a fierce mountain stream, which was dramatic. 

We got a breathtaking view of the highest mountain in the Pyrenees, still with snow clinging to its heights, even though the temperature where we were was around 30 degrees Celsius. 

Mount Aneto with its summer snow

And eventually we got to the fine waterfall we’d been recommended to visit, the Saut deth Pish. 

The falls at Saut deth Pish

The name, incidentally, means ‘the leap of the fish’ in the local language, Aranese. It doesn’t mean anything like what I suspect someone with a less clean mind might have imagined based on an English interpretation. Especially as that final ‘h’ doesn’t affect the pronunciation of the third word.

Sadly, the waterfall wasn’t the top. We ploughed on a little further, making for another restaurant, where we’d been told to have lunch. After a lot more effort, along increasingly difficult tracks, we emerged onto a high valley running up to a distant ridge, beyond which we could guess the path ran down to the restaurant. But between us and the ridge there were another four or five kilometres of continuous, unrelenting, grinding climb.

“That’s enough for me,” I announced, “even the best of things must come to an end.”

Fortunately, everyone agreed. We turned our bikes around and went hurtling back down the way we’d come, stopping only at the restaurant we’d visited before. We had an excellent lunch there, though by then, pretty much anything would have tasted great. 

The way down replaced strain on legs from pumping pedals, with strain on hands from gripping brakes. Approach another bike and you got a powerful whiff of burned brake pads. But it was fun. Even though it seemed to last about ten minutes, while it had felt as though we’d taken five hours on the climb (the true figures were more like two and a half hours and forty minutes, but I’m just saying how they felt).

Enjoying the way back down

The most startling discovery was just how steep the road had been. Somehow, we hadn’t noticed on the way up, even though we’d been battling against the slope. On the way down, we all kept asking ourselves, “what? I really came up that?”

What I can tell you is that my legs didn’t feel any better when I stopped, any more than a beaten head would when you stop banging it against a brick wall. And there was no saving of arses, however much we may have killed our legs. 

Still, it was a wonderful day. We saw some fabulous places. It’s glorious being in the mountains in the summer.

It’s just a pity that they keep the mountains in such hilly places…

The honourable Tory. And Boris Johnson

Have you watched the new season of Borgen on Netflix? We enjoyed it a lot. It intelligently charted how one can lose one’s way, or even one’s self, in politics. 

There’s a moment in the show when the former Danish Prime Minister, from the earlier seasons, Birgitte Nyborg, now back as Foreign Minister, visits her old friend and mentor Bent Sejrø, to ask for advice at a moment of crisis. He, it appears, thinks it’s time for her to step down:

“Sometimes in your career,” he tells her, “you face very important decisions. They define who you are and how you’ll be remembered… Resigning takes great courage.”

It may come as a shock to readers of these posts, but I’m not a fan of the British Conservative Party. Or any other Conservative Party. But I have to admit that I have a certain admiration for politicians, Conservative or not, who have shown the kind of courage that Serjø suggests it takes to resign.

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, or Malvinas, back in 1982, a storm of criticism burst out levelled at the British Foreign Office. It had failed to spot what Argentina was preparing. Its behaviour had also suggested that Britain was indifferent to the fate of the islands and would not resist the invasion.

At the time, the Foreign Secretary, was Lord Carrington. His response to the criticism of the ministry he headed was to resign immediately. The then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, tried to persuade him to stay, but he wouldn’t. He decided to take full responsibility for the failures of the Foreign Office and as far as he was concerned, that meant he had to go.

John Nott, then Defence Secretary, also felt he had let the country down and submitted his resignation. He, though, was persuaded to stay on. That made sense: as the man in charge of the armed forces at a time when Britain had suffered a military reversal, he stuck around to oversee the response. Before the end of the year, however, he announced that he would not be seeking re-election even as a Member of Parliament and was replaced as Defence Secretary.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Carrington and Johnson
The honourable Tory and the other kind

Yes, I’m going to compare those honourable resignations with another more recent example which was, frankly, rather less honourable.

If a writer created a character like Boris Johnson, readers would reject the novel as ridiculous. “No,” everyone would say, “a serious country could never elect a man like that as its Prime Minister.”

Well, Britain did. Of course, it helped that he was up against a buffoon as laughable and even more inept, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn. He was the leader the Labour Party had inflicted on itself as a completely unnecessary gesture of charitable generosity towards the Tory Party.

Johnson screwed up the handling of the Covid pandemic, costing several tens of thousands of people their lives, and claimed – still claims – that he handled it superbly. That’s because on his watch Britain got vaccines out faster than most nations. The fact that it then vaccinated rather fewer than its neighbours he somehow fails to mention. 

While the country was in lockdown, he organised or attended lockdown-busting parties – that’s right, in the plural, not just one of them – in 10 Downing Street. That made him the first British Prime Minister ever to be convicted of a crime while in office. Learning nothing from US President Tricky-Dicky Nixon, who demonstrated that the cover-up is worse than the crime, Johnson lied about whether the parties had really been parties, what he knew about them, and which he’d attended.

His one solid achievement was the generous level of support he provided to Ukraine, in its war with Russia. Sadly, however, it soon became obvious he was using Ukraine as a blessed relief from facing up to his failures at home. Due to face Tory MPs from Northern seats, most of them in danger of losing out to a resurgent Labour Party poised to take back many of its old ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, he preferred to duck out and make an entirely unnecessary trip to Kyiv with plenty of photo opportunities.

Perhaps the most serious of his offences was one of the earliest, when he tried to prorogue – suspend – parliament in the runup to Britain’s scheduled departure from the European Union. No one was fooled. The only purpose was to limit opportunities to challenge the way the government was handling Brexit. And, it turned out, he was acting illegaly, as the British Supreme Court quickly ruled. That alone should have been enough to drive Johnson from office.

He has repeatedly claimed to take “full responsibility” for his shortcomings- But that wasn’t ‘taking responsibility’ in the way Lord Carrington did. He would fire or discipline a few underlings, but as for holding up his hand and taking responsibility personally, himself, that never happened. 

Instead, he clung on until the latest scandal. He’d appointed a known sex pest as Deputy Chief Whip, a powerful position in the disciplining of Tory MPs. When the scandal broke, he was slow to react, and later lied to say he’d acted at once. He then compounded his lies by pretending he hadn’t known about the man’s record.

Suddenly, his colleagues lost patience. Ministers began to resign. Their resignation letters and statements made much of the need for integrity in government. And yet those same people had spent three years propping up Johnson, even defending his behaviour. They did that even though it was clear to anyone following the news, that integrity was an alien notion to Johnson.

It seems clear that the timing of their belated resignation had little to do with integrity, and a lot with giving a successor time to establish a name, in the two years still left before the next election. In other words, it’s as calculated and devious a move as any Johnson carried out himself.

Meanwhile, he resigned. He explained why:

In the last few days I’ve tried to persuade my colleagues that it would be eccentric to change governments when we’re delivering so much, when we have such a vast mandate and when we’re actually only a handful of points behind in the polls … But as we’ve seen, at Westminster the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves it moves, and, my friends in politics, no one is remotely indispensable.

In other words, even now, when he claims to be taking responsibility, he’s still blaming others for his self-made troubles. 

Besides, despite his resignation, he hasn’t actually gone but plans to cling on in Downing Street for a few painful weeks longer, until a successor is named.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a character says of the executed Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

Let’s adapt that to Boris Johnson. 

Nothing in his tenure of office honoured him or it.

Not even the leaving of it.

Bangladesh, tribute to the joys of British imperial rule

A friend of mine posted recently on Facebook that she was baffled by the lack of British coverage of the Bangladesh floods, in the country of her family roots.

It’s true that they were pretty much the worst floods in a century, leading to over a hundred deaths and millions of displaced persons. That’s pretty disastrous as disasters go, so bafflement seems to be in order. Until you take a look at the long relationship Britain has had with Bangladesh.

That’s something I’ve been doing as I write the episodes for my podcast, A History of England. More accurately, I’ve been finding out a bit about Bengal, of which today’s Bangladesh was once a part. 

Not everyone knows that the British Empire in India wasn’t initially built by Britain, but by a private corporation, the East India Company. Its initial aim was to set up trading stations and use them to trade in Indian products or raw materials for Britain, and British manufactured goods for India. 

The trouble was that the rise of the East India Company coincided with the decline of the Mughal Empire was beginning to fail in India. Local rulers were rising and challenging its central authority, and quickly beginning to challenge each other. That was a game the East India Company decided it could profitably join.

Mostly the Company did well, and when it didn’t, it went cap in hand to the British government for a bail out (‘too big to fail’ isn’t a new concept). One of its major costs was raising a military force. Initially, it was just to guard the company’s posts but, as it got further and further stuck in to the squabbling between various bits of the fragmenting Moghul Empire, it increasingly needed a significant fighting force. It recruited extensively, mostly Indian soldiers with British officers.

Obviously, that didn’t come cheap.

Here comes the really clever trick in the Company’s strategy in India. And nowhere was it demonstrated better than in Bengal.

The Company fought a long military campaign in Bengal. Its forces were led by a man who’d been a juvenile delinquent, including running a protection racket targeted at shopkeepers in the Shropshire town of Market Drayton as a boy. 

His father pulled a few strings to get him a job as a clerk with the East India Company. When war engulfed the post where he was working, he volunteered to join the fighting and quickly emerged as a highly effective leader of men and the possessor of extraordinary physical courage. 

His name was Robert Clive.

Using his skills, mixed with a good degree of luck (but Napoleon always said he looked for generals with luck) and a great deal of bribery, he was able to defeat the forces arrayed against him in Bengal. His efforts were crowned by the Mughal Emperor, still the titular ruler, granting him the ‘diwani’, the authority to collect taxes in Bengal. 

The former juvenile delinquent Clive, now a hero of the British Empire,
receiving the authority to collect taxes in Bengal from the Mughal Emperor.
A highly romanticised image: in reality, they stuck a chair on a table

That was massive. It meant the Company could pay for the armed force it needed to secure its hold on Bengal out of money raised in taxation from the Bengalis themselves. Can you imagine? What a fantastic arrangement! The Company used Indian soldiers to secure the subjection of Indians and paid for the whole thing out of Indian taxes.

The money was, indeed, enough to make sure the those of the Company’s men who returned home didn’t leave India emptyhanded. Clive brought home the equivalent of £90 million in today’s money and an annual income of £8 million.

Obviously, to support the Company’s operations and its Executives, to say nothing of its shareholders, taxes had to rise a bit. Within four years of the East India Company taking over taxation in Bengal, a famine hit the country and, sadly, local authorities no longer had the tax revenue to provide the kind of relief that had traditionally been distributed. Estimates of the deaths vary between 1 and 2 million.

One of the interesting things about India back then, and Bengal in particular, was that it was a huge exporter of textiles. Perhaps the world’s greatest. So much so that back in Imperial Rome, the writer Pliny had complained about the way the insatiable demand for Indian fabrics was draining the city of its gold reserves. 

When the East India Company started importing Indian textiles into Britain, it met consternation among local weavers. The new cotton fabrics were doing massive damage to the traditional linens and wools. But before long, the British were hard at work making their own calicoes and muslins. What’s more, they demanded free market access to India. Only in one direction, though: they were just as much in favour of tariffs on imports from India as they were keen on exporting tariff-free the other way. In the early nineteenth century, British import tariffs on Indian Calicoes stood at 78%, while on muslins they were 31%.

What’s more, the new factory methods introduced by the industrial revolution made British cotton mills hugely competitive with old hand loom weavers both in Britain and India. By 1793, a Lancashire mill operative would be 400 times more productive than an India weaver. 

Between 1753 and the end of the eighteenth century, Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, saw its fabric exports to Britain fall by more than half. In 1818, the East India Company simply shut down its textile operation in Dhaka. In the words of Nick Robins, in his excellent The Corporation that Changed the World, ‘by 1840, [Dhaka’s] population had fallen from 150,000 to just 20,000, with jungle and malaria ‘fast encroaching upon the town’.”

Britain finally left India in 1947. But not before delivering one more gift to Bengal: another famine, in 1943. This time estimates of the number dead range between 2.1 and 3.8 million. Slowness in distributing relief and general maladministration contributed significantly to the extent of the disaster.

Doesn’t all that leave us plenty to think about?

Like, perhaps British indifference to the plight of Bengal is nothing new.

And, maybe, that those who denounce as woke any criticism of that fine institution, the British Empire, need to think again. Suggesting it didn’t much benefit its subject people may be woke. But it’s pretty accurate too, isn’t it?