I didn't expect the Spanish inspection

It was that time at last. For over three years, I’d been able to avoid thinking about it. But now it was upon me, unavoidable, irreversible, unstoppable.

Our car had been registered for the first in November 2018. Here we were in November 2022. Under Spanish law, it had to undergo its Technical Vehicle Inspection (ITV) and there was no way to duck that duty.

At first, I thought I’d done well, even got ahead of the game. When the letter showed up (yep, snailmail) telling me that the car had to go to the ITV before the end of the month, I smiled with self-satisfaction. I’d already been online (yes! Some of these things are available online these days) and booked in for an inspection.

Sadly, my self-satisfaction was premature and unjustified. It was only on the day of the appointment itself that I realised that, despite having a huge wad of papers for the car, I was missing one crucial document. I didn’t have a certificate for the car issued by the ITV.

But could they really expect one? After all, I was taking the car in for its first inspection. How could I have a certificate before getting it inspected? It was time to leave, so I chose to assume the requirement for the certificate was wrong, or at least incorrectly applied to a car that had not yet had an inspection.

It turns out I was the one who’d got it wrong.

“Where’s the ITV certificate?” the receptionist asked me. 

She was polite about it – I’d specifically chosen that ITV office in the hope that they’d be a little kinder towards a foreigner and non-native speaker of Spanish than the one closer to us, where I’d had an unpleasant experience on a different matter – but, polite or not, she was firm. My explanation that I didn’t have the certificate and maybe never had, cut no ice at all.

“Every car in Spain is issued with one. Otherwise, it isn’t authorised to be driven on Spanish roads.”

How could I get one?

“You have to contact the DGT.”

That’s the Directorate General of Transport. My heart sank. Another bureaucracy? How long would that take?

“Can they issue one at once?”

She shrugged.

“I think they might,” she said, with a total lack of confidence which inspired absolutely no confidence in me. 

A department of the Spanish state that would see me immediately without an appointment? And that would issue the necessary document at once? About as likely as a British Prime Minister announcing that the country got it wrong about Brexit and doing the sensible thing of requesting readmission to the EU on whatever conditions the other members set.

“Do I need a new appointment with you?” I asked.

She smiled, which was pleasant and confirmed I’d been right to choose this office over the other one.

“If you get back anytime today, we’ll do the inspection.”

Back home I went. Danielle went through all our papers looking for the wretched certificate, unsuccesffully. I went online to see what if anything the DGT offered as a possible solution. And that’s when things started to look up.

Well, look up slowly. Very slowly. I clicked on the button for ‘issue a new copy of the ITV certificate”. It asked me for a username and password.

That meant going to the clever and ostensibly secure system I use to store passwords (God knows what I’ll do if it ever gets hacked). Armed with the username and password, back I went and typed them in.

“Your password is out of date. Please create a new one,” the system told me. I’m not sure it actually said ‘please’.

I went through the password change function and discovered that I needed the ‘activation code’. Fortunately, I had a record of that too, also in my secure repository of passwords and the like. Back there I went and found the code. I typed it in, not without apprehension: what if they said that it too was now out of date?

It turns out it wasn’t. I created a new, secure and totally unmemorable password. Instead of logging me in straight away, however, the system then took me back to the login page, so I entered my (memorable) username and my (unmemorable) new password. I was in.

And what did I learn? With the app ‘miDGT’ (‘myDGT’) I could download a copy of my ITV certificate anytime I wanted.

Over to my phone I went. I found the app and downloaded it. It also wanted a username and password. “No problem,” I thought, “I can use my memorable username and my nice, new unmemorable password”.

Of course, that meant looking up the password again, but I did that and typed it in.

“Incorrect access data,” I was told. Peremptorily, I thought. I tried several times, but without success. I then tried the old, tired password, but that didn’t work either.

So I created the second new password of the day.

That worked.

I downloaded the certificate and printed out a copy, in case the ITV person wanted a hard copy.

Back I went to the office.

She did indeed prefer the hard copy.

“But,” she said, “where’s the white sheet that goes with the certificate?”

I showed her my phone (before I got out of the car, I’d logged in again, against just this eventuality). She looked at various functions offered by “miDGT”. None provided what she wanted.

“Look,” I pointed out, “both the app and the printed versions of the certificate include a QR code. Maybe that would give you what you want?”

“Maybe it would,” she agreed, “if we had a QR reader.” 

Ah, well. The DGT and the ITV are related but separate branches of government. No reason to suppose that just because one of them starts using QR codes, the other will be able to read them.

I didn’t say that, though. It occurred to me that it might not be tactful. And not being tactful was, I reckoned, a sure way of not getting the cooperation I wanted.

I was right.

“Hold on,” she said. 

Choirs of angels began to sing in my mind. When a Spanish bureaucrat tells you to hold on, it means they have a potential solution in mind. If they didn’t, they’d just send you away.

Indeed, she had a solution. After tapping away at her computer keyboard, she printed out a copy of the form she needed, to go with the certificate. I paid my fee. And, at last, the process was under way.

It still took an hour – 45 minutes sitting in a queue, fifteen minutes for the actual inspection – but now I’m the proud possessor of a windscreen sticker saying that our car is OK for another twelve months.

The car. With its ITV sticker. A badge of pride.
Which proved less easy to obtain than I might have hoped

Imagine my relief.

At least next time, I’ll have a better idea of what to do. Plus, I’ve had further confirmation of the fact that Spain is moving firmly into the twenty-first century. The bureaucracy is getting web-enabled. 

And it works almost smoothly.

Grandparenting: bikes and meals and stories

One of the benefits of grandparenting is that it gives you the chance to learn some of things you never mastered as a parent.

I’m at the grandkids’ home as I write this. And, as always, there’ve been plenty of learning experiences for me. 

For instance, there’s the extent to which kids like rituals. Elliott and I established a new one in my first three days here. Every evening when it comes to time for bed, he grabs one of my fingers, and leads me towards the stairs. Then I jump him up the stairs, two at a time, with him making a little grunt of pleasure at each jump.

It's not as though he expects me to do anything once we get up there. He’s living proof that often it isn’t the destination that matters, it’s the journey. And, boy, he enjoys that journey.

Having said all that, he didn’t want any of it last night. A healthy attitude towards ritual, I feel. Do it when it feels right, but don’t let it dominate you.

He also seems to appreciate my cooking. As, I’m glad to say, does his big sister, Matilda. That may not be unrelated to the fact that I tend to cook simple things that are easy to prepare, and likely to appeal to a child’s taste. Like spaghetti. 

Elliott and Matilda enjoying Granddad's fine cuisine

What’s best about a child enjoying a meal is that their behaviour leaves you in no doubt of their appreciation. And I have the photos to prove it. 

They both continue to make stunning progress with their bikes, now their biggest source of outdoor amusement. It’s a joy watching them getting so much pleasure from them. As long as you’re not alone, that is. I soon discovered that being the only adult with the two of them on bikes is a recipe for a heart attack. 

There’s always one that rides off in front, while the other decides that it’s really, really important to take a look at something a long way behind. That’s usually a shop where chocolate might be bought, if it’s Matilda. With Elliott, it can be something far simpler but a lot odder. He likes to find a place with two or three steps in front of it. Picture the entrance to a house, say. No one, he seems to believe, knows what true happiness is until they’ve pushed their bike up three steps. 

“It’s a huge effort,” he seems to be saying, “but, boy, it’s worth it to get to the top.”

Of course, that only means that he has to get back down again. It seems, however, that this is fun too. Now I can understand it if there is, say, a short ramp next to the steps, down which he can slide. And, indeed, he will always take the ramp if there is one. But it doesn’t matter if there isn’t. Struggling back down, supporting the weight of the bike, is almost as satisfying as struggling up.

It seems a weird pastime but, hey, mountaineering’s no different really, is it? Just the same thing on another scale.

He makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s suggestion that you shouldn’t do to others what you would have them do unto you. Their tastes may be different. In this instance, at least, Elliott’s tastes and mine differ significantly.

That’s not always the case. Elliott has become a keen fan of the Cars films. And I freely confess that I get a sight more pleasure watching them for the n-th time (where n is a large number) than I do from practically any other show or film I’ve been obliged to rewatch that often as part of my grandfatherly existence.

But back to the bikes. Having one grandkid on a chocolate hunt or a three-step climb, while the other bikes off into the distance, is a real problem, especially since the ‘distance’ inevitably involves reaching a street at some stage. With cars. That one has to be stopped at the kerb, while the one hanging around at the back, has to be spurred into movement. That requires me to be in two places at the same time, a trick I still haven’t mastered. 

Matilda and Elliott setting a metaphor for life
Going round and round at speed and getting nowhere
Uncle Michael filming the whole for posterity

The moral is to maintain a one-to-one adult to kid ratio if the kids are on bikes.

Talking about tricks I have or haven’t mastered brings me back to what I said at the beginning, about learning as a grandparent what I never learned as a parent.

My Dad was excellent at inventing stories for my brother and me. They were long, rambling and wholly engrossing. The protagonists were always the three of us. We were forever getting into scrapes, generally by launching ourselves into massively ingenious criminal endeavours, which always ended up being less ingenious than they seemed at first, leaving the three of us in jail. From which we would, of course, escape. There was never an ending, which meant we could go right on next time from where we’d got to the time before.

The stories were terribly unfair to my brother. It was always him who got into the most laughable scrapes that left him complaining, “why is it always me?” while the two of us chuckled at his discomfiture. It always amazed me that my father would do that, because there was no question of his preferring me to my brother, and certainly my brother always remained hugely attached to him.

Anyway, I never managed to invent stories to amuse my boys the way he amused us. I just read them books. However, since one of those books was The Lord of the Rings, I can assure you this wasn’t an easy option.

With Matilda, I decided it was time to start making up stories. When she asked for a bedtime book the other day, and had trouble choosing one, I started telling her a great story – I thought – about how she had gone back a long, long way in time, to visit the dinosaurs. She had carefully avoided falling into the claws of a Tyrannosaurus, and instead had established a friendship with a Diplodocus (if the two species don’t belong to the same era, please don’t bother to point it out. After all, that’s hardly the least plausible part of this story).

Matilda (in my account) ended up taking a trip around the prehistoric world on the back of her friendly Diplodocus and even saw a Tyrannosaurus from a distance, in perfect safety, since the Diplodocus was far too big for the predator to attack it.

You can see that this was a different style of story from my Dad’s. It even had an ending, when Matilda heard her father calling her home to go to bed, said goodbye to the Diplodocus and headed back. Different from his kind of stories but, I fondly believed, a success all the same, judging by the way she immediately came to sit next to me when I started, and sat with her eyes as wide as she could get them while it lasted.

Alas. I had been fooled by appearances. As soon as her Dad told her it was time for bed, she complained.

“I want a book!”

“You’ve had a story,” he replied.

“I don’t want a story!” she objected, “I want a book!”

I had to get out of the room while he read her a book (a shorter one than Lord of the Rings).

Oh, well. You learn more from your failures than from your successes, and I suppose that’s as true in storytelling as in any endeavour. And at least my apprenticeship has got under way at last.

Though, judging by Matilda’s reaction, I’m still far from reaching a point that would have made my Dad proud. 

Postscript 

Matilda and Elliott’s Dad, Nicky, tells me I’m talking nonsense.

“Of course you invented stories for us,” he assures me. “Stories in which we were characters, where you tried to put us in situations that were embarrassing for us.”

Oh, well. I have no memory of that. And I reckon my story, here, is better for forgetting it.

Good news for once. With a little bad in its slipstream

Good news never seems to come untarnished, does it? There’s always some accompanying bad news to take the sheen off a bit.

Still, my feeling is that while there is some good news around, let’s celebrate it. It doesn’t matter that it’s not unalloyed. It’s just so welcome after such a long time of depressing events.

They’ve mostly taken the form of moves towards ugly autocratic regimes in country after country, toxic in themselves and desperate for the future of the planet, as they generally deny that anything’s going wrong with it. We’ve had the re-election of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. We’re witnessing the rising power of the far right in France. And most recently there’s been the actual formation of a government of the extremist right in Italy. 

All very depressing.

That’s why it’s been such a joy to see a few authoritarians getting a bloody nose recently. Bolsonaro defeated in Brazil. Putin’s army forced to abandon the Ukrainian city of Kherson. And now the US electorate burying Donald Trump. 

The American mid-term elections weren’t just a balm to the soul because of the right’s failure to deliver the tsunami it had promised. Or threatened. It was immensely satisfying above all for the way Trump-endorsed candidates, or any candidate who upheld Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, generally underperformed expectations. And the loss of reproductive rights, because of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, worked against anyone associated with him, since it was his appointees that made that happen. The faithful stuck with him, but they’re losing numbers, while in the meantime, independents turned out against him.

Being endorsed by Trump seemed like a sure road to electoral success in the not-so-distant past, but at these elections it turned into a millstone, costing candidates votes, and in many cases victories that looked all but in the bag.

Rob Jesmer, a former Republican strategist, commented that, “it's not a question of whether it was a negative, it's a question of how negative it was”.

This kind of conversion of a vote-winner into a vote-loser is by no means unprecedented. It has even happened in Britain in recent years. Twice.

Yesterday's men; Corbyn, Johnson, Trump
Vote winners who turned into vote losers

The first time was on the left. Jeremy Corbyn, from the hard left, was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015. An inspirational figure, he seemed at first to be a major electoral asset but, in 2019, he took Labour to its worst defeat since 1932.

The man who beat him, the Conservatives’ Boris Johnson, had the same experience. After leading his Party to an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons in 2019, his unethical behaviour and blatant lying punctured his balloon, until his own party finally ditched him earlier this year, as the only hope of mending its electoral chances. Vote winner to vote loser, just like Corbyn and Trump.

All of them men of the extremes. None able to keep the support of moderates.

But, as I said, good news doesn’t come unqualified. While it looks as though Trump has been struck a fatal blow by his underwhelming performance, the elections were clearly not won by the Democrats. Doing less badly than expected, even a lot less badly, isn’t the same as winning. The House of Representatives is slipping from their grasp, even while they take pleasure from retaining control of the Senate.

If there has been a clear winner, alongside Trump as a clear loser, it has been in the state they both call home. In Florida, Ron DeSantis romped home in his bid to retain the governorship, drawing Republican candidates on his coattails to unprecedented success across the state. He emerges from the election greatly strengthened in his own bid for the presidency and, while he’s at least as right wing as Trump, he’s less of a buffoon, which makes him more dangerous.

I just hope that he’s going to have trouble winning support for his particularly extreme brand of politics outside his state. What’s more, Trump has rounded on him, giving him one of his trademark nicknames, though rather a clunky one, Ron DeSanctimonious: even his touch in inventing nicknames seems to have abandoned him. It’s just possible that the two of them will tear each other apart, undermining the credibility of both and handing the next presidential election to the Democrats.

Still, that may be too optimistic. The right has done the left a favour in these mid-terms, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be as helpful in the run for the presidency. Besides, Democrats would have to find a candidate people can believe in, which there’s little sign of now.

Oh, well. Let’s wait and see. After all, as the Hungarian and Italian elections showed, electorates have trouble learning lessons. Take Britain, again. The Conservatives were elected to power in 2010, on a promise to bring debt down and wipe out deficits in government spending. The price would be some years of austerity, but they claimed the prize was worth the suffering. 

Twelve years on, debt has grown and there’s no sign of a balanced budget anytime soon. The Conservatives even elected a leader, Liz Truss, who in the shortest time in office of any Prime Minister in history, cost the British economy a further £30 billion. Meanwhile, austerity has torn the public services apart, particularly the National Health Service, buckling under the load on it and with its nurses about to strike over their appalling, and deteriorating, pay and conditions. 

And what’s the government promising? Why, more austerity again.

Fool me once, they say, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. As Conservative poll ratings tick up again, it looks as though many British voters – with luck, a minority – plan to vote for them again, allowing themselves to be fooled twice, and without an ounce of shame.

See what I mean? We’re beginning to get some good news. But always with a nasty streak of bad news close behind it.

Grandparenting again: words and silences

The grandkids have been back. And with plenty of progress with which to dazzle their grandparents, not least this one. Above all because most of it was in the area of language, and I’m particularly keen on how we use words.

Matilda and Elliott enjoying a picnic in the woods

Let’s start with Elliott, who reached eighteen months while he was with us. I once had to contend with the mockery of a couple of sceptics, whose blushes I’ll spare by not naming them here, though his grandmother and mother know who I mean. They used to laugh when I suggested that Elliott had the makings of a strong silent type.

“What do you mean?” they scoffed, “can’t you hear the noise he makes?”

Well, that was true enough. He certainly wasn’t backward in making his voice heard. And it’s equally true that our family has been notably short of strong silent types in the past: my stepson, who shares my forename, David, but not my inability to stop talking, is the only one I can think of. But that only means it’s time for another.

Elliott’s behaviour this time fully vindicated me. Strong he certainly was. Bravely he kept pushing his balance bike along (they are without pedals, which help kids learn how to move around on a bike, and how to keep their balance, in the hope that they can skip the training-wheel stage later). Despite pushing himself along so far and so long, he didn’t lack energy and strength to go clambering up and down things in the playground where we eventually turned up.

The indefatigable cyclist
Elliott on his bike in the woods

And with strength came silence. In fact, at first he barely said anything. That may have been in part because he was sucking on a dummy (US trans: pacifier) which does rather limit speech (it would certainly limit mine), but even after he’d taken it out, he kept his verbal communication to the necessary minimum. Little cries of interest or annoyance, depending on whether he approved or disapproved of what I was doing, but interspersed with the occasional word – his vocabulary’s growing, though the word I remember him using most was ‘car’. He likes cars and has a generous disposition to share the pleasure with me, so he likes to point to any that go past, or indeed that we go past when they’re parked, in case I missed them.

But there was never a wasted word. Classic behaviour of the strong silent type. He’d demonstrated both strength and silence.

Things were different with Matilda, now well into her fourth year. She’s really getting places now with language. Two of them, what’s more. Good, fluent sentences too. She will, like most kids, refer to herself in the third person – “Tilly wants….”, “Tilly is…”, but that’s rare. Mostly she’s mastered the vertical pronoun. “I want…,” she’ll say, and quite often, “I don’t want…”

She’s also reached a stage I remember from my own childhood. This is the discovery of the word “why?”. What I like about her use of it is that she seems to be earnestly trying to learn from the reply, which she often repeats in part (the key part).

“Don’t put the chair there,” I might say.

“Why?” she might ask, a perfectly reasonable request, in my view.

“Because it might fall over.”

“It might fall over,” she’ll repeat. Apparently absorbing the lesson. And not just in appearance, I hope, but in reality, too.

As I said, she’s progressing in two languages. Her Spanish has been coming along a treat since she started ‘big school’ – kindergarten – having left behind the nursery school Elliott still attends. Her mastery of the language only became apparent to me when I took her to the same playground I’d visited before with Elliott. There, a big girl – Sofía, who was five and told me so, even using the English word, since she’d heard Matilda and me talking – decided she wanted to play with Matilda. That led to a conversation at length and at speed in Spanish.

I was most impressed. Especially when Matilda responded to my suggestion that we head home. Usually she’s very good at deciding which language to use with which adult, and she clearly has me categorised under ‘Anglo’, but on this occasion, her firm and unambiguous response to my gentle English suggestion, came out in Spanish (maybe because of the conversation with Sofía):

“No quiero ir a casa.”

I was impressed by the use of “quiero”, the right form of the verb to want, in the first person of the present tense – so correctly meaning “I want” or, in this case, “I don’t want”. And “ir a casa” is precisely “to go home”, so she’d heard the words in English but had no trouble responding in Spanish.

Of course, the mere fact that she could make her wishes so clearly known was no surprise. That had been the case long before she used much language, just as it is with strong, silent Elliott, words or no words. 

Incidentally, only minutes afterwards – it may have been no coincidence that we heard a bell ring in the meantime – Matilda announced to me, in English, “it’s late”. It turned out that this meant that we were, after all, going home, as became clear by her picking up her bike and clearing off while I tore around at speed picking up the other belongings and racing after her before she could put herself in harm’s way, on a cycle track separated only by a kerb from the road (fortunately, nothing had appeared that would have had Elliott calling out ‘car’).

The trouble with mastering language is that words can also be used to slander or denounce. And, I’m sorry to have to announce, Matilda has learned both. 

One of my favourite actions with the grandkids is to attack them with loud roaring noises and pretend to bite them. They both seem to enjoy this and react with gales of laughter. 

Now I know that seems silly, but it’s hurtful to say so. Matilda, however, does.

“Granddad’s silly,” she says. Sometimes she goes so far as to say “very silly”.

I like the use of the word ‘granddad’ by the way, though I do slightly miss her earlier name for me, ‘Dad-dad’. But ‘silly’? It’s odd that I don’t find it offensive. Possibly because it’s true. More likely because it’s Matilda saying it.  

The charm of Matilda
Offering her silly granddad a flower

Even worse was the moment when I gave her two little chocolate buttons.

She knows that’s not allowed, and I hoped it would be our little secret. But she immediately, with her most charming style, told her mother and grandmother.

“Granddad gave me chocolates.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. Two pieces.”

Language is great. But, boy, it marks the end of keeping things quiet, doesn’t it? 

Ah, well, I suppose the just confirms that nothing in life is an unmixed blessing. That’s just as true of the kids’ communication skills as it is of anything else. But at least those developing skills provide a lot of fun.

What the Tories get right

It’s another record for the British Conservative Party! 

The Conservatives, or Tories as we call them, more or less affectionately according to our standpoint, have stolen another march on Labour, electing themselves as their leader and UK Prime Minister, a man of Indian extraction. The first one. You may like or dislike Rishi Sunak, but there’s no denying that it’s quite an achievement, in a country still not comfortable with multiculturalism (especially, ironically enough, among Tories).

Nor is it the first such march the Tories have stolen over Labour. They gave the country its first ever woman Prime Minister, in Margaret Thatcher. And then they twisted the knife by providing us with the second, Theresa May. And then really put the boot in by giving us the third, Liz Truss, though perhaps Conservatives won’t want to talk much about her.

A commentator I heard recently went still further, pointing out that the Conservatives gave Britain its first Jewish Prime Minister. First and only, so far. Benjamin Disraeli was technically Christian, but only by conversion. He was born Jewish. 

Dizzy, Maggie, Rishi: Tory firsts

That’s an honourable record for a Party not known for its commitment to diversity.

Some of the details, though, aren’t quite as honourable as the overall picture. I mean, take the case of Disraeli. The Conservative Party split over customs duties on imported grain, in 1846. A majority wanted to preserve the duties, but the minority included nearly all the leaders, in particular all those with ministerial experience. The other lot may have been larger, but it was desperately short of men of talent or proven track record.

Disraeli was one of the few who stood out from the crowd. He was an excellent speaker, a hard worker, a man who mastered his subject and out-debated most of his opponents. And yet, and yet, when the party needed a leader in the House of Commons – the overall leader, Lord Stanley, later to be known as the Earl of Derby, was in the House of Lords – Disraeli was passed over for appointment.

Not once. Not twice. Three times.

And even then, Stanley decided to hand the role of Commons leader, usually held by one man, to a committee. Disraeli would be just one of three members, alongside two nonentities.

It would take three years before the committee fell apart and Disraeli finally won the appointment for himself. And then another seventeen, ending with the death of Derby, before he won the overall leadership of the party and became Prime Minister himself. The Tories gave Britain its first ever Jewish Prime Minister, but not with what you might call enthusiasm.

Even Maggie Thatcher wasn’t exactly a shoo-in. She stood for the Conservative leadership following a general election defeat for the incumbent leader and Prime Minister, Edward Heath – his third defeat out of the four elections he fought. Many of his fellow Conservative MPs were fed up with his record, but there was no obvious successor, so most expected him to be re-elected leader despite his defeats. Most of the Conservative-leaning press backed him as, according to polls, did the members of the party around the country.

Thatcher’s campaign was brilliantly managed by her fellow Tory MP Airey Neave.

She was little known, an Education Secretary who’d hardly covered herself in glory in the post and had little to qualify her for the top job. What Neave did was talk to groups of disaffected MPs who really had no time for Heath anymore, and suggest that, even if they weren’t keen on Thatcher, they should vote for her to force Heath out and precipitate a second ballot in which they could choose a candidate they really wanted.

That worked. She beat Heath, not by enough votes to be elected at once, but enough to force Heath out and trigger a second ballot, which several other candidates then joined. The front runner was a party heavyweight, Willie Whitelaw. Many expected him to walk the election, but many had expected Heath to walk the previous one.

What had happened in between was that Thatcher had picked up momentum. Now that she’d beaten Heath, Airey Neave could go back to the MPs he’d canvassed before, but this time to say that she was no longer a rank outsider, only up to collecting protest votes. Now she was looking like a winner.

And win she did. The rest is history. The history of a woman who’s a saint for some, something else for others. The first woman in the post.

Again, though, it wasn’t a pushover. It took effort. It took some clever footwork, under the direction of a fine campaign strategist.

Even Sunak’s arrival in the top job wasn’t straightforward. It took him two bites at the cherry. He had a go in the summer but was cheated of the prize when the Tory Party membership chose Liz Truss in preference to him. There are suspicions that, though solidly right wing himself, he wasn’t quite right wing enough to satisfy the appetite for raw flesh of an electorate – Conservative Party members – that likes to think of itself as one of the most sophisticated in the world but is in reality just one of the most reactionary.

Of course, there’s also a suspicion that these characters preferred Truss for her rather lighter skin colour than Sunak’s.

It turned out to be a disastrous decision. Truss tanked the economy in a matter of days. She had to go, and this time the Parliamentary Conservative Party managed to arrange things so that the members around the country wouldn’t get another chance to spoil the show. Sunak was the only candidate backed by his fellow MPs, and was therefore elected unopposed. He was in, but at his second time of asking.

Truss did at least give the Tories another record. Previously, the shortest tenure of any British Prime Minister had been that of George Canning in the late 1820s, who clocked up just 119 days. But he died in office. His immediate successor, Viscount Goderich, set the record for the shortest tenure of a Prime Minister who survived his term. He hated being Prime Minister, and wept when he went to see the king to stand down, or to be dismissed as he surely would have been had he not resigned. The king had to offer him a handkerchief to dry his tears.

Goderich managed 144 days.

Truss didn’t just beat those two, she crushed their records, lasting just just 50 days as Prime Minister.

Ah, well. It seems the Conservatives are at least good at setting records (both Canning and Goderich were Tories too, by the way). And it also seems that the records aren’t always quite as commendable as they appear at first sight. Still, they represent significant achievements.

Let’s hope Labour can start to emulate them soon. Maybe the current leader, Keir Starmer, could hand over to a woman or to someone from an ethnic minority after his own long, successful term in office.

That would be fine new record to admire. And just great for the country.

Halloween and the McDonald's effect

So that’s another Halloween behind us. 

It always strikes me as a bit of a bizarre celebration. Though, to be fair, the way Christians celebrate most feast days seems pretty bizarre these days. I mean, just think about it.

Easter is supposed to mark the execution and resurrection of Christ, as the redeemer of mankind. I’m not quite sure who feels redeemed these days, given the state of the world. In any case I’m not sure how that has anything to do with chocolate eggs, rabbits or chickens.

If Easter is about the death (the temporary death) of Christ, Christmas is about his birth. You’d think that might be a matter of some reverence and solemnity. Nothing to do with a large laughing fellow in a red suit and a white beard, or with eating and drinking far too much.

So it is with All Saints Day, or All Hallows as it’s sometimes called. 

Many religions go in for ancestor worship. The closest Christianity gets to it is All Hallows, when the idea is to remember those who went before us. In most Catholic countries, many do indeed pop down to the cemetery to do a bit of remembering.

But the night before, the eve of All Hallows or Halloween, which might be the moment to start getting into the mood for the quiet reflection of the day after, has evolved (or possibly declined) into a rather strange pantomime when kids, not all of them all that young, go wandering the streets dressed up to look faintly worrying, and go demanding unhealthy foods from strangers’ houses. What’s more, they do it with the time-honoured phrase ‘trick or treat’, suggesting that a failure to comply with the request could have undesirable consequences. It may just be me, but doesn’t that sound terribly like extortion with threats? 

This curious custom comes to us from the US, and it seems to be working its way into the culture of more and more countries where it was previously foreign. I suppose that’s what come of having the biggest economy in the world and the most powerful armed forces. People tend to follow your lead.

Terrifying Halloween Figures on Cruz’s terrace

To be honest, it can be rather more attractive than the ‘trick or treat’ menace suggests. Cruz, a nearly-neighbour of ours (that’s not to be confused with ‘near neighbour’: this one lives several streets away) in our little district on the outskirts of Valencia in Spain, likes to do up her garden and front terrace for Halloween (she does the same for Christmas, though with different decorations, of course). She then invites anyone who’s so inclined to come in and look around. 

We had our grandkids with us, so visiting her house went down a treat (no trick) with them.

Matilda displaying the appropriate level
of terror before a Halloween horror

It seemed a kind, generous and open-hearted way of marking this strangely alien event. I congratulated her on the initiative. She explained that she did it purely for the fun of it and because the children enjoy it.

Cruz with some of her frightening figures

The funny thing is that the Valencia region – formerly a kingdom in its own right – has its own tradition of faintly frightening figures, and it’s a little sad to see them being swamped by the diminutive ghosts and luminous skeletons of Halloween.

The Kingdom was ruled by Arabs until the 13th century. Then, in 1238, it was ‘liberated’ by King James I of Aragon. The quotation marks around ‘liberated’ are there because it’s not at all clear that there was much of a liberation. It may just have been the replacement of one ruler by another, and the newcomer may have been rather less sophisticated than the one he kicked out.

Indeed, the man who many regard as Spain’s finest poet and playwright of all time, Federico García Lorca, was murdered by followers of General Franco in 1936, his body disposed of in an unmarked grave still not discovered today, for having said that the worst thing that happened to his native Andalusia was to have the Moors kicked out of it. No doubt his cause wasn’t helped by the fact that he was gay, not an inclination likely to win him friends in Franco’s movement, but the comment about the Arabs seems to have been the immediate cause of their being irritated with him. 

Fatally irritated. 

That’s despite his probably being right.

So one of the figures used to frighten kids in the Valencia region is ‘the Moor Mussa’, presented as a former Arab king of ‘Balansiya’ as Valencia was known when it was Moorish, seeking revenge on the dastardly Christians by preying on their children. Only the badly-behaved ones, however.  

The Moor Mussa
I wonder whether the smile makes him
more or less frightening?

This reminds me of the Latin-American friend who told me that in her childhood, adults would try to frighten her with the warning that “el pirate Draque” would come for her if she didn’t mend her ways. I love it that England’s revered sea captain Sir Francis Drake is seen in South America as a bogeyman.

The Butoni might have upset me as a child

The Valencian horde of monsters contains many more characters. There’s the Butoni who comes for kids who leave their meals unfinisehd, cry too much or refuse to sleep (thank God I wasn’t brought up in Valencia: I wouldn’t have lasted a week). 

Quarantamaula: oh wow! A shapechanger
Particularly fiendish

Quarantamaula is still worse, because he’s a shape changer. He’ll take the form of whatever animal the child he’s after finds most frightening. That way he can use the fear he inspires to get the behaviour he (or, I suppose, anyone trying to look after a disobedient kid) requires.

And there’s a whole host of others, as my good friend Ana Cervera, always an invaluable source of information about my adopted city, assures me.

A host of scarekids...
Thanks, Ana, for sending the picture through

The tradition, since the middle ages, is that on the night of 31 October to 1 November, Valencians come together to tell each other horror stories with these creatures as protagonists.

Now, I’m not claiming that they’re particularly wonderful. Or that they aren’t. They seem a tad more frightening than most Halloween figures, but I leave it to you to judge whether that’s a good or a bad thing. As for making a bogeyman of an Arab, does that feel more than a little politically incorrect? But I do like the idea that different regions have different traditions, and it seems a pity that they should be lost in a tedious homogenisation across the world. Especially as there’s nothing specifically appealing about the Halloween celebrations that we all seem to be switching to.

Even if they’re interpreted through the warm heart and kindly intentions of a generous person like our nearly-neighbour Cruz.

Oh well. The US is top dog, at least for now, and preferable to some of the other possible candidates. Xi’s China? Putin’s Russia? Spare us. I’ll put up with Halloween rather than have them dictating my way of life, even at the cost of giving up on the variety of local traditions.

And even if it does mean putting up with the dull conformity of what I think of as the McDonald’s effect…