Tiredness and language-learning choices

“We are approaching Madrid, Puerta de Atocha, Almudena Grandes.”

That’s the announcement we hear whenever we travel by train from our home near Valencia to Madrid. That reference to ‘Almudena Grandes’ moves me every time. Not only because it recognises an extraordinary person who deserves it more than many honoured by statues or other tributes, but also because it was by no means a given that she would get the recognition.

I got to know María de la Almudena Grandes mostly while walking through our local woods, usually with our dogs. Well, her books. I sadly didn’t get to meet her in person. That was all part of my long and, so far, only partially successful effort to learn the language of my adopted country, Spain. It’s been nearly four years since we moved here, and I still sound like a tourist.

In language learning, an important threshold is when you can at last read a newspaper or a book with pleasure. Not necessarily with ease or complete accuracy. But without having to look up so many words, or skip over so many you don’t understand, that the whole process becomes unrewarding or a chore.

I learned some Spanish at school, over half a century ago. As a result, with living here and being exposed to the language every day, I was able to get to that important threshold reasonably quickly. And because I like listening to audiobooks, as well as because my worst problem wasn’t so much understanding the written word in Spanish as the spoken, I took to listening to novels in the language.

As in any language, there are different types of novels in Spanish. There are those with a claim to a place in the hall of literary fame, and those that would never get past the turnstile at the entrance. That second type is the kind of book you might buy in an airport terminal, or perhaps to read on a beach. 

I like both types. Within the pulp fiction category, my favourite is thrillers. If they’re reasonably good, they can be compelling, but they use a rather simpler vocabulary than their more literary equivalents, their plots are generally quite simple because they’re essentially predictable, and overall they’re less challenging to the tired mind. 

These days, my mind is easily tired.

Recently I came across a writer called Juan Gómez Jurado. He wrote a three-novel series (it wouldn’t surprise me if more came along later) called Red Queen, Black Wolf and White King. You can maybe see some sort of pattern in the titles. 

I listened to the first two quite quickly. They were fun. I liked the character of the cynical and masterful chief of the Spanish section of the shadowy European crime-fighting organisation at the centre of the plot; I enjoyed the main character, the brilliant but tormented young woman who is the Spanish representative of the shadowy European crime-fighting organisation; I particularly liked the character of the somewhat overweight (“not that he’s fat” is a repeated refrain) middle-aged policeman, in trouble for his repeated breaches of procedure and haunted by the fear that his colleagues will discover he’s gay, who has to look after the young woman. He’s my favourite, because he introduces some moments of humour. 

Overall, the first two books of the series were fun and unchallenging, just what I needed. But then I started on the third book. And suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was by now becoming clear that though the organisation had come up against various malefactors, they were all really controlled by one great villainous figure, sworn to destroy the brilliant young woman. 

The master criminal is the White King, who provides the title of book 3. With a sinking feeling, I could picture the shape of the book to come. Up against this monster of evil, she would make mistake after mistake, leading to a peak of disaster, perhaps where her very life, or that of people close to her, would be at threat – you, know the equivalent of her or her friends being in a deep well gradually filling with water, or bound to a bomb whose timer is moving with deadly slowness towards zero – and then, by an extraordinary feat of intellect, she would find the one way of defeating the evil genius she’s battling and, metaphorically, with one bound (of hers) everyone would be free.

All just too Marvel comic, too much superhero and supervillain stuff.

I may be wrong, and the whole thing may turn out to be far more subtle than that. When I get back to it. But just then, I found I could go no further and laid it down.

Instead, I needed something a little more stimulating. “What about Almudena Grandes?”, I wondered.

I’d read her five novels (the sixth unfinished because of her tragically early death) on people living through the Spanish civil war and the years of dictatorship that followed, resisting as best they could the terrible oppression of Franco’s far-right authoritarian regime. 

When I add that she identified, not without justification, the Communist Party as the main spearhead of that resistance, you’ll probably understand why getting her the recognition she deserved wasn’t easy. Madrid, although celebrated for its indomitable will and the courage with which it resisted Franco’s fascist onslaught during the war, is today strangely right wing, both within the City itself and in the Autonomous Community around it. It’s those organisations that set the names of squares and streets, and there was no way they were going to give that great Madrid native, the powerful voice of the left Almudena Grandes, one of them. That’s why it’s the station that has been renamed: the great stations are managed by the national government, not the city or region, and the national government is currently led by Pedro Sánchez, a man of the centre-left.

Great book, great writer

This time I turned to Los Besos en el Pan, Kissing the bread. It follows a wide group of people living in an unnamed district of Madrid at the time of the 2008 crisis. The title comes from a custom of an older generation, which demanded of its children that they kiss any piece of bread that fell to the floor before putting it back in the basket. At a time of acute poverty, when hunger was widespread, no food could be wasted. The message is very much that the older people have the experience to cope with the difficulties their kids and grandkids are struggling with. “Crisis? You call this a crisis?” they seem to be saying, “you don’t know what a real crisis looks like.” 

Indeed, some of those characters say it explicitly.

The book abounds with different people, with different concerns and different approaches to making their way despite the difficulties of the time. It’s marked by two of Almudena Grandes’s most striking characteristics: her hatred of the injustices inflicted by the elite on the poor who deserve better – the hardworking individuals thrown onto the scrapheap of unemployment in middle age, the kids who can’t find jobs or afford their studies, the public services including healthcare being starved of funds or even closed down – and its counterpart, her immense love of people. The stories aren’t all happy, and two or three end badly, even tragically. But they’re all ultimately about affection and warmth and kindness. That makes the book a delight to read. Or to listen to.

But it’s a lot more complex than Red Queen. Delightful, lovely, compelling but not easy. In fact, because it was so good, and because I missed some of the details first time through, I read it again this week, having finished it only the week before. 

Because it is compelling. Despite the challenge, far more gripping than something like Red Queen. Perhaps indeed because it’s so challenging.

Rather proving that the best things in life aren’t necessarily easy. They do require effort. But the effort’s worth making.

At least, when I can find the energy deep inside my tired soul.

As the light comes back

We’re on the way back up again!

With the solstice, and our shortest day, firmly behind us we in the Northern Hemisphere, can start to enjoy days getting longer again. The worst misery of the long nights is done. While officially winter has just begun, in reality we can start to feel that spring is on its way. 

As it happens, here in Valencia, there’s been little sense of anything like real winter. It’s no doubt down to global warming, sadly, though I have to admit we’re enjoying it for now. While the nights have been cold recently (well relatively), the days have been positively hot, into the low twenties.

That’s Celsius, I swiftly add, for the sake of my Transatlantic friends.

Bleak midwinter in our woods

The warmth was something we were well aware of, Danielle, our son Michael and I. Our back garden is far from big. In its layout it’s moderately long, and thin. What made it even less far from big was that both sides were lined with thirty-year-old cypress hedges, impressive when it comes to securing privacy but, boy, so invasive. They turned the garden from long and thin to long and thinner. At certain points they grabbed two and a half or three metres of our space.

We decided it was time to do away with them. Simple fences would be fine instead, with climbing plants to decorate them. We got a couple of quotes to have the work done by professionals and, frankly, they seemed ridiculously excessive. Why not, we thought, do the work ourselves?

Well, we have. The job’s done. But the effort it cost explained why the quotes were so high.

Having Michael around to help was a blessing. Because it wasn’t just a matter of cutting down the old hedges. Quite a lot of the cypress had grown into the fence on one side, so that meant cutting out metal wire from old, thick trunks or branches. Then the cut material had to be bundled up and tied with twine: the local council is great, because it will collect garden waste for free, but only as long as it is left out by the side of a street in bound bundles below a certain size. Tying the stuff up and carting it to the street was a lot less easy than you might imagine.

Fortunately, once the hedges were more or less gone, we tackled a much pleasanter task. To get ready for the forthcoming visit by our grandkids, soon after Christmas, we set up a children’s playhouse in the newly widened garden. That initially meant preparing a base of gravel to rest it on and extending the existing crazy-paving path to lead the kids to the house.

In the unseasonal warmth, the hedges and the playhouse had us working in shirtsleeves and still complaining about the heat. Well, not complaining that plaintively, to be honest. Blue skies and sun might mean higher temperatures than strictly comfortable but it was preferable to rain or freezing cold.

Anyway, it’s all but done now. All that’s left is a little more clearing up and another stone to lay. Then we can sit back and wait for Matilda and Elliott to arrive and, I hope, be wowed by their gift. 

Should be fun.

December sunshine on the grandkids’ playhouse

And, of course, we can just enjoy the warmth and clear weather in the meantime. Knowing that, with the solstice passed, we’re now on the way back up towards springtime. Plenty to look forward to.

So, for now, season’s greetings to you all. However unseasonal the season is. And, of course, to my friends in the Southern Hemisphere, all my sympathy.

Unseasonal season’s greetings

Meghan and Harry: the long running royal soap goes on

It’s fun to see the storm that Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary has provoked.

Netflix promotes Meghan and Harry

Just to be clear, it’s the storm that’s fun. Not the documentary. If I spend six hours watching a TV show, I want it to be something a little more compelling than a self-justification by a couple, against their victimisation by the British royal family and media. Even if the complaint is true. Which it is.

What makes it even less interesting is that the couple is made up of a minor star whose claim to fame is a competent performance in a middle-ranking, entertaining but essentially superficial show, Suits. Her support is provided by a husband whose major claim to fame is his birth. Unless I’m much mistaken, birth is something that has been achieved by every one of the eight billion humans living on the planet.

So why all the fuss?

Well, I think Jonathan Freedland, one of my favourite Guardian journalists, got that about right. The real purpose of the royal family, since it doesn’t rule or do anything much else that’s useful, is to provide entertainment. Or, as he puts it, distraction.

How does this work? 

Well, the trick is to play on our emotions, like the writers of the best shows. They pull you one way – getting you to loathe a character, for instance – and then the other – painting them in sympathetic colours after all. And the British public loves this roller coaster of sentimentality. 

That public’s good at it too, since it’s nothing if not astoundingly fickle.

It happened with Diana. After her death, the upsurge of sympathy for the fairy-tale princess amazed the world. The Queen, on the other hand, and the family were seen as cruel, self-absorbed, and out of touch. 

Charles, many felt, should never inherit the throne, which should bypass him entirely and go to his son (or, more importantly her son), William. And Camilla, the scheming other woman who’d caused so much suffering to Diana, on no account should she ever be Queen Consort.

Funny to think back on all that now, isn’t it? Charles is on the throne and Camilla, naturally, is his Queen Consort. All those certainties have simply melted away, like snow in the spring. And the Queen’s death in September was mourned by millions, the outrage over Diana’s treatment simply washed away. 

Elizabeth II did her duty, we were breathlessly told. Well, she certainly did. But with taxpayers funding the monarchy to the tune of over a £100 million a year, I’d say doing her duty is pretty much the least we ought to expect.

Still, at least she and her family laid on plenty of the kind of distraction Freedland talks about. Not least with Harry and Meghan. She was initially welcomed with enthusiasm. Beautiful and a wonderful demonstration of how diversity is becoming anchored in British life, right up to the royalty. Until the racism started to come out, as well as the media persecution of the kind that had literally driven Harry’s mother, Diana, to her death. 

Harry and Meghan are just the latest episode in the long-running soap opera that is the British royal family. To see how long running, we don’t even need to go back to the time of Henry VIII and his six wives (two of whom he sent to the scaffold). A fine example is George IV, one of Queen Victoria’s uncles, entirely untouched by the kind of respectable and straitlaced morality we associate with the notion ‘Victorian’. 

He was a spendthrift, a heavy drinker and a womaniser. At 21, he fell for Mary Fitzherbert, a Catholic widow, and secretly married her, though it was against the law for the spouse of a Catholic to become king, and indeed against the law for the heir to the throne to contract any marriage without the monarch’s consent – which he certainly didn’t have.

Despite an income of over £6million a year, in modern terms, which most of us would probably find it possible to scrape by on, he needed a Parliamentary grant, out of the public purse, of the equivalent of £20 million. In addition, he received nearly £8 million to do up Carlton House, where he lived in London. 

Well, you know how expensive home improvements can be.

Caroline and George
An earlier episode in the soap

Eventually, he gave way to pressure from his father and married Caroline of Brunswick. This was possible because the previous marriage was illegal and therefore not binding. 

George and Caroline detested each other, and both continued to have lovers. For George, that included a long-lasting on-off relationship with Mary Fitzherbert, but it was by no means limited to her.

He and Caroline lived apart for years. She moved to Italy, living and travelling extensively with a servant, Bartolomeo Pergami. Few were in any doubt that he was her lover. There was even a rumour that she’d had an illegitimate child.

Like most husbands who’ve behaved badly themselves, George took a dim view of his wife’s alleged misdemeanours. He set up a commission to investigate her alleged adultery. The investigation concluded there was ‘no foundation’ to the rumours against her, but still he curtailed her access to their daughter Princess Charlotte.

That princess proved as self-willed as her father. She refused to marry the husband he’d found for her, instead choosing the man who later – much later – would become King Leopold of the Belgians. But then she died while giving birth to a stillborn son. That piece of devastating news only reached her mother from a passing visitor, as George hadn’t felt it necessary to tell her. 

When George IV mounted the throne after the death of George III, he decided that what he really, really wanted, more than anything, was to divorce his Queen. He demanded that parliament pass a Pains and Penalties Bill that would annul the marriage and strip her of the title of Queen. There was a public outcry over this suggestion. Eight hundred petitions were raised in her support, with over a million signatures between them. 

Even so, shocking evidence of adultery was submitted to the House of Lords for the debate on the bill, which became in effect a trial of the Queen. The Lords passed the bill, but such was the support for Caroline in the country that it was never even submitted to the Commons, since there was no prospect of its passing there. 

Meanwhile, Caroline decided that she rather liked the idea of being Queen. So she came back to England to claim what she saw as her own. This led to a lamentable scene, fully worthy of the finest traditions of soap opera, where she tried to get into Westminster Hall, where guests were gathering before the coronation ceremony. She was kept out by soldiers with fixed bayonets until a senior official slammed the door shut in her face.

With a wonderful sense of timing, wholly in keeping with the melodramatic character of the whole episode, she died just three weeks later. 

A few months earlier, the French emperor Napoleon, against whom Britain fought a long and bloody war, had died. The king was told “Sir, your bitterest enemy is dead”. 

“Is she, by God!” he replied.

The British public loved Caroline. Just like they loved Diana. Just like they would love Meghan. But with Caroline, as with Meghan, the love evaporated quickly.

It soon emerged that after the King’s extraordinary behaviour in excluding her from his coronation, she had accepted a government offer of £50,000 a year (close to £6 million today) to leave the country permanently. Many of her former fans decided that she was just another hypocritical money-grubber after all. So they went off her.

But, boy, they’d got their money’s worth in the meantime. Loving her. Going off the king. Going off her. Who could want more from a soap?

Like the Diana story. Like the Harry and Meghan story. The show just goes on.

And on. 

When it's positive to be negative

“Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative” says the old song. And don’t we always have a friend who comes around, if we’re feeling low, attempting to cheer us up by telling us to stay positive? Ah, for the days when that was good advice. 

Like so many things, Covid has changed all that, hasn’t it? 

Danielle and I both had colds in the last couple of weeks. Mine came first, so it sounds like I passed it on to her. And that wasn’t nice of me, since I didn’t get too bad – short of energy and with a bunged-up nose (what the Spanish, among whom we live, call ‘constipado’, not at all to be confused with the English ‘constipated’). 

Poor Danielle, on the other hand, was truly laid low, with headaches, a sore throat, a terrible cough as well as all the ‘constipado’-ness. Why, she even ran a temperature and had to take to her bed, which was particularly unfortunate since we were visiting our grandkids at the time and it cut down the time she could spend with them.

As she was feeling just as bad after we got home, she decided she might be suffering from something a little less benign than a mere cold. We could hardly believe that it might be Covid, after having escaped infection throughout the height of the pandemic, and having had a further vaccination – our fourth – just at the end of November. But we took tests and, sadly, in both cases the result was the opposite of what we’d hoped for.

Yep. Our Covid tests had accentuated the positive. Which, far from eliminating the negative, let it in with all the force of a major irritation.

The bug: it’s negative when it’s positive

As so often when one receives bad news, my first reaction was denial. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” I thought. “I feel just fine”.

Old friends, not seen for years, were due to turn up from France the very next day. Surely they could come anyway? After all, feeling this well, how coud I possibly be transmitting a disease? 

But then saner thoughts (saner though negative) prevailed. It would be no act of friendship to renew our acquaintance by passing a Covid infection on to them. We wrote to warn them and they, sensibly, decided to postpone their visit. That’s despite having already checked in for their flight the next day.

Fortunately, they were able at little cost to rebook for January. If we can stay infection-free then, I’ll be happy to re-accentuate the positive after all. Which I suppose would be a celebration of the negative test status.

We’d arranged various things for our visitors. That all had to be undone. The lunch in our favourite local restaurant had to be cancelled, and the friends who were going to join us there put off. We had to pull out of the flamenco concert for which we’d booked four tickets, and find four friends who could take the tickets instead of us (fortunately not something that proved too difficult). And our exasperation was only deepened when the heavy rain that had been forecast for the time our visitors were due to be with us failed to materialise, and we had some glorious weather which would have made their visit all the more enjoyable.

Instead we sat around at home isolating ourselves or, at most, going for walks in the woods with our dogs, since social distancing there’s pretty easy: you can walk kilometres without getting within ten metres of anyone else.

And, of course, we kept testing ourselves. After all, I felt fine and Danielle was clearly on the mend too. The symptoms had been relatively slight, especially for me, and hadn’t lasted long. I reckon that’s down to the way the bug has evolved, making it less nasty these days, though I suspect having four vaccine shots helped too. 

Our recovery made it feel bizarre to have to behave as though quarantined when there seemed to be nothing the matter with us. But the grim two-line display that kept appearing on the test strip told us we just had to put up with our isolation.

Until finally it didn’t. We both got tests that showed us clear. We could return to normal life. Which was a relief, even though it deepened our frustration: we were infection-free once more, at a time when our friends would still have been with us, had they been able to stick to their planned visit.

Oh, well. At least we were negative at last.

Which meant we could be positive again.

Russian thoughts on Russian failures

Remember that lightning campaign that was going to lead to the fall of Kyiv and give Russia control of Ukraine in three days? Well, we’re heading towards 300 days with no sign of victory yet. Indeed, the unstoppable Russian Army has been not just stopped – repeatedly – but pushed back again and again.

Extraordinary, isn’t it?

Deserted and captured Russian tanks
Russian 'special military operation' in Ukraine, 2022

It struck me that it would be interesting to find out what the poor benighted soldiers at the bottom of the Russian army think of their experiences. This blog is, of course, entirely dedicated to public service, and it’s in that spirit that I here record some perceptive remarks, by Russian soldiers, on their misfortunes in combat.

Let’s start with one soldier’s comments on how the ranks of the army behaved as they crossed into foreign territory during the offensive phase of an operation:

We did not think of anything, we knew nothing. We let our commanders think for us and did what they told us.

Just what we pictured, right? Individual soldiers had little idea of what they were doing. Or even of where they were. Let alone of why. 

When they were forced back onto the defensive, you won’t be surprised to learn that all sorts of questions about their supposedly powerful army came bubbling to the surface. Here’s another young officer’s remarks:

The 10th and 11th divisions attacked the enemy’s left flank … The enemy put forward 6,000 riflemen – only 6,000 against 30,000 – and we retreated, having lost about 6,000 brave men. And we had to retreat, because half our troops had no artillery owing to the roads being impassable, and – God knows why – there were no rifle battalions. Terrible slaughter! It will weigh heavy on the souls of many people! Lord, forgive them. The news of this action has produced a sensation. I’ve seen old men who wept aloud… Many political truths will emerge and evolve in the present difficult days for Russia. 

Impassable roads. Lack of appropriate weaponry. Soldiers unable to stand up to an enemy attack. Oh, yes. Just what the Western Press has been saying too.

And what about that reference to the political truths that will emerge? Doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing to set hearts trembling in the Kremlin? To shake the throne of tyrants?

That same officer later had the opportunity to meet some wounded enemy soldiers and was struck by the difference between their attitude and that of the Russians. In fact, he paints such a flattering picture of the other side that it’s hard not to think it’s a tad overstated. Still, these are his words, and he was there:

Every soldier is proud of his position and respects himself, for he feels himself to be an effective spring in the army machine. Good weapons and the skill to use them, youth, and general ideas about politics and the arts give them an awareness of their own worth. With us, stupid foot and arms drills, useless weapons, oppression, age, lack of education, and bad food and keep destroy the men’s last spark of pride, and even give them too high an opinion of the enemy.

He didn’t just write acerbic comments in articles or letters home, he also raised his concerns with the authorities back in Moscow:

My conscience and sense of justice forbid me to keep silent in the face of the evil being openly perpetrated before me, causing the deaths of millions and sapping our strength and undermining our country’s honour… We have no army, we have a horde of slaves cowed by discipline, ordered about by thieves and slave traders. This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland – words that have been so much misused! – nor valour, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, on the one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption.

“Hold on!” you may be saying now, “what’s that reference to the Tsar?”

Well, of course, he might have been referring to Tsar Vladimir III, which would be a far more appropriate title for the man who likes to impersonate the President of a Republic, Vladimir Putin. But I’ll come clean and admit my subterfuge. I’m not really an intrepid war correspondent who’s been out amongst Russian troops in Ukraine, collecting their views.

No, the tsar in question was Nicholas I. The comments I’ve been quoting don’t come from Putin’s wittily named ‘special military operation’ of 2022, but from the Crimean War of 1853-1856. I found them in a highly useful study, the historian Orlando Figes’s Crimea. 

The first quotation was from Teofil Klemm who served with the Russian army as it invaded, not Ukraine, but the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, in the area where the Danube reaches the Black Sea, in what is now Romania. 

A Turkish counter-attack forcing back Russian troops
Russian siege of Silistria, 1854

The remaining quotations are from a Second Lieutenant, a rank from which he was never promoted, doubtless because he was so outspoken in his criticisms of the Russian Army. Not that he or we ought to complain about his lack of a military career. He had far greater and more valuable success, as one of the world’s outstanding novelists, penning in particular War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

He was Leo Tolstoy.

What makes these criticisms striking is that they apply so powerfully to the current Russian Army, as well as that army nearly 170 years ago. It is run by incompetent, brutal and dishonest officers, commanding poorly educated men, cowed by pitiless discipline and oppressed into silencing any thought about what they are doing. Together they form an unsurprisingly mediocre fighting force, serving a cause about which they know little and understand less.

That’s not all. Tolstoy talks about the useless armaments. The Russian infantryman of his day was armed with a long-outdated weapon, the musket. His French or British enemy used a rifle instead of a musket, giving him several times the range, accuracy and effectiveness. Thousands of Russians would be mowed down long before they were close enough to have any hope of doing the enemy any harm at all. 

Today, the imbalance of weaponry is once again a key factor in Russian failure.

The most striking parallel between the two wars is, however, that in 1812, just over three decades before the Crimean War, the Russian Army had destroyed the colossal Grande Armée with which Napoleon had marched on Moscow. That had made the defeat of Napoleonic France inevitable. Curiously, though unsurprisingly, the Western powers had been immensely grateful to the Russians for using their huge force that way, while at the same time more than a little terrified that they had such force available to them.

Less than seventy years ago, Russia, in the form of the Soviet Union, had crushed Hitler’s attempt to overrun its territory. That made the Nazis’ eventual defeat inevitable. And, once more, the Western powers were both immensely grateful to the Russians for that use of their force and a lot more than a little terrified that they had such force available to them.

Doesn’t history repeat itself?

There is, however, another lesson to learn from that parallel. Russia’s military power is massive and impressive when it’s used to save its homeland. It showed that when it fought Napoleon and when it fought Hitler.

When it launches its own invasion, however, whether in Moldavia and Wallachia, or in Ukraine, and finds itself fighting well-armed opposition, it’s woefully inadequate.

If anyone ever learned any lessons from history, that, I suggest, is one that whichever Tsar is occupying the Kremlin at any time would do well to learn. He'd be doing himself one hell of a favour. And the rest of the world too.