Coping with my cowardice

Conscience doth make cowards of us all. I think what Shakespeare meant by ‘conscience’ was what we might call self-consciousness. That has certainly been making a coward of me.

A couple of years ago I turned again to a form of exercise I’d rather abandoned for a long time. That’s running. I never liked it, though I had to admit that it did seem to do me good. And, with my weight rising and my sleep less peaceful than it once was, I felt it was time to take it up again. After all, these days I listen to audiobooks while out walking, so why not listen to them while running, and turn some effective if painful exercise into a rather more pleasant experience?

The problem was that I felt somewhat embarrassed. I knew I was slow. Clumsy even. Certainly overweight. I really didn’t want anyone to see me out running with all that against me.

Now, I’ve read Sartre. You sacrifice your very liberty if you see yourself through the eyes of others. The trick was to rise above all that and say to myself “who cares? It shouldn’t matter to me whether anyone else thinks I’m silly. What matters is what I think of myself.”

The trouble was that I rather thought of myself as silly.

Thus conscience did make a coward of me.

The answer was to do my running indoors. I don’t mean on a treadmill. No, I literally mean running around the house. Up and downstairs from time to time to make it a little more challenging. But at least the floor was flat, there were no stones to negotiate, and above all nobody could see me.

Well, not nobody. Not eventually. Inevitably the time would come when family would find me panting around the house and say, “what the heck are you doing?”, often with a rather more emphatic word relacing ‘heck’. 

And you know what? That really opened my eyes. It suddenly came to me that while I was worried about looking silly while running outside, nothing was more silly than running indoors. I mean, dodging furniture when you could be breathing the fresh air of our woods? Enjoying the sights of the stately pines? Running along sandy paths?

It finally dawned on me that I was being silly. I needed to start enjoying those things. I needed to get out of doors to do my running.

So I’ve started outside running again, at last. And would you believe it? It really is much pleasanter.

I like our sitting room (left)
But a woodland path is far better for a run

What’s more, far from looking at me as though I were silly, people have been friendly to me out there. It’s a bit like the way other parents, complete strangers, will strike up conversations with you at a school gate if you have kids with you as they do. Or indeed other dog walkers will smile and chat if their path crosses yours while you’re out with a dog or two of your own.

So I was delighted that two joggers I passed in the woods, on two separate occasions, made a point of smiling and raising a hand in greeting at me as I struggled on.

That was truly gratifying. A real pleasure. Of course, I can’t help feeling that part of their message is “I know what you’re suffering, because I’m suffering it too. But doesn’t it feel better knowing that you’re not the only victim of such self-inflicted pain? Just keep going. You’ll be able to stop soon.”

Certainly, that made me feel much better. Far from being ridiculed, I was being offered human solidarity. Some fellow feeling and kindness.  

It actually makes the whole ghastly experience much less ugly. It makes me feel less of a coward. And Sartre was right, it makes me feel much freer.

Though, of course, that may be because there’s a lot more space in the woods than in my sitting room.

A sick pet, a witty vet and a new word

Idiopathy. 

That was the new word. I came across it because our toy poodle Luci fell ill. Poor girl. She’s all heart: affectionate, companionable, seeking us out almost to the point of neediness. So it was sadly ironic that it was her heart that gave her trouble.

She was having long and painful coughing fits, fighting for breath. She was off her food, which is quite extraordinary for her. And she was too tired even to jump up onto the sofa next to us.

At first, a young vet in our local clinic decided that she had kennel cough and prescribed first an anti-inflammatory, and then an antibiotic. It would later turn out that not only was the diagnosis wrong, the treatment made her condition worse. Fortunately, the third time we took her in, a colleague became suspicious that we were dealing with something entirely different from kennel cough.

What she had was fluid filling the space around her heart, and indeed around her lungs. The pressure it generated was preventing her heart beating properly. It even made it difficult for her to breathe.

We found ourselves driving to the nearest veterinary hospital with people competent in cardiological problems. Nearest, but not that near, since it took twenty-five minutes to get there. And competent though not actually cardiologists themselves, it being late on a Friday night, and the veterinary cardiologist having headed home for the night, and indeed the weekend.

Fortunately, there was an excellent and likeable vet on duty, a young man from the Canary Islands, who does a week on duty at nights at the hospital south of Valencia, and then goes home to his Mum for a week. He expertly applied a syringe and extracted the fluid that was causing poor old Luci so much pain. Sadly, the news wasn’t encouraging: the fluid around her heart included blood. There was nothing good about that.

It was a bad weekend, above all for Luci, who spent two nights at the hospital. And for Danielle, who made the 50-minute round trip three times even before the Sunday evening, with either me or our son Michael as company. Then, not long after her return home on Sunday, Luci had a horrible episode which looked like a stroke, where she went stiff as a board and pretty much lost consciousness. That had us back down at the hospital yet again (all three of us this time). However, after a battery of tests that revealed nothing, we took her home again. She spent the rest of the night in reasonable calm.

Poor sick Luci getting tenderness from Toffee

Then on Monday we saw the cardiologist. He was great. Cheerful, kind, gentle and, above all, informative. Well, as informative as the information at his disposal allowed him to be. 

The most likely cause of Luci’s problems was a tumour on the heart. That would have been, in effect, a sentence of death. But he found no sign of a any kind of growth and told us he thought the chances of its being cancer were very small.

However there was no trace of an infectious disease, or of trauma, or of a toxin.

That’s when I learned the word ‘idiopathy’. Perhaps, after so many years working in and around healthcare, I should have known it before, but I didn’t. Its roots are Greek, and at first glance it sounds like the disease (‘pathos’) of being an idiot. That could be the kind of thing afflicting those who still think Brexit has been good for Britain, in the face of all the evidence.

But the word ‘idiot’ comes from ‘idios’ meaning of one’s own, because an idiot is (literally) someone who is wrapped in a world of his own. Again, that reminds me of Brexit. I don’t know what world is inhabited by those people who thought they could trust men like Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, but it certainly isn’t the world I know.

In fact, putting the two Greek words together gives us a term for a disease that is its own cause. You might think that this is like a self-inflicted wound. Rather of the kind suffered by people who voted for Brexit in the first place.

It turns out that, in the context of the cardiology consult, it really was the term for a disease which seems to have caused itself.

“In other words,” the cardiologist told us with a winning smile, “it means that we haven’t the faintest idea what caused the problem.”

I appreciated his honesty. And felt a little encouraged. At least, nothing said beyond any doubt that what Luci was suffering from was life-threatening. She’s not out of the woods, and we’re still far from relaxed, since we realise that this mysterious ailment could reappear as suddenly and with as little warning as the first time. But at least there’s no reason to despair for now.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned a new word. Idiopathy. A disease we can’t begin to explain.

Hey! Doesn’t that sound like Brexit too?

Toledo teachings

It was a great holiday. 

That’s if you can have a ‘holiday’ when you’re retired. Perhaps what I mean is ‘break away’. And not from work, since we expended seriously more energy getting to know ten cities in central and western Spain in thirteen days than we would have done by staying at home.

That included a quick trip into Portugal for lunch, as I mentioned last time.

Anyone familiar with this blog will know that I rather like the Spanish poet, Jaime Gil de Biedma. He said that of all histories in History, the saddest is Spain’s, since it always ends badly. It’s a clever remark, and I don’t like to contradict it, but I do have to say that the elements of that sadness, the avoidable tragedies, the self-inflicted wounds, are by no means unique to Spain, but apply to most countries I know anything about.

All that came to mind when we got to the fine city of Toledo.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged across most of the Anglo world that “in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. That commemorates the so-called discovery of the New World. I say ‘so-called’ because, to the people living there, it wasn’t new and they no doubt reckoned it had been discovered by their ancestors, something that happened millennia earlier.

In any case, though Columbus’s voyage launched Spain on its road to global empire, it was only one of three key turning points in Spanish history that year.

Another was the fall of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, Granada, to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Christian monarchs of the newly unified Spain. 

The third was the decree of the same year expelling the Jews from the country.

We don’t know for sure when Jews first reached the Iberian peninsula. There are suggestions they may have got there soon after Rome conquered the territory from Carthage, at the end of the third century before our era or the beginning of the second. A wave of immigration seems also to have turned up after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, when Rome conquered Judaea. What’s certain, and we have archaeological evidence for it, is that Jews were there in the second century of our era.

That makes it clear that by 1492, they’d been there a long time.

As for Muslim rule, it had lasted in Spain for over seven centuries. It had been driven back, step by grim step, in what is referred to as the ‘reconquest’, the process by which Christian rulers took over again. Granada in 1492 completed the process.

As for Toledo, it fell to the Christians in 1085. Despite the defeat of the Arab rulers, many ordinary Muslims were allowed to live on in the city. They were the ‘Mudéjars’, derived from an Arabic word for ‘those permitted to stay on’.

Defeated people tend not to enjoy the same status as the victors, and the Mudéjars were no exception. For instance, only certain professions were open to them. When you restrict what people can do to just a limited range of things, they tend to get very good at those things. The Mudéjars became outstanding builders and agriculturalists in that specific form of agriculture that requires irrigation. To this day, Spanish irrigation systems are derived from those the Arabs left behind.

Something a bit similar happened to the Jews, in the era that Toledo was ‘the city of the three peoples’, when they lived mostly in harmony with Christians and Muslims. Like the Mudéjars, they were limited in what they were allowed to do. At times, they might be permitted to own land, and did some good farming, but often that was prohibited. However, there was one activity that was open to them pretty much all of the time, which was financial service. Of course, most Jews are no better at that kind of business than anyone else, but for the minority that was, it provided a good way to become seriously wealthy.

Jews are just as generous and just as mean as any other people. If they have a reputation for being tight-fisted, that’s above all precisely because it was in finance that they had the best opportunity to be highly successful. Lots of people have to borrow money at some time or another, but who on earth likes the guy that lends it, and then collects interest on the loan? The fact that the authorities have driven him into that kind of work isn’t going to make him any more popular.

As the richest Jews made their money, they decided that one thing to spend it on was beautiful buildings. In Toledo, we visited two former Synagogues. Both are glorious. But what’s most striking about them is how Arab they look. The arches with internal lobes, the brickwork, the carved wooden ceilings are just the kind that one associates with great Muslim architecture.

One of the two temples we visited was the Synagogue of Saint Mary the White, whose Christian-sounding name is only down to the fact that synagogues aren’t generally named but are simply called after the street in which they stand. 

Everywhere you look inside it, there are Muslim eight-pointed stars. But then the builders decided to leave a small humorous reminder that they knew they were building for Jewish clients: they put in one six-pointed Star of David. 

Just one. 

One of many eight-pointed stars in
the Synagogue of St Mary the White (l)
and the only six-pointed one (r)

Why did the Jews put up with this kind of Muslim design? Why, for the same reason that the Christians did, in many of Toledo’s churches.

A fine Arab-styled window in Toledo's St John of the Kings Monastery
Compare the decoration with the Synagogue pictures above

It was the best and most fashionable architecture of the time. They paid for the best. Their Muslim architects gave them the best.

Mudéjar carved wooden ceilings
Transito Synagogue (l) and St John of the Kings monastery (r)

That strikes me as admirable. Which is why the expulsion of 1492 feels like an astonishingly self-destructive act. Why, when the three peoples were living so well alongside each other, would you want to bring that coexistence to an end?

But bring it to an end Ferdinand and Isabella did. The Jews were given four months to convert or get out of the country. One hundred and twenty days to end a presence that had lasted nearly 1400 years and probably longer.

And here’s a poignant detail. Many of those who left carefully locked up their houses and took the keys with them. Often, those keys became heirlooms, passed on to their descendants down to today.

Spain and Portugal decided some years ago to allow anyone who could prove descent from the expelled Jews to claim automatic citizenship. Our guide in Toledo told us that, some time ago, he met an Argentinian Jewish couple who’d just been naturalised Spanish. He was anxious to congratulate them and welcome them to their new home. All they could do was cry.

They were back after half a millennium of banishment. And they had their key. Though it would open no door.

As for the Muslims, in 1609, they too were forced to convert or go, again with only a few months to choose. Many left.

Even the converts who stayed, whether from Judaism or Islam, were regarded as suspect and inferior and subject to repeated persecution by their Christian rulers. Those rulers clearly felt that ensuring the ethnic and religious homogeneity of Spain was the right thing for the country and the best way to obey the will of God. It’s an attitude that I find hard to reconcile with a gospel of love but, hey, theologians are good at some remarkable mental (and moral) acrobatics.

What the two expulsions did was make sure that Spain lost some of the best farmers, builders, administrators and financial experts in the world. It’s no surprise that the Golden Age of Spain, when it enjoyed its greatest flowering of art and literature and held its greatest power, was essentially just the sixteenth century. 

The century that followed 1492. 

After that, decline set in. And Spain found itself being overtaken by countries which may not have liked the culture and customs of their immigrants, but knew how to make the most of the skills they brought with them.

The lesson seems obvious, doesn’t it? Keep your doors, and above all your minds, open to other people. Learn from them. Let them build or invest or cultivate for you. That way lie riches.

And yet, many countries, in particular Brexit Britain and the previously-Trumped US, seem dedicated once more to putting up walls, making life difficult for people from other cultures, and keeping them out if possible. Like the Spanish Christians in 1492, they seem intent on impoverishing themselves, because they prefer homogeneity and poverty to tolerance and prosperity. 

Which is why the saddest history of all History isn’t just Spain’s.

Curious what lessons you can learn from a brief holiday, isn’t it?

Popping over to Portugal

It may be because I’m from an island race that I still find it a bit of a thrill to nip across to another country for lunch. Not so easy when you don’t have a land border.

Now, I naturally don’t mean doing a Rupert Murdoch or a Bill Gates, and popping to, say, Rome from, say, Berlin, by private jet or anything like that. We’re on holiday in Extremadura in far western Spain which took us to Badajoz for a night. Take a wrong turning there, and you might well find yourself in Portugal before you know it. Driving to the little town of Elvas took under half an hour.

The first thing I enjoyed about the excursion was that we only became aware that we’d crossed the border when we saw the ‘Welcome to Portugal’ sign (or ‘Bem-vindo a Portugal’, since they persist in speaking a foreign language there). 

I never entirely lose the pleasure of seeing international borders becoming porous. And, let me assure you, this was a border that took itself seriously. Elvas itself makes it clear, in its heavy walls with projecting bastions and defensive towers, to say nothing of its several outlying fortresses. That was all to dissuade nearby Spain ever being tempted to do a Putin to the Portuguese.

Elvas Castle: impressive but above all defensive

It’s all the more uplifting, as a result, to find this particular border has become little more than an imaginary line in the soil. One wall down out of so many in the world is, it seems to me, a small step in the right direction. It’s only a pity that so many people, particularly in the US and Britain, seem keen these days on building such walls up again rather than helping demolish them.

Elvas, by the way, provides poignant testimony of how sad that is. It has a British cemetery. In it are buried or commemorated British soldiers who fought alongside their Spanish and Portuguese allies in the Peninsular War, against French troops that were occupying Spain in Napoleon’s days. A reminder that Britain once understood that it was sometimes in its own interests to help out its continental neighbours.

Memorial plaque in the Elvas British cemetery

Back to the other thing I liked about our visit to Elvas. That was to do with the meal. I very much hope that this doesn’t offend any of my Spanish friends, since Danielle and I both love our new adoptive home. But I have to admit that there are a couple of customs in Spain that leave me a little less than comfortable, and Portugal is a country in which we don’t encounter them.

The first involves the categorisation of tuna as a vegetable. Most countries, of course, view it as a fish. In Spain, however, no mixed salad can possibly be complete without tuna on top of it. Why, back in Spain, when we asked for a mixed salad without tuna, what we got was something delicious but, inevitably, crowned with tuna despite the chef’s assurances that it wouldn’t be. 

“Salad without tuna?” they seem to say in Spain, “why, that’s like a beach without the sun. It’s positively heretical, like communion without a wafer.”

What do you mean, no tuna?
That wouldn’t be a salad

What’s more, over this trip, we’ve come across a number of Spanish restaurants which have the irritating habit of not only serving salad without any kind of dressing, but without even offering us salt, vinegar and olive oil. As for them and they bring them, sometimes with bad grace. As for pepper, “what, on a salad?” they seem to say, “that’s like asking for a sunshade in a swimming pool”.

So you can imagine our delight when, even before serving us the salad, the Portuguese waiter provided us with two bottles, one of vinegar and one of olive oil, accompanied by a shaker of salt and, more astonishing still, another of pepper.

Ah, that’s what makes it such a pleasure to go abroad for lunch. However briefly, you get to enjoy another culture. Not, though, I hasten to stress, that it was anything but a pleasure to return to the Spanish side of the frontier.

After all, we really do love our adoptive home in Spain. Even the strange idiosyncrasies it sometimes displays.