When a stalker is not a stalker

It’s the little things that bring home the cultural differences between nations.

That’s because they affect our lives far more. For instance, Spain gives kids presents on Twelfth Night rather than Christmas Day. That makes some sense because it’s the anniversary of the arrival of the Three Kings to give presents to the infant Christ. In any case, sensible or not, the custom affects us once a year.

Similarly, the cult of machismo which infects a sadly large percentage of Spanish men, only really emerges as a problem when an offence is committed. That’s only a news item for us, though it’s something far worse for the victim (sometimes involving her death). 

Of course, it gets a far higher profile when it’s Luis Rubiales, the President of the Spanish Football Federation, kissing a world-cup-winning woman player on the lips, without her consent. Indeed, we can all then be caught up in the scandal and indignation (or in other people’s cases, in his defence), praying for him to be fired (or, for those others, vindicated). But it’s still remote from our daily lives.

On the other hand, unlike any of the other countries in which Danielle and I have lived – England, France and Germany – where council lorries call weekly or so to collect rubbish, and it gets taken as long as we’ve remembered to put our bins out on time, in Spain the system is different. There are large containers on the edges of pavements around the neighbourhood and our job is just to deposit our rubbish in them whenever our bins need emptying. That’s true of general waste as of recycling.

Since, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, we seem to produce a huge amount of rubbish and, above all, of recycling even though there are only two of us, this difference really impacts on my life. I find myself popping down to the bins every other day, and sometimes – especially when the grandkids are with us – every day, so this is a difference that I truly feel in my own personal existence.

Not that it’s a bad thing. Gone is the need to remember when the bins have to be put out, and the terrible panic when you realise at midnight – or worse still, six in the morning – that you’ve forgotten to do so. You empty your bins when they need emptying, safe in the knowledge that the council lorries will be around within a day or so to empty the containers. You walk a little further than with the other system, but that’s not much of a hardship.

Now, one of the things I’m sure I’ve mentioned before is how having dogs helps you make friends. Walking dogs is like dropping kids off at school. It brings you into contact with people who are happy to chat to you, and some of them turn into something more than mere acquaintances.

Toffee and Luci out for a walk
A great hook for friendships, like dropping kids off at school

Miriam is a lovely lady, the first Miriam in her family after three generations of Marias on the female side. Of course, Miriam is only another form of Maria, so her parents didn’t stray far when they named her. And she and her equally appealing husband Alex made sure that the family would revert to norm quickly, when they named their own daughter Maria.

Our little orange dog Toffee gets on very well with theirs, and even the black one Luci seems OK about running into them. So whenever we meet, there’s a great deal of celebration, made all the more joyous by the fact that Miriam always carries dog treats with her, and always gives our two one or two of them, or more if she can get away with it.

The friendship that sprung up between the dogs and them quickly communicated itself to the humans, and we’ve even enjoyed having them around to dinner.

Recently, I took some recycling out quite late in the evening. I take the whole lot with me and then sort it out, putting the paper, the glass and the plastic or metal each in their appropriate receptacle. The containers all have their openings facing a fence which is pretty close to them, and once I was on that side of the containers, in the deepening darkness, I was out of sight of the road. 

When I came round the corner of one of the containers, therefore, and stepped out into the fading light, I was concerned to see a young woman right in front of me. My fear was that I might have scared her. A man appearing at night from what might seem to be a hiding place? It could be worrying. So I was quick to say ‘Hi’. 

Well, this being Spain, I said ‘Hola’.

She did look at me a little quizzically, but then smiled and said ‘Hola’ back before she got into a car that had stopped to pick her up with the little dog she was walking. No harm done, I felt. I obviously hadn’t upset her too much.

A day or two later, I ran into Miriam and Alex again, as we were walking our dogs.

“Hey,” Miriam told me, “Maria saw you the other night.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes, you were by the containers, dumping some recycling. She was with the dog.”

Things clicked into place.

“That was Maria!”

“Yes,” Alex told me, “she thought you might not have recognised her. But she recognised you. And she told us, ‘Well, he said ‘hola’ to me, so I reckon he must have known who I was’. Apparently she said ‘hola’ back to you.”

Ah, well. There was I worried I might be taken for a stalker. Whereas, in fact, far from frightening the woman I more or less sprang out on, I’d merely had the bad manners to fail to recognise her as a friend.

Still, I suppose that’s a lot less serious. No one could take me for a follower of Luis Rubiales based on so little. 

Or, at any rate, I hope not.

New Sandman

“Karla is not fireproof because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.”

John le Carré had a way with words. And he was the great chronicler of the skulduggery of the Cold War. I know that he wrote novels not histories, but I would say to him what the French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote to the English novelist Samuel Richardson, “history is often a bad novel, and the novel, as you write it, is a good history”. 

Though Karla is a woman’s name, behind that code stands a man. In the world of George Smiley, le Carré’s extraordinary creation of an outstanding British spy, Karla is the shadowy, dangerous, effective senior figure in the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, where he heads Directorate XIII, also known as the Karla Directorate. He’s Smiley’s antithesis in the series of novels that have come to be known as The Quest for Karla, and it’s Smiley who swore to take him down if he could.

Alec Guiness as Smiley, Patrick Stewart as Karla
A chance meeting before the Quest for the KGB man had even started

We never learn Karla’s real name. But we do learn a nickname, given him, it seems, by General Vladimir, the courageous Russian defector to the British who, even in old age, continues his battle against the KGB chief. The nickname is ‘the Sandman’. You may know the fairy tale, rather a sinister one, in which the Sandman arrives to scatter sand in your eyes so that you fall asleep.

The story behind the nickname is told in Smiley’s People.

“Why did Vladimir call him the Sandman?” Smiley asked, knowing the answer already. 

“It was his joke. A German fairy tale Vladi picked up in Estonia from one of his Kraut forebears. ‘Karla is our Sandman. Anyone who comes too close to him has a way of falling asleep.’”

A way with words, as I said. Gently, almost by implication, le Carré gives us the portrait of a sinister figure. Because this Sandman, of course, puts you into a sleep from which there’s no waking up. 

It seems the KGB was good at producing Karlas. 

One of them, as deadly as le Carré’s creation, has risen to the top of the country he once served. Vladimir Putin is far from being a perfect copy of the original Karla. But he certainly shares some notable characteristics with him.

He has the same deviousness as Karla, so you never know what he’s doing or planning. The difference though, is that when you finally find out what he’s up to, you’re not always left feeling wry admiration for his ingenuity. On the contrary, you’re often left wondering what on earth he was thinking of, since far from improving circumstances he complains about, so many of his decisions make them far worse.

He was terribly upset about the possibility of NATO stationing US missiles on Ukrainian territory, at a time when there were none, and no plans to send any. After invading the country, however, he now faces a Ukraine bristling with such missiles.

He also reacted furiously to NATO expansion that brought the alliance’s borders far too close to his own. But the invasion of Ukraine ensured that Finland joined. As a result, NATO has added 1340 km to its joint border with Russian territory. 

Most self-destructive of all, he complained about NATO when the organisation was at a low ebb, with numerous European countries losing their enthusiasm and the then US President, Donald Trump, publicly declaring it obsolete. The Ukraine invasion has reawakened the alliance and given it a new dynamism. Why, even Trump now says it isn’t obsolete any more.

Putin lacks Karla’s intelligence. Equally he lacks his subtlety. His subtlety is that of an armoured division crossing your border, a gunman standing on your doorstep, or a missile slamming into a crowded theatre.

What he certainly shares with his fictional counterpart, though, is his Sandman qualities. People getting too close to him tend to fall asleep. And their sleep isn’t the kind you wake up from.

Boris Nemtsov had been Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and an early supporter of Putin as President. But, as he saw civil rights being rolled back and the state returning to its old authoritarian ways, he spoke out against him. In February 2015, hours after calling for people to join a march against Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, into Crimea, he was shot four times in the back. Putin announced that he would take personal control of the investigation into the killing, but no one has ever been brought to justice for it.

Alexander Litvinenko was a former agent of the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB. Living in London, he believed for his safety, in 1999 he denounced the service, then run by Putin, for a series of bombings in Russia that prepared the ground for military action against Chechnya later that year. That action was the springboard for Putin’s rise to the presidency. In 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium by visitors from Russia and died three weeks later. The UK authorities have identified two agents from the security service as suspects for the murder, but Russia refuses to extradite them. Putin even decorated one of them for services to the motherland.

Anna Politkovskaya was an outstanding investigative journalist working for one of the few truly independent newspapers in Russia, Novaya Gazeta. She became increasingly convinced that Putin was turning Russia into a police state, and said so in her book Putin’s Russia. She wrote extensively about the abuse of Chechens during the particularly brutal and dirty war the Russian authorities waged against them. In 2006, she was shot dead in a lift in her apartment building. Five men were later convicted of the murder, but the judge said it was a contract killing and at least $150,000 of the fee was paid by someone whose identity remains undiscovered to this day.

This is just a partial list of the people who’ve been put to sleep when they got too close to the Sandman. And now, of course, we can add one more.

A latter day incarnation of Karla
Putin, the new Sandman (l), and Prigozhin, the latest to fall asleep

If Putin is none too subtle, Yevgeny Prigozhin showed what it is to part company with subtlety altogether. His Wagner group has mercenaries in various African nations, where they’ve been accused of murder and torture. In Ukraine too, Wagner soldiers are believed to have taken part in the murder of civilians though, there, it sadly seems that regular Russian soldiers were engaged in the war crimes with them. Not a lot of subtlety among any of this sorry crew, to be honest.

Well, Prigozhin also got too close to the Sandman. And now a plane crash has closed his eyes. He mounted an aborted coup against Putin, which he should never have started unless he was going to see it through: a frightened cobra is even more dangerous than a resting one. A surprising length of time has passed since that bizarre uprising, but it’s possible that the two-month gap was just what it took to lull Prigozhin into an entirely unjustified sense of security.

Putin may not be as clever as le Carré’s Karla. But he’s certainly as dangerous. And, sadly, he too often gets his way.

Like Karla, Putin’s a fanatic, even if he’s only a fanatical Putinist. Let’s hope that Smiley’s view of Karla applies to him too, and his lack of moderation will lead to his downfall. And that we can find a Smiley to make it happen.

And the big question after the world cup final: where were the royals?

For me, it was always going to be a day embracing both victory and defeat. 

My roots are English, my home is in Spain. So a match between England and Spain for the Woman’s World Cup of football was always going to leave me both happy and unhappy with the outcome, especially as neither side had previously won the championship and both sides deserved the win equally and deserved defeat as little. Inevitably, I was going to be both pleased and disappointed with the outcome.

Spain crowned Women's World Cup champions

My greatest disappointment, though, was with some of the attendance at the game. Or more to the point, the non-attendance. I’m talking royal families here, and if Spain beat England by just one goal to nil on the pitch, when it came to royalty, the scoreline was much more crushing.

The first thing to say is that the British royal family costs a heck of a lot more than the Spanish. The Guardian kindly did a study on the comparative costs to the British taxpayer (leaving aside any private income) of the Windsors in Britain and the Bourbons in Spain. The results are staggering.

The subsidy to the royal family shouldered by the British taxpayer is officially £86m. However, that rises to £127m when we add in the income from the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, which many feel ought to be going to the public purse.

What’s more, the Guardian article was written before the government agreed a 45% increase in the taxpayers’ direct contribution to the family from 2025. This is at a time when the same government is telling us that medics are only worth a 6% increase, plus a flat raise of $1250 for junior doctors. 

The Spanish Bourbons, on the other hand, cost Spanish taxpayers £7.4m. That’s more than fifteen times less and means that if the British royal family reduced its subsidy from taxes to the same level as in Spain, Britain could save nearly £120m a year, even before the forthcoming increase At a time when there’s controversy in Britain about the failure to build a promised number of new hospitals, that level of savings would pay for a new hospital every four years. 

Of course, the royalists would immediately tell me that the Windsors do so much for the country in various intangible ways. Mostly they’re to do with expressing the feelings of the people and enhancing the prestige of the nation. So here’s my question: where is the nation’s prestige more at stake, and where have the people’s feelings been as widely engaged, as in the fortunes of the Lionesses team in the 2023 Women’s World Cup?

Surely someone from the royal family ought to have been at the final.

Now Spain has a serious political problem to solve at the moment. The recent general election left no party with a parliamentary majority allowing it to govern. It’s far from certain that even with carefully constructed and highly unstable multi-party coalitions, a majority government can emerge. The King is due to hold conversations with seven parties over the next few days to explore possibilities.

In the circumstances, it’s understandable that neither he nor any leading politician could be spared to travel to Australia for the World Cup final. But still someone went, and frankly a pretty appropriate choice. Spain sent its Queen, Letizia, to encourage its women’s team.

And Britain? The royal family sent no one. Prince William, the next in line to the throne, who is even President of the English Football Association, decided he couldn’t go and just sent a message of encouragement instead. 

There’s a website which allows the public to find out what the royal family’s future engagements are. I can find nothing on it for any member of the family on the day of the Final. Nothing, at least, that they’re prepared to admit to on this public website.

They cost well over fifteen times more than the Spanish royal family, but the British royals couldn’t find anyone to attend the biggest sporting event involving a British team for years. 

Failing any of the official royals going, couldn’t we at least have swallowed our pride and contacted Meghan Markle to ask her to go? At least she has glamour and apparently a capacity for empathy. Come to think of it, that might even have made her a better choice than any of the pompous dullards from the official side.

In any case, I fully understand that there’s a huge majority in Britain for retaining the monarchy. But, hey, guys, they’re the paid servants of the British people. The hugely well-paid servants. Couldn’t we at least ask them to do what they’re paid for?

After all, we demand that in spades from our junior doctors.

Words and wheels: rapid progress by the grandchildren

It’s hardly an original observation, but one of the most striking aspects of young children is how quickly they develop. Something of a commonplace, you might feel. And you’d be right, but that doesn’t stop me being bowled over every time I see the grandkids achieving some new breakthrough.

With Elliott, now on his way to two and a half, it’s mostly in the field of language. He talks and talks, which keeps me well amused, though no doubt in a few years it’ll also drive me round the bend. It’s ironic how we spend so much time hoping for our kids to start talking and then, once they do, desperately praying that they might occasionally shut up.

With Elliott, some of the words aren’t formed with the strictest accuracy, and that can sometimes make it hard to understand what he means. Take the other day, when he insisted to me that what he really, really wanted was something by one of the masters of surrealism. 

I kid you not.

“Dali?” I checked with him. “I don’t think we have anything by Dali.”

I wish we had an original Dali, I have to admit, but to be honest, we don’t even have any prints. Besides, was he after any old Dali, or something specific? You know, melting watch faces, a crucifixion from above, or a portrait of his sister by an open window? Which would he like?

Dali’s sister, by an open window
Not, it turns out, what Elliott was really after

Elliott cut through all this idle speculation.

“Dali! Dali!” he insisted.

He was pointing at the fridge so I began to suspect it might not be a purely aesthetic craving that he was hoping to satisfy.

“Dali! Dali!”

He grasped the fridge door and pulled it open. Yep, that’s another development. He knows how to open the fridge, though he hasn’t quite grasped the notion of closing it afterwards. Still, to be fair to him, his father who really ought to know better hasn’t mastered that skill either, so it may be a genetic problem.

I came over to look where he was pointing. I followed the direction of his imperious finger. It clearly wasn’t indicating the butter or the cheese or any vegetables.

“Jelly!” I cried, “you want Jelly!”

“Yes,” he agreed, relief clear from his voice, now that I’d at last emerged from my obtuseness and grasped his meaning, “Dali.”

Elliott enjoying his Dali

Matilda, who is celebrating her fourth birthday as I type, also likes jelly. But she expresses herself differently. I hesitate to say more correctly, as that seems unfair to Elliott, but I have to admit that I understand her better.

“I want some jelly,” she informed me the other day.

“Did you ask your mother and did she say yes?” I replied. 

I’ve been trained, you see.

“Yes,” she assured me, but there was something about the way she was looking at me that left me less than convinced that this was the unvarnished truth.

Suddenly, she ran off. Next, I heard her talking to her Mum.

“Can I have a jelly?” she was asking. 

“Yes,” was the answer.

Matilda ran back.

“My Mummy says ‘yes’,” she told me.

She got her jelly.

I don’t know whether she felt bad about the untruth and decided to set it right in hindsight, asking her mother after telling me she already had. Or maybe she felt it was an error to be economical with the truth on a matter so easy to check. Either way, whether she was uncomfortable about an untruth generally, or uncomfortable about an untruth so easily exposed, she’s clearly in a significantly higher moral class than, say, Donald Trump. A low bar, I know. But, hey, she’s four and he’s 77.  

Both Elliott and Matilda have what I think are called balance bikes. They have no pedals, but no stabilisers either. Instead, they’re driven along by kids pushing with their feet on the ground. One of the great benefits is that this teaches them to learn to balance on their bikes, since once they have a bit of speed up they can let the bikes coast, which allows them to get their feet off the ground.

Elliott, who’s always keen on doing anything that Matilda can do, is a committed cyclist, just as she is. Sometimes, however, he gets a little tired. Now one option is for him to get up on my shoulders, but that leaves me carrying him around my neck and his bike in one hand, which I find just a trifle tiring. I’ve found, however, that he’ll consent to keep riding his bike as long as I push him and sing a song to accompany the process.

The song in question is an invention of mine and he seems to appreciate it despite its complex and sophisticated lyrics. It’s sung to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’. The words, which you’re welcome to learn for yourself if you don’t mind the strain of studying them, and use with another kid on condition you change one key word to match the child’s name, are:

Push, push, push, push, push, push, push
Push, push, push, push, Elly, push, push

Repeat until home or Elly’s attention is distracted by something more interesting.

Matilda marks completion of her fourth trip around the Sun

Talking about bikes and Matilda’s birthday takes me on to another great breakthrough of this visit.

To celebrate her reaching the ripe old age of four, Matilda has a new bike, with pedals. But still without stabilisers. And the philosophy of training kids on balance bikes seems to be entirely confirmed by her experience. It took her twenty minutes to learn to zap along the pavement outside, pedalling away, and staying upright the entire time. 

Or almost.

Off, off and away
Matilda speeds away from her pit crew,
encouraged by Luci

She still needs some shepherding, if only to make sure she doesn’t stray into the road, and to help her get started again when she stops. That means following along behind her. And let me tell you, she’s mastered this sport to an impressive degree. It left me breathless and exhausted trying to keep up with her. I thought my running days were over but, apparently, they’re not.

I hadn’t allowed for yet another type of impact grandchildren could have on my life.

Correction: Sheena, my daughter-in-law and Matilda and Elliott's mother, who is seldom wrong on these matters, points out to me that Nicky isn’t the only adult who leaves the fridge door open. Since that seems to be her tactful way of telling me that I do it too, I can only say that this only proves my contention. If I do it, and my son Nicky does it, and his son Elliott does it too, doesn't that rather strengthen the idea that the problem is genetic?

Grandparenting: a two-year-old resolves a quandary

What can be better than watching the formation of sophisticated reasoning in a young mind?

The reasoning in this case involved the challenge of weighing options against each other. For instance, when you’re faced with two desirable but incompatible possibilities. You know, do you go to that concert you’ve been looking forward to so much? Or do you give that up to spend the evening with an old friend, only in town for one night, and who has invited you to an excellent restaurant? 

You’d like to do both, but that’s not on. You balance the pros and cons, you weigh up what you gain against what you miss, you make a choice which you feel mixes the least disappointment with the most satisfaction.

It's like the ‘guns or butter’ dilemma, the classic economics problem faced by national governments. Do they invest in things that deliver benefits to citizens, such as social services or healthcare (butter), or in national security and defence (guns)? Again, they’d like to do both but, as often as not, they have to choose one and neglect the other.

In this particular instance, however, the issue for decision was marginally less significant than a guns or butter debate. Well, less significant in the broader scheme of things, though for a two-year-old coming to grips with delicate moral considerations, with cost-benefit analyses, with the weighing of options against each other, it must have been as acute and challenging as any of the grand questions that puzzle the minds of the adult world.

Let’s call the question he had to address the ‘lead versus shoulder’ quandary.

Young Elliott had heard me say that I was taking the dogs out for a walk.

“And me! And me!” he announced, “Me walk the dogs.”

Elliott hasn’t entirely mastered the handling of relations with dogs. Sometimes he decides they’d really enjoy having a toy thrust in their face or being pushed around with a foot, which does little in the way of inspiring confidence in them, but these moments are becoming increasingly, and mercifully, rare. He’s coming to grips with the notion that stroking their backs or giving them something to eat (“Me! Me! Elliott give them that!”) wins their trust and affection far more effectively than rougher forms of play.

The younger, smaller and more sociable of our two toy poodles, Toffee, is responding well to Elliott’s improved treatment of her. They’re mostly getting on a lot better these days.

Elliott winning Toffee’s heart and mind

So when we took the dogs out, Elliott was holding Toffee’s lead.

That was fine until we got into the woods, when we took them off the lead. At that point, holding on to the lead became a little redundant. Still, Elliott has grasped the notion that possession is nine tenths of the law, so he refused to hand it over when I asked. On the other hand, he fully grasped the notion that, if the dog wasn’t on the other end of the lead, there was no real need for him to do any more actual walking.

“Granddad, me on your shoulders,” he announced. 

I reckon he still says ‘Dad dad’ rather than ‘Granddad’ but I knew he meant me. Then again, it had to be me, as I was the only other person there.

I lifted him up and so our party, of me, Elliott on my shoulders, and the two dogs proceeded on our way.

At one point, with my shoulders aching – grandkids have this horrible way of growing bigger and heavier while you’re not watching – I tried to get him to walk, but that worked about as well as the UK government delivering benefits from Brexit. I decided I’d just have to struggle on until we left the woods and the dogs went back on the leads.

When we reached that happy point, I lifted Elliott off my shoulders and expected him to walk home from there, with Toffee back on her lead. As, at first, it seemed things would go. 

But not for long.

Elliott walking Toffee

“Granddad, me on your shoulders,” he proclaimed a short way down the road.

“Ah, that’s not going to work,” I replied, indulging in a little unmerited and premature satisfaction. “When you’ve got a dog on a lead you can’t go on my shoulders.”

It wasn’t strictly true. It might have been inconvenient to have a grandson trying to control a dog on a lead from my shoulders, but it wouldn’t have been impossible. But, hey, my shoulders were beginning to ache, and I felt they deserved a slight economy with the truth.

And then I saw Elliott plunge into a moment of careful thought. He weighed costs and benefits. He balanced all, brought all to mind, and came to a conclusion.

He held out Toffee’s lead to me.

“Grandad, me on your shoulders”, he explained, in case I hadn’t understood how he’d resolved the quandary.

So I ended the walk with Elliott on my shoulders and two leads in one hand (the other was on Elliott’s leg). And, though my shoulders objected, I felt the price worth paying. After all, I’d just witnessed an important step in Elliott’s development towards mastering moral philosophy.

That’s priceless.

Wanted for the British poor: redoing what’s been undone

Here’s an interesting story about a young conservative, early in the twentieth century, who like many in the middle class had taken to giving time to social work in the deprived areas of Britain. As he left work one evening at the centre where he was doing that work, in the tough, poor, crime-ridden London district of Limehouse, one of the young girls who’d been at the centre joined him.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m going home to tea,” he explained.

“I’m going home to see if there is any tea,” she replied.

Children in the poverty of London’s East End, around 1900

Now, the definition of poverty changes down the years, so we can’t exactly compare conditions today and then. All the same, whatever the technical definition of poverty, not having enough to eat has to be pretty much a constant element of being poor. A child who’s not sure whether there’ll be anything for tea, for the family evening meal, is unlikely to be getting enough to eat.

That’s poverty.

That conversation wasn’t the only event that changed the outlook of the young man back in Limehouse all that time ago. But among the many events that forced him to rethink his conservative views, it must have counted particularly, because he told the story in 1946, when he was in a position at last to help children like that little girl. He had become Prime Minister, leading the most radical government in twentieth-century Britain, the first Labour government with a parliamentary majority. 

His name was Clement Attlee. 

Pat Thane, professor of contemporary British history at King’s College London, tells us that while the government he led did not eliminate poverty in Britain, it set in train a series of progressive reforms that massively reduced it. The result was that by the 1970s, still according to Thane, income and wealth inequality were at their lowest levels since 1900.

I said that Attlee’s government had been the most radical of the century. I should perhaps have said it was the most radically progressive. Because in 1979, Britain elected another government almost as radical. But Margaret Thatcher was radically regressive, busily undoing as much as possible of the reforms made since the war.

At the start of her watch, Thane points out, people like the little girl of Attlee’s story, suffering childhood poverty, accounted for about 13% of all children. Eleven years later, in 1990, 22% of children were in poverty.

The Labour government that took over, under Tony Blair, in 1997 reversed about half of Thatcher’s increase in childhood poverty. Then, however, the Conservatives returned to power in 2010 and figures have steadily worsened ever since. It isn’t just children, as adults too have been increasingly plunged into poverty. Conditions have become so bad that they have even attracted the attention of the United Nations. A special rapporteur for the organisation, Professor Philip Alston, found that “fourteen million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials.”

Destitute means that, like the little girl that Attlee knew, they’re not eating enough.

In 2019, Alston said of the cuts to British public services, that they have had “tragic consequences”. With the brightest jewel in the series of achievements of the Attlee government, the National Health Service, in a state of such crisis that it is to all intents moribund, I’d have to say that ‘tragic’ is about right.

That’s what made it such a bitter experience to read an article by Frances Ryan in the Guardian in which she argues that “Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don’t deserve leisure time”. 

Recent opinion polling suggests that about a quarter of the British people think that the poor have no right to expect to be able to pay their utility bills or to eat a balanced diet. 

The meanness becomes even more widespread when it comes to matters that are not these bare essentials of life. Apparently, only 60% of Britons believe that the poor should be able to join in seasonal celebrations such as Christmas or Easter, and only 55% feel they should own a television. When it comes to socialising, things are worse still: only 27% feel the poor should have the right to do anything so extravagant as to enjoy time with their friends. 

Leisure and pleasure are, it seems, to be reserved only for the well-off. 

That’s a splendidly Victorian view of life. The poor aren’t victims, they’re the perpetrators of their state. They’re the undeserving poor. At best, they warrant a little charitable help from their ‘betters’, those who have a reasonably comfortable standard of living. At worst, they deserve punishment, by being denied pleasures the wealthier regard as basic, for having been so feckless as to be poor. 

It took some four decades of campaigning for Labour views before Attlee got into power so he could start doing something about the shameful behaviour which denied the poor so much. But at least he eventually pulled it off. He convinced enough people that the misery that existed alongside the comfortable life of many was a problem worth trying to solve.

With poverty rampant again, we seem to be back with the conditions that first drove Attlee to abandon conservatism and dedicate himself to fighting the shame of poverty in prosperous Britain. And Frances Ryan’s study suggests the work of convincing people of the need to combat poverty also needs to be started again. Much has been undone and needs to be redone. 

Kids in poverty, England, around 2020

We need a new Attlee. A politician who can overcome the narrow-mindedness of the people we need to persuade to vote for progress, if a progressive government is ever to form. A politician who, having got that far, can then bring in the radical changes necessary if we are to redo what has been undone since the 1970s.

Is Keir Starmer, today’s leader of the Labour Party, the man for that job? When I see him keener on accommodating than challenging the regressive views of people whose votes he needs, I feel assailed by doubt. But he's almost certainly going to get the chance, in a year or two, to prove me wrong.

If he does, no one will be more delighted than I am.

Words are fun. But what matters is what we say

We had a wonderful holiday in Galicia last week.

That was partly down to the climate. Galicia is up in north-western Spain, on the Atlantic. Set out westward from the coast, and  you’ll end up in the Bronx or in Cancún, depending on your luck (I’ll leave you to decide which would be good luck and which bad). A long range of hills just inland of the north coast ensures that the whole region has a cooler, Atlantic-fed micro-climate, so when it was 35 C in Valencia where we live, it was in the low twenties, and sometimes lower still, up there.

Cow herding in Galicia
Weather like England’s. A relief after the Valencian furnace

The relief was immense. Why, it even amazed me to discover that sitting on a café terrace while the rain diluted my coffee, was a pleasure rather than an annoyance. Of course, it was fine rain, of the kind I became so familiar with in England. Indeed, a Galician who knows England confirmed to me that the weather in the two places is pretty much identical. 

One thing about the Galicians is that they speak their own language, distinct from standard Spanish (also known as ‘Castilian’). 

People are generally not good at learning foreign languages. When they do, they often create their own version, by incorporating words and structures from their mother tongue. That’s just what the inhabitants did when the Romans invaded the Iberian peninsula and, as part of crushing the natives into understanding the superior benefits of Roman rule, drove the earlier Celtic languages into extinction.

What the Celts learned instead, though, wasn’t the appalling classical Latin of the Roman elite, with its ghastly structures, its multiple declensions and conjugations, but the low Latin spoken by the legionaries, the traders and the shopkeepers who came flowing into Iberia to subdue it, or to make their fortune once it was subdued. That’s the far more user-friendly Vulgar Latin, the Latin of the vulgus, which is the Classical Latin word for the common people. It was a lot closer to modern Italian, say, than to the Latin of the Senate or the poets. 

But as Celts learned it, they gave it a local flavour.

In the northwest, the language that emerged was Galician-Portuguese. Given its name, it probably won’t surprise you to know that it gave rise to two modern languages, Galician and Portuguese. I’ve heard that two people each speaking one of the languages can have a comprehensible conversation. I wouldn’t know about that, but I do know that to my uninitiated ear, it sounds a lot more like Portuguese than Spanish, even though Galicia is in Spain. 

What I liked about the use of the language is that it’s unaggressive. I remember an official in Barcelona who fired a barrage of Catalan at me three times without success, merely, as far as I could tell, to uphold the principle that in Catalonia, officialdom speaks Catalan. Eventually, he switched to Castilian, which it emerged he spoke with complete mastery, hugely better than I did. At least then I was able to understand that he wanted to see my identity papers.

Well, that kind of thing doesn’t happen in Galicia. Everywhere we went, we came across Galician speakers, speaking the language happily with each other. It’s their mother tongue and it’s what they use in their daily lives. If we approached them, however, they switched at once and without reluctance to Castilian, correctly identifying us as foreign. That meant they were using another language though, it turned out, it was one they’d mastered just as entirely as their Galician. 

Basically, they have two languages, and switch with ease from one to the other. 

That, though, makes it quite a chore to learn a third. Sadly, neither Galician nor Castilian is the main language of international communication. We stayed in a village on the Santiago pilgrim path, the Camino as its fans call it. Most pilgrims on it are dependent on that international language. 

Which is English. Or, more accurately, American.

The extent of the problem was clear from the menu we saw outside a local café.

Not quite English

Now, it wasn’t too difficult to work out that ‘Paste with tunafish’ meant ‘pasta with tuna’. And easy to mentally correct the misspelling of ‘patatoes’. Similarly, ‘coffé’ wasn’t too obscure. But ‘came from home’ and ‘water or cane’ were a bit harder.

It turns out that they’re great examples of what can go wrong when you translate directly from a dictionary. 

A ‘caña’ may be a cane, as in a bamboo cane. It can also be a small glass of beer. So what ‘water or cane’ was really offering was a choice between water or a beer. 

The third option was ‘came from home’, which was tougher to crack. 

Now, ‘vino’ as a noun is ‘wine’. As a verb, it’s the third person singular of the simple past of the verb ‘venir’, to come. Which in English is ‘came’. Add in the translation of ‘de’ as ‘from’ rather than ‘of’, and it becomes clear that ‘Came from home’ is a direct translation of ‘vino de la casa’, more correctly translated as ‘house wine’.

Still, if I was amused by that menu, I was much more tickled by a sign we saw above a butcher’s shop. 

Marriage announcement

It announced a marriage. Putting up that kind of sign is, apparently, a custom around there. It was in Galician, and my attempted translation of it is:

For St John’s Day, a pilgrim woman and a butcher, ground bread.

N & L 22.07.23

St John’s Day is the 24th of June. It seems that the wedding took place between ‘N’ and ‘L’, one I assume the pilgrim, the other the butcher, on 22 July 2023. We had a drink in the bar opposite and were told that the wedding had indeed taken place on that day.

So what about this ‘grinding bread’ business? After all, you may grind wheat to make your bread. Or if you’re the giant in the Beanstalk story, you may grind an Englishman’s bones to make your bread. But you don’t grind the bread itself, surely?

I turned to my expert on all things Spanish, our good friend Marisa in Valencia. Her reply? “Maybe they had some intimacy before marrying”.

We checked with the waitress in the bar.

“Yup,” she said, “that’s about the size of it”.

Well, she was speaking in Spanish, so those weren’t her exact words. But that was the gist.

What a great sign. Far more fun than the weird menu. One of many moments that made it so enjoyable to spend a little time among the Galicians.