Saying it simply, sliding to a fall and getting home quickly

Because English is a Germanic language that has absorbed a huge number of words of Latin origin, often via French, it contains quite a few pairs of words meaning roughly the same thing, each from a different root. As often as not, the Latin-derived one is longer and more learned, making it feel more pompous, than the other, simpler Anglo-Saxon term. 

You can describe someone as parsimonious, a fine term of Latin root, or simply say he’s mean, which is simpler, shorter and means pretty much the same.

You can observe things if you want to make sure we understand that what you were doing was intense and possibly research-oriented, otherwise you might simply say you watched them. 

You might feel that someone else (though never yourself, of course) is mendacious, rather than describing him as lying. To express myself (or say things) in a more demotic (or everyday) way, I might say he’s a lying git. That’s how a Londoner (and I’m the son of a Cockney and an adopted Londoner myself) might characterise (or simply call) such a person. Now ‘lying git’ is just as long as ‘mendacious’ in syllables, though it’s shorter in letters and a lot more colourful.

For that matter, take policemen. In Britain, some of them tell us that they go out on foot patrol and proceed along various thoroughfares. We, on the other hand, might think of them as bobbies on the beat, walking down the street (which even has the merit of rhyming).

I’ve been suffering from an earache for some time now. Eventually my general practitioner (or family doctor) decided I needed to see a specialist. This being Spain, that meant having to visit a department of Otorrinolaringología. That can be abbreviated, as it is in French, to ORL, but I noticed that everywhere I saw the specialty displayed – say on signs directing me to my destination (necessarily quite long signs) – it was written out in full. 

To be honest, I find it almost impossible to pronounce that mouthful. Not just in Spanish, come to that. Oto-rhino-laryngology exists in English too. I’m glad to say, though, that the term is generally only used in technical jargon. In England, I’d have gone to see an ENT specialist.

That’s someone who deals with disorders of the Ear, Nose or Throat.

Even a mug can understand the problem

The visit itself went quite well. The doctor prescribed a new treatment which (I hardly dare say this) may actually be working. He commented on my surname – Beeson – which he rightly identified as not particularly Italian in origin, which is surprising for someone born in Rome. I was impressed not only by the lighthearted way he was talking to me – which I welcomed – but with the thoroughness with which he’d read my record. No other doctor has ever commented on my Italian birth, probably because they hadn’t noticed.

Indeed, the only setback, or rather downside, literally, of the whole experience came on the way to the appointment. We’ve had a lot of rain here recently and I can state, from experience, that a heck of a lot of the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Also it creates a lot of mud.

I was cycling quite quickly along a cycle path and didn’t notice the patch of mud ahead until I hit it, on a curve which I’d already started to take before I realised what was about to happen. What was about to happen then happened. The wheels slid out from under me, and I found myself horizontal when I should have been vertical. And splattered in mud when I should have been clean.

This kind of fall has happened to me rather a lot in recent months, which is a lot more than most other people I know who use their bikes regularly. Each time I think it’s down to my misfortune (or perhaps I should say bad luck), but I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m just accident-prone.

Anyway, the result was that I turned up or my appointment with a grazed knee and elbow and mud on my shorts and shirt. I decided not to mention the mud, and neither did the doctor or his assistant, which struck me as not just tactful but much the least stressful way of dealing with the issue.

On the way back, I asked Google to find me a route and display it on my phone. Now, there were moments along the route when I was in known territory and realised that there were better ways to go than it was suggesting. That might be only because they avoided travelling along motorways surrounded by traffic doing 120 km an hour or more (including lorries). However, and I appreciate that this is undoubtedly merely a subjective reaction of my own, when I take a different route from the one suggested by Google, I always have the sense that it’s somehow offended. Even when, to be fair, it really ought to know better. Indeed, even when it turns out that it really did know better.

At one time, when I turned away from the Google route, I could almost hear it saying to me, ‘oh right, you’ve decided not to take my recommendation that would get you home in 40 minutes, have you? On your head be it. Let me just recalculate. Your route, smartarse, will take you a full 32 minutes.”

Honestly. My route was quicker than what it had suggested. And it knew.

So here’s my question: if it knew that all along, why didn’t it recommend the quicker route in the first place?

Still, at least I got home in one piece and with no further falls. Which was fortuitous. Or, as we say in plain Anglo-Saxon, bloody lucky.

How a bird in the hand led to two in a cage

Many years ago, when my stepson David was barely a teenager, he was coming back into the house from the garden when he glanced up at the roof and stopped, frozen in his tracks. On the edge of the roof was perched a white dove.

He barely had time to think, “oh, how I wish he’d fly down to me,” before the dove granted his wish and came down to settle on his head.

By mutual consent of our family and the bird, he made his home with us for the rest of his life. He received a name, Fotzel. That’s a term of endearment for a mischievous little boy, in the dialect of Alsace, in Eastern France, which was the mother tongue of both David and his mother, my wife Danielle.

Fotzel on the wing

Danielle is good with birds, as she is with animals generally, or with plants, and indeed with us. She decided that what Fotzel needed was a companion. Or, more specifically, a mate.

She found one in a pub that had so many doves in an aviary at the back that they could spare one without noticing her absence. By this time, we’d built an aviary of our own, taller than a tall man and about as long on each side. It was enclosed with strong chicken wire but we’d made a hole in the top, big enough for the doves to fly in and out, but too small for any hawk to try flying in.

The female duly laid a clutch of eggs. But then, however, she decided that life in our garden was nothing like exciting enough. Maybe she’d got too used to the livelier atmosphere of a pub, though I couldn’t say. All I know is that she cleared off, abandoning her eggs in the dovecote we’d built.

Not a problem, it turned out. Fotzel took over, sat of the eggs till they hatched, and then looked after the hatchlings until they turned into healthy and happy adults. Well, I don’t know how to measure dove happiness, but at any rate they ate their feed with apparent enthusiasm and seemed disinclined to clear off, despite the hole in the roof which left them free to make their own choice on the matter.

I don’t, of course, want to condone incest, but I have to admit it worked for our dove community. Within a relatively short time, it had turned into a real colony, busy, lively and cheerful. And, naturally, Fotzel was its patriarch until he took his last flight, off into the unknown, at a ripe old age (as far as we could tell).

Fotzel surveying his domain

Some years later, David had ensconced himself firmly in Scotland, where he lives with his family to this day and their great satisfaction, while we had moved to Strasbourg in Eastern France. On our way to dinner with friends who lived in converted farmhouse in the nearby countryside, Danielle told me, “if they ask us to take a kitten, the answer is no. Got it?”

I got it. But that evening, when each of us in turn had the exquisite pain of having a tiny cat climbing our legs, using his claws for grip, we simply couldn’t resist the temptation – such as is the animal-lover’s perversity – and took him home. So started Misty’s fifteen-year stay with us, ended only by undiagnosable but disabling illness just last year. He followed us from France to Germany to England and finally to a well-deserved and apparently satisfactory retirement in Spain. 

Misty as a young lad
Always keen on choosing inappropriate receptacles to relax in

He did become a little cranky as an adult, something I put down to being dragged from France to Germany to England and finally to Spain. The crankiness left me scars which have now faded, but I clearly remember the scratches on my hands. They were often for unforgivable offences, such as stroking him without paying due attention to the process. I would make the mistake of thinking that I could watch TV and stroke Misty at the same time, a delusion from which he rapidly (and painfully) disabused me.

Still, he stayed with us, never showing any desire to clear off, right to the end of his life, nearly eighteen months ago.

Misty enjoying his retirement in Spain
and still as ready as ever to relax in odd places

Now fast forward to just last week. We had been invited to lunch with our excellent friends Pamela and Ian. When we stepped outside for some hors-d’oeuvre titbits and a glass of wine on their patio, they warned us, “oh, you might have to watch out. A bird showed up this morning and seems not to want to go. It was sitting on the edge of the sofa a short time ago.”

It was sitting there still. It was a budgie. She (for it turns out she was a she) was white with the faintest of faint blue on her back. She was dishevelled, not terribly clean and obviously not in the happiest of states.

Danielle, as I mentioned before, is good with birds. Pamela and Ian did have some seeds. In principle, they were for human consumption, but when Danielle gave her a handful, the bird hoovered them up with every sign of enjoyment. She also had some water. 

And after lunch (ours as well as hers), inevitably, we took her home.

That was something of a feat since we were on bikes. Fortunately, Pamela and Ian lent us a cat carrier. Danielle pulled off the remarkable trick of cycling with one hand on the handlebars while she clutched the carrier’s handle in the other.

By that evening, we had a cage. And as had happened with Fotzel, we even had a companion – or more than likely a mate – for the newcomer to our household. 

Our new resident, delicately attired in tasteful white,
and her new mate, dressed more flamboyantly
Keeping one beady eye each on my doings

I like birdsong, so it’s a pleasure to hear them tweeting in their cage outside our front door. A lot more pleasant than the social media activity that goes by the same name (or is it called X-ing now?) It's equally a pleasure to go out and see how they’re doing in the morning, even before I have my first cup of coffee. 

For the third time, simple serendipity has provided us with a new animal extension to our household which we’re happy about. Another unplanned pleasure, as I was celebrating in my last post.

By the way, since the second arrival’s a male, he’s inherited the name Fotzel. As for the lady in white, Danielle has named her Justine. That’s pronounced the French way, with the ‘u’ roughly rhyming with ‘oo’ in ‘boon’.

Danielle’s not certain how she came up with the name. I reckon it’s because the bird had clearly flown away from her original home and had probably been driven by the heavy winds we’ve been having lately, until she was completely lost. Then we luckily turned up and were able to save her from her difficulties, and Pamela and Ian from the problem of working out what to do with her.

Justine time.

Justine and Fotzel indoors
for a brief cage-cleaning operation

Unplanned pleasure

Fail to plan, they say, and plan to fail.

I’m sure there’s some truth in that. As there is in most aphorisms. Not all of them of course. I have no idea who came up with that bright little drop of optimism that ‘good things come to those who wait’, but he must have been living in a different universe from mine.

Still, even if planning is generally a good thing, it’s often the unplanned that gives the greatest pleasure. 

While we were in southwestern France last weekend, we decided to pop down to the beach at Argelès-sur-Mer. That was less of a visit than a pilgrimage. The beach is spectacular, but we live near the Spanish Mediterranean coast and probably wouldn’t travel to France just for sand and sea. No, this beach isn’t just golden and sunlit, it’s associated with something much darker and shameful.

The beach at Argelès, showing no sign of its shameful past

When Francisco Franco succeeded in overthrowing the Spanish republic in 1939, ushering in 36 years of dictatorship ended only by his death, some 500,000 people who’d served the legitimate government fled, mostly into France. There they were interned by the French authorities. Something like 100,000 of them were simply dumped on the beach at Argelès with, initially, practically no amenities apart from the wire fencing to prevent their escape. 

When I say ‘nothing’, I really mean nothing. There were no latrines. There was no shelter. There was no reliable supply of fresh water. Every now and then someone would turn up and toss some food at the internees. It was pretty vile. Hunger and disease-ridden, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Deaths were nothing like as horrific as they might have been had the internment lasted longer, but fortunately with the outbreak of the next war, the world war, within months of the Spanish defeat, many were recruited into the French armed forces, while others were able to move on to friends or family ready to take them in, or into charitable accommodation, above all that provided by Quakers. Even so, several hundred died.

So, we visited the beach to see what the place looked like. There’s no trace of the camp anymore but still, it felt like a small act of deserved respect to visit the place where this shameful act took place.

But then we had the whole of the afternoon ahead of us. What to do next?

We saw signposts to a coastal path that zigzagged along the top of the sea cliffs, towards the lovely fishing village of Collioure, a few kilometres further on. I say ‘fishing village’ though what it really is now is a major tourist destination with some pretty wonderful accommodation for the pretty wonderfully rich. We went there once before, but by car, and found it was impossible to park anywhere inside the town, it was so seething with visitors. In the end, we had to park outside the town and walk half an hour to get to the seafront. 

To be fair, though, it’s such a fine place that it was worth it. Indeed, walking in was probably an enhancement to the visit, since it gave us time to see the place from various angles as we approached it, which is a much better way to get to know somewhere than shooting in by car.

Anyway, this time we had no intention of walking all the way to Collioure. It was only a little over four kilometres away, but it was hot, the terrain was rough, and there was a lot of climbing. We decided we wouldn’t go the whole way. 

So, naturally, we did.

Approaching Collioure the hard way, by the cliff path

It was good to see Collioure again. It was, I suppose unsurprisingly, just as attractive the second time as it had been the first. But we were pretty tired. Our main concern was getting back to Argelès, where we’d left the car. A bus, we decided, would be just the thing and, failing that, a taxi.

There were signs to the tourist office. But at 4:00 on a Sunday afternoon? No chance it was open.

And yet it was. 

“Is there a bus to take us back to Argelès?” we asked.

“Ah, I’m afraid,” the friendly woman behind the counter told us, glancing at her watch, “that by now the last bus will have gone.”

“Oh,” we said, trying not to sound too disappointed.

“But there is a boat,” she went on, “and the next one leaves in twenty minutes, from the pier just outside this office.”

Joy. Elation. Relief, too.

Collioure Castle in the background, with our boat in front
It may not seem much, but it felt like luxury

We waited the twenty minutes and then travelled back to Argelès in what felt like luxury, even though it was just a crowded tourist boat. But it was a pleasure. We saw from below the cliffs we’d struggle past above just an hour or so earlier. We enjoyed watching the surf crashing on the rocks, and the sinking sun casting a glow on the deep blue sea around us. And we got back to Argelès in twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half, and in comfort instead of in footsore exhaustion.

Leaving Collioure, the easy way, by boat

It was a delightful, and entirely unplanned pleasure. It can be the best kind, I reckon. Certainly, that’s how we felt.

Of course, the good thing didn’t come to us as we waited for it. On the contrary, we had struggle to it along difficult paths through oppressive heat.

Further convincing me that whoever said that about good things coming to those who wait, certainly didn’t belong to the universe I inhabit.

September 11, half a century on

On the 11th of September, thoughts obviously go to those in the US marking with sorrow the terrible attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington. Twenty-two years later, I naturally feel great sympathy for them when I think how, driving along a road in Britain a friend of mine and I received a call from a colleague who asked, “have you heard about the plane flying into one of the Twin Towers?”, and the feeling of sickness that came when I realised this wasn’t the first line of a joke with a punchline behind it.

Of course, the sense of sickness deepened when I realised another plane had flown into the second tower. To say nothing of the three more planes converted into terrorist weapons.

Still, it’s important to remember that this isn’t the only act of appalling violence associated with 11 September. Indeed, this year marks an important anniversary, the half century, of another. Fifty years ago, on the 11th of September 1973, a group of Chilean officers led by Augusto Pinochet, rose in revolt against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

Pinochet and his fellow mutineers had decided that they knew best what was good for their country and were better qualified than any civilian to achieve it. Their insurrection opened a seventeen-year period of dictatorship that cost at least 3000 opponents their lives. The bodies of 1000 have never been discovered.

It was an event that casts credit on no one. Obviously, there’s nothing but shame for the brutal dictators themselves, not just for their cruelty, but also because they seized power in a military coup, an act that denies a fundamental principle of military life, respect for the chain of command, which should have left them subordinate to the President. He was killed in the presidential palace when it was bombarded by units of his own air force.

La Moneda, the Chilean Presidential Palace
under attack from ground and air on 11 September 1973

There’s plenty of shame for plenty of others too. Three years earlier, soon after Allende was elected, the then commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces, René Schneider, was assassinated. He had championed what came to be known as the ‘Schneider doctrine’ that you could choose a military career or a political one, but you couldn’t combine the two.

While the US for a time denied all involvement in overthrowing Allende’s government, documents made public since make it clear that the death of Schneider had been orchestrated by the American CIA. Then CIA chief at the time, Richard Helms, convened a top-level meeting after Schneider’s death. The Agency chiefs sent a congratulatory cable to the CIA station in Chile, stating that, “a maximum effort has been achieved,” and that “the station has done excellent job of guiding Chileans to point today where a military solution is at least an option for them”. 

It took another three years, but in time with vital support from the CIA, the coup imposes a ‘military solution’ and launched the seventeen years of repression Chile then suffered.

Nor did Britain cover itself with honour. In 1998, after the end of his dictatorship, a human rights violation case was opened against Pinochet by a Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón. The case turned on an interesting principle, of universal jurisdiction, which said that for this kind of charge, action could be taken anywhere in the world against a former head of state, even if an amnesty had been granted in his home country. Pinochet was held under house arrest for eighteen months in the UK, in the course of which former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, always an admirer of the bloodstained dictator, spoke out in his favour, as did former US President George H W Bush. But the most deplorable act was that of a centre-left, Labour government, when the Home Secretary Jack Straw released Pinochet on health grounds. 

Pinochet left in a wheelchair but stood up from it as soon as he was back on the ground in Chile and greeting his well-wishers. 

With such a depressing trail of cowardly and unethical acts all along the way, it’s no surprise that in the US and Britain we prefer to focus on 11 September 2001 than 11 September 1973. We ought, however, to pay more attention to what happened in Chile. That’s particularly the case given that its wounds have still not wholly healed.

Here's what Beatrice Ávalos, a Chilean educator interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País, suggests for this anniversary:

Perhaps the harshest effect in the years that followed the military coup was establishing a rift between Chileans and Chileans, raising some up and attacking the humanity of others. My proposal would be that we might use the rest of the year to heal that rupture by reaffirming our commitment to both political and social democracy, recognising the legitimacy of many of our differences. I would propose that opponents in the National Congress issue a joint statement expressing a vigilant commitment to democracy and to human rights; and that in every place where we work and live we offer each other our hands on the 11th of September, looking at each other and making a powerful pledge of ‘never again’. 

Now, isn’t that an excellent proposal?

Prim, and weird people

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the human race. It’s just people that are sometimes a bit weird.

That was confirmed by a visit to the fine old Catalan town of Reus. It’s rather an attractive place, as it happens, with a pretty centre. But it also has a curious history, as we learned from an old friend, Rosa, someone I’d mistakenly let drift out of contact for many years until last year, when we had a great reunion during which Danielle at last met her.

Rosa lives in Reus, which is why we made a stop there, on our way to Perpignan in southwest France. I’ll explain in a later post why we were heading for Perpignan. Probably.

Danielle and Rosa are leading the way into the
great restaurant and Vermut maker Vermuts Rofes

Reus is a great centre for vermut, which is what Spain calls vermouth. My visit allowed me to confirm that the city deserves to be proud of its production of this fine drink. I liked both the red and the white I tried, the latter in a vermut maker's which is also an excellent restaurant, where we had a great meal with Rosa.

The city's only 16 km from Tarragona, which is the capital of the province to which both belong. Now, the way Rosa tells it, Reus was for a long time the more commercially successful of the towns. It had a much more dynamic business sector and that allowed it to finance a thriving cultural life.

But, she explained, Reus rested too much on its laurels. For instance, local businesses, including shops, liked to shut at 1:00 in the afternoon and open again at 5:00. Not convenient for the people who travelled into town to buy supplies and equipment, or perhaps to see a doctor,, and might have liked to make a day of it, with lunch thrown in. Apparently, the good merchants of Reus didn’t care. Clients simply had to adapt their expectations to the way Reus businesses liked to operate.

As a further example of their outlook, Rosa also pointed out to us one of the most fashionable shops in the town. Perhaps the most fashionable. Rosa went there once, just once, and never again. She was dressed casually, though well. That didn’t stop the shop assistant she turned to for help finding an item she wanted, telling her she doubted the shop had anything to offer her.

This strikes me as the kind of arrogance that underlies the story told about many high-end shops where, if you ask the price of something, the assistant will answer, “if you need to ask, you can’t afford it”.

Faced with either of those types of snootiness, my inclination would be to do what Rosa did, and walk out of the shop, never to return.

Now whether this kind of attitude was the only cause of the relative decline of Reus or whether other factors came into play, what happened is that as the decades rolled by and turned into centuries, Reus faded while Tarragona blossomed. Eventually, the upstart on the coast overtook its rival, adding wealth and dynamism to the privilege it had enjoyed since Roman times, of being the capital of the province that includes both, and which has always carried its name. 

You can imagine how Reus felt. Even the university has its faculties split between the two centres, and rather than be called after either, has given itself the name of a person instead (Rovira i Virgili, if you must know, who was president of the Catalan government in exile from 1940 to 1949, in succession to Luis Companys who went into exile in France after the end of the Spanish Civil War but was handed back by the Nazis, to meet an unpleasant and quick end, though not quick enough, given how unpleasant it was).

We enjoyed one particular facet of the rivalry between Reus and Tarragona. This is associated with the name of General Juan Prim. If you’ve never heard of him, let me assure you that nor had we until we got there.

He was a nineteenth-century general, born in Reus, who made a name for himself in, among other things, civil wars devastating Spain in his youth and later in colonial warfare in North Africa. A couple of generations later, another Spanish general, Francisco Franco, would win prominence by his North African campaigns. The difference, however, was that Prim remained surprisingly liberal, not something anyone could say about Franco, who was just prim. And nasty.

Prim in particular spent ages scouring Europe for someone who could be brought into Spain as constitutional monarch, replacing both the warring branches of the existing royal family (literally warring). That would mean accepting a crown offered by democratic election. Prim is reported to have said that looking for a democratic monarch in Europe was like looking for an atheist in heaven. 

Eventually though, Amadeo of Savoy accepted the role. In fact, he only lasted, as King Amadeo the first (and only) of Spain, for just over two years. After an attempt in 1873 on his and his wife’s lives, he decided that, quite frankly, it was too much like hard work trying to rule Spain, a nation as deeply divided then as it is now. He stood down and told the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, that Spain was simply ungovernable. 

Prim, though, didn’t see any of that. In December 1870, as he left the Cortes, of which he was a member, just a few weeks after voting for Amadeo to be given the throne, he was gunned down in the street and died soon after.

Prim and his horse
Seen from the direction of Tarragona

Reus decided to give its glorious son a suitable monument. It takes the form of an equestrian statue of Prim in the saddle, brandishing his sword.

Now there’s a story told in Reus, that the statue is so oriented that the horse’s back end and, I suppose, therefore Prim’s too, are facing Tarragona. I’ve not been able to confirm that but, hey, it’s telling that the tale is even told, isn’t it? Whether it’s true or not.

It’s great to celebrate your favourite son. But if you can do it in a way that also abuses your despised neighbour, isn’t that just win-win?

See what I mean? The human race may be absolutely fine. But think of Prim. Of what happened to Companys. Of the behaviour of Reus shopkeepers. Or of the rivalry of that city with Tarragona.

Surely you’ve got to agree that people are weird.