A (rare) good news story

There isn’t so much good news around at the moment to want to pass by a piece that comes my way. And this one particularly attracted my attention because it linked to some local knowledge of mine. And, after just four years living in Spain, my local knowledge tends to be either extremely local or non-existent.

Up in the hills above and to the north of Madrid stands the village of Hoyo de Manzanares, lively, pleasant and welcoming. It’s where our grandkids, Matilda and Elliott live. Just for the avoidance of confusion, let me assure you, and this may come as a relief to you (since they're four and two and a half respectively), that their parents live there with them.

The next town eastward is Colmenar Viejo. I’ve always liked it for its name. It means ‘old beehive’. Whenever I see the name, usually on a signpost, I wonder whether honey’s better from an old hive, like wine from old vines. Alternatively, it might be a place that old bees retreat to. Or, again, it may mean that there never was a beehive there at all, rather like the community where we live, ‘Los Sauces’, the Willows, without a single willow anywhere within kilometres of the place.

The town hall and main square of Old Beehive

I most recently came across Colmenar Viejo’s name not on a signpost but in the headline of a newspaper article. The story was about a woman from the town. Her name is Eva Nogales and if you’ve never heard of her, well, neither had I.

It turns out that she’s shared this year’s Shaw Prize with a German scientist. What, you may be wondering, as I did, is the Shaw Prize? It turns out it’s an award for outstanding science set up by a businessman from Hong Kong. The prize is seen as a kind of ‘oriental Nobel prize’. Indeed, it appears that one in every seven recipients of the Shaw go on to win a Nobel too.

She won her share for the work of a team she leads in Berkeley, California, which mapped the structure, atom by atom, of proteins that play a vital role inside the human body. 

‘All life is chemistry,’ she points out, ‘ultimately, in biology, everything’s chemistry.’

She goes on to point out that everything comes down to 20 compounds called amino acids, which act like Lego pieces out of which complex proteins can form. 

‘With just twenty elements we have all the beauty of life, from a bacterium to an elephant, by way of a sea sponge.’

If you’ve read this far, you may be thinking, ‘well, OK, this is all very well and fine, but it’s not that extraordinary, is it? After all, there are winners of major scientific prizes every year, aren’t there?’

That’s true. But not that many of them are women. And even fewer are the daughters of a shepherd father and a seamstress mother, both of whom had to leave school to go to work when they were eleven or twelve. Eva Nogales grew up with parents that humble in their origins, but intensely committed to their daughter’s having the opportunity to study.

Eva Nogales, winner of an international science prize,
from Colmenar Viejo (Old Beehive)

She’s back in Colmenar Viejo at the moment. She returned to spend Christmas with her mother (her father died some years ago). While there, she met three teachers who were central in sending her towards a career in science, her teachers of biology, physics and mathematics. All three are women.

It’s a great story, isn’t it? Though the message is perhaps not quite as positive as it seems at first sight. That’s for precisely the reasons that make it so attractive.

Her recognition by the scientific establishment is lovely, but wouldn’t it be great if it were common for women? It’s wonderful to see someone from a humble background rise as far in international prominence as Eva Nogales, but whatever believers in the American Dream might suggest, that’s not common either, is it? And, though this is less important than the other two, wouldn’t many Europeans be pleased to see Europe rekindling the extraordinary dynamism in science it knew before World War 2, and offer as encouraging an environment to its top performers as Berkeley or other American universities?

Of course, if all those things were as normal as I’d like, the Eva Nogales story wouldn’t be so striking. Its very rarity makes it attractive. That rarity’s rather sad.

Still, let’s enjoy it anyway. Next time I’m in Hoyo, perhaps I can get across to Colmenar Viejo. And if I do, I’ll make a point of wandering down the street renamed ‘Avenida Evangelina Nogales de la Morena’, in honour of a local girl made good and a fine scientist.

It’s all in the timing

It must have been sixty years ago that I started to learn French. That was at a weirdly English school, even though it was in Rome. Its Englishness was above all in its spirit and in the teachers it recruited

Our teacher was English and one of the few things I remember of her teaching, was when she told us earnestly that we had to learn to distinguish between the French words ‘ay’ and ‘ay’ (that’s the same sound as the ‘ai’ in ‘pain’ and would have been deeply painful to anyone who knew more French than I did).

She meant the words ‘et’ and ‘est’ and neither is pronounced ‘ay’.

The only other thing I remember from those classes was the tale of a sign seen outside a French teashop early in the twentieth century. That was a time when the custom of tea drinking was being adopted from the Britain where, French people then and, indeed, in many cases now, see it as a long and deep-rooted tradition.

As a quick digression, that’s a misleading belief.

Back in 1652, in that strange period when England was a republic and Puritans were a lot too powerful, the first coffee shops opened. They served a drink that we would probably regard as an undrinkable sludge today. But people back then liked it, especially for the buzz it gave them. The Puritans, who abhorred alcohol though they never actually banned it, were happy to see people going for this alternative, which contained no alcohol and didn’t leave them drunk.

Coffee houses proliferated over the next few decades. They became favoured meeting places, with many developing a specific character of their own. Some focused on people in business – Lloyds of London, the insurance operation, was founded in a coffee house which gave it its name (it was Lloyds Coffee House). Others were political, with supporters of different factions gathering in different establishments. Others might cater to artists or writers or journalists, and so on.

This was before tea had become a national beverage. Though it wasn’t long before. Just eight years later, after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, who’d developed a taste for this infusion of leaves from the far east, began to drink tea in England.

The fashion spread rapidly, in the upper circles of English society, where ladies would serve each other this delicate drink when they met in the afternoon. So note two things about that: it was a drink taken at home, not in an establishment outside like a coffeehouse. That made it a drink fit for women, or at least ladies, who would not have liked visiting a coffee house, with its male-dominated, rowdy atmosphere. And it was a drink people preferred to take in the afternoon.

As the price fell, so the custom of drinking tea extended into ever broader circles of society, ceasing to be exclusive to the very wealthiest (or ‘best’ as they liked to think of themselves, and still do). Gradually England, and later Britain, became the temple to tea drinking that it’s reputed to be today. That’s even though it was a coffee-drinking nation earlier and, to this day, drinks more coffee than tea.

Now there are many times of day when a Brit might drink tea. With breakfast. During the morning. In the afternoon. With the evening meal which, by continental standards, Britain tends to take early (at around 6:00) and is often called ‘tea’. Classically, though, just as in the time of the restoration, tea is a drink for the afternoon, at about 4:00.

‘Four o’clock tea’ therefore became something of an institution.

And the sign outside the French teashop?

My class learned that it read ‘Ici on sert le four o’clock à cinq heures’ – here we serve the ‘four o’clock’ at five o’clock.

We all chortled.

I was reminded of all that when I saw an old flapping notice on a board in Valencia, where we live.

The municipal authorities had decided that there was some benefit in reproducing, in the city, the Oktoberfest made famous by the German city of Munich, in Bavaria. You’ve probably seen pictures of buxom German women in traditional dress carrying handfuls of those massive stone beer tankards the Germans call ‘Steine’ (which means ‘stones’). Clearly, Valencia had concluded that having their own Oktoberfest would be both fun and, probably, a money spinner, both of them attractive characteristics. So they’d organised one.

What I was looking at was a publicity poster for it.

Advertising Valencia’s Oktoberfest

It read:

IMPORTANT

The official Valencia OKTOBERFEST 

will start on 15 September.

An October festival in September? Yep. Just as much fun as the four o’clock served at five.

From Boston to Gaza: learning nothing from experience

It can be such a bore, studying history. And what’s the point anyway? As Henry Ford so rightly pointed out, the only lesson to learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history. 

It’s much more exciting just to go blasting ahead and learn by surprise that things work out just as badly for you as they did for the last guy to try the same trick. Not a pleasant surprise, of course. Just a surprise which you’d have been denied had you gone to the tedious lengths of trying to learn from experience.

Take British General George Gage, way back in 1768. This was when the Americans, and above all the inhabitants of Boston, were revolting. They were doing things like boycotting British goods, distributing incendiary leaflets against the enlightened rule of the British government, and generally behaving as though they were entitled to the same rights as the British born. 

But Gage had the answer. He landed 3500 troops to occupy the city. At the time, the population numbered 16,000, so that was close to one soldier for every four Bostonians. Since he knew the troubles were all down to a small band of hotheads, he knew he’d sort them out, with that level of force, in no time at all.

To his astonishment, it turned out he was mistaken. Far from a few hotheads stirring up trouble, there was no sympathy anywhere in the city for British rule, and especially none for the ‘lobsters’, British soldiers in their red uniforms. On 17 March 1776, British forces, by then increased to 11,000, had to evacuate the city. The event is still marked annually by a holiday known as ‘Evacuation Day’.

British troops evacuating Boston after failing to pacify the city

Within four months, the American colonies had declared themselves independent of Britain, and within seven years, they’d achieved that independence.

Or take the Spanish, four decades later. At the time Spain, which has had more than its share of appalling kings, had been suffering under one of its worst, Charles IV. His son Ferdinand VII would be still worse, so awful that in his carefully balanced and moderately toned book on Spanish history, Una historia de España, Arturo Pérez Reverte describes him as the greatest ‘hijo de puta’ in the country’s rich history of such ‘sons of whores’ (that’s a literal translation: I’m sure you can think of plenty of English expressions that communicate the same degree of respect and admiration).

And yet when, in neighbourly fashion, France decided to free Spain of such men, ‘inviting’ both father and son to be their ‘guests’ across the border, ultimately replacing them with Joseph, brother of the then French Emperor Napoleon, the Spanish people showed no gratitude. Quite honestly, replacing their own ‘hijos de puta’ by a foreign military occupation didn’t leave them feeling particularly liberated. On the 2nd of May 1808, there was an uprising in Madrid in which a number of French troops were killed, an event strikingly recorded by the outstanding painter Francisco Goya.

Francisco Goya’s painting of the French Mameluke soldiers
under attack by the people of Madrid on 2 May 1808

No problem, decided Murat, overall commander of the French troops in Spain. He was a highly effective general, one of Napoleon’s great cavalry commanders, and he commanded serious forces from what was then Europe’s, and probably the world’s, best-trained, best-led and most effective army. He could sort out this uppity behaviour in no time at all.

The next day, the 3rd of May, he had several hundred men rounded up around Madrid and shot. Again, Francisco Goya depicted the executions, producing what has become one of his most celebrated paintings. With hindsight, we view the rising and the shootings as the starting point of what came to be known as the Peninsular War, covering Spain and Portugal, which culminated five years later with the French armies driven back across the Pyrenees into France.

The Third of May shootings, depicted by Francisco Goya

Sadly, that left Spain saddled with its ‘hijos de puta’. But what it mostly showed, as the people of Boston had shown Gage, was that a civilian population that loathes you, is unlikely to be pacified by military force. Even if it is the best in the world.

I could go on and on. But let’s summarise.

In 1916, Britain put down the Easter uprising in Dublin, and shot a number of the ringleaders. That included one of the finest political leaders not just of the time but of all time, James Connolly, who had to be shot tied to a chair, because the wounds he’d received in the earlier fighting made it impossible for him to stand to face the firing squad. He would have died of his injuries within a day or two anyway.

And yet, within six years, 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties had broken free of British rule.

Between 1954 and 1962, France sent colossal armed force into Algeria to put down a rising for independence. I personally knew one of the soldiers who went, a civilian conscripted into the French army at a time when military service was still obligatory, and who came back so destroyed by what he’d seen – and perhaps what he’d done – that he never recovered and died, a depressive alcoholic with his liver shot to hell, in his forties. The war was marked by the widespread use of military force, backed by brutal police action, torture and executions. 

And at the end, where did that lead? Despite the murder of many leaders, the Algerian National Liberation Front ultimately achieved its aim and France was forced to leave its colony.

And what about those six counties in Ireland that didn’t go with the rest of the island when it broke free from Britain back in 1922? I remember the terrible shock of seeing news coverage on the invasion of the most fiercely nationalist area of the city of Derry, the Bogside, in 1972, on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

At the time, the most effective organisation opposed to British rule in Ireland, the Irish Republican Army or IRA, had hit bad times. It had few members or resources and was unable to do much in the way of mounting operations. But then, on Bloody Sunday, the British army decided that it could pacify the Bogside, in no time at all, by sending in crack units, paratroops. In they went and at the end of the operation, thirteen civilians had been killed.

That night, the IRA was inundated with volunteers demanding to be enlisted.

It took 25 years of the so-called ‘Troubles’ before, by political and diplomatic action rather than military force, a way out was finally found, in the Good Friday agreement that brought peace at last to the six counties. For a moment, it looked as though we had at last learned a lesson, learned that blundering into a civilian population like George Gage in Boston in 1768, was no way to solve this kind of problem. That military force couldn’t beat insurgents with popular support, but would only do shameful harm and drum up more support for the insurgents.

Which makes it all the sadder to see what’s happening in Gaza today. Because the Israeli government, entirely justified in reacting to the horrifying terrorist attack on its civilians on 7 October, entirely justified because of the sheer venomous brutality of the assault, has chosen to react not with intelligence and targeted skill, but in the most blundering, incompetent and inappropriate way imaginable. It’s sent the heaviest of forces into Gaza, the most densely populated place on Earth, no doubt expecting to wipe out Hamas in no time at all.

General George Gage in spades. 

Israeli tanks leaving a trail of death and destruction in Gaza

It’s costing thousands of Palestinian civilian lives. Now it’s even caused the deaths of three Israeli hostages, shot by the very force sent to rescue them, so blunt and misguided an instrument it’s proven to be. And, as ever, it’s undoubtedly recruiting more men into the Hamas terrorist organisation than it’s wiping out – no doubt two, three, maybe even ten new recruits for every Gazan civilian killed.

Teaching us again that harrowing lesson from history, that no one learns lessons from history.

More grandparenting chronicles, with scenes of celebration and exhaustion

With kiddie seats in the car, Danielle and I can’t both travel to the station to pick up our grandkids and one of their parents. So when they joined us for a brief visit last week, I stayed at home while Danielle went to fetch them. On their arrival, Elliott, eager two-and-a-half-year-old that he is, rang the bell rather than wait for a key, and I came out to let them in.

As I approached, I could see him on the other side of the gate.

‘Grandad, granddad, granddad,’ he was chanting while jumping up and down.

Now I don’t have much of a fan club. So it’s good to find one, even if it only has a single member. In any case, if that single member is Elliott, he makes up in enthusiasm and volume for the lack of anyone else celebrating with him.

It amazes me slightly. I’m not aware of having done anything special to excite his admiration. But, hey, I’m certainly not the one to question any unqualified enthusiasm for me.

Enjoy it while you can is my attitude.

So at the gate, I responded to Elliott’s greeting by jumping up and down myself, and chanting, ‘Elly-Belly, Elly-Belly, Elly-Belly’. The others just had to stand around in the street watching our weird behaviour. Once I’d opened the gate, Elliott and I sealed our mutual approval by a fully reciprocated hug.

Part of my charm for Elliott, it turns out, is my apparent willingness to carry him on my shoulders. I say ‘apparent’ because neither of the grandkids is quite the featherweight they were some time ago. Once up there, they seldom show any inclination to get back down, and the effect, not just on my shoulders but also on my back does, eventually, become rather more than I can stand.

That slightly limits my enthusiasm for this pastime, but I try to hide it.

Mode of transport of choice
while enjoying Valencia's Christmas lights

This shoulder-riding business is, by the way, the area in which Elliott most resembles our smaller dog, Toffee. She has a thing about not being made to walk too far. ‘Too far’ in this context can mean a minute or so after leaving our garden. When she feels she’s had enough, she’ll start jumping up and pushing her nose against my leg. Even without words, it’s clear she’s saying, ‘pick me up, pick me up, pick me up’. She does it to me because she’s identified me as a soft touch.

Elliott doesn’t jump up or push his nose into my leg. He just stops in front of me, back to my knees, holds up his hands and informs me, ‘I want to go on your shoulders’. Actually, I think he says, ‘me want to go on your doulders’ but, while I sometimes find it hard to understand what he’s saying, I can’t pretend there’s anything unclear about this message. So up onto my shoulders – or possibly doulders – he goes.

I do this with some dread. Partly because I know it’ll be quite exhausting enough. Partly because I know that at some stage Matilda, who weighs significantly more than Elliott, will be demanding her turn.

Matilda is living proof of a principle of genetics of which I was previously unaware. Her mother, Sheena, is rightly famed for her enthusiasm for long country walks. That’s ‘enthusiasm’ in the broad sense, that runs from total commitment at one end of the scale, to deliberate and sustained procrastination at the other. Without wanting to be critical of a daughter-in-law of whom I’m as fond as I am of Matilda and Elliott, this chronicler’s total attachment to the truth prevents me hiding the fact that Sheena is not at all at the ‘total commitment’ end of the range.

Matilda strides out in style

Elliott training with his sticks

Matilda seems to have inherited all Sheena’s attachment to walks.  So though the kids couldn’t wait to try out their Christmas presents, consisting of their first hiking boots and Nordic Walking sticks, once they’d covered a few hundred metres, she loudly proclaimed her exhaustion. Both she and Elliott now decided it was time I made doulders available to ride on, to avoid over-tiring their legs.

Recovery. And restoration.

Up came Elliott until, once I was reaching the end of my tether, Matilda demanded that I carry her. Committed as I am to complete fairness, I lowered Elliott to the ground (over his objections) and took Matilda instead.

Mode of transport of choice
after a strenuous hike

I coped, if with difficulty, up to the last, steep climb back to the car. Then I lifted her down, much to her annoyance, which I was only able to overcome by adapting the ‘Push-push-push-push’ game I’ve described once before. Normally, this involves a child sitting on a bike while I push him (I say him because it had always been Elliott before) while singing, to the tune of Twinkle, twinkle, little star, ‘push-push-push-push-push-push-push-push-push-push-push-Elly-push-push’.

Matilda was walking rather than on a bike, but I pushed her up the last slope of the path, singing that same sophisticated song, with its complex lyrics, substituting ‘Tilly’ for ‘Elly’. That was so successful that Elliott insisted on my going back down to the bottom of the slope and doing the same with him. ‘Elly’ replaced ‘Tilly’ in the lyrics, but the success was exactly the same.

Talking about Matilda, on the last day of their stay, she asked for her special drinking bottle, the one with lots of twisty, spiral bits and a plastic straw incorporated into the structure itself. We bought it for her at the zoo during a visit by the grandkids some months ago. Then it was filled with some sticky drink that claimed to have the flavour of a fruit though I suspected it had never been anywhere near a fruit or anything else that healthy. Unfortunately, the quality of manufacture of these things is very much on a par with the quality of the contents.

‘I’m sorry, Matilda,’ I told her, ‘it broke and we had to throw it out.’

She pondered this for a moment.

‘That’s a little bit sad, you know,’ she told me eventually, solemnly and perhaps a little reproachfully.

A truthful response seemed the most appropriate.

‘I know,’ I told her, ‘but that’s life, I’m afraid. Things wear out and sometimes they break. That’s sad, you’re right, but it’s just the way things are.’

She contemplated this response, seemed to accept it, and nodded.

‘We can always get another one,’ I assured her, ‘we haven’t been to the zoo for a while, so we can go again next time you come.’

She nodded again.

‘But I choose the flavour of the drink,’ she stipulated.

That was an easy condition to grant. I assured her that I wouldn’t dream of having anyone other than herself choose the flavour of her drink. Apparently satisfied with our conversation, she moved off to find a more entertaining way to pass the time.

Incidentally, Matilda had an important triumph during this stay. On the way out to the walk that had involved my using my ‘push-push’ song, and on the way back, she sat in the car with Toffee on her lap. The kids and the dogs haven’t always seen entirely eye-to-eye, concerning such matters as fur pulling on the one side, and growling on the other. So the fact that she’s now big enough and mature enough to sit with Toffee on her lap, stroking her the way a poodle likes, may be a small step for mankind (and even dogkind), but it’s a leap forward for the two of them.

Elliott’s just as keen on the dogs. But he hasn’t quite learned to bridle his enthusiasm to the point that he treats them with the gentleness they require.

Of course, with me, he’s fully entitled to give free rein to his enthusiasm, unbridled and unlimited. I have no objection at all. Indeed, I welcome it.

Popularising an ugly game

If you think that football is the international game, think again. If you think it’s athletics, or chess, or tiddlywinks, well, you’re still on the wrong track. Today, the great game in country after country, is ‘get the immigrant’.

It’s the one thing that seems to unite large, and growing, numbers across nations and cultures. They all hate anyone from other nations or cultures. And they’re keen to keep them well away, especially if they’re being badly treated and escaping persecution or back-breaking poverty.

Here’s what a British Conservative MP, William Evans-Gordon, had to say on the subject, talking about the horror of finding aliens taking over areas of London: 

East of Aldgate, you walk into a foreign town

Even further to the right, Nigel Farage told a UKIP conference about how upset he was on a train in the outskirts of London:

It wasn’t until after we got past Grove Park that I could actually hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage. Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes.

Returning to Evans-Gordon, he also declared:

Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders 

And another Conservative MP from the far right of the party, at the time Home Secretary and responsible for action on immigration, Suella Braverman, used the same kind of language about invaders when she told the House of Commons:

The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast, and which party is not

Keeping that kind of invasion out requires a solid barrier, and the Dutch politician Geert Wilders claimed he knew what was needed:

We must have the courage to restrict legal immigration instead of expanding it, even if we sometimes have to build a wall

Naturally, his is not the only, or most famous, call for a wall against immigrants. Who could forget Donald Trump, with all his typical self-deprecating modesty:

I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.

Trump got four years as president to show what he could do and got a few miles of wall built, not an inch of it paid for by Mexico.

Before we go any further, I should admit that I’ve cheated a little. 

Farage, Braverman, Wilders and Trump are all contemporary politicians. Evans-Gordon isn’t. He was a Conservative MP from 1900 to 1907. I quoted him only to show how little the rhetoric of these characters has changed in over a century. The only shift has been in the targets of their attacks. In the early years of the twentieth century, the great concern, not just in Britain but across Europe and in the United States, was with Jewish immigration. Persecuted within the Russian empire – which back then extended right into most of Poland – Jews were fleeing westward, often destitute and in terrible health. Far from being greeted with open arms and assistance, most of the countries to which they turned tried to keep them out.

These days, anti-Semitism has faded somewhat, though it’s making a bit of a comeback thanks to the pursuit of violence by both Hamas and the Israeli state. What has grown into that same space is Islamophobia. As Geert Wilders assures us:

I am not ashamed to say that our culture is far better than the Islamic culture, which is a culture of barbarism.

What’s interesting about these views is the paradoxes they often contain. For instance, there were several hours of violent rioting in Dublin on 23 November, in protest against a knife attack which left three children and an adult injured, some hours earlier in the city. The rioters burned buses and cars, including police cars, and looted shops.

Police at the riots in Dublin

Rioters shouted anti-immigrant slogans.

Curiously, the Guardian tells me that the Irish have also raised nearly 350,000 euros for a young man who intervened against the knife-wielder, at considerable risk to himself. Clearly his action was appreciated by many in the country. And who was this heroic young fellow? Why, a delivery driver by the name of Caio Benicio. Where’s he from? Brazil.

He wasn’t alone in his intervention. A seventeen-year-old student joined him, taking minor injuries to his hands and face. He was from France.

In other words, the riots were triggered by the actions of a man who, it seems, was a naturalised Irishman and long-term resident of Ireland. He was overpowered by two foreigners. Both recent immigrants to the country.

A similar irony emerges from the recent history of Geert Wilders. He won the most seats in the recent Dutch general election but is having a bit of trouble trying to put together a government coalition he could lead. The man he appointed to conduct negotiations with other parties, Gom van Strien, had to stand down before he’d even started because of fraud allegations against him. That’s quite useful evidence about Wilders, showing that it isn’t only in his political stance that he resembles Donald Trump, but also in the company he keeps.

What’s more, despite his virulently anti-immigrant views, he strangely takes a populist or even left-wing stance on various social and economic matters, such as healthcare, pension entitlement, the minimum wage and public housing. According to two Dutch economists, Marcel Klok and Marieke Blom, if it pursued such policies, a coalition including Wilders might well have the effect of stimulating the economy. But Dutch unemployment is low. So the economists told the Guardian: 

Given the current strains in the labour market, we expect this to result in more demand for foreign workers.

Wilders espouses economic policies that may well lead to more immigration, while continuing to spout his bitter anti-immigrant rhetoric. But there’s nothing unusual about that, as the Irish have shown, or indeed experience in Britain. Anti-immigrant language is common across the British political spectrum, while huge areas of the economy, particularly agriculture, the catering sector and healthcare are in desperate circumstances for lack of foreign workers.

Ah, well. Anti-immigration remains the great international sport. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes any sense. 

Presumably that’s why it attracts spokesmen who talk nonsense, like Wilders, like Trump, like Braverman. Or William Evans-Gordon. Spouting the same bile for over a century, even if the ethnic group targeted has changed.

The luck of a Churchill

The devil’s in the detail, they say. Again and again I have to admit that’s true, when I’m trying to refresh my knowledge of history, as I do for my podcast, A History of England. But sometimes it’s also in the detail that I find the most fun.

The greatest pleasure can be in the personal anecdotes. Especially when they concern historical giants whose main achievements are familiar to us. That’s the case, for instance, of the strange strokes of luck in Winston Churchill’s early life.

Cartoon of Churchill by ‘Spy’ (Sir Leslie Ward), 
in Vanity Fair, September 1900 
National Portrait Gallery D45032

Churchill didn’t bother with university but went straight into the army. Once there, he was constantly demanding to be sent into combat, even though the unit to which he’d been assigned wasn’t due any action. He had himself seconded to a different regiment so that he could take part in fighting on the northwest frontier of British imperial holdings in India. He did the same when he accompanied a military expedition into Sudan. 

Often, he’d only be allowed to join this kind of mission at very considerable expense to himself. He covered his costs with his pen – it turns out that in Churchill’s case, the pen may have been mightier than the sword, but he proved good at wielding both together – writing articles for the press at the time, or books, which enjoyed considerable success, about his experiences afterwards. 

This worked well for him when Britain went to war against the Boer republics in South Africa. He pleaded to be allowed to go and eventually, after much badgering by him and lobbying by his supporters, was allowed out there, but only at his own cost. That he covered by persuading the Morning Post newspaper to pay him £250 a month for a four-month assignment. In modern terms, that’s close to £40,000 a month or over £150,000 in total, a sum most of us would regard as very welcome.

Early in his stay in South Africa, he was on an armoured train that was ambushed by Boer troops. He immediately got stuck into the job of getting the train and the wounded out of there, something he did highly effectively, but which was hardly the work of a newspaper correspondent.

At the end of the engagement, he was captured and held at a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria. However, within weeks he’d escaped. That’s all a bit controversial, since he left behind two others who’d been planning to escape with him. Did he leave them behind? Or were they slow at getting their act together? It now seems that he probably did nothing wrong, but one at least of his fellow prisoners apparently never forgave him for going without him.

He was now wandering through tough territory, on his own, trying to get to the port of Lourenço Marques, today Maputo, in the then Portuguese territory of Mozambique. That was 280 miles (450 km) away.

He eventually decided he could take no more of struggling along the road without proper food or shelter, and knocked at the door of a house near a mine. And that’s where luck struck for him. The man who opened the door to him was an English mine manager called John Howard. Once Churchill abandoned the ludicrous cover story he’d invented to try to explain what he was doing alone and dishevelled on the road at night, and admitted what he was really up to, Howard agreed to help. 

A first piece of luck.

Howard called in another Englishman, Dan Dewsnap, from Oldham near Manchester, who lowered Churchill down a mine shaft with plenty of provisions. 

He stayed for a week until they were able to get him onto a train where he could hide among goods being taken to the Portuguese port, on behalf of another Englishman, Charles Burnham. The train trip was due to last 16 hours but in fact took more like 64, with frequent stops and holdups. Later Churchill talked of his luck in avoiding discovery during any of them, but the real luck was that Burnham had decided to travel on the train with him and distributed bribes judiciously to make sure it got through the various blocks without over-zealous scrutiny of the cargo.

A second piece of luck.

Before he left England, Churchill had been selected by the Conservative Party to stand in a by-election in Oldham. He was beaten though he did reasonably well. He was back from South Africa in time to stand there again in the 1900 general election. At a public meeting, he told the story of the help he’d received in South Africa from Dan Dewsnap, from Oldham, the town which Churchill hoped to represent in parliament and where he was speaking. 

‘His wife’s in the gallery,’ a voice shouted out from the audience.

It’s hard to say how much that helped Churchill's election chances, but it felt like a good omen. Dan Dewsnap had assured him that, after his 1899 defeat, ‘they’d all vote for you next time’. Surely, he’d win the seat on his second attempt?

He did. However, the swing in voting to Churchill between 1899 and 1900 had been only 6%. That’s nothing historic. So much for ‘they’d all vote for you’ – it was far fewer than ‘all’. 

Then again, that had been enough. Who needs more than enough? He was in and that was all that mattered.

His third piece of good luck.

His victory in Oldham launched Churchill’s career in politics. As it happens, it would really take off following the next general election, in 1906. At which he won a different seat, and not as a Conservative, but as a Liberal.

That, though, is another story. And it, too, involved a good share of luck. Perhaps I can tell that one too, some time.

Spanish politics, a spectator sport for our times. Sometimes terrifying, always entertaining

As a spectator sport, politics can be right up there with the most gripping. 

Sometimes, here in Spain, it feels like a gritty comedy drama. Sometimes, more like a bullfight. But it certainly isn’t dull.

The 28th of May, when local and regional elections took place, was a bad day for those of us out here who don’t much like the far right. Or even the less far right. The traditional party of the right, the Popular Party or PP, in alliance with the far right Vox (which means voice in Latin, a good name for that bunch of loudmouths) swept into office in town halls and regional assemblies across the country. For the PP, think of the US Republican Party before Trump. Vox is the Trump version. 

Those results painted a bleak picture for the centre-left government of the Socialist Party, the PSOE, and the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. It looked like the elections due before the end of the year were likely to see him out of a job. I just hoped he would be able to turn things around a bit over the few months the old parliament still had to run.

But then he astonished me. Instead of waiting he called a snap election in July. My immediate reaction was to think that he’d made a mistake, that it was too soon, that he could only be defeated if he went that early. But then I reminded myself that Pedro Sánchez constantly surprises everyone, constantly overturns any predictions made about him.

And this time he did it again.

It’s undeniable that he lost the July election. The PP won 137 seats to the PSOE’s 121. Sánchez had come second. On the other hand, against all expectations, he’d actually added one seat to his tally in parliament, at a time when everyone expected him to lose some.

Then there were his allies out to the left of the PSOE. A bunch of small parties organised in a group called ‘Unidas podemos’ (‘United we can’, with ‘united’ in the feminine – yep, that’s how with-it they were) had won 35 seats last time around. Now, with a new leader and reorganised as ‘Sumar’ (‘add up’), they took 31.

A relatively small loss but a loss all the same.

The problem is that there are 350 seats in the lower house of the Spanish parliament. To be absolutely sure of being able to form a government, a candidate for Prime Minister has to have the support of 176 MPs. 

If that’s not possible, a second round of voting takes place, in which it’s enough simply to get more MPs voting for you than voting against. The problem was that neither the PP with Vox, nor the PSOE with Sumar, could gather 176 votes, or even enough to outvote the other side if they all voted together.

That was remarkable, given that the PP had 137 seats. In the previous parliament, Vox held 52. All they had to do was hold or increase that number. The local and regional elections, in which they’d done so well, suggested they’d have no problem. That would give the PP-Vox coalition the votes it needed.

That was what made the election in July so extraordinary. Because far from growing its allotment of seats, or even holding its own, Vox collapsed, losing 19 seats to end up with 33. That meant that together with the PP’s 137, it would reach 170 and fall short of a majority by six.

Even with the support of two small parties with one MP each, they’d still be on 172. That wouldn’t quite get it over the line.

It’s up to the king to decide which party gets the first chance to try to put together a coalition that would allow it to lead a government. He perfectly sensibly called on the PP to have a go. The biggest party in parliament clearly deserved to try first. But no one expected them to pull off the trick, hated as they are by so many of the smaller parties – or at any rate, hated as is the presence of Vox in a potential coalition by almost all the other parties.

Once it became clear that the PP wasn’t going to succeed, the king, again perfectly properly, called on the PSOE instead. It makes sense, doesn’t it? You try the biggest single party first, and if that doesn’t work, you switch to the second biggest.

That’s when Sánchez astonished me again. He’s proved himself extraordinarily skilful at coalition building. 

With his 121 seats and the 31 of Sumar, he was on 152. 

The two Basque parties (left and right) with their eleven MPs and the (left-wing) Galician party with one, came on side, putting him on 164. 

Still far from enough. 

Sánchez needed the support of the two Catalan nationalist parties with seven MPS each. That’s ERC, the Left Republicans of Catalonia, and Junts per Cataluña, Together for Catalonia. The ERC was happy to back him. That put him on 171. But that meant he still couldn’t outvote the opposition, even if Junts abstained.

He needed both Catalan parties to vote with him. But their support came with a serious price tag. The leader of Junts and then President of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, had held an unauthorised referendum on Catalan independence on 1 October 2017. It had been attacked by police sent by the PP government of the time in Madrid, with serious violence, followed by the flight of some leading members of the party, including Puigdemont, abroad (those who stayed were gaoled). 

Junts and ERC wanted an amnesty for their colleagues in gaol or facing trial. And they wanted an official referendum.

It was clear that Sánchez would refuse the referendum. But he was prepared to move on amnesty. And I feel, why not? After all, these characters hadn’t done anything violent, no one had been killed by their calling the referendum, illegal or not, and I really couldn’t see how their actions merited a prison sentence.

Right wingers demonstrating against the Spanish Socialist Party

A lot of people in Spain, however, don’t see it that way. The right wing has been holding angry demonstrations outside the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid. But many on the left are just as fed up. Spaniards are sensitive about anything that affects the integrity of the nation, and they find the behaviour of the organisers of the referendum far more reprehensible than I, as a mere Englishman, do.

That shows the courage of Sánchez. While sticking firmly to his refusal of a referendum, he agreed to put a bill to parliament providing the amnesty the Catalan parties wanted. They eventually agreed to accept that commitment as the price of their support, possibly in part because their vote has been falling in successive elections, and the alternative of another general election didn’t appeal to them.

So Sánchez got the seven MPs from Junts to back him too, taking him to 178. And then, to cap it all, he even persuaded the single MP from the Canaries Coalition, a right-winger who’d previously backed the PP-Vox attempt to form a government, to switch and support him instead.

So he ended up with 179 votes, a clear absolute majority, and has been re-elected for another term of Prime Minister.

Now, there’s a lot of hostility towards the amnesty. Of course, I feel the electorate can only blame itself. If it didn't want a compromise, coalition government, they should have given one party a majority. They elected a parliament that pushed Sánchez into this kind of concession. How can they blame him now?

Still, the question remains, whether the hostility to the amnesty will eventually do him serious harm. It’s hard to know. Spaniards can get passionate about their politics, as the demonstrations against the Socialist party show. But will they be able to keep it up? However passionate such movements are when they start, it’s hard to see them lasting for many months.

Interestingly, one of the symbols of those demonstrations is the Spanish flag with the royal coat of arms that normally sits in the middle, cut out. Why? Because by even inviting Sánchez to try to form a government, some of these demonstrators feel the king has betrayed the country.

The Spanish flag with the royal coat of arms cut out

That’s not limited to Vox people. Many on the right call what Sánchez has pulled off a ‘coup’. It was fascinating to see the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Ayuso, in the PP but on its hard right, calling for a response ‘golpe por golpe’. That’s a gloriously ambiguous demand. It can mean ‘blow for blow’, which would be fairly innocuous. But it can also mean ‘coup for coup’. Was she calling for an actual coup against Sánchez? And was that what upset the people who cut the coat of arms out of the flag – that the king hadn’t called out the army for a coup?

Intriguing times ahead. Sánchez faces terrible hostility. He heads a coalition that runs from Coalición Canaria on the right to Sumar on the left. The received wisdom is that it can’t last.

But that’s the thing about Sánchez. He keeps proving received wisdom foolish. It’s going to be fascinating to watch what happens in the coming months and years.

Spanish politics is going to remain a remarkable spectator sport for a while yet.

Victorian morality and four love stories to make the point

When I was a kid, certain people – mostly conservative people – would hold up Victorian morality as a model that society as a whole, and I in particular, ought to return to as soon as possible. Strict and pure, those Victorians knew how to live a life of goodness, instead of simply chasing a good life.

Recently, though, I’ve been reading up on the Victorian period, and the Edwardian that followed it, for my podcast, A History of England (which, incidentally, now has the first 35 episodes also available in Kindle or paperback form, on Amazon). 

Let’s start with the Derbys and the Salisburys. Grand old English families. Long-established nobility and, in the nineteenth century, right up there at the top of the British political tree. 

The fourteenth Earl of Derby was Prime Minister on three separate occasions, one of only four heads of government to have managed more than two terms. On the other hand, he had the misfortune to become leader just when his Conservative party was emerging from a catastrophic split. That had given its opponents a grip on power that it was able to shake only on a few brief occasions. His three terms gave him a total of less than four years in office.

The third Marquess of Salisbury, on the other hand, also managed three separate terms, but between them they gave him nearly ten years longer than Derby. He, however, headed a Conservative party that had pulled itself together, while the Liberals opposite had themselves split, leaving them out in the cold for a long time.

Sadly, the two families were linked in another and less reputable way than leadership of the Conservative party and capture of the top job in British politics. A way that rather undermined the irreproachable morality which is the boast of those who admire the Victorian era, including – in their time – the Victorians themselves. 

Salisbury’s father, the second marquess, was widowed at 48. When he was 56, he launched himself into a second marriage, with Mary Sackville-West, who at that time was 23. He died in 1868 when she was 34. She waited for a decent mourning period but in 1870 remarried, this time to none other than the 15th Earl of Derby, son of the former Prime Minister. 

That fifteenth earl had a distinguished political career himself though he never made it to Prime Minister.

The second Marquess of Salisbury, Mary Sackville-West and
the fifteenth Earl of Derby

He was a lot closer in age to his wife than the Second Marquess of Salisbury. Indeed, he was two years younger. All very proper, you might feel. But the Salisbury who became Prime Minister didn’t see it that way. There was a distinctly cold relationship between him and his stepmother (only six years his senior) and her second husband. That flowed from a widespread suspicion, which seems well-founded, that the couple hadn’t waited for the death of Salisbury’s dad to get their own relationship started.

Now, that wasn’t wholly in line with the expectations of Victorian morality.

Nor was Salisbury the only Prime Minister of the time to have been caught up in a love triangle of this kind. Decades earlier, in a time that is strictly speaking pre-Victorian, since the matter came to a head the year before Victoria mounted the throne, the then Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, had what on the surface seems to have been a close friendship with a certain Caroline Norton.

Mr Norton didn’t see things that way. In 1836, he sued his wife for divorce, on the grounds of her adultery with the Prime Minister. The charge was hardly beyond reasonable belief. Melbourne had a reputation as what was known as a ‘ladies’ man’, which means a man who has his way with ladies. However, the husband couldn’t prove his case and was denied the divorce.

Lord Melbourne and Caroline Norton

That was only the start of Caroline’s troubles, however. Married women’s property was at that time regarded as the husband’s, so after they separated she took nothing. He also denied her access to their children. What’s more, any earnings she might have, and she’d hoped to live on her income from journalism, also belonged to the husband, so he was able to deny her even that. She got her own back a little by running up debts with tradesmen, and telling them to sue her husband for payment. 

She also campaigned hard for reform of the law, and indeed gained at least some improvements in how divorce worked.

But the great story of the time has to be that of the Parnells. Charles Stewart Parnell, despite being a landowner and a Protestant, became the champion of the downtrodden Irish to the point where many called him ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He launched a blistering campaign of parliamentary disruption, with long speeches on indifferent points, and hundreds of amendments to proposed law, amendments that took forever to debate but never had any chance of being adopted, but only delayed legislation. He came to be seen as an appalling nuisance by pretty well everybody other than his backers in parliament, but he focused MPs’ minds on the Irish issue for a good decade.

A fellow Irish MP, but of a very different kind, a man more than enthusiastic to ingratiate himself with the powerful in England and driven only by whatever could lead to his personal benefit, was Captain William O’Shea. He played a dubious role as a go-between for Parnell’s Irish movement and the British government, limited in usefulness by the consciousness on both sides that he tended to say what he felt they would like to hear, rather than what was actually the case. 

Unfortunately, for all three, when his wife Katharine met Parnell, they fell entirely in love. They were, in fact, the love of each other’s life. For quite a time, O’Shea did nothing about it. That was probably because he felt that discretion served his own personal agenda better. When he realised, however, that no one trusted him anymore and his hopes of a bright future in politics were in pieces around his feet, he turned on the couple and sued his wife for divorce. The result? Parnell was found guilty in the court of public opinion, not of so much of adultery, but of adultery flaunted before the pubic. His career crashed, since Victorian morality was utterly unforgiving, not so much of the sinner, as of the sinner caught.

Katharine and Charles Parnell

Parnell was sacked as leader of his party and he barely had time to marry Katharine after her divorce came through before dying a few months later, at the age of 45.

The Norton affair (in both senses of the word) predates the strictly Victorian period. Let’s end with one that stretched beyond it. It also involves the Salisbury family we met at the beginning of this string of edifying stories.

Edward Cecil was one of the sons of the third marquess of Salisbury, the Prime Minister when his tale opens. Cecil was a Major in the army and was sent to South Africa to take part in the Second Boer War (yep, Britain not satisfied with one such war, in which it had been left with a distinctly bloody nose, launched itself into a second just as soon as it could). Cecil travelled with his wife, née Violet Manxse, with whom he was far from happily married.

It was no doubt because Cecil was the son of the Prime Minister that the man in charge of British South Africa, Lord Alfred Milner, offered to put them up at his official residence. It was an honour that did Cecil’s marriage absolutely no good at all. He was packed off by the army to the town of Mafeking (today Mahikeng) which soon found itself in the grip of a Boer siege that lasted 217 days. That was plenty of time for Violet Cecil and Alfred Milner to fall in love, just like the Parnells had, and then for their relationship to grow and take meaningful shape to the satisfaction of both.

Edward Cecil, Violet Manxse and Alfred Milner

Over the next twenty years, they had little chance to take things much further. However, in 1918, Edward Cecil died. Again, there was a decent mourning period, but on 26 February 1921, Violet and Alfred were finally married.

It was all a bit late, though. Milner was 66, Violet 49. He died in May 1925, of sleeping sickness contracted on another African trip. Poor Violet: after waiting twenty years, she got four years of marriage, followed by 33 years of widowhood.

Not unlike the Parnell story, I can’t help feeling.

In any case, all four these stories strongly confirm one view of mine. That all that business of Victorian morality is so much guff. It’s just a fine hypocrisy, in which what mattered wasn’t how you lived, but whether you avoided getting caught.

What happened at Roncesvalles. To Roland. And to me

In my memory, David Ross was a large man. Something about him always made me think of him as a walrus. He was tall and broad-shouldered and the years had added to his girth too. A shock of white hair and a fine white moustache naturally reinforced my impression of him as a walrus. He also struck me as immensely old, which is a little chastening, since he was probably younger when I knew him than I am today.

He was, I should mention in passing, my professor of Mediaeval French when I was studying at Birkbeck College, London.

At the back, on the left, with a moustache:
David Ross and other Birkbeck heads of department, 1972-3

The conversation I’m thinking about took place in 1979. I know that because he gave me a copy of an article he’d written, Before Roland: what happened 1200 years ago next August 15? He was referring to 15 August 1978, but it was the following year when he gave me the paper. So it was in 1979. I was 26. Which is no doubt why he seemed so old to me.

What did happen 1200 years before August 1978? That was a battle in 778 in a place the French call Roncevaux. The great French emperor Charlemagne had come across the Pyrenees into what we now call Spain, though he would have said he was in Gascony, the land of the Gascons or Basques (slightly different name, same people), on his way into the Emirate of Aragon. An Emirate because this was the time of Arab control of most of the Iberian Peninsula. Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon, was one of the great centres of Spanish Muslim culture.

Charlemagne had won some victories but things hadn’t worked out too well. The Arab allies who’d agreed to let him have Zaragoza in return for his support had decided, once the city had fallen, that, well, actually, they weren’t that keen on handing it over. And he’d had bad news about enemies threatening his home territory in France, so he set off to get back across the Pyrenees. On the way, he attacked and destroyed the walls of the Gascon (or Basque) capital Pamplona, which had left them (the Basques or Gascons) more than a little irritated with him. Besides, they knew that he had a rich baggage train with him, along with some important Arab prisoners that their compatriots would like back.

And who’s this Roland Ross talked about? Well, he’s the eponymous hero of the first great work of French literature that survives to this day, The Song of Roland. Not everyone is convinced that Roland ever existed, but Ross seemed to feel that, on balance, the evidence suggests he probably did, and I tend to agree with him (perhaps I should say that I follow his view: he was an authority on the subject, I a mere student).

Charlemagne, the story has it, gave Roland command of the rearguard of his forces. The baggage train would be between that rearguard and the main body of the army. In that formation, the French headed for Roncevaux and from there through a nearby pass in the Pyrenees, back into France.

Well, most of them made it. But the Basques/Gascons had other ideas. There are various schools of thought as to whether they were alone, or whether it was Arabs alone, or a mixed force, that took exception to Charlemagne’s plans. David Ross inclined towards the idea of a mixed force. Again, I go with him.

The Song of Roland describes how they lay in wait for the French in wooded territory on the way to the pass. The ambushing forces knew they couldn’t hope to tackle the whole of Charlemagne’s army, but maybe the rearguard would be an easier target. And so it turned out.

Not only did they defeat Roland’s men, they wiped them out to the last man. Who, this being an epic poem after all, was Roland himself. As he lay dying, he at last blew his great horn, which he hadn't wanted to do before, to avoid recalling Charlemagne and the main force. Now, though, he needed to let his king know what had happened. Such was the force of his blowing that he burst a blood vessel at his temple, and the king's army heard him, even in the distant passes.

The dying Roland sounding his horn
This is not a contemporaneous image

His last dying gesture was to hold out his right-hand glove to God. That was the gesture of vassalage, of subordination, that a knight would make to a fief lord, his chief, and Roland, knowing his time in this world was over, was offering to become one of the paladins of the divine host, as in life he’d been one in Charlemagne’s. All very noble and chivalrous and heroic, as I’m sure you’d agree.

Meanwhile, the Basques/Gascons and their Arab partners made off with the baggage and the freed prisoners.

The trouble is, The Song of Roland is from the twelfth century and the battle was in the eighth. What Ross demonstrated, I thought with great skill, was that the poem had been heavily modified in those four centuries and, in particular, a great deal from the middle sections had been massively rewritten. So his article was about reconstructing the story as it was originally told, which is why his title referred to ‘what happened’. I reckon he did an excellent job of it. 

So why am I telling this story now?

Because earlier this month, Danielle and I, along with three friends of ours, peeling off from a hiking exhibition in high Navarre in Spain, spent the day in and near the little town of Roncesvalles. If you’ve guessed that this is the Spanish name of Roncevaux, congratulations. It’s also known as Orreaga, in Basque.

Navarre – or Navarra in Spanish – is traditionally part of the Basque nation, though these days the province is so heavily inhabited by Castilian-speaking Spanish that few Basque-speakers remain. Why, it isn’t even part of the official Spanish autonomous community known as the Basque Country. Even the high part of the province, where we were, doesn’t have many Basque speakers anymore, though the proportion is higher there than in the lowlands. Back then, however, the place must have been full of Basques. I imagine certainly enough to seriously disrupt, with a little help from some Arab allies, Roland’s trip back to France.

Roncesvalles today boasts a colossal monastery and a couple of churches, a museum and three restaurants or cafés. Part of the monastery has been turned into a hotel and another into a hostel for pilgrims. “Pilgrims?” I hear you cry, “What does Roland have to do with pilgrims?” To which the answer is nothing.

Interior of the Royal Collegiate Church in Roncesvalles

Roncesvalles is now part of the pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostella, or the ‘Camino’ as its fans call it. That’s become a heck of a business these days. There are cafés and hostels and restaurants all along the way, catering to the footsore pilgrim. As, of course, there are all the support services, such as guides and shops selling everything from camping gas to maps to sticking plasters.

Pilgrimage is today, as I suspect it always has been, a huge commercial opportunity for the shopkeepers, hostel keepers and restaurant owners all along the way.

Roncesvalles, whose actual registered population these days is just 12, is a thriving place but the crowds are all from outside, walkers working their way along the Camino together with the multitude offering them money-making services.

And of the great battle? Of Charlemagne? Of Roland holding out his glove to God? Frankly, there’s practically nothing. God, or possibly Mammon, has taken over.

790 km to Santiago. We managed three

Ah, well. We had a good day anyway. We walked a stretch of the Camino. Three kilometres, I think, at a point where there were 790 more to go. Clearly, we failed to get anywhere near Santiago but, on the other hand, we got to a wonderful restaurant in the next-door town of Burguete (Auritz in Basque) where we had a lunch worth a pilgrimage.

And that’s without mentioning the great dip into my past, to one of my favourite teachers, David Ross. Not to mention the even longer flashback to Roland.

Thanks, Roncevaux, and my hiking friends, for providing me with an excellent trip into old memories.

My hiking companions, leaving Roncesvalles
On the way to a fine meal in the next town