Grandparenting: when Matilda gave me an art lesson

On my latest visit to her house, there came a moment when Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, thrust an etch-a-sketch at me and said, ‘what should I draw?’

Like an idiot, I said, ‘a horse’.

The look she gave me conveyed many things, but enthusiasm wasn’t one of them.

My suggestion had been obviously crazy. Far too difficult. Nervously I racked my mind for some easier alternative.

‘What about a house?’

Odd, isn’t it? Change one letter and a challenging drawing option turns into an elementary one. I always find that kind of linguistic oddity amusing.

‘A house?’ said Matilda, now with a smile. And got drawing.

What I was expecting was a box with the top split to form something like a roof, two windows as though they were eyes and a tall rectangle as a door, in the position of a mouth. Or possibly a nose. To complete the picture, there might be a chimney at the top with a spiral of smoke coming out of it.

A House. As one might expect a five-year-old to draw it

What I got was different.

A House. As Etch-a-Sketched by Matilda

Not everybody agrees on what we’re looking at here.

Matilda’s uncle, my middle son Michael, assures me that what I see as a bed inside the house is in fact a pair of steps leading to a door. That strikes me as far-fetched. Or should I say far-sketched?

Matilda’s grandmother Danielle agrees with me that it’s a bed, with a pillow at one end and someone’s head lying on it. However Danielle qualifies her view: ‘but it would be a cut-off head’.

It’s true that the head looks a bit bodiless. It may well be this apparent decapitation that led to Matilda herself being dissatisfied with the picture. ‘My drawing’s bad,’ she assured me, before deleting it. A deletion which suggests that she hadn’t spotted me making a more permanent record of it on my phone.

Why did I take a photograph of her drawing? 

Because I was impressed that, the way I interpret it, what she’d chosen to show was something from inside the house rather than a dull exterior. She’d presented the life within and not just the structure without. In other words, more than a house, she’d drawn a home.

I think that’s impressive.

Obviously, I could check out whether she agrees with my interpretation. ‘You could always ask her what she drew,’ Michael urges me. 

He’s right, of course. But I’m not sure she’d tell me. And I’m not sure I want to know anyway. I rather like the uncertainty. Is it just a door? Is it a decapitated individual in a bed? Or is it just someone lying down to rest from the stress of outside life?

I don’t know and I like it that way. It means we can choose our own interpretation. And that strikes me as the richness of art.

Postscript

Talking about art, here’s another Matilda story.

The most celebrated painter from Valencia, where we now live, is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station, to which I’m heading today after my visit to Matilda and Elliott, is even called after him. No year seems to go by without some new Sorolla exhibition in the city, if not two or three, and the top floor of the  Museum of Fine Arts is dedicated to Sorolla and his contemporaries.

Among the paintings by Sorolla’s contemporaries on show is one that always gets me smiling. It’s called La Mosca, The Fly, and it was painted in 1897 by the artist Cecilio Pla. A commentator I’ve read calls the smile in the painting ‘contagious’, which is just how it feels to me. 

La Mosca by Cecilio Pla

I find the work playful, humorous, and quite simply fun.

Now in Matilda’s parents’ kitchen the curtains, though I suspect of a slightly less expensive fabric than in the house of a late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class family, nonetheless make me think of the painting. So for a while now I’ve been trying to get Matilda to emulate the whimsical pose of the painting in her own kitchen. On this visit, I was finally able to do so. 

The result was at least as playful, humorous and fun as Pla’s piece. Though with a distinctively Matilda touch to it. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Pla to have his model stick out her tongue – that was all Matilda. 

But, hey, doesn’t that just make it all the more playful?

Matilda as La Mosca, by me

Sharpness to cool

There are things to establish when you move somewhere new. You know, find a doctor, identify a well-supplied grocer, work out your way around the local bureaucracy. And, of course, get yourself a good hairdresser.

The hairdresser we found when we moved to Spain was in the city of Valencia itself, which was a bit of a bore, since we live outside it, and had to travel in to get our hair cut. But he was great and so we stuck with him. Apart from his skill in hairdressing, I liked the fact that he was German – not the most likely nationality for a hairdresser in Spain – which gave me a rare opportunity to practise my German.

I kept speaking German to him until I had the slightly galling realisation that he spoke near-native English. Which made his English just a tad better than my German. That’s ‘tad’ as in the difference between the professional actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and those of a primary school nativity play.

He eventually announced to us that he was planning to leave the salon where he worked and go self-employed. That was perfect for us. Since that time, he’s been coming to our place to cut our hair, which rather reduces the time it takes us to get to him. Instead of a half-hour metro journey with walks to and from the station at each end, we now just have to get from our living room to the back patio. And ours isn’t a particularly big house.

A few months ago, my then four-year-old granddaughter Matilda announced that she wanted me to shave. She was quickly and enthusiastically seconded by Danielle. Now, for a great many years – a couple of decades or more – I used to alternate image, between bearded and clean-shaven, every few years or so. But recently, I’ve stuck with a beard for the best part of ten years. 

A change, they say, is as good as a rest, so I decided to accede to this request from such key figures as my wife and granddaughter. I shaved. That was certainly a change though I’m not sure how much of a rest it was – I feel just as tired as ever. 

Then came the first visit of our hairdresser. He examined me with a critical eye.

‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘you looked more modern with the beard.’

‘Danielle,’ I told him, ‘thinks I look younger without one.’

He shrugged.

‘Which is better?’ I asked him, ‘more modern or younger?’

‘Well...’ he said, shrugged again and left the word dangling.

‘We’ll see how you look,’ he went on, ‘with shorter hair and no beard.’

He worked his usual magic with clippers and scissors.

‘Ah,’ he said at the end, ‘you certainly look sharper.’

I was briefly distracted by the thought that it was appropriate that tools as sharp as a hairdresser’s should pass on their sharpness, but that wasn’t really the main issue, was it?

‘Sharper?’ I replied, ‘that sounds good. It feels like a step on the way to “cool”.’

‘Well…’ he said again, with a third shrug.

Then he brightened.

‘Maybe you could say that we’re working towards it.’

On the way to cool? Sounds like a surprising boon, unexpected in my 72nd year. One I’d be only too happy to take.

If only I believed that so much could be achieved with just clippers and scissors.  

Bearded or clean-shaven

Ireland: a softness in the air and a kindness in the hearts

Living in the province of Valencia in Spain gives us a lot of joy. The only serious downside, and it might be a lot more serious in coming years, is the impact of climate change. Summer temperatures climb well into the thirties (Celsius) and the rain just stops. Reservoir levels are dangerously low. Going out, say with the dogs, is uncomfortable – for them as much as for us – except in the early morning or just before dark in the evening.

I know that people like that fine Mr Trump in the US (for whom I wish nothing less than more fuel for his complaints about the electoral system) deny that anything like global warming is happening, but for people like us who are living it, we have a slightly less complacent outlook on our climate.

So it was with some joy that we headed for Ireland a couple of weeks ago. I remember a friend from the English Lake District talking to me about someone who complained to him about the rain.

‘It’s called the Lake District,’ he’d replied, ‘where do you think the lakes come from?’

Ireland is called the Emerald Isle. It doesn’t take long to work out where the green comes from. It was a tremendous relief to us to live in temperatures in the high teens and to see some rain, though of course when it came to locals, we found that we’d simply exchanged one set of complaints for another.

At home, people were saying to us, ‘oh, the heat today! Roll on September. I expect no relief before then.’

In Ireland, I overhead someone talking to her friends saying, ‘I keep waiting for the summer, and it never comes.’

Sunlight and clouds, mountains and sea, in Donegal

Well, it was good to get away from the summer for a while. Perhaps not for too long. I have to admit that grey skies and frequent showers quickly pall on me, reminding me much too much of my youth in England. But I have to confess it was good not to have that oppressive heat weighing me down, or indeed it was even good to remember what it’s like to feel cold, despite a light sweater and jacket (waterproof jacket, of course).

All this culminated in Enniskillen. 

We spent most of our time in Donegal, which has the wonderful distinction of including the most northerly part of Ireland, without being in Northern Ireland. It’s in the Republic. But, often called ‘the forgotten county’, it’s remote from Dublin and most routes to and from it cross the territory of Northern Ireland, which lies within the United Kingdom. That of course is a consequence of the partition of Ireland I talked about earlier this month, a partition agreed at a peace conference in London at which the Irish delegation had been led by Michael Collins. After agreeing to the treaty, he said that he’d just signed his death warrant – as indeed he had.

Enniskillen is in Northern Ireland, and it was on our route back from Donegal to Dublin Airport. I wanted to see it because I’d heard it was a lovely city, on an island between two lakes, or perhaps two sections of the same lake, Lough Erne. Years ago I heard that it never rains in Enniskillen, you just get a ‘softness in the air’.

Well, when we got there, with two friends from Valencia, Concha and Manolo, we found that the air had become immensely soft indeed. So soft that we were soaked within minutes of getting out of our cars. So soaked that Danielle and I both had to change at Dublin airport to avoid flying home in damp clothes and shoes.

That reminded of the words of Winston Churchill, who as a government minister had helped craft the agreement that partitioned Ireland. A year later the tensions between Protestants committed to the Union with Britain and Catholics seeking a united, independent Ireland, had surfaced again, specifically about who should get two of the counties of the North of the island. Churchill talked about how ‘we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again’.

Well, Enniskillen is in County Fermanagh. And I was delighted to be able to take a photo of one of its steeples in the rain. Looking suitably dreary, though it probably wouldn't have, had there been a little sun.

A dreary steeple in Enniskillen, Fermanagh

Fortunately, not everything we experienced in Enniskillen was dreary. On the contrary. When we parked our cars, we found that the pay machines for the car park didn’t allow payment by credit card. A man walking past asked us whether we needed change.

‘It seems we do, and we don’t have any pounds,’ we told him.

Without our asking him for anything, and refusing our offer of euros in return, he reached into his pocket and pulled out two pound coins, enough for our car and our friends’ to stay as long in Enniskillen as we could stand it in the rain. 

You don’t often find someone spontaneously, and enthusiastically, offering money, for nothing in return, to complete strangers. In fact, it’s only happened to me once before. Just ten days earlier, in Donegal, where we were trying to pay for a car park and bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have a euro coin.

‘Do you need a euro coin?’ asked a passing woman, thrusting one into our hands.

Well, the Irish weather may be less than ideal, but the people are great. I remember once, as a much younger man, asking for change for a two-franc coin in Geneva – change, not a gift – and being refused, including by a man who told me that he worked for a living (which I hadn’t doubted in the first place). Spontaneous generosity instead of hard words? Not hard to decide which is preferable.

It was particularly poignant to see such warmth on both sides of a border that has caused such suffering and so much death. The people seem to be one, with only the border to divide them. Ah, the power of religion, to set up such barriers between personalities that have so much in common.

And, to be honest, even if it rains a bit more than I’d like, after a couple of months of roasting summer, the Irish cool and wet were, I admit, a great relief, just as the kindness was a joy.

The memories of the Irish

‘The problem,’ the saying goes, ‘is the English can't remember history, while the Irish can't forget it’. 

My mother gave me a fine illustration of the truth of the notion. Back in the 1930s (the late 1930s, I imagine, since she was born in 1924) an Irish friend invited her to a rally in England addressed by an Irish patriot. I think she said it was the son of the murdered Irish Republican leader, Michael Collins, which would make it a great story, had Collins ever had a son. 

Maybe it was just one of his associates.

‘I should warn you,’ her friend told my mother, ‘he’ll be mentioning Oliver Cromwell within the first ten minutes of his talk.’

In the event, it was under five minutes.

Cromwell, many English people know, was the man who led the New Model Army in seventeenth-century England. The uprising it drove put a big dent in the doctrine of the divine right of kings, by putting a definitive end to a king who believed in it (it cut off Charles I’s head, which is pretty definitive). What a lot fewer remember is that Cromwell was also the man who applied in Ireland what the Roman historian Tacitus accused his compatriots of doing in their conquered territories: Rome, he said, made a desert and called it peace. Cromwell pacified Ireland with sword and flame. The Irish haven’t forgiven him (and they shouldn’t) but nor have they forgotten (which maybe for their peace of mind they should).

I’m an Englishman and therefore cursed – or possibly blessed – by a short memory. Even so, as Danielle and I turned up in Dublin a few days ago, I remembered clearly when we were last there together. It was with two of our sons, then aged five and three, back in 1988. This time, it was on our way to meet one of those sons, now 40, and our daughter-in-law, with their own children, aged five and three. 

As we were reminded by a couple of people in Dublin this time, 1988 was the year of the Dublin millennium. We enjoyed some of the events associated with the celebrations, though they left me a little confused. There were references to all sorts of things happening in Dublin rather over a thousand years earlier, including the foundation of the city, but no mention of anything particular in 988.

In the end, I tackled a young actor in Viking costume who’d been re-enacting tenth-century events.

‘If nothing particular happened in in 988, why are you celebrating the millennium in 1988?’ I asked.

‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘we missed the actual anniversary, but when we saw the success Cork made of its 800th anniversary in 1985, we decided to have a celebration ourselves, even if it’s a few decades late. We promise to get it right next time.’

I think it was the Irish wit of the reply that appealed to me most. 

It was lovely to be back in Dublin with Danielle. And I was intrigued to see a mural on a hoarding near where we spent the night.

Curious mural in Dublin

It showed the face of Michael Collins with a great quotation from him: ‘Give us the future… we’ve had enough of your past…’

The past Britain – specifically England – gifted Ireland was dismal. It was by no means just Cromwell’s massacres that blackened it. His campaign completed an extraordinary transfer of land to alien ownership, specifically to the English and Protestants. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, something like 50% of Irish land had been owned by Irish Catholics. By the time the English Civil War broke out, that proportion was down to 14%. By the end of Cromwell’s time, it was down to 5%. England didn’t just kill in Ireland, it also stole. Massively.

At the end of the following century, one of the better English Prime Ministers, William Pitt the Younger, attempted to bring in legislation to grant Irishmen equality with the English, at least in trade. He was defeated, by a coalition of legislators representing British industry, which was more than happy to see tariffs on Irish trade kept in place – even trade with Britain – to protect their own privileged position. There were regulations, too, about what industries the Irish could engage in and which they were banned from developing, again to protect English interests. In addition, Catholics – and the vast majority of the Irish were Catholics – were banned from holding any kind of public position or teaching in the universities.

The dying also continued. The terrible famine in the late 1840s cost about a million lives and a million emigrants, at a time when the total population before the Famine had been eight and a half million. Even today, the total population, of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland together, is still not seven million. An excellent measure of Britain’s attitude to the disaster was that, when it abolished slavery, in 1833, it paid £20 million in compensation to the former slave owners. Its total aid to Ireland during the Famine was £10 million.

Nor did the killings end. Why, some even happened in Collins’s own time, including the Croke Park massacre, when British soldiers entered a stadium in Dublin and fired for a minute and a half into a crowd waiting for the start of a Gaelic football match, killing fourteen, including three children, and wounding sixty others.

So, yes, I understand why Collins felt Ireland was sick of the past. And would like to take over its own future.

Sadly, though, while the British Empire was already in decline, it was still the world’s greatest ever and had huge power. Tired of fighting after the world war and desperately short of money, Britain knew that it could defeat the Irish uprising but only by using massive force, which would be a catastrophic expense and, since it would lead to terrible killing, would be condemned by the world and even by much public opinion in Britain (think Gaza today). 

On the other hand, it was quite impossible, politically, for the British government to allow the Protestant-majority counties of Ulster to be absorbed into a separate, Catholic-dominated Irish state.

Equally, Collins knew that the Irish Republican forces, which he commanded, hadn’t the resources to impose their will on the British. Indeed, keeping the army in the field was draining the new country’s already stressed finances. 

The compromise was to partition the island. Six counties of the northeast would remain within the United Kingdom. The other twenty-six would be given quasi-independence as the Irish Free State. The compromise took the form of a Peace Treaty signed by the British and the Irish delegation to the negotiations, led by Michael Collins. 

After the signing, Collins confided to his diary ‘I tell you this, early this morning I signed my death warrant.’

Eight months later, he was proved right, when he was gunned down by members of the anti-Treaty forces led by his former comrade, Éamon De Valera.

Not many people in England know much of this. But plenty do in Ireland.

Across the Collins mural, somebody had scrawled the word ‘Traitor’.

Ah, yes. The Irish have long memories. It was fun to be back in the country and have it proved to me again.

 

Fun fakery and a fine fiesta

We like to think of ourselves as good immigrants, Danielle and I. That makes us  want to get familiar with our new host country and, specifically, with the region where we live. That’s the Autonomous Community of Valencia, as it’s grandly called, with its three provinces: Valencia itself (the one we live in) with Alicante to the south and Castellón to the north.

Now we’ve been to Castellón province several times and discovered that it has many glorious towns and much wonderful countryside, with hills and woods running from the border with Aragon to the west, down to a coastal plain with its sun-drenched Mediterranean beaches. But, somehow, until a few weeks ago, we’d never been to Castellón city itself, the place that gave the province its name. So when Danielle saw that the council was organising a guided tour of the ceramics of the city, we signed up for it.

We met the group on the edge of a fine park in the centre of town, the Ribalta Park, named for a painter, Francisco Ribalta. A fine introduction to the fine fakery we were to encounter on our tour.

Rather a fine park

Castellón likes to celebrate Ribalta as one of its most distinguished native sons. There’s even a plaque outside a Castellón house marking it as where he was born. Which is just a tad puzzling, since it’s well known, including to our guide, that he was born in Catalonia, in a town called Solsona, some 250 km away.

Castellón's House of the Storks. Which isn’t

We also visited a lovely house on the square outside the park, known as the ‘House of the Storks’. At first glance, you can see that the house owes its name to the wonderful climbing series of ceramic tiles on the front of the building, each set of which apparently rests on a bottom tile with a picture of a bird. The stork that gave its name to the building. Except that when you look closely at it, you discover that it isn’t a stork at all. 

Call that a stork?

It’s a heron. Heron House? La casa de las garzas? Did someone decide that casa de las cigüeñas sounded better? Or did an early error consecrated by simple habit establish the name in the mind of the population?

The city also has a cathedral. Except that it isn’t a cathedral. There’s a local bishop but his seat isn’t in Castellón city itself but in Segorbe, a glorious city further up the long valley that runs westwards through the province to Aragon. I’ve been told that Segorbe had hoped it would be the capital of the province and give it its name, but Castellón beat it to that honour. The bishop, though, stayed in Segorbe, so the large church in the middle of the provincial capital isn’t really a cathedral – a bishop’s main church – but a co-cathedral, a sort of associate cathedral, a tad second best.

It was funny to come across all these things that weren’t what they seemed. A native son who wasn’t. Herons claimed as storks. A church the size of a cathedral which wasn’t one. Funny and fun. But I don’t want to give the impression that everything in Castellón was just fakery. There was much that was authentic and beautiful. 

There were some fine buildings. 

And there were loads of ceramics.

On park benches:

On drinking fountains:

Even on modern buildings:

That underlined the fact that this isn’t an art for a museum, but something living and flourishing to this day.

We particularly liked the ceramic advert outside what was once a dairy. It proudly claimed that the milking was done in the presence of the public. Our guide told us that you could choose which cow you wanted your milk from.

And it wasn’t just ceramics. Just as authentic was the way the people of Castellón enjoyed themselves. We stopped for a simple but excellent lunch in a side street, rowdy and cheerful with a loud crowd, which became deafening when a hen party showed up. Group after group standing or sitting outside the cafés and restaurants of the street cheered the hen party and shouted congratulations to the bride as they danced by.

A cheerful atmosphere for lunch

As for her, boy, was she having fun. She seemed well lubricated. And she danced and sang with tremendous gusto. A real fiesta spirit.

Further enlivened by a joyful bride

It was a good way to get to know a part of our adopted region that we’d neglected before. And an excellent way to spend a day.

Giving way takes courage

‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it’. That’s a Shakespeare line that always amazes me by how many situations it applies to. Today, I’d say of Joe Biden that nothing in his career became him like his withdrawal from it. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good president – he had some notable achievements – but he was no longer a good candidate, at a time when his defeat would return to the White House a man determined to undermine the most fundamental values of the US constitution.

It’s obvious that standing down was immensely painful to him. That makes his action particularly courageous and admirable. It puts him into the tradition of a man like George Washington. He received a commission from the Continental Congress, the body that headed the thirteen colonies that rose against Britain, to head its armies. When he emerged victorious from the war, many feared that he would use his popularity to make himself dictator or king of the newly independent nation. Instead, he went to Congress and handed back his Commission.

Biden has shown himself a worthy heir of Washington

As I’ve said before, what he didn’t do (he didn’t seize power) is right up there in importance with what he did (he won the war). What Biden hasn't done (he’s not clinging on to the nomination) is a fine way of crowning a career including some pretty great things he did do (like post-Covid measures and initiatives to aid economic recovery).

But what happens next? 

A friend commented to me recently that Biden clinging on to the nomination would leave the Democrats with no chance of beating Trump. Replacing Biden would certainly not guarantee them victory. But it would at least give them a chance.

It was quite clear, and I got that message powerfully even from individual Americans that I know here in Spain, that many of those who dreaded the return to power of Trump couldn't bring themselves to vote for Biden, once his state of health showed him to be unfit to hold the office of President for another term. 

The frontrunner to replace him is the present Vice President, Kamala Harris. If she wins the White House, it’ll be historic: the first woman to hold the post and the second person of colour, after Barrack Obama.

However, front runner or not, she’s not even sure of the Democratic nomination yet. There are other possible candidates. They all have one advantage over Biden, which is their age. Had Biden stayed in the race, he would have been the oldest candidate ever for the presidency. Now that mantle falls on Trump’s shoulders. I hope the Democrats will be as ruthless against him as he was in using age as a weapon against Biden. That would be especially appropriate as Trump too is suffering from the effects of his advancing age, shown in speeches that are frequently incoherent and confused.

If it is Kamala Harris that faces off to him, it’s likely that he’ll attack her for being allegedly soft on drug offenders during her time as Attorney General of California. I hope he does. But I only hope that because it’ll give her the opportunity to respond by asking just how tough a sentence the law should impose on a felon convicted of fraudulently using company funds to cover up, for his own electoral purposes, an affair with a porn star.

Harris has also built herself a good reputation as a defender of abortion rights. Trump has surrounded himself with anti-abortion characters, like his running mate JD Vance. I’d love to see her suggesting that it’s not at all surprising that he refuses women rights over their own bodies, seeing how little respect he’s shown for those bodies in his behaviour and, indeed, his boasts about what he likes to do to them.

I’d love to watch Trump squirming under that kind of pressure.

A century on

One hundred years ago today, what a different place Britain was.

Only a few months earlier, in September 1923, when Britain officially took up a mandate from the League of Nations to govern Palestine, the British Empire reached its greatest ever extent. Which was odd, because Britain was already decidedly on the downward slope. It had been the banker to the world up to the First World War ten years earlier, but had emerged from that conflict a debtor nation, indebted above all to the United States. 

One of Britain’s allies, that had provided limited but valuable assistance in the war, had been Japan. But the US, worried about Japanese competition in the Pacific, put pressure on Britain to end the alliance. There had been a time when Britain would have firmly but politely – or perhaps not politely – rejected such interference in its affairs, but those days were gone, and it complied with the American demand.

So it was never truer than in the middle 1920s that the sun never set on the British Empire, but it was also true that the Empire’s sun was already setting.

Into that world, on the 11th of July 1924, a little girl her parents decided to call Leatrice was born into the Bannister family. Anyone who knows a little about British Jewish life knows that ‘Bannister’ was one of those give-away names: most people who held it had been called ‘Bernstein’ before they showed up in England.

Nat Bannister, Leatrice’s father, had been raised in back-breaking poverty in London’s East End. He’d left school at fourteen and taken work in the lithographic printing industry. He spent the First World War avoiding military service in what he saw as an indefensible conflict, and ended up spending two years in the harsh conditions of Dartmoor prison for his pacifist pains.

His wife, Yetta, came from a more comfortable family, of more recent refugees than Nat’s, who got out of the Russian Empire not long before Russia went to war with Japan. Her father had already spent seven years in the Tsarist army and could imagine what fate awaited him in the Far East if war broke out with Japan, as he was sure it would. He was a skilled craftsman, making the uppers of shoes for people with feet deformed from birth or as a result of accident, and could provide a better childhood for his Yetta than Nat enjoyed.

Yetta was a radical and an early member of the British Communist Party, though her flirtation with Communism didn’t last long. It was at a public meeting which she addressed that Nat, never a member himself, first saw her. She was recovering from the death of a fiancé who’d made it through the war but then succumbed to the so-called Spanish flu, and she resisted Nat’s courtship for quite a time. She apparently once lost her temper with him, broke off the engagement she’d finally agreed to and flung the ring at him before storming off into the night. Instead of going after her, he got down on his hands and knees hunting for the ring, which he eventually found and presented to her again when she was calmer.

Leatrice grew up in a North London suburb, in an atmosphere she described as stiff with anti-Semitism. She escaped from that when she took a job as secretary to a Labour Member of Parliament and Secretary of the reformist Fabian Society. That meant she spent the latter part of the Second World War close to the circles of power, a remarkable apprenticeship for someone in her late teens to early twenties.

What she didn’t get was a higher education, to her great regret. 

Leatrice in London’s Hyde Park in 1947

After the war, when travel became possible again, she made a beeline for Paris to a typist’s job at UNESCO. There she met Leonard Beeson. Apparently, what first attracted her were his silk socks, which she got to examine closely when sitting on the floor at a party, with her back to the couch on which he was sitting more comfortably. That, apparently, was as good a start as any to a relationship that led them into a marriage lasting from 1951 until his depressingly early death in 1983.

The marriage took her from Paris to Rome, where her two sons were born. From Rome, they moved to Kinshasa in what was then called the Democratic Republic of Congo and is called that again after spending some time as Zaïre, though its relationship to democracy has always been distant. In the last of Leonard’s professional moves, they travelled from Kinshasa to New York. There she was at last able to satisfy her desire for a university education, obtaining a degree from City University of New York, with the best class (Summa Cum Laude, with highest praise) and winning herself the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa key.

The couple enjoyed a brief retirement during which they split their time between France and England. When that was ended by her widowhood, she moved to Oxford, much to the astonishment of most people who knew her, since she’d had no previous connection with the city. It suited her well though, giving her a wide new circle of friends (including the local Labour MP) and the opportunity to serve as a City Guide, which she did with great enthusiasm, until infirmity at last forced her to stop.

Like her first quarter century, she lived her last in England. A profoundly different England, no longer the leading nation of a Britain that bestrode the world, but part of a middle-ranking power that was, at the time she moved back, at last building itself a future as a part of Europe. But then she was saddened, as I was, when it turned its back on that project, and on its neighbours, by voting to leave the EU, in what looked like nothing more than a last desperate grasp at global glory, something that was already slipping from its grip when Leatrice was born, and had long gone by the time she died.

Still, it was England, it was her home, she felt comfortable there, and that made it a good place to see out her last years.

She died on her 94th birthday, on 11 July 2018. So today I can raise a glass to her twice: once for the 100th anniversary of her birth, and once more to the way she managed, although unconscious at the time, to make it to one last birthday.

On my brother’s behalf and my own, that’ll be my salute to our mother Leatrice and the remarkable life she lived in some rapidly changing times.

Leatrice with Leonard in France in the 1980s

What a relief it was to have it confirmed by an exit poll last night that Labour, led by Keir Starmer, was on its way to a massive win over the Conservatives in the election of 4 July. 

The BBC projecting of the exit poll for the Labour landslide

July the fourth. Celebrated in the US as Independence Day. In Britain it was the occasion that the electorate marked its independence of a Conservative government that had nothing more to give. Another moment to celebrate.

I may have overstated when I said that it had nothing more to give. With most governments, including ones we don’t like, we can usually point to one or two achievements and have to admit, even if between gritted teeth, ‘well, it’s true, at least they did that.’ I can think of nothing, in all honesty, which fourteen years of Conservative rule have left in a better state than when they came to office.

That’s even on their own terms. The Tories were obsessed with public debt when they came to power, but they leave it higher now than back then. They were also obsessed with immigration, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that many sectors of the economy need immigrants – healthcare, agriculture, catering for instance – just to keep turning over. But even they admit that illegal immigration is out of control.

The health service is in crisis. Schools are crumbling, literally, with ceilings falling in due to dud cement. The Tories presided over the terrible self-inflicted wound of Brexit. The party of law and order has seen prisons releasing inmates early because they can’t handle the numbers. The police force hasn’t the resources for its task. And the nation’s rivers and the sea off its beaches are flooded with untreated sewage.

As you can imagine, that’s why it’s a relief to see that government go.

But in 1997, when Tony Blair came to power, I reacted with joy, not just with relief. That’s because, whatever his faults, he was a man that inspired. And indeed his government, despite its many errors, the most appalling of which was the Iraq War, did much to be proud of: huge improvements in the health service, freedom of information, devolution to the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, the Good Friday Agreement over Northern Ireland, and much more. 

In 1997, we could sense all that promise and, boy, it felt good to be alive.

But Blair’s government was elected by 13.5 million people. They represented 43% of the votes cast. Britain uses a first-past-the-post system, by which it only takes one more vote than any other candidate, without necessarily having a majority of the votes cast, to win election in a parliamentary constituency. That’s why a government can win a landslide majority in the House of Commons on a minority of the votes, as Blair did in 1997. 

Taking 43% is actually quite respectable.

The 2024 election also gave Labour a landslide majority in the Commons, but this time it took only 9.7 million votes, 3.8 million fewer than won by Blair in 1997. And that represented only 33.8% of the votes cast, not a great deal more than one vote in three. Putting it another way, there were very nearly two votes against Labour for every vote for it.

What makes those figures particularly stark is that at the previous election, in 2019, Labour had its worst result since 1935. It took just 202 seats in the Commons, under half its haul this time. And yet it took 32.1% of the votes cast – so though it has more than doubled its total of seats, Labour only added 1.7% to its percentage of the popular vote.

That’s the difference between the catastrophic defeat last time and the historic landslide victory at this election (Starmer will have more Labour MPs behind him than Blair did).

What this means is that what has taken Starmer to Downing Street isn’t a huge wave of support. It’s a tsunami of dissatisfaction, even bitterness, directed against the Tories. A well-deserved tsunami. But it leaves Starmer with a massive task to win positive support for Labour. He has to do it quickly. His majority of over 170 looks unassailable, enough to carry him through to victory at the next general election too. However, if you look at the percentages of votes cast, you can see that it’s a lot more fragile than that, with a couple of percentage points marking the difference between massive victory and crushing defeat.

After all, looked what happened between 2019 and this year. Back then, it was the Tories who won a landslide. This year, they’ve lost 250 seats and emerged with the lowest number of MPs in their history. That’s how quickly and how massively things can switch around.

Starmer understands all that. In his first speech as Prime Minister, he explained:

our country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal and a return of politics to public service. When the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future. But we need to move forward together. Now, this wound, this lack of trust, can only be healed by actions, not words. I know that. But we can make a start today, with the simple acknowledgement that public service is a privilege and that your government should treat every single person in this country with respect. If you voted Labour yesterday, we will carry the responsibility of your trust as we rebuild our country. But whether you voted Labour or not – in fact, especially if you did not – I say to you directly my government will serve you. 

He knows he needs to rebuild trust and he can only do that by serving the electorate, especially the two-thirds of electors who voted against him. I wish him well with that task. It’s a big one, and Britain needs him to succeed in it.

Before I leave, I have to mention the man he defeated, the outgoing Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. When he announced his resignation, he said:

Whilst he has been my political opponent, Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our Prime Minister. In this job, his successes will be all our successes. And I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent, public-spirited man who I respect.

It’s refreshing to hear a politician talking about an adversary as someone he can respect. One of the worst aspects of politics today – especially in such campaigns as Trump’s in the US – is the apparent belief that it’s not enough to defeat the other side, you have to eliminate them.

Adapting a phrase from Macbeth, I can say of Sunak that nothing in his time in office became him like the leaving of it. 

Bridge in a trumped-up world

Danielle and I like playing bridge.

Apart from the enjoyment of the game, I just like its name. We live in a world that needs bridges. Sadly, we seem instead to be building walls, the most dismal being the one along the US-Mexico border, whose only redeeming feature is that it doesn’t exist and probably never will.

But as well as the name, I like the way bridge classifies the four suits of the deck of cards it uses.

Two suits are referred to as ‘majors’. They’re hearts and spades. That seems to celebrate two of the more positive aspects of human existence, affection and hard work (please don’t write to tell me that this isn’t the derivation of ‘spades’ – I know and it’s of no importance – the word is spades and spades are for digging, and that’s all that matters to me).

On the other hand, the minors, inferior to the other two, are diamonds and clubs. A certain type of precious stone may or may not be a girl’s best friend but is certainly, and above all, an ostentatious display of wealth. Similarly, a club may well provide an opportunity for entertainment (perhaps even by playing bridge), but also and very often acts to separate out a self-appointed elite from the excluded masses.

Love and work preferred over wealth and elitism? My kind of values.

Greater, of course, than any of the suits is the fifth bridge option, known as No Trumps. It’s hard to imagine what could be more appropriate, given what looks like the probable outcome of the US election in November.

No Trump: something to pray for. Whether or not you’re a bridge player.

Max: highs and lows and a big step forward

Max in our woods

The 21st of June 2004. The day of the year when we got most light. But a day of highs and lows, for us, but above all for Max. 

The low for him is that he spent most of it under the care of a vet, who anaesthetised him and cut out a growth from his lip. That was one of the two events of the day that Max certainly knew about, at least until the anaesthetic knocked him out. What he didn’t know about, but might have given him a compensating high, was that a representative of the dog shelter where we met him was at the vet’s too. She had the papers we needed to sign to move Max from his existing status, in foster care with us, to full adoption. 

We signed. The deed was done. Max had adopted us.

As it happens, if he’d been aware of it, I’m not sure whether he would have regarded it as anything like as momentous as we did.

‘So what’s changed exactly?’ he might have asked.

After all, he knew, and had known for a while, that he lived with us. That we and the house we amusingly persist in regarding as ours, now formed his household. He didn’t need anyone’s signature on a dotted line to confirm what to him must have seemed obvious.

Humans, though, are more complicated. We need bits of paper. We need other people to confirm things that anybody sensible, like a previously abandoned dog only too relieved to have a house to live in at last, views as a done deal.

To be fair, there had been a few issues that we at least, if not Max, needed to clear up during the fostering period.

He had been known to growl at our grandkids. Now, I’m not beyond growling at them myself, especially at 3:00 in the morning, but it’s unlikely that I would ever bite them. Was the same true of Max? We couldn’t really share a house with a dog that might harm the children.

Well, I’m glad to say that during their most recent visits, relations between the grandkids and Max have improved immeasurably. In fact, while our grandson Elliott was with us the week before last, he became quite a fan of feeding Max treats. Max returned the favour, naturally becoming rather a fan of Elliott in his role as treat purveyor. As I recorded previously, Max had probably had little or no contact with kids earlier and that made him wary of them. He seemed to have overcome such fears now, and to have adapted, at least to those two.

In one area there’d been a slightly worrying development, but one we think we can deal with. As he has become increasingly integrated into the household, he has learned from the girls – Luci and Toffee, the two toy poodles – that it’s the dogs’ duty to guard the house. There are people who have the gall to go walking casually past the end of our back or front garden, sometimes even taking their impudence to the point of having dogs – other dogs, not properly cleared or authorised to approach the premises – with them. The answer is naturally to run down to one or other gate and bark at them and, as I mentioned last time, Max has become good at that.

Unfortunately, he’s gone still further. He tends to be less well-disposed towards men than women, possibly because the person who abandoned him was likely to be a hunter (the podenco breed is the classic Spanish hunting dog) and probably a man. When a workman visited us some time ago, and Max couldn’t stop him coming in by barking at him, he bit him instead. Nothing too damaging, and the victim took it in good part, though he admitted it had hurt. We’re taking more care now to keep Max away from anyone he might not take to well, since it’s not something we want to see happen again.

Overall, though, we felt there was no insuperable obstacle to the adoption and so Danielle signed.

The worst moment for Max at the vet’s must have been when Danielle left him there. The poor chap knows what abandonment feels like. Why, the shelter had picked him up from a roadside, where he’d maintained his existence for an uncertain time by foraging for whatever food he could find. He’d learned the difference between surviving and living. Danielle stayed with him until the anaesthetic knocked him out, but waking up, surrounded by strangers in a strange place, must have been a dismal experience that woke some less than pleasant memories. 

I’m not sure he altogether forgave us at first. It may have been just the after-effects of the anaesthetic, but it seemed to me that when we got him home, there was something of an unspoken reproach about him. Something which, had he expressed it in words, might have taken the form, ‘you left me behind. Don’t you know how painful that is for someone who’s already known abandonment? Besides, I woke up with this bloody pain in my lip. What on earth did you have those guys do to me while I was out and unable to defend myself?’

Yep. Couches are a good thing. And this one’s mine

Still, it didn’t last. Quite quickly he settled back into his life. Another change during the fostering period was that, where before he seemed reluctant to clamber onto a couch, perhaps because he’d never lived indoors and didn’t know what they were for, these days he’s fine with them. Indeed, he’s taken over one of our couches, to the point where for a while he insisted on its exclusive use and simply wouldn’t get up on it if anyone else was there. These days, he might even consent to letting one of the family, or one of Luci and Toffee, up onto it with him, but still won’t share it with other visitors.

OK, OK, Luci can come too. So long as she behaves

Anyway, it was good to see him on his couch and relaxing once more, the mood of hurt and disappointment apparently dissipating.

And then, of course, there was the evening walk. Max is a dog who springs to his feet and rushes over if he hears us so much as approaching the door. Getting out into the woods was a return to delight for him. I should say, in passing, that he’s great on walks and our fears that he might suddenly reveal the common podenco custom of disappearing and failing to return for hours, haven’t been realised. 

The walk went well. Max enjoyed himself. He even revealed his imperturbability by simply ignoring a magpie that attacked him.

Max ignoring an aerial attack

Why did the bird attack? Well, the magpies have their fledgelings at the moment and, like their close cousins the crows, the magpies have young that leave (or possibly fall from) the nest before they can fly. For two or three days they need to be protected from potential predators, a category to which they have clearly decided that Max belongs.

So it was fun to see him being not just admonished – with loud cawing – but actually buzzed by a flying magpie while we were out. And equally fun to see how he completely ignored it. He had things to smell, bushes to explore, and he wasn’t going to be disturbed by a tiresome bird.

Back to normal, then. And now as a full member of the household. Something for him to take for granted and for us to celebrate.

Which we did with a glass or two that evening.

Now I’ve adopted you,
the least you can do is stroke me when I ask

Best granddad. Or the worst

The best Granddad in the world opens the door
for Elliott to make all sorts of new acquaintances

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, wrote the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. To him, it didn’t matter whether you always held the same beliefs, only that whatever you believed, you endorsed it forcefully and upheld it energetically at the time you believed it. ‘Speak what you think now in hard words,’ he urged, ‘and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’.

Well, it seems that at the tender age of three, our grandson Elliott, who has just spent four days with us without his parents or sister, is a convinced Emersonian. Indeed, I suppose a purist among logicians might go so far as to claim that he falls into a fallacy, the excluded middle. 

It seems that I am either the best granddad in the world, or the worst, but never any of the little dull things in between.

The visit started well. There was the ice cream in the centre of the village of La Cañada, to which our street belongs (I like to think of the shops in the centre as ‘downtown’ and, since the pocket handkerchief of a square with the ice cream shop has the same name as Madrid’s great Puerta del Sol, clearly the village authorities feel the same).

Joy is an ice cream

Later there was the opportunity to make the most of the cherry season.

Or a bowl of cherries

We also went several times to the swimming pool. It’s not ours alone. We share it with fifteen other households, but that’s not many and we often have it to ourselves. 

It took a little while for Elliott to get his confidence back, after a year without swimming. We spent our time mostly in the kids’ area, which is reassuringly shallow. But we were able to get some good games going, when the best granddad in the world (definitely!) swung him around in circles with his feet in the water or supported him while he doggy-paddled around. The best was when he came and sat on my lap while I sat on the bottom of the pool. That meant I could move around with him in that safe position, to the delight of us both.

Enjoying the kids’ pool with Granddad

But, sadly, things turned much less satisfying that evening. He and I went to Burger King, usually a moment of supreme pleasure for him. But, maybe because he’d been to the swimming pool twice that day, he was tired. He barely touched his food, announcing that he no longer liked nuggets, an astonishing declaration from someone who had always previously been a great fan of them. Then, while waiting for his dessert, he headed back to the play area, something he loves taking advantage of while at Burger King. This time, however, though he dutifully removed his shoes, as specified in the instructions, instead of climbing up to the top of the construction in order to slide back down from floor to floor as he usually does, he just lay on the ground without moving.

Eventually, his dessert was ready. It was ice cream with caramel sauce on it, which should have been received with enthusiasm. Sadly, it had been served with a spoon stuck upright in it. 

‘You’ve tasted it!’ Elliott challenged me and started to cry.

‘I haven’t,’ I assured him, with perfect truth.

‘You have, you have,’ he repeated, tears now running freely, ‘I don’t want it.’

He pushed it away.

No amount of reasoning on my part could convince him to eat it, so I started preparing everything to leave. But, rather than throw out his ice cream, now melting away, I quickly ate it myself. After all, he clearly wasn’t going to. On the other hand, with hindsight, it occurred to me that it wasn’t a move liable to make my protestations of innocence – true though they were – any more believable.

I’d undoubtedly become the world’s worst granddad.

Just before things turned dismal:
this playground, as well as rides, has rocks, water, fish and turtles

Nor was what I think of as the Burger King Incident the low point of the visit. That came the following day. We went to a favourite playground of his, by bike, him in the kid seat behind me. Everything went fine until we were a couple of minutes from home. There’s a downhill stretch there so I was going fairly quickly. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think I hit a bit of a shallow pothole, causing the front wheel to rise off the ground and, when it came down on loose stones, to slide away from me, bringing us both crashing down.

Poor Elliott. He had a terrible shock and wailed to show it. Fortunately, and this was confirmed by a paediatrician later, he had no worse injury than a nasty graze on his arm. With the help of several people who came rushing over to our assistance and assured him he had nothing seriously wrong, it was easy, courageous boy that he is, to calm him down quickly. He stopped crying though I don’t think his view of his granddad improved at all.

Meanwhile, my left leg and arm were covered in blood. I took a look at the knee and thought, ‘oh Lord! That could need stitches’. A neighbour tried to patch me up with steri-strips but she was convinced, and convinced me, that I needed to go and see a nurse. The nurse re-did the patching but told me I just had to go to hospital. As I feared, that meant spending five hours in an emergency department waiting for treatment which, in the end, involved six stiches.

The only good side to all this is that we had, I felt, reached rock bottom. The only way forward now was up. Or so I hoped. And it turned out my hope was justified.

I took Elliott out for another bike ride the next day, but of a very different kind. He was on his own bike and, since it’s a little big for him, I trotted along behind him holding his shoulder so he didn’t fall. That was a far more satisfactory experience.

I asked that afternoon who the best granddad in the world was.

‘You,’ he said.

One way of looking at that is to see it as Emersonian non-consistency. However, I like to think it’s more a matter of not holding a grudge. And in my view, that’s a really good character trait.

By then, I wasn’t feeling too well, so I retreated to bed. But Danielle tells me that when she dropped him off with his dad at the station in Valencia, Elliott told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t gone on that bike ride’. 

That’s amazingly mature for a three-year-old. It’s also entirely legitimate. I share the sentiment and also wish we hadn’t gone on that bike ride.

All I can say is, ‘don’t worry Elliott, or Matilda, that’s the last time granddad goes out on a bike with a child behind him. I can live with the chance of injuring myself, but never again want to put either grandchild at risk.’

Something I’m sure Sheena and Nicky, their parents, will be relieved to know.