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.