Christmas day without my mother: something of a relief

Christmas. So many memories.

Not all of them bad.

The tradition in English-speaking households is to have presents, at least for the kids, on Christmas morning. I’ve no idea who came up with that terrible idea: it means the children are up at 5:00 or 6:00, waking their parents to demand gifts.

My family was no different. We’d wake up at the crack of dawn and find a Christmas stocking stuffed with goodies at the bottom of our beds. That would hold our attention for the best part of two minutes, by which time we would have reached the obligatory mandarin at the bottom, and then we’d take off to wake up the parents and find our “real” presents.

An early foray into empirical experimentation tested his existence

There came a time when I began to suspect that the gifts weren’t really being brought by Father Christmas. But I was a child interested in evidence and prepared to carry out carefully designed experiments to test any hypothesis.

So, one Christmas Eve, I propped a bongo drum between a chair and my bedroom door. The outcome was spectacular. When the door was pushed gently open some time after I’d fallen asleep, the drum fell to the floor, with a highly satisfactory, indeed nearly explosive, noise followed by a volley of cursing. That was not the kind of language I’d expect any saint to use, and the voice was in any case unmistakably my mother’s. That left me freed of an old deception but also, as I discovered in the morning, denied a Christmas stocking.

Danielle is from Alsace, in Eastern France, where they have a different approach. Like so many on the Continent, they celebrate Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. The tradition in her village was for a father to take his kids out in the afternoon, so that in his absence the mother would set up and decorate a tree – never done earlier – and assemble presents around it. The kids would be greeted by an apparently magical transformation when they returned.

The family would have their Christmas meal, after which presents would be opened. In the evening, not at the crack of dawn the next day. Indeed, if families go to Midnight Mass – usually held at 10:30 or 11:00 these days, as a more convenient approximation to midnight – the kids get home tired and unlikely to wake up early on Christmas Day. The parents enjoy a lie-in.

That strikes me as far more civilised than the Anglo-Saxon way. I have no idea why English speakers don’t adopt it.

My mother was one who never could. To her, Christmas was a sacred fixture in the Calendar, inextricably linked to the 25th of December. This was a little odd, since she was Jewish and, therefore, technically not expected to celebrate Christmas at all.

That may only further underline the tenuousness of the link between Christmas and Christianity. Today, for all but a diminishing band of true believers, it’s a feast of the family and of commerce, not a celebration of the birth of Christ. There’s no reason why members of other faiths, or none, shouldn’t celebrate it.

This, however, created difficulties. Christmas Day in England is the day when nothing happens. Public transport virtually stops and more or less everywhere is shut. My mother absolutely wanted to go for a meal with us, but there are few restaurants open and the ones that are either offer a special Christmas meal at an eye-wateringly special price, or they’re indifferent places hoping to cash in on the general absence of anywhere to eat out.

Once we ate in a Turkish restaurant opposite the Synagogue. Run by Muslims, it was ironic to see it fill up quickly with Jews, all known to my mother. The spectacle of Jews being served by Muslims on the day of a great Christian festival certainly tickled my sense of irony, which went some way towards making up for the mediocrity of the food.

On another couple of occasions, we went to a Thai restaurant near her home, where the food was frankly even worse than in the Turkish place. It really only had geographic convenience going for it. Our first attempt to eat there was a fiasco, because my mother told us that lunch was being served after 3:00. It was only when we showed up that we discovered that the correct information was that they were serving until 3:00. So we missed out on food altogether.

I could never persuade my mother to have our Christmas meal on the 24th, French style, when there would have been a huge range of restaurants to choose from. It had to be the 25th. To be fair, I suppose she knew that all around her people would be celebrating with family on that day, and she’d have felt miserably lonely if she hadn’t. I sympathise and I’m happy we helped her avoid that fate. But it was exasperating to go out on the hunt, each year, for a restaurant that could accommodate us, serve us a reasonable meal and not require us to take out a new mortgage on our house. A hunt that failed every time.

My mother wasn’t always an easy person to get on with. Even so, I often miss the things we did together. When I watch something good on TV, I want to tell her about it. When the Labour Party does something avoidable and self-destructive, I want to bemoan our fate with her. When the kids do something particularly admirable, I want to share the pleasure with her. But the Christmas day meal?

Not so much.

Ah, the tradition. The joy. The terrible food.
Have a great Christmas, everyone. Christian or not

Nationalism: toxic generally, but it has a lighter side

After a great month in Valencia, in Spain, we’re driving back towards England. That’s Danielle, the two toy poodles and me. The first stage of the journey took us into France. That meant travelling through Catalonia.

Or rather not through Catalonia, but into it, because even when you get over the border to France, you’re still in a bit of Catalonia, north of the Pyrenees. Even the French refer to the region as ‘le pays Catalan’ (note that the expression is in French, not Catalan).

Separatist feeling is nothing like as strong as on the Spanish side of the mountains. You hear far less Catalan being spoken on the streets. But there is still a strong attachment to the region’s Catalan roots. Town and street names often appear in Catalan as well as French, and the Catalan flag – gold and red bars – proudly flies everywhere.

The flag of Catalonia flying from a small surviving part of the
battlements of Perpignan (French) or Perpinyà (Catalan)

Indeed, when I ordered an ice cream in fine old town of Perpignan (Perpinyà in Catalan), the waiter who served me was full of congratulations of my choice of mandarin and raspberry as it produced a serving in the Catalan colours.

An excellent ice and in the appropriate colours for Catalonia

It took us a while to drive to French Catalonia. As we approached the border, we discussed where we might get dinner. One of the more attractive aspects of French towns – including, we assumed, the Catalan ones – is that they tend to offer a wide range of restaurants where one can eat well, and not always for a lot of money.

‘I’d like a crêpe,’ I announced.

Crêpes are sold in crêperies. They’re usually Breton and offer both savoury and sweet pancakes, and they can often be delicious. Sometimes not so much. But I’m forever hopeful. They usually sell wines and beers but the drink of choice to wash the crêpes down is Norman or Breton cider, served in pitchers and drunk out of vessels that look like nothing so much as tea cups, even down to the handles.

It was a shock when we got to the village where we were spending the night, just on the edge of the Pyrenees. There were far fewer restaurants than we’d confidently expected, and most of them were closed. With autumn on us and shorter days, we soon found ourselves wandering dark and gloomy streets in, even at 9:00 at night, in an apparently hopeless quest for somewhere that would serve us food.

It was beginning to seem to me that we would just have to come to terms with not finding anywhere open. We’d have to settle for a night without a meal. Given my weight, that might well be a lot better for my body, but it would be a lot less fun for my soul.

Danielle hadn’t yet accepted the grim truth that weren’t going to find anywhere. She was leading the way confidently ever upwards through the village streets, into the top levels where the streets were all streets and it was perfectly obvious we’d find no restaurants.

And then we came around a corner and saw light flooding out onto the pavement. A pool of good cheer. And – it was coming from a crêperie. We received a new burst of energy and new strength to our legs, as we made at speed towards the vision of delight, even though the street became even steeper for our last few steps.

It was not just a crêperie, but a genuinely Breton one. With a real Breton as owner and chef. It was open, we weren’t too late to order, and it let us in with the dogs. We had an excellent savoury crêpe each followed by one with caramelised apple, drowned in calvados and flambéd. 

Washed down with cider, of course.

On the wall alongside us was a large Breton flag. But, to my amusement, next to it was a Catalan one. I remarked on the fact to the proprietor.

Breton (left) and Catalan flags

‘Well, what do you expect?’ he asked, ‘if I hadn’t put a Catalan flag up, the people here would have lynched me.’

French Catalonia is about as far southwards from Brittany as you can get without leaving France. But Danielle is from Alsace, which is as far eastwards as you can get without landing up in Germany. But she’s always been struck by the number of Breton-Alsatian couples she knows.

She told the proprietor. ‘It seems that whenever a Breton meets an Alsatian, they both say, “what a shame that France comes between us.”’

France of course would deny that vile allegation. The nation brings these disparate regions together, its leaders would claim, it doesn’t separate them. A great notion, though somewhat belied by the staunch spirit of independence expressed in so lively a way by regions such as Alsace, Brittany or Catalonia.

Symbolised by the two fine flags we could admire while enjoying the excellent crêpes Danielle’s persistence had earned for us.

Uneasy but necessary bedfellows: history and politics

A book I read in the old East Germany, by a dissident called Heinz Knobloch, had a catch phrase running through it, ‘mistrust the green spaces’. A green space was often a spot where once a building stood that represented something the regime would rather not publicise, but which was too important to be built over completely. A major office of the Nazi regime, or of the Weimar Republic it overthrew, or even of the German Empire that preceded both.

Perhaps the best example of this fiddling with historical monuments concerned not a building but a statue. The imposing equestrian statue of Frederick the Great of Prussia, with its frieze of significant people of his time around the plinth, originally stood on the grand boulevard of Berlin, Unter den Linden.

The Frederick the Great statue in 1920

The Socialist Unity Party (SED) that ruled East Germany weren’t going to have that symbol of royalist and aristocratic elitism standing in the capital’s most prestigious avenue. For a time it vanished altogether. But, hey, Berlin was the capital of Prussia, and Prussia was the heartland of East Germany. After a while, the statue reappeared, but not in the capital, instead in the Charlottenhof Palace in Potsdam. On display, but not in too public a way.

Then came another rethink. In the 1980s, the SED changes its historical memory policy. East Germany was a state but not a nation. To make it a nation, it needed cultural roots and therefore a history. Frederick II was one of the greatest figures of its past, and the SED decided that, after mature reflection, and taking all things into consideration, it was important to bring him out of his relative obscurity and set him back up somewhere with a bit of class about it.

So the statue reappeared on the Unter den Linden. Where it stands to this day.

Politics makes history. And history matters to politics.

That’s as true in Spain as it is in Eastern Germany. Around the corner from where we’re living in Valencia is a thoroughfare that proclaims itself to be ‘Democracy Street’. However, the sign also tells us that it was formerly ‘Castán Tobeñas Street’.

Democracy Street. Formerly Castán Tobeñas

‘Aha,’ I thought when I saw it, ‘might this be a leading figure of the Fascist period deemed better forgotten than commemorated?’

So it seems. He was a jurist who rose to the position of President of the Spanish Supreme Court, a post he held for nearly 25 years under Franco, until just before his death. Seems open and shut. A major figure of Franco’s regime, far better consigned to the dustbin of history than commemorated by a street in Spain’s third city.

The reality is far more complex. But when is reality anything but complex? Why else does Donald Trump avoid it altogether?

Pascual Marzal is a Professor of the History of Law at Valencia University, and served as a member of the City Commission on the application of the Historical Memory law under which the street name was changed. He says he’s fully on board with the law, but opposes its application to Castán Tobeñas.

He points out that Tobeñas was also a leading judge under the second Republic, the one that Franco overthrew. He was, indeed, tried by a court martial of the Fascist regime, which acquitted him on the grounds that the previous government had appointed him exclusively for his legal skills, not for any particular political position. Such were those skills, indeed, that they decided to make use of them too. Hence his promotion to the Supreme Court.

Apparently, Tobeñas wrote some seminal texts on civil law and is regarded to this day as a major scholar in the field.

As Marzal asks, who can say with certainty that they would have behaved better under an autocratic regime? Would we resist? Or would we, like Tobeñas, come to terms with the regime and accommodate with it in order to make a living?

It’s an excellent question.

My wife comes from Alsace, in Eastern France. With the adjoining department of the Moselle, it is the region of the country that lost most men during the Second World War. The problem is that, because Germany regarded Alsace not as occupied France but recovered national territory, young men were subject to German conscription. So those Alsatian dead were above all wearing German grey not French blue. Few wanted to serve, but the consequences of a refusal were dire, not just for the individuals but for their families too.

These were the ‘despite ourselves’ (malgré nous) and a lot of them died in Russia. France has little reason to be proud of what they did, but Alsace has every reason to mourn their loss. So the region has its war memorials, though they say little about what uniform the men they commemorate were wearing when they died.

Tobeñas seems similar. He was unfortunate to live under a regime he could not serve with honour.

Unfortunate indeed. But though he couldn’t serve it with honour, he chose to serve it anyway. Why then should he be honoured today with a street name? After all, he was a judge. An authority of the law. And he served a regime that came to power illegally and ruled with little legal restraint. A jurist, above all others, must have found that particularly lamentable.

I’m glad the malgré nous have their monuments in Alsace. But I’m equally glad that the law on historical memory has deprived Tobeñas of his street. And I love the fact that it’s become Democracy Street instead, a lovely dig at Fascism.

History is complex. Sometimes it makes judgements that are perhaps too black and white. But they have to be made.

This one strikes me as have got more right than wrong.

Atlantis in the City of Serendipity

Alone in the fine old Swiss city of Basel, I felt I needed to find somewhere a bit different, perhaps even a bit special, to spend my evening.

As it happens, Basel’s a city I know well. It’s because I needed to consult documents in the university library here that I came to stay for a weeks in Hegenheim, just across the border in the French province of Alsace, way back in 1981. It was because I was in Hegenheim, that I met a pleasant nine-year-old who wanted to talk about the planets, and ended up spending the evening with him drawing a map of the solar system. It was because of that boy and that map that I met his mother. And, 37 years and two sons on, that boy’s my stepson and that mother’s my wife.

There was a place that did rather wonderful open sandwiches I knew, but it’s shut up shop and been replaced by a slightly garish bar. There was a sushi restaurant that tempted me but, hey, they’re two a penny around Europe now. Nothing special there, certainly. But then I saw a sign, on the door of a restaurant that looked definitely closed (lights off, chairs piled on tables): ‘roof terrace this way’.

Door to the sun terrace

I walked ‘this way’, following several more signs. Eventually I reached a door marked ‘Sun Terrace’. Now, that sounded special. Particularly to an Englishman, in other words someone from a country where, as a general rule, there’s far too little sun to encourage anyone to build a terrace.

I climbed a flight of stairs, then another, then a third. The encouraging signs kept urging me upwards. I emerged on a kind of high courtyard that would have been completely open to the sky had a large portion of it not been covered by canvas awnings. Another set of steps took me to the very top, close enough to the canvas to touch it, and where I could see out to a narrow vista of three or four roof tops and typical Basel house walls, plastered and moulded and painted attractive colours.

Hardly had I placed my order and wondered whether the awnings would actually hold out the rain, when the elements provided me with a conclusive answer. 

They wouldn’t.

The sun terrace turning into a rain terrace

Not much makes me proud of being British these days, since a small majority of my compatriots decided that what the world most needed was a country that turned its back on its neighbours. But I have sufficient pride in my British stoicism, and the resistance it gives me to the weather, to want to stay put despite the downpour that gradually developed above – a few drops, a shower or two, then rain, then a true summer storm, lightning and all.

The waiter was good enough to rub down my table from time to time, even wiping the surface of my increasingly moist Kindle – if I have to eat alone I do find being able to read while I do it is the only way to make the experience pleasurable. But I ate my way stoically through my excellent first course despite the increasing evidence that the position was becoming untenable.

Excellent first course.
Note the raindrops in the background

“It won’t last long,” a waitress told me, expressing what was – as I told her – my firm conviction too. Though I suspect conviction didn’t really come into it, so much as a willingness to encourage each other’s denial of the evidence.

Things finally came to a head when that same waitress wondered whether I really needed another bottle of water, but couldn’t instead just leave my glass on the table a while to see it fill up all by itself.

I retreated, Brit or no, to the slightly better shelter offered by the roof courtyard below. And there enjoyed my equally excellent second course.

It was over the chocolate mousse that I heard the waitress explaining to another client that the lease on the building was being terminated and within a few weeks the restaurant would close. She seemed unfazed by the knowledge – ‘it was very badly run,’ she announced – but to me it seemed sad that a place I’d discovered after 37 years was only going to last a short time longer. It was called Atlantis, oddly enough, and it seems I’ve merely caught a glimpse of it before it’s swallowed up by the waves.

Pity after serendipity, I suppose. But at least Basel gave me my wife and she’ll still be there when I head home the day after tomorrow. With a story about a certainly rather different – perhaps, indeed, special – dinner experience to tell her.

Vintage 1982

One of the advantages of clearing out a home, as I described a couple of weeks ago, is that you find lots of things you’d forgotten about. Many of them deserve nothing better than being forgotten, and there’s nothing to do but throw them away. Others, however, it’s a pleasure to rediscover.

The flat we were leaving was on the Franco-German border and we were going to be travelling back through France. Since we were running out of wine at home, this was a welcome opportunity to buy some more. Good wine at sensible prices.

However, down in our ex-cellar we discovered not just a few bottles of wine, but several dozen. That rather eliminated the need to buy any on the way back to England. There were, in fact, rather more bottles than we were able to get into the car with the other belongings we chose to rescue, so we gave a number away – though the smallest number possible.

These were the leftovers of a time when I used to buy bottles of wine when they were young and cheap and lay them down for a few years till they became far better. Fine wines at cheap prices. However, few English houses have cellars, so that’s rather gone by the board since we returned to the country. But it was wonderful to find that some bottles had survived. Even though, in some cases, this wasn’t a matter of saving a fine wine but rather of reawakening an old memory.

Our oldest wine was a Brouilly from 1982. 35 years old. Older than my sons.

Well, we certainly aged that one...

Twice, in our wine-collecting days, Danielle and I went to the wine fair in Hagenthal, not far from her home village in Alsace, Eastern France. Ah, those were different days. Not necessarily better, just different. The police let it be known that they would not be carrying out alcohol tests on drivers near the fair for as long as it lasted, so tasting posed no danger – no danger of arrest that is, though plenty of danger of injury to oneself or others.

The first time was in around 1984, which was when we bought the Brouilly. I knew little enough about such wines at that time and chose the ones I bought merely on the basis of taste. This one seemed good and I assumed it would become better with a little aging.

For second visit to the fair, we were accompanied by our sons. The younger, Nicky, must have been about four at the time. He stuck to me like glue and insisted on trying a sip of every wine I tasted, leaving him in a curious state by the time the evening ended.

Different times, as I said. But not necessarily better.

At least, it seems that the experience did no lasting damage to him. Unless one counts his invariable tendency to challenge my judgement on any matter we discuss. Which, considering that I fed him wine when he was four, is perhaps not entirely out of place.

And the wine itself? Well, a Brouilly is a Beaujolais. Some can be kept quite a while, but the Brouilly only five to ten years. We tasted a bottle of the 1982 when we got home. And then tipped the rest down the drain, which I’m certain helped clear it quite effectively.

Not a great wine, as I said, but an eloquent reminder of days gone by.

Parting of the ways with my oldest friend

The one benefit of a boarding school, from a kid’s point of view, is that you’re with your friends all the time. They’re within walking distance. There’s none of that phoning their parents to check whether they can come over and establishing when is convenient for both families. You just pop round, convenient or not.

The first step, of course, is to make some friends at the school.

Fortunately, when I showed up at the boarding school I attended – Dartington, now sadly closed – I found myself quickly thrown into the company of one boy of my age. In fact, he was a couple of months younger, which was a shock to me: I was used to being the youngest in my group. He also had a name that struck me as weirdly spelled: Alasdhair (pronounced Alastair).

We had a number of interests as well as our relatively young age in common. We both liked languages, for instance, and we shared an interest, passing as it turned out, in physics. However, it was neither of those things that first formed a bond between us.

One of my earliest memories of Alasdhair was cycling with him to a poetically named village near the school, Landscove. Isn’t that evocative? Coves are things you get on the coast. What’s one like when it’s inland?

It turns out, nothing special. Landscove is in Devon which is known for its hills. That made it a struggle to get there on our bikes. It was little reward for the effort to discover that it was a pretty little village but with nothing to distinguish it from any of the others around.

Alasdhair was fortunate in having his mother, Barbara, and sister, the equally strangely-spelled Shellagh (pronounced Sheila), living at the school. Shellagh and Barbara were as charming and fun as Alasdhair and it was balm to my soul to be adopted by them. They offered me a welcome which I’m sure I outstayed by repeatedly visiting their flat in the evenings to enjoy the atmosphere of family life while away from mine.

But inevitably I spent most time with Alasdhair himself. We listened to comedy radio programmes, in particular I’m sorry I’ll read that again, featuring the team that went on to launch Monty Python along with the one that launched another TV programme, The Goodies. We cultivated our taste for science too, notably by stealing rather a lot of wire at one point, laying it around the roofs of the school and using it to run an illicit radio station. Fortunately, we were caught before we ran out of enthusiasm for becoming DJs.

We also tried fermenting potato juice and then breaking into the chemistry lab where we tried to distil the product into vodka. Our pains yielded a lot of broken lab equipment and a tasteless, murky liquid with absolutely no intoxicating effect.

What else did we do? We walked on Dartmoor until our feet felt like lead. We bored our contemporaries by talking about relativity theory without understanding it. We maintained a friendly rivalry over linguistic ability, which I probably edged over him in French, but he won hands down overall by also learning German.

I don’t want to give the impression that we lived in each other’s pockets, because we certainly didn’t. We each had our own circle of friends, his significantly larger than mine; our orbits simply intersected more often than most and we had too much in common not to keep gravitating towards each other.

After school, we kept up our bond by making for London to study Physics. We both got involved with the radical left and took our eyes off the study ball with the result that neither of us covered ourselves in academic glory, though he got closer to it than I did. We lived with some other friends in glorious squalor, in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of the unfashionable east of the city. We even took in a group of young West Indians we met locally, which led to some interesting and colourful experiences, not always with the most successful of outcomes.

After college, our ways parted, as he made for the States and I stayed in Europe. Even so, we spoke or wrote from time to time and met occasionally. We went skiing together, with the woman, Danielle, who became my wife and another who didn’t become his, and we spent time together in Danielle’s home region of Alsace, enjoying the life, the food and the drink of the three countries that join there, France, Germany and Switzerland.

We met in England too. On one occasion he, his first wife and I met in Oxford for a picnic. We started by shopping for delicacies – smoked salmon and smoked ham, melon, salads, French bread, white wine – after which we faced a characteristically English mishap, when the heavens opened and threw down a deluge which looked apt to drown us.

Fortunately, we found a gloriously English solution. In South Parks Road there is a cricket ground with a graceful wooden pavilion and, in those days, the grounds weren’t fenced off from the road. We repaired (quickly) to the terrace of the pavilion and found all we needed: a table and benches under shelter. The picnic was all the more memorable for taking place within a metre or two of dense downpour from which we were fully protected.

In later years, I was sorry to hear that his marriage had ended, but delighted by the pride he took in his children’s progress and the joy that gave him. I was pleased too by his second marriage, to Becky Villarreal, an event I know brought him solace in what turned out to be the last few months of his life.

For he remarried not long after learning that he was suffering from stage 4 cancer, the disease that had much earlier killed his mother. Cancer has no stage 5, unless we use that term for death. Even so, his doctors held out a meagre hope of giving him another year or two of life.

It really was a meagre hope and on 4 November, it ran out.

Alasdhair Campbell, 1953-2016
in Dartington Hall Gardens, one of his favourite places

Of all friends with whom I still maintained contact, Alasdhair was the one I’d known well longest. Though the contact was more tenuous in later years, it had never been broken; but because it was tenuous, its ending feels all the more unreal. I certainly haven’t accepted it yet, and still expect to write to him or hear from him at any time.

It’s a particularly strong feeling when I visit Oxford, as I still do frequently, and see the cricket ground and its pavilion. That leaves me smiling with pleasure at the memory of our picnic and ruefully at the fence that prevents any repetition of it. I feel it too whenever I travel by air, as it reminds me of the many long journeys Alasdhair used to take for work and which he would commentate on facebook. Indeed, it is on a plane that I’m writing this testimonial now.

Odd that he’s not around any more. Terribly unfair. And poignantly sad.

A smile for brexit, Storks like San Francisco Chinese, a fountain flowing with wine. And much more besides

A French policeman flagged us down as we crossed the border from Germany. He walked over to us, his face set, his air threatening. As we let down a window, he leaned in.

“Brexit or no Brexit?” he asked, having spotted our British number plates.

“No Brexit, no Brexit,” we chorused.

“OK, passez,” he assured us.

We’ve just spent a few packed days in the town where we used to live. That’s Kehl, in Germany, which has been a district of the great German city of Straßburg, or a market town opposite the great French city of Strasbourg, depending not so much on the geography but on the history of the region.

One place we visited was Basel, where there’s a celebration going on in honour of the sixth centennial of the publication the translation of the New Testament by Erasmus of Rotterdam, who lived the latter part of his life in the Swiss city. Among the many quotes from the great scholar, I particularly liked one in which he says that he wants to be a citizen of the world, at home anywhere or, better still, nowhere.

One of the Erasmus quotations scattered around Basel

Now there’s a thought for the dividing world we live in.

We visited cousins in Basel, and were struck by the storks’ nest on the chimneys of the house opposite.

“The council sent people up to destroy the nest as soon as it was made, but the storks rebuilt it within three days. By the time the authorities sent back people, there were already eggs and it was too late.”

This reminded me of a story we were told in San Francisco’s Chinatown years ago.

When the Chinese community first arrived it was granted some fairly lousy, worthless land outside the city limits. But then San Francisco grew and had to spread all around, forcing the price and desirability of the Chinese area up.

In 1906 came the devastating earthquake and fire. Chinatown was destroyed. The whites of San Francisco saw a way of making something positive of the disaster. They summoned a meeting of the council to take back control of the Chinese district.

Alas, it took two weeks for the council to meet. And in that time the Chinese had completely rebuilt their homes and businesses and it was too late to drive them out.

Hence today’s Chinatown.

Just like the pair of storks we saw in Basel.

We also visited a village in deepest Alsace, in the wine country.

That’s Alsace, the great province of eastern France, not Elsaß, which was more than once a flourishing province of western Germany.

In between some of the vines, we found cherry trees rich in fruit, ridiculously late, because of the lousy weather this year. We weren’t complaining though, as we picked and ate handfuls of different varieties of glorious cherries at every tree we reached.

Joy on a country walk

In the local village, we visited the fountain which will, at the annual feast day in a couple of weeks’ time, be flowing with wine instead of water. The sign above the fountain informs the visitor that it celebrates the moment when, by decree of the royal court in Colmar, the people of the village were freed of the feudal requirement to pay a tax in wine, in 1897.

Royal decree? In 1897? When France was firmly republican? Well, Alsace was Elsaß then and anything but firmly French. Colmar was a provincial city of the German Empire.

The village has a massive Protestant church and an only slightly less massive Catholic one. It also boasts are well-restored synagogue, though no real Jewish community any more. Still, the building’s impressive.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews of the village were pretty poor (few of any community were particularly wealthy). So many of the boys and young men would set out for the ‘fifth voyage.’ Their parents would find them enough money to get to the French coast somewhere, where they’d take menial service in one of the great transatlantic liners. Five crossings would allow them to pay for their passage, and at the end of the fifth they would leave the ship in the States and set out to make their fortunes.

Many did, and sent back funds to support their families and also endow their home village with a good synagogue. Which stands there to this day, near the Protestant and Catholic churches, as a mute monument to a fine state of affairs when three great faiths were able to live side by side without tearing each other apart.

Erasmus I suspect would have approved. As do I. It was an arrangement that should attract a smile as fulsome as the French policeman gave us, after he’d finished ribbing us about the Brexit vote.

That was a good experience. Brexit hasn’t given me much else to smile about.

Happy Liberation Day

Seventy years ago today, the city of Strasbourg fell to Free French forces, under the command of General Leclerc de Hautecloque.

French troops enter Strasbourg, November 1944

Strasbourg is the capital of Alsace, on the Rhine, as far East as you can get in France without finding yourself in Germany. In fact, for centuries many Germans claimed that once you were in Alsace (perhaps I should say Elsaß), you were already in Germany. 

The territory had been German until the seventeenth century, and became German again after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It was only reincorporated into France at the end of the First World War. When it was retaken by German forces in the Second, it wasn’t regarded as occupied France, but as re-integrated Reich territory. One particularly painful consequence was that, unlike other Frenchmen, young men from Alsace were treated as Reich citizens and subject to call-up.

So to drive the Germans out of Strasbourg was to achieve not just a military victory, but a major symbolic one. It would mark the definitive end of German occupation, with only minor operations left to clear the final German positions.

But it was even more symbolic because of the words pronounced nearly four years earlier by the French commander, then Colonel Leclerc. He had captured the Italian position at Kufra, in the Sahara desert of Lybia, at the head of Free French forces brought up from Chad.

Leclerc and his officers watch the French flag being raised
over the Italian fort at Kufra, March 1941

In the great scheme of things, the battle of Kufra was unimportant. Fewer than 700 soldiers were involved. Its significance was that it marked France’s return to the war on the Allied side, and what’s more, marked it with a victory. It was an acorn; Leclerc had the vision to see the oak it could turn into.

So at the end of the battle, in March 1941, he had his troops swear what has come to be known as the oath of Kufra:

Swear not to lay down your arms until our colours, our beautiful colours, are floating from Strasbourg Cathedral.

He understood the importance of the capture of Strasbourg, and set it as his goal before he’d even left Africa.

On 23 November 1944, the goal was achieved. And, indeed, a young soldier took it on himself to scale the tower of the Cathedral and fly the flag from it.

Today, Strasbourg has become a city symbolising peace. No one challenges French sovereignty over it. Why, French and German military units even train together nearby. The Council of Europe, including the Court of Human Rights, brings together representatives from all over the Continent in the city.

We lived in or near Strasbourg for eight years, and I nurture the hope of moving back some day. Tonight, I’ll raise a glass to all my friends in and around that fine city, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of its final liberation.

And for now, put this note up to mark the day.

The French flag still flies frequently today
over the Cathedral in Strasbourg

Countdown to War. Day 8, 5 July: Did someone say war?

One hundred years ago today, on Sunday 5 July 1914, the young Mancunian Martin would have visited his Methodist Minister, to collect the Observer once he’d finished with it.
 
Like the Manchester Guardian the previous day, the Sunday paper reflected on the Entente Cordiale or cordial understanding between France and Britain. 

Now that this instrument of peace and understanding between the two nations is such an accepted, and let us hope a solid, factor in international polity, a certain retrospect is all the more welcome...

Peace and understanding. The hallmark of 1914, as US and Canadian troops showed when they met in Vermont the day before, for joint commemorations of the end of the War of 1812 a hundred years earlier. That was the spirit when “the American Ambassador was the principal guest at a banquet given at the Savoy Hotel last night by the American Society in London in celebration of Independence Day,” an event attended by 250 and which “evoked much enthusiasm.”

As usual, however, neither peace nor understanding were particularly in evidence in Ireland. Although the paper reported on a speech by Tory MP Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland: “the chance of civil war, in his opinion, had become very small,” which ought to be encouraging, Martin remained sceptical. Their denials only reinforced the ideas politicians tried to dismiss, if only because they raised them. In any case, another article, headlined  “Rifles in Belfast”, pointed out that “the South Belfast Regiment of the Ulster Volunteers openly carried rifles and bayonets through the streets of Belfast in a march yesterday afternoon.”

That hardly seemed like a gesture for peace.

It also seemed that the repercussions of the shooting in Bosnia still hadn’t entirely died down, as Martin had begun to believe:

According to a telegram from Sarajevo it has now been ascertained that ten persons were implicated in the conspiracy. They have all been arrested. All telegraph and telephone communications with Sarajevo are now under strict censorship, and are only permitted to be made in German.

Clearly, the Austrians were taking things seriously in their restless province. That was underlined by another piece which, like the comments about Ireland, only increased the fears it was trying to allay:

A semi-official communiqué issued in Budapest warns Servia that although Austria-Hungary does not desire a war with Servia, she expects the Servian Government to fulfil all [its] obligations in connection with “the crime which was undoubtedly promoted in Belgrade.”

War? That word hadn’t been used before. Even mentioning the possibility seemed to raise the spectre of a tragic event being turned into an international disaster.

German troops in the formerly French city of Strasbourg in 1915

Meanwhile elsewhere, another “semi-official” announcement had been issued, this time by the German authorities, for their province of Alsace, seized from France 43 years earlier:

TRICOLOUR BANNED IN ALSACE

A semi-official warning against the wearing of the French colours was published here today. The warning states that it has recently been observed that French colours and badges have been worn in a conspicuous manner, especially by persons returning from excursions across the frontier, and adds that it is desirable to recall the fact that the public display of these colours in an offence punishable under a decree of 1848, which has been confirmed by numerous judicial decisions with imprisonment and fines.

So it seemed that even among local people, tensions were still simmering over which nation should control the province.

The Royal Navy: never stronger

It was unfortunate that France and Germany couldn’t patch up their differences. After all, Britain’s “cordial understanding” with France didn’t prevent her having equally cordial relations with Germany. Why, even their navies, though rivals, got on well enough. The Observer carried an item from Kiel, Germany’s main base on the Baltic:

It is announced that before the departure of the British Squadron from Kiel on Tuesday, Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender sent the following telegram by wireless from his flagship King Geroge V. to Admiral von Cörper, the commander of the Baltic station:–
“Before leaving Kiel Bay I beg you and the commander-in-chief to accept the hearty thanks of the British Squadron for the magnificent hospitality shown to officers and men, comrades in the past and always.”

Heartwarming.

They died – for what?

Today’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ programme on the BBC quoted a British General in Afghanistan saying ‘don’t ask me if it was worth it. It wasn’t worth it.’

There seems to be a general conspiracy never to admit that we’ve sent young men and women to their deaths without purpose. The press is quick to accuse anyone who dares voice a doubt of undermining the forces themselves and denying consolation to their bereaved relatives – as though anything could be worse than the bereavement itself.

A few days ago I visited a church in Saverne, in Northern Alsace, and came across a plaque:

Age shall not wither them. But if only it had been allowed to...

Some eighty men from a single battalion died over eight years of what can hardly be dignified by the word war: it was a last ditch attempt by the French government to hang on to its colony in Algeria. The full story of the war crimes committed during that time has yet to be told. In any case the effort failed: France withdrew from Algeria, and all the atrocities were for nothing.

Fifty years on, a church celebrates their deaths ‘for France’. And yet it’s hard to see in what sense their deaths served their country. If anything, Algerian independence has done far less for Algeria – a string of authoritarian governments, a long and vicious civil war – while it helped free France from imperial illusions, allowing it to carve a new role for itself as a European nation.

Something Britain has still to learn to do.

As for the French people, they’re not sending young people out there to be maimed or killed. It was ending the war that served them, not prosecuting it.

When my wife, Danielle, was growing up at the other end of Alsace, she was close to her cousin, something of an elder brother to her. It was a blow when he was called up for military service, and a far greater one when he was sent to Algeria and she lost contact with him for the best part of two years.

But no blow was worse than when he returned, unrecognisably transformed. Introverted, bitter, quick to anger. Over the next two decades he sank deeper into alcoholism and watched his life fall apart: he became a chronic invalid; he was fired from his job, which took some doing since he was employed by his father; while his family stayed together, home life became increasingly fraught.

Finally, his frame could take it no more and his difficult life came to an end in his forties.

His name won’t appear on a plaque anywhere. These memorials are always big on the fallen, but they say far less about the ones who came back alive. Some of them are horribly maimed and needing lifetime care which they don’t all receive. Others are much less visibly injured and fall through the net of the care system. And some like Danielle’s cousin have wounds so deep inside them that they are often not even recognised.

He took his injury serving in a war which gained France nothing. Now we’re beginning to hear the people who know best say that the Afghan conflict will have proved as futile.

But men and women are coming back from it as damaged as Freddy was. The United States and Britain have a major problem of injured veterans unable to find the treatment they need or even regular employment.

It’s time to admit the truth about them. We sent them out there. It was a pointless exercise. The least we can do is look after them.

And become a lot less casual about doing it all again somewhere else.

A big hand for handiwork

Wouldn’t it be great if we learned to value manual work properly? Especially if that meant being in less awe of the men (and tiny number of women) who draw their seven-figure salaries by getting others to push ten-figure numbers around computer screens. Particularly since manual work doesn’t usually put the whole world economy into a tailspin.

All these thoughts came to me yesterday morning while visiting old friends in Alsace. Regular readers of this blog will remember that this region is in eastern France. I stress the fact because just before I left I had a kind e-mail from a friend wishing me a good break ‘in Germany’. Three moments of extreme unpleasantness in three generations (the second and third better known as the First and Second World Wars) tested whether Alsace was in Germany and established that it wasn’t.

Ironically, we were visiting a family of Germans who came to live here over sixty years ago. The founder of the dynasty died earlier this year and his son René and son-in-law Tibi have taken over the glassblowing business he set up and lived from for half a century. Tibi embodies what it means to be a modern European: he’s a Hungarian-speaking Romanian, married into a German family living in France. 

He showed me around the workshop.

‘Artistic glassblowing is great, but you can’t live by it,’ he told me, ‘so we build precision glass equipment for chemistry labs.’

Fun to put grapes inside a glass but it doesn't pay the bills

The works are only minutes away from the Swiss city of Basel with its huge pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

‘We blow the end of one short tube of glass into a concave shape, another into a convex one. My job is to grind both ends until they fit together perfectly: the pieces move unhindered against each other but without allowing water or impurities to slip between them.’

The work is slow and painstaking. But it has one huge advantage: no-one has yet come up with a way of automating it.

It also belongs to along tradition of scientific work. My physics teacher at school had done his PhD under no less a figure than Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel laureate.

‘He illustrated a principle of his work to me once,’ my teacher told us, ‘with a story about C. T. R. Wilson.’ Wilson is best known to the general public, if he is known at all, as the inventor of the cloud chamber.

‘Rutherford met him in Birmingham when he was over on a visit from the US, and found him grinding a glass stopper to make a hermetic seal with a bottle.’ Watching Tibi on his grinding machine this morning reminded me of the story. ‘Five years later, Wilson was back in this country and Rutherford saw him in London. And, unbelievably, he was grinding the same bottle stopper.’

The story was told to show how patient scientific work has to be. Now I don’t believe Wilson had really been grinding for five years, but I do believe Tibi when he says that on top form, he can finish 35 pieces of his work, but it can be far fewer. And a batch contains 1000. He grinds them all to an accuracy of a hundredth of a millimetre.

The daily grind: Tibi inspects his work for accuracy

 They all help support research which might ultimately benefit the whole of mankind by increasing the efficiency of processes or delivering new cures for diseases.

They aren’t likely to cause the whole of the world’s financial system to fall apart at the seams.

They are never going to give the skilled artisan working on them a seven-figure bonus.

A useful reminder that we may have some work to do sorting out our sense of priorities.

Part of the latest batch of a thousand

Royal Indifference

On 31 August 1997, we were staying at my mother-in-law’s house in a little village in upper Alsace, France. 

I stress ‘France’ because of the widespread confusion over whether Alsace is in Germany, a confusion the Germans spectacularly shared on three occasions between 1870 and 1945.

Friends of ours from England were staying in a hotel nearby and joined us for breakfast. Their first words as they came in were ‘do you know about Princess Di?’

We hadn’t heard about her death in a car crash that morning.

In a matter of instants I travelled from incredulity to grief. And that grief led me straight back to incredulity. Why on earth was I so upset?

After all, not a week earlier we had been royally dismissing her highness. She’d been on holiday in a seaside villa where she had complained vociferously about being photographed from boats on the bay and had then chosen to sunbathe on the roof of the house, in about as perfect a position for the photographers as any imaginable.

It seemed an odd way to avoid publicity.

And yet I mourned her death. As did most of my countrymen, though some went a lot further in their grief than I was prepared to follow them.

I never went down to St James’s House to lay flowers. I really couldn’t work up any enthusiasm over whether the Queen had flown a flag at half mast or not. I couldn’t get passionate about Tony Blair’s intense reaction to the event, which I assumed had owed a great deal to perceived electoral advantage anyway.

A sea of flowers in the ocean of grief for Diana's death

Even so, I'd joined many of my countrymen on the roller-coaster ride from disdain to despair, by which we had illustrated, as if illustration were needed, that the opposite of love isn’t hatred but indifference. Clearly, though I had thought myself indifferent to the royal family (a bunch of polo-playing jet setters: how could they possibly speak for me?), I had been less indifferent than I hoped. 

I was apparently caught up in that bizarre love-hate affair between the British people and the royal family that shows no sign of dying down to this day. The Queen’s Jubilee, her cameo performance at the Olympic opening ceremony, stoked the love; but it takes only the slightest provocation to bring out all the worst in prurient spite again, as we’ve seen in the publication of the nude pictures of Prince Harry and now the topless photos of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.

Ironic that we should have a row over Kate’s breasts just days after the relaunch of the campaign to stop the Sun newspaper’s topless page 3 girls.

I seem to have made a little progress since 1997. Had they not been reproduced in a mass-circulation tabloid on sale on every street corner, I would have seen none of the photos of Harry; at least, I didn’t go looking for any.

Similarly, it was a relief to discover that I not only avoided googling Kate’s breasts, I didn’t even have to resist a temptation to do so. I found it more interesting to read about the murder of the US ambassador in Libya which struck me as potentially more significant in our lives. After all, the Kate business had generated vitriol, but Libya produces oil.

Perhaps I’m learning a little of the indifference I was lacking before. It would be a comfort to know that the nation was doing the same, and for two reasons.

First, because this swinging backwards and forwards between adulation and contempt can’t be doing any of us any good.

Second, if we’re ever going to solve some of the problems that beset society, we need to unlearn our cult of deference towards those who claim the prerogative to be considered our betters. Then we’ll be able to learn how to insist on the right to make our own destiny.

It will be a measure of our success that we stop ogling the royals and buying the papers that feed us all the titbits (and the pun’s deliberate). That will mean mastering our thirst for publicity about them. 

Taking their statements at face value, that ought to please the royals. However, I wonder how happy they would really be at the prospect of drifting out of the public eye.

But by then, in our blessed indifference, why would any of us care what they thought?