Popularising an ugly game

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

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

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

East of Aldgate, you walk into a foreign town

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

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

Returning to Evans-Gordon, he also declared:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police at the riots in Dublin

Rioters shouted anti-immigrant slogans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impartiality? Sure. As long as you’re impartial for us

It’s with some delight that I see Gary Lineker, ex-leading England footballer, returning to the BBC’s Match of the Day programme, on which he was an outstanding presenter and commentator.

Well, I say outstanding. To be honest, it’s been decades since I’ve watched Match of the Day. But people who know about these things tell me he really is outstanding.

Small-boat immigrants in the Channel

He was suspended because he put some tweets up about the UK government’s plans to stop illegal immigrants travelling across the English Channel in small boats. Those plans involve keeping them in centres that have yet to be built before deporting them back to the countries they came from, or to a range of third countries, that have yet to say they’ll take any. Except for Rwanda. It’s prepared to take 200.

For the record, more than 40,000 such immigrants arrived in Britain last year. If I've got the arithmetic right, Rwanda’s generosity represents around 0.5% of the total.

Gary Lineker

Lineker’s tweets compared the government’s language over its proposals to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Well, perhaps that wasn’t entirely wise. There’s a good principle, known as Godwin’s law, that says that the longer an online debate goes on, the closer it gets to a comparison with the Nazis or Adolf Hitler. An often-quoted spin-off rule is that such a comparison should end the debate, and the person who has made it has lost the argument.

Still, the principle behind Lineker’s comment seems entirely justified. Perhaps rather than compare the government’s thinking to Hitler’s, we could compare it to that of other less controversial, more contemporary but still weird figures. Take Matteo Salvini, for instance, who as Interior Minister in Italy, closed the country’s ports to vessels that had rescued immigrants who’d been left drowning in the Mediterranean when the boats carrying them sank.

Presumably he felt that it was better to let people drown than to let them in. 

He also once said that what Italy needed was “a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighbourhood by neighbourhood”.

It’s hard not to think that he sees certain people as pretty much sub-human. Which is, I think we can agree, more than a little ugly. Without even having to break Godwin’s Law. 

Incidentally, Matteo Salvini has congratulated the British government on its stance on illegal immigration to the country. Which probably tells you as much as you need to know about the policy.

Salvini: indifferent to the suffering of immigrants
and a great fan of the British government approach

In any case, the motivation given by the BBC for Lineker’s suspension, was that it needs to maintain its strict impartiality. Now, I think that’s an important principle. Perhaps, though, the BBC ought to start by setting its own house in order. Its Chairman, Richard Sharp, is a long-time donor to the Conservative Party. He’s also under investigation for having organised a loan for the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, at just the time when he was being considered for appointment to the chairmanship. That’s a decision over which the Prime Minister has serious influence.

I don’t know. It may just be me. But that history suggests to me that there’s a much bigger problem of impartiality at the BBC than Lineker. I can’t help feeling that impartiality matters more at the top of the organisation than at the level of a sports presenter.

It’s hard not to feel that there are people out there who think that impartiality is good, but only as long as it’s impartiality for them. Rather like Donald Trump, who’s keen on free speech, as long as it’s freely adoring of him.

In any case, impartiality is most important when it comes to news and current affairs. Football commentating? I’m not sure it matters that much. Besides, Lineker didn’t make his comments on air in his capacity as a BBC presenter, he made them on his private Twitter account. And he isn’t even a BBC employee, but a freelancer.

All this made it heart-warming to see how many of his fellow commentators and presenters on sports programmes supported him by refusing to do their broadcasts. That left the BBC’s sports coverage in tatters over the weekend. Which, no doubt, explains the end of the suspension.

A delight, as I say. Though perhaps more of a relief. At least, for as long as this setback to the Salvini trend in British politics endures.

More on the life of Immigrants in Valencia: cleaning the woods, revelling with the ‘Chinese’

It has been quite a learning experience, since we became immigrants in Spain and moved to a house near woodland. 

I had no idea how much work it takes to keep it clean and tidy. We’d been out once before, with a bunch of volunteers, picking up litter. On Saturday, we were in the La Vallesa woods near where we live, shifting branches and small trees.

Tidying up the woods at La Vallesa

Professionals had been in before us, with their chainsaws, thinning and pruning. Now we were doing the grunt work of shifting the branches down to paths where they could easily be reached by trucks with equipment to turn them into chips, to be fed back into the ground. Which sounds like a good plan.

Taking some of the trees out lets the others grow more strongly, with less competition for the scarce resources in this not hugely fertile soil. Then, using the felled branches to provide further feed, strengthens them still further. Besides, and this is one of the main aims, the organisers reckon that thinning the woods reduces the danger of disastrous fires. These woods have had plenty of them, even if nothing on the scale of Australia, but then that’s just the fate we’re trying to avoid.

The relatively small fire at La Vallesa in 2014

As has been the case every time we’ve joined a group around here in Valencia, the people we met were immensely welcoming and friendly. One of the organisations, of the six behind the initiative (which naturally meant six, mercifully brief, speeches at the beginning, as each had to have its say), one was an association providing mental health support for young people. Some of their users were there, and it was a great pleasure to see how much they enjoyed being out with the group and doing work that was so useful.

Some were helping us, but others were with the group of children who'd come with their parents and who were planting other trees, oaks and chestnuts, in the hope of introducing a little more diversity in the woods. 

That was the start of the day. In the evening, we went to see the celebration of the Chinese New Year in Valencia city itself. There’s quite a large Chinese community in the region, including a small but growing Chinatown with some excellent restaurants and shops, and an area out by the airport where Chinese companies line up along the road with their warehouses.

The Chinese New Year parade
working its way through the Valencia Chinatown

Still, the parade was by no means exclusively Chinese. I wouldn’t even say that Chinese people were in the majority. But the celebrations involved letting off firecrackers and fireworks around a parade which included at least a dozen groups of drummers, hammering their drums with tremendous energy and enthusiasm. Nothing could possibly appeal to Valencians more. Their great festival each year involves wandering the streets and letting off firecrackers, in two varieties: one that sounds like machinegun fire, and the other like heavy artillery.

The streets in which they do that are decorated with large sculptures in highly inflammable material. So, if it’s inflammable, what do you reckon they do with it? Yep, that’s right. On the last night they set fire to them, while filling the sky with fireworks and the ground, naturally, with yet more crackers.

A sculpture burning at the Valencia ‘Fallas’

With that background, Valencians were bound to take to the Chinese New Year with unbounded enthusiasm. As we discovered when we stood in the crowd in the little Chinatown to watch the parade go by. “Let’s get ourselves some Chinese costumes,” they must have said, “join an appropriate association and go out to beat our drums.” And they did just that, with obvious and infectious joy.

Valencian drummers in Chinese costume, enjoying the parade

A fun way to spend a day, in the woods in the morning, at the parade in the evening.

Afterthought

There were a few, very few, face masks being worn by people in the crowd at the Chinatown parade. I’m not quite sure what they were trying to protect themselves against. Did they think that merely being at a Chinese New Year event would expose them to coronavirus?

At any rate, I’m glad to say that, to my knowledge, there wasn’t a single case of infection from Wuhan at the celebrations in Valencia.

The immigrant in Spain: the joy of officialdom

In our continuing exploration of the exciting experience of being immigrants, we are discovering – or rather, rediscovering – the joys of dealing with public authorities. Because, you see, their procedures differ significantly from one country to another.

The ticket for your turn
Vital whatever you're after

For instance, when we moved to France, we knew we were going to be dealing with one of the most bureaucratised nations in Europe. The “village postmistress” is the iconic representative to the French of the worst kind of public service: she’s rude, dismissive and profoundly unhelpful. You know, the type who tells you that you needed Form 31B completed and signed by a doctor and then, when you return with Form 31B duly signed and completed, that it had to be the version in green not the version in buff.

So imagine my surprise when we moved to Strasbourg. I knew we had to register with the local authorities but didn’t know how soon. In the end, I went four months after we arrived. The interview went well, the young woman dealing with my case being polite, good-humoured and apparently efficient.

I know one should never offer anyone in authority any information for which they haven’t asked. For instance, like an experienced border crosser, I never show my passport unless told to produce it. But somehow on this occasion my conscience was bothering me, so I asked a question I never should have.

“Oh, by the way, just how long does one have to register? Is it three months or six?”

She looked up from the paperwork with an expression as cool as it was level.

“You have a week,” and paused dramatically. “But did I ask you when you got here?”

Later we moved just across the border into Germany. That’s the country of ‘Ordnung muß sein’, perhaps best translated as ‘order is to be respected’. So we were a bit worried about how the authorities would react when we decided we wanted a wood-burning stove.

“You need a chimney sweep to give your chimney a safety certificate and you can go ahead.” I had visions of complex inspections, failed on technicalities, and mountains of paperwork. But she went blithely on. “Here’s a list of local sweeps; personally, I was always find this one least demanding when it comes to the certificates.”

Now we’re in Spain. The land, we were told of ‘mañana’, where everyone prefers the easy life, where “laid-back” is a national pastime.

The first shock was to discover the punctuality of the people we’ve met. Not just for business meetings, either. We’ve found that friends are always on time simply to go out for a walk – and punctual not because they’re on time, but because they turn up ten minutes early to be sure they’re not late.

And then there are the authorities.

To be fair, despite a small number of exceptions, they’re uniformly friendly and kind. Even one who wasn’t to start with, ended up wreathed in smiles at the end of our interview. It was either that she’d had a lousy client just before us and it took a while for her to recover her equanimity, or that she was charmed by my delightful selection of Dad jokes – a little laboured in my halting Spanish but still up to the same remarkable standard as I achieve in English (OK, please resist the comment, it’s much too obvious).

The problem isn’t the people, it’s the process. I’ve already remarked that you can never do anything in a single visit in Spain. The first visit is so that you can be told that, although you followed the steps outlined on their website pretty well exactly, you failed to take one crucial step, or failed to bring one crucial document, or possibly failed to go to the right building in the first place, so that you have to plan for another visit. Or possibly more than one.

Most recently, it was the payment of a duty. We’d followed the online instructions carefully, including printing the document and taking it to the bank to make the necessary payment. But it turned out that, had we ticked another box (for, so the form claimed, a ‘supplementary’ payment, and we thought we only need the basic service), we’d have been charged a couple of euros more, and that was the sum we should have paid. Fortunately, they told us that this time we wouldn’t need a new appointment, but should just bring in the reprinted form with the bank’s certification that we’d paid the correct sum.

That was good news. Because this was a police office and if you showed up without an appointment, you had to take a ticket and wait your turn. But when your turn came around, all it enabled you to do was to make an appointment – and for two months down the line, the pressure on that service being so intense. To go through that again would have been soul-destroying.

As it happens, even with an appointment, we weren’t seen at the allotted time. Instead, just after the specified time, someone came out and gave us – a ticket. So we had to wait for our turn to come up on the display just like anyone who didn’t have an appointment.

You had an appointment? So what?
Wait your turn like anyone else.

So what was the point of having an appointment, you may well ask? Well, it meant that this time around, we actually had a proper interview. The one when they told us we’d paid the wrong level of duty.

But, hey, the man who told us did it politely and with a smile. Which makes all the difference, doesn’t it? A cold, unsmiling bureaucrat, of the kind we have in England, is so much harder to deal with.

So I can now confidently say that, of the countries I’ve had to deal with, Spain certainly has the most complex and time-consuming of administrative systems. But ironically, it’s quite pleasant.

Because the people are.

There are immigrants and immigrants

It’s curious being an immigrant again.

Queuing to get into Valencia

I mean, it’s not the first time. That’s not counting my childhood in Rome, where I wasn’t an immigrant but an expat. If you don’t think that’s an important distinction, think again. Expats are people who never really belong. They’re usually in the country for a relatively short time, maybe on a limited contract, often with an embassy or a research institution or some kind of international organisation.

They tend to congregate with others of their kind, talking their own language, and have the sense that they’ll be gone within a while anyway, once their tour of duty is up. They tend to talk about the local people with a definite article, as in “the Italians do such-and-such”, where such-and-such is usually something that the person talking about it doesn’t like much.

The first time I was a real immigrant was when I moved to France in the late nineties. I was on a French contract with a company incorporated in French law. In fact, when it all fell through, it was great to have French law to fall back on with its generous approach to unemployment benefit. A lot more generous than, say, Britain’s. You can actually live on French unemployment pay.

Still. France was a bit special. As the husband of a Frenchwoman, I had a right to French nationality. Once I’d started work again, I set about securing it as quickly as I could. When it came through, I wasn’t an immigrant any more, but in my home country. My second home country, indeed, but a home country nonetheless.

But then we moved just across the border – a short car drive from the superb eastern French city of Strasbourg – into Germany. There we were truly immigrants once more, and it was fun. Discovering how things were done. Struggling, in my case (Danielle is a fluent German speaker), with a different language. Learning to enjoy different foods and pastimes. A great experience.

And now we’ve started all over again. Immigrants to Spain. Without Spanish citizenship or any right to claim it. Truly foreigners making a new home for ourselves in a different country.

It’s proving just as enjoyable as Germany. It helps, I suspect, that though our Spanish is execrable, we let ourselves go and speak it anyway. Far from reacting with horror at the way we’re massacring their language, they seem pleased, relieved even at not having to struggle with English to communicate with us.

So they just talk Spanish at us and, if we only understand two words in three, it doesn’t matter because they’re more than happy to explain what they meant. Making friends has proved surprisingly easy and, even among those who haven’t become friends, we’ve found people gratifyingly friendly.

There have naturally been a few problems. Civil servants tend to be a pain. Some of them take a perverse delight in telling you that you haven’t got the right document and need to come back in six weeks’ time when you’ve got it. However, in some cases we’ve found that even those can become quite pleasant if we persevere, trying to talk Spanish, until smiles eventually replace the frowns and rudeness.

We’ve also discovered that there’s no point thinking you can do anything in a single meeting. It will always take two or even three. The first may be where they tell you’ve gone to the wrong place. But even if that isn’t the case, it’s where they tell you that you don’t have the right documents. Generally, though, when you get there for the final meeting, having booked the appointment correctly, with the right papers, it all goes smoothly and even cordially

Nor is it only in the public sector that it all takes so long. Any big institution seems hopelessly sclerotic with bureaucracy. The banks, for instance, as well as ministries or local councils. Most organisations here have websites these days, and online procedures for doing administrative jobs. But again and again, you get to the final stage, when you’ve filled in page after page of information and uploaded half a dozen scanned documents, and you press the ‘Submit’ button, only to get an error message that tells you helpfully that ‘there is an error with your application’.

The only solution seems to be to go to the place in person, because they certainly don’t answer emails or return calls in response to voicemail. That’s what I generally do these days, without even attempting the online route. It may take a little longer but, in the end, you get smiles and your case dealt with – even the people in the bank are charming if you go and see them yourself – and that was the aim of the exercise, wasn’t it?

So we’re enjoying our status as immigrants.

Still, I know we’re immigrants who get an easy ride. We’re not Muslim or dark in skin colour. We’re not the ones who get told to go back home. I can’t begin to compare my achievements with those of Ilhan Omar, who has risen from refugee roots to become a US Congresswoman. That only makes it all the more shocking that she has been the target of racist attacks from her president.

And think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps one of the most impressive performers in the US House of Representatives, agree with her or not, also called on to go back home – though she isn’t an immigrant at all, but US born and bred.

The 'squad' of awkward women of colour in Congress, attacked by Trump
Ilhan Omar is speaking. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is next to her in black

No. There are immigrants and immigrants. Some are treated gently. Others are the butts of aggression from people who draw encouragement from such as Trump. They face attack even if they are merely descended from immigrants (and how many of us aren’t?) and only distinguished by the colour of their skin or their faith.

We’ve seen that there can be joy in being an immigrant. Oh, how I wish we lived in a world where that was true for all of us.

Hey, New Zealand: couldn't you lend us Jacinda for a while?

It’s a tale of two accidental leaders…

Jacinda Ardern was never meant to be Prime Minister of New Zealand. Or at least not yet, not so early as to make her the youngest in a century and a half. She was serving as Deputy Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party when, just seven weeks ahead of the 2017 General Election, the then Leader, Andrew Little, stood down in the face of the dire poll standing of the party.

That’s not an issue for the British Labour Party under its present leadership. It trails a thoroughly discredited Tory government in the polls, at a point when it needs to be well ahead to stand any chance of winning the next election. But Corbynists shrug such matters off. There’ll be a surge, they say, as there was last time. They ignore the fact that the surge wasn’t enough to win and only produced a defeat less drastic than had been feared.

Funnily enough, Corbyn was an accidental leader too. He only stood for the leadership because no one else on the left was prepared to throw his name into the hat. He had no expectation of winning and, indeed, only made it onto the ballot because political opponents within Labour agreed to nominate him as a way of giving the left a chance to be in the game. They didn’t think he’d win either, and how they must be regretting it now.

As it happens, Ardern didn’t win the General Election. She came second with 46 parliamentary seats to the National (conservative) Party’s 56. But coalition negotiations allowed her to assemble a government and she took office. Since then, she’s impressed again and again, including in her personal behaviour: giving birth while in office in a way that charmed the nation.

At no time has she been more impressive than in response to the dire events that took place last Friday, 15 March. A new and far more dreadful Ides of March than those that marked the assassination of Julius Caesar. In Christchurch, a terrorist opened fire in two Mosques killing 50 worshippers and injuring many others.

Her statement to Parliament moved me to tears. She found an extraordinarily powerful way of expressing her total solidarity with the victims and their friends or relatives. It was a moving statement that said that these Muslim immigrants belonged to New Zealand and New Zealand belonged to them. It was a highly effective way of rejecting the views of anyone who might be inclined to nurse  xenophobic feelings towards the victims, a sense that it was tragic but nonetheless, they were somehow wrong to have come to New Zealand, that they were in some sense responsible for the attack on them.

She said:

We cannot know your grief, but we can walk with you at every stage. We can. And we will, surround you with aroha, manaakitanga and all that makes us, us. Our hearts are heavy but our spirit is strong.

Jacinda Ardern with the victims
Showing aroha, manaakitanga and ... leadership

She spoke of “us”, embracing all New Zealanders. And she underlined the message by using the Maori words for love and a much deeper sense of hospitality. The Prime Minister was saying categorically and clearly that the victims belonged in New Zealand and deserved its welcome.

Talking of the presumed perpetrator who, following her example, will not be named here, she said:

A 28-year-old man – an Australian citizen – has been charged with one count of murder. Other charges will follow. He will face the full force of the law in New Zealand. The families of the fallen will have justice.

He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety.

And that is why you will never hear me mention his name.

He is a terrorist. He is a criminal. He is an extremist.

But he will, when I speak, be nameless.

And to others I implore you: speak the names of those who were lost, rather than name of the man who took them.

He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing. Not even his name.

I find it hard to read these words, courageous, outspoken, resolute, without feeling a pricking of tears in my eyes.

Compare them with what Jeremy Corbyn said when asked whether, in a second referendum, he might vote for Brexit:

It depends on what the choice is in front of us. If we’ve got a good deal in which we can have a dynamic relationship with Europe which is all the trading relationships and so on that might be a good way forward that unites the country.

“It depends”. A prevaricating, vacillating reply. And why does he make it? Because he thinks there is a Brexit deal that can unite the country. Which means he wants to pull in the xenophobes who voted to leave the EU out of a dislike of immigrants. Where Ardern tells xenophobes that New Zealand stands for different values, Corbyn tries to appease them.

He must know he can’t. Any deal that he would call ‘good’ would involve a softer Brexit that leave voters would regard as a betrayal. He’s making the same error so many others have made before him, not least David Cameron who called the Brexit referendum: he’s throwing raw meat to people who will only demand more, when they see that pushing their demands gives results.

Ardern stood firm and she’ll be admired for it. Corbyn yielded and he’ll be despised. Two accidental leaders, but only one is truly a leader, showing that accidents can turn out well on some occasions and pitifully badly on others.

How I wish we could borrow her for Britain, to lead Labour, and eventually the country. And send Corbyn back to his allotment to tend to his vegetables. He’d be much happier. As would Britain.

Alas, New Zealand wouldn’t let her go. But can we perhaps can find her like ourselves? At least she’s shown us what to look for.

Immigrants: the problems

One of the most difficult tasks an immigrant faces is adapting to a new culture.

For instance, since we’ve arrived in Valencia, we’ve had to learn about shop opening times. Shopkeepers like to open in the morning until a late lunch, of impressive length, followed by a second opening in the evening.

That wasn’t a problem, in principle, until we discovered that the reality doesn’t always correspond to the theory.

It’s particularly confusing with restaurants and bars. You look them up on Google. It tells you comfortingly that the place is open right now. You walk thirty minutes to get there only to find a firmly locked door. You look at the sign next to it. “Open”, it says, “from 10:00 till 22:00 without interruption”. You check your watch. It’s 15:00. But the door is indisputably locked.

Sometimes you’ll find a little handwritten sign saying something like “we’ll be back at 19:30” which at least tells you what’s happened – the staff needed a break and, hey, who’s going to let a mere notice of opening hours dictate their lives? I mean, such notices aren’t posted under oath. They’re not a commitment or anything.

I particularly enjoyed the visit to a pet shop I made. I wanted some chews for the poodles who’d been looking at me pathetically all morning. What did they want? I’d wondered. And, since we were out of chews, I decided that this mght be what they were missing.

At the pet shop, I pushed at the door but it wouldn’t yield. I looked inside. It was a bit dim but there were lights on. Alongside the door was a sign proclaiming that the shop was open from 10:00 till 14:30 and from 17:30 till 20:00. My watch was unambiguously clear: it was 11:30. The shop should have been open.

And then my eye was caught by a large sign in the middle of the door, one it was hard to believe I’d missed before. “ABIERTO” it proclaimed in letters that filled an A4 page. “OPEN”. No mistaking it.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but having read the word I tried the door again. I suppose unconsciously I assumed it was enough to have read the statement that the shop was open for it to prove, indeed, open.

Unsurprisingly, the door remained locked.

A terrible picture of two disappointed poodles was beginning to form in my mind. In my desperation, I looked around again and saw – oh, joy! – a doorbell. I rang. Moments later a woman appeared from the back of the shop and, smiling at me through the glass, opened the door, let me in and sold me some chews. She didn’t apologise or even explain what had happened. But I noticed as I was walking away that she was busily locking the shop door again.

The poodles were happy, anyway.

Fallas sculpture on a Valencia street

As it happens, we’re not just immigrants, but refugees. And, at the moment, twice over. Firstly, from the whole sorry mess of Brexit, where Britain has given in to its worst xenophobic instincts to inflict a terrible wound on itself. But secondly, we have taken refugefrom the Fallas in Valencia.

The Fallas are probably one of the greatest fiestas in Spain. Men, women, children, the old and the young, parade through the streets in glorious traditional costumes. Great sculptures appear on many street intersections, only to be burned in a huge series of bonfires accompanied by fireworks on the final night. And, throughout, the city is filled with firecrackers being let off in all sorts of places by all sorts of people.

I don’t just mean the ordinary firecrackers that sound like a cap gun. Oh, no. In Valencia, one kind of cracker sounds like a pistol being fired. And then there’s the other kind, in the form of a tube about as long as a coke can and a half, which explodes with the sound of a heavy artillery piece. And it wouldn’t be so bad if there were only one of these at a time, but Valencians like to hang up garlands of the damned things so that ten or twenty of them fire in rapid succession.

Did I say they were let off by all sorts of places by all sorts of people? I should have added “at all sorts of time”. There is no quiet moment, day or night. Oh, no. This goes on 24 hours a day. The firecrackers turn Valencia from a pleasant, welcoming, friendly city into a simulation of Beirut at the height of the Lebanese civil war.

I have to confess to a certain wimpishness over these matters. While some people travel great distances just to take part in the Fallas, I do appreciate having a certain amount of sleep each night. Valencia in the Fallas is not a place to encourage such ludicrous aspirations.

We suffered the Fallas experience last year and decided that once was enough. So this year we’ve taken refuge in the Madrid area. We’ve rented a flat. That proved an interesting exercise when we first arrived.

Danielle told me to approach the porter at the gate into the complex and explain which flat we were taking, so he would hand over the keys and raise the barrier.

“We’re looking for the Radinslov place,” I told him.

He looked at me completely blankly.

“The Radinslov place?” I tried again, hesitantly.

How was I going to explain this in my broken Spanish? After all, the name suggested something Slavic, and how many Slav families could there be in an apartment complex outside a small village some kilometres from Madrid?

“Do you mean the Radins?” he asked.

It turns out I did. When I explained the misunderstanding to Danielle, she showed no sympathy with my predicament.

“We’ve rented the Radin family’s loft,” she explained, and to rub the point in, “Radins’ loft not Radinslov.”

The whole business particularly tickled her. On two nights in succession, she’s woken up laughing at the memory of my discomfiture. I don’t see what’s so funny about it myself but, hey, I suppose it’s better to spread laughter than tears.

Even unintentionally.

A racially pure Britain

It’s been quite a month for racial awareness in Britain.

First we learned that the country’s first inhabitants were black. The first recognisably human people to populate the island, some 10,000 years ago, were dark-skinned, new research into so-called ‘Cheddar Man’ has shown. Bad news for those grieving for the ancient racial purity of the country. At least if they’re white.

Next we had the news that quite a while after Cheddar Man’s time, around 4500 years ago, a bunch of people showed up from the Continent. These were the ‘beaker people’, so-called because of finds of a distinctive style of pottery beakers with a flared lip. DNA analysis has shown that they’re distinctly different people. They turned up in Britain and the previous inhabitants simply vanished into the background, never to re-emerge.

One of Britain's original inhabitants, apparently

So the population of Britain was originally black. Those people were then supplanted by immigrants from Continental Europe, though what their colour was I don’t know: what I’m focusing on is that they came from what is now the EU.

What this means is that all those concerns about immigration that drive Brexiters are entirely misplaced. Especially when they target immigration from the European Union. We – and indeed they - are the immigrants from Europe. Without such immigration, few of us would be there.

The third piece of news that caught my attention in this context was the statement of Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary (Labour’s spokesperson on home affairs), that some use the term ‘immigration’ as a euphemism for ‘race’. Good for her for having said it. To be honest, the statement is so obvious that it really shouldn’t be necessary to say it, but it certainly is. There are far too many siren voices, particularly worried about the pro-Brexit sentiments of the North of England, who keep urging the rest of us to understand the ‘legitimate’ concerns in some communities about immigration.

Well, if it’s a euphemism for racism, as it all too often is, I see no reason at all to accommodate it.

In any case, these new findings of archaeologists should have left the xenophobes in disarray. Let’s say we do set out to get rid of the immigrants from our midst. One of the geneticists who worked on the Beaker people project reckons that “at least 90% of the ancestry of Britons was replaced by a group from the continent”. That would suggest something like 59 million would have to leave Britain.

Angela Merkel has been good about taking refugees in the past. Today, however, the pressure is on her to stop. And in any case – nearly 60 million? Could be tough.

Interestingly, that would leave a very small number of Britons on the island. It might be hard for them to keep basic services going – the schools, say, the hospitals, the trains. But then I suppose that’s the problem with people who want to create ethnically homogeneous nations: they don’t realise they’re cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

Still, they would at least have achieved their aim. The country would at last have shaken off the impact of 4500 years of immigration. It would be racially pure.

And, of course, black.

A small act in a large cause

It’s not often you get the chance to make a gesture of refusal, however small, to the Trumpists, Brexiters and other xenophobes. 

A recent business trip took me to Imperia in North West Italy. The most convenient way to get there was to fly to Nice in Southern France and then take a train for the short trip across the border and down the coast.

On the way back, I had to change at Ventimiglia, in Italy but just a few minutes by rail from Menton in France. Really. It feels as though if you ignored the rules by wandering off the end of the platform and along the track a bit, you’d have inadvertently crossed the border.

I haven’t entirely mastered the train system between Imperia and Nice. There are Italian trains, there are French trains, there are regional trains that could belong to either country without my having the faintest idea which. Delays on the way back only deepened my confusion. At 11:22, was the train at platform 2 the delayed 11:14 or would that be the one drawing in to platform 6? One way or another, I managed to miss the regional train I was booked on for Nice.

In the meantime, I’d started a conversation with a young man as lost as I was. He addressed me in broken English.

“I am Younis. I from Libya,” he assured me earnestly. I nodded. “You see? Black?” he added, pointing to his arm. 

There was no doubt about it. Not just his arm but all parts of his skin exposed to view were dark enough to qualify for what we call black.

Younis at Ventimiglia
I hope he gets to Paris safely

“Libya not good now,” he continued, perhaps with a view to furthering my education. I told him I’d heard reports to that effect.

“I have brother in Paris. At one o’clock from Paris.”

Did he mean an hour from Paris? I didn’t pursue it as it hardly seemed useful to debate expressions of time in English. He was, after all, heading for France where they were unlikely to be helpful

“I go to Nice. I get to Nice from here?”

I told him yes, I thought so, that we were on the right platform as far as I could tell. I didn’t add that I’d been wrong before. I felt we both needed our optimism kept up.

Eventually a train pulled in. Judging by the name of the company on the side and the direction it was travelling, I felt emboldened to go out on a bit of a limb.

“I think this is the Nice train.”

“Nice?” he said. He had a fetching smile and turned it on me at full beam. Then he leaped through the nearest door onto the train.

I was more cautious and walked up the platform to check with a guard first.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “this is the Nice train. But you can’t use your regional ticket on it. You’ll need a new one.”

I got on and found a seat.

A few minutes later we pulled into Menton.

“This is a service stop only,” the loudspeakers announced, “do not leave the train here. The stop is only to allow the police to carry out security checks. Please have your documents ready if asked for them.”

It occurred to me that things might not go well for Younis, who had assured me that he had “no papier”, that “in Italian they just…” and he made the pantomime of taking a photo, “and they…” with a pantomime of taking prints of all his fingers.

Just then he reappeared and I waved at him. He gave me another beaming smile and walked down the carriage to sit opposite me.

“Where we are?”

“Menton,” I said, “France.”

“France? We in France?”

I didn’t think the beam could be increased in intensity but it was.

“Why we stop?”

“The police are checking papers,” I said, and the beam switched off.

“I no papier…” he repeated, “Italian just…” and he did the finger-printing thing again.

“I know,” I said, “we just have to hope.”

“I no trouble with police,” he assured me, by which I think he meant that he had committed no crimes.

“I’m sure,” I replied, disinclined to explain that to police forces around Europe just being black and undocumented was more than crime enough. He would probably discover that quite soon – I only hoped it wouldn’t be in the next few minutes.

I looked up the carriage. There were no police in sight though there was someone almost as baleful: a ticket collector. He reached us.

“I think I have to buy a new ticket,” I told him, showing him the one I had.

“I’m afraid so,” he said, “that’ll be €12.50.”

A corporate card backed by a company that is tolerant of its staff, even when they get things wrong, put me in a position of some privilege. But then the collector turned to my travelling companion.

“Your ticket, please?”

“What he want?” he asked me.

“A ticket for this train. It’s twelve euros fifty.” I looked at him expectantly.

“I don’t have it,” he said, apparently as distraught as I was unsurprised. 

He’d got into France, a big step towards realising his dream of joining his brother. He’d avoided the police. And now he was going to be plunged into trouble with them, for want of the cost of two coffees in a station cafe.

“I’ll buy his ticket,” I told the collector, pulling out my personal card.

Once the transaction was complete, the collector told me I was very kind, without any obvious trace of sarcasm.

That surprised me. Most officials, in my experience, disapprove of helping people in what was obviously Younis’s position. But, in any case, I didn’t feel I’d been kind at all. Real generosity would have been to make a long-term commitment to help Younis, and I was doing nothing of the kind. I doubt our paths will cross again. Besides, the sum I’d parted with wouldn’t get me from Nice station to the airport. It wouldn’t cover the price of the meal I had there. I’m not sure it would feed my dogs for more than a day (and they’re little dogs).

Instead, for a small price, I was enabled to do three things that mattered to me:

• Distance myself from Brexiters who, for all their rationalisations, are merely offering cover to xenophobes if they’re not xenophobes themselves
• Reject the Trumps, Farages, le Pens and others who feel they can loudly proclaim their defence of Christian values, despite having had their sense of human compassion surgically excised
• Provide a little assistance to a man who had struggled across the Mediterranean and was now attempting to travel several hundred miles on no money, to make a better life for himself in a nation which, along with my own, had militarily meddled the heck out of his.

Cheap at ten times the price. Now I only wish I’d thought of buying him a ticket all the way to Paris. A missed opportunity.

The mysterious meanings of markers

The thing about pre-literate societies is that they are separated from us by a veil of mystery that we penetrate only with difficulty. Because they have left no written records of their beliefs or explanations of their actions, we’re left guessing at dimly suspected truths. It’s like reading a thriller by one of the better authors.

• Just what was Stonehenge for?
• Why were Neolithic burial mounds shaped like their houses?
• Were those long mounds really for burying people or for something else and, in either case, why?

In North America too, pre-European societies have left behind traces of their culture over which archaeologists, or tourists, can only wonder and scratch their heads.

Cherokee marker tree from the Appalachians

One such phenomenon is the so-called “marker tree”. Native Americans would tie down a growing sapling so that it was forced to bend to one side and grow horizontally for a time, before growing vertically once more. The result was a shape that spoke “man made” in an unmistakeable language. By following a trail from marker tree to marker tree, others could find their way to a sacred spot, a source of water or perhaps a safe river crossing; conversely, they might understand the tree as a warning to keep out of someone else’s territory. No one quite knows. You see? A wonderful sense of mystery. Enhancing the charm.

It was a pleasure to learn about Indian marker trees when my friend Becky visited us from Texas and introduced me to the notion the other day. She’s the daughter of Mexican immigrants who was never allowed to forget it, when she was a student at her massively white, ostentatiously wealthy school. Her father, though, established at least one excellent relationship with a white, the owner of a local farm where he worked as manager.

If anything, they got on rather too well. At least, for the taste of her mother. It became something of a habit of theirs to share a bottle or two after work, making the evening a lot of fun for them, though far less for the family.

“Later he stopped drinking altogether,” Becky told me, “but at the time it was a major leisure-time activity for the two of them. They particularly enjoyed it when they took heavy farm equipment out for a joy ride after a drinking session. Two drunk men driving a combine harvester? You can imagine the scene.”

The farm has long since been sold and converted into a golf course. The designers of the course were careful not to disturb one of its key features: a bent tree, showing the characteristic signs of human manipulation that make marker trees.

“I used to hear women golfers cooing as they interrupted their game to admire it. You know – ‘I wonder what it meant. What it was pointing to. How much it meant to the people who made it what it is’. They were really awestruck.”

Becky's tree. She knows just what it marked

Again, you see? The sense of a mysterious presence, of a lost culture, whose sentiments one can only guess at. But Becky had reason to see an even greater charm in the intriguing appearance of this strange link to a distant past: she knew that the past that marked the tree wasn’t quite as distant as the golfers believed.

“My Dad and his boss took one of the farm vehicles out after several hours on the bottle. They managed to drive it straight into a fine mature tree in one of the fields and knock it almost flat.”

“And?” I asked, guessing where she was heading with this story, and wanting her to move on after her pause.

“Well,” she continued with a smile, “they thought they’d killed it but they hadn’t. Its roots clung on in the ground and it just kept on growing. They tried to right it several times, but there was no way they could move it – the tree was far too heavy. Instead, the new growth bent upwards as the trunk extended, so it resumed its proper, vertical direction. In fact, it ended up growing three great limbs looking like three trunks. Giving it the appearance of a marker tree.”

“But not an Indian artefact at all?”

“No. A Tex-Mex one. Lubricated by a great deal of liquor.”

Sadly, the tree has gone now. After evolving from farm to golf course, the next stage of that land’s existence is to be housing. The twisted oak has been cleared to make way for the new build.

It seems sad. Because if there’s charm to the mysterious old, there’s humour to spice it in the mysterious old explained by an unguessed recent truth. Still, that’s builders for you: no respecters of culture, of traditional significance, of the transcendent meaning that links us to our past.

A crying shame leading to a sad loss, I say.