Travelling with a storyteller on a night train from revolution

If I remember, I had to run for the train. Miss it and I’d be travelling through the night, or waiting until the following day. This train would get me there after midnight, but at least well before breakfast time.

I was heading for Hull, in Yorkshire, from London. If I was late, it was probably because this was the time, forty years ago, when I was heavily involved in activism for the far left, and I’d been busy forwarding the revolution. A revolution which, in case you hadn’t noticed, didn’t happen despite my efforts. I was convinced it would, but in a top-down Cult, you can convince yourself of anything.

It was a time when I read quite a few books of Lenin’s. I remember almost nothing about them, just that they were stiflingly boring but had sonorous titles.

Far from difficult to put down
And eminently forgettable

One title I liked was The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Few people today have any idea who Mr Kautsky was, and fewer would feel it worth spending thirty seconds on Wikipedia to find out. But Lenin wrote ponderously against him, itself a characteristic of the hard Left: it spends far more time denouncing its ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors’ than its enemies.

When it comes to wiping those backsliders out, I reckon a cruel but effective method would have been to start reading them Lenin’s works. They’d be begging for the firing squad in no time at all. Or at least for a pen to sign any confession put in front of them.

Another title that sticks in my memory is Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. I remember not a word of the contents, but the title remains relevant today: there is something infantile about the far Left, to which I then belonged. But, like St Paul, when I became a man, I put away childish things. Then, however, I saw things as through a mirror darkly, and felt sure, as do so many today who should know far better, that wishing for change yourself was enough to make it happen.

I was on my way to Hull to see a fellow wishful-thinker of the Left. However, since she was also my girlfriend at the time, I don’t think the activity for which we were getting together was exclusively the advancing of socialism. Which was another reason, I suspect, why I was anxious to get there before tonight had become irretrievably tomorrow morning.

In my hurry, I’d taken no reading material with me. Not even Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which wouldn’t have been the best way of passing the time on the journey (what on earth does the title mean, anyway?), but might have been better than just looking out of the window. Fortunately, a fellow passenger in my compartment took pity on me.

“I’ve just bought two books. You can read this one, if you like.”

Practically impossible to put down
and far more memorable than Lenin

It was Nevil Shute’s The Chequerboard. I’d never read any Shute before. I’d probably never even heard of him. But within minutes, I’d fallen for the story and simply couldn’t put it down. In fact, handing the book to the generous passenger when he left the train, was a painful experience. It took me a while – well, I had a revolution to organise and more Lenin to read – but within a few months I found the time to pop into a bookshop and buy a copy of the book, to finish it.

The thing about Shute is that whatever you think of his writing, he was an extraordinary storyteller. And in The Chequerboard he gives that skill plenty of scope: as well as the protagonist’s own story, the framework for the novel, we get the stories of the three men he sets out to track down. They’re finely constructed, compelling tales, a pleasure to read at any time, especially in a train running through the featureless landscape of night-time England.

The kindness of the stranger in my compartment is a memory I treasure. So is my pleasure in reading Shute. I’ve consumed a great many of his novels since then, and re-read several of them many times, though none so much as The Chequerboard.

My daughter-in-law Sheena, knows how much I like the book. She also knows that I’m working to improve my Spanish. So, when she saw a copy of Tablero de Damas, the 1951 Spanish translation, she snapped it up for me.

Found for me by Sheena in Madrid
where she lives with my son and new granddaughter

As she says, there’s something to be said for reading a book you already know, in a language you’re trying to learn: you don’t have to struggle to understand the story and can concentrate on the words. Since they’ve been written by a native Spanish speaker, I’m sure they’re good enough to help me with the language.

Although what gives reading the book additional spice is seeing how awful the translation is: librero (bookseller), for instance, for ‘bookmaker’ (someone who takes bets, for instance on horse races), of ‘cutting corns’ (removing calluses of dead skin) rendered as selling agricultural products.

But that just makes re-reading the book all the more fun. As does the memory of the strange times, and the kind circumstances, in which I read it for the first time. Especially as it was so much more entertaining than my usual reading.

Thank you, Sheena. Thank you, Spanish translator. Thank you, stranger on a train.

And thank you, of course, Nevil Shute.

Letrice in Beirut, or how we like to turn a bad situation into something far worse

It was Paris on the Mediterranean. It was sea-bathing in November, it was visiting Roman ruins in a blouse, it was sitting with colleagues on a sunny café terrace when at home everyone was indoors or wrapped in coats and scarves. It was no wonder her visit to Beirut left my mother, Leatrice, with indelible memories that she was still sharing with me 70 years later, not long before she died.

Leatrice in Baalbek or at the beach
She was a pretty 24-year old, but maybe already a little uptight...

It was 1948. A single trip abroad as a child had been followed by the thirties in London, then the air raid warnings and the bombs of the war, then the harsh winter of 1946, the bomb sites on every street, the rationing, the general gloom of the past-war years.

Leatrice, as I’ve mentioned before, got out just as soon as she could. In 1948, she was working as a typist for UNESCO in Paris. It organised a conference in Beirut and, to be a success in those pre-Word processing days, a conference had to have a legion of low paid assistants along, to record the words of the important or self-important, and to produce the documents without which no one would believe they’d actually been doing very much.

For Leatrice, it was a sheer joy to be there, to see the sights, to go for a swim, to visit the ruins at Baalbek, to enjoy the pavement life. I was reminded of that when going through another bundle of old photos, as part of a task that is probably going to take most of my retirement even if I have a long one, and came across more pictures of that trip.

What made the pictures all the more poignant was that I was looking at them just as I’d learned that Donald Trump, in what passes for wisdom in that orange head of his, had decided that the best action he could take in response to new threats from Iran, was to launch a drone-borne missile strike to assassinate the senior Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Now Soleimani was a ruthless autocrat and his hands are stained with the blood of thousands killed in combat or simply murdered in cold blood. The world is absolutely is arguably better off without him in it. But the same could be said of Saddam Hussein: we’re better off freed of him, or at least we would have been, had what followed in his wake not been far worse. Indeed, one of the most toxic consequences of bringing down Saddam was the rise of Soleimani.

It seems we don’t like learning from our mistakes (or, for those like Trump, perhaps we’re unable to learn), and keep thinking that a quick fix – the invasion of Iraq, the murder of Soleimani – is likely to deliver a long-term solution.

The reality, of course, is that Iran will avenge the death. It may do so directly itself, or it may use a proxy force, perhaps in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia once more, perhaps in Syria attacking Israel, or indeed perhaps through its client militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Whichever option they eventually select, it’s going to make the Middle East a still more tragic region than it already is.

Especially as whatever action they take, there will almost certainly be further retaliation from the US or its clients in Israel or Saudi Arabia. So things will ratchet up. Which, you may remember, is rather how things went after the invasion of Iraq.

Looking at my mother’s Beirut photos reminds me how far we’ve come.

Clockwise: the venue for the UNESCO conference;
Leatrice third from left at a pavement café; a street scene; the seafront.

Leatrice agreed with the description of Beirut as ‘Paris on the Mediterranean’. She regarded it as a sliver of paradise. But that was before the US and Russia, Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, to say nothing of its own internal conflicts, started interfering the life out of it.

I’d like to say that they’ve turned a paradise into a purgatory, except that purgatory is supposed to be where souls are purged ready to enter heaven. Sometimes, the Middle East looks more like a soul condemned to hell, from which there is no hope of escape. Certainly, none while its destiny is being set by Trump or Soleimani, Netanyahu or Assad, Putin or Mohammad bin Salman.

Lives overheard

One of the benefits of there being so many mobile phones around, is that you hear all sorts of tantalising titbits of conversation as you walk along the streets of a city.

In London the other day I caught:

“So you’re saying the watch I picked up wasn’t yours?”

Now, what could that be about? Did his friend send him back to the office to collect the watch he’d left on a desk, and he’d taken someone else’s, meaning he now had two colleagues lamenting the loss of a timepiece?

Or it could be worse than that. Maybe he went back to the café where his friend had left his watch, saw one, collected it and shot back out thinking he was doing his friend a favour, only to discover that he’d taken the watch of an innocent customer who’d only just removed the watch from his wrist to rest it. That customer had since reported the theft to the police, providing them with an excellent description of the culprit, further reinforced by crystal-clear security camera footage.

I did hear a siren approaching as I went past, so I moved away quickly rather than witness the arrest of an unfortunate individual, guilty only of good if misdirected intentions.

Only to walk around the corner and hear a young woman, striding up Exhibition Road, proclaiming loudly:

“You can throw me under a tube.”

For those possibly not familiar with London, the tube is the underground railway that criss-crosses the city. To be thrown under one would not be a life-enhancing experience.

The usual expression is ‘throw me under a bus’...

...but under a tube would be more certainly terminal

So what terrible catastrophe had overtaken her? Had she been denied promotion by a scheming colleague who had secured a post, by rights hers, and whom she was now challenging to finish her life altogether, since he had already irreparably damaged her career prospects?

Or was she talking to her now ex-boyfriend, who had dumped her for her sister, heaping humiliation on top of harm? Bereft even of family support, since she had already been abandoned by her parents for her terrible choice of lover, she had now been betrayed by her own sibling.

Indeed, she might have been talking to the very sister. No wonder she felt that being thrown under a train would be a perfectly reasonable next step in the progression of disasters afflicting her.

But I think the finest titbit I overhead came from an anxious young man saying:

“You mean, he saw me leaving this morning?”

Well, I could construct some plausible circumstances that might lead to that kind of statement. But is it worth it? I’m sure you can find your own easily enough. And they probably wouldn’t be very different from any conjecture I might come up with.

Ubiquitous mobile phones? At least they add spice to a stroll through London. And a little exercise for the imagination.

What makes a summer

One swallow, they say, does not a summer make.

It’s pretty hot here, in Valencia as in most of Spain, and yet it doesn't seem to be just the heat that tells me it’s summer. There’s something else, and for some time I couldn’t make up my mind what. 

So I’ve been wondering just what does make a summer.

Not the swallows, I’d say. They turned up here in their masses – I never got a chance to spot the one that didn’t make a summer. Besides, my wife tells me they were swifts not swallows anyway. The swallows showed up a while later and, confusingly, looked exactly the same to me. In any case, one swallow or one swift certainly didn't make our summer, and even the huge numbers that eventually arrived affected our comfort much more than the season.

For a few days before they arrived, we were being irritated by flies coming into the house when we had the windows open. But then the swifts showed up in their hundreds, flying around behind our flat at sunrise and sunset, like vacuum cleaners of the air, scooping up any insect with the temerity to come anywhere near them. The fly problem vanished.

I have a lot of affection for the swallows. Indeed, I’m delighted that the house we plan to move to shortly has a pair in residence and they even have fledglings at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that it’s they who make my summer.

Swallow fledglings in our new place

So, I kept asking myself, what does?

Certainly not the date. How many British residents, including me when I still was one, have enjoyed a glorious, sunny, warm May only to shiver through a dank and cold June?

It wasn’t really the temperature either. It gets hot in Spain. We’ve even had temperatures in the low thirties in Valencia (no, no, that isn’t freezing cold, you poor benighted users of that outdated temperature system), despite the nearness of the sea and the breeze blowing off it. But it’s far worse in Madrid, where I go fairly frequently to visit my sons and their partners (and soon my second grandchild), where the high thirties or even low forties are not unknown.

It took me a while to work out just what it was that made a summer for me. And the enlightenment came in the form of a memory from my distant childhood.

For my first thirteen years, I lived in my native city, Rome. Throughout my childhood, I’d always felt profoundly English, to the extent of experiencing nostalgia for a country I’d visited frequently but never lived in. I remember catching my breath, and feeling a flood of emotion, over a geography book in my (English) school in Rome, when I came across a picture of a typical London street with a sodium streetlamp. My nation. In some sense, my home. Spiritually.

Then my parents sent my brother and me to boarding school in England. One evening some months after that wrenching move, I was at my grandparents’ house, watching TV with them. You know, black and white, and we felt at the cutting edge of technology because we had three channels instead of the two we’d got used to.

The programme was about an archaeological expedition in Greece. I remember nothing about its findings. All that sticks in my mind is a sound. Like the picture of the sodium lamp, it brought a lump to my throat and made me catch my breath.

Cicadas. Grinding away. I could almost feel the heat and smell the pine needles.

That’s summer. Hear that sound and you know you’re out of the grip of the winter and the cold. You know you’re safe in shirtsleeves, and short ones at that. Sunset doesn’t mean a chill that forces you indoors, it means the warmth becomes comfortable and that, even at night, you can sit outside with a drink and enjoy the smells and the easy living.

Just a few minutes’ walk from where we live at the moment (before we move in with the swallows) is the long park that winds through Valencia in what used to be the bed of the Turia river. Right now, it's full of that beguiling sound day and night. Reminding me again and again that summer is here. Just like when I was a kid.

Summer floods the Turia park
Just imagine the cicadas providing the accompanying sound track

It’s as nostalgic as it’s wonderful to hear the cicadas telling me I’m back in a land of real summer again…

Navigating crowds: a matter of nostalgia and bitter self-knowledge

As a general rule, I try not to get nostalgic about the way things were in my youth. As a general rule, I don’t think things were much better in my youth or anybody else’s. As a general rule, I think things tend to be much of a muchness, just more so, and older people always whinge about how much better they were.

Still, it was brought home to me this week, that in one little but annoying respect, things were indeed better back then. What made the discovery particularly galling was I that I learned that I was part of the overall decline in standards. That was an object lesson I was taught by the fine Spanish city of Valencia.

What I discovered there is that people have retained the ability to walk among others without causing them inconvenience. I remember it used happen in Britain too, when I was young. At busy London stations, for instance, people wove their routes around each other, no one ever walking in a dead-straight line, but constantly swerving so as to inconvenience each other as little as possible. The aim was always to avoid, if possible, making anyone else break their stride, far less have to stop to let you pass.

I once met a crowd coming out of a station in Hong Kong and was astonished to find that the human tide that seemed about to engulf me, in fact parted and let me through without so much as brushing against me. The individuals who created the crowd behaviour simply moved slightly aside, as did the people beyond them too, so that they could flow past me without my being troubled at all. They didn’t even seem to be conscious of what they were doing since no one made eye contact with me as they were taking their avoiding action.

Huge numbers, but extraordinarily well-behaved

On a smaller scale, the same was true in Britain. Not any more, though. This very day, a woman who’d been standing still contemplating who knows what – the chances of better weather? The way to find a happier path through life? The perils of the human condition? – suddenly took a decision to abandon meditation for action at the very moment I was walking past her, stepping straight into my path. As she was dragging not one but two wheeled suitcases behind her, it was only by good fortune that I avoided being brought down to the ground. I don’t know whether she would have apologised had she noticed what she’d done, because she never looked around or saw what had happened, leaving her entirely unaware that there was anything to apologise for.

In Valencia, on the other hand, it was clear that the old skills still survived. Three young men wandering down a pavement can seem threatening but, out there, one would inevitably slide behind the other two, opening enough space for someone coming the other way. People leaving shops somehow knew who was already on the pavement and avoided touching them or blocking their path, while they joined the flow without disrupting it. Even cyclists would stop to let you through on cycle lanes, a striking contrast to, say, Amsterdam where riding you down, or at least threatening to do so, seems to be a point of pride for them.

Just don't step into her cycling lane...

So good were the Valencians at navigating through crowds that they showed me up as completely inadequate to the task. Again and again I had to apologise for having stopped in someone else’s way, or walked across in front of them, or stepped out of a side street into their path. Bringing home to me the galling truth that it isn’t just other people who’ve lost the skill, I’ve somehow mislaid it too.

Ah, for the good old days. The days of my youth when we knew how to walk considerately. If only people could learn that ability again.

Starting, I must shamefacedly admit, with me.

Disaster avoided, but success is still to work for

In the end, it didn’t happen. 

Predictions of a Labour wipeout in yesterday’s UK local elections weren’t fulfilled. The reports of Jeremy Corbyn’s execution by a disdainful electorate turned out to be premature at least. Labour lived to fight another day.

It wasn’t for any want of wishing. A great many people were longing for his crushing rejection. Sadly, a disappointing number of them were in leading positions in the Labour Party.

In local councils up and down England, seats were being contested that were last fought in 2012, something of a high point in Labour’s standing in the councils. Even yesterday morning, the BBC was reporting the likelihood that the party would lose “dozens” of seats. In the end, the number was 23 – so just short of two of those dozens. They won 1291, which is just short 108 dozen. So they came close to a historic high.

A point not made as loudly as it might since the elections is that, if Labour clung on to most of its gains from the surge it enjoyed in 2012, the Conservatives were able to advance little from their lamentable levels of that year.

In Wales, they lost one seat leaving them one short of half the total, but still very much the largest party in the principality.

Labour’s worst result, of course, was in Scotland. A nation that Labour once dominated has now gone over massively to the Scottish National Party. Labour’s historic defeat there was still more strongly underlined yesterday when it was overtaken by the Conservatives, a party that went into decline in the 1950s and has led a rump existence north of the border for half a century.

There’s no denying the seriousness of the blow. On the other hand, it’s no bad thing to see Labour gradually being weaned of its dependence on Scottish votes. Especially with the still strong likelihood of Scotland separating from the United Kingdom, Labour needs to learn to win in England.

Which takes us to the best of yesterday’s news: London. We’ve had eight years of Conservative rule in the capital, and by Boris Johson, perhaps embodies pure privilege with all its arrogance and entitlement more than any other. Yesterday Labour has won both the Mayor’s office and the London assembly back – electing as Mayor Sadiq Khan, the son of a bus driver, educated not at Eton and Oxford, but at a local comprehensive (state) school and the University of North London.

Sadiq Khan, son of a Pakistani bus driver, new Mayor of London

Symbolically, the victory is most important for being the first time a Muslim has become Mayor of a major Western city. That’s significant for two reasons. At a global level, it matters because it shows Muslims everywhere that the extremists are wrong, that we are at last beginning to reach a place (despite the Trumps of this world) where a Muslim can pursue the most exalted of careers.

It also makes an important point about the value of immigration.

At a more local level, the Khan win shows that a racist campaign need not succeed. Khan’s Tory opponent tried to brand Khan a companion of extremists, playing into the racist narrative that any Muslim, merely as a Muslim, must be suspect in the Western world. That slur was massively rejected by an electorate that gave Khan the largest personal vote ever received in British history. There had also been a last-minute attempt to smear Labour as anti-Semitic, which may have cost the Party votes in the capital with its relatively large Jewish community. Khan has made it absolutely clear that he holds no such views, and it was encouraging to see him winning in spite of the attack.

So, overall, where do we stand? As Jeremy Corbyn put it, Labour hung on. Obviously, hanging on is nothing like good enough. We have a long way to go to unseat the Tories. That will only happen when we learn to do better than in the past, rather than more or less doing as well. However, yesterday’s results were anything but disastrous. They form a good launchpad for improvement.

Certain things have to happen now. The Party has to learn to take on the Tories far more effectively. Above all, it must learn to stop its own infighting. In that context, it’s sad to see two Labour MPs point out in the Guardian that they were wrong to nominate Corbyn for the leadership. Corbyn is the Labour Party leader; attempting to replace him would be distractive and disruptive; it would almost certainly fail since the membership massively backs him. So – get on side, focus on the real opponents and get the Party moving forward – for the country’s sake, as well as our own.

Yesterday shows we can do it. With a government that is destroying the health service, education, even the police, we know it’s time. Let’s now find the will.

Air travel can be so complex sometimes... Even when it seems simple

Please pay attention. This is a complex story. You need to focus.

Now, I readily admit that it doesn’t seem that complex at first glance. You might even be fooled into thinking it’s trivially simple. I know I was, but like you, I had to learn that I was sadly mistaken.

Over the last three days, I travelled from London to Vienna, then Vienna to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to London. I know that doesn’t seem that complicated, but it really, really is.

I mean, what you’re supposed to do when you catch a plane is fly from point A to point B, do whatever you came to do, then travel from point B to point A. Even if there are intermediate stops in between, the basic principle holds. Out, then back.

A triangular trip? Way beyond the capacity of the airlines in our post-low cost age.

The first thing that went wrong is that I couldn’t check in on-line. So I turned up at the airport with nothing proving I was booked on the flight other than an e-mail from a booking system.

The second thing that went wrong was that the check-in machines inside the terminal wouldn’t check me in. A disdainful employee, aged about sixteen as far as I could see, came over to provide assistance. He clearly thought I looked about eighty.

“Let me see, sir, can I help at all?” he said, and you can just imagine the superior tone, can’t you? Underneath them is lurking the thought “poor old man, he doesn’t understand that you have to feed in your passport open, not closed.”

So he took my passport and fed it in, exactly as I had. “Your reference number, sir?” So I gave it to him and he typed it in, just as I had a few minutes earlier.

And then, just as I had, he stared, bemused, at the error message on the screen.

“You’d better go to a manned check-in desk, sir,” he advised, which at least had the merit of being exactly what I had intended to do.

The Austrian Airlines lady sorted me out, and off I went to Vienna.

Which is where the third thing went wrong. No suitcase greeted me on the carousel.

I went to see another Austrian Airlines lady.

“But,” she told me, “you are travelling to Frankfurt.”

“This is true,” I confirmed, “but not till tomorrow.”

“But your bag is in transfer, ready for the next leg of your trip.”

“Great. But what am I supposed to do during the day tomorrow? I have a meeting. My suit’s in the case.”

She considered this.

“Ah,” she said at last, “you are making a stay in Vienna.”

It was a relief that I had found someone with the necessary intellectual acuity to grasp the extent of my predicament.

She looked sorrowful, which didn’t calm my apprehension at all.

“We can get the bag brought round, but it could be a long time.”

It was getting on for 11:30 at night. I could picture myself stuck there till 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. But in the end it only took twenty minutes, and she came round to check everything was OK, so we exchanged smiles and I thanked her warmly.

The fourth thing that went wrong was the next day, when I came to check my bag in again for Frankfurt.

“But you have a bag in the system already,” the third Austrian Airlines lady told me.

I looked, I hope pointedly, at my bag which was undeniably right there, stolid and unmistakeable.

“Do you have another bag?”

I explained to her that I didn’t. She called a colleague over. He explained to her that she had to delete the existing record for a bag in the system and then register a new one. She tried, and failed when the system told her she couldn’t delete the entry. So he had a go, slightly condescendingly, intent on proving that with his expertise, he wouldn’t make the same mistake she had. Until he bumped up against the same error message. At which point he hightailed it out of there, ostensibly to take care of the next passenger. 

I was delighted to see that the “next passenger” turned out to be a group of nineteen Mandarin speakers on a Kung Fu world tour. Served him right, I felt.

Meanwhile, my young lady called a support person, who was on break. Eventually, she got back from break and assured us she’d be right over, which turned out to be ten minutes later.

“So you want this bag checked through to London?” she asked.

I stayed calm.

“No,” I explained in measured tones, “Frankfurt, please. Where I can collect it.”

I made a point of checking the luggage tag carefully, to ensure it really was marked ‘FRA’. It was.

The fifth thing that went wrong was at Frankfurt today. I was pointed at a machine to get the luggage tag for my case.

Looks straightforward. But, believe me, it isn’t

“Your suitcase is already checked in,” the machine told me.

But this was Lufthansa, and they take no nonsense from machinery.

The woman who dealt with my case – and I use the word in both senses – was a battleaxe with pink hair.

“Problem?” she said, “there is no problem.”

The bag got checked in and sent on its way. As was I. And at Heathrow there was my suitcase on the belt, waiting for me.

Now I just have to get it home and bring this terribly complex trip to what I hope will be a happy conclusion.

Responding to the Brussels attacks: how to get it wrong

It’s Brussels this time. At least another 31 deaths and over 200 injured. Harrowing, dismal events, and the latest in a series of them.

The scene at Zaventem airport, Brussels, soon after the explosion

That’s bad enough, but then it gets worse. As usual, our own reaction will magnify the damage and give the terrorists a victory they’ve done nothing to merit.

The Belgian government, for instance, will go way over the top with security measures, making life much safer but far less convenient. People will have to leave earlier to get to work on time, earlier to catch a plane. So as well as the tragedy inflicted on the families immediately involved, the terrorists will leave a lasting mark on the economy of a major European capital, making it more difficult to run.

The British government has added to the mix by advising against travel to Brussels. I have no particular reason to go to Brussels at the moment, but fear of terrorism wouldn’t stop me: the place is going to be one of the safest on earth for the new few weeks or months. Just a pig to get around.

In any case, it would be nonsense to fear Brussels, since I commute into London. That city has to be facing a risk of terrorism at least as high as at any time since the IRA campaign of the eighties. But I still feel I’m much more likely to be involved in a traffic accident than caught up in a terrorist outrage; since I’m not going to stop crossing roads or driving a car, it makes no sense avoiding London.

Besides, refusing to be deflected denies the terrorists an easy win.

There are other, still more vital ways, of denying them. One of the most important is to resist the urge to bomb them out of existence. It was that kind of thinking that got us into our difficulties in the first place: an illegitimate, unnecessary war in Iraq spawned ISIS. The Syrian civil war has become a proxy for East-West clashes as well as tensions inside the Middle East, that are wreaking havoc in Libya and Yemen too. We’ve brutalised a great many young men, and not a few young women, and given them something to avenge.

Staffan de Mistura, UN Special Envoy on the Syria crisis, told the Guardian that, following the Brussels attacks:

The message we are drawing out is that we need to end the fires of war. We need to find a political solution in Syria to make sure we can all concentrate on what is the real danger, in the world and in Syria.

Take away the underlying conflict, and you take away its expression in other countries – in Turkey, which suffers more often than most, but also in Europe.

Going a step further, we also have to resist the temptation to blame the outrages on Islam or Molenbeek, the district of Brussels from which the attacks against both Brussels and Paris came. Donald Trump is naturally attacking immigration itself as the source of such terrorism, trying to blame entire populations for the work of a handful of people; in Britain, the far-right UKIP attacks open borders in Europe, ignoring the fact that Salah Abdeslam, who led on the logistics of the Paris attack, was stopped at the Hungarian-Austrian border in September 2015, but was allowed to drive on. The failure wasn’t due to the Schengen group’s open borders but to lousy intelligence.

Stigmatising a European Muslim population of several million for the actions of a tiny minority simply creates more enemies for us; targeting Molenbeek would be just as counter-productive, since what makes the district generate aggression so easily is precisely that it’s so poorly assimilated. 30% are out of work. One in three of the population is foreign. Increasing its pain will do no one any good.

The IRA campaign in Northern Ireland was waged by a few hundred activists. Behind them, however, there were probably many thousands of passive supporters who provided the active members with information and shelter as necessary.

Eventually, once Westminster had woken up to a more intelligent approach to the province than military repression, huge sums were invested into Northern Ireland to revive the economy. A long campaign led to reasonably fair access to jobs, housing and education for Protestants and Catholics. The effect was to drain the swamp that gave the activists their support.

At the same time, intense and highly competent intelligence work enabled the security services to break up IRA groups and thwart attacks. After all, if the IRA had to depend on many thousands, it was impossible not to have leaks to the police, and good intelligence took advantage of them.

It’s clear, if only from the fact that Abdeslam escaped arrest in Molenbeek for several months, that there’s an extensive passive support network there too. Again, there must have been leaks. But were the security forces set up to take advantage of them? Belgium is, for instance, coming to terms with the fact that the police force has far too few Arabic speakers.

Whatever Trump may say, Molenbeek doesn’t demonstrate a failure of the Community, merely a failure of Community policing.

Will we be smart enough to apply the lessons of Northern Ireland elsewhere in Europe? To respond to the latest attacks not with increased repression but with investment and highly-competent intelligence work? To help all our sad little Molenbeeks, across the continent, out of their misery rather than drive them deeper into it?

Which boils down to one simple question: will we avoid giving the terrorists yet another undeserved victory?

London: just the place for an influx of visitors from abroad

It was a great pleasure to have friends from France with us this weekend. 

One of them had never even been to England before, poor chap, so it was particularly rewarding to be able to put an end at last to his exclusion from the finer side of life.

What most foreign visitors want, when they come to see us, is to be shown London. It’s always enjoyable taking them round. If they’re French, I like to get them as quickly as possible to Trafalgar Square and then down to Waterloo Bridge. It seems to get the tone about right, somehow.

Most of the time it’s familiar to us, of course. St James’s Park, again. The monument on Whitehall to the women who served in the war, once more. The Millennium footbridge, for the nth time. And yet, St James’s remains one of my favourite parks in the world, the Millennium bridge with its near-horizontal suspension cables is extraordinary, and the women’s monument, just coats and overalls hanging on pegs, is strikingly moving. Seeing them with people who are discovering the sights for the first time brings them into sharp new relief.

Monument to the Women of World War 2

Besides, I had only last week listened to a radio programme that examined just what we mean by ‘road’ and ‘street’. I’d always thought of the first as applying to the countryside, the latter to towns, but the programme took that idea a step further: roads are about getting vehicles from place to place but streets make spaces.

Now that’s quite an insight. St James’s Park, which I like so much, is defined by the streets that surround it, helped by the presence of some pretty spectacular buildings along them: the rather ponderous Buckingham Palace, for instance, where our present monarch Elizabeth II lives, opposite Whitehall Palace where her distant ancestor Charles I was executed.

Given how unfortunate that link is, it’s perhaps just as well it’s provided by such an enchanting stretch of greenery.

St James: one of the world's great parks

But the thoroughfare which I find particularly attractive, and at the same time powerfully definitive of a space, is the Thames. The river’s long curves give London its shape. And, when it comes to travelling through the capital, it’s unsurpassed: the boat trip down to Greenwich is a delight in itself, and leaves you in a wonderful place, where among other joys you can have such fun jumping across the Prime Meridian, from the Western hemisphere to the Eastern and back again.

It was far from the first time I'd taken the boat down to Greenwich, though that didn’t mean I enjoyed it any the less. What I’d never done was travel on the river by night, as we did on the way back, which was truly magical: it's worth it just for the sight of the the skyline and the bridges lit up in the dark.

The Millennium Bridge is beautiful during the day,
haunting at night

It was a good day. And all down to a visit from France.

These days, the free movement of citizens between EU nations gets a pretty bad press in Britain. Not from me. It’s given me a lot of fun. Bring it on, I say. Let’s have more of it.

London Transport of Delight

It was an apt title for a song, A Transport of Delight, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann’s salute to ‘that monarch of the road, observer of the highway code, that big six-wheeler, scarlet-painted, London Transport, diesel-engined, 97-horsepower omnibus.’

A true monarch, the London bus. I always like to head upstairs. And not just upstairs but, if the seats are available, right at the front so I can watch the streets go by, the crazy cyclists putting their lives on the line, the misguided drivers using a three-litre engine to travel at an average of eight miles an hour and, of course, the backs of the heads of the passengers in the bus in front: bus drivers in London have never lost their enthusiasm for closing the gap behind a stationary bus to something an underfed dachshund would find a squeeze, whenever they get the chance.

Upstairs, up front. It was my delight when I was nine and I see no reason why the passage of a mere half century should make any difference.

Homeward bound: my transport of delight, London's No 30

My true love is the number 30. In the morning, it’s a relief to see it turn up at my stop without making me wait twenty minutes. But at night, it’s the first stage of my trip home; big, red, airy, comfortable, it says ‘relax. It’s time to knock off. We’re working so you don’t have to. Let us take it from here.’ 

And it takes me through some of the most sought after bits of London. Even thoug it’s a mere bus. I love it when the overhead display says ‘Harley Street. Bus stopping.’ The street made famous for housing some of the most expensive and exclusive physicians in the world? That’s somewhere for a taxi at the least, if not a chauffeur-driven Jag. But the number 30 has the chutzpah to stop there.

A bus to Harley Street? Oh the delicious incongruity

Not that the display always gives good news. I’m less than enchanted by a recent habit the buses have developed. ‘The destination of this bus has changed’, the display may announce suddenly, for no obvious reason, ‘listen for announcements.’ Yeah, right. I know what that means. Another bus or a ten minute walk. A rip-off. When I climb into a bus and pay my fare, I enter into a contractual arrangement with the bus line, to take me anywhere I want, up to the place named on the front of the bus. Dropping me off short? That, as we say these days, is a trick worthy of a banker.

It can only happen because of electronic communications. Someone gets a message through to the driver. ‘That chap upstairs? The one sitting at the front and having a bit of a laugh at the jags caught in the traffic? Don’t take him to Selfridges. Drop him at Baker Street and make him walk. That’ll wipe the smile off his face.’

And I blame electronic communications for another of the disadvantages of buses. The maddening mobile phone conversation. But even more maddening than a conversation is the guy with a new phone who’s decided to choose himself a ring tone. That’s what I had this morning. It was enough to make me wish I’d walked from Baker Street where the 30 dumped me. All the way we were accompanied, at high volume, by fragments of pop music, alternating with odd chirrupings and rings, or electronically distorted extracts from well-known classical pieces.

Still, those are just the leavening of rough among the vast smooth of that wonderful institution, bus travel. Flanders and Swann, again, were clear:

If tickets cost a pound a piece Why should you make a fuss? It's worth it just to ride inside That 30-foot-long by 10-foot-wide Inside that monarch of the road, Observer of the Highway Code, That big six-wheeler, scarlet-painted, London Transport, diesel-engined, 97-horsepower, 97-horsepower omnibus.

Yep. The cheapest fare’s actually £1.35 these days, but hey, the point’s still well made.

A tale of two cities. And two meals. And two friends. And two remarkable women

The last two days have provided me with a couple of good meals out in London.

One was with an old friend from college days and it was great to catch up. He told me about the new exhibition soon to open at the British Museum, which takes as its theme the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. It’s apparently going to be based principally on personal recollections – you know, ‘what I did on Hajj last year’. I’m not sure that the compulsion to go will prove irresistible.

It was London in July, so we ate outdoors and had finished – well practically finished – our main course before being forced indoors by the returning rain.

And yesterday evening I had dinner with a  Ukrainian friend and colleague, on his first visit to Britain.

‘The people seem, I think, more friendly and more relaxed,’ he told me.

Friendly and relaxed? In London?

Once I'd dropped him off at the end of the evening, after a pleasant stroll through the rain in Regent’s Park, I hopped on a bus where I had one of those experiences that are absolutely characteristic of our majestic city.

I was in the presence of a woman who had clearly not always been blonde. She was in her forties, overweight with an air of not being happy about it – or much else either. In one hand, she was clutching a cigarette from which she had clearly squeezed the burning tip before clambering onto the bus, intending to light it again at the earliest opportunity, and she was, as we like to say, well lubricated.

In lesser countries than England, accent tells you little more than where someone comes from. But in this great nation it gives you a pretty good indication of their social class, or at least social pretensions, as well as their education. When it came to this woman, perhaps I’ll just say that in this country you can leave school voluntarily at 16 and if she didn’t, I would rather suspect that she was pushed out by way of recognition of her achievements to that point.

Nothing she was saying undermined that assessment. Next to me was a tall young man I’d have said came from sub-Saharan Africa. He had one of those white caps that Moslem men wear there. He was talking quietly into a mobile phone.

No doubt reinforced by the liberality with which she'd applied her dose of alcoholic protection against the bitterness of everyday life, the pseudo-blonde had decided to make a contribution to the on-going and vital debate between the West and the world of Islam.

‘Why don’t you fuck off back to Afghanistan?’ she was saying, repeatedly, and with only minor variations in the words. I assume that geography hadn’t been one of the subjects that might have persuaded her teachers to keep her on at school. Or history either. The target of her advice simply kept talking into his phone.

Friendly? Relaxed? Oh well, perhaps an exception only proves the rule. In any case, my Ukrainian friend was no doubt comparing London with the US cities he knows, where life is indeed a tad more frenetic, and with his own Kharkov where anxiety perhaps takes the edge off even the sunniest disposition (though I’m not sure we have much less to worry about in this country).

In any case, at dinner we didn’t just speak about England.

‘How’s Yulia Tymoshenko’s trial going?’ I asked at one point.

‘I don’t really follow it,’ he said. I must have looked surprised - a former president on trial, one feels, might be a tale worth following. ‘There are so many lies,’ he explained.

‘She’s accused of corruption?’

‘Abuse of power,’ he told me, ‘well, it is perfectly true.’

‘But she denies it?’

‘She says it is political.’ He paused. ‘Well, it is also perfectly true.’

‘So both sides are telling the truth?’

‘Yes, but they use so many lies no-one believes them and they do not prove anything.’

I could understand why he didn’t feel inclined to follow the case.

Of course, over here we’re still absorbed by the exciting turns and twists of our own corruption saga. I’m particularly delighted by the  revelation in the Murdoch case, detailed by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian and denied by no-one, that David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, had come close to appointing Guto Harri as his director of communications in 2007. Harri is a former BBC correspondent and enjoys a high reputation for honesty.

Before Cameron finalised the appointment, he was approached by Rebekah Brooks, then Chief Executive of News International, and told to appoint Andy Coulson, her successor as editor of the News of the World, instead. It seems she felt that giving Coulson the job would strengthen the links between News International and the Conservative Party. And Cameron did what he was told.

Coulson later had to resign because of the current phone hacking scandal and has recently been arrested in connection with it.

Isn’t it wonderful that the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition and Prime Minister in waiting felt obliged to follow the instructions of the Chief Executive of News International? And isn’t it splendid that Rebekah Brooks knew she could dictate the actions of a political leader in this way?

Especially as she’s been arrested herself now?

The hairstyles may clash, but in many other ways,
their Yulia has so much in common with our Rebekah

Eat your heart out, Ukrainians. An intelligent and acute countryman of yours finds my London friendlier and more relaxed than his own Kharkov. Meanwhile, I can affirm from personal experience that the standard of public debate here remains as high and edifying as ever. And when it comes to corruption and abuse of power – we’re at least the equals of anything that Ukraine can do.

It makes me proud to be English.

The logo that spells discord

We’re getting terribly excited in London about the forthcoming Olympics, now less than a year and a half away. The place is being absolutely plastered with the logo.

Ubiquitous logo

Those Olympics are already proving a tremendous success. As is well known, the primary purpose of the Olympic movement is to foster discord between nations. These particular Olympics set the right tone from the outset, when the French had their noses put completely out of joint by not winning the competition to the stage them. I mean, then President Chirac knew it was in the bag for Paris, so he went round irritating other nations on the International Olympic Committee. For instance, he made some derogatory comments about Finnish cooking. After all, who cares about the Finns? Poor old Chirac. The Finnish delegation’s votes turned out to be pretty essential.

There was never any danger of our behaving that way, of course. I mean, given the traditional delights available in English cuisine, we were never going to cast aspersions on others. Not even on the Finns. Dried reindeer meat? Bring it on. It can’t be worse than smoky bacon crisps.

More recently, the Iranians have got upset about the logo itself. They reckon the it spells the word ‘Zion’. Funnily enough, the US television presenter, Glenn Beck, who has left no doubt concerning the moderation and liberalism of his views, agreed with them.

The Iranians feel that the logo demonstrates that the international Jewish conspiracy has been exerting its malign influence. Again.

Now this is obviously rubbish, and on at least three counts.

1. I don’t believe there’s any such a thing as an international Jewish conspiracy. Or if there is, let me just point out to the people behind it, that my mother is Jewish which automatically qualifies me for membership. So I deeply resent the fact that no-one has ever tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘hey, want to join this conspiracy?’ World domination – I’d be into that like a shot. I could become a banker and get paid a hell of a sight more for doing a lot less work.
2. If there were such a conspiracy, no-one with the brains to organise it would ever waste their time getting the word ‘Zion’ into the London Olympic logo. What? You think they might feel that words like ‘Zion’ and ‘Zionism’ aren’t getting enough exposure in the world press already? That Jews don’t get enough publicity?
3. The word is obviously not ‘Zion’ anyway. If it’s anything, it’s ‘Zior’. My guess is that ‘Zior’ is a word in some long-lost language meaning ‘bloody ugly logo’

The worst of it? It’s plastered all over London.

The American on the Truro train

On a Truro to London train, I met a retired trial lawyer from San Francisco. He lived there from 1963, a time and a place ‘where it was good to be a single.’ But in his late forties, with the latest woman he’d been seeing heading back East, he began to wonder whether he was getting to an age where ‘no-one gave a damn any more’ and he might turn into a sad figure hanging around bars hoping for action that would never happen.

It was approaching Christmas in 1985. A niece rang him. She knew an Englishwoman – more specifically a Cornishwoman – who was living in Detroit, where she was editing a magazine. She was going to be spending Christmas in San Francisco, and it seemed to the niece that the uncle should meet her.

The uncle allowed himself to be persuaded and phoned the Englishwoman at her home. The call was taken by her then seven-year old son, who ‘for the only time in his life took a message correctly. He’s never done it since and he’s 32 now.’

As arranged, the lawyer called at the flat where the Englishwoman was staying. She sent someone else to answer the door, in case she couldn’t stand him. The man who opened the door said ‘who are you?’ gruffly.

‘I’m the uncle,’ came the reply.

They went out and liked each other. They met again on Boxing Day, at which point in his words they ‘hit it off’. I’m not quite sure what he was implying but he did add that there was nowhere open for them to eat, so perhaps he meant that they were forced indoors and indulged in more than polite conversation.

He suggested they should meet again. She had a pretty packed schedule, but said she would try to get him an invitation to a dinner she was going to. He turned up and found that of the eight people there, he already knew two, one of them a former client.

It soon became clear to the others what was going on between the two of them, particularly when she announced that she didn’t want to go back to Detroit as planned on the 31st, and not just because she didn’t like Detroit. There was, however, a problem.

‘I can’t cancel,’ she wailed, ‘I have a plane ticket.’

‘Of course you can,’ explained a doctor who was present, ‘you have terrible earache.’

She stayed on another week. He was introduced to the delights of organising babysitting so that he could meet his new girlfriend.

Eventually she had to go, however. So he went down to the local TWA office. A strike was under way; for the first and only time of his life, he crossed a picket line. ‘What you’re doing,’ he said, ‘is temporal, but this is important.’

He laid $1000 in cash on the counter and said ‘give me as many round trip tickets to Detroit as this will buy.’

The answer was ten. This meant that for the next several months they visited each other every other weekend. That phase ended only when, in the early summer of 1986, they married.



San Francisco

Today he’s in his seventies. They share their time between a place near San Francisco and another on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. ‘If you’d told me when I was young that I would end up living in Cornwall I wouldn’t have believed you. At the time, I didn’t know where Cornwall was, let alone the Lizard peninsula or the hamlet of 50 people where we actually live. The most active business in our village is a hole in a wall, the village post box.’

Urban life in the The Lizard, Cornwall

At least it explains why we met on a train up from the lovely Cornish city of Truro.

When you're crossing the country, you may meet some interesting people