The keys to an unsolved mystery

After a few weeks, I feel the trauma of the experience has receded enough for me to tell this story.

It all started a little while before the lockdown. Remember those times? When we thought we could handle objects on supermarket shelves with no threat to life? When we used to shake people’s hands? Chat to them without masks? We were in the little town of Manises, not far from our home outside the fine old city of Valencia.

We were there to complete the latest round of formalities that Spanish residents have to go through, in order to obtain some document, whose precise nature I can no longer clearly remember, though it was doubtless immensely important and an essential ingredient for a happy life in 21st century Spain.

On the other hand, it may have been to pay some tax or other. That’s another activity that’s popular with the Spanish bureaucracy.

We took the opportunity to wander around the place a little and find out what it offered in the way of exciting amenities. This was useful, because we had only been there in the evenings to play badminton (another receding memory, still banned in these Coronavirus times). We hadn’t seen much of the rest of the town.

Then we returned to the car. Only to discover that the keys had vanished. Both of us had seen them go into Danielle’s bag. Neither of us had seen them come out. We’d been to few places where they could have been expected to fall from the bag. In fact, really the only place was the tax office (yes, I think it was that). We went back, but there was no sign of the key. We tried the police, but they hadn’t had anything handed in either.

So we had to accept the inevitable. Neither of us had ever lost a key before, but now we somehow had. It was a sad record to break but, hey, life is full of things that just happen.

Getting the car back was a little awkward, involving a return trip home by taxi to collect a spare car key, with the help of our neighbour, who holds a copy of our house keys. But it was done in time, and we quickly ordered another key for the car.

Two weeks later, it still hadn’t arrived, but the lockdown had. The garage shut down. We couldn’t collect the new spare key even when it did arrive.

Fast forward 100 days to the end of the strict ‘confinement’ we crawled though in Spain.

The glorious day eventually came when we could return to the beach. And with friends. Things weren’t quite back to normal, so if we had travelled in the same car as the friends, we would all have had to wear masks. So we took two cars. Which turned out to be quite fortunate.

Because after a seven or eight kilometre walk through a nature reserve and along a beach, we got back to the cars, only to discover again that the keys were no longer in Danielle’s bag. We all searched. We took everything out of the bag, turned it upside down and shook it. No keys fell out.

We went back over the walk, with no greater success.

It seemed extraordinary. Having never previously lost a key in our lives, we had now managed to lose two in just over three months. I won’t hide it from you: it was a pretty depressing discovery.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, to lose one key may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.

Our friends were immensely kind. They took us first to the garage. The new key was available, but not usable, since it has to be programmed first. We had to find a way to get the car to the garage, which isn’t easy without a working key. While there, we ordered yet another key, to make sure we had a spare again.

Then our friends took us home, which at least didn’t take them too far out of their way: they live just half a dozen doors away from us. We walked disconsolately indoors. Danielle decided to get something out of my bag.

And found – the car keys.

It remains a complete mystery how the keys moved from her bag into mine. But somehow they did. We’ve decided that this is an enigma we’re never going to solve. Any more than the mystery of how it never occurred to any of the four of us on that walk to look in my bag for the keys, after not finding them in Danielle’s.

Another lift from our friends enabled us to collect the car. And the very next day, we had a call from the garage. The new key had turned up just 24 hours after we’d ordered it, unlike the previous one which took at least two weeks. So we couldn’t cancel it.

Three of a kind: an insurance policy

I’ve been back to the garage and got both new keys programmed and usable. So we now have three keys for the car.

Which may be just as well. With our track record, a bit of an insurance policy against key loss feels like a good investment.

To lose two vehicles sounds like carlessness

The definition of a pedestrian, according to a former boss who was married with two adult sons, is a man with three adults in his family and three cars.

Pedestrianism: good for the soul, hard on the soles

I now have another. It’s someone in a household preparing for its escape from Brexit by selling off most of its major possessions: the house, of course, but also the two cars my wife and I used to use. Selling my wife’s took seven weeks so we decided not to wait too long to sell mine. Inevitably, we had an offer, at an attractive price, within days instead of weeks.

What should we do? We’d just spent a little money removing some scratches which I’d managed to put on the car (those pesky columns in car parks, you know). The longer we left on the street (the only place we could park it) the greater the risk that it would suffer further damage.

Besides, would we get as good a price another time?

We went ahead and sold the car. Reducing ourselves to enforced pedestrianism. Much better for health. Much better for the soul. Not so hot if you want to nip out for a bunch of bananas or a pat of butter (at least, one that isn’t beyond its sell-by date, the specialty of our corner shop just up the road).

Still, our aim is to unburden ourselves of possessions that tie us down (and a right-hand drive car is not a particularly useful asset when moving to continental Europe), this is at least one step down that road. Every time we walk down roads where we previously drove, we can be reminded that it’s becoming real, our exit from Brexit. We’re on target for the end of February still.

If we can just close the house sale with as little pain, we’ll have taken a major stride towards our goal.

Still, it does make me think of Oscar Wilde and The Importance of Being Earnest.

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

To sell one car may be regarded as a judicious step towards freeing oneself of unnecessary bonds. To sell both doesn’t just look, it really is carelessness. At least in our case.

From Hard Labour to London Transport

Bureaucratic records are dry to the point of dullness.

Record of a condemnation

Some poor fellow, 27 years old, appeared before a court martial on 13 April 1917. He was resisting mobilisation on the grounds of conscientious objection (in other words, pacifism); he was condemned to two years gaol with hard labour.

From 16 April to 14 July he served at Wormwood Scrubs, still a high-security prison in West London. My work involves hospital visits and I’ve frequently been to Hammersmith Hospital. It’s right next door to ‘the Scrubs’ and seeing that huge wall would make me think of Oscar Wilde, “all that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong”.

But this prisoner didn’t stay long at the Scrubs. In July 1917 he was transferred to an even grimmer destination, Dartmoor prison in England’s South West. I was at school near Dartmoor and one of my best memories of my time there was walking on the moor, which occasionally led us to Princetown where the prison stands.

This story all sounds a little dire, doesn’t it? What makes it more powerfully personal is that it happened to one Norman Bannister – also known as Nathaniel Bernstein – who was my grandfather.

Nor does the record wholly reflect his experience, as he would tell it, about the transfer to Dartmoor. They went by train and with him were an officer and a private soldier, both armed, with a uniform laid out on the bench beside him. All the way down, and the train trip took some four hours then, they threatened him with their weapons and demanded he put on the uniform.

He refused. It’s a decision for which my admiration only grows each time I think of it. And it all came back to me again the other day.

No need to ask a policeman
Poster promoting the classic Underground map

The object that reminded me of the story may seem wholly unrelated to it. It came from a book we rescued from clearing out our former flat in Germany. It was a collection of London Transport posters put together by an architecture historian, Harold Hutchison, in the 1960s. Not, in itself, a particularly significant book, you may feel, but it includes a dedication from its author:

To N. Bannister who has served London Transport so well and so long

My grandfather left school at the earliest moment after the end of the obligatory (and free) period of schooling – at 13. He was apprenticed to a lithographer and, by the time he was 24, when the First World War broke out, he was a fully qualified master of his trade. But war interrupted all that, taking him eventually to prison.

Striking view of Charing Cross station

However, with peace he was released and returned to his career. The skill he had developed was an ability to look at a painting and determine, by eye alone, how many colours it would take to print a good copy of it. He spent the majority of his career as a salesman for a lithography company one of whose major customers was London Transport.

The Underground to greenery

I don’t imagine my grandfather contributed much to society with his hard labour at Wormwood Scrubs or Dartmoor. But he did defend a principle that matters as much today as it did then. On the other hand, in peacetime he contributed to the production of art – popular art but art nonetheless – that brightened the lives of millions of commuters and produced some iconic images.

Glorious sketch of Chiswick to the west of London

Which I was delighted to leaf through when I came across the book.

The poignancy of memory

I keep on working through my old photos, a process constantly slowed down by the reawakening of memories of moments long past, of people long missed and of events long gone.

There was a morning in 1982 when Danielle announced to me that she really ought to have a pregnancy test. By the time the afternoon was nearing its end, I’d forgotten all about it and when I rang her I began talking about all sort of indifferent matters. Eventually she interrupted me:

‘Don’t you want to hear about the test?’

I managed to bite off the words ‘what test?’ and simply answered, ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ although her tone of voice made it fairly clear what the result had been.

‘Positive,’ she told me.

It wasn’t a shock but it certainly was an overwhelming piece of news. The kind that you know at once is going to leave absolutely nothing the same. And, from this first intimation of his arrival, I have to say that Michael has affected the nature of my life pretty fundamentally ever since (aided and, I like to think, abetted by the arrival of his brother Nicky just eighteen months after him).

One of the first things we had to do was get married. I appreciate that these days it’s far from unusual to have a child outside marriage, but this was 1982 and the dear, sainted Maggie was Prime Minister and making it ever more difficult to acquire British citizenship. We didn’t know the sex of the child at that time. The problem would arise if it was a boy, as indeed turned out to be the case: the French still imposed on young men that ghastly waste of time known as military service and if the child was born, even in England, he wouldn’t inherit British nationality from me – and therefore the escape card from the French military – unless I was married to Danielle first.

As it happens, by the time he turned eighteen French military service had been reduced to a day and he did it anyway. Though it turned out to be as complex as getting married had proved nearly nineteen years earlier. Which is another memory that brings me great pleasure...

So we didn’t actually need to get married, although I’m not at all sorry we did, 36 years on…

The problem with getting married was that Danielle needed a divorce first. You know the Oscar Wilde saying about a second marriage proving the triumph of hope over experience? Danielle was about to demonstrate it.

Her first husband made no problem about the divorce but he spoke no English and all the documents were in that language. It proved difficult to get him to sign in the right place, but eventually he did. We were married on 11 January 1983 and Michael was born on the 29th, so it was a close-run thing.

Incidentally, thereafter I became the specialist in remembering our anniversary, Danielle in forgetting it. That lasted until 2005 when our first grandchild – Aya – was born to my stepson David and his wife Senada also on 11 January. Danielle’s never forgotten Aya’s birthday so she now remembers our anniversary too.

It was a small wedding organised in a hurry. We had some close friends and family there and naturally took photos of them.

Leonard, my father, to the left in his trademark black tie
Alasdhair to the right, in a far-from-trademark beard
The smiles reflect their personalities...

The one I came across the other day was of my father and my old friend Alasdhair. My father was a man of extraordinary gentleness as well as courage and he was an inspiring presence in my life. Alasdhair I had met when we were both 13 and we had remained close through our school days and university. Later, he moved to the US but we kept in contact all the same, seeing each other from time to time but, above all, each remaining a constant known presence in the life of the other.

The photo therefore represents some precious memories to me.

But they are poignant too. My father lived only just over four more months after that picture was taken. Alasdhair did better but succumbed, to cancer, just over two years ago.

The joy is tinged with sadness. I suppose that’s what the passage of 36 years is bound to bring. But the pleasure of finding the photo was undiminished for all that.

An education policy that hankers for the past and pursues the downright trivial

For anyone who saw it, wasn’t that a great story about UK School Minister Nick Gibb being asked what eight times nine makes during a TV interview on the Good Morning Britain programme?

Why was he being asked? Gibb wants to introduce testing of multiplication table knowledge in eight and nine-year olds throughout England. There is a hankering after such traditional – you might say outdated – forms of school learning among many in Conservative circles.

The wet dream of Tory education ministers
Perfectly useless as a means to develop mathematical skill

Gibb’s answer to the question?

I’ve learned through bitter experience never to answer these kinds of questions on live television.

In other words, he wasn’t confident that he knew the answer. Which, as the interviewer Kate Garraway pointed out, hadn’t stopped him becoming a government minister. His answer that eight and nine-year olds wouldn’t be asked such questions on live TV was glib but a cop out: they’re not paid ministerial salaries either.

In any case, this nostalgic longing for rote learning is entirely misplaced. It’s true that I sometimes smile at the slowness of shop staff in calculating change. If the till doesn’t tell them, or they don’t have a calculator to work it out, they often find it difficult to decide such problems as what change from a £5 note to give me for £3.89’s worth of purchases.

But who cares? They do have a till machine or a calculator, and either is likely to be more accurate than their calculations. It takes much the same time to use either of those devices as to do the mental arithmetic. In any case, the calculation doesn’t require knowledge of a multiplication table.

Besides which, this is all so trivial. What if they got it wrong and I didn’t spot the error? The total sum at stake is £1.11. Who cares? As a general rule, I’d prefer correct change, but when all’s said and done, I’m far more likely to do more damage to my finances myself, through some ill-considered purchase, than the maximum I could lose through this calculation being carried out incorrectly.

Certainly, this isn’t worth a major national initiative and inflicting more boredom and pain on children.

What’s far worse is that multiplication table exams only test children’s memory, the least interesting part of mathematical ability.

Here’s what I’d like a child (or a government minister) to do, if they can’t remember what eight times nine makes.

At the simplest level, they might say, “I know what eight times ten makes, because that’s easy – it’s eighty. And nine times is just ten times less one time, so the answer must be 80 – 8.”

Or, if the child had mastered some of the earlier entries in the multiplication table, they might say, “well, four times nine is thirty-six, so eight times nine must be just twice that, which isn’t hard to work out.”

A really clever child who knew some of the multiplication table, but not the row for eight, might say, “8 is just 4 x 2, and 9 is 3 x 3, so I’m trying to work out 4 x 2 x 3 x 3, or 4 x 3 x 2 x 3, which is six twelves, and I know the answer to that.”

To be honest, if the child took that last approach but got the answer wrong, I’d be inclined to give the work a good mark. The reasoning is so good, and it demonstrates a knowledge of factorisation (you can split numbers into simpler components) and of the commutative nature of multiplication (you can multiply numbers in any order and the result is the same). Reasoning is far more useful to mathematics than simply getting the right result – which we can obtain more reliably from the ubiquitous calculator (hey, they’re even on our phones).

Surely that’s more useful than simply parroting “72”? As Nick Gibb apparently wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.

An anecdote about Einstein recounts that a student once asked him what the speed of sound was. Einstein replied that he didn’t clutter up his memory with such information, but instead made sure he knew how to find it. I think even Nick Gibb would have trouble denying that Einstein was pretty good at maths, despite his aversion to burdening his brain through rote learning.

I’m assuming that Gibb has heard of Einstein, though he might well deny it on live TV, as a self-protective measure.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, a Tory government chasing the mirage of a reversion to traditional education policy, is merely the uninspired in pursuit of the undesirable.

Sheffield's trees: a maze worthy of Kafka

Have you been following the scandal that I like to think of as Sheffield-street-tree-gate? No? You don’t know what you’re missing.

Let me start by giving a little background. This may seem a bit of a roundabout way of setting the context, but bear with me – it will make sense in time.

It’s his novel The Trial that made an adjective, Kafkaesque, out of Kafka’s name. In it, the protagonist K (and, no, the choice of that single letter is unlikely to be mere coincidence) comes under investigation for a crime without ever being told what it is. And yet, even if he doesn’t know what crime he’s accused of, he somehow knows that he’s guilty – a neat way of expressing the universal sense of guilt, over the harm that each of us has somehow done. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his contemporary Oscar Wilde said “each man kills the thing he loves.”

As any of us would, K does try to deny his guilt. But the policemen who arrest him make it clear there’s no point:

”Our authorities, as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draw them out, like it says in the law, and they have to send us police officers out. That’s the law. Where do you think there’d be any mistake there?”

“I don’t know this law,” said K.

“So much the worse for you, then,” said the policeman.

Near the end, K explains his predicament to a priest.

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.”

“That is true,” said the priest, “but that is how the guilty speak.” 

Kafka's Trial: a vortex that sucks us in and grinds us down

The Sheffield street-tree scandal concerns the activity of a private company, Amey’s, that has been contracted by Sheffield City Council to look after its trees. It has started by felling a number of them, and in one particularly notorious incident, showed up at 5:00 in the morning, demanding that residents move their cars or have them crushed by falling trees. Two women aged 71 and 70 found themselves arrested for the first time in their lives when they tried to prevent the felling, prompting protests from Nick Clegg, the local MP, who denounced “scenes you’d expect in Putin’s Russia.” I suppose that, given the President Elect’s admiration for Vladimir, one might be tempted to add “or Trump’s America”.

This is the same Clegg who, as leader of the Liberal Democrats, made a pact with the devil by entering a coalition with the Tories. That kept David Cameron in power for five years with nothing achieved for himself but the reduction of his parliamentary presence from 62 to 8. 

But I digress. 

The Save Sheffield’s Trees group told the Guardian that if Amey’s people “blitz the city’s trees in the first five years of their 25-year contract, they can spend the next 20 years with much lower maintenance costs”. I suppose some will see that view as unduly cynical. Not implausible, though, is it?

Another person arrested over the battle of the city’s trees is a Green Party member, Simon Crump. He apparently was held by the police for eight hours, but he believes it took that long because the police simply couldn’t find the right charge to bring against him in their computer.

“It was quite Kafkaesque,” he informed Helen Pidd of the Guardian. “I was being imprisoned because they couldn’t work out what to charge me with.”

He’s right. And no doubt, whatever it was the police thought he’d done, he was guilty as charged. 

Kafka would have been proud.

Season's greetings from our sponsor

A couple of weeks ago, a friend from Marseille wrote to complain about an initiative to include the name of a sponsor in that of the City’s historic stadium, the Vélodrome. 

‘Will it become the ‘Vélodrome Nutella’?’ he asks. And goes on to wonder whether Bernard Delanoë, mayor of Paris, isn’t missing a trick. ‘Why not turn the Champs Elysées,’ he suggests, ‘into the Champs L’Oréal – because we deserve it?’

Funnily, not more than a couple of hours after reading his remarks, I discovered that St James’s Park, as iconic in Newcastle as the Vélodrome is in Marseille, was being rebaptised the Sports Direct St James’s Park stadium. It seems that there’s a bit of trend starting here.

My friend sees cynicism in all this, quoting Oscar Wilde’s view that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

Well, maybe. On the other hand, isn’t this just a matter of turning some grand old monuments into tributes to business? And doesn’t business perhaps deserve them? After all, isn’t it to some our greatest businesses, especially in financial services, that we owe today’s climate of economic stability and widespread prosperity?

On the other hand, I was a little disturbed by a sight that greeted me as I came through St Pancras International station the other day. The main hall now houses a massive Christmas tree made of Lego bits.

Lego gets the tone right

At first sight, I was amused by it – it’s striking and funny at the same time. But then I thought again. 

Christmas is the second most important feast of the Christian year after Easter (yes, though you wouldn’t know it from the scale of the celebrations, the death and resurrection trump, in liturgical terms, the birth. You’ve got to admit that birth’s more common). This is a time of year devoted, by Christians at least, to giving thanks for the birth of the Lord and Redeemer of all mankind. Turning it into an opportunity for advertising by Lego, however charming, might seem inappropriate.

After all, what would it say about our moral qualities in the West if Christmas became just another massive binge of commercialism?

Postscript with no relevance to the above: we’ve just started watching the second series of The Killing. It’s proving as gripping and powerful as the first (I’m talking about the original Danish version – I don’t know about the American remake which I haven’t watched). 

What’s extraordinary is that Series 2 manages to be strikingly fresh in feeling, even though the formula is exactly the same: a main story that is a classic thriller based around murder (but with an extraordinary central character in the detective, Sarah Lund), a family struggling with events risking to tear it apart, and a reasonably likeable political figure having to cope with a crisis of fearful complexity without being able to place full trust in his staff.

Well worth watching.