Grandparenting in the time of the kings

A few days before the New Year, Matilda and Elliott came to see us in our home in La Cañada, near Valencia. 

Well, they brought their parents too – at six and four, irritating rules concerning who’s allowed to do what on the highway meant they needed an adult to drive the car. Besides, it’s always good to have their parents nearby, so they can turn to them whenever they need a break from the company of their grandparents. 

Not that this often happens with Danielle, their Mamama. Nor with their uncle Michael, who was also with us. During a walk in the woods, he and Elliott had an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reverse roles in a shoulder carry.

Nice try. But not wholly successful

Winter visits naturally require respect for winter traditions. They arrived a couple of days after Christmas but, hey, what’s so special about one date rather than another? A Christmas tree, especially one with Christmas gifts underneath it, is just as wonderful on the 27th of December as on the 25th. And so it proved.

Just as enjoyable on the 27th as on the 25th

Another tradition we indulged in was the fine French winter dish of Raclette. This comes from Savoie, up in the Alps, so well suited to cold conditions. You grill slabs of the Savoyan cheese, Raclette, and then pour it over potatoes, to be eaten with pickles or ham. I like the underlying principle of this kind of meal which, like its cousin Fondue, has the diners doing some of the cooking. Besides, it’s a great dish – if you don’t know it, you should give it a try (come to think of it, even if you do know it, you should give it another try). But it’s even more fun with children happily learning to toast their cheese and use the special spatulas provided to scrape it onto their potatoes.

A dab hand at Raclette

Much less conventional but doubtless as much fun, was Mamama Danielle’s visit to the woods with the children to paint tree stumps. The idea is to colour the exposed surface of the stump, with enthusiasm and imagination, and demonstrate that in a woodland environment, not only will art imitate nature, nature and art also mix well.

 

Painting the forest

Nor did Danielle limit her activities with the children to painting. On the contrary, with their Dad Nicky, she took them to a bouncy castle paradise, where Matilda amazed everyone by her daring in tackling obstacles and slides even some adults feared to attempt. Elliott was never far behind her.

Matilda and Elliott: bouncy castle adventures

I too took the kids on an outing. This was to the next town, La Eliana. It has a playground that has long been a favourite of Matilda and Elliott’s, and it still attracts them. That’s despite the local council's apparent intent to wind it down, taking out pieces of equipment from time to time and not replacing them, so that it becomes increasingly denuded of sources of fun. That didn’t stop them enjoying themselves, however, even doing simple things like using bits of plastic they found lying around to decorate the sad site of a long-departed swing.

Art replacing boisterousness:
decorating the site of a long-gone piece of playground equipment

In any case, I’m not sure that it isn’t the travelling to get there and back that gives them their real fun, more than the playground itself. We go by metro and they love that. This time they made a new discovery: standing in the rubber-sided connection between carriages, which twists as the train goes around curves. Exciting stuff. At least as enjoyable as a vanished piece of playground apparatus.

Fun between the carriages

Then it was back to tradition. Mixed traditions, come to that. The great feast of the Christmas period here in Spain is the Feast of the Kings – los reyes – on the 6th of January, twelfth night. With unfaultable logic, that’s when Spaniards give children gifts, the idea being that the three kings in the Christian narrative brought gifts to the infant Jesus at that time. 

We had to take some liberties with the dates again, since the kids were going home with their parents in tow on 3 January. So we had the celebration a few days in advance. I can only say that the dating inaccuracy again did nothing to reduce the enthusiasm of the celebration.

With slightly less scriptural basis, the Spanish, like the French, celebrate the feast of the kings with a specific type of cake. In Spanish, it’s called a roscón de reyes (cake of the kings). In French, it’s a galette des rois (same). There’s a baker’s near us that makes the French variety rather well.

Roscón de reyes

Galette des rois

Danielle’s a good Frenchwoman at heart (well, as good as she can be: she’s from Alsace in the far east of France, on the border with Germany, and there’s some doubt about how good they are at being French, except as a way of not being German). She prefers the French version. Apparently, Elliott agrees, though Matilda would rather go for the Spanish variety. But in our house, our rules apply, and we had a French galette.

As the galette des rois protocol prescribes, the youngest person present (in this instance Elliott) sat under the table and called out the names of the people to receive each slice of cake as it was cut. That’s a way of ensuring that the slice with the little token in it – as often as not a figurine of one of the biblical kings – goes to someone selected entirely at random. This is important, I should point out, because the person who gets the token becomes the king or queen of the day and wears a fine cardboard crown, almost Trump-like in its golden glory. 

Whether we were quite as fair in the distribution of slices as these rules suggest I can’t claim with unqualified integrity. This year the crown went to Matilda, who duly became queen, just as last year, Elliott became king. 

He was less than enchanted with being usurped this year. He made clear his disapproval of this manifestly unfair choice (i.e. one that didn’t favour him) in the way that a four-year-old does best, though in his defence, he did that briefly before recovering his equanimity. Funnily enough, this is another common point with that fine President Trump, who also likes to express dissatisfaction with decisions that deny him what he feels is his entitlement (Nobel Peace Prizes come to mind). Unfortunately, unlike Elliott, Trump’s dissatisfaction comes backed up with serious armed force and powerful economic weapons. He also makes much more of a fuss and makes it for far longer.

Besides, in the grandkids’ case, Matilda had the generosity ultimately to give her crown to Elliott. Which is nothing like María Corina Machado handing over her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump. Matilda wasn’t expecting anything in return, so wasn't as disappointed as the Venezuelan opposition leader.

Elliott enjoying the crown

As for us, we all had a fine evening. Not spoiled even by the passing disagreement about the crown (Shakespeare was wrong: it’s the head that doesn’t wear the crown that doesn’t lie easy). And, even though Matilda might prefer a Spanish roscón, we all took great pleasure from our French-style, Spanish-baked galette.

All in all, it was a good visit, and a fine way to celebrate the season.

Venezuela: the case for just saying “no”

There is a glorious scene in my favourite book of World War One memoirs, Emilio Lussu’s Sardinian Brigade. He describes a moment when his Italian unit is waiting to charge the Austrian lines. The pre-assault artillery barrage starts up but the fire, instead of hitting the Austrians, falls on its own, Italian positions.

While Lussu rushes about trying to restore discipline among the panicking troops, he’s struck by an astonishing sight: one machine gun unit which is under full control of its officer, a friend of his, marching in fine order – towards the rear.

“What on Earth are you doing?” shouts Lussu.

“Attacking those guns,” replies his friend.

“But they’re our guns,” he shouts back.

“They’re firing at me,” comes the calm reply, “so they’re enemy guns.”

That strikes me as a thoroughly sensible, not to say commendable, attitude. By analogous reasoning, if a government is wreaking havoc on the lives of workers and the poor, it is, by that simple fact, a government hostile to the principles of socialism. It’s crucial to bring it down, as quickly as possible. If it claims to be socialist then, as soon as we’ve got our hollow laugh out of the way, we need to devote ourselves still more urgently to the task – a false friend is far more dangerous than an open enemy.

Why do I mention that just now?

Because there seems to be a belief among certain circles of the British Left that we need to back the present government in Venezuela, on the grounds that it’s ‘socialist’. This is a ‘socialist’ government that presided over a reduction in GDP by 18.6% last year. Inflation was running at a yearly rate of 741% in February 2017. Although the official figures are different, many commentators believe that unemployment is climbing towards 20%.

The face of socialism? Not as I see it

Venezuela is sitting on the biggest oil reserves in the world. And yet it’s GDP per head is a little over $12,800 a head and falling, while even Cuba, with no oil, is running at $11,900. How long before Venezuela falls below Cuba?

There’s plenty wrong about Cuba, but at least it’s delivering a stable economy, secure if low living standards and decent healthcare, in spite of decades of US sanctions. Nicolás Maduro’s government is delivering chaos, in which the first victims are the poor and the workers it claims to protect.

Sure, the parties likely to replace his in power may well be pretty awful. At least they’re open enemies and we can get on with opposing them once they’re in office. The one controlling the regime right down is a false friend and it’s wreaking horrific damage on those it should be defending.

Marching on it at the head of a machine gun detachment probably isn’t a good idea. But doing the same thing metaphorically? It’s firing on our people, which makes it the enemy, so why not?

After all, don’t forget Stalin called himself a socialist too. He proved it by taking out 80 million people. Among whom were all the leaders, bar him, of the revolution that was supposed to bring socialism to Russia.

I got tired decades ago of being told that his successors’ governments had to be supported simply for the principles to which they paid lip service. I feel tired when I hear the same stale old rhetoric being dragged out in defence of Maduro. 

We need to find something more innovative. And actually stand up for the people we’re supposed to represent.

Left and right: opposite wings or the meeting point of a circle?

“Any delay in the ranks of the left exposes us, at the very least, to a further advance by the far right, which will further reduce the social and political strength of the left in the parliamentary elections.”

That was French Socialist Party politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2002, the first time the far right National Front saw its candidate, Jean-Marie le Pen, win a place in a run-off election for President.

In 2017, no longer in the Socialist Party, Mélechon took a stance on the far left of French politics and came fourth in the first round of the Presidential election, with a respectable but insufficient 19.5% of the votes cast. Once again, the far right is through to the runoff – in this case represented by le Pen’s daughter, Marine. But, amazing to relate, Mr Mélenchon seems to have forgotten his wise words of 2002 about the damage of delay, preferring indeed to delay day after day instead of coming out in favour of the centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron, front-runner in the first round and now the only candidate able to block “a further advance by the far right”.

Now, why might that be? Could it perhaps have something to do with the sense that rather a lot of Mélenchon’s voters might prefer to go with the hard right in the second round, than with the soft left? And that Mélenchon would rather go along with that than lose contact with a voter base he rather values?

Call me cynical if you like, but that’s what I think is going on. There is in the hard left a holier-than-thou attitude which claims that it’s more principled and honest than the rest of us, but it’s capable of being just as opportunistic and evasive as, say, a Blair or a Putin.

At a deeper level, there is also a deeper link between far left and far right. Both are far out. They like to reason in terms of simple, pure solutions to complex problems, which avoid any of the complexities and messiness of reality. Compromise? That only dilutes the purity of our principles. Instead you end up defending a maximalist policy which, on the left, can lead you to defend the rights of the poor so hard in Venezuela that you bankrupt the country and starve your people. On the right, it leads to taking Britain out of the EU to escape from international control, only to leave it entirely dependent on the whims of the United States (or, worse still, the Trumpiverse).

There is today a taste for the simple and uncompromising. And it leads to the far right and far left both exerting greater appeal than they usually do – and almost interchangeably. Which is why voters can switch from Mélenchon to the National Front without apparent inconsistency.

Nor is this an exclusively French phenomenon. Kate Hoey, left-wing Labour MP for Vauxhall, has an enviable reputation for standing up for the rights of her hard-pressed, poor constituents. And yet, seduced by her enthusiastic dislike of the European Union, she found herself working shoulder to shoulder with Nigel Farage, then leader of UKIP, the British equivalent of the French National Front. They may have come to their common position from opposite directions but ended up, like two halves of a circle, meeting at a single point.

Hoey with her buddy, and supposed inveterate opponent, Farage

In the pursuit of fantasist, simple solutions, people can find themselves with strange bedfellows, though they approach them from different directions. Britain, sadly, is going to be living with the consequences of those fantasies for decades to come, struggling to find a role outside the EU. In France, on the other hand, if the defeat of Mélenchon is followed and confirmed by the defeat of the National Front, that fate may well be dodged.

At least for now.