Laughing at us, not with us

Benjamin Franklin came up with many pithy sayings that have become proverbs, such as, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it”.

Every time I see someone in the British media or politics talking about some aspect of the nation being “the envy of the world”, I cringe.

It’s been said about the National Health Service, where it had some validity until ten years of austerity starved Britain’s favourite institution until it could no longer deliver what the nation needs.

It’s been said about the justice system, despite Britain being the nation where it’s hardest to defend against a libel suit, where the Birmingham Six could be wrongly condemned and the family of Stephen Lawrence denied justice for his murder.

It’s been said about the Army, though it sent soldiers tramping across the Falklands in boots so bad they fell apart on the way.

Still, in some areas Britain had a fine reputation. For instance, for its sense of humour, which God knows we need more than ever. Or, despite Brexiter claims, in international negotiations, where the UK tended to get its own way in the EU (much to the annoyance of France), as Bobby McDonagh, once Irish ambassador to the UK as well as having worked many years with the EU, made clear in the Guardian in July 2019:

British influence in the EU went well beyond that available to most member states. The UK’s impact was exceptional due to several factors. The quality of its civil servants. The effectiveness of its coordination mechanisms. The reach of its diplomacy. The potency of its networking. The admiration for its pragmatism. The predominance of the English language.

Meanwhile, the reputation Britain enjoyed for administrative skill, pragmatism and diplomacy, was enjoyed by the US for its knowhow.

I’ve always enjoyed the story of a Canadian politician who said that, when his country was founded, it hoped to combine French culture with the British political system and American knowhow. Sadly, it had in fact combined the French political system with American culture and British knowhow.

US knowhow gave the US a huge advantage over Japan in World War II. It had the capacity to build war material at a colossal rate, replacing losses and extending their advantage, at a time when Japan could no longer build either ships of planes.

The Moon landing was another staggering achievement. Second in getting a man into space, they were nonetheless first in putting a man on the Moon (the series For All Mankind gives an entertaining and insightful view of what might have happened had they been second).

When it came to doing things right, it made sense to look at what was happening in the US. And when it came to doing the right thing, at least in politics and administration, you could do a lot worse than turn to the UK.

Both nations built those reputations over years of careful, competent work. Now they’ve lost them.

Not improving US standing in the world

Trump has spent his presidency undoing Obama’s good work before him, on global warming, on international relations and on medical preparedness for epidemics, particularly relevant today. Nothing, however, has shown up his unfitness for the job so much as his handling of the pandemic itself. Many have died because of his slowness to act. Now, many more will die as he forces the nation to open to business too soon, against the advice of his experts, and for no better reason than that he needs the economy to be booming to secure re-election.

In other words, his electoral interests matter more to him than the primary duty of all national leaders, to protect their people. He’s indifferent to the suffering of others. That, incidentally, seems to me to be the textbook definition of a sociopath.

They may be laughing at you these days,
rather with with you...

In the UK, Johnson’s focus was on completing Brexit, with the simplistic slogan, “Get Brexit Done”. It ignored any of the details of how a Brexit would look or the impact it would have. But Johnson isn’t a details man.

His failure to grasp detail is particularly stark in the pandemic. He had several weeks’ warning and much to learn from countries hit earlier. But like Trump, the Prime Minister is more concerned with holding his post than with carrying out its duties. Why, he even failed to attend five meetings of the emergency committee preparing for the epidemic when there was still time to act.

This week, as he announced that it was time to relax the lockdown and send many people back to work, it emerged that he’d made no arrangements to ensure their safety. Laughably, he made it sound as though they should go in on Monday, when in fact the relaxation was planned for Wednesday. Nor could he make clear how they should get there, by their own means or public transport.

This led to the German newspaper <i>Die Zeit</i>, one of many foreign media shocked by Johnson’s behaviour, to comment acerbically, “the government is now trying to pretend that it has the situation under control.”

Far from being the envy of the world, Trump and Johnson have made the US and UK objects of ridicule and pity. British comedy enjoys high international fame, but right now people are laughing at us, not with us. It will be a long way back for both nations to the reputations they once enjoyed, with no guarantee they’ll get there. 

But who’s to blame? They didn’t vote themselves into office, after all.

If you plan to vote for Trump, you’re not making America great. You’re contributing to preserving an administration the world sees as incompetent and which will cause the deaths of tens of thousands of your compatriots.

If you plan to vote Conservative in Britain, you’re trying to preserve a government which is making the country a laughing stock and the most dangerous in Europe for Coronavirus.

We often get the governments we deserve. And if we don’t vote for a better one, we deserve the one we have.

Even if its bad deeds confirm, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, our justified but lousy reputation.

Lockdown disappointment, or why the truth is sometimes hard to bear

What a terrible disappointment those of us who live near Valencia had to suffer on Friday night.

We’re near the end of the eighth week of our lockdown in Spain. Reputedly the toughest in Europe.

As it happens, we’re now in phase zero of lockdown relaxation. That means we’re allowed out for exercise once a day, at specific times, alone, or for walks with one other person from the same household. You can get your hair cut, though only with an appointment. Chlldren can go out with their parents and dog owners can walk their dogs, close to home. Otherwise, we’re only allowed out to shop for food or medication, or attend healthcare centres.

Phase 1 is due to start on Monday, 11 May. That would allow us to travel together by car, and to go anywhere within the three provinces that make up the Valencia Community. We could go to the mountains! Or to the sea!

Cafes and restaurants and more shops would also reopen, with strict social distancing restrictions, and groups of up to ten people could even get together.

It was something to look forward to. We felt sorry for the other Communities, in particular Catalonia, which had decided not to ask for permission to move to phase 1, because they didn’t feel their health situation warranted it yet. As we were astonished to discover that the Madrid Community had asked to transition, despite being the place worst hit. The Madrid director of Public Health even resigned in protest over the local government’s drive for further relaxation.

Then the lightning bolt struck.

Ultimately it was up to the Ministry of Health at national level to decide which areas might be allowed to move to phase 1 and which would have to wait. In the end, only 51% of Spanish residents will be making the transition. Madrid certainly won’t. But even within the Valencian Community, only a few smaller regions will be allowed to, but most won’t, including the city of Valencia itself. That covers us.

Why won’t we be allowed to move to the next phase?

The Health ministry has looked at the trends in infections and compared them with the number of general and intensive care unit beds in the hospitals. They’ve looked at testing and infection monitoring facilities. They’ve looked at a range of factors. Their conclusion? Like Madrid, we’re not yet ready to manage the risks, or to handle a resurgence of cases if one occurs.

That’s not a popular decision. A lot of anger, above all from the Conservative and hard right opposition, has been directed at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and the Left-leaning coalition government. Even with two parties, it’s in a minority in Parliament and has to depend on smaller groups to get its measures adopted.

That includes the continuation of the state of emergency that’s being used to impose the lockdown. They had the guts to back him when it came up for renewal this week.

Pedro Sánchez battling for his strategy in the Spanish Parliament

It’s not quite clear what his critics expect. Presumably they realise he doesn’t have a magic wand to end the pandemic. Have they perhaps decided that the economic damage of the lockdown isn’t worth the health benefit it’s delivered? That benefit has been considerable, with new cases and deaths both dropping steadily. So do the critics think that money matters more than lives?

The strategy seems to be working

They’re not alone. State after state in the US is opening up. Some, like Nebraska, are doing so at a time when it’s obviously extremely risky. Not only are infections and deaths in Nebraska not falling, they’re rising steeply. But the governor is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, who wants the economy going again to strength his chance of re-election, whatever the cost in lives.

Last week, I wrote about the way lies flourish when people choose to believe them.

The attacks on Sánchez show the reverse side of that same coin. When the truth is unpalatable, people prefer to reject it and attack the bearer of the message. In my earlier piece, I quoted the American journalist H L Mencken. Here’s another view of his which applies just as well outside the US:

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

The truth is that a lot of Spain isn’t ready to move from phase 0 to phase 1 of lockdown relaxation. At least, not without putting far too many lives at risk. Our disappointment is real, but we just have to swallow it.

Otherwise we simply run from the truth. And we belittle human life, like Pete Ricketts, the governor of Nebraska. A far more enlightened governor, Andrew Cuomo of New York, asked recently, “how much is a human life worth?”

Those backing Trump and Ricketts, or attacking Sánchez, probably won’t admit it, but I suspect their answer would be pretty low.

At least, for any life but their own.

Doctor's orders in a time of pandemic

As we’re repeatedly and rightly told, in this time of pandemic we need to be guided by scientific and medical experts basing themselves on solid evidence. Not by a series of bigoted views based on no more than gut feel.

On the right, Dr Fauci, a medical expert to follow
With him, a buffoon it might be wiser to shun

Unfortunately, the evidence is patchy and experts don’t always agree on how to interpret it.

• Does recovery from Covid-19 leave you immune to the disease or could you be infected again? It’s not clear.
• Are masks worth wearing or do they provide little real benefit? Views differ. 
• How quickly will an effective vaccine be available? No one really knows.

None of this is a cause for worry. It’s in the nature of science. Scientific principles are never proved, they’re merely accepted as good working theories for just as long as they’re not disproved.

To believe that science offers certainty is to misunderstand its fundamental nature.

Now I’m going to step into an intellectual minefield. Doctors tend to have a fairly favourable view of the extent of their knowledge. Whereas my view is that uncertainty is even greater in medical science than in most of the others, because medical science is still in its infancy.

A recent study of 3000 Randomised Control Trials, the most powerful type of clinical trial, showed that 396 of them (13%) led to what are known as ‘medical reversals’. That’s when a new finding leads to what was previously regarded as good practice being found to produce no benefit or, even, to do positive harm.

What that says is that medicine is still a long way from reaching the kind of stability of a field such as physics.

This all came to mind just the other day, as I was working on a project of mine that has lasted too many years, but which I can now focus on more completely, following my retirement. It’s a novel based on the life of Emilie du Châtelet, a remarkable intellectual of the eighteenth century, a time when it was more difficult even than today for a woman to be taken seriously as an authority.

A fairly large collection of her correspondence has survived, and I’ve been reading it as a way of getting as close as I can to her voice and, even more important, to her feelings. I’m now into the last few of her letters, when she was already carrying the baby of the entirely unworthy man for whom she developed a terrible, and ultimately fatal infatuation (yes, her life really is that surprisingly interesting).

In one of her letters to him she writes:

It’s true that I have been feeling so unwell for the last week that I was obliged to submit to bleeding, to avoid the same accident as happened at Commercy. So I came here to be bled… Since the bloodletting I’ve been feeling even worse, but at least I’ve done what I had to do to avoid the danger which worried me more in my current state than in any other. I’ve felt sick and had a headache ever since the blood was taken.

Bloodletting. This was a standard practice, and perhaps the most common surgical procedure in Western medicine for something like 2000 years. Emilie du Châtelet obviously hated and dreaded it. But she went through it, because in her “current state” – i.e. pregnant – it was clearly something that she “had to do”.

She “had to do” it? That was only because that’s what physicians of the time would have told her to do.

Today, we know that, except for the treatment of a small number of specific blood disorders, this kind of intervention isn’t just useless, it’s harmful to the patient. But, back in 1749, it was regarded as an absolute must. Practically all doctors agreed.

It’s often said that the difference between a doctor and God is that God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.

Well, the information that doctors have isn’t handed down from on high, carved on tablets of stone. The sheer number of medical reversals proves that. What’s believed today is the best available working hypothesis but no more.

Still, a good working hypothesis is as good as it gets while we await further evidence. So it’s best to follow it. In other words, we do, as I said, need to respect medical experts’ views, because they have the best information available in the state of knowledge today. Though we should remember that it could change tomorrow.

Respect isn’t quite the same as reverence. In particular, it allows us to indulge in a measure of scepticism. Always, I feel, a good approach when it comes to protecting our health.

After all, look what happened to Emilie.

The territorial imperative in practice

It’s curious the impact neighbours can have on your life.

Right now, I’m thinking of the neighbours at the front of our house, a pair of house martins, and one from next door, a Siamese cat.

The house martins I mentioned once before, when they turned up a few weeks ago and moved into the nest over our front door. It’s unlikely to be the same pair who were there last year, though one of the two of them may well have hatched there then. Since one of the things they’ve done is drive away a pair of larger house martins who clearly had their eye on the same nest, I can’t help suspecting that this is an ungrateful son or daughter taking over the parents’ place and kicking them out.

Kids, right? Think they’re owed a living.

My suspicions are reinforced by the fact that the female of the pair isn’t just smaller than the male, as they tend to be, but far smaller. Clearly a very young lady. Perhaps just a bit too sure of herself, a bit too convinced of her right to call the shots around the place.

We had a neighbour like that once. That was when we were living in Luton. She used to have parties that went on from about 10:00 at night until about noon the next day. We assumed that they were cocaine-fuelled, if only because I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to keep going that loudly for that long without some artificial stimulant to give them the energy.

The noise they made tended to follow a cyclical pattern. There’d be some silence when we’d think that we might perhaps be allowed to sleep. Then the voices would start up again, growing louder and louder as the revellers fell out with each other, until they were shouting abuse. That would sometimes culminate in the noise of breaking crockery, weeping, or loud lovemaking – well, sex, anyway - before returning to silence. Then rinse and repeat.

This was several years into the austerity programme of the Tory government, so the resource-starved police couldn’t do anything about the noise. One policewoman I was talking to did actually say, “Good God! I can hear her down the phone line!” That was through the intervening wall. 

The policewoman was sympathetic but couldn’t help.

I’m glad to say that the young lady who has moved in over our front door is far more attractive and far more well behaved than that neighbour from hell. But pretty or not, she and her partner are just as good at making their presence felt. Not, I’m glad to say, at night. During the day, though, if we have the gall to step outside, or merely open the front door, they like to share their views on the matter with us.

The house martin making her displeasure known to us
Small in size but highly communicative

Now, I had a limited education, and was never taught house martin. So when they go and perch on the phone line that crosses our yard and chatter away to each other, to any other passing house martins, and above all at us, I really can’t make out what precisely they’re saying. But I have no trouble with the gist. It’s “who the heck do you think you are, wandering around this place as though you own it?” I’m cleaning up the language here a bit, but I think they add a request roughly translatable as “go away” though I suspect expressed somewhat more forcibly. And who can blame them?

It’s clear that they regard the place as theirs and our irruption into it as a gross and unwarranted invasion of territory, bitterly to be deplored. And they tell us so. Loudly and at length.

Another creature that makes that kind of point indisputably clear is our assault poodle Toffee. She now weighs in at not a terribly long way off 4 kilos, making her a no doubt daunting presence to any passing creature the size of a squirrel or smaller. But like Queen Elizabeth I, she has the heart and stomach of a King, and she thinks foul scorn that anyone should dare to invade the borders of her realm.

That was made clear to me when I saw her, flat on the ground at the bottom of our garden, barking into the hedge while her tail flailed from side to side so fast that I swear, had we been able to attach a generator to it, we could have driven a dishwasher off it.

Toffee making her displeasure known to the Siamese
Small in size but not in heart

The object of her anger? The Siamese cat from next door.

The previous occupants of our house had no animals, so the Siamese clearly got used to wandering in and out of the garden as the whim took him. Toffee, though, has no intention of allowing such liberties. So there she was, barking her heart out to defend our territory. Sorry, correct that: her territory.

It really is an imperative, isn’t it? The protection of territory. Humans have that instinct too. It inflames anti-immigrant rhetoric: we don’t want him here, he’s foreign. Or, indeed, racist thinking: we don’t want him here, he’s different. Or the American or British hostility towards international institutions: we don’t want to be with them, we’re different.

Natural, I suppose. Though also a bit sad.

After all, aren’t we supposed to have bigger brains and more powerful intellects than house martins or poodles?

If you want lies, you'll get liars

It’s a lazy, easy accusation against politicians to say they all lie. In reality, many politicians only lie because it works. They’ve understood that enough voters want to hear their lies and believe them, which makes the right lies, told well, the quickest way to get power and to hang on to it.

The American journalist and writer H L Mencken summed up the process quite neatly, starting with a point I’ve felt for a long time: politicians – perhaps I should say most politicians – have no special aptitude for government, only an aptitude for getting into government.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

I’m not sure about its never being possible to satisfy B without looting A. After all, if US healthcare hadn’t been allowed to keep festering, and the British NHS hadn’t been repeatedly hacked at, for the last ten years, wouldn’t both A and B have benefited from better services in our present pandemic?

Perhaps I’m a little less cynical than Mencken. Or am I just less realistic?

What interests me most, though, is Mencken’s reference to the process of finding people who “pant and pine” for a promise that is unlikely to be kept. Isn’t that the incentive for politicians to lie? Or, put it in other words, if you want politicians to lie to you, isn’t it likely that you’ll end up with lying politicians?

Vote for lies and you'll get liars

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are saddled, for now, with political leaders for whom the lie seems to be as natural as breathing. At the start of the Coronavirus crisis, the UK Prime Minister claimed that the NHS was fully prepared for any eventuality. As well as the impressive rate of growth of deaths generally in the UK, the number of deaths of healthcare workers denied adequate protective equipment, proves how entirely false that statement was. Johnson’s good at thanking front-line staff for their courage and selflessness, less good at protecting them.

Trump’s lies have been more barefaced still, and compounded by irresponsible ignorance. Having suggested that injecting disinfectant might protect against the virus, whereas it’s much more likely to kill you, he attempted on the following day, to pass off the comment as “sarcasm”. That’s even though hundreds of millions have been able to see him on TV making the remark without the slightest hint of sarcasm.

At least a large minority of Americans seem happy to maintain their trust in Trump despite his being caught repeatedly in easily exposed lies. In the UK, the position is worse: a majority of the electorate still believes in Johnson, however often he shows he can’t be trusted. They “pant and pine” to be told what they want to hear, especially in the atmosphere of fear that comes with a crisis,  when it’s comforting to believe government is looking after you,

Most recently, the UK government has made a number of unrealisable promises, just as Mencken warned. One was that the UK would be carrying out Coronavirus tests at a rate of 100,000 a day by the end of April. By the 29th, we had reached some 81,611, though that included people receiving more than one test in a day.

Then suddenly, on the 30th, the day of the deadline, the UK reached 122,347. A brilliant success. The Health Secretary manfully and modestly claimed it as a triumph not for himself, but for the Health Service. A matter for celebration, in any case.

Sadly, a lot of people, anxious to believe whatever they’re told by the government, will take that as gospel. But when we look at the detail, we see that those 122,347 tests actually only affected 73,000 people. Mark Twain once commented that:

Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” It shows that he did not know how to tell them.

Indeed. Most people understood that 100,000 target to mean 100,000 people tested, but if you do enough repeat tests on the same people, you can get there with just 73,000 people. Dexterous sleight of hand.

A still more curious fact is that 39,000 of those tests weren’t actually carried out on the 30th. They were sent to people who had ordered them. Who knows when the tests will be used? Or whether they’ll be used at all?

So people actually tested on the last day of the month may have been under 40,000.

That reminds me of one of the classic lies: “the cheque is in the post”.

How about “the test is in the post”?

Believe it if you want. But if you do, you’ll only be asking to be deceived again. And right now, a lot of people are dying.

Girl in the spotlight

Occasionally, things work out well even if by pure accident. Serendipity, I think they call it.

In 1996, I was working for an American company, based in Baltimore, Maryland. A group of us travelled to the company headquarters, where we were met by a woman who remains a friend to this day. Let’s call her Peg, since that’s her name.

Peg had laid on a stretched limo to take us to Washington DC, which isn’t that far away, on a free day during our stay. That didn’t suit most of our party, who wanted to go shopping or, in one notable case, find the restaurant where ‘the waitresses serve you topless’.

In the end, Peg cancelled the limo and drove just two of us to DC herself. It was a brief trip and we couldn’t see much of the city. But we visited the National Gallery of Art where I was introduced for the first time to the work of the remarkable American painter Winslow Homer, but that’s not what I plan to talk about here today.

The other show we visited on that day was an exhibition of Vermeer paintings. It had previously been in London, but it was booked solid. So it was something of a surprise that we could just turn up in DC, buy tickets, and go in with minimal waiting time.

The work we did on that trip has left no trace in my memory, as it fades into the dusty history of business. But getting to that exhibitions has left an indelible mark on me. As well as providing me with a good friend.

Girl with a pearl earring

If I remember, I knew very little about Vermeer at the time, so it was staggering to visit an exhibition of 21 of his paintings, given that we only know of 35 in all. And, naturally, I was bowled over by Girl with a pearl earring, the painting which blows away most people who see it. Why, it’s even been turned into a novel by Tracy Chevalier from which a successful film was made. Starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth, it’s not at all bad, by the way, in case you haven’t seen it.

The painting is extraordinary in many ways. Look at the earring – it really isn’t one, is it? The pearl is just a drop of white paint and there’s no hook attaching it to the ear. Again, small drops of light moisten the eyes and lips. The girl’s nose, too, isn’t separated from the cheek by anything – there’s no line. In fact, there isn’t a line anywhere in the painting. It’s all done by planes and, above all, by light, which is what Vermeer did best: play with light and use it to convey shape and mood.

There’s one thing about the painting, though, that has worried some people. There’s no background. That’s not Vermeer’s style. He would usually do extremely detailed paintings which filled the canvass with walls and windows, people, plants, again all working with light to produce the same haunting effect. Look at Woman holding a balance and you’ll see the complexity of the background, including more pearls shown just through drops of light, as well as the characteristic way he has the sunlight from the window play on the woman’s face.

Woman holding a balance

The background to Girl with a pearl earring is dark and without features. So is the painting by Vermeer at all? Or, to put it in other terms, just who was Colin Firth playing in the film?

It was a great pleasure to discover, therefore, that the Mauritshuis musem in Delft, Holland, Vermeer’s home town, which owns the painting, had just completed a project called Girl in the spotlight. Experts have used recent technology to take a closer look at the picture. Scanning techniques have allowed them to see lost details and even the way the building was built up.

They discovered that there was a background to the picture initially: a green curtain but, down the centuries, the pigment has faded to give us the featureless background we see today. And the project concludes:

Vermeer signed his artwork in the upper left-hand corner with IVMeer.

Good to know it’s by him. Not that I seriously doubted it. After all, how many artists have worked with pure light with such mastery? But it’s helpful to have it confirmed.

And it’s fun to be reminded of a great day, in fine company, in lovely surroundings nearly quarter of a century ago.

Light at the end of the lockdown tunnel

Sunday was a great day.

(Nearly) summertime and the living is easing

It wrapped up week 6 of our lockdown here in Spain and, boy, it’s been (and still is) a tough lockdown. People not absolutely obliged to travel to work are only allowed out to go the shops, the banks, a pharmacy, a healthcare centre or (it may just be me, but I find this amusing) to the newsagent to get a newspaper. Could this be the triumph of the much-maligned Mainstream Media? Of those institutions Trump denounces as purveyors as fake news? Here they have special status.

There are a few exceptions to the lockdown rules. We, by sheer good luck, fall into one of them: dog owners are allowed to walk their dogs, though only close to home. But what exactly is ‘close’? At one time, the suggestion was just 50 metres but, outside the cities, there is slightly more leeway in the definition.

In a spirit of complete compliance with the strict letter of the regulations, I can firmly state that we never go far.

And in strict compliance with the spirit of the regulations, we never meet anyone anyway, so we’re exposing neither ourselves nor them to any risk.

Besides, the smaller dog – Toffee – has developed a certain indolence recently. Since we’re only allowed to walk on the streets, and not in the woods, and she doesn’t like the streets, she’s more than capable of lying down suddenly at the end of her lead – we’re not allowed to take them off the lead – and making it quite clear that she intends to go no further.

That really can happen within 50 metres of home.

The option then is to head back or carry her. And, small though she is, I certainly do not enjoy carrying her far. That too helps to keep the definition of ‘close’ to within pretty tight bounds.

The only people allowed out under any of these arrangements were, in any case, adults or kids of 14 or over. The only exception were children with a single parent or carer: when the adult went out, the kids necessarily went with them. But all other kids were stuck indoors. Which is pretty soul-destroying if you think that the lockdown was just coming up to the end of six weeks.

Lovely weather AND the kids are out again

That’s what made Sunday so great. The Spanish government decided that the downward trend in numbers of Coronavirus cases and, above all, of deaths was sufficient to allow a little slackening of the rules. And the big deal was that kids up to 14 would now be able to go out, for an hour a day, to play as they wished, with no particular destination in mind. They could take toys, scooters, skates or even bikes. A single adult could accompany them, taking care of up to three kids.

What made things even better was that the weather had just turned glorious. To me, still retaining British criteria, it felt like summer, with temperatures in the mid-twenties (OK, OK, high seventies if you insist on using that old-fashioned Fahrenheit). No one from around here would call that summery, of course. They’d just say, “just you wait. You’ll see what real summer is like. You’ll be regretting the rain.” And I know they’re right: we were here last summer. Even so, Sunday felt good and raised my spirits, for both the weather and the unusual sight of families out walking.

People did cheat a bit. There were a lot of family groups out, with what looked distinctly like two parents with the kids. And at times different families met up and chatted, not always, as far as I could tell, respecting social-distancing requirements.

In our local city, Valencia, things were worse. The council, unlike its opposite numbers in Madrid, decided to reopen the parks for the first time. A flood of humanity descended into them. The police were nice, though. They announced in the evening that they’d gone round that day telling people what they should be doing and, above all, what they shouldn’t, without fining anyone. But that was a one-off ‘pedagogical experience’. From Monday on, it would be fines again. And they’re not cheap here.

The weekdays have seen a return to something more orderly. People are still out, and the weather’s still good, but social distancing has become the norm again.

Now we’re waiting for the next step. The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said that the exit from the lockdown will take up to eight weeks, until the end of June. That’ll make 14 weeks in all, which sounds a bit right: Wuhan in China is approaching three months.

The exit will happen in steps, making it a lockdown stepdown, I suppose. The stages will be timed differently in different regions. The first step, however, has already been announced. As of the coming Saturday, we adults will also be allowed out, for the first time since the whole business started, for an hour’s exercise or walking a day. And we don’t even have to go out alone but can walk with others from our household. In my case, that means that I can enjoy Danielle’s company, though if our cat Misty wants to join us, I dare say we won’t object to his coming along too.

That’s subject to things continuing to go well. But yesterday saw the lowest number of new cases registered since the lockdown began, so I’m feeling a little optimistic.

There could be light at the end of this particular tunnel.