A village in the hills, a pool of light in the gloom

In a fairly gloomy world, a story that casts a little light is a precious thing. So I thought I’d tell talk about Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village in the high country of central France.

One of the more depressing developments these days is the growth of nationalism, with its still uglier relative, xenophobia, and its particularly toxic cousin, racism. 

“If you prick us,” cries the Jew Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, “do we not bleed?” 

Yes. We’re all the same flesh and blood. Jews, Christians and Muslims. Whites and blacks. Gays and straights. So why do we build so many walls, with such contempt, or even persecution, aimed at those kept outside them?

It’s fascinating – perhaps the right word is horrifying – to see the most recent survey of British attitudes on national and racial distinctions. Nearly half (47%) believe that people who lost their jobs during the Covid pandemic must have been under-performing at work. They blame the victims for a misfortune not of their making.

What’s worse, the survey found that 13% of the population believe that economic hardship suffered by black people is down to lack of motivation or willpower.

This hostility towards ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’, is on the rise across the world. In Britain, it led to Brexit, where people who will be among the first victims of the damage it is causing voted for it, such was their dislike of foreigners. In the US, it led to small children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents and held in cages. Across Europe, it has led to a proliferation of barbed wire and discgraceful political leaders, such as Matteo Salvini who closed ports in Italy to ships carrying migrants rescued from drowning at sea.

That makes it heartwarming to come across the story of the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village of 2500 people on a high plateau south of Lyon. This is a community which has maintained for centuries a tradition of offering refuge to those in need.

Back in the seventeenth century, it took in Protestants fleeing persecution in a France determined to become entirely Catholic. The population is predominantly Protestant to these days.

That Protestantism, however, didn’t prevent the village taking in priests too, when they needed a safe haven, during the French revolution.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the village became a holiday resort for children from poor families. Barns were converted, hostels were built to accommodate the visitors. That meant that it was well-equipped to help people out when it continued its tradition of welcoming refugees in the twentieth century.

Some of its visitors were celebrities. Albert Camus, later to be a world-renowned novelist and Nobel prize winner, spent a year there from the autumn of 1942, recovering from tuberculosis and finishing his outstanding novel, The Plague.

Others were just fleeing persecution. In the late thirties, it was Spanish republicans escaping the Franco dictatorship. This was a time when France was imprisoning such refugees in what were in effect concentration camps where thousands died.The few who made it to Le Chambon were treated as they deserved, as human beings.

One was Juliette Usachs, a Catalan Protestant doctor who took charge of a house made available to receive mothers and children escaping Franco’s Spain. Before long, though, she found herself looking after a new and different population of refugees: from 1941, she cared for Jews fleeing the German Nazis and their collaborators in Marshall Petain’s puppet government in the southern half of France.

In the end, something like 2500 Jewish refugees were kept hidden in Le Chambon, and survived the war. 

Some of the children Le Chambon saved
with the adults who helped save them

One of the young Jews who made it to Le Chambon was Erich Schwamm. He arrived with his family, when he was 12, in 1943. He may have met Albert Camus. He made it through the war and felt he’d been so well treated in Le Chambon that he stayed until he’d completed his school education, in 1950. At that point, he went to Lyon, where he qualified as a pharmacist and had a successful career, with his French, Catholic wife from the region.

He never forgot the village that rescued him, however. When he died, on 25 December 2020, his will included a legacy to the village of nearly 2 million euros.

The village has maintained its tradition. Today, fifty migrant children are being educated in its school, while they wait for the French authorities to decide whether they can stay in the country or not. As far as Le Chambon is concerned, they are children, and like any child they need to be looked after and deserve to be educated. Whatever their creed, colour or background.

What struck me most about Le Chambon and its behaviour during the war is how the inhabitants stayed silent and kept their secret. You can imagine what fate awaited any refugee, or indeed anyone harbouring one, if they were caught by the Nazi or collaborationist authorities. But no one in the village ever denounced either the people in hiding or the hosts that hid them. There was solidarity across a village which felt that the first duty of humanity was to protect other humans. 

The village inhabitants remain quiet to this day. They don’t make a show of their humanity. No street is named for anyone. There is no rue de Gaulle, there is no rue Juliette Usachs, there will be no rue Erich Schwamm. It’s only others who honour them. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, has awarded the whole village the status of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, one of only two villages honoured this way, alongside Nieuwlande in the Netherlands. But Le Cambon itself makes no boasts about its behaviour.

But, as the Spanish paper El País points out, Le Chambon sets no price on the help it offers others. And it expects no prizes for it. 

So isn’t it great that it got one?

The unhelpful hermit, or a Scarborough tale retold

There are plenty of sad stories around in this time of pandemic and economic misery. So it came as no surprise when my friend Rosemary recently told me a sorry tale of  her own.

Now Rosemary had been going through troubled times of her own, the details of which we don’t need to go into for the sake of this story. Let’s just say that as she flailed around seeking a solution to her difficulties, she came across a friend of hers who suggested that she might do worse than to consult a guru who lived up a nearby mountain.

“A terribly wise man,” she explained, “who always seems to have just the advice you need when you’re facing a serious problem.”

Well, Rosemary trusted her friend and, besides, she was running out of options. She decided it might be worth giving the suggestion a try. 

“Where does he live?” she asked.

“In St Margaret’s hermitage, up at the top of that mountain,” her friend replied, pointing out of the window.

Where this was all happening isn’t terribly relevant to the story either, but you might have guessed from that last remark that it wasn’t central London.

A hermit’s hut
For a hermit with taste and the means to satisfy it

“A hermit in a hermitage?” said Rosemary, “sounds appropriate.”

“Oh, appropriate is his strong suit. The right word at the right time.”

And then her friend gave Rosemary a crucial piece of advice.

“The one thing to bear in mind is that, while he doesn’t charge for his services, he does expect a gift. It’s barren around the hermitage so he needs people to bring him supplies. Don’t bring food though – that’s what most people give him and he has plenty. What he needs is things to season the food he has. Salt, pepper, herbs, spices. Anything of that kind. He’ll be delighted if you bring him those.”

So Rosemary put together a large collection of every kind of herb and spice and seasoning she could think of, and stuffed them in her rucksack. Then she shouldered it early one morning and set off to climb the long track to the hermitage.

It was quite a trek. At first the path was clear and she followed it with ease. But later it became steeper and wandered from side to side. There were many others on the way to see the wise man, and sometimes she just followed them, but they didn’t always know the way either, so she would just find herself lost in company, which is a little better than being lost alone, but not a lot.

Eventually, she got to the hermitage, which was little more than a hut. It was already mid-afternoon, and she had to wait in a queue to be seen. Eventually, she was let into the hut, just as the sun was setting, knowing that a long return hike awaited her in the dark.

“Come in, my daughter,” said the hermit. “And what have you brought me?”

She proudly laid out her wares. Salt and pepper. A range of herbs. Many spices. Curry leaves. Coriander (OK, OK, my American friends, cilantro). Chillies. Enough to stock a fine kitchen.

“Where’s the parsley?” he asked

Alas, she’d brought no parsley.

“Parsley’s the one thing I long for,” he told her, obviously disappointed. 

“I didn’t know.”

“Errors, my child,” he told her, in his wise way, “are merely moments crying out for correction, turning them into opportunities for improvement. Just come back another day with the parsley and I’ll answer any questions you may have.”

Her heart sank. A struggle back down the mountain in the dark lay ahead. Then a struggle back up again once she’d bought the parsley. With no guarantee that the wise man’s answer would, in fact, solve her problems.

You see what I mean about a sad story? Poor her. The hermit was adamant that until she’d brought him what he wanted, he wouldn’t pay any attention to her difficulties.

As she had no parsley for the sage, he gave Rosemary no time.

And here ends my little tribute to Simon & Garfunkel.

The good bureaucrat, or the way out of the labyrinth

If you’ve paid into a pension plan, you expect to get a pension back. In time. It turns out that, with French state pensions, ‘time’ can be rather long.

Danielle and I worked in France from 1996 to 2008. The French pension system is notorious for being ludicrously complicated. Indeed, one of the main things President Macron campaigned to do was reorganise it and, he hoped, inject a little more rationality into it. Ours was especially complicated as we spent some time as employees and some time self-employed, so we ended contributing to a bewildering number of funds.

That didn’t prove too big a problem for me, but only thanks to Gregory.

Who was Gregory, I hear you ask? Well, he was that rare creature, the bureaucrat with a human heart. I never met him, I never even had a telephone conversation with him. But I developed a picture of him just from our email exchanges. I always thought of him as a ‘lad’, which was probably unfair, especially as I realise that my mental image of him is of someone in his thirties or forties. Although I have no basis for even believing that.

What I know about him is that he actually wants to solve problems and help the people he’s dealing with. 

The pension system had warned me that it would take up to six months – actually, six months and two days – to sort out my entitlement and start paying me. I don’t know where they got the two days from. They make the estimate sound terribly accurate, don’t they? It’s like ‘seventeen minutes’ sounds like a time precise to the minute, whereas ‘quarter of an hour’ sounds like anything between twelve minutes (less would be ‘ten minutes’) and eighteen (more would be ‘twenty minutes’).

The impression of accuracy was just that. An impression and no more. It was more like twelve months and several attempts at communication by phone or email before, oh joy!, Gregory got involved.

To give you a sense of the kind of help he provided, when he asked me whether I was happy to backdate the payments to when I first submitted my application, I asked him whether it was better to take the extra value of the pension that had been added by the delay. He came back to me within a few hours – not a few days, let alone a few weeks – saying that he’d run a calculation and it would take seventeen years for any delay to add extra value greater than the payments lost by the delay. 

That certainly helped me choose the backdating option instead.

Unfortunately, poor Danielle wasn’t as lucky as I was.

One of the greatest honours for writers is to have their names used to form an adjective. You know, like Dickensian or Orwellian. One of the best is ‘Kafkaesque’. It describes the kind of nightmarish process that can suck you into an apparently endless labyrinth of bureaucracy where however far you go, your goal never seems any closer, while nothing seems meaningful and no one can tell you what you need to do to get out.

That’s what happened to Danielle over her French pension.

Kafka’s The Trial
or the nightmare of a bureaucratic maze
with no way through and no way out

She started, as I did with an online application to an organisation in Paris. Which referred her, as it referred me, to an office in Bordeaux. But that’s where our paths diverged. It was Bordeaux that put me in touch with Gregory. Danielle, on the other hand, was told that no, it wasn’t Bordeaux who was dealing with her case, it was Strasbourg. In Strasbourg they hadn’t heard of her. Back to Bordeaux she went. The papers were being sent across, it seemed. In Strasbourg they hadn’t received them. Then they had but they needed some more documents, even though Danielle had already submitted them. She sent them again. They lost them. She sent them again. Then they lost the whole file. She had to start again in Bordeaux and, once she’d prepared all her papers, they told her that she had to deal with Strasbourg.

The French are generous with ‘familles nombreuses’. You get a bit more of a pension if you have three kids or more. We have three boys. Well, sons – their ages range from 36 to 49 so ‘boys’ may be a misleading term. Danielle had to submit birth certificates for all three. She applied for them, received them and sent them in. Then they got lost. So she had to apply for new ones. Which also got lost. So she obtained a third set which, miraculously, no one lost.

She had to go through the process of officially applying for the birth certificates because copies won’t do. Nor will old certificates. Why on earth do bureaucracies need recent birth cerficates, not more than three months old? What do they expect to change? They think the date of birth might be revised, or what?

Still nothing happened. Danielle went online to Paris again. That was no good because her case was in the hands of the people in Bordeaux. Who told her to contact Strasbourg.

I may not have got the order of all those steps right, but you get the general picture.

But then, out of the blue, she got an email from the Bordeaux office. And it was signed by – Gregory.

He started off by pointing out that she seemed to have been mucked around dreadfully by his organisation. She agreed. He remembered having dealt with my case, and suggested he could perhaps handle hers. She agreed with that too. He then asked her whether she might like to have her first payment backdated to the day when she originally asked for a pension. She agreed again. Finally, and it was as if celestial choirs had broken into song, he asked for her bank account details.

With Gregory in charge, the process took two weeks. Within that time, the arrears of pension showed up in Danielle’s account followed by the monthly payments, regular as clockwork, without a hitch (so far, at least).

Leaving us thanking whatever powers run the universe for the existence of such as Gregory. The bureaucrat with the big heart. Who goes such a long way to make up for all the others. 

Bridging the decades

An unexpected pleasure of my retirement has been that I’ve been able to start playing bridge again.

That’s a game I enjoy. It isn’t as intellectually challenging as chess, but it’s a good deal quicker. If I ever play chess once more, it has to be outdoors, so that if I need something faster moving, for a little excitement between moves, I can watch the grass growing.

Besides, bridge combines competition with collaboration, since you play with a partner. That’s much more fun. It also gives you someone to blame for your errors.

Generally, it’s just more social. And, indeed, when we started playing here in Valencia, Danielle and I travelled into town several times for games with two people who have quickly become good friends. They’re both older than us, but impressively young at heart. He’s Hungarian by birth though, after a childhood mostly spent in Britain, speaks a beautiful English that would pass as an Englishman’s. 

She’s from eastern Switzerland and is the first speaker I’ve come to know personally of that country’s fourth official language, Romansh, spoken by maybe 50,000 people in the world. Since they’re so few in number, most of its speakers, and this includes her, also speak German or Italian, and she has both. The couple live part of the year in France (pandemic permitting), and she speaks French too, as well as the English she uses with us. And now she’s mastered Spanish, naturally, while she’s been living here. There may be other languages she’s learned, but I don’t know about them yet.

They have a fund of great stories to tell, and we used to enjoy spending time with them. As often as not we’d have lunch, which was also better for conversation, once the cards were out of the way.

Of course, Covid restrictions have done away with all that. Now we play online, which is OK, though it suffers from two problems. The first is that we use an internet service, whose software doesn’t always work, so on one occasion my partnership was awarded a lot of points we hadn’t won. I prefer winning to losing but prefer to do it with points I’ve actually earned. As well as software problems, we’re all of us dependent on various bits of hardware to access the service, and they can’t always be relied on either, leading to irritating interruptions.

But the worst thing is not meeting face to face. I did so enjoy it when we could. It was a pleasure in itself, but it also reminded me of the days when I was playing in England in the 1970s. 

Great Aunt Rene, second from left
Great Uncle Reg, third from left

I used to play with a great aunt and a great uncle of mine. I was a callow student at the time. Having screwed up one attempt at a degree, I was having a second go while working as well. I was also playing squash and tennis (despite smoking like a chimney – why on Earth did I do that?), I was in an amateur dramatic group and I was conducting an immensely complex and unnecessarily dramatic emotional life (hey, I was in my twenties).

Sometimes, it makes me feel tired just to think of those days.

Bridge sessions with my aged relatives (I can still say that: I’m not yet quite as old today as they were then) offered brief moments of gentility as a respite from the roller coaster of my daily life. There would always be a break for tea halfway through, served in china cups and accompanied by cake or biscuits, sometimes even both, and gentle conversation. At the end of the game, we might get a glass of sherry to wrap up the day.

Reg had won the Military Cross for valour in the Frist World War, when he had single-handedly attacked and captured a German machinegun nest. This was a surprising discovery, since when I knew him, he seemed inoffensive, cheerful and pleasant, but not at all the kind of man capable of such daring aggressiveness. Perhaps he used up a lifetime’s worth in one burst of reckless frenzy.

Rene was remarkable. She was a sister of my paternal grandfather, who was only fifteen when his own father had died. This was in the early years of the twentieth century, at a time when a family had to be headed by a ‘man’, so it fell on his shoulders to play that role, though his mother was still alive.

Rene was clever and wanted to make something of it. When it came to the right time, she broached the subject with her brother. 

“I want to go to university,” she told him.

That simply wasn’t going to happen. I’m sure money was tight, but I suspect means would have been found had she been a boy. As it was, she had to be satisfied with being a wife and later a mother, making ends meet in difficult circumstances for several decades, but always maintaining a quiet dignity and the kind of refined gentility I enjoyed so much on the occasions we met to play bridge.

Such gentility every day would have been too rich a diet. From time to time, it was a delight and a restful change from the hurly burly. Being reminded of it has been a pleasure, as I’ve returned to bridge here.

But not online. That gentle pleasure, and the memories of my great aunt Rene and my great-uncle Reg, really need face-to-face play to start again. Something to look forward to when these tedious restrictions finally end.

Still. In the meantime, I can at least continue enjoying the game itself. Even online, it’s better than chess. 

Whatever The Queen’s Gambit may suggest.

Officials, the joy of border crossings

It was fun to read a story recently about the pleasure of dealing with border officials.

Getting into the US: always a delight

I liked the story because I’ve come across several experiences of that kind. Some faced by me, others by relatives. Some bad, a few good.

Let’s start with how my grandmother got her surname. She was a Lithuanian Jew, making it odd that her maiden name was Johnson. That came about when her mother turned up with her and her brother at border control in England.

“Name?” barked the official.

My great-grandmother spoke barely a word of English but she understood that.

“Sonnschein,” she said.

“Johnson it is,” said the official.

My grandfather, the husband-to-be of the newly renamed Johnson girl, was called Bannister. Just like Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. Both men were in reality called Bernstein.

That puts me in mind of the old joke of the Jew who appears before a judge, wanting to change his surname from Blumstein to Watson.

“Very good,” says the judge, authorising the change.

Six months later, the same man appears in front of the same judge, wanting to change his name again, to Richards.

“I understand your wanting to change your name from Blumstein to Watson, but why Watson to Richards?” he asks. 

“So,” explains the Jew, “when people ask me ‘yes, but what were you called before you were called Richards?’ I can say ‘Watson’.”

A less amusing border crossing came when I was leaving the US from Washington International airport back in the nineties, with a couple of clients. They were surprised at how cursory the checks on baggage were. Even the questioning was brief to the point of negligence.

“Don’t you carry out more serious security checks than that?” one of them asked.

“The bombs don’t get placed on planes here,” said the official, “that only happens in your countries.”

My client wasn’t ready to give up.

“But surely you have a responsibility for our safety, don’t you?”

“Well, I’m not the one who’s going to be flying,” she replied.

Ah, the age of innocence before 9/11.

I had a somewhat brusque welcome into Canada once, at Toronto. The official asked me what I was doing there.

“Business,” I explained.

“And what is your business?” she asked.

At the time I was working on systems for benchmarking hospitals against each other. It involved identifying examples of best practice and then seeing how close a client was getting to it. So maybe one hospital might be getting a particularly low rate of readmissions after a particular operation. If our client was doing less well, we’d try to find out why, and help them improve. That’s a fascinating but difficult challenge, especially given that one hospital might be seeing patients in a more serious condition than the other.

It’s not that easy to explain all that in a sentence or two. It isn’t like “my company hopes to launch a new brand of baked beans in your country”. It’s particularly hard when you’re jetlagged after a transatlantic flight. I rather stumbled and stammered through my attempt at an explanation.

“I can take you down the hall to an office where you’ll spend the next three hours being questioned, if you like,” she courteously explained.

A much more pleasurable experience happened when my wife Danielle and I were leaving San Francisco after our hugely delayed honeymoon. It happened about ten years after our wedding, mainly because Danielle was about ten months pregnant when we got married.

Danielle had added both boys (the one about to pop out at our wedding and the one who came eighteen months later) to her passport, so their photos were in it. 

The official gave us a beautiful and winsome smile.

“Where are these guys?” she asked Danielle.

It was a pleasure to explain to her that friends had taken them in and that we missed them, so that despite having enjoyed our visit to California, we were looking forward to getting home to them again.

Now to the story I read the other day. 

Tomás Navarro Tomás was a leading Spanish philologist and librarian. He ran the Spanish national library from 1936 to 1939, and also published a number of significant works on the language.

Tomás Navarro Tomás when times were good

This was the time of the Second Spanish Republic. It was the legitimate government that had appointed him, but to have supported it, as Navarro did, was a serious black mark in the eyes of the hard right military officers who rose against it in 1936, fought a bitter civil war, and eventually seized power across the country in 1939. In January of that year Navarro fled to the US with his family, since he might have faced execution if he’d stayed behind. 

More accurately, he might have faced assassination, since he’d committed nothing we’d regard as an offence, in a democracy.

He had his suitcases engraved with his initials. Which, of course, were TNT. 

You can see where this is going? Yep, that’s right. As he stepped onto US soil, he found himself summoned to an interrogation room where he was questioned about whether he was carrying high explosives. 

Wouldn’t it be helpful if terrorists always labelled their weapons to make it easier for officials to identify them?

Anyway, I found it particularly amusing to discover how terribly alert to terrorist threats US border people had been in 1939, over sixty years before 9/11. Isn’t it odd how they seemed to have lost all that seriousness by the time I was flying out of Washington International back in the 1990s?

Divine right of Cummings

The latest revelations about Dominic Cummings and the awarding of large public contracts to his friends, tells us little we didn’t already know about his toxic influence on public affairs during his time as Boris Johnson’s chief adviser. It tells us a lot, however, about the way the Johnson regime sees itself. Sadly, that’s also the way a lot of its supporters see it.

A company called ‘Public First’ was paid £564,393 to research public understanding of Coronavirus. The company is run by James Frayne and Rachel Wolf, both former colleagues of Cummings and Michael Gove, the minister for the Cabinet Office. Gove is a long-time political ally of both Cummings and Johnson, though Gove showed himself capable of stabbing Johnson if he thinks it serves his purposes, when he declared himself a candidate for the Conservative Party leadership in Johnson’s first and unsuccessful run for it. 

Loyalty, however, isn’t a necessary requirement to work in these circles. As proved by the fact that, without much of it, Cummings, Gove and Johnson have frequently collaborated, notably in the Brexit campaign, where they achieved a success for which the country is already beginning to pay a seriously high price.

Civil servants were worried about Public First being awarded its contract, since being so close to the Johnson clique was likely to bias its findings. What’s more, there’d been no competitive tender, so no one else had been able to bid for the work. Had a Labour politician behaved this way, the press and the Tory Party would be denouncing the practices as obviously corrupt, or at least open to corruption. 

Where the revelations become really telling is when we see how Cummings replies to criticisms around these events. The High Court is carrying out a judicial review of the award. The Guardian reports that, in his submission to the court:

Cummings described Frayne and Wolf as his “friends”, but added: “Obviously I did not request Public First be brought in because they were my friends. I would never do such a thing.” He said he “requested” civil servants hire the firm because, in his experience, it was the only company with the expertise to carry out the required focus groups urgently.

“The fact that I knew the key Public First people well was a bonus, not a problem,” he said, “as in such a high pressure environment trust is very important, as well as technical competence.”

Nothing corrupt, you see, because people like Cummings vouch for the integrity and professionalism of the company involved. If people of such stature are prepared to trust these characters, then who are we to question that judgement? Cummings, Gove, Johnson: these are all characters beyond suspicion. Their decisions aren’t corrupt and shouldn’t be questioned.

That assumption of unquestionable authority flows from the nature of these men born, as they believe, to rule. When they condescend to rule us, we should be pleased, perhaps even honoured, certainly grateful that they choose to do so. That way we don’t have to bother our heads (for women, they might say pretty little heads) about weighty matters of policy, best left to them. 

Boris Johnson, Charles I and Dominic Cummings
Regal figures, entitled to rule by their very nature,
beyond challenge by mere mortals

This kind of self-belief is by no means new. Charles I is the only King of Britain to have been executed. He too knew that he was born to rule, specifically selected by God for the throne, and therefore ruling as he chose, by divine right. He signed agreements with his opponents and then casually broke them, because he was answerable only to God, so no human authority could hold him to account. Like Johnson, Gove or Cummings, whatever he did was necessarily right, because it was he who was doing it.

But the justification for this kind of high-handed behaviour doesn’t have to be religious, as it was with Charles. Lenin was convinced that the great sweeping force of history had put him in power in what became the Soviet Union. In Hitler’s case, it was the race and its necessary striving to superhuman status. 

For Johnson, Gove and Cummings, it’s simple entitlement. These are special people. Lesser beings can only trust them, thank them for their guidance and move on. So if it was to their friends that they handed a contract without a tender, that “was a bonus, not a problem”.

It’s only cynics like me who say that if we allow government to award contracts without a tender, we’re just asking to be ripped off. A true believer in the cult of Johnson told me recently that the fact that Britain had got so much further than the rest of Europe in vaccinating its citizens against Covid, was down to the agility of a government that avoided all that tedious and unnecessary red tape to get agreements in place fast. Nothing corrupt about that, you see. It’s simply more efficient. These fine people demand trust, because “in such a high pressure environment trust is very important”.

Clearly, Johnson and his coterie feel we have no basis to try to hold them to account. And, from my friend’s comment, it’s clear that this kind of thinking permeates deep into society. Their fans are steeped in it.

That at least gives us an idea of the measure of the problem we face to free ourselves of this baneful influence…

Romans, Jews and tastebuds

What a Roman doesn’t do to an artichoke, isn’t worth doing.

That’s actually an adaptation of what I used to say about Alsatians. That’s ‘Alsatians’ not as German sheepdogs, but as people from Alsace, that glorious area of eastern France. It’s so far east within France as to be practically in Germany. So practically, in fact, that over a seventy-year period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, Germany made three forceful – violent, indeed – attempts to ensure that it was fully under its administration.

That means that my wife, Danielle, who is an Alsatian (yes, yes, bark worse than bite and all that), had a grandfather whose identity papers are marked ‘French by re-incorporation’, since when he was born, his province was German.

I always used to say that anything an Alsatian didn’t do with a pig, wasn’t worth doing. I appreciate that the saying is susceptible of an unfortunate misinterpretation. But, as you’ll probably have guessed, that was entirely intentional.

Anyway, it’s true that Alsatians really knew how to make full use of the unfortunate pig, in the other, more everyday sense, eating almost everything on it, usually prepared in some outstandingly delicious way, and using most of the rest to make things, such as items of clothing.

Artichokes are rather less big and seriously less versatile than pigs. So I suppose there are fewer things that Romans can do to them. In fact, there are just two things that spring to my mind, but they’re both entirely to my taste: carciofi alla romana and carciofi alla giudia. And, yes, ‘alla giudia’ does mean ‘in the Jewish style’. I’m sure I must have tried both during the thirteen years I spent in Rome following my birth there, but only became conscious of them again when I went back there, for work, around four years ago.

It was Fabio, a colleague but much more to the point, also a good friend, who met me and helped me rediscover the joys of my native city. He knows it well, despite being Milanese himself. It should also be said that he's a fine appreciator of good food. In fact, the only time I know for certain that I got up his nose was when I insisted that we had a rather inferior snack before a client meeting, when there wasn’t time for a proper meal. He didn’t say it in so many words, but his body language and above all his expression, told me with unambiguous clarity how much he resented being forced to eat so badly.

So there could hardly have been anyone better to organise me some fine dining in Rome. Except that for a while, whenever he said, “there’s a great restaurant I want you to try,” it always turned out to be the same restaurant. After this had happened three or four times, I tried to communicate to him tactfully that I was convinced there was more than one good restaurant in Rome.

“Oh, no,” he said, except that ‘no’ wasn’t the word he used, “do I keep taking you to the same place?”

Wryly, he accepted that there were indeed other good restaurants in Rome. He booked us tables in a few of the others on my later visits and, in one of them, we had carciofi alla giudia. It was an explosion of taste and an explosion of nostalgia. A truly memorable experience.

So I decided today that it was time, now that I’m retired, to try cooking these great dishes myself. I wanted to start with carciofi alla giudia. That wasn’t just because of my Jewish roots (yes, yes, I know I shouldn’t enjoy Alsatian pork dishes but, hey, to backslide is human). It was mainly because while deep frying is terrible for you, it also happens to produce some extraordinarily delicious results.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough oil and, this being a Sunday in suburban Spain under Covid restrictions, there was no way we could get any more. So it had to be carciofi alla romana instead. 

Trimmed and ready

I stripped the outer leaves. I cut, peeled and trimmed the stems. I carved out the ‘beard’ at the centre of the artichokes.

Steeping in water and lemon juice

Still steeping, but covered to stop them getting out

I left them all to steep in water flavoured with lemon juice. I prepared a stuffing of roughly chopped mint with finely chopped garlic. I seasoned the stuffing with salt and pepper.

Mint and garlic stuffing

I stuffed the artichokes and rolled them in some more salt and pepper. Then I cooked them in oil mixed with the water in which they’d steeped.

Ready to eat

It was a lot of fun. Exciting to be producing a prestigious Roman dish myself for once. But to be utterly honest, it wasn’t that brilliant. Good, but hardly special. Not really worth the effort. Either I screwed up or I chose the wrong recipe. Or it really isn’t that that wonderful a dish.

So, in the end, I enjoyed eating the things far less than I enjoyed preparing them. Or writing about them. Or wallowing in the nostalgia. Those things were all great, so the experience worked out fine, but not for the reasons I was hoping.

Oh, well. I’m just going to have to buy some more artichokes. And a lot more oil. 

The Jewish way gets my vote for next time.