Grandparenting in ‘me too’ times

It was ‘metoo’ time during my most recent visit to the grandkids. 

Elliott, whose language progress is startling, has learned that immensely useful expression. By which I really mean ‘me too’. ‘Hashtag’, though it may of course come later, is still a little beyond him for now.

And ‘me too’ doesn’t even always mean quite what you might think. It may be because big sister Matilda has something, or is doing something, that he thinks he could profitably partake of too. Literally, then, ‘me too’. Sometimes, on the other hand, it really means ‘me instead’. 

Like when Matilda got the last yogurt. The message of his ‘me too’ was clearly “I can give that a much better home than she can”. Swiftly followed by “Send it over this way, pronto.”

Still, there are plenty of adults who don’t really distinguish between ‘me too’ and ‘me instead’, aren’t there? One was recently President of the United States, another Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Elliott strikes me as having a better character than either of them, and just needs to take his educational breakthrough with ‘me too’ a step or two further.

Talking about educational breakthroughs, I had my own during this last visit. 

Elliott has mastered the notion that peeing in a toilet bowl is a pretty damn clever thing to do. So, as we were getting ready to go to a birthday party – that was for a 49th birthday, not for someone in their peer group – he announced that he was going to show me how he’d mastered that process.

“Just push his nappy to one side,” Sheena, his mother, told me. “You can pull it up again afterwards.”

It was a fresh nappy – OK, OK, diaper if you prefer – which she’d just put on him. I pushed it down. He performed, admirably I should say. And I pulled it back up again.

Except, unfortunately, that the nappy had come undone and, when I closed it again, I got it wrong. An error for which I was the one to pay. At the party, Elliott, who gets on well with Dad-dad (why bother with a complicated word like ‘Granddad’ when everybody understands ‘Dad-dad’?), was sitting on my lap. A disconcerting sense of wetness began to spread up one of my legs. And, yes, when I looked, I discovered a tell-tale soaking on that side of my shorts.

“I thought putting a nappy on would be a pretty intuitive job,” my son Nicky told me later, after he’d put a new one on Elliott.

Well, I’m glad to say that it is intuitive, and when I undertook the task on two later occasions, it worked just fine. My only defence? Putting a nappy on from scratch is one thing, re-fixing one that’s been taken down is another.

That may not be much of an excuse, but I don’t have another, so that’s the only one you’re getting.

Interestingly, this wasn’t the only unconventional use to which my shorts were put. One of my grandparental duties was taking the kids to school each day. This was more enjoyable than in the past, because they both walk now and I didn’t have to push them in a pram or pull them in their favourite wagon (tough on the way to school, which is almost entirely uphill). As a rule, I made sure that I had tissues in a pocket in case either of my charges needed a nose blowing, but on this occasion I’d forgotten. And Matilda was now demanding a nose blow. As I searched my pockets in vain, she came up with a solution.

“It’s OK,” she said, “I’ll use this.”

And before I could stop her, or even react, she’d wiped her nose on my shorts. That left the nose beautifully clean. And, to be honest, so were my shorts as soon as I could get back home and wash them off a bit.

On the way to school

Taking the kids to school was a lot of fun. The first stop is Matilda’s, since she’s at the big school (she’s rising four, after all). Outside there are some nice rocks Elliott can clamber over to his heart’s content, since walking along the pavement is just kind of safe, kind of dull. 

That’s the Elliott way, incidentally. There’s little pleasure in anything if there isn’t just an edge of danger to add spice to it. I discovered that when I took them to a local playground. They were both fine on swings and safe things like that. But they didn’t want to stick with those unchallenging experiences when they had the opportunity to run a few risks instead. 

Fun but not really the challenge we were looking for, is it?

There’s a skate park next to the playground. There were no skaters around so I was happy to let them play there. Elliott led the way, sliding down curved surfaces designed for skateboarders to make daredevil turns. There was a perfectly safe way to get back to the top, and a rather riskier one that involved climbing up a stepped partition wall, with a good chance of falling off either side.

No need to tell you which Elliott chose.

The safe way? You’ve got to be kidding. Much too tedious

Still, I have to say that he’s generally good with not pushing himself too far beyond what he can manage. Matilda’s got good at moving, at some speed, across a rope bridge in the playground. With his ‘me too’ outlook, Elliott made it clear he wanted to do the same. But I was impressed that he surveyed the challenge, then stopped and waited for me to come and help him across.

Angels rush in where the daredevil wisely fears to tread

Sensible fellow.

Then there was the moment when Matilda showed us what it means to be a big girl of nearly four. The sad part is that being a big girl means being exposed to peer pressure. “Big girls don’t…” has become a bit of a phrase for her, and it’s a pity when what completes the sentence is something she obviously likes.

For instance, she has for years had a sock puppet which is vaguely like an elephant, if you can think of elephants as very small and with no legs. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, she has always called it ‘Adge’. Because she likes it so much, there are several of them in the house, so one or two can be washed – like my shorts after a nappy fiasco – while others remain available for use. She knows very well that there are several, but always treats the one she happens to be with at any time as though it were the single individual she’s always known and always called ‘Adge’. 

Adge
One of them. Though in some special sense,
they’re all the same one

Incidentally, she knows that ‘Adge’ means ‘elephant’. We discovered that when, on a visit to Valencia, we took her to the zoo and she saw some real elephants. She immediately pointed at them crying ‘Adge! Adge!’

Anyway, the other day she announced that ‘big girls don’t have Adge’.

Peer pressure. Inescapable. Painful.

Still, she had the sense to stick with Adge and enjoy the company still for a while, at least while at home. But I couldn’t help sensing she wasn’t entirely comfortable about it. Still three but already learning that not all forms of behaviour will be acceptable to her peer group.

Ah, well.

Incidentally, she’s also pretty good at ‘me instead’ behaviour. One of the things she likes about Dad-dad visits is that she gets multiple opportunities to steal my glasses. Her instead of me, you see. And very fetching she looks too.

They may be my glasses. 
but they suit her far better

If the kids have decided that the name ‘Granddad’ is one to modify, to ‘Dad-dad’, they feel much the same about their Uncle Michael. Oddly, they’ve adopted the same name for him as my other granddaughter did at their age, though now she’s a young woman about to start college. 

All three of them decided from early on to dispense with the word ‘Uncle’. Instead they call him ‘Michael Michael’ (well, I don’t think Aya still does, you understand, but the other two do). And Michael Michael is someone whose visits are always particularly exciting. 

Michael Michael
His visits never disappoint

He is, indeed, always greeted with great joy.

Finally, I can’t close this without a reference to food. I cooked only once and, as usual, I made pasta with a tomato sauce. Those two little sophisticates have developed a major liking for pesto, so they’re always disappointed with what I prepare. That made it particularly gratifying to have it confirmed that, despite his initial lack of enthusiasm, Elliott really got a lot out of eating a plate of my pasta. As he demonstrated when ‘Michael Michael’ picked him up after the meal.

OK, OK, the pasta wasn’t too bad after all

That particularly sophisticated diner, Matilda, has developed a liking for a new kind of fruit. Most of us call them ‘red currants’. That, I’ve now learned from Matilda is entirely wrong. They’re called ‘sour things’. And she can’t get enough of them.

Sour things
Much appreciated new delicacy

So I whenever I could, I would feed her some.

And, in smaller quantities – I don’t think he likes them that much – to Elliott too. Because, naturally, once he saw Matilda eating them, he had to burst out with his favourite new saying.

“Me too! Me too!” he called out.

Eat your greens

The haematologist may not have been physically sucking her teeth as she looked over my blood test results, but metaphorically she was doing it in spades. Tut-tutting even. You know, like the electrician looking around your wiring and saying, “what cowboy put this lot in for you, then?”

“You need to eat more greens,” she told me, sternly, like a judge not satisfied with the stiff sentence just pronounced who decides to add “without possibility of parole”:

She didn’t actually use the word ‘greens’. Being Spanish, she said ‘verduras’. However, you can see that the word is just a derivate of ‘verde’, green and means the same thing.

It’s obviously sound advice. It put me in mind of a fine episode of The West Wing. That’s The Supremes (season 5, episode 17, if you really want know). Commenting on the death of a Supreme Court Justice, Owen Brady, the Chief Justice tells Toby Ziegler, “Brady was your age. Eat your greens”.

Chief Justice Roy Ashland: “Eat your greens”

If the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, even a fictional one, confirms my haematologist’s advice, that’s good enough for me.

Well, I’ve been following her injunction, like the well-behaved convict I am, anxious to establish my good behaviour even if I have no hope of parole. In fact, parole is available for no part of my sentence. For instance, another worrying element that my blood test led to was a further rise in the number of pills I have to take. 

This seems to be one of those milestones (or do I mean millstones?) in the ageing process. For nearly thirty years, I was taking one pill daily. Then last year, following the weird experience that various neurologists have decided must have been a TIA – a transient ischaemic attack or mini-stroke – the number grew to three, increased by my GP to four, with the extra one there to try to counter the noxious side-effects of one of the others.

Now the number has increased still further to five, with a sixth added two to three times a week. I feel there’s a bit of a race on. Will I go to my grave out of natural causes first or will I succumb to strangulation by excessive pill consumption before that happens?

Anyway,  back to the greens. I’m now consuming a lot more than ever before. Dutifully. Daily. Diligently. 

It’s actually not such a bad thing to do. But that’s chiefly because I don’t stick to what are strictly greens. Fortunately, I’ve discovered that in Spanish as in English, the word ‘greens’ isn’t restricted to green things. 

Fortunately, it also includes reds and yellows and oranges and purples, and no doubt others besides. This means I can get my ration of greens not just from peas and broccoli and lettuce, but also from cherries (just as well, since the season here isn’t quite over yet), black figs (season well under way and more purple than black), nectarines (one of my favourites and now hitting the shops in large quantities), to say nothing of lemons and bananas, mandarins and oranges (sadly out of season locally but available from abroad), both kinds of grapes, alongside carrots and tomatoes and beetroot.

A selection of greens

That’s one of the things I like about general language. That’s as opposed to lawyer-speak or scientific jargon. It’s fluid, it’s wide ranging, it allows bending to cover far more than its literal meaning. 

As a result, while still enjoying spinach and celery and cucumber, I can also go looking for variety, by choosing other fruits and vegetables of as many colours as in Joseph's famous coat.

I can do that while continuing to obey, and strictly obey, the spirit, even if not the letter, of the instructions of that wise though severe haematologist.

Draining the swamp

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

With these words the lawyer Joseph N. Welch punctured the brutal self-importance of Senator Joseph McCarthy, at a committee hearing McCarthy chaired on 9 June 1954. 

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welch would add, a devastating blow to the brutal campaign of persecution that was McCarthyism. One from which it would never recover.

Decency. That’s a far more important notion than the word perhaps suggests. It means dealing with people, even adversaries, in a way that respects their humanity, their dignity and their rights. It seems a key ingredient in democracy, ignored by the autocrats of this world, such as Putin or Xi Jinping, and the would-be autocrats, such as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson.

Trump and Johnson. What price decency?

There’s one issue on which I agree entirely with Donald Trump. His call to ‘drain the swamp’ was, I felt, entirely right. Of course, the agreement went no further than that, since to me he was himself the biggest inhabitant of that US swamp, a view he certainly didn’t share, preferring to see himself as the drainage-engineer-in-chief, and the swamp as the habitat of his critics.

That makes it all the more ironic that the principal focus of his attack at the time was Hillary Clinton, in particular for having dealt with confidential information insecurely (by using a personal email account). The accusation would be greeted by his adoring worshippers chanting ‘Lock her up!’. 

Now, of course, he stands accused – indicted, even – for his irresponsible handling of confidential information, by storing top secret documents in an insecure location (his Mar-a-Lago golf club). Indeed, his offending went far further than hers. It seems he showed secret military documents to unauthorised people. He also refused to hand back the secret documents when the authorities demanded their return.

It is, on the other hand, no surprise that his behaviour has led to no chants of ‘lock him up’ from his worshippers.

Still, at least this kind of behaviour is so indecent that it might well repel the independent and undecided voters any candidate needs to win the presidency. Nor is he going to be helped by his other kind of indecency, his appalling behaviour towards women, in one case at least now fully established in a court of law.

Suburban Americans, whose support he needs to get back to the White House, take a dim view of that kind of behaviour.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain had its own champion of indecency in the form of Boris Johnson. This was a man brimming over with charisma, itself living proof of just how dangerous a quality that can be, who would deploy all his charm and good cheer when telling the public that he had always followed the Covid confinement regulations that he’d introduced himself, when there were photos of him breaking them brazenly. I’ve even seen it plausibly argued that he has become so dissociated from reality that he can genuinely convince himself that he’s telling the truth when he’s blatantly lying. He’s not actually peddling a lie because he genuinely believes it to be true, even though he knows how overwhelmingly the evidence proves it false.

That may explain why he’s so upset that the parliamentary committee investigating him didn’t accept his arguments. “I believe myself,” I imagine he assures himself, “so how can anyone else disbelieve me?”

He’s resigned from parliament before the committee could submit its report to the House of Commons, with its recommendation of suspension. That spares him the humiliation of having a House with a Conservative majority voting against a former Conservative leader that won a landslide majority for the Conservative party.

Just like Trump, he blames everyone else for his misfortunes. The Committee was a kangaroo court. Its chairman, the Labour MP Harriet Harman, was biased against him. He attacks the committee for having decided in advance that he was guilty, ignoring the fact that it has a Conservative majority, including MPs who previously backed him.

Attacking his opponents is exactly what we could expect from him. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” we might reply, just like Mandy Rice-Davies did back in 1963, when told William Astor had denied having an affair with her.

The scandal in which Rice-Davies was caught up spelled the end of the career of another leading Conservative, John Profumo. He hadn’t become leader of the party or Prime Minister, which Johnson did, and which Profumo was widely tipped to do. But like Johnson, he lied to parliament and, in a time when most people found such an offence against decency unacceptable, he had to go.

Well, few but the members of the Johnson cult, as blinkered as the Trump cult in America, can be in any doubt that their boy lied to parliament too. 

Like Profumo, he’s gone. That, along with the indictment of Trump, suggests to me that maybe, just maybe, decency is making a bit of a comeback at last. What a huge advance that would be for us all. Mandy Rice-Davis and Joseph Welch, such different people with such diverse histories, might both be delighted.

As should anyone who believes that respect for institutions and for other people, as well the upholding of some basic standards, matter in politics. Anyone, indeed, who really believes the swamp needs draining. Anyone who realises that top candidates for flushing down that drain are precisely the Trumps and the Johnsons.

Maybe then we can move on, to see what can be done about the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping around the world.

Coping with my cowardice

Conscience doth make cowards of us all. I think what Shakespeare meant by ‘conscience’ was what we might call self-consciousness. That has certainly been making a coward of me.

A couple of years ago I turned again to a form of exercise I’d rather abandoned for a long time. That’s running. I never liked it, though I had to admit that it did seem to do me good. And, with my weight rising and my sleep less peaceful than it once was, I felt it was time to take it up again. After all, these days I listen to audiobooks while out walking, so why not listen to them while running, and turn some effective if painful exercise into a rather more pleasant experience?

The problem was that I felt somewhat embarrassed. I knew I was slow. Clumsy even. Certainly overweight. I really didn’t want anyone to see me out running with all that against me.

Now, I’ve read Sartre. You sacrifice your very liberty if you see yourself through the eyes of others. The trick was to rise above all that and say to myself “who cares? It shouldn’t matter to me whether anyone else thinks I’m silly. What matters is what I think of myself.”

The trouble was that I rather thought of myself as silly.

Thus conscience did make a coward of me.

The answer was to do my running indoors. I don’t mean on a treadmill. No, I literally mean running around the house. Up and downstairs from time to time to make it a little more challenging. But at least the floor was flat, there were no stones to negotiate, and above all nobody could see me.

Well, not nobody. Not eventually. Inevitably the time would come when family would find me panting around the house and say, “what the heck are you doing?”, often with a rather more emphatic word relacing ‘heck’. 

And you know what? That really opened my eyes. It suddenly came to me that while I was worried about looking silly while running outside, nothing was more silly than running indoors. I mean, dodging furniture when you could be breathing the fresh air of our woods? Enjoying the sights of the stately pines? Running along sandy paths?

It finally dawned on me that I was being silly. I needed to start enjoying those things. I needed to get out of doors to do my running.

So I’ve started outside running again, at last. And would you believe it? It really is much pleasanter.

I like our sitting room (left)
But a woodland path is far better for a run

What’s more, far from looking at me as though I were silly, people have been friendly to me out there. It’s a bit like the way other parents, complete strangers, will strike up conversations with you at a school gate if you have kids with you as they do. Or indeed other dog walkers will smile and chat if their path crosses yours while you’re out with a dog or two of your own.

So I was delighted that two joggers I passed in the woods, on two separate occasions, made a point of smiling and raising a hand in greeting at me as I struggled on.

That was truly gratifying. A real pleasure. Of course, I can’t help feeling that part of their message is “I know what you’re suffering, because I’m suffering it too. But doesn’t it feel better knowing that you’re not the only victim of such self-inflicted pain? Just keep going. You’ll be able to stop soon.”

Certainly, that made me feel much better. Far from being ridiculed, I was being offered human solidarity. Some fellow feeling and kindness.  

It actually makes the whole ghastly experience much less ugly. It makes me feel less of a coward. And Sartre was right, it makes me feel much freer.

Though, of course, that may be because there’s a lot more space in the woods than in my sitting room.

A sick pet, a witty vet and a new word

Idiopathy. 

That was the new word. I came across it because our toy poodle Luci fell ill. Poor girl. She’s all heart: affectionate, companionable, seeking us out almost to the point of neediness. So it was sadly ironic that it was her heart that gave her trouble.

She was having long and painful coughing fits, fighting for breath. She was off her food, which is quite extraordinary for her. And she was too tired even to jump up onto the sofa next to us.

At first, a young vet in our local clinic decided that she had kennel cough and prescribed first an anti-inflammatory, and then an antibiotic. It would later turn out that not only was the diagnosis wrong, the treatment made her condition worse. Fortunately, the third time we took her in, a colleague became suspicious that we were dealing with something entirely different from kennel cough.

What she had was fluid filling the space around her heart, and indeed around her lungs. The pressure it generated was preventing her heart beating properly. It even made it difficult for her to breathe.

We found ourselves driving to the nearest veterinary hospital with people competent in cardiological problems. Nearest, but not that near, since it took twenty-five minutes to get there. And competent though not actually cardiologists themselves, it being late on a Friday night, and the veterinary cardiologist having headed home for the night, and indeed the weekend.

Fortunately, there was an excellent and likeable vet on duty, a young man from the Canary Islands, who does a week on duty at nights at the hospital south of Valencia, and then goes home to his Mum for a week. He expertly applied a syringe and extracted the fluid that was causing poor old Luci so much pain. Sadly, the news wasn’t encouraging: the fluid around her heart included blood. There was nothing good about that.

It was a bad weekend, above all for Luci, who spent two nights at the hospital. And for Danielle, who made the 50-minute round trip three times even before the Sunday evening, with either me or our son Michael as company. Then, not long after her return home on Sunday, Luci had a horrible episode which looked like a stroke, where she went stiff as a board and pretty much lost consciousness. That had us back down at the hospital yet again (all three of us this time). However, after a battery of tests that revealed nothing, we took her home again. She spent the rest of the night in reasonable calm.

Poor sick Luci getting tenderness from Toffee

Then on Monday we saw the cardiologist. He was great. Cheerful, kind, gentle and, above all, informative. Well, as informative as the information at his disposal allowed him to be. 

The most likely cause of Luci’s problems was a tumour on the heart. That would have been, in effect, a sentence of death. But he found no sign of a any kind of growth and told us he thought the chances of its being cancer were very small.

However there was no trace of an infectious disease, or of trauma, or of a toxin.

That’s when I learned the word ‘idiopathy’. Perhaps, after so many years working in and around healthcare, I should have known it before, but I didn’t. Its roots are Greek, and at first glance it sounds like the disease (‘pathos’) of being an idiot. That could be the kind of thing afflicting those who still think Brexit has been good for Britain, in the face of all the evidence.

But the word ‘idiot’ comes from ‘idios’ meaning of one’s own, because an idiot is (literally) someone who is wrapped in a world of his own. Again, that reminds me of Brexit. I don’t know what world is inhabited by those people who thought they could trust men like Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, but it certainly isn’t the world I know.

In fact, putting the two Greek words together gives us a term for a disease that is its own cause. You might think that this is like a self-inflicted wound. Rather of the kind suffered by people who voted for Brexit in the first place.

It turns out that, in the context of the cardiology consult, it really was the term for a disease which seems to have caused itself.

“In other words,” the cardiologist told us with a winning smile, “it means that we haven’t the faintest idea what caused the problem.”

I appreciated his honesty. And felt a little encouraged. At least, nothing said beyond any doubt that what Luci was suffering from was life-threatening. She’s not out of the woods, and we’re still far from relaxed, since we realise that this mysterious ailment could reappear as suddenly and with as little warning as the first time. But at least there’s no reason to despair for now.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned a new word. Idiopathy. A disease we can’t begin to explain.

Hey! Doesn’t that sound like Brexit too?

Toledo teachings

It was a great holiday. 

That’s if you can have a ‘holiday’ when you’re retired. Perhaps what I mean is ‘break away’. And not from work, since we expended seriously more energy getting to know ten cities in central and western Spain in thirteen days than we would have done by staying at home.

That included a quick trip into Portugal for lunch, as I mentioned last time.

Anyone familiar with this blog will know that I rather like the Spanish poet, Jaime Gil de Biedma. He said that of all histories in History, the saddest is Spain’s, since it always ends badly. It’s a clever remark, and I don’t like to contradict it, but I do have to say that the elements of that sadness, the avoidable tragedies, the self-inflicted wounds, are by no means unique to Spain, but apply to most countries I know anything about.

All that came to mind when we got to the fine city of Toledo.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged across most of the Anglo world that “in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. That commemorates the so-called discovery of the New World. I say ‘so-called’ because, to the people living there, it wasn’t new and they no doubt reckoned it had been discovered by their ancestors, something that happened millennia earlier.

In any case, though Columbus’s voyage launched Spain on its road to global empire, it was only one of three key turning points in Spanish history that year.

Another was the fall of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, Granada, to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Christian monarchs of the newly unified Spain. 

The third was the decree of the same year expelling the Jews from the country.

We don’t know for sure when Jews first reached the Iberian peninsula. There are suggestions they may have got there soon after Rome conquered the territory from Carthage, at the end of the third century before our era or the beginning of the second. A wave of immigration seems also to have turned up after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, when Rome conquered Judaea. What’s certain, and we have archaeological evidence for it, is that Jews were there in the second century of our era.

That makes it clear that by 1492, they’d been there a long time.

As for Muslim rule, it had lasted in Spain for over seven centuries. It had been driven back, step by grim step, in what is referred to as the ‘reconquest’, the process by which Christian rulers took over again. Granada in 1492 completed the process.

As for Toledo, it fell to the Christians in 1085. Despite the defeat of the Arab rulers, many ordinary Muslims were allowed to live on in the city. They were the ‘Mudéjars’, derived from an Arabic word for ‘those permitted to stay on’.

Defeated people tend not to enjoy the same status as the victors, and the Mudéjars were no exception. For instance, only certain professions were open to them. When you restrict what people can do to just a limited range of things, they tend to get very good at those things. The Mudéjars became outstanding builders and agriculturalists in that specific form of agriculture that requires irrigation. To this day, Spanish irrigation systems are derived from those the Arabs left behind.

Something a bit similar happened to the Jews, in the era that Toledo was ‘the city of the three peoples’, when they lived mostly in harmony with Christians and Muslims. Like the Mudéjars, they were limited in what they were allowed to do. At times, they might be permitted to own land, and did some good farming, but often that was prohibited. However, there was one activity that was open to them pretty much all of the time, which was financial service. Of course, most Jews are no better at that kind of business than anyone else, but for the minority that was, it provided a good way to become seriously wealthy.

Jews are just as generous and just as mean as any other people. If they have a reputation for being tight-fisted, that’s above all precisely because it was in finance that they had the best opportunity to be highly successful. Lots of people have to borrow money at some time or another, but who on earth likes the guy that lends it, and then collects interest on the loan? The fact that the authorities have driven him into that kind of work isn’t going to make him any more popular.

As the richest Jews made their money, they decided that one thing to spend it on was beautiful buildings. In Toledo, we visited two former Synagogues. Both are glorious. But what’s most striking about them is how Arab they look. The arches with internal lobes, the brickwork, the carved wooden ceilings are just the kind that one associates with great Muslim architecture.

One of the two temples we visited was the Synagogue of Saint Mary the White, whose Christian-sounding name is only down to the fact that synagogues aren’t generally named but are simply called after the street in which they stand. 

Everywhere you look inside it, there are Muslim eight-pointed stars. But then the builders decided to leave a small humorous reminder that they knew they were building for Jewish clients: they put in one six-pointed Star of David. 

Just one. 

One of many eight-pointed stars in
the Synagogue of St Mary the White (l)
and the only six-pointed one (r)

Why did the Jews put up with this kind of Muslim design? Why, for the same reason that the Christians did, in many of Toledo’s churches.

A fine Arab-styled window in Toledo's St John of the Kings Monastery
Compare the decoration with the Synagogue pictures above

It was the best and most fashionable architecture of the time. They paid for the best. Their Muslim architects gave them the best.

Mudéjar carved wooden ceilings
Transito Synagogue (l) and St John of the Kings monastery (r)

That strikes me as admirable. Which is why the expulsion of 1492 feels like an astonishingly self-destructive act. Why, when the three peoples were living so well alongside each other, would you want to bring that coexistence to an end?

But bring it to an end Ferdinand and Isabella did. The Jews were given four months to convert or get out of the country. One hundred and twenty days to end a presence that had lasted nearly 1400 years and probably longer.

And here’s a poignant detail. Many of those who left carefully locked up their houses and took the keys with them. Often, those keys became heirlooms, passed on to their descendants down to today.

Spain and Portugal decided some years ago to allow anyone who could prove descent from the expelled Jews to claim automatic citizenship. Our guide in Toledo told us that, some time ago, he met an Argentinian Jewish couple who’d just been naturalised Spanish. He was anxious to congratulate them and welcome them to their new home. All they could do was cry.

They were back after half a millennium of banishment. And they had their key. Though it would open no door.

As for the Muslims, in 1609, they too were forced to convert or go, again with only a few months to choose. Many left.

Even the converts who stayed, whether from Judaism or Islam, were regarded as suspect and inferior and subject to repeated persecution by their Christian rulers. Those rulers clearly felt that ensuring the ethnic and religious homogeneity of Spain was the right thing for the country and the best way to obey the will of God. It’s an attitude that I find hard to reconcile with a gospel of love but, hey, theologians are good at some remarkable mental (and moral) acrobatics.

What the two expulsions did was make sure that Spain lost some of the best farmers, builders, administrators and financial experts in the world. It’s no surprise that the Golden Age of Spain, when it enjoyed its greatest flowering of art and literature and held its greatest power, was essentially just the sixteenth century. 

The century that followed 1492. 

After that, decline set in. And Spain found itself being overtaken by countries which may not have liked the culture and customs of their immigrants, but knew how to make the most of the skills they brought with them.

The lesson seems obvious, doesn’t it? Keep your doors, and above all your minds, open to other people. Learn from them. Let them build or invest or cultivate for you. That way lie riches.

And yet, many countries, in particular Brexit Britain and the previously-Trumped US, seem dedicated once more to putting up walls, making life difficult for people from other cultures, and keeping them out if possible. Like the Spanish Christians in 1492, they seem intent on impoverishing themselves, because they prefer homogeneity and poverty to tolerance and prosperity. 

Which is why the saddest history of all History isn’t just Spain’s.

Curious what lessons you can learn from a brief holiday, isn’t it?

Popping over to Portugal

It may be because I’m from an island race that I still find it a bit of a thrill to nip across to another country for lunch. Not so easy when you don’t have a land border.

Now, I naturally don’t mean doing a Rupert Murdoch or a Bill Gates, and popping to, say, Rome from, say, Berlin, by private jet or anything like that. We’re on holiday in Extremadura in far western Spain which took us to Badajoz for a night. Take a wrong turning there, and you might well find yourself in Portugal before you know it. Driving to the little town of Elvas took under half an hour.

The first thing I enjoyed about the excursion was that we only became aware that we’d crossed the border when we saw the ‘Welcome to Portugal’ sign (or ‘Bem-vindo a Portugal’, since they persist in speaking a foreign language there). 

I never entirely lose the pleasure of seeing international borders becoming porous. And, let me assure you, this was a border that took itself seriously. Elvas itself makes it clear, in its heavy walls with projecting bastions and defensive towers, to say nothing of its several outlying fortresses. That was all to dissuade nearby Spain ever being tempted to do a Putin to the Portuguese.

Elvas Castle: impressive but above all defensive

It’s all the more uplifting, as a result, to find this particular border has become little more than an imaginary line in the soil. One wall down out of so many in the world is, it seems to me, a small step in the right direction. It’s only a pity that so many people, particularly in the US and Britain, seem keen these days on building such walls up again rather than helping demolish them.

Elvas, by the way, provides poignant testimony of how sad that is. It has a British cemetery. In it are buried or commemorated British soldiers who fought alongside their Spanish and Portuguese allies in the Peninsular War, against French troops that were occupying Spain in Napoleon’s days. A reminder that Britain once understood that it was sometimes in its own interests to help out its continental neighbours.

Memorial plaque in the Elvas British cemetery

Back to the other thing I liked about our visit to Elvas. That was to do with the meal. I very much hope that this doesn’t offend any of my Spanish friends, since Danielle and I both love our new adoptive home. But I have to admit that there are a couple of customs in Spain that leave me a little less than comfortable, and Portugal is a country in which we don’t encounter them.

The first involves the categorisation of tuna as a vegetable. Most countries, of course, view it as a fish. In Spain, however, no mixed salad can possibly be complete without tuna on top of it. Why, back in Spain, when we asked for a mixed salad without tuna, what we got was something delicious but, inevitably, crowned with tuna despite the chef’s assurances that it wouldn’t be. 

“Salad without tuna?” they seem to say in Spain, “why, that’s like a beach without the sun. It’s positively heretical, like communion without a wafer.”

What do you mean, no tuna?
That wouldn’t be a salad

What’s more, over this trip, we’ve come across a number of Spanish restaurants which have the irritating habit of not only serving salad without any kind of dressing, but without even offering us salt, vinegar and olive oil. As for them and they bring them, sometimes with bad grace. As for pepper, “what, on a salad?” they seem to say, “that’s like asking for a sunshade in a swimming pool”.

So you can imagine our delight when, even before serving us the salad, the Portuguese waiter provided us with two bottles, one of vinegar and one of olive oil, accompanied by a shaker of salt and, more astonishing still, another of pepper.

Ah, that’s what makes it such a pleasure to go abroad for lunch. However briefly, you get to enjoy another culture. Not, though, I hasten to stress, that it was anything but a pleasure to return to the Spanish side of the frontier.

After all, we really do love our adoptive home in Spain. Even the strange idiosyncrasies it sometimes displays.