They shall not pass

No pasarán, they shall not pass, was the rallying cry of republican resistance, especially in Madrid, to the military uprising that led to Franco’s near forty-year dictatorship in Spain. 

They shall not pass!
Madrid's defiance to the rebels besieging the city

Of course, when the rebels won, they gloated ‘ya hemos pasa’o’, ‘we passed’ (dropping the ‘d’ in ‘pasado’ reflects common pronunciation of the word).

Funnily enough, the spiritual heirs of Franco, the hard right Vox Party, used the same words superimposed on a photo of the Madrid town hall, when they took four seats in the municipal council in 2019. 

Vox declares its heredity in a tweet using the Francoist gloat

In the next set of local and regional elections, in May of this year, Vox did better. In many regions and towns across Spain, it’s now in coalition with the main party of the right, the Popular Party or PP. And they’ve shown that they mean business.

One municipality has dropped the film Buzzlightyear from its festival because it shows a kiss between two women. Another has banned a stage play based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando which contains what Vox regards as inappropriate messages about gender fluidity and being gay, though they claim the reason is a budgetary problem no one had spotted before. In the region of Castilla y Léon, run by this coalition for some time now, PP has had to rein in Vox which wanted legislation to force women to have a scan and psychological counselling before they could get an abortion.

Meanwhile, the PP Mayor of Málaga, backed by Vox, has just increased her salary to a tad more than the Prime Minister of Spain’s. In all, some 28 authorities run by the PP, with or without Vox, have upped their pay. To be fair, so have 14 authorities where the social-democratic PSOE is in power, but the PP and Vox were strident in their denunciations of the allegedly spendthrift left, and the Mayor of Málaga has set a remarkable record.

It was in response to its bad showing in the local elections that Pedro Sánchez, the current Prime Minister and leader of the PSOE, called snap elections on 23 July. Now, his government had made errors, notably a new law on sexual consent, a necessary measure but one whose drafting led to the entirely unwanted and unfortunate release of a number of convicted sex offenders from prison. You can imagine the hay the right wing made with that. 

It also made a big deal of the fact that the PSOE had formed a coalition with a party of the more extreme left. Even worse, since even in coalition it remained a minority government, it had depended on support from small nationalist movements demanding the independence of their regions, such as the Basque country or Catalonia. That was bad enough, but the right really turned up the heat over Sánchez depending on support from the Basque Party EH Bildu, which includes convicted supporters of the former terrorist organisation ETA, some of them guilty of violent crimes.

All this felt like a heck of a potent barrage from the right. It was hard to see how the left could resist. Some of us might still be saying ‘no pasarán’, but in a whisper, and more as a prayer than in defiance.

“I think I’m going to move to southern Portugal,” my neighbour Nacho told me as we shared a bottle of wine, as we do from time to time.

And then – something happened. 

Sánchez stood firm and gave no ground on principles, despite the battering and abuse he was being subjected to. Faced with his firmness, the assault from the right began to fall apart. The leader of the PP, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, began to make errors. He claimed that PP governments had always uprated pensions in line with the cost-of-living index. It wasn’t hard to prove that was at best false, at worst a lie, and that was pointed out fast. What’s more, photos emerged of his association with Marcial Dorado, later jailed as a drug dealer, who’d taken Feijóo out on sailing jaunts in his yacht on several occasions.

Feijóo made things worse by declaring that he hadn’t known Dorado was a drug trafficker. He claimed that he had only known that he was a smuggler. Still, you can imagine how well it went down among supporters of Feijóo’s party, with their predilection for a hard law-’n’-order line, to hear the leader of their party admit he’d accepted luxurious hospitality from a man he knew was a smuggler.

Today, senior figures of the PP, publicly loyal to Feijóo, are in private criticising the colossal errors he made in the closing stages of the campaign. As well as the gaffes on pensions and Dorado, one that they’re not mentioning but should, is the damaging effect of getting too close to Vox, now revealed as rather too extremist even for some who were previously open to the PP working with them.

Why are all these errors so important? Because Feijóo didn’t achieve the electoral triumph that seemed so likely. It’s true that he won the elections, taking more votes and winning more parliamentary seats than any other party. But even adding 47 seats to take 136 left him far short of a majority, which requires 176. As for Vox, perhaps because it has begun to show its true colours, its holding fell dramatically, by 19 seats to 33. 

That means that even together, the two parties don’t command a majority. There are two other right-wing MPs who could take them within five votes, but that’s still not enough. The other MPs are all representatives of parts of Spain that are more or less committed to further autonomy or even independence. Both the PP and Vox have ruled out ever granting them any such thing, so it’s clear they won’t support them into power.

Meanwhile, in a glorious irony, Sánchez managed to avoid losing ground and even added two to the PSOE’s tally of MPs. Though his party is second behind the PP, he’s in a better position to form a government, with the support of the smaller parties, than is Feijóo. The result is that, after spending the campaign denouncing Sánchez and promising to revoke everything he’d done, Feijóo is now turning all polite and respectful towards the PSOE and pleading that they hold back on voting down his attempts to form a government. Quite a glorious turnaround.

And quite a disaster for the right. 

Frankly, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. Of course, we’re not out of the woods. There may have to be another election. Vox has certainly not disappeared and can make a comeback. Feijóo may be forced out and replaced by the even more hardline President of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. 

Sánchez celebrating a successful resistance with his supporters

There are many pitfalls ahead. But at least, for now, we can take courage from the fact that they didn’t pass. For now, no han pasado. 

Or pasa’o.

“I’ve postponed my plans to move to Portugal,” Nacho assures me.

Winning’s great, but surely it has to be for something?

Art imitating nature is obvious. It’s when nature imitates art that things get interesting. That’s includes reactions to Thursday’s by-elections in England.

As it should be: art imitating nature
Camille Corot, Landscape with lake

For the small number of you who perhaps don’t follow British politics as assiduously as you might, let me explain that these elections were caused by Boris Johnson and one of his friends standing down as MPs, in protest at the gall Parliament had shown in demanding that Johnson account for lying to it. 

There was a third by-election, on the same day, to elect a new MP in place of one who’d got himself disgraced in yet another parliamentary scandal.

The outcome of the elections was one win each for the three main parties. That’s the Conservatives, in government, Labour ahead in the polls and likely to take over, and the Liberal Democrats, working hard to get in on the act. One win each may sound equitable, but all three seats had been Conservative with big majorities, so its two losses represent a major upset for the ruling party. 

That’s the ruling party in Britain for the last thirteen years. It has some startling achievements to its name: worse inflation than any comparable country, a major cost of living crisis, a health service on the brink of collapse and an economy falling apart as a result of that fine piece of national assertion, Brexit. ‘Taking back control’, the backers of Brexit proclaimed, making it ironic that economic decline now seems entirely out of control.

The controversial result of the three is the only one the Conservatives clung onto, in Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, by the slender margin of 495 votes over the Labour challenger. Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party – my own party, I’m a member still – is upset over the loss and knows exactly who should take the blame.

That would be Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London. He recently decided to extend what’s known as the Ultra Low Emission Zone, generally referred to by the melodious acronym ULEZ, to all London Boroughs. That meant it would in future apply to the area covered by the constituency Labour failed to gain.

The ULEZ requires anyone in an older and more polluting car to pay £12.50 for every day they enter the zone. That’s harsh and a lot of people resent it, something on which the Conservatives played in leaflets hammering out the message that this was a Labour measure. Enough voters in Uxbridge and South Ruislip were swung by this campaign to cheat Labour of what was expected to be a win that would have completed an excellent day.

“We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet,” Keir Starmer has angrily announced. “We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.”

Even his deputy Angela Rayner, often at odds with him because her roots in the party are far to the left of his, agrees with Starmer on this point. Labour lost the constituency, she claims, because it failed to “listen to voters”.

Here’s the thing, though. Unprecedented heat waves are sweeping huge areas of the world. Records are being broken with painful frequency, as the planet heats up, ice caps melt, and the mercury climbs to previous maximum values or beyond. People are dying – in Italy, for instance – and disasters abound, including fierce wild fires.

Fighting a wildfire in Greece as temperatures soar

It may already be too late to reverse the trend. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try. And the thing about the ULEZ is that it’s exactly that: someone trying to do something about a situation heading towards catastrophe.

In other words, Sadiq Khan’s action was the right thing to do. It may not be a vote winner, and may indeed have been a vote loser. But it’s still the right thing.

So what is Angela Rayner saying? We should be listening to voters even when they’re telling us to do the wrong thing? Is that what leaders do or is leadership about persuading people to do the right thing even when they’d rather not?

And this is what made me think about nature imitating art. It reminded me of a clever moment in that excellent TV series The West Wing. Josh Lyman, who will later help Josiah Bartlett win the Democratic nomination for President and, ultimately, the presidency itself, has yet to make that jump and is still working for a different candidate, John Hoynes. But not enjoying himself. He explains why:

I don't know what we're for. I don't know what we're for or what we're against except we seem to be for winning and against somebody else winning.

John Hoynes: unable to tell Josh Lyman what he’s actually for

Yep. That’s depressing. A political team that’s only for winning and against anyone else winning hardly seems up to leading us towards doing what needs to be done.

It just leaves those who think it’s urgent to do the right thing wondering “what the heck do we plan on winning for?” 

Building our jungle

It was green in colour, though less so in spirit. 

The back garden of our house near Valencia, when we moved in, had grass and thirty-year old cypress hedges on each side. That made it attractive in its own way, but the hedges didn’t leave a lot of space in between and, as far environmental concerns go, the grass and the hedges took a lot of water for what they were. Something to avoid at a time when water crises seem to be looming.

Funnily enough, a photo of the garden when it needed no watering – in a rainstorm – shows clearly how invasive the hedges were. It was never a big garden, but the cypress hedging took 1.5 to 2m each side. That made it all but claustrophobic.

A little claustrophobic in the rain

Better, and a sun trap on a good day
but still a little narrow
Note Toffee and Luci enjoying the sun

Towering hedges under a striking sunset

Three years into our lives here, we decided it was time to make a change, especially since Danielle was keen to get some more things planted and therefore needed more space. The hedges had to go. After we’d received a shockingly steep quote for the work, we decided we’d do the bulk of it ourselves, a choice whose wisdom we later questioned more than once.

The gardeners who come to us once a week for a few minutes to tidy things up told us that if we took the branches down, they’d get the trunks out with a chain saw. On one side of the garden that was a bit of a chore but hardly unbearable.

The easier side where the hedge hadn't grown into the fence

On the other side, though, the hedge had interwoven itself into the fence so intricately, that parts of the fence were actually inside the wood of the branches. We had no choice but to take hedge and fence down together. Now, that really was hard work. The council would collect branches, if we tied them up in reasonably-sized bundles (which we did) but with no metal mixed up in them. Then there are people constantly travelling around collecting metal that people don’t want (and sometimes, if they’re not caught, even metal people still want and are using), so we could leave the fencing for collection too, but separately from the wood.

Tangle of fencing after removal of vegetation

Fortunately, our son Michael was with us. Ostensibly he was on holiday. However we unhesitatingly, and unscrupulously, put him to work for hours at a time picking out wood from fence wire.

With the fence down, the next job was to put in a new one. That needed a new low wall to hold the fence posts. We sensibly decided this work was beyond us and got both jobs done by professionals. 

New wall in

Fence posts going up

The new fence complete

Next we covered the fence with willow.

Willow going up along the fence
Note Danielle in the background, hard at work

After that we laid gravel in the garden between the new, extended beds for flowers. It amazed me just how much gravel it took. For a while, I seemed to be going out every day to buy more bags of the stuff.

Another batch of gravel bags

Toffee out inspecting the new gravel
Note the willow on both sides,
with the carefully designed gap on the right to allow 
sunlight to fall on the growing tables

Finally, Danielle could start planting. At that stage, we were simply at the mercy of the weather. We had less rain than we might have liked, but there was enough all the same, and the sun, as most people in Spain have discovered this year, was more than sufficient, whatever the climate change deniers may say about it.

The plants go in, the flowers come out

Further inspections by Toffee

The jungle takes hold

The grandkids’ playhouse in an increasingly jungle-like setting

Now, we’re just waiting for the climbing plants to grow up the willow fencing, to give us a new, much less invasive and more attractive kind of hedging. More attractive in scent, too, since the climbers include fragrant plants such as jasmine.

It took hard work, but we’re delighted with the result. And, of course, it’s a far more appropriate garden for a Mediterranean setting. It takes far less water.

I thought it would be fun to finish this post with a last image related to the one at the start. The new garden has had its first rainstorm. See for yourself how things have changed.

The jungle as rain forest

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.