Eliminating the widows and orphans

It’s surprising how tedious a job it is getting rid of widows and orphans. It took me ages the other day and required a lot of patience. However, I’m glad to say that no blood was shed, and no tears, nor was any crime against humanity committed.

In this context, a widow is the generally short last line of a paragraph, sitting on its own at the top of a page, isolated from the rest left one page back.

Similarly, an orphan is the generally short first line of a paragraph, alone at the bottom of a book’s page, cut off from the rest which, I suppose one could say, extending the metaphor a bit, is the parent to which it belongs.

In my brief time in publishing, from 1983 to 1985, I was taught to abhor such widows and orphans and do all I could to eliminate them. And last weekend, I engaged in just that tiresome undertaking. Successfully, I believe, in the end, but not without a great deal of exasperation over the time it took.

This means that I carried out some extensive killing of widows and orphans without, however, engaging in war crimes. Which is a relief, given the appalling news that keeps bombarding us (and the munitions that keep bombarding them) these days.

Why was I doing all this? After all, I’m no longer in publishing, and haven’t been for nearly four decades. The answer is that I’m only out of publishing for other people, but have taken, with enthusiasm, to publishing on my own account.

Now about to celebrate its third birthday

Recently I realised, with some surprise, that the first episode in my podcast series, A History of England, went out on 19 November 2020. That means I’m within a month of its third anniversary. I had no idea it had been so long, but I suppose that only confirms the old saw about time flying when you’re having fun. 

It certainly has been fun, though it’s also hard work. I keep an episode to just under fifteen minutes, but scripting, recording and editing each of those mini-episodes takes several hours. I’m reasonably pleased with the results, with 1200 people following the podcast and over 80,000 plays so far. That’s poor, of course, compared with celebrity podcasts, but it’s a lot more than I dared hope for when I got started nearly three years and 165 episodes ago. 

I have to confess that it slightly amazes me to find that so many people are interested in discovering how tracking the development of England down the centuries can show how it got Britain into the state it’s reached today. Which, I add at once for clarification, is in my view by no means where it ought to be. Or, come to that, where it’s happy to be.

‘Not for resale’: the proof copy
Guiding my destruction of widows and orphans

Well, a few people have suggested that it would be helpful to have books accompanying the podcasts, so that followers can check on the page for anything that was perhaps unclear in the spoken version. That struck me as a good idea but, somehow, I kept failing to get it done. At last, however, I have. A Kindle version and, now, a paperback edition, are up on Amazon. 

Kindle and paperback editions on Amazon

And, as far as I know, the paperback no longer contains any widows or orphans.

Glimmer of humanity

They say that the first casualty of war is the truth.

I’m not sure of that. It strikes me that both reason and humanity go first. The killing of the truth becomes necessary because the perpetrators want to hide their previous adoption of irrationality and inhumanity. 

For instance, take the reactions to the Hamas attacks on southern Israel. These have been rightly described as some of the most brutal in the history of terrorism, with kids tortured and murdered in front of their parents, or the parents in front of their kids. Such is the sense of horror this inspires that some seem to feel that any kind of retaliation is legitimate, however many victims it produces and whether they’re with Hamas themselves or not.

Meanwhile, on the other side, I’ve seen interviews with people who simply can’t bring themselves to condemn the level of brutality those attacks generated, but instead simply point to their own grievances concerning the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli state over 70 years. It’s hard to believe that they feel that history justifies that level of cruelty towards innocents. It seems, however, that there are those who reckon it does.

I’ve also heard people claiming that “the Jews” are wreaking terrible harm on the Palestinians. I want to scream “not all Jews are Israelis”, but even that wouldn’t be saying enough. I’d need to add, “not all Israelis favour state violence against the Palestinians”. We’ll see that at the end of this post

This kind of intransigent positioning leads to the killing of the truth, as you can see from the news coverage of the Gazan hospital hit by some kind of weapon, leading to the death of more than 400 people. Somebody fired the missiles that did the damage. But everyone who might have been responsible is denying it was them. Someone, therefore, is lying.

What’s most interesting about that lie is that it’s clear that the perpetrator realises that the action was shameful and that’s why they won’t take responsibility. They did it, but they knew it was wrong. And that knowledge didn’t stop them.

In this terrible fog of hatred and desire for revenge, deepened by the lies and evasions, it’s a comfort to find even a small glimmer of decency and humanity.

For me that was provided by a remarkable man, whose book Sapiens impressed me when I read it. He shows the deepest understanding of the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. He also seems to have the most intelligent suggestion for a way out of the mess, if only enough people could be found to take it.

He's the Israeli historian and writer, Yuval Noah Harari.

Yuval Noah Harari

He gave an interview to an Indian news service, CNN-News18. The recording on YouTube is a little messy, with more than one instance of the interview, not starting at the same point, but his statements are clear enough.

Harari’s stance strikes me as enormously insightful. Hamas is actually fighting peace itself. A Gaza strip at peace, maybe even prosperous, doesn’t fit the Hamas world view. How would a peaceful Gaza still provide a role for Hamas?

That strikes me as the best answer I’ve heard to the question, “what on Earth was Hamas trying to achieve?” They knew that if they did actually go to war with Israel, as they claimed, they’d be crushed. But if they were at war with peace? That I can see them achieving.

Incidentally, that means that the best way of defeating them in the long term is to work once more towards peace. That would leave them no reason for being. No better ultimate solution to the problem of dealing with Hamas can exist.

That, though, is for the longer term. The immediate task for Israel has to be to put an end to Hamas's capacity to engage in terrorism. That means military action, however unpleasant that may be, since it’s clear that nothing else can possibly neutralise the constant threat from one of the ugliest terrorist organisations the world has seen.

How should Israel tackle that task?

Harari gets it absolutely right. He declares:

Israel now is in a struggle, not just to protect its territory and citizens but to protect its humanity... Israel must keep the possibility of peace alive.

What’s more, as Harari suggests, Israel needs to find a way of doing that which doesn’t reduce it to the same level as Hamas. I think Harari’s right to say that Israel doesn’t deliberately target civilians as Hamas does, but it can behave with such indifference towards civilian life that the numbers killed become horrific. Can it rise above that kind of behaviour?

Well, I don’t have a lot of hope. People who’ve been hurt badly often only want to hurt back. The present Israeli government hasn’t shown itself particularly inclined to moderation and decency. As for Hamas, it certainly wouldn’t recognise either moderation or decency if it tripped over them in the street.

But, as Harari says, maybe international pressure can begin to make itself felt. Maybe it can push two intransigent parties to see that both sides are made up of humans and humans have human rights. The starting point for any actual progress in that sad region is for both sides to recognise that truth.

Let’s just hope that it isn’t one of the truths that have become casualties of war.

Making the Ninth of October go with a bang

The ninth of October is a big celebration for the Valencian Community in Spain, where we live. It marks the day in 1238 when good king James I of Aragon liberated Valencia from the cruel oppression of the Moors. Had we forgotten, we’d have had a reminder early in the morning from the distant sound of firecrackers being let off. 

Celebrating the Valencian day by
carrying the Valencian flag through the streets

The big difference between a firework and a firecracker is that the first combines explosive din with the beauty of bursting colours. A firecracker leaves out the colours and therefore the beauty, leaving only the noise. I’ve pointed this out to Valencian friends (I know, I know, I missed a vocation as a diplomat) and my remarks are, I suppose I’d have to say, somewhat contentious. Valencians divide into two sharply differentiated camps. There are those who find the racket as disagreeable as I do, and there are those who go into raptures over the rhythm achieved by a well-orchestrated firecracker display. For the latter, the firecracker fans, those who fail to appreciate this fine and subtle point are philistines, a group to which I, unrepentantly, belong.

It may be that this joy from what to me seems merely to be racket, is associated with a key event which, legend has it, occurred during James I’s campaign to take Valencia from the Muslims. An Arab prophet had apparently declared that the city would remain in the hands of his people as long as the lord’s bat survived. One night, however, the Christians encamped outside the city that they were keeping under siege, discovered that a bat had made its home on the crest of the king’s tent. He ordered that it be left in peace and treated with reverence.

Sometime later, again at night, while the Aragonese troops were sleeping, the king heard a loud drumming noise. He awoke his men and the alert was sounded. Rightly, it turned out, as the Arabs from besieged Valencia had made a sortie and were about to attack the camp. King James’s men being ready for them, they inflicted serious losses on the Arabs and forced them to retreat to the city.

“Who sounded the drum?” the king wanted to know.

To his astonishment it turned out to have been the bat, by flinging itself repeatedly against the sides of the king’s tent.

Perhaps that’s what the Valencians celebrate when they enjoy the rhythmic detonations of the firecrackers. I hear only din. They hear a distant echo of the bat’s warning all those centuries ago. Something still commemorated in the crest of the city and even the logo of the Valencia football club.

A bat dominates the Valencia football club logo

Of course, what happened on 9 October 1238 was a major and significant achievement. It put an end to the long and harsh rule of the Muslim rulers. And what did the Arabs ever do for us, after all?

They inflicted their cultural values on the good people of Christendom, in such barbaric acts as decorating the palace in the village of Anna.

Cultural tyranny: inside the Arab palace in the town of Anna

They took advantage of good Christian water by forcing it to flow through unnatural irrigation channels into the fields, using methods which even Christian farmers continue to impose on themselves to this very day.

Arab irrigation channel at Almiserà, Valencia
A legacy of the yoke of Moorish rule

And they enforced a terrible regime of coexistence, in which Christians, Jews and Muslims lived side by side under Muslim rulers. Multiculturalism, right? Woke before the term had even been invented. Who wants that?

Strangely, some people apparently do. Or did. One of the finest Spanish poets and playwrights, a man of massive international reputation, Federico García Lorca, said in 1936 that the expulsion of the Moors was “a very bad moment… what was lost was an admirable civilisation, a poetry … an architecture and a subtlety that were unique in the world”. 

On 18 August of that same year, he was murdered by nationalists who knew better than to say things so subversive of national values. To be fair, even more than his views on the Moors, the fact that Lorca was gay probably made it all the more certain that he would meet a swift, violent end at the hands of an insurgency of the far right. His killers threw the body into a grave whose location has to this day still not been discovered.

Oh, well. The ninth of October is just a pretext for a party these days, anyway. And there’s not so much to get joyful about in our times to turn down any opportunity the calendar gives us.

Though I prefer to celebrate a long way from the firecrackers. And remembering Federico García Lorca. A man – dare I say this? – rather more to my heart than even good king James I. 

Lorca, who liked the Arabs in Spain,
and was terminally disliked by Spanish nationalists

Grandparenting summer

It’s been a good summer, enriched by some immersion grandparenting.

That included two short experiments that together represented a big step forward in our grandparenting practice. Twice over the summer, the grandkids stayed with us for two nights, without their parents. And it worked out well. On each occasion, there was one night when Elliott woke up and demanded attention, but not for too long either time. On the other night of each stay, both kids slept right through. 

The time will come when they can stay with us for a longer period, giving their parents a break and, who knows, maybe even allowing us to take them on holiday somewhere. Perhaps to France. They both hold French nationality and, in a statement of surprising understanding, Matilda has let us know she wants to be better acquainted with the country and its language. When Danielle and I first met, it was French that we spoke to each other, and occasionally we fall into it again.

“Why are you speaking French?” Matilda often challenges us if she hears it.

It impresses me that she even recognises the language. And I can’t help feeling that behind her comment lies the implication, “I don’t want to be left out, I want to understand”. We’ll have to see what we can do when she’s a little older.

Matilda on her pedal bike
You think she doesn’t look happy? She wasn’t.
Her words after I took this picture were, “I don’t want photos.”

The big thing this summer has been the bikes. As I explained before, Matilda received her first pedal bike for her birthday in August. It’s quite clear that using a balance bike, the kind that has kids pushing themselves along with their feet on the ground, teaches them how to cycle much more effectively than using a pedal bike with training wheels. That was certainly clear when I saw her last week, at her home in Hoyo de Manzanares, near Madrid. She’s mastered both getting started (while with us, she still needed a push) and stopping (she now uses a brake and gets her feet on the ground, instead of falling over pretty much every time she came to a halt). And, boy, does she get some speed up in between.

Matilda running on the rocks outside her school

“Me too, me too,” says Elliott

The real problem is that Elliott, who has always wanted to do anything that Matilda could do, at the same time as she learned to do it – walking, running, talking – naturally wants to use a pedal bike too, even though he isn’t quite two and a half years old yet. His dad bought one for him, but he bought it from someone near us in Valencia, and it’s at our place until we find a way of getting it to him. In the meantime, Elliott has to beg his sister for some time to use her bike. When he does get to use it, he’s quite remarkable – I timed him keeping going for ten or fifteen minutes. That may be partly because he hasn’t yet fully mastered stopping, but it’s still remarkable.

Matilda’s pedal bike
“Me too, me too,” says Elliott

Language is the other area where the kids have bowled me over. Their mastery of Spanish can only leave me consumed by envy. But their English also just gets better and better, not just in the words but in the thinking behind them. 

“I like coming to Valencia,” Matilda told me.

I felt quite flattered, a feeling that lasted only until she could finish her remark.

“Because,” she went on, “we get ice cream every day here.”

There was ice cream on only one occasion last week, when I was with them. That’s ‘parents’ rules’. Sheena, my daughter-in-law, tells me that she regards us as applying ‘grandparents’ rules’. The latter are seriously more grandchild indulgent (and possibly grandparent-peace-purchasing).

The other enjoyable thing about being in our place is that they get to see trains going by from time to time. They call each one they see a ‘chu-chu-bahnele’, which is the equivalent in Danielle’s mother tongue, Alsatian, of what we might call a choo-choo-train. 

For the avoidance of confusion, Alsatian in this context has nothing to do with a breed of dogs, and everything to do with the language spoken in Danielle’s birth region of Alsace, in Eastern France.

Why do I find the use of Alsatian so enjoyable? Because it was what Danielle used when pointing out trains to our kids, when they were of that age. And she used it with our friends’ kids too. 

Now Elliott will cry out “chu-chu-bahnele” whenever we see so much as the railway track (well, strictly speaking it’s a metro track, but it feels like a railway since it’s all above ground near where we live. He doesn’t make the distinction, so nor do we). 

As it happens, with him the fascination seems to be just part of a general interest in alternative means of travel to cars.

“Plane! Plane!” he’ll say whenever he sees or hears one passing overhead.

They’re both beginning to grasp some of the subtler distinctions of language. For instance, they never want anything. They always need it. After all, a want can be denied. But a need? Well, it just has to be satisfied, doesn’t it? 

That slippage between terms, by the way, is by no means limited to children.

Chupa chups, as they call them, or lollipops as I would, are the object of one of those needs. Fulfilled, it creates considerable delight. It was, on one occasion, even under parents’ rules, in Hoyo, while I was there. 

Chupa chup moment, with Michael-Michael
After Edward Hopper

The event gave me the opportunity to take a photo of them in pensive enjoyment of their Chupa chup moment, along with a highly welcome visitor, their Uncle Michael. Or Michael-Michael, as they continue to call him. The moment with him and their chupa-chups gave me the opportunity to take a photo I felt had a bit of the wistful, enigmatic mood of an Edward Hopper painting to it.

The moment also has rarity value. A visit by Michael-Michael is received with such unconfined joy that, as a rule, we would certainly not apply words like peaceful to the scene that ensues.

High delight - literally, too - when Michael-Michael visits

And there were other special moments for the kids in the course of the summer. Their Granny flew down to join us from her home in Belfast, in Northern Ireland.

Matilda enjoying her granny’s presence

It was with their granny that they got to satisfy yet another need, the well-known requirement of the human soul to bathe from time to time in foam. A fine way to spend a little time on a hot summer day. As Granny can testify.

Matilda revelling in the foam

Granny can testify to the enjoyment

The heat, of course, was one of the major aspects of the summer, with global warming seeming to go right on in its inexorable way. That, I’m sure, was one of the things that made the foam so welcome, just like the swimming pool and the sea. And the pleasure the kids took in all three made it all the more bearable for us too.

A fine summer, as I said, despite the heat. The kind that leaves lots of great memories. All of which makes for what we’d call a good time all round, doesn’t it?

A rare moment of peace in an action-packed summer

Saying it simply, sliding to a fall and getting home quickly

Because English is a Germanic language that has absorbed a huge number of words of Latin origin, often via French, it contains quite a few pairs of words meaning roughly the same thing, each from a different root. As often as not, the Latin-derived one is longer and more learned, making it feel more pompous, than the other, simpler Anglo-Saxon term. 

You can describe someone as parsimonious, a fine term of Latin root, or simply say he’s mean, which is simpler, shorter and means pretty much the same.

You can observe things if you want to make sure we understand that what you were doing was intense and possibly research-oriented, otherwise you might simply say you watched them. 

You might feel that someone else (though never yourself, of course) is mendacious, rather than describing him as lying. To express myself (or say things) in a more demotic (or everyday) way, I might say he’s a lying git. That’s how a Londoner (and I’m the son of a Cockney and an adopted Londoner myself) might characterise (or simply call) such a person. Now ‘lying git’ is just as long as ‘mendacious’ in syllables, though it’s shorter in letters and a lot more colourful.

For that matter, take policemen. In Britain, some of them tell us that they go out on foot patrol and proceed along various thoroughfares. We, on the other hand, might think of them as bobbies on the beat, walking down the street (which even has the merit of rhyming).

I’ve been suffering from an earache for some time now. Eventually my general practitioner (or family doctor) decided I needed to see a specialist. This being Spain, that meant having to visit a department of Otorrinolaringología. That can be abbreviated, as it is in French, to ORL, but I noticed that everywhere I saw the specialty displayed – say on signs directing me to my destination (necessarily quite long signs) – it was written out in full. 

To be honest, I find it almost impossible to pronounce that mouthful. Not just in Spanish, come to that. Oto-rhino-laryngology exists in English too. I’m glad to say, though, that the term is generally only used in technical jargon. In England, I’d have gone to see an ENT specialist.

That’s someone who deals with disorders of the Ear, Nose or Throat.

Even a mug can understand the problem

The visit itself went quite well. The doctor prescribed a new treatment which (I hardly dare say this) may actually be working. He commented on my surname – Beeson – which he rightly identified as not particularly Italian in origin, which is surprising for someone born in Rome. I was impressed not only by the lighthearted way he was talking to me – which I welcomed – but with the thoroughness with which he’d read my record. No other doctor has ever commented on my Italian birth, probably because they hadn’t noticed.

Indeed, the only setback, or rather downside, literally, of the whole experience came on the way to the appointment. We’ve had a lot of rain here recently and I can state, from experience, that a heck of a lot of the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Also it creates a lot of mud.

I was cycling quite quickly along a cycle path and didn’t notice the patch of mud ahead until I hit it, on a curve which I’d already started to take before I realised what was about to happen. What was about to happen then happened. The wheels slid out from under me, and I found myself horizontal when I should have been vertical. And splattered in mud when I should have been clean.

This kind of fall has happened to me rather a lot in recent months, which is a lot more than most other people I know who use their bikes regularly. Each time I think it’s down to my misfortune (or perhaps I should say bad luck), but I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m just accident-prone.

Anyway, the result was that I turned up or my appointment with a grazed knee and elbow and mud on my shorts and shirt. I decided not to mention the mud, and neither did the doctor or his assistant, which struck me as not just tactful but much the least stressful way of dealing with the issue.

On the way back, I asked Google to find me a route and display it on my phone. Now, there were moments along the route when I was in known territory and realised that there were better ways to go than it was suggesting. That might be only because they avoided travelling along motorways surrounded by traffic doing 120 km an hour or more (including lorries). However, and I appreciate that this is undoubtedly merely a subjective reaction of my own, when I take a different route from the one suggested by Google, I always have the sense that it’s somehow offended. Even when, to be fair, it really ought to know better. Indeed, even when it turns out that it really did know better.

At one time, when I turned away from the Google route, I could almost hear it saying to me, ‘oh right, you’ve decided not to take my recommendation that would get you home in 40 minutes, have you? On your head be it. Let me just recalculate. Your route, smartarse, will take you a full 32 minutes.”

Honestly. My route was quicker than what it had suggested. And it knew.

So here’s my question: if it knew that all along, why didn’t it recommend the quicker route in the first place?

Still, at least I got home in one piece and with no further falls. Which was fortuitous. Or, as we say in plain Anglo-Saxon, bloody lucky.

How a bird in the hand led to two in a cage

Many years ago, when my stepson David was barely a teenager, he was coming back into the house from the garden when he glanced up at the roof and stopped, frozen in his tracks. On the edge of the roof was perched a white dove.

He barely had time to think, “oh, how I wish he’d fly down to me,” before the dove granted his wish and came down to settle on his head.

By mutual consent of our family and the bird, he made his home with us for the rest of his life. He received a name, Fotzel. That’s a term of endearment for a mischievous little boy, in the dialect of Alsace, in Eastern France, which was the mother tongue of both David and his mother, my wife Danielle.

Fotzel on the wing

Danielle is good with birds, as she is with animals generally, or with plants, and indeed with us. She decided that what Fotzel needed was a companion. Or, more specifically, a mate.

She found one in a pub that had so many doves in an aviary at the back that they could spare one without noticing her absence. By this time, we’d built an aviary of our own, taller than a tall man and about as long on each side. It was enclosed with strong chicken wire but we’d made a hole in the top, big enough for the doves to fly in and out, but too small for any hawk to try flying in.

The female duly laid a clutch of eggs. But then, however, she decided that life in our garden was nothing like exciting enough. Maybe she’d got too used to the livelier atmosphere of a pub, though I couldn’t say. All I know is that she cleared off, abandoning her eggs in the dovecote we’d built.

Not a problem, it turned out. Fotzel took over, sat of the eggs till they hatched, and then looked after the hatchlings until they turned into healthy and happy adults. Well, I don’t know how to measure dove happiness, but at any rate they ate their feed with apparent enthusiasm and seemed disinclined to clear off, despite the hole in the roof which left them free to make their own choice on the matter.

I don’t, of course, want to condone incest, but I have to admit it worked for our dove community. Within a relatively short time, it had turned into a real colony, busy, lively and cheerful. And, naturally, Fotzel was its patriarch until he took his last flight, off into the unknown, at a ripe old age (as far as we could tell).

Fotzel surveying his domain

Some years later, David had ensconced himself firmly in Scotland, where he lives with his family to this day and their great satisfaction, while we had moved to Strasbourg in Eastern France. On our way to dinner with friends who lived in converted farmhouse in the nearby countryside, Danielle told me, “if they ask us to take a kitten, the answer is no. Got it?”

I got it. But that evening, when each of us in turn had the exquisite pain of having a tiny cat climbing our legs, using his claws for grip, we simply couldn’t resist the temptation – such as is the animal-lover’s perversity – and took him home. So started Misty’s fifteen-year stay with us, ended only by undiagnosable but disabling illness just last year. He followed us from France to Germany to England and finally to a well-deserved and apparently satisfactory retirement in Spain. 

Misty as a young lad
Always keen on choosing inappropriate receptacles to relax in

He did become a little cranky as an adult, something I put down to being dragged from France to Germany to England and finally to Spain. The crankiness left me scars which have now faded, but I clearly remember the scratches on my hands. They were often for unforgivable offences, such as stroking him without paying due attention to the process. I would make the mistake of thinking that I could watch TV and stroke Misty at the same time, a delusion from which he rapidly (and painfully) disabused me.

Still, he stayed with us, never showing any desire to clear off, right to the end of his life, nearly eighteen months ago.

Misty enjoying his retirement in Spain
and still as ready as ever to relax in odd places

Now fast forward to just last week. We had been invited to lunch with our excellent friends Pamela and Ian. When we stepped outside for some hors-d’oeuvre titbits and a glass of wine on their patio, they warned us, “oh, you might have to watch out. A bird showed up this morning and seems not to want to go. It was sitting on the edge of the sofa a short time ago.”

It was sitting there still. It was a budgie. She (for it turns out she was a she) was white with the faintest of faint blue on her back. She was dishevelled, not terribly clean and obviously not in the happiest of states.

Danielle, as I mentioned before, is good with birds. Pamela and Ian did have some seeds. In principle, they were for human consumption, but when Danielle gave her a handful, the bird hoovered them up with every sign of enjoyment. She also had some water. 

And after lunch (ours as well as hers), inevitably, we took her home.

That was something of a feat since we were on bikes. Fortunately, Pamela and Ian lent us a cat carrier. Danielle pulled off the remarkable trick of cycling with one hand on the handlebars while she clutched the carrier’s handle in the other.

By that evening, we had a cage. And as had happened with Fotzel, we even had a companion – or more than likely a mate – for the newcomer to our household. 

Our new resident, delicately attired in tasteful white,
and her new mate, dressed more flamboyantly
Keeping one beady eye each on my doings

I like birdsong, so it’s a pleasure to hear them tweeting in their cage outside our front door. A lot more pleasant than the social media activity that goes by the same name (or is it called X-ing now?) It's equally a pleasure to go out and see how they’re doing in the morning, even before I have my first cup of coffee. 

For the third time, simple serendipity has provided us with a new animal extension to our household which we’re happy about. Another unplanned pleasure, as I was celebrating in my last post.

By the way, since the second arrival’s a male, he’s inherited the name Fotzel. As for the lady in white, Danielle has named her Justine. That’s pronounced the French way, with the ‘u’ roughly rhyming with ‘oo’ in ‘boon’.

Danielle’s not certain how she came up with the name. I reckon it’s because the bird had clearly flown away from her original home and had probably been driven by the heavy winds we’ve been having lately, until she was completely lost. Then we luckily turned up and were able to save her from her difficulties, and Pamela and Ian from the problem of working out what to do with her.

Justine time.

Justine and Fotzel indoors
for a brief cage-cleaning operation

Unplanned pleasure

Fail to plan, they say, and plan to fail.

I’m sure there’s some truth in that. As there is in most aphorisms. Not all of them of course. I have no idea who came up with that bright little drop of optimism that ‘good things come to those who wait’, but he must have been living in a different universe from mine.

Still, even if planning is generally a good thing, it’s often the unplanned that gives the greatest pleasure. 

While we were in southwestern France last weekend, we decided to pop down to the beach at Argelès-sur-Mer. That was less of a visit than a pilgrimage. The beach is spectacular, but we live near the Spanish Mediterranean coast and probably wouldn’t travel to France just for sand and sea. No, this beach isn’t just golden and sunlit, it’s associated with something much darker and shameful.

The beach at Argelès, showing no sign of its shameful past

When Francisco Franco succeeded in overthrowing the Spanish republic in 1939, ushering in 36 years of dictatorship ended only by his death, some 500,000 people who’d served the legitimate government fled, mostly into France. There they were interned by the French authorities. Something like 100,000 of them were simply dumped on the beach at Argelès with, initially, practically no amenities apart from the wire fencing to prevent their escape. 

When I say ‘nothing’, I really mean nothing. There were no latrines. There was no shelter. There was no reliable supply of fresh water. Every now and then someone would turn up and toss some food at the internees. It was pretty vile. Hunger and disease-ridden, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Deaths were nothing like as horrific as they might have been had the internment lasted longer, but fortunately with the outbreak of the next war, the world war, within months of the Spanish defeat, many were recruited into the French armed forces, while others were able to move on to friends or family ready to take them in, or into charitable accommodation, above all that provided by Quakers. Even so, several hundred died.

So, we visited the beach to see what the place looked like. There’s no trace of the camp anymore but still, it felt like a small act of deserved respect to visit the place where this shameful act took place.

But then we had the whole of the afternoon ahead of us. What to do next?

We saw signposts to a coastal path that zigzagged along the top of the sea cliffs, towards the lovely fishing village of Collioure, a few kilometres further on. I say ‘fishing village’ though what it really is now is a major tourist destination with some pretty wonderful accommodation for the pretty wonderfully rich. We went there once before, but by car, and found it was impossible to park anywhere inside the town, it was so seething with visitors. In the end, we had to park outside the town and walk half an hour to get to the seafront. 

To be fair, though, it’s such a fine place that it was worth it. Indeed, walking in was probably an enhancement to the visit, since it gave us time to see the place from various angles as we approached it, which is a much better way to get to know somewhere than shooting in by car.

Anyway, this time we had no intention of walking all the way to Collioure. It was only a little over four kilometres away, but it was hot, the terrain was rough, and there was a lot of climbing. We decided we wouldn’t go the whole way. 

So, naturally, we did.

Approaching Collioure the hard way, by the cliff path

It was good to see Collioure again. It was, I suppose unsurprisingly, just as attractive the second time as it had been the first. But we were pretty tired. Our main concern was getting back to Argelès, where we’d left the car. A bus, we decided, would be just the thing and, failing that, a taxi.

There were signs to the tourist office. But at 4:00 on a Sunday afternoon? No chance it was open.

And yet it was. 

“Is there a bus to take us back to Argelès?” we asked.

“Ah, I’m afraid,” the friendly woman behind the counter told us, glancing at her watch, “that by now the last bus will have gone.”

“Oh,” we said, trying not to sound too disappointed.

“But there is a boat,” she went on, “and the next one leaves in twenty minutes, from the pier just outside this office.”

Joy. Elation. Relief, too.

Collioure Castle in the background, with our boat in front
It may not seem much, but it felt like luxury

We waited the twenty minutes and then travelled back to Argelès in what felt like luxury, even though it was just a crowded tourist boat. But it was a pleasure. We saw from below the cliffs we’d struggle past above just an hour or so earlier. We enjoyed watching the surf crashing on the rocks, and the sinking sun casting a glow on the deep blue sea around us. And we got back to Argelès in twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half, and in comfort instead of in footsore exhaustion.

Leaving Collioure, the easy way, by boat

It was a delightful, and entirely unplanned pleasure. It can be the best kind, I reckon. Certainly, that’s how we felt.

Of course, the good thing didn’t come to us as we waited for it. On the contrary, we had struggle to it along difficult paths through oppressive heat.

Further convincing me that whoever said that about good things coming to those who wait, certainly didn’t belong to the universe I inhabit.