Rising early: the pain and the joy

How sad, I used to feel, that old people woke up so early. What a shame, I used to tell myself, that they couldn’t sleep in as I did, till 9:00. Or 10:00. Or even 11:00.

These days, as I move further into my eighth decade, I’m having to come to terms with the idea that being that old isn’t something happening only to other people, but that I’m one of them myself. Just like those old people I once felt so sorry for, I also find it increasingly difficult to sleep late. If I wake up and it isn’t yet 5:00, I try to fall asleep again. If it’s approaching 6:00, it could go either way, but I generally get up. At 7:00, well, these days that’s beginning to get into lie-in country.

There is, in any case, now a new motivation to get up when I wake. Two motivations, one might say. Each has a name: Luci and Toffee. They used to sleep on our bed, but it’s extraordinary how much space a pair of toy poodles can take up. And how little opportunity they can leave to us to get any rest. We finally decided, a few weeks ago, that this had become much too much of a good thing. These days, they get banished downstairs, a harsh decree we reinforce by closing the stair gate installed primarily as a safety measure for the grandkids, now adapted to serve as an escape-proof fence for the dogs. Against the dogs, they’d no doubt correct me if they could.

So when I come down in the early hours, these days I’m greeted by two whimpering poodles bursting with enthusiasm to overwhelm me with welcoming affection.

Despite being retired, I still find that my time just fills up with things to do. Some of them are, of course, simply leisure activities. For instance, we recently went for a walk in the hills with a group of friends. The plan was to hike 14km and end up with a paella. In the end, having spent too long enjoying coffee and cakes before we even set out, the hike became a bit of a stroll and, though the paella plan was unaffected (an amazingly good one by the way, in the Valencian hill village of Serra), we only walked six kilometres, indulging more in conversation than in serious exercise. Even so, that took most of the day. The changes in altitude, the conversation in a language I still haven’t fully mastered, the consumption of a large meal, all left me worn out by the time we got home.

When I woke early the next morning, therefore, I didn’t plunge straight into work. And I really mean work: keeping up my English history podcast (wittily entitled A History of England), now at over 180 episodes, has proven quite a task. I find myself having to read book after book, because for every authority I consult, I always feel the need to consult another, to try to cancel out bias in either and get to something like knowledge underneath. Writing the episodes is no small task either, above all the (self-imposed) obligation to keep them short. Remember Blaise Pascal who once apologised for writing a long letter, because he didn’t have time to write a short one.

Recording the episodes isn’t a brief job either. What with editing, correcting, correcting the corrections, the production of fifteen minutes’ worth of material can take several hours.

On top of that, there is of course this blog, though I write fewer posts these days. Then there are the other projects, including a third novel and booklets to accompany the podcast. To say nothing of the various jobs that keep cropping up, around the house, around the car, around administrative authorities.

So the other day, I decided I was going to have a quiet moment with the dogs. With a coffee in front of me, Toffee on my lap and Luci by my side, I put aside for the moment further study of suffragists, Home Rule campaigners and their Ulster volunteer enemies, or the steady, accelerating descent to the First World War. Instead, I chose to relax into the day by chuckling my way through the last few chapters of Lessons in Chemistry.

Between my slippered feet and the collar of my dressing gown:
Luci (left) and Toffee making my (early) morning speial

Do you know the book? As you’ve no doubt spotted, I like to think of myself as a bit of a writer. Not a successful one, I’ll admit at once. But one who enjoys churning out the stuff. And one who knows enough about writing to bow his head in humble admiration when he comes across someone with real mastery of the art. And in writing this, amazingly her first novel, Bonnie Garmus has provided an object lesson in how to do it well. It’s full of life, dynamism, humour, but also occasionally grim tragedy, with an extraordinary set of messages on how one should live and how one should treat others, between women and men, between adults and children, even between humans and dogs. 

The TV series differs from the book in many respects, but not at all in its ability to entertain and intrigue. It’s as well worth watching as the novel is worth reading, and the novel is well worth reading. 

It may be a tad early, 6:30 in the morning. But earliness is the curse of age. Though, with a coffee in your hand, two dogs pressed up against you, and a good book to enjoy, it can turn it into something more like a blessing.

A cheering irony from a land of many ironies

Having failed to inform myself on what to expect, the first time I visited Stormont, the home of Northern Ireland’s parliament, I was shocked to see the approach dominated by a massive statue.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Why, Edward Carson,” I was told.

The statue of Edward Carson in front of Stormont Castle

Carson? It seemed extraordinary. 

The year 1910 was a strange one in British politics, because there were two general elections that year. In both the Liberals, for the last time in their history, emerged as the biggest single party in the House of Commons. They didn’t, however, have a majority and depended on the votes of Irish Nationalist MPs to cling on to office.

Irish Nationalist MPs? You may be wondering how there were any of them. Well, Ireland – the whole of it – was then still part of the United Kingdom and it sent MPs to the UK parliament in Westminster.

To retain their support, the Prime Minister HH Asquith had  to go some way at least to meet their aspirations. It had once been the policy of his Liberal Party to grant Home Rule to Ireland, giving it back the Dublin parliament that had been done away with early in the nineteenth century. Home Rule had split the Liberals back in the 1880s and cast them into the outermost darkness where there is waling and gnashing of teeth – in other words, opposition – while the Conservatives enjoyed almost uninterrupted power for twenty years.

Parliamentary arithmetic, however, is parliamentary arithmetic. The Irish MPs had to be accommodated. Painful though the previous experience with Home Rule had been, Asquith was going to have to try again.

As before, there was fierce resistance from the official Opposition in Westminster. But even fiercer was the hostility of one community within Ireland itself. Further back in the past, in the early seventeenth century, the then King James VI of Scotland and I of England, had sent Protestant Scotsmen to settle in Ireland, to strengthen Protestant power over the Catholic majority. Nearly four centuries on, their descendants were still living in Ireland, mainly in Ulster, the north-eastern corner of the island. They even formed a majority in a large part of that province.

Carson had played a major role in setting up the organisation that came to be known as the Ulster Volunteer Force. It smuggled arms into the province, mostly from Germany, ready to use them to resist any attempt to bring Protestants under the authority of a Catholic-dominated parliament in Dublin. Carson was one of those Irishmen who believed that the place of Ireland was to be an integral element of the British Empire, benefiting from being part of it and helping to sustain it. That was the position known as Unionist.

He proclaimed a policy of ‘No surrender’, a slogan taken up by another well-known Irish Unionist nearer to our own times, Ian Paisley.

Now what the Ulster Volunteer Force was doing was illegal. Criminal even. Indeed, when another figure, Sir Roger Casement, tried to smuggle in German arms on behalf of the other side, the anti-Union Nationalists, the British authorities hanged him. But Carson remained an MP and indeed, despite having organised armed resistance to one British government, he became a minister in another. Why, he even became a law officer in that government, holding the post of Attorney General of England, upholding the authority of a system of laws he’d flouted himself.

An amusing irony, wouldn’t you say?

Poor old Carson. He wasn’t an Ulsterman but a Dubliner. However, Unionism was in a minority in the south or west of Ireland. He found himself having to concentrate his energies saving Protestants from Catholic supremacy only in Ulster. Indeed, even in Ulster he had to give up on his initial hope of keeping all nine counties of the province united with Britain. With their Catholic and Nationalist majorities, there was no question of separating three of them from the south and west of the country.

Indeed, there was even a question mark of whether two further counties, where the Protestant majority was thin, Fermanagh and Tyrone, might have to be left out of a union with the British Empire. But they stayed in.

At the end of this protracted and, ultimately, vicious struggle, Irish nationalists had moved away from their old allegiance to parties looking for Home Rule, to Sinn Fein which wasn’t prepared to settle for anything less than full independence. And at the end of 1921, it achieved its aim – in part. That part was made up of 26 of the 32 Irish counties, while the remaining six in Ulster, with their Protestant majority, were excluded and remained with Britain.

The six counties got their own parliament at Stormont, and in 1932, their government erected the statue to Carson in front of the building.

Now, let’s be clear what had happened. Those six counties had a Protestant majority, for sure. But it represented a minority of Ireland as a whole. So what had been achieved was to create a separate territory to manufacture a majority out of a minority. Not, perhaps, what a strict democrat would regard as strictly democratic.

That majority remained dominant for decades in the north-eastern corner of the island, the region known as Northern Ireland by the (unionist) community that likes to underline its difference from the rest, but the North of Ireland by the (nationalist) community that wants to stress that it’s still part of the same country.

One person who sticks to the expression ‘North of Ireland’ is Michelle O’Neill, a leading figure in today’s Sinn Fein. And why is she so significant? Because last week she became First Minister. So Nationalist Sinn Fein now holds the top political position in the six counties that were hived off to create an anti-Nationalist majority.

Michelle O'Neill addressing the Assembly at Stormont

Another fine irony.

It reflects the fact that the Protestants’ numerical advantage has been steadily eroding. There are now more Catholics in the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland than there are Protestants. That doesn’t mean that reunification of Ireland is on the cards anytime soon. On the contrary, polls suggest that there isn’t yet a majority for it. But, surely, another significant step has been taken along that road.

And here’s another nice irony. 

Every time Michelle O’Neill drives to work at Stormont, she’ll go past that colossal statue of Carson, the stern upholder of the law who felt entirely entitled to break it when it suited him. And it suited him to break it in order to keep anyone like her well away from the kind of post she now holds.

I hope she smiles and waves to him each time.

Non-Christmas grandparenting

Christmas is about kids. That’s a commonplace. In our case, that means grandkids. 

In our home, Christmas was for Matilda and Elliott

Not that they actually came to us at Christmas. Here in Spain, there are two important days: Christmas (though Christmas Eve matters rather more than the day itself) and the feast of the kings, 12 days later on 6 January. The grandkids’ parents, Nicky and Sheena, organised things brilliantly, showing up on the 27th of December, two days after Christmas, and leaving on the 6th of January, so we avoided any of the formal Christmas festivities and instead made our own fun on the days we wanted. I took to that particularly well, since my mother, though Jewish, always insisted on celebrating Christmas, and specifically Christmas day. That was a real pain as she wanted us to join her for a restaurant lunch, which is awful in Britain on the 25th of December, with practically everything shut. Non-Christmas celebrations are easier and, by that token, far pleasanter.

Michael, Nicky’s brother and our middle son, had been with us for some days before the others showed up. He and Danielle decided that we needed a Christmas tree for when the grandkids arrived. They popped out to buy one only to discover that the shop we usually go to had sold out. So they got – I should say, Michael got us, as a Christmas present – a tropical fig tree instead. Danielle decorated it just like she would have decorated a standard tree and, I have to say, I liked it as much as any traditional Christmas tree I've seen.

The beauty is that, now that the decorations have been removed, we can continue to enjoy the tree, as an actual tree. It’s a living, breathing, photosynthesising plant. You know the saying about a dog not being just for Christmas? It turns out our Christmas tree isn’t just for Christmas.

Not just for Christmas

Anyway, the curious Christmas tree was well received by the grandkids when they arrived. Though they both informed us with unanswerable firmness, “that’s not a Christmas tree”. Still, true Christmas tree or not, the presence of true Christmas presents underneath it guaranteed it a reception as enthusiastic as we could wished. As I’ve explained, it wasn’t either of the days when kids might receive gifts in Spain, but hey, who needs to fixate on the calendar if there are presents at stake?

Presents really enhance a tree

The presence of Uncle Michael – Michael Michael as they still occasionally call him – also added to their pleasure, so the holiday got off to a fine start.

My first trip out with either of the grandkids, which was on a day when Matilda felt under the weather and so Elliott was coming with me alone, I suggested we go for a ride on the metro. Well, I didn’t use the word ‘metro’. I offered him a ‘chu-chu-bahnele’ trip, since ‘chu-chu-bahnele’, based on the word ‘Bahn’ in Danielle’s Germanic mother tongue, the dialect of Alsace, is what she’s always called trains, with our kids and even with those of other families whose company we’ve had occasion to enjoy. 

Elliott in the chu-chu-bahnele

Of course, the moment Matilda heard that her brother was going on a chu-chu-bahnele, she experienced a miraculous and total recovery from her illness. By then though it was too late. Sheena pronounced from on high, like a High Court judge passing a heavy sentence, that someone who was too ill to do anything like exercise at 9:00, couldn’t possibly have recovered by 10:00. So when Elliott and I left the house, it was with Matilda’s protestations ringing in our ears.

Elliott had found a stick which he apparently felt attached to – at least, it remained attached to his hand all the way down to our local metro station. Said station is in the woods, though, and when we got there I suggested to Elliott that it wasn’t fair to take the stick on the train – sorry, chu-chu-bahnele – and we should throw it back among the trees where a whole lot of other sticks seemed to have congregated, doubtless ready to welcome it back as a long lost friend. Elliott agreed and the solemn ceremony went well, with appropriate expressions of farewell from both of us, as we threw the stick back beyond the tracks.

We then travelled a whole four stops (the perfect length of journey: just long enough to enjoy the pleasure, short enough not to get boring). That left us with only a brief walk (mercifully brief for my shoulders) to our favourite playground. It has a pond with ducks on it as well as the usual collection of swings and slides and climbing frames. Elliott went to great lengths – well, he ran a fairly great length – trying to make friends with a bunch of ducks that had come to shore. They, sadly, responded to his overtures less enthusiastically than he’d hoped.

Unapproachable ducks

But we had plenty of fun all the same. 

The kids also enjoyed playing hide and seek with us. I have to say, though, that I’m not sure that they’re quite as effective as they might like at hiding themselves.

Grandkids hidden?

Not so much, it seems

Matilda has become an expert at what I like to think of as a bum staircase descent. She likes occasionally to sit at the top of the staircase, and then slide down, step by step, on her bum. She seems to enjoy it, which I find curious, since I’m sure it would only leave me with a sore bum.

Bum descent

We’ve become connoisseurs of the various playgrounds within a short bike ride of us, and deepened our familiarity with them on several occasions during this visit. A bike ride followed by a time on swings or slides and then a bike ride home? It seems that’s pretty much an ideal way to spend a morning.

Matilda and Elliott enjoying a visit to the village next door

Our local playground is fun too

Danielle even had the kids working. Child labour, I believe, is somewhat frowned upon these days, but she thought they’d enjoy helping to spread new gravel in the garden where some gaps had opened in the gravel previously laid.

How does that happen, by the way? I mean, it’s not as though gravel evaporates, does it? So how come, after having carefully laid gravel evenly and, if I say so myself, aesthetically, a few months before, bare earth starts to peep through in various places? 

I’d understand it if there were corresponding areas where the gravel is piled up thick. However, I’ve never found any. So the whole thing just remains a mystery.

Hard at work

Anyway, the work went well for a good twenty minutes or so. At that point, the kids joined the ranks of the campaigners against child labour and downed tools. Danielle finished the job later, after they’d gone.

In any case, Elliott still seems to be much more interested in bringing small spadefuls of gravel from the garden and scattering them on the patio instead. That provides the stimulating sensation of walking on pointy bits of stone if ever we go out there in thin-soled footwear. It even introduces an element of exciting suspense as we discover whether we’re going to slip on what is, after all, an ideal skidding surface of loose stone on solid stone.

Even though Matilda and Elliott’s family was leaving on the Day of the Kings, we did manage to get one celebration of the feast in, the day before. This one followed the French tradition, with a special cake (our local bakery, Spanish to the core, does a great ‘galette des rois’, fully up to French standards). There’s a token baked into it which makes the person who finds it king or queen for the day, and this year it was Matilda who won that enviable honour.

Queen Matilda

Then there was the occasion when Elliott came to me with a stick in his hand. I explained to him that this must be the same stick that we’d thrown back amongst its friends at the metro station. It had, no doubt, enjoyed seeing them all again but ultimately decided that it was missing the boy that had shown it so much affection before. Now it had made its way back to him.

A friend to stick by

He seemed a little sceptical but nonetheless satisfied with my explanation. He spent quite a time with the stick. It was clear to me that he was enjoying playing with it, and I saw no evidence that the stick wasn’t enjoying being played with just as much.

So, who knows? Maybe it was the same stick. And who can prove otherwise?

England's shameful conquest of itself

Nearly three decades ago, Danielle and I saw a remarkable production of Shakespeare’s Richard II. Slightly over three decades before that I saw the same play, as a special treat offered to us schoolkids, at a remarkable place: the Minack Theatre in Cornwall, which is outdoors and cut into the rock above a sea cliff. That means you get a stunning view of the sea in the background and gulls occasionally swoop over the stage, which is wonderful.

However, the special treat was neither special nor a treat to me. Because one of the things about the Minack is that we had to sit on seats cut into the granite of the hillside. I guess people who’ve been before bring cushions, but we had no such comfortable accessories. The performance, at least as I remember it, and to be fair I should underline that fourteen-year-olds aren’t the most patient of audiences for classical drama, was slow and tiresome. Well before the play had ended, my backside was telling me that it had been far too long. 

The experience left me anything but well-disposed to the play.

But then came that second and outstanding performance, at the National Theatre in London, in 1995. What made it so outstanding? 

First and foremost, it was the casting of Fiona Shaw in the part of the king. A woman playing a king? It was an inspired choice. I think one of the central concerns of the play is the contrast between the king, seen as effeminate and weak, and the character of his rival, Henry Bolingbroke, strong and manly. One of the things the great directors of Shakespeare can do, with writing of that quality, is turn some of the messages around, so The Merchant of Venice, for instance, becomes the tragedy of Shylock rather than the triumph of Portia, or The Taming of the Shrew turns from a celebration of husbandly authority to teach an uppity wife a salutary lessons, into a shocking presentation of male abuse of a woman whose only offence was to show a little spirit.

Fiona Shaw’s portrayal of Richard showed him as feminine rather than effeminate, while Henry came across as macho, not manly, as a bully, not a figure of strength.

Fiona Shaw as Richard II
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings

That was breathtaking. But it wasn’t the only aspect of the performance that has stuck with me. One of the great speeches of the play is the dying soliloquy of John of Gaunt, in which he describes England as ‘this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle’. It’s one of those Shakespeare speeches like ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet which has an audience listening to it in silent awe, and I imagine puts massive pressure on the actor to bring new life into what might otherwise come across as clichéd.

Gaunt had just got going and tomblike silence had settled on the place when, suddenly, a mobile phone started ringing somewhere in the audience.

I don’t know whether its owner has recovered from the PTSD with which the experience must have left him. All I know is that Gaunt paused while the owner scrabbled in his pockets with the eyes of the entire audience on him, tracking the phone down to silence it. And then Gaunt went on.

Now the thing about that speech is that it sounds at first as though it’s going to be a hymn to England. Indeed, if it’s ever quoted at all, it’s always just the bit about the ‘sceptred isle’ that gets trotted out. If you go on to the end, though, you find it’s quite the opposite. What Gaunt is saying is that England has been brought low, and its decline is down to corruption and pettifogging officialdom. Above all, it’s something England has done to itself. 

That England that was wont to conquer others  
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

It conquered itself. No one else is to blame. The wound was self-inflicted.

That all came to mind when I came across a recent poll that showed that a clear majority of British voters now understand that Brexit has done the UK harm.

Overall, only 22% still think that Brexit has been good for the economy, while nearly 50% think it has been damaging. Only 9% believe that it has done any good for the National Health Service while over 45% think it has been harmful, which is particularly ironic, since the snake-oil salesmen that championed Brexit, especially Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, promised that it would provide an extra £350 million a week for the NHS. Perhaps more telling still, while many voters backed Brexit not for any high-minded principle, but out of simple xenophobia and against immigration, 53% now believe that Brexit has made it more difficult rather than easier to control British borders.

Brexit, it seems, no longer has any redeeming features for most British electors. And yet who gifted that poisoned chalice to Britain? Why, voters themselves. 

Predominantly English voters.

Well, if the bard’s to be believed, that was upholding a long tradition. England imposing a shameful conquest on itself. Which leaves only one question.

If it inflicted the wound on itself, does it have the spirit, now voters have recognised the mistake, to find its own cure too?

A (rare) good news story

There isn’t so much good news around at the moment to want to pass by a piece that comes my way. And this one particularly attracted my attention because it linked to some local knowledge of mine. And, after just four years living in Spain, my local knowledge tends to be either extremely local or non-existent.

Up in the hills above and to the north of Madrid stands the village of Hoyo de Manzanares, lively, pleasant and welcoming. It’s where our grandkids, Matilda and Elliott live. Just for the avoidance of confusion, let me assure you, and this may come as a relief to you (since they're four and two and a half respectively), that their parents live there with them.

The next town eastward is Colmenar Viejo. I’ve always liked it for its name. It means ‘old beehive’. Whenever I see the name, usually on a signpost, I wonder whether honey’s better from an old hive, like wine from old vines. Alternatively, it might be a place that old bees retreat to. Or, again, it may mean that there never was a beehive there at all, rather like the community where we live, ‘Los Sauces’, the Willows, without a single willow anywhere within kilometres of the place.

The town hall and main square of Old Beehive

I most recently came across Colmenar Viejo’s name not on a signpost but in the headline of a newspaper article. The story was about a woman from the town. Her name is Eva Nogales and if you’ve never heard of her, well, neither had I.

It turns out that she’s shared this year’s Shaw Prize with a German scientist. What, you may be wondering, as I did, is the Shaw Prize? It turns out it’s an award for outstanding science set up by a businessman from Hong Kong. The prize is seen as a kind of ‘oriental Nobel prize’. Indeed, it appears that one in every seven recipients of the Shaw go on to win a Nobel too.

She won her share for the work of a team she leads in Berkeley, California, which mapped the structure, atom by atom, of proteins that play a vital role inside the human body. 

‘All life is chemistry,’ she points out, ‘ultimately, in biology, everything’s chemistry.’

She goes on to point out that everything comes down to 20 compounds called amino acids, which act like Lego pieces out of which complex proteins can form. 

‘With just twenty elements we have all the beauty of life, from a bacterium to an elephant, by way of a sea sponge.’

If you’ve read this far, you may be thinking, ‘well, OK, this is all very well and fine, but it’s not that extraordinary, is it? After all, there are winners of major scientific prizes every year, aren’t there?’

That’s true. But not that many of them are women. And even fewer are the daughters of a shepherd father and a seamstress mother, both of whom had to leave school to go to work when they were eleven or twelve. Eva Nogales grew up with parents that humble in their origins, but intensely committed to their daughter’s having the opportunity to study.

Eva Nogales, winner of an international science prize,
from Colmenar Viejo (Old Beehive)

She’s back in Colmenar Viejo at the moment. She returned to spend Christmas with her mother (her father died some years ago). While there, she met three teachers who were central in sending her towards a career in science, her teachers of biology, physics and mathematics. All three are women.

It’s a great story, isn’t it? Though the message is perhaps not quite as positive as it seems at first sight. That’s for precisely the reasons that make it so attractive.

Her recognition by the scientific establishment is lovely, but wouldn’t it be great if it were common for women? It’s wonderful to see someone from a humble background rise as far in international prominence as Eva Nogales, but whatever believers in the American Dream might suggest, that’s not common either, is it? And, though this is less important than the other two, wouldn’t many Europeans be pleased to see Europe rekindling the extraordinary dynamism in science it knew before World War 2, and offer as encouraging an environment to its top performers as Berkeley or other American universities?

Of course, if all those things were as normal as I’d like, the Eva Nogales story wouldn’t be so striking. Its very rarity makes it attractive. That rarity’s rather sad.

Still, let’s enjoy it anyway. Next time I’m in Hoyo, perhaps I can get across to Colmenar Viejo. And if I do, I’ll make a point of wandering down the street renamed ‘Avenida Evangelina Nogales de la Morena’, in honour of a local girl made good and a fine scientist.

It’s all in the timing

It must have been sixty years ago that I started to learn French. That was at a weirdly English school, even though it was in Rome. Its Englishness was above all in its spirit and in the teachers it recruited

Our teacher was English and one of the few things I remember of her teaching, was when she told us earnestly that we had to learn to distinguish between the French words ‘ay’ and ‘ay’ (that’s the same sound as the ‘ai’ in ‘pain’ and would have been deeply painful to anyone who knew more French than I did).

She meant the words ‘et’ and ‘est’ and neither is pronounced ‘ay’.

The only other thing I remember from those classes was the tale of a sign seen outside a French teashop early in the twentieth century. That was a time when the custom of tea drinking was being adopted from the Britain where, French people then and, indeed, in many cases now, see it as a long and deep-rooted tradition.

As a quick digression, that’s a misleading belief.

Back in 1652, in that strange period when England was a republic and Puritans were a lot too powerful, the first coffee shops opened. They served a drink that we would probably regard as an undrinkable sludge today. But people back then liked it, especially for the buzz it gave them. The Puritans, who abhorred alcohol though they never actually banned it, were happy to see people going for this alternative, which contained no alcohol and didn’t leave them drunk.

Coffee houses proliferated over the next few decades. They became favoured meeting places, with many developing a specific character of their own. Some focused on people in business – Lloyds of London, the insurance operation, was founded in a coffee house which gave it its name (it was Lloyds Coffee House). Others were political, with supporters of different factions gathering in different establishments. Others might cater to artists or writers or journalists, and so on.

This was before tea had become a national beverage. Though it wasn’t long before. Just eight years later, after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, who’d developed a taste for this infusion of leaves from the far east, began to drink tea in England.

The fashion spread rapidly, in the upper circles of English society, where ladies would serve each other this delicate drink when they met in the afternoon. So note two things about that: it was a drink taken at home, not in an establishment outside like a coffeehouse. That made it a drink fit for women, or at least ladies, who would not have liked visiting a coffee house, with its male-dominated, rowdy atmosphere. And it was a drink people preferred to take in the afternoon.

As the price fell, so the custom of drinking tea extended into ever broader circles of society, ceasing to be exclusive to the very wealthiest (or ‘best’ as they liked to think of themselves, and still do). Gradually England, and later Britain, became the temple to tea drinking that it’s reputed to be today. That’s even though it was a coffee-drinking nation earlier and, to this day, drinks more coffee than tea.

Now there are many times of day when a Brit might drink tea. With breakfast. During the morning. In the afternoon. With the evening meal which, by continental standards, Britain tends to take early (at around 6:00) and is often called ‘tea’. Classically, though, just as in the time of the restoration, tea is a drink for the afternoon, at about 4:00.

‘Four o’clock tea’ therefore became something of an institution.

And the sign outside the French teashop?

My class learned that it read ‘Ici on sert le four o’clock à cinq heures’ – here we serve the ‘four o’clock’ at five o’clock.

We all chortled.

I was reminded of all that when I saw an old flapping notice on a board in Valencia, where we live.

The municipal authorities had decided that there was some benefit in reproducing, in the city, the Oktoberfest made famous by the German city of Munich, in Bavaria. You’ve probably seen pictures of buxom German women in traditional dress carrying handfuls of those massive stone beer tankards the Germans call ‘Steine’ (which means ‘stones’). Clearly, Valencia had concluded that having their own Oktoberfest would be both fun and, probably, a money spinner, both of them attractive characteristics. So they’d organised one.

What I was looking at was a publicity poster for it.

Advertising Valencia’s Oktoberfest

It read:

IMPORTANT

The official Valencia OKTOBERFEST 

will start on 15 September.

An October festival in September? Yep. Just as much fun as the four o’clock served at five.

From Boston to Gaza: learning nothing from experience

It can be such a bore, studying history. And what’s the point anyway? As Henry Ford so rightly pointed out, the only lesson to learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history. 

It’s much more exciting just to go blasting ahead and learn by surprise that things work out just as badly for you as they did for the last guy to try the same trick. Not a pleasant surprise, of course. Just a surprise which you’d have been denied had you gone to the tedious lengths of trying to learn from experience.

Take British General George Gage, way back in 1768. This was when the Americans, and above all the inhabitants of Boston, were revolting. They were doing things like boycotting British goods, distributing incendiary leaflets against the enlightened rule of the British government, and generally behaving as though they were entitled to the same rights as the British born. 

But Gage had the answer. He landed 3500 troops to occupy the city. At the time, the population numbered 16,000, so that was close to one soldier for every four Bostonians. Since he knew the troubles were all down to a small band of hotheads, he knew he’d sort them out, with that level of force, in no time at all.

To his astonishment, it turned out he was mistaken. Far from a few hotheads stirring up trouble, there was no sympathy anywhere in the city for British rule, and especially none for the ‘lobsters’, British soldiers in their red uniforms. On 17 March 1776, British forces, by then increased to 11,000, had to evacuate the city. The event is still marked annually by a holiday known as ‘Evacuation Day’.

British troops evacuating Boston after failing to pacify the city

Within four months, the American colonies had declared themselves independent of Britain, and within seven years, they’d achieved that independence.

Or take the Spanish, four decades later. At the time Spain, which has had more than its share of appalling kings, had been suffering under one of its worst, Charles IV. His son Ferdinand VII would be still worse, so awful that in his carefully balanced and moderately toned book on Spanish history, Una historia de España, Arturo Pérez Reverte describes him as the greatest ‘hijo de puta’ in the country’s rich history of such ‘sons of whores’ (that’s a literal translation: I’m sure you can think of plenty of English expressions that communicate the same degree of respect and admiration).

And yet when, in neighbourly fashion, France decided to free Spain of such men, ‘inviting’ both father and son to be their ‘guests’ across the border, ultimately replacing them with Joseph, brother of the then French Emperor Napoleon, the Spanish people showed no gratitude. Quite honestly, replacing their own ‘hijos de puta’ by a foreign military occupation didn’t leave them feeling particularly liberated. On the 2nd of May 1808, there was an uprising in Madrid in which a number of French troops were killed, an event strikingly recorded by the outstanding painter Francisco Goya.

Francisco Goya’s painting of the French Mameluke soldiers
under attack by the people of Madrid on 2 May 1808

No problem, decided Murat, overall commander of the French troops in Spain. He was a highly effective general, one of Napoleon’s great cavalry commanders, and he commanded serious forces from what was then Europe’s, and probably the world’s, best-trained, best-led and most effective army. He could sort out this uppity behaviour in no time at all.

The next day, the 3rd of May, he had several hundred men rounded up around Madrid and shot. Again, Francisco Goya depicted the executions, producing what has become one of his most celebrated paintings. With hindsight, we view the rising and the shootings as the starting point of what came to be known as the Peninsular War, covering Spain and Portugal, which culminated five years later with the French armies driven back across the Pyrenees into France.

The Third of May shootings, depicted by Francisco Goya

Sadly, that left Spain saddled with its ‘hijos de puta’. But what it mostly showed, as the people of Boston had shown Gage, was that a civilian population that loathes you, is unlikely to be pacified by military force. Even if it is the best in the world.

I could go on and on. But let’s summarise.

In 1916, Britain put down the Easter uprising in Dublin, and shot a number of the ringleaders. That included one of the finest political leaders not just of the time but of all time, James Connolly, who had to be shot tied to a chair, because the wounds he’d received in the earlier fighting made it impossible for him to stand to face the firing squad. He would have died of his injuries within a day or two anyway.

And yet, within six years, 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties had broken free of British rule.

Between 1954 and 1962, France sent colossal armed force into Algeria to put down a rising for independence. I personally knew one of the soldiers who went, a civilian conscripted into the French army at a time when military service was still obligatory, and who came back so destroyed by what he’d seen – and perhaps what he’d done – that he never recovered and died, a depressive alcoholic with his liver shot to hell, in his forties. The war was marked by the widespread use of military force, backed by brutal police action, torture and executions. 

And at the end, where did that lead? Despite the murder of many leaders, the Algerian National Liberation Front ultimately achieved its aim and France was forced to leave its colony.

And what about those six counties in Ireland that didn’t go with the rest of the island when it broke free from Britain back in 1922? I remember the terrible shock of seeing news coverage on the invasion of the most fiercely nationalist area of the city of Derry, the Bogside, in 1972, on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

At the time, the most effective organisation opposed to British rule in Ireland, the Irish Republican Army or IRA, had hit bad times. It had few members or resources and was unable to do much in the way of mounting operations. But then, on Bloody Sunday, the British army decided that it could pacify the Bogside, in no time at all, by sending in crack units, paratroops. In they went and at the end of the operation, thirteen civilians had been killed.

That night, the IRA was inundated with volunteers demanding to be enlisted.

It took 25 years of the so-called ‘Troubles’ before, by political and diplomatic action rather than military force, a way out was finally found, in the Good Friday agreement that brought peace at last to the six counties. For a moment, it looked as though we had at last learned a lesson, learned that blundering into a civilian population like George Gage in Boston in 1768, was no way to solve this kind of problem. That military force couldn’t beat insurgents with popular support, but would only do shameful harm and drum up more support for the insurgents.

Which makes it all the sadder to see what’s happening in Gaza today. Because the Israeli government, entirely justified in reacting to the horrifying terrorist attack on its civilians on 7 October, entirely justified because of the sheer venomous brutality of the assault, has chosen to react not with intelligence and targeted skill, but in the most blundering, incompetent and inappropriate way imaginable. It’s sent the heaviest of forces into Gaza, the most densely populated place on Earth, no doubt expecting to wipe out Hamas in no time at all.

General George Gage in spades. 

Israeli tanks leaving a trail of death and destruction in Gaza

It’s costing thousands of Palestinian civilian lives. Now it’s even caused the deaths of three Israeli hostages, shot by the very force sent to rescue them, so blunt and misguided an instrument it’s proven to be. And, as ever, it’s undoubtedly recruiting more men into the Hamas terrorist organisation than it’s wiping out – no doubt two, three, maybe even ten new recruits for every Gazan civilian killed.

Teaching us again that harrowing lesson from history, that no one learns lessons from history.