Small reminders of lost friends

It’s curious how little things can be heavily loaded with memories.

For instance, back in 1964, my family was camping in Italy, on our way home from a holiday in what was then Yugoslavia, to our home, at that time in Rome. I’ve already described the arrival in the same campsite of an English family, travelling in a tiny Minivan, two adults, two young children and one baby, all of them hot and tired. My parents offered them a cup of tea and a friendship was born that has lasted till today.

Well, it’s lasted with Hazel, the mother of the children, and the children themselves. It would have lasted with Michael, the father of the children, but he died a few years ago. He certainly lives on in my memory, however, and in particular whenever I make ice cubes.

Michael during a beach visit with us in Italy

After that first meeting on the campsite, our new friends came to visit us in Rome. And at one point during their stay, I was putting water in an ice tray and decided, with all the superiority of an eleven-year old, to explain that I wasn’t filling it up entirely because water expands on freezing.

As I was providing that explanation, so helpful to a research scientist, I managed to spill some of the water.

“Ah,” said Michael, “and now you’re demonstrating that water always finds its own level, right?”

I still spill the water sometimes, but I always think of Michael when I do.

Alasdhair, my school contemporary

My oldest friend in my generation was Alasdhair. I met him at school when we were both thirteen. We lived together, with a bunch of other students, in a chaotic shared house at university. Later, our paths parted somewhat – having the Atlantic between us will do that to a friendship – but we never lost contact with each other until his death nearly four years ago. At a ridiculously early age.

I think of him whenever I’m washing up. There was an occasion when his mother had taken the two of us away, when we were fourteen or fifteen, for a few days, and had set us up to washing the plates and cutlery one evening. I was washing, he was drying.

“That doesn’t look quite clean,” she pointed out about one of the plates.

“No problem,” said Alasdhair, wiping it with a tea towel, “a good drier-upper will get what a good washer-upper misses.”

The memory makes me try harder to make sure things are properly clean. Or to dry what I wash, and correct any bits I missed.

Sometimes when I’m washing up, I’ll be cleaning a skillet. That reminds me of the dearest friend I’ve had without ever meeting him. His name was Bob and he lived in Kansas and we met online, through Facebook, though I can’t for the life of me remember how. For several years, we regularly exchanged messages, jokes or advice.

Bob, the best friend I never met

One of his pieces of advice, shared with Danielle who also became his friend, was on the use of a skillet. The beauty of that instrument, you see, is that because it has a metal handle it can be put in an oven, though it looks like frying pan. Danielle bought one after that discussion and has become an expert in his use, as she always does with anything to do with cooking, as with so much else.

So from time to time I find a skillet to wash up and it brings up gentle memories of a kind and excellent man. It’s a lasting regret that we were never able to act on our plans to meet, in the US or in Europe, before he too died far too young, five years ago.

It’s a pleasure that such simple acts can bring good friends to mind. They’re poignant moments, of course. But welcome too.

The history is bad enough, we don't need the monuments

Pulling down statues? Oh, it’s a controversial question in Britain today.

The Prime Minister has said that removing statues of celebrated men of the past is in effect lying about our history. But, like so much that Johnson says, that’s simply false. The history is there with or without the statues. No one is suggesting rewriting it. Statues aren’t about recording history, they're about honouring people who helped make it.

Why honour those responsible for some of its most shameful moments?

The demand to rid the country of statues to our most discreditable historical figures comes chiefly from the Black Lives Matter movement. I support their general aims, and in particular their desire to free ourselves of those blots on the urban landscape, though I would like to see it go a little further.

Edward Colston's statue drowned
Black Lives Matter protestors dump slave trader's monument

Would I have backed the tearing down and dumping in Bristol harbour, of the statue of Edward Colston? I don’t know. It might have been better to have the City Council remove it by democratic decision. But, in purely pragmatic terms, it’s probably easier for Councillors not to put it back in place, than it wold have been to take the initial decision to get rid of it.

Maybe the protestors did the Councillors a favour.

Certainly, the streets of Bristol are cleaner for not having the statue there. I remember clearly the shock I had on seeing it for the first time. I hadn’t previously known anything about him, far less that he had a public monument. Discovering that he did left me speechless. How, I thought, could we honour a man who was a major figure in the Transatlantic slave trade? He may have been a benefactor to Bristol, London and other places, but some at least of his wealth came from slavery. Doesn’t that mean that whatever worthy cause he funded, and however much he gave, what he was handling was the filthiest of dirty money?

Let’s be clear. The slave trade in which Colston prospered believed that men and women could be treated as cargo. It took 12-12.8 million free men and women, captured either in slave raids or as a result of African wars in which Europeans had no legitimate interest, and transported them across the Atlantic. Between 1.2 and 2.4 million of them died on the voyage, the conditions were so inhuman.

Once in the West Indies or Americas, they were reduced to they status of cattle. They had no protection against rape, torture or murder. A white slaveowner had the legal right to do what he liked to a slave with whom he was dissatisfied, or with whom he wanted to satisfy a desire.

The justification for slavery was that the enslaved, for the most part black Africans, were less than human. So the institution set out deliberately to dehumanise them.

How can anyone who played a leading role in this business deserve a statue, simply because he endowed some schools, hospitals and almshouses? Should Berlin erect a statue to Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, on the grounds that he put up some fancy buildings?

The Black Lives Matter movement exists precisely because whites have still not fully emancipated themselves from the attitudes that legitimised slavery. The slogan  is needed because at some fundamental level, we live in societies which don’t think black lives matter enough.

Getting rid of statues of slave traders, of those who resisted the end of slavery, or of those who felt they could treat some people as inferior to others, will contribute to emancipating us all from those shameful attitudes. So I support the movement wholeheartedly.

However, I would like to see the movement go further still, at some time, without distracting from the top priority today, bringing to an end the undervaluing of black lives. I have longed for years to see at least one additional statue removed. It shocked me the first time I saw it just as much as the Colston statue later did. And I saw it a lot, as I was a student for four years at King’s College London and the statue is in the Strand, not far from the College.

It is the statue of Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris who headed the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command during World War 2.

Bomber Harris's statue in the Strand

The principal actions of Bomber Command were mass air raids on German cities. They were sometimes masked as aimed at ‘military targets’, but it’s hard to see how carpet bombing the whole of Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden, could possibly be necessary to hit the few, if any, legitimate military targets they contained.

Dresden after the bombing
A legitimate military target? Seriously?

More honestly, if still euphemistically, the raids are sometimes defended as action to ‘break the enemy’s morale’. In other words, it was hoped they would batter the German population into withdrawing its support from Hitler. That’s military action to obtain political change. And that means action directed against a whole population, and therefore against civilians. 

There’s a name for that. We call it terrorism.

My father served in the Royal Air Force during that war. Indeed, he was a Navigator in a bomber. But he was never in Bomber Command, serving instead in 101 Squadron, which dropped supplies to resistance fighters, towed gliders or dropped paratroops.

Leonard Beeson
Bomber Navigator but never a terror bomber

He often said he was relieved that he’d never taken part in any of the raids on cities. He was forever grateful that he had, by good fortune, avoided being involved in terrorism.

So it shocks me that we still have a statue to the main architect of that terrorism in one of the great streets of the British capital.

The key issue today is to teach us all that Black Lives Matter. So let’s get rid of the statues of the slave trade traders and deniers of freedom, today.

But tomorrow? Perhaps we can move on and learn to stop honouring our terrorists either. After all, we need to remember the role these people played in history, but we don’t need to honour them with monuments.

Cummings and Johnson: how Oscar Wilde got them exactly right

It’s a harrowing balancing act that governments have to carry out in combating Coronavirus.

Let’s not forget that the economic effects of a strict lockdown are devastating and can even lead to disease and death themselves. So a government has to ask itself “how many more lives do we save from the virus by maintaining a lockdown, than we are losing to that lockdown’s impact?” If the answer is that the lockdown is saving fewer than it’s losing, then the choice is obvious: the lockdown must be raised.

But what if the numbers are close to each other? Which way should one jump? Or, to put the choice more starkly, how many lives is it reasonable to put at risk of CVid death, to avoid deaths through poverty and lack of care – or even lack of food?

This is particularly difficult given that it is often the same groups who are at jeopardy. The poorest are the most vulnerable to economic disruption, just as they are the virus itself. That makes it an extremely difficult balance to reach, a particularly delicate judgement call.

What makes the calculations even more fraught is that questionable motivations are often also at play.

In the US, for instance, Trump was anxious to avoid a lockdown and has done all he can to keep it as short and as lax as possible. Is that because he thinks the lockdown will cause more deaths than the virus? Well, with 114,000 dead and counting, that’s clearly not working out.

No. He has calculated, correctly I’m sure, that in order to stand a chance of re-election in November, he needs the economy to be booming. This strikes him as so desirable a goal that he feels that a few tens of thousands more deaths are a price worth paying. He’s trying to get the lockdown relaxed as quickly as possible to start restoring his much-damaged electoral chances.

Dominic Cummings, UK head of government (left)
with his sidekick Boris Johnson, nominally Prime Minister

In Britain, the situation is still murkier. The government there, led by its Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings but fronted by Boris Johnson, faces no election for four years. But it’s true that its marionette strings are pulled by some pretty large fortunes, and the sight of the economy crumbling with those fortunes suffering, must cause considerable pain.

As a result, it’s rushing to release people from lockdown long before it’s safe to do so, just as it got into it go far later than it should have done, and in far too relaxed a way.

Sadly, that’s where we hit the very nub of the government’s difficulties. Because its dilatoriness in getting going, and its hurry in getting out, have as expected given the UK one of the highest rates of Covid death in the world: 602 per million.

You might feel, “well, at least they saved the economy”. Except they haven’t. We read now that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of the richest nations, expects the UK to suffer the most severe impact of the pandemic on its economy.

Cummings and Johnson claim they want Britain to be world-beating. But they probably didn’t mean that it should rack up record numbers of deaths. Especially if they’re also running up the worst record of damage to the economy. That sounds like lose-lose.

Of course, the OECD might be wrong. Perhaps that’s what Cummings and Johnson are pinning their last hopes on. Because if it’s right, the outlook seems dire indeed.

Oscar Wilde defined a pessimist as “one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both”.

Oscar Wilde: as apt today as in his own time

It looks like anyone still backing the Cummings government is fully a Wildean pessimist. It has delivered both evils, in spades. And these oddly trusting people continue to choose them…

Reminders of a wedding, nearly a century on

As I keep going through old photos, in my long, slow task of getting them sorted and, eventually, digitised, I keep coming across some I’ve never seen before or, having seen them, have forgotten all about.

That was the case of some pictures of my grandparents’ wedding. That’s my maternal, Jewish grandparents.

My grandparents on their wedding day
8 September 1921

There’s the standard wedding photo, with the two of them in their finery. They’re looking a bit stern though. Might that be just the way people posed back then? Or Jews, at least, at their wedding? Or was there something to feel a little stern about?

Another photo shows the rest of my grandmother’s family (but I have no photo of his, or at least none I’ve found so far. I’ll keep looking). Shmuel, the paterfamilias, is seated. He was the shoemaker who specialised in making shoe uppers for damaged or deformed feet and could, apparently, make the right shape of upper for a foot that he'd merely felt with his hands. It was a valuable skill and it enabled him to make a home for his family in England, one in which they could live modestly but in comfort.

From left: Edie, Shmuel, Jonny, Blume

He was a smart character, who in 1902 had seen the Russo-Japanese war coming, as it did in 1905. He’d already served seven years in the Tsarist army and knew that, as with black Americans two or three generations later, Jews would be the first called up to fight and the first chosen as cannon fodder. So he left Vilnius for England.

To his far right was my great-grandmother, Bluma. Those who follow this blog may remember that she travelled to join him a year later. My grandmother remembered them standing on the dockside in St Petersburg. In Bluma’s arms was my great-uncle Jonny, who in the photo appears between his father and mother, while my grandmother, then three, was holding onto her with one hand and a potty for Jonny with the other. At far left of the photo is my great-aunt Edie, the youngest and the only one born in England.

Jonny later became a musician, composing a little and also producing arrangements of Jewish music. My last conversation with him was when he rang me at my grandmother’s to ask if I could help a young man he knew who was being charged with inciting British soldiers to mutiny. I forget what political cause he was trying to serve, but it was one I agreed with. Jonny knew I was with the radical left at that time and thought that would help, although I reckon a lawyer might have been more useful.

Emigrating saved the lives of the Sonnscheins. The relatives who stayed behind were all wiped out in the Holocaust.

As for the wedding itself, it nearly didn’t happen. I’ve already told how my grandmother had been engaged to a soldier who somehow managed to survive the First World War, only to be carried off by the flu epidemic of 1918 to 1919. That was a far worse pandemic than today’s.

My grandmother’s name was Yetta Johnson (properly Sonnschein). She may have been a founder member of the British Communist Party, or at least a member from its early days. She apparently became quite a fiery speaker on its platforms. One day, a young man – 28 or 29 – variously known as Nathan Bernstein, or Norman Bannister to anglicise both names, or Nat Bannister as I always think of him, who had recently been released from Dartmoor Prison where he had spent that last two years of the war as a Conscientious Objector, attended a meeting where Yetta was speaking.

He wasn’t inspired to join the Party though he was inspired to join her. She was less enthusiastic, and even broke off the engagement at one point, leading to one of the iconic scenes of our family history: she threw the ring on the ground in the street and Nat, rather than go after her, got down on his knees to find it.

Eventually, she let herself be persuaded to go through with the wedding, on 8 September 1921. Those were the photos I found.

The marriage lasted nearly 60 years, until his death in 1980. On the face of it, that’s a highly successful marriage. But the reality I think was less easy.

I remember him with great pleasure. An image that has stuck with me is of him running for a bus one morning, when he was already 70. He had a great shock of white hair, which I think I’ve inherited, and I remember seeing it stirred by the breeze of his run as he covered the ground like an athlete, calling to me, “you can get home alone all right, can’t you?” 

That trust in my ability to steer myself back, which was fully justified, appealed to me as much as the sight of his running.

However, I don’t think my grandfather can have been an easy man to be married to. He did well in his chosen profession of lithography, eventually becoming a salesman who could visit clients, such as London Underground, and tell them at a glance how many colours it would take to reproduce a picture as a publicity poster. So he was able to provide them with a reasonably comfortable life, but he never lost his instinct for economy. My mother remembered long arguments at home in which her mother had to plead for some small addition to the allowance he gave her for housekeeping, in weeks when she had run short.

He also had quite a temper, though when he died, my mother did admit that he may have been in some pain for the many years before, as the cancer that eventually killed him grew within his body. Still. Living with him can't have been easy.

Is the sternness in the photos perhaps a presentiment of that life to come? Certainly the bleak expression reappears in the picture of Yetta on her own in her bridal dress. Somehow, she doesn’t look over the moon, does she?

Yetta at her wedding
Somehow, not my picture of the ecstatic bride

Alongside the difficulty of life with Nat, I wonder how completely my grandmother recovered from the loss of her first fiancé. He died in 1919, I assume, and she was married in 1921, so she may have met my grandfather within a year or eighteen months of that loss. Did she settle for him on the rebound?

It’s all speculation now, of course. But I find it intriguing to think about. So it’s a pleasure to have the photos to remind me.

Governments losing against Coronavirus: it's no coincidence

“One of the things that makes novels less plausible than history, I find,” says a character in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day, “is the way they shrink from coincidence.”

We do try to reject coincidence. “This happened after that other thing happened, so it must have been that other thing that caused this one.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc, the Romans used to say, after that so because of that.

And yet there really are things that are simply coincidence, in the sense that they happen together, or after each other, purely by chance.

London had a population climbing towards seven million over the decade I was a student there (yep: I was once the proud owner of ten University of London student cards). And yet I hadn’t been there many years before I had my first experience of meeting people I knew, without arrangement, on the street. It happened to me several times over the period I lived there.

What? The chances of meeting any particular person out of 6.5m is, naturally, 6.5m to 1. And yet I several times met individuals I knew?

We are not intuitively good at handling statistical reasoning, as the psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman has pointed out. I had a wide network of acquaintance, which immediately increased the chance of meeting any one of them by chance. And it was not as though I only ever crossed the path of one other person in any one day – on the contrary, commuting from home to work or to college brought me close to hundreds or even thousands of people (hence the difficulty of maintaining social distancing today).

Take that into account, and the probability of meeting someone I knew was significantly higher than I might have imagined. Certainly, high enough for it to be perfectly reasonable that it should happen several times over a ten-year period. Particularly when you consider that most frequently the encounters were in places which act like people-funnels, such as the main railway stations.

In fact, the most surprising such event I witnessed was just last year, as I was catching up with a Turkish friend, Muharrem, who was about to enter Victoria Station ahead of me. I found him in lively conversation, in Turkish, with a woman. After she had left, Muharrem explained to me, “she’s one of the most famous novelists in Turkey, and I met her when I was working at a library where she came to give a talk”.

Despite this kind of experience, we do shrink from coincidence. Indeed, that shrinking becomes a weapon in the armoury of people trying to build certain kinds of argument. They might, for instance, say:

“My friend Sally took that medication. And exactly two years, five months and 17 days later, she had a series of terrible migraines. Coincidence? I think not.”

It’s a great debating trick, because it establishes in advance that only the most naïve and credulous people could possibly respond, “well, actually, yes, I reckon it probably is a coincidence.” As, of course, it is.

After all, Sally probably took other things than that medication before getting her migraines. If anything that happened before them could be regarded as a potential cause, might it not have been the chocolate she had the day before, or the overindulgence in wine, or the fact she drove through a polluted neighbourhood? After that so because of that isn’t an argument, it’s a sloppy and unreliable way of reasoning.

To establish that there’s more than chance at play, we have to show some causal connection between the two incidents.

To take a different example, naturally chosen entirely at random, consider lousy government. Faced with a major and fatal pandemic disease, a lousy government fails to take it seriously. It may attempt to put in place measures to protect its healthcare workers, and even promise to do so, and then take far too long and under-deliver. It may, rightly, identify track-and-trace as the best way to combat the virus, promise to put a system in place and then fail to meet its own deadline.

Or lousy government might just be far too glib in attitude. It may be scornful about simple and effective measures like wearing masks. It may pay lip service to other measures, such as social distancing or quarantining, while flouting them itself and turning a blind eye to infringements by friends or supporters. It may be halfhearted about its lockdown measures and end them too soon.

Now which governments around the world have been most guilty of some or all of these kinds of behaviour?

Why, the governments Trump’s United States, Johnson’s UK and Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Which makes it fascinating to look at the latest figures published by Worldometers. Imagine which are the governments with the highest numbers of deaths due to Coronavirus:

The three nations with the worst Coronavirus death totals
Note that Johnson's UK has the worst death rate per million

A coincidence? I think not.

Coronavirus lockdown release: phase 2 cotinued

We continue our slow climb out of lockdown here in Spain. It’s a relief, but tinged with anxiety, since there are signs of an increase in infections, and in daily deaths, as the restrictions are lifted.

The other uptick is in Opposition attacks on Government over its handling of the infection in the early stages. The Opposition claims that the government knew a lot earlier about the seriousness of the crisis than it has admitted, making its failure to take action sooner intolerable to the Conservatives.

Personally, I like the administration led by Pedro Sánchez and his Socialist Party. Its handling of the crisis since that early stage has been outstanding. However, I suppose as a supporter of democratic process, I can hardly object to an Opposition holding Government to account for its earlier errors, however much I may prefer the latter to the former.

Otherwise, how could I possibly demand that the Labour Opposition in Britain hold the Cummings government, and its figurehead leader Johnson, to account there? That’s a demand that needs to be made all the more strongly, now that Britain has officially racked up a performance worse than Spain’s, in deaths per million, despite having had the examples of both Italy and Spain to learn from.

At least in Spain we’re continuing to emerge from lockdown. Now, it may not last if infections keep climbing. So we’re taking advantage of freedom today, for fear that it might be curtailed by a new lockdown tomorrow. That means doing as much as possible, as soon as possible.

Museo de las Bellas Artes, Valencia

For instance, after having our first haircuts in three months, we headed for the Valencia Museum of Fine Arts, now visitable again. That’s an opportunity that hadn’t been taken up by many, so we met only one other visitor during our time there.

I’ve been there a couple of times before. However, I realised on this visit that I’d seen only a small fraction of the collection. That’s because previously I started, as one might expect, on the ground floor, which is just room after room of religious art from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Obviously, many people whose opinions I respect love this stuff. I’m afraid I quickly find I’ve had a surfeit of nativities, even more quickly of Mary weeping over Christ’s body, most quickly of all over martyrdoms, flagellations of Christ and crucifixions. In fact, three or four pin-cushion Saint Sebastians are usually about as many as I can stand before I head for the exit.

Why on Earth, in a religion like Christianity, focused as it’s supposed to be on loving one’s neighbour and turning the other cheek, are so many of its followers quite so obsessed with suffering, torture and death?

Still, there were a couple of paintings in this part of the Museum that I enjoyed.

Saint Sebastian cared for by Saint Irene
by Vrancke van der Stockt

I liked a Saint Sebastian who, far from being a pin cushion, seemed to be dying – or, more likely, already dead, given the shock and grief of Saint Irene who was looking after him – from a single arrow wound. A tribute, I felt, to the lethal power of even one arrow. No tribute at all, though, to the shooting accuracy of the Roman legion, a whole execution squad of which had been assigned to dealing with him. Did the rest all miss, then?

Adam and Eve by Matthias Stom

The other one I liked was of a strangely stylised – almost surreal – painting of Adam and Eve holding a fruit, oddly elongated upwards. I wondered whether the artist was perhaps a member of a strange heretical sect of which I hadn’t previously heard, which believed that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree from which they weren’t supposed to eat, was a pear and not an apple?

Was it a pear they tasted?

Look at it. It’s obviously a pear.

Incidentally, while on the subject I can’t resist passing on this thought from the outstanding eighteenth century thinker, Denis Diderot, who commented that the Christian God is a father who attaches great importance to his apples, and very little to his children.

But back to the Museum of Fine Arts. For the first time in three visits, rather than giving up and leaving after having a glut of the religious paintings, I let myself be persuaded by Danielle to take a look at the other floors. And what a joy that was. On the upper floors, I discovered the collections of more recent paintings, that were far more to my taste.

Perhaps the most famous painter from Valencia is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station in the city is even called after him. And the Museum has some excellent examples of his work. One, I thought at first glance was of a cricketer, given his all-white clothes.

Sorolla's painting of a cricketer?
Not, the son of a friend

But cricket has never really caught on in Spain, and this turns out to be a rather eye-catching portrait of José Luis Benlliure López de Arana, son of Sorolla’s friend, the sculptor Mariano Benlliure.

The Fly
A charming surprise to discover it

Even more striking was a painting by a contemporary of Sorolla’s, Cecilio Plá. It’s called The Fly and includes a smile that charms by its cheekiness, within a pose that mystifies by the way it reveals all the more by being partially hidden.

So, all in all, it was a rewarding visit. What can I saw about Phase 2 of our lockdown release? Just ‘so far, so good’.

Of course, that’s what the man said as he passed the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building, having fallen from the top. Let’s hope we’re heading towards a better fate than awaited him.

Release for some, jeopardy for others

We’re emerging here in Valencia. Slowly. With a little optimism.

We’ve moved into phase 2 of the Lockdown relaxation process. With some justification. According to the Health Ministry, Spain has just had two days without a single Coronavirus death anywhere. Friends of ours from a few doors down the street tell us that their daughter, a nurse in the major local hospital, is being redeployed to Oncology after a couple of months in intensive care. The ICU beds are empty at the moment.

The only jarring note is that the Ministry has also warned that there are signs of an increase in infections as the restrictions relax. We’re clearly not quite out of the woods yet. It’s going to be face masks and social distancing for a while yet. Maybe even rubber gloves.

Still, we needed to celebrate our entry into phase 2. And what better way to do it than to go back to the sea? Especially if we took advantage of the new regulations to go there with friends. So we drove to a lovely spot south of Valencia, El Saler, with Maria José and Santi, our near-neighbours and the parents of the no-longer-ICU nurse I mentioned before.

The beach at El Saler

The day started relatively grey, but that meant the temperature was ideal for walking, warm enough for tee shirts, cool enough to be comfortable. We started in an almost jungle-like nature reserve before heading for the beach where we could walk with our feet in the surf.

The Nature Reserve at El Saler

A forest dweller we met

The company was great, the place was glorious, and as we walked, so the clouds cleared and we finished the outing, back in the woods, with bright sunlight filtering through the tree cover.

Danielle and Maria José wandering into the sunlight

It was a fine way of celebrating our emergence into a freer life. And it lifted my mood which had been rather depressed by a Tweet I saw in the morning from Trisha Greenhalgh: “I’ve never been so scared. There. Is. No. Plan.”

When I first heard Trish Greenhalgh, she was giving a conference presentation of remarkable brilliance. So brilliant that I wrote a post about it at the time. She is one of the leading Public Health specialists in England and one of the most convincing experts on evidence-based medicine I’ve ever heard.

If she is worried about the government simply having no plan, it seems to me a lot of other people should be too.

There’s much to criticise the government for in Spain. It was painfully slow in recognising the seriousness of the crisis about to hit the country. As a result it did far too little to prepare for it and reacted far later than it should have. But when it awoke to what it had to do, it acted fast, decisively and effectively. The results are obvious, as we've been slowly emerging from lockdown for a month now, and have had two days without a death.

It won’t necessarily benefit the government. Its vote seems to be more or less holding up, but it certainly isn’t improving, and the Conservative opposition is progressing. Given how well the government’s performed, that hardly seems just, but politics is an unkind game.

Meanwhile, Britain has a government which, as Greenhalgh puts it, simply has. no. plan. It never has had a strategy, but has stumbled from crisis to crisis since the pandemic hit, making up policy on the hoof, inventing commitments out of thin air and then failing to honour them.

Now it’s relaxing a lockdown that was never as strict as Spain’s, and doing so far too early. Spain, with its slow start, long had a far worse record in deaths per million than the UK, but the gap is now so small that it looks as though Britain will move beyond Spain in a matter of days.

The hasty relaxation is happening only in England, I should say. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with better governments, are being more prudent. The fear, and it’s certainly Greenhalgh’s, is that the Cummings/Johnson English administration is opening the UK up to a second wave of infection. The population certainly doesn’t deserve that fate, but I fear that can only be fixed when it chooses itself a better government.

Meanwhile, over here we’re slowly moving towards a new normal. There’s no reason for complacency, so it involves a lot of use of face masks, of hand gel, even of gloves. But we can go out more, we can meet friends, we can even get our hair cut or go to the dentist.

The dentist, in fact, was the downside of our first day in Phase 2. After the visit to El Saler, I had to head into town – my first metro trip since March, with gloves and mask and an empty seat next to each seated passenger – to visit the dentist. Who proceeded to beat the daylights out of my jaw, far longer in my view than strictly necessary, since it never offered him the slightest resistance.

Still, it was a small price to pay for another step out of lockdown. I just hope it doesn’t lead to a surge of disease. As I hope there’s no new peak in England either. 

Let’s hope Greenhalgh’s fears prove unfounded.

Danielle and Maria José collecting seashells