Trump, Twitter and Freedom of Speech

Poor old Trump! So many of his former collaborators and enablers are deserting him, now that he’s only days away from losing power. As someone I follow on Twitter so aptly put it, the shits are deserting the drowning rat. What hurts him most, is that he can’t sound off about it on his favourite communication medium, Twitter.

Trump: his megaphone has gone

Some have reacted to his ban from Twitter as an assault on free speech. People talk a lot about freedom of speech (well, I suppose talking is what it’s about). Often, they seem to suggest that freedom of speech is, or should be, unlimited.

To be fair, they have good authority for that belief. Trump’s American. Here’s what the first amendment to the US Constitution says on the subject:

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…

That seems absolutely clear and unqualified. There can be no legal measure that abridges freedom of speech.

And yet, and yet… The United States inherited English Common Law against defamation. So libel and slander are illegal in the US just as they are in Britain. It’s true that American law makes it a lot less easy to win a libel case than British law does (which is why many plaintiffs prefer to sue in Britain rather than the US). In particular, truth is an absolute defence in the US – a true statement cannot be defamatory. With “public figures”, the plaintiff also has to prove “actual malice” by the defendant to win a case. 

Even so, harder though a libel case is to win across the Atlantic, libel laws exist and therefore in a real sense they ‘abridge’ the freedom of speech.

What’s more, if two or more people agree to commit a crime, or to adopt illegal means to achieve even a legal end, they are guilty of conspiracy. They may not have committed the actual crime planned. The mere fact of having planned to do it is in itself a crime.

Like it or not, that constitutes another abridgement to freedom of speech.

Finally, the US Supreme Court has determined that incitement to actions in the far future is not a crime, but incitement to illegal acts to take place imminently is. In particular, incitement to riot is criminal. This means that incitement is only free speech protected by the First Amendment if the action being incited isn’t imminent. Otherwise, there is no such protection.

Again, this is a clear abridgement of freedom of speech. That’s particularly explicit in this case, because the Supreme Court’s decision constitutes a stated limitation to the protection offered by the First Amendment.

There’s nothing in the least bit surprising or unusual about these limitations. No democracy allows defamation, conspiracy or incitement. I can’t see any reason why they should. I rather suspect that even the people who were upset about Trump’s freedom of speech would oppose lifting all bans on defamation, conspiracy, incitement or other abuses of free speech.

It seems that in the United States, as in any democracy, freedom of speech is by no means unlimited. On the contrary, it’s heavily qualified by laws that limit its abuse. And one of the things it most strictly limits is incitement.

There is no right to incite.

Before the mob attacked the Capitol in Washington DC, Trump told it:

Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. …

… You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

It’s for judges to determine whether these words meet the legal test for the crime of incitement. They may well still get that chance, if Trump is prosecuted once he loses his presidential immunity. But to me, in a purely lay sense, they sound exactly like a textbook case of incitement.

I repeat. There’s no right to incite. In other words, Trump isn’t merely exercising freedom of speech, he’s abusing it.

Twitter, in the absence of a court decision, felt it had to take the decision to prevent such abuse continuing. It decided it couldn’t and that meant banning Trump.

In one sense, Twitter had every right to take that decision. It’s a private-sector company. Like any other private organisation of its kind, it has the right to set its rules and exclude anyone who breaks them. Specifically, it isn’t under any obligation to protect freedom of speech generally. Think of a newspaper like the Daily Mail or the Guardian in Britain. They’re under no obligation to give everyone who wants it space in their pages to peddle their views. Nor is Twitter.

That, however, leads to a different issue. Is Twitter – or Facebook or any other social media platform – like a newspaper or not? Because a newspaper can be sued, for instance, for libel. But who gets sued if a tweet is defamatory? Is it Twitter or is it the author of the tweet?

That’s a much bigger question, and one that governments need to start to  address. How do we control abuse of free speech on those platforms? Can they be treated as publishing companies with responsibility for their content? Or are they merely platforms, no more responsible for the content they distribute than the printing press is for the content of the newspaper produce on them? 

It’s likely we need to get to a position which is somewhere between the two. That’s immensely difficult to define, but it needs to be if we are to protect freedom of speech while controlling its abuse. 

As far as Trump is concerned, on the other hand, the abuse is clear. And that means that the Twitter ban is entirely appropriate.

Heroism in the time of Trump

There are words so heavily overused that they lose any real meaning.

What does ‘literally’ mean any more? “I literally phoned twenty times yesterday”. There’s a glorious irony in that kind of statement, because almost certainly the speaker didn’t really make twenty phone calls. It just felt that way. In other words, the statement is about an impression, not an accurate count, so exactly the opposite of literal.

Something similar has happened to the word ‘hero’. 

Today we use the word for the player who scores the winning goal in a tight-fought football match. Or for more or less anyone in one of the emergency services who does the job well. Even for the targets of a terrorist attack, as though being needlessly killed turns a victim into a hero. 

These are admirable, or in the case of the victim of terrorism, vile incidents. But heroism, in my view, is something much more specific. 

It used to apply to someone who took on an overwhelmingly dangerous challenge. In many cases, the hero knows the challenge is too great, but rises to it anyway. If it’s the right thing to do, heroes do it, even if it's likely to destroy them.

That’s what happened to the 300 Spartans who gave their lives to hold the pass at Thermopylae, just long enough to allow the Athenians to prepare a defence against the invading Persians. 

Even more heroic are those who take on terrible odds alone. Edith Cavell was a British nurse working in Belgium when World War One broke out. She made it clear that she would nurse anyone who needed her help, from either side of the fighting. “I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved,” she declared. 

Even more striking at a time when patriotism is constantly celebrated as uniformly good, are Cavell’s words on the plinth of her statue near Trafalgar Square in London: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone”.

The Cavell statue in London
Patriotism is not enough

However, because she didn’t limit herself to nursing, but helped some 200 Allied soldiers escape Belgium, she was executed by the German occupation authorities.

Another figure that I’ve always found attractive is that of Bill Millin. He was the lone piper on Sword beach in Normandy, during the D-day landings in June 1944. His commanding officer, Lord Lovat, ordered him to play the pipes. According to Millin, he warned Lovat that War Office regulations prohibited playing the pipes in combat. 

“Ah, but that’s the English War Office,” Lovat replied. “You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.”

He stood and played his bagpipes to the men, on a beach that was being raked by enemy fire. He emerged unscathed. When he later spoke to some German prisoners, they explained that they hadn’t fired at him because they thought he was crazy.

Bill Millin’s unit landing at Sword Beach
Lord Lovat is to the right of the column, in the water
Millin is on the right of the landing craft, waiting to disembark
- with his pipes

That craziness is another important element in heroism. Not because the hero is crazy but because, to most of us, it seems crazy to face such danger.

All of those aspects of heroism make the latest instance impressive.  

This was the case of Eugene Goodman, the lone Capitol policeman who faced the mob that broke into the building on 6 January . He knew there was no way he could stop that number. But he also knew that he could lure them away from the targets of their violent fury.

So he used himself as bait. He pushed the figure in the lead of the crowd, Doug Jensen, now arrested and facing five criminal charges. He threatened him and others with his truncheon. Then he turned and ran upstairs, drawing the baying crowd after him and away from the Senate chamber, where a number of elected officials and staff were sheltering. Again and again he did it, though he must have known that at any time a mob in a mood that ugly could overpower him and injure him horribly or kill him – as happened to his colleague Brian Sicknick.

Eugene Goodman confronts Doug Jensen
with the 6 January mob behind him

There have been calls for him to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor or the Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor, and I hope it happens. What he showed was real valour. Indeed, true heroism.

A great story. On the other hand, the best hero stories have two figures. The other one is the villain, out to destroy the hero, like Sauron out to get Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.

In this case, the mob were just like Tolkien’s orcs, merely the evil armies of the Dark Lord Sauron. He, The Lord of the Rings tells us, was “the Power that drove them on and filled them with hate and fury”. 

Not, of course, that Donald Trump is Sauron. Even though he's just as unappealing, he’s also a lot more ridiculous. Look at how, the moment he realised the coup attempt had failed, he tried to distance himself from it by condemning the violence. Can you imagine Sauron being such a loser in his evil?

That only makes it all the more wonderful that there are heroes like Eugene Goodman prepared to stand and face such forces of darkness and cry, metaphorically if not literally, “you shall not pass”. 

A tale of an orange woman

It’s good to be living in the land of the orange. 

Ready for picking, a tradition in Valencia

That’s orange, with a small ‘o’, not ‘Orange’ with a big one, as in William of Orange. There were about six of those Williams of Orange, just to avoid any confusion. And, for further clarity, their title, ‘Orange’, came from a little town in France that still has that name, though they were Dutchmen. Naturally. What did you expect? Logic and rationality in the ways of men?

Of course, if you’re English like me, the William of Orange that matters to you is the third of that name who, by pure coincidence, was also the third William to mount the English throne (and, in passing, the Scottish one, which was still technically separate back then) when he grabbed power. And the grab involved military force. So if he’s the important William of Orange for the English, he’s even more important for the Irish, because most of the fighting took place there and, like most fighting in Ireland, it was pretty deadly.

William was Protestant and in that bloodthirsty conflict, he led the Protestant side. Which is why a lot of Irish Protestants, especially in those six Ulster counties that remain part of the United Kingdom (for now: Brexit may change that before long), are called Orangemen.

What about an Orange woman, though? I suppose that could be a female Orangeman. Alternatively, she could be the famous – or possibly infamous – mistress of King Charles II, the “orange girl” Nell Gwynn. Such orange girls sold the fruit, among others, to theatre goers, and also assisted them, for a small fee, in getting messages to the actors or actresses backstage, not always for the kind of purposes on which the Church tends to smile.

Nell Gwynn
Not our orange woman

None of the above is in the least bit relevant to what this post is about. Except perhaps the words ‘orange’ and ‘woman’.

The woman in question was a member of the Nordic Walking group we’ve joined in Valencia. Her name is one of those wonderfully uplifting and religiously significant ones that the Spanish like to go in for: Ascensión. I presume that’s about the ascension to heaven of some divine person or another, probably the virgin Mary, since it’s a female name.

Ascensión in one of her fields outside Valencia, 
on the horizon behind her

When we gave her a lift the other day, I wondered whether that turned our car into an ‘ascensor’ – as something that was carrying Ascensión – which, in a slightly curious way, is the Spanish word for the other kind of lift. I thought that was an amusing play on words, but I wasn’t sure it would work for anyone I shared it with. I mean, it would mean little even to fellow English speakers from across the Atlantic, for whom the first kind of lift is generally a ride, and the second kind an elevator.

As for trying it in Spanish, my experience with puns in that language hasn’t been encouraging. Some who have got used to me now give me a kind of weary, knowing smile, as if to say, “yes, I that’s a pun you’ve come up with and because I’m friendly, I’m acknowledging the fact, but don’t expect an uproarious response, like actual laughter”. Most Spaniards, though, just look at me blankly and change the subject.

It seems that Spaniards don’t appreciate my punning wit quite as much as my English-speaking friends. Among them, of course, it’s a much sought-after and warmly admired aspect of my character. Right? 

Right?

The reason we gave Ascensión a lift is that she invited us out to her alquería. Now, that’s a word I like. That initial ‘al’ tells you it’s Arabic, dating from the time when most of Spain was under Moorish rule, and indeed it’s from the word in that language for a farmstead – which is what it means in Spanish too.

So now at last we’ve reached the word ‘orange’ to go along with the ‘woman’, who was Ascensión. Because her alquería is set in orange groves, and she grows and sells the fruit as a small addition to her income. The income’s small because the sector’s taken a terrible competitive blow from North Africa, just across the water, with its cheaper products.

But Valencia, as well as being a region of rice, of wine and (at one time) of silk, is an orange-growing area of long tradition. The oranges are excellent. So being invited to Ascensión’s place to collect as many as we wanted to pick, was a dream come true. We filled a crate, and as a result we now have excellent fresh orange juice, or simply fresh oranges to eat, pretty much every day. With the promise that, once the crate is empty, we can fill it again.

The crate of oranges we picked at Ascensión's alquería

Nothing to do with William. Nothing to do with Protestant Ulstermen. Nothing to do with Nell Gwynn. 

Our orange woman is Ascensión, and it’s a privilege to have met her.

Filomena's snow

Our son in Scotland once introduced us to a remarkable woman called Filomena, who had a campsite near Loch Tay, where we once enjoyed a stay. Obviously, camping in Scotland’s a bit of a special taste, since it’s either bitterly cold or it’s reasonably warm and crawling with midges. I’m sure there are days between the seasons, in spring or autumn, when it’s lovely though the midges haven’t cottoned on yet, but I’ve never had the good fortune to pick those days for a camping trip.

At Filomena’s, it was cold. She made up for it, though, with warmth of heart and wildness of character, a kind of hangover from the hippies of the sixties. 

Valencia snow scene: young almond trees coping with the cold

I thought of her again this week in Spain, when storm Filomena hit the peninsula. As wild as the child of the sixties, and even colder than a tent in the Highlands, it brought Spain the biggest snowfall it’s seen in a century, and the lowest temperature ever recorded in the country – 35.8 degrees Celsius below zero some 400 km north of Madrid. 

At one time we lived in Alsace, in Eastern France, where heavy snow is a routine happening in winter. In such places, procedures and equipment are in place to deal with snowstorms when they happen. I remember hearing the snow ploughs heading out at 3:00 am in Alsace, with the result that the main roads at least were clear by the time the morning rush started.

Now, places like Spain, or indeed England where we lived before coming here, don’t have either the resources or the processes in place to react that fast or that efficiently. Snow just snarls the country up. I remember, at every snowfall in England, there’d be tales of drivers stuck in their cars overnight on the motorways. There’d be lots of pride about the spirit of the Blitz, with people helping each other out and keeping their morale up in atrocious conditions. That amused me, since all I could think was, “why don’t you just buy some snowploughs and train some guys to use them, for overtime payments, when these things happen? Britain is the sixth biggest economy in the world, after all.”

The inclement weather is, apparently, all part of global warming. I know the deniers will say “warming? You call this warming?” But I love the fact that warming can lead to great drops in temperature too. If nothing else, it shows the nature of an average – the average can go up even if an individual value goes catastrophically down. 

It also illustrates another favourite theme of mine, the paradoxical nature of things. I loved the idea (though I loathed the phenomenon whenever I got caught up in it) that the orbital motorway around London, the M25, built to reduce traffic congestion, just added to it. The new motorway won itself the enviable title of “longest car park in the world”.

Similarly, I’m just tickled pink by the idea that Donald Trump is so shameful because he’s entirely shameless.

So extreme cold due to global warming? Strikes me as wholly in line with the nature of things.

It’s certainly true that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Down here in the coastal plain near Valencia, we just got rain. Lots of it. The poor dogs probably didn’t enjoy the route marches I took them on through the woods quite as much as I claimed they did when Danielle called me mad for forcing them to follow me. But we saw no snow. 

Javi, with his trademark smile: organiser of great outings

So today we went up into the hills to find it ourselves. We went with our excellent friend Javi (pronounced roughly Habi) who leads our Nordic Walking group. This time we took the Nordic Walking sticks, as ever, but added snow shoes (or rackets as they’re called here, convincing me that snow walking’s a racket).

The thing about Javi is that he must be working with several hundred people in various types of sport. Whenever we go on walks with him, we find ourselves in a group of around 20 people, at least 18 of whom we’ve never met before. Since they’re almost without exception generous, amusing and fun to know, it makes taking part in the outings he organises as pleasurable for the social interactions as they’re healthy for the exercise.

He wins every point, the Latin poet Horace declared, who combines the agreeable with the useful. Javi did just fine on that measure. On a wonderful day of snow in a part of the world which doesn’t see that much of the stuff.

The group. 
That's me on the left. Lying down because I'm so laid back?
Oh, no. I fell over trying to put my mask on.
The woman crouching next to me? I brought her down with me

Why we thank Mr Trump

On 4 January, I tweeted that 2021 was going to be the year when we said goodbye to Trump. A reply quickly came back:

Trump is not gone. #6/1/21

Tweets I received about the Trumper movement

At the time, I thought that the date was relatively innocuous – just a reference to the final stage of the electoral process, certification of the results by Congress, and the vain hope that there might still be an outcome favourable to Trump. 

My response was to agree he hadn’t gone yet, but his increasing desperation showed that he wouldn’t last beyond 20 January. Back came another Tweet:

Are you actually following the election fraud and imminent US civil war?

In my response, I pretended to misunderstand the reference to ‘fraud’ and said that I didn’t think Trump would get away with his fraud. As for the alleged imminent civil war, my view was that the Trump supporters would not in the event have the stomach for a war, and if a number found the spirit for it, they’d be overrun quickly.

Well, I’ve been forced back to those tweets following what actually happened on 6 January. Now I understand that the reference to ‘imminent US civil war’ and to the date of 6 January was no coincidence. What we saw on that night, when rioters invaded the DC Capitol building, was the start of predicted civil war, with the aim of achieving the forlorn hope behind the statement “Trump is not gone”. 

My view that it was forlorn, incidentally, hasn’t changed. It isn’t going to happen. As I think I was right to say that the resistance against Biden’s victory would be seen off quickly. 

Indeed, that happened immediately after the invasion of Congress. Just as soon as the Capitol was clear, the certification process started up again and continued through most of the night, ultimately reaching the only outcome that was right and legitimate: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been validly elected President and Vice President respectively. 

The rioters had gone. Far too few of them have been arrested yet, but at any rate, if that was the start of a Civil War, it has captured no territory, and its only achievement has been to delay a process which took place anyway, with an outcome that was always inevitable.

In other words, instead of being a dramatic, gigantic, even monstrous undertaking, this incipient civil war has turned out to be ugly, damaging and ultimately ineffectual. Which is a perfect expression of everything about the Trump presidency. He has hurt many people directly, for instance by unleashing violence against them, and he has hurt far more indirectly, for instance the 360,000 deaths flowing from his failure to take proper action over Covid. He has toyed with war with Iran, and appeasement of North Korea. He has fanned racism and xenophobia. 

On the other hand, he’s achieved next to nothing. Sometimes, that’s a good thing. For instance, that promised wall with Mexico would have been an obscenity, but he didn’t have the guts or the ability to deliver it.

So why have I referred to thanking Trump in the title of this post?

Because it is one of the most striking effects of his incompetence that he again and again plays into the hands of his enemies. For instance, the other important event that took place on 6 January was the confirmation of two Democratic senatorial wins in Georgia. 

Although Joe Biden won the Presidential election on 3 November, the Democrats did far less well in other races. They lost seats in the House of Representatives. The failed to take the Senate.

That last failure was going to mean that Biden might find his legislative programme – perhaps even his Cabinet appointments – blocked. But with the two wins in Georgia, Democrats do, after all, have the slimmest margin of control in the Senate. The two sides are exactly equal, with fifty seats each, but the new Vice President, Kamala Harris, has a casting vote, giving the Democrats control after all.

That failure of Trump’s was, of course, a huge success for the Democrats. For that, a huge amount of credit goes to the candidates, to the celebrity figures that campaigned for them, and for the huge numbers of unnamed party canvassers who worked for the win. Special credit goes to Stacey Abrams, who has been doing outstanding work for years to get voters, and above all black voters, registered. 

But then there’s a particular contribution made to the Democratic success that absolutely has to be acknowledged. I don’t think the victory could have been assured without Donald Trump’s input. His constant whingeing about the outcome of an election he thinks was stolen, and the vast majority knows was legitimate, has put off just enough Republicans – either persuading them to stay at home, or even to vote for the Democrats – to make the two victories possible.

Trump as the Democrats’ friend? Not a title he would want. But then he didn’t want to be a loser either.

The mobster's mob attacking the Capitol building in DC

And things have only got worse since. The assault on Congress will have an even bigger effect nationally than the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign produced in Georgia. That’s because the crowd that invaded the Capitol did so on Trump’s incitement. 

He’s been a mobster for a long time. He’s now built himself a mob.

Nothing will switch the allegiance of the hard core of diehard Trump supporters. But ordinary mainstream Republicans, who backed Trump only because he was the party’s candidate, must be at the very least wondering how they can continue.

So, thank you Mr Trump. It was about time that the Democratic Party received some additional help. So good of you to provide it.

And to the author of the ‘imminent civil war’ tweet, I see what you meant now.  I’m just delighted that things have worked out no better than I warned you. 

It’s not going to get any better for you. 

Trump phone call: what it taught us, what it didn't

It was a glorious phone call. Donald Trump spent an hour talking to – well, mostly at – Brad Raffensberger, Secretary of State in Georgia. It was one of the most revealing incidents in Trump’s rather unusual, not to say weird, career. It was him through and through. It was him in spades.

Donald Trump and Brad Raffensberger

So what exactly did it reveal about him?

In the first place, it was clear he had no intention of listening to anyone else, as he talked over them whenever he felt like it. Convinced as he is that his view is the correct view, he sees no point in letting anyone else talk, since they would take a position different from his and that, by definition, at least in his mind, means they are wrong. 

“We believe our numbers are right,” Raffensberger told him.

“But your numbers aren't right. They're really wrong and they're really wrong, Brad,” Trump replied after a long ramble, offering no evidence to back up his assertion (Raffensberger’s claims have been confirmed by audits and stood up in court).

In the second place, let’s just look at the rambling itself. Trump has little command of language, and he uses words not to elucidate but to browbeat and bully. Here he is giving Raffensberger some information I’m not sure he needed to know (bear in mind that he’s from the State of Georgia, which was about to hold two Senatorial run-off elections, and he’s the Secretary of State):

… I think we should come to a resolution of this before the election. Otherwise you're going to have people just not voting. They don't want to vote. They hate the state, they hate the governor and they hate the secretary of state. I will tell you that right now. The only people like you are people that will never vote for you. You know that Brad, right? They like you know, they like you. They can't believe what they found. They want people like you. 

Then there’s the constant resort to projection, as I’ve pointed out before. This is where Trump accuses others of faults he embodies himself. For instance, when he told Raffensberger “I just want to find 11,780 votes” he was trying to steal an election, an attempt he’s been running under the slogan “stop the steal”. There’s something wonderfully barefaced about accusing opponents of stealing an election you’re trying to steal yourself. 

Then there was this outburst:

There's only two answers, dishonesty or incompetence. There's just no way. Look. There's no way. 

Dishonesty or incompetence? Let’s look at Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic. All those stories about its being little worse than the flu, or of disappearing soon. Either he knew that was nonsense, in which case he was dishonest, or he believed it despite its being obviously inane, in which case he was incompetent.

Or perhaps not simply incompetent but also deluded. Look at this sentiment, repeated by Trump several times, in different words:

I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There's no way I lost Georgia. There's no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes… But I won that state by hundreds of thousands of votes.

Does he really believe this to be true? Does he really believe that he has won the election not just in Georgia, but nationally too? Does he really believe that he is going to start a second term on 20 January?

That may seem unlikely, if there’s any truth in the rumours that Trump is planning to travel to Scotland to play golf on that day. Perhaps I should say “was planning”. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, has now locked down the country and banned travel except for essential purposes. As she pointed out, “coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose”. 

It’s hard to attend your own inauguration if you’re out of the country. So if he really was planning to travel outside the US, that’s as close an admission of his defeat as we’ve had from him. In turn, that makes all his talk about having won a straight lie, so he would be deeply dishonest.

On the other hand, listening to the recording of the telephone call, it does sound as though he genuinely believes in his victory, certainly in Georgia, and probably for the country as a whole. If that’s the case, then he’s deeply deluded.

Dishonest or deluded, then. As he might say himself “there’s only two answers”. Although nothing stops him being both dishonest and deluded. 

Whatever the answer, though, whether he’s dishonest, deluded or both, he’s certainly unfit to hold his office. As rather over 81 million voters in the US have decided. Well, 81 million applying any reputable way of counting them, though not Trump’s way.

That’s the main point about the phone call. It taught us what we already knew: 

• Trump is unfit for office – we knew that. 
• He can’t listen – we knew that.
• He’s incoherent and uses language to bully and browbeat – we knew that.
• He projects his own faults on others – we knew that.
• He’s trying to steal an election he lost – we knew that too.

In other words, the recording of the phone call taught us nothing we didn’t already know. But, boy, did it confirm a lot. Maybe, just maybe, that might at last shake the convictions of the diehard among Trump’s supporters.

Old age and a New Age

The thing about our coffee machine is that, once you’ve finished making a batch, you run it with the coffee holder empty, to flush out any loose grounds that may have got stuck in it. I know that and do it a lot. So it was irritating when, the other day, having made coffees for Danielle and me, I started doing the rinsing operation, only to realise that I’d unthinkingly ground more coffee into the coffee holder.

Fill only for another coffee. Leave empty for rinsing

So what had happened? A brainstorm? A senior moment? 

I had a feeling that such things might not be related to my age. Indeed, didn’t they happen to me when I was much younger? Trouble is, I can’t remember. So is that itself a sign of age?

As well as these terrible questions, full of existential angst, imagine the quandary that faced me. Was I going to throw out the new grounds and waste good coffee – oh, sacrilege – or did I have a third cup instead of my usual two?

Now that definitely is a problem related to my age. Because these days I feel safer if I never get too far from a toilet (OK, American friends, a restroom, though rest isn’t my main concern when I visit one). Alternatively, if I’m out of doors, I need easy access to a convenient and reasonably private bush. 

Three coffees instead of two? That only makes the low-proximity need more acute.

The probem has become so irritating that my daughter-out-law, who is a doctor out here in Spain, suggested that I get some tests done, to check for various potential nasties, among which the nastiest, I assume, is prostate cancer. So I got them done. But Spanish GPs have developed the disagreeable habit of only granting telephone appointments. As well as the problem of having to carry your phone around with you at all times on the day of appointment, for fear of missing the call (the doctors can get brutal if you do – trust me, I have the emotional scars to this day), it also means you can’t see what they’re looking at, or do any of the usual things we do in conversations. You know, watching body language, making or interpreting gestures and so on.

“So how are the results?” I asked.

“Perfecto,” the doctor told me.

“I was concerned about potential prostate problems.”

I heard paper rustling, as though he was checking through the results again. For all I know, though, he might have been turning the sports pages of the local paper. Then he gave me his considered, second opinion on my test results. They were:

“Perfecto.”

Oh, well. Nothing to worry about, I suppose. I mean, if I’ve achieved perfection, how can I hope to do better?

What made my problems worse on what I now think-of as my three-espresso morning, is that it was New Year’s Day and we were off to the beach to watch those of our friends who were [bold]/[foolhardy] enough [delete according to taste] to go for a swim. 

The bold or foolhardy wading wisely back to shore

Support was what we were providing, and I was fine with that, as long as it remained moral support and reasonably remote. But the difficulty was that there are no bushes on the beach. So I needed easy access to some kind of restroom/toilet. Which was fine, since there were plenty around. Unfortunately, they were all in cafés. And cafés mean coffee.

I just can’t use a café toilet without buying something. I mean, if I sneak in to use a loo and then sneak out again, I can feel the eyes of all the staff on me, and the embarrassment is unbearable. So each time I find I just have to buy another coffee.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? In order to deal with a problem associated with my excessive coffee level, I find myself adding to that level. It was a painful dilemma, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Well, that’s enough of that. At least the doings on the beach were good. Lots of good wishes within a group of much-loved friends. I noticed that a significant majority seemed committed, like us, to providing support, with only a minority hardy enough to do any actual bathing. But overall, the atmosphere was cheerful and optimistic. 

The optimism was partly down to the glimmer that’s turning into a real light in the US (there were several Americans present). The worst infection that the United States has suffered in nearly 250 years of existence is about to disappear. Covid will take longer, but it feels almost inevitable now that the far more serious plague is drawing to an end, with Donald Trump leaving the White House.

Sadly, as the US begins to emerge from its dark tunnel, Britain’s mini-Trump and the country he technically leads, is entering its own far longer tunnel of Brexit. The Americans have kicked Trump out after just four years. But Britain will be stuck with Brexit for a generation.

Mixed times ahead, then.

It was a lovely day, on the beach on 1 January, though an odd one. The sky was all light and dark, sun and clouds. A perfect symbol, I felt, for the strange new age we’re entering.

Sunlight and shadow on New Year’s day
Just how I feel about the year ahead