Mostly Mild Max

People talk about a ‘one-month anniversary’, don’t they? Unfortunately, my ingrained pedantry rebels at that expression, since the whole point about the prefix ‘anni’ is that it relates to a year. We need a different word.

My humble proposal (and and I pride myself on my humility) is ‘mensiversary’.

Max moving in
‘Hey, who’s this other dog?’

The second of April was the first mensiversary of the latest addition to our household. That’s the arrival of Max. He’s a Podenco, a classic Spanish dog, which makes our taking one a symbol of our assimilation to our adopted nation. 

Not that the symbolism was the reason we took him. We need exercise and our Toy Poodles, Luci and Toffee, for all the joy they bring us, have had pretty much as much walking as they can stand when we get to half an hour. Max feels he’s barely got going when he’s done 5 km (3 miles if you insist on sticking with the measures of the empire) and he likes that twice a day, so he keeps us very much on our feet before leaving us on our backs. 

Like many nations the world over, Spain is a highly divided society. People of opposing views glare at each across a chasm of incomprehension on many issues – the rights of immigrants, the status of Catalonia, the appropriateness of kissing a football player on the lips without her consent and, in particular, on animal welfare. As well as the fans, there are those who regard bullfighting as a barbaric form of entertainment obtained by torturing an animal before putting him to death. Hunting, too, is divisive, between those who see it as a sport and those who regard it as a way to take pleasure from the killing of living things. And there are hunters who like to use Podencos for a year or two and then abandon them by a roadside somewhere, while in the opposite camp are those who try to take them to shelters that give them all the care charitable donations allow them to provide. 

Max was one of the rescued. Not that he was Max when we met him. Someone had given him the name ‘Hannover’ which, as well as being a bit of a mouthful for a dog’s name, made no sense given he had absolutely no connection with Germany. ‘Max’ is short, easy to say and easy to recognise, which is what a dog’s name needs to be.

So Max he became. Not in any way in tribute to the ‘Mad Max’ of Hollywood fame. He’s about as sane as they come. I’ve never known a dog with a temperament as quiet and gentle as his. It was a week before we heard him so much as bark.

That isn’t the reputation of the Podenco breed.

‘Oh, you want to be careful with them,’ people would tell us, ‘they’re hunters, you know. And once they’re off the lead, they go hunting. Good luck to you on getting them back before they’re exhausted or hungry or both.’

They follow that kind of warning up with some blood-chilling tale.

‘My Podenco still runs away all the time. I’ve got a GPS device on her collar and I can tell where she is, but when I move towards her, she just moves somewhere else. Once, I spent three hours tracking her and then had time to go home, get some food, and return to tempt her back to me with something to eat.’

Well, we got to know Max before we took him. We visited the shelter several times, taking various dogs out for walks to see if we could work out how they’d behave. Of them all, Max was the one who showed no inclination to clear off, never barked, never growled at other dogs, and showed both affection and a good temper. 

So we took him, even though he was nothing like the dog we’d had in mind. Danielle goes for male cats but female dogs (she also goes for male children, which she’s done three times over, but that’s not something that depends on her choice). We also wanted a small Podenco, of the kind that comes around knee-high to us. Max is male. And he comes pretty much to waist height, which means he can stand up to a table or kitchen surface to grab any delicacy we may have carelessly left out.

His size was another reason to call him Max. Not that we’ve adopted the suggestion of renaming Luci ‘Mini’ and Toffee ‘Micro’. That seemed unfair.

The pack greeting a passer-by
That’s Max, Toffee and Luci, not Max, Micro and Mini

Well, Max has continued for the most part mild as ever. He’s enthusiastically joined the pack Luci and Toffee had already formed. So when they go chasing down the garden barking at anyone with the temerity to go walking past the gate, he likes to go with them. And he demonstrates that he too can bark (deep and loud, now that he’s decided to let us hear him, as opposed to the girls’ yaps).

Max in our woods, off the lead

And, most wonderful of all, he’s never run away from us in the woods. We’d planned not to take him off the lead for the first two or three months. But within ten days we felt confident enough to let him loose and, while he certainly likes to go running into the undergrowth, he seems if anything anxious not to get separated from us and reappears quickly each time. Even more quickly if we call him.

Of course, he may shock us yet and disappear for some hours on some future walk. But, so far at least, so good.

Sunbathing with the pack
That’s Luci to the left, Toffee to the right, not Micro and Mini

His rapid assimilation into the household also demonstrates a political principle for me. Many years ago, I was told that ‘if you want to make a man a conservative, give him something to conserve’. It seems to be true of dogs too. Now that Max has regular meals, a pack, and plenty of affection, he’s become possessive and taken to being a little aggressive towards other dogs, growling at them if they get too close to the main source of his contentment, Danielle. ‘She’s mine,’ he’s clearly saying, ‘try to divert any of her affection towards you and you’ll have me to answer to.’ Very menacing, very worrying. Very conservative.

Even so, he remains mostly mild. His biggest failing sadly concerns children. A friend of ours is a professional dog trainer and I think he got Max right: ‘he’s probably never lived with small children before and he sees them as little noisy creatures that run around everywhere. Unfamiliar with all of that, he perceives them as a threat. So he growls.’

Well, that’s all very fine, but we can’t have our dog growling at our grandchildren. By the end of their last visit, he was getting a lot better, accepting treats from their hands. But there’s more training to be done. And we’re going to do it.

Overall, however, we’ve been more than happy during our first month together. I’m looking forward to the future with him. So it’s with pleasure that I say:

‘Happy mensiversary, mostly mild Max!’

What’s a flowerbed for if it’s not for sunbathing?

Immersion grandparenting

Hammocks are fun, says Matilda

Since the grandkids are with us again, with their parents in tow, it struck me that I’d better get a move on with telling the story from back in February, of their most recent previous visit, when the parents weren’t in tow. Well, they were in tow enough to have one of them bring the kids to us and another pick them up four days later. That gave them (the parents) the chance to have a well-deserved weekend break together for the first time for, oh, centuries. In between we had the kids on our own.

That’s ‘immersion grandparenting’. With them alone, keeping them amused, out of trouble and away from danger, is down to us with no one to take over if (sorry, when) we get tired. It’s grandparenting without a net. Much the most exciting, if not a little exhausting, kind.

The kids are fine with us on their own these days. Matilda did mention on a couple of occasions that she’d like Mummy to give her a cuddle before she went to sleep, but it was without any real sorrow and she shed no tears – it felt rather like a formal protest as though to say that she wanted it on record that she missed her parents and, though she could cope with grandparental care for a short while, we weren’t to believe that she saw this as any kind of long-term arrangement.

When it came to entertaining them, my thanks are due to Matilda who came up with an excellent suggestion. There was a film she wanted to watch. Slightly thrown by her idiosyncratic pronunciation of the first syllable of the title, I spent some fruitless time looking for ‘Papa Troll’ which, you’ve got to admit, doesn’t sound like an impossible title for a kids’ film. It turns out that what she wanted was the second Paw Patrol film. To be honest, I wasn’t aware that there’d been a first film but, hey, you learn a lot from being with grandkids.

The price of the film was, I felt, reasonable. It was around eight euros. But the excellence of the economics only became fully apparent once we realised how often the kids could watch it. The price per child per viewing worked out at around ten cents, which is unbeatable value. And, when they finally decided they’d had enough of it, I’m glad to say I found Paw Patrol 1, at an even lower price, and again providing hours of entertainment.

Beach fun in February, with Elliott (l) and Matilda

Apart from the films, there’s one aspect to being with us in Valencia that the kids continue to perceive as outstandingly advantageous. I mean, apart from playing on the beach in February. That’s ice cream every day. At home, ice cream’s a luxury, available only on rare special occasions. So having ice cream every day is a kind of anticipated preview of heaven. 

There's playground fun to be had at the beach too

Also in Valencia, while the kids do have their own bikes, the alternative is to travel on kids’ seats on ours. This is a great source of pleasure. Since kids like rituals, there are of course traditions associated with these bike rides. For instance, on one occasion I was out with Elliott on the back of my bike, and we’d been gone some ten minutes when he suddenly piped up from the back, ‘why no bumpity-bump?’ 

Bumpity-bump is what we do when we go over what the English, in their cruel way, refer to as sleeping policemen, though technically I think they’re called traffic-calming measures. You know, those bumps in the road that are designed to slow motorists. I call out ‘bumpity’ as we hit one on a bike, and ‘bump’ when we come off the other side. He echoes the calls. Matilda does the same, I might add, whether on my bike or Danielle’s.

Well, on that occasion I’d gone ten minutes and crossed several bumps but without any bumpity-bumps. Elliott was, rightly, reminding me of the ritual which I had, quite honestly, forgotten. I remembered it for the rest of the ride. 

Making their own entertainment:
Elliott housecleaning, Matilda mastering colouring

Talking about Elliott, and specifically about Elliott talking, it’s time for me to admit that there are those in my family who rather question my prediction that he would be a strong silent type. It’s true that his sometimes-unquenchable loquacity might be seen as undermining my sense of his quietness. No one, mind you, questions his strength: seldom have I seen a kid who’ll pick himself up from pretty much any fall with so little apparent concern or spilling of tears. His sister’s pretty tough too, treating her own injuries – and of the two grandkids she’s the only one to have broken a bone or suffered a burn – with philosophical courage once the first shock has passed. But his resilience even at the time of the accident is remarkable. This suggests that Elliott’s as strong as I maintain, and his general willingness to take pain without complaint might even seem to prove my belief that he’s strong and silent, were it not that he has developed a readiness (how shall I put this) to be outspoken on other occasions and matters. A readiness he exercises frequently and at length.

Interestingly, his handling of language has apparently reached a new stage. He’s decided he doesn’t like qualifiers. ‘Lovely Elliott’, as Danielle inadvertently described him on one occasion, received the response ‘just Elliott’. He had no time for the expression ‘fresh orange juice’ either, insisting that what he was about to drink was simply ‘orange juice’. I’d be inclined to say that he had an admirable commitment to concision, if I didn’t expect him to correct that to ‘just commitment to concision’. 

While he’s become good at expressing himself, he hasn’t developed quite the same level of attachment to the process of listening. Or at any rate listening and obeying. It was biking that brought that out again, in a dramatic fashion. Danielle and I were about to take them out on our bikes, much to their delight – they like the bike seats and enjoying going ‘bumpity-bump’ on them to one or other playground (we’re becoming experts on the respective advantages and disadvantages of all the playgrounds anywhere near us, and quite a few that aren’t). Our brand of bike has a design flaw, which is that it has a built-in lock but, if we set the lock with a pedal next to the kickstand, it becomes impossible to unlock. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but I had to lock my bike and then unlock it again before we set out. As I was getting everything done, Elliott came trotting over, making a beeline for a pedal.

‘Don’t move the pedal!’ I cautioned him.

He looked up, smiled, and moved the pedal. That lined it up neatly with the kickstand just as the bike emitted the ominous clicking sound which told me it was now locked. And that was the end of our projected excursion, since I could no longer unlock the bike. Indeed, it took me three weeks, including emails to the support service of the company that built the bikes. That’s not as straightforward as it one was, since the company has gone broke and been bought up by another. Eventually, a helpful person in the service kindly told me the (actually quite simple) solution to the problem and I could start using my bike again.

To be strictly honest, that’s not the only aspect of Elliott’s behaviour these days that can be – let me put this carefully – a little tiring. You can tell him – ask him, beg him – to do something, or more to the point, not to do something, and he’ll blissfully go on refusing to do what he should or, more to the point, refrain from doing what he shouldn’t. At one point, I got so annoyed that I couldn’t prevent myself making clear to him my displeasure (verbally, I hasten to add, only verbally). 

Actually, to be entirely truthful, that happened more than once.

‘Come on, David,’ Danielle told me, ‘he isn’t three yet. Stop expecting him to behave like an adult.’

I felt like getting a little picky and pointing out that, actually, I knew a lot of adults as impervious to rational requests as Elliott. It’s probably just as well, for my own wellbeing, that I thought better of saying so.

The best response to a burst of annoyance on my part, however, came inevitably from Elliott himself. He’s someone who generally resist any attempt of mine to kiss him (‘I don’t want a kiss,’ he frequently informs me with firmness). On this occasion, however, faced with my obvious irritation, he looked at me wistfully and said:

‘I’d like a kiss.’

How can any anger resist a request so disarming? Mine evaporated. Such is the power, I suppose, of one who’s certainly a strong type but perhaps all the stronger for not being entirely a silent one.

Having fun in Valencia can be exhausting for everyone

The grandparenting chronicles: carnival

Granddad’s glasses! What a joy for Elliott

February saw me back in Hoyo de Manzanares, visiting the grandkids in their home. It was carnival time, which meant cheerful celebrations by the kids in their respective schools. It also meant pressure on Sheena, their mother, to produce outstanding costumes she could feel proud of when she sent the kids to school wearing them.

Pollo Pepe arrives at Elliott’s school

As it happens, in the event, only one child celebrated carnical at school that week. That was Elliott, who went as Pollo Pepe, perhaps better known to English-speaking readers (and children) as Charlie the Chicken, aka Charlie Chick, the creation of one Nick Denchfield. Pollo Pepe is his Hispanic version and he’s gone down big in this country, as was forcefully illustrated by the sheer number of kids in chicken costumes. To be fair, one of the best was the one put together by Sheena. And, in any case, you can’t have too many Pollo Pepes, now can you?

And what about Matilda, I hear you cry? Well, she was disappointed, naturally, at being left out of the festivities on the day when we shepherded them to their respective schools, her in her day-to-day school clothes, him proudly dressed as Pepe. But, fear not: her disappointment was only temporary. She’s a big girl now – why, she’ll be five this summer – and her big school, much bigger than Elliott’s, was pulling out all the stops for carnival. It was going to involve the whole of Hoyo in the celebrations, by having the kids parade through the town, in costume. The weather forecast for the day itself, however, was highly unfavourable, and weather forecasts are often right in Spain as they are far more seldom in Britain (indeed, it chucked it down). So the parade had to be postponed. Only postponed, though, not cancelled.

Matilda got her festivities the following week (which sadly meant I missed them). In a costume at least as wonderful as Sheena prepared for Elliott. Hers was on a woodland theme and it worked beautifully. 

Matilda in her carnival procession

Matilda got a kick out of parading around her village in it, with all her schoolmates.

The kids and their bikes

Bikes, you may remember, are a key factor of the kids’ lives. And these days they just seem to get keyer and keyer. During my February stay, Matilda and Elliott were frequently on bikes on our school runs. That was pretty impressive. And it would have been even more impressive had they entirely mastered the process. The problem is that getting to school is mostly uphill, and mostly pretty steep. 

We, the grandparents, cheat. We have electric bikes. With them you can sit at the bottom of the steepest, longest hill you can imagine, and feel entirely undaunted. You know that you can sail up it, pedalling with minimal effort, as your source of external power takes the strain from your legs.

Now, I discovered that the grandkids cheat too. Well, Elliott especially. To be fair, he’s still not three, which is the manufacturer’s specified minimum age for his bike. So he’s doing extremely well to be riding to school at all. Perhaps it’s not unreasonable that he, too, relies on an external source of power to help get him to the top. Unfortunately for me, however, that external drive is grandad-powered. That brought back to me all the horror of the long, steep slope that I believed I’d put behind me thanks to my electric bike.

The way back down, at the end of the school day, is a lot easier. Matilda handles that just fine. At the time of my visit, however, Elliott still had a little progress to make. He understands how brakes work. He’ll even slow himself with them from time to time. But the use of brakes hasn’t yet become instinctive. So when there was a need to stop quickly, he still tended to rely on scraping his shoes along the ground. That worked, I grant him that. But when holes started to appear in his shoes, the technique lost any appeal it may ever have had for the parents (or the grandfather, come to that).

Children like rituals. Or at any rate habits. One of Elliott’s is to hide each time we get to his house.

Now the notion of ‘hiding’ is still a work in progress for him. He always goes to the same place. Well, I suppose that rather underlines the ritualistic aspect of the exercise. Nor has he entirely grasped the notion of ‘hiding’ as ‘making yourself invisible’. He gets most of himself behind a pillar but then peeks out to make sure that we’re all ready to react appropriately.

This happens when he leaps out with a bit of a shout. Nothing too intimidating. A lion’s roar, but more on the cub scale than that of the king of the Savannah.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I always react with startled shock, throwing up my hands in horror and shouting, ‘so that’s where you were!’. My reward is a beaming smile which never fails to make its appearance.

Nor was cycling the only form of exercise in which the kids indulged while I was there. Nicky, their dad, has returned to rock climbing, a sport to which he was devoted in his teens. Already back then, his devotion excited my admiration, as he cycled half an hour each way through dark, cold streets in the winter, to get to a climbing gym in the south of Strasbourg, where we lived at the time, after a full day’s school and school days are full indeed in France (often he got out only at 6:00). That happened three times a week, a level of commitment I haven’t seen in a great many teenagers.

Daddy back with an old passion

Well, he doesn’t go so often these days. Family man, and all that. And the presidency of the Hoyo chess club also makes its demands on his time. But he goes and sometimes he even takes the kids.

Elliott enjoys himself, but he tends to spend most of his time on a climb which, as his dad rather dismissively but far from inaccurately put it, is a bit like a ladder. The fun thing about it is that you get to the top and then come back down by a slide. You can imagine the attraction, an attraction felt by Matilda too.

She, however, has now graduated to proper climbs. I watched her more than once struggling up one of them, helped on her way by her dad, and felt she wasn’t doing badly. But imagine my astonishment when, a while later, noticing that she wasn’t near me, I went around the corner to where the climb she’d struggled with was located, to find her on it again – and not at the bottom, but right at the top. She’d climbed it on her own and without assistance. 

Matilda reaches the top. Unassisted

Naturally, I fetched Nicky at once while she waited, and when we were together, we saluted her achievement with suitable applause. She seemed pleased. As for us, we were downright impressed.

Especially Granddad. 

And a postscript

Matilda’s very attached to the mug she was given by her friend Eduardo at his third birthday party. So when it came to leaving a cup of milk for Father Christmas’s visit, back in December, and Sheena suggested using that mug, Matilda was a little concerned.

‘Let’s not,’ she said, ‘he might steal it.’

Too precious to risk

Wise girl, I say. Why trust a guy who sneaks into your house at night? A little caution seems fully called for.

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?