Sounds in the Hickory Wind

A Memory of Peas

2012-01-28T18:59:00.000+01:00

Peas produce a very strong memory reflex in me. Fresh peas, that is. Proust managed to write seven volumes after being set off by a Madeleine cake dipped in sugary coffee*. I don’t think I can manage such a monumental task, but peas remind me of my childhood in an unusually powerful way.

One reason for this is that there are no peas where I live. People sometimes buy tinned or frozen peas for putting with particular dishes, but fresh peas are almost unknown. The pleasure of biting into a newly shelled pea, from a pod you’ve just picked from the plant, and feeling it burst in your mouth, releasing a moist green taste with a tang of something or other I’ve never quite identified, is difficult to convey to those who’ve never experienced it.

Here, peas are grown, but of very poor quality, and they are harvested whole for animal fodder, or not harvested at all, but what is not eaten is left to dry up and die in the field, to add nutrients to the soil. It’s quite common in May and June to pass yellow fields which on inspection turn out to be a carpet of dead peas.

This is not, of course, really about peas. It’s about memories. My father grew vegetables in the garden (and on his allotment) for many years. AT certain times of year we were self-sufficient in peas, runner beans, tomatoes, carrots, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, beetroot, turnips and swedes. The beans were strung from a frame over which a kind of green plastic net was hung, and every spring (early spring, very cold) the process of turning over the whole garden with a fork, and ploughing in the contents of the compost heap, was carried out, mostly by my father, sometimes with the assistance of his more or less willing volunteers.

The Brussels sprouts were big plants, big enough to make a jungle for young boys to play in. The runner beans could be eaten fresh from the plant, crunching in a very satisfying manner in the mouth. And the peas were collected when the time was right and we sat around shelling them into a large bowl. The popping of pods and the taste and smell of the freshly shelled peas left a strong impression on my memory. So when I saw fresh peas in the market the other day, it was not so much the eating of peas that I was looking for, but the recovery of a memory of childhood.

It worked, up to a point. It was fun to shell them, and they were good to eat.

*I read the whole thing a few years ago, in a very good Spanish translation, the first two volumes by the poet Pedro Salinas. I even read part of the first volume in French. Whether it was worth it, I still couldn't say. Reflecting on my death bed, I don't think 'I can go in peace, I have read Proust', will be the main thought in my head. But you never know.

Garonda

2012-01-23T19:00:00.000+01:00

"The boy’s mind lived on a lake. In a big house on a lake. He didn’t see the house as near or next to the lake, but on it. Not floating, just on it. People lived on lakes, after all. Not people like him, to be sure, but people in stories, or people you heard talked about. Pliny had lived on Lake Como. He wanted to live on a lake. And you had to live in a house, everybody did, so the house had to be on the lake. So his mind lived in a big house on a lake...

It wasn’t really a swimming lake. He swam when it was hot or he was annoyed about something. His favourite place for swimming was in the shallow water near the bank with the short, soft grass, because then he could lie in it to dry. But sometimes he swam in the deep water right in the middle, just to show it didn’t bother him. Swimming in pools, or in the sea when they went on holiday, he didn’t like very much. His body felt heavy and the water powerful. In the lake it didn’t matter...

He fished sometimes because there were fish to catch. No one else ever came to the lake to fish, or for anything else, so someone had to catch the fish. Tom didn’t use a rod and line, he didn’t know how to. He fished with his mind, relieving the lake of its excess and passing the time happily, being part of it all. He couldn’t have given a name to the fish, they were just fish. Silver things about eight to ten inches long. Shiny, attractive creatures, with a bit of life about the eyes, moving languorously together in a group that never took any form but always seemed about to. The colours changed too, when they turned sideways and the lighter belly was visible. At times they all did it together, and it was as though a lamp had been shone on the water...

He didn’t eat the fish. He didn’t do anything with them exactly. He fished with his mind and they stayed there until they were forgotten. They went wherever fish do go when the fishermen have finished with them...

...he liked the house on the lake because it was big and empty. Only his mind lived there, and no one ever came to visit, but the house was always clean and warm, and there was always roast beef and buttered buns whenever he wanted them. It was more or less a low box of light grey stone, with a lot of rooms he didn’t use but liked going into, especially the upper ones which were full of chests overflowing with wonderful objects that you could play with, dress up in or just look at for the sheer pleasure of having them. He found old dolls and cricket bats, lace bonnets and leather trousers, yellowed railway tickets to towns he had never heard of, notes and coins from faraway countries some of which he was sure no longer existed, ornate lamps for hanging on brackets or standing on tables, woollen blankets with initials sewn into them, pocket watches that still ticked if you shook them, hourglasses, single earrings, little tin boxes with pictures on the lid, cases made of calfskin and rubber for keeping things that had now been lost, wooden games that children played with long ago and still had most of the pieces, marbles and conkers, rock cakes so hard they were like real rocks, wigs and false moustaches, dried-up paints and tiny mirrors, plastic binoculars and metal knives with blades for doing a hundred different things, books with stories, magazines with pictures, albums half-filled with stamps or cartoons or newspaper clippings or scribblings in unreadable writing. There was always more to be found, always another passageway, a hidden door, and more treasure beyond.

All the rooms had large windows and a view of the lake. Most had the same view, his favourite one; the foreground speckled with water so close he could see the individual drops, giving way to a more even surface, then just a suggestion of silver-grey and in the background the lively green of the long grass that the birds loved to swoop over and which was always in the sun..."

A Question about Bank Accounts*

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000+01:00

*Down the bottom. There's some preamble (rambling) first

Something I forget to comment on in the recent post about some of the measures introduced by Mariano Rajoy: it will also become illegal to pay for a transaction worth more than €1000 in cash.

Modern governments hate cash, and probably have done since the dropping of the gold standard. Ideologues hate cash because they fear people may be purchasing unapproved items. Governments fear that they may be losing opportunities to take a bit of tax. Since they have noticed that the need for a physical medium of exchange has been greatly reduced by modern technology they have been looking for ways to limit its use as much as possible. Money cables, credit cards, bank accounts, the interwebs, etc have made trade at all levels a simpler, quicker, more liquid process, and we are all better off for it. But it leaves a trail. That trail should exist for the convenience of the parties involved in the transaction of course, but its existence is a too tempting for the powers that be to ignore. It is the easiest thing in the world to invoke the spectre of drug cartels and Chinese Mafiosi and demand that the trail be preserved for the convenience of the government.

For a couple of years it has been impossible (over here) to have a mobile phone unless it’s linked to an identified bank account. None of that picking one up at the supermarket with a €50 card already in it. You have to go through a tedious amount of paperwork and give out a lot of personal information before the company is allowed to sell you the product you want.

For rather longer it has been impossible to pay in any large sum to your bank account without having to identify yourself and having your details taken. Now it is illegal to pay cash for anything more expensive than medium-sized television.

It won’t work. There are plenty of ways around it, the simplest of which is just to ignore it completely. For decades companies have traditionally worked a kind of double accounting system with their employees’ salaries, industries with anything involving VAT, property registrars with the values of houses, and so on (err, so I hear). The government knows this very well, and they have always been complicit up to a point, and taken it all into account. It would collapse the economy if they suddenly tried to claim all of the tax that the law says is due.

So this new restriction is just a bit of a nuisance, really. It shouldn’t matter very much. Two points, however:
a) It shows the way the new government is thinking- exactly like the old one, but with more freshness and energy (no surprise there),
*b) If the government is going to effectively force everyone to have bank accounts, is there not a case for them supporting banks that should have gone bankrupt, on the grounds that some banks at least must continue to exist?

The answer is almost certainly no, but I can see them using that line to justify something, somewhere, in the future.

Casablanca and Other Westerns

2012-01-22T19:00:00.000+01:00

When people ask me about me about my favourite films (and they do, especially children), I usually mention Casablanca, because it’s more or less true. Then I talk about the Westerns I watched in my childhood, and the thrillers- blood, death, crazy people and clever but tortured detectives- that I tend to watch now, because they are entertaining without requiring thought, and Mrs Hickory likes them. Such an answer is what is expected, it’s easily understood, and it doesn’t lead to long and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to explain things to people who don’t want to understand them.

The truth, what I actually watch on those rare occasions when I have the time and the inclination to sit and watch the television with the brain fully engaged and exclusively focused on the screen, is too complicated to attempt to discuss with any but the most enthusiastic cinephile. Italian neo-realism and Scandinavian black comedy are interests so niche that to confess to them is to be dismissed as nuts, or to be asked to pontificate all evening to an audience that thinks you’re nuts anyway.

So I keep my cinematic tastes to myself, at least in real life. But it struck me the other day, when answering a question about those tastes, that Casablanca is really a Western. A Western disguised as an anti-Nazi propaganda film disguised as a romantic melodrama, but at bottom, a Western. Flawed goodies, human baddies, a girl who is too good for all of them, a world too tough for them to live in as they would like, and a battle, a gunfight, that is won by the goodies, and yet not quite won, as the hero of the goodies wins righteousness even as he loses his prize.

Talking of Westerns, I add an idle thought on ‘The Man who Shot Liberty Valance’, a great film even if you don’t like the genre. Liberty Valance is a nasty piece of work, a drunken thug not above provoking men into drawing on him so he can shoot them, a bully and a coward. But he survives by using the decency of those around him against themselves. James Stewart is a moralist, a pacifist (and a bit of a coward too, as I recall) who won’t use Liberty’s spiteful bullying of him as an excuse to fight him, and Liberty knows this. John Wayne is not afraid of him, but won’t kill him just because he can, he will only do it if he is forced to, and Liberty is very careful not to force his hand. The story, and the film, works because the characters are complex, carefully crafted, and coherent. We understand why they behave as they do. Otherwise it would be so much nonsense.

'The Grapes of Wrath'

2012-01-22T07:00:00.000+01:00

This is the review I wrote, the notes I jotted down, as soon as I had finished the book. I haven’t changed anything. It would probably have been better if I had, but this way it is authentic (and less work, which is the real reason for leaving it as it is):

I have finished The Grapes of Wrath. Although I know that Steinbeck writes wonderful books, full of dramatic truth and sometimes a kind of magic realism, finely drawn characters and always the feeling that he has written something worth telling and saying, I had never read either Grapes nor Of Mice and Men. This is mostly because I haven't come across them cheap and they are still in copyright so not on Gutenberg. But I found Grapes in a free download and have finally been able to read it.
It is anchored in reality, and apparently reflects how the situation was for the people who had travel in search of work for the first time in generations. Although he explains the reasons they have to go, and is critical both in the voice of the narrator and of the characters of the banks and the big investors who are changing the world and causing such hardship, and although he makes no attempt to understand the true motives of all those involved or to analyse the possible benefits that might derive from the changes- and which did, in the end- (quite rightly. There is no narrative need to do so) the book is not social denunciation or some such rubbish. It is a story, and it never forgets that he is crafting a story.
The hardship, the conditions forced on the workers, the harshness and hard hearts of the powerful, and the cynicism of some of those who take their opportunities at the expense of others are part of the story, not something added on to make a point. It may be a book about its time, but it is still worth reading now, and will be long into the future, because a tells a story about real people- who it first takes the trouble to create- and they are very human and very interesting.
There is more than one narrative voice, aside from the characters themselves and the ostensible narrator. There is one, probably at least two, meta-narrators who appear occasionally to comment on the greater context of the tale, in its historical and human implications.
Steinbeck doesn't wave his hands about in a 'you know what I mean' kind of way, expecting us to imagine all the things that he hasn't been able to create himself, and to gaze in wonder at a mishmash of clichés and transeunt orthodoxy, like many who call themselves writers. He creates his own world, fills it with recognisably human creations of his own, and has them do and feel interesting and coherent things. You live their lives along with them, you can feel what they feel in the sound and rhythm of their words, and it was worth doing.

Rajoy's First Days

2012-01-21T19:00:00.000+01:00

The new Spanish government has introduced a number of measures to attempt to address the financial crisis. Governments aren’t very good at creating employment, which is the major problem, nor at creating liquidity, especially when they can’t even print money. One of the things they can’t do is force people to spend money, offer, or take out loans- if people aren’t confident they won’t take the chance.

They have increased income taxes, not surprisingly, and closed a number of government agencies, which will have saved a certain amount. Autonomous governments around the country, and not just Popular Party ones, have almost stopped creating new posts for public employees, at least unsackable ones. No one seems to know what to do about VAT. Even the opposition, who reduced it at the start of the crisis, then raised it, then raised it again, aren’t sure what it is they think the government should be doing with it, but they’re pretty sure that, whatever the government does, they’ll find a way to show that it was wrong. Once they’ve finished with their own internal beauty contest, that is.

If you were expecting a more detailed explanation and critique of the measures, then I’m sorry to disappoint. The soap opera of politics has become terribly tedious and I know longer want to waste time getting to grips with the details of it all. If you want to know more there’s a big, wide Internet out there (not much of a sales pitch, I realise, but this blog isn’t in it for the money).

One thing I find a little odd is that the left in general (the Socialist party and the Unions), have accused the government of ‘trying to make the middle classes pay.’ Who do they expect to pay? The working class is doing less work than ever, there are nearly 5 million unemployed, another 4 million are public employees, any working class people left who are lucky enough to make a living are not going to solve the problems between them, and in any case socialists don’t usually talk about taking money from the workers. Therefore I assume they are trying to set the middle class against that nebulous entity, ‘the rich’. But the rich don’t have enough money to solve the problems either, unless you interpret ‘rich’ to include half the middle class and then tax them all into extinction. This is not good policy in the long term. So, the lately governing and now opposition Socialist party doesn’t know what to do. Well, we knew that already. The question is, does the Popular Party have any better ideas. I doubt it, somehow, but we shall wait and see.

Hedgehog News

2012-01-21T07:00:00.000+01:00

I read that badger numbers are rising in many parts of Britain, and that hedgehog numbers have been falling sharply and continuously at the same rate. The Independent article (it was ‘drawn to my attention’, but I don’t remember who by, sorry), gives an idea of the extent of the decline and mentions some possible, indeed probable, reasons for it. The article it links to in jstor describes a revealing and high resolution inverse correlation between badger sett density and hedgehog presence (in different areas of Oxfordshire). Not damning, but worthy of consideration.

Many people would consider this to be just another little piece of information about our little island, but in England everyone has to have an opinion about everything. In the comments we find badger-haters, badger-lovers, people who think they’re on a different thread, people who blame their particular political bugbear for the continued existence of badgers/hedgehogs, people who see the writer as part of a government conspiracy, and those who just think he’s an idiot (he isn’t, although the only intelligent comment I read does point out, correctly, that TB is not spread by a virus).

The jstor article is much more difficult for the media butterflies to criticise. It doesn’t claim that it’s all the badgers’ fault, it just observes, and advances interpretation of the findings. Which is what science is supposed to do, often at the cost of not saying very much at all.

Your blogging hedgehog is from North Africa, and knows little of these badgers that so terrorize my European cousins. Back home there are several snakes we have to look out for, as they can unroll us like the badger, and there are a couple of very nasty cat-like things that can just crunch through spines and everything. But not badgers as such. So I have nothing in principle against the creatures.

My bipedal co-blogger remarks that he was brought up in South-East England which is supposed to be full of badgers, but he never saw one. They remain, for him, creatures of myth and fairy-tale, bounteous beings that bring fortune to those who encounter them. Not to me, of course, but I hope I never will.

On Sacking Bad Teachers

2012-01-20T19:04:00.000+01:00

I see that the idea of sacking bad teachers has come up again. It won’t happen, it never does. The unions won’t have it and the government isn’t going to pick a fight when they’ll get the blame for the resulting trouble. So I confidently predict, anyway. I would love to be proved wrong.

The fact that it is controversial to suggest not placing our children’s education in the hands of proven incompetents is quite astonishing in itself. There are many jobs that require little more than punctuality, responsibility, personal hygiene and the ability to interact socially (not that it’s necessarily easy to find that combination of skills), and there are invented public sector jobs that could be done by a performing monkey, but teaching is not one of them. In the private sector the lazy, incompetent or unnecessary are very quickly removed, and even in the public sector there is some kind of attempt to make sure that doctors, nurses, policemen and judges (for example) are capable of doing what they’re paid for, but apparently anyone can be put in a classroom and told to get on with it, and no one cares what happens.

The ability to teach schoolchildren is not really a matter of having an extensive knowledge of a subject. It helps to be familiar with and understand it to some extent, and it’s more important at the higher levels, but the real skill of teaching lies in a combination of closely related communication skills, self-confidence, preparation, knowledge of the people you have in front of you and the ability to recognise and respond to their reactions instantly. It’s a complicated process of communication, and part of that process is respect, including making it clear why you are trespassing so heavily on their time and patience. They need to understand the process they are part of.

No, it’s not rocket science, but it’s beyond the scope of quite a lot of people, and unfortunately many of them seem to be teachers.

In Spain, about whose situation I can speak with much greater knowledge, the state education system is full of incompetent teachers. There are two reasons for this, both of which would be utterly indefensible, indeed, inconceivable, if the system were actually designed for the benefit of children. The first is that state teachers are civil servants, and as such have jobs for life. It is almost impossible to remove a teacher who is not buggering boys in the bike shed. There is almost never enough will among the people who could, in theory, move to have a teacher sacked, to follow through the tedious, dense and lengthy administrative and legal rituals to get it done. No will and no interest. They would become extremely unpopular among their colleagues, not to mention in the Union.

The second reason is that the process by which they are chosen to be given that job and pension for life is not intended to assess the candidate’s competence as a teacher. For some years I ran the English department of an Academy that prepared people for the public exams that distributed these lifelong positions; not a diploma which entitled you to apply for a job, but the job itself. I got to know the system very well. I even wrote books about it. It's a terrible mess.

There are two parts to this exam- in the first a subject title, vaguely related to the study of English, is drawn from a list of 75 such subjects and you have to write about it. This is then read to a jury of more experienced teachers who mark it accordingly to a series of criteria which were not even made public until a few years ago (I would have to use my contacts to get some ideas of what they were actually looking for). The second part is to produce and explain a year plan for a specific group, including a detailed description of at least one set of lesson plans. This is also performed in front of the jury.

Guess who wrote the lesson programmes for them? And the first part is divided into sections on grammar, history, literature, didactics, socio-linguistics, and so on, with a number of subject titles in each one. If you got a subject you happened to be able to write well about you could do a good exam, otherwise you’d have to wait another couple of years. Once you’ve passed that exam and got a post there is a notional period of practice/probation, but it’s almost impossible to fail it even if you spend most of it off sick with stress.

In short, the system is not designed to find good teachers and keep them good. It doesn’t care whether teachers can teach or not. The point of the system is to be able to tick boxes in such a way that no one can be blamed when something goes wrong. I know there are lot of incompetent teachers in state schools, not only because in another existence I get paid to do what they are unable to do, but also because I put quite a few of them there.

Any country that lets its government employ bad teachers will get the youth it deserves. And that youth will grow up and let the same thing happen.

My Thruppence Ha'p'ny on Racism in Football

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000+01:00

Málaga FC Undergo Late-Night Sensitivity Training

I didn’t know whether to post this, or merely to tuck it away as a collection of odd thoughts that I might research, analyse, and turn into something worth reading at some point in the future. At the moment it’s more a collection of questions to myself, and if he so wishes, to the reader.

Luis Suárez, a Uruguayan who plays football for Liverpool, has been punished for making racist remarks to Patrice Evra, another football. Punished quite severely, in fact, on the grounds that he made repeated references to Evra blackness in a nasty tone of voice.

It was alleged that he had called Evra a ‘nigger’, (if we’re going to talk about the word I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist), but it then appears that he hadn’t used that word, but a Spanish appellative which is only very broadly similar in its semantic charge and the exact meaning of which in the context has not been properly identified. (In Spain in general, to describe someone as ‘negrito’ is quite harmless and inoffensive, though it probably would be if used as a vocative. How it is used in downtown Montevideo I have no idea).

The fact that Suárez insulted Evra in some way does not seem to be in doubt, but, since Evra had just kicked him in the ribs it’s hardly surprising that he had a go at him. (I have frequently pointed this out to people who say that Spanish football fans are racist because at such and such a ground they made monkey noises at such and such a player. There are, and have been, quite a few black players in Spain, though nothing like the number there are in England, and it has not been unusual to see a black player on the field for over twenty years. Some of them were born here. When fans make monkey noises at a player they aren’t picking on him because of his race, but because they don’t like him. There may have no real reason for disliking him, but it isn’t just because he’s black, not in my experience.)

A young lad at ~~Manchester Utd~~ Oldham also complained recently that a spectator repeatedly shouted racial insults at him when he approached the touchline. It would be nice if the players didn’t have to put up with abuse from fans but football isn’t like that. Also, the player, who appears to have been generally upset by it, and I don’t blame him, has just announce to the entire football world that he’s easily wound up. He may well regret it. And it won’t just be the spectators. In the give and take of the penalty area during free kicks and corners, all kinds of things are said, because the referee can’t hear them, and he only sees the resulting punch from the one who loses his cool under provocation.

Football has far bigger problems of behaviour than a few specific insults which are deemed, for some reason, to be worse than the others that fly about constantly. Football fans are no longer the thugs they were for thirty years, until the football authorities were finally persuaded to do something about it before the whole money-spinning circus got itself closed down, but the fact remains that there is a great deal of menace on the terraces, shouting and singing abuse is still considered a privilege you buy when you pay for your ticket, and parts of many towns are effectively closed down on Saturday afternoon so the crowds can be escorted to the match. The fact that home and away supporters still need to be separated by fences and police lines tells you all you need to know. The problem has not gone away, and it’s a very serious one. Only tradition allows football to continue to do this. I don’t think it’s even the money.

On the field, players constantly try to injure each other, to get each other punished and banned from games by faking fouls, they provoke each other verbally, as I said above, whenever they think the referee can’t hear, they claim goals, penalties, corners, fouls and even throw-ins that they know didn’t exist with an extraordinary passion. The clubs and the media conspire to create an atmosphere close to warfare before any big game, and then deny any responsibility for the resulting violence.

All of these problems are far greater than a few cross words between players in the heat of the moment, but there are risks involved in addressing them, so it’s much easier to pick on a few relatively unimportant but uncontroversially bad things, and declare them to be the root of everything that is wrong with the game.

Much as I enjoy football, I realized long ago that it should have been given an ultimatum to get those involved in it to behave like decent human beings, or, after a period of grace, be abolished. It was never going to happen, of course, and the business of Suárez and company is just the latest attempt to pretend they are doing something by tinkering around with details.

Things I Noticed on the Beach

2012-01-13T19:04:00.000+01:00

There is always somewhere people gather to relax, a place associated with exercise, hobbies, activities of great and surprising variety and strangeness. In the centre of Madrid it’s El Retiro; in my little retreat it’s the old railway line; and in Málaga it’s the seafront.

There you will find the usual collection- a large collection, even on a cool January morning- of runners, skaters, walkers, strollers, cyclists, and old people not exactly moving but not exactly keeping still. And among them, and on the beach itself, the more unusual collection; people you weren’t expecting to see but you register without surprise. The sand sculptor who has created a little zoo of flattened animals, a lion painted yellow, a giraffe with darker spots, an unhappy looking elephant, a fat rhino and a rather terrifying crocodile.

There was a girl who appeared to be testing her abseiling kit. She had stretched the belts between two trees and was repeatedly pulling it as tight as possible and checking some aspect of it which I might have been able to define more precisely if I knew anything about abseiling. I hoped that when she’d got it all set up and working she would run into it and do a kind of human catapult thing, but it turned out that that was not the purpose of the exercise.

There was a pair of middle-aged tramps who were trying to work out how to have sex on the beach without attracting attention. If they’d simply got their kit off they’d have had the entire shore to themselves in a matter of seconds but they didn’t think of that. I assume they found a solution in the end.

After the 6th Jan, the front was also full of children on new bicycles and rollerskates, and skateboards and other, more modern forms of locomotion which passed this hedgehog by some time ago. It’s a standard post-Reyes scene, in which parents with hangovers have to take the kiddies out to play with their new presents. Imagine how her eyes will light up when she sees it, they said to each other with joy both paternal and maternal as they bought the new wheels. And they were probably right, but their own eyes did not open with joy, or anything much at all, at six in the morning when they were dragged out of bed to go and watch it being ridden. Such, I imagine, is parenthood. Ups and downs

A great swarm of cotorras- a kind of small parrot, this one I think- flew around in rough formation for a while as we sat eating fish. About thirty of them, a colony formed as a result of a pair escaping from captivity some years ago. They flock, and seem to obey either a leader or a collective, sheep-like instinct to avoid being seen to stand out. As the leader of a flock of sheep at any moment is the one most recently frightened by its own shadow, so these birds seemed to go where the most nervous one was taken by its fear of noise and movement. They are emerald green and strangely compelling to watch. The photo was taken on the phone from a distance and doesn’t do them justice at all.

The fish and the prawns were excellent, too.

Now I’m back at home, working and battling the frost that covers the trees every night. Not everything in life can be selfish pleasure (well, in theory it can, of course, but I’ve never got it properly worked out).

In the Hills Again

2012-01-08T19:54:00.003+01:00

Just a couple of miles north of Marbella lies the Sierra deLas Nieves, a mountain range like many in the south of Spain, imposing from thecoast, beautiful when you’re up in it and, despite the name, not actually highenough to be snow-covered, even in winter. It covers a wide area which iscrossed by a network of what, for want of a better word, I shall call ‘paths’. Theyare walkable, indeed they were made by walkers and are intended to be walked,but they are not easy. Mrs Hickory, despite her many merits, is not a mountaingoat, and needs a little persuading to get her to join me on these jaunts, butin the end she always comes, and afterwards when we’re sitting comfortably in a bar at ground level, sheclaims to enjoy them.

We found a strawberry tree covered with fruit. Some of itwas ripe and edible. I don’t know if it’s common for January, you don’t seemany of them in my part of the world, but they provided a bit of colour beyondthe shades of green and blue.

From the top you can see Marbella, the other mountain rangeswhich undulate along the coast, Gibraltar (I think), the Mediterranean, and thecoast of Africa in the distance. The full effect is made up of the combinationsof colours and the physical feeling of being surrounded not only on all sidesbut also above and below, by the beauty and power of nature, the sensations inthe body from the effort of getting up there, and the knowledge that you haveto get down again and that it won’t be easy. Photographs don’t give any senseof what it is likely to be there.

There’s nothing particularly special or unusual about thosemountains. There are many like them, but they are all worth seeing.Little by little, one by one, we’re getting there.

On Things that Socks Do

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000+01:00

St Sebastian Despairs of Finding his Other Sock

It may be true that there is nothing interesting to say aboutsocks, but I shall do my best. Most of the time they get on with their basicfunctions of keeping your feet warm, stopping your shoes rubbing, distinguishingone 15-year-old girl from another and marking you out as an Englishman whenwearing sandals at the beach, but when left unsupervised they will enjoythemselves in quiet and surprising ways which mostly involve playing tricks ontheir erstwhile wearer.

It is in the nature of socks to be two, but their ability tobecome one, and sometimes three, between one look in the drawer and another, orbetween going into the washing machine and coming out, is well known. I have attimes found the missing pair in the pocket of a pair of trousers, up the sleeveof a shirt, in the machinery of the washer itself, nested inside another sock,and many have never appeared at all. But it isn’t just that they get lost. Theyalso have the ability to multiply. Where once there was a pair suddenly therewill be an extra one, inexplicably (and rather uselessly). Lost socks willreappear the next time you do the washing, caught up in something that wasn’t evenin the machine the first time. Douglas Adams would have made a fine job offailing to explain this.

The other day I ran across the best trick I have ever seenperformed by a sock. One of the pair had teased out a loose thread from itself,tied it around its own instep with a complex knot (we hedgehogs don’t join theScouts, so I can’t say exactly what type), trapping the leg of its pair (whichwent into the machine separately) inside it. If socks were interesting inthemselves, and I accept that they may not be, this would be positivelyFortean.

One of the reasons I know I’m happy is that I can take pleasurein being frustrated by the behaviour of socks.

A Christmas Tale of Sorts

2011-12-30T13:37:00.000+01:00

A student of mine is a doctor, a gastroenterologist, and he spends much of his time doing endoscopy, which consists of sticking tubes into whichever hole is most appropriate for reaching the troubled organ. These tubes are quite remarkable; they can light, see, cut, slice, sew, seal, burn, and deliver various types of instrument or bits of plastic for opening, closing or healing all kinds of vessels in the body. Quite, fascinating it is, and it's done with the precision of a module landing on Titan, through a control panel which wouldn't look out of place in the cockpit of a fighter plane.

He was on call on Christmas Eve, and had to go to the hospital at 11 in the evening. A bad time, because on Christmas Eve everyone has dinner with the family over here. It's as big an occasion as lunch on Christmas Day. But these things happen, he said, he's used to it.

The emergency was an old man whose oesophagus was blocked. He needed emergency endoscopy to remove the blockage, after which he was pronounced fit and sent home.

The point is that my student described it as a normal Christmas Eve call- grandad, having had to spend all year eating yoghourt and baby food, is determined to have a proper dinner with his family that day, and is reminded why he was told to stick to the baby food in the first place. Just an anecdote- surprising to me because it wasn't surprising to the doctor- but an example of how the human spirit can be both stronger and weaker than the flesh. On the whole I found it an optimistic tale, and not only because one day we may all be that man.

On the Drinking of Meths

2011-12-26T19:17:00.001+01:00

If this blog has failed to notice Christmas, it's because the blogger has beenrather busy noticing it in person. The suckling pig was excellent, the beer suitablycold, the presents perfectly chosen and the company very agreeable. The weatherhas been cold and sunny, making it possible to run and ride enough to make roomfor the piglet, and to avoid the preparation of it. In short, Christmas as itshould be. I hope readers can all say the same.

And now, in the interests o fbalance, a post about the observation of human misery.

The highest expression of human desperation is to me the drinking of meths.When exposed in London to all kinds of human life, including all kinds of humansuffering, the lowest of the low, those so far lost to any possibility of areturn to humanity and happiness that they could not remember being human orconceive of becoming so once again (that's how I imagined it) were the methsdrinkers.

I saw them regularly in Euston Square. I wouldn't even call it misery. Myimpression, rightly or wrongly, was that they were beyond any experience ofemotional suffering. It was a world I could observe but not imagine, as it wasso far from my understanding.

The image of figures that had once been people, sipping purple fluid fromglass tubes or some makeshift container, a barely discernible vapour risingfrom the surface, is fixed in my mind, so firmly that it is almost certainlynot real. But they were there, on the grass under the trees when it was warm,on the benches when it was cold or wet. And not only in Euston Square, thoughthat is where I remember them.

To drink meths, I imagine, indicates a resignation from life morecomplete than any other act, even suicide. Taking one’s own life requires anact of will, and the recognition that one could continue to live, even thatone’s life has some value. The meths drinkers have nothing, and they know theyhave nothing. They eat at times, a few crumbs abandoned by the birds, just areflex when the discomfort is too great. Most will not live long enough to needto eat. Their existence consists of the only pleasure that remains to them, theconsumption of industrial spirit, which they know will quickly drive them madand damage their organs beyond repair, will destroy what is left of theirhumanity, will reduce their human relations to being with people like them andattempting to articulate abuse at each other. They have renounced theirhumanity, because they believe it has renounced them. They are the most hopelessgroup of creatures have ever come across. I don’t believe any of them couldever have been returned to anything resembling a form of normal life.

They belonged to another world. In fact, they created anotherworld within ours, surrounded themselves with an aura of remote horror, andallowed us to surrender that space to them. People will sit next to tramps andfilthy, bloodied drunks on benches, if there’s nowhere else.They won't sit with the drinkers of meths. No one will join their world. They exist on another plain, that the rest of us do not want to be part of. We are happy to leave it to others to experience.

On Marriage and Intellectual Contortions

2011-12-24T19:04:00.000+01:00

I recently expressed an attitude to marriage, which boiled down to 'shareyour life with whoever you want, celebrate it as you wish, and call it anthingyou choose, but leave me to do the same and don't go on about it all the time,I'm not interested.'
I came across an article the other day that spoke about a woman's attitudeto marriage and how she changed her mind. Although it was from the Guardian,and she still writes for them, I saw it in an EFL textbook. It doesn't appearin any online archive, to confirm that it is complete and is really what shewrote, and in any case this post is not an attack on her but an analysis of aparticular way of thinking, so I won't give her name (I’d probably misspell it,anyway). The quotes are from the article as it appeared in the textbook.
She first sets out her youthful attitude to marriage, a combination of distastefor the dull, repetitive life she saw her mother and other women lead,reinforced by political indoctrination via books and a feminist gang at heruniversity. She saw marriage, everyone's marriage, as an enslavement imposed bya patriarchal hierarchy, an unnecessary, even evil, social invention.

So, she might lack a little perspective and contrast, not tomention observation of how real people experience marriage, but her position onthe matter is admirably clear. And she hasn’t finished.

Ah, yes, the ‘I don’t understand it, nor why people do it,therefore it is wrong and must be stopped’ approach to argument. Blinkered,certainly, but, as I say, perfectly clear.

Then she falls in love.

Truly heartening to see the moment of revelation. The restof already knew that, but it’s good to see she has realised her error, and cometo understand the reality. Now she will humbly renounce her previous beliefsand asked to be welcomed into the fold of the enlightened.

She could just have asked someone, but in any case her eyeshave been opened, which is what matters.

Precisely, that is exactly what motivates most people to getmarried and have a big bash to mark the event. She has finally discovered whypeople get married, and that it has nothing to with the patriarchal impositionof servitude or anything else. They do it because they want to.

No, it isn’t, but we´ll let that pass. She has nowunderstood not only why people get married but also why they often do it inchurch, in a ceremony whose basic traditions have not changed for generations.Except that she hasn’t.

There then follows a list of all the things which she won’tbe doing, specifically so that her marriage will be a special kind of thing,unique to her, not like all those other marriages that is so much resembles. Herreasons for getting married, and doing it in a traditional way, are powerful,personal and feminist. Other people still marry because they are crushedbeneath the jackboot of something or other.

I have a sneaking suspicious that it won’t be entirely freefrom pomposity or smugness, but that would also be a way of making it ‘ours’,so I wish her the best. She may have six children or be divorced by now, but I wishher well anyway. I hope she made her wedding ‘theirs’, and their marriage, too.

It’s just a shame that having been moved, by completely genuinesentiments, to marry and to do so in a particular way, she fails to recognise thatit is exactly those sentiments that move everyone else to do the same thing. Shecould have dispensed with all that junk she learned at University and rejoicedin her new understanding of humanity. But no, her marriage must be special,different, free, unique.

Like mine. And yours.

Of Clocks and a Victim of Time

2011-12-17T21:07:00.000+01:00

The Spanish Royal Clock Collection is one of the largest inthe world, spread cross a number of palaces that have housed the king and courtat various times. A representative selection is now on display at the PalacioReal, and it’s worth a look if you’re in Madrid.

Hildeyard's Clock of the Four Faces

There are two aspects to a clock, the technology and theart. Once the technology reaches a kind of plateau, as it has now, it is mainlythe designers who make a difference, creating attractive and innovative piecesand giving the customers what they want, which is not necessarily the samething.

After the perfection of the regulator in the early 18thC itwas up to the artists, enamellists, sculptors, goldsmiths and jewellers toattract the attention of kings and other moneyed patrons. The result was a considerableamount of Baroque horror, whimsical allegory expressed in thick gold plate, butalso some beautiful and original craftsmanship.

There was a long-case regulator clock with no face, and theclock on the pendulum itself, an elegant, striking piece by the Woolls brothersand the master Abraham Matthey, a beautiful skeleton clock with a heliospendulum and moon phases in blue ceramic, a curious clock on the end of abarrel carried by a negro, with too much gold for my taste, but the balance ofthe piece was perfect, almost like a Greek marble (this was by Michel FrancoisPiolaine).

The star of the show, at least in my judgement, is afour-faced clock by Thomas Hildeyard (a London clockmaker), quite magnificent,and a wonderful clock, as in a thing that ticks and tells you the right time,rather than a gallery piece. Every part of it has function, as well as beauty.

I blogged about the Viaduct of the Calle Segovia a couple ofyears ago. It’s just down the road from the Palace and, as we left, we saw anunnecessarily large number of police cars and ambulances, with more arriving. Therewas potential suicide on the viaduct, the latest aspirant to a large andgrowing association of the depressed, the disillusioned, the disappointed andthe mad. He was between the plastic protective panelling and the parapet. Therewere policemen and paramedics everywhere and more arriving but no one seemed toknow what to do. The police were instinctively keeping everybody back and theambulance staff seemed to be giving each other moral support. You expectedDenzil Washington to sweep in in an ostentatious but unmarked vehicle and foreveryone to suddenly relax. We waited as was seemly, but in the end I don’tknow whether he completed his final act of self-expression, or is lying in ahospital bed being talked at by experts and reflecting on where it all wentwrong. Time, you see, changes everything, but it is responsible for nothing. Itjust passes, we take care of the rest.

The Runway Runners

2011-12-16T22:31:00.001+01:00

We don’t have much to boast about here, nothing much to putus on the international map. We briefly had the best handball team in theworld, but it was sold this summer to a club in Madrid. All we have left is thenew stadium which the ratepayer (me, that is) owns most of and can’t find aprofitable use for. We like to make a fuss about Don Quijote even though henever came anywhere near the place, and we had the National Treasury and the HQof the Inquisition back in the 16^th C, but they were sent to Madridas well. Thus the decline started.

We do, however, have one of the longest airport runways inEurope.*

It was supposed to beSpain’s first private airport (but guess who owns it now). One of the ideasmooted during the long, painful and ultimately still birth of the project wasto use it as a depot for intercontinental airliners that have to rest forseveral days between flights while being thoroughly checked for missing wingsand so on. Parking would be much cheaper than at Barajas. A bright idea in its way, but no one wasinterested. It did get us 4kms of paved pachydermus leucos, though, andthus the Runway Runners were conceived.

Running is a boring business. Good for the cardiovascularsystem, great for making a little room for the weekend beer, and excellent atshowing you how death is more to be welcomed than feared. But bloody tedious.It needs to be livened up. As I discovered by chance, one foggy evening, climbing the fence and running the entire length ofthat useless tarmac with a stopwatch in your hand, pursued by salivatingAlsatians gives it just that bit of spice that makes all the difference.

I had to share the experience, naturally. It’s not somethingyou can keep to yourself, and it’s much more fun in company. So I told a selectfew running acquaintances who were looking for a new challenge, and the RunwayRunners were born.

Most airports do have actual planes in them, doing the stuffthat planes do on airport runways, and they have security of kinds that mostnormal travellers know nothing of. It all takes planning, timing and thecarefully measured assistance of a hipflask. It’s easier at night, and in someways more fun- most things are at night. Whatever the people who plan thesecurity protocols have in mind- protecting the public, covering their backs,exercising naked power, or just having a laugh- the actual blokes in uniformjust want to get paid and go home. Especially the night shift. They put theleaner, fitter, brighter-looking ones on during the day. The fat and hopelesswork at night when they can’t be seen and, let’s face it, no one ever breaksinto an airport, do they?

Until now. Oh, the exhilaration. The tang of burning dieseland the freshly discharged contents of chemical lavatories in your nostrils,the wind from the exhaust of a 747 in your hair, the pulse pounding in yourtemples as for a moment the end of the runway seems to be getting further andfurther away (they are all different lengths and whoever’s turn it is to do theresearch always forgets to tell anyone else, and so we are running blind, notknowing exactly how our strength should be spent), the happy thought thatthere’s always someone slower than you (which is why we let Pablo ‘El Cojo’join the club in the first place, of course) and the knowledge that if thepolice finally get to you they’ll probably treat it all as a big laugh (orpossibly not).

I feel younger since I started the club, fuller of joie devivre, esprit de l’escalier and moules mariniere. I drift over waters of thedeepest blue and seduce diaphanous maidens by the light of the full moon. Theclub has no rules, except that I am the Law. We shall soon go international,intercontinental, and, when NASA finally builds a landing pad on the moon,interplanetary. We have no limits. We can do what we will.

*This despite the fact that we don’t have an airport in anybut the purest technical sense. We have a fenced area with a control tower,flashing lights, terminals, baggage belts, posts for the police and customs tohave a quiet fag between shifts- all the paraphernalia you associate with anairport, and the runway, of course. In many ways it looks just like an airport.But there are no staff, no passengers, and no planes. It’s a model of anairport, very useful if you want to show someone what an airport looks like,but it’s not going to let you fly anywhere, which is the defining feature of anairport, I should have thought.

NOTE: It’s possible that some of the above is not entirelyaccurate.

On Gay Marriage

2011-12-07T07:00:00.000+01:00

Gay marriage is once again a thorny question, I see. Butmarriage is what you want it to be.

The Church of England seems to have a bit of trouble knowing what it believes in. It should be telling its followers the will of God so they don't get any nasty surprises when they die, but either they simply don't know the will of God, and have to make it up as they go along, or they are just one more social organistion jockeying for influence by following a trend and calling it leadership. Either way, you wonder what use the CofE is to those who seek moral guidance. The Catholic Church at least makes it clear that it's passing on the Boss's orders and if you don't like them you can take your chance with Him.

Marriage looks far too much like people giving other peoplepermission to do what they want and to think of themselves in the way theychoose. I dislike the very idea of marriage as a social ritual. Marriage is notabout other people, it is a matter for the contracting parties.

Nearly all societies have taken it upon themselves to ritualize union in some way, and to reserve the right to give permission before permitting or tolerating overt sexual union and breeding, with the consequent restriction of freedom of all involved. The desire of gay couples to have the government determine whether or not they are married strikes me as a bit perverse. Why would they want to have their freedom restricted in this way? Presumably it isn't all about tax or inheritance.

Where’s the problem? It doesn’t fit the church’sidea of what marriage is, but it doesn’t matter. It needs to fit the couple’sidea of what their mutual commitment means and how they choose to make itpublic, if indeed they do. I would rather the state got out of the marriage business and left people to define their own unions. Not everyone will take your union as seriously as you do, but the law can't do anything about that. After all, it is likely to be the one of the most important things in your life, whereas almost nobody else actually gives a damn.

This has got a bit confused and rambling. In short, though I like Marriage as state, at least the way I'm experiencing it at the moment, I reject the idea of marriage as paperwork. I only got married because i was already Married, and should I cease to be Married I may or may not do more paperwork to become unmarried, but at that point it will no longer matter. This post is therefore written from the perspective of one who doesn't understand why people who have never had to bother with the paperwork are so keen to be allowed top do it. I am quite certain I'm mising something; the question is, is that something more than trivial?

Is it possible that we have reached such a state of dependence that we think nothing is real until a government official allows it to exist?

Forget politics and marry your horse if you want to. Afterall, you are as married as you think you are.

Reactions to Losing the Election

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000+01:00

A sadly familiar fact of political life is the far- and not so far- left rattling their sabres and threatening violence on the streets as soon as they lose democratic power.

The Socialist party and the unions are already blaming thenew government for the mess that they have left, and making threates.

http://www.abc.es/20111203/espana/psoe-opondra-calle-recortes-201112031449.html

The leader of the outgoing Socialist party calls for 'opposition on the streets' against the cuts in public spending in Castilla-La Mancha, made necessary by the incompetence and electorally motivated profligacy of José María Barreda, the previous president of the region. Barreda himself was already making cuts, long before his end, as he realised that he couldn't keep his promises, but he was stopping building work, road works and the like, throwing thousands of ordinary working men and women onto the dole. María Dolores de Cospedal has at least sought to place the burden on the shoulders of contracted professionals (the chemists, who are heavily subsidised, have not been paid for months, for example, and your humble blogger lost his cushy little number teaching a course at the University. Hey ho.)

By the way, there is an idea out there that politicians would have to pay more attention to the will of the people they represent if we knew where they had a pint in the evenings. Well I do know where Barreda has a drink at the weekend, we often go to the same bar, adn it doesn't seem to have brought us any closer.

This is the same story in more or les the same words but from a leftwing newspaper.

http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2011/12/03/actualidad/1322911557_071190.html

The communists are feeling puffed up because they've got 11 seats- they were down to two last time, and so the leader draws himself up and calls upon his mob to get onto the streets. It really does sound very familiar.

http://www.abc.es/20111203/espana/abci-consejo-201112031350.html

http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2011/12/03/actualidad/1322913366_169650.html

The workers' unions will join them, of course, and organise much of the dirty work. They know that when they call a strike they are legitimising violence, thuggery, threats and criminal damage on a large scale, but they do it anyway, because they earn a lot of money and get on the TV for doing it, and then they deny that the violence is anything to do with them. I have yet to see a union leader who genuinely knew how to look after the interests of the workers who paid him.

The outgoing government of Zapatero, which has lost and no longer has any legitimacy, has used its last few days (this isn't like England where the loser packs his bags the same night)

This is just politics as usual, of course. None of it will help anyone, nor achieve more than headlines and broken windows, but I suppose it has to be done. It is, like so many things, part of being human.

Open Sesame

2011-12-05T07:00:00.000+01:00

I was introduced to the story of Ali Baba and the fortythieves by a recording from the records section of the public library, back inthe early 70’s. It was told by an American actor with what sounded to me at thetime like a very broad accent, and an exaggerated and inappropriate prosody. Itwas part of a series of what could loosely be termed ‘fairy tales’, which welistened to repeatedly, told by the same man, or by a number of people withsimilar voices. At the start of one of the stories he said, “A legend is astory so old that no one really knows how true it is”, which continues to serveme as a working definition. It also has good metre for an opening line.

I used to hear Open Sesame as open sessally/sesserly, asthough it were an adverb, describing a way in which something should open. But Iwould also think of it as meaning opening in a sesserly manner, so it was anadjective too.

Close sesserly sounded all wrong of course, because it hadthe wrong number of syllables, and because it was too clearly a mixture oforder and password. Open sesserly sounds like it’s all a password (even though Ianalysed it mentally as an imperative + adverb, it was an unconscious syntacticanalysis, and made no attempt at semantic deduction).

Then when he forgot the password and could only remember itwas the name of a grain, I was completely confused because I didn’t know that sesamewas a grain, or indeed anything at all except a meaningless codeword. It wassometime later when I came across sesame seed buns, and discovered that it wasa real plant (though not actually a grain).

In other news, Rahul over here suggests a way of comparing greatTest batsmen. It needs some refinement, so such readers of this blog as areboth cricket fans and familiar with optimization strategies in statisticalanalysis might like to pop over and help out. In any case, it’s a good read.

There isn’t any particular point to this post, nor anythingespecially relevant about the memory, but I don’t know who Jeremy Clarkson is,so I have to talk about something else.

The World Core Curriculum

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000+01:00

It isn’t at all clear that schools as such need to exist,and it is certainly unnecessary for all children to go to school. We may assumethat there are some things, many things, which children need to learn, andwhich a significantly large number cannot learn directly from their families.Which doesn’t mean they can’t learn them at home or elsewhere. The modern worldshould have changed completely the way education is carried out, but a combinationof lack of imagination, the desire of governments to monopolise the minds ofthe young, and the demands of teachers’ unions, have meant that little haschanged. It is simply not necessary to herd children into buildings andenvironments that are often unpleasant, to waste many hours a day throughouttheir entire childhood being instructed in things they do not need to know, andfailing to learn the things they do. Attention is invariably focused, and thelaw tends to encourage it, or even require it, on those children who cannot ordo not want to learn, and those who do or can must educate themselves as bestthey can from the scraps that fall to them.

There is no real purpose to the continued existence ofschools as such. There is no defensible excuse for denying children half theirchildhood for no reason, or for failing to do what you promised to do when youforced them to sacrifice their freedom 8 hours a day.

Even so, the World Core Curriculum Movement is notintrinsically wrong to try to identify the things that it is useful forchildren to learn, but the conclusions they have reached are, to say the least,open to question.

It is clear that they start with the more or lessunquestioned assumption that government is entitled to fill the heads ofchildren with whatever it thinks fit. Further assumptions transparentlyinspiring this curriculum are that nothing much will change in the world otherthan what they want to change, that more or less everybody is soft-left andprogressive like them, and most importantly, and dangerously, that the purposeof education is to make the young fit the role-shaped holes that their bettersimagine they can create in society. They are pure utilitarians, sort of modernFabians. Other than that their list is little more than a collection of all thethings they can think of that children might be taught.

There is no apparent recognition that societies differgreatly in their requirements and possibilities, and that children differgreatly in their abilities, interests and aspirations. There is no apparentrecognition of the fact that what it is useful for children to learn and whatsociety might need them to know are not necessarily the same thing. (If themain purpose of education is to allow one to make a better living, you need tobe educated in the things that are likely to be most in demand, taking intoaccount your own aptitudes, but society changes, partly in response to theeffort, the interests and the skills of the people who happen to make it up atany given moment.)

They matter because they are influential. This is not someinsignificant groupuscle wittering away to itself, it’s being used already.

TETRAHEDRON:

Point 1 -- Our Planetary Home and Place in the Universe

Point 2 -- Our Place in Time

Point 3 -- The Family of Humanity

Point 4 -- The Miracle of Individual Life

Yes, they call it the Tetrahedron, because they’ve split itinto four points. And in the original document there is a tetrahedron drawnabove it in case you missed the significance.

These four points are all very well, by all means encouragechildren to marvel at the universe and our place within it, but it’s only thestart, surely?

If you click the link you will see that the entirety of the Miracle of Human Life section could bescrapped- it’s not school material- and the rest of it is a basic primary schoolcurriculum of the ‘getting to know the world around us” type. Well, perhaps notbasic, but most of it is fairly elementary “who I am” stuff. All kinds ofthings that go beyond knowledge, all the things we acquire this basic knowledgein order to be able to do, the cognitive skills required to use itproductively, and to change the world for the better, are summed up in onethrowaway line that looks as though it wasn’t even finished properly:

Teaching to question,think, analyze,
synthesize, conclude, communicate

The following point I do find interesting, though, even ifthey have chucked it in a dusty corner of the list:

Teaching to focus fromthe infinitely
large to the infinitely small, from the distant
past and present to the future

It is rare to find people who appreciate the importance of avery broad temporal, geographical and social perspective on the universe, sobonus marks for that.

But it lacks imagination and ambition, it focuses far toostrongly on ideas of civics and citizenship, of the ‘know your place’ variety,and it will, I strongly suspect, be implemented by the people like these, andlike those described here. And it’s coming soon to a school near you, if ithasn’t already arrived.

They are planning for tomorrow with yesterday’s ideas, andit isn’t going to work.

La Laguna de Caracuel

2011-11-28T07:00:00.000+01:00

A body of water, about 1200 yards long and 600 across,surrounded by hills, just south of the village of Caracuel. There’s wateraround here if you look for it. Not enough, or not the right kind to irrigatethe crops and provide drinking water everywhere without a great deal ofinfrastructure, but I leave the engineering to those who understand how to doit, pay my taxes (rather grudgingly) to pay for it, and thus have the luxury ofseeing water aesthetically rather than functionally. Only the farmers worryabout it these days, since the engineers and the taxpayers have done their jobwell enough for the rest of us.

Caracuel is a tiny village with no apparent purpose, exceptthat it’s at just the right distance from here to do a bit of cycling to. Nowit’s like many such villages, a good place to come from, or better still, foryour parents to come from. That way you get to grow up somewhere moreinteresting, but you have a house in the country to go to for quiet weekends.Once you’ve passed 30 you appreciate that.

There is a castle on a hill above the village, a small Moorishconstruction that is mostly ruined. It’s probably worth the climb up a leastonce, but is probably visited mostly at night by the young who can doubtless finda number of uses for it. As did the Arabs, I expect.

The lake was covered with coots. Hundreds, probablythousands. Ducks of several kinds, small white herons which are very commonhere, and a few hawks of the kind that like voles and fish and are often foundnear water, but mostly coots. The photo shows this clearly.

We take what we can get here, so collections of waterfowlhave good entertainment value. And the road is hard on the knees, but sweet onthe eyes.

Hedgehog News

2011-11-27T07:00:00.000+01:00

Here we go again. A hedgehog likes to know that his house ishis own, and that he’s not going to have to argue with other wildlife, that thefood and water are there as long as he runs around enough to find them, andthat life will be largely free from the stress that is so damaging to thelustre of the spines and the dampness of the nose. The biped and his mate areok. They don’t eat my food and they go to sleep just when I want the place tomyself. The rabbit tried to get matey but he worked out who was boss long agoand we have an agreement.

But I’d thought we’d seen the last of that lad in the photowhen his third or fourth avatar had a bit of owl trouble over the summer. I wastoo sanguine. They’ve got a couple more of the things and they don’t understandwhen they’re not welcome. They escape and come looking for you, try to shareyour bed, and lie against you looking inanely cheerful. Damn nuisance.

I’m an insect animal, really. Cheese, nuts and chocolate arefine, and the cat food they leave lying around is ok (even though they don’thave a cat- funny that, now I think about it). Biting the heads off smallmammals isn’t my style. We are a proud and noble species, above such things. SoI’ll have to be patient, until they realise that my life is not enriched byhamster gossip, or my human co-blogger finds a way to keep them in their cage.

A Tale of Two Cities

2011-11-26T07:00:00.000+01:00

Aspiring tyrants know that if they give their supporterspermission to kill the people they don’t like, revolution will follow byitself.

Reading ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ this summer, I was struck by theatmosphere of filth hanging about the final scenes in the prison. Not just themoral filth, the sheer horror of evil nobodies using someone else’s abstractidea to gain the power of life and death over their neighbours, and employingit mercilessly, but the physical filth of the prison. It permeates the scenes.You can smell the rats, the sweat, the seeping grey walls, the fear. Youstruggle to see through the darkness that fills the cell, night and day. Prisondramas don’t show you what the places smell like, but I bet there’s a fair bitof armpits and cabbage. Deodorant costs money.

Sydney Carton doesn’t make the final speech, culminating in ‘Itis a far, far better thing...’ It is the narrator, or probably Dickens himself,who speaks those words immediately after his death, imagining what Carton mighthave said if he had the opportunity and the eloquence. Sydney Carton himselfspent his last minutes helping a wholly innocent young woman to approach deathwith a little less terror than she otherwise would, and his only words were toher. They weren’t even half-meant for himself, and no one else heard them, orcared about them.

The last hours, knowing he would only leave that stinkingblack cell to be led to the block where he must lose his head, knowing that heneedn’t have been there, and that neither he nor the man he replaced had done anythingto deserve death, must have been suffocating, filled with unrelieved and mountinghorror. The gesture itself was magnificent. The circumstances of it were vile,colourless, lacking any grandeur. The banality of evil, indeed.

The Hickory Wind

2011-11-25T07:00:00.000+01:00

I am slightly disappointed, though not surprised, that noone has ever asked what the title of the blog refers to. The cognoscenti ofCosmic American Music will know, and why would anyone else be interested?

It may be right, it may be wrong, but it's Rock'n'Roll

Hickory Wind was arguably the most emblematic song of GramParsons, and is a painful expression of longing for a lost past. Parsons wasborn Cecil Ingram Connor and revolutionised both country and rock in the early70’s by writing songs and performing them in ways that no one else dared to do.He was a tortured musical genius (or a self-absorbed trustafarian junkie,depending on your point of view), who discovered Emmylou Harris, taught theByrds how to make real music, taught the Stones how to do country, and died at26 of a heroin overdose (of course) leaving a small but influential legacy, anda musical landscape transformed.

For years I planned to get a tattoo in his honour, but Icouldn’t come with a way of conceptualising the hickory wind in a unobtrusivedoodle. When I finally had an idea I was happy with, Mrs Hickory vetoed itbecause it involved a tombstone and it gave her the creeps. In any case thereis a time and an age for that sort of thing, and I left it behind some timeago.

I have always been a fan of North American music, fromcowboy songs to western swing and Appalachian folk, from Tex-Mex to Cajun andzaideco, from Green Grow the Rushes to George Gershwin, including southern jazzand blues played by old black men on the steps of their house, which is aboutas authentic as music can get. My favourite is the rough, tough Texan stuff,like Steve Earle, Guy Clark, Townes van Zant, Kevin Welch, Terry Allen, and wecan add Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Ed Bruce and George Jones when they allowedto make music instead of money. Gram Parsons doesn’t fit in there, but he was aone-off, like Tom Waits. It’s a million miles from Nashville, and all thatcommercial syrup that has given country music such a bad name.

A Purpose

2011-11-24T07:00:00.001+01:00

"...And so he chose to die. One evening as the sun wentdown over the barn at the other side of the path that bordered the field he waswalking in he decided to die and he exercised his will to that end. It shouldhave been easy. Everything he had done had been easy when he had wanted to doit. He had loved at will, believed at will, swum at will, persuaded at will,run, jumped and kicked at will, learnt, passed exams, won places and awards atwill, thought and understood at will, created worlds at will, exactly as hewanted them...

...At that moment it never occurred to him that hiswill would not be enough to kill him. He was deeply disturbed to find he stilllived, and it was several minutes before he could accept that he had not died.If his will would not act directly on his heart, then it would act on his bodyin other ways...
...there was a tree there and his belt would serve asa rope. He found pleasure in the contemplation of the act, in the working outof details, in the solving of problems. How many times had he asked himself, asan adolescent and a young man, certain there must be an answer, ‘How can it bethat the end of life is death?’ The only end of life is death. At times he hadlost confidence in his question, and begun to wonder if it was not simply so.The only end of life is death...
... having had the insight, he could believepassionately, that the only end, the only purpose, of life, was death. To die?To die well? To die aesthetically? To die bravely? It was hard to know what anyof these ideas might mean, and it was probable, if the original proposition wastrue, that they meant nothing. He could seek a beautiful woman, a good andpromising child, a philanthropic old man, a dynamic and big-hearted young one,and give his life to save theirs. It should not be impossible to contrive thecircumstances...
...Should he seek truth in his death? He couldcontrive a death that would express great dramatic truth, coherent and completein its narration of itself. His death could be great art. An expression of thevery fact that it was the central, the only, purpose, not of his life, but ofall lives. He could die for God, as he had once desired to. He could die forlove as he had once been ready to. He could die for socialism, for nationalism,for freedom of speech, for the right to pasture goats on common land, for anadministrative matter so insignificant and obscure that no one would everunderstand it. That would be great indeed; to die for something which nobodyelse in the world could possibly conceive of dying for...
...So he stepped off the bough, to achieve death. Hisfall had barely started when it was arrested by the running out of the verylimited slack there had been in the belt. His hands, which he had not tied,instantly and without his consent, began to rise towards his neck, but they hadonly moved a matter of inches when the branch snapped cleanly and he fell. Hehit the ground hard and awkwardly, and was unable to stir for some seconds. Thebuckle was closed in the normal way, and had not tightened on his throat. Whenhe became aware of himself once more he felt pain in his neck as from a blow,in his back as from a severe twisting motion, in his head as from a very badconscience, and in his chest as from a heart attack...
...But what was right. A public death perhaps, butonly public because it had to be, not to stage a spectacle. Standing before abus in Trafalgar Square.But why? What purpose was served by such a thing? The driver and even thewitnesses could suffer permanently from the shock of it, and there was no needto cause trouble in that way. and people would think he was doing it for acause, as a protest or some such thing. Perhaps he should have a cause. Itwould delay him slightly but he could find a cause to die for. Immediately hesaw the difficulty. His death was his purpose. To construct a reason for itwould be worse than useless, it would be to recognise that his death was not apurpose in itself...
...He thought of those who had chosen to die by theirown hand, not from cowardice, or hopelessness, or monumental stupidity, butfrom greatness. He thought of Seneca, dying of loyalty, surrounded by thefriends his greatness had brought him. Tom was not prepared to share his deathwith anyone, let alone such friends as he had, but the slitting of the wristswas something to be considered. It was associated with abandoned girls, fallenperformers and overcharged melodrama. That was another problem- he could not bedramatic for the sake of it, but neither could he be melodramatic....
...He thought of Socrates, dying of justice. Alsosurrounded by the friends he had earned, and completely certain that what hedid was right. The story told was in this case probably very close to thetruth. But both of these men had died because it had been decided that theyshould. They had accepted the decisions and so had made their deaths feelright. Tom’s death was entirely a consequence of his own understanding of whathe should do; only his will and his reason were involved... In any case, thedrinking of hemlock would definitely have been melodramatic, and could giverise to misinterpretations which would devalue any assessment of his action.

He thought of Cleopatra, dying of dignity. Her end, atleast as transmitted by the old historians, was far too self-consciouslydramatic to serve as any kind of model, and her reasons were a long way fromhis. The snake might be a problem, too. So wrapped up was he in his thoughtsthat it was a moment before he smiled at this. He thought of Thích Quảng Đức, dyingof, truth, perhaps, his final thoughts unknowable, but apparently clear andserene. His death had a meaning that his continued life could not. His death, whateverit actually achieved meant to him exactly what he intended it to mean. He knewwhy he died, and he believed that he should..."

Why Blog?

2011-11-23T07:00:00.000+01:00

Bloggers often ask themselves and each other why they blog.Why they started blogging, why they continue to blog. What blogging is.

I started blogging because I thought I had something to say.For years I’ve been saying it to myself, inside my head or in notebooks or tothis clever box I’m now writing on. Sometimes to editors, publishers,long-suffering friends, or random people in the pub. Then I saw that a lot ofpeople were putting the better bits of the stuff they were saying to themselveson the Internet and getting reaction. Some had fans, cheerleaders, groupieseven. Others seemed to like abuse, it appeared to inspire them. Some got noresponse at all, and yet still blogged. There is a chap on my blogroll,Cronaca, who I’ve been reading for years and never commented on, because I’venever felt I had anything to add to the post. Neither, apparently, does anyoneelse. I can’t remember ever seeing a comment on a post of his, and yet hecontinues to write about interesting things. Some people should probably havekept their thoughts to themselves, and I might be one of them, but blogging isa form of freedom, and no one is forced to read it. Only a handful of peopleare even aware of the existence of this blog, but I still spend time craftingposts for those who do drop in.

But the question was why, and I haven’t answered it yet. Ihalf-expected, in hindsight I realise this, to be welcomed onto the net byfawning admirers, smitten by the quality of my prose and dazzled by thebrilliance of my insights. Well, it didn’t happen quite like that. When I gotpast the stage of effectively not existing, and a few people started leavingcomments, I discovered that they were not all bowled over by the power of myrhetoric and the strength of my arguments. They did not stand on the sidelinesclapping. They took issue, they expressed disagreement. They pointed out flawsand errors. My notebooks never did that.

So I had to think a bit more carefully about what I wrote,anticipating objections, clarifying obscurity, deepening the research (or atleast doing some), which I discovered was what I should have been doing in thefirst place. Thus I learnt to think a bit more clearly, and to write a littlebetter.

It means thinking more carefully about the audience, whichis the secret of successful communication of any kind. One of my littlesidelines is training people to speak in public (and usually in what is, forthem, a foreign language), and the main problem they need me to solve is how toreach their audience. It seems obvious, but most people can’t easily appreciatethat the audience dictates everything about a talk/presentation/lecture/vivavoce, and everything, the content, style, structure, the delivery, the way youstand, the clothes you wear, the tone of voice, the way you use the attrezzo,including the subject matter of the talk itself, if you have a certain amountof freedom, must be designed to attract and hold the audience. You have to dotheir work for them.

The first and most important question is, who will you betalking to? Often they don’t know, or don’t think it matters. They are usuallynervous about it, and so everything revolves around them as performer, and theyforget that it’s the other side of the communication process that will decideif it went well or badly. Who am I talking to here? Myself, mostly, I think.Blogging is an exercise in talking to yourself as though you were someone else,with the occasional random observation from a passer-by, which may help or not.Blogging is not communication, at least not the way I do it. It has no goalwhich is directly related to the readers, or seeks anything from them. But Iknow that a few people, somewhere, will read what I write, and that someone,possibly, will think it worth adding a thought of their own to.

And that, I think, is why I do it.

In Which I Cautiously Welcome Our New President

2011-11-22T10:45:00.001+01:00

We had a general election on Sunday. In fact it's been going onfor weeks although I've done my best to ignore the more soap operatic aspects,which is what the media seem to be interested in. The Popular Party is going towin an absolute majority, with about 186 seats, meaning it won't have to reacha coalition agreement with any of the regionalist parties, who have their owninterests and complicate the business of government considerably.

The outgoing Socialist party has collapsed, losing over athird of its seats. The Communists have risen to 11 seats, which is a pity, butit was to be expected that as support fled from the PSOE some of it should goto the far left. One thing we can be sure of that Rajoy is not responsible forthe economic situation in Spain, but the signs are that he will blamed almostfrom the very start. And there are murmurings from the unions and other farleft organisations that they are ready to get their thugs on the streets.

Rajoy looks like a human being, and more of a leader than many. Zapatero has always seemed to me to be a monkey put up to lose the 2004 election sartorially. He won it by pure chance and quite clearly didn't know what to do. Of course, it hasn't been him leading the country for the last seven years, but his organ grinders, and that's a problem because you don't know necessarily who they are.

The PSOE is a curious animal. Zapatero is still the leader of the party, even though he wasn't standing for President, and he hasn't resigned yet. It is assumed he will, but it isn't at all clear who will succeed him. I wonder why Rubalcaba, an experienced and reasonably decent type, was persuaded to commit political suicide by fronting the election. Was it really so that Pepe Blanco can become leader without a serious challenge? If it is, God help us at the next election. But these are witterings from the back of the circle. I am not within the Beltway, and will just have to wait and see like everyone else.

The true extent of the debt will be discovered over thecoming weeks, as it was in Castilla-La Mancha and Valencia after the autonomouselections in May, and it may well be huge. Whether Rajoy can make any realdifference to the situation, or we’ll just have to wait for liquidity to workits way through globally, is questionable.

So, for that matter, is the extent to which he will beallowed to act. The EU, and Angela Merkel in particular, have made it clearthat the budget and other aspects of economic policy are a matter for them, andnot for the Spanish Parliament. He has been summoned to receive instructions.

Even so, not much has changed. Life goes on much as before,which is as it should be.

The Commune

2011-11-16T07:00:00.000+01:00

It’s not often you come across intelligent, eloquent,considerate, moderately expressed, libertarian communists but, via a man I readfor his science, not his politics, I’ve come across one. Or probably a group ofthem.

I intend to engage with them, and this post is in a sense abit of throat-clearing, an ordering of notes before I start making a fewcomments over there.

Unlike the spite-filled stupidity of the SWP, the Spanishcommunist party, many trade unions and others, they sound like people you couldget on with, have a drink with, argue deeply about ideas with, and go amicablyon your way, agreeing to disagree.

They are still wrong, of course, despite all the above. And forthe usual reasons. They speak of the obvious and essential morality ofredistributing wealth equally among everyone. But in order to redistributewealth, someone has first to create it. And no, it doesn’t grow on trees.Apples grow on trees, but to eat them someone has to pick them. The picker willwant the bulk of the apples, or at least the option of satisfying himself,before letting others eat. If people have no motive for creating wealth therewill be very little indeed to redistribute. And we know this not only becausewe know what people are like, but because it is observably true.

Who will police this equality? And how will they be equal,when they have power over others? If people had been designed by communists, wewould be very different, and it might even work. Mind you, I wouldn’t like tohave been designed by communists, and neither, I suspect, would they.

Oh, and primitive tribes do not lead an idyllic life inharmony with nature. There is great variety of form and structure, but theyhave certain things in common. Their lives are a constant battle to avoid beingpoisoned or eaten by nature. A battle we have won, to the great advantage ofall of us who live in developed societies. They tend to be very unequal indeed.Women have almost no status at all, and so no rights. If they have adult sonsthey may be accorded a form of respect, but where food and shelter are thedifference between life and death the best is taken by the leaders. Young menare a threat to be controlled. They are in constant and imminent danger ofstarving, being killed by wild animals, or by the neighbouring tribes with whomthey will be in a more or less constant state of war (resources are scarce, andpeople are human), most of them will die young of preventable diseases andeasily curable wounds. Their entire life is controlled by the leaders, who arethemselves constrained by tradition, ignorance, circumstance and the worldabout them, which isn’t interested in harmony. It isn’t some hippy summer oflove. They are able to be as happy as we are, by using the same mechanisms, butit isn’t, objectively, fun.

Communism cannot work. The idea that it has never beenproperly imposed, that Stalin, Castro, Mao, Sung, Pol Pot and many, many moregot it wrong, and that it can be done properly and everything will bewonderful, is widespread, and wrong.

Decades of bloodstained misery in dozens of places aroundthe world have convinced almost everybody else that it cannot work, but thetrue believers will continue to construct an impossible logic to justify it,because rational gymnastics, however complicated, are much easier to performthan the apparently simple act of recognising a belief to be false andexchanging it for another. It’s part of being human.

Elections

2011-11-15T07:00:00.000+01:00

I don’t have a great deal to say about the Spanish election.I don’t have much insight beyond what you could get by reading the papers. Ionly look at the political circus occasionally, and I never watch the TV news. Iam bored senseless with the soap opera that politics has become in Europe. Afawning and ignorant press run to take photos of their idols, and defend themfiercely from attack. News is determined by the image, not by the importance ofa story. Simplistic narratives are created and maintained by reporters who havemade little attempt to understand the facts that they purport to explain to thepublic, and no attempt to discover what the public might in fact want to know.Political journalism has become as lazy and salacious and false as the gossip columns.Perhaps it was always like that. The result is that I am not interested in thepersonalities and the details of who might or might not have meant what whenthey supposedly said, or will say, what to whom, and so I can’t give informedcomment. But I can describe my own experience of the process.

The campaign has as its backdrop the departure of thesitting president, an incompetent figurehead propped up with varying success byhis advisers for eight years; and a very severe economic crisis, with nearly 5million unemployed, a stagnant, illiquid economy, and government debt, bothregional and national, at levels which cannot be sustained even on paper formuch longer.

It is almost certain that Mariano Rajoy, the leader of thePopular Party since 2004, will be elected President, and quite likely that hewill have an absolute majority in Parliament. There is widespread perceptionthat Zapatero made a mess of handling the crisis and his party will pay heavilyfor it. Rightly or wrongly, his hand was on the helm, and people want a changeof pilot. The expectation invested in Rajoy is very great, and he is certain todisappoint many people, but if he can do enough, and the economy recoverssufficiently in the next couple of years (which two outcomes are notnecessarily related) he may be in for a while.

There is no ‘indignao’ movement here, in this small citythat is now my home. There was, from May to sometime in the summer, but it seemsto have melted away. In the bigger cities it seems to have morphed into the occupymovement, and to have lost its original purpose.

At national level I can only refer to impressions andanalogy, but here at least the ‘indignaos’ were not the usual bunch of hairykids shouting and breaking things because they wanted other people’s money.They were mostly young and hairy, true, but their protest was considerate,peaceful, intelligently articulated and directed against the system ofelections and representation, which works by closed lists and public funding ofparties, essentially places all power, and a lot of our money, in the hands ofthe party controller. Thus the councillors and MP’s who represent us have infact no loyalty at all to the voters. They owe everything to the party managerswho decide who gets on the list and therefore who can enjoy a career of posingfor the press at public expense. The parties have even claimed repeatedly thatthe seats belong to them, and not to the elected member (and certainly not tothe electorate), replacing one of their team with another when they resign, dieor are sacked.

The main complaint of the indignaos was that the parliamentsare not truly representative of the people who elect them, and they are quiteright. Not only are they right but they were able to persuade people that itmattered. And they have affected the election. A party founded a couple ofyears ago by Rosa Diaz, a woman who left the Socialist party to pursue her ownpath, is standing, and she, as the candidate for the presidency, is standing,on a platform that doesn’t look very socialist, and instead looks very muchlike the platform for electoral and representational reform that the indignaosand many others want to see. She won’t win, but she might get a seat.

The streets are full of posters. There is a set date aboutthree weeks before the election when the campaign officially begins and theparty workers spend the night hanging their leaders photos from lampposts. Thecity puts up billboards on roundabouts and parks and they stick them there,too. Vans with loudspeakers tour the streets making promises they have nointention of keeping. People you thought you knew hand out pot plants on streetcorners in the name of minor groupings you’ve never heard of. And in a townthis size, one of the newly elected councillors is always a friend of yours whoyou had assumed had no politics worth speaking of and would have been on theother side if he did have them.

That’s the extent of the intrusion into my existence of thegeneral election. The vans you just screen out, and beyond the fact that oneside of the street is blue and the other red, you don’t have to notice itunless you want to. Until they start giving orders, of course.

The Monarch of the Glen

2011-11-14T07:00:00.000+01:00

I have a new bicycle. It’s a decent little bike, the goodside of average, shall we say. And it isn’t little in fact. Your blogginghedgehog is 6’2” and well-built. One of the things I impressed on the chap whoput it together was that it needed to be big, and very strong. When I cycle I likethe bike to know it’s being ridden (insert random Freudian analysis here). Thehandlebars aren’t for resting my palms on, they are for pulling the thing upthe slopes it doesn’t like the look off. The transmission is supposed to turnthe considerable force with which I push the pedals into forward motion, lotsof it, rather than dissipate it pointlessly. I hate the business of whirringaway and hardly moving, like a hamster on a wheel. I go everywhere in top gear(muevo mucho desarrollo, as we say over here), unless the hill is so steep thatit stops me dead. I made all this clear to the bike chap, he absorbed it alland produced a bike able to take all this ill-treatment and come out lookingrelaxed and robust, as though it were me who’d done all the work. If you seewhat I mean.

So I’ve been ‘testing it out’, of course. Today’s ‘test’took me past a farm by an old bridge with a mediaeval mill on it. There are alot of old mills around here (not windmills- Don Quijote’s famous tilting wasn’tfar from here, but where there’s water you don’t build windmills (they’reunreliable, need much more maintenance, and make bad homes and workshops)), butthis one was working until quite recently, and is bigger than most.

All the way out the wind was singing in my ears. Literally singing.If I turned the head at the right angle it would play my ear as though it werea flute, or a Mongolian throat singer. I kept catching snatches of conversationjust beyond my ability to interpret, as though the land were trying to tell meancient secrets.

Anyhow, to the Landseer reference in the title. I had heardthat this farm had deer in a park within it, but we hadn’t seen them when wewent looking last year. There are areas not far from here with a lot of deerbut nearer the town you rarely see any, so I was delighted to see a group ofabout a dozen grazing and generally wandering about within fifty yards of theroad.

There was an adult male, he of the photo, quite animpressive specimen. He was sort of fighting with another, smaller, male, but Ithink it was a play-fight and the other was too young to be a challenge. Thisother male didn’t have antlers, but short spikes like an antelope. In afull-grown fighting male you occasionally get this and it’s very dangerousbecause it can easily kill anything that gets in its way, but in this case itwas just that it was its first growth year.

The pattern of light and shade among the trees, and the factthat I couldn’t get closer without scaring them off, made it difficult to getgood pictures (at any rate, that’s my excuse), but I offer you the best I coulddo.

On the Swinging of Cats

2011-11-13T19:30:00.000+01:00

This is not a Cat

Is it illegal to swing a cat? I don’t know, and I’m notgoing to bother finding out. I saw a mention in the Independent, I think, abouthow some lad who had been filmed by a CCTV camera swinging a cat by its tailhad ‘given himself up’. Knowing my fellow-countrymen as I do, I can believe itwas a major story for days, and not just in the tabloids.

Cruelty is repulsive to most people- and by cruelty I mean actionsthat are performed primarily in order to enjoy the suffering of another-because it is an expression of something lower than the humanity we believe weshare. Something like that, anyway. From there to loudly asserting one’s ownsuperiority is a short step for many people. And from there to the belief that ‘society’(ie someone else) should punish the perpetrator of such an act is a furthershort step.

Should we punish cat-swingers? Individually we can and do.Someone who swings a cat by its tail tells you a lot about himself. Youprobably wouldn’t want to employ him, to have him in your house, or anywherenear your pets, and by extension, your children. You would speak badly off himwhen his name came up, associate him with everything base, damage whatever goodname he might have previously had. In short, you would punish him. But is thereany reason why the criminal law should be involved, other than to express ourcollective contempt for people who swing cats? Is it not, perhaps, a little tooeasy to demand that the law punish this young cat-swinger, rather than have todo it ourselves, as we could, and probably should?

On Eternal Vigilance

2011-11-04T19:13:00.002+01:00

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, as someone oncesaid, quite correctly. But he had the time and the energy to be vigilant. Mostof us, you know how it is, by the time you’ve done all the things you have todo, then some of the things you want to do, you don’t have much of anythingleft to be vigilant with. Just about enough energy to moan about how taxes havegone up again and the government wants to ban short-tailed lizard racingbecause they found someone enjoying it, or to froth a little about what Israelhas done in Gaza, or what Hamas has done in Jerusalem, according to whichevernewspaper we read last; laugh or frown at the latest nutty remark by a USPresidential candidate, again, according to taste/prejudice/politicalpersuasion, the sort of thing we say in the pub when we’re pontificating onworld affairs in the belief that we are experts and that someone cares what wethink. But vigilance?

Vigilance is tough. And it’s not just the time and theinclination. We may cheer on the people of Libya as they finally chase theirbloodstained despot out of town, but we also notice- or perhaps we don’t- that,although the people, collectively, might be destined for a better, freer, moreprosperous and stable life (let us hope so) many individual Libyans have losttheir lives, or their homes, their jobs, their families and the majority haveprobably seen their lives hugely disrupted. They may expect a better future,but the present is difficult and uncertain. People, real people, have lost alot by standing up for themselves. Belling the cat takes courage, and can getyou killed.

In Britain, and in Spain, you can still criticise thegovernment without being visited at dawn by the secret police, so vigilance isa question, not so much of courage, as of energy, effort, study, will and time.And the fact that you can do it without risking your life means that now is thetime to take it seriously, before it is too late. I don’t expect to see tyrannyin either of my homelands in the near future, but the stranglehold which ourrulers*, many of them completely unaccountable, have on every aspect of life isinfuriating, and the grip is tightening. In Spain we have Citizenship on the school timetable (guess what that's all about), and historical truth is decreed by law. I read somewhere (I forget where, sorry) that in Argentina exactly the same interference exists in schools. The real danger starts when theprotection of the state’s existence and ideology becomes the central goal, and there aresigns that the EU is beginning to think in this way. A step on the way, and a warning sign, is when all new laws seem to be created for the convenience of the rulers and their minions, rather than for the protection and prosperity of the people (making it illegal not to fill in a form properly, not to cooperate with the authorities, to possess cash, to own things that can conceivably be used to do harm; responding to every problem not by looking for a solution but by criminalising any action which might require them to look for that solution).

*Not leaders, I tend to find them elsewhere. Offhand I can’tthink of a single European ruler who I would follow anywhere, physically,intellectually, ideologically or morally. I can’t think of a single one who hasever displayed real, personal leadership or physical courage, which is a sinequa non for any leader. Some appear to have a certain capacity to attractfollowers, but then so do Meadowbank Thistle. They don’t inspire me. And theidea of anyone at all following Herman von Rompuy to the ramparts is utterlyhilarious.

Las Tablas de Daimiel

2011-11-01T19:05:00.003+01:00

There is a system of water meadows about 20 miles NW of thetown, locally, and perhaps nationally famous, for the birds that live on thewater and among the reeds.

It’s not comparable in natural beauty to the system of lakeswhere I spend the summer (and which I write about repeatedly), but the wildlifeis more varied, more copious, and more interesting. It makes a good day out forthe kind of person who likes wandering in the country seeking new forms ofbeauty.

Apart from a failed attempt to walk there from the nearesttown, many years ago, when we misread the map in some way I have neverunderstood and got lost in the middle of nowhere without water, and a couple oftimes when I have reached the lakes on the bike but not explored anything, neitherof us had ever been there. It’s a strange thing not to have seen in 12 yearsbut now we have made up for it.

The water is not interesting, at least, not in autumn. Inspring it’s probably much more colourful and fresh. Now it consists mostly ofmad and dried rushes. But there are birds everywhere, and that’s what you go tosee.

There are several miles of woodenwalkways out across the water to the small islands in the middle, and they takeyou through the main nesting areas without disturbing the birds. At least, theydon’t look disturbed by the people constantly wandering past, and taking photosof them. There were storks, nesting in the higher tress, and occasionallystretching their wings to take a turn around the lake. Last week I went to aplace that is full of storks’ nests, and they had already left for Africa tospend the winter. I don’t know why these were still here. There were coloniesof brilliant white heron-type birds, ducks of various kinds, flamingos, mostlywhite, and a large group of younger birds mottled with black. Only one wasgenuinely pink. They don’t get enough carotene in their diet to get a goodflamingo colour. There were geese by the mill and a small water snake trying tohide from something that hadn’t noticed it was there. A beaver rolled around onits back, disappearing under the water and popping up again at regularintervals.

There are many mills on thispart of the river, most of them ruined, but one is well conserved and used as amuseum of all things milly. The floor is mostly glass so you can see the waterchannels and the sluices that drove the wheels, and a collection of equipmentfrom different periods is exhibited and explained.

But it’s the outdoors whichis fun, watching the birds do their thing on a sunny autumn day, as though theywere alone, or do they take an interest in their public, watching us watchingthem?

Calatrava La Nueva

2011-11-01T10:39:00.000+01:00

Thisweekend I have been mostly visiting places I’d never been to before. On Fridayit was Calatrava la Nueva. The defense of this region against the Arab hordeswas entrusted to the Knights of Caltrava (the whole area is known as the Campo deCalatrava and many villages are called X de Calatrava). The original fortressstill stands beside the river a few miles north of the town, and we have oftenwalked or ridden out there to see it. It shows the history of the area in themix of Moorish and Christian elements, where it changed hands several times.

Butthat fortress was abandoned at the beginning of the 13^th C, becauseof the constant fevers caused by the marshes, and because they found a betterposition to defend. The new castle was on the top of a hill, rising about 800ftabove the surrounding plains. Barely accessible, impossible to take, you wouldthink, and an extraordinary feat of construction.

Thekeep is built right into the limestone slabs that the hill is made of, andwhich lie partly exposed at various points. They provide anchorage, and savedsome work on building, which would have been very welcome. Every stone, everybrick, every tool had to be hauled up the steep slope that is the only accessroute. Outside the keep there is a surrounding wall, within which are bakeries,mills, ovens and a little street of craftsmen’s workshops. Lower down a secondwall skirts the hill protecting what was effectively a village of maybe 200people, who lived and walked in the safety of the castle, growing crops andtending cattle on the plain, and returning within the walls at night, or incase of danger.

Thekeep itself is high and thick, the chapel is high, Gothic, simple, elegant andatmospheric. Wind whistles and there is little light. It was probably alwayslike that. The battlements give spectacular views of the surroundingcountryside and hills. You can see the castle of Salvatierra across the road,but it is little more than ruins now. And you could have seen the Arabs comingfrom a long way off. Just like atAlarcos, it was probably a good job, working for the Order, becoming a Knight,living in a great castle with everything provided, walking the battlements whenyou were on duty, enjoying the landscape and the sense of power that comes frombeing high up and near impregnable, chatting and joking with the other Knights,year after year, until the day when you saw, a long way off, the Arab armyapproaching, and everything went quiet, and you knew that now was when youearned your money.

You tell the kids today and they don't believe life could ever have been anything but safe and comfortable.

News and Views from Spain

2011-10-30T20:49:00.000+01:00

The Castle of Salvatierra, Seen from the Castle of Caltrava la Nueva

Things are happening over here in my adopted homeland. Things of some considerable importance, and not just to the politicians and journalists and professional screamers, but really important, to everyone.There will be a general election on the 20th November, anniversary of both the death of Franco and the execution of Primo de Rivera by the Republicans. Whether there was any symbolism intended in this, an attempt to gather a few votes by association, or it just struck the socialist government as the best date, it is hard to say (because they aren’t going to tell the truth, obviously).The centre-right Popular Party will almost certain win, unless there is some major political upheaval between now and them, and Mariano Rajoy, a moderate man, at ease with normal people, intelligent and an unrepentant smoker (still, I think), will become President of the government. It is possible, but by no means certain, that he will have an absolute majority, giving him some freedom to fight the recession in his own way. What he will do with that freedom, whether it is something that can be solved by politics, is another matter.Cuts in public spending, the encouragement of liquidity, and radical exhortations to work harder, we may take as read. He can’t sack any civil servants, because of the absurd nature of public employment here (a system introduced in the 19thC to try to combat a certain kind of corruption- it’s possible it might be in need of review, but who is going to commit political suicide by telling four million people they don’t have jobs for life any more, and might have to justify their wages like the rest of us?)He will not negotiate with ETA. The PP never has, which is why their local councillors became the target of the terrorists in the 90’s and early 2000’s. He will cut a better figure in the world than Zapatero, but he is not of the clique, as he believes in individual freedom and democracy in a way that many European politicians don’t.Zapatero is not standing. He knew his time was up and left the job of losing to someone else. Typical of the man. Too small in every way. He should never have become President, and he wasn’t meant to be, not even by his own party. It was a fluke.The man who has accepted the job of fighting the election is Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, one of the best and most intelligent of the leaders of the socialist party, a man who is capable of not doing cheap politics when the occasion demands more than slogans and PR. If he takes seriously the job of leader of the opposition we might get some decent government in the next few years. I wonder.The parties are largely financed with public money, and elections are by party lists, meaning that you are not really represented by anybody, not even in the limited way that you are in England. You don’t know who defends your interests and represents your views to the government, who holds it to account in your name. Since MP’s are, because of this system, employed by the party, it is the party that controls their loyalty, their minds and their consciences, and as the party pays them with taxpayers money, the divorce from any real democratic representation is complete.Despite which, it works up to a point. This is a free country. Full of petty bureaucracy, worthless people with little bits of power, prohibitions on all kinds of trivial things, permits for things that should not require permission, and the usual suffocating effects of rampant statism, you can ignore a great deal of it and complain openly and robustly about the rest, you are still allowed to possess, to buy and to sell, to meet and talk to whoever you want, to speak publically and privately and to say and do what you want- up to a point- without having to explain yourself to anyone, and that is probably the closest to freedom it is practically possible to get in this world.In other news, ETA have realised they weren’t getting anywhere by murdering innocent people and have announced a ceasefire. They say it is permanent, but they have said that before. They seem to think that they deserve a prize for this, a prize of their own choosing, which we will have to give them or they will start killing people again. There really does seem to be a mentality among the leaders of ETA that they can make demands about how their defeat and destruction will take place. They are already demanding the release of their prisoners (because Tony Blair let IRA murderers out), and expect to be treated as normal human beings, as though decades of bloodshed could just be forgotten.They have made this announcement because they are weak, and because it is politically expedient. They have not come to realize that random slaughter is intrinsically wrong, that you can’t necessarily kill people just because you haven’t got what you want, that they don’t in fact represent any more than a tiny fraction of the people in whose name they claim to act. They haven’t even realised that they are doomed to continue indefinitely the abject failure of everything they have ever attempted, except for the murders themselves. They have seen that more people voted for their area of the political spectrum when they stopped killing people and formed a coalition with a democratic party. They have dimly perceived that they might do better in the upcoming election if they make a point of not killing anyone between now and then.The new President (anticipating events very slightly) has said he will not negotiate with them, and I hope he means it. There are plenty of democratic organizations and democratically elected politicians who genuinely represent the varied opinions and desires of the Basque people. To treat the terrorists as though they could legitimately speak for others is an insult to them, and to everything they have suffered at the hands of ETA.

In Praise of Beauty

2011-10-21T20:09:00.000+02:00

"Miss Josephine Dunbar

Conniston
Lake District

12th June 2002

Dear Mr Elland,

Thank you very much for your recent letter. It is always a pleasure toknow that someone has enjoyed my work, especially a young man like you whomight easily find the writings of an old woman twee and tiresome.

It is an interesting question you ask, one that I have never askedmyself as such, but I shall now do so and try to find an answer. You ask it ofme, perhaps because as a poetess, or simply poet as the younger ones refer tothemselves (I think they are right to do so, but for myself I prefer the olderform) you imagine I am used to finding beauty. You might even think I know whatit is. Let me see if I can help you here.

I have spent my life seeking beauty anywhere it might be found. I havebeen fortunate in having the means to do this but I can say that I have made itthe purpose of my life to find beauty. Or rather I discovered that the onlypurpose I could conceive of my life having was to experience beauty.

The expression of beauty in my poems is secondary. They are almost adiversion, a pastime, enjoyable (and frustrating) to write, and which serve toset down what I have experienced, and perhaps allow others to feel it too. Theymay be beautiful in themselves; they are intended to be. But really what I havewanted to do all my life is to contemplate beauty. It is why I live here, andis behind most of what I have done in my life.

It is not at all easy to explain what beauty is. Dictionaries tend tospeak of that which inspires pleasure in the senses, or cause spiritualdelight. I think it is very hard to define in a way that makes sense to someonewho does not understand it. It is more a feeling we all have in our hearts whichis revealed by certain things at certain times. We can and I believe we shouldlearn to await and expect those moments, to give our heart the opportunity tosee the beauty in something which might otherwise pass us by unenjoyed. Manypeople fail to notice the beauty around them, much less seek it outdeliberately, because they have no time, no freedom of action, of will or ofspirit to allow them to do it. It is a great shame that so many people spendtheir whole lives oblivious to almost everything that would make themmeaningful. Perhaps they do not miss it, perhaps they find other things asimportant to them as beauty is to me. Perhaps they do not think to find areason, but simply live out of habit. I could not say, and I know that it isvery hard to increase the sense of beauty in grown men and women. In childrenit is easier and highly rewarding. I have frequently had the satisfaction ofdoing this in schools or with small groups who visit. They are marvellouslyreceptive to beauty and delight in finding it in places they had neverpreviously thought to look.

Fortunately there are people who feel the value of beauty and want toappreciate it more. I could repeat my belief that beauty is the main purpose,at least of my own life, and I cannot imagine another. Most of the people Italk to or correspond with regularly share this view of life, or this passion,in slightly more realist terms. Were you to become one of them I should be veryhappy to keep receiving and replying to your letters.

You know what beauty is, then. That much is obvious. Trust your instinctin this, because it really cannot be wrong. John Keats said that what the mindseizes as beautiful must be true, a remark I must say I have never been quitecertain of understanding. Presumably he referred to artistic truth, which isdifferent from scientific or rational or historical truth, but equally real inits sphere of application. In any case it is certainly true that what the mindseizes as beautiful must be beautiful. So you may have confidence in your ownreactions. I repeat, trust your instinct.

Beauty can be found almost anywhere. I don’t, I imagine, need to tellyou that beauty can be found in nature, in music, in pictures, in everything wecall art, but there is much more to be found. Found, I say, and I insist onthis. You discover beauty, perhaps where you or others have not noticed itbefore, but you cannot interpret or define it into existence.

It is one of the great things that makes us human, together with reason,speech, sense of humour, and very little else I think, but the ability toappreciate beauty is uniquely human because no other creature has anythingremotely like it. There are animals that learn from experience, all of them toa certain extent, some of them by trial and error and memory of past failures.Most seem to communicate in some way, all social or sexual animals need to beable to do it. Most mammals, at least, appear to enjoy play and to have fun,especially when they are young. We can see the origin of these things in otheranimals, but the love and imitation of beauty has no counterpart in the animalworld. Courtship displays are an entirely instinctive phenomenon, both in themale creator and the female observer, and are absolutely not precedents or origins.(Cave paintings were not done to impress women, and women did not watch thesunset as they watched the biceps of the menfolk. I think you would agree onthis.) Beauty is real and exists in the world, but to see it one must be human,and that gift evolved directly from the human spirit, not from our primitiveinstincts. That is why I think we are at our most gloriously human when wecontemplate and understand beauty. I might also add, as you will have realisedanyhow, that it is in my nature to love it above all things.

Where to look for beauty, other than in the places you know of already?Think about these things:

Consider the shape of a blade of tall grass, or an earof corn, or a branch of a willow tree. Don’t imagine them, go and look at them.Find them when their shape is exactly as it should be, when they are at theirfinest and proudest, when the weather has been kind to them, and look for thebest among them. Observe how the colours respond to the light, how the edgesform lines that are sublimely smooth but never straight, how they bend and swayin the wind, however still the air may seem, how they form groups that move notquite as one, but exactly as they should. Enjoy the shape and the movement andthe sound it all makes. Do not attempt at first to turn it into anything morethan what it is. Do not seek words to describe it or parallels with otherbeautiful things, less still with works of human creation.

(The idea that man can compete with God is a conceitof those who make art. It is not true, I fear. Human art in any form- when itis anything at all, and it is not always- is an expression of somethingconceived by the human mind. The beauty of nature, the art of God, if you like,exists for reasons quite different from those we have for creating things, andwhich are probably beyond our comprehension. They should not be compared, evenwhen one represents the other.)

Do not, as I say, attempt to interpret the sensationswhich arrive at the senses; just allow them to exist as they are. There is atime later for asking why we love to experience these things, and the answerscan help us enjoy them more, but at first you must learn to recognise theinherent beauty. Only we can understand beauty, but it is not a human creation,we did not invent it and we cannot impose it on anything. It is there if weknow how to find it.

Look at the human body. There is beauty- do notconfuse this with human attractiveness, beauty is far more than that- in manyparts of many bodies, in many movements or expressions, habitual or fleeting.Hair can be beautiful, eyes, feet, a gesture. The whole body can acquire beautybecause of what it does, and it can do something beautiful while itself beingugly. (Ugliness is quite as real, and at least as common, as beauty. I think itis obvious that one could not exist without the other.) It is curious forexample, I thought it most curious when I first observed it, that classicalballet cannot be performed beautifully by ugly dancers, whereas Flamenco can. Ihave in Southern Spain seen shrivelled oldwomen with twisted limbs make beauty with their bodies to the sound of a Gypsyguitar. Forgive me the rhetorical flourish. It is a distinction I have neverbeen able to explain, something to do with the distance of the performer fromthe original conception of what is being expressed, I should think, but it isundoubtedly true, I assure you.

There can be, there is, beauty in the shape, the form,the texture, the colour, the pattern of light, the grace of motion, offorgotten parts of the body. Even of parts that a young man like you may nothave the habit of looking at. The angle of a heel, the closing of an eye, theway a smile takes shape, the colour of a cheek, the way a sleeve folds around awrist.

There is in the museum at the Acropolis a series ofscenes from the frieze which depicts the Panathenaic procession. One particularmoment captured is of a young woman, an unimportant part of that procession,bending to adjust or tie her sandal, which has come loose or is bothering herin some way as she walks. The gesture is not especially graceful, it is ratherclumsy, in fact. Yet there is a remarkable beauty in the carving. That beautyis the work of the sculptor, of course, but his skill was inspired by his eyefor detail. He undoubtedly noticed what most would not even have thought tolook for, a fragment of beauty hidden in the most insignificant part of thespectacle. That is what you must learn to do. You may or may not be a giftedartist, the skill of Pheidias is given to very few indeed, but you can learn tolook. You may not have his hand, but you can have his eye.

That last sentence sounds more like a silly old womantrying to be clever than a poetess. I shall leave it in, though, so you knowwho it is that is giving you this advice. I hope you have written to others aswell.

There is a rather absurd notion of found poetry,another conceit of artists, I fear. I object to the name because poetry iscreated, and can no more be found than can art (unless salvaged from an ancientshipwreck like the Venus de Milo, but that is not what I mean of course.) Theexpression is used to mean the chance placing of beautiful phrases in technicalor other mundane settings. They are no more poetry than Coniston is sculpture,but they may be beautiful. It takes a practised eye, or at least a willing one,to see them and perhaps that is why they are confused with art by some. Do notimagine, then, that there is no beauty in the dictionary, in descriptions ofrock sediment, in signs hastily written and pinned onto boards, in thetelephone directory.

(As another little aside, I think what these and manyother possible sources of surprisingly agreeable language have in common isthat they are produced unselfconsciously. The writer is not hoping to beawarded a prize, only to be clearly understood.)

The way the sense respond to the sound of a cricketbat striking a ball must mean that it has some intrinsic beauty, besides beingalmost unbearably evocative to the true lover of the game..."

On the Search for God

2011-10-21T18:42:00.000+02:00

Walking along the banks of the river the other day, and arguing with myself about the truth or otherwise of such thoughts as popped into my head, I was struck by the following, doubtless unoriginal, ideas.

Sciencewill never discover God because one of the axioms/dogmas/assumptions of scienceis that nothing is, in theory, beyond the reach of human reason. God is almostcertainly beyond that reach, being, for reasons of His own, discernible only byrevelation. Therefore the scientific method can never find Him as it hasdefined him not to exist and will always reach that conclusion. It is possiblethat human reason (groping blindly from paving stone to paving stone, with noknowledge whatsoever of and no way to conceive of what might be off to thesides) is far from being the perfect instrument we imagine, and is even createdimperfect for a reason, that it is sufficient for us to recognise and love God,if we choose, and no more.

It is easy to say that there is nothing to suggest the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, being guiing his creation and waiting to judge us when we die, but the mistake that the more vocal atheists make is to imagine that all knowledge must be accessible to human reason. There is no reason whatsoever why this should be so. Militant atheists of the Dawkins/Randi type make rather too much noise, and show up their superstitious horror of anything that lies beyond their ability to discover.

I am a great fan of reason, and a great believer in its ability to provide both knowledge and certainty about that knowledge, but I think it highly arrogant to assume that this rather poor tool of ours- which some wield with great dexterity, it's true- is a universal attractant for everything that is so. Recognise the limits, attempt to push them back, by all means, but do not imagine you can be certain of what is or is not beyond them.

Of Wells

2011-10-17T12:16:00.000+02:00

I mentioned the Plaza del Pilar in Saturday’s post. ThisPilar has nothing to do with the popular female name Pilar, which comes from LaVirgen del Pilar, and refers to a pillar of stone on the banks of the Ebro onwhich Our Lady allegedly appeared in the 1^st C to encourage St Jamesthe Great when he was having a bit of trouble converting the Spanish. Thatpillar still stands, and was incorporated into the magnificent mediaevalbasilica that was built on the site, and which lies at a funny angle because ofit.

Anyhow, the Pilar in the town here is not a pillar, it’s adifferent word meaning ‘spring’. The original village came into being becauseof that spring, and it grew because it was on the royal road from Toledo toCordoba. People would rest at the spring, eat, buy things, stay overnight, andit became a sort of 10^th C Watford Gap.

In the 12thC, after some unpleasantness with the Arabscaused the fortified settlement nearby to be abandoned, the King founded awalled town on this site, more or less guaranteeing its existence, growth andprotection. But old names of the place, and still existing names of streets andneighbourhoods, reveal a lot about the intricate relationship between the townand its springs and wells.

One of the earliest names of the village on this spot wasPozuelo de Don Gil, (Don Gil’s Well). D. Gil Turro was the semi-legendaryfounder. Later it was known as Pozuelo Seco (Dry Well), which is partly why themajor settlement in the area moved to a hilltop by the river about 8 milesaway. There is a street Pozo Dulce (Sweet Well), at the bottom of which therewas once a well of drinkable water. Here it’s common to distinguish betweensweet and bitter wells, which is reasonable enough.

There’s another street called Pozo Concejo (Council Well)where the corporation dug a public well to provide for an increasing populationat some point. It’s long gone, as has the original spring and the other wellsin the town itself, but the names live on, and we remember a little of our historytherby.

Memories of 70's Britain

2011-10-16T21:04:00.001+02:00

I was talking to a friend yesterday and, looking for ananalogy to explain some impression I had of the current economic and politicalsituation in Spain, I was reminded of the case of Britain in the 70’s. Ahugely, unsustainably, unproductive public sector, controlled by the unions whomore or less dictated their own terms; millions of people paid to burn money;an ever-smaller productive sector struggling to pay for it all; successivegovernments full of cowards, incompetents and ideologues who could not, or wouldnot, deal with the situation; an increasing number of immigrants willing to dojobs and accept wages that the welfare state, and general prosperity, have made the locals treat withcontempt.

The role of the Indian and Pakistani immigrants is being played by the Chinese. Although there have been Chinese restaurants in most Spanish towns for over 30 years, in the last few years there has been an explosion in corner shops and cheap boutiques run by Chinese. They work very long hours, have low overheads and no employees, and offer people what they want when they want it. They give their children Spanish names and make sure they integrate, study hard and don't have to spend their lives working 15 hours a day 7 days a week to make a living. It all sounds very familiar.

Because of the system of public employment, devised tocombat a particular type of political corruption in the 19^th C, itis almost impossible to remove the unnecessary, lazy or incompetent. With the problemsthe country has now there is a need for someone to change a lot of things.Mariano Rajoy, despite his merits (not being Zapatero is a good start), isunlikely to have the guts to do what has to be done. It isn’t just fightingwith the unions and losing the next election that’s the problem; it’s also thatrestructuring the entire economy means a great deal of hardship for manypeople. In 80’s Britain the result was that by 1988 it was a different countryfrom the Britain of 1979. Without the reforms, without Margaret Thatcher, itwould not have happened. But for many people it meant years of hardship beforethe change caught up with them.

I don’t see any Spanish government in the near futurechanging the employment conditions of their employees (they certainly won’t askthose of us who pay them what we think). So there will be no 80's in Spain in the near future, but we could do with one.