What politicians say!

Our politicians have apparently been broadcasting Easter messages. Well, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have done so. “Easter is a moment to reflect, and an important time for Christians and others to gather together with families and friends,” said our Prime Minister. She went on to talk about "the opportunities ahead – the opportunities that stem from our decision to leave the EU, and embrace the world – our shared interests, our shared ambitions and, above all, our shared values can and must bring us together.”

This from a woman who actually voted to remain in the EU. But that is water under the bridge now. Alistair Campbell criticised her for suggesting that God would have voted to leave.

Even Jeremy Corbyn seems to have brought religion into the picture, talking about how we need to face up to the problems that face us: "we need to respond to these problems head on, through action and support for social justice, peace and reconciliation. Those principles are at the heart of Christianity. And Christians throughout the world will this weekend be remembering Jesus’s example of love and sacrifice, and the Easter message of redemption and peace.”

I am a little disturbed by all of this. First of all, when did our political leaders start sending out Easter messages? I suppose some spin doctor told them that sending a message on youtube is the modern way of doing politics. And when did it become part of the British way to link politics and religion so obviously. Alistair Campbell is supposed to have said during he Blair years that "we don't do religion".

Will we soon find every political speech ending with "God bless the United Kingdom" and school children obliged tonstart the day with an oath of allegiance?

Meanwhile despite all this religious feeling that seems to abound, a face-off still seems to be going on. Here is a link to an article by the excellent Paul Mason, reminding us what nuclear war is all about.

 Where will it all end?

Counting the cost! And other comments!

Well, so far as I have been able to ascertain, World War III has not yet broken out, despite the best efforts of a trigger-happy chocolate cake lover on the one hand and an equally unpredictable "look at my weapons" show-off on the other.

And here we are, Easter Sunday, celebrating the day the Prince of Peace is said to have risen from the dead.

One news report I came across about the queen and other members of the royal family attending church this morning was much more concerned about the fashion aspect of it all than anything else. Kate used-to-be-Middleton wore a cream coat and hat while the queen herself wore turquoise. Princess Anne's son, Peter, is married to someone with the unlikely name of Autumn. (I have come across a few girls called Summer, so why not Autumn? I have yet to meet any Winters!) She wore blue. I assume that the men all wore sober suits that did not give rise to any fashion comments.

Think how much money went into clothing the royal (sometimes by marriage) ladies for that church visit! There is an article in today's paper about the cost of weddings. Couples are opting for a cheaper day than has become normal in recent years. "Couples are realising that they don't have to spend £20,000 to have a great wedding day", says one wedding blogger (a wedding blogger!!!!) although elsewhere in the article it states that the average wedding costs £30,000! Wow!!! The writer speculates on how much will be spent on Pippa Middleton's wedding dress (wedding next month apparently) since the dress she wore as bridesmaid to her sister, Kate used-to-be-Middleton, cost an estimated £20,000. Wow, again! Some people expect a whole wedding for that! I would expect a good sized new car and some change as well!

But, do not despair! You can buy a wedding dress from Dorothy Perkins for between £85 and £175 and Topshop offers dresses from their bridal range for around £400. You can get the flowers, typically £1,500 from a professional florist (another WOW!) for under £150 from Lidl. They say "under £150" but that is only just under: "A selection of spring flowers, which includes 100 roses, 80 chrysanthemums, more than 160 tulips - enough to make a bridal bouquet, three bridesmaids' bouquets, six buttonholes and eight table displays - is £149." Hmm! Since when have roses and chrysanthemums been spring flowers?

All right! That's enough of that. It's Easter Sunday. One of my neighbours is hoping that no-one has bought her an Easter egg; it was her birthday last week and she received lots of chocolates AND she is trying to lose weight.

A number of years ago we spent Easter in Salamanca, in a small pensión overlooking the impressive main square. We had an excellent view of all the Easter processions from our balcony. Indeed, we were woken in the small hours of good Friday morning by the mournful sound of the funeral march as they carried the statue of Christ crucified past our pensión. The other processions were at a more reasonable hour. I watched the "re-encuentro" where they bring together the statues of Mary and the risen Christ and make them meet in the square, the men carrying the statues dipping down to make the statues bow to each other. Salamanca does Easter well. The next morning, looking at pictures in the local paper, I saw a photo of the "re-encuentro" with our pensión in the background and my good self on the balcony. Fame at last!

Going even further back in my Easter memories, one year we were in the small town of Cómpeta in Almería, a place with fewer inhabitants than some of the large cruise ships have passenger. Despite their small size, they still managed a procession every day through Holy Week, no mean feat in a town where the streets are seriously hilly. They were accompanied by a very bad town brass band and the local madwoman who called out furiously every chance she got. Less solemn and theatrical perhaps that Salamanca and Sevilla but quite spectacular in its own way.

Enjoy your Easter eggs!

Seasonal stuff!

Just briefly at some point in the news on Thursday I saw footage of the queen giving out Maundy Money on Thursday: Maundy Thursday. The whole thing goes back to Christ washing the disciples feet. Until the death of James II, the British monarch used to wash the feet of selected poor people. Then that was stopped and for a good long time now the monarch just gives out money, supposedly to the deserving poor. Who decides who receives the royal gift? Well, it seems that nowadays the people who are chosen to receive the money have been recommended by clergy or ministers in recognition for the services to the church or local community. There you go; I rather thought the hats on display among the 91 women receiving the Queen's bounty suggested that they were not poor, deserving or otherwise!

I see that Tesco has joined Cadbury's and the National Trust in the select group of those who offend against Christianity this Easter. They put out an advertisement along the lines of "Great offers on beer and wine! Good Friday just got better!" Vicar and broadcaster, the Reverend Richard Coles, said the advert was "extraordinarily and unnecessarily ignorant". We should remember and respect what Easter is all about, he comments. Tesco apologised but also pointed out that for many people Easter is simply a secular holiday. Judging by numbers who were stuck in traffic jams yesterday that would indeed seem to be the case.

 On the hill just outside our village every year they set up three crosses every year just before Easter. I am not sure when this particular tradition started. I don't remember seeing them when we moved into his house thirty years ago. But as I ran around the village yesterday morning, Good Friday morning, I found myself in a moment of nostalgia, remembering the Good Fridays of my childhood when I would go to church with my father. I loved those Easter hymns such as "There is a green hill far away". If I miss anything connected to the church I dropped out of long ago it's those solemn, moving hymns.

We would always return home to the smell of hot cross buns, warmed up in the oven by my mother. Why did she not go to church with us? She can't have left the hot cross buns to warm up for the whole time of the service and back then there were no timers on the oven. Maybe she stayed home with the younger children, although they did go along to the Easter Sunday service. It's a small mystery. But all my memories are just of me and my father at the early morning service. And the smell of hot cross buns can take me right back. Proust can keep his madeleines for I have hot cross buns.

Here's a link to a video clip that has been doing the rounds. An extremely articulate three year old has some difficulty understanding why her parents give her loads of chocolate at Easter and, for that matter, Hallowe'en, Christmas, and her birthday. The rest of the time they tell her it's bad for her. Besides, isn't there a big problem with obesity?

I am just astounded at how well she expresses all these ideas, especially her comments about bunnies not even laying eggs!

The question remains: why do we chocolate eggs at Easter? So I did a little research. It turns out that eggs were traditionally banned by e church during Lent. And so, for centuries, Europeans have decorated eggs to give to children at Easter in celebration of the new season. Here comes another memory: my mother used to boil eggs with onion skin in the water so that the eggs came out extra brown for Easter! The Victorians adapted "Holy Week eggs" into cardboard eggs containing small gifts. However, the first chocolate eggs appeared in Germany in the 1800s and have been around ever since. (I have been told that we have the Germans to thank for Christmas trees as well!) And the chocolate egg tradition has spread; I can remember when you did not see them in Spain, except possibly in Catalonia, which has always prided itself on being rather more cosmopolitan! Nowadays, of course, Easter eggs are all over Spain.

And, finally, we must not forget that many Christian festivities were sort of overlaid onto pre-existing pagan festivals. Christmas coincides with the winter solstice. And eggs have always been a pretty potent fertility!

Think of that when you munch those chocolate eggs tomorrow!

Big boys' toys - and other games.

As a form of escapism I have been re-watching The West Wing, a world where POTUS and his employees are idealists, mostly, and talk about fairness and doing the right thing. I've seen the episode where a young doctor is killed serving with the army in the middle east and President Bartlett wants to lash out fiercely and furiously - blow them from the face of the earth - but is persuaded to take a more reasoned and muted approach. He's not perfect but he's striving for perfection and accepts that not everyone has to love him.

In the most recent episode I have seen, an (eventually unsuccessful) appeal is made for the president to intervene and prevent the execution of a convicted man. Various religious points of view come into play: Roman Catholic - Bartlett himself calling in his priest and even wanting to call the pope; Jewish - Communications Officer Toby Ziegler's rabbi preaches a sermon stating that revenge is not the Jewish way; Quaker - a deaf political advisor talks about how wrong it is to take a life.

Toby Ziegler questions his rabbi about revenge and the Jewish point of view. The Torah, he says, calls for an eye for an eye. His Rabbi responds that the Torah also says these things:

A rebellious child can be brought to the city gates and stoned to death.

Homosexuality is an abomination and punishable by death.

Men can be polygamous and slavery is acceptable.

He then comments that those were probably perfectly good rulings for the century in which they were written but not for this modern century. And I found myself thinking about religious fundamentalists, of all religions, still insisting on living by some of those old social rules.

But not only that: I also found myself thinking of President Trump responding to news of a chemical weapons attack in Syria (still not proven to have been carried out on Assad's orders) by sending American planes to bomb Syria. Even as I thought about this last night news came of massive bombs dropped on an ISIS stronghold in Afghanistan. During his campaign Trump said, "I know more about ISIS than the generals". He did not tell us how this could be so but he promised to "blow the s***t" out of ISIS.

One news report I read this morning said:

"The US had sustained an air campaign to eradicate Isis in eastern Afghanistan for more than a year, and according to Borhan Osman, an Isis expert with the Afghanistan Analysts Network, it had already been effective. “Isis was on the brink of losing their stronghold. It didn’t seem like there was a need for such a dramatic military measure,” he said."

So maybe he didn't know more than the experts after all.


Apparently those expensive bombs killed 36 activists. And frightened a lot of ordinary folk just getting on with their lives. What it makes me think of most of all is of someone who had toy soldiers as a little boy and now has the real thing to play with. Real bomb! Real targets! Real explosions! And real consequences!

End note: This is not what I was going to write about today. I had some Good Friday nostalgia in mind that will have to wait until tomorrow. I just had to get this other stuff out of the way.

 And here is another approach to things. A friend of ours is currently in Jordan, working with Syrian refugees, organising chess events. Here's a photo from the newspaper La Voz de Galicia, showing a chess event by skype between Pontevedra and the refugees:

 It's not all hopeless.

Things people don't know.

My phone pinged me a text message at 8.30 this morning. It was my eldest granddaughter, on her way to work on the tram. She had just overheard a couple talking about the Beatles. (Goodness knows where she gets the habit of earwigging on other people's conversations. I rather suspect it might be from me!) At one point they named them:

"John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and ... Harrison Ford".

She's a very music-savvy young lady, our granddaughter, and found this rather amusing. She just had to share it and so she texted me and her mum. I should think that, despite his own fame in the acting field, Harrison Ford would be quite flattered to be taken for one of the Fab Four. It''s not everyone who gets mistaken for guitar-great George Harrison.

I should not mock. I am one of those who mixes up the names of the famous all the time. Or else I simply forget their names totally. I know exactly who I mean. I can picture the star concerned. On a good day I can tell you which films they were in, although it does have to be a good day. But can I recall the name? Not until hours later! This has little to do with old age and decrepitude. I have always been like this. Neither is it helped by having a husband with total recall, one who heard a song and tells you who first recorded it and in which year.

At least the couple who misremembered the Beatles' names did not do so in the presence of the massed press. Unlike Press Secretary Spice with his faux pas about Hitler not using chemical weapons. I could almost feel sorry for him. He is rather like a very faithful, over-eager puppy, working hard to justify his master's actions. He would have done better to say nothing at all in that regard. Instead he showed probably not a surprising level of ignorance - surely he knows about the concentration camps, although he did refer to oddly them later as holocaust centres - so much as a level of thoughtlessness. His tongue clearly worked faster than his brain! I am not convinced, however, that he should be accused of anti-semitism. It was a silly comparison to make but it wasn't really holocaust denial.

He should watch The West Wing and take lessons from C.J. on how to be a good Press Secretary.

And here are some people who don't know what's going on in their lives. A Dutch man and a Spanish woman have lived all their adult lives, indeed one of them from the age of three, in Britain. They have two children, 15 and 12, born and brought up in the UK. The two children have Spanish passports but their first language is English. They both go to school here. Nobody thought there was a problem until Brexit came along and the parents decided it would be a good idea to apply for permanent residency for their children. The Home Office has turned down their application because there is not sufficient proof that the children have lived permanently with their parents. This is a hard one; children don't have employment records and tax returns. But surely there are school records and medical histories.

Who knows?

Fearless girls!

On Wall Street in New York there is a statue of a charging bull. It was placed there in front of the New York Stock exchange by its creator Arturo Di Modica after the 1987 stock market crash. He installed it in the middle of the night without a permit, apparently as a symbol of America's financial resilience. The authorities wanted to remove it - after all, Di Modica never asked permission to put it there - but the public wanted it to stay and so, stay it did.

Now the artist is getting cross because another statue has been erected facing his bull. Called "Fearless Girl", the work of an art is called Kristen Visbal, it is a young girl, hands on hips, chin raised defiantly. On the eve of International Women's Day on March 7th it was placed on a traffic island near Wall Street to make a point about there being a dearth of women on the boards of the largest US corporations. She looks for all the world as though she is challenging the bull. The statue quickly became a tourist magnet. Tens of thousands of people signed a petition for the statue to stay longer and the mayor Bill de Balasio extended the permit for one year.

Arturo Di Modica is not best pleased. He says it undermines the artistic copyright of his statue. Well, maybe it does. It certainly changes the way people look at the art work. But once a work of art is out there in the world - and he wanted his work to be out there - who does the interpretation of that work of art belong to?

As for embellishing works of art, I am pretty sure I read a story about David Hockney and a friend taking pictures of statues with clothes and scarves and so on added. Or maybe I just dreamt that.

Personally, I love the image of the cheeky, defiant girl facing down the charging bull. All power to her elbow!

Girls need to see some positive images. I recently read that by the age of six girls are more likely to believe that boys are smarter than members of their own gender. At that age they also start to avoid games or activities said to be for "really, really smart" children. Here's a link to some information about a series of books aimed at readers aged 5 to 8, aimed at possibly combating the stereotypes.

Written by a two women, Isabel Sanchez Vegara and Lisbeth Kaiser, they tell the stories of women who followed their dreams, women such as Marie Curie, Frida Kahlo, Amelia Earhart and Coco Chanel.

I need to find some for my three year old granddaughter who has already protested about the male dominance of the hero-roles in children's stories. 

A few things about language-learning!

Here is something I came across in one of the weekend papers:

"Singing in a foreign language can help you learn to speak it, according to research from the University of Edinburgh. Lead researcher Dr Karen M Ludke said: 'Melody could provide an extra cue to jog people's memories.'"

So my friend Heidy and I have been right all along. I used to get my students to sing songs in French and Spanish, having done so when I was a school-kid myself. Heidy selected tunes to go with declensions, conjugations and rules to do with word order in German. Learning lists like that with a tune meant that replaying the tune, even in your head, brought back the grammar rule. A very useful tool in a written exam situation. Less so when you need to speak the language. But singing songs in the foreign language helps you get something approaching the correct intonation.

Listening to CDs of foreign songs also helps. You find yourself singing along and learning expressions in context, sometimes only discovering later how the expression is written. When our eldest granddaughter was small and lived at our house for some time, she used to hear songs in Spanish that I played on CD in the kitchen. At three years old she was singing along nicely, totally unaware of what she was singing. Even President Trump's grandchildren are reported to be able to sing songs in Mandarin Chinese! Language classes for tiny tots should be made up of nursery rhymes and counting, clapping, repeating games. They can learn the grammar later.

In the same article I also read:

"Singing in a choir can boost the immune systems of cancer patients. A study by Tenovus Cancer Care and the Royal College of Music found that singing for just an hour boosts levels of immune proteins and reduces stress."

Join a choir that sings in a foreign language and kill two birds with one stone!

In today's newspaper I found this:

Half of young adults in the UK do not feel European, poll reveals.

Survey also finds only a third of those aged 18-30 can speak a foreign language, while a fifth do not feel British.

Here is a link to that article.

I am firmly of the opinion that a large part of the reason why so few speak a foreign language is because of decisions taken to stop making the study of a foreign language compulsory after year nine in British schools. A high percentage of those I taught in AS and A Level French and Spanish classes went on to use their language skills and consider themselves European! Learning a language makes most people more tolerant and accepting of difference. So why cut it off just at the age when young people are growing up to have their own opinions and ideas? What better way to reinforce prejudice and insularity than to say that there is no need to speak anything but English!

Other research shows that bilingual children achieve more in school. Perhaps this because their brains have been expanded by the need to learn two languages at the same time.

And finally, a link to an article about a young lady who stood up to the English Defence League and a picture of that young lady that went viral.

She is probably bilingual and tolerant.