Tag: Spain

Sunny days and coronavirus

We know that March can have wonderful days. Not this year, we thought. We were wrong. The wind is south-easterly, the sky a deeper blue than we Brits are used to, and the sun is warm, even hot by day, and the nights are chill. Floods are receding, the mud which clogs our field paths is drying out. Should we be exultant? The clocks will change this weekend…

If only. This is crisis time. Coronavirus has invaded all our lives. A time to be anxious, to worry about relatives and friends. If not ourselves. We’ve a wartime, a bunker mentality. We can’t get together to chat by conventional means, so we find new ways.

All those political disagreements, the scars of four years of Brexit enmity, are put aside because we all of us have a bigger, shared agenda.

That may sound positive. But the real world is bleak  For health workers, care workers, anyone travelling by public transport, for people working when they don’t want to, living in towns or cities, built-up areas, blocks of flats, for people who’ve lost their jobs, or the self-employed, people without work or income, relying on promises from government.

Testing kits, ventilators, masks? We haven’t had, and still don’t have, the equipment. Anti-viral kits – available when?

The real statistics – how much worse are the real statistics, with so many untested?

What of the US? Trump believes the tide could be turned, restrictions lifted, by Easter. But New York is battening down. Has Italy peaked? Check the number of deaths there as a percentage of cases. So much higher than anywhere other than Spain. Spain now has more deaths recorded than China.

Reading through the data it is evident that different countries have radically different testing regimes. In the U.K., what about care homes? They aren’t testing their residents – there simply isn’t the equipment.

The available data suggest that France and Germany have far more cases, France twice as many, Germany three times as many, as the U.K. But France has forty deaths per one million population, the U.K. eighteen – and Germany only six. That suggests far more testing in Germany, and a realistic death rate, and far less testing in the U.K., which is indeed the reality. We have far more cases than the available figures suggest.

(The demographics are helpful in contrasting the U.K. and Italy and Spain. In 2018 just 16% of (British) 25-34 year olds lived with their parents, compared with 44% of Spaniards and 49% of Italians.’ (The Economist))

India with only a small number of cases, that is, reported cases, has gone into lockdown. What indeed, would be the implications for a country as open and chaotic as India if the virus took hold? An early lockdown of 1.3 billion makes sense.

Coronavirus has scale. It has entered into very corner of our lives and, it seems, into every corner of the world. We are reminded, as maybe never before, that we are one world, one humanity, open to the same diseases, and with the same capacity for coming together in a crisis.

I try to keep up with wider news. Bennie Gantz being asked to form a government in Israel, though today’s news is that he will serve in a unity government under Netanyahu. The end of Netanyahu?The reining in of settlements? Not yet.

Joe Biden looks odds-on to be the Democratic candidate for president. The opponent Trump didn’t want. And backed by a Bloomberg billion or two. Trump has a remarkable ability to dictate agendas. It may be harder now. Especially if coronavirus heads west and south from New York across the USA.

And what of the USA and China, with their spat over the origins of the virus, and the impact it’s already had by way of expulsion of high-level American journalists from China.

But as for other news, you may search, but you will not find.

When the world does re-open, there will be some big surprises.

Finisterre – end of the known world…

Last year walking the Camino across Spain I put all thoughts of politics out of my mind. I posted a blog when I returned, entitled ‘On being a European’. I had confidence a European and international outlook would win out in the end, whatever the short-term travails. The Brexit vote hit that confidence hard, but walking the Camino Portuguese, and the passing of the weeks, has helped bring calm and perspective. And a shrug of the shoulders – can we really be so daft?

At Cabo Fisterra, Cape Finisterre, where I ventured after Santiago, I clambered down the rocky slope below the lighthouse, and looked out west, over a stretch of ocean which to the Romans would have been at the very edge of the known world – finis terrae. The ocean as the Styx, and somewhere out there would have been Charon, with his boat, ferrying souls.

High cloud patterned the sky but didn’t reduce the sun’s intensity. Mist held to the coast behind me, but not out to sea.

In medieval times, likewise, this was the end of the world, and pilgrims would continue beyond Santiago to Finisterre. In the voyage of St Brendan he sails out west from Ireland and passes over into paradise.

I’ve this fantasy of May, Davis, Fox and Johnson, sitting in a restaurant, at the end of the world (borrowing from Douglas Adams!), having a last meal before they cut ties with Europe and venture off into the unknown. The ocean is peaceful just now but the autumn and winter storms will be mighty.

On another tack, but still in Spain, there’s a quote I like from Gerald Brenan’s classic book, The Face of Spain, about Spain, but more applicable to the UK just now: ‘I do not know where we are going, but I do know this – that wherever it is we shall lose our way.’

And China…. thinking walls, not oceans…. I’ve a sense that the Emperor Shih Huang Ti’s behaviour, as recorded in Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, might just have relevance to our own times: he ‘ordered the construction of the Great Wall and the destruction of all books preceding his reign, so that history would henceforth begin with him and his wall.’

In this post-expertise age, we are in a not dissimilar place. We might just finding ourselves using a new, unknown and very friable building material, not stone, not brick – but brexit. On one side of the wall, the old Europe, and on the other, the ocean.

The EU referendum – which way to vote?

I walked the Camino across the northern Spain last autumn, from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. I made many friends along the way. We walked as English, French, Italians, Spanish, Belgian, Dutch, Czech …and we walked as Europeans. We walked with Americans and Japanese and Koreans and Indians and Chinese … sharing our continent with people from all over the world who had been drawn to share our history and our landscape. The citizens of Navarra, Rioja, Castile and Galicia will I’m sure forgive me for saying that they represent not just Spain but a continent that until seventy years ago knew best how to pull itself apart rather than pull together.

So you wonder why in the current debate I’m pro-Europe, so strongly in favour of staying in? I’m English, European – and a citizen of the world. I look out rather than in, I’d take my country out into the world, rather than putting up impediments and turning inward. (Brexit supporters would of course argue that once out of Europe we’re open to the world. And I’d argue that we might just not get noticed.)

I believe in trade without borders, and a continent open to migrants and refugees. But always consistent with one thing – that we don’t water down what it is to be British – our language, culture, traditions, our way of life, our moral compass. They are our contributions to the world – as other countries have theirs.

There’s a balancing act required, and it’s that outlook I want to see influence policy. Begin with an open mind, and an open door. There may have to be boundaries, as the Syrian refugee crisis has demonstrated. Some crises may seem all but insoluble. But they will not find final resolution unless we have that open mind.

And to take another key issue in the EU debate. Don’t close your borders (physically and metaphorically) and then build bridges into the air, not knowing if they will find resting-places on another shore. It’s those ‘bridges’, as proposed by Leave campaigners, not least the trade deals which in the Leave imagination will be easy to set up, that worry me.

I want to see us walking and travelling and talking and trading as English, Welsh, Scots, Irish – as Europeans – as members of a world community. Much will be at stake on 23rd June.