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September 2001 |
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Monday 10 September We're home again, after two wonderful weeks in Spain. Mary survived the trip pretty well, with only two moderately severe allergic attacks. We are both very pleased about this, because it means that we should be able to plan similar trips for the future. It wasn't easy, though. Mary had a running battle with the hotel staff, who were doing their best to be helpful but really had no idea of how careful Mary has to be to avoid any kind of exposure to chemical fumes. They knew that they should avoid using detergents when cleaning our room, and they tried to mop the tiled bedroom floor and clean the bathroom using only water. But the mops and cloths had obviously been previously used with detergents, and the residual chemicals were enough to cause a reaction. After a few days of this, Mary asked them to stop cleaning the room altogether and said that she would do it herself. This worked fine, and we had no more trouble with the room after that. Meals were not too much of a problem either. It was warm enough that we could have breakfast and dinner outside on the hotel terrace, provided we were careful not to sit downwind of anyone wearing perfume or aftershave. Those are just two examples of the way that we had to be on our guard all the time to avoid allergens. But I won't say any more about that because nobody is going to be interested in reading about it. I must also be careful not to spend too much time drooling over our adorable grandson Tommy, who had his second birthday while we were there. I'll say something about him in the next entry, and also put up a photo or two of him when I have had time to process them. I'll also say a bit about how we spent our time while we were in Spain, and why this trip was tinged with nostalgia because it is probably the last time that we shall be visiting this place. But at the moment I just don't have time for a proper journal entry. There is so much waiting to be done on our return home that I don't know when I shall have much time for the internet. So for now you'll have to make do with this brief announcement that we had a great time despite all Mary's problems, and I'll try to fill in some of the details later in the week.
So 11 September 2001 will go down alongside 7 December 1941 as a day that will live in infamy. What a dreadful start for the new millennium. I hope that this is not a portent of further horrible atrocities in years to come. Like most people, I am still stunned by yesterday's appalling events in New York and Washington. It is hard to believe that any human could coldly plan and carry out such a massacre of innocent people. Almost as shocking and sickening as the devastating carnage in the USA were the TV pictures of people in some parts of the Islamic world dancing in the streets in celebration. It's a sad reflection on humanity that anyone could take any pleasure in such senseless suffering. It shows the depth of hatred for the United States that exists in some parts of the world. But all the Arab political leaders were quick to condemn the attacks. They recognise that such terrorism is always counter-productive. The nearest that we have come to experiencing such incidents in Britain has been the IRA bombing campaigns in London and other cities. These have been completely counter-productive. In fact, if it hadn't been for the bombings most British people would be only too glad to see Northern Ireland leave the United Kingdom and become united with the rest of Ireland. But that was impossible for as long as the terrorism continued, with each bombing hardening public opinion against the IRA and its aims. The kamikaze terrorists in the USA are an even more elusive enemy than the IRA. But whatever their cause is, they can have done it no good by their callous acts. On a personal level, I am relieved that none of my American friends have been directly hurt in this tragedy. But all of us will be affected by it in unpredictable ways, and overnight the world has become a different place. Sadly, it's a worse place than it was before.
I'll say something about our trip to Spain eventually. But for the moment I still have other things on my mind, as I guess most people have. Yesterday, the University circulated this message to all members of staff:
This morning, Vladimir, one of our Russian colleagues, circulated this email around the Department:
Vladimir makes a good point. But what he omits to mention is that these bombings were followed by a brutal invasion of Chechnya (the presumed homeland of the bombers) in which thousands of innocent Chechnyans and many Russian soldiers were killed or wounded. We could do without a repetition of anything like that. With an inexperienced President who seems clearly out of his depth handling this crisis, no wonder people are nervous that the United States will lash out at the first apparent enemy that comes to mind. But trying to counter terrorism with terrorism will only breed new generations of terrorists, as the Russians found when they invaded Chechnya. When Pan Am flight 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988 the British and American governments were quick to blame a convenient scapegoat (Libya) and sent bombing raids to Tripoli. They turned a blind eye to evidence indicating that the plot may have originated in Syria, because it would have been politically inconvenient to fall out with the Syrian government at a time of tension in the Middle East. What happens this time, if the terrorists can't be linked to some convenient enemy like Afghanistan or Iraq? Having impetuously declared "war" against an unknown enemy, President Bush may find it hard to backtrack if the enemy turns out not to be one of the "usual suspect" countries. The Nato powers were equally rash to invoke the declaration that an armed attack on one of their members is an attack on all. So far, all we know about this "armed attack" is that it consisted of 18 fanatical individuals armed only with knives. I'm not trying to belittle the appalling crime that was committed. All I'm saying is that it doesn't constitute "war" or "armed attack" in any sense of the words that I recognise. So much has been discussed and analysed about the week's events that there is certainly nothing new for me to contribute. But for what they're worth, here are my thoughts on the subject. First, of course it's right that all the world's security services should collaborate to track down all the individuals involved in this outrage and bring them to justice. But that has to be done through the due processes of international law, not by sending in assassination squads. Second, it's obvious that the United States will have to introduce the same level of security (baggage inspection, metal detectors) for internal flights that is already taken for granted in most other countries. Third, the myth of Fortress America has been shattered for ever. I hope that the grotesque plans for a National Missile Defence scheme, advocated by George W Bush and cravenly supported by Tony Blair, will now be seen for the useless sham that they are. The Star Wars shield would not have been much use this week. I think it's this realisation, as much as the horrors of the actual incidents, that has caused so much trauma in America. Americans have had to realise that they are vulnerable, just like everyone else in the world. Of course, I'm talking in sweeping generalities: millions of thinking Americans already knew this. But if any good can come out of these dreadful incidents, it will be that America as a whole might come to realise that it cannot insulate itself from the rest of the world. Maybe that's the real message that my colleague Vladimir wanted to convey. Well that's enough politics for me. Next time I'll revert to my usual domestic concerns.
We stayed at our usual hotel in Spain, and for the first few evenings Steve, Jo and Tommy came to join us there for dinner. Tommy was very taken with the bar at the hotel. He has learned to ask for jamón, whereupon Antonio the bartender serves him his favourite snack. When Antonio first saw Tommy he tried to greet him with a "high five". Tommy was frightened by Antonio's upraised hand, so we had to demonstrate to him what was expected. After a while, Tommy got the idea and raised his own little hand to meet Antonio's. Later, I took Tommy up to our room, and as we left the bar I said to him, "That Antonio's a strange man, isn't he?" Tommy thought about this for a bit and then started chanting "Strange man! Strange man!", all the way up the stairs and along the corridor to our room.  Tommy isn't speaking in sentences yet, but has quite a large vocabulary, and he is learning to put words together into short phrases. Beside the hotel there is a parque infantil or children's playground, with swings, climbing frames, a roundabout and a slide. The first evening we were there, there were some older girls using the slide, and Tommy was watching them intently. When he saw one of them at the top of the slide, about 8 feet above ground, he said to himself very solemnly, "Long way down." We thought that he was far too small to use the slide himself, but the next evening there were no other kids in the playground and Tommy ran over there and started to climb it. The steps were almost as high as he could manage, but he climbed all the the way to the top, pausing only to look over the side and comment "Long way down" before launching himself down the slide. Steve and I had to be close at hand, one of us standing behind the steps in case he slipped, and the other one waiting at the bottom of the slide to catch him as he came hurtling down. He really enjoyed this and kept demanding to do it over and over again.  We spent the days at Steve and Jo's farm. Steve has been doing a lot of work on the house, and although it is still very rustic and comparatively primitive, it is incomparably more comfortable than when they first bought it as a semi-derelict ruin. The first Wednesday of our visit was Tommy's second birthday, and he spent the morning opening presents. His favourite was a play house in the form of a little tent. He loved climbing in and out of this, but before long he decided that it was his bar, from which he would serve tapas de jamón and horchata. Part of the reason for our going to stay with them was so that we could house sit for them and look after their animals (one dog, five cats and four hens) while they went off on a short trip. They left the day after Tommy's birthday and were away for a week, staying for a couple of days with some friends near Ronda and then going to further west to explore the country between Seville and the Portuguese border. The aim of the trip was for them to go house hunting. They have decided that the time has come for them to sell their farm and move elsewhere. This is partly because they want to be somewhere where it will be easier for Tommy to meet other kids to play with, but mainly because they have no reliable telephone connection where they are now, and Jo really needs an ISDN line for her work. Until now, the company in Cambridge that she works for have sent her work on CDs, but they are not willing to do this any longer, so she has to be somewhere with good internet links. While Steve, Jo and Tommy were away, Mary and I continued to stay overnight at the hotel but we spent most days at the farm. There wasn't much to do there apart from feeding the animals and cooking for ourselves, but we were happy to spend the days relaxing, reading a lot (more about that in the next entry) and just enjoying the tranquil atmosphere of this beautiful place that we have come to love so well. We did venture out a few times. We went in to Málaga one morning to do some shopping and on another morning to visit the botanical gardens, and we spent one day visiting Nerja (pronounced Nair-hha -- don't make it rhyme with merger unless you want to be taken for an ignorant British tourist). Nerja is a resort on the Costa Del Sol, considerably more upmarket (or upscale as they seem to say in America these days) than the average Costa resort but still unmistakably touristy. Most Costa resorts are either British or German. You can tell that Nerja is for the Brits when you see an Indian takeaway called Balti Towers. (You can't get much more British than that.) But the town centre is very attractive, and there are long expanses of sandy beaches. It was a hot day, and I had an irresistible urge to go swimming. I did not have any swimming things with me, but I bought a cheap pair of trunks at a beachside souvenir stall and enjoyed a long swim while Mary rested on a shady bench on the promenade. It made a very pleasant change from the dry and dusty surroundings of the Montes de Málaga. When Steve and Jo returned from their house hunting trip, they were full of enthusiasm. They based their search in a picturesque town near Seville, where they stayed in a nice little hotel and Tommy had a great time playing with other kids in the town square. They saw several properties for sale, and fell in love with one of them. This is a large old house (16 rooms) in a little village a few miles away. Their idea is to run it as a bed and breakfast place until they make enough money to buy some land nearby for farming. The only drawback is the cost. Even if they make a good price on their present place, they will still be a good deal short of the asking price for this mansion. But apparently that is where parents come in. *SIGH* We'll help them out as best we can, of course, though with the stock markets in their present depressed state it's not a good time to be selling any holdings. But even if they succeed in getting this place it could be a while before the purchase is complete. In the meantime they plan to move to that area in any case, and find somewhere to rent until they can move into their dream house. We're very pleased for them, but we are also sad that we probably won't be going back to the Málaga area again. Although it's dry, arid and plagued with mosquitoes, we have come to love it. We shall also be very sorry not to stay at the Hotel Los Arrieros again, where they have treated us so well. On our final night they presented us with a large bottle of the best local wine. And Antonio gave Tommy a toy snow plough (of all things! - I don't think they have ever seen snow in that area).
Saturday 22 September Book reviews supplement I brought two novels with me to read on the Spanish trip. The first was Kazuo Ishiguro's latest, When We Were Orphans. Like most of his books, it has for its main theme the way that individual lives get caught up in historical events. I thought that this book was less subtle than Ishiguro's earlier work The Remains of the Day. In that book, the narrator Stevens the butler is so stolidly loyal to his employer Lord Darlington that he is blind to the fact that the man is one of the leaders of the movement to appease Hitler. The book cleverly reveals bit by bit the sad truths that the narrator is hiding from himself. The Remains of the Day was made into a successful film, but as so often happens the film lost most of the subtleties of the book. In When We Were Orphans, the narrator is Christopher Banks, a famous detective whose obsession is to discover what happened to his parents. They disappeared mysteriously when he was a child in Shanghai at the time of the opium wars. The narrative cuts cleverly between London in the 1930s and Shanghai a quarter of a century earlier, and for about three quarters of the book I found it very entertaining. But then the story started to get more and more implausible, and I almost lost interest altogether. It was only towards the end of the book that it became clear that the narrator was supposed to have had a fever, and that some of the unrealistic episodes may have only occurred in his delirious imagination. I still found that last part of the book a disappointing anticlimax. It definitely isn't in the same class as The Remains of the Day. But it could make a good movie, and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets made into a film some time soon. I finished When We Were Orphans in about three days, and gave it to Jo, who had been wanting to read it. It was obvious that I hadn't brought nearly enough reading material with me to keep me going for the rest of the holiday. But that didn't matter, because Steve and Jo are both avid readers and their house is filled with books of all kinds. I browsed through their bookshelves and came across Piers Paul Read's book The Templars. I don't know what made me decide to read this book, except that it is a study of a period of history about which I knew next to nothing. It tells the story of the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, starting in the year 1099 when a sense of outrage spread across Europe at the fact that Christian pilgrims were unable to visit Jerusalem in safety because the Holy Land was in the hands of Moslem infidels. Armies were assembled to reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom, spearheaded by the Templars, an order of knighthood which was a strange cross between a monastic order and a multinational military task force. The early Crusades were comparatively successful, establishing a chain of fortified castles which provided a measure of protection for the faithful as they made their pilgrimage. In the longer term the effect on the Islamic world was to unite the disparate tribes under such inspired generals as the Saracen leader Saladin, and the mysterious Old Man Of The Mountains who sent bands of fanatical (and probably drugged) young Assassins on suicide missions to drive out the Christian invaders. Within 200 years the last vestiges of Christian occupation had been wiped out and the Holy Land reverted to Islamic control. The effects on Christian Europe were more insidious, corrupting the church from within. Theologians propounded the pernicious concept of the Holy War. Others preached that the setbacks in the Holy Land represented the Judgement of God on sinners. The search for scapegoats led to the establishment of the Inquisition, and evildoers such as witches were denounced, tortured and burnt to death. Eventually the Templars themselves were denounced and their leaders burned at the stake. The Templars is not a particularly well written book. It reads too much like a textbook, with a lot of unnecessary detail. But the overall story that it tells is a fascinating and sobering one. I remember thinking as I read it that the flames of hatred that were lit during the Crusades continued to smoulder through the centuries. Three weeks later, after the terrible events of 11 September, one can't help seeing shocking new parallels with many of these ancient events. But don't jump to conclusions: I wouldn't want to suggest for one moment that what we are seeing now is in any way some sort of renewed enmity between Christians and Moslems. Also, I'm in no position to criticise those who have rashly used the word 'crusade' in recent days. They obviously have no understanding at all of the historical implications of the word, but then neither did I until I read this book. Still, they do say that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, and I can't help fearing that the modern day Templars who are raring to charge into Afghanistan will end up hurting themselves more than their enemies. I finished The Templars in a week or so, and went back to Steve and Jo's bookshelves. This time, my eye fell on Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind. I know the author slightly, because we were both on the Council of the London Math Soc for a while in the 1980s, but I have never read his book before. It caused quite a bit of controversy when it first came out, in 1989, because of its unorthodox theories about the nature of consciousness. The book is long and substantial, and covers a wide swathe of modern mathematics and physics before the final section where he applies these theories to study the workings of the mind. I zipped through the mathematics section fairly fast, because of course most of it was already fairly familiar to me. Then I slowed down for the physics part, which like the rest of the book is extremely well written apart from one irritating fault. The author's fault is that he can't resist ending sentences with exclamation marks. I estimate that on average there is one of these per page! Sometimes two consecutive sentences end this way! If you read the book really carefully you can even find one place where three consecutive sentences have this fault! This soon gets extremely tiresome. Some editor at Oxford University Press should have dealt with this, but from what I know of this publisher I'm not at all surprised at the lapse. When the time came for us to leave Spain I was still only about half way through the book. But Steve said that he had already read the whole book twice, so he was happy enough to let me borrow it until our next visit. Now I'm reading a few pages each night at bedtime, and I still haven't got on to the controversial final section. But if you want a finely written bird's eye view of 20th century physical science, I can strongly recommend The Emperor's New Mind.
The past week has been difficult. As soon as the weather started to get colder and the heating came on, Mary found that she was getting severe allergic reactions from the radiators - not just the usual pains and tightness in the chest, but stomach cramps and panic attacks which left her feeling depressed and sometimes suicidal. We don't know what can be causing this. It could be paint fumes from the hot radiators (although none of them have been painted for years) or dust being stirred up by convection, or maybe the radiators somehow ionise the atmosphere. We have had to turn the central heating right down and experiment with other forms of heating like electric fan heaters. Even so, she is still suffering from some kind of reaction most of the time. If we can't find some way round this problem, the only alternatives would be for us to move house (but neither of us wants to leave this house, and in any case there's no guarantee that anywhere else would be any better), or for Mary to spend the winters in some warmer climate. We have had vague plans for a long time that when I retire we might look for a little place in Spain near Steve and Jo, and spend the winters there. But it now looks as though Mary may have to start doing that sooner than we had planned, even if it means us having to live apart for part of the year. We have already arranged to go to the Canary Isles for a couple of weeks in January, as we have done for the past two years, and we're looking into the possibility of Mary staying on there for a couple of months after I leave. I don't like the idea of having to live on my own. That's something I have never had to do before. I may be a natural loner and call myself lobo solo, but when it comes to the crunch I don't relish the prospect of being genuinely alone for such a long period. Mary likes the idea even less than I do, but if she can have some respite from whatever it is that it making her ill then that is something that she has to try. The problem with the heating is a real setback, because until last week it looked as though the desensitising injections were starting to have some effect, and the allergies and chemical sensitivities were beginning to improve. Mary went for a scheduled visit to the allergy clinic yesterday for further tests, and they told her that some other people have had this trouble with central heating systems and there doesn't seem to be any known cure for it. It's all very depressing. Meanwhile things are busy at work. Term starts next week and I have a new course to teach, and I also have to be in London on four of the next seven days. I'll go there tomorrow and stay overnight, coming back on Friday and then going again on Tuesday to stay overnight again. So you won't be hearing from me for a bit. I hope that the next entry will be a bit more cheerful.
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P B Shelley, Hellas