On 26 January the home secretary, Charles Clarke, announced proposals for a new way of dealing with people he suspects of involvement in terrorism, to include a range of restrictions on their activities up to and including putting them under house arrest. These proposals are meant to replace the present law under which non-British terrorist suspects who can’t safely be deported can be held indefinitely in prison without trial, following the historic judgment of the law lords last December that the law as it stands is in breach of Britain’s obligations under the European Human Rights Convention (dating to 1950 and nothing to do with the EU).
In my view the new proposals would do little or nothing to remove the unacceptable features of the present law. Indeed in some ways they would make matters worse. The arguments are more fully set out in my article published in the Guardian on 28 January 2005 and in my letter published in The Times on the same day. You can read both these on my website, if you want to and if you haven’t already, by clicking on the links immediately above or by following the links at the bottom of my home page, http://www.barder.com. They are also on the Guardian’s and the Times’s websites respectively, but the versions on my website have the advantage of links to enable you to jump with one click to other relevant key texts and documents. [nb: since the makeover and redesign of this website in July 2005, some of the many hyperlinks may no longer work. I'm slowly working through them to up-date them; but if you spot any such errors, please let me know by message from the Contact section of this website.]
In a recent email message a friend has understandably misinterpreted one feature of the law lords’ judgment. It’s true that the law lords held that imprisoning foreigners without trial was disproportionate to the threat they posed. My friend inferred from this that the law lords were suggesting that foreigners should instead be liable to other restrictions on their movements and activities, short of being sent to prison.
They didn’t in fact suggest that. The law lords did two things: they scrutinised the existing law (under which the home secretary may detain foreign nationals, but not Brits, indefinitely and without trial on the basis of his "reasonable" suspicion that they are terrorists and belief that unless deported or detained they are a threat to national security) and declared it incompatible with the UK’s obligations under the European Human Rights Convention, on the grounds that it discriminates against foreigners in a situation where nationality is irrelevant to the threat, and because the power is disproportionate to the relevant threat (from terrorism). Secondly, they quashed the government’s opt-out from the Convention on the same grounds, although ‘with misgivings’ they didn’t disallow the government’s ‘state of emergency’, declared in order to make the opt-out possible.
The declaration of incompatibility doesn’t invalidate the law, which remains in force until and unless parliament repeals or amends it. But detentions under it are now legally in breach of the UK’s international obligations and the opt-out from the Convention is no longer in force. The law lords certainly didn’t recommend house arrest, tagging, or any other form of deprivation of liberty for foreigners (or anyone else): on the contrary, they denounced the present law, and in my view will strike down Charles Clarke’s latest proposals if they ever become law in their present form. They condemned the discrimination involved in subjecting foreigners, but not Britons, to the liability to be detained without trial, but at least one of them pointed out in his ‘Opinion’ that this couldn’t be taken as an invitation to the government to extend its application to UK citizens as well as foreigners (which is what Clarke proposes to do), since detention without trial was also in breach of the Human Rights Convention as being ‘disproportionate’ as well as discriminatory. In other words, the implication of the law lords’ judgment was that the whole system should be terminated as being in breach of human rights obligations, not that it should be made more widely applicable in slightly amended form.
The Home Secretary: at least the beard is different! 
Thus one flaw in the present law – that it discriminates against foreigners – is indeed to be cured, not by abolishing detention of foreigners without trial as the law lords implicitly required, but by applying the new proposals to Brits as well, a paradoxical consequence of the judgement since it actually makes matters far worse. Clarke tries to meet the problem of disproportionality by seeking the power to impose a range of restrictions on suspects, depending on the degree of wickedness of whatever he suspects them of planning to do: banning them from using mobile phones at one end of the spectrum to house arrest (plus all the other restrictions) at the other. This sounds like ‘proportionality’: but I can’t see the courts agreeing that although prison without trial is disproportionate to the threat posed, house arrest accompanied by a ban on telephones, the internet, contact with specific people, etc., is not. Both involve a deprivation of liberty without due process: the difference in the creature comforts available as between Belmarsh prison and a two-bedroomed flat in Burnley is legally neither here nor there. But it may once again take two or three years before a case to test this can be launched after the new system has passed into law and has gone through a series of appeals up to and including the law lords or the European Court.
There’s a striking contrast between the mild and conciliatory manner in which Charles Clarke has presented and defended his proposals, and the aggressively populist style generally adopted by his predecessor. This may well help him to push his eventual draft legislation through to triumphant enactment. His motto should be: ‘Suaviter in modo, illiberaliter et magis quam Blunkett in re.’ Moreover, I suspect that Charles Clarke is asking parliament for 120 per cent of what the government expects to get, incorporating several elements that can be sacrificed as ‘concessions’ to be represented as part of a ‘compromise’ that will satisfy enough of their critics in parliament, especially in the Lords, to get the rest of the package through – the rest of the package actually constituting 100 per cent of what they really want and expect to get. For example, I’m pretty sure that they will ‘concede’ to the critics’ demand for wiretap evidence to be made admissible in the criminal courts (which is almost entirely a red herring) and they might even in the last resort give up the house arrest provision, especially as they must know that it won’t get past the law lords, or if it does, will be struck down in the European Court of Human Rights. Even if the government does make a few concessions to the civil rights enthusiasts, this set of proposals ought to be rejected root and branch. It is an encroachment by the state on the liberty of the citizen unparalleled in peacetime and has no possible justification. If parliament swallows this, it will swallow anything. (Yes, no doubt it will.)
PS: I got up at 6.15 am this morning and struggled in to the BBC studios for a discussion-cum-interview on the Today programme on this issue, but the programme turned out to have been beset by various technical glitches this morning, as a result of which it was running very late, and the interview – by John Humphrys with Lord Carlile QC and myself – had to be cut short after just a few minutes. (You can hear the relevant segment, if your computer and internet connection can cope with streaming audio, anyway until the start of Monday morning’s Today programme, by clicking here: it’s about three or four minutes into that clip.) An extremely affable John Humphrys apologised afterwards for the brevity of the interview, and indeed did so on air, saying that a much more extended discussion had been planned. [This clip is probably no longer available on the BBC website.]
I’m suitably relieved to have escaped relatively unscathed over the past few months from encounters with those terrifying Star Chamber inquisitors John Humphrys, Kirsty Wark (twice) and Carolyn Quinn, not to mention sundry other lesser interviewers on other programmes. I’m bound to say that all three turned out to be the soul of courtesy and friendliness. I still await my blooding at the hands of the dreaded Jeremy Paxman.
Brian
29 January 2005
http://www.barder.com
[This piece contains a spoiler, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know in advance what happens to the central character in the film. But in fact it’s completely predictable and indeed it has been widely revealed in countless reviews.]
Mike Leigh’s film about the downfall of the cheerful, benevolent back-street abortionist in 1950s post-war working-class Britain is hugely impressive, beautifully acted (especially by Imelda Staunton as the abortionist, on-screen almost throughout the film) and directed with Leigh’s usual sense of social realism, outrage and humanitarian concern.
Yet the more one thinks about Vera Drake after leaving the cinema, the more doubts begin to nag. Of course it’s impossible to dispute the central message – the cruelty of the blanket ban on abortion and the misery of the desperate girls and women driven as a result to often squalid back-street abortionists at a time when having an illegitimate baby was thought to bring unbearable shame: yet is that message truthfully and subtly conveyed? The portrayal of working-class life in England in the 1950s comes dangerously close to cliché, even parody, taking you back to those old black and white films and television series with Kathleen Harrison. There’s a fatal sentimentality lurking at its heart, isn’t there? At least one person I know, of working-class origins and familiar with 1950s London, thought it patronising, and I see what she meant.
Imelda Staunton as the cheerful abortionist
And the character of Vera Drake: can anyone regularly performing back-street, illegal abortions for 20 years or more really have been so unremittingly cheerful, virtuous, unselfish and high-minded, never accepting a penny for her services, motivated only by the desire to help girls and women in trouble? How could she have continued in these crimes (for that’s what they were) for week after week, year after year, without her own family ever suspecting what she was up to, indeed without setting gossipy tongues wagging that would have led to her arrest and conviction long before the story asks us to believe actually happened? And the actual abortions, shown in the film just as Vera assures her customers they will be: a simple and straightforward procedure, more uncomfortable than painful, pretty well guaranteed to succeed, not involving any real risk. Could Vera’s home-made abortion kit, never properly sterilised, really have been in use for more than 20 years before any of her customers died as a result, leading to investigations which would have led straight to her door? According to the film, it’s only after 20 years of abortions that a customer of Vera’s first suffers a severe reaction to what has been done to her, and even then she miraculously recovers. Pull the other one! Sentimentality again, surely?
Then one begins to reconsider Staunton’s performance. It seems grippingly realistic at the time. Yet it’s actually a performance on only two notes: the cheerful, chirpy, Pollyanna charlady who does abortions on the side in the first half of the film, and then the sobbing, inarticulate, disgraced and ruined saint in the second. How much more moving if Vera’s motives had been shown to have been even slightly mixed, as surely an illegal abortionist’s motives would have had to be in the real world: or if there had been some indication of the inevitable squalor and danger of the procedures she was carrying out! All the selfishness, cynicism and greed involved are cannily ascribed to the woman Lily (played by Ruth Sheen) who refers pregnant women to Vera, “a viper whose mendacity and viciousness Vera never suspects” (in the words of the plot summary in IMDB). More sentimentality, in fact. Abortion actually raises difficult moral and ethical questions which are inescapably complex; here the moral issue is presented as simple. This is a movie that ought to have been made in black and white.
It’s a remarkable film, with many qualities, and it’s certainly not to be missed. But it’s flawed by an all-pervading sentimentality at its heart: not the great movie that it might have been.
PS: A friend has sent me this (fair) comment:
“I don’t really dissent from any of this, but might add that:
1) someone was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 recently who claimed to have known just such an abortionist, who did the deed from humanitarian motives and didn’t ask for any money. We must beware of projecting our own cynical or materialistic values on a period which was simpler, less mercenary and more imbued with public spirit in the post-war era (and I don’t think it sentimentality to believe that);
2) I knew exactly such a cheery, every-helpful, ever-obliging, slightly simple woman in my childhood; she was our next-door neighbour in Leeds (though actually Welsh herself) and I spent about as much time at her house as at home.
3) Mike Leigh’s mother was a midwife, and he must have known about the conditions of the time; do you think he was deliberately falsifying them? Not impossible, and done to strengthen his message – though, as you say, it actually weakens it.
“I particularly agree about the time period. This is so implausible that one has to ask why Leigh chose it. Why not make it 10 years, or even 5? I guess one could make a similar case on abortion whatever the period. On the other hand you have to remember that Vera’s husband was away at the war, her children quite small, and her sister-in-law hostile for quite a lot of that period. And since they couldn’t conceive of her doing it, why should they suspect? Gossipy neighbours are another matter…
“My guess at Vera’s motives, hinted at in the film – but Imelda Staunton refuses to divulge the back-story they invented in rehearsal – is that she had a traumatic abortion herself and consequently felt some obligation to prevent others suffering the same.
“A film which creates such controversy must be worthwhile!”
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
“Traditional grammar teaching is waste of time, say academics…
“…Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education pressure group, said: ‘This research looks like it is advocating a return to the laissez-faire attitudes of the 1960s, when youngsters were not taught grammar…’”
– The Times, 19 January 2005, p. 13
Another lost cause, I suppose.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
As Minette Marrin has tartly pointed out in the Sunday Times of 16 January 2005, the case of Prince Harry and the swastika armband does indeed call for an abject apology – from the national and international press, for their sadistic bullying of a silly and wholly inoffensive 20-year-old boy; for blowing up an intrinsically trivial incident into a huge, world-wide, front-page lead story; for their pomposity and hypocrisy; and in the case of the Murdoch press, for ruthlessly exploiting a minor clanger in order to pursue the proprietor’s vengeful vendetta against the royal family. No more needs to be said about this ridiculous matter apart from commending an equally good and sensible commentary on it in the Observer of the same date, by David Aaronovitch. Like him, I’m no royalist or monarchist; like him, I’m no defender of Nazism or fascism (and I’m not likely to be, with ancestors in what’s left of the Jewish cemetery in Krakow and almost certainly others reduced to a small proportion of the mountain of ashes at Auschwitz); like him, I regard the group of socialites with whom Harry seems condemned to spend his days and nights as obnoxious undesirables. But the media campaign of recent days, internationally as well as in Britain, has been even more odious. On this issue at least it’s time (as the Blairites say of Iraq, with no justification whatever in that case) to draw a line under it and to move on.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
Religion has taken a battering lately, with the disastrous misadventures of that pair of faithful believers Messrs. Bush and Blair, the murderous activities of various Muslim fundamentalists, the success of the Sikh theatre censors in closing down by violence a play which they didn’t want Birmingham theatre-goers to see, and now the demonstration by tsunami that if there’s a God, he (or she) is either not omnipotent or not benevolent, a logical imperative from which the agonised hand-wringing of the media theologians has offered no escape.
You’d think, wouldn’t you?, that against this backdrop the Christian faithful might show a decent reticence in the face of the BBC’s decision to broadcast on television, late in the evening, an award-winning satirical musical comedy, Jerry Springer – The Opera, which has been running in London’s West End to admiring reviews and audiences since October 2003 after a triumphant run at the National Theatre, following equally successful runs at the Battersea Arts Centre and the Edinburgh Festival (its first working draft was performed in August 2001). Not a bit of it. According to the BBC, “[it] has received more than 15,000 complaints about its decision to air the musical Jerry Springer – The Opera. Campaigners Mediawatch UK have railed against the show going out on BBC Two on Saturday because of the high level of swearing. There have also been thousands of complaints to TV watchdog Ofcom.” Crowds of fundamentalists with banners demonstrated outside the BBC studios demanding cancellation of the broadcast. An article in a publication called ‘UK Christian News’ reported that:
‘A Christian activist group, Christian Voice, run by Stephen Green, is organizing the protests to take place on Friday 7th and Saturday the 8th January. With protests confirmed outside BBC London, BBC Birmingham, BBC Manchester, BBC Plymouth, BBC Glasgow, BBC Cardiff and BBC Norwich, the organizers hope that Christians in the UK will send a clear message to the internationally famed television broadcaster that the program is in no way endorsed by the Christian community [my emphasis].
‘Citing a recent large protest by Sikhs, Green, in a recent email newsletter to Christian Voice supporters says "It is interesting that this story should break a week after four hundred Sikhs felt strongly enough about the play Behzti (Dishonour), which depicted sex abuse and murder in a Sikh temple, to protest outside (and inside) the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. There were some arrests, but you have to admire their willingness to stand up for their religion. Is Almighty God sending Christians a challenge?” ‘
Another article in Christian Today revealed that –
‘The Bishop of Manchester, Rev [sic] Nigel McCoulloch [sic], the Church of England’s leading spokesman on broadcasting said, "Freedom of expression is not the issue here, since the show already runs on the stage. On a publicly-funded service channel, my worry is that this outrageous opera is a major departure from viewers’ current expectations, as it is evidently highly offensive material. In addition, I believe the timing of the Broadcast at 10pm, with a trailer Programme at 9pm on a Saturday evening, is professionally irresponsible. At these late times, many older children may be drawn into watching it."
‘The Rt Reverend emphasised, "I have made my views clear to the BBC and, in the interests of informed discussion, have asked if they might be prepared to let me see a tape prior to broadcast. Sadly, they have refused that request."
‘The Reverend joins a growing mass of 15,000 other complainants, bombarding the Corporation with further Protests.’
(The bishop was reported a few weeks earlier as having “spoken out against shops opening on Sundays after his [Manchester] diocese was named the most Godless in the country.” ‘"The temple-like structures of some supermarkets and shopping malls suggest shopping is a new religion," he wrote.’)
After the television broadcast, the BBC reported that “Hundreds of Christian protesters rallied outside BBC buildings before and during the broadcast on BBC Two. At least 45,000 people contacted the BBC about the show, mainly to complain about swearing and religious themes.
Jerry Springer — The Opera
The BBC denied reports that any bosses were in hiding after abusive phone calls, but said unpleasant calls had been received and reported to police.” Around a third of the comments received by the BBC after the broadcast expressed approval of the BBC’s decision to go ahead, and appreciation of the show, the rest voicing varying degrees of outrage and offence. The fact that a high proportion of the protests had clearly been orchestrated through e-mail bombardment and website publicity doesn’t of course invalidate them, although it might suggest some slightly artificial swelling of the numbers.
I thought it was an outstanding production: funny, beautifully acted, danced and sung, with some delicious pastiches in the music ranging from Brecht to Bach, and numerous memorable highlights (who will quickly forget the Ku Klux Klan chorus nimbly tap-dancing in their swirling white robes and pillow-case mask-hats?). There was an underlying moral seriousness, too, which lifted it from the level of the purely provocative: an examination of the moral ambiguities involved in the use of personal relationships and private torments for profitable entertainment while still somehow respecting, not judging, the individuals involved and perhaps even contributing to a resolution of their conflicts. The parody in the first half of the show of the original television programme presided over by the real (British-born) Jerry Springer was splendidly realised, no easy feat when the subject of the parody is itself so often close to self-parody. The portrayal of Adam and Eve, Jesus, Mary, and God, was made acceptable by the fact that all of them were plainly roles played by characters from the TV show in Act I and imagined in a dream. To take offence at these grotesques viewed at so many removes reveals a wholly unreasonable sensitivity (but of course the vast majority of the protesters had not seen the show either in the theatre or on television, and so had no first-hand knowledge of what they were protesting about).
In any case, giving offence can’t justify censorship or suppression of valid material, especially when it is of the quality of this production. Home truths and the provoking of thought will always offend someone. I take deep offence myself at the attempt by the forces of unreason to prevent me from enjoying, and being sharply stimulated by, the best couple of hours of television that I can remember for years.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
‘I was walking along a country lane on a summery July day when I heard a hoarse whisper from somewhere beside the road. I turned back to investigate, and found to my surprise that I was being urgently addressed by a large and hideous toad, whose skin resembled wrinkled leather covered in some loathsome slime, mottled with what appeared to be suppurating green pustules. The toad thanked me fulsomely for stopping, and explained that it had been the victim of a witch’s curse many years earlier. Its life as a toad had been an appalling burden, and I had been the very first person willing to interrupt my walk to listen to the tale of woe. "There is only one way," the toad continued in its distinctive throaty whisper, "that I can escape from this terrible and undeserved fate to which I have been condemned by an evil witch so long ago, and that is a way that I dare not hope ever to be open to me."
‘I invited the horrible creature to describe how it might escape its lot.
‘ "If I can only find a man, an adult male, willing to share his bed with me for a whole night, from midnight until dawn on a summer’s morning, then and only then shall I be freed from this intolerable burden and permitted to resume my former joyful and wholly guilt-free life. But I realise that it is far too much to ask of you, however kindly a person you might appear from your friendly face and generous demeanour, that you should besmirch your bed and spoil your well-earned sleep, not to mention your fine bed linen, by sharing your bed with such a vile creature as myself from the midnight hour until the moment when rosy-fingered dawn–"
‘"All right, all right,’ I interrupted, "I’ll do it, not so much from any high-minded motive but rather because of my sheer curiosity about the resolution of this extraordinary tale." Gingerly I picked up the repulsive creature and dropped it into a plastic bag that I happened to have in my Barbour shower-proof jacket pocket, and, turning back, I made for home.
The Toad
‘During that evening the toad and I had a long and interesting conversation about the French philosophes, on which the toad happened to be something of an authority, and about the quality of the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), topic on which by contrast I felt I had the edge. After a pleasant supper, at which the toad ate some soft-boiled rice, we duly retired to my bed, shortly before midnight. We slept on our sides, turned away from each other back to back, and thus had little if any contact with each other during the night, although I was able to sleep only fitfully, my mind tormented by speculation as to what the morning would bring.
‘The day dawned bright and clear, the sun’s first rays awakening me from my light slumbers. Turning from my side to see what fate had brought to my unwanted bed-mate, I was astounded to find a young girl of about 15 or 16 years, sleeping peacefully, her long blonde hair streaming over the pillow and framing a smooth, pink face of extraordinary beauty. The coverlet, partially pushed back by the involuntary movements of sleep, revealed an exquisite and fully formed figure, quite naked, whose bosom rose and fell rhythmically as the young girl breathed tranquilly in her deep and quiet sleep, her long pale eyelashes resting on her high and blushing cheeks.
‘And that, my Lord, concludes the case for the defence.’
This reproduces as nearly as I can manage at more than 30 years’ distance the story I first heard from Sir John Killick when he was British ambassador in Moscow in the early 1970s. John Killick died recently. He was a good boss and a good friend.
Sir John Killick
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
It’s a common experience that living for even a short time in certain indefinably special countries leaves a deep and ineradicable impression. Even a visit of a couple of weeks to those special cultures or landscapes may print itself in the memory more vividly and durably than months or years spent in other places which are on the face of it no less picturesque, exotic or complex. Those who know the subcontinent (especially perhaps India) at first hand often experience this sense of fascination with it and sometimes a lasting commitment to its people and their culture. China, perhaps Russia, perhaps Poland, can exercise the same pull. Other places will come to others’ minds.
For myself, as for many others who have spent time there, Ethiopia has this quality to an extraordinary degree. There is a freemasonry among old Ethiopian hands that has few parallels. This is especially true of those of us who were in that country during the famine years of the mid-1980s, not just because the images of famine experienced then are quite literally unforgettable, but also because involvement in the huge international famine relief effort of those days was for many of us the deepest experience of our lives: more demanding, more emotional, yet in some ways more rewarding than anything else we have done before or since. The sheer size of the disaster and of the scope for action to save those threatened by it was both humbling and energising: a million or more human beings dead, another 7 or 8 million in danger of death from starvation and disease – a completely different order of magnitude from even the horror of the 2004 tsunami, and far more prolonged. Those who have described the tsunami disaster as the worst human catastrophe in our lifetimes have short memories, or are not yet 20.
One consequence of that famine, filling the world’s television screens and newspaper front pages for nearly three years in the 1980s, has been to set up an almost indestructible association in the world’s mind between Ethiopia on the one hand, and on the other hand those unbearable images of pot-bellied starving children, flies crawling over their eyes, tiny bodies in the arms of dignified mourning mothers, grave and patient families waiting stoically outside the feeding centres in the knowledge that only the few who might still be saved could be let in.
All the more exasperating for those who now govern Ethiopia and represent her abroad that this automatic connection between Ethiopia and starvation is so durable, and yet so dated. Partly by the Ethiopians’ own exertions, partly with much (but not enough) international help for development, partly through the end of the internal and regional conflicts that have bedevilled famine relief and development alike, above all by the substitution of a broadly democratic régime for the murderous tyranny of the Mengistu gang – for all these reasons Ethiopia is now a different country. Of course there is still terrible poverty, drought can still threaten perilous shortages of food, and much remains to be done to enable a proud and strikingly talented people to enjoy even a fraction of the standard of living that we in the rich west take for granted. But for the most part those starving babies and mass graves are a thing of the past.
Evidence for this heartening transformation is provided in profusion by a new website recording in words and pictures an adventurous bicycle expedition
Owen & Grethe near Fiche in Ethiopia
around part of northern Ethiopia in 2002. The two cyclists, Owen and Grethe, write in their introduction: “It is fairly unusual to go on cycling holidays in Ethiopia [an understatement that’s hard to beat]. We planned our own route and made our own arrangements partly to give us flexibility to combine cycling and sightseeing.” The website includes masses of background information and advice for those contemplating a visit to Ethiopia (not necessarily in the saddle), with plenty of photographs taken during the expedition that do full justice to Ethiopia’s glorious scenery, beautiful and colourful people, and endless variety. It’s not necessary to have been there in the days of tragic famine and inspiring relief work, 20 years ago, to recognise in this new website the special pull of Ethiopia, its sensational landscapes, its handsome and capable people, and its extraordinary history. You need to go there, or to have been there, to taste the full sharp bitter-sweet flavour of the place. But you get a definite whiff of it from http://www.owen.org/cycling/ethiopia/ – written, photographed and produced, I should admit, by my own son Owen and Grethe, his Danish partner (and fellow runner and cyclist). To both of them I raise my hat.
PS: No more of these puffs for other Barders’ latest websites, anyway for the time being, I promise.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian
For a couple of years now my wife and I and two of our three adult offspring (hardly ‘children’), with a friend of one of them, have sought refuge from the forced jollification of the English Christmas (those paper hats and crackers, being pressured to hug strangers) and its ferocious costs (special ‘Christmas menus’ from mid-November onwards at £30 a head or more for luke-warm turkey swamped in glutinous gravy) by assembling somewhere pleasant and European-continental: recently Lille, and the much underrated Ouistreham. This time we went to Sitges, just down the coast from Barcelona in Spain, not because it happens to be one of the chief gay centres of Europe but because it’s a delightful place, especially perhaps in winter when its long luxurious beaches are empty, there are few Barcelona day-trippers thronging its shops and restaurants and museums, and yet most of its numerous restaurants and cafés are open – and serving mainly delicious Spanish food, especially of course sea-food, at remarkably modest prices. And no paper hats.
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While the snow was delivering a white Christmas in many parts of Britain, thanks presumably to global ‘warming’, we were sitting outside pleasant sea-front restaurants in Sitges eating prawns and paella and wearing short-sleeved open-necked shirts (or the female equivalent) with hats to protect our heads from the hot sun. And it’s only half an hour’s train trip to the glories and eccentricities of Barcelona.
I haven’t yet got around to putting any of my Sitges photographs on my website[1], but that doesn’t matter because my daughter’s vastly superior pictures of Sitges from an earlier visit are already available on the Web at http://www.btinternet.com/~vbarder/sitges/ (and she has kindly agreed to my advertising it here). If you don’t yet know Sitges, try it – but not, please, at Christmas-time. We want to have it to ourselves again then, in case we decide to go back this year.
[1] Postscript: my Sitges pictures are now here: have a look!
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
6 January 2005
