Degrees of Separation

   

 

The film of the catastrophic flash flood in Nepal is horrific, and the likely casualty rate is likely to be high, so many people are still unaccounted for.  The immediacy of the films brings home the casual brutality of Nature, and the ease with which a whole way of life can be brushed aside in moments.  But this is a disaster in Nepal, a far distant country from my placid residence next to the Med in Castelldefels.

     That ‘distance’ was obliterated when I greeted a friend after completing my morning swim.  I asked after his ‘aches and pains’ as he has been having muscular trouble, but he rejected my questions and asked if I had seen the film of the flood.  I told him I had and he then told me that this was a place he knew.  He had worked there, he knew people who lived there, he had seen pictures of a building that had been his administrative centre being destroyed in images that he had been sent which had not been seen on TV.

     Suddenly, a distant disaster was humanized and localized, I was speaking to someone who had knowledge of and a stake in what had been lost.

     Life goes on.  He was, after all, preparing to have a swim, as he does most days, but his mind was not centred on getting a good lane in the pool to himself.  It was a long way away.

     This event has forced my mind back to something more local, the Valencia DANA (Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos), an isolated high-impact depression, which is a meteorological phenomenon characterized by extreme weather events, particularly in regions like the Mediterranean Sea basin.

     An abstract from a report by members of the University of Valencia sums up the disaster:

 

The unprecedented DANA floods that struck Valencia, Spain on October 29, 2024, caused catastrophic human, economic, and ecological damages, resulting in 223 fatalities, the displacement of 15,000 residents, and long-term health and environmental consequences and incurred financial losses estimated over 50 billion euros. Vulnerabilities in urban planning, ambiguous command and control oversight, delayed warnings, and insufficient preparedness underscored systemic gaps in the flood preparedness and management.

 

     The key concepts are found in the last sentence, and the apportioning of blame is ongoing.  The President of Valencia, Carlos Mazón, was widely condemned for his lack of urgency in the early stages of the disaster, but he took over a year ignoring repeated calls for him to go, for him finally to resign.

     In the immediate aftermath of a disaster attention is rightly focussed on rescue and reconstruction.  But almost as important are the efforts made to understand exactly what occurred, and how the disaster was dealt with, in other words, looking for lessons to try and ensure that the disaster is not repeated.

     In the case of the DANA in Valencia, politics and self-interest have complicated the issues.  In extraordinary scenes on November 3^rd, a few days after the tragedy, the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by high-ranking officials were pelted with mud and met with cries of “Murderers!” when they visited Paiporta, one of the municipalities worst affected by the floods.

     In May in 2025 a delegation of family member victims of the DANA went to the EU in Brussels to demand truth, justice and accountability as they felt that the response of the administration in Valencia and in Madrid had been wholly inadequate.  They stressed that they were there, “not for revenge, but for truth and justice.”  One of their leaders said, “We are not here out of pity.  We are here because we have the right to know why our children, parents, siblings died, and to know who had the duty to protect them and failed.”

     In the Grenfell tower disaster, I am reminded of Conservative peer, Lord Pickles, who, when he was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, his department was directly responsible for housing policy, building regulation and fire safety guidance.  In Cameron’s government, Pickles enthusiastically championed a “one in, one out” (and later “one in, two out”) rule to slash building regulations and bureaucracy, thus compromising officials from tightening laws on combustible building materials.

     While he was being questioned, giving evidence in the Inquiry, he suggested that the Inquiry’s senior counsel should speed up his questioning because had had important afternoon meetings planned.  An astonishing piece of disrespect, though a revealing insight into his assumed importance.

     The final report of the inquiry he was heavily criticized.  He is still a member of the House of Lords and The Conservative Party.

     Too often there is no real end to a disaster.  Lives are lost, destruction is widespread and things are never really the same again.  And to make matters worse, the follow up in trying to understand what happened and why is too often muddied by politics, money and self-interest.

     The probable cause of the flash flood in Nepal was the lower part of a Himalayan glacier breaking off and crashing hundreds of meters onto the valley floor.  The massive impact generated ground energy equivalent to a 5.2-magnitude earthquake.  As the giant cascade of ice, mud, and rock raced down the steep valley, friction heating melted large volumes of the ice into water.  The debris temporarily blocked local rivers creating an intense buildup of water and sediment that catastrophically burst downstream as a high-speed flash flood.

     Why this happened may well include the fact that the event coincided with the monsoon season, meaning surrounding sediment and soil were already waterlogged and easily swept up.  Climate change means that the rising temperatures in the Himalayan region can destabilize glaciers and weaken mountain rock, leading to such extreme ice avalanches.

     Explanation.  Reconstruction.  Prevention.  Easy words to type, it remains to be seen how the authorities and the world respond.

    

    

First steps!

My third week out of hospital and my first walks outside the house and my first trips to the local shops in the car!

It is a sign of how limiting the thrombosis and embolism are that such ‘easy’ actions I now regard as worthy of note.  Yesterday, with all the confidence of an idiot, I did rather too much and today I am aware that I did so.  I cannot say, in all truthfulness that I am actually suffering, but I am sitting down and biding my time before another foray into the lairs of commercialism!

I have not been idle in these last few weeks and have been working on the notes that I made during my stay in hospital and have worked them up into a series of poems that are part of my new chapbook called, “A Point of Blue”.

This chapbook comprises not only the dozen or so poems directly related to my stay (including one about the flowers that I was given!) but also half a dozen prose pieces to accompany them.  I have also included ‘drawings’ that I did on my reMarkable tablet that may be, “little more than glorified doodles” but they also, “come as near as I am ever going to get to some form of non-literary meditation”.  High-sounding words!  But this collection is best described as “a wry mixture of prose poetry and ‘drawings’” where, in spite of the seriousness of the condition, I am still able to get some humour out of the situation!

The chapbook is in process of being published and will have an ISBN number and will be one sale at €5 in the Euro zone and £5 in the UK.

I am pleased with how this chapbook has turned out and I am looking forward to comments about the content!

Next week will be a significant one for me as I intend to go to the opera.  The next opera in my season ticket is Romeo and Juliette by Gounod.  I have never seen this opera, although I know one or two of the arias, and I do not intend to let this opportunity slip!  I have book an hotel room for a night in Barcelona and the walk to the Liceu is very short.  We will have to see how it goes.  The only problem is that I have to inject myself at 9.00pm and that might be a little disconcerting for the audience if I do it during the performance!

Meanwhile the political situation in Spain becomes ever more murky.  On the television today there are scenes of pensioners throughout the country protesting and demonstrating about the derisory 0.25% increase – well below the rate of inflation, for yet another year – while the political fall out from the various corruption trials for members of the right wing minority government of PP continue to shock. 

It is becoming even clearer that the party is systemically corrupt and the frankly disgusting antics of the leader of Cs as he expresses his shock and distaste for the party that his group of sluttish politicos helped elect to government, masks the fact that the dyed in the wool sheer badness of PP was abundantly clear to even the most politically inept neophyte when his bunch of opportunistic riffraff voted for them.

More and more of the people who are in the courts being processed through the glacially slow judicial system are singing and implicating all the top echelon of PP.  The latest phase of this farce is the ex-treasurer of PP (all of the treasurers of PP in the history of the party have been accused of malpractice – and I’m using that word because they have not yet been sentenced and put in the prison that they richly deserve) has given evidence in the Valencia parliament about the funding of a past PP campaign.  As the national treasurer he has asserted that he no knowledge or control over the finances of the regional PP in Valencia.  In other words, he has thrown the past PP politicos in Valencia under the proverbial bus and washed his hands of a responsibility that you might, possibly have expected a national treasurer to have some knowledge about.  Especially as the campaign was such a major part of the national campaign and all the political leaders of PP were there to soak up the paid-for adulation!

In spite of the overwhelming evidence of corruption, I have no real expectation that any of the major political characters in PP will resign or have judgements (official judgements that is, in the court of public opinion they are guilty as sin!) against them. 

But, as always I live in hope and always believe that justice, will, eventually triumph.

The people have decided? Again!

Although still bitter about the fact that 52% of those who bothered to vote decided that Brexit was a sensible solution to the perceived problems of a massively wealthy country with a privileged relationship with the largest trading partnership in the world – I can at least see that a distant professional political class linked to obvious disparity in the distribution of wealth and the completely unscrupulous campaign of a group of post-truth ruthlessly selfish, self-seeking political opportunists might offer some sort of explanation for what appears (still) to be a collective decision to shoot whatever feet were available to view.

            If I hear another person say something to the effect that, “Things are not as bad as those who said we would really suffer when we left the EU are they?” just once again.  I will scream. 

            May I point out that we have not actually left the EU?  We are still full members of that organization, though we now appear not to go to certain meetings, allowing the French and Germans to decide whatever is best for their own interests.  We have not left.  That is years in the future.  A future completely and utterly unsafe in the conspiratorial hands of an unelected Prime Minister of a Party that  . . .  well, you can see the way that this rant is going.  And the point I want to make is not about the UK but my adopted country of Spain.

            The Conservatives, you will not be surprised to learn, is not my party of choice.  I have veered in my life between utter contempt for the Conservative Party (it was a real effort for me to give the title of such a beggared organization capital letters) to downright loathing.

            

     At the moment I tend more to the latter than the former.  It is difficult to feel anything remotely positive about an unelected Prime Minister who presents her choice of Foreign Secretary as anything than a joke in poor taste and, further, who expects to be taken seriously when she suddenly pulls the emaciated and ossified corpse of the rabbit of the reintroduction of grammar schools from the cesspit of unthinking Tory appeasement.  And that is enough of a mixed metaphor to be going on with.

            Just a reminder about the subject of this diatribe – which is Spain. 

            However, just before we get to that country, I would like to make a link between this ‘policy’ suggestion of the re-introduction of grammar schools and the Anglican Church.  As an Anglican Atheist myself, I feel a certain nostalgic concern for the doings of the Church and I am always fascinated by Religion.  There are important concerns that religion attempts to wrestle with and believers and non-believers can gain from studying the way that the Church has struggled with some of the major philosophical and social questions since its institution.  It has thought long and hard and Church thinkers have contributed to the intellectual development of our civilization.  It is therefore all the more frustrating that sizeable sections of the modern church find challenges like social and political inequality too difficult to cope with and so turn to ‘easy’ questions to which there appear to be equally ‘easy’ answers.

            If you find that church leaders are attempting to find ways to challenge the vested interests of the status quo, the easiest way to unsettle their socialist tendencies is to raise the twin concerns which are guaranteed to act in the same way as the chorus of sheep in Animal Farm who chanted, “Four legs good; two legs bad!” as soon as any other animal challenged the authority of the pigs.  The two key areas whose discussion will swamp anything else are, of course, the questions of Abortion and the ‘question’ of homosexuality.

            If you want another example of one stupid thing swamping discussion from my experience as a teacher, then it would be an item on a staff meeting agenda discussing school uniform and the pupils’ wearing of jewellery.

            The amount of time that I have listened to discussions about the size, positioning, composition and cost of various items of clothing and earrings to be worn by school children make medieval scholastic discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin look like casual throw-away lines!

            So, the point that I am making is, the unelected May is raising the ghost of a lost policy with the concept of new grammar schools.  If she fails (and she should because there is no educational expert who thinks that they work for all children) then she can point to the fact that she did her best but the establishment (sic) did her down.  If she succeeds then she will make the middle class grunts in the shires happy as they will assume that their privileged darlings will obviously get to the grammar schools and the lesser breeds without the law (who don’t vote Conservative anyway) will get the Sec Mods that they deserve!

            I can’t wait to see the Jesuitical logic that will have to be used to show that naïf little Candide’s tutor was right all along and they will be the best possible schools in this best of all possible educational worlds. 

            I assume that all of Trump’s speeches are being video recorded for cabinet ministers to learn from.  After all, the fact that the rambling gibberish that he spouts has nothing to do with education doesn’t make any difference as he finds it difficult to focus on anything at all, apart from spouting twisted childhood memories of the nursery rhyme about Dumpty Dumpty – and it all seems to go down well with a certain section of the Republican Party.  And how different are the American and British Conservatives anyway?  It’s just the Brits don’t have guns.  Yet.

            Anyway, Spain.

            We have just had the results from the election in Galicia and the PP (the Spanish Conservative Party) has won an overall majority.  Again.

            If you do not live in Spain that may mean little.  If you do live in Spain it is incredible.

            

          PP has had the sort of catastrophically bad publicity for months and months and months that would be amusing if it were not all too real.  Every treasurer of the party, since it was founded, has been charged with criminal mismanagement.  Corruption has become synonymous with the name of the party and day after day companies, politicians, businessmen, party workers, anyone in fact who has had any contact with this toxic brand have been accused.  The scale, of what can only be called theft, is astonishing and scalps have been claimed by courageous media types who bring the latest misdemeanours to light.

            The epic mismanagement of public funds in Valencia has degenerated into pure farce with the senator for Valencia being accused by the High Court and then resigning from PP who put her there so that the acting president (PP) can claim it is nothing to do with him because she is no longer in the party!  In an ironic touch which is poignant to the point of insult: the ‘senadora’ actually gets paid more now that she is not in a party and has extra funds allocated so that she can manage alone outside the framework of an established organization!  The idea of resignation for the misdemeanours of her dictatorial and grasping reign in Valencia does not of course enter her head and, with a brazen audacity that takes the breath away she continues to flaunt her apparent disinterest in the chaos that she has caused.

            It is difficult to give a true impression of just how overwhelming the stench of corruption is in this country.  Any one of the tens of major scandals that have rocked this country would have settled the hash of any government in the UK trying to brave it out.  But in Spain, few of the true criminals are actually in prison.

            Spain has a whole section of society that is above ordinary justice: thousands of people who cannot be tried in the same way as ordinary citizens.  The UK has no one who is above the law in this way.  German has no one who is above the law in this way.

            Spain may point to the fact that the sister of the present King was actually arraigned in court for corruption and was cross-examined.  And as part of her evidence she said, “I don’t know” hundreds of times.  I think in a British court she would have been charged with contempt.  And we are still waiting for a judgement.  I am not holding my breath that she will spend the time in prison that one of the prosecutors has demanded.  Her husband was arraigned with her, charged with exploiting the royal name and overcharging by misappropriating public funds (guess where!) etc etc.

            In spite of the torrent of adverse publicity, Galicia has voted in a majority PP government in its autonomous region!  It makes one weep.  In spite of the massive amount of evidence that points to institutional systemic corruption, they vote for more of the same.

            It is, sometimes, difficult to maintain an optimistic approach.  But not impossible.

            There are solutions to the present situation.  The parties of the left could find some sort of way to work together to stop what would be a total disaster – the continuation of the ‘government’ of PP.  They must find a way.  

          In a very real sense, the future of a united Spain depends on it.