Welcome Joe Biden. 

First of all, anything or anyone would be better than “The Donald.” Having said that, I don’t think Mr Biden is a good replacement. He is a good man. Of that I have no doubt. He understands the workings of government in the United States of America. He understands this at Congressional level and from the point of view of the White House. Barack Obama used him as an integral part of his team not as a vague reminder of his mortality.

But put bluntly he is too old. At almost 80 he is significantly older even than Pope Francis was on taking office and the Catholic Church is a deliberate gerontocracy. 

The physical demands of running a country – and in that time of plague are fearsome. The mental pressure of watching so many of your fellow citizens dying from COVID are beyond comprehension. These stresses will almost certainly mean that he has only one term as President. And he is too old to thrive in the late years of life already battered by personal tragedy. He has not recovered from the death of his son Beau, taken by cancer just five years ago. Had he been emotionally ready he could have followed Obama as a candidate four years ago and would have almost certainly defeated Trump. America would be a very different place as some people voted for Trump simply because they hated Hillary Clinton.

It is, incidentally, a worrying mark of Democratic politics that four years on Joe is still the future despite being so well advanced into his Twilight years.

He has to be that rather worrying character, “An Old Man in a Hurry”. 

He has COVID to defeat, he has an Economy to stabilise, he has a Healthcare system to secure and he has a Society to heal. It is a task that in my lifetime only once has anyone got anywhere near succeeding, Nelson Mandela and that’s still very much a work in progress with at least a couple of generations before it’s settled or ends in tears.

Because we watch American TV and we speak the same language we often fall into the error of thinking that we and the Americans are alike. We are not. Even if we understand the mechanics of American politics, we don’t understand the American psyche. Despite the attempts of British politicians to mimic American flag worship we are a totally different people with a totally different mindset. 

For half of the people in America today is the end of a four-year nightmare. They have been watching their country drift towards a state of mind where racism and sexism and xenophobia are the norms, and they hate what they see. For about 1/5 of the Americans, the liberal Republicans, who want low taxes and high stock market prices they may have voted for Trump originally because they hated Hillary and this time while holding their noses because they fear Biden the Marxist. 

And then there are “The Deplorables” (a term Steve Bannon and his crew use with pride). These are the people who believe the stories they hear on the wacky Internet radio stations, who take Fox News to be a balanced TV channel, who love guns and free speech who hate Black and Hispanic people and who despise Abortion, Affordable Healthcare and Homosexuality. I fear about 1/3 of the United States of America population has been radicalised, not just by Trump – he’s just the megaphone – but by the Super rich backers and supporters who manipulate news media and spent billions on supporting candidates in elections. Can a frail old man taking on a task, that would stretch the brightest and strongest of young men or women to the limit, succeed in unifying the moderate majority and suppressing the radicalised minority. A minority that is wound up and armed to the teeth. It is vital that he does this and if he fails and Trump or a successor to Trump wins the election in four years it could well be the end of American democracy because those who have tasted power with Trump and had it snatched away will, if they win again, not allow themselves to be side-lined a second time. 

1/3 of a country’s population fanatically committed to a particular cult is enough to take over that country. Remember Lenin and the Bolsheviks did it with many less. In the face of evil most of us keep our heads down and hope for the best. It’s that playing out of the Acton-ism about the triumph of evil. 

The best that can happen is the Biden beats the plague, the economy does well, and people like him. Then he can hand on to Kamala in four years by which time a whole new generation of liberal politicians, Democrats and Republicans, will be doing proper Liberal Democratic politics and the populist emergency will be over. The Deplorables will be pushed back into the long grass and continue to lurk harmlessly.

The worst will be that Trump or another Trump Like Megaphone comes to the fore as Joe is overwhelmed by issues and rapidly declining health. Blacks and Latinos will be put back in their place and voting will be restricted to appropriate people. Super rich backers American and Russian won’t want to see another failure.

It is clear that there is a set of very strong Democratic institutions in the United States. However, one aberrant presidency has demonstrated just how fragile is the balance that determines the contrast between stability and chaos. It has more or less held for a quarter of a Millennium. I hope that this is the fullest extent to which it will be stretched and not collapse. I think the next few years will be very testing and the outcome is by no means certain. 

Paul Mason in writing about that the Corbyn years (htpps://paulmason) has highlighted some lessons we need to learn. The first is that Corbynism wasn’t an accident. And he’s right, there was a dramatic dearth of socialism or even radical social democratic enthusiasm among the candidate to replace the hapless Ed Miliband. 

Had Ed lost manfully to his more able brother and gone off in 2010 to concentrate on the climate emergency  and left it to David to bash Cameron, instead of winning and then believing the flawed policy that suggested sitting still while the coalition destroyed itself perhaps we would have a very different political landscape. Scotland might have received greater attention resulting in Labour not being annihilated north of the border. But in 2015 the Labour Party was feeling crushed and the old men, still smarting from the kicking Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair had given them in the 80s and 90s saw a hope – albeit a slim one – of at last taking revenge for the defeat of the Militant revolution and grasping control first of the party then of the country. 

For the ageing revolutionaries like McDonnell, McCluskey and Livingstone this was a last throw of the dice and then there was Corbyn, sincere and dull, scruffy and with a back catalogue of bad decisions that made him a figure of derision among most political observers.

And yet in 2015 with a demoralised party still deeply scarred by Blair’s disastrous Iraq policy and bruised by five years of Ed’s vacuousness, the mood of society was different. There was a ground swell of socialism. Syriza had won in Greece and there was a new generation who found the idea of a moral and decent socialism to be attractive. 

Oh, and by the way to vote in the Labour Leadership election you paid £3 and had an equal say.   

It is of course true that among the Labour MPs were those for whom socialism was a very dirty word. These were people seduced into being part of the Labour family by the hope of being part of a Miliband’s centrist government for ever. There are always needed to be an exit room for them. 

Mason goes on to say that the change in the Labour Party was real and that those who had been lost to active political involvement by being part of the left but with no home in Blair and Brown’s New Labour have become an important part of the newly revived Labour Party. My greatly missed friend Paul Flynn always told me that he was “True Labour” not “New Labour” and he never got offered the opportunity in government his talent deserved. Many like Paul found under the Corbyn a home they thought they had lost forever. The legacy of the Corbyn revolution is that there are great many people who have become engaged in political discourse who would have simply evolved themselves into activism without seeking specifically political activism. By this I mean involvement in issues such as Palestinian support, anti-capitalist events and climate concern, in short green politics. So the Corbyn years did make the party very different and, while the Leader’s team had all the levers of control in their hands they made some significant changes. I don’t believe that a Labour Manifesto of the future will ever offer Thatcherism Lite, which is rather the route into which Gordon Brown had pushed himself by 2010. And Ed Balls who had been the brains behind the Treasury in the last part of Brown’s control was the star of Milibandism. 

During Corbyn’s time Socialist intellectuals with real alternative strategies began to flourish and their influence grow. The Labour Party now is a much more democratic socialist entity than a social democratic one and Mason is right, this alternative thinking must not be lost in the desire to regain power by the route of looking like the Tories only being a bit more competent and a bit nicer.

He is also right when he says that there has been a significant growth in left thinking intellectual platforms. Even without the finance behind the right-wing economically libertarian organisations that have been the outriders in the swerve away from the last remnants of the post-war settlement within the Conservative party, there has been a growth of organisations like Common Wealth and Labour for a Green New Deal. As he argues it is actually true that one third of the electorate voted in 2019 for a seriously socialist platform. 

Margaret Thatcher destroyed the trade unions as a political force and Blair absorbed the new reality as if it were an eternal orthodoxy. Only in very recent times with the Corbynista  Revolution have we seen unions beginning to stiffen their resolve. Sadly in Unite the result was to punish the enemies within the party rather than win power for the rank-and-file of the working people.  Len McCluskey whose political outlook was shaped in the 1970s, played, in the Corbyn era, a role which failed to harness  the slowly growing politicisation of the workers. The post-pandemic world will be a very different place and there may well be an equivalent movement that floated in the Atlee/Gaitskell/Wilson era which sees the Butler/Macmillan Tory equivalent of having similar goals but with different strategies. The Johnson administration has started with distinctly Buskilite  tendencies. Worker power, the destruction of the Gig economy and false self-employment has properly been called out and identified in the Corbyn era. It is for Starmer to maintain the drive and not slip into Brown like timidity. 

As part of this newly burgeoning intellectualism Mason sees Communism in the post Corbyn era is having a proper place in the Labour Party thinking, sourced from Gramsci and others but which recognises the destructive and negative influence of Stalinism in the failed experiment that was Leninism in the Soviet Union. Mason considers the changes in the working class dynamic and refers specifically to Claire Ainsley’s “The New Working Class.” This new working class he rightly concludes has no intrinsic loyalty to the Labour Party, which explains for example why Scotland was able to totally abandon the Labour Party when its people saw the SNP represent their aspirations, it also explains why Greens and Lib Dems took significant quantities of votes from the Labour Party in December 2019. The challenge for the post-Corbyn Labour Party is to provide an intellectual and spiritual home for these members of the new working class. But Labour lost votes, in very significant amounts and in key areas to the Conservatives. Some of this movement can be put down to the media assault on Corbyn and McDonnell and also to the complicity in attacking Corbynism from the right wing of the Party. But the party-the hands of Corbynites became ever narrower and exclusive in its outlook, if you are not fully signed up to believe there is no place for you at the table. This has in some cases led to people with very limited outlooks reaching Parliament and giving opponent easy targets for future attacks. 

To regain the trust of the lost non-metropolitan working class who left to support Boris and who gave the Tory seats that are part of the heartland of the Labour movement, the Labour Party must move away from the hard left Socialist Worker/Militant movement which has been in control and become the guardian of the aspirations of those people who abandoned the party of posh boy Trotskyites for the safe haven of the Tory toffs. 

The left and becoming more inclusive needs not to follow the line that helped sink Hillary Clinton in the states by condemning people as deplorable, a tendency that dominated much of the anti-Brexit rhetoric. Mason is also right when he says that while the party can’t be a social movement but that the party must learn from the methods of the social movements of the left who have prospered in recent times even though long-term success eludes them. 

Mason’s analysis then turns to the quality of the leader and his leadership team. That he was not capable of being an effective leader is without question. He is, always was and always will be an inadequate person and politician. The early period of his leadership was marked by the sniping of the vast majority of the parliamentary party and the party workers, but even when he gain control of all the levers of power, his leadership was distinguished by its incompetence. 

I do not believe that he is an anti-semite or an evil terrorist supporter. I believe he is a sincere Marxist believer who has demonstrated a lack of discrimination when choosing which causes to support. He took the road of surrounding himself with advisers who made him look inwards. The leader of the opposition built a wall around himself and his office. 

Then the anti-Semitism. Personally I have problems with the Israeli state – not it’s right to exist and provide a home for all Jewish people from wherever they come. All Jewish people have a right to have a home where they feel safe. My issue is with how this just entity has treated the Arab peoples, Christian as well as Muslim, who were the citizens of the land out of which Israel was formed. Nothing justifies the use of violence and the pursuit of justice by individuals or groups. So the violence of Hamas and Hezbollah is wrong but so too the violence of settlers forcibly removing families who have lived on and farmed land for centuries. But to criticise the excesses and misbehaviour of Mr Netanyahu and his supporters is not to give legitimacy to Holocaust deniers and their fellow travellers. We have a good sense in Britain that religious belief and diversity is a given and making it safe and comfortable for Jewish people in the Labour Party is something that Mr Starmer must achieve and he needs to act ruthlessly and rapidly to make it clear that everyone whatever their race or religious affiliation is welcome within the party. 

The end of the Corbyn experiment has coincided with the Covid-19 crisis there are two strands to the crisis, health and wealth. In one form or another the crisis will drag on in health terms until an effective vaccine is developed. This means that there may be some restrictions around until 2021. We, and the developed countries of Europe and North America are now in recession. The wealth crisis will worsen unless there is coordinated action to ensure the recession though it may be deep and painful does not become a long-lasting slump or depression. And I find much to support in the view that we need a strategy of smart re-industrialisation – increased ownership of national assets by the National community as represented by the state – a degree of societal planning albeit tempered by the understanding that market economics can inform though never command – that following a crisis that has hit people without regard to economic status, health and social policies must be based on the well-being of the whole community – and finally the climate crisis needs us to act together now and work for solutions dictated by the needs of future generations. It is more obvious than ever that, just as in 1945 we cannot go back to business as usual. 

For Britain post Coronavirus to avoid a return to  business as usual the new dynamic will require a different post Brexit settlement than that which had been planned by the neo liberal ideologues. When a crisis that is worldwide struck we needed mechanisms to work in a united worldwide response. We don’t yet know the effect on Africa of Coronavirus. But we do know the extraordinary disparity between the healthcare facilities in Western Europe and sub- Saharan Africa. If we, as we master this crisis do not share our capacity with the less economic the advanced societies we will all suffer. 

Corbynism and the political experiment it represented was a failure but the rebalancing of the Labour Party has the possibility of providing a realistic alternative government when the next election comes. 2024 probably, but who five years ago would have seen…

Peter Landers April 8, 2020

Why is it while at home I’m happy to have two slices of toast – wholemeal of course- dairy free spread and lemon and lime marmalade washed down with an oat-milk latte, but when I stay in a hotel I eat as if eating breakfast was the sole aim of my life. I have no idea. But unable to restrain myself iPhone my way down to the breakfast room of my luxury boutique hotel, ordered a soya latte and plundered the groaning breakfast buffet with four visits to satisfied my craving for cheese, ham, salami, fruit salad, yoghurt, the Viennoiserie,  jam and orange juice. 

After this meal I staggered back to my room to prepare for the day of discovery in Valletta. I have read the book, I had a map and my phone would always come to my rescue when I got lost. I had not appreciated that Valletta, though the old city is small, is very steep. I’m so glad that the weather was dry while I was there, because some of the streets were so steep wet day might make them very slippery and I have a troubling predisposition for crashing melodramatically to the ground in embarrassing circumstances.

My first task was to get hold of a little pile of Euros, to pay for my daily expenses. I found a bank with an ATM and made my withdrawal. When I first travelled to Europe changing money was a distinctly difficult process. You had normally, to do it in the bank. You therefore, had to queue and hope that the clerk was a better linguist then you were. You presented your notes or your travellers cheques and your passport and if you were lucky nearly 20 to 30 minutes later you could walk out of the bank with your Lire or Marks or Francs or Pesetas. Now you take the same action as you do in the UK, this will continue to works well until something goes wrong with the system. We are brilliant at taking everything now for granted. But on this occasion the system worked and with €50 rattling around in my wallet I determined to discover Valletta.

Valletta is without doubt the easiest city in the world to visit. Why? Because it is only 1 km from end to end and it is, at its widest point 600 m across. On three sides it is protected by the sea and the fourth side consists of the sprawling and busy suburb of Floriana. 

The city owes its existence to the fight in the 16th century against the aggressive land grabbing of the newly emboldened Ottoman Turks inspired by Suleman the Magnificent’s capture of Constantinople. Malta, if one wishes to control the shipping lanes of the central Mediterranean is the perfect base. Valletta has a stupendous natural harbour making it perfect for ship-based industry. Having been born within a hundred yards of a ship repairing yard and with the whole of my mother’s family engaged in shipbuilding and repairing, to see another active ship repair yard in Malta filled me with mixed emotions. 

Great to see it being done but sad that among the industries decimated by the vandalism of the 1980s, shipbuilding was one that effectively disappeared in Britain. At the time of my parents being born the majority of ships in the world in terms of tonnage were built in Britain. Glasgow, Belfast, Tyneside and the Mersey were the true centres of this trade and even Newport has its ship repair yards as well as its more famous ship breaking yard, Cashmore’s.

Valletta has not only its position to make it easy to defend but is surrounded on all sides by massive defensive ramparts. The main City Gate is the newest and least defensible access point to the city looking out at the Triton Fountain and the Bus Station tumbling down the hill from the ultramodern Bridge and Parliament Building. This Renzo Piano designed  modernist and rather brutalist building was constructed to serve the national and individualistic personality of the City and of the Republic. As with any modernist public building its design met with much criticism from lovers of the traditional architecture that is normal in this most southerly of European capitals. To my mind it is a simple modern structure that asserts the character of the new Malta, tiny in geopolitical terms but proud and independent members of the European Union. From the City Gate the whole of the town is simple and for the most part flat as we follow Republic Street which ends up with Fort St Elmo at the conclusion of the kilometre walk.

Turn right when you pass the Parliament Building and before you reach Merchants Street you preach the ruins of the old Opera Theatre where in his time in Malta my father saw the famous but ageing Italian opera star Amelita Galli-Curci. I really don’t think he particularly enjoyed the experience. Listening to an old singer whose vocal cords are shot is a painful experience.  

The Royal Opera House was destroyed in the Second World War but the ruins have a contemporary existence as an open-air music venue. And it has seen lots of good and loud rock musicians in recent years. 

Follow on past the old opera venue and you cross first Merchant Street and then St Paul Street and at last come to the city’s main Park, The Upper Barrakka Gardens. As with everything in Valletta it is small, there’s not a lot of greenery but what it has is the most magnificent view of the Grand Harbour and the three cities, the original settlements grouped round the Grand Harbour itself. There are a number of monuments in the Gardens including a pugnacious bust of Winston Churchill, whose determination to retain Malta as a base in the Second World War, often at a terrible cost to the island, to control the supply routes to Egypt and the Middle East and as the Allies gained the upper hand to facilitate the invasion first of Sicily and then Italy.

In 1565 Valletta wasn’t a place. There were other settlements around the Grand Harbour, a number of fortresses and the most important city on the island was M’dina, high up in the hills. 

Without going into the geopolitical shenanigans of the mid-16th century Mediterranean World, just as it would be in the Second World War Malta was a very attractive base for dominating the sea lanes.

 The Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire – which basically was everything in west and central Europe which wasn’t France or England – gave control of the island to the Knights Hospitaller, of St John of Jerusalem, who in 1522 had been kicked out of their base in Rhodes by the apparently unquenchable onslaught of Suleiman the Magnificent’s Ottoman Empire. The Maltese were neither consulted nor did they give permission for their home to be given to the Knights, who mostly came from the aristocratic families of France and Spain. 

The Ottomans desired the complete domination of the Mediterranean and the crushing of Christianity throughout the region. Much of the time their ambitions were aided by the animosity of the French King for the Emperor which was generously reciprocated. The Knights, although having been defeated in Rhodes were exceptionally able fighters. They expected their new island home to be the target of Sulieman’s ambition.

As you walk along Republic Street, once you have passed the Cathedral (technically the Co-Cathedral of St John) and the Grand Master’s Palace with their open-air café’s the street begins to slow down, shops are less attractive and the building is less grand. Always in your eye line though is the sea at the farthest end of the road. So in the hope of seeing the bright blue Mediterranean close up before the late afternoon chill drove me into a warm café for my pre-dinner at aperitif I follow the road until I could go no further. There in front of me was Fort St Elmo. 

And on the right an exhibition/experience called The Malta Experience. I will never know what the Malta Experience offered as I took the more serious route and paid my €7 to visit the Fort and the National War Museum. The man at the office wouldn’t take cash, was wearing a face mask and had plastic gloves. Suddenly a worm of doubt about being away from home started nibbling at my resolve to enjoy a week in Malta. The Fort and the brilliant War Museum dispelled my concern. 

The museum is spread over many of the buildings in the fortress complex and to appreciate the amount of information available you have to let your inner history geek takeover 

totally – do that and it’s an amazingly productive hour or two. Add to that the discovery that the views out to sea and round the bay towards St Julian’s are spectacular and you have a perfect afternoon. 

Two things dominate the island’s war history, the Siege of 1565 and the defence of the island in the Second World War from June 1940 to November 1942. And piece by piece the museum tells the two stories. For me the most interesting story is of how the pathetically underprepared state of the defences of the island when war broke out in 1939 survived. The air defences consisted of a few Gloster Gladiator fighter bombers, mostly fitted with torpedos. The Gladiator was the last biplane ordered for the RAF and by the day they came into service they were essentially a twenty year old  design that was outgunned by the even least competent of Italian and German warplanes. Although there were more than three planes there never seemed to be more than three in the air and the myth of the planes being named as Faith, Hope and Charity grew up. And who am I to dispel that myth. 

There was a desperate struggle to defend Malta during the year before 1941 when squadrons of Spitfires replaced these brave and desperate fighters. The highlight of my visit to the now almost deserted Museum, and in most of the areas of the museum I was the only visitor, was the exhibit which has the only remaining Gladiator, Faith by name, from the siege. To reach across and touch the solid rubber wheel of this piece of history was a moving moment in this most visitible of museums.

My walk back to the hotel took me – as everything in Valletta does – to the posh end of Republic Street. There’s a nice outdoor café, which is active all day in late (by Maltese standards) into the evening. Before soaking up the dying heat up the fast retreating Sun, I crossed the bridge and braved the automatic ticket machine to buy a week’s bus ticket which would give me unlimited travel freedom. At €21 it was a good deal getting me to any corner of the island of Malta and even across into Gozo. 

Then to buy myself a drink. With early originality of typical tourists I chose the drink that seemed to be the most hyped at the moment, an Aperol Spritz. Apparently it’s the ninth best selling cocktail in the world. Watching the world wander by with this slightly alcoholic soft drink to cheer me took up a pleasing hour till the Sun was out of sight and the big gas heaters were fired up to keep the customers comfortable. 

And then dinner, it easy to get eating wrong when you’re travelling alone and if you read more of my written meanderings there are some magnificent mistakes which I can share with you. In some respects I’m a meticulous planner for visits to new cities. The daft website TripAdvisor provides ideas about restaurants and reviews by past diners. There are, in my universe two reasons for writing a review on such a site, first the restaurant bosses paid me with wine and whiskey to say good things. The second is that I have paid through the nose for a rubbish meal that has made me and anyone else I’m travelling with spend a night vomiting or otherwise decorating my hotel toilet.

If I’ve  had a good meal and a nice evening I just congratulate myself on my choice and consummate  good taste and move on. So I had read lots of reviews and studied lots of the website menus and then I took the easy way out and asked the man in the office of the hotel to suggest somewhere nice for dinner. He did, and it worked as I had my best meal of the trip.

So, this is a story of my ill-fated short holiday to Malta. The first question we have to consider is, why have a holiday in Malta? And in March? 

Well, I’ve never been to Malta and its one of the few countries on my list of places that my father visited while on military service that I have not yet visited. The only one left now is Pakistan, but I don’t see me making a trip up the Khyber pass to the Afghan border any time soon. My father served in the Second Battalion of the South Wales Borderers. While they were returning from their five years of garrison duty in India, they were diverted, remember that this was 1935 and they were travelling on a Troop Ship via the Suez Canal,  to Malta, as we were expecting a possible war with Mussolini’s Italy over their annexation of Ethiopia. 

So my father and his mates were stuck in Malta with nothing to do for the best part of a year. In the end the unpleasantness with the Italians came to nothing but rather than sending them home they ended up in Palestine, keeping the Jewish settlers and the Arab majority away from each other. Both the settlers and the Arabs were friendly and shared their meagre resources with the soldiers. However after dark either or both groups were capable of shooting at the British soldiers.

So that was one reason why felt it would be a good thing to visit Malta. And so, when my doctor gave me the okay to renew my restless wanderings and I need a place without language issues and without the bitingly cold weather that early March brings to many of the most attractive part of Europe, I decided that Malta was the place. When I discovered that weekly a plane travels from my local airfield-Cardiff Airport-I booked my flight. 

My dilemma then was travelling to the airport. Should I drive and park at £70 or should I travel by public transport-which for me is without charge. I decided that public transport was the way to go but the day before I was due to travel I buckled to my lazy inner self and booked a space in the Long Stay Car Park at the airport. 

At the best of times Cardiff airport is not busy. With the collapse of Flybe which generated 60% of the airport’s business, there was a somewhat desolate feel to the Long Stay Car Park. The mood did not change with entry to the terminal building. The café had two staff and three customers including myself. Security was proper but there were significantly more staff than punters. In my experience this often leads to me having a grumpy stand-off with a bored and miserable member of staff. However there were no problems and I was able to wait in some comfort without resorting to my magic lounge card. At that stage in the pandemic panic – it seems as I write at least a lifetime ago, social distancing was a sort of thing but nothing like the thing it has now become. So when the flight was called the 150 souls booked onto the plane were herded into a narrow passage and kept there for at least half an hour while we had to fill in health forms for the Maltese Government.

Arrival in Malta was quick and quiet, it was rather late in the evening and I rather expected to be tested to see if I had a temperature- but no, I wasn’t tested. A lady with the facemask and the thermometer was collecting the medical contact forms. Some of the passengers she tested but she merely waved me through. Perhaps it was because I look cool! I then had to find the driver from the limo service. There were a lot of drivers with name boards but no one had my name on it. So I rang the hotel was told nothing was booked for me-a good start. 

The Malta “taxi to hotel service” is brilliant and after paying the fixed fee by card in the arrivals area I was ushered to a taxi with no need to discuss price or face an almost certainty of being ripped off. And it was €10 cheaper than the limoservice. 

I had booked myself into a small hotel in the centre of Valletta, the capital of this EU affiliated island republic, whose horrible reputation for corruption I had decided to put to one side for the sake of warm weather in early March. The hotel calls itself a luxury boutique hotel. The Night Manager/Porter welcomed me and took me into the office to check in. A bottle of chilled prosecco was produced and my travel weariness was assuaged. He was a charming little man and spoke excellent English. He at first denied that I had booked the limo service until I showed him the email and he agreed to give me a whole bottle of prosecco to make me feel better about their mistake. However the thing which enthralled me about this gentleman was the fact that he was wearing a slightly ill-fitting toupee which was a strikingly intense black colour which instantly dispelled any idea that it might be anything other than a wig. For obvious reasons I have never given the slightest thought to treating my own lack of hair with an artificial substitute. This was a decision made easier by the memory of my uncle Fred who always, in my memory, and especially in his time as an undertaker wore a wig. Incidentally he came to a sticky end having had a fatal heart attack while having sex with his boyfriend while my aunt Emma was out at church. 

So here I am in a luxury boutique hotel with a man whose chosen hair substitution was calling up bizarre images from the late 1960s. The hotel and especially my room was delightful. I expected that the proximity of the lift in my room would be a distraction but not at all. The hotel is built in an old converted property around a central atrium, which was once a courtyard. My room actually had no windows opening onto the outside world which made it rather odd and a little claustrophobic but the comfortable bed and large and well equipped bathroom and breakfast included not to mention a bucket of the prosecco delivered to my door, I was able to unpack and relax into an early night’s sleep.

Sunday Morning Summation

And so it was Easter Sunday, I had followed Holy Week from Palm Sunday in Burgos to the Resurrection in the square outside The Cathedral of Santiago. I had had so much fun following and recording the efforts of the local people to contextualise the moments that led to the foundation of Christianity. The new and eternal covenant between man and God. They do this with dramatic imagery and strong actions. Walking masked and barefoot through the streets, carrying enormous statues which show scenes up from the last days before and after the crucifixion (note: I am feeling a little guilty as I am sitting at a café drinking coffee as I write and I can see into and hear Mass going on in the Jesuit church on the other side of the square). I have already been to Mass. Following the procession of the Resurrection from the great Franciscan church towards the Cathedral I, for the first time in the process, became emotional, my bizarre Camino was having an effect on me. I had enjoyed almost every minute of the trip-15 minutes in Valladolid are probably the exception, but on Good Friday evening and suddenly on Sunday morning I arrived at a feeling that was more than enjoying an alien cultural experience. I was part of the event, I was a participant I was involved and part of me will always recognise Santiago as a part of my Easter, wherever I am celebrating the feast. Just as Jerusalem and the New Fire Ceremony in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is part of my Easter and being in St Peter’s Square at Pope John Paul II’s last Easter Mass, all these memories now have a new and enduringly strong companion. As I write a large English-language tour group passes, they are just seeing the buildings and hearing about the history they, unlike me and those thousands of real pilgrims are not part of the spiritual Experience, that we now own.

Some big churches are strangely soulless especially when awash with tourists, such is the Cathedral of Santiago. It might be that it is because it’s under restoration but I have had the same feeling in Notre Dame which had much of the atmosphere of a Victorian railway station, a bit smokier now! The Franciscan and Jesuit churches appeal so much more, they are to use the Italian word, simpatico (sympathetic) and church like. Both are big but different. People visit St James to “ hug the statue” and hope for luck. But in the real churches with real people as well as tourists it is like being a part of the community of the people of God. It is a joy now to go to Mass with people standing as there are no seats. 50 or 60 years ago this was normal, but now, so rare.

So I had reached the conclusion of my pilgrimage and I actually feel like a pilgrim. I have stood in front of the reliquary that holds (allegedly) the bones of St James, which fro a simple logical point of view it is nonsense. He died in 44 A.D., he disappeared, and 400 years later the bones were identified and moved to north-west Spain. But that it is clearly not true is now of no relevance. The bones have been here 1600 years and are made Holy, not by being real but by the faith of the countless numbers of pilgrims who have used the life, work and death of James the Apostle to inspire their own faith in Jesus and his message of salvation.

Now I must drink coffee and eat a fine gourmet dinner and make my way home as safely as I can. Then I need to put my photos and films in order and bore all my friends with what I have to tell them.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton