Dieu et mon Fromage

My daughter and her companion went to France for a few days to stay in a château and stomp grapes with a few friends (apparently, while a neighbour attended the event, playing a harp). 

Cor, I said, bring back some fromage while you're there.

On the way home to the south of Spain, she made a small detour and passed through Oporto in that small but agreeable country over to the left of us. 

And here we are, enjoying a very ripe lunch of various different cheeses (that thing that looks like bread in the middle of the photo was the runniest and most pungent of the lot - I swear it winked at me once).

And with a bottle of port to help wash it down, the three of us had a very jolly lunch.

Decolonisation Again

 The Brits have returned the Chagos Islands – or all except one (Diego Garcia) – to Mauritius and to the people who used to live there, the Chagossians. Or more likely, since they were unceremoniously chucked out back in 1969, to their descendants.  

While this item may not have made a major impact in the lives of the good people who inhabit the United Kingdom, it certainly has here in Spain, with the suggestion that, well, since you’re in the mood, what about handing back Gibraltar (and, sure, maybe the Falklands too while you are at it)?

The Telegraph – a British newspaper that leans solidly to the right – says ‘Keir Starmer has refused to rule out ending British control of Gibraltar and the Falklands, amid an ongoing backlash over his Chagos Islands deal’. Yes, The Telegraph and its more conservative ‘Sun never sets on the British Empire’ readers may well become excited about the Chagos Deal, and maybe for them it will become the Suez Crisis of the 21st Century.

Mind you, at a mean height of just four feet above sea-level, the Chagossians will need to roll up their trouser-legs, as it’ll likely all be underwater by 2050 thanks to Global Warming.

I’m vaguely fond of Gibraltar. I got married there to my American bride on the second attempt. Word had reached us as we were dickering with the judge that my father had suddenly died in Madrid, so we pleaded cause of absence and returned for another try a couple of weeks later. The judge, give him his due, let us have our wedding papers and sundry costs on his shilling, making our match one of the cheapest in history (one jolly night at the Holiday Inn). A year later, we went to Paris for the honeymoon.

Then, The Express brings us: ‘Gibraltar tries to calm fears it will be returned to Spain after UK and Chagos fiasco. The people of Gibraltar have been assured by their Government that Sir Keir Starmer's decision regarding the Chagos Island will not affect their future’.

I like Gibraltar. I mean, I don’t (it’s ghastly), but I like that it’s there. Some pink glitter for the map, a change of pace and the chance to see a British bobby talking in llanito. 

So, leave it alone. There are thirty four thousand Gibraltarians who want to remain British, but without going anywhere near the United Kingdom (ring any bells, Readers?). If the colony fell to Spain, then what would they do with the Gibraltarians?  Leave them there, but make them do this and that – or enjoin them to take out Tarjetas de Identidad Extranjera and deprive them of the vote? Maybe give the people living in nearby San Roque ‘back’ their properties. As Gibraltar en la Corazón says (back in 1704, the British possession of Gibraltar was only formalised nine years later at at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713), ‘…It is easy to imagine that column of men and women dragging their belongings: some children, others elderly, heads bowed, stripped... 5,000 people walking towards the hermitage of San Roque, located a few kilometres away…’

San Roque

These days, it looks lovely.

Ah, decolonisation. Gibraltar is a British problem: let Whitehall build a nice camp on Salisbury Plain for them.

Some say, well why not just give the Rock to the Spanish and give Melilla and Ceuta to the Moroccans? Easy enough if you are living in somewhere like Albacete or Torquay.

There are of course, several differences. For one, there are 170,000 Spaniards in the two North African enclaves, and right now, Spanish politicians are busy squabbling about what to do with a handful of immigrant minors stuck in the Canary Isles (another territory that Morocco claims). Since they would likely not be treated favourably by the Moroccans, I doubt that they would want to stay and at the same time it would be hard to comfortably house 170,000 indignant colonos over here in Almería and Málaga.

The population of the Falkland Isles – whose inhabitants are even more British than the Gibraltarians (they’ve been there since the 1830s) – runs to about 3,700 souls. Wiki says that there are even a few llanitos living there. They probably would rather stay where they are, too.

It’s all well and good righting ancient wrongs, but for every victor on the one hand, there has to be an eviction on the other.

What's Yours is Mine (What's Mine is Mine, too)

 

It always seem to me strange that people, using old dusty stories, yearn to take your land, or your city, or your home… and make it theirs.

Historical examples abound, right enough – from Gibraltar to Palestine; from Comanche Territory to The Ukraine; from Belize to uh, Olivenza.

There’s always somebody waving an old document, or maybe a rusty key. My great-great-great grandfather used to live here and then the government threw us all out and now look, we want it back.

The Moors have claims to Córdoba, the Moroccans want Melilla and the 1,200,000 Miami Cubans are the cause of the sixty-six year old US blockade against Havana.

If they come in and take over, will they let me stay? Is there someone with a better claim to my farm because of an old deed, or a tradition of what’s written in someone’s Good Book?

The Moriscos lost their properties in Sixteenth Century Spain and were obliged to head off to North Africa – where none of them had ever been before.

The true gibraltareños living in San Roque, worrying all day long about getting their rock back.

Those who had to flee from their homes thanks to the Spanish Civil War, still living grumpily in France or Germany.

Refugees the world over: war, greed and politics.

Then, if that’s not bad enough, it must also be very trying for the folk who live in a house to know that the bank wants it – because of monetary considerations (the rent, the mortgage, the new tower block that someone plans to build on the same site).

But we were talking about Olivenza.

Olivenza, also known as Olivença, is, says Wiki ‘a town in south-western Spain, close to the Portugal–Spain border. It is a municipality belonging to the province of Badajoz, and to the wider autonomous community of Extremadura’. It was Portuguese for a long time, but it was ceded by treaty to Spain in 1801 following a squabble. Presumably the locally defeated Portuguese burghers have been talking of little else since then, Bless them, fingering their old iron keys and maybe a contract or two.

Maybe there’re a few well-oiled flintlocks in a chest somewhere in the attic held just in case. Two hundred and twenty years is but a moment in time, right?

And those 12,000 Spanish oliventinos who live there now? What to do with them – give them Portuguese identity cards and build a few flats? They’d rapidly become a nuisance.

See, Nuno Melo, the current Portuguese Minister of Defence (that’s to say: the man in charge of the Portuguese army) is now claiming Olivenza (or Olivença) because you know: the treaty/schmeaty.

For España for once, the shoe is on the other foot.   

By the way, some idiot from the Vox party stole a breeze-block from Gibraltar in 2014 and it’s now taking pride of place in the foyer of that party’s head office in Madrid.

The Gibraltarians want it back.

Maybe the Portuguese could help…