Basqueing in the Sun 2

Day 3-4: The rain in Spain falls mainly on San Sebastiain

In which our valiant knight errant and his squire embark on their first sally.

Said day began rather late – we were both quite tired after all the travelling. By the time we dragged ourselves out of bed and got out, it was mid-morning and we decided to head up Monte Urgell, the hill that overlooks the Old Town and atop which the city’s fort is perched. Very excitingly, San Sebastian was originally built on what is geomorphologically a tombolo at the mouth of the Urumea River, joining the prominence of the mount back to the mainland. Well, OK, it’s exciting to me. As we walked towards the mount, we got a better view of the large statue on top. I was fairly certain it was Jesus, Adam thought it was Mary. As we got closer, Adam changed his guess to ‘transvestite Mary’, because it was obviously a male figure. It was Jesus. The mount itself is quite pleasant to wander around – there are lots of fortifications scattered around, culminating both literally and metaphorically in the fort at the top – and there’s also an English Cemetery, with graves from the First Carlist War[1], when 10,000 British volunteers were sent over to fight on behalf of Queen Isabella II, mostly because her government owed us money and we didn’t want them to default on the debt. We were the benevolent imperial power, yes. It’s a bit surprising that the citizens were happy enough to see us to give us a cemetery – an Anglo-Portuguese force had burned down the whole town in a sack in 1813 as part of the Napoleonic Wars. As such, it’s not entirely clear how useful the fortifications ever were, but I suppose they made everyone feel better. But, nowadays, you do get a good view of the city from the top, though it was a rather grey day that constantly threatened to drizzle.

One thing that was also very noticeable was that virtually all the information panels had been graffitied with a range of slogans, which mostly fell into two camps ‘Tourists Go Home’ and ‘Fuck Nazis/We Love Lenin’. It was very educational.

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Left to right, top row: La Concha in the grey; Poseidon/Neptune/Aquaman is Basque and proud; San Sebastian from Monte Urgell in the grey
Middle row: Looking towards Gros in the grey; the Cemetery of the English; some quaint local graffiti
Bottom row: The Transvestite Mary of Monte Urgell; looking across La Concha Bay towards Santa Clara Island

After climbing the mount, we headed back down into the Old Town and looked round St Mary’s Basilica, which was pretty much your standard Big Catholic Church. We also confirmed our previous impression that the Old Town is rather picturesque and then wandered over the other side of the isthmus the Old Town is built on to the suburb of Gros and its accompanying beach[2], where we also had lunch, consisting of more pintxos. We then abruptly retraced our steps and walked round the coast in the other direction to the Miramar Palace. This was the summer home of Queen Regent Maria Christina for several decades, the building of which really turned San Sebastian into the high-end seaside resort we see today[3]. It’s quite a nice building, apparently built to look like a traditional English south-coast cottage. If by ‘cottage’ you mean ‘manor house’. It’s moderately interesting from the outside, but you can’t go in – the building’s now used as a conference centre and events venue.

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Left to right, top row: standard Catholic altar in the basilica; the one on the right is bowling, the one on the left is…doing something odd; Our Lord of the Kamehameha
Middle row: one of San Sebastian’s many nice plazas; it’s rather modern cathedral; the twee Miramar Palace
Bottom row: A very much not-life-size sculpture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Unless they were gnomes. Also, not clear why they’re here when they’re not Basque.

To finish off the afternoon, we went to the Basque Maritime Museum, which had an exhibition on Juan Elcano, the Actual First Man To Circumnavigate The World. The credit for this is usually given to Magellan, but Magellan got himself killed in the Philippines; Elcano was the man who actually captained the eventual survivors back to port in Spain. He was also Basque, hence why he got an entire museum exhibition in San Sebastian to himself. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a tad biased. Elcano was pretty much uncritically lauded to the skies as the greatest example of Basque derring-do ever. It was also a bit light on detail – it never really explained why the Basques had such a maritime bent or why their shipbuilding technology was better than elsewhere, for instance. It was good on the actual series of events that happened during the circumnavigation itself, but needed a bit more context about what happened before and after, and why Elcano and the Basques were so involved.

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Juan Elcano. Looking heroically ruggedly masculine. Because he was the Best. Guy. Ever. Apparently.

It was then back to the hostel for a bit of a sit-down and a freshen-up, and then it was dinnertime, which consisted of more pintxos. From two different places. They were very nice, but did rather fall into the common failing of a lot of Spanish cuisine, that of being essentially big chunks of meat. It was only the first proper day of the holiday and I was already missing vegetables. We hung around in a bar for a bit – it was very busy in the Old Town, as the Monday was a public holiday, so everyone had a three-day weekend – and then headed back for the night.

Awaking late again the next day, we observed it was raining a fair bit – the perils of the Atlantic coast of Spain in October – so decided to head over to the San Telmo museum, the local repository of all things Basque. This was an interesting visit, though the museum perhaps left something to be desired. It did again feel a bit biased – my general impression after leaving was that the Basques had been the first to do everything (at least in Spain) or at the very least did it better than nearly everyone else, without ever really explaining what made Basques different. It felt very hard as if it were trying to justify Basque exceptionalism on social and cultural grounds, rather than on linguistic ones, where they definitely are exceptional. Oddly enough, there was virtually no mention of the strangeness of Basque as a language at all. I know no one really knows where it came from, but in a museum on Basque history and culture, one panel on the language and all the associated theories seems required. The museum was also curiously silent on ETA and really everything post-war; it felt a bit as if the Basques haven’t really come to terms with all that just yet.

But, it’s still a good museum to visit – it’s quite large, with three extensive floors set inside a renovated 16^th-century Dominican convent[4]. The convent chapel has been done up with a load of monumental allegorical wall paintings of Basque relevance – there are a lot of boats and iron[5]. The exhibits walk you through various facets of Basque life and history, from prehistory up to WWII. I particularly enjoyed the selection of traditional Basque hats, which the church banned Basques from wearing outside the Basque Country, because they were too phallic[6], and the section on traditional Basque pastimes. These people make the Cornish look urbane and sophisticated – one of the traditional instruments is literally a plank of wood that you hit with hollow sticks. Top sports include chopping-the-piece-of-wood-you-are-standing-on[7], throwing-the-metal-bar, and carrying-heavy-rocks. It’s amazing what peasants get up to if you leave them to their own devices. There was also ‘The sword of Boabdil’, Boabdil being the last Muslim ruler of Granada. Why it was there and not in Granada or Madrid was not explained. We presumed that it was probably ‘a sword of Boabdil’ (there are several on Wikipedia) that had been looted from the armoury by a Basque nobleman and brought back home, but it wasn’t very clear.

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Left to right; top row: HATS; CLOISTERS; The (A?) Sword of Boabdil
Middle row: PENIS HATS. LITERALLY; the acme of Basque traditional music; rustic Basque sporting equipment.
Bottom row: The chapel.

We paused our tour at lunchtime – the ticket let us back in all day – during which I had some excellent calamari, and then decided to try to walk the 8 km or so to Pasajes, the town over the headland, as the weather had cleared and the forecast for the rest of the trip was damp, so this might be our only chance to get outside for an extended period[8]. So we set off walking and climbed the headland up a fairly steep path, getting a good view back over San Sebastian, and of the rather grey sea. The reason for the grey sea were the rather lowering skies. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, we therefore turned around and retraced our steps, rather than risking getting soaked and having to get a bus back from Pasajes late. Adam slipped over on the way down, which seemed to confirm our decision. Once we got back to the city centre, it, obviously, brightened up considerably, but it was now too late to complete the walk in daylight, so we shrugged and went back to San Telmo to finish off the parts we hadn’t got to before lunch. However, it did mean we’d walked a very small section of the Camino, so I reckon we’ve now completed something like one milli-pilgrimage to St James. Must be worth a day or two off in Purgatory….

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From left to right: it was briefly sunny; it stopped being sunny; this was when we turned back.

These consisted of the art collection. There were some nice pieces, but nothing really amazing. So, with that discovery, it was back to the Old Town for dinner, which consisted of more pintxos. I felt that, by this point, I’d got the hang of pintxos and quite wanted something different, but the Basques are bloody nationalist about their cuisine and other options were a little limited. Plus, Adam was still keen on pintxos, so it wasn’t worth making a fuss about. After that, it was bed. Tomorrow, we were heading to Bilbao.

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San Telmo. Or St Elmo, as we’d call him. Preparing to set his Fire on a boat.

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[1] The Carlist Wars (there were two-and-a-half of them) were a series of conflicts over the 19^th century that were Spanish civil wars before the Spanish Civil War. The first one was in the 1830s and the general cause was that King Ferdinand VII had left only one heir, a daughter, who ascended the throne as Isabella II. Her government was relatively liberal and progressive, so all the conservative monarchists got up in arms, decided she wasn’t the actual rightful ruler because Salic Law, and supported her uncle, Don Carlos, and his male-line successors. There is still a Carlist claimant to the Spanish throne today, but they seem to have stopped fighting about it.

[2] San Sebastian has beaches on both sides of the tombolo on which the Old Town is built. La Concha is the more famous and more picturesque one, but Gros on the other side has, apparently, a very good beach for surfing beginners. There were certainly plenty of people doing silly things with boards and mostly falling over, even in October.

[3] It’s so high-end, there’s a local bylaw forbidding residents to hang washing out of their windows, so as not to lower the tone.

[4] One of the few buildings the English failed to burn down.

[5] The main reason the Basque Country became a maritime centre was that it had lots of wood and iron in the mountains, so could build lots of ships. The rest followed from there.

[6] They’re really phallic. Like, really really obviously so. They’re the least subtle symbolism I’ve ever seen.

[7] Also known as DIY foot amputation.

[8] Later events would prove the forecasts to have been mostly wrong in this regard.

Basqueing in the Sun (actually not much sun)

Or

Covid Tour 2020

Day 1-2: Trainhopping

In which the ingenious hidalgo meets his squire and attempts to catch many trains.

In what could be described as ‘self-indulgent idiocy’, ‘utter stupidity’ and ‘an astonishing dereliction of civic duty’, I recently went on holiday. To a foreign country. Reaching even greater heights of insanity, I went from Grenoble, where I live, one of the maximum-alert zones in France[1], to Spain, the other country in continental Europe that’s doing really badly at the moment[2]. Though not to Madrid – I’m not that mad – just to the Basque Country. Via Catalonia. I make good life choices.

The motive for this trip was to go and visit Adam, my friend from university who now lives in Barcelona. Given I was now living in the south of France, this was rather more practical than it had been when I was in the UK. And we’d been meaning to do this trip all year. And I had to do something with all the holiday I get[3]. So, disregarding all the health advice, we did it anyway. After all, the individual risk to both of us was negligible and we both live on our own, so who we were going to infect anyway[4]?

So, anyway, this meant I found myself heading off to Barcelona on the TGV last Wednesday. Though I very nearly didn’t make it – in a display of uncharacteristic logistical failure, I managed to completely mess up the Grenoble tram network, meaning I missed my first train by a minute. Fortunately, there was a coach twenty minutes later that got me over to Valence in time to catch the TGV, so it worked out, but it was a rather more exciting start than I’d hoped for. I’d also realised the previous evening that I had to put tags on all my baggage – it’s a legal requirement in France[5] – and the only suitable thing I had to hand was a Christmas present tag. So my big bag was sporting a Santa appendage. It probably looked a bit silly.

Four-and-a-half hours later, I arrived in Barcelona, met Adam and we went out for dinner because we could – it was the first time I’d been out since leaving the UK in August. One thing I can say is that having to wear a mask all day is really quite unpleasant. Good thing that was going to be the case every day for the entire holiday….

The following day, my squire and I[6] got on another train to get to San Sebastian/Donostia[7], though not until the middle of the afternoon. We consequently just hung out in the morning and went out for lunch – Adam had what I can only describe as ‘chicken rogered with a beer can’; I had meatballs. I made the better choice. Getting on the train was, however, rather odd – it was the most airport-like experience I’ve ever had in a train station. We had to queue up at a security checkpoint[8] and then wait to board and everything. I suppose it was broadly comparable to getting the Eurostar, but this was for a train from Spain to another part of Spain. It would be like getting a train from Birmingham to Cardiff and having to go through all the security palaver you associate with international travel. I suppose the Spanish have more of a history of train bombings than the British….

Six-and-a-half hours later, we got to San Sebastian. Most of the scenery we’d passed through – the interior of Aragon and Navarre – could best be described as ‘unremittingly bleak’. You can see why the Spanish were so keen to find other places to live as soon as shipbuilding technology allowed them to get across the Atlantic. Our initial impressions of San Sebastian was that it seemed fairly nice, but it was a bit difficult to tell as it was gone 21:00 and dark. There were certainly an awful lot of casinos and gambling establishments, which I hadn’t expected, and the Old Town, where we went for dinner, looked pleasantly olde-worlde. But we’d find out more in the morning.

Dinner, incidentally, was the first time either of us had encountered the Basque concept of ‘pintxos’[9]. This is basically tapas, though very slightly different. With tapas, you get relatively large dishes that are meant to be shared between multiple people. With pintxos, you get smaller individual portions. But the general idea of ‘have lots of small plates rather than one big plate’ is essentially the same. I was also very glad that Adam actually spoke Spanish, because I can’t – I can read it well enough, but can’t speak it – and it made things a lot easier. Especially because, for some reason, my brain had decided that the best language to attempt to communicate in was, for some reason, German. I think a part of me was applying a decision tree of ‘Is it English? > No > Is it French? > No > You only sort-of speak one other language, so it must be that one.’ Thanks, brain.

Back at the hostel[10], we discovered that there was no shower-gel dispenser in the bathroom. I had anticipated this and had brought some; Adam hadn’t. He washed using the hand-soap. Before you all think I’m heartless, I’d only brought enough shower gel for me for the week, so I didn’t have any to spare and there was no point us both being stinky. With that, we went to bed and were looking forward to properly starting the holiday the following day.

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[1] To be entirely fair, it was only declared a maximum-alert zone just after I left. Before that it was merely a higher-alert zone. But now I’m back, there’s a curfew and everything. I’d like to pretend this really puts a crimp in my social life, but I don’t have one yet, so I can’t say it’s materially affected me at all.

[2] I feel, having been in the UK earlier this year when we were doing the worst in Europe, that I’m playing some sort of covid-based version of bingo. Pretty certain I’m nearly at a full house now – just need to get to Italy.

[3] I get 45 days of holiday. Plus public holidays. And I had to use 15 days of it before New Year, so it was either this or sitting on my own in my flat for a week, which would have been pointless.

[4] Don’t worry, we wore masks and everything. We’re not both entirely mad.

[5] Because the French love pointless admin.

[6] In an effort to be thematically appropriate, I was reading Don Quixote on the Kindle. It’s really very good, certainly if you’ve read at least some chivalric romances, so you understand why it’s so silly.

[7] It’s the Basque Country. Everything has two names.

[8] The rules weren’t anywhere near as strict as at an airport, though – you could take liquids on, for instance.

[9] Pronounced pin-choes. One thing that’s very obvious about Basque is that they like ‘x’ and ‘k’ a lot, and also the ‘tx’ combination. It just looks very very odd.

[10] Which was quite nice, actually – it’s called ‘A Room in the City’. It’s got a good terrace and bar, which I’m sure would have been lovely in better weather and if there’d been anyone else around.

Second-class Citizen

As promised last week, a consideration of the structure of French academia. I happened to mention a few weeks ago that there was less difference between PhD students and postdocs in France than in the UK, because PhD students here are actually employed on contracts and are therefore less like students than in the UK. Now I’ve been here a bit longer, I’ve realised this leads to a quite problematic attitude in French academia[1] that I don’t think exists (as much) in the UK[2]. To sum it up, it’s that postdocs here are very much second-class citizens of the academic world.

The reason behind this is, because the only real difference between me and one of the PhD students here is that I get paid a bit more – we’re both on fixed-term contracts as employees of the same body, with pretty similar conditions and obligations – and am slightly older, postdocs are treated as glorified PhD students. The only difference between the two groups is quantitative. In the UK, the gap between PhD students and postdocs is both quantitative and qualitative – postdocs get paid more AND are in a fundamentally different relationship with the department/university, so are a more recognisably separate group and are perceived more as junior lecturers. The actual gap between postdocs and permanent lecturers/academic staff in both countries is pretty much the same, in terms of remuneration, employment relations and so on, but the perceived gap is much wider in France. To put it another way, as a permanent lecturer or similar in the UK, you look down from your ivory tower and see the big group of postgraduate (PhD/Master’s) students milling around the base, and then there’s a smaller group of postdocs halfway up that you recognise are a bit more like you. In France, looking out of the same tower, all you see below you is a big mass of people on various kinds of non-permanent contracts that all just merge into one blurry hodgepodge. Which you ignore while you drink another glass of wine.

The upshot is that French academic departments feel much more divided between those on permanent contracts (lecturers, professors, etc.) and those not (everyone else) than in the UK. The practical effect of this is that the permanent staff tend to not engage[3] with the non-permanent rabble. No one’s actively hostile or anything like that; they’re just not very interested in you, because they know you’ll be off again soon enough, so why bother talking to you? I understand the impulse – as a PhD student, it became increasingly difficult to bother to get to know each year’s new intake of Master’s students, and I sometimes wondered if it was worth it, given they left what felt like immediately – but it really doesn’t help make a department welcoming if you feel a large chunk of said department is just politely waiting for you to go away. Or feel that you’re sort of there on sufferance as a necessary evil. I think this was exemplified for me by a meeting I had a couple of weeks ago: it was the big once/twice-yearly departmental general assembly[4], and part of that was talking about leavers and joiners. New members of permanent staff got a whole slide and a little introduction each[5]. The new PhD students got all their names put up in a table on one slide. The new postdocs and people on fixed-term contracts? We got one bullet point saying ‘Welcome to all of you!’. Talk about tokenism.

I’m overdramatising a bit, and I’m not pretending the UK is entirely free of this sort of dynamic either, but British departments do seem to be a bit better, structurally, at valuing postdocs. I’m finding it particularly annoying, because one of the things I was quite looking forward to as part of being a postdoc was not being treated like a student any more and feeling, generally, slightly more grown up. Instead, if anything, I’ve gone backwards. My reaction to this is to, of course, not bother working all that much, as I hinted at recently – it doesn’t seem worth it.

Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité. They might be the French slogan, but Orwell was certainly right when he said some are more égal than others.

[1] Or, at least, an attitude that’s a problem for me. But, given this blog is entirely written by and about me, I feel I can, within these walls, so to speak, generalise the problem. More seriously, various people I’ve spoken to here have brought it up unprompted in conversation, so it’s clearly not just me making a mountain out of a molehill.

[2] Admittedly, by ‘UK’, I mean ‘one small department in Cambridge’, so I might be wrong, but I think there’s a real difference between the mean UK attitude and mean French attitude.

[3] I’m talking about socially here – obviously, they have to engage at a research and work level.

[4] Think something like an AGM. The levels of boredom and administrative tedium are about comparable.

[5] I actually got the impression you only got in this category if you were in the director’s inner circle (or, perhaps more accurately, if your boss was). It seemed a rather bitty list.

A Protesting Work Ethic

So, I’ve done the PhD, I’m a doctor now and have started a postdoc. Seems I’ve got this academia lark figured out. The thing is, actually, I’ve realised I don’t care all that much about work. What I’m not saying is that I hate my job[1] or I regret my life choices or anything like that. Just that work is not something that terribly motivates me. I’m profoundly career-unoriented. Now, possibly, the fact that I’m writing this whilst I still haven’t really got into my new project yet, and whilst feeling a little socially isolated, because I’ve just moved to a new country, don’t know anyone and the God-virus is nerfing all my social opportunities, may be making me a little less enthused than would otherwise be the case, but I don’t think it’s just that. Though I think there is also a reason linked to the structure of French academia, which I’ll cover separately in the next few weeks.

To explain this, it’s perhaps worth me stating why I did a PhD. If I’m really honest, it was to spend another four years in Cambridge doing things that do matter to me: learning and being able to hang out easily with my friends. The fact that it also happens to be the most obvious pathway to a career of a kind that is more likely to suit me is an accident. A happy accident, but not the main reason I did it. There was also an element of me feeling that, as someone who thinks they’re probably fairly clever[2], I should get a bit of paper that allows me to be called a doctor purely to prove the point[3]. Which I have now done. And yes, I suppose there was also a small element of genuinely caring about academia and glaciology and science and all that – I’m not a carefree monster.

The problem is that only the last of these reasons really translates well into a postdoc. Functionally, apart from increasingly fine distinctions within academia that only other academics care about, there’s nowhere further to go to prove I’m clever. I have to go where the job is, which may or may not be where my friends are. There’s an element of continued learning, but it’s increasingly straitjacketed and specialised. Doing things just because they seem interesting is less viable. I mean, sure, I realise I need to do something to earn money, but that’s never been something that motivates me. In my head, it’s in the same category as other tiresome-but-necessary things such as shopping and haircuts[4].

This doesn’t mean I’m not happy to do work – I need to earn money, and earning it doing something that I find at least partly interesting and at least partly care about is much better than the alternative. I also need something to fill up about 8 hours of my day, and if that happens to be gainful employment doing said vaguely interesting thing, that’s handy. But what it does mean is that I see very little reason ever to do more work than I’m strictly contracted to do. I’m also puzzled when people seem enthusiastic about work and expect me to be the same – I mean, it’s work, surely there are more interesting things you could be doing? Why aren’t you permanently faintly annoyed at this state of affairs? Just me? OK, nod and smile and maybe they’ll go away….

Fundamentally, what motivates me are things that I mostly find outside work, at least at the moment. Possibly, if I did more teaching as part of my job, that would generate more intra-work motivation, because I like helping people understand things[5], but that’s not what I’m doing currently. To put it bluntly: I’m unlikely to be one of those academics that seems to work all the time. I like glaciers, but not so much that everything else falls by the wayside. Of course, this is just how I feel now – things may change. We’ll see.

P.S. I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and I think the caveat I put at the beginning was partially true – I know a few people now and feel a bit more enthused about work. But the overall point of work not being a terribly motivating factor in my life remains true. I mean, it’s work.

[1] If anything, I quite like my job. It’s reasonably interesting, pays enough, is pretty flexible and gives me the opportunity to live somewhere nice.

[2] I’m reasonably certain this is factually correct, rather than a load of hot air.

[3] I know. I’m incredibly shallow really. But, come on, I do competitive quiz tournaments. Obviously I have some sort of insecurity about needing to constantly prove I’m clever.

[4] Now I own one of those handy clipper things so I can do my own hair, having never required anything more complicated in the hair department than the periodic shearing. OK, it still takes up time I’d rather use on doing something else, but at least I don’t have to pay someone else for doing it or waste more time queueing for my turn. So that has got a little less tiresome.

[5] And also because, as I already understand them, this is an opportunity for me to show off how clever I am again. Come on, how many people’s motivations for doing anything are really entirely altruistic?