Don Trumpote

I have finally finished reading Don Quixote. I got through the first half whilst I was on holiday in the Basque Country, but it took me a while to finish off the second half , because I got distracted by reading other things. It is, for what is often claimed to be the first modern novel, a very impressive literary creation, with all kinds of self-referential cleverness. Though you do need to have a decent idea of how chivalric romances are supposed to work to really get why Cervantes’s work is such a good parody of the genre. I will, however, say that the second part was perhaps the sequel that didn’t really need to be written. It doesn’t do anything fundamentally new, though it does neatly tie everything up. The only real difference is that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, rather than wandering around doing stupid things, are being deliberately hoaxed for their own amusement by a succession of hosts who have read the first part, know who they are, and therefore intend to see how far Don Quixote’s chivalric madness really runs[1]. But the jokes are basically the same and it felt as if the original idea didn’t quite have enough steam to sustain two novel-length books. Certainly, by the three-quarters mark, I was a bit bored and quite ready for the book to end. I know many literary critics prefer Part II, but I’m in it for the lolz, not the depth of characterisation, so we can agree to disagree there.

But that’s by the by. What is worrying is how applicable the book is to the current political situation in America. Don Quixote is a man who, against all the evidence of his own eyes and despite what everyone else is telling him, persists in deluding himself into believing his own fantastical claims and keeps believing them in the face of everything the world throws at him. Sound familiar? Though then, to sustain the metaphor, we’d probably have to conclude that Rudy Giuliani is Sancho, which I feel is unforgivably traducing the brave squire[2]. Mitch McConnell and the entire Republican leadership then take the place of the Duke and Duchess, and the other hoaxing hosts of Part II, in enabling Don Trumpote[3] to continue his mad fantasies. Though somehow I don’t think they’re doing it for what is ultimately some fairly harmless, if cruel, amusement. Cervantes was writing what he knew to be a surreal and ridiculous parody; the modern Republican party seems to be trying to write the updated, serious, dystopian remake. The difference is that, in Don Quixote, everyone else in Spain except Sancho can see that his master is utterly insane; in today’s America, we seem to have the Spartacus crossover, where a large chunk of the population is also, in fact, Don Quixote, and just as unable to recognise reality. They are all mightily impressed by the Emperor’s New Clothes. What we’re also missing is any equivalent to the priest; Master Nicolas, the barber; and Sanson Carrasco, the graduate, who seek to heal the ingenious hidalgo and persuade him to return home. Possibly because Don Trumpote doesn’t actually have any friends, just minions.

Don Quixote’s antics were, in the end, pretty victimless. He and Sancho took most of the beatings and damage, even if there were a few incidental characters along the way that suffered personal injury or destruction of property. However, they were usually recompensed and ultimately dealt with fairly. And, finally, Don Quixote recovers his wits and dies as the respectable Alonso Quixano the Good that his friends and neighbours know him to be. I wish I could believe that Don Trumpote’s utter rejection of reality was going to end so benignly or cause so little lasting damage along the way.

There’s no real point here – other people who actually know about American politics have already written reams of better analysis of the situation than I could ever be bothered to. But it really does seem to me that a 400-year-old parody about a madman written to be deliberately ridiculous is one of the closest parallels to the behaviour of a sizable proportion of the populace of the most powerful country in the world. Which is a tad concerning.

[1] The answer is all the way.

[2] I can see Sancho getting the complete wrong end of the stick and doing a press conference at some random garden centre, but I don’t think he’d be vain enough to dye his hair.

[3] The Knight Of The Orange Face. If I’m honest, I came up with this and then wrote the rest to justify using it. If you’re surprised by this, you clearly have not been paying enough attention to literally anything I write. If you don’t get it, go and read all 200,000 words of Don Quixote and then appreciate how good a joke it is.

Love Lies Reeling

This probably qualifies as the most personal post I’ve yet written. Oh, don’t worry, it’s not going to be icky or anything, just that it does tangentially relate to my love life[1]. So, I am currently a single young man under lockdown in France. All social activities have been on hold since I got here in late August. My nearest physical friend is 500 km away in Barcelona. Therefore, the number of ways I can meet girls in real life that don’t fall under the headings of harassment, indecent exposure, or pathetically desperate[2], is precisely zero. Which means it’s time to get serious about online dating.

I dabbled around a bit in Cambridge, but never pursued it terribly seriously – something about still being a student and having no money subconsciously discouraged me from doing anything much – but now I’m a Real Person[5], it seems about time I started getting a bit more involved. So I looked around a bit to try to work out what people used over here, downloaded one of them and thought I’d see what happened.

What happened was that I got a match fairly quickly, we started talking, and four days later, she asked me for money to pay for her internet connection. Well, one scammer is bad luck, right? Then, almost immediately, almost exactly the same thing happened. Again. I hadn’t encountered this in the UK at all, though I’m sure it exists, but getting hit instantly by two scams makes me wonder whether I’m an idiot, or just really unlucky. In future, I think I’ll use a paying service, which should hopefully stop this sort of thing from happening.

But, the existence of scammers on dating apps is not really all that revelatory; what I actually wanted to talk about was how the scams were set up. Scammer #1 – let’s call her Bonnie[6] – claimed to be a currently-forcibly-unemployed-due-to-lockdown hairdresser in training, living in Brittany[7]. As we chatted, she further claimed she lived with her grandmother, because her parents had died in a car crash when she was only 8, so she had no other family, and that she had been recently cheated on by her ex. All very much calculated to generate sympathy, fairly evidently, but not so improbable that you’re going to hang up, as it were, immediately. People do die in car crashes and cheat on each other, after all. Amazingly, we also seemed to agree on nearly everything, though her train of thought was a bit difficult to follow at times and she certainly seemed to have hang ups about honesty, which, to be fair, would be consistent with what she claimed to be. She was also quite evasive whenever I asked a direct question, which, again, could be excused in-character to some extent. This was Day 1.

On Day 2, she declared her undying love for me. Which I thought was a bit much. And kept calling me incredibly handsome. I mean, I’m not utterly unattractive, but I’m sensible enough to also know that I’m not George Clooney, so I was fairly certain at this point that she was either utterly mental or a scam. But, I kept going for a bit, because if it was the former, I didn’t want to just ghost her out of the blue[8], and if it was the latter, I’d find out soon enough. And indeed, I did find out on Day 4, at which point I said goodbye and bailed. I didn’t see the point in being unpleasant – my main emotion was embarrassment, really. Someone out there knew more about me than I was entirely comfortable with. Fortunately, I have the emotional range and responsiveness of a raw potato[9], so all her work trying to get me to feel sorry for her and attached to her was extremely unlikely to ever bear fruit. Or shoots, if I continue the tuberous metaphor.

Scammer #2 – let’s call her Clyde[10] – was definitely a more subtle operator. She felt more like a real person and less like a bot typing out a script – she actually answered my questions and was generally a bit more lucid. The setup was essentially the same, but differed a bit in the details – her parents had died in a car crash when she was 17, not 8, she’d recently moved to Grenoble from Brittany[11], and she was looking to set up a clothing business, though was currently unemployed. But, to top it all off, she was currently in Morocco on ‘personal business’. Which was an incredibly stupid premise – travel abroad? Now? Really? – especially as you can easily look up travel restrictions in Morocco, as I did. You can get in as a French citizen, but you need a really good reason, and she’d already said she didn’t have any family over there, and, being an unemployed clothes retailer, I was fairly certain she was unlikely to have been invited by a Moroccan company or by the government, which meant it seemed very unlikely that she could be in the country.

The Morocco thing meant I was sceptical from Day 1; on Day 2, the astonishingly similar family situation was revealed and I was just waiting for the request for money, doubtless because of unforeseen complications in Morocco, to turn up. Mostly out of a sense of morbid fascination, rather than because I really doubted my guess, though the evidence was still entirely circumstantial. And lo! the request arrived on Day 4, because of unexpected Moroccan complications, despite the fact that I’d been deliberately soft-pedalling things for a couple of days. You’ve got to admire her resolve to carry things through. So I politely said goodbye and deleted her too.

The conclusion is that I’m apparently not quite stupid enough to fall for what turned out to be pretty obvious scams. Well done me. But there’s one thing I don’t get and if any of you reading this know the answer, please do tell me: why Brittany? For Bonnie, I assumed it was just somewhere she’d picked to claim to be that was sufficiently far away from me that she could have indefinitely temporised on meeting up. But Clyde actually lived in Grenoble (or at least claimed to); why would she say she was from Brittany? Clearly, being from Brittany has to mean something. Is there some sort of French stereotype that Breton women are exotic or easy or dirty that I’m just not aware of that means French men are more likely to go after them? Or are Bretons of all stripes generally regarded as a bit unsophisticated and rustic[12], and the meaning was therefore more ‘I’m just a poor country girl; I can’t possibly be scamming you; I’m too stupid.’? Or was it more of a case of ‘everyone knows Bretons are weird so any inconsistencies or strange behaviour you notice are because I’m Breton and definitely not because I’m a scammer.’? So yeah, if you think you know, do get in touch. Because it’s inexplicably annoying me as the final piece of the puzzle[13]. In the meantime, let’s see if I can find anyone who isn’t just interested in me for my possible cupidity.

[1] You may think that the revelation that I have one is sufficiently newsworthy for me to leave the post there. Or, at least, that I’m trying to have one. But please, contain your astonishment, because there’s more.

[2] Or all three, which I think is what standing on a street corner lewdly dressed with a sign saying ‘GET IT HERE’ would count as. Shame: I paid a lot of money for that sign[3].

[3] Don’t worry, that was a joke. I don’t have a sign. It’s more of a sash to go with the mankini[4].

[4] That was also a joke. I apologise for the state of your mind’s eye now.

[5] Reality of personness still currently debatable.

[6] I’m going to assume they were both actually women, just to make things easier. But, to be honest, they could have been 50-year-old guys called Pierre. Or even the same 50-year-old guy called Pierre.

[7] Quite why she matched with me was thus one of the things that seemed a little inexplicable from the start. Brittany’s about as far away as you can get in metropolitan France from where I am.

[8] One thing I have definitely learned is that I should probably be less initially nice to random people I meet on the internet. I just don’t want to be that person that automatically assumes everyone else is out to get them until proven otherwise, that’s the problem.

[9] Though it has been peeled and someone’s carved a happy face on it, so that’s fine. It’s made an effort, at least.

[10] I assume you all saw this one coming.

[11] Where she’d left her grandmother. A bit weird to leave your only family member who you claim to be deeply attached to that far away purely to get away from your ex who hurt you so bad by cheating on you with your best friend. But what do I know?

[12] In the same way that the English generally look down on our western Celtic neighbours, the Welsh and the Irish, as being a bit uncouth and generally backwards. I’m not saying I subscribe to this view, but it’s definitely there.

[13] I’m sure you’ve worked out this was the real point of the post. But I couldn’t just write two lines saying ‘What are French stereotypes about Bretons?’, because that would be dull. And now you’ve got an entertaining story out of it too.

Basqueing in the Sun 4

Day 7: Back to the Riviera

In which Don Quixote declares war on the fish-headed giants.

This was a bit of a lost day – we had to be back in San Sebastian for the evening, because we were getting the train to Barcelona very early the following morning – so we had to get the bus at some point, but that was about it. Our plan had been to fill the time with a walk, but the weather wasn’t really playing ball, or we’d considered heading inland to Vitoria, but we were a) a bit museumed-out and b) we’d have to go to San Sebastian first to drop our luggage in the hostel, so we’d just end up travelling for most of the day, which didn’t seem terribly appealing, given we’d be spending all day on a train the following day. However, there wasn’t really anything left in Bilbao we especially wanted to see, nor was there much in San Sebastian we were all that keen on.

In the end, we moseyed round the cathedral in Bilbao and the Church of St Anthony to fill the morning. Both were mildly interesting – the cathedral was Gothic, which was good, and the church was a rather oddly constructed, lopsided affair that was a bit different. We then took a very early lunch, where I ate more squid[1], and hopped on the bus back to San Sebastian, where we returned to the same hostel as before. It was mid-afternoon at this point, so we did the only thing left to do: we went to the aquarium. This ended up being quite a good decision. The aquarium starts off with a historical exhibition about why Basques care about the sea, which finally filled in a lot of the contextual gaps left by the two Maritime museums. Particularly, it actually talked about the importance of whaling to the Basques and how this drove a lot of Basque maritime development, though it was a bit cagey on how Basques actually contributed to nearly wiping out all the whales. The actual aquarium itself was exactly what you’d expect – there was a good range of local and exotic species, a big tank you could walk through in a tunnel, and so on – but it wasn’t bad, by any means. At the very least, it passed the remainder of the afternoon quickly and engagingly.

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Top row, left to right: Bilbao cathedral; the interior of St Anthony’s Church; the lopsided exterior of the church.

We then went to a proper restaurant, rather than a pintxo bar, for dinner, as we’d been told it served the world’s best cheesecake. I also had steak, for a change, because I couldn’t face more cephalopodicide, cod is dull, and therefore large chunks of meat were essentially what was left on the menu. The cheesecake, when we came to it, was indeed very nice. Possibly not the best in the world[2], but certainly very good[3]. It was then back to the hostel for the night, a journey during which we got absolutely soaked, which was annoying, though not terrible, given we were going to bed anyway and could dry everything overnight.

Day 8-9: Trainhopping 2

In which our heroes are persuaded to return home.

Our train back to Barcelona left at 07:30. So, up we got at 06:00. We were not very happy. We did at least get a taxi to the station, to avoid the rain, though, when the time came, it decided to mostly not rain. Typical. The train itself was uneventful and we were back in Barcelona for a late tapas lunch, after which, being rather tired, we just sat in Adam’s flat and watched Life of Brian, because obviously[4]. For dinner, we headed out for Japanese food, just for a change. We’d heard earlier that day that all the bars and restaurants in the city were going to be shut from the morrow, so we really had been riding on the wings of the storm[5].

Adam was back to work the following day, but I was spending another day on the train back to Grenoble. Ultimately, I got back as expected in the late afternoon, having successfully negotiated the trams this time, but the Barcelona-Valence train did run half an hour late, because, apparently, some people were refusing to wear masks, so they had to get the police in and eject them from the train at Figueroas, before we even left Spain. This was a little annoying. But, I had a 50-minute change at Valence, so it didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. An unfortunate coda to what was generally a very good holiday – what with one thing and another, getting away for a bit in any form felt particularly special!

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[1] I had actually had enough squid by this point. I do like them, but it turns out that you can have too much of a good thing.

[2] I don’t have enough data points to make that assertion.

[3] The restaurant is called ‘La Vina’, if you’re interested.

[4] It goes without saying that we can both quote essentially the entire movie.

[5] The following week, the Basque Country also imposed fresh restrictions. From a certain point of view, we’d timed the holiday pretty much perfectly. From another, we’d gone at the worst possible time to catch covid.

Basqueing in the Sun 3

Day 5-6: Bilbo, Bilbo, Bilbo Baggins, the greyest little city of them all

In which a second sally is attempted and our heroes discover art.

To get to Bilbao, we took the bus. That’s right: there’s no train line between two major cities about 90 km apart[1]. To be fair, there’s a good reason – the terrain is tricky to say the least. The motorway is one of the more impressive bits of vehicular infrastructure I’ve encountered. By the time we arrived, it was lunchtime, the journey having passed without incident[2]. At this point, we made a very important discovery: the Basque for Bilbao is ‘Bilbo’. The local buses have the slogan ‘Bilbobus’ emblazoned on them. Lots of shops are ‘Bilbo-‘ something. I was very happy. This also led me to develop a Theory: the Basque Country is the Shire, with its major city having clearly been named after the first Hobbit to be involved in the affairs of the wider world, who obviously became a mythologised folk hero. This Theory has an important corollary: the Basque language is evidently thus just a descendant through many ages of Westron, the Common Tongue of Middle-earth. I await my Nobel Prize for Linguistics imminently.

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Basque = Westron. Fact.

Having made this discovery of great moment, we arrived at our hostel via the metro, as it was a half-hour walk and it was raining. And we had all our luggage. We were in the Casco Viejo, the Old Town (again). It seemed very nice, though it was interesting to observe that virtually every street corner sported what looked to be a recent immigrant selling umbrellas. Presumably, they sell something else when it’s not rainy. The hostel itself was also very nice. It was actually a B&B, which was momentarily exciting[3], until we realised the second B wasn’t happening because of the pandemic. So it was just a B. But a good B. The concierge was also incredibly camp and I kept expecting him to go full-Carry-On at some point, but this didn’t happen. Probably for the best.

Dumping our luggage, we went out for lunch in the form of more pintxos. We then meandered round the city for the first part of the afternoon – we found the cathedral, the football stadium[4] and lots of fairly pleasant cityscape. Bilbao has a reputation as being a bit grey and industrial and, whilst it’s certainly less pretty than San Sebastian, it’s really not that bad. I imagine it was pretty grim 50 years ago, and possibly the area downriver where the port now sits might be a bit more industrial, but the actual city, as such, is surprisingly pleasant. Our peregrinations eventually took us to the Maritime Museum (another one), which is sited on a regenerated bit of dockside, next to a big red crane that seems to be the emblem of modern Bilbao. Inside, we were treated to more on the Best Basque Ever, Juan Elcano, though this exhibition focused less on the circumnavigation and more on his life and the context surrounding Basque involvement in the expedition. In other words, it nicely filled in a lot of the gaps left by the exhibition in San Sebastian. The remainder of the museum exhibits also helpfully filled in some of the missing context from the San Telmo Museum about why Basque shipbuilding and seamanship was more advanced than elsewhere[5], though not entirely. I particularly enjoyed a heroic statue of a Basque sailor perfectly pulling off the power stance[6], which was meant as a tribute to all Basque sailors. The museum further hosts the official visitor centre of the local Port Authority, which was very corporate and banged on a lot about intermodal transport nodes, whatever they are. Bilbao is one, though, that was very clear.

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Top row, left to right: INDUSTRY; CRANE; POWER STANCE!!!!
Bottom: the re-enactment of the Battle of Mactan (where Magellan died) on show in the museum was very Batley Townswomen’s Guild

After this, having rather tired ourselves out with a lot of walking, we headed back to the hostel, lolled around a bit, and then found more pintxos for dinner. This was the Sunday evening of the three-day weekend, so we were looking forward to future evening being a bit less busy, because, as in San Sebastian, all the locals seemed to be out for the holiday.

Our second day in Bilbao was dedicated to Art. Well, some of it was art, anyway. We went to the one-thing-that-everyone-knows-about-Bilbao, the Guggenheim. And then the Fine Art Museum that is just round the corner. I might not like modern art very much generally, but the Guggenheim wasn’t actually too bad. It’s certainly the most interesting modern-art museum that I’ve been to. To start with, the building itself is very impressive. It looks as if the inside should be a bit of a mess, but it actually all works quite well. Inside, there is a lot of modern art. There was a Lee Krasner exhibition, which made me quite certain that Abstract Expressionism is a waste of time and paint, and what looked like a load of symbols from a non-verbal reasoning test by Lygia Clarke, that I was primarily puzzled by. But there were some actual interesting pieces by Anselm Kiefer and Gerhardt Richter, and there’s an entire floor of Olafur Elliason, who likes glaciers, so is automatically my favourite exponent of contemporary art. He also tends to do quite a lot of interactive stuff, which is a bit more interesting, but I will admit my favourite piece of art was just a load of photographs he took of Icelandic glaciers spaced 20 years apart to show the effects of climate change. I think I may have missed the point of much of the rest.

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The Guggenheim and its environs from various angles. And the best art in the whole building.

Lunch was taken before returning to more Art. For once, it wasn’t pintxos, but a fairly normal sandwich, which was actually a pleasant change[7]. Then we hit the Fine Art Museum. It turns out the collection is disappointingly modern – it’s mostly 19^th– and 20^th-century pieces – but there’s a good set of works by Goya and El Greco[8], as well as a scattering of earlier paintings. We were both taken by a Bosch-esque weird Dutch peasant thing by Mandijn. The oddest thing about the museum, though, was how it was organised. There’s a ‘masterworks’ exhibition, which included most of the best pieces, and a landscapes exhibition, which was fine, but nothing special, but it’s the permanent collection that’s set out weirdly: it’s alphabetical. That’s not alphabetical by author or title or anything like that; it’s alphabetical by theme. The curators have picked a theme for each letter of the alphabet, put one letter per room, and put all the thematically appropriate art in each room. It’s quite a nice idea, but it’s rather poorly executed: depending on the room, the theme may only begin with the ‘right’ letter in one of Spanish, Basque, English or French. It feels more as if they should have picked one language to base the themes on, rather than choosing whichever one is most convenient. Some of the themes were also very loose and seemed a little contrived. On the other hand, it did mean that there was probably at least one interesting piece in each room, but I think it could have been set up a bit better. Regardless, the museum was worth a look round, though we felt very much Art-ed out by the end.

Consequently, we popped back to the hostel for a rest, before heading out for what ended up being a 3-course set dinner. It was pretty much our last proper day of holiday – we thought we’d spend some more cash. The food was solidly fine – I consumed some more cephalopods[9] – but it was let down by a rather manufactured dessert. We wandered around the Old Town briefly afterwards and were surprised to find a plaque saying, more or less, ‘Bolivar was here’. We were surprised, because we didn’t think Bolivar ever made it up here – we knew he’d spent time in Spain, but principally in Madrid. As far as I can tell, his visit to Bilbao was pretty brief – it doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere, particularly, and the city is just jumping on the bandwagon a bit. Though I did find out that the name ‘Bolivar’ was itself originally of Basque extraction, so that was interesting. And that was pretty much that for Bilbao.

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[1] At least, no direct train line. You can get between the two on the train, but you have to go quite a long way inland, change and come back again, taking three hours for a journey that’s an hour on the bus.

[2] Except someone asking Adam for money almost as soon as we got into the bus station at San Sebastian. Bus stations are the same the world over.

[3] We’d been acquiring breakfast in cafés so far. This was fine, but meant I was eating breakfast rather later than I’d like.

[4] One blessing of the pandemic was that Adam couldn’t drag me to a football match or on a stadium tour, as he’d threatened to do. To be fair, I’d have been OK with the tour, but was quite glad to avoid the match.

[5] It made the point better about how the combination of lots of trees and iron ore meant the region had the necessary raw ingredients to build lots of boats. Combined with the mountainous interior that favoured coastal transport and pursuits, as opposed to riverine or terrestrial ones, the Basques were pretty much forced to become good at sailing.

[6] As used by Sajid ‘Did You Know My Father Was A Bus Driver?’ Javid in all circumstances.

[7] It was also a nice sandwich.

[8] An artist who was probably 300 years ahead of everyone else.

[9] They’re just so yummy.