It was a long day of family celebrations today, around the 65th wedding anniversary of my parents. This, I feel safe in saying, is an achievement which few of us following after are likely to emulate. In my case, for example, I’d have to (re)marry tomorrow and live until I was 127. Which I discount.

Time to think about a post has again been short so I’m resorting to another quote from M. Rocca’s memoirs of his time in Spain during The War of Independence. In this paragraph, he majors on the dignity also observed twenty years later by Borrow. At times, one gets the impression that the Frenchman - while admiring Spanish resistance - nonetheless feels it isn’t entirely fair. I’m reminded of the old joke in which the Coliseum crowd takes exception to a Christian buried up to his neck in sand biting off the testicles of a lion which leaps at him . . . .

Hurried on by the pleasure of the ride and the impetuosity of my horse, I climbed one hill and then another; I crossed a torrent, and arrived at the entrance of a large village. The inhabitants, having seen me coming from afar, were afraid that I should be followed by a numerous body; the alarm instantly spread among them, and they hurried from all quarters to their houses, where they were occupied in barricading the street-doors, preparing, according to their custom, to escape over the walls of the back courts. Seeing that I was alone, they gradually came out of their dwellings to the market-place, where I had stopped. I heard several men repeat, with considerable energy, the word "matar" ; as I did not then know the Spanish language, I thought at first that it was a manner of expressing their astonishment at the sight of a stranger; I afterwards learnt that the word means to kill. The Spaniards were not so peaceable as the inhabitants of the plains of Germany, where a single French soldier gives laws to a whole town. When I saw the crowd increase, and the agitation augment, I began to fear lest the inhabitants should detain me as a prisoner. I spurred my horse on both sides, and went without the village, placing myself on a hillock, where I was soon followed both by the men and the women ; I then began to make my horse leap backwards and forwards over a low wall, and a ditch behind me, to show the inhabitants I was not afraid of them, and that I could easily escape when I pleased. Detained by curiosity, (it was the first time since we passed the Ebro I had seen a village entirely inhabited, and above all by women) I returned to the height where I had at first placed myself, and made a sign with my scabbard to the people not to come within ten paces, and tried to make them understand that my horse wanted food. The inhabitants, wrapped up in their great cloaks, looked at me in silence, with a kind of astonishment; keeping up, nevertheless, in their looks and behaviour, that gravity and that dignity which characterize the Castilians of every age and of every class : they appeared heartily to despise a stranger, ignorant of their language.