Unholy hopes for dissolution

On this occasion I think my old colleague the Europa Sur’s editor is ill informed in http://www.europasur.es/article/opinion/2244982/bendito/brexit.html.

No doubt the person who described Sr Margallo’s comment at an academic seminar summer 15 to Mr Picardo was the same who told me. According to this Spaniard, asked in a private session, what he would do after a Brexit, Sr Margallo said he would join his good friend Sr Landaluce (not present at the seminar) for a cheers and at 6 pm that evening go down with him to La Linea and close the border. It may have been tongue in cheek, or apocryphal in the mouth of the Spanish teller, but all the evidence is that it reflects Sr Margallo’s bottom line. Sr Grimaldi’s relishing of a Brexit  - despite the damage to Europe -  underestimates Gibraltar and its people. It also reflects a most Hobbesian vision of the world -  that people thinking as he appears to  require the EU to stop them being, I paraphrase, greatly tongue in cheek, “nasty, brutish and short”.

Parisian thoroughfare

They call it the jazz district. At heart of the exquisite mix of dirt and culture called Paris, past an avenue of pillars, dark alleyways and bins.  St Denis. I know it well.

We hired a flat  in Rue de Palestra in the Easter of 2010 for a family holiday.        

Cheeses named after saints sigh their wafts from nearby Rue Montorgueil where a giant golden snail declares sovereignty  over endless food stores and restaurants.                              

The family are in hysterics. After a battle of fromage, pate and sticks of bread and my couple of heady glasses of vin rouge we are off sight seeing.

 With Tintin in my mind and poor O level French on my lips I hail a cab - "A le sacre bleu" I demand. 

The driver is either too stunned or hasn't the heart to correct me as we speed off to le Sacre Coeur

ahead of an encounter with Dali and failed resistance to beautiful cakes.

In the evening a ten minute walk takes us to the New Morning jazz club to see James Carter. Dark, unswept, furnished like a second hand shop in the sales. It's dominated by an overweight 

madame whose curves are splattered in yellow but faded sequins broadcasting a sleazy but friendly smile - this is  the perfect jazz club. 

Paris is a bazaar of international intensity, a spirit of eras and art, tempers and good service. It's a huge free spirit peppered with prejudice and challenge.

A true city is, surely, defined by the fact that it has at least one opera house  and  more than one jazz club. And endless gastronomic temptation, of course.

Despite the flashes of tension and the mostly unfair reputation of Parisian indifference, post war Paris was the cultural safe haven for many of the jazz greats escaping the racial prejudice of the US  - from the lynching south up to northern states, in diminishing but nonetheless real spirals of violence.

The jazz refugees - Sidney Bechet, Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon et al - Miles Davis' famous affair with Satre's lover Juliette Greco, are part of the legend of Europe's cultural haven which was a home to  countless artists including an exiled Picasso. It's where races blended in rivers of art.

Like many, the news of the Paris attack last weekend  brought memories of this racy metropolis flooding back. For me -  the fateful day of 9/11 when in 2001 we watched Sky news stunned by the emerging  images, and the  personal scent  of visits to this great heart of France city of

romance and culture.

Arriving back this week, just two days later on the afternoon flight, I found the streets of London defiant, vibrant, determined.

Rich Mix, a Shoreditch cultural centre, was relaxed even as theatres and performance halls around London adopted tightened security measures. 

In booking to see the  powerful trumpeter Christian Scott I had not anticipated the seating arrangements. For the first time in over 30 years I found myself being asked

to have my hand stamped - no tickets, no seats.

Eventually, with some ingenuity, we secured a small sofa on an overlooking balcony. 

Only as the audience gathered in a wild array of dress and hair styles to chill in a tsunami of sound and rhythm, did  it dawn on me that we were that audience. That same gathering of people that trundle through cold nights, packed metros to work, to love and , just from time to time, to celebrate.

JE SUIS....just another punter dreaming of strolling along a Parisian thoroughfare.

On decolonisation

GBC Gib Talks http://www.gbc.gi/tv/programmes/gib-talks-125

REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE....? My last last interview as Gibraltar Chronicle Editor. Cleverly edited documentary by Iranian backed Italian production team. www.presstv.com interesting but some very doubtful policies behind certain stories.
Gib documentary

Awe de toilette

When fellow pension trustee and Prostate campaigner Douglas Ferro tweeted:"

Douglas Ferro @ferrod1

Marketplace toilets used by most tourists. Gents 1 toilet no lock ladies 3 toilets 1 no lock other 2 out of action for over 4 weeks pse act"

(Not sure what to make of last two words!) even the CM retweeted -  clearly its no joke for those who get there anxious for relief.

But it does allow me to add my 2ps worth on public loo issues. Firstly who allowed the financial genius /  environmental scammer who came up with a blow dry for hands to make so much money. The backs of trousers take the brunt -  these are a waste of energy and space, please recyclable paper towels.

And then there's discrimination. I have to assume most architects are men? It's the only explanation why nearly all establishments and facilities have allotted the same space to men's loos as women's. Why? Women are always queueing for a couple of cubicles whilst the mens is half empty.....

That's it before this nascent blog does to pot....

In the halls of Seville's Bellas Artes

The trouble with writing is that it can seem so trivial at times. Outrage, from the sublime to the simplest basics. Having taken on the role of CM's special representative and switched the 

lights out on over 30 years of journalism - sometimes exhilarating sometimes, forgive me, chronic, I felt I needed some time off.  A year would have been great, a month seemed reasonable.... A week will do.

When I look back I know there are things I covered well and things which could have been better. My only regret really, in terms of stories, is that I was often so sucked into our collective naval gazing I was unable to carve out time for stories I was telling other journalists from abroad, such as the BBC, were the big stories of a decade's time, over a decade ago.

It haunts me that we are so focused on the niceties of day to day life on our Rock that we don't always remind ourselves of our geographical reality. Africans have been drowning in the Strait in a continuous dark and silent flow for many, many years. Those who do not fade down into the ancient arms of the Mediterranean currents, end up bobbing in the culture of abuse that has sustained Andalusian needs at a time of austerity. Africans toil the beds, soil and mattress, of the region's black economy.

Gibraltar may be small and trivial to the bigger picture of this harsh landscape, but we cannot ignore its growing reality.

So yes. That is a story we ignore to our peril. 

In that, our relationship with Spain remains a challenge. Like a political remake of Jurassic Park we have found ourselves in the bizarre situation of being threatened by Tyrannosaurus Margallo through the frontier gate that he is so keen to close.

As I headed up the Ronda road for my escape into the mountains the thought of those poor people thrust into the deep into their own self- sponsored watery graves, seemed to make trivial Spain's investment in having its boats dodging provocatively through Gibraltar's waters.  

The other failure, but not through lack of trying,  has been that of fostering genuine human relations with our neighbours that transcend the old political sores.

As I strolled through Carmona, much as the author of Don Quijote had once done, it struck me that Sr Margallo's own battles with windmills look increasingly like turning into the beams that will, despite him, lead to supporting the building of good realisation of Gibraltar's great potential.

The dedicated Paco Oda ploughs on in the apparent hope that elections in Spain will pass before any final move is made on the very successful Gibraltar Instituto Cervantes. Sharing culture is an act of peace.

Having myself, through editorials sharing, on a reciprocal basis, column space with one time Europa Sur editor Juan Jose Tellez, always advocated dialogue and cultural links, I had been, in this dull Margallo era, tempted to give up on that. Will Spaniards easily give up their obsession with us... i doubt it.

The pride of place at the Museo de Bellas Artes goes to our own Gibraltarian artist Gustavo Bacarisas. Posters and booklets are printed with his work and there is open acknowledgement of his being born in Gibraltar. How can Spain so consciously reject our cultural contribution to the wealth of this region now when it was clearly accepted almost a century ago.
A new Spain should recognise the value of our small distinct nation and respect that distinction.

Bacarisas painted, well he is a llanito, the beautiful women of Seville.
Culture should be put to the fore and politics left aside.

And still. That dark, secret flow of death arrives at dream shores that we fail, blindly fighting over history, to protect. There are more important things we should all be focused on, not least the human disaster at out shores.

As Margallo travels the globe believing himself a superhero, he fails to to see the greater picture.

When he goes, better people should try. We are them.

The apps have it…?

A valedictory by Dominique Searle

As I walked out one morning last week a blue sky with determined wisps of white cloud painted the prospect of a lovely day. Ten strides down the hill and I paused to look at my mobile. It plainly predicted rain from 11 am onwards.  The inclination to continue was defeated by my growing faith (reliance?) on apps. I returned for my coat.

And the app was right. As I left an interview the white had turned to grey and in line with weather.com and the BBC the water opened a spray upon me.

That’s not quite how it was in 1984 when I began full time work with the Gibraltar Chronicle and would more likely have relied on a moan about a twitch in Slim’s knee to predict levanter or rain.

The Chronicle has been a lifetime journey for me. I was a one year old when I began to live on the premises of the Garrison Library offices. For decades I was lulled to sleep by the whish of the printing press. Ink on the soles of my shoes and running between the giant printers shouting from one end of the print shop to the other, guillotine to lead setting.

Serving copious glasses of whisky to Harold Wall in the Christmas ‘wayzgoose’ under the direction of Betty and Sheelagh and generally dodging about between many of the characters who were part of this newspaper, some of whom I would get to work with or even lead (yes John Shephard is 80 this year and still a bastion of the old school in the office).  And like John I have folded, delivered and done most jobs that help get the daily round out, through thick and thin.

The names are too many to list from Nancy to Hector and so on…but that was just when I was a child unknowingly straddling the tense world that existed between civilian and military on the Rock and then, more so, the Rock and Spain. The border closure was as much a story for me as an event.  Headlines rolled about the kitchen table as naturally as the rest of the days more mundane affairs.

So this is a valedictory piece as I stand on the precipice of 31 years as a full timer on the newspaper and many years as stringer for The Times and Reuters as well as contributing to other media.

Now, before me, a whole new opportunity to move on to a fresh challenge still immersed in the variations of the stories that define and have defined this gem of a Rock so desired by others. We can be forgiven for sometimes thinking we are the centre of the universe. I shall miss writing the headlines, especially the ones we would never use!

The world is not perfect, nor are people. But the Chronicle’s own well over 200 years of struggles and triumphs has mostly reflected, if not in its reports in its own change of ethos, the story of Gibraltar’s political life.

I have tried to be a gentle myth-buster -  despite what we say about Spain we have only ourselves been a real democracy for decades, not centuries. But we were ahead - when Spain was a dictatorship, we were a colony.

I remember EFE Ryan but never worked under him but my editors were my father for a short time and then Francis. In the 1980s surge of the Brussels Agreement, Sir Joshua Hassan, the politics, the events and the dramatic opening of the border…we had some great times. And for journalists great times generally means a big story put to bed with a beer (or two).

As it turned out the clinch year for me as a young journalist was 1988. The biggest hard news events were the IRA incident and  Barlow Clowes but the lasting revolution came with the sweeping to power of Joe Bossano. He was the first ever leader who had to deliver a real economic plan after MOD slashed its contribution from 70% of the economy in a rapid slide to 7% a decade later.

He knocked the colonial chip off the Gibraltarian shoulder and made people look to themselves for their identity. But his way of doing things provided news!

Then the avalanche of 1996 hit -  not just with the dramatic change of government and the events that had led to that - but also with my becoming editor of what, as it turned out, was a bankrupt newspaper.

Peter Caruana rode in on a wave for change and on an era that was enjoying prosperity generally. The tripartite -  his greatest political gamble and achievement -  ushered in a fresh, sadly not so long lived era of relations to which it would be good for all in this neck of the woods to return.

Then there was the myth of a £1m aid from the Government for the company-  there was no donation, there was a debt to Government which we are still paying today (unlike many here today, gone tomorrow companies, often from abroad, that have walked away with impunity). The debt has largely been paid for by the workforce who for the most part, from myself to the delivery driver, editorial and printing, endured static and modest wages for a decade and lost up to 90% of our pension expectation. We almost lost 70% of our pension entitlement when that fund was put into winding up in hugely underfunded state.

With administrative, but not financial, help from the Treasury and Income Tax departments  that loss has been greatly mitigated by makling a distribution of the fund instead of purchasing annuities.

Thanks to Lucio Randall and Douglas Ferro for their support on the pension board. We finally got there, though not in the happy state we might have hoped for, with best arrangement possible.

I take my hat off to them all and especially those who strove to push this project ahead for the public good.

That project, however, of salvaging the future of a company that anyone in their right mind would have had closed, would not have been possible without the hard work and support that I had from Suzette Martinez, my commercial manager. Nothing short of obsession and dedication got us through the early days with the occasional encouragement and advice from Jaime Levy at Hassans who had faith ( a decade and a half of it) that we would eventually come through. And from my good friend Peter Montegriffo who has listened priest-like to my woes.

Suddenly in 1996 there were just two of us making up the newspaper’s editorial team, Paco and myself.  Plus, of course, some stalwarts in the contributions section. I am not sure how but the paper managed to get to breakfast tables in the morning despite the turmoil behind the scenes.

This is a sketch of an industry where what is usually work – writing stories and chasing leads , meeting people and serving the news to the public - was the undoubtedly the upside of it all.

Anyone who runs a small, intense business knows that recruiting the right person is key to all. You are better off waiting for years than putting up with the wrong choice. 

As the management of reality began to take shape in my first years as Editor, I was strolling up Library Ramp in my usual state of disconnect, working though some story or problem, when I alighted on Alice Mascarenhas. She was back from UK having interrupted her GBC career to venture into theatre and TV in UK studying and working in the field. 

Amidst the debt agreements and on going liabilities I had (and here I should interrupt and say I learned my financial management from Joe Bossano’s ideas of safe recurrent spending and building rainy day funds) there was an opportunity to try and recruit someone who could instantly bring a new dimension and potential to the newspaper.

As GBC pondered whether or not to take her back I offered her the freedom to create her own department.  We needed to break free from the concentration on politics and no one has more command of local cultural life then her. It was a major coup!

Against the odds she joined that madness of our treadmill. None of us have really lost weight, but we certainly lost sleep!

For me its been a 12 hour day every day and often a large chunk of the weekend for three decades, and although we were paying our way by 2000 it all almost unravelled until four years ago when it was agreed to restructure the company. With the haemorrhage arrested through reorganisation, we started to make real headway. Apart from myself (and Johnny the photographer) there are now five full time editorial staff.

Again a key move was to bide my time until a Gibraltarian obsessed with good newspaper reporting came along. That happened some eight years ago when Brian Reyes’ ship came into port (he was a Lloyds List staffer) and he joined the team. The best local hard news reporter I have met and sufficiently affected by the news obsession to want to do this job.

Is it a good time for me to leave? Yes…..no…..yes.

The company liabilities are well covered and despite the expanded team we are paying our way and making a modest profit.  And we have a solid rainy day fund set aside to cover any dips and for investing in significant improvements to our systems and product as the need arises. Against all trends in Europe the newspaper is gradually growing its circulation both in print and pay for e-editions. It has never been in a better state in my lifetime in terms of either staff or commercial viability.

But the challenges ahead for all newspapers -  and many have fallen in the British fields -  do not exclude the Chronicle. The move towards a greater dependency on electronic editions has it implications for the ability to afford, in the longer term, the journalists to serve a quality product.

The high cost of printing remains a challenge and soon enough newspaper printers throughout Europe may become extinct to smaller bespoke machines for ‘discerning’ clients of specialist periodicals like the FT

Whilst GBC takes advertising at below cost rates (given its public subsidy) and all but one or two publications print in Spain, the playing field is not really level for the Chronicle and some other media here. What keeps us going is you, the reader, and your passion for Gibraltar and the team’s passion to keep the sparkle of 1801 alive.

Brian is well equipped to take us into a new era. And he has a great team behind him from editorial, across layout to commercial and advertising. Again I thank them all for their loyalty and hard work. (Enjoy retirement Charlie!)

Why move? The extraordinary challenge put to me by the Chief Minister is certainly one thing. It feels the time is right.

The fruit of years of work from all my team needs a fresh drive. I need a new adventure (dreams of a sabbatical were never to be…) and the newspaper will benefit from a fresh approach.

Rather than risk eventually becoming a cantankerous old editor battling on, I think a great deal can be achieved by someone younger and with new ideas for the times ahead. Despite the safe platform the role of editor is always a daunting challenge. Taking an historic publication forward and, above the sea of emails, Tweets, blogs and social media, producing something you all trust enough to pay for…not the easy life, for sure.

What does the new job entail? Many of the same players but, for once, being one myself rather than a mirror on events. My work at the Chronicle and more recently in philanthropy with the Kusuma Trust has taught me patience with people and the need to try and understand people’s stories, not just convey them.

So too the ebb and tide of political life, the fact that, as Margallo shows us, time does not always move forward, has made me feel strongly, that we must not only build good allegiances and defend ourselves but work towards a new path. Despite all the rowing, hitting back, probing, jibing and general rough and tumble of political exchanges one only has to look back at the polls and referendums to know that Gibraltar is as united as is possible on defending our future and our rights.

I have seen and heard a great deal from my Editor’s vantage point -  on stage and behind the scenes -  and welcome my new role to put that to good use.

On the key factors my experience is that all our Chief Ministers since Sir Joshua have put 100% plus into defending this Rock of ours.

I know that Fabian Picardo is doing so. I share his readiness for the battles ahead and his optimism for our future.

My sincerest thanks to you all -  readers and staff -  for the lifetime of support.

I leave the Chronicle -  print and ipads - in good hands….