I NEED LUISA’S SPIRIT TO STOP A ROAD

A lovely story meandered across the meadows of the broadsheet newspapers this week and even found time to look in at the hallowed portals of the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4.

It might, with reasonable accuracy, have been entitled ‘Plus ca Change, Plus c’est la Meme Chose,’ for it concerned a seventeenth century Spanish noblewoman - Luisa de Carvajal - whose observations of an enforced sojourn in London some three hundred years ago have turned up, faithfully recorded in 150 letters, in the attic of a Madrid convent.

Which only goes to show that nuns, holy though they may be, are, in the earthly respect of housekeeping, no better than the rest of us when it comes to de-cluttering the loft. No doubt convent attics are built especially large for this purpose, which makes me wonder what else might be up there, steeped in that institutionally religious smell of incense, floor polish and boiled cabbage.

For what Luisa de Carvajal wrote might have been written about Londoners at any time, I suppose, in the intervening centuries. At least what we have been told she wrote; for it seems that from the 150 letters dealing with every aspect of the capital’s ‘mode de vie,’ from lavatories to executions, we are being asked to judge her work from a single short paragraph which happens to deal with cooking. She damns viciously with faint praise, does Luisa.

“The food looks good,” she writes, “but has no smell and almost no taste.” Well, what did she expect? Isn’t our cuisine reputed the world over for its blandness? Is that not why those clever people from ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ were able to write a beautifully satirical sketch about a group of Indians going for ‘An English’ and demanding ‘the blandest dish on the menu?’

Poor Luisa! One wonders why she didn’t send out for a packet of salt. Instead she wrote long and elegant letters castigating the barbarity of the neighbours, the thin walled houses, the rowdiness (always worse on Fridays) and the twenty-five thieves regularly hanged every month. And while we ourselves may no longer hang miscreants, they themselves seem determined to ensure that the quantity violent death available on the capital’s streets remains at levels sufficient to aggravate modern day Luisas into writing any amount of minatory missives home.

Still, it is not everyone who is privileged to have a name that would sound respectable even when attached to a Persian cat. And like a Persian cat Luisa emerges as a most superior being: someone accustomed to the highest standards and who had no time for nonsense. Her writing also shows her to be a woman of action. She may have been a Mrs Tittlemouse figure, used to order and neatness, now plunged into a London cess pool populated by so many Mr Jackson’s, but she was determined to do something about it.

Writing was her escape from this dungeon as it has been for so many before and since. The sheer joy of having in front of one a blank page on which to marshal thoughts and sentences, words and phrases as though they were troops ready for battle.

Sadly, though it is a joy that is being heavily discounted. Fewer and fewer people these days take any joy in writing at all. Even what is written is ‘dumbed-down’ to the point where it no longer exercises the brain so much as sends it to sleep.

Besides, a good letter not only demands a certain elegance and power of observation, but in a library or vault or attic, it will survive for 300 years. More in fact, for hardly a week goes by without some new archeological dig turning up this fragment or that, telling us about who was doing what to whom in the days of some long forgotten empire and enjoining us to remember to pay Sextus three denarii for the dogfood. No amount of convent attics will I fear do anything to preserve our electronic scribblings.

But the joy of scribbling also brings burdens. The other day I found myself enjoined to attend a public meeting in a neighbouring village through which, or rather around which, our dear Assembly government may be building a new road for the purpose of arriving marginally more quickly at a very much under-used airport.

No sooner had I been introduced to the meeting’s beautiful and erudite secretary, who had been allocated the job of committing our thoughts to paper and preparing a report for the great and the good, than I found myself urgently propelled into her shoes, so to speak, as she herself has had precipitously to depart on rather sad family business on a distant continent.

Oh dear! I have until Monday to read and digest the consultant’s report and then try to rustle up a little of the Luisa spirit to explain, carefully and calmly, why it is somewhat less than a good idea - with predictions of environmental catastrophe as frequent as bland cooking - to spend a ridiculous amount of money to build a major road to get to a minor airport.

I need Luisa’s spirit for it is obvious that the powers that be take little account of rationality. The statistics on which the report is based are five years and a $100 dollars an oil barrel adrift for one thing. I fear that in their minds the decision to build a new road is already taken. We are now just going through the motions. Facts, in the minds of the proposers, only exist to be rebutted.

What is needed is a little spark, a key phrase, arrowed where the mind is vulnerable; a convenient ladder from which a minister may easily disengage himself from a petard and climb down from his hook; that will disarm this countryside despoiling time bomb. And I have until Monday evening.