On trust and the grape

Peo­ple trust each other where I live. I'm not talk­ing about the kind of con­fi­dence where no one needs to lock their doors. I mean that where I live you don't see that look of sus­pi­cion in the eyes of a stranger that you con­sis­tently do in Eng­land, for ex­am­ple.

There seems to be a basic be­lief that the men and women next to you are not out to cheat you or some­how do you wrong. And this is de­spite acts of ter­ror­ism, theft and self­ish out­looks on daily dis­play, in ad­di­tion to a main­stream media that feeds on re­port­ing crime. Of course this un­stated faith is reg­u­larly abused. Maybe rou­tinely so. Yet it con­tin­ues.

We used to live on the out­skirts of Vi­lafranca del Penedès, a medium sized town of about 40,000 peo­ple in the agri­cul­tural in­te­rior of Cat­alo­nia. Be­hind our apart­ment build­ing there are large grapevine plan­ta­tions and paths run­ning through them. Every day peo­ple walk there, jog, or take their dogs for ex­er­cise.

But there are no fences. It would be easy and cheap to put fences around these fields but no­body has felt this to be nec­es­sary. Thou­sands of euros of vine­yards lie ap­par­ently un­at­tended for short pe­ri­ods of time and these vines are of course un­guarded.

If this was in, say Is­rael or near an Eng­lish town would it be the same? My guess is no.

There are also no fences in the lit­tle vil­lage we have cho­sen to live in since mov­ing a hand­ful of kilo­me­tres away from Vi­lafranca. The grape is still the dom­i­nant fea­ture in the land­scape and our house looks onto fields of vines: ver­dant green in sum­mer and bare brown after Oc­to­ber. I find it im­pos­si­ble to walk through these fields with their sooth­ing geo­met­ri­cal lines and not feel bet­ter than I did be­fore.

Maybe this is partly why the farm­ers I talk to seem to be a con­tented bunch. De­spite ab­surdly low prices for their qual­ity pro­duce it's ap­par­ent that they enjoy what they do. I know sev­eral who vol­un­tar­ily work into a very ripe old age, tend­ing to the sim­plic­ity of cul­ti­vat­ing plants in what the French call an in­dus­try of plea­sure. Give a man a job that is he is sat­is­fied with and he is halfway to being happy.

Re­cently though, the basic con­fi­dence that the av­er­age Eu­ro­pean has in those around him or her is sadly being tested and is also being shaken. Ter­ror­ism by fa­nat­ics, ex­trem­ists and the ultra-mar­gin­alised is mainly re­spon­si­ble for this but so far Spain and Cat­alo­nia have re­sisted see­ing right wing po­lit­i­cal par­ties as a pos­si­ble an­swer to the var­i­ous forms of ran­dom slaugh­ter that have con­tin­ued across the con­ti­nent (and for that mat­ter, much of the world.) I sus­pect how­ever, that all those healthy fields of green and red grapes will stay un­af­fected and un­touched by the sadis­tic joy of small-minded ego­tists in­tent on mass-mur­der.