THE SLAP

This is not a pleas­ant topic to write about, but it is some­thing I feel I need to ad­dress. It’s def­i­nitely a cul­tural issue in some re­spects, though as al­ways, it’s going to be dif­fi­cult to draw any real con­clu­sions in that re­gard.

What hap­pened was this: I reg­u­larly play in a pitch and putt tour­na­ment with a bunch of peo­ple of dif­fer­ent na­tion­al­i­ties, in­clud­ing Cata­lans, Ital­ians, Amer­i­cans, British and Irish. If you don’t know what pitch and putt is, it’s a short form of golf, i.e. shorter holes where you have 3 shots to get the ball in the hole, as op­posed to 3, 4 or 5 shots in reg­u­lar golf, de­pend­ing on the dis­tance. We play once a month at one of the many courses dot­ted around Cat­alo­nia. I’m not great at golf, or pitch and putt, but I do enjoy it a lot, even if I am aware of all the en­vi­ron­men­tal crit­i­cisms aimed at it… but we’re not going to get into that here. For me it’s a great way to see old friends, meet new ones and do a bit of com­pet­i­tive sport while hav­ing a stroll through na­ture.

But as you may have guessed from the be­gin­ning of this col­umn, my last out­ing was not as pleas­ant as usual, due to a re­gret­table in­ci­dent I and my fel­low pitch and put­ters wit­nessed on the course. On the hole ahead of us was a Cata­lan fam­ily com­pris­ing a cou­ple in their thir­ties, their two small boys and two grand­par­ents. The grand­par­ents were quite el­derly and just walk­ing round with the group, but the mother, fa­ther and two boys were all play­ing.

The younger of the two boys was get­ting more and more frus­trated as he went round the course – and be­lieve me, pitch and putt and/or golf are for the most part very frus­trat­ing sports, even for adults, try­ing to get that lit­tle ball into a tiny hole 100 me­tres away in just three shots – al­though he could clearly ac­tu­ally play the game and hit the ball quite sweetly at times. As his frus­tra­tion and tem­per tantrums in­creased, so did the ex­as­per­a­tion of his par­ents, but noth­ing had pre­pared us for what was to come on the 18th tee. After a cou­ple of wild swings and misses from the young lad, he vented his frus­tra­tion by at­tempt­ing to storm off, only to be caught by his dad and given a cou­ple of sting­ing slaps on the thigh/back­side. My group of four were all quite hor­ri­fied, and waited for the mother or one of the grand­par­ents to step in, or at least say some­thing. But no, clearly this pun­ish­ment was ac­cept­able to all those pre­sent, as they sim­ply ig­nored the re­sult­ing cries of the boy.

One of the guys in my group, an Eng­lish­man, had to be re­strained from mak­ing his feel­ings known to the fa­ther of the boy, as the rest of us felt it was “not our busi­ness” and we should “stay out of it”. Al­though noth­ing fur­ther came of it, in the car on the way home I was sud­denly struck with a feel­ing of guilt for not hav­ing said some­thing to the fa­ther and for re­strain­ing my play­ing part­ner. If the man had hit his wife, would we have stopped him? Or one of the el­derly grand­par­ents?

So here’s the cul­tural part… I cer­tainly would never have laid a fin­ger on my son while he was grow­ing up, as I see it as great weak­ness to re­sort to vi­o­lence to ed­u­cate your chil­dren. I’ve lived here for many years and don’t re­mem­ber see­ing a Cata­lan par­ent slap­ping their child be­fore. So this came as quite a shock. I tend to use these tour­na­ments as an op­por­tu­nity to ed­u­cate for­eign­ers about Cat­alo­nia and Cata­lan cul­ture – for many of the par­tic­i­pants are not from here, as I have said, and know lit­tle about where they have cho­sen to live – but un­for­tu­nately any good work I might have done on this oc­ca­sion was sorely un­der­mined by the ac­tions of that one fa­ther to­wards his son.