A Christmas lunch

On 14 December 2024, I dressed for a Spanish Christmas lunch with considerably more thought than the occasion eventually appeared to require.

I chose a black dress with a beautiful pattern that reminded me of Andalusia, earrings inspired by Dalí's melting clocks, and a Spanish-style hairstyle. There was a deliberate idea behind the whole arrangement. When Laureano saw me, he supplied the caption himself. “Eres mi muñeca española.”

You are my Spanish doll.

At the time, I heard affection. I had made an effort, he had noticed, and we were going to celebrate Christmas together with his two children and the Spanish delegation (NATO Spanish officers and their wives and kids). It seemed a perfectly reasonable beginning to an afternoon.

I am Roman Catholic. I grew up within a Catholic culture, and Christmas occupies first place in my calendar of celebrations. I understood what the occasion meant. I understood the importance of family, of arriving together, of making an effort for other people. I was not approaching Christmas as an anthropologist encountering an obscure local ritual.

Nor had I arrived naked, wrapped in the flag of the Russian Federation. The outfit was an attempt to honour the occasion. Even the Spanish newspaper account published much later would notice the Spanish gesture in my clothes as people noticed.

This was only the second occasion in my life on which I had spent time with members of the Spanish delegation. My knowledge of Spain extended to rather more than the dress: I knew Goya, Cervantes, Isabel I de Castilla and the cultural references through which a country becomes familiar from a distance. What I lacked was any sustained acquaintance with this particular community.

The lunch took place in a marquee at a pub in Bushey. The marquee was unheated. This matters, because much of my immediate thinking that afternoon concerned warmth, a drink and eventually somewhere to sit. International intrigue was some distance down the list.

I tried to introduce myself to a group of women. They dispersed. I approached again elsewhere, and something similar happened. I felt like a border collie chasing sheep. After two or three attempts, I decided that I had done enough introductory work for one Christmas.

There is a point beyond which trying to join a conversation begins to resemble herding sheep, except that the sheep have apparently agreed to move in every direction except yours.

Laureano had disappeared somewhere. I think he was worried about his kids. Later he told me hat they were treated awfully by other children, as the kids mimicked their parents' behaviour. I found myself standing alone in a corner, with what felt like five metres of empty space around me, while the other guests gathered elsewhere. I was cold, thirsty and bored. I went outside, where Admiral Delgado and some other officers were standing, and tried a conversation there.

The replies were mostly monosyllabic. Eventually Laureano reappeared and bought me mulled wine, which was the first development of the afternoon to address an identifiable problem.

There had already been changes to our table allocation before the lunch. These happened by email; nobody physically moved us from table to table while we were eating. The correspondence contains three versions of the seating arrangements, circulated on 11 and 12 December. Laureano later described a progression down the military hierarchy. My pleaded account also addresses those arrangements. The surviving covering emails establish the revisions; they do not, on their own, establish the motive for each change.

By the time food was being served, however, the problem had become more basic than the rank of our table companions: I did not have a chair.

I told Laureano that I could sit on his lap. At least it would be warmer. When Enrique passed, I asked for a chair, and one appeared.

On one side of me sat Simone, a Brazilian woman whose partner, as I understood it, was also going through a divorce. She asked me about immigration matters, and we had an entirely normal conversation. In English. On the other side sat Pilar, an English teacher and a petty officer's wife, who kept her back towards me and spoke Spanish when something needed passing around the table.

Simone matters to this memory. There was no uniform wall of hostility, and being a new partner in complicated personal circumstances did not appear to produce the same response in every case. Any explanation has to accommodate that difference.

At the time, my conclusion was fairly modest: these people were strange. If strange people did not want to speak to me, I was happy to stop trying. I was not conducting a study of Spanish social organisation over the Christmas pudding.

I understood the occasion. I did not understand why these particular people were behaving towards me as though they had already reached a collective conclusion about someone they barely knew.

Then, on 19 September 2026, I read the Spanish article about the woman whom her partner's NATO colleagues had called “Red Sparrow”. The woman was me. Suddenly, there was a story to place beside the memory.

How a person becomes a story

The article did not give me a reliable explanation of everything that had happened. It contained factual errors, including its chronology of our relationship and its claim that the two December celebrations took place in the same location. The lunch on 14 December was at the pub in Bushey. The earlier event was at Northwood. It happened two days earlier, on 12 December 2024 and is still debated across various court rooms in both countries.

But the article offered something I had not previously possessed in this form: attributed accounts of how people within that environment described me, and how they described their own behaviour towards me. Finally, I realised what happened and why people behaved so strangely.

A newspaper source's account is evidence of what the source told the newspaper. Its accuracy, provenance and relationship to any institutional decision still require examination.

Consider the passage about the earlier Christmas event. I am described as attractive and friendly. Then comes the qualification: I spoke English with a Russian accent. Actually, I agree, this is something weird about me. For some reasons, I have never acquired Polish accent in my English. I do not know why.

It is what it is.

The account then moves on to questions I allegedly asked about surnames, previous postings and people's work, presenting them as extraordinary and inappropriate.

There could, of course, be a genuine security issue in a particular question, depending on its content and context. But the article does not reproduce an exchange sufficiently precisely to let the reader assess that. It gives the interpretation, carried by the authority of an unnamed senior officer. A reader is invited to accept that an introduction had become an interrogation.

My accent, my shooting ability and the alleged questions are then assembled into a familiar fictional character. The nickname is described as a joke. That leaves a substantial question unanswered: at what point, if any, did a joke begin doing the work of an assessment?

The article's Christmas-lunch passage is even more revealing. It says that Laureano's estranged wife was devastated, particularly because the children were attending, and that other officers' wives, who were her friends, had said they did not want to sit with me. It then describes our allocation to a table of non-commissioned officers, contrasts his silence with my supposed “spectacular scene”, and reports that the women ostracised me and everyone avoided me.

What, precisely, was this spectacular scene?
Which words, which actions, which exchange?

All I remember that Alex, Pilar's husband, was talking about his plans to apply for a job at Bydgoszcz and then I had some fun teaching him how to pronounce it. Really, try to make a Spaniard to say "SZCZ", and you would understand my highlight of that day.

I remember the cold, the missing chair and my joke about sitting on Laureano's lap. A description of me as scandalous supplies none of the detail necessary to compare that label with what actually occurred.

Nor does the passage present avoidance as something that began only after my alleged behaviour. It has already told us that women did not want to sit with me. Their refusal therefore needs an explanation of its own.

The language makes the asymmetry visible. His wife's distress receives a reason. Her friends receive a relationship through which their loyalty becomes intelligible. My reaction receives a label. My own account is missing from that scene.

I can understand why a separated spouse might find a former partner's new relationship painful, including its presence at a family occasion. Understanding that pain does not establish that the new partner has done something wrong. Laureano and his wife had separated in August 2024. Our relationship began in October, and by November we were living together.

Why would attending a Christmas lunch with him and his children require an explanation framed around my moral unacceptability?
What acceptable arrangement was I supposedly refusing?

There are two chicken-and-egg problems here.

The first concerns the relationship between the label and the exclusion. Did people first decide that I should be absent, or that our relationship should end, and find the spy story useful afterwards? Or did they first take the spy story seriously and then conclude that I should be excluded?

The second concerns acquaintance itself. Did they avoid speaking to me because they had heard stories about me? And did their refusal to speak to me help those stories survive, because there was no ordinary acquaintance through which to challenge them?

A person can become very well known as a character while remaining almost entirely unknown as a person.

Laureano was part of that process too. According to what he told me, he had joked about sleeping with a Russian spy who was supposed to kill him. I cannot reconstruct every private conversation or identify the first author of every phrase. But I cannot analyse him solely as a man subjected to institutional pressure while ignoring his contribution to the descriptions circulating about me.

The possibilities are not confined to one clean sequence. Suspicion could encourage exclusion; exclusion could prevent correction; resistance could then be interpreted through the original suspicion. Several people could contribute different motives without ever agreeing on a common plan. The article cannot establish which sequence occurred. It does give us reasons to investigate rather than accept its finished characterisation.

Whose honour, whose voice?

This is where research on cultural codes becomes useful, provided that it helps us formulate questions rather than supplying a national verdict.

In their 2002 paper, “Honor in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe”, Patricia M. Rodríguez Mosquera, Antony S. R. Manstead and Agneta H. Fischer compared Spanish and Dutch participants. Across two studies, they found that Spanish understandings of honour were more closely associated with family and social interdependence, while Dutch understandings placed comparatively greater emphasis on individual achievement and autonomy. These were comparative tendencies in particular samples, not instructions governing every Spanish person, and the study did not examine my circumstances or compare Spain with Britain.

That distinction nevertheless gives me a useful question: when reputation is understood relationally, who is entitled to define what somebody else's relationship means for the group?

In the newspaper's account, the wife already occupies a recognised place within a network. Her friends have a reason to take her side. Laureano belongs to a professional hierarchy and a community with shared relationships. I enter as the new partner, without a comparable position from which my account can be heard. This is my interpretation of the episode through the research, not a finding made by its authors.

Family loyalty can be generous, protective and sustaining. I know that from my own Catholic upbringing. The difficult question arises when loyalty becomes a reason to withhold ordinary recognition from someone outside the existing arrangement. Who gets protected, and whose explanation becomes unnecessary?

There were at least three possible ways to accommodate my existence. The community could recognise me as Laureano's partner while keeping professional boundaries intact. It could offer a more conditional inclusion, mediated through him and its informal expectations. Or it could seek my absence, perhaps even the end of the relationship. We should not assume that the first two routes were genuinely attempted merely because we can imagine them. The question is why exclusion became an acceptable response at all.

Here the military setting matters as much as the national one. An officer's dependence on his institution, a hierarchy's interest in managing its personnel, friendship with a separated spouse and assumptions about a Soviet-born woman can overlap. Calling the result simply “Spanish culture” would conceal the work done by each element.

It would also leave a crucial evidential gap untouched. A nickname circulating socially does not itself prove the basis of an administrative restriction. The later movement from personal descriptions to decisions affecting me requires its own documentary reconstruction. I am pursuing that through records, complaints and litigation. Cultural interpretation cannot substitute for identifying who said what, who checked it and who acted upon it.

What it can illuminate is the question that kept returning: why was I so frequently discussed through my relationship with an insider, while being given so little opportunity to speak as a person in my own right?

That is where the little Spanish doll returns to the story.

I do not retrospectively convert an affectionate phrase into proof of contempt. But I now hear a possibility in it that I did not hear that morning. A doll can be admired, dressed beautifully and cherished. None of that requires asking what she thinks. Once she speaks, disagrees or demands an explanation, the relationship has to accommodate something more demanding than an attractive presence.

I came to experience a version of femininity in which affection could coexist with a refusal of equality. In that experience, a woman could feel like a doll to be enjoyed until she became inconvenient, damaged or tiresome. I am describing what became intolerable to me in these relationships, not announcing what Spanish men universally think of women.

The question was whether I could be recognised as an equal interlocutor when I stopped being agreeable.

The songs I no longer need to write

The Christmas lunch was strange. What followed was considerably harder to put at a comfortable distance.

After our separation, and around Laureano's suicide attempt on 17 September 2025, I encountered a contrast that profoundly affected me. Members of his community supported him in hospital. Nobody from that circle contacted me.

I did not resent the support he received. I wanted him to receive it. What shocked me was discovering that the same network's capacity for concern did not appear to extend to asking how I was, or hearing what had happened to me. I was intimately involved in the circumstances, yet remained outside the conversation about them.

The experience left me with psychological distress and a persistent difficulty reconciling the things I had seen. A community could be caring and capable of solidarity. I had witnessed that capacity. I had also experienced its boundary.

I began studying Spanish cultural patterns because I wanted to understand that boundary. I also began writing songs in Spanish. Music gave me somewhere to put questions for which ordinary conversations had provided no satisfactory answer.

Flamenco came particularly naturally. Some of those songs have reached tens of thousands of views. There is a peculiar intimacy in discovering that a musical language can hold your experience even when the social world to which you are addressing it has left you unheard.

For nine months, the songs became a monologue. I was speaking to aspects of Spanish culture that I found increasingly unacceptable, using a language and musical forms I loved. I was trying to say, from inside the sound: this is what your way of relating has felt like to me.

I learned the language. I kept learning the references. My attachment to Spain survived my anger. Understanding grew, but acceptance did not follow automatically. It is possible to recognise how an arrangement makes sense to the people within it and still refuse the place it offers you.

About a month ago, Laureano reappeared in my life. This time, I found myself recognising patterns that I had previously tried to explain away or resolve through another conversation. I could see more clearly how his loyalties and institutional identity shaped what he expected from me. I could also see that understanding those expectations would not make them acceptable to me.

About a week ago, I blocked further communication and published what I now think of as my last Spanish song in this conversation. I do not mean that I have prohibited myself from ever writing in Spanish again. I mean that the particular impulse which sustained this musical exchange has ended. I no longer have another verse with which to explain the same boundary.

There is a public chronology here too. Before The Telegraph's sensational publication on 14 September 2026, I had kept my intimate life private in public. My approaches to journalists concerned institutional accountability. They were not an invitation to turn my relationship into entertainment. Once the relationship became the public frame through which the case was understood, I began speaking openly about my own experience. That response should not be projected backwards onto the woman arriving at a Christmas lunch in December 2024.

She was trying to celebrate Christmas. She had chosen the dress carefully.

In “I AM UKRAINE”, I wrote about the cultural resources that help me remain, organise and build. In “I AM BRITAIN”, I wrote about independent judgement, evidence and the freedom I find in recognising absurdity. Those essays describe ways of thinking that help me act. This essay identifies a set of expectations I have learned to recognise and cannot make my own.

My conclusion concerns the place available to me within the relationships I encountered. I could not continue accepting that other people's loyalty to one another made my account optional, or that affection entitled someone to manage my voice. I wanted equality in the conversation, including when what I said was unwelcome.

I still love Spain. Its language and music have helped me articulate an experience I could not initially explain. I am grateful for that capacity, and free to decide what I will no longer try to accommodate.

The institutional questions remain. I will continue asking for the decisions, the records, the sources and the explanations. I do not need personal reconciliation before pursuing an answer, and I no longer organise my efforts around the hope of being accepted into the circle.

This article is the verbal ending to a monologue that was musical for nine months. I understand much more than I did in that cold marquee. I have also reached the limit of what I want to keep explaining.

I am not Spain.

Today's song - La Loba Del Ruedo | A Silent Victory