Life With Piggies

 There used to be a nice Canadian show on the television about the delightful critters that live quietly in the garden. A slow and amiable voice helped us as we wandered around a giant lower-forty in far-off Newfoundland looking under leaves and behind rocks. Pleasant-looking bees worked feverishly to please the cameraman as the plant-life went through its various routines: flowers, seeds and pods. Small rodents galloped aimlessly about in the undergrowth as some muted music accompanied the friendly talk. Oh! to live near a Canadian garden and to follow the dragonflies!

Here in Mojácar, we use a Californian gardening book. It has most of our flowers and shrubs, but it is understandably light regarding the local fauna that flitter from bush to bush, or in the case of some of our guests, from root to root.

Such are the wild boar, those large pigs which appear to have joined our society recently. They are not particularly dangerous, although they can weigh anything up to 150 kilos and have an impressive collection of teeth. There’s the story of one of them taking a lamb from its mother. Another, that we’ve all seen, has a jabalí grabbing somebody’s picnic and running off along the beach, with the irate owner, I think he was a Frenchman, chasing along behind.

Could they attack a human: me for example? It’s possible.

My late-wife and I once had a wild boar as a companion (I think, rather than a ‘pet’). He would follow along behind when we went horseback riding. Theodore would eat anything, and we had persuaded one of the local restaurants to save scraps from the diners’ plates: vegetables, gristle, bones and even lobster-shells.

My garden though – a wasteland with some stunted fruit-trees I’ve been trying to bring back to life – has recently attracted the attention of a sounder of wild boars. They drop by every night and dig up the ground (it’s relatively soft now after the rains) and search for the roots which the indulgent orange-trees have shyly put forth, once again, thanks to a combination of the recent floods, plus my attentive husbandry.

I come out every morning to see if anything has budded yet, and find huge holes in the earth, or even in the track that leads to my property. Rocks have been rolled away from their place, and even the stone-terraces have been attacked, as the piggies search for something choice under the earth. They are after the rootlets: fresh, juicy, crisp, tasty rootlets. I may not have a green finger, or is it a thumb, but even I know these fellows need to go.

So, down to the shop in the nearby town, which has everything for hunters, riders, pet-owners, prospective pet-owners, gardeners and I haven't even made it to the upstairs yet, where there are kitchen goods, televisions, fly-traps and screwdrivers galore. It's a sort of Settlers' Dream. Anyhow, they gave me a Jumbo-sized box of what turned out to be rat poison. Stick a bit down and stand back. Yah, I don’t think so. The last thing I want is a dozen dead pigs cluttering up the orchard.

You may be surprised to learn that I have found the answer to this – forget the blast from a shotgun or the services of a large hound, and above all, ignore the local recommendation of strewing human hair taken from the barber’s floor onto your land (imagine a shred of that being caught by the wind and blowing into your face). My solution is to simply scatter around some powdered cayenne pepper. Honestly, it works out cheaper than buying dog-food.

Understandably, the boars don’t care for that spicy kick to their snout, (although, on the other hand, it’s true to say that a pinch of something picante does wonders to a good pork goulash).  

Thus encouraged, they will leave me and mine alone and go and dig up the neighbour’s garden instead, while I can return to my daily visit to the citrus trees and to counting the blossoms.

To Each Their Own

 I’m surprised we don’t have an identity. There are 307,000 Brits living in Spain and perhaps a million stretched across the whole of EU (nobody seems to know how many). Then there are all those EU nationals who live in another EU country than their own, plus all those who came from somewhere else – South America, Northern Africa, China, The Ukraine and Timbuctoo.

How many is that?

In Spain, there are around 8,500,000 people who are foreign-born, and across the whole of European Union of 450 million souls, we are talking about some 60 million ausländers of one sort or another who have chosen a (new) EU country to make their home.

Begging the question, who are they?

Broadly speaking – we foreigners have come here either to work or to retire.

The workers may be those poor folk who arrived here through economic necessity, sometimes risking their very life for the chance of a better future, or maybe they flew here with just a good job-offer in their pocket.

The retired folk, perhaps because we live better over here (I’m thinking of – oh my Lord: it’s the PIGS countries with their good food, friendly neighbours and warm winters!).

But all of us, we do rather pass without much notice from the local people. There are a few wealthy Hollywood or sporting (probably football) types who grace the pages of the gossip magazines, as we wander through their palatial homes in Mallorca or Majadahonda, accompanied by some bearer of purple-prose; then there are a handful of tame foreigners who have been accepted by the local population (in Spain, we have James Rhodes, Ian Gibson, Viggo Mortensen and the late Michael Robinson); the odd homage for standout political leaders (there’s no Churchill Square but Madrid does have its sublime Plaza de Margaret Thatcher). A few other foreigners from an earlier time are remembered – the various sherry families and the Dr Fleming barrio also in Madrid (he discovered penicillin).

There’s no Glorieta de Francis Drake though… There’s someone who needs a publicist.

Wouldn’t it be fun, if one of our current number became known for his or her literary or musical endeavours, or because he (we!) invented a cure for cancer.

That would make all of us ghosts walk a little taller.

The largely invisible foreigners: whether expats, immigrants, guiris, émigrés, piratas, hijos de la Pérfida Albión or those people who for various reasons find themselves on the run – are all living a better life while admittedly suffering from certain absences; whether family, traditions or a decent pot of Scottish marmalade in the fridge.

What do you miss, the social media sometimes asks.

Me? Nothing, I’ve been here too long.

A useful page to help get through the bureaucracy here in Spain is one called Brexpats in Spain International. The name probably came about thanks to the Brexit (which affected us EU Brits far more than it did you UK Brits). The other day, this worthy organisation decided to change its name to Expat Support in Spain – and were strongly criticised for doing so by many of its supporters. The Facebook announcement quickly got 203 comments before being turned off. The first one said: ‘Whilst I understand that the group no longer fit its previous name, Expat is not a good catch-all either, I and many others are NOT expats, we are immigrants and proud to be so!’

It seems that the Brits have put their foot down – no longer merely indignant about bullfights and uncastrated feral cats, they now have a new bugbear – being called an expat.

The word comes from expatriate, which means ‘a person who lives outside their native country’. An immigrant means something similar, without being as specific. The Brexpat people serve, from their page on Facebook, the northern Europeans (that’s to say, pretty much the Brits, since no doubt the Swedes have their own page) and we all understand the meaning of the word. An immigrant – usually one who moves for economic reasons – will probably be aiming for a passport from his host country, will certainly aim to speak the language, and will most probably be working in some menial position, such as in the plastic farms or on a building site.

In short, we know what the word ‘expat’ means when we hear it.

But what do the Spanish think? Are we guiris immigrants and nothing wrong with that?

I asked a few journalist friends.

·‘It sounds inappropriate. The concept of immigrant in Spain is associated with ethnicity, culture, and, above all, integration. The English, as Europeans, don't consider themselves to be immigrants’. José María (note here he uses another name for the British: los ingleses).

·‘The English who consider themselves immigrants are right, because they've migrated from their country to settle here. That's what immigration is. Coming from one country to settle in another. But you're right too. For a Spaniard, it sounds strange to call a Western European an immigrant, because we have a subconscious understanding that immigration is linked to poverty, to flight, to leaving developing countries to come to more developed ones. So, technically, an immigrant is both a Moroccan and an English person, but in everyday language, an English person isn't called an immigrant, but a Moroccan is’. Miguel Ángel.

·‘I'd laugh. I often defend the English. As you know, some Spaniards are prejudiced against the English. It's also true that they don't usually make much of an effort to integrate’. Says José Antonio.

·‘The meaning of "immigrant" is another’. From Ángel.

·‘No, the term is correct, from the perspective that they are immigrants in Spain and emigrants from the United Kingdom, although they are not strictly emigrants in the economic sense. Nowadays, the word "expat" has become fashionable to differentiate economic immigrants from those who aren't’. Writes Diego.

Why we must label ourselves as anything at all is another question – unless they happened to be handing out a new passport.

Censorship, the Opus Dei and a Brand New SEAT

 Here's a story from Ángel Medina. We used to run a newspaper together called El Indálico.
 ...

It was the year 1974. Franco was still alive, and the regime was tightening in the face of the imminent death of the ghastly old Caudillo. It was rumoured that the borders were heavily guarded against any possible infiltrations of 'revolutionary material'.

Yes, we knew all too well what was meant by that.

Even so, a feeling that everything was soon going to change was in the air. People were already preparing for a major adjustment and the desire for freedom was manifested in all social orders: in the press and on the radio, on the state-controlled television... and also at the cinema.

Censorship continued to prohibit numerous films that were shown around the world and those of us Spaniards who could travelled to France to see them. Several French towns near the Spanish border (Perpignan, Céret, Amélie les Bains…) specialised in organising some weekend film marathons in which, over three days, you could watch films that were not permitted in Spain.

Stuff like The Kama Sutra, The Last Tango in Paris, La Grande Bouffe, Paths of Glory, Emmanuelle…

I had just bought a Seat 133 and decided to give it a good run by going to one of these film events, and so I travelled north with a friend to the neighbouring country with the intention of stuffing ourselves with cinema and at the same time bringing back some anti-Franco press and literature.

We saw a dozen films, bought Che Guevara t-shirts, some communist and libertarian newspapers and also several copies of the book that was on everyone's lips and that apparently brought to light the machinations and internal struggles for power within the Franco regime: “The Holy Mafia”, the history and situation in those days of the fiercely dreadful Opus Dei.

I bought five copies, although I had heard that carrying more than one could mean arrest and even imprisonment.

The night of our return to Spain, we cunningly planned to cross the border in the early hours of the morning, assuming that the civil guards at customs would be half asleep and would not be very interested in searching our luggage. I had the books in question lying on the back seat, casually covered by a trench coat.

A member of the Guardia Civil approached, and after looking carefully through the window, he spoke to me in a placid voice: ‘Would you be so kind as to get out of the car?’

I felt my intestines churning (what is commonly known in Spanish as shitting myself with fear) and putting my hands together as if I were going to be handcuffed, I slowly got out of the vehicle. The cop climbed into the car, sat down, took the wheel and pressed the accelerator and brake, while I was silent, standing at the door of my brand-new Seat, and he said to me:
‘I’m planning to buy a car, and I wanted to see if I fit well and was comfortable in this new model. And yes, I like it. Thanks for letting me try it. You can continue. Have a good trip!’ 

I just made it around the next corner…

The Train-ride

We were talking over a bottle of wine about some of the old times and I remembered this story about one of the many differences that exist between Spain and the UK; and while we should celebrate and encourage those differences - after all, Spain is a wonderful place to live and Britain isn't - this particular item may not be the finest example in Spain's quiver of attractions and curiosities. 

I refer to the humble suppository.

Chris had long hair and a thin moustache. He favoured pink shirts and kept his things in an off-the-shoulder handbag. His girlfriend was a pretty looking Danish girl, and we find her seated beside him on a train chugging slowly north towards Madrid.

They had arrived in Mojácar that summer of 1968 in a purple mini-moke, a type of low-slung jeep – much to the understandable horror of the small group of foreigners seated outside the village’s only bar and enjoying their early-morning brandies. Chris, it emerged, was a writer doing research on Carlos, the murderous ex-bodyguard of Rafael Trujillo, the assassinated dictator from the Dominican Republic, whose disgraced minder was now running a beach-bar in our quiet resort. According to my dad, Carlos made a good Cuba Libre and anyway, one should always try to forgive and forget.

Chris’ research, once he got around to it, involved a few talks over a glass of rum with Carlos Evertsz about his ghastly experiences as a torturer, inquisitor and bodyguard and Carlos, a short black fellow with a nasty look to him, must have taken offence at one of Chris’ questions on a particular occasion.

Or perhaps he just had a hangover that day.

The jeep was found, smashed to pieces.

Chris and his girlfriend, Gitte, decided to take off to Madrid for a week for some research and a release from the volatile Carlos. On the way to the train, Chris visited a farmacia to get something for a cold he’d picked up.

We are in the train again. It’s just left Linares where it had stopped for lunch. In those days, the conductor would go through the carriages asking what everyone wanted to eat and would then phone through to the station, where twenty-seven portions of meat and fifteen of fish would be waiting in the restaurant: along with chips, salad and wine, followed by a small plate of membrillo (a lump of quince jelly) for ‘afters’.

Not bad for sixty pesetas.

Back on the train, Chris sniffled again and remembered his package from the chemist. He opened it up and extracted a metal-foil-wrapped bomb-shaped item. The carriage, drowsy from its lunch, watched with mild interest.

Chris had never seen a suppository before and, as he peeled the foil off the plug (principal ingredient: cocoa butter), he decided he couldn’t eat it so, after a moment’s thought, decided to ram it up his nose.

The carriage stirred in anticipation. ‘No’ said some old girl in black.

No? thought Chris. Perhaps, since it’s a streamer, I should open another. He placed the second suppository, with its agreeable smell of cocoa butter, into his other nostril and sat back with a satisfied groan. The two suppositories dangled slightly from his nose, and he found that he had to hold them in place. His girlfriend tittered suddenly and the carriage, released, burst into laughter.

The man sat facing Chris lifted himself partway from his seat and made an explicit motion towards his backside. ‘Aquí’, here.

Chris, his face the colour of his favourite shirt, excused himself and went to find the lavatory. He told us afterwards that he could see the tracks flashing by when he looked down the pan, and that, after an embarrassing but successful operation hovering over the seatless commode, he unfortunately coughed, firing the luckless suppository down the hole and into the heart of the Andalusian countryside.

He eventually completed the book about Carlos, carefully waiting until that disagreeable fellow had been deported from Spain.

I think I must still have a copy somewhere. 

Beggars Can't be Boozers

Times are hard. We have a beggar installed outside each of our supermarkets these days. Each one of them appears to have his patch and of course, he'll have a dog. Except for the old Romanian woman at the Co-op who looks like she just ate hers. 

I've seen well-meaning people come out of the shop with a piece of meat saved for the hound (and a scowl for its master). It's not easy being a beggar, sitting on your arse for hours each day and wearing a forlorn expression. Not easy, I say, especially with the new hard-to-climb-into dustbins we now have serving our community. 

So, to be a beggar, un pordiosero, the first thing you will need is a friendly looking dog; and the second thing is of course a good stomach. 

And remember, many of us who might walk past with our nose in the air are just a paycheck or a pension-payment away...

Money doesn’t take you far,
A shop, a store, a mart, a bar,

So looking for the cheapest link
I chose a shop to buy a drink

My pocket full I entered in.
To buy a jug of Spanish gin

I picked a brand I didn’t know
It cost the lot, I turned to go

My bottle in a plastic sack
I toddled out, my mind turned black.

I left that market in a fog
And saw a beggar with his dog

The man was holding out a cup
I tipped my jug and filled it up

Can I share it, asked the mooch.
Of course you can’t – it’s for the pooch. 

 

Spanish Shilling October 2010

The Stamp Collector

 In the bad old days, the village postman wasn’t much good with foreign names (although he liked to collect stamps, sometimes removing them with a certain amount of bureaucratic relish from the corner of the envelope). It was no big deal: in those times, the twenty pound notes tenderly send by my dad’s sister would be folded inside within a sheet of carbon paper to fool the early X-Ray machines in Madrid.

I’d be sent to Old Martín with instruction to collect all the foreigners’ letters – at least those of the foreigners who were sat in the village square, drinking and gossiping.

It’s not as bad as it sounds.

The correos opened in those day at the reasonable hour of 3.00pm.

Anyone who wasn’t in the square drinking, naturally risked losing his twenty quid.

(To explain: In the late sixties, the British only allowed one to take out fifty, later sixty, pounds a year on holiday. We would all head to Gibraltar for a top-up until General Franco closed the border.)

It’s a far cry from today. Now we don’t know each other – there’re too many of us – and the post office wouldn’t give out the mail to some spotty foreign kid anyway. Now, it’s either delivered by a person dressed in a yellow uniform driving an equally buff-coloured three-wheel motorcycle, or its placed in a tin post-box and you come along during opening hours to see what – if anything – is new.

As for the folded twenty pound notes, now the British Government lets you take abroad as much as you like: to spend freely on rounds of brandy, weekends in a Parador or buying a second hand car with no MOT and the steering wheel on the wrong end of the dashboard.

Before they took to delivering the mail, I too had a post box: un apartado. Nº 35 it was. Then they started charging a heavy sum for its rental, insisted that each person who used the PO Box would have to pay separately for the same number, and they introduced (free) house deliveries anyway.

It was an easy call, although any letters which later arrived at my Nº 35 were solemnly returned to sender, unread.

I’m sure that as a result of the Person Unknown stamp on the repatriated item, the editors of my old school magazine were convinced that I had precipitously joined the list of ‘the dearly departed’.

Which, on the bright side, saved me continuing with my modest annual subscription.

The world moved on, and someone invented emails, which took the wind out of the sails of the Spanish postal system. Then along came DHL and their parcel-totting competitors, plus those fellows who whizz through the city traffic on their bicycles with an urgent message stuffed down their Velcro pouch.

The post office was on the ropes.

So it invented in own high-speed parcel delivery system, operated as a bank for a while, started to sell books by right-wing authors (have a look next time), sent and received money abroad, sold stickers, lottery coupons and magazines and generally moved, as they say, forward.

The postage stamps were another change. Instead of a stamp which one could lick and affix, the new ones have peel-off backs. Or, and more usually, they print out an inelegant sticky strip with numbers and bar-codes, and press it onto your envelope – as often as not hiding part of the first line of the address.

So today, I went to post a letter to foreign parts and said that I wanted a stamp rather than an adhesive label, if it was all the same to them.

There was a fuss, but eventually the clerk played ball and found two stamps. The first had a peel-off back, the second did not. It has to be glued on, she said, as – not finding the glue-stick – she sellotaped it onto the envelope.

But let me leave on a positive note.

I always used to joke that when I grew up, they would put me on a postage stamp. Now, it appears, you can take along a photo to the correos and they will run you up a set of 24 street-legal stamps, with a sticky back, and bearing your smiling image.

I think I could have some fun with that.    

Tourism for Spain 2025

 The FITUR – Spain’s gigantic tourism fair – is now over. Deals have been struck, hotels booked, new attractions publicised and above all, 2025 is met with optimism and faith.

The goal is to bring 100 million foreign tourists to Spain this year (it was 94m in 2024) – and to increase the money taken last year (a tidy 126,000 million euros), and just maybe increase the percentage of Spain’s GDP to be marked down to tourism.

Tourism is an excellent industry, as they come, they pay, and (best of all) they go. During their brief visit, they spend every day on drink, on food, on hotels and on souvenirs. Apart from a tee-shirt or a decorated pot, they won’t export anything from Spain in exchange for their money much beyond a hangover, a sunburn and maybe a secret telephone number or email address from someone they met at the hotel disco.

And all that lovely money. Most of it is spent in places where neither Spaniards nor foreign residents tend to go: whether the tour-hotels; those AirBnb homes; the spoiled and overcrowded attractions (think the Alhambra, the Grand Mosque, the Sagrada Familia or other ‘untenable popularity’ places as listed recently by Fodor) or indeed in the tacky souvenir shops. Those businesses relying on tourism – rather than residents – will have their own solutions to bring to the table: more tourism please, and let’s stop with that ‘Tourist Go Home’ stuff.

FITUR was good for tourism, but it was also good for Madrid. 225,000 people came to the show, and the city took in, says a tourist-page, an extra 445 million euros in those five days.

Spain, says CNN, and looking at the American market, is ‘the red-hot tourist destination’.

In his New Year’s speech, the mayor of Málaga Francisco De la Torre warned about La turismofobia and calls for moderation because, he said, "the success of Málaga" depends on tourism’. We need to take note of this, because not only does tourism help Spain’s GDP, it is also less tiresome for we residents than living in a town dedicated to factories or heavy industry.