Sunday, March 17, 2024

Sometimes, We Must Laugh at Ourselves

 It's been a tough few months recently for the country - with protests of one sort or another receiving coverage in the national newspapers.

A long-term protest is the one currently going on outside the head offices of the PSOE, the ruling government party which is the socialist party. Those to the right, the PP and the Vox, agree on one point, that everyone else in Spain is not only wrong, but shamefully so. 

Thus inspired, they wrap themselves in the Spanish flag - it's odd how national flags these days only belong to the far-right - and get on down to the Calle Ferraz in Madrid for some good ol'-fashioned protestin'. Maybe burn the president in effigy or howl some appropriate insults. The police will likely turn a blind eye (Madrid is a conservative city) and the media will be there. 

What with the tractors all driving through the city, lovingly decorated once again with Spanish flags (the agricultural workers who really do all of the picking, wrapping and dodging work inspectors will have stayed home); the angry protests outside the headquarters of the smellysocks; the populists banging on in their heavily subsidised media (Madrid spends 27 million this year on 'institutional advertising' for friendly newspapers and TV channels) and the current issues with the regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Madrid is as usual the centre of attention in Spain.  

But let us move our attention to another city, usually (if not currently) in the hands of the left: Valencia. There, the fallas have just finished. The fallas are a week-long festival with lots of music, fireworks and a tradition of comic papier-mâché models which will be judged and them, with one saved for posterity, thrown into the flames. It's like we read it in Gormenghast, with the Hall of the Bright Carvers. 

But not every model - they are called ninots - are destroyed, and one must be saved. My own favourite this year is the old lady with the sun-glasses and the Spanish flag.

Now, where have I seen her before?

Monday, March 04, 2024

Dere's a Rat in Me Kitchen

 There’s a major bookshop in our local city, and I’ve dropped by there a few times – either to buy a novel in Spanish (which I can read, if sometimes a bit slowly), or one in English from their foreign-language nook downstairs. Three or four shelves in English, plus a few books scattered in there in German – hey, it’s all foreign, right?

The spines on Spanish books are always printed upside-down which means that the usual book-stocker employee, unaware that this peculiar custom has yet to emigrate beyond the Pyrenees, will put the English (and German) books on the shelf the wrong-side-up so as to match the other shelves upstairs. Then along comes a Brit and pulls a few out to scope the back-cover and before you know it, the foreign books are higgledy-piggledy, which means, when I come along for a spot of browsing, I have to throw my head from one side to the other, wrenching my neck, to glom the offers on display.

At twelve euros a pop or maybe more, they ain’t cheap, neither.

So, in the Brit community fifty miles to the north, there’s a few charity shops that sell books.

The Brits will volunteer to run these shops, collecting funds for some Noble Cause (dogs and cats, usually – they haven’t yet run to helping the Palestinians).

The charity shops work on stuff being brought around and kindly donated.

Often after a local funeral.

Books are considered as a filler, I suppose, as they are usually sold at six for a shilling. Which is fine by me. See the difference here? One book at twelve euros in the city, versus seventy two charity books in guiriville for the same price. I mean, if I get half-way through and decide that it’s tripe, then I’m down by fifteen cents.

So the other night, I am lying in bed in the place I’m looking after, a country-home. Nice, very quiet, lots of trees and birdies. Reading some rubbish about a pretty detective who rides a Ducati through the worst streets of Washington (I do love to travel), I was interrupted by a large rat galloping across the bed and disappearing under the wardrobe.

So the next day, I went to buy some poison. A box with a dozen blue cubes of some dreadful stuff that disagrees with rats and I leave one on the kitchen counter, and returned to my detective, now in bed with her lawyer.

The next day, the poison had gone. But, you know, judging by some evidence in the fruit bowl, the rat hadn’t.

Or maybe there were two rats. I put another cube out.

The following day, the second cube had gone, but someone had got into the rice crispies.

I put out a third cube, put everything edible in a steel case with a combination lock, and returned to my pile of books.

And so, Best Beloved, every day and until the box was empty, the daily poison has been taken away from its place in the kitchen. Seems I either had a very strong rat on my hands, or I was doing the Devil’s Work and killing the babies living in some hitherto undiscovered hole.

I found one possible lair under the wardrobe and wedged the detective and her motorbike in it. It was about time she did something useful.

Today, a friend gave me a humane rat-trap. You leave a chunk of cheese within, the trapdoor goes *clunk* and you take him outside and toss him out in the campo a few kilometres from home. That’s the theory, anyhow.

I also bought a box of strychnine this morning, just in case.  

Saturday, February 17, 2024

The Bar Indalo

 In the old days - the sixties through the early eighties - the Hotel Indalo, located in the Mojácar Square, housed the Bar Indalo: the focal centre of the pueblo.

It was an ugly bar, dark and scruffy. They rarely managed any tapas and the decoration was bleak. There were a couple of tables and a black and white TV, switched on whenever there was a football game.

As somebody says, the toilets were pretty grim as well.

Outside, there were a few tin tables and chairs.

It was where we all met to catch up on the day's gossip.

I think it was a terrible shame when the hotel and its bar were demolished, along with the Aquelarre theatre, to make room for the 'multicentro' - three stories of grim souvenir shops.

In the picture, Antonio and Diego were for many years the two barmen.

The Rudderless Island

 Those of us who moved to Spain from the United Kingdom will have our view about how the old country has either prospered or gone to the dogs since the Brexit, or perhaps even before that particular upset.

My dad used to trace Britain’s final decline to the Suez Crisis in 1956. Now, I think it was when they arrested Julian Assange in 2010 on a trumped-up rape charge (oh look, I’ve gone and used the t-word!).

But we all have opinions. Those of us Brits who are living in Spain have other things to think about – unless we are among those unfortunates who find themselves enmeshed in the 90/180 Schengen Trap – then it’s a daily and anxious look at the calendar and the doubt about who to look after the house for the next three months.

Another way to look at the UK comes from a Spanish journalist who works at El País called Ana Carbajosa, who after travelling extensively across Britain has written a book called ‘Una Isla a la Deriva’: the drifting (or rudderless) island. The write-up provided by the printers, Península, says, ‘When did the United Kingdom collapse? How is it possible that the empire in which the sun never set has ended up becoming an increasingly isolated, fragmented and unequal place? How much has Brexit contributed to deepening cracks that had been opening for decades? How were unscrupulous politicians like Boris Johnson or Liz Truss able to end up running the country?’

elDiario.es interviews Ms Carbajosa. Their first question is: ‘What misconceptions are there in Spain about the United Kingdom?’

She answers, ‘We probably think that the United Kingdom is a unit and that the United Kingdom is the English (los ingleses). In truth, the United Kingdom is a very complex and diverse country due to the geographical and regional differences that, as the experts I spoke with for the book explained to me, are the most noteworthy in all of Europe. In all European countries there are differences between rich and poor regions, but the poor ones are not as poor as those in the United Kingdom, which is (by the way) also the sixth largest economy in the world. There is a brutal regional inequality that we are not aware of and that has contributed to Brexit and other political phenomena’.

She tells us that the media and politicians who she meets there talk of ‘Broken Britain’.

But that’s all happening elsewhere. We live in Spain, with its own triumphs and failures (of which, if we stick to The Euro Weekly and other low-shooting English-language media, we are blissfully unaware of).

Perhaps we can stay here – or perhaps some hostile currents in Iberian politics or the media (chucking Spaniards out of the UK needs some retaliation, maybe) may send us abruptly home. There are 5,700 Spaniards currently living in the UK under threat of deportation.

After all, as we fail to concern ourselves about Rishi Sunak’s hostility towards the immigrants, it’s not like we have the ear of the Spanish legislators.

Most unlikely, of course, but there you go. We live in unlikely times.   

Friday, January 26, 2024

Now, They'll Let Us Vote... (in the UK)

It was a shame that those of us Brits who back then in 2016 had lived abroad for fifteen years couldn’t vote in the famous referendum over leaving the European Union. The Brexit as it became known: the one where the UK would steer a new course all by itself.

As to where it was going, who could be sure? Glory, success and ennoblement of course, but maybe only for those few millionaires who had wisely moved their funds offshore beforehand.

But that’s the problem for the United Kingdom and its inhabitants to face. Brexit will bring some benefits perhaps, along with some unpleasant realisations and lessons.

Over here in the remains of the European Union, things appear to be moving along. We are managing quite well in the absence of the British, and wish them well with their straight bananas and trade deals with Timbuktu.

We couldn’t vote, us lot. Normally, voting for a candidate to become either a member of parliament or to crash and burn might be useful enough for those who live there – a good candidate will have ideas and energy to spruce things up locally – with the benevolent support and indulgence of his party – but we live, and have lived for a long time – in foreign parts.

The French have long had a group within their parliament which represents Frenchmen abroad. They have eleven seats in the National Assembly. Nice.

The referendum, of course, was different. Instead of discussing the pros and cons of increasing the acreage of sugar-beet (I’m from a bucolic part of East Anglia: left for Spain when I was thirteen), it was about a subject which would enormously affect us expats – traitors and malingers as we might have been considered back in Henley – in many ways.

Sugar-beet, by the way, is a kind of turnipy-thing that you can either get sugar from, or can feed to the cows.

Yet we couldn’t vote in the one thing that would have affected us.

Back then, I doubt even the British media bothered to ask us our views, despite there being 1,300,000 of us living in the EU and another 4,200,000 living elsewhere in the world.

Regardless of the usefulness or otherwise of swelling my North Norfolk constituency by one person; and following a change in the law, we Brits abroad (fifteen years and up) are now encouraged to register (every three years) and to call for our postal vote. This register of Brits abroad may not be huge (although they endearingly estimate three million potential voters – spread of course across 650 polls), but it might attract a few extra donations to one party or another which will no doubt be welcomed (if criticised elsewhere).

Right now, I’m renewing my passport (they do this these days in Belfast). My current one has ‘European Union’ stamped in gold on the cover. My new one won’t.

I suppose you are right – I should be looking for Spanish citizenship after all these years here. After all, I speak Spanish and know my way around – even if I do happen to look extremely and pinkly Nordic.

All I wanted, really, was to be a European.

Anyway, it boils down to this: either get myself a Spanish passport, or find out more about the fascinating politics of sugar-beet.

Monday, December 25, 2023

Put some Brits Together, and They'll Start a Newspaper

 It’s a funny world – the expat press.

Over here in Spain, there are a small number of both Brit free-sheets and paid newspapers, all solemnly ignored by the national advertisers. The free-sheets have more locally-sourced adverts (they have to cover their costs somehow, and the printed copy is about a euro a pop these days). Does anyone read those adverts, or simply gloss over and past them?

The pay-for newspapers can probably spend a bit more on copy and rely a bit less on promotions. I also don’t doubt but that their print-run is far smaller. One of them, the weekly Costa Blanca News, has a copy price (August 2022) of 2,70€. It’s been going since 1973. Another one, the daily Majorca Daily Bulletin, as the ‘Iberian Daily Sun’, was going as far back as 1969. The oldest of them all is the monthly Guidepost (since February 1958) out of Madrid and still ‘published continuously and unfailingly from then onward’.

I ran a weekly for a while called The Entertainer during the eighties and nineties, eventually learning that there is no honor among thieves and that it's hard to pay off a large mortgage (for printers bills) when there's nothing coming in.

An English-language daily started in Madrid called The Standard back in 1992. It was a serious 'European' kind of newspaper, priced I think at 50ptas. The paper, once again ignored by the national advertisers (they seem to prefer to go through media-buyers who then take an annual cash return called un rappel from their chosen publications), folded after just forty days. 

Indeed, not only do the larger advertisers stick to the tried-and-true (did you ever see an advert for a leading car company in an expat newspaper?), the so-called institutional advertising - propaganda bought and paid for by the provincial, regional and national governments (to keep everybody in line) - never appears in the foreign-owned newspapers - English, German or Dutch. The few smaller agencies that will deal with the foreign press like to pay out typically on 120 days (the printer likes his money after 30 days). 

There are quite a few of these newspapers and magazines about - some large with others being a spot more modest. On the Costa del Sol, there’s the Sur in English, a Spanish-owned freebie in operation since 1986 (it began as a couple of pages once a week in the local Spanish version, to later expand into its current dominant position). Two others of note are the biweekly free newspaper called The Olive Press which at least uses journalists and professional writers and produces some investigative journalism; and finally the downmarket Euro Weekly News (which self-importantly claims that it is known to its readers as The People’s Paper, although it’s more often referred to as The Weenie). This particular free-sheet has featured Leapy Lee among its columnists for the last twenty years or so. The notorious Mr Lee pumps out a far-right tirade about the United Kingdom each week, evidently to the approval of the publication’s readers. This paper appears to mix up its content without much attention to where or what it is on about, rarely providing much useful news about Spain, preferring to entertain the readers with a fruit-salad of filler, dogs, puzzles and lottery winners. Perhaps you read it: perhaps you wrap the fish in it. 

Put it this way - you are not going to pass the current affairs test put out by the Instituto Cervantes as a step towards gaining Spanish nationality if you only source of information on this great country is The Weenie

There are some glossy Costa magazines past and present (Lookout 1964 – 1986 was the best I think) and various what’s-on guides, plus a couple of English-language radio stations and, of course, lots of Internet news and help-pages, blogs, vlogs (video-blogs) and other sites.

All, with the exception of Business over Tapas and a few of my fellow bloggers, decorated with endless and aggressive advertising. At least one has to patiently sit through an advert on the radio. In print, you merely skip past it.

It’s certainly true that, these days, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper putting out one’s copy there on the World Wide Web than it is taking it down to the printers, so – I dunno – perhaps at least on Facebook we could forego the click-bait?  


Monday, December 18, 2023

Good Cheer, and Watch Those Polverones!

 Christmas in Spain. At least down where I live, it doesn’t quite ring true like the old traditions in England. There’s no holly or mistletoe (acebo and muérdago) to leave on the shelf or kiss the maid under. Come to think of it, there’s no maid either. The tree looks a bit out of place as well, and some of us settle for the dried flower from a century plant, una pita, bedecked with a ribbon or two.

I just have the one Christmas card this year to put on the – well, the chimney-piece if there was one. It’s from my old nanny from when I was a child in Norfolk (it’s almost sixty years since I’ve last seen her). It has a snow-scene and a short poem in a rather wonky metre. It was posted in late October and I gather that it must have travelled about fifty kilometres a day to reach me in Almería a mere seven weeks later. Well done our friends at Correos, and don’t forget the seasonal tip for Mr Postie!

The thing is, the old traditions don’t really have the same thrust over here. For me, Deep and Crisp and Eeeven only works with Domino’s Pizza! I suppose one can buy Christmas Pud at the English shop in our local market town, and douse it with brandy, but I’ll pass on that, thanks. The turkey is fine, although my Spanish family prefers plates of jamón serrano and gambas.

I think they may have a point.

We have plenty of cakes here though. The Roscón de Reyes is as delicious as the polverones are terrible. These floury morsels are quite impossible to swallow, even with a seasonable glass of anís. I wonder - do the banks still offer this interesting combination to its customers (usually consumed before one see one's balance)? I will have to go down and look…

Carol singing in England for me as a child was a quick couple of verses of ‘The First Noel’ followed by mince pies and some warming toddy. Then off to the mansion at the other end of the lane for a repeat. Here we are regaled ceaselessly throughout the entire season by villancicos: horrible songs pumped out all day long through the Nation’s municipal and supermarket loudspeakers as performed by cute little choristers and their noisome piping voices.

Dressing up as Santa Claus is just silly. He wears a heavy red outfit with cap and mittens, while our local temperature is in the high twenties thanks to Global Scorching.

I think just a red tee-shirt would be quite enough to go with the ho ho ho.

There’s no Christmas stocking here, and indeed the whole presents-under-the-tree thing is another foreign import. I suppose that, reeling as we are (or will be) from not winning the Christmas lottery, something in gaudy paper to unwrap on Noche Buena – Christmas Eve – might be a good idea. A kind of consolation gift.

The small presents given out by the Spanish for January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany – usually falling on the day before school begins – don’t quite hit the spot.

I was once one of the Three Kings – the blond one of course. All went well as we arrived in the town square in a dumper truck but when the first, rather fat child sat on my knee to receive a dinky-toy, he spotted that under the heavy makeup lurked a guiri. He let out a quite improper shriek, even though I explained that all three of the Reyes were indeed foreigners. From afar.

The best thing about our Christmas season, and you will notice it in the photos we send to our families and friends in far-off England, is the fact that we are all wearing tee-shirts under a warm blue sky.

Could there be a better gift than that?

Thursday, December 07, 2023

Madrid's Barajas Airport

 My own experience of galloping through the Madrid airport with my wheelie-suitcase last week, with eighty minutes to disembark at the international end of the huge installation, go through immigration (as a non-EU foreigner), take the underground train-link, the security inspection and then the race through the garish duty-free corridor and onward for the local flight at the other - furthest - end just in time to join the back of the queue as they boarded the Almería flight, makes me anything other than a fan of that dreadful airport. 

It seems that I’m not the only one: From El Español here: ‘How the Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas is no longer the best airport in Europe in just one year: it has dropped 30 places’. 

I remember the first time I landed in Barajas, back in the sixties. I had arrived on a flight from London on a BEA Comet. The airport was - of course - much smaller then, and certainly friendlier. They had a free cinema to while away the time before one's next flight. I shouldn't be surprised to learn that more than a few travelers, enveloped in the comforting arms of Disney, consequently missed their connection to Rio.

Those who didn't fancy the cinema could sit on a sofa rather than a metal bench, sturdily designed with arm rests to stop one from stretching out for a time-consuming zizz. Not many of us carry a book any more, and one can only stare at a mobile phone for a limited period. No wonder we untidily lie on the floor with our suitcase for a head-rest. 

They even had large paintings on the walls in those times to lull away our anxiety.

The bar was cheaper too - with prices only twice what they should have been. And you paid the waiter, not a machine. 

Security didn't exist, beyond the odd bored-looking cop. Now, and this happens in all airports, we must waddle through a metal detector while holding up our trousers: our diminutive suitcase pitifully opened by some creature with rubber gloves asking what's in this lead-lined box? It's me teef mister. 

As for flying with a proper suitcase which can hold more than a single change of clothes, well they charge extra these days don't they? 

But times change, and airports grow as they must cater to evermore clients. The Barajas airport now handles some 50,600,000 passengers every year besides me, and probably couldn't care less how happy or otherwise their customers may feel.  

So, here I am. The plane has stopped and the seat-belt light is off. Everyone has stood up, stretching after the cramped nine-hour flight and now they are now taking their cases down from the overhead lockers and standing around in that narrow walk-way looking impatient. 

Naturally, I'm at the way-back of the airplane - and there's just one hour and twenty minutes to go before my connecting flight.