Easter Week (let's have a party)

 

Easter Week is here and for once the weather is on its best behaviour. Perhaps a few showers up there in Galicia (they seem to enjoy them), but warm and sunny for the rest of Spain.

Which means tourists, visitors, families and an agreeable amount of mayhem and hullabaloo.

 

Those city folk who can trace the heritage of a far-off beginning in some abandoned pueblo will be back for a few days, making a fuss of the old people who stayed behind, proudly parking their car in the street which used to be more familiar with donkeys than with SUVs. The old kitchen with the fire lit and an agreeable smell of chicken and sausage (bought yesterday at El Corte Inglés) floats out the door where the menfolk are doing their best to appreciate some home-made wine, el vino casero. It’s rough but it’s honest.  

But most of Spain, plus a generous number of foreign visitors (they’ve wisely cancelled their hols in Turkey or Cyprus and decided on the old standby of España once again) are now on the beach, getting their first rays since last summer.

The locals are performing their processions, La Virgen María is on the move, and the town band is tootling along behind her, providing melancholic or joyous melodies as demanded. Jesús may be carried solemnly from the church once around the square no touchies, and followed by a clutch of old girls in black, but most of us are in the bars, the restaurants and the souvenir shops (which have stayed open late, just for you).

Is Easter a religious or a pagan holiday? Who knows and, with some small but no doubt vocal exception, who cares?

The cities are another thing again. More crowds taking the week off work, milling about with their perambulators, and then there are the penitents, the nazarenos, often dressed in capirotes (those sinister outfits with the robes and pointy heads) marching down the side streets in columns, briefly posing for the cameras.

Easter is fun. There are special cakes at the bakery – including those wonderful torrijas soaked in milk, egg and sugar then fried (or with sweet wine instead of the milk): it’s a sort of jolly version of French toast, or if your generosity stretches far enough, the Spanish answer to the British hot cross bun.

It’s now the start of the season, and this year Spain is certain to hit its goal of a hundred million foreign tourists (after all, apart from France, where else can they go?). Once the Semana Santa is over, and before the bacchanalia really takes hold, I might be just about able to zip down to the supermarket (and the library) to load up on provisions for the inevitable summer onslaught.

My shopping list reads: beer, bangers and books.

For sure, it’s gonna be a hot one.  

Döner Kebab

I see we have been recently blessed with an alarming number of Döner Kebab outlets locally. My little Shangri-La has six (!) of them and Turre, the pueblo up the road, has another three. Next door Garrucha Port has eight of them (who needs fish?).

Indeed, the whole of Spain appears to be stiff with them.  

Is this the end of the late night pizza and the bocadillo filled with battered squid rings?

I checked with Google, which shrugged its shoulders helplessly. In Germany, there are 16,000 of them. Queues stretching around the block. In Spain, ¿quien sabe?

Another answer from Google says: 'Kebabs can be a healthy, high-protein meal, particularly when choosing grilled chicken or lean meat skewers served with vegetables and pita. However, commercial döner kebabs are often high in saturated fat and sodium, potentially exceeding daily allowances. Healthiness depends on meat quality, portion size, and sauce choices'. 

The BBC is equally catty: '...Last year food scientists for Hampshire county council found that döner kebabs were the fattiest takeaways. One contained 140g of fat, twice the maximum daily allowance for women, and the calorific equivalent to a wine glass of cooking oil. And 60% of the kebabs tested were high in trans fat, which raises cholesterol levels...'

Later it says: 'Research by the UK's Food Standards Agency in 2006 found that 18.5% of döner takeaways posed a "significant" threat to public health, and 0.8% posed an "imminent" threat...'

But that was in England twenty years ago. What about Spain in 2026?

Are they worth a try?

No doubt a good one is a culinary delight, especially with that yummy yoghurt sauce and some salad - however I imagine that restauranteurs blinded by the bright lights of commerce might find it easy to, er, cut corners. 

The last one I had was around 40 years ago. It was pretty tasty as I recall.

It's time I had another go. Maybe wash it down with a beer. 

But which one of them all is the very best? I suspect that I am only going to risk it the one time... 

The Electric Company

 Endesa (founded in 1944) was a public company which was sold off to the private sector beginning in 1998 and finally ending up under the control of the Italian (publically owned) Enel by 2009. 

...

Back in the summer of 2024, the electric company stopped sending me bills. Kind of them. I went to their local office several times, and also sent them a few emails, and was told on each occasion that the issue was 'una incidencia'.  

This continued until some fellow showed up, lost, to put in a new meter, sometime about November last year. By then, I had enjoyed sixteen months without a factura.

Since then, they've been coming in fast. Sometimes quite expensive ones as they adjust for the months consumed. Some of the facturas are for two months, others for one. I've been paying them as best I can. 

Yesterday, a Sunday (!), the company sent me nine emails. They were all different bills, some for dates I had already paid, some repeated and some new. They added up to a lot of money.

I went to the local office and the lady there says that some of them were repeats indeed, but four of them were good... and there were another two of them waiting for me in her computer. 

You can ask to pay them in parts she said helpfully...

 I never got an apology or an acknowledgement - despite six visits so far to the Vera office.  

I can see myself changing to another electric supplier in the days to come.  

 

Scams, Shams and Spam

Come Thursdays, and my email fills with unwanted spam. Last week I got a couple from Norton Security sent from two different sites reminding me it’s time to pay their annual subscription (I have never in my life used Norton). The kosher version of this company functions in real life precisely as a spam-buster. Their messages also say at the bottom that I ‘can unsubscribe’ by clicking on something or other; thank you, most kind, I think not.

Microsoft also reaches out, again twice, from two different and rather odd sounding addresses, neither of which appear on their proper webpage – no doubt an oversight on their part. Again, I block them (‘submit as Spam’), but they will return (probably next Thursday – I wonder, possibly this day has an extra significance in Albania?).

Then there was a special deal on a memory-foam pillow. I’m retired. I already have a fucking pillow. 

I got a too-good-to-refuse offer on my ‘auto-insurance’, an Omaha Steak gourmet sampler box (no charge), a free mystery parcel from the American post office (!), a cure for Alzheimer’s from Bill Gates and a message which assures me that ‘my wife says I’ve never had sex like this’.

Again, I can unsubscribe, but well, maybe I should go and get married first.

This is all designed to catch out the unwary.

What I do, what we all do, is mark it as ‘Spam’ and then wait for the next one.

Whatever happened to those exiled Nigerian princes who would kindly offer you half of their five million shillings if they could just borrow your bank account for a few days?

Also on Thursday last week – what a day it was! – a message arrived that very evening from my caja to tell me that it was going to pay on my behalf to another bank which I have never dealt with the unlikely sum of 1,982.44€ within the hour and could I ring this number if I wasn’t in agreement… No, I could not.

The next day, the lady at the caja told me that it hadn’t come from them. There’s a surprise.

I got several bothersome phone calls on Thursday as well. No one rings any more – they send you a WhatsApp instead. Now these calls, and I’ve blocked loads of them, come from Madrid or Valladolid or Myanmar and they want to sell me something. ‘Hola’, they say, ‘buenas tardes. Mi nombre es-’, but by then I’ve already hung up the phone.

All this, and I’m on the Lista Robinson (created precisely to stop these calls) and besides, the Government has just made those call-centres illegal.

Maybe the word hasn’t got through yet.

These days, one is always doing something more rewarding than waiting for a phone call. In my case it was driving (try and get the phone out of your trouser pocket while wearing a seat-belt) or having a siesta and dreaming about how I was going to surprise my future wife.

A useful site called Maldita keeps an eye out on scams. I was reading about how somebody sends you a message on WhatsApp about an earthquake and how you should link to such and such a page which, says the item, will clear out your phone in under ten seconds!

On Facebook last… yes dammit, it was also on Thursday… a series of adverts appeared with the Spanish king trying to sell me a get-rich-quick scheme. Then one from the head of the Banco de Santander, then another with both of them. I wrote to the Facebook poohbahs and said it was a scam and they thanked me for my nice letter, but that the adverts were fine and dandy. Old Mark Chuckleburg must need the money.

I remember last summer there was another Fb scam, where you and nine others received a message about a car-crash and an ‘Oh The Horror! Click here for details’.

I checked with Google AI and got: ‘Spam bypasses filters because spammers constantly evolve tactics—using new domains, rotating IP addresses, and embedding text within images to evade detection. Filters cannot be perfectly restrictive without blocking legitimate emails, and sophisticated spam often masks itself as legitimate, personalized, or "important" content to bypass automated AI-based filters’.

It was almost a relief to hear from a poor French-woman today who was caught by one of those hugger-muggers (Eastern Europeans who wisely avoid stealing from Spaniards). She lost her thief-proof Cartier watch in a tris-tras which, the husband told me, he himself couldn’t have removed from her wrist in less than a minute.

And thus we continue, one eye on our purse, as the world turns.

What’s that? Trump’s dead? Click on this link. 

Breaking Wind

Now I’m getting a little older, I have taken to walking each day. Severe walking. This means, according to those health experts that infest the Internet, that I must haul in my stomach, straighten my back, and walk, purposely, at least six or eight or ten thousand steps a day, according to whichever adviser catches me first.

I used to take the dog with me for my peregrinations, but I’ve noticed that, unlike me, he reckons that age is an excuse to stay home and chew on a book.

To measure my steps, I have an application on my mobile phone. Six or seven thousand yesterday, including the steps I took when I stupidly left the phone on the bed.

Another health expert tells me that I must walk along my route – happily, I live between the countryside and the beach – with a sense of awe as this will refresh my brain.

If you prefer to use a kayak for your exercise, then it would of course be a sense of oar.

And thus, I walk purposefully along the beach, winking gamely at the passersby, and sigh mightily each time I notice a seagull, a flowering sandwort or a naked woman going past on a pedalo.

The day before yesterday, I had to go to the townhall to get a paper. This means in our fragrant dorp, parking at the back then walking up to the village itself: through, up and over and down the narrow streets on the other side. And then back. Steps mostly, and no cheating. Then (fortifying myself en route with a cold glass of beer), I drove down to the urbanisation on the beach where there’s currently no parking because the city fathers are building a parking-lot (enjoy the irony) to see a lawyer, who promptly sent me back up to the village again for another bit of paper.  

And that day, wonder of wonders, I scored around 9,000 steps just chasing documents.

This made me think: what kind of numbers does a waiter do, or a barman – just with his daily toing and froing between the coffee machine and the icebox? Probably a hell of a lot more than nine thousand. Come to think of it, I once did 20,000 without leaving the stables. 

It’s been windy though. Wind is not kind to those who travel on their own energy. I used to particularly hate cycling into the wind. It’s worse than rain or probably (although I wouldn’t swear to it) snow. The wind makes forward motion very stressful, and the sense of awe can go and hang itself.

On this occasion – last weekend – the wind was blowing strongly. With gusts, says my phone knowledgeably, of up to 75kph carrying old bits of cardboard, leaves, some small branches and a surprised looking seagull apparently flying backwards. I started out on my enjoyable power-walk, tummy in and gamely taking notice of my surroundings (including a plastic wheelie-bin that suddenly overtook me on the straight), but decided, as the rain started, that I should probably turn around and head back to the car: leaning forward into the wind with tiny faltering steps.

Then, as I passed the supermarket, I had an idea: twice round and up and down the aisles would easily put me in the black for the day.

As for the awe, I bought a chocolate bar.  

... 

The figure struggling against the wind is our local totem: the Indalo.  

The Mojácar Library

I was sorting through some old books of mine found in a few boxes in the attic and came across a handful I just knew the local English Library would kill to get their hands on. Treasures like ‘Fodor’s Amsterdam 1957’, Maigret’s Second to Last Case’, and a virgin copy of ‘Teach Yourself Swahili’.

At the bottom, hidden under the ‘Collected Works of Alistair MacLean’s Greatest Poems’, I found a peculiar scientific magazine about pets, or rather: ‘Anthrozoös – A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People, Animals and Nature’.

Where on earth did that come from?

The library was closed for the day, giving me a chance to dive into the mag, thirty years old this month. All a bit beyond me, although I found an article about cockfighting – a pastime apparently still legal in Jeréz de la Frontera.

Another book, and I’ll keep this one, has seventy-five front pages of Almería newspapers courtesy of the Almería Press Association.

One of the newspapers featured was mine: ‘The Entertainer’ (if you remember it).

I found another treasure: ‘Mi Mamá me Mima’ – a book about how Spanish women were treated during the Franco years (Spoiler: not good), with useful tips about cleaning the kitchen and so on.

In reality though, once I’ve dusted off all the classics, the dictionaries and the Latin primers, and put them lovingly either in the dustbin or aside for the Chief Librarian to worry about, I turn with more interest to the large remainder.

See, I’m more of a thriller reader.

Spy stories are good, plus bug-eyed monster books and the better detective yarns. By now I’ve read over seven thousand of them I reckon (apart from War and Peace, which took over a month, I can usually get through two or three books a week).

When we first moved to Spain, before the Age of Television, my dad shipped half a ton of novels to keep us (and a number of English-speaking neighbours) amused. It was hard finding shops that catered for the English reader back then. There was one shop in Granada which had a shelf of very old paperbacks – probably printed in the fifties – and a couple of second-hand places in far off Torremolinos on one side, and Benidorm on the other. Not much to be going on with unless you brought your own with you (or fancied a merry weekend in T-Town).

I was an unwilling student in England in those tender days of the second half of the sixties and was a keen reader (there wasn’t much else to do at my school). So, with a suitcase full of books, records and teabags, I would be welcomed three times a year by my parents (or one of their friends if there was a party going on) at the Almería airport.

My bookcase, or rather, my several bookcases, are full of treasures and as I get older and more forgetful, I discover, ruefully, that I can read them all over again.

As for an electric book, a Kindle (with a thousand books stored therein), I think it would look a bit silly and self-conscious leaning against the wall all by itself on an otherwise naked bookshelf.

I still prefer books to the soulless TV, which now – for a small consideration – brings you shows in your own language (one might never know that the neighbours are Spanish).

These days, I can’t afford new books in English (where available: the nearest store in is Almería) and don’t approve of Amazon, so the second-hand or charity shops (we have at least eight within a ten-minute drive) keep me happy enough, four for a euro.

And then, there’s the library. They say they will accept books in good condition but are probably thinking of someone bringing in just two or three. They have a fine collection, it must be said, and I’m a keen member (also – it’s nice to talk with the volunteer librarians about books). I brought them four boxes-worth last week.

I was wondering though: the English Library still doesn’t have a computer, using instead a card-filing system; but one day, in the far future, I suppose one could just avoid a visit and download interesting reading matter via the Internet onto the trusty Kindle – leaving me and many like me with no one to talk to.

The Mojácar Old Days (were the best)

I’m not sure if they did table-service back then, I’ll have to ask Haro’s son Paco when I see him. ‘Let’s see, two gin and tonics, three wines, a beer and a Fanta Orange’ (the last one being for me). I’m pretty sure you had to walk up to the bar to place your order.

In those days, back in the late sixties, there wasn’t much else to do for my parents and their friends beyond gossip and drink while seated around the rickety tables of the Hotel Indalo in the square. There was no TV, no newspapers and few interruptions beyond…

‘Napia, gimme a duro’, said a dishevelled local fellow called Antonio: the price of a brandy.

My dad would hand over the five peseta coin and Antonio would totter into the bar for his reward.

Oddly, the word Napia (my family name is Napier) would raise chuckles among the local folk. Everybody had a nickname (important when there are seventeen people called Paco working in the town hall) and napia means in Spanish a beak, a hooter, a conk, a schnozz – in short, a large nose. This happened to be a feature of my father’s appearance, along with being very tall, red-headed, and covered with so many freckles that they always looked like they might one day decide to join together.

He was also known as El Langostino.

My parents had already decided to leave the UK and move to somewhere odd, when a family friend suggested Mojácar: a falling-down white village in the forgotten province of Almería with a view of the sea and just the one cheap hotel (60 pesetas a night). They arrived in the summer of 1966, just a few months after the bombs fell from the stricken USAF B-52 over the nearby village of Palomares.

I was at boarding school and didn’t make it over to Spain until the following year.

It's out of print, sadly.

A couple of the people regularly gathered around the tables on the terrace were something to do with the Americans – one of them was rumoured to be in the CIA and another had worked ‘for Uncle Sam’ installing a desalination plant over the site of one of the fallen bombs as a sop towards an outraged Franco (it was quickly dismantled after the Americans left and sold for scrap). The engineer deciding to stay and open the village’s first beach bar.

There were a couple of London wide-boys, a few artists, some gays, an Olympic skier gone to seed, a dance instructress who had been in the French resistance, a Danish fellow with a handlebar moustache who spoke better English than Terry Thomas (who he strongly resembled), an air-vice marshal with a plummy accent, an American draft-dodger (Vietnam), two or three piednoirs (Franco didn’t allow work-permits, but French Algerians were excepted), and a revolving number of others who came and went as circumstances allowed.

If they all enjoyed a few jars, the odd libation, a nip or two, a gargle and a swally, the only sober one at these sessions would be me. I was thirteen when I first came to Mojácar, and I maybe smoked a bit – but I had no interest in booze, and the one time I tried I was sick all over my father.

Smoking though. Everybody smoked. It was so cheap back then – a packet cost between five and twelve pesetas (three to seven cents of a euro) with the only problem being that this was black tobacco, grown I think in Extremadura. Far rougher than Virginia.

Not an issue of course – everyone in those times smoked Ducados or Celtas.

Even Antonio, the moocher.

The hotelier’s son, about my age, grew up as one does and wrote a book a few years ago. It was a homage to those early foreigners who had stayed either in the hotel or slept in the foyer. He kindly called his tome: ‘Mojaqueros de Hecho’ (Francisco Haro Pérez) - The Made Mojaqueros.