A Roof Over My Head

There apparently aren’t enough homes in Spain for all of us, and thus we read the scare-stories of okupas, frustrated house-hunters, poor souls renting (or even buying) just a single room, or living in a caravan or a car, or I suppose, slumped on a park-bench.

We also know that there are plenty of empty houses, abandoned blocks, rotting urbanisations and so on, but not perhaps located precisely where we want to live, or even if we did, the town hall, the regional authority, the owner or even perhaps some squabbling inheritors have ruled that the place must stay empty for whatever reason there might be. Usually of course to do with greed.

Some owners of a perfectly usable block of apartments – it happens – might leave them empty or unsold for speculative reasons. Sooner or later, thanks to demand, the price will go up.

There might be empty business premises which could be turned into residential housing. Sometimes, although rarely, they are. Many downstairs spaces were originally planned as shops or bars or hairdressers – but no one came forward, and so they got bricked up and covered with graffiti.

The main problem in Spain – or anywhere else – is location. An ambitious young lawyer or accountant wants to live in Madrid, not in Sigüenza (as beautiful as it may be). A dentist or a banker would prefer Barcelona to Cuenca and the best discotheques, restaurants and museums are not necessarily in Teruel.

Or Tossa del Mar. Good beaches though.

But now there’s a new system coming from the USA, which never misses a trick when it comes to screwing money out of the less fortunate. You may live in the sticks to save on city-rentals and practice teleworking. Hunched over the computer each day while wearing nothing more than a tee-shirt with the cat and a cold Martini both waiting for your undivided attention. Rather like I’m doing now.

It seems that clever landlords are charging extra rent if you do that. An apartment is just for sleeping in, showering and watching Netflix. Working from home is ratable.

There are more homes in Spain than we like to imagine, although not all are located within the boundary of the M-30. Google says there are 27 million dwellings and 49,700,000 people living here: which works out at a little less than two people to a home. Whether this figure refers only to functional residences or anything which vaguely has a roof is unclear.

I buck the trend by living alone. You can blame me for all the panic stories listed at the beginning of this essay. But, while I’m alone, I’m not alone, since there are 5.6 million of us. A whopping 28% of all dwellings in the country are unipersonal. Shopping for one.

Well, we could get together, maybe on a Facebook chat, and share and loosen up some property. However, says Infobae, ‘A study suggests that splitting an apartment with people with whom you don't share a romantic relationship has worse consequences for mental health than living alone and not having a partner’. Sure, I would rather have a partner, and while there’s not much room in my hobbit house, hidden in a small forest a few klics from Civilization – except during the summer holidays when it’s Hell out there – I am getting sick of talking to myself and heating baked beans in the microwave.

Am I lonely? Not particularly. But the other night I went out to an Indian in the next town down from me for some company and sat by myself with just a very old paperback for entertainment. Restaurants (particularly during the ever-longer season) prefer two or more to a table, especially if one of them is the designated driver. 

When the summer is finally over, with the fiestas patronales just a noisy memory and a sticky taste, and when I can park the car in the village once again rather than having to take the bus, then I'll be able to go out and see my friends. Come the end of the evening, I'll head for home, glad to be living alone with my books and my cat.

I Must Have Been Hungry

It was hot where I live, on a hill overlooking a dry riverbed, not far from the sea. Indeed, Thursday and Friday were both in the 40s.

My daughter was celebrating her birthday that Thursday (as it happens, she’s also in her forties) and I joined her and others as a Party of Six (follow me please) to the table in the corner, by the windows, in a smart restaurant in the next town from mine.

Our family knows their family, and thus we were treated to cocktails and jamón as the waiter left us some menus, bread and changed our plates and glasses. Smart places always do, for some unfathomable reason.

The owner reappeared and chose the meal for us – an eminently sound idea as I never like to read menus and tend to order the same as the person seated to my left (unless he or she is a vegetarian). I think the best restaurants are those who have no menu at all – maybe a blackboard with today’s ‘catch’ – but the simpler the better. One is there for the conversation, not to get lost in a thick book of food. By now, and anyway, our unopened menus had discretely disappeared.

And it came to pass that, being both a smart restaurant, and with special favour from the kitchen, we were served endless plates of delicious thises and thatses. The plates being passed around to the left and quickly emptied.

The main course began with a similar routine, or maybe that was the continuation of the first course Part the Second. More munching and forks clashing. It was too delicious to talk (and too noisy to hear). Mmm, good! Anyway, it was then followed (fresh plates, clean knives and forks) with a hot piece of iron over a small oil-heater and a large plate of raw beef for us to cook to our liking.

Urrrrp!

I was reading somewhere that when there’s a choice on your plate, you eat more. At home, not being much of a cook, I heat up one thing or another from the fridge or a can from the shelf, add some mayonnaise and call myself satisfied. But when there are lots of little exquisitely laden plates, multi-cultured tapas, then one can become quite a pig.

After that along comes the desert, or afters, or pudding. It’s been a while. Here, the same thing: a gigantic platter with at least ten different postres and, like Pokemon, you’ve gotta catch them all. The cake and the (apparently) forty-strong staff all smiling as my daughter blew out the candle.

My granddaughter’s boyfriend was the driver, sitting there poor chap with his glass of water. The rest of us, to a greatest or lesser extent, drank beers, wine, gin and tonics and a shot or two of tequila.

Friday morning, I had no hangover but noticed I had put on over half a kilo.

Animal Life

Sometimes, along comes a comment or an entire post on social media written – as often as not – by a Brit on the emotive subject of animals, and how we love them. 

Me and a friend

As of course I do.

Mostly.

Cats for example. Fine and agreeable balls of fur one can snuggle with. They give in return a kind of cynical love and the feeling that, if they were only bigger while we were smaller, they would probably drop the pretence and attempt to eat us instead. As it is, cats and their lower-class cousin the feral cat (inexplicably protected by both the vecinos and the town hall) are responsible for the deaths of approximately 400 million animals annually in Spain.

'This staggering figure includes hundreds of millions of small mammals, birds, and reptiles. In fact, free-ranging and feral cats are responsible for significant pressure on local wildlife and are cited as threats to hundreds of conservation-dependent species’, says Google AI.

No wonder the Dawn Chorus is ever-more muted.

But yes, cats are cute. They go ‘Miaow’.

Returning to social media, and the unconditional love of many people for all things that fly, run, stagger or crawl, here’s an exchange about a yellow scorpion I had with someone who found one in her house and was doubtful about taking it outside:

 Me: Nasty things. I've been stung four times (so far) by them. It's around six hours of pain and no apparent wound or swelling to help look for sympathy.

 Them: Poor little guys! Having to encounter a big clumsy oaf of an ape. I hope they're OK.

 Me: I'm pretty sure I stamped on at least three of them.

 Them: Colour me fking astonished. I wish you the same. 

 Me: You think I should have bought them a drink?

Living, as I do, in the campo, there are lots of wild creatures here that make my life more enjoyable. There are plenty of geckoes (or ‘crocodiles’ as a friend with poor English disarmingly calls them) and a few chameleons; we have wild tortoises that walk right up to me and ask for food; there are butterflies, bees and other friendly insects; rabbits scampering along in front of my car and partridge couples debating whether to gallop straight legged across the orchard or maybe take to flight. There are magpies and hoopoes; a few foxes and a very vocal owl that sits on a branch outside my bedroom window.

But we have other critters I don’t care for at all. Should I accept the social media explanation that ‘they were here first’? Even if they weren’t. Yes, the flies and mosquitos have been here forever, and also the wasps (I destroy a nest whenever I can), but the wild boar and the mischievous mountain goats (ibex) are both new, having descended from the hills in the past ten or twenty years.

The boar dig up the roots of the trees and bushes and knock down the ancient stone terraces in search of grubs and rootlets. I shake out powdered hot pepper which discourages them – maybe they’ll dig up the neighbour’s plot instead where there’s no polvos picantes to disturb their sensitive noses.

But the mountain goats! They’ll get onto the terrace and chew the bark off the ornamentals, or strip the leaves, or – and this is just nasty – break off branches from the citrus and other fruit trees and leave them scattered around as a message. It’s just as well they don’t have a Facebook account.

I know, I should get a large hound. But then, where I live, we are infested with the black fly that gives the poor dogs leishmaniasis. Which kills them.

Oh look, there’s an egret in the garden!

Fire in the Hills

The heat right now is far from normal. There are those who post things on Facebook like ‘It’s summer, of course it’s hot’ or ‘They’re on purple and are running out of colours for the maps’ or (worse still) ‘It was much hotter twenty thousand years ago’. Silly remarks to try and make light of our current global warming.

Brought on, as much as anything (Mr Trump, are you reading this?) by burning fossil fuels. Drill, baby, drill indeed.

Spain has moved towards clean energy, whether solar, wind or geothermal, thank goodness. It wasn’t so long ago that the Partido Popular government had a ludicrous ‘sun tax’ to keep us burning diesel and gas.

I’m doing my bit – staying home and reading. Drinking plenty of water. Using the fan at night (apparently, it costs about six cents for an eight-hour breeze). The book I’m reading right now is a Hammond Innes thriller about people caught on the ice-flows of Antarctica. The Baddy is trying to kill them, and he has just rammed and sunk their whaling ship. It’s cold as Hell.

The heat is terrific. My phone says, ‘Tomorrow will be hotter’. I have to shower several times a day in cold water. The wild boar are attacking my orchard, digging up the roots and knocking down the stone terracing. Bastards! 

But this is nothing. From my window I can see across the valley to Bédar, a small town I used to live in back in the seventies. It’s on fire. Smoke obscures the setting sun, and flames stretch along a corridor of maybe fifteen kilometres. Small flashing blue lights, and a helicopter overhead. I can see the sky glowing behind the mountains. The Facebook is alive with pictures and updates. Bédar has been evacuated and the townsfolk (it’s a small place) have been ordered inland to the next pueblo, Lubrín. They are in the municipal building there. Others have been sent to Los Gallardos below, but then that too became under threat. Movement on the A-7 motorway below was cut by the police. Fire moves so very quickly. You can come round a bend in the road, and find it’s taken a short cut and is now both ahead of you as well as behind.

My son is a fire-fighter in America. He tells me on WhatsApp to be ready, to pack a bag with my passport and a change of clothes – and of course my Hammond Innes book. Close all the windows and shutters, and the interior doors. Be prepared. A friend from Bédar sends me a worrying message from where she lives, out in the campo: ‘Road in both directions blocked by flames. We’re out but there’s hardly anywhere to go. We stupidly waited too long’.

By midnight on Thursday, the authorities were talking about a dozen fatalities. People we know. Maybe my friend. 

-Updating this on Tuesday, The fire is out, the president of Spain and the President of Andalucía have had their pictures taken and my friend and her husband are among the now thirteen dead.

 

The New Normal. The Coalition of the Right

 

Those of us who live in Andalucía (or, for that matter, in Castilla y León, Extremadura or Aragón) now have a regional government made up of the PP (the majority party) in alliance with the Vox. The tail in every case, wagging the dog.

This dreary coalition, I call it the PPox (in honour of a social disease), has the program of the Partido Popular with certain policies from Vox added under duress (one hopes) such as the discriminatory Prioridad Nacional.

Wiki explains: ‘National Priority or preference is the idea that a series of political, economic, or social rights should be reserved exclusively or primarily for the members of a nation. It is a popular term that encompasses the concepts of nativism and social chauvinism’.

Málaga Hoy says that the Andalusian agreement supposes: ‘National Priority for housing, a ban on the burka in public spaces, and an emergency plan to address waiting lists are among the 150 measures in the pact. For access to public housing, ten years of residency registration will be required for purchases and five years for rentals. There will be a priority pathway for cancer diagnosis and an annual audit of the cost of healthcare for foreigners’.  

Google AI says: ‘The "national priority" (or prioridad nacional) policies proposed by conservative coalitions aim to give native-born Spaniards preference over foreigners for state aid, social housing, and public subsidies. However, experts note these moves directly conflict with national equality laws’ (and indeed, Article 13 of the Constitution: “Foreigners shall enjoy in Spain the public freedoms guaranteed by this Title under the terms established by treaties and the law"). The European Commission doesn’t approve either: ‘Brussels warns that it will ensure there is no discrimination with the National Priority’.

Furthermore (the Right has always been uneasy with the science of climate change), Andalucía will be declared "free from the burdens of the European Green Deal". There is no mention in the program regarding gender violence, LGTBIQ+ rights and Muslim and Arab language school studies are to be dropped, as the manly activities of bullfighting and la caza (hunting) now take centre stage. 

elDiario.es has: ‘Through 150 measures, the agreement consolidates ideological concessions made by the PP to Vox, such as the outright rejection of the 2030 Agenda and the creation of a new Law of Concord (forgive and forget the past crimes under the Dictatorship). The far-right leader Manuel Gavira will become vice president with a super-ministry under his control: the Ministry of Tourism, Local Administration, and Justice’.

The whole deal was announced just half an hour before the Thursday coronation of Juanma Moreno, giving little time for any revolt among the conservatives. The reaction from the regional PSOE leader María Jesús Montero was to call it a "pact of shame. For the first time since the Franco regime, the far right will enter an Andalusian government", she said.

Will this state of affairs be a success? In Madrid, Alberto Núñez Feijóo (screaming daily for fresh elections) admits that, if the voters wanted it, then he would agree to a pact, a pax, a PPox with Vox.