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.

Deaf as a Post

I may have given the impression over this long and normally enjoyable life that I was a little distrait with my family, my friends, my immediate circle and (now that I come to think of it) with that nice policeman who wanted to breathalyse me the other day: at seven in the morning on the way to the airport.

The thing is, like many people over the age of, let us say fifty, I am stone deaf.

My grandmother had an ear trumpet which she would point towards whoever interested her. The result was that the whole family tended to raise their voices which in my opinion is a good idea, especially here in Spain where ‘the dog that doesn’t bark doesn’t get fed’.

And thus, like many a slightly vague senior, I eventually gave up and admitted to myself that I am a trifle hard of hearing – a bit like the Twelve Steps:

‘My name is Lenox, and I’m deaf’.

‘Speak up, we can’t hear you’, they shouted back.

I happen to have a Spanish connection. These are very common between our hosts, but quite rare for Johnny Foreigner. There will normally be a sister-in-law who is a judge, a brother who works in the city hospital, a school friend who is now a Guardia Civil and so on. Almost everybody has a useful contact either through the extended family or by happenchance. They like to say: ‘It’s not what you learnt at school, it’s who you sat next to’.

A very fine system it is too. In Spain, everyone is in with a chance.

For we foreigners, this is a lot harder, but I’ve been here for a long time: almost sixty years (cough cough!) and, anyway, where I’m going with this is I know someone in the hearing aid business, or rather I did as she has since moved to Tenerife. Long story short, I got some staggeringly expensive pinganillos for a song. Fifty percent off the listed price.

Spain is very noisy, and one may be tempted to soldier on without a listening device (sorry, that’s the best the Thesaurus could come up with apart from ‘a vacuum-tube hearing aid’). The ambient noise, the drills, the shouts, the tricked-out mopeds, the horns and sirens. It’s not so bad when you’re deaf, for sure, but then you need to hear what your darling says too.

The main drawback to my hearing aids is that they faithfully pick up all kinds of noise that I would rather not hear – the folk at the next table, the coffee-grinder behind the counter, the television and the waiter shouting ‘dos cañas y una Fanta limón’ to the woman working the bar. I can always take one out of my ear, unplug myself on one side as it were, to better hear what’s going on the other side where my neighbour is seated. Unless it’s not interesting, in which case I can more or less manage what my grandmother used to do with her ear trumpet, which was to point it the other way.

Spain is the second-noisiest country in the world, only behind Japan – and that’s because they have paper walls (useful in an earthquake) whereas ours are made of machimbrado: thin brick and plaster. The sound travels through them, and once it has arrived, it bounces off the tiled floor and naked walls.

Which is why I like a carpet and a painting or two in my quarters.

Hearing aids are not as easy to remember as glasses. I will have reached for my specs right from the start, while clambering out of my pit, but I may be behind the steering wheel before I remember the hearing aids, blast them.

Still, I probably won’t need them just to do the shopping and to have a beer and a tapa afterwards. Deaf people are very good at saying ‘fancy that’ and ‘well, I never’ when they can’t hear you.

I’m feeling better now. Barman, bring me another caña!