Did Spain Get a Bit Tamer Over the Years, Or Is It Me?

The subject of old Renault 4s came up somewhere. My dad had bought one back in 1967 which stood us proud until one day some nitwit from Melilla creamed us on the way to the liquor store in Vera. I was in the front with my dad and suddenly, so was the dog and several empty crates of beer. 

It was a wonder that nothing was spilled. 

The Renault had a push-pull gear lever, as did its rival the 2CV. If you are not familiar with this, then know that there's a stalk sticking up out of the motor, the gear lever, and then there's an umbrella handle poking through the dashboard somewhere with a little ring on the other end which is loosely held over the gear-stalk. All you had to do was waggle it in the right way, a bit like those cranes that win a prize in the back of most bars. There was a trick to it. Reverse was way over to the right.

Or was it the left?

After that experience, my dad stuck to Citroëns. 

And beer from the supermarket in cans.

Life in Spain was fun. Franco had closed the gates to Gibraltar but otherwise left us in peace. Indeed, a trip down to the Rock to change money - it had the nearest Barclays Bank - involved a detour via Tangier, which was always a blast. Morocco meant - and still does - trips to the souk and a growing collection of carpets, trays, jalabahs and Goulimine beads. Gibraltar was English beer, sausage rolls and people with funny accents; but hey, you can find those anywhere these days, Brexit notwithstanding. 

My father and I spent a few days in clink in Vera once. We had been cleaning up the local view-points (by sawing down a select choice of billboards) and were thrown into the calabozo below the Vera town hall for our troubles. Greenpeace would have been proud of us. To our surprise, we were arrested several months after we had hung up our saws by a contrite pair of Guardias (my dad used to send a crate of wine over to the cuartel every Christmas with his compliments), but justice in Spain is rarely swift. We spent five days in the pokey before being released on bail. I announced that I was leaving school (I was attending one in Seville) as the consequent result of having become an old lag at 17. And thus I grew up. Franco returns to the story here, as he celebrated around about then his thirty five years of terror with an amnesty for small-time evil-doers like ourselves. 

Thus nothing more was said.

I went off after that and conquered society; well, the warm bits anyway. As an adult, I have spent most of my time in Spain (with periods living in the USA, Mexico, Paris, Florence and so on). In all, I have spent maybe three months in the UK since 1970 - probably more than enough.

Spain had filled up over the decades with us Brits - or rather, a reduced number of coastal villages did. There aren't many of us to be found inland, or in the cities. Locating an English breakfast or a Union Jack pub is hard to do where I live - a suburb of the provincial capital with an abandoned beach where there are no hotels, souvenir shops, Indian restaurants or even tourists. We have no currency exchange places or charity shops or even, for that matter, earnest dog and cat people. Each morning I manage perfectly well with a slice of tortilla and the local newspaper.

I can't complain. I spent plenty of my time as a young whippersnapper in the discos and knock-shops with the best of them.

I smoked pot and still can't remember what I did when I was 27. I drove cars way to fast (I'm not counting my dad's Citroëns here) and was lucky in love. I travelled the world, or enough bits of it to catch a balanced viewpoint. I opened an expat newspaper here in Spain and ran it for fourteen years, which meant the end of my money.  I was married to a wonderful lady (she took this picture), who died in 2014; and above all, I read books. 

When we moved to Spain in 1966 - my parents, me and two whippets - we brought with us a half ton of books. These were not classics, or textbooks or anything of much value, but if there's one tradition that the Spanish will grimly stick with, it's broadcasting truly awful television. So I endlessly read novels. Indeed, as the years catch up, it's the one thing I can still do. And at the risk of contradicting myself - what a pity there's not a good charity shop handy! The nearest one - six books for a euro - is an hour down the road from me.