Allez les Filles

Isn’t it a grand thing when one can change one’s opinion? It doesn’t happen often in one’s adult life – beyond maybe discovering that some of those rock groups really weren’t that good after all – and yet, lookit, here we are today: fans of Spanish women’s football!

They’ve done awfully well in the last twelve months, breaking the records that men’s football can currently only dream about – championships, FIFA World Cup championships and more – indeed, the Barcelona women’s blaugranas team just beat the French Olympique Lyonnais team in the Bilbao stadium in front of 51,000 spectators to win The UEFA Women’s Champions League.  

This strange new world we live in: a proper televised women’s sporting event where a couple of fellows brought a pro-Palestinian banner on to the pitch at the beginning of the match, receiving cheers from the fans (and evident approval from the organisers).

I learned today that Women’s Football has been played in the UK since 1890 (at least) but that ‘some saw it as a threat to men’s football. The FA banned women from playing the sport at FA affiliated grounds between 1921 and 1971, with the governing body stating: “…the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged”’.

In Spain, the first club ‘the Spanish Girl’s Club’ dates from 1914 (‘twenty years before women could vote’, says an article I’m reading). From the Civil War until Franco’s death, the sport was dropped – call it chauvinism if you like.

I’ve never liked football – a long game interspaced once or twice in ninety agonizing minutes with a shrieked ¡gol gol gol! from the exited commentator on the TV on the shelf behind me. ‘Who won?’, I ask without turning round.

It’s probably to do with my early school life – the choices were either soccer or Latin (or, uh, smoking on the roof of the lavatories).

But look at the players! Somebody said unkindly a few years ago that you would never get eleven women to agree to wear the same outfit in public, but suddenly we saw that this whole deal wasn’t about sexy girls, like the ones playing volleyball matches – where nobody cares about the score anyway. This was about real ones: playing sport and playing to win: an inspiration for girls everywhere. Something to make society proud.  

Luis Rubiales was the one who discovered that the age of treating young women like giddy chickies was now officially over. ‘He didn’t respect me, neither as a player nor as a person’, said Jenni Hermoso.

Now that’s a mistake he won’t make again.

Mojácar Mass Tourism

There is so much spoken about making Mojácar more attractive for the tourists. This begs a few questions: 

1. Why? 

2. Where are we going to put them? 

3. What is in it for the majority of us who don't have businesses here? 

4. Will we have to queue everywhere? 

5. Will we be able to park? 

6. Will we be able to sleep? 

7. Will the business-folk still need us during the summer, like they do during the winter (the ones that stay here during the 'low season')? 

8. How many 'I got laid in Mojácar' tee shirts should I buy each summer?  

Fact: one resident spends, in one year, the equivalent of 500 tourists; and is still here next year. 

We could really make something of Mojácar if we dropped the Walt Disney vulgarity and became proud of the place. A beautiful town would create more demand than cheap tourism can - and more demand raises property values (unless they flood the municipality with thousands more noddy-houses - the current plan).  

There isn't room,
it doesn't fit.
It's Mojácar's doom.
Enough of it!

The Banksters

 And how are our friends the banks doing?

The banks used to – vaguely and no-doubt erroneously – be thought to be more of a service for citizens than their current behaviour - a kind of inspiration for the vultures, the hyenas and other consumers of the dead, dying and the weak.

The banks make their money from the manager’s office rather than the teller’s desk, as the widow’s mite is placed into the drawer where it will start to earn interest, only, not for the widow, poor dear, but - down the line - for the share-holders. 

The bank isn't that interested. Small beer doesn’t make you a major player. You need some big investors with stories of major profits ahead.

So how did the banks become so unpopular? Less branches, more commissions and a diminishing service.

Now we have the case of the hostile bid from the second-largest bank in Spain towards the fourth. It started friendly enough, but the smaller bank said it wasn’t a high-enough offer. All this, right now, during the frenzy of the Catalonian elections. That fourth largest bank, that’s from Sabadell in Catalonia (although their head-office these days is safely in Alicante) with 19,213 slightly worried employees.

The putative pirate, the Borg as it were, is the BBVA (the name is an amalgam of distant banks). The head office is in Bilbao, and there are 121,486 employees. The president of the BBVA is Carlos Torres and last year he took home 7.6 million euros (not much by the standards of Amancio Ortega, who expects to pocket some 3,000 million euros in 2024, but still enough to keep the wolf from the door).

And those shareholders: wealthy leeches who can’t even claim a loyalty towards the company whose paper they hold, the employees, the traditions and the products it makes.

Although, of course it’s true that the banks only make the one product. Money.

My bank (I’ll send you my account details by separate cover) is a lot smaller. It’s one of those Cajas that used to be run by the Church. These days, of course, it maintains a stand just inside the Cathedral door in case the Messiah returns unexpectedly. But for the rest of us, it takes our moolah, charges us for the pleasure, and makes its real money from investments, projects, deals, the resale of homes it has expropriated from those who couldn’t meet the mortgage, and other worthwhile and marvellous devices too numerous to mention.

The politicians (well, those who don’t plan a future in la banca) are against the merger. There will be less banks. There aren’t many already with Santander, BBVA, Caixabank and Sabadell being the Big Four and taking up, between them, 75% of all deposits and, if there’s a fusion, why, there’ll be even less competition.

Fewer branches too. The widow will have to take a bus to get to the nearest counting-house.

Oddly, my bank was burgled over the May-day holiday. Two weeks later, you know, it’s still shut. 

...

After I wrote the above, I found this headline from El Mundo: ‘Banco Santander, in favour of the BBVA's takeover bid for Sabadell: "It makes sense and it benefits shareholders"’. 

Well, that’s all right then.

The Last Morisco (with some corrections)

 A local author has written a fascinating book about the revolt of the Moriscos in 1570. These were the times when the defeated Moors who remained in Spain had to become what was called by the Spanish ‘the New Christians’ (eat pork, go to church and all the other things one must do to show one’s fealty). Even so, they were not allowed to own land and their children were obliged to be educated, thanks to strict rules from Felipe II, by Catholic priests. The Moriscos, descendants of Muslims thus forcibly converted to Christianity, faced increasing pressure. These ‘New Christians’ (many still with a copy of the Koran hidden under the bed) remained suspect in the eyes of the authorities, leading to latent tensions and conflicts. Between 1568 and 1571, the Moriscos in the Alpujarras and down towards the Almerian coast rebelled against their treatment.

The book is called El Último Morisco by Diego Ramos.

It has been ably translated into English as ‘The Last Morisco’ (but yet to go to print) by Andy Mortimer, and I’ve been sent a proof to comment and correct as I see fit.

The problems we have found so far – I’m half way through it – are firstly to do with grammatical accents (does the English language accept the odd place or person’s name with an accent?). The British newspaper-guides say ‘no accents’, but we are living here in Spain and, it seems to me, we might as well try and learn things right rather than wrong.  That said, we prefer Malaga to Málaga, Cordoba for Córdoba and for that matter, we use Seville for Sevilla and Orense instead of Ourense.

But then, what of the Spanish ‘n-with-a-squiggle’: the ‘ñ’ that doesn’t even appear on our British keyboard? We have decided that this, the most Spanish of letters, will stay. España, año, and Peñiscola indeed!

A second issue is measurement. Do we talk of leagues, kilometres or miles? What about yards? The Spanish measurements of the time were complicated and they even varied between one place and another. La fanega, a land-measurement, changes violently according to both location and indeed meaning. It was considered in Castilla to be 1000x1000 varas, which was a unit something smaller than a square metre. So, a sort of pint-sized hectare. However, in Galicia and Valencia, Andalucía, the Canaries and Extremadura, the range differed considerably. In short, anything from 5,707m2 down to a pocket-sized 833m2. In some places, it was merely the extent of land necessary to grow a certain amount of grain. The word fanega comes from the Arabic faddãn. The word still appears in old escrituras in Almería (to the horror of any surveyor).

So we think maybe to resort to old English measurements – a pace, a morning’s walk, a day’s ride and so on. After all, it’s not a text-book, it’s a fast-paced novel: indeed the blurb at Amazon says ‘…Focusing on the story of Khalíl and Dídac, two young people whose lives are shaken by the storm of war, El Último Morisco recreates with singular vividness the Spanish universe of the mid-16th century, populated with characters, some despicable and others heroic; with broken families and the corpses of innocent people half buried in wintry ditches…’

The tag says ‘Could history repeat itself?’

The English version will be in print perhaps by September. It is the story of a shockingly bloodthirsty time in Spanish history (although, perhaps not the most, since every now and again along the way, there’s been a revolution here of some sort or another). By chance, I’m currently reading a novel about Madrid in 1936, on the eve of the Civil War.

Things are not looking good.

Perhaps the lesson here is that an occasional violent rebellion is in the nature of this most charming and welcoming nation.