The Stamp Collector

 In the bad old days, the village postman wasn’t much good with foreign names (although he liked to collect stamps, sometimes removing them with a certain amount of bureaucratic relish from the corner of the envelope). It was no big deal: in those times, the twenty pound notes tenderly send by my dad’s sister would be folded inside within a sheet of carbon paper to fool the early X-Ray machines in Madrid.

I’d be sent to Old Martín with instruction to collect all the foreigners’ letters – at least those of the foreigners who were sat in the village square, drinking and gossiping.

It’s not as bad as it sounds.

The correos opened in those day at the reasonable hour of 3.00pm.

Anyone who wasn’t in the square drinking, naturally risked losing his twenty quid.

(To explain: In the late sixties, the British only allowed one to take out fifty, later sixty, pounds a year on holiday. We would all head to Gibraltar for a top-up until General Franco closed the border.)

It’s a far cry from today. Now we don’t know each other – there’re too many of us – and the post office wouldn’t give out the mail to some spotty foreign kid anyway. Now, it’s either delivered by a person dressed in a yellow uniform driving an equally buff-coloured three-wheel motorcycle, or its placed in a tin post-box and you come along during opening hours to see what – if anything – is new.

As for the folded twenty pound notes, now the British Government lets you take abroad as much as you like: to spend freely on rounds of brandy, weekends in a Parador or buying a second hand car with no MOT and the steering wheel on the wrong end of the dashboard.

Before they took to delivering the mail, I too had a post box: un apartado. Nº 35 it was. Then they started charging a heavy sum for its rental, insisted that each person who used the PO Box would have to pay separately for the same number, and they introduced (free) house deliveries anyway.

It was an easy call, although any letters which later arrived at my Nº 35 were solemnly returned to sender, unread.

I’m sure that as a result of the Person Unknown stamp on the repatriated item, the editors of my old school magazine were convinced that I had precipitously joined the list of ‘the dearly departed’.

Which, on the bright side, saved me continuing with my modest annual subscription.

The world moved on, and someone invented emails, which took the wind out of the sails of the Spanish postal system. Then along came DHL and their parcel-totting competitors, plus those fellows who whizz through the city traffic on their bicycles with an urgent message stuffed down their Velcro pouch.

The post office was on the ropes.

So it invented in own high-speed parcel delivery system, operated as a bank for a while, started to sell books by right-wing authors (have a look next time), sent and received money abroad, sold stickers, lottery coupons and magazines and generally moved, as they say, forward.

The postage stamps were another change. Instead of a stamp which one could lick and affix, the new ones have peel-off backs. Or, and more usually, they print out an inelegant sticky strip with numbers and bar-codes, and press it onto your envelope – as often as not hiding part of the first line of the address.

So today, I went to post a letter to foreign parts and said that I wanted a stamp rather than an adhesive label, if it was all the same to them.

There was a fuss, but eventually the clerk played ball and found two stamps. The first had a peel-off back, the second did not. It has to be glued on, she said, as – not finding the glue-stick – she sellotaped it onto the envelope.

But let me leave on a positive note.

I always used to joke that when I grew up, they would put me on a postage stamp. Now, it appears, you can take along a photo to the correos and they will run you up a set of 24 street-legal stamps, with a sticky back, and bearing your smiling image.

I think I could have some fun with that.    

Tourism for Spain 2025

 The FITUR – Spain’s gigantic tourism fair – is now over. Deals have been struck, hotels booked, new attractions publicised and above all, 2025 is met with optimism and faith.

The goal is to bring 100 million foreign tourists to Spain this year (it was 94m in 2024) – and to increase the money taken last year (a tidy 126,000 million euros), and just maybe increase the percentage of Spain’s GDP to be marked down to tourism.

Tourism is an excellent industry, as they come, they pay, and (best of all) they go. During their brief visit, they spend every day on drink, on food, on hotels and on souvenirs. Apart from a tee-shirt or a decorated pot, they won’t export anything from Spain in exchange for their money much beyond a hangover, a sunburn and maybe a secret telephone number or email address from someone they met at the hotel disco.

And all that lovely money. Most of it is spent in places where neither Spaniards nor foreign residents tend to go: whether the tour-hotels; those AirBnb homes; the spoiled and overcrowded attractions (think the Alhambra, the Grand Mosque, the Sagrada Familia or other ‘untenable popularity’ places as listed recently by Fodor) or indeed in the tacky souvenir shops. Those businesses relying on tourism – rather than residents – will have their own solutions to bring to the table: more tourism please, and let’s stop with that ‘Tourist Go Home’ stuff.

FITUR was good for tourism, but it was also good for Madrid. 225,000 people came to the show, and the city took in, says a tourist-page, an extra 445 million euros in those five days.

Spain, says CNN, and looking at the American market, is ‘the red-hot tourist destination’.

In his New Year’s speech, the mayor of Málaga Francisco De la Torre warned about La turismofobia and calls for moderation because, he said, "the success of Málaga" depends on tourism’. We need to take note of this, because not only does tourism help Spain’s GDP, it is also less tiresome for we residents than living in a town dedicated to factories or heavy industry.

Extinction Internet

 What a marvellous thing the Internet is. Now we can throw out the set of encyclopaedias, talk to all our friends for free, save a fortune on subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, download (pirated) films, check our bank account and order a smashing looking shirt advertised on Facebook for just nine ninety five.

Or two for fifteen, if we are quick.

And then, when you unwrap the package – if it ever gets to you – you find that the shirt is made of polyester. See, the Internet is service, information, and increasingly, opportunity.

Opportunity for scammers, hackers, fraudsters and crooks. Many of whom don’t even exist: that’s right, the woman with the large chest who wants to be your friend either on Facebook (‘I love your posts, you seem such an interesting person’) or in your Messenger (here’s one I just got from Busty Emma: ‘Hi Dear!’). They are both bots, like the empty phone calls or the get-rich-quick adverts.

I’m reading on Facebook this morning, in a paid-for advert, the following (in Spanish): ‘Donation of 544,000 euros. Please contact me to benefit’. I’m also getting tarot-reading and offers by Pedro Sánchez, Amancio Ortega and other Spanish household names to invest in a get-rich-quick scheme. Ya think?

Even in my private paid-for email account, I get scam adverts like, f’rinstance, ‘Get your free Oraal B Series 9 from Uniited Heallthcare’ – what’s with the misspellings, is it to fool the spam-guard?

Then, beware of anything that starts with ‘Congratulations…’ Indeed, I was offered a free Trump tee-shirt only yesterday, just pay for the postage and send us your details.

Besides emptying your bank account, or taking your ID or your online-presence, or pushing extremist views down your throat (with a nod to the anything-goes policies of Elon Musk and The Zuck), the Internet can provide misleading information (The old joke of – ‘All climate scientists agree on global warming, but on the other hand and to be fair, Sandra on Facebook says that it’s all bollocks’).

The Guardian notes, ‘…it is possible to conclude that Zuckerberg has always cared more about his company’s proximity to power than to its proximity to truth’. Indeed, his reversal of the fact-checkers has prompted the joke site El Mundo Today to announce that it, too, has removed its ‘protocols of verification’.

Revealingly, the word “enshittification” has just been crowned as Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows. ‘The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking’.

Luckily, there are several fact-checkers out there, Snopes, Maldita, Wikipedia (currently under threat from Musk), and of course Russia’s bogus Global Fact-Checking Network…

By the way, Invermectin, which reputedly cures both cancer and Covid if you believe the Internet, is in reality a horse laxative.

Besides misinformation, or rather disinformation (used a lot in the recent American elections, and indeed, with anything to do with Trump); there’s the danger of cyber-warfare, hijacking, bluesnarfing (you should switch your Bluetooth connector off to avoid piracy); malware – (viruses, spyware, worms and so on); denial-of-service attacks which can break down a network; phishing and password attacks.

And note that, these days, only amateur hackers bother to break into your account – the professionals are busy hacking the hospital, or the bank, or the electricity company.

Twitter has meanwhile become notoriously toxic, and some people are moving to an imitator called Blue Sky. The main advantage of this platform is that it doesn’t carry far-right posts along the lines of Elon Musk and his support for the AfD, the German fascist party (‘Jawohl, Hitler was a communist’), or his suggested invasion of the UK.

These days, it must be acutely embarrassing for anyone who owns and drives a Tesla.

We have rather taken to no longer following the news – neither buying newspapers any more (El País now prints around 52,000 copies daily – as against 470,000 just twenty years ago), or even watching the Telediario (75% of Spaniards now have a streaming service – Netflix, Disney and so on). Instead, we get our news from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where it has little or no editorial control. Don’t believe me? Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Uber have all given Trump a million dollars for his inauguration fund (sic!) and Elon Musk pumped 277 million dollars into the Donald Trump candidacy. The incoming president’s goals will become clear enough in the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be too sure of investing in Bitcoin: like fairies’ promises and happy endings, it ain’t necessarily so.

Our phones – if we are important enough – run the risk of being spied on by the Israeli Pegasus – or for that matter, being blown up by the Mossad.

The Dutch professor Geert Lovink in an essay called ‘Extinction Internet’ explains that there will come a time when everyone will get tired of being connected to the Internet, because the disadvantages of sharing opinions online will be so great – the negative aspects far outweighing the good – that people will simply turn away. The Spanish news-site Infobae ‘consults experts on the implications of a web increasingly dominated by bots and artificial content’. They find that ‘the Golden Age has passed and now most traffic is either bots (no relation) or synthetic AI-generated content’. One advantage to this is that it’s a cheap alternative to paying journalists. As Forbes notes, ‘Beyond news generation and consumption, AI is improving the business and operation of journalism, which is important given the high cost and low revenue usually associated with the news media industry. Journalism can be a resource-intensive business…’

As for the Spanish Government’s plan to punish the media who publish bulos (fake news), we can only await events (as the Partido Popular and its allies criticise the proposals).

In short, corporate greed and Internet fraud between them will one day outweigh the social advantages, certainly for the ordinary consumer. Could it be happening right now?

Are we seeing the Internet die? Not for Industry as a whole, but rather as we – humble users and customers – might understand it? Maybe soon we will have to return to Telefónica and writing postcards?

It might not be such a bad thing.

So, where am I going with all this? Oh Hell, let’s see what’s on Facebook.    

What Are We Going to Call Ourselves?

Ángel Medina and I used to produce and edit a monthly newspaper a decade ago called El Indalico which ran for around 108 editions. 

Ángel has now begun to record some of his essays on a blog here.

Here's one I translated.

...

Among the stories that I am going to publish on this blog there will be some related to Mojácar, the town where I have lived for more than thirty years. And they will be part of what I will call “Stories of Mojácar”. 

They are unusual and fantastic because the pueblo and its inhabitants are quite strange.

In every sense. 

Little by little, I will reveal what this place is like, which was on the verge of disappearing as a municipality after the Spanish Civil War due to the abandonment it suffered from its inhabitants thanks to hunger, a lack of resources, a fierce lack of communications with the surroundings, plus the aridity of its lands, always yearning for those drops of rain that never seemed to fall.

The town was lucky to have Jacinto Alarcón, a providential mayor who in the 60s managed to cause a National Parador hotel to be built and also, by giving away ruins or plots of land to diplomats and others, attracted personalities and investors who started the take-off of the town as an international tourist attraction. 

Many people later following his line consolidated this projection by building apartments, housing estates and hotels.

One of the many who believed in that future was Pedro García, who built and ran the Hotel Continental for many years, which is still there today.

Pedro, a restless and hard-working man, wanted to contribute in some way to that local development and thought of forming an association of hotel entrepreneurs who would join their efforts to achieve that definitive take-off of the town. And with his best spirit he met the businessmen of the area for that purpose one afternoon on the terraces of his hotel.

'The first thing is to find a name for the association. I propose ASEMMOJ (Association of Businessmen of Mojácar)', he proposed.

'No', replied one attendee, 'ASEMHOMOJ would be a better bet (Association of Hotel Entrepreneurs of Mojácar)'.

'Why only hoteliers? What about those of us who have bars?', another participant jumped in, 'it should be called ASEMHOYBARMOJ (Association of Hotel and Bar Entrepreneurs of Mojácar)'.

'You forget that we must limit the association to those of us who are forming it, who are neighbours of La Rumina and El Palmeral', said Pedro. 'I propose we go with ASEMHOYBARRUMPALMOJ (Association of Hotel and Bar Entrepreneurs of La Rumina and El Palmeral de Mojácar)'.

Then said another: 'And you haven't counted on the merchants who are here? Let's call our association ASEMHOYBARYCOMRUMPALMOJ'.

And so the initials were added until the session became a brawl and those present, shouting, did not stop arguing and demanding more and more absurd and complicated names until one of them, the since deceased Manolo Picardo, manager and owner of the Hotel Río Abajo, gave his verdict.

'That's enough! Silence!' And he continued with the greatest expectation: 'the Association will be called ATEM, which is META ('ambition') backwards and means that we will never get anywhere.

Which, give it its due, it didn't. 

2025, To Start As We Mean To Continue

No doubt like they do everywhere else, Spain hauls out its special gala TV shows on New Year’s Eve to help bring in the celebration. We must eat our twelve grapes and let off a firework.

This time around, the fierce competition between the national television and the commercial Antena3 channel (no one watched any of the others) came to a head.

La Una had David Broncano (host of the leading comedy chat show La Revuelta) and Lalachus (a jolly and overweight comedienne) to host the countdown from the roof of a building in Madrid overlooking La Puerta del Sol, while across the way, on another rooftop with another premium view of the square and its clock, were the Antena3 stalwarts Cristina Pedroche and Alberto Chicote. Cristina, for some reason, wearing a skimpy dress made from synthetic crystals containing real mother’s milk (no kidding).

And, it’s cold out there, on a Madrid rooftop, half naked, at half-past eleven at night.

At one point, as sensible folk stay home with the heater on high to watch the telly, Broncano is seen to break the unwritten rule as he shouts though a megaphone over to the rival team to ask ‘Say fellas, when do we get to eat the grapes?’ (Spaniards eat twelve grapes during the New Year chimes).

Well, I don’t know, but Antena3 promptly put up a screen so that their presenters could no longer be seen from the roof of their cheeky TVE rivals. Heh!

All good fun. Then Lalachus pulls out una estampita (a small card) from her copious bosom and waves it at the camera. It’s a representation of a popular TV show called Grand Prix – a version of It’s a Knockout: an affable looking cartoon-bull logo wearing a gold medal, only instead, this card has a bleeding heart around the bull’s neck – a joke that’s sure to offend the easily offendable: that’s to say, a small and extreme section of the Catholics.

Not that New Year’s Eve has anything to do with Christian tradition.

Duly offended, Hazte Oir and the Abogados Cristianos people were at the door of the juzgados bright and early the next morning to denounce the fat lady and her smarmy companion, along with the head of the Spanish television, and anyone else who may have laughed or sniggered. Blasphemy!

Cue the Monty Python joke (reworked): ‘Nobody laughs at the Spanish Inquisition!’

The Archbishop of Seville asks ‘How long will they take advantage of our patience?’ The senior Spanish prelate Monseñor Luis Argüello calls the joke ‘an intolerable offence’.

The opportunist Vox party calls for the presence of the president of the RTVE José Pablo López (a socialist appointee) to give an explanation of the affront in Congress.

Turn the other cheek, girls.

La blasfemia (or rather, its modern version known as el escarnio) is an offense that’s still on the books, although it will likely be removed this year says Félix Bolaños the justice minister. But first, presumably, we will have to suffer some lawfare from m’learned friends.

Some of those offended, says one editorial following the hateful affront to Catholics worldwide, are the very same people who regularly criticise Lalachus for being a fatty and complained about her appearing on the New Year’s Eve show (where the national TV beat out Antena3 in viewer numbers for the first time in fifteen years).

In the end, it’s not about religion, it’s about politics: where, of course, anything goes.