Something about Birds

Breakfast is, as often as not, a meal shared with lots of friends. Small, feathery ones called ‘sparrows’. Now, British readers may not be familiar with these creatures as apparently there aren’t any left in that great country as they have all succumbed to the fumes from lead-free petrol, rather like the dodo succumbing in its day to – apparently - lead. Poor British sparrows, what will the cats do?
Here in Spain, we have either been blessed by an entirely stronger version of this ubiquitous birdie or, more likely, the unleaded gas has as much lead in it as ever.
Proof of this apparently improbable claim came from my old luxury Mercedes 500 – which ran enthusiastically on leaded petrol and single-handedly kept the Arab States in Wellington boots and caviar. In the days of the ‘turn-over’ to unleaded from leaded – this latter having an extra extra tax on it to encourage us to switch – I was concerned because my car wouldn’t be able to run on the unleaded stuff and that I would eventually end up leaving it on the side of the road with the keys in the ignition and a sign in the window saying ‘do not under any circumstances steal this car’.
It turned out, on enquiry at the local petrol station, that it ran just fine on the green stuff, so that was alright, except, they could have told me before and saved me some lolly. Perhaps they were fooled by my apparent wealth, although the Old Girl actually cost relatively little and the 500 badge on the boot didn’t really have much to do with the 200 badge on the engine.
I’m down at the beach today, as always, sharing my little buns – two doughy things – sugared bread-balls for goodness sake, with a hoard of sparrows who don’t mind a little sugar in their lives. I have been told that the owner of the cafeteria in question, clearly a keen bird-lover, puts some insulin in his cakes, or at least he should. Otherwise the Spanish sparrow might follow the fate of its British cousin, killed by something we sometimes mix – for odd reasons – into our petrol.
As I watch the diabetic sparrows hopping erratically over to our table, my wife is telling me that you can’t throw rice at weddings any longer, as the pigeons eat it and it swells up in their stomachs giving them indigestion. It is indeed wonderful what concerns we humans have for our fellow beings, as long as they have either four legs or lots of feathers. Personally, I never feed pigeons anything, as they are little more than airborne rats in my opinion. I do however remember throwing bits of bread soaked in ouzo at the seagulls following the ferry around the Greek islands, and other bits of bread soaked in brandy crossing over to Tangiers. Seagulls enjoy the game and will, after a couple of mid-air catches, fly upside-down for you for a while. Until they crash into the side of the ship of course, or drown.
You had to have been there.
So, I was feeding some snowbirds a few days ago tapas and beer over at the campsite. I know them from other years and we were having a chat about this and that. They want to buy a winter-house here, they say, and then fly here instead. They have been driving down to the south in an enormous camper every winter and then they move north again in the summer, a bit like the swallows which should be arriving any day now. Our swallows – actually, I think they are really martins, but I’ll call them ours – spend the winters in Africa and migrate north to Spain in the springtime, returning to the area and even the nests they vacated the summer before. It will be interesting to see how many return to perch on the telephone line outside, as their departure last July coincided with the famous and horrible Mojácar/Turre brush-fire which killed so much of our local bird and animal-life, including all the tortoises. We let our visitors from Africa build their mud nests under our eaves.
We don’t get many birds that wander about on the ground near our porch, thanks to our bloodthirsty cat. The sparrows on our estate aren’t tame, like the ones outside my breakfast café, and other birds are careful not to land in our garden. Apart from Bertha our pet chicken, of course, who is built like a brick out-house. The cat keeps out of her way. Things are better at one of our neighbours whose garden is feline-free and often visited by doves. I was over there the other day and those pretty grey turtle-necked doves were wandering around pecking at this and that, even at our shoes. Who needs a cat, hey?
I saw a hoopoe today while sawing up some charred branches (from last summer’s fire). This is a kind of jay, I think, with a crest on its head that rises and falls at its owner’s whim. They are a pretty bird with a remarkable call, from which they get their name. No sugar buns for them – they like insects. This one had soot on his feet, from perching on one of our trees, I expect.
We have an aviary with a number of teetotal ‘love birds’ living there, little brightly coloured parrots. It gets so you don’t notice their singing after a while, despite the aviary being just outside the bedroom. I feed them a mixture of seed I get from the molino in Turre and they reward me by making me smile. It is strange to think that only a few dozens of millions of years ago they used to stomp about the land, tearing each other to shreds and considerately leaving their bones, as dinosaur fossils, for us to wonder about.
I wonder if these distant creatures would have liked those little buns, with sugar on them, which I have for breakfast with my coffee.
Or perhaps they would have preferred something a little stronger.

Taking a Leak

I had just discovered that the editor had pushed his fine paper up from biweekly to weekly and this meant that I would need to write something quickly. But what could I write about? There’s only one place where a man can think about these things, look for inspiration and admire at the same time Mother Nature’s wonderful design and symmetry, and that is while having a refreshing pee off the side of the terrace.
We have the good fortune to live in a country house, surrounded by either lush vegetation or a scorched and arid landscape – depending of course on the time of the year and whether we have had any really good brush fires in the recent past. My dad bought the house years ago, attracted I think, as much by the terrace and its pissing opportunities as by the house itself and its austere marble bathroom.
I learnt from an early age about the advantages of emptying one’s bladder while contemplating the sunset and considering a knotty scientific problem or remembering a bit of poetry from school. It certainly beats staring towards a white tile finish or a vandalised french letter machine where speed seems to be the only concern, while the mind is disengaged and quiet. I know that this is a man’s thing – which explains why we are so good at building cathedrals – but there is always room for company I suppose. At least, behind that bush over there.
I don’t think there was any formality to this habit of emptying one’s bladder outside until my dad’s second wife took to planting mint in a garden just below the kitchen window. Until then, any part of the terrace, or even the big eucalyptus would do for a whiz. But from that time until now, the spot outside the kitchen window has always been my favourite.
As for my step-mother, she wasn’t as sharp as my mum and it took her a year or two before she discovered why the mint never did very well and why the rest of the family never wanted any in our gin.
We are, as I have said, far away in the deepest country and it is rare to see anyone while going about my morning’s ablution. The first of the day. Today I was lucky to spot our snooty neighbour go past (looking firmly the other way) riding on his roan stallion and trailed by his greyhounds three. I waved cheerily at him, without letting go, but it was probably a wasted gesture. What on earth can I write about for The Reader, I asked myself, idly spelling my name in the dirt below.
My dad would tell a story of drinking in some French bar, now long disappeared, on the playa. It, too, had a terrace. At some point, round about the fifth brandy, my dad zoomed in on this feature of the building and decided to take a leak as the barman was otherwise engaged, adding up his bill. It was night time and the terrace looked awfully inviting and anyway, my dad thought, it might help remind him where he’d left the car and also, come to think of it, what sort of car it was. He stepped over to the terrace and, to his momentary surprise, lurched off the edge towards the garden, some five metres below. He landed, as he recalled later, in a cactus. Convinced that he’d been pushed by the barman (a story denied later by a very amused Frenchman who presented himself at our house the next morning in search of his twenty five pesetas) and picking spines from his chest, my dad decided to walk home, straight over the hills and navigating by the stars.
The oddest part of this tale, told sometimes late at night around the fire, was when my dad got part way home, fairly lost but with the scent of ruined mint faintly playing in his nostril, he found that he had to give that same organ a good blowing. Normally he would carry a handkerchief (and a very bloodstained one was indeed offered by the Frenchman in evidence) but – since no one was present – my dad sat down, took off his trousers and then his underwear, and luxuriantly blew his nose on this patient and forbearing undergarment.
Much, apparently, to the surprise of an old peasant pissing against a nearby algarrobo tree.
So many silly stories from the good old days, before we were obliged to behave ourselves.
Ahhh: a beer from my wife to bring inspiration. Little does she know where I’ll get it. So the other day, a school friend and sometimes writer came over to stay from London. Over his duty-free scotch, we remembered the names of the masters and imitated their accents, we recalled the nicknames of the other boys (I kindly refrained from reminding my old friend of his) and we talked of our lives since.
I eventually went outside for a pee and my friend joined me as a shooting star fizzed its way across the heavens. ‘Gor’, he said, ‘It’s marvellous here. I haven’t done this since I was a kid’.
‘You’ll remember the words to the school song now’, I told him. They were in Latin, a bloody useless language they taught us there. He did, too, and soon we were both bellowing out the old song ‘Floreat, floreat, floreat Rugbeia’!
So there we are; a deadline to beat and nothing to write about. I think I’ll go and have a pee on the terrace and see if inspiration strikes.

The Message on the Wall

They’ve not done much in the past thirty years as regards the building of social or cultural projects in our town. There is an ‘artisan centre’, which was built with finance from the Regional Government, in a town which has never produced much in the way of ‘artisans’. No mad desire on the part of our local politicians to help those mysterious basket-weavers and toy-soldier makers perhaps, but there was a handy piece of land there that, let us say, increased its value overnight. The whole point of the building was finished before it was started, if you know what I mean. We eventually managed to fill it up, more of less, and convert it into something ill-planned but vaguely useful. Many years on, the building has been repainted and had the locks changed - and has been reborn as the ‘Centro de Usos Multiples’, the multiple-use building. Very clever, that, although now no one can quite agree on what this seamlessly integrated building is now called. Streets, buildings and so on are always having their names changed in Spain. We give them nicknames and say to the taxi driver, ‘the street after the pink church’ or ‘just past the Mayor’s folly’.
Besides our Artisan Centre, which has a mixture of free and, inexplicably, paying-for social attractions inside, plus a converted ‘sort-of’ concert hall, a theatre, a conference room, a bar, a library and some offices, the town now boasts a new (if unusable) swimming-pool and sports centre, along with a two storey car park all built on what used to be the Campo de Fútbol, which means in English ‘the Football Field’, although it no longer fulfills that function at all. Oddly, there’s no political will to change the name. Perhaps the taxi drivers put their feet down for once.
We also have a new – unopened – art museum, several marble statues of local girls in traditional dress scattered about and the fairly new remodelled area around our castle. The castle, described in the 1910 edition of the Encyclopaedia Española as ‘inmutable’, or ‘unknockdownable’, was knocked down the day after the ‘M – P’ volume of that worthy reference book came out and long before the tourist boom and the idea (around here) that castles might be of interest. There’s a pretty nice house there instead. We call it ‘El Castillo’. Such irony. Surrounding this is the remodelled area known either as the ‘lookout’ or the ‘bunker’, depending, perhaps, on your politics. The Junta de Andalucía dug deep for this construction in the early nineties, hurriedly removed the archeological traces they found, plus a ‘number of bones’, and ‘castellated’ with heavy stone the approaches and surroundings. They put up some spiffing lights as well.
Unfortunately, the area has been adopted by the world’s foremost graffiti artists as their unofficial headquarters. The tone of the decorations here is, essentially, juvenile politics with just a touch of personal epigrams. We are entertained principally by messages - in Spanish - such as ‘¡Viva las FE de los Jons’, or ‘Yay for the Junior Fascists’, which may have been crossed out by the next yoof in favour of ‘Nacional Sindicalísmo’ or ‘¡Viva Lenin!’ Which, essentially, all means the same thing.
It’s a curious fact that you never find a graffito, which says ‘Hooray for the Agreeable Centrist Party!’
The area surrounding the top of our town is built with porous stone blocks covered by the aforementioned graffiti. In August, it’s covered by panting tourists as well, all taking videos of the view (which removes the necessity of contemplating it ‘en vivo’ as it were). But they are, al least, easy to remove.
On the approach, next to the tattoo parlours, there are some handy spray-paint outlets for the artist who came: inspired yet unprepared.
Which leads me to ask, if the Government is prepared to add a ‘special tax’ to the price of a CD or a DVD to pay the impoverished pop singer or film director whose work it is assumed that you are stealing (!!), an extra euro on every purchase, then why not add a few bob to the price of spray cans and give the money to the unfortunate department that has to clean all this crap off the walls every day?
Moving to the cities, these painted messages change. Granada is now totally ruined by the grafiteros or ‘street artists’ as they are quite revoltingly called. A brave judge has just fined one of these cretins 1,000 euros, but a practical magistrate like this is rarer here than a clean city wall. In Murcia, the tone is beastly paintings of people’s initials in various colours, plus some sexual innuenda. However, I should pause here and acknowledge one superb graffito in that city which has been painted on the wall of the Foreigners’ Centre, the ‘Centro de Extranjería’, and has remained there for years. It looks down at the long queue of hungry and sad looking foreigners and asks in violent black paint: ‘¿Burocrácia o apartheid?’
Bloody good question that.
In the Valencian community, the main thrust of the graffiti artists is to paint-out place names which smack of sounding Spanish, and replacing them with their Valenciano versions. Thus Jávea will be blacked out on all of its approaches, and Xàbia put in its place. Elche becomes Elx. Since road signs are useful only to those who are not familiar with the way, and since these (wealthy tourists...) will almost certainly be unfamiliar with the Xàbia place name, one might expect some attrition or spoilage among the visitors. Nationalists are such shallow and inconsiderate people.
In Almería, we are concerned with just the two languages: Spanish and, in all its many flavours, English. We live, as the Cajamar savings bank would have it, ‘in a sea of profitability and tranquillity’.
As the rusted orange paint gently falls from our inert cranes, and discoloured posters advertise half-built urbanizations in Águilas, our town has concerned itself for once with the padrón, the population registry. As we all know, this register helps get extra funds for the municipality (so artlessly spent) and also allows for extra licences, schoolteachers, police and medics. However, the government of Zapatero, keen to stave off a popular insurrection at its complete ineptitude, has taken to sending out lolly to the town halls in what is known as the PlanE which is meant to create short-term (at least until the next elections) jobs.
Jobs for the boys, judging from what I’ve seen.
So, more souls on the padrón equals more cash for the project, which explains the rather pointless parking lot and, now, two padel courts for our citizens (it’s a form of Mexican tennis apparently).
Plus a 1.7 million euro football field (Boy – that’s really going to confuse the taxi drivers) somewhere on the beach and carpeted, unusually, with Astroturf.
No. Hold on, we have to pay for that.
One day, the local wannabe politicians who talk of fixing our community will do so from the viewpoint of experience and solidarity rather than the tired old mixture of ignorance and greed which has so blighted our communities. We half-heartedly listen to the ‘experts’ as they flap on about tourism or ‘rural tourism’ or ‘golf tourism’ or, God forgive us, ‘gastronomic tourism’ as if these are the simple answers which will fix our municipalities and bring work, even to those poor coloured people queuing forlornly in Murcia. Sometimes, the braver politicians even talk of ‘residential tourism’. Do you know, I think they mean us.
However, whether we can see it, read it or not, there is little doubt that as things stand for our small mistreated community, short of a big change in our thinking, we won’t need a spray can to know that the writing is on the wall.

Found This (heh heh)

The Calamar Song
(Apologies to Lonnie Donnegan)

Does your calamar lose its flavour on your denture overnight?
Does your partner say don’t chew it do you whimper back ‘I might,
If the ruddy thing weren’t frozen I would cough it out in spite’.
Does your calamar lose its flavour on your denture overnight?

Does your migas taste like porridge when it’s sticking to your gums?
Do you try to use a finger - but find that you’re all thumbs?
This Spanish plat de jour tastes a lot like baker’s crumbs!
Does your migas taste like porridge when it’s sticking to your gums?

Go on then, one more!

Do your molars go all lumpy when the tapas plates are laid?
Snails and squid and tuna bits, d’they make you feel afraid?
Get a round of drinks aboard and hope that someone paid –
Do your molars go all lumpy when the tapas plates are laid?

Free Willy (and Edna)

It rained the other day. You may have noticed it if you live anywhere near me, because it bucketed down with the enthusiasm of an explosion at sea. It poured. Those of us lucky enough to live on a flat bit of land were merely worried about the water coming sideways through the windows, but for those whose homes are built on the side of a cliff, the view from those same windows must have changed from one minute to the next, as their homes spun round and slid inexorably towards the soft warm Mediterranean down below, just past the recently-barbecued beach bar.
It was a ‘perfect storm’, as the book of that title would have it. It filled the rambla, the dry-river bed which, for a short while, revealed its true function of being one of the province’s major drains. The appropriately named ‘Rio de Aguas’ showed its teeth as it does once every seventeen years.
Our two goldfish must have sensed the rain sluicing under the door. They appeared agitated each time that they circled their comfortably equipped quarters towards the front, where the view of a few books floating across the carpet must have caught their eyes. As they arrived again in front of their tank, gobbing gently in horror at the scene, their piscine brains may have briefly awoken once again to the prospect of a larger world without. Not even a soggy meal of fish-kibble floating slowly past them towards the bottom of the aquarium where the dishabille little glass mermaid lies on a bed of sponge would put them off this unexpected contemplation of a world beyond their ken.
The number of animals under our care has risen again recently with the arrival of a small dog which I suspect was once billeted at a PAWS compound and has now, by a roundabout route involving some friend of my son’s, made its home with us. The flood didn’t seem to bother it, nor yet the bad-tempered cat with the long claws and the remarkable aim together with a well-known antipathy towards all things canine, nor indeed the chicken, whose egg-laying capabilities, coupled to a number of outraged squawks delivered outside our bedroom window every morning, have made it a favoured member of the family for providing us with a regular breakfast, an early-morning wake-up call and the prospect of an agreeable Sunday lunch if her other duties fail her. The philosophy of our pets, well-cared for as they might be, is simple. In every life a little rain is going to fall.
I was gently releasing a large and outraged country rat that my wife had found hiding under the sink, now dried and fluffed, back into the garden when a thought suddenly hit me. Why not allow the goldfish their freedom? They could be released into that giant muddy lagoon which the river had by then become, and maybe, if rumours about Edna’s sexuality were true, start a whole empire of goldfish down in the lake.
Well, a short-lived empire. The sun would dry out our rambla by Easter. Then again, when your attention span is reduced to just a few seconds, three months is a hell of a long time.
We could even sell the untenanted aquarium in the classified section of The Reader, now universally confirmed as Almería’s leading Eng-lang weekly.
So, I squelched my way across the garden and back inside, trailing mud across the carpet on my way to the kitchen to find an empty jam-jar.
My son wandered in at that moment. ‘Would you like to release Willy and Edna into the wild, to allow them to swim free, to let them go where no fish has gone before? And anyway, we could sell the aquarium at the market’, I asked breathlessly.
Visions of covering himself in mud must have dazzled him. ‘Yep’, he agreed. ‘I’ll do it’.
Willy wasn’t entirely convinced about his departure to another home. There might be sharks there, he may have reasoned, or cat-fish. But, as Edna had already packed her things and leapt into the jam-jar, Willy had soon forgotten his concerns and was quickly wedged in beside her.
My boy climbed onto his motorcycle and was soon skidding his way enthusiastically down the lane towards the rambla, a jar of slightly reluctant fish in one pocket and the bottle of fish-eats in the other. Just in case they didn’t like the local grub.
I was emptying the fish-tank and explaining events to the glass mermaid when he returned, covered as expected from head to toe in mud.
‘Wait’, he said, ‘I found a terrapin’.
So, now the aquarium and the mermaid have a new guest. For some reason, we call him Noah.

The Snails of Palomares (reworked)

Back in the sixties, the allies had this idea that it would be a good thing to have a few bombers aloft in the skies, loaded for bear (Russian Bear, that is), in case Breshnev or Kennedy’s finger slipped on the fateful red button while playing with their respective girlfriends. I write this, but I’m not entirely sure about Leonid. I think he preferred drinking. Anyhow, a USAF B52 bomber was peacefully taking on fuel from a KC 135 flying tanker carrying 110,000 litres of the right stuff high in the skies over Vera on January 17th 1966 when something went terribly wrong – the two aircraft touched… and exploded. Debris rained down on the fields and coastline below, including four vacuum-packed and unarmed nuclear bombs.
The non-nuclear explosives in two of the weapons detonated upon hitting the ground, resulting (I discover from Wikipedia) in the contamination of a 2-square-kilometer area by radioactive plutonium.
The kafuffle as the remains of the aircraft, blobs of raw plutonium and the four bombs were quickly re-secured by the Americans is well known. Two of the bombs landed on the ground in Palomares (‘falling open and melting everything in their path’ according to unverifiable and probably rather unreliable reports) and the other two fell in the sea, where one was soon found rolling gently in the breakers while the forth was located in a deep trench off the coast several months later by Alvin, that cute little mini-sub that starred in the National Geographic magazines of the period. I remember reading about it at school and thinking that I wanted one. Another suggestion is that a wise old fisherman, who reputedly enjoyed a shot or two of Magno with his breakfast, may have helped in the search by circling the area in his row-boat with his head in a glass bottomed bucket scanning the sea-floor for large metal sausages (as the scientists kindly put it to him). He’s been known ever since as Antonio the Glow.
As far as the American Navy was concerned, he was certainly cheaper to fuel.
Franco was on board the Fifth Fleet destroyer for a brief visit to see how things were getting along while toying with a complimentary chocolate Easter bunny and complaining about the length of time needed to find a ruddy great steel bomb when, just at that very moment, a large and sinister looking object, rusted and covered in whelks, was fortuitously hauled aboard right in front of him.
A suggestion from the time was that the last bomb was in a very deep hole in the sea and was impossible to extract, so a cunningly designed plastic reproduction had been lowered off the other side of the ship to be triumphantly raised in the presence of the mad Caudillo to cheer him up.
This of course leads one to surmise that the fourth bomb is still out there somewhere, rolling slowly about as the current plays with it in its dark and forgotten trench: which in turn accounts for the fish with two heads I had for lunch yesterday.
Fraga Irribarne the Minister of Tourism, perhaps unaware of this sleight of hand, famously took a dip in the sea with the American ambassador at the time to show there was no radiation. Come to think of it, perhaps they did smell a small rat, as, in point of fact, they carefully enjoyed their frolic in front of the Mojácar Parador, some ten kilometres down the coast.
The Marines, for want of anything better to do, removed 20,000 tons of topsoil, fertile and safe, and took it to South Carolina where they spread it on the fields, because, you see, there was no radiation.
It's now used to grow terbacca.
A small desalination plant was built in Palomares by the Americans for thirty million dollars as a kind gesture (it was quickly closed down after the resident engineer moved to Mojácar to open the El Patio beach bar and, seeing that he wasn't coming back, the Catalan caretaker sold the guts of the building for scrap). A few rusting Geiger counters were left to record the ambient radiation level – if only there only would have been any, which of course there isn’t – and new construction extending from Vera Playa into Palomares was given the go-ahead by forward thinking (and impartial) town-planners.
Now, after forty some years, along comes ‘the bombshell’. A recent test on Palomares snails (please pay attention here if you count pond-life in your carefully balanced diet) has shown a higher than normal level of radiation. That luminous slime they leave as they melt their way over the rocks is, apparently, smokin’.
The American Department of Energy, together with the CIEMAT Spanish atomic agency, has now bought ten hectares of the land which had been previously cleared by speculators ready for some building, although one can only wonder quietly about the dust already raised and blown to the heavens by the tractors and diggers.
The site is now being examined by a team of experts armed with exotic scientific instruments together with a bucket and a kitchen sieve which they bought from Lopez. Rumours are that they have failed so far to find the presence of any dangerous radiation particles, but they have confirmed the discovery of the marble floors from two Roman villas, the still-faintly luminescent remains of Antonio’s row-boat and part of the foundations of what appears to have been a small Phoenician shoe-shop which the Junta de Andalucía has since described disparagingly as ‘probably illegal’.
Local ecologists have reacted to the news by saying that a much larger area needs to be sanitized.
The half-life of plutonium is a lot longer than ours.
For the meantime, don’t eat the snails.

It was Paul Beckett the artist who once said 'Mojácar is a beautiful village - despite the best efforts of the mojaqueros to ruin it'. Well, that was a long time ago and they have continue to have full rein to trash the pueblo, which was - and probably still is - the imán - the main draw or the magnet that brought all of us here in the first place.

You have seen some amazing pictures of the pueblo of Mojácar which rises in a tumble of white blocks on the final mountain of the Filabres chain as it swoops towards the sea.

Quite magic.

The narrow streets - just a donkey's width - and the flat roofs. The whitewash and the old girls dressed in black. Well, some of that has gone now, especially the old girls who are now decked out in more modern outfits. Those narrow streets are quiet squares are now full of tourist tat, junk-filled shops and late-night bars. The town hall is currently knocking down a swathe of cheap Franco housing by the church to build more car spaces (in a town that should be pedestrian only) and re-inventing its history. At the medieval fuente, the new roundabout (traffic is heavy in the summer season) will have a giant stainless steel Indalo to decorate it. The mayoress' idea, apparently.

Approaching Mojácar, the first detail you see is an enormous orange crane that has reared over the village now for around three years. No one wants to offend the builder by suggesting he might want to take it down. Maybe nobody cares.

Here's a billboard that decorates the side of the road as you approach the main square, the Plaza Nueva.

Ugly, isn't it?

The Rainstorm

This was the view yesterday from my terrace during the freak rainstorm that washed Mojácar clean. In fact: not so clean, as mudslides and falling boulders blocked some of our roads for a while. Our 'dry riverbed', the optimistically called 'Rio de Aguas', lived up to its name for once and turned into a proper river as water flowed down from the interior. I shall have to dust off the old kayak. There are rumours of several house-floods, as water either came through the door or via some crack in the flat roof that all the homes in our town are obliged to feature, but we survived more or less unscathed.

How to be Taken for a Spaniard

Forget learning a few words of Spanish and introducing a morning brandy into your café-life, there’s more to becoming a Spaniard than not turning green each time they put a bull-fight on the telly.
First of all, you have to look Spanish. Many people from foreign parts manage this easily enough, and the whole thing is, I agree, down to fate, but, if you look like a Swede, it doesn’t matter how fluent you might be in the language and culture, you will still be on the outside, looking in. In short, Mother Nature is cruel about our looks: take the case of two Nordic looking Spanish friends of mine. I once went out to some local dives in Marbella with these two work-colleagues, Alfonso and Juan. Alfonso is blond and has a beard. He comes from Motril. Juan is a redhead and is from Estepona. Me, I look like a Swede. After Alfonso was complimented on his Spanish for the third time (‘not bad – how long have you been in Spain…?'), and Juan was advised to try a glass of ‘we call this vee-no’, we decided to either split up – or to stick to the English bars.
My dad was once drinking in a bar in Murcia with some fellow who, as my father recalled later, ‘looked like a syphilitic Turkish tax-inspector’. ‘Where do you suppose I am from?’ asked the swarthy gentleman as he bought another round of drinks. ‘Denmark?’ suggested my father to his delighted companion, who triumphantly admitted that he was, in fact, a tax-inspector from Istanbul.
‘Spanish’ is not a language (it’s called ‘Castilian’ anyway), but a cultural identity. There is no point speaking it if you have nothing of value to say. You need context. Please don’t go on about Gordon Brown because no one in Spain has heard of him. Just say the same stuff but switch to Zapatero. In fact, try watching Spanish TV which not only helps you with the language, it also helps you with the culture, informs you about what’s going on around the corner and increases your enjoyment and understanding of this country. You can’t carry on living like an exile like a child pressing his nose to the glass of an English toyshop, missing 95% of what’s happening here (and who’s doing it), just for the sunburn.
To assimilate here – and I don’t mean just being able to buy a drink for the old shepherd who lives in the frightful dive across the hill and whose vocabulary is probably around a hundred words (say two weeks of study with a Donald Duck comic in Spanish) – you need to adopt a few new mannerisms. Three things spring to mind. The proper use of swear-words, never using a winker and the correct disposal of rubbish.

‘Tacos’

These are the Spanish equivalents of those naughty words that Spellcheck doesn’t like. All those three, four and six letter words that we learnt at a tender and impressionable age. Here, they don’t use asterisks. In Spanish – a wonderful language for swearing in – what might be considered as the harsher words to our way of thinking are here used to great and often gentle effect. You will find the most remarkable terms used towards friends and family, and I will, since the subject is considered disturbing in English, limit myself to just one example.
Lorenzo (a vile old boozer who lives across the way) was telling me about his lunatic and alarmingly cross-eyed son, who had, just that very morning, enjoyed a short conversation with his father about the colours of the sunrise as they briefly melted and blurred into the sides of the hill. ‘Si, hijo mio. Tienes razón coño’, his dad assured him. ‘Bloody right yes, you silly bastard’ would be an understatement as a direct translation, but, in effect, the old boy was really being quite understanding.

Traffic Matters

Never use your winker while driving. No one ever does. On roundabouts a winking car usually means a foreigner is driving, or else the winker has been on for months. Don’t trust it and expect anything. The only time it’s used is probably when the motorist says to himself ‘bugger me, I wonder what this knob does..?’ Actually, in the old days, when driving was a more neighbourly and enjoyable activity than it is today, when we had roads instead of sterile motorways with speed cameras hidden in bushes, when driving half-crocked was considered socially acceptable and people asked for a ride by standing in the middle of the highway, the winker was used by truck-drivers to allow you to overtake. The left-winker meant: ‘the road is empty ahead, please feel free to pass at your convenience’ – or perhaps it meant ‘I’m turning left and there’s a huge pantechnicon bearing down on you’ – or, as I’ve said, ‘help, my winker is stuck’. But that was then. Now, no one uses them. The horn, now there’s a useful button. Very handy for zebra crossings.

A Spreading Waste

The third vital thing to know, if you want to pass yourself off as a Spaniard, particularly one from the south, is the proper disposal of rubbish.
What you do is you throw it out of the nearest window.
This is the hardest of all to get right. Really. And you thought windows were for the view!
Bung it out the window or chuck it on the floor or dump it in the corner-
It’s starting to sound like a song, like the recipe for sangria (‘one of white and one of red…'). Everything must go.
The ditches are full of rubbish, with plastic bags gamboling playfully in the wind and empty beer cans rolling noisily across the highways of the province. Dead cats stare reproachfully at the traffic as empty disposable lighters bounce off their crushed skulls. Of course, it’s not just the Great Outside that’s brimming with junk that, all too rarely, receives a cursory scrape by order of the local government.
Although, we are beginning to see some small political will towards cleaning up, putting things in containers and bottle banks and generally looking like ‘somebody is doing something’.
I remember being given a gamba when I first came to Mojácar. I stripped it down, ate it and chooped the brains (as instructed), but then, feeling uncertain, I put the shattered remains, sticky legs and surviving goo discretely back onto the tapa-dish. No, no! On the floor! I learnt. With the rest of the junk. I had noticed that I was standing up to my ankles in paper, tooth-picks, stoppers, used lottery tickets, fines and pictures of Franco. But, soon enough, a drudge scuttled under me with her broom and plastic scoopy-thing leaving the scene fresh for further onslaught. Nowadays, they either don’t give you a tapa, or else there’s some little baskets invitingly scattered around below the bar, which appears to be a sensible arrangement.
At least, to a fellow who looks like a Swede.

Someone Sensible in Marbella

Some towns want foreigners – more than others. While places like the Catalonian town of Vic or the Madrid town of Torrejon de Ardoz are in the news at the moment for not allowing ‘illegal’ foreigners to register on the padrón – the town hall register of inhabitants – and what the hell is an illegal human being anyway? – others, like Marbella, are keen to match, as closely as possible, the legal number of inhabitants with the actual number.

The Marbella ‘councilor for tourism and extranjeros’ (sigh!), one José Luis Hernandez, says that ‘The fact that the residents, whether Spanish or foreign, don’t get on the padrón contributes towards a collapse in public services. For this reason, we have only half of the number of police that we need, or hospital beds, or courthouses, schools, taxis, buses and so on for a city of this size’.

Marbella has 140,000 inhabitants (from 130 nationalities) officially, but the service industries, such as the local garbage collection company, estimate a year-round population of some 235,000 souls.

Mojácar and many other towns where foreigners live, whether the ‘illegal’ ones who have come here to work without papers, or the comparatively rich ones who have transferred themselves from one European country to another, are failing to get everybody onto the padrón, and the whole community suffers as a direct result.

Curiously, Marbella excepting, no other ‘tourist’ or ‘foreigner’ town has made efforts to address this problem – perhaps concerned by the threat of the ‘uncontrolled vote’ of the foreigners.

Don’t worry Mr Mayor – we’d all vote for YOU.

A Picture and a Thousand Words

Well yes, you can always find just the right photograph. This rather pugnacious one features in today's El Mundo (Andalucía) and heads a story about the demonstration yesterday in Almería City of a group of (generally speaking) Northern European property owners, whose properties have arbitrarily been classed by the regional government as 'ilegal', which means in English 'lacking in the correct paperwork'.
The properties, generally in out-of-the-way interior villages, were legal enough when they were being built, in fact, the town halls were overjoyed to see the stimulation of their shrinking and moribund pueblos as fresh money poured in creating a plethora of jobs and, indeed, taxes. Yes, here's the paperwork. They were legal enough as well when the promotors flew to strange towns in England and elsewhere to show their videos. They were legal when the local lawyers and notaries and town councillors checked the paperwork and they were legal when the homes were sold (those ones which were completed, but that's a different story).
But, it's the autonomous government which needs to be attended to. Yes, things were fine then, but, they're not fine now. Without the permits from Seville, you can't get electricity. Without the right paperwork, you can't get water. So, many retired people, safely installed in their new homes in Eastern Almería (or elsewhere) are on a generator. Or a hose-pipe. Or maybe, they've just been served demolition papers.
Others we know of (a story I heard again yesterday) buy their home and as the papers are processed, the agent or builder took out a fresh mortgage against the property which, it's so clear, the new and unconscious owner will have to deal with. Still other owners find part of their land taken in legal and town hall supported expropriation for commercial ends (known as 'Land Grab') where the dispossessed owner has to pay for the privilege.
So, while the newspaper may have chosen this picture to make some patriotic or jingoist point, the fact is, despite yesterday's march being entirely peaceful (how could it ever be otherwise?), it is also true that our demonstrator that models this picture has every right to be indignant.

The World is my Oyster

‘Yes, good afternoon’, says the phone in Spanish, ‘my name is Josefina. I would like to talk with the subscriber of this number, Don…’
‘Whaa?’
‘Good afternoon…’
It was awhile after lunch and I’d just got into bed for an enjoyable siesta. After all, there’s one thing about Spain, people leave you alone after your midday meal so you can have a rewarding kip. I’m wrapped in a sheet, four blankets and a wooly hat. It’s cold this afternoon. And now the phone is ringing.
‘Lissen here, Alberta, or whuddever your name is, I don’t want anything. I’ve already got one. We are delighted with the service. Please go away’.
‘…with the subscriber of this number’.
‘Jiminy Cricket, Penélope, he’s away on his hols’.
‘When can I talk with…?’
‘Between us, Genoveva, he’s in the Tower of London having his toenails removed. Why don’t you call back when they’ve let him go, say in about ten year’s time?’
Don’t you just hate it? You’ve got all snuggly under the covers, the TV has been switched off, the dogs have had the scraps from a very satisfying lunch the remains of which is gently bubbling and writhing its affable way through your upper intestine. Even the last remaining fly of the season is comatose, wandering slowly around on the ceiling out of harm's way. Why would any person call at this time? Especially some girlie from the phone company. Don’t they sleep, these people?
I unplug the phone from the wall before Josefina can find any reinforcements and get back into bed. ‘It was a wrong number’ I tell my wife, who has managed to doze through the whole thing.
God I hate telemarketing. That fellow who rings once a month rain or shine and wants to help me invest my fortune on the Stock Market. The joker who tried to sell me a course in English (‘but I am English’, ‘Yes, but you could improve your language skills with our system’), the stupid people from the phone company who want only to be told how deliriously happy I am with their service. And they do not take ‘no’ for an answer. They will ring at the most inappropriate moments - rather like my bank manager come to think of it - and they will expect courtesy from your part.
Yesterday, somebody rang me with some sales gimmick… and suddenly put me on ‘hold’! It’s a wonder I didn’t ring him back.
The whole thing is worse than the spam you get on your emails, which is, at any rate, now pretty much under control these days. Nigerians, Russian girls and improbable prizes. In America you can now register your phone with the government with a program called ‘Do Not Call’, and sales-people will apparently voluntarily agree not to harass you. The only callers free from this are those who conduct surveys (‘Hello, what do you think about the new telemarketing laws?’) and, of course, political ‘vote for us’ calls.
Sometimes here in Spain, the telephone lady will insist on speaking to the ‘abonado’, the subscriber. Perhaps when I’ve neglected to pay the phone-bill. Sometimes I say I’m ‘me’, when the fact is I’m not, really. You see, there’s a small problem, as I never reported the passing of my dad to Telefonica, and so the listing remains in his name, some 23 years after his death.
Well, it seemed like too much of a performance, you know what they are like here: we just love that paperwork.
The other day, I had to go to the correos to pay the phone bill. They have a special thing on the post office computer: phone number, amount owed and the ‘NIE’ (tax number) of the subscriber. Click, fiddle and pay. All done, have a nice day. Unfortunately, I really didn’t have any idea of my Dad’s old residence card number and, without it, the computer will do its level best to shrug its shoulders and waggle its eyebrows. Can’t be done, Old Sport.
But here the mobile phone comes into its own.
‘Hello, can I speak to Josefina? Listen girl, do you remember me? Can you tell me my dad’s ID number because I’m in the GPO and I’m trying to pay the bill and, because the phone is cut, I can’t ring him and ask him what his…’
‘Really, that’s great, thanks’.
That’s right, she told me.
I get messages on the mobile phone as well, things with moving shapes, pictures, filmettes and text. I can’t see them, don’t want them and distrust their nasty ways. Where is the button to delete this stuff?
You want to watch out for these messages – the other day some company fired half its staff with an SMS.
Man, that saves some time and stamps!
The kids love it, though. They send meaningless tripe (I’m sorry, I meant ‘interesting messages of high social value’) to each other with a speed that is quite remarkable. The muscles they must develop in those thumbs!
…
My great grandfather was a journalist, and he was called along by Alex G Bell – apparently by a messenger pigeon – to witness the invention of the telephone. You probably know the story. Alex is standing there, surrounded by journalists – well, three or four of them, the rest were covering the latest invasion of Afghanistan – staring at this black bakelite doodad sat on a table.
‘Well’, said my ancestor after a suitable pause, ‘what’s it called?’
‘I call it a telephone’.
‘And what, pray tell, does it do?’
‘Until somebody else builds another one, I’m buggered if I know’ replied the Great Man.
Communications have advanced wonderfully since then and now we are never far from our mobile phone. Many new expressions have come into the language, like ‘What, I can’t hear you’ and ‘I’ve run out of credit’ and ‘blasted thing, I don’t have coverage here’ and of course the latest ‘hold on, there’s a police car on the side of the road’.
We all do it. Today, I saw our local cop speeding off towards some intrigue, with a phone pressed firmly to his ear.
I had a call this morning ‘hello, are you Lenox? You’ve left your phone in my bar’.
Ah for the good old days. A squat black phone on the hall table. Eccles, the butler picks it up:
‘Pennsilvania 65000? – it’s for you Sir’.
Now they are in every room, in every pocket.
So anyway, my great grandfather, alerted by a second carrier pigeon, returned the following month to the home of the inventor.
‘Look, now it works a charm’, he said proudly, ‘in a moment, it will ring’.
It rang.
‘Yes, hello’.
‘Good afternoon. My name is Josefina, I would like to talk to the subscriber…’

A Potted Version of Events

The story starts with Helen and Len Prior whose house was demolished (in front of cameras) on Jan 9th 2008. They were an ordinary retired couple who had built a house - with all legal papers (at least, apparently) like so many others who have moved from the inhospitable north of Europe to live in Southern Spain. Their house was demolished, against the instructions and wishes of the town hall of Vera, Almería and a large local demonstration was held in Vera shortly thereafter, supported by both foreigners and local people.
Another demonstration, this time in an interior and moribund town called Cantoria was held in September 2008 against the declaration by the Junta de Andalucía's local gauleiter of 'viviendas ilegales' in that town. An ITV crew made a film - 'Paradise Lost' which is on YouTube (plus a second version dubbed into Spanish) - which highlighted the demo. Spain's reputation, on the back of this and other tv shows, plus ample press reports, takes a dive. The situation is not mentioned or covered at all in Spain (except by local town radios or small papers). The damage to the economy of the area is not discussed.
A few months later (Jan 9th 2009, the first anniversary of the outrage against the Priors), a large demo was held in Almeria City. The Brits, generally retired, came out and demonstrated. I used the image at the time of 'carpet-slippers and walking sticks... some of the demonstrators stopping for a pee or a beer along the route'.
The Junta de Andalucía is by now talking about '11,000' illegal homes in Eastern Almeria (and tens of thousands more in the rest of the autonomy). In Valencia, other related problems are being publicised abroad - in particular the 'Land Grab' which brings various MEPs to the area and later forms the basis of 'The Auken Report' which slams the Spanish state in Brussels.
Over Christmas, eight more houses are served with final demolition orders - this time in Albox. The families are all Brits and, apparently, are unaware of the paperwork which the town hall has been holding since September. We then hear that another house is to be demolished on January 12th, next to the Priors in Vera. The local Brit property owners association calls for a candle-lit vigil for the Priors on their 2nd anniversary (they have been living in their garage,which escaped the demolition, for the past two years) and a fresh and larger demo for 11th January once again in Almeria City.

The damage to Spain's reputation abroad is huge. Stories of tens of thousands of 'illegal homes' belonging to Britons in Spain is hardly going to stimulate the arrival of home-buyers. The shattered Almería economy (30% unemployment) desperately needs a reversal of this situation and the home-owners need to feel protected. The Andalucian government must create an agency to inform, advise, protect and defend the foreign home-makers, because it is in their interest to do so.
As we all know only to well, even those of us whose homes are legal and not under threat, not in the path of another road, railway or hospital complex and nowhere near the ever-increasing distance from the sea in the retroactive 'ley de costas', there is no talk of compensation, no Rule of Law and no comeback on the promoters, builders or politicians.

See www.theentertaineronline.com for updates, and this site for full history of events.

Whoops: Early New Year Prank

Well, we were all enormously excited when the New Year rang in and our very own Mr Zapatero became president, no, I mean ¡presidente! of the entire 27 countries of the European Union. Long may his reign... I'm so sorry. Six months apparently.

Is it long enough for King Zap to fix the faltering European economy, which, er, apparently is now only faltering in Spain and Latvia. Or was it Lithuania. One of those.
Here's a jolly picture of the official front page of the Presidencia Española website:

Looks like they confused Mr Hasbeen with Mr Bean.

Best joke of all: they apparently spent 11,9 million euros in security for this website. Tell that to the hackers!

Cold and Wet

Cold and wet as I write this. It is colder inside the house than out, for some reason, perhaps because I’m hardly sitting still when I’m in the garden, cutting down some wood. Our house is quite old and far too large, well-built with thick walls, high ceilings, small windows and tile floors which all work to keep it cool in the summer, but this tactic is rather less successful in the winter. The wooden doors and windows have a small but inevitable gap between themselves and the lintels or the frame and a merry gale shoots through these various weaknesses in our defence. There’s a window that must be kept open for the cat, only this often changes from one window (the one in my study) to another (the one in the sitting-room) according to who is doing what and where. The cat will, of course, make his own arrangements if he can’t get outside for a pee.
It’s a large house – for sale if you are interested – and among other sundry attractions, we have three fireplaces. But no electric chainsaw. This means that we may have as much as one fire burning, hopefully somewhere near where I am shiv- I mean sitting, depending on whether anyone has been out sawing and gathering…
There are other solutions to keeping warm like the handy Spanish gas fire thingy on wheels that follows me about on a piece of string wherever I go, producing what it insists is something called ‘black heat’; the electric fire bought in an unthinking moment from Lopez a few years ago which the children unfailingly leave ‘on’ when they are out; and the heat from the ‘cocina’ which leaks from our enormous French oven and mixes with the tantalizing smell of dinner, keeping us all sat in the kitchen around the breakfast table for a genteel and civilized amount of time.
Any other solution to staying warm in our house during the winter snap is either to do with eiderdowns, wool, a hot bath, booze, cuddles or some passing physical exertion. We manage. A handful of crumpled up newspapers, a few twigs, a lump or two of orange-tree or pine root, close all the windows and Bob’s your uncle.
And, as long as it’s outside, I say to hell with the cat!
It is true to say that, if it’s cold in Mojácar, with its warm Mediterranean microclimate, then it will definitely be colder everywhere else. From my house I can see that there is snow on those high hills of the Filabres, no doubt great drifts of the stuff blocking the roads and covering the trees. I don’t think I’ll bother to go and look. The mayor of Vélez Blanco – which is still in Almería, you must visit their castle one day, and try the trout at the restaurant up there – was obliged to get his bright red tractor out over Christmas and put a snow-plow scoop on the front of it to help free some villagers in the nether parts of his pueblo. Their front doors and windows were buried under two metres of snow. Their wails of terror echoing up through their chimneys. I look forward to reporting an anecdote one day of our own intrepid mayoress doing something similar.
We are only a few hours from the Sierra Nevada (apparently only 55 minutes once they build the AVE route to Granada) where there is snow five months of the year. It’s a great place for skiing and drinking hot rum. I once went out walking with my father while staying in a hotel up there and we got quite lost. There was a blizzard and the road had disappeared. We were seriously contemplating the condition of our souls when, suddenly, a fellow carrying a wedding cake loomed out of the darkness coming from the other direction and we followed him several kilometers to a large and rather merry bar where we stayed the rest of the night.
Spain is famously a warm country, now even more so thanks to the disappointing results of the Copenhagen talks on CO2 controls, and it is always a surprise just how cold it regularly gets. This is primarily because most of the country is on a high plateau and somebody cut down all the trees several hundred years back while planning an invasion of England so there’s the wind-chill factor to consider as well. Icy city views appear on the television together with some old lady being interviewed and laughing ruefully about the cold. Mountain passes are often closed for a day or two at a time. Even the A4 motorway out of Madrid heading south was cut a few days ago because of the snow.
Rain is another thing you don’t expect to see much of in Spain, apart from Galicia where of course it rains every single day. We have a few clouds here and there, a rare damp afternoon in Roquetas de Mar, reports of a sprinkle in Lubrín, and then one night there’s a blue moon shining over Albox and suddenly we have a really good gully-washer.
So, despite the adverse weather patterns, every now and again, it rains. The garden needs it. The farmers need it. The roof-repair people need it. Especially in Mojácar where, for esthetic reasons, our roofs are, by law, entirely flat. But, come-on, who in their right mind is going to build a flat roof? Tilted ones with tiles stop the rain coming in and help insulate the house. I think it’s because our early builders here weren’t great shakes. So leaks are commonplace. Small pools of accumulated water on the roof. Eventually a trail of water drips menacingly through some weakened spot. Those nights of sloshing about in the guest-bedroom in one’s pajamas and slippers trying to move the bookshelf. Ah, happy memories!
Not any more though, no more leaks or drips. I had the roof fixed a couple of years ago.

It rained in every town
Except Mojácar,
A very damp and soggy
Thing to do.
It rained in every town
Except Mojácar
And then one day,
It rained in Mojácar too!

Old Glories

I started a newspaper here - 'The Entertainer' - in 1985. It built its way up to three editions and 40,000 copies weekly, plus a Spanish monthly edition ('Entertainer en Español') until, in 1999, I signed a ... (*removed by court order*)... well, it all ended in tears. At least, for me.
Anyway... checking through old web-editions of The Entertainer (I started the first web-edition of an English-language paper in Spain in 1998), I found this:

'Living in Spain, the Foreign residents' (November 1998)
While figures for the foreigners living in Spain are hopelessly inexact, it is known that 1,200,000 properties are registered in Spain as belonging to foreigners. This figure gives an approximation of 3.6 million foreigners, at three per property, with some relationship with the country. Surprisingly, the Spanish authorities themselves appear to be indifferent to the numbers, and even to the income derived from this group. If we accept the low figure of 600,000 English speaking residents on the Costa Blanca and in Andalucia, who each spend £1,000 per month - a not unlikely figure which includes a percentage of their house and car price, their taxes and purchases - their annual spending power would come to £7,200 million (1.5 billion Pesetas). All brought in as foreign exchange.The Spanish authorities would be well advised to consider this form of 'tourism' and to encourage its growth. For a foreigner, living in Spain is now far easier than in the past, particularly for EU citizens. 'Work permits' and 'residence permits' are now just a formality, since all Europeans have the right to live and work where they will inside the European Union. However, the majority of foreigners who live in Spain are, of course, retired. They have lived a full and fruitful life elsewhere and have decided to retire to what can only be described as the warmest, safest and most comfortable part of Europe - the Mediterranean coast of Spain and her islands. They live in or near the small towns dotted along the coast, away from the cities, and evince little interest in returning 'home' again. Those that do eventually move, move inland into the 'real Spain' - to the Andalucian hinterland or elsewhere. The Mediterranean coast of Spain could be likened to southern Florida twenty years ago - a place of opportunity, beauty and tranquillity (well, it's a lot prettier!). Many foreign-run businesses now operate along the coast and in the islands with everything from dentists and doctors to English food supermarkets, realtors, builders and, um, newspapers. There are theatre and choral groups, clubs, associations, golf, bowls, water sports... life need never be dull. Spain itself is a fascinating and beautiful country to get to know, and residents make keen travellers. Certain foreigners have already voted in local elections, and by May 1999 - the time of the next local vote - all European citizens resident in Spain, and possibly all non-Europeans as well, will be able to vote. This will give the foreign residents a greater say in how their community is maintained and developed, as well as better protection from the occasional town hall 'excess'. Communications in Spain have improved dramatically in the past few years, and there is now a coastal motorway that runs from the French border, down through Barcelona and Valencia, and along the Costa Blanca and Costa de Almeria. This motorway will soon be completed on down to the Costa del Sol and Gibraltar. A second motorway through Granada currently connects with Malaga and continues to 'the Rock'. The rail-system is adequate, but slow, with the exception of the high-speed AVE link between Madrid and Seville (and on to Cadiz). Air-links are good, with airports in every main city, plus Gibraltar, although it must be said that the Almeria airport is a 'horror'. Prices in Spain are average, with both housing and labour rather cheaper than elsewhere, and clothing, cars and gasoline rather higher. The weather, however, is better here than anywhere else, and that's the main thing.

Not bad - eleven years later I'd only make a few minor adjustments to the above.
It's still warm.

Demolitions, Demonstrations, Democracies.

It’s a funny place, Spain. There are now so many levels of authority, with so many public servants (‘funcionarios’ as they are amusingly called), that no one is ever quite aware of what to do, scared of ‘doing the wrong thing’, panicked by those situations which are not covered in the ever-changing handbook (ever more of us are said to be ‘en situación irregular’) and, in short, the country appears to limp along from one crisis to the next, with no firm judicial or political presence anywhere in evidence.
Let’s look at our local problems, and leave the country’s larger conundrums, like whether a maverick judge should try and sue Franco for genocide, or the attempts to re-open the wounds of the Civil War, or whether the Catalonians should secede from the rest of Spain and have a glorious non-bullfighting cava-swilling Catalan speaking mini-state all of their own, or even if our best-of-the-year sportsman plays on an American team in a game practically unknown here in this country (the NBA), all for another time.
Two years ago, the ‘delegado provincial de la Consejería de Vivienda y Ordenación del Territorio de la Junta de Andalucía en Almería’ – the Junta’s homes and council house poobah – apparently waiting until the normal judge (who ‘has never signed a demolition order and never will’) was away on holiday and a substitute judge was in charge, obtained a fast-track demolition order on a home in Vera. This killed two birds with one stone. Or maybe three.
First of all, Vera is a town run by a small political party at odds with the ruling PSOE. The mayor has been in power there for some time and, well, politics is a dirty business. Then, the house in question belonged to a retired British couple, Len and Helen Prior. Britons aren’t likely to turn around and bite. They will have no useful cousins in politics, relatives in the judiciary or immediate family in the Spanish media. No one will know, or care, if something happens to such an unimportant family, especially if the action is legal.
But was it legal?
Spain’s mayors have always exercised the ultimate power in their towns. You could argue that they are the stewards or representatives of the just and rightful aspirations of their townsfolk (and we shall all fall over laughing while you do), but it could be argued that they would best know their way around locally and precisely what their community needs most.
Then, with the advent of the ‘autonomies’ in 1979 (Almería was the only province in Spain that voted against its proposed autonomy of Andalucía with Seville at six hours away as its capital and master), new powers and centres of interest were created.
So, as a mayor allows building in his municipality, bringing in much needed taxes to help pay the ever-growing number of ‘funcionarios’ working flat-out in his town hall (and remembering, together with their families, who put them there during election times), the autonomous government begins to discover an interest in these activities and, ahem, opportunities.
On the one side – and we shall leave corruption or special interests or politics out of the equation – we have the limits of water, space, ecology, the number of school-teachers, local police, health-workers and so on to consider. Can the town expand and in which direction? On the other hand, as we are talking about small moribund pueblos generally (in this case) in the interior of Almería, towns which have little or no agriculture, industry or tourism, where the old are dying off and the young are leaving, then what could be better than an influx of apparently wealthy foreign retirees who not only buy a house (and a car and a washing machine and a sofa and a television) but continue to bring in money from abroad twelve months of the year, keeping local businesses afloat and creating jobs.
Almería currently enjoys 30% unemployment.
What is a mayor to do?
While Vera, the town of the Priors, is close to the playas and can aspire to some seasonal tourism, the interior towns of the Almanzora Valley have serious concerns to address.
So now, as our friend the gauleiter from Seville declares 11,000 properties in the eastern part of the province to be illegal (the Junta’s delegado provincial is actually from Oria, a small town in Almería), putting many economies at risk and rubbishing Almería’s name abroad, another eight British homeowners in Albox are told, over Christmas, that their houses are to be demolished.
Did the cops carry candles and wassail them before they handed over the demolition papers? Perhaps not.
How can you build 11,000 illegal houses? Somebody? You there at the back?
Are these people mad?
A house, with all its papers from the town hall in order, is nevertheless arbitrarily demolished. So where is the compensation? Well, we have the courts for that. Len and Helen Prior actually had their case in the Constitutional Court in Madrid when the bulldozers went in. Eighteen months after the fact, the court ruled in their favour. Now the Junta de Andalucía is appealing. After that is all sorted out, the Priors are free to sue either the Junta de Andalucía, or the town hall of Vera. Depending.
This will take the rest of their life. They are, after all, elderly retired foreigners. European. But, alas, foreign.
They have no heroes: no representatives, no ombudsman, no MP or MEP. Only a local foreign home-owners association, the AUAN, to do what it can – demonstrate, write letters, hold candle-lit sit-ins. The British media will often cover these stories, but it naturally has its own agenda; the Spanish press won’t touch the subject with a bargepole. It’s politics.
The problems regarding compensation are, in fact, far worse than the agony of going through the Spanish legal system. Many building companies and promoters have limited liability of just 3,000 euros and the ‘president’ is, as often as not, someone without patrimony to chase after.
It is clear that some houses need to be demolished. They have been built in flood areas, dry river beds or other dangerous or unsustainable places – and, yes, of course the town hall knew about them. But these homeowners must be compensated fully. This modern European country, ultimate destination for many hundreds of thousands of Northern Europeans, needs an agency to protect, advise, inform and defend the foreign property buyers – precisely because it is in everyone’s interest to do so.
Meanwhile, the Priors, two years on, are living in a garage.
Nice one, Spain.

A Day in the Life of Lenox Lenoxovitch

Zzzz. I slowly discover that my dream has once again taken me to a strange bathroom. I wake up with the pressure on my bladder and stumble slowly and carefully – there’s a large dog asleep on the floor somewhere – to our en-suite to siphon the python. My wife wakes up as I fall over Ginger on the way back and switches on the light.
‘What time is it?’ She asks.
I have a rule. If it’s four o’clock I try and get back to sleep. If it’s six, I’ll get up and make a coffee. I used to have a very good internal clock which could tell me the time to the minute, which is why I’ve never had to wear a watch. These days, it just clanks gently on the hour somewhere in my brain like an old but well-wound railway clock.
Unfortunately, it’s five.
Since it will be six long before it’ll be four again, I decide to make an early start to the day. Coffee, a slice of toast and some orange juice squeezed from the in-law’s fruit.
Well, at least we have water this morning. The other day, fresh – or not so fresh, come to think of it – from our drive home from the Madrid airport, we found that the water had been cut. So, the following morning I drove down to the water company’s headquarters in Vera – across a track and following a road-works gang, and in to sort the thing out.
My first remark, there was an audience of Spaniards waiting their turn behind me, went down well. ‘Lady’, I said, ‘I’ve come to take a shower. Where do I change?’
The water had been cut, it turned out, because they had found an old bill from 2004 and (apparently anxious to cash it before the statute of limitations ran out) had gone to my bank only to discover that I had failed to budget for this eventuality and, despite being a regular customer who wasn’t particularly going anywhere – apart from a well-earned holiday after the Great Fire of Mojácar last summer – decided to cut the precious life-giving fluid to my finca. The result – whatever hadn’t died in the farm the first time round was shriveled up and dry by the time I was sat in the water company’s office coughing up not just the 230 odd euros they wanted, but another fifty reconnection charge.
Bastards! I got my own back though. I think my audience were appreciative as I noisily filled out my first ever ‘complaining sheet’.
But today, no water problem, no bucket by the loo. All friends again. Instead, a quick and violent shower, followed by me mopping the floor where I’d made a poorly judged squirt.
I went to the shop this morning to get in some food and drinks. The choice was between my usual supermarket, which, since December 1st, has taken to playing a grotesque collection of muzak Christmas songs and ‘villancicos’ (high-pitched whiney children’s songs for Navidad and, don’t forget, the Three Kings) and the other, larger one where the shop assistants interrupt one’s shopping experience by periodically bellowing instructions over the in-house tannoy system like something out of a Butlins holiday-camp. Normally, I’ll shop with an iPod stuffed into each ear.
I had made my way to the queue at the front (I’m in the bellowing shop-girls supermarket) and was waved past this fellow. ‘You go ahead’, he said in Spanish. ‘Why, thank you’, I answered politely. ‘I’ve just been having a drink with Jacky Mankewitz’, I added, under the impression that I knew this fellow, who looked faintly like the Postman, ‘and, do you know, at his age, he’s still playing tennis’, I finished.
No, on closer inspection, definitely not the Postman.
Now I have to queue for another five minutes as the lady in front of me pays for her trolley in patiently counted out pennies, all the while aware that the Spanish bloke behind me is convinced that I’m barking mad. I’m not really; it’s just that, in a tourist town, everyone starts to look alike.
I drive home with my shopping, including a rather suspicious English fish pie which I am already regretting having purchased. Some chap in Pieland has spent millions making this thing, doing the packaging, the design, the flakes of – one hopes – fish wrapped in monosodium glutamate and so on and, lo! There’s a box of it in a supermarket in Spain. The picture looks like Captain Nemo wrestling with a deep-Atlantic squid. I nuked it in the microwave and it was, indeed, horrible. Again I remind myself to eat Spanish stuff in Spain.
Thanks in part to our water-company-induced drought that followed the summer conflagration, we have lots of firewood. Blackened, sooty and dead. It just needs scooping up, cutting, breaking or uprooting and the chimney is stuffed to bursting for the evening. Our house is a country-house, nice in the summer, cold and drafty in the winter. A good fire in the bedroom to keep everything toasty.
So I get down and dirty with a saw. There’s a lot of work to do. Some of the trees are beyond me: I’ll have to get the neighbour and his chain-saw over. Perhaps I could invite him to some spare fish-pie. There, a wheelbarrow load should do it. I down tools and head for the house; my hands black with soot, my shoes full of ash.
Sometimes, it’s like living in one’s own junior plague. Heaven forbid that I ever see a proper one.
Inside, there’s a message on the phone. Our phone number is, unfortunately, very similar to a popular local restaurant. I discover that I’m having a party of six at 8.30.
The fire warms us as it slowly gets late, and the book falls to the floor. We lie in bed; a stray hair from the cat tickles my nose. The dog growls at some dream-figure and a gecko stirs and stretches quietly behind a painting.
Zzzzz.

The Forums

Hello Lenox, sqwerlie has just replied to a thread you have subscribed to entitled - loadabollocks. - in the XYZ forum. This thread is located at …. There may be other replies also, but you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the forum again.
That’s right, a message on the email to go and check the forum.
The idea of a forum is sound enough, especially for those living some similar kind of life, whether its musicians, scientists or, in our case, people who’ve moved or moving – by and large – from Northern Europe to come and live in Spain. The ‘expats’, ‘Europeans’, ‘Brits’ or what have you. We could start a thread on the correct nomenclature if you like.
The forums, or ‘fora’ I suppose would be more correct, offer the chance for people with generally silly nicknames to ask questions, make announcements or comments, to complain or criticize or to support or disagree with threads which, in theory at least, are something to do with Spain.
Usually, this falls down pretty fast.
The first line of defence against the ‘trolls’, people who write – at best – mischievous comments, disingenuous arguments or provocations, are the moderators. They can erase threads or comments and, one can only suppose, they must be dedicated to reading everything that comes along on their ‘watch’ before things get out of hand. The only time that I have been pressed into this particular service, things were quiet enough until some foul porn-linking Russian tosser found his way to the site – posting maybe forty or fifty rather terrible pictures every day and so on with me solemnly removing them again – before the site-owner managed to fix the problem once and for all by closing the forum to new subscribers, which didn’t do much for the whole enterprise. Moderators on larger sites (this was a small specialist one) must have quite a job. We sometimes criticize them for their actions – or lack of them – but they need to be ‘eternally vigilant’. Well done, Ahana!
Moderators also need to know their subject. One site about Spain I sometimes post on has a ‘mod’ and enthusiastic poster who is so dumb that she flies all through an argument, missing the point, adding trite remarks, brainless gushes and regular doses of solipsism as if she was more a troll than a moderator.
There are around twenty forums I’ve linked to on The Entertainer Online (a site I maintain with notes and items about Spain) and these vary in quality from ‘busy’ and ‘useful’ to vague, unvisited and clumsy. One popular site, which served Almería foreigners well enough for some time, was so thoroughly tweaked to death by its webmaster last year, the inevitable result was that visitors fell away. Currently it has little ‘snowflakes’ coursing down the screen. No one, at least among the expat population of Almería, who are probably on average in their fifties or so, likes change.
While some threads or sections seem concerned with ‘life back home’, with generally negative comments about the foreigners who are moving to England (!) or how the British ‘need to pull up their socks’ for some reason or another which the writer would be only to happy to contribute towards if only he hadn’t chosen a life – apparently – of exile, most threads are to do with living in Spain. These divide into the good and the bad and, with the issue of ‘illegal homes’ to spur us on, they may move into white-hot agitprop and (usually poorly informed) politics. One very active forum, based in the Almanzora Valley, got so heated on the subject of ‘capitulation or confrontation’ regarding these illegal homes (the Seville government, who has chosen to describe those foreign-owned homes in Eastern Almería as ‘ilegal’ puts the number arbitrarily at 11,000), that the forum eventually took a particular position of what might be sententiously described as ‘working within the system’ while those in disagreement with this policy started a new one. These two forums sum up how the Europeans think: they are locally known as the ‘blues’ and the ‘purples’.
Forums can have much to say and they offer the opportunity to say it. Some take this chance to fool about, write meaningless patter, post endless ‘smileys’ or even write in ‘fool’s English’ using misspellings and poor grammar for some peculiar reason of their own.
Most if not all threads are eventually ‘hijacked’. A thread that starts about ‘smoking in bars’ will, by the third page, probably be about the price of salt, or bullfighting, or how some ‘forum character’ was once a sea-captain.
But, it’s the numbers which work against the forums. Check out a thread and you will see the number of visitors, or readers. You can then divide that by the number of posters to give you an idea of how far some subject has actually dissolved into the expat consciousness.
Sadly perhaps, it won’t be many.

Spanish Maid Service

It’s a standard conversational piece at any get-together: a chance to show one’s true worth at the negotiating table, an opportunity to display one’s in-depth arrival into local society.
The hourly price of a maid.
And no matter how wealthy you are, anyone who pays fifty cents more an hour than you do wants their head examined; and as for anyone who pays fifty cents less... Jeez Louise!
Every morning, except Sundays, thousands of maids make their way across the Spanish landscape. Poor things. They arrive by bus or on foot. Some few are long-sufferingly picked up by the patron from their apartment on the other side of town, and then there are a small number of them that arrive in a better looking car than the house-owner has.
These are the unsung heroes of Spain. They make the bed, they wash the dishes, they polish the silver, they do the laundry and they wipe the baby’s ass. They sometimes get into the gin.
They don’t dress up for the occasion, however, like the French ones do. Oo la la.
There are two schools of thought about the preparation of one’s house for the domestic onslaught. The first type has it that the maid should never suspect what a scruff they are dealing with, and so these proud home-owners will set to with a will to make the bed, dust, wash up and hide the empties and all the rest of it leaving the bewildered maid when she arrives with nothing much to do at all. Perhaps they are right – after all, maids gossip freely about their employers.
Then there is the second type, which is impervious to criticism and figures to get their money’s worth. They will leave everything in complete chaos.
Good Lord, I’ve just described myself.
Spanish maids are useful for teaching ‘kitchen Spanish’. There is many a foreign housewife whose command of Spanish might best be described as ‘inadequate’ and who has learnt just a hand-full of useful words and yet at the same time, and with the modest help of a dictionary, knows the name of more different vegetables in Spanish than the green-grocer himself.
In Madrid, the fancier establishments will have a live-in maid from the Philippines (for no reason that I can fathom) and, if there are children present in the menagerie, then there will be a nanny from Dublin. Furthermore, a ‘lady companion’ for abuela (Granny) will visit every day and will need to speak proper Spanish (and be immensely patient as she takes her out for walks). Ideally, she should be the same height as well. She’ll almost certainly come from Ecuador.

Here in Almería, you might discover after a few months that you in fact have a Romanian maid: but then come to think of it, you might have a Romanian green-grocer, so be sure to check your dictionary.
As one’s Spanish (or Romanian) improves – it can take a while for recent arrivals to discover which language they are in fact learning from the kitchen staff – the maid – or ‘the cleaner’ as they are sometimes called these days – can also fill you out on the ins and outs of life in the pueblo, as a sort of ambulatory and knowledgeable Who’s Who. When you have finally mastered the history, intrigues and relationships between everyone from your Spanish maid’s barrio, you will be ready to enter into polite society, local-style. Your maid, needless to say, will by this point have become your master.

Maids often come from extensive families. Their joint estates, pieces of land or tumbled down cortijos way to hell and gone in the hills, inevitably coveted by adventurous foreigners, can make them potentially more wealthy than the Duke of Wellington. The social history of Spain is wrapped up in that land and your maid knows the stories.
Spanish maids are often very useful as babysitters, too. The kids disappear with her for the weekend while the liberated parents go off for a trip or to a party. The children will be returned, spotlessly clean, on the Sunday night having taken part in some particularly bloodthirsty pig-killing at the farm of old ‘Tío Antonio’ and clutching a small packet of oil paper wrapped sausage as a souvenir.
Christmas can be tricky. Your domestic will expect an extra month’s pay and a day off and you’ll probably end up with an expertly wrapped humorous ashtray from that new Chinese emporium. Decency prohibits you from accidentally breaking such an item until Lent. You will also need to budget for saints days, fiestas and other dates in the calendar when no one, maids included, show up for work. On those festive occasions, stick to sandwiches is my advice.
But these are small concerns.
So, aside from the potential problem of language which, as we have seen, can sooner or later be straightened out, the only remaining hurdle is a decent cup of tea. Tricky. While much could be forgiven of a maid back in the United Kingdom (assuming you could afford one there) as long as she could come up with the goods in the char department, here you will just have to make it yourself. Come to think of it, tea doesn’t go down to well with a piping-hot tortilla, which a Spanish maid will happily prepare for you and serve... therefore, for refreshment, you should probably stick to a nice glass of wine.
So, as you climb into your bed tonight, brushing off the chocolate mint from your pillow, consider how lucky you are to have found a teacher, a cleaner, a chum and a companion.
Who doesn’t snore.