The Fifth Column

An article called ‘España no funciona’ at Infolibre here looks at why Spain has always been so divided (a massive weakness evident today during the current crisis).  It says in part ‘…The forty years of democracy after the Franco dictatorship have failed to dismantle the power of the negative Spain – that of the young gentlemen, the cardboard-generals and the retrograde cardinals. Rouco Varela (the fundamentalist Spanish bishop) has more media presence than that of Father Ángel (wiki) and thousands of other exemplary priests and nuns. We have failed to cultivate the value of honesty. Journalists, too…’. An example is the ‘Revolution of the Rich’ or ‘Los Cayetanos’ in the smartest barrio of Madrid. We read at eldiario.es ‘What’s happening with the revolution of the rich has nothing to do with the ravages of the pandemic, or the devastation of the economy, or the temporary lack of freedom; what is happening is a manifestation, however freaky, of the struggle of the gentlemen to hold on to power’. A more cynic version comes from Meneame here: ‘What has already been coined as the "Núñez de Balboa Movement" consists of a group of people who live in the most expensive neighbourhood in this country and who have never come out to demonstrate until they have had their vacations in Bali or Formentera cancelled and their right to a great job without having to study for it removed. Dozens of Cayetanos are demonstrating without keeping the required social distance, endangering their lives and that of their families, and inevitably that of the health workers who will soon have to care for them…’. As economist Marta Flich says in a video at El Huff Post here, ‘the virus has no ideological preference’. Then there’s the sad video-clip here of a woman rooting through a dustbin as the flag-wearing militants pass by ignoring her. These right-wing protestors have been given a ‘secret manual of disobedience’ from goodness-knows-where which tells them to film with their telephones anyone who looks like ‘a Government secret policeman within their ranks’ and advises them to not carry their DNI (ID cards). The story ‘Spain’s 1% revolt against continued coronavirus lockdown’ has been made available to American readers at The Huff Post (US) here.

Mojácar, City of Witches

An essay from Miguel Ángel Urralde, from Almería Hoy here (2015)

The old fellow called el Tío Frasquito El Campechano swore that he saw them swooping down from El Picacho (where the radio masts are above the pueblo), every evening, at nightfall, and fly over the church tower with their brooms. His wife rebuked him saying that he was confusing witches with swifts or maybe the bats that, at those hours, went out to hunt mosquitoes. She herself knew more than one witch, but she certainly didn’t believe they were capable of flying on a broom. In the bars and taverns of Mojácar the people sang:

More than four hundred witches left Mojácar,

They went walking to Andujar,

Along the way they gave birth

To an army of scoundrels.

According to Don Ginés Carrillo, a post-war Mojaquero doctor and the influence behind the city's amateur theatre El Aquelarre (which means ‘the witches coven’), this romance has spread by word of mouth since time immemorial in Mojácar. There are those who say that the content of the verse is dedicated to the large group of Mojacar and Turre Moors who, having been expelled from the area in the early 16th century, marched through Andujar on their way north to La Mancha. The Christian settlers of the time, when they 'acquired' the lands and animals of the Moors, held their consciences calmer by calling them witches, because in addition, many of the Moorish women knew the healing properties of native herbs and plants, and this left the Christian women looking bad before their husbands when they needed some folk medicine on a sprained ankle or swollen knee.

Over time, as needs must, the Mojaquera women learned about the herbs and memorized the spells, and since many did not marry or perhaps they soon became widows, they had time to learn to recite healing prayers and to know secrets about love affairs that they could secretly sell for a fee.

Don Ginés, who as a doctor had free entry to all the houses of the town and who also loved the secrets of spiritualism, knew many witches in the town and therefore, as he owned the theatre which was located in front of the church, he called it El Aquelarre, that is to say, 'The Coven'. Now Don Ginés, not knowing any Basque, few people did in those days, could not know that in that language aker means goat and larre means countryside, so he actually called his theatre something like "the gathering of bastards where the yokels live".

But then again, perhaps he knew exactly what he wanted to say, because on some issues D. Ginés played his cards close to his chest and the local people, although it might be difficult to imagine, were even more uneducated than they are today. We will never be able to know for sure if his effort to highlight the presence of witches in the town was due to the unfair competition that they gave him as a doctor or to the trust in their powers that the town held for them.

The post-war Mojaquera witches were not socially frowned upon, and they came to help in childbirth, as well as to cure a disease or a simple syndrome, such as frigidity, the ache from a sprain, anaemia or the evil eye or whatever. They were specialists in curing boils, the shingles and easing bad moods, and above all they had developed psychological knowledge and sagacity. If their prayers did not always heal, there is also no record that they ever did any wrong to the sick. The lack of culture made them necessary and poverty made them numerous. They always took care to heal in the name of God and imploring the saints, just in case.

The most famous of the Mojaquera witches, who maintained a loyal clientèle until the arrival of tourism, was Tía Rosa La Cachocha. She was the one that was most recognized in the making of pichirichis.

The pichirichis were powders that she would prepare, to be taken, dissolved in liquid, by a specific male, chosen beforehand by an unattached woman and, following the spell, he would become 'hooked' on her. In short, a marriage potion.  

Many young Mojaquero men were understandably concerned about Aunty Cachocha's potions for years, and they were warned that they should not consume any type of drinks in the houses where a young woman lived. Of course, there were always those who suspected that one didn’t need a witch’s help to hook up, and when there was enough evidence of this, about the time the foreigners began to arrive, trade in the powders plummeted. Thereafter, the brooms that were used for flying were no longer in demand and the broom factory in Turre closed.

The old Tío Frasquito El Campechano would continue to look out at night towards the El Picacho convinced that if he did not see the witches fly over the hill, it was simply because there were too many new houses that spoiled the view.

...

I knew a few of the stories from my early years in Mojácar. The fuente, the hippies would say, was (is) located on the conjunction of two ley lines, which of course meant powerful juju.  Certainly there were several curanderos, faith healers, but they were quite common in rural Spain. Some would charge a coin (black) and some would do it for free (white). I remember the story of a young Dutch woman who was one day accosted by an old Mojaquera sternly dressed in black. 'You're pregnant' said the old woman. 'No I'm not', said the Dutch lady sadly, 'I'm barren'.

The old lady in black was right though. 
Comer to think of it, that's maybe why Carlos Almendros called his book 'Mojácar, Rincón de Embrujo' - Corner of Enchantment.  

The Eminent Author

I was clearing out the shelves of the house the other day, not getting very far as there are a large number of books occupying a considerable number of shelves, and the piles of volumes I keep on the floor or in boxes hardly needed adding to.
My parents had brought out half a ton of books with them when they left the UK for Mojácar in 1966. We had built on these modest beginnings enthusiastically ever since - usually by incorporating a visit to the nearest second hand bookshop as the crow flies, fortuitously located in Torremolinos: a nine hour journey in the late sixties which certainly merited a few drinks once we got there.
There has never been much in the way of English book-stalls in Spain, there simply isn't the market. An old librería in our local city had a modest shelf of English books, imported, as I remember, by 'Atheneum'.  The usual treasures: Part II of 'Don Quixote', 'Amsterdam on Five Guilder a Day' and the notorious 'English as She is Spoke'. Fine books all. These days, the second-hand shelves at the charity shops (at the miracle price of six for a euro) or the English chap at the market with his crates of thrillers keep me in yarns.
As a young'un, I had operated a library of sorts, which entailed the other English-speaking residents of Mojácar coming by the house for a gin and a gossip with my parents and to pass through to my corner of paperbacks to stock up on a clutch of Ian Fleming or Desmond Bagley novels. Nothing too taxing, which is why today I remain a voracious reader of thrillers, sci-fi, mysteries and what my old schoolmaster would have described as assorted escapist tripe.
Among the dusty harvest of my top shelf, before I had to go and lie down, I found a couple of travel diaries of mine: indeed I've got them here.
The first was an early trip to South Africa, beginning on February 4th 1975 when I sailed from Barcelona on the MV Europa. Several of our books at home were from H Rider Haggard ('Allan Quartermain' and 'King Solomon's Mines' etc) and our old place in Norfolk had once belonged to him before he took off for his adventures and sold the property to my great grandparents. In short, at 21, I also wanted to go and hunt elephant and meet a Zulu.
The diary, looking at it now, is in disappointingly tiny fading lines of prose. I wonder now about how I did with the pachyderm. I think there's a photo-album somewhere.
The second is a rather easier to read journal from 1979 through 1980, which took me from Spain to the USA and later to the Dominican Republic - a jolly place full of whores. Ah, Memories.
I had been briefly in print in a collection at the tender age of fourteen, the sensation of my circle of friends (Dobberman, Jackson and Mosely Jr) and was even a founder member of the International Society of Poets. Good, huh?  To join, you simply set them a poem and a postal order for £10.
Much later in Mojácar, I found myself at 34 to be in the newspaper business, writing 'stories' (never has the euphemism for 'news' been better applied) for 'The Entertainer', a weekly free-sheet which lasted under my stewardship for fourteen years. I also wrote sketches and articles in Spanish in 'Entertainer en Español', a monthly which ran for five or six years.  Later, too, I edited various other titles, some in Spanish and wrote for a few more. A number of the pieces are here in 'Spanish Shilling', while others can be mined by the patient researcher on the 'Wayback Machine' (a useful site which saves the stuff which others would rather see lost, heh). I also have material published on a six-pack of blogs.
Why don't you write a book, they ask me. Well, a few of them do.
A handful of my friends have done just that. The normal print run for a local amateur author is recommended to not exceed 1,000 copies, and even then, there'll be four or five hundred left in boxes in the garage to be quietly thrown out several years later. The people who make a fortune off of authors expect more than one slim volume, and they want someone with a name, or the opportunity of making one.
At my level, a book which would be for sale in the local PAWS shop and a few other outlets, or free to anyone i knew with an upcoming birthday, would mean I would be full circle back to sending a postal order for the 2020 equivalent of £10 (per copy) to the local printer.


The mash-up comes from The Penguin Classics Cover Generator here.

The New Arrival

A nice picture of the latest arrival at Albero, a beautiful filly called Dante. Here with her mother Ana and her adoring auntie Loli. For pictures from Albero Centro Ecuestre, the riding-centre in La Cañada (Almería), follow their photo-blog here.

Briefly, a New Beginning

It's kind of interesting what's happening now. We've been in lockdown for a month so far and we have just been told to expect another month of the same ('at least'). The meaning of 'lockdown' seems to be changing as this crisis extends itself: the police are out there because there is almost no excuse left to take to the street (I saw a cop car fining some poor idiot last night at 2.00am from my window - all he wanted was a chocolate bar).
I live on a horse-farm, with stables and a couple of paddocks. There are over thirty horses and no one to ride them. At least I am out every day working on the scut jobs - watering, feeding and moving one from here to there, and another from hither to yon. Bits of horse kit (all with new names en castellano as I learn stuff with my sieve-like brain) and where we left them bent over a fence or on a wall somewhere. Fixing a fence, shouting at the water-heater. Collecting a massive number of eggs each day from the poultry; uprooting taters from the lower forty.
No one to help, because, you know, lockdown.
I had to go to the medical centre because my wife Alicia is still in a wheelchair after an accident in December and we needed a prescription. I'm talking to a nurse through the window of the car and we both have masks on, and rubber gloves and goggles. A fellow is energetically squirting the car with some killer mixture. I get the prescription and drive round the corner to the farmacia, whooping through my lowered mask to get my breath back.
The chemist from behind his sheet of virus-proof glass sells me a potion to wash my hands every time I leave the property.
So, we are fully kitted up, in case of doubt.
The IMF says to expect a recession as important as the Great Depression of 1929. Who the fuck is going to want to pay for riding lessons in a time like that, I wonder, or for livery service (we currently have ten horses that are 'paying guests'). I'd jump out of the window, only we live on the ground floor.
So, for the next month - at least - I will be driving down to the supermarket every once in a while, kitted up like an extra from the Andromeda Strain movie and quickly buying whatever goes well with eggs, or maybe over to the feed store for another truck-load of straw.
We never thought it would come to this, although we knew something was coming (my friend Jesse, an American gun-nut, was hoping for zombies). But, when it's all over, or - to be more precise - when it's as over as it's going to get, we won't be going back to the good old days. They've gone.
Expect more government control, a minimum guaranteed income, no foreign holidays, a highly cautious society (wary of football matches, cinemas, restaurants, bars and shopping malls) and a large number of places, currently closed, that won't be opening again.
Just try and explain all this to the horses.

Maura Settles Down

The whole story started for me back in January 2008, when a phone-call from the BBC asked me to drive over to Vera (about ten kilometres away) and take some photos of a house being demolished. A Brit’s house (otherwise, the BBC wouldn’t have called). The home in question belonged to Len and Helen Prior. They had built in a quiet area outside Vera, not in a flood-plain or a national park or near a beach or on a projected train or road route, or even in a place of particular beauty. The house, in an area where other similar houses stood on their own acreage, had a pool and a garage.

The Junta de Andalucía, in those days controlled by the PSOE and famously corrupt, had produced a rule that towns could only grow by a fraction every eight years. A tiny village by one house perhaps, a city by several thousand. Coupled to this remarkable legislation, which naturally favoured the best-connected constructors, the ecologists (who merrily ignore the huge environmental damage caused by the plastic farms and other profitable sources of contamination) were firm in their opposition to building houses without proper permits (and they didn’t mean town hall permissions) and they had the ear of the government in Seville.

In Andalucía, Seville rules the roost and no one particularly cares what happens in the farther reaches of the autonomous region; and Cantoria, Vera, Zurgena, Albox and Arboleas in Almería were very much off their map – until the ecologists alerted the authorities to the one house per thousand (or whatever) rule, with the result that the town halls discovered that they didn’t have as much power as they had thought. This isn’t the time-share pitch, or the ‘off-plan’ gamble, or many other sucker-scams, since everyone here wanted it to work: the buyers, the sellers and the local business-people – after all, the funds brought from abroad would keep the local supermarket, pharmacy, house-painter and bar in operation...

In 2008, the homes, aimed primarily at foreign buyers, were abruptly deemed illegal and Andalucía discovered that it had 300,000 of these (the size of the city of Málaga) which, the cheques having cleared, they were now noticing. This meant threats, rare demolitions, fines, invalid title deeds, and the water and electric cut. It also meant ruin for many builders and even more so, for many foreign buyers – including the Priors.

The stories of this example of Spanish duplicity were reported around the world, causing the local businesses in the small towns – where there is no tourism and not much of anything else – to lose their chance to grow; and indeed, some of them are now listed as ‘pueblos moribundos’ (dying villages) or even abandonados (empty).

After all, few foreigners want to retire to a Spanish city.

Maura Hillen from the AUAN

A home-owners association from the Costa Blanca – the AUN – had been working on a different but equally trying problem: the ‘land grab’ (roughly: one’s home or surrounding land could be claimed by a neighbour who had obtained papers to form an urbanisation). They helped set up in Albox a sister association called AUAN which, with no official support, eventually managed to get the Andalucian building laws changed, beginning with the cosmetic of changing a vivienda ilegal into alegal (a word that, if it existed in Spanish, would mean ‘sort-of-legal’). Maura Hillen is an Irishwoman and has been at the helm of the AUAN, working tirelessly with endless trips to Seville with the association’s lawyer English-born Gerardo Vásquez and her partner organisations including the SOHA (based in the Axarquía of Málaga with similar problems) and the Chiclana (Cádiz) based FEC and others.

This weekend, a press release from the AUAN began: ‘Maura Hillen has stepped down as President of Abusos Urbanísticos Andalucía No (AUAN), after 11 years in the position, during which she received an MBE from the British government for her work. Maura will continue as an external consultant and spokesperson for the Association, to help the new President, David Fisher, from Chiclana, a city with 15,000 alegal houses, at least during the period of transition...’.

Well done Maura, you worked very hard at this (when all you really wanted to do when you moved to Spain was to retire quietly).

Len and Helen Prior, unknown to Spaniards (who are familiar with few anglo expats beyond the TV football pundit Michael Robinson, the Irish historian Ian Gibson and the Canadian TV English-language teacher Richard Vaughan) became, unwillingly, the world’s best known expats outside of Spain. Their house was demolished (the BBC sent me a cheque for £100) but their pool and garage, for some reason on a separate escritura, survived. Despite it all, the Priors, with their best of British pluck – you can imagine them brewing cups of tea in the midst of the Blitz in 1940 – never left.

Eleven years later, they still live there, in their converted garage.

A fragment from a bitter poem by the late British poet laureate John Betjeman:

‘...That builder caught the wife and me all right!

Here on this tide-less, tourist-littered sea

We’re stuck. You’d hate it too if you were me:

There’s no piped water on the bloody site.

Our savings gone, we climb the stony path

Back to the house with scorpions in the bath’.

Coronavirus: What the Horses Don't Know.

It must be a hard time for those who are currently trapped in a small apartment. A couple of rooms, and someone always on the family computer playing games. The cat ('I told you, we should have got a dog') scratches itself fitfully waiting for what turns out to be the last tin of Whiskas. The beer ran out two days ago. Perhaps there's a minuscule terrace to escape from the mother-in-law, but those poor souls are going crazy under house arrest.
The government said two weeks, then two weeks more. They'll likely have to add another few weeks after that.
How can people survive like this?
Apparently, one third of the entire planet is in lockdown. Every day, famous people - politicians, actors, princes and clowns - are reported to have caught the plague. Probably they will survive. Not for them the gigantic gymnasiums full of beds and harassed nurses, forced to wash their face-masks as there aren't any spare. An ice-rink serving as a morgue. Tearful doctors on Facebook videos. Old people in a residence run by the nuns found dead by the army. No one allowed to attend a funeral for a final farewell.
The government spent years cutting back on health costs, closing down units, research departments and staff. It's all creaking at the edges. It's worse in Italy, and now getting that way all over. In America, a teen is turned away from a Los Angeles hospital and dies miserably a few hours later. Like 27,500,000 of his fellow citizens, he didn't have health insurance.
It's serious. Some people are asking to see how far the limits are, whether they can walk to the second-nearest supermarket, or if they can go there every day. Maybe just a teensy-weensy drinks party with the neighbours. Perhaps if I go outside at night down to the beach and keep well away from others...
Many people have to go out. They still have a job. I feel for them.
There's a page which reports the daily stats for Spain, other countries and for the whole world. Today's stats (Friday 27th March) for Spain are 64,059 cases reported (are all cases reported? Probably not). So far, there have been 4,934 deaths, including today the 48-year-old head of the GAR (Spain's answer to the SWAT). So, evidently it is not just unfit elderly people who are at risk.
I'm lucky. I live in a house in the campo with stables and horses that need feeding. While the business is closed (it's a riding school) and there's no money coming in, and horse-feed is expensive, we were stockpiling before the crisis. Yes, while you've been hoarding toilet paper, we've been hoarding straw.
In our case, we are three. Me, my wife who is the expert on horses but is in a wheelchair, and her large strapping son who is 21 and gets to muck out the stalls. This means, in my case, around four hours a day lugging bales of this and sacks of that, plus watering all the 34 horses under our care - of which 33 of them are extremely dangerous (one of them trod on my foot yesterday) and the 34th is a week-old foal (but with a certain look in her eye...). Without lots of exercise, rather like those poor folk cooped up in a small apartment, horses get aggressive and bouncy. And me, I'm getting long in the tooth.
There's no one else to help because, you know, lockdown.
So, we don't go out, or at least we haven't so far. The chickens provide us with eggs and the bread-lady delivers (for how much longer?) two loaves every day. We have our own olive oil from last winter's crop and we have tomatoes and papaya. It could be worse.
The TV is on, and we watch as the Government makes a hash of things. We wonder if the other lot, the opposition, would have made a bigger cock-up; but with luck, we shall never know.
Try and get through this. Perhaps we will become better people following this terrible time.
Stay safe.