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

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

It was a wonder that nothing was spilled. 

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

Or was it the left?

After that experience, my dad stuck to Citroëns. 

And beer from the supermarket in cans.

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

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

Thus nothing more was said.

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

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

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

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

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

One Day, Somebody will Publish These Essays as a Book

I've been fixing some of my favourite stories and have posted them here. One day, maybe somebody will publish these things as a book. Judging by those volumes that friends have completed along the way, sales won't be brisk. One book co-authored by my late wife Barbara, along with a riding instructress and a physiotherapist, had such a small run, maybe ten copies, that one day a great-grandchild of mine will become wealthy from selling the last existing copy at Bonhams.

Selling books is about marketing. The publisher wants the author to agree to a minimum of three books, and also to give a talk or two, and a few book-signings.

But who cares. I write these things because they are fun, and maybe readers can learn a bit about Spain as they thunder through the collected works of L Napier, your servant. 

The Morning Bracer Sets One up For the Day

I won't say that I started the year with a glass of tequila, mainly because I was in bed by half-past nine. Age takes its toll. Breakfast will come around in due course, and maybe I'll have a rare Bloody Mary to set me up instead of my usual glass of warm goat's milk. 

The more seasoned workers out here in the Spanish shires like to start their day with a bracer, to help them get going until the whistle goes for their merienda, sometime around eleven. Now a morning nip in Spain could mean a brandy or an anís (or indeed a fiery mixture of the two called a sol y sombra) but taking that as a regular morning wake-up will eventually rot your liver with the consequence that your retirement years chewing a pizzle-stick while looking tolerably wise will be all the shorter. 

The answer (if you are a drinker, that is) would be to  pour some hot black coffee over the hootch - hey presto: ¡un carajillo! Whether it's un brandy (we aren't allowed to say 'coñac' any more) or something from the cut-glass aniseed bottle with a picture of a monkey on it. 

Of course, the unconventional will order something less known, maybe a ponche (a late friend of mine thought it was the the fountain of youth and would switch to it, he said, when the brandy was paining him). Ponche, it comes in a silvered bottle, is pretty good stuff. It's a sort of sweet-orange syrupy little number. 

Huh, I just got corrected by Google (or, in this case, Gargle) who says  'The genuine Spanish ponche is made with five top-quality natural products that come from different parts of the planet: the skin of the best Andalusian oranges, cinnamon collected in Sri Lanka, vanilla from Mexico, cloves from Madagascar and nutmeg from the Moluccas Islands'. Geez, it certainly makes Sloe Gin look a bit foolish.

Yesterday, I was in the local bar having my morning half a toasted pan de hoy soaked with tomato and olive oil ('un medio con tomate') and a coffee, when the fellow next to me surprised me with his order. It was a glass half-filled with crema de menta, topped up with warm milk and a spoonful of sugar. After he had tottered out back into the inclemence of the January sunshine, I asked the old girl behind the bar whether she sold many of those. She said, that no, but that he was a retired Guardia Civil, and he evidently liked the colour. 

There's a popular kiosk in downtown Almería, near where I live, which serves a breakfast drink called un americano. This rare beverage is a leche manchada - a milky-white coffee - with a shot of dyed Licor de Kola (a strange Valencian alcohol based on the African kola-nut which is said to be brewed by the true inventors of Coca Cola). Served with a twist of lemon, some vegetable dye and a sprinkle of cinnamon. The bad news is that the kiosk has been bought by a teetotal Saudi who is planning on trimming the morning menu, leaving any ambitious Almerían cafetero with an interesting opportunity. 

For those who won't go with coffee, but want to keep their drinking civilized, one could not do better than to emulate my friend Manolo, who always takes un tewe - a tea with whisky.  If he were Scottish, I suppose he'd be pouring it into his porridge. Hell, I personally don't say no to a tot of Cap'n Jack poured on my ice-cream.  

And so, we return by a roundabout route to the Bloody Mary. The secret of which, and don't tell anyone I told you, is a surreptitious squirt of dry sherry into the shaker. 

Thus the day takes of a joyous and propitious view, whether it's to work, relax, write, or recall criminals apprehended or otherwise. A simple libation before the serious business of surviving until the cocktail hour.  

Whatever Happened to The Schrödingers?

 I suppose we all know where we stand when we come from the same village. We went to school together, grew up together, had the same football team, priest and accent. We slept with each others sisters (or attempted to) and then, By Gum, we married 'em. 

As we got older we worked the fields together, or opened a bar, or tearfully waved our hankies as one of us went off to Germany to seek his fortune. We bought a television and laughed at the same show; we got older still, sold an old farmhouse to an English family; and finally we died. Our companions went to the mass to see us off and that was that. If somebody remembers to pay for it, there'll be a photograph of us with our donkey or maybe our taxi glued to the funeral stone in the cemetery. 

Now, the extranjeros of course are different. We all came from somewhere else and mostly never knew anyone before we met up here. We could even, if we wished, rewrite bits of our past - not that any true expat would ever ask, or at least, listen to our story. There can, after all, be only so-many generals on the retired list. 

We are older, too. If the average villager is 37, then we are some twenty years their senior, and with poor dietary decisions and too much booze, we will quickly shoot to the top of the queue on the village Sick List. 

The cemetery that serves the village where I live, in a country not my own, is full of fellow Brits. Some of them have bits of English-as-she-is-wrote on the stones, things like 'My Hisband Bernie' and 'We Shall Met Again'. It doesn't matter so much, until you find that they've carved the marble to remember 'Brian' for eternity as 'Brain'. 

One thing though, we know what happened to the villagers, as well as to Bernie, Brain and the rest of us. All except for those who, for one reason or another, disappeared out of our routines. Some were the life and soul of the party, then abruptly went back to Where-ever-it-was that they came from, leaving behind them little more than some memories and a modest bar-bill. Somebody else, of course, quickly took their place.

And we wondered, as we went through the old photographs, what ever happened to Bertha and John, or Gitte, or the drunken Mrs Porridge? 

I suppose that it has become easier, in certain cases, with social media - I learned today of one poor chap who spent time here in our village in Spain and died this weekend in London of some horrible disease. But what of Erna who was a dancer and could still do the splits at eighty? She had come to us 'in her liddle car', because she said, she was heading for Austria but couldn't find the reverse gear. Some family was eventually dispatched from Copenhagen to take her home. But then what became of her...? 

The question is this: can you mourn someone when you don't know if they are dead? 

Now and again, a box arrives with the ashes of someone, who, last time you saw them, was singing something blue in the café down past the bank. He'd gone back to his country (he never did trust foreign doctors), no doubt was attended to by a doctor with a suspicious accent in his own national health service, and - well, the long and short of it - he wanted his ashes to be scattered in Spain. Anyway, the customs have him now and I wonder - does anyone have a spare fifty euros?

Olive Weekend

I had spent Thursday and Friday with my daughter and family, who live an hour down the motorway, celebrating first Thanksgiving (where one eats too much) followed the next day by my birthday (where one’s interests traditionally turn to drink). Coming into the weekend, and now safely home, I found myself in bed feeling dopey and with a lungy cough. My goodness! With fears of Covid, no one came close to see how I was doing. The best I got was a brief call from below. ‘You all right up there?’ 

They probably thought I was in the final agony of the virus and that their next sight of me would be a gloomy corpse staggering down the stairs and shouting 'brains!' 

Luckily I slept most of the time and had practically nothing to drink or eat except for a box of chocolates I had been planning to give to someone for Christmas.

There was no high-temperature as far as I could tell, but I suffered from lethargy and while not sleeping or dozing, I found reading to be too much of a bother.

I’ve had all my shots: corona and ’flu, so it could have been anything. In the old days, they’d have called it a ‘dreaded lurgy’.

By an agreeable coincidence, I missed the three days of intensive olive-picking down on the farm and, as I was house-bound on Tuesday, I also didn’t have to lug them down to the almazara for them to be turned into oil.

Think of it as a belated birthday present.

                                Just kidding, they got me on the second harvest. 😀

 

Brexpat Day

It’s time that those of us who are British by birth (or passport) and have the good fortune to live in Spain, with papers allowing us to stay, wounded perhaps peripherally by Brexit (we suddenly went from second-class citizens of Spain to third class-residents of Europe, with the appropriate strictures that have been thrust upon us), should celebrate.

The tourist season (why do they call it that, if one is not allowed to shoot them?) is over for another six months or so, and we have the cooling beaches and emptied restaurants to ourselves. We need no longer need to queue to get into the health clinics and the bar-staff will once again greet us enthusiastically by name and, if there’s a karaoke, will even let us sing ‘My Way’ twice in a single evening.

Many of our brothers have fallen by the wayside in this heroic struggle between Europe and Stupidity. Those without the correct paperwork must now resign themselves to shortened visits to Shangri-La to avoid the British winter, and even entertain the possibility of having to sell their villa to a German or (irony alert), a Pole.

Other Brits have found that imports from the UK are a disaster, with even a Christmas card taking several weeks and being steamed open by the zealous Spanish aduana, before charging the mortified recipient a fortune for the time wasted.

We can’t vote in European elections any more, but then, which Spanish candidate ever did anything in Brussels – or elsewhere else for that matter - for the expats?

So, battered and bruised yet oddly triumphant, we British expats can now celebrate being able to stay here without many bothersome issues to worry us. We may not be immigrants (how many of us have taken out Spanish nationality?), yet we have – in our muddling way – won the ring.

There is, as any Spaniard will tell you, no time like the present, so I suggest that we invite the skeleton crew over from the British Government in Exile (it’s in the apartment upstairs from the English library), because Thursday, (Thanksgiving Day for the Americans) is upon us, and anyway, I’ve already ordered the turkey.

From this year onward, we who survived the horrors of Brexit must never forget: Brexpat Day – turkey, baked beans and a nice cup of tea.

Won’t you join us?

 

Taking a Few Steps

I was reading one of those noble and irritatingly pious posts that often seem to pop up on Facebook, tenderly placed there by someone who, while short on original ideas, nevertheless feels the urge to receive a small number of 'likes' each morning with his breakfast cereal.

The subject was the number of steps one should profitably make during one's day to ward off heart-attacks, gout and boils on the ankles. This number, says those who know, is 8,000. Eight thousand steps, count 'em: one, two, three... and continue. 

I have a cheap mobile phone among my possessions. It has a direct link to Facebook so that I too can post those occasional inconsequentialities that catch one's attention, along with the kitty pictures.  The phone is of the Chinese persuasion (and none the worse for that) and it comes with a number of useless apps, like a direct link to Amazon (for Goodness' sake) and an alarm clock.

It also has a tiny bean-counter within, which counts the number of steps I make daily, saving me the trouble of doing so myself. It errs on the side of caution and reckons I need to manage at least ten thousand shuffles during my active hours rather than the eight thousand recommended by American doctors, or perhaps it's just that the orientals take shorter steps. 

In reality, while this is useful information indeed - after all, one doesn't want to keel over while one is raiding the fridge - this service only works when the phone is nestling in one's pocket. 

I have found myself more than once walking back to the house to get the phone - not because someone might be calling (I'm retired, and no one calls me any more) - but to allow it to rejoin the count. Plus the steps it evidently missed.

Now, with time on my hands and an empty day to face, it's a wonder indeed that I generally clock up as much as 16,000 paces. My empty day begins as the day-light begins to arrive through the bedroom window (which is why I don't need an alarm clock). I have learned to ignore most of the farm animals, who start their early morning bellow round about 4am, just as I am settling back into bed after the second nocturnal trip to the lavatory. But the dog gets going at dawn, with an endless series of high-pitched yips. She is locked in with the horses and she also needs a pee.

Since I'm soon there - it's around 200 paces away - I also water the horses (there are 35 of them), feed the chickens, the rabbit and the ducks. Then I help Alicia with the feed, the repairs and the usual chores of an active stables. Horses drink a lot, and so I must fill their buckets three times a day.    

The phone doesn't care how I get my paces done. I thought that I could perhaps put the phone into a saddle-pocket and let the students pattering around the ring all day help put my score up to stratospheric levels, which could impress the lower echelons of the Chinese Secret Service as they closely monitor my activities through the ether. I could be increasing my count while sitting in the kitchen and eating a sandwich.

Of course, I'm fooling no one but myself with these inventions. I think I'll take the dog (and the phone) and walk into the pueblo and have a beer and a tapa, maybe see how I'm doing. 

Sober, for a Month

'Being sober on a bus is, like, totally different than being drunk on a bus'.
Ozzy Osbourne

I haven't had a drink since last September, well, this September if you want to split hairs. Because you see, it's the ghastly month of Sober October once again. I am sitting here wondering if a cerveza sin alcohol counts against the rule of zero booze! It may do, so I stick instead to a soft lemony drink from Lidl that I call Sucedáneo de Acuarius. 

In its favour, it's cheap. 

There's a jar of smoked herring in the fridge, the rollmops that the Norwegians do so well. I found it in the local shop yesterday and brought it home. But how do you have a rollmop-session without vodka? Huh?  A glass of goat's milk just doesn't cut it.

Sober October is an excuse to give the liver a rest. I once managed a whole year off the booze, following an attack of jaundice in Guatemala. The local curandero told me to keep away from the grog if I didn't want to keel over, so there it was. In those days, I could always smoke weed to keep me going, but I gave that up, along with terbaccy, much to the relief of my tubes, these many years ago. 

A WhatsApp friend has sent me an article which says that,despite the assurances of Spain's best and brightest advertising executives, booze - even in small quantities - is bad for you. Taking a glass of wine with your pork chop will not help your heart manage to keep the beat. But, can you cook with wine, does that count? How about a custard trifle with a spot of sherry in the jelly? No? I thought not. Not that I intend to stay on the wagon a moment past Halloween. I have a hankering for a real beer or two.

My parents, along with most of the foreign population of Mojácar back in the 'early days' (before it became bourgeois), were heavy drinkers - brandy for breakfast types. They all died young: inebriated and cheerful, and leaving a sizable bar bill between them. This experience kept me generally wary of the hard stuff, and I rarely drink anything strong (rollmops and vodka excepted). 

Perhaps the new campaigns on the TV for low-alcohol whisky and gin are aimed at people like me. Have you seen them? Drink Beefeater 20%, it'll make you feel good. The advert is legal because - apparently - there's a strength limit on advertising booze. Of course, the advert is to persuade people to drink the proper stuff, not the gnat's-piss version. It's a bit like non-alcoholic beer - what's the fun in that?  

I have a count-down next to the bed. Every day I cross off another number on the calendar, working my way slowly down. Will I have lost any weight after a month on the soda-pop? I shall let you know.

...

Somebody commented on this elsewhere:  'Interesting, although I always go by the mantra "if you give up booze, it doesn't make you live longer, it just seems like it"'