I used to be a Linesman

I’m obliged to balance my life around football this month – as if the last eight months had never happened. The endlessly televised sweep of a team of over-paid egoists regularly proving to the world that the best thing to do with your head is to beat a ball with it. It certainly beats learning something, even if it’s as ephemeral as the weather program on Channel 87. My associate on the paper is from Valencia, so we have had to close early over the winter and spring on the nights that his team was playing. Or carry on working I suppose at a kind of half-speed. In fact, close early and have a whisky with the Russian girls over the road. It has its positive side.
On football night, the whole town would be quiet, apart from the bellow of a million television screens and the occasional shriek from the viewers along the lines of ‘shoot the ref’ or ‘kill the tropical gentleman playing wing for the other team’. This being a loose translation, but one that, I hope, manages to maintain the sentiment.
Eventually, two things would be bound to happen. The first would be a dozen heavy explosions as Pedro, the town pyrotechnican, blasted skywards a few rockets substantial enough to have given Werner von Braun a flutter of pleasure, regardless of who won as long as somebody did (Werner’s sentiments exactly), and, secondly, the final whistle would invariably presage a great outpouring of voluble football fans into the streets, bars and knock-shops of the community.
But, with Barcelona apparently winning every cup ever cast, plated or pressed, with ‘their foreign team-maters’ beating ‘our foreign team mates’ (assuming you’re a Real Madrid, Valencia or Seville supporter), I had kind of assumed that the whole season was finally washed up for another year. Actually, another three months, but, even that’s a start.
It’s our own fault, of course. The game was invented by the English – apparently as an economical way of keeping warm. It was later introduced by the Scots (who had previously been prospecting in the hills and run out of porridge) into a small mining town in Murcia in the later part of the nineteenth century. In fact, the oldest footie pitch is still there. In Aguilas!
Spain’s most famous commentator is English. He’s called Michael Robinson and he used to play for Osasuna (who did rather well this year). If you know him and David Beckham (who he? – Ed) then you can usually get a drink or two out of it. Of course, if you know Ronaldihno, you might get a full dinner…
Now, to my recent surprise, the world cup has started. Trinidad and Tobago against Finland. Most unfair, Finland should have teamed up with Sweden and given them a good thrashing.
Catalonia wanted to field its own team – after all, in the Reino Unido we have Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, England and the Scilly Isles all fighting their corner, so why shouldn’t the really-jolly-nearly independent republic of Catalunia have its own chaps? Spain (or if you prefer – the lumpenspain) is in fact quite in favour of the idea, considering that any Catalonian player found in the Spanish team would probably score an own-goal just out of spite.When another country’s team plays, even if we couldn’t find it on a map, we roar with pleasure or rage. Pathetic. Personally, if Ethiopia beats Cyprus or not, I can truly claim not to care – as long as the office doesn’t close early again.

I was probably dreaming all along

Two pictures from last night.
The truth is, the first picture is posted here for the pleasure of a ‘statistically appreciable minority’ of those that visit this site – namely, myself.
Well, you are welcome to marvel at the picture (a rare portrait of your guide to this site, taken last night in a natural pose in, for some reason, the Almería bull ring, where, as you can see, I was not entirely alone). If there’s a point to this posting, it’s that you can always find something peculiar, interesting, remarkable or unforgettable if you tear yourself away from the television, the football and your English neighbours and go and try something different. That and… it’s best to take a camera.

No Spitting on the Bus

So, you can see what happens during the World Cup. Between the fans staying either at home, or at least in front of the TV set inside, together with the still far from calm weather (it's mid June and still snowing), there's not much action on the deck.

Today, a number of cars are supporting little flag-poles together with their national emblems stuck to their back windows as they motor past. Quite embarrassing for the ordinary folk - especially those who had carefully ordered one from Trinidad and Tobago. In retrospect, it's just as well that they arrived late at the post office...

Meanwhile, as an occasional shriek filters out from the bar inside - either a free kick or one of the Russian girls dropping a beer down the neck of a punter - the terrace is peaceful and calm.

Like the old days...

Medieval Market in Mojácar

It's a surprisingly overcast weekend, with some rain over Mojácar and lightening up in the hills beyond. This morning, the second day of the three-day Moors and Christians bash, I staggered and wheezed up the hill from the Campo de Fútbol - converted into a parking lot - to have a look at the medieval market and the street musicians.

Nevertheless, in my picture, the new Morales leasure centre and business emporium has stolen into centre-stage (that's the massive crane above the hulk). I'm told they've all got a small hallway each where they will soon be able to sell teeshirts and humorously shaped ashtrays to their heart's content.

The market is fun, with the vendors dressed up in sacks and selling plastic key-chain witches, oulde bed-side lamps and other memorablia from a byegone age. A rather good street-band hops past playing an old Malicorne number on whistles, bagpipes and drums. A Rumanian accordianist twitches into 'O Sole Mio' outside the Indalo to the faint horror of the tourists. Spare a shilling, Guv?

A Mojaquero decides to drive his car through the square and up to his eyrie. Outta the way, he honks at the tourists. It should be fun tonight.

A Trim Little Number in Yellow

The phone rang. One of the kids had been messing with the damn thing so I wasn’t immediately aware what was going on. The CD was belting out some fine blues and there was this thin weepy sound running below, just on this side of conscious. A mild arrhythmia over my heart finally helped me put it together – the damn mobile phone in my shirt was vibrating and… yes… actually crying to be answered.
Which was a relief in one sense, I’m not going to keel over the steering wheel with a cracked pump and disappear with the old banger over the cliff. At least, not today.
Talking on a mobile phone is illegal when you’re driving. Like many other agreeable activities which one can get up to behind the wheel, yes… many agreeable activities (dreams for a moment)… Whoa! I almost left the road there. Jeez – that was close.
So, since I don’t have a chauffer like the head of the traffic department, a political oaf called Pere Navarro, and therefore can’t answer the phone and plan my next piece of business; and, unlike Mr Navarro, who is concerned about the heady mixture of saving lives, pissing people off and furthering his brilliant career in the PSOE, I just want to sell another set of encyclopaedias… Shit! I'll have to pull off the road.
There’s a handy lip on our roads, called the arcén. That’s where you go when you need to stop the car and do something else. You don’t want to spend too long on the arcén as it can be quite dangerous, with truck drivers thundering past your narrow ledge of safety or perhaps, nodding off as the tachometer clicks into the red, they drive straight in, through and over you. The sod never even noticed.
Then, there’s the road-cops, los primos. The cousins.
You can’t loiter with your vehicle on the arcén unless you have your emergency lights on, are wearing a kind of psychedelic pyjama top and have placed your warning triangles both fifty metres before and behind.
Unless it’s a motor-bike. They haven’t figured out where you can carry the triangles yet.
If they show, the cops are going to want to see if you carry spare light bulbs, a driving licence and the rest of it – and they will be looking for illegal immigrants hiding under the spare wheel, traces of narcotics in the ashtray and an illegal radar trap apparatus stuffed down your jumper.
Pere Navarro has introduced the ‘points system’ now. You start with twelve on your licence and the police are under instruction to start the carving. Aggressively. They take any more and, shit, I’m walking home. It’s all right for Pere, he can always get another chauffer.
All this to answer the phone, which has stopped ringing by now anyway.
So, I pull the stupid yellow day-glo number on, over my head. The price tag is flapping on my chest so I wrench it off and (no one looking) throw the bloody thing into the undergrowth.
To the boot of the car to get the triangles. You need to carry two of them – one for ahead and the other for behind. They had better not blow over, the cops might think I just threw them onto the road in a petulant rage.
I take the first one up the road and pace out fifty metres, forty-nine, fifty. Then back to the car and repeat the same process the other way. I will have walked over a quarter of a kilometre by the time I'm through with this but, anyway, I’ve dumped the second warning sign on the ground here on the curve and I've brought the phone and am now gonna…
-Eh Oiga!
There’s some bloke up-road from me. He’s standing a hundred metres away, just by my front triangle. It trembles in the slight wind. –You wanna buy this thing off me, he shouts.
-You fuck the fuck off, bastard! A huge trailer rumbles past and the triangle, grateful for the distraction, is blown off the border and flitters down into the valley below.
I’ve picked at the phone now for the re-dial and am walking back to the car, one eye on the gypsy and the other out for the cops. I’ve got my surviving triangle tucked under my arm where it gently rips my pyjama top.
It was a wrong fucking number. But you knew that.

Los Moros y Cristianos

The Moors and Christians is a fine old traditional fiesta which dates all the way back to 1988 when somebody decided to dress up as a Moor – a north African warrior – and following this sartorial decision went on a three day bender in Mojácar, finally waking up in the holding cell of the Almería immigration Police where only a bent and slightly moist Spanish identity card stood between the hung-over celebrant and a one-way trip to Casablanca.
His shoe-prints can still be found on the inside back door of the Mojácar paddy-wagon, next to the dent caused by Peter Honey’s head as he engineered his daring escape on a steep hill approaching the Huercal Overa hospital after being taken, unconscious and just in time, from the gentlemen’s lavatory located, vaguely speaking, somewhere behind the Bar Indalo.
Times change, and now thousands of people will dress up as Moors (a sheet, a pair of slippers and a readily available ID card being the main features) or as Christians, where an all-weather suit, an orange tie, brogues and a trilby hat is the obligatory dress. It's theoretically the celebration of an agreement made over a glass of blackberry juice in 1488 by the local mayor (a Moor) and the leader of the besieging Christian forces who was anxious to carry on towards Granada (where you could get a decent beer).
The three-day jag ends on Sunday afternoon (June 11th) with an endless procession through the main square of our town and off, away down the hill to the awaiting busses below. Six well-represented guilds, in full and exquisite costume, will make the march-past, with a ambulatory band between each one to keep the peace and provide musical refreshment for those onlookers too foolish to have found shade and shelter in one of our agreeable if slightly over-priced bars. Although no tomatoes are thrown, no bulls are loosed and the paella has usually all gone by the time you’ve found a plastic plate and scraped it clean, the Moors and Christians is a festival that is certainly worth visiting.
Tell them I sent you.

One of those Concerned Citizen articles

This is a picture of a bit of road. Yes, yes - prize winning stuff. This portrait of a piece of the King's highway is just below the Mojácar fuente and is taken on the first bend going towards Turre. It's a highly travelled road, with the one-way traffic through the pueblo returning on this section, plus the through traffic going both ways. It's serpentine, narrow... and is heavily used by pedestrians who live in the barrio down below, or who are walking to and from the cemetery, preferably dressed in black. There's never been a side-walk here, but there used to be a kind of narrow way for walkers which, with the nice new metal traffic-guards, has now been made redundant.

Previously, you would merely fall to safety if a bus was coming up behind you or, at a pinch, you could tangle yourself with a cyclist panting up the rise in his purple acrylic outfit and silly hat. Now, to avoid the increasingly speedy and dense traffic, a pedestrian needs to be able to - hop - leap over the balustrade before dropping several metres to safety.

It's not that easy, says the town hall. The road belongs to the diputacíon - the county council. They won't consider a side-walk here (until somebody presumably kicks up a stink). However, the town could incorporate this stretch of road (it's within existing city limits) and create a pavement, probably at the cost of some minor expropriation.

Or, how about this. They could put up a 30kms speed sign...

The Cold Cut

I was in Pamplona last summer when I was suddenly taken short by an urge for a haircut. You know how it is – by this time of life, you are not too keen on being wrapped in a sheet and seated in front of a huge mirror for twenty minutes contemplating your fallen chin while a flunky clips away at your head, but, on the other hand, you’ve just broken (or mislaid) your comb.
The somewhat gabby hairdresser lady established that I was a tourist, had once ‘run the bulls’ (madness!), loved to eat fish à la Navarro and pointed out that there was nothing like a trip to the ‘pelu’, the hairdresser, to pass some time. She motioned to Brad Pitt on the wall behind her and we agreed that, yes, I’d like to look exactly like him.
I had a ‘Number Four’. An electric clipper thing with a bit extra on the top (in case a future barber or member of Brad Pitt’s family reads this).
There’s a lady in Mojacar who seems OK. She looks like Lisa Minelli. She runs a hairdresser just downstairs from the office. I sometimes belch, break wind, sneeze, hoot or yap as I pass her office. It’s nothing personal, it’s just next door to a popular bar. Sometimes I inadvertently surprise her as I groan from a cold beer or snort from some minor blockage caused by a shrimp. It has occurred to me to be embarrassed by these small yet regular dramas, but I reckon it’s her move first.
Lisa once cut my hair, in the days before I knew about choosing a number for my grooming pleasure – now that I come to think of it, a convenience similar to dining at the Chinese (Numbah Foll - and easy on the MSG).
Normally though, I go over the way to this gloomy fellow called Pedro. The idea will come to me (must cut hair) as I pass his shop and, if it’s empty and Pedro is evidently immersed in his newspaper, I’ll go in.
Numero Cuatro I told him today. Easy on the top.
Walking back to the office, surrounded by flies attracted, I suspect, to the hair-gel that Pedro has slapped onto my head, I was visited by a violent sneeze. The kind that shrieks. Yaaahhh!
Just at that moment, as a bullet of snot ricocheted across the empty walkway, I saw a startled looking Lisa Minelli having a smoke on the terrace. I’m not sure, but I don’t think she was very impressed.

El Corte Inglés

Spain’s only surviving mega department store has now got all permissions to start work on its latest shopping experience, the El Ejido Corte Inglés. The store will be four stories high (according to the plans) and will have a 7,500m2 supermarket as the ground floor. So adiós to Miguelito’s corner sweetie-shop.
The Corte Inglés used to have a competitor, Galerias Preciados, but this was owned by a rather nasty enemy of the first PSOE government after Franco kicked off, and Felipe Gonzalez’ government simply… expropriated it. There’s a rather full exposé of the giant shop at http://www.nodo50.org/elotropais/n3/corte.htm if you're interested.
It includes this quote from the president and main shareholder, Isidro Álvarez, "no hay quien pueda con nosotros" (‘no one can beat us’).
The chain eschews advertising in the foreign language press (except the Diario Del Sur’s ‘Sur in English’) and, is the kind of shop that, this reporter at least, tends to go to as little as possible, usually making a U-turn just after entry.
Practically every city in Spain has at least one Corte Inglés and Almería is quite put out that the province’s second city should have stolen the march to become the first one in this hitherto rather forgotten province (Almería City still hopes for its own outlet).
The last one built that I know of is the one in Pamplona’s old-town. This particular one is nine stories high and is executed, for some ghastly architectural reason, in grey iron chapa. ‘Hideous’ is an understatement.
The department store is a kind of Bourgeois status symbol, with millions of Spaniards going about visibly holding their iconic shopping bags with the green triangles on it (even if they contain produce from other cheaper commerces).
The great debate about El Corte Inglés - or for that matter WallMart, is whether a super-store like this adds convenience to the shopper or whether it freezes out the small commerce ‘down-town’. Like anywhere else, it’s a debate where the Shilling decides.

Blimey!

I had to meet some people in a hotel on Mojácar beach, the Marina Playa. Which is full - judging by the number of cars surrounding it. The town hall, which had forgotten about the necessity of a good parking lot, having ploughed up the grass park in front of the hotel a year or two back...
Anyhow, after I found my friends, we went to the bar which used to be called 'The Drowsy Duck' and is now, I think, called 'The Irish Bar'. Very atmospheric.
And quite large, at least 200 metres worth of merryness. The ceiling, as you may see, is decorated entirely by newspapers. The whole lot, and this is the unnerving bit, by old 'Entertainers'.
Now, like anyone in the free-newspaper business (that's quite a chunk of people these days), I don't like to see hard worked and well-produced copies of my newspaper doing service as wrapping paper, floor driers, or blocking out shop windows or perhaps sitting in out-of-date piles somewhere. It's not really why we bothered, don't you see?
The 'Irish Bar' papers on closer inspection date from the time when... (*the rest of this article has been removed by an injunction from the Vera Court).

Whining

This is the season for mosquitoes. Around here, they fly around in large and voracious clouds that are said to be able to drain a person dry in under five minutes. The sound of their trillion wings beating is like a distant Japanese motorcycle race where the really frightening part, rather like the doodlebugs sent by the Germans over London in 1944, is when the sound stops.
The mosquito, male, is a dull kind of fly that sips nectar all day long at some flower with its legs crossed and smoking a cigarette, come to think of it, rather like the rest of us. Only we put gin in ours. It’s the female that causes the trouble.
Which just goes to show, once you wrench the fur off, how similar to each other all of The Earth’s many species are.
The female will land apologetically onto an exposed piece of flesh and inject a portion of saliva into the bite, a tonic that causes a moment’s anaesthesia, followed by a quarter of an hour of itching. She needs your blood to nourish her fertilised eggs. You need the saliva to catch Malaria and Dengis Fever. The mosquito considers the operation a fair trade.
Our mosquitoes are well-fed and voracious. Yet, despite their weight, they can still fly. They may need to take a run at it, wings flapping furiously, their cargo of blood churning and slopping around in their stomachs, but they can usually take off in the space of a few feet. However, there is a second variety which breeds in the giant un-drained swamps of Garrucha and Pueblo Laguna. Here, the insects are so heavy from generations of over-feeding, their wings have atrophied and these creatures have in fact lost the power of flight. They are about the size of a squash ball and are obliged to gallop across the land in the search for any exposed ankle. When fully refreshed, they can be easily, if messily, dispatched.
Our own observation is that neither mosquito pellets nor spray slows them down much, or, at least, we note that they can get in a few bites before they die. Sometimes they do both simultaneously, which can cause embarrassment to both parties. The only alternative to becoming an involuntary intra-species blood donor is to close the window at night (which has the added advantage of closing out the sound of those who don’t have to get up in the morning). The drawback to this is that it’s getting very hot now… very hot… ver…

The Birdies

I bought Barbara four of these 'Love Birds' when we were courting way back when. They were such a success that we built an aviary for them, with lots of nesting boxes. They bred with such unabashed enthusism that the aviary was soon filled up with these inseperables. Eventually, we cut a narrow tube in the roof so they could stroll out into the wider world, without anything being able to get in - short of an ocasional sparrow. I now have once or twice a season sparrow hunts with a butterfly net.
The Love Birds appear to keep their inside numbers at around eighty, with various more living outside.
I feed them on a basic mixture of all-seed ('mijo') and sunflower seed ('pipa') with the odd bit of bread or celery thrown in. They are happy to nest (if they have a small-entrance box) and will put bits of appropriate nesting material - such as spikes from the ferns and palms - which they carry tucked into their back or tail feathers. I put in clumps of palm leaves occasionally which they happily take to pieces. A friend built what could only be described as council-boxes... about forty of them in two rows hung on the wall.
The weather is right for them here. A birdie expert from the UK drops by our house on his annual visit to Mojacar in the summer and invariably marvels how they breed so well. He says that he has to put little heaters into their nesting boxes back home...

I was at an exhibition this evening at the Monte Paul Beckett, a galery down in the valley near my house. The paintings were by an artist staying at the Fundación Valparaiso, an art centre just a bit further down the lane.
These events are usually fun as I get to see some of the 'old timers' who I knew in the 'sixties, 'seventies and so on. One chap came up and said '¿me conoces?' and it was the British Honorary Council from Almería from those far off times, Gaspar Cuenca. A pleasure to see him and to remember some of the old stories. Gaspar partnered up with 'Cheap Pete' and opened an antique shop in Almería in the mid seventies until Pete ('Pedro Barato' - he built El Palacio in Mojácar) dropped dead after winning a Royal Flush in a poker game.
I gave Beatrice Beckett, the widow from Paul and owner of the art gallery, a cartoon of her drawn by Win Wells in 1982. That's Win and Silvio (Narizzano')s house, the Moño Alto, in the middle of the picture.
It's always fun meeting the art set at these functions. Sometimes they even look at the pictures... 

Something Different

It must be getting harder to come up with a new cuisine around here. We are spoilt for choice. We have Spanish restaurants, British, French, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Argentinean, Columbian and Thai restaurants. We have German. There are a number of Dutch places. We have nouvelle, hunt and fish restaurants. Beach-bar grub. Pizzas and burgers. There’s a Donner Kebab. We shall sooner or later even have both the Colonel and Ronald Macdonald, lucky us, probably situated behind Garrucha. We have tapa bars and bocaterias (submarine sandwiches). You can dine on Tex-mex or munch on paella. There’s still room here, I grant you, for both a Greek and a Suchi restaurant. In fact, and here’s a suggestion, you could even combine the two.
Not bad. In the old days, we just had chicken knuckles, lamb lumps, crotch-meat and sardines. All that at fifty cents a head with a bottle of wine thrown in for good measure.
Sometimes even a full one.
I was thinking that there is space here, however, for a really good off-world diner. Besides Dibbler’s rat-on-a-stick and the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, it’s a hard fact that the world is remarkably thin on decent alien eateries.
I imagine being served something colourful (tastes like chicken) by a waiter with an over-indulgence of fingers. Perhaps a decanter of (tastes like wine) darfle-grog. Pictures of the Planet Clunk would decorate the walls while squirty-music played. Perhaps my friends would come and throw bits of clump at each other.
So, it’s just a suggestion, but it could play well to the gallery, don’t you think?
Good Lord no. I haven’t had a drink all day.
Not even a darfle-grog.

The View in late April

Further to remarks made the other day, here is the village of Mojacar taken from somewhere below. Apart from the crane which currently dominates the scene, the notorious multi-storey car parking has been initially approved to go in front and below the bit there in the middle (an old multi-storey car park now doing duty as a tourist office and a cookery school). The town may well improve as a result of this service, if designed with some respect towards the surroundings. Time will tell.
The problem at the moment is that the Junta de Andalucía is most unlikely to approve this parking building (700 cars, offices, shops and the inevitable hotel) until the PGOU, the General Plan, is approved. 

Our Pueblo - Love it (or Trash it)

The pueblo of Mojácar is a symbol; it’s the reason that many of us came to live here. The playas are very ordinary, the surrounding towns are, generally, rather grim and the services are decidedly second-rate. But, no matter, the pueblo is a metaphor for our freedom of life-style, our courage to leave wherever-we-came-from and our galloping Bohemianism.

It’s a pretty village, with narrow streets and amazing views. Over the years, it has maintained its number of inhabitants – at around 300 – while the buildings have been converted into tee-shirt emporia, humorous ash-tray shops, bars (there are over fifty) or building sites. One such site, in the Plaza Nueva, has got around the two storey limit by ignoring it. Its ground floor alone is two stories high (higher than the Jamon Jamon building to its left) then there are two additional stories. Against the law? Fuck the law. Against good taste and aesthetics? Faggot talk! Against your own town’s interests? Screw you, it’s our town to do as we please.

The ayuntamiento has hired some chap to come along and, I suppose, beautify the pueblo. So far, this means knocking out the old square below the church (la Plaza de Parterre) in favour of some marble folderol with lots of Indalitos (too late, another mayor, Bartolo, flogged off the Indalo to the provincial government in 1987). Another job is to turn the rock garden next to the hideous ice-cream shop (now a late-nite bar) on the left as you reach the Plaza Nueva, into a rubble garden approached by a staircase made from chapa, from pressed pig-iron. Neat!

Mojacar pueblo is no stranger to philistinism. The Plaza Nueva used to have two arches off it, leading into the ‘medina’ or narrow back-streets. Pretty. They were knocked out by a Frenchman in around 1974 who built the horrible three storey nick-nack shop now called Angela’s. The beautiful theatre was knocked down in the mid-eighties to build some tee shirt emporia (the residents of the pueblo buy them by the kilo). The Fuente and the Castillo were both thoroughly trashed in the mid eighties as well. The Arco de Luciana was knocked down in 1997 and the next mayor actually got into office on the promise to rebuild it. Which he didn’t.

With almost no parking as another deterrent, together with the noise from the fifty bars, the ambitious illumination, the piss smelling streets, the graffiti and the lack of shops (another tee-shirt, Señor?), few people live in the village and many of those who live in the surroundings, while being fond of Mojácar pueblo, find justification easily enough for not visiting.

Sitting out Easter from my terrace

Easter is the time when the heavy drums are brought out from dusty store-rooms, tra-boom... tra-boom…, together with the figures of pale-looking Christs taken from their normal roosts behind the church altars. Christ suffering dreadfully on the cross, now equally fraught on the shoulders of the Carpenter’s sons. Perhaps la virgen follows behind, a large painted figure on a wooden plinth, with a purple mantle and, currently, a slightly bilious expression. She is carried, creaking gently, by six or eight devotees. Tra-boom… tra-boom…

The cadres of the faithful will be dressed in their sinister hoods and gowns as the whole procession lurches, stops and starts down the streets and through the crowds. The onlookers genuflect, perhaps for the first time in a twelvemonth and they pinch out their cigarettes as the figures pass.

In our pueblo, there’s not many people in the crowd and, tourist office excepted, not much enthusiasm from the participants either. Easter may be the main fiesta in the religious calendar, but it’s just an excuse for a few days on the costa and in the disco-pubs for most of the population. Some fifteen million people have left the cities for a few days off work, a chance for a ligue or a borrachera: an affair or a piss-up. Perhaps the faithful have gone to Sevilla; here they’ve come for the party.

The beach is full of visitors (no self-respecting local will go near the water until September) and the street that fronts Mojácar playa is nose-to-tail crammed with cars. I once ran an Easter picture on the front page of the paper. It was a pen and ink drawing by an artist called Ampudia in dramatic black slash. A picture of three crosses on a hill standing at slight angles to each other. Below, girls are sunbathing.

The bars, the restaurants and most of the souvenir shops are open on Easter Friday, even if the estate agents, mechanics and supermarkets have closed for the day. Certainly the gas station, with lead-free now at 1.16€, is doing wonderful business. You can pick up a box of chocolates, a bottle of whisky, some french letters or, of course, a sex-video while you are there. For some reason, they don’t sell cigarettes any more. It’s probably a moral thing.

As the sun sets over the pueblo, a brass band stutters enthusiastically through a mixture of Souza, pasodobles and sacred music as the volume in Mojácar’s six hundred bars swells and roars. The children in their flamenco suits gallop through the crowds, shrieking. There’ll be some thunder-flashes let off later. One way or another, we’ll stay up until dawn.

Trains

Apparently there's a speeding ticket waiting for me at home. I can't imagine why, since the car won't get over a hundred klix unless there's a high wind coming from behind.
The DGT, the traffic agency, has been accused of placing speed-cameras in easy, straight and non- dangerous bits of the nation's highways as 'recaudatorias' or cash generators. They are sometimes hidden on those rather useless panels with soviet-style messages ('don't drink and drive') which are beginning to decorate the motorways.
So, with petrol going up, parking prices through the roof, speeding tickets clattering through the post-box and nitwits scratching messages in your paintwork, it's easier these days to take the train. Murcia to Madrid is about four hours. You can read your book or wander about in a train, and although they won't let you smoke or open a window, you can a least sip on a beer in the calaboose.
I shall be taking one later today in the loose direction of home. First I must buy a book.

The Entertainer. A couple of bits

Twenty One
We were sat around the pool drinking wine or beer. The band was setting up in the corner. One of the rockers, known as The Fat Man, held out a copy of his new newspaper, The Entertainer. A Spanish journalist friend looked it over with surprise. 'You've got the adverts at the top of the page', he said, 'they're meant to go at the bottom!'
Mike (as he understandably prefered) said that he had wanted to start a radio, but the police chief had explained to him (through my wife who was interpreting) that the 'Ley de Fraga' stated that foreigners weren't allowed to own a radio station. How about a newspaper instead?
The first edition was a scissor, kitchen table and shorthand affair, put into final form at the printers in Almería. It was to be a weekly, it needed funding. It was April 4th 1985.

A few people were going to make a fortune out of it (if not the one who put a fortune into it).

Twenty one years later, the name survives in various not always wholesome forms.


*The rest of this article has been removed to comply with a court injunction

A Small Trip in Time

El Oasys Parque temático del Desierto de Tabernas

I’ve got this new car. I say ‘new’ in the sense that I have recently acquired it rather than ‘brand new’ as with heated seats, airbags and a television on the dashboard. It’s a huge old white Mercedes diesel that takes several minutes to get up to speed, a bit like a boat. I imagine howling down a speaking tube to the engineers down below ‘full speed ahead – there’s a straight bit coming!’…
The other day I steered it to Mini Hollywood past Tabernas to see the recent additions to the zoo there.
The zoo is a generous 25 hectares of cages, runs and paddocks which backs onto the Mini Hollywood cowboy town, knees-up can can show and hangman’s rope. All coming highly recommended by this reporter.
We (there were three of us in my party) were met at the gate by the company biologist. I entertained him with my plans to seed the surrounding hills with wallabies to encourage tourism. You should try saying ‘wallaby’ in Spanish, by the way. He seemed a little out of his depth as I droned on about the empty space and lack of biodiversity. ‘But there’s over eighty autochthonous species in the park,’ he argued. Boring ones, I pointed out.
We passed through the gates and allowed an eager photographer to take my likeness in a cowboy hat and pistola (picture ready at exit) and carried on through the intriguing looking cowboy film-set cum Clint Eastwood memorial park, past a very surprised looking ornamental Indian wedged in a window and into the zoological garden, called the Oasys.
We had been invited to see the improvements on the reptile house, which is a large single-storey building with snakes, lizards, terrapins and crocs in large and well-decorated tanks (with no smells), good lighting, interesting displays and surprisingly frisky inmates. The hall appears to be the work of Dr Herman Schleich, a herpetologist, explorer and writer. He has spent many years in such odd places as Cabo Verde and Nepal and now lives in Tabernas, no doubt with a pet chameleon clinging to his shoulder when at home. He has done a fine job of the display.
We moved on to larger things, including a superb and dramatic stadium full of tigers. A guide holding a crib-sheet followed us around: she confessed to me that she preferred cats to snakes. We continued past marmosets, parrots, porcupines, prairie dogs, past the bar-restaurant, past the macaws, duck, pheasant, lynx and panther to another new enclosure, where the bears live.
The park is massive and the backdrop to the whole thing is, of course, the Tabernas desert. The whole effect is most dramatic.
Waiting beside the bear-pens and the deep valley below them was a train-wagon waiting to take us slowly off to the larger animals, including two lumbering hippos, a clutch of camels (of both persuasions), some wolves and a variety of deer who looked, on the whole, pleased to be behind a different fence. They have secretary birds and buffalo. Giraffe and wildebeest.
As we chugged slowly past, the clouds came to a rare decision and it began to rain, which is always an agreeable yet novel phenomenon in the desert. The hippos looked faintly pleased and the giraffe tutted and went inside.
We continued on foot back towards the spiritual centre of the zoo (I think I had already mentioned the bar?) and helped ourselves to some refreshments. A magnificent male peacock watched from a nearby wall.
From here, we repaired to the snake-shed for another look (via the bat-cave and a room devoted to animals tracks). I noticed on this second visit that there was a model head of a Tyrannosaurus Rex (I’m generally quite observant that way) and a collection of fossilised lizards, crocodile and froggy toys, African and Asian denizens of the forest and desert floor rendered in wood, and several books on show from the pen of Dr Schleich.
The rain had stopped and we had been in the park for several hours. A bit wet but thoroughly satisfied. It was time to leave. The way out of the zoo takes you past a huge and little-visited cactus garden with perhaps as many as two hundred and fifty varieties collected from all over the warmer bits of the world. Some are in flower now, producing blooms which are rarely seen.

El Fraile
From here, you are in the alley behind the cowboy town of El Fraile, which you will suffer a strong sense of déjà vu. As far as I know, and the museum of posters and projectors will back me up here, if it wasn’t shot in Tabernas, it wasn’t a spaghetti western. The museum, we’ve crossed the main plaza by now (without getting shot at by some loitering desperadoes) is crammed with posters of The Greats. I shall mention my own favourites here (sorry, Clint): Anthony Steffen, Giuliano Gemma, Lee Van Cleef, Bud Spenser and Terence Hill. Marvellous, and, with the exception of Van Cleef, all Italians. Music from the greatest Italian composer of them all, Ennio Morricone, echoes from gigantic speakers disguised in the roof; that dramatic piece with the single chord - just as it did in a Fistful of Dollars: dum di di dum di… dum di di dum. People are outside in the plaza, gathering…

And then the Hero, upon being given a four-barrelled shotgun in The Stranger Returns, quips, "Old man, there'll be hell raised in the village tonight,"


El Oasys is just to the west of Tabernas. Coming from Vera, take the motorway towards Almería and turn off towards Sorbas. Taberenas is the next town (the old N430 to Almería) and the park, still remembered as ‘Mini Hollywood’, is on the right, a few kilometres past Tabernas.