A Small Problem With Bugs

One exhausted Swallow arrived today from Africa and perched on a pole near our gate. It may be just the first of what appears to be rather a late arrival by the rest of the Gang, or perhaps - things being what they are - the only one that made it across the Mediterranean without ending up as pot luck somewhere.
At any rate, there's no rest for the wicked, and there are a whole lot of mosquitoes - three different varieties of them - to feast upon. So, Little Swallow, get off your feathered backside and get busy.
We are being eaten to death!

Roads, in a Roundabout Way

What fun it must be to design a roundabout. Sometimes they are located in the middle of a road, with other roads leading off in different directions. You must slow down to eighty sixty forty thirty and that car parked on the right, the one with a fellow sat in the passenger seat, he'll be a radar cop ready to repair Spain's GOP at your expense. Sometimes, though, the roundabouts are just there, interrupting the smooth flow of the road without any reason or any other exits. Perhaps there are some municipal plans we don't know about. One day, there'll be an urbanisation. Perhaps somebody will be parked on the edge of the roundabout, sat in his enormous and unnecessary 4X4, as a temporary decoration.
Still, these traffic circles, with their two lanes - down from three or up from one - are fairly humdrum. European affairs. Even the overwrought gardening, designed to hide the vehicular flow from the left, hardly makes them intriguing.
Much more popular here are the 'shy circles', those roundabouts that touch rather than intersect. These are used as a complicated and confusing method of bleeding onto another road, usually by obliging you to zip across half its width and then, breathlessly, joining the speeding traffic from the left and dovetailing in behind the red BMW that ain't stopping for nobody. Then crank it before the lorry coming up catches you with a roar on its air-horn. Confusing but rather satisfying I think. There will be no badoom badoom road studs on the approach to the shy roundabout, but the main road which hurtles past will have any number of rows of these charming studs, to entertain and bemuse drivers hurrying past the eccentric circular bifurcation.
These roundabouts, whether true or shy, are designed by young achievers in the second year of high school. They are rewarded with yellow stickies to put on their exercise books. First year students cut their teeth on petrol station forecourts, where a large expanse of concrete will be decorated with obtuse traffic routes, stops, bleeds and parking areas.
Favourite local ones: the Los Gallardos to Garrucha road has three shy roundabouts, all very dangerous indeed. Turre has a hidden shy roundabout, covered in rampant plant life. There is no view whatsoever for drivers of on-coming traffic coming from the left. A right-of-way route powers in from the right.
For a gas station forecourt, nothing beats the Ballabona on the motorway between Vera and Huercal Overa. Several hectares of cement have been turned into a horizontal snakes and ladders set. Most enjoyable to ignore.
But, fresh from our labours driving around the immediate area, why not come and shop in Vera? You can leave your car in the handy underground parking lot which has just been opened. Apparently, a British firm got the tender, since you have to follow a cross-flow into the establishment, going from the right lane to the left. Now, that puts the fun back into motoring.

The Proof Reader's Eye

Anyone can make a mistake. Once we were putting together a newspaper and managed to spell our own name wrong. 'The Enterainer'. Took a while to live that one down. Then there are those mistakes which have two meanings, or don't really work as titles. You can buy books full of them at PAWS sales.
But here is one that must have missed the proof-reader's eye. It is the only possible explanation. It's in one of our local newspapers in the classified columns and follows right after a notice which says 'Readers of a sensitive disposition may find some of the advertisements in this section offensive'.
Boy, they may have understated themselves on this one.

El Kiosco

Ángel Medina has lived in Mojácar for about twenty five years. He built what still remains as one of our best small hotels, the Rio Abajo. He has worked in publishing (he was the director of El Indalico) and in radio with Cope Mojácar. He has also been in local politics, running both cultura and turismo in the last two legislatures.
Ángel is from Valencia, and is well-known locally as a cook and bon viveur. So now, he is running El Kiosco, the kiosk outside the Parque Comercial on Mojácar Playa.
Today, he made a paella.

Joe Bloggs

Spain has four special names for unknown or forgotten people: these are Fulano, Mengano, Zutano and Perengano. The most used is Fulano, 'Whassisname', which comes, apparently, from the Arabic: fulān which means 'anyone'.
Mengano, or 'Whojammie', is also from the Arabic man kān and means 'whoever'. The other two names, 'Thingy' and 'Spike' are used less. The first, Zutano, may come from scitānus, Latin for 'wise one', but it's anybody's guess about Perengano.
The Spanish use these names for handy reference, Fulano and Mengano above all.
The diminutive version, Fulanito, is particularly useful for jokes, along the lines of 'little Jimmy'.
The female of Fulano, Fulana, is used (as is always the way) pretty much exclusively to mean a puta.
And now, looking at Wikipedia, I find all sorts of other versions, in every language: including Miðalhampamaður from the Faeroe Islands.
I know, time to go and do some work...

Yabba Dabba Doo

Mojácar's underground car-park looks rather like the film-set for The Flintstones today. Although - why is nobody working?

Barbara is My Heroine

I am very proud of my wife Barbara. She has a terrible disease to deal with called Wegeners' granulomatosis which has weakened her over the past decade, besides obliging her to suffer innumerable operations and hospital stays. She was accused by one spiteful local newspaper article of having a self-induced injury - although they were unable to explain how this could have come about - and, over the years, she has been sorely treated by her own two brothers, who live nearby.
Despite these setbacks, she remains strong and positive, and she has done this to a large degree by taking to horse.
Barbara worked for many years, both in her native USA and here in Spain, with disabled children; introducing riding for the disabled into Spain in 1986 and starting her association Animo around the same time. She now works on a hippotherapy program in a centre in Almería called Animo-Albero.
Barbara has meanwhile developed a program which has helped to keep her strong and has attracted the interest of her doctors - this is to sit bareback on a horse, allowing the animal's own strength to exercise and stimulate her body (it's close to the philosophy behind hippotherapy). This has not only energized Barbara but has slowed down or even reversed some of her symptoms.
She was sent a beautiful therapy horse called Cookie by the therapeutic riding cooperative Cadí Moixeró (an RDI centre in Barcelona) last September and, previous to this, she had been riding in Almería once or twice a week at the Centro Albero, helped by the owner and trainer at the centre Loli Berenguel. Cookie is now in Almería working with the disabled children and Barbara has now acquired a second horse, pictured, thanks to a donation from a local businessman called Diego Mañas Romera, at the Yeguada Valdesol in Sorbas.
Barbara is strong and has all my love and support.

Malicorne

Driving up to Andorra la Vella in my first car, an old Renault van (that went like a cracker, it had an Ondine engine), sometime in the early seventies. For no particular reason. The town didn't have much nightlife beyond a few stainless steel bars. From one of them, some fantastic music was wafting up from the cellar. Down there I met a Frenchman who was playing Malicorne, a Celtic folk band. This one is called L'écolier assassin Enjoy.

The Underground Car-park (again)

Here is the latest picture of our new car-park. Not long now. Will it be in time for the Moors and Christians in Mid June? We hope so, otherwise Mojácar's internationally famous fiesta may be something of a squib...
Meanwhile, where are the photos and in-depth analysis of this folly in the pages of the Weenie and its imitators?

Mojácar Cutre

I took quite a few pictures, but my hands must have been shaking... or maybe the camera just flat refused to record what it was seeing. At any rate, here's the best one:

The event was the latest exhibition at the Mojácar Art Gallery (Museum... almost) at the Fuente. Mojácar was arguably discovered, at its weakest moment, when less than 600 people lived here, by a small group of 'intelectuales' who arrived here in the mid-fifties. These included well-known artists like Cantón Checa, Jesús de Perceval and others. They christened both the 'Indalo' (the local hombrecillo mojaquero totem) and themselves as 'Los Indalianos'. Partly through their efforts and influence, together with Mojácar's striking light and appearance, other artists found their way here, and the town became a Bohemian destination during the sixties.
Paul Becket, Fritz Mooney, Matts Hojer, Marisol González, local artist Clemente Flores, Mojácar artist Nicolás Carillo Murcia, Juan Guirado, Manolo Coronado, Luz Marqués, Michael Sucker who painted the church fresco, Francisco Reyes, Win Wells, sculptor Charles Salerno and a hundred others I've missed all contributed to the notoriety of Mojácar.
But politics and art don't mix. You can't make a buck off of culture, it seems. One mayor got a grant to build an art gallery, while another allowed exhibitions to be held there - under the authority of Leslie, the only foreign worker out of the 160 municipal staff (Mojácar these days is about 40% local and 60% out-of-towner - a mixture of Spaniards, Britons and a sprinkling of East Europeans, West Europeans, some South Americans and a few others). The gallery was closed down by the current incumbent, who built a large what-was-going-to-be art museum at the Fuente but is now a mixture of Spanish library and exhibition hall. This ran for a while with art exhibitions, proving to be very popular with the foreign settlers here, but has now changed to something else.
The show tonight, running until February 29th, was well attended by the local people, including the Partido Popular hierarchy, but I was the only forastero there. You see, instead of art, Raquel the young Councillor for Culture had plumped on a show of carnival costumes together with photographs of previous celebrants in all their finery sellotaped to the walls.
Now, Mojácar is not noted for its carnavales. Here, the children dress up in matching outfits and are fêted in the Artisan Centre. That is pretty much all there is. A few local adults giggling and shivering in the cold wander around the fuente area for a day or two. The local celebrants don't seem to know the customs very well - after all, Carnival has only been going since Franco died - and the dates are sometimes a bit off. The costumes are often unmasked and the saturnalia aspect is rather muted. We have Cadiz and Águilas for those who really want to party...
So, a month without art may not be a particular loss - but it is a sign of what Mojácar is becoming.
Cheesy.

Pan Para Todos

We have friends who apparently can't eat without a slice or two from a barra de pan to help them. Fork in the right hand, lump of bread in the left. Wine in front... and fill it up won't you?
And if we are out of bread, would you like to nip down to the gasolinera to pick some up? Why bread, along with pornographic videos, wine, cigarettes again (that didn't last long), cigars, Butano and chocs are all freely available at the gas station is one of those strange things about life here. Anyway, we have a crisp warm barra de pan and we are all set for our meal.
In the morning, half a small panecillo is toasted in the local café and then spread with tomate - crushed or whizzed up - which the customer then covers with olive oil and salt. It's good with a coffee. For the mid-morning merienda, what is better than a bocadillo, an entire barra cut lengthways, and filled with cheese, ham or sausage?
But, with sublimity, comes its cousin crappo. Spain's aptly named pan de molde, bread-in-a-mold or, in American terms wonder-bread, is no Hovis. The best brand (apart from a couple of British-style ones occasionally available where foreigners are likely to shop) is Bimbo. It's not very good. Imitators of this brand are many - Panrico being the best known - and are also not up to much. You can make un sticky sandwich with them or toast them on the plancha with a thick gob of margarine but the taste of a piece of industrially-made pan is poor and dry. Some British restaurants serve a buttered slice if you ask them nicely, but I prefer to munch on real Spanish bread: 'Con pan y vino se anda el camino'.
Better stick to 'Spanish bread'.

Madrid Olympics

Not sure about the latest campaign for Madrid to hold the Olympics - this time in 2020 (or is it 20020, and why spell Madríd with an accent?). Or is an 'M20' that we read here? Madrid campaigned for the 2012, the 2016 and now, the city is back again with more. How much have they spent in their various efforts to date?

Censorship is Greed

Spain has passed its own Internet copyright law called the 'Ley de Sinde', after apparent heavy pressure from the American embassy, pressed in turn by Hollywood. Oddly, the Ley de Sinde, Sinde's Law, was crafted by the Minister of Culture from the last Government, the PSOE Ángeles González-Sinde, where it was pulled at the last moment by popular opprobrium. The masses, for once, had spoken. Then, as the PP Government took over in December, the socialists' law was quickly switched through Parliament and will be on the books from March. You would think that a Minister for Culture's job would be to support culture, rather than cut it, but there you go - and to Hell with the masses, by the way.
So, the Americans forced through the anti-copy law here in Spain, yet a few weeks later, failed (thanks again to the masses) to do the same thing through their own Congress back in Washington.
The Pirate Bay, a Swedish file-sharing site, recently commented that Hollywood itself was born out of filmmakers moving away from the East Coast, where Edison had just invented the first movie projector, to avoid his patent and to market their own systems.
Well fine. All this becomes the second step in the policing of the Internet in the West. The first was to do with paedophilia (and who is going to argue with that?), now it's about protectionism and later, when we get around to it, it'll be about freedom of speech.
In fact, a ripped-off film may lose someone a few cents, but that someone is either a copyright owner - a rich corporation - or a wealthy participant. The money won't go to the stage-sweep, who might be grateful for it. With music, the trail is even easier. Real musicians do what they do to make music or to make money?
Who gets that money by the way: all competent musicians, or those whose production is manipulated by the companies?
We won't mention the SGAE here - who collect the royalties and sometimes put them to creative use...
Today, a piece of Spanish news about copyright ownership appears, that the family of the writer Valle-Inclán, the Civil War poet who died seventy five years ago, should have the copyright ownership extended by three years because their sugar-ticket didn't receive any rents during the war years. The family has apparently fought ever since over who should get what from the plunder and has even held back some material from the Public view for their own reasons of profit. Should families (or record companies) live from dead authors and musicians?
The other night I saw a film. It came from a friend who had bought it from a market stall. It was an illegal copy. It was also very bad, but that's beside the point. I have three alternatives with such a film: see it and pay, see it for free or not see it. If I pay for it, and it turns out to be bad - can I get my money back? If I see it for free, or I don't see it - is there any material difference to the copyright owner?
For that matter, if I like a CD and play it a hundred times, should I perhaps be paying the record company some more moolah? Can I lend a book to someone without alerting the family of the author?
Now, if I am not going to pay for something, having obtained it for free, then the film or music company will not be taking my shilling, whether I see or listen to it or not. However, since the film from the other evening, 'Mr Popper's Penguins' (truly awful rubbish with Jim Carey), could never be classed as 'culture', there may be a way out here. Put a block on downloading or copying rubbish and leave cultural material alone. Call it 'Censorship on Entertainment' and leave it at that. We could have a 'Ministerio de Entretenimiento' whose job would be to collect our savings and send them to the moguls.
Meanwhile, those who, for monetary considerations, decide against downloading 'Fast and Furious Part V' will have a choice - read a book, download something of value, or watch telebasura.
The certainty is, with all of those clever kids out there equipped with a digital brain and a keyboard, the Internet should remain safe from the lawyers, politicians and bankers who would like to control both it and, of course, us.

The Underground Car-park

Mojácar is quiet these days - as in 'there's no one open and no one comes to visit' rather than 'it's quiet'. Ever morning, the bangbangbang of the drills wakes up the neighbours at an early hour. The dust rises and the trucks come in and out. This underground car-park for just 37 cars will cost over 1,5 million euros and oblige the pedestrian village to have a drive-through lane past the church. The whole thing should be ready before June's Moors and Christians festival.

The Availability of Books

Without television (long story), we read a lot at home; either churning through the Internet or staying up with a good book. Years ago, when there really wasn’t a TV option, and satellite watching was still a far-off idea, we would carefully write our names in our stash of well-thumbed novels – spy stories, thrillers, derring doos and bug-eyed-monster books – and lend the best ones to our friends, who would rarely, if ever, return them. Sometimes, I find one of our collection in a jumble sale or on a friend’s shelf.

There isn’t much in the way of book-shops here – and the rare one that opens usually doesn’t last long (there’s a good one called Bookworld in San Pedro that bucks the trend) – so I go along to the local markets now and again to fill up with the reasonably latest used and cast aside thrillers. Mojácar has a Wednesday market with one chap with a good selection in English and a second Sunday flea-market with a few stalls of books of every and any description. Turre has an English language book-stand on Friday market and Albox has a large Saturday flea-market, although I have yet to visit. Otherwise, a few supermarkets – notably SuperTurre - sell a cheap range of new books at five euros, and there are no doubt other places besides.

Perhaps the best choice is to join the Mojácar English Library (bottom floor at the Centro de Artesanía, now confusingly re-named at the Centro de Usos Multiples) which is open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 11.00am until 1.00pm.

Besides these outlets, we have the three fallbacks of Amazon dot com, friends coming out from England (via a good bookshop) or the wonders of electric books with Kindle and so on.

All of these mean I have plenty of books in the house, on shelves, in boxes and trunks and in an unsteady pile beside the bed. Being blessed with a faulty memory, I'm slowly working through the old ones again with the same sense of wonderment and surprise as the last four or five times.

The best book I have read in the past few months is called ‘The City and the City’ by a British author called China Miéville. It’s a murder mystery set in a city populated by two different nationalities that speak their two exclusive languages and walk through their city totally ignoring anyone or anything connected to the other population. They are taught from birth to ‘unsee’ the others as if they didn’t exist and, in the book, few people are able to ‘cross’. Odd, but makes sense. It also reminds me rather of life in Mojácar where many people also ignore the other nationality as if they simply weren’t there. The difference is, the English-speakers here don’t have a Council or an Elder.

Although they do,without doubt, have a better library.

The Day Trip

The odd things that happen in Spain. Yesterday we went to Almería to pick up two friends and to continue on to the Province’s other big city, El Ejido. Just along from our first destination is a feed store, so we stopped there for a few things, including happening on a clip to hold the dog safely in the car – the police being very keen on stopping you these days if your pet isn’t properly secured.

Next door at the stables, we transferred to Loli’s car, and four of us boarded along with two miniature ponies and a baby sheep that happened to be loitering nearby. The ponies jumped into the rear of the vehicle without much prompting. Noticing my surprise, Loli told me she once went to some children's pet-show with no less than eighteen critters in her buggy, including ponies, tortoises, chickens, rabbits and a slightly bilious coatimundi.

Today, we were off to a party for disabled children given by a physiotherapist called Beatriz, who with Loli and Barbara, makes up the senior members of Animo.

Loli’s vehicle has tinted rear windows, so our load of horseflesh was safe from the public eye, as long as our passengers didn’t neigh too loudly. Unfortunately, one of them was minded to produce ear-splitting whinnies through most of the trip, which included the part where we drove across the city of Almería.

I had the window down (to combat the smell – Dutch ponies can be stinky in confined quarters, especially after breakfast). We arrived at the lights at one point just as another shriek came from somewhere in the rear of the vehicle. A man in the car next to us looked up in horror. All he could see was Loli and me. ‘She’s had this cold for weeks’ I told him gamely ‘nothing seems to shift it’.

It was a good day with the children in El Ejido. We gave them rides on the ponies and told them stories about the sheep, a black and white male that stuck firmly beside Loli during the entire experience, as if his friend could somehow explain what the whole thing was about. A Wise King showed up towards the end of the afternoon and pulled presents out of a sack on the back of one of the ponies. Each child got a calendar decorated with his or her photo (I got one of me posing with our chicken, Maude). Barbara and Loli, co-writers of Manual Básico de la Hípica Terapéutica, both received hard-covered printer’s copies of their book.

Once again wedged into the car and lulled into drowsiness by another sustained chorus of bellows, we returned safely past any and all police check-points to the stables in Almería and, transferring to our vehicle, we continued home, the car full of tomatoes from El Ejido, some grain for our horses and a box of mixture for Maude.

A Stuffed Bull's Head

The age old problem of 'what to buy someone for Christmas' has just been answered. A stuffed bull's head. These are not just any old bulls, these ones come from the top farms, breeders and some of them even met their ends at the hands of a famous bullfighter! Imagine the jolly stories you can make up as you swirl your glass of wine and ripple your pencil-thin moustache.
When I was around nine or ten, I came to Spain for holidays with my parents. We went to Playa del Haro (as it was comfortably called in those days) and saw a thrilling bullfight in Gerona. I got a large raffia bull's head to crown my experience and it decorated my bedroom in England for the next few years.
I found this flyer at the Sicab horse fair in Seville last month and thought that it would interest those Gentle Readers who don't like raffia. So there you are, your very own genuine stuffed Bull's Head.

The Siege of Mojácar

It seems that this retablo, showing 'el asedio de Mojácar', is in Toledo. The wooden carving was made by Rodrigo Alemán (1470-1542) and the picture is part of a new collection of historical photographs held by the Ministerio de Cultura and the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España. The 'search page' is here.
Mojácar was attacked in 1488 as part of the final surge against the Moor. The fortified town either gave in after an agreement between the alcaide and the Christian leader that they would all get along peacefully (the disneyesque version suggested by a plinth at the fuente) or the more historically accepted version is that the whole town was put to the sword and repopulated by 400 properly Christian Spaniards from Lorca.

A slightly neglected copy of the retablo, made in 2004, is affixed to the back of the Mojácar church.

All This?

All this for 37 cars? That's not someone who cares for Mojácar.

Banco de Sabadell

Full marks to the Banco de Sabadell. I know that they are merely after our savings, but it's not often that you see an acknowledgement towards the foreigners who are living here full-time rather than those who are enjoying a short holiday here (and yet seem worthy of the spending of millions of euros in their pursuit). Tourists, you see, have no reason to be loyal. They'll take their next holiday somewhere else.
As the bank manager knows, there is a huge amount of money being pumped into Spain by those foreign settlers. There would be a lot more if the politicians woke up.