The British Residents, Briefly

The British residents in Spain are usually politely ignored by the media, so a fallout from the sad passing of Elizabeth II last week brought us – briefly – to the fore. The local paper says that there are so and so many Brits living in our province and then launches into an article involving the bowlers at some club looking glum and dropping platitudes.

What else can one say on an occasion like this?

In all, we may be 282,000 or so resident here (just to make the point – that’s considerably larger in number than the population of the city of Granada which rests at 232,000), but we aren’t noticed much. How many of us Brit residents are household names to the Spanish? James Rhodes, Tony King, the late Michael Robinson, two or three obscure British hispanophiles who writes books about Franco, Ian Gibson (who’s Irish anyway) and then the fellow on the TV who teaches English (Richard Vaughan, who is from Texas apparently).

And let's throw in Mr Bean, who was very popular here in his day.

 

My friend Andrew Mortimer (who teaches English to the Spanish Legion) penned an article which appeared in our local paper: Adiós a mi Reina (in English with Spectrum here).

I got interviewed on Canal Sur radio.

Plus a mention in La Voz de Almería where, once again, they spelled my name wrong.

The Canary RTVC produced a report about the reaction from the Brit residents.

La Razón has an article called ‘The Little England of Alicante, in mourning for Elizabeth II’. Again, we start with the numbers (know that there are 69,728 Brits registered in Alicante).

Several Anglican services were held in various resort towns, reported or not by the media.

Some books were made available to write down one’s thoughts. I expect the British Embassy in Madrid had a nice leather one.

El Confidencial says that some of the British tourists in Magaluf got pissed and a little lachrymose.

Sur in English had a full front cover (The Queen died on the Thursday, thus giving the Sur time to ‘stop the presses!’, but – alas - too late for its English-language rivals).

Two regions of Spain declared days of mourning – one day for Andalucía, and three for Madrid. Furthermore, both Felipe VI and his Queen, and old (‘after all, I am the oldest royal that’s alive today’) Juan Carlos and Doña Sofía and all due to attend the State Funeral next Monday in London. From France, President Macron said that the British thought of Elizabeth as their Queen, while the rest of the world thought of her as ‘The Queen’. Nice.

Even Putin was solemn and called her passing ‘a heavy, irreparable loss’.

Everyone is sad, except of course the Argentinians.

Sigh!

See – we’ve forgotten about the British residents living in Spain already… 

 

 

A Well-kept Secret

 
We return once again to ‘The most beautiful towns in Spain’. Some of these towns are special, but one must be in no doubt, the attention-grabbing label has been firmly stuck on the postcard by the local tourist authority.

They will be glad to see you, hope you have time to take a photo or two (post it on Instagram, because any publicity is good publicity), and then for Goodness Sake, why not stroll around and spend some money?

Friends, our souvenir shops don’t run on air!

The problem for the discerning tourist, who reads about these ‘best kept secret’ destinations, or sees the carefully angled photographs put out to attract his attention (Google will do the rest), is that thousands of other equally choosy people will have seen the same promotion. By the time you get there, it’s full to the gunnels of people all ready to get in the way of your photo.

You have seen the massed crowds at Machu Picchu (and that ain’t even easy to get to), the hordes of visitors in Venice, the wall-to-wall trippers in Barcelona, the apologetic oriental mob in Ronda, the gaggle of Brits in Mojácar and the multicultural throng visiting the Alhambra.

There’s nothing less relaxing than appreciating the magnificence of the mosque in Cordoba as the thousand raised camera-phones and their owners noisily and irreverantly recording the scene.

Personally, I think we have left it too late.

In the past, I have sometimes laughed at the restored fortress in some dingy town, where ‘over fifty people visited daily’ during the summer months. The rusted sign indicating the walls of a mosque in some Alpujarra village (the roof fell in over 400 years ago) or the iron cowboy erected near a bar where ‘Clint Eastwood once tried the garlic mushrooms’ (they were good, too).

But now I have changed my mind, and I shall diligently search for these treasures, content in knowing that the press of souvenir shop-keepers, tourist councillors coach attendants or travel-article hacks will be light to non-existent.

The food will be good (it always is in Spain), the tinto de verano will be cheaper and the bar-owners will close up and be in bed by midnight.

See, they never made a list of ‘the Ugliest Villages in Spain’, because – well, that’s a properly well-kept secret.

We've Got the Horses Ready

Back home and drinking one of those beers from the Aguila people that you have to turn for a moment upside-down. Gassy. Urppph. 

Alicia and me had been to Velefique this morning, a small village of 300 souls up in the hills beyond Tabernas (you remember - where they shot all the spaghetti cowboy films). The village is due to have its three-day-long fiesta starting on Monday, a Moors and Christians effort, and we were to supply the four horses and skilled and costumed riders. Not me, no, I'll be either in the bar, if it's open, or the chiringuito: the temporary tin-bar in the square next to what looks like a pop-group platform. Oh yes, it'll be noisy.

The councillor in charge of fiestas is called Ramón. He showed us where we could keep the horses, where the water was and so on (Alicia will sleep up there Monday and Tuesday). I complemented him on his pueblo, which apparently can trace its history back to the Romans.

They've already started on the decorations

So noisy indeed was the fiesta last week in next-door Senés, where we had brought our four intrepid riders and horses for another Moors and Christians hoopla, that the bar-owner and wife had upped stakes and closed for the season (only two days this time - the village is even smaller). No one likes to overwork, I agree, but closing up for the fiesta? The only place that served drinks in Senés during the thrash was the estanco, the cigarette shop who luckily has a side-line in beer. 

Well, and the chiringuito as well - probably the same crew, I shall have to have a look at them. Their old-bit-of-pig sandwich was delicious. 

Fiestas (or ferias) in Spain often overlap the single day saint's celebration (Almería, which kicks up its heels from the 19th carries on until the 27th, inclusive. Well, since the last day is a Saturday, we might manage a merrie and boozy luncheon on the Sunday, down at the playa, why not?).

But first, Velefique. I was reminded of a pretty village inland from Mojácar called Bédar, when my dad had bought three houses in 1966 for ten thousand pesetas (sixty euros). I opened a bar there for a few months sometime in the mid-seventies before deciding that hard work was not for me. I called it El Aguila, the eagle (there was a brand of smokes called El Aguila in those days, plus of course the beer. Marketing, I figured). Fifty years later, and Bédar is now a British colony where people complain about the dog-poop and have tea-parties. 

I'll check to see how much a house costs in Velefique during the fiesta next week. 

Assuming the bar remains open.

The Send-off

I was at the Tanatorio waiting as the old friends gathered. The air-con was on (just as well, it was killer hot outside) and, as Andalucía always favours naked walls and plenty of marble, the echoes and reverberations of the various conversations were such, that even with my hearing-aids turned to Yowza!, I still couldn’t make out what anybody was saying.

Something about The Departed, I supposed, as I looked solemn and said ‘uhh’ now and again.

Eventually, we were called to the chapel (similarly accoutred, but with a wooden cross for decoration and this time, with the seats all facing the same way). We tottered in and filled up the room from the back rows first. I was seated at the front – I was going to say something apparently.

The boom-box was switched on, the coffin was brought in, someone sniffled and the show began.

The son was the first up. No one knew him, he’d flown out from Manchester. He had brought some notes which included some jocularities as one does: the time my father did this, the time he said that. We laughed dutifully (although I still couldn’t make out a word).

I was third out of five. No notes and I took my glasses off (there was someone in the audience who owed me some money from a long time ago and I didn’t want to see him).

The dead friend had run the local bar for many years, and then finally retired a couple of decades ago. Like many in the bar-world, he’d enjoyed a drink or two.

I remembered one hot evening when he had reached into the bottle cooler for a beer, found the temperature evidently to his liking, and fell asleep there, his head and shoulders slumped over the white wine.

Many of his customers are of course resting in the same cemetery which is now his new address. When the gates close each night, if you listen closely, you may hear a ghostly champagne bottle as it pops.

My point, as they played something from Frank Sinatra and we survivors staggered out into the hot afternoon’s heat, wondering who would be next, is this:

God, how old we’ve all gotten!

 

BeeBapoRu

I'll never have a fluent-sounding accent when I speak Spanish. It's pretty good, but if I have an accent, it's an English one. Which stands to reason I suppose, since that's where I'm from. It's easy enough to spot although there's the exception maybe when I'm on the phone and my caller can't see me and realise that there's no way a tall blond/gray sunburned Swede with blue eyes like me could ever be from Murcia.

It's a pity really, as I only started to learn Spanish when I was thirteen. The sounds eluded me, whereas I began with French at the age of six, and thus, although I've since forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, when speaking to a Frenchman I tend to sound like an alcoholic from Lyon who must have just misplaced the words he needed for that particular moment. 

Also, in French, there are a hundred ways of saying 'you know what I mean, um, at the end of the day...' and other useless fillers to ward off actually saying something useful. In Spain, all we have is coño.   

We need context when we talk in Spanish - which means we need to know the society in which we are moving - the food, the geography, the politicians and the film-stars. So, there's another reason to watch the Spanish news on the TV. 

I clearly lean towards the parrot-theory of language: it's not what you say - it's how you say it. After all, no one is listening anyway, they are just waiting politely for their turn. One clever way to pick up the cadence and the various tics that belong to a language is to imitate it when speaking in your own. French lends itself to this - as we know from watching 'Ello 'Ello (here). And so why not Spanish as well?

We must then turn to the detail. It's easy enough to work the jota, the sound in such words as bujía, jamás and reloj, although they say that smoking helps, and it's a little harder to get the rr right: pero and perro. Then there's our friend the Ñ (called an 'eñe' - or 'enye' if you are missing it on your keyboard), which for some reason the British newspapers like to switch for the letter N, giving rise to such horrors as Espana, cono and Feliz Ano. 

The LL is easy enough, pronounced like the middle bit in William (although, oddly, there's a war in Spanish between the LL and the Y). Actually, the ll was considered as just another letter of the Spanish alphabet until 1994, as was the ch. 

It made playing Scrabble easier: a point which is rarely made. 

For us Brits, I think that the Spanish J is the big one, and here's Camilo Sexto singing his 1975 hit Jamás (Never!), if you feel like practicing the jota and singing along. 

After all, that's what your parrot would do. 

The confusion in Spanish between the letters B and V works in our favour I think, as we hear them differently. As the old Latin joke goes, the great thing about the Spanish is that they don't know the distinction between vivere et bibere; that's to say, between living and boozing. 

And who can argue with that?

One point that English-speakers need to remember when in the throes of speaking castellano (that's what they call it here) is to pronounce foreign words and names as a Spaniard would. I'm usually called Lenon (like the pop singer) Andrew is Andréu. William is Guílian. It gets worse. The singer JJ Cale is Jota Jota Kalay. 

My title BeeBapoRu refers to how one calls a popular unguent available at the farmacia which one rubs on one's chest. That's right: it's Vicks Vapour Rub as pronounced by the chemist. If that doesn't work by the way, then drink a Bloody Mary (un bludi) with plenty of salsa guorsesterechaer and lie down for a bit.

And practice that Camilo Sesto song.

 

Being There: a Day at the Garden

Like many people, I'm not much of a gardener. Sometimes I remember to go and squirt everything with the hose, for which the shrubbery is suitably grateful, perhaps even rewarding me with a flower or two. Other times... well, I was doing something else, you know how it is. 

Here in our neck of the world, it's hot, and the garden (lovingly laid down by my mum back in the sixties) needs lots of attention. Unlike the household chores, which brings you back to where you were before you scruffied things up, or made lunch, or spilled a gin and tonic on the carpet, the garden moves slowly forward, and of course, upwards. 

There's even the odd occasion when, in a burst of enthusiasm, I find myself driving over to the vivero, to buy something which could be perfectly de-potted and decanted into that space near the olive tree which hasn't produced anything of interest since the dog dug up the marihuana plant last year. 

Gardening means pruning, cutting, digging, uprooting, weeding, bug-removing, planting and, above all, watering.

Three times a week, I say to myself, water everything you love and the garden will one day look peachy, just like it used to a generation ago. 

Then of course - and this is key to a happy horticulturist - remember to switch off the garden-tap after use.

Once you have forgotten to switch off the hose, and moved on to other duties like shopping, watching the TV or driving to Barcelona for the weekend, the gaily-coloured tube will carry on pumping water to that one surprised, grateful and eventually waterlogged and dead geranium until such time as the call to put on a cap, rinse one's face with Factor Fifty and go outside and water the garden returns. Which - at best - is every two days. It's not like forgetting to switch off the soup, or pull up one's zipper, or watch the news. When one is not in the garden, one is not switching off the hose.

The water bill, which arrives at the end of every two months, is suddenly through the roof. It's happened to me a couple of times, and blast it, it happened again this weekend. I forgot to turn the hose off. I had filled a watering can to access an outlying violet and then went off to save the world from the space invaders and, well, you know how it is.

By the time I had retaken Aldebaran, the garden was looking like the Red Sea. 

This brings about another problem; I mean, besides the bank-loan to pay the water company. 

The unseasonable flood has brought me a ton of weeds and stinging nettles. And snails. 

I am also pretty sure that my mum visited me last night. I wasn't asleep when she came. 

I'm in the garden now. 

Watering.