Re-inventing Water

Life was so much easier before someone invented 'inventing'. In those far-off days, if there was something useful to hand, you grabbed it and used it. Take the humble wine-bottle. They've been stripping off their shoes and socks and hopping up and down in a large bathtub full of grapes since the first ever drinking song was introduced ('I belong to Lorca') and putting the resulting liquid into wine bottles. Which are, whichever way you look at them, bottles for storing and serving wine.
Now, if such a thing had of been introduced since someone invented 'inventing', and copyright, and trademarks and patent registration and, well, a legal framework for greed, each winery would have needed to market a different bottle: round, square or oblong; fat, skinny or wobbly; white, brown or green. Yet. all wine bottles – except those cheap cartons of dubious plonk which Mrs Hardy at Number Six still insists on storing upside-down – are interchangeable until you come to the label.
Unlike, say, water-bottles. Now water has been around for as long as wine, but here in Spain, the idea of actually drinking it in a genteel sort of way is comparatively new. It dates, in fact, from the times that the good people of Lanjarón in Granada (ghastly town, by the way, don't bother to visit) decided to put some of their product, which springs out of the rocks there, into bottles to sell to the people on the Costa del Sol to pour into their whiskies. They probably considered using wine-bottles to start with, but then decided on their own, watery design. With a nice label that said: 'Lanjarón, Water!' Whoever it was, Paco el Aguero or some-such, promptly made himself a fortune and had soon ordered himself a dozen donkeys from the Corte Inglés. It was bound to be only a short time before others followed his trail. I mean, said the envious neighbour, the damn stuff comes out of mountains and all I need to do is stick it in a bottle.
Not with my bottle, said Paco. Get your own.
Now look at us, there must be a hundred different types of water in the supermarket, each and every one in a different shape of bottle. I have to say, of all of those designs, ridges, spouts and fasteners, the silliest comes from Paco el Aguero's descendants, who obviously haven't followed the Old Boy's flair for simplicity. It's got a special top that pours the water in two different ways. Enough said.
Returning to wine and its associated paraphenalia for just a moment, imagine that whoever first introduced the corkscrew had the far brighter idea of registering it as a patent. We would be reduced to either paying through the nose, or pushing in the cork with the wrong end of a fork, or bashing the bottom of the wine-bottle against the bar to avail ourselves of its contents. Come to think of it, been there.
Water, in whatever strange container it is served, either an old weeping cántaro, or a jug, or a gaily designed plastic bottle or, as I saw the other day, in an incredibly expensive 'designer' flask at a euro a sip, is still pretty much water. It is still diluted with somebody else's ice, or is merely a junior and un-respected ingredient in somebody else's beverage like beer or Orange Fizz. When the manufacturer gets all fancy with his giant list of ingredients, sodiums, minerals and whatnots, it's still just water to me. A laboratory has taken a cup-full from the spring, lugged it away to Barcelona, and established its chemical breakdown to a nicety. Whatever for? Tastes good, Paco old sausage, but could do with a bit more aluminium silicate.
This aqueous treasure is honoured by all right-thinking Spaniards. Have you ever had to stop on the side of a road next to some healthy looking nettles to try some miracle 'fuente' which is ummhum, good? ('That's OK', says your bucolic friend gesturing towards your shirt, 'it'll soon dry off in the car'). Eight pints a day keeps the doctor away, and, if those eight pints, listed in the ingredients merely as 'agua' (I mean, who cares), are just there to make up the 99% by weight of a beer bottle, which in most bars works out cheaper anyway, then make mine a Mahou.
You see all those different water bottles spread across the shelves at the supermarket, and then you see them again at the public fountain as cars stop and the different sized and shaped plastic containers (good for several hundred years according to my ecologist friends) are topped up with agua de la fuente. Good water... and cheap! This stuff is good for making ice, boiling up for tea and, unlike the stuff that comes out of the tap, is reasonably tasty.
The stuff from the tap, reputed to kill garden flowers – to say nothing of most household germs – is all right for doing the dishes, flushing the loo, squirting the cat, or even showering and bathing, and that's why in most homes around here, Sr Roca's sundry bathroom articles come as standard.
So, we are agreed, I think? Keep it simple. Water from the fuente and wine from the store – unless you plan to make your own. Tell you what, I'll design the bottle.

Office/Apartment for Sale

That's the tower at the Parque Comercial, the shopping centre on Mojácar Playa. It's fitted out as a radio station at the moment. The top floor is a small apartment with bathroom. Fine views! The mid-floor is an office, with a circular metal stairway up to the top. Downstairs, the main part of the set-up (that's on the third floor of the Parque), there are five rooms, a bathroom and a large terrace (on the left of the picture).
Here's the view from the terrace:

The Red-Eye Flight

Sat in the car at the airport, doing a swing past the guards every so and along so as not to get stuck in the park and queue to pay and lug the suitcases across and up the steps. It’s worse inside with huge hangers full of marble and Germans. I park on the flowerbed for a piece. They arrive. The girl looks nice. We leave with the windows down and papers blowing around and out. No air-con in this old car.
With friends staying you want to show them around and impress. That’s right. It’s too early though. I was once in there having a drink, you know, and Dennis Hopper came in so I pretended I didn’t know who he was then we bought each other beers and stuff, and laughed at the girls, then it turned out it wasn’t him anyway.
Right, come on, they’re a lot cheaper than on the coast than here and the company is nicer.
Sandwiched between a tour-bus and a cement truck, we pull off the road at the first opportunity. A few houses stand around, looking unconcerned. The car cools down over another flowerbed, this one rather tatty, as we enter a building through an enormous barn-door. We’ll have a couple of beers and tapas. I’m all knowing as the host; role-playing as a tour-guide with witty answers to all the queries.
‘…That’s right, donkeys!’
Some blond fellow watches us from the far end of the bar. He probably works down at the cowboy town film-set. A young girl with a bruised face works the beers and the customers. The blond looks like he wants to start something. The residents here have an easy way to measure themselves against each other: how long you bin living here? You have to watch their eyes when you face up for this one. It’s a kind of pissing contest where there can only be one winner. I try and avoid this, as the loser can get sore.
My friends are looking at the sad range of entrails lying under the glass counter.
‘Sí, una ronda de cañas. ¡Oiga!’ The little barmaid brings the specie and goes ‘t’ree beer?’ and I’m deflating like a spare tyre on a Renault. Kinda place is this anyway? ‘Thank you dear child. And where are you from?’
Rumania. Well I’ll be buggered. All these years living here, trying to blend in with the locals and to pick up a few words, and do you know, I can’t even say: I am a secret policeman, where is your sister?

A Rumanian friend had been telling me about his work permit and the paperwork he’d given in. He’d prepared and written up the document himself on a sheet from a Bucharest cigarette company with fancy headed-paper and had covered it with stamps made with ceiling wax and the metal top from a Chivas Regal bottle. We need people like this in Spain.
We’re into some of those beers in dark glass and feeling the kick. The blond fellow has joined us. It’s too hot to take an attitude.
From the terrace you can see a piece of a wide, sandy riverbed. It was here that they shot the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1966. Well, a small piece of it. A Welshman, cashiered from the Horseguards, once told me the story of how the producer, Sam Spiegel, had obtained a thousand horses and camels to attack the papier mâché town of Aquaba on the Carboneras coast. The Welshman led the charge dressed in suitable togs but for some reason, with no saddle. One mistake and I would have been trampled to death noted the Welshman sadly as I solicitously bought him another drink. It is told that, after the shoot, they asked Sam Spiegel what was to be done with the camels and horses. He answered laconically: ‘Can ‘em!’
A machine gunner shot the whole herd. Some reward for being in an Oscar film.

My friend notices that the bar has a sign to say that This Establishement has Complaining Sheets. We order a few to take away with us.
A man in a string vest comes through a door behind the bar. He’s scratching himself with a kind of reserved enthusiasm. ‘You boys look like you would like the coast. You ever been there?’

It’s about an hour’s driving to get to my place. I reckon it’s going to take us a little longer.

Barefoot in America

I was visiting my daughter in the USA during the early part of this month, when the fine town that she had chosen to live was experiencing a heatwave; what might be known as an Indian Summer, if I'm not stepping on any Native American toes by using that expression. You see, I'm from England, where the weather is always foul and the automobiles are tiny. I was having a great time, marveling at the farmland and the generous rate of exchange. So, what with one thing and another, I was putting in a good deal of walking, whether through the aisles of some of the larger commercial establishments over on the Miracle Mile, or up and down the High Street known there as Muskogee Avenue, or borrowing my daughter's enormous car and trailing off into the surrounding countryside for walks to admire the changing and autumnal colours of the trees together with the rich and varied local animal and bird-life. Man, I love those armadillos. They are like small tanks with the digging strength of a Spanish wild boar.
One creature that fails to induce a rush of friendly emotion in my breast is my daughter's dog, Dawg, who is a large and tiresome black puppy that gambols around your feet in an irritating way.
I had nevertheless managed to forget about him one afternoon as I lay out on the deck with a beer and a book. Catch a little sun. My shoes were tossed nonchalantly under my seat.
I was thinking about a visit the day before to one of the town's finest bars where I had caused a small sensation amongst the habitual clientele by sitting on a stool near the door and putting a bright pink 'Breast Cancer Awareness Month' bag with some laundry in it onto the bar while asking in a fruity English voice for a lager and lime. Guaranteed to make friends, experiences like that, once the misunderstandings have been cleared up.
I awoke to find that Dawg had eaten my shoes.
Now, before leaving for America, my wife had packed my suitcase with the usual tea-bags, brightly coloured beads, malaria tablets and alka-seltzer pills, along with the special polar outfits that she thinks are appropriate for all my trips wherever they may be - from Canada to Kansas to the Sahara desert. All this, together with some string-vests, y-fronts, socks and other 'smalls' packed firmly yet lovingly into my case meant that there wasn't any room left for inessentials like, for example, some spare footwear.
That evening passed with some television: me in socks.
The next morning, I borrowed the car to go and buy some shoes. The warm and dry weather had spectacularly changed overnight to a heavy rainstorm and my daughter had got up early to take off for work. I was barefoot in charge of a heavy vehicle, which, and Bless my American friends, is not something you are allowed to do in Spain. Terrorists, you know.
The lady greeter at the big store told me I couldn't come in. No shoes, no shirt, no service.
'No, but I've come to buy some shoes. You have them there over in the back'.
No shoes...
I could sort of understand her concern. Despite my particular emergency, it is true that those sweaty Brit tourists who walk around the supermarkets of Mojacar and Turre during the summer in nothing except their Speedos and flip-flops, showing off their flab and tats, are hardly an advertisement for our country's dubious charms and, although I was wearing a jacket and tie, I was nevertheless decidedly and blatantly unshod.
I drove back to the house to think this through. I threw a cushion at Dawg who began to tear it to shreds and I had an idea. I opened up my case and put on three pairs of socks, one after and over the other – to give my feet some bulk and maybe even keep them dry. Back to the gigantic store, park near the front and... hah! - in through the other entrance.
I ambled over to the shoe isle secure that my footwear would look 'natural', if a trifle European. I had just chosen a likely looking pair of brogues when my nemesis happened by. I must have inadvertently left a damp trail across the store.
'Feet like that', she said, 'you'll need a sixteen'.

Poppy Day

We had spent an uncomfortable yet amusing few days in clink and were now out on bail. My mother, who had been supportive during the ordeal, smuggling in Casera bottles full of vodka, while we lounged about reading books and listening to the World Service, was now angry with us about the whole experience and my ever-so-slightly contrite dad was ready to ‘put things right’.
We had been spotted sawing down four of Mojácar’s first-ever billboards in a late-night drunken spree – this was in 1971 – and, a mere three months later, the Guardia Civil had told us to report to the Vera hoosegow and to bring a change of clothes.
When we got there, early and excited, the cop told us to go and have a drink in the bar while ‘our beds were being made’. On our return, we bumped into the carpenter just coming out, while brushing some sawdust off his trousers. ‘They’re ready now’, he said brightly.
But, five days down the line and with an uncomfortable interrogation with the judge behind us, we were now out and reinserting ourselves back into society as hard as we could in the bar opposite the town hall while my mother gave me some parental grief about ‘being an old lag at seventeen’.
She had borrowed the money from friends to make our bail and we were able to go home, with some vague threat of a court-case hanging over us in the future. It appeared that we could get three months in the old Almería prison, a thing that looked like a fortress from a foreign legion film. Things were, indeed, beginning to get a bit ‘serious’.
My dad called the embassy in Madrid and they began the process of smoothing things over (ah – the good old days!). I don’t know how far they had gotten with this – I mean, they still hadn’t Asked a Question in the House – when General Franco surprised us all by declaring a general amnesty on everyone except ‘politicals’ to celebrate his thirty-fifth year in power. We were free.
For some reason, the ambassador considered that it was a propitious time for him to visit the far-flung corners of his empire and so he wrote to my father telling him to put him up in the Parador and to entertain him and his wife when they arrived. A jealous friend of my father, a retired air-vice marshal and Rex Harrison look-alike with a withering sense of humour and a nasal accent, heard the news and rushed down to our house to see us. ‘I’ve brought you a present’, he whinnied, clutching a plant in his hands, ‘it’s a type of yellow creeper’.
The ambassador and his tweedy wife were duly shown around the pueblo (there wasn’t much on the playa in those days) and were gamely patient with some of the odd people who lived here then, including a very drunk and alarmingly homosexual American called Sammy who surprised the ambassador, who had clearly dealt with a few odd types himself, by saying that he wanted asylum together with a British passport, preferably a pink one.
The ambassadorial entourage had departed, the charges against us had been dropped, the ambassador’s influence had caused the judge in Vera to be transferred to a less agreeable destination (Algeciras), the billboards were back up on the beach and all was well.
Until, a month later, a package arrived from Madrid with a covering letter from the consulate. ‘The Ambassador has recommended you to be in charge of the Poppy collection’ began the note. The box, of course, was full of Poppies and pins.
The Poppy, a red paper flower with a plastic hook, is used by the British and many other nations to remember those fallen in the different armed conflicts of the past hundred years. It is worn on the left lapel to remember ‘the field of poppies’ (‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row…’ from a poem written by a Canadian from the times of ‘the Great War’) and services are held throughout the Commonwealth on Armistice Day, which is on November 11th.
The box, unfortunately, had arrived in the Mojácar post office sometime in mid November, and there was little chance of catching up. My dad threw the box into a drawer somewhere and sent a cheque for ten thousand pesetas and a covering note back to the Consulate explaining that everyone had been thrilled to buy a poppy.
The next year, another box arrived, and poppies found their way into a couple of bars, where, without too much exaggeration on my part, they gathered dust. In due course, a second cheque was sent out. This continued for some time, with the cheques sometimes a bit more and other times (when the pound was down) perhaps a little less.
Some years later, when my father was ill, the package somehow found its way to me. Despite having, in those days, a lively reputation for handing out cheques to all-comers, I instead left tins in various bars and discovered, the hard way, that if you want donations, you have to go and ask for them. I do remember Charlie Braun, a large German from the seventies and eighties, once taking a Poppy from some box and putting in a few coins. ‘If it wasn’t for us’, he explained, ‘you vouldn’t have a Poppy Day’.
Luckily, somewhere around that time, the British Legion formed a much-needed chapter in Mojácar and, much to my relief, the key word ‘efficiency’ came to the Poppy collection.

Advancing with a Suitcase

Now, all we need is a taxi

They say that traveling broadens the mind. Certainly, having lived abroad since I was thirteen besides fingering the old bucket and spade a few times even before moving to Spain, I have never been at a loss when in the company of foreigners.
It probably helped that I came from an area which has no particular tradition of either superiority or paranoia; an area best known for being flat and cold: somewhere in the east. Our most famous son, you’ll want to sit down for this, being the Singing Postman. They say his guitar picking wasn’t up to much, but that he was known for his First Class Delivery.
There weren’t any foreigners in Norfolk in those days (‘them days’) except, of course, for the odd Londoner that had got lost. This was probably, along with the flatness, the cold and the terrible music, just another good reason for leaving. Years later, when driving my new wife along a Norfolk lane (a rare visit to England), we came round a corner and bumped into a troop of Nazi soldiers with their collars loosened, having a fag. While my wife wrestled with the possibility that the English were odder than she had originally thought, I asked an amiable-looking feldwebel the way to Downham Market as we were lost.
‘Somebody hass removed all zer signs’, he agreed, pointing vaguely East.
It turned out that they were shooting a piece from ‘Allo Allo’.
Living abroad, you need to be flexible with your language, your ideas, your culture and your understanding. People, you soon discover, are pretty much as friendly (or as disagreeable) regardless of where you happen to be: despite their sex, race, age and golf handicap.
We all pretty much know this by experience, so there’s not much point in banging on about it.
Traveling, for me, has a purpose. Usually it means that I am going to see someone for some fairly solid reason. The days of going on vacation with a rucksack and a copy of Lonely Planet seem to have passed and the opportunity to go on a group-holiday - a package - has, in my case, yet to arrive. Then again, I doubt you learn much from this latter kind of experience beyond knowing to watch out for the Shepherd’s Pie.
And the people in the room next door.
I live in a traveler destination anyway: making sure that I’m not taken for a tripper by mistake. I go around stoutly wearing sweaters when the tourists are in tee-shirts – which is bloody uncomfortable I can tell you during August. Hell, I’ve been here so long I need a holiday.
Travel might be good for you, it may remove some of your day-to-day stress and it can be agreeable, exciting or instructive. It is no doubt wonderful once you’ve got there and taken your boots off with a satisfied groan; but for me, the actual process of traveling has become increasingly arduous. I don’t mind driving the two kilometres or so to the beach, but driving to Madrid has lost its charm. Nowadays, the stress of having one eye on the speedo, one on the mirror and none left to look out of the forward porthole is beginning to take its toll. The thought of driving all the way across Europe quite undoes me (and it’s not because of the French, who I get on well with). It’s more to do with my back.
The headaches.
That disgusting motorway coffee.
Those friggin’ lorries!
Flying is, of course, uncomfortable, violent and embarrassing (ohmigod, I forgot to put on fresh socks and they’re going to think it’s a Nerve Agent). If you are flying to the UK, you are certain to be searched by some pimply redheaded bastard from Slough. I’ll grant you that, while the flight is cramped, it is, at least, cheap. Somebody told me they flew to Heathrow for 99 pence the other day - plus airport taxes and an extra pound for the lavatory. This, of course, doesn’t include the interminable waiting, or the last bit - the taxi or train to your final destination. Don’t forget the two-mile walk as well, lugging a heavy suitcase and a bulging plastic bag.
Why do prices never make the least bit of sense? Are the airline accountants drunk the whole time? The girls at the Vera travel agency told me that the flight from Almería to Madrid can cost 600 euros return ‘but there are special offers for just 75’. Well, I’d rather pay the 75 euros but, what is it going to cost me? The Americans make the joke about obtaining cheap tickets or ‘upgrades’ that means you have to ‘wear a purple leisure suit’ which is, presumably, something of an imposition. When I can, I’ll take the train.
One day, there will be a high speed train that will take one in comfort from the Vera train station to Madrid in the blink of an eye. It all sounds very exciting and novel. Until then, there’s the Murcia/Madrid Talgo which will do. Some time in the bar, plus a few turns walking up and down through the carriages as the train deposits you, after four hours, in the middle of the Nation’s capital. Ver’ civilized, yes. Ah, the hurly burley of the city, where the finest sights and Man’s most noble attractions can be enjoyed while swivelling the wire postcard stand in your comfortably appointed hotel!
So - these days I prefer a good armchair, a reading light and a small side-table, upon which the very best travel awaits me between cardboard covers. The characters and guides in the books piled on the table besides me are guaranteed to always be stimulating, refreshing and different. They will take me to the very best places, place me firmly into the most remarkable situations, introduce me to quite the most peculiar people and, in short, show me everything. They will know to offend, impress or attract me and they will have the good sense to leave me alone when the mood has passed.
I have made a lot of friends that way.

The Chicken Who Crossed the Road

There is a particular spot on the beach near the office which is especially recommendable for those lost souls who wish to enter into a semi-conscious state of Zen. I refer of course, to the zebra crossing in front of the farmacia. Many a time, while driving, I have seen people standing there, on the lip of the road, staring into space with their eyes part-way shut in some kind of philosophical ecstasy. It would be wrong to stop and join them in meditation and worse still to startle them with a modest burst of the horn. One should merely drive-by with one hand on the wheel as you absently dial somebody on your mobile-phone.
Other times, if the participants forget themselves so much as to take a step off the pavement, their minds far away in transports of bliss, I think it is fair – assuming you notice them – to steer them back to the side of the road with a yell and a generous honk on the horn. Sometimes, as they lose their concentration and return to reality, they playfully shake their fist at your passing and shout some small prayer of gratitude at your departing rear.
So, other times, stripped of my wheels, it is me that stands there, lost in my thoughts, with cars racing past over the black and white lines before me.
And then, out of the blue, one of them stops.
The driver smiles, and gestures for me to cross. I may perhaps be able to worship all the better from the other side with the sun no longer in my eyes.
Or then again, he may simply be an Englishman stopping on a zebra crossing to give way to a pedestrian.
Let me say this: as a driver you soon learn that many people stood on the side of the road in front of a zebra crossing have merely found a pleasant place to pause, often for a refreshing gossip, and show every sign of surprise when you stop in front of them. I mean, local people cross the street when the feeling takes them, not when there are black and white lines stretching away from their well-shined shoes. They must dimly suspect that these lines are for the convenience of the visitors, to perhaps help them navigate their way across the road. But, who wants to cross at this moment anyway – even to be polite – when Consuelo is in full flight about the goings-on in the apartment upstairs.
I even remember stopping once as my car approached the black and white lines, with people (on this occasion) evidently ready to cross, when the car behind me (you could almost hear the tsk) accelerated and overtook me, narrowly missing the small and doughty herd of walkers.
So, the other day, I was not at all surprised while standing by the crosswalk at the farmacia, my mind full of the pills I was intending to purchase, when a car stopped in front of me. Not, near me, or, before me in preparation for me to cross, but actually in front. Blocking my way. Now here’s a new one, I thought. The car would have parked on my toes if I hadn’t of been standing on the elevated pavement.
‘Oiga’, shouted a small and hirsute gent with a black moustache as he lent across his wife’s chest and peered up towards me, ‘¿dondé está la salida para Murcia?’
It’s strange isn’t it? There are some foreigners who, by a happy chance, can blend right in. They are both accepted and ignored at the same time. They would have black hair, perhaps, and might be short. They might have a decent tan or lean towards short-sleeved button-up shirts with small alligators embroidered on their chests. They could wear a heavy gold watch or sport a gold tooth. They might have a generous paunch and be wearing an old but lovingly preserved woolly bullfighter’s hat. I’m not saying that Spaniards look like that; it’s just that you might blend in a bit if you had that sort of appearance. People might confuse you for a local person, who both speaks the King’s Spanish and, Por Dios, knows the way to Murcia. However, when you are tall, blond and with a peeling nose, when your teeth stick out and your upper garment is a tee-shirt that says ‘Gibraltar is British’ (well, all right, I’m embellishing this a bit here), then the chances are that you might be a foreigner. Added to this, when Don Francisco is driving along the beachfront with his señora past a series of hotels and bars with ‘British Breakfast only 18 euros’ written monolingually on a blackboard stuck on the street for the elucidation of passers-by, you may want to be on the lookout for someone, well, more your own size.
So, here we have a fellow who wants to go to Murcia. He’s Spanish and he’s just stopped on a zebra crossing and persuaded this tall foreign gentleman to stoop down and stick his head in the motorist’s open car window. It seems that no one has considered that there might be a language problem – which there isn’t, you see, because I can speak Spanish and I know which way Murcia is.
I was in Murcia once, with Juan and Alfonso. We’d been to see some people on business and, following this, we were settling down in a bar for a beer and a tapa. Juan is a tall red-head, with a beaky nose and freckles. Alfonso has a beard and is blond. Me, well, you know that I don’t look much like Julio Iglesias. So Juan orders the drinks and the barman is pretty impressed. ‘Man’, he says, ‘your Spanish isn’t bad. It needs a bit of work maybe, but it’s not bad at all. Where are you from?’ ‘I’m as Spanish as you are, I’m from Malaga’, says Juan, whose full name is Juan de Dios Diez de Oñate. ‘I’m from Granada’, Alfonso pipes up from the darts machine, ‘and I’m from Valencia’ I added (with my gentle English accent peeping around the words).
He didn’t believe any of us.
So, here we are. I want to get to the farmacia, the motorist wants to get to Murcia and the caravan of cars behind him, all by this time tooting, honking and shouting, are clearly in a hurry to be going somewhere too.
Well, I say, savouring the moment of power over all the traffic before relenting slightly, ‘you just carry on until you reach that huge sign there in front of you and follow the gigantic arrow painted on it which is pointing towards your destination’. I said it in Spanish and I’d like to think that a small blink of surprise crossed his face. ‘Gracias’ he said and put his car into gear.
Do you know, I had almost forgotten why I was standing there, on the edge of the pavement, staring across the street at the farmacia. It was of course to cross the road and get my pills.
But before I could put a foot onto the zebra crossing stretching invitingly in front of me, the whole cavalcade of cars, lorries, bicycles and a fellow on roller blades, all accelerated across my path.
In Andalucía, a zebra crossing is just a street decoration.

Mercury Rising

I had to meet someone the other night and we had agreed over the phone that I would come along to Paco’s Bar for a chat. Parking in Spain is never easy: the rare parking spaces are filled with any number of items and reasons which will keep you away – unless of course, you ignore them. Parking spaces here have rubbish bins, bell-shaped metal bottle banks, trees, traffic signs, rubble, skips, tables and chairs, elevated wooden bar terraces, disabled parking, old broken cars, some bastard motorcycle taking up a whole space and, of course, everybody else’s cars. So driving in Spain usually involves a fair amount of walking.
Paco’s Bar has one of those wooden terraces outside, which illegally takes up at least four parking spaces, but no one seems to mind much, certainly not his brother Pedro, the mayor. I arrived, slightly out of breath, and walked across the empty terrace and into the bar. Which was full. Full!
There was a football game on the television and what looked like another football game just about to kick off on another TV. My friend was at a table, wedged in with other fans: he gave me a brief wave before returning to the game. I shoved my way to the bar and caught one of Paco’s Romanian girls. ‘Un tercio’, I shouted over the din. A bottle of Beer.
‘Who’s playing?’ I asked somebody.
‘Real Madrid against Tenerife’ he said.
I pushed my way outside again and sat on the lonely wooden terrace to watch the cars go by looking, no doubt, for a parking space. The sound of the football came through the door, with the odd shout and cheer as something happened. Perhaps my friend would mosey out at half-time and we could discuss our business.
I’ve never cared for football, either playing it or watching it. The game is too intense for my liking, and when the bars put up a big screen, the players become the same size as the viewers. It’s hardly conducive to a quiet gargle when there are sweaty people in green or red and white stripes tearing past you shouting ‘mine’.
And then, once the game is over, almost all of its pleasure evaporates. Fans want to see another, but have no interest in what went before, short of a lingering memory of the final score. ‘Who won’, I ask automatically, over and over again.
They say that soccer is one of the few endeavors in life that one can become an expert in a short time. I mean, just watch a couple of matches and listen to the knowledgeable commentators droning on. I sometimes dwell on this as some fellow at my side enthuses throatily about the current game on the telly which I am determined to ignore. ‘Kill the ref.’ is my stock answer, which almost always works.
If I’m still there after an hour, God forbid, then ‘Which ones are the whites?’ can be a satisfying question to the inevitable chain-smoker squeezed in next to me.
There are bars which only cater to these beer-sportsmen. One on the beach has six different household TVs with, presumably, six different sporting events going on at the same time. Who needs to talk about anything else? A new one in the ‘town next door’, called the Sportsbar, has a large screen with a football-green pitch and people rushing about, visible from the door. I hope they do well.
My suggestion for those who like a quiet drink and don’t wish to be pushed in the back by some cretin shouting either ‘goal’ or indeed ‘gol’, is to come along to my new saloon. It’s a ‘Weather Bar’. We show nice and peaceful weather forecasts on the television with the sound turned off. On the wall we have autographed pictures of José Antonio Maldonado, the iconic Spanish weather man who always faces the map and talks to the viewers over his shoulder, of Francis, who has a house locally, of Hazel, Joe and the Black lady with the oversized heels.
It’s a peaceful atmosphere in my ‘Weather Bar’ and I sell a lot of ‘pink gin’. The advantages are, I hope, clear. In the sports bar up the road, they watch their football and they all go home with a headache. In my place, where the entertainment is just as ephemeral (‘did you see the weather forecast last Friday – hell of a thing. When Francis pointed at Spain on his map, I almost fainted’), where the language is slightly technical, yet full of those comforting clichés so beloved by meteorologists everywhere (‘should lift by the afternoon’, ‘somewhere over the Alps, a cup of tea is brewing’ and ‘looks nice down there in Spain’), and where the very greetings themselves are weather-related: ‘Nice day today, might rain later’. Now that’s the kind of bar which does a good round-the-clock trade and you can drink without worry.
‘Just popping down to the Weather Bar, Darling, don’t wait up’. How could anyone possibly be upset by that?
Best of all, you’ll even know whether to bring an umbrella when you return tomorrow.

Sex Ed

Apart from some quiet giggles from the back row, anything to do with sex was met with silence or a certain suspicion from the boys in my classroom. We were about twelve or thirteen years old and the infantile books read by the majority in ‘library’ didn’t go near the subject at all – especially in the sixties – while the type of novel harvested from my father’s collection at home – if allowed past ‘inspection’ by the English lit teacher – inclined towards a handy and moral dot dot dot just after the unsurprising end-of-chapter clutch between the hero and his new (yet infinitely mysterious) friend.
Not much there then.
For a while, I had a black and white French postcard which, at tuppence a look, was keeping me in sweets, but demand was so high I had little time to examine it myself. A continental couple fastened together in coitus, you know the form.
A friend of mine had got into trouble for looking up the worst word there was in the dictionary – a blue-stocking pre-war Oxford thing. He’d just read the entry for ‘copulate’ and was reeling from the possibilities when a teacher noticed his expression and asked to see what he had been looking at. Dimwit told him, too.
So, as the final term at my prep-school ground towards the end, some ‘leaver’ or other would be taken out of class for the obligatory and highly embarrassing ‘sex talk’ given by the headmaster. You would sit in the same leather chair he’d bent you over for the previous five years while giving you ‘six of the best’ for a poor showing in Latin or talking after the lights out. Under those conditions, and considering the risk, you can see why I had such a high price on my postcard.
It was a couple of days before the end of term. I had given up on ever being told anything about sex but, since my parents were shortly moving to Spain, I reckoned I’d find out my own way.
But then the call came. Titters (from the back) from the Latin class as I was called to see the headmaster. Who started this delicate subject with ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed a tassel-like thing hanging in front of you?’
Blimey, no wonder the English are famous for everything except sex.
Spain was, indeed, much more racy that my prep school in Wiltshire. The first person to give me what appeared to be a passionate kiss was, unfortunately, the chief-of-police’s son from Vera who caught me in the corner of my parent’s sitting room while I was still in the first flush of youth. I did better a couple of years later when I initiated proceedings with an American girl who my dad said looked a lot like Harpo Marx. She talked a lot more, as I remember.
But enough about me. Franco still held Spain in his catholic grip and sex was not something that nice girls did, which was why tourism was so well received by the Spanish, especially when the tourist was a young woman looking to have some fun with some local fellow (Gaaar – the kid was covered in spots and still she preferred him to me…). I usually ended up translating. Thanks to some strange films breaking ground in Sweden at the time (‘I Am Curious Yellow’ for example), which were most definitely not shown in Spanish cinemas, willing foreign girls were known as ‘suecas’, ‘Swedes’, even though most of them were British.
So, on the hunt for suecas, gangs of youths would take up foreign ideas like ‘going to the beach’, ‘dancing to soul music’, ‘wearing Varon Dandy (an eye-scorching gentleman’s perfume)’ and even ‘having a pet – look, he’s called Chico’. All very healthy and, as long as they didn’t get too involved, little damage was done. The alternative to chasing the tourist girls – where available – was a Saturday evening trip to the nearest whorehouse, of which Spain, both under Franco and beyond, has been remarkably blessed.
What the average Spaniard sees in ‘casas de putas’ or bordellos is something a lot different from the soulless ‘half an hour dearie’ version in Soho. Here, everyone goes for a drink, to show off and to enjoy a slap n’ tickle with some houri from Eastern Europe or South America. It’s reasonable but not de riguer to go upstairs. What happens to those poor moth-eaten girls who stand on the side of the road near a convenient bush will remain, I hope, a mystery. Boys will be boys, according to the ultimate authority: mama.
Recently, such innocent pastimes by a generous part of the Spanish male population have fallen under a cloud. A PP councilor from Palma, in Mallorca, maxed out his town-hall credit card to the tune of 50,000 euros on massage parlours and other extra-marital fun while he should have been at work. He has just got two years of prison to look forward to (and the opportunity to discover a whole new ’nother kind of sex).
While ‘puticlubs’ and so on have not changed much after Franco’s death and the power of the Catholic Church’s passing, despite perhaps a small hike in prices in the Nation’s ‘prostíbulos’ (there are over 130 of them in Almería province alone), the advent of pages of newspaper adverts for all kinds of erotic services (a tip of the hat to a friend called Steve for pointing them out) and a new kind of private club in some horrid villa (a group of friends etc), we now have ‘Russian Brides’, Viagra, display cabinets chocked full of condoms, french ticklers and battery-run penis rings on display in our supermarkets; and, above all, we the wonderful limitless power of the Internet.
Bring forth the Bluestockings. No booze, no fags no sex…
Erotica itself, in the shape of big-production cinema, was available just across the border into France but, again by the mid seventies; you only had to go to your local flea-pit, or indeed watch it on the late night telly.
Pornography is now a far cry from my French postcard and is sold as DVDs (in place of cigarettes) in petrol stations across the land. I was told by a local manager that lorry drivers (for some reason or other) often rush up to the counter where an unabashed girl is posted at the cash-register to ask if the latest triple x video-gruesome has arrived. Dear God!
But sex, one on one. Mano a mano. Besides being very good for one’s heart and so on, it is, of course, the single best way to learn another language.

A Trim Little Number in Yellow

(Spain: somewhere on a narrow and dusty road to nowhere). I was driving along just this side of safe, with one eye on the speedo and the other on the rear-view mirror. Half asleep and all bored. Then, the mobile 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 a 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 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 this time.
Talking on a mobile phone in Spain is illegal when you’re driving. Like many other agreeable activities that one can get up to behind the wheel, yes… many agreeable activities…
Whoa! I almost left the road there. And there’s one helluva drop on the right, down to a distant valley full of olive trees. Jeez – that was close.
So, since I don’t have a chauffeur like the head of the traffic department, an ambitious 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 ruling PSOE, all I’m after is a bit of peace and quiet, getting on with life and following the Spanish dream of being left alone. In fact, I just want to sell another set of encyclopedias without any interference from nobody to some family that probably doesn’t want them, can’t read and write properly and… Oh Hell! I'd better pull off the road.
Last thing I need is to lose some more points off my licence. They already took three last month for driving in carpet slippers instead of the approved brogues. Drivers don’t get corns and blisters in that cute fantasy life dreamt up by the city-living fat-cat pink champagne swilling socialist jerks that get to invent all these new intrusive laws while helping themselves to another brown envelope and, in passing, running our country into the ground.
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 besides driving. Like kick one of those hidden speed-cameras to death. You don’t want to spend too long on the traffic-curb as it can be quite dangerous, with truck drivers thundering past your narrow ledge of safety or perhaps, if they are nodding off as their tachometer clicks into the red, they might drive straight in, through and over you.
Thumpity thump. The sod never even noticed. Probably thought it was a new kind of ‘sleeping policeman’.
Then, there are the Guardia Civil road-cops; ‘los primos’, we call them. The cousins.
You can’t loiter with your vehicle on the ‘arcén’ unless you have your emergency lights on, are wearing a kind of high visibility yellow fluorescent jacket, available at a store near you, and have placed your warning triangles both fifty metres before and behind to warn other drivers of your untoward immobility.
Pere Navarro is really looking to be remembered by history.
If they show up, the sheriff of Nottingham’s men are going to want to see if you carry a spare pair of glasses, an inspection sticker, a shoe-press, anything at all on the back seat (apart from mother), a nice clean driving licence and the rest of it – and of course, while they are there, 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. Don’t worry about your insurance papers; they’ll have checked you already on their dashboard computer.
Now we have the ‘points system’, just like in real countries. How many times do second-rate politicians do that trick to help down the medicine ‘Oh, and in Finland you have to carry an extra pair of snow-shoes, so it’s not just here’…?
We start with twelve gold stars on our licences and the police are under strict instruction to start the carving. Aggressively. That and collect money like a carney at a fun-fair. They take any more off me and, shit, I’m walking home. It’s all right for the crazed traffic tsar; he can always get another chauffeur.
All this to answer the phone, which has stopped ringing by now anyway. Still, when you work for yourself, pay a fortune in gas and social security, you don’t want to miss a phone call – it might be a sale.
So, I hide the half-empty flask of whiskey under the seat, next to the crowbar; pull the stupid yellow day-glo number on, up over my head. Look like a booby. The price tag is flapping on my chest so I wrench it off and (no one looking) throw the bloody thing off the edge of the road.
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 fit of bad temper.
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. The hell he came from? 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.
‘What’s up?’
‘This triangle, you wanna buy…? He repeats.
‘You can sod off, you 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 chancer and the other out for the cops. I’ve got my surviving triangle tucked protectively under my arm where it gently rips my fluorescent pajama top.
It was a wrong fucking number. But you already knew that.

So Many Names

How good are you on names? I have a small problem with remembering them which dates back to school times. I attended a place with eight hundred other boys, 120 of which presumably in their leaving year, a large number somewhere in the middle, and another 120 just arriving. All dressed in the same uniform and haircut. All to be known by their last names. Then there were the masters and the associate staff. And Matron. There was a little ‘blue book’ that listed the whole lot of them by house, name and dates. There were twelve ‘houses’ of which, by the time I left, I could confidently locate four. But, the ‘blue book’ knew. Some fellows learnt the whole thing and could put the right name to everybody. People like that, we knew, would one day excel in public life. Now, I wasn’t as game at this as I might have been, never knowing by name more than about twenty people, students and masters, and by sight, perhaps another thirty or so (plus the tea-lady).
This didn’t prepare me very well for adult life, especially a place like Mojácar which, in a way similar to the old school (‘Gloreat Rugbeia’) has lots of both new-boys and, indeed, leavers. The difference being, according to my mum, that here is more like a lunatic asylum.
Which is why they won’t let us do sports.
Spain has its own way of dealing with names. While we get by with a first name, a middle name that no one knows and a last name, the Spanish go for a first name (un nombre), the more generic the better, and a handful of last names (los apellidos). Here, a woman’s surname doesn’t change on entering into the holy state of matrimony (unless the husband’s name is rather smart in which case she’ll tack it on the end of her own). She’ll keep her old collection and, if pushed, might accept being ‘la Señora de so-and-so’. Any children take the best bits from their two parents’ surnames and weld them together into a fresh and different name. Thus José López Rodríguez marries María Pérez Muñoz, who keeps her name as always it was, and the children are called María López Pérez and José-Luís López Pérez (who may call himself, quite correctly under Spanish logic, Pepe Pérez). I’ll explain that in a minute, but suffice it here to note that the Spanish authorities will always want to know the first-name from one’s parents. Francisco, son of José and Alicia.
You may notice, if you have one of those absurd green A4 documents, to be carried at all times, unfolded and together with your passport and a psychedelic orange pajama top (or is that for driving?), that the useless paper (‘this document is not valid as identification or nationality without an accompanying passport’) may not carry your photograph, or thumbprint, or inside right leg measurement, but it will solemnly list your parent’s first names. Doris and Percy. Like anyone knows or cares. They don’t list the middle ones though (which don’t exist in Spanish anyway), as these are just used in police reports to cause confusion when leaked to the press (‘Richard Waverly B was arrested yesterday in connection with…’). I mean, how many Dicks do you know?
My dad was known as ‘Chick Napier’ at school, not because there were many others with his name, but because ‘he had eyes like poached eggs’. Most people, equipped as they are with first, middle and a variety of last names, also enjoy an ‘apodo’ or a ‘mote’ – a nick-name. Somebody goes to work in Germany for six months in 1925, as happened in Mojácar, and the whole family to this day is called ‘Los Alemanes’. Another well-known family is Los Marullos, and one of them, Francisco Gonzalez ‘el Marullo’, was mayor of Mojácar. Marullo means ‘sneak thief’. Nobody from around here finds that peculiar. It makes it easier for people to identify one another. Another family from the hills is known as ‘Los Pajules’, the tossers. They may make one think of Onan from the Bible, whose unconventional sexual activities duly (and inevitably) wiped out his line, but the Pajules clearly have a wider repertoire, since there are quite a lot of them. In fact, every local family will have its own ‘apodo’ which, as we have seen, they will be fiercely proud of.
Small towns have a reduced number of ‘apellidos’. Here in my town, we have Flores, García, Gonzalez, Haro and a couple more. I had an employee called Paco Flores (Paco is really Francisco) and one day I went down to the bank to pay him something. The manager looked pityingly at me, ‘there’s twenty six Francisco Flores with accounts here’, he said. Turned out later that my chap wasn’t one of them anyway, being called Francisco-José Flores instead.
Spaniards, like the Welsh who apparently all share the same surname, are obliged to invent different nicknames, or just use different variations of their first name. Francisco can be Franco, Francis, Pancho, Paco, Paquito, Frasquito, Ico and Fran. Actually the most famous Pancho of them all, Pancho Villa, was really called Doroteo. Who would have guessed?
A friend called Diego has a sure-fire solution to his poor memory for names. He calls all the men ‘León’ and all the women ‘Guapa’ – Lionheart and My Pretty. It’s so much more elegant than the British ‘Ahhh, this is Errr-um…’ And then the Brits expect us to know the names of their children and their dogs as well.
Until ‘La Democracia’ arrived in 1975, you had to call you child by a nice Christian saint’s name, or two would be even better. Sometimes a boy’s name followed by a girl’s (which isn’t generally worth making fun of, unless you can show a good turn of speed). Like José María. Or, of course, María José. I can’t see those names working at my old school, even though, since my day, it’s apparently gone co-educational.
So here in Spain your married parents are separately named (father's name) (mother's name) and you legally take their two first surnames to make up your own set. You may use just your father’s name in the street or, both, or indeed, if your father’s name is a bit humdrum, then you can use your mother’s surname. Take our president for example. He’s called José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He uses his mother’s surname. However, his kids won’t technically be able to call themselves ‘Zapatero’ which is a bit of a swizz. They’ll probably use it anyway.
Spaniards, for their part, are confused about us having two first names and one surname, which the ladies among us will change on getting married. Same surname? They sometimes confuse us as brother and sister.
If you are called Juan and you bump into another Juan, you’ll call him ‘Tocayo’ which means ‘namesake’, which in English, as far as I know, doesn’t work. Of course, I’ve never met another Lenox.

Scare Tactics

There is a story today in El Mundo about the reporter who smuggled a gun on board a ferry to Ibiza. He had it stuck under the seat of his car and he got away with it.
Proving that the security is not up to scratch and that any mad bomb-wielding fiend or ETA hoodlum could do the same. There is nothing for it, says the shocked and scandalized reading public... all cars must now be searched!
This type of crap journalism is part of the justification for more rules, searches, outrages and irritations, together with new departments, gadgets and tax-money to pay for them.
Oh, but what if... cry the bourgoisie as they cower behind their wheels, I've got it so good and I don't want to lose it all...
The press returns to the attack. A journalist got a job working in a secret factory, or tested the fecal content of a meat patty from a famous burger-chain or is pretending to be the Queen's footman (all revelations in tomorrow's News) or has helped initiate and organize a civil protest (see Fox's 'Revenge of the Tea-baggers'). The authorities must tighten up - we could be in danger from a commie takeover!
The Media, to fill pages or screens, has taken to making us nervous and afeared. Better stay home... and watch the news.

What If?

The idea behind insurance is obvious. You pay a little out on a regular basis and it will save you worrying about an unexpected piece of bad fortune. You will be covered if something goes terribly wrong. Wikipedia (taking the larger picture here, I feel) defines insurance ‘as a guaranteed and known small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss’. In Spain, of course, this is not entirely the case.
Here, you pay your insurance and everything goes fine. Keep up the payments why don’t you. However, if the caca hits the ventilator, it’s amazing how often the insurance company will smilingly explain why they don’t, actually, have to cough up a penny, see, because of this or that fascinating and little-known escape clause often referred to as ‘an act of God’.
In the old days, it was a ‘do as you would be done by’ arrangement with your neighbours. Their house burns down, then it follows that you must help them to build them another one. ‘Must’, because, what happens if it’s your house that has been immolated? Insurance is therefore a very civilized arrangement.
So we have Neighbourhood Watch. It’s in our interest to keep an eye out for strange faces, or cars, or people with black eye masks, striped jerseys and carrying a large bolt cutter from Lopez. We have rejas on our windows, a telephone on the night table and, for American readers, as likely as not we have an arsenal of well-oiled and fully loaded semi-automatics under the bed. You never know when you might need them.
Community insurance makes sense, but what about when the driving force is not social, but commercial? We are obliged to carry various different types of insurance thanks to the law, yet the cover comes from commercial companies. I have a car, a ton of metal that thunders along at 70kph while I’m fiddling with the CD player, so I must insure it, at least against me having an accident (while listening to Beethoven). Yet, the government allows different private insurers to essentially fight over the right to be my shining beacon in troubled seas. A few years ago, and thanks to the new rule of not having to actually carry an insurance receipt in the car (don’t worry, the nice policeman knows), it became clear to me one day after checking my bank statements that I had two policies on the same car. One was 200 euros more expensive than the other. Indignant (and mystified), I told the bank-clerk who then wanted to know which one did I want to cancel. Well, how about the more expensive one, hey?
Some of the readers of this piece will have worked (or still work) in the insurance business and they will no doubt argue about the obvious and overriding benefits of ‘peace of mind’. But, thanks to the profit margin, insurance is still stacked against the customer. For example, if I have three cars, how can I be driving more than one of them at any one time? Insure me, the driver, rather than the vehicle! Charge more for the young or inexperienced driver, but not for the car. I will grant you that here in Spain, we all pull a fast one on the insurance: ‘yes, it’s for me’, we say, patting some sporty little motorcycle with distaste, ‘the boy may just use it occasionally…’ But, have you seen the premiums on those things?
So, we must carry insurance, fundamentally, in order that we are seen to do so by the traffic police. That’s moving far away from the basic and logical reason to be covered, isn’t it?
Unlike car or work insurance (which is bloody expensive and almost utterly useless if you happen to be autonomo - self-employed), house insurance is voluntary. Well, I think it is. I have a mortgage, but when the fire came, I was told that the mandatory coverage I must pay for the pleasure of borrowing was, in fact, a life insurance.
I did have private home insurance for a while. A high wind blew the roof off the stables and the insurance perito, the assayer, said that they would only pay out if the wind was over a 100kph. I said that if the roof fell off, it didn’t matter if the wind was 1kph, but luckily, a contact from Garrucha Port gave me a certificate to say that the wind on that day had been 110kph. So the company coughed. Another time, when part of the ceiling fell in on my sleeping son, who was saved by little short of a miracle, the company went with the ‘act of God’ routine and I gave up bothering.
In several cases following the recent fire, home insurers found out that their outbuildings or land were not insured. Some of Spain’s major companies – who spend a suspiciously large amount on television advertising – were talking quickly about ‘the small print’ to their bemused customers.
Sevillana is meant to pay when there’s a power surge, but when the recent fire blew the electric and fried my computer and the telly, the man on the phone assured me that it was ‘a fortuitous act’ and therefore not covered by their service contract. They obviously don’t believe in God at the Sevillana.
It’s clear that a commercial company doesn’t make money by handing out for claims, and the perito’s job must be to minimize the insurance company’s obligations. It’s just strange, with this in mind, how Lloyds of London, for which my batty old step-mother was a ‘name’, always managed to report the most alarming losses. When she died, I discovered that she practically single-handedly had insured the twin towers, which seemed on balance rather unlikely. They cleaned out her account though…
I do have one insurance which is quite excellent. This is the Sanitas, the Spanish private health which has stood by our many problems and innumerable hospital visits over the past few years. So, with this fine company in mind, insurance can sometimes be a life-saver. Just don’t forget to read the small print.

Small Business

Having some time to kill today, I went down to visit a friend who has a store on the beach here in sunny Mojácar. How's business? It's the question you have to ask. Now, there are a few places who say they've done really well, and why not, good luck to them and all that - but most store-owners, bar-keeps and restauranteurs say that it's been a very lean summer, and the autumn doesn't look very promising either. Many emptied shop-fronts are showing the 'se alquila - for rent' sign and the nervous owners (usually local mojaqueros) are beginning to get worried about whether they should continue to ask for the usual higher rent from the next customer.
There are simply too many places. Each apartment block in Spain is built over a ground-floor of potential shops and bars, and like anywhere else, we have too many businesses chasing too few clients.
When the tourists are here, the night clubs do good business (the owners spend the rest of the year in Madrid or Berlin), and the restaurants do what they can. Unfortunately, most of our local hotels offer a three-meal deal so who's going to go out for an expensive steak?
But after the short season is over - the bars, restaurants and stores have only the residents as customers. Now, we don't buy many tee-shirts, plastic squid bottle-coolers or humourous ash-trays and, as my shop-keep friend drily noted, the local population for their part never go to any of the foreign owned businesses if they can possibly avoid it.
Today we hear that this absurd government is going to put up taxes and the IVA (sales tax) which isn't going to help our small businesses much.

Drinkies

The day would start with a small libation in the plaza. Late, perhaps, but it had been a long night. There were two bars, facing each other across the square decorated with a few mangled orange trees, a couple of old cars, several corrugated-sided Citroen vans, as often as not an orange dumper - Spain’s motorized pack animal - and, when not in service, a giant Chrysler from the fifties painted egg-shell blue which served as the village taxi. No one ever went to the smaller establishment, which sold ice-creams and was run by a succession of daughters from one of the local Families. We would use the old Indalo, hotel, restaurant and bar: the clubhouse, assembly room and social hub of the pueblo.
We had stayed there for several months – the price was a hundred pesetas a day for the three of us, rooms, food and drink included – when we had first arrived, and still regularly used the services of the upstairs restaurant where culture-shock and chips were served with a bottle of gritty red wine. We'ed all dine together. Tabs Parcell, the retired air vice marshal, would take his plate and put it under his shirt, next to his skin to ‘warm it’. Sammy, the flamboyant Italian-American homosexual from the merchant navy would handle the translation, under the impression that his bad ‘brooklinése’ would be comprehensible to a mojaquero waiter. Norma, another American expat, who ran an antique shop under the arch, would mutter ‘no, no’ to herself as we kept her glass filled. My dad, tall, freckled and red, known locally as ‘El langostino’, the lobster, would be sticking to whisky – he said the wine gave him gallstones. My mother, practical and in charge, would wander into the kitchen and pick up the lids on the various cauldrons to organize lunch.
The morning session, starting round about twelve, would place the small foreign community, British, French, American and a few others, around the wobbly metal tables of the Indalo, outside on the pavement, or inside, if the weather was bad, at the high marble bar. The inside bar was gloomy, dark, painted in shades of brown and stain, with a big mirror behind the bar together with a few bottles of strange cheap versions of better known brands. Diana, a retired nanny who had taught generations of children how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, appropriated the Green Fish, an unfortunately named Spanish gin, as her own. Diego, whose son these days has a bar on the beach, El Rincón de Diego, where there’s a large photograph of the bar from the old Indalo, would serve his motley crowd with a suggestion of pride. At a few pesetas a drink – a very large brandy cost just a ‘duro’ – the foreign customers soon got high-spirited and only the blistering sun managed to maintain any kind of order. Turkey Alan, a youthful cockney pocket thief, might be telling a story about his dog, a grateful looking greyhound, or perhaps old Cicero, a pungent American professor who lived by himself and spent his money on ‘whiskey and putas’, is noisily standing a round. Tony, a friend of my dad’s, drones on about women while nobody listens and Fritz, the dapper artist with the beard and the terrible laugh, might be sketching an approximation of the party while smoking a ‘dookeedoo’. David, a bald anthropologist who could speak several different North African languages, would be rubbing his short goatee gleefully and telling obscure and very filthy stories about his subjects in the Rif while his wife, Ursula, she of the gravelly voice, is asking me about school in a rather threatening manner as if she was seriously considering the job of ‘Matron’. Another round of drinks arrived. I had a Fanta.
Perhaps, if it was a hot day – it usually was – there would be a move towards the beach; not to swim, in particular, but rather to drink in one of the few places that existed in those days. Beach-land, traditionally inherited by the younger or dumber or less greedy members of the Families over the decades and centuries, was worth nothing. In 1967 we heard of land going for one peseta for ten metres. There were few takers.
There was one really good restaurant on the beach, however, run by French Algerians (they were known as ‘pied noirs’ and Franco smiled favourably on them). This was the Rancho del Mar, where Maxime’s quality food went for McDonald’s prices. Cheaper places, with simple menus, were the Puntazo, the Flamenco and the Virgen del Mar. Salad. Crotchmeat and chips. Sangría.
By three in the afternoon, the group would be building up again outside the Indalo. The post-office, ineptly run by Martín, who couldn’t read or write much, but spoke a bit of French, was open from three to five. I’d be sent to collect the letters, which would be passed to me with their stamps wrenched off by the old man, with the instruction to bring back the ones I couldn’t deliver, ‘…or throw them away’.
In the square, an elderly platinum blonde called Franny and her son Eddie, a semi-retired fifty-year old female impersonator, might perhaps have joined the group, both insisting on drinking Manhattans which they had long ago taught Diego how to make. Roger, who opened the first British bar, La Sartén, in 1968 could have shown up as well, together with Pop-eyed Peter (who was to run away with a mojaquera girl), Alan the Tin Miner and ‘Friggit’, a Swedish woman of doubtful morals. Giggling into his brandy, here's Chris with the long hair and moustache, a pink Mini Moke and a Danish girlfriend called Gitte. As the drinks continued, the group might have felt persuaded to sing, initially simple songs accessible to both the British and the Americans (‘I wonder whose kissing her now’, for example) followed, in the fullness of time, by numbers like ‘My little sister Lily’ and ‘Cats on the Rooftops’ (both also available in Spanish upon enquiry).
The evenings were more of the same. In La Sartén, where Roger would companionably allow you to ‘help yourself, Sport’, or the Zurri Gurri, a sensuous cave-bar run by a couple from Madrid, or the Witches Brew (captained by an American lesbian called Pat and her German friend, the scorching Rita) which also sold leather goods. Today, it’s the ‘Time and Place’.
In those far off times, when the Guardia Civil came in to a bar, conversation died. You had your papers ready. They could hand out some rough and ready justice. We were all a little worried to see them. My dad used to bribe them. ‘Have a drink with me’, he’d say and they’d have a brandy or a whisky and affably call him by his surname.
Later, after the bars closed at one, the only place open was the Pimiento, a disco run by Felipe, another pied noir. Drinks were slightly more expensive, but you could always dance to his collection of scratchy imported singles.
Far into the night, there was only one bar that had a license. It opened at four in the morning for the Garrucha fishermen. Thanks to its neon lights and white tiling, it was familiarly known as ‘the Lavatory Bar’. Pedro ran it and sold carajillos, black coffee with brandy, to the fishermen and, as often as not, the same thing for the surviving foreigners. I stayed with the Fanta. As the last members of the Mojácar Jets downed their drinks and raised their voices in song, while the municipal cop looked through the door and Pedro went ‘Shhh!’, an age slowly and drunkenly made its way to its final bow.

The Cyber Squatter

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The Trouble with Towels

It’s the simple things that catch you out.
Like towels.
We had spent a couple of nights after the Mojácar fire camped in the office on the beach. There’s a small pied-à-terre up in the tower above the office – connected by a twisty climb of around sixty steps – a room equipped with a superb view of the sea, the mountains and, on a clear day, Gibraltar. There’s a fold-away bed and a tiny bathroom with a cold-water shower. Perfect.
The tiny apartment has probably been the host to all sorts of excitement in previous years (although my lips are sealed) and a cold shower is no doubt just the answer after a long climb up all those steps. It hits you when you are out of condition – slogging up sixty steps, then having to go straight back down again for supplies. Yoghurt, beer, smokes, shampoo and towels: the usual iron rations. Unfortunately the towels that I bought from the supermarket a considerable distance below were those highly coloured ones designed for the beach which, being made of polyester, are guaranteed to be one hundred percent non-absorbent. You would do better trying to dry off (after that cold shower mentioned above) by rubbing yourself with a sheet of glass.
What is the point in that? A towel that might look the goods, but doesn’t dry! It’s like a friend of ours who once came out from England to stay with us. Pork sausages and tea-bags scattered among his valises. He had rented one of those old fashioned bathing costumes you are likely to see on Blackpool Pier naughty postcards. A sort of vest and shorts in red and white stripes. I believe it even had a belt. The label from the costume shop said ‘don’t get wet’.
In the end, we left him on the nudist beach.
Our new towels each have a label on them with the ‘ingredients’ listed, in their case, in the ten languages of the ten EU countries (and no doubt a few other places outside the control of the Brussels demons) where these remarkable articles can be bought. A non-absorbent towel, despite its unarguably good-looks, would probably be a non-starter in any cold northern country. You’re not going to sell many of them to the Finns, it seems to me. So the polyester content was merely written in those ten languages: same, same, same, one with an accent, same, something in Greek that no doubt sounds like polyester (come to think of it – it probably comes from the Greek anyway), polyester again and then, the Romanian maybe, to be a bit different, with polyesther. All, as noted, lovingly written on the little white (polyester) label. Think about it, it’s a truly international word! Ugly perhaps, but even the Hungarians have thrown away the opportunity to introduce a completely different Magyar word which meant the same thing. And you know how important it is to keep the language pure – and safe from foreigners.
It’s the biggest difference between the United States of America and the (one day) United States of Europe (plus Turkey and, with a bit of luck, Serbia). Language. Well, and towels. In the USA, everyone speaks some form or other of English. There’s a bit of French in Louisiana and some Spanish in Texas and New Mexico, but essentially, everyone speaks English – even when they don’t. The immigrants to the USA want to join in, to become ‘Merkens. Not the same over here in Europe at all. Half the people just in England don’t even speak English. If there are currently twenty seven countries in the European Union, there are a lot more official languages than that. All supported by different kinds of dim-witted bigoted regionalists busily and angrily pushing their own confusing (but frightfully old, antique, practically millennial) languages. A generous chunk of the Spanish flat-out refuse to speak the language of the motherland, unless, of course, they’re talking to someone from another weird bit of the country… they’ll use Spanish as a lingua franca.
I says: ‘Uggh’.
So thank goodness for polyester, a word that cuts to the quick of our confused linguistic mishmash; unlike cotton – a useful ingredient, I would have thought, to put in towels and other articles of clothing. Baumwölle, algodón, coton, bumbac, pamut etc.
I rang up the manufacturer. ‘Sí’, said a voice. ‘Sí’ I answered back playfully. There was no ‘Yes, good morning, Consuelo at the phone, Plastic Towels and Underwear Incorporated. How may I help you?’ Consuelo, a Spanish girl’s name that ends, confusingly, in ‘O’. No wonder we can’t get a handle on the language. Sheesh!
‘Listen here,’ I say, ‘why don’t you use a bit of cotton in your towels?’
‘Well’, she answers, ‘we could, but there wouldn’t be any room on the label’.
‘But they don’t absorb’, I say, the water pooling round my feet. ‘They’re no bloody use’…
The first towel, the one I got, a simple design in red… yellow, green, puce, pink, orange, mustard and ochre, would have been just the thing to tie to a flagpole on a low-lying island in the Pacific. How ever much Global Warming helped the ocean wash over the land, that flag would always be there, defiant, colourful… and bone-dry.

Last Days

Somehow, August is the month where it finally dawns on us that the heat has gone on for far too long, where we’ve been battered and bowed by too much tourism, where the nights have been too noisy and where everyone who we need to see for some pressing reason – lawyers, doctors or politicos – have closed their offices and gone off somewhere on holiday on our shilling: like the Seychelles or the Dominican Republic.
In August, many of our local cosmopolitans return ‘home’ to Britain or Germany to see their families, escape the heat (we are on ‘Alerta Naranja’ today) and to have a decent pint of beer. So there’s no one about who we know except for the restaurant and bar owners, who are all far too busy to stop and talk to us anyway.
August is a good month to stay in. Use the pool and send the kids out to do the shopping. Read, watch the telly. Swim again.
In my town, August ends with its fiesta popular. The local saint, in our case one Agustín (patron saint of sangria, ugly buildings and bad haircuts), is celebrated with a noisy piss-up. In Spain, a patron saint’s day is extended, according to the size and wealth of the town, to several days or more. Almería City (currently in its fiestas) used to have a ten day thrash (where everything was essentially closed and one dressed up every evening in flamenco costumes or a clean shirt and jacket and went out and ate gambas and got rat-arsed). Now, with the current crisis, it has been reduced to a mere eight days. Naturally, everyone is hysterical about this, although at least the top name bullfights and a few major concerts and a shit load of fireworks are still de rigueur.
Here in Mojácar, we have just four days of fiesta, starting this coming Thursday and running through Sunday August 30th. No bullfights, no name-bands but, of course, plenty of things that go bang. Late, late nights and lots of volume. Dancing in the square. You won’t be sleeping much later on this week…
But, right after the last string of paper flags has been cleared up on the following day, August takes its bow and we enter into September, the very best month of the year.

Strength in Numbers

There’s a new service on our local radio: it re-broadcasts a three-hour program from London put out, apparently, by the Sun newspaper. So now, those of us who live here can keep up to date with what’s going on ‘at home’. The latest gossip about those sterling characters that are too important to appear on such a channel, as re-told to the breathless costa-dwellers. The frothy mixture interspersed with bits of news, the weather forecast (for the Thames Valley no doubt), some pop songs, some politics-lite together with other wholesome and instructive entertainment.
Sometimes, living here is a bit like what one can imagine must occur on Pitcairn Island, the tiny and unapproachable island in the south Pacific, taken over 150 years ago by the mutineers from the Bounty.
‘Ahoy there Mr Christian, any news from London?’
‘No Mr Christian …’
Of course, there is one clear and obvious difference. Each year, crisis notwithstanding, our group is growing larger. More and more people are re-locating here, anxious to join in. Our children have often moved to Spain to be with us: in some cases, they’ve been born here. We may be grafting here, or we may be retired, but we will have worked hard in our past lives from wherever it was we left behind, to come here and to call this home.
We have many skills and countless experience and we are prepared to offer our help and advice to improve our new neighbourhood. So why don’t they ever ask us?
The longer we live here, the less important our old country of residence becomes. The less urgent to catch up on the latest activities of shallow and plastic characters that we only know of anyway from watching Sky television. How much future each of us has is down to fate, but there’s no doubt but that our future is here.
To be fully comfortable living here, we must know our way about. Not just the geographical constraints of our pueblo and indeed our province, but we must find out how things tick. The culture of Spain, the kitchen, the traditions, the history, its society and, as far as possible, its language. These are all crucial elements to living here in comfort and in peace.
But there is more, we must be satisfied with our own society. To describe ourselves as ‘Brits’ or ‘Expats’ or ‘ingleses’ or ‘guiris’ or some other slightly insecure or perhaps negative term, is a weakness. To think of ourselves as ‘colonials’ or ‘exiles’ (like our interbred friends on Pitcairn) or ‘immigrants’ or even as ‘future Spaniards’ are all wrong and perhaps even slightly absurd. The colonial works to become wealthy with the intention of returning home; the exile has his nose pressed to the glass, anxious yet unable to return inside. An immigrant is here to better his lot: to find work and dignity. As for us becoming future Spaniards, even those of our children who are born here will tell you that such a thing is not easy. We are, perhaps, ‘émigrés’, living here because we can.
Our lives here are fine. We live well. As long as nothing goes wrong, we have nothing to fear. We live almost in a different or shifted dimension from the Spaniards. We walk past them, but sometimes we suspect that we could walk right through them as if through a ghost. They are here and we are here, but we are not, quite, here together. We tolerate them, they tolerate us.
Which must be our fault. Our mistake. We say we must try harder.
In fact, the problem which our group faces is a different one. We have yet to create a ‘society’, or ‘an entity’. Being an ‘Expat’ doesn’t quite make the grade – it’s as if we used to be ‘a Pat’, but got demoted somehow. We need, it seems to me, to become proud of ourselves, of our group. In fact, we need to become a group. Believe me, the local people would not only understand, they’d treat us better.
There’s a word which a friend, Christine, brought to my attention which could work. Cosmopolitan. It would make things a lot easier. We could dispense with ungainly terms like ‘Europeans’ (does that include Spaniards, what about Americans?), the ‘Brits’ (what about the Germans, the Dutch and so on?) or even the ‘Extranjeros’? I am sure that the local Spaniards and the political institutions would respect us more, if we could leave aside the apathy and unite as a proud group, with fresh ideas, enthusiasms and energies for our towns and parishes.
Locally, society is divided not between the Spanish and the Foreigners, so much as between the Local Spanish and everybody else. The town halls are run exclusively by local people (with a few rare exceptions) and they are staffed exclusively by local people. In my town (Mojácar), we have well over 50% Cosmopolitans (I’m using that word now), yet all the public jobs go to the local, ethnic people. This is because we have been happy, in our majority, to allow this to happen.
In the old days, when there were but a few foreigners living here, we would look out for each other. The British embassy was never going to move a finger (its job is to promote British industry abroad) and the Consulate’s only obligation is to sell us another passport or extend some ‘home’ benefits to us abroad. When there were only a few of us, we would help each other out: drive those in need to hospital, translate for them, wine and dine them (as necessary) and join together when the chips were down to buy them a ticket out. Now, we are too many and we lack an identity. For this reason, perhaps, we have associations, clubs and circles. But, precisely because we are weak, apolitical and inert, we are picked upon. We are a powerful group. All the money that circulates here is (or rather was) ours. It came from elsewhere. We have homesteaded here because we love it, because we find it beautiful and peaceful. Yet, when some threat looms, we shrug our shoulders and, unbelievably, we put up with it.
Imagine what we could do, those of us who have the intelligence and the experience, whether we are Britons, Germans, Norwegians, Americans or Madrileños, if we became, truly, Cosmopolitans.

Stuck at Home

I've been stuck at home for the past week, after breaking my foot in some odd and pointless way. After the Mojácar fire went through the estate back on July 23 - 24, cornering for me the local charcoal market, I had been obliged to buy a whole lot of garden-hose and to tell the local water company that their hook-up was all burnt and melted. They fixed their pipe, but didn't replace the meter (free water while the sun shines!). So, with a hundred metres of hose and a wheelbarrow, I went on up to the top of the land to hook up the set for a good flushing. Maybe some of the five hundred trees planted by my dad back in 1969 would only be singed. So, first thing, I put my foot down wrong and fractured a bone somewhere. I went to the emergencia in town and then off to Vera for X-rays. Got wrapped up tight and sent to bed.
My wife has had to take over the squirting and soaking. Poor Barbara - no help either!
Yesterday I was lugged off to see Miguel, the chap in charge of taking note of losses incurred by the local landowners. I had prepared a list which didn't fit the proper reclamación so together we bashed out another one. This is for the Junta de Andalucía: sign here and here... and here.
Say, Miguel, how much is a forty year old pine tree worth anyway?