These Days, Fun can be Expensive, Inconvenient and a Fraction Drawn-Out

 One of the questions now being asked, now the local fiestas, celebrations, concerts, rallies, expositions and sporting events are largely over, is this:

Who exactly do they benefit?

The apocryphal story from the mid-sixties is told of my mother stomping down to the main square from our apartment by the church wearing her slippers, dressing gown and a hand bag – with which she slugged the mayor shouting ‘turn the music down, I’m trying to sleep’. 

In those days, there’d be a few strings of bunting, a local pop band, the bar doing a brisk trade, and the old deaf-and-dumb lady, la muda, selling cigarettes (single, or a half- or full pack), along with Bazooka Joe bubble-gum and wax matches, cerillas from a tray hanging from her shoulders. The families would dance together – small children up to the oldest grannies, all holding hands and bobbing around. There were songs like La Chica Ye Ye or the grisly Las flechas del Amor…

Brandy was three cents a tot. A small glass of a kind of red wine which would make one’s teeth rot was even cheaper.

They were different times. The only visitors would be family who had emigrated to Barcelona or France or Germany. I remember a family known as los marseilleses, who would come for a few days around that time in their Citröen Ami, look down their noses at their country-cousins, and then disappear again.  

There’s the World Day of the Tourist coming up in late September (when they’ve all gone home again), but in our town, neither this nor the non-existent Day of the Foreign Resident are pencilled in. No celebration as such, even if we are here all year long putting money into the economy. Mind you – I think there’s another Saint’s day which pops up around then.

These days, as we’ve all seen (only too vividly) the fiestas are a joy for the shop-keepers who will obligingly stay open until late, but there’s not much pleasure for the locals. Even if one does attend, and has a pricey beer at the metal chiringuito raised in the square (next to the deafening dance-band), who ya gonna talk too? Who ya gonna dance with? So, what with the visitors all enjoying their last few days of the holidays, the instant traditions taking up the usual parking spaces (medieval market anyone?), the far-from cheap drinks and tapas or the ride on the roundabout, I’ll take vanilla.

They’ve even extended them an extra day or two, since one can never have enough fun.

In the old days, maybe a neighbour owned a black and white TV and would kindly leave his window open for the curious, at least for the football game, but now everyone has a huge flat-screen with a hundred channels and a fridge full of beer. Why go out, say the vecinos, when one can be dazzled at home for free?

It comes down to this – a local event can be for the local people, or, if it’s the summer and you are in one of Spain’s ‘Most Beautiful Villages’, then it’s for the business-folk and the tourists. The visitors will all have to sleep somewhere – and for that we have the Airbnb hosts and the hotels, all rubbing their hands.

The Residents don’t stay in them; and for that matter, they don’t buy souvenirs either – making us very disappointing as customers.

And if we do need to drive into the centre to join the festivities and see the fireworks, where can we park that's not a half-hour walk away?

So if something is a bit expensive, yet perceived as cheap by the tourists, then that’s the price of a fiesta without the people it is meant to be for (and, one way or another, who paid for the music and the bunting).

Or who knows? Perhaps we are just getting old.

Meanwhile, and sad to relate, there’s no one left prepared to stomp down to the fiesta at three in the morning, waving her handbag, to tell the mayor to go and pull the effing plug.

Editorial For Late August (the well was running dry)

Each week I write Business over Tapas and send it out to subscribers. It comes with plenty of useful news about life in Spain, and a well thought-out editorial. I've lived here for most of my life and edited and directed a number of newspapers, both in English and Spanish, between 1985 and 2008. 

But sometimes, there's not much to write about...

...

August has just about made its apologies and left, bringing us Welcome September – which is the best month of them all. The weather (should be) perfect, warm but not killer-hot. The sea will be just right and there’ll finally be some room on the beach.

The subject of la turismofobia will be dropped (at least until next year) and the children will all be back in school.

For journalists and hacks, there’s the renewed prospect of writing about Spanish politics – that effervescent mixture of insults, betrayals and some occasional improvements (or at least, changes) in our lives.

And then the autumn slowly creeps towards us, bringing a freshness to the air and the garden. We can go for walks once again in the campo or along the paseo marítimo. Maybe drop in somewhere for a beer, where the barman remembers our name and is once again pleased to see us.

September is a good moment to start new adventures, and maybe pause to see what the others are writing about:

So, here’s the intro over at that new costa magazine ‘Spain By Jingo’:

Welcome to our coolest month, September, where it’s blissfully hot and groovy.

We enjoyed the thrash during the summer, but now thankfully, they’ve all rushed home again, leaving us to enjoy the peace and pick up the pieces.

We hope you enjoyed our local fiesta last week. We had a go on the dodgem-cars, which reminded us a lot of the roundabout along the beach in front of the hotel.

Seriously though, here in Spain we drive on the right.

In this exciting edition, with some brand-new advertisers for you to meet, we have Beryl’s nail extensions on P.9 and also three and a half ways to cook a chicken with Gillie on the same page (Ok, Ok, the full-page advert from an offshore financial adviser that was going to go there fell through at the last moment – we think he got arrested. We pulled his article too, just in case…).

Peter Grubshall is back with the riveting story of his move to Spain with ‘From Gloucester to the Costa’.

With our fiendish quiz on P.14 (all about Your Favourite Country) and our guide to useful words in Spanish in the Back, we are sure you’ll have a fab month.

Andy and Lucía.

...

(I leave you wondering - what is your favourite country?)

The Best-Kept Secrets in Publishing Aren't Secrets At All

 

Churning through the media articles every day to find material for my weekly bulletin about Spain, I often find pieces which are designed to make the reader go past the title and into the text – surrounded as it is with advertisements, pop-ups and, of course, the EU’s insistence on asking us if it’s OK to place cookies on our phone or computer every bloody time.

Then along comes the text that says: ‘We notice you’re using an ad-blocker…’

Damn right I am.

But despite all this, yes, I have decided that I want to read about ‘We’ve Found the Best Village in Spain’. So, open the stupid link, already!

This is called click-bait, when they don’t tell you the very vital thing you wanted to see in the headline, which is why you have to click into the story. Usually, they’ll get around to the subject in hand in the third or fourth paragraph, after you have hurdled a long diatribe about Spain’s wonderful unknown and unspoiled pueblos, a couple of adverts for shoes, shirts, or a merry cruise to Norway and an insistent request to subscribe.

The problem often being that – I guess if enough people read the article – which may have started out life somewhere else (Google has an uncanny trait of rumbling unoriginal material) then when you take the plunge and finally arrive at the destination itself, at least for lunch and a look-see, it’s going to be full of fellow-readers and, well, sorry to tell you, but – thanks to the recent media-exposure – I’m Afraid You May Need to Book!

Annoying for those who bought a place there some years previously, precisely because it was off the beaten track.

These ‘beautiful’ or ‘best kept secret’ articles are easy to write (thanks Wikipedia!) and they fill a space. How many times have you seen a picture of that street covered by a huge rock in Setenil de las Bodegas (Cádiz) or that embarrassing pueblo in Málaga they painted blue?

Right now, there are endless stories of ‘a pretty village in Spain where they want to ban tourists’. Above all apparently, the ones who take ‘selfies’, according to one gloomy home-owner. Often called ‘The little Mykonos’ (by absolutely nobody except copy-editors, I suspect), the village – Binibeca Vell – is in fact a 1972 urbanisation on the edge of San Luís in Menorca. And it’s probably not looking its best after those heavy rains last week.

See, it gets full of visitors, which is no doubt a treat for the local souvenir shop, but it is kind of a nuisance for everybody else.

There may be lots of money in tourism, but it doesn’t get spread around as fairly as it might.

The alternative is to tell the locals to stay inside so as not to inconvenience the cruise-ship trippers (as happened on the Greek island of Santorini the other day), or close the local bar (as reported in a pueblo in Galicia – ‘We don’t want any Madrid tourists here giving themselves airs’, explained the owner in garbled Galician). A fellow from Barcelona says that in his city, ‘We don’t walk in a straight line any more, we dodge’. Over in Santiago de Compostela, the locals complain about the pilgrims – ‘it’s like Easter every day of the year’.

How about Peñiscola, in Castellón? Eight thousand people live there, and there are 25 visitors for every resident. ‘Excuse me, coming through…’ (My own Mojácar is in sixth place according to the media report).

No doubt the city fathers would prefer wealthy tourists – the ones who spend and tip lavishly – while not so much the other kind, who drink a few beers and are sick in the fabled village gardens. Or, worse still, the ones who spray-paint an esteemed foreign resident’s eleven million dollar home. But, sad to say, you can’t really have the one kind of visitor without the other, unless there’s a fellow in a uniform at the gate. Also – wealthy people don’t necessarily behave themselves better.

Tourism is either packing as many sights into a short vacation as one can (‘If this is Tuesday, this must be Belgium’) or spending the holiday in one single place, usually to relax and get pissed. Both have their merits and – evidently – their issues.

But, don’t we have a right to two holidays away each year? (We can except us foreign residents in this instance, with a car-trip across Spain or a weekend in a Parador. For one thing, we don’t tend to travel in packs).

The point is this: would Spanish tourists suddenly come to your town in the UK or Germany and behave in the same way – and if they (by some miracle) they did – how would you feel? A thousand drunken Spaniards in Hatfield (dubbed as ‘The Most Boring Town in England’) wearing Gibraltar Español tee-shirts and singing loudly and tunelessly as Henry over at The Red Lion gleefully fills them up with more drinks.  

So remember, as you scan the blogs and news-sites for fresh and interesting places to visit:

‘Your vacation spot is somebody else’s home’.

A Little Dab Will Do Ya

 Two things to know about me – I’m blind as a bat… and I like bats.Well, any critter really. 

The bats come from finding eleven of them stashed in my curtains in my bedroom early one morning while of a tender age and still living in Norfolk. Cute little things. None of them bit me as I shooed them outside.

Here, there are no curtains to speak of, and the usual critters hanging upside down from the rafters tend to be geckos. Nice and friendly – like the bats, they enjoy a fresh mosquito to munch on.

Now, this thing about being short-sighted. I got my first pair of specks when it became apparent I couldn’t see the writing on the blackboard. In fact, I couldn’t even see the blackboard.

I was given some horn-rimmed glasses (we call them glaffas in Spanglish) and thus equipped, I went through my formative years, leaving the school choir when my balls dropped (it was a mutual decision) and finding new and interesting pass-times, some of which involved my specks inappropriately steaming up.

Horrid things. Wandering around looking out of a pair of magnifying glasses from the wrong side while covered in spots - that, and being made to wear shorts. It's a part of my life which I try hard to forget.

When it came the time to cautiously making myself available to the Gentle Sex, I thought I would switch from my specs (now much scratched) and try out instead some fashionable blue-tinted bottle-bottomed contact lenses.

Which have stood me in remarkably good stead ever since.

The other day, while preparing myself for the evening’s adventures ahead, I was to be found taking a shower in the family hip-bath. My eyes, like the rest of me, were naked (and pink).

And what is that down near my feet, thrashing about and hoping to escape the water. I reached down to rescue it – it was a panicking gecko, poor little guy. But wait, let me just get a little closer to have a better look. I dropped onto all-fours and held my face a few inches away…

Before letting out a shriek and abruptly abandoning the tub.

Bloody thing was a giant centipede.

The Ice-cream Tart

The Spanish have so many wonderful things going for them, that I can only lament that I spent the first thirteen years of my life living elsewhere.

My parents felt the same way, and loaded up the car in Norfolk for what would become a one-way trip south back in 1966.

And he we are - or at least, here I am (my parents having duly succumbed many years ago, surrounded by friends, to one of what used to be Spain's greatest attractions - coñac at five pesetas a tot).

I live quietly, having learned a few vital lessons about life here:

Never lend your money to friends, or start a newspaper - which comes pretty much to the same thing.

Steer away from brandy.

Never keep the nub end of a joint in your car's ashtray (long story).

Always order the tarta al whisky after a good lunch.

Spain's Whisky Tart is a sort of vanillery helado thing, with a few crushed nuts and a bit of sponge, and a miniscule squirt of hootch to add flavour. Imagine that - an alcoholic ice-cream!

When you order it in one of this country's one million better restaurants, then the maître will bring a bottle of scotch and either baptise your desert in that generous devil-may-care way so typical of the Spanish, or even leave the bottle next to your plate for you to drown your bowl of ice-cream a tu gusto.

As a young 'un, I used to have the flan with a tinned peach for pud; good in its way, but nowhere close to a whisky tart.

In fact, I think I'll indulge myself right now - the essay needs a picture, right?

Hot Summer Nights

 Gosh, it ain’t half hot.

It’s so hot I’ve got a towel wrapped around the pillow. The window is wide open and the screen has been checked (somehow, the little buggers still manage to get in to the bedroom and bite. They probably carry wire-cutters within their dental array – the mosquito’s answer to the Swiss Army Knife).

The noise from the passing traffic and the odd summer concert drifts through the curtain and refreshes me – it’s come that I can’t sleep until I’ve heard that particular summer song at least twice.

It’s dark, apart from the moonlight and the little red and green glows from the television switch, the extension cords, the mosquito plug-in and the electric clock which winks throughout the night (it’s more trouble to get up and reset it following the regular power-cuts that plague the barrio). If I wake up for a pee, which I do around 3.30am, the room glows like the approach to a small provincial airstrip: and I half expect a small follow-me airport vehicle to escort me to the loo.

Maybe detour past the fridge to drink some cold water on the way back to Runway One.

I pull the fan a little closer to the bed and fall back into my pit, now damp with sweat. Try and get back to sleep, but maybe check the Facebook first. Maybe read for a spell (I much prefer books to the television). Maybe spray the room and scratch for a bit.

So hot. I’ve taken to having two (or even three) cold showers throughout the day. I haven’t done that since school all those years ago. At least there’s no one here to flick me with a towel.

An hour has passed, so I’ll try and sleep again. The concert has stopped, but there’s an owl on a nearby tree that lets out a liquid hoot every fifteen seconds. I noisily shut the window – maybe he’ll take the hint.

I look again and now it’s 7.00am. I’ll get up and make myself a toast and coffee.

While that’s going on, I’ll have another pee and brush my teeth.

I’m told by the fellow on the TV that I have bad breath, so I go for a quick gargle of mouthwash, making my tongue look like I’m a lizard-person. The product has a child-proof lid on it, which means that it won’t fall open by chance in the shopping-bag, or indeed in the bathroom. I too need both some wire-cutters and some patience, hard to do when I’ve just heard the toast-launcher eject my breakfast onto the kitchen floor.

Outside, it looks like it’s going to be another nice day.  

Dodgy Phone Calls: Spam, Whistles and Con-artists

For some reason, we are getting lots of telephone calls in these times from unknown numbers. My Android phone is good enough to say: ‘watch out, this is probably a spammer’ which is ammunition enough for me to press the ‘refuse call and block number’ button.

It used to be someone from a cheap-energy company wanting you to switch out of Endesa, or maybe a salesperson from some dodgy newspaper or magazine hoping for your business. These days, it’s likely a robot which is checking to see if anybody is on the other end of a phone-number. If you do pick up, it lets out a cheerful little beep, and hangs up.

Yes Boss, we’ve got a live one here.

The numbers are collected and sold – either to spammers, crooks, thieves, con-men, or that fellow who wanted to sell you a cheap health insurance.

In my phone memory, I have several calls refused by me in the last few days as ‘Llamante no deseado (sospecha)’ and others as ‘Fraude (possible)’.

There’s a new service I’ve found, a kind of reverse phone number directory for fraudulent callers called ListaSpam. They say they have a list of over a million crooked phone-numbers between Spain and Latin America. You can download their app – free – and your phone will automatically bounce any of these bogus callers.

ListaSpam is a simple dot com, so let me look up some of the calls I’ve had recently:

The number 951125163 from Málaga has been checked 22 times by unwilling victims.

The number 624156344 has been checked 205 times, and has four complaints.

The number 613592067 has been checked 297 times, and has four complaints

The number 613889843 has been checked 337 times, and has two complaints.

The number 625028220 has been checked 504 times, and has seven complaints.

But the prize goes to 951823073, checked 5,835 times, with seventy-one complaints.

All these numbers, plus others, have called me in the past week, even though I’m on the Lista Robinson – a useful register of numbers not to be called by importune sales-folk or telemarketers. It has saved me a large number of calls, and if they get through to me and I say I’m on the Lista Robinson, they’ll say they’re sorry and hang up. If they don’t, then I hang up. It’s evidently not fool-proof, but it helps. If you do speak to them, tell them that you intend to make a denuncia to the AEPD – the Spanish protection of data agency (they are acting outside the law). They’ll disconnect soon enough.

So how do they get my number? Maybe someone at the electric company or the town hall is making a few euros on the side selling a list of phone-numbers to people with wonky accents.

These spam calls are something new, probably starting – in my case – about a month ago.

Right now, between Facebook (‘Oh, I do love your posts, would you please be my friend?’), sundry texts about small debts I’m said to owe to Tráfico or the electric company or my bank (what was your pin number again?) as sent to Messenger, and then the email spam (I now get 20 or 30 of these each day – usually to tell me I’ve won a prize), I’m getting more junk than real calls from friends and family.  

Today (Saturday) I got a call at 2.00pm, as I was settling down to a sandwich, and then another at 3.00pm, just as I switched on the news. It’s like they have a sixth sense to call at an inconvenient moment. The phone warned me both times and I blocked the numbers at once.

Say, that wasn’t you calling was it?  

The Coming Divorce

 I don't suppose that anybody cares much, but me and Facebook, Facebook and I, are about to part company. 

We had a longish fling together, eleven years according to them, but now the time is fast approaching when we must divide the furniture, the paintings and the dog, and see who gets the car. 

This is because they keep putting me down. 

I post something, and they put it 'lower in feed' (how many people read - or rather see my posts on Facebook anyway?). 'Lower in feed' is kind of like Being Sent to Coventry.

Not nasty stuff, like pictures of dead Palestinian children, or swastikas, or pictures of Donald Trump looking stupid - but, I don't know, pretty innocuous news stories from the Spanish press (one last week showed a graphic from elDiario.es on the voting spread following the European elections). I post these things because they are interesting. 

They currently question, or remove, about one post a week. 

They accuse me of posting 'Graphic violence' on this one, and another of the Argentinian president Milei insulting Pedro Sánchez (also a press clipping). Javier Milei is currently back in Spain and no doubt insulting the Royals this time. Me, I'm not gonna say nuffing, no.

Today, they suddenly removed an article which comes from this blog about the old drinking habits of the foreigners in Mojácar back in the sixties which I had posted just over a year ago on Mojácar Golden Years (a page about Mojácar back in the sixties).

A year ago!

They said it was 'spam'.

 It is, I agree, a pretty terrifying article - I wonder if they had read it. Maybe they got a complaint from Alcoholics Anonymous.

Indeed, the break-up is edging closer (freeing me up to spend more time with other projects).  

I put Ronald Searle's marvelous cat at the top of this page to try and fool the Thought Police - we shall duly see how that goes. 

The Lizards Need to Cool Off

It’s been so hot here recently (thankfully, the weather changed for the better after the weekend) that I decided it was time to have a look at the two antique air-conditioning units that top and tail my digs. I had only the one mando, which needed batteries, but that was an easy challenge well within my capabilities. The other air-con didn’t have a control or any buttons or knobs as far as I could see.

I know that the global warming – you can believe it or not, I don’t care – is besieging us and each year it’s a tiny bit hotter, and well, I’m a tiny bit older too.

My daughter sent round a capable young fellow called Ashley (born and raised in the pueblo) to see if he could work his magic. 

I thought I had better clean up the bedroom and so moved things here and there, creating some space for air-conditioning mechanics, and discovered why the bedroom unit wasn’t working after I pulled a heavy trunk away from the wall.

Yes, friends, it had been left unplugged.

By the time Ashley arrived, I was down to just one non-functioning air-conditioner.

This particular piece, a relic from the days of Francisco Franco, is in a room full of both books and my computer and is decorated with a cane-and-plaster ceiling which is generally heaving with geckos.

We feared that the small and amiable lizards probably looked on the rather fuzzy-looking box located above the small window as a kind of Geckos’ Graveyard. Switch that thing on and there’d be bits of grated lizard all over the house.

Anyway, it turned out that there is a way to open up these things, and buttons are revealed. ‘Huh. Who needs a mando’ I wondered.

And, it works a treat. Sort of. No reptile’s entrails to speak of.  

Now I have to upgrade the computer with a new operating system. Maybe Ashley knows someone. Like the air-con, the old box of tricks has seen better days and it never fully recovered from the millennium bug fright, you remember, when the internal calendar was going to return everything back to 1900: Goodness, how the time has gone.

The power here is erratic, with those annoying micro power outages, which is why I must remember to ‘save save save’ as my late father in law, a retired IBM technician, would say.

To counter this, some years ago I bought an eternal battery (well, good for three minutes anyway) which also controls any fluctuations in the voltage. One can never be sure.

Anyway, it doesn’t work and when the power goes, it goes too.

There’s probably a lizard trapped inside it.

 ...........

Ashley (Mojácar area) Tf. 693 486 788

Country Life

 The arrival of June means summer is here, which brings with it hot days and steamy nights, lots of visitors to dodge (or greet, depending on one’s age and inclination) and above all, lots of noise.  

There are fiestas and concerts plus, if you live anywhere south of Madrid, the Moors and Christians thrashes – which in our town’s case means three days of very noisy cap-guns, stunning outfits, parades and music from the marching bands.

I live in the campo, which has its own challenges. The visitors tend to have six legs, come out in swarms, and bite. A dab of repellent behind each ear usually keeps them away – or failing that, a green incense coil does the trick. The noise is provided by the hordes of brightly-coloured Argentinian parrots ('cotorras') who come and perch outside my window, the barking of the dogs who weren’t invited to the fiesta, and me shouting at the wild boar which have recently multiplied in my neck of the desert.

The pigs will come out at night and dig for grubs and the tender roots which are an unappreciated detail of my flower beds and modest fruit orchard. They will also pull down rocks from the stone terraces which are a fixture of southern Spain. They have noses like bulldozers. Sad to relate, I have found that putting the rocks back where they were doesn’t seem to work as it should. There must be a lot more to building a good terraza than meets the eye.

Oddly, the most destructive brute of all is a charming looking kind of wild goat called an ibex (or maybe it’s an arruí, a Barbary sheep, say some of the local naturalists doubtfully). It looks like a deer and it can stand on a thimble. Or, if there isn’t one to hand, then the top of a fruit tree will do. This cabra montes doesn’t just eat the fruit, or the geraniums when dallying in my garden; it breaks off the branches, or throws down heavy planter-boxes, while one of them even bit off an entire potted shrub the other day and then it pooped in the suddenly empty and unappealing flowerpot: a little souvenir of its visit, bloody thing!

There are about twenty of them local to me, and I’m told that they have moved, like the wild pigs, down from the hills and into the municipality. For most of my life, I had never seen a single one, but now I must rush outside and go ‘Hoo!’ several times a night.

Maybe I should get a dog to frighten them off, but the last one died of leishmaniasis, which comes from the no-see-ums – the tiny biting flies.

I was just talking on the phone with my son, who is in Missouri. There, they have a lake full of a kind of aggressive fish called an alligator gar which he tells me makes a barracuda look like a beginner. One simply can’t swim there and these things apparently reproduce at an amazing rate. They are from foreign-parts, he says, and thus an invasive species. A bit like the ibex and the cotorras, or maybe (to stretch a point), your humble correspondent.   

Allez les Filles

Isn’t it a grand thing when one can change one’s opinion? It doesn’t happen often in one’s adult life – beyond maybe discovering that some of those rock groups really weren’t that good after all – and yet, lookit, here we are today: fans of Spanish women’s football!

They’ve done awfully well in the last twelve months, breaking the records that men’s football can currently only dream about – championships, FIFA World Cup championships and more – indeed, the Barcelona women’s blaugranas team just beat the French Olympique Lyonnais team in the Bilbao stadium in front of 51,000 spectators to win The UEFA Women’s Champions League.  

This strange new world we live in: a proper televised women’s sporting event where a couple of fellows brought a pro-Palestinian banner on to the pitch at the beginning of the match, receiving cheers from the fans (and evident approval from the organisers).

I learned today that Women’s Football has been played in the UK since 1890 (at least) but that ‘some saw it as a threat to men’s football. The FA banned women from playing the sport at FA affiliated grounds between 1921 and 1971, with the governing body stating: “…the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged”’.

In Spain, the first club ‘the Spanish Girl’s Club’ dates from 1914 (‘twenty years before women could vote’, says an article I’m reading). From the Civil War until Franco’s death, the sport was dropped – call it chauvinism if you like.

I’ve never liked football – a long game interspaced once or twice in ninety agonizing minutes with a shrieked ¡gol gol gol! from the exited commentator on the TV on the shelf behind me. ‘Who won?’, I ask without turning round.

It’s probably to do with my early school life – the choices were either soccer or Latin (or, uh, smoking on the roof of the lavatories).

But look at the players! Somebody said unkindly a few years ago that you would never get eleven women to agree to wear the same outfit in public, but suddenly we saw that this whole deal wasn’t about sexy girls, like the ones playing volleyball matches – where nobody cares about the score anyway. This was about real ones: playing sport and playing to win: an inspiration for girls everywhere. Something to make society proud.  

Luis Rubiales was the one who discovered that the age of treating young women like giddy chickies was now officially over. ‘He didn’t respect me, neither as a player nor as a person’, said Jenni Hermoso.

Now that’s a mistake he won’t make again.

Mojácar Mass Tourism

There is so much spoken about making Mojácar more attractive for the tourists. This begs a few questions: 

1. Why? 

2. Where are we going to put them? 

3. What is in it for the majority of us who don't have businesses here? 

4. Will we have to queue everywhere? 

5. Will we be able to park? 

6. Will we be able to sleep? 

7. Will the business-folk still need us during the summer, like they do during the winter (the ones that stay here during the 'low season')? 

8. How many 'I got laid in Mojácar' tee shirts should I buy each summer?  

Fact: one resident spends, in one year, the equivalent of 500 tourists; and is still here next year. 

We could really make something of Mojácar if we dropped the Walt Disney vulgarity and became proud of the place. A beautiful town would create more demand than cheap tourism can - and more demand raises property values (unless they flood the municipality with thousands more noddy-houses - the current plan).  

There isn't room,
it doesn't fit.
It's Mojácar's doom.
Enough of it!

The Banksters

 And how are our friends the banks doing?

The banks used to – vaguely and no-doubt erroneously – be thought to be more of a service for citizens than their current behaviour - a kind of inspiration for the vultures, the hyenas and other consumers of the dead, dying and the weak.

The banks make their money from the manager’s office rather than the teller’s desk, as the widow’s mite is placed into the drawer where it will start to earn interest, only, not for the widow, poor dear, but - down the line - for the share-holders. 

The bank isn't that interested. Small beer doesn’t make you a major player. You need some big investors with stories of major profits ahead.

So how did the banks become so unpopular? Less branches, more commissions and a diminishing service.

Now we have the case of the hostile bid from the second-largest bank in Spain towards the fourth. It started friendly enough, but the smaller bank said it wasn’t a high-enough offer. All this, right now, during the frenzy of the Catalonian elections. That fourth largest bank, that’s from Sabadell in Catalonia (although their head-office these days is safely in Alicante) with 19,213 slightly worried employees.

The putative pirate, the Borg as it were, is the BBVA (the name is an amalgam of distant banks). The head office is in Bilbao, and there are 121,486 employees. The president of the BBVA is Carlos Torres and last year he took home 7.6 million euros (not much by the standards of Amancio Ortega, who expects to pocket some 3,000 million euros in 2024, but still enough to keep the wolf from the door).

And those shareholders: wealthy leeches who can’t even claim a loyalty towards the company whose paper they hold, the employees, the traditions and the products it makes.

Although, of course it’s true that the banks only make the one product. Money.

My bank (I’ll send you my account details by separate cover) is a lot smaller. It’s one of those Cajas that used to be run by the Church. These days, of course, it maintains a stand just inside the Cathedral door in case the Messiah returns unexpectedly. But for the rest of us, it takes our moolah, charges us for the pleasure, and makes its real money from investments, projects, deals, the resale of homes it has expropriated from those who couldn’t meet the mortgage, and other worthwhile and marvellous devices too numerous to mention.

The politicians (well, those who don’t plan a future in la banca) are against the merger. There will be less banks. There aren’t many already with Santander, BBVA, Caixabank and Sabadell being the Big Four and taking up, between them, 75% of all deposits and, if there’s a fusion, why, there’ll be even less competition.

Fewer branches too. The widow will have to take a bus to get to the nearest counting-house.

Oddly, my bank was burgled over the May-day holiday. Two weeks later, you know, it’s still shut. 

...

After I wrote the above, I found this headline from El Mundo: ‘Banco Santander, in favour of the BBVA's takeover bid for Sabadell: "It makes sense and it benefits shareholders"’. 

Well, that’s all right then.