Litter-Buggery - 29 December 2020

Spain has an enviable system of describing distances. Rather than kilometres, they use time. Or they may use rest-stops, cigarettes smoked, the number of songs from Joan Manuel Serrat listened to (and sung along with) on the CD player, or even brothels (depending on your route, Murcia to Almería can be a six-brothel voyage). For shorter peregrinations, I use dustbins. 

I walk the dog each day past four green 'contenadores'. These large bins, together with smaller empty waste-baskets with an inverted bin-liner bobbing merrily out of them, are liberally distributed along my route, as indeed they are all over Spain. There is a tendency of course on the part of the public to eschew the friendly nearby dustbin and just hurl the empty gin-bottle out into the campo, but we try. We try.

People often like to leave their rubbish near the giant receptacles, perhaps to stop it from feeling lonely. The excuse might be that maybe the lid is broken, or that they fondly imagine someone might need an unwanted sock to pair with the one they have already, or perhaps an almost new toilet lid. Sometimes, they even put their trash inside the bins (where, in the snootier neighbourhoods, the beggars will then climb in afterwards and throw everything out again).

Unlike some northern nations, Spain has never held a poor opinion towards rubbish, and it is traditionally thrown on the floor, or out of windows or the open doors. I wonder sometimes if that was why they invented windows - an easy place to discard unwanted trash.

I remember my first shrimp, at the age of thirteen. I dutifully dismembered it, chooped its head and left the reamins on the bar. No, no, pantomimed the barman, flapping his hands, the garbage goes on the floor! And he was right. Under my very feet, a woman was mopping the marble flags and loading the detritus into a bucket. They used to say that one could tell a good tapa-bar by the amount of crap on the floor.

Sometimes, as we are lighting a cigarette or searching for the next brothel in the car (with its garish lights and brutish architecture), we must swerve violently as a surprise missile is hurled out of the window from the vehicle in front. It's usually a wrapper of some sort, or maybe a bottle (can, plastic or glass). Evidently, not wanted on voyage.

When walking the dog, along the side of the road we will find glass, trash, rubbish, human poop (it's a terrible thing to be caught short in the campo), dead things, empty wine bottles (do drivers savour the last drop of the vino before jettisoning the bottle?), plastic sheets and bags, mungy bits of clothing and sundry french letter packets. Then, depending on the neighbourhood, clumps of discarded copies of the free English-language press, some pages of which may have found a final use...

Indeed, as I now live in an area noted for its plastic farms, I see where the old rolls of mangled plastic are left in untidy piles alongside the road, or where bits whip against a piece of barbed wire in the wind, or maybe make their way slowly and majestically towards the sea (often in the back of a truck). In some cases, the plastic sheets are simply ploughed back into the land. Goodness knows what the dog will find on his walk... 

For some reason, there is no Spanish version of 'Keep Britain Tidy', even though those contenadores are emptied daily (rather than twice a month as, apparently, the humble dustbin is in the UK). A Spanish friend explained to me once that the bins here need to be emptied regularly 'as we eat fresh food rather than things out of tins' (which seems to be an argument that's hard to refute).

With the exception of rampant litter-buggery, I love Spain.

Behind the Scenes

The stories on this site, plus many others still to come, can be found, unpolished, at Spanish Shilling. That's a blog I've been writing since 2006. Prior to that, I wrote a daily blog called The Entertainer Online (which came from an American server which blew up at some point). This went from 2002 to around 2009. You might find bits of it on the Wayback Machine (even the bits which these days I'm not allowed to mention).

I had owned and edited a newspaper called The Entertainer from 1985 to 1999. It was free, weekly, delightfully bad, and came in three editions for the Costa Blanca, Costa de Almería and Costa del Sol. Neither I nor anyone I ever met or who participated in any way had a clue about newspapers, but you learn. You learn. 

Newspapers are produced because the editor likes to write, or he likes his desktop publishing designs, or maybe he has no interest in either, but knows how to sell and run advertising. The latter gambit is probably the way to go. 

The Entertainer was sold but I was never paid. You'll find their version of events if you search hard enough. It's now a successful freebie under another name (although following my edition numbering).

Besides The Entertainer, I also produced or edited or both over fifty editions of Entertainer En Español, a hundred of El Indalico, fifty of The New Entertainer (here) and a few others besides. 

All of this taught me a number of lessons, as well as much about this wonderful country of Spain, where I've lived - more or less - since 1967. 

These days, I write a weekly news-digest about Spain called Business over Tapas - useful news: no flimflam, guff, drivel, news about doggies... and no adverts. It's sent out to readers by subscription. There's also a Facebook page here. 

Actually... away from the keyboard, I spend most of my time shovelling shit at the stables we operate just outside Almería. On consideration, it's a lot better for the soul.   

Adra (because it's there) - 24 December 2020

Over the years, I have visited many parts of Spain. I've studied in Seville, lived in Madrid, spent long hospital time with my late wife in Pamplona and, during the nineties, run offices in various pueblos on the costas, which necessitated regular visits (and a lot of aspirins). There was also an office in Mojácar, the town that I have called 'home' for most of my life. I know the province of Almería pretty well, with the last few years spent living just outside the capital, and, of course, I've made endless trips to various towns and villages over the past fifty years.
But, until now, I had never been to Adra.
This hardly makes me unique. No one has ever been to Adra.
Adra, at 25,000 inhabitants, is the large fishing port that signals the end of Almería when heading along the Mediterranean west into Granada and Málaga. In the old days, it was a turn-off from another switch-back curve on the ghastly road between Almería and Málaga (there were 1,060 of those horrible switch-backs, as the old N340 curved and wiggled through the sharp hills above the coast-line), but now the fishing town of Adra is close to the bright new motorway. There is still little inclination to visit the place, which, as I finally discovered this weekend, is a shame.
According to Wiki (we couldn't find a tourist office), Adra is the fourth oldest town in Spain, founded in 1520BC. Let see... it was originally called Abdera by the Carthaginians, was flattened by an earthquake in 881, yadda yadda, it had the first steam engine in Spain and is a big fishing port...
Yep, the man from the Wiki clearly hasn't visited the place either. Confusingly, Google gives more space to another Adra, which is an agency of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (and may help to explain why no one ever visits).
Anyhow; in the spirit of 'because it's there'. I went with my pareja to give the car a good growl, see the sights, buy a 'He who is tired of Adra is tired of Life' bumper sticker, and hopefully enjoy a good fishy lunch. The road to Adra, designed apparently by more of the school of those who only know the town through its motto: 'En Adra, perro que no muerde, ladra' (the dog that doesn't bite you, barks at you instead), swings you in through and out in a confusing swirl, but then, as your heart sinks and you wonder whether the next town down, Motril, might be open for business, the planners relent and bring you back down to the harbour.
That day, there was by chance a flea market. We walked around, admiring a stand selling Franco memorabilia, and eventually, while looking for a bullfight poster for a friend, we bought a couple of naïf pictures from another dealer. They look great in our kitchen.
Adra appears to be a place that is worth getting to know, or maybe a great place to hide, as nobody would ever think of looking for you there. It's probably chock-full of museums and interesting relics and buildings, plus a few wanted counterfeiters and smugglers (the murderers prefer Marbella, obviously), but we were there principally for a cold beer and a warm fish-head.
Alicia didn't want to eat in the Club Náutico (you can never go wrong in a Club Náutico in my opinion) so we walked past some dowdy looking places, including a joint that described itself from outside as 'American/Italian', before alighting on the Taberna La Granja, a splendid and atmospheric bar/restaurant in a back street. We ate a satisfyingly expensive lunch there, served by the owner himself (intrigfued, no doubt, in meeting the first visitors to the town in decades) and returned, replete, to the car.
La Granja - and you are on your own here - has a great Tarta de Whisky. The owner pours half a bottle of scotch over it to make sure that it meets with the diner's approval.
Worked for me, although I may have got a speeding ticket while we were driving home...

Share With Your Dog - 14 December 2020

I am one of those people who rarely gets sick - much beyond a cold, a cough and the traditional annual week in bed with 'man flu' just after Christmas to catch up on my reading.
The dog is ill though - he has leishmaniasis. This nasty disease is a parasitic infection that comes from the no-see-ums that fly around in clouds over stagnant water (there's an obliging pool in our nearby dry river bed). These midges bite on the ankles in humans, without causing much more damage than a passing itch, but they appear to be mortal for most dogs in my barrio (not all, my last hound managed to bark at the neighbours for twenty two years before death took her).
My dog has the disease, and a vet recently discovered a medicine that keeps the infection in check - it's a pill that humans take against gout called Alopurinol. He's managed over a year now on one of these pills crushed daily into his doggybix and seems to be doing well on the diet.
Gout is a nasty little complaint. It's like a tiny piece of gravel behind the bone in one of your extremities. I looked it up on the Internet after my toe turned red, started to hurt and swelled up. Too much brandy apparently. I was limping around shouting blue buggery, taking a whack at any child or animal that came to close to me and wondering whether to go and see the doctor. But then, I thought, what about the dog's daily dose!
So, here we are. The dog and me are sharing the same box of tablets. One for you my dear and one for me.
Ahh, that's better.

Spain's Frontier Towns - Near no Modern Borders - 09 December 2020

 

Vejer de la Frontera

 

What do Jérez, Arcos, Morón, Vejer, Chiclana and a number of other Andalusian towns have in common? Their full and proper names are ‘...de la frontera’. They are all ‘on the frontier’, and yet, since nothing is simple in Spain, they aren’t. The Cádiz city of Jerez de la Frontera, for example, is 242 kilometres away from the nearest frontier – that’s to say, Portugal.

One could argue that early Spanish cartographers were not very good at their jobs, or that the Royals were never wrong, but the fact is, the place names make perfect sense when you roll back a few centuries to the time of the Moors and the Kingdom of Granada.

The Christian forces of Aragon and Castile were slowly (oh, so slowly) taking the country back from the Moors. These North African colonists had been in control of almost all of Spain for anything up to seven hundred and fifty years (depending on which bit we happen to be talking about) although, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the writing, whether in Arabic or in Latin, was definitely on the wall. Granada, as we know, capital of the ‘Nazarí Kingdom’, fell in 1492, the same year as Spain discovered the Americas. 

This would be known as Spain’s greatest time. 

Stood between the Christian and Moorish territories while leading up to the final push in the later XV Century were a number of frontier towns which watched uneasily over a no-man’s-land (or ‘Terra Nullius’ as it was officially known – an unclaimed space between the two forces). During its existence, this border strip had great military, political, economic, religious and cultural importance. Beyond being a border like many others, it was for more than two centuries the European border between Christianity and Islam. It was, therefore, a place of exchange and barter, which kept alive in both territories the spirit of the Christian crusade and the Islamic jihad together with the chivalric ideal, already anachronistic in other European territories.

It also made possible illicit economic activities, such as trade in oriental products, as well as regular military incursions, aimed at taking booty, as well as the captivity of hostages with whom to maintain the slave business, or simply to negotiate the redemption of captives. Religious orders took sides in this regard. The border was a key element in the formation of the identity of Andalucía and in the formation of the vision of Islam throughout Spain. 

While another culture might have dropped the Arab names once conquered, the Spanish have appeared gracious enough to keep them. Such towns as Vélez-this and Alhama-that are quite common (the first comes from the Arab word for ‘land’, the second for ‘baths’). Indeed, anything beginning in Al – comes from the Arab prefix ‘the’: Alhambra, Almería, Alpujarra... 

Al-Ándalus, as far as the Moors were concerned, means and meant anything which was under Moorish control in the Peninsular – at some point, almost as far north as Pamplona. 

 

Of all of the ‘frontera’ towns, mostly located in Cádiz, the largest in Jerez de la Frontera, with its magnificent Alcazar, an XI Century Moorish fortress. The Moors called the city ‘Sherish’ and held it until 1264, although the Christian forces controlled the surrounding lands from 1248. The town would become a ‘frontier’ with the Granada kingdom. 

Jerez is the largest non-capital city in all of Andalucía, with a population of around 210,000 souls (larger than Cadiz – its provincial capital – as well as Almería, Jaén and Huelva). It is known for wine, horses, flamenco and motorcycles. 

Morón de la Frontera, in the province of Seville, owes its appellative to having a major garrison, once it had been conquered in 1240 by Fernando III, from which the Christian forces could harass the Moors.

Morón de la Frontera may not have a frontier, but the nearby American-controlled air-base of Morón (actually located in the next-door municipality of Arahal) – which has been going since 1953, of course does. You’ll need a passport to make it past the heavily-armed gate and on to the PX store... 

Another town on our list is Chiclana de la Frontera. It is just up the road from both Conil de la Frontera and Vejer de la Frontera. There must have been a gleam in the eye of King Fernándo IV when he got into the swing of naming his towns in the Most Loyal Province of Cádiz... 

Chiclana is just 24 kms south of the city of Cádiz and has become a tourist resort with the largest number of hotel beds anywhere within the province. With a population of over 84,000, the town is only marginally smaller than its nearby capital city. The town is noted for its monuments and its wineries. 

Next door’s Conil de la Frontera, again in reference to the far-off ‘frontier’ with Granada, is a beautiful resort which grows five-fold during the summer season. 

The ‘frontier’ town with the most charm must nevertheless go to Vejer de la Frontera, a small coastal town with a view of the Atlantic. Vejer is a member of the ‘Prettiest Towns in Spain Association’ and is a maze of narrow streets and white houses.

I like the story of how a Moorish prince and his Christian damsel were forced to leave Vejer as the enemy forces arrived. She tearful, he defiant. ‘I’ll build you another town as pretty as this one’, he promised her and, back in North Africa, that’s what he did, building in her name the beautiful turquoise-blue town of Chauen. 

Moving beyond the frontiers of Andalucía (well, barely), mention should be made of Murcia’s frontier town. Puerto Lumbreras, the Port of Lights (roughly), may have been a trading or military port, but it is around 32 kilometres from the coast and thus its name refers to its frontier status, as it is separated from Almería’s Arab-sounding Huercal Overa on the other side of the wide no-man’s-land strip, in this case some 23 kilometes, and was a heavily-garrisoned fortress-town. 

For two hundred years, the sometimes uneasy border between the Christian and Moorish cultures stood until Spain’s famous ‘Catholic Kings’, Fernándo of Aragon and Isabela of Castille, brought the ‘re-conquest’ to an end in 1492, and Spain was born from the ashes.

I briefly ran a bar in the hills and made some very nasty tapas. Urrrpf - 01 December 2020

My first (and penultimate) foray into business was to open a bar in the Almería mountain village of Bédar in 1976, when I was a just a young lad.

The Bar was called 'El Aguila': The Eagle (because of the view). I sold a local brew called Aguila beer and Aguila cigarettes (clever, eh?).

The beers, served in small bottles of 20cc (known as quintos or - if you can pronounce it - cervecillas) came from a warehouse in the nearby gypsy-town of Cuevas, and I could fit seven crates of them in my car. Thirty to a crate. The smokes, a brand similar to Ducados (strong black tobacco) came from a shop in Bédar called 'la tienda de Simón', which sold everything - from a wheelbarrow to a shower-bucket. A tin of butter to a postage stamp. Cigarettes and a tot of brandy. A useful place indeed.

Creating a bar takes a bit of work.

I had three old houses in Bédar, bought by my father for ten thousand pesetas (sixty euros) off of Old Gregorio in 1966. My father, whose Spanish at the time was non-existent, wasn't sure if he'd just paid for a very expensive lunch at Pedro's bar or if he was now the owner of three houses bought - apparently - off someone Pedro refered to as Hermano. Herman to his friends.

I fixed them up, slightly. Knocked a hole through the walls. Built a kitchen somewhere, brought in a few mattresses and a sofa. The three houses, now one, had electric but no mains water. Nor did the rest of the village, of course.

I put in a wrought-iron window terrace in the larger room for the bar, placed a plank of wood on top and, with a couple of bottles of banana brandy found at Simón's, was about good to go.The cross-eyed water man - who brought supplies in four large clay cántaros on his donkey - kept everything sluiced down, and the lavatory on the terrace was strictly soak-away.

The doctor from Los Gallardos came for an official look. He said the downstairs was fine, but the upstairs was off-limits. Three rooms and a terrace for the public to enjoy: a bit of razzmatazz for the Bédar denizens.

The bar in theory was to be run with EJ Whyte, an Irish American who lived in Bédar and was responsible for bringing fellow-American artist Fritz Mooney to the area on the back of a BSA in around 1962. However, after enormous trouble getting work permits (think on this Brexiteers) - many trips to Almería, papers, fruitless visits, long walks up and down looking for obscure offices and people who had 'gone out for a coffee', stamps and photographs... EJ finally told the little man in the employment office in Almería to shove it up his backside, leaving me, as it were, in sole control.

The card in the photo is the official permit to handle food. They give you a nail-brush and peel your eyelids.

Thus, I ran the bar by myself (sometimes my friend and local builder Juanico joined me - once arriving with a live and evidently stolen sheep which, after meeting a violent end on the bar-room floor, improved the tapas for a week or so). Beers and tapas. A quinto beer and a really quite horrible tapa cost 10 pesetas (seven céntimos in today's money). Since the local youth liked to play chinos (spoof) for a round, I found that I was drinking rather a lot. Perhaps many bar-owners do. I remember one in Los Boliches who used to surreptitiously finish all the dregs from the returned glasses. I rather doubt he's still going today.

My tapas weren't very good. I had bought a chapa, a large piece of iron plate, off Juan el Fraguero from Mojácar, and this was put on a small gas-fire. I would cut frankfurters sideways, sliced down the middle, with a squirt of hot sauce. I also offered costellitas: the bit of bone on the end of a rib with a nub of gristle hanging off it, also with a squirt of hot sauce. Bédar has long since had trouble with ulcers, apparently - it was good hot sauce. Then there was the mysterious bits of off-cuts in the bag of costillitas from the butcher's daughter in Cuevas. Juanico identified them as being rams' testicles. Apparently she must have liked me, he reckoned.

I had a record player and four of five records - the most popular being Nat King Cole singing in Spanish. Nat's accent was worse than my father's, but the clientele seemed indulgent.

My neighbours weren't convinced I wasn't running a brothel. One day, old dad came in for a chatico de vino (six pesetas). After about a dozen of these, he was sure that the place was of a moral rectitude seldom found in Spain. Several of the local kids actually carried him, gripping his arms and legs as he sang one of Nat's most popular numbers, home to his missus.

The bar was fun - sometimes. But it wasn't a money-maker. At threepence a beer, I wasn't making a fortune. My girlfriend didn't like it much, once hitting me on the head with a beer-crate.

Realising I was not cut out for the hospitality business, I rented the place out after a few months to some Brit football enthusiast called Roger for a 'Greenie' - our name for a 1,000 peseta bill (6€) - per month. He was popular with the local lads and no doubt improved their soccer skills. Of course he never paid the rent (he probably lost it on chinos), although the tapas improved slightly...

The rest of the house, about two thirds of it if you counted the creaky bits upstairs, carried on as mine. The ceilings were made of beams, cane and plaster. Some of the beams were made of pine and others were just pita, the century plant stalk. I can tell you, they aren't very firm after a few decades...

One day, EJ came down from Madrid to stay the night. I left him the key to the house and drove to Mojácar. EJ relates that he suddenly woke with a terrible thirst, remembered there was a bar next door, and battered down the intervening wall using a butano-bottle as a sledge-hammer. He says he served himself a cool beer from the bar and meekly went back to sleep again. House guests, hey?

A few years later, I fixed up the whole building properly into one large and slightly eccentric house.

It's sold now.

The Empty Villages of Spain - 23 November 2020

The authorities are worried, as more and more people move to the cities and away from their moribund villages in the quinto pino (the sticks). Small villages are losing their inhabitants and even drying up completely, ending as news items along the lines of ‘Entire Spanish village for sale’ in the newspapers.

Depriving them of services certainly doesn’t help – no bank, no pharmacy, no school, no town cop and even – Yarggh – no bar.

There have been some protests recently, as the villagers march on Madrid (waving their pitchforks).

But the politicians, keenly aware of the small (and evidently decreasing) number of votes in play, are not all that interested. The campaign ‘Teruel Existe’ notwithstanding (Teruel is a small and bitterly cold province, merrily ignored and avoided by all and sundry), the province has lost fifty per cent of its population in the past 100 years.

Interestingly, and to prove a point, Teruel Existe turned itself into a political party last year and, to the rueful surprise of all the other political groups, it won a seat in the Spanish parliament.

Alcontar (Almería) lost almost 10% of its population in 2018.

But, and despite some teleworkers moving to the campo and a healthier lifestyle, the bloodletting continues. In Almería, over sixty of the 102 municipalities claim  a population loss: municipalities where the young have moved to The City to find jobs, romance and a decent tapa.

Those old houses in the pueblos are kept, as often as not, by the now-displaced owners who visit once a year (in their fancy cars) and they may still appear on the local padrón (to vote for their cousin Paco, of course). In short, the real numbers are even worse than the statisticians admit.

So, what to do?

Property is cheap enough in them thar hills, and as long as the ecologists in the regional government don’t mind about foreigners moving in, providing jobs, money and a hankering for tinned beans in the local shop, there is a small gain to be made for the pueblo. A campaign perhaps? After all, the kids aren’t coming back, so we will need new (or rather, old) settlers to replace them. Imagine that, a Spanish promotion aimed at foreigners, but not at tourists!

Other potential and useful settlers might be those poor refugees, washed up on Spanish soil. Go and till that land!

Sometimes, one of those peaceful villages could make an excellent old people’s home: a community benevolently run by the social services, with proper treatment for those who could benefit from country life under supervision.

The Government could step in, of course, and say – no town under two thousand without a bank, a chemist, a bus-service and a school!

And maybe, as some villages hopelessly die, amalgamate them into nearby municipalities. We don’t need on paper 102 communities in Almería if ninety would be enough.

I Might As Well Get It Out Of My System - 18 November 2020

I was once asked to make a list of ‘things I didn’t like about Spain’. It would be easy enough to make one about the things I do like, and it would run to many pages, but the things I don’t? Hum. Well, there the bureaucracy which drives us all, Spaniards and foreigners alike, up the wall. Las cosas de palacio, van despacio, say the Spanish sententiously, as if by giving the creaking bureaucratic system an excuse, wrapped up in a popular saying, it all makes sense. In the past two years, for example, no one has managed to get Spanish nationality because the twenty-five thousand people whose job it is to sort out the paperwork have instead taken a disturbingly long lunch-break.

People sometimes have to live rather poorly – a house with no water or electric for example – for a number of years because of some elusive bit of paper trapped in the bottom of a drawer belonging to a public official who has been off work with a runny nose for thirty-six months, but absolutely should be back any day now.

I try and live with the system, since I love it here. My Spanish wife knows nothing of HP Sauce and shepherd’s pie, and she has never had a Yorkshire pudding or even a mushy pea. I am nevertheless proud of her as she sips her afternoon cup of English tea with milk and one sugar (my only remaining British weakness).

But, we were talking about Spanish wrongs – like corruption. How they get away with it defeats me. The country is positively leaping with crooked bankers, politicians and manufacturers of ladies hosiery. They stash millions in off-shore financial paradises, pay no tax, and – most remarkable of all – are highly esteemed by large swathes of the population. OK, in my personal experience, I’ve had more trouble from thieving Brits that crooked Spaniards (lawyers maybe – there’s always hungry lawyers here), but over the years, I’ve found that owning nothing helps keep them away, along with plenty of garlic.

So, the list. We’ve done bureaucracy and corruption, there’s also littering.

How can a proud nation like the Spanish merrily toss as much garbage into the countryside as is humanly possible? The beaches, the roadside, the streets and the public buildings are caked in debris. Everywhere is thick with plastic, flattened beer cans, bottles, graffiti, cardboard and rubble. I take my trash home with me, or at the very least, leave it on the back seat of the car for a few years, but our friends and neighbours? They scatter it everywhere across this great country with gleeful abandon.

Noise, I suppose. This country is deafening. Happily, with the passage of the years, I have become quite deaf, so am immune to the cacophony of the world’s second loudest population (after the Japanese whose houses, for Heaven’s sake, have paper walls).

Lastly (and believe me, I’ve been thinking about this list for years), I would say, parking. There’s never enough, as though the designers feel they can squeeze more money out of shops and buildings if there are as few parking spots as possible. Then the few spaces that are there will as likely as not have a caravan of dustbins clogging them up.

As if there was a serious litter problem here!

So, many people (at least in my local village) will park two abreast – en paralelo – with their warning lights on. ‘I’m sorry, I really am, but I just needed to stop the car for a moment as I zip into the bank, buy a lottery ticket and have a very quick coffee with my lawyer’. You can always get past. Yesterday, I had to drive at least fifty metres along the pavement, because the road was completely blocked by two double-parked cars. Luckily for us all, they both had their warning lights on.

But what are a few minor niggles, when compared to the endless wonders of this great country we have chosen to call home?

On the Road to La Matanza -12 November 2020

It was one of those adventures that sometimes spring up over a beer. It seemed that old Antonio el Perejil (Tony the Parsley) had recently gone to his reward and had left his house to his son, who wanted to sell it.
The house was, apparently, quite close to Níjar, recently brought into the pack of Almería's Most Beautiful Towns (actually, there should be about fifty on the list), and up a track.
Into the Nowheres.
We drove into Níjar only to find that the road which, as Google said, led to a walkers' path, was closed. Reversing down a narrow street and around the other way, we waved down an old fellow and asked him which was the best way to get to La Matanza.
A great name, no?  It's called La Matanza because this was the final stand of the Moors in the Níjar of the Reconquista, around 1490. 'Oh', says the old man, 'you mean Antonio el Perejil's place? He's dead you know'. 
Yes, we knew that.
'Well, you go out of town, along that road, then up this other one, round there (he waved vaguely) and it's just a hop and a skip. I was there only a few years back, lemme see, well in around 1980 now that I think of it'...
I helped the old boy back onto the pavement and we pulled a u-turn and, as they say here, we abandoned Níjar.

The new road we found turned into a street and from there into a track, and then a river bed and then a track again. We were about ten kilometres along this route, by now with alarming drops on one side and cliffs on the other. Google had fizzled out completely and we were wondering whether to go on or turn back when a van abruptly arrived in a gentle cloud of dust (you are never completely alone in Spain). Now my Spanish is pretty good and Alicia is from Almería, but we had trouble with the man who climbed out of the Renault to have a look at us. 'Gor and blast', he said 'La Matanza? It's just down vere'.

The house is the higher one, on the right. It comes with forty hectares of land.

We peered uneasily over the drop. 'Of course she'll make it', said the man, looking appreciatively at our car, 'mine does it, no worries'.
We arrived at the house, which had some olive trees behind it and a courtyard to the right. One of the neighbouring houses (they were all empty) had solar panels and a full reservoir. 
In the Bad Old Days, during and after the Civil War, a place like La Matanza, an isolated clutch of a dozen houses, was probably a good place to be. It was safe, ignored and produced its own food and water. There wasn't much to do after night fell, especially if you had run out of candles, but one rises early in places like this.
Now, there's no one left - apart from the man with the van - although he would be living back in Níjar, where there's electricity, TV and a number of decent pubs.
A tired sign pointed back towards the town, at just 4.5kms. That was probably the Google walkers route.
It was a cold and blustery day, so the pictures aren't as bright as they would normally be, up in La Matanza, which looked, we decided, like a modest version of Machu Picchu, but without the tour buses.

Sea views? Of course there are sea views!

It's for sale, if you're interested I'll mention you to Antonio's son. It's probably ideal for someone who wants to get away from it all and can't afford Algeria.

The Lost Art of Hay Surfing - 11 November 2020

Every farm in southern Spain has something called an 'era' which is a flat dirt circle, I think called a threshing circle in English, where the hay would be put after being cut with a scythe. A wooden board with rows of knife-like wheels underneath was pulled by a donkey and driven with long-reins by the farmer. Weight must be applied to the board in order to cut the hay, hence the children. There are actually several different boards with different types of knifed wheels for each phase of cutting. It was a very exciting time for the children when the farmer called them to come and sit on the board while he went round and round. It takes several days to cut the hay into small pieces and release the grain from the stalk. It is a sticky job, in the heat you get covered in pieces of hay and it is a bit like a ride at an amusement park, bumping up and down it is a rough ride especially when the hay is in the centre at the beginning, it gets to be a smoother ride as the hay gets spread around the circle. The board sometimes even flips over.

No harm is done because you just fall into a huge pile of hay. You must watch your fingers though and can’t hold on to the board for risk if being cut by one of the blades. When the threshing is done you must wait for a windy day and with a naturally grown pitch-fork, you throw the hay in the air. These pitch-forks grow on a tree in the shape of a fork and after being whittled down a little make the perfect pitch-fork. On the windy day, and after hours of repeating this procedure of throwing the hay in the air, the cut hay is on one side of the era and the grain on the other, it is quite ingenious really, each to be stored and used throughout the year. I would like to have shown you a picture of the pitch-forks but ours was lost. We have an era on our property and across the street is another era that is shared by three houses: it is communal property and doesn’t belong to any one of the houses but to all three. It is things like this that make buying land in Spain difficult. For example a long time ago your grandfather may have traded a donkey for the large algarrobo tree on the corner of his property, the donkey is long since dead but the tree on your land now belongs to someone else.

From Barbara Napier's Animo Stories here.  The two photos come from the same 'era' in the hills above Mojácar. The first one dates from the 'fifties, the second one features our daughter and was taken in the early 'eighties.

Fake News and How to Control It - 10 November 2020

Fake News. Bad, right? The Government thinks so and is introducing rules to stop the media from posting fake or manipulated items by setting up a permanent commission against la disinformación  -  (as they prefer to call it). The commission, says El Español here, is purely PSOE-controlled and without the presence of Podemos (a regular victim of bulos).

These journalistic inventions, as we know, are often used to create anger, disdain or hopelessness in the readers or viewers - for political or economic gain. They are not to be confused with slanted reportage, or even propaganda (using selective facts for manipulative purposes), which happens the whole time, depending on the politics of the media in question. We are talking here about purposely-produced lies.

The current debate is of course whether this is a righteous struggle against these items of hoax news, or simply government censorship (with all the sinister connotations which that supposes).

Some news-services currently use 'fake news' without any particular limit - OKDiario is one of at least a dozen notorious examples. Their recent editorial on the subject at hand says ‘Now it will be Little Franco Sánchez who decides which news is true and which is fake’.

Many more bulos are found in the Social Media (although both Facebook and Twitter have recently taken to some form of ‘fact-checking’ claims published on their platforms).

A local English-language free-sheet famously fired off a hoax news-story last August based on fake interviews with Government ministers. Indeed, it made the pages of Spain’s leading fact-checker here. The point being that fabricated stories like this can cause unnecessary alarm amongst the public.

Fake news is a recognised problem in Brussels, but the EU's strategy against disinformation is ‘aimed towards Russia and China, not as a surveillance of the national media’ (here). Indeed, the official opinion from the European Commission on Spain’s, ah, putative control of fake news is “Any initiative in the field of disinformation must always respect legal certainty and freedom of the press and expression. But we have no reason to think that this has not happened in the case of Spain”.

Maldito Bulo here (the Spanish version of Snopes) is more or less on board with this ‘ambiguous rule’ (yet of the opinion that independent sources – like Maldito Bulo and others – should be the ones to monitor the news and social media), but the press is not at all happy. The AMI (the national association of newspapers) is quoted here as saying 'You can't take away our freedom of expression').

The leader of Vox doesn't like it either: 'The Tyrant Sánchez introduces Censorship', writes Santiago Abascal in a characteristic tweet. Slightly more alarmingly, the Spanish Secret service CNI is also against introducing institutional controls against fake news (for professional reasons, we wonder?).

In short, it is one thing to monitor fake news, but it’s quite another thing to seek to stop it.Maybe the threat of fines coupled with disclosure might help cool the jets of the wily fabulists.

A Trim Little Number in Yellow - 06 November 2020

(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 fellow 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 pencil-chewing 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 indeed after to warn other drivers of your untoward immobility.

Good old Pere enjoys his lunch somewhere, thinking of all the good he’s done.

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.

Here we have the ‘points system’, just like they do in other countries. How many times do second-rate politicians produce that trick to help one swallow 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, Hell, I’m walking home. It’s all right for the 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 tears a hole in my fluorescent pajama top.

It was a wrong number. But you already knew that.