The Lavatory Bar

 

In the old days, before the passing of Franco, the bars closed at 1.00am. Most of them no doubt closed a lot earlier, right after the black and white football game on the telly ended, but the bars in the tourist towns at least, would remain open for the boozy foreigners until the bell went. By the late sixties, prices for a gin and tonic had crept up to fourteen pesetas (around nine cents of a Euro), and a beer cost anything up to a duro – five pesetas. Our town lush, Old Antonio, would patrol the bars in Mojácar on the look out for a drink, looking more and more dishevelled after each invitación. ‘Rubio, dame un duro’, he’d whine.
The local bars were dressed in simple stone, marble, slate, tiles and plaster. There might be a calendar for decoration, the obligatory shelf of bottles, Green Fish gin and so on, perhaps a TV or a radio or a juke box – or with luck, all three. Noise was the keynote of a good bar, with the walls rebounding the sound and lifting it on high.
The few foreign bars would be decorated with paintings from local artists (who always attempted to drink for free) and would have the lights on low. Music came from a record player.
By 1.00am, those who wished to continue with the business of drinking would move to our solitary discothèque, run by Felipe, a Frenchman from Casablanca. Felipe would charge a little more for a cubata, the generic name for a mixed drink, but he had a disk jockey and a dance floor. At 2.00am, according to the rules, he’d close the door and pretend to be shut while we finished our drinks.
This could take some time, as the next legal establishment, the Fisherman’s Bar in nearby Garrucha, didn’t open until three.
In those days, the local Guardia Civil had to provide their own transport, which would generally be an old moped. They wouldn’t bother hiding behind a road-sign to catch the occasional drunk driver - they couldn’t stop you without ‘probable cause’ anyway - or, for that matter, tear along behind you shouting weedoo weedoo while waving their arms. For one thing, they'd have fallen off. At best, they might be in the village watching the small car-park and kindly helping drivers reverse safely out of their space and away down the hill.
The trip to Garrucha took about fifteen minutes and included a drive through the dust, ruts, or puddles, depending on the season, of the floor of the riverbed, the oddly named ‘Rio de Aguas’ that, in those days, more or less divided the two towns geographically.
Garrucha High Street was and remains, a narrow and ugly road that flows straight through the fishing village and away towards Vera and civilization to the north. In those times, it was a two-way street. Half way down it was the Bar Bichito, a bar with a special licence to open at 3.00am for the fishermen to have an early morning carajillo, a black coffee and brandy. This particular mixture always seemed like a good idea to the inebriates from Mojácar who would order a round as a song began to bubble up from within them.
Hitherto, the evening's drinking had been reasonably quiet, with the music taking the strain, but in the Bichito, fetchingly designed in white tile throughout and known to the foreigners as ‘The Lavatory Bar’, there was no music and entertainment had to be found elsewhere. The joint made ordinary local bars of the times look positively attractive. The door was on the end and opened into a narrow bar which stretched along in a small 'el' shape parallel to the street. There were two small tables and a few chairs just inside the door, and, if feeling faint, one could always sit outside on the curb. Otherwise, we stood at the chest-high bar (or even higher for some of the vertically challenged local fishermen), blinded by the bright lights and namesake décor and watched, between songs, as Pedro man-handled his one-spout Italian coffee machine. The toilet facilities, a throne with a long drop, were through the back and doubled as a storage room for the beer and soft drinks.
The fishermen and the old municipal cop would look on in a friendly way as the small group of plastered Britons, French, Germans and Americans, depending on the draw, would start on their lengthy repertoire. A family favourite of ours was ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’ (an old song immortalised in the late sixties by the New Vaudeville Band) followed, perhaps, by the popular drunken bawl ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’ or perhaps ‘Bless Em All’. A cockney couple, Pat and Tony Farr, had taught us a number of songs, such as ‘I’m One of the Ruins that Cromwell Knocked Abaht a Bit’ and ‘I’m Henry the Eighth I Am’ and so on.
More carajillos as Pedro, face pitted with acne, would tell everyone to hsss, to be quiet. People are trying to sleep (apparently).
Things could only get worse as the Rugby Songs were unleashed. Rugby Songs are England’s answer to folk music and run along the lines of ‘My Little Sister Lily’ or ‘They Were Tattered, They Were Torn…’ with lots of lines ending in –uck and so on. Curiously, many of them are set to opera music, which gives the performers a chance to really crank out the key words with enthusiasm. At times, even the extranjeros can be loud.
The ride home was always uneventful I’m sorry to report. No accidents or arrests. But those were different times. Cheap, basic and fun.

A Hearing Device, Guaranteed to Miss Nothing in under Five Metres

 Age-related problems: losing some of that fine conversation that buzzes around me in a public place. Perhaps it runs in the family. My Great Grand-mother was famously deaf. She used an ear-trumpet to listen in to interesting bits of conversation and would reputedly swivel it away from boors half-way through their patter. Much to their dismay, no doubt. I don't suppose she needed it to listen to the wireless, or indeed the Old Boy playing the piano. People around her learned to shout. As it should be.
I wondered if I wasn't also heading in that direction. I had been thumped on the ear by my wife's brother a few years back, which broke my eardrum. So, I went to the hospital for a hearing test. They put you in a booth and tell you to wave when you can hear some shrieks over the ear-phones. After a while, the techie came in. When do we start, I asked. Start? he bellowed, we're finished: you're deaf.
So how about that? I either needed a girlfriend who had previously worked as an air hostess in a Zeppelin, or a hearing aid.
Hearing aids come in all sizes and conditions, and despite our excellent Spanish health system, they are not dished out free to deaf punters. The techie had a cousin who sells them in the oddly-named local town of Huercal Overa - starting at 1000 euros and going up to better than 4000, and that's just for one ear. Madre Mía. Do they still make ear-trumpets? 
I was complaining about this robbery over a beer, when someone said, loudly, why not try the Chinese shop? Well, I'll be boondaggled, they sell 'em for nine euros, with an extra battery thrown in.
So, now I can hear everything: the buzz of a mosquito, the early morning scream of the new cockerel that someone kindly gave me last week and lives in a cage outside my bedroom window, and pretty much all that lies between.
Indeed, I'm getting rather fed up with my hearing aid, and am thinking of taking it back to the shop. I'll buy some glasses there instead and take up using sign language.

Up On The Roof

The infinity of space is a subject that makes us dream. The Hubble observatory, drifting purposefully around our planet like an extra from a Kubrick movie, brings us its extraordinary photographs of the births and deaths of far flung galaxies and star systems. A star some ten thousand light years away explodes in a cataclysmic act and consumes, in a moment, a dozen planets that had anxiously spun around it. Everything recorded with infinite detail by the space observatory as if it were happening in real time, and not, as the astronomical measure suggests, some ten thousand million years ago. The stuff of wonders!

Led by these thoughts, when I read in the press that there was to be a spectacular meteor shower called ‘the Leonides’, ‘with various shooting stars every minute’, I went up the ladder on to my empty roof-top, with a sleeping bag and a pair of binoculars which used to belong to a German officer and were found in the sands of the Libyan desert a few years after the Second War. They had probably belonged to Rommel. I had recently snapped these gems up in the Sunday Market off a gypsy.

That particular night was cloudless, the skies clean and the stars as cold and hard as a banker’s heart.
Lying in my sleeping bag and gazing at the firmament, after a few hours had crept uneventfully past, I suddenly saw a red light coming in from the West. I doubted that it might be a UFO, common enough round here during the sixties, when Mojacar seemed to abound with them, and when people would impatiently wait for a flying saucer story to end to cap it with another even more interesting one. Meetings these days with small green creatures being a rarity, and with the absence of a non governmental organization for their care, it seemed more likely to be a light from the Madrid plane – or possibly the plane alight – or perhaps the nub end of my wife’s cigarette.
Indeed, and she had brought me a cup of tea.
‘Any meteorites?’ she asked.
‘Nary a one, the astronomers must have got it wrong’. 

Apparently, they were twenty-four hours out, which isn’t bad for several million light years; so, the next night found me on the roof again. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Alright, about five in the morning I could see some red sparks over to the East, but they were probably just an illegal exhalation from the local power station. The conservative provincial media, of course, eventually convinced our mayor a few years back that the smog which he’d complained about was nothing more than a collective delusion similar to something a group of shepherds might have seen a couple of thousand years ago in Palestine, and nothing more about this phenomenon has ever been said. Odd really, as I’m the only one who still has these visions, or maybe there’s still lots of sand in my binoculars.
Meteorites though, were not to be seen. 

It rained the following night, but there I was, back on top with my sleeping bag, not this time to observe the stars, but to cover a leak over the bedroom.
In the old times, our craftsmen would build flat roofs because it was cheaper, less likely to fall down, and because furniture in those days didn’t complain over the odd dousing from a leak. Economics continue to play a role today and I should state that I’m lucky to be able to enjoy the use of my own roof as the new ‘pyramid’ style of construction favoured by some developers (one man’s roof is the next man’s terrace, and so on for fifteen steps into the mountain) can lead to additional problems from your ‘next floor neighbour’, and obtaining permission to fix a leak – often with the help of a lawyer – from someone who hasn’t been back since he bought his apartment five years ago can easily become complicated.

A flat roof has another overweening advantage which will become clear when our little town fulfils its intention to expand to seventy thousand souls, with the consequent and inevitable collapse of its road system. I’ll be able to park my helicopter there.
These days, I sleep full-time on my roof; admiring the horizontal views (while they last) and the safer, vertical ones. I breathe the reasonably uncontaminated air with relish as I continue to watch the night sky for meteorites.
There are worse ways to live.

 

The Saga of the Hotel Algarrobico

 Driving over the coastal mountains from the Almerian tourist-trap of Mojácar south (or is it west?) to Carboneras is a delight. You pass through the hamlet of Sopalmo, which sits in tiny splendour over a sandy track that leads drowsily down to the sea a mile away. Here is one of only two places in Spain where you can find a chameleon, the other being in Nerja.  There's a  small restaurant here that will fill you up for ten euros as the kids go exploring with their butterfly nets.

We are at the edge of the gigantic – and generally rather empty – Natural Park of Níjar/Cabo de Gata.

 

But before we reach the large municipality of Níjar, increasingly covered with plastic farms, we must pass through Carboneras, the ugly fishing town made famous by the Algarrobico hotel.

 

The curving road passes the scraped hill of the ‘Moors Blood’, a colourful side of striated rock where a battle may have taken place half a millennium ago, and zigzags towards the highest part of the route towards Carboneras, with crags on one side and alarming drops on the other: a road straight out of The Italian Job – or perhaps the perfect final scene for Thelma and Louise. At the top, there’s a small parking area, liberally decorated with graffiti, where you can see for miles. Camera-phones record an empty dry mountain, a rugged coast, that clean blue sea and – off to the south-west  – the back of a monstrous hotel, several miles away and far below.

The only plant-life in this – and most – of the Parque Natural is scrub: no doubt of huge environmental value to our friends the ecologists, but, dress it how you will, it’s just scrub none the less.

 

The ecologists are simple city folk. They live through subsidies, European funds and obscure publications. They are like the Caliban of Shakespeare: rude destructive fellows, who flow from their apartments in the suburbs out to deal harshly with the countryside, subsidised by the gullible politicians from far-off Seville. In Almería, the ecologists must ignore the 350 square kilometres of plastic farms, which do huge damage to the environment but bring in much wealth. They will spend their time – and what European funds they can attract – on such foolishness as ripping up a small plantation of agave outside the city: a plantation that has been there for almost a century. The plants, they say, are invasive. So too are the prickly pear cactus (brought to Spain by the conquistadores), but not the potato, tomato, tobacco and sweet-corn (brought by the same conquistadores, the ones who didn't fill their bags with gold). The local tortoise must be protected, they insist (again with European backing) so the harmless creatures are collected and sent to prison camps in the high sierras of los Vélez, where they solemnly die of the ‘flu.

A wise French businessman told me twenty-five years ago: ‘in the next century, mon cher, the two growth industries will be tourism and ecology’.

 

In a small and ugly town in Almería, a few years later, those two forces finally declared war.

As the car breasts the final hill on the route to Carboneras, the rear of the ghastly hotel becomes visible again: surrounded by land prepared by the builder for shops, restaurants and an urbanisation of 250 villas (land, incidentally, which does not fall within the new frontier of the Natural Park, and is thus still theoretically viable). These days, sightseers come to see the hotel. Aghast, they take pictures: perhaps they’ll stay for lunch in the town. Nearby is the small villa where Peter O’Toole stayed when filming part of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, and just past the Algarrobico on the other side is the dry river bed where the Arab horsemen attacked Aqaba in that furious cinematographic gallop.

 

Carboneras is a reasonably well-off if unusually ugly fishing town. It has three ports – commercial, marina and industrial – some nice beaches, good fish restaurants, a huge and highly pollutive power station which will be closed down soon (say Endesa), a vast and inoperable sports stadium (built in a moment of megalomania), and the largest fishing fleet - reputedly - in all of Andalucía: mostly stationed of the West African coast.

Opening up the appalling Algarrobico hotel and finishing off the surrounding satellite urbanisation would have brought many jobs to the town, but as a smirking Greenpeace spokesperson said after a recent judgement on the urbanisation's future, ‘they can always help work on the demolition’.

 

The reality is that, after fifteen years of rotting in the sun, open to the elements, to the vandals and the ecologists, the twenty story hotel would be almost impossible to finish. Its time has come. But, what about the costs involved in demolition – money that could have been better spent? The politicians speak blithely of returning the several hundred metres of empty rocky scree back to how it was – but how impossible is that? And, is it even worth the effort? The Junta de Andalucía now says it's got a million euros earmarked for demolition purposes for 2021 (suggesting that it'll take several years).

 

The justification for the demolition comes from a rule that you can’t build in a national park, even though the hotel was not in a national park when work began; indeed the promoters bought the land in 1999 off the Junta de Andalucía itself (through a public company called Soprea) as urbanisable. The boundaries were subsequently moved as the PP in Madrid changed the coastal building limits. In 2006, the project which had the blessing of then President of Andalucía Manuel Chaves, fell foul of the Minister for the Environment Cristina Narbona from the Zapatero Government, who ordered work stopped when the hotel was 90% complete: it was being built on public land.

 

Almería is a large province of 8,000 square kilometres, of which 3,100sqkms are protected – about 35% of the entire province. We are talking here of perhaps one hectare. Couldn’t Almería afford to lose a tiny fraction of its empty, unvisited and largely pointless parkland to help create some jobs?

 

A recent interview with the President of the Superior Court of Justice in Andalucía says that ‘judges sometimes contradict themselves – we are human and can also get things wrong’. A spokesperson for ‘Salvemos Mojacar’ (an extremist ecological organisation) does not suffer from the same doubts: ‘it must be demolished and the promoter should not be reimbursed by as much as one penny’ (they seek 70 million euros in damages).

 

So, as sometimes happens in Spain: the building can never be completed, and it can never be entirely demolished. Jobs are lost in an area of high unemployment, and a rotting and monstrous hulk of a building will perhaps be turned one day, after at least a decade of uselessness, into a mountain of rubble.

Perhaps the rabbits, its future residents, will be pleased.