The Potshot Kid

It must be strange living with guns. People may decide at any moment to whip them out and take a shot at you. Perhaps because they were annoyed at you, perhaps it was just in a moment of excitement. It's also true that you could decide on a whim to pull your own gun out of your holster and shoot back at them. Hell, maybe go and shoot someone else while you are in the mood.

There are indeed a few people I would like to shoot, when I think of it (and the world would be a better place for their passing) but, since I live in Spain, I don't have a gun. Being British, the best I can come up with is to shake my fist in their general direction after they have safely passed by.

This is probably for the best. The picture, by the way, is me at the cowboy film set in Tabernas. Don't worry, it's a cap-gun.

As it happens, and talking of firearms, I am soon away to visit family in far-off Texas, a place where one can easily acquire a gun from the local supermarket. Or maybe an arsenal, since they often do a special three for two service. I once asked a fellow I'm friendly with over there as to how many fire-arms he had. He answered with - 'if you know how many guns you have, you don't have enough'!

Guh-uns: he said. Two syllables.

It turned out - and this was some time ago - he had seventeen.

On that visit, I was pruriently looking one day at the guns for sale in Walmart - a sort of gigantic Carrefour. Just looking, I really didn't want one.

Anyhoo, I saw a wrist-rocket (the kind of catapult that might be used by Tom Cruise) for sale and thought that might be a good thing to get, after all, we are infested with cats at home. The salesman said I needed to show him my driver's licence, to keep everything ship-shape.

He was a bit surprised to see a Spanish one (a country that didn't appear in his computer), but we agreed that it was, in reality, a driver's licence in Spanish, so he put me down as coming from Puerto Rico. 

I never got to shoot any cats with my catapult - you see why they named it that - and I think the rubber has since perished. Maybe I'll go and buy another one while I'm there. It's going to be a long winter.

Drinkies (Mojácar 1967)

 

The day would start with a small libation in the plaza. Late, perhaps, but it had been a long night.

There were two bars, facing each other across the square decorated with a few mangled orange trees, a couple of old cars, several corrugated-sided Citroen vans, as often as not an orange dumper-truck - Spain’s motorized pack animal - and, when not in service, a giant Chrysler from the fifties painted egg-shell blue which served as the village taxi.

No one ever went to the smaller establishment, which sold ice-creams and was run by a succession of daughters from one of the local Families. We would instead use the old Indalo: hotel, restaurant and bar - the clubhouse, assembly room and social hub of the pueblo.

We had stayed there for several months – the price was a hundred pesetas a day for the three of us, rooms, food and drink included – when we had first arrived, and still regularly used the services of the upstairs restaurant where culture-shock and chips were served with a bottle of gritty red wine. We'd all dine there together. Tabs Parcell, the retired air vice marshal, would take his plate and put it under his shirt, next to his skin to ‘warm it’. Sammy, the flamboyant Italian-American homosexual from the merchant navy would handle the translation, under the impression that his bad ‘brooklinése’ would be comprehensible to a mojaquero waiter. Norma, another American expat, who ran an antique shop under the arch, would mutter ‘no, no’ to herself as we kept her glass filled. My dad, tall, freckled and red, known locally as ‘El langostino’, the lobster, would be sticking to whisky – he said the wine gave him gallstones. My mother, practical and in charge, would wander into the kitchen and pick up the lids on the various cauldrons to organize lunch.

The morning session, starting round about twelve, would place the small foreign community, British, French, American and a few others, around the wobbly metal tables of the Indalo, outside on the pavement, or inside, if the weather was bad, at the high marble bar. The inside bar was gloomy, dark, painted in shades of brown and stain, with a big mirror behind the bar together with a few bottles of strange cheap versions of better known brands.

Diana, a retired nanny who had taught generations of children how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, appropriated the Green Fish, an unfortunately named Spanish gin, as her own. Diego, whose grand-son these days has a bar on the beach, El Rincón de Diego, where there’s a large photograph of the bar from the old Indalo, would serve his motley crowd with a suggestion of pride. At a few pesetas a drink – a very large brandy cost just a five-peseta ‘duro’ – the foreign customers soon got high-spirited and only the blistering sun managed to maintain any kind of order. Turkey Alan, a youthful cockney pick-pocket, might be telling a story about his dog, a grateful looking greyhound, or perhaps old Cicero, a pungent American professor who lived by himself and spent his money on ‘whiskey and putas’, is noisily standing a round. Tony, a friend of my dad’s, drones on about women while nobody listens and Fritz, the dapper artist with the beard and the terrible laugh, might be sketching an approximation of the party while smoking a ‘dookeedoo’, the strong local cigarette. David, a bald anthropologist who could speak several different North African languages, would be rubbing his short goatee gleefully and telling obscure and very filthy stories about his subjects in the Rif while his wife, Ursula, she of the gravelly voice, is asking me about school in a rather threatening manner as if she was seriously considering the job of ‘Matron’. Another round of drinks arrives. I take a Fanta.

Perhaps, if it was a hot day – it usually was – there would be a move towards the beach; not to swim, in particular, but rather to drink in one of the few places that existed in those days. Beach-land, traditionally inherited by the younger or dumber or less greedy members of the Families over the decades and centuries, was worth nothing. In 1967 we heard of land going for one peseta for ten metres. There were few takers.

There was one really good restaurant on the beach, however, run by French Algerians (they were known as ‘pied noirs’ and Franco smiled favourably on them). This was the Rancho del Mar, where Maxime’s quality food went for McDonald’s prices. Cheaper places, with simple menus, were the Puntazo, the Flamenco and the Virgen del Mar. Salad. Crotchmeat and chips. Sangría.

By three in the afternoon, the group would be building up again outside the Indalo. The post-office, ineptly run by Martín, who couldn’t read or write much, but spoke a bit of French, was open from three to five. I’d be sent to collect the letters, which would be passed to me with their stamps wrenched off by the old man, with the instruction to bring back the ones I couldn’t deliver, ‘…or throw them away’.

In the square, an elderly platinum blonde called Franny and her son Eddie, a semi-retired fifty-year old female impersonator, might perhaps have joined the group, both insisting on drinking Manhattans which they had long ago taught Diego how to make. Roger, who opened the first British bar, La Sartén, in 1968 could have shown up as well, together with Pop-eyed Peter (who was to run away with a mojaquera girl), Alan the Tin Miner and ‘Friggit’, a Swedish woman of doubtful morals. Giggling into his brandy, here's Chris with the long hair and moustache, a pink Mini Moke and a Danish girlfriend called Gitte. As the drinks continued, the group might have felt persuaded to sing, initially simple songs accessible to both the British and the Americans (‘I wonder whose kissing her now’, for example) followed, in the fullness of time, by numbers like ‘My Little Sister Lily’ and ‘Cats on the Rooftops’ (both also available in Spanish upon enquiry thanks to Gerry, who was meant to be studying at Granada University).

The evenings were more of the same. In La Sartén, where Roger would companionably allow you to ‘help yourself, Sport’, or the Zurri Gurri, a sensuous cave-bar run by a couple from Madrid, or the Witches Brew (captained by an American lesbian called Pat and her German friend, the scorching Rita) which also sold leather goods. Today, it’s the ‘Time and Place’.

In those far off times, when the Guardia Civil came in to a bar, conversation died. You had your papers ready. They could hand out some rough and ready justice. We were all a little worried to see them. My dad used to bribe them. ‘Have a drink with me’, he’d say and they’d have a brandy or a whisky and affably call him by his surname.

Later, after the bars closed at one, the only place open was the Pimiento, a disco run by Felipe, another pied noir. Drinks were slightly more expensive, but you could always dance to his collection of scratchy imported singles.

Far into the night, there was only one bar that had a license. It opened at four in the morning in the next-door village of Garrucha for its fishermen. Thanks to its neon lights and white tiling, it was familiarly known as ‘the Lavatory Bar’. Pedro ran it and sold carajillos - black coffee with brandy - to the fishermen and, as often as not, the same thing for the surviving foreigners. I stayed with the Fanta. As the last members of the Mojácar Jets downed their drinks and raised their voices in song, while the municipal cop looked through the door and Pedro went ‘Shhh!’, an age slowly and drunkenly made its way to its final bow.

A Well-kept Secret

 

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

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

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

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

You have seen the massed crowds at Machu Picchu (and that ain’t even easy to get to), the hordes of visitors in Venice, the queues of people waiting for their turn on the final shuffle to the top of Mount Everest (!), the wall-to-wall trippers in Barcelona, the apologetic oriental mob in Ronda, the gaggle of Brits in Nerja and the multicultural throng visiting the Alhambra.

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

Personally, I think we have left it too late.

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

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

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

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

The Blues Come for Brexit

 

We wonder, maybe, how things are getting along in the UK following the acrimonious divorce known as ‘Brexit’ – a split which left the departing defendant, his head held high, with little more than a caravan, an overseas bank-account he neglected to mention to the court, a hefty lawyers’ bill, and the cat.

The reason given was that we Brits were concerned about the un-elected people running the European Union – the second or third largest political and economic power in the world – as if we in the UK choose our own civil servants, or practice some form of proportional representation (rather than first-past-the-post).

A country where the last prime minister was eternally on holiday and the next one was chosen by a handful of right-wing politicians who still evidently believe in the Raj. 

She would last a matter of six weeks or so, make an ass of both herself and indeed the UK before the Conservative Members of Parliament were asked to choose yet another wonderkid. 

It's certainly an interesting system you've got there...

The French at least have eleven deputies (members of parliament we call them) who represent solely those French people who live abroad. Imagine – eleven MPs exclusively speaking for the interests of the French diaspora overseas. But wait: in the UK, they want – finally, long after the Brexit boat has sailed – to allow us expats to vote for our ‘local’ MP according to his views on the price of sugar-beet. Not a dedicated representative and spokesperson for our interests, but the one chosen from our last place of residence.

That should water us down.

There are around a million three hundred thousand Brits living in the EU, without voice, presence, reputation or prominence. That’s around the same number as the entire population of Estonia or Cyprus. Or Glasgow.

Glory be! We need our own police force.

Here in Spain, we Brits slid quietly from second class Europeans to third class residents. We have a special card called the Foreign Devil’s Card (also known as the TIE) and we must queue in the non-European line. We can no longer have a British bank account and we must accept that we can’t get parcels from the UK as we used to. As to whether we will be able to continue to vote in local elections (that’s to say, in the municipality where we are now settled), that’s still open to doubt: until the Interior Ministry says otherwise.

It could have been worse. Imagine that Brussels righteously decided that we should all have been shipped back to what would have essentially been some camp erected (by Polish labour) on Salisbury Plain.

Pork-pies and Gentleman’s Relish are no longer easy to find in the stores here, although we can still watch British television, eat fish and chips at Dave’s and find an unread (and unreadable) pile of trashy free English-language newspapers dumped outside. The front-page leader with something about the local dog home.

The Spaniards wonder how we made such a mess of the whole thing. Even the Catalonians, keen to depart Spain for pastures unknown, have now changed their minds after seeing how Brexit has affected the UK.

Referendums aren’t a very good idea anyway. A popular vote supposes that there will be another one coming along in four years’ time; whereas, a referendum is a one-off. You can’t vote the Brexit a second time say the winners of the plebiscite. Although, given the chance, they would probably vote in a referendum in favour of hanging as well.

Things haven’t gone well, and the British politicians (and the media) will blame the coronavirus, the irascible Europeans anxious to put a spoke in the gilded British wheel, global warming, partisan attacks from ‘the Remoaners’, the war in the Ukraine, Northern Ireland or – best of all – the pesky French.

Who apparently hate us.

Or have forgotten us entirely. One of the two.

The British left the EU, not because of those un-elected foreign bureaucrats, or the lies on the side of Boris’ bus, or the propaganda from the Daily Express and other media owned by non-tax paying billionaires; but by the simple fact that, following from the implicit belief that we British are better than everyone else – if Britain couldn’t run the European Union (for better or worse), then it didn’t want to be a part of it.

Most Europeans, not to put too fine a point on it, think we have gone nuts. Britain is suffering from shortages (of trained workers, farm produce, foreign sales and promotion) along with extra paperwork and bureaucratic blockages, while we TIE holders living in the un-wounded remains of the European Union are now in the odd position of being better-off than our Island brethren.

At least we can stay here for longer than ninety days.

The Village Fiesta

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

Alicia and I were in Velefique this week, a small village up in the hills beyond Tabernas (you remember - where they shot all the spaghetti cowboy films). The village was celebrating its three-day-long fiesta which started on Monday, a Moors and Christians effort, and we supplied the four horses and their skilled and costumed riders. Not me, Gracious no, I was either in the bar or propping up the chiringuito: the temporary tin-bar in the square next to a pop-group platform.

Oh yes, it was noisy all right.

The councillor in charge of fiestas is called Ramón. He had showed us where we could keep the horses, where the water was and so on (Alicia slept up there with the crew on Monday and Tuesday).

I got a ride home (well, to water and feed the rest of our animals).

It’s a nice little pueblo, no foreigners, no hotels and strictly no souvenir shops. Velefique (pop. 230) can apparently trace its history back to the Romans.

So noisy indeed was the fiesta last week in next-door Senés, where we had similarly brought our four intrepid riders and horses for another Moors and Christians hoopla, that the bar-owner and wife had upped stakes and closed for the session (only two days this time - the village is even smaller).

No one likes to overwork, I agree, but closing up for the fiesta? The only place that served drinks in Senés during that particular thrash was the estanco, the cigarette shop who luckily has a side-line in beer.

Well, and the chiringuito as well - with the same crew. I can highly recommend their old-bit-of-pig sandwich which comes together with one’s welcome glass of beer.

The Moors were ejected from the hills of Almería sometime around 1490, a couple of years before Granada fell to the forces of Fernando of Aragón and Isabel of Castille. To prove their undying fealty and rigorous un-moorishness, everyone had to start eating pork and stop bathing (true story!).

Fiestas (or ferias) in Spain often overlap the single day saint's celebration (Almería, which kicks up its heels from the 19th, carries gamely on until the 27th, inclusive. Well, come to think of it, since the last day is a Saturday, we might as well manage a merrie and boozy luncheon on the Sunday, informally known as ‘el día de resaca’, down at the playa, why not?).

 

But first, Velefique. I was reminded of a pretty village inland from Mojácar called Bédar, when my dad had bought three houses in 1966 for ten thousand pesetas (sixty euros).

I opened a bar there for a few months sometime in the mid-seventies before deciding that hard work was not for me. I called it El Aguila, the eagle (there was a brand of smokes called El Aguila in those days, plus of course the beer. Marketing, I figured).

Fifty years later, and Bédar is now a British colony where people complain about the dog-poop and have tea-parties.

I forgot to ask Ramón how much a house costs in Velefique these days (much to his relief).

See, I was thinking of opening another bar.

The Send-off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God, how old we’ve all gotten!

Names, Best Forgotten

 

How good are you on names? I have a small problem with remembering them which dates back to school times. I attended a place with eight hundred other boys, 120 of which were presumably in their leaving year, a large number somewhere in the middle, and another 120 just arriving. All dressed in the same uniform and haircut. All to be known by their last names.

Then there were the masters and the associate staff. And Matron. There was a little blue book that listed the whole lot of them by house, name and dates.

There were twelve ‘houses’ of which, by the time I left, I could confidently locate four. But, the ‘Blue Book’ knew. Some fellows, they must have been swots, learnt the whole thing and could put the right name to everybody.

People like that, we knew, would one day excel in public life. Now, I wasn’t as game at this as I might have been, never knowing by name more than about twenty people, students and masters, and by sight, perhaps another thirty or so (plus the tea-lady).

This didn’t prepare me very well for adult life, especially a place like Mojácar which, in a way similar to the old school (‘Gloreat Rugbeia’) has lots of both new-boys and, indeed, leavers. The difference being, according to my mum, that here is a lot more like living in a lunatic asylum.

Where no one knows who the nurses are.

Spain has its own way of dealing with names. While we get by with a first name, a middle name that no one knows and a last name, the Spanish go for a first name (un nombre), the more generic the better, and a handful of last names (los apellidos). Here, a woman’s surname doesn’t change on entering into the holy state of matrimony (unless the husband’s name is rather smart in which case she’ll tack it on the end of her own). She’ll keep her old collection and, if pushed, might accept being ‘la Señora de so-and-so’. Any children that happen along will take the best bits from their two parents’ surnames and weld them together into a fresh and different name. Thus José López Rodríguez marries María Pérez Muñoz, who keeps her name as always it was, and the children are called María López Pérez and José-Luís López Pérez (who may call himself, quite correctly under Spanish logic, Pepe Pérez). Or nowadays, they can legally reverse the surnames, with Mother's monica coming first - thus Pérez López, why not.

Which explains why the Spanish authorities will always want to know the first-name from one’s parents. Francisco, son of José and Alicia.

You may have noticed that the Spanish are very enthusiastic about our middle-name, under the impression that it's really a first surname - a sort of anglo deal where we use our second-surname in an acceptable way, while quietly dropping the first one.

Which is usually Douglas or Reginald and chosen to honour grand-dad while sublely reminding him about the Will.

Our middle names (God forbid we have several of them) are generally ignored by both foreigners and the Spanish except when in prison or hospital and they will always be used in police reports to cause confusion when leaked to the press (‘Richard Waverly B was arrested yesterday in connection with…’) or at the hospital ('I'd like to see Señor uh, Waverly - did I pronounce that right?').

My dad was known as ‘Chick Napier’ at school, not because there were many others with his name, but because ‘he had eyes like poached eggs’. Most people in Spain, equipped as they are with first and a variety of last names, also enjoy an ‘apodo’ or a ‘mote’ – a nick-name. Somebody goes to work in Germany for six months in 1925, as happened in Mojácar, and the whole family to this day is called ‘Los Alemanes’. Another well-known family is Los Marullos, and one of them, Francisco Gonzalez ‘el Marullo’, was mayor of Mojácar. Marullo means ‘sneak thief’.

Nobody from around here finds that peculiar. It makes it easier for people to identify one another. Another family from the hills is known as ‘Los Pajules’: the tossers. They may make one think of Onan from the Bible, whose unconventional sexual activities duly (and inevitably) wiped out his line, but the Pajules clearly have a wider repertoire, since there are quite a lot of them. In fact, every local family will have its own ‘apodo’ which, as we have seen, they will be fiercely proud of.

Small towns have a reduced number of ‘apellidos’: surnames. Here in my town, we have Flores, García, Gonzalez, Haro and a couple more. I had an employee called Paco Flores (Paco is really Francisco) and one day I went down to the bank to pay him something. The manager looked pityingly at me, ‘there’s twenty six Francisco Flores with accounts here’, he said. Turned out later that my chap wasn’t one of them anyway, being called Francisco-José Flores instead.

Spaniards, like the Welsh who apparently all share the same surname, are obliged to invent different nicknames, or just use different variations of their first name. Francisco can be Franco, Francis, Pancho, Paco, Paquito, Frasquito, Ico and Fran.

Actually the most famous Pancho of them all, Pancho Villa, was really called Doroteo. Who would have guessed?

A friend called Diego has a sure-fire solution to his poor memory for names. He calls all the men ‘León’ and all the women ‘Guapa’ – Lionheart and My Pretty. It’s so much more elegant than the British ‘Ahhh, this is Errr-um…’

And then, for Goodness Sakes, the Brits expect us to know the names of their children and their dogs as well.

Until ‘La Democracia’ arrived in 1975, you had to call you child by a nice Christian saint’s name, or two would be even better. Sometimes a boy’s name followed by a girl’s (which isn’t generally worth making fun of, unless you can show a good turn of speed). Like José María. Or, of course, María José. I can’t see those names working at my old school, even though, since my day, it’s apparently gone co-educational.

So here in Spain your married parents are separately named (father's name) (mother's name) and you legally take their two first surnames to make up your own set. You may use just your father’s name in the street or, both, or indeed, if your father’s name is a bit humdrum, then you can use your mother’s surname. Take our former president for example. He’s called José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He nevertheless uses his mother’s surname. However, his kids won’t technically be able to call themselves ‘Zapatero’ which is a bit of a swizz. They’ll probably use it anyway.

Spaniards, for their part, are confused about us having two first names and one surname, which the ladies among us will change on getting married. Same surname? They sometimes confuse us as brother and sister.

There are even the equivalents to Thingume, Woosit and Whatyacallim for those of a forgetful disposition - thus Spain has Fulano, Mengano, Zutano and my old mate Perengano to hold up the side. Una Fulana, unfortunately, and Spain being how it is, is a name for a whore.

If you are called Juan and you bump into another Juan, you’ll call him ‘Tocayo’ which means ‘namesake’, which in English, as far as I know, doesn’t work.

Of course, I’ve never met another Lenox.

BeeBapoRu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And who can argue with that?

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

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

And practice that Camilo Sesto song.

Being There (Hosing Edition)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm in the garden now. 

Watering.

Adiós Facebook. Hello Vida

I've given up with Facebook.

This time, they jailed me for another month after putting a frivolous comment on a Spectrum Radio post about the new proposal to double-pack passengers on a flight.

I wrote: 'Why not knock them unconscious and stack them in the hold'.  Pathetic perhaps, but hardly revolutionary.

The Thought Police were quick on the uptake and gave me another month to cool my heels (I had just got out that day from an earlier and equally stupid sentence). 

Facebook - where one isn't even allowed the luxury of a kangaroo court. Where the power to close one down is evidently in the hands of faceless gnomes.

It raises the question - are they really watching us, or is there a filter that catches the key words like 'unconscious', or do people with a loose understanding of the word 'fair' routinely report their rivals (apparently one can)?

Facebook takes my money for promoting a site of mine called 'Business over Tapas', that I can't even visit.

Indeed, I'm currently barred from putting as much as a 'like' on a post, and friends don't know I've been removed from all activity because I can't tell them. For that matter, I am not permitted to send even a 'like', much less a heart emoji, to a birthday friend.

They've even gone to the length of freezing the feed - with nothing new for me to see since I was thrown into the slammer

So, to Hell with Facebook.

It's a pity because, having been in desktop-publishing most of my life, I enjoyed seeing and posting on Facebook. I no doubt spent far too much time looking at it on the cell-phone (the average time spent on social media by those who use it, says Statista, is over two hours a day).

Me and Donald Trump both! 

Did you see that? It says '...usually takes a few weeks...'!

Still, with all this free time I now have, I can do all sorts of other things to fill my day.

Dig a hole, maybe.

Twins: A Tale of Two Cities

We danced, pranced and tottered around Mojácar during the magnificent Moors and Christians festival a few weeks back - fortuitously on the same weekend as similar festivals cheekily held in the two neighbouring towns of Carboneras and Vera, and please don't remind me about the consequently high cost of the costume rentals.

A festival which began in our case thirty four years ago in 1988 to remember the quincentenary of the Fall of Mojácar (whimsically touted as a 'peaceful transfer of power' from one bloodthirsty lot to another, a bit like what's going on right now in the Ukraine, come to think of it).

Doubly important this year, as a second anniversary has also fallen upon us.

Thirty years ago this week, the Elders of the town decided it was time to 'twin' with another city elsewhere. Perhaps, back in 1992, with the first flush of international tourism upon us, the swollen population of Britons living locally and the opportunity to travel abroad at a reduced and subsidised rate, they might have gone for Henley-on-Thames, or maybe Southend or perhaps Brighton.

The children could have perfected their English, as the Good People of Brighton swapped their brood with their Mojaquero colleagues for a fortnight. The wealthy Henlyans might have bought some decent houses here (in those days, unfortunately, we were only building small apartments - there's more profit in them, even if the dwellers are poorer and short-term).

Maybe they could have chosen some place in Romania to adhere to. It might have sounded like a good idea if we had a socialist town hall, what will all the Romanian immigrants to the area back then, but we don't.

It's conservative. Money, souvenir shops and short rentals preferred.

At any rate, and no doubt after much discussion, we chose to join our futures and twin with a town in Andorra called Encamps ('Encamp' in Catalán).

Andorra is a fascinating place, in many ways, it's a sort of Spanish Gibraltar. Encamps itself is a charming resort with good skiing, lots of shops, a population of
13,000 souls and fourteen banks.

Not much to do with Mojácar you might think, but did I mention the banks?

Every year a bus-load of visitors head north, their bank-books held firmly, to enjoy the attractions of the local restaurant and hostal.

It's all quite convivial and works both ways as look, in our photo, there's some of the Encamps people here in Mojácar to enjoy the Moors and Christians festival. We hope they stayed for the jolly parade on Sunday night (is that a mannequin standing next to our tourist councillor dressed here in purple?).

The story goes that our small inland neighbouring pueblo of Turre was highly impressed by our choice of the twinned town. They famously had a plenary meeting on the subject of finding something equally suitable for them. 'We don't want anything too foreign', they argued, driving a pencil line through most of Europe, 'or really anywhere that is different in their moral values from ourselves' (Catalonia fell from the list with a quiet thud). 'No one who might swamp us with different ideas, incomprehensible languages or food that's picante or runny, and anyway, we don't want to subsidise expensive bus tickets for our inhabitants...', they agreed.

In the end, so goes the story, after several rounds with the porrón, they decided the best answer would be to twin with Mojácar. I'm not sure that Mojácar picked up the gauntlet though.

I like the collection of flags which can be seen in the Plenary Room at the Mojácar town hall. There's the Spanish one, the Andalusian one and the Andorran one there, all in a row.

And if the Andorran ensign is coincidentally the same as the Romanian flag, who are we to quibble?

Spanish Warming (Written Just Before a Cooling Rainstorm)

It’s getting hotter each time around, and worse still, it’s getting hotter earlier.

This may be because I’m becoming older, and it’s just a subjective opinion, or it could be that the meteorologists, climate scientists and environmentalists are right: global warming is occurring and, on first impression, that’s not good.

The record high temperatures reported this year at the poles must be a concern. All that ice melting into the sea can only mean that, sooner or later, the coastal cities are in for a nasty shock. It’s starting already with Venice, and perhaps we have seen those mock-ups of London, the Netherlands or Seville under water.

And really and for true, using less shower-water; or putting the plastic bottles in the right-coloured trash-container; or cutting out the inconsiderate use of ear-wipes, are all very commendable things to do, but at the same time – it won’t make an atom of difference. The major polluters: the oil companies, plastic container-users, the coal burners, the cruise ships, those who chop down the forests and those who sell us the SUVs – none of them will slow down their drive for profits – even if it kills them.

Recycling – the great panacea to our industry-encouraged over-consumption – is more of a chimera that a reality. Did you see that mountain of unsold clothing dumped in Chile? Did you think that plastic can be melted down and used again? The Chinese don’t want our old plastic bottles or the sun-bleached sheets from the invernaderos anymore. How about those accidental fires over at the vehicle and tire-dumps?

Spaniards are worried about the climate-change which they are experiencing, but they are not necessarily prepared to do much about it. No one accepts a higher tax on petrol, or to eat less meat, muchas gracias.

We put up with not getting a free shopping bag from the supermarket – as we load all of the heavily wrapped-in-plastic products we took off the shelves into a cloth-bag. Who are we fooling here?

Those of us who are older must worry for our children and those that come after. We think that they won’t have it as well as we did: even if they can afford an air-conditioning system.

This latest heat-wave we have suffered in Spain, where apparently half-cooked baby birds fell from their nests in Córdoba, is said to be nothing compared to what is coming in the years ahead.

Most of Spain is on a high-plateau. The coastal bits are relatively benign, but the inland parts of the country suffer temperature extremes. Ándujar (Jaén) has just reported a new June record for Spain, at over 44ºC. Last year’s August 14th record of 47.4ºC in Montoro (Granada) still stands for the moment.  The World Meteorological Organisation says that this heat wave just settling down now was around 10ºC hotter than the usual for this time of the year in Spain and France and furthermore, ‘was a harbinger of things to come’.

Together with the fires (another sad record in Zamora this week with 30,000 hectares burned), the polluted lagoon at el Mar Menor in Murcia and the generic desertification, we are indeed facing an uncertain future.

Summer, by the way, began on Tuesday – what we just went through, that was Spring.

Eve and the Trippers

I was in our local cemetery, where the foreigners at last lie in peace with their Spanish neighbours. Walking around slowly: looking out for my parents, for old friends and for people I knew. Here is the British bullfighter; there the Air-Vice Marshall. Here is my dad. There is my mum. Here's Fritz the artist, who's headstone claims he was born on November 31st, a month with only thirty days. Old Pfeiffer, whose apfelstrudel was all the rage in Vienna, is there: dead these forty years. And then I saw the stone for Eve Steinhauser, who despite her name, was an Englishwoman who worked for Horizon Holidays.

I had also worked for them, briefly, when I was 17; taking tourists round the sites (the sights) in Crete, the old Minoan Civilization. A posh accent describing the Minotaur to retired doctors, bank-managers and their wives. I was at the top end of the tour-operator's offer, a subsidiary of the holiday-company called Wings.

Eve had been sent to Mojácar by Horizon to see if it was worth bringing their holidaymakers to the small resort. Mojácar doesn't really work as a tour destination - it is a pretty village two kilometres away from the sea on a high hill, with beautiful views, and with a long coastline (for all practical purposes) of a dozen kilometres. From your hotel to wherever you wish to walk... is a long pull. There was no bus then although there was a couple of old taxis - we are in the early seventies; but there wasn't much to do after a hot walk, besides take the inevitable tour to the cowboy town in Tabernas an hour away in a coach (cue some Morricone music) or see some dodgy Flamenco in the hotel disco.

So Eve, conscious of the fact that a man who works in a toothpaste factory wants a holiday that won't stop, knew that Mojácar wasn't the right place. There was just one hotel in the village that could work and nothing of any size on the beach.

But then she met my mother.

Heather had suffered from encephalitis some years before she came with my dad and myself to Mojácar in 1966. The scars in her mind were slight, but she had no spacial memory, no recent memory, and she had somehow lost the bit that stops you from being rude to strangers.
 

+ One night in the bar +

Eve - I'm here to see if Mojácar is the right place for a tour operator.

Heather - Don't you f***ing dare to bring in those a***holes to our town you horrible woman.

Lenox writhing in embarrasment.

Eve would tell the story (since my mother forgot) - I had quite decided to tell Horizon against coming to Mojácar, until Heather changed my mind.

So, the company came to the village, to turn it into a resort. They bought a second hotel on the hill, a hulk which they were forced to demolish, before rebuilding it alarmingly over-budget. With the new hotel, the Moresco, and the other place above it, the Hotel Mojácar (built with public money by Roberto Puig - a Valencian who couldn't bear the thought of customers in his hotel), Horizon Holidays opened Mojácar, as my mother would say, to the f***ing trippers.

Horizon was bringing in tourists, the Mojácar people reacted accordingly. The foreign residents, who had brought in money, bought houses and opened bars, were quickly dropped in favour of the trippers. Nicknack shops opened, and Old Jacinto the mayor changed the name of the main street up to the village from the Generalísimo to Avenida Horizon.

The company, now heavily invested in Mojácar, was allowed to build another hotel, an ugly skyscraper on the far end of the beach: a twelve storey monstrosity called the Hotel Indalo. Shortly after this, as the millions of British trippers insisted on continuing to enjoy their holidays in Benidorm, several hundred kilometres up the coast, Horizon quietly went bust.

Clarksons came and went, as did other tour-companies of the era. Mojácar attempted to sell the tourists (here on a shoe-string holiday) small and squashed-together apartments. No one was buying villas any more.

With an ever-larger presence of Britons in the town, whether living here or merely visiting, it was only a matter of time before we twinned with a tourist town, and where more appropriate than Encamp, the Andorran town famous for its banking with no questions asked. The Avenida Horizon became the Avenida Encamp. The Hotel Mojacar was rebuilt as apartments, the Hotel el Moresco has been closed since 2008 (never to reopen). The Hotel Indalo along the beach is now the Hotel Best and the playa itself is now full of bars, ice cream joints and of course, an unending supply of nicknack shops selling Chinese-made goods.

Residents don't buy souvenirs, but (to employ my mother's word), trippers do.

Benidorm, meanwhile, continues to grow.

Could You Say That Again, Slowly?

An interesting subject here. Spain is the only country that prohibits the use of its place-names in Spanish where local versions/names occur. Mostly. 

Gerona or Girona? Sangenjo or Sanxenxo? Jávea or Xàbia? The local version often takes precedence, which is a bother if you don’t know that Iruña is another way of saying Pamplona (apparently Pampeluna in English says Wiki) or Elx is Elche. 

Or Maó is Mahón.

A few other cities have an English version (we use Seville over Sevilla and Majorca over Mallorca even if we have given up on The Corunna).

Sometimes – in the Basque country at least, they just use both – like Vitoria-Gasteiz (well, officially anyway). 

Then there are the English-language newspapers that for some reason don’t have an ‘ñ’ on their keyboards, bringing us the joys of Logrono, Peniscola and Salobrena.

And the seasonal Feliz Ano of course. 

Come to think of it, the Catalonians prefer Catalunya to Cataluña (they haven’t used the ñ since 1913).

Spain therefore bends over backwards (mostly) to accommodate regional variants – Lleida for Lérida, Eivissa for Ibiza (I mean, really!) and so on, whereas other countries just use the regular name (imagine the weather forecaster on British TV saying Caerdydd instead of Cardiff or Dùn Èideann for Edinburgh).

However, when the Spanish go abroad, it’s all Londres, Estocolmo, Nueva York and Pekín. 

Finally, how about the Galician name for Xibraltar!

Almería: Cowboy Country

When I think of my province – Almería – I don’t bring to mind flamenco dancers eating enormous plates of paella after an enjoyable afternoon at the bullfight explaining the minutiae of the spectacle to aghast tourists.

Hideous plastic farms aside (and I live completely surrounded by them), I’m gonna go along with the cowboys.

I learned my Spanish from going twice-weekly to the old pipa-theatre, the summer cinema open to the stars (late-showings only) and began with ‘hands up’ and rapidly progressed to ‘die, you dirty dog’ – useful on so many occasions, and especially now, with the Russian army due to arrive later this week on the twelve noon from Numa.

The old pipa-theatres were so called, because you ate a twist of sun-flower seeds noisily from your wobbly wooden chair, which could be picked up and turned around to make it easier to chat more comfortably with one’s neighbours during the slow boring bits.

Of course, with a good cowboy film, shot locally and with an Italian, German or Spanish director, there weren’t going to be many boring bits for sure.

Barbara my Californian wife would say, oh look, those aren’t American horses, those are PREs (which is horsey-folk slang for Spanish nags) as the rest of us wondered how a German director could get an Italian actor to say ‘Hands Up!’ in Spanish.

The gigantic speakers, plus the simple story line (Die, you dog!) made it easy to both follow the plot and also to pick up some vocab.  Even today, I like my movies loud.

The movies were shot in Almería back in the golden years of regular visits to the cinema. The desert scenes of Tabernas were considered just the job for a good shoot-out and the extras came cheap enough. Sergio Leone and others like him managed to take an American original (we were all brought up on cowboys and Indians, stamped with the heavy American morals of the time) and improve upon it. Cut the chat, they figured correctly, and shoot somebody. Leone brought the camera close to the actor’s face and we could see the twitch in the eyes just before the guns blazed. The astonishing Ennio Moricone provided the music.

At 25 pesetas for a cracking good evening, with a beer or a soft drink for another ten, hold the pipas, it was blissful.

Tabernas today, a half century on, has several cowboy towns – or film-sets – open to the public. The largest is the Mini Hollywood now called Oasys with a museum, film posters of Anthony Steffen, Giuliano Gemma, Bud Spencer, Terence Hill (all Italians), Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef, Dan van Husen (who came to my 21st birthday party in Mojácar), Klaus Kinski and so many more. There’s a collection of old film-projectors, a zoo (for some reason), a bar with lots of character actors wandering around shooting each other as we complacently drink a beer and many other attractions besides.

They even lend you a cowboy hat and a revolver and take a picture of you looking either mean or else bemused (or in my case, mildly sun-stroked and drunk).

By the mid-seventies, the film-makers had moved on, as the local agents got increasingly greedy, and they began to make cowboy flicks in Yugoslavia or Morocco (‘Huh, that’s an Arab horse’ says Barbara derisively).

Nowadays, Tabernas gets a few adverts shot there and maybe a Spanish director will make a rare cowboy film (Pedro Almodóvar is filming one at present), and my old mate Eduardo, who has made his career by getting shot and dramatically falling off a galloping horse, will likely make a brief appearance in the second reel.

...
 

The history of the Spanish cowboy films at Valencia Plaza here explains how the local industry fell to pieces.

Breakfast on the Costa

In the eighties, a bumper-sticker plastered on the back of a number of vehicles in the USA’s most intriguing state would read ‘Welcome to California. Now Go Home’. Behind the wheel of the old rust-bucket bought from a dealer in Detroit (where else?), I felt a bit of an interloper driving around The Golden State with my travellers cheques, my snappy British accent and my half-empty jar of Ovaltine.

 

Tourism may not have been such a Big Thing in California, despite the popular song from Supertramp (here ya go) and the steady arrival of farmers from the Dust Belt looking for a decent job; but, at 12% of GDP (here), it’s certainly a Big Thing in Spain. Before the pandemic, around twice as many foreign tourists chose to enjoy Spain's charms as there are Spaniards living here. And, if that was not enough – with two people dressed in lederhosen, or with peeling noses, or perhaps wearing sticky ‘Gibraltar is British’ tee-shirts for every Spaniard, you can add the huge numbers of displaced Spaniards themselves – everyone has a right to a vacación – flocking to the same destinations.

 

Those resorts will have put up the flags, organised a fiesta and will be ready for the onslaught. Shops full of glitter, bars with cold beer and restaurants with fresh fish. The late night joints will be buzzing and the cops will be on every corner, complacently fingering their books of fines. A loud midnight buzz of people, fun, parties, botellones, noise, fire-crackers, sirens, arguments, screams, music, songs and the burble and bang from those irritating Harley Davidsons... The following morning, there’s the rubbish to clean up.

 

Money is made, vast amounts of money for the shop-keepers, the apartment owners, the barkeeps, the souvenir shops: the municipality itself – but that’s no consolation for the normal folk, those who live here year round, working in ordinary jobs or retired, who must somehow get through their day: past the jams, the queues, the noise and the dust.

 

The town fiesta: costumes and spectacle, paid with our taxes, is so full of visitors, that there’s no parking, no room, and no welcome for the locals who with resignation will decide to stay home and see it on the telly. ‘We’ll go next year’ they say.

 

The apartment block: with half of the flats rented out, a two-bed apartment with twelve people staying there, filling the pool for a late-night dip, uprooting the flower bed and being sick in the lift.

 

So now we have a new word: la turismofobia. And we read the headlines, particularly about Barcelona and Madrid, Granada and Palma, where the cities are taken over by the tourist hoards. How can one rent an apartment when the owner can earn five or ten times as much as a weekly tourist-let (legal or otherwise)? The football hooligans, over for a match between one of their and one of ours. The drunken swarms of young foreigners bellowing and vomiting their way across the coast-road. The staggering numbers of flights into Spain (275 million people passed through a Spanish airport in 2019). Then there are the cruise ships, with their sudden massive influx into the local port.

 

Worst of all, we simple guiris, as we negociate our way through the crowds of trippers, must make that same answer, over and over again: 'No, I'm no tourist, I live here'. In the old days, we stuck out by not carrying a camera. Now we have to wear long trousers instead.

 

This is a fabulous country and there are few better places to live; but on the car, there’s a new sticker. It reads: ‘Welcome to Spain. Now Go Home’.

The Driving Licence Issue - Resolved

My first road-legal vehicle was a Vespino. This is a moped with a 49cc motor. With such a machine, I could pedal away to help its small engine get me and a packet of cigarettes up the hill to the village. I was sixteen.

Following this, and a few other mopeds (the pedals were usually removed to make the bike look a bit racier, and the motorbike would be ‘trucado’ to get it up over whatever the limit was, I think it was 60kph in them days).

Like most young fellows, I wanted a car and, in 1975, the year that Franco died, I passed my driving licence in Huercal Overa and took over operation of the Peugeot that my dad had bought in Madrid a few years earlier on tourist plates (from Bert Schroder, if there are any old-timers reading this). A succession of cars followed, usually second-hand, and there it was – the perfectly normal story of a fellow living in España, trying to impress the girls with his wheels.

Many Brits living here in Spain, in this post-Brexit time, seem surprised that the rule to stop the legal use of a British driving licence for foreign residents of the British persuasion should not have been subject to yet another extension once again as May 1st 2022 rolled around. Somehow, many of us British are convinced that we should be allowed to be different from the American or South African resident or anyone else who aspires to drive on his home-licence.

The message evidently didn’t get through to the Spanish – we Brits are special. Oh, but we are allowed to drive with a British licence in France, we say – why not ’ere?

Thus, the cold water of reality now means classes and both a written and practical driving test, which is a serious bother. They’ll do a health check as well.

Mind you, one can always wing it – how many times does one get stopped by the tráfico anyway; and if you do, you simply explain to them in a condescending yet respectful way that you are British.

They’ll soon see your point and will no doubt wave you on your way with a crisp salute.

It’s clear that many of this unfortunate set of non-European foreign residents will need to bite the bullet and go through the rigmarole, and it is not easy. Fifty years driving and now told to watch your rear-view mirror and to hold the steering wheel properly, with three eighteen-year-olds squeezed across the back seats nudging each other and chuckling.

For some, the answer is a taxi or a bus. The Tarjeta SensentayCinco for the Oldies gets you discounts on travel. Or then there’s the car-share app Blablacar for long trips. For others, perhaps, one can acquire a vehicle that doesn’t need a full licence. Not the Vespino, no, nor a mobility scooter (not yet, anyhow), but something to do the shopping with or to go out as a couple to a favoured restaurant.

The answer to this is the ‘coche sin carnet’, the microcar. The reality is that one does need a licence for these, the same AM permit as for mopeds and three-wheelers (it’s very easy, just drive a zigzag and a circle). They have a limit of 45kph and, needless to say, with their egg-beater engine, they can’t go on the motorways.

There are a few brands available in Spain, including the Aixam, the Ligier, the Chatenet and the Microcar.

Even cooler is the all-electric city-car, the Citroën Ami (road-test here). To drive one, you just need to be sixteen years or older and perhaps equipped with a keen sense of humour.

It’s not easy changing one’s feathers as one gets older, but a golf-cart with windows, heating and a radio doesn’t sound so bad.

At this stage, who did you want to impress anyway?

Two Winters

We enjoy two winters here in Almería, the proper one, which lasts for a few months and is usually passably survivable, and the tourist one, which lasts rather longer. The first is a spell of cold, with some rain and even occasionally some snow. The second is far longer.

It's the time when the town's businesses must rely on those who live there: the residents.

We will have had a couple of biblical events to keep us cheerful – a major flooding perhaps or a cliff collapse. A road is blocked and a pipe freezes. The imported foods pavilion is briefly out of tea-bags and the price of long-sleeved tee-shirts went up slightly and word reached us of a British cabin crew on strike.

I have spent most of our winter out in the garden cutting down trees and sawing up firewood for the evening’s entertainment, in front of the telly. The rest of Europe pretends that they are managing just fine, thank you, while well aware that we are doing a lot better down here. Perhaps, as a recent survey suggests, 44% of the people remaining in Britain will decide to take up their inclination to move ‘overseas’, and it could be that a few of those, attracted by our weather, will head in this direction, their cheque book and the phone number of a really good lawyer in their inside-pocket.

But our physical winter, three months of so-so weather, followed by nine months of sun, is inverted when it comes to ‘the season’. Excepting Christmas and Easter, and there are eight and a half million people on the roads during this week – the tourist season itself runs from mid-June until mid-September, coinciding neatly with the opening periods of the wealthier discothèques, beach-bars and hotels. So the nine months in the figurative winter of empty beaches and delightful walks in the hills and the three months of the tourist-summer (horrible, far too hot – a perfect time to go and visit someone elsewhere), leave us in reality with six months of perfect warm weather and splendidly quiet and peaceful life without queues, noise and people in the supermarkets wearing nothing more than sunburns and swimming trunks and shouting at the check-out staff.

This perfect period, divided as it is by the summer high-season into two, is due to start right after Easter. No more rain and too early for any traffic-jams. Three months, less these few days over Easter, when the tourists are still wherever tourists come from, working in some niner to fiver and thundering twice daily through the hyperborean night in uncomfortable passenger trains dreaming of some far-off break abroad where they can raise some hell. Don’t you miss it?

As we consider our good fortune to live here, at least during the major part of the year outside that brief and savage summer onslaught, we go about our unspoken business of turning our adopted pueblos into true communities. We paint our houses, trim the gardens, scoop up the dog-poop, rehearse for the summer comedy play and collect money for the cats home.

Meanwhile, the Spanish authorities, the politicians and the bankers, have all decided that tourism is the panacea to the country’s problems. Pack ‘em in tight and lock the doors. Sex, sea, sun and sangria. And then, keeping with that particular letter from the alphabet, when they've spent their savings, they can sod off back home. The recipe has worked well enough in the past twenty years and so it has to keep on going. Benidorm is a veritable wonder. A few towns across the country have actually increased their volume in the last season – well, in 2018 anyway, before the records were all burned. My own home-town of Mojácar, which miraculously decided not to attend the Fitur world tourist fair in Madrid back in January, has been singled out for criticism recently as having ‘obsolescent and mature’ hotels – which is bean-counter-speak for it’s time to demolish and rebuild several of our steamier tripperdromes. Who knows? Perhaps just knock them down and be done with it. To be fair (who, me?), Mojácar in fact has some modern establishments and it also has the Parador, a hotel which actually attracts wealthy people who spend money.

Spending money, you see, is the whole point of tourism, but don’t tell the government accountants who are much more interested in numbers rather than in results.

The average visitor to our province is here for five days.

The average resident is here all year long. And next year too.

See, so he spends more.

In fact, tourism is a shaky premise anyway, as a cheaper or brighter or jollier new place elsewhere, in Cyprus or the Dominican Republic or Croatia or Murcia, can leave your resort dead in the water from one season to the next. The beginning of a two-year long pandemic or a terror-bombing, or a hotel collapse, or even a tour company going bust can halt tourism overnight. They won't come, but we residents will remain (I mean, during a really terrible war, who is gonna buy the house anyway?).

Tourists, particularly the ones who ‘work hard for fifty weeks a year’ are not necessarily loyal to a particular destination. They want to let their hair down. Cheaply.

A report of typhus or man-eating jellyfish can empty out a resort in a jiffy. The brush-fire that scorched Mojácar a few years ago and burnt down a few houses was considered of little importance by the town hall. However, they were concerned of losing their tourists and actually obtained funds from the Andalusian government, not to rebuild, replant or repair, but to help promote their hotels. Please don't believe what is being said about us in The Express, they wailed, read the spanking full-page colour advert in the Voz de Almería!

The ministry of tourism, sports, business and dental floss is aware of this and is tossing obscene amounts of money at the job of promoting Andalucía, which involves the usual tactics and targets which have been used since Hannibal showed up with his elephants. There was a huge Andalucía pavilion at the Berlin Travel Show last month, and no doubt much business was made as exhibitors from one stand went and visited those from the one next door. Videos, key-rings, postcards, calendars, a couple of clog dancers, a small bowl of traditional food (who really eats garullos in real life?) and a hundred other time-wasters were all rolled out. The real business, of course, offering hotels with hundreds of beds, or chains of hotels with thousands of beds, for a slightly cheaper price than the competition, is all done elsewhere and at a different time.

The ‘experts’ try and promote new ideas. Forget the tired old sol y playa, they say (which accounts for 99% of all tourism – how many package-hotels are there in Jaén?); how about gastronomic tourism? (Pass the garullos, they smell delicious), or agro-tourism. I'm sorry - after fifty weeks of stuffing toothpaste into a tube, the head of the family wants to go and look around a tomato plantation under plastic?

But it’s not really convincing, despite the businesses that cater to the tourist trade; the hotels, discos, nick-nack shops and all doing their level best to try and increase not only the number of visitors – which is bad enough for the all-year long residents – but the length of the season as well. All it means is that it's harder to park, harder to shop and where the local village fiestas and concerts are aimed, no longer at the villagers themselves, but at the visitors with their swollen wallets. Hurry, Jim, there may be some room at the back.

It is said that every foreign home-owner (who puts a fortune into the community while yearning for peace, beauty, safety and other noble improvements) started out as a tourist. But, despite the efforts of the tourist board to the contrary, the best tourists are those who come under their own steam and search out the places, restaurants and shops which appeal to them. It’s not much use to local business when five hundred people are having a micro-waved lunch in the 20€ a day hotel down the road.

But let’s not worry about this small cloud on our horizon, as we now have three months when the weather is perfect, the roads are empty and the barman still remembers our name.

Spanish as She is Spoke

This thing about learning Spanish. It's hard to pick up a new language, especially if you plan to chat, gossip, converse or argue the issues of the day with someone sat on a bench wearing a beret and absently chewing on a bull's-pizzle a bit beyond 'Cor, it's hot today'. 

That was about the first thing I learned - a sort of Mediterranean version of the standard English comment 'it looks like rain again', with the massive positive - at least for me - that being too hot beats being too wet any day of the week.  

It's useful too, because your partner in conversation can shake his head, if he has the energy to, and reply, 'eyep' or the equivalent in our local version of castellano, which might be 'joder' or some other positive and considered answer.

Which doesn't get you very far in practicing your Teach yourself Spanish, Chapter Two, the verbs. 

Bloody verbs, grammar and future imperatives. There's not one person in a thousand who knows his way around the infinitives and the gerunds back home, and now we are faced with them here, along with the huge lists of vocab - and that's just to buy something in the market. 

'Leeks, Señora, I want leeks! Hold on, here it says... puerros! Did I pronounce that right?'

One lady I knew learned her Spanish entirely from a book. She was quite good, too, only her pronunciation let her down. 'Hooeyvos' for eggs. Or 'heggs', as a Spanish market-fellow helpfully told me the other day. 

All that effort and they try and answer in English!

Another lady, also a master of Spanish, got hers from a course in XVI Century plays, and would say to the barman something out of a Calderón de la Barca primer like 'Prithee, varlet, bring me a flagon of your finest grape'. Imagine explaining that to Antonio, who had only that very morning learnt not to put hot milk in our teas. 

When we do learn Spanish - the type for conversation rather than the one for ordering half a kilo of rice - we will need something to talk about. Which is where knowing about Spanish culture comes in.  An example would be the vice versa experience of the other day, when the man at the gas station told me that he once lived in Dartmouth 'just over the bridge'. Ahh, I said wisely. 

I have no idea where Dartmouth is, although Google says there's one in Canada with a floating pontoon.

Knowledge of the Spanish culture - having something to talk about - means knowing the geography, history, politics, literature, music, gastronomy, bullfighting, TV shows and the latest sports results. There's no point in interrupting a talkfest to announce 'I bought a kilo of leeks yesterday in the market'. There may be a couple of seconds pause as everyone digests this in companionable silence, before the conversation about putting in solar electricity on Paco's roof will resume once again.

To learn these things - throw your English-language TV, books and newspapers out of the sitting-room window (after all, they talk about where you are from, now about where you are now) and read and watch Spanish stuff. Armed with what you've learned, be like a parrot. Repeat. 

A Brit asked me the other day while I was enjoying a noisy beer in Antonio's - there was a football match going on the TV - how to say 'Kill the Ref!' in Spanish. I told him the magic words which he then shouted out at the top of his lungs. We both drank free than evening until the bar closed. 

A hobby is a good idea. Join the local railway club, or historians society, or painters' nook. You already have something of interest shared by all the group - if it's only where to buy a decent tube of umber. 

Speaking Spanish can sometimes feel frustrating, when the addressee refuses to understand you. This may be because you don't look like a local person, so logic dictates that you therefore must be a foreigner, who - as everyone knows - speaks foreign. Which, tragically, he spreads his hands in apology, he doesn't.

There are ways around this of course, you can try wearing a beret and ordering a bull's-pizzle from Amazon. Or you could consider calling them on the phone. I always wanted to grow a pencil-thin moustache to look the part, but my hair is too blond and patchy. 'Shut your eyes' I tell 'em, 'you'll see'. 

In short, it may not be easy, but it's worth it.

The Invisible Tribe

 

In the past I have often pointed out the difference (and benefit) to Spanish society between foreign settlers and foreign tourists. While the settlers are cordially ignored by the authorities (except during the tax season), foreign tourism receives enormous media attention, massive investment, endless promotions both at home and abroad, heavy institutional advertising and even a dedicated government ministry along with its regional equivalents. In several communities and resorts, the councillor for tourism is the second most visible politician in the government.

But then, as Spain basks in the huge amount of money brought here by tourism (forgetting that a sizable chunk of this stays in the country of origin to pay agencies, airlines, insurers and so on), along comes something to put the cork in – maybe a pandemic like the one that has assailed the industry for the last two years.

If visitor numbers had dropped by 75% in 2021 over 2019 (the last halcyon year for tourism) the number of foreign residents either stayed the same (they couldn’t sell-up and leave, what with one thing or another) or even rose in numbers.

That’s of course not including those few who dared the odds and actually took out Spanish nationality.

There are currently over six million foreigners resident in Spain at the present time – up from 4,850,000 recorded at the beginning of 2019. That’s ten per cent of everyone. Some of them are retired, some of them are living from income from abroad, some of them working and some of them studying. Some of them here illegally. Some without documents. Some of them sending their money home to their families, as they should.

While many of the six million are immigrant workers, the largest collectives being Romanian, Moroccan and Colombian, the fourth largest group of foreigners currently living in Spain are the British at precisely 282,124 souls.

Maybe. That's the figure from the padrón - those who are registered in the town halls across Spain. Other painstakingly accurate figures for the Brits are quite different. The Government claims 407,628 Brits living in Spain. Statista reckons on 313,975 and the ABC newspaper goes with 290,372.

All good for December 31st 2021.

Why are the figures so different (and so painfully acquired)? We imagine teams of dedicated beancounters adding up numbers each time they go to the market, the expat bar or the dog pound. And then, to show they weren't making it up, they arrive at those ridiculously exact figures before locking their desks are rushing out for a coffee.

There are other official government sites available, but the browser found a ‘potential security threat and did not continue to www.mites.gob.es’. So, we shall remain blissfully ignorant of the information to be found on that no doubt highly useful page.

Then we have headline from  a silly English-language newspaper from last October which claimed that British expats are said to be leaving Spain "in droves"; while, conversely: the property site Idealista was posting the opposite: ‘The Brits bought 7,560 homes in the second half of 2021 – the largest group of foreign buyers’, they said.

With all the confusion, the authorities will understandably react according to the figures to hand (once they’ve successfully looked up the phrase ‘in droves’ in the dictionary), without worrying if they are correct; or maybe just go out for another coffee instead. Of course, looking out of the window in an office in Madrid, one won't see many Northern European residents. They tend to live in a wash of small pueblos along the coast and on the islands. Even then you probably won't notice them - or confuse them with tourists - unless you happen to be trying to sell something to the director of the local medical centre.

In all, nearly 64,000 homes were bought by foreigners between July and December last year. And that’s good money brought here almost exclusively from outside Spain. 

So we come back to our original doubt - why does Spain chase the foreign tourist and ignore the foreign resident?

Rather than try and figure out the number of foreign residents who are retired or live from funds from abroad (including a clutch of wealthy Americans, some rich Venezuelans, a few idle Chinese and a sprinkle of superannuated New Zealanders), but not Tommy who works at the campsite, we can only choose a wildly inaccurate number – say 500,000 – to contrast with the tourists, whose statistics thanks to the enormous machine dedicated to surveying them we know down to the last digit.

Figures suggest that the average age of this sub-group of half a million – that’s to say, those who live comfortably in Spain without employment – is around 61 years old, against tourists who are (I’m diving through the INE records) maybe 20 years younger.

Then of course, residents often take trips within Spain – not to all-inclusive hotels on the beach, full of fellow-Brits or Europeans, but to more expensive destinations, such as the Parador hotel chain or to fancy restaurants, or to areas away from the sol y playa; which makes them, in the eyes of the Spanish authorities (if only briefly), tourists.

So, if the money spent by just the wealthier foreign settlers – 500,000 multiplied by a year’s worth of living – is contrasted by the amount spent by the tourists, then the residents are clearly a group to treasure. At 20,000€ a year (my guess, and we shall ignore the major investment of buying both a 250,000€ house and a car) that’s 10,000,000,000€ per year spent by the higher end of the resident foreigners in Spain. The average visitor, here for five days rather than 365, is going to be worth a lot less.

But you won’t find any official agency or policy that promotes foreign home-buyers investing in Spain!

Tourists, then, are described as anyone foreign who comes to Spain (even if they are taking an onwards flight to somewhere else and never even leave the airport), plus all the people on all the cruise ships – regardless of if they disembark for a two-hour stroll around Málaga harbour or not – plus all the people who hop over to Spain every weekend (add ’em all together José), but not the ones who drove across the frontier or who slept in the guest room last night or on the sofa.

Then we have those non-EU citizens (now including a large number of Brits) who own homes here are but aren’t allowed to stay for more than 90 in any 180 day period. What are they exactly – residents, home-owners, tourists? No one knows or seems to care – except of course for the affronted local businesses.

Following the pandemic, we now have a terrible war and next up perhaps, a tourist bombing, or an earthquake, or something poisonous in the water. Maybe Portugal will drop its prices or Greece will give free ouzo to visitors. Tourists are just fine, they leave money and go away with a sunburn and a hangover. But they are finicky, and without any obligation or an emotional link to return.

But the residents will stay. They have an investment in Spain: their property.

Why can’t the authorities see this? There is so much more opportunity in this field.