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.