Everything That's Runny Contains Water

I saw a billboard today while driving along the main road towards the playa on my way for a swim – it was the local ice-cube company advertising its product and it said: ‘Probably the best ice-cubes in the world’.

I’m pretty sure that a couple of examples from Señor Freezer are rattling around in my iced-tea right now, gently melting and turning my beverage into watery-iced-tea.

Which is doubly refreshing.

Come to think of it, I suppose all the drinks we enjoy are made pretty much from water. Which they are always telling us we must drink lots of. So, are all drinks, essentially, just water with flavouring?

Starting of course with water itself (flavoured with salts and minerals), and finishing, by a circuitous route, with beer, which is after all merely bubbly water with some boiled hops and barley along with a judicious squirt of alcohol (don’t tell the Germans I wrote that). Indeed, the sober answer is this: ‘According to The Brewer's Handbook, most beer contains about 95% water, and the remaining 5% is alcohol. Beer, in short, is mostly water but this is barely noticeable because of the flavour of other ingredients’.

The taste though, whether in beer or in whisky, depends on the water, so a distilled H2O won’t give much taste to the finished product, whereas a nice ‘fresh mountain stream’ might be just the ticket.  

Let’s see. Sweet sticky soda drinks are 90% water (we know what most of the rest is). Milk is about the same. Tomato ketchup is about 70%. Wine has 85% water and soda water is 90%, while sparkling water is 99% made up of our old friend agua, with a bubble or two added to help make us burp.

With all of the above, it’s clear that whatever one drinks (or sloshes on one’s chips), it’s all mainly down to water.

So, and sorry for asking, but why is beer cheaper than water in most bars? And with a free tapa thrown in for good measure!

Of all of these endless libations, only the stuff commercialised by the plastic water-bottle companies has a breakdown of the water and its minerals and salts printed on the label. No beer ever said ‘this brew has calcium, magnesium and sulphates’.

So, what is water?

Well, lessee, it takes two haitches and one oh, or two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. A simple formula we all learned in school.

But with all of the free hydrogen and endless amount of oxygen in gas filling up the space around us – why doesn’t it all club together and turn into water? It’s no doubt just as well that it doesn’t, otherwise I’d be writing this piece while wearing some manly-looking water-wings.

The reason, apparently, is that most of the hydrogen around is already in the water anyway. The other reason is metastability (here if you insist), but I’m sorry I asked now.

Another puzzler about water – if it’s made up of inflammable oxygen and explosive hydrogen – why doesn’t it detonate every now and then?

It would certainly keep us on our toes if it did.

Mind you, you can always nuke it for an interesting reaction. Of course, rather than playing with steam-engines, I boil mine for a nice cup of tea twice a day. Boiling your water is a good idea as it kills anything that shouldn’t be there anyway.

Which I suspect is how we did so well in India.

Returning to the plastic-water-bottling industry (Motto: We do Our Bit for Pollution), an estimated 6,500 million emptied litre water-bottles will be obligingly cast into dustbins or chucked out of car windows or left on the beach or in the countryside this year in Spain (up 3% from last year, says the pwbi proudly). I don’t know how much of that is recycled, the plastic I mean (don’t worry about the water, it will return all by itself).

The good thing about beer (and the reason I drink it) is that it comes in either cans or in bottles made of glass, never plastic. Or better still, on draught.

Although I suppose it’s a pity that they can’t make beer-bottles out of cardboard.

The ice has now dissolved in my drink, adding its own secret chemical make-up to my beverage. I think I’ll chuck the dregs and go and get a brewski from the fridge.

 

Pop Goes the Weasel

 

It was a hot and steamy night - they always are, aren't they? - and I was wondering where the Jack in the Box came from. Perhaps I was asleep after all. Maybe I'll look it up when I get up in the morning.

Google was a trifle disappointing, as it only seemed to know about a cheap American fast-food chain operating under that name. Perhaps your hamburger is delivered to the table within a box, and when you unfasten the lid, the whole thing is abruptly lifted, bun, tomaydo and patty, to all go flying across the joint with a satisfying ¡Splatt!

I do like a novelty meal.

I later find, and thanks to The Cambridge Dictionary, that this artifice is defined as ‘a children's toy consisting of a box with a model of a person inside it that jumps out and gives you a surprise when the top of the box is raised’.

Which reminds me of a birthday I once attended in Dallas, where the figure inside the cake was not only real, but was found to be wearing just half of a bikini.

No doubt the top bit had gotten caught in the icing during her dramatic entrance.

It’s bound to be a popular thing, surprise visits from somebody are invariably interesting – if refined a bit by my fellow countrymen, who have ingeniously taken the concept one step further, as Facebook regularly tells us.

See, the Brits are always 'popping' into some place or other.

I imagine we are all sat around a table, chugging a beer, when, de repente, a small bubble appears on the floor to expand quickly and then, 'pop!', there's a Brit standing there, just like something out of Harry Potter.

We popped into Joe’s, they write, and we had a sandwich.

The half a pound of tupenny rice doggerel ends with ‘pop goes the weasel’, which, on further application to Google, tells me that the meaning of this Cockney song is to ‘pop’ (pawn) granddad’s ‘whistle and flute’ (suit) to pay for the groceries.

Which is what will allegedly happen to some of the Brits here if they don’t pull out their finger in Westminster and put up the pensions.

Those imported Bakewells don't grow on trees you know.

In Spain, the nearest thing to a Jack in the Box is a Caja Sorpresa, a similarly explosive receptacle, if only to be used once, to fire confetti into the air. Which sounds like we're at a wedding.

Maybe they could put someone inside the cake, make it even more of an event to remember.

The Quiet Life, Free from Tourism

I always wanted to go to visit Machu Picchu.

And just stand on that hill.

The famous picture, rendered for once in black and white, occupied a wall in a Peruvian restaurant in Madrid that I used to go to. Unfortunately, the Pisco Sours were so damn good, that it was hard, after enjoying two or three of them, to remember if one had eaten yet. The crestfallen face of the owner as we asked for the bill just as the chupe de camarones was arriving…  

While I didn’t remember eating much there, I still remember that photo – the one of the bent mountain high in the Andes, with the abandoned Inca settlement tumbled down below.

I travelled a lot as a young ’un in the seventies, at dollar-a-night places in Mexico and Central America, a few bucks more in the USA, and so on, as one could. The Americas, unlike Spain, hadn’t quite caught on to the idea of foreign money (except Yankee-green) in those far-off times and it was hard switching a ten pound note or a thousand pesetas into the local currency.

The thing was, there weren’t many travellers, or tourists, much beyond the crowds heading for Disneyland, Chichen Itza and Key West.

Now, of course, there are.

I missed my chance to visit Machu Picchu and now I'm told that it’s so full of visitors that I couldn’t imagine going there. Like the inspiring Mezquita in Córdoba or the Alhambra in Granada, their time as places to visit has passed. Santiago de Compostela or the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Don’t go. They are done; cooked; crammed; despoiled.

There are too many of us, all wanting to take a picture as we finally, after a long and impatient queue, make it through the doors. We talk, we crowd, we flash, we hold our souvenir pamphlet and we smile at the Japanese tourists with their extendable selfie-sticks.

Next time, try Jaén or Ciudad Real. They may not be much, but they’ll be more enjoyable. By far.

In Mallorca, the locals have put up signs in English saying ‘Don’t bathe here, it’s dangerous’ and underneath, in the local tongue: ‘Don’t worry, we’re just fooling the guiris’.

Well fine, don’t live in a place with lots of tourists, why don’t you?

Forget Florence, or Venice, or Barcelona, or Benidorm, or Marbella or Mojácar – buy a house somewhere quiet, with little or no tourist potential.

Because if there is one, the temptation is high: rack up those rents and open a souvenir shop.

Now my town is on the coast, it’s a suburb of Almería City. It’s ugly and has no tourism whatsoever – frankly, there’s nothing to see and the beaches aren’t worth visiting. Which means that I rarely have to take a picture, except once a year when the local saint, looking a little pale, is hauled along the main  drag on a waggon pulled by a pair of bulls (relieved, no doubt to be spared other more onerous duties).

So, I was lucky. I got my travelling in early. Nowadays, I can see the world for a few pennies, from the comfort of my own armchair and with a pile of second-hand books from the charity store.   

 

The Snails of Palomares

 

A USAF B52 was taking on fuel from a flying tanker somewhere over Vera (Almería) on January 21st 1966 when something went wrong – the two aircraft touched, and exploded. Debris rained down on the fields and coastline below, including four unarmed nuclear bombs.

I mean, ‘four bombs which hadn’t been armed’, rather than ‘four defenceless bombs’. That would have been cruel.

The gerfuffle as the remains of the aircraft, blobs of raw plutonium and the four bombs were re-secured by the Americans are well known. Two bombs landed on the ground in Palomares (‘falling open and melting everything in their path’ according to unverifiable reports) and the other two fell in the sea, where one was soon found while the forth was finally located in a deep trench off the coast several months later by Alvin, that cute little mini-sub that starred in the National Geographic magazines of the period. Antonio the wise old fisherman with the 150-metre ice-blue stare suggesting fully-fledged insanity may have helped. He was certainly cheaper to fuel.

Franco was on board the Fifth Fleet American destroyer for a brief visit and toying with a complimentary Easter bunny as the bomb was fortuitously hauled aboard.

A suggestion from the time was that the last bomb was in a very deep hole in the sea and was impossible to extract, so a plastic reproduction had been lowered off the other side of the ship to be triumphantly raised in front of the mad Caudillo to cheer him up.

Fraga Irribarne the Minister of Tourism, perhaps unaware of this sleight of hand, famously took a dip in the sea with the American ambassador at the time to show there was no radiation. On the other hand, they carefully enjoyed their frolic in front of the Mojacar Parador, some ten kilometres down the coast.

The Marines removed 800,000 tons of topsoil, fertile and safe, and took it to South Carolina, because, you see, there was no radiation.

It's now used to grow terbacca.

Roberto Puig, an eccentric architect, was meanwhile putting the finishing touches to his Hotel Mojácar located in the village of the same name (many, many years later, Pedro Sánchez, the future president, bought an apartment within the since-converted hotel). Roberto hired a van and drove over to Palomares and managed to secure part of a wing from the bomber, which he proudly affixed to the wall in the cave-bar under his hotel. The local wags said it had an unearthly glow.

A small desalination plant was built in Palomares by the Americans for thirty million dollars as a kind gesture (it was quickly closed down after the resident engineer moved to Mojacar to open a beach bar and, seeing that he wasn't coming back, the Catalan caretaker sold the guts of the building for scrap). A few rusting Geiger counters were left to record the ambient radiation level – if there was any – and new construction extending from Vera Playa into Palomares and Villaricos was given the go-ahead by forward thinking planners (see, I could have written ‘greedy capitalists’).

A recent test on Palomares snails (please pay attention here if you count gastropods in your carefully balanced diet) has shown a higher than normal level of radiation. Their stomach is their foot, so what they walk on, so to speak, they eat. Snail poop, we read somewhere, might spread radioactive dust.

Of course, a light wind, common in that corner of dusty Spain, will spread a lot more dust, radioactive or otherwise.

But one has to start somewhere.

The American Department of Energy, together with the CIEMAT Spanish atomic agency, eventually bought ten hectares of land which had been previously cleared by speculators ready for some building, although the dust already raised and blown to the heavens by the tractors and… no, I’m not going there.

Local ecologists have reacted to the news by saying that a much larger area needs to be sanitised.

The half-life of plutonium is a lot longer than ours.

For the meantime, my advice is, don’t eat the snails.

Walt Was Here

 

I first came to Mojácar in 1966 with my parents who bought two apartments here (I’ve just found the escritura) for – apparently – 90,000 pesetas: that works out at just 260 euros per apartment.

We lived in the one upstairs with the three bedrooms and a roof terrace and rented the downstairs one to Michel for 1,000 pesetas a month, which he could never afford, and he would generally stay for dinner on rent-night instead.

One of the stories I heard (when not in school in the UK, polishing my Latin) was that a local woman had fallen into disgrace around 1899 and had taken ship to the Americas to hide her shame. She ended up in Chicago and found employment as a maid with the Disney family and after she died giving birth, the child was adopted by them.

A mere 25 years later, Walt Disney’s climb to fame began.

This seems unlikely as the girl wouldn’t have written home saying – I’m about to give birth to Walter (not an easy word for a Spaniard to say), who will one day be a household name.

Furthermore, the Mojaquero version has it that the child was called José Guirao Zamora and that his dad was the Mojácar doctor of that period – who also apparently suffered from prescience.

Not that the family hasn’t always strenuously denied the tale.

We would tell of the two FBI agents asking to see the Church Registry sometime in the fifties, so as to keep the matter secret (why we would think that they must have come asking for Disney if it was a secret, is a secret). The twist is that all the documents were destroyed in the Civil War so no one could prove anything one way or the other.

It was all a good story, and while the Disney Corporation would tremble in outrage at the suggestion of their Founder being a Mojaquero, there wasn’t anything much to prove that he wasn’t.

Well, except for a birth certificate (which, strangly, has never been found) or a Certificate of Baptism currently on display in the San Francisco Disney museum (‘Walter Elias Disney: 5 December 1901).

The old mayor of Mojácar Jacinto Alarcón once told me the story of Walt Disney. In his version, he and Diego Carillo (the village doctor) were once reading a magazine which had a picture of Walt Disney in it. ‘Coo’, said Jacinto, politely dropping the ñ, ‘he’s the spitting image of you. I bet you’re related to him’. 

Thus, after another round of Anis del Mono, was a legend born.

All Good Stuff, one might say, and we can’t dine out on Gordon Goodie the Train Robber (he had a beach-bar in Mojácar) for ever.

When asked if he was from Mojácar – so the story goes – Walt himself replied ‘Who knows…?’

Despite the fact that if he was, he certainly never came back – unless he was one of those FBI agents, of course.

So, fifty or sixty, or probably seventy years later, the Mojácar City Fathers have decided that, well, yes: Walt Was Here.

So now we have two enormous murals in the village, vast wall paintings of Mickey Mouse welcoming the tourists to come and buy some souvenirs. There’s to be a Plaza de Walt Disney and even a Walt Disney festival to be held in late November (unless they hear about it first in San Francisco).

One little town in Andalucía - Júzcar in Málaga - has painted itself blue to accommodate the Smurfs, and now another has grown a pair of huge mousey ears – to please the shopkeepers.

Take the Train (if there is one)

The best thing about the train is that it will take you into the centre of the city. You won’t be dumped in some stainless steel and marble airport half an hour or more – by taxi - from the downtown.

Living in Almería – one of the cities that has waited patiently for about twenty years for a high-speed train to take us somewhere, indeed anywhere… we have either had to get in the car, or on a very uncomfortable and slow bus, or take the trouble to buy an air-ticket, or climb aboard the one existing slow train – there's only one train station in the entire province, and that's in Almería City: a line which meanders across the landscape before eventually hooking up with civilization in Linares (Jaén) and so on northwards or alternatively west to Seville. 

The problem with arriving by car at your city destination is increasingly - where to leave it? 

There never was much in the way of railways in Almería, beyond a few mining routes built with foreign investment in around 1900 – now all since lost beyond the elevated rail-head in Almería City (now restored and converted into a tourist attraction) known as el Cable Inglés. 

Trains are the best, because one can wander around in them – pop into the bar for a brandy and to read the paper. Even seated, one can stretch one’s legs. There’s no baggage issues either. Bring along a full suitcase, why don’t you.

Me and my dad on the Almería sleeper

Many years ago, taking the Sleeper to Madrid was, if you’ll forgive the pun, just the ticket. The carriage, built in Birmingham in 1948, was sturdy and comfortable, and one was delivered on Platform One in Madrid’s Atocha railway station at seven in the morning – the perfect time for a coffee and a bun before taking a taxi to one’s appointments. 

Trains are better than airplanes, and if they are fast, then there’s little more to be said. Downtown to downtown without taxi rides to and from the airport – plus one is doing one’s bit for the struggle against Global Warming and one's Carbon Footprint production. 

(A pop singer called Taylor Swift who leads the pack in air-rides with almost 8,300 tons of CO2 emissions in 2022 might want to take note. Take the train, Child, we’ll wait). 

Trains then, will deliver one feeling refreshed while other forms of transport lean towards leaving one nervous, washed-out and irritable. 

They say that Almería – poor forgotten province in the south East of Spain – should finally have its AVE (tren de alta velocidad española) by 2026. 

Until then, By Jove, I shall be staying home on the couch and reading some well-illustrated travelers’ guides.

Foreign Residents Bring Wealth to Spain Too

 

Tourism is doing well again – with around 12% of Spain’s GDP coming from that business. It provides jobs, and income and perhaps some pride for Spaniards in the many cultural, culinary and geographical offers this wonderful country can boast.

Mind you, most of them are here for the sun-burn, the evening boozing and the odd summer romance.

And the endless selfies which are then uploaded to Facebook.

It’s not that we particularly like tourists: the queues, the jibber-jabber, the crowded restaurant, the full parking-lot, the foreigner in the supermarket who is not wearing a tee-shirt and the other one being sick in the municipal gardens – it’s the knowledge that they’re spending lavishly and, better still, that they’ll be gone in a week or two.

Not that all of them spend wisely – some don’t even use our hotels, preferring to doss down with friends or family. Others come along in their camper-vans or maybe rent an apartment from a family who doesn’t even own a hotel.

Contrast this with Residential Tourism – with no promotion, no agency, no ministry, no budget and no wealthy hoteliers to defend it. This form of tourism (of course, it’s not tourism at all, it’s really homesteading) also has a high – if largely unknown – value for Spain. They buy an ice cream or a bottle of lotion or a china ornament. We buy a house and a car and white goods, and we shovel money into the outstretched hands of the lawyers, insurance agents, gestores, doctors and (above all) barmen – all year long.

A couple of years ago, there wasn’t much tourism, thanks to the dreadful pandemic. Maybe next time, it’ll be something as simple as a cheaper offer elsewhere, or a war, or a cholera outbreak, or new visa-requirements, or because Vox won the elections in Spain…

But you know something? We Residential Tourists will remain here and steadily grow in numbers, bringing Spain a massive and reliable income each year.

Perhaps one day somebody will notice.      

The Usual

It’s always nice to see when a new café opens near where I live. Sometimes, I even make an effort to visit there and have a coffee or a beer and a tapa, depending on the hour.

I live in a working-class neighbourhood, so the cafés are open early, five o’clock early, and generally call it a day by one in the afternoon. The bars will last a little longer, perhaps closing around five – after the lunch trade, or even staying awake until the wee hours of ten thirty or eleven at night on the weekends.

My tap-room habits aren’t what they were, and I tend these days to stay home and raid the fridge or put on the kettle according to my inclination.

In the morning, I might drop in at the café opposite and have a coffee and a tostada. Since this order never varies, the girl will smile when she sees me and shout through to her partner who will cut a small loaf length-ways in half and put my bit in the toaster. He'll then cover it with shredded tomato and I'll round it off with salt, pepper and lots of olive oil. Good stuff. 

Of course, if I wanted something else, maybe a tostada with tomate y jamón on it, or with butter and jam (locally called 'un mixto'), then it's easier to go to one of the two other nearby establishments, who will know exactly what I want, because I always have the same when I'm there. 

It saves on the conversation.

It used to work the same way when I was younger - that place for gin & tonic, that one for a beer and, oh my, that one for a beer as well. Well, sometimes you have to order, but with training, they'll just plonk down the right drink in front of you. 

I remember Diana, an elderly and eccentric British lady, coming into the Sartén (a famous bar in Mojácar) one evening and arranging herself on a bar-stool. 

'The usual?' asked Simon, by way of greeting. 

'Oh yes, rather', answered Diane. 'By the way', she said after a short pause, 'what is my usual?'

'Creme de mente you silly old cow', said Simon, reaching for the bottle.

So today, I crossed the road for my breakfast coffee and tostada, to find a new girl behind the bar. 'Café con leche', I said, 'y una media con tomate'. 

'You want that in a glass or a cup?'

'Warm or hot milk?'

'What sort of bread do you want?'

So many questions. I wonder if she'll charge me the same as the usual girl does - which is just 1,20€ plus the few bits of straw from the stables that have collected in my pockets during the morning. 

Brenda Lee keeps giving me a mental nudge as I write this. 

But Brenda, it's As Usual!

I think I've got the record somewhere. 

It beats watching the television.        

The Letter Home

 Dearest Ethel,

This may come as a surprise, but Maude and I have decided to return to England and we shall have to rely on you, as our favourite sister, to put us up in your house until we can find out feet again.

I remember telling you twenty-nine years ago that we were moving to Spain to start a new life and that you would soon be ready to move over and join us. In fact, if it hadn’t have been for the various things which got in the way, I’m sure that you would have been one of the 200,000 Brits that annually leaves the country for better things – or at least did so until the bother with the Brexit.

Which, come to think of it, you supported.

Things started to go wrong here some time ago, when the local town hall decided on tourism as their mainstay. That way, they reasoned, we get their money quickly enough, and in return they get a sunburn and a hangover.

Maybe a social disease which their famous health service will no doubt quickly resolve.

Tourists though, once the flight, agency fees and airport breakfast have all been paid for, don’t leave a great deal of money for the villagers to spend on sprucing up their wardrobes and transport.

The average tourist, having perhaps been sick in the hotel gardens, or creamed a streetlight on the far side of the road while backing out of a parking space with the rental, or purchasing the very last set of water-wings in the whole province, doesn’t leave that much money here, and he only does so for an average of five or six days. Whatever he spends in the hotel (all inclusive?) will end up, once the staff are paid, in Barcelona.

Whereas we foreign residents are here all year long, pumping money into the bars, restaurants, shops, dealerships, furniture stores, dog-charities, pharmacies, tax-experts, lawyers and dentists. Our outgoing begins to add up – as the local bank-manager will tell you. Or he would if he could. Sometimes we rent out the spare-bedroom - pin money of course, and don't tell the Hacienda.

Naturally, we don’t use the local hotels, so we are of no use to them or their apologists.

If we go on holiday, or explore Spain, then we will stay in the Parador and generally splash out in some destination with there are no package-tours, tourists or blue flags. We spend because we love to be here; and we expect, and receive, little in return.

Perhaps a street named after us, or an international gala, or even that the mayor and his henchpersons might come by the local foreign bar for a round of drinks to show that they care. Just the one time would be enough, I think.

We once had a foreign-sounding street. When the mayor of the day decided to open the pueblo to trash tourism, we were greeted with the 'Avenida Horizon' which stretched - briefly under that name - from the bottom up to the top. Mind you, it lasted as long as the tour-company: a couple of years.

After all, there’s a Plaza Margaret Thatcher in Madrid (no kidding!).

The odd thing is that there is no Spanish ministry to encourage foreigners to move here and buy a 200,000€ home. The Ministry of Tourism has international fairs here and there, agencies and offices, staff and a huge budget in 2023 of over ten thousand million euros.

Us lot? Well, we are sometimes allowed to vote.

There are over six million foreigners in Spain, and around a million of them are Northern Europeans. Sometimes, it’s like being on a cruise.

Although to be sure, some of us are in steerage.

I suppose that when a local person sells something, the buyer hauls it off (or drives it away). But, when we are talking about a house, then you’ve suddenly got yourself a new and permanent neighbour who only speaks foreign and keeps dogs. There goes the barrio. Worse still, if your father hadn’t have sold the family land thirty years ago for peanuts, you wouldn’t be driving an old SEAT today.

In short, we have an ‘us and them’ situation, with all the eggs in the ‘them’ basket.

Despite some towns having more Northern Europeans than local Spaniards on the town hall registry – it’s a rare town hall that employs a guiri and a rarer one still that has a foreign councillor.

So the experiment appears to have failed. We have good sun tans, know more about the world than we ever did before, have finally learnt how to cook and can walk through a crowd without saying ‘sorry’; but it is now time to return back to England…

…or maybe move on to somewhere else.

Hmmm…

So Ethel, we won’t be wanting much, but could you get in some decent vegetables.

Besos.

Bloody Pay-Walls

 

Like any other business, running a newspaper – or a news-site – is primarily about making money. In the Media, there is naturally a competition to see who does it best (the journalists having one view, those who sell advertising leaning towards another). The more copies sold is a good indication of how many readers one has, the quality of one’s reporting and the impact of one’s editorials. There are auditing companies (the OJD is the leader in Spain) who check the print-run and the copies returned, or they fathom the readership-numbers (that copy we left in the bar was read by twelve people!) to arrive at the figures to be presented to the advertisers. There is, inevitably, a certain amount of fudging.

To increase newspaper sales, one can lower the cover-price (as some British red-tops do) or give away gifts or discounts of some sort to readers, or run an ‘advertorial’ (a paid-for item disguised as news) or take a small commission on products sold through the newspaper.

One can also increase the pages, or throw in a weekly magazine – but paper is ever-more expensive and indeed, many Spanish newspapers no longer even own a press, preferring to have their copies printed in production-intensive printers. There’s one in Valencia for example – AGM – that prints 24 dailies plus a few weeklies and various other goodies.

With newspaper sales falling – El País has gone from 469,000 copies sold daily to 60,000 in its 45 years of operation – it makes sense these days to print elsewhere and save on the staff.

But progress once again came to the attention of the editor (and the proprietor), with the arrival of the cyber-edition which costs nothing to print, nothing to distribute and there are no copies returned to be pulped. The dot com revolution has changed newspapers for ever.

However, the journalists, the bean-counters and the office cleaner still need paying, so with a free cyber-edition one must still search for income. The ad-blocker on most computers puts a dent in advertising revenue, so they endeavour to take some income from the readers.

Thus we have both subscriptions and pay-walls.

Which understandably weakens the number of visitors, but brings in some income.

News being news, it can of course be easily found elsewhere – from the TV to the other competing news-sources which remain free to use, along with the blogs (‘citizen’s journalism’) and the social media posts (which are sometimes corrupted).

It’s understood that one newspaper (or a pool) sends a correspondent to the Ukraine with all the expense and organisation that entails, and then along comes a scrivener and just hacks those stories without any guilt, but still… an event belongs to more than just its reporter.

Thus a pay-wall can only be of any moral use for protecting editorial or opinion.

After all, you can’t copyright or own a news-story.

Few people will be paying subscriptions for two or more news-services (in the hope of receiving a wider spread of news and opinion), and anyway, there are still many free news-sites to visit.

Furthermore, many pay-walls can be breached easily enough – search the same headline on Google, and we find that someone has likely pinched it; or use 12ft Ladder or an archive of an earlier posting with Remove Paywall (‘Read articles without annoying paywalls’), because, yes, precisely, they are annoying. Other pay-wall protected sites flatly can’t be opened without a credit card, so (frustrated or not), we don’t read them.

After all, are you going to subscribe to a page for just that one article?

A news-site may ask the reader to turn off his ad-blocker before being able to access the page: which seems reasonable enough. You do have the ad-blocker app, right?

Some cyber-news sites post a photo-version resistant to copy and paste. To copy, one must solemnly type out the text. Or maybe ‘take a screen-shot’. Others are of course easier.

The copy-justification is called ‘fair-use’, and needs to be brief, delivered within quote marks and with a link to the original (which, no doubt, brings traffic). Google is an obvious example of this practice. Meneame is another. Plagiarism (or ‘intellectual copyright’) occurs when a larger chunk of text is copied, unattributed to the medium where it came from.

Does the pay-wall system work? – Well, it brings extra income through subscriptions and, after all, news-sources can’t live entirely from advertising – except in Spain, where massive amounts of money are given as ‘institutional advertising’ to those news-sites which are ‘close’ to the administration. For example, the National Government, says The Objective here, has earmarked over 145 million euros in publicidad institucional for 2023.

Give me a slice of that, amigos, and I’ll write nice things about you…

The Guardian is an example of a major news-site without a pay-wall – it relies on voluntary subscriptions and, since it’s free, it can expect more readers. The Press-Gazette however thinks that with more dedicated clicks from subscribers (presumably anxious to get some return for their investment), the paper would receive quality visitors.

Now that’s just silly.

 

(Cartoon by the Great Charles Addams)

Artificial Intelligence is Here

 

A reader sends me an article about AI (not the sauce, that’s A1) and how it’s going to be taking away many of our jobs. AI being Artificial Intelligence. I told him that AI has been writing the editorial at my news bulletin Business over Tapas for years.

He said, if it wasn’t for the spelling mistakes, he might have believed me.

El Mundo ran a front-page article recently, purporting to show how easy it would be to plant a story with an AI program, using a mock-up picture of two politicians at daggers drawn, actually photographed by a clever paparazzi to be holding hands. One of their examples was Pablo Iglesias and Santiago Abascal, commie and nazi, hugging each other and smiling for the camera.

It’s a fake, right enough, but we are all taken in by a good photo, which of course is well worth a thousand words.

While El Mundo graciously acknowledged that the photos (they had four of them) were bogus, designed by artificial intelligence (under instruction – at least for the time being – of a human operator), it also shows how easy it would be for a less – ah – scrupulous news-source to take things a step further.

And while a tricked-out photo is one thing; how about a fake video, with the victim saying something, with his real voice, that he never really said. Perhaps the President with a declaration that will cause a major international crisis; all at the hands of a fellow hunched over a laptop and wearing a hoodie, or maybe a swastika.

After all, half of us will believe anything we are told.

This is nothing new – Frederick Remington, the famous western artist, drew a few anti-Spanish pictures for his boss the newspaper tsar Randolf Hearst back in 1898, helping to back the US war with Spain over Cuba. Imagine what could be done today. 

In other fields, AI is proving to be a fascinating tool. A black and white portrait of two women won the Sony World Photography Awards a few weeks ago – until the artist, a programmer, fessed up and turned down the prize. No cameras for him.

I was watching a clever little film earlier this week, designed and scripted by AI, of aliens attacking the Earth. It’s called Last Stand. The voice of Joe Biden – why, it sounds real! There’s another video out there called ‘I am not Morgan Freeman’. Well, you sure look and sound like him, Buddy.

And then, there’s AI music. All it needs is a ‘prompt’ – a suggestion of what the programmer is looking for – and away it goes. For example, there’s Freddy Mercury singing ‘Yesterday’ (he recorded it last week). Or how about Donald Trump singing a prison ballad?

A (half-humorous) quote from a Hollywood composer runs ‘It may be a good time for me to switch careers to brick-layer. That is, until they have AI brick-layers’.

Anyway, give it another year or two… when the home computer decides it’s had enough of looking at porn or going on Facebook and suddenly locks the front door and deactivates the cell-phone…

The hep word at present is ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). We read that ‘ChatGPT can’t “think” on its own or offer opinions. It can only respond to incredibly specific directions. Once the user gives it the go-ahead along with some other details, ChatGPT engages in complex problem solving and executes tough tasks, like writing an essay, in seconds...’

Like this one.

Splish, Splash, I've Broken the Bath

 

We have an old shower downstairs, just the thing for a quick wash, and when the gas-heater works, why maybe a shave as well. Otherwise, we could go to the bijou apartment upstairs and knock on granny's door to ask if we could maybe use hers. 

Not much chance of that, I reckon. I'm not certain she approves of me.

One thing and another, and not that it matters much during the summer months, but we live in a cold-water house, more or less. 

The water itself comes from a well. It's pumped into a tank below the sitting room (sometimes called the floating room when I forget to turn the pump off). From there, a second and needlessly noisy pump on the roof sends the water to the kitchen sink, lavatory and bathroom. 

And, of course, upstairs to la abuela: the irascible granny.

A gas-heater used to warm the downstairs shower, until it choked irredeemably to death early last year. The water, you see, comes from somewhere far underground (the River Styx, I suspect) and is heavily full of cal, apparently called lime in English. The cal clogs up the pipes and tubes, so we sometimes don't have water in the kitchen, or available for refreshing the toilet, or maybe it'll fail to go thrumming through the gas-heater, as explained above.

My wife's brother is a plumber, and he sometimes drops by to siphon the pipes with some dreadful product he gets from the cooperative. Vinegar, maybe. The gas-heater though, he told us while stroking his chin, was unquestionably fucked.

So, we bought a new one. Now, the new ones don't just run on butano, because that would be too easy. These ones need an electric socket as well (to light the display). Furthermore, they need a drafty chimney presumably to dispel any leaked gas; or, mind you, one could nail it to the wall outside until one of the neighbours (we live in an interesting barrio) happened to notice it. 

An inspector came by. Your chimney is too tall, he said, so I can't give you a special green Government-approved tick. 

Long story short, granny abruptly went to Her Reward last October (no doubt forgetting to send us a postcard once she'd crossed the River Styx, although one can never be too sure with the state of the Correos around here) and I thought - why not swap the small electric heater from her vacated rooms, and then buy a proper bath we could put in her quarters upstairs (now open to the rest of the household), to be fed by the brand new gas/electric heater previously introduced? We even have a short upstairs kitchen-chimney for it to blissfully sit under.

The inspector, we knew in our bones, would approve. 

My brother in law enthusiastically set up the tubing, as we erected the bath within a wooden frame in what used to be the upstairs larder (easier than putting it into the bathroom. For one thing, it would have had to have been installed vertically). 

I was a bit dubious. An old house with a bath upstairs sitting astride a pair of beams. But the first time I got in, the bath full to the brim with steaming hot water, I thought to myself, well this is a fine thing. The concrete beams won't give way and 

Crack! 

The bath, at least the end of it entertaining my head n' shoulders, suddenly fell a couple of inches. I got out a lot faster than I had gotten in and went off to go and read my book about whales.

I like having a good soak, so the following morning I took the side-panels off and had a look to see what had happened. It was because we had put a small bit of wood in the wrong place and the bath had settled. No probs.  

The next bath-night, a few evenings later, the water-supply abruptly ran out. The tank under the sitting room was empty (it might have been my fault: I think I left the garden-hose running).

The following time for bathies, it was the butano-bottle we had brought up from downstairs. Empty, Blast it!

Then, the taps wouldn't work at all, they'd filled up with cal. I had to unscrew them and soak them in vinegar. 

The plumber cuñado then dropped by one day and told me I shouldn't run it very hot as the plastic pipes he had put in would melt. I said, what's the point of a tepid bath? So, now I use a kettle to, as it were, top it up. 

But the duende, the spirit of old granny, still wasn't finished with me. Yesterday, the bath full and steaming, I lowered myself in with a merry splash, my bottom catching on my way down a full and opened bottle of shampoo, which had been balanced on the bit of wood next to the tub, which reaching the bath-water just before I did, found me then firmly sitting on it.

To say I enjoyed a soapy bubble bath last night would be an understatement.

Hot, Dry and Maybe Terminal

 With the recent heat wave and the ongoing drought, we are once again fearful of Climate Change – or, to be more exact, Global Warming.

The term “Climate Change” was coined by Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist, who advised the government of George W Bush in 2001 to emphasize a lack of scientific certainty around the Earth heating up and drop “Global Warming” for the less scary-sounding “Climate Change”.

One term sounds like a pleasant day on the beach, while the other makes one worry for our children’s future. But the climate isn’t changing – it’s heating, rapidly!

Now, readers in Galicia may take this with a pinch of salt, but here in southern Spain, we’ve just endured a few scorching summer days… at the end of April.

We read that ‘Unusually warm April temperatures engulfed the Iberian Peninsula last week, breaking numerous high-temperature records and setting a new (preliminary) European hottest April day on record (Cordoba Airport reached 38.7°C on April 27th)’.

Of course, it could just be another anomaly, like all the other ones we have experienced in recent years; but there seems to be a likelihood that this summer is going to be long, dry and brutally hot.

"This is not normal. Temperatures are completely out of control this year," Cayetano Torres, a spokesman for Spain's meteorological office, told BBC News, (which prefers to stick to the safer ‘climate change’ terminology). The article also notes the concern over the likelihood of an increase in forest fires here in Spain this season. Last year, a record 310,000 hectares of woodland burned in Spain.

Not that we all believe this stuff. Wiki says that a whopping four out of 69,406 peer-reviewed articles on the subject of global warming published in scientific circles during 2013 and 2014 were from ‘negacionistas’, however ‘The campaign to undermine public confidence in climate science has been described as a "denial machine" organized by industrial, political and ideological interests, and supported by conservative media outlets and sceptical bloggers to fabricate uncertainty about global warming’.

One eccentric American site we found says that ‘nearly four people in every 10 believe climate change is mainly due to natural causes’, which translates as ‘it ain’t our fault, so why cut back on our contaminating industries?’.

Following from the Doñana debacle, a leading Spanish paper asks – is the Partido Popular a climate change denier? Pedro Sánchez evidently believes so.

Some denialists have taken to blaming the meteorologists for the high temperatures this past week – with the AEMET official weather forecasters complaining of endless harassment ("asesinos", "miserables", "os estamos vigilando") from Twitter-feeders and others.

Anyway, it’s now early May, with the summer set to begin on June 21st, to last until… Maybe we should have bought a vacation home in the north-west of Spain after all… 

There's Not Much Racism in Spain

 

It always seems to me rather a waste of time being a racist when you live in somebody else's country than your own. If you don't like foreigners (for reasons which you no doubt hold dear but which I find repugnant) then the first thing to do is not go and live somewhere abroad. You may find that your own country is overrun by people who look or speak 'funny' and you should feel free to write letters to your favourite newspaper or join your local equivalent of the KKK and make a fool of yourself every other Friday. But you should definitely re-consider moving to another country.

See, as even Leapy Lee could tell you (from his home in Mallorca), it'll be full of foreigners.

I once asked a British friend over a beer if there were many foreigners living in his street on the playa - 'Oh no', he answered, 'they're all English'. He's lived here about twenty five years and doesn't speak a word of Spanish. He nevertheless has quite a high opinion of his hosts, as long as they leave him alone. 'It's their country', he concedes.

Just not their street.

There's no reason to be a second-class citizen here, which many Britons tend towards, with their 'I'm just a guest here' and so on; but it is equally absurd to get ah, uppity, about being somehow superior. Waste of time when you're living in Spain. Innit?

Of course it's hard to blend in. I'm tall, blond, red-faced and however good my Spanish might be, I'm obviously a foreigner who must, it follows, only speak foreign. Not that it matters much, I suppose. It could be worse. So anyway, a girl who is staying with my daughter in Madrid goes out for a coffee and comes across some troll who has a swastika tattooed on his neck and 'orgullo blanco' - white pride - thumped in on his bald head.

Oh dear, a lunatic. Now, the girl is Spanish, but she's black. So this idiot starts in on her with insults. She is soon surrounded by a passing gang of South Americans who take her side. Some more Nazis drift into the bar...

Followed by the police.

My mum's cousin - he was also my godfather - was a leading member of the British National Front: our version of the Frente Nacional - and he once told my dad that the extreme right prefers its members to come from the poor and the uneducated. While there must no doubt be intelligent racists here and there, it appears that they are not welcome in the party. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French version, says the same thing: 'bring me les petits Français', she says, 'the ones whose jobs are under threat from the immigrants'.

Spain has its Nazis like anywhere else, now congealed into the Vox Party and running around 15%, which includes those who remember the good old days with the Generalísimo - Francisco Franco. In October 2019, and much to their indignant rage, the Government finally removed his remains from that dreadful site outside Madrid known as the Valley of the Fallen.

Spain today, where there are well over four million 'inmigrantes', plus a large number of foreign residents (me and my pals there on the costa) is surprisingly affable towards its foreigners - at least the red-faced blond ones. There may be a sort of institutional racism regarding the guiris, who are rarely employed in any white-collar capacity; but we manage, we manage.

Just don't try and homologar your papers here, the Spanish will move mountains to fuck you. It's the breaks.

I think, if anything, they ignore us. We are not tourists (here for the two weeks and some industrial strength alka-seltzer), but we do practice 'turismo residencial', the Spanish name for what we call the expats. If we were all wiped out by a selective virus, I doubt there would be any sign of our passage here a year later.

The Spanish generally reserve their dislike for the Jews (for some odd reason), the Freemasons and the Gypsies. While Gypsies have been in Spain since the sixteenth century, they are still thought badly of, and beside producing Flamenco and working with horses, they certainly aren't featured much in the snootier magazines.

It's odd though, since you shouldn't really be a racist, it seems to me, if you live in another country; and if you only got to know your new neighbours then you would perhaps be pleasantly surprised, but we Britons haven't quite caught the message yet. There's the language of course, and the culture. Maybe the giblets as well.

I sometimes ask people who have just returned from a visit to England as to how it's getting on over there. The first or second criticism will always be something to do with the asylum seekers, the Muslims, the Poles, the foreigners... Which, I imagine, explains Brexit, and indeed my embarrassing godfather.

So, if you are thinking of living here, do come. The Spanish will treat you well, although they will probably never come to your bar or your shop, or hire you to work for them. That's the breaks.

I’ve been Dubbed, Subtitled and Translated into Sign-language

 

It seems that we can blame that old sod Franco for the size of the Spanish dubbing industry. Where other countries tamely put subtitles on their cinema or television screens, the Spanish are much more partial to James Dean’s mouth making a ‘hi’ movement as a strange and gravely Madrid-accented voice says ‘hola, ¿que tal?’

 

There are those who are surprised to discover how their favourite star really sounded - think of Humphrey Bogart or Homer Simpson.

 

Sometimes, they don’t even remove the original soundtrack – just turn it down with the Spanish version bellowed out on top. There’s David Attenborough telling us about snakes in his whispery voice – which at least this viewer can – or at least could understand – if it wasn’t for the same bloke from Madrid thundering out something about serpientes venenosas rendering the whole thing impossible to understand in any language.

 

Franco didn’t approve of foreign languages – Basque and Catalonian of course – but anything else either. They might be saying something untoward, immoral or revolutionary. So he banned them. No one was to speak anything but Spanish – including the nation’s deaf, who were not allowed to use sign-language (and even today they sign in a rather furtive sort of way, as if they are still on the look out for a Guardia Civil).

 

So, forget subtitles, everything imported had to be dubbed. Except, come to think of it, pop music. It would have been a stretch having our friend from Madrid crooning ‘she loves yer ya ya ya’ in castellano over the Beatles. I can’t see many people buying the record either.

 

Anyway, in some cases, films were translated away from their original meaning – if immoral or faintly subversive – and represented in a more acceptable light. ‘She’s my girlfriend’, for example, might safely become ‘she’s my fiancée’. Of course, if the film strayed to far from the Catholic Church’s view of morality, or the Government’s view of political propriety, it would never be shown here anyway. Which is why everyone had to drive up to Perpignan to see Marlon Brando’s ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and why, between the death of Franco and the arrival of the Internet, they sold porn films by the lorry-load out of the Spanish gas stations.

 

Dubbed porn films, if you can imagine such a thing.

 

Televisions now have this special button for those who wish to see something in its ‘versión original’. Press it and – whoops – up’ll come the show in all its glory. My Spanish step-son, who is learning English and is fond of Bob Esponja, inexplicably refuses to avail himself of this useful service of switching him into SpongeBob SquarePants. Perhaps he doesn't want me to get the joke.

 

Of course, humour don't always translate, which makes watching Friends or Frasier a bit hit or miss when enjoying the Spanish version. And anyway, Niles was funny because of his voice!

 

The dubbers, there must be a small coterie of them working out of a cellar underneath a multiplex in Madrid, are usually unknown - until one of them ups and dies. Then the media will tell us that Paco Orbera was the beloved voice of Errol Flynn, Fred Flintstone, The fellow with the big chin in Gunsmoke and Bruce Willis.

In the City, there will be a few cinemas that show films in ‘V.O.’ with subtitles, usually lowbrow romantic comedies. They do well with the American students.

Now, for all I go on about the desecration of Die Hard ('Jungla de Cristal' for some reason) by the dubbers - who I think must have some kind of cast-iron contract - at least the Continentals are prepared to look at foreign cinema, as well as their own (and the Spanish make quite respectable movies). In Britain, we think that everything good, if not ours, comes from Hollywood. When was the last time you saw a French film, an Italian TV show or a Spanish documentary? Bloody Americans – if there’s a decent European film out there, they’ll churn out a re-make (gotta have that Tom Cruise as the Good German who wants to murder Hitler).

 

In Greece or Portugal or Denmark or Poland (well, I’m guessing about Poland to be frank), you’ll sit down with the local version of popcorn and watch the movie in its original language, the subtitles wobbling there at the bottom of the screen and – in the Mediterranean cinemas at least – with the entire audience talking at once. It's just Spain that's being contrary over this.

 

I suppose dubbing can be useful. The first thing I learnt in Spanish was ‘Hands up’, which I have to admit that I’ve still yet to use in my private capacity. A German friend once told me that he’d learnt English from listening to pop music. Apart from coming out with some odd expressions occasionally ‘(‘Baby, light my fire’, ‘you’re my Rockafella’ and so on), he managed a certain fluency without, apparently, an undue amount of effort. Perhaps some of my readers might want to follow his example and start practicing singing along to Miguel Ríos or Camilo Sesto (If I were you, I’d save the Flamenco until a bit later).

 

And thus the dubbing industry, started and encouraged by Franco, had, by the time of his death, become so powerful (in a relatively small field) that it has managed to continue on into modern times.

 

One rare occasion when subtitles are used outside of entertainment is when a Catalonian politician holds forth on the TV, and his pronuncios are posted below: usually too briefly to be read. Curiously though, when a Catalonian politician wants to appeal to the larger public about something other than politics, why, he’ll address us in Spanish. This does not happen in the Basque County, however, where all declarations, political or otherwise, are made in Spanish.

 

Perhaps they don’t have a good subtitling service there…

The Village Vote

 

Insults and discovery on the one side, triumphs and cat-calls on the other – it must be getting close to election-time.

Those few of us foreign residents who either have the vote or will be voting in the municipal elections to come on May 28th will be doing so in our town of empadronamiento, which, in most cases, will be a smaller conurbation, perhaps somewhere between a thousand and fifty thousand in size.

We may even know the candidates for mayor (and most probably, some folk from their party-list).

The regional elections fall (in many cases) on the same date. If you follow your local TV, you will see the candidates often enough – at least the one for the party that controls that particular autonomía. Of course, no foreigners are able to vote in these elections, making them for us as hechos de otra pasta – a different kettle of fish.

We return to the local ones.

The party candidates will soon have the list of voters (of course, the mayor has it already) and they will be looking for support. Normally, one votes along family lines, which is simple and obvious enough, and one might be considered locally ‘to have so many votes’ under his roof. There may even be rewards: a job for Junior in the town hall, or at the very least, a post in the gardening squad. 

Sometimes, those who have long moved away to the City will keep their name on the padrón, and thus will vote locally, inevitably for family. We foreign residents with the right to vote (that’s to say, EU citizens and some Brits and Norwegians who have claimed their emancipation) are a bit more tricky as we may not be familiar with the candidates and their little foibles, and might lean towards voting along party lines. Perhaps it’s worth putting one of us guiris on the list, safely towards the bottom, to keep us all in step.

Those lists – a candidature is a party list with thirteen or fifteen or more putative councillors on it – will either be (vaguely) representative of a national party or they could be a local effort: ‘Keep Villa de la Sierra Flat’ or some such thing. The parties with the national support will be handing out free lighters and pens, but may on occasion be obliged to march to the tune called out in Madrid. 

The local ones may be short on the complimentary tee-shirts, but will have more freedom in their message. The results are important for the parties with their headquarters in the Spanish capital. With enough town halls in a given province, the diputación (viz. the provincial council), falls under their control.

The budgets will have been passed for the year, but since no one in the ayuntamiento can be completely sure what will happen this time, there may be a good argument for spending the whole year’s worth of funding before then, which also has the advantage of seducing a few on-the-fence voters as the council fills in the potholes, erects some more street-lights and plants a tree or two.

It’s a murky world, local politics.

I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside

 

The weather is just perfect for an early-year swim in the sea. Perhaps if I didn’t live here I would take up my own kind offer and jump off a handy rock and splash about for a bit before staggering out for a refreshing glass of tinto de verano, easy on the ice. However, since I do live here, I tend to forgo the splashy stuff and get straight in to the bar for my order. I mean, it’s still too cold for us thin-blooded locals, and anyway, come to think of it, I haven’t swum in the sea besides a couple of ill-considered visits after an extended lunch for about twenty years.

I may have developed a very slight case of hydrophobia, the fear of water, which is apparently a side effect of rabies. As far as I know, no other signs of this dreadful plague are in evidence on my person and I wonder if it might just be a minor and slow-moving dose that I could have picked up that time I was savaged by a bad-tempered vole which I was attempting to attach to a hanky prior to parachuting the rodent from the roof of the family home while I was still of a tender age. Still, sixty years on and I’m still going strong, no twitches or obvious widow’s peak, although I do like to keep the windows open during the full moon just in case.

The sea is protected by Costas, a selfless organisation that makes sure that the primal brine isn’t sullied by anything beyond an occasional bather while the pristine sands of the coast are free from skyscrapers, dog messes, barns, garages, piers (a huge no-no) and, above all, any suggestion of permanence from those temporary ‘dismountable’ buildings which we call ‘beach bars’. Anything really, much beyond a happy sprinkling of ‘Blue Flags’ which denote ‘excellence’ in the beach facilities, cleanliness, showers and wheelchair access together with no interference in Mother Nature’s soft and salty embrace. So protected is the sea these days, that I wonder exactly what the showers are for – are they like swimming-pool showers, where you are meant to wash yourself down before getting in so as to keep the sea-water clean?

Apparently, the Costas people have decreed that any tussocks of grass which grow on the sand, or any seaweed washed up onto the shore, can’t be removed by the local town halls (except after midnight when the ecologists are all tucked up asleep on their futons). In short, the sea and the beach belong to us all, are to be left au naturel, and we have free access and use for all its treasures, except of course when told differently.

The other day, I took the dog down to one of those ‘unimproved’ beaches along the coast a way. It's along a dusty track on a cliff above some undisturbed coves. No metal benches, beach bars, life savers, peculiar white-painted cabins – with the inevitable ‘Goofy was here’ graffiti: no football or beach-ball courts, no playpens, swings or broken whirly-things, no flags, dustbins, informative signs in three languages, showers, accordionists, tulip-vendors or public lavatories. Just a few of those colourful motor-caravans as favoured by the wealthy trekkers from the far north that the police are now talking about fining after three days camping outside of the ‘approved areas’. Peaceful. I even anticipated seeing a few dolphins near the shore nodding and squeaking at us. They’re asking for fish really.

My dog seemed to be happy enough with the lack of clutter on that particular beach and ran about chasing pebbles and bits of flying seaweed (oops!). I took my socks off.

Things went well until I began to drive home with the window up to stop the cloud of sand and dust thrown by the wheels. The car stank of warm and wet hound and the thunderhead of dust, it turned out, upset a group of hiking Germans dressed in old-fashioned shorts who were coming the other way, intent on invading the next-door beach. Boy, did I get an earful.

On reflection, I should have been carrying a Blue Flag.

Future Imperfect

 

‘So what do we want the future of our town to be like?’ I asked the founding members of the latest version of our chamber of commerce. ‘We can have tee-shirt shops and bus loads of tourists, fancy hotels and convoys of BMWs or lots of satisfied residents living in peace and tranquillity’.

Behind me, a champion of the tee-shirt school of thought got to his feet. ‘We need more tourists and we need to bring them in through aggressive advertising and promotion,’ he said. Paid for, no doubt, by thee and me.

The occasion was a meeting in a local hotel. We were about thirty, divided as always in ex-pat Spain by the twin curses of monolinguality and self-interest. The local people consider that the town is for their exclusive use and that the visitors here (even those who are third generation) have as few rights and opportunities as possible.

Our town is beautiful. Or so they maintain. In point of fact, it's a modest settlement with simple buildings planted in an astonishing setting. The pueblo is a white cubist village with narrow walking streets adorning the top of a hill overlooking the sea since the dawn of time. It had almost disappeared, falling into rubble and abandonment, by the mid to late fifties and only the arrival of artists, followed by settlers from elsewhere during the following decade, allowed the village to re-group, and those of its citizens who had moved away to France, Germany or beyond, to consider returning. At least to sell off a few plots.

So it began. The older kids had inherited the agricultural lands – land where the water was no longer arriving. Many of them had left for better opportunities elsewhere. The second-born got the worthless beach-land, where no one lived, no one fished and, of course, no one went.

Now, years later, the greed has set in. The village overlooks seventeen kilometres of beach, strung out beside a narrow and poorly planned road with no possibility of widening it and equally no chance of building a parallel road to relieve the increasing traffic density. The tourist hotels don’t really work in the town’s benefit as their visitors aren’t going to walk very far along the thin coastal strip, and because the hotels themselves, having been forced to make cut-throat offers, don’t want their customers to leave the premises. If they are going to drink, by Golly, they’ll do it in our establishment here (by the way, there's a party tonight!).

Bad news for our eight hundred bars and restaurants.

Since builders make better money off apartments than they do houses, our town has built an endless number of small, ugly and, by necessity, cramped apartments that are inevitably only employed during the season (la temporada). Our eight hundred bars and restaurants mentioned above are therefore beholden to the year-long residents who either live in the reduced number of houses that the town possesses or, if they are in those small apartments – usually paying quite ferociously high rents - they probably can’t afford to go out anyway.

The best return on one’s buck for the builders (and the corrupt officials who sign them off), being apartments, then the worst return is parking spaces, roads and gardens. As far as the first two go, there are never enough parking spaces, which mean that there are never enough places for the customers to leave their cars (I have to spell it out here), which in turn means that the eight hundred bars and restaurants (many of whom also pay a cripplingly high rent) don’t get enough customers. I usually drive up to the pueblo for dinner; drive around looking for a space without success… and then motor on inland to the next town.

I’m sorry amigos, I was hungry.

The narrow roads, which kink and higgle n’ piggle around the different borders and narrow pavements, are usually too tight for two cars to pass, or one to park. Nice planning from the tee-shirt shop philosophers who, unfortunately, have run the town hall for the past thirty years.

Teddy bears, humorous ashtrays, wobbly pots, rag throw-rugs and vulgar tee-shirts: Louche shops selling tourist-tat.

Where are the theatres and the noble buildings? Why haven’t the wealthiest (and, trust me, they’re wealthy!) local families donated as much as a wooden bench to their community in all these years?

I turned to the chap who wanted busloads of tourists – one can only imagine that his interest was in his three-storey emporium – and asked him if his new shop (his old one had tragically burnt down last summer) would be a fraction less ugly than its predecessor. ‘Oh’, he said, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to ask the architect’.

‘¡Ay Pobre Mojácar! La tratamos como una vieja puta. Todos queremos joderla mientras nadie quiere comprarla flores’: Poor Mojácar, we treat her like an old whore. All we wanna do is fuck her. No one wants to buy her flowers.

Here Come the Easter Bunnies

My favourite meme for La Semana Santa is the picture of some sunbathers in their swimming outfits somewhere on a Spanish beach and just beyond them, there’s a platoon of costaleros (float-bearers) bearing the heavy wooden base and statue of Jesus or sometimes a rather well-wrapped-up María as they trudge past on their way either to or from the iglesia. The sacred and the profane.

One should allow the faithful their pious week of devotion without unkind jokes, but as always these days, most of Easter Week is centred not around Jesus, but rather his opposite number, the Demon Lucre.

In the fancier cities (Seville being the obvious choice), the narrow balconies on some apartment buildings along the route where the processions pass are rented out by the afternoon to the prosperous for a veritable fortune, canapés and a bottle of wine included.

So sorry, there’s this rich group from Barcelona that have taken the balcony for the processions, maybe try us next year. Indeed, the tax people have already warned the apartment owners not to forget to declare their extra windfall.

Many places will have the streets full of visitors, frantically waving their mobile phones as the fellows in their cone-headed outfits (capirotes) march slowly past, to the sound of the municipal band playing the vaguely sacred music, or maybe there’s a gypsy singer performing a saeta. The larger processions will be sticking to the main avenues, where the 25€ seats are. OK, in Seville they cost rather more – anything between 70 and 160€. Apparently the cofradías (the guilds) share most of that between them, with a cut allotted for the people they have been obliged to hire to carry the saints (volunteers among the faithful being at an all-time low this season).

It’s a good time to dress up a bit. Maybe wear a shirt for once. Many of the women will be dressed with ruffles: and peinetas, fans in their hair.

This year there are more people than ever hoping to acquire a seat in the choicest area and ticket holders will soon be sat possessively upon them, upon a rented cushion.

Somebody is selling cold drinks and chucherías – assorted commercially-wrapped nibbles.

-’Scuse me, can you pass that down to the caballero?  

It’s the Easter school hols, with the kids out for a noisy week. Take ’em to the beach or the aqua-park, or maybe the parque de atracciones with the rides or the cowboys or the clowns. Wear them out, stick them in front of the telly and then go out for a decent evening meal.

Only, there’s a shortage of waiters to go around this year – it seems that we aren’t paying them enough and some places have even had to cut back on their tables.

The tourist departments have been busy posting adverts in all the media and are helping to fill the hotels to the brim. The regional government takes out a page every day in all the newspapers with institutional advertising (less of course the local foreign-language newspapers) to keep everybody on the message.

It’s the beginning of the season, and here in España, every tourist counts.  

Learning English

A local woman in the shop across from where I live put me down from the beginning as an Englishman. She's right, although I could be German or Swedish - as so many of us are. Anyway, English.

And to prove her point, she bursts out with her entire knowledge of the language in one remarkable salute when I heave up alongside.

Wotcher, she says.

I wonder where she picked up that particular greeting. Probably from a holiday visit to Torremolinos some time in the distant past. Or maybe she went to see a show at a music hall in the Old Kent Road.

Wotcher, orl the naybours cried,

ooh yer gonna meet Bill,

as yer walks the street Bill...

For those who need it, including perhaps my friend from over the way, there are a number of English-language schools in Almería ideal for brushing up one's idiom, including one with the odd name of 'The Mancunian Academy', which presumably teaches its students to speak the King's English with a flat Manchester twang.

A friend who hails from that city laughed when I told him about the school and said ... the poor things will all end up speaking Espancunian. Indeed!

A student I know in the Almería educational system is sixteen and he and his 120 classmates are currently using a book called 'The Skin I'm In' by a black American author called Sharon Flake. It's written in the vernacular: '...Then I had to fess up and tell her I forgot to do it. She asked Mr Pajolli if it's OK for me to use my office time to do my math homework. He said, yeah, but that I'd have to make up the time later. Teachers don't do nothing but cause you grief, I swear that's all they do.'

There used to be a Scotsman living in the nearby resort of Roquetas and who taught English. Can you imagine the sounds his more attentive students made? Another teacher I know comes from somewhere 'oop north'. I asked him precisely where a couple of times, but frankly, I couldn't understand what he said.

Over on the other side of the pond, as a Spanish journalist reporting on the USA tells us, more and more people over there are learning to speak Spanish.

Which, as I know from experience, they most certainly aren't.

First of all, it's not Spanish. As anyone can tell you, it's called 'Mexican' (Sorry amigos!) and secondly, no one wants to speak it much beyond 'andalay' which the American girls think means 'beat it'. Indeed they insist that all the Latins learn to speak English (or to be more precise, 'American'). The claim from the Spanish journalist is frankly about as likely as the British all suddenly deciding to learn to speak Urdu.

Back to teaching the Spanish to be able to communicate with us, so that they'll understand us when we want a full-English breakfast, just try and keep it simple.

Don't ask for kippers and remember that if they don't understand you, then shout!

My advice to the Spanish students is to watch movies on the TV in the original language, not dubbed into Spanish. There's a handy button on the remote. Read stuff in English - although maybe pass on Sharon Flake for the time being - stick to Agatha Christie, and even, I don't know, brave the Brit pub down on the Costa and ask for a pint.

But above all, try and shoot for good English. After all, if you are going to make the superhuman effort to learn a foreign language, you might as well get it right. A Spanish woman I once knew spoke fluent English which she had learned while living in the East-end of London. She came from a 'good family' too.

So here's the deal: Learn English from someone who speaks or writes it clearly, because the point is to be able to communicate to those English-speakers you will be meeting later on. Not all of them will speak it very well, so why not make it easy for them.

Are you wimme?

Good Food, Good Meat. Why Wait? Let's Eat!

I had two lunches yesterday. The first was an invitation to visit and eat with an Elderly British couple. We had fried turkey breast and a glass of white wine. Followed by an ice-cream on a stick. We talked about the weather (it's been a mixture of sunny and wet days this week).

I then made my excuses and drove along the beach to a restaurant which is opening soon for the season. It was a Spanish friend's birthday and an enormous table for thirty or more had been laid. People came and went as more and more platters arrived from the kitchen. I was sat next to two local people I knew slightly, with a Danish couple seated opposite.

I discovered that the Danes had recently bought a house in the pueblo. I was going to trnslate something for them but discovered that they both spoke fluent Spanish. 'Oh, we learned it when we decided to move here', they said.

How very un-British of them, I thought.

My neighbour passed me endless pieces of meat, sausage, morcilla, alioli and salad. The man on my other side was more concerned about my glass. I had at least three drinks in front of me at one point (although, looking at the picture now, I seem to have been the only one). Pedro was running around telling everyone to eat and drink more, as his sister looked on approvingly. A cousin invited me to go hang-gliding over Easter and a young woman asked me about journalism, as she was studying both this and the English language, and was soon to leave for Malta.

The Spanish, of course, know how to eat and enjoy themselves.

I skipped dinner, by the way.

There's a thread on Facebook with British residents discussing local Mojácar restaurants, which is the best of them and so on. Very positive. There must be a hundred places, with local and foreign cuisine: Spanish, Basque, Madrileño, French, Brazilian, German, Greek, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Indian, American, Italian, English, Irish and Argentinian.

The choices for best place, though, and seen through British eyes, seem odd. The cheapest and worst are mentioned regularly with enormous enthusiasm, while some will only eat in those family-owned place with ridiculously large menus. Menus where one has to take out one's specs ('glafas' as a bilingual friend calls them) and read with a glass of wine to hand.

Me, uh, I'll have what he's having.

Eating out should be a leisurely mixture of good food, good wine, good company and good service. You are paying for some entertainment and some theatre.

Skimp on these and - if it wasn't for the washing up - you might as well have stayed home.