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.

Under Plastic

 I live in an area surrounded by greenhouses.

Plastic ones.

In Almería, and perhaps only counting those invernaderos which cover the dry earth from El Ejido and Dalías east towards Almería City and La Cañada, there are said to be 36,000 hectares of crops growing under plastic. There are more west towards Adra, with the provincial frontier with a small bit of coastal Granada, and on the northern side of Almería; more still around the curiously-named town of Campohermoso (plastic farms are most certainly not hermosos - that's to say: beautiful) located in the campo de Níjar and, back on the coast, as close as they can manage to install them around the attractive natural park of the Cabo de Gata.

An article in the Spanish press calls Almería 'the Orchard of Europe'. It may be thinking more of the olive trees out towards Tabernas and Sorbas, or maybe the lemon tree I've got planted in my garden (you can see it from the street), but our main contribution to the supermarkets of Europe (and even those of the UK when Almería isn't heavily snowed in - at least according to the Daily Express), are the plastic farms, where we grow tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and melons (and, er, marijuana too). 

The number of hectares under plastic in the province hasn't changed in twenty years, which seems unlikely, since new ones are always going up, but there you go. 

View from somewhere above El Ejido taken last week

 

The plastic farms are raised on land which is pretty infertile: blasted by the sun and bone-dry. Back in 1960 (lots of photos here), someone figured out that covering the plot with plastic and bringing in the water - generally from underground aquifers, would encourage the plants to grow faster and stronger. It gets very hot inside the invernaderos, and frankly a bit hard to breathe on the days that one sprays with weed-killer or pesticide, but the profits are good, and the workers don't seem to have anything much to say about the conditions. 

This is because most of them are either 'undocumented' or registered as migrant workers. Many live in wretched conditions (El Walili, a long-term bidonville in Nijar, was abruptly torched and bulldozed flat recently. It had some 500 residents who were obliged to scatter). Around 98% of the workers in these farms are foreigners says the local union, a number somewhere between forty and fifty thousand, and of course they don't have many rights, and certainly not The Vote (needless to say, the racist Vox party does well in the agricultural sector). A further 30,000 (generally Spanish or at least European), work in the packaging plants or as truckers hauling the produce north. 

An article in Público runs details about the labour inspections in the invernaderos and the difficulties of the inspectors in finding who, where and what. According to this, in the last five years, some 11,000 workers have been found to be improperly employed, and the inspectors have handed down around fourteen million euros in fines. Agrodiario on the other hand says that the field-workers are all legal and well paid.

The plastic eventually perishes, and is either lovingly collected and sent to a proper recycling plant, or more likely, discarded in one way or another. An article on Google claims that around 80% of all used plastic ends up either as landfill or simply junked, and another 12% is burned (often in 'accidental' fires). An article at Wiki claims that around 30,000 tons of plastic waste is produced annually. On the bright side, a study by the University of Almería claims that the giant immensity of the plastic actually reduces global warmth - at least locally - by reflecting the sun's heat back into space. 

One of the smaller support industries belongs to the bee-breeders. They produce small hives of a few dozen bumble-bees which are then installed within the plastic farms and employed to fertilize the plants. I sometimes find a stray one coming to inspect my lemon tree (they sting like the very devil).

Almería was always a poor and forgotten part of Spain. Now, with its gigantic industry of plastic farms, producing in 2022 a massive 2,787 million euros in sales, it's certainly odd that Vícar and Níjar are the two poorest municipalities in the entire country.

Paperwork

 

We have all laughed, or shuddered anyway, at the mention of Spanish paperwork. What happens is that a veritable legion of functionaries (now, there's a word) spend their entire adult lives - it's a protected job in Spain - filling out forms.

The forms will be in triplicate, need additional supporting documents (which, in turn, will need other bits of paper) and so on.

We used to have to drive into The City, now and again, to hand in, collect, or refile various formularios for sundry purposes. I remember that one would often need a poliza, a twenty-five peseta stamp, to add to the document. These useful and decorative items would be sold in an estanco, a cigarette shop. The nearest one to the Government office invariably being half a mile away. A bit like - and maybe you have noticed - the nearest pharmacy to the hospital or medical centre is invariably located on the other side of town.

Anyway, walking calms the soul (or maybe the sole: I shall have to look it up).

My father-in-law used to be pleased if he got one or more of his three bits of paper stamped or archived as appropriate on his rare trips to Officialdom. He claimed that it brought an interesting sense of drama to his otherwise quiet existence.

We often used - and indeed we still do - the services of a gestoría, an office whose single purpose is to help you get through the various jumps which an immense army of bureaucrats must create to justify their existence. For a modest sum, the gestor will sort you out splendidly - and may, if he has other business to take care of, even accompany you to see the pen-pusher in question.

They all know each other, naturally enough - 'Hola Paco, I've got another one here, he says he wants to import a fire engine'. 'You'll need to fill out this form, and that one and bring along those two from industria, and a P834 from the police. How's your uncle doing, has he had his gall-bladder removed yet?'

You can see why you need a gestor. Buy him a drink afterwards.

Getting a residencia in the old and dark days of the Late Sixties would often revolve around a small gratuity to the nice policeman at the jefatura. I remember being deeply impressed as our gestor swept around the cop's desk and deposited a plastic bag containing a carton of Marlboro and a bottle of Johnny Walker next to the officer's lower extremities.

Everything went smoothly after that.

But, as legions of people pass in front of the armies of bureaucrats, the paperwork begins to mount up. Not just the shelves and the cupboards but the tables and chairs and even the floor are eventually full of piled up documents, and archives, and cardboard folders crammed with photocopies, and binders with abandoned forms and memos, and packets with double-spaced applications and folios in triplicate, bristling with staples and paper clips and Post-its and perhaps even some sealing wax...

and as Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout eventually discovered...

The garbage rolled on down the hall,
It raised the roof, it broke the wall...

When such a moment arrives, the chief pen-pusher will call upstairs to the junior political appointee, impatient to be noticed and moved to higher office, perhaps in the motor division, and inform him of the problem. Maybe fill out a few forms just for the appearence of the thing.

It is now that we meet a new department, the Junta de Expurgo. Their job is haul all the paperwork away, under supervision from a magistrate since it could be sensitive - this is when they might find that empty carton of Marlboro for instance - and to go through it in search of those treasures which must be saved for future researchers as patrimonio histórico.  The rest of it is then destroyed in a special oven along with those inflamable things confiscated by the cops such as - well, perhaps it's better not to ask.

And then, the whole wonderful process begins anew.

Gentlemen

While Spain has made leaps and bounds in almost every sphere, public lavatories still need some way to go. We may no longer be in the field of the early travel guide which recommended in the brief section under 'Conveniences' to 'where possible, best start your own', but there are still a few problems that need ironing out.

Being a fastidious and modern country, ruled by all sorts of obscure interests - often of a commercial leaning - we must now expect wheelchair-accessible toilets, even if the building in question has a stairway to get to it. Perhaps, you see, you broke your leg after you gained the bar.

Probably tripped over the step.

Some lavvies don't have a seat, for a reason which I shall shortly be examining, and customers, certain customers, may no doubt be obliged to fastidiously hover over the pan. Which is hard on the thigh muscles. At least these thrones will flush in an orderly way as a rule.

Many years ago, my mother pulled the chain of a local dunny and the whole tank fell off the wall and on to her head. The rest of us standing around the bar were left speechless as she returned, drenched, from the servicio. I believe I learned several words I hadn't come across until then. 

Worse still, there are those latrines that don't rinse, and haven't for some time. The lever has disappeared, or maybe it rusted. You probably won't find them in your local bar, but if you find yourself caught short in the wrong neighbourhood, you'll see that, O Lordy, they exist.

One horrid sort of privy is the old-fashioned squatter, which is a kind of perforated porcelain base with two raised bits for your feet, pointing either one way or indeed the other according to the nature of one's purpose.

On the bright side, the days of being invited to put the used paper in a handy nearby basket have more or less passed.

Pissoirs, those elegant against the wall systems, are odd. They are often fixed to the wall in an elevated position, too high for the shorter gentleman. Oddly, in the USA, this tendency is reversed, with the urinal apparently installed for those of a smaller stature. Our local hotel favours these plumbing fixtures in a basement setting, which is fine, only the automatic light tends to go out after a brief time, which can be annoying if one is day-dreaming.

New Spanish bogs have lower and close-to-the-porcelain tanks, so a collapsing reservoir rarely happens anymore, even if the flow in the modern variant is somewhat reduced. They have a small and large flush to save water. Which may explain why customers sometimes feel that their brief visit to the WC is rather second-hand.

Indeed, I once stayed in a very smart hotel in Melilla and, on removing the wrapper on the crapper and lifting the lid, found a large turd in the bowl.

They had a chocolate on the pillow, too.

Talking of low tanks, many modern privies have a pan so close to the flusher than the seat won't stay vertical for the discerning gentlemen. It's hard and unnatural to try and hold the seat up while taking a whizz, so the usual thing is to not bother, and merely piss all over the commode, seat included. Using one foot to hold it up doesn't work either unless you have a good sense of balance and, besides, are seriously well-endowed.

'Yes, I've finished, go ahead' you mutter to the next person as you make your escape.

Maybe as many as a quarter of all public johns have this unfortunate design-flaw, at least around where I live.

One small step better, other thrones have a seat which appears to be steady when lifted to the vertical, but will suddenly fall from the position with a mighty crash. If that doesn't make you jerk mid-stream, nothing will.

It's all because the tank is to close to the khazi, for goodness sake. I can't imagine who designs these things, the potty company or the installers.

It's as if the Nation's fontaneros all sit down to pee - or maybe they have a secret code of humour... 

But Hush!, the Secretary has just informed the President of the Worshipful Guild of Plumbers that he may rise at his convenience and deliver his speech to the congegration. Apart for his tendency to tell fart jokes, one can be sure how he will begin:

'Ladies and Gents...'

 

Franco Remains Dead (Despite What We Hear)

 

 I was a handsome young fellow in those days, un señorito if I say so myself. I was living in Mojácar in a society of older and generally rather drunken Europeans and a sprinkling of Spaniards who treated us, in those days, with a mixture of gratitude and respect, as we learned a few words of Spanish, built unimaginably large houses and drove astonishing cars (usually with the steering wheel in a novel place on the dashboard) and sometimes bought them a drink in the bar in the village square - the Hotel Indalo run by Antonio. Toma una copa conmigo, my dad would say.

Some of those cars would fall off the cliff as we drove home, sometimes with tragic results, but we were left alone by the police - we were bringing wealth to the village and it was sorely needed. Jacinto, the old mayor, his job awarded to him by the provincial governor, was careful to see that we were happy and that no one watered down the gin.

They were idylic times.

Franco, we said, if the subject came up, he's a good old thing - keeps the place safe. And it was true enough. The Guardia Civil were feared and when it came to it they were, let's say, suitably 'trigger happy'. Things were quiet enough in our small, forgotten, ignored and peaceful corner of a province that, during the Civil War, had been fiercely supportive of the Republicans. Every village had its stories of murder and executions: it had been a terrible time, now carefully put to the side and forgotten.

The Swedes up in Jávea went rather further than we did, organising one day a big (and approved) rally in the bull-ring, with home-made banners reading 'Arriba España' and 'Up Franco' (they meant well). But we were quiet enough - never talk about politics or religion was our motto. Antonio, un brandy por favor.

Then came word that the Old Boy was failing. He was put on life support in the Ruber Clinic in Madrid and lay in and out of a coma for several weeks as the world anxiously sucked its teeth and wondered what would happen next. The once and future king Juan Carlos was waiting with the rest of us.

Saturday Night Live in New York famously began its regular news-segment with the story that 'The Caudillo of Spain, Francisco Franco, is still dead'.

It's said that the crowds oputside the clinic would enthusiasticaly shout 'Adiós, adiós' and that the stricken dictator would ask a fawning courtier, 'what are they saying?' 'Goodbye, goodbye', said the lackey. 'Why, where are they all going?'

And then, finally, he went. On November 20th 1975, the Generalísimo breathed his last and Spain went into heavy mourning. Everything was closed down and quiet.

The small group of emigrés that lived in and around Mojácar naturally felt sorry for their kind hosts and thought that the best thing to do would be to show up at the iglesia for the mass to celebrate the soul of the murderous old sod. We trooped in to the church, dressed in shirts and ties (those of us who owned such things) and were faintly surprised to see that, apart from a couple of old girls dressed in that kind of black you don't normally see these days, and a startled-looking priest, there was nobody at all. The cura gamely got on with his pater nosters and we stood or sat, as required, while trying to look as sorrowful as we could. What will they do without the old swine? we wondered.

At last the service creaked to an end. We passed through the door of the church into the somber evening outside, where a large and evidently indignant group of Mojaquero males were waiting for us. A threanening pause. Then Alcalde Jacinto suddenly broke the hostile silence with exactly the best thing to say:

'Antonio, go and open up the bar, the extranjeros are thirsty'. With a groan of relief, we all scampered off around the corner to the Hotel Indalo for a welcome libation.
...
I found the newspaper featured at the top of this story while cleaning out a box of junk this morning.

Mojácar, 2073

 Archaeologists have begun work on a new dig to discover precisely what lies under the town of Disneyville in southern Spain.

It is known that the settlement under the garish collection of today's souvenir stands and disco-pubs was once called Mojácar, but there is little left to guide the investigators into an idea of life in the town in the Twentieth Century.

Beginning at the foot of the hill, volunteers from the Granada School of Archaeology have been working diligently with spades, brushes and blue plastic buckets to unearth the secrets of the town that once existed here.

They now know that the 'Moorish Fountain' was built over the remains of the earlier 'Public Fountain', with a bounty of white marble in what was known at the time as the 'Bathroom China' style of reconversion. The fountain's earlier purpose of washing clothes, refreshing the livestock and providing drinking water (this in the halcyon times before the nuclear desalination plant) was largely sublimated in favour of a photographic concept, designed to seduce the weary visitors, with the erection of a peculiar and most ill-thought municipal art gallery and some other attractions of dubious historical value nearby. By the turn of the century, the area had become the centre of Mojaquero culture, with seven bars and a number of jolly festivals, usually including the ancient sport of delivering something pointy to a gaily coloured and beribboned hole from horseback (an early version of wham, bam and thank you Ma'am).

We drive up the hill on the Avenida Encamp (named after a town in Andorra famous for its foreign bank accounts) and past the venerable Hotel Moresco, which is one of the rare buildings that has survived the many changes to the settlement over the centuries. Originally built by the Phoenicians, the hotel has remained closed to the public now for over 65 years, glaring remorselessly at the passers-by from its location on the bluff. The owners are said to owe more money in taxes than the value of the building, while having remarkable connections in Madrid. So, an impasse.

Visitors would find it hard to imagine that, at one time, Disneyville was once thought to be an attractive residential village, with a small number of amusing bars, an elegant theatre, an open-air cinema, several romantic arches (including the Arco de Luciana), a single town hall building and sundry other wonders now lost. The surrounds of the old castle that crowns the hill was heavily reconverted in the late 20th Century, with the discovery of an ancient burial ground bulldozed quickly over, and is now the home to a worldwide association of graffiti artists. Another area used as an ancient cemetery was the Plaza de Parterre, rebuilt in an amazing mixture of styles, including Roman, Moorish and Neo-vulgarian. Above, archaeologists have located a strange plaza with what appears to be a tiny underground garage (evidently accessible only to those with impeccable connections who may have been allowed to drive through the pedestrian streets of the village before the introduction of personal fliers and other modern forms of transportation).

But, after all is done, the characterless buildings excavated to find the cultura popular underneath, we must move to the Plaza Nueva, so called, despite being erected in the early 16th Century. At the time, settlers, given land in nearby Turre by Royal Decree, could not stay overnight in that region, thanks to the irate mozarabes who dwelt in the hills above, so they would live in and around the main square of Moxacra - as the town was called by the departed Moors.

A few centuries later, now with a road of access built in the mid 1950s (the Generalísimo, later Avenida Horizon and now Av Encamp), the square became the main point of the village. A small hotel called the Hotel Indalo dominated the plaza (archaeologists have found traces of it under the remains of at least fifteen different nick nack shops) and diagonally across the square, the largest of all the emporia stands, three stories of tat. Previously, a modest carpentry evidently occupied the same space,  connected with attractive arches to the narrow street to the left and the wider pedestrian avenue towards the church on the right.

But, it's the viewpoint we focus our attention on: This was a three-storey car-park built by a mayor in the early eighties, with vertiginous ramps for the vehicles. The building was in one way a failure, but it was later used for some small purposes underneath, and a mayor purpose above, where its large marble roof became a perfect place for a number of competing cafeterias to fill with their brightly-coloured tables and dustbins. The viewpoint was an immediate success (substituting, as it did, the previous exactly-the-same view).

In 2016, the construction was demolished and another viewpoint was created to crown a fresh - albeit never completed town hall (paperwork and jobs, then as now, was a lively consideration of the local inhabitants). The view is marred somewhat by an earlier wave of archeologists, who disembowled the famous 'piramid mountain' in front, known in previous times as Mojácar la Vieja, which was later found to be empty.

The narrow streets of the earlier town were, generally speaking, preserved (except near the church, now a souvenir shop selling Chinese-made material, including small busts of one Walter B Disney, said to have been born here in the late 1890s). Some streets had been introduced, as it were 'from scratch', in the 1950s and evidence of earlier lanes, running in different directions, give an early example to the sometimes ingenious local planning. The earlier 'popular architecture' was replaced in the second half of the 20th Century by uninspired 'off the shelf' designs with untypical large windows, later used inevitably as shop-fronts.

One narrow alley gives evidence to a brief presence of a large number of pre-Brexit British settlers in Disneyville: a street which for around thirty years was called Calle Pedro Barato, named after an ex-pat scallywag who was known as 'Cheap Pete' by a grateful if poorly-informed mayor. The name of the street was quietly changed  in the early years of the current century to Calle Cal.

Disneyville hides many interesting anecdotes under the streets and rubble and is well worth a visit.

Planning a Trip

The editor calls in a junior staffer, probably after a late lunch involving shrimp, and says, I want a story by tonight on three of Spain’s finest and least-known villages. Over the road, another editor, this time belching gently after a few too many glasses of beer, is telling his wife (the one who does most of the work) to get out there and find a few interesting destinations along the Costa Blanca, with some decent stock photos.

Maybe tie it in with an advertiser or two.

Another one, thinking of its expat readers, finds its latest copyist a job to do: tell us of the least-known Spanish cities and their manifest attractions. We find out that there are but three: Badajoz, Soria and Ceuta. They are, nevertheless, ‘some of Spain's most exquisite hidden gems’. The story merits a brief paragraph on each.

My own adopted town, Mojácar, has enjoyed thousands of pages of copy over Christmas as an Italian chocolate company decided to stump up for the Christmas lights (including its name charmingly blazed across the highest building in the town square). The mayoress is so pleased by the onslaught of visitors (all eyeing with trepidation the fifty or more souvenir shops waiting anxiously for their trade) that she has extended the illumination until, at the very least, the end of January. Unfortunately, the destination’s tour hotels weren’t in on the plot, so they are all seasonally (and firmly) closed.

Meanwhile, the agency that runs ‘Spain’s most beautiful pueblos’ has chalked up another six for 2023, including Trevélez in Granada (a touristy Alpujarran village with good trout and jamón).

Looking for a beautiful village to visit? Trusty old Google throws in its hat with over six million results, including: ‘15 of the most beautiful villages in Spain’ at The Points Guy; ‘The Most Beautiful Towns in Spain’ with Culture Trip; ‘18 Beautiful Towns In Spain To Visit’ from the obscure Hand Luggage Only and from someone we have at least heard of: ‘Spain’s 30 most beautiful villages, as voted for by readers of El País in English’. Nice pictures. Mojácar comes in at Nº27, even though, I think, it's more dramatic than beautiful.

Of course, one always wonders about readers’ votes…

So, as we fill the car once again, only to discover that the twenty per cent gasoline-discount has disappeared, and open the map to our chosen destination for the day, we hope (forlornly?) that it won’t be too full of coaches, tourists and screaming children, and that there will be a parking space somewhere near the restaurant that Tripadvisor enthuses so strongly about.

Spain has something over eight thousand municipalities, and some of them can count on a handful of nice villages all within the same parish. Níjar in Almería - for example - can boast the attractions of the Cabo de Gata, San José, la Isleta del Moro, Agua Amarga, Las Negras, Fernán Pérez, Pozo de los Frailes, Rodalquilar and even Níjar itself (plus another sixteen rather more humdrum settlements besides).

So, between one thing and another, getting out those travel stories are a full job for an editor.

Ask, And You Shall Receive (Maybe)

This one starts with a conversation on Facebook. Somebody posted a question along the lines of: ‘I’ve had it with the UK and I want to move to Spain, is it easy to find a job?’

Us old hands living in Spain for long, longer or longest were happy to post answers to this. Here’s mine:

‘The Spanish won't employ you over their own, or hire you over their own. That's assuming perfect language skills and all papers in order. Thus, you either find a foreign-owned business - a bar, English-language newspaper, real-estate office... or you self-employ. Some of us (and this is frowned on) seek to live by ripping off our fellow countrymen’.

This last bit set the cat among the pigeons.

It seems that I aren’t the only one who has learned through experience not to trust the first person who sidles up to me and says ‘What Ho, Old Stick, Can you lend me a few bob, I’ll pay you back when the cheque arrives from my parents’.

Because, you know, he won’t.

Not that one wishes to discourage those who seek to the leave the Old Country for a better life abroad.

And Life is, after all, an adventure.

Moving to Spain, an excellent place to live, is a good idea. It’s best to have money coming in from outside to keep one in gambas and albariño; perhaps a pension, or some regular dividends, or even a wealthy older brother who subscribes firmly to the aphorism ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’.

The second-best way is to find a job (like our intrepid Facebook correspondent) with the disadvantages and cautions listed above.

The third (minority) way is to try and snow your fellow countrymen, until such time as circumstances merit a swift departure for somewhere new and innocent.

Beyond being short-changed in a shop, the times I have been conned over my lifetime in Spain has always been by fellow-Brits. A pity really, but there you go. It’s not like it happened every day, but I’ve been living here a long time now…

No doubt the Dutch would say the same thing about their own countrymen, and amen with the Germans and the Danes.

There's a page on Facebook called ‘Named and Shamed, Costa Blanca’. This type of page, of course, can sometimes be counterproductive, and watch out for the legal profession when dropping a literary dime on someone. However, the content will help put us on our guard.

Returning one last time to the thread mentioned above, and how it’s always one’s fellow countrymen and never the Spanish who hand you a sob story or a cunning get-rich-quick scheme that only needs a bit of seed money; Amalia, a woman living in the UK, posted an interesting (bombshell!) observation: ‘I must say this also happens in England between us Spaniards’.

Huh!