Spanish Shilling

I got an invite last week from Jon Clarke the editor of The Olive Press to come along to his lair on the Costa del Sol and celebrate the twentieth anniversary of that august publication.

It’s a longish drive down there from my corner of Almería, especially in my elderly banger with no heating (that early morning start) and only the one cassette to stimulate me on the in-flight entertainment. It’s a bugger actually, as everyone says that oh, they just threw out a box of them only last month.

Coincidentally, the festivities fall on my birthday which is the very day that my Spanish driving licence goes phut.

I had a newspaper once, back in the eighties and nineties. It was based in Mojácar and eventually ran to three weekly editions in English plus a monthly in Spanish. Times were harder then – the local businesses weren’t so open to advertising as they appear to be now, and the national companies didn’t want to know – even when my wife would squeeze into a business suit and do the rounds in Madrid. Turned out that the large companies exclusively use agencies who get a cash chuck-back from the newspapers and magazines where they place the advert. One lives and learns. 

A second problem in those days was that no one had heard of desk-top publishing. We had to type out texts, print them up on bits of paper, cut them to size on a light-box, paste the whole thing together and fit a black and white photo here and there. Fiddly enough when it’s an article – but then along comes the client who wanted a special decoration on his advert, good for one insertion and was there a discount? That was the only income you would find from a free-sheet, so – as usual – the customer was always right.

Once the pages had been completed, we would haul the whole jim-cracker to the printers, 90 minutes away. Three times a week, usually me in the company Lada. Listening to a cassette. A few hours later, say six in the morning, the paper was ready, in bundles, to be whisked away to favoured locations.

At least, and unlike its successor, it had news, articles and entertainment within.

Then one day we got a tiny Macintosh computer, where you could create a page on the screen. Then a year or two later, colour arrived. No more blue-splash on the front and back, we suddenly had a full palette (unless the printers cocked it up). If that wasn’t enough, after a million trips taking the whole paper along to the city on a diskette, the Internet arrived (with that whizz, buzz whoosh noise as the phone was connected) and instead we could send the whole thing down the wire. It still took a long time, but the Modern Age was arriving for sure.

There were a few other problems too, employees can be crafty and a couple of them ended up with the paper, such is life.

I retired to do other stuff and here we are, twenty-five years later. Newspapers are pretty-much dead now, with the national titles losing sales every year and the kiosks closing down, with everybody moving to the Internet where there’s no limit to the page-size, or the links, or the ease-of-access or (above all) the incredible savings in production costs.

The Olive Press employs professional journalists (unlike its competitors) and produces a now monthly print-edition across Spain with a number of useful supplements. But its strength is in its Internet edition, its investigative reporting and its attention to the subject at hand: Spain.

Thus, they will be celebrating later this month, but I like to think that I was there first.      

Last week Spain suffered its second serious rail accident of the year, this time with 69 dead. The earlier incident on the high-speed line between Madrid and Seville occurred back in January where 46 people lost their lives. 

When you are doing anything up to 200kph on a line where swerving is not an option, coming to a dead stop brings on a whole new and tragic meaning.

Pedro Sánchez lamented that ‘We can’t allow this to happen in a country like ours’.

The excuse from the Minister of Transport Óscar Puente after the January accident in Adamúz: ‘The chances of this happening again are remote, almost impossible’.

This time, they talk of human failure but one can’t blame a single employee when a whole system has failed – especially since the unions and train-personnel have been complaining for years about the antiquated control system. High-speed trains run on a network of special rail track owned and managed by ADIF, and the one carrier on the high-speed rail system is now three, with Renfe now joined by Ouigo España, owned by the French national rail company (SNCF), operating as a popular low-cost high-speed option, and Iryo – a private consortium backed by Italy's Trenitalia (Ferrovie dello Stato), Air Nostrum, and Globalvia. 

Has trust been broken by this second accident? Would you take the AVE to Madrid right now – or rather use the regular train which takes four times longer? The Guardian makes this point: ‘Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has admitted “trust in high-speed rail has been broken” after Wednesday’s train collision that killed at least 69 people, injured more than 100 and prompted a national debate on the safety of the country’s rail network’.

Sitting with your back to the engine may be a small safety-recommendation, but it is clear that no one will currently be able to relax fully on the fast journey from one city to another.

Regardless of the excuses, we are in an election month and the public needs to be satisfied quickly. Puente has already offered to resign, and Pedro Sánchez said no – that he maintained his confidence in his transport minister. The Partido Popular, after the three days of official mourning, have been campaigning on the events, while Vox didn’t even bother to observe the time-out after the accident, noting that Santiago Abascal maintained that the rest of the parties "wanted to use mourning to silence" the criticism about the state of the infrastructure and assured that Vox would not join that strategy, a procedure he also adopted after the Adamúz accident.

A conservative friend writes in Diario de Almería: ‘Criminal liability is a matter for the courts. Political accountability is of a different nature and follows a different timeline. One need not wait for a court ruling to demand explanations, parliamentary appearances, or decisions regarding the continued tenure of those who lead an essential public service. A minister’s resignation does not equate to an admission of guilt; rather, it can be a way of accepting the institutional consequences of an extraordinary crisis’.

On Tuesday, the Minister of Transport Óscar Puente gave his report, recommendations and decisions to the standing committee regarding Spanish rail. Following his report, he resigned both his post as acting-minister and also from further activity in party politics.

The famous Atocha train-bombing in March 2004 put an end to the Aznar regime. Could the same be true for the candidature of Pedro Sánchez 22 years later?

I went to a clinic at the hospital in Almería on Thursday for a check-up and got a thumb’s up (to coin a phrase) from the proctologist. So that’s good news – I hope my last girlfriend, who dumped me a while back, is reading this.

The next day, I thought I’d better have a long walk, so I wandered along the beach for a while, preferring as always to tread the bicycle lane – it’s easier on the feet, you never get hit by a jogger rushing up behind you and, generally speaking, it has better views. I’m careful of course, and keep to the left, pressing myself against the hedge when there’s an oncoming cyclist. This time, a tandem bicycle went past with a couple pounding away in cadence. Next thing will be a penny-farthing with a bloke wearing a bowler hat and shorts. 

I wonder though if a conversation ever arises back at the nest – ‘Maud, I need a packet of smokes, would you mind helping me peddle down to the fag shop?’

Nothing looks sillier, and is probably dangerous too (no weight over the rear brakes), than a tandem with no back-rider weaving down the hill: ‘Oy mate, yer passenger’s fallen off!’ 

Thinking idly about this and then, remembering the looming All Souls' Day, I took myself to the cemetery to see my family and some friends. 

Each year, more of my gang are to be found in the local necropolis, while less of them remain out of it (as it were).

There were a lot of cars in the parking lot, and an old girl was there, squatting on an upturned flowerpot and selling blooms to adorn the niches therein.

We have a particularly lovely camposanto, with the Departed stacked, as it were, three stories high (come to think of it, just slightly smaller than some of those holiday apartments on the beach, yet far more permanent).

The graveyard is beautifully conserved, with plenty of grassy spaces and now (adopting a custom I saw in a German Friedhof last year) brooms and dustpans are present here and there with the sign that reads (a trifle forlornly) – ‘Please put them back when you are finished with them’.

On the weekend, the camposanto was a riot of both flowers and candles.

I was cleaning the dust on the lápida of my wife, who left us twelve years ago, when I stopped to speak to a neighbour performing a similar task. I don’t think I had seen him in twenty years or more, so I made the observation that the nice thing about our beautiful cementerio is that all of us will end up here one day and it’s the only place I know which is truly integrated, foreigners and locals, side by side in harmony. As to whether blissful, I couldn’t really say.

My friend – who used to work in the bank in the next-door village – might have drifted to the right during the years we’ve been estranged. He now wears a wrist-bracelet of a party anxious to change the fortunes of the country in the forthcoming election. That particular party has a ‘Spaniards First’ motto and I could see a distant look in his eye as he imagined all of the foreigners being moved to the niches strategically built next to the toilets.

So, down to the café for a beer and a tapa. I did eleven thousand steps, says I triumphantly to the waiter, a convivial fellow called Pablo. He looked at his watch – one of those intelligent ones which does everything except draw you a bath. I’ve done eleven thousand as well since I started work here this morning, he tells me, and I haven’t even been out of the door.  

Well, I’m a lot older, I said weakly, and asked him for a second beer.

I ghought I'd write a few wofds wigh my fat forffingef on the litgld kehpad that can be found ln my Andflid.

Just to show how aggravating it can be. Indeed, when it comes to writing something on that tiny keyboard that comes with my mobile phone, I’m all thumbs.

I don’t extend myself much on my android (‘Andflid’) as a rule, beside insulting Maga Republicans on Facebook (and most of them have worse spelling than anything my finger can manage), because of the bother of having to go back a few times to repair my text. The laptop is a far better option if I’m writing an essay – I can see the keys!

Yes, I have spellcheck, which will fix your spelling a treat, but I also like to write in three languages, English, Spanish and Spanglish (and then sometimes in a fourth, Gibberish, when the feeling takes me).

There’s WhatsApp, I suppose, for those text messages, although my younger daughter – when she wants to have a word with me – probably has the answer. Why struggle over a text when you can simply press the record-button and let fly with sixty-seconds worth! 

And anyway, even with a few honest mistooks, one can still read the sentence I started this essay with.

After I left school in the UK, I went to an international college in Seville, and took English, Spanish, French, and shorthand/touch typing, so I can more or less manage with a proper QUERTY keyboard.

I have a granddaughter from the United States visiting at present (my late wife was American). To be precise, she was just here with me for a few days, time for her to get over the jetlag and enjoy a Chinese dinner on the beach, and then off she went to Granada to learn Spanish.

I told her – switch the keypad on your cell phone to Spanish. It has all the letters you need for English, plus easy access to accents, the ñ and so on.

Indeed, I said, try not to use English at all (except when sending a message home to your mom, who was born here in Almería and speaks perfect Spanish anyway).

The thing about learning a language is to learn the culture. You can’t amuse a Spaniard talking about baseball, British TV shows or the joys of Yorkshire pudding – go with stuff which is of more interest – whether it’s tinto de verano versus cerveza de barril (personally, I like the belch from a good caña), or should one put onion in a tortilla de patatas, or the best way to prepare a fabada asturiana; plus which is the best Spanish pop group, who will win the elections (and why) or what’s going on in Madrid.

The grammar will come when it’s ready.

Go to the movies, and stick to watching Spanish TV, not Desperate Housewives.

Today I got a lengthy message on WhatsApp from my granddaughter (unlike me, she has functioning opposable thumbs) to say that she is studying hard, takes the bus to class each morning, was at a student’s party last night, and is having fun.

No doubt she will find a nice boyfriend while she’s there (Spanish I hope) and then decide to stay in España for ever.

As so many have done before. 

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Each week, I post a blog called Business over Tapas with useful news about Spain. It has the editorial I've posted here - usually - plus a number of short items of interest together with their links to sources. There are no adverts and no fluff. 

There is an election looming, with two very different possible outcomes. Readers will have already made up their minds, and most of us can’t vote in Spain anyway, but these are the two strains: 

The conservatives want to lower taxes and lower services. They would adjust Spain’s military spending towards the 5% of GDP, as demanded by President Trump (preferably with American-made weapons). The banks, industry, the Church, the Judiciary, the Military, most of the media, the nostalgics for Franco and so on will support them.

The progressives (as they call themselves) want to tax the rich, increase social services and aid, are against war and if all went well (as per the CIS poll), they would be in the majority.

The conservatives are two parties (or two-and-a-half if you count the Catalonian secessionist Junts per Catalunya). These are the Partido Popular and Vox. The PP is led by the rather grey Alberto Núñez Feijóo (hard to pronounce, hard to remember) while Vox has the dashing Santiago Abascal, who likes to be seen on horseback or wearing military garb (although he was never in the army or indeed in any civilian job beyond briefly running a bar as a teenager). He is friendly with both Trump and Netanyahu.

                                                                                  (My picture is a cartoon from the summer hols). 

The PP has been losing support towards Vox, which is an unashamedly fascist party, and is a member of the European ‘Patriots for Europe’.

The One can’t win the elections without the Other. This would include – in a conservative government – Vox’s leading claims, which include a discriminatory Spaniards First agenda (possibly illegal under European law) called National Priority.

To add to the excitement, a small and eccentric far-right party called Se Acabó la Fiesta might conceivably gain a seat (there are a total of 350 up for grabs).

The Junts would be a useful but disagreeable ally for the conservatives – more so since Vox would like to see it and other secessionist parties banned, even though Junts has taken under its wing the far-right Aliança Catalana, a Catalonian version of Vox.

Vaguely in the centre would be two other regional parties – the PNV and Coalición Canaria.

On the other side, we have Pedro Sánchez (worth five legions just by himself), his PSOE socialist workers party, and what has turned into a large number of splinter groups from the far left which one could head under the title (with a nod to Monty Python) ‘the Judean People’s Front’. The title for alliance of the left has long been taken by Izquierda Unida, a coalition which includes (or included) the Partido Comunista de España, the Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña, the Partido de Acción Socialista, the Partido Carlista, the Partido Humanista and the Izquierda Republicana. Over the years, the coalition evolved from a multi-party alliance into a unified political movement organized through regional federations (such as Izquierda Unida-Verdes and Esquerda Unida). With me so far?

Then there is Podemos, which came in strong in 2015 with 69 deputies and has withered ever since (as often as not due to aggressive tactics from the right-wing media and the judiciary) down to just four in the outgoing government. Other groups on the left of the PSOE include the regional ERC (with the shooting star of Gabriel Rufián who… almost… managed to bring everyone together), the Basque EH-Bildu party, an Andalusian one called Adelante Andalucía, plus the survivors of the departed Sumar party – now called Frente Amplio, a coalition of various lefty groups: the above-mentioned Izquierda Unida, plus Más Madrid, Catalunya en Comú (Comuns), Compromís Regional (Valencian Community) and the Verdes Equo. Add to this heady mix, the far-left nationalist Galician BNG.

Trying to get them all together – as everybody on the left was hoping, has turned out to be as hard as herding cats. With some of the small lefty parties presenting candidatures and others joining into an approved lefty coalition, clearly there will be votes that fall between the cracks, and thus lower the chances for Pedro Sánchez to return as prime minister. 

Of them all, Podemos has proved the most intransigent.

The elections are for the Congreso de los Diputados (350 seats) and el Senado (266).

Furthermore, there are the – I’d call them joke parties: Pacma (the pets’ party), Democracia21 (Miriam González, the wife of Nick Clegg), and at least a dozen others…

The elections are on Sunday, November 29th. There will be two weeks of active campaigning, which means posters everywhere with ‘Vote for Me’ slathered across them, which starts on Friday November 13th. Right now, we are in ‘pre-campaigning’ times.

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Each week, I post a blog called Business over Tapas with useful news about Spain. It has the editorial I've posted here - usually - plus a number of short items of interest together with their links to sources. There are no adverts and no fluff. 

I invited myself to the Senior Citizens lunch-date last week held in one of our finest hotels. To do this, one only needs to discover that the town hall has its annual free treat for the over-65s and to know to drop by the secretary’s office in due time to pick up a ticket.

All rather fun, I’d not been before.

I’ve become a trifle deaf – it comes with age I suppose. At least I still have my hair and teeth, or at least, most of them anyway. Although it might go in some way towards explaining why nothing in the giant array of serve-yourself food was crunchy.

The queue outside was designed to be barged, so we all did – creating a tight-to-fit blockage at the door into the dining hall. Once past the ticket-inspector, I joined the noisy throng looking for somewhere to sit.

The first person I saw was Doña Beatriz, who had kindly mentioned me during her speech as la pregonera at the opening of the village fiesta back in August. I thanked her for her kind words. We foreigners often tend to get overlooked.

Then casting about, I suddenly heard my name hooted across the room, so found my way to an empty chair next to a British friend, who like me, is an old-timer here in our community.

Janie once worked as an air hostess for a zeppelin, so I was pleased to see her, and indeed hear her voice rise above the herd.

The Spanish are a noisy race, and their refectories are designed to echo appealingly to encourage the cacophony – hard walls, lots of massive windows and a tiled floor. According to my friend Colin, who writes a daily blog from Galicia, a ‘noisy bar’ is a tautology in Spain, he says, since there’s no other kind. Apparently, when we are young, our hearing can distinguish what we want over the roar from what we don’t – known perhaps as ‘the cocktail party effect’. Sadly, this useful skill diminishes as one gets older.

Thus, many of us ancients were sufferers of hearing-loss. Two hundred or so pensioners bellowing across the tables at each other. Even my friend from the airship, who had once long ago been trained to project her voice across forty metres of companionway, was obliged to give it her all as she asked me politely for the salt.

We went to fill our plates, after all, a free meal at a buffet means ‘pile them high’.  Three times to the trough and back. I bumped into the mayor on the second visit (he was the only person there who was underage) and thanked him for the lunch. One of the racier old girls filling her plate next to me asked who he was: ‘he’s a handsome looking cove’ I think was what she said.

A merry session, a hearty scoff and a glass of wine (one must be careful these days) and so I took my leave, slightly nonplussed as to what was the point of this luncheon. There were no speeches or prize-giving or a raffle for a brand-new coffee-machine from the local white-goods emporium or maybe a colourful painting of our village from the schoolchildren.

I went outside – ah bliss! So quiet I could hear a pin drop.

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Each week, I post a blog called Business over Tapas with useful news about Spain. It has the editorial I've posted here - usually - plus a number of short items of interest together with their links to sources. There are no adverts and no fluff. 

So, who will win? Gosh, that's a hard one.

A few thoughts. 

I’ve been noting a few mistakes – probably from a lack of schooling – in the written Spanish that sometimes appears on my feed on Facebook. This comes down to breaking – or perhaps not knowing – a few simple rules. 

For example, using ‘ll’ (the double L used to have its own section in the dictionary) for a ‘y’. One I saw this week: Está cerca a la plalla (shudder!). 

Another one showed up today: yo te apollo.  

Then there’s the common use of an ‘h’ where there never meant to be one: haber si te entiendes. (rather than: a ver). 

And our favourite, a ‘b’ for a ‘v’ or vice versa. Bamos a Varcelona as it were… 

Spaniards also suffer from el lambdacismo, the confusion some citizens have between an ‘l’ and a final ‘r’: calol for calor, amol for amor and so on.  

And don't get me started about el andalú... 

All of the above, and that’s before we foreigners take the chance to mash the language… 

In Spain, "Una familia, una casa" has become a prominent political slogan and debate topic spearheaded by left-wing politicians, most notably Gabriel Rufián. The thrust, backed (more or less) by the Spanish Constitution, is that every family should have a home. This, many would argue, should come before profit, especially in the guise of the ‘Vulture Funds’ – who tend to buy entire blocks of apartments in their endless search for a buck.

The Vulture Funds (often but not always foreign carrion-eaters) may aim to increase rental-prices or add some slap-dash repairs and seek fresh tenants. They might plan to remove their existing tenants (known in the trade as ‘las cucarachas’), or perhaps leave the building entirely empty waiting for higher property values or maybe turn the apartments into short-term tourist lets or even a hotel. Who knows, and perish the thought, these scavengers might even enlist the help of a city councillor to expedite matters.

Circling just behind these birdies – who are just as happy investing in houses as in anything else with good opportunities – we have los grandes tenedores – landlords that own either ten or more homes or over 1,500m constructed. It can be a great business, especially if you divide the apartments into various rooms-for-rent, demand being what it is. 

Then there are the banks, whose mortgages sometimes turn out to be a little too rich. 

So Maricarmen. Article 47 of the Spanish Constitution establishes that all Spaniards have the right to enjoy decent and adequate housing, ‘though it is categorized as a guiding principle of social and economic policy rather than an absolute fundamental right’ (says Google AI properly), but housing isn’t just in the hands of the state, but rather under the control of the regional (and city) governments.

Maricarmen Abascal was a victim of this mess. She had been living in the same apartment since Franco’s times (when prices were cheap, there were firm rent-controls and not everyone dreamt of being a capitalista). Her parents moved in along with Maricarmen back in 1957 and until recently (as the only survivor) she was paying 500€ a month. A Spanish investment company bought the whole building a few years ago and suggested that she should be paying a more reasonable rent – like 2,650€ a month. Long story short, the 85-year-old was evicted last week and carted off to hospital. Serves her right, eh?

Not everyone would agree, and there have been protests – a sit-in began in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol on Saturday which soon turned itself into a tent-city.

Not that she was the only one – evictions in Spain (whether vulture-related, foreclosures, rent-in-arears or squatters) are numerous. Indeed, says Público, there’s an average of 44 evictions taking place daily in Spain. Not that you’ll see any flag-wavers or right-wing banners amongst the protestors.

The story has gone worldwide. ‘The dramatic eviction of Maricarmen has put Spain’s worsening housing crisis back in focus, amid rising rents, limited affordable homes and a political fight over tenant protections’, says an Asian source.

The Government had tried to resolve this issue back in April this year but were shorted by the contrary votes of… well, the usual suspects. It’s now trying once again. Meanwhile, Urbagestión, the investment fund that evicted Maricarmen, feeling hurt by the negative press, on Monday relented and said she could have her old place back again.

Building more homes is all very well, and very necessary, but with the law of the jungle, where the new homes are picked up by the wealthy for speculative purposes, more attention needs to be placed on building rent-controlled council-homes, an expense which has fallen by 43% since 2002.

An item in Marca notes that Canada, faced with a similar issue, found the solution by stopping foreign venture-capital from entering the residential housing market.

Spain’s minority government has now proposed (once again) rent-controls, a halt on all evictions until 2030, and banning the purchase of housing by investment firms.