Spanish Shilling

It was hot where I live, on a hill overlooking a dry riverbed, not far from the sea. Indeed, Thursday and Friday were both in the 40s.

My daughter was celebrating her birthday that Thursday (she’s also in her forties) and I joined her and others as a Party of Six (follow me please) to the table in the corner, by the windows, in a smart restaurant in the next town from mine.

Our family knows their family, and thus we were treated to cocktails and jamón as the waiter left us some menus, bread and changed our plates and glasses. Smart places always do, for some unfathomable reason.

The owner reappeared and chose the meal for us – an eminently sound idea as I never like to read menus and tend to order the same as the person seated to my left (unless he or she is a vegetarian). I think the best restaurants are those who have no menu at all – maybe a blackboard with today’s ‘catch’ – but the simpler the better. One is there for the conversation, not to get lost in a thick book of food. By now, and anyway, our unopened menus had discretely disappeared.

And it came to pass that, being both a smart restaurant, and with special favour from the kitchen, we were served endless plates of delicious thises and thatses. The plates being passed around to the left and quickly emptied.

The main course began with a similar routine, or maybe that was the continuation of the first course Part the Second. More munching and forks clashing. It was too delicious to talk (and too noisy to hear). Mmm, good! Anyway, it was then followed (fresh plates, clean knives and forks) with a hot piece of iron over a small oil-heater and a large plate of raw beef for us to cook to our liking.

I was reading somewhere that when there’s a choice on your plate, you eat more. At home, not being much of a cook, I heat up one thing or another from the fridge or a can from the shelf, add some mayonnaise and call myself satisfied. But when there are lots of little exquisitely laden plates, multi-cultured tapas, then one can become quite a pig. 

After that along comes the desert, or afters, or pudding. It’s been a while. Here, the same thing: a gigantic platter with at least ten different postres and, like Pokemon, you’ve gotta catch them all. The cake and the (apparently) forty-strong staff all smiling as my daughter blew out the candle.

My granddaughter’s boyfriend was the driver, sitting there poor chap with his glass of water. The rest of us, to a greater or lesser extent, drank beers, wine, gin and tonics and a shot or two of tequila.

Friday morning, I had no hangover but noticed I had put on over half a kilo.

Sometimes, along comes a comment or an entire post on social media written – as often as not – by a Brit on the emotive subject of animals, and how we love them. 

As of course I do.

Mostly.

Cats for example. Fine and agreeable balls of fur one can snuggle with. They give in return a kind of cynical love and the feeling that, if they were only bigger while we were smaller, they would probably drop the pretence and attempt to eat us instead. As it is, cats and their lower-class cousin the feral cat (inexplicably protected by both the vecinos and the town hall) are responsible for the deaths of approximately 400 million animals annually in Spain.

'This staggering figure includes hundreds of millions of small mammals, birds, and reptiles. In fact, free-ranging and feral cats are responsible for significant pressure on local wildlife and are cited as threats to hundreds of conservation-dependent species’, says Google AI.

No wonder the Dawn Chorus is ever-more muted.

But yes, cats are cute. They go ‘Miaow’.

Returning to social media, and the unconditional love of many people for all things that fly, run, stagger or crawl, here’s an exchange about a yellow scorpion I had with someone who found one in her house and was doubtful about taking it outside:

 Me: Nasty things. I've been stung four times (so far) by them. It's around six hours of pain and no apparent wound or swelling to help look for sympathy.

 Them: Poor little guys! Having to encounter a big clumsy oaf of an ape. I hope they're OK.

 Me: I'm pretty sure I stamped on at least three of them.

 Them: Colour me fking astonished. I wish you the same. #TeamScorpion

 Me: You think I should have bought them a drink?

Living, as I do, in the campo, there are lots of wild creatures here that make my life more enjoyable. There are plenty of geckoes (or ‘crocodiles’ as a friend with poor English disarmingly calls them) and a few chameleons; we have wild tortoises that walk right up to me and ask for food; there are butterflies, bees and other friendly insects; rabbits scampering along in front of my car and partridge couples debating whether to gallop straight legged across the orchard or maybe take to flight. There are magpies and hoopoes; a few foxes and a very vocal owl that sits on a branch outside my bedroom window.

But we have other critters I don’t care for at all. Should I accept the social media explanation that ‘they were here first’? Even if they weren’t. Yes, the flies and mosquitos have been here forever, and also the wasps (I destroy a nest whenever I can), but the wild boar and the mischievous mountain goats (ibex) are both new, having descended from the hills in the past ten or twenty years.

The boar dig up the roots of the trees and bushes and knock down the ancient stone terraces in search of grubs and rootlets. I shake out powdered hot pepper which discourages them – maybe they’ll dig up the neighbour’s plot instead where there’s no polvos picantes to disturb their sensitive noses.

But the mountain goats! They’ll get onto the terrace and chew the bark off the ornamentals, or strip the leaves, or – and this is just nasty – break off branches from the citrus and other fruit trees and leave them scattered around as a message. It’s just as well they don’t have a Facebook account.

I know, I should get a large hound. But then, where I live, we are infested with the black fly that gives the poor dogs leishmaniasis. Which kills them.

Oh look, there’s an egret in the garden!

The heat right now is far from normal. There are those who post things on Facebook like ‘It’s summer, of course it’s hot’ or ‘They’re on purple and are running out of colours for the maps’ or (worse still) ‘It was much hotter twenty thousand years ago’. Silly remarks to try and make light of our current global warming.

Brought on, as much as anything (Mr Trump, are you reading this?) by burning fossil fuels. Drill, baby, drill indeed.

Spain has moved towards clean energy, whether solar, wind or geothermal, thank goodness. It wasn’t so long ago that the Partido Popular government had a ludicrous ‘sun tax’ to keep us burning diesel and gas.

I’m doing my bit – staying home and reading. Drinking plenty of water. Using the fan at night (apparently, it costs about six cents for an eight-hour breeze). The book I’m reading right now is a Hammond Innes thriller about people caught on the ice-flows of Antarctica. The Baddy is trying to kill them, and he has just rammed and sunk their whaling ship. It’s cold as Hell.

The heat is terrific. My phone says, ‘Tomorrow will be hotter’. I have to shower several times a day in cold water. The wild boar are attacking my orchard, digging up the roots and knocking down the stone terracing. Bastards! 

But this is nothing. From my window I can see across the valley to Bédar, a small town I used to live in back in the seventies. It’s on fire. Smoke obscures the setting sun, and flames stretch along a corridor of maybe fifteen kilometres. Small flashing blue lights, and a helicopter overhead. I can see the sky glowing behind the mountains. The Facebook is alive with pictures and updates. Bédar has been evacuated and the townsfolk (it’s a small place) have been ordered inland to the next pueblo, Lubrín. They are in the municipal building there. Others have been sent to Los Gallardos below, but then that too became under threat. Movement on the A-7 motorway was cut by the police. Fire moves so very quickly. You can come round a bend in the road, and find it’s taken a short cut and is now both ahead of you as well as behind.

My son is a fire-fighter in America. He tells me on WhatsApp to be ready, to pack a bag with my passport and a change of clothes – and of course my Hammond Innes book. Close all the windows and shutters, and the interior doors. Be prepared. A friend from Bédar sends me a worrying message from where she lives, out in the campo: ‘Road in both directions blocked by flames. We’re out but there’s hardly anywhere to go. We stupidly waited too long’.

By midnight on Thursday, the authorities were talking about a dozen fatalities. People we know. Maybe my friend.

Updating this on Tuesday, The fire is out, the president of Spain and the President of Andalucía have had their pictures taken and my friend and her husband are among the now thirteen dead.

Those of us who live in Andalucía (or, for that matter, in Castilla y León, Extremadura or Aragón) now have a regional government made up of the PP (the majority party) in alliance with the Vox. The tail in every case, wagging the dog.

This dreary coalition, I call it the PPox, has the program of the Partido Popular with certain policies from Vox added under duress (or at least, so Juanma Moreno claims) such as the discriminatory Prioridad Nacional. 

Wiki explains: ‘National Priority or preference is the idea that a series of political, economic, or social rights should be reserved exclusively or primarily for the members of a nation. It is a popular term that encompasses the concepts of nativism and social chauvinism’.

Málaga Hoy says that the Andalusian agreement supposes: ‘National Priority for housing, a ban on the burka in public spaces, and an emergency plan to address waiting lists are among the 150 measures in the pact. For access to public housing, ten years of residency registration will be required for purchases and five years for rentals. There will be a priority pathway for cancer diagnosis and an annual audit of the cost of healthcare for foreigners’.  

Google AI says: ‘The "national priority" (or prioridad nacional) policies proposed by conservative coalitions aim to give native-born Spaniards preference over foreigners for state aid, social housing, and public subsidies. However, experts note these moves directly conflict with national equality laws’ (and indeed, Article 13 of the Constitution: “Foreigners shall enjoy in Spain the public freedoms guaranteed by this Title under the terms established by treaties and the law"). The European Commission doesn’t approve either: ‘Brussels warns that it will ensure there is no discrimination with the National Priority’.

Furthermore (the Right has always been uneasy with the science of climate change), Andalucía will be declared "free from the burdens of the European Green Deal". There is no mention in the program regarding gender violence, LGTBIQ+ rights and Muslim and Arab language school studies are to be dropped, as the manly activities of bullfighting and la caza (hunting) now take centre stage. 

elDiario.es has: ‘Through 150 measures, the agreement consolidates ideological concessions made by the PP to Vox, such as the outright rejection of the 2030 Agenda and the creation of a new Law of Concord (forgive and forget the past crimes under the Dictatorship). The far-right leader Manuel Gavira will become vice president with a super-ministry under his control: the Ministry of Tourism, Local Administration, and Justice’.

The whole deal was announced just half an hour before the Thursday coronation of Juanma Moreno, giving little time for any revolt among the conservatives. The reaction from the regional PSOE leader María Jesús Montero was to call it a "pact of shame. For the first time since the Franco regime, the far right will enter an Andalusian government", she said.

Will this state of affairs be a success? In Madrid, Alberto Núñez Feijóo (screaming daily for fresh elections) admits that, if the voters wanted it, then he would agree to a pact, a pax, a PPox with Vox.

I may have given the impression over this long and normally enjoyable life that I was a little distrait with my family, my closest friends, my circle and with the nice man in the tax office. The thing is, like many people over the age of, let us say fifty, I am stone deaf.

My grandmother had an ear trumpet which she would point towards whoever interested her. The result was that the whole family tended to raise their voices which in my opinion is a good idea, especially here in Spain where ‘the dog that doesn’t bark doesn’t get fed’.

And thus, like many a slightly vague senior, I eventually gave up and admitted to myself that I am a trifle hard of hearing – a bit like the Twelve Steps:

‘My name is Lenox, and I’m deaf’.

‘Speak up, we can’t hear you’, they shouted back.

I happen to have a Spanish connection. These are very common between our hosts, but quite rare for Johnny Foreigner. There will normally be a sister-in-law who is a judge, a brother who works in the city hospital, a school friend who is now a Guardia Civil and so on. Almost everybody has a useful contact either through the extended family or by happenchance. They like to say: ‘It’s not what you learnt at school, it’s who you sat next to’.

A very fine system it is too. In Spain, everyone is in with a chance.

For we foreigners, this is a lot harder, but I’ve been here for a long time: almost sixty years (cough cough!) and, anyway, where I’m going with this is I know someone in the hearing aid business, or rather I did as she has since moved to Tenerife. Long story short, I got some staggeringly expensive pinganillos for a song. Fifty percent off the listed price.

Spain is very noisy, and one may be tempted to soldier on without a listening device (sorry, that’s the best the Thesaurus could come up with apart from ‘a vacuum-tube hearing aid’). The ambient noise, the drills, the shouts, the tricked-out mopeds, the horns and sirens. It’s not so bad when you’re deaf, for sure, but then you need to hear what your darling says too.

The main drawback to my hearing aids is that they faithfully pick up all kinds of noise that I would rather not hear – the folk at the next table, the coffee-grinder behind the counter, the television and the waiter shouting ‘dos cañas y una Fanta limón’ to the woman working the bar. I can always take one out of my ear, unplug myself on one side as it were, to better hear what’s going on the other side where my neighbour is seated. Unless it’s not interesting, in which case I can more or less manage what my grandmother used to do with her ear trumpet, which was to point it the other way.

Spain is the second-noisiest country in the world, only behind Japan – and that’s because they have paper walls (useful in an earthquake) whereas ours are made of machimbrado: thin brick and plaster. The sound travels through them, and once it has arrived, it bounces off the tiled floor and naked walls.

Which is why I like a carpet and a painting or two in my quarters.

Hearing aids are not as easy to remember as glasses. I will have reached for my specs right from the start, while clambering out of my pit, but I may be behind the steering wheel before I remember the hearing aids, blast them.

Still, I probably won’t need them just to do the shopping and to have a beer and a tapa afterwards. Deaf people are very good at saying ‘fancy that’ and ‘well, I never’ when they can’t hear you.

I’m feeling better now. Barman, bring me another caña!  

Aren’t we lucky speaking, reading and writing in English? We either managed to be born in an English-speaking region, or we learnt it as a child (easily) or as an adult (more difficult). There are those who don’t speak the language and they doubtless will have found themselves at a disadvantage as they go through life in the West.

Like Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Santiago Abascal for example.

English has become the lingua franca, the common tongue, even though it’s not the first official language in any country of the EU-27: and then only in Eire and Malta, which make up between them just 1.3% of the European Union’s total population. Nevertheless, around 43% of the EU speaks English, led (after the aforementioned Eire and Malta), by the Netherlands, Croatia and Austria.

Probably using subtitles rather than dubbing on the films and TV shows is a help.

Disappointingly, around 77% of Spaniards, says the INE, speak no English whatsoever. Yes, despite the tourism.

General Franco didn’t help, banning all languages to be spoken other than Spanish (hence the subtitles). This included Catalan, Euskera, Galego and even signing for the deaf.

English of course does better elsewhere, thanks to the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, and a host of other countries around the world. If you are thinking of going into business, the hospitality sector or politics, it’s a vital tool to acquire.

Which brings us back to Alberto Núñez Feijóo (not an easy name, and I say this in sorrow, for English-speakers to remember on indeed pronounce).

Feijóo was on a TV chat show the other day – on one of the commercial channels: needless to say, he won’t go on the national TVE. He told Pablo Motos on ‘El Hormiguero’ that he doesn’t speak English at all (he blames his childhood school rather than Franco) but he says that he can always translate something, when necessary, on his handy mobile phone.

There’s the memory of Mariano Rajoy refusing to answer a question put by the BBC in English at a meeting in Brussels back in 2017.

The lack of English in (most) Spanish politicians came to light back in 2013 with Ana Botella, the mayoress of Madrid (José María Aznar’s wife) and her promotion for Spain’s capital city with a: “Relaxing cup of café con leche in Plaza Mayor”.

Today, with the departure of Alberto Casado from the PP, no one in that party particularly speaks what the Spanish fondly like to call ‘the Language of Shakespeare’ (not many of us do either, but that’s another story). Over at Vox, Feijóo’s putative partner Santiago Abascal speaks a little broken French (apparently), but that’s as far as it goes. 

Thus, once again, Pedro Sánchez and his team have the advantage in Brussels, at the UN in New York and elsewhere. Sánchez speaks good English and French; the Minister of the Economy Carlos Cuerpo has English, French, plus adequate Mandarin and Japanese. The Minister for the Environment Sara Aagesen Muñoz is fluent in English. The Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares Bueno has fluent French and English. The Defence Minister Margarita Robles Fernández has ‘good’ English and French. The Minister for Hacienda Arcadi España García has some English (and presumably a lot of Math). The clever Minister for Transport Óscar Puente speaks good English and so on (Thanks to Google AI for the foregoing).

Returning to Feijóo, who won’t remain the leader of the Partido Popular for much longer (says El País), we can look at the two leading rivals for his position.

The president of the Madrid Region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso speaks some English (she worked as an intern on a radio station in Dublin), but she has acute political problems with her boyfriend now finally coming to roost. The other is Juanma Moreno from Andalucía, who says he is currently taking lessons from ‘a native teacher’.

Thus, once again, the difference in professionalism between the current government and the competing PP/Vox politicians is evident. 

Let’s see – we’ve had Felipe González (sometimes known in those days as Señor X) and his… at the very least… improper war against the Basque nationalists with the GAL (27 state-murders); José María Aznar who blamed the same Basque group, the ETA, for the Al Qaeda train explosions in Madrid in retaliation for his war with Bush Jr and Blair in Iraq (192 deaths) – plus having some of his ministers ending up investigated for corruption; Zapatero and his peculiar eyebrows; followed by the mysterious M.Rajoy (any Spaniard knows where I’m going with this) and his departure precisely for corruption; and now Pedro Sánchez, who we are told has both a shifty brother and a dodgy wife.

While the far-right, the media-whores, the conservative judiciary, the CIA and the Mossad are doing what they do best – character assassination – the pickings are a trifle thin. The brother and the wife are – as we all know full well – both squeaky clean (as was the attorney general, not that it mattered much) and anyway, there’s the far more traditional fare of the ex-ministers Santos Cerdán and José Luis Ábalos to keep the courts happy.

But Zapatero a crook? He is a benevolent and slightly forgettable ex-president who nevertheless got Spain out of Iraq, ended ETA (through dialogue rather than retaliatory assassinations), legalised mixed-marriages and brought about both women’s rights in the workplace and parity in politics. A piece from The Economist says ‘…the judicial probe centres on Mr Zapatero’s controversial ties to the dictatorship in Venezuela, and in particular the €53m bail-out by Mr Sánchez’s government of Plus Ultra, a Venezuelan-Spanish airline, during the pandemic. The judge claims that payments of around €2m to Mr Zapatero and his daughters for consultancy work were mainly a commission for arranging the rescue…’

This following a timely leak from the CIA, via Homeland Security, of the contents of a phone held by Rodolfo Reyes, a Venezuelan partner of Plus Ultra airways, confiscated at the US border and cloned back in 2021 (the use of any information extracted in such a way would be illegal under Spanish law). Whether Washington wanted to poke the Spanish hornets’ nest and whether Zap’s work in the dreaded Venezuela had anything to do with the sudden release of the damning documents is open to surmise.

The other day, the Guardia Civil were searching his offices (all live on TV of course) while looking for proof of corruption and found some expensive jewellery in his safe. Zapatero it seems took bribes, -oh how are the mighty fallen!- and was paid in gold and rare stones (rather than the more traditional transfer of funds to the Cayman Islands). The baubles have been assayed (by a Madrid jeweller’s shop – belonging by chance to the ex-PP minister Ana Mato), and valued at over a million euros. Well, there’s no arguing with that!

Zapatero told the judge on Wednesday that he did not contact any authority to influence the Plus Ultra bailout and denied receiving bribes. Later on Wednesday, Zapatero gave a written statement insisting on his innocence and granting ‘a voluntary universal authorization to facilitate the tracing of his money and accounts’.

He further stated that he would fully explain the jewels found in his safe at a later time.

The question of whether the contents of a cloned phone can be used in this inquiry will of course be down to the judge, the judiciary and the opinion-piece writers.

Not that this would matter one way or the other – Zapatero’s reputation is now in shreds.

‘…Beyond radio, television, or internet talk shows’, writes Ana Pardo de Vera for Público: ‘journalists are spending a lot of time in newsrooms discussing everything related to the former PSOE prime minister of Spain between 2004 and 2011. Because it's surprising that the only head of government who didn't have a single corruption case in his ranks would so wildly overturn the chessboard—his party, his family, and himself—as some would have you believe, with sentences handed down here and there without even having listened to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’.

It’s a lot easier for columnists when they are at odds with the government – those of us who support Pedro Sánchez must always bring up the fast-growing Spanish economy and the various advances introduced, higher pensions and minimum wage and so on – while for an opposition writer, well, the subject is an easy one: corruption! They may be right, but one must remember the last Partido Popular government fell precisely for this reason, and there are still plenty of the old guard around today.

I’m told the FIFA-Games began this Thursday. Gracious me, what exciting times we live in, the Pope, Mr Bunny and now footie. Since the Spanish are playing, then they are of course my team (Go Spain!), but then I’m told that little Cabo Verde is doing well (they play Spain on June 15th) and that they will need our support.

Indeed, may the odds be ever in your favour.

I’ve never cared much for soccer (as you will probably have guessed by now). The sports master put me on the left wing at my first school, since I was tall and fast, but as I learned out much later, when trying to ski in a straight line, my left leg is a fraction smaller than my right, which meant I kept missing when shooting at the goal (that, and crashing into a tree). At my second (and last) school, they made us play rugger, and my inclination was to keep as far away from the ball as possible.

Since then, my only sport has been walking around in giant circles.

I’ve only ever watched one soccer game as an adult, when I was dragged to an Almería – Granada game after attending a political rally in the city bullring (you see how useful these things can be?). I genuinely thought they were teasing me, all the way to my seat high above the pitch, and this in the days before Facebook. God, it was boring.

I did join a game on one interesting occasion just after I had finally left school. I was seventeen and the foreigners (we were neither called either ‘expats’ or ‘immigrants’ – or guiris – in those days) decided to play against the cream of our village in a ‘friendly’, the losers to stump up for a jolly barbeque following the adventure.

Their side took it a bit more seriously than ours, with a final score of 11-1 (I think the Mojaquero team scored an own goal just to cheer us up). I remember that, as the final whistle went, five of our stalwarts were seen to be standing off the pitch and surrounding my mum who had at that moment arrived with a freezer-box full of beer.

But enough of this, the gentle reader wants to hear about the World Cup (Yay!).

It’s being played in various stadia scattered across Mexico, the USA and Canada.  It’s apparently very expensive to go there, cripplingly expensive to stay there (while not being arrested or deported by Trump’s goons), and nothing short of a King's Ransom to travel from one game to the next, if the inclination to do so should tempt you.

For me, having just watched the first day of the Pope’s visit to Spain on the telly, plus listening to Bad Bunny on the radio (he’s still performing in Madrid), we now face six full weeks of endless footie (104 games says the webpage). No news, just penalty shoot-outs.

Luckily, I’ve just loaded up with some thrillers at our English library.

This may all be good for Pedro Sánchez, as the attention of the electorate is swung to other distractions, and it may even be good for Donald Trump (the American 250th celebrations will be held on July 4th, half-way through the games).

So, if you like soccer, have a great time, don’t drink to many beers or eat too much popcorn, and may your team make it to the finals.

If you don’t, I could lend you a book about fishing once I’m through with it.

One day, my late wife brought home a foal she had acquired from a gypsy. Barbara loved horses and always rode bareback, When she was a child in California, she would ride to school on her horse and, as they said in those times: a hundred dollar horse and a five hundred dollar saddle. 

Well, the horse was the important thing. 

The stable, for want of a better word, was an old building near our house in Mojácar (Almería), across the street from the camposanto. A couple of years later, a Madrid doper and his British girlfriend moved in, put up a plank of wood across some bricks, and opened a bar: La Venta del Olivo. It wasn't a great success perhaps, but on the plus side, management didn't object if the customer rolled himself a joint. 

Carlos (known to all as Karlangas) tended to stock whatever he could find, which was often a fraction skimpy. You mean, he told me once, you've never tried Kahlua, reaching for the one lonely bottle in evidence upon the shelf behind him. 

Life went on, and the place was taken over by a famous artist from Águilas (Murcia) via Mallorca called Manuel Coronado who renamed it as El Delfos. He put a young Mariano - a skinny gent with long hair (he now runs a successful flamenco tablao in Mojácar pueblo) - behind the bar, covered the walls of his now greatly extended building with his paintings and set out to enjoy life in Mojácar as we all strive to do. Manuel ('Manolo') was indeed famous, and he created the Premio Delfos, with candidates who would come down for a few days and stay in the Parador hotel. These included José María Álvarez de Manzano, the mayor of Madrid for over a decade; Manolo Pimentel, a cabinet minister under Aznar, and one or two others... 

The town hall, an early enthusiast of the if-it-ain't-one-of-ours doctrine currently known as La Prioridad Nacional, would have nothing to do either with Manolo Coronado (they still don't have one of his paintings in the municipal collection) or indeed with his Premio Delfos. Manolo eventually threw in the towel when a couple of local people from next-door Turre 'borrowed' a horse of his for the village fiestas, and managed through inattention to strangle its foal. 

Mariano was left running the Delfos. Besides several brave attempts to open a restaurant, hold exhibitions and run the bar, the fact is that it is a little off the beaten path being neither on the beach nor up in the village. As such, it never attracted the custom it deserved. 

Now it's run by a new group, including the indefatigable Angeli van Os. I had got to know Angeli while we were both living in Paris in around 1984, and she must have remembered me talking about Mojácar, as a few years later, to my surprise, I bumped into her here. Angeli was a successful model before she retired and settled locally. She is one of those lucky people who remembers everybody's name, which makes her ideal for the front-person of the Delfos. The bar and restaurant is now very much a place to visit, while enjoying the advantage of being off the tourist radar. There are concerts and other events going on regularly. It's a fun place with plenty of outside tables, empty views and amusing regulars. I have to say - I've still yet to see anyone from the town hall there.

The Delfos is located on the left, down from the cemetery on the Mojácar road to Turre.

Spain is in a mess right now. The background to this is a mixture of judicial bullying, corruption, foreign meddling and improper aspiration.

Agenda Pública had several US experts commenting on Spain back in March 2026: ‘Trump’s Oval Office threat to "cut off all trade with Spain" is coercion in plain sight, and it also betrays how stretched he already is on Iran’, said one. ‘Prime Minister Sánchez’s actions are deeply disappointing for those of us in the United States who wish to see a strong U.S.-Spain relationship, including strong military cooperation between our two countries’, said another. ‘There could be other types of actions, such as measures affecting U.S. exports to Spain, investments, or visas, as well as financial matters…’.

‘The White House’, we read elsewhere, ‘through its ambassador, has publicly expressed its "frustration" with the refusal of Pedro Sánchez's government to allow the use of the Rota and Morón military bases for the war against Iran. Furthermore, the ambassador has openly criticized Sánchez for not receiving him in three months, something interpreted as a deliberate snub to the Trump administration’.

By June, this frustration had reached the point where – we suspect – the Americans and their disagreeable friend in the Middle East are now actively trying to remove a thorn in their side, in favour of a sweeter and better colleague in the Moncloa, one able to increase the national expenditure on arms while cutting taxes for the wealthy and – with the insistence of Vox – creating a Jim Crow policy against minorities (including, of course, women).

Sad to say, however, the Spanish electorate have a low opinion of both Trump’s America and Bibi’s Israel.

Late last month, and we return to the US embassy in Madrid, we find the American ambassador Benjamin León receiving in separate meetings both Feijóo and Abascal (and Ayuso in her offices at the Puerta del Sol). What did they have to discuss, asks the leader of the Izquierda Unida? Plots, plans and a new president for Spain? Perhaps.

The worry about American involvement in Spanish domestic affairs brings this headline from El Huff Post: ‘Donald Trump's frustration with Spain and suspicions about US involvement in Zapatero's indictment: "The real political target is Sánchez."’.

The Italian weekly L'Expresso has a leader that warns that "no European leader sleeps soundly" now that "Washington has activated the beacon."

But the plotters need an unarguable scandal. The joke attacks against Sánchez wife and his brother are not going to pull down the Government – maybe the Judiciary can come up with something better. Cynical? Me?

Step aside Begoña, we’ve got Zapatero… The judicial machine got rid of the Sánchez-appointed Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz last November without providing any proof of wrongdoing, while still not bringing the investigation of Ayuso’s boyfriend a year down the line any closer to fruition. The case against Cristobal Montoro goes back to 2016 while the Kitchen Case (the last PP government trying to silence proof of fraud) is being quietly unreported. The Courts block Zapatero’s bank account, but not Montoro’s, or ‘the boyfriend’, or Fernández Díaz… They threaten to take away the passport of the president’s wife (where would she go?). But, we all know what’s really happening.

As someone says, the PP has so far failed to bring down the coalition government and Pedro Sánchez, but it has succeeded in destroying the Spanish justice system and its reputation.

What stops the government from falling, says Gabriel Rufián, is that the alternative is infinitely worse. ‘These people prefer a left-wing thief to an honourable right-wing government’ says the PP spokesman Miguel Tellado.

Forget the polling station, or the 2027 elections, ‘"I will do everything possible to change the government, and when I say everything, I mean everything," says Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

Will he succeed? It’s certainly possible.