Spanish Shilling

A far-right agency called Manos Limpias has denounced the wife of the President of Spain for corruption (using newspaper-cuttings as proof). The Court, surprisingly, has taken up the charge.
Pedro Sánchez said late on Wednesday that he had had enough of the bulos and attacks from the far-right and is considering resigning as president.
His final decision on Monday.

I wrote about the background to this in my Business over Tapas weekly bulletin - 

‘The spreader of fake-news Pilar Baselga, a regular in the far-right media and circles, availed herself last week of her right to not testify before the judge investigating the falsehood she launched in November 2022, when she said that Begoña Gómez, the wife of Pedro Sánchez, is a transsexual and was part of a drug trafficking network. As elDiario.es has learned from sources familiar with the statement before a Madrid magistrate, Baselga has now preferred to remain silent…’ Nevertheless, and despite the above, Manos Limpias (a far-right Christian agitator group) has successfully managed to find a judge able to launch an inquiry into Begoña Gómez for corruption. Pedro Sánchez said in the Cortes on Wednesday that “Despite the news that I have just received, despite everything, I continue to believe in the justice-system of my country”.

......

But late on Wednesday Pedro Sánchez said that he was cancelling his engagements for the next few days and would give his answer on Monday.

He has written a letter to the Spanish public - 

 Madrid, April 24, 2024
Letter to Citizens
It is not usual for me to address you through a letter. However, the severity of the attacks that my wife and I are receiving, and the need to give a calm response, make me think that this is the best way to express my opinion. I thank you, therefore, for taking a little
of your time to read these lines.
As you may already know, a court in Madrid has opened proceedings of charges against my wife, Begoña Gómez, at the request of a far-right organization called Manos Limpias, to investigate alleged crimes of influence peddling and corruption in business.
Apparently, the judge will call those responsible from two digital newspapers that have been publishing on this matter to testify. In my opinion, they are media with a marked right-wing and ultra-right orientation (El Objectivo and probably OKDiario - Lenox). Logically, Begoña will defend her honour and will collaborate with Justice in everything required to clarify facts that are as scandalous in appearance as they are non-existent.
In effect, the complaint by Manos Limpias is based on alleged information from that constellation of ultraconservative headlines referred to above. I emphasize the 'supposed information' because, after its publication, we have gone to some length in denying the falsehoods expressed at the time while Begoña has undertaken legal actions so that these same digital companies rectify what, we maintain, are spurious information.
This strategy of harassment and demolition has been going on for months. Therefore, I am not surprised by the overacting of Sr. Feijóo (PP leader) and Sr. Abascal (Vox leader). In this outrage which is as serious as it is crude, both are necessary collaborators with the far-right digital 'news' galaxy and the Manos Limpias organization. In fact, it was Mr. Feijóo who reported the case to the Office of Conflicts of Interest, calling for me to be disqualified from holding public office for 5 to 10 years.
The complaint was filed twice by said organization, whose officials were later disqualified by the leadership of both the PP and Vox.
Next, they exploited their conservative majority in the Senate promoting a commission of investigation to, as they say, clarify the facts related to this matter. Logically, judicialization was lacking in the case. This is the step they have just taken.
In short, it is a harassment and demolition operation by land, sea and air to try to weaken me politically and personally by attacking my wife.
I'm not naive. I am aware that Begoña is being denounced not because she has done something illegal, they know there is no case, except for being my wife. As I am also fully aware that the attacks I suffer are not my fault as a person but what I represent: a progressive political option, supported election after election by millions of Spaniards, based on economic progress, social justice and democratic regeneration.
This fight started years ago. First, with the defence that we made of the political autonomy of the organization that best represents a progressive Spain:  the Socialist Party. A fight that we won. Second, after the motion of censure and the successive electoral victories of 2019, the sustained attempt to delegitimise the progressive coalition government in the heat of the ignominious meme of  '¡Que te vote Txapote!'. That couldn't break us either.
The last episode was the general elections of July 23, 2023.
The Spanish people voted overwhelmingly for progress, allowing the return of a progressive coalition government, against the coalition government of Sr. Feijóo and Sr. Abascal that the conservative media and demographic batteries predicted.
Democracy spoke, but the right and the extreme right, again, did not accept the electoral result. They were aware that political attacks would not be enough and now they have crossed the line of respect for the family life of a President of the Government and attacks on his personal life.
Without any embarrassment, Sr. Feijóo and Sr. Abascal, and the interests that they
move, have set in motion what the great Italian writer, Umberto Eco, called "the mud machine". That is, trying to dehumanize and delegitimise their political adversary through accusations that are as scandalous as they are false.
This is my reading of the situation that our beloved country is experiencing: a coalition of
right-wing and ultra-right interests that do not tolerate the reality of Spain, that do not accept the verdict of the polls, and that are willing to spread mud to: first, cover up their obvious corruption scandals and inaction before them; second, hide their total absence of a more political project beyond insults and misinformation; and third, to use any means at their disposal to reach and personally and politically destroy their political adversary. This is all about a coalition of right-wing and far-right interests that extends across the main Western democracies, and to which, I guarantee, I will always respond with reason, truth and education.
At this point, the question I legitimately ask myself is, is it worth all this? Sincerely I don't know. This attack is unprecedented, it is so serious and so gross that I need to stop and reflect with my wife. Many times we forget that behind the politicians there are people And I, it doesn't make me blush to say it, I am a man deeply in love with my wife who suffers with her the impotence of the mud that they spread on her day in and day out. I need to stop and reflect. I urgently need to answer the question of whether it is worth it, despite the mud into which the right and the extreme right try to turn politics into. My doubt is whether I should continue at the head of the Government or resign from this high honour. Despite the caricature that the right and the extreme right in politics and the media have tried to make of me, I have never been attached to the position. Yes I have it to duty, to political commitment and public service. I do not go through positions, I assert the legitimacy of those high responsibilities to transform and advance the country that I love.
All of this leads me to tell you that I will continue working, but that I will cancel my public agenda for a few days so I can reflect and decide which path to take. Next Monday, April 29, I will appear before the media and announce my decision.
Thanks for your time. Sincerely,
Pedro Sanchez

I was reading Laurie Lee, who left the UK at the age of 19 to walk across Spain from Vigo to Almuñecar, a town outside Málaga, back in 1935. All he had with him was a violin, and he lived by begging for his keep.

A peseta, a piece of fruit, a glass of brandy (it was cheap in those days), anything for a merry tune from his fiddle. He managed the trick and wrote his ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’, a book which ends with his rescue by a British naval vessel out of Gibraltar just as the uprising by the Nationalists starts in July 1936: the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

But we were talking about begging. Laurie Lee would play the tunes that worked the best with his audience, and knew to leave a few copper pennies in his open cap pour encourager les autres. He hadn’t caught on to the idea of looking sad and tragic, nor sitting slumped outside a supermarket, nor indeed of having a doggy to hand to awaken the charity of – at least - the British passers-by.

I look at these wretches – they are the same ones, at the same exits to the food-stores until death they do part – and think, if that was me sat on a cushion, staring tragically at my coppers in a plastic box, would they, passing by in my place, leave me a few pennies out of charity? Probably not.

But how to increase the yield? One American I knew told me he would wear a suit when begging, after all, how can you give a small coin to a panhandler dressed like a bank manager?

Another thing for beggars to know – never whip out an iPhone for a bit of quiet surfing. It sends the wrong message to the punters.

My late wife would say that she would only give to those beggars who were doing something. Like standing on their head or playing an instrument (happily, she never saw that Romanian who used to perform ‘Spanish Eyes’ over and over again, being the only tune he’d ever learned to play on the accordion).

Did you ever see the routine with a goat, a step-ladder, a trumpet player and a gypsy? Now that’s worth a few coins I reckon.

My favourite beggar of all is El Llorón, a man who lurks near the Granada cathedral and can turn on the water-works at will. This weeping fellow fires off a series of mournful shrieks as he thrusts his cap at you, evidently far too upset to give you the reason why, and then he joins his mates for a smoke and a laugh around the corner.

Most tiresome are the gypsy ladies – we are still in Granada – who pin a cutting of rosemary onto your shirt ‘for luck’ and then attempt to charge you for the trick.

In the resorts, most of the beggars appear to be Eastern-European. At least, in my local supermarket, each and every exit has its very own pordiosero (and for all I know, there’s one stationed outside the lavatory window).

‘How is Piotr doing over there in Spain?’

‘Yes, he has found a secure position in one of their food-stores’.

I’m sure most of them are nice, except for that bad-tempered fat lady who always shrieks invective at me when I pass her.

But I think I have more time for the tramps; although, come to think of it, I rarely see more of them than just the occasional glimpse of their legs sticking out of a full and indubitably ripe container.

I saw one of our beggars at the check-out the other day, buying three beers with a handful of one and two cent coins which were solemnly counted out by both him and the sales-girl. That fellow’s been sitting outside the door in the same patch for years; I mean, for all I know by now he’s on the town hall’s padrón. Perhaps he’s generally too drunk to stand.

I was next in the queue behind him looking impatient and going ‘tut tut’, while er, holding a six-pack and a bottle of vodka.

The writer Laurie Lee later went back to Spain, crossing over the Pyrenees in 1937 to join the International Brigades and fight on the Republican side. And yes, he took his violin with him.

Sad to say, most of those who live through begging these days don’t appear to have the same urge to give anything back.

We’ve looked at the incipient turismofobia, as a mixture of the usual dislike and enviousness shown towards the apparently wealthy foreign tourists, who sometimes appear to under-appreciate this wonderful country (and are -whoops!- sometimes sick in the garden).

But it’s a great business – they bring money – 13% of the GDP comes from the trippers – and in return, they go home again with empty pockets, a sun-burn and a hangover. Not a bad exchange, all in all.

Not that the trickle-down-system necessarily works in this case for everyone. Some areas get a lot of visitors, and others, of course, don’t. Some folk make some good money from tourism, and most of the rest of society – needless to say – doesn’t. Indeed, all they seem to get is the inconvenience.

The Canary and Balearics have it the worst, because one can only pack so many peas into a jar.

For the islanders, thanks to the huge number of visitors, there’s high demand for a dwelling, a lack of affordable homes on offer, ever-more tourist apartments (they pay better), more and more short-lets, shortages, queues and of course legions of guiris understandably out for a good time… bringing scary news items like ‘Lanzarote on brink of collapse as tourists overwhelm small island and exploit resources’, ‘Ibiza locals living in cars as party island sees rents soar’ and ‘Protesters in the Canary Islands on hunger strike over mass tourism’. And there’s nowhere to go, beyond living in a cave, a hut or a van, or the incredible bother of flying over, daily, from the mainland. We learn that if you really want a cheap place to sleep, then there’s always ‘The most surreal (and precarious) rentals offered in the Canary Islands, from shacks to mattresses in parked cars’.

Not that the problems of high-rents, scarcity and being pushed to the back don’t occur elsewhere. An article in El País is titled ‘A journey through Spain with the victims of voracious tourism: “I can't take it anymore”. Residents from Cádiz, Palma, San Sebastian or Tenerife explain how their lives have worsened due to the rise of tourist apartments, the filth in the streets and the collapse of public and private services’. In Barcelona, someone is telling the local radio, ‘in our block there are 33 ATs (tourist-lets), and there’s noise, dirt and vomit’. The plan is to build more short-term apartments – because they produce better income for the owners (which, as often as not, turns out to be a vulture-fund). One detail in the story is of a resident who saw 28 people come out of a tourist-apartment one morning (after an understandably noisy night). And because they are short-term – maybe just a day or two – they don’t care much if they break or trash something…  

In my local tourist town, you can rent only until May, when the landlord will start looking for some Booking or AirBnb mini-breaks.

So where do you go until the low-season returns?

In Madrid, the national government talks of building more affordable apartment blocks, while threatening to clear out the worst barrios of an excess of ATs.

In metropolitan Valencia, there are twice as many tourist-lets as regular rentals.

In Seville, a local association complains about the bars and restaurants occupying the pavement with their ‘terrazas’, the endless special city-hall ‘events’ designed to bring in visitors (the current Feria de Abril), and of course, the tourist-apartments.

It can be annoying when hotels are allowed full swimming pools, but – due to water restrictions – residents living in community-blocks are in doubt. The good people of Málaga are not amused.

Maybe we could go swim at the hotels – it’s only fair…

Perhaps, say some visionaries, we could create a new tourist destination to ease the pressure on the current ones: a ‘New Ibiza’ in Cantabria.

Don’t laugh, they’ve already bought the land.  

The BBC says that ‘Activists have begun a hunger strike on the island of Tenerife, in protest at what they see as the destructive growth of tourism on the Canary Islands. Protesters are calling for a halt to the construction of a hotel and a beach resort in the south of the island’.

The answers to all this are inevitably to curtail the number of short-term apartment lets and to build more housing to become available for residents. Furthermore, to raise hotel prices (more wealthier tourists, less cheap holidays); apply ‘eco-taxes’ in high density resorts, show some respect towards local residents (priority parking stickers as an obvious example) and – above all – relief of the 90/180 day rule – being those long term tourists who generally own their own home (and in six months will evidently be spending a lot more than the brief visit by a holiday-maker).

Short-term apartments are fine in a rural tourism setting, but not so much in the city.

A graffiti on a wall in Madrid: ‘Fuck BNB, save the Barrio’.

Right now, the season is only just starting…

Is it a case of sore losers, or of opportunities lost? Could it (possibly) be simple belief in their superior powers of management?

Would, in short, Spain be a better place with a conservative/far-right government than the current weak mix-and-match of Pedro Sánchez?

Judge with the examples of the regions of Castilla y León, Valencia, Extremadura and Aragón, where in some cases – inevitably – the tail wags the dog. The PP needs Vox just as the PSOE needs the lefties and the (sometimes rather trying) independence parties, who, in both the Basque Country and in Catalonia, will be faced with the inconvenient complication of being joined at the hip in the national government while at daggers drawn in the two upcoming elections.

This could end in tears as the PSOE will likely become obliged to choose one over the other, which is perhaps why Feijóo is calling for fresh national elections once again.

Even though there’s no doubt but that the Partido Popular (and Vox) will do terribly in both the coming Euskera and Catalunya elections.

Since the Spanish economy is doing well, the opposition must find alternate reasons to harass the Government.

Corruption is a good place to start, but it is a two-edged sword. Right now (as two leading ex-ministers of José María Aznar - Rodrigo Rato and Eduardo Zaplana are coincidentally facing massive prison sentences), they are voting against the Government’s tactic of the amnesty for the Catalonian illegal referendum of 2017 from their majority presence in the Senate.

Bulos, or fake news are a popular alternative. Take poor Begoña Gómez, who gets a pasting from The Objective (a conservative news-site). A recent headline reads: ‘The Government hides the amount of a subsidy in the name of Begoña Gómez’. The photo shows Pedro Sánchez and his wife, Begoña Gómez. Good stuff. The site, however, later admits that the issue is with another woman entirely, who simply shares the same name. The same fake-news headline also made it to Telemadrid (which later, briefly, apologised) and even the floor of the Parliament.

Generally speaking, the conservatives have the support – more or less – of the private media, the judiciary, the church and the military, but not so much of the voters (evidently) and most foreign observers.

Charles Dickens could have been writing about Spain in 2024: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”.

Forgive me for having a laugh at an article provided by the Senior Travel Reporter for the Daily Express about the real lowdown on Spanish food and drink, but she hasn't a clue.

Under the intriguing title 'I live in Spain and there’s a tourist trap that catches out lots of visitors’, we read,

‘A Spanish resident warns British visitors to avoid one of the country's most popular drinks’. We learn that ‘“Sangría is a tourist trap, originally created by some British folk. The authentic and original version is called ‘tinto de verano’'".

"What’s the difference? The original uses actual wine and lemon. Sangría is a soda like Coca Cola and Fanta, so imagine going to Spain and paying 10 euros (£8.58) for a jar of Fanta. This happens everywhere in Spain”’.

Actually…

The clue is in the word tinto. It’s red wine, fizzy lemon or lemonade, with a bit of vermouth if you're lucky, ice and – why not? – fruit. Sangría is about the same animal, but (we fall back on the venerable British recipe) may have some extra booze thrown in. Like brandy, vodka, pear schnapps, or whatever else is gathering dust in the cupboard…  

Google helpfully explains about Spanish Sangría: 'Its origins can betraced to the southern buy drostanolone propionate region of Spain, where it was first used as a refreshing way to endure the summer's heat'.

Which explains the mix-up.

The Express felt it needed to pad out the article, so moved on to Paella, which, we learn, comes from Valencia.

Apparently, "You can find ‘paella’ in cities like Madrid, Barcelona and Seville, but it is a tourist trap and unironically it is 99 percent microwaveable yellow rice, it looks gross".

Luckily for us, “Now, there are some hidden authentic paella restaurants out there outside of Valencia, but like the name suggests, they are hidden and mostly known through word of mouth".

Most Spaniards I know down here in the south call paella, or any other rice-dish cooked in una paellera (a large flat pan over charcoal) as simply un arroz. Good all over, too!

The comments are always worth a look in this most British newspaper. 'Spanish cuisine is revolting, as is sangria', says Panhandle, evidently a shepherd's pie and pint of bitter individual.

But wait, this journey through Spain is not yet complete. The writer introduces us to tapas.

'Seville claims to have invented tapas while octopus is popular in Galicia. In San Sebastian, many bars serve pintxos, small snacks with a range of toppings'.

Well, sure, but the whole point is that you are meant to wash them down with a glass of something cold and damp, like, er, sangría.

We are surrounded by louche pintadas and graffiti, somebody’s initials in blue, black, red or silver spray-paint, squirted furtively but ambitiously over an old door, on a wall, on a shop-front, on the side of a ruined house.

Forget the Banksys and the news-items that show up here and there like ‘Andalucía is home to two of the prettiest street-paintings in the world’ – here, we talk about the jungle of aggressive balloon letters painted at night to dismay the local residents. It’s grim vandalism: a kind of Call of the Worthless. ‘Urban art is an industry, graffiti is just ego’ says a columnist.

The street-artists know that Society has no room for them, that there’ll be no chance for them to be remembered, raised, honoured or respected. Theirs is the sour realisation that they are the detritus of modern-life.

Have you seen the pictures of the underground trains in Barcelona? Cohorts of feeble-minded nitwits are out every night, spray-cans at the ready. Did you know, it cost the city 11,5 million euros to repair them last year?

Did you see the old ruin covered in competing letrasets near the motorway, or the besmirched shutters in front of the entrance to the bar that closed down last year, or the ruined and unreadable street-signs or that odd message on the bridge (how on earth did they get up there, anyway?). What about the daubed political comments, crossed out by opposing idiots who get their ideals from comic-books? Will my vote change because I suddenly see a Pedro Xanche maricón inked onto a wall?

The offensive doodle must either be removed (I saw a can in my local Chinese shop which claims that it will lift it) or painted over by either the owner or the council. Why bother? It’ll probably be back tomorrow.

One answer is to employ municipal graffiti-removers – pay them with a one euro surcharge applied on all spray-paint sold in the shops.

The town hall is busy planting trees, gussying up the fancy buildings and spending a fortune on tourist campaigns, while the secret hoards of scribblers are out night after night befouling the walls and alleyways (preferably where these idiots can’t be seen, or denounced, or arrested).

It gets worse. There’s a new phenomenon in Spain called el turismo vandalico, where foreign tourists come here to paint. Not with watercolours, but with spray-cans. Tenerife is particularly punished with this kind of visitor.

A book in the Valencian language says that it is ‘…all about our popular culture, which - among other things - helps to understand how those graffiti that emerged as a spontaneous countercultural outbreak having evolved from the primary scream to today’s sophistication…’.

Yer, right on. That’s no doubt how Rembrandt started too.

The defacement lies in its unstated threat. We are out there.  Vandalism isn’t just paint-spray on a shop-front. In its more extreme moments, it can be worse: where one paints some crap on a castle wall, or gouges out one’s initials on a prehistoric relic, or cuts down a famous ancient tree.

The message is: I may not be going anywhere, but I’m here nonetheless.

There comes a time, perhaps, when your Spanish might be described as being pretty damn good. You can read the instructions, the newspaper and the nice letter from the power company, and you can understand the news on the TV – understand the words, that is, if not the context.

The context, because the background is all important. We must grasp the culture to know what’s going on, and indeed, why it’s going on. Take a course in Spanish politics, history, geography and art. Get a Spanish companion and go together to a wedding or a matanza – a pig killing. Go to the football game. Join the local train spotters group. Speak loudly and often.

But let’s look at a rarely mentioned corner of the pronunciation jungle. You have mastered the jota and you can roll your rr more or less, but how do you pronounce foreign words in Spanish?

Answer: as a Spaniard would.

Let’s start with a drink – a soda pop. There’s Sprite (pronounced espry), there’s 7Up (siete oop, maybe? No, they’ll just call it seben), Pepsi Cola is pesi and then there’s Schweppes (no one can pronounce that in any language, but in Spanish it’s just called eshwehs) and thus, to no one’s great surprise, we all drink La Casera.

Do you see the difficulty?

Some foreign place-names have been spanishified. 

There’s Londres for London, Edimburgo up in Scotland, and (for some reason) Cornualles for Cornwall. But if you go to Middle Wallop, then you are in for a treat. It’s pronounced Mid.del gualop. Wolverhampton becomes Guolberhanton. For Heathrow, you drop the second h. Liverpool has a b. 

As for Worcestershire, don’t even try.

Now me, I’m from Norfolk, and luckily, that’s more or less the way you would say it if you were talking in Spanish.

It’s all about communication of course; saying it in a way that the listener will understand. After all, we are in espain.

Oh, and by the way, jappy easter.

(Pido disculpas a él que se siente ofendido por lo anterior)

 It's been a tough few months recently for the country - with protests of one sort or another receiving coverage in the national newspapers.

A long-term protest is the one currently going on outside the head offices of the PSOE, the ruling government party which is the socialist party. Those to the right, the PP and the Vox, agree on one point, that everyone else in Spain is not only wrong, but shamefully so. 

Thus inspired, they wrap themselves in the Spanish flag - it's odd how national flags these days only belong to the far-right - and get on down to the Calle Ferraz in Madrid for some good ol'-fashioned protestin'. Maybe burn the president in effigy or howl some appropriate insults. The police will likely turn a blind eye (Madrid is a conservative city) and the media will be there. 

What with the tractors all driving through the city, lovingly decorated once again with Spanish flags (the agricultural workers who really do all of the picking, wrapping and dodging work inspectors will have stayed home); the angry protests outside the headquarters of the smellysocks; the populists banging on in their heavily subsidised media (Madrid spends 27 million this year on 'institutional advertising' for friendly newspapers and TV channels) and the current issues with the regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Madrid is as usual the centre of attention in Spain.  

But let us move our attention to another city, usually (if not currently) in the hands of the left: Valencia. There, the fallas have just finished. The fallas are a week-long festival with lots of music, fireworks and a tradition of comic papier-mâché models which will be judged and them, with one saved for posterity, thrown into the flames. It's like we read it in Gormenghast, with the Hall of the Bright Carvers. 

But not every model - they are called ninots - are destroyed, and one must be saved. My own favourite this year is the old lady with the sun-glasses and the Spanish flag.

Now, where have I seen her before?

If we can just play ‘catch-up’ here for a moment, know that there are two sides in the Cortes, the Spanish parliament. Following the election last summer, the PP took the most seats, but wound up with a minority that even an alliance with the far-right Vox wasn’t quite enough – just four votes short – to get them into power. Then the second party in number of deputies, the PSOE, took the opportunity to get all of the other groups, the briefly united left (or far-left), plus the nationalists and the Catalonian secessionists, to agree to vote in Pedro Sánchez as president. Only, the secessionists, the Junts per Catalunya (and to a lesser degree, the ERC), said they would pull out unless an amnesty over the independence events (and bogus referendum) of 2017 were shelved. All forgiven and forgotten.

Says the Financial Times here: ‘Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has broken a parliamentary deadlock by striking a fresh amnesty deal with Catalan separatists aimed at protecting them from terrorism charges. A neat move, taking advantage of an EU definition of ‘terrorism’ narrower than Spain’s’. The PP had hoped to find support for their efforts against the amnesty from the European Commission for Democracy through Law (known as The Venice Commission) but the opinion from this body is that amnesties are acceptable in a democracy, thus stymying the efforts of the Spanish conservatives to weaken the government and even cause fresh (and likely winnable) elections.

“Thank you to the Popular Party and the Senate for requesting this report. Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños, said last week with a smile on his face. The director of elDiario.es describes the PP as being ‘victims of their own propaganda’ here.

Pedro Sánchez reacted to the news during an official visit to Chile by saying that the current legislation will now last the full four years – as elements of the judiciary continue to seek ways to bring the edifice tumbling down.

The exiled leader of Junts Carles Puigdemont, living peacefully enough in Belgium, ‘celebrated the outcome with a tweet in which he thanked the PSOE for its “willingness”, but also announced that he has no intention of stopping there. “Now, self-determination. We have every right to continue the independence process”, he crowed. The amnesty (passed in a vote on Thursday), will now be slowed down (but not stopped) by the PP-controlled Senate before passing into law somewhere in late May or June.

A protest was held in Madrid on Sunday against the amnesty. The PP and Vox were both at the event. Many Spanish flags were waved by the protestors, as they do.

The next important subject was to be the budget for 2024, but this has now been dropped following the surprise collapse of the Catalonian regional governmnet and the announcement of fresh elections there for May 12. Changes and rivalries from the Calalonian politicians in Madrid would make a national 2024 budget difficult to pass.

Other proposals for this legislation include a ban on prostitution and the recognition of Palestine as a country.

…

The lesson is that a small party with just seven deputies has managed to hold to ransom the government of a modern democracy. But what would have been the price to pay, we wonder, if the Partido Popular had have won the summer elections with the help of Vox?

For example, the far-right Voxers wants to ban all nationalist parties.

It looks like we might get a clue of how this could have played following the results this Sunday in Portugal with a hung-parliament and the far-right Chega taking third place.

There’s a major bookshop in our local city, and I’ve dropped by there a few times – either to buy a novel in Spanish (which I can read, if sometimes a bit slowly), or one in English from their foreign-language nook downstairs. Three or four shelves in English, plus a few books scattered in there in German – hey, it’s all foreign, right?

The spines on Spanish books are always printed upside-down which means that the usual book-stocker employee, unaware that this peculiar custom has yet to emigrate beyond the Pyrenees, will put the English (and German) books on the shelf the wrong-side-up so as to match the other shelves upstairs. Then along comes a Brit and pulls a few out to scope the back-cover and before you know it, the foreign books are higgledy-piggledy, which means, when I come along for a spot of browsing, I have to throw my head from one side to the other, wrenching my neck, to glom the offers on display.

At twelve euros a pop or maybe more, they ain’t cheap, neither.

So, in the Brit community fifty miles to the north, there’s a few charity shops that sell books.

The Brits will volunteer to run these shops, collecting funds for some Noble Cause (dogs and cats, usually – they haven’t yet run to helping the Palestinians).

The charity shops work on stuff being brought around and kindly donated.

Often after a local funeral.

Books are considered as a filler, I suppose, as they are usually sold at six for a shilling. Which is fine by me. See the difference here? One book at twelve euros in the city, versus seventy two charity books in guiriville for the same price. I mean, if I get half-way through and decide that it’s tripe, then I’m down by fifteen cents.

So the other night, I am lying in bed in the place I’m looking after, a country-home. Nice, very quiet, lots of trees and birdies. Reading some rubbish about a pretty detective who rides a Ducati through the worst streets of Washington (I do love to travel), I was interrupted by a large rat galloping across the bed and disappearing under the wardrobe.

So the next day, I went to buy some poison. A box with a dozen blue cubes of some dreadful stuff that disagrees with rats and I leave one on the kitchen counter, and returned to my detective, now in bed with her lawyer.

The next day, the poison had gone. But, you know, judging by some evidence in the fruit bowl, the rat hadn’t.

Or maybe there were two rats. I put another cube out.

The following day, the second cube had gone, but someone had got into the rice crispies.

I put out a third cube, put everything edible in a steel case with a combination lock, and returned to my pile of books.

And so, Best Beloved, every day and until the box was empty, the daily poison has been taken away from its place in the kitchen. Seems I either had a very strong rat on my hands, or I was doing the Devil’s Work and killing the babies living in some hitherto undiscovered hole.

I found one possible lair under the wardrobe and wedged the detective and her motorbike in it. It was about time she did something useful.

Today, a friend gave me a humane rat-trap. You leave a chunk of cheese within, the trapdoor goes *clunk* and you take him outside and toss him out in the campo a few kilometres from home. That’s the theory, anyhow.

I also bought a box of strychnine this morning, just in case