Spanish Shilling

The terrible fires that have burned some 400,000 hectares (about 1,550 square miles) are now extinguished thanks to some sterling work by the firefighters, with help from other regions and even other European countries. Bravo! Fierce rain also made a welcome but slightly late arrival in the north over the weekend.

Bringing the danger home to my corner of Spain, our nearby municipality of Lubrín (Almería) lit up the sky on Thursday last week as 400 hectares burned in a scrub fire.

We saw those large yellow water-planes repeatedly flying over us to load in the Garrucha harbour. All very scary.

Fire-prevention is the key lesson to be learned. In other times, the country-folk would clean out the mountains (if nothing else, at least for firewood). Goat-herders and hunters would be present, helping in their different ways.

Now everyone has moved to the cities: better jobs, more nightlife and a Corte Inglés for that shopping thrill. A quote from a more substantial organ than my humble newsletter: ‘…the exodus of farmworkers to cities in recent decades "has created vast areas of flammable scrub on abandoned land"’.

The PP leader Feijóo feels that the answer to the fires in Spain lies in putting ankle-bracelets on every person that would feature on a proposed list of registered arsonists. The more likely cause, global warming, is still a step too far for conservatives (a bit like the school shootings in America: it’s pretty damn obviously the availability of guns and not the video games). From El Mundo, we read that a proposed deal by Sánchez to form a united front against national disasters has flown too close to the sun: ‘The PSOE and the PP dismiss the possibility of a State Pact on climate change to prevent wildfires. Sánchez's party accuses the Partido Popular of "institutional disloyalty," while Feijóo's party criticizes the government for using the "wild card" of climate change to "evade responsibility"’.

How anything and everything in Spain is political; and Feijóo’s only driving interest is to somehow make it to the top before he is defenestrated by those bunching up behind him (Ayuso, Moreno, maybe Mañueco and others). 

The larger fires occurred in three regions – all controlled by the PP. These were Castilla y León, Galicia and Extremadura. Apparently, during the winter season, none of their agents managed to participate in the Government’s working group to define the inventory of firefighting resources, nor did they attend any of the eight meetings with Civil Protection last year, where the number of available resources must be detailed for coordination of their use in emergencies’.  The idea was – let the central government handle it, until the first fire roared into life.  

So now, as the political season returns, the usual angry (and largely pointless) fighting will return to the Spanish parliament.

In the hope that the building’s fire extinguishers have been checked.

My Godfather Andrew Fountaine was an interesting man. He lived in a giant house (in Spain, it would be called un palacio) in the middle of the Norfolk countryside called Narford Hall. It had 52 bedrooms and a private chapel reserved for Henry VIII (when he happened to be in the neighbourhood). Andrew was known locally as being bitterly against fox hunting, and he would empty a shotgun in the general direction of anyone he saw on his estate wearing red and riding a horse. After the War, Andrew – something of a Mosleyite – went into politics but ‘…exiled from the Conservative Party prior to the 1950 general election, Fountaine, standing for a new party, the National Front, fell just 361 votes short of being returned to Westminster. He would remain a prime mover in the NF cause throughout the 1960s and ’70s – ‘the movement’s moneybags to a large degree’ – losing more elections along the way…’

He wasn’t much of a godfather, truth to say. I don’t think he ever passed me a single cheque drawn on Coutts.

There’s a ringing quote from Andrew in the 1948 Conservative conference where he denounced the Labour Party as consisting of "semi-alien mongrels and hermaphrodite communists".

He told my mother (she was a cousin of his) that his party didn’t need or want the usual suspects – Blacks, Homosexuals, Jews (although they seem to favour Israel in these interesting times), Women (their place is in the home), Intellectuals (always asking difficult questions) and any Aristocrats (present company excluded). No, he said, we want the down-trodden, the poorly educated, the fearful and the (beery) flag-wavers.

A generation or two later, the British have Brexit, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.

These days, here in Spain, the equivalent to this collection of extremists is the Vox party and their leader Santiago Abascal (he often dresses up in military outfits, presumably for the sake of it). He and many of his circle came from the Spanish conservative party, the PP.

I was having dinner the other night with a conservative friend with ties to the Establishment in Madrid, and he says that the apparent 15% approval that Vox enjoys is in fact badly understated; in fact, the latest poll finds them with 19% favour. Since then, they’ve squabbled with the Catholic Church and been found to have received a second tranche of money from a Hungarian bank.

Across Europe we have these hate groups, politically linked in every way except for the detail on the flag, while being strongly supported and financed by the Russians and their allies. In England, there’s currently an (embarrassing) George Cross flag-waving anti-immigrant campaign. Here we have the Vox politicians attempting to disallow Muslim prayer meetings.

If you see someone with a Spanish flag wristband, that’ll be a Voxxer, so don’t ask them about Franco. It also leads the question – can you have a national flag without being a Nationalist? Unless it’s the season of the World Cup, then evidently not.

Social Media has been kind to Vox (extreme posts often attract more attention that the softer ones, as Donald Trump would tell you), while several eccentric groups such as Abogados Cristianos, Hazte Oir and Manos Limpias have all helped to put a spoke in the lefty government’s wheels, and then there are several news outlets which are heavily subsidised by the far-right who print what they’re told – OKDiario, The Objective and EDATV being examples...

It may be too soon to fear a Vox government, but they would likely enter through the back door in an alliance with the Partido Popular (the party under Feijóo’s control could never earn a majority). Expect lots of flags.

Perhaps I’ll be able to dine out with my Andrew Fountaine stories.

The PP and Vox: a likely case of the tail wagging the dog.

I was looking at my cell phone on Saturday, and it said: ‘Higher temperature is expected tomorrow’. I looked again and it said 40ºC. Forty degrees is higher than my blood temperature. Then it added, lows of 28ºC during the night. Sticky!

Mojácar where I live is said to have an agreeable microclimate. It’s not as hot as much of Spain in the summer, and it never snows here in the winter.

We had one bad fire back in 2009, which burned a couple of thousand hectares between Mojácar and next-door Turre, including my old farmhouse (the house survived but all the trees and garden went, and I had the terrible experience of seeing little birds flying and abruptly turning into puffs of flame).

The fire comes so fast, so fast, that people can get caught and they can die. That day, the police drove by with a megaphone – ‘Get out now!’ We grabbed the dog, and we drove down into the rambla, the dry riverbed.

People don’t forget a bad fire: the fear and doubts will remain long afterwards.

Right now, many thousands of people are experiencing this (and much worse). There are huge fires burning across the north-west of Spain in particular. On Wednesday, the afternoon TV news said 400,000 hectares have so far been burnt this year (as against 47,000Ha in all of 2024), particularly in Galicia, Castilla y León, Extremadura and Asturias. Just Galicia alone has already overcome the terrible wave of fires in 2017: by Monday morning, the blaze had already devoured 63,000 hectares there. To combat the flames, the Government has maintained a large deployment of more than 3,400 soldiers and 450 resources, which have been joined, among others, by air resources and BRIF helicopter-borne brigades of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, with 600 personnel, and more than 5,000 Guardia Civiles and 350 National Police officers. Furthermore, Pedro Sánchez pledged on Sunday to forge a ‘national pact’ to confront the climate crisis during a visit to the wildfire-ravaged region of Galicia.

Spain is now in its third consecutive week of heat alerts, with fires still burning in the northwest and western provinces. Military units remain on the ground to support exhausted fire crews, while France and Italy have dispatched water-dropping aircraft to an air base near Salamanca (Castilla y León) to aid the response. On Monday, we read that ‘Spain accepts help from several European countries to help tackle the nineteen active forest fires ravaging the country. Firefighting reinforcements from Germany, Slovakia and the Netherlands will be added to those already provided by Italy and France’.

Even so, we read of ‘dangerous and uncontrolled fires’, with not enough help, or maybe none at all. A UME (army) captain acknowledges the lack of resources to fight the fires: "We are under terrible pressure", he says.

Fires will eventually die down, as the fire-fighters gain control, or simply as the wind turns, or even when there’s nothing left to burn. But until then, there is devastation, loss of life, loss of animals, homes and businesses. Over the weekend, there were reports of major fires with far too little help as the services were badly stretched, and of villagers being told to wear wet face-masks and to stay in their homes.

We read of global warming, and we worry if things will get even worse next summer. But whether one considers this as probable, or as a story cooked up by doomsayers, various hoaxes (bulos) can be found everywhere, from irresponsible news-outlets to social media. The main ones are: ‘There is an organized criminal network operating behind the fires’ (if intentional, they will come from simple acts of arson).

‘They want to reclassify the burned lands thanks to the reform of the Forestry Law’ (burned areas may not be rezoned as urban for 20 years).

‘Penalties must be increased to stop the fires’ (currently, you can get up to 20 years in prison, but only 9% of firebugs are apprehended).

‘Arsonists are primarily responsible’ (under 10% of fires are wilful).

‘The fires are intentional; climate change has nothing to do with it’ (hot summers dry out the undergrowth).

‘Protected areas burn more than other areas left to nature’ (This depends on where the fire starts, not where it ends up).

One way or another, it will take decades to repair the burnt forests – and perhaps some of the villages and homes and stables will be gone forever.

So, whose job is it to finance the fire-stations, pay for the airplanes and send out the firefighters? The answer (and the politics) is that it falls on the regional governments. ‘It is often pointed out that summer fires are avoided in winter, when clean-up and preparation activities are carried out to hinder the easy spread of fires’. Short of a national emergency.

And thus, we come to the politics.

‘…The outcry comes after Feijóo accused Sánchez of not having activated "vigilance in Spain's forests and mountains" in time before the risk season began. He also blamed him for the fires that began ravaging Andalucía, Castilla and León, Galicia, and Madrid (all PP fiefdoms)’. Público quotes Pablo Fernández (Podemos) who says ‘The PP is only clear about the regional powers to lower taxes for the wealthy, and to privatize public services. In the other areas, it tries to pass the buck, as is the case with forest fire prevention and extinction, which falls under the jurisdiction of the regional governments’. Another source agrees – ‘From extreme denialism to cuts in fire prevention: the political debate on the climate emergency’. One report tells of how a bulldozer was moved 17 kilometres from its fire extinguishing job to become the backdrop to a speech from Feijóo and the regional president for Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, in Palacios del Sil (León). The vecinos were understandably not amused.  

Firefighters are often poorly paid, or have temporary jobs, or (as in Madrid) are on strike (they’ve agreed to return to work until the emergency is over)…

And still Spain (and next door Portugal) burns.

In Jumilla (Murcia) – a town 110kms north of Torre Pacheco (wiki) – a ban on religious gatherings in public sports centres has sparked criticism and accusations of Islamophobia. The ban, initially proposed by the far-right Vox party, was recently approved by the coalition (PP/Vox) in the Jumilla town hall. This decision affects the local Muslim community, who traditionally use the sports centres for religious celebrations. The ban is seen as a violation of the Spanish constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and worship (Google IA). The Guardian here says: ‘Outrage as Spanish town bans Muslim religious festivals from public spaces’.

Antena3 has: ‘The Muslim community's indignation at the ban in Jumilla: "It's very dangerous here’". The city council of this Murcian town has decided to prohibit its Muslim residents from celebrating festivals such as the End of Ramadan or the Feast of the Lamb in the municipal sports centre’.

‘Feijóo's PP avoids questioning the termination of the Islamic events it approved in Jumilla: "It is unacceptable that we are being presented as a xenophobic party"’. elDiario.es here.

The Partido Popular stands alone in its anti-Muslim crusade: neither the Church nor the right-wing media support Génova (PP headquarters in Madrid). From the Episcopal Conference (the Catholic authority in España) to media outlets aligned with Génova, they have turned their backs on the PP's argument regarding the controversy concentrated in Jumilla. El Plural here.

‘Vox leader Santiago Abascal calls for "protection" of public spaces against "practices alien to Spanish culture" and demands a ban on the veil’, says 20Minutos here. 

From El País here (with video): ‘Abascal attacks the bishops over Jumilla: "I don't know if their position is due to the public revenue they receive or the cases of paedophilia." The Vox leader responds to the Episcopal Conference's statement in support of the Muslim community with an unprecedented criticism of "part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy"’.

From Información here: Santiago Abascal's obsession with Al-Andalus and hatred as a profitable electoral weapon. This is how Vox deploys the far-right playbook that has been so successful in many European democracies’.

‘The Prosecutor's Office opens proceedings for alleged hate crimes against the leader of Vox in Murcia. It has opened a pre-trial investigation against José Ángel Antelo for the statements he made during a public appearance on July 12, 2025, in Cartagena, regarding the violent incidents that erupted after a North African man allegedly attacked a 68-year-old resident of Torre Pacheco’. From elDiario.es here.

‘Jumilla business owners offer their facilities to the Muslim community for prayers. "They ban us from the soccer field for two festivals a year; it doesn't make sense," explains Lancinha, an African migrant, sadly’. An item from La Verdad here. From the same source: ‘"We should be more concerned with how we live, not where we pray". Ana López and her brother, farmers from Jumilla, employ dozens of immigrants to harvest their fruit’.

On Monday, the Government challenged the agreement prohibiting Muslim prayers in Jumilla's sports centres. The summons, presented by the Executive Delegate in Murcia and coordinated with the Ministries of Justice and Territorial Policy, maintains that the regulations allow the use of the sports centre for sociocultural activities, and therefore considers that "the objective reasons given are unfounded". elDiario.es has the story. ‘The Government gives Jumilla council one-month deadline to reverse its Islamic prayer ban in municipal facilities’ says The Olive Press here.

…

‘A Francoist group registered as a legal party mocks the death of Sumar leader Yolanda Díaz's father. El Movimiento Católico Español includes the name of the historic trade unionist Suso Díaz, who died on July 8, in a list published on its official Telegram channel under the title "cosecha rojiprogre (red harvest)"’. The story at Público here.

Spain’s economy is the envy of Europe, but the plight of its strawberry pickers tells another story says The Guardian here. Grim reading.

Some notes on Spain found on the web:

Tell them this: Spain cannot be understood without its 800 years of Arab presence (711-1492). During that period, Al-Andalus was a cultural and scientific melting pot that left an indelible mark:

• Innovations in agriculture, architecture, and medicine.

• Advances in mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.

• Hydraulic infrastructure that is still used today.

• Cities like Córdoba, Granada, and Seville flourished as global centres of knowledge and trade.

This heritage reminds us that we are a multicultural country by nature.

Today, in the 21st century, Spain has more than 2.6 million foreign workers paying into Social Security.

However, a large proportion of them—and many Spaniards as well—work in precarious jobs:

• Long hours with low wages.

• High temporary and hourly contracts.

• Sectors such as hospitality, agriculture, and care, essential to the country, remain under-recognized.

Let's think about it:

Centuries ago, the arrival of other cultures boosted the economic, cultural, and scientific development of the peninsula.

Today, however, we still fail to tap into the full potential of those who come to work, build, and contribute.

Spain grew thanks to this mix. History shows that combining cultures improves the future.

Sat in the car at the airport, doing a swing past the guards every so and along so as not to get stuck in the expensive park and queue to pay and lug the suitcases across and up the steps. It’s worse inside with huge hangers full of marble and Germans. I park on the flowerbed for a piece. My old mate and his companion arrive. The girl looks nice. I help haul the suitcases. We leave with the windows down and papers blowing around and out. No air-con in this old car.

With friends staying you want to show them around and impress. That’s right. It’s too early though. I was once in the airport bar having a drink, you know as one does, and Dennis Hopper came in, so I pretended I didn’t know who he was then we bought each other beers and stuff, and laughed at the girls, then it turned out it wasn’t him anyway.

Right, come on, they’re a lot cheaper just down the road here than they are on the coast and, frankly, the company is nicer.

Sandwiched between a tour-bus and a cement truck, we pull off the road at the first opportunity. A few houses stand around, looking unconcerned. The car cools down over another flowerbed, this one rather tatty, as we enter a building through an enormous barn-door. We’ll have a couple of beers and tapas. I’m all knowing as the host; role-playing as a tour-guide with witty answers to all the queries.

‘…That’s right, donkeys!’

Some blond fellow watches us from the far end of the bar. He probably works down at the nearby cowboy town film-set. A young girl with a bruised face works the beers and the customers. The blond looks like he wants to start something. The foreign residents here have an easy way to measure themselves against each other: how long you bin living here? You must watch their eyes when you face up for this one. It’s a kind of pissing contest where there can only be one winner.

After better than fifty years man and boy, I try and avoid this, as the loser can get sore.

My friends are looking at the sad range of pickled entrails lying under the glass counter.

‘Sí, una ronda de cañas. ¡Oiga!’ The little barmaid brings the drinks and goes ‘t’ree beer?’ and I’m deflating like a spare tyre on a Renault. Kinda place is this anyway? ‘Thank you, dear child. And where are you from?’

Rumania. Well, I’ll be buggered. All these years living here, trying to blend in with the locals and to pick up a few words of various languages as one does, and do you know, I couldn’t even say in her gibberish: ‘I am a secret policeman, where is your sister?’

A Russian friend had been telling me about his work permit and the paperwork he’d given in. He’d prepared and written up the document himself on a sheet from a Saint Petersburg cigarette company with fancy headed paper and had covered it with stamps made with ceiling wax and a melted metal top from a Chivas Regal bottle.

We need people like this in Spain.

By now, we’re into some of those beers that come in dark glass bottles and feeling the kick. The blond fellow has joined us. It’s too hot to take an attitude.

From the terrace you can see a piece of a wide, sandy riverbed. It was here that they shot the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. Well, a small piece of it. A Welshman, cashiered from the Horse Guards, once told me the story of how the producer, Sam Spiegel, had obtained a thousand horses and camels to attack the papier mâché town of Aqaba on the Carboneras coast. The Welshman led the charge dressed in suitable togs but for some reason, with no saddle. ‘One mistake and I would have been trampled to death’ said the Welshman sadly as I solicitously bought him another drink. It is told that, after the single take was successfully filmed, they asked Mr Spiegel what was to be done with the animals. He answered laconically: ‘Give the horses to the gypsies and shoot all the camels.’

The whole bloody lot. Some reward for being in an Oscar film.

My friend notices that the bar has a sign to say that This Establishement has Complaining Sheets. We order a few to take away with us.

A man in a string vest comes through a door behind the bar. He’s scratching himself with a kind of reserved enthusiasm. ‘You boys look like you would fit in perfectly in Mojácar. You ever been there?’

It’s about an hour’s driving to get to my place. I reckon it’s going to take us a little longer.

I bought my first car from a dealer in Almería. I was eighteen and had recently (that morning, probably) passed the driving test in Huercal Overa. The car was a kind of old Renault van called a 4F with the push-pull gears but fitted with an Ondine engine rather than the usual 4L couchez-avec egg-beater. This meant that the old girl could thunder along at a rather better speed than suggested by the body and was just the ticket for me. The passenger seat was removable; it merely hooked in at the front, so it offered a rather nasty surprise to anyone sat next to me when I stepped on the brake, but with the seat parked on the tarmac, I had room to stretch out full length on a thin mattress for a snooze. That’s right: my first vehicle was a camper.

I remember belting one day down the wiggly line on the map laughably called a road which connected Mojácar with Murcia and all points north. In those far-off times, roads went through towns, rather than round them, which meant you could stop for a libation every hour or two. Trucks would work their winkers to let you pass. There were no discernible speed limit and no one took any notice of the signs anyway. There were drain-channels across the road which, if hit with sufficient speed, would cause you to leave a dent in your roof as the car dipped and you didn’t. On this occasion I was approaching Murcia at somewhere over a hundred kph when I saw two cops on the side of the road, just at the point where the road itself dropped about six inches and turned into a rutted track. No warning signs, of course. Spoil the fun. There wasn’t time to slow down nor was I inclined to, as the two grinning policemen waved me past, like fans at the track. I think I broke a kind of automotive long-jump record that day.

The car took me to England in about 1972 on an early adventure in my life, the only time I have ever driven from here-to-there, all the way through to Calais and across the channel. Crossing into France caused me some embarrassment as I stopped at the frontier and whipped out my passport at the desk with a merry ‘Bong-jour’ only to see a small package arc across my line of vision. It was a single and rather elderly prophylactic that I had kept in an inner pocket ‘for emergencies’. To my horror, monsieur le flic saw it as well. ‘Is ze engleesh gentleman goin to defloweur one of our fine French beautees?’ he asked kindly, picking it up and returning it to me. Sadly not.

The front axle of my passion-wagon fell off in Norfolk and a mechanic friend of the family told me that it would cost 50 pounds to repair and that the car wasn’t worth it. Yea, right. So, once fixed, and driving back home, again through France and into Spain, the old Renault van proved him wrong. It lasted another couple of years before I sold it on to the Bédar town hall.

A few years later, a Spanish friend with an odd sense of humour told our family of how he had just bought a strange foreign car: a brand he couldn’t remember (you could only buy Simcas, Renaults, Citroëns and Seats in Spain in those days, peppered vaguely with a few enormous American Dodges and a strange kind of Austin making sure that the British car industry would remain a world power forever). He had left this car, he continued, in Almería, parked on some side-street and the problem was, as he explained to the police, he couldn’t remember where he had left it and, as they attempted to take down some details, he admitted that he had no idea what sort of car it was.

Despite this unforgivable lack of crossing one’s tees and dotting one’s ayes, the car was eventually located and returned to its concerned owner… who promptly sold it to my father. It soon became mine. It was a two-tone Karmann Ghia 1500 Special and easily the worst car ever made.

It had a rear engine hidden under a false boot and a large and empty space in the front, empty, that is, except for some rust and a sack of cement. Without this aid, the front wheels would lose all contact with the road once you got up to about sixty, which may have helped improve my reaction time and general driving skills but must nevertheless be seen as a major design flaw. Sometime along the way, a school-friend came to stay and asked to borrow the car. He seemed a decent sort, and he played a lot of polo. He wanted to go down to Marbella for some amorous reason. I gave him the keys. I have never heard from him or the car since. I hope he’s all right.

I met my fastest and most terrifying car for the first time when wandering around in Madrid and suddenly saw her sat in the window of a second-hand car studio. This was a red Italian super-car, a 1967 Iso Rivolta with a gigantic American Corvette V8 engine in it, making the car capable of breaking the sound barrier. I was about 30 and in the  mood for some muscle, and so I bought it from the suspiciously grateful dealer for a million pesetas.

The car brought me down to Mojácar in a personal record time, helped by not having any brakes at all. It was quite splendid. It turned out that the car had belonged to a political nutter who had shot some left-wing lawyers dead in a famous attack in Madrid in 1977. He obviously wouldn’t be using it for a while. To give you some idea of how fast this luxury four-seater was, the speedo – while unfortunately broken – went up to 300kph.

But that was then, before they invented air-bags, satellite navigation and eight-track. Today I drive an old Mercedes lovingly made in 1984 which, at a top speed of around 100, is a bit slower than I’ve been used to, but it does mean that the traffic cops and those ugly speed trap gizmos on the motorway will leave me alone as I chug effortlessly past.

These days, that’s enough for anyone.

Do you remember ‘the Twinkie Defence’? This was the story of some lunatic who ran into the mayor of San Francisco’s office many years ago and shot several people to death, including Hizzonor. The Californian police, failing for once to shoot the ‘alleged perpetrator of this heinous and unprovoked attack', carted him off to clink instead.

Well, the pesky defence lawyers got hold of him and discovered that he had munched on a couple of cup-cakes before bursting through the doors of City Hall. Their defence was based on this simple meal – the sugar in the cup cakes (or ‘Twinkies’ as the Americans call them) had gone to his head.

Imagine what he might have done if he had eaten an entire box of them.

Here in Spain, traditional cakes – found above all either at the village fiesta or behind glass at the back of a roadside restaurant – are to be seen and admired, but, at least until recently, never eaten. They would vary from the ones created from sugar, flour, lard and some confectioner’s kreme, drizzled with cheap honey, while the better ones might have had a glass of sticky rum splashed over them to make them even more scrumptious…

No, I’m kidding. They were (and are) horrible.

We had to buy one in the pueblo the other day for a child’s birthday. ‘Hapy Birhtday to Jhonahton’ was lovingly picked out in vermillion paste across the top of this monster. Luckily Jonathan isn’t much of a reader and failed to notice the errata. He nevertheless picked up a valuable lesson after finishing his second piece of the confection:
Always sit near the door.

At home, we disagree about cakes. I like a fruit cake prepared several months before, stuffed with cherries and whatever else it is they put in those things and covered with marzipan and icing, while my wife prefers something chocolaty with nuts.

But the Andalusians veer from this, preferring to use oils and lard (that’s to say, rendered animal fat) to butter. The best place to start with genuine local cakes is at the village fiesta where you can admire a range of er, sweet things usually covered in enthusiastic if incautious wasps. Ask for a media-luna – a marvel of the cakemakers' art which is usually designed more for show than for tell.

Other varieties might be tooth-breakingly hard and maybe stuffed with ‘angel hair’, also known as sugared pumpkin mush. The icing will be generous, but free from milk or butter. I think it’s fair to say that the entire cake, built to both look good and to last during the several days of the fiesta, should never be eaten on an empty stomach.

There’s a notorious cake made in the south called Torta de Chicharrones. it’s made with pork-fat, flour, yeast, an egg and small chewy bits which turn out to be chicharrón – pig’s crackling. 

The best time for cakes (apart from during the village fiesta), is the Christmas Season which brings polverones, which are cookies made of crushed almond-dust. The also popular roscones are round cakes made with cream, milk, sponge, with bits of angelica root and other dried fruit and they will follow the erstwhile British custom of the sixpence in the mix by putting a small metal virgin or the representation of one of the three kings, a collectable, somewhere in the confection.

A fashion no doubt introduced by dentists.

In all, Andalucía, under the control of the Moors for many centuries, enjoys something a bit heavier than a sponge cake covered with icing. The usual fillings (which in Morocco or the Middle East can be quite delicious) include dates, nuts, dried fruit and lashings of honey.

But the most likely place to find a cake is with one’s breakfast. We have ‘Napolitanas’ which are buns filled with cream or chocolate. They vary from warm and good to dry and old. You can dip them in your coffee – sometimes, indeed, you are obliged to.

The most popular bun is the ‘Madalena’ which is a simple and rather tasteless sponge scone. Well, spongy anyway. It comes wrapped in plastic. The ‘Cruasán’ is the Spanish croissant, made with pork fat rather than butter. Not very good as a rule, especially when it’s been on the cake-shelf for a couple of days. There are a few brand-name cakes in their eye-catching packets, chocolate Swiss-roll types of things, including a frightening looking pink one called ‘Pantera Rosa’ which I both imagine and hope is banned in the Greater San Francisco area. Lastly, the ever popular and industrial doughnut, the ‘Donut’, which comes in assorted flavours and a truly alarming collection of chemicals, food additives, colourings, flavourings, preservatives and conservatives. Personally, I love ’em.

It's hard to escape the fact that the best places where lumps of sugared sponge-drops are served with your coffee are usually heavily patrolled by diabetic sparrows, destined to die at an early age in a blissful sugar-rush.

As our area has enthusiastically grasped the nettle of the Twenty-first Century, where you can no longer find a simple salad on the menu, or pig n’ chips without an endless complication of sauce and adornment (I had slices of strawberry surrounding my lamb chops the other evening in a Mojácar hostelry), so, too, our coffee shops have improved in the cake department. We have Italian, French and British cakes, scones, pies and bonbons which are a far cry from an earlier age when the aerodynamic ones were prized by discerning customers above all others.

I think that the new trend started with the introduction to Spain of the Italian tiramisu (a soft and chocolaty little number).

The other day, I rounded off my dinner with a delicious ‘Grannie’s Cake’ (‘pastel de la abuela’) – very good it was, although packed with around 1,000 calories.

Cakes, ice cream (delicious in Spain), chocolates and sticky things in plastic cups. I wonder if they have an effect. Perhaps they’re just there to make us fat.

Bédar is a small white village in the high hills of the Sierra de los Filabres, overlooking the wide plain of Los Gallardos, Antas and Turre which is rimmed on the other side by the concurrence of a few descending mountains, the final one covered by the white cubed houses of Mojácar, with the Mediterranean Sea beyond. Bédar was a mining village, peopled in its day by the Moors, and re-discovered by the British in the 1880s when they set about opening up a number of hills between Águilas and Bédar looking for iron, copper, silver and other minerals.

It's so magnificently 'orrible that it's worth a posting here. 

Europa Press tells of this idea to build a truly gigantic metal toro in some strategic location. ‘The Spanish Bullfighting Academy is seeking a municipality to erect a 300-metre bull as a major tourist icon’. Somebody says Guadalajara (since Madrid has already gone with niet).

I wonder if we will all be asked to chip in.

‘It’ll be like the Eiffel Tower of Spain’ say the promoters of the plan.

We have black Soberano bulls dotted along the highways, and I think they are fun to see as I am driving hither and yon (especially yon). But a kind of Angel of the North or Eiffel Tower located - at least in the artist's rendition - on a giant roundabout may be a bit rich.

An iron bull with easily the largest pair of cojones in the world.  

Spain is different. 

It looks like the Partido Popular has – inadvertently – handed a reprieve to the PSOE and their current troubles following the discovery of (yet again) a nest of bad eggs in their own barn.

Recently, we were talking of the abrupt fall of the Socialists’ party organiser Santos Cerdán, after he was found to be taking bribes from some Ibex-35 companies. He’s now in prison awaiting events.

We always knew that the other lot was full of crooks – several still in jail and many others due to attend court in the months to come. Why, the last PP government of Mariano Rajoy fell thanks precisely to corruption.

Conservatives (if you will forgive the generalisation) are known to be more interested in money than they are in helping the underprivileged. We barely raise an eyebrow when one of their politicians is caught with his hand in the till. It’s all part of the game. There’s a difference though, when one of the progressives, the defenders of the workers, a syndicalist, a man of the people (and so on…) pulls a fast one on both his party and his country.

See, that’s not good.

Going back to the Felipe Gonzalez years, the PSOE have had a few ministers in jail (José Barrionuevo and Rafael Vera), or – do you remember the party member from Zaragoza who was promoted to be head of the Guardia Civil, Luis Roldán, and who ended up with a fortune in Switzerland and was forced to make a run for it in 1994, eventually being caught in Bangkok to eventually be jailed for 31 years? Not good. Later, the Andalusian wing of the party was found to be immersed in irregularities – two presidents of the Junta de Andalucía (Chaves and Griñán) plus a handful of others being found guilty in the ERE scandal.

But what of the Partido Popular? Aznar’s government at one time had a few bad eggs for sure: three of his ministers went to jail (Rodrigo Rato, Jaume Matas and Eduardo Zaplana), a couple of others managed to obtain pardons and now, after a secret judicial inquiry lasting several years (sometimes, these things are more secret than others), another minister from those and later times, Cristóbal Montoro, the long-time Minister for Hacienda, has been rumbled.

Montoro, who just a couple of weeks ago was seated up on the podium at the PP’s national congress, was a powerful party apparatchik who was not necessarily liked by his co-religionists: “He did a lot of damage, and now he’s going to do a lot more damage,” a PP council member says mournfully.

Montoro, the finance minister under both Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, now stands accused of the crimes of “bribery, fraud against the Public Administration, malfeasance, influence peddling, prohibited negotiations, business corruption and document falsification” for allegedly favouring, while he was Minister of Finance in Mariano Rajoy's government, gas companies that were clients of the law firm he founded in 2006’.

Along with some other stuff, like re-writing the worst excesses of the PP’s ‘black account’ before it reached the courts in 2020.

The Guardian says: ‘…It is alleged that Montoro established the “economic team”, a lawyer’s office linked to the finance ministry, which took kickbacks from gas and other energy companies in return for favourable government policy. It is further told that between 2008 and 2015 Montoro and 27 others accused, among them senior treasury officials, were paid at least eleven million euros by big energy companies. According to the police investigation led by the judge Rubén Rus, “the economic team received large commissions in return for its capacity to influence legislative and executive powers”’.

Montoro was evidently a big fish in the PP. He has now resigned from the party while maintaining his innocence. Over the weekend, two senior figures in Hacienda, both involved in the Montoro affair, were also dismissed.

In passing – well done the judiciary for keeping this inquiry silent for a full seven years!

The advantage for the PP was already beginning to slip from their fingers, the accusations from the eccentric Judge Peinado against the wife of Pedro Sánchez notwithstanding.

In the months to come, no less than thirty PP scandals will be brought to trial.

‘Public procurement rigging, bribe-taking, illegal urban development plans, influence peddling, irregular financing, even failure to provide assistance and negligent homicides; also the use of reserved funds for paramilitary operations…’ Plus the issues with Isabel Ayuso’s boyfriend (the Court is asking for three years and nine months) and the ongoing inquiry into Carlos Mazón in Valencia regarding his inactivity during the flood last autumn.

With the perhaps unfortunate timing of the release of the Montoro scandal, the aggression from Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been abruptly toned down: ‘Whatever needs to be investigated, let it be investigated’, he tweets.

And lastly, another headache for Feijóo – with a fact-checker reporting ‘Several senior officials from the Feijóo era in Galicia have been charged with corruption despite what the Popular Party leader claims’.

Which brings us to Vox. See, neither the PSOE nor the PP can claim that – unlike Vox – they’ve never had a crooked minister mortally embarrassed by the media filming him (or her) as he is admitted into the Soto de Real prison. Vox is the party that can claim the laurel (apart from the small issues of race, foreigners and so on, plus the current fraud-case against their erstwhile leader in Andalucía Francisco Serrano. The court is asking for eight years).

So, does the fall of Montoro trump the Cerdán scandal?

Better still, should we all be taking an enjoyable summer’s reprieve from politics?

If Pedro Sánchez can hold his government together: that’s the question, and will someone else . one of ours or one of theirs – be abruptly found to have been on the take?

It’s a dirty business, politics, but someone has to do it.