Spanish Shilling

Most of those who arrive here like to read.

We know people who don't, and good luck to them, but as someone says - they only gonna live once, while we will live a thousand lives.The life I'm living at the moment isn't a particularly rewarding one - I'm on the back of a truck, a Hudson Super Six, shuddering slowly along Route 66 on the way to California during the Depression with a couple of families of Okies who were unable to pay their rent on the miserable acres of dust where they had lived raising cotton. The book of course is John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath'. We have good moments and bad moments in our journey along a thousand lives - right now, we've just lost Grandpa.  

Our collection leaned strongly towards tripe, and I remember the sensation of one year was a book called 'Mandingo', which involved a very well-endowed slave and an endless number of southern

daughters. I see it was written in 1957, but our copy, from the publishing house of Pan, would have dated from around 1968 or so.  The author, Kyle Onstott, wrote a few more in a similar vein (as one does, when one hits on a winner) and they all found safe harbour on our shelves.

I've never cared for the TV, and - while I learned Spanish by going to the movies (my first words in castellano were 'hands up!') - I've had to give up on the pictures since they don't make 'em like they used to, you can't smoke, and the local open-air cinema is long closed down: sold to a speculator. 

Five more boxes of books to go through - and I suspect that my daughter has found some more that I thought I had safely hidden up in the attic.

I was walking down the street of our local market town the other day, day-dreaming of the light chores that faced me as I fiddled absently with a shopping list in my shirt pocket, when a car suddenly hooted its horn behind me and practically gave me a heart attack. ‘¡Ehh Tío! What's the hurry?’ I shouted, annoyed.

It's not like there's any room on the pavement for me to walk which is why I understandably choose the street. The pavement is full of carelessly-pruned trees, cracks, holes, dust-bins, ONCE stands, chairs and tables, parked motorcycles, telegraph poles, partly dismantled telephone booths, low flying shop awnings (duck, or lose an eye), an old iron bench, a half-filled skip, prams and trolleys, visitors from the north (who evidently don't know the rules), shop signs, accordion players, traffic directions and postcard stands. Little old people will have taken a wooden chair out of their gloomy ground-floor home to turn it to face their front door, and will be sitting on it grimly ignoring the passers by. Many motorists have parked at least two wheels on the pavement, which can vary arbitrarily in width from several metres wide to the span of a hand. Some flagstones and cornerstones are missing. A dusty square hole suggests a departed tree.

A pavement in Andalucía is rather like the tile skirting in a room: it's there strictly for show.

So there I was, walking down the street, dodging the pedestrians, cars, motorbikes and ice-cream carts when this car honked behind me!

Not that I took any notice.

The cars are double-parked down the High Street, the Calle Mayor, some with their emergency lights on giving the impression that the drivers will soon return. A bus disgorges passengers from the middle of the street while the traffic waits with more or less patience behind. A moped takes to the pavement. Its exhaust pipe appears to be missing.

In front of the bank, work-men are inexplicably painting a new zebra crossing. They will just do half the street (protected by red cones) this morning and perhaps they will return tomorrow to do the rest. Perhaps not. There's a zebra crossing on the other street which was never finished, as if the diligent street-crossing pedestrian will be obliged to give up his object in mid-flow, or perhaps he'll pass obligingly across into another dimension. Like most of the people in the scene, I am only faintly interested in what the painted white stripes are for: a decoration...? a service...? Do children try just to walk on the stripes for good luck?

A family of gypsies is standing on the pavement now, just opposite a zebra crossing. Are they thinking of using it, or is it just a comfortable place to congregate? The traffic hesitates slightly in doubt. But no, it's just a variation of the companionable group standing on a street corner, chatting away agreeably while, inadvertently, breaking the flow.

Who's in a hurry anyway?

Seduced by the white lines, a visitor lurches into the street. Streets are indeed for crossing, nobody disputes this, but the white lines are not there to make you forget to look at the oncoming traffic, or to forgo waving a rolled up newspaper at it. A car pulls to a halt as the visitor heads blindly across the street towards the souvenir shop: the car behind swerves and accelerates past the first one, narrowly missing the opportunity to make the ‘it happened here’ news-page of the provincial daily. The nearby municipal policeman, shocked into inaction, decides it is time to go and have a quiet nip in the pueblo's only English bar. Perhaps he won't have to pay.

I am seated by now at a nearby table under a spreading tree, trying to ignore a panhandling dog who somehow thinks I might share my tapa with him. ‘Bugger off’ I tell him, flapping my face-mask in his direction. ‘Shame’, tuts an oily Englishwoman sat at a sunny table nearby. The dog edges hopefully towards her. It growls at an approaching street vendor clutching several miracle spanner kits and a fishing rod. ‘Looky looky’, mumbles the itinerant merchant disconsolately at the Englishwoman as the dog edges him off. nothing to beat sitting outside and enjoying a drink while watching the world go by. after a while, I leave a couple of euros next to my empty beer glass since I don’t want to go inside again. The owner won’t mind. He's a tiresome Atletí supporter who always has the sports TV on at full blast inside and knows that I don’t like football. Anyway, the Russian girl does the tables.

A wave of horns echoes down the street as the double-parked cars take their inevitable and regular toll. It’s strange how emergency lights are considered as a polite and respectful signal to stop the traffic-flow for a shorter or perhaps longer period. Sometimes, if the horns are insistent enough, the absent driver will erupt out of a shop at a sort of half-waddle-run, apologetic and shrugging helplessly. ‘I wouldn’t have stopped the entire street, you know’, his gesture indicates, ‘but I had to carry out this rather important little negotiation’. As the traffic lets out its collective clutch, it occurs to me that it's a perfect moment to amble across the plaza to the shady side and check out the blind man's lottery results. Money back or try again! A bicycle has been chained to the bench in front of the shoe-shop, slowing the pedestrian traffic down still further. I'm not too judgmental about this, seeing as the bike is mine. I release it from the bench and we slowly walk along the street together towards the port and the prospect of a fish lunch. I’ll do the shopping later. I'm not in any hurry.

I’m not by nature a flashy dresser – I’d have moved to Milano rather than Mojácar if I was – but early this morning I noticed that I needed to give the old shoes a bit of a shine. Well, right after I’d finished scraping the dog mess off them.

The shoes, a clean shirt and all the bits in-between, would be accompanying me a little later to see the bank manager about my overdraft. It seemed like a good investment to make and I certainly didn’t want to leave the wrong kind of deposit on the floor.

So, under the sink in the kitchen for the bottle of Old Mrs Smoker’s Patent shoe-liquid, a small brush and a rag. The brush, the small bottle of Mrs S and… a tee shirt. In fact, under that sink in the kitchen, in that hard to get to cupboard reserved for polish, squeezo and bug-spray, I found a whole nest of tee shirts.

Now, Mrs Lenox likes to keep her memories in photo albums, and we have a camera for this. We also have a shelf packed full of volumes of nostalgia, baby pictures and people grinning whitely at the flash. Whereas I prefer to have my closest moments emblazoned across my chest and following this stored lovingly in my drawer. So I was surprised to see a pile of treasures, old memories, drunken sprees, exotic dancing women and other things that go up to make a gentleman’s life complete, images in cotton rather than film, all stacked under the sink.

‘Ah’, I mourned, as I pulled out the first one, covered in old silver polish and grime, with a few really quite small holes in it, ‘but this one comes from my trip to Mexico’. But worse was to come. My cycle-trip across Britain was next: Land’s End to John of Groats with the ‘Fentiman Flyers’. We had cycled all that way when I was about 34 and could still do that sort of thing, while eating, drinking and smoking along the entire route. It was my only trip I’d ever done in Britain (besides the regular train trip to school in the sixties) and now, all that was left was the old tee-shirt, stained and unloved.

Others followed. A set that I’d printed up myself on the occasion of the first ever Moors and Christians in Mojácar, which like so many traditions around here, is not as old as one might think. I had printed 300, sold about four and the bulk of the remainder were there, under the blasted sink.

Tee shirts are a relatively new invention. They are simply under-vests with a message or picture on them. Plain white ones had become respectable with Marlon Brando and the decorated versions followed along in America in around 1965 and in Europe a few years later. Tee shirts are a way to make a statement which, unlike tattoos, is easily removable at the end of the evening. We have political tee shirts (Vote for me), funny tee shirts (Vote for them), protest tee shirts (Don’t vote for them), nihilist tee shirts (Don’t vote!), existential tee shirts (Why vote?) and explanatory tee shirts (It’s their country, like. Know what I mean?).

Oh, and wet t-shirts (spelt the American way since they are inexplicably more popular in Miami than in Mojácar), which, on reflection, get my vote.

But before these all came along, and these garments were merely white and worn under a shirt, the hippies invented the tie-dye. You took a tee shirt and wrapped a few rubber bands or tied bits of string around chunks of it, maybe sealed a pinch in a plastic bag, all tightly knotted, and put the whole thing into a boiling pot of dye, available for three pesetas in all the better drogerias. Boil for a while, or until your mother came rushing into the kitchen, douse in cold salty water (was it? Or did the salt go into the first pot?), untie the bits of string and, hey presto. A mungy looking mess!

Let your hair grow long, wear some Goulimine beads, sit cross-legged on the floor while picking out the best buds on the cardboard cover of a Santana album (try and do that on a CD), roll a doobie and hope that no one notices your tie-dyed tee shirt came out a bit wonky.

Well, that cultural phenomenon didn’t last long.

But the idea did. The lowly undergarment – less its cousin, the string-vest that only an Englishman could wear – was coming of age. It started to have colour and began to be worn alone. Well, when the weather permitted. It was only a matter of time before someone came up with catchy designs and words. Including endless copies of Che Guevara looking beatific; some very silly ones (‘I’m with stupid’ and ‘My parents went to Albox…’) and a lot, at least around here, in meaningless English sold in the Chinese shops (‘I lovve your drum’). I think my first proper as-we-understand-them-today tee shirt came from a beach-bar night-club called Trader John’s (better known afterwards as ‘the Congo’) a sort of down-market but lots of fun night spot you would never either find or would be allowed to operate these days (Spain having, in my opinion and as far as drinking is concerned, gone to the dogs). It helped make both the club and indeed Mojácar famous. So simple: a logo and the name of the joint. Now, alas, lost.

The next one, traces of which are still reposing, in shreds, under the sink, was another good old and well-loved number which said ‘Relieve Mafeking’. People would come up, you know, with a well-crafted tee shirt. Why I should treasure this one is probably best left to me and my confessor.

I’ve gone though loads of these simple yet decorative garments over the years; sometimes bought but usually acquired free, one way or the other. The latest, stolen I suspect, is a splendid effort. This one will never make its way into the rag-box. It’s an artist's inspiration of what must be Caribbean people dancing away with tom toms and so on, and the catchy phrase ‘Rasta Riddim’ gaily etched above the illustration. Below, it says ‘Peace, Love, Harmony’.
And below that, perhaps as an afterthought, it says 'Mojácar'.

Even the moths wouldn’t mess with this one.

So what are the rules about blurring out faces in press photographs and TV news and documentaries? Are we protecting the innocent, or maybe the guilty? I’m confused. Is it the perpetuators, the criminals and the revolutionaries we shouldn’t see, or the police who catch them, or the innocent parties that happen to be in the picture? When ex-President Aznar flipped the bird the other day at some students who said he was a monster, we were treated in the Spanish press to Aznar, his raised second finger and the students, but not the surprised fellow with the computer-generated re-touch standing next to the truculent politician.

In England, they would have edited the offending digit.

When they remove the prisoners’ faces in those tedious documentaries about life behind bars in Alabama, I can’t help wondering (as I search for the TV control) why they don’t want us to see them. We might recognise them if we were to later bump into them in a bar in Mijas?

This would be a bad thing?

Sometimes – for our benefit and viewing pleasure – children’s faces will be blurred, if we are talking about children, or perhaps we see them modestly just from the waist down, or then again, the children just appear in the photograph, or video, because we were talking about something else. They are children, nothing more, except on news shows when they become victims or, just sometimes, future prisoners in Wandsworth. Conversely, why could we see Jon Venables as a child, but not as an adult?

Are we protecting them from these sex-lunatics we hear about, who will commit foul crimes upon themselves if left to contemplate this photo (but not that one)? So why are we occasionally covering or distorting their faces and why is it the other way round on the American shows? Or is it?

Lawyers, in a word. Don’t get me started.

It gets worse, the producers now blur out bits of the decoration they don’t like. The fellow’s tee-shirt on the Discovery Channel might have a brand-name written on it, or his cap, for Goodness sake (better not swear!). And what did that footballer just do? Heavens-to-Betsy! Blur it out!

Do you remember the fuss with Justin Timberlake revealing one of the boobies from that Jackson girl during the Super Bowl a dozen years ago? Gosh, what an accident. We had already seen the horror and put our hands over the children's innocent faces before the producers at NBC could hit the Red Button. In fact, and thanks to this dreadful incident, now they have a ‘one minute delay’ system on live broadcasts.

And, as I think further, why do we suppress the sound of swearing in Anglo shows, with a LOUD BLEEP to make sure that the viewers will know that the censors and defenders of public morals are ever vigilant? Now they even put a blurry bit over the mouth so we can appreciate the censor’s zeal – unless you, the viewer, happens to be one of those rare people who can read lips closely enough to have the sound turned off (with the added advantage of not being pestered by those irritating BLEEPs), yet is somehow stirred to violence, wrath and the Old Testament by the prospect of a naughty word. If not, let me tell you all about subtitles.

Of course, beyond a previous agreement with the editor, I must abide by the Anglo rules of printing swear-words in my article with an absurd substitution of asterisks with just the first letter appearing before to give clever adults a guide as to what I might mean, yet confuse those children who look forward to my weekly output and would read them all in one go if only the adults ‘ud let them.

Those same kids are now expected to be in bed by 10.00pm as something called a ‘watershed’ is passed at this time. I am sure that they have watched enough ‘grown-ups’ telly’ long before they blossom into discovering the superior diversions of booze, sex and the other manifold attractions of young adulthood. In Spain, at least, the government control on our viewing is considerably more relaxed – and they don’t usually wait until 10.00pm before switching on ‘the better stuff’. In fact here, even some of the adverts are downright risqué. Unfortunately, the European parliament, again concerned about public decency, has recently managed to hold in check quite a bit of Spain and Italy’s more lusty output on the ‘little screen’, no doubt to keep those sweet little kids pure – those that bother to stay in and watch the box. Telly, come to think of it, is now no longer used at all by the eight to eighteen demographic, which prefers the endless attractions of the Internet where, despite the best efforts of Mrs Whitehouse’s continental successor, we can still pretty much find anything we want and, while the lawyers are busy checking their portfolios, download anything we want as well  – at least here in España. All it takes is a Virtual Private Network, a VPN.

Spain has nevertheless picked up a few ideas from the Anglos and will now blur things it doesn’t approve of. Policeman’s faces are often pixelated here and on occasion can sometimes be covered by a sinister looking black balaclava – particularly in the Basque Country – as if the local population would tear them apart if they only knew who it was that was marching their handcuffed second-cousins from their homes during a dawn raid.

So, as the blurry figures from the Sky TV – and, who knows, maybe YouTube – together with the silly expurgated BLEEPs, flicker and echo through the household, what about Hollywood? Have you ever seen a movie with a swear-word and a blurred mouth? No, you haven’t.

You won’t on Spanish TV either – here, they are not afraid of their language. All those expressive four (five and eight) letter words which pepper the idiom are given their full value, not hidden behind those silly asterisks. Honestly, the children don’t mind.

And, whether we can join the dots or not I don’t really know, but there is a lot less crime and disrespect here in Spain than you will find in Britain. Perhaps because the populace isn’t treated entirely like an idiot.