Spanish Shilling

 I saw a billboard today while driving along the main road towards the playa on my way for a swim – it was the local ice-cube company advertising its product and it said: ‘Probably the best ice-cubes in the world’.

I’m pretty sure that a couple of examples from Señor Freezer are rattling around in my iced-tea right now, gently melting and turning my beverage into watery-iced-tea.

Which is doubly refreshing.

Come to think of it, I suppose all the drinks we enjoy are made pretty much from water. Which they are always telling us we must drink lots of. So, are all drinks, essentially, just water with flavouring?

Starting of course with water itself (flavoured with salts and minerals), and finishing, by a circuitous route, with beer, which is after all merely bubbly water with some boiled hops and barley along with a judicious squirt of alcohol (don’t tell the Germans I wrote that). Indeed, the sober answer is this: ‘According to The Brewer's Handbook, most beer contains about 95% water, and the remaining 5% is alcohol. Beer, in short, is mostly water but this is barely noticeable because of the flavour of other ingredients’.

The taste though, whether in beer or in whisky, depends on the water, so a distilled H2O won’t give much taste to the finished product, whereas a nice ‘fresh mountain stream’ might be just the ticket.  

Let’s see. Sweet sticky soda drinks are 90% water (we know what most of the rest is). Milk is about the same. Tomato ketchup is about 70%. Wine has 85% water and soda water is 90%, while sparkling water is 99% made up of our old friend agua, with a bubble or two added to help make us burp.

With all of the above, it’s clear that whatever one drinks (or sloshes on one’s chips), it’s all mainly down to water.

So, and sorry for asking, but why is beer cheaper than water in most bars? And with a free tapa thrown in for good measure!

Of all of these endless libations, only the stuff commercialised by the plastic water-bottle companies has a breakdown of the water and its minerals and salts printed on the label. No beer ever said ‘this brew has calcium, magnesium and sulphates’.

So, what is water?

Well, lessee, it takes two haitches and one oh, or two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. A simple formula we all learned in school.

But with all of the free hydrogen and endless amount of oxygen in gas filling up the space around us – why doesn’t it all club together and turn into water? It’s no doubt just as well that it doesn’t, otherwise I’d be writing this piece while wearing some manly-looking water-wings.

The reason, apparently, is that most of the hydrogen around is already in the water anyway. The other reason is metastability (here if you insist), but I’m sorry I asked now.

Another puzzler about water – if it’s made up of inflammable oxygen and explosive hydrogen – why doesn’t it detonate every now and then?

It would certainly keep us on our toes if it did.

Mind you, you can always nuke it for an interesting reaction. Of course, rather than playing with steam-engines, I boil mine for a nice cup of tea twice a day. Boiling your water is a good idea as it kills anything that shouldn’t be there anyway.

Which I suspect is how we did so well in India.

Returning to the plastic-water-bottling industry (Motto: We do Our Bit for Pollution), an estimated 6,500 million emptied litre water-bottles will be obligingly cast into dustbins or chucked out of car windows or left on the beach or in the countryside this year in Spain (up 3% from last year, says the pwbi proudly). I don’t know how much of that is recycled, the plastic I mean (don’t worry about the water, it will return all by itself).

The good thing about beer (and the reason I drink it) is that it comes in either cans or in bottles made of glass, never plastic. Or better still, on draught.

Although I suppose it’s a pity that they can’t make beer-bottles out of cardboard.

The ice has now dissolved in my drink, adding its own secret chemical make-up to my beverage. I think I’ll chuck the dregs and go and get a brewski from the fridge.

Tourism is doing well again – with around 12% of Spain’s GDP coming from that business. It provides jobs, and income and perhaps some pride for Spaniards in the many cultural, culinary and geographical offers this wonderful country can boast.

Mind you, most of them are here for the sun-burn, the evening boozing and the odd summer romance.

And the endless selfies which are then uploaded to Facebook.

It’s not that we particularly like tourists: the queues, the jibber-jabber, the crowded restaurant, the full parking-lot, the foreigner in the supermarket who is not wearing a tee-shirt and the other one being sick in the municipal gardens – it’s the knowledge that they’re spending lavishly and, better still, that they’ll be gone in a week or two.

Not that all of them spend wisely – some don’t even use our hotels, preferring to doss down with friends or family. Others come along in their camper-vans or maybe rent an apartment from a family who doesn’t even own a hotel.

Contrast this with Residential Tourism – with no promotion, no agency, no ministry, no budget and no wealthy hoteliers to defend it. This form of tourism (of course, it’s not tourism at all, it’s really homesteading) also has a high – if largely unknown – value for Spain. They buy an ice cream or a bottle of lotion or a china ornament. We buy a house and a car and white goods, and we shovel money into the outstretched hands of the lawyers, insurance agents, gestores, doctors and (above all) barmen – all year long.

A couple of years ago, there wasn’t much tourism, thanks to the dreadful pandemic. Maybe next time, it’ll be something as simple as a cheaper offer elsewhere, or a war, or a cholera outbreak, or new visa-requirements, or because Vox won the elections in Spain…

But you know something? We Residential Tourists will remain here and steadily grow in numbers, bringing Spain a massive and reliable income each year.

Perhaps one day somebody will notice.      

Other less damaging birds sit and nest in the higher branches, leaving their droppings all over the washing. Mind you, a scrape with one's fingernail usually repairs any unsightly adornment.

However, in life, nothing is perfect and our pet chicken, Valentina, she of the delicious morning eggs, must join this tale about now.

 

After an enjoyable forage about the garden, and a chase with the puppy through the flower beds, she will rest her feet and gossip with the sparrows while perched on our converted clothes rack. And, if the mood strikes her, she’ll poop.

 

It's a funny thing I suppose. You take some teeshirts and socks and trousers and pillow cases; wash them and hang them on the line, and then you discover that they are far dirtier now than they were when you started.

Without the sun and a soft breeze, the clothes will take a little longer to dry in this location - but at least they'll be perfect, with a delightful hint of perfume à la Mercadona when they're ready to collect.

Following on from the recent municipal elections, several of our new mayors have hiked up their sueldos, their wages, as the first order of business. Whether this shows acuity in their ambition; or that they’ll be working harder than their predecessors and are worth a few extra bob to the tax-payers; or whether (I wonder) if they have to send part of it back to Party HQ:

It’s a cruel thought to suggest that mayors, and their councillors, can expect other forms of income above and beyond the official stipend, paid as always fourteen times a year.

There are, to balance this out, many mayors who take no wage at all – even if some of these might find other ways to make ends meet. I can only guess what these may be – planning permissions on certain bits of land perhaps, or a share in the caja from a new nightclub, or some modest commission on the new street-lighting.   

Perhaps something far more simple: like an old friend of mine, mayor of a small pueblo where I used to live in my twenties, now deceased, who would be taken by the village taxi once a month down to the puticlub in the nearby town, where he was given a rum and coke followed by a jolly visit upstairs, the bill to be sent to the ayuntamiento and no questions asked (not even by his mum).

The councillors too, each with his own department, may find some opportunities, and we wish them well. However, the larder will be bare – beyond the chance of a small official stipend – for those in the opposition.

Many of the new mayors earning an extra dollop from their town halls are from Vox, or maybe the PP, plus we hear of one who comes from the PNV (she upped her annual salary over the outgoing one by a cool 30,000€). And why not. A mayor has many responsibilities and functions, and is the first one to get into trouble when things go wrong. Few of them will climb any higher in politics (and in theory, should return to their old job once they leave office).

In practice, this doesn’t always pan out, as the attractions of real-estate, secret bank accounts in Panama and eating a lot of gamba roja tend to become over the seasons ever more apparent.