Thoughts of Eggcup

The personal attacks people have made on me during the time I have been posting on this site are bewildering and too numerous to recite, but I've had people imagine they know who I am and embellish the details using their vivid imaginations. I've been a 'little old woman,' 'a middle-aged lady' and a man;  I've been told I'm a business failure, I've been castigated for encouraging people to speed and blamed for being a terrible mother, encouraging my son to worm out of traffic fines (my son isn’t old enough to drive). I've been told I'm 'desperate to sell my properties,' and that they're of 'poor quality'... People don't even read what I've written, before jumping in to accuse me of all sorts. This kind of cyber-bullying would be pathetic if it wasn't also dangerous.

And it's made me wonder about what's behind all this nastiness. One thing I've observed is that the cyber bully has to always be right and always have the last word. Often, that last word will be in the form of a personal attack; the equivalent of shouting into someone's face/or going on and on about the issue, until everyone else has walked away. In my experience it is usually, though not exclusively, a male phenomenon and as the bully is usually, again not always, intellectually-challenged, he will add a sexist element; hence the 'accusation' of me being old and a woman - the worst thing a person can be in his small-minded, sexist and ageist world-view.

I have also noticed that the cyber bully can never give up or he will lose face. The victim of his vitriol then has a choice; to lower her or himself to his level or to rise above it. The problem is that if we do not answer every stupid point, bully boy thinks he's won. The only way in which he has really won is by showing himself to be a fool and by driving people away. Sometimes he gets banned from the site if he actually calls a person a name, but quite often he is able to remain by using a more veiled language - for example: 'you don't seem cut out for x,y,z’ [I'm telling you you have a serious failing, which I don't have], or 'you're a very bitter woman' and, today, I had ‘you odd little woman.’

I believe these abusive people may be suffering from a superiority complex; I get told by other landlords, for example, that I am a rubbish one, but they're brilliant at it, and have never had a day's bother. Why this need to portray oneself as infallible?  If the person is male, does he have short man syndrome? Was he bullied at school for something in his appearance or personality? Sometimes, women too show this belief in their superiority; I've got no idea why they do it. Whatever the sex, their anonymity protects them from a reliable psychological analysis.

On the Eye on Spain Forum, a common pattern is that someone (often a new person to the site) asks an innocent question, asking for help and receives a couple of useful suggestions. Then others start to comment and pretty soon the thread 'turns.' It is quite easy to identify the moments when this happens - it's when someone writes something with an edge to it or launches an outright attack on the original poster's character; then other cowards jump in to agree with the bully. The original poster often doesn't know what's hit them. It's a chance for this group of insecure people to attack someone else in order to feel better about themselves.

Unfortunately, this behaviour is not harmless and the pen can be mightier than the sword. I recently read about a University Facebook page being used to 'rate' people students have slept with. When I read the example of what one girl had written about a boy, saying that he thought he was good in bed, but he didn't know what he was doing, I thought, 'What if that was my son when he's older?' He  could kill himself over something like that. There have also been many cases of children as young as 12 committing suicide unable to cope with the shame of what others have said about them. Children and young people are particularly vulnerable. So, when adults in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, behave in a thoroughly distasteful manner on the internet, what hope is there for our young? The irony is that these adults are very often the ones to berate the younger generation for their 'failings.'

Luckily, I'm old enough and wise enough to be able to process this nonsense and not let it affect me for more than an hour or so, if at all. For others it will have a greater impact. People whom you don't know, whom you'll never meet and who are anonymous can lay into you. And they think they have the right.  If no-one challenges them, they carry on, just as the eternal bully does. Little dictators, tapping away in their living rooms or studies, relishing their power to insult and lord it over others.

I have thought for some time about writing on this theme and would like the decent people on the site to make a stand and join together in condemning these personal attacks when they happen. If one person is having a nasty go at someone, then we should report it. The bullies often gang up like a pack of wolves coming in for the kill; so it would be good if the decent members can work together too to eradicate this menace. I suggest that the rule of thumb should be that no-one should address other posters in any way that would not be acceptable in a face-to-face encounter. Some people are like pieces of wood, however, and incapable of empathy, so maybe they talk to people like this in the flesh... That may be so, but it should not be tolerated on a public forum.

Whatever the future holds, it is depressing to witness and/or be on the receiving end and others have retreated from the Forum because of the behaviour of the unruly, 'I'm always right,'' I'll insult you personally if I can't beat you in an argument' brigade. I recently withdrew from the site for a while because of this and have observed others do so. Maybe they could come back (you know who you are) and refuse to be cowed into submission by the ugly element on the internet.  If decent people regularly leave the site in this way, the wolves will be left to take control...

At 8.20 exactly this morning I had the strangest experience in my sleep. I was walking up a street; I’d just stopped at a kiosk and asked for the smallest ice-cream – I felt I couldn’t stomach too much, but was also craving it. The woman handed me one of those little, milky lollies and as I gave her a pound, she kept her hand out, so I had to put more coins in it. I noticed my purse bulging to overflowing with coins. I then went back up the same street – I seemed to be going in circles, revisiting the same spot, when I came across my red carpet bag on the ground, with a pair of reading glasses lying near it.

I had my carpet bag slung cross-ways over my shoulder, so I knew I was entering a weird reality.

‘Here goes,’ I thought and I picked up the glasses – they were real; that was okay. I then went to pick up the bag and that was it. Reality dissolved and I felt an ‘oomph’ swirl through me – like before you vomit – and I lost consciousness. And I woke up. I think I died.

‘I’ve got to write this down,’ I thought, so I got up and opened the bedroom door. There was Ruby, my black Labrador, lying on the landing carpet, looking up at me; something she never does. It honestly felt like she knew I was in danger – sensed or smelt it, and had either come to protect me or to comfort me.

This was a couple of hours ago, but I still feel strange, like I cheated death. And I also think that if death were like that it would be nothing to fear. Just a sudden giving in, collapsing and submitting into a nothingness.

EyeOnSpain is mostly concerned with the experience of British expats in Spain. There is now a reverse phenomenon going on, as more and more Spaniards come to the UK. Maybe they’ll soon set up their own website: OJO SOBRE EL REINO UNIDO?

Anyway, I met one of these young Spaniards this week – he’s going to give our children an hour’s conversation class a week – and after a month of being in the UK he has found nothing apart from this one hour. It was sad to see how grateful he was for this little job: ‘Gracias por las oportunidades,’ he texted (more than ten people had applied, most with experience of teaching children).

This is one of the consequences of what the criminals in Spain who have stolen vast sums of money, have done to the younger generation. They’ve destroyed their hopes and scarred their lives. But these people are holding their heads high and hoping things will turn and turn soon. In the meantime, they’re getting out of their country in droves and taking any work they can find in the UK.

The phenomenon hit the headlines this month when a 25-year old man called Benjamin Serra Bosch had a ‘rant’ about the position he now finds himself in, as part of Spain’s ‘lost generation.’ Despite having three degrees he’d had to take a job in the UK which included cleaning toilets (also wiping tables and serving coffee). He was particularly upset that some customers were looking down on him, assuming he was only capable of this kind of menial work. His on-line comments struck a chord with many Spaniards both in Spain and in the UK. These are people who have spent time, money and effort getting an education and what for?

It took me back to my own experiences in the late 1980s. I can relate to the position Spaniards find themselves in, although it wasn’t so bad for me that I had to go abroad (I did, incidentally, go to work in Madrid for a year, but through choice, not necessity).  But I would say that it has in fact never been a straightforward path from university to the ideal job, as young graduates like Benjamin might assume. My degree was in Social and Political Sciences. What job could I do with that? Like Benjamin I found myself cleaning; in my case private houses. One particular family I cleaned for in Barnes, London, particularly stuck in my mind and my experience resonates with that of Benjamin.

This family had one of those houses which looks immaculately clean when you arrive and where you struggle to make it look like you’ve done anything. There were little silver-framed photos of mummy and daddy and the children on the polished piano which I had to dust along with all the other ornaments, clean the fridge, the oven and vacuum the already spotless carpet throughout the house. The mother was a lecturer in a southern English university and had a way of talking to me like I might be shit on her shoe. Her husband wasn’t much better. Whatever. I needed the money and just cracked on with it, cleaning every Tuesday for several months. Then one day the man came into the kitchen as I was having my 15-minute morning break. He started chatting and, in passing, mentioned that he had studied at Cambridge. That was my opening.

‘Yes, I went to Cambridge, too,’ I said, as I perched on the kitchen stool and munched my way through the little plate of Bourbon biscuits.

‘Did you?’ he replied, surprised. After he’d recovered himself he added: ‘I went to Emma. Where did you go?’

‘King’s,’ I stated, delivering my coup de grâce (everyone knew King’s was better than Emma).

Of course his and his wife’s attitudes towards me changed from that moment on. They now spoke to me as an equal, albeit a skint one from a poor family, who had to clean to make ends meet.

‘It’s too late now,’ I thought spitefully. ‘They should have spoken to me as an equal from the start.’ A person is a human being whatever work they have to do, and some people would do good to remember this.

After I finished my stint of cleaning posh people’s houses, I got a full-time job with MENCAP as a support worker – again unrelated to my degree and this time my duties not only included cleaning toilets. I also had to clean bums! Adult bums! Someone's got to do it, and in fact it is a worthy and important job.

So I have some understanding of what Benjamin feels, when certain fools look at him sideways, but I also think he needs to accept for the time being that maybe the majority of graduates, both Spanish and British, will not find highly skilled work as the jobs aren’t currently there and maybe never have been. They’ll just have to knuckle down doing whatever turns up. I’ve always felt that if you’ve got ‘something about you,’ it will out.

Of course many of the young Spaniards arriving in the UK, like Benjamin, would be glad to get even these jobs. They’re keen young things, doing their best to make a new life; sometimes with poor English (unbelievable given the vast sums of money dedicated to teaching them the language; what on earth are they doing in Spanish schools to make them so rubbish at it?).

So they are taking any work they can get, usually in restaurants and bars, at maybe £5 an hour; trying to make ends meet on that (often with family help). Others are now not even as lucky as that and I fear that so many are arriving that the work supply is drying up (funny how we’ve got so many local youngsters on benefits, yet many of these Spaniards find work in their first week). But good luck to them. Hopefully they can make a life for themselves in the UK for as long as it takes for Spain to get out of the mire. As no-one knows how long that’s going to be, I'd suggest they plan for the long-term…

Update: our lovely young teacher has now found a full-time job as a carer of people with special needs and has said he wants to set roots down in Britain and only return to Spain for holidays.