Spanish Shilling

We were talking over a bottle of wine about some of the old times and I remembered this story about one of the many differences that exist between Spain and the UK; and while we should celebrate and encourage those differences - after all, Spain is a wonderful place to live and Britain isn't - this particular item may not be the finest example in Spain's quiver of attractions and curiosities.

I refer to the humble suppository.

Chris had long hair and a thin moustache. He favoured pink shirts and kept his things in an off-the-shoulder handbag. His girlfriend was a pretty looking Danish girl, and we find her seated beside him on a train chugging slowly north towards Madrid.

They had arrived in Mojácar that summer of 1968 in a purple mini-moke, a type of low-slung jeep – much to the understandable horror of the small group of foreigners seated outside the village’s only bar and enjoying their early-morning brandies. Chris, it emerged, was a writer doing research on Carlos, the murderous ex-bodyguard of Rafael Trujillo, the assassinated dictator from the Dominican Republic, whose disgraced minder was now running a beach-bar in our quiet resort. According to my dad, Carlos made a good Cuba Libre and anyway, one should always try to forgive and forget.

Chris’ research, once he got around to it, involved a few talks over a glass of rum with Carlos Evertsz about his ghastly experiences as a torturer, inquisitor and bodyguard and Carlos, a short black fellow with a nasty look to him, must have taken offence at one of Chris’ questions on a particular occasion.

Or perhaps he just had a hangover that day.

The jeep was found, smashed to pieces.

Chris and his girlfriend, Gitte, decided to take off to Madrid for a week for some research and a release from the volatile Carlos. On the way to the train, Chris visited a farmacia to get something for a cold he’d picked up.

We are in the train again. It’s just left Linares where it had stopped for lunch. In those days, the conductor would go through the carriages asking what everyone wanted to eat and would then phone through to the station, where twenty-seven portions of meat and fifteen of fish would be waiting in the restaurant: along with chips, salad and wine, followed by a small plate of membrillo (a lump of quince jelly) for ‘afters’.

Not bad for sixty pesetas.

Back on the train, Chris sniffled again and remembered his package from the chemist. He opened it up and extracted a metal-foil-wrapped bomb-shaped item. The carriage, drowsy from its lunch, watched with mild interest.

Chris had never seen a suppository before and, as he peeled the foil off the plug (principal ingredient: cocoa butter), he decided he couldn’t eat it so, after a moment’s thought, decided to ram it up his nose.

The carriage stirred in anticipation. ‘No’ said some old girl in black.

No? thought Chris. Perhaps, since it’s a streamer, I should open another. He placed the second suppository, with its agreeable smell of cocoa butter, into his other nostril and sat back with a satisfied groan. The two suppositories dangled slightly from his nose, and he found that he had to hold them in place. His girlfriend tittered suddenly and the carriage, released, burst into laughter.

The man sat facing Chris lifted himself partway from his seat and made an explicit motion towards his backside. ‘Aquí’, here.

Chris, his face the colour of his favourite shirt, excused himself and went to find the lavatory. He told us afterwards that he could see the tracks flashing by when he looked down the pan, and that, after an embarrassing but successful operation hovering over the seatless commode, he unfortunately coughed, firing the luckless suppository down the hole and into the heart of the Andalusian countryside.

He eventually completed the book about Carlos, carefully waiting until that disagreeable fellow had been deported from Spain.

I think I must still have a copy somewhere. 

(A re-worked story of mine from 2010. Hey, it's raining here...)

Things are moving fast, and many of us wake each morning wondering what’s the latest shock coming from the Land of the Free. We switch on the TV or check the news on our mobile phone. What on earth is the King of America – and his supporters – up to now? He seems to be breaking things randomly. Silly calls and plastic straws and then some deadly serious issues too. We wonder if we will survive his reign (and in the likely event that he doesn’t last his four years, his vice-president appears to look like being an exceedingly poor choice as his replacement).

We worry about our children and the grand-kids. They won’t have it as easy as we did.

In my own defence, I’ve spent several years in the USA: I love being there, I was married to a wonderful woman from California and two of our three children (all born in Spain) live there. If you are going to be a foreigner in Gringolandia, being a tall, handsome and well-spoken Brit is as good as it gets. 

Let us look then at Spain’s relations with the USA (known here as Los EEUU).

Since the Spanish think of America as being everywhere from Chile to Canada, we call their people los estadounidenses, which is an ungainly word meaning the United-Statesians. Don’t wanna offend no salvadoreño, no.

The USA, a NATO member, maintain a couple of military bases in Spain – a naval base in Rota (Cádiz) and an air-force base in Morón de la Frontera (Seville), although Politico reports ‘American troops in Europe are not forever, US defence chief Hegseth warns. Donald Trump’s man in the Pentagon hints at major disruption to the continent’s 80-year-old protective security architecture’. Meanwhile, some of the lefties here shout: ‘Yankees go home’. Beware of what you wish for.

Spain’s main international disagreements with the Americans are not about their military presence here, but rather to do with Gaza, Cuba and Venezuela; and since Trump’s return, the Ukraine. The Spanish people’s first concern – on another phase of dismay – could well be the shocking American treatment of their Hispanic citizens and immigrants (legal or otherwise). 

Trump launched his first volley towards Spain right after his inauguration (‘Liberty Day’) by (probably) confusing the country as a member of the BRICS, the ‘emerging world economies’ that include Brazil, Russia and China. Maybe he thought the ‘S’ stood for Spain (rather than South Africa). We’re with the PIGS, remember?

Understandably, America’s policies don’t always dovetail with Spain’s – several times, they’ve sided with Morocco for instance.

Right now, there are important economic differences too. Congress wants to inflict tariffs (aranceles) on their trading partners, and an agreement that foreign traders won’t be subject to DEI policies (diversity, equity and inclusion) – which goes against Spanish and European law, social justice and common sense. "We want to ensure that our contracts comply with all U.S. federal anti-discrimination laws and that suppliers do not operate programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion that violate existing federal laws," U.S. embassy sources told the Spanish national broadcaster RTVE, as if distasteful Trumpian policies must automatically be observed by the rest of the Free World.

But if trade is one thing, then security is another. Could Trump bring us into a war? Or maybe, could Trump take a step back and bring the rest of us into a war? The Economist says ‘… the Ukraine is being sold out, Russia is being rehabilitated and, under Donald Trump, America can no longer be counted on to come to Europe’s aid in wartime…’

Nominally, or at least in pre-Trump times, ‘Spain and the United States are close allies and have excellent relations based on shared democratic values, including the promotion of democracy and human rights’, says the US Department of State. And maybe the coming breakdown stems in part from the Moncloa. A Spanish newspaper reports that ‘On Monday, Sánchez legitimizes Zelensky in Kiev and puts Spain in the way of both Trump and Putin. He offers his full support to the leader of Ukraine against these threats on the third anniversary of the invasion’. A second article – this time about the Middle East – highlights Spain’s opposition to the ludicrous plan to turn the land into a gaming resort: ‘Sanchez calls Trump's plan for Gaza “immoral”:  and “Gaza belongs to the Palestinians”’, says the headline.

Elsewhere we read (in a blistering take-down of the American leader): ‘Trump's betrayal opens a window of opportunity for Sánchez. Although, what the Spanish president must avoid in any case is that an excessive desire to take political advantage of Trumpian exuberance ends up by seriously damaging our country’.

It would be good to read that Sánchez has the support of all Spaniards (and better still, all Europeans) in his crusade against the current American leader (and his partner Elon Musk), but of course, there’s the Partido Popular, who are always looking for an angle to somehow take centre stage, and then there’s the far-right (are we allowed to call them fascists?) represented by Vox. This weekend at the PSOE Regional Congress in Seville, Sánchez called on Núñez Feijóo to cease his policy of being ‘a collaborationist’ with the far-right, and urged the PP to clearly position itself in favour of Europeanism. "You can’t support Europe only on the even days of the month", he said. 

From an editorial at elDiario.es, we read ‘…Trump's offensive against Ukraine has left the Partido Popular in an uncomfortable position. Its only reaction to the events in Washington has been to criticise Sánchez for standing out in his denunciation of the policies of the new US government. It is difficult to know the PP's position on international relations, beyond generalities, other than seeing the world through what Sánchez does’.

It’s true that Donald Trump has a few friends from Spain. The Vox leader Santiago Abascal f’rinstance. Even if Trump, at the CPAC (the annual ‘Conservative Political Action Conference’ held last weekend), salutes Abascal from the tribune by mangling his name as ‘San Diego Obascal’. They must be very close.

Elon Musk though, Donald’s first buddy, further encouraged Abascal when he said on Sunday that ‘Vox will for sure win Spain’s next elections’.

No doubt, there’s a lot he can do to help make that forecast come true. 

The Spanish voters are divided, as in most other countries where one is legally allowed to have an opinion, into the four blocks of far-left, left, right and far right. Even the small regional parties must march to this drum, while tending towards supporting the socialists in government (simply because the conservatives would consider their dissolution).

The old Ciudadanos party, which toothily claimed to be a centre party, was proved to be a crutch for the right, and it also showed us – once again – that no one wanted to be in the centre anyway.

My take is that the far left is, as always, too busy squabbling amongst themselves to ever get together to achieve much. They famously did it prior to and during the Civil War and (after being understandably quiet for the next forty years) haven’t achieved all that much since. The Conservative Media, the Judiciary, Church and Establishment all put a stop to their brightest star Pablo Iglesias – he of the ponytail – through lies, innuendo, bulos and lawfare.

In the socialist seats (a party with a lot of corruption cases in its history, particularly from Seville), another strong and intelligent man has risen to take the helm. He is truly a statesman and is well-considered in Europe, if less so here in Spain. Nevertheless, Pedro Sánchez and his government has done surprisingly well for the economy (rarely a strong point with the lefties) and is – compared with the other party bosses – the captain in the popularity stakes.

On the right, we have the party of Capital. Yet, they have a weak leader who is more prone to pointless attack than to mounting any useful opposition. The Right must defend the economy (and profits), but the economy is doing just fine. Could the PP do better in this important sphere? We remember the last time they were in power.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party recently voted against the increase in pensions (no doubt in a gesture towards fighting against rising costs) and promptly got a Black Mark from Spain’s better than ten million pensioners, and was obliged to reverse course in a second vote just a week later. The point of chastising the government is not always going to play well with the ordinary folk queuing up outside the bank or the employment office.

The chances are good that Feijóo will anyway soon be deposed in favour of Isabel Díaz Ayuso or possibly Juanma Moreno (both currently nursing some problems of their own).

If supporters of the Partido Popular tend to think more of their wallets than they do of mine, then the Vox crowd have a different and far more negative agenda based on hatred, fear and jealousy. This party, which has a soft spot for General Franco (and his international equivalents today), is slowly growing in popularity and now stands at around 15% in the polls.

If the ragbag of far-left groups must support the PSOE to keep the wolf from the door, then the Voxxers will be vital in any future election to putting the PP into power, and their price will be high.

Right now, a small but symptomatic headline comes from a tiny village in the forgotten province of Zamora. It appears that no one has given birth in Vega de Villalobos in the last eighteen years, but now everyone there is thrilled by a Happy Event. The ninety-one residents of the village are said to be delighted.

But then a Vox deputy called Rocio de Meer (a good old Spanish family name if ever there was one) wrote on Twitter last week, as one does, complaining as usual about the foreign immigrants and to make her point she refers to the birth of the Vega de Villalobos child saying: ‘The future of Spain is dark’. See, the baby’s name is Ayoub (and not, I don’t know… Manolito). Worse still, she received 10,000 ‘likes’ for her efforts. The parents may be integrated, but they are still newcomers.

The leader of Vox is Santiago Abascal. He is also the president of ‘the Patriots for Europe’ clique in the European Commission and he has just held an international far-right fest in Madrid, with all the usual suspects in attendance, including Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen, André Ventura, Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders and Kevin Roberts, president of the sinister American Heritage Foundation (the ‘Project 25’ people).

Donald Trump received suitable adulation from all those present (as Europe waits for his tariffs to kick in).

The phrase Make Europe Great Again appeared on the rostrum during Vox’s ‘Cumbre de Patriotas’ (celebrating the utopian and largely fictionalised past of our continent, or are we thinking of Mussolini and his partners of ninety years ago?).

Apart from the music, I can’t think of a time when Europe was greater than it is now.

Thus Spain has its four political groups (plus some small and eccentric satellites). As for the large number of foreigners living in this marvellous country, 6,800,000 of us, well we don’t have the vote and, sad to say, we don’t count for much with the politicians.

Unless we misbehave of course.

Or have a baby.    

In the bad old days, the village postman wasn’t much good with foreign names (although he liked to collect stamps, sometimes removing them with a certain amount of bureaucratic relish from the corner of the envelope). It was no big deal: in those times, the twenty pound notes tenderly send by my dad’s sister would be folded inside within a sheet of carbon paper to fool the early X-Ray machines in Madrid.

I’d be sent to Old Martín with instruction to collect all the foreigners’ letters – at least those of the foreigners who were sat in the village square, drinking and gossiping.

It’s not as bad as it sounds.

The correos opened in those day at the reasonable hour of 3.00pm.

Anyone who wasn’t in the square drinking naturally risked losing his twenty quid.

It’s a far cry from today. Now we don’t know each other – there’re too many of us – and the post office wouldn’t give out the mail to some spotty foreign kid anyway. Now, it’s either delivered by a person dressed in a yellow uniform driving an equally buff-coloured three-wheel motorcycle, or its placed in a tin post-box and you come along during opening hours to see what – if anything – is new.

As for the folded twenty pound notes, now the British Government lets you take abroad as much as you like: to spend freely on rounds of brandy, weekends in a Parador or buying a second hand car with no MOT and the steering wheel on the wrong end of the dashboard.

Before they took to delivering the mail, I too had a post box: un apartado. Nº 35 it was. Then they started charging a heavy sum for its rental, insisted that each person who used the PO Box would have to pay separately for the same number, and they introduced (free) house deliveries anyway.

It was an easy call, although any letters which later arrived at my Nº 35 were solemnly returned to sender, unread.

I’m sure that as the result of the Person Unknown stamp on the repatriated item, the editors of my old school magazine were convinced that I had precipitously joined the list of ‘the dearly departed’.

Which, on the bright side, saved me continuing with my modest annual subscription.

The world moved on, and someone invented emails, which took the wind out of the sails of the Spanish postal system. Then along came DHL and their parcel-totting competitors, plus those fellows who whizz through the city traffic on their bicycles with an urgent message stuffed down their Velcro pouch.

The post office was on the ropes.

So it invented in own high-speed parcel delivery system, operated as a bank for a while, started to sell books by right-wing authors (have a look next time), sent and received money abroad, sold stickers, lottery coupons and magazines and generally moved, as they say, forward.

The postage stamps were another change. Instead of a stamp which one could lick and affix, the new ones have peel-off backs. Or, and more usually, they print out an inelegant sticky strip with numbers and bar-codes, and press it onto your envelope – as often as not hiding part of the first line of the address.

So today, I went to post a letter to foreign parts and said that I wanted a stamp rather than an adhesive label, if it was all the same to them.

There was a fuss, but eventually the clerk played ball and found two stamps. The first had a peel-off back, the second did not. It has to be glued on, she said, as – not finding the glue-stick – she sellotaped it onto the envelope.

But let me leave on a positive note.

I always used to joke that when I grew up, they would put me on a postage stamp. Now, it appears, you can take along a photo to the correos and they will run you up a set of 24 street-legal stamps, with a sticky back, and bearing your smiling image.

I think I could have some fun with that.    

This seems like a good time to write about Brexit, which finally came to pass five years ago this February 1st. No doubt, like the majority of Brits living in Europe at the time (many of us without the vote on this considerably important topic), or in Gibraltar, I was decidedly against it.

My passport used to say that I was a European citizen; and now, it doesn’t.

But let’s start with the British opinion on the Brexit, where a far from thunderous 52% of those who voted back in June 2016 wanted out of the EU.

The Telegraph says: ‘Brexit wasn’t a failure. It liberated us from the declining, dictatorial EU’ (the right-wing organ introduces the above with the slightly inelegant ‘The Telegraph is publishing a series of essays on How to Save Brexit from expert commentators…’).

To which I say ‘indeed’.

We might as well do The Express (the low-brow right-wing newspaper): ‘Has Brexit failed? It’s the patently stupid question that people won’t stop asking’. Answers on a postcard.

John Redwood writes the Conservative line: ‘The voters were right about Brexit. We now need a government to use the freedoms we have gained’.

The BBC brings us a cautious ‘Brexit has some benefits, No 10 says on anniversary’.

There’s Adam Bolton over at Sky News writing ‘Most people think leaving the EU was a mistake - but don't expect politicians to reopen the Brexit question. Five years on, even many of those who still champion Brexit, including Nigel Farage, concede that it has "failed" - so why are the main parties afraid to tell voters they got it wrong?’

The Guardian also wonders whether there’s a light in the tunnel: ‘Hope mixes with anger on Brexit’s fifth anniversary’.

The European press (unless they are supporters of the AfD or Geert Wilders) are worried that any fresh departure from the EU could only weaken the rest – and we all know that there are some dangerous creatures out there circling the wigwams (or was it the wagons?).

To turn to the Spanish media, we find El País with ‘55% of Britons regret the EU exit as the British government cautiously approaches Brussels. Keir Starmer is quietly seeking greater cooperation with Brussels to revive the UK economy’. elDiario.es, reporting from Oxford, has ‘Five years of Brexit, the reverse that has slowly sunk the United Kingdom amid popular disappointment. Only 11% of adults now believe that leaving the European Union has been a success while the country suffers the obstacles of the self-imposed border to buy tomatoes, sign footballers or sell sandwiches in its supermarkets outside the island’. Sandwiches always were a problem, that and bendy bananas.

The ABC assures its readers that ‘57% of the Brits would vote to re-join’. 62% of the Brits, says another Spanish paper doubling-down, think that ‘the Brexit was a fiasco’.

A local Brit blogger calls it ‘The worst day in modern British history’.

There is some question about whether the UK should look to shelter under the wings of the EU or grasp the US nettle held by Donald Trump. None of the Spanish media appear sanguine about the UK going it alone (Bravely, By Jingo), but accept that there won’t be a cautious Return to the European Union for a long time, although, as a pundit tells 20Minutos, the two powers need each other.  

How’s business here down the line? Todotransporte says ‘After five years, Brexit has not been so bad (for Spain)’. It says that Spanish exports to the Sceptred Isle are actually up by 25% over 2020 with Spain enjoying an annual surplus of 12,500 million euros.

To return to those Brits who have a connection or a sympathy towards Spain, we have the (apparent) future issue of the 100% tax on non-EU citizens buying a home here, and the ongoing one of those who own a place, but don’t have residence and thus fall under the 90/180 day issue, obliging them to leave the Schengen Area – and indeed their Spanish home – for lengthy and unnecessary periods.  This second issue, of course, wouldn’t be fully resolved by the UK re-joining the EU – it would have to sign into the Schengen Treaty.

Which, ‘like Breturn’, is a non-starter.

The FITUR – Spain’s gigantic tourism fair – is now over. Deals have been struck, hotels booked, new attractions publicised and above all, 2025 is met with optimism and faith.

The goal is to bring 100 million foreign tourists to Spain this year (it was 94m in 2024) – and to increase the money taken last year (a tidy 126,000 million euros), and just maybe increase the percentage of Spain’s GDP to be marked down to tourism.

Tourism is an excellent industry, as they come, they pay, and (best of all) they go. During their brief visit, they spend every day on drink, on food, on hotels and on souvenirs. Apart from a tee-shirt or a decorated pot, they won’t export anything from Spain in exchange for their money much beyond a hangover, a sunburn and a maybe a secret telephone number or email address from someone they met at the hotel disco.

And all that lovely money. Most of it is spent in places where neither Spaniards nor foreign residents tend to go: whether the tour-hotels; those AirBnb homes; the spoiled and overcrowded attractions (think the Alhambra, the Grand Mosque, the Sagrada Familia or other ‘untenable popularity’ places as listed recently by Fodor) or indeed in the tacky souvenir shops. Those businesses relying on tourism – rather than residents – will have their own solutions to bring to the table: more tourism please, and let’s stop with that ‘Tourist Go Home’ stuff.

FITUR was good for tourism, but it was also good for Madrid. 225,000 people came to the show, and the city took in, says a tourist-page, an extra 445 million euros in those five days.

Spain, says CNN, and looking at the American market, is ‘the red-hot tourist destination’.

In his New Year’s speech, the mayor of Málaga Francisco De la Torre warned about La turismofobia and calls for moderation because, he said, "the success of Málaga" depends on tourism’. We need to take note of this, because not only does tourism help Spain’s GDP, it is also less tiresome for we residents than living in a town dedicated to factories or heavy industry.

Under a photo of the Minister of Homes and Urban Agenda and a logo that reads, ‘Housing: the Fifth Pillar of the Welfare State’, an article from Spanish Property Insight (the best English-language site on the subject in general) says ‘The Spanish government floats radical tax plan targeting British and other non-EU property buyers’.

They aren’t alone. Dozens of headlines say something similar. The Yahoo news site quoting some regional Brit newspaper, says ‘Warning to Brits after Spain reveals 'extreme' plans targeting them’ and The Telegraph says ‘Spain wants to kill off the British holiday home dream, here’s what you can do about it’. Some erroneous hyperbole quickly arrived from The EWN saying that ‘Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez shook the world with the ambiguous claim that his government planned to tax properties owned by non-EU nationals by 100 percent’.

My favourite one though comes from The Times, with a comic but despairing piece called ‘Spain’s anti-Brit tax is a reminder: no one wants to be driven out by immigrants’.

Ah yes, the British fear of Johnny Foreigner. No wonder they chose Brexit.

I imagine that well over half the people reading this are neither British nor American citizens hoping to move to Spain (although, for sure, it’s a good time to come).

Come quickly though, as Sánchez later refined his plan, to say that all sales to non-EU foreigners could be halted. "We will propose to ban these non-EU foreigners who are not residents, and their relatives, from buying houses in our country since they only do so to speculate", Sanchez said at a political rally in Plasencia, in western Spain, on Sunday.

For balance, know that all the Brits currently resident in Spain (around 300,000) or Americans from the USA (perhaps 64,000) are evidently a lot fewer in numbers than the 1,560,000 foreign EU citizens living here.

And there’s the key. I think we Brit/American commentators take an – perhaps understandably – parochial view of our importance to both the Spanish people and to their political concerns.

In reality, we are fairly small fry and, worse still, we live in small and relatively unimportant towns along the coast and islands. Andalucía has the most Brits (and that would be in Marbella, Mijas, Estepona or Níjar with around 3,000 in each), followed in order by the Valencian Community, the Canaries, Catalonia, the Balearics, Murcia and only then the Madrid Region. As a matter of fact, Pedro Sánchez when looking out of his window doesn’t see hoards of resident Brits tucking into an English breakfast on the Avenida de Castellana.

Madrid, by the way, has a population of 3,400,000. 

The point being – the Spanish government will be looking at its own citizens (especially those that vote) rather than at the foreigners who, Bless them, come here with full wallets to buy a home on the coast.   

In short, with this suggestion, the Government is looking elsewhere.

Two considerations here - the foreign vulture funds are the main buyers of property (to speculate usually as corporate landlords), and secondly, it’s the wealthy Latin Americans who are taking over choice properties particularly in Madrid (there are now well over a million of them living there: with some wealthy ones in the smarter areas, which is now known as el Miami de Europa, and with other poorer immigrants and perhaps even living without papers down in the workers’ neighbourhoods). Both issues being far more important than the plight of our British and American cousins who may have waited a bit too long…

Maybe Sánchez was reading a recent piece from El País which says ‘They are not guiris, they are the new Madrileños: today, 40% of the residents of the centre of the capital were born outside of Spain’.

The concern, then (at least in anglo quarters) is that the tax on buying a property could go up maybe later this year or next – or even to be closed off entirely – and this would certainly put some non-Schengen buyers (already concerned with the 90 in 180 day limit within the region) off. One way around would to be to rent and take out residence-papers, as the proposed surcharge is only for non-resident non-EU citizens. Or maybe there will be early elections, as La Razón hopes, and the PP will get in and smile on us foreigners once again.

From the Spanish point of view, the increase on property tax for non-EU foreign investors might be little more than wallpaper (there are a number of rather more useful proposals), but it shows that the Government is thinking of its citizens, for all that the conservative media runs articles about the inconvenience towards foreign-buyers.   

Or maybe not: ‘Closing the country to rich foreigners might win some votes, but it won't solve the real problem’ says El Economista sententiously.

Ángel Medina and I used to produce and edit a monthly newspaper a decade ago called El Indalico which ran for around 108 editions. 

Ángel has now begun to record some of his essays on a blog here.

Here's one I translated. It deals with the Spanish delight in acronyms (think Banesto or Renfe as examples).

...

Among the stories that I am going to publish on this blog there will be some related to Mojácar, the town where I have lived for more than thirty years. And they will be part of what I will call “Stories of Mojácar”. 

They are unusual and fantastic because the pueblo and its inhabitants are quite strange.

In every sense. 

Little by little, I will reveal what this place is like, which was on the verge of disappearing as a municipality after the Spanish Civil War due to the abandonment it suffered from its inhabitants thanks to hunger, a lack of resources, a fierce lack of communications with the surroundings, plus the aridity of its lands, always yearning for those drops of rain that never seemed to fall.

The town was lucky to have Jacinto Alarcón, a providential mayor who in the 60s managed to cause a National Parador hotel to be built and also, by giving away ruins or plots of land to diplomats and others, attracted personalities and investors who started the take-off of the town as an international tourist attraction. 

Many people later following his line consolidated this projection by building apartments, housing estates and hotels.

One of the many who believed in that future was Pedro García, who built and ran the Hotel Continental for many years, which is still there today.

Pedro, a restless and hard-working man, wanted to contribute in some way to that local development and thought of forming an association of hotel entrepreneurs who would join their efforts to achieve that definitive take-off of the town. And with his best spirit he met the businessmen of the area for that purpose one afternoon on the terraces of his hotel.

'The first thing is to find a name for the association. I propose ASEMMOJ (Association of Businessmen of Mojácar)', he proposed.

'No', replied one attendee, 'ASEMHOMOJ would be a better bet (Association of Hotel Entrepreneurs of Mojácar)'.

'Why only hoteliers? What about those of us who have bars?', another participant jumped in, 'it should be called ASEMHOYBARMOJ (Association of Hotel and Bar Entrepreneurs of Mojácar)'.

'You forget that we must limit the association to those of us who are forming it, who are neighbours of La Rumina and El Palmeral', said Pedro. 'I propose we go with ASEMHOYBARRUMPALMOJ (Association of Hotel and Bar Entrepreneurs of La Rumina and El Palmeral de Mojácar)'.

Then said another: 'And you haven't counted on the merchants who are here? Let's call our association ASEMHOYBARYCOMRUMPALMOJ'.

And so the initials were added until the session became a brawl and those present, shouting, did not stop arguing and demanding more and more absurd and complicated names until one of them, the since deceased Manolo Picardo, manager and owner of the Hotel Río Abajo, gave his verdict.

'That's enough! Silence!' And he continued with the greatest expectation: 'the Association will be called ATEM, which is META ('ambition') backwards and means that we will never get anywhere.

Which, give it its due, it didn't. 

What a marvellous thing the Internet is. Now we can throw out the set of encyclopaedias, talk to all our friends for free, save a fortune on subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, download (pirated) films, check our bank account and order a smashing looking shirt advertised on Facebook for just nine ninety five.

Or two for fifteen, if we are quick.

And then, when you unwrap the package – if it ever gets to you – you find that the shirt is made of polyester. See, the Internet is service, information, and increasingly, opportunity.

Opportunity for scammers, hackers, fraudsters and crooks. Many of whom don’t even exist: that’s right, the woman with the large chest who wants to be your friend either on Facebook (‘I love your posts, you seem such an interesting person’) or in your Messenger (here’s one I just got from Busty Emma: ‘Hi Dear!’). They are both bots, like the empty phone calls or the get-rich-quick adverts.

I’m reading on Facebook this morning, in a paid-for advert, the following (in Spanish): ‘Donation of 544,000 euros. Please contact me to benefit’. I’m also getting tarot-reading and offers by Pedro Sánchez, Amancio Ortega and other Spanish household names to invest in a get-rich-quick scheme. Ya think?

Even in my private paid-for email account, I get scam adverts like, f’rinstance, ‘Get your free Oraal B Series 9 from Uniited Heallthcare’ – what’s with the misspellings, is it to fool the spam-guard?

Then, beware of anything that starts with ‘Congratulations…’ Indeed, I was offered a free Trump tee-shirt yesterday, just pay for the postage and send us your details.

Besides emptying your bank account, or taking your ID or your online-presence, or pushing extremist views down your throat (with a nod to the anything-goes policies of Elon Musk and The Zuck), the Internet can provide misleading information (The old joke of – ‘All climate scientists agree on global warming, but on the other hand and to be fair, Sandra on Facebook says that it’s all bollocks’).

The Guardian notes, ‘…it is possible to conclude that Zuckerberg has always cared more about his company’s proximity to power than to its proximity to truth’. Indeed, his reversal of the fact-checkers has prompted the joke site El Mundo Today to announce that it, too, has removed its ‘protocols of verification’.

Revealingly, the word “enshittification” has just been crowned as Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows. ‘The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking’.

Luckily, there are several fact-checkers out there, Snopes, Maldita, Wikipedia (currently under threat from Musk), and of course Russia’s bogus Global Fact-Checking Network…

By the way, Invermectin, which reputedly cures both cancer and Covid if you believe the Internet, is in reality a horse laxative.

Besides misinformation, or rather disinformation (used a lot in the recent American elections, and indeed, with anything to do with Trump); there’s the danger of cyber-warfare, hijacking, bluesnarfing (you should switch your Bluetooth connector off to avoid piracy); malware – (viruses, spyware, worms and so on); denial-of-service attacks which can break down a network; phishing and password attacks.

And note that, these days, only amateur hackers bother to break into your account – the professionals are busy hacking the hospital, or the bank, or the electricity company.

Twitter has become notoriously toxic, and some people are moving to an imitator called Blue Sky. The main advantage of this platform is that it doesn’t carry far-right posts along the lines of Elon Musk and his support for the AfD, the German fascist party (‘Jawohl, Hitler was a communist’), or his recommended invasion of the UK.

These days, it must be acutely embarrassing for anyone who owns and drives a Tesla.

We have rather taken to no longer following the news – neither buying newspapers any more (El País now prints around 52,000 copies daily – as against 470,000 just twenty years ago), or even watching the Telediario (75% of Spaniards now have a streaming service – Netflix, Disney and so on). Instead, we get our news from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where it has little or no editorial control. Don’t believe me? Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Uber have all given Trump a million dollars for his inauguration fund (sic!) and Elon Musk pumped 277 million dollars into the Donald Trump candidacy. The incoming president’s goals will become clear enough in the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be too sure of investing in Bitcoin: like fairies’ promises and happy endings, it ain’t necessarily so.

Our phones – if we are important enough – run the risk of being spied on by the Israeli Pegasus – or for that matter, being blown up by the Mossad.

The Dutch professor Geert Lovink in an essay called ‘Extinction Internet’ explains that there will come a time when everyone will get tired of being connected to the Internet, because the disadvantages of sharing opinions online will be so great – the negative aspects far outweighing the good – that people will simply turn away. The Spanish news-site Infobae ‘consults experts on the implications of a web increasingly dominated by bots and artificial content’. They find that ‘the Golden Age has passed and now most traffic is either bots (no relation) or synthetic AI-generated content’. One advantage to this is that it’s a cheap alternative to paying journalists. As Forbes notes, ‘Beyond news generation and consumption, AI is improving the business and operation of journalism, which is important given the high cost and low revenue usually associated with the news media industry. Journalism can be a resource-intensive business…’

As for the Spanish Government’s plan to punish the media who publish bulos (fake news), we can only await events (as the Partido Popular and its allies criticise the proposals).

In short, corporate greed and Internet fraud between them will one day outweigh the social advantages, certainly for the ordinary consumer. Could it be happening right now?

Are we seeing the Internet die? Not for Industry as a whole, but rather as we – humble users and customers – might understand it? Maybe soon we will have to return to Telefónica and writing postcards?

It might not be such a bad thing.

So, where am I going with all this? Oh Hell, let’s see what’s on Facebook.    

No doubt like they do everywhere else, Spain hauls out its special gala TV shows on New Year’s Eve to help bring in the celebration. We must eat our twelve grapes and let off a firework.

This time around, the fierce competition between the national television and the commercial Antena3 channel (no one watched any of the others) came to a head.

La Una had David Broncano (host of the leading comedy chat show La Revuelta) and Lalachus (a jolly and overweight comedienne) to host the countdown from the roof of a building in Madrid overlooking La Puerta del Sol, while across the way, on another rooftop with another premium view of the square and its clock, were the Antena3 stalwarts Cristina Pedroche and Alberto Chicote. Cristina, for some reason, wearing a skimpy dress made from mother’s milk (no kidding).

And, it’s cold out there, on a Madrid rooftop, half naked, at half-past eleven at night.

At one point, as sensible folk stay home with the heater on high to watch the telly, Broncano is seen to break the unwritten rule as he shouts though a megaphone over to the rival team to ask ‘Say fellas, when do we get to eat the grapes?’ (Spaniards eat twelve grapes during the New Year chimes).

Well, I don’t know, but Antena3 promptly put up a screen so that their presenters could no longer be seen from the roof of their cheeky TVE rivals. Heh!

All good fun. Then Lalachus pulls out una estampita (a small card) from her copious bosom and waves it at the camera. It’s a representation of a popular TV show called Grand Prix: a version of It’s a Knockout: an affable looking cartoon-bull logo wearing a gold medal, only instead, this card has a bleeding heart around the bull’s neck – a joke that’s sure to offend the easily offendable: that’s to say, a small and extreme section of the Catholics.

Not that New Year’s Eve has anything to do with Christian tradition.

Duly offended, Hazte Oir and the Abogados Cristianos people were at the door of the juzgados bright and early the next morning to denounce the fat lady and her smarmy companion, along with the head of the Spanish television, and anyone else who may have laughed or sniggered. Blasphemy!

Cue the Monty Python joke (reworked): ‘Nobody laughs at the Spanish Inquisition!’

The Archbishop of Seville asks ‘How long will they take advantage of our patience?’ The senior Spanish prelate Monseñor Luis Argüello calls the joke ‘an intolerable offence’.

The opportunist Vox party calls for the presence of the president of the RTVE José Pablo López (a socialist appointee) to give an explanation of the affront in Congress.

Turn the other cheek, girls.

La blasfemia (or rather, its modern version known as el escarnio) is an offense that’s still on the books, although it will likely be removed this year says Félix Bolaños the justice minister. But first, presumably, we will have to suffer some lawfare from m’learned friends.

Some of those offended, says one editorial following the hateful affront to Catholics worldwide, are the very same people who regularly criticise Lalachus for being a fatty and complained about her appearing on the New Year’s Eve show (where the national TV beat out Antena3 in viewer numbers for the first time in fifteen years).

In the end, it’s not about religion, it’s about politics: where, of course, anything goes.