Spanish Shilling

The new pet-law going through the Spanish parliament at the present time has a few odd bits. First, to own a dog, one will need to take a course. We don’t yet know what this entails (probably the Government doesn’t either), and anyway, cats, as we know, tend to take no notice of us except when it pleases them to do so. The legislators have wisely taken note.

Both cats and dogs, however, will be issued with a proper DNI card. This is to help them sign for Amazon packages and to make it easier for the authorities to control abandoned animals (will they have to carry their card with them at all times?).

Our pets should be 'integrated into the family life'. Where they don't live in our home, they should have a proper purpose-built place to live in with shelter and protection - stables or whatnot. Take care they don't breed indiscriminately (there go the rabbits). At least one sex should be fully sterilised unless one is registered with the breeders association the 'Registro Nacional de Criadores'.

You can't leave 'em tied up when you are absent, nor may they wander about in public spaces 'without the person responsible for their welfare' (the one that used to be called 'their owner'). You will already have your little plastic bag and a squirty full of vinegar for your twice-daily peregrinations around the park with Fido.

In the case of dogs, that they are trained properly, and that all one's animal companions ('pets') visit the vet regularly. We await the formation of a free national health service for pets with interest.

Those pets that live in an aquarium or a cage, then the capacity needs to be big enough for them to be comfortable. We leave our pet lobster to thrash around in the bath. In short, there'll be no more goldfish bowls, for Goodness sake!

Naturally, you can't allow pets to suffer, neither may you 'dock' their ears or tails (their balls, yes, why ever not?). You won't be able to leave an animal enclosed on a terrace or elsewhere permanently; or breed them without a licence (!); or exhibit them for sale in shops; or sell them to friends (a contract should be signed saying the animal was given free); or donate them without papers and microchip; or 'release' them into nature; or kill them; or bury them without telling the appropriate authorities; or use them in adverts; or use 'choke' collars; or animal fights or exhibitions or circuses; or kick them...

This remarkable and far-sighted law should be through before the end of next year.

Finally (and mention this to the Romanian fellow down at the Mercadona), one may not have a dog handy when one is begging.

It is said that the limit of domestic animals allowed in a household is five, or maybe six; although this varies between town and country, and between autonomies. No doubt the surplus will be expeditiously terminated by the competent authorities.

Lastly, and this is Spain, fighting bulls are exempted from the above rules.

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Copied from articles here, here and, generically, here.

I had been carrying the neon tube in my car for a few days, ready to try out a small experiment. It was a bit too long so I had a bit of it sticking out of the window on the passenger side. Apparently, there’s no specific law against this as long as you fasten a red strip of material to the end. I used an old tanga which I had found in the spare room.

Somewhere, I’d read that if you hold a neon tube firmly at both ends and stand under a 264 million gigawatt electric pylon, similar to the ones that Endesa likes to raise up in people’s back yards, the light will pick up the ambient electrical radiation and actually glow.

It would make a bloody good photo, I reasoned. It would help publicise the case of the unfortunate veterinarian lady from the riverbed as she stood on her roof under the stretch of the giant cables that the power company had thoughtfully draped over her home. To say nothing of the massive pylon they had erected just outside her bedroom window. She would stand there like a modern goddess, her legs slightly apart, her chin raised defiantly, the neon tube held firmly between her palms as it radiated.

While the vet glowed, just after sunset, I would be ready to take a quite sensational picture.

On the way down from the sierras where I had been hunting mushrooms, my way took me past what used to be a rather large and modern restaurant – Madrid money, they say – which sits defiantly under another enormous electric highway once again erected by the omnipresent electricity provider; a monopoly whose only interest and loyalty – as proved over the past few months – is to its shareholders. Curiously, the joint, which is evidently spreading gently out from the original farmhouse and which has been tastefully converted to a roadside brothel, apparently has no electrical hook-up of its own and has to rely on a generator.

The lines crossing above the locale actually hum and one's hair writhes slightly as it debates whether to stand on end under the cables.

A perfect place for my experiment.

I stopped the car outside the door and climbed out with my rod, looking something like a manic Luke Skywalker.

Right there, outside the front door, I spread my legs slightly, grabbed hold of both ends of the neon tube and, with a short prayer to the god of idiots, waited to be bathed in light.

Well, nothing happened, actually, and after wishing a good evening to the three or four slightly startled looking girls together with the bouncer who had come outside to join me, I put the rod back in the car, fastened the knickers firmly on one end, and quietly drove home.

The cables above the vet’s place, I noticed this morning, are now in full working mode. You can see the air bubble as it touches them. Perhaps the earlier experiment hadn’t worked because the power wasn’t strong enough. These new pylons appear to hold an even heavier charge. I think I might try my neon tube experiment again tonight.

I haven't had a drink since last September, well, this September if you want to split hairs. Because you see, it's the ghastly month of Sober October once again. I am sitting here wondering if a cerveza sin alcohol counts against the rule of zero booze! It may do, so I stick instead to a soft lemony drink from Lidl that I call Sucedáneo de Acuarius. 

In its favour, it's cheap. 

There's a jar of smoked herring in the fridge, the rollmops that the Norwegians do so well. I found it in the local shop yesterday and brought it home. But how do you have a rollmop-session without vodka? Huh?  A glass of goat's milk just doesn't cut it.

Sober October is an excuse to give the liver a rest. I once managed a whole year off the booze, following an attack of jaundice in Guatemala. The local curandero told me to keep away from the grog if I didn't want to keel over, so there it was. In those days, I could always smoke weed to keep me going, but I gave that up, along with terbaccy, much to the relief of my tubes, these many years ago. 

A WhatsApp friend has sent me an article which says that,despite the assurances of Spain's best and brightest advertising executives, booze - even in small quantities - is bad for you. Taking a glass of wine with your pork chop will not help your heart manage to keep the beat. But, can you cook with wine, does that count? How about a custard trifle with a spot of sherry in the jelly? No? I thought not. Not that I intend to stay on the wagon a moment past Halloween. I have a hankering for a real beer or two.

My parents, along with most of the foreign population of Mojácar back in the 'early days' (before it became bourgeois), were heavy drinkers - brandy for breakfast types. They all died young: inebriated and cheerful, and leaving a sizable bar bill between them. This experience kept me generally wary of the hard stuff, and I rarely drink anything strong (rollmops and vodka excepted). 

Perhaps the new campaigns on the TV for low-alcohol whisky and gin are aimed at people like me. Have you seen them? Drink Beefeater 20%, it'll make you feel good. The advert is legal because - apparently - there's a strength limit on advertising booze. Of course, the advert is to persuade people to drink the proper stuff, not the gnat's-piss version. It's a bit like non-alcoholic beer - what's the fun in that?  

I have a count-down next to the bed. Every day I cross off another number on the calendar, working my way slowly down. Will I have lost any weight after a month on the soda-pop? I shall let you know.

How often we worry about communicating. In Britain there are many different accents and slang, which help to breed a sense of belonging to a community as well as presenting a challenge to anyone outside it. Which is why the young need to re-invent themselves every generation. In Spain, there’s plenty of argot, but spoken Spanish is pretty much easy to understand wherever you come from, with the gypsy accent and the Cadiz accent being perhaps the hardest to grasp, although, apart from the dropped constanants and a few bits of vernacular, they are intelligible enough. The gypsies talk proudly of their special language, Caló, but no one appears to know more than a few words of it. Rather like me saying something remembered from my Latin classes.

Yup, in Latin they call that table ‘mensa’. Now there's a conversation stopper.

To make things comfortably more complicated, Spain has some regional languages that are being encouraged – or so it seems to me – so as to bring the local politicians into the centre of power. We all know that the Catalonians have ‘Catalán’, the Valencians have ‘Valenciano’ (which is the same as Catalán, but don’t say I told you), the Galicians have ‘Galego’ and the Basques have something that has nothing in common with any other language: it’s called in Spanish ‘Euskera’, while in the Basque country, it’s called ‘euskaldunak’.

Then those living in eastern Almería have something even odder – it’s called ‘English’…

It seems a pity that everyone living on the Iberian peninsular, Portuguese and Gibraltarians included, couldn’t all speak one language, but there you go. In a generation, few people in Barcelona will speak more than broken Spanish, and fewer still of the Galicians will be able to make themselves understood when they take a shopping trip to Madrid.
And as for the Basques…

The other day, three young cousins of my wife arrived to stay. You know how it is; a quick email and they’re on your doorstep the following morning. They were backpacking around Europe for a month before completing their studies in a university in Washington DC. They spoke, of course, American.

Actually, they didn’t, because they were deaf. They signed in American: although they dropped their vowels, invented meanings, used their own slang and were otherwise difficult or impossible to make head or tail of. To my surprise, there is no single, international, all-useful deaf language. Quite the reverse, everyone seems to have their own. The cousins enthusiasticly folded their fingers too dam’ fast and they never stopped. Don’t talk with your hands full, I wanted to tell them at the dinner table.

Here, try some of this…

Oddly, you begin to pick it up quickly – or, at least, your own version of it, even as you are wondering exactly who is the one with the handicap!

Of course, they would write things down for us as necessary with the family pen and notepad and were great fun besides. Being energetic young kids, they drank and smoked like troopers and stayed up late with my son and his friends on the Playstation. With fingers like that, said the kids, it’s no wonder they keep winning…

On one occasion during their short visit, three of us: a Spaniard, my son and I, together with the three of them, went out for a boozy dinner – hands and fingers flying – in a pork and chips place on the beach, the other tables staring and wondering who we were, you must try the Licor de Pacharán and so on; and we followed this with a trip to our friend’s house where we drank a bottle of whisky, never stopped talking for a second, smoked ourselves blue and generally partied until dawn. Yet, all the while, you could have heard a pin drop.

The neighbours didn’t bang on the walls, we didn’t shout and bellow as we left round about sun up and the loudest sound would have been my stomach churning.

They went off to Madrid on the six o’clock bus to go to some important international congress of signing as delegates. Several hundred of them let loose in Madrid.

Blimey, that must have been a riot!

A report in today’s El Mundo recommends having a good kip after lunch – known to residents and visitors alike as ‘la siesta nacional’ – or, in modern parlance, the ‘yoga ibérico’. Doctors recommend it for obscure medical reasons, common sense supports it as it keeps you off the street during the worst hours of a hot day and it’s even an institution that is gathering adepts in other countries. Indeed, one can now read about having ‘a power nap’ in American literature. Just the ticket after a hard morning’s gardening, a bottle of wine and a heavy lunch.

Meanwhile, the European Union is committed to stopping the siesta and many multinational companies are now operating in Spain with a ‘nine to five’ philosophy.

They probably make their staff sit on hard wooden chairs as well.

The bottom line is always the cash. Spain considers that ‘you work to live’ and the Anglos, stiff with their protestant guilt ethic, say that ‘you live to work’. Silly really, but that's just one of the many civilized reasons why we chose to come and live here, gracias.

I suppose that the Spanish nine-to-fivers experience rather mixed results from insisting on this calendar as, while they may receive business from abroad after the two o’clock watershed, they won’t get many ‘walk-ins’ during those last hours of their working day. They also will, without any doubt, be off their top form following an unsatisfactory sandwich and a soft drink. For the rest of us, I can say that it can be quite a nuisance when you wake up after a hearty siesta, shower and then take a taxi to some office clean across town to discover that it shuts at five for the day.

Five is hardly a late hour in a country which rarely goes to bed before midnight.

Indeed, much of Spain’s business is carried out over a beer or a glass of wine, either during the leisurely lunch which helps make living in this country such a pleasure, or during the evening, when the office-workers slip next door to the local cafeteria for a beer and chat, perhaps with a client. This explains why my subscription news-letter about Spain (a modest income, but one needs something to do) is called 'Business over Tapas'.

The Spanish say that most deals are made outside the office.

Between this agreeable state of affairs and the burgeoning Anglo presence in the business world, the battle lines are drawn.

Movistar, the phone company, appears to have embraced the European working clock – at least, it has taken to sending me irritating commercial messages round about three in the afternoon on my cellphone when I am usually fast asleep. I can't imagine 'Management' being at their desks, but maybe those poor employees with broad South American accents aren't so favourably treated.

A rare intrusive call around four o’clock the other day came from some gruesome English local newspaper that clearly prefers the British work-schedule, wanting to talk to me about a classified advert selling home-made sweet chutney that I had placed in the parrish rag. Not to buy a jam-jar mind, but to ask me if I wouldn't like to advertise with them.

It ruined that day’s nap entirely; as I was left wondering why the Lista Robinson hadn't kicked in. That's a service here in Spain which stops all unsolicited phone-calls. It operates pretty well as a rule.

The Spanish siesta is an institution that has worked for hundreds of years and is based on the soundest of experience and principals. Many of Spain's victories and defeats over the centuries have been down to a refreshed army captain making a late-night raid against the French or (in the case of the Invincible Armada) a look-out's inopportune kip. Oddly, I recently read somewhere that the siesta was introduced by Franco - a claim probably written by some stringer for the telephone company during his lunch hour. After all, goes the logic, if the Generalísimo invented it then it’s OK to give it the bum’s rush and adopt instead those miserable Anglo hours.

So take no notice, and close the shutters after the lunch is over, allowing both the cocido madrileño and your body to settle confortably. You will then be better able to face the long evening ahead.