Spanish Shilling

There's a mental gauge commonly employed by the British, who are used to their own starchy cooking, on Spanish food - as to how edible might it be. It starts at the bottom with chicken and chips and ends in the stratosphere with something like calf's brains or entrails of some description. Squid in its own ink, maybe. Most of us work our way up to around the three quarters mark, with some surprising and agreeable results. 

Only a courageous few of us will ever try the bull's testicles.

Towards the middle of my own standard of the Spanish cuisine, comes the leg of a young goat cooked in a rich sauce, or the blood sausage known as morcilla. I'm told there's not much blood in the morcilla - just enough to give it some taste.

I was drinking one evening with some low Spanish friends who persuaded me to try the morcilla, and I found it - to my surprise - to be very good. I can now even eat it sober. Encouraged, they then offered me a piece from an innocent-sounding tortilla de sacromonte (which I knew to be a beef brains omelette). Eww. 

The things one does when one's drunk.

There are one or two things towards the high-end on my gauge which I don't like at all - those little baby eels (angulas) that one is meant to eat with a wooden spoon. Chicken livers (although, turned into paté and relaxed a bit, I suppose that they aren't so bad). Partridge en escabeche, a kind of vinegary sauce popular with hunters and (less so) with their patient families, peppered as they are with bits of lead pellet from the shotgun blast distributed unevenly among the slivers of breast.

My dad used to want to clear the house every now and again. He would put an operatic record on in the sitting room and then fry up some kidneys. Between the ghastly noise and the foul smell, we would quickly agree to leave him in peace for a time. 

Back to the blood sausage - my wife Alicia tells me that at the matanza, the pig-killing, they boil up an entire sack of onions, mix it with a slew of spices and some minced pig, and them wash it sparingly with blood. Too much blood, apparently, makes it go hard. 

Having explained the wonders of the traditionally abrupt demise of the family pig, she moved to the subject of goats. We should get a baby one and then feed it up to be milked every day (by whom?). We would go and talk with the shepherd who lives just down the road together with his large and scruffy flock. The plan was that I should drink goats' milk. Perhaps build me up, I don't know. 

While the goat itself - at least a young one - is more or less edible, and its cheese is first-rate, I've never been able to bring myself to quaff a glass of goats' milk. I somehow imagine it's full of bits of stringy hair. 

There's currently a brick of it in the fridge, unopened, and waiting for my attention. Me, I'm waiting for the expiry date to come around, so I can say - well, I had to throw it away, it would have been off.

The American embassy has sent out a warning: ‘News media report volcanic eruptions have occurred in La Palma, Canary Islands. Evacuations are underway in Cabeza de Vaca and El Paraiso. There are reports of ensuing forest fires as well. U.S. citizens are advised to monitor local news and government websites for detailed information, including precautions to take and possible evacuation instructions’. There’s a satellite map, here.

The Canary Islands are a long way from the Spanish mainland, being in the Atlantic Ocean some 600kms off the Western Sahara. In the improbable event that the eruptions turn the island of Palma into an explosive Karakatoa, the resulting tsunami (says a concerned article at the NZ Herald) where ‘…anywhere between 150 and 500 cubic kilometres of rock could slide into the ocean at 100 metres per second…’, adding, ‘The immense force caused by such a landslide would generate huge waves, hundreds of metres high, that would spread across the Atlantic and hit the coast of the Americas at heights of up to 25 metres…’. Concentrating more on the American East Coast than elsewhere, a 2008 clip from The BBC on YouTube explains what could – conceivably – happen. Another (better) hair-raising video from Naked Science, with the notable quote ‘…It’s a new-born baby island, barely passed its four millionth birthday…’, can be seen on YouTube here. Both British-made documentaries appear to be more concerned with the US than with Europe (or even the UK). Even the ABC is more worried about Manhattan than it is about Cádiz.

Shades of Hollywood’s Roland Emmerich and his disaster film ‘2012’.

The tidal wave reaching Spain – at least the Atlantic coast, would apparently be less severe and the tight entrance into the Mediterranean would stop anything much more than a heavy sea rising a few metres inland.

Volcanic eruptions are quite rare and can be dangerous – as the good people of Pompeii found out – briefly – to their cost (although the current tremblers in Yellowstone could herald something better described as catastrophic). However, Spanish volcanologists say the chance of such a scenario is infinitesimal. The Olive Press also looks at the rank improbability of a mega-tsunami here. 

In all, the likelihood is that the Palma eruption could continue for some time and, as the TV whimsically noted on Monday, the lava flowing into the sea will fortuitously cause the island to grow in size (!).

We read in El País in English that ‘The president of the island council, Mariano Hernández Zapata, called the scene ‘devastating’ given that the molten rock ‘is literally eating up the houses, infrastructure and crops’ on its path toward the coast’.

As the island of La Palma – really just a small portion of it – is in eruption, and everyone who lives or in holidaying nearby are hurrying across the hills to catch a glimpse of the treat (except of course the Americans), the President of Spain passed up a formal visit to the UN to meet instead with the startled neighbours while the Minister of Tourism is looking into the possibilities of making the new volcano a tourist attraction.

Meanwhile, to keep us on our toes, Sicily’s Mount Etna has just erupted.

Not that it’s necessarily happening at all, mind – some negacionistas reckon it’s a fake.

(Written from the top of the Sierra Nevada with a handy scuba suit and a tin hat)  

Goodness, there’s another row between the Daily Express and the EU. On this occasion, the Spanish – at the very least – have said that those Brits living in Spain, as we delicately put it on Facebook, ‘under the radar’ – that’s to say, without the appropriate paperwork – will be summarily ejected from the country when discovered.

If we might assume that this will be the case for all of the EU-27, not such a leap perhaps, then there will soon be quite a large number of tearful Brits waiting on the quayside for one of London’s fine destroyers to dock.

One can imagine the call from the captain: ‘Form an orderly queue please (they already had, of course). You can bring with you one small suitcase, no pets and no foreign companions’.

Bickering between themselves as to whether they were expats (or exexpats) or rather immigrants, the deported Brits shuffle slowly forward to the gangplank.

‘I suppose this is all to do with Brexit’, says one redundantly.

The problem doesn’t end there.

As they disembark at the other end, in some British port far away from the eyes of the press, they will wonder what will become of them. This isn’t a re-run of Dunkirk – nobody in the UK wants anything to do with this.

Neither their relatives, anxious about the spare-bedroom and the drinking problem, nor the Home Office - notoriously unhelpful when it comes to dealing with new settlers from abroad - will wonder if they were in any way responsible for the 200,000 or so refugees who would be preparing themselves, in that British way we have, into making something of a fuss.

The UK is not the same as GB, as any number-plate enthusiast can tell you, because now it’s just another foreign country.

There's nothing else for it but to keep checking the Daily Express to see how this issue is coming along.  

A good newspaper, even an ex-pat one, needs a letters page. There, the readers can have the last word on a subject raised in the publication. Letters are good for the readership (and thus, the advertisers) - being an elementary proof that there are indeed readers.

Good editors know that there are several subjects that can always be guaranteed to generate letters. Bullfighting is probably the most obvious one. An article about the beauty or the passion of the corrida will inevitably attract correspondence from those who consider it a barbarity. And why not, perhaps they’re right. Even though Fernando the Bull is in fact rather less intelligent that Rupert the Rat (according to a veterinarian friend), it probably isn’t right to torture dumb animals. Personally, I don’t care much. The corrida has tradition, bravery and catharsis to counterbalance the touchy-feely arguments against it and is, at any rate, a better way to pass the time than watching football (cue… letters…).

Another ‘red rag to the bull’, or easy provocation to the readers, is to write about minority languages. Catalan, Welsh, Euskera and whatever it is that they speak on the Scilly Isles. Apparently, it’s not that the nationalists want their people to learn whatever obscure tongue was preferred by the natives in the ninth century; it’s that they want them to use it exclusively, with the rather obvious problems for the next generations carefully buried under a rock.

Not that one wants to offend one's readers. Stimulate them, teach them about the subject at hand (Spain), amuse them and fortify them, while sometimes having some fun I suppose. That would be the editor's job. Printing some interesting letters from the public: that would be the editor's pleasure.

My dad used to write letters back in the sixties to the Eastern Daily Press. This was long before he bought his first typewriter. There would be one of these impassioned and eccentric missives printed four or five times a week to brighten up the newspaper. They never made much sense, but were extremely popular. A journalist once told him that the newspaper actually had a staffer who, among his other duties, was employed to interpret them and pull them into shape.

When I ran a newspaper here in Spain (many years ago), one of the regular columnists was a right-wing journalist called Peter Gooch who wrote about Spanish politics. He was a sort of Leapy Lee figure but armed with better grammar. He and I agreed from the beginning to occasionally ‘go over the top’ so as to generate remarks in the foreign bars along the lines of ‘I do like those Peter Gooch articles, he’s very sound!’ and letters of condemnation or approbation from the public. In politics, you can be sure to always displease half the people all the time.

Actually, all of the writers and all of the content was about Spain - no room for articles about Prince Phillip or the star from Carry on Dancing. In those days, people would come up to me and comment about the newspaper, usually when I was reading somebody else's. Well, I would say, why don’t you write me a letter?

There is, of course, one section of society that doesn’t read letters in the English-language press, and this is the Spanish authorities. Feel free to thank the local hospital staff in print in the local expat gazette, but know that no one who took bits out of you a few weeks ago in the operating theatre will ever know of your gratitude. Similarly, you shouldn't feel that a quick letter from ‘Disgusted of Arboleas’ to the Britz News regarding the proposed municipal pig-farm is going to make any difference. You will have to take the next step. Start a petition… Demonstrate!

There’s a magazine I know that, while set in Spain, deals pretty exclusively with articles about nail extensions and highlights in one's hair. I wonder where they find those articles they write (or rewrite). It's a glossy that is filled with adverts. The editor claims to want letters. Sorry, can’t type with these fingers…

Another local mag provides a regular editorial along the lines of: ‘Cor ain’t it hot. Well, this is another great issue with a great article from Ben about cooking spinach on page nine and a super new competition for the kids on page fifteen. Till next time, have a smashing read. Yours, Bertha and Robin.’

They don’t get any letters either.

People don’t write much any more? How about the social media? Post an opinion there and watch the dust fly. Angry readers, happy readers, trolls, and all inbetween. The Facebook page for our village, which usually deals with missing gerbils and the best way to fry an egg, for example had 250 replies following the story of the man who brought his dogs and cats out of Afghanistan on an aeroplane. 

Social media has taken letter-writing to a brand-new age.

They say that travelling broadens the mind. Certainly, having lived abroad since I was thirteen and besides a few brief adventures beforehand, fingering the old bucket and spade a few times even before moving to Spain, I have never been at a loss when in the company of foreigners.

It probably helped that I came from an area which has no particular tradition of either superiority or paranoia; an area best known for being flat and cold: somewhere in the east. Our most famous son, you’ll want to sit down for this, being the Singing Postman. They say his guitar picking wasn’t up to much, but that he was known for his First Class Delivery.

There weren’t any foreigners in Norfolk in those days (‘them days’) except, of course, for the odd Londoner that had got lost. This was probably, along with the flatness, the cold and the terrible music, just another good reason for leaving. Years later, when driving my new wife along a Norfolk lane (a rare visit to England), we came round a corner and bumped into a troop of Nazi soldiers with their collars loosened, having a fag. While my wife wrestled with the possibility that the English were odder than she had originally thought, I asked an amiable-looking feldwebel the way to Downham Market as we were lost.

‘Somebody hass removed all zer signs’, he agreed, pointing vaguely West.

It turned out that they were shooting a piece from ‘Allo Allo’.

Living abroad, you need to be flexible with your language, your ideas, your culture and your understanding. People, you soon discover, are pretty much as friendly (or as disagreeable) regardless of where you happen to be: despite their sex, race, age and golf handicap.

We all pretty much know this by experience, so there’s not much point in banging on about it.

Travelling, for me, has a purpose. Usually it means that I am going to see someone for some fairly solid reason. The days of going on vacation with a rucksack and a copy of Lonely Planet seem to have passed and the opportunity to go on a group-holiday - a package - has, at least in my case, yet to arrive. Then again, I doubt one learns much from this latter kind of experience beyond knowing to watch out for the Shepherd’s Pie.

And the people in the room next door.

I live in a traveller destination anyway. Making sure that I’m not taken for a tripper by mistake, I go around stoutly wearing sweaters and long trousers when the tourists are in tee-shirts – which is bloody uncomfortable I can tell you during August.

Hell, I’ve been here so long I need a holiday.

Travel might be good for you, it may remove some of your day-to-day stress and it can be agreeable, exciting or instructive. It is no doubt wonderful once you’ve got there and taken your boots off with a satisfied groan; but for me, the actual process of travelling has become increasingly arduous. I don’t mind driving the two kilometres or so to the beach, but driving to Madrid has lost its charm. Nowadays, the stress of having one eye on the speedo, one on the mirror and none left to look out of the forward porthole is beginning to take its toll. The thought of driving all the way across Europe quite undoes me (and it’s not because of the French, who I get on well with). It’s more to do with my back.

Flying is, of course, uncomfortable, violent and embarrassing (ohmigod, I forgot to put on fresh socks and they’re going to think it’s a Nerve Agent). If you are flying to the UK, you are certain to be searched by some pimply redheaded bastard from Slough. I’ll grant you that, while the flight is cramped, it is, at least, cheap. Somebody told me they flew to Luton for 99 pence the other day - plus airport taxes and an extra pound for the lavatory. This, of course, doesn’t include the interminable waiting, or the last bit - the taxi or train to your final destination. Don’t forget the two-mile walk as well, lugging a bulging plastic bag and wondering if you can light up yet.

Why do prices never make the least bit of sense? Are the airline accountants drunk the whole time? The girls at the Vera travel agency told me that the flight from Almería to Madrid can cost 600 euros return ‘but there are special offers for just 95’. Well, I’d rather pay the 95 euros but, what is it going to cost me? The Americans make the joke about obtaining cheap tickets or ‘upgrades’ that means you have to ‘wear a purple leisure suit’ (they say 'leeshoor suit') which is, presumably, something of an imposition. When I can, I’ll take the train.

One day, there will be a high speed train that will take one in comfort from the Vera train station to Madrid in the blink of an eye. It all sounds very exciting and novel. Until then, there’s the Murcia/Madrid Talgo which will do (leave the car at the station for a mere 15€ a day!). Some time in the bar, plus a few turns walking up and down through the carriages as the train deposits you, after four hours, in the middle of the Nation’s capital. Ver’ civilized, yes. Ah, the hurley burley of the city, where the finest sights and Man’s most noble attractions can be enjoyed while swivelling the wire postcard stand in the foyer of your comfortably appointed hotel!

So - these days I prefer a good armchair, a reading light and a small side-table, upon which the very best travel awaits me between cardboard covers and I don't even need to wear a face-mask. The characters and guides in the books piled on the table besides me are guaranteed to always be stimulating, refreshing and different. They will take me to the very best places, place me firmly into the most remarkable situations, introduce me to quite the most peculiar people and, in short, show me everything. They will know to offend, impress or attract me and they will have the good sense to leave me alone when the mood has passed.

I have made a lot of friends that way.