Spanish Shilling

How good are you on names? I have a small problem with remembering them which dates back to school times. I attended a place with eight hundred other boys, 120 of which were presumably in their leaving year, a large number somewhere in the middle, and another 120 just arriving. All dressed in the same uniform and haircut. All to be known by their last names.

Then there were the masters and the associate staff. And Matron. There was a little blue book that listed the whole lot of them by house, name and dates.

There were twelve ‘houses’ of which, by the time I left, I could confidently locate four. But, the ‘Blue Book’ knew. Some fellows, they must have been swots, learnt the whole thing and could put the right name to everybody.

People like that, we knew, would one day excel in public life. Now, I wasn’t as game at this as I might have been, never knowing by name more than about twenty people, students and masters, and by sight, perhaps another thirty or so (plus the tea-lady).

This didn’t prepare me very well for adult life, especially a place like Mojácar which, in a way similar to the old school (‘Gloreat Rugbeia’) has lots of both new-boys and, indeed, leavers. The difference being, according to my mum, that here is a lot more like living in a lunatic asylum.

Where no one knows who the nurses are.

Spain has its own way of dealing with names. While we get by with a first name, a middle name that no one knows and a last name, the Spanish go for a first name (un nombre), the more generic the better, and a handful of last names (los apellidos). Here, a woman’s surname doesn’t change on entering into the holy state of matrimony (unless the husband’s name is rather smart in which case she’ll tack it on the end of her own). She’ll keep her old collection and, if pushed, might accept being ‘la Señora de so-and-so’. Any children that happen along will take the best bits from their two parents’ surnames and weld them together into a fresh and different name. Thus José López Rodríguez marries María Pérez Muñoz, who keeps her name as always it was, and the children are called María López Pérez and José-Luís López Pérez (who may call himself, quite correctly under Spanish logic, Pepe Pérez). Or nowadays, they can legally reverse the surnames, with Mother's monica coming first - thus Pérez López, why not.

Which explains why the Spanish authorities will always want to know the first-name from one’s parents. Francisco, son of José and Alicia.

You may have noticed that the Spanish are very enthusiastic about our middle-name, under the impression that it's really a first surname - a sort of anglo deal where we use our second-surname in an acceptable way, while quietly dropping the first one.

Which is usually Douglas or Reginald and chosen to honour grand-dad while sublely reminding him about the Will.

Our middle names (God forbid we have several of them) are generally ignored by both foreigners and the Spanish except when in prison or hospital and they will always be used in police reports to cause confusion when leaked to the press (‘Richard Waverly B was arrested yesterday in connection with…’) or at the hospital ('I'd like to see Señor uh, Waverly - did I pronounce that right?').

My dad was known as ‘Chick Napier’ at school, not because there were many others with his name, but because ‘he had eyes like poached eggs’. Most people in Spain, equipped as they are with first and a variety of last names, also enjoy an ‘apodo’ or a ‘mote’ – a nick-name. Somebody goes to work in Germany for six months in 1925, as happened in Mojácar, and the whole family to this day is called ‘Los Alemanes’. Another well-known family is Los Marullos, and one of them, Francisco Gonzalez ‘el Marullo’, was mayor of Mojácar. Marullo means ‘sneak thief’.

Nobody from around here finds that peculiar. It makes it easier for people to identify one another. Another family from the hills is known as ‘Los Pajules’: the tossers. They may make one think of Onan from the Bible, whose unconventional sexual activities duly (and inevitably) wiped out his line, but the Pajules clearly have a wider repertoire, since there are quite a lot of them. In fact, every local family will have its own ‘apodo’ which, as we have seen, they will be fiercely proud of.

Small towns have a reduced number of ‘apellidos’: surnames. Here in my town, we have Flores, García, Gonzalez, Haro and a couple more. I had an employee called Paco Flores (Paco is really Francisco) and one day I went down to the bank to pay him something. The manager looked pityingly at me, ‘there’s twenty six Francisco Flores with accounts here’, he said. Turned out later that my chap wasn’t one of them anyway, being called Francisco-José Flores instead.

Spaniards, like the Welsh who apparently all share the same surname, are obliged to invent different nicknames, or just use different variations of their first name. Francisco can be Franco, Francis, Pancho, Paco, Paquito, Frasquito, Ico and Fran.

Actually the most famous Pancho of them all, Pancho Villa, was really called Doroteo. Who would have guessed?

A friend called Diego has a sure-fire solution to his poor memory for names. He calls all the men ‘León’ and all the women ‘Guapa’ – Lionheart and My Pretty. It’s so much more elegant than the British ‘Ahhh, this is Errr-um…’

And then, for Goodness Sakes, the Brits expect us to know the names of their children and their dogs as well.

Until ‘La Democracia’ arrived in 1975, you had to call you child by a nice Christian saint’s name, or two would be even better. Sometimes a boy’s name followed by a girl’s (which isn’t generally worth making fun of, unless you can show a good turn of speed). Like José María. Or, of course, María José. I can’t see those names working at my old school, even though, since my day, it’s apparently gone co-educational.

So here in Spain your married parents are separately named (father's name) (mother's name) and you legally take their two first surnames to make up your own set. You may use just your father’s name in the street or, both, or indeed, if your father’s name is a bit humdrum, then you can use your mother’s surname. Take our former president for example. He’s called José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He nevertheless uses his mother’s surname. However, his kids won’t technically be able to call themselves ‘Zapatero’ which is a bit of a swizz. They’ll probably use it anyway.

Spaniards, for their part, are confused about us having two first names and one surname, which the ladies among us will change on getting married. Same surname? They sometimes confuse us as brother and sister.

There are even the equivalents to Thingume, Woosit and Whatyacallim for those of a forgetful disposition - thus Spain has Fulano, Mengano, Zutano and my old mate Perengano to hold up the side. Una Fulana, unfortunately, and Spain being how it is, is a name for a whore.

If you are called Juan and you bump into another Juan, you’ll call him ‘Tocayo’ which means ‘namesake’, which in English, as far as I know, doesn’t work.

Of course, I’ve never met another Lenox.

I'll never have a fluent-sounding accent when I speak Spanish. It's pretty good, but if I have an accent, it's an English one. Which stands to reason I suppose, since that's where I'm from. It's easy enough to spot although there's the exception maybe when I'm on the phone and my caller can't see me and realise that there's no way a tall blond/gray sunburned Swede with blue eyes like me could ever be from Murcia.

It's a pity really, as I only started to learn Spanish when I was thirteen. The sounds eluded me, whereas I began with French at the age of six, and thus, although I've since forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, when speaking to a Frenchman I tend to sound like an alcoholic from Lyon who must have just misplaced the words he needed for that particular moment. 

Also, in French, there are a hundred ways of saying 'you know what I mean, um, at the end of the day...' and other useless fillers to ward off actually saying something useful. In Spain, all we have is coño.   

We need context when we talk in Spanish - which means we need to know the society in which we are moving - the food, the geography, the politicians and the film-stars. So, there's another reason to watch the Spanish news on the TV. 

I clearly lean towards the parrot-theory of language: it's not what you say - it's how you say it. After all, no one is listening anyway, they are just waiting politely for their turn. One clever way to pick up the cadence and the various tics that belong to a language is to imitate it when speaking in your own. French lends itself to this - as we know from watching 'Ello 'Ello (here). And so why not Spanish as well?

We must then turn to the detail. It's easy enough to work the jota, the sound in such words as bujía, jamás and reloj, although they say that smoking helps, and it's a little harder to get the rr right: pero and perro. Then there's our friend the Ñ (called an 'eñe' - or 'enye' if you are missing it on your keyboard), which for some reason the British newspapers like to switch for the letter N, giving rise to such horrors as Espana, cono and Feliz Ano. 

The LL is easy enough, pronounced like the middle bit in William (although, oddly, there's a war in Spanish between the LL and the Y). Actually, the ll was considered as just another letter of the Spanish alphabet until 1994, as was the ch. 

It made playing Scrabble easier: a point which is rarely made. 

For us Brits, I think that the Spanish J is the big one, and here's Camilo Sexto singing his 1975 hit Jamás (Never!), if you feel like practicing the jota and singing along. 

After all, that's what your parrot would do. 

The confusion in Spanish between the letters B and V works in our favour I think, as we hear them differently. As the old Latin joke goes, the great thing about the Spanish is that they don't know the distinction between vivere et bibere; that's to say, between living and boozing. 

And who can argue with that?

One point that English-speakers need to remember when in the throes of speaking castellano (that's what they call it here) is to pronounce foreign words and names as a Spaniard would. I'm usually called Lenon (like the pop singer) Andrew is Andréu. William is Guílian. It gets worse. The singer JJ Cale is Jota Jota Kalay. 

My title BeeBapoRu refers to how one calls a popular unguent available at the farmacia which one rubs on one's chest. That's right: it's Vicks Vapour Rub as pronounced by the chemist. If that doesn't work by the way, then drink a Bloody Mary (un bludi) with plenty of salsa guorsesterechaer and lie down for a bit.

And practice that Camilo Sesto song.

Most of the media in Spain - understandably enough - is owned by large corporations who want to make money (the general rule being, that newspapers, radio and even TV tend to lose money). They also want to bring the public, their audience, around to a particular view. After all, what one loses on the swings, one can make back on the roundabouts. The politicians will be interested in helping them as for the quid pro quo. You bring us voters, mass-approval and the odd swinging door promotion and we'll sort out that vexing company tax issue that the lefties have been on about.

An article at The Corner disagrees with the accusation of media manipulation in Spain. ‘Discrediting is easy, it sounds good because it serves to justify oneself and blame others for one’s own mistakes. It is the easy road to social regression, to that malaise that demobilises and encourages irresponsibility’ it says.

So, in short, we should believe everything we read. 

Several TV chat shows have been found to be manipulating the truth about Irene Montero recently, nothing new there. The Minister of Equality Montero (Podemos) was asked about the events in Melilla the other day when at least 23 immigrants died while trying to cross the border from Morocco. Montero went on record saying it was a tragedy and insisted on an independent inquiry. 

Her words were carefully edited and the result was something truly different. Thus the chat shows of El Programa de Ana Rosa (Telecinco) – a sort of ‘Fox and Friends’, Espejo Público (Antena 3) and Más de Uno (Onda Cero Radio) were egregiously brutal against the minister. The video in question was tricked up – it says here – by a right-wing journalist and lawyer called Javier Gimeno Priede. 

A few days after the original broadcast, Ana Terradillos apologised on El Programa de Ana Rosa saying that they had failed to show the entire Montero interview. 

Known in the World of the Media as 'the old apology at the bottom of page nine'.

There are several commercial TV channels in Spain, plus the ones operated by the regional governments, plus, of course, the national RTVE. The regional ones, in both the news and the opinion 'tertulia' talking-head programs, are slanted according to the colour of the politicians in charge, as we know and give them the appropriate credit (The Andalusian Canal Sur, for example, gives us the news slanted to favour the Partido Popular, with a few nods towards Vox). The RTVE is more or less impartial, like the BBC, with representation from both the Government and the Opposition on the board of directors. 

Or, to put it another way - both sides complain about their lack of impartiality...

Which brings us to the commercial channels with their long pauses for adverts. They are of course supporters of the conservatives and are owned by large corporations (Silvio Berlusconi owns both El Cuatro and Telecinco) while Atresmedia (Antena3 and LaSexta) belongs to a combination of Planeta (they also own La Razón) and Bertelsmann. Wiki says that 'The merger of Antena3 with LaSexta (by means of the absorption of the latter) was formalised in October 2012. After the merger, LaSexta somewhat retained a perception of a left-leaning profile, starkly contrasting to those of the rest of Planeta media properties'.

More important than the example of the hostile editing of Irene Montero mentioned above is the cynical manipulation carried out by the previous government regarding Irene's husband Pablo Iglesias (he of the ponytail, since removed) and the party he started in 2014: Podemos, and - according to some newly unearthed secret recordings involving (apart from the usual suspects) - the director of LaSexta, Antonio García Ferreras, who is better known to viewers as a news-caster and who is generally considered to lean slightly to the left. 

Ferreras, Pablo Iglesias and Eduardo Inda

The recordings are between the master manipulator the ex-commissar José Manuel Villarejo in March 2017 (shortly before his arrest) and Ferreras, who essentially admits on tape that he knew at the time that the 'proofs' against Podemos were bogus, but he had run them on his show anyway. 

The tapes, discovered by Patricia López at Crónica Libre, show that Planeta - owner of LaSexta among other outlets - were happy to run the invented news of Eduardo Inda from OKDiario, knowing it to be false. The bogus story (shortly before the June 2016 general elections) was how the Venezuelan government had donated $272,000 to an offshore account run by Pablo Iglesias. It is, we read, '...the final confirmation that the largest Spanish communication group has conspired for years with members of the police, judges and sundry self-styled journalists to try to sink the credibility and political career of Pablo Iglesias'.

The campaign was certainly effective, as the difference between the December 2015 and June 2016 Spanish general election results for Podemos was from 65 to 45: a fall of twenty seats.

Between the media, the corporations and the judiciary (Podemos has been the accused party in any number of court-cases which were later archived), it's no surprise to read that the presidents of Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Chile have all spoken of the 'mediatic sewers' in Spain. 

Also critical of the media-manipulation in Spain, we find France's Jean-Luc Mélenchon who writes: "Scandal in Spain: the journalist of an important television program invented defamatory revelations about Podemos and Pablo Iglesias in connection with the (Rajoy Government) Ministry of the Interior". 

The leading fake-news provider, OKDiario (its director is the talking-head Eduardo Inda, who, oddly, often appears as a guest on Ferreras' show Al Rojo Vivo) naturally denies the whole story - based on his news-site's fabrication of illegal financing for Podemos via Venezuela, known, at least in right-wing circles - as PISA or 'Pablo Iglesias sociedad anónima', claiming that it is nothing more than an invention from the left-wing media to attempt to justify Podemos' fall in popularity. The story certainly cost Podemos many votes in the 2016 general election.

Ferreras on his Monday broadcast at Al Rojo Vivo denied the charges, 'we have never published news knowing it to be false', he says.

...

"I guarantee you, there is a war out there. There is a war between facts and slogans, there is a war between information and propaganda, there is a war between truth and lies". Thus, Javier Ruiz's farewell in June 2018 on the final broadcast of the program Las Mañanas de Cuatro.

Like many people, I'm not much of a gardener. Sometimes I remember to go and squirt everything with the hose, for which the shrubbery is suitably grateful, perhaps even rewarding me with a flower or two. Other times... well, I was doing something else, you know how it is. 

Here in our neck of the world, it's hot, and the garden (lovingly laid down by my mum back in the sixties) needs lots of attention. Unlike the household chores, which brings you back to where you were before you scruffied things up, or made lunch, or spilled a gin and tonic on the carpet, the garden moves slowly forward, and of course, upwards.

There's even the odd occasion when, in a burst of enthusiasm, I find myself driving over to the vivero, to buy something which could be perfectly de-potted and decanted into that space near the olive tree which hasn't produced anything of interest since the dog dug up the marihuana plant last year. 

Gardening means pruning, cutting, digging, uprooting, weeding, bug-removing, planting and, above all, watering.

Three times a week, I say to myself, water everything you love and the garden will one day look peachy, just like it used to a generation ago. 

Then of course - and this is key to a happy horticulturist - remember to switch off the garden-tap after use.

Once you have forgotten to switch off the hose, and moved on to other duties like shopping, watching the TV or driving to Barcelona for the weekend, the gaily-coloured tube will carry on pumping water to that one surprised, grateful and eventually waterlogged and dead geranium until such time as the call to put on a straw hat, rinse one's face with Factor Fifty and go outside and water the garden returns. Which - at best - is every two days. It's not like forgetting to switch off the soup, or pull up one's zipper, or watch the news. When one is not in the garden, one is not switching off the hose.

The water bill, which arrives at the end of every two months, is suddenly through the roof. It's happened to me a couple of times, and blast it, it happened again this weekend. I forgot to turn the hose off. I had filled a watering can to access an outlying violet and then went off to save the world from the space invaders and, well, you know how it is.

By the time I had retaken Aldebaran, the garden was looking like the Red Sea. 

This brings about another problem; I mean, besides the bank-loan to pay the water company. 

The unseasonable flood has brought me a ton of weeds and stinging nettles. And snails. 

I am also pretty sure that my mum visited me last night. I wasn't asleep when she came. 

I'm in the garden now. 

Watering.

I've given up with Facebook.

This time, they jailed me for another month after putting a frivolous comment on a Spectrum Radio post about the new proposal to double-pack passengers on a flight.

I wrote: 'Why not knock them unconscious and stack them in the hold'.  Pathetic perhaps, but hardly revolutionary.

The Thought Police were quick on the uptake and gave me another month to cool my heels (I had just got out that day from an earlier and equally stupid sentence). 

Facebook - where one isn't even allowed the luxury of a kangaroo court. Where the power to close one down is evidently in the hands of faceless gnomes.

It raises the question - are they really watching us, or is there a filter that catches the key words like 'unconscious', or do people with a loose understanding of the word 'fair' routinely report their rivals (apparently one can)?

Facebook takes my money for promoting a site of mine called 'Business over Tapas', that I can't even visit.

Indeed, I'm currently barred from putting as much as a 'like' on a post, and friends don't know I've been removed from all activity because I can't tell them. For that matter, I am not permitted to send even a 'like', much less a heart emoji, to a birthday friend.

They've even gone to the length of freezing the feed - with nothing new for me to see since I was thrown into the slammer

So, to Hell with Facebook.

It's a pity because, having been in desktop-publishing most of my life, I enjoyed seeing and posting on Facebook. I no doubt spent far too much time looking at it on the cell-phone (the average time spent on social media by those who use it, says Statista, is over two hours a day).

Me and Donald Trump both! 

Did you see that? It says '...usually takes a few weeks...'!

Still, with all this free time I now have, I can do all sorts of other things to fill my day.

Dig a hole, maybe.