Spanish Shilling

We are surrounded by louche pintadas and graffiti, somebody’s initials in blue, black, red or silver spray-paint, squirted furtively but ambitiously over an old door, on a wall, on a shop-front, on the side of a ruined house.

Forget the Banksys and the news-items that show up here and there like ‘Andalucía is home to two of the prettiest street-paintings in the world’ – here, we talk about the jungle of aggressive balloon letters painted at night to dismay the local residents. It’s grim vandalism: a kind of Call of the Worthless. ‘Urban art is an industry, graffiti is just ego’ says a columnist.

The street-artists know that Society has no room for them, that there’ll be no chance for them to be remembered, raised, honoured or respected. Theirs is the sour realisation that they are the detritus of modern-life.

Have you seen the pictures of the underground trains in Barcelona? Cohorts of feeble-minded nitwits are out every night, spray-cans at the ready. Did you know, it cost the city 11,5 million euros to repair them last year?

Did you see the old ruin covered in competing letrasets near the motorway, or the besmirched shutters in front of the entrance to the bar that closed down last year, or the ruined and unreadable street-signs or that odd message on the bridge (how on earth did they get up there, anyway?). What about the daubed political comments, crossed out by opposing idiots who get their ideals from comic-books? Will my vote change because I suddenly see a Pedro Xanche maricón inked onto a wall?

The offensive doodle must either be removed (I saw a can in my local Chinese shop which claims that it will lift it) or painted over by either the owner or the council. Why bother? It’ll probably be back tomorrow.

One answer is to employ municipal graffiti-removers – pay them with a one euro surcharge applied on all spray-paint sold in the shops.

The town hall is busy planting trees, gussying up the fancy buildings and spending a fortune on tourist campaigns, while the secret hoards of scribblers are out night after night befouling the walls and alleyways (preferably where these idiots can’t be seen, or denounced, or arrested).

It gets worse. There’s a new phenomenon in Spain called el turismo vandalico, where foreign tourists come here to paint. Not with watercolours, but with spray-cans. Tenerife is particularly punished with this kind of visitor.

A book in the Valencian language says that it is ‘…all about our popular culture, which - among other things - helps to understand how those graffiti that emerged as a spontaneous countercultural outbreak having evolved from the primary scream to today’s sophistication…’.

Yer, right on. That’s no doubt how Rembrandt started too.

The defacement lies in its unstated threat. We are out there.  Vandalism isn’t just paint-spray on a shop-front. In its more extreme moments, it can be worse: where one paints some crap on a castle wall, or gouges out one’s initials on a prehistoric relic, or cuts down a famous ancient tree.

The message is: I may not be going anywhere, but I’m here nonetheless.

There comes a time, perhaps, when your Spanish might be described as being pretty damn good. You can read the instructions, the newspaper and the nice letter from the power company, and you can understand the news on the TV – understand the words, that is, if not the context.

The context, because the background is all important. We must grasp the culture to know what’s going on, and indeed, why it’s going on. Take a course in Spanish politics, history, geography and art. Get a Spanish companion and go together to a wedding or a matanza – a pig killing. Go to the football game. Join the local train spotters group. Speak loudly and often.

But let’s look at a rarely mentioned corner of the pronunciation jungle. You have mastered the jota and you can roll your rr more or less, but how do you pronounce foreign words in Spanish?

Answer: as a Spaniard would.

Let’s start with a drink – a soda pop. There’s Sprite (pronounced espry), there’s 7Up (siete oop, maybe? No, they’ll just call it seben), Pepsi Cola is pesi and then there’s Schweppes (no one can pronounce that in any language, but in Spanish it’s just called eshwehs) and thus, to no one’s great surprise, we all drink La Casera.

Do you see the difficulty?

Some foreign place-names have been spanishified. 

There’s Londres for London, Edimburgo up in Scotland, and (for some reason) Cornualles for Cornwall. But if you go to Middle Wallop, then you are in for a treat. It’s pronounced Mid.del gualop. Wolverhampton becomes Guolberhanton. For Heathrow, you drop the second h. Liverpool has a b. 

As for Worcestershire, don’t even try.

Now me, I’m from Norfolk, and luckily, that’s more or less the way you would say it if you were talking in Spanish.

It’s all about communication of course; saying it in a way that the listener will understand. After all, we are in espain.

Oh, and by the way, jappy easter.

(Pido disculpas a él que se siente ofendido por lo anterior)

 It's been a tough few months recently for the country - with protests of one sort or another receiving coverage in the national newspapers.

A long-term protest is the one currently going on outside the head offices of the PSOE, the ruling government party which is the socialist party. Those to the right, the PP and the Vox, agree on one point, that everyone else in Spain is not only wrong, but shamefully so. 

Thus inspired, they wrap themselves in the Spanish flag - it's odd how national flags these days only belong to the far-right - and get on down to the Calle Ferraz in Madrid for some good ol'-fashioned protestin'. Maybe burn the president in effigy or howl some appropriate insults. The police will likely turn a blind eye (Madrid is a conservative city) and the media will be there. 

What with the tractors all driving through the city, lovingly decorated once again with Spanish flags (the agricultural workers who really do all of the picking, wrapping and dodging work inspectors will have stayed home); the angry protests outside the headquarters of the smellysocks; the populists banging on in their heavily subsidised media (Madrid spends 27 million this year on 'institutional advertising' for friendly newspapers and TV channels) and the current issues with the regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Madrid is as usual the centre of attention in Spain.  

But let us move our attention to another city, usually (if not currently) in the hands of the left: Valencia. There, the fallas have just finished. The fallas are a week-long festival with lots of music, fireworks and a tradition of comic papier-mâché models which will be judged and them, with one saved for posterity, thrown into the flames. It's like we read it in Gormenghast, with the Hall of the Bright Carvers. 

But not every model - they are called ninots - are destroyed, and one must be saved. My own favourite this year is the old lady with the sun-glasses and the Spanish flag.

Now, where have I seen her before?

If we can just play ‘catch-up’ here for a moment, know that there are two sides in the Cortes, the Spanish parliament. Following the election last summer, the PP took the most seats, but wound up with a minority that even an alliance with the far-right Vox wasn’t quite enough – just four votes short – to get them into power. Then the second party in number of deputies, the PSOE, took the opportunity to get all of the other groups, the briefly united left (or far-left), plus the nationalists and the Catalonian secessionists, to agree to vote in Pedro Sánchez as president. Only, the secessionists, the Junts per Catalunya (and to a lesser degree, the ERC), said they would pull out unless an amnesty over the independence events (and bogus referendum) of 2017 were shelved. All forgiven and forgotten.

Says the Financial Times here: ‘Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has broken a parliamentary deadlock by striking a fresh amnesty deal with Catalan separatists aimed at protecting them from terrorism charges. A neat move, taking advantage of an EU definition of ‘terrorism’ narrower than Spain’s’. The PP had hoped to find support for their efforts against the amnesty from the European Commission for Democracy through Law (known as The Venice Commission) but the opinion from this body is that amnesties are acceptable in a democracy, thus stymying the efforts of the Spanish conservatives to weaken the government and even cause fresh (and likely winnable) elections.

“Thank you to the Popular Party and the Senate for requesting this report. Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños, said last week with a smile on his face. The director of elDiario.es describes the PP as being ‘victims of their own propaganda’ here.

Pedro Sánchez reacted to the news during an official visit to Chile by saying that the current legislation will now last the full four years – as elements of the judiciary continue to seek ways to bring the edifice tumbling down.

The exiled leader of Junts Carles Puigdemont, living peacefully enough in Belgium, ‘celebrated the outcome with a tweet in which he thanked the PSOE for its “willingness”, but also announced that he has no intention of stopping there. “Now, self-determination. We have every right to continue the independence process”, he crowed. The amnesty (passed in a vote on Thursday), will now be slowed down (but not stopped) by the PP-controlled Senate before passing into law somewhere in late May or June.

A protest was held in Madrid on Sunday against the amnesty. The PP and Vox were both at the event. Many Spanish flags were waved by the protestors, as they do.

The next important subject was to be the budget for 2024, but this has now been dropped following the surprise collapse of the Catalonian regional governmnet and the announcement of fresh elections there for May 12. Changes and rivalries from the Calalonian politicians in Madrid would make a national 2024 budget difficult to pass.

Other proposals for this legislation include a ban on prostitution and the recognition of Palestine as a country.

…

The lesson is that a small party with just seven deputies has managed to hold to ransom the government of a modern democracy. But what would have been the price to pay, we wonder, if the Partido Popular had have won the summer elections with the help of Vox?

For example, the far-right Voxers wants to ban all nationalist parties.

It looks like we might get a clue of how this could have played following the results this Sunday in Portugal with a hung-parliament and the far-right Chega taking third place.

There’s a major bookshop in our local city, and I’ve dropped by there a few times – either to buy a novel in Spanish (which I can read, if sometimes a bit slowly), or one in English from their foreign-language nook downstairs. Three or four shelves in English, plus a few books scattered in there in German – hey, it’s all foreign, right?

The spines on Spanish books are always printed upside-down which means that the usual book-stocker employee, unaware that this peculiar custom has yet to emigrate beyond the Pyrenees, will put the English (and German) books on the shelf the wrong-side-up so as to match the other shelves upstairs. Then along comes a Brit and pulls a few out to scope the back-cover and before you know it, the foreign books are higgledy-piggledy, which means, when I come along for a spot of browsing, I have to throw my head from one side to the other, wrenching my neck, to glom the offers on display.

At twelve euros a pop or maybe more, they ain’t cheap, neither.

So, in the Brit community fifty miles to the north, there’s a few charity shops that sell books.

The Brits will volunteer to run these shops, collecting funds for some Noble Cause (dogs and cats, usually – they haven’t yet run to helping the Palestinians).

The charity shops work on stuff being brought around and kindly donated.

Often after a local funeral.

Books are considered as a filler, I suppose, as they are usually sold at six for a shilling. Which is fine by me. See the difference here? One book at twelve euros in the city, versus seventy two charity books in guiriville for the same price. I mean, if I get half-way through and decide that it’s tripe, then I’m down by fifteen cents.

So the other night, I am lying in bed in the place I’m looking after, a country-home. Nice, very quiet, lots of trees and birdies. Reading some rubbish about a pretty detective who rides a Ducati through the worst streets of Washington (I do love to travel), I was interrupted by a large rat galloping across the bed and disappearing under the wardrobe.

So the next day, I went to buy some poison. A box with a dozen blue cubes of some dreadful stuff that disagrees with rats and I leave one on the kitchen counter, and returned to my detective, now in bed with her lawyer.

The next day, the poison had gone. But, you know, judging by some evidence in the fruit bowl, the rat hadn’t.

Or maybe there were two rats. I put another cube out.

The following day, the second cube had gone, but someone had got into the rice crispies.

I put out a third cube, put everything edible in a steel case with a combination lock, and returned to my pile of books.

And so, Best Beloved, every day and until the box was empty, the daily poison has been taken away from its place in the kitchen. Seems I either had a very strong rat on my hands, or I was doing the Devil’s Work and killing the babies living in some hitherto undiscovered hole.

I found one possible lair under the wardrobe and wedged the detective and her motorbike in it. It was about time she did something useful.

Today, a friend gave me a humane rat-trap. You leave a chunk of cheese within, the trapdoor goes *clunk* and you take him outside and toss him out in the campo a few kilometres from home. That’s the theory, anyhow.

I also bought a box of strychnine this morning, just in case

 Last week’s main story was the tragic fire that burned two connected 14- and 10-storey blocks of flats in Valencia on Thursday February 22nd in just a couple of hours. 138 apartments were gutted. That it happened during the day meant that only ten people were killed. Another 500 or so (the estimate of the total inhabitants in the two blocks) are reported safe.

The fire started on the seventh floor following a spark from a short-circuit inside an electric window-awning.

The façade of the building – which began construction in 2006 – was covered by an innovative material called Alucobond, an aluminium composite that includes synthetic material.

The manufacturer’s website insists on its product: ‘High-quality, resilient and unique in appearance – Alucobond® stands for sustainable construction quality and the highest creative standards. The façade material is distinguished by its outstanding product attributes such as precise flatness, variety of surfaces and colours as well as excellent formability’.

The suggestion is that the inner core was highly flammable. The cladding ‘was made from polyurethane, Says The Local, which is a versatile plastic material, which exists in various forms. It is used in everything from shoe soles to sportswear fabrics and mattresses. It’s also often found in building construction, particularly for cladding and insulation. The material is highly flammable, and "when heated, it catches fire" said a fireman. The fact-checking site Maldita expressed caution over the claim, saying that the cladding was more likely to be a rock-wool composite. 

A friend who lives close-by sent me the photograph he took the next morning. 

We are reminded of the Grenfell tragedy in North Kensington, London, which burnt down in June 2017 with 70 deaths. The fire ‘was accelerated by a dangerously combustible aluminium composite cladding and external insulation, with an air gap between them enabling the stack effect’. 

Back in 2008, when the buildings were completed, similar to the entire real-estate sector in Spain, the developer behind the project and an even larger sister block nearby, a firm called Fbex, went into crisis. Two years later it filed for bankruptcy for 640 million euros and the entity passed into the control of its lending bank Banesto.

Many of the owners (or perhaps mortgage holders) were left with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. The city hall of Valencia has given shelter to those affected. Mapfre insurance nevertheless has an obligation for 26.5 million euros on the buildings.

There are an untold number of high-rise buildings in Spain using a similar kind of cladding with polyurethane built before the regulations were changed in 2006. How would the owners (or, again, the mortgage-paying tenants) feel to discover that their building is potentially a fire-hazard? The tenants in the second Fbex project, in nearby Mislata (162 apartments) are understandably very concerned.