Spanish Shilling

Isn’t it a grand thing when one can change one’s opinion? It doesn’t happen often in one’s adult life – beyond maybe discovering that some of those rock groups really weren’t that good after all – and yet, lookit, here we are today: fans of Spanish women’s football!

They’ve done awfully well in the last twelve months, breaking the records that men’s football can currently only dream about – championships, FIFA World Cup championships and more – indeed, the Barcelona women’s blaugranas team just beat the French Olympique Lyonnais team in the Bilbao stadium in front of 51,000 spectators to win The UEFA Women’s Champions League.  

This strange new world we live in: a proper televised women’s sporting event where a couple of fellows brought a pro-Palestinian banner on to the pitch at the beginning of the match, receiving cheers from the fans (and evident approval from the organisers).

I learned today that Women’s Football has been played in the UK since 1890 (at least) but that ‘some saw it as a threat to men’s football. The FA banned women from playing the sport at FA affiliated grounds between 1921 and 1971, with the governing body stating: “…the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged”’.

In Spain, the first club ‘the Spanish Girl’s Club’ dates from 1914 (‘twenty years before women could vote’, says an article I’m reading). From the Civil War until Franco’s death, the sport was dropped – call it chauvinism if you like.

I’ve never liked football – a long game interspaced once or twice in ninety agonizing minutes with a shrieked ¡gol gol gol! from the exited commentator on the TV on the shelf behind me. ‘Who won?’, I ask without turning round.

It’s probably to do with my early school life – the choices were either soccer or Latin (or, uh, smoking on the roof of the lavatories).

But look at the players! Somebody said unkindly a few years ago that you would never get eleven women to agree to wear the same outfit in public, but suddenly we saw that this whole deal wasn’t about sexy girls, like the ones playing volleyball matches – where nobody cares about the score anyway. This was about real ones: playing sport and playing to win: an inspiration for girls everywhere. Something to make society proud.  

Luis Rubiales was the one who discovered that the age of treating young women like giddy chickies was now officially over. ‘He didn’t respect me, neither as a player nor as a person’, said Jenni Hermoso.

Now that’s a mistake he won’t make again.

It seems to be an endless series of elections recently, with the Galicians, the Basques, the Catalonians and now along comes the Europeans. The three regional ballots threw up a few interesting results – the Partido Popular did well in Galicia, the two regional parties PNV and EH Bildu scored neck-and-neck in Euzkadi (the PSOE will be the decider) and the PSC (the regional name for the PSOE) took the largest vote in Catalonia, the two independent parties coming second and third, and the PP in fourth place. And, of course, the final disappearance of Ciudadanos – the oh-so-centrist conservative clone.

The news and opinion has been full of the results and the intrigues: how did our party do? Are we growing or sinking? Should we run another survey already?

Can we extrapolate the regional results for Europe?

Perhaps not. Spain only has 61 out of 720 MEPs.

But, on the other hand, the populists are doing well across Europe, so the chances are that both the PP’s Alberto Núñez Feijóo (whose platform seems to be more about destroying Spain’s government and the socialist party than providing any policies of his own), and the insufferable Santiago Abascal, may be rewarded come June 9th.

Abascal was entertaining his friend the Argentine president Javier Milei this week-end during the Vox ‘Europa Viva 24’ summit (‘the anti-human-rights summit’ says one lefty commentator), along with a number of other far-right leaders (a pity Trump couldn’t come, although of course he’s busy at the moment).

The conference, enthused La Gaceta, ‘brought together dozens of patriotic leaders from Europe and Latin America’. The future is ours, say the populists, or to put it another way, ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’.

‘Madrid became, this weekend, the epicentre of fascism’ said elDiario.es here.

Things then went a bit awry, when Milei told his captivated audience that Pedro Sánchez' wife was una corrupta. The Spanish president was not amused and has called the ambassador home from Buenos Aires. Unsurprisingly, the Partido Popular were careful not to defend the President of Spain, saying "Our job is to oppose the president of Spain, not the president of Argentina".

Meanwhile, the irrepresible Javier Milei has now tweeted from his flight home to his followers and admirers:  “I’m surfing on a wave of socialists’ tears. Long live Freedom, shit”.

Last month, Milei received the ex-president of Spain José María Aznar in Buenos Aires. The Argentinian bruiser also met several business-leaders on Saturday, including the chairman of the CEOE (the Spanish Confederation of Employers' Organizations) – Spain having major business interests in Argentina – but was not able to fit in time to visit the Spanish president (both leaders no-doubt releasing a satisfied breath over this breach of procedure).

As an aside – why do so many of the far-right have peculiar haircuts? From Trump to Boris to Geert Wilders to Milei? Is it a sign of their disregard for conformity?

The drift across Europe, say the editorials, is towards the right. We see that the conservatives are bedding down with the populists (a tactic that has so far seen mixed results here in Spain, as the tail so often ends up wagging the dog).

For the flag-wavers, illegal immigration is their cause juste, although the immigrants are needed to help pay the social security and thus the pensions of an ever-aging population. They’ll also do the jobs that none of us want to do, from picking strawberries to cleaning bathrooms. The other pin in the populist cause is Islam, since the suspicion is that they will one day rise up and murder us all in our beds.

Probably just to shut us up.

The threat of the European far right – and its possible acceptance – gets a timely reminder of what happened less than a century ago with the cover of Der Spiegel: a German flag draped over a disturbing symbol from the past.

So, what does the European Union do and why should we vote (those who can)?

We read that ‘All 27-member states hold inclusion, tolerance, justice, solidarity and non-discrimination as crucial pillars of the European Union’.

Unless – you see – the far-right gets in. 

And how are our friends the banks doing?

The banks used to – vaguely and no-doubt erroneously – be thought to be more of a service for citizens than their current behaviour - a kind of inspiration for the vultures, hyenas and other consumers of the dead, dying and the weak.

The banks make their money from the manager’s office rather than the teller’s desk, as the widow’s mite is placed into the drawer where it will start to earn interest – only, not for the widow, poor dear, but - down the line - for the share-holders. 

The bank isn't that interested. Small beer doesn’t make you a major player. You need some big investors with stories of major profits ahead.

So how did the banks become so unpopular? Less branches, more commissions and a diminishing service.

Now we have the case of the hostile bid from the second-largest bank in Spain towards the fourth. It started friendly enough, but the smaller bank said it wasn’t a high-enough offer. All this, right now, during the frenzy of the Catalonian elections. That fourth largest bank, that’s from Sabadell in Catalonia (although their head-office these days is safely in Alicante) with 19,213 slightly worried employees.

The putative pirate, the Borg as it were, is the BBVA (the name is an amalgam of distant banks). The head office is in Bilbao, and there are 121,486 employees. The president of the BBVA is Carlos Torres and last year he took home 7.6 million euros (not much by the standards of Amancio Ortega, who expects to pocket some 3,000 million euros in 2024, but still enough to keep the wolf from the door).

And those shareholders: wealthy leeches who can’t even claim a loyalty towards the company whose paper they hold, the employees, the traditions and the products it makes.

Although, of course it’s true that the banks only make the one product. Money.

My bank (I’ll send you my account details by separate cover) is a lot smaller. It’s one of those Cajas that used to be run by the Church.

These days, of course, it maintains a stand just inside the Cathedral door in case the Messiah returns unexpectedly.

But for the rest of us, it takes our moolah, charges us for the pleasure, and makes its real money from investments, projects, deals, the resale of homes it has expropriated from those who couldn’t meet the mortgage, and other worthwhile and marvellous devices too numerous to mention.

The politicians (well, those who don’t plan a future in la banca) are against the merger. There will be less banks. There aren’t many already with Santander, BBVA, Caixabank and Sabadell being the Big Four and taking up, between them, 75% of all deposits and, if there’s a fusion, why, there’ll be even less competition.

Fewer branches too. The widow will have to take a bus to get to the nearest counting-house.

Oddly, my bank was burgled over the May-day holiday. Two weeks later, it’s still shut.  

A local author has written a fascinating book about the revolt of the Moriscos in 1570. These were the times when the defeated Moors who remained in Spain had to become what was called by the Spanish the New Christians (eat pork, go to church and all the other things one must do to show one’s fealty). Even so, they were not allowed to own land and their children were obliged to be educated, thanks to strict rules from Felipe II, by Catholic priests. The Moriscos, descendants of Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity, faced increasing pressure. These ‘New Christians’ (many still with a copy of the Koran hidden under the bed) remained suspect in the eyes of the authorities, leading to latent tensions and conflicts. Between 1568 and 1571, the Moriscos in the Alpujarras and down towards the Almerian coast rose in rebellion against their treatment.

The book is called El Último Morisco by Diego Ramos.

It has been ably translated into English as ‘The Last Morisco’ (but yet to go to print) by Andy Mortimer, and I’ve been sent a proof to comment and correct as I see fit.

The problems we have found so far – I’m half way through it – are firstly to do with grammatical accents (does the English language accept the odd place or person’s name with an accent?). The British newspaper guides say ‘no accents’, but we are living here in Spain and, it seems to me, we might as well try and learn things right rather than wrong.  That said, we prefer Malaga to Málaga, Cordoba for Córdoba and for that matter, we use Seville for Sevilla and Lerida instead of Lleida.

But then, what of the Spanish ‘n-with-a-squiggle’: the ‘ñ’ that doesn’t even appear on our keyboard? We have decided that this, the most Spanish of letters, will stay. España, año, and Peñiscola indeed!

A second issue is measurement. Do we talk of leagues, kilometres or miles? What about yards? The Spanish measurements of the time were complicated and even varied between one place and another. La fanega, a land-measurement, changes violently according to both location and indeed meaning. It was considered in Castilla to be 1000x1000 varas, which were something smaller than a square metre. So, a sort of pint-sized hectare. However, in Galicia and Valencia, Andalucía, the Canaries and Extremadura, the range differed considerably. In short, anything from 5,707m2 down to a pocket-sized 833m2. In some places, it was merely the extent of land necessary to grow a certain amount of grain. The word comes from the Arabic faddãn. The word still appears in old escrituras in Almería.

So we think maybe to resort to old English measurements – a pace, a morning’s walk, a day’s ride and so on. After all, it’s not a text-book, it’s a fast-paced novel: indeed the blurb at Amazon says ‘…Focusing on the story of Khalíl and Dídac, two young people whose lives are shaken by the storm of war, El Último Morisco recreates with singular vividness the Spanish universe of the mid-16th century, populated with characters, some despicable and others heroic; with broken families and the corpses of innocent people half buried in wintry ditches…’

The tag says ‘Could history repeat itself?’

The English version will be in print perhaps by September. It is the story of a shockingly bloodthirsty time in Spanish history (although, perhaps not the most, since every now and again along the way, there’s been a revolution of some sort or another). By chance, I’m currently reading a novel about Madrid in 1936, on the eve of the Civil War.

Things are not looking good.

Perhaps the lesson here is that an occasional violent rebellion is in the nature of this most charming and welcoming nation.