Spanish Shilling

Each week I write Business over Tapas and send it out to subscribers. It comes with plenty of useful news about life in Spain, and a well thought-out editorial. I've lived here for most of my life and edited several newspapers, both in English and Spanish, between 1985 and 2008. 

But sometimes, there's not much to write about...

...

August has just about made its apologies and left, bringing us Welcome September – which is the best month of them all. The weather (should be) perfect, warm but not killer-hot. The sea will be just right and there’ll finally be some room on the beach.

The subject of la turismofobia will be dropped (at least until next year) and the children will all be back in school.

For journalists and hacks, there’s the renewed prospect of writing about Spanish politics – that effervescent mixture of insults, betrayals and some occasional improvements (or at least, changes) in our lives.

And then the autumn slowly creeps towards us, bringing a freshness to the air and the garden. We can go for walks once again in the campo or along the paseo marítimo. Maybe drop in somewhere for a beer, where the barman remembers our name and is once again pleased to see us.

September is a good moment to start new adventures, and maybe pause to see what the others are writing about:

So, here’s the intro over at that new costa magazine ‘Spain By Jingo’:

Welcome to our coolest month, September, where it’s blissfully hot and groovy.

We enjoyed the thrash during the summer, but now thankfully, they’ve all rushed home again, leaving us to enjoy the peace and pick up the pieces.

We hope you enjoyed our local fiesta last week. We had a go on the dodgem-cars, which reminded us a lot of the roundabout along the beach in front of the hotel.

Seriously though, here in Spain we drive on the right.

In this exciting edition, with some brand-new advertisers for you to meet, we have Beryl’s nail extensions on P.9 and also three and a half ways to cook a chicken with Gillie on the same page (Ok, Ok, the full-page advert from an offshore financial adviser that was going to go there fell through at the last moment – we think he got arrested. We pulled his article too, just in case…).

Peter Grubshall is back with the riveting story of his move to Spain with ‘From Gloucester to the Costa’.

With our fiendish quiz on P.14 (all about Your Favourite Country) and our guide to useful words in Spanish in the Back, we are sure you’ll have a fab month.

Andy and Lucía.

...

(I leave you wondering - what is your favourite country?)

Churning through the media articles every day to find material for my weekly bulletin about Spain, I often find pieces which are designed to make the reader go past the title and into the text – surrounded as it is with advertisements, pop-ups and, of course, the EU’s insistence on asking us if it’s OK to place cookies on our phone every bloody time.

Then along comes the text that says: ‘We notice you’re using an ad-blocker…’

Damn right I am.

But despite all this, yes, I have decided that I want to read about ‘We’ve Found the Best Village in Spain’. So, open the stupid link, already!

This is called click-bait, when they don’t tell you the very vital thing you wanted to see in the headline, which is why you have to click into the story. Usually, they’ll get around to the subject in hand in the third or fourth paragraph, after you have hurdled a long diatribe about Spain’s wonderful unknown and unspoiled pueblos, a couple of adverts for shoes, shirts, or a merry cruise to Norway and an insistent request to subscribe.

The problem often being that – I guess if enough people read the article – which may have started out life somewhere else (Google has an uncanny trait of rumbling unoriginal material) then when you take the plunge and finally arrive at the destination itself, at least for lunch and a look-see, it’s going to be full of fellow-readers and, well, sorry to tell you, but – thanks to the recent media-exposure – You May Need to Book!

Annoying for those who bought a place there some years previously, precisely because it was off the beaten track.

These ‘beautiful’ or ‘best kept secret’ articles are easy to write (thanks Wikipedia!) and they fill a space. How many times have you seen a picture of that street covered by a huge rock in Setenil de las Bodegas (Cádiz) or that embarrassing pueblo in Málaga they painted blue?

Right now, there are endless stories of ‘a pretty village in Spain where they want to ban tourists’. Above all apparently, the ones who take ‘selfies’, according to one gloomy home-owner. Often called ‘The little Mykonos’ (by absolutely nobody except copy-editors, I suspect), the village – Binibeca Vell – is in fact a 1972 urbanisation on the edge of San Luís in Menorca. And it’s probably not looking its best after the heavy rains last week.

See, it gets full of visitors, which is no doubt a treat for the local souvenir shop, but it is kind of a nuisance for everybody else.

There may be lots of money in tourism, but it doesn’t get spread around as fairly as it might.

The alternative is to tell the locals to stay inside so as not to inconvenience the cruise-ship trippers (as happened on the Greek island of Santorini the other day), or close the local bar (as reported in a pueblo in Galicia – ‘We don’t want any Madrid tourists here giving themselves airs’, explained the owner in garbled Galician). A fellow from Barcelona says that in his city, ‘We don’t walk in a straight line any more, we dodge’. Over in Santiago de Compostela, the locals complain about the pilgrims – ‘it’s like Easter every day of the year’.

How about Peñiscola, in Castellón? Eight thousand people live there, and there are 25 visitors for every resident. ‘Excuse me, coming through…’ (My own Mojácar is in sixth place according to the media report).

No doubt the city fathers would prefer wealthy tourists – the ones who spend and tip lavishly – while not so much the other kind, who drink a few beers and are sick in the fabled village gardens. Or, worse still, the ones who spray-paint an esteemed foreign resident’s eleven million dollar home. But, sad to say, you can’t really have the one kind of visitor without the other, unless there’s a fellow in a uniform at the gate. Also – wealthy people don’t necessarily behave themselves better.

Tourism is either packing as many sights into a short vacation as one can (‘If this is Tuesday, this must be Belgium’) or spending the holiday in one single place, usually to relax and get pissed. Both have their merits and – evidently – their issues.

But, don’t we have a right to two holidays away each year? (We can except us foreign residents in this instance, with a car-trip across Spain or a weekend in a Parador. For one thing, we don’t tend to travel in packs).

The point is this: would Spanish tourists suddenly come to your town in the UK or Germany and behave in the same way – and if they (by some miracle) they did – how would you feel? A thousand drunken Spaniards in Hatfield (dubbed as ‘The Most Boring Town in England’) wearing Gibraltar Español tee-shirts and singing loudly and tunelessly as Henry over at The Red Lion gleefully fills them up with more drinks.  

So remember, as you scan the blogs and news-sites for fresh and interesting places to visit:

‘Your vacation spot is somebody else’s home’.

Two things to know about me – I’m blind as a bat… and I like bats.

Well, any critter really. The bats come from finding eleven of them stashed in my curtains in my bedroom early one morning while of a tender age and still living in Norfolk. Cute little things. None of them bit me as I shooed them outside.

Here, there are no curtains to speak of, and the usual critters hanging upside down from the rafters tend to be geckos. Nice and friendly – like the bats, they enjoy a fresh mosquito to munch on.

Now, this thing about being short-sighted. I got my first pair of specks when it became apparent I couldn’t see the writing on the blackboard. In fact, I couldn’t even see the blackboard.

I was given some horn-rimmed glasses (we call them glaffas in Spanglish) and thus equipped, I went through my formative years, leaving the school choir when my balls dropped (it was a mutual decision) and finding new and interesting pass-times, some of which involved my specks inappropriately steaming up.

Horrid things. Wandering around looking out of a pair of magnifying glasses from the wrong side while covered in spots - that, and being made to wear shorts. It's a part of my life which I try hard to forget.

When it came the time to cautiously making myself available to the Gentle Sex, I thought I would switch from my specs (now much scratched) and try out instead some fashionable blue-tinted bottle-bottomed contact lenses.

Which have stood me in remarkably good stead ever since.

The other day, while preparing myself for the evening’s adventures ahead, I was to be found taking a shower in the family hip-bath. My eyes, like the rest of me, were naked (and pink).

And what is that down near my feet, thrashing about and hoping to escape the water. I reached down to rescue it – it was a panicking gecko, poor little guy. But wait, let me just get a little closer to have a better look. I dropped onto all-fours and held my face a few inches away…

Before letting out a shriek and abruptly abandoning the tub.

Bloody thing was a giant centipede.

Well, let’s see, the Catalonian parliament was having its debate and vote to invest Salvador Illa as president of the region (good news for the party back in Madrid), as, out in the street, the long-exiled Carles Puigdemont suddenly appeared like a puff of smoke from a Arabian lamp, gave a speech to around 3,500 supporters, and abruptly disappeared once again.

Right under the noses of endless numbers of mossos (the Catalonian police), snitches, journalists and members of the Vox and PP – all failing to know how he did it.

He had even warned us that he’d be coming, and yet, with Barcelona closed tighter than a drum, he still reappeared the next day back in Waterloo, Belgium.

I wrote a little poem. Baroness Orczy fans may recognise it. Ahem.

They seek him here,

They seek him there,

Those mossos seek him everywhere.

But they can't find

That man they want,

That demmed elusive Puigdemont!

Everyone is running around in a panic, looking for someone to blame. It must have been that Perro Sanxe (Pedro Sánchez) back in Madrid (or in reality, the president and his wife are on holiday in some secret location – By Jingo! This whole disappearing thing is getting out of hand. No, he’s not in his apartment in Mojácar he bought back in 2001– I looked through the window yesterday).

The next worry, after the PP and Vox spokespeople have shouted themselves hoarse calling for the President to appear in the Senado and explain how Puigdemont made the whole country look foolish, will be to see if Pudgi’s party the Junts per Catalunya will continue to support the government once it returns to political business later this month… or go over to the opposition (where it will find some highly uncomfortable allies).

Meanwhile, back in the Catalonian parliament, the new president Salvador Illa, upstaged, is now apparently in charge.

While we have been confused (or maybe hoodwinked) over the gender of that Algerian boxer at the Olympics, another longer trick has been played particularly on the Spanish. This is the Spanish journalist who had been held without charge in Poland for the past thirty months, while the foreign ministry apparently did nothing at all to help.

But maybe they knew something we didn’t.

The journo, known to us as the left-wing Pablo Gónzalez, but to the Russians as Pavel Alekseyevich Rubtsov, was released last week as part of a major prisoner swap between the USA and Russia.

In all, sixteen prisoners returned to the West, while another eight of them headed East.  

That’s right, Pablo was on the list of prisoners claimed by the Kremlin and he’s now in Moscow. We read that ‘Pablo's legal team has issued a statement stressing that the release was made possible thanks to Russia's "genuine interest" and "intense negotiations" between the parties involved. According to his lawyers, while Russia was working to resolve the situation, others were focused on criminalizing the journalist instead of protecting his rights’.

Now, his return to Russia raises new questions about his true identity and the reasons behind his detention and release. Was he one of ours unjustly held by the Poles for thirty months, as the Spanish press has claimed all along… or perhaps one of theirs?

The Americans at least aren’t in any doubt: ‘Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted that “a group of brave journalists and democracy activists are being exchanged for a group of brutal spies”.

The exchange included no money or sanctions relief…’

Elsewhere, we read that ‘Poland's former foreign minister during most of Pablo González's imprisonment, Zbigniew Rau, said on Friday that this Spanish citizen is, in fact, a "senior officer of the Russian military intelligence", thereby justifying his confinement…’

In honour of these brave men returned to Mother Russia, Vladimir Putin has promised to dish out medals to all of them, which includes Pablo and also the notorious hit-man Vadim Krasikov, who was being held by the Germans.

A comment floating around underlines the Spanish disenchantment: ‘Full marks to Putin for caring about the plight of an innocent Spanish journalist. No doubt but that he will have done it simply to protect press freedom and not because he worked for the Russians’.

Will Pablo (Pavel) return to Spain? His wife certainly hopes so. See, he has double nationality, says the media (come to think of it, it’s odd that we Brits aren’t allowed the same privilege).

Anyway, Joe Biden got the Wall Street Journal journalist Even Gershkovich back (with several others held by the Russians), so everything worked out fine.

Except for that poor Algerian pugilist, who remains on the Facebook (s)hit-list.