The British residents in Spain are usually politely ignored by the media, so a fallout from the sad passing of Elizabeth II last week brought us – briefly – to the fore. The local paper says that there are so and so many Brits living in our province and then launches into an article involving the bowlers at some club looking glum and dropping platitudes.
What else can one say on an occasion like this?
In all, we may be 282,000 or so resident here (just to make the point – that’s considerably larger in number than the population of the city of Granada which rests at 232,000), but we aren’t noticed much. How many of us Brit residents are household names to the Spanish? James Rhodes, Tony King, the late Michael Robinson, two or three obscure British hispanophiles who writes books about Franco, Ian Gibson (who’s Irish anyway) and then the fellow on the TV who teaches English (Richard Vaughan, who is from Texas apparently).
And let’s throw in Mr Bean, who was very popular here in his day.
My friend Andrew Mortimer (who teaches English to the Spanish Legion) penned an article which appeared in our local paper: Adiós a mi Reina (in English with Spectrum here).
I got interviewed on Canal Sur radio.
Plus a mention in La Voz de Almería where, once again, they spelled my name wrong.
The Canary RTVC produced a report about the reaction from the Brit residents.
La Razón has an article called ‘The Little England of Alicante, in mourning for Elizabeth II’. Again, we start with the numbers (know that there are 69,728 Brits registered in Alicante).
Several Anglican services were held in various resort towns, reported or not by the media.
Some books were made available to write down one’s thoughts. I expect the British Embassy in Madrid had a nice leather one.
El Confidencial says that some of the British tourists in Magaluf got pissed and a little lachrymose.
Sur in English had a full front cover (The Queen died on the Thursday, thus giving the editor time to shout: ‘stop the presses!’, but – alas - too late for its English-language rivals).
Two regions of Spain declared days of mourning – one day for Andalucía, and three for Madrid. Furthermore, both Felipe VI and his Queen, and old (‘after all, I am the oldest royal that’s alive today’) Juan Carlos and Doña Sofía and all due to attend the State Funeral next Monday in London. From France, President Macron said that the British thought of Elizabeth as their Queen, while the rest of the world thought of her as ‘The Queen’. Nice.
Even Putin was solemn and called her passing ‘a heavy, irreparable loss’.
Everyone is sad, except of course the Argentinians.
Sigh!
See – we’ve forgotten about the British residents living in Spain already…