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Today Shampoo and Donkeys Day Forty one of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com The Miba Hotel and Restaurant mentioned: https://hotelmiba.com/ Day 41 Shampoo and Donkeys It is day 41 of our Spanish Lockdown and I should not have mentioned Noah as today it has poured with rain all day, everywhere is damp and miserable. The Mediterranean does not do wet days very well. In a country like the UK when we are used to miserable wet weather, even in the height of summer, there is always some kind of inside activity to do, here it is all about the beach or walking, cycling, climbing, getting outdoors. True if you are in a big city like Granada or Malaga you can or rather could go to a museum but that is about your lot. There are some very odd perceptions of Spain, I remember a few years ago my mother came to visit with my stepfather and my sister Ann accompanied them on the visit. It was a horrible rainy day when they arrived, something that I think surprised them both. They had come for a week but just packed the bare essentials, I sorted out my mother’s list of extras from our end. “Do they have paracetamol in Spain?” was the first thing my mother asked. Well yes they do, but I have to go to the pharmacy and get some for you as you cannot buy anything that is considered medicine from a supermarket or corner shop. That includes indigestion tablets, cold remedies, cough syrup. The only thing you will find in the supermarket are sticking plasters and condoms .. everything else is at the pharmacy and prices vary from expensive to very expensive. Next question.. “I use Loreal hair shampoo can you get that for me?” I went to the hypermarket and called my mother. “OK which one do you want?” She told me what she bought in the UK and then said “I don’t suppose they have Loreal?” The answer was yes the do and the type you want. She seemed surprised that there was such a choice. I discovered why when we were driving them back to the village. Malaga is a fairly ugly sprawl of a city, the old centre is beautiful but around it have grown endless blocks of flats that lack any outward charm, it reminds me a bit of the dreary suburbs of Paris in that respect. My mother looked out of the window of the car down at the urban sprawl below. “What ever is this place?” she said. I replied “That’s Malaga.” “But I thought Malaga was a little fishing village.” And there in that single line sums up the perception a lot of Brits have of Spain. It’s all, to borrow the original description of this Podcast.. Sangria, straw donkeys and those oversized Mexican sombreros with heart sign Benidorm on the rim. Our friends Shirley and Colin came to visit when we had just bought our new home. Shirley called me some months before and said she would like to surprise Chris, so we arranged that they would stay at a local hotel and I would divert Chris from our regular trip to the house to check on the building work on the guise that we should have a coffee at the hotel. On the way to the house I said let’s pull over and have a nice coffee in the Hotel and Restaurant Miba. “Why?” .. I suggested that it just might be nice to do, he was suspicious but pulled the car over. Shirley and Colin hid behind a piece of rather tasteful sculpture but with their backs to the entrance of the bar. We sat just a row of armchairs down from them. I said to Chris, “Can you see the elephant in the room.” He said “I don’t think Matilde has any sculptures of elephants in the hotel.” “No,” I said “look around.” Well those two in front of us look a bit like Shirley and Colin… and at that moment Shirley turned around.. you should have seen the look on Chris’ face. Well everybody burst into tears and started hugging each other, all with the bemused bar staff looking on. It was Shirley’s birthday treat to come and see us. On the day of her birthday we asked her if she wanted to go to the beach or shopping. “Shopping please.” I warned her that Spanish shops are not going to be the same as British ones. She said that she didn’t mind and that she would make the most of whatever we had. I knowing full well she was in for a big birthday surprise. We drove to Granada, as we got close to the enormous Nevada shopping centre, I thought she would realise where we were taking her, but good luck was on our side, her boss rang and she was deep in conversation as we drove down to the car park. The call ended and she said “this car park is posh.” We walked her the glass entrance that swept up with escalators to the first of two massive shopping floors. “Oh my god.” She said “I don’t believe it there is the biggest Zara I have evr seen, look a “Michael Kors, and over their..” she reeled off the names of all of her favourite shops she could see. Nevada is based more on those big American Shopping malls, with fountains, marble floors and giant TV screens showing previous exciting shopping events at the Mall. They were both gobsmacked. Colin said he had no idea that this was what Spain was like.. it is and always was more than sangria and straw donkeys.
Today Monkees and Post Day Forty of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 40 Monkees and Post It is day 40 of our Spanish Lockdown and if I was Noah in the Bible the floods would have gone, and I would be getting off my Ark by now. Today thin beardy boy, from the local courier delivered our spare microphone, as the other two have succumbed to the heat and humidity. At first, he gave me a large box full of wine, but that was for the house down the road, then he gave me the plastic package the microphone had arrived in. I undid the plastic, threw it away and washed my hands. The box the microphone was damaged at the side, if only the company I bought it from had packed it a bit better. You suddenly get that sinking feeling that things are going to get complicated. But plugging the thing in, it seems to work ok. I have a love hate relationship with microphones, it took me a long time to get used to using one. I was working in a well-paid but noisy and dull factory job when I jumped ship and joined the new radio commercial radio station Essex Radio. A few months earlier I had been given an opportunity to start working there on a Saturday Sports Show, for my travelling expenses and usually one of the presenters would all take us for pizza after the show. I can remember being so nervous that first Saturday morning that I threw up in the local park on the way to the railway station. I had to travel to Southend where the radio station was and that involved a tortuous journey halfway across Essex then back again toward the coast, stopping off at the delightful railway station that was Shenfield. Of course, none of the trains coincided with each other and you would spend sometimes almost an hour in a freezing cold waiting room waiting for a connection. So what had started as a Saturday job turned into full time freelance work, I was paid the paltry sum of £2 an hour but they told me they would also pay me net and pay my National Insurance, one of those was true. Years later I discovered my National Insurance wasn’t paid, so I lost a year in accrued state pension.. thanks Essex Radio. But wow what a job, there were popstars popping in like lovely Alyson Moyet who was just a kid then, with a face full of acne, or Davy Jones from the Monkees, .. what a complete fruit cake he was, he sort of clung to the walls when I took him down to the studio. I remember there was a large pile of Essex Radio stickers on a window ledge.. “Oh man can I have some of these?” I said “Yes help yourself.” ..he took the lot, I have no idea what he planned to do with fifty Essex Radio car stickers, but he filled both pockets full. Then carried on clinging to the walls till we got into the studio. One of the things the Radio Authority, called the IBA then made Essex Radio do, was a lot of local speech, this included a local farmer with whistling teeth who came in to record a local history spot called Essex tales. There were two very nice ladies from the local library, one with a guitar who came in to record a children’s spot. Nobody wanted the onerous task of recording all these worthy features, so it fell to me to make sure they were recorded and made ready for air each day, the rest of the time I engineered live shows with the presenter sitting opposite me just playing records and the odd jingle. It was a great time. Day 40 and I long for freedom, I read today thanks to a Facebook friend, that the Spanish Post Office has completely fallen over and there are thousands of pieces of undelivered mail. What was most surprising was that the Post Office is run not by a business Director but by a former Union Official turned Politician. I just assumed like the UK, the Post Office was run as a public company. In recent years there has been an explosion of parcel and mail carriers here and with the advent of email, I think it is only the Spanish love of pieces of paper that have kept Correos going. Our local post office is a tiny little place, inside it looks very much like the Blue Peter Appeal office, - awash with parcels, marked urgent and Amazon Prime on. They have even started using some of the offices as an overspill. Usually there are two members of staff peering into computer screens, slowly processing whatever the customer has asked for. Nothing in the Spanish post office is in any way efficient. It always involves all that peering and then reams of paper being printed off, followed by a lot of stamping of paper. My favourite lady in there is a tiny shrew of a woman who smells strongly of tobacco that brings down her precious post office stamp with such ferocity it sounds like a K.O. punch from Muhammed Ali. The man sitting next to her, again when you get to know him, he is a polite enough person, but he wears a constant pained expression, usually he will almost get to the end of his painful slow tapping at the computer when he will let out a great sigh, throw his hands in the air, and you know you are in for an even longer wait. Finally there is a feisty lady who is our delivery person. She drives into our estate entrance with speedy determination, jumping from the little yellow van, already wielding the keys to the post boxes at the bottom of the mountain, looking once at her sorting the mail into the little boxes we all have, it was like a scene out of that old Post Office film from the 1930s when they are sorting mail on the Mail Train. I’m not sure that it has changed that much from when the Spanish Post Office started in 1716, maybe that is the problem?
Today Boobies and Zoom Day Thirty nine of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 39 Boobies and Zoom It is day 39 of our Spanish Lockdown, last night brought more custard and more bad dreams. I seem to keep getting those high anxiety dreams where I am not in control. I have not really had them since I worked at the radio station. And it was about the radio station last night, I had to engineer a radio show, but I managed to take the radio station off air as I did not recognise the buttons that sent the studio to the transmitters. I imagine that we are all having similar dreams of not being in control, because I think this must be a bit like being in Prison, having decisions taken away from you about where you can go and what you can do. The Spanish Government have back tracked on the decision only to allow children to accompany adults to supermarkets, pharmacies and banks. My next door but two neighbour, Sylvia shouted across from her garden saying even before the “veerus” she would never entertain taking her children to a supermarket as they would run wild and pick up things from the shelves, which would now be dangerous for their health. She said in English.. “I do not have a word for our Government!” Sylvia cleans, she is very good cleaner, before she had her children she was a very good teacher, had passed her exams and taught in a local school. About a year or so ago she decided that she wanted to return to teaching. Now here in Spain she has to take all her exams again. Once you leave teaching your professional qualifications are struck off and if you return you have to all the exams again. And you must pass each part of those exams again, if you do the authority will decide where you can go and teach.. and it can be anywhere. It is a similar situation for the police, there are tough exams and you can posted anywhere. To me it seems really harsh and quite unfair, in contrast my niece Alice had to return back from France when her husband’s work started to be more difficult to find. She has good qualifications in Geography, so thought she would approach a local school to see if there was work. She got an interview, that went well. They told her “you can start now.” And they did mean now, that afternoon she found herself teaching in class for the first time with just the National Curriculum guide and a white board for company. And I bet she is a very good teacher just Sylvia. These are some of the cultural differences you come across when you start to scratch the surface of another country’s way of life. Britain will allow you to hold your professional qualification and be quite happy to employ you without all the jumping through hoops that Sylvia will need to do. Pilar with the big boobies has set up her own Estate Agent. We love Pilar she was one of those larger than life personalities that dominated the little village we lived in when we first came to Spain. I can’t think of more crazy time to begin such an enterprise, but she has some very interesting properties on her books. She had lived in Germany for a while, so saw how business was conducted there and believes that she take that experience and make something for herself. No need to take all her exams again. I am not sure what will happen to the property market anywhere in the world, let alone Spain, but this is a beautiful part of the world and the weather is mostly glorious, and I can imagine once the hiatus of the virus is over, a vaccine found and slowly we all get vaccinated, life will return to a new normal. Day 39 and it has been a long day, I did my first Zoom directed voiceover. Back in the UK I had got used to Skype where usually just one person directs you remotely. Zoom is something else, this time I had five people from the project, quite daunting, and then there was the technology that had to be tamed. I managed to stick some earbuds into one ear, hook the microphone onto the same side and then listen to myself through the actual headphones and record myself and keep notes of the takes and finally read the script. I did it, I was a bit stressed, so were the others at again having to be together remotely. There was interesting BBC article that people were finding Zoom meetings far more difficult than ordinary face-to-face meetings as you miss the social cues, facial expression. I had no visual link to the guys directing me as the computer was behind me. My studio laid out for a singular experience. I reckon I will need a monitor on the wall in future to get some of those important visual cues that were lacking today. Poor Chris has to spend the time being as quiet as possible. Although the studio is sound proofed and treated, if you open a door or put the air-conditioning on in the house you do hear it. Over the years I have got used to working a lot more from home. I don’t think I would want to go back to my life in the UK, where it took me longer to travel, and cost a fortune in rail fares and finding an overpriced sandwich in London, for the sake of a few hours work. I think a lot of you are thinking just the same, here in Spain where remote working was never a thing… well it is now … and it might just be one of the good things that come out of this pandemic – people get to spend more time with family and the ones they love and can work just as well away from the office.
Today Mary Poppins and Locusts Day Thirty eight of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 38 Mary Poppins and Locusts It is day 38 of our Spanish Lockdown and yesterday evening I made perfect custard. I usually just guestimate the ingredients but as Birds Custard is an expensive commodity here I actually followed the directions on the side.. and blow me you get great custard including the revolting skin which Chris likes and I hated so much at school. I think lockdown has now made the most mundane of things a highlight of the day. Whereas in a past time, maybe going to see the premiere of a west end play with a decent buffet press party with wine would be a good night, now it is custard. It is shameful; but being members of the press we got to see a great many plays and musicals, and for the life of me I can only remember a handful, sometimes I can only remember the free buffet. We were at the Prince Edward theatre, I think .. well a theatre with a glass balustrade outside at the front, seeing the first night of something or other, but I remember they laid on a sumptuous Chinese buffet. For Chris and I, this was going to be our main meal of the day. I made a bee line for the chicken satay, and the guy beside the spring rolls made a deliberate moving and turning around action as I headed his way. Shovelling satay onto my plate I noticed that it was the comedic actor Rowan Atkinson. who clearly believed I was some deranged fan heading for a one to one, when in reality I hadn’t even noticed him for the delicious looking chicken satay. Chris loathes chicken satay but is more than happy to eat Chinese and there was also plenty of free wine and soft drinks to be had. But now post lockdown our highlight is custard, at least I am unlikely to find Rowan Atkinson blocking my way in the kitchen, just three good legs cat who has a habit, like most cats, of being under your feet at just the wrong moment. Day 38 and we have had a plague of locusts, which seems about right for this post-apocalyptic times. The first came to an unfortunate end in the jaws of the three good legs cat, who chased the creature into next doors terrace and because the poor thing hadn’t warmed up in the morning sun, made easy prey. But don’t tell the cat, who after pawing and ripping the locust to pieces, sat regally and proudly as if he was one of the lions around Nelson’s column. Tonight we might watch a film, I forgot we have the latest Mary Poppins on the Apple TV. Signing into the ghastly new look, split in to three bits iTunes reminded me we had a number of films that we had purchased. We saw the theatrical Mary Poppins a number of times, I think at The London Palladium. The first was a pre-premiere press special, where the whole audience are press or press related and the poor cast have to perform in front of critics and drunken hacks. We went to the evening performance and there had been an unfortunate flying incident in the matinee, where the clever wire device that allowed Mary Poppins to fly off across the audience in the stalls, had become detached as she got half way across and it left her balancing precariously over the audience for an embarrassing amount of time as the cast continued in great earnest to wish God Speed Mary Poppins. In the end they wheeled her back to the stage and some wag of a hack cried out – look Mary Poppins returns. So the evening performance consisted of a quick black out at the appropriate moment so the actress playing Mary could jump off stage. I thought it was a great clever show, with an amazing moving set that effortlessly moved from the attic to the drawing room and pulled back to reveal the park. About a year later we went to a cast change, another free ticket and another buffet, but only two free glasses of wine allowed. The ensemble cast were all looking quite worn out compared to that first performance, and you could see they were only going through the motions. Chris had just finished a long day at work and had grabbed a sandwich to stave of hunger during the performance. Unfortunately, it must have been off because about a quarter way through he whispered that his stomach was churning, and he really needed to fart. I said to him wait to they pipe up with “Chim Chim charee.” And let it rip. By the interval he was in need of the loo. Knowing the theatre, we knew there was a little bar up in the gods that had a bog we had used before, usually the bar was deserted as the press all went to the main bar for the free drinks, of course forgetting there were paying audience in the theatre that night. We reached the bar and there was a collection of elderly ladies gathered around tables all drinking gin and tonics, dressed up to the nines, in fact they all looked is if they might have all been former Nannies themselves. Chris made a bolt for the toilet and I stood in the corner of the little bar trying not to look conspicuous. Amongst the interval chatter you could clearly hear Chris .. lets say evacuating enthusiastically, the dear ladies all doing their best to ignore the noise. One or two looking toward the toilet door with disgust. Chris did manage the second half, or Act Two as theatre folk like to call it, but it was a struggle and we sadly had to leave before the free buffet, going home hungry.
Today Mozzies and Orgies Day Thirty six of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 37 Mozzies and Orgies It is day 37 of our Spanish lockdown and I have been bitten on the bum, it happened the other night. I had thrown the duvet off as it had got to warm, half asleep and half aware of a mosquito in the room, he must have got me right between the cheeks. As he flew passed my ear I grabbed our handy fly killing aerosol, and sprayed there was the usually angry strangled high pitched buzzing and then silence. I don’t usually get effected by bites, usually just a bit of a red mark. But I woke up in the morning and my inner left cheek is stinging like hell. I found the culprit on the floor… a tiger Mosquito. These are nasty little creatures that have come over from Asia and are making their home here. They carry all sorts of exotic diseases with them. Here in Spain you can pretty much guarantee that something will bite or sting you. The place is alive with drunken bees, huge hornet wasps, flies, particularly those little biting flies, normal wasps, mosquitos and cochineal beetle larvae that are like tiny little gnats… never squash one on the wall as the excrete blood red mush.. cochineal colouring comes from.. well that beetle. I looked up what do to stop the pain - antihistamine.. well I haven’t got any of that, but I found some Essential oil of Lavender so I carefully dabbed some into the affected area … well that was a mistake. If you have ever seen that YouTube video of that idiot sticking a firework out of his arse and then lighting it .. running around screaming in pain.. well that was pretty much the same pain. Day 37 and Mr Cullens is arriving. Well to be precise “Luke” will sort your order. We have found an online English grocers based in Nerja called PJ Cullens. They have custard powder. I have been thinking about custard ever since my friend Paul was posted he was serving it every day with naughty stodgy puddings.. well he is Scottish! The wind has got up and I have put together my client Ryan’s first Podcast in which he interviews himself as he is under lockdown in a hotel room in Istanbul. His story of how he came to be a popular New York Times photo-journalist, then the financial crisis of 2008 ended that career, so slowly he has become a successful TV show host of Extreme Rides and Extreme Treks, a month ago he had started filming season four of Extreme Treks in Myanmar, then the covid 19 crisis ended that, at least for the moment. The door bell rings… her comes the custard. We have one of those video doorbells, the house lies lower on the mountain with stairs outside leading up to the street. I climbed the three flights of stairs and opened the door. “Hello mate Cullens delivery for you.” Wow an English voice I said where are you from he pointed out to sea, “Morocco” from his accent I would have guessed East London. It is unusual to hear many English voices here accept if you go to the beach and the Chiringuitos. So we have custard, a stodgy pudding and Robinsons Lemon Squash, Branston Pickle and all other manner of English comfort food. Their Supermarket in Nerja only opened a few months ago and in the space of a couple of weeks they have got a fully functioning online service – well done to them. I would love to see more supermarkets and restaurants offer online and take-away services here. They have never really bothered, there are just two restaurants listed on Just Eat for this area. The economy is completely reliant on the tourist trade, a short but fierce season between late June and mid September when tens of thousands swell the local population in an orgy of summer fun, stuffing their faces in the Chiringuitos, packing the beach out and spending nights in the bars and clubs boozing till early morning. The locals take a deep breath and the tills ring mostly with cash for three solid months. That income has, it would appear been ripped away from the local economy this year. This will have a very serious effect on the local economy, we can only hope the Government has a financial plan to keep these businesses afloat.
Today Scream and the Gas Board Day Thirty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 36 Scream and the Gas Board Day 36 of our Spanish lockdown and the wind is blowing across the sea and through the mountain. It can be very windy here, I believe before this coast was called the Costa Tropical it was called the Costa Wind. It rattles everything, plays musical notes through the glass balustrade and generally gets you down. Breakfast and then the three good legs cat walk on his lead, in which, yet again he fell down the mountain trying to get to next door. I think the problem with male cats if they have a wanderlust and see each door or fence as a new opportunity to increase their territory. As you know we try and keep him away from feral cats, they sometimes have cat leukaemia, which can be passed on by a bite or scratch. I returned and did an Audition for a voiceover agency. I do a lot of those and a bit like going for an acting audition – mostly you are wasting your time, with only a five percent success rate after an audition. At least I don’t have to travel somewhere and sit in front of bored producers. Petra Facetimed yesterday and said to me “You haven’t broken anything for a while.” Well that jinxed the afternoon when I discovered not one but both of our spare microphones had stopped working. Both I think have succumbed to the extremes of heat here, now only my Rode microphone is working OK – I have a feeling that because it is made in Australia they design them to cope with high 30s temperature. I have ordered another, it is coming from a third party company on Amazon, so fingers crossed. Yesterday I was talking about Mrs Findings knicker display to the workmen building the new part of my Secondary school. I left school at sixteen in 1977. Before the exams in the blazing heat of the summer we were given careers advice. This consisted of a sweaty bloke from the employment exchange trying to palm off ten apprenticeships to the Gas Board, I was tipped off by the boy ahead of my. “Now than.” He said “A lad like you could do well to get yourself an apprenticeship, there is a job for life waiting for you at the Gas Board sonny.” “I am awfully sorry but the smell of gas makes me vomit.” I said. “Oh..” he replied. “Do you have any other suggestions?” I asked. He rummaged around a sheaf of papers he was carrying, looking up at me every now and then. “Mmm not really.” - so that was my careers advice over with. It was my Grandfather who forced me to write to Marconi, the local electronics company in town.. in fact the home of radio. Mr Marconi had decided on Chelmsford as his first wireless factory, god knows why. I guess being Italian he just picked a town near London. I wrote a letter in fountain pen, on blue Basildon Bond writing paper, asking if there were any apprenticeship opportunities. Secretly hoping they would say no. Just my luck, they wrote to say please attend an induction test at their Writtle Road factory, about five minutes from where I lived..damn! I went along and there was a motley collection of similarly feckless teenagers all standing outside a classroom. We had a number of tests to carry out, simple maths, some drawing, and a practical test of assembling a unit with only the instructions and a diagram. I successfully completed this test and was surprised to discover I was the first to finish. I was allowed to leave and my fate was sealed, I was invited to join the company as a “Wireman Assembler.” I actually enjoyed my time at Marconi, they were strict but I learnt a great deal about electronics and I was really interested in the Broadcast section where they made Telecine machines, that turned film into TV pictures and of course television cameras.. huge coffins with a lens at one end and a black and white monitor the other, that moved around on compressed air. We got to play and see the cameras in action which was a lot of fun, so at the end of the first year you could decide which part of the company you would go and work in and I asked for Broadcast. They gave me Marine.. Marine! Building transceivers for Navy Ships.. I was also “shipped” to a far-off factory behind the local paper – The Essex Chronicle – the place was a dull, dismal dump full of middle aged ladies silently building circuit boards. Although I did well academically – I was really bored – I remember I went into the room with the flow solder machine in it. Where a conveyor belt took priceless circuit boards down into a vat of molten solder, where the board kissed the solder and the components were soldered onto the board. I didn’t know what I was doing, and mucked around with a few of the controls, then left. The next day there was a middle-aged lady scream from the room. Everybody gathered around to see if someone had fallen in the molten vat.. no, much worse. Middle-aged Marconi Lady had fed the machine with thousands of pounds worth of circuit boards and they had gone along their merry journey and straight down into the bubbling molten solder – disappearing into a burning mass. Nobody was blamed, but I handed in my notice. My foreman Mr Poulson said: “What are your plans?” “I’m going to work in radio.” He said “You daft pratt, you’ve got a job here for life!” As it turned out Marconi went bust some years later and it was radio that actually gave me the job for life.
Today Biscuits and knickers Day Thirty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 35 It is Sunday and day 35 of our Spanish Lockdown. We got up and had breakfast, and I finished my work in the studio. I needed to paint the bottom of the walls, I found some paint and it was still OK. Normal life seems so long ago now, we are now into our second month and I think I have had enough, I can understand why all those Americans have come out into the street and demanded that they can reopen for business. It does sound selfish, but there really is only so much lockdown that you can cope with. I really admire the Italians they have gone through hell and back. Day 35 and I was thinking about school and had I had been better academically would my life have been different? It probably would, I do remember working at the BBC and the subject of which University did you go to? Well I didn’t go to University at all and when I told my colleagues they all looked quite aghast. The BBC was a funny old place to work in, there were a lot of well-meaning souls who had never done a days work in their life. We used to have regular editorial meetings and everyone brought their copy of the Guardian to suggest news stories that we could perhaps cover on the radio station. I brought a copy of the Daily Mail, on the grounds that according to the research most of our listeners were lower middle class, cab drivers, shop workers and the like and love it or loath it, the Daily Mail would probably be their paper of choice, rather than The Guardian. It did not go down well, the only good thing about the Editorial Meetings that we got a tin of Rover Biscuits for each meeting to go with the tea and coffee. If it was an important meeting there were sandwiches with wine too. Unheard of at LBC. They did later, as a cost cutting exercise stop the wine and sandwiches, but the biscuits carried on. I am not going to blame my schooling for a lack of University education, I was quite a lazy feckless boy, always a C on rarely a B or B plus. But I don’t think I was stupid, it was just like a lot of kids at school, the one size fits all didn’t work with me. I neither fitted in or made many friends. After suffering a crazy sixties phonetic teaching experiment called ITA, after the first two years at school all I could read was this crazy language and not a word of ordinary English. I did catch up, many of my classmates did not though. Then onto Junior school and a fairly undistinguished passage through the school. The final year there were too many pupils for the two classes, and I along with 10 others draw the short straw. We were put with the year below us, sharing a classroom and Mr Pumphrey, Mr Pumphrey was one deeply unpleasant man. It was clear very early on in his career that he realised he had made a terrible mistake becoming a teacher, particularly at a school that served a council estate. So he had little interest in the year he was teaching, what he did was to devote two thirds of the blackboard to his year and a third to us. He would write a list of things we should quietly be doing whilst he taught the rest of the class. I spent a whole year doing, well nothing, I learnt, well nothing. I sat next to a really clever and gifted boy called Peter Chantry, he was doomed we were all doomed. We didn’t even get a chance to sit the school certificate it was a given that we would all go to Westlands Secondary Modern on the edge of the council estate. Westlands Secondary Modern was typical of deeply underperforming schools of its time. A hideous 1960’s building, roasting hot in summer and freezing cold in winter with a rag bag of teachers that wouldn’t look out of place in a St Trinians movie. My own real friend was Nick. He was six foot something and I was five foot nothing then, we made an odd pair. We both struggled with school, it wasn’t the best days of our life. The Headmaster was a brute, whose name I forget but managed to cane some poor boy at Assembly every morning, not the same poor boy I hasten to mention. There was hope on the horizon, the school was getting a brand new teaching block and upgraded status to Comprehensive, the trouble was the whole building process was going on around us, I remember that the wing that had the science labs, metal work and wood work rooms was shut and reformed. So for woodwork we had to learn theory.. and trust me there is only so much you can learning about sodding wood and dovetail joints and the like. We were luckier with science, they opened that part of the block early and we were treated to proper science labs, fully equipped a biology lab with the most amazing new teacher who inspired us all, she had come from industry and had worked for Bayer in Cambridge so really new her stuff. Unlike my form teacher – Mrs Finding who spent most of her teaching career sneaking off to the reprographics room to be banged senseless by fellow English teacher Mr Boiley. When she wasn’t spread across the Roneo machine she would balance on top of the radiator and show her knickers off to the workmen below, building our new teaching block. So it was really no surprise I didn’t go to University and I guess I was lucky that I got any kind of job at all, as it turned out I have had and continue to have a most wonderful and satisfying career.
Today Dead Man's Coat Day Thirty four of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 34 Dead man’s coat It is day 34 of our Spanish lockdown and the day started fractious, we bickered about something or other, so I took the three good legs cat for his walk to get some space. We are very, very lucky in that we have more than 150 square metres of terraces and even a narrow mountain garden that separates us from our neighbours. I have a workshop down in the pool room and Chris has his gym area up behind the garage. It allows us to stay home but enjoy some space. My favourite space that I also share with the cat, is our little voice studio that sits behind the house, between the mountain and the back wall. I have spent most of the day sticking back the acoustic tiles that were removed for the electrician when we had our building work done. Again this is not an easy process. I use contact adhesive glue to stick the tiles.. so had to source that from Amazon, but it came in about four days. Last night I watched the YouTube channel “Doing it Ourselves” about a family who are slowly restoring the magnificent French Chateau De La Basmaignee. They are having similar challenges and now can only do work with what they have around them, making the best use of things that are in their workshop, left over wood stain, re-purposing and cutting sand paper to fit the sander. Weirdly it has actually made their channel even more watchable, the place is extraordinary, filled with old paintings and antiques, but also many rooms are in a stately ruin. There was a bit where they had to shovel tons of pigeon shite from the attic, celebrating by raising up their cherry picker to the top of the roof and attaching the Chateau flag to the flag pole. It looked very dangerous, very good TV. I find myself more and more vicariously living my life through others. I guess being trapped inside for most of the time I am longing to get out, go to the shops, eat at a restaurant, do all the normal social things again. We watched Foxes Afloat, two guys on a narrowboat who are having to move to get water. The whole of the British canal system is on Lockdown and you can only move your boat for essential reasons. But their channel is, well normal, but hugely enjoyable. Colin one of the guys on the narrowboat has a natural talent for photography and his drone shots over the rolling English countryside are spectacular. I try very hard to make the weekends different, spending less time on the internet and getting out in the garden or, today repurposing an IKEA unit for our little studio. We learnt today that one of our colleagues from LBC had died of Motor Neurone Disease. I dearly loved Steve Butterick he was one of the most affable men I have ever met and more laid back than Dylan the rabbit in The Magic Roundabout. He had a soft laughing face, just like Dylan too. Somehow he contrived to take the whole of Wimbledon off from work every year, he loved tennis and used to go and work for Radio Wimbledon the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club’s own radio station. He was also one of the most frugal men I have ever met. We were once working together and he told me he had seen a carpet in pretty good nick in a skip outside some business or other. He decided to return later in the evening and retrieve it. It nearly killed him pulling out the carpet from the skip and then he had to drag it back home.. and then laid it in one of his rooms. Another time he turned up in a very natty suit. “Where did you buy that suit?” I asked “From a charity shop.” He replied. Now this would have been the 1990’s before Charity Shops became cool. I said it looked like a drug dealers’ suit. “Funny you should say that as I think I have found a bullet hole in it.” He was joking but there was a very suspicious hole right by the breast pocket, I would imagine the work of a moth. Motor Neurone is a foul disease, Chris’ mum died from it, her demise was quick. It began by her having trouble swallowing food, it ended with her in a wheelchair. Mercifully she died in hospital of a heart attack. Death and of course taxes are inevitable we hear today that the Spanish Prime Minister does not think bars or restaurants will begin operating until the end of this year. It all sounds a bit bleak again, but there is hope from the 26th April he will allow children out to exercise and play, if anything the children have shown us adults how to behave, they have stayed at home drawn rainbows, sent messages of love and support to the vulnerable, sung songs and embraced the virtual world that we now live in.
Today Pigs and Puppies Day Thirty three of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 33 Pigs and Puppies It is day 33 of our Spanish Lockdown and the day dawned gloomy and it was again raining slightly. This is unusual weather, many of the plants in the garden are looking a bit sad, not only are they recently planted but they are clearly not enjoying the rain. Down below onto the mountain side where the cactus grow, the most amazing thing has happened we have sweet peas growing up and around the cactus. I have never seen that here before and it brings a weird incongruous mixture of the Mediterranean and English country garden. Three good legs cat has learnt how to balance himself at the end of the swimming pool and escape down to that garden on his own. We have a child gate that normally prevents him from going AWOL. He has yet to fall in the pool and has chosen the end that is 1.7 Metres deep. I have moved a Moroccan lantern closer to the edge of the pool to try and stop him. The other day we heard a grunting sound from outside the house. We suspect that the wild boars that live on the far side of the estate have started to move in, in search of food. Awe you are probably saying to yourself ..sweet little piggies. Wild boars are not little or sweet, they are bad tempered and will attack and take a chunk out of your leg if you are not careful. The best defence is to run or jump up to something they can’t reach like a wall. They also cause quite a lot of damage in the countryside, rooting up crops and generally making a mess. In the village of a Sunday morning we would hear gunshot as the locals went in search of a suckling roast pig for the dinner table. Here we let them be, they live in the undergrowth around the baranco and that’s where I would like them to stay. Back in the year 2000 we thought our old neighbours from the UK were mad buying not one but two houses in the little village of Frigiliana. We had already been to inspect what would be their final home and were amused to discover the first room of the house was reserved for the donkey. The burro was and is an important animal. Even now in Frigiliana the only way to get building materials up the steep winding steps of the narrow lanes in the village is by donkey. I am a loss to work out just why Spain has such a poor reputation for animal welfare. It is getting a lot better and Mascotas – as pets are called here, have a much better life. We have a big pet superstore in the main town and it is full of treats and high quality food for your pet. I wonder if the harshness toward some animals is that they are just there for a purpose.. the donkey just to haul building materials and the like, the dog to be an ‘burglar alarm’ for the property. This is a phenomena we came across living in the village. Locals with property in the countryside would station a fierce dog in the grounds, sometimes only feeding the brute once or twice a week. We have one such beast as you leave the top of the estate into the mountains. We called him fluffy, after the three headed dog in Harry Potter. You are best to avoid his gaze, he comes lumerping down the drive way and throws his mighty gait at the..gate making the fencing shake all the way down the drive. He has a deep and very threatening growl, that turns into a full on bark if he catches your eye. He got out at least once, unfortunately at the same time our President was walking his little dog. Fluffy ripped the poor animal to pieces in front of its owner. Now you would think this would be front page news, but I feel the Spanish just shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. Younger Spanish seem to have a different attitude to animals. The daughter of my dear Spanish friend Maria came running up to us once when we were having coffee in the town. “Mama I have found puppies.” She said in Spanish “What do you mean?” Maria asked. Her daughter got out her mobile phone and showed us the photo she had just taken. There amongst the rubbish of one of the shared bins was a small box with I would guess six dear little pups. I don’t know what goes through the mind of anyone who would do that to a litter of puppies. Her daughter said she had called the police, I thought well good luck with that.. but no, suddenly the phone rang, it was the local police to say they were horrified and had got the pups to safety and were waiting for the local animal welfare charity to pick them up. Her mother turned to me and said. “The people who do this sort of thing are bastards.. is that the right English word?’ I replied “Yes it is.” The elephant in the room here in Spain has to be bullfighting. We have watched one bullfight, only on the TV. I have to say I found the whole affair distasteful. The Picadors spend some time chasing the bull on horseback sticking spears in the creature till it is bleeding, confused, weary and angry all at the same time, then the Matador makes his appearance. The only good thing I saw was at the end the Matador made quick work of dispatching the bull. Rather like horse racing in the UK, there is a lot of money in bull fights and most towns have very fine bullrings – Granada amongst them, paid for often by let us say very influential members of society. The Spanish I meet are either in favour of bull fighting or hate it with a vengeance and want it stopped. I am in the latter category. So day 33 comes to a busy close, I have been working all day, I am looking forward to an evening relaxing, I am planning to make an apple pie.. still no custard yet though.
Today Quiz and Crazies Day Thirty two of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 32 Quiz and crazies It is day 32 of our Spanish lockdown, three good legs cat managed to have at least a couple of his fits before breakfast. They have the look of an epileptic fit but are caused by him catching the painful part of his hip. Last night we watched a great deal of television, we don’t usually binge watch anything. We caught a bit of Paul O’Grady looking after some poor sick dog that seemed to have a similar problem to three good legs cat. The dog had an operation to remove the piece of hip that was causing him pain, and was much better. Normally we would go to the vet and sort out an operation, but only emergency visits to the vet are allowed and our neighbour Lena was stopped by the Guardia taking her dog to the vet as she went to the vet in Almuñecar which isn’t our local town. So the cat will have to wait to restrictions are lifted enough to get him to the vet.. it is a daily worry though. The ITV drama “Quiz” was on, fascinating and well produced, it told the story of the Major and the coughing cheat that might have won him a million pounds on Millionaire back in 2001. It did remind us both of the days on radio when we wrote quizzes. I must have written at least ten thousand questions over the year we did a daily quiz. The cheats, the quiz crazies and the downright stupid took part. It was a hard job to research the questions, get the mix right of different types of questions on a wide variety of subjects. Contestants had to answer as many questions over sixty seconds as they could, highest score went on to a £100,000 prize live in the studio. The prize was insured by one of those game companies. It consisted of 300 envelopes and the contestant had to think of a number and that numbered envelope would be opened with a one in three hundred chance of winning. On one particular evening we had a listener who had done very well and was through to the final. I greeted him at reception took him upstairs to the studios, got him coffee and ran through the process with him. We also videoed the whole thing for security and to use on the, then new social media of YouTube. We encouraged contestants to talk over their decision making process, he had two choices in mind, number 32 which was the door number of his childhood home and number 24 his girlfriend’s lucky number. In the end he chose 32 – he opened the envelope and bad luck no prize. The Host, the lovely Gary King said “Why don’t you open envelope number 24, your girlfriends lucky number.” He tore the envelope open and just stared at it. I was behind the glass watching and notice him go ashen grey and start to sway. He was quite a big guy and the thought of him passing out under the studio table was quite a worry. “Are you OK?” said Gary, the guy pushed the paper over to him .. it read congratulations you have won £100,000. It made great radio, we went to an ad break and I had to physically help him out the studio by now he was a mass of sweat, I got someone to get him some water. I felt terrible, this poor guy, I knew our Programme Director would be thrilled because it was such good radio. But in the process, we had pretty much ruined this man’s life. I asked the crumpled wreck that was now sitting in the sofa if he wanted anything. He murmured “need a drink, need a drink.” “Here you go.” I said passing him the water. “No I need a f**** drink, C**** she will kill me, what am I going to do?” he started whimpering. “I will get you a car and you can go anywhere you want in London and drown your sorrows.” ..more whimpering but he nodded his head. I called Lewis Day, “get me a cab asap.” Within five minutes a Mercedes was waiting outside. I helped him into the cab… and never saw the poor chap ever again. Looking back I should have felt bad for him, but over the months we had, had some hideous contestants who frankly ruined my baby. It was my mechanic.. the rules of the quiz, and I received a constant barrage of Emails from listeners correcting, usually wrongly, the answers on the card. It was a real insight into the dark world of the quizzers. Day 32 and I haven’t achieved that much, despite sitting here at the computer all day. I have managed to listen to The Ryan Pyle Podcast our new clients work, he is a very interesting man who spends his life as a nomad; extreme trekking around the world.. well nomadic except for a BBC TV film crew in tow with him. I am really looking forward to working with him, he is stuck in a hotel room in Istanbul at the moment trying not to go too crazy. I spoke to our lovely Spanish neighbour this morning, shouting from our garden to her window, she says. “The kids are going crazy, they go from running around to total boredom, I don’t know what to do.” It is sending us all crazy but if the world can hold its breath just a bit longer we can at least prevent the health services collapsing. In the short term drugs that can help treat the virus are starting to be trialled and maybe we are only a year or so away from a vaccine.. before we all go crazy.
Today Custard and Daleks Day Thirty one of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 31 – Custard and Daleks It is Day 31 of our Spanish Lockdown; I am starting to get quite blurry eyed. All day peering into the new computer that arrived yesterday from China, has made me quite myopic. The first thing we did when it arrived is to wipe the whole thing down with alcohol, starting with the box it came in. I have to hand it to Apple their logistics are to be admired. The machine started in China moved the Chinese Export Zone and then flew to South Korea where it went on to Germany, from Germany to Portugal and from Portugal to Spain, it took more than two weeks. It does prove that many businesses are quite capable of operating within lockdown. The delivery driver left the parcel on the step and sat in his cab; I received an email to confirm delivery. Chris gets his computer to himself and has spent the day doing gym classes online, to begin with this felt a bit odd, now it is just a normal part of our daily routine. Read a Facebook post from our friend Paul Coia, he was the first voice that was heard on Channel Four television back in the UK when it began broadcasting in 1982. Channel Four started with a raft of most peculiar programmes, quite a lot of complaints from Mary Whitehouse at the time. There were also quite a few complaints about Paul too. Up to that time continuity announcers were plummy accent types who had been to Eton or Sandhurst. Paul was a Scot and, well sounded Scottish, ..outrageous! He posted that every night he was making Birds Custard and old-fashioned stodgy puddings he had also, out of boredom, discovered an Airfix Dalek kit that he was constructing. It had been a birthday present from the two of us more than 25 years ago.. and he had kept it all this time. I said “you idiot, it is worth a fortune still intact and boxed up.” I am really missing our British comfort foods. But where to buy custard locally? The local town is a custard free zone. Spanish puddings are flan, arroz con leche, tarta de queso, and that is about it. The flan is like a crème caramel without the exciting crunchy top, arroz is a very very sweet rice pudding and the tarta a kind of really quite nice cheesecake, but less sweet than its American cousin and no biscuit base either. If you want something else you need to go to a posh restaurant where you will find chocolate desserts, fruit pies and the like. When we first came to Spain, I thought Spanish chocolate was disgusting, it had a lot less cocoa powder and was a poor product. That has all changed and the big brands and of course Lidl’s own chocolate have vastly improved the offering and choice. When I was a child, sweets were a weekly treat, the three of us would go to the local cooperative shop and choose one item to the value of sixpence .. about two and half pence. We were always greeted by the friendly, over friendly Manager of the store who always came out to greet us, often lifting me up to pick something from a higher shelf. Sometimes he would let us have extra sweets as a special treat. What a nice man I thought. I was very sad when one day he suddenly disappeared as he was so kind to us. We were told that there had been some sort of bookkeeping problem and the Cooperative had sacked him. Years later I realised the truth and just why he was so tactile and generous. Day 31 and our thoughts have turned to custard. At school I hated custard it used to be served in great aluminium jugs and had a thick slimy skin on it. To be honest I hated school dinners, I have never cared for boiled potatoes and the half cooked mouldy spuds that my infant school served up were quite disgusting, rather like my father’s dinner time rules, you were not allowed to leave the table until you had finished your meal and one particular Dinner Lady delighted in bullying the children into eating everything on their plate. To this day I still avoid plain boiled potatoes. Spanish spuds are different, they really taste potatoey – actually a lot of fruit and veg from the supermarket might not be perfectly formed, but all taste much better than the fruit and veg in Britain. It took me a while to realise that although a lot of the fruit and veg grown here is sent over to the UK.. it has to travel for quite a few days and is packed not quite ripe, so that it arrives still edible. Here the produce arrives sometimes within hours of being picked and ripened by the sun.. really delicious. My Uncle Peter who lived in Barcelona during the 1950s with my Spanish Aunt Isobel, used to boast that you haven’t eaten an orange unless you have picked it from the tree yourself. I used to think he was just showing off, but actually oranges have a completely different texture and taste, fresh from a tree. Aunty Isobel never turned up at our house without a gift. Our Spanish friends now are the same, just a little something to say thank you for inviting me. I remember once Uncle Peter’s car rolled up outside our house and Isobel emerged struggling with what looked like a great big black metal shield. “Ohh deeee ana, I have dragged this bluddy thing alf way across Spain, but I know you will like it, so much.” She gave the enormous metal shield to my mother. We all gathered round to take a look. It was repulsive, in the centre was a large brass cut out of a fish, possibly of the goldfish variety, then to one side a series of nylon cords were stuck to the metal representing reeds. It also weighed a ton. “You like no?” said Isobel. My mother always polite said.. “Yes it is very lovely and an original piece I would think?” “But of course.” said Isobel, “We Spanish produce some very fine works of art, you know.” My mother turned the monstrosity around to see if she could find the name of the Spanish artist who had, had the gaul to produce this ugliness. “Oh!” my mother exclaimed. Isobel came closer to see what she had found. We all looked and there on the back was a “Made in England” sticker! For many years the “monstrosity’ as it was called by us all, hung in our hallway and every time I used to pass it I would remind me of my crazy Spanish Aunt and her “horrible” gifts.
Today Rulers and Prince Caspian Day Thirty of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com t is day 30 of our Spanish Lockdown and the sun has shone through the high cloud. the weather though is unseasonably cool. The traffic this morning is noticeably noisier, there has been a very slight lifting of the Lockdown to allow some industries and some construction return to work. I have started recording my work for children's literacy, I am the computer voice for quizzes that tests whether a child has read a particular book. If they pass they can move on to the next book. I love books, I didn't always. When I went to school in the swinging sixties, teachers wore caftans and one thigh length boots and an impossibly small mini skirt that showed her teaching credentials every time she bent over to pick the chalk up from the blackboard. In the 1960s at school we were experimented on, the grandson of the man that gave us shorthand Sir Isaac Pitman, a gentleman by the name of Sir James Pitman decided to create an Initial Teaching Alphabet, and we were to be the first children the educational authorities would try it on. The language was based on sounds, had some similarities to English but looked nothing like it. As a result after two years at school not a single one of us could read a word of English, simple words like Exit or Entrance could have been written in hieroglyphics for all I could make out. My mother was alarmed, the school was alarmed and quietly dropped the scheme, leaving two whole years illiterate. So I couldn't read, well I could read a crazy 1960s language invented by some knighted knob. It was frustrating and in a fit of pique I picked a book up and decided to teach myself. It was a long and painful process, asking my mother what every other word was or meant. But after that first book I read another and another, until I had read the whole of the infant school library. It wasn't that expansive and even then excluded Enid Blyton. The school allowed me to cross the playground to the Junior School and raid their library. I think the infant school felt a sense of guilt that they had whole class loads of kids who could barely write their own name. When I eventually moved up to Junior School I was a voracious reader. Once in class I had reached an exciting part of Prince Caspian from the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis,.. Peter was about to get his head sliced off in battle.. when I was suddenly aware of my teacher Miss Hatfield standing over me. "This is supposed to be a maths lesson.. what are you doing Campen?" "Er reading Miss Hatfield." "Come up to the front of the class and bring 'that' book with you." The whole class watched as I walked to the front, they all knew what was coming and were, frankly looking forward to it. Miss Hatfield took the book from me and said. "This will be returned to the school library, you will not be allowed to just help yourself to books anymore." She then opened her drawer and took out her wooden ruler. "Hold out your left hand and make a fist" For an elderly spinster she would have made a very fine bowler at cricket. She rose up into the air her arm swinging backward and then suddenly down, the ruler hitting me across the knuckles of my hand, it bloody hurt. "Now leave the room and stand outside till I call you." I went outside and cried. Not just with the incredible stinging pain that my knuckles were in but in the total frustration of knowing I couldn't wander the school library anymore. My mother told me I shouldn't be reading in class during a maths lesson. But she took it upon herself to take me and my two sisters regularly to the public library, allowing to choose books from the children's library and by using her ticket, books from the adult library too. Ten years old and I was reading the works of Isaac Asimov, excellent stories like The Bicentennial Man.."A Robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." So I suppose I owe something to todays generation of children so that they too get to enjoy reading books as much as I did when I was a child. Day 30 and this morning we are cleaning the pool with the manual pool vacuum. A beastie of a thing, that has a heavy square metal suction attachment and a long blue plastic tube that twists itself around everyone and everything. The pool water is sucked up from the end and then recirculated through the filter, which catches any dirt from the bottom of the pool. Three good legs cat watched on from the pool side with great interest, occasionally threatening to jump in and catch the blue snake that was moving up and down as Chris manipulated the steel pole the vacuum was attached to. The Mayor of Lanjaron .. the place where the mineral water comes from. Has dipped into the Town Hall coffers and ruled that every citizen in the town will have a face mask and gloves, given to them every week. A few days ago the conservative Mayor of Motril complained bitterly that the Province, also conservative run, were going to stop the displays of appreciation toward the local Police. The Secretary of State for Security Sandra Garcia had put out the instruction. The first people to say they were going to ignore our Sandra were actually members of the Police! The whole thing snowballed and came to bite Ms Sandra Garcia on the bum. The prohibition has been dropped and the citizens of this area can wave flags, sing songs from their balconies and the Police can also wish children happy birthday whilst they are confined to their houses, the police can continue also to wave at the crowds and sound their sirens. A wonderful people powered, democratic U-turn. The Mayors of all the villages and towns here have a great deal of autonomy. Their rule is God. Sometimes it is misused, like naming a local street after a family member or indulging themselves in pet schemes. One local Mayor has been very keen to see the municipal market disappear. There is a theory that she has been approached by a supermarket chain that fancies the plot the market is on for their next superstore. Although the market hasn't been built for long, it was poorly constructed and in danger of falling down. But there has been a lot of local opposition to the whole scheme, with people demonstrating in the street, social media videos made etc. So the Mayor waited to Lockdown and brought in the bulldozers, and has raised the whole market to the ground. Mayors have a great deal of autonomy. And of course nobody could take to the streets to demonstrate, the deed had been done and the market traders have been put out of work. Day 30 is ending and I not convinced we are even half way through this, I am equally convinced that the whole world will have to keep the rules of distance until a vaccine is found, these are the new rules, .. and we are getting used to it.
Today Tuna and potties Day twenty nine of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 29 of our Spanish Lockdown, we woke to horrible weather, thick fog, pouring rain and a damp chill to the air. When we get this kind of weather it always reminds me of a disastrous holiday I went on with my father, his new wife two toddlers and a baby, my fathers second attempt at a family. I had reached a crisis point in my career. Career huh! I worked on a Production line that made Britvic 55 and Pepsi Cola. It was sweaty dirty work, I still bear some of the scars where broken bottles had sliced into my hands, the place was crawling with cockroaches. My mother had got me the job following unemployment during the famous winter of discontent, then a rubbish job at a Petrol station, that I hated so much I used to turn the lights off on the forecourt in the hope I could quietly sit and listen to the radio. That worked well until a surprise visit from my Manager. A written warning and punished by having to clean the car wash out.. yuk. And for about a month after I had to take in all the tankers, a foul job that meant climbing a ladder on the side of the lorry then balancing on top of the tanker with a dipstick to take the readings of how much was actually in the tanker. Finally the worst punishment of all .. cleaning the ladies lavatory.. girls you are disgusting, the worst thing the men ever did was to pee on the floor, that just needed a bucket of water with bleach to clean. At least once a week in the ladies you would encounter human solids on the floor. Judy who was the Assistant Manager said to me one day, you are going to need this today.. she handed me one of those ice scrappers from the shop. I entered the ladies with trepidation .. and there stuck to the wall was a used tampon.. the ice scrapper was needed to remove it. More disgusting is that once I had finished Judy put the ice scraper back on the shelf. .. I resigned after that. So I went to work on a noisy, deafeningly noisy production line. You had to wear ear protectors as the crash of bottle against bottle was so loud. But the money was really good. By that time I was working at the weekend for the local commercial radio station "Essex Radio." They offered me a job at £2.00 an hour, I was earning nearly £5 at Britvic. So I needed time to think; so a holiday in Anglesey with my fathers new family seemed just the ticket. I can't say we saw very much of Anglesey. Every day it persisted down with rain, it was foggy, so any mountains to be seen, were hidden away. Worse, my father decided that it would be fun to go camping. If anyone has seen that clip from the Carry On film where Sid James and Bernie Breslaw put the tent up. It was just like that, only worse, the rain and wind combined meant that the rain actually got inside the tent, we spent most of the time huddled around the heater. One of the rare trips out in the hire car, in the pouring freezing rain with my father having to back the car into the tent so we could jump in through the hatchback boot turned to disaster. One of my dads kids was potty training, we were just leaving Bangor when the child announced they needed the potty for "big ones." .. so we sat with a steaming potty until we left the environs of the town and my stepmother Linda, threw the contents out of the car window. Sitting on my own in the front of the car, with the family in the tent, I made the decision to quit the bottling factory and take the job at the radio station. It's funny how a bit of bad weather can bring back a flood of memories. So Day 29, - Easter Monday back in the UK - started quite poorly. We also had to brave the bank, so armed with an authorisation paper we went to the bank, there was a long queue of masked Salobreñians waiting outside. Luckily the cash machine was working and we both withdrew the maximum amount and then fled. Ricardo the electrician turned up for his money, he had fixed new air conditioning and an unrelated cable fault, put a new lightning detector and electrical surge detector in. He also bought with him a lovely bottle of Chlorine. "I found only one place open and have bought this for you." So the day improved. Many places are closed even the ones that are allowed to be open. Finding shops shut even without a pandemic is de rigueur here in Spain. When you do actually find a place open there can be a complete lack of any sales technique. My friend Petra from the big house went to have her iPhone repaired. The salesman said, "ah this is facil, I can do this in maybe five minutes." "Excellent," said Petra "I will wait." the salesman looked at her and then looked up at the clock with was at ten to two and looked back at her. "We close for lunch, come back at five." She knew that arguing that a job that takes five minutes could be done 'before lunch.' would be a waste of time, so she returned at 5.30pm. "Ah here is your iphone.. it is broken." He had failed to mend the phone and handed it back to her. "That will be forty euros please!" "But you havn’t fixed it." There followed a long argument in which Petra left the shop minus her broken phone. Chris bought a tin of tuna from the local superstore, one of those large tins that had a little key you pull to open it, ..the key broke off, we had the receipt so returned to the shop, stood in a long painful queue at customer services and Chris placed the tin onto the counter. The woman picked it up, holding it between forefinger and thumb. "What is wrong with this tin?" "The key has broken off." Chris said. She slowly inspected the damage, let out an annoyed sigh and said "ticket!" "here you go." Chris handed the receipt over and she walked away from the two of us toward her colleague, they poured over the receipt, inspecting it like a archaeologist would a piece of dead sea scroll. She returned, another sigh, she punched the till and returned the four euros it had cost, but not before producing two receipts which she stapled together... welcome to Spanish customer services. Our friends David and Colin had arranged for someone to come and give them a quote to fix their pool. Manuel arrived and inspected the work. "This will take little time to fix, I shall return Mañana." A few weeks later we returned to the Super Store to buy more tuna. Chris picked a tin up from the shelf... "I don't believe it." he said .. it was the same tin of tuna we returned - minus its key! Meanwhile at David and Colin's and six months later - they were relaxing by the pool and heard a noise, somebody was crashing around in the pool room. It was Manuel who had returned to fix the fault. David, incredulous said "We had that fixed months ago." Manuel looked surprised. "But you asked me to do it!" .. Jen and Jack had a similar experience at the Super Store, they bought some garden furniture. Tied it to the roof of their car. Half way down the motorway the furniture it all fell off onto the motorway. Stupidly Jen stopped the traffic and managed to put it back on the car roof. Cheekily they returned it, got their money back. A week later she said they were back in the super store "And they had put it back on display for sale, even the broken bits!" Finally our friend bought a thirty thousand Euro Landrover from a main dealer. She had been a customer of theirs for many years. The Salesman handed her the keys and came close and whispered in her ear. "I have left a special present for you on the back seat." Thinking that it might be a set of mats or a tool box, she opened the back door of her new car to discover some sachets of car wash. But everything has changed recently, suddenly shop assistants have started to smile at you. At the Super Store they are all wearing teeshirts that say in Spanish "Can I Help You." Many offer free delivery.. unheard of until recently I have a suspicion why Spain has improved so much. We are going to spend the evening catching up on some Amazon Prime TV, yes Amazon Prime arrived in Spain about a year ago, complete with free delivery, easy returns and streaming TV.
Today Villa Paula and the rats Day twenty eight of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today impossible hair and toads. Day twenty seven of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today Flash Harry and the Poof test. Day twenty six of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today Sick dogs and angry cats. Day twenty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today Ice cream and drains Day twenty four of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today Fiestas and Freddie Mercury Day twenty three of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today shocking electricity and the bright yellow car. Day twenty two of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today scary Cheesecakes and Church Bells. Day twenty one of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today scary Martha and the kitchen urinal. Day twenty of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day nineteen of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. Today 'filthy fincas and feral cats' To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day eighteen of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. Today 'the toothless cat and the blood spattered kid!' To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day seventeen of the Spanish Lockdown, the diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. Today all fur coat and no knickers To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day sixteen of the Spanish Lockdown, the diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. Today drinking gin at 7am and the greatest hits of Queen. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
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