Podcasts about salobrena

Transcript: Day 98 The End? Sunday and the Alarma is over, Lockdown is unlocked, 99 days, it started on Saturday March 14th, but actually I consider that weekend to be the two phoney days of Lockdown.   Saturday 14th March was a pretty normal day, the supermarket rammed with people taking everything off the shelves, including the toilet paper, something that the Spanish do not a use a lot of, most prefer to wash in the bidet than smear on the pan, as it were.   Sunday was equally as busy as people rushed around to be in the right place before the strict measures and fines started on Monday 16th March.  Our friends Jen and Dave making a run for it to their seaside flat, Jen told me “Well it will only be for fourteen days, so we grabbed a few things from the village flat and drove early to the coast.”   As it turned out it has been 99 days and Jen only had her flip flops to wear which after week three fell to pieces and had to patched up with sticking plaster.   For us that first day felt, well felt like this:   CLIP:   So, 99 days, the first thing that happened was our air-conditioning failed due to a power surge that also, we discovered destroyed our faithful ten-year-old iMac computer, then the business laptop decided to join the other two in a suicide pact. That left us with one working laptop and the challenge of buying a new laptop and fixing the air conditioning in full Lockdown.   Ricardo came to the rescue for the air conditioning, finding a new unit tucked away in a warehouse, the laptop had to come all the way from China.  The iMac now resides in our workshop waiting for a trip to Harry the Russian who fixes computers in town.   Chris was out of a job, Spain shut all Gyms on Saturday 14th including the one where he was working, but thanks to our Administration ladies they were able to fill in the complicated online paperwork so that Chris could receive some money from the Government.      Then there was the silence, no traffic, no planes, nothing but birdsong and the waves crashing against the shorelines.  Weird but after a few weeks, quite relaxing.    Our British friends fleeing the country so that they could look after their parents back in the UK.  They left so fast that they had to leave their precious dog behind.  He hasn’t seen them for months now, poor love, but he is enjoying life with a family who run a local kennels.  It took them two days driving pretty much non-stop through Spain and France to grab a ferry back to England.  Petra says she never ever wants to go through that again.   Being really worried about our family, for a few weeks Britain just ignored the Pandemic and my elderly parents went out to a packed pub lunch on Sunday March 15th – but bless them, after that they stayed at home, I think they picked up the seriousness of the situation.    It all seems a long time ago now as we sit outside in the warm sun, the road below noisy and busy, the sounds of the motorcyclists haring round the coast road, great gaggles of cyclists shouting encouragement to each other and on Saturday evening the sea was filled with silly boys on jet skis racing each other, yachts out from Marina de Este, little fishing boats and the odd canoe, far off on the horizon a stream of container ships were heading out to the Atlantic.   Parasols decorated the beach in the distance, all perfectly socially distanced thanks to the lifeguards and the new officers of beach protection.   Chris turned to me and said, “it is if this never happened, like some kind of dream.”   The fact is, it is still happening, it has not gone away and it has not ended, probably not ended for years to come, even if a vaccine was found, it would take years to administer and there would be parts of the world, I am thinking poor parts, that will not be vaccinated.    There currently is no proper control of the virus, it looks like a particular steroid might help, but it seems to have many side effects, My LBC colleague Ken Guy took it for cancer he says on Facebook:   I see that the steroid Dexamethazone could be useful in the treatment of Covid 19. It was part of my cancer treatment back in 2009 and should still be, but I gave it the flick pass sometime back. I took six pills each Monday. It kept me awake till Wednesday and produced mood swings. Neither Gracie nor I appreciated its effect, so I’ve not taken it since.   I should point out he is an Australian. So here in Spain we might be at the end of Lockdown, but we are only at the beginning of the understanding of what this virus is and does, where it actually came from, bat? Wet market? Laboratory Accident?   Will it mutate? Will it return in the Autumn and cause another Lockdown? Will the effects of the virus be nothing compared to the economic havoc it has reeked across the world?   The virus is like life, full of more questions than answers, and in life you should always dare to take risks.  As humankind we took a risk climbing down from the safety of the trees, learning to stand upright, our lives are all about risk.   Thank you for listening to Spanish Practices these last few months, our biggest hope is, weirdly, that we do not have to come back for another season, that dear Spain never has to go through Lockdown ever again, stay safe and well, Goodbye.

Full transcript: Day 97 Of mousy women and men Saturday the weather is calm, the sun is shining, I have been doing some extreme weeding on the mountainside and managed to not fall down, the one time I did I thought it was best to relax and just let my body slide to a bit where I could cling on.  Our garden in Essex did not have the same extreme challenges, unless you count the incredible numbers of snails that ate their way through most of our English garden.   I have been spending some time reflecting, yesterday about the reasons why we came to Spain, today a reflection of things past.  Sometimes it is not healthy to keep reliving the past, much better to look forward to the future.   But often the future is fashioned by the past, all my mental health problems during the 1990s definitely changed me long-term as a person. I am pleased to say now I am a much more ‘mellow’ individual, although I am still capable of falling off my perch as my dear colleague Richard Dallyn used to say.   Over the years we have worked with hundreds, maybe thousands of people, some like us ordinary, some famous, some politicians’ others who might fall into the celebrity status, whatever that now means.   By 1997 I had already become an old lag at LBC and was often pressed into service to train the new young blood coming through the radio station. I remember one such day when I was training a new studio engineer, it was the two Julia’s show, Julia Sommerville the Presenter and Julia the Producer.   Julia the Producer decided that it was a bonus having me in the studio as it meant she could go sit out in the office and catch up on the paperwork that we all had to fill in to comply with the Broadcast regulations of the time.   I agreed and asked what was on the show, she said “A regular guest and some children’s author.”  “Fine,” I replied, I was quite happy that there wasn’t anything complicated about the show.   First up I left my charge and went up to collect the regular guest, who was been badged up by the very efficient reception staff at ITN.  Down we went to the basement, sorry, lower atrium of the large glass and steel building that is ITN studios. The guy I was training had been good, had engineered a junction into a commercial break and out again with no problems.   Then a call from reception, the next guest had arrived.  I left my charge once again to travel those sick making glass lifts of ITN and back to reception for the kiddies author, she was a mousy sort of woman and clearly suffering from nerves.  ‘Oh God, I thought, this one will be trouble.’  On the way down I checked her title and that she was the right guest,.. yes it does happen that you can put the wrong guest into the wrong studio.   A seem to remember an occasion when a guest for Geet Mala our Asian show wound up in a discussion about the future of railway transportation in the other studio, he gallantly discussed the advantages of off peak travel until it was discovered he had actually come to talk about a new Indian Restaurant opening in Brixton.   “I want to be called by my initials,” mousy woman piped up.  “Oh” I replied. “And what are they dear?” She told me, I thought that is seriously weird, so I put my foot down.  “The thing is, that nobody has ever heard of you, this is your first book,” “yes,” she replied.  “So, we are going to call you by your proper name, so listeners can relate to you.”   Mousy woman agreed, but it made her shake a little bit more.  I took her into the studio and Julia warmly greeted her, she said “My daughter read your book last night and loved it.”   We both had a copy of the book, whilst Mousy lady was telling us all how she was desperate and wrote the book in some café in Glasgow or Edinburgh or somewhere, I took a look at the book.  It was your usual fairly dismal children’s book offering.  The cover had a train on it with some spotty gormless urchin in glasses in front of it.   I flicked through the pages, it was mostly about magic, not my cup of tea at all.  Well the interview was over and the show runner, the poor kid who didn’t get paid but got to enjoy the ‘media experience’, had come back from his break, so I got him to dispatch Mousy Lady upstairs.   I thanked her for coming in, “Oh I see you have a copy of my new book,” she said, “would you like me to sign it for you?”   I answered “no” but I shall look forward to reading it later, she smiled and as the runner led her away I took the book between thumb and forefinger and threw “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling,” into the bin.   So that book became a life-changing book for me.  One I realised what a pratt I had been and how rude with it too. This poor woman had come to plug her book that she had worked long and hard to write and I dismissed it, without having the good grace to read the thing.  I did years later, and it is a cracking children’s book, every bit as good as the classics, which it has now become.   And two I constantly try to be a kinder person, I don’t always succeed, there is something inside of me that wants to be capricious, arch and downright rude, but I work hard to control it.   Maybe I was always destined to be the hapless journalist that dissed J.K. Rowling as an author, but it did teach me a lesson .. always try to be kind.

Transcript (uncorrected) Day 92 Dance off   Monday has come, I usually dread Monday as it always brings administration stuff which I really don’t care for.   By the way if you want to catch all 92 episodes with transcripts of Spanish Practices head over to THE secret spain dot com.   Today the administration was our Spanish Tax return, I say our, as we are married it has been done jointly, I get the classification of Woman, the form does not seem to have a code for Partner.    The Spanish Tax year runs from January to December, unlike the UK tax year that runs April to April, it means that, certainly for a Brit you have to get your shite together straight after a major holiday of feasting and excess.   The Spanish celebrate Christmas differently, it outwardly seems a much more serious affair, Midnight Mass at the Church is a rather dreary occasion, I have heard carol singing from the children in the main town. Carols are sung in Latin which makes them sound beautiful if a little inaccessible.   We still haven’t got our Christmas quite right, it is fairly difficult to have a traditional Christmas here, several attempts at cooking a turkey has led us to give up and go for a chicken.  The main Spanish meal and celebration is on Christmas Eve, like it is in many other Catholic countries.   One year our friend Maggie got us organised enough to make a Christmas cake, she brought dried fruit over from the UK, it is quite hard to find here, even though a lot of it comes from nearby Morocco,   There is more than a physical divide between Spain and Morocco, it extends to a cultural one as well.  When the Moors were driven out of Spain by the Christians, the ones that remained were forced to convert to Christianity and as a kind of obvious test, a lot of local Christian dishes were pork based. Many of the exotic spices were now more difficult to obtain and were not used in the new Christian cuisine of the conquered area.   It does mean that the local pork here is quite delicious, but for our friends who are Jewish who asked me did I think there was anywhere Kosher to eat, the answer here is no.   The cake we made came out very well, Maggie told me to feed it regularly with Brandy.  So I fed it every day, turns out that it only needed a feed once a week, but I have to say it was far more delicious Brandy soaked.   But it does not put you in the mood to fill a tax form in, January is bleak enough without that.  There are personal allowances here, but less generous than the UK, there is also little incentive to save, no ISAs or as far as I can see opportunity to easily buy shares, up to now cash is king, it allows the Spanish to ‘protect’ there money from the onerous tax system.   I mentioned to Carmen that winning the lottery is probably the only way the ordinary Spanish can hope to amass a fortune. She told me “you are joking, they tax you if you win at 33%!” So good luck can turn into bad luck when the tax man comes knocking to take a share of your good fortune.   In the UK, I believe the tax is taken at source when you buy a ticket, in the long run the taxman makes more money taxing everyone than just the winners, but it doesn’t work like that here.   Speaking of Christmas, one year in the little village of Velez the whole village, well everyone who was in the syndicate won the major Christmas lottery – The Gordo.  Every person walked away with one hundred thousand Euros, many bought flashy cars and others improved their houses, for one-year Velez was a very lucky little village.       Monday and today the Alhambra has announced how it will welcome visitors back to the palaces.  No more tickets but a system that links your entry back to your Passport number or DNI number and I guess our NIE number.   The attraction will run at just fifty percent so a lot fewer visitors milling around could actually make the Alhambra a nicer place to visit.   Some clarification on tourists yesterday and it looks like the British will also be allowed to come to Spain along with the rest of the European Gang, although not a member of the Schengen area or an affiliate, I think, if I understand right, UK is still technically in Europe so tourists are allowed.   There is the complication that the UK has, finally, introduced a quarantine period, just at the time the whole of Europe drops their quarantine period.  I was looking on a Spanish site that has the UK Government quarantine advert in Spanish on.  I have to say the Spanish were very unimpressed by the less than warm welcome they might receive in London, so I imagine if you stay at home in the UK this year, London will also be a great place to see as there will be fewer tourists willing to spend 14 days banged up in a Travelodge waiting for their holiday of a lifetime to start.   Oh, and if you are thinking of going on a clubbing holiday to Ibiza this year, it looks very much like you will not be doing much dancing.  Clubs that have areas for dancing will be prohibited from opening them.  The dance floor must be laid out for sedentary use. Tables and chairs with social distancing measures.  I think the Spanish Government has identified clubs with a lot of people up close and personal as a viral hotspot.   To discover more episodes of this Podcast Spanish Practices head along to the secret spain dot com where you can find all the episodes and transcripts.   This evening we are off to the gym, Chris has a class to teach, I am not sure that there will be many people there, it is after all the first day of Gym’s being able to open, tomorrow I will report back on just how that went.   SOC

Transcript (uncorrected) Day 91   Sunday and Uncle Pedro has been doing his weekly Zoom meeting, he likes to surprise the regional Governments, just to remind them all he is the one in charge.   So he has brought forward the date when Spain will open its borders to everyone except Portugal, so on Monday 22nd June the Lockdown will be over, for now and so will this Podcast, I still have the story to tell about one of the stupidest things I did some years ago. I will keep that for later in the week.   But you can’t have a Podcast about Spain without mentioning the Spanish Royal family and in particular the former King of Spain, Juan Carlos de Borbón.   It must be remembered that Juan Carlos although swore allegiance to Franco as soon as Franco had popped off, Carlos started the transition to democracy back in 1975, which, with one or two hiccups along the way, seems to have served Spain well, although there are some who would wish that Franco was still in charge.   My Aunty Isobel who had a large portrait of Franco in her sitting room in Luton, She eulogised the man.  She used to say things like, “when you come to Spain you will find no crime, because the General has eradicated it,”    My late father used to describe Aunty Isobel’s rantings about how great Spain is under Franco’s rule as, bollocks, - he was very fond of that word, as are the Spanish, I often hear the word cojones used in everyday Spanish slang.   Where we would say I couldn’t give a toss, the Spanish say they couldn’t give tres cojones, we might say I swear on my mother’s grave, the Spanish say Me corto los cojones, - I would cut my own balls off. Finally we say you will die laughing, the Spanish say descojonada , laugh your balls off.    Sadly, King Juan Carlos hoping that he might be remembered as the great architect of Spain’s transition to democracy is overwhelmed by his terrible reputation as a corrupt old philanderer.   He had been accused by an old German socialite – Fräulein Sayn-Wittgenstein of not only giving her a good old philander but of using her to squirrel away money in secret overseas assets.   He also took the Fräulein on his secret trip in 2012 to Botswana to hunt elephants, most people are going to find it hard to like a man, let alone a King who in this modern age would think that was an OK thing to do.   I have to say our own Royal Family quite like killing animals for sport as well, but I think Prince Philip would stop short at bagging an elephant, .. I think?   He didn’t do very well with his trip to Botswana and managed to break his hip, which is how the scandal came about. But on previous occasions he had managed to kill one of these magnificent beasts and there is a picture of him standing next to a dead Elephant.   At the time in 2012 he was the Honorary President of the World Wildlife Fund, I mean you couldn’t make this kind of thing up.   In his younger days Juan Carlos loved nothing better than riding his Harley Davidson motorbike around Spain on his one King mission to philander as many eligible Spanish girls as he possibly could.   He loved to ride along the hairpin bends, as they were then of the old coastal road that passes by the bottom of our estate here near Salobreńa, indeed some of the Kings friends from Almuńecar are still alive today and remember him travelling the coast on his own and without any security, well it was a different time.   Now according to our friend Carmen he would pull up outside our estate and take the Canada, goat road down to the tiny secluded beach below us, park up his motorbike there and give some poor local girl he had met a good philandering.   Then after jumping her he would jump back on his motorbike and disappear back to Madrid.   The popularity of the King, amid the accusations of corruption and playboy lifestyle, tarnished the monarchy in Spain and made them quite unpopular.   But suddenly, as things often happen in Spain, the King decided to abdicate in 2014 and was replaced by his son King Felipe the sixth of Spain. He is married to Letizia a former news journalist and a very glamorous Queen in the mode of Princess Diana.   In dramatic contrast Felipe has set an example of a modern monarch, he is married to a former TV news journalist, they lead an understated life.   A couple of months ago in a massive snub to his father Juan Carlos, he renounced his personal inheritance from his father, worth millions of Euros but coming from a secret offshore fund with ties to Saudi Arabia.   Felipe has said he wants to renounce his inheritance along with any asset or financial structure who character is not in accordance with the law.   A modern Monarchy for a new modern era, something that Spain badly needs in a time of the new normal and the exit from the Lockdown.     Enjoying Spanish Practices, hit the subscribe button on your favourite Podcast Player, catch up with all 91 episodes.     The music Leaving Havana was composed by Marty Stone and Ben Hatten and both are reproduced under licence from Storyblocks. Spanish Practices is a Creative Radio Partnership Ltd Production.

Transcript here: Day 90 holiday from hell Saturday your Sunday and the Spanish Government has started to talk about how they envisage foreign visitors coming to the country, the first lot will turn up on Monday, they are Germans coming to the Balearic Islands.   Interestingly about 35,000 people travelled to Spain in May, whilst not holidaymakers, they were mainly people returning back to Spain for work or back to their residency.   From all those who travelled, 104 people were detected to have Corona Virus.   But in a couple of weeks the onslaught will begin, instead of personnel there will be automatic heat detector cameras, inline health declarations, this will only apply to people arriving by sea and air.  If you drive into the country, there will be no health checks.   But as we know people lie on health declarations, they do it all the time with travel insurance, and how do you track and trace hundreds of thousands of visitors into the country?   I am not sure that will be possible. For us we are probably going to stay away from the beaches and bars, at least for the moment.   For the all-important tourist industry, the spring was a disaster, a complete standstill, nobody went anywhere, saw anything and it is highly likely that, that will continue into the summer.   Only half of the hotels in Spain will open and most of them will only be at 25% capacity.  As I have mentioned in previous Podcasts, tourism represents more than 12% of Spain’s GDP.   The Industry want some kind official map of safe areas to travel in Europe that will allow travel corridors, I am not sure that any area is really safe. Also, you are going to have to ask yourself can I trust the airline. How safe will the hotel be? If there is a virus outbreak, will I end up being trapped in Spain unable to return home?  Airports are fairly unpleasant places not, what will they be like with all the virus prevention measures?   Personally, I have no plans to travel at the moment, we are discouraging friends and relatives from travelling this year too.   It is not all bleak news, there will be intrepid folk who will see this as an opportunity.  An opportunity to explore and see tourist sites normally rammed with coach parties and other tourists.   The Spanish themselves will probably come to the coast, so far, fingers crossed, the social distancing on the beach is working well, helped by the Lifeguards and security staff employed by the Local Government to ensure beach safety.   The new normal is embracing face masks, alcohol cleaner and reducing surfaces and objects that get touched a lot.  All the restaurants here are using chalk board menus or telling you is on offer.  No sticky menus and special of the day cards.   Our Gym also opens on Monday, there are a raft of health measures and social distancing happening.  Studios are marked out for distance, entry is strictly by booking a class, use of masks and alcohol cleaner at the point of entry to the class is obligatory.  But you don’t need to wear your mask when you are in position in your marked square.   Exercise equipment has been re-spaced to reflect the 1.5 metre rule for distancing and cleaner is to be used on all equipment.  The use of a towel is also obligatory, it was before.  I am not a fan of grubby towels; I prefer disposable tissues and cleaner before and after I use an exercise machine.   Towels don’t kill bacteria or viruses but do mop up the sweat. We will go on Monday, Chris is teaching a class, it will be interesting to see how many turn up and what the overall experience will be like.   Saturday afternoon and Carmen is coming, or rather we are going to pick her up from Alcampo after I collect my glasses, hoping there will be no dramas collecting them, I have waited patiently for nearly three months for them.  Currently I am writing this with a pair of one Euro reading specs from the pound shop, which is far from perfect.   I do worry that we all bang on about the new normal, but that it doesn’t actually exists and that the virus is still out there waiting.  I don’t even know if I have the virus and was asymptomatic, I bet you don’t either.   New glasses but no fitting service, they were just inched over a sanitised mat and I was given a card to read from, in Spanish of course.  We were early so shopped in Alcampo, no gloves just alcohol dispensed from an automatic machine.    The shelves were looking healthier, no police tape sealing off the things you could not buy, I am still wondering who made a list that you could buy a TV but not a book.   We saw Carmen and we drove her back home to hand over the car.  Some refreshments and a bowl of Tyrrells Crisps, “Oh my god, I forgotten how good British salt and vinegar crisps taste,” She said. The Spanish supermarkets are not very adventurous in the crisp flavours.  I notice that quite a few Spanish like Pipa’s – they are just sunflower seeds that they eat spiting the husks out into a nearby handy ashtray.   The day ended with Carmen disappearing into the distance with our old car. Tomorrow as story of the Playboy King of Spain and why a little beach below the estate got Royal Approval.   If you are enjoying Spanish Practices we would love a 5 star review. The music Leaving Havana is by Marty Stone and Ben Hatten, Spanish Practices is a Creative Radio Partnership Ltd Production.   

Full Transcript: Day 89 Fag End Friday and we are off to the Administrator to sell our old car to Carmen, what could possibly go wrong, find out later in this episode.   If you want to catch up on previous episodes and full transcripts, go to the secret Spain dot com   Today I have been thinking about Satan’s smoke. A great many people in Spain seem to smoke, I remember we had to pick up a parcel from a UPS pick up point that turned out to be a rather sad looking Travel Agents, I guess even sadder now we are in the Covid19 world.   It was a pain to get to, Chris had to negotiate the one-way system of Motril and park the car in a tiny space in an equally tiny square.  We got out the car and looked around, finally seeing the little shop and a sad and very tiny sticker saying UPS pick up.   We went inside, a very disinterested lady was sat, chuffing on a ciggy above her was a large sign “No Fumar” to her right were some rusty carousels with actual travel brochures - Viaje inglés with your usual pictures of a pleased with himself beefeater, Stone Henge and William Shakespeare.   Behind her a shabby shelf filled with a disorganised pile of parcels, one of which would be ours.   I said in Spanish ‘I have to collect my parcel’. I placed the UPS note on the counter.  She took one last drag of her cigarette, blew the smoke out in both our directions and stubbed it out on the counter.   She picked the delivery note up with a great deal of disinterest. Turned to the bulging shelves let out a “mmmm” then “Dinee” The DNI is the Spanish Identity card, I don’t have that I have a Knee an NIE card, I gave her that, she replied “No good, ..passporte!”   Well I don’t actually carry my British passport around, it stays in the safe, so I said “No passporte” she replied “No paquette”   Then I had an idea, I wonder if she would accept my, then, British Driving Licence.  I got that out and pointed to the EU flag thing on the pink plastic card.   Another “mmm” she turned around and started to poke at the parcels on the back shelf, one fell off with a slight tinkly smash sound, eventually she found our parcel.   “Sin, sin aqui”   I signed my name and she pushed the parcel across the counter.  “Gracias,” I cheerily said, she gave us a withering look and reached over for her cigarette packet and drew out another smoke, lighting it with one of the Chinese shop lighters that threw an enormous flame up, momentarily lighting up the dingy shop for a moment.  We left.   As Chris tried to reverse out of the impossibly small square, she came to the door to watch us suffer, scowling and flicking cigarette ash up in the air in a theatrical way.   So, smoking in Spain, wherever you are seems to be a thing, I can almost imagine a Hospital Operating Theatre with a surgeon he is in the depths of some complicated surgery, the patient laying on the table.  He stops, pulls out a cigarette packet and lights up, then carrying on with the operation fag ash falling gently into the patients open body.   It was Rodrigo de Jerez who in 1492 first saw ‘natives’ smoking and brought the dried leaves back to Spain.   This did not go down well with the Church, The Spanish Inquisition stated that ‘only Satan can give to a man the ability to expel smoke through his mouth.’   So they locked up poor old Rodrigo for ten years, he was released after seven and the habit got picked up in Seville, but still the Church was having none of it.   In 1624 the Inquisition posted a tile that said you blow smoke out of any of your orifices and we will severely punish you, and that stayed the Church’s outlook until the 18th century.   By then the state had started to take an interest and saw an opportunity for tax and of course control.   The first tobacco factory in the world was in Seville which started production in 1758 they made snuff and cigars, but the quality was a bit shite,  mainly due to the men working in the factory not turning up to work and when they were at work having a half arse attitude to the manufacture of the cigars. The solution was to hire female workers to do the job, by 1829 all cigar making was done by women, there were more than six thousand women working in the factory by 1868 with their good wages made them ladies independent economically and a really important part of the economy of Seville.   Thursday and our trip to the Administrator his hit a little bump in the road, the DGT, the Government office she must visit has shut down the internet appointment system as “too many people are using it,” so she will have to doorstep the office in Granada to get the paperwork done.. sigh!   It is enough to make you want to take up smoking! All over Spain you see Estancos, little Tobacconist shops are where you buy you ciggies from, stamps and since 2014 a few other bits and bobs like crisps and the like.  Estancos are  Government controlled and have been for over 400 years ago they were traditionally awarded to War Widows, if you want to sell cigarettes you have to buy them from the Estanco, it is no good looking in the supermarket, along with paracetamol, cigarettes are also not sold there.   The weekend comes, it has already arrived for you, and as usual the wind will accompany our Saturday howling and whistling along the coast of Spain.

Thursday and the wind is blowing and driving us mad, a new Spanish law on plastic waste might change the way we use single use plastic and three good legs cat gets a scare, oh and something in Spain that has taken longer to build than the pyramids and still isn't finished. Find out more https://www.thesecretspain.com Listen on the radio in London, Surrey and Machester here: https://www.thepodcastradio.co.uk/ Day 88 Plastic not fantastic - uncorrected transcript Thursday and we spent the morning gathering the paperwork for the car sale, a mind-boggling pile of every single transaction and certificate, we are missing the MOT, as the MOT centre has only just re-opened and there is long complicated waiting list to get your car MOT’d.   The Government has given an extension to the end of the year to sort that out, but Covid19 rules currently mean that for a lot of the centres it is you that run through the car, checking the lights and brakes etc,the MOT engineer shouting instructions in Spanish through a walkie talkie at you.   The wind has returned with a vengeance as is whistling and blowing around the house, the result of the Azores high spinning up north due to ocean temperatures, so summer is so far cancelled, which is probably a good thing as Brits are not welcome abroad just yet.   Thursday and we patiently wait for the completion of our awnings, there is just one small piece missing, they might turn up tomorrow or Monday to fix.   Patience is something you will need in sack fulls if you are thinking of living in Spain, take the mighty Sagrada Familia the Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, they began building that in 1882.   Designed by Gaudí when he died in 1926, only a quarter of the basilica was completed.   They hope to complete it in 2026 it didn’t actually get a licence for construction until a few years ago either. In the end the Sagrada Familia will have taken longer than the Egyptian pyramids to build, and only 50 years less than the Great Wall of China.   A few years ago, we visited the Cathedral, early in the morning we arrived just before it opened. That meant we beat the coach tours.  The place is truly amazing, one to put on your bucket list when you are allowed to travel again.   Thursday and the paperwork has been sent to the Administrator, not the one that couldn’t find our car but a new one that has decided that the thing on the drive with four wheels and an engine actually exists.  So we will see tomorrow how that pans out. Days here follow a weather pattern, the morning is quite calm and then the wind builds up at lunchtime, white horses fill the ocean and it is hard to stand up against the incredible strength of the wind.   It makes me think that Global Warming is slowly screwing the whole of the world, with terrible fires in Australia killing millions of wild animals, freak weather popping up all over the world, a plague in the form of Covid19, all we seem to be missing is a river of blood.   Tonight, we are going to have fish for dinner, that might very well contain microplastics, 8 million bits of plastic get chucked into the ocean 100% of baby sea turtles have plastic in their stomachs. We really have done a pretty poor job looking after the planet.   Every day I take down a plastic bag full of what mainly amounts to packaging.  Supermarkets seem to shroud everything you buy in the stuff. Slowly slowly that is changing but it would be nice to see the legacy of this pandemic is that we all stop and take a bit more notice of how we are turning the place into a human shite hole.   On Tuesday the Spanish Cabinet approved a draft law that introduces a new tax on plastic waste. According to El Pais Newspaper “The indirect levy will tax the manufacture, import or acquisition of non-reusable plastic packaging from other European Union countries for use in the Spanish market, according to the Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition.”   So slowly some Governments are waking up to the fact we must change our ways.   Ok that’s enough, I shall be knitting my own muesli next and wearing a kaftan.  Chris believes that the Azores High will move down slightly in the week to come and the weather here might settle down.   An almighty crash, the piece of wood the cat was hiding under has come crashing down, and frightened one of the lives out of the three good legs cat. I heard mewing at the side door to be let in, he is not amused at all.   Our biggest worry is we have put up the sail now as it is summer.  It is a large canvas thing that gives us shade, currently it is blowing around like a, well like a sail and in danger of ripping its mooring out from the garden wall.   Our challenges tomorrow include a trip to the big town for Chris to be trained in Covid19 sanitation for his job as a Gym Instructor, followed by a trip to the Administrator with our friend Carmen, oh and there is yet more wind.   If you are enjoying Spanish Practices hit that subscribe button, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your Podcasts. Thank you also for the twelve thousand downloads we have had, and of course thank you if you are listening on Podcast Radio in London, Surrey and Manchester.    

Today the embarrassment of explaining Fawlty Towers to my Spanish friends, an internet outage, and the end of central Government control in Spain   Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 87 Fake Spanish Waiters uncorrected transcript    Wednesday and the Spanish Parliament has approved the Royal Decree for “new normality”. It starts in a very good place with central control being released and the regional Governments can go back to being in charge.   Well I say Wednesday, it is actually Thursday we had an Internet moment last night, every couple of months the internet falls over, we have a peculiar Internet system here, it uses a line of sight dish that sends and receives the internet from a transmitter and receiver site, last night it decided to be naughty and not work.   We found out after returning from our Covid19 shopping experience, now that we can both travel in the car we split the shopping so I get to enjoy the rubber glove, mask, steamed up glasses experience too.   Our client Ryan emailed to say he had not received the audio I sent him at midday.  He was right it still had not synced into the cloud even after 5 hours.   Then we could not turn the lights on through Alexa, she did that red spinning thing saying she couldn’t connect to the internet.  This is our fault for bringing northern European technology down to southern Spain and expecting it to work as well as it did in the UK.   Spain, does have good high speed internet in many of the cities, but out here on the coast it is not particularly fast or reliable.  Why am I banging on about the internet?  Because right now as many people as possible who can work from home should, that is the Spanish Government advice.   But it is going to require massive infrastructure improvements, more fibre optic availability and a much quicker and better way of being connected.  I remember when we first used to come to Spain twenty or so years ago, the electric grid network was equally unreliable, now there seems to be fewer power outages even in the big storm we had 18 months ago, the electricity stayed on.  So, Spain has come a long way in 20 years with the quality of the power network, now I think they need to think about the internet network in the same way.   A phone call from the Opticians about my glasses, in Spanish I picked out most of the words, but there I was having trouble with a word that sounded like mountains, she kept saying the mountains are wrong, or at least that is what is sounded like.   For the last 12 weeks I have been wearing a pair of specs that are held together with insulation tape, it makes me look a bit special needs, if I dare say that in this Little Britain p.c. world.   It turns out that the mountains, is the word Monturas, - the frames, so the bloody frames of my new glasses are broken on arrival, so the new glasses have been sent back to the factory… sigh!   Back to Little Britain and whilst I am not going to comment on the ‘black face’ characters of that show and ‘Come Fly with Me’ – I leave that up to my black friends, it really is their call, though I find characters like Precious Little funny, but uncomfortable watching all at the same time. She is what comedy writers would call a grotesque, a bit like Judy in Punch and Judy.   A few years ago when we were learning Spanish and helping our friends with their English the subject of comedy came up and what our favourite comedies were about.  I spoke to Maria about “Fawlty Towers” “Tell me,” she said “What is funny about an hotel,”   I said, “Well there is this character called Manuel, he is from Barcelona and is portrayed as a stupid idiot because he never understands what anyone is saying.”   “So, who is the Spanish actor who plays this Manuel,” she asked.  “Well he isn’t Spanish he is English and he, er well puts make-up on and a silly Spanish moustache and walks around with a vacant expression on his face.”   Suddenly she recognised the show, “This is cannot be right, we had this show many years ago and the waiter was a stupid Italian from Naples, not Spanish, ha you know how stupid Italians are,” she laughed.   Turns out she was right, when Fawlty Towers was shown on La Una, they dubbed all the characters into Spanish and made Manuel a waiter from Naples in Italy.  He was still Andrew Sachs an English Caucasian actor playing a Latino with a false moustache and fake suntan skin.   Finally yesterday, Wednesday we are sorting out selling our car, in Britain you fill in the little slip at the bottom of the V5 and exchange some money and job done.   It would appear in Spain it is a long complicated process which involves a trip to the main Trafico DGT office in the city of Granada, a great deal of form filing and there is TAX to pay on the sale, based on how new the car is.  There is an official list of the tax payable.  The Administrator who will be receiving a large fee for doing all this work has already said “Your car does not exist.”   I do feel that a car selling drama might be on the horizon, keep listening and subscribe to the Spanish Practices Podcast, in a few days’ time I will tell you the story of an event that I shall always regret for the rest of my life.

Today a story of a TV set and an inconvenient death, and speaking of inconvenience, how dare you ask to transfer money at a Spanish bank without an appointment. find out more at https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 86 Inconvenient Death uncorrected transcript   Tuesday and the wind has dropped for the moment so we spent a jolly hour or so cleaning up the mess.  We have learned to take a completely different approach to cleaning here.   In the UK washing down, spraying paths with the garden hose and brushing with a broom was our normal procedure for a tidy up.  Here it starts with a broom and dustpan and brush, the secret is to keep everything as dry as possible.  Most of the dirt here is like sand, fine and if you wash a terrace down it turns into a brown slurry, the best thing is to remove as much as possible.   After a broom and dustpan, we have a vacuum cleaner that is now used for outside, it is a fairly knackered Dyson held together by Sellotape, but it does a good job of sucking up the remaining dust from outside.   Only then do we go in with a mop and bucket, or a Karcher. It can be a miserable job to do as the wind might return tomorrow and blow more mess around.  I am convinced it is why the Spanish have a fondness for the colour Brown, it hides all that dust, oh and the terracotta Andalucian tiles never show the mess either.   Tuesday and we very sadly hear of a death in our old village, a 52 year old man who had been dead for some ten days, it was his sister who discovered him according to the Seaside Gazette.   A few years ago when we were in the village there was a similar sad occurrence.  The husband of a couple who had bought one of the flats in the complex where we were living had decided to come out and buy a new TV set for the apartment.   It would seem he and his wife were not getting on particularly well, so it was also a little break from each other.  Our friends Jen and Dave met him in the street a few times, he seemed nice enough if a little distant.   The couple had the flat in the same block as Jen and Dave in fact the apartment was above theirs.   For some reason, I can’t remember why, I had to go and visit Jen, to collect a key or something. As I arrived at their block, I couldn’t help noticing the drains were smelling particularly bad that day.    I mentioned it to Dave, he said “I wonder where it is coming from?” We noticed the window open in the flat above theirs, and it seemed to be coming from there.   Dave said to me “I haven’t seen that bloke for a few days?” I said “You told me he seemed to be a bit down.”   “I know I will get the ladder and climb up and have a look, we tried knocking this morning and nobody answered.”   Later that afternoon he told me he climbed up to the window.  “The smell was terrible, he said and he peered into to see a swarm of flies around something purple, then he realised it was a human arm, nearly falling off the building he called the ambulance and police.   They arrived and broke the door down to discover the poor man had slashed his wrists, covered the whole flat in blood and died.  Dave said he seemed to have deliberately sprayed the walls up and down with his blood.   Some other locals had seen him staggering around drunk a couple of days before.  The Pharmacy said that he had come in and shown them a UK prescription for Valium which they agreed to dispense for him.  Later the pathology report showed that he had taken the lot.   The Police called his wife, “Oh my God she said, did he get any blood on the new TV?”  The policeman said “No”. “Thank god for that,” she said. They asked her if she would fly over to identify the body.  She told them “Fly over now, do you know how much short notice flights, cost, I will let you know when I can find a cheaper flight.”   In the end it was over a week before his wife found a flight cheap enough to take and come and identify his body. Jen and Dave in the meantime asked her what she wanted to do with the flat, she asked them to clean it up as she would be staying there when she came over.   Dave explained that there was a great deal of blood up the walls and on the floor the forensic team had left quite a mess, so he didn’t think they could do it but suggested that he contact a professional cleaning company.    He called a company that came in after scene of crimes to clear up and they quoted three thousand Euros to remove all the blood and evidence that someone had died in the flat.   The wife flatly refused to pay that amount, so Dave managed to negotiate a deal for two thousand Euro, which she reluctantly agreed to pay.  So, what a sad and tragic end to a life and an astonishing reaction from his wife to boot.    To be fair none of us no the back story of this guy, but I would hope that my nearest and dearest would care about me more than a new TV set.   Carmen is buying our car; she went to the bank to transfer the money.  “It is not possible,” what do you mean it is not possible, she said, you’re a bank, that’s what you do.  “only by appointment,” since when she asked, “since yesterday.”   The Banks here are mostly annoyed by the inconvenience of having to have customers, some only allow you to pay bills on certain days and times of the week, they all used to shut at 3pm, just like the banks did in the UK in the 1970s, but some are now changing.   It does seem a little odd that we are in the middle of Spain’s most serious financial crisis in modern history, following a pandemic that is not over yet and the Banks still cling on to their belligerent, obfuscated way of behaviour.

Monday and we are off to buy our new car in the Covid19 world of car showrooms, no coffee, no handshake, just masks and security tape. Has the glamour of car buying come to an end?   find out more https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 85 Testing Times uncorrected transcript   Monday morning, normally I do the hateful administration work but this morning we are off to the car showroom to collect our new car.  Yesterday we did a test run, found the dealer and the car looking rather dusty sitting in the disabled parking space.   We arrived just before ten a few moments in front of our Bank Manager who accompanied us to translate the paperwork. Car showrooms in our part of Spain are exactly the same as anywhere else.   So Chris, Laura and I entered the showroom, the interior done out in Germanic grey tiles and fairly stark furniture, that was taped off, yellow and white tape marked out where we could stand and the cars all had a security tape on the doors, to stop you casually opening them without a salesman, welcome to the Covid19 car buying experience. Our new car was in the showroom facing a large glass door that led to outside.   Suddenly a thin man with kind brown eyes appeared.  He might have had a beard, who knows, he might have smiled, who knows. He addressed Chris in very fast Spanish.  Laura interrupted with the “he is English but understands some Spanish.”   “Come to the desk, please have a seat.” He said arranging three seats at two metre intervals, he sat behind the desk, behind a plastic screen with a little hole to pass documents through.   “Pasporte please or your Residence card.”  Chris produced his little green card. This unimpressive bit of green card, that you need to keep safely behind a plastic wallet, or the ink and print wear off.  Is our identity that allows to stay here in Spain during the Alarma.  Now in a perfect world it would have a photograph, but the British Government objected to the Spanish Government keeping photographic records of its citizens.  Never mind that a scan of your Passport at Passport Control here, brings up your UK photo, your address and pretty much everything else about you!   Luckily we now both have Spanish Driving Licences and they have our photograph on, Spanish style. In the UK you go to a Photo-Me booth, here you go to a photography studio and a woman with a camera tells you to look ahead, “no smiling.”   Then you sit in the window of the shop waiting for her to print out the pictures and take a pair of scissors to cut each photo by hand.  That bit was easy.  The next not so.   Our Lawyer – Paco took us to Trafico in Granada, a building in amongst a large housing estate, driving through Granada is bewildering, traffic coming at you from all angles and directions.  Paco weaved his way in traditional style, missing the exit for a roundabout so swinging the car back on itself and the traffic to exit.  I found myself gripping my seat as he ignored the red light ahead and turned into a side street where the Government office was.   We were early and had the strongest coffee I had ever drunk in a small bar nearby that looked over a piece of derelict land where people clearly took their dogs to do their business.   The austere Trafico building had an equally austere inside, Paco had to punch a great deal of information into a touch screen to produce a ticket, “come” he said “we must go upa the stairs.”  We followed him upa the stairs.  “Sit” we sat down in those chairs that had not only been joined together but bolted together onto the floor.    In front of us stretched a row of desks and behind the desks some very serious Functionarios were processing paperwork, that when completed was filed behind them in acres of filing cabinets stretching back into the distance.   To amuse us while we waited there were four TV screens hanging from the ceiling all showing the same thing.  They were driving safety films, various hapless drivers crashing into each other, mangled wreckage and bodies and blood, not the cheeriest introduction into our future as Spanish Licence holding Brits.   The was a loud BUZZ and it was our turn.  A very serious man sat behind a tower of papers, Paco did the talking, the man said nothing, looked at all our paperwork.   He then moved his chair back a few inches and took in a large breath.  This is always the point when you know things are going to go badly wrong.   “Now,” he said in Spanish “I can under the European law give you a new licence, but it will end when you do the Brexit, so maybe a few months, maybe a few years,” he laughed.   There then followed an intense conversation with Paco. Paco turned to us and said, he thinks you are better to make the exam and then come back.   It took me 23 years to pass my driving test, and I only passed because the examiner knew a friend of mine really well so we just took a gentle trip into the country where I did some parallel parking and we came back to the test centre, I botched up reversing into a parking space, but he said, take another go at it, I did and he said I am pleased to say you have passed.   But no, not that sort of an exam a medical one. We were told to go over to the building across the road where they did the exam.  The first part involved you grasping two bath taps and a very old computer in front of you showed a game of pong that you had to steer with the two taps. When I played this game there was a lot of buzzing sounds and at the end it came up 40%   The lady in a white coat sitting at the desk looked at me, sighed, looked at my score, sighed again and said “you pass, got to the lady of bloods.” “It is OK,” said Paco, they just want to pressurise you.”   In the next office another woman in another white coat wrapped a blood pressure monitor around my arm. There was a lot of peeping, she sighed, “You are very pressurised, you bloods are too high.” She said.  Paco interjected, “He has just had a cup of strong coffee,” “Oh,” she said “That is OK you pass, go to the room for your eyes.”   Another room another lady in a white coat.  “You wear the gafas when you drive?”  Truthfully I didn’t when I was in the UK so answered “no” “Take them off,” I took my glasses off, “you see the shapes ahead, tell me which way they are up?”  I actually couldn’t see the chart, let alone the shapes. “Put your glasses on.” I put them on, she got a large wooden stick and whacked the stick against each line, “Read,” “In Spanish?”   “Si, this is a Spanish test.”  I told her which way up the shapes were but sometimes I got my “sube” mixed up with my “baja”   She put the stick down and sighed “You must always wear your gafas when you conduct,” she said, “will you?”    “Yes I promise,” I said – “Good you pass that will be thirty eight Euros.”   So we both have a driving licence with our photos on and I do wear my glasses to drive.   The process of buying the car was very professional, Ruben the Salesman tried very hard to speak English, showing Chris the whips of rain, the spear of oil and the lights of always on. The paperwork done he handed Chris the keys.  You may take your car. Chris looked at the impossible turn out of the showroom, there was a large wall directly in front of the exit.  Ruben said, “Do not worry I take the car out for you,” and that was that, a very pleasant experience, no touching, no coffee, no smiles no handshake but everybody was trying their best to be as new normal as they could.  

It is Sunday and I have been driving our existing car for the first time, we are buying a new one tomorrow, as in Phase 3 we can go to a car showroom. Can I say that the gear box stick is in quite the wrong place and while we are at it, so is the steering wheel.  Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 84 Car Share   Sunday the start of a new week, Monday brings us phase 3, we have jumped a week, the Alarma itself finishes June 21st, the central Government hands over its central control to the Juntas – the Regional Government.  So only 14 more of these special Podcasts left and I am saving my best story to last, one clue, it was major misjudgement on my behalf that I will pay for the rest of my life.   First we should get a Royal Decree, a Bill that will detail everything that will happen after the Alarma, Lockdown ends, then that will be interpreted by the Regional Governments who in turn will make their own rules about the de-escalation of Lockdown.. complicated isn’t it.   And all the while the rules change and alter.  Tomorrow we pick up a new car, not sure what the sales service will be like, guessing, a bit average by British standards.   There is a lot of paperwork to fill in, all written in complex Spanish, the stuff that doesn’t not translate with any proper meaning.  Laura our Bank Manager is coming along to help Chris through the process.   Banks here are more, I guess old fashioned, you get a named Manager, she is principally employed as a salesperson, up selling insurance, TV sets sometimes, yes the Bank here will flog you a TV or a mobile phone.   We did a test run to discover where the dealer was located, a Google map put them about 300 metres away in a different road, that turned out to be a Mercedes dealer.  Driving around what is known locally as Gasoline Alley, we found the dealer and we found our new car, sitting looking rather dustily in the disabled parking space.   Chris collects the car at 10am, so hopefully they might give it a clean and stick the matriculation plate on.   A few months ago, we looked at buying a new car from the local Fiat dealer, as we currently have a Fiat.  We were with our dear friend Maria, she went up to the salesman who was on the way out to the back for a ciggy.   “This hombre is interested in buying a new car.”  The salesman looked at her wearily, let out a long sigh and slumped himself back down into his chair and started jabbing at the computer screen.   “Marca?”  Chris replied Fiat, 500, sports.  “Mmm Desportes.” He said, his eyes narrowing, thinking here is an English with some money.  The next thing he said was too quick for us to catch.  Monica said, “He is asking if you need finance.”  Chris told him we didn’t, we would pay cash, but trade in the old car.   Then came the Spanish moment, he said “But your car is only three years old, why do you want to buy a new one?”   To be fair he has a point, but it is not something you would ever hear come from the mouth of a British Salesman. He jabbed the keys of his computer some more and showed us an Abarth with an eye watering price.   “No no” said Chris “a sports trim Fiat 500 not an Abarth.”  “But this is very nice car, go very fast.” I asked, “Are there any deals on at the moment?”  Monica translated – the Salesman looked at us puzzled – so no deals then, if ever.   In an earlier Podcast I told about our friend who bought a very expensive Range Rover, in excess of 38 thousand Euros and the Salesman whispered in her ear after the sale, “I have left you a little present on the back seat, for being such a good customer.”   When she opened the rear door of the car, there laying forlornly was a single sachet of Turtle Wax polish.   So we found the Dealer and found the car, now it was my turn to drive our current car home, as I will need to do this tomorrow.  I drove in the UK, often having to pick up Chris from the Railway Station or wherever the Railway Company was giving up running a service, which was usually a small village called Shenfield.   So I am a very average driver, but could get myself around our local town fairly well, hardly any scrapes or misjudgements.   But driving in Spain is a whole new ball game, and to save Chris screams and shouting, did you see that car, can you see the cyclist and so on and so on, I have refrained from driving.   So the first thing I notice about sitting in the driving seat of our current car is the gear stick is in quite the wrong place and while we are at it, so is the steering wheel.  Chris also sits up very erect and he has the driving seat set to, upright, electric chair, which I find quite uncomfortable.  I prefer the setting comfortable Lloyd Loom wickerchair, further back but not as far back as out friend who practically drives looking up at the roof of his car.   Driving off, and after driving small urban cars in the UK, if feels like I am driving one of those enormous American Jeeps.  Chris points out that this is a Jeep but in Fiat clothing. So that would explain that.   Changing gear is problematic, one, I am not used to the gear box and two, force of habit makes my left arm move to change the gear, and in correcting myself I seem to swerve across the road, well that’s my excuse.   I just wish Chris would stop screaming, he is a very bad passenger, and there was nothing coming the other way, so I am not sure what his problem is?   The Fiat 500X is a very nice car if you have a family and need enough boot space to hold a baby elephant, but we have both found it too big for our needs, I shall be driving it very carefully tomorrow as it has a new home to go to, someone who actually does have a family for the family car.   I am sure everything will go smoothly tomorrow, we might be pleasantly surprised, I might find I will actually find fifth gear on the way back home, subscribe to the Podcast and find out tomorrow, if you go to the secret spain dot com you can find every episode and full transcripts too.     

Bad news is good news for us find out why in this episode, also a reflection on the last few months as Andalusia moves into phase three of the Alarma. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 83 Hey Ya! (uncorrected transcript) Saturday, your Sunday and I thought I would take a few moments to reflect, the new normal is becoming normal and throughout the world the death toll from this virus continues to rise, but we are all getting used to it.   I wonder if it was like that during the world war.  To begin with everyone was in a state of hysteria worries about bombs dropping on their house, a few years in people become blasé about the whole situation.   “Ere our Tony did you hear that your Aunty Doreen copped it last night, ruddy great Doodlebug fell on her house.”   “Oh, our Ethel that’s terrible, now what’s for tea me love?”   I don’t like wearing a mask, but I am kinda getting used to it.  I know surgical masks are in short supply in the UK and the Government have asked you to make your own, rather like the dig for victory campaign in the war.   Here surgical disposable masks can be bought from the chemist at a fixed price of 96 cents and about half the people wear those. Spain bought medical supplies from China so that the masks would not run out in the hospital.  To begin with they did, and medical staff were left using bin bags for PPE gowns, but there seems to be adequate supplies now.   So how are we doing, well I am still talking to God, and certainly chatting to my late sister in law, her picture hangs on the wall, she liked the sea, so we put the picture in a place where she gets a lovely view of the Mediterranean.   We get a definite feeling that our neighbours and ourselves are trying to be kinder people, with one or two exceptions.  Life will never be the same again, all those big questions you ask yourself like will there ever be a vaccine?   I wonder if there will be, if not will we have to live with controlling the virus, how that will work I am not really sure, I am not a scientist but maybe drugs will control the virus, you get it but the chance of you dying is much less than it is now and the symptoms are supressed.   Who knows? The biggest casualty after the terrible death rate, will be the world economy and how it functions and how we get our head around the massive amount of debt that every country will be racking up to support the economy.   I had a chat with my brother in law a few weeks ago, online of course and we have decided let’s all move the decimal point. You know when countries get into terrible problems with inflation, they just move the decimal point, and everything seems much better.   I guess that is a far too simplistic approach if the whole world just moved all currencies a decimal point.   Our own financial future rather relies on an unsettled world, this is because of the perverse way our pension pot continues to be filled.   We are both ITN pensioners, the UK TV news provider for three major channels in Britain, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.  Bad news is usually good news for ITN as more people will watch the TV news shows and the TV companies can sell higher rates of advertising.   For the last few years all the profits of ITN have been ploughed into the hole in the staff pension scheme, they were not required to do this but frankly they are a bloody decent company and it was a pleasure to work for them for seven years.   This year it is different and there is a major downturn in advertising at the moment and that means less money, the company has asked if they can arrest the payment this year.  I believe they plan to put the profit money into making more programmes.  ITN Productions has produced some very fine shows including “For Sama” or “Ed Sheeran in his own words.” .. not bad for a little TV news organisation that started off in a small corner of Rediffusion London ITV.   So how complicated life is, here we are in Spain, relying on a TV company in the UK to report bad news so that they get a increased audience and keep paying our pension.. but it gets even weirder.   Some years ago after ITN we were employed by Chrysalis who took over the running of the radio station – LBC.  One year they enjoyed incredible profits through selling seven notes of a back-catalogue piece of music they owned.  The seven notes were used on a platinum number one for the group Outkast and the song was called Hey Ya! Now they could have squirreled the money away to Panama or someplace similar, Jersey also comes to mind for some reason or another. But again, they were a bloody decent company and put the money into a pension scheme.   Each month I receive a small amount of money from:   So will Chris when he retires fully in a few years’ time.     In reflection the last few months for the whole world have been incredibly hard, full of frustration and fear, full of love and kindness.  I truly hope that the outcome of all of this, is that the world will be at least a kinder place.  

Today a story from the past about two crazy American guys called Ben and Jerry and their weird ice cream, a trip to Leroy Merlin a French owned Spanish run DIY chain. find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com Uncorrected transcript here: Day 82 Dough Boys   Friday and another week ahead in phase 2, but no, suddenly we are moving to phase three, some changes, restaurants can fill to 50 per cent capacity, shops too, but more importantly this should include inter province travel, living on the edge of two provinces this has caused quite a few people to miss out on friends and going to main towns where they can shop, have their hair done.   Everything gets written in details in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the B.O.E. if you visit the website you will see just how many rules and regulations there are here in Spain.   The weather remains ‘iffy’ wind, sunshine and cloud with rain coming on Sunday, once we hit 25 degrees I declare ‘ice cream’ temperatures, which means we go and buy ‘Maxi Bon’ ice cream, a kind of vanilla ice cream with chocolate covering one end and a biscuit covering the other.   That means you can hold the biscuit end without the ice cream melting.  Actually they seem to put something in ice cream now that stops it melting so fast.   That got me thinking back to our food show we produced for LBC, both Chris and I worked on the same show.  I can’t tell you how much fun it was, the world was literally our oyster. We had restaurants, food manufacturers and even oyster growers in as guests on the proviso they fed us.   I know, that does sound a bit wrong, but at the weekend in Hammersmith where we were based there was hardly anywhere open to get food.   I set up a couple of guests from America who were producing a new range of ice cream.  Their Press Officer told me that they had a new ice cream that contained raw cookie dough.  How disgusting, we both thought.   Saturday afternoon came along and two very harassed guys called Ben and Jerry came to the studio with their Press Officer.  She told us, they are in a bit of a state, ‘you see their ice cream which they have shipped over to the UK from the states is the wrong size.’ Seems an American pint is not the same as an English one so the metric conversion label is wrong, and they will have to change every one. They were two very nice guys and crazy enthusiastic for their ice cream, and of course brought along samples for us to try.  I had never seen an ice cream in a tub before so that was unusual.  We left the raw one too last.    Chris opened it and said he thought he might give it a go as he always liked to lick the bowl clean when his mother made cakes.  He took a scoop.  “My God, it’s bloody delicious.”  He plonked a serving out onto a paper plate for me.   What a revelation, who would have thought raw cookie dough would taste so well with vanilla ice cream.  Looking back, I guess we were the first two Brits in London to try Ben and Jerry’s Raw Cookie Dough Ice Cream.   The Name of Ben and Jerry is now owned by Unilever but the ice cream is still good even though the two funny guys from America don’t run it anymore.   Friday and the afternoon brings a trip to our local D.I.Y. store Leroy Merlin, a French chain that is here in Spain and Portugal.  Think Homebase before the crazy Australians too it over and tried to sell barbecues all year round.   The local store is quite high tec with lots of flat screens that you could use to look at products, a bright place with soft furnishings, bathrooms, lighting and the like.   Under Covid19 rules it is a much less pleasant place to be.  No touching the touch screens anymore and masks, alcohol wash and gloves are obligatory at the door.   The prices are expensive there is a lot less of pile it high, sell it cheap here in Spain.  The DIY culture is relatively new, before Juan the handyman, not the builder or the gardener or the estate agent would pop round and fix or make whatever you needed.   That is changing and everyday Spanish are trying their hands at projects. Particularly laminated floor.  We saw many properties that had original white marble flooring covered over with laminated fake wood effect floor.   Much like the destruction of anything Victorian during the 1960s in Britain, I remember my dad ripping out a cast iron Victorian fireplace with caustic handmade tiles, throwing it in the skip and then covering the gaping hole in a piece of hardboard.    The Spanish are doing much the same with laminated floors at the moment, I guess they will realise their error too late twenty or so years down the line.   The weekend is coming along with the rain and probably more wind, I have topped up on DIY essentials so I have a number of jobs that will need doing around the place, none of which involve any hardboard, you will be pleased to know.

Thursday and the bloomin wind is driving us potty, along with administration, WhatsApp spats about a community pool and we have a guide to consumer law here in Spain. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 81   Thursday and a bit of a low day, hard to put your finger on it, but the weather is not helping, once again the wind is blowing, the high pressure that makes summer calm and hot has gone north and giving the UK a really great few months.   A fitful night’s sleep as once again we are awash with paperwork that has to be done for our Spanish administrators, paying tax is a pain, but dealing with it in two countries along with running two businesses takes a lot of time away from actually running the businesses, add that to that the process of slowly putting our retirement into place, some days gets you a bit down.   Onward and forward, oh last night there was a WhatsApp spat with the neighbours over opening our Estate Pool, some want to open it within the Alarma, which means a complicated process and the hiring of staff.   We try not to get involved but I couldn’t help myself, saying that if we had liability insurance if something went wrong with following the complicated instructions to operate a community pool under lockdown, we could end up being sued.   Of course, forgetting that such a thing doesn’t occur in Spain, so I confused my neighbours, who wrote things like “How absurd that you might be able to sue somebody.”   I sometimes find the Spanish a bit insular, they have never thought that there might be other ways of doing things, like the plumber still using the same technique from 100 years ago.   They are not adventurous with their food, sticking to Spanish staples, which are delicious, but there is more to food than paella and grilled fish.   I think the British were the same, slowly as people from different countries came to the UK we adopted some of their food as our own.  Curry is one example.  Food shows in the UK are not afraid to take dishes from all over the world.   It is happening slowly here and “Master Chef” is on La una and if you got into a high-end Spanish restaurant you will eat some of the finest food in the world.   And special mention must be made of Dani Garcia who has elevated Andalusian cuisine to a whole new level and is one of the few chefs in the whole world to have been awarded three Michelin stars.   Thursday and the wind is still howling around the house and blowing the contents of the mountain onto the terraces.      Back to how the Spanish deal with civil matters like noise, problem neighbours well they go to the police.  Sounds an odd thing to do but the police play a pivotal role in sorting out disputes.  The process is called denouncing.  So, you make a statement to the police and denounce your neighbour for making too much noise, or building a wall on your property etc.   There is something akin to a small claims court here for claims under six thousand Euros, a verbal procedure that is called a juicio verbal (hoo-eesee oh verbal )   And there is also the complaints book, when you are very annoyed with the half arse service you got in a shop you can fill in their official complaints book, the local consumer office will look at your complaint, you send of your copy of the complaint along with supporting evidence, photos and the like, so it is a bit like saying “I will report you to trading standards.” But a more formal process.   In fact just threatening to fill in the book can bring you a refund on that broken kettle you bought. Speaking of kettles our friends Dave and Colin returned a broken one back to the shop.  There was a whole ceremony involving the security guard who wrapped the thing in shrink wrap and then a new kettle was brought to the table and the old one placed into the box of the new one and then that was presented minus box to Dave, who later thought it must have something to do with not trusting the staff at the shop with refunds.   Saying all that, consumer law generally falls below what you might expect at home, I have already mentioned our famous tin of tuna where the key broke off, our money refunded but the offending tin was put back on the shelf only for Chris to pick it up again and nearly put it in our basket, thus repeating the whole process.   We usually buy from Amazon and mostly we have had no problem and indeed I have returned things via the Spanish Postal Service and we have got our money back.   Some furniture that we bought that was minus instructions, nuts and bolts, from a large store via mail order, we thought would be a pain to return, it was, but thanks to our friend Carmen the furniture was collected and we got a refund to our UK credit card the next day.  In that time the British pound had fallen off a cliff, again and we were actually £30 up on the deal, you can see why hedge funds are so popular now in Britain.   A windy Thursday has come to an end, three good legs cat is propping himself up against some furniture, he is a very good boy really considering he suffers pain in his bad leg.  Hopefully we will be able to get an operation sorted out for him when the vet can do routine work again.   Finally back to our friends Dave and Colin who have been in Palm Springs, during lockdown, yesterday they got flights home, via a very torturous route back to the UK, hopefully by now they are back in Blighty, they will be back here in a few weeks’ time, but first they will have to quarantine, yet another horse bolted, stable door, idea from the British Government.  

Day 80, a day of confusion when we were told our house didn't exist, also we talk a little bit about Spanish Income Tax, and explore some caves in Nerja. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 80 Caves and Confusion Wednesday and the day begins in Spanish confusion as the man that is coming to service Petra and Justin’s pool and will first collect the key from our house has rung to say our house number does not exist. I had one of those surreal conversations with him in my very average Spanish.  The trouble is those language courses do not actually prepare for the way and how the Spanish actually speak. We can probably all remember poor old Manuel the waiter from Fawlty Towers who you to say “I speak Engleesh, I learned it from a book.” The character spent much of his time confused by what everyone was saying. To prove that our house and house number do exist I have sent the pool man a WhatsApp with the GPS, this is usually the easiest way to solve the problem of not having a post code.  Well we do have a post code but it covers one town, a village, four Estates and a hotel. Petra can speak very good Spanish, she has a University Degree, but even she gets confused and here the local accent is quite thick, think of the English Cornwall accent and imagine somebody Spanish speaking with that kind of dialect. Wednesday and it looks like some tourist attractions will be opening soon, including our local Aqua Park, the large water slide, which I can see from here has had a coat of paint and the sea water normally used in the park is going to be chlorinated, something I thought happened anyway.  – I still don’t quite know how a social distancing water park full of children will actually work – but good luck to them. Another tourist attraction about twenty minutes down the motorway is the Caves of Nerja, caverns that stretch for three miles just above Maro next to Nerja.  They were discovered in recent times in 1959 by five kids who slipped down through a sink hole and made their amazing discovery – the place was opened up to tourists, sixty years ago in 1960. I can’t say I usually enjoy caves, we have been to the Glow Worm Caves in New Zealand, where you lay face up in a boat and travel through the caves on water, above you are what look like stars, but are actually glow worms. We expected the Nerja caves to be a disappointment, they are not, they are quite spectacular caverns with an enormous stalactite, or is mite.. oh yes tights come down don’t they. We went probably 20 years ago now; we had the caves to ourselves and it cost about 4 Euro to get in then.  Now things are very different, and the Caves have become a major tourist attraction, entry is about 14 Euro now. For that you get a headset in your language that will take you on the tour. Until recently concerts were held down in the caves as they formed a natural amphitheatre. So how did the Nerja Caves form? About five million years ago water got into the marble rock and dissolved it, forming the caverns. Evidence of human occupation were discovered along with skeletons dating back 25 thousand years, there are also cave paintings, but public entry is restricted to the paintings. In 2012 some more remains of painting were found, depicting seals, dated from 45 thousand years ago, possibly the oldest paintings of humanity. This is fascinating place to live, mankind has made this area his home for maybe more than 45 thousand years. Wednesday brings the weekly shopping trip, I get Chris’ mask ready, we tie it so that the mouth area forms a cup that seals and allows him to breathe better and I put a drop of Lavender oil on it so it is a more pleasant experience. I have to say our trip to Almunecar and there were a sizable minority that have discarded their masks, one old man just held a filthy looking mask in his hand, a couple the worse for wear staggered into the local shop I was outside, proceeded to kiss passionately, they obviously haven’t heard of the British rule about not having sex with strangers, although the law will allow you to invite a professional lady into your house.  You can tell this was a law created by an old Etonian can’t you! Wednesday and a busy day is over, I have produced four Podcasts today, excluding this one, made a commercial for ACAST and spent a horrible time trying to get my tax information sorted for the Spanish Tax Authority – Hacienda I can’t say I am looking forward to being a Spanish Tax payer, the tax payer has to prove to the tax man that he does not owe money, not the other way round as it is in the UK, it means that they can freeze your bank account and or help themselves to any money in the account, the onus is on you to prove you do not owe money. As a result the most familiar thing you hear from anyone Spanish who comes to work for you is. “Please pay me in cash.”

Day 79 and slowly things are returning, restaurants are opening and the Government is giving away free money and claiming nobody died of Covid19.. although the regional Governments dispute this. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 79 Free Money Tuesday, and yesterday no deaths were reported due to the virus, but the regional Governments have disputed this. Our local hospital has only had a couple of cases last week and this week none.   The local beach has opened with a great many rules.  They believe that the beach will hold 19 thousand people.  Well even in the height of summer the local beach does not get that busy.   But the Spanish love to congregate together so now they are going to have to walk far from their favourite chiringuito bar to fulfil the rules of social distancing.   Speaking of social the local Socialist Mayor has been congratulating the Government on its plan for a minimum income for all citizens of Spain.  I am not sure how the money will be awarded, or on how they will means test people, but I was amused by the cultural response from at least one person replying to the Mayors Facebook Post, who said in Spanish, “This is a good thing because people deserve a little rest from work.”   Spain has a reputation for a land of feckless idlers who would rather be sitting in a shady bar than a busy office or building new relationships than new buildings.   Anecdotally I agree that the pace of life is slower here, appointments get moved or forgotten and you can wait an age for something that might take a few days to do in the UK.   But the Spanish we have come across work hard. None more so than our construction team, they were here every day from 8 in the morning to 6.30 at night.  Our work started last July in the blaze of the summer sun.   It is a very complicated thing to build on sides of mountains, the first thing that the construction company did was to launch a digger down the side of the mountain.  I say launch because the driver just tipped the machine over the edge than crawled with at a great angle with equally great skill down to the bottom by carving his own road out as he went.   At the bottom he turned around, somehow, and started digging great chunks out from the mountain, all day every day, for at least two weeks.  The dust, noise and general mess was almost unbearable. Then Jesus the Grua would come with his crane and haul the earth into waiting lorries, some of which dumped their soil onto the lower part of the Estate, where we have created a new community entrance with planting, other lorries disappeared to who knows where to dump the spoil.   I do know that we had to pay a licence for removing the soil, the waste and so on.   Micro-piling was another very noisy operation.  A thing that looked like the screw from Thunderbirds drilled down into the ground seven metres and a great rod of metal was then hammered deep into the mountain and then filled with grout.   We had to have fourteen of these to form the foundation.  Then came the foundations themselves, cement lorries turned up in unison whilst the long elephant arm hung over our house pumping concrete into shuttered troughs.   It was a privilege to see it all so close at hand.  They all worked very hard indeed.   The columns that formed the terrace were attached to the piles and grew like spindles up the side of the mountain, they were shuttered and joined together then the whole lot filled with more concrete.    It took almost the rest of the year to finish the job, everyday at least two people would be working, Juanee the tiler, then the bad tempered old electrician, the plumber who has put in by the drains something the Spanish rarely use and that is a U Bend.   I don’t really know why the u bend didn’t catch on in Spain, I mean the toilets have them, sometimes the bathroom will share one in the middle of the floor that will be covered in a little round tin top with a screw in the middle.   If you have ever stayed in a Spanish hotel that is often the thing that catches your foot in the night.  If you open them up, we had to once to discover what was causing a blockage, there are a larger version of the thing you find under a British sink.    But frankly and I know this is the second Podcast in a row when I have mentioned plumbing, the Spanish plumbing is not as robust as its British counterpart.   They like to weld water pipes together with a weird press like thing, rather than use compression joints.  In the flats it led to disaster when after five years the Town Hall got around to fixing the water supply and as a result of the increased and much welcomed pressure, every singly pipe in one block of flats utility point split open and flooded the whole place.   Hot water tanks also come with a relief valve that hangs off the bottom end of the tank and either drips or sometimes will relief itself and empty the contents of the tank onto the floor or kitchen worktop, as the Spanish like to stick a hot water tank in the middle of the kitchen rather like we plonk a central heating boiler in a kitchen cupboard.   Off to the Administrators our Gestors, these are the ladies that look after our tax and Chris’ self-employment paperwork. An hour of administration work, lots of copies of bills and the like.  It is not easy to be self-employed in Spain.     I promise you that I will mention plumbing no more, but it is one of the cultural differences that you will notice if you come here to stay for any amount of time. Oh and ignore the old British saying of “If you must use any strange loos, put plenty of paper down first,” never do that as that will definitely block the Spanish pipes and come back to haunt you.    

Monday and the day Bruce Forsyth didn't play his cards right, community swimming pools and dirty rain.  The daily Podcast diary of a British couple in Lockdown Spain, phase 2. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 78 Brucie Bonus Monday oh how I loathe you, but only because it rained last night for 10 minutes, but it was that dirty calima rain, the brown sand from the Sahara fell and covered everywhere in a sticky glaze. So we spent an hour this morning clearing it up from the outside terraces.   If you don’t it finds its way into you home and gets trodden onto the tiles like Man Friday footprints.   Phase 2 here in Granada Province, more restaurants are now opening, the beaches are opening, you can get married and go to a funeral. I think that’s about it, I am confused.  We have kinda got into a pattern now, so are quite happy to make minimal journey’s and eat at home, for the moment.   We are lucky we have outdoor space and a pool, for many Spanish living in small flats with large families – it must have been purgatory, at least now they can socialise.  Even our friend Carmen was out with her friends yesterday, finally celebrating her birthday.   I have never been that good in confined spaces, I think years of working in radio studios haven’t helped.  When LBC was run by the TV news people ITN our studios were tiny, they were in the lower basement, although you were forbidden to call it that.  The Management liked you to say lower atrium.  But in reality the basement, next to the big pump that pumped the poo out of the building up to the London sewer.   The building looks quite swish on the TV, if you have ever watched Channel Four news, all that glass and lit offices is real.  Sadly, their studio is where the original canteen was.  The canteen was amazing, there was a roast of the day, at least two mains and a veggie dish and desserts to die for. Infact where Jon Snow reads the news is where the dessert cart used to sit, I can’t watch the news without remembering the delicious spotted dick that they served in that canteen.   The toilets in the building were another matter, the Architect Norman Foster built the ITN studios and had a love of Italian sanitaryware, so he designed these Italianesque bogs, complete with Italian plumbing and highly polished marble floors.   Now Italian plumbing and British plumbing are a marriage made in hell, our pipes are 1mm larger than the Italians, so the loos leaked.  Worse was if you were hoping for any kind of privacy whilst you were on the throne, there was no chance as the marble floors reflected you and your business to anyone standing by the sinks or urinals.   Also, less glamorous was that ITN only had one dressing room, usually reserved for the female newsreader.  So, the male newsreader would make-up in the toilet.  Nothing is odder than seeing Dermot Murnaghan putting eye shadow on and turning to you as you are washing your hands to ask you if he had put too much on!   So, I like to avoid working in small places, even though I am recording this in a cupboard right now.  I also think the trauma of once getting stuck in the ITN lift with Julia Somerville.  We had a stilted conversation about films for twenty long minutes of my life.   The famous lifts of ITN appear on Channel Four news, they were fast and glass, anybody with a nervous disposition would be better off using the stairs that were oddly hidden behind a false door, - another Norman Foster idea, I guess.   Chris remembers once Bruce Forsyth jumping into the ITN lift, Bruce stood beside him asking if the lift was going up to the ITV programme centre? Unfortunately, it was going down to the basement.  Chris couldn’t help himself and turned to Bruce and did a Brucie “No Bruce you want to go higher, higher!”     Bruce laughed, sadly it wasn’t his day, because they had summoned him to the ITV office to sack him on the grounds, he was too old for Play Your Cards Right.  So, he went back to the BBC and Presented Strictly Come Dancing and took his audience with him.   Monday and a Skype with a client, and a discussion about the community swimming pool. The complex measures to keep the pool social distance safe, hiring a member of staff and the fact that the pool pump needs maintenance, means our Estate will not open the swimming pool this year.   I think a lot of communities are going to struggle to adequately fulfil the rules that the local and national Government have laid down, the local main town beaches open tomorrow, I hope people do a better job at social distancing than Southend-on-Sea has managed these last few days.   This year the summer is going to look a much different place to that of a normal Spanish summer.  I don’t think we will see the usual numbers of tourists coming this year.   Flying will be far more complex, it was miserable enough before passing through airport security, add the extra sanitary measures, temperature taking and the like, not the best or most glamorous way to start your holiday.   We shall see, but if you do make it to Spain, you will receive a warm welcome, enjoy good food, beautiful coastline and countryside, that much has not changed in the new normal.

Saturday and the weekend has come with some bad news if you are planning a party in Spain, this is the story of a British couple behind the police lines in Spain, a daily diary of Lockdown.   Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 76 Fiestas and the F-Word Saturday, and the weekend has come, and with it a rise in Spaniards testing positive for Coronavirus, it would seem, that “somebody said we are having a fiesta”   Nearly all the new cases are from people getting together for a party, in one case 80 people, four of which were asymptomatic virus carriers.   Un doing the lockdown is not without its risks and the Health Authority were expecting a rise, at the moment the victims have been traced, it is when random people contract the virus not connected with events like parties that the problems begin again.   The places where there have been outbreaks have been either held or returned to a lower phase.  The Spanish are taking this all very seriously, no mucking about.   Meanwhile in Southend on Sea they are reporting that they think they are seeing a second wave of the virus.  A friend has posted on Facebook that the police turned up to a large BBQ party at a local pub and they were ignored.  When they tried to break up the party one 81-year-old woman told the officers to F-Off.  Which they did.   I think this is the challenge of policing in the UK, where it is done with consent.  Here it is different, the police are feared more, they will intervene physically and break up anything that was not allowed under the rules.   It is our biggest worry that the tourists that arrive on July 1st bring with not just their lovely money, but a second wave of the virus and that we will spend Autumn back down in Lockdown, that would be very bleak.   Uncle Pedro has moved forward his plans for a minimum universal income, there are at least 850,000 families below the poverty line here in Spain, they are helped by a mess of uncoordinated schemes that reach about 300,000.   The new scheme aims to lift about 1,6 million people out of poverty, it will be based on the previous year’s income and savings, but it is a step toward a better welfare system. Says Uncle Pablo, the Deputy Prime Minister.   Spain does need a better welfare system, whether this is the right way and will actually work without being a disincentive to work we will have to see.   Saturday was a manic busy day.  Now that the lockdown is being eased the trades people have suddenly woken up from their furloughed 12 weeks.   We had the Blind People turn up for two days, they did an excellent job fitting electric blinds on top of our Pergola.   Then the carpenter Alberto WhatsApped me – we come on Saturday at 8.30am OK?   Saturday?  - tradesmen working Saturday in Spain? And he and his brother did turn up at 8.30am.  They finished their work covering the back of the pergola to stop the rain pouring from the roof and terrace above.   I spent the morning trying to get the wi-fi to extend enough to work at the top of the house, which meant ladder climbing and placing an extender in a weatherproof, sun reflecting box, soldering CAT6 cable and the like.  It seems to work.    In the afternoon an amazing sight fifteen or so juvenile buzzards flew over, arching and soaring around, it was incredible.  They say that the Lockdown has allowed record numbers to hatch and thrive this year.   Finally, the day was over, and we made dinner for about 8pm, sitting down on the terrace to eat it.  Suddenly there was a ring at the doorbell it was 8.40pm.   At the door Miguel from the Blind People, “I come to measure where the carpenter has been.”   “Saturday” I said.  He replied, “Yes this is the new normal we work Sunday too now.”   I allowed him through the house, and he measured the carpenters work, drawing out his tape measure like a sword, flourishing to the length and width of like he was taking part in a fencing tournament.   “How will you fix the material; will you glue it? I asked “No, no” he said clipping his tape measure back into its holster.  “We will stretch,” he said making a stretching motion with his hands. “No I go, good weekend to you.”  And with that he was gone.   Even in the UK having somebody turn up on a Saturday evening would be unusual, here in Spain it would have been unheard of.  But this is the new normal.   How it will all pan out here and back in the UK, we just don’t know, none of us, it will be tricky to get the new normal right, the cost is high as people will die if it goes wrong.   Let’s hope that all the hard work that has gone into observing the lockdown here in Spain is not wasted if the summer tourists bring more that their Euros into the country.  

Today how we lost a cool £49,000 to a Spanish bank, that we will never see again.  Property nightmares and how to avoid them, here in Spain. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Disclaimer, we do NOT receive any remuneration from advertising, the views expressed our our own and not others.   Day 75 - Property Nightmares   Friday, Day 75 phase 1 and the blind men are still here, it is confirmed that we will be in Phase 2 by Monday, I we are still a little confused as to what extra benefit there is, we believe that more shops with a bigger floor space can open, but neither of us is absolutely sure.   Martin Myall the Editor of the Seaside Gazette makes a good point about yesterday’s drop in old people claiming their pensions. Normally new pensioners pop off to an office to sign up for their new pension, but at the moment this has to be done online, and as many Spanish pensioners are not internet savvy, they haven’t claimed their pensions yet.   A quite depressing sight greeted us on Facebook yesterday.  An ad for the flat we were buying back in 2006 has come up.  The bank has finally finished the construction and the flats are for sale from 72 thousand Euros.   We were in the process of buying a flat in a small coastal town not far from here, it was an off plan sale, and the bank had already snaffled 49 thousand pounds worth of our money and then the financial crisis hit and the promoter went bust and the flats lay empty but tantalisingly close to completion.   Never mind, all off plan purchases in Spain are protected by a guarantee. So, we toddled off to the bank to get our money back.  The man from the bank he say ‘NO.”   We said that is against the law, the man from the bank he say “Si”   So, can we have our money back, the man from the bank he say “NO”   They said we were welcome to sue the bank for the money, but so far those who have tried, are either seriously out of pocket in legal fees or have got nowhere and received nothing, and the process has taken now 15 years.   So our advice is to NEVER, NEVER, EVER, NEVER buy anything off plan here in Spain, as there is a good chance that the guarantee that they offer you is completely worthless.   Also, a lot of promoters and Estate Agents are very fond of over photo-shopping and over computer generating images.  From afar you might think you are buying a property in an upmarket urban district with fully grown palm trees and lush vegetation when in reality the house or flat is down a dusty track next to a dried river bed filled with years of detritus, that will flood in the winter rains.   And as for the lush vegetation and those palm trees, they never get planted.   To be fair not all off plan experiences have been like this and some people have been very happy with their purchases.  But our personal advice is NEVER, EVER buy off plan.   We met a couple of guys who bought from an off-plan development, it was a modest house and they had some issues with the roads and services but finally the house was built, and they went to visit the property.   They were so excited at seeing the place one of them said, I must just pop to the loo.  He went into his new bathroom, did what he needed to do, while his partner was outside admiring the garden.  He flushed the loo and the contents of the bowl was flushed out onto the garden below. No sewerage or drains had been put in!   So Friday has arrived and I can hear the blind men packing up, I am hoping they will show us how the complicated remote control for the blinds operate, I had a quick look and it does look a bit like the control panel of the new spaceX rocket.   Don’t let us put you off your Spanish dream, but it is worth doing that reality check I spoke about the other day.   Yesterday I saw a Facebook post from a couple who are planning to come and live in Spain in a couple of years’ time, they said they were looking for an up to three bedroom house with a swimming pool, her husband had 10 motorcycles he wanted to bring over too, so they also needed some space for those.   They wanted somewhere not out in the sticks and close to the coast.  Their budget was £200,000 British pounds.  And that is the problem, all those bargain holiday home shows have done Spain a disservice,   they like to portray Spain as a place where you can buy cheap property.   That was probably true twenty or more years ago, but for what they wanted to buy, realistically they need a budget of £400,000 British pounds to avoid disappointment.   There is also the cost of changing all the motorcycle licence plates over.  We matriculated our car, the process was quite expensive, involved a lot of tooing and froing that our Agent had to do on our behalf, there was an import MOT that had to be done, and a great deal of paperwork, original documents for the car, which luckily we had.   There is a lot to learn, but the rewards are a lifestyle that others dream of, a chance for friends and family to visit -  and the enjoyment of family time together, here in Spain.

Wednesday and there is news that tourists coming to Spain will be greeted by beach vigilantes, who will be employed to make sure we all socially distance and bathe in the correct safe way. Day 73 of Spanish Lockdown for a British couple and their three-good legs cat.   Find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 73 Beach Vigilantes Wednesday week two of Phase 1 and we learn that the Spanish Government is going to make sure that you naughty old tourists behave yourself on the costas, if you decide to take a holiday abroad here. Three thousand vigilantes will be hired by the Junta to police the beaches and make sure your Parasol is the right distance between the family social distance sitting next to you. They will be paid 1,900 Euros a month for the summer period. It will cost 24 million Euros the Vigilantes will report to the Policia Local. It is worth just pausing a moment to explain the police services here in Spain there are three main types.  The Guardia who dress like a scary military army, that is because they are a scary military army.  They do the highways, ports and rural areas, and will investigate crime in those areas and they work out of, in the case of our local main town. A big, scary fortress like building that looks like it might contain thumbscrews and other such paraphernalia, called a Garrison. All the while you also must remember policing in Spain is not like the consent policing in Britain, if you mucked around with the Spanish police like you sometimes see the British Bobbies suffer in social media videos, you are likely to find the butt of a rifle whacked around your face, or at the very least be flung to the floor, for a jolly good batoning. Next up from the Guardia are the Policia Local, they are more like the British Police, crime prevention, traffic control, a bit like the Guardia and also intelligence gathering – for instance  investigating if you might be one of those naughty indoor farmers growing wacky baccy. Then there are the National Police they will be the ones that might give you a jolly good batoning in a riot, they have civilian status. BUT there are various different mixtures of these three main police, remember this is Spain and Autonomous regions have created their own police forces that carry out the functions of one or the other groups of police. Again – really confusing for the Tourist, they all travel around in different colours of cars too, the local police look like a typical police car, the ones from that work for the Autonomous area might have red and yellow cars, looking a little like New York Yellow Cabs and finally the Guardia have white and green cars, usually those big four wheel drive things. It is Wednesday and there has been a lot of drilling and noise from our neighbours below.  This has much to do with the way that houses are constructed here. The Spanish have an amazing love affair with Portland cement, pretty much every building you come across is made from the stuff, they pump it out from great elephant trunk things into shuttered wood and build incredible buildings. They are the masters of the cement truck and mixer.  No self-respecting Spaniard doesn’t have a cement mixer tucked away somewhere.. that might be an exaggeration. But it is hard to fathom the next stage of building.  Once they have completed their cement buildings and walls inside and out, they take a cement cutter and rip holes out of every part of the newly constructed building. In the UK we love a bit of trunking, it is easier to hide behind a stud wall.  For the most part Spanish construction uses very little wood.  It is very expensive here; I think there were historical political difficulties in persuading countries like Sweden to sell wood to the country. So, no trunking, but tubo – round plastic piping is placed into the gaping cement wounds in a building then plastered into place with a magic substance called Yeso.  Yeso comes in two flavours – “bloody hell that dried quite quickly” and “oh shit it has set straight away” Yeso holds up many Spanish Houses in the same way “no more nails” seems to keep British homes together. It means that house building is a very noisy process here.  Everything from a simple wall to a three-bedroom villa seems to require a lot of shouting, drilling, banging, crashing, cement mixing, hammering before it gets completed. A special mention must be mentioned about Jesus or Jesus the Grua, he is an amazing local man that owns a large red crane attached to a lorry.  He is the person tasked with delivering all the building materials.  Clearing away the spoils and dropping plant and cement down the mountainside where it is needed. He does this with the precision of a marksman, not from the comfort of his cab but with a remote-controlled thingy that operates the crane.  It is precision work, one moment of distraction and you could loose a corner of your balcony. Yesterday I watched him reverse down our tiny main Estate road in between parked cars, me flattened against the wall, and two oleander bushes.  He was magnificent, there could only have been a few inches gap between us all, I am pleased to say he missed us all. I am not sure what the uniform they will give the beach vigilantes of Andalucia but I am guessing it will not be a pair of too tight red shorts and  jolly yellow tee-shirt with Baywatch written on it.  

Could legally growing marijuana save Spains Economy? Today the whole podcast is going to pot, after all it is time we started to chill and relax, before the onslaught of tourists arrive here in Spain.  This is the daily diary of a British couple in Phase 1 Lockdown in Spain.   Find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 72 gone to pot   It is Tuesday, and today we celebrate 1,918 lives not taken by the virus, the Health Ministry mis-calculated the figures which represent a 7% drop in the number of deaths.   You can endlessly criticise the statistics and method used to collect the data, as Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.” But this is still good news.   Less good news is that the Health Ministry is only testing about half the suspected cases of Covid19, which makes an even bigger mockery of the un-lockdown phases that Spain has imposed on the country, with some parts still in zero and a bit, some in Phase 1 like our province and some in Phase 2.   I looked at the IKEA site yesterday and some stores are open to the public, some are not, the Malaga store has a click and collect service operated outside in the car park.   The local large shopping centre has managed in Phase 1 to half open some of its bigger stores with the shops that have access from outside and cutting down the floor space of each store.   It is turning into a right old mess.    It also looks like social distancing measures will be enforced by fines, so on beaches during the summer holidays, distances of 4 metres have to be kept and only a certain number of people may share a sun parasol.   Our local main town will be patrolling the beach with a drone, so if you think you might be getting away to a relaxing holiday abroad, think again. Although things seem to change by the day here, rather like they are doing in the UK.   Yesterday instead of driving hundreds of miles to test my eyes and accidentally ending up at my parents’ house, - now that would be a long drive from here!  I got MY eyes tested at an Opticians.   I think Governments all over the world are struggling to give good governance, Spain and Britain have both had some challenges, to say the least.   I wonder if we should just all chill out and concentrate on what we can do to relax.   I remember when we first came to Spain and the little flat in the village, we were quite amazed by how quiet it was on a hot Saturday afternoon, so decided it would be pleasant to take a stroll around the place.   Leaving the flat which was on the edge of the village we walked into the small streets and lanes that lead to the main drag through the place.   There was an overwhelming smell of pot, not just from one house but from the whole village.  An elderly lady was attempting to water her, rightly named, ‘pot’ plants, she was clearly stoned out of her head.   Some old men were wobbling, far more than usual, down the road toward their meeting place by a local sports bar.   From every house the smell was strong enough to make you feel slightly high too.  There is a myth that marijuana is legalised in Spain.  It is not and the organised crime mobs that control the mass growing of it regularly play a game of cat and mouse with the authorities.   Out in the campo and with either stolen electricity or solar, sophisticated air conditioning – I can believe that there is a lot of money at stake in the growing of weed.    With a shortage of money and jobs following the covid19 virus I wonder if more enterprising Spanish souls will indulge in “indoor farming” as it is euphemistically called.   There are arguments on both sides as to whether Marijuana should be legalised, I would think it would certainly end the criminal gang activity associated with growing weed, rather like the end of the bathtub gin mafia operations during American Prohibition.   The danger I guess is that would lead to more criminal activity with higher classes of drugs.  I don’t know what the answer is, I am just a simple Podcast Producer.   There does seem to be a fair share of drug busts here though, further up the coast class A drugs find their way across from north Africa and southern Spain seems to be a landing point for these drugs that then get spirited away north to other European countries.   I will leave you with a quote from our local newspaper “The Seaside Gazette”. Martin Myall writes:   “A man driving a Peugeot 406 overtook a Guardia Civil patrol car on a B-road in the Alpujarra Granadina and was dismayed to see its lights activate. He was dismayed because the 66-year-old man happened to have nearly 60 kilos of marihuana onboard.   So how the hell did the Guardia know that he was carrying wonky weed? The answer was because they got a strong whiff of it as the man sailed past them. Quite apart from that, it’s never a good idea to overtake a police car anywhere in the world.”   His trial is pending, but the amount of Marijuana the man was carrying could be turned into a street value of 75,000 Euros, now for somebody who has waited months for their ERTE – Furlough payments, that is a tempting amount of money to make.   I have wondered if they actually legalised weed, to grow commercially – there wouldn’t be a single tomato to buy in Tesco ever again as all those seas of Plastic greenhouses would all be going to pot.

Monday and day 71, and a few tips about buying a property here in Spain and what you need to do as a Brit, before January 2020. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com   Day 71 Peseta Pats Monday of week two of phase 1, we are still confused about why we have not moved to Phase 2, so I asked my Spanish neighbour from Granada.   “There are not enough beds in the Hospital, of the critical kind.”  She said.  It would appear one of the worries is a flood of inter-province holiday makers would risk overwhelming the hospital.  I suppose the answer to that would be to add more beds.   I think all hospitals will have to re-think their ICU facilities and what is required to look after and keep alive patients with Covid19.   Monday is accounts day, and Chris is going through the Community payments for our Estate, he is the joint Treasurer. If you live in an Urbanised Estate or a block of flats you will have what amounts to a resident’s association with the power to collect fees and make decisions about any building work and maintenance.   A kind of mix of Management Company and Residents Association. We have a President, Vice President, Treasurer and hold a regular annual meeting where you can vote on passing budgets and plans for building and maintenance.   For the fee you get to live in a block of flats or development that might have community facilities like a pool.  The land will be, well should be, legalised for urban development. There should be services like electricity and water available, sewerage.   Roads and public gardens are maintained along with shared thing like lifts.  When the visitors to Spain return it is worth considering living in an organised development like this, if you want to be closer to the coast or near or in a town.   If you are looking for solitude, it is a lot cheaper, in some ways or can be a lot more expensive if you find there is no water supply or electricity, or the electricity is not powerful enough to turn a toaster on.  That can all mean expensive utility costs or having solar power.  Access roads here can be owned by other landowners, so you need to check you can actually tar over a road.   Look out for Canadas – the protected goat tracks, you can’t change those very easily and they are usually no more than a dirt track, that might lead to your new rustic house.   We are now only a few weeks from the tourists returning back to Spain, some will be keen to look at coming here to live, even though Spain has suffered a great deal with the Covid19 virus, it still remains a beautiful place to live, with many places enjoying mild winters and hot sunny summers.   The pace of life here is slower, particularly here in Andalucia, it makes for an attractive retirement option.  The process for Brits to live in Spain will be a little more complicated in the New Year, but people from all over the world come and settle here.    It just might mean the end of the Peseta Pat’s – those Brits who came here thinking it might be a cheap place to retire to – I guess it depends on how you put a value on lifestyle.    It is possible to live on a budget here, just as it is possible back in the UK,  but truthfully we find the cost of living is much the same as it was back in Britain, you might pay less council tax, but you will pay more income tax, alcohol costs are lower but eating out is now only slightly cheaper than the UK in many of the tourist places.   If you are considering a move to Spain, try to avoid thinking about living the dream, but living the reality, be honest with yourself about how big a change it is to jump from one country to another.   Monday in phase 1, there is a bit more traffic about, below us I can hear the familiar sound of banging, crashing and drilling as our neighbours are having a new metal gate put in.   I am off to the opticians a six o’clock appointment, but when I looked at the ticket it said 4 o’clock so we rocked up at 4 to discover that Claudia had a ticket that said six o’clock but written in the diary in biro she was 4pm and I was 6pm – have you lost the will to live yet.  Thought so.  Suffice to say there was a lot of ballet dancing mask wearing social distancing, I was allowed to remove my mask to see what my new glasses would look like san mask. Two weeks and some more glasses to drop to the tiled floor and break.     If you are serious about coming to live in Spain, as a top tip get here as soon as the Alarma – what the Spanish call the Lockdown is over and you can fly, get your NIE, rent a property with a tenancy agreement, then apply for your Residency card.  Once you have the Green card it will give you protected rights and an easy transition to the new T.I.E. card for British citizens in Spain.  Oh and don’t confuse citizenship for residency.  You can be a British citizen and reside in Spain. Becoming a Spanish citizen is a whole different thing the being able to live, work and retire here. The clock is ticking down to January.   The clock is also ticking down to the end of the Spanish Lockdown it might come quicker than sooner, there is a lot of pressure for the Spanish Government to keep up with the timescale of Italy and Greece, it is an interesting that the Lockdown was put on a short hiatus as the Government worried about the economy, and in reality it is the economy that is again driving the end of the Alarma in Spain.

Day 70 of Lockdown, and Spain will be open for tourists in July says Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez today.  What will it mean, and what is it like for tourists here along the Granada coast? The daily dairy Podcast of a British couple and their three good legs cat, living on the Costa Tropical. Find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 70 "Tourist Trap!" Sunday comes with a breeze and more Mediterranean sunshine; the Spanish Prime Minister Uncle Pedro has announced today that he is going to start allowing tourism to return to Spain.   That is very good news for businesses all over Spain, less good news if you think that the tourists will come, create another wave of virus, then leave to their own more liberal countries whilst we face yet another lockdown in the Autumn.   Off this morning to water the plants at Petra’s and Justin’s big house on the corner.  Despite the great care that Pepe the Palm took in cutting down the fronds from the palm tree, some debris has got into the pool.  I had a go at fishing some of it out.   Swimming pools are complex things, we are asking water to behave abnormally. Those Nasrid Sultans created pools and fountains with running water, whilst a swimming pools water stays put and needs a lot of loving care to stay clean and sanitary.   Our German neighbours, who have spent Lockdown in their native country discovered from their pool man that the water had gone green, which means emptying the pool, cleaning every surface and refilling again.   Our own modest pool stands on six micro piles, anchoring it into the mountain and protecting it from earthquakes.  I have only felt one earthquake here.  It was quite sudden, shook the house for a second and at the same time there was a sound similar to a lorry emptying a ton of earth onto the ground. Chris slept through it, but the cat went crazy, running around meowing.   An active fault runs along the sea in front of where we live and it has, in the past caused a few issues.  The houses below us caught the force of one minor earthquake, it moved them about an inch further down the mountain causing great cracks to appear and parts of terraces to topple to one side.   At our friends house it cracked open their swimming pool like an egg and the contents of the pool emptied out onto the road below.   Mother nature isn’t keen on being tamed, but luck was on our side.  The Highways Authority decided to widen the National Road in front of us, by chopping the front of the mountain off; despite being told by Geologists that, that might cause the whole mountain to move down onto the new road.   The Highways Authority ignored the scientific advice, now where have I heard that phrase recently? The mountain moved and started to deposit chunks of itself onto the main road.   As a result, an Australian team were shipped in to pile drive the whole edge of the mountain, it took months to do with the piles going hundreds of meters under the houses, more piles were drilled down from the first road anchoring that in place.   The whole process cost in excess of fifty-four million Euros, but as a result we probably have the most stable Estate along the whole coast, although I am touching wood when I say this.   It is one of the reasons that this area has kept a lot of its more traditional Spanish charm, you just can’t build great big high-rise hotels here, the geology will not let you.   It is a good place to come on holiday, the majority of holidaymakers are Spanish, about 60 per-cent, the beaches are good to swim from, the diving is good too, you can do water sports and the like, and the beach sand is a granite grey but a bit grainy if you are thinking of building sandcastles.   It is though possible to go up to the snow peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountain in the morning, ski till lunchtime then drive back down to the beach and sunbathe after first enjoying a pretty good lunch with wine for about ten Euros in one of the beachside Chiringuitos – restaurants.   The British Ex-Pat wave stops at Nerja about 25 minutes on the motorway from here.  Nerja is still in the Costa del Sol.  When we first visited the town over twenty years ago it was still quite a sleepy Spanish place.   Over the years more English, German and Scandinavian’s have made it their home, so there is a very different feel to the place.  If you crave a proper curry or Thai food there are restaurants there to cater for you, along with English supermarkets like Cullens if you get an urge for Birds Custard or a Cherry Bakewell.   We very much prefer where we live here on the coast, on a clear day you can see the coastline of Morocco, during winter storms you can see the lightening and thunder rumble and light up the Atlas Mountains in the far, far distance.   The night sky is usually clear and filled with stars, a walk along the country road here is filled with the sweet scent of bella de noche, the lady of the night.  I remember walking back up the road one night when we were first here and pointing up at the night sky to Chris, we were trying to work out what the reddish cloud was that streaked across high up in the sky.   It took a moment to realise it was the milky way.  Finally, the moon can be as big as the ones you see in films.  We have a cheap telescope and it is truly amazing to look upon the surface of the moon on a warm Mediterranean night.   All very good reasons why Prime Minister Sanchez stood up to say he plans to open the country up for tourism once again.  We hope it can be managed safely and that the tourists that come, please, please, respect the rules for their and of course our own safety.

Day 69 it is Saturday and a tale of majestic beauty and ticket fraud, the daily diary of a British couple in Lockdown, still, in Spain.   Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 69   Saturday and the weekend has arrived with thirty plus temperatures, somewhere nearby somebody has some gentle Spanish guitar music playing and the birds are singing away.    The Alhambra Palaces have said they plan to open again on the 1st of June and are putting in place social distancing measures, so I guess fewer people allowed around the palaces in each timed trip.  So this might be one of the best times ever to see the Alhambra, it truly is a wonder.   There is a lot of tosh written about the Alhambra, ruddy American Washington Irving with his “Tales of the Alhambra” seriously muddied the waters between fact and fiction.  Some of the myths are quoted in some books as facts.   Published back in 1830, the book did help the restoration of the Palaces that had fallen into a poor state of decay.  Rather like the old medieval British castles were the locals helped themselves to what amounted to an easy supply of building materials, the same fate happened to part of the Alhambra, locals “borrowing” stones and parts of the palaces.   So much so that much of what you see has been recreated.   Also, the name “Alhambra” which some think means in Arabic “The Red Fortress” is under debate too.  As the castle bit was whitewashed, so it wasn’t red at all but white.  Rather like those drab Roman buildings in Rome, in reality they would all have been painted.   I have to say I really love the gardens there, the scent of roses and myrtle, which like a Mediterranean box is fantastic. Also you have to admire the Moors and their engineering, bringing water into the Palaces and Gardens from miles away, all by gravity.   The Palaces themselves are much smaller than you expect, but are still amazing with their geometric designs and clever courtyards that with a water fountain in the middle could keep cool in the searing heat of a Granada Summer.   It was the home to the last Muslim ruler of Granada, Boabdil, who was finally chucked out of the city, but not before a lot of diplomatic complicity between, him and the Catholic interlopers, finally the place was reconquered by the Catholic kings back in 1493   Boabdil made the journey across to the “Moor’s Sigh” a place near modern day Otura here in the mountains that lie between us in Motril and Granada city, looking back at the city he once ruled, he let out a sigh .. yeah - I am guessing that might be tosh too.   But Boabdil didn’t do too badly he got offered an Estate in Laujar de Andarax in present day Almeria, but instead he went off to Morocco and built a palace at Fez where he spent the remainder of his life.   Here in Salobreña a Moorish castle fort stands there was also some shenanigans involving Mohammed the 7th and his brother Yusuf who also had rights to Granada, Mohammed banged him up in the Castle here.   But Yusuf was still a threat and Mohammed, who was on his death bed sent someone to pop Yusuf off, and the myth is that they found him playing Chess with the gaoler.  He asked if he could finish his game of chess, and that was agreed.  So Yusuf made the chess game last until his brother Mohammed had popped his clogs, and then Yusuf grabbed the Sultans job becoming Yusuf the third of Granada.   How true any of these stories are but the Nasrid dynasty managed to reign for  two hundred and fifty years in Granada, so that wasn’t bad going at all.   Of course this Podcast being Spanish Practices, aside from all the intrigue and mystery of the Nasrid Dynasty, there was also a more modern mystery of why the Alhambra Palace was so packed with visitors.   It turns out there was a major ticket scam involving more than sixty people, all in cahoots with each other according to the newspaper “The Local for the 3rd of October 2014:   “For three years, the fraud network - made up of Alhambra staff, travel agents and hotel workers – reaped the benefits of forging tickets, using old ones and carrying out other shady deals without raising the alarm.   They were able to control how many tourists had access to the UNESCO World Heritage Site and even forced tour guides and agencies that weren’t part of the fraud network to buy fake tickets off them.   The scam was made easier thanks to the backing they received from the Alhambra’s IT head and two officials responsible for the transfer and safekeeping of the tickets.   The Alhambra, the medieval symbol of Muslim rule in Spain, receives approximately 3 million visitors every year.   The court’s estimates put the total number of fake tickets dished out by the fraud gang at around 50,000.   The whole thing nearly bankrupted the tourist attraction and was partly blamed on poor management.  Hey ho!   When they finally get to reopen The Alhambra it is definitely one of the things you should try and see yourself, it truly is an astonishing place to visit, and thanks to social distancing, might be all the more enjoyable as there will be less people allowed to visit, at least in the near future.

Today do you think you will be taking your summer holiday in Spain this year? Dirty deals behind closed doors and road works.   find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 67 Holidays in Spain? Day 67   We have reached Thursday of Phase 1, Day 67 of Lockdown.  So many numbers, so many days so far.   The sweet sound of the birds singing in the trees, the gentle roar of the sea in the bay in the distance has been replaced by a terrific roar of the road gang who are re-surfacing the main road through our Estate,   We own the road although the local Town also are supposed to help us keep it roadworthy as it leads up to the Campo, the countryside beyond.   They have kind of glued a new surface to the old.  The danger of doing anything more is that a lot of the services run just a few inches under our road.    Back in Britain many roads were in a shocking state.  The High Street in the town we lived in – Chelmsford was little more than a dirt track with an open sewer running one side of it.   It took the mighty Victorians to invest heavily in the infrastructure of the United Kingdom.  Build proper drains, tarmac the roads properly through towns.  They used the money they were raking in from the Empire, they did a very good job.  The sewer system still has a lot of Victorian tunnels in operation still.   Here in Spain that golden time never happened.  A much poorer country the infrastructure was left to the local Town Halls to organise.  I have to say locally they did a fairly poor job of it.  When it rains heavily in the little town of Salobreña all the roads flood at the entrance.   The Spanish don’t do drains, and when they do they don’t do them very well.  We are lucky being on a private Estate, there are gulley’s and culverts that take the mountain rainwater away and down the hillside.   We have our own cesspit that sorts the sewerage and we buy water from a local hotel’s well.   The water is then pumped up to the top of the mountain into two great big covered depositos – water tanks. Then gravity brings it down in a big grid of pipes down to the houses and our water meters.   But all of that has to be paid for by us.  You will only find utility companies, as you might know them, in the larger cities.   If you ever decide to buy a holiday home here, and I think there will be some real bargains coming up in the next few years.  Then the first thing to worry about is where does the water come from?  Is there electricity and how many kilowatts, some Spanish homes only have two kilowatts of power, that is enough to put a kettle on, but not the toaster.   Is the property legal, does it actually have a licence of first occupation, is it on an Urbanised site, like out house or out in the country, a rustic property?   It is very easy to be completely beguiled by the beautiful countryside or the azure blue of the sea and get yourself into a lot of trouble.   Saying all of that we really love living here, there have been many challenges, learning curves, but that is all part of the fun, er well life anyway.   Thursday and the weather has really picked up the temperatures are hitting about 26c and sun is shining, it what makes Spain so attractive yo visitors.   If Spain opens up to tourists in July there might be conditions of travel from other countries, rather like Greece has instigated.  Currently visitors from the United Kingdom are not allowed into Greece until the UK has the viral rate and figures under control, the same might happen for Spain.   For those Brits who have booked their holidays before the virus took hold, this might come as a very hard blow.  It would be a shame if families who were planning a summer holiday will have to move it to the next year.   I remember as a child we rarely had any kind of holiday, and spent the summer playing outside, building dens, climbing trees, going out a playing with friends.   A foreign holiday isn’t a necessity but a fairly modern luxury.  This year will definitely be good news for the traditional seaside resorts, already Southend on Sea has seen the beaches packed with holiday makers.   The pictures made the Spanish television news.  My friend Carmen was aghast at what was happening in the UK.  The Spanish are generally better at following rules, for instance if you don’t wear your mask in the supermarkets or shops you will be thrown out by the security guard.   Tomorrow is Friday and we look forward to moving to the next phase on Monday, or the criteria has been passed allowing that to happen, only a political decision would change that.   Meanwhile in Parliament, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has done a deal with a political party with links to the terrorist organisation ETA, so that he can extend the Lockdown, in return he is going to dismantle the Labour reforms of the conservative PP party, there are lot of dirty deals being done behind closed doors.. but hey, that has always been the case here in Spain.

Day 66, and this is a story of an old man called Pepe, a palm tree and a trip into the little seaside town of Salobreña. Daily life behind the police lines in Spanish Lockdown. find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com   Day 66 Palm Sun Day Wednesday of phase 1 and yesterday evening we went along to the big house, belonging to our friends Petra and Justin.  We did a bit of watering; they have a great many planters filled with exotic plants that all get thirsty in the warm weather.   We also let in Pepe, and his wife, I would guess that Pepe is in his late fifties, maybe early sixties, it is hard to tell, he was one of those thick set, strong looking Spanish that come from families that have spent years of harsh back breaking agricultural work here, picking at the rock hard soil, that grows so much of what you are probably buying in the supermarket right now.   From avocados, pineapples, strawberries, tomatoes, kumquat, oranges, lemons, grapefruit. Throw it in the ground, water it and it grows.    The worst agricultural jobs are under the sea of plastic.  The hideous man size polytunnels that stretch for miles along this beautiful coastline, that mean you can have strawberries on Christmas Day.   That work seems to be mostly done by migrant labour.  Moroccans that are shipped over on the ferry.  They work under the incredible temperatures that those plastic greenhouses rise to.  The picking has to stop in the main part of the day, as it is so hot, continuing late into the night so that you can enjoy all year-round fruit and veg.   Pepe had come to trim the palm tree that towers maybe 20 metres or more in front of the house.  He turned up in a very ordinary looking Estate car, - We were expecting a cherry picker or some kind of crane device on tow behind his car.   He got out, his wife was with him “hola” she said to us and he opened the boot and pulled out a pair of those calliper looking things that children who had polio used to be strapped to when I went to school in the far off black and white sixties.   We followed them both with intrigue.  His wife had a large machete in her hand, so we definitely kept our social distancing.   The bottom of the callipers had foot holders and were connected by some kind of harness.  In one moment, he whipped the harness around the tree, placed himself in the callipers, his wife handing him the machete – and like a rat up a drainpipe he shot up the tree all the way to the top. The boot parts had spikes that sunk into the trunk.   His wife stood some metres away, and then with the machete he started to hack off the dead fronds from the tree. They came tumbling down the twenty metres to the ground with a crash.  His wife calmly walking over and dragging them out of the way.   Not one thought to a risk assessment form, health and safety, barriers or even a sign that said, “Danger men at work.”   We were both astonished at how incredibly strong he was and agile and how it looked so incredibly dangerous, but somehow, we felt completely safe standing there, whilst we talked to his wife about the stupidity of trying to buy clothes.   “Only the small expensive shops are open,” she said in Spanish.  “What is the difference between shopping in the big supermarket for food, and then they rope the clothes off because you are not allowed to buy?”   She threw her hands up in a theatrical way “no se” – I don’t know!   Wednesday morning and we were both on edge, we need to go to the Pharmacy and the Post Office.   The Government have made wearing face masks obligatory, they are 93 cents each and last once, so going out is going to be rather expensive in the next few weeks.   We drove in the car together and I sat in the front passenger seat for the first time in more than twelve weeks. I had forgotten what the car smelt like, that sweet interior smell of whatever they make car insides with!   We parked up and walked without masks down the street.  As people approached, they crossed the road and also gave you that, “stranger in town” look.   Salobreña is a tiny seaside town and everybody knows everybody else, and sometimes they are also related to each other too.  So, they know when there are foreigners afoot, and ones without any masks.   I looked into the Pharmacy just one old lady at the right-hand side till.  The other Pharmacist waved me in through the door. I had a list which I leaned over a barrier made of a carboard cut out advertising hoarding of a woman with a self-satisfied smile on her face after treating her intimates with some kind of cream for thrush.   The Pharmacist peered down her glasses at the list.  “Es corecto?” I asked.  “Si,” was her one-word answer.   Twenty-two Euros later we had some masks, more paracetamol and ibuprofen and some tablets for hay fever.  The same drugs, less the masks, in say Wilkinson’s in the UK would have come to just a few pounds.  Over counter drugs here are eye wateringly expensive.   The elderly woman at the other till was asking in accented English - Spanish how much again for her purchases? The Pharmacists repeated the amount.  I turned to her and said “Us English have so much trouble speaking Spanish.”  She turned to me and pulled her mask down.  “I speak perfect Spanish been living here twenty years.” She said “But I can’t speak a word of it with this bloody mask on!”   She was right, you can actually speak quite coherent English without actually moving your mouth.  Later I put a mask on and tried speaking Spanish and immediately the wretched thing fell off my face.   It probably explains why there are very few Spanish Ventriloquist acts around, so looks like I am going to have to practice speaking Spanish without moving my mouth – “gottle of gear”. “bott tay ah, de therrr ccaaar tha”          

Day 65, Tuesday and Phase 1 of the unlockdown, today stealing from the sun and the return of the peseta.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 65 Stealing from the Sun   We are in Phase 1 of Unlockdown – it is Tuesday and the weather is improving, bringing with it our hay fever.  We both suffer from it, I have to say that I didn’t really suffer in the UK, but although we live in the coast, it really gets me for about a month a year.   Some of culprits include the blossom from Olive trees, they do say if you consume the local honey it can help with immunity to hay fever.  The local honey is delicious, a bit like a floral toffee.  It comes in quite plain jars that have been filled from a great big vat of the stuff.   It is a bit like the water, which tastes delicious if you go to the spring just outside the village, we lived in.  Whilst we were living in the village we filled used water bottles with the water, it had a clean sweet taste to it.   I do ponder that with a solar panel array, some batteries, collecting rainwater and going to get spring water, we could almost live off grid.  Many rustic fincas do, they get their water from a spring have solar energy and a cesspit for sanitation.   Up until recently it was quite difficult to live off grid as the Spanish Government decided they owned the sun and that should you dare to put up a solar panel, you were heavy taxed and had to compensate the old state power company for “stealing from the sun”   The European Parliament forced the Spanish Government to overturn the tax and now you can put up solar panels, but you do not get compensated for over producing electricity and putting it back into the grid.  So, there is a device that, in effect, wastes the excess energy that you produce, stopping it returning into the grid.   Southern Spain is the perfect place to have solar power and on grid installations are becoming much more common, they are the ones that make hay whilst the sun shines and then rely on the grid at night for power.   Day 65 and I have been on a rubbish trip, normally Chris does this, but as I have put on at least 4 kilograms in the last few weeks, I have decided that I really ought to start increasing my exercise regime.    Oddly rather like the excuse that it is Christmas.. so I WILL eat that piece of cake, the Virus has also given some of us an excuse to have that extra glass of wine, eat a whole packet of crisps.   Now I am beginning to notice that my tee-shirts have either shrunk in the wash or are not fitting me as well as they should, I still can’t go to the big Hypermarket and buy more, not in Phase 1.   Tuesday and the big news is that the Government want to make mask wearing obligatory in all confined spaces, so banks, shops, anything inside, and also outside where social distancing is not possible.   I really don’t like the intrusion of my civil liberty to choose what I wear, but on the other hand if it stops me unwittingly passing on the virus then it is no different to being made to wear a seat belt in a car.   But it will be very odd to see newsreaders on the TV wearing masks, having worked in a TV studio, they are very confined spaces!  Also, we are allowed in phase 1 to meet up to ten people on the terrace of a local bar or restaurant, that must also mean wearing masks.  It is going to make eating and drinking quite difficult.   I think that is the trouble with making anything ‘obligatory’, it often leads to ill thought out law making.    The Bank of Spain has today revised its impact on the virus, they believe the economy is expected to slump anywhere between 9 and 13% with public debt running at 124% and economic activity not to recover until late 2021.   Once again, the Governor of the Bank of Spain is suggesting that Europe helps out with a ‘risk-sharing’ scheme to mitigate the chances of countries like Spain or Italy failing financially.    Well Europe didn’t help Greece out and I guess the same will happen again with Spain, it will be asked to make the country more efficient, offer more opportunities for self-employment, reward its citizens for success rather than punish them with some of the most draconian tax payments in the world.   Somehow, I doubt that either of those scenarios will happen.  It is a country that has had persistently high unemployment and relied heavily on international tourism to prop the economy up. I also doubt we will see the return of the much-loved Peseta, where five thousand pesetas could get you a very nice full English Breakfast with coffee and a small house in the countryside.   There are plans to include International Tourism that would return when the country reaches Phase 4 in mid-June, which would also allow country-wide travel.   Who knows we are only at Day 65, and the days have turned into months, that might well turn into years too.            

Day 64 of Lockdown, day one of Phase 1, and life is just starting to get back into gear, albeit with only a few small changes, here in Spain.  Today a story of why Ernie Wise influenced our decision to come to live in Spain.  Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 63 and the reason we don't work Christmas Day anymore, how the Magna Carta protects us but not the Spanish.  A daily diary in Lockdown from a British couple behind the police lines in lockdown in Spain.   Find out more:  https://www.thesecretspain.com The Seaside Gazette https://www.theseasidegazette.com/ Day 63 Christmas and the Magna Carta It is day 63 of our Spanish Lockdown, tomorrow brings some freedom, I think, but in true Spanish Practices style there is a lot of confusion and weird rules.   Martin Myall from our local paper “The Seaside Gazette” writes, I quote:   “You can jump in the car with your kids and spouse, but you can’t go out walking together. You can, however, sit with them altogether on a bar terrace.   You can drive out into the mountains, but you can’t park up and go for a walk whilst you’re there.   What time you go for your walk or take your kids out for fresh air is restricted, but you can go to a bar or restaurant any time you want, as long as they are open.”   Thanks Martin. In other words, a shambolic mess.  But it is a step in the right direction, also the MOT centres will open, but there is an equally complicated system to book an appointment based on the date your car needed its MOT, that is so incredibly complicated and boring, you will feel your life ebbing away just reading it.   Back in the UK similar half arsed, thought out rules are causing equal confusion, 15 million people took to the roads and drove to beauty spots all over the country, this weekend -  to then take their exercise, but with all the facilities closed including all public toilets it was a very British cock-up.   I find myself siding a bit with my friend Nick Ferrari who has been staying that you can’t successfully phase in the end of a pandemic crisis without all these anomalies coming to the surface.    The British Government is also thinking about phasing in different regions ahead of others.  I can’t tell you how miserable and very second class, or rather zero class we felt last week knowing our neighbours in the next province were enjoying freedoms we were denied.    I suppose I should be thankful I do not work for the authorities, two members of staff posted on their Facebook feed, criticism of the measures one Spanish town were taking, they now face dismissal and are being investigated.   Nobody wants Spain to move backwards, instead of forwards.  But it is a very new democracy and there are going to be mistakes made along the way.  If you look back at British democracy it is littered with miss-judgements.   Fortunately, the Brits have article 61 of the Magna Carta, which allows you to be critical of the Government, I don’t think the Spanish have quite that kind of protection.   I love living here in Spain, I like the Spanish, they are, for the most part warm-hearted good people, our neighbours messaged us this morning to say they are coming back to the coast next week.  It has been very quiet without them, their two children and of course Pinko the dog. So, we are both looking forward to that.   It seems a long time ago when we started talking about what we would do when we were closer to retirement.  We both knew we couldn’t stay working in radio.  Unless you are in senior management, radio is an industry that relies on a young, keen workforce, willing to work long silly anti-social hours.  There are only so many Christmas Days you are willing to give up.   Back in the 1980s, there was a queue of people willing to work on Christmas Day, it did help that you received four times your salary, were driven in by cab, wherever you lived, and you got three meals cooked for you throughout your shift.   Fast forward to now and if you worked on Christmas Day it just means you will get a day in lieu of the Bank Holiday, so no more queues to work that day.   I think our most successful bonus payment was for working the millennium night, into the 1st of January 2000.  We had already volunteered and been offered the shifts, as it was a show with our friend Steve Allen, and was always lots of fun to do, the worst bit was getting the tube back to Epping in the morning where we parked the car at our friend’s café.   Then the Management suddenly offered a bonus payment of £700 tax free, to work the night, as they were having trouble getting anyone from the TV side to put out the ITN news.    So, we enjoyed a bonus of £1,400 pounds for working six hours together.  We spent it on a holiday to Spain, that time going to Menorca, a charming and much quieter Balearic Island to its neighbours Ibiza and Mallorca.   It was another reason we decided that Spain would be our destination country to move to.  It was a journey that rather oddly involved Ernie Wise, one half of the great comedy duo Morecambe and Wise.   A story I will tell you tomorrow on the next Podcast, after a day, that we both hope will lift the spirits here, allow us to step forward, but only at the prescribed times, and enjoy, providing we stay in the car, unless we are at a bar, going out again.                  

It is day 62 of our Spanish Lockdown and we have reached Phase 1, well on Monday, here in Granada and Malaga, hooray.  But there are plenty of rules to follow.  This is our daily diary of life here and a glimpse back into the past when we worked for LBC Radio in London. Find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com Full uncorrected transcript: Day 62   It is day 62 of our Spanish Lockdown and the good news is that we can go to Phase 1 of the un-lockdown process here in Andalucia, Spain, from Monday morning.   Of course there are a magnitude of rules to follow, and places and things you can’t go to or do, but it is a start, it will also help local business get back to work, it will require social distancing, that will easily be the weakest link in the plan.   Meanwhile in Madrid which is still stuck in phase zero and a bit, ..yes the Government have changed the rules yet again.  The posh residents of Salamanca district are revolting.  Some of them believe that this is just a power grab for the central government under the guise of public health safety. They want their freedoms back and one resident accused Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of creating a country of ‘idlers.’   Anecdotally it seems that the furlough payments here have been a bit of a mess, some have received payments, others have not.  It has meant that some families have had to seek help from charities and food banks, just to get through this.   It appears that it doesn’t matter if there is a socialist government in charge or a right wing one, they are all capable of making a complete balls of it all.   Spain is a country that loves its rules and regulations, it sometimes make day-to-day life an overly complicated pain in the arse.   Back in 1984 when I first joined LBC Radio in London, I came across my first experience of restrictive practice working.  Put simply, depending on the Union you belonged to you were restricted in what you could do.  I was a member of the ACTT - Association of Sinner Mat a Graph, Television and Allied Technicians, other staff were members of the NUJ – The National Union of Journalists.     This meant that as a member of the ACTT I had to be instructed by the NUJ member as to which band of the record they wanted to play – I would put the transcription arm onto the record, an engineering task, but the cueing up of the track would be done by the NUJ member – an Editorial task… and so on.   Once a member of the NUJ forgot and put his own record on, the Engineer on duty did not say a word, he just switched all the microphones off, turned the studio to off air, and walked out along with his colleagues, the radio station was off the air for about an hour.   There were many, many strikes.  When they occurred, the Management would come down from their offices and play music or the station would stay off the air.   In television there was a famous strike at ITV in the late 1970s that took TV shows off the air for six weeks, but despite being in the same Union it was a different dispute so LBC stayed on the air, and had the best six weeks of revenue it had ever had.   BUT there was one time of day when the restrictive practices were conveniently forgotten by the NUJ, that was overnight.  There was a heavy drinking culture during the 1980s in Fleet Street, so by evening you would find many journalists completely trashed followed a little later by the printers of the newspapers.   By about 3am Fleet Street and the little Lanes behind it were awash with vomit and wee.  At about 5am Westminster council came along with a sanitation truck, rather like the disinfectant trucks being used in Lockdown.  They would wash away all the human detritus down the drains, by dawn the streets would be clean again.   This meant there were maybe just two or three NUJ members on duty overnight, and members of the ACTT were allowed to Produce radio shows, something I was very keen to do.   I finally got my big chance when one of the regular Engineer Producers went sick at short notice.  So I came in and set the show up, picked the stories, edited the tapes, wrote the scripts and then the Presenter turned up, Mike Carson, you will probably know him as he is the voice of ‘J.M.L. homeware, those handy gadgets you never knew you needed.   “Oh God! What are you doing, you are just an Engineer, why have they given you to me?”   I explained my past with Essex Radio, but he wasn’t impressed, it wasn’t until about the third hour in he realised that I could do the job and gave me some faint praise.  “You are doing alright.” He said.. thanks Mike.   The next big breakthrough was that Management created an Engineer Producer role during the Daytime, but strictly Production based, no Editorial influence.  I and my colleague Ronnie got those two positions.   Then came the day when the Producer of the Show went sick.  My boss said to me, well you know how to Produce, I want you to do it.  I said yes and sat myself down at the desk and started to prep the show.   Within two minutes the Father of the Chapel of the NUJ came over. “What are you doing?”  I told him.  “If you don’t move from that desk, we will all walk out.”    Well following a stand-off between the Union and Management, the Management agreed I should be shadowed by an NUJ member, so they dragged Barbara in, who was a ditzy freelance, whose job was to sit beside me, do nothing, but just be there.  That kept the NUJ very happy.   She sat down beside me, saying “You don’t mind do you?”  I said not at all, then she leant forward and whispered in my ear “Actually I am not a member of the NUJ I am ACTT, like you.”   And that pretty much sums up what a ridiculous situation the unions had got the country in to.  It was no wonder that Maggie Thatcher was able to crush them, as by then they had lost their grass roots support.   Day 62 and we look forward to Monday, a careful, safe step forward by the country, at last. The right decision let’s hope we can keep moving forward, fingers crossed.

Day 61  and this is the story of a British couple behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain, the real story of day to day life under the Alarma. The frustrations of a loss of freedom despite the Health Region reaching the criteria for the easing of Lockdown, the Government have decided though to keep us in Lockdown. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 61 - Civil Unrest and Manic Mondays It is Day 61 of our Spanish Lockdown, we have reached the point last week when we were hoping for a bit of freedom, by the end of today we should know, but last week the government didn’t tell us until Sunday afternoon.   Just the ability to pop to the main town would be helpful, a few restaurants open anything that would bring a touch of normality to our life.   Yesterday we spoke to our friends Shelley and Chris back in Essex.  Apart from going for walks they have not left the house, though will need to next week to pick up medicine in central London. They will drive in and only one visit the Doctors.  They shop online and use Amazon Prime to deliver anything else.    They can both work from home, Shelley has done an amazing job turning the office-based company she works for into a virtual office in a matter of weeks. But she has had to work very long hours to achieve that.   The one thing they miss is the freedom of spontaneity, you can’t just pop out to grab something from the shops as they have to say isolated.  It is the same for us, we are being overwhelmed with rules and regulations by the Spanish Government and the Local Government – The Junta Andalucia. And both keep changing their minds.   As a result, many are not sure when and where they can go out, or if they can travel to certain areas or how many should be in a car. The Police Guide frequently asked questions runs to a head popping 24 pages alone.   As an antidote to all this misery I have been wallowing in old TV shows, I discovered a few days ago that they have made some new Thunderbirds episodes.  Not the new Children’s TV series, but actual episodes of the 1960s show.  It seems there were a number of sound records released with adventures using the voices of the original cast and they have extended those recordings with extra effects and made them into new episodes using reconstructed puppets complete with strings made of titanium.   You might remember in Episode 43 I mentioned that my mother treated Chris a bit like Parker, whilst she was on holiday with us, Chris driving her around everywhere.   I always like those Gerry Anderson TV shows, for one they were made in colour and on film so looked and sounded so much better than the other children’s shows around at that time.   You can still watch an old episode and they stand up pretty well with the current TV shows for children.   There was one night and that famous LBC Arts show, sometime during the mid 1980s when Gerry Anderson came in with two of the puppets, which I think were up for Auction, ‘Lady Penelope’ and her faithful Butler come Chauffeur ‘Parker’     I have to say close up, they were much larger than I expected and ‘Lady P’ bless had let her self-go, her hair was looking very Lockdown – and her dress a bit untidy – but she did have amazing eyes.   Parker was in a worse state of repair.  The solenoid that made his mouth work was connected to a piece of leather that had rotted, so his mouth hung open like some kind of idiot.  He didn’t smell too good either.  That kind of over handled 1960s child toy smell.    But it was a pleasure to see them both close up without their strings.   Day 61 and I have spent most of the day in our little recording studio recording the last few children’s literacy scripts, having work forces us into having a structured day.  Although Chris can’t work at the moment as all the gyms here are closed, he fits in with my work pattern and will do something like an online class or watch a seminar whilst I record.   Yesterday afternoon I spoke to our old neighbour Erika, who now lives nearby, although we cannot travel to see her, as that is not allowed. She says she is going out of her head, living alone she just has her cat for company, she can’t travel the few miles to see her friends as they are in a different Province.    She hates going to the shops, putting the gloves on wearing a mask.  On the way home a few days ago she saw a friend from the local town, they stopped, two metres and more apart and started to have a chat. At that point the police passed, slowed down to have a look at what they were doing.  They both felt uncomfortable so decided to go their different way.   It is very hard to undo human nature, we are social animals and crave fellowship, social interaction – and these last few months have been very hard, particularly if you are on your own.   The Guardia Civil Police have produced a report, which has been leaked, where they fear if Lockdown restrictions are not eased, there could be isolated pockets of civil unrest in the Country.  That, although understandable, would be a disaster for the whole country.   Here we wait again to see if this coming Monday we shall enjoy a Happy Monday or another Manic Monday in Andalucia.  

We have reached Day 60 and frankly have had enough, but we are taking courage by channeling my Great Great Grandmother (Pictured in the episode art) This is the story of a British couple behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain, the real story of day to day life under the Alarma. Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Here for: Natalie's Golf Conditioning Podcast  Day 60   It is Day 60 of our Spanish Lockdown and we have had enough, enough of the weather, enough of not being allowed, sensibly and with distancing, to live our lives, oh and definitely enough of the stupidity of some Spanish Government Ministers.   Yesterday the Minister for Consumers Alberto Garzón stood up and  said that “Tourism is not a strategic sector of the Spanish Economy”. Consequently the Government will not put any effort into starting the tourist sector up again, until next year.   Stupidly putting the jobs of millions of Spaniards at risk. Uncle Alberto also went on to say that it wasn’t important because “the sector only worked for six months a year and then didn’t actually contribute much to the economy for the rest of the year.”   I have to point out to Alberto that I tend to take my summer holidays in the.. well summer and that will be your explanation for why there is an increase of economic activity in the tourist sector during the summer.   It is bitterly disappointing to my friends who work in the tourism industry here along the Costa Tropical.  For them during summer they work very long and hard to run their hotels, serve their customers in their bars and restaurants, bringing money into the Spanish economy and employing ordinary working people across the coast here in Spain.   For the record Tourism represents 14.6% of the country’s GDP, it grew last year by 2.4% accounted for 2.8 million jobs and nearly 15% of ALL jobs in Spain ..but I quote Uncle Alberto “It is not of strategic importance.”   Perhaps I have lost something in translation, but I doubt it.   A Post on Facebook from Chelmsford Remembered greeted me this morning with an old picture of my Great, Great, Grandmother – oh my God she looks just like me except I have never worn black crinoline. Or one of those stern Victorian expressions. I am usually a far jollier person than Great, Great Grandmama. My Aunt May also saw the post, it has been a difficult year for her as my Uncle Thomas died a few weeks ago, they had been together for better or worse at least fifty years, she messaged me: “I am going out of my head here alone.  At the funeral we were only allowed close family, 7 in the crematorium, 2 in the porch six foot apart. My flowers were cancelled, so the Funeral Directors put a silk arrangement on the coffin.  No order of service, no cars, we just had to go our separate ways afterwards, quite depressing. I take my dog out about 6.30 then call in the Co-Op and get food, then I am in the rest of the day, just keep eating for comfort, no enthusiasm for doing any housework, just trying to keep sane.” The UK Government, or more accurately the Government that now only seems to control England has listed a set of daft complicated and in some places insane rules for undoing lockdown. Including the stupidity of this wonderful quote from my Facebook friend Max Ayres: “Apparently we cannot visit our relative’s homes. But Estate Agents can buy and sell houses.  So I put my house up for sale and my Mum is coming for a viewing at five o’clock.” Day 60 and on a brighter note I edited a wonderful guest for Natalie Lowe’s Pro Fit Golf Conditioning Podcast – Damian Hughes – he was talking about talent: CLIP ..down to talent 1’03 Golf Conditioning Podcast You can hear the rest of that Podcast on Monday Morning on The Pro Fit Golf Conditioning Podcast with Natalie Lowe, it is an excellent listen. He is also right, our dear friend Nick Ferrari is the Breakfast Presenter for LBC Radio, people often say to us what is Nick like in real life?  Well he is exactly the same as he is on the radio, just a bit ruder and louder.  But he fits the 20 80 talent versus determination formula. Last year he found himself stranded in France, due to an air strike.  He was due to present his Breakfast Show the next morning.  He told his other half eff-this I am getting back.  He hired a car, drove all night through France and then onto the ferry, arriving at the radio station just in time for his show in London – Determination. I think it is a quality we are all going to have to channel, if we are ever to break free of the power of ‘R’ the flattening of that curve that will help bring us the freedoms my sister in New Zealand is starting to enjoy. My Nephew has his birthday today and is going out to dinner in Auckland, as today their country reached level 2, well done Jacinda. Even though Day 60 has probably been our most miserable yet, the windy cold weather, broken sleep, comfort eating, drinking, stupid politicians, ..  I think I am going to channel Great Great Grandmama and raise my head and give the world my very best determined steely eyed Victorian stare.

Day fifty nine. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today Bosoms and Birthdays Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 59 bosoms and birthdays   It is Day 59 of our Spanish Lockdown, Wednesday, there is a rumour that Mercadona has masks for sale in its stores, and if so we will buy some.   I notice that the UK Government is encouraging people to make their own out of sticky back plastic and a pair of Val’s old knickers, since the episode with the Blue Peter Advent Calendar where my poor construction of the thing allowed family retainer Reg to be scalded with boiling wax.. I would rather leave surgical mask making to, .. surgical mask makers.   The day is dry and there is some sunshine, enough to clear up the mess of dirty rain that fell last night covering every surface in Sahara sand, three good legs cat is having a bad day, he has had several of his ‘fits’ and horrifying sight where his right back leg comes unjointed and clearly gives him sharp pain that makes him spin around on the floor hissing in agony.   Although the medicine we give him helps with the inflammation, it doesn’t stop the pain. When we enter Phase 1 we will take him to the vet, if he does need an operation at least from Phase 1 there will be staff to look after him, and routine or non-emergency operations should resume then.   Day 59 and our friend Carmen’s birthday in lockdown, but she has treated herself to a new red phone, I think it might by an iPhone, she really wanted a red car, but that will also have to wait.   I messaged Juan the builder, not the gardener or the estate agent.  He says that a plumber will call tomorrow at 4 to 5pm in the evening. The drip drip drip leak in the pool room might finally stop.   I caught a video of Sandi today called cleverly, of course Vox Tox, she was talking about the history of May Day.. social history is one of Sandi Toksvig’s favourite things, when she came to LBC it was my job to find and research at least a couple of ‘facts of the day’ for her.   No mean feat as the internet was really still in its infancy, so a mixture of slogging through Google and her mini book library of information allowed me to piece together the information for her the previous afternoon ready for her to arrive in the morning and turn it into sparkling, funny and interesting radio.   She is an amazing woman, I once brought in a very old Electrical Guide I had found in the loft of our house.  It dated from 1920 and was full of frightening illustrations of gentlemen leaning over a full sink of water to fit an electric razor to the light fitting.  She turned the booklet into twenty minutes of hilarious comedy.. genius.   I never made it to University, but my job at LBC was like being in the middle of a living University with so many guests that came in who were as clever as Sandi.    My first encounter with the Arts show I remember had an eclectic mix of guests there was their regular ballet correspondent and slightly built American lady who was forever going on about the Ballet Rambert, then a drunk comedic actor Terry Scott who arrived flustered and beetroot faced, reeking of Brandy who was probably appearing in a local pantomime, I think by then his TV career had ended except for his role as a voice on Dangermouse.   Then the final hour was the film Director Derek Jarman who had just made a film about the painter Caravaggio, that had a lot of male nudity in it.. one of those films that Channel Four used to show with a little triangle in the corner of the screen.    Indeed we would often sit around in the engineering department watching those films in the hope, for most of the engineers, that they might spot a naked breast.. or worse.   I remember we were casually watching one arts film and a lady with enormous exposed bosoms walked into shot, and we all gasped it was Angela, the Producer of the Arts Show that happened to be on the air down the corridor.    My Shift Leader Tony went galloping down to the studio, swinging the door open he announced to her “Hey Angela we’ve just seen your tits on Channel Four.”  She turned toward him with disinterest “Oh that, I did that film in my modelling days, so what.”  She said.   Just another evening working for LBC.   Day 59 and Chris has once again gone out for the weekly shop, he has returned with gin and cake, but no masks yet.    With the Spanish Government now considering the wearing of masks obligatory, we will probably have to wear one, if it gets us to Phase 1 and onward, then bring it on.              

Day fifty eight. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today Bombs and Bonfires Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 58 Bombs and Bonfires   It is Day 58 of our Spanish Lockdown, and what a miserable wet day it has been, chilly too. It is quite annoying that the UK is enjoying good weather and we have had, well really quite British weather.   A few days ago, we had a massive fire along the vega – the reed beds between Salobreña and Motril, destroying many acres of natural wild habitat.  It looks like it was started by yet another bonfire that got out of control.   Several times a year we suffer from bonfires that are uncontrolled, burning whole sides of beautiful rugged mountain landscape, destroying acres of plains,  leaving a blackened scorched waste.   Here between certain months of the year you are allowed to burn agricultural rubbish, leaves and the like, although judging by the acrid black smoke sometimes, the odd bit of plastic waste too.  The bonfires contribute to the poor quality of air we sometimes suffer here.   I can only describe it as the choking, smoky night after bonfire night in the UK.  I have no idea why farmers and small holdings are not made to compost garden and agricultural waste, as they are in the UK, or incorporate it back into the fields, instead in one of the driest regions of Europe, sometimes tinder dry, they can light a bonfire and choke the air with smoke.   The bonfire that got out of hand in Salobreña was also lit in an area outside the town curfew, so the Lockdown rules had been ignored.  It has left a great blackened scar along the coastline, I hope the person responsible feels thoroughly ashamed, but I doubt it.   Day 58 and a chat on Skype with mind coach and hypnotherapist Steve Simpson who is planning a new Podcast. He was speaking from a lovely part of Essex – Burnham on Crouch, probably one of the poshest parts of the county, where everyone has their own boat and makes that strange posh laughing sound. … when they hear something funny.   We talked about synchronicity how certain events lead to others and all of them seem to be interconnected.   If it wasn’t for my friend Diane, helping me get my first radio job and then when she left to work for LBC, I sort of followed her along and ended up at the radio station, I wouldn’t have had a career in radio.   It took me nearly a year to break free of the audio department and start working on Engineering live and recorded shows. What a relief but what a horror, as I had to work shifts, that included night work.   I don’t know if you have ever worked a night shift. Some people enjoy it others do not, I fall into that latter category.  Night-time is for sleeping.  Nights on the radio are populated by weirdos and insomniacs and sometimes insomniac weirdos.   One of my jobs later on was to answer the calls from listeners, some just wanted to call for a chat, some just rang called you an Effing C, hoped you die of cancer, and then would hang up.   Once I took a call from an Irish Man with a strong southern accent, he told me he had planted a bomb at Victoria Station and then he gave me a codeword, which for obvious reasons I am not going to repeat.   We had a special form to fill in to keep those bomb callers talking, I tried desperately to find it amongst the mountain of paperwork in the studio, as he was talking, but to no avail.  As soon as he hung up, I dialled 999 and was put through to Scotland Yard, they asked me what he said, and did he give me a codeword?  I said yes and told them what it was.  They said thanks and hung up, immediately evacuating Victoria Coach Station.  It turned out to be a hoax on that occasion.   To begin with LBC had a trained Counsellor to take the overnight calls from the nutters, but it turned out all the calls were from nutters. Then LBC radio, very early on, hit a financial crisis, the advertising revenue dried up and a large number of Journalists were made redundant.   But they kept the Counsellor, the reason?  He had a bicycle, and as they could not afford the radio car, they pressed him into service covering London news stories holding a walkie talkie as he cycled past police lines, as the BBC and their radio car was being held back, so he scooped a number of stories, broadcasting live to air on just a walkie talkie.   His name was Jon Snow and he is now one of the most respected Journalists in the UK, regularly presenting Channel 4 news since its inception in 1982.   Day 58 and it’s three o’clock in the morning and I am awake.  Once more I have just had an anxiety dream.  This time I couldn’t find my train ticket to get home from work at the radio station, there were lots of young kids, well twenty-year olds, laughing at my incompetence, one round face girl came up to me and said, ‘do you need some help?’  I said thanks and she helped me look for the orange ticket to get me home,   “Where have you got to get back to?” she asked, I answered “Southern Spain” she didn’t blink an eyelid .. well that stuff happens in dreams doesn’t it.   Then suddenly I was out on the streets of London, lost, trying to find the tube station and right line to get me back to Spain. Every corner I turned seemed strange, I didn’t know where I was, then I woke up.   Today the Spanish Government announced that anyone now travelling to Spain will have to go into self-appointed quarantine for 14 days! So I guess that ends any chance of international tourism this summer in Spain?   It is going to mean for many businesses that rely on tourism, some tough months ahead.   Meanwhile, according to The Seaside Gazette, the Town Hall at Velez Malaga have awarded themselves a whopping salary increase, their Mayor will receive over sixty-three thousand Euros and expenses paid in 14 payments, as Functionarios in the Town Hall get double payments in July and December, whilst the Town Hall is in effect closed.   So it really is a tale of two cities in Velez Malaga, the poor businesses and the wealthy Town Hall.. right in the middle of Spain’s most challenging times in its recent history.          

Day fifty seven. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today Railway Children and Sewers Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 57   It is day 57 of our Spanish Lockdown and the cold wind has returned and is blowing everything around, making the dogs bark and giving the usually mild-mannered Mediterranean Sea white horses.   I do love being by the sea, everyday it is different, different colours, from proper Med Blue down to slate grey, most days, even in Lockdown there are ships out at sea to watch.  From tiny trawlers to big container ships on the far horizon.   We also get from time to time dolphins coming to play and eat fish, so this is a special place only marred by the poo bloom.  The Mayor of Salobreña just refers to it as the ‘El bloom’ a line of scummy water that makes its way around the coast from Nerja to Salobreña, ending up on the beach.   The bloom is caused by the town of Nerja pumping raw sewerage into the sea.  You are probably asking .. well why don’t they have a sewerage works like every other town along the coast? Well they do, only it has taken more than ten years of misappropriation of funds, bad contractors, arguments between the town and the Junta to be built, but it is now finally finished.. only it hasn’t got any power at the moment, so doesn’t work!   The result is that we live at poo corner, sometimes the effluence washes out to sea – off to Morocco.. so nobody cares, apart from the Moroccans but often it passes by our house onto the tourist beaches nearby.   Day 57 and Juan the builder, not the gardener or estate agent finally called me back.  I had already called him twice, when I finally got through he told me “I am in the place of the wires, making electric shopping, I will call you back.”   He did and hopefully we will receive the honour of a plumber coming to give his expert opinion on our drip, drip, pool leak, it leaks about 5 litres a day, at the moment.   Juan says that there will be no further work on finishing our house until Phase 1 starts, he said “It is crazy we are still on Phase zero, I think the best is to make everyone in Spain angry or everyone happy, not some happy and some sad, but I am not the government.”   So we will wait and wait. This morning I read that South Korea has had a second wave of the virus in one of its towns, the same thing has happened in China back in Wuhan where it all started, so we will wait.   A post this morning from my old LBC colleague Andrew Cheal, who has been posting about Dominic Allen.   I met Dominic on the second day of my new job at LBC in 1983.  I had known his voice for several years listening to the Sportwatch show where we would record match reports off of, to use second hand on Essex Radio.   He was every bit a gentleman and introduced himself, wished me well in my new job as I gave him the reel of tape he required for his sports bulletin.   In the 1980s there was a great deal of drunkenness at LBC.  Pretty much the whole of the Management was the worst for wear post lunchtime o’booze.   Indeed, our Managing Director suffered a heart attack at his desk, collapsed on the floor and his secretary thought he was just pissed as usual from lunchtime.  It wasn’t until he didn’t move for a few minutes that they investigated, and an ambulance was called.   We had an overnight Editor who drank himself into a stupor, by morning he would be lying unconscious on the floor, people would just step over him as if nothing was wrong.  Eventually he would come too, stagger out and get the bus home.   But our Dominic was the master imbiber.  Dominic led a dual life as a Sports Reporter and an Actor.  We once turned EastEnders on to find him serving potatoes to Sharon in a scene where she was in a restaurant and he was the waiter, correcting her pronunciation of Vichyssoise, she called it Vicky Soss.   He was also the bastard policeman that took Jenny Agutter’s daddy away in the film “The Railway Children” He looked great playing that brief part as he was well over six-foot-tall and built like a brick privy.   That got him a similar role in the “Naked Civil Servant” where as an Army Sergeant he was required to stick a finger up John Hurt’s bottom. LBC Sports Editor Dave Brenner, describes that as a two-pint story.  In other words, if you bought Dominic a couple of pints, he would reveal all his thespian stories.   Dominic when he was very, very drunk would lose consciousness and topple over, all six foot plus of massive hulk would come thundering down.  Once at a party he had finally drunk the hosts’ liquor store dry and passed out he went down like a poleaxed tree, straight through the middle of a rather flimsy coffee table, turning it into two, two-legged side tables.   Then there was our famous open all hours drinking hole in Fleet Street – “The Workers” – one of the most mis-named club come pubs ever.   Most of the journalists could be found there getting tanked up and Dominic could spend much of the afternoon there, slowly drinking himself into a stupor. My colleague Rob Sims remembers one day when very, very drunk, Dominic was on the phone to his agent in the tiny little wooden phone booth they had in the club, when down he went,   Wedged at the base, the phone dangling over his unconscious head, The suave and former BBC Radio 4 Newsreader - Douglas Cameron took hold of the receiver and informed the caller "Dominic's just been called away."   Day 57 and the sea is gradually calming down for the evening, as each day passes normal real life becomes more detached, this is becoming the new normal.        

Day fifty six. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today Churchill and Porn Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 56   It is Day 56 of our Spanish Lockdown and the Mayor of Motril is mad, not in the crazy, dribbling eye swivelling sense, although she might be also doing that too.   She is mad at the national Government for setting out the criteria for allowing a Health Area to move to Phase 1 and then changing the rules at the last minute, but only for Granada and the Malaga area.   She has asked for a written explanation as to why they have done this? Many of the businesses that have prepared to open on Monday, now cannot.   One restaurant along the coast in La Herradura - “Bambu” had spent time and money flattening out the beach, laying their tables out at 2.5 metre spaces, putting in sanitation, buying food and bringing back four of their workers from Furlough.   Understandably the owner Darío de Haro is a little pissed off.  One he will have to throw away the food that he has bought to cook with, two what does he now do with the workers who he has put on the pay roll, with no chance of customers? There does not seem to be any coordinated answer from the central Government.     If the restaurants locally can open, there is a good chance that they will survive economically, this is the Secret Spain, relatively few international tourists visit the area, save for a trip to the Alhambra Palaces.   The tourists here are predominately Spanish, usually with their second holiday home here on the coast.    Day 56 and I have never read so many angry Facebook posts from my Spanish friends, they think it is all very unfair.   I have always tried to be fair, I think if you can, try to be kind too.  Maybe it comes from a childhood living in a small town in Essex, where life was relatively simple, the joys of going out to play and three TV channels made things, well certainly more naïve.   It was a tremendous shock to start work in London, it was a bit like starting at the big school where you had no friends.  On my first day I encountered a very bad-tempered Irish man by the name of Donal, it was Derek who was the first friendly person I encountered.  “Has Donal shown you how the Calrec mixing desk operates?” he asked “Er no.” so Derek showed me how the complicated task of bringing audio in from all over the world was achieved.  I managed to grasp most of it.   Then he took me to the area where we fed out audio to the network and showed me how to do that and what to say to announce each piece of audio, then he took me around the studios.   All the while he was doing this, he wore a pair of slippers.  I finally plucked up enough courage to ask him why.  “Oh it’s because I’m just ending a night shift, I find slippers lovely and comfy.”   My friend Diane rescued me at lunch time.  “Come on I will buy you a drink.”  We went to the Cheshire Cheese around the corner, one of the oldest pubs in the world, they still had sawdust on the floor.  There I met Carol the radio stations film critic.  She hugged me, looked at my stressed condition and whispered in my ear “Don’t worry, they are all mad here.”  I said, “Yes I know I have just met a man who wears a pair of slippers to work.”   I spent the rest of the day mastering the equipment, it was very complicated and not what I used to.  By the end of the day I had a splitting headache, mainly from the incredible noise in the newsroom, if you can imagine the clatter of thirty typewriters on the go, a constant swirling blue fug of cigarette smoke,-  it would appear that every journalist smoked, and all in a decrepit airless basement that was painted in different shades of shit brown.   Before I left I was approached by a guy called Ray.  Ray was the wireman, a job that involved a lot of smoking and standing in a small room of teleprinters that provided the newswire services the journalists were copying, .. sorry re-writing, to use for the radio news service.   He told me it was his job to rip the paper copy off and walk to the intake Editors desk.  I said “couldn’t the Editor get it himself?”  Ray’s face went crimson.  “Just let one of the fuckers try.” He said “And we will all walk out, you included.. er you are a Union Member?”   “No, er not yet, but I have filled the form in.”  earlier that day a fairly unpleasant engineer approached me and told me, “You have to be in the ACTT union or we won’t let you work here.”   “Oh,” I said, “so it is not a choice then?”    “Of course it is a choice, you can choose to work here or not, that’s a choice isn’t it?”  So I chose to join the Union and had to pay my subs up front.  “You will get your Union card in a few days,” he said and then slouched off back upstairs.   I told Ray this and Ray’s face returned back to its normal slightly ruddy complexion.  “Good,” he said, then he came closer to me and said “Do you fancy buying a porn video?   “What?”    “A porn video, you see we have all these video recorders to monitor the radio station and, well nobody checks, so we copy some of the best porn in London, proper hard stuff an all.. there is one copying now.”  He had a small TV monitor in the wire room, he took a quick look around and switched the channel, in one blink we moved from Mavis Nicholson to a woman who was inserting a banana into an intimate place.  I said “Well maybe another time.”  It put me off bananas for quite a few weeks after that.   Day 56 and last night we watched the film “The Darkest Hour,” with Garry Oldman magnificently playing Churchill.    There was a Churchill quote that has stuck with me today -   “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”    Thanks Winston as we need the courage to continue in phase zero.  

Day fifty five. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today The Pain in Spain. Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 55 - The Pain in Spain It is day 55 of our Spanish Lockdown and Uncle Pedro has succeeded in shattering the country into tiny pieces. Some parts will move forward to phase 1 including the Basque region which jumps to moving between provinces too, I am sure it has nothing to do with the support that the Spanish Prime Minister needs from the Basque Party. We will stay in lockdown phase zero.  Despite our local health area coming up to the criteria of phase 1 we have been lumped together with the city of Granada and so our lockdown continues. It is interesting a similar province like Valencia has been allowed to split into its health authority areas and not us.  I think the reason is that the government are frightened that if they open up the coastline of the Costa del Sol and the Costa Tropical, where we live.  There will be a great wave of Spanish travelling down from the cities to their second beach homes.  They are probably right. It didn’t stop us getting very cross last night.  My friend Pilar posted a very sweary post on Facebook, we all joined in, I decided to do my swearing in English, which she seemed to appreciate, nevertheless we all calmed down enough to agree that we didn’t want an onslaught of people flooding the coast .. not just yet anyway. What it has done is to fragment Spain into pieces, where one neighbour can be living in Phase 1 and enjoy the benefits, whilst another neighbour a few miles down the road is still stuck at phase zero.. what a shambles. Day 55 and the night was miserable, it is funny how much you are affected by the outside force of government and how miserable you can wake up in the morning, even though the sun is shining. I have busied myself – the best medicine – and connected up our cat 5 network around the house.. I know that sounds beyond boring, but sitting there with a soldering iron reminds me of those far off days when I worked for Marconi and would be assembling electronics from a schematic and assembly instructions. I didn’t regret leaving Marconi or the fruit juice factory to work at Essex Radio, but I was deeply saddened when I parted company with the radio station.  I had been a freelance for over two years and the promise of a full-time job was in the end not offered, so I look around for somewhere else and wrote on spec to LBC radio in London with a list of my experience, they wrote back and offered me an interview.  So I took a rare trip to London, found the wretched place tucked in a side street in Fleet Street, by the famous Dr ‘Dictionary’ Johnson’s old house. The interview was a car crash, I think at one time I thumped the table saying that I could do the job as I already do it every day for Essex Radio.  I left with a sinking feeling. A few days later in the record library I was assisting our Managing Director, the larger than life, Eddie Blackwell, pick his Jazz records for the show I was about to record for him, when the phone rang and Jean on reception said that LBC was on the line for me.  There followed a difficult conversation in front of my boss where they offered me a job. My boss Eddie Blackwell was a kind of east end barrow boy made good.  During the 1960s he worked for a radio station called Radio London, it was on a ship anchored in the north sea and was the inspiration for Radio 1.  Radio London was a slick American sounding radio station and he was in charge of RadLon sales, bringing in a great deal of money with big advertisers like Weetabix.. a fact he reminded us all of at least once a day. He loathed the control of the I.B.A. – the radio authority who dictated when and what we should be broadcasting and also should we dare to make too much of a profit the rate of tax leapt up to something ridiculous like sixty percent.  Eddie used to say “I might as well take money we make and give it away in the street as I would pay less tax.” Day 55 and we went toilet flushing in the big house, I removed a very dead cockroach from one of the bedrooms, it had stuck to the floor, but I prised it off and put it in some loo roll. So that was my bit of exercise today, frankly I just don’t feel in the mood to do very much at all.    Oh and we have a little drip, drip leak down in the pool room, that is coming from the joint between the sump drain and the pump… we are really hoping that will not need the pool to be emptied as it costs more than 100 euros every time we do that.   Back in 1984 and I started working for LBC, my trips to London were a great adventure, I had never properly commuted, though I did travel to Southend on the bus every day when I worked for Essex Radio.   So I got to work with Donal, who was a very bad tempered Irishman who smoked a pipe, he wasn’t particularly well liked, and he smoked that really strong tobacco which filled the already cigarette blue air with a yellow pipe fug.   There were quite a few Engineers who didn’t like Donal or his pipe smoking, once when he went to the toilet they filled his pipe with marijuana and that sent him berserk and then he went fast to sleep for the rest of the day.   Somebody else super glued his pipe to the wall, - he used to leave it propped up against a shelf, that again was less funny than it sounds. As when he tried to pull it off the wall the notice board it was stuck too came away from the wall and struck him on the head.   On the first day he introduced himself “I’m Donal and do you know why I hate the …”. And then he used the ‘N’ word, quite openly and went on with a long diatribe about black people being less than white.   He was a fairly incompetent engineer, I remember once Lisa Hampele who went on to work for the BBC, had tried to send him audio down the line from some far flung part of the Empire and Donal had forgotten to hit record, then she got flustered and her crock clips fell off.. in those far off days you had to unscrew the telephone handset and put crocodile clips of the mouthpiece connections then connect your tape recorder.   It all turned very nasty and we have a recording of her telling him to F – Off, which he did by cutting her off and her story never got to air. Everybody had a story to tell about Donal. I made a decision to get out of that department as soon as possible, I gave it six months and then I would move on.   Day 55 and the best we can hope for is that the Spanish Government realises what a muddle it has turned the country into and re-considers its decisions, it is very disappointing that they treat the Spanish like children but then if you look at the way some people have ignored social distancing in the UK.. you can hardly blame them.          

Day fifty four. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today naked women and fireworks. Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 54 Naked women and fireworks It is day 54 of our Spanish Lockdown.  Victory in Europe day.  Last night there was an enormous fire that stretched along the coastline between Motril and Salobreña.  The reed beds were alight, and the fire raged most of the night. It was finally put out at 10.30 in the morning. Weirdly it must have been reminiscent of watching the buildings of London burning in the distance after an air raid.  When I think about my grandparents and my mother, father and stepfather, they all went through an awful lot but the war did eventually end. When the war came to an end the street where my mother lived held a party, somebody had an old firework that they had kept until the end of the war, it was lit, veered off course and burned my mother.  Which is why we rarely had fireworks when we were children. Day 54 and this is a very sad day, we should have been off to Malaga airport to pick up our nieces, to spend a couple of days here, by the pool sipping cocktails.  Hopefully next year. Chris is busy talking to Petra she is very keen for us to go and visit the big house and flush her toilets, .. well whatever turns you on!  It is a bit sad and empty here, there are about thirty or so of us still living on the Estate, but usually by now everyone has arrived for the early summer. We are hoping that maybe some of our neighbours might be able to drive over maybe in a month or so and cheer the place up a bit. The sadness continues as our German neighbour Lena lost her lovely dog Rico this morning.  For quite a few months now he has had a number of medical issues, yesterday he took a turn for the worse, Marie-Carmen our vet gave him some morphine to help him through the night, but he was no better this morning so sadly Lena had to take her beloved dog to the vet one last time.   Day 54 and I was listening to a Facebook post of Spike Milligan from The Goons ruining an Australian news bulletin by interjecting jokes in the background.  I never met Spike but did meet Michael Bentine, who had come in to plug a children’s book.  I had a very interesting chat with him in the green room about the comedic actor Peter Sellers, who he described as a mad ‘see you next Tuesday’ – and actually used the real naughty word too!    It would seem that The Goons real success was that Peter possessed one of the very first tape recorders, a great big coffin box full of valves.  They would all go around to Peter’s and practice all the daft voices, recording them into the tape recorder over and over again, listening back until they got them right.    It was Sandi Toksvig who told me about meeting Spike Milligan, she was appearing with him on a TV show and always admired his work, so took a trip down the corridor to his dressing room.  She found him standing on the table pulling the tiles down from the false ceiling.   “Whatever are you doing dear?”  she said.  “I am trying to get rid of the *******g voices.” He said, “They are in here somewhere, and when I find them, I am going to rip them out.”   She realised that he was talking about the Tannoy that was hidden in the ceiling that the Producer and reception would make announcements on, seemingly it was driving him mad, literally. We went for a walk yesterday afternoon, just to the shared bins, which sit down below on the roadside, we bumped into our Belgium neighbour Enrique, who’s claim to fame is that he had something or other to do with Plastic Betram’s hit, Ca Plane pour Moi. He has relatives in Barcelona and says they are revolting. No not in that way, he says some have had enough of the nationally controlled police telling them – Catalonians – what to do.  There has been considerable unrest in the Catalonian part of Spain, During the riots in October last year police were shipped in from outside the province, who have been accused of being heavy handed. It seems that on the nudist beach between the Olympic village and Barcelona town the police spotted a woman swimming naked, they called out to her to stop, she told them to F off and then  said that they were not Catalonian so she wasn’t going to take any notice off them. That was enough to get them to charge into the water and haul her naked onto the beach, the fracas coming to an end with the woman biting one of the officers on the chin, hospitalising him. It looks like Barcelona and Madrid will be kept on full Lockdown next week, so it is going to be a difficult time in both of those cities. As they used to say on the Jaws films – “stay out of the water.”                                 

Day fifty three. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today back to the sixties and why the Spanish might face chaos   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 53 Buzz Aldrin and Marshall Tito It is day 53 of our Spanish Lockdown, phase zero hasn’t brought any real change to our situation here.  Except Chris has been able to go to the pool supply shop that is now open.  He came back with a boot load of chemicals, but the rules about car travel and distance continue and of course the beaches are closed unless you are walking along the beach.   Phase 1 on Monday might not happen if we do not make the criteria – based on number of deaths and infection rate.  But if that phase starts, we will be in a similar situation as the UK is now.   Spain can only dream of doing what Britain plans this Monday.  The Spanish press has been full of the news that Britain as a country has had more deaths now than Spain or Italy.   After having quite a simple childhood that lacked continental holidays with the only foreigners I came into contact were my Spanish Aunty Isobel and her sister.  It is no wonder that going out to work was a bit of a shock, working at Marconi was really a bit of an extension to school, we were all white working class lads, not a single woman in our group.   Britvic soft drinks was slightly different, a mixture of people worked there including the ferocious Zardar, I am not sure that was her real name.  She was an enormous woman with hands like a navvy.  Most of the men were scared of her, she could lift the bins full of broken glass, with just one hand.  She came from the “happeest country in ze world.. Yugoslavia, and the most vundeful leader – Marshall Tito, well I suppose it did take almost ten years after his death for civil war to break out in former Yugoslavia, so he clearly had a unifying control over the country.   It wasn’t until I got into radio that I started to meet I suppose you would call more educated people, including the kind of colleagues who would smile and be your friend and whilst your back was turned would slag you off and steal your work.   We had one such freelance at Essex Radio, I will call him Brad, that was a minor publicity agent who got himself some freelance work working on the Essex Radio Helping Hands Appeal.  Before you know it he had managed to get out Italian Maintenance Man to get him a desk, a phone extension and an in and out tray.   I shared a desk with the Junior Sports Reporter who was quite unusually a woman, she was kind enough to let me have a drawer and she had the top drawer, in return I purloined and electric typewriter for us both.   Her name was Helen Rollason, she was a petite attractive woman, who could pass for a young looking Valerie Singleton.  I used to joke with her that she should be on TV. ‘Don’t be daft.” She said, “Who ever heard of a woman presenting Grandstand.”   Years later I helped her put together a professional demo for Radio 2, where she became the first woman to regularly present sports bulletins for the BBC, I was so thrilled for Helen when the day came when she also became the first woman to present BBC 1’s Grandstand.  Her early death from cancer was an absolute tragedy, and I still think of those times now of sharing that desk.   Back to Brad with his own desk,but had now run out of work as the charity appeal had ended.  He was looking around for other things to busy himself with and decided that my job would be just the ticket.   I engineered shows, playing commercials, records and producing features for Essex Radio.  Brad decided to pick on the, you might say weakest, certainly the nicest man in the radio station our Sunday Radio Vicar Peter Elvey.   So it was decided that Brad should engineer the Sunday Show and Special Religious Interview that went out every Sunday lunchtime. There is a skill to engineering or driving live radio shows, Brad did not have that skill and you would often hear records crashing into commercials, moments of dead air and missed microphones.   Brad’s demise as an Engineer came one Sunday lunchtime when Peter Elvey had gone over to the United States to interview Buzz Aldrin about his Christianity and taking communion whilst on the moon.     Brad played out the tape, which needs to be timed to fit before the network news at one o’clock.  A mathematical skill I hated and used to check over and over again as the time got closer to the news.    Brad was full of bravado – he had told everyone that this was one of the easiest jobs he had ever done.  Brad also mistimed the Buzz Aldrin interview by a whole minute. For something so important you would make a decision to quietly drop the news bulletin, not Brad.   Peter Elvey had got to his last and most important question to Buzz Aldrin.   He said.  “Now Buzz NASA didn’t want you to be open about your  Christianity, I know you took Holy Communion on the moon, and I just want to ask you what that was like.”   “Well Peter I can tell you it was..   Clip Essex Radio News Jingle   Brad cut Buzz Aldrin off and that was the last time he did one of the easiest jobs he has ever done.   Meeting a wide breadth of people at Essex Radio really opened my eyes to the world. It was the start of a pathway that has brought us both here living in a foreign country, trying to make sense of the way things are done here, I hope on Sunday that we get the news we are waiting for, a tiny bit more freedom, a chance to go and buy Marmite together and sit and have a coffee with friends once again.       

Day fifty two. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today back to the sixties and why the Spanish might face chaos   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 52 corkscrews and ants   It is day 52 of our Spanish Lockdown and a Wednesday worry, the hateful weekly shop is with us once again.  This morning our neighbour was stopped by the police on the way back from the chemist. “Where are you going?” – back to my casa “Where have you come from?” – the chemists “OK perfecto, you may go.”   An encounter with the police in Spain is very different from one in the UK, where usually, if you are doing nothing wrong the police are usually quite charming.   I remember once when Chris was stopped for speeding with a blues and two behind us, pulling into the hard shoulder the W.P.C. got out and the first thing she said to Chris was “That’s a nice car, I have the new Mini too, and it really can go fast, sometimes too fast.” – And that was her very British way of giving him a speeding ticket.   Here they do a lot of pointing and waving and stand very close so that you can see they carry a gun, they wear a military looking green uniform - and it is for a Brit very intimidating and makes the process of popping out to the shops, rather stressful.   I remember coming on holiday here once and we had gone through the usual car rental hell of Malaga.  “Pleese be checking for any of scratches, or it will be our pleasure to make you pay for them.”   I don’t know if you have spent any time in the underground rental car park at Malaga, but it should definitely be called the twilight zone, a few sad fluorescent lights hang dejectedly from the ceiling, whilst you kids in charge of car returns, screech around the place.   It is hard to get your bearings, you have just got off a flight and suddenly you are in sweaty hot Malaga .. and somebody is asking you to check a car that you can hardly see the colour of, get in drive off in amongst crazy car kids, bewildered fellow holiday makers and try and make your way to the exit and twist the rental car around the corkscrew exit ramp up into the dazzling sunlight, find the right exit so you don’t end up going to Torremolinos.   Chris managed very well there was a slight disagreement about which direction with Chris veering off to the left, correctly, at some speed.  I said “Slow down, you’re going to hit him.”  “Hit what?” Chris still dazzled failed to notice he was heading at speed toward a Guardia officer who was flagging him down.  The Officer jumped back as Chris came to a sudden violent halt in our rental car.  That is the other thing, you never quite now how hard the breaks are going to be on a rental.   Chris eventually wound the window down, when he found the right bottom.  The Officer lent down, “Where are you going?”    “I am sorry I don’t speak Spanish.” Chris said, I said “He is speaking English!” the Officer said “I am speeking English.”   We told him we were off on holiday, he said “OK that is fine, enjoy your holiday.. and drive slowy!”   Day 52 and Chris returns from the joys of shopping in Lockdown.  No fizzy water and still no ant killer.  I am afraid I have taken to sucking the poor ants up into the vacuum cleaner where they have to Dyson with death.  I remember my mother used to pour boiling water over ants and they used to crackle and explode .. so I guess the vacuum cleaner can’t be any worse.   I really want to be able to go shopping with Chris, go to the big store, but the things we like to eat.  It is quite miserable going to the small supermarket in the town, OK if you like offal or chickens feet or just want to make a stew, but there isn’t much else in there.   It is interesting that the same supermarket in the big town has a better selection and things like sushi and fresh seafood salad, then we can go to the Hypermarket buy Chinese food, chilli, herbs .. the stuff of dreams.   This might all change next week if Andalucia sign the Phase 1 of unlockdown.  BUT there is an awful lot of political infighting were the Labour Government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gets criticised by the Conservative Andalusian leaders.  It would be more constructive, I think, that they all got together and got us through this without all the political games.   It took until the 1970s for us to have our first proper family holiday, I think my father toyed with Saint Tropez, possibly Marsaise or the Algave coast.  He certainly brought home all the exciting brochures advertising far off foreign package tours.   They were all deemed too expensive, so we went to Wales in the Hillman Hunter.  To stay at a holiday ‘cabin’ at Caswell Bay. The Hillman Hunter was a quite horrible car that British Steel gave my father when he worked as a salesman for them. Drab Green in colour, it had red plastic seats that you stuck to in summer and froze on in winter.    It was a luxury model.. it had a heater, no radio of course.  My father bought one about six months later and I remember him drilling a hole for the aerial, bracing himself as he hit the metal chassis of the car.   He needn’t have bothered as the drill bit went through the car body like a knife through butter, already the car had started to rust.   So we arrived at our holiday cabin, I don’t remember much about the cabin as I was so excited at being on a proper holiday.  Caswell Bay was actually a very beautiful part of the world with a broad sandy beach.   It only rained for about half of the holiday, so all in all it was a great success.  I wonder if this year’s summer holidays will have to be on home soil… if so I can highly recommend Wales and Caswell Bay.           

Day fifty one. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today back to the sixties and why the Spanish might face chaos   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 51 Cops and Kaftans   It is day 51 of our Spanish Lockdown, and the day started early, Chris had a BBC interview to do on Skype, so I set the laptop up for him and got out the figures and facts just in case they asked him about specific numbers.   Today it was Sonia on BBC Essex, I like her and Ben her normal co-host. Having worked for the BBC it is refreshing to hear real local sounding voices, the radio station is run by our friend Lou and she tries very hard to make the content sound good.  It is really hard to do that as the BBC tries equally hard to be well meaning but often shoots itself in the foot.   Day 51 and my cousin, Pandy has discovered Facebook and also the irritating habit of mass messaging people.  It is her birthday and she is sharing the day with us, complete with pictures of when she was a little girl.    We used often spend a week of summer holidays with her and her sisters and brother Paul.  Usually my dad had spent the holiday money on booze so it was a way of us getting some kind of change of scenery.   They lived just outside of Harlow in a pretty village carved up by a main road called Sheering.  We used to go on the bus into Harlow and marvel at all the wonderful new buildings and go paddling in the municipal outdoor pool and visit the gardens.  I am afraid that Harlow didn’t wear that well and I am not sure anybody would make it a holiday destination town.   Tomorrow is crunch day for the Alarma, .. it might all fall apart in the Congress of Deputies.  Spanish Prime Minister Uncle Pedro’s plan for four phases of unlockdown and extending the Alarma have to be ratified in Parliament.   The PP party are keen to end the whole process and allow for things to go back to normal, straightaway.  The speculation is that they are all missing their mistresses and golf courses, or that might be the other way round?   Uncle Pedro has also been busy with the machinations of Government he has increased the bureaucracy by around nine new departments and sub-departments, so at least the Functionarios will be safe in their jobs if not the rest of the population. Being a libertarian northern European, I find the Spanish way of handling the crisis to be on one hand, strong and trying their best for the people, and on the other hand, stifling all self-determination an echo of the past before 1974.   For instance, I am not sure giving the job of deciding what constitutes essential shopping items to a military man is the right thing to do.  I think I will decide what I need and don’t need, to eat, thank you very much.    One of the most important things is of course Marmite, it comes from the Pound Shop in the main town, and supplies are running dangerously short.  We managed to order emergency provisions of Marmite and Custard Powder from the Costa del Sol, so might have to resort to that again as the Guardia currently turn you away from anywhere that your Postal Code doesn’t cover.   Back to the 1960s and my kaftan wearing Godmother Jenny, another family we spent holiday time with.  They originally lived in a place called Maldon.  A muddy sea inlet in south Essex that had some charm.  It also sported a Lido, a massive outdoor swimming pool fed by seawater that was supposed to be pumped in and out of the pool.    In reality it was a filthy botulistic infested tatty dump.  The only change of water came from kiddie pee.  I remember swimming in the Lido and spent the next couple of days with quite serious food poisoning.  So ill that my mother had to come and visit me.  Happy holidays.   My Godmother Jenny was a proper sixties chick, she was all for progressive education and we spent a lot of time learning things and if we were good we were rewarded with a star, that we could stick up on the kitchen wall league table.  I don’t think I ever made gold star status.. the story of my life!   They moved to Basildon.  My Godfather Gerald was one of the town planners of Basildon… hard to believe there was any planning involved in Basildon, but he was very proud of what he had achieved.    Years later working for Essex Radio we played a friendly game of Give Us A Clue against the local Police there.  Arriving we found ourselves in the reception area where some local was ‘going down’ there was a lot of swearing, handcuffs and a number of officers pulling him through a door, to I guess the cells.  The desk sergeant gave us a hard stare.  “What do you kids want?”  Well we were all quite young then, there was Yvonne, Nicki, me and possibly one other from the Essex Radio newsroom all in our early twenties.   Nicki piped up. “We have come to play Give Us A Clue with you.”  His fierce scowling face broke into a broad grin.  “Oh you are the radio guys.. come in come in.”   There was a buzz of a security door and suddenly we were in the throbbing heart of the police station, a slight smell of disinfectant and strong tea pervaded the corridor.   At the end of the corridor was a carpeted bar area serving drinks and the like and an attempt at comfortable furniture also on one side of the room  big heavy curtains obscuring all the windows.   The Sergeant saw us looking at the massive curtains. “Those curtains are special safety curtains.. cos the little fuckers in the street keep trying fire bomb us, bastards.” He said.  So safely behind the fire proof curtains we played Give Us A Clue – I believe the cops won.. well they usually do in the end.   Day 51 and I can hear children playing, there is a lot more traffic on the roads.  Whether tomorrow will bring a sudden end to the Alarma we shall wait and see, the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says if he loses the vote that will bring chaos, I am inclined to agree with him.               

Fifty days of Lockdown. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com A random handful of clips from the last fifty days of lockdown.

Day forty nine, Gin and Toksvig, Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 49 Gin and Toksvig It is day 49 of our Spanish Lockdown, the start of phase zero and limited outings for exercise both for children and adults.  The day is going to be hot so an early start to build some shelves for a cupboard and to finish plastering over the cables I had put in for the wifi.  All done by 10am before the sun starts to make things uncomfortable.   10 am is usually second breakfast time for the Spanish, so we had a coffee and a biscuit.   The sudden hot weather has brought with it many, many flies, they get it in the moment you open a door or a window. You can spend a great deal of time chasing them around the place.  We have mosquiteros or what the Americans call ‘screens’ and this time of year they are a godsend, that and have persianas or shutters that you can lower to darken a room and finally Toldos – awnings that come down on an electric motor and provide shade for the balcony.   In other words, it is all about opposites, opposite to the British was of letting as much light in, opening every window and sitting outside unprotected by the sun, trying to get some kind of tan before the rain starts again.   It always amuses me on those places in the sun shows, where the voiceover goes.. “and this charming Spanish house has a rooftop solarium.’ Accompanied with a shot of a red painted rooftop. There is no way on gods earth you would want to sit up on a rooftop in the midday sun.. you will die.   Day 49 and we are both getting worried about just how Spain will manage to recover from the pandemic.  Not only from a health point of view, but the Spanish economy, which still hadn’t really recovered from the 2008 crisis.   It is quite disconcerting to see the ‘militarising’ of the whole pandemic.  Whilst it was sort of reassuring to see soldiers on the streets, it was equally disturbing and you can’t help thinking are the military wondering if this is an opportunity, rather like the 1981 coup d’état when the parliament was stormed by the Guardia who took hostages not before they turned off all the TV cameras.. or so they though. Unfortunately for them, they stupidly left the main camera on and the whole world saw what was going on. King Juan Carlos denounced the whole affair and although shots were fired, the hostages were released without anyone being killed.    I worry that if Spain does not get some kind of tangible help from the E.U. the country will face bankruptcy, not at all a healthy situation for the European Union, but much worse for the ordinary Spanish who have weathered the storm of financial crisis that has dragged on since 2008, now only to get another even bigger wave of possible poverty and loss of employment and services.   We shall have to wait and see what the response is from the E.U. You always get the feeling that the far right is quietly waiting in the wings for another chance at a more successful coup d’état. This time they will remember to switch all the cameras off in the Congress of Deputies.   Day 49 and the afternoon has been glorious and I have been for a chilly swim with Chris he insists on proper swimming, today 100 six metre lengths.   Then my phone went off, I am trying to make the weekends different by not reading emails or going to much on social media, most weekends I fail, but Lockdown kinda merges all the days into each other – and that isn’t healthy.   The message read ‘have you finished the timecode editing.’ It was from my client Tony, woops, I thought the deadline was Monday, so I have spent an hour or so doing some work for him.   I got into Podcasting by accident, I was working on the Sandi Toksvig show on LBC in about 2005 when we noticed this new thing called Podcasting that was happening in the U.S.   Sandi is an Americophyle and she had noticed that listening to audio files called Podcasts seemed to be growing in popularity in the states and were starting to be listened to in the UK too.   So I made a ‘podcast’ a special episode of her show with a few extra bits in it.  Some very bright guys in engineering got it into the iTunes system and we also posted it online.   We expected maybe a few hundred downloads of the special show.  We were right we got three hundred downloads – in the first hour! Then hundreds and hundreds more. That attracted the attention of ‘The Management’ who decided to offer a subscription Podcast service.  The software was designed by a brilliant engineer who the BBC quickly poached to write software for their new on demand service the BBC iPlayer.   And I became the Podcast Manager, not only overseeing everybody’s contribution to the service but having to manage all the subscriptions and payments.. what a bloody nightmare that was. In its time it made a good deal of money, a NDC prevents me from saying how much, but it did well.   Now everybody seems to either about to start or have their own Podcast, even the two of us got in on the act with The Campen Players Podcast.. and now Spanish Practices. Day 49 is ending and a gin and ginger beer with ice is waiting for me, and we look forward to phase 1 starting in a week or so.          

Day forty eight, On yer bike! Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 48 On yer bike! It is day 48 of our Spanish Lockdown, slowly we are unpicking that lock, last week, the children could go out for a bit of exercise, today we can join them. I went for a walk, I planned to take a gentle ramble into the countryside, maybe accompanied by my trust tape recorder, giving you a walk with nature, maybe accompanied by three good legs cat, who I take, or rather he takes me on his lead.  He is a bit of a cat dog, in respect that he will tolerate a lead and loves to sniff and explore every nook and cranny along the way.   Instead we headed for Petri and Justin’s big house on the corner.  Petri called from the UK.. “Justin is worried about the tall palm, can you take a look.”    So we both took a walk to the house, took some pictures of the palm, it is growing the fruit tendrils, which Justin would like cut off.  When palms fruit they grow masses of these weird flowery things that one, make a mess and two are loved by rats.   It was nice to leave the house and to think that the Police are not going to stop us for going for a walk. Although back in bad luck La Herradura an English couple rocked up to the beach complete with deckchairs and picnic lunch. The sojourn lasted exactly ten minutes before the police arrived and explained to them that sitting in a deckchair swigging beer might be considered an English exercise – but not here in Spain.   Day 48 I am a bit filthy.  I got up this morning helped clean the pool, then threaded to mains cable through a wall to power our WiFi extender.  Now I have a very expensive and brand new MacBook.  After my other machine burnt out. I have to say, I prefer the older machine, it was better at picking the wifi up, it had considerably more sockets to attach stuff, including normal USB, not what Apple call Thunderbolt, the keyboard rattles, I loved the silent keyboard of the old machine, I could write little notes when when I was live recording with a microphone near by.   Steve Jobs mantra was always “is it better” just making something sleeker and thinner and shinier, doesn’t mean that it is better. It also gets very hot and the battery at the moment says 8% grrrr.   The local Spanish shy away from expensive Apple products, most of the phones you see when you are out and about are Android, computers tend to be P.C. based and much cheaper.  I think the Spanish are far more sensible when it comes to buying in to the Apple experience, as I guess the folk at Cupertino would call it.   So I have had to move the wifi nearer the machine and that involves drilling out more of the horrible white dusty rendering that most houses have on their walls.   So not at all the chilled day I was planning, then I fell asleep outside, in the shade but the midday temperatures have suddenly jumped back to what they should be.  I woke from my doze, overheated and vaguely remember dreaming about Barry Manilow, .. I have no idea why.   Chris has gone off for a walk accompanied by next doors dog, it is still really too hot to go out walking.  The Spanish are used to the heat here.  When summer comes you will see them in the early morning and then they disappear for the rest of the day, returning about 6-7pm in the evening where they will come out be social and finally have something to eat at about 10.30pm, after that maybe spending time out on the street or in a bar till 2 or 3am.   The late night life also includes the children who seem to be quite happy playing in the playgrounds until the early hours, I don’t know how it might affect their education and how tired they might be at 9am when school starts in the morning, but that is life under a hot sun.   The sun is not your friend and sitting out on a beach in the midday sun does really only fall to mad dogs and Englishmen. Oh and a few Germans and other northern Europeans.  The Spanish respect the sun, they hide away from it, even when they are on holiday. Sitting in the shade of a bar, drinking coffee, soft drinks or the odd beer, chatting with friends, that does seem to be what the majority of home-grown tourists do.   Early this morning we were greeted by another magical sight.. the cyclists have returned, not in great packs but enjoying a short healthy cycle for a mile or so and then back home.   We both had cycles back in the UK, I gave up cycling when a bus driver attempted to knock me over as he wanted to get to his bus stop I was passing.  I found cycling in Britain a cold and miserable experience, you seem to be universally hated by motorists.  The cyclists are just as guilty, some ride aggressively, through red lights and the like.  I remember once we were going to work, stopped at a set of red lights at London Wall, when suddenly a cyclist shot down the nearside of the car, smashed into our side mirror, breaking it off its mounting and simultaneously calling me a see you next Tuesday as he jumped over a set of red lights narrowly missing traffic coming from the other direction.   Here there seems to be a much more relaxed approach to cyclists, they are indulged and allowed to meander in front of you. I think it is because they are tourists and bring much needed income into the local economy, something I really hope will be able to start up again soon.       

Day forty seven, Bank Robbers and other Bees. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 47 Bank robbers and other bees It is day 47 of our Spanish Lockdown and the wind has dropped, the sun has come out and the world looks a better place. And you find me outside. Tomorrow we are allowed out to exercise, of course there is an awful lot of complex times and where and when you can go, how old you are as to when you go and there many tables to pour over to make sure you don’t end up with a fine from the Guardia. Municipalities under thousand can go out when they want.  Poor old La Herradura, a small holiday resort that was under 5 thousand on the electoral role has found it number increase this year thanks to the thing that must never be named, so they now have 5,134 residents, in theory – living there. So they have to abide by the times set out by the government. Our niece Facetimed this afternoon, she was surprised that we hadn’t even been let out to exercise from the start.  Britain lockdown is a much looser affair, with large shops already opening like BandQ.  Our own chain of DIY store - Leroy Merlin – still has it’s door firmly shut. I am sitting here in the relative peace of the lower terrace, probably the first time I have been able to sit down here since early February.  The birds are singing and there is a buzz of bees below helping themselves to the nectar from the wild flowers that are growing in abundance thanks to the wet weather.   It was a warm sunny day like this when we went to take a look at a new development of luxury flats in the small coastal town of Castell de Ferro. I think the word luxury gets very overused, you can get luxury chocolate, luxury bath salts and of course luxury travel.. well you used to able to.   The flats appeared to be quite well built, the one we had decided to invest in was somewhat narrow, had the oddness of the master bedroom having an onsuite that was also the only bathroom in the flat.   The Spanish love quite narrow small rooms, I guess that the British obsession with getting as much natural light into the place, just doesn’t matter as the purpose of going inside is usually to escape the sun and the heat.  You often see on those places in the sun shows, Brits moaning about how gloomy it is inside. So we couldn’t loose buying into this development, people were making fistfuls of cash, flipping properties within a few months of buying them. So it seemed a sound investment.  Spain was on the up, there seemed to be a building crane at every corner.  The sun was shining, and every night was fiesta night.   I guess with foresight, that Utopia had to come to a crashing end.  And crash it did, with the financial crisis, Spain, pretty much fell into the Mediterranean Sea.  The crisis unearthed all sorts of dubious land deals, even our block of flats was very near to an ancient fort, indeed the house they planned involved removing ancient pine forest growing up the side of the fort, already land had been cleared and the first flats built mostly with views of somebody’s rendered wall.   Worse the Spanish banks had been giving mortgages out to anybody that happened to be passing by the door.  Even our bank in the UK were, let us say, laissez faire.  We presented ourselves to the British bank and told them we wanted to borrow fifty thousand pounds.   We were expecting, forgive me, the Spanish Inquisition, what we got was a cup of hot tea, they took a quick look at our bank account, there was some tapping of computer keys and then a ‘ding’ and we were told the money would be in the account in a couple of days.   I don’t know why we didn’t hear the alarm bells ringing from that moment on, but my tea had even gone cold and we had enough money to put the deposits required down on the flat in the sun.   So the 2008 crisis struck Spain and the building companies went down like dominoes, the banks were left with bad debt and hundreds and thousands of half built flats and houses, a handful of ghost towns and even a ghost airport.  It was a mess, a disaster for the Spanish.   But never mind we have a bank guarantee, so we can ask for our deposit back.  They told us, “Er we have already spent your money so you can’t have it back”. We said “But we have a guarantee, that is against the law to do that!”   They said “Yes it is, and you are most welcome to sue us.”  As I have mentioned the legal process in Spain is slow.. very slow, like maybe ten years and very expensive, and you do not get your costs back, so you could end up seriously out of pocket, even if you have right on your side.   So the banks got away with it, as they often do and probably will do again when we are finally out of Lockdown.   That reminds me tomorrow we can both leave the casa, together, go for a brisk walk .. not too far and at the appointed time for our age group and health situation. So here’s to a change of scenery and a breath of proper fresh air.               

Day forty six, Blue Peter and Alcoholics. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 46 Blue Peter and Alcoholics   It is day 46 of our Spanish lockdown, Chris is busy watching a webinar for managing your gym back into business, it is going to be a long complex journey to open gyms up again.  They are a major place where contagion could occur.    Until there is a vaccine the new normal is going to be anything but normal.  This morning I recorded more of my children’s scripts, that kind of takes your mind of things as there is a lot of concentration pronouncing words correctly, enjoying what you are saying without going to Blue Petery.   Blue Peter is a children’s television show famous for sounding very enthusiastic about everything.  I mentioned once before when I accidently burned a dinner guest with my Advent Candle from an old coat hanger.   I worked for a couple years with Blue Peter Lesley Judd, she was great fun, a really heavy smoker, she would sit crossed leg on top of my desk tapping away her script on an old Remington newsroom typewriter we rescued for her, as she didn’t like the computer thingy.   She told me that a lot of her Blue Peter assignments were done on a tight budget, she said there was never a discussion about insurance or risk assessment.  She said one time they winched her across from a Lighthouse to a boat, she told me she was so scared a petrified that she wet herself, screaming out at the cameraman .. he just replied, don’t worry love I am filming only your top half the kiddies will never know.   I got to work with Peter Purves, another Blue Peter presenter and former Doctor Who companion.  We were at the London Academy of TV Film and Media, a rather odd place housed in the Church Hall of St Pancras.  The church was a beautiful Greek revival church built in 1819.  The church hall was a squat concrete ugly lump built in the early 1970s, we had our studios on the ground floor and on the first was the Church Hall used for TV and film rehearsal during the day and The Karate Club and Alcoholics Anonymous in the evening.   The toilets next to the little voice booth I used, would frequently block and raw sewerage would wash under the wall and into the booth, so it always smelt very strongly of room freshener.   From there we taught a variety of students, some already from radio and television, some complete novices.   Peter Purves had the glamourous studio with studio lighting and a camera with autocue.  I had the room that was used for makeup – so we were surrounded by weird dolls heads that the stage make up students would practice on.   I found teaching really hard work and although I enjoyed it, I can now see why teachers need six weeks off in the summer to recover each year.   Day 46 and Chris is busy with his webinar, telling me when the virus hit China and the gyms closed, and Instructors lost their incomes, one chain went on a recruitment drive and cherry picked the best Instructors, paid them a retainer to come and work at their gym chain when the pandemic was over.   We struggle a bit with the Internet and I was pleased to discover our Internet company RadioKable was now offering 40Mb download speed.  I wrote asking to change to the slightly higher speed.   The called.  “Mr Stephen, your mast is in a state of collapse, so many people using the internet, we cannot make you faster.”  A very pleasant man by the of Vincente said.   “Oh dear.” I said is there anything you can do.  “We can make your bill 10 Euro cheaper each month.” He said.    The Internet is almost as important as clean water and electricity, Spain has suddenly discovered that their infrastructure lags a long way behind other countries.  Fibre Optic is available but it is installed by the old state telephone company, who make it painfully difficult for us to get the service.   We had an Engineer come to access our Estate, when we told him that one resident didn’t want cables across his house, he said “Well you can’t have the fibre optic then!”  With that he jumped into his van a sped off.   We arranged for a fund for road cutting and applied for the licence from the Town Hall, which took several weeks to be authorised.  By that time it was too late, the old state telephone company had moved on to their next location.  So no Fibre Optic. The Administration is famously slow and ponderous in Spain, with many people at many desks in many departments at the Town Hall, all sitting as each individual piece of paper lands in their in-tray to languish a few days before the inevitable stamp of approval is dipped onto the ink pad and slammed down onto the application and then off the paper goes to the next desk.. and so on.   If you are coming here to retire and enjoy the better weather, which today is blowing a 60 kilometre gale, yet again! You are probably going to be fine.  But for anyone contemplating a business who has been used to the relative efficiency of northern Europe, you will need a lot of patience.   I think it is one of the reasons the Spanish work to live, rather than live to work, most just can’t be bothered waiting for that piece of paper to emerge triumphant from the Town Hall.          

Day forty five, Flies and Poolside Cocktails. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 45 flies and poolside cocktails Day 45 of our Spanish Lockdown.  When will it ever end?  Uncle Pedro, the Spanish Prime Minister has issued a very complicated phasing of return to halfway normal life. No dates, as it will be based on how many deaths have occurred as each day goes by. It is progress but it does look like international air travel will not return this summer.  The best that can be hoped for is that you can travel within your local region.   This is also the miserable day that Chris has to go shopping, he has to go to two supermarkets as neither are now stocked well. It is turning into an arduous task to find enough food and cleaning materials.   I guess that more than a month of Spanish manufacturing stopped has had an impact on supplies.  Today no bread, but we have potatoes, pasta and rice for carbohydrate.   Nothing to wash your hands with, but luckily we have a collection of old hotel soaps and hand wash that I am pressing into action.   Nothing to kill ants or flies.. a much harder call this one as we are overrun with ants in the house at the moment, three good legs cat doesn’t help with his twice daily fish tossing, covering the floor with little pieces of fish.. you can see the ants just waiting for their moment to carry off a tasty tossed morsel.   The flies I can whack with a handy Chinese shop swatter. But the tiger mosquitos are going to be harder to kill as we have about a week or so of spray left for them.    Whereas Britain suffered with shortages at the beginning, it does seem that we are getting a taste of that now here.    But as my client comedian Rob Deering said on the Running Commentary Podcast today.. “We have just got to suck it up.” As there are more serious things to worry about than getting fly spray and chlorine for your pool.   The Running Commentary boys have magnificently carried on running, both separately but together.  Paul runs in one part of London and Rob in another and we sync the two recording devices and their phones.. and it works really well until they get cut off, which is often.. but once I have edited it all together, they a producing a fine and inspirational show. Some sadness this week as they remember the London Marathon that will at best postponed at worst it will have to jump a year.   I was doing some charity work for Multiple Sclerosis teaching a Press Officer how to deal with live streaming and that’s how I got to meet Rob and Paul.    You can catch Rob Deering at the weekend on the Isolation Song Contest a kind of indoor Eurovision, check the link in the Podcast description, or go to Just Giving dot com, Isolation Song Contest for more.   Day 45 and with the shopping done it has turned out to be a fairly nice afternoon, the sun was shining and the temperature about 20 to 21c, but at about four pm the wind returned yet again.   It took us a couple of weeks to get over my mother’s visit to us a few years ago.  Having to keep working and entertain holiday guests is hard work.   It seems sublime that family would want to come and visit you when you ‘live abroad’ we were really looking forward to seeing our nieces visit us next week for a few days, they had booked the hotel and we were planning to pick them up from the airport and just let them chill in the sun and sip those much vaunted cocktails by the pool.   We are both desperately sad that it is not to be.  But having guests can be joyous but also a burden.  Many of our neighbours curse that they have so many bedrooms and that quite distant members of the family will suddenly descend on them, the children making a bee line for the pool, the adults helping themselves to the booze.. as “It is so cheap over here.”   I think if we had stayed in the UK and moved to somewhere like Basildon, not a single family member would consider taking a weeks holiday with us.    We love our family but love privacy too.  It is handy that we have a very fine hotel just five minutes’ drive away, or even closer is a large Spanish hotel that offers bargain rooms in the summer, well they did.   I hope the girls will come same time next year if international travel is once again allowed.. and of course there are any airlines left that haven’t gone bust, unemployment figures are going to soar so high I wouldn’t be surprised if UB40 put on a comeback tour.   It is far from all doom and gloom and we are very lucky to live where we are, a lack of bread and fly spray can be overcome, and there are much more important things happening right now in the science laboratories of the world.. as Rob Deering says .. “suck it up.”              

Day forty four, Tea and Pee. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 44 Tea and Pee   It is Day 44 of our Spanish Lockdown and we have cautiously put the cushions out on the garden furniture.. I know it is a bit rash, but looking at the weather, which of course was cloudy again today, it says there should be no more rain for a whole week.    The weather in Spain varies a great deal, it is a large country and the places with mountains and northern coastline can experience some pretty horrible weather.  We used to religiously watch the weather at ten o’clock on La Una, it came just after the sports news.   Monica Lopez is our favourite presenter, she always dressed as though she was off to a very good night out, sometimes she wore a cocktail frock, some nights a glitzy number for the town and there was one night when she was all in leather.. not sure where she was heading that evening?  Of course never the same dress and she has a penchant for a thigh length boot.  Her clumping around the set almost drowning out her weather news. whilst all the while there is tinkly pinkly weather music playing, possibly to hide her heavy-footed deportment.     The presentation of the weather forecast here in Spain is somewhat different to the staid dull BBC version. Monica throws her arms around like a Cervantes windmill, caressing the interior and exterior of the country, constantly moving from one side of the screen to the other, then she moves along the set to the different maps, clump, clump, clump and there she here is in front of the UV forecast for tomorrow - running her hands up and down like a dervish.   Most of the time her ample bottom obscures our part of the country so you find yourself trying to glance down the side of her thighs to determine just what the weather holds for Motril.  In the summer it is usually scorchio, scorchio.   Meanwhile back the BBC, we had a look around the weather department, a few years ago, Chris was the LBC weatherman for just over 17 years. A very nice guy called Nana sits at the top table and makes sure that each weather presenter goes to the right studio with the right forecast.  Don’t forget the BBC also have a world service.  Their bulletins seem to come from a little studio to one side of the giant screen that sits up on top of the New Broadcasting House newsroom.   Day 43 and yet again we have good figures for Spain, well I say glibly ‘good’ hundreds of people have died, families are mourning their loss, but the figure is much lower than a few weeks ago.  Also, they are statistics and I think only give an indication of the true picture.   A few years ago, my mother came to visit, we took her out in the large charabanc driven by Chris.  Although it had cost my sister and I quite a lot of money to hire, the Seat Alhambra did not meet with my mother’s approval, the door was not wide enough and it was too far from the ground for her to get into, helping her in was also problematic as her bad arm was the one required to help her into the car.  So, I got her a little footstep from the Chinese shop and that did help.   First stop was the Alhambra Palaces, it seemed only appropriate given the car model.  I enquired as to the suitability of disabled access to the palaces, there is none, but a wheelchair accessible map allowed a trip around the gardens and grounds.   We had bought the tickets from the bank so where able to use the online ticket machines, but we had to queue to arrange a wheelchair, which involved paperwork at the kiosk and then more paperwork and my Tax number and signature at the gate.   The tour of the gardens was a great success, my mother loved it and I spent the hour or, so the others were going around the palaces with her in the courtyard where I bought her a cup of tea.   Tea is a little problematic in a famous coffee drinking country.  Spanish coffee is usually strong enough to blow your head off and leaves you with a slight migraine and vision impairment .. but you get used to it.   To order something like English tea, you ask for Té Negro, that will give you a scalding hot glass cup of black tea.  Asking for milk usually gets whoever you are serving you quite flustered.. Café con leche comes with hot milk and that is usually what you get served with separately to the tea.   My mother was not amused and found the taste not to her liking. We spent the time talking about when we were all children and I think she enjoyed sitting there, but after the hour was done it was getting chilly and the day was over.   Success, so the next day we went up into the mountains with my mother and took her on a tour.. not so successful.  “Breath-taking views of the mountains mum.”   “No I think I will stay in the car.”   “Take a look at these wonderful Olive trees mum.”   “No I think I will stay in the car.”   “Fascinating Olive museum mum.”   “No I think I will stay in the car.”  Brian piped up “Is there a toilet Stephen?” “Yes there is.” I replied.  “Well can you take me as I don’t like those foreign toilets.”   I have to say Spanish toilets are pretty much identical to British bogs, true if you put too much paper down or worse they will block, but the same again can be said for the Lavatories of the UK.   So I took Brian to the toilet passing by the lovely Carmen-Maria who runs the little shop.  She sells or manner of local produce, wines, cheese, olive oil and the like.  I have to say the static display of olive harvesting is well, a bit crap, but it is a nice place to visit if only to pick up fine Iberico Hams.     The next day we brought in the reinforcements in the form of Mark and Maggie and that worked really well.  Far up into the mountains to visit some of the beautiful pueblo blancos that nestle in the Siera Nevada.   Both Maggie and Mark kept my mother entertained and Mark engaged her in conversation and the day was much better, only marred by Brian letting off a giant belch that Maggie, sitting in front of him said “blew a parting in her hair.”   Day 44 and a short exercise walk on Saturday outside is filling me with excitement .. but to dampen the whole thing down we might have to follow a strict Spanish timetable of exactly when we might be allowed out into the fresh air.     

Day forty three, Parker and Lady Penelope. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 43   It is day 43 of our Spanish Lockdown and I was woken today by the noise of the traffic below us going to work.  Which I guess is a good sign.  So far only construction and manufacturing companies have been allowed back to work.   The kids can go out to exercise and yesterday we witnessed scenes similar to the British parks, with families chatting away and kids playing with each other.  It seems it is quite hard to explain social distancing to a three-year-old.   We should be allowed out from Saturday the 2nd of May for short exercise walks etc.  It will be interesting to see how that goes.  The local main town has already frozen rent on the pavement café’s all around Motril, the Mayor, Louisa, is planning to allow restaurants to open for pre-booked take-aways. This will stop crowding and hopefully give some much-needed cash-flow for the restaurants.   It is interesting that the right-wing Mayor of Motril has done her level best to support local industry, going so far as to offer a special City Certificate to all the children who have been locked down for so many weeks.   Meanwhile on the other side of our bay in the Labour controlled town of Almuñecar, Mayor Trinidad has chosen to use the lockdown time to pull down the local market, on the grounds of safety.  A very controversial decision, which has in the past caused people to demonstrate on the streets.. something they were unable to do these last few weeks, whilst the bulldozers tore the building down.   Almunecar has suffered recently from past maladministration they have just been fined two million Euro for an illegal property deal, it does seem some of the old Spanish Practices are alive and well in some towns of Spain.   It is quite hard to get news about Spain, due to the law that prevents Google from searching for news stories from the papers.  A law that says the Internet is stealing the jobs of journalists by allowing people to link to newspaper sites was passed a few years ago.  It does mean I have to rely on the local paper “The Seaside Gazette” and a local online Spanish paper “Motril Digital” for substantiation.   The Press is in a major siege change across the world, we have all become reporters.  On this computer I am taping out this Podcast, I have a camera that is of a higher quality than the ones we made at Marconi in the 1970s, and those colour television cameras cost thirty thousand pounds each, and struggled to deliver 605 lines in colour that stayed stable.  The camera had to have two racks of equipment to maintain the picture quality.   Now we are all reporters with our camera smart phones and Tik Toks, Instas, Zooms and the like.   I don’t know why Spain chose to close itself off to the world, when it came to searching for news about the country, I don’t think it has served the press here very well.  There also isn’t the same culture of reading a newspaper as there is in the UK. I guess sixty years of Franco, the only thing you were going to read in the press is stories that had been allowed by the regime, so ordinary Spanish maybe didn’t bother with a paper.   Here in Andalucía illiteracy levels were, in the past, some of the highest in Europe from 1924 to the 1970s children left school here at fourteen to go work in agriculture.  Franco looked upon southern Spain as a breadbasket for the rest of the country, with industry centred in the north. Spain still spends less GDP than the other EU 27 countries on education.   Day 43 and I have been watching a video of the first radio station I worked for – Essex Radio. The original studios have been bought by a recording studio to make records and the like.  It is a rather unpleasant thirty-minute trip from London to get to Southend, I hope though they will be successful and it is pleasing to see a place that was built more than forty years ago still functioning.   A few years ago my mother visited us in our little flat in the village.  Accompanied by my stepfather Brian and sister Ann - we spent a week showing them the local sights.  We had to hire a very large Seat Alhambra so that we could take everybody in one car.   I see we take, it was poor Chris who had to do all the driving in this enormous beast of a vehicle.  When he was driving the oddest thing occurred, my mother completely ignored him, he said even Lady Penlope’s Parker was treated better.   I don’t think it was intentional, but when at the end of the holiday we were at Malaga Handling and Chris went to say goodbye, at that very moment the buggy to take my mother and Brian to the gate arrived and my mother pushed Chris out of the way and jumped up into the vehicle to be whisked at some considerable speed away to their waiting flight, only my sister waving us goodbye as they disappeared into the scattering holiday makers waiting in queues for their flights.   I have been spending a lot of time in our little studio recording online learning, so far today I have been a porcupine a duck a fox and a small girl, this afternoon I worked for another client for a medical product, for a moment it was quite hard to be a grown up, I wonder if the last few months of incarceration is slowly turning us all into little kids again.  I have one friend who is making Lego and another doing jigsaws.   Evening has come and it is time for my hot milk and cookies before I go to bed and dream of being an astronaut – good night everyone.          

Day forty two, Killer Prawns and Jeremy Clarkson. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.   Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 42 Killer Prawns and Jeremy Clarkson   It is day 42 of our Spanish Lockdown and Jen and Jack have sent us a picture from their balcony showing a little girl excitedly whizzing down the road on her tiny scooter.   For the children of Spain, today is a red-letter day.  They are now allowed out once a day for a short exercise period.  For many who live in the small flats that are dotted along this coastline, it must truly feel like freedom.   The news gets better, cautiously the curve seems to be flattening, so much so that Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will allow us all out for a short exercise period from Saturday May 2nd    Last night we watched Jeremy Clarkson with a YouTube live edition of Drive Tribe, the previous night I had a strange unrelated dream about Jeremy Clarkson, he was demanding all sorts of things that I had to do and was asking me to edit some books he was producing, then weirdly yesterday evening we fired up YouTube and found the first recommended live event was a Drive Tribe live interview between him and the recently recovered Grand Tour and former Top Gear Producer Andy Wilman.   Loath him or love him, he made thirty minutes of live lockdown TV that was far better than the uncomfortable Children in Need, Comic Relief affair this week from the BBC.   Andy Wilman had chosen to swig Corona Beer during the whole interview, and we got to learn a candid, maybe too candid behind the scenes view of what it is like to work with Amazon. Andy looked very pasty faced and had clearly had a rough time with Covid 19, whereas Clarkson looked like he had been at the port, but the reality was he was badly sunburn from sitting in the back yard of his Cotswolds farm.   It was funny and raw, quite rude in places and maybe the future of TV?   I don’t know a lot about cars, back in 1997 I was Producing a Car Maintenance Show for LBC and decided that the Expert we had on air didn’t really know enough about cars either.  He was a nice enough guy, I liked him as he was a short arse like me.  So I sacked Richard Hammond from the show .. I often wonder to this day whatever happened to him.   Day 42 and the morning was dry.. no rain and the sun was trying to peak through the cloud.  An opportunity to clear up the mess the dirty rain had made the previous day.   For some complex meteorological reason, sometimes when it rains, it rains Sahara sand – a dirty brown sticky mess that dries like glue all over everything and everywhere.  It is a bugger to get off the terrace.  My Spanish neighbour José uses his Karcher, I prefer a mop, so spent more than two hours this morning cleaning everywhere down, finishing by putting the little plastic robot tank cleaner into the pool to clean that up.   We naively thought that we were leaving outdoor dirt behind when we came to Spain.. as of course it was always sunny and every hotel we stayed at had immaculate grounds.   How stupid could we have been, first hotels have an army of staff that clear up all the time and secondly it does rain and here we do get a lot of wind. And a lot of mess too.   The devils plant also grows here in abundance – Bougainvillea – oh yes you might be shouting at me that it is a beautiful plant.  But it is an absolute horror, apart from the really sharp thorns it has, it grows like a bloody weed and its sodding beautiful flowers constantly fall off and almost instantly dry into a paper thin, drain blocking, pool pump wrecking menace.   Then there is Oleander another ghastly and very poisonous toxic plant, ingestion of any part of this plant can make you seriously ill and even cause death.  Burning the leaves is equally toxic too.  Sorry to be so brutal about two of the most loved plants in the Mediterranean but neither of them are going to get planted in our garden.   Day 42 and the weather has changed back to being cold and windy, Chris is cooking the three good legs cat his fish.  He can no longer digest ordinary cat food, he can manage his little biscuits, but wet cat food has a most unpleasant effect at either end of his body, so he has frozen Panga fish from Vietnam for his breakfast and tea.     My mother’s visit to see us a few years ago in the village was delightful but hard work.  We were living in a little flat and had managed to rent another flat in the same block on the first floor for her visit.   My mother and Brian are old folk and set in their ways and there were more riders than a pop star diva for their visit.  A list of English food was required including English butter, cheese and my stepfather Brian’s favourite – north Atlantic Prawns.  He specifically said that “I don’t want any of those Spanish prawns Stephen.”   We found some frozen ‘prawn cocktail’ type prawns in the local Hypermarket they were nearly 8 Euros for a small packet. Anyway, my mother and Brian were on holiday, so we bought them for their arrival, put some in the freezer and a serving in the fridge to defrost.   My Mother and Stepfather have very prescribed eating times, and I am afraid to say under Lockdown we are the same too, looking forward to and eating meals at pretty much the same time every day now.   So, Teatime was at 5.30pm our time, and my sister was in charge of helping my mother prepare their tea in the ‘foreign kitchen’, as my mother described it.   There was a lot of drama around every meal time, I think I am very much the same as my mother and can create quite a lot of drama over nothing.. it must be something in the family DNA.   Half way through the week Brian surprised me by ordering a large plate of Gambas in a restaurant and finishing the whole plate off with great gusto.  “Those were lovely Stephen.” He told me, “But I thought you didn’t like ‘Spanish’ prawns.”  “Well I do now!” he chuckled.   At the end of the week, I asked him if he had enjoyed his English prawns.  “No,” he said in a very matter of the fact way.  “They were very slimy, so have not eaten them all.”   At nearly 8 Euros I wasn’t going to waste them so a few days later we fished them out of our freezer, having moved them back down to our flat. And I looked at the defrost instructions. It said in Spanish “This product must be cooked before being eaten.” ..woops