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The Spanish Lockdown due to Covid19 started in March 13 this year and we been at our homes till the end of May, finally we been allowed to throw an outdoors party at La Daurada in my hometown where I been doing David Tort & Friends the last 6 years. Obviously this 2020 it’s being a weird and difficult one, and last Wednesday June 24th we made it happen, the response was unreal. Obviously with all the measures we’ve been able to set up 34 vip tables where everyone been together with their families and friends, let’s keepo safe and strong, but nothing’s gonna stop our right to dance and be social, even if we can’t give a hug to our friends in the other table right next to you, we’re a global family and music’s gonna keep us stronger than ever. Much love! El bloqueo Español debido al Covid19 comenzó el 13 de marzo de este año y estuvimos en nuestras casas hasta finales de mayo, finalmente se nos permitió hacer una fiesta al aire libre en La Daurada en mi ciudad natal donde estuve haciendo David Tort & Friends los últimos 6 años. Obviamente este 2020 está siendo extraño y difícil, y el pasado miércoles 24 de junio lo hicimos realidad, la respuesta fue irreal. Obviamente, con todas las medidas, hemos podido establecer 34 mesas vip donde todos estuvieron juntos con sus familias y amigos, mantengámonos seguros y fuertes, pero nada va a detener nuestro derecho a bailar y ser sociables, incluso si no podemos darles un abrazo a nuestros amigos en la mesa de al lado, somos una familia global y la música nos mantendrá más fuertes que nunca. ¡Mucho amor! Get @HoTLrecords latest releases: David Tort - Afraid Of The Dark: https://smarturl.it/HoTL107 Discoplex & Squ4re - That Feeling ep: https://smarturl.it/HoTL108 Roger-M - House Freaka: https://smarturl.it/HoTL106 www.hotlrecords.com www.facebook.com/hotlrecords www.twitter.com/hotlrecords www.instagram.com/hotlrecords @hotlrecords www.davidtort.eu www.facebook.com/davidtort www.twitter.com/davidtort www.youtube.com/davidtortofficial www.instagram.com/davidtortofficial
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.
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 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 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.
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 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
Today Shampoo and Donkeys Day Forty one of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com The Miba Hotel and Restaurant mentioned: https://hotelmiba.com/ Day 41 Shampoo and Donkeys It is day 41 of our Spanish Lockdown and I should not have mentioned Noah as today it has poured with rain all day, everywhere is damp and miserable. The Mediterranean does not do wet days very well. In a country like the UK when we are used to miserable wet weather, even in the height of summer, there is always some kind of inside activity to do, here it is all about the beach or walking, cycling, climbing, getting outdoors. True if you are in a big city like Granada or Malaga you can or rather could go to a museum but that is about your lot. There are some very odd perceptions of Spain, I remember a few years ago my mother came to visit with my stepfather and my sister Ann accompanied them on the visit. It was a horrible rainy day when they arrived, something that I think surprised them both. They had come for a week but just packed the bare essentials, I sorted out my mother’s list of extras from our end. “Do they have paracetamol in Spain?” was the first thing my mother asked. Well yes they do, but I have to go to the pharmacy and get some for you as you cannot buy anything that is considered medicine from a supermarket or corner shop. That includes indigestion tablets, cold remedies, cough syrup. The only thing you will find in the supermarket are sticking plasters and condoms .. everything else is at the pharmacy and prices vary from expensive to very expensive. Next question.. “I use Loreal hair shampoo can you get that for me?” I went to the hypermarket and called my mother. “OK which one do you want?” She told me what she bought in the UK and then said “I don’t suppose they have Loreal?” The answer was yes the do and the type you want. She seemed surprised that there was such a choice. I discovered why when we were driving them back to the village. Malaga is a fairly ugly sprawl of a city, the old centre is beautiful but around it have grown endless blocks of flats that lack any outward charm, it reminds me a bit of the dreary suburbs of Paris in that respect. My mother looked out of the window of the car down at the urban sprawl below. “What ever is this place?” she said. I replied “That’s Malaga.” “But I thought Malaga was a little fishing village.” And there in that single line sums up the perception a lot of Brits have of Spain. It’s all, to borrow the original description of this Podcast.. Sangria, straw donkeys and those oversized Mexican sombreros with heart sign Benidorm on the rim. Our friends Shirley and Colin came to visit when we had just bought our new home. Shirley called me some months before and said she would like to surprise Chris, so we arranged that they would stay at a local hotel and I would divert Chris from our regular trip to the house to check on the building work on the guise that we should have a coffee at the hotel. On the way to the house I said let’s pull over and have a nice coffee in the Hotel and Restaurant Miba. “Why?” .. I suggested that it just might be nice to do, he was suspicious but pulled the car over. Shirley and Colin hid behind a piece of rather tasteful sculpture but with their backs to the entrance of the bar. We sat just a row of armchairs down from them. I said to Chris, “Can you see the elephant in the room.” He said “I don’t think Matilde has any sculptures of elephants in the hotel.” “No,” I said “look around.” Well those two in front of us look a bit like Shirley and Colin… and at that moment Shirley turned around.. you should have seen the look on Chris’ face. Well everybody burst into tears and started hugging each other, all with the bemused bar staff looking on. It was Shirley’s birthday treat to come and see us. On the day of her birthday we asked her if she wanted to go to the beach or shopping. “Shopping please.” I warned her that Spanish shops are not going to be the same as British ones. She said that she didn’t mind and that she would make the most of whatever we had. I knowing full well she was in for a big birthday surprise. We drove to Granada, as we got close to the enormous Nevada shopping centre, I thought she would realise where we were taking her, but good luck was on our side, her boss rang and she was deep in conversation as we drove down to the car park. The call ended and she said “this car park is posh.” We walked her the glass entrance that swept up with escalators to the first of two massive shopping floors. “Oh my god.” She said “I don’t believe it there is the biggest Zara I have evr seen, look a “Michael Kors, and over their..” she reeled off the names of all of her favourite shops she could see. Nevada is based more on those big American Shopping malls, with fountains, marble floors and giant TV screens showing previous exciting shopping events at the Mall. They were both gobsmacked. Colin said he had no idea that this was what Spain was like.. it is and always was more than sangria and straw donkeys.
Today Monkees and Post Day Forty of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 40 Monkees and Post It is day 40 of our Spanish Lockdown and if I was Noah in the Bible the floods would have gone, and I would be getting off my Ark by now. Today thin beardy boy, from the local courier delivered our spare microphone, as the other two have succumbed to the heat and humidity. At first, he gave me a large box full of wine, but that was for the house down the road, then he gave me the plastic package the microphone had arrived in. I undid the plastic, threw it away and washed my hands. The box the microphone was damaged at the side, if only the company I bought it from had packed it a bit better. You suddenly get that sinking feeling that things are going to get complicated. But plugging the thing in, it seems to work ok. I have a love hate relationship with microphones, it took me a long time to get used to using one. I was working in a well-paid but noisy and dull factory job when I jumped ship and joined the new radio commercial radio station Essex Radio. A few months earlier I had been given an opportunity to start working there on a Saturday Sports Show, for my travelling expenses and usually one of the presenters would all take us for pizza after the show. I can remember being so nervous that first Saturday morning that I threw up in the local park on the way to the railway station. I had to travel to Southend where the radio station was and that involved a tortuous journey halfway across Essex then back again toward the coast, stopping off at the delightful railway station that was Shenfield. Of course, none of the trains coincided with each other and you would spend sometimes almost an hour in a freezing cold waiting room waiting for a connection. So what had started as a Saturday job turned into full time freelance work, I was paid the paltry sum of £2 an hour but they told me they would also pay me net and pay my National Insurance, one of those was true. Years later I discovered my National Insurance wasn’t paid, so I lost a year in accrued state pension.. thanks Essex Radio. But wow what a job, there were popstars popping in like lovely Alyson Moyet who was just a kid then, with a face full of acne, or Davy Jones from the Monkees, .. what a complete fruit cake he was, he sort of clung to the walls when I took him down to the studio. I remember there was a large pile of Essex Radio stickers on a window ledge.. “Oh man can I have some of these?” I said “Yes help yourself.” ..he took the lot, I have no idea what he planned to do with fifty Essex Radio car stickers, but he filled both pockets full. Then carried on clinging to the walls till we got into the studio. One of the things the Radio Authority, called the IBA then made Essex Radio do, was a lot of local speech, this included a local farmer with whistling teeth who came in to record a local history spot called Essex tales. There were two very nice ladies from the local library, one with a guitar who came in to record a children’s spot. Nobody wanted the onerous task of recording all these worthy features, so it fell to me to make sure they were recorded and made ready for air each day, the rest of the time I engineered live shows with the presenter sitting opposite me just playing records and the odd jingle. It was a great time. Day 40 and I long for freedom, I read today thanks to a Facebook friend, that the Spanish Post Office has completely fallen over and there are thousands of pieces of undelivered mail. What was most surprising was that the Post Office is run not by a business Director but by a former Union Official turned Politician. I just assumed like the UK, the Post Office was run as a public company. In recent years there has been an explosion of parcel and mail carriers here and with the advent of email, I think it is only the Spanish love of pieces of paper that have kept Correos going. Our local post office is a tiny little place, inside it looks very much like the Blue Peter Appeal office, - awash with parcels, marked urgent and Amazon Prime on. They have even started using some of the offices as an overspill. Usually there are two members of staff peering into computer screens, slowly processing whatever the customer has asked for. Nothing in the Spanish post office is in any way efficient. It always involves all that peering and then reams of paper being printed off, followed by a lot of stamping of paper. My favourite lady in there is a tiny shrew of a woman who smells strongly of tobacco that brings down her precious post office stamp with such ferocity it sounds like a K.O. punch from Muhammed Ali. The man sitting next to her, again when you get to know him, he is a polite enough person, but he wears a constant pained expression, usually he will almost get to the end of his painful slow tapping at the computer when he will let out a great sigh, throw his hands in the air, and you know you are in for an even longer wait. Finally there is a feisty lady who is our delivery person. She drives into our estate entrance with speedy determination, jumping from the little yellow van, already wielding the keys to the post boxes at the bottom of the mountain, looking once at her sorting the mail into the little boxes we all have, it was like a scene out of that old Post Office film from the 1930s when they are sorting mail on the Mail Train. I’m not sure that it has changed that much from when the Spanish Post Office started in 1716, maybe that is the problem?
Today Boobies and Zoom Day Thirty nine of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 39 Boobies and Zoom It is day 39 of our Spanish Lockdown, last night brought more custard and more bad dreams. I seem to keep getting those high anxiety dreams where I am not in control. I have not really had them since I worked at the radio station. And it was about the radio station last night, I had to engineer a radio show, but I managed to take the radio station off air as I did not recognise the buttons that sent the studio to the transmitters. I imagine that we are all having similar dreams of not being in control, because I think this must be a bit like being in Prison, having decisions taken away from you about where you can go and what you can do. The Spanish Government have back tracked on the decision only to allow children to accompany adults to supermarkets, pharmacies and banks. My next door but two neighbour, Sylvia shouted across from her garden saying even before the “veerus” she would never entertain taking her children to a supermarket as they would run wild and pick up things from the shelves, which would now be dangerous for their health. She said in English.. “I do not have a word for our Government!” Sylvia cleans, she is very good cleaner, before she had her children she was a very good teacher, had passed her exams and taught in a local school. About a year or so ago she decided that she wanted to return to teaching. Now here in Spain she has to take all her exams again. Once you leave teaching your professional qualifications are struck off and if you return you have to all the exams again. And you must pass each part of those exams again, if you do the authority will decide where you can go and teach.. and it can be anywhere. It is a similar situation for the police, there are tough exams and you can posted anywhere. To me it seems really harsh and quite unfair, in contrast my niece Alice had to return back from France when her husband’s work started to be more difficult to find. She has good qualifications in Geography, so thought she would approach a local school to see if there was work. She got an interview, that went well. They told her “you can start now.” And they did mean now, that afternoon she found herself teaching in class for the first time with just the National Curriculum guide and a white board for company. And I bet she is a very good teacher just Sylvia. These are some of the cultural differences you come across when you start to scratch the surface of another country’s way of life. Britain will allow you to hold your professional qualification and be quite happy to employ you without all the jumping through hoops that Sylvia will need to do. Pilar with the big boobies has set up her own Estate Agent. We love Pilar she was one of those larger than life personalities that dominated the little village we lived in when we first came to Spain. I can’t think of more crazy time to begin such an enterprise, but she has some very interesting properties on her books. She had lived in Germany for a while, so saw how business was conducted there and believes that she take that experience and make something for herself. No need to take all her exams again. I am not sure what will happen to the property market anywhere in the world, let alone Spain, but this is a beautiful part of the world and the weather is mostly glorious, and I can imagine once the hiatus of the virus is over, a vaccine found and slowly we all get vaccinated, life will return to a new normal. Day 39 and it has been a long day, I did my first Zoom directed voiceover. Back in the UK I had got used to Skype where usually just one person directs you remotely. Zoom is something else, this time I had five people from the project, quite daunting, and then there was the technology that had to be tamed. I managed to stick some earbuds into one ear, hook the microphone onto the same side and then listen to myself through the actual headphones and record myself and keep notes of the takes and finally read the script. I did it, I was a bit stressed, so were the others at again having to be together remotely. There was interesting BBC article that people were finding Zoom meetings far more difficult than ordinary face-to-face meetings as you miss the social cues, facial expression. I had no visual link to the guys directing me as the computer was behind me. My studio laid out for a singular experience. I reckon I will need a monitor on the wall in future to get some of those important visual cues that were lacking today. Poor Chris has to spend the time being as quiet as possible. Although the studio is sound proofed and treated, if you open a door or put the air-conditioning on in the house you do hear it. Over the years I have got used to working a lot more from home. I don’t think I would want to go back to my life in the UK, where it took me longer to travel, and cost a fortune in rail fares and finding an overpriced sandwich in London, for the sake of a few hours work. I think a lot of you are thinking just the same, here in Spain where remote working was never a thing… well it is now … and it might just be one of the good things that come out of this pandemic – people get to spend more time with family and the ones they love and can work just as well away from the office.
Today Mary Poppins and Locusts Day Thirty eight of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 38 Mary Poppins and Locusts It is day 38 of our Spanish Lockdown and yesterday evening I made perfect custard. I usually just guestimate the ingredients but as Birds Custard is an expensive commodity here I actually followed the directions on the side.. and blow me you get great custard including the revolting skin which Chris likes and I hated so much at school. I think lockdown has now made the most mundane of things a highlight of the day. Whereas in a past time, maybe going to see the premiere of a west end play with a decent buffet press party with wine would be a good night, now it is custard. It is shameful; but being members of the press we got to see a great many plays and musicals, and for the life of me I can only remember a handful, sometimes I can only remember the free buffet. We were at the Prince Edward theatre, I think .. well a theatre with a glass balustrade outside at the front, seeing the first night of something or other, but I remember they laid on a sumptuous Chinese buffet. For Chris and I, this was going to be our main meal of the day. I made a bee line for the chicken satay, and the guy beside the spring rolls made a deliberate moving and turning around action as I headed his way. Shovelling satay onto my plate I noticed that it was the comedic actor Rowan Atkinson. who clearly believed I was some deranged fan heading for a one to one, when in reality I hadn’t even noticed him for the delicious looking chicken satay. Chris loathes chicken satay but is more than happy to eat Chinese and there was also plenty of free wine and soft drinks to be had. But now post lockdown our highlight is custard, at least I am unlikely to find Rowan Atkinson blocking my way in the kitchen, just three good legs cat who has a habit, like most cats, of being under your feet at just the wrong moment. Day 38 and we have had a plague of locusts, which seems about right for this post-apocalyptic times. The first came to an unfortunate end in the jaws of the three good legs cat, who chased the creature into next doors terrace and because the poor thing hadn’t warmed up in the morning sun, made easy prey. But don’t tell the cat, who after pawing and ripping the locust to pieces, sat regally and proudly as if he was one of the lions around Nelson’s column. Tonight we might watch a film, I forgot we have the latest Mary Poppins on the Apple TV. Signing into the ghastly new look, split in to three bits iTunes reminded me we had a number of films that we had purchased. We saw the theatrical Mary Poppins a number of times, I think at The London Palladium. The first was a pre-premiere press special, where the whole audience are press or press related and the poor cast have to perform in front of critics and drunken hacks. We went to the evening performance and there had been an unfortunate flying incident in the matinee, where the clever wire device that allowed Mary Poppins to fly off across the audience in the stalls, had become detached as she got half way across and it left her balancing precariously over the audience for an embarrassing amount of time as the cast continued in great earnest to wish God Speed Mary Poppins. In the end they wheeled her back to the stage and some wag of a hack cried out – look Mary Poppins returns. So the evening performance consisted of a quick black out at the appropriate moment so the actress playing Mary could jump off stage. I thought it was a great clever show, with an amazing moving set that effortlessly moved from the attic to the drawing room and pulled back to reveal the park. About a year later we went to a cast change, another free ticket and another buffet, but only two free glasses of wine allowed. The ensemble cast were all looking quite worn out compared to that first performance, and you could see they were only going through the motions. Chris had just finished a long day at work and had grabbed a sandwich to stave of hunger during the performance. Unfortunately, it must have been off because about a quarter way through he whispered that his stomach was churning, and he really needed to fart. I said to him wait to they pipe up with “Chim Chim charee.” And let it rip. By the interval he was in need of the loo. Knowing the theatre, we knew there was a little bar up in the gods that had a bog we had used before, usually the bar was deserted as the press all went to the main bar for the free drinks, of course forgetting there were paying audience in the theatre that night. We reached the bar and there was a collection of elderly ladies gathered around tables all drinking gin and tonics, dressed up to the nines, in fact they all looked is if they might have all been former Nannies themselves. Chris made a bolt for the toilet and I stood in the corner of the little bar trying not to look conspicuous. Amongst the interval chatter you could clearly hear Chris .. lets say evacuating enthusiastically, the dear ladies all doing their best to ignore the noise. One or two looking toward the toilet door with disgust. Chris did manage the second half, or Act Two as theatre folk like to call it, but it was a struggle and we sadly had to leave before the free buffet, going home hungry.
Today Mozzies and Orgies Day Thirty six of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 37 Mozzies and Orgies It is day 37 of our Spanish lockdown and I have been bitten on the bum, it happened the other night. I had thrown the duvet off as it had got to warm, half asleep and half aware of a mosquito in the room, he must have got me right between the cheeks. As he flew passed my ear I grabbed our handy fly killing aerosol, and sprayed there was the usually angry strangled high pitched buzzing and then silence. I don’t usually get effected by bites, usually just a bit of a red mark. But I woke up in the morning and my inner left cheek is stinging like hell. I found the culprit on the floor… a tiger Mosquito. These are nasty little creatures that have come over from Asia and are making their home here. They carry all sorts of exotic diseases with them. Here in Spain you can pretty much guarantee that something will bite or sting you. The place is alive with drunken bees, huge hornet wasps, flies, particularly those little biting flies, normal wasps, mosquitos and cochineal beetle larvae that are like tiny little gnats… never squash one on the wall as the excrete blood red mush.. cochineal colouring comes from.. well that beetle. I looked up what do to stop the pain - antihistamine.. well I haven’t got any of that, but I found some Essential oil of Lavender so I carefully dabbed some into the affected area … well that was a mistake. If you have ever seen that YouTube video of that idiot sticking a firework out of his arse and then lighting it .. running around screaming in pain.. well that was pretty much the same pain. Day 37 and Mr Cullens is arriving. Well to be precise “Luke” will sort your order. We have found an online English grocers based in Nerja called PJ Cullens. They have custard powder. I have been thinking about custard ever since my friend Paul was posted he was serving it every day with naughty stodgy puddings.. well he is Scottish! The wind has got up and I have put together my client Ryan’s first Podcast in which he interviews himself as he is under lockdown in a hotel room in Istanbul. His story of how he came to be a popular New York Times photo-journalist, then the financial crisis of 2008 ended that career, so slowly he has become a successful TV show host of Extreme Rides and Extreme Treks, a month ago he had started filming season four of Extreme Treks in Myanmar, then the covid 19 crisis ended that, at least for the moment. The door bell rings… her comes the custard. We have one of those video doorbells, the house lies lower on the mountain with stairs outside leading up to the street. I climbed the three flights of stairs and opened the door. “Hello mate Cullens delivery for you.” Wow an English voice I said where are you from he pointed out to sea, “Morocco” from his accent I would have guessed East London. It is unusual to hear many English voices here accept if you go to the beach and the Chiringuitos. So we have custard, a stodgy pudding and Robinsons Lemon Squash, Branston Pickle and all other manner of English comfort food. Their Supermarket in Nerja only opened a few months ago and in the space of a couple of weeks they have got a fully functioning online service – well done to them. I would love to see more supermarkets and restaurants offer online and take-away services here. They have never really bothered, there are just two restaurants listed on Just Eat for this area. The economy is completely reliant on the tourist trade, a short but fierce season between late June and mid September when tens of thousands swell the local population in an orgy of summer fun, stuffing their faces in the Chiringuitos, packing the beach out and spending nights in the bars and clubs boozing till early morning. The locals take a deep breath and the tills ring mostly with cash for three solid months. That income has, it would appear been ripped away from the local economy this year. This will have a very serious effect on the local economy, we can only hope the Government has a financial plan to keep these businesses afloat.
Today Scream and the Gas Board Day Thirty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 36 Scream and the Gas Board Day 36 of our Spanish lockdown and the wind is blowing across the sea and through the mountain. It can be very windy here, I believe before this coast was called the Costa Tropical it was called the Costa Wind. It rattles everything, plays musical notes through the glass balustrade and generally gets you down. Breakfast and then the three good legs cat walk on his lead, in which, yet again he fell down the mountain trying to get to next door. I think the problem with male cats if they have a wanderlust and see each door or fence as a new opportunity to increase their territory. As you know we try and keep him away from feral cats, they sometimes have cat leukaemia, which can be passed on by a bite or scratch. I returned and did an Audition for a voiceover agency. I do a lot of those and a bit like going for an acting audition – mostly you are wasting your time, with only a five percent success rate after an audition. At least I don’t have to travel somewhere and sit in front of bored producers. Petra Facetimed yesterday and said to me “You haven’t broken anything for a while.” Well that jinxed the afternoon when I discovered not one but both of our spare microphones had stopped working. Both I think have succumbed to the extremes of heat here, now only my Rode microphone is working OK – I have a feeling that because it is made in Australia they design them to cope with high 30s temperature. I have ordered another, it is coming from a third party company on Amazon, so fingers crossed. Yesterday I was talking about Mrs Findings knicker display to the workmen building the new part of my Secondary school. I left school at sixteen in 1977. Before the exams in the blazing heat of the summer we were given careers advice. This consisted of a sweaty bloke from the employment exchange trying to palm off ten apprenticeships to the Gas Board, I was tipped off by the boy ahead of my. “Now than.” He said “A lad like you could do well to get yourself an apprenticeship, there is a job for life waiting for you at the Gas Board sonny.” “I am awfully sorry but the smell of gas makes me vomit.” I said. “Oh..” he replied. “Do you have any other suggestions?” I asked. He rummaged around a sheaf of papers he was carrying, looking up at me every now and then. “Mmm not really.” - so that was my careers advice over with. It was my Grandfather who forced me to write to Marconi, the local electronics company in town.. in fact the home of radio. Mr Marconi had decided on Chelmsford as his first wireless factory, god knows why. I guess being Italian he just picked a town near London. I wrote a letter in fountain pen, on blue Basildon Bond writing paper, asking if there were any apprenticeship opportunities. Secretly hoping they would say no. Just my luck, they wrote to say please attend an induction test at their Writtle Road factory, about five minutes from where I lived..damn! I went along and there was a motley collection of similarly feckless teenagers all standing outside a classroom. We had a number of tests to carry out, simple maths, some drawing, and a practical test of assembling a unit with only the instructions and a diagram. I successfully completed this test and was surprised to discover I was the first to finish. I was allowed to leave and my fate was sealed, I was invited to join the company as a “Wireman Assembler.” I actually enjoyed my time at Marconi, they were strict but I learnt a great deal about electronics and I was really interested in the Broadcast section where they made Telecine machines, that turned film into TV pictures and of course television cameras.. huge coffins with a lens at one end and a black and white monitor the other, that moved around on compressed air. We got to play and see the cameras in action which was a lot of fun, so at the end of the first year you could decide which part of the company you would go and work in and I asked for Broadcast. They gave me Marine.. Marine! Building transceivers for Navy Ships.. I was also “shipped” to a far-off factory behind the local paper – The Essex Chronicle – the place was a dull, dismal dump full of middle aged ladies silently building circuit boards. Although I did well academically – I was really bored – I remember I went into the room with the flow solder machine in it. Where a conveyor belt took priceless circuit boards down into a vat of molten solder, where the board kissed the solder and the components were soldered onto the board. I didn’t know what I was doing, and mucked around with a few of the controls, then left. The next day there was a middle-aged lady scream from the room. Everybody gathered around to see if someone had fallen in the molten vat.. no, much worse. Middle-aged Marconi Lady had fed the machine with thousands of pounds worth of circuit boards and they had gone along their merry journey and straight down into the bubbling molten solder – disappearing into a burning mass. Nobody was blamed, but I handed in my notice. My foreman Mr Poulson said: “What are your plans?” “I’m going to work in radio.” He said “You daft pratt, you’ve got a job here for life!” As it turned out Marconi went bust some years later and it was radio that actually gave me the job for life.
Today Biscuits and knickers Day Thirty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 35 It is Sunday and day 35 of our Spanish Lockdown. We got up and had breakfast, and I finished my work in the studio. I needed to paint the bottom of the walls, I found some paint and it was still OK. Normal life seems so long ago now, we are now into our second month and I think I have had enough, I can understand why all those Americans have come out into the street and demanded that they can reopen for business. It does sound selfish, but there really is only so much lockdown that you can cope with. I really admire the Italians they have gone through hell and back. Day 35 and I was thinking about school and had I had been better academically would my life have been different? It probably would, I do remember working at the BBC and the subject of which University did you go to? Well I didn’t go to University at all and when I told my colleagues they all looked quite aghast. The BBC was a funny old place to work in, there were a lot of well-meaning souls who had never done a days work in their life. We used to have regular editorial meetings and everyone brought their copy of the Guardian to suggest news stories that we could perhaps cover on the radio station. I brought a copy of the Daily Mail, on the grounds that according to the research most of our listeners were lower middle class, cab drivers, shop workers and the like and love it or loath it, the Daily Mail would probably be their paper of choice, rather than The Guardian. It did not go down well, the only good thing about the Editorial Meetings that we got a tin of Rover Biscuits for each meeting to go with the tea and coffee. If it was an important meeting there were sandwiches with wine too. Unheard of at LBC. They did later, as a cost cutting exercise stop the wine and sandwiches, but the biscuits carried on. I am not going to blame my schooling for a lack of University education, I was quite a lazy feckless boy, always a C on rarely a B or B plus. But I don’t think I was stupid, it was just like a lot of kids at school, the one size fits all didn’t work with me. I neither fitted in or made many friends. After suffering a crazy sixties phonetic teaching experiment called ITA, after the first two years at school all I could read was this crazy language and not a word of ordinary English. I did catch up, many of my classmates did not though. Then onto Junior school and a fairly undistinguished passage through the school. The final year there were too many pupils for the two classes, and I along with 10 others draw the short straw. We were put with the year below us, sharing a classroom and Mr Pumphrey, Mr Pumphrey was one deeply unpleasant man. It was clear very early on in his career that he realised he had made a terrible mistake becoming a teacher, particularly at a school that served a council estate. So he had little interest in the year he was teaching, what he did was to devote two thirds of the blackboard to his year and a third to us. He would write a list of things we should quietly be doing whilst he taught the rest of the class. I spent a whole year doing, well nothing, I learnt, well nothing. I sat next to a really clever and gifted boy called Peter Chantry, he was doomed we were all doomed. We didn’t even get a chance to sit the school certificate it was a given that we would all go to Westlands Secondary Modern on the edge of the council estate. Westlands Secondary Modern was typical of deeply underperforming schools of its time. A hideous 1960’s building, roasting hot in summer and freezing cold in winter with a rag bag of teachers that wouldn’t look out of place in a St Trinians movie. My own real friend was Nick. He was six foot something and I was five foot nothing then, we made an odd pair. We both struggled with school, it wasn’t the best days of our life. The Headmaster was a brute, whose name I forget but managed to cane some poor boy at Assembly every morning, not the same poor boy I hasten to mention. There was hope on the horizon, the school was getting a brand new teaching block and upgraded status to Comprehensive, the trouble was the whole building process was going on around us, I remember that the wing that had the science labs, metal work and wood work rooms was shut and reformed. So for woodwork we had to learn theory.. and trust me there is only so much you can learning about sodding wood and dovetail joints and the like. We were luckier with science, they opened that part of the block early and we were treated to proper science labs, fully equipped a biology lab with the most amazing new teacher who inspired us all, she had come from industry and had worked for Bayer in Cambridge so really new her stuff. Unlike my form teacher – Mrs Finding who spent most of her teaching career sneaking off to the reprographics room to be banged senseless by fellow English teacher Mr Boiley. When she wasn’t spread across the Roneo machine she would balance on top of the radiator and show her knickers off to the workmen below, building our new teaching block. So it was really no surprise I didn’t go to University and I guess I was lucky that I got any kind of job at all, as it turned out I have had and continue to have a most wonderful and satisfying career.
Today Dead Man's Coat Day Thirty four of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 34 Dead man’s coat It is day 34 of our Spanish lockdown and the day started fractious, we bickered about something or other, so I took the three good legs cat for his walk to get some space. We are very, very lucky in that we have more than 150 square metres of terraces and even a narrow mountain garden that separates us from our neighbours. I have a workshop down in the pool room and Chris has his gym area up behind the garage. It allows us to stay home but enjoy some space. My favourite space that I also share with the cat, is our little voice studio that sits behind the house, between the mountain and the back wall. I have spent most of the day sticking back the acoustic tiles that were removed for the electrician when we had our building work done. Again this is not an easy process. I use contact adhesive glue to stick the tiles.. so had to source that from Amazon, but it came in about four days. Last night I watched the YouTube channel “Doing it Ourselves” about a family who are slowly restoring the magnificent French Chateau De La Basmaignee. They are having similar challenges and now can only do work with what they have around them, making the best use of things that are in their workshop, left over wood stain, re-purposing and cutting sand paper to fit the sander. Weirdly it has actually made their channel even more watchable, the place is extraordinary, filled with old paintings and antiques, but also many rooms are in a stately ruin. There was a bit where they had to shovel tons of pigeon shite from the attic, celebrating by raising up their cherry picker to the top of the roof and attaching the Chateau flag to the flag pole. It looked very dangerous, very good TV. I find myself more and more vicariously living my life through others. I guess being trapped inside for most of the time I am longing to get out, go to the shops, eat at a restaurant, do all the normal social things again. We watched Foxes Afloat, two guys on a narrowboat who are having to move to get water. The whole of the British canal system is on Lockdown and you can only move your boat for essential reasons. But their channel is, well normal, but hugely enjoyable. Colin one of the guys on the narrowboat has a natural talent for photography and his drone shots over the rolling English countryside are spectacular. I try very hard to make the weekends different, spending less time on the internet and getting out in the garden or, today repurposing an IKEA unit for our little studio. We learnt today that one of our colleagues from LBC had died of Motor Neurone Disease. I dearly loved Steve Butterick he was one of the most affable men I have ever met and more laid back than Dylan the rabbit in The Magic Roundabout. He had a soft laughing face, just like Dylan too. Somehow he contrived to take the whole of Wimbledon off from work every year, he loved tennis and used to go and work for Radio Wimbledon the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club’s own radio station. He was also one of the most frugal men I have ever met. We were once working together and he told me he had seen a carpet in pretty good nick in a skip outside some business or other. He decided to return later in the evening and retrieve it. It nearly killed him pulling out the carpet from the skip and then he had to drag it back home.. and then laid it in one of his rooms. Another time he turned up in a very natty suit. “Where did you buy that suit?” I asked “From a charity shop.” He replied. Now this would have been the 1990’s before Charity Shops became cool. I said it looked like a drug dealers’ suit. “Funny you should say that as I think I have found a bullet hole in it.” He was joking but there was a very suspicious hole right by the breast pocket, I would imagine the work of a moth. Motor Neurone is a foul disease, Chris’ mum died from it, her demise was quick. It began by her having trouble swallowing food, it ended with her in a wheelchair. Mercifully she died in hospital of a heart attack. Death and of course taxes are inevitable we hear today that the Spanish Prime Minister does not think bars or restaurants will begin operating until the end of this year. It all sounds a bit bleak again, but there is hope from the 26th April he will allow children out to exercise and play, if anything the children have shown us adults how to behave, they have stayed at home drawn rainbows, sent messages of love and support to the vulnerable, sung songs and embraced the virtual world that we now live in.
Today Pigs and Puppies Day Thirty three of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 33 Pigs and Puppies It is day 33 of our Spanish Lockdown and the day dawned gloomy and it was again raining slightly. This is unusual weather, many of the plants in the garden are looking a bit sad, not only are they recently planted but they are clearly not enjoying the rain. Down below onto the mountain side where the cactus grow, the most amazing thing has happened we have sweet peas growing up and around the cactus. I have never seen that here before and it brings a weird incongruous mixture of the Mediterranean and English country garden. Three good legs cat has learnt how to balance himself at the end of the swimming pool and escape down to that garden on his own. We have a child gate that normally prevents him from going AWOL. He has yet to fall in the pool and has chosen the end that is 1.7 Metres deep. I have moved a Moroccan lantern closer to the edge of the pool to try and stop him. The other day we heard a grunting sound from outside the house. We suspect that the wild boars that live on the far side of the estate have started to move in, in search of food. Awe you are probably saying to yourself ..sweet little piggies. Wild boars are not little or sweet, they are bad tempered and will attack and take a chunk out of your leg if you are not careful. The best defence is to run or jump up to something they can’t reach like a wall. They also cause quite a lot of damage in the countryside, rooting up crops and generally making a mess. In the village of a Sunday morning we would hear gunshot as the locals went in search of a suckling roast pig for the dinner table. Here we let them be, they live in the undergrowth around the baranco and that’s where I would like them to stay. Back in the year 2000 we thought our old neighbours from the UK were mad buying not one but two houses in the little village of Frigiliana. We had already been to inspect what would be their final home and were amused to discover the first room of the house was reserved for the donkey. The burro was and is an important animal. Even now in Frigiliana the only way to get building materials up the steep winding steps of the narrow lanes in the village is by donkey. I am a loss to work out just why Spain has such a poor reputation for animal welfare. It is getting a lot better and Mascotas – as pets are called here, have a much better life. We have a big pet superstore in the main town and it is full of treats and high quality food for your pet. I wonder if the harshness toward some animals is that they are just there for a purpose.. the donkey just to haul building materials and the like, the dog to be an ‘burglar alarm’ for the property. This is a phenomena we came across living in the village. Locals with property in the countryside would station a fierce dog in the grounds, sometimes only feeding the brute once or twice a week. We have one such beast as you leave the top of the estate into the mountains. We called him fluffy, after the three headed dog in Harry Potter. You are best to avoid his gaze, he comes lumerping down the drive way and throws his mighty gait at the..gate making the fencing shake all the way down the drive. He has a deep and very threatening growl, that turns into a full on bark if he catches your eye. He got out at least once, unfortunately at the same time our President was walking his little dog. Fluffy ripped the poor animal to pieces in front of its owner. Now you would think this would be front page news, but I feel the Spanish just shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. Younger Spanish seem to have a different attitude to animals. The daughter of my dear Spanish friend Maria came running up to us once when we were having coffee in the town. “Mama I have found puppies.” She said in Spanish “What do you mean?” Maria asked. Her daughter got out her mobile phone and showed us the photo she had just taken. There amongst the rubbish of one of the shared bins was a small box with I would guess six dear little pups. I don’t know what goes through the mind of anyone who would do that to a litter of puppies. Her daughter said she had called the police, I thought well good luck with that.. but no, suddenly the phone rang, it was the local police to say they were horrified and had got the pups to safety and were waiting for the local animal welfare charity to pick them up. Her mother turned to me and said. “The people who do this sort of thing are bastards.. is that the right English word?’ I replied “Yes it is.” The elephant in the room here in Spain has to be bullfighting. We have watched one bullfight, only on the TV. I have to say I found the whole affair distasteful. The Picadors spend some time chasing the bull on horseback sticking spears in the creature till it is bleeding, confused, weary and angry all at the same time, then the Matador makes his appearance. The only good thing I saw was at the end the Matador made quick work of dispatching the bull. Rather like horse racing in the UK, there is a lot of money in bull fights and most towns have very fine bullrings – Granada amongst them, paid for often by let us say very influential members of society. The Spanish I meet are either in favour of bull fighting or hate it with a vengeance and want it stopped. I am in the latter category. So day 33 comes to a busy close, I have been working all day, I am looking forward to an evening relaxing, I am planning to make an apple pie.. still no custard yet though.
Today Quiz and Crazies Day Thirty two of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 32 Quiz and crazies It is day 32 of our Spanish lockdown, three good legs cat managed to have at least a couple of his fits before breakfast. They have the look of an epileptic fit but are caused by him catching the painful part of his hip. Last night we watched a great deal of television, we don’t usually binge watch anything. We caught a bit of Paul O’Grady looking after some poor sick dog that seemed to have a similar problem to three good legs cat. The dog had an operation to remove the piece of hip that was causing him pain, and was much better. Normally we would go to the vet and sort out an operation, but only emergency visits to the vet are allowed and our neighbour Lena was stopped by the Guardia taking her dog to the vet as she went to the vet in Almuñecar which isn’t our local town. So the cat will have to wait to restrictions are lifted enough to get him to the vet.. it is a daily worry though. The ITV drama “Quiz” was on, fascinating and well produced, it told the story of the Major and the coughing cheat that might have won him a million pounds on Millionaire back in 2001. It did remind us both of the days on radio when we wrote quizzes. I must have written at least ten thousand questions over the year we did a daily quiz. The cheats, the quiz crazies and the downright stupid took part. It was a hard job to research the questions, get the mix right of different types of questions on a wide variety of subjects. Contestants had to answer as many questions over sixty seconds as they could, highest score went on to a £100,000 prize live in the studio. The prize was insured by one of those game companies. It consisted of 300 envelopes and the contestant had to think of a number and that numbered envelope would be opened with a one in three hundred chance of winning. On one particular evening we had a listener who had done very well and was through to the final. I greeted him at reception took him upstairs to the studios, got him coffee and ran through the process with him. We also videoed the whole thing for security and to use on the, then new social media of YouTube. We encouraged contestants to talk over their decision making process, he had two choices in mind, number 32 which was the door number of his childhood home and number 24 his girlfriend’s lucky number. In the end he chose 32 – he opened the envelope and bad luck no prize. The Host, the lovely Gary King said “Why don’t you open envelope number 24, your girlfriends lucky number.” He tore the envelope open and just stared at it. I was behind the glass watching and notice him go ashen grey and start to sway. He was quite a big guy and the thought of him passing out under the studio table was quite a worry. “Are you OK?” said Gary, the guy pushed the paper over to him .. it read congratulations you have won £100,000. It made great radio, we went to an ad break and I had to physically help him out the studio by now he was a mass of sweat, I got someone to get him some water. I felt terrible, this poor guy, I knew our Programme Director would be thrilled because it was such good radio. But in the process, we had pretty much ruined this man’s life. I asked the crumpled wreck that was now sitting in the sofa if he wanted anything. He murmured “need a drink, need a drink.” “Here you go.” I said passing him the water. “No I need a f**** drink, C**** she will kill me, what am I going to do?” he started whimpering. “I will get you a car and you can go anywhere you want in London and drown your sorrows.” ..more whimpering but he nodded his head. I called Lewis Day, “get me a cab asap.” Within five minutes a Mercedes was waiting outside. I helped him into the cab… and never saw the poor chap ever again. Looking back I should have felt bad for him, but over the months we had, had some hideous contestants who frankly ruined my baby. It was my mechanic.. the rules of the quiz, and I received a constant barrage of Emails from listeners correcting, usually wrongly, the answers on the card. It was a real insight into the dark world of the quizzers. Day 32 and I haven’t achieved that much, despite sitting here at the computer all day. I have managed to listen to The Ryan Pyle Podcast our new clients work, he is a very interesting man who spends his life as a nomad; extreme trekking around the world.. well nomadic except for a BBC TV film crew in tow with him. I am really looking forward to working with him, he is stuck in a hotel room in Istanbul at the moment trying not to go too crazy. I spoke to our lovely Spanish neighbour this morning, shouting from our garden to her window, she says. “The kids are going crazy, they go from running around to total boredom, I don’t know what to do.” It is sending us all crazy but if the world can hold its breath just a bit longer we can at least prevent the health services collapsing. In the short term drugs that can help treat the virus are starting to be trialled and maybe we are only a year or so away from a vaccine.. before we all go crazy.
Today Custard and Daleks Day Thirty one of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 31 – Custard and Daleks It is Day 31 of our Spanish Lockdown; I am starting to get quite blurry eyed. All day peering into the new computer that arrived yesterday from China, has made me quite myopic. The first thing we did when it arrived is to wipe the whole thing down with alcohol, starting with the box it came in. I have to hand it to Apple their logistics are to be admired. The machine started in China moved the Chinese Export Zone and then flew to South Korea where it went on to Germany, from Germany to Portugal and from Portugal to Spain, it took more than two weeks. It does prove that many businesses are quite capable of operating within lockdown. The delivery driver left the parcel on the step and sat in his cab; I received an email to confirm delivery. Chris gets his computer to himself and has spent the day doing gym classes online, to begin with this felt a bit odd, now it is just a normal part of our daily routine. Read a Facebook post from our friend Paul Coia, he was the first voice that was heard on Channel Four television back in the UK when it began broadcasting in 1982. Channel Four started with a raft of most peculiar programmes, quite a lot of complaints from Mary Whitehouse at the time. There were also quite a few complaints about Paul too. Up to that time continuity announcers were plummy accent types who had been to Eton or Sandhurst. Paul was a Scot and, well sounded Scottish, ..outrageous! He posted that every night he was making Birds Custard and old-fashioned stodgy puddings he had also, out of boredom, discovered an Airfix Dalek kit that he was constructing. It had been a birthday present from the two of us more than 25 years ago.. and he had kept it all this time. I said “you idiot, it is worth a fortune still intact and boxed up.” I am really missing our British comfort foods. But where to buy custard locally? The local town is a custard free zone. Spanish puddings are flan, arroz con leche, tarta de queso, and that is about it. The flan is like a crème caramel without the exciting crunchy top, arroz is a very very sweet rice pudding and the tarta a kind of really quite nice cheesecake, but less sweet than its American cousin and no biscuit base either. If you want something else you need to go to a posh restaurant where you will find chocolate desserts, fruit pies and the like. When we first came to Spain, I thought Spanish chocolate was disgusting, it had a lot less cocoa powder and was a poor product. That has all changed and the big brands and of course Lidl’s own chocolate have vastly improved the offering and choice. When I was a child, sweets were a weekly treat, the three of us would go to the local cooperative shop and choose one item to the value of sixpence .. about two and half pence. We were always greeted by the friendly, over friendly Manager of the store who always came out to greet us, often lifting me up to pick something from a higher shelf. Sometimes he would let us have extra sweets as a special treat. What a nice man I thought. I was very sad when one day he suddenly disappeared as he was so kind to us. We were told that there had been some sort of bookkeeping problem and the Cooperative had sacked him. Years later I realised the truth and just why he was so tactile and generous. Day 31 and our thoughts have turned to custard. At school I hated custard it used to be served in great aluminium jugs and had a thick slimy skin on it. To be honest I hated school dinners, I have never cared for boiled potatoes and the half cooked mouldy spuds that my infant school served up were quite disgusting, rather like my father’s dinner time rules, you were not allowed to leave the table until you had finished your meal and one particular Dinner Lady delighted in bullying the children into eating everything on their plate. To this day I still avoid plain boiled potatoes. Spanish spuds are different, they really taste potatoey – actually a lot of fruit and veg from the supermarket might not be perfectly formed, but all taste much better than the fruit and veg in Britain. It took me a while to realise that although a lot of the fruit and veg grown here is sent over to the UK.. it has to travel for quite a few days and is packed not quite ripe, so that it arrives still edible. Here the produce arrives sometimes within hours of being picked and ripened by the sun.. really delicious. My Uncle Peter who lived in Barcelona during the 1950s with my Spanish Aunt Isobel, used to boast that you haven’t eaten an orange unless you have picked it from the tree yourself. I used to think he was just showing off, but actually oranges have a completely different texture and taste, fresh from a tree. Aunty Isobel never turned up at our house without a gift. Our Spanish friends now are the same, just a little something to say thank you for inviting me. I remember once Uncle Peter’s car rolled up outside our house and Isobel emerged struggling with what looked like a great big black metal shield. “Ohh deeee ana, I have dragged this bluddy thing alf way across Spain, but I know you will like it, so much.” She gave the enormous metal shield to my mother. We all gathered round to take a look. It was repulsive, in the centre was a large brass cut out of a fish, possibly of the goldfish variety, then to one side a series of nylon cords were stuck to the metal representing reeds. It also weighed a ton. “You like no?” said Isobel. My mother always polite said.. “Yes it is very lovely and an original piece I would think?” “But of course.” said Isobel, “We Spanish produce some very fine works of art, you know.” My mother turned the monstrosity around to see if she could find the name of the Spanish artist who had, had the gaul to produce this ugliness. “Oh!” my mother exclaimed. Isobel came closer to see what she had found. We all looked and there on the back was a “Made in England” sticker! For many years the “monstrosity’ as it was called by us all, hung in our hallway and every time I used to pass it I would remind me of my crazy Spanish Aunt and her “horrible” gifts.
Today Rulers and Prince Caspian Day Thirty of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com t is day 30 of our Spanish Lockdown and the sun has shone through the high cloud. the weather though is unseasonably cool. The traffic this morning is noticeably noisier, there has been a very slight lifting of the Lockdown to allow some industries and some construction return to work. I have started recording my work for children's literacy, I am the computer voice for quizzes that tests whether a child has read a particular book. If they pass they can move on to the next book. I love books, I didn't always. When I went to school in the swinging sixties, teachers wore caftans and one thigh length boots and an impossibly small mini skirt that showed her teaching credentials every time she bent over to pick the chalk up from the blackboard. In the 1960s at school we were experimented on, the grandson of the man that gave us shorthand Sir Isaac Pitman, a gentleman by the name of Sir James Pitman decided to create an Initial Teaching Alphabet, and we were to be the first children the educational authorities would try it on. The language was based on sounds, had some similarities to English but looked nothing like it. As a result after two years at school not a single one of us could read a word of English, simple words like Exit or Entrance could have been written in hieroglyphics for all I could make out. My mother was alarmed, the school was alarmed and quietly dropped the scheme, leaving two whole years illiterate. So I couldn't read, well I could read a crazy 1960s language invented by some knighted knob. It was frustrating and in a fit of pique I picked a book up and decided to teach myself. It was a long and painful process, asking my mother what every other word was or meant. But after that first book I read another and another, until I had read the whole of the infant school library. It wasn't that expansive and even then excluded Enid Blyton. The school allowed me to cross the playground to the Junior School and raid their library. I think the infant school felt a sense of guilt that they had whole class loads of kids who could barely write their own name. When I eventually moved up to Junior School I was a voracious reader. Once in class I had reached an exciting part of Prince Caspian from the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis,.. Peter was about to get his head sliced off in battle.. when I was suddenly aware of my teacher Miss Hatfield standing over me. "This is supposed to be a maths lesson.. what are you doing Campen?" "Er reading Miss Hatfield." "Come up to the front of the class and bring 'that' book with you." The whole class watched as I walked to the front, they all knew what was coming and were, frankly looking forward to it. Miss Hatfield took the book from me and said. "This will be returned to the school library, you will not be allowed to just help yourself to books anymore." She then opened her drawer and took out her wooden ruler. "Hold out your left hand and make a fist" For an elderly spinster she would have made a very fine bowler at cricket. She rose up into the air her arm swinging backward and then suddenly down, the ruler hitting me across the knuckles of my hand, it bloody hurt. "Now leave the room and stand outside till I call you." I went outside and cried. Not just with the incredible stinging pain that my knuckles were in but in the total frustration of knowing I couldn't wander the school library anymore. My mother told me I shouldn't be reading in class during a maths lesson. But she took it upon herself to take me and my two sisters regularly to the public library, allowing to choose books from the children's library and by using her ticket, books from the adult library too. Ten years old and I was reading the works of Isaac Asimov, excellent stories like The Bicentennial Man.."A Robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." So I suppose I owe something to todays generation of children so that they too get to enjoy reading books as much as I did when I was a child. Day 30 and this morning we are cleaning the pool with the manual pool vacuum. A beastie of a thing, that has a heavy square metal suction attachment and a long blue plastic tube that twists itself around everyone and everything. The pool water is sucked up from the end and then recirculated through the filter, which catches any dirt from the bottom of the pool. Three good legs cat watched on from the pool side with great interest, occasionally threatening to jump in and catch the blue snake that was moving up and down as Chris manipulated the steel pole the vacuum was attached to. The Mayor of Lanjaron .. the place where the mineral water comes from. Has dipped into the Town Hall coffers and ruled that every citizen in the town will have a face mask and gloves, given to them every week. A few days ago the conservative Mayor of Motril complained bitterly that the Province, also conservative run, were going to stop the displays of appreciation toward the local Police. The Secretary of State for Security Sandra Garcia had put out the instruction. The first people to say they were going to ignore our Sandra were actually members of the Police! The whole thing snowballed and came to bite Ms Sandra Garcia on the bum. The prohibition has been dropped and the citizens of this area can wave flags, sing songs from their balconies and the Police can also wish children happy birthday whilst they are confined to their houses, the police can continue also to wave at the crowds and sound their sirens. A wonderful people powered, democratic U-turn. The Mayors of all the villages and towns here have a great deal of autonomy. Their rule is God. Sometimes it is misused, like naming a local street after a family member or indulging themselves in pet schemes. One local Mayor has been very keen to see the municipal market disappear. There is a theory that she has been approached by a supermarket chain that fancies the plot the market is on for their next superstore. Although the market hasn't been built for long, it was poorly constructed and in danger of falling down. But there has been a lot of local opposition to the whole scheme, with people demonstrating in the street, social media videos made etc. So the Mayor waited to Lockdown and brought in the bulldozers, and has raised the whole market to the ground. Mayors have a great deal of autonomy. And of course nobody could take to the streets to demonstrate, the deed had been done and the market traders have been put out of work. Day 30 is ending and I not convinced we are even half way through this, I am equally convinced that the whole world will have to keep the rules of distance until a vaccine is found, these are the new rules, .. and we are getting used to it.
Today Tuna and potties Day twenty nine of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com Day 29 of our Spanish Lockdown, we woke to horrible weather, thick fog, pouring rain and a damp chill to the air. When we get this kind of weather it always reminds me of a disastrous holiday I went on with my father, his new wife two toddlers and a baby, my fathers second attempt at a family. I had reached a crisis point in my career. Career huh! I worked on a Production line that made Britvic 55 and Pepsi Cola. It was sweaty dirty work, I still bear some of the scars where broken bottles had sliced into my hands, the place was crawling with cockroaches. My mother had got me the job following unemployment during the famous winter of discontent, then a rubbish job at a Petrol station, that I hated so much I used to turn the lights off on the forecourt in the hope I could quietly sit and listen to the radio. That worked well until a surprise visit from my Manager. A written warning and punished by having to clean the car wash out.. yuk. And for about a month after I had to take in all the tankers, a foul job that meant climbing a ladder on the side of the lorry then balancing on top of the tanker with a dipstick to take the readings of how much was actually in the tanker. Finally the worst punishment of all .. cleaning the ladies lavatory.. girls you are disgusting, the worst thing the men ever did was to pee on the floor, that just needed a bucket of water with bleach to clean. At least once a week in the ladies you would encounter human solids on the floor. Judy who was the Assistant Manager said to me one day, you are going to need this today.. she handed me one of those ice scrappers from the shop. I entered the ladies with trepidation .. and there stuck to the wall was a used tampon.. the ice scrapper was needed to remove it. More disgusting is that once I had finished Judy put the ice scraper back on the shelf. .. I resigned after that. So I went to work on a noisy, deafeningly noisy production line. You had to wear ear protectors as the crash of bottle against bottle was so loud. But the money was really good. By that time I was working at the weekend for the local commercial radio station "Essex Radio." They offered me a job at £2.00 an hour, I was earning nearly £5 at Britvic. So I needed time to think; so a holiday in Anglesey with my fathers new family seemed just the ticket. I can't say we saw very much of Anglesey. Every day it persisted down with rain, it was foggy, so any mountains to be seen, were hidden away. Worse, my father decided that it would be fun to go camping. If anyone has seen that clip from the Carry On film where Sid James and Bernie Breslaw put the tent up. It was just like that, only worse, the rain and wind combined meant that the rain actually got inside the tent, we spent most of the time huddled around the heater. One of the rare trips out in the hire car, in the pouring freezing rain with my father having to back the car into the tent so we could jump in through the hatchback boot turned to disaster. One of my dads kids was potty training, we were just leaving Bangor when the child announced they needed the potty for "big ones." .. so we sat with a steaming potty until we left the environs of the town and my stepmother Linda, threw the contents out of the car window. Sitting on my own in the front of the car, with the family in the tent, I made the decision to quit the bottling factory and take the job at the radio station. It's funny how a bit of bad weather can bring back a flood of memories. So Day 29, - Easter Monday back in the UK - started quite poorly. We also had to brave the bank, so armed with an authorisation paper we went to the bank, there was a long queue of masked Salobreñians waiting outside. Luckily the cash machine was working and we both withdrew the maximum amount and then fled. Ricardo the electrician turned up for his money, he had fixed new air conditioning and an unrelated cable fault, put a new lightning detector and electrical surge detector in. He also bought with him a lovely bottle of Chlorine. "I found only one place open and have bought this for you." So the day improved. Many places are closed even the ones that are allowed to be open. Finding shops shut even without a pandemic is de rigueur here in Spain. When you do actually find a place open there can be a complete lack of any sales technique. My friend Petra from the big house went to have her iPhone repaired. The salesman said, "ah this is facil, I can do this in maybe five minutes." "Excellent," said Petra "I will wait." the salesman looked at her and then looked up at the clock with was at ten to two and looked back at her. "We close for lunch, come back at five." She knew that arguing that a job that takes five minutes could be done 'before lunch.' would be a waste of time, so she returned at 5.30pm. "Ah here is your iphone.. it is broken." He had failed to mend the phone and handed it back to her. "That will be forty euros please!" "But you havn’t fixed it." There followed a long argument in which Petra left the shop minus her broken phone. Chris bought a tin of tuna from the local superstore, one of those large tins that had a little key you pull to open it, ..the key broke off, we had the receipt so returned to the shop, stood in a long painful queue at customer services and Chris placed the tin onto the counter. The woman picked it up, holding it between forefinger and thumb. "What is wrong with this tin?" "The key has broken off." Chris said. She slowly inspected the damage, let out an annoyed sigh and said "ticket!" "here you go." Chris handed the receipt over and she walked away from the two of us toward her colleague, they poured over the receipt, inspecting it like a archaeologist would a piece of dead sea scroll. She returned, another sigh, she punched the till and returned the four euros it had cost, but not before producing two receipts which she stapled together... welcome to Spanish customer services. Our friends David and Colin had arranged for someone to come and give them a quote to fix their pool. Manuel arrived and inspected the work. "This will take little time to fix, I shall return Mañana." A few weeks later we returned to the Super Store to buy more tuna. Chris picked a tin up from the shelf... "I don't believe it." he said .. it was the same tin of tuna we returned - minus its key! Meanwhile at David and Colin's and six months later - they were relaxing by the pool and heard a noise, somebody was crashing around in the pool room. It was Manuel who had returned to fix the fault. David, incredulous said "We had that fixed months ago." Manuel looked surprised. "But you asked me to do it!" .. Jen and Jack had a similar experience at the Super Store, they bought some garden furniture. Tied it to the roof of their car. Half way down the motorway the furniture it all fell off onto the motorway. Stupidly Jen stopped the traffic and managed to put it back on the car roof. Cheekily they returned it, got their money back. A week later she said they were back in the super store "And they had put it back on display for sale, even the broken bits!" Finally our friend bought a thirty thousand Euro Landrover from a main dealer. She had been a customer of theirs for many years. The Salesman handed her the keys and came close and whispered in her ear. "I have left a special present for you on the back seat." Thinking that it might be a set of mats or a tool box, she opened the back door of her new car to discover some sachets of car wash. But everything has changed recently, suddenly shop assistants have started to smile at you. At the Super Store they are all wearing teeshirts that say in Spanish "Can I Help You." Many offer free delivery.. unheard of until recently I have a suspicion why Spain has improved so much. We are going to spend the evening catching up on some Amazon Prime TV, yes Amazon Prime arrived in Spain about a year ago, complete with free delivery, easy returns and streaming TV.
Today Villa Paula and the rats Day twenty eight of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today impossible hair and toads. Day twenty seven of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today Flash Harry and the Poof test. Day twenty six of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today Sick dogs and angry cats. Day twenty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today Ice cream and drains Day twenty four of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today Fiestas and Freddie Mercury Day twenty three of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today shocking electricity and the bright yellow car. Day twenty two of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Today scary Cheesecakes and Church Bells. Day twenty one of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day nineteen of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. Today 'filthy fincas and feral cats' To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day eighteen of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. Today 'the toothless cat and the blood spattered kid!' To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day seventeen of the Spanish Lockdown, the diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. Today all fur coat and no knickers To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day sixteen of the Spanish Lockdown, the diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped. Today drinking gin at 7am and the greatest hits of Queen. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day fifteen of the Spanish Lockdown, the diary of a Brit in southern Spain and how the Corona virus - Covid 19 has stopped all normal life. Today beautiful rats and hot tubs. To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
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