Tealess for hours

A few years ago I used to take photos of houses and write the descriptions for an estate agency here in Spain. Often, if it were a house in the countryside, the sellers would tell me how they had spent loads of money on putting in piped water or connecting the house to the electricity grid. I had to be careful how I told them that all that money was irrecoverable. If they hadn't done it the house would have been worth less – off grid houses or with tanked rather than live water are less popular than the connected ones - but nobody pays extra because a house has electric and water. When you click the switch you expect the current to flow, when you open the tap there should be water. Utilities, like roofs, are things you expect in a house.

There was a little piece on the Town Hall website the other day about improving the water supply to some little hamlet and there was a picture of the pipe. It wasn't a very big pipe maybe 6 or 7cms in diameter. It wasn't very high tech either, just some thickish looking plastic pipe. I suppose that something similar feeds the water to our house. Yesterday though it didn't.

If there is leak on the householder's side of the water meter you call a plumber. If it's on the other side then you call the bloke who drives around in a big white Jeep and works for the Town Hall. He usually comes quickly, digs up the road and patches the leak. It happens from time to time.

I didn't worry too much when the tap was empty. The water pressure has been pathetic for a couple of weeks now and I presumed they were doing some routine maintenance to sort that out. Just to be safe though I sent a text to the Jeep man. I didn't ring because I didn't want to pester a man who might be, almost literally, up to his neck in it

Our Internet and phone connection had gone phut the day before. I suspected a general fault rather than a household problem. I used the WhatsApp group in the village to ask if other people were having problems. The answer was yes, which was both re-assuring and not at the same time. The phone and the internet connection came back. Somebody said a mast had collapsed but I don't know.

I must have been a bit too blasé about the water for Maggie's liking. She wasn't as confident as me. She used the same village WhatsApp group to ask about the water. Yes it was a general problem. A couple of hours later the water came sucking, blowing, popping and gurgling back. It was very cloudy and the pressure was pathetic.

We heat our water with a gas water heater powered by bottled gas. We chose gas because our rural electric supply is a bit on the feeble side. I thought we had the hot water supply secured but, this morning, the water pressure was so feeble that the water heater refused to kick into life. Cold shower or no shower were the options.

Civilization hanging by a thread or the delights of rural life in Spain?

Fallas in Elda

Spanish websites have improved no end in the time that we have been here. Nowadays it's nearly as easy to find something in Spanish as it is in English.

There are dishonourable exceptions of course. RENFE the state rail provider has a useless website. It may be possible to book a ticket and it may not but trying to find what trains go from where to where is impossible, so far as I can tell.

This being the case I had no worries about trying to find some information about the Fallas taking place in Elda this weekend. Google gave me the website and there was a skeletal but serviceable calendar. There wasn't much in the way of background information so if you didn't know what Fallas are then you would be a bit stymied but I did visit last year so I had a vague idea of how it all worked.

The basic idea is that a number of groups, comisiones, based on neighbourhoods build a falla. A falla is a sort of flammable tableau made of individual figures (which I think are called ninots) set against a built background. Usually the tableau represent a contemporary theme - maybe something political or sociological. Each Comisión also elects a series of "Carnival Queens" with a court of "ladies in waiting" and sends representatives, the mayordomos, to a central council which co-ordinates the whole shebang. There are activities all year round but the whole lot culminates with the tableau being built in the streets for a climactic weekend when there are parades, a mascletá (a sort of sound only firework display) and the burning of the tableau. The religious element, and there is nearly always a religious element in Spain, turns, I think, around San Crispín and San Crispiniano (The Henry V, Agincourt saints) the saintly brothers who are the patron saints of shoemakers. Shoemaking is an activity associated with Elda.

Last year I went looking for the various statues and found about four of the nine. I also followed a couple of the processions from their home base to a church but it was all a bit hit and miss. This year I thought to do it properly. So I tootled around the website and the Facebook page and eventually I found a timetable. Tomorrow, Sunday looked like a good day. I thought I could go to the mascletá at half past one and also wander around some of the fallas statues. I couldn't find the location of the individual fallas though and when I put the location of the mascletá into Google maps it came up with a blank. Another Google search and I found newspaper articles that gave me a clue as to the location but it had taken me a long, and frustrating, time.

Eventually I sent a snotty Facebook message to the Central Council something along the lines of "Do you want any tourists at your fallas? The answer has to be no. That's why there is no map of the location of the fallas and why the address of the mascletá isn't a real address. Ah of course, it's only for the people of Elda. The families with years of pure blood. I should have known". to give them their due they came back to me within a couple of hours with a little map and with a street name for each of the fallas and a comment to thank me for the message because it would help them improve the organisation.

So, if you have nothing much to do on the 18th of September and you are within striking distance of Elda I'll see you at the Fallas de Elda roundabout (Calle Juan Carlos I and Calle Jardines area) at half past one.

Political comment

I'm finding that I'm shouting at the telly and the radio more often recently. The politicians are talking more nonsense than usual but, more than that, one of them seems to have simply decided that none of it is really anything to do with him.

We don't have a proper government at the moment but we do have a Caretaker Government,  a Gobierno en funciones, run by the Partido Popular. Mariano Rajoy is the less than charismatic leader of the PP and Caretaker President. He's one of those blokes who appears to have almost no political personality. From time to time the news programmes show him out for a bit of exercise and he just looks wrong in badly co-ordinated sports clothes. If he abandons his suit for a jacket and trousers the jacket is too blue and the trousers too black. When he doesn't wear a tie he reminds me of that picture of John Major meeting the troops and wearing a ribbed pullover to ride around in a tank - completely out of his element. But to be fair, when I saw Mariano interviewed on a "come over to my house and let's cook something" type interview show he seemed a perfectly likeable bloke

In the UK the Speaker of the House of Commons is a party politician but, once they become Speaker, they try to be impartial. There is a similar position in the parliament here and Ana Pastor, from the same party as Rajoy, is currently the Presidenta del Congreso de los Dipuatdos. In the last, very short lived parliament, the equivalent position was taken by a bloke called Patxi López from the other side, the PSOE. When the Government has to explain itself before the MPs or diputados, it's the Presidente del Congreso who arranges the debate. Patxi tried, in the face of objections from the PP, to organise the debate when MPs wanted a Government response but when Ana should have done the same thing she prevaricated. There were mumblings about her lack of impartiality. The thing they wanted to talk about was an ex PP Minister, who had resigned, because he was suspected of having dodgy Panamanian bank accounts, taking up a position with the World Bank with obvious backing from the Caretaker Government. Mariano Rajoy said about that one that it was nothing to do with him. If Soria (the politician was called José Manuel Soria) wanted to apply for a "civil service" type job that was his right, completely up to him. I can see why Soria was interested though with a pay rate of 620€ per day. Rajoy had nothing to say about the impartiality of the Presidenta.

The ex Mayor of Valencia is a woman called Rita Barberá. She is one of hundreds, nay thousands, of PP politicians accused of corruption. In her case it's to do with illegal funding of her party. There are plenty of other politicians from the other parties being investigated for corruption but the majority stakeholders are definitely the PP. Even the party itself is caught up in a case for dodgy funding of a rebuilding programme at party HQ. But back to Rita; one of those larger than life characters that politics throws up from time to time. When she was defeated in the local elections to be mayor of Valencia her party popped her into the Upper House, the Senate. 

Spanish politicians have a sort of political immunity. They can't be tried by lower courts, just the Supreme Court, so that getting a prominent politician into the dock is a lengthy process. Rita resigned from the PP a couple of days ago but she is refusing to give up her seat in the Senate to maintain that protection.

As you may imagine the press wants to know what her (ex) party and particularly the Caretaker President have to say about the case. For days Mariano said nothing at all. He just kept quiet. This is one of his favourite tactics. Say nothing, see how things are going, maybe it will all go away. When he did speak his answer was that as Rita was no longer in the party he had no authority over her and it was absolutely nothing to do with him. Silly me, I thought that a President might have something to say about political corruption especially when the case is about illegal funding within his own party. I must be mistaken

Rajoy is a master of inaction but, to be honest, none of the leading politicians seem to be up to making a decision at the moment. We have a four way split. The centre left can't talk to the hard left because one is for talking with the Catalans about self determination. The party that doesn't seem able to decide whether it is left or right leaning has thrown its votes in with the PP this time though last time they did a deal with the Socialists. In return for their votes they demanded several concessions. One of the biggest was that the PP stomped on corruption. They haven't had a lot to say about Rita's shenanigans. The smaller regional parties can't join with either of the big parties again because of the stuff about Catalan independence. One of the two, apparently, workable options is that the centre left just abstains and so lets Rajoy back in. They have said no several times though. They say they can't stomach another Government headed by Rajoy. The other option is that Rajoy goes, that someone else takes over but his side are staying loyal at the moment.

I should mention that the PSOE, the biggest left leaning party, has a big corruption case going on at the moment too. That one involves two former Presidents of the Region of Andalucía. Those two did resign their political office and they are in court and fighting their corner. I don't remember feeling the need to shout at the radio when that story first broke.

Undressing and covering oneself in fake blood

I'm feeling a bit Sanjay Gandhi today - not because I've won a dodgy car building contract - but because I've been part of an enforced sterilization program. I didn't even offer a free portable radio.

Britons who live here are often very vocal in their complaints about how animals are treated in Spain. On a big scale the bullfights which kill horses and bulls in front of cheering crowds give them obvious ammunition. These sort of things no longer go unnoticed by lots of ordinary Spaniards either. Many Spanish people have no time for these hangovers from bear baiting times. Every time that the people of Tordesillas arm themselves with lances and sit astride their horses ready to cut down a bull they are harried by protestors. It's the same in Coria where the bull is peppered with little darts and then has his balls cut off. They no longer throw a live goat from the church tower in Manganeses de la Polvorosa to be caught in a fire fighter style blanket having bowed to public pressure. In Carpio del Tajo the they have not used live geese in their festival for over thirty years - nowadays the geese that they wrench the heads off, as they ride by on horses, are already well dead. Half naked protestors daubed with fake blood make it less comfortable for the bullfight crowds to get to their seats and so it goes on. Lots of the barbarism has been toned down but there are still plenty of spectacles which, at the very least, use the distress and suffering of animals as a form of supposed entertainment.

On a much smaller scale the expat rural Britons often have stories about puppies abandoned outside their homes, kittens thrown into rubbish bins and hunting dogs abandoned on the road when they are too old to keep up with the hares they are supposed to catch. Hunting, by your everyday Joe, is still very common in the countryside.Then of course there are, from time to time, stories in the British popular press about some donkey being terribly mistreated and most of us have a story about a horse, mule or dog tethered in the midday sun without shade or water.  On the other hand most Britons will add to that a story about other Britons who have abandoned dogs when they return to the UK as a reminder that Spaniards don't have the market cornered in mistreatment of animals.

Despite all of this apparent random cruelty there are lots of animal protection laws in Spain and they were recently beefed up which is probably why it's only in the recent past that people have started to be prosecuted. One of the reasons is that the perpetrators have made it impossible for the offence to be ignored. Post a video on YouTube or WhatsApp of setting fire to a cat and you can be pretty sure it will go viral. Shortly afterwards expect a house call from the Guardia. That was the case with a couple of twentyish year olds who had a whale of a time jumping on piglets and squashing and killing seventy of them in the process.

I remembered the piglet case from the news. There was another one about a bullfighter who had been mistreating a horse and as I Googled for the information I came across lots of newspaper articles along the line - "Guardia Civil shelves cruelty case", "Town Hall drops charges against man who arranged illegal dog fights" and so on. I wrote an article for the TIM magazine about catching song birds to eat and, there again, lots of the articles I read in my research talked about how the authorities turned a blind eye to illegal capture techniques. There is still an awful lot of acceptance of animal mistreatment in Spain though the idea that animals have no "rights" is far less prevalent than it once was.

Around here there are several animal rescue charities - lots are run by Britons. It's probably fair to say that dog rescue is the biggest area but I've been to both a horse and a primate rescue centre close by. Cats are often covered by the dog charities but Spanish thinking on cats is that, generally, they can take care of themselves. So whilst a loose dog will be hauled off to a charity for adoption or to the Town Hall dog pound nobody really takes much notice of the moggies unless they are being mistreated.

I may have mentioned that we took on a couple of cats recently. We got them from an association in Pinoso which is called Gatets sense llar del Pinós. The name is in the local Valencian language but it means something like Pinoso Kittens without a home.

Before we'd got the cats we had an occasional visitor to our garden, a big, mature, white, male cat. He was wary of us but semi approachable so we left out some dried cat food when we remembered. We hadn't seen him for a while but, as soon as we got the two rescue cats, he started to turn up regularly. There was a lot of screaming and bits of fur and cats refusing to come down from trees. The white cat even found a back way into the house so he could eat the food we'd left out for our two. We had a lot of fun with a hosepipe and I invested money in a water pistol. But Maggie had bigger plans. She borrowed a trap from Gatets; one can of Premium cat food and he was captured. And if you go back to the first sentence you will see who it was who got to take him to the vet where the castration was paid for by the local Town Hall via the Charity. I paid for the flea and parasite stuff though. He was obviously pretty sore and very wobbly as he came out of the carry box and made his way gingerly out of our garden.

September

It's pretty hot. Yesterday I went to Villena to have a look at the Moors and Christians parade. The parade started at 4pm and, according to the State Weather Agency, that was the exact time when the day's temperature reached its zenith  of 40.4ºC. Just for my mum that's 104ºF.

It's a bit unusual for it to be so warm in September. September is the month when Spain gets back to normal. The youngsters are going back to school, shops are back on regular opening hours, the Guardia Civil shelves its various traffic campaigns until either Christmas or the next long bank holiday weekend. On the telly the new series are getting under way and, on the radio, the journalists and DJs who have held the fort whilst the better known presenters take their holidays are going back to whatever it is they do when it's not July or August. League football is more or less back into full swing. The courts are about to go back into session too so we can look forward to a revival of all the corruption trials that have been on hold during the sandcastle and siesta season. It's not quite everyone who goes back to normal because there is a bit of a move to taking holidays, amongst groups like pensioners for instance, at the beginning of September when the weather is still good but the prices of accommodation and travel drop.

The politicians haven't had their usual long break. They've been in apocryphal darkened rooms with beer and sandwiches. We've had two General Elections one in December of 2015 and one in June of this year and in both cases the two traditionally big parties have found their number of parliamentary seats reduced because of the emergence of two new parliamentary groups. This means that nobody has a clear majority and the politicians have all been doing the it's my bat, my ball and I'm not playing. First the socialists had a go at forming a government and failed leading to the second General Election and we've just watched as the conservatives failed to form a government too. There's still talking to do and maybe they'll cobble something together but positions are so fixed that it looks unlikely. The general view of politicians, always bad, is at an all time low - the word vergüenza, disgrace or shame, is on everybody's lips. There are a couple of big local elections coming up which may lead to change but generally the pundits are talking about a third General Election. Spain's Constitution lays down a strict timetable for the holding of elections and without a change to the law, which is in the air but which needs all the parties to agree, the next general election will be held on Christmas Day. Can you imagine the turnout?

I'm still on holiday, or rather I'm not working. It's just about now that the various education courses are advertised but the start date of even the earliest courses won't be till the middle of this month and the majority will kick off at the beginning of October. It looks as though I'm going to be back with the same employers as last year which is not exactly a reason for rejoicing but it's an income and I need to earn some money. With a bit of luck I may also have a second little job teaching English at an academy in Pinoso. If it happens, and I have personal experience of the problems of getting new courses off the ground, it will be good to be working in my own community for a change.