Careful with That Axe, Eugene

Bétera, near Valencia, mid August, years ago. Our friends had taken us to join the crowd in the main street. We didn't quite know why. They weren't explaining and our Spanish wasn't up to asking. When the fireworks, hung from overhead lines, started to go off and shower the crowd with sparks and flame we knew what to do though. We retreated before the wall of fire. The end of the street was sealed, there was nowhere to go; hundreds of us cowered, cheek by jowl, knowing, or at least trusting, that the flames and sparks wouldn't reach us. And sputter out they did. 

The next night we went back to the same place to join in the fiesta. We noticed there were no parked cars and that all the windows were boarded up. As midnight approached our friends herded us back to the car and abandoned the town centre. We didn't know why. We found out though. After midnight gangs of young people wearing overalls and crash helmets, and with at least one fire extinguisher per group, just in case, mount a firefight using Roman candles. In Elche, on the Nit d'Alba, they used to do something similar. First the official firework display but later, much later, the same idea. Firework armed gangs battling it out.

The Day of the Innocents, a reminder of the day when the biblical Herod had all the male babies under two put to the sword to protect his crown from a potential usurper, Spaniards do what we Britons do on April 1st. In Ibi there is a bit of a fight that day. The Ibenses, like the Beterenses and Ilicitanos, use fireworks but first they go to work with flour and eggs. The Spanish word for flour is harina, the word in the local Valencian language is farina. The event is called els (the) Enfarinats (floury ones).There's more to it but, in brief, one group elects a mayor and other officials to run the town and another group takes exception to this coup and stages a counter coup. That's when the flour and eggs fly, the flares go off and the bangers and jumping  jacks bang and jump.

The first time I saw els Enfarinats in 2011 their fight evolved in front of the church in the old part of town. I watched from a safe distance. I thought it was bonkers. The second time, in 2016, I got in much closer at the risk of a camera dusted with flour and garnished with egg. I took a pal there in 2022, a couple of weeks ago. This time the fight wasn't in front of the church because the church square was one big building site. The battlefield had been moved to an ordinary looking street with a PA system blasting out reggaeton as the event got underway. There was a wire fence type enclosure around the battle zone. The clash had two halves, like a Crystal Palace v Brighton and Hove Albion game. For the flour part anyone could get reasonably close but only outside the fence. In the second half, with fireworks, it was Enfarinats and pass holders only. We sat some fifty metres away in tiered seating to watch. It wasn't the nearly participative event I remembered; it was something I viewed as a spectator. I know in Elche that, to take part in the firework battle, you now have to attend a pre-event training course.

People say that health and safety rules are regularly flouted in Spain. It's true and it's not true. Sensible health and safety practices are ignored all the time, everywhere, by people who decide that those ideas are a bit silly, a bit unnecessary or too much faff. Most of us clamber onto a wobbly kitchen chair from time to time to reach the top shelf or sprawl out in the sun without sunscreen but for some people H&S has become so second nature that they'd never go up a ladder without someone at the bottom or fix the wonky toaster by prodding at its insides with a kitchen knife. The smaller, the more domestic, the situation the less likely that safety will be the paramount consideration.

Eleven or twelve years ago I taught some English to the management staff of the Dos Mares Shopping Centre in San Javier. I remember their building officer pacing the room and cursing after a visit from the H&S inspector. "Can you imagine," seethed my pupil, "I've already got two blokes on the cherry picker we use to do maintenance at height on the building. One on the ground holding on to ropes and harnesses that are fastened to the bloke on the platform. Both wearing goggles and hats and gloves and safety boots and this idiot wants a third person in the team. I asked him why - will he be there to catch the falling man if the harnesses and ropes fail? Lunacy". 

I remember someone who worked for the Town Hall in Pinoso sacking a building firm he'd hired in 2007 because the building workers were not using any safety gear whilst they worked on his private house. "I make sure people follow the rules," he said, "how can I possibly have people flouting those same rules when they work on my house?" And yet, in Forcall last year I watched as people ran in and out of a burning bonfire, in Vilanova d'Alcolea for Sant Antoni they have horses running through fire and locally I've run in amongst people dressed as devils as they unleashed fireworks left right and centre. 

Now I understand a bit better how things Spanish work I've often wondered about going back to Betera to run away from those fireworks again but I've had trouble finding the details. Maybe it's because what we did then won't fit behind a fence and so it's just not acceptable anymore.

Dancing in the streets

I saw something about the fiestas in Cañadas de Don Ciro this last weekend. Now Don Ciro really is no more than a wide spot on a very rural road but they have fiestas. It reminded me that I hadn't written anything about our own local fiesta which was a couple of weekends ago now. 

The Culebrón fiesta is one of a series for the outlying villages which are part the Pinoso municipality. The first village fiesta takes place in late Spring and they go on through the Summer with the villages taking it in turns to have a weekend of festivities. The fiestas are not usually particularly exciting or expansive but they are deeply ingrained in local culture and they offer the villagers a break from the routine with a chance to have a bit of a natter with friends, family and neighbours against the backdrop of some planned activities.

There are usually two key themes. One is religious. Nearly all the fiestas are tied in to the patron saint for the village. The saintly effigies usually get an outing. Sometimes the saints stay away from home for days and sometimes they just get a quick tour of the village. There are as many variations as saints.

The other theme is eating, well eating and drinking. Most of the Pinoso villages have a sit down evening meal. Occasionally the meals are classy with ceramic plates and decent cutlery but usually it's plastic plates and glasses with mass catered food. The quality of the meal is importantish, it's always a topic of conversation afterward, but really it's the sitting and chatting and drinking and laughing that matters.

The dinners used to be followed by showband type bands, orquestras playing paso dobles and jotas. As budgets shrank, in the smaller villages, so did the number of musicians and nowadays it's often a playlist and a laptop. Mind you people have been complaining that the Motomami tour by Rosalía doesn't have any live musicians either!

The activities to go with the feasting, drinking, dancing and religious observance can be legion. Traditional games are very usual. In this area something, a bit like horseshoes, called tanganilla or caliche, is common, a cooking competition (traditionally for men) making gachamiga (a sort of garlic pancake) is standard issue too, maybe a communal picnic, vermouth sessions, foam machines, water slides or bouncy castles for the kids, cake and a drink type sessions - chocolate with churros, horchata with fartons, sometimes basketball or football competitions or even summer cinema. I've seen things as mundane as domino competitions and face painting and as innovatively simple as beer tasting sessions. It all depends a bit on your budget and it all depends a bit on what is considered acceptable in your neck of the woods. 

The activities are a bit academic. Village fiestas are not really about activities. They are about nattering to your neighbour, having a beer or a wine and remembering old so and so alongside the opportunity for a bit of partying.

One of the key figures in organising the village fiestas in the Pinoso area are the pedáneas or pedáneos. Britons tend to describe these people as village mayors or mayoresses but they are more actually the interface between villagers and the local administration. They also represent the village in any number of local functions. So if the street lamp outside your house fails or if you feel the bins are not being emptied properly the idea is that you moan to the representative and they pass on your moans to the town hall. Our village rep is Belgian. She's hard working and organised. She, and her family, seemed to have done most of the work to organise the fiesta. The one area where there were probably other willing helpers was with the organisation of the religious part of the proceedings. 

The programme was similar, but different, to the pre Covid years. On the Friday evening there was a vermouth session - a few litres of vermouth, nuts, crisps, olive and mixers and space to chat. On Saturday there was a market for second hand stuff and for craft stalls and the like. There was nothing for the Saturday afternoon. The evening meal on Saturday evening was organised into tables for friends and family groups rather than the more usual long table free for all. There was nothing on Sunday apart from the all important evening mass and procession followed by the "Wine of Honour" which is a  sort of end of event stand up buffet. 

Looking in, as someone who knows nothing about how things were organised and as someone who is not particularly integrated into the village, it felt as if the fiesta had a different emphasis to past years. It had a more businesslike feel. The timetable was more precise and none of the smaller elements were there - no competitions, no kids games. In fact, mass and procession apart it could have been almost anywhere sunny in Europe. The evening meal for instance was absolutely Spanish but the menu didn't feature anything that might be alien to a Dutch or Scottish diner. Anyone who saw the advertising and wished to could have a stall at the market or a place at the dinner table. That meant there were far more people involved than usual but not, necessarily, villagers. The religious ceremony maintained its village base with almost nobody, except the invited dignitaries and musicians, not having ties to the village.

It was nice to have the fiesta back. 

Armani doesn't do a blue tux

Twenty years ago, more, I was walking out of Covent Garden, probably via Floral Street, maybe King Street. It was love at first sight. In the window of Emporio Armani; a charcoal grey suit. I walked away twice but I was drawn back. The chap in the shop wasn't like the man in the Aquascutum shop a few years before who had explained to me that if I were just looking that's what the window displays were for. Mr Armani's man was welcoming and persuasive. My credit card groaned but bore the strain. I wore suits a lot then and I always felt great in the Armani. Like a dinner jacket it had a magical back straightening effect.

In fact, once upon a time, I had suits and shirts and shoes and trousers for almost any occasion from a barbecue to a wedding. Maybe a new tie for a funeral or new shoes for a naming ceremony but the basic kit was there. It's not the same now. I have jeans and T shirts and hardly anything else. I never iron. I do have several pairs of chinos and quite a selection of short sleeved shirts in the wardrobe but I can't wear them. They look alright on the hangers but, once on, the buttons on the shirts gape and the trouser waistbands dig in. Heaven knows why; a faulty washing machine maybe. They are remnants of the dress code from the place I worked in Cartagena.

We went to see the crowning of the local carnival queens in Pinoso last night. Considering that we are a town of 7,500 people the event is glitzy, polished and professional. The presentation is rehearsed and smooth, the frocks range from the elegantly understated to the fluffiest meringue. The smiles are wide, teeth flash and emotions are on plain view.

As we set off to see the coronation I changed my shorts for a far too narrow (given my age) pair of jeans, brushed my hair but kept the same t shirt on. Maggie changed into a nice bright frock. She had caught the mood better than me. In general people were pretty smartly dressed. Some people were in their finery but smart casual was the order of the day.

People do dress up in Spain, they dress up all the time, but they seem to do it more because they want to rather than because society tells them they have to. Normally, if you are going to a wedding or a baptism then you put on your finery and, in general, women seem to do it much better than men. They look relatively comfortable in their satin dresses and high heels whilst the blokes fidget with their marginally too short or slightly overtight suits and the wayward knot in their tie. The same doesn't seem to be true of funerals. The general style for funerals always strikes me as being a bit scruffy and I sometimes wonder if there is a slightly anarchic resistance to dressing up in the face of mortality; better to cock a snoop at death than to kowtow. If there is a dress code in banks and insurance offices I haven't caught the essence of it. For most professionals the appropriate style seems to be an unremarkable blouse skirt or shirt trouser combination but, nearly as often, the woman bank manager will be wearing a metaphorical pair of ripped jeans and pink pumps and nobody seems to mind or even notice. At the theatre I've seen men in Salamanca and Madrid wearing traditional cloaks side by side with men in scruffy everyday stuff. Basically, and within reason, people seem to wear what they want when they want.

So, nowadays I go everywhere and to everything in jeans and T shirts. I don't have a pair of shoes that will take a polish and however nice the salesman is I will never again spend over a thousand quid on a suit.

The pedanía at play

Each of the little villages associated with the small town of Pinoso, the pedanías, have a weekend fiesta sometime over the summer. It's the turn of Culebrón this weekend. It's happening now.

So far we haven't been to anything that's been put on at this year's fiesta and I suspect that we won't be going over for the rest of the event tomorrow. To be honest the programme isn't that important, it's more the idea that the village is as full as it ever gets, that people are around and that they do things together with a lot of laughing as a part of the recipe. In the past the event had a sort of curtain raiser in a meal organised by the Neighbourhood Association the weekend before but that hasn't happened twice in a row now, possibly because of differences of opinion between a couple of key village personalities. As I haven't rejoined the Association this year I wouldn't be able to attend even if it had happened!

People who have a "weekend home" in the village will use it this weekend if they ever do. When the football competition was on I'm sure some of the spectators had time for a chat and maybe a beer. Whilst the children were served cake with chocolate the adults probably chatted and sat around, maybe with a beer. I've only glanced at the programme for this year but it hasn't changed much over the past few years. The big events are the meal on the Saturday and the mass and procession on the Sunday where the figures of San Jaime and San José are paraded around the village. Since 2013 there has also been a walking and running race that attracts a lot of competitors and fills the village in a way that doesn't happen on any other day of the year.

I can hear the after dinner music now, as I type. We would usually be there but the last couple of times it has all been a bit lacklustre and we have had our incomer status emphasised in various and subtle ways.

I was very clear to Maggie that I didn't want to go but she thought we should. Her argument centred around the fact that we live here. So, at the last minute, and way past the closing date for reserving a place, Maggie made an effort to book us in for the meal. She phoned, texted and sent another message but the pedánea, a sort of village mayoress didn't reply.