The car forum

Manuela Carmena is the Mayor of Madrid. For most of her career she was a lawyer and then a judge but in 2015 she entered politics with the left leaning Ahora Madrid. She now leads the city council with the support of the Socialist party. I like Manuela and I think that lots of people, even those who disapprove of her politics, like or at least approve of her too. I wait to be corrected. Actually she broke her ankle a few days ago and she's still laid up so, all the best Manuela.

Each year in the Christmas run up the Madrid council has a bit of a junket for the press. This year one of the presenters was a comedian and media host David Broncano. The event became newsworthy because it ended up as a sort of improvised comedy double act between the two of them. I heard a bit of it. One of the comments from David was that the only script he had was from Forocoches. I had no idea what Forocoches was so I determined to find out.

The story goes that the founder of Forocoches, Alex Marín, bought a Renault Laguna in 2002 and couldn't find an Internet forum that talked about cars. So he decided to create one. He'd been making some money from a series of websites before then and this was just another. Except that it took off in a big way. The forum on car chat soon spread to other areas and it is now a hotbed of political incorrectness, countered with political correctness, with opinions of very colour and hue about anything and everything. It's also like that site which tried to get Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name to be the British Christmas number one or, and they nearly managed this, to get the Royal Navy to name its newest scientific research vessel after a Spanish admiral who defeated a British fleet.

I wasn't at all impressed when I first visited the forum. The site looks dead old fashioned and it is festooned with adverts and banners but that doesn't stop it being massively successful. It took me days to raise the enthusiasm go back for a second peek. I then realised that you needed to be invited to join the forum. You could also buy your way in with bitcoin and the like. There were lots of warnings about code scams. One journalist who'd used the forum to write an article about her online dating experiences paid 20€ for her invitation! Codes are also given away on some of the social media sites so I had a look there but the codes are all gobbled up within minutes of being published. I couldn't be bothered and with looking at the parts that anyone can read, without being a member, I realised that even if I could get in I'd probably not be able to understand what was going on. It is a sort of Internet version of one of those conversations that you see in a film between a bunch of Locs wearing rappers and gangstas dripping in gold and driving around in Cadillac Escalades or Maybach Exeleros. The forum is loaded with street talk, abbreviations, obscure social references. I couldn't even understand the invitations to codes on Twitter without paying attention..

But that wasn't the point. It was that Manuela knew what Forocoches was and the newspapers didn't feel that they needed to explain. The threads that she and Broncano talked about included "Manuela is going to make us walk", (She's introduced traffic and pollution reducing measures in Madrid and tightened up on electric scooters and the like), "Echenique likes Manuela", (Pablo Echenique is an Argentine-born Spanish physicist and left wing politician who rides around in a high tech wheelchair because of his spinal muscular atrophy) and "I spy Stalinism in Manuela", (Maybe because she's short or has webbed feet - it couldn't be because of her politics!)

So, yet another thing I didn't know about Spain despite all these years here.