Order, order

There seems to be a bit of a conspiracy to keep me on my toes as I reach the end of my working life. Most of it is positive enough. Pension paper mostly. Having found forgotten private pensions I've had to make phone call after phone call and fill in myriad forms. Because I live here and not where the pensions are I've had to talk with the tax people in the UK and fill in more forms to get myself exempted from UK tax. That Spanish tax process, for the calendar year 2018, starts in a few days time and has to be done before the end of June. I hope that having got the UK exemption means it will be easier, if more expensive, to sort out.

Then there's the state pension. I did a blog about that. I hoped, I was told, it would be paid through the Spanish Social Security people in Euros but, disappointingly, it now looks as though it's going to be paid in the UK in Pounds.

And what about Brexit. Now, to be honest what happens in the UK isn't very important to me. I certainly don't give a toss about the puerile posturings of a bunch of public school boys (and girls) in Parliament but their pompous hubris is making it reasonably difficult to work out what's going to happen to us.
In general the statements from the Spanish, and British, governments have been dead positive. All about our current situation being protected and so forth provided the other country plays along. But there's a lot of difference between a ministerial statement and what happens in some hot office awash with foreigners trying to get various bits of paper in a language we have problems with. Obviously, as soon as we Britons are out of the Union, we have to do things exactly as Malawians or Russians or Canadians. All of us are from "third countries" as far as Spain is concerned. There are at least 300,000 Brits in Spain, maybe more. The problem is that we've never quite understood why Johnny Foreigner wants us to jump through their stupid hoops. Why the hell should I change my UK driving licence for a Spanish one?, what's the point of registering with the local council?, why would I want to pay Spanish taxes instead of British ones?, come off the doctor's list in Barnstaple? - not on your nelly. So, there has been a bit of a scramble amongst we immigrants to get our paperwork sorted before we lose all those automatic rights that being a European Citizen gave us.

Of course if you want to be certain of staying in Spain it's easy enough to become Spanish. You do a test to prove you can speak Spanish and another to prove that you know something about the country you live in. So being able to answer simple questions, the sort of thing a Briton would know about the UK- for instance "Which Officer of State has precedence after the Royal Family?" The sort of thing every Briton knows, or here, the sort of thing that every Spaniard knows. Yeah, right. Most of us can't handle B1 Spanish and as for the Spanish constitution you can forget that. And maybe we want to stay British because, technically, we have to renounce our British Nationality if we become Spanish. Anyway, there's quite a long waiting list from lots of people who've run away from terror regimes or are looking for a newer, better life.

I thought we were pretty sorted, pretty Brexit proof. I'm very timid and tend to do as I'm told. After all we do live here, our house is here, our cats are here, we don't live anywhere else or have money and property overseas.  We pay Spanish taxes, we vote in Spain, our doctor and dentist is here, my driving licence and my road tax is Spanish, I listen to Spanish radio and I buy my clothes in Spain. I've probably spent less than a month in the UK in the past fourteen years. But it now looks as though, having checked the details pretty thoroughly beforehand, there has been a bit of history rewriting and we may be one piece of paper short of the full hand. It's odd because it's a piece of paper that I have helped other people to obtain. It's probably not going to be much of a problem. But, it could be. And for some people something similar will be a problem. They will find that they can't fulfil some requirement or other and so can't get residence here and they'll wonder what to do with the house they bought that they shouldn't live in all year or the car that they shouldn't drive.

Never mind. Oh the Archbishop of Canterbury and then Lord Chancellor but all we Britons knew that.

A grave situation in the dead centre of the town

I did a summer stint on parks, gardens and cemeteries when I was a boy. I still tell stories of those few months. The first time was, I think, in Hollywell Green. A Victorian mausoleum appropriate for the status of one of the mill owning families of the time. Before anyone thought to brick in the heavy, lead lined mahogany coffins, putrefaction and excellent craftsmanship produced a splendid time bomb designed to spew bone fragments left right and centre. One of my gofer jobs was to check for bones and sweep them up before the family and undertakers turned up with the latest of the family line.

Spanish graveyards are different to British ones. Well different and the same. Spaniards have mausoleums too for those old powerful families. I suppose it was wine or saffron or something instead of wool. Who knows. The idea is the same though, rich folk lording it over the people who made them rich even when they are all dead.

So there are mausoleums and there are graves, the sort where the coffins are lowered into a pit dug into the ground. Think of the scene in one of those old cowboys where the makeshift wooden cross marks the spot and one cowboy, hat in hand says "Someone should say some words". So far, then, Britain and Spain are much of a muchness.

But Spaniards are flat dwellers. Not so much where we live, in the country, surrounded by trilling birds and old blokes in straw hats working the earth, but in anywhere with any population Spaniards tend to live in flats, in apartments if you prefer. In the older blocks, the one without lifts, the top floor flats are cheaper. Nobody wants to haul their degradable plastic bags full of groceries up six flights of stairs to the third floor and older people don't want to buy a flat and then spend the rest of their days as semi prisoners, staring out of the window.

It's the same when they're dead. Nowadays cremation is growing in popularity but until recently it was always burial. Burial with a difference for we Brits. The Spaniards build a sort of thick wall, or a double faced chalet. In the outside walls they leave space for something akin to lengthened pigeon holes; pigeon holes long enough to take a coffin. When the time comes the coffin is hoisted up, horizontally and slid into a hole in the wall. The pigeon hole is sealed with something rough and ready and later, probably, with a commemorative stone. The rental on the nichos, niches, that's what the pigeon holes are called, is very low. And, just as with the flats, the higher niches, the ones you need a ladder to get to to put on flowers and to clean the stone are cheaper. If you're really poor, if nobody is willing to pay for your disposal then the town hall will bury you but you go into a common grave. Bones cleaned out of older niches, to make way for new occupants, also go into the same space. If I've mis-remembered that the correct version is in this article that I wrote for the old TIM magazine

Nowadays, with cremations, lots of the urns also go into niches, smaller niches, sometime with the urn on view but more often the urn is treated like a coffin and walled in and given a commemorative stone.

I like Spanish cemeteries. The architecture of the mausoleums is often incredible. The rows and rows of niches are nearly always well cared for and the system itself is neat. They are usually very colourful too because the niches that don't have fresh flowers nearly always have colourful plastic ones instead. Alcoy does tours around their cemetery so I thought it must be worth a look and I went over there yesterday. The snaps are here. Usually Spanish cemeteries are oases of tranquillity but, at the start of November, on All Saint's Day, most families turn out to spruce up the family plot. The graveyards become just as noisy as anywhere else with hundreds of people out and taking advantage of the opportunity to greet friends and neighbours alike.

One last, very positive, thing about Spanish cemeteries is that they always have toilets. Nowadays, knowing where the nearest toilet is is often important to me.

Big Brother has a file on me

I got a message from SUMA, a local government tax collection agency, telling me that I could check what they were going to take out of my bank account in April. In their email there was a link that took me to something called Carpeta Ciudadana - the Citizen File.

The Carpeta Ciudadana is basically a site that collects together lots of the information held on me by various Government agencies. There was a list of all the ministries - from defence and education to work and immigration - and any procedures that I had open with them. There was another section for notifications, another for information held on me and so on.

I was a bit worried that the page showed that Hacienda, the tax people, had two processes open on me but then I realised that it was to do with the time I sorted out some unpaid tax on a small UK pension during a tax amnesty. It's not as though I have anything to hide but the fewer dealings I have with authority the better I like it.

It was amazing checking through the pages though. There were details of  my work record, details of my car, my road tax, details of the points on my driving licence, details on the house, local taxes paid, proof that I didn't have a criminal record, my work history, any dole payments etc. All sorts of stuff.

If that's what they are telling me they hold on me I wonder just how much more they know?

By the book

"You use a lot of continuous tenses in your books. Is there any particular reason for that?". It's an interview on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme, Front Row, some twenty years ago. The author was from the USA, he was pleased. "Being interviewed in England is just so great - you want to talk about my use of grammar!".

When we first arrived in Spain I wanted to try reading in Spanish but bookshops used to scare me. They usually had counters and the books were on shelves behind the counter. If you wanted to buy a particular book it was fine. You just asked. In Spanish. Of course they never had the book but you were hooked now, you had to order it, wait two or three weeks and then be shocked by the price. Spanish books are expensive. If you wanted to browse then tough luck. Slowly that changed. Faced by online sellers lots of traditional bookshops went to the wall, despite price protection, and the survivors became more self service. In the newer shops you could judge a book by its cover, turn pages, read a few lines, check the price and whatnot before deciding to buy or not.

I also discovered libraries. Cheap and browser friendly but not quite the same as owning a book. I also realised that books written in Spanish and bought from Amazon UK were, even after delivery charges, cheaper than the same book bought in Spain.

Then Maggie bought me a Kindle and my reading habits changed. It was still cheaper to buy Spanish language books from the UK than from Spain but now they came instantly and with samples. No nice covers though, no paper and glue smell on fanning the pages and print size became a personal choice. After a while Amazon forced me to become Spanish, website wise, but I was, and I am happy with Kindle. One of the big advantages of electronic reading for foreign languages is that the dictionary is inbuilt so, if looking up a word is essential, it interrupts the reading flow a lot less.

Reading in another language has made me more aware of the differences in books. Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne are a harder read than Sally Rooney or Kate Atkinson simply because of when they were written. Some authors though are easier to read than others because of their style and vocabulary choice. I'm a bit out of touch with modern English language writers but, as an example, I remember Philip Roth as being a harder read than Joseph Heller. If I decide to buy a book by Kate Bernheimer or Terese Svoboda in English I may or may not like it but it's very unlikely that I won't understand it.

That's not always the case when I'm buying a book in Spanish. Sometimes Spanish language books are full of words that I don't know, they can have a complicated, difficult to follow, structure and they can have cultural references that I don't understand. Julio Cortázar for instance was Argentinian and famous for his book Rayuela; easy enough to read but so pointless that I've tried it and abandoned it twice. Or Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas, a supposed classic, which my own personal review records as being awful: dry, boring and incomprehensible. Sometimes the books are beyond my language grasp. I've tried to read Diario de un Cazador by Miguel Delibes a couple of times. It actually seems like it might be good but there is so much slang, so much colloquial speech, that I've had to admit it's beyond me.

When I buy a book that I find I don't like or I can't understand I often go back to the tried and tested for the next book. Someone like Isabel Allende for instance, or maybe a police story by Lorenzo Silva. Mind you that doesn't always work. I'd just read a book by Marcos Giralt Torrente that I really didn't like so I thought I'd read a Pérez-Reverte. This bloke pumps out books like there's no tomorrow and they're fine, easy to read, often with a nice narrative. I'd seen one called Cabo de Trafalgar, about the Battle of Trafalgar and I thought it would be a hoot to have a book where Nelson and Collingwood were the baddies. Bad mistake, nautical terms on every line: topsails, boatswains, forecastles, rigging and monkeys left right and centre but also with French and English speech spelled to be pronounced in Spanish - guar is bisnes for war is business - I still enjoyed it but it wasn't easy. So, lets hope that Jesús Carrasco has a good one with Intemperie which is the book I've just bought.

Access denied

I picked up four pieces of post from our PO box in the Post Office today. This is quite unusual. Often there is nothing. Two of the envelopes were from departments of the Spanish Government. One was my European Health Card from the Social Security people. I applied for this, online, last week. I did it as I brushed my teeth getting ready for bed. It took moments, it was easy. The card's only valid for six months but, next time, as a pensioner, it'll be for longer. No problem anyway. I brush my teeth every night.

The other was from the Catastro, the Land Registry. It was an answer to my appeal of February 2017 when they said we owned half of next door and charged us much more IBI, the local housing tax, than we should have paid. A lightning 25 months to respond then. In that time I've sent several emails, been to their Alicante office (where I metaphorically banged on the table) and reported them to the Ombudsman. That's probably why they answered so quickly.

Instead of sending me the notification by post the letter inside the envelope told me how to get to that notification online. To get to the notification I had to "sign" a receipt but, being the 21st century, they wanted a virtual signature. No problem; I have a digital certificate, an electronic signature, on the computer. Up to now that has always been sufficient when dealing with Government Departments. But not today. It took me over three hours to eventually get to the notification. Their systems only worked with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome after several modifications and not at all with Mozilla Firefox. There were links to pages and pages of supporting documentation about how to access the notification along with helpful hints on how to get around potential hiccoughs. I tried downloading the older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer mentioned in that supporting documentation but Windows 10 didn't like them. There were three potential programs to "sign" the receipt. Neither Chrome nor Edge wanted to talk to Java and the Government software, AutoFirma, something like SelfSign stalled in downloading at 99% time after time and the dodgy downloads wouldn't delete. I had to disable pop up blockers (the on/off on Edge wasn't where all the answers in Google said they should be) and I had to dismantle all sorts of other safeguards like firewalls and non acceptance of cookies. I got there in the end, because what I lack in skill I make up for in doggedness, but it was a hell of a job.

To be honest it was so outrageous that I didn't get particularly cross. I was doing that cursing and laughing out loud thing. I remembered the strikes of workers within the justice system asking for computer systems that worked and the piles of paper that you can see behind the judges in the current Catalan trials. Obviously the roll out of technological solutions varies from one department to another. I wonder if Catastro still has ink wells on its desks?

The good news is that they seem to have put everything right in their records. They've even regularised a bit of land that we didn't know wasn't registered. Now all I have to do is to hope that they give us some money back!

Ambulance chasers

We were following an ambulance. It wasn't in a hurry and neither were we. On the back door was the symbol of the Generalitat, the Regional Government, and the name of a private firm. Along the side, in big letters, SAMU, obligingly decoded for us even in Valenciano (Servei d'Ajuda Mèdica Urgent), the English would be something like Emergency Medical Care Service. I think, though I'm not absolutely sure, that just as people in care homes wear name tags in their cardigans, writing SAMU on an ambulance says who they are and where they belong. Use SAMU or SAMUR (which is the service for the emergency ambulances in Madrid) and you mean ambulance: the sort of ambulance that comes for heart attacks and road traffic accidents and not the sort of ambulance that comes to take you for your appointment with the urologist.

Health Services in Spain are devolved to the seventeen Regional Governments. Ours, in Valencia, is called the Generalitat Valenciana. Hence the logo on the ambulance. But I wondered about that name of the private firm. Obviously there are private ambulances to move people to and from private clinics and to deal with patients who are paying through their insurance companies or health plans. Mutual societies, which work with the Social Security Department to cover work place health, might also use private ambulances. But that wouldn't be the case for an ambulance with the Generalitat logo. Google of course knew. It seems that, in the modern world, the Health Authorities usually outsource their ambulance services. So there's a tendering and contracting process for outsourced fleets of ambulances. Staff can also be outsourced though it seems that the doctors and nurses aboard the ambulances are, usually, Health Authority Staff whilst the drivers and paramedics come with the ambulance.

I know there are Red Cross, Civil Protection and yellow DYA ambulances. I'd also read a story recently, in the local press, about our Town Hall buying a new ambulance. So how did this all fit together?

I think the Red Cross ambulances are, much like the Red Cross or St John in the UK. I saw a Red Cross ambulance crew in action only a few weeks ago in Aspe. They were covering a fiesta and somebody was taken badly ill. I presume that event organisers have to cover emergency first aid and one of the potential options is the Red Cross. The DYA is another example of a charitable organisation that raises money in any number of ways, including selling its services. The DYA was originally set up to cover the shortage of ambulances to deal with road traffic accidents in Spain but, I think, it now generally operates through arrangements with Regional Health Authorities. Obviously when push comes to shove, in a train crash or terrorist attack, all the ambulances from everywhere become available. So then, what about our Town Hall ambulance? Checking back in the local press the ambulance was described as a TNA. Google said TNA is Ambulancia de Transporte no Asistido. The penny dropped.

There are two basic types of ambulances. Emergency Response Ambulances and Transfer Ambulances. Emergency Response Ambulances come in two types and with three crewing levels. Transfer ambulances come in two variations with two crewing levels. There are plenty of other sorts too, like rapid response vehicles, but I'll just stick to the principal types.

Generally, when someone calls 112 (there are other numbers too but 112 is foolproof), the ambulance that turns up will be an SVB - Basic Life Support ambulance. It will be crewed by two TES, técnicos en emergencias sanitarias, or emergency health specialists which are probably equivalent to UK paramedics. They will have spent a couple of years at college getting their qualification and they will probably have done lots of short ancillary courses. The SVB vehicles are kitted out with defibrillators, all those immobilising braces, oxygen, drips and a long etcétera.

The next step up is an SVA - Advanced Life Support ambulance. These SVA vehicles carry more medication on board than the SVBs and more sophisticated kit. The real difference though is not in the vehicles, it's that SVAs come with more qualified staff. The SVA Sanitarizada (the lowest level of SVA) comes with an Emergency Health Specialists (TES) and an Emergency Nurse. The course to become a nurse in Spain is a four year university degree course. Most SVA nurses also do a further two years masters in nursing.

The most sophisticated vehicles and crew is also an SVA but, this time, it's called Medicalizada. These ambulances are sometimes referred to as Mobile Intensive Care Units. The on board equipment doesn't usually vary much from the Sanitizada but this time the TES and the Nurse have a Doctor with them. A Spanish SVA Doctor will have done six years at university, a couple of years on a Masters in Emergency Medicine and another four years or so on a specialism like cardiology or intensive care medicine.

Away from the full blown, nobody dies on my watch, vehicles there are the two types of transport or transfer ambulance. The first of these is what my dad and his mum would have recognised as ambulances. The patient will probably be on a wheeled stretcher. Their lives are probably not in danger but they are not well. It's possible, though not likely, that the transfer could become an emergency so the vehicles are equipped with horns and lights. The patient will be accompanied by one TES paramedic and a driver. The driver may just have first aid type knowledge from a couple of months course or they might be a TES as well.

The last and simplest type, the TNA, the sort of ambulance that our Town Hall just leased, may have a first aider or a TES type driver but there is no expectation that the run will become an emergency. Often these vehicles are minibuses.

In re-reading various articles about transfer ambulances it looks as though there are often arrangements between local Town Halls to share access to the SVB ambulances. I was talking to one of my students about this and she said that before Pinoso sorted out its own local arrangements people could die whilst they waited for an ambulance to arrive from Elda, which is where our hospital is, some 28 kilometres away.

There is all sorts of legislation about how a vehicle qualifies to be an ambulance, from simple things like having the word ambulance painted back to front so that any driver looking in their rear view mirror will be able to read that they have an ambulance on their tail through to what it needs to carry, how it can operate and how long it can take to get such and such a distance.

Just one last thing. Spanish ambulances have traditionally had amber flashing lights, they've only just started to use blues and twos. Ambulances could have blue lights from August 2018 and all of them will have to carry blue lights by August 2020.

Peace and Love

Back in 1993, in a football game between La Coruña and Sevilla, there was an incident between Diego Maradona and Alberto Albístegui. The physiotherapist for Sevilla went out to help Maradona but by the time he got there Maradona was back on his feet and no worse for wear. The La Coruña player, Albístegui, was bleeding though, so the Seville physio gave him a hand. Back on the touchline the Sevilla coach, Carlos Salvador Bilardo, was incensed by the behaviour of his medic. He was shouting the equivalent of "For God sake Domingo (name of the physio), who gives a toss about the other side!, the ones in the coloured shirts are ours, Pisalo, pisalo!" Now pisalo means something like stamp on him, stamp on him. It was one of those football stories that became legend.

As a result, during the nineties, it was not unusual to hear chants from the Spanish terraces of “Pisalo, pisalo!” when the fans thought a certain type of play was called for.

1994/95 season Cup-winners Cup. Chelsea against Zaragoza. Chelsea aren't doing well. The terraces turn to fighting. The Spanish police wade in truncheons a go go and the uninvolved Zaragoza fans begin to chant "Pisalo, pisalo," in support of the police action.

The legend is that the Chelsea supporters heard the Spaniards chanting and thought they were saying "Peace and Love!, Peace and Love!". Suitably shame faced the Chelsea supporters settled down. It was in the British newspapers the next day so it must be true.

Thank you Alex for that little gem to add to my cultural knowledge of Spain from his language learning podcast of this week.

A piece of cake

Britons are often disappointed by Spanish cakes. You pass a cake shop and there are all sorts of incredibly appealing cakes and buns with reds and greens and cream and pastry and they look really tasty. But they aren't. The cream isn't real, it tastes of nothing much. The pastry is too flaky or there's too much of it and the coloured bits are just sugary.

Now it would be an untruth to say there aren't any nice cakes, pastries or buns in Spain. I really like lots of the traditional stuff. Bizcocho, for instance, is a sponge cake and there are lots of variations on bizcocho just as there are lots of variations on sweetened bread like toñas or the almondy flavours of things like Tarta de Santiago. Not far from us, in Petrer, we have the shop of one of the most famous cake makers in the whole of Spain; Paco Torreblanca. But, in general, fancy cakes in Spain are often disappointing.

Just bear with me whilst I add something else into the mix. Because I'm old I continue to watch broadcast telly. In the same way that the, Ted Rogers hosted, 3-2-1 show of the late 70s and 80s was based on a Spanish TV show, lots of current Spanish TV programmes are based on international templates: First Dates, Big Brother, The Voice, Come Dine With Me, Strictly Come Dancing, Got Talent, Kitchen Nightmares, Boom and lots more have Spanish versions. Last night the Spanish interpretation of the Great British Bake Off, cleverly titled Bake Off España, aired for the first time. Jesús Vázquez was the host and Dani Álvarez, Betina Montagne and Miquel Guarro were the judges.

I've never seen a full episode of the Great British Bake Off on either the BBC or Channel 4 but I have seen bits of it as Maggie is an avid viewer. Some of those cakes look truly incredible. I did watch the whole of the first of the Bake Off España programmes last night. I didn't think the standard was very high. In fact it looked to me as though lots of the bakers didn't have a firm grasp on the basics. The crema in the milhojas was a runny liquid, a couple of the participants had real problems making their ovens work and there were two kitchen fires. The judges even spat one of the cakes out!

"Well, what would you expect?," asked Maggie, "Spaniards aren't good with cakes."

Making one cross

It's election time in Spain. The local and European elections were on the cards, programmed in on the calendar for May from long ago, but then the Central Government, headed up by Pedro Sanchez, couldn't get its budget through parliament and so was left with little option but to call a General Election. On Monday of this week the President of our region in Valencia decided to bring forward the regional elections and to hold them on the same day as the General Election, April 28th.

As I listen to the news there seems to be a qualitative difference between the politics I'm used to and what's happening at the minute. It all seems very personal, very combative. It's more like squaring up for a shouting match or a brawl than a political debate. No actual fisticuffs to date though!

You may or may not remember that Spain had two General Elections very close together in late 2015 and mid 2016. In both cases the conservatives gained most seats but they couldn't manage a clear majority. Eventually, in October 2016, Mariano Rajoy, the then leader of the conservative Partido Popular or PP, pulled a minority government together. In June 2018 one of the highest courts in Spain handed out lots of sentences in a big corruption case. The court said the PP was implicated directly in that corruption. As a result Pedro Sanchez's socialists orchestrated a vote of no confidence. It was supported by a whole host of disparate political parties and that was the end of Rajoy. He jacked in his job and went back to being a property registrar. Sanchez became President.

For years and years the two big parties in Spain have been the Partido Popular, PP, the conservatives, and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE, the socialists. There has always been a good smattering of nationalist parties particularly from Cataluña and the Basque Country and the vestiges of the old communist party always picked up a few seats too. That two party structure started to fall apart when a left wing group called Podemos did well in the 2014 European elections and shortly afterwards a right/centre group called Ciudadanos, which had been present in Cataluña for a while, gained ground on the national stage. In the last two general elections it has been four big players plus the nationalists.

On top of this splintering on the national stage there are the Catalans. Back in 2017 they organised a second referendum on independence. None of the safeguards were in place for a fair vote and the referendum had been banned by the courts beforehand  but, somehow they have managed to produce a situation where anyone outside of Spain sees them as the innocent victims of a brutish and almost totalitarian government. The politicians involved in that declaration of independence were locked up soon after the referendum and not given bail. Some of the Catalan politicians foresaw that possibility and fled the country. Holding those politicians in prison, on remand, for so long hasn't done Spain's democratic image much good. The jailed politicians are actually in court now.

It's difficult to be objective about Cataluña. My view is that the independence politicians are a bunch of petulant children who are quite unable to have any conversation that doesn't start from the premise that their birthright has been stolen from them and that Cataluña should be an independent nation now. So far as I can see they haven't actually done any politics for ages - economy, education, health and the like - because they spend all their time talking about being oppressed and bullied. Obviously there are other schools of thought.

The nationalist Catalans did support the socialist censure motion against Rajoy but, when it came to budget time, they refused to help the socialists a second time unless Sanchez talked to them about Independence. Sanchez said we can't have talks with a pre-set condition of talking about Independence and the Catalans said talk to us about Independence or you won't get your budgets. The Catalans knew that their reaction would mean the fall of the socialist government so I can only presume that they think they are going to get on better with the PP and Ciudadanos. Now there's a bit of clear thinking for you. Even by trying to talk to the Catalans the right of centre parties continually called the socialists out saying that they were negotiating with rebels and betraying the Spanish people. In fact Ciudadanos and the PP keep blathering on about imposing central government rule in Cataluña. Under much more pressing circumstances, when the Catalans actually declared unilateral independence, Rajoy used an article of the Spanish Constitution to impose direct rule but it only lasted as long as it took to organise local elections and get the next regional government in place.

Without the Catalans and other nationalist politicians in the Basque Country the socialists couldn't raise the support to get their budgets approved. Without a budget the government couldn't do the things it wanted to do. It was an impasse and the only real way out was to call a General Election which is exactly what happened.

The last time I saw opinion polls the Socialists were out in front. In their short time in office they've got stuck in to doing lots of things that have been on the cards for ages. The fact of doing something has cheered up their long time supporters and brought on board some of the ditherers. They're having a tough time at the moment because, with the election called, they have decided to use their dying days of office to enact some legislation by decree and the other parties are calling this an electoral strategy.

Second up were Ciudadanos. They have a good looking youngish bloke in charge. They're pretty right wing and they are all for taking over Cataluña but they too seem to put their money where their mouth is. They managed to leverage some things they wanted to see done out of the last government and their Catalan leader comes across as level headed and articulate woman. So they cheered up their natural sort of supporters and took lots off the PP.

The replacement for Rajoy as leader of the PP  is also a smart youngish bloke. However he seems to be ill informed and stupid. He's talking about rolling abortion laws back to a 1985 law (nobody quite knows why he's talking about abortion as nobody else is) and he seems to be quite happy to lie, not the usual sort of political manipulation of the facts, but the Donald Trump sort of direct untruth. When the PP had slumped to third in the polls he said that it was because the socialist government now had charge of the statistical office and so they'd made up the figures.

Finally there's Podemos, the left wingers who subsumed the old communist party into their ranks and then let it wither away. They've been involved in lots of infighting and they've failed to support pragmatic and popular changes which they have tried to explain ideologically. Complicated and subtle political messages don't make easy news and the right has been able to exploit the lack of agreement on the left.

So socialists popular and out in front, Ciudadanos popular and in a strong second, the PP trailing badly and hampered by poor leadership with Podemos entrenched in navel gazing and on the verge of extinction. The likelihood is that nobody will get a majority. The most obvious outcome is a rightist coalition but nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to Spaniards doing deals so no crystal ball gazing at the moment.

There's also another factor. Down in Andalucia at the end of 2018 the socialists, who had held the region since democracy was re-established, didn't win an outright majority for the first time. The PP and Ciudadanos did a deal to take over and govern the region but even then they didn't quite have enough votes to do it. The wild card was a bunch of right wingers called Vox. They want to suspend the Catalan Government, in fact they want to re-centralise all government (Spain is basically organised federally), to centralise education, to beef up support for "family values" (they don't much care for feminists), close frontiers and mosques and they want to increase the influence of Spain in Europe. Basically then usual sort of idiotic populist nonsense that we've heard from the USA, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland and an increasingly long etcetera.

Vox doesn't have any parliamentary seats but it does have a Twitter and an Instagram account. And they are on a roll. They are doing what Trump does. They do not argue in the time honoured tradition of proposals and counter proposals. They publish something bad, nasty, homophobic, sexist, jingoistic or whatever in a short, easily digestible form and right thinking people rise up against them and denounce them on the social media. The debate actually helps abhorrent politicians to spread their poisonous messages. We see their misinformation and twisted analyses on Facebook or in WhatsApp groups because all of us have "friends" on Facebook who we would steer clear of in real life or at least we'd steer clear of the subjects that turn up on social media. Those people believe the slurs, repeat the false information and they simply attack anyone who is not with them. If we respond the nonsense gets more exposure and if we don't respond we are doing less than we should. It's a bit tricky.

And, down in Andalucia, the two, run of the mill, right wing parties, the Partido Popular and Ciudadanos, were perfectly happy to get into bed with the far right politicians of Vox. If I were to use that crystal ball my guess is that, after the vote on April 28th, that's what we will be looking at on a national scale.

Lord Carnal and Lady Lent

Today is Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent. Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday. Time for a bit of a knees up before the sackcloth and ashes of Lent. No booze for forty days, no chocolate. Pancake day.

As a young person I knew about Carnival in Rio. Lots of people in feathers, well women really. In fact some of them without many feathers at all: drumming and dancing, a wild bacchanalia. I had no idea why. It was something they did in Rio. Just like mushy peas and mint sauce in Yarmouth. Years later I realised that Mardi Gras in New Orleans was something akin though, to be honest, I still associate Mardi Gras with the backdrop to the druggy scene in Easy Rider.

I was taken a bit by surprise by Carnival by the Carnaval of here. I suppose it was when we lived in Cartagena. All of a sudden there was Rio passing in front of Zara and Druni the perfume shop. Some of the feathers the women dragged behind them were so wide that they touched both sides of the narrow street. There were groups of singers too. The costumes were all a bit too much falling down trousers and squirty flowers, too slapstick, for me and the songs were incomprehensible but Spanish people roared with laughter. The funny satirical songs are called chirigotas. If they are important in Cartagena then they are absolutely enormous in Cádiz. The chirigotas are so ingrained in Spanish culture that they get a brief slot on the national news on the telly.

When we'd lived in Santa Pola I don't think I'd ever realised there was a carnival procession there, nor in Pinoso. In Ciudad Rodrigo, where we lived for a while, Carnaval was a big event but there the scantily clad women and be-sequinned and top hatted men were supplanted by bulls running through the street.

But now I know about Carnaval, at least I know it is celebrated in Spain. I know it's big in Cádiz and monstrous in Tenerife. Round here Torrevieja and Aguilas and even Cabezo de Torres celebrate Carnaval flamboyantly with big processions and often with drag queens in impossibly high heels. Somebody told me that in Jumilla the other day part of the parade showed a disinterred Franco carried high on the shoulders of bare chested soldiers. Irreverence for two Spanish legends in one! Here in Pinoso, last Saturday, we had a nice little parade without sequins and without drag queens or satirical songs but with lots of people we knew.