One King and Three more

It's a sort of Spanish Christmas Day today. Obviously Covid spoiled the usual parades and yesterday's buzz in the streets but the Three Kings were out and about delivering presents overnight and today the kids are on the TV news whooping over their booty. It's been good Christmas weather. Up North there have been the usual pictures of snowploughs doing their stuff, people leaving their houses by the upstairs window to slide down snowdrifts and shoppers using skis to get to the supermarket. In the Val d'Aran, the other day, the temperature was -28ºC. Here in Culebrón, for the Christmas period, it's usually been sunny by day and bitterly cold overnight. The water we put out for the cats was solid, solid ice this morning but I am glad to report that the extra insulation that we added to our water pipes seems to have done the trick and, so far, we've not woken up to frozen pipes and no water.

Today is also the day that the Pascua Militar is celebrated. I forget where we were, maybe visiting a Bronze Age Settlement or it could have been the cuco tour or even the one about the history of esparto production, but we got talking to this bloke. He was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. He told us that we should keep an eye on the Royals and the military. The Pascua Militar is a military ceremony that happens every 6th of January in the Royal Palace in Madrid. The King receives the President of the Government, the Minister of Defence, Minister of the Interior, the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Chiefs of Staff of the various branches of the military and lots of other martial types. It is true that only the other week, at the beginning of December, a bunch of over 400 ex military officers signed an open manifesto saying that the unity of Spain was in danger and complaining about commies in the coalition government, about the danger of the present government siding with the Catalans to break up Spain and lots more blah, blah blah of the sort that you'd expect from a bunch of moustache twirling, out of touch, dried up right wingers. It wasn't taken very seriously, at least publicly, but there were obviously echoes in that open letter of the tanks on the street in Valencia and the Guardia Civil bursting into parliament back in 1981 in an abortive attempt at a coup.

Back in 1981, on February 23, King, Juan Carlos I was relatively new to the job. He was a King that had been picked as Head of State by Franco, the old dictator, himself. The King was a member of the Borbón dynasty, he was married to Sofia from the House of Glücksburg (the Duke of Edinburgh's family) and he was titular head of the armed forces. On that long night he seemed to be on the side of the good guys. He went on TV to tell the army to stay in their barracks and the coup attempt fizzled out. That same King abdicated a few years ago and handed over to his firstborn, our current King, Felipe VI. The old King stepped down because he was getting old and infirm but also he'd become very unpopular, mainly because of parading one of his mistresses a bit too publicly but even more so for the pictures of them standing over an elephant that they had just slaughtered. He's now called the King Emeritus. In August he ran away amidst the scandal of a $100 million kick back from the Saudis and just recently he handed over 600,000€ to straighten out a bit of tax that he'd forgotten to pay. Oops a daisy! Reputation in tatters.

Now I don't care about Royalty. I've always lived in countries with royals; here, in the UK and even in Saudi Arabia. Royals seem to be a bit of an anachronism in the modern world but I don't get too worked up about them. When they all married their cousins they could at least claim the bloodline and some interesting genetic deformities but now that they all marry actors, journalists, handball players and nursery nurses they're just another sort of celebrity - like footballers and people who make sex tapes. I don't worry too much about the Kardashians, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa or C. Tangana either. Our King here seems like a nice enough bloke. His children seem well behaved and I liked the story about him stopping off for a set meal at some roadside restaurant but I hope that he's just another irrelevant rich person and that the conspiracy theory man wasn't right, especially given the date.