Moving forward together

I'm sure you've heard my theory before that you don't learn popular culture; if you're born somewhere then the culture is yours be that food, music, TV programmes or YouTube influencers. You can't help it. The talk at work, the talk at school, the stuff your parents tell you, the memes and gifs that turn up on your phone, the little snippets you read in the newspaper all help to make sure that you know what's going on. That's how, I suppose, I learned about MOTs, Trooping the Colour, Premium Bonds, the Boat Race, laverbread, the RNLI Lifeboats, Spaghetti Junction, Engelbert Humperdinck, driving on the left and how to make tea. 

Changes in language are similar. Ordinary people are in charge. Words and phrases come and go. Some old academic bloke might argue that there is a perfectly good phrase to describe keeping a safe distance during a pandemic but everyone else is going to say social distancing whether he likes it or not. Somebody once asked me about how you decide that someone is competent in a particular language. What's the threshold for somebody to be able to say that they speak English, Spanish or Swahili? Some people have less education than others, some have learned more vocabulary, some have different ideas about how language should be used but who is to say which form is better than another? What says that the Radio 4 pundit talking about early 20th Century Art speaks better English than the geezer with the barrow having a beer in the Queen Vic? Where is the level? If an ordinary Spaniard doesn't know a word that came from a novel does that make the novelist highbrow or the non word knower lowbrow or are they simply different people?

This does mean that some things that come easily to locals require much more effort from we outsiders. I know a little bit about Spanish history and politics because I've made an effort to do so but it's much more difficult to latch on to everyday things. Consider, for instance, events; things like sports matches, theatre, concerts, guided visits, exhibitions and demonstrations. Sometime, shortly after we got here I had a bit of an email battle with one of the local tourist offices which had published a calendar of events. Most were without dates. Why bother to put dates when Mother's day is always the first Sunday in May and "everybody" knows that or when it's common knowledge that International Book Day is the 23rd April. I suppose that, among Britons, Christmas Day wouldn't necessarily get a date either but it does suppose that everyone shares the same knowledge. There was a time when Ramadan and Diwali would have passed unremarked in the UK but, nowadays, that isn't the case. The argument I made to the tourist office was that they needed to remember that not everyone in their town shared the same, Spanish, Catholic background. 

I was thinking about this yesterday just after I'd spent ages trawling through the Facebook pages and other tourist offices and town halls websites to see what sort of things are happening locally over the summer. Some of those things are repetitive, they turn up regularly  - like Burns Night, The Grand National, the Lewes Bonfire, Trooping the Colour, Turkey and sprouts, Glastonbury or Glyndebourne - whilst other things are one offs - concerts, weddings, race meetings, car rallies, election hustings, break dance competitions and so on. Some are things that you might anticipate and plan for. I don't know when Henley Regatta is or Royal Ascot or the Manx TT but it's relatively easy to find out and plan for them if you fancy getting involved. Here in Spain I might do the same for Holy Week in Malaga or the candle festival in Aledo. The flip side is that the only way to know that Villena tourist office is going to do a guided tour of the village of Zafra is to check their publicity. Checking Villena's website, well that and the other thirty that go along with it, is turning into a right slog.

Mind you finding out about local things isn't always such mind numbing toil. I was in Castilla la Mancha the other day and I went for a set menu in a restaurant. One of the dishes was called Galianos which I'd never heard of but turned out to be a pheasant and rabbit dish. I was pondering Galianos and its position in "the popular database". My guess is that many Spaniards wouldn't know what Galianos is either but I also suppose that the situation would be akin to me eating with my, relatively young, nephews. Imagine bubble and squeak or toad in the hole was on the menu. Ny nephews may never have heard of them, they're old fashioned foods after all. I have though so we could pool our experience. In return I presume they would help me out with what to order in a Korean restaurant on the basis that they have probably eaten Korean when I haven't. 

Some things we just know. Some things we learn. Some things we have to search out.