Spain was quick to open up theatres and cinemas and audience venues in general after the total shutdown in the Spring of last year. The venues adapted. Things, generally, had to be booked online beforehand, even for free events. The programmes started much earlier than is normal in Spain. The capacity of venues was drastically reduced and there were all sorts of restrictions about entering and leaving the venue and where you could sit. I have felt much less safe in supermarkets, where the tussle for the unblemished and tasteless tomatoes went on much as before, or in bars and restaurants, where friends and acquaintances greet each other effusively, than I have over the Covid time in a theatre or cinema.
Some of the Covid measures were a nuisance. I don't like giving my phone number and email address away nor having someone check my temperature but, the broader democratic freedoms aside, it wasn't really either onerous or even intrusive. In fact there were definite upsides. The cinemas closed for a while but for months after they'd re-opened they were more or less deserted and nobody crunched popcorn or commented noisily on the action. It's only in the last month or so that I've had to share the film with more than a couple of people. Cleaners roamed in mobs, the hand soap dispensers were filled to the brim, the hand towels were waiting, no sweets, no popcorn and lots and lots of space around the seats. Even in an empty cinema, with just the two of us, people would check that we were still wearing masks. It all felt secure. In fact there have been no outbreaks linked to cinemas.
Theatres have been the same with spare seats between patrons and whole rows of seats left empty to keep people apart. The productions have fewer people on stage than usual and musical performances dropped from full orchestras to quartets and wind ensembles. Even contemporary music concerts were carefully controlled with the audience seated on some pre-numbered chair with lots of space around. Security guards prowled to make sure that you stayed put unless your bladder demanded otherwise. My primary school teachers would have approved.
Now, as I type, lots of us, the old and the not so old, have been vaccinated, immunised maybe. We only have to wear masks inside or outside when we are in crowded spaces. The tables in the bars are closer, waiters are back to wiping down tables with dirty cloths and the lottery as to whether there will be hand soap and paper towels in the toilets is back to normal. We are forgetting very quickly how much effort has gone in to keeping us healthy and the infections, if not the deaths, are showing how blasé we have become about Covid. The TV is full of medical people complaining about full wards, high occupation of intensive care beds and the postponement of routine operations.
Covid has been bad, sometimes terrible, for all sorts of people and for all sorts of organisations. On a small scale I felt quite sorry for young people. Like very old people they only have limited time to enjoy their age. When I was at university I was able to take full advantage of my first taste of independent living. The problems of car loans, mortgages, finding work and all those boring adult things were still to come. It was a time for experimentation and new things. If I'd missed that brief slot it would have been gone forever. That's why I can empathise with the young people who feel aggrieved that they were criminalised for simply wanting to dance or to drink rum and coke with other drunken friends at 4am in the morning.
It seemed to me that the authorities needed to recognise that this section of the population, in a rich, Western, democratically free country has high expectations. What they want may be trivial on the scale of things but then so are most of the things that most of us want most of the time. Young people's wants should not be less important than other sections of the community just because what they want isn't something particularly deep and meaningful. Nobody seemed to think that families wanting to share time together was valueless nor is there a public outcry when victorious sports people hug each other or when politicians rub shoulders at Very Important Summits. Shutting down the dance clubs might be an easy option but opening the dance clubs and keeping them safe should not be beyond the wit of a rich and well organised Western state.
And that's how we get back to the Mar de Músicas. We'd gone to see Califato ¾ which is a band from Andalucia whose songs mix traditional musical elements, from that region, with other styles from rock and punk to electronic music.
The band came on stage at the appointed time. This is a nearly unknown phenomenon in Spain. It surprised at least half the audience which arrived after the off. Most of the late arrivals seemed to need to pass directly in front of my view of the band. Meanwhile, not in any big way but in an annoyingly consistent way, the tallest man on the mixing desk chose to stand rather than sit. He was just in my line of sight. The beer trolleys and the people with beer packs on their back wandered around. They too seemed determined to pause in my direct line of sight. Lots of the audience moved chairs to be nearer their friends, their mask use was less than consistent and, rather as you would expect, they stood up to dance gripping on to their big plastic beer glasses.
At a normal concert with normal rules I'd have done what I always do when the off duty basketball player stands in front of me, when the stoned group of mates start to dance and tread on my toes, when the really drunk little man starts to unintentionally fling beer around with his drunken dancing and when I just feel uncomfortable to be wherever I am in the seething crowd. I'd move. But I wasn't supposed to move and being a rule following fuddy duddy I simply stayed put and seethed. Nobody was really doing anything particularly wrong, it just peeved me.
Actually I didn't care for the antics of one of the band members either; some big fat bloke who seemed to delight in showing off his belly. I suspected that, were we ever to meet in a quieter setting, he and I would have found little to talk about and that he may have relieved the boredom by lighting his farts. Or, of course, he may be erudite and charming man. And, to top it off, I didn't understand a word they said. Again that's hardly surprising as the band's last album made heavy use of a spelling system called EPA (Estándar para el andaluz or, under its own, non official rules, Êttandâ pal andalûh) which is designed specifically to represent the Andalucian dialect in a written form. Not understanding what is said in Spanish always makes me cross.
The terrible thing was that the music was really good but I couldn't both seethe and cheer wildly so I chose to sulk.
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