Gotelé and bowler hats

We form impressions about places. Ask me to describe Morocco and I'd say reds and oranges and hot and noisy with strong aromas. I wouldn't talk about snow and ice even though I know there's plenty of snow and ice in places and at times in Morocco. In just the same way some of those impressions are now dated. The Britain in my childhood was a pretty austere place and while my my contemporaries wore terylene shorts and brown plastic sandals to play out men going to work in offices really did wear bowler hats and carry folded umbrellas. My guess is that you'd have to go some to find a bowler hat in the city nowadays, at least in an everyday context. In Spain a lot of those cliches come from the South, from Andalucia and from the past. Very few people would think bagpipes as typical of Spain (but try going to a festival in Asturias or Galicia and avoiding them) but they might think flouncy frocks and bulls.

I heard a programme on the radio the other day that made me think of some of the things I associate, have associated, with Spain that are now gone or going.

Most Spanish people live in flats. There are entry phone systems designed to keep the riff-raff from getting into the building. This could be a problem for delivery drivers, postal workers, pizza deliverers and even more so for the riff raff hoping to kick down the door and steal the Lladro (there was a time when Lladro pottery was really popular and seen as typically Spanish by Britons) but the work around is easy enough. If there is no answer, push all the doorbells and, if anyone answers, say "postie," "pizza," or "Amazon", but not riff-raff, to get past this basic front door security. In the past, one of the other open sesames was "Circulo".

The Circulo de Lectores, or Readers Circle, was a book club. I'm presuming you're old enough to remember the idea —a sort of magazine/catalogue with a range of books from classics to bird spotting to philosophers to potboilers. You signed up for a minimum period and promised to buy so many books per year as well as getting a tasty introductory officer. I think it was German-owned, but it was a very Spanish institution. Unlike the book clubs in, say, England, which sent things by post once they'd captured their client, the Spanish version worked on a series of reps who had a strong relationship with their clients. The main reason, apart from Spaniards preferring to talk to someone rather than to read something, was that the Spanish Post Office, when the scheme first started, wouldn't deliver anything heavier than 200 grammes in weight. So the rep who signed you up would also bring you the new catalogue, take your order, and deliver the book or books to you—a bit like the man from the Pru of my youth who collected the insurance money each week and might end up as, at least Godfather, to the newborn.

The Circulo changed over the years and by the time I bumped into it, in about 2008, it was no longer the semi magical institution that it once was, helping to build a Spanish middle class, and its catalogues were simply more junk mail pushed into the advertising letterbox outside my block of flats. By then if you did sign up the Post Office would deliver. I never did sign up, but I was close. The Circulo de Lectores no longer exists.

When I heard a radio programme the other week about the Circulo, I was staring at a wall, painted in gotelé, from my hospital bed. The photo is of gotelé—a sort of textured paint that was very popular in Spain a while ago and which you still see from time to time. That's where the idea for this blog, about things that no longer are, came from.

My sister is getting her kitchen cupboards sprayed. Apparently, there are trends in kitchen cupboards; I suppose I knew that because one of the things that crossed my mind when I was thinking about gotelé was floor tiling. There's a sort of composite floor tiling that is basically white but has splotches of red and brown. I don't know exactly when it was popular but my guess is the 60s or 70s of the last Century. By the time we got around to choosing Spanish floor tiles, at the turn of the 21st Century, our choice was, apparently, and happily limited to variations on terracotta. If we'd arrived a bit later we'd have square white tiles and nowadays floor tiles are rectangular and decorated with a wood grain pattern. Maggie tells me our light oak kitchen cabinets look dated too.

Now, obviously, some things just disappear because the technology changes. Like fixed phones and call boxes. In my holidaying middle years Spanish phone boxes were a real challenge. They had a coin slot where the coins rolled down, except that they didn't, or the ones in bars where you had to ask the person behind the bar to give you the phone and they set going some sort of meter that gave the price of the call, or the locutorios, offices with lots of individual cabins - where you were assigned a cabin and paid when you'd finished your calls. The Telefónica locutorios are not to be confused with those those 21st Century locutorios, nearly always run by Latin Americans, where you could use a computer with an internet connection, as well as phone access, or even buy one of the hundreds of phone cards which, by one method or another, gave you access to cheap international calls. I remember whiling away many a happy hour discussing the merits and defects of the various phone cards. And, of course, just like in the UK, long before denationalisation of the phone companies, there were a series of telephones that were iconic to Spaniards just in the same way as I remember that mushroom coloured model that we had on a small carved table in the family home for years and years and years.

The smoke filled bars, their floors littered with napkins and discarded bits of food, were places to make phone calls but their sound was a mixture of the usual and incessant chatter, coffee machine whirring and crockery clattering and the sounds of one of the two models of one arm bandits. I forget one tune but the other played the Tweety Song, incessantly. And mosto. Mosto is just grape juice. It's still very available in supermarkets but it used to be a standard soft drink in bars. I actually asked for a mosto in a bar the other day just to see if it still exists and the pained expression of the twenty plus server proved to me that it's another thing from the past.

Oh, and el paseo. Not the Civil War paseo, the route to the firing squad, the paseo is or was, the evening stroll before eating dinner. It was a thing where bow legged, short, Spanish men dressed up a bit (think sta-prest slacks and Ben Sherman type shirts), linked arms with their floral and bling be-frocked wives and set out to have a bit of a stroll, stopping off at the same series of bars to take the same range of drinks and tapas, all the while stopping to natter with their acquaintances going in the opposite direction on the same circuit. And mopeds, Spain was full of mopeds, not small motorbikes, not scooters, mopeds; and what a racket they made for 49cc engines. There were several funny tricycle type vehicles too. And still lots of working animals, like donkeys and mules pulling carts or goats climbing step ladders while someone with a bandana played the accordion and sent the children round to collect coins from the onlookers. Nuns and priests in the street; as many as in Rome. And tiny, ridiculously low, ticket windows with a Norman arch shape window which would have been good for wheelchair users but were a bit inconvenient for anyone over a metre sixty five, not that there were many people over that height. They were where you went for a bus, theatre or cinema ticket. The person, caged in by the tiny hinged window, would, naturally, be smoking. Actually that just reminded me the number of men missing various limbs were a common site too. And one that may still exist - Sunday morning bread. Again it was the blokes who got to do this - pretending it was a sort of household task. They bought the Sunday morning paper as well as the baguettes and, why not, maybe a glass of wine in one of those stumpy wine glasses on the way home; after all the little woman was at home doing the housework and getting lunch ready. Sunday afternoon was for football matches. And finally one of those things that does still exist but is in decline. The road junction where you turn right to turn left across the road. They are basically roundabouts with the main road through the centre being the one with priority. There's one by Bar Mucho to go to Encebras and another by the Torre del Rico turn but most of them have been replaced by roundabouts or traffic lights.

Obviously this is an easy game for anyone to join in. You can do it with almost anything. We had a conversation about Spangles, Treets, Marathons and Buttersnap a little while ago.