Pedro got there first

I spent most of yesterday morning locked in combat with the IMSERSO booking portal. For those who have not read the multiple blogs I have written about it, IMSERSO is the Spanish state’s subsidised holiday scheme for pensioners—an enterprise designed to keep coastal hotels open and retirees occupied during the off-season. The system won't let you apply a minute before your allotted time. Mine was 09:00 on 17 September. Having done my homework beforehand, I had compiled a tidy list of preferred destinations and target hotels.

My initial plan was to head out to the Canary Islands—the offer included Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, or Tenerife. Yet when I finally logged in at two minutes past nine, the digital calendar was already glowing red with ‘full’ dates. Fuerteventura and Lanzarote were completely wiped out, leaving a mere three green blobs on Tenerife, the island we'd chosen, but none of the dates or hotels had any relation to my pre-planned targets.

The dearth of space is simple: those with more points, earned through greater age, registered disability, or longer working lives, got to choose yesterday, leaving us lesser souls with the table scraps. I eventually managed to get my name down for a cancellation, though it currently sits in administrative limbo as a provisional offer. Because my modest point total places me lower down the food chain, holding this pending spot prevents me from booking anything else. Maggie and I have a backup plan in mind, but for now, I am left waiting to see if someone else's change of heart turns my tentative reservation into an actual holiday.

It seems, however, that Pedro Sánchez had rather less trouble securing his own Canary Islands break in Lanzarote. The fact that I know that is probably the sort of thing that makes Maggie think I'm a very strange sort of person. I take it as evidence that, little by little, I'm still picking up the sort of Spanish background knowledge that you acquire without really noticing.

Much of it comes from the radio. I have my little routines. Either live or in podcast form, I listen to plenty of contemporary music, a general arts programme, a couple of cinema-related podcasts, a documentary series, a couple of history-related slots (one of which is particularly mischievous), and a deeply socialist political analysis programme. Given that there are only 24 hours in a day, I skip a lot of them, but the menu is still pretty extensive. I also like radio news—the sort you can listen to as you garden, wash the dishes, or cut your toenails.

It was during one of those news bulletins a week or two ago that I heard the president of Madrid complaining, as always, about the president of the government. This time she joined the chorus of complaints about his handling of the situation in Ceuta, where thousands of people crossed the border from Morocco. How many died in the attempt is still unclear, but the lowest estimates put the figure at well over 100. Of those who did cross and have chosen to stay, most are still on the streets, remarkably unprocessed. Isabel—she's Isabel Díaz Ayuso—was pretty snarky: "No se puede estar como el jeta de La Mareta, en chanclas.

Now, when I heard that phrase, I knew what it meant, well, more or less. I knew what a jeta was and I knew what chanclas were, so I had the basic idea: "You can't go around acting like the cheeky scoundrel in flip-flops." There had been a lot of complaining that he was on holiday. But La Mareta left me flummoxed. I wondered what a mareta was. It turns out it's not la mareta, it's La Mareta. And it's the place that Pedro went to in Lanzarote without fighting with calendars and red blobs.

La Mareta is a luxury seafront estate in Costa Teguise, Lanzarote. Originally built in the late 1970s for King Hussein of Jordan—and designed in collaboration with the famous Canarian artist César Manrique—it was gifted (like I might give a box of chocs) by King Hussein to King Juan Carlos I. Surprisingly, the old King handed it over to the Spanish state like a good Monarch. Today, it serves as an official state retreat. While it was initially used by foreign dignitaries (such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl) and the Spanish Royal Family, in recent years it has primarily functioned as a holiday residence for sitting Spanish Prime Ministers.

I sometimes marvel at references like that. If you were to say to me that Andy Burnham had sloped off to Chequers when he should be overseeing RAF bombing raids on Yemen, I'd know both the RAF and Chequers. I didn't know La Mareta. They do the same thing to me when sports commentators talk about Los Colchoneros claiming a hard-fought win at El Sadar. It's rather like being told that the Gunners had to dig deep to win at Selhurst Park. But whilst knowing what La Mareta is is the sort of thing I want to know, knowing the fate of Atlético de Madrid against Osasuna interests me about as much as knowing who plays at Selhurst Park—though I do actually know who the Gunners are!