Is it a car, is it a skirt? No, it's a glass!

Being remarkably hip and cool, or whatever you say nowadays for being hip and cool - straight fire Gucci maybe - we go to see a fair number of contemporary musicians. Just so my mum understands I mean pop festivals. We go to see the town band too so, really, we're neither hip nor cool. Never mind. At a music festival, in non Covid times, the security check at the entrance was to look for anything unsafe and to root out food and drink. Nobody likes to pay festival prices for beer or for a rum and coke.

Festivals aren't permanent events, more or less by definition. The jobs they provide are temporary. Most of the staff are temporary. And temporary tends to unknown and unknown tends to untrustworthy. Years ago the daughter of one of my work colleagues went to Ibiza for the summer season to work in a bar. The young woman turned up, sober and unstoned, on time, every day, for the whole of her contract. Her boss was so unused to this responsible behaviour from his young, temporary staff that he paid her a bonus and tried to hire her, then and there, for the next season.

At a festival the temporary staff on the bars aren't trusted to handle money but someone has to, so the bosses get someone to run a cash office in whom they have more confidence. These money handling trusties take the money from the paying punters and change it into little tokens which then become the currency of the festival. It's a doubly good trick because, as well as limiting pilfering, not all the tokens get changed into goods. If, for instance, the tokens are worth 1€ and they are sold in blocks of 10 with the charge for a beer being 3€ there will be a good number of people who buy three beers and have one useless token left over. It's not a huge intellectual leap for friends to pool the left over tokens or for people to queue at the cash office to turn the tokens back into money but both processes are a bit of a faff. The end result is that lots of people go home with a couple of plastic tokens and the organisers get to keep the euros that bought them.

The cost of a small glass of beer in Spain varies but it's still not that unusual to get a beer for as little as a euro, maybe 1.50€. In a decent sized city normal bars might charge around 2.50€ and, if the bar specialises in good looking servers and is trendy - sorry, straight fire - then you can pay a lot more. Nonetheless, even in posh restaurants, restaurants with Michelin stars and strange names, restaurants with oddly named craft beers, I don't think I've ever been particularly shocked by the price of beer; it's not like buying a beer in Paris. One of our local bars charges as much as 6€ for high alcohol (often Belgian) beer and I think that's as much as I've ever paid in anywhere normal. 

At festivals there will be a beer sponsor. They'll have all the bars and serve their, usually, very ordinary lager in plastic glasses at inflated prices. Nowadays the tendency is that you will need a token to buy a reusable plastic glass in a pretence of being environmentally friendly. Festival beer is as expensive as beer gets - 3€ or 4€ for a small glass is pretty usual. The first time it's a shock but by the fifth glass nobody cares much especially if the bands are good.

There are lots of ways to ask for beer in a bar. By name for instance or by the size of the glass. When Britons want a, nearly, pint sized glass (as in Pulp Fiction we have no quarter pounders or pints because we have the metric system) you can ask for a tanque or una jarra. A small glass of beer is usually a caña. The size of a caña varies - in Madrid it tends to be around 200ml but, in the Basque Country, a caña is around a third of a litre. In Castilla y León they have smaller measures that are called cortos, in Andalucia tubos are common and so it goes. Bottles are usually botellín or quinto for the 200 ml size and tercio for the 330 ml size. Again there are regional differences, in Cataluña for instance I think the 330 ml bottles are called medianas by the locals, and there are litre bottles or litronas. Young people and seasoned drinkers often order beer in litronas to share.

Recently we've been to see three bands in the music festival in Cartagena called the Mar de Músicas. With our allocated seats located I went to find the bar and I was pleased to find that the bar staff dealt in cash (and cards). Maggie's wish for a vodka was thwarted though - only soft drinks and beer. I order a couple of cañas and paid the 3€ each. Beer in hand I now have time to read the price list and I notice that they have a bigger, squashy, plastic glass which contain as much as a litre and the price is 7€. This sort of big plastic glass is habitually used for cubatas and cubatas are mixed drinks in the rum and coke, vodka and lemon style. At the Mar de Músicas, and at most festivals, you don't have to go to the bar. Men and women with beer filled backpacks wander the auditoria happy to bring it to you. Near us a couple of young women were ordering beer; they checked prices and quantities and eventually asked for a big plastic glass full of 7€ worth of beer and two smaller empty glasses. They were going to share. As they ask the price their question is "How much is a mini?". I'd forgotten that's what the big glasses are called. Spanish irony I presume.

Being old and pernickety

We went to see a band at the Mar de Músicas in Cartagena a few days ago. The Mar de Músicas is a series of musical concerts held over a couple of weeks in the Murcian city of Cartagena.

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.