All the news that's fit to print

We have a splendid little town in Pinoso. I mean splendid. The other day we had David Bisbal here, one of the biggest pop stars in Spain. A bit like getting Ed Sheeran to play Marlborough in Wiltshire. There was a float in the carnival procession complaining about the concert. About 5,000 people paid the ticket price of a bit less than 30€ per head and the event made a profit. The complaint was that the prices were too high, that the audience was outsiders and that the profit went to the Town Hall. I presume if the prices had been lower and the Town Hall had made a loss there would have been complaints about that too.

Sometimes though I do wonder about the way that the Town Hall spends money. The current administration has done a lot to prettify the town. There are arguments both ways. The first is - what a waste of money when we need more (fill in the space s appropriate). The second is - lovely, how nice our town looks. I've tended to the second camp. Pinoso is not endowed with many, any, buildings of note. There is lots on a small scale but you have to know what you are looking for. So, keeping the town neat and tidy and the lights and drains working seems reasonable enough.

The Town Hall runs a radio station, produces a periodic magazine, maintains a Facebook page and has a website. The Town Hall website was tarted up recently. It's now slower than it was, more difficult to navigate and altogether much clumsier than before. Nonetheless at least it gives us a way of dealing with some of those minor admin procedures and it gives us access to information. But not really. Take the news sort of information - events and happenings. There have been a couple of pieces put out by the media team which haven't rung true with me. For instance in Culebrón we have a bit of a fun run and the headline was something like "Even more runners this year" but I remembered differently, I checked and there were, in fact, fewer runners in 2018 than in 2017.  There are little reports too from the local police but there seems to be very little about the break ins that we hear about on the grapevine - I suspect a hint of subtle disinformation - report that a flower pot was vandalised but forget that someone was robbed at gunpoint, because that's not a local police issue, is disingenuous to say the least because of the picture it paints. There was a piece too about how sad it was that the local football team wouldn't be playing next year despite the best efforts of the newly formed committee and the councillors to get the team onto an even keel. The comments on a local forum type Facebook page suggest that the reason for the crisis in the football teams is that the Town Hall has pulled the funding. Winston Smith would be proud of them - rewriting history subtly or not. I could be completely wrong of course. We Britons tend to pick up dodgy information because of our dodgy Spanish or because we choose not to get too involved with our adopted new home. The thing I really don't like though is that when I do try to check I find it more or less impossible.

Now the other day I had a conversation with a Canadian who has lived here for a long time. I was being relatively supportive of our administration and he was less so. The conversation ranged across everything from Education Policy and the use of the local Valencian language to general funding in the town. We had different ideas about where the money was coming from. We both knew that there was local, provincial and regional funding but we had different ideas about how it was being used in Pinoso and how much there was of it. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned to one of my students how nice something new was in the town and she agreed but went on to say that the Town Hall only likes to spend money on sexy, vote winning, projects. She lives at the top of a pot holed and tree root damaged tarmac road and that sorting the road out was neither sexy or vote winning. Here in Culebrón I watched the hypocritical annual clean up of the village before our local fiesta. It reminded me of that little story that says that the Royals think that a new paint smell is normal. I marvelled at the piece haranguing local citizens for dumping things beside the rubbish bins which serve the rural areas outside the town. I think they said it had cost the Town Hall 7,000€. I could hardly believe that a Town Hall with a budget of well over 10,000,000€, that happily spends thousands on new flowerpots and railings, was worried about 7,000€ but, even more, I wondered if they'd considered why people had dumped rubbish. Was it perhaps that the communal bins are full to overflowing because they do not have sufficient capacity for the frequency with which they are emptied? Or maybe it's because the town's tip doesn't open at the right times?

One of the selling points of the new webpage was how it allowed people to feedback to the Town Hall and to find "transparency" information. It is possible to make comments on the website but nobody ever answers them. Saying nothing, refusing to engage in a conversation is a remarkably effective way of blocking complaints or questions - it worked in the days of paper forms and it still works in the electronic age. Nonetheless, following on from my conversation with the Canadian I clicked on Transparencia on the Town Hall website. There are redirects to things like budget proposals, income and expenditure predictions, declarations from councillors about their personal wealth and lots more good things. I clicked on a number of links and the message that came back was usually "It seems that we can't find the page you're looking for. Maybe you should try a general search." Other headings led to broken links. In other words either the website isn't functioning or the transparency is a sham. I did try searching and I did find some very basic budgetary stuff there published to the Provincial Bulletin. Stuff like 5,000,000€ in from the quarry and 5,000,000€ out on personnel. That's a lot of personnel for a town of 7,500 people. I'm probably just misreading it all because if those employees were getting the national average pay of 23,000€ that would be 217 staff and there can't possibly be 217 Town Hall staff for a town of around 7,500 souls can there? Oh, and, 23,000€ sounds like a good wage to me. For instance, if I were paid according to the agreements between teaching unions and employers, my annual pay for a 34 hour week would be around 15,000€. Who knows, the information may be there but the website is so turgid, so slow, so laborious, with so many dead ends that I always give up.

And that worries me. The truth is that the Town Hall has tight rein over the flow of information. When we used to have a weekly newspaper, when we used to have a website run by an ex-school teacher it was relatively easy to find alternative and optional points of views; non sanitised information. That's a healthy sort of town, a town that knows how to take and respond to criticism as well as to organise a splendid fiesta and build a new library.

Support for corvidae

The music festival season is just beginning to warm up in Spain. We usually try to get along to at least one event. It's good to hear a band that goes on to greater things - "Calvin? great musician! First time I saw him he was on the tiny fourth stage just by the latrines at half past six in the evening" It's good to hear new bands in general and I always look forward to those vegetable noodles they serve in the overpriced food areas too.

So I was reading an article, in Spanish, from a national newspaper. It was suggesting ways to keep the costs of festival going to a bare minimum. It suggested coachsurfing (sic). Fortunately for me coachsurfing was hyperlinked and when I followed the link there was a little piece about couchsurfing (sic). Taken along with the rest of the article about how nice someone had been to some tourists I decided that it was about an internet method of finding a floor to kip on. Someone who would put you up on their couch for a fraction of the price of the cheapest hostel. I have no idea whether couchsurfing is in use in the UK but there is a fair chance that it is - it's just new to me. I may know what wotless and glamping mean but it's imppossible to keep up with all the linguistic changes from a couple of thousand kilometres away.

Back in our living room I was watching some late night current affairs programme. The subtitles were on. They repeatededly mentioned crowfunding (sic) which is a fair phonetic interpretation of the word the people were using during the debate. I guessed straight away that it was not some crow support charity but a mispronunciation of crowd funding. Similar things happen all the time. I'm never quite sure whether the word is basically an Englishism given a Spanish twist - like WhatsApp becoming wassap or whether some Spanish person has decided that an English word or phrase will do the job better than a Spanish word and invented something that only exists here. Not to stray too far a really simple example of the latter would be the word parking, which is a well established and widely used Spanish word, that translates as car park or parking lot.

English words crop up in the middle of educated Spanish speech all the time. Today, in maybe an hour or so of radio listening, I noticed base camp, hotspot and peacekeeper. Often the words are pronounced to Spanish pronunciation rules so that they become unintelligible to my Brit ear. It's quite strange to maybe hear a new phrase or word on the radio or TV only to realise, when I see it written down, that it is some perfectly simple English word. Change the stress, as my students do, on ear to make it sound like a West Country exclamation and you'll appreciate how easily and quickly it can happen.

At least I've worked out a strategy for one thing that used to flummox me all the time. I get to the cinema and the title is in English. I often tried, unsuccessfully, to guess the Spanish pronunciation. Now I just say the title in English and follow it up with a Spanish phrase which says "I hate it when the titles are in English." We all have a bit of a laugh and the success rate on trouble free ticket buying has skyrocketed.

Keeping up to date

When we first settled in Pinoso the Internet wasn't as all pervasive as it is today. There was still a weekly rag, el Canfali, which reported the news from Pinoso and many of the surrounding towns. The quality of its journalism was questionable but it was a part of my weekly routine to buy and read it. I was sad when it died. Good for my Spanish and good to know what was happening.

Our local Town Hall runs a radio station and a TV station. The TV station fell foul of the digitalisation of the Spanish television networks and finally gave up analogue broadcasting in March 2012. Even before it closed we lost the signal in Culebrón with a change of transmitter. I don't quite understand how or why but it still exists on the internet although it seems to produce still rather than moving images. There are just fourteen videos on its Facebook page for instance. The Pinoso Town Hall website is enigmatic about Telepinos's future "waiting to find a method of being an open window for all the people of Pinoso."

The radio station is fine. The signal's a bit weak our side of town but it broadcasts on the internet too. A mix of local programming and idiosyncratic music.

The other source of written information, alongside the commercial Canfali and the generalist commercial provincial press, was and is a free magazine produced by the Town Hall. It's called El Cabeço. It used to be monthly but times are hard and it now seems to be truly periodical - sometimes it covers three months, sometimes two. I don't have to worry about publication date. My pal Geoff collects one when he sees one in the newsagent where he picks up his Daily Mail every day. When it comes out I get one. I presume the same writing team put together the news on the Town Hall website every day.

I suspect that the editorial in El Cabeço is a little biased. When the PP/UCL were in power el Cabeço told us about their wonderful achievements. The present administration is PSOE/PSD and it's their turn to be outstanding. Nonetheless a lot of the information is purely factual and the parts I can read (much of it is in Valenciano) are usually pretty interesting. Each of the political parties gets space in the magazine anyway and they anticipate the guff of their opponents and answer back in anticipation. It can be amusing to read. There is obviously something close to "Parliamentary Privilege" in what opposing politicians can say within its pages.

You may remember that when we voted in the European elections I mentioned that we had a sort of referendum about some local questions too. Well El Cabeço tells me there's going to be another one in September this time about the future of our local salt dome, our emblematic mountainlet, el Cabeço in Valenciano or el Cabezo in Castellano.

Before I explain tell me what the answer is to this question: "Are you in agreement with the wells of the salt dome being used for potentially contaminating substances quite unrelated to their actual use?" It loses something in translation but I hope you have no doubt about the correct answer.

This is about the plan to use the empty spaces within the hill to store some of Spain's strategic oil reserve. I notice in his editorial in the magazine that the mayor doesn't shilly shally around when he describes the idea as damaging (nocivo) and says that he hopes the referendum will give support to the plans his party is developing to stop the project.

I don't quite understand why there is going to be a referendum. Thousands of opposing signatures have already been collected which surely serve the same purpose but I look forward to reading about the landslide support for keeping the hill clean in the next edition.