Life in Culebrón

I heard a news item that said that someone had died. The name sounded, on first hearing, to be Mujica but in fact it was Múgica. The first, José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica, is an ex Uruguayan president, who has YouTube video after video overflowing with avuncular socialist wisdom and the other is Enrique Múgica Herzog who was, in Francoist times and during the transition, an important Spanish politician. The Uruguayan I knew in the same way as one knows Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs. The Spaniard I didn't know at all. I've mentioned a pal who lives in el Cantón, a small village just over the border into Murcia, a couple of times in the last few blogs. His village seems to be being pretty "solidario" at the moment and they've made a couple of videos ; the together, as a team, we can win sort of videos. One of the clips, the second part of the video, shows people from the village singing along to Resistiré , a song from the 80s which has ...

When it comes to National Identity I'm not a believer. I don't, for instance, see anything to be proud of in having been born in a particular place and I don't think  that the people of one nation are intrinsically different to the people of another. I do believe though that we all learn from our surroundings and that, as such, there are learned, generalised, national traits. One thing that Spaniards like to say about themselves is that they are "solidario". It's not an easy word to translate into English - it's the attitude of being supportive, caring, empathetic, sympathetic and in it together. Whenever there is an earthquake or hurricane somewhere in the world there will be something in the Spanish news about us being solidario and sending this or that team of rescue workers, search dogs, blankets or tents. The truth is that Spain has cut its foreign aid and only spends about 0.14% of it's Gross Domestic Income (GDI) on overseas aid. As a ...