Tópicos

The dancer's dark eyes flashed. Arching her back she twisted her lithe body so that her brightly coloured dress, tight at the hips but loose below her knees, swirled around her mimicking the movement of her bright blue wrap. She stamped her feet, she clapped her hands and her olive coloured skin shone with a fine patina of sweat. Spanish cliché time. As real and yet as unreal as Morris Dancers outside the pub on the Village Green.

I've just finished a book by a Spanish author. The basic premise is that her main character moves to London looking for work and ends up working in a bookshop where her life takes a turn for the better. It was an enjoyable, if slight, read, a bit like one of those US Christmas films where the hero rediscovers the joy and warmth of small town life. What struck me most about the book was that it was loaded with Spanish clichés about England and that it repeatedly and wantonly ascribed Spanish habits to Britons.

One of the principle things, that turned up time and time again throughout the book was tea. Gallons of tea. I suppose that's because lots of Spaniards truly believe that England stops for tea and a bun at 4pm. It happened in the book over and over again. The characters drank Earl Grey brewed in fine porcelain teapots and when they were not tucking into cakes they could rely on an unending supply of dainty cucumber sandwiches. The protagonist and her love interest even go to Fortnum and Mason's to drink tea at one point. There is no mention of sitting at your desk, drinking tea from stained mugs with pictures of cats on them and having to squeeze the teabag with your fingers because there are no spoons.

Drake, Sir Francis, not the Canadian musician, and Holmes, Sherlock as in 221b Baker Street, get a few mentions as does New Scotland Yard. For some reason Spaniards know these names. It's a bit like the way that the TV news here always says Boris Johnson's Government but doesn't name Macron when speaking of the French Government. Pirate, by the way, always appears in any sentence that describes Frank Drake. In this book the owners of the pub have the surname Drake and, when they are first introduced, the phrase is that they denied any link to the famous pirate elevated to the knighthood. The pub run by the Drakes is called the Darkness & Shadow which reminded me of the pub in, I think, the Reggie Perrin books, called the Desiccated Kipper. It's a bit different to most English pubs, but a lot like a Spanish bar, in that you order your drinks from the table and people serve them to you. Given my minimal bar presence I must seek it out the next time I'm near Earl's Court.

There are lots of things that we English apparently do that I missed out on when I lived there. It is, of course, possible, that they are common now. For instance, in the book, English shops wrap things bought as presents at Christmas time just as they do in Spain. When the owner of the bookshop closes for the evening he puts down a metal shutter blind. In the UK I only remember those metal roller blinds from areas like Hulme in Manchester though I have no idea if Hulme is still dodgy or not.  The bookshop is in Temple though and last time I was there it bore very little resemblance to the Mancunian badlands. There's a likeable if swotty lad in the book, named Oliver Twist, and his mid afternoon snack is bread stick into which solid lumps of chocolate bar chocolate have been pushed. It's Spanish comfort food but I don't think it's an English staple. Now if he'd had a sugar sandwich! I've heard that Britons are now very outwardly emotional and have embraced touchy feely behaviours but I don't think the smacking lips, air kisses to both cheeks are common yet - they are in the book, just as they are in Spain. Oh and Christmas Eve is when families get together for a big family meal just as they do on New Year's Eve. And so it goes. 

No I can't stop. Here are a couple more to finish. There are a few spelling mistakes, Spaniards find English letter sequences troubling at times just as we Brits stumble over Spanish words. They are going to go to Candem (sic). The best spelling mistake though led to an interesting factlet. It's another Fortnum and Mason mention. The book says that the shop's owners invented Scott eggs (sic again) as easy to eat food for Victorian travellers. Actually there was also mention of an English urban myth that was new to me. It seems that many of us think it is an offence to eat meat pies on Christmas Day. I did read the Wikipedia to check and it seems to have something to do with why mince pies are not meat pies. I forget the details though.

Ah well, I might pop down to the bull ring now or perhaps I'll just have a bit of a siesta. No, I'll do it all mañana.

Hasta la vista, baby.

Truths and falsehoods

I listen to a fair few podcasts. Most are arty or documentary like and just one of them, Spanishpodcast,  is aimed directly at people learning Spanish. This week the episode was called True or False, ¿Verdadero o Falso? and dealt with some of those commonly repeated "facts". You know the sort of thing - we only use 10% of our brains (false), hippos have pink sweat (true), hair and nails continue to grow after death (false), koalas have two penises/vaginas (true) and others of the same ilk.

There were a couple of Spanish related stories in the podcast that I thought I could safely pinch for this blog. The stories have the added advantage of satisfying any cravings I might have to write a blog entry whilst gently steering me away from politics. I'd been tempted though because, yesterday, Parliamentarians were being sworn in as "MPs" at which time they have to promise or swear to uphold the Spanish Constitution. Lots of the Deputies used their brief moment in the spotlight to make some form of statement - from local to global, for the Catalan republic, for the Basque Country, for Spain in general and for depopulated Spain in particular, for the planet, for social services, for murdered women, for democracy, for love not hate and for the Trece Rosas, the thirteen young women killed by a Francoist firing squad soon after the Civil War. Today there are politicians saying this tinkering with the swearing in ceremony is an abomination, a misuse of a public forum blah, blah, blah and that it should be stopped by law. As I keep saying I fear that Spanish society has a very tenuous grasp on the idea of liberty of expression.

Anyway back to Spanishpodcast. Apparently one of the stories, as you down the tequila and Jägermeister shots, is that, in Iceland, it is legal to kill Basques. The Basques are people born in the Basque Country in the North of Spain. Amazingly it's sort of true. Alex, the man from Spanishpodcast said that it's a long story but the essence is that in 1615 a Basque fishing boat went down in a storm off the coast of Iceland. The fishermen, who were probably whalers but Alex kept quiet about that because he knows we foreigners are touchy about whaling, managed to swim ashore. The Icelanders, all those Helgasons and Sturlusons, thought that these Basques were invaders, the vanguard of a bigger army, so they slaughtered them all. That done they had a bit of a parliamentary session and enacted a law making it legal to kill Basques. The law stayed on the statute books until 2015 when the Icelandic Government finally abolished it. And from that date I suppose the tourist routes between San Sebastian or Bilbao and Reykjavik became just a touch safer.

The other story was about a war, the longest war that Spain has ever undertaken, which passed off without dead and wounded or even weapons. It's a bit like the idea that Berwick on Tweed is still at war with Russia (you can Google it just as well as me but I've played drinking games too!) because a small town in the South of Spain, Huéscar, declared war on Denmark in 1809 and that war went on for 172 years until 1981. Not a shot was fired, nobody was killed or injured and really nothing happened at all but, officially, there was a war. In fact the story goes that sometime in the 1970s a Danish journalist was briefly detained in Huéscar but as it was the town archivist who discovered this declaration of war in 1981 and couldn't find the peace declaration to pair with it, a story in the 1970s sounds a bit fishy to me. Anyhow, when it was discovered both sides, the Andaluces and the Danes, took it in good part and had a bit of a party to celebrate the peace. In good Andaluz style that is now an annual fiesta and the Danish ambassador to Spain is usually one of the attendees presumably with a peace offering - pastries maybe?