Rooted in the land

Last week we booked up for an Experiencia Gastro-Cultural in Novelda. The hook was the word gastro rather than on the word cultural. 

The morning consisted of a couple of visits to the two "principal" Modernista or Art Nouveau houses in the town. Both are on the Calle Mayor in Novelda. One is run by the Fundación Mediterráneo and has an entrance charge whilst the other, the Centro Cultural Gómez Tortosa, is owned by the Town Hall, so it's free, and is home to the Tourist Office. Both are pretty stunning in their detail and, every time we go, they seem to have improved their offer of things to see.

So, if the Modernista heritage was the cultural part of our visit, what were we going to get on the gastro side? Novelda has long been associated with saffron. The crocus flowers that provide the saffron originally all came from Castilla La Mancha (nowadays a lot of the saffron also comes from Iran) and it seems to be by sheer chance that Novelda became the place to process the saffron and then sell it worldwide. I have heard that, like the marble industry located in Novelda, the saffron trade owes a lot to the 19th Century railway boom. Nowadays, businesses that began with saffron have branched out into associated areas. If you buy one of those kits of "botanics" to mix in your gin, if you have a salt cellar with pink Himalayan, or black truffle salt or even if you just look at the spice and condiment section in Mercadona, you'll often find that the company that did the packing and marketing is based in Novelda. So that's where our tour guide took us next. To the LayBé factory where a small team puts saffron into nicely designed tins, worries about the ideal qualities of salt cellars and frets about packaging up varieties of paprika. There wasn't a lot to see to be honest but the talk we got from one of the owners was pretty interesting and it just shows how important marketing and image are nowadays.

Next, the bloke who'd been showing us around changed his hat from tour guide to winemaker. Apparently his family has been in winemaking, as Bodegas Ortigo, since 1880 with vineyards near Las Salinas. At one point the vineyard, and its wines, had all but disappeared, then, a few years ago, the guide and his family decided to give it another go. We got to taste the result. The white, the rosé and the red all have a bit of a twist on the typical wines produced around here. We got to do "the cata", the tasting, outside a shop called El Escaparate. It's one of those places that sells, nuts and chocolate, olive oil, salt, honey and a whole host of similar edible things in cans and jars at inflated prices. The wine was served with coques or cocas - the local variant on a pizza but only in as much as it has a bready sort of base and a topping. I like cocas but Maggie always refers to them as fat pies!

As I drank my wine I thought about bodegas selling "odd" wines, about the young woman at LayBé selling salt that tasted of fried eggs and saffron packaged in fancy little tins. The man selling his wine was passionate. Although all the businesses, the saffron place, the trendy shop and the bodega, were simply businesses, and business is easy to understand; selling things to produce profit, there was something else to each of them. People dream up new businesses all the time. Not long ago food delivery on bikes, leasing cars or the idea of selling a unique digital image would have seemed ridiculous. Nowadays they are just another business. There was something though that the businesses we'd seen and the places we'd been, had in common. The man, Angel by name, was waxing lyrical about "nuestra tierra", our land, our home, our traditions. It's the sort of thing you hear folk musicians talking about, it's the stuff of local historians, it's the reclamation of their place in history by women or by communities and by groups with a common bond. It's something that's there in the foundation trying to preserve the variety in citrus groves or the farmer herding rare breeds. It's there in the towns that depend on tiger nuts for the horchata but have found hundreds of ways to market products made from the nuts, it's the people who still make the lip balm that was developed by their great grandad for local farmers in the huerta of Valencia. 

Maybe they're just another business, maybe they are simply looking for that unique selling point but I got this feeling there was more heart and passion in this than that and that it highlighted a way of doing business. Angel had sounded proud of "his" town as he showed us the houses, as he took a pride in the development of the town, as he talked about Modernista houses about the quality of the local buildings, that Modernista past, the pride in the Novelda woman who had been given the pejorative nickname of the Pitxotxa but had gone on to build up a business empire in a hostile world ruled by men.

Or maybe I'm just getting sentimental in my old age.

Agility

There are ways of doing things in Spain. If you want a lunch in a restaurant don't go in much before 2pm or after 4pm. If you go out drinking then, to fit in, you need to start on the spirits and mixer drinks after around 11pm. Drinking a hot drink whilst you eat food, with some leeway for breakfast toast and pastries, is tantamount to treason. Don't start filling your car with petrol or diesel before you've given someone the opportunity to come and do it for you as the majority of filling stations still have attended service. When your everyday doctor refers you to a specialist expect another appointment in the specialist department before you actually get to see the oncologist, cardiologist or whoever. In the bank or at the post office don't be too surprised if each person takes ten to fifteen minutes to get served (even if they are only buying stamps or paying a bill) and expect the employee behind the desk to look confused as they prod at the keyboard and stare in apparent bewilderment at the screen.

Lots of "official" things can be done online nowadays, at least partially, but don't be too shocked if you have to go and queue somewhere to start or to finish that online process. It may be possible to open an online bank account by staring at a camera with documentation in hand but don't expect that sort of new fangled thinking to work for local, regional or national government documentation

Like the rest of Europe Spain has started to vaccinate against Covid. There are 17 Autonomous Regions and each one has its own Health Service. Central Government distributes the weekly deliveries of vaccines but each Region administers the coronavirus jabs. Madrid, which includes the capital city and is the second most populous Region in Spain, started vaccinations at the end of December. Anyone with any experience of organising anything new knows to expect teething problems but the Madrid programme went well wrong.  Only putting 46 teams on the vaccination (two per team) wasn't a good start but then not working the couple of public holidays or the weekends in the first week didn't help. In fact Madrid only managed to use 6% of the vaccine available to them that first week. The, always good for a laugh, President of Madrid blamed Central Government, as she always does, but as Madrid's weekly supply of the vaccine is 48,750 doses my junior school arithmetic tells me that each of the 46 teams would need to have vaccinated 1,059 people per week, one every nine and a half minutes, to use all the supply. Meanwhile in Asturias, where they got 42,000 doses from Central Government in the first week they managed to achieve something like 80% of their target. Last time I looked our Valencian Region had done about 12,000 vaccinations or nearly 20% of the 60,000 doses it had on hand. I don't know anyone who's had one.

I did see a Tweet which said  that the recruitment criteria for 'jab nurses' are set by the EU and that the requirements were two years vaccinating experience, knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, completion of a Covid online training course plus other coordination and training skills. The Tweeter said it was obvious why there weren't enough people working. I have no idea if this was a Brexiteer making a point about the awful EU bureaucracy or something normal and maybe true. I could find no other reference to those criteria but I did find plenty of information about Regions setting up much shorter training programmes back in December so they were ready to administer the vaccines when they arrived.

If the vaccination rates don't go up then Spain will never reach it's 70% of the population vaccinated by the summer target. As you may imagine, because "all" the pundits and the reporters and the politicians live in Madrid this caused a bit of a media storm. One of the radio commentators I heard said that the problem in Spain was lack of agility. An unpreparedness to find a way, an unwillingness to depart from the tried and tested and I suddenly found myself with a new theory. The lack of Spanish agility.

From the big things, like the ERTES, the temporary lay-offs for Covid, the registration of people for the new baseline for family income, the Ingreso Mínimo Vital, the problems that people are having getting appointments with nearly all Government Departments, the inability or unwillingness to provide power to the illegal "shanty town" in Madrid, the difficulty with changing the way that education is delivered, right down to the tiny things like only being able to get a substantial meal at certain times of the day were all suddenly explained. It's not a lack of organisational ability (as many of my compatriots are happy to suggest), it's not about any laziness or "mañana" attitude but it is an unwillingness to accept that the system may be flawed. Once you have something in place it cannot, usually, be altered, tinkered with or improved to suit circumstances.

Well, it's a theory.