And nobody wears Prada

I was hanging around in the Corte inglés in Alicante the other day. Corte Inglés is a big department store. Like all traditional retailers Corte Inglés has been having a hard time recently but they're still something of a Spanish institution. Anyway, Father Ted like, I, inadvertently, wandered into the women's underwear section. As I averted my eyes, I found myself gazing at small section dedicated to "traditional" clothes from Alicante. I was rather taken with the silk brocade waistcoats but not so much with the 190€ price tag on most of them.

I've often wondered where people get their "traditional" clothes from so Corte Inglés was a bit of a surprise. Maybe all the branches in Provincial Capitals have a "traditional" section. I've asked of course and been variously told that some of the clothes are hired, that there are family heirlooms, that lots are made in family, that there are people who make a living by supplying the clothes and, from time to time, I do see the costumes in shop windows. There used to be a shop in Pinoso, in Plaza Colón, opposite the market that sold fiesta clothes. Down in Murcia, for the Bando de la Huerta celebrations, they move so much "traditional" clothing that you can buy it in the supermarkets.

I've said in the past that the idea of "traditional" dress seems a bit strange to me. (I'm going to give up on the inverted commas now but remember they're there). Who is it who chooses? Who stopped the clock in the 18th or 19th century? Why isn't traditional something from 1945 or 1967 or 2023? And if it were would traditional be what people wear to the office, to a wedding or to do sport?

Probably around 2006 our village, Culebrón, prepared a float for the big parade that is a part of the Pinoso fiesta in August. Culebrón had been promised drains by the PP administration of the time but they were not forthcoming. The float's main feature was an oversized toilet. We were told to try to wear something traditional to accompany the float and that the traditional dress for Culebrón was striped grey trousers or skirt topped off with a white shirt. We did our best.

There's another event in Pinoso which celebrates the liberation of Pinoso from the shackles of Monóvar in 1826. The celebration, called Villazgo, takes place in February. For years it was a great event, nowadays in cash strapped Pinoso it's a pathetic affair held in a car park. I used to buy a newspaper most mornings from a shop called Juanjo and I liked to try and chat to the owner as a way of practising my Spanish. We got talking about Villazgo and Juanjo told me about the typical and traditional form of clothing for men in Pinoso before selling me a sort of smock. Very simple, a big baggy black shirt to be worn with a blue and white neckerchief. He wasn't telling fibs, I know from years and years of experience that it's one of the most common men's outfits for Villazgo. Mine is still unworn. I have never been one for fancy dress and I always think I'd feel like a bit of a fake dressing up as a Spaniard - I was born in Huddersfield after all where cloth caps and clogs might have been more appropriate.

There are several events in Pinoso when people wear something that is called traditional. I often wonder if it's traditional in the way that blokes with bells on their clothes doing clodhopping type dances with clashing sticks on various village greens in England in the guise of Morris dancers or Mummers are, apparently, a part of my heritage. Those Pinoso events include Villazgo. Easter is another. There's a day in the Holy Week celebrations when women process through the streets wearing peinetas and mantillas. You know the sort of thing. Think of a, supposedly, Spanish woman in a 1950s Hollywood film, wearing something that isn't the flouncy fiesta frock. She'll have a high comb stuck into her raven coloured hair to support a very fine lace scarf that hangs around the side of her face and down her back. For most of the time though when the women in Pinoso don traditional dress they'll wear a pleated skirt, called a refajo, which is a huge circle of cloth with a circular, elasticated(?), hole for their waist pleated over and over again and usually in green, red and tonal stripes. It's the sort of skirt that the "carnival queens" wear during the Pinoso fiestas in August but it's also the skirt for the folk dancers.

Another event in the August Fiesta is the ofrenda, the flower offering. People set off from a district called Santa Catalina and parade through the streets to the Parish Church. It's one of my favourite events. The participants smile sufficiently to light up a large city. People from all over the area, even over the border into Murcia, are invited to the ofrenda and the range of traditional clothes is impressive. The contingent from Culebrón always wear those grey trousers or skirts we were told about in our toilet training days. There are blokes in velvet knee breeches and Cordoba style hats, there are women from Alicante dressed in huge silky skirts supported on some sort of scaffolding so typical of the city's San Juan fiesta. As we're in Valencia region it's very difficult not to be aware of the Fallas Fiesta which takes place in March in Valencia City (there are other fallas in other towns too) and even I can tell that there are big differences, as well as seeming similarities, between the women's outfits from Valencia and Alicante. I can't actually remember if either Alicante or Valencia features the breast enhancing bodices but they are also a big part of the ofrenda. To their credit several of our town councillors make a real effort with some splendid traditional clothes in several of these events. Indeed I was thinking of a couple of the waistcoats sported by our current mayor when I was in Corte Inglés.

Mention of the Fallas reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend who was born in Valencia city. She complained that, during the dictatorship, the traditional dress had been discouraged and a sort of Francoist revision of traditional was put in place. I have no idea what the changes were - maybe fewer push up corsets - but she got very hot under the collar about it. She also told me how much her sister had spent on a dress for a recent edition of Fallas - again I forget how much but it made me blanche at the time.

Anyway. So I thought, there's a blog here about the differences that there are between traditional Pinoso and, similar but different, in Monóvar (next town down the road) or Yecla (across the frontier into Murcia). In fact someone told me that the stripes on the refajo skirts are horizontal, as against vertical, in one or the other. I was lying in bed thinking about it. I decided that books, as against the Internet, would probably be a good source of information. 

I went to the library where Clara, the librarian/archivist was extremely generous with her time (and forgiving of my Spanish) as she told me about the local traditional clothes. Basically what she said was that traditional was a load of tosh. That the clothes worn came from a range of periods and the differences between an outfit in one place and another was that one town was doing the equivalent of featuring the 1960s mini skirt whilst another had chosen to highlight the 1970s catsuit (not literally you understand but figuratively) or that two towns had chosen the same basic period but one was stressing Sunday best while the other had gone with working in the fields. Add in a bit of similarity, or variety, because of the seasonal nature of the clothes, the climate they were designed for, the materials they were made of, whether the clothes were made by Balenciaga for a rich landowner or came from Stradivarius for a factory worker and lots of other sensible and obvious factors.

It was a very informative session and I borrowed a couple of books and got to see several reference books with old pictures of the area (sometimes with Clara pointing out her mum or grandma in some grainy B&W photo) but it didn't help me write the definitive guide to traditional dress in Pinoso. Maybe when I've read the books!

Top Hat, White Tie and Tails

In the 1970s I wore cheesecloth shirts and loons. I don't now. Looking back I shouldn't have then. In the film Beau Brummel, the one with Stewart Granger and Elizabeth Taylor, Beau caused a bit of a sensation when he appeared at court wearing full-length trousers rather than knee breeches and stockings. Watching the Pinoso Half Marathon it struck me that the competitors were wearing clothes that would have been outlandish at best, and scandalous at worst, not so long ago. Fashions change as they always have. If not I'd be dressed like Francis Drake or Somerset Maughan and Inditex and Primark would be customerless.

Despite this constant change lots and lots of events in Spain feature something that we tend to call traditional dress. I was reminded of this when we went to see the start of a romería in Yecla the other day. There was no traditional costume there but it was something traditional, the repetitive, apparently unchanging ritual of rural, and not so rural, Spain.

One of my favourite events in Pinoso is the flower offering at the end of the town's fiestas. More than once, in the crowd, watching the procession pass, some local standing next to me has explained why the invitees from Yecla or Alicante are easy to spot because they wear this and that which aren't a bit like the things worn by the people from Pinoso. To me the fiesta clothing of Monóvar, Pinoso or Algueña is very similar but apparently not so. The Monovarians or Algueñans have this sort of skirt and that sort of shirt whereas we have that sort of skirt and this sort of shirt. 

Go to Valencia for the springtime Fallas festival and watch hundreds and thousands of women wearing a bodice or corset which matches the material of the skirt accompanied by a shawl worn across the shoulders and knotted at the waist - a costume inspired in the clothes that people actually wore in the street, presumably rich people, in the 18th and 19th centuries. Oh, and expect to hear the tune Valencia more than once!

I wanted to add a few lines about the outfits worn for the midsummer San Juan festival in Alicante. I was looking for something short and snappy, like the description that Google gave me for the Falleras (The women in the Valencia Fallas). Instead I found that there were pages and pages of rules about how people should turn out. For instance for women, the mantilla, the head covering, has to be starched and with seven folds to raise the mantilla above the head whilst the hair has to be worn in a sort of bun with the hair well back from the face and with orange blossom in the hair on the left side. I presume that there is some sort of policing of these rules to stop some wild spirit from wearing a carnation in their loose hair. In fact, thinking of it, I've actually seen people being barred from the Easter processions in Cartagena when their gloves didn't have the correct type of buttons.

I wonder if this is going to remain frozen in time or if the women in the flower offerings in the 23rd Century (if we get there) will be wearing shorts and string tops and the men some sort of baggy sports clothing with a funny haircut as a reminder of the traditional costume of the 21st Century?

Getting down

Spain is full of fiestas. Fiesta is an idea that we foreigners living here begin to get a glimmer of but which most of us never quite understand fully. It's not just a street party or a carnival. A proper fiesta is based on traditions, sometimes traditions based on beliefs. Fiestas are a collective expression of a community; it's not about somebody organising something and other people watching. Fiestas are commonplace, often nearly ignored by locals yet usually loaded with symbolism in the clothes, dances, music, songs or other manifestations such as language and bonfires. Recognising, and altering, those symbols is something often passed from generation to generation. Fiestas are periodic and repetitive - with the same basic things happening year after year.

There are, within towns and cities, fiestas and fiestas. Some are only fiestas in name because they were designed by tourist boards or trade associations. They don't fit the spirit of the definition above. They can be big, they can be enormous, but they do not, necessarily, represent the spirit of a community. You'd have to ask a local to be sure but I think that, for instance, San Juan in Alicante is one of those seminal fiestas. If you go and watch the parade it's impressive but the real San Juan is not in watching - it's in participating. In getting into a barraca and eating, drinking and dancing with your friends, in sitting around a bonfire with people you met at school etc. It's one of the reasons I like the Easter celebrations in Spain - the Church may think they're religious events but I think that they are much more an expression of a community. Here in Pinoso I think Santa Catalina is like that, in Valencia the Fallas and in Ciudad Rodrigo the encierro at Carnaval. There are thousands of others. I should say that in these days of mass tourism some of the fiestas may lose some of the spirit of that description. I know a couple of Valencianos who think that Fallas is just one huge commercial inconvenience nowadays aimed at tourists. The Wine Horses in Caravaca struck me as one enormous booze up and people have said the same about the Bando de la Huerta in Murcia.

In fact it was to the Bando de la Huerta that we went yesterday. A bando is usually the sort of thing that the town crier reads out, a proclamation. Town Halls here still pin bandos to their noticeboards. As an example in December last year the town of Yecla issued a bando banning the collection of wild plants, like holly and ivy, connected with Christmas. In this particular case, so Wikipedia tells me, the bando is a programme, often with a critical political message, for the fiesta written in verse. Huerta is the key word here though. The dictionary definition I knew, before living in Murcia, was market garden but it's a lot wider than that - it means the fertile, irrigated land of Murcia (and Valencia). It's the countryside, the agricultural land.  From that quick look at Wikipedia it seems that the Bando was originally a festival organised by rich people to mock the peasants in the countryside with their funny habits and clothes but, nowadays, it's a celebration of the traditions and customs of the countryside and the wealth and harvests that it produces.

We've been around this area for ages and it's the first time that we've been free to go. We didn't stay long and we didn't participate. We just watched some of the parade and we were even a bit late in arriving to see all of that. Apparently Pinoso had a group in the parade and we missed them for instance. One of the reasons we were a bit late was that we couldn't find anywhere to park. The city centre was closed off, cars were parked, and double parked, everywhere. Obviously everyone wanted to get in on the act. Outside all of the bars there were piles and piles of men and women drinking and talking and wearing waistcoats and "traditional" dress. Very odd to see young men with modern haircuts, piercings and tattoos consulting their mobile phones, beer in hand, wearing zaragüelles, a type of big, baggy, white boxer shorts and often alpargatas, the shoes we Brits call espadrilles. In a way that's where the fiesta was. In just the same way that it was in the Floridablanca gardens where a barraca, a sort of temporary HQ set up by a peña, one of the neighbourhood or interest groups that participate in the fiestas, was in full swing and oblivious to the passing parade as they served traditional and typical Murcian food and where there would be folk music, displays of bygone days and the like. We could see the fiesta around us, everywhere but we didn't really get involved.

Just to say that the Wikipedia article about the Bando is about 10 pages of A4 long so there is lots more to know about this event if you're interested. Bear in mind too that the Bando is just one of several events happening in Murcia this week as a part of the Spring Festival.

A cinema, a parade and something on words

Here are some ramblings from this weekend.

Once upon a time Pizza Express used to serve really good pizzas in interesting buildings. The person who launched the restaurant chain was a chap from Peterborough called Peter Boizot. One of his other ventures in the town was to try to restore the old Odeon Cinema to its former glory as a single screen venue. I've not been to Peterborough for ages but I have this vague recollection that the venture failed. People must prefer multi choice cinemas.

Spain, like everywhere else, has multiplexes in amongst fast food franchises and out of town shopping centres. The big, single screen cinemas are a thing of the past. Youngish people, twenty somethings, I taught in Cartagena still talked nostalgically of the city centre cinemas so it can't be that long ago that they disappeared. Nowadays the old cinemas are gone, boarded up or used as retail outlets.

Years ago, on holiday, I saw my first ever Rus Meyer film in a cinema in central Alicante. On Saturday as I Googled the films from a restaurant table on my phone I was surprised to find that there was a cinema, Cine Navas, just 400 metres away. And, for once, Google maps wasn't fibbing. It was all pretty run down to be honest but it was still pretty impressive, acres and acres of velvet curtains lined the walls and the floor was raked downwards from the screen so that you naturally looked up to the screen. Quite different to the tiered seating of today. The screen was big enough but the image was a bit dull and the soundtrack less than crisp so I wondered if it actually was a real film. The film by the way was terrible - Viaje a Sils Maria or the Clouds of Sils Maria in English I think.

When we came out of the cinema we could hear music. At the top of the road there was a parade. We went for a nosey. Hundreds of people were walking along the street wearing "traditional" clothes. We presumed, and I later confirmed, that it was an early procession as part of the "Bonfires of St John." Nowadays this big Alicante festival is usually given its Valenciano name of Fogueres de Sant Joan rather than its Spanish or Castellano name of Hogueras de San Juan. It marks the Saint's day on the 23rd but it also turns around the shortest night of the year. Huge statues are burned in the street. I like San Juan, it's a very community festival in lots of places with people lighting little fires to cook food, setting off fireworks, jumping over waves to get pregnant etc. San Juan seems also to be a signal. People go and open up their winter long abandoned beach or country house ready for summer.

We'd been in Alicante on Saturday to collect some visitors for one of Maggie's Secret Wine Spain bodega tours and we'd taken advantage of being there which meant spending money. So Sunday was quieter. Very quiet. Too quiet. I polished the car and, as I did so, I listened to a podcast from the radio about the visit of the Beatles to Spain. The Spanish expert on the Beatles explained that their first single Lips Me hadn't been a big hit. I had to listen three or four times to eventually decide that Lips Me was Please Me. The pronunciation and also the mis-titling of Please Please Me didn't help. Later in the programme I was told that the big break for the Beatles was thanks to Harrison Knight. I thought of the people I could remember as being associated with the Beatles - not Brian Epstein, not Mal Evans nor Neil Aspinall nor that American chap because he was an Alan something. Then it struck me. A Hard Day's Night.

This sort of strange pronunciation of English words is very common here. English is fashionable so using an English word in place of a perfectly good Spanish word is rife. There is also a tendency for the English way of saying something to supplant the more usual Spanish form. Lots of English language sounds are very difficult for many Spaniards, hence the mispronunciation. There is a second problem too. If a Spaniard knows how to pronounce an English word correctly it often isn't recognisable to other Spaniards who haven't studied English. So words are intentionally mispronounced to make them intelligible. Sometimes there is a sort of recognised half way house type pronunciation. I can usually guess at common words but names are a real problem - trying to interpret the names of music artists on the radio is by turns a lot of fun and frustrating.