Spanish Practices - Real Life in Spain
Society & Culture:Documentary
Day forty three, Parker and Lady Penelope. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.
Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day 43
It is day 43 of our Spanish Lockdown and I was woken today by the noise of the traffic below us going to work. Which I guess is a good sign. So far only construction and manufacturing companies have been allowed back to work.
The kids can go out to exercise and yesterday we witnessed scenes similar to the British parks, with families chatting away and kids playing with each other. It seems it is quite hard to explain social distancing to a three-year-old.
We should be allowed out from Saturday the 2nd of May for short exercise walks etc. It will be interesting to see how that goes. The local main town has already frozen rent on the pavement café’s all around Motril, the Mayor, Louisa, is planning to allow restaurants to open for pre-booked take-aways. This will stop crowding and hopefully give some much-needed cash-flow for the restaurants.
It is interesting that the right-wing Mayor of Motril has done her level best to support local industry, going so far as to offer a special City Certificate to all the children who have been locked down for so many weeks.
Meanwhile on the other side of our bay in the Labour controlled town of Almuñecar, Mayor Trinidad has chosen to use the lockdown time to pull down the local market, on the grounds of safety. A very controversial decision, which has in the past caused people to demonstrate on the streets.. something they were unable to do these last few weeks, whilst the bulldozers tore the building down.
Almunecar has suffered recently from past maladministration they have just been fined two million Euro for an illegal property deal, it does seem some of the old Spanish Practices are alive and well in some towns of Spain.
It is quite hard to get news about Spain, due to the law that prevents Google from searching for news stories from the papers. A law that says the Internet is stealing the jobs of journalists by allowing people to link to newspaper sites was passed a few years ago. It does mean I have to rely on the local paper “The Seaside Gazette” and a local online Spanish paper “Motril Digital” for substantiation.
The Press is in a major siege change across the world, we have all become reporters. On this computer I am taping out this Podcast, I have a camera that is of a higher quality than the ones we made at Marconi in the 1970s, and those colour television cameras cost thirty thousand pounds each, and struggled to deliver 605 lines in colour that stayed stable. The camera had to have two racks of equipment to maintain the picture quality.
Now we are all reporters with our camera smart phones and Tik Toks, Instas, Zooms and the like.
I don’t know why Spain chose to close itself off to the world, when it came to searching for news about the country, I don’t think it has served the press here very well. There also isn’t the same culture of reading a newspaper as there is in the UK. I guess sixty years of Franco, the only thing you were going to read in the press is stories that had been allowed by the regime, so ordinary Spanish maybe didn’t bother with a paper.
Here in Andalucía illiteracy levels were, in the past, some of the highest in Europe from 1924 to the 1970s children left school here at fourteen to go work in agriculture. Franco looked upon southern Spain as a breadbasket for the rest of the country, with industry centred in the north. Spain still spends less GDP than the other EU 27 countries on education.
Day 43 and I have been watching a video of the first radio station I worked for – Essex Radio. The original studios have been bought by a recording studio to make records and the like. It is a rather unpleasant thirty-minute trip from London to get to Southend, I hope though they will be successful and it is pleasing to see a place that was built more than forty years ago still functioning.
A few years ago my mother visited us in our little flat in the village. Accompanied by my stepfather Brian and sister Ann - we spent a week showing them the local sights. We had to hire a very large Seat Alhambra so that we could take everybody in one car.
I see we take, it was poor Chris who had to do all the driving in this enormous beast of a vehicle. When he was driving the oddest thing occurred, my mother completely ignored him, he said even Lady Penlope’s Parker was treated better.
I don’t think it was intentional, but when at the end of the holiday we were at Malaga Handling and Chris went to say goodbye, at that very moment the buggy to take my mother and Brian to the gate arrived and my mother pushed Chris out of the way and jumped up into the vehicle to be whisked at some considerable speed away to their waiting flight, only my sister waving us goodbye as they disappeared into the scattering holiday makers waiting in queues for their flights.
I have been spending a lot of time in our little studio recording online learning, so far today I have been a porcupine a duck a fox and a small girl, this afternoon I worked for another client for a medical product, for a moment it was quite hard to be a grown up, I wonder if the last few months of incarceration is slowly turning us all into little kids again. I have one friend who is making Lego and another doing jigsaws.
Evening has come and it is time for my hot milk and cookies before I go to bed and dream of being an astronaut – good night everyone.
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