A Conversation Overheard

We can just make out the name 

The news in Cádiz this weekend was the arrival of Cunard's latest Queen Elizabeth. It was a sight for sore eyes to see the Red Ensign fluttering from a ship of such importance. The problem is that it looks no different from all of the other cruise liners that moor here - except perhaps that it's even uglier. This slab-sided floating prison where people pay through the nose to be relentlessly entertained has none of the romance or beautiful lines of Cunard's former queens of the sea. Some useless information: when the QE2 came to Cádiz, it had to drop anchor in the bay and its passengers were ferried ashore in lighters because of its draught. I was told this by Jesús el Cura, one of my tri-dentine wine-drinking pals.

In fact, and it hurts me to say this, the French cruise ship that was also moored there put the QE to shame. And Yes, as well as having hefty engines, it really was a sailing ship. It was truly, breathtakingly, beautiful, not like Cunard's luxury outsize shoebox. I know which I'd rather be on if I had to go on a holiday for battery hens. What is the attraction of being shuttled around from city to city on an outsized shopping mall anyway? It beats me.

L´élégance, ma p'tite choux

 Anyhow, to the conversation. In one of the local bars we overheard a crew member from the QE talking to his counterpart on Club Med's ship, La Belle Bite I think it was called. They were comparing working conditions, wages, turn around times, the obligatory - yes obligatory - tips charged to their prisoners, private health insurance &c. &c. &c. It turned out that the QE man worked less, got paid more and had more fringe beneifts. Poor Jean Louis was désolé while Bollocky Bill from the QE came out with the clincher
"Yeah, well I work for Cunard, innit?"
Jean Louis' mournful rejoinder came back
"So do I. And I work longer hours, but I don't get half of what you do!"

If you didn't get it, read it out loud and you might just enjoy it. OK, It's an old joke, but hey, it deserved an airing and the bracing air of Cádiz this morning most certainly blew away the cobwebs.

QE and Ls Belle Bite moored together and not a cannon in sight!
I couldn't get any closer as the Port is closed to the public. A couple of hours after this pic was taken, hailstones the size of peas were thundering from the skies. Nice Ford Focus in the foreground.

A Snortlingly Good Recipe

- Even for carnivores like myself!

Spinach with Chickpeas.

As with all of the best recipes, it's a to-taste one.

Ingredients:

Spinach, fresh or frozen - frozen is best as you can calculate better how much you're going to get after boiling it.

Salt.

Several peeled cloves of garlic.

Dry bread.

Whole cumin seeds.

Sweet paprika powder (preferably Spanish).

Olive oil (preferably Spanish).

Pre-cooked chickpeas - if you have some (a lot) left over from a chickpea stew, even better!

Vinegar (preferably white wine or cider).

Method:

Boil the spinach in salty water and drain. I usually keep some of the water back to use as a base for soups.

In a small frying pan and using quite a bit (slightly more than you would normally use) of olive oil, fry the bread until it is golden brown. Remove the bread from the oil and then fry the cloves of garlic idem. Fry at a low temperature. It does not matter if the bread soaks up a lot of the oil, but please do not fry in smoking oil as this burns the oil and we are going to need it later.

While frying the bread and garlic, put the drained spinach into a frying pan, sprinkle liberally with the paprika and gently heat to remove the excess water, stirring often.

Image courtesy of recetas-algarra.blogspot.com

Pound the bread, garlic and cumin seeds in a mortar and pestle, either separately or together, depending on the size of the mortar.

Pour the still-hot oil onto the spinach and add the  pounded bread, garlic and cumin.

Pour in some vinegar, add the chickpeas and cook the whole together over a low heat, moving it continuously until all of the water has evaporated and it has the consistency of the example in the photo.

Serve piping hot and enjoy with a good white or rosé wine and plenty of crusty bread.

If there's any left over, it can, of course, be frozen and later (gently) microwaved at a future date. When microwaving, use a medium setting and stir often

If you are feeling particularly adventurous, you can add beaten egg to the dish before serving. This adds a certain creaminess, but makes it a bit bland - a good way of reducing the punch of the spices if you think you've added too much.

My general tip for herbs and spices is add twice as much as you feel comfortable with - but that, of course,  is a personal opinion.

For the true carnivores: You could always try frying some chopped bits of bacon or diced cured ham until crispy in the olive oil before anything else, and chucking it onto the dish just before serving so that when served, it still retains that wonderful fatty crunch. 

A digression: It wasn't that long ago in England that you could only buy olive oil in small bottles from the chemists to relieve earache or earwax. How times have changed! Where now the oft-criticised "Greasy Dago" of times past? I'd still rather fry my chips in lard, though. Heart attack city, but well worth it! As they say in Spain, "You've got to die of something some time".

More Thoughts on Manufacturing, The Materials Used and Manpower.

In recent posts, I have mused on all of the above and have on several occasions mentioned my iPod.

Before I begin, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not an iPostle of the late Steve Jobs, although I am an admirer of his (megalomaniac?) vision and his quest for perfection in design and ease of use. Neither am I a slave to designer labels.

Obviously when we buy a prestige product, part of the high price is simply a premium for having this or that logotype on it. This logo, however, is also a seal of quality. When Apple presents a new product, it is staking its whole reputation on it. When Hua Xin Wei (invented name) brings out its latest mp4 player, it is staking very little on it as it has, and probably never will have, a reputation to protect. It will sell this product before moving onto its next which may not even have the same brand name.

Therefore, what does quality matter to such manufacturers? Very little. They will market a product with the same memory capacity as an elegant aluminium-cased iPod at a fraction of the price. It will be made of cheap, fragile plastic with cheap, fragile controls and when it breaks after a few months or the first time you drop it, so what? Chuck it and buy a new one. As the saying goes: "You gets what you pays for". In this case you pay for cheap materials, cheap labour and shoddy workmanship.

I know that my iPod was also assembled in China. Please take note: it was assembled in China. Its most important constituent parts were made in Korea and the US. Its supposedly inflated price is a guarantee of quality and good workmanship. I should imagine that the rejection rate during all steps of quality control is rather high to ensure excellence in the product sold. Another example of such stringent quality control in a premium product is that exercised by Ferrari. Their chassis are made to tolerances of microns and if they do not pass the quality control, they are scrapped - not re-machined, recalibrated or re-assembled. They are scrapped.

Another element to consider is the attitude of the workers themselves. Workers in a factory producing prestige articles will take a greater pride in their work - and will in all probability be paid more. Top-down excellence is a key to good manufacturing. Cheapness per se is not a good thing. Indeed, arch-capitalist Henry Ford well knew this. In 1914 he decided to pay his workers $5/day - double the going rate. This attracted the best and brightest mechanics in Detroit, cut his training costs and reduced the turnover of labour, making the Ford company highly profitable and enabling its workers to buy what they produced - thus creating further demand for its cars.

If your employer treats you with contempt, then you will treat your job with contempt and resentment, slinging the finished product together or offering sloppy service. Remember British Leyland in the 1970s? It was a company riven by politics and class - even prestige cars such as Jaguar and Range Rover were flung together between strikes and teabreaks (the former probably being more frequent than the latter). It was a miracle if your new car actually worked when BL finally deigned to deliver it.

The conclusion? Companies that take pride in their products and workers that take pride in their work produce superior goods or services. In such cases it is definitely worth paying more to ensure that what you're buying will, in the case of goods, give lasting use and satisfaction. 

A final anecdote: At Christmas I lost my Kindle. I found it 2 months later in a bag in the deep freeze (please don't ask!) After a few days of thawing out in the fridge then a further couple of days in the wardrobe, it resumed service with no harm done. A paragon of excellence!

La Posada de Antonio Revisited and Spanish Employment Policy.

Quite a while ago I wrote rather glowingly about La Posada de Antonio, under the name of Tony's Inn. unfortunately this week I have been treated to a view of the ugly underbelly of such a business.

Spain is a country of two-tier employment: people who have permanent contracts and who cannot be moved by dynamite and people whose job is more precarious than a car hanging over a precipice. This leads to many abuses - by the employees in the first case and the employers in the second. Luckily I find myself in the first group, but unfortunately the waiters in Posada de Antonio are most firmly mired in the second. They seem to change monthly, although the cook, a true artist, is still the same one.

Recently, unwillingly and embarrassingly I was witness to the eponymous Antonio giving an overworked waiter a public dressing-down for his inefficiency at peak time. His inefficiency however, was the result of being overstretched, not being lazy. It did not occur to Antonio to get behind the bar (perhaps his impressively Pavarotti like-embonpoint impeded him from doing so) and help out. Obviously, his status would not allow him to do such menial things. Instead, he continued to chat with his mates and mutter comments about the poor waiter to his wife, while giving the unfortunate man dark looks. Observing the waiter, I saw a man terrified. He was glancing at his boss continually, waiting impotently for the next blow to fall. Indeed, I think it already has. I haven't seen him since.

Is this a way to treat someone who knows that his job is on the line every day, every minute? I think not. Shame on such arrogant, bullying employers with their monthly (weekly?) contracts.  Shame on such employers who think that public humiliation is a means of getting employees to perform better. While such instability exists, how can we expect to have a stable economy?

   

Driving over Lemons, (almost) Driving over Precipices and Hell-lo Godders

Many years ago, a friend of mine invited us to spend a couple of weeks in her farmhouse in La Alpujarra. Once we arrived at the nearest village, we had to drive for 45 minutes along a rutted potholed dirt road - and at night. As usual I got lost.  Never had a Ford Sierra better deserved its name as, magnificent, it superbly sailed over the terrain.

After an hour, however, I began to suspect that I had missed the turning to the farm, so in the blackest of black nights, I asked my Dark Lady to get out of the (RWD) car and guide me as I executed a three-point turn as obviously I did not want to get my wondrous car stuck in a ditch on a track with no street lighting. I had fearful visions of having to walk miles to get a mobile signal and then wait further hours for the tow truck to arrive - if indeed it would before daylight. 

Inching backwards and forwards and obeying the raps on the car meaning that I had reached the edge of the road, I finally managed to turn around, though not without a nerve-wracking moment when the back wheels began to scrabble on the edge of  the ditch. Once pointing in the right direction, we retraced our steps and were guided in my friend MB who had walked out to the turnoff.

The next day MB took us to where I had executed my wheel-scrabbling turn and my knees went weak as I looked over the edge of the "ditch" - it was in fact a 100-m precipice! Of all of my near-death experiences, this one is definitely in the top three.

After a week of idyllic tranquillity, we were suffering withdrawal symptoms for the city and so we wended our way to Granada where we spent the whole day marvelling at the number of buildings and people while simultaneously - and joyously - breathing in the air pollution. Such was our rapture with normal buildings that we were too overwhelmed to even consider visiting the Alhambra! We were also fascinated by the number of women wearing fuchsia tops.  

After our fix of city life we rumbled back up the mountains to the farm. Arriving at teatime, our rapture and amazement continued as, at the tiffin table, we were introduced to Godders and his wife whose name immediately escaped both of us due to Godders' aura.

Godders was (and I hope still is) a typical upper-middle-class English gentleman. Our first glimpse of him was his candy-stripe shirt, his fawn slacks and - most strikingly - his panama hat out of the sides of which sprouted an abundant mane of snow-white hair. There was so much of it that I immediately had the impression that it was stuck onto the sweatband of the hat, just like we see false noses stuck onto glasses. Also striking was the dense undergrowth of hair sprouting from his ears. He could have used curling tongs on it. And as for his beetling eyebrows, I suspect that when he used his bicycle, he would later have to spend at least a quarter of an hour removing the dead insects impaled thereon.  I was speechless, as was my partner. He was also, I must add, the possessor of a magnificent hooter.

When were introduced, he compounded the comic effect with a fruity nasal drawl that would make Leslie Philips' "Hello" (see min. 2.41) anemic by comparison.

We would later find out that he had bought a house further down the valley with no water rights. Unperturbed, Godders promptly bought a flat in town to do his laundry in. He also had an inflatable boat to row around his swimming pool. One day it sprang a slow puncture and he was disconsolate. It seemed to be on a par with the disastrous battle of Jutland, when Admiral Beatty commented: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today". Still, Godders found the time and good grace to drown his sorrows in knickerbocker glories at Flambouyant, the local ice-cream parlour and, gentleman that he was, he treated us all on several occasions.

So, here's to Godders, English gentleman and all round jolly good chap. May his navy always rule a foreign swimming pool that is forever England.

Any Old Iron? A Long and Rambling Comment on the Economic Crisis

Here in Seville, we know things are starting to get bad socially and economically when individual recyclers, or families of, raid the recycling bins. It is a shameful sight to see people of all ages rummaging through bins for food, clothing and anything that they might be able to sell in order to eke out their existence.

At the apex of this rather scandalous pyramid of poverty are the paper recyclers. To join this band you need a Ford Transit (or similar) with or without insurance or MOT - fines for lack of documentation go unpaid due to the fact that that those sanctioned can plead poverty and that they are unable to pay.

Next come the scrap metal scavengers, usually with nothing more than a shopping trolley to transport their prizes.

Finally come the household refuse collectors, armed with a hooked stick to rummage through the dumpsters and to rip open the bin bags without having to dirty themselves any more than is necessary. They are in search of - what? Food, I most definitely hope not. These people will be looking for anything saleable - old toys, books, clothes, whatever. Strangely enough, this class of scavenger might have a scooter or a bicycle with a trailer - some still even have the family car as cars are now unsaleable - everyone has one and quite a few people are trying to sell theirs to get some money to scrape by.

Today my interest lies in the second group - the scrap collectors because this is where recycling, a supposedly environmentally friendly activity, turns into a dangerous and highly polluting one.

Until relatively recently, labour was quite a small cost in the production of any article - witness the great buildings from Roman times - until, I would argue, the early to mid-20th century. Could we possibly imagine how much manual (slave) labour went into any Roman building? Imagine the millions of terracotta tiles, shaped by hand over moulds, that were needed to roof the impressive (hand-carved) (hand-quarried) stone and (handmade) brick buildings of the Roman Empire. 

A truly striking portico and façade
(photo courtesy of Wikipedia) 

A striking and more modern example of  such intensive labour here in Seville would be the portico of Seville's 17th-century Palacio de San Telmo. It took father and son sculptors, Matías and Antonio Matías Figueroa fifteen years to complete.

Such an undertaking nowadays would clearly be economic madness, although using modern scanning technology and automated carving, it could no doubt be reproduced at a fraction of the cost and in a matter of weeks. The most expensive input now would probably be the stone.

   La Giralda. the steles are to be found at
   the right-hand corner of the base.
   (photo courtesy of losmejoresdestinos.com)

Humankind has been recycling ever since the first humanoid picked up a bone from his last meal and bashed someone over the head with it - from bone to bone-crusher in one fell swoop of all too-human intuition. 

Staying in Seville, most of the older brick buildings in the city were made with Roman bricks quarried from the nearby Roman ruins of Italica. Indeed, the cathedral's Moorish belltower, La Giralda, was built using such bricks and at ground level we can even see some marble Roman steles. We can therefore surmise that in those times input costs in descending order would have been: materials/ transport/labour.

Nowadays, and in general terms,  that order has changed and has become labour/transport/ materials in the developed world and transport/labour/materials in the developing world, although the latter two might very well be interchangeable. 

Yet it is only right that labour should be paid a fair and living wage. We are talking about people, about families. About society.

But I digress. Last week (the trigger for this article) I saw a scrap metal scavenger pulling yards and yards of copper wiring from a skip -obviously for re-sale (at a pittance) to scrap metal dealers. Everyone knows that scrap is bought by weight and that therefore the plastic will be heavily discounted from the price paid. So how to maximise the  price? By stripping the wire of its plastic (usually PVC, if it's old wiring - which logically it will be). Anyone who has stripped even a small length of wire knows how arduous and time-consuming such a task is, so I am sure that you too, dear reader, have already hit upon the most efficient solution - burn the plastic off. This obviously releases noxious, highly poisonous gases, harmful to both the environment and to the incendiaries themselves. Furthermore, such  activities will also blight the ground beneath the fire and in summer months might even lead to larger, uncontrollable, bush fires.    

Another, similar, case is the scavenging of old fridges. No economically "sensible", scrap merchants will accept a fridge full of CFCs which they will then have to re-process according to  legal requirements. Again, the solution is obvious: smash open the cooling system in the street so that when it arrives at the scrapyard, it is CFC-free. 

Thankfully, and probably due to the fact that the cost of recycling is included in the price of new tyres,  tyre-burning to recover the steel inside is now uncommon. Furthermore, the plumes of dense, black smoke can be seen from a long way off and will thus alert the authorities. Until about ten years ago tyres were the fuel of choice in the brick fields beside the Guadalquivir when starting up the brick kilns. These bricks, incidentally, still used the same - or same-size moulds as those used in Roman times. 

The riverine brick kilns are now a thing of the past, but: how can we make such uncontrolled recycling a thing of the past too? That is a knottier problem, but one which requires society to recycle the people it throws onto the scrap heap instead of obliging them to lose their dignity and become members of an underclass that the rest of us hardly see as we go about our daily lives, blithely oblivious to the fact that it only takes a small chain of personal economic disasters to find ourselves in the same degrading position.

   

  

Cádiz Provincial Museum II

As I mentioned in the first part of this post, in my visit to the Museum, I most definitely saved the best until last - the very last. 

After inspecting Trajan and the other Roman statues, I went to see the display cases  housing objects in everyday use in Roman Cádiz. and there are many wonderful, small objects to contemplate such as this collection of glassware. As the photograph was taken through the glass case, the angle is not the best that it could be, but to give you some idea of their delicacy, the small objects at the front of the display are insects carved out of rock crystal. The workmanship is superb and would grace anyone's home.


The I turned to what I consider to be the Museum's most impressive, and surprisingly, given its size, the most intimate and moving object.

Alabaster Phonecian sarcophogi,
 found in different places in Cádiz
at different times.

Not a particularly good angle

In my opinion, the female sarcophagus, unearthed in 1980  is an absolute masterpiece of the sculptor's art. The colour of the stone, the  museum's magnificent lighting and the expressiveness of the sculptor who somehow manages to convey to us that the woman who was placed within was both a loving and dearly-loved person, makes the viewer stop in his/her tracks.

I have mentioned elsewhere my own definition of art and, in the modern parlance, this ticks all of the, ahem, boxes. I view of the fact that these pictures are not very good, here is a link to a (rather dizzying) virtual tour of the museum. We start outside in Plaza Mina If you want to go to the ground floor, where the sarcophagi are, click on Planta Baja. The sarcophagi are in room 2. All you have to do is click on the map.

Photography, however clever, cannot substitute the sensation of being in front of such a delicate, yet massive carving. I would strongly recommend a visit to anyone visiting the city of Cádiz. As Arnie says: "I will be back". 

Cádiz Provincial Museum I

After my conversation with my three pickled friends, I wended my way through the sinuous streets of Cádiz to visit its Provincial Museum. I hadn't been there for many years, so I felt it was time to re-acquaint myself with its treasures.

Partial view of Plaza Mina, courtesy
of enclasedepatrimonio.blogspot.com

Occupying a large palace that covers one whole side of the square, the Museum is in Plaza Mina, a beautiful shady square. 

As we all know, the term "provincial" in English can be rather dismissive and indeed, this is a small museum, but what it lacks in volume it more than makes up in quality. For those who like religious paintings, it has canvases by Zurbarán and Murillo at shovel point, at the Spanish say. In my opinion, one dead Christ, martyred saint or beatific Virgin Mary looks a lot like the one hanging next to it and the one hanging next to that &c.. Needless to say, I sailed past this particular surfeit of sanctity at a goodly, and not exactly godly, pace. Any faster and I think I would have triggered the alarms. I could almost smell the incense.

A rather bad photo of an excelent
painting

One painting on a religious theme did, however, attract my attention.  The original is only about 18 inches by 10, but the detail is amazing. Every stitch on the embroidered coat is brilliantly picked out and the stained glass window is a tribute to true artistry. It is a 19th-century work by Jose Gallegos, about whom I could find out nothing. The painting doesn't even have a title, but it is stunning. 

I had come however to see the archaeological section, so with the aid of the excellently-translated museum guide, I started my circuit. 

After a cursory glance at the Prehistoric items, I arrived at this small (5-inch) 5th-century BC bronze. Much restored, it still possesses all of the majesty it had the day it was released from its cast. Hercules and Cádiz have a very special relationship. The mythical Pillars of Hercules, to be found and the ends of the Earth (i.e. where the Mediterranean flows into the Atlantic) were in fact Gibraltar which geographically - but unfortunately not politically - is in the province of Cádiz, and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

Trajan

Reserving the best till last, I sped past the next gallery to contemplate the Roman statuary where I saw life-size busts and figures as well as a monumental statue of the emperor Trajan.

Since the time of Augustus, Roman Emperors had their likenesses erected and stamped on coins throughout the Empire in what was probably the first conscious policy of creating a corporate image - remember that next time you eat a Big Mac or drink a Coca Cola!

Trajan was no exception. A small digression on Trajan: he was born in Italica, a Roman city outside Seville. In fact the Seville quarter of Triana was thus named because it straddled the Via Traiana, or Trajan's road (to Italica). He was succeded by his nephew Hadrian - also born in Italica - of Hadrian's Wall fame. Gibbon recalls in his "Decline and Fall..." how the first time that Hadrian addressed the Roman Senate, the Senators fell about laughing at his incomprehensible accent. Almost two thousand years later, the Sevillian accent is still a source of wonder and confusion to all who have the great fortune not to be born there.  

End of digression. Have you ever wondered why so many Classical statues lack arms or heads (look at the statue in the background, too)? The answer is quite simple. These appendages were made of bronze and as such were removed to be molten down and re-used. Indeed, as late as Gibbons' visit to Rome, people there were still enthusiastically putting the marble statues themselves into lime kilns to obtain quicklime for whitewashing. O tempore! O mores!

Here we will finish for the day, as the exhibits I want to discuss next deserve their own post.

Our Lives in Their Hands

When I travel to Cádiz, I tend to use the coach. It is more environmentally friendly and a hell of a lot cheaper than going by car or motorbike - motorway tolls alone are 2/3 of the price of the bus ticket.

I tend to spend most of the journey in a semi-trance, listening to my iPod and reading, but last weekend I was sitting diagonally opposite the driver - and marvelled at his skill as he negotiated the junctions and roundabouts of  Seville before getting to the motorway.

As a car driver, I am used to steering quite a large car along the same or similar routes, but please pause to think about this: in any car you are always behind the front wheels and as such you are directing the car to where you are going. The coach driver, perched in front of the wheels, is steering towards where s/he has just been.  More than once my driving instincts told me we were going to hit a lamp post or mount the pavement - even perhaps drive straight over a roundabout. But no! the 40+-foot(?) coach was gently guided around all obstacles with no mishap. Today power steering helps any driver a lot, but even so I was fascinated as I watched the driver caress the steering wheel as he seemed to enter a Zen-like oneness with the mammoth machine he was so skilfully manoeuvring. It reminded me of a car advert in which Bruce Lee advises us all to be water and flow through life, weaving past obstacles and being one with our surroundings.  

Obviously, such skilful coach driving is the result of exhaustive training and practice but it has left me in a state of profound admiration for the professional drivers who do it every day of their working lives.

But there is more. The driver has to observe a 100-km/h (60-mph) speed limit, not just because of speed cameras but also because of the tachograph which is recording his/her every move as well as fuel consumption, braking etc. Try that in your car. See if you are able to observe the speed limit at all times, accelerate and brake smoothly and still arrive on time without getting impatient or frustrated at the other, obviously inept, road users. I couldn't. In fact, I think my children learnt to swear in English by listening to me as I was driving.

So, hats off to our imperturbable coach drivers. They earn every penny of their wages.

Finally, in the interests of balance, here's a video by Bob Newhart on training urban bus drivers.

The noblest prospect a right-minded Englishman living in Seville ever sees is the road that leads him to anywhere outside that particular nest of complacent narrow-mindedness.

A truly welcome sight for escapees from
Miarmaland (Seville)

Please excuse my misquoting Samuel Johnson's famous saying "The noblest prospect a Scotsman ever sees is the road the leads him to England".

So, this weekend I escaped yet again to Cádiz and have had many an adventure. Perhaps the most memorable was a 1-hour long conversation with 3 cooking-wine-drinking gentlemen in a small square near the municipal market and who between them boasted a grand total of 9 teeth - 3 each. How about that for share and share alike?

Conversation ranged from the wisdom (or lack of same)of mixing Coca Cola with gin, instead of Tonic,  to the Spanish Civil War, the Phoenicians, and the use of Sherry barrels to age Scotch whisky. One of my new-found friends used to be a cellarman in a Sherry bodega until it went bust. I suspect that he probably took most of the production home with him in his gut, leaving the empty barrels to be sold onto Scotch distillers.

They invited me to share their cheap white wine and hard-won ciggies. I declined both, claiming that I didn't smoke and that 10.30 in the morning was a tad too early to be drinking alcohol. Both refusals were taken in good part. I did however share in their breakfast brought to them by a waiter from a nearby bar. A rather disconcerting question: did I look like I might be a new addition to the band? Perhaps I was going to be inducted into a secret brotherhood whose initiation ceremony included the chiselling out of all of one's teeth except for 3 front lowers! 

Walking through the narrow, yet luminous, streets of Cádiz you can perceive a certain feeling of expectancy; the feeling that anything is possible. Whatever it is, there is a certain surreal undertow to the situation. You feel that things are not quite right, that time or reality is slightly out of kilter. I insist, I did not drink any of the wine! My theory is that this is due to the fact that we are talking about a true seaport; there is a refreshing openness here - a stark contrast to the inward-looking city of Seville where time stopped in the 16th century. The Sevillian mentality has fossilised, while Cádiz, like my own beloved Liverpool, is quite simply mental. There is a refreshing madness in the air and you suspect nothing is quite what it seems - except,  perhaps, the dog poo if you step in it.

A good example of how Seville is a self-centred city full of self-centred people (the Spanish word is ombliguista, literally navel-staring) is its April Fair. This is a celebration of all that is Sevillian - closed groups who save up all year to rent a small marquee with a security guard on the door prohibiting entry to all who are not members or who do not have invitations (unless it's the guard's own cousins). The result? crowds of people wandering about the Feria ground, threading their way through vomit, puddles of horse piss and and steaming piles of equine shit. Meanwhile the fortunate ones look on impassively from behind a fence and drink overpriced Sherry and beer, and are deafened by low-quality music played on even lower quality stereos. 

Another example - and one that really grinds my gears even after 27 years in Seville: people simply push past you without so much as an excuse me. Not so in Cádiz where people open doors for each other and even say "excuse me".  

I must, in all fairness however, mention the breathtaking arrogance and bad manners of a Gibraltarian Bobby who whistled to me and snapped his fingers at me like a dog the last time I went to Gib (the Spanish can have it for all I care. Full of money-launderers and drug traffickers, it is a scandal to the good name of Great Britain). After obediently pulling over, I remonstrated with him. He apologised and told me he had thought I was Spanish because of the plates on my car, thus compounding his offensiveness. I immediately demanded to see his superior officer. 

The next post will be less vitriolic and will concentrate either on my journey down to Cádiz or on its magnificent provincial museum.

Rammstein - or How to Solve the Spanish Debt Crisis and Reverse The Pay Cuts in My Salary

OK, I know that readers of my blog might think that I don't particularly like our Teutonic cousins. After all, Liverpool comedian Stan Boardman did make the very salient point that "they bombed our chippy". Indeed, who can forget the famous Fokker joke  that got him banned from TV for years? As a matter of fact they did bomb my mum and aunt's hairdressing salon and cost them their life's savings, as well as razing part of Liverpool city centre, thus condemning us to the concrete monstrosities of post-war construction. But the uglification of post-war Britain is, of course, the result of the greed and corruption of local government. They did reconstruction a hell of a lot better in West Germany (as it then was until Germany was re-united much against the will of Margaret Thatcher - who was right yet again).

However, there are some things that I do admire about the Germans - they make good cars and, supposedly, good motorbikes. My Ford was built in Germany, although admittedly its impressively responsive and all-forgiving heart, a massive V6, is in fact American. I also have two German motorbikes - an old one that works when its petrol tank isn't full of water, and a new high-tech one that doesn't work at all. Perhaps when BMW bought what was left of British Leyland, it also absorbed the ethos of 1970s Brtitish "quality control".

Anyhow, dear reader, if there is one German-born product that has me thoroughly enthralled it is the Neue Deutsche Härte group Rammstein. I do not like Heavy Metal, in fact I hate it. I do not like German music either. But this group appeals to something deep within my psyche. 

It might be the compelling beat, it might be the complexity of the music. But I think its appeal more likely resides in the brutal force of the language and its dramatic delivery. These elements somehow seem to call us from the primeval woods of pre-Roman civilisation. 

We must not forget that English is a bastard language, but one which is at heart Nordic. The Angles and the Saxons were both invaders from what is now Germany. In their turn the Anglo-Saxons were placed under the Viking yoke. Later the Normans, who as the name suggests, were in fact French-speaking Norsemen, invaded us and so a veneer of French was added to our elemental  language.  

The music of Rammstein, then, is a mixture of brutally hard-hitting music and words with such a forceful delivery it that cuts through the centuries. It seems to call to our ancestral core. It seems to spring from the pagan pre-Roman groves. It is thoroughly enjoyable and somehow inspiring.

Warning: this music is to be played at full volume, but not when driving. The speeding fines tend to be as eye-wateringly impressive as Rammstein in concert. Indeed, if all drivers on Spanish roads were required by law to play Rammstein while they were driving instead of headache-inducing Flamenco fusion - a fusion to my ears of cats on heat and constipated gypsies - the Spanish debt crisis would be over in months. Better Rammstein than Merkel, I say.

FIRE!!! Call Pugh, Pugh, Barney MacGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb.

Today we had a fire drill. the first one in all of my years of working there - if we except another in a different Faculty that was scheduled to start 15 minutes into one of our exams.

Fire drills are only to be expected in a public building, with numerous students and members of the public milling about. Thank heavens that (by pure coincidence!) the smoke detectors had been checked two weeks previously and that we had been given a course in autoprotección  -or self protection/preservation last Friday. And I had always thought that self protection meant always wearing a condom (even to class!) just in case. Since last week I have taken to carrying one round with me in case of fire - or at least that's the excuse I give my Dark Lady!

A word on last Friday's course. It was all very interesting. we were shown the chain of command and taught how the disabled were to be left at the top of the stairwell to roast until the firebobbies arrived. The highlight was when the ruggedly handsome fireman, er sorry, firefighter arrived to show us how to use extinguishers and other assorted hoses etc. All of our female colleagues went weak at the knees. Yet who can blame them? He arrived in all of his toggery including a pair of really impressive boots. Later the more valiant (mainly the ladies - those less attracted to firemen were able to sneak off and have a coffee) took turns in extinguishing what looked like an enormous gas cooker filled with water through which bottled gas bubbled and burned until they put it out with powder fire extinguishers. For the Spanish speakers among us there is a rather naughty joke to be made here about echar polvos con el bombero. There's also the equally bad English Joke about what to call two Spanish firemen: José and hose B

Part of the talk involved how, when the alarm sounded, the first teacher out of class had to put on a green hi-viz jacket and direct operations. Today, when the alarm sounded, I suspect that I was not the only one who stayed in class doing a Corporal Jones "don't panic" routine just to avoid this rather dubious honour.

It's That Man Again!

Anyhow, we all got outside safely and were then regaled with the sight of our Teutonic Director with his red hi-viz jacket (the only piece of clothing he wore that didn't smell of crusty armpits) ordering us about with a bullhorn, enjoying immensely his newly-given powers. Unfortunately, it reminded me of the famous saying "Give someone a uniform and they think they're H*tl*r".

Soon, however, we were back in class and enjoying a listening on now-illegal squatters in GB. Well, wasn't that exciting? I'll soon be getting yet another certificate from the University accrediting my attendance on the course. I'll be sure to put it on my CV.

Am I (Turning into) White Trash?

Yesterday evening, as I sat out in the patio of The Shed, listening to my iPod, I realised that I was induging in White-trashery.

No swing seat or dog and unfortunately the icebox isn't 

full of Duff beer or Budweiser, but you get the general

idea.

Sitting there, drinking beer (admittedly from a long-stemmed Judy's glass) and surveying my kingdom of a rusting barbecue, a slowly-collapsing flat-screen TV box and other detritus that should have long been chucked out, listening to Seasick Steve, Lynrd Skynrd,  and other such American Rock and Blues, I suddenly realised that I was enjoying a White-trash moment.

And there is nothing wrong with that. The patio doesn't boast a rusting V8 engine - or even a V6. My gas-guzzling V6 is in full working order and in its corresponding vehicle (pron. vee-hickle). I do however have a half-dismantled motorbike in the front yard while currently the gas tank and other bike bits reside in my bathroom, waiting for me to get round to cleaning the carburettors. Maybe I'll leave that for my highly-skilled motorbike mechanic son. 

All I needed to complete the picture of a Good Ole Boy was to be sitting out in my undies (boxer shorts, preferably), kicking out listlessly at the chickens as they scrabble around the cigarette butts trying to get at the recently-planted donut seeds. I should have been wearing a yellowing halter-neck vest, a bottle of Jack Daniel's within easy reach, and have been smoking one of those matchstick-thin joints so favoured (or should that be favored?) by Americans, instead of the European fat ones. I indulge in neither, I hasten to add. However, I sat out in a jumper and cargo pants, sans joint. A pump-action shotgun held together by duct tape across my knees and a venerable half-blind, toothless, arthritic dog would have completed the picture. If the truth be known, I would have preferred a bottle of pink Champagne, but they don't sell that down at the local Chinese 7-11. Yet.

Still, the principle is what counts. For a while I was living the life of White trash - without the disadvantages of abject poverty and a lack of book-larnin'.

My origins are working-class Liverpudlian, so perhaps such stuff has a sort of atavistic charm. What is even more interesting is that my children are so obviously middle-class in outlook and upbringing - a tribute to the social mobility afforded to people like me thanks to the good State educational system we enjoyed in GB until the politicians started (and haven't yet stopped) tinkering with it in the 1970s.

Note: a Judy's glass is Liverpudlian for a stemmed glass. In my time there, when couples used to go out in the 'Pool, the usual order went something like "A pint of bitter and a half of lager & lime in a Judy's glass" - this latter obviously for the lady. The great advantage of all Judy's glasses is that if held correctly - by the base or stem, the beverage remains colder longer as one's body heat is not transmitted to the liquid 

Note 2: Please watch the donut seeds video. It's a true work of genius.

   

One for Prospective Bikers

At last, it seems that winter has finished. Here in Andalusia it is never really Spring until the dread day when the students in your class, be they High School or University students, become totally unmanageable and the class is given over to youtube videos, games or simply telling them silly stories. Obviously such external factors in no way affect we professionals who labour under the onerous task of teaching them!

I of course do not indulge in such silliness. The fact that I have fun classes - if my students want them or not - does not mean that in the back of my mind professional foresight is not at work. Perish the thought that I too am affected by such sap-rising factors as the weather and temperature!

April, as my uncle TS would say, is definitely the cruellest month. Seville's April Fair falls, naturally enough, in April - except next year when it is in May and gives me a huge holiday two weeks after Easter. But I digress. There is a saying in Spanish - No te quites el sayo hasta el 40 de mayo which in English is: cast not a clout till May is out. This is also true of motorcycle clouts. 

I have been happily casting clouts for the past few weeks, but now it is the turn of my biking clouts to be washed and prepped in preparation for the motorbiking season. Such preparations are not however the only ones needed. My [t]rusty old steed needs a thorough overhaul after the recent winter rains that filled the petrol tank with water - and yet still it fired up!!!  

Luckily, after the donkey-work of removing and cleaning the easy bits, my son, a fully-qualified mechanic of high-performance bikes, will do the rest and resuscitate my zombie-bike in time for my April excursions far and wide as I escape, briefly, the purgatory that is Seville for more pleasant places and, dare I say it, less obnoxious people.

To the Lighthouse!

This particular, and not very original, musing has nothing to do with Virginia Woolf, whose works, to my great shame (and please forgive such a shameful pun!) are still a closed book. The title however, is particularly apt.

A Spculative drawing of the Lighthouse at Pharos,
Alexandria Courtesy of Wikipedia 

What is the function of lighthouses? As we know the first one was at Pharos, Alexandria. Probably it is the origin of the name of the Portuguese coastal town of Faro and definitely of the Spanish (and I suppose Portuguese) word for lighthouse, faro. The function of the first, indeed all, lighthouses is twofold: to warn sailors of dangerous shores and to serve as an aid to navigation. Each lighthouse also has its own occlusion code so that experienced sailors can instantly recognise them.

Can we possibly imagine what it must have been like sailing close to the coast, but perhaps out of sight of land, our only guide the stars which would often be obscured by clouds and bad weather? As ships and navigation became more sophisticated and sailors ventured out onto the wide oceans, the welcoming wink of a lighthouse must have been a signal of hope and of home after months, perhaps years of sailing.

The first sign of land, of home, of family might have been the glimmer of a lighthouse. All of the

Lighthouse, Cádiz. Courtesy of Luis Domingo, as seen on
Panoramio 

crew would have been straining their eyes, trying to see over the horizon as they felt the call of their home port pulling them homewards, sensing the lighthouse even while it was still over the horizon.  All would have dreamt of their own lighthouse and of their loved ones. In the days before GPS, lighthouses were one of the few solid, immoveable reference points - a point that  even if it hadn't been seen for years, existed. That was known to exist, calling them home. The lighthouse was a point that the lost, the becalmed - and even the most assured navigators would instinctively aim for, even if it seemed so far away, so unattainable.

We all need lighthouses. We all need to know which is our lighthouse. But, for the lighthouse to call us we must also keep them in our own consciousness and call to them. Only then will we find them again through the fog and darkness of our own existential Odyssey.