Spanish Practices - Real Life, Real Spain

Today Scream and the Gas Board

Day Thirty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.

To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 36 Scream and the Gas Board

Day 36 of our Spanish lockdown and the wind is blowing across the sea and through the mountain. It can be very windy here, I believe before this coast was called the Costa Tropical it was called the Costa Wind.

It rattles everything, plays musical notes through the glass balustrade and generally gets you down.

Breakfast and then the three good legs cat walk on his lead, in which, yet again he fell down the mountain trying to get to next door. I think the problem with male cats if they have a wanderlust and see each door or fence as a new opportunity to increase their territory. As you know we try and keep him away from feral cats, they sometimes have cat leukaemia, which can be passed on by a bite or scratch.

I returned and did an Audition for a voiceover agency. I do a lot of those and a bit like going for an acting audition – mostly you are wasting your time, with only a five percent success rate after an audition. At least I don’t have to travel somewhere and sit in front of bored producers.

Petra Facetimed yesterday and said to me “You haven’t broken anything for a while.” Well that jinxed the afternoon when I discovered not one but both of our spare microphones had stopped working. Both I think have succumbed to the extremes of heat here, now only my Rode microphone is working OK – I have a feeling that because it is made in Australia they design them to cope with high 30s temperature. I have ordered another, it is coming from a third party company on Amazon, so fingers crossed.

Yesterday I was talking about Mrs Findings knicker display to the workmen building the new part of my Secondary school. I left school at sixteen in 1977. Before the exams in the blazing heat of the summer we were given careers advice. This consisted of a sweaty bloke from the employment exchange trying to palm off ten apprenticeships to the Gas Board, I was tipped off by the boy ahead of my.

“Now than.” He said “A lad like you could do well to get yourself an apprenticeship, there is a job for life waiting for you at the Gas Board sonny.”

“I am awfully sorry but the smell of gas makes me vomit.” I said. “Oh..” he replied. “Do you have any other suggestions?” I asked. He rummaged around a sheaf of papers he was carrying, looking up at me every now and then. “Mmm not really.” - so that was my careers advice over with.

It was my Grandfather who forced me to write to Marconi, the local electronics company in town.. in fact the home of radio. Mr Marconi had decided on Chelmsford as his first wireless factory, god knows why. I guess being Italian he just picked a town near London.

I wrote a letter in fountain pen, on blue Basildon Bond writing paper, asking if there were any apprenticeship opportunities. Secretly hoping they would say no.

Just my luck, they wrote to say please attend an induction test at their Writtle Road factory, about five minutes from where I lived..damn!

I went along and there was a motley collection of similarly feckless teenagers all standing outside a classroom. We had a number of tests to carry out, simple maths, some drawing, and a practical test of assembling a unit with only the instructions and a diagram. I successfully completed this test and was surprised to discover I was the first to finish.

I was allowed to leave and my fate was sealed, I was invited to join the company as a “Wireman Assembler.” I actually enjoyed my time at Marconi, they were strict but I learnt a great deal about electronics and I was really interested in the Broadcast section where they made Telecine machines, that turned film into TV pictures and of course television cameras.. huge coffins with a lens at one end and a black and white monitor the other, that moved around on compressed air.

We got to play and see the cameras in action which was a lot of fun, so at the end of the first year you could decide which part of the company you would go and work in and I asked for Broadcast. They gave me Marine.. Marine! Building transceivers for Navy Ships.. I was also “shipped” to a far-off factory behind the local paper – The Essex Chronicle – the place was a dull, dismal dump full of middle aged ladies silently building circuit boards.

Although I did well academically – I was really bored – I remember I went into the room with the flow solder machine in it. Where a conveyor belt took priceless circuit boards down into a vat of molten solder, where the board kissed the solder and the components were soldered onto the board.

I didn’t know what I was doing, and mucked arou...

Today Biscuits and knickers

Day Thirty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.

To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 35

It is Sunday and day 35 of our Spanish Lockdown. We got up and had breakfast, and I finished my work in the studio. I needed to paint the bottom of the walls, I found some paint and it was still OK.

Normal life seems so long ago now, we are now into our second month and I think I have had enough, I can understand why all those Americans have come out into the street and demanded that they can reopen for business.

It does sound selfish, but there really is only so much lockdown that you can cope with. I really admire the Italians they have gone through hell and back.

Day 35 and I was thinking about school and had I had been better academically would my life have been different? It probably would, I do remember working at the BBC and the subject of which University did you go to? Well I didn’t go to University at all and when I told my colleagues they all looked quite aghast.

The BBC was a funny old place to work in, there were a lot of well-meaning souls who had never done a days work in their life. We used to have regular editorial meetings and everyone brought their copy of the Guardian to suggest news stories that we could perhaps cover on the radio station.

I brought a copy of the Daily Mail, on the grounds that according to the research most of our listeners were lower middle class, cab drivers, shop workers and the like and love it or loath it, the Daily Mail would probably be their paper of choice, rather than The Guardian.

It did not go down well, the only good thing about the Editorial Meetings that we got a tin of Rover Biscuits for each meeting to go with the tea and coffee. If it was an important meeting there were sandwiches with wine too. Unheard of at LBC. They did later, as a cost cutting exercise stop the wine and sandwiches, but the biscuits carried on.

I am not going to blame my schooling for a lack of University education, I was quite a lazy feckless boy, always a C on rarely a B or B plus. But I don’t think I was stupid, it was just like a lot of kids at school, the one size fits all didn’t work with me.

I neither fitted in or made many friends. After suffering a crazy sixties phonetic teaching experiment called ITA, after the first two years at school all I could read was this crazy language and not a word of ordinary English.

I did catch up, many of my classmates did not though. Then onto Junior school and a fairly undistinguished passage through the school. The final year there were too many pupils for the two classes, and I along with 10 others draw the short straw.

We were put with the year below us, sharing a classroom and Mr Pumphrey, Mr Pumphrey was one deeply unpleasant man. It was clear very early on in his career that he realised he had made a terrible mistake becoming a teacher, particularly at a school that served a council estate.

So he had little interest in the year he was teaching, what he did was to devote two thirds of the blackboard to his year and a third to us. He would write a list of things we should quietly be doing whilst he taught the rest of the class.

I spent a whole year doing, well nothing, I learnt, well nothing. I sat next to a really clever and gifted boy called Peter Chantry, he was doomed we were all doomed. We didn’t even get a chance to sit the school certificate it was a given that we would all go to Westlands Secondary Modern on the edge of the council estate.

Westlands Secondary Modern was typical of deeply underperforming schools of its time. A hideous 1960’s building, roasting hot in summer and freezing cold in winter with a rag bag of teachers that wouldn’t look out of place in a St Trinians movie.

My own real friend was Nick. He was six foot something and I was five foot nothing then, we made an odd pair. We both struggled with school, it wasn’t the best days of our life.

The Headmaster was a brute, whose name I forget but managed to cane some poor boy at Assembly every morning, not the same poor boy I hasten to mention.

There was hope on the horizon, the school was getting a brand new teaching block and upgraded status to Comprehensive, the trouble was the whole building process was going on around us, I remember that the wing that had the science labs, metal work and wood work rooms was shut and reformed.

So for woodwork we had to learn theory.. and trust me there is only so much you can learning about sodding wood and dovetail joints and the like.

We were luckier with science, they opened that part of the block early and we were treated to proper science labs, fully equipped a bi...

Today Boobies and Zoom

Day Thirty nine of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.

To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 39 Boobies and Zoom

It is day 39 of our Spanish Lockdown, last night brought more custard and more bad dreams. I seem to keep getting those high anxiety dreams where I am not in control.

I have not really had them since I worked at the radio station. And it was about the radio station last night, I had to engineer a radio show, but I managed to take the radio station off air as I did not recognise the buttons that sent the studio to the transmitters.

I imagine that we are all having similar dreams of not being in control, because I think this must be a bit like being in Prison, having decisions taken away from you about where you can go and what you can do.

The Spanish Government have back tracked on the decision only to allow children to accompany adults to supermarkets, pharmacies and banks.

My next door but two neighbour, Sylvia shouted across from her garden saying even before the “veerus” she would never entertain taking her children to a supermarket as they would run wild and pick up things from the shelves, which would now be dangerous for their health.

She said in English.. “I do not have a word for our Government!” Sylvia cleans, she is very good cleaner, before she had her children she was a very good teacher, had passed her exams and taught in a local school.

About a year or so ago she decided that she wanted to return to teaching. Now here in Spain she has to take all her exams again. Once you leave teaching your professional qualifications are struck off and if you return you have to all the exams again.

And you must pass each part of those exams again, if you do the authority will decide where you can go and teach.. and it can be anywhere. It is a similar situation for the police, there are tough exams and you can posted anywhere.

To me it seems really harsh and quite unfair, in contrast my niece Alice had to return back from France when her husband’s work started to be more difficult to find. She has good qualifications in Geography, so thought she would approach a local school to see if there was work.

She got an interview, that went well. They told her “you can start now.” And they did mean now, that afternoon she found herself teaching in class for the first time with just the National Curriculum guide and a white board for company. And I bet she is a very good teacher just Sylvia.

These are some of the cultural differences you come across when you start to scratch the surface of another country’s way of life. Britain will allow you to hold your professional qualification and be quite happy to employ you without all the jumping through hoops that Sylvia will need to do.

Pilar with the big boobies has set up her own Estate Agent. We love Pilar she was one of those larger than life personalities that dominated the little village we lived in when we first came to Spain.

I can’t think of more crazy time to begin such an enterprise, but she has some very interesting properties on her books. She had lived in Germany for a while, so saw how business was conducted there and believes that she take that experience and make something for herself. No need to take all her exams again.

I am not sure what will happen to the property market anywhere in the world, let alone Spain, but this is a beautiful part of the world and the weather is mostly glorious, and I can imagine once the hiatus of the virus is over, a vaccine found and slowly we all get vaccinated, life will return to a new normal.

Day 39 and it has been a long day, I did my first Zoom directed voiceover. Back in the UK I had got used to Skype where usually just one person directs you remotely. Zoom is something else, this time I had five people from the project, quite daunting, and then there was the technology that had to be tamed. I managed to stick some earbuds into one ear, hook the microphone onto the same side and then listen to myself through the actual headphones and record myself and keep notes of the takes and finally read the script.

I did it, I was a bit stressed, so were the others at again having to be together remotely. There was interesting BBC article that people were finding Zoom meetings far more difficult than ordinary face-to-face meetings as you miss the social cues, facial expression. I had no visual link to the guys directing me as the computer was behind me. My studio laid out for a singular experience. I reckon I will need a monitor on the wall in future to get some of those important visual cues that were lacking today.

Poor Chris has to spend the time being as quiet as possible....

Today Custard and Daleks

Day Thirty one of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.

To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 31 – Custard and Daleks

It is Day 31 of our Spanish Lockdown; I am starting to get quite blurry eyed. All day peering into the new computer that arrived yesterday from China, has made me quite myopic.

The first thing we did when it arrived is to wipe the whole thing down with alcohol, starting with the box it came in. I have to hand it to Apple their logistics are to be admired. The machine started in China moved the Chinese Export Zone and then flew to South Korea where it went on to Germany, from Germany to Portugal and from Portugal to Spain, it took more than two weeks.

It does prove that many businesses are quite capable of operating within lockdown. The delivery driver left the parcel on the step and sat in his cab; I received an email to confirm delivery.

Chris gets his computer to himself and has spent the day doing gym classes online, to begin with this felt a bit odd, now it is just a normal part of our daily routine.

Read a Facebook post from our friend Paul Coia, he was the first voice that was heard on Channel Four television back in the UK when it began broadcasting in 1982. Channel Four started with a raft of most peculiar programmes, quite a lot of complaints from Mary Whitehouse at the time. There were also quite a few complaints about Paul too. Up to that time continuity announcers were plummy accent types who had been to Eton or Sandhurst.

Paul was a Scot and, well sounded Scottish, ..outrageous!

He posted that every night he was making Birds Custard and old-fashioned stodgy puddings he had also, out of boredom, discovered an Airfix Dalek kit that he was constructing. It had been a birthday present from the two of us more than 25 years ago.. and he had kept it all this time.

I said “you idiot, it is worth a fortune still intact and boxed up.” I am really missing our British comfort foods. But where to buy custard locally? The local town is a custard free zone.

Spanish puddings are flan, arroz con leche, tarta de queso, and that is about it. The flan is like a crème caramel without the exciting crunchy top, arroz is a very very sweet rice pudding and the tarta a kind of really quite nice cheesecake, but less sweet than its American cousin and no biscuit base either.

If you want something else you need to go to a posh restaurant where you will find chocolate desserts, fruit pies and the like.

When we first came to Spain, I thought Spanish chocolate was disgusting, it had a lot less cocoa powder and was a poor product. That has all changed and the big brands and of course Lidl’s own chocolate have vastly improved the offering and choice.

When I was a child, sweets were a weekly treat, the three of us would go to the local cooperative shop and choose one item to the value of sixpence .. about two and half pence.

We were always greeted by the friendly, over friendly Manager of the store who always came out to greet us, often lifting me up to pick something from a higher shelf. Sometimes he would let us have extra sweets as a special treat. What a nice man I thought.

I was very sad when one day he suddenly disappeared as he was so kind to us. We were told that there had been some sort of bookkeeping problem and the Cooperative had sacked him.

Years later I realised the truth and just why he was so tactile and generous.

Day 31 and our thoughts have turned to custard. At school I hated custard it used to be served in great aluminium jugs and had a thick slimy skin on it. To be honest I hated school dinners, I have never cared for boiled potatoes and the half cooked mouldy spuds that my infant school served up were quite disgusting, rather like my father’s dinner time rules, you were not allowed to leave the table until you had finished your meal and one particular Dinner Lady delighted in bullying the children into eating everything on their plate.

To this day I still avoid plain boiled potatoes. Spanish spuds are different, they really taste potatoey – actually a lot of fruit and veg from the supermarket might not be perfectly formed, but all taste much better than the fruit and veg in Britain.

It took me a while to realise that although a lot of the fruit and veg grown here is sent over to the UK.. it has to travel for quite a few days and is packed not quite ripe, so that it arrives still edible.

Here the produce arrives sometimes within hours of being picked and ripened by the sun.. really delicious.

My Uncle Peter who lived in Barcelona during the 1950s with my Spanish Aunt Isobel, used to boast that you haven’t eaten an orange unle...

Today Flash Harry and the Poof test.

Day twenty six of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.

To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com