Day 36 "Scream"

04/21/20 • 7 min

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 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

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

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

Previous Episode

Day 35 - "Biscuits"

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...

Next Episode

Day 37 - "Mozzies and Orgies"

Today Mozzies and Orgies

Day Thirty 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

Day 37 Mozzies and Orgies

It is day 37 of our Spanish lockdown and I have been bitten on the bum, it happened the other night. I had thrown the duvet off as it had got to warm, half asleep and half aware of a mosquito in the room, he must have got me right between the cheeks.

As he flew passed my ear I grabbed our handy fly killing aerosol, and sprayed there was the usually angry strangled high pitched buzzing and then silence. I don’t usually get effected by bites, usually just a bit of a red mark.

But I woke up in the morning and my inner left cheek is stinging like hell. I found the culprit on the floor... a tiger Mosquito. These are nasty little creatures that have come over from Asia and are making their home here. They carry all sorts of exotic diseases with them.

Here in Spain you can pretty much guarantee that something will bite or sting you. The place is alive with drunken bees, huge hornet wasps, flies, particularly those little biting flies, normal wasps, mosquitos and cochineal beetle larvae that are like tiny little gnats... never squash one on the wall as the excrete blood red mush.. cochineal colouring comes from.. well that beetle.

I looked up what do to stop the pain - antihistamine.. well I haven’t got any of that, but I found some Essential oil of Lavender so I carefully dabbed some into the affected area ... well that was a mistake. If you have ever seen that YouTube video of that idiot sticking a firework out of his arse and then lighting it .. running around screaming in pain.. well that was pretty much the same pain.

Day 37 and Mr Cullens is arriving. Well to be precise “Luke” will sort your order. We have found an online English grocers based in Nerja called PJ Cullens. They have custard powder. I have been thinking about custard ever since my friend Paul was posted he was serving it every day with naughty stodgy puddings.. well he is Scottish!

The wind has got up and I have put together my client Ryan’s first Podcast in which he interviews himself as he is under lockdown in a hotel room in Istanbul. His story of how he came to be a popular New York Times photo-journalist, then the financial crisis of 2008 ended that career, so slowly he has become a successful TV show host of Extreme Rides and Extreme Treks, a month ago he had started filming season four of Extreme Treks in Myanmar, then the covid 19 crisis ended that, at least for the moment.

The door bell rings... her comes the custard. We have one of those video doorbells, the house lies lower on the mountain with stairs outside leading up to the street. I climbed the three flights of stairs and opened the door.

“Hello mate Cullens delivery for you.” Wow an English voice I said where are you from he pointed out to sea, “Morocco” from his accent I would have guessed East London. It is unusual to hear many English voices here accept if you go to the beach and the Chiringuitos.

So we have custard, a stodgy pudding and Robinsons Lemon Squash, Branston Pickle and all other manner of English comfort food. Their Supermarket in Nerja only opened a few months ago and in the space of a couple of weeks they have got a fully functioning online service – well done to them.

I would love to see more supermarkets and restaurants offer online and take-away services here. They have never really bothered, there are just two restaurants listed on Just Eat for this area.

The economy is completely reliant on the tourist trade, a short but fierce season between late June and mid September when tens of thousands swell the local population in an orgy of summer fun, stuffing their faces in the Chiringuitos, packing the beach out and spending nights in the bars and clubs boozing till early morning.

The locals take a deep breath and the tills ring mostly with cash for three solid months. That income has, it would appear been ripped away from the local economy this year. This will have a very serious effect on the local economy, we can only hope the Government has a financial plan to keep these businesses afloat.