Day 55 "The Pain in Spain"

Spanish Practices - Real Life in Spain

Day fifty five. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today The Pain in Spain.

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Day 55 - The Pain in Spain

It is day 55 of our Spanish Lockdown and Uncle Pedro has succeeded in shattering the country into tiny pieces. Some parts will move forward to phase 1 including the Basque region which jumps to moving between provinces too, I am sure it has nothing to do with the support that the Spanish Prime Minister needs from the Basque Party.

We will stay in lockdown phase zero. Despite our local health area coming up to the criteria of phase 1 we have been lumped together with the city of Granada and so our lockdown continues.

It is interesting a similar province like Valencia has been allowed to split into its health authority areas and not us. I think the reason is that the government are frightened that if they open up the coastline of the Costa del Sol and the Costa Tropical, where we live. There will be a great wave of Spanish travelling down from the cities to their second beach homes. They are probably right.

It didn’t stop us getting very cross last night. My friend Pilar posted a very sweary post on Facebook, we all joined in, I decided to do my swearing in English, which she seemed to appreciate, nevertheless we all calmed down enough to agree that we didn’t want an onslaught of people flooding the coast .. not just yet anyway.

What it has done is to fragment Spain into pieces, where one neighbour can be living in Phase 1 and enjoy the benefits, whilst another neighbour a few miles down the road is still stuck at phase zero.. what a shambles.

Day 55 and the night was miserable, it is funny how much you are affected by the outside force of government and how miserable you can wake up in the morning, even though the sun is shining.

I have busied myself – the best medicine – and connected up our cat 5 network around the house.. I know that sounds beyond boring, but sitting there with a soldering iron reminds me of those far off days when I worked for Marconi and would be assembling electronics from a schematic and assembly instructions.

I didn’t regret leaving Marconi or the fruit juice factory to work at Essex Radio, but I was deeply saddened when I parted company with the radio station. I had been a freelance for over two years and the promise of a full-time job was in the end not offered, so I look around for somewhere else and wrote on spec to LBC radio in London with a list of my experience, they wrote back and offered me an interview. So I took a rare trip to London, found the wretched place tucked in a side street in Fleet Street, by the famous Dr ‘Dictionary’ Johnson’s old house.

The interview was a car crash, I think at one time I thumped the table saying that I could do the job as I already do it every day for Essex Radio. I left with a sinking feeling.

A few days later in the record library I was assisting our Managing Director, the larger than life, Eddie Blackwell, pick his Jazz records for the show I was about to record for him, when the phone rang and Jean on reception said that LBC was on the line for me. There followed a difficult conversation in front of my boss where they offered me a job.

My boss Eddie Blackwell was a kind of east end barrow boy made good. During the 1960s he worked for a radio station called Radio London, it was on a ship anchored in the north sea and was the inspiration for Radio 1. Radio London was a slick American sounding radio station and he was in charge of RadLon sales, bringing in a great deal of money with big advertisers like Weetabix.. a fact he reminded us all of at least once a day.

He loathed the control of the I.B.A. – the radio authority who dictated when and what we should be broadcasting and also should we dare to make too much of a profit the rate of tax leapt up to something ridiculous like sixty percent. Eddie used to say “I might as well take money we make and give it away in the street as I would pay less tax.”

Day 55 and we went toilet flushing in the big house, I removed a very dead cockroach from one of the bedrooms, it had stuck to the floor, but I prised it off and put it in some loo roll.

So that was my bit of exercise today, frankly I just don’t feel in the mood to do very much at all.

Oh and we have a little drip, drip leak down in the pool room, that is coming from the joint between the sump drain and the pump… we are really hoping that will not need the pool to be emptied as it costs more than 100 euros every time we do that.

Back in 1984 and I started working for LBC, my trips to London were a great adventure, I had never properly commuted, though I did travel to Southend on the bus every day when I worked for Essex Radio.

So I got to work with Donal, who was a very bad tempered Irishman who smoked a pipe, he wasn’t particularly well liked, and he smoked that really strong tobacco which filled the already cigarette blue air with a yellow pipe fug.

There were quite a few Engineers who didn’t like Donal or his pipe smoking, once when he went to the toilet they filled his pipe with marijuana and that sent him berserk and then he went fast to sleep for the rest of the day.

Somebody else super glued his pipe to the wall, - he used to leave it propped up against a shelf, that again was less funny than it sounds. As when he tried to pull it off the wall the notice board it was stuck too came away from the wall and struck him on the head.

On the first day he introduced himself “I’m Donal and do you know why I hate the …”. And then he used the ‘N’ word, quite openly and went on with a long diatribe about black people being less than white.

He was a fairly incompetent engineer, I remember once Lisa Hampele who went on to work for the BBC, had tried to send him audio down the line from some far flung part of the Empire and Donal had forgotten to hit record, then she got flustered and her crock clips fell off.. in those far off days you had to unscrew the telephone handset and put crocodile clips of the mouthpiece connections then connect your tape recorder.

It all turned very nasty and we have a recording of her telling him to F – Off, which he did by cutting her off and her story never got to air. Everybody had a story to tell about Donal. I made a decision to get out of that department as soon as possible, I gave it six months and then I would move on.

Day 55 and the best we can hope for is that the Spanish Government realises what a muddle it has turned the country into and re-considers its decisions, it is very disappointing that they treat the Spanish like children but then if you look at the way some people have ignored social distancing in the UK.. you can hardly blame them.