April brings the sweet spring showers...

...on and on for hours and hours (thanks,Flanders & Swann).
It seemed that way at times over Easter, although actually it was more short downpours. This always happens in Spain, and the poor people who have been preparing all year for Good Friday processions have to put their Virgin Mary back in the crypt. There are tearful scenes, mainly involving the parish priest and the big strong men deprived of their right to stagger through the streets of Seville or wherever carrying a ten-ton icon.

Still our Easter was great, pottering about quietly for the first week, then when my little (!) brother Pete and girlfriend Bridget arrived it was all systems go, Toledo, Escorial, Segovia, Madrid, and that was just the first morning.The sun could have shone a bit more, especially in Segovia which was as usual a grey cold day out, but it was lovely to see them. I particularly enjoyed the last day when we strolled around the old part of Madrid in the sunshine, and had a 100%non-tourist (Eva the waitress just recites the menu at top speed) lunch with Javier in Don Paco,a tiny packed restaurant just off the Gran Via. Pete is signed up for an ecological trip to Argentina next spring, counting condors and communing with goatherds etc. His Spanish is coming along fine, a little more practice and he´ll be able to order beer, pay and visit the loo in any part of Patagonia you care to mention.

In other news..... our back garden is producing mutant lifeforms. We've found loads of 4 leaf (even 5 & 6 leaf) clovers, and there are a couple of gross-looking amphibian earthworms swimming around in the ex-sandpit now full of rainwater. Shouldn't they drown? Should I call David Attenborough?

Rhinestone cowboys

Spain is currently a building site. How about this: one quarter of all the concrete produced in Europe is used in Spain, and last year more new buildings went up in Spain than in the UK, Germany and France PUT TOGETHER! How do I know? No I haven't been browsing through Civil Engineering Today or similar. It's because 'el caso Marbella' has just hit the headlines here - most of the town council from the mayoress down is behind bars, charged with the most staggeringly corrupt gold-rush type practices, aided and abetted by a mafia (possibly literally, as Russian and Eastern bloc 'black money' pours in) of lawyers, builders, and assorted hangers-on.

This is no surprise to anyone. 30,000 illegal buildings do attract some attention after a while, like 20 years. It's certainly no surprise to anyone who ever saw Jesus Gil y Gil, ex-mayor of Marbella and the pioneer of much of this slime-fest. The man was amazing, if he didn't exist you'd have to invent him. Dripping with gold chains, complete with hairy chest, big gut and peroxide wife, he was also chairman of Atlético Madrid football club (kind of Madrid's Everton) and a lot of the Marbella loot found its way to Atletico's coffers. Also, he was the most staggeringly politically incorrect Spanish man I ever heard, and that's saying something. Example: half-time during a match with a Dutch club, in Holland - Señor Gil what do you think of the match so far? Great, the only problem is all these blacks they keep bringing on, it looks like the Congo out there. (In the row that followed, Spain was divided into those who thought Gil's comments were perfectly reasonable, after all it did look like the Congo, and those who thought they were reasonable but perhaps badly timed.....)

There are little Marbellas everywhere. The small town where I live, halfway between Madrid and the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains, used to be a summer getaway for city dwellers. Now they're building a monstrous leisure/retail park next door, parking for 1,200 cars etc etc. An area which was categorized only 2 years ago as protected countryside has been hastily requalified by the local council as building land, to build a hotel and .......GOLF COURSE??
We have water restrictions! My garden will die this summer if it doesn't start raining!
So, Carlos, Mayor of Torrelodones, my eye is on you. The first whiff of a gold Mercedes and I hope you join the Alcadesa de Marbella.

Sin novedad

Sin novedad/RIP Hammy
Meaning 'no news', this is a normal response to the question 'how's things?' here in Spain, particularly among the over 5o's. I'm told the full version ('no news from the front') dates back to the Civil War, when no news was definitely good news.Well it's pretty much sin novedad here. Except - Hammy the hamster died of old age. The poor thing was about 110 in hamster years, couldn't stir from his bed, eat or run happily about chewing electric cable as in his prime (Javier still mutters darkly about the cost of the new fridge). But he just would not die. In the end I took him to our local vet, a cool pony-tailed dude who had obviously never been asked to LOOK at a hamster before, let alone put one to sleep (the Spanish are not big on kindness to animals, certainly not to anything smaller than a dog).Anyway in true English sloppy anthropomorphism we buried him in a coffin (Quality Street tin) with a wooden headboard, on which Sammy wrote R.I.P Hamy.2003-2006. He will always be my favorit hamster. He and Helen want to dig him up in a month to look at the bones.So much for infant sentiment.

Radio Maria

Spain is different. And you don't have to drive over lemons to find this out. I've lived in and around Madrid for 10 years, and it can still surprise me - in a good, bad or just plain that-is-so-weird-it's funny way.
Today, on Telemadrid, a guy on a health discussion panel was complaining gently that in his profession, he had to be careful really - he couldn't eat too much spicy food, smoke too much or drink more than say 3 gin-tonics (Spanish size obviously) in one session. He was a GP.
Reminds me of when I was pregnant with Sammy, number 1 son now 8. "Do you smoke?" asked my gynaecologist at our first meeting. "Not any more" I said proudly. "Well don't torture yourself," he replied in kindly tones. "Better to smoke just a few than get all wound up about it." "How many is a few?" I asked (surely I wasn't hearing this...) "Oh, let's say no more than....." (yes? 1 a month?) "five or so a day".
WHAT??? I didn't smoke that much when I WAS a smoker!

That was a long time ago but as Señor Moderation on TV reminded me, Spain is still different.

This blog is the attempt of a permanent ex-pat to come to terms with the differences, maybe explain some of them, and have a good laugh in the process.

By the way, Radio Maria really exists and is a radio station dedicated to the female God of Spain, the Holy Virgin Mary - but more of that another time maybe.