Abusadora

This wonderful chap was making the most of a community Xmas party in San Sebastián de la Gomera that we sort of crashed a few years ago.

Just love the way he manages to integrate a repeat order for another chela into his dance moves...

I guess that in both temperament and to some extent accent, the people of La Gomera are closer to the tropical Hispanic model than Iberians proper.

This clip has always been a favourite souvenir of mine from that trip and I recently rediscovered it on an old 2003 Mac external drive that I managed to fire up again. As this was one journey we made without a digital camera, the Mini DV camcorder tapes I'm currently processing through Final Cut are a real treasure.

Ultimo Encierro

The World Cup went and left a hole in the daily routine that neither the cycling nor the golf was ever going to fill.

We stuck with the latter until it came a bit processional on the final day. D couldn't believe the size of the bunkers at St Andrews. My father has played the old course on a few occasions and swears that at times he doubted he'd get out the sand traps himself, let alone the ball!

For a couple of days after the final whistle in Johannesburg however, we still had those bizarre goings on over in Pamplona, televised by TVe, a 'sporting' event with some semblance to a public catastrophe. In the US they call out the National Guard for less, though thanks to Hemingway Los Sanfermines remain resiliently popular with American travellers, many of whom fork out over one hundred Euros for a balcony package including a share of a view of the mayhem and assorted Navarrense snacks.

The last of the encierros (see clip above) was expected to provide an appropriately danger-laden send off for the festival. And sure enough, the final tally was five hospitalisations, three from gorings. The caramel-coloured bull in the video brought up the rear and for a while refused to follow his mates (and most of the mozos) into the arena before adding to the injury tally. The back-up plan of the organisers seems to be to send in some chaps with rolled up newspaper to whack the bull on the backside in the hope that it will thus recover its forward momentum. For a while we had our doubts that this would work...

Local lipdub

200 out of the 396 inhabitants of Herreruela, a small community close to Toledo, perform a very Spanish version of Waka Waka.

Head cases

It's has been fascinating to follow the Spanish version of the European debate surrounding the outward signs of non-assimilation.

This week teachers in a Madrid school voted 17-2 to bar a Muslim pupil called Najwa Mahla from wearing her veil in class. School rules prohibit all forms of headgear, and any compromise on the part of the centro's authorities was made that much less likely when almost all the other students started appearing with headscarves in sympathy with their modest sixteen-year-old schoolmate.

Spain is not a secular society: annually the Cathlic church takes a chunk of taxpayers' money and there's nothing that other traditions or indeed non-believers can do about it. The problem of women wandering around in silly outfits as a mark of their faith in supernatural nonsense is also not a problem limited to Muslims, as testified to by the quantity of nuns one spots on the streets over there.

Spain has not had quite the full-on experience of mass immigration that both Britain and France have had, and the very nature of Spanish imperialism has meant that many of those seeking a new life in the Iberian peninsula already speak the local lingo and are, culturally at least, quite a long way down the road to Spanishness. Islamic immigration (to a large extent from North Africa) on the other hand, is perhaps an even thornier matter in Spain than elsewhere in Europe.

This Christian nation has a particular history of confrontation with the old enemy, something to which OBL himself has made repeated allusions to in his nutty video spots, and less tolerant Spanish commentators have made much of the remarks of one 'community leader' who has observed that "This is the territory of our enemy, we are here to recover it for Islam."

The country's extended early contact with oriental ways was noted for periods of mutual tolerance and exchange, and there's no question that the Islamic civilisation left a lasting mark on the local culture, not least on the Spanish variety of Catholicism. All this might help explain the particular unease that unassimilated Muslims generate in the nation which invented the Inquisition as one of the strictest enforcers of assimilation the world has ever seen.

The symbolism of the veil is complex, at once religious, cultural, nationalistic. Whilst I am uncomfortable with the very notion of imposing religious symbols (and observance) on the very young, I don't believe that the cause of secular values is much aided by confrontations such as these, where the right of the child to an education becomes compromised, and which tend to be counter-productive anyway on the political level.

In this instance it strikes me that the Catholic children who adopted the veil in solidarity have demonstrated a far more commendable attitude than the majority of adult contributors to the debate.

My own school was a privileged environment with a stringent set of rules regarding uniform. Yet there were boys there from around the world who were permitted small but significant exceptions, such as the Sikhs. Somehow their turbans never seemed to say to me "I'm your enemy within," but it has been my experience that in Britain at least, members of the elite are often (and perhaps surprsingly) more cosmopolitan and tolerant of otherness than certain small-minded factions of the middling sort.

Spanish Pedazos #8

Similar to Guatemala's quesadillas (though arguably both yummier and more artery-clogging) quesadas are a speciality of the region of Cantabria in Spain.

Other than a kilogram of cheese, the recipe usually also includes a heady mix of eggs, flour, milk, nutmeg and occasionally, yogurt.

As you can see from this pic, they are mixed up in a human-machine hybrid process which includes a certain amount of forearm movement!

Spanish Pedazos #7

V standing above the little Asturian fishing village of Cudillero, whose residents speak the unique Spanish dialect of Pixueto. Every 28th of June a long poem written in this tongue outlining the events of the previous year is recited to a figure of St Peter as part of the village's fiestas patronales.

The northern route of the Camino de Santiago passes through here so there's a pilgrim hostal down below in the main town, where big battleship-grey seagulls swoop out of the sky like Stukas and visitors fleeing them are likely to slip in the many puddles of cider left by the locals' highly visual but somewhat wasteful serving technique.

Legend has it that the Vikings first discovered and settled this cove on the northern coast of the peninsula.

Taken July 2004.

Spanish Pedazos #6

Asturias aka el pais de los quesos is a veritable treasure trove of edible productos artesanos. My mouth waters at the recollection of it.

Here in Antigua the cheese situation is generally less favourable. And I say this the morning after having grated the last little chunk of Parmesan I brought back with me in June....Parmesan from Reggio that is, as opposed to queso parmesano from Tegucigalpa.

The mainstream shops here mostly stock poor Central American simulcra of already insipid gringo imitations of real cheese: chafa not cheddar!

Step upmarket (into say Epicure but porfa not Sabe Rico, regretably a bit of a bare-faced estafa) and you can find premium old world staples from Switzerland — decribed in The White Tiger as "a small , beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money" — and Holland. But not a whiff of say Camembert or Manchego.

Locally-produced queso seco goes well sprinkled over frijoles and the queso de pueblo has a pleasingly creamy texture. The salty ricotta-like requesón, made from the first cut of the cheese, is also rather scrumptious.

For much of last year we were buying our queso de capas from don Andres, a charming itinerant who reaches our road from his home town of Patulul at around 11am every Friday. Unfortunately, once I'd whittled down the suspects in the case of our occasional bowl problems, don Andres's layer-set cheese looked in imminent need of legal counsel. We still buy his cream though.

Nothing produced here however is quite a match for the famous string cheese of Oaxaca — el quesillo — though one can make do with the ersatz versions flogged by the La Cuna del Queso (Taxisco).

Spanish Pedazos #5

Another view from the village of Cahecho, Cantabria. It's the kind of place where you can still see highly compact little Spanish viejas carrying buckets to be filled with water at a the hand-crankable iron pump at the lower end of this incline.

Spanish Pedazos #4

Drive south from Comillas and the road steepens as one enters the Cantabrian end of the Picos de Europa. At the summit of one inviting lane leading up into these mountains we found the slightly crumbly-looking village of Cahecho, and checked ourselves into the family-run Casa Lamadrid, the only inn taking in overnight guests that evening.

In this pic, a farmhouse is partially hidden by beanstalks. These are the famous judías verdes of the region, which turned up at dinnertime in a viscous soup form — a tripa-turbulento concoction packed off with the local 50%+ aguardiente known as orujo, distilled from the pomace of the grape.

Spanish Pedazos #3

Comillas, a mecca for expensive recreation in the latter part of the nineteenth century, duly became a playground for vacationing Catalan modernists.

Joan Martorell's Sobrellano Palace flaunts a farrago of quoted architectural styles amongst which the English perpendicular gothic and the Venetian predominate. The building was commissioned by the first Marquis of Comillas and inaugurated in 1888.

Spanish Pedazos #2

It may not be difficult to spot Moorish decorative flourishes in La Antigua but the basic model for domestic architecture in the colonies fell just outside the Caliphate: the mountainous north, especially Asturias, Cantabria and Navarra. This is after all a land of densely wooded contours, cooler and wetter than the plains to the south.

The Spanish empire may have radiated out from Seville, but Andalucia was deforested in order to produce the great fleets it depended on, and today the patios of the lower half of the peninsula tend to feature colonnades constructed from stone rather than wood.

This image comes from the picturesque Cantabrian seaside town of Comillas which we visited for the first time in 2002. The houses are made with locally quarried stone, but the incorporation of terraza española attests to a technique that was to be transplanted successfully to Central and South America.

Spanish Pedazos #1

A new series of images from the Howard archives. First up, an extended set of photos taken on our various journeys around the Iberian peninsula. This one shows the dense concrete ceiling of the Islamic bathhouse at the Alhambra punctured with motifs that will be familiar to anyone who has wandered the streets of Antigua.

Virtual San Fermín

This morning the A3 news carried a piece about how the authorities in Pamplona have created a virtual version of the San Fermín encierro. We saw how visitors can now practice this particularly stupid activity on a running machine wearing a VR helmet...where presumably there is greater danger of falling off the back than getting a cuerno up the orto.

Unbleeped

"Hostia de mierda, me cago en la puta!"

No, not something we overheard at 'midnight mass' the other night (here generally held around 10pm) but the voiceover on an amateur video shown on Spain's Antena 3 on Christmas Eve - which showed some unfortunate Basque surfer getting wiped out big time and propelled towards jagged rocks by a freak wave off San Seb.

His mate with the camera uttered this suitably profane (and basically untranslateable) exclamation on the tape, which was played back unbleeped on a lunchtime news bulletin. I'd have been surprised if I hadn't heard the Spanish C-word (Coño) used with some frequency on pre-watershed (even Children's) TV over there.

Revolto

We've been watching the chefs on Galicia TV this morning. Whilst a revolto may sound intrinsically less yummy than a revuelto, the visual presentation of this dish with fresh green asparagus has left us with our mouths watering.

In comparison the native cookery shows are a bit depressing. There are only so many times you can learn how to make a pepián, after all. Cocina Sal y Pimienta on Canal 3 features seventies-style muzak and the dirty aluminium pans of superannuated Chapin cuisinier Luis del Cid, who can barely knock up a decent spag bog these days.

Then there's the blatant product pushing on Secretos de Cocina, where no dish is complete without Mirasol margarine or salsa Natura's. At least they have replaced that mudo Carlos with the likeable buffoon Coque. Best of the bad bunch is perhaps the high-camp indigene Chef Humberto, a regular guest on Al Filo de La Noche.

Still, since signing up for SKY, we've also had access to an excellent Argentinian foodie station called el Gourmet, which is in many ways superior to British digital channels such as UK Food or indeed anything on the Beeb. So far our favourite show here has been that of Buenos Aires-based Japanese chef Takehiro Ohno (pictured) with his signature line "hmm...que lico".

The most exciting development on SKY though was the arrival today on channel 203 of BBC Entertainment. (All the effort I put in to getting the iPlayer running out here may after all have been premature...)

Back in the days

When Spain thought Eurovision was a serious cultural event they got NUL POINTS for this daringly ethnic ditty (1983):

Baila el Chikichiki

Spain's entry into this year's Eurovision Song Contest...a real winner!

Mira quien entra

Endemol has teamed up with RTVe to produce one of the most extraordinary talent contests I have ever witnessed. The Spanish national broadcaster has come up with some fairly out-there TV formats in the past (Ankara for example), but Hijos de Babel (Children of Babel) is something else altogether.

The twist here is that each of the aspiring singing stars has to be an immigrant. Now, when I first heard about this I thought it was quite a clever idea, but I wasn't quite expecting it to result in X Factor meets Big Brother meets Eurovision meets some dodgy political theatre.

None of the contestants performing on the show's opening night appeared to be unusually talented in the singing department and none of them were exactly what you would call lookers. This was surprising because on the last series of Gente de Primera I was genuinely amazed how much more talented the Spanish pool of wannabees had been than their Ango-Irish or even American counterparts.

No, here the most important thing seems to be the relative quality of the sob story. "I left Colombia because of the violence....I've been living rough on the streets of Bilbao....I haven't seen my father in Cuba for years" etc. Whilst these were recited a particularly ikky little piano tune was played in the background. Believe it or not, the tradtional journey home VT for the X Factor hopefuls goes easier on the saccharin. I wouldn't be surprised if they were handing out tissues in the audience.

With public sympathies now swelling, each tuneful immigrant then has to ritually lick the Spanish culo. "Spain is truly the land of opportunity... 'glacias a toros' for letting me live in this utterly wonderful country...ésta es la madre patria" etc.

The pool of finalists contains a Colombian chola with plenty of attitude and hand gestures, a pair of intense Arabs, some cheeky-chappy Cubans and the token arrogant Argie (who expressed concern that her level has deteriorated since she came to Spain.)

An Indonesian girl with a perma-smile who sang Kirring me Softry in a way that had me wishing myself quickly dead, might have blown her chances by admitting that almost every € she has earned in Spain has been remitted to her homeland to help repair her family's roof. (Conditions which must have been normal in Indonesia for generations were also then described as absolutely unbearable.) There was also a girl from Ecuador who reminded me how people who break into song in social situations using heavy vibrato really ought to be randomly tased.

During their individual performances each act also had to contend with some of the most horrendous choreography and stage effects I have ever seen in my life.

It being Spanish prime time this live production kicked off at 10pm and finished at 1:45am. On a Tuesday. Don't these people have jobs? By 12:30 UK time the presenter looked as if he had had several cafe solos and a line of coke to keep himself going through all this grotesqueness.

He ended up by reading out a phone number which other new citizens who think they have a special talent could ring and leave their personal information. You have to wonder whether la migra will be listening in to that line.

Por que no te callas?

The Iberoamerican summit in Santiago Chile ended in disarray when King Juan Carlos of Spain invited Hugo Chávez to shut the fuck up. The Venezuelan presidente had been heckling Zapatero's closing speech and had repeatedly referred to the Spanish leader's predecessor José María Aznar as "un fascista" of the extreme right. The incident has gripped the Spanish-speaking world and El Mundo has this morning compiled all the related Internet gags it could find. A commentator on Five Live said it was rather like a typical British Christmas dinner where the relatives are united in silent munching before someone says something and then it all kicks off!

Meanwhile Chávez has described Juan Carlos as "impudent" and insinuated that the King played a role in the coup attempt against him in 2002. (One of those Spanish ambassadors again...though somehow I can't imagine Juan Carlos back in his hotel room slobbering over a candle and hissing "Yo soy luz, Chávez es la oscuridad"!)

"No rey, no nos vamos a callar. Yo soy de los hijos de Bolívar," affirmed Chavez yesterday, but then said he hoped this spat woudn't damage relations between the two countries.



Full Disclosure: Zapatero and Juan Carlos are my heroes. Chávez isn't!

And another...

There are a few videos on YouTube which show the reality of the Madrid Metro too.