Day 56 - "Churchill and porn"

Spanish Practices

Day fifty six. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today Churchill and Porn

Find out more at: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 56

It is Day 56 of our Spanish Lockdown and the Mayor of Motril is mad, not in the crazy, dribbling eye swivelling sense, although she might be also doing that too.

She is mad at the national Government for setting out the criteria for allowing a Health Area to move to Phase 1 and then changing the rules at the last minute, but only for Granada and the Malaga area.

She has asked for a written explanation as to why they have done this? Many of the businesses that have prepared to open on Monday, now cannot.

One restaurant along the coast in La Herradura - “Bambu” had spent time and money flattening out the beach, laying their tables out at 2.5 metre spaces, putting in sanitation, buying food and bringing back four of their workers from Furlough.

Understandably the owner Darío de Haro is a little pissed off. One he will have to throw away the food that he has bought to cook with, two what does he now do with the workers who he has put on the pay roll, with no chance of customers? There does not seem to be any coordinated answer from the central Government.

If the restaurants locally can open, there is a good chance that they will survive economically, this is the Secret Spain, relatively few international tourists visit the area, save for a trip to the Alhambra Palaces.

The tourists here are predominately Spanish, usually with their second holiday home here on the coast.

Day 56 and I have never read so many angry Facebook posts from my Spanish friends, they think it is all very unfair.

I have always tried to be fair, I think if you can, try to be kind too. Maybe it comes from a childhood living in a small town in Essex, where life was relatively simple, the joys of going out to play and three TV channels made things, well certainly more naïve.

It was a tremendous shock to start work in London, it was a bit like starting at the big school where you had no friends. On my first day I encountered a very bad-tempered Irish man by the name of Donal, it was Derek who was the first friendly person I encountered. “Has Donal shown you how the Calrec mixing desk operates?” he asked “Er no.” so Derek showed me how the complicated task of bringing audio in from all over the world was achieved. I managed to grasp most of it.

Then he took me to the area where we fed out audio to the network and showed me how to do that and what to say to announce each piece of audio, then he took me around the studios.

All the while he was doing this, he wore a pair of slippers. I finally plucked up enough courage to ask him why. “Oh it’s because I’m just ending a night shift, I find slippers lovely and comfy.”

My friend Diane rescued me at lunch time. “Come on I will buy you a drink.” We went to the Cheshire Cheese around the corner, one of the oldest pubs in the world, they still had sawdust on the floor. There I met Carol the radio stations film critic. She hugged me, looked at my stressed condition and whispered in my ear “Don’t worry, they are all mad here.” I said, “Yes I know I have just met a man who wears a pair of slippers to work.”

I spent the rest of the day mastering the equipment, it was very complicated and not what I used to. By the end of the day I had a splitting headache, mainly from the incredible noise in the newsroom, if you can imagine the clatter of thirty typewriters on the go, a constant swirling blue fug of cigarette smoke,- it would appear that every journalist smoked, and all in a decrepit airless basement that was painted in different shades of shit brown.

Before I left I was approached by a guy called Ray. Ray was the wireman, a job that involved a lot of smoking and standing in a small room of teleprinters that provided the newswire services the journalists were copying, .. sorry re-writing, to use for the radio news service.

He told me it was his job to rip the paper copy off and walk to the intake Editors desk. I said “couldn’t the Editor get it himself?” Ray’s face went crimson. “Just let one of the fuckers try.” He said “And we will all walk out, you included.. er you are a Union Member?”

“No, er not yet, but I have filled the form in.” earlier that day a fairly unpleasant engineer approached me and told me, “You have to be in the ACTT union or we won’t let you work here.”

“Oh,” I said, “so it is not a choice then?”

“Of course it is a choice, you can choose to work here or not, that’s a choice isn’t it?” So I chose to join the Union and had to pay my subs up front. “You will get your Union card in a few days,” he said and then slouched off back upstairs.

I told Ray this and Ray’s face returned back to its normal slightly ruddy complexion. “Good,” he said, then he came closer to me and said “Do you fancy buying a porn video?

“What?”

“A porn video, you see we have all these video recorders to monitor the radio station and, well nobody checks, so we copy some of the best porn in London, proper hard stuff an all.. there is one copying now.” He had a small TV monitor in the wire room, he took a quick look around and switched the channel, in one blink we moved from Mavis Nicholson to a woman who was inserting a banana into an intimate place. I said “Well maybe another time.” It put me off bananas for quite a few weeks after that.

Day 56 and last night we watched the film “The Darkest Hour,” with Garry Oldman magnificently playing Churchill.

There was a Churchill quote that has stuck with me today - “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Thanks Winston as we need the courage to continue in phase zero.