"Sant Juan:" An explosive night

One thing that shocked me soon after moving here was that there are parents in Spain who are quite blasé about letting their young children play with fireworks. 

We personally witnessed a very nasty example of this at our first Sant Juan’s Day celebrations, over a decade ago.
  

A (then 5 year old) friend of my son’s had been allowed to play with firecrackers by himself for several hours and with little direct supervision by his parents.

This boy was standing very close to a small bonfire in the square where we were and he threw some kind of cracker into. 

As was likely, it exploded, injuring a girl nearby as well as damaging this boy’s face and eyes. My wife had the presence of mind to throw water in his eyes and he was rushed screaming to a hospital for treatment. 

Judging purely from the size of the blast from the fire, I would say the boy was quite fortunate to have not suffered permanent eye damage. 

(Perhaps the only pleasing result from that is that because our son also saw this happen to his friend, he still has a strong fear of firecrackers years after the event.) 

Another who shares these concerns is Juan Pedro Barret, the head of the burns unit at the Vall d'Hebron hospital in Barcelona. 

Doctor Barret is fed up of seeing injuries caused by the misuse of fireworks, including the need for hands, fingers and feet to be amputated.

He believes that the night of San Juan is always one of the worst times to have to be on duty in the accident and emergency department. 

According to him there is a constant flow of injured people but that after the mid-nineties when safety measures improved the number of those seriously harmed has decreased somewhat.

In one El Pais newspaper poll (of 2165 people) 70% supported the placement of restrictions on festivals with fireworks due to danger.

"Generation Precarious" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Oriol Duran]

I saw the best minds of my generation being dog-walkers or asking ’Would you like fries with that?’”

This may well be the sentiment of plenty of young people under the age of 30 across the developed world. 

Certainly, I include Catalonia, and especially those who camped across Barcelona’s main street of Gran Via and into the public square in front of the University of Barcelona.

Yes, they had other issues too that are important to them: the jailing of independence movement leaders, police brutality against protesters, increasing legal restrictions on free expression, but one of their other three stated aims was “a dignified future.”

It’s worth considering what this means. I see no reason why we should simply ignore the different groups who made up the “encampment”. 

When I visited the area in early November I saw groups of surprisingly youthful-looking kids being politically active. Some were in their mid-teens but were confident and obviously happy to be there. One young woman I spoke to had a makeshift stall that was all about a red plastic rubbish bin and her own writing I read was a vague and confusing attempt at satire. Another group were encouraging tweets as a method of expression where you could win a prize.

It’s difficult to argue though, with much of what the main section of the Gran Via campers have said. 

Calling themselves the ‘October 14 Generation’, their manifesto states, “We are a generation without a future. The generation of precariousness. The one that does not have access to housing, the one that is the victim of a system that threatens the very existence of our planet. We are a generation that has been robbed of the most basic social and labour rights.”

To me, that is all clear and true. Only someone living with their eyes closed could dispute it and in fact the far right continue to dishonestly and selectively use these young people’s sense of frustration and alienation for their own political benefit all across Europe.

Of course, it’s easy to write off the street-campers as just some university student vandals and fire-starters who are abusing the privileges that they’ve been given. 

Sadly, even a great writer and thinker such as Antonio Muñoz Molina (considered to be progressive) did this in a recent article for El Pais newspaper. His comments seem to have at least partly come from jealousy when comparing his own strict upbringing compared to “the academic authorities’ paternal and maternal indulgence” over these students’ postponed exams.

To make a comparison, I originally come from a part of the planet (Australia) where the level of political interest in most of the population, but especially the young, could best be described as minimal. In fact, apathy rules. 

I’m filled with optimism (rare for me) when I see young people taking a strong interest in anything outside their own narrow lives, even if I don’t happen to agree in all cases with everything they are on about. If any protester anywhere uses violence against people or private property then I naturally condemn it.

History has taught us that for protest to gain enough popular support to cause meaningful, long-term, lasting change it has to be non-violent. If that means camping out in a public square and main street, then that is a far more humanitarian option than us attacking each other with sticks. It might even help to foster a future that is less unstable.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2019.]

    

"Brits in Spain resort to Irish ancestry to stay in the EU after Brexit"

[Photo: ALBERTO PEZZALI (GETTY)]

"On June 23, 2016, Emma O’Sullivan spent the evening in her apartment in the Gràcia district of Barcelona, initially concerned and later shocked by what she was hearing on the BBC: that 52% of her fellow Brits had voted to exit the European Union, leaving her and around 1,300,000 more British nationals living in the EU in a state of limbo.

“After the initial shock, I went through all the stages of mourning,” she recalls. “Denial, fury, resignation…” In fact, according to the Kübler-Ross model for dealing with grief, the third phase is bargaining, and this is essentially what Emma did; she negotiated her own exit from Brexit.

Fortunately, her grandfather on her father’s side was originally from Cork, allowing her to claim Irish citizenship...

(Ireland used to receive around 6,000 applications for citizenship a year before the 2016 referendum. But last year alone it received 25,000, some from British nationals living in Spanish territory.")

Read more from source here.

"The new nomads" -- Spain's young people

   "Spanish society has got an outstanding debt with its young people, who can’t construct a personal and professional life..., who don’t have decent jobs and salaries, don’t have adequate housing and can’t start a family.

The last decade has been witness to how the concept of “mileurista” [somebody earning 1,000 € a month] has passed from being derogatory to being an aspiration.

A recent study by [the trade union organization] Comisiones Obreras with the title “#GeneraciónMóvil” [mobile generation], shows the following: unstable and unpredictable personal and career paths, always conditioned by low salaries, unbearable rates of temporality and a rotation that turns the young into nomads in the labor market: from one sector to another, from salaried to self-employed, from victims of undesired partiality to false interns, with imposed stopovers in unemployment or abroad, without safe horizons nor the least capacity to plan life projects in the medium or long term, without security...

In 2017, 66 of every 100 young people had a temporary and/or part time contract; and still worse, 20 of every 100 salaried young suffered from double precariousness (temporary and part-time contract). Only 34 of every 100 had a fixed full-time contract...

Lastly, emancipation: 81% of the young between 20 and 24 years, 53% of those between 25 and 29, and 24% of those between 30 and 34 years still live with their parents. … leading to a lower birth rate, as they have their first child later or can’t afford to have children at all.

[…] many young people are deprived of the opportunities they should have had: the right to live their own life independently has been snatched away from them, to take their own choices, forcing them to accept, in the best of cases, any job, to work at any price, to study what the job market dictates to them and not that for which they had a vocation, or to return again and again to their family’s home, hiding their frustration."

SOURCE: Joaquín Estefanía's article: “Ideas,” El País, Dec. 30, 2018, p. 8 [printed edition] (Originally found as excerpts here at LITERARY RAMBLES blog.)

"The Spanish female referee proving rugby is not just a man’s game"

"Alhambra Nievas is blazing a trail for women in the sport, becoming the first woman to be the main referee in an international men’s rugby test match.

The first woman to be the main referee in an international men’s rugby test match, taking charge of the Women’s Rugby Sevens Final at the 2016 Rio Olympics, being crowned World Rugby referee later that year… Spaniard Alhambra Nievas is taking a traditionally male-dominated game by storm.

The award-winning rugby referee from Granada became the first woman to officiate in a men’s international fixture last November, marking the latest accomplishment on her record-breaking CV.

My mom gave me my name out of nostalgia – and because she’s passionate about Granada and the Alhambra

In a testament to her name – which her mother gave to her out of love for Granada’s Alhambra Palace, established during Spain’s Moorish dynasty – Nievas heralds a new dynasty for women, not only in the niche, close-knit refereeing world of rugby, but also in sport itself.

“My mom gave me my name out of nostalgia – and because she’s passionate about Granada and the Alhambra. I sometimes feel as if it weighs a responsibility upon me, or a type of personality. It’s special and beautiful – I like it.”

The 34-year-old’s story is illuminating – even more so in a country that once witnessed Oscar-winning actor Javier Bardem – who briefly played for the national under-21s team – state that being a rugby player in Spain is like being a bullfighter in Japan.

The latter might still be a rarity, but Nievas has seen the wind of change blowing strongly in her country, where the 11-man, two-footed game is worshiped by many.

“My grandad watches a lot of soccer, he loves soccer,” she explains. “The first time he watched a rugby match, when I was refereeing on TV, he was shocked. He said to me, ‘Wow…the players didn’t give you any stick – just respect! You looked like you had everything under control!’ "

Read more from source here.

"The words we use" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Good. Bad. These are two words that have come back into public language recently. 

Unfortunately, they are words which express the extremes of a moral spectrum and have been returned to politics via the snarling mouth of US liar-in-chief Donald Trump.

I have tended to think that using a word like 'good' is a clear one and therefore better than saying something is 'appropriate'. 

We can easily discuss why X, Y or Z is good or bad (and just as importantly, who something is good or bad for) but it is much more difficult to say why something is appropriate. 

That is why it has been a popular word with pre-Trump politicians looking for a sneaky way to justify the unjustifiable.

I remember first hearing the word appropriate when I started out as a secondary school teacher in the mid-1990s. 

Students would often be told that their behaviour was inappropriate and I could see that this word had no meaning for them, apart from being prohibitive. 

It would have been a lot more educational to tell them that they had done something that was disrespectful, dangerous, illogical or even thoughtless.

Of course it could be argued that all this concern with words is just for writers and teachers and is some kind of an academic exercise that has no relevance for the average person. 

After all, they are only words, right? 

I would simply reply: tell that to the Roma rights groups. Only a couple of years ago they felt compelled to protest against a decision by Spain's Royal Language Academy (RAE) to include a definition of a gypsy as a 'swindler' in their new official dictionary. 

Words inform and they can also misinform. Trump and May and Le Pen and Wilders know this all too well.

Others have noted the importance of language across society. Writing in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Josep Ramoneda argued that "the struggle for power, anywhere, is also the struggle for the control of words. 

The one who imposes his verbal categories on the public mind wins. Example: the word austerity." 

His opinion is that "people are accepting it as something inevitable. Austerity is one of the terms of virtue. From it derives a whole chain of complementary words: sacrifice, rigor, responsibility, etc."

Ignoring all shades of grey in his black and white universe, Donald Trump tells anyone listening what is bad and what is good but he almost never uses the word ‘because’ to explain why things can be categorised so neatly. 

He asserts. He insists. If he and the others like him are to be countered, it will be for the rest of us to do the explaining. 

Through clear imagery and equally simple words.


[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2017.]

"What can Spain do to tackle its growing suicide problem?"

"Suicides have hit a record high for a third year running, and are Spain’s main cause of unnatural death...

Experts call for a national strategy to curb the rising number of people taking their own lives."

Read more from source at El Pais in English.

"Can George Orwell Teach Catalonia a Lesson?"

"In the clear yet cold winter of 1936-1937 a 33-year-old George Orwell found himself fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.  He was to vividly record his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, one of the first-rate nonfictional books on the brutality of war. 

Now, with almost 50% of Catalans in favor breaking away from Spain, Spaniards are facing a possible fracturing of their country.  Absurd? Impossible? Illegal? Unconstitutional?  Well, Orwell had never imagined that the Barcelona he admired, where “the working class was in the saddle,” and where “there was a belief in the revolution and the future,” was to have “lies and rumors circulating everywhere, the posters screaming from the hoardings that I and everyone like me was a Fascist spy” in less than six months’ time.
No one is predicting that in today’s Spain fellow countrymen will be killing each other, and the Minister of Defense has said that Spanish military involvement will be unnecessary as long as everybody “fulfills their duty.”  But there are several salient historical and political parallels between what Orwell experienced in the Spanish Civil War and the current independence movement in Catalonia."

Read more from source at El Pais in English here. 

"Brussels rebukes Spain for failing to take in refugees"

[Refugees and migrants wait in line for tea in a camp in Idomeni, on the border between Greece and Macedonia. STOYAN NENOV Reuters]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week on Catalan (English language) TV, I called for the European Union to hold back financing for Spain if the national government did not immediately follow up on it's previous agreement to welcome significantly greater numbers of refugees than it had done.

"Spain has only taken in 18 refugees since September 2015, when European countries pledged to help people fleeing conflict in Syria. 

In March, the Spanish government promised to speed up that rate by accepting 467 new refugees within that same month. 

But a European Commission report shows that nearly two weeks after the deadline expired, not a single one of those 467 people has arrived on Spanish soil.

Several European institutions are rebuking Spain for these disappointing numbers, and talking about "a lack of willingness" on the part of the Popular Party (PP) acting administration. Acnur, the United Nations refugee agency, joined that chorus of critical voices in Congress on Tuesday."

More from El Pais source article (in English) here.

"Spain at last welcomes back the Sephardim"

"Following new legislation, the first descendants of expelled Jews get Spanish nationality..."

Read from from source at El Pais in English here.

Varoufakis in conversation with Claudi Pérez of El Pais

A fascinating interview with the former Finance Minister of Greece, who (as usual) tells it how it is about Spain, Greece, Europe, the past, the present and the still uncertain future.

"Jewish community to file complaint after anti-Semitic tweets posted from Spain"

"The Jewish community in...Catalonia has taken action over anti-Semitic messages posted on social networking sites after Israeli basketball team Maccabi Tel Aviv beat Real Madrid to win the Euroleague title on Sunday.

After the game in Tel Aviv was over, nearly 18,000 offensive messages appeared on Twitter, according to Jewish associations, which have announced they are planning to file a complaint with the state attorney on Tuesday. According to sources from the Jewish community, the complaint will include tweets from five users of the micro-blogging site – along with their full names – which, the complainants will argue, constitute incitement of hatred against Jews."

Read more from El Pais [in English] here.

"High-speed rail beats air travel for the first time"

One of the AVE networks high-speed trains. / Mariano Cieza Moreno (EFE)

As part of my next book I plan to take trains across Spain and Catalunya this summer. Personally, I don't intend to use high-speed rail (because I prefer the slower version, when I have the time) but I am very pleased about this weeks news. Overall, train travel is far superior to air travel in my view, and is a vital part of any country's infrastructure...

"For the first time ever, high-speed rail has outpaced air travel in Spain.

Figures released by the National Statistics Institute (INE) this week show that 1.9 million people used the country's extensive AVE network in January compared with 1.8 million people who bought plane tickets.

This represents a 7.3-percent year-on-year drop for airplane travel and a 22-percent rise in high-speed rail journeys.

For the aviation sector, the number is the 28th straight month of decline, while the railway network has seen 11 back-to-back months of growth.
 
The AVE has become more popular ever since the Public Works Ministry made the decision to lower the fares in February of last year. Meanwhile, airlines have experienced a hike in taxes and a cut in their flight routes."

Source: El País, here.

New York through the eyes of a Spanish great

[In the Big Apple, 1990. Source: antoniomunozmolina.net]

His insight and acute powers of observation always make his journalism worth reading (as well as his fiction.) Spanish maestro Antonio Muñoz Molina writes in El Pais about his adopted home of New York city as a "nostalgia factory." (Article in English.)

"Nowadays when there are banks and Starbucks on every corner of the yuppied-up Village, and glass towers full of the predatory oligarchs of Russia and China, even nostalgia has a flavor of political protest."

 

Antonio Muñoz Molina becomes first Spaniard to win literature prize for 15 years

He is a writer I have championed ever since I first read his work some years ago.

"Novelist and essayist Antonio Muñoz Molina on Wednesday became the first Spaniard in 15 years to be awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters.


The jury decided to honor the 57-year-old author, who was chosen over names such as Irish writer John Banville and Japan's Haruki Murakami, for "a body of work that admirably assumes the condition of the intellectual committed to his time."

For the last few days, the jury had been considering the need to hand the award to a Spaniard. The last Spanish national to win the Letters prize was Francisco Ayala in 1998 and no Spanish-speaking author has received the honor since Guatemala's Augusto Monterroso won 13 years ago.

"When one receives a prize, one feels very happy and when one doesn't, one doesn't," Muñoz Molina told a press conference in Madrid on Wednesday. "But I don't think that the career of a writer can be measured by the prizes they receive. One can be very good and not win prizes and one can be bad and win them."

Article and photo source here at El Pais.

Atheist groups suspend [planned] Easter procession in Madrid

"A second attempt in as many years by atheist associations to hold a march on Maundy Thursday has been quashed by the central government delegation in Madrid, a decision that was backed by the regional High Court.

Luis Vega, of the Madrid Association of Atheists and Freethinkers (AMAL), said it had been decided to postpone the march until the end of the month. Last year the protest was held in May, without incident.

The five organizations also based their decision on the “aggressive and anti-secular” words of police chief Ignacio Cosidó, who described Holy Week as a “dam against lay currents.”

AMAL also stated that the ruling spoke of “provocative groups.”

“These are veiled threats because the police, who should protect us from such individuals, seem to be telling us that we will suffer the consequences if we hold our march when we are peaceful people with old people and children in attendance.”"

Marta Fernández Maeso in El País.

Spanish literature prize goes to 94-year-old 15-M protestors' role model

It takes two 90-year-old men to show the doubters that the protests across Spain and Europe are not just young people complaining.

A 94-year-old writer, economist and humanist...José Luis Sampedro is this year's winner of the National Literature Prize because of his defense of a "more human, more caring economy that is able to help develop people's dignity."

Sampedro, who says the terms "productivity, competitiveness and innovation" should be replaced with "distribution, cooperation and recreation," has turned into an intellectual and moral role model for the members of the 15-M movement (which inspired Occupy Wall Street and other social protests across the globe). The nonagenarian author and thinker gained recent notoriety among a younger audience by writing the foreword for the now-famous protest essay, Time for Outrage! by [Nazi concentration-camp survivor] Stéphane Hessel, also 94 years old.

[Photo of José Luis Sampedro by ULY MARTÍN, El País.]

When words do no justice

A brilliant cut-up job on the political manipulation of The Word “austerity.”

"In the Spanish case, the ideology of austerity has some background music: the song about the inefficiency of the public sector, and of the regional government system as a machine for waste. Any new trial balloon or proposed cutback is accompanied by verbose rhetoric about the incompetence of the public sector, the frivolity of its spending criteria, the uselessness of its investments.

It matters little that in this country, private debt weighs far more heavily on our economy; and that the uncontrolled leverage of many companies and the irresponsibility of the financial system, cheerfully giving away money, have resulted in company closures, mass layoffs, unemployment and a throttling of the supply of credit necessary if the Spanish economy is to get back on the path of growth."

[Spanish journalist JOSEP RAMONEDA in the English language version of El País.]

Barcelona and dozens of cities unite in world-wide protest

140,000 people came together in Barcelona today, according to El País.

This, under a banner reading "De la indignación a la acción. Toma la calle" (From indignation to action. Take to the streets.)

"That smell of wet ash and tiny particles of decayed flesh"

"There were no EL PAÍS correspondents there at that particular moment. Elvira and I had arrived in New York just 10 days earlier with three of our children..."

Great Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina recalls how a day meant for sightseeing was transformed by the imperative need to document the horror caused when two planes were flown into the twin towers.