A new idea (for many)...

"A considerable part of our intellectual and journalist class still thought poorly of resistance to dictatorships other than fascist ones. I happened to be watching the [November 1989 scenes of people breaking through] the Berlin Wall on TV, in a house where the company included several writers, publishers and critics of apparently progressive inclinations. They watched the images of people embracing in Berlin with long faces, as if viewing the broadcast of a funeral."

[Pointing out a clear example of hypocrisy, Spain's Antonio Muñoz Molina comparing his own joy at the Cairo revolution with a similar historical event, in El País. ]

I share his feelings but there is one problem here. Liberty is a universal desire for mankind, including the men and women of the Arab world. But (unlike the Western world) democracy is a new idea, an unknown experience and barely understood in an Arab society that instinctively regards the strong leader as the best kind of leader, maybe the only kind of leader.

[La libertad es un deseo universal de la humanidad, incluyendo a los hombres y las mujeres del mundo árabe.

El problema es que (a diferencia del mundo Occidental) la democracia es una nueva idea, una experiencia desconocida y apenas entendida en una sociedad árabe que instintivamente considera al líder fuerte como la mejor clase de líder, tal vez la única clase de líder.]

Catalan speakers denied a voice in Valencia

In a pig-headed piece of small-minded politics, the right-wing People’s Party (PP) in Valencia have created a law that meant that after 25 years the Catalan language broadcasts on channel TV3 in that region stopped yesterday.

This move is in spite of the fact that (as one report put it) “in this territory, around 40% of its inhabitants have Catalan/Valencian as their mother tongue, and in some… towns or counties, they are the vast majority.

Una mujer que tiene duende

Video: A perfect example of some of the best flamenco you will ever see or hear. Concha Buika, from Palma de Mallorca is a Spanish singer whose family came from Equatorial Guinea and who grew up among gypsy people.

Considerate words in black times

"I’m not worried about my professional future, but rather the future in general. It’s a great time for me, and I have work for the next year, but what about everyone else?”

Agustí Villaronga, Mallorcan director of the Catalan language film Pa negre [Black bread] which won nine Goya awards, including Best Film and Best Director.

(Last week I lost my teaching job, incidentally.)

A universe of pain

Video: This week an exhibition in Barcelona. Photojournalist Gervasio Sánchez culminates a decade of his work with a new exhibition called 'Disappeared'. He has pictured the pain of family members who face the loss of a relative disappeared by a dictatorial regime. The work is shown simultaneously in Madrid and León.

Attacks on Catalan reporters in Egypt

Joan Roura, a correspondent for TV3, a Catalan public television station, was attacked [yesterday] by men who tried to steal his mobile phone while he was conducting a live broadcast for the 24 hours news channel.

Assaults were also reported against Sal Emergui, a correspondent for Catalan radio RAC1 [and] Gemma Saura (amongst more than 30 other members of the international media.)

Source: here.

The Brit, the lesbian, the priest...and a terrible miscarriage of justice

In 2001 Dolores Vázquez was found guilty of murdering Rocío Wanninkhof, a 19 year old woman in a small southern town.

During testimony, Vázquez was described as hombruna, [‘man-ish’ or butch] with a violent temper. A host of witnesses were called in, including a spiritual medium, a priest, two (Ukrainian) maids, and a barman. The priest said that when he told Vázquez of the death, she began vomiting, which could have been a sign that she was possessed.

Vázquez had been involved in an intimate relationship with Wanninkhof’s mother and one of the first ever public juries eventually found that she had killed Wanninkhof because she blamed the teenager for problems between them. The court sentenced her to 15 years in prison, but after serving over a year in prison on appeal, DNA on a cigarette butt at the murder scene shifted the investigation’s attention Tony King, a British expat, already serving a 36-year sentence for the August 2003 rape and murder of another teenager.

In 2006 King was sentenced to 19 additional years for the murder of Wanninkhof.

According to a recent news report, “Dolores, or Loli as her friends and family call her, is now waiting for the State to compensate her for the miscarriage of justice, confirmed by the arrest and imprisonment of Tony King. Her solicitor has asked for four million euros to compensate for the time Vázquez served in prison and the media harassment and personal damages she endured. The Ministry of Justice has made an offer of 120,000 euros.”

Money for something

Faced with new, tougher European stress tests and international concerns over their exposure to the property bust, Spain’s savings banks, or cajas, are very likely to soon be partially nationalised.

A very good idea to get what is actually public money back in public hands, but the decision to do this would only be a fair one if Spain’s larger commercial banks were also dealt with in the same way.

A photograph (of what is there)

(Photo: Javier Berasaluce Bajo)


In this diary entry Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina makes the crucial observation that "often literature does not consist of inventing but in telling clearly what one has seen with one's own eyes."

Another great writer, George Orwell who spent time here (fighting against Francoism in the 1930's) said a similar thing. "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

A New Year Warning!

The (Catholic) bishop of Córdoba has a New Year revelation for us all. He believes that UNESCO has a program to make half the population homosexual and says that this United Nations organization is bent on “implanting an ideology” that already supports this theory in schools.

He then goes on to warn that sexuality is not “a game of pleasure “and on the subject of abortion states that “Spain walks proud of her progress towards her own destruction” due to a declining birthrate.

I look forward to more pearls of wisdom from church spokesmen over the coming twelve months.

Barcelona VS bamboo

For sheer beauty alone this building beats Gaudí ‘s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona hands down.

Another interview for Australian radio

On Sunday I will be interviewed again on Australia’s publicly-run ABC Radio, this time about the festivities of this time of year in Spain and Catalunya. The program is Overnights – Round the World and will be at broadcast there on Boxing Day morning.

I will mention the caganer, the El Gordo lottery, calcats and romesco sauce, caga-tio and other oddities.

Will Europe do anything about child slave labour in Uzbekistan?

As someone who prefers to buy cotton clothes I have sometimes thought about the apparently back-breaking work of picking cotton plants from out of the ground.

The mental picture of children (as young as our 9-year old son) being dragged from school only to spend hour after hour twisting their bodies in the fields is a very disturbing one.

The single biggest destination for Uzbek cotton is the European market. Despite strong condemnation from the European Union over the use of child slavery in Uzbek cotton production, the EU continues to allow the Government of Uzbekistan to benefit from reduced trading tariffs for its cotton imports to the EU despite its own rules that these benefits should be withdrawn.

SIGN THE PETITION calling on the EU to remove trade preferences for Uzbekistan to stop child slavery.

"Piensa es gratis"

Think, it's free of charge.

These were the words that greeted me when arriving back at Barcelona airport after five weeks away in Australia not so long ago.

Piensa es gratis is the title of a new book by Joaquín Lorente which was the first words I consciously noticed, glancing at the airport bookshop while wheeling my luggage trolley along. Ah yes, I am home now, I thought. Back in the land of the mind: Europe.

The genius George Orwell devoted his last years on the earth to digging deeply into, amongst others, the idea that thought can only be truly free when there is freedom of speech to go along with it.

Many economists tell us that nothing is free of ‘cost’ because there is always “opportunity cost” – that we are constantly doing things at the expense of doing something else. I am writing this instead of sleeping on the train at this moment.

But to me freedom of thought is important because without it we are no more evolved than beasts.

Video: "Thanks to life"

Video: Mercedes Sosa - Gracias a La Vida: surely one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded in the Spanish language (and one of the most well-known songs in Latin America apparently.)

[Lyrics translated into English:]

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me two beams of light, that when opened,
Can perfectly distinguish black from white
And in the sky above, her starry backdrop,
And from within the multitude
The one that I love.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me an ear that, in all of its width
Records— night and day—crickets and canaries,
Hammers and turbines and bricks and storms,
And the tender voice of my beloved.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me sound and the alphabet.
With them the words that I think and declare:
"Mother," "Friend," "Brother" and the light shining.
The route of the soul from which comes love.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me the ability to walk with my tired feet.
With them I have traversed cities and puddles
Valleys and deserts, mountains and plains.
And your house, your street and your patio.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me a heart, that causes my frame to shudder,
When I see the fruit of the human mind,
When I see good, so far from bad,
When I see within the clarity of your eyes...

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me laughter and it gave me longing.
With them I distinguish happiness and pain—
The two materials from which my songs are formed,
And your song, as well, which is the same song.
And everyone's song, which is my very own song.

Thanks to life

Parents with a fear of rubber

Yes, despite the Pope softening his words on condoms there are still a few parents here in Spain that object to the idea that someone should put a sheath over their penis before sex.

Do these parents believe that it is better for their kids to run the risk of sexually transmitted diseases or an unwanted pregnancy?

The Spanish Ministry of Health is doing the sensible thing and promoting condom use through their ‘yopongocondom.com’ campaign but have been criticised for their efforts by an organisation called The Confederation of Catholic Parents Associations in Spain (CONCAPA).

Considering that a couple of years ago two 19th century (pig gut) condoms were found in a Salamanca library book, contraception is nothing new in Spain.

How to confirm a stereotype

One standard opinion of Spanish people is that they enjoy cruelty to animals. Unfortunately, this is supported by some of the festival activities here.

“In the Basque village of Lekeitio, the celebration of Antzar Eguna (Geese's Day) is honoured with contestants who try to hold onto a dead goose for as long as possible while being jerkily dipped into the ocean on a rope. The winner is the one who decapitates the goose with his bare hands. In earlier times, the geese was alive…”

See photo of this “event” here.

"I like the fact that there are things I don't like."

These words (from Madrid University of Complutense Philosophy Professor Fernando Savater) are as good a definition of tolerance as you are likely to find anywhere.

YouTube video of him here.

[It's good to be back after a month without internet at home!]

Tomorrow in Spain...

Avaaz.org says: This Sunday, at more than 6300 events in 187 countries, citizens around the world will shatter a dangerous myth: that the global climate movement has somehow disappeared.

On Sunday, October 10 -- that's 10/10/10, a date to remember -- we will gather in climate "work parties" around the globe to demonstrate our determination and trumpet a call to our governments: "We're getting to work... what about you?"

For environmental events to be involved in: click here.

The generation that is hoping for Plan B

I have an acquaintance who is a waitress even though she has a high-level science degree. These days some people would consider her to be lucky to have any kind of paid work.

"For Spain’s twenty-somethings, the dream was over before it began. Two years after Wall Street crashed, a crisis that seemed far away has now taken over their lives.

Spain has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, and joblessness is most severe among the under 25s. The question people like Iván Miguel, fired from his job as a waiter the day after Spain won the World Cup, are asking is whether they are doomed to a life without meaningful employment."

The first part of an EL PAÍS report on Spain's "Generation in crisis."