Day 54 - "Naked women and fireworks"

Spanish Practices

Day fifty four. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today naked women and fireworks.

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Day 54 Naked women and fireworks

It is day 54 of our Spanish Lockdown. Victory in Europe day. Last night there was an enormous fire that stretched along the coastline between Motril and Salobreña. The reed beds were alight, and the fire raged most of the night. It was finally put out at 10.30 in the morning.

Weirdly it must have been reminiscent of watching the buildings of London burning in the distance after an air raid. When I think about my grandparents and my mother, father and stepfather, they all went through an awful lot but the war did eventually end.

When the war came to an end the street where my mother lived held a party, somebody had an old firework that they had kept until the end of the war, it was lit, veered off course and burned my mother. Which is why we rarely had fireworks when we were children.

Day 54 and this is a very sad day, we should have been off to Malaga airport to pick up our nieces, to spend a couple of days here, by the pool sipping cocktails. Hopefully next year.

Chris is busy talking to Petra she is very keen for us to go and visit the big house and flush her toilets, .. well whatever turns you on! It is a bit sad and empty here, there are about thirty or so of us still living on the Estate, but usually by now everyone has arrived for the early summer.

We are hoping that maybe some of our neighbours might be able to drive over maybe in a month or so and cheer the place up a bit.

The sadness continues as our German neighbour Lena lost her lovely dog Rico this morning. For quite a few months now he has had a number of medical issues, yesterday he took a turn for the worse, Marie-Carmen our vet gave him some morphine to help him through the night, but he was no better this morning so sadly Lena had to take her beloved dog to the vet one last time.

Day 54 and I was listening to a Facebook post of Spike Milligan from The Goons ruining an Australian news bulletin by interjecting jokes in the background. I never met Spike but did meet Michael Bentine, who had come in to plug a children’s book. I had a very interesting chat with him in the green room about the comedic actor Peter Sellers, who he described as a mad ‘see you next Tuesday’ – and actually used the real naughty word too!

It would seem that The Goons real success was that Peter possessed one of the very first tape recorders, a great big coffin box full of valves. They would all go around to Peter’s and practice all the daft voices, recording them into the tape recorder over and over again, listening back until they got them right.

It was Sandi Toksvig who told me about meeting Spike Milligan, she was appearing with him on a TV show and always admired his work, so took a trip down the corridor to his dressing room. She found him standing on the table pulling the tiles down from the false ceiling.

“Whatever are you doing dear?” she said. “I am trying to get rid of the *******g voices.” He said, “They are in here somewhere, and when I find them, I am going to rip them out.”

She realised that he was talking about the Tannoy that was hidden in the ceiling that the Producer and reception would make announcements on, seemingly it was driving him mad, literally.

We went for a walk yesterday afternoon, just to the shared bins, which sit down below on the roadside, we bumped into our Belgium neighbour Enrique, who’s claim to fame is that he had something or other to do with Plastic Betram’s hit, Ca Plane pour Moi.

He has relatives in Barcelona and says they are revolting. No not in that way, he says some have had enough of the nationally controlled police telling them – Catalonians – what to do. There has been considerable unrest in the Catalonian part of Spain, During the riots in October last year police were shipped in from outside the province, who have been accused of being heavy handed.

It seems that on the nudist beach between the Olympic village and Barcelona town the police spotted a woman swimming naked, they called out to her to stop, she told them to F off and then said that they were not Catalonian so she wasn’t going to take any notice off them.

That was enough to get them to charge into the water and haul her naked onto the beach, the fracas coming to an end with the woman biting one of the officers on the chin, hospitalising him.

It looks like Barcelona and Madrid will be kept on full Lockdown next week, so it is going to be a difficult time in both of those cities. As they used to say on the Jaws films – “stay out of the water.”