Day 57 - "Railway Children and Sewers"

Spanish Practices

Day fifty seven. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat. Today Railway Children and Sewers

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Day 57

It is day 57 of our Spanish Lockdown and the cold wind has returned and is blowing everything around, making the dogs bark and giving the usually mild-mannered Mediterranean Sea white horses.

I do love being by the sea, everyday it is different, different colours, from proper Med Blue down to slate grey, most days, even in Lockdown there are ships out at sea to watch. From tiny trawlers to big container ships on the far horizon.

We also get from time to time dolphins coming to play and eat fish, so this is a special place only marred by the poo bloom. The Mayor of Salobreña just refers to it as the ‘El bloom’ a line of scummy water that makes its way around the coast from Nerja to Salobreña, ending up on the beach.

The bloom is caused by the town of Nerja pumping raw sewerage into the sea. You are probably asking .. well why don’t they have a sewerage works like every other town along the coast? Well they do, only it has taken more than ten years of misappropriation of funds, bad contractors, arguments between the town and the Junta to be built, but it is now finally finished.. only it hasn’t got any power at the moment, so doesn’t work!

The result is that we live at poo corner, sometimes the effluence washes out to sea – off to Morocco.. so nobody cares, apart from the Moroccans but often it passes by our house onto the tourist beaches nearby.

Day 57 and Juan the builder, not the gardener or estate agent finally called me back. I had already called him twice, when I finally got through he told me “I am in the place of the wires, making electric shopping, I will call you back.”

He did and hopefully we will receive the honour of a plumber coming to give his expert opinion on our drip, drip, pool leak, it leaks about 5 litres a day, at the moment.

Juan says that there will be no further work on finishing our house until Phase 1 starts, he said “It is crazy we are still on Phase zero, I think the best is to make everyone in Spain angry or everyone happy, not some happy and some sad, but I am not the government.”

So we will wait and wait. This morning I read that South Korea has had a second wave of the virus in one of its towns, the same thing has happened in China back in Wuhan where it all started, so we will wait.

A post this morning from my old LBC colleague Andrew Cheal, who has been posting about Dominic Allen.

I met Dominic on the second day of my new job at LBC in 1983. I had known his voice for several years listening to the Sportwatch show where we would record match reports off of, to use second hand on Essex Radio.

He was every bit a gentleman and introduced himself, wished me well in my new job as I gave him the reel of tape he required for his sports bulletin.

In the 1980s there was a great deal of drunkenness at LBC. Pretty much the whole of the Management was the worst for wear post lunchtime o’booze.

Indeed, our Managing Director suffered a heart attack at his desk, collapsed on the floor and his secretary thought he was just pissed as usual from lunchtime. It wasn’t until he didn’t move for a few minutes that they investigated, and an ambulance was called.

We had an overnight Editor who drank himself into a stupor, by morning he would be lying unconscious on the floor, people would just step over him as if nothing was wrong. Eventually he would come too, stagger out and get the bus home.

But our Dominic was the master imbiber. Dominic led a dual life as a Sports Reporter and an Actor. We once turned EastEnders on to find him serving potatoes to Sharon in a scene where she was in a restaurant and he was the waiter, correcting her pronunciation of Vichyssoise, she called it Vicky Soss.

He was also the bastard policeman that took Jenny Agutter’s daddy away in the film “The Railway Children” He looked great playing that brief part as he was well over six-foot-tall and built like a brick privy.

That got him a similar role in the “Naked Civil Servant” where as an Army Sergeant he was required to stick a finger up John Hurt’s bottom. LBC Sports Editor Dave Brenner, describes that as a two-pint story. In other words, if you bought Dominic a couple of pints, he would reveal all his thespian stories.

Dominic when he was very, very drunk would lose consciousness and topple over, all six foot plus of massive hulk would come thundering down. Once at a party he had finally drunk the hosts’ liquor store dry and passed out he went down like a poleaxed tree, straight through the middle of a rather flimsy coffee table, turning it into two, two-legged side tables.

Then there was our famous open all hours drinking hole in Fleet Street – “The Workers” – one of the most mis-named club come pubs ever.

Most of the journalists could be found there getting tanked up and Dominic could spend much of the afternoon there, slowly drinking himself into a stupor. My colleague Rob Sims remembers one day when very, very drunk, Dominic was on the phone to his agent in the tiny little wooden phone booth they had in the club, when down he went,

Wedged at the base, the phone dangling over his unconscious head,

The suave and former BBC Radio 4 Newsreader - Douglas Cameron took hold of the receiver and informed the caller "Dominic's just been called away."

Day 57 and the sea is gradually calming down for the evening, as each day passes normal real life becomes more detached, this is becoming the new normal.