Day 95 - "Bonfire Night"

Spanish Practices

Transcript:

Day 95 Bonfire night

Thursday and now just a few days before everything un locks, the end of the Alarma and the new normal will start on Monday, many Spanish can go back to work and get the working week off to.. er, well er, a two day start, because next Wednesday “we are having a Fiesta”

The Fiesta of San Juan to be precise, the beginning of summer and those long summer holidays, after all we have all been working so hard these last few weeks … erm!

San Juan is when hordes of Spanish all head to the beach for a party, it will last all night and bonfires are lit all along the coast on the beach, there will be a lot of food and drink, all in throwaway plastic containers, barbecues and plenty of booze, that will also come in plastic containers and tin cans.

The idea is that the bonfires of San Juan are said to purify and protect, and ward of evil spirits, also at midnight, Spanish time, you go to the water’s edge and wash your face in the sea water to bring you good luck and hope for the future.

The following morning all along the beautiful coastline it looks like there has been an illegal rave, the devastation and litter is truly appalling. The crowds must leave the beach by 10am that following day so that a massive council run cleaning operation can come along and mitigate the damage done to the eco system. By removing hundreds of tons of rubbish off the beaches.

They are often too late, and we have the pleasure of watching swathes of plastic litter pass by us on the sea. For two years running the locals decided, why bother bringing your own firewood to the beach when you can rip up the disabled wooden walkways for wheelchairs and set fire to them, at the expense of the local council and of course those who are disabled.

Ok, ok, I am painting a rather bleak picture here and there are some who bring their own bin bags and do clear up, but some don’t and as I have mentioned the Spanish do like a smoke, so hundreds and thousands of butt ends are discarded on the beach. Every cigarette has a small ring of plastic at the filter end, so they also need to be cleared up off the beach too.

At least twice a year usually at the end of summer we have beach cleaning volunteers who go along the beaches collecting cigarette ends and other summer holiday detritus left by visitors and tourists.

This year, San Juan is cancelled, no bonfires, no plastic waste out at sea, no drunken behaviour ripping up disabled boardwalks, also no income for the bars and restaurants that stay open all night.

Covid19 measures mean instead of spending money on cleaning up the beaches, the council is spending money on policing the beaches and closing them ALL across the whole of Spain next Wednesday.

I have been to a San Juan festival and enjoyed the event, but there is a great deal of young drunken behaviour, a lot of drugs and booze, not the family event we were expecting so came away soon after midnight.

I think what has happened, well at least here, is that what should be a great family festival has been hijacked by a club 18 to 30 mob who just go wild and trash the place. We have seen it happen so many times in the UK.

When we lived in Essex, we were very close to a rather attractive park with a museum, there were ornamental flower beds and lovely stretches of grass to enjoy a summers day on.

Except that summer picnics have turned into a competition to scatter as much plastic and other waste around and then leave it on the grass. I know speaking like this makes me into a bit of a Victor Meldrew. I am not.

I like a good party, I like to let my hair down, if I had any, but I can’t bear to leave a mess behind, and I don’t understand why you would want to do that?

Thursday and the economic figures are starting to emerge all over Europe detailing the cost to the economies of Lockdown. In Germany there was a 13% decline in economic activity, here in Spain a whopping 34% fall in output.

Spain is hit harder as it has a reliance on the services industry. And almost 95% of Spanish businesses are small to medium enterprises, here where we live, they are often family run.

It was another of those big culture shocks to discover so few national chains of anything other than McDonalds or Burger King, I swear the first business on the moon will be one of those two.

The Spanish Government is expecting a drop in GDP of 9.2% this year, I personally think they are way out and GDP has fallen a lot more than that.

There is to be EU money made available to help Spain but some in the EU are worried that the left-wing Government will spend the money on ideological schemes rather than re-igniting the business sector.

The conservatives in Spain believe that the money should be spent on digitising Spain, making more of the administration online and easier to work, create jobs with re-industrialisation to provide what they describe as ‘real jobs’.

The good news is neither side want cuts or austerity. The bad news is as usual left and right are both at logger heads as to how the money should be spent.

One thing is for certain though, they are not alone, the whole world is sharing in the same challenges and that getting us out of lockdown will be a far more complicated process than putting us in.