I’m sat here trying to think of anything interesting that I have done in the past month or so.  My wife is a bit ‘merry’ (she’s been round to Jan’s house) and isn’t helping much and the dogs are busy barking at anything  that moves on the street.  The two cats are lounging around being feline and the last of the San Isidro festival is happening down in the plaza.

The San Isidro festival is a strange one for us because it’s supposed to be a kind of religious one but just ends up as a normal kind of “feria” that involves lots of music, food, booze and visitors dressed in their finery and wearing an obscene amount of perfume and after-shave.

This year’s one was a teeny bit different in that I was a part of it.  I was officially in the programme as the coach of the girls’ team who were playing a friendly game against the girls of the local town, Priego De Cordoba.

It was yet another opportunity for our mayor to have a photo taken to show how amazing she is but it was also an opportunity for the village to see the girls play.  It was an exciting match that we lost 4-3 and ended with much bonhomie and smiles, which is what you want really.  Graham and Jane came to see us play and they said it was impressive so I’ll take that.

Last weekend we took part in a tournament in another town bloody miles away.  It was a not-lets-take-this-too-seriously tournament where we played against teams from much larger towns than us.  This is a recurring theme.  We are, quite literally, a small village and we will always be up against teams that can pick from a population ten times the size of ours.

It didn’t matter that much because my team are coached by a proper coach who knows his stuff.  True, the opposition girls were twice the size of ours but we more than held our own.  We somehow lost one after battering them, lost another one fairly and squarely and won two.  The girls were delighted.  As were the parents.

What irked me was the involvement of the Fuente Tojar coaching supremo/local government wannabe man-about-town who can obviously speak to the girls in Spanish and thinks he can take over a project that he didn’t think was worthy until I petitioned for it.  He brought along an effing tactics board for effing’s sake.  A tactics board!

I despair.

Luckily he’s still a bit nervous around me and the girls take more notice of what I say in appalling Spanish than him.  He’s the coach of the three teams of boys and I think he should stick with just doing that.    

Anyway, apart from all of that, not a lot has been happening.  I am still living in a building site, which can get depressing at times.  We are finally getting to the point where the house is looking ‘normal’ and the kitchen is becoming more usable.

 My mum is showing all the positive signs of a slow recovery which is great.  I know she gets really frustrated at not being able to do lots of things but she’s so much better than she was a month or so ago.  It’s all good.

The weather hasn’t turned brutal just yet, which is nice for all concerned and especially for the festival.  It means that the ladies of the village and surrounds can wear their traditional flamenco dresses for the Saturday dances in the plaza.

And very fine they look too.  Very colourful, very showy, very very tight!  

We had the traditional flamenco music  as well as slightly bizarre renditions of popular British and American music and lots and lots of food and drinks.  We even had a couple of lovely chaps who asked permission to park in front of our house, which is a first because the norm is to just park wherever the Hell you want even if it stops people leaving their homes.

We also had ridiculous firecrackers that kept going off for an hour and really stressing out the dogs and making me really angry because it’s all so pointless and puerile and rather pathetic.  If you’re going to do fireworks at least do them at night and make them pretty.  The sense here is that there are too many man-children who like to see “It go bang bang!  Look, I can make it go bang bang!”.

Anyway, back to the dichotomy of celebrating with flamenco music and costumes and something that is a huge huge part of Andalusian culture if not Spanish. 

Flamenco was first sung by the gypsy (Gitano) population of the really shitty parts of Sevilla and surrounds and is a lament to the hard and difficult life that these people endured. 

The contradiction arises when Flamenco is used to attract people to the area and is used in all of the tourist information online and without whilst, at the same time, the Gitano population are, at best, scorned, and at worst despised. 

It doesn’t matter where you go, Gitanos are not welcome anywhere.  And yes, this prejudice against Gypsies is pretty much the same as in the UK and for some of the same reasons.  The difference with the UK is that there the Gypsy population and their traditions are not used as an excuse to attract people to the country and to celebrate wildly for a few times of the year. 

It’s slightly similar to the dichotomy of Andalusians voting for Vox, the extreme right-wing party that wants to eject all foreigners especially Moroccans.  There the contradiction is that the Moors (the forerunners of Moroccans) were in power in Andalusia for hundreds and hundreds of years and surely, I mean surely, during that time they must have mixed their genes with the local non-Moor populations?  I mean, come on!

I’d love to see some DNA records of people who vote for Vox because there is an undeniably fantastic chance that they have Moorish blood in them.  I mean, you can see it in so many of the population here in Andalusia. 

But, I digress. 

The academic year is coming to a close – schools shut for the whole of July and August here – and thoughts are turning to next year.  I need a job and I need a job in Cordoba because we can’t do this living apart in the week thing.  It’s shit. 

We’ve made the most of it regarding the new work on the house, to which I have contributed my now third wall – I’m doing the upstairs bathroom and terrace at the moment – but it’s time that we shared our frustrations and triumphs during the week as well as the weekend.  Given that this time last year we were thinking about careers online, I’m not making any assumptions about what will be happening in September. 

Let’s see what happens!

Ciao,

Hasta Luego, Inshallah

Paul

PS. Okay, so this is a well known French singer singing a song in English with a Spanish theme originally made famous by an American of Italian descent – sanitised flamenco.