UK National Fish and Chips Day

In the UK June 1st  (for this year anyway because it is always on a Friday) is celebrated as National Fish and Chips Day.

Which brings me back rather neatly to England and especially my home town, the fishing port of Grimsby. They know a thing or two about chips in Grimsby let me tell you and there is a chip shop in every street – sometimes two and people there know best how to cook them and to eat them.

Never mind the fancy restaurant trend for twice or even thrice fried potatoes they just cut them up and sling them in a vat of boiling fat or preferably beef dripping and then serve them piping hot and crispy on the outside with delicate fluffy middles with the only two accompaniments that chips really need – a generous sprinkle of salt and lashings of good vinegar.

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The First Eurovision Song Contest

Four years earlier the Great Smog of 1952 darkened the streets of London and killed approximately four thousand people in the short time of four days and a further eight thousand died from its effects in the following weeks and months.  In 1956 the Clean Air Act introduced smokeless zones in the capital.

Consequently, reduced sulphur dioxide levels made the intense and persistent London smog a thing of the past. It was after this the great clean-up of London began and buildings recovered their original stone façades which, during two centuries, had gradually blackened.

By all accounts the summer of 1956 was truly abysmal: rain, hail, lightning, floods, gales and miserable cold. It was the wettest July in London since records began, and August was one of the coldest and wettest on record across Britain, as barrages of depressions swept the country.  But there was a silver lining to this cloud and September was such an improvement it was warmer than August, a very rare occurrence, and the rest of autumn turned into a glorious Indian summer.

In the 1950s, as Europe recovered after the Second-World-War, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) based in Switzerland set up a committee to examine ways of bringing together the countries of the EBU around a ‘light entertainment programme’.

What was needed was something to cheer everyone up.  At a committee meeting held in Monaco in January 1955, director general of Swiss television and committee chairman Marcel Bezençon conceived the idea of an international song contest where countries would participate in one television programme to be transmitted simultaneously to all countries of the union. The competition was based upon the existing Sanremo Music Festival held in Italy, and was also seen as a technological experiment in live television as in those days it was a very ambitious project to join many countries together in a wide-area international network.

The concept, then known as “Eurovision Grand Prix”, was approved by the EBU General Assembly in at a meeting held in Rome on 19^th October 1955 and it was decided that the first contest would take place in spring 1956 in Lugano, Switzerland.

It was held on 24^th May 1956. Seven countries participated, each submitting two songs, for a total of fourteen. This was the only Contest in which more than one song per country was performed as since 1957 all Contests have allowed one entry per country. The 1956 Contest was won by the host nation with a song called ‘Refrain’ sung by Lys Assia.

The United Kingdom first participated at the Eurovision Song Contest in the following year. The BBC had wanted to take part in the first contest but, rather like trying to get into the Common Market, had submitted their entry to the after the deadline had passed. It hasn’t made the same mistake again and the UK has entered every year since apart from 1958, and has won the Contest a total of five times. Its first victory came in 1967 with “Puppet on a String” by Sandie Shaw.

There have been sixty-two contests, with one winner each year except the tied 1969 contest, which had four.  Twenty-five different countries have won the contest.    The country with the highest number of wins is Ireland, with seven.  Portugal is the country with the longest history in the Contest without a win – it made its forty-fourth appearance at the 2010 Contest.  The only person to have won more than once as performer is Ireland’s Johnny Logan, who performed “What’s Another Year” in 1980 and “Hold Me Now” in 1987.

Norway is the country which holds the unfortunate distinction of having scored the most ‘nul points’ in Eurovision Song Contest history – four times in all, and that is what I call humiliating. They have also been placed last ten times, which is also a record!

For many years the annual Eurovision Song Contest was a big event in out house usually with a party where everyone would pick their favourite and would dress appropriately to support their chosen nation.  In later years no one ever picked the United Kingdom because the only thing that is certain about the competition is that being the unpopular man of Europe we are unlikely to ever win again and every year there is a ritual humiliation with a predictable low scoring result.

Scrap Book Project – Bank Notes

Foreign travel and different bank notes remind me of my dad’s insistence on always returning home from foreign holidays with currency for his personal memory box.  The note above is from the former state of Yugoslavia which dad visited several times in the 198os.

Even if it was 90˚ in the shade and everyone was desperate for a last drink at the airport dad was determined to bring a souvenir note or coin home and would hang on with a steadfast determination that would deny last minute refreshment to everyone so long as he could get his monetary mementos back home safely.  How glad I am of that because now they belong to me and now my own left over bank notes from my travel adventures have been added to the collection.

The euro is useful because it has simplified travel to Europe but I miss the old pre-euro currencies. To have a wallet full of romantic and exciting sounding notes made you feel like a true international traveller. I liked the French franc and the Spanish peseta and the Greek drachma of course but my absolute favourite was the Italian lira simply because you just got so many.

When going on holiday to Italy you were, for just a short time anyway, a real millionaire. The first time I went to Italy, to Sorrento in 1976, the notes were so worthless that it was normal practice for shops to give change in the form of a postcard of a handful of sweets.

My most favourite bank notes are probably from Switzerland.  Everyone knows that the Swiss are fond of money and they leave no one in any doubt of this with the quality of their notes.  Not only are they brilliantly colourful but they are printed on high quality paper as well and one is thing for certain – these notes are not going to fall apart easily.  Another interesting thing about the Swiss Franc is that there is something about it which prevents it being scanned and half way through the process the scanner stops and produces a message on screen that it cannot copy a bank note.

 

Scrap Book Project – Continental Holidays

  

From the Scrap Book, these are 1965 newspaper advertisements for holidays to Spain and the Balearics and the cost seems to be an average of about £35 which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a good job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225 so some things in life have defied inflation and become cheaper.

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.  For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.

They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that decorated their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In the photograph my grandparents Ernie and Olive were roughly the same age as I am now and they were clearly having a very good time sitting at a bar enjoying generous measures of alcohol, the same sort of good time that I like to enjoy when I go travelling.  I’m guessing of course but Grandad, who looks unusually bronzed, seems to have a rum and coke and Nan who looks younger than I can ever remember her appears to have some sort of a beer with a slice of lime and that’s about forty years before a bottle of Sol with a bit of citrus became anything like fashionable.  With him is his brother George (no socks, very impressive for 1960) and his wife Lillian. Nan and Grandad look very relaxed and with huge smiles that I can barely remember.  I wonder how they managed to be among the first early holidaymakers to visit Mediterranean Spain in the 1960s?

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.  Within a few years he was flying to Majorca, Menorca, and the Costa Brava.   In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vickers Vanguard airoplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   By the end of the decade BEA was also flying to Malaga on the Costa Del Sol.

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.  Today visitors to Benidorm fly to Alicante to the south, which is closer and more convenient, but the airport there was not opened until 1967.

I am curious to understand how they were able to afford it?  Grandad was a bus conductor with London Transport on the famous old bright red AEC Routemaster buses working at the Catford depot on Bromley Road (he always wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he didn’t break the glass by knocking it as he went up and down the stairs and along the rows of seats with their metal frames) and Nan worked at the Robinson’s factory in Barmerston Road boiling fruit to make the jam.

Benidorm developed as a tourist location because it enjoys a unique geographical position on the east coast of Spain.  The city faces due south and has two stunningly beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean Sea that stretch for about four kilometres either side of the old town, on the east the Levante, or sunrise, and to the west the Poniente, the sunset, and it enjoys glorious sunshine all day long and for most of the year as well.  Today, Spain is a tourist superpower that attracts fifty-three million visitors a year to its beaches, 11% of the Spanish economy runs off of tourism and one in twenty visitors head for Benidorm.  The city is the high rise capital of Southern Europe and one of the most popular tourist locations in Europe and six million people go there each year on holiday.

Thanks to http://www.realbenidorm.net/ for the use of the image

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Other Benidorm Posts:

Benidorm c1960

Benidorm, Plan General de Ordinacion

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm – The Surprise

World Heritage Sites

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Charlton Heston is El Cid

In March 2009 I visited the town of Belmonte in Castilla-la Mancha and visited the castle were some of the scenes for the film El Cid were shot.  On the way back down after visiting the castle I crossed the exact spot where Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren filmed the closing scenes of El Cid the film that was released on 14th December 1961.

El Cid is the national hero of Spain, a bit like our Queen Elizabeth I or Winston Churchill.  He was a warrior, a nobleman, a knight, and a champion.  He became a legend within only a few years of his death and most Spaniards know about him because at school they read an epic poem called El Cantar de Mío Cid.  It is the first great poem in the Spanish language and was written about 1140, only fifty years or so after he died.

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar known as El Cid Campeador, was a Castilian nobleman, a gifted military leader and a diplomat who fought for and then fell out with Alfonso VI, was exiled but later returned, and in the fight against the Moors conquered and governed the city of Valencia on the eastern Mediterranean coast.

It’s a good story but the film takes a few historical liberties so, in truth it is best not to rely upon it as a source document for serious study.

The film is a Hollywood historical epic starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren and tells the story of the heroic warrior as he sets about (seemingly single-handedly) recovering Spain from the Moors.  With its charismatic stars, a cast of thousands (wearing real armour and using real swords) and its grand themes of love, loyalty and justice, it perpetuates a glowing image of the greatest hero in Spanish history.  Cid is a towering and talismanic figure, the perfect chivalric knight, devoted to his wife and children, a magnificent warrior, unerringly true to his word and merciful to his opponents.  Most of all, he is sworn to the service of God and dedicated to saving Spain from the fearsome invaders from North Africa.

The reality of course is that this wasn’t a completely accurate portrayal of the great warrior and the life of  ‘El Cid’, from the Arabic sayyid, ‘lord’, differed from the film version in many crucial respects.

One aspect of the film that is somewhat confusing is the relationship between the Cid and some of the Spanish Muslims who he holds in high regard and treats with respect and here we begin with an aspect of the film, which is, broadly speaking, accurate.  The Cid’s generosity to some of his Muslim opponents and his alliances with local Muslims against other, more fundamentalist, Islamic armies are based on fact because El Cid was a mercenary who would, in fact, fight for either side.

Three centuries before El Cid lived, the Muslims of North Africa had conquered Iberia but slowly the Christians had regained control of the northern half of the peninsula and the two faiths established a practical live and let live arrangement.  Relations between the two faiths in Spain had yet to be sharpened by the inflammatory and inflexible rhetoric of crusade and jihad and furthermore, it was quite common for local groups of Christians and Muslims to make alliances to fight other Christians and Muslims.  But things were changing and El Cid lived just as the age when the Crusades was beginning and the Christians probably had their eye on the bits of the peninsula with the very best beaches.

El Cid lived at this time and the film shows him having Muslim allies, even though it carefully omits the numerous occasions when he acted for Muslim paymasters against Christians because he was, in short, a warrior for hire, a mercenary, who spent much of his career fighting for whoever paid him the most and the  film accurately pays tribute to his formidable military prowess for which others were prepared to pay. His finest victory was the capture of Valencia in 1094, which is shown in the film on a grand Hollywood epic scale, complete with siege towers, cavalry charges and the full clash of medieval arms.

So there is at least some truth in the film and its plot, but it on the whole it is a highly romaticised version of the story.  The explanation for this lies in the identity of its historical consultant: Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who was the foremost Spanish historian of his age and the author of the standard biography of the Cid, first published in 1929.

The portrait of the Cid Pidal promoted to the movie makers was flawed in two ways.  First, in the evidence he used because he gave substantial credibility to the ‘Poema de Mio Cid’, a work written at the height of the crusading age and, crucially, fifty years after after the Cid’s death.  Then, his valiant deeds against Muslims made him a suitable exemplar to inspire a generation of holy warriors fighting the Crusades, and his life quickly moved into the realms of legend.

The second reason for Pidal’s inaccurate characterisation of El Cid lies in the blurring between the historian’s version of medieval Iberia and many of his own perceptions about the Spain of his own lifetime. To him, the notion of a patriotic hero uniting his troubled country was highly attractive and one that fitted the nationalist mood of Spain in the 1930s.  Hence Heston’s El Cid repeatedly demands a victory ‘for Spain’, but in fact Spain as a national entity was of little relevance in the eleventh century and ‘for Castile’ would have been a much more likely rallying cry.

The end of the film is based entirely on legend.  Shortly before he died in 1099 he allegedly saw a vision of St. Peter, who told him that he should gain a victory over the Saracens after his death.  So he was clothed in a coat of mail and was mounted upon his favourite horse, Babieca,  fastened into the saddle and at midnight was borne out of the gate of Valencia accompanied by an army of a thousand knights.  They marched to where the Moorish king and his army was camped, and at daylight made a sudden attack. The Moors awoke and it seemed to them that there were as many as seventy thousand knights, all dressed in robes of pure white and at their head El Cid holding in his left hand a banner representing Reconquesta and in the other a fiercesome sword, La Tizona.  So afraid were the Moors that they fled to the sea, and twenty thousand of them were drowned as they tried to reach their ships.

El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

El Cid and Alvar Fáñez another hero of the Reconquest

El Cid and his Horse Babieca

El Cid and his Wife Ximena

El Cid and his sword La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

King Alfonso X and Tapas

The Abacería L’Antiqua was full to overflowing and heaving with activity and just as we were pondering whether or not to stay a table became available and we made ourselves comfortable. The food looked good and the bar was doing brisk trade so we selected some items from the tapas menu and waited for our food to arrive.  All around the bar there were barrels of sherry and this is something else than Andalusia is famous for.

Sherry is a fortified wine made from white grapes that are grown near the town of Jerez on the coast. In Spanish, it is called Vino de Jerez and according to Spanish law, sherry must come from the small triangular area of the province of Cádiz between Jerez, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and El Puerto de Santa María.

After fermentation is complete, sherry is fortified with brandy and because the fortification takes place after fermentation, most sherries are initially dry, with any sweetness being added later. In contrast, port wine is fortified halfway through its fermentation, which stops the process so that not all of the sugar is turned into alcohol.  So now you know!

According to legend, the tapas tradition began when the King of Castille Alfonso the Wise (died 23rd November 1221) visited a tavern in the town of Ventorillo del Chato in the province of Cádiz, and ordered a glass of sherry.

There was a gusty wind, so the innkeeper served him his glass of sherry covered by a slice of ham to prevent the sherry from getting dirty.  The King liked it, and when he asked for a second glass, he requested another tapa or ‘cover’ just like the first.  This evolved into the practice of using slices of bread or meat as a practical measure meant to prevent fruit flies from hovering over the drink. The meat used to cover the sherry was normally ham or chorizo, which are both very salty and activate thirst and because of this, bartenders and restaurant owners began creating a variety of snacks to serve with sherry, thus increasing their alcohol sales.

The menu was entirely in Spanish and that made it exciting, ordering items from the list with little or no idea what they might be.  Thankfully we didn’t get any shocks and a couple of the dishes were so good that we ordered seconds.  It was a great place and it felt as though we were eating in a traditional way and not in a place created for tourists.    The bodega was a vibrant and effervescent place with people of all age groups and whole families enjoying their Sunday lunchtime gathering and we enjoyed the garrulous atmosphere and just being a part of it all.

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/spain-tapas-and-pinchos/

A Motoring Offence in Spain

“I had already learned to be wary of the Civil Guard, who were the poison dwarfs of Spain.  They would suddenly ride down upon you on their sleek black horses, far out in the open country and crowd around you all leather and guns and put you through a bullying interrogation.”                                                        Laurie Lee – ‘As I walked out one Sunny Morning’

There was still a very long way to go so we planned for another very early start.  When we woke in the morning there was no power and we had to pack in pitch darkness so goodness knows how much stuff we left behind.  We met in the car park and then we had our first problem of the day – the car wouldn’t start!  It was wet and miserable and the electrics were damp and it was probably still trying to get over yesterday’s long drive because this journey was one of the sort of improbable things that these days Jeremy Clarkson does on ‘Top Gear’!

We couldn’t bump start it because it was an automatic so Richard, who understood how cars work,  lifted the bonnet and fiddled with the leads and poked around a bit and the rest of us , who didn’t know how cars worked, stood around and kicked the tyres.  We were all impressed when Richard got the poor thing going and we set off on the road for Burgos on the way to France.

Richard was driving and by the time it got light we were making good progress north along a main highway that, because it was Saturday, was not especially busy this morning.  To this day I still dispute the designation ‘motorway’ because it was single carriageway, had no emergency lane, no lights and as it happens no road markings either.  Richard was driving sensibly and only overtaking when it was safe to do so but then, after about sixty kilometres, we had our next problem.  And this was serious!

All of a sudden the interior of the car was flooded with blue flashing lights from behind and a Spanish highway patrol vehicle was pulling us over.  Richard complied and we all left the vehicle to be confronted by two Guardia Civil policemen in their olive green uniforms, shiny black boots, creaking leather belts and those tricorn black hats that they used to wear, getting out of their green and white patrol car and looking very serious indeed.

We weren’t absolutely sure why they had asked us to stop and when we asked for explanation one of them drew a diagram that seemed to indicate that we had overtaken on double white lines.  Double white lines!  What lines?  They may have been there twenty years ago but there were certainly none there now!

There were two of them and the older one started to write out a ticket for a fine for fifteen thousand pesetas, which was about £60 and seemed like a lot of money to us, especially bearing in mind that we didn’t have any pesetas left anyway.  Anthony was minded to argue and started to get stroppy but the younger one tapped his fingers on the holster of his pistol and readjusted the blood-stained wooden cosh in his belt and the rest of us took that as a sign that we should just shut up and pay up.

This didn’t get over the problem of having no cash but the two highwaymen had a solution and made us follow them to a garage where they supervised the cashier as he exchanged everything that we had got into pesetas and the policemen gleefully took possession of it.  He took all of our French Francs, UK Sterling and what few Portuguese Escudos we had left, and actually we had more of those between us than we thought because Tony had been holding back on a bit of a stash concealed in the back of his wallet that he hadn’t owned up to and the rest of us were all a bit upset about that!  We had been thoroughly mugged and as we waved goodbye to the two policemen Anthony shouted a rather unpleasant accusation of dishonesty and an invitation to enjoy our contribution to the Guardia Civil Christmas party fund, which thankfully they didn’t hear.

When we arrived back home I wrote to the Spanish Embassy in London to complain and to request a refund and although they replied and sympathised they explained that they had no authority over the police and therefore couldn’t do anything to help.  It was a nice letter though!

Richard was a bit upset about the incident and sulked for the next hour or so while we drove past Burgos and stopped at a little town at just about breakfast time and found a bank where we could get enough cash to buy some fuel to get us out of Spain.  We carried on out of Castilla y León and into the green mountains of the Basque Country, past Bilbaó and San Sebastián and then headed east towards the Pyrenees and then the last Spanish town of Irun at the border with France, which we finally reached about twenty hours behind schedule.

Cofete Beach Fuerteventura

I am not really a beach person, I quickly get bored, an hour is usually quite long enough  and I think that the invasive nature of sand is completely incompatible with the intimate nooks and crannies of the human body.  In selecting a favourite beach however this one wins hands down!

Cofete beach on Fuerteventura, which is one of the Canary Islands, which I visited on 21st November 2001.

Cofete is a small village in the south-western part of the Jandia peninsula in Fuerteventura and nearby it has a sandy windswept Atlantic facing beach that is about five kilometers long so gloriously empty that every person on it gets about a thousand square metres of  space all to themselves.  The beach is not really suitable for safe bathing and the advice is that you shouldn’t swim here unless you are Shiwan Ye or Michael Phelps because of the pounding waves, dangerous tides and the strong currents.

There is something curiously mysterious about it, deserted, solitary, lonely, and brooding away in the background are the eight-hundred metre high mountains of Jandia that seem to separate it from the inhabited holiday side half of the island.  The weather is almost always breezy, the waves are very high and the beach appears breathtakingly eerie but nevertheless beautiful.  There are never many people on the beach because it is so inaccessible and there are no lifeguards to rely on in an emergency.

To get there it is necessary to drive over twenty kilometres of track that in some places only allows for single file traffic.  Some of the passing places have steep drops to the side, and the journey can only realistically be tackled in a jeep or four-wheel drive vehicle and believe me it is a really uncomfortable journey, but one worth making nevertheless.  The route there goes through the very pretty Punta Pesebre, the Playa de los Ojos (Eyes beach), which is difficult to access, and the fishing port of Puerto de la Cruz before the lovely Playa de las Pilas.

If you want to sunbathe without any clothes on then this is the place to do it.   The beach is permanently deserted and there is enough private space to stretch out and enjoy the sun on the parts that it does not normally reach!  Some of the people on the beach were doing beach exercises this morning and I began to speculate about what were the three most dangerous athletics events for a naturist and I decided that they would just have to be the high jump, the pole vault because you certainly don’t want your exposed bits and pieces dangling about in mid-air and most of all, especially for a man, hurdling, the thought of the potential for painful injury makes my eyes water!

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More Beaches:

Ambleteuse, France

Galicia Blue Flag Beaches

Cofete Beach

Mwnt Beach, South Wales

Albufiera

Portimão, Carvoeiro, Praia Vale de Centianes and Silves

Portugal, Beaches and a Sunset

Kefalonia, Fiskardo and Assos

Kefalonia, Villages and Beaches

Kefalonia, Lassi and Hotel Mediterranee

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Greece 2009 – Ios, Beaches and Naturists

Serifos Psili-Ammos

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Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen)

The route from Manzanares Real to El Escorial took us to the foothills of the Sierra Guadarrama mountain range and directly past one of the few remaining reminders of the Franco regime – the Valle de los Caídos.  The Valley of the Fallen is a shallow green natural basin tucked into the folds of the mountain about fifty kilometres north of central Madrid.  It is the controversial last resting place of the dictator General Francisco Franco who conceived this place for himself out of his own arrogance and conceit.

For almost forty years until his death on 20^th November 1975 the Generalíssimo was someone that Spaniards could not escape from.  He was there in school books, church prayers, statues, plaques, street names and thousands of other reminders of a violent insurrection that led to a vicious civil war.  Now though his face and name are being erased from public view and even the army, where nostalgia for the dictator survived long after his death in 1975, has pledged to remove all plaques, statues and monuments to the regime of a man it once revered.

From the entrance gate there is a five kilometre drive to the monument on a road that passes through lush vegetation of tall pines punctuated by a scattering of oak, ilex and poplar trees and which passes over a couple of elegant stone bridges and at the top is the most recent piece of fascist religious monumental architecture to have been erected in western Europe.  A huge blue-grey granite cross soars one hundred and fifty metres into the sky which on a clear day can be seen from the centre of Madrid and no wonder because it is claimed to be the largest in the World.  Below the cross are a series of arches overlooking a wide featureless concrete esplanade and beyond the galleries is the entrance to the basilica through two modest bronze doors.

The floor is made of granite and black marble and above it there is an interior dome lined in gold mosaic.  The basilica is longer than St Peter’s in Rome and almost as high and is built to dimensions that matched the mountainous ego of its creator.  Officially it is a war memorial in remembrance of all those who perished in the Spanish civil war and a symbol of forgiveness and peace but the monument has never actually managed to achieve this worthy status because it was built partly by using Republican prisoners as labourers and the grim intimidating monument has always been seen rather as a symbol of the victory of the Nationalists.

Today the monument is an embarrassment to the State and successive Spanish governments have agonised over what to do with it.  Since 2004 the left-leaning government, which has been following a policy of the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings and spaces, has had an uneasy relationship with a monument that is the most conspicuous legacy from Franco’s rule.

In November 2009, Patrimonio Nacional, who manages the building, suddenly and controversially ordered the closure of the basilica for an indefinite period of time, citing as a reason deterioration and preservation issues which may affect the cross and compromise some of the sculptures. These allegations have been contested by technical experts and the religious community that lives in the complex, and had been seen by some conservative opinion groups as a policy of harassment against the monument, an opinion reinforced when in 2010 the Pieta sculpture group started to be ‘dismantled’ with hammers and heavy machinery.

Every year on the first Saturday after the 20^th November old hard-line Francoists attend a religious ceremony at the monument in his memory, which is really a massive political rally, and this annual gathering of fascists is also an embarrassment to the government and to most of modern Spain.

We had read that the monument was closed but the gate was open so we swung inside anyway and pulled up beside the pay kiosk at the entrance where a middle aged lady explained that the monument wasn’t open and we should leave.  I followed some cars and drove on expecting to find a turning point but after a kilometre it was obvious there wasn’t one and the cars we were following were authorised to be there so I did a three point turn instead next to two vertical granite columns at either side of the road.

What we hadn’t known about was the significance of the 20^th November and being only a week away this must have been making the people on the gate a bit nervous because as we drove down we passed the woman from the kiosk who was pursuing us in a red Seat and who waved frantically to us as we drove by.

Political rallies in celebration of the former dictator are now banned by the Law of Historical Memory, voted on by the Congress of Deputies in October 2007 and it seems that the authorities were anticipating extra trouble this year in response to the closure of the monument and back at the gate two burly guards were shaking their heads and giving disapproving grimaces.  I gave my best socialist smile and made pathetic gestures of apology but then left as quickly as possible and rejoined the road to El Escorial where we hoped we might be made to feel more welcome.

Lottery Disappointment Syndrome (LDS)

19^th November 1994 was the day of the first UK National Lottery draw and a £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of striking lucky and guessing correctly the winning six out of 49 numbers.

I remember that everyone was talking about the National Lottery and I bought my ticket a few days in advance of the Saturday night draw.  This was in the days before ‘Lucky Dip’ so I had to choose my numbers and like a lot of people I selected meaningful dates like my birthday, my house number, my age and so on.

In 1994 I was working for Cory Environmental at Southend-on-Sea in Essex and I used to drive there everyday from Rugby, a journey which took just a little under two hours (it was a company car so I didn’t mind putting excess miles on the clock, running up a massive fuel bill or making a major contribution to global warming with my diesel emissions) and on that Saturday morning I was on weekend duty and as I drove along the M25 that morning my head was full of plans for spending the winnings that I was confident of picking up later.  I mean, how difficult could it be to pick 6 numbers out of 49?

After a day at work the return journey was the same, would I move to France or Spain? Would I have a Ferrari or a Lamborghini? How would I tell my boss to shove his job and how much would I miss my friends and family? I was totally confident of a life-changing moment in just a couple of hours or so.

Well, it wasn’t to be of course, I don’t think I even got one number, eight people shared the jackpot that night and I wasn’t one of them and I never have been of course and except for the occasional £10 win I have suffered from sixteen years of LDS – Lottery Disappointment Syndrome!  I live in Grimsby, I have a Volkswagen Golf, my boss told me to shove off last year and made me redundant but on the upside I still have my friends and family!