Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis

Last week’s horrendous, tragic plane crash in Madrid led us and many others living in Spain to take firm decisive action: to turn off the TV, ignore news websites, and stop buying the papers.

The news media had gone (and continues to go) too far again. Within hours of the accident we had all the information we would need. The plane had lost control, crashed near the airport, and all but a few very lucky people (now 18), had died.

Yet the ‘news’, playing to the famous national ‘morbo‘, or morbid fascination with all horrendous events, has been camped out outside hospitals and the main convention centre morgue where bodies are being identified, trying desperately to secure images and, worst of all, interviews with emotionally destroyed relatives.

Occasionally it seems (OK, I have watched a minute here, a minute there of the news, all I can take), they strike gold and discover the story of the guy who tried to get off the plane before the second fatal take off attempt but wasn’t allowed, the text message sent to a friend about ‘problems with our plane’, and more emotion-twisting horror than your average viewer can take.

And still it goes on, 4 days later. Part of the reason it is so hard to watch is that it so closely mirrors the news coverage of the Madrid train bombings, a few years ago, when we were all glued to images of twisted train wreckage and dead bodies for days (or weeks) on end, trying desperately to understand how something so insanely horrendouns could have happened.

According to a conversation overheard in a doctor’s waiting room, all this Spanish morbo can be traced back to a lady named Nieves Herrero (nicknamed Nieves Horrores), who started the trend in the 90’s with a daily morning TV programme called ‘Cita con la Vida’ (A Date with Life), that scoured the country to broadcast the most upsetting, awful social and personal tragedies Spain was hiding in its quiet villages and city suburbs.

Here’s a quote from Wikipedia’s entry on Nieves Herrero that perfectly captures the current Spanish media behaviour, and the average night on Spanish TV:

“She was heavily criticised for the coverage given to the famous Crimen de Alcácer, making a live broadcast from this village the same night that the bodies of the girls were found. In the programme, they took advantage of the emotional state of the families of the victims, interviewing the parents about how they felt at the time, and converting their pain into a public spectacle to be broadcast to the whole country.”

The country became addicted to ‘other people’s awful lives’, the media discovered there was plenty of tragedy to go around, and no watchdog ever stepped in to say just how much horror they could get away with showing. The result is that you will see bodies, devastation, and emotional hell that you would never see in 100 years on the good old BBC.

But let’s face it, this morbo is not just a Spanish problem, it’s just more out in the open here. In the end, revelling in other people’s misery is a very modern, developed world phenomenon. I think it plays to either one of two basic human positions:

1) “Thank god my life isn’t that bad”

……or, perversly, (and please tell me if I’m wrong),

2) “If something that bad happened in my life it would probably give me the shake up I need to change things dramatically forever, and kick me out of the everlasting everyday mundane.”

Whichever the case, for many Spaniards this latest round of media morbo has been a step too far. Is it possible that one day an audience that just can’t take any more will switch off for good? Will we ever see the demise of this endless aggressive probing into emotionally-debilitating modern human horrors?

Comments welcome as always.

Like most people when they first move to Spain, when I arrived in Madrid nearly 10 years ago, I found it tricky to adapt to the crazy timetable during the first few weeks. I was eating at 1pm, but everyone else turned up at 2… or 3…. I ate dinner in empty restaurants at 8.30, the Spaniards came in as I was paying my bill.

Still, within about 2 weeks I worked out what was going on, and did as the locals were doing. Friends wouldn’t meet until 10pm on a Saturday night? No problem! Soon got used to that!

But recently something perplexing is going on. These days I get up at 7 a.m. and work from about 7.30 until 2. A quick rest after lunch, then more work until 6ish, when I am obliged (under new household laws designed to control my computer addiction and give me back some of my old life) to stop work, close the lid of the laptop, and pay more attention to my wife.

All fine… until we meet up with Spanish friends in the evening. By 11pm I’m shattered! By midnight, as the assembled locals start looking if anything even more lively, I’m sending pleading glances to Marina, hoping she’ll take the hint and announce it’s time to go home. By 1 am I’m downright pissed off!

I think I have three options to beat this very Madrileño problem:

1. Get up later (unlikely, and not very Spanish)

2. Start taking a 45 minute siesta on days we are going out (hmmm… tempting)

3. Take up coffee, in heavy doses.

How do you deal with the long end of Spanish timekeeping?

Car owners in Spain are required to have the following four things in place before they can take their vehicle out on the road: paid-up car tax, valid insurance, the ITV vehicle inspection certificate and, last but not least, a complete disregard for their own personal safety.

This was proven again this weekend, at an official level, when we took our car to sort out item 3 on the list, the ITV.

The ITV, or Inspección Técnica de Vehí­culos, is the equivalent of the British MOT. A new car has to take this test after 4 years on the road, then every 2 years for a while, then finally every year.

The test is administered at huge warehouses on the dusty outskirts of cities all over Spain, and involves checking exhaust emissions, suspension, brakes, indicators, seatbelts, and other small items required for general road safety like whether or not your headlights work.

Ours didn’t. At the very second the guy told me to turn on my headlights for this seemingly important part of the test, a warning light popped up on my dashboard telling me that the front left headlamp had failed. Oh No!

This blatantly meant we were going to fail the ITV, would have to drive back to Madrid, get it fixed, and come all the way back out to kilometer 20.4 of the A6 motorway to take the test again several days later.

As we queued up to get out ‘Fail’ certificate the injustice of this terrible piece of bad timing weighed heavily: why couldn’t the damn light have blown just 2 minutes later? I approached the desk and was informed by a nice young lady, ‘Here we are, no problems, 2 more years.’ The car passed the test!

Marina and I scanned the piece of paper to see how on earth this was possible. At the bottom there were two colomuns: Infracciones Graves (Serious, Your-Car-Is-Off-The-Road Problems) and Infracciones Leves (Little Fluffy Don’t-Worry-About-It Problems). Under the Small Problems column, where things that are not important enough to fail you and keep your car off the road go, we read ‘broken headlamp bulb’.

So next time you drive along a narrow Spanish country lane in the dark, and a nearly-impossible-to-see car with only one functional headlamp comes tearing round a blind corner nearly forcing you off the road in shock, don’t worry! Relax! It’s just an Infracción Leve, not in any way to be confused with something that might actually make the already scary roads of Spain any less of a secure environment for you and your family!

Spanish car-madness stories/experiences welcome in the comments below.

There’s a granny on the first floor that makes the sign of the cross, just as if she’d entered a church and stood before the altar, every time she crosses the threshold of our building, stepping out into the mean streets of Madrid.

You sometimes see this with old ladies that get onto the Metro too, and I’ve seen more than a few younger women franticly tracing thumb and forefinger up and down, side to side across their chest, as they step on a plane bound for the UK (I imagine they are more worried about the flight than the destination, though these days it’s a toss up as to which is more dangerous!)

I used to inwardly smile at this sort of ‘antiquated’ behaviour, but these days, as many of the big cities in Spain start to take on unpleasant aspects of other great metropolises around the globe, I’m not sure those grannies (and why is it only women I see doing this?) are so crazy. After all, believer or non-believer, every bit of supernatural protection probably helps!

I mean, look what happened right below our balcony recently:

http://www.viddler.com/player/98e8aad4/