A festival like a war zone

Ah, the joy of waking up to a morning of utter stillness!

Sometimes pleasure doesn’t need anything particular to happen. Sometimes it’s enough that something cease. Simple absence can do as much as any presence.

By sheer accident, and without either intending it or knowing about it, we took possession of our flat in Valencia at the time of the annual Fallas festival. A ‘falla’ is a wooden structure built in the street – often at an intersection, presumably as a means to optimising traffic flow – usually on some an amusing theme, or at any rate an uplifting one, such as the seven deadly sins, loneliness or breast cancer.

A powerful falla for breast cancer

Falla outside the town hall

A touching falla to loneliness

Several of the ones we saw reflected a theme of our day – a caricature of that fine President the US electorate voted against but the US constitution put into office. I suppose laughing at him is a reasonably healthy response. The alternative would be crying, which would be more effective and a great deal less encouraging.

A familiar figure clutching a US flag
With apologies for the poor focus. But then his is just as uncertain

While the Fallas are up, many Valencians don traditional dress and process through the streets, often accompanied by a brass band. This is a charming sight, as old and young, men and women, girls and boys, the able-bodies and the disabled all take part. They look wonderful and they reflect a powerful sense of community, embracing all walks of life, although to be quite truthful, the costumes in the city centre do contain just a tad more silk and are more luxuriously embroidered than the ones in the less well-heeled (or well-skirted) outer suburbs.

Members of a Fallas procession

The costumes are complex. A friend can be a great help

The only trouble is that once you have seen fifteen of these processions, the charm tends to wear off a little. At number fifty or sixty, even though they embrace old and young, men and women, girls and boys, able-bodied and disabled, they start to spread a sense of sameness, brass band or no. One starts to long for a little variety, provided in my case by a helpful pickpocket, in a dense crowd, who freed me of the burden of carrying my (brand new) work phone any further. 

That certainly broke the monotony for me and left me some far livelier feelings.

Those feelings were principally directed against myself. As Danielle pointed out, “why on earth were you carrying your work phone with you on a Sunday in the first place? And how often do I have to tell you not to put a phone in an outside pocket? Don’t you learn?”

It’s true that I’ve twice been relieved of phones by pickpockets, and the previous time it was in Madrid. Now, I’ve spent a great deal of time in Spain and intend to spend a great deal more, and it is not my experience that the country is any less honest than any other. However, it does seem to be endowed with more than the usual quota of pickpockets, and they seem particularly deft at their work. A lesson I need to learn. As my wife likes to remind me.

“She seems very wise,” my HR colleague Laura told me when I reported the loss.

“She is,” I replied, “and keeps telling me it’s a shame I don’t listen to her enough.”

“How odd!” said Laura, “that’s exactly the kind of conversation I keep having with my husband.”

The other custom associated with the Fallas is the throwing of fire crackers. There are even fenced off areas devoted to the practice, though that doesn’t seem to stop people chucking them wherever they like. There seems to be a particular variety that has been volume-enhanced, so to speak, so they let of a fearful retort. They’re the heavy artillery of crackers, where the usual ones are just small arms.

Now, I love fireworks. Arching up in the sky, bursting far above our heads, raining down multi-coloured and beautifully patterned collections of sparks, they’re a joy. The noise they make is clearly just a secondary characteristic, contributing little if anything at all to the spectacle.

Crackers, on the other hand, are just noisy, providing only the secondary effect. And, in my view, contributing little to the spectacle.

In fact, during the Fallas, the seem to convert the otherwise delightful city of Valencia into a latter-day version of Beirut at its worst. After a brief silence, new volleys of small crackers will suddenly start again. Palestinians are exchanging fire with regular Lebanese soldiers. Then, as the firing intensifies, it’s clear that the Druze militias have opened up against Falangists. Finally, as the heavy-artillery crackers start up in another sustained roll of thunder, you can hear Hezbollah exchanging cannon fire with Israeli missile emplacements.

Of course, it’s nothing like as bad as Beirut. There’s no fear, for instance, of being hit and maimed or killed oneself, for instance. No risk of anything much worse than having your phone lifted. But, in my judgement, not being quite as terrifying as Beirut, is a low bar to set for any form of popular entertainment.

Eventually the whole thing ends in a literal blaze of glory. All the fallas, being made of wood, are inflammable and, as midnight strikes at the end of the four-day festival, they are all set alight. The Fallas are destroyed by Fi-re (that at least should tell you how to pronounce it). Strings of bonfires stretch out across the city while fireworks (at last) burst overhead. A fitting end for essentially ephemeral art.

Cremà de Fallas.
A blazing end for truly ephemeral art

And then – peace returns. As though the militias had laid down their arms. The Israeli Defence Forces had withdrawn to their borders. Hezbollah had decided that it was time to transform itself into a social service group and held a mass destruction of its weapons.

A quiet morning dawns. The citizens can sleep again. Until they go about their business in calm with no further fear of an explosion behind them to startle them out of their tranquillity without warning at any moment.

At least for another year.