Coronavirus lockdown and last time enjoyments

Our local sports club, usually a centre for people and pleasure
Now abandoned for the duration

The streets are emptying here in Spain.

We had two friends from France staying with us last week and took them to Valencia’s main station on Sunday, for the first leg of their trip home. That was the day before the start of the full Coronavirus lockdown across the country, but already the streets were deserted.

Valencia, capital of the fiesta, now nearly a ghost tow

Particularly striking was the five-mile long park that runs along the old riverbed. It is one of the city’s most impressive resources, with its football pitches, its rugby ground, its baseball diamond, its running tracks, its cycling paths, its athletics stadium and, above all, its green spaces where people meet to dance or to chat, to party or to sunbathe.

This time there was no one.

That was the culmination of a strange week. Circumstances changed gradually, day by day, but anything but slowly. And we had to adapt to stay in step.

On Monday, we were still expecting the great Fallas fiesta to start on the following Sunday, though anxiety and anger was climbing against the authorities for not cancelling it. Hundreds of thousands thronging the streets? It seemed irresponsible at best.

On Tuesday, the fiesta was cancelled.

Then we had a whole string of ‘last time’ moments. Obviously, we hope they won’t be truly last times, that the epidemic will end and we’ll get through it, so that we can start doing all these things again. But these were the last times before the lockdown.

At that time, Danielle was in the Madrid region. She’s been travelling there weekly for some time now, to look after our new granddaughter Matilda so that her parents could go back to work. What we didn’t know was that last week would be the last time she’d do that until the end of pandemic.

She came home on Wednesday with our French friends. Her last railway trip for the foreseeable future.

On Thursday, we took our friends around Valencia, wandering the streets and popping into various places we felt they ought to see. That might mean somewhere cultural or just pleasurable, such as the Museum of Modern Art, or a restaurant we’ve come to know and love, or the main square with its masked Fallas sculpture, or our final port of call, the glorious Café de la Horas which serves the best Agua de Valencia in the city.

Fallas sculpture dedicated to women
now with an anti-virus mask

Danielle disagrees that it’s the best, but she admits it’s pretty close to the top. And, for those who may not know this fine beverage, let me say that the word ‘agua’ (water) is misleading, as is the fact that it’s made mostly of orange juice. It isn’t the orange juice that provides the kick.

The Cafe de las Horas
Not just splendid for its kitsch but for its outstanding Agua de Valencia

All these visits were last times.

On Friday, we took our friends on a walk with the Community Walks group we belong to, partly for the exercise though mostly for the company. We even began planning another walk for the following Friday, not realising that this too had been a last-time occurrence.

On the way back, we decided to have lunch in a local restaurant. I phoned ahead to book a table. “For now?” they asked and when I confirmed that it was, “oh, then, no problem,” they replied. I realised later why they’d hesitated. The local government authorities had closed all bars, cafes and restaurants throughout the region, from that evening. Lunch had been our last chance to eat out.

And finally, on Saturday we took our friends to one of the local beaches. That was something I didn’t expect to be forbidden any time soon. I was so wrong. The axe of the nationwide lockdown fell the following day, so our walk along the beach – which I’m delighted we enjoyed – turned out to be the last of our last time pleasures.

Last beach walk.
We even had a pair of acrobats to admire

Our friends are back home in France, just in time to beat the lockdown. We took advantage of taking them to the station to pause a moment in the old city. For the last time.

We’re now adapting to an indefinite period of confinement. Apart from work, medical needs or basic shopping including food, the only reason we’re allowed out at all is to walk the dogs, and we’ve even had a loudspeaker van touring the area to warn us that it’s one person with dogs, and it’s take them out, take them back, no more.

It looks like we’ll be catching up on a lot of reading over the next few weeks, and binge-watching a few series. We just have to hope we don’t go stir crazy.

Still, if it minimises the impact of the pandemic and helps us through it, that’ll be a price worth paying. 

Even though it’s a pretty high price.

Romans, Arabs, Fascists and hard drinks

Organising events is something a great many of us have done at some time. 

It might be a bring-and-buy-sale. It might be some worthy public meeting, or a concert, or a festival stand, perhaps raising money to defend women’s rights, or protect the polar bear, or prepare the overthrow of capitalism. It might just be an amateur dramatics evening.

What I think few of us are likely to have done is organise a stand at risk of being attacked by Fascists, or to make a major archaeological discovery as we do so. But that’s what our friend Marisa did.

The thing about Marisa is that she’s extremely bright and frighteningly well-informed. She also happens to be a Valencia City guide, by which I don’t mean that this is what she really is in any essential way, only that among the many things she does is act as an official guide around Valencia. In either English or Spanish, naturally, as monolingualism would be far too limiting.

Her brightness and depth of information make her tours particularly fun, so we join them whenever we can.

Regular readers of this blog will know that Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite writers. Ankh Morpork is the biggest city in his fictional Discworld. In Men at Arms, he says of it:

Technically Ankh-Morpork is built on loam, but what it is mainly built on is Ankh-Morpork; it has been constructed, burned down, silted up, and rebuilt so many times that its foundations are old cellars, buried roads and the fossil bones and middens of earlier cities.

As with most of Pratchett’s comments about the Discworld, this one is equally true of a lot of the world we inhabit. Especially its older cities. What the centre of the city of Valencia is built on is Valencia. Or, more accurately, Valentia.

The baths of Roman Valentia
Underneath the present city. Naturally

Valentia was founded by the Romans and, as Marisa explained, it was used to settle former soldiers of the legions that had fought the Lusitanians under their iconic commander Viriathus. Those Lusitanians had been too benighted to appreciate that the Romans were there to liberate them from their primitive way of life and initiate them into the wonder and glory of life as Roman citizens.

The Romans were prepared to go to great lengths to help them attain civilisation, even if that meant massacring them in large numbers to attain that noble goal.

To be fair, the Romans were enlightened enough to settle quite a few of Viriathus’s soldiers in Valentia. After all, they were veterans too, weren’t they? Besides, as a boss of mine once told me when I mentioned we were buying our first house, “the best way to make a man a conservative, is to give him something to conserve”.

It didn’t work with me, I’m glad to say. We sold that house, anyway.

It didn’t work that well for the early Valentians either, or at least not for that long. 75 years later the city was razed in the Civil War that raged throughout the Roman possessions, to decide which of two power-hungry autocrats, backed by big money and large armies, should rule over them.

Can you imagine? A state of the world in which ordinary people have their lives wrecked because plutocrats are fighting each other for power. How sad it would be if the same kind of thing happened today.

It took half a century, but eventually the city was rebuilt, on top of the Roman ruins and sometimes using stones from them, as is traditional. Eventually it morphed into Spanish Valencia.

Which is just as well, as we might have found it difficult to live here otherwise.

In between, it spent a time under Arab rule. After Marisa had shown us some of the Roman remains under the modern-day city, she asked whether we’d like to visit the fragments of Arab wall that can still be seen in certain basements.

Well, we decided we would, so we did. In particular, she took us to the place where, back in the 1980s, there was a patch of wasteland with a slowly collapsing house at the back of it. At that time, Marisa was a student at the art school, then called the Royal Academy of Saint Charles.

The Fallas are the great festival of Valencia
They're about to come around again
A latter-day Valencian tries the traditional costume

One year, when the great annual festival of the ‘Fallas’ came around, she and some of her friends decided to organise a drink stand to raise a little money. The Council gave them permission to use the wasteland.

It was full of rubbish that people had been throwing there for years, if not decades. The first job was a long and tedious clean-up of the whole site. In particular, they had to clear the stairs that led down into a basement where they were planning to sell their drinks. When they got there, they found that one side of the basement was made of what looked like old, strongly cemented and thick walls.

They thought little of it and went ahead selling soft drinks, along with Agua de Valencia, which looks like orange juice but isn’t, and is certainly not soft. It all went well, in general. Their only problem was that this was the eighties and there were still a lot of unreconciled Fascists around, who hadn’t accepted the return to democracy after the death of the dictator Franco.

Sadly, some of these people are making a comeback again today, with the hard right surging in the polls. That’s one of the biggest issues that Spain, like many other countries, now has to face.

Back then, some of these Fascists identified, correctly as it happens, the students on the drink stand as left-wing and decided that they would make a great target for violent attacks. Ultimately, the students had to hire a security guard to protect them.

I’ve worked on drink stands before, but I’m glad to say I’ve never needed to protect myself from physical injury.

What was most remarkable, however, was the wall. Eventually, the students decided that it might be rather more significant than they had originally imagined. They mentioned it to the council.

It turned out that what they’d stumbled across was one of the best-preserved segments of the old Arab wall around the city, significantly bigger in Arab than in Roman times, lying under the newer buildings.

Marisa, with the Arab wall she helped uncover, behind her

It was a privilege to have one of the people responsible for its discovery showing us that stretch of wall, now well-preserved and set up for visitors to admire. Especially as they’d uncovered it in order to sell Agua de Valencia, a drink it strikes me as particularly apt for celebrating such a find.

It just goes to show. Facing down Fascist violence can have some remarkable consequences. Though this has to be one of the least expected.

The Rain in Spain

Whatever rain gods are looking after Valencia seem a tad forgetful.

It’s a highly fertile region of Spain. Throughout the province of Valencia – of which the city is the capital – there are groves of oranges, mandarins, olives, almonds and other fruit. Fields are full of artichokes or cabbages, potatoes or carrots. As Danielle points out to me, you more or less only have to plant something around here for it to grow and flourish.

That needs rain. But the rain hardly ever falls. Though when it does, you certainly know it.

When the rain falls around here, it really falls

The other evening was the first when we played badminton during a rainstorm. All around the hall stood buckets carefully positioned to catch the leaks from the roof. Even so, there were wet patches that we had to avoid.

“Why don’t they fix the roof?” Danielle asked our badminton club president.

“Because it doesn’t rain often enough,” he replied.

Makes sense. With rain so infrequent it’s easier, and cheaper, to put buckets out.

Those long periods of dry weather, with clear skies and warm temperatures, are wonderful. Sadly, though, we pay for them with periods of intense rain when the weather finally does break. They can be ferocious: back in September, there was flooding in many parts of the province, leading to some six deaths. It’s as though around here, it forgets to rain most of the time, and then compensates with long, intense downpours.

See what I mean about forgetful rain gods? Or perhaps not so much forgetful as easily distracted.

The Cafe de las Horas: 
where rain gods would go for Agua de Valencia

I imagine them getting together for a little light entertainment whenever they can. As local gods, knowing the area well, they probably make for the Café de las Horas for a particularly good Agua de Valencia (looks like orange juice but that's only one ingredient), or maybe they go in search of an especially well-prepared paella. Then they pass their time in well-lubricated pleasure until the provincial council sends someone to remind them of their duty.

Paella Valenciana, a great Valencian invention

I picture a deferential figure, probably a man, unostentatiously dressed, with a pen in his breast pocket and an official notepad. He approaches the rain gods in trepidation, worried at their response to his interruption but equally determined to carry out his difficult task.

“Err… excuse me, gentlemen… oh, and ladies,” because Valencia being a community of liberal outlook, a small but growing minority of its rain gods will be female, with gender equality an objective by 2050, “my apologies for disturbing you, but I wonder whether you’ve lost track of certain obligations?”

This would be the approach around the 15th of a month without rain. By the 25th, he would probably have been replaced by his boss, a man or possibly a woman (see above) of more redoubtable aspect, who takes an altogether sterner approach.

“OK, fun’s over, time to pull your fingers out. We need a month’s rainfall and we need it in the next five days. Get to it.”

In response to one or other of these local bureaucrats, one of the gods might say, “oh, hell, yes. It’s that time of the month again. We’ve got to provide these guys with some water.”

“But,” another might protest, “I’ve booked us a table for a paella on Saturday.”

“It’s Wednesday. If we pull out all the stops, I bet we can get enough rain out over the next three days to meet the quota, and still enjoy the meal on Saturday. What’s more, if the rain’s done by Friday evening, we’d have great weather for our lunch. We could eat outside.”

“Let’s do it!” cry the others, “one big push, everyone, and we’re done.”

They rush outside and see to it that our badminton courts are flooded.

The official from the council would be a Rain God Reminder. And his (or her) success in affecting weather conditions would be celebrated by all.

After all, it would be a great demonstration of the power of reminder over matter.