More on the life of Immigrants in Valencia: cleaning the woods, revelling with the ‘Chinese’

It has been quite a learning experience, since we became immigrants in Spain and moved to a house near woodland. 

I had no idea how much work it takes to keep it clean and tidy. We’d been out once before, with a bunch of volunteers, picking up litter. On Saturday, we were in the La Vallesa woods near where we live, shifting branches and small trees.

Tidying up the woods at La Vallesa

Professionals had been in before us, with their chainsaws, thinning and pruning. Now we were doing the grunt work of shifting the branches down to paths where they could easily be reached by trucks with equipment to turn them into chips, to be fed back into the ground. Which sounds like a good plan.

Taking some of the trees out lets the others grow more strongly, with less competition for the scarce resources in this not hugely fertile soil. Then, using the felled branches to provide further feed, strengthens them still further. Besides, and this is one of the main aims, the organisers reckon that thinning the woods reduces the danger of disastrous fires. These woods have had plenty of them, even if nothing on the scale of Australia, but then that’s just the fate we’re trying to avoid.

The relatively small fire at La Vallesa in 2014

As has been the case every time we’ve joined a group around here in Valencia, the people we met were immensely welcoming and friendly. One of the organisations, of the six behind the initiative (which naturally meant six, mercifully brief, speeches at the beginning, as each had to have its say), one was an association providing mental health support for young people. Some of their users were there, and it was a great pleasure to see how much they enjoyed being out with the group and doing work that was so useful.

Some were helping us, but others were with the group of children who'd come with their parents and who were planting other trees, oaks and chestnuts, in the hope of introducing a little more diversity in the woods. 

That was the start of the day. In the evening, we went to see the celebration of the Chinese New Year in Valencia city itself. There’s quite a large Chinese community in the region, including a small but growing Chinatown with some excellent restaurants and shops, and an area out by the airport where Chinese companies line up along the road with their warehouses.

The Chinese New Year parade
working its way through the Valencia Chinatown

Still, the parade was by no means exclusively Chinese. I wouldn’t even say that Chinese people were in the majority. But the celebrations involved letting off firecrackers and fireworks around a parade which included at least a dozen groups of drummers, hammering their drums with tremendous energy and enthusiasm. Nothing could possibly appeal to Valencians more. Their great festival each year involves wandering the streets and letting off firecrackers, in two varieties: one that sounds like machinegun fire, and the other like heavy artillery.

The streets in which they do that are decorated with large sculptures in highly inflammable material. So, if it’s inflammable, what do you reckon they do with it? Yep, that’s right. On the last night they set fire to them, while filling the sky with fireworks and the ground, naturally, with yet more crackers.

A sculpture burning at the Valencia ‘Fallas’

With that background, Valencians were bound to take to the Chinese New Year with unbounded enthusiasm. As we discovered when we stood in the crowd in the little Chinatown to watch the parade go by. “Let’s get ourselves some Chinese costumes,” they must have said, “join an appropriate association and go out to beat our drums.” And they did just that, with obvious and infectious joy.

Valencian drummers in Chinese costume, enjoying the parade

A fun way to spend a day, in the woods in the morning, at the parade in the evening.

Afterthought

There were a few, very few, face masks being worn by people in the crowd at the Chinatown parade. I’m not quite sure what they were trying to protect themselves against. Did they think that merely being at a Chinese New Year event would expose them to coronavirus?

At any rate, I’m glad to say that, to my knowledge, there wasn’t a single case of infection from Wuhan at the celebrations in Valencia.

Getting the public to appreciate the public good

He wished to God the dust would settle. Why didn’t someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one’s responsible, no one gives a hoot.

Ah, I wish I could write with le Carré’s intense succinctness. A few short sentences to conjure up an entire atmosphere. This is Peter Guillam, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, undertaking one of the most terrifying tasks as a spy: stealing information from his own service, in the duty room of its headquarters in London.

But it’s the idea le Carré expresses that struck me. No one gives a hoot for a place that many people use: “it isn’t mine, so it isn’t my responsibility”. I suspect we’ve all come across that attitude at some time or another.

It poses a problem for Socialists. How do you get everyone to take responsibility for something none of them owns as an individual, but we all own as a collective?

The simple way around the issue is to go for nationalisation instead of public ownership. Unfortunately, they’re absolutely not the same thing. A nationalised undertaking belongs to the state, not to the people. The extent to which it serves the public interest depends on who controls the state.

As I repeatedly point out to the fans of nationalisation, it was a nationalised industry, the National Coal Board, that was responsible for the slagheap slip at Aberfan in 1966, when 144 people were killed, 116 of them children. It was that same National Coal Board that broke the back of the miners and, in effect, killed the coal industry in Britain in the 1984 strike. 

‘Nationalised’ is not synonymous with ‘at the service of the people’.

One of Luton’s most attractive places: Stopsley Common

There are, however, instances of common use, if not common ownership. The trouble is, like the duty room in the spy service building where Guillam was at work, because no one owns it, some may well abuse it.

Danielle joined volunteers cleaning Luton streets when we lived there. What’s more, one of the loveliest places nearby was Stopsley Common, its very name underlining that it’s a public asset. Sadly, though, some people felt that this tract of common land was an ideal place for dumping waste. It was repeatedly disfigured by piles of builders’ rubble. Someone had decided that, since it was cheaper to dump the waste on the Common than take it to a tip, and the land didn’t belong to them as individuals, they might just as well leave it there.

It’s an international problem, as we confirmed this weekend. Near us, here in Spain, La Vallesa woods are even more spectacularly beautiful than Stopsley, and just as much a public resource. We joined volunteers there this weekend to clear up junk. It included, once more, builders’ rubble. In some cases, the rubble was in sacks, which had been dragged quite a way from the road, as though the people who left it were prepared to make a special effort to make it more difficult to collect.

Why drag it into the woods?
By the road, it would have been easy for the Council to collect

The woods don’t belong to them. To use Le Carré’s language, they don’t give a hoot.

The encouraging factor, on the other hand, is that there are people who do give a hoot. There were several dozen people there helping to clear up. There’s not a huge amount one can do in a couple of hours, but it was nonetheless a pleasure to see so many show up.

Volunteers cleaning up the rubbish

They represent the spirit that can make common ownership viable. That’s the public at its best.

We just need to educate the waste-dumpers to see things the same way. They’re the public at its worst, least concerned with the wellbeing of all. Make no mistake about it: it’s the biggest blockage to a socialised approach to the public good, and the attitude is by no means limited to the most privileged in society. A mindset change is needed throughout society.

When we’ve surmounted that obstacle, one of the fundamental planks of socialist thinking will stop being just a pious wish and become a feasible objective. But don’t be fooled – it’s very different and far better than mere nationalisation.

The Torture Chamber that wasn't

What was that strange place, we wondered, each time we passed it in our walks through the local woods?

One of the gates. With a Levantina car parked inside it

A high wall surrounded the whole plot of land. It was pierced in two places by tall wrought-iron gates, decorated with representations of fruit or leaves, and in one case, topped by an impressive coat of arms. The iron was rusty, though, and the grounds were overgrown. There was just one building inside and, despite its fearsome defences, with close-mesh bars at all the windows, and the high mast of aerials and satellite dishes at the top, it looked distinctly uninhabited.

Inside one of the gates, adorned with a sign proclaiming that the place was protected by Levantina security company, stood several cars from that company.

My first thought was that it was the estate of some minor noble of earlier times, now abandoned and left to go to rack and ruin.

“Old nobility?” scoffed Danielle. “The gates are set in simple cement-block gateposts. Whoever spent a fortune on the gates spent nothing on the frame he mounted them in. And it certainly isn’t old.”

Danielle inspecting the estate through the main gate
Note the heraldic decorations. And the concrete gateposts
You can just see Toffee on her back legs, also looking inside
Meanwhile Luci’s wondering why they’re bothering

I had to admit she was right. There was nothing ancient, venerable or even aristocratic in the plain concrete pillars on either side of the gate. How could I have been so naïve? After all, even the one building we could see was just a concrete blockhouse. Too big to be a gatehouse, and not close to a gate anyway, it was far too small and unsightly to be some kind of baronial hall.

The blockhouse. Note the aerial and satellite dishes
And the wire

The most striking feature of the place was its security. The wall came with an iron-bar fence, and further in, there was the line of barbed wire. I’ve already said that the building looked like a blockhouse, dour, featureless, undecorated.

But there were no watch towers, no guards, no manicured parade ground. So not a prison camp or anything like that. Going past with a group of friends, we debated other possibilities.

Could it be a drug lord’s highly secure location for storing his product? It’s true that it looks too much the part, but might that not be brilliantly devious double-camouflage? Make it look too much like a drug lord’s hideaway, and no policeman would ever suspect that it could be one.

“Too obvious,” they’d all say, and go and look somewhere else.

That didn’t feel too plausible. I preferred the theory that it was a top-secret site operated by the Spanish intelligence service. Underneath that apparently uninhabited blockhouse, there were deep basements equipped with sophisticated torture devices where, even as we spoke, orange-suited prisoners suspected of criminal subversion were screaming out their confessions to crimes of which they were entirely innocent.

That seemed possible until we considered that any self-respecting Spanish spook would want to be based in Madrid. The woods of La Vallesa somewhere outside Valencia? Much too far from the metropolitan delights that make life bearable to the senior servants of the Spanish state.

The mystery all ended the day we turned up and found a Levantina car outside the gates, with its driver at the wheel. He was pleasant, polite and friendly.

“The place belonged to some guy who was crazy about security,” he explained, “and his son, who inherited it, can’t sell it. It suits us, though, as a place to keep our cars. So we rent it as a car park.”

A Levantina Seguridad car

A security guards’ car park? What a let-down.

No minor noble entertaining his superiors to lavish dinners in the hope of an appointment further up the aristocratic ladder.

No drug lord bawling out an indolent underling who has yet again failed to liquidate an upstart competitor on a Valencia street corner.

No sadistic inquisitor pointing out that the electric dial setting has to be kept below five if his powerless victim’s survival is to be guaranteed, and then cackling insanely as he turns it up to six.

Just a car park.

“The mystery’s gone,” Danielle pointed out to me as we walked past recently. She was right. It had. Fortunately, the beauty of the woods around are more than enough to compensate.

Otherwise, how would I cope with the loss of my fantasies?