Web Log Costa Blanca

When I wrote a whimsical piece on this topic on the 26th of August I had no idea that, in October, rains would bring devastation to the Costa Blanca—or the part of it where I live. Storms and floods destroyed cars, brought down a bridge, savaged buildings and wrecked entire beaches. The precipitation may have been as high as 400 litres per square metre, in 24 hours. The area was officially declared a disaster zone, the Vice-President came to see the damage, and for days the rains were the main item of news on Spanish TV.

A friend of mine had to swim out of the ground-floor of his apartment block into his garage, where he found his car submerged in water. It had been a new car; it was now a complete write-off.

For some really revealing photos, have a look at the webshots.com album put together by Chris Young (from which I have borrowed my tiny thumbnail).

And where was I while all this rain was falling? In Manchester. (Yes, the irony is a little oppressive.)

However, I did get the start of it. It had been bucketing down all night when I got up on Friday to go to the airport. Since I was staying for a while, I’d decided to go by coach, and had ordered a taxi. It never came. When I telephoned, the dispatcher said it was impossible for a taxi to get to my urbanisation, because of the water. (more…)

In 2001, when I first came to live in my present house in Calpe, the hill across the valley to the east was a sandy brown. A desert hill, which made you wonder what had ever been grown on its ancient stone terraces.

It seems there was very little rain in Calpe in the 1990s—and I know there was a drought all through Spain. I visited Madrid two or three times a year in that decade, and travelled around much of Spain. (Of course I spoke much better Spanish then, before I came to settle among expats.)

Torrential rains came in October 2001, and have been coming back—several times a year—ever since. I’ve heard that the Jet Stream is going to bring warmer weather in September and October, but it’s been raining through much of August this year. We blamed the drought on global warming; no doubt it’s responsible for all the extra rain too. Whatever the reason, the result has been to turn the Costa Blanca green.

Now there is a green hill, and it’s not far away (as in the hymn). It’s just across the valley from me.

Just yesterday, in a supermarket, I witnessed something I’ve seen dozens of times, but which never fails to astonish me.

A man, of about my own age, needed to pass through a queue. “Excuse me,” he said.

If I’d been in Basingstoke or Hull, nothing could have been more normal. But I wasn’t. I was here on the Costa Blanca. This was a Spanish supermarket, and the queue was made up of the usual motley group of Spaniards and expatriates. The man had absolutely no reason for supposing that any of them were English.

I’ve also heard expatriates—German and French as well as English—reply in their own language when the long-suffering girl on the till spoke to them in Spanish. I don’t know what makes these monolinguists tick. From the looks on their faces, it’s as though they can’t really believe that there really are foreign languages. Their own language is so natural to them, they can’t face the fact that it’s just one among many. Surely, their faces seem to say, everyone must understand the only language I speak.

I’m not talking about casual holiday-makers. I’m talking about the expatriate population.

Ah well, let’s end on a positive note. If you want to know the politest way to say “Excuse me” in Spanish, it’s “¿Con permiso?” It’s a question, and you say it the same way you’d say “May I?” in English. So you wait for an answer. A polite Spaniard will immediately say, “Si”, and move aside for you.

Of course, if you say it to another monolingual expat… Sigh.

The girls who make the cold calls are always certain there will be no problems. The engineers who turn up always say it’s impossible.

The Internet has redefined “the countryside”. It is no longer a place where farmers grow crops, or the unspeakable pretend to be hunting the uneatable.

In the early twenty-first century, wherever you live on the planet, you live in the countryside if you live too far from a relay station to get broadband.

I am alluding here to a famous remark made by the Duke of Wellington. He was born in Ireland, to English parents. He hated people calling him Irish. Sometimes they would say, “But you were born in Ireland.” He would reply, “If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?”

A couple of days ago I found myself on the main page of a famous search engine (not Google). It was all in Spanish. I know enough to recognise the word Preferencias, so I clicked on it, expecting it would allow me to switch to English. No such luck. I could set all sorts of preferences, but not change the language. My computer was in Spain (they could tell from its Internet Protocol address) so I must want to talk to it in Spanish.

I talk to Spaniards in Spanish, and I am very happy to do so. But my computer is not a person (or a horse). I prefer to talk to it in English.

Google of course allows you to switch to a fantastic array of languages. I haven’t looked recently, but it used to include Klingon. I always fancied surfing the Web in Klingon—but do I know enough Klingon to change Google back to English afterwards? That has always deterred me.

To come back to my serious point: it may be a kindness to offer languages based on the IP address of the given computer. It is also essential, in 2007, to offer alternatives.

No, there isn’t a typo in the title (this time). These are the very words which confront any visitor to the English homepage of the Barclays Bank website here in Spain. They are part of an animated ad for the bank’s deposit account.

Of course, as any English speaker will spot immediately, there’s a mistake. ‘Trouble’, at least in this context, is not a countable noun, like ‘eye’ or ‘mistake’. It’s what linguists call a “mass”, or uncountable noun. (Think of ‘love’, which is not countable, and ‘kisses’—which are.) You can’t have ‘a’ trouble focusing.

I mentioned a few days ago that there are close on a million native English-speakers here in Spain. So why didn’t the bank—or the copywriters—run the text past one of them? Any English-speaker would spot the mistake instantly, without any special linguistic knowledge. They would just know that it “wasn’t right.”

I’m sure this sort of thing happens all over the world, wherever a native institution displays something in what, for it, is a foreign language. But you wouldn’t expect it on the Web page of a major institution here in Spain, when you could wander out into the street and find someone who spoke the relevant language.

Extraño, ¿no?

A couple of months ago, I was chatting to a taxi driver when he told me that some recent ‘fares’—I think that’s what you call a taxi driver’s customers—had told him off for speaking Spanish, and for not knowing their language. (To keep the record straight, I should say that they weren’t English.) I would hate any reader of this blog to suppose that an attitude like this informed my earlier post on Internet Explorer, or Brenda’s comment on PayPal.

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I know, I know. The most predictable and boring thing you can do in a blog is to slag off Microsoft—and people often slag them off from a hidden envy. The company is so successful. Bill Gates is so rich.

However, the company can behave in a totally high-handed way. What has got my goat right now is what they’ve done to my copy of Internet Explorer 7.

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