Spanish Practices - Real Life in Spain
Society & Culture:Documentary
Today Monkees and Post
Day Forty of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.
To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day 40 Monkees and Post
It is day 40 of our Spanish Lockdown and if I was Noah in the Bible the floods would have gone, and I would be getting off my Ark by now.
Today thin beardy boy, from the local courier delivered our spare microphone, as the other two have succumbed to the heat and humidity. At first, he gave me a large box full of wine, but that was for the house down the road, then he gave me the plastic package the microphone had arrived in.
I undid the plastic, threw it away and washed my hands. The box the microphone was damaged at the side, if only the company I bought it from had packed it a bit better. You suddenly get that sinking feeling that things are going to get complicated. But plugging the thing in, it seems to work ok.
I have a love hate relationship with microphones, it took me a long time to get used to using one. I was working in a well-paid but noisy and dull factory job when I jumped ship and joined the new radio commercial radio station Essex Radio.
A few months earlier I had been given an opportunity to start working there on a Saturday Sports Show, for my travelling expenses and usually one of the presenters would all take us for pizza after the show.
I can remember being so nervous that first Saturday morning that I threw up in the local park on the way to the railway station. I had to travel to Southend where the radio station was and that involved a tortuous journey halfway across Essex then back again toward the coast, stopping off at the delightful railway station that was Shenfield.
Of course, none of the trains coincided with each other and you would spend sometimes almost an hour in a freezing cold waiting room waiting for a connection.
So what had started as a Saturday job turned into full time freelance work, I was paid the paltry sum of £2 an hour but they told me they would also pay me net and pay my National Insurance, one of those was true. Years later I discovered my National Insurance wasn’t paid, so I lost a year in accrued state pension.. thanks Essex Radio.
But wow what a job, there were popstars popping in like lovely Alyson Moyet who was just a kid then, with a face full of acne, or Davy Jones from the Monkees, .. what a complete fruit cake he was, he sort of clung to the walls when I took him down to the studio.
I remember there was a large pile of Essex Radio stickers on a window ledge.. “Oh man can I have some of these?” I said “Yes help yourself.” ..he took the lot, I have no idea what he planned to do with fifty Essex Radio car stickers, but he filled both pockets full. Then carried on clinging to the walls till we got into the studio.
One of the things the Radio Authority, called the IBA then made Essex Radio do, was a lot of local speech, this included a local farmer with whistling teeth who came in to record a local history spot called Essex tales. There were two very nice ladies from the local library, one with a guitar who came in to record a children’s spot.
Nobody wanted the onerous task of recording all these worthy features, so it fell to me to make sure they were recorded and made ready for air each day, the rest of the time I engineered live shows with the presenter sitting opposite me just playing records and the odd jingle.
It was a great time.
Day 40 and I long for freedom, I read today thanks to a Facebook friend, that the Spanish Post Office has completely fallen over and there are thousands of pieces of undelivered mail. What was most surprising was that the Post Office is run not by a business Director but by a former Union Official turned Politician.
I just assumed like the UK, the Post Office was run as a public company. In recent years there has been an explosion of parcel and mail carriers here and with the advent of email, I think it is only the Spanish love of pieces of paper that have kept Correos going.
Our local post office is a tiny little place, inside it looks very much like the Blue Peter Appeal office, - awash with parcels, marked urgent and Amazon Prime on. They have even started using some of the offices as an overspill.
Usually there are two members of staff peering into computer screens, slowly processing whatever the customer has asked for. Nothing in the Spanish post office is in any way efficient. It always involves all that peering and then reams of paper being printed off, followed by a lot of stamping of paper. My favourite lady in there is a tiny shrew of a woman who smells strongly of tobacco that brings down her precious post office stamp with such ferocity it sounds like a K.O. punch from Muhammed Ali.
The man sitting next to her, again when you get to know him, he is a polite enough person, but he wears a constant pained expression, usually he will almost get to the end of his painful slow tapping at the computer when he will let out a great sigh, throw his hands in the air, and you know you are in for an even longer wait.
Finally there is a feisty lady who is our delivery person. She drives into our estate entrance with speedy determination, jumping from the little yellow van, already wielding the keys to the post boxes at the bottom of the mountain, looking once at her sorting the mail into the little boxes we all have, it was like a scene out of that old Post Office film from the 1930s when they are sorting mail on the Mail Train.
I’m not sure that it has changed that much from when the Spanish Post Office started in 1716, maybe that is the problem?
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