I have heard horror stories of people sitting in official offices with someone keeping watch at the door while large brown envelopes of money were counted and exchanged, like some clandestine exchange of government secrets by two characters from a cheap spy thriller.  They don´t have unmarked drops in secluded woods  or write messages in invisible ink but it is pretty cloak and dagger and certainly not something to be discussed at a polite gathering.

Black money is not an invention of the Spanish and hard cash is common currency in countries which have experienced civil unrest or civil war in living memory.    People like to have a bit of cash on hand  “just in case”.   If you need to pack up and move in a hurry then cash is good.  You are not going to end up with your life savings stuck in a bank where you cannot access it, just as you need to leave the country.  Likewise, some cash can smooth your journey as you flee an area or country.  Crossing palms with silver could mean the difference between survival and death. When the crisis is over the desire to be in control of your money stays and people prefer to have a mattress full of bank notes than a cheque book or credit card.

A distrust of government and a dislike of banks also plays a part.  The Spanish do not like the thought that your money is somewhere that the government can keep their eyes on it or in the hands of some organisation who might do something silly with your hard earned shekels.  Perhaps we in the UK should have been more cautious about giving the banks free reign with our wealth!!
The downside to black money is that you can never use it legitimately.  You cannot buy investments with it as the government will wonder where you got this sudden wealth from and you cannot use it to pay the mortgage of domestic bills if times get tough.  I once asked a bank manager friend what you could do with this dodgy currency and he said buy a car, buy a boat or go a holiday.  Fine if you fancy any of those options but tough if you are suddenly made redundant and need to draw on your savings to get by.

The problem  with black money is being the last in the chain.  The practise is dying out and will one day gasp its final breath and then anyone who paid black money when buying property will be stuck with the big bill because they will have to declare the full value of the property on the paperwork and pay up accordingly, so think carefully before you get involved with the practise.  It is not legal and you may end up being the Patsy.

I had never really thought of people still becoming saints nowadays except for the odd Pope I suppose.  During lunch I mentioned my new learned knowledge to the bar owner.   “How many saints are there I asked” he said one for every day of the year and a few spares” but as he pointed out “we get two birthdays in Catholic countries because you have your own day of birth and then you have your saint´s day.  It´s a bit like your Queen Elizabeth, she has her real birthday then she has her offical one”.  It made sense.

I started to have a look at some of the saints and discovered that they don´t all have that slightly pained, dewy eyed look that we so often see in biblical paintings.  Some of them have an unenviable patronage burden to bear.   That jolly chubby man dressed in red who delivers your children´s presents every Christmas is modelled on a saint who is the patron saint of prostitutes – St Nickolas.  It brings that phrase from Goodfellas “she is not doing that with the mouth that kisses my children goodnight” into a whole new realm of what is acceptable.  Delivering presents to little children one minute and providing succour to hookers the next!   Or what about poor old  Saint Fiacre who is the patron saint of cab drivers and hemorrhoids – a strange combination, I grant you but maybe it is all that sitting down and driving about looking for fares that causes the problem.  Then there is St Clair of Assisi who got lumbered with the sainthood for televisions.  The fact she was born and indeed died  long before the thing had been invented seems to be unimportant and poor St Gertrude of Nivelles who is the patron saint of suriphobia or the fear of mice and is now depicted covered in the wriggling creatures.  Continuing  the animal theme there is St Hubert of Liege who is the patron saint of mad dogs and then there is Saint Monica the patron saint of Alcoholics.  The poor woman was married to a bad tempered pagan named Patricius and she prayed constantly for the conversion of her recalcitrant husband and two sons.  However, she had not been as pure as you might think, she was in fact a reformed alcoholic herself.

Well those are only a few of our saints but they are among the more interesting and some of the ones we can definitely relate to.   So next time you are in the Art Gallery looking a canvass depicting a pale faced saint gazing upwards towards  heaven with his hands clasped in prayer just think that it might be the haemorrhoids causing that look not divine worship.

he proceeded to dump her for Anne Boleyn the protestant harlot as she was branded,  much to the humiliation of Catherine´s parents the King and Queen of Spain. Suspect there was more than a little angst there.

Henry´s daughter Elizabeth I got on well with Philip II of Spain so much so that he had thought of marrying her although he had been married to her aunt Mary previously who rather inconveniently died aged 42.   However, it all turned to tears in July1588, when Philip sent a huge Spanish  Armada of 130 ships and 30,000 men to England to replace Elizabeth with a Catholic monarch but we all know how that seafaring foray ended.

By the early 1800´s we were getting on a bit better though and the British joined with the Spain to fight the French in the Peninsula Wars against our close neighbour the French a la Sean Bean in the TV series Sharpe.

The defining moment when the British fell in love with Spain came in the 1950´s when Pedro Zaragosa the then mayor of Benidorm had a excommunication process started against him.  Not because he was a bad catholic and did not go to mass but because he allowed the bikini to be worn on his beaches. So Pedro got on his scooter and went to Madrid, no mean feat, it is a long way on a 50cc moped.  He asked to speak to General Franco the Spanish dictator.  Probably only to see the madman who had ridden 9 hours on a moped from Benidorm, General Franco gave him an audience. Franco told him to go back to Benidorm and eight days later Franco´s wife and the Minister of Governance arrived in Benidorm, reconfirmed his appointment as mayor and gave him an insignia to wear on his jacket so he could enter Franco´s Madrid palace whenever he wanted. Mrs Franco stayed on in Benidorm for 4 or 5 days.  She liked the place a lot and used to visit and stay at Pedro´s house.  Carmen Franco became one of Benidorm´s leading patrons.  The town has changed greatly from those days as a fishing village. It now has the highest concentration of skyscrapers in the world outside Manhattan.

The British spread south to the Costa Blanca and established holiday resorts such as Torrevieja.  They swarmed further south to the Costa del Sol and established Marbella, Estepona and Malaga to name but a few of the well known Brit enclaves.

However, at the beginning of this decade people had a change of heart and decided that what they really wanted was “real Spain”.  Considering the amount of British who had come to Spain and built their version of England in the sun it is surprising there were any unspoilt areas left to call “real Spain” but it is a big country with a large landmass so thankfully some of it remained untouched by Burlington Bertie´s English Bar and the obligatory Fish and Chips.

The Brits started coming in smaller units.  Gone were the days when 52 seater coaches queued up at the airport like massive wagon trains waiting to pick up the incoming Brits and whisk them off to their hotels.  Now we had people arriving in two´s and four´s on budget airlines to airports who´s names they could not even pronounce like Jerez and Seville.  They were booking villas and apartments in places like Cadiz City, Chiclana de la Frontera and Vejer de la Frontera and hiring cars so they could explore the countryside and local beaches.  They wanted to eat Spanish food, some of them spoke some Spanish and they wanted to blend in.  The Spanish tourist industry had changed forever and the only little enclave which is still doing what it always did and is as popular as ever is …………………….. you´ve guessed it – Pedro Zaragosa´s Benidorm.

Many people ask me what the Spanish think of us and if they like us.  Well the answer is yes, they do like us.  I recently heard the chief of the Guardia Civil say that he liked the British because they keep themselves to themselves and didn´t cause any trouble. They come to Spain, they spend their money, they enjoy the sun and the lifestyle and they get back on the plane and they go home.

For the Spanish, money is not the only consideration.  They genuinely like the British, they find them friendly and relatively easy going but confusion sets in when people drink so much they cannot walk as the Spanish fail to understand why you would get so drunk that you are in your hotel bedroom by 11 o´clock. They also fail to see why you would lie in the sun until you are so burned you need to go to the local emergency centre for treatment but other than the odd little foibles, they do like us and they would miss us a lot if we suddenly decided to go elsewhere.

What happened to Pedro Zaragosa – well the archbishop got the message and dropped the excommunication proceeding against him, the bikinis stayed and Spain flourished into the modern holiday destination we now know.

I parked the car in the underground and when I emerged from that dark exhaust filled cavern what I saw was akin to a scene from Dante´s Inferno.  There were men with moustaches dressed as babies with full size nappies and large dummies, there were men dressed as women complete with high heels and stockings,

there were women dressed as various animals, a cat, a couple of pantomime cows with udders and to top the lot three elderly and I mean kicking 70 year old  ladies wearing full nuns outfits with a ciggy in one hand, a bottle of Mahou in the other and a set of rubber replica male genitalia firmly strapped to their foreheads over their veils.

Maybe  I looked a bit shocked or maybe they just could not be bothered to venture further for a victim but one of the nuns said “where do you come from love”. “Chiclana” I replied and at that she leapt into her role as  conductor.  The other two old nags straightened up and put down their Mahou´s and with a wave of the self appointed conductor´s hands all three burst into song.  Having just got over the outfits the song managed to send me back into shock.  It was a bawdy little number about a girl from Chiclana and what she did on the weekends.  Nothing to do with working in a shoe shop more about her nocturnal activities.  I have to say it was probably an accurate listing of all the things your average teenage female would like to do on the weekend but due to sturdy window locks and  alert parents they only tend to lie in their room and think about it.  I certainly never managed to escape the homely nest and get up to what this girl did until I was over 18.  Don´t ask me why but when they finished I felt obliged to point out that I was originally from Edimburgo (Edinburgh) and only lived in Chiclana.  The hands got waved again and off they went into another three choruses of the same song but this time replacing Chiclana with Edimburgo.  At the end, all three in one perfectly synchronised move raised their hands and wiggled their strap on genitalia at me while winking.  I remembered the old saying that sometimes a swift retreat is the better part of valour so I thanked them (which didn’t really seem appropriate) and left.

I sat myself in a small bar, rang hubby on the mobile and told him I would stay put until he came and rescued me as some James Bond baddie had obviously put something in the water supply in Cadiz that was affecting the natives in a pretty odd way.

The TV was on in the bar as they always are in Spain and they were screening Carnival from all over Spain, Cordoba, Murcia, Granada on and on it went.  There were more men in babies nappies singing ditties, I hasten to add they had been toned down considerably for general screening to the nation and there were some women dressed as nuns but minus the rubber extras.  I watched  for a while but my attention kept on wandering to the merriment outside.  It seemed that Carnival  was all of a bit samey but Cadiz appeared to be doing it much better than the rather tame efforts on the TV.  The odd groups who came in the door of the bar every few minutes, gave a quick rendition and exited to cheers and laughs all round were a cut above those on the box. The barman told me “they´ll be at it till 4 or 5 tomorrow morning you know”.  As it was late February and cold I can only imagine that the alcohol and the party atmosphere served to keep them warm.

Hubby duly appeared and rescued me.  We set off in the direction of the car park again.  Just as we got to the  three singing nuns one raised her Mahou to salute me and promptly fell over backwards into the municipal gardens landing in a large patch of Poinsettias.  The other two nuns, a couple of men dressed as women with large inflatable boobs and a priest wearing stocks climbed in after her and hauled her to her feet.  I have to take my hat off to her – when they got her upright again and got her habit back down round her ankles instead of over her head  where it had come to rest, she still had a ciggy in her mouth and a full bottle of Mahou in her right hand with not a drop spilled.  I couldn´t help it,  I told her she could be an honorary Scot with drinking etiquette like that.
If you are in Cadiz in February take your life in your hands and see some of the Carnival  – I guarantee you will never see anything like it in your life again.

was responsible for tapas but that was definitely menu del dia, not tapas.  The fact is – tapas exists in many countries and has been around since time immemorial.  It has different names but the concept is the same.  It is not a meal or first course to a meal.  It is a standalone snack to be eaten with a drink.

The Greeks serve meze.  In fact most of the middle east does.   The name itself originally came from the Persian for “relish or taste”.  It was never intended to be a small course of a meal.  It was designed to stand alone and enhance the flavour of the drink it is eaten with.  Whether that be ouzo, raki or wine they are all accompanied by vine leaf parcels of rice with a piquant tomato sauce, slightly salty taramousalata or garlicky tatziki.   A Greek waiter once informed me that the most popular meze amongst the local Greeks was tatziki and chips – well who wouldn’t if they could?

In Italia they call it antipasto “before the pasta”.   Again it is not meant to replace a starter but is rather a taster to get the taste buds dancing in readiness for the main acts to follow.  Scappi Bartolomeo the famous Renaissance chef who worked at the Vatican mentions it.  Likely he would have served some of the antipasto we see today such as roasted peppers, cured ham and  caponata (eggplant relish)  which all go well with grappa, Campari and wine.

India gets in on the “tapas” act with its famous street food or chaat.  Normally bought from stalls, this food consists of easy to eat bites which you can pick up and eat without the aid of cutlery.  Some of the best on offer are  samosas, pakoras and pooris.  Often served with a dollop of mint raita or tamarind chutney to cool the sometimes fiery content of meat, fish or vegetables.  Alcohol is not popular in India so you are normally offered a cup of tea or coffee with your chaat.

Izakaya,  the Japanese gathering places where your over worked Japanese banker goes for  a couple of sakes and a bite to eat on his way home to unwind before facing the wife and kids are not restaurants.  They are bars which serve small snacks, just like our tapas bars. The name itself is a combination of “i” for to sit and “sakaya” for sake shop.  They serve a selection of tofu with toppings, boiled and salted soyabean pods, chicken or meat skewers and of course raw fish slices plus some miso soup and  picked vegetables. The saki can be served warm from porcelain cups or chilled in summer from small square wooden boxes but remember your etiquette, never fill your own cup.

In Mexico Antojitos or “little whims” are served with Margaritas, beer and the nation´s best known tipple Tequila.  They offer mini versions of their most famous dishes such as burritos  and enchiladas, with chilli con queso and guacamole and sometimes black bean or tortilla soup.  In Mexican Antojitos you can see the blend of Spain with South America.  When  the Spanish set sail for new horizons and found South America they brought rice, garlic, onions and meat  with them and the locals already had an abundance of corn, chillies, tomatoes and fish.  Put the two together and you have some very tasty snack food indeed.

The Chinese offer dim sum or “heart´s delight” which originated in the teahouses.  Generally offered from carts wheeled around by the waiters with the steaming hot dim sum straight from the kitchen in little bamboo baskets, you point to what takes your fancy i.e. your heart´s delight.  We are all acquainted with the little pork and prawn dim sum offered in modern Chinese Restaurants and they are very typical of what has been served for centuries.  However, outside of China it is not often you see them accompanied by Chinese tea or wonton soup which would be the norm.

I rest my case – tapas exists the world over but you can´t beat settling in to the corner of an Andalucian  tapas bar with a fino or a glass of wine and a few of those little white plates.  I like the traditional tapas personally, tortilla filled with fluffy potato, prawns in garlic sauce, meatballs in tomato gravy and of course our finest jamon on a little plate with a bit of mature Manchego cheese and some local almonds.  So  probably  Spain cannot lay claim to having invented the concept  but we do it as well if not better than anyone else and for my money you cannot beat the tapas in Andalucia.  Well to be exact – The Costa de la Luz but then I would say that – I live here.