La disculpa; Las fiestas

La disculpa

The Bunker, Castellón de la Plana, Valencia 25/03/14

Ideally I would have started writing this earlier on. It really would have made the whole thing simpler. I wouldn't now be faced with having to remember and synthesise everything that’s happened since I arrived into something that is hopefully interesting, at least partially readable and, failing both of those things, short. Also, being removed from the events themselves and not being spurred on by the fleeting energy of the moment only serves to heighten the feeling that there is no particular reason to write about them at all, being as they are just a bunch of stuff that happened to some people. Similarly, the cooling off effect of hindsight, combined with the slow burning of ever encroaching memory loss, makes the challenge of placing yourself back in those moments all the more acute, and raises the further question of whether to write about them as if at the time of their happening or at least shortly after – like a diary- or whether to recount them from a more removed standpoint, a little older and maybe even a little wiser – like a story. Which would you prefer to read? At this stage, probably neither.

But then again, six or so weeks after an event which I haven’t even mentioned yet (I moved to Spain), seems as good or at least as arbitrary a point as any at which to start keeping a record of it. Also I am on holiday at the moment and have a free morning. In addition, anyone who’s familiar with your average teacher training course will know that writing about –sorry, reflecting on- something largely insignificant that you vaguely remember from several months ago as if it is a) very significant indeed and b) much more recent that it is, might just be the difference between a ‘Good’ and a ‘Requires Sterilisation’. As for synthesising everything that has happened into something short, snappy and maybe even sexy, I'm quietly confident that this won’t be too much of a challenge. Once you get down to it, not a lot's happened. I reckon I've got about three posts max in me. I mean, I live in a car park.

Las fiestas

At the risk of confirming various stereotypes about the ‘mañana, mañana’ attitude of tax-dodging lay-about southern Europeans, the first post is about parties and drinking. I assure you it’s nothing but a happy coincidence.

I mentioned I was on holiday. Well, I am. It’s a local festival called la Magdalena, which celebrates the town’s founding in the 13^th century. At the time, the would-be inhabitants were living up in the hills outside the city, based around the Ermita de la Magdalena, which either gives its name to the hill it sits on or the other way round. The current church is a 15^th construction, so I assume there must have been something there before. Down in the plain below at that time was a Moorish settlement in what is now Castillo de Fadrell, a 12^th Century fort just outside the city. Round about 1250 Jaime I, King of Aragon amongst other things, either kicked or negotiated the Muslims out as part of his drive south and the establishment of the Kingdom of Valencia and gave the land to the people up on the hill.  A central part of the festival is a pilgrimage of sorts from the town up to the church, complete with a bamboo cane and what looks like a big bagel tied on with a green ribbon, for reasons I am somewhat unclear on. I assume it's just an olde-worlde snack. This is accompanied by the traditional Magdalena attire of a kind of of black painter’s smock and either a green or blue-checked neckerchief. I say pilgrimage ‘of sorts’ because on the Sunday morning when the procession takes place, most people seem to be either hung-over or still drunk from the marathon session the day before. In this sense the reverent, religious overtones of the word ‘pilgrimage’ may be little misleading. Make no mistake; Magdalena is a week-long piss-up. But at least it’s a piss-up with a history.

Perhaps the other highlight is the mascleta (daily at 14:00 apart from Sunday, because everyone is at church). As far as I know, this tradition doesn’t exist outside of the Valencian region. Mascleta are essentially fireworks, but much less colourful and about a thousand times as loud. In Castellon, the mascleta takes place by one of the town’s many roundabouts – this one adorned with giant multicoloured bamboo canes – and the finale, where the explosives are let off in breathtakingly rapid succession, creates a cloud of flashing smoke that looks like the inside of a hurricane along with a sound that genuinely makes your ribs rattle.

This is a tradition borrowed from Valencia itself, where mascletas, also at 14:00, punctuate every day of Las Fallas (Falles in Catalan/Valenciano), a festival that runs from 15^th – 19^th March, and is probably based on a medieval pagan festival to celebrate the start of spring (the spring equinox is 20^th March). Pagans being pagans, they like to mark the equinox by lighting fires. The story goes that the carpenters and artisans of Valencia would take this opportunity to throw out into the street and burn any unwanted work and wood from the winter. Sometimes people would make these into human form and dress them up in clothes. Occasionally they would make them look like members of the local community. With time, the piles of wood became ever more detailed and complex, and today the statues often satirise politicians, recount news events from the past year, and in many cases stand as tall as the surrounding buildings. In theory they are made of nothing but wood and paper but in reality owe much of their structural intricacy to polystyrene. These are the fallas/falles that give the festival its name. The people that build them are called falleras. Construction can take the whole year and the cost runs into the tens of thousands of Euros per sculpture. And then at around midnight on the 19^th they set them on fire. At some point during the history of the festival the Church intervened to make the last day of fallas coincide not with the spring equinox but the Saint Day of Joseph out of Joseph and Mary, adoptive father of Jesus and patron saint of carpenters. 19^th March is also Father’s Day and a public holiday in Spain.

None of that helps to explain the mascelta, but whatever its historical origins or significance, its main function in Castelló seems to be to announce the commencement of the day’s drinking.

I feel I should add a word on the drinking here, as I fear I risk painting the inhabitants of my current city as debauched borrachos to a man. First of all, it’s fiesta. It’s not like this most of the time. Secondly, Spanish drinking is not like British drinking. At home, the shortage of clement weather and large public spaces means that we are often obliged to squeeze our drinking into a few liver-pounding hours before the cold and the dark and the guilt of the whole thing make us return home at roughly 9:34pm, ideally bloodied or weeping. Here it’s different, at least at fiesta. You can pad around quite happily with a cold beer, go in and out of bars, have a little sit down for a while accompanied by some combination of pork and carbohydrate, get another beer and maybe a carajillo, chat, have a bit of a dance, stop for dinner at 2am and before you know it’s tomorrow and you don’t feel like going to work. True, it lacks the romantic self-annihilation of the British session, and there is nothing of the complex, coded intimacy of the pub, an institution which doesn't exist in the same way outside the British Isles, but it feels somehow more healthy, more open, more social. To be honest though, once you get down to it, it’s probably just sunnier.

It’s not just the open nature of the alcohol but also of the fireworks that characterise these festivals. Throughout both Magdalena and Fallas, loud sporadic bangs are heard in the streets, as people set off firecrackers and minor explosives in crowded public spaces. The main culprits of this seem to be small children and middle-aged men who really should know better. That said, coming from a family of pyromaniacs myself and having grown up with a Dad who not only goes back to lit fireworks but also attempts to make them work by sticking another firework in the side as a makeshift fuse, I feel quite at home amongst the mild chaos and risk of minor-limb loss that both Magdalena and Fallas engender. And like Dad says, when waxing lyrical about the halcyon days of a less litigious age, if you lose a finger it’s your own fault.

He’d also like the dancing.

Falla, Valencia

Falla de la Plaza del Ayuntamiento

 

Falla at Calle de  Cuba, Valencia

Lights at Calle de Cuba, Valencia

 

Falla before and after la cremà