Country Life

 

In Spain, we all live in the city. The laws are written for and by the city-folk. The services and the offices and the bureaucrats are all in the city.

Dash it, it’s just so convenient to live there.

Those of us who live in the country are looked after by those who are wiser and better than we – those who, by definition, live in the city.

Here in the country, there’s no bus stop or taxi rank outside our homes, and we may not have fast Internet or a bank within walking distance, but we manage. Our concerns are to do with not paying too much tax, making sure all our sheep are registered and chipped, and hoping that the kids, when they grow up, will take over the business, such as it is, rather than move to the city where all the fun can be found.

For the city-folk, the countryside is an amusement park, where nothing bad must ever happen. That’s why they’ve now banned the hunting of wolves. That’s why the story of a pack of wild dogs killing 220 sheep has shocked the nation. 

We are fondly watched over both by the ecologists (most of whom live on the seventh floor of an apartment block and have never in their lives stayed up late to help an animal give birth) and by the tax-men, who are convinced we are either overcharging the city-folk, or employing ‘illegals’ and pocketing the difference (there may be some truth in this).

While selling tomatoes to the supermarket chain for eighteen cents a kilo.

We are visited, just around election time, by indulgent politicians, who otherwise have forgotten or ignored us.

They often arrive on a tractor wearing a waterproof jacket and rubber boots. The swarm of photographers usually gives them away.  But, we know that when they talk about public services, it’s more metro lines or bike-lanes they mean, not fixing the potholes or bringing fibre-optic or reopening the local school. We need local trains, because what use is a high-speed train when it doesn’t stop in the nearby market town (making it, needless to say, a low-speed train)?

 For politicians, ‘Building houses’ means building apartment blocks, not eradicating the shacks where the immigrants live in favour of proper housing. In short, they want to protect ‘the countryside’ without knowing much about it. The wolves and the pheasants are more important to them than we are (once the voting booths are closed).

No wonder Vox, which is very much a huntin’, fishin’ and bullfightin’ party (albeit, a racist one), is doing well in the campo.

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Some ideas are suggested by an article called ‘En el campo no se puede votar a Podemos’ here.