1970s Islington

1970s Islington

I lived in Islington in the late1970s, orbiting around the political-social planet whence Jeremy Corbyn came to conquer the known Labour Party universe. I am not aware of ever meeting Jez, but I am sure I was sometimes near.

El Greco an Ironist?

The Ironies of El Greco?

Was El Greco something of a ironist? His religious paintings are so perfect, so pious. The expressions of divine and saintly figures are unimprovable as depictions (if one must have them) of divinity and sainthood. And yet… does El Greco deliberately push it all a little too far? And do not some of his human figures, when they appear, subtly undermine the otherwise sublime message?

El Greco, famously, slighted Michelangelo as painter (but admired his sculptures). He offered to repaint the Sistine Chapel. Wryness or just arrogance, or perhaps both?

The Art of Politics and the Politics of Art in Madrid

The Art of Politics and the Politics of Art in Madrid

An intense guided art tour to Madrid, Segovia and Toledo ends fittingly with the contemplation of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia Museum. This painting is on one level rawly simple – basically a long scream far more visceral than, say, the existentialist and easily parodied howl of Munch. But the Guernica scream or, rather, screams are emitted by and among implacable and anguished images that draw on deliberately oblique and fragmented references to Spanish art and Spanish history through art.

A Late Tide but lots of Seals in Norfolk

Why hasn’t the Tide turned up for my Seal Trip?

“Time and tide wait for no-one” is a very old saying; so old that “tide” meant, well, “time” (as in "Yuletide”) when the saying was originally said. However, most would agree that the saying still works if “tide” means “tide”. The tide, surely, is as inexorable in its comings and goings as time itself. But that isn’t necessarily so.

Astonished by Goya; Creeped out by Goya

Astonished by Goya; Creeped out by Goya

The excellent catalogue that accompanies the excellent exhibition, Goya: the Portraits, at the National Gallery contains a passage that is key to understanding Goya’s power as a portraitist.

The catalogue refers to the series of etchings that Goya published at the end of the C18, Los Caprichos (not included in the Exhibition). In Goya’s own words (promoting the collection commercially): “He [Goya] has selected from among the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society … those subjects he feels to be most suitable materials for satire…”. One of the etchings shows a monkey painting the portrait of an ass.

I am not unwell; I am off to Hospital

I am not unwell; I am off to Hospital

I am spending increasing amounts of time having bits of me checked out. I don’t know whether it’s my age, or a policy adopted by my GP surgery, but I keep getting referred to specialists. This is not because of illness. They say that this or that should be “investigated”, just in case: cholesterol, moles, eye, blood pressure – that sort of thing. Specialists require other specialist input to do their work – scans, blood tests, dieticians.

Hepworth; Greenwich; English Touring Opera - an Autumn Miscellany

Hepworth; Greenwich; English Touring Opera – an Autumn Miscellany

Tate Britain – Barbara Hepworth

Tate Britain on a rainy Monday is not crowded, even when it is hosting a fairly prestigious exhibition of works by Barbara Hepworth. The clientele, if that’s an appropriate word, are pretty homogenous – or, to be precise, fall largely into one of two homogenous groups. One group comprises art students, A Level students I should guess at the time of my visit, equipped with sketchpads. They had a tendency to block access to one side of sculptural exhibits by standing immobile, absorbed in drawing.

Cambridge by Train and Bike

Cambridge by Train and Bicycle

If you take away the crowds, the railway station at Cambridge could be admired for the pleasing Victorian structure it is, low rise and far-flung (an extremely long “double” main platform where two trains can pull up nose to tail).

Alas, the crowds cannot be taken away, and, so it seems, forever congest the small ticket hall and jostle through the narrow doors to and from the platforms.

Asides from Glyndebourne #2

Asides from Glyndebourne #2

A second outing to Glyndebourne (see previous blog July 2015), this time by taxi from a Lewes B&B.

Alas, no warm sunny weather this time _ rather, intermittent fine drizzle floated in from the Downs. So, the lawns were largely empty, apart from some hardy hold-outs, among whom we were numbered. A picnic blanket with a reasonably waterproof backing and a golf umbrella balance on a low stone wall provided a dryish encampment, supplemented by cagoules. Good subject-matter for a Bateman cartoon.

Preservation of a massacre: Oradour-sur-Glane

Preservation of a Massacre: Oradour-sur-Glane, France

I spent much of my childhood visiting the sites of battle. This wasn’t because of any unhealthy obsession on my part (though obsessions can doubtless be inculcated) but because my father was a career army officer, and my mother’s father also. They had both served in the Second World War, which in the 50s and 60s was very close in recent history (although to the mind of a child growing up in peaceful England, or even in army quarters in relatively peaceful Germany, it was an incomprehensible distance away).

VENICE MISCELLANY

VENICE MISCELLANY

The Selfies of Venice

If it is true that to photograph someone is to capture a bit of their soul (as some societies have believed), then Venice metaphorically has had its soul sucked out many, many times over. But these days, it is tourists’ souls which mass in forlorn invisible pieces in the City’s main thoroughfares and sites.

An Evening at the Athenaeum

AN EVENING AT THE ATHENAEUM

“Who’s Who” is a strange institution, simultaneously seeking to buttress the fiction of the traditional British establishment and to acknowledge successes in avant-garde and popular culture.

The format of the entries includes “recreation(s)”, traditionally expected to be shooting, fishing, golfing, sailing, rugby, cricket and so forth. One of the avant-garde entries, Charles Marowitz, a theatre director of the 60s and 70s (recently deceased) listed his sole recreation as “balling” – by which he didn’t mean croquet or billiards or, indeed, dancing. “Who’s Who” stoically allowed the somewhat tasteless subversion. (Although it could also be the case that the sub-editors didn’t know that “balling” was a hippy slang word for having sex.)

Moral Personality of Corporations

MORALITY PERSONALITY OF CORPORATIONS

(This post summarises one way of understanding how a kind of moral personality comes to be attributed to corporations. There are of course many other aspects of corporate or business ethics more generally.)

You are a company-formation agent. You fill out some paper or online forms; you and your assistant agree to subscribe £1 of share capital each; you choose a name (eg “2015/xx ltd); you adopt some generalised off the peg constitution; you pay a fee and file at the appropriate companies registry.

Congratulations. You have created life – well, not exactly: you have created a new “person” so far as the law is concerned. Never mind that your new company is now filed in your computer or cabinet and lies dormant in its slim line of code or slim folder of papers. It is a legal person.

Morality in the conduct of war

Morality and the Conduct of War

The early Christian Church had no state and no armies and no tradition of militancy – quite the opposite. Like its founder (in most of his words and deeds) it was largely pacifist in its attitude to conflict. That all had to change when Christianity, courtesy of the Emperor Constantine, became the state religion of a decidedly militaristic state – Rome. Military victories were attributed to divine assistance, with the clear implication that war and Christianity were perfectly compatible.

Asides from Glyndebourne

Asides from Glyndebourne

The first thing one notices on arriving at Glyndebourne is the beauty of the place, a series of wonderful large flower and tree gardens and vast lawns, all set in the South Downs. Beyond the gardens are fields and lovely hills. Perfect on a sunny, but not sweltering, summer’s afternoon. (A slight reservation must be registered over the large wind turbine at the back of the house and the big water tank-like structure on the roof where house joins concert hall – presumably containing the stage machinery.)

North Norfolk Miracles

NORTH NORFOLK MIRACLES

The great philosopher David Hume wrote this of miracles in general: “that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish”.

What would Hume have made of  Walsingham (during his lifetime its shrine and pilgrimages were in their long period of post-Reformation slumber)?

Bernard Williams

Hesitant Thoughts about Bernard Williams

I have never quite “got” the philosopher Bernard Williams. His range of erudition was vast; his writing style often dense or elliptic, reading like the extension of seminar or common room discussions at which one had not been present; and his programme in ethical philosophy hard to pin down (which was precisely the point).

Williams was a realist, in sense of taking persons as one finds them, and recognising that there are many ways of living lives. He considered that “ethics” consists more in learning and reasoning about the values of one’s particular culture and less in discovering some universal theory of life and seeking to apply it; still less in discovering a system of moral “oughts” which become binding rules for living.

Argos-nauting

Argos-nauting in Holloway

If you are not a regular (once every few years), a visit to Argos is disconcerting. Argos’s premises make no concession to presentation. They are basically sheds, divided into two areas. At the back they are warehouses where the goods are stored. At the front, they have the feel of of a shabby airport passport area. Concrete floors; queues which perplex (which one to join?); friendly but firm employees ministering to your uncertainties and finally letting you go.

Better Together in Aberfeldy- A Memoir of the '14

Better Together in Aberfeldy

Once a year, in May, a distinguished professor of political theory invites a group of friends (and some friends of those friends), mostly 60 –plus in age, to 2 days’ canoeing down a river. After 3 years of the Wye and the Severn, in 2014 the group gathered by the Tay in Scotland.

Apart from one airport-to-convention hotel-back- to- airport trip, I had not been to Scotland since I was 10 or 11 years old, taken by grandparents to Edinburgh on the sleeper. (I vaguely remember a coach trip to Loch Lomond and being fascinated by the sight of a man in a kilt, not because of the kilt but because of the dirk in his stocking.)

The base for this Third Age in a Boat adventure was Aberfeldy. As well as its charms of a Highland nature (here of the geographically lowish sort), it is notable for its association with two influential English exports- the C18 General Wade and the C21 JK Rowling, whose country residence is hard by; one major denizen of the Scottish pantheon, Robert Burns, who wrote a poem above the town (the Birks of Aberfeldy, celebrating the impressive gorge and waterfall of the tributary Moness river); and one Anglo-Scottish hybrid, the Black Watch.

Baggini on Free Will

“I am determined to make my own choices”

Baggini on Free Will

In his book, optimistically entitled “Freedom Regained – the Possibilty of Free Will”, Baggini seeks to update a compatibilist version of free will (compatibilism being the, or a, school of thought which holds that human free will is “compatible” with a deterministic model of the universe; which entails that the universe is, without exception, governed by physical laws such that all that happens, or has happened, happens inevitably from a set of initial conditions, including what all that happens inside us. Incompatilists argue the opposite, either in despair of free will or because they hold to some variety of indeterminism, whereby the physical laws don’t necessarily apply to all or an important element of human action).

Regent's Park on Friday Afternoons

REGENT’S PARK ON FRIDAY AFTERNOONS

Regent’s park draws many people for many purposes. It is contained within a circle of dominating, mainly residential, Georgian buildings, sinister in their vastness, elegance and general plutocratic blankness. It contains, since 1955, the US ambassador’s stately residence, set in 12 acres of grounds behind high gates, which are patrolled by police armed with sub-machine guns (but usually police of a bobby-like cheerful demeanour at odds with their weaponry). Of course, it also contains the famous Zoo, of which the passing public may see, gratis, the giraffes. Once, you could stroll past the wolves’ enclosure, separated from a nightmare pursuit only be a wire fence. No more; the pack was packed off up the M1 to the Zoo’s country residence at Whipsnade.

Nerja and Frigiliana - Moors, Civil War and the Costa (April 2015)

 NERJA AND FRIGLIANA – MOORS, CIVIL WAR AND THE  “COSTA”

When someone offers the opinion that a particular Spanish town on the South coast (Costa del Sol) is “unspoilt”, there must always be implied the qualification “relatively”. The next question is, “relative to what?”. Large swathes of that coastline are hideous.

FRIGILIANA AND THE THREE CULTURES

FRIGILIANA AND THE “ THREE CULTURES”

Below the bus stand in Frigiliana, in the road beside the very convenient public conveniences, is a mini roundabout consisting of a small decorated edifice. The decorations are reliefs of the Cross, Crescent and Star of the three Abrahamic religions. The motifs are a symbol of Frigiliana’s claim to celebrate the “Three Cultlures” of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The village’s main festival in high summer is called the Festival of Three Cultures. It was instituted in the remote past (2006) and appears to consist of a three day-and-night long street party, with lots of “3C” food and drink and lots of entertainers dressing up in 3C costumes.

One may well be puzzled by this imagery. What has Frigiliana got to do with Islam, Judaism and Christianity, all in tandem? The answer, I think, is “very little”, although the village is indeed the site of one of the battles between Islamic and Christian foes, of which more below.

RIO CHILLAR

RIO CHILLAR -  NERJA to FRIGILIANA

The course of the Rio Chillar (“course” being a neutral term which does not necessarily imply the presence of water) marks a definite boundary as it passes Nerja. At the sea or southern end, it hems in the urban development of Nerja itself; and is cossetted in an artificial channel with walkways on either side. Further north, the Chillar gets more practical – on the town or eastern side there is a dusty carpark and builders’ merchants, along a pitted unmade road. On the western side, accessed by various  fords and rickety footbridges, are semi-rural arable plots and cottages.

A little further up, there is the overwhelming and ugly high concrete viaduct of the coastal motorway, under which one does not linger (not least because of worries about the quality of the concrete).

Above the motorway, the Chillar soon has a junction with its tributary, the Rio Higueron.  This river (often dry) comes down the gorge which borders the eastern flank of Frigiliana. If you turn up it, you pass more agricultural plots and eventually  reach a track. This goes up to the hamlet of La Molinetta, an old mill complex which stands on the Nerja-Frigiliana road where it takes its last steep bend before reaching Frigiliana.

If you suffer from vertigo you should leave the river valley here. There is a shortcut footpath from La Molinetta to the outskirts of Frigiliana which avoids most of the road.

Otherwise, pressing on along the Higueron means passing through one of the river’s  cahores, or canyons, which create (when there is plentiful water) a fast and challengingly deeper flow. An artificial path consisting of steep sideless stairs and canyon-wall ledges has been made to help walkers to negotiate this obstacle. It is somewhat vertigo-inducing, especially the stairs, which many prefer to descend on their bottoms (if coming down from Frigiliana). If you so suffer, but your luck is in, perhaps you will find no water, and can find a way to scramble down the large boulders, if descending. If you you are going up, I think the stairs need to be taken; but the ascending vertigo is far less!

If you ignore the Higueron junction and continue to proceed north east up the Chillar, you soon come to a place where a road descends to the river by a small modern industrial building, next to which is a carpark. Beyond this point the Pinto hill rears up. It is the beginning of the sierra heights, and is the feature which divides the two rivers. You are now at the mouth of the steep Chillar valley. However, it is at this point very wide; made wider because the side of the Pinto has ben gouged by large-scale quarrying. The river here, in the absence of heavy rain or melting snow, is a collection of effortful trickles.

The real beauty  of the Chillar lies just ahead, where the valley narrows to create gorges which must be waded through. Also, high on the eastern side, an acqueia (stone-made water channel) snakes along the valley/gorge. This you can allegedly walk along (but not I…).

[Work/walk in progress]

April 2015

NERJA FEBRUARY 1937

NERJA: FEBRUARY 1937

On 9^th February 1937, Italian troops, leading the Nationalist forces approaching from Malaga, entered Nerja, their motorcycle outriders roaring down the Calle Pintada. Thus ended the local manifestation of the Republic, for Nerja had been a Republican-held town until that day.

It seems that Nerja was one of countless towns and villages across Spain where similar events unfolded from the outset of the Nationalist uprising in July 1936. There was a leftwing backlash against people perceived to be Nationalists or their sympathisers-  especially clerics, landowners and professionals. In Nerja, a truck-load of anarchist militiamen from Malaga came over to help matters along – several alleged right-wingers, including the local priest (whose church had been ransacked), were taken to the Rio Seco to the west of Playazo beach, and shot.

The communist mayor of Nerja, elected in August 1936, tried to calm these inflamed and murderous tendencies. But sporadic assassinations continued.

When Malaga fell in early February (the subject of an earlier post on this site), the retreating Republican troops temporarily established their headquarters in Nerja (for a matter of days). This brought air attacks – machine guns and bombs, including at the junction of Calles Pintada and Carabeo.

Republican forces and much of local population, turned refugees, were soon in full flight along the coast road (N 340) towards Almeria. This exodus, which started from Malaga and gathered people as it went, is notorious for the pitiless and indiscriminate bombing, machine-gunning and naval shelling of the wretched columns.

One objective of the Nationalists was the destruction of bridges along the road, to slow the Republican retreat. One such bridge was (and still is) the one in the barranco gorge between Nerja and Maro, a couple of kilometers or so to the east. The task of destroying it was given to Nationalist naval forces. They couldn’t see the bridge, as it is built well down below the lip of the gorge. What they could see was the high, proud and elaborate profile of the Aquila Aqueduct further up the gorge. This C19 construction, built in classical style (and still aqueducting today) the Nationalist warships mistook for the road bridge, and their shells were aimed accordingly. Thus the fleeing Republicans and refugees were granted precious time to cross the actual bridge. (The nationalists realised their mistake at last when water was observed to be pouring out of the damaged aqueduct.)

Taken by the Nationalist, Nerja endured the usual bloody purges of leftists and liberals. The cinema was the place for summary trials; the cemetery the place for summary and quasi-judicial executions.

The aforementioned communist mayor of Nerja somehow escaped death. Two lengthy spells of imprisonment sandwiched time spent as a guerrilla in the Sierra. He outlived Franco.

This narrative is taken from a Spanish book, “100 Anos  de Nerja en Fotos”  by a local historian, Pablo Rojo Platero. What he writes rings true and is consistent with the overall history of the Civil War in the Malaga area.

The fact that Nerja was in Republican control until February 1937 unfortunately casts doubt Laurie Lee’s account of the War as witnessed by him in Almunecar, just up the coast to the east of Nerja ( the final pages of“As I walked Out One Midsummer’s Morning”). There can have been no clashes with “Nationalist militias” occupying Nerja in the autumn of 1936. There can have been no mistaken bombardment of Almunecar by Republican warships trying to strike Nerja.

April 2015

WALKING BEHIND NERJA

THE NATIONAL PARK BEHIND NERJA

I have (at the time of writing this in the early days of April 2015) been on only relatively short excursions into the vast National Park (strictly speaking Parque Natural), which includes the Sierras of Tejeda and Almijara.

 I have written about walking from Frigiliana in past posts. One thing I noted was that Frigiliana sits on the border of the Park – so that the unprotected countryside to the south and west is scattered with modern settlements, built here and there with not detectable planning influence; and Frigiliana itself displays its own “Costa” swathe of dense apartment bulidings on the edge of the Higueron gorge, where the Park starts. To the north and east, however, there is no new building and the prospect is mountainous, green and wild.

The demarcation between Costa and Park is also very pronounced inland from Maro, an eastern satellite village of Nerja nestling, if that is the right word, between the coastal cliffs and the motorway.

From Maro, via a grim tunnel under the motorway, you rapidly leave a few small farm buildings behind and ascend into the Park up a barranco – a dry river bed. This is a stony, vegetation-shrouded ascent, which gets steeper and steeper as the Sierra foothills are reached. On a ridge some 600 meters up, next to a rural ruin, you look back towards the coast over green and rocky slopes and cliffs. The dense white buildings of Nerja are in view, along  with the smaller urban patch of Maro.

The urbanisation (or, literally, the “urbanizaciones” , the villa suburbs) are halted and hemmed in by the Park. From the your perspective on the ridge, you can imagine a giant knife slicing off the riband of coastal development, leaving nothing but wild green hills falling away to the sea. This is, no doubt, much how the landscape appeared until recent years.

Turning away from the Costa and daydreams of geo-engineering, the view is one of mountains. A series of ranges march northward with increasing heights. Between are steep valleys, some glacial and dry, others containing rivers.

From the particular ridge above Maro just described, there is a lumpy path down to one of glacial valleys, where the wildness is somewhat abated by a wide track, inviting to cars, which leads up to a well-appointed picnic area. Downhill, it is an easy stroll of a few kilometers to the Caves of Nerja and the bus stop. This is probably the direction you’ll turn if you have just come the way I have described, completing a circuit of just under four hours.

Uphill, a short distance past the picnic area, the car-friendly track ends at a ridge, from which the view is a spectacular mix of green valleys and ridges in the foreground and grim-ish bare peaks further back.

The immediate valley is the deep cut of the Rio Chillar, which eventually finds it way to the sea at Nerja, not always accompanied by any water at that end. Beyond are a couple of steep ridges and then, at this point out of sight, the not quite so deep but seemingly more sheer and rocky gorge of the Rio Higueron, above which stands Frigiliana.

The walk across to Frigiliana ( or vice versa) follows the long distance Gran Senda de Malaga ( which be rendered as the “Great Malaga Trail”)- basically, for this section, an old mule track. It has recently been thoroughly way-marked with new red and white wooden signs and the occasional painted mark. So it is perfectly possible to walk it unguided, if suitably equipped for the weather conditions and the often steep and stony path (walkers do get lost in the hills, sometimes with tragic results; there is a risk in some places of taking a path which proves not to be a path or of just getting disorientated among the numerous ridges and ravines). If starting or ending at the Caves, the Frigiliana walk will take most people at least six hours, allowing for rest and meal stops.

But if you are only an occasional walker of rough hill country tracks, you might feel more relaxed about your first traverse if you join a guided group. A calming guide with a steadying hand is especially helpful when crossing the Rio Chillar. Where the path comes down and, on the other side, goes up, the river, although not wide, is rocky and drops over several short, sharp levels. Crossing with dry feet is a precarious affair of hopping from boulder to boulder, with immersion certain to befall any walker who loses his or her footing (give the guide your phone before hopping off).

For myself, I think that on future walks I’ll wade and eat lunch while drying off on the other side.

Between the Rios Chillar and Higueron, the path goes over a couple of ridges and around the heads of valleys below various of the lower summits of the Almijara. The slopes are covered in scratchy scrubland plants, which provide no shade but would, at the expense of laceration, prevent much of a fall if you were to slip off the path (a possibility, in places, for the clumsy walker).

Either end of the walk between Frigiliana and the Caves is fairly easy. Towards the Caves, there is the vehicle track mentioned, or you can descend into the parallel barranco for much of the way for a pleasant walk along its narrow and impressive canyon. On the approach to Frigiliana, the wonderful gorge of the Higueron is always uplifting. Most of the time its bed is basically a wide and dry stony track. But after heavy rain you are reminded that it is, indeed, a Rio. A broad shallow stream takes over, necessitating that you end your walk with a lot of hopping from side to side (but not of the immersion-threatening kind).

April 2015

Would I want to reside on the costa del Sol?

WOULD I WANT TO BE A RESIDENT OF THE COSTA DEL SOL?

Where does one find large populations of migrants, often the majority community in places, which integrate with the indigenous people little if not at all, speaking their own language and hardly attempting to learn the local language?

A clue: the most popular paper among these swamping migrants is the Daily Mail. They no doubt tut-tut over stories of “unintegrated “ communities of immigrants in the UK (the development may even be given as a reason why they left). But most of the British living in Spain, especially on the Costas, are a mirror (no pun) image of the Daily Mail monstering stories: lots and lots of them, keeping to themselves and not supporting Spain in football or anything else.

There is one key feature about this unintegrated migration which is absent in other countries, including the UK. The economies of most of the Costa are, in the most literal sense, built round it. The grim urbanaciones have been thrown up to house the foreigners and vast numbers of locals are employed in the business of servicing their pleasures and needs. (There is the faintest of analogies with London, with much of luxury and not so luxury new residences being built with a view to being sold to overseas buyers; but the analogy breaks down in terms of the numbers who actually come and live in those properties.)

Therefore at one level there has been a mutually beneficial symbiosis between migrant and native. By and large, the migrants either don’t work, and direct their UK pensions into the local economy, or they work in the service and building industries, where has been more than enough opportunities in the wake of the foreign influx – until the economic crisis, that is.

Where migration cause no great economic stress, and there are no huge cultural or religious differences (leaving aside the youth “culture” on display in certain resorts, which is not generally that of the wider migrant communities), then populations seem to rub along beside, but apart from, one another. It is possible to live in Spain without ever learning a word of Spanish, because your neighbours are all British, you drink in British bars and, when you go to Spanish restaurant, it is one where the menu is bi- or tri- lingual and the waiters understand an order given in English. Shopping at a supermarket can be done wordlessly.

And yet, there are strains. Spain’s economy has been very hard hit. Unemployment, especially in Andalucía is high; and the cornucopia of service jobs is perhaps not cornucopia enough. Spanish jobseekers may come to point a UKIP-ish finger at working migrants.

Also, the Spanish public services infrastructure, including but not limited to health services, is greatly stretched by the migrant populations. Under EU rules, the UK gives Spain a capitation payment for each UK citizen resident in Spain. Those payments depend on the UK citizens registering their residence. This a lot of them don’t do, out of ignorance, laziness or for shadier reasons (tax avoidance, crime, evading creditors?). There is therefore a large official underestimate of the numbers of migrants, but very real and increasing demand on the Spanish state by the actual numbers.

The lack of Spanish language skills among many of the British migrants has a serious consequence. As the British population ages, in most cases having arrived not in the first flush of youth or even middle age, the need for social and health services proportionately rises. Spanish healthcare professionals cannot operate like waiters, with a functional repertoire of tourist English. Both parties must well understand each other. When this is often not possible, the Costa healthcare services have translators sitting in on consultations between professional and patient. In the case of complicated or serious conditions, or hospital admissions, this is a necessity which is potentially very inconvenient and distressing.

I would consider living (part-time at least) on or near the Costa only if I could achieve a level of proficiency in Spanish which would allow me live outside, or leave at will, the Costa British bubble. I would vow to sustain an interest in Spanish history and culture and, indeed, politics: about all of which many migrants and their local English language news sources are largely indifferent, except where politics concerns local developments which may directly improve or diminish the amenities they enjoy.

How to live in Spain and avoid being enticed into the bubble? A starting point would be to find a town or village where the Daily Mail is not offered for sale -  which will undoubtedly not be a place on the Costa itself.

March 2015