Free-D

Poor old Silvia Clemente, it seems to be out of the frying pan and into the fire. After being at the centre of several stormy teacups concerning the archives (yawn) and more recently, the International Arts Festival, she now finds herself dealing with a plague of field voles. I feel kind of well informed on this subject because when I was thirteen I did a project on water voles and was highly recommended for my efforts. Of course, the field vole is rather different. Now there are two types of voles, the common vole (paradoxically not found in Britain) and the field vole.

Grassy habitats

They live in mainly open, grassy habitats with dense ground cover. It particularly likes overgrown fields with damp tussocky grass… and of course therein lies part of the problem, the wet weather means that they’ve bred like…er…rabbits. They forge overground runways with groups of females making nests and the males tending to play the field (literally) mating with several female groups. In fact they’re pretty efficient mating machines: they are up for it throughout the spring and summer, with four to six young born at a time, weaned up to sixteen days and ready to procreate themselves at just six weeks! It’s little wonder then that plagues occasionally occur. Fortunately once they have a population explosion they become extremely aggressive (with each other) and breed less successfully. I have a suspicion – and this could get me into trouble – that the plague that’s hit the headlines in recent weeks has done less to endanger either crops or our health than to fill the pages of the local press and give the farmers yet another thing to gripe about. The fact is that they are not normally pests and the claim that they carry with them tulremia is vastly exagerrated. Tularemia - also known as rabbit fever - comes from one of the most infectious known bacteria. Before antibiotics, the disease had a relatively high fatality rate. I was severely admonished for making suggestions to terrorists in a previous article, so I hesitate to say it, but the bacteria is also recognised as a potential bioweapon of choice for terrorists because of its infectious qualities and the fact that it has low lethality (therefore not endangering the lives of its users).

I don’t know what it is about the rodent that engenders such fear and loathing in people – perhaps the bubonic plague had a long-lasting effect on our collective consciousness. Recently the photos of thousands of drowned voles in irrigation canals has brought that latent fear to the surface. There is talk of hundreds of thousands of acres at risk and, more terrifying still, of the flies and ticks that will emerge from the rodents’ rotting corpses.

   Compensations

Farmers are demanding compensation and permission to use anticoagulants, clorophacinone and bromodiolone, not harmless in themselves, but apparently the lesser of two evils. Every cloud as they say: voles are the favourite delicacy of barn owls, kestrels, foxes, snakes and even wild boar, so while the farmers are seething the local fauna must be having a feast.

Portuguese laureate José Saramago, in self-imposed exile in Lanzarote (I could think of worse places) declared this week that it was inevitable that some time soon the Iberian Penninsula would be one country. After all, his argument goes, “We see an undivided whole made up of different nationalities, some with their own languages, which have lived more or less in peace.” It would seem to go against the trend in Europe at the moment where the tendency is for devolution of power from powerful centres to nations within nations like Scotland and Catalonia. I was trying to work out the linguistic mix: if my maths is correct (and it often isn’t), then about 28 million Iberians would have Spanish as their mother tongue, 10 million Portuguese and 4.8 million Catalans, with people like me making up the other 7.2 million Basques, Gallegos and other odds and sods. The relationship between the Portuguese and the Spanish, as far as I can gather, is rather ambivalent. The Portuguese are rather antagonistic against their larger neighbours (the second most significant date as far as they’re concerned is 1640 when King Joao IV regained independence), but most Spanish seem to think of Portugal as some little cousin whom you need to grudgingly include in your games. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating, Salamanca repeatedly turns its back on two of its most valuable assets: the River Tormes and its proximity to Portugal. I’m continually amazed about how few people pop over the border to sample the historic delights of Monsanto, Sortelha and Sabugal, let alone the endless Atlantic Beaches north and south of Aveiro.
It comes as some comfort that a joint initiative between Spain, Portugal and Italy has just held its 3^rd get-together in Lisbon with the three heads of state as their special guests. The event is organised by COTEC Fundación para la Innovación Tecnológica run by our very own Mariano Rodríguez Sánchez (Emperor of Salamanca). Unfortunately, COTEC’s website doesn,t actually work, which isn’t a great advertisement for technological innovation, but lets not be churlish!

Boxing and bullfighting have managed to crawl their way into our
consciousness as something eminently noble because of their inherent
savagery… they represent the perfect sports for lost romantics. A
commentator compared the Nadal-Federer clash at Wimbledon to Ali’s
Rumble in the Jungle. No disrespect to the Lawn Tennis Association but
strawberries and cream and Federer’s grass-stained shorts hardly compare
to Ali on the ropes mocking Foreman with “Is that all you got, George?”.
Nah, it won’t wash… Read the rest of this entry »

The streets of Salamanca will now echo with the unmistakeable sound of a Southern Carolina twang, a Texan drawl, a NewYork banter, an LA whine or San Franciscan chatter, because, now the summer’s come, Salamanca belongs to the good ol’ US of A – or at least it seems that way. Now, you have to remember, that I’m British and being British I suffer from this ambivalent attitude towards Americans (Americans being from the US and not Latin Americans, or Canadians or anyone else from that great continent). Read the rest of this entry »