Free-D

So fiesta is nearly upon us. This time it’s the February carnival; a weekend of dressing up, drinking and dancing (for some at least).  It’s an embarrassing time of year if you’re an English visitor; the noise of the fiesta making communication all but impossible and the threat of being invited to dance hanging, horribly, in the air. “Dance”: could any concept be more un-English? That is unless you’re referring to those strictly regimented Jane Austen type of affairs. And the Jota’s alright of course; there’s very little physical contact or gyrating in that.

The carnival itself is not naturally Castellano. Well, it barely seems natural at all to dress up in this fashion: the young ladies of Salamanca will insist on endangering their kidneys in these “parky” conditions (thermals and a muffler would be my advice). Thus attired they go wobbling about on heels, many of them keeping warm by the virtue of the crushing mobs that a fiesta always brings into the bars. If all this is giving the impression that I’m not a fan of the carnival – it’s not necessarily true: I just prefer everyone else to enjoy it. The Spanish, in England at least, unjustly suffer the reputation of being fiesta loving “grasshopper” types. But as a matter of fact, you very soon discover that Castellanos at least are far more “antish” in character. But then it’s always been ants that make the best grasshoppers on the sly. As the good book says, “There’s a season for everything under the sun.” The tiresome fable of “the grasshopper and the ants”, like all moralistic tales, tries to reduce life to a simple equation. But most grasshopper types understand the grim exigencies of everyday life and try (relatively unsuccessfully) to “buckle down”: just as those of the “antish” persuasion  after a hard days work try to relax by playing the ukulele or “dabbling” with watercolours  (also unsuccessfully). We’ve all got our natural inclinations (I have to confess to being mostly grasshopper), but it’s how we respond to the challenges inherent in these inclinations that counts.

Personally I’ve always hated this particular fable. It’s a mean little tale to tell your children: You have to choose little Johnny, between a life of faceless drudgery and an existence of immoral self indulgence ending in tragedy. Of course the ants in the fable eventually allow the grasshopper to die, because that’s about as far as that extreme kind of ant imagination can take you. I can’t help thinking that we’ve outgrown these simplistic stereotypes: now if you’ll just take note of that most instructive   tale, the topillo and the toad…