Blackout

No, the title of this post doesn’t refer to my recent lack of posting on this blog - the best I can plead in this regard is that I have been very busy driving around Europe collecting my scattered belongings from previous lives - no, in fact it refers to the Channel 4 docu-drama of the same name which aired recently.

I sat down to watch it on my laptop with a mug of hot coffee and an hour and a half later I was traumatised enough to start composing this blog post on the same device. Let me explain. Blackout deals with the ‘fictional’ scenario of an electricity blackout hitting the UK. We are not really told what caused it other than it was a cyber attack by a person/organisation/state with a grudge. It’s shot in the kind of Dogme panicky first-person Blair Witch Project perspective, and apt to give you nightmares because every scenario that is depicted is eerily plausible. The acted parts are intertwined with real footage, mostly filmed during the mass riots that broke out in London and across the country two years ago. You might almost say it is prescient, but we’ll have to wait and see with that.

We get to follow the misfortunes of several people caught up in the ensuing chaos, including a twenty something brother and sister involved in a traffic accident, a mother and her young daughter who try to make an emergency dash to Sheffield and end up being at the mercy of a tagged offender (untrackable now the system has run out of power), a couple of freeloading hooligans on a rampage of shoplifting, theft and arson, and a young middle-class family in London, the father of whom just happens to be a wannabe survivalist who has a video blog which he uploads to YouTube much to his wife’s annoyance. 

The story starts with life as it is today. Everyone is shopping and travelling and social media posturing and is completely wrapped up in their own world. When the blackout strikes, there is an initial mood of hilarity - a great excuse for a party. The survivalist character is in his element, and his wife films him firing up his emergency generator and filling water bottles from the radiator system. “You look happy,” she says, to which he replies “I am.”

Alas, his happiness isn’t to last. On day two of the blackout, the smells of his preparedness barbeque attract unwanted attention from some dodgy young Asian men who invite themselves round and start asking questions about how they are coping. One of the children gives away the fact that the family owns a generator. Things get worse from then on. 

Up north somewhere, the two hell raisers start their vodka-fuelled trail of destruction as they try to get back home, stealing cars and eventually causing a huge accident with a fuel tanker. By day three anarchy has started to engulf the cities, with wide scale rioting and pitched battles with the police. David Cameron (yes, it’s very realistic, even he’s in it as himself) launches an emergency plan and fuel is trucked into key strategic locations - most of which seem to be central government offices. The hospitals are overwhelmed and losing power having got through not just the emergency backup generator, but the backup backup generator, and have now run out of fuel. The ICU equipment, which is battery powered as a last backup, slowly goes flat and the docs and nurses have to make split decisions over who to save and who to abandon. It doesn’t help that people are pouring in through the doors with carbon monoxide poisoning and burns (house fires rage out of control from people using candles).

By what must be day five or six, total despair reigns. People are either trapped in the cities, or else can’t get into them due to police roadblocks. Nobody can contact one another and the only sound from ‘the authorities’ is an Orwellian sounding radio message read out by a pleasant-sounding woman saying “We apologise for any inconvenience and are trying to restore order as soon as we can” - while the masses starve, loot and generally freak out.

It’s not all doom and gloom. There are some genuinely warming moments where people look out for one another. I won’t give any more away than I have done already. But the real message of this film is as simple as it is scary. The message is that the security of our modern lives is a flimsy facade and that behind it lies a rotting haunted house full of demons that the bright lights of the 21st century keeps at bay. With the flick of a switch all of the things we take for granted are gone. In a moment a middle class family can be transformed into a besieged group fighting for their very survival in their own home. Cars cease to function, money is useless, and those who took the precaution of filling up their petrol tanks can expect to get robbed for their efforts. People get sick, families erupt into firefights of blame, there are no communications, no food and no drinking water. People descend, rapidly.

This is how the programme describes itself:

Feature-length 'What-If' drama exploring the effects of a devastating cyber-attack on Britain's national electricity grid.

Based on expert advice and meticulous research, Blackout combines real user-generated footage, alongside fictional scenes, CCTV archive and news reports to build a terrifyingly realistic account of Britain being plunged into darkness.

The film plots the days following a nationwide power cut, as experienced by a cast of ordinary characters struggling to feed and protect themselves and their families. These eyewitness accounts reveal the disastrous impact of a prolonged blackout on hospitals, law and order, transport, and our food and water supplies.

The programme casts members of the public from user-generated footage, weaving real-life archive with scripted drama to tell the story of how Britain could descend into chaos and anarchy without power.

I dunno, what’s with all the expert advice? It’s almost as if somebody wants us to consider that the fictional scenario depicted could be a distinct possibility. Did I say could be a possibility? Bear in mind that 50% of the film is actual footage of the country erupting in violence two years ago - and the trigger for that outburst is still being debated with much head-scratching. And I like to remind people here that the UK energy regulator has been forecasting semi-controlled power outages beginning in 2015/16 for at least two years now. Jeepers, I even came up with my own fictionalised account of how it could happen several years ago.  The only factor the film missed out was what happens to the nuclear stations in the absence of an electricity grid to keep them stable. 

A friend of mine was doing a long-haul road trip through Germany and Denmark with me last week and he was telling me about living in New York during the ‘great blackout’ of 2003. “The first night was fun, with everyone having impromptu parties,” he said. “But when the second night came and there was still no power then a sense of dread began to descend. Suddenly it wasn't fun any more.” Quite. 

I’m not one to get off on doomer porn but I do have a worrying intuition about how some people will behave if there is ever a serious interruption to the nation’s electricity supply . My gut instinct is that there would be widespread anarchy in some of our larger cities for a while, although I doubt this would last once all the (now useless) plasma televisions have been looted and the rioters run out of energy due to lack of food. And the supposedly lawless inner city areas are not lawless at all and there are any number of community elders to give their wayward youths a clip round the ear (or, in some cases, a dose of Sharia law). Once the initial surge of looting, chaos and pitched battles with the police/army has burned itself out an order of sorts will be restored, especially if the power comes on again. 

I can only wonder about how the situation would be outside the large cities. Sure, there is likely to be some trouble, but there is only so much looting and arson you can get away with if everyone in the town knows who you are and where you live. Food might be a larger problem. And medical care.

Any such episode will be one of the ‘thunks’ on the downward steps of our peak energy curve, and the psychological impact of it will be long lasting. In its wake we can expect the authorities to consolidate their power, and for various political miscreants to appear out of the woodwork with ‘solutions’ to ensure that such a catastrophe doesn’t happen again. Normality will be restored, until the next time.

And a catastrophe such as a prolonged power outage would get people scared enough to agree meekly to a whole raft of measures imposed by the government to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again. We’ve gotta keep those lights on! It’s not hard, for example, to imagine people protesting against fracking being branded ‘traitors’ and arrested. First they came for the anti frackers, then they came for the anti nukes ...

Interesting times.

***

On a side note, I had an interesting time driving around Spain during August. I would briefly like to report that Spain is in a weird and eerie state of limbo. The south of Spain, from appearances, has never had it so good. Business is booming in the village where I used to live and everywhere is now immaculate and clean. New shops are opening up, even if there aren’t that many customers. My former neighbour’s daughter, a newly university-qualified teacher, has now been unemployed for three years and breezily says she doesn’t ever expect to find a job in this life. She’s not bothered by this, although her father grumpily confided that it would have been better if she had learned to pick olives, like him.  He’s doing great now the price of food has gone up, he says.

However, on the way back up north I found myself driving around the massive new periphery motorway that encircles Madrid. Madrid is now engulfed by huge yards the size of multiple football fields where one can pick up rusting construction equipment on the cheap. Imagine hundreds of bulldozers, diggers, cement trucks and the like all parked in long neat rows with scarcely a human in sight. I saw them in the daylight on the journey south - along with several horizon filling ‘urbanizations’ of roads laid out in the arid earth with streetlights, ragged developers’ flags and not much else. 

Okay, so it was about midnight on the way back up north, but it is a bit eerie to not see another car for over twenty minutes on a brand new highway surrounding a major first world capital city. It was a toll motorway, but all the barriers were open. I later read that the volume of traffic is now so low on the new toll routes that they lose money if they have to pay people to man the toll booths. They might simply close them. 

Further north still my GPS satnav led me to a petrol station in the middle of nowhere. Almost out of fuel at 2am I discovered the station, like so many roads, had a large sign on it saying ‘cerrado’. It looked permanent. I sighed and pulled in - I had almost run out of fuel and didn’t fancy doing so in the dark. I got out and lay on the weed-broken tarmac in my sleeping bag and watched shooting stars until I fell asleep. At about 4am I was awoken by the sounds of a pack of wild dogs which seemed to be coming ever closer. I shivered and got back in the car. 

I made it to Santander on the north coast and spent most of a day there waiting for the Plymouth ferry. 99% of the vehicle traffic was British holiday makers with big SUVs and shiny new caravans with names like Ambassador and Elite. We had to wait in a large concrete compound under the hot sun, and a huge cinema-sized screen was placed at the front with Sky news on. It was a continuous loop of news all day - Let’s Bomb Syria and Michael Douglas splits from Wife - both given equal billing.

I escaped the compound and explored Santander on foot. I liked it, but it was like a city gasping for air. Every third or fourth shop seemed to be shutting down. Many of the remainders were ‘We Buy Gold’ shops, or tacky Chinese junk pop-ups. Later on we sailed away from it in the dark and it disappeared into the night on the horizon and that was that. Cocktails were served in the bar and a lousy cabaret singer from Newcastle came on and tried to be all Shirley Bassey. That’s it, my Spanish adventure over.

Adios to Orange Blossom and Stranded Assets

I have just returned from Spain, where we had to go at short notice to give a farewell kiss to our stranded asset. Yes, our farmhouse, which had been the focus of all my dreams and efforts a few years back, was finally released from legal limbo land and the keys handed over to the happy new owners. We got back around half of what it cost us to buy it and do it up, but speaking with other people in the same situation we know that we are among the lucky ones.

What a strange place Spain is! This truly is a country where dreams go to die. To the casual visitor it looks like an earthly paradise. The entire region was bursting forth with a trillion wildflowers on our visit, the air was scented with jasmine and orange blossom and the boughs of the lemon trees still hung heavy with fruit. A bumper wet winter had left the Sierra Nevada mountains with a deep snow pack - meaning happy times for farmers in the year ahead - and the local people were just as courteous, graceful, witty and family-oriented as they ever were.

These were among the reasons why, almost ten years ago, we had chosen to go and live there. The ruined house on the side of a fertile hillside had been converted into a small organic farm. Our kids were happy to sit in the shade of an almond tree with a rock and bash open almonds while I either worked on the land or went into the office where I was running a small ecologically-conscious newspaper that I had set up. Life was good.

Or at least it would have been if we hadn't taken out a loan to renovate the property. In time that loan became an unbearable burden and our dreams slowly dissolved before our eyes as we found ourselves forced to return to work in Copenhagen and live in a government subsidised flat for five whole years. That wasn't part of the plan.

And we were the lucky ones. Those who steadfastly refused to leave are now stranded. Most foreigners have left the area. Those who stubbornly refuse to lower the asking price of their houses are hit the worst because they can't cut their losses and move on. Instead they exist in a shadowy half-world of penury, trying desperately to earn a euro here or there and doing anything they can to keep the wolf - or in this case the bank - from the door. The last thing they need is escapees like me parachuting in and pointing out how lovely the smell of orange blossom is in the spring air.

Those with families to support face an unpleasant decision. With all work having dried up many are finding that the only way to feed their families is by doing illegal things. 'Such as?' I asked my friend, who is still desperately clinging on in a legal way. 'All sorts,' she replied. Dope grows remarkably well in Andalucia.

Only those who can draw money from the currently still-functioning pension systems of northern Europe are faring better. Yet even that may not be a shortcut to safety as healthcare costs are climbing just as they themselves go into decline. The Spanish have a word for foreigners like that. They call them 'soloistas' or some such word - loners. People without family who rely on their money from other countries, their healthcare from far away and a cheap and functional system of airlines to take them wherever they need to access these services. Many of them sit in their jerry-built concrete shells by their swimming pools, drink in hand, and convince themselves that they are still living the good life - even though sterling has depreciated, food costs have rocketed and all of their friends have either been evicted or hot-tailed it back to the country they had said they despised before things started to go wrong. Just one more glass of sangria and everything will be okay again ...

Spain is a strange place. It has been in a state of free fall collapse for several centuries. One of my favourite writers, Jan Morris, described the country's fortunes as (paraphrased) 'like a rock bouncing, bouncing, bouncing down a steep mountain, its descent every now and again arrested by a small outcrop.' Here was a country that had a vast empire that was able to liquidate - quite literally - the wealth of an entire continent and bring it home. Five centuries later it was one of the most backward regions of the western world and an embarrassment to the EU. And then the money began to pour in.

The money was used to modernise the country in a kind of Spanish Great Leap Forward. It was all about catching up. Building. Building roads and airports and millions and millions homes that nobody really wanted. You want ten thousand euros? - I'll lend you fifty! Peasant farmers who owned dry and dusty parcels of land in Almeria - land that would have been literally worthless, almost a curse on the family - suddenly found they could borrow thousands from the bank to buy boring equipment, pumps, plastic greenhouses and fertiliser. All of a sudden they were rich on selling tomatoes and lettuces - and all kinds of other tasteless pseudo foods - to the moneyed northern Europeans, and could afford to employ migrant Africans in bonded slave-like conditions. New pickup trucks and a house by a golf course were suddenly the order of the day. It was a boom alright.

I'm happy that the place where we had chosen to live - La Alpujarra -  was considered too backward even for this kind of boom. The roads were too bendy. The people were too simple. The land was too steep and the streets of the local town were full of the dirtiest and most bedraggled kind of New Agers. Sophisticated people from Granada would come and visit in their thousands every weekend and bring with them loud music, iPhones and shiny fast cars. The locals secretly called them 'aliens' and kept their mouths shut as they were serving them in their restaurants and guest houses. I'm happy to say I was never called an alien. At least, not to my face.

But what of these urban sophisticates now? They are among the ones we see on the news reports, living on food handouts and protesting against the government. With their safety blanket pulled out, unemployment rocketing (said to have reached 6 million last week) and the country's political (and royal) classes being steadily exposed as crooks and liars, things suddenly don't look so rosy. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

Not so for my erstwhile neighbours who, by and large, are getting along just fine with their fields and their small houses and appropriately sized vehicles. Fertlizer and pesticides had always been too expensive, so not that many people had got into the habit of using much of them. These folks had always said things were terrible even at the best of times. The country people of Andalucia haven't forgotten that the region is prone to famines, genocide and an unstable climate. Listen to some proper flamenco and ask yourself if this comes from a land of happy upbeat people.

Driving back down the coastal highway on the way back to the airport it was impossible not to notice how empty it was. This was a Saturday mid-morning and a few years ago one would have expected it to be moderately busy. Now, we saw a car only every few minutes. It felt like the whole road was ours - and this was the widely ballyhooed mega motorway that was supposed to be a 'ring of tarmac' encircling the whole of Spain. Sadly uncompleted, like a broken necklace.

In the news today I read that a Spanish woman dowsed herself in petrol and walked into a bank. The bank had taken her house and her savings and everything else she owned. 'You have taken everything from me!' were the words she shouted before igniting the fuel. Such stories are increasingly common.

What next for such a country? There is a growing chorus calling for the debt to be abandoned - for the country to walk away from its obligations to the monolithic banks and finance organisations and to set themselves free again. There is, if the truth be told, no other option. Whether it goes smoothly or is done with explosives is the only question worth asking. Alas, Spain's history, if it can be used as a guide, doesn't bode well. I'd love for someone to tell me that I'm wrong on this, but I'm not sure I'd believe them.

But I hope that in this case the past is going to prove to be no guide to the future. Spain held out for so long against the Anglo model of capitalism. Petty local corruption, ironically, kept development at bay and ensured the system as a whole remained resilient. It was only the surging tidal wave of EU reforms that swept away the small scale municipal corruption and replaced it with respectable-looking TBTF corruption.

Bounce, bounce down that mountain.

The Great Escape Part VI: Into The Firing Line

The first issue of The Olive Press

If you are still reading this - well done! You're one of the few who hasn't cut their RSS in disgust. In any case, I promise this is leading up to something that is relevant to the stated aims of this blog.

You can read the other parts by clicking on the links below:

Part I: Maladjusted
Part II: Adjusted for Inflation
Part III: Drifting

Part IV: A Merry Dance

Part V: Out of the Frying Pan

One does not simply move to Spain. In fact it took about nine months of planning and several visits roaming around Andalucía, but by September we were installed in a 500-year-old stone house in a small village perched on the side of a mountain in the most backward part of Spain’s most backward province. We also had a new baby with us, Sofia, and it got so cold in the house during the following winter that we all had to wear several sweaters and gather around the fire every evening just like people must have done for the previous half millennium.

Nobody yet had a mobile phone in the village – there was no point because there was no signal – so instead they stood on their roofs and shouted to one another. In the crisp winter air, scented by olive wood smoke, and looking around at the surrounding snow-capped peaks, I felt like I had arrived in paradise.

We had, again, been able to exploit the property bubble, and our house in Denmark being worth more than when we had bought it (largely thanks to the City deciding to build a metro station next to it and redeveloping the beach area into something that wouldn’t look out of place in Miami) – so we had some leeway to get settled. Property in Spain was cheap – not as cheap as it had been but still very cheap by northern European standards. This was especially so of crooked 500-year-old piles of stone in out-of-the-way villages where nobody spoke English.

Our plan was to live in the small village house until we could find an old ruin on a bit of viable land, which we would then build up into a liveable house and embark on a path of low impact living where we would live until the end of our days. The reasons for doing this were primarily environmental ones – I wanted to walk my talk and hop off the consumer treadmill – but I was also convinced that it would provide a good place for bringing up children, in contrast to what they would experience in rich, highly industrialised northern Europe.

I got into living in Spain like a fish slipping into water. It almost felt like a kind of homecoming and most days I had to rub my eyes to check it wasn’t all some kind of dream.  We had moved to La Alpujarra, a collection of valleys and villages between mountains just to the south of Granada and just to the north of the Tropical Coast. The region had been populated by the Islamic Moors in the 16^th century after they were expelled from Granada, and not an awful lot had changed since then (apart from the people, of course). The economy was mainly agrarian and the farmers were all small scale. Old traditions hung on – like the matanza (pig slaughtering festivals), a belief in the duende , or spirit, of flamenco – and nobody had ever heard of an iPhone.

But even in paradise, alas, one must earn a living. I was fortunate enough to be offered a job in an estate agent’s office in Orgiva, the main town. I took it. The job involved driving around the region and photographing properties and putting together a website for rentals. The boss was a louche and sleazy Englishman with a lisp and it wasn’t long before I realized he was crooked and was never going to pay me.

I quit after a month (again, never having been paid a cent). I was moaning about what a scoundrel this boss was to Mary, a young woman from Yorkshire who also worked there, and she heartily agreed. She went on to say that herself and her husband, who had taken to wandering alone in the mountains for days at a time, had planned to start a local newspaper. I said I thought it was a good idea.

One day soon after I had a day at leisure in my village and decided it would be a great idea to walk to the summit of the mountain. Mulhacen is the highest mountain in Iberia and it seemed like a good use of a day. I drove part way up and then walked the last few hours. As I was trekking across the boulder-strewn upper slopes I happened to round a summit of sorts and was able to look out for miles and miles across the southern littoral of Spain and out across the Mediterranean. What I saw shocked me because, despite it being only late Autumn the entire seaboard seemed to be covered in white snow. I squinted at it, trying to look more closely, and could make out delicate filigree patterns in the surface of the white stuff and then I suddenly realized what I was looking at.

It was a shrink-wrapped landscape, smothered in white plastic greenhouses as far as the eye could see. I had read about them, sucking up the dwindling groundwater and replacing it with pesticides and fertilizer – just to provide cheap salad to the supermarkets of northern Europe. 

I hiked further up to the summit, marvelling at the beauty around me but perturbed by what I had seen. By the time I made it down again, late in the evening, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to start a newspaper and draw attention to this landscape-eating monster which was clearly spreading towards La Alpujarra where it would no doubt consume and kill the area. I considered that it might just be a hopeless gesture, but nevertheless I wanted to do something within my power to try and stop it spreading into La Alpujarra and destroying the unique and rich biodiversity. 

Plastic greenhouses spreading across the land in Almeria, Spain

That newspaper, when it appeared, was called The Olive Press. I started it with Mary’s husband, who was eventually coaxed down from his Wordsworthian wanderings. It started off as a local community newspaper, aimed to appeal to the sizeable population of beatniks, hippies, renunciants, New Agers and general misfits who lived in the area. I thought that if we drummed up enough interest in the various environmental abuses going on in the region then it might wake up the sleepy Spaniards, who seemed to be turning a blind eye to all of it. 

We had an office, recently vacated by a lawyer who had gone missing (signs of a fight were there in the kicked in door and abandoned volumes of law), a few desks and supermarket-bought computers, a receptionist and a husky (similarly rescued from said supermarket). Mark, Mary’s husband, said he was a journalist. I didn’t have a clue but taught myself how to design a newspaper with QuarkXpress For Dummies – and we were away.

The newspaper, on its first print run, was very popular. We timed its release to coincide with the local market day and I watched, agog, as people walked around the streets reading it. I even saw Chris Stewart – the person whose book had led me to move to Spain – walking past with a copy (later, he wrote articles for it). We drove it all over the region, delivering it to every inconsequential village we could find. In short, it was a great debut. 

But the thing about newspapers is that you can never rest. Work was frenetic. I did the graphic design, acted as commissioning editor, accountant, features editor, proofreader, restaurant reviewer and distributor. Every week I went out to meet and interview interesting people who were doing interesting environmental things. I met some inspirational people and got to see a lot of Andalucia, which was like a universe in its diversity and its richness. I felt like my whole life had been building up to working in this role.

At the same time as we were working on the newspaper, my wife and I also bought an old ruined farmhouse on a hill called Cerro Negro (‘the Black Hill’) and set about making it habitable. This was to take some two years of hard work just to get comfortable and, being off grid, I had a very sharp learning curve ahead of me fitting all the solar PV, the water system, sewage system and all the other crucial systems that most of us take for granted.

If, before, I had considered I was living in paradise, now I was sure of it. On the land were numerous trees, including oranges, lemons, grapefuits, olives, pomegranates, apples, pears, peaches, figs and many, many almonds.  The land was very fertile and irrigation came from a stream which ran directly from the melting snows at the top of the mountain. Situated up a very poor unsurfaced road we never got any passing traffic and the peace was absolute.

I had found my paradise and now I would have been happy to live out the rest of my days there in rustic simplicity, living ‘away’ from civilization but being very much a part of the local community, cultivating great food and genuine friends and having all the time in the world to cherish and educate my two young daughters. I had found peace and happiness and , what’s more, I had found it at a relatively young age.

Our farmhouse and smallholding on Cerro Negro

*** Fast forward by two years ***

If, God forbid, one day I should die and go to Heaven and St Peter or someone like that is there to tell me what I did right in my life and what I did wrong (tip of the hat to Kurt Vonnegut), I’d imagine that he’d say starting The Olive Press was the one good thing I did. Without going into too many details about what was achieved (that would take an entire book which, by the way, I have actually written and is sitting on a USB stick in my drawer in case anyone is interested to read it – and, yes, I did find a publisher for it after a long search but they said ‘Take out the dull bits,’ meaning the bits about peak oil and wider environmental concerns and I said ‘Sorry, I can’t’.). 

Among its more noteworthy achievements was acting as a catalyst to stop a disastrous golf course being constructed on a UNESCO site by shadowy rich investors. The battle turned into a war of attrition, with one of the supporters on our side, hispanophile writer Alistair Boyd (aka Lord Kilmarnock) actually dying, with the stress of being hit by a 1 million euro lawsuit perhaps being a contributory factor.

The paper was also heavily involved in a scandal involving MP Margaret Moran - one of Tony Blair’s ‘babes’ and, coincidentally, a neighbour of mine-  who had been bullying our newspaper delivery man, and in the resulting conflagration she sued the paper (and lost). This turned out to be one of the first inklings of the UK parliamentary expenses scandal which was a major contributory factor in the downfall of New Labour.

In the end the whole newspaper saga was a firsthand lesson for me in the corrupting influence of money and how it can warp and muffle honest reporting. The original newspaper, as I had planned it, was too local and perhaps too radical to earn enough money to pay the staff. Thus it had to be expanded outside of its original geographical area, into regions where people were not so, well, enlightened. Sales people became involved and bigger advertisers were attracted, who naturally insisted we tone down the editorial so as not to scare the ‘clients’, and desist from putting pictures of mangled and abused animals on the cover. And from my point of view it was difficult to write an editorial about the perils of global warming when on the facing page we had placed a full page advert showing cheap fares for British Airways.

It wasn’t just the advertisers complaining. My business partner too was unhappy with the 'green' label and said he was unhappy being considered ‘a fucking tree-hugger’. Instead he wanted to take the paper more upmarket to attract a wealthier readership - abandoning the original readership in the process. Articles about expensive organic wine were okay, by this way of thinking, but not ‘far out’ ones about the local anarchist community building their own school. Given this uncomfortable state of affairs it wasn’t long before I found myself unwelcome my own office and the paper began its descent first into schizophrenic please-everyone sensationalism and then into celebrity obsessed lowest-common-denominator hackery and faux moral outrage over inconsequential matters, which is where it rests today. 

To cap it all, after all the time, effort and money I poured into it, I ended up penniless and working on a building site to make ends meet. I had to sell my stake in the newspaper and tried to put the whole thing behind me, but the legal ramifications and costs went on for month, if not years, afterwards. Later my business partner simply disappeared, leaving unpaid debts, and our names were displayed on a kind of wall-of-shame in a public place in Granada City. 

The financial crisis hit at the same moment, meaning we couldn’t sell our little village house and were left with a mortgage that needed paying every month. Our life in paradise had rapidly taken a hellish detour and my wife buckled under the financial pressure and almost suffered a nervous breakdown. Eventually she went back to Denmark with the children to try and find work. When they left I felt like an utter failure.

The paper itself was taken over by Jon Clark, a London Fleet Street journalist who had been the ‘Show business Editor’ of the Daily Mail. I got on fine with Jon, who lived in an opulent mansion at a secret address near Ronda (secret, because so many people were after him, not least the desperado family of a local serial killer he had written a book about). Jon was also the first journalist on the scene of the infamous Madeleine McCann case, in which a toddler was abducted in nearby Portugal, and has used The Olive Press as a platform for reporting suspected sightings and other developments in the case ever since. 

There were countless other battles and controversies, proving that a little paper could have a lot of bite. In the early days it was known as a campaigning newspaper, always at the centre of things and getting into trouble by confronting power. Indeed, in 2008 the newspaper was honoured with the Spanish ‘Beacon of Hope’ award for its environmental campaigning (of which there was plenty), so we must have been doing something right.

If, by now, you’re imagining me now as some kind of fearless paladin in shining armour with my trusty sword of valour and a shield of integrity, please cast aside those thoughts immediately. Think of me more as a Bilbo Baggins type character – all I wanted to do was have a fairly quiet life with a local community-based newspaper, Yes, I wanted to draw attention to the menace of the plastic greenhouses - but I had no interest in making a name for myself by taking on British MPs, Russian development consortia or murderous Spanish gangster politicians. Indeed, the fear of thugs coming round to my remote farmhouse in the middle of the night and exacting revenge on me and my family was quite a real one. No, the honour for that lies squarely with Jon Clarke, who either has large cojones or a small brain, or quite possibly a mixture of the two

I was left behind at our house without my family for some months desperately trying to earn enough money to stop our house being repossessed. Some similarly penniless friends moved in with me and brought their kids too and, although it was nice having company, it felt like I was a guest in my own home. They also brought with them chickens, goats and even a donkey.

I worked as a labourer down on the coast, mixing concrete by day and learning skills that will be useful in the future. Leon, my friend and the one I was working for, built ‘organic’ buildings, using plenty of hand moulded plaster, rocks, wood and other natural materials. He taught me that building a house is not all that difficult if you know what you are doing and are willing to spend plenty of time on it rather than going for the industrial indentikit style of building. 

Apart from my income from laboring I tried to sell the produce from the smallholding -but the prices were so low that it wasn’t even worth the petrol money to drive them to market. Thus I left thousands of the juiciest organic oranges and lemons imaginable rot on the ground. 

I did manage to sell the grapefruits, which were popular with foreigners, and I also secured a bizarre online night-time job where I was part of a global 24 hour team writing reports about real-time acts of violence around the world. These reports were then conveyed to wealthy clients who had ‘interests’ in the places where these things were happening. That’s how I learned that at every minute of every day, someone somewhere is dying in a hail of bullets or being hacked to bits with machetes – usually in out-of-the-way countries that don’t make the news but where business concerns lie.

But the money I earned wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage, and what’s more, I missed my family. It was a low point, and when my wife phoned and said she had saved some money for me to come and visit in Denmark, I jumped at the chance.

I flew there one Spring evening approaching my 37^th birthday. In the airport I picked up a copy of The Copenhagen Post, Denmark’s only newspaper in English. In it there was a job for a graphic designer to do the layout using DTP software. I had experience of this and so applied for the job, getting an interview two days hence. At the interview I was offered the job as long as I was able to start the following week. Thus I hastily got back on the plane and returned to Spain. I spent a day packing what I considered to be valuable into our tiny Renault Twingo car, borrowed 50 euros off a friend to add to my 150 euros that was all I had to my name, and set off on the three day drive to Denmark.

As I left, a storm was breaking over the mountains and, glancing back I saw a rainbow over the hillside where our house was. I had poured my life, my dreams and the rest of our money into that house, and never had considered we would leave it behind – but here I was. I vowed to return to Spain. It was a defiant vow and one I intend to keep.

I drove to Denmark at 80km/hr to save fuel and made it after three days with barely any petrol left in the tank and no money at all in my wallet. Along the way I had slept in the car and, once, at a free campsite in France and had only a loaf of heavy home-made bread to eat along the way. I was miserable the whole way, but at least I would be seeing my family again.

I did the last leg from the middle of France to Copenhagen without stopping, driving for almost 20 hours without a break and arriving in Denmark at breakfast time on a Sunday morning.  I pulled up outside my mother-in-law’s house, where my family were being put up in the spare room, and rang the doorbell. Footsteps approached the door and it opened. I was let in without a word. There would be a period of shame to pass through, that much was clear.

We were homeless and without money, our dreams shattered and our life in Spain aborted. There was no sympathy for our plight, quite the opposite, in fact, because if you dare to live your dreams you can expect to face the consequences when they go wrong. But at least I had a job and my health, and we were a family again. I sat on the bed in our shared room and hugged my kids, who were full of joy that I had returned. And then I fell into a deep sleep.

Thus began the toughest three years of my life.                   

Spain: The End of the Affair

It's funny how journalistic narratives are supposed to play out. I have just spent the last week in Spain, finally divesting myself of the small farm that was to have been my life's work but instead turned into an albatross around my neck. In theory I should be writing about how everything is broken down there, how gangs of unemployed youths roam the streets in large packs and how lampposts are amply hung with the swaying corpses of those who could take it no longer.

But if I wrote that I'd be lying. Superficially at least, Spain appears to be utterly normal, if a little quiet. In fact I don't think I have ever seen it so well presented. There is the appearance of calm, at least. The new airport in Malaga is open for business and where, before, passengers could choose between coffee and orange juice at a single fly-blown cafe run by a friendly old man, they can now choose between about a dozen or more chain cafes, and blow their euros at numerous fashion and electronics stores.

Driving from the airport in Malaga to the small town in the mountains near Granada where I was staying, one is reminded though that all is not well. The country, for a while, was running on mega-projects and one of the grandest was to build a concrete ribbon of motorway so that one could travel all the way from Cadiz on the westward Atlantic coast to Barcelona on the northern Mediterranean coast. This was no easy job as Spain is mostly mountains and the road had to carve its way through terrain that just isn't very motorway-friendly. It was one of the projects that was supposed to bring the country into the 21^st, no, 20^th century but the only problem is that it remains incomplete. You get to La Herradura and a sign says 'End of Motorway' and spits you back onto the winding coastal road that was such an embarrassment for the regional government. The hills have been blasted ready to make way for the new road but judging by the layers of dust on all the machinery arrayed there, combined with the lack of workmen, it doesn't look like that road is going to be finished any time soon.

Along the same route I drove past a hill covered in the kind of poorly-built and ugly little apartments that the country now has several million of, and looming over them was a large sign declaring '€39.000 bank liquidación'. These would probably have sold for around €100,000 only a couple of years back.

I carried on driving, arriving late at night in the village in the mountains where I used to live. The last hour of the drive I had only passed one or two cars. I was able to keep the full-beams on practically the whole time without having to dim them for approaching cars. Was I imagining it, or had it always been this quiet?

In the daylight things seemed like they were back to normal. More beautification projects had been completed and the local town of Órgiva no longer looked like the shabby one I remembered. There was a new supermarket – the first 'proper' supermarket in the whole region – along with a new municipal swimming pool, football pitch, basketball court and a fancy new open air courtyard cafe where the patrons have misted water sprayed on them to keep them cool as they sip their Alhambra lagers. Crisis – what crisis?

It was only when I began to speak to people that I got the feeling the local economy was running on fumes. A friend had taken a job at a local cafe, working for peanuts she explained, as her builder husband stayed at home. He wasn't idle though, he was doing what he was good at – building – although now he was doing it for his family so that they would have somewhere to live on a piece of land that someone had lent them. Others were joining in, and soon they would have a small community of a handful of families living on a piece of land remote enough to make it unsellable, but fertile enough to make it livable.

I did my business with the lawyer and notary and spent a couple of days catching up with old friends and listening to their stories. One morning I went to buy distilled water for the batteries in my solar system, as the levels were beginning to get a bit low and the Mexican man who looks after my house in my absence has no transport and can't carry heavy loads. As I was purchasing some 5 litre containers in the small hardware store the next customer, stood behind me, was launching a spirited complaint against the store owner about a consignment of chicken feed he'd ordered but which hadn't turned up. The owner was saying something about supply problems and the disgruntled customer in the rough local dialect retorted 'Hombre, my chickens will have died of hunger by the time it eventually arrives.'

There was something familiar about the voice and I turned around and found myself looking at the English writer Chris Stewart. 'Problems?' I asked. He did a double take and stared at me. 'What are you doing here?' he asked 'I thought you lived in Denmark.' I explained all that had occurred to me. Chris Stewart, you see, was one of the original emigrees who, as he says, fled Thatcher's Britain and moved to Spain to become a shepherd, living a life of poverty in these here hills. He later wrote a book about it called Driving Over Lemons, which became immensely popular and persuaded thousands to follow in his footsteps. Like me. He was also the founding member of Genesis, along with Peter Gabriel, but he doesn't like to talk about that.

'Things are woeful here,' he said. 'There's no work – I've never seen it so bad.'

We chatted for a few minutes. I told him my theory that this was one of the better places to be. Several centuries of grinding poverty, famines and civil war had made this part of Andalucia resilient, I argued. Most country people over 50 still knew all about growing food and on top of that there had been a mass immigration of downsizers, such as himself, who treated the land and the water with respect. 

'Hmm,' he said, not quite convinced. 'I suppose we'll see.'

Over the rest of my stay I had ample time to think about what was going wrong in Spain. It seems rather unfair that the Spanish people should be made to suffer. They are, after all, some of the most pleasant, helpful and down to earth folks on the planet. Cast aside, for a moment, all those stereotyped images of hot-blooded bullfighting macho types; in my experience the vast majority are family-centred, hard working and full of grace. Neither are they particularly materialistic above a certain minimum level of comfort.

It seems to me that Spain, as part of the EU, has had development rammed down its throat, whether they wanted it or not. The TV commercial for Spain used to be 'Spain – it's a little different' – and it was (and then some!). The task of the politicians was to make it the same as anywhere else. But all that infrastructure that was built seemed to be constructed primarily for the benefit of the hordes of northern Europeans who saw the country as one big golf course and luxury hotel development. Corruption oiled the wheels of illegal land development and speculators piled money into a 'housing' boom (they were not really houses, more like flimsy clinker shells) which was fuelled by the banks. It's a sad tale of environmental despoilation in one of the most beautiful places in Europe and now the local people are left with a toxic legacy of ruined coasts, damaged aquifers and unpayable debt.

As I left to return to Denmark I felt a wave of sadness. People kept telling me how lucky I was to be living in 'safe' Denmark. Soon I will have no further ties to Spain or La Alpujarra. It really does feel like the end of the affair.

At the Business End of Progress

Greetings from Spain. I am here sorting out some business, which one day I'll get around to writing about, and watching as the country starts to realise that the tidal wave of money that swept over the nation has not only subsided, but that the back current is sweeping away most of what it was meant to improve in the first place.

I'll give you a full update next week but seeing as I'm currently in the middle of a surreal desert and surrounded by the detritus of the transplanted Hollywood film industry, a computer connection is not the easiest thing to come by. Yes, I'm in the Badlands of Spain, Almería to be precise, where many Spaghetti Westerns were filmed and Clint Eastwood was almost a local. It's an unnerving place because nothing is what it seems. Old Western towns in which the buildings are just dusty façades are dotted here and there and the desert is filled with cast off detritus, such as ancient American cars and a billion beer cans. Speaking of Americans, the military accidentally dropped an atom bomb here in the 1960s, but locals are too polite to mention it. Luckily that atom bomb didn't go off, and if it had done history would look a whole lot different now.

I've been thinking quite a bit about progress recently, and the general difficulty in accepting that what has appeared as a simple linear progression for most of us, is about to be rudely interrupted. I remember the first time I realised that the whole doctrine of  benign western capitalism was a sham. It happened on a trip to Laos, in south-east Asia, in the year 2000. I narrowly escaped being blown to dog meat by a bomb on that trip, planted at a border post by Hmong agitators who wanted to get rid of the communist government.

Luckily for me, I paused to buy a Pepsi Cola from a street vendor, thus delaying me for thirty seconds and a minute or so before the bomb went off at the immigration desk, which I was walking towards with my visa in hand, killing several members of staff and turning all the computers into blobs of warm plastic and metal. I'm probably one of the few people alive who can claim that Pepsi saved my life. But before that happened I had just spent a month in that amazing country, witnessing first hand the west's attempt to turn it into just another sweat shop, using the tool of aid. This, for me at least, was when the penny dropped about how our system of economics had got out of control like some giant wild beast ans beginning to consume whole nations.

At the time I wrote down my thoughts in a diary. Here is what I wrote:

***

New Year's Eve 2000, Vang Vieng, Laos

We have been in Laos for ten days now and this is the first time I have been able to sort my thoughts into some sort of intelligible order. When we first entered Laos we found ourselves among extraodinarily friendly and warm people (even compared with the legendary friendliness of the Thais) - which is almost contrary to what I had expected given their abominable treatment at the hands of foreign powers. I had read the modern history of Laos and been depressed by the seeming wickedness and insensitivity of mankind: the 'overspill' of the Vietnam war and the widescale bombings.But at least I had thought it was in the past. Over the last ten days I feel as though I've had my eyes opened to another kind of assault on Laos and its peoples - by outside appearances a much less harmful one as the abominable Secret War, but potentially one with the capacity to do a whole different kind of damage.


After the first few days here, my head was spinning when I contemplated writing about our experiences. This was, after all, supposed to be a travel journal, I reasoned. But I felt wretched about being here: a sunburned foreigner surfing into their country on a tsunami of hard currency. Looking around, it seemed obvious what I represented: westernism, consumerism and the burgeoning tourism industry. I felt too strongly to give some facile travel account about us 'on holiday' in Laos. I decided to axe the travel journal and just take photographs. Then, some days later, I realised that's just the kind of 'head in the sand' thing that us westerners excel at. I reasoned that if I carry on with the journal then no matter how limited its scope and how restricted it is in expression, it will at least serve as a record of the people we met and the feelings we felt at the time, if only as a personal one. Maybe one or two people would read it and would make them think twice about endorsing 'development', as I have. That would at least be something.


Normally when going to countries and researchingt their histories it is, to a greater or lesser extent, difficult to relate to much of it; usually history happened well before we were born. But in Laos there was a Secret War (from our point of view) that was fought partly during my own lifetime. From 1964 to 1973 Laos had the misfortune to be geographically located next to Vietnam, China and Thailand. Although a neutral country in the Second Indochina War (what we would term the 'Vietnam' War) the ruling Pathet Lao were sympathetic to communist North Vietnam (the Vietcong) which incurred American fury. The Americans, frustrated by the rules of the Geneva Accord (1962) which stipulate that foreign troops may not be deployed in a declared neutral country, acted to side-step this inconvenience. 


CIA agents were placed in Laos and, with the leadership of an individual called Vang Pao, trained up an army of Lao civilians, Hmong hilltribesmen (particularly useful as they felt little allegiance to the nation of Laos, were brave fighters and in need of money) and Thais. By this stage eastern Laos was overrun with Vietcong, some of whom were being hidden in villages by sympathetic, but in all likelihood ignorant, villagers. So began America's Secret War, which was so secret that the very term 'Laos' was to be replaced by the sinister term 'The Other Theatre'. The facts and figures of this conflict are staggering - even more so when you think that Americans (nor, in the main, the Western media) didn't know about it, and still don't. If ever there was a prime test case for Noam Chomsky's Propaganda Model, which states that Big Media tends to ignore the plight of those 'hostile' or irrelevant to US foreign policy, this is it.


Here are the facts and figures. During the Secret War the Ravens, the codename for US pilots in Laos, who flew in civilian clothing and allegedly carried suicide pills, flew one and a half times the number of air sorties flown over Vietnam (over 580,000 in total). This meant an average of one planeload of bombs dropped on Laos every eight minutes, twenty four hours a day, for nine years. The cost of this, at least in monetary terms, was $2 million per day. In 1970 Richard Nixon authorised massive B-52 carpet-bombing strikes on this genteel nation in order to obliterate large tracts of the countryside. Laos being an overwhelmingly rural nation, this naturally included civilain areas. By the time the Americans pulled out they had dropped 1.9 million metric tonnes of explosives on Laos - which works out at about ten tonnes per square kilometre or over half a tonne of high explosives for every man, woman and child. This statistic makes Laos, on a per capita basis, the most heavily bombed country in the history of war. So much for being 'neutral'.


There is far too much history to be able to go into in any depth - and I'm not even going to try. It is very instructive and depressing to read up on this era in history.


One of the main legacies of this war in Laos is the sheer number of unexploded bombs (called UXO or unexploded ordinance) left lying around. It is thought that 130 Lao civilians are killed each year by UXO, mostly in the eastern provinces. Forty percent of these people are children, who find the bombs and play with them, but a larger proportion are people ploughing fields or trying to defuse them and sell them as scrap. The most common UXO is the cluster bomb (called the 'bombi' in Lao) of which up to thirty percent dropped remained undetonated. The manufacturers, still in business, of these evil devices are said to be refusing to cooperate with demining efforts and won't say what proportion didn't explode citing 'commercially sensitive information'. This high level of non-detonation was later explained by the fact that these 'products' were being tested in Laos for later use in Afghanistan, Cambodia and more recently Iraq and Serbia.


This UXO has put large sections of land off limits to peasants returning to their land after the war. Laos has a small population (four and a half million, growing at 3.5%) so the pressures on land have not been too great - until now. Since the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, Laos, was, and supposedly still is, communist in a most pragmatic manner. Now that the era of communism is over Laos has been cut loose from its Soviet master and is entering the 'liberal' world of capitalism and 'democracy' (one could argue that they are much the same thing nowadays). The 'International Community' (i.e an undefined club of powerful industrial nations and blocs operating under the Washington Concensus) is pouring vast sums of money into Laos to help it to 'develop'. The net effect of this is to transform it from a self-sufficient nation to one that relies on imported consumer goods. Hard currency will be needed to pay for these goods and this can only be gained, according to the priciple of competitive advantage by selling what you are best placed to, which in the case of Laos will be cheap labour and strip-mined raw materials.


Unless you count the nationl brewery, Laos has no manufacturing base; something that must be corrected immediately and at any cost, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Thus, it is said, a large expanse of secondary and primary forest is now being cleared in central Laos to build an industrial base. It is hoped that subsistence farmers and tribal villagers can be retrained and relocated to this area to form a new class of worker that will be 'economically mobile'. Tax hikes are being used as economic cattle-prods to ensure the peasantry get the message and jump to it. Funny to think that forest floors will soon be sweatshop floors and that rice farmers will be Nike-stitching McWorkers.


Aid arrives in the form of giant projects. Tarmac roads are being constructed throughout the length of the country, huge dams are being proposed. The Mekong is no longer a river to provide fish or a wellspring of inspiration and folklore but an under-utilized energy resource. Its placid and languid waters will soon be put to work irrigating cash crops in the dry season and providing cheap electricity to fuel the industrial revolution and sell to energy-hungry Thailand for a roaring profit. Large areas of primary forest are being felled (despite them being cynically designated National Biodiversity Conservation Areas to keep outside critics happy), often by Chinese and Vietnamese logging concerns, in order to earn foreign exchange to pay for the expected influx of consumer goods and the huge fees demanded by foreign development consultants. The thousands of villagers displaced by these dams, highways and forest clearances are expected to become dutiful members of the New Economy (the whole project is called the New Economic Mechanism or NEM) and will be relocated to specialist built worker suburbs where they will all have TVs and will enjoy a much higher standard of living. Like I said, McWorkers.


The stakes are now high in Laos. Predatory transnational corporations (TNCs), those eager agents of 'free trade', are circling like vultures. The politicians, secretive and sinister, are ready to sell the non-replaceable natural resources of Laos for a fistful of dollars. Everywhere there is talk of development and the NEM. Huge mansions have mushroomed up in Vientiane where imported 'specialists' and 'experts' live behind high fences in this almost crime-free country. The urban people are excited about the influx of luxury goods and some look longingly over the Mekong to Thailand where the American Dream can now be lived out much more cheaply than it ever was in America. Dollars continue to pour in in the form of donations by countries, world organisations and companies and always the message is 'You are poor, we will alleviate your poverty'. Thai, Chinese and Vietnamese businessmen are hammering on the doors - eager to get to work in a newly liberalised country where things such as workers' rights and environmental protection are almost unheard of. Given the lack of free press, they are likely to remain so.


Many of the backpackers we had met on our travels in Asia had urged us to go to Laos 'Before it's too late', whatever that means. Now I know. They mean go now while it still has a distinctive culture. Go now while the forests are still intact and the air isn't choked by fumes. Go before they've heard of air-conditioning and laptop computers. Go now while the people still regard you with respect and not just the latest coloniser.


If you want to read more about my exploits in Laos, India, Mexico and whole load of other places you can continue here.