Letter from Spain #60

President-elect Elon Musk. And we used to worry about Rupert Murdoch's influence ...

I’m back, after travelling for the past 16 days, firstly to Madrid, then to the Baix Empordà region of Catalonia (a bit more on those trips in a future post), and finally to the UK for a week. During that time we’ve had the catastrophic floods in the Valencia region … and Elon Musk has become the President-elect of the United States (sorry, Donald).

As for Valencia, I simply can’t imagine the trauma - the sheer horror - that people have faced and are still facing after the flash floods of 29 October, which have so far claimed over 220 lives and with many still missing. Almost half the people killed were 70 years old or older.

Spaniards, especially in Valencia, have been critical of the regional and national government’s initial response to the disaster. Under Spain’s decentralised system of government, it’s supposed to be the regional governments that lead the response to any disaster - but many residents were left without food and water for days and had to rely on aid provided by volunteers instead of any government.

There’s also real anger and outrage at the Valencia government’s failure to send out any warnings about the imminent flooding in the first place. Again, Spain’s decentralised government tasks regional authorities with handling civil protection - but this clearly failed in Valencia.

Despite Spain’s national weather agency (AEMET) having issued the highest red alert warning as early as 7.30am on 29 October, warning of the risk of ‘very intense’ rain and floods, the local emergency alert to all cell phones in Valencia was only sent out after 8pm, nearly 13 hours later. In many cases residents were only contacted when floodwater was already gushing through their towns, or their vehicles were floating away.

The head of Valencia’s emergency department has since admitted she didn’t know it was possible to send such warnings until the evening of the first day of the floods. As for the president of the regional government, Carlos Mazón of the right-wing People’s Party (PP), he’s not only totally incompetent but he’s also a liar.

He was having a three-hour lunch with a journalist on the day of the storm, while some towns and villages had already started to fill with water. He’d initially lied about his whereabouts and he’s also lied about the timing of ordering the emergency authorities into action.

‘I’m not going to deny mistakes,’ he told Valencia’s regional parliament on Friday, adding he was ‘not going to shirk any responsibility’. As the head of the regional government he also said he ‘would like to apologise’ to those who ‘felt’ that ‘the aid did not arrive or was not enough’.

As he spoke, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the parliament building, jeering and chanting slogans demanding his resignation and calling him a liar.

But has he resigned? No. That doesn’t happen in Spain.

---

As for the USA elections and Elon Musk-cum-Donald Trump … well, it was always going to happen, wasn’t it? In hindsight, it was obvious.

I’m no Trump (or Musk) fan, but on the morning after the election results became clear, I posted a simple comment on my Facebook page about 71 million Americans voting for him can’t all be wrong or insane, ‘can they?’ Well, it was finally 76,427,168 Americans. Two weeks on, I think some people are still arguing about it on my Facebook comments section.

Those 76.4 million Americans (including Musk, who we’ll get to in a minute) knew exactly who they were voting for:

A convicted felon, the first former president ever to be convicted of a crime … a man accused of 34 other felony counts across criminal cases in New York, Florida, Washington DC and Georgia - a man declared liable by a court for sexual abuse - a man who talks about the size of a golfer’s penis during political speeches - a man who accused immigrants of eating cats and dogs - who fomented an uprising at Capitol Hill by refusing to concede a previous election that he’d clearly lost - a man who has often demanded the jailing of his opponents - a man who will imperil NATO - who thinks of his own interests above all else … who survived two impeachment attempts … etc etc …

Those 76.4 million Americans didn’t care. Most of them probably thought they were positive attributes. They knew exactly who they were voting for and they still wanted him as their President. Who are we to call them all insane and wrong? It’s called democracy (with the help of a bit of fake news, I guess).

Trump won because his policies obviously made sense to 76.4 million people. Okay, he probably also won because too many male US voters refused to vote for a woman (or a black woman), hence the fact that he beat Hillary and Kamala but not Biden … although that might be simplifying things a bit. But Trump clearly offered voters simple, old school American patriotism and aspiration instead of what Kamala Harris was offering … which wasn’t clear.

What is clear is that the liberal and ‘woke’ campaigns didn’t work, and they will need to change.

In the final weeks of the US election campaign, Trump’s team launched an advert not focusing on the economy and immigration, but on Kamala’s past support for taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for transgender prison inmates in the US.

‘Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,’ she’d said in a clip from 2019 that was used in the ad, before the narrator delivered the tagline. ‘Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ It quickly went viral.

According to the New York Times, the ad was credited with tipping the race in Trump’s favour in all seven key ‘swing states’.

Now … if you must know, I’m more worried about Elon Musk than Donald Trump.

Musk wields more power than anyone else on the planet. He oversees companies valued at more than a trillion dollars, whose engineers have built, or are building, reusable rockets, a humanoid robot, hyper loops for rapid transit, and a man-machine interface to be implanted in human brains. Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply …

He personally owns and controls the biggest, ‘instant’ media platform in the world. We know that Twitter (X) has been riddled with far-right fake news and biased since Musk took it over - but the current alternative of Bluesky (or whatever it is) is just a drop in the ocean.

Musk’s campaign group ‘America PAC’, which was set up to support Trump in the presidential contest, called on registered voters in seven swing states to sign a petition supporting the United States First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment, with its right ‘to keep and bear arms’. Each day until the election, one signatory was selected at random and awarded a million-dollar prize. He promoted it widely on Twitter. A US judge rejected arguments that the sweepstakes were an illegal lottery violating state laws.

Since Trump’s election victory last week, Musk has been a near-constant presence at his side, offering advice on cabinet appointments and even sitting in on his first phone calls with foreign leaders. He’s now going to co-lead a new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) with Vivek Ramaswamy.

According to some reports, Musk is overstaying his welcome at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, and he’s beginning to annoy the transition team - those who have been alongside Trump for many more years, before Musk came on the scene.

Years ago, in another era, we (or ‘many other people’) used to worry about Rupert Murdoch’s influence on world politics. But Musk has clearly ‘outFoxed’ Murdoch … and we’re just allowing him to get on with it. That is scary.

Books, Reviews, Research, News & Events

The Barcelona Connection - Research

In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.