Fat chance

What's this? You get nothing for weeks on end and then, suddenly, the bloke can't shut up? Well, I said a couple of entries back that Christmas was going to be a bit different for me this year, and so it's proving. I'm writing about stuff I haven't seen or experienced before, and today has provided such a thing.

Today, as on every December 22nd, they draw El Gordo, 'the fat one', the colloquial name for the special Christmas lottery that Spaniards go crazy for every year - see previous entry on the matter. Now I'm familiar with the lottery, and many of the customs associated with it, of course. But I'm usually back in the UK by now, so I've never seen it actually drawn. 

Can't be complicated, right? Just get the machine to do its thing, announce the numbers, job done, surely? Course not. This is a big deal here. As with pretty much every raffle I've ever seen in Spain, it's drawn by 'innocentes' - children. They'll have no association with the promotion or running of the lottery and are above suspicion when it comes to drawing and announcing the winning numbers. This is how everything from the ham at the local football club to the biggest domestic lottery prize in the country is drawn; it's pretty much always a child.

Fair enough. So you get kids to draw the balls. Still can't take long, right? Wrong. This is the biggest lottery draw of the year and there are a lot of prizes. So the draw, live on TV and streamed on the internet, starts at about 9am and goes on until about noon. And the kids sing the numbers, and the associated prizes, as they come out. Here's a recent one, with one of the jackpots and the last number in the sequence being announced. They're showing the balls to the judges, and there's excitement in the crowd, for the size of the prize. 

So this morning, you go into a shop, or a bar, or the tobacconists, and you can hear the kids singing this. It's everywhere. Can you imagine that, for three hours? I don't care how much you like kids, or how much you believe in the luck of the Gordo, that's got to get on your nerves eventually. (Or in my case, in about twenty seconds).

And how the Spaniards believe. Even at €20 per ticket for a chance to win a tenth of any prize that ticket's number may throw up, they buy them from everywhere they go in normal years, to get different numbers from different parts of the country. They exchange them as gifts. And they ignore the fact that on any given week, the jackpot for EuroMillions is larger, the prize is only shared if anybody else has chosen exactly the same numbers as you, and the tickets are an eighth of the cost. 

But this is as much about tradition as genuine chances, as they all know, of course. Nevertheless, you wouldn't put up with three hours of that if some small part of you wasn't listening for your numbers, just in case. Well I wouldn't anyway. "Don't come to the bar after twelve," a bar-owning mate told me cheerfully this morning. "I'll be closing forever 'coz I'll be rich."

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¿Qué es esto? ¿No hay nada durante semanas y luego, de repente, el tio no se puede callar? Bueno, dije un par de entradas atrás que la Navidad iba a ser un poco diferente para mí este año, y eso está demostrando. Estoy escribiendo sobre cosas que no he visto o experimentado antes, y hoy ha proporcionado tal cosa.

Hoy, como cada 22 de diciembre, sortean El Gordo, el nombre coloquial de la lotería especial de Navidad que los españoles enloquecen cada año - ver entrada anterior al respecto. Ahora estoy familiarizado con la lotería, y muchas de las costumbres asociadas a ella, por supuesto. Pero normalmente ya estoy de vuelta en el Reino Unido, así que nunca he visto que se sortee. 

No puede ser complicado, ¿verdad? Sólo hacer que la máquina haga lo suyo, anunciar los números, trabajo hecho, seguramente. Por supuesto que no. Esto es algo importante. Como con casi todas las rifas que he visto en España, son sorteadas por "inocentes" - niños. No tienen ninguna relación con la promoción o el funcionamiento de la lotería y están fuera de sospecha cuando se trata de sortear y anunciar los números ganadores. Así es como se sortea todo, desde el jamón del club de fútbol local hasta el mayor premio de la lotería nacional del país; casi siempre es un niño.

Me parece justo. Así que haces que los niños sacan las bolas. Todavía no puede tomar mucho tiempo, ¿verdad? No. Este es el mayor sorteo de lotería del año y hay muchos premios. Así que el sorteo, en vivo por TV y en streaming por internet, comienza a las nueve de la mañana y dura hasta el mediodía. Y los niños cantan los números, y los premios asociados, a medida que salen. Aquí hay uno reciente, con uno de los botes y el último número de la secuencia anunciado. Están mostrando las bolas a los jueces, y hay emoción en la multitud, por el tamaño del premio. 

Así que esta mañana, entras en una tienda, o en un bar, o en los estancos, y puedes oír a los niños cantando esto. Está en todas partes. ¿Te imaginas eso, durante tres horas? No me importa cuánto te gusten los niños, o cuánto creas en la suerte del Gordo, eso tiene que ponerte de los nervios eventualmente. (O en mi caso, en unos veinte segundos).

Y cómo creen los españoles.Incluso a 20 euros por boleto para tener la oportunidad de ganar un décimo de cualquier premio que el número de ese boleto pueda ganar, los compran en todos los lugares a los que van en años normales, para obtener diferentes números de diferentes partes del país.  Los intercambian como regalos.E ignoran el hecho de que en una semana cualquiera, el premio mayor de EuroMillions es mayor, el premio sólo se comparte si alguien más ha elegido exactamente los mismos números que tú, y los boletos cuestan una octava parte del costo. 

Pero esto es tanto una tradición como una oportunidad genuina, como todos saben, por supuesto. Sin embargo, no aguantarías tres horas de eso si una pequeña parte de ti no estuviera escuchando tus números, por si acaso. Bueno, no lo haría de todos modos. "No vengas al bar después de las doce," me dijo alegremente un amigo que es dueño de un bar esta mañana. "Cerraré para siempre porque seré rico."

Lotteries

This entry, on what is a deeply depressing morning for many millions of Brits, myself included, is going to be a curious mixture of politics and Spanish Christmas habits.

I wake up this morning scarcely recognising the country I've left behind. An election in which former mining communities like Blyth can collectively forget what life is like under a large Tory majority, in which Dennis Skinner's seat can turn blue, in which the final nail is being busily polished for Scotland's membership of the Union, feels fundamentally at odds with how I've always pictured the British nature.

That's not to say this couldn't be seen coming, as shocking as some results like the ones I've mentioned above may be in isolation. My partner has retained a resolute optimism that minds had changed since 2016, that our departure from the EU would ultimately never happen. It's an optimism I've never shared. A right-wing dominated press, owned by an ever-smaller group of billionaire barons, has been busy sowing xenophobic seeds which have sprouted healthily in the north of the country. Genuine belief that getting out of the EU and the supposed drop in immigration that would entail would make for a better future gave us the referendum result in 2016, and those people want what they voted for. They still seem to believe the lies they were told.

It's come down to that, in my opinion. Brexit has so divided the country, that it alone would have been enough to hand this election to the Tories. This was another referendum in all but name, but if you also throw in the constant vitriol the likes of the Mail and the Sun - still comfortably the biggest-selling papers in Britain for all that circulation is down everywhere - have thrown at Corbyn in personal attacks, you've got a Labour leader that many people regarded as unelectable to add to the anti-EU sentiment. Hence the total clusterfuck we have to digest today.

The crumbs of comfort have to be looked for with a microscope. My home city Brighton remains a little island of red and green in a sea of southern blue. The good people of Liverpool have not forgotten their abandonment by the Thatcher administration, and kept the city red. (Chin up, Hels.) I'm oddly pleased for the Scots. Separatism is anathema to me, but the fact is that they will now absolutely hold another referendum on leaving, they will absolutely vote to leave after the promises made to them if they stayed were (of course) broken, and will then remain within or rejoin the EU. So this separatist movement at the same time stands for unity - just with Europe, not Britain. A pretty damning indictment and admirably respectable.

If I hadn't already left, I'd absolutely be looking for a way out now. An increasingly isolated, deep-blue Britain tied ever-closer to a United States possibly still led by Trump is a dystopian future I'd want no part of. Those people to whom getting out of the EU was more important than, for example, not selling off the NHS - does anybody, anybody, seriously believe the Tory promises on that score? - will be the ones who most surely reap what they've sewn. You can bet your arse that the patrician class will be able to afford the drugs, won't have to wait in corridors, won't die of neglect in an American-style health 'service'. Maybe then, when it's too late, people will realise what they've done.

How do I pick myself out of the slough of despond that's in danger of settling? Ham and hampers. Obviously.

When I head to Britain for Christmas on 19th December, the enormous difference between how it's done back home and how it's done here will again strike me. There are, of course, a few lights strung across roads here. But it's nothing like even a small village of Viana's size would do in Britain. Nor do you see lights twinkling in people's homes, suspiciously perfectly triangular 'trees' outlined in their windows. It looks, basically, a lot less Christmassy. There are signs, though.

The most obvious ones are in the bars, which sell lottery tickets for the big Christmas draw. For some reason, Spaniards go completely crazy for the lottery at Christmas. Tickets for the biggest one are given as gifts, with some bizarre superstitions about not giving one from a different area to somebody who's gifted you a ticket from their area. The tickets all have the numbers already printed on them, you see, and are different everywhere you go. So you have people buying them everywhere they stop in Spain to make sure they've got loads of different numbers. OK, fair enough. Except. Ex-cept. Each of these tickets costs €20, and is known as a 'décimo'. That's because holding the winning number entitles you to a tenth of any prize that ticket may win, as they're sold in perforated sheets of ten. So you'd have to buy all the tickets of a particular serial number, costing €200, to take home the whole prize. These tickets are sold in their millions, despite the fact that on any given weekend the Euromillions jackpot can be bigger than the Spanish Christmas prize, the tickets cost a tenth of the price and if you happen to have the only ticket with the winning numbers on it, you keep the lot.

There are cheaper ways to get involved. All the bars also raffle off hampers, or legs of ham similar to the one I won in the half-time raffle at the football. The hams are tempting enough, but the hampers are absolute monsters. Clipped on the left-hand side of the image of this one is a grown man's coat to give you some idea of scale:

It has to be tied to the ceiling at the top,
to stop it collapsing under its own weight.

The way this works, you usually pay between €3 and €6 for an entry, depending on the size of the prize, and take a two-digit number from 00 to 99. Your name goes on a poster against that number, and if the last two digits of the big Christmas lottery match your two, congratulations, you've won the chance to wrestle the bastard home.

I shudder to think what me and my partner, the two of us already overweight, would do with one of these if we win it. Confronted with so much chocolate, biscuits, alcohol and top-notch ham, and dealing with a new year that will see the dawn of the post-EU, Tories-doing-what-the-fuck-they-want Britain, I've got a horrible feeling it'd all be gone by Easter. And that's being conservative. With a small c. A very small c.