Rural life and its problems.

There’s a small village in Asturias called Ribadesella which we may or may not have visited. The name rings a bell but we may have just passed through it on a bus going from one place to another along the north coast of Spain. There was a time in the ten years before I retired when we spent a part of each summer exploring the top of Spain, starting with Bilbao (Bilbo in the Basque language) and San Sebastián and gradually working westwards. We never reached Finisterre, believed in Roman times to be the edge of the world, certainly the edge of the known world at the time. When we got to La Coruña (A Coruña in the Galician language) we took a left turn towards Santiago de Compostela and Pontevedra and eventually Vigo, where we went to live for a while after I retired. 

Anyway Ribadesella is a little place in Asturias, probably 6,000 inhabitants and quite a lot of tourists. Kayakers go there for the yearly Descenso del Sella, when they kayak down the river - not my idea of fun but, hey, each to their own! Now, it seems that some of the tourists have been complaining that the local donkeys and cockerels are too noisy, waking them up at ungodly hours of the morning. What’s more, free roaming cows leave a mess behind them. So the local municipality has put up posters gently reminding people that rural places tend to have rural animals and their concomitant noises and mess. 

We have a tendency in this country to forget what rural places are really like. It may be because we are such a compact little island, so densely populated in many parts that little village communities, such as the one we live in, are not really isolated but within easy reach of big conglomerations. Consequently many Britons seem to have forgotten that milk and eggs comes from noisy, messy creatures, that donkeys can be working animals, not just kept in donkey sanctuaries, that vegetables actually come from mucky earth and so on. Yes, there has been an increase in people growing their own vegetable during the lockdowns but it’s not the same as being in contact with your origins. We found when we lived in Galicia that most city dwellers go back regularly to their ‘pueblo’, the small place where their family originated and where they still have a house and a bit of land. And in the outskirts of Vigo there are allotments where people don’t just grow vegetables but also keep the odd sheep or goat or some chickens. 

On the poster from the Ribadesella municipality it is worth noting that, even though written in good, clear Castilian Spanish, it is addressed to the “Pueblu Asturianu”, with the heading in the local “language” Asturiano (Asturianu). And Ribadesella’s name in Asturiano (Asturianu) is Rebadeseya. Which brings me back to an old bugbear: most of the so-called local languages are really little more than local accents, regional pronunciations (purists would say mispronunciations) of standard Spanish. Basque (Euskera) is a different kettle of fish, probably the oldest language in Europe, straddling Spain and France. Catalán has enough French in it make it substantially different. Many argue the same for Portuguese in Gallego (the Galician language) but I am only partly convinced about that.

I haven’t studied all 15 regional dialects in depth but from what I have seen and heard, it still seems to me a bit like gathering together a list of Lancashire “twang” vocabulary and expressions and calling it a language. Or perhaps making grammar rules to explain the glottal stop replacing the letter “t”, together with the loss of the final “g” (talkin’, and listenin’ and speakin’) and calling that a language. 

Okay! That’s another rant over and done with!

Getting back to rural matters, I read something yesterday about “pandemic walkers” - unusual numbers of people going walking in the  countryside, some discovering it for the first time. It seems that they are having problems in the Lake District because paths have been widened and seriously eroded by the feet of huge numbers of people trying to walk up Conston’s Old Man, for example, and other such places, trying to keep socially distanced initially but more recently just crowds walking along together. Combined with extreme weather and fewer people going abroad  this influx of visitors is putting the beauty of the Lakes at risk. Who knew?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!