News. Media. Días festivos.

Yesterday we received news that an old friend, someone we had lost contact with over the years, had died suddenly. Later in the day I saw that Aretha Franklin had died. Two strong women no longer around.

The former I remember especially from a school holiday where we took a crowd of youngsters camping and doing everything in French. Such was her quirky way of doing things that she organised a midnight swim - in the sea, in the dark, no less. The French, she told us, do this all the time. Well, I suppose she should know. She was French, after all. We went along with it but I made sure my children, aged 8 and 10, perfectly competent swimmers though they were, stayed holding my hands in the shallow water. You wouldn’t get away with such activities now!

Aretha Franklin might have said, like Leonard Cohen, but without the irony, “I was born like this, I had no choice, I was born with the gift of a golden voice”. She sang for Barack Obama at his inauguration.

Both Obama and Trump tweeted her praises when the news of her death came out. Typically the media have made a thing about it, saying that Obama praised her wonderful talent while Trump made the personal connection, remembering that she had once worked for him. The media can make a perfect storm out of anything.

Yesterday turned out to be another día festivo. Wednesday was the Feast of the Assumption, Mary going up to heaven, but I have not worked out yet why yesterday was a holiday as well. It might have been something to do with San Roque, a saint whose name means nothing to me except as the name of an Italian restaurant not too far from where we live in Greater Manchester.

I only realised it was a holiday when I went out for bread in the morning and found all the shops still closed. Bang went my plans for buying fruit! In the evening, when we went out to check our internet stuff in a local cafe, I picked up a paper and found one section full of photos of processions in various parts of Vigo, and one of San Roque meeting the Virgin - that thing where they make the statues bow to each other in greeting. It’s always quite impressive.

In Vilagarcia, the paper told me, they were having a Fiesta del Agua, presumably throwing water at each oter. Across the bay in Cangas, however, they were having Danzas Ancestrales. Some people know how to maintain tradition. Both will no doubt attract tourist-spectators if marketed properly.

Of course, it is quite possible they don’t want tourists. In one of the papers I skimmed online I discovered a whole lot of places - Oxford, Cambrideg, Cornwall, the Isle of Skye, Venice - whinging because they have too many tourists. Honestly!?!? Do they not want the tourist income?

Actually I can understand the Venetians getting a bit cross; it gets to a point where the locals are seriously outnumbered. And then they had the problem of the gigantic cruise liners trying to go down the Grand Canal.

It seems, however, that some people only visit places to take selfies. Cornwall has become attractive because people have seen the remake of the Poldark series in the television and they want photos on the “locations”. In Skye it seems to be “fairy holes”.

“In Cornwall, it’s social media driving people to two beaches in Poldark,” says Alistair Danter, project manager at destination management organisation Skye Connect. “In Skye, it’s social media driving people to five iconic destinations to take a selfie.”

I have to confess to our having done a bit of TV series tourism. We went to Sicily and visited places where the Montalbano series was filmed. But we didn’t take selfies, just pictures of places. There is a limit to our “groupie” behaviour! 

One of the spokespeople in this article about the selfie-tourism  pointed out that in the case of Cornwall it’s important to recognise the economic need. “It’s one of the poorest counties in England,” he said. “And the second-poorest region in northern Europe. One quarter of children live in poverty. So Cornwall desperately needs tourists. It’s also the county that’s most dependent on tourism in England as a part of its total revenue.”

 You have to put things in perspective.