Time is tight today. So here’s a brief compilation of 3 year’s posts on GYPSIES . . .

2004

There’s a permanent gypsy camp in the woods on my side of the river and I regularly see family groups on their way into and out of town. One woman – with 2 small children in tow – is always pushing a serious wheelbarrow back home, laden with whatever they have found around town. This morning, though, she was pushing it into town - full of vegetables, fruit and shellfish whose provenance smelled rather doubtful. It was hard to believe anyone would buy any of the stuff, especially the mussels. But, just in case, I will eat at home tonight.


Talking of gypsies, I read that in the UK they are adopting a new strategy – buying up large plots of land and then illegally installing drains, roads and houses, defying the local authorities to do anything about it. This is common practice in Spain and helps to explain why even the rule-shy Spanish are rabidly anti-gypsy.


After an excellent lunch of squid and Alboriño today, I polled along to the regular Sunday flea market in Vegetables Square. Possibly because it’s winter, this has gone downhill since my last visit. Always something of a joke, it’s now dominated by gypsies offering the rakings from the house, garden and cow shed of the latest peasant to die in the mountains. Or, quite possibly, from his or her rubbish tip. The place was overflowing with items that are not even at risk of being stolen in a billion years, let alone bought.


2005

A Romanian girl has withdrawn a suit against her own father in which he was accused of trying to sell her baby to local gypsies for €7,000. She now says it was all a misunderstanding and that he was only trying to make kindergarten arrangements. Families!


Sometimes it’s hard to believe what you’re reading. One of today’s local papers reports that the Portuguese police have arrested twenty members of a large gypsy clan and charged them with kidnapping mental defectives in north Portugal and forcing them into slave labour in the vineyards of La Rioja. I suspect it’s considered wrong to write ‘mental defectives’ these days but, in the context, this seems a very small crime.


Strange events in a local village. A group of Rumanians tried to kidnap a gypsy girl of 8 when she went to get the family bread from a nearby service station. What, I wonder, would a gang of Rumanians have against a group of gypsies? Perhaps it was something to do with what the Spanish papers regularly term ‘a settling of accounts’. Incidentally, the young girl was going for the bread at just before 11pm, presumably for the evening meal.


2006

In a country where rule compliance is possibly less pronounced than elsewhere, the gypsies are in a class of their own. Simply put, they frequently act as if they were completely above the law. One of the worst examples of this happened yesterday in Sevilla, when a young gypsy girl ran into the road and was hit by a passing car. She was only lightly injured and the 64 year old driver got out to attend to her. For this he was beaten up by the girl’s family and then murdered with 11[!] shots into his head and body. This atrocity received rather less prominence in the media than you might have expected, possibly because we regularly read of deaths in gypsy clan wars that are invariably referred to as ‘a settling of accounts’.


Down in Sevilla, a court has imprisoned the gypsy who slaughtered the driver of a car which bumped into his daughter when she ran into the road a couple of weeks ago. His defence is that he’d found a gun in a rubbish bin and happened to have it on him when he got blind drunk before the accident. He then shot the man because he was beside himself with anger and thought he recognised him as the head of a rival gypsy clan. He insists that, although he was senselessly inebriated, it was him who fired 6 shots though the window, then opened the door, re-loaded the gun and fired another 6 into the body. No one else - least of all his wife – was involved. Obviously a believer in the Hitlerian principle - If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big one


Racism is still a feature of Spanish football but it’s encouraging to see the criticism its now getting in the media. Relatedly, Spain is reported to have around 650,000 of Europe’s 3 million gypsies. Generally speaking, they’re not well regarded, though the truth is 80% of them are said to have been assimilated into the country’s middle class. Sadly for me and my neighbours, we have some of the other 20% living nearby in squalid shacks on land granted to them by a local marchioness. Given their tendency to disregard civic laws and norms, it’s a little hard to take a positive view of their life style. Especially, when they come begging at the door.


I mentioned our local gypsies the other day. I read today the police are investigating the impregnation of an 11 year old by another member of the community. A girl being pregnant so young would not, of course, be very newsworthy in the UK but it still is here. Needless to say, the police are getting nowhere. Most people refuse to talk and those that do later retract their statements. It very much looks like they’re going to have to be content with the insistence that ‘things have been dealt with in line with our traditions’


The local gypsies have figured twice in the news this week. Firstly, Galicia’s Supreme Court has confirmed the local council can knock down the 10 illegal shacks on land earmarked for an industrial park. Mind you, the council has said they lack the resources to do this so it may take several more years before we see anything happen. This might be because the council is only too aware that the second incident involving the gypsies was a shoot-out at one of the pay booths on the nearby autopista. This was between members of the same family. So imagine how they treat strangers.


Gypsies are not popular in Spain. And, putting aside possible culpabilities on either side, I can say from my own experiences over the last 6 years that I can understand why this is so. And then there are the reported incidents such as one last week of 200 gypsies walking out of a Madrid restaurant without any suggestion of paying the bill, while their kids distracted the staff by helping themselves to items on sale. Strangely, there was no police response. Though perhaps this wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to those of us used to hearing stories of gypsies routinely terrorising nurses, doctors, consultants, anaesthetists, surgeons, etc. Nearer to home, passing a Chinese bazaar in town this week, I was assaulted – almost literally – by the sight of the owner fighting with a woman from one of the local permanent gypsy encampments. The former was holding a rather garish pink bra and noisily claiming that latter had tried to nick it. The owner’s husband came out and said he’d called the police. The gypsy woman’s response was along the lines of ‘You’d better let me go. I know where you live’. I didn’t wait to see whether the police would respond in this case. Judging from the number of times they ring my bell, the gypsies know where I live as well.


We’ve had so much rain in the last 2 week it’s as if the weather gods have decided to dump on us all the stuff we didn’t get in the first 9 months of the year. Naturally, the itinerant umbrella sellers have been out in force on the streets of Pontevedra. But the funny thing is, whereas these have hitherto always been gypsies, now they’re all Senegalese. I can’t imagine the former have given up this street trade and moved upmarket, so wonder whether they’ve contracted it out.

Which reminds me – I often see some of the beggars I mentioned the other day crossing the bridge towards my locality. I’m told this is because the gypsy encampment down below my house harbours one of Spain’s biggest drug supermarkets. Which is nice to know. And I thought this was a select area, even if one of the larger houses does belong to the owner of a couple of brothels in Vilagarcía. Live and let live. This is Spain and none of us are fascists these days.