On the Spanish Blackout
Diary, Wednesday 4th June 2025
I have read some dreck over my morning sangria that the Spanish blackout, which happened about a month ago, was in fact a sort of primeval event in which every Spaniard, lacking electricity, returned to a blissful state of nature. Time today is so swift, our memories so short, and it is surprising to see with what facility apparently recent events enter the prism of social history, especially when filtered through the keyboard of Americans.
If there was any such transformation I was unaware of it. I was first alerted to the blackout when, reading on my balcony, I heard the screams of my enormously obese neighbour, who was complaining that they had “taken away her fucking stories1”. Attempting to switch on my own television set, I found that they had taken away my stories, too.
Like most people I scurried onto the street, where people were already slamming their bodies into the windows of the now-closed shops, braying for water bottles, toilet paper and table wine. Word spread that a local shopping mall had a power generator, and so we all fled there like so many exposed woodlice seeking the next rock. Gypsies — or anyone poor enough to be mistaken for one — had already bought up the desired supplies to resell, and were displaying their wares in a long, makeshift market which traced the pavement. Many of them did well enough by this business, but the idea of buying up the entire stock, thereby creating an artificial scarcity in order to sell it again at an even more inflated price, occurred to nobody but me. I took to the river to wait things out.
The experience was all rather humdrum, and mixed in with the usual bleakness which accompanies events of national scarcity. There was no, to my knowledge, great exaltation at the lifting of digital fetters. The usual pettiness, envy and irascibility that characterises the Spanish mass were on full display, its colours and strokes slightly exaggerated by the urgency of the situation2. The defects of the Englishman are hypocrisy and depression. Finding these defects absent in the Spaniard, we often assume that they have none, confusing the absence of our own defects for the absence of defects in general.
It is an attractive idea to think that the Spanish live more authentically; it gives one an ideal to aim for. The implication is that if a blackout occurred in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon country the reaction would have been far more neurotic and inhibited. The Spanish themselves are fond of presenting to the world an image of themselves as thinly-civilised savages, incapable (or undesirous) of the good timekeeping and moral rigidity required to sustain the Protestant work ethic. Ostensibly a self-critique in which they frame themselves as something approximating Africa’s half-European cousin, what they really mean to say is this: they know how to live well better than we do, and are probably better at dancing.
Along the river people were drinking themselves into a daytime stupor. Before anyone could get decently soused news was already coming in that lights were appearing in the city centre, and that they would be making their way to our peripheral neighbourhood soon enough. We began to slouch up the hill.
The Japanese Ambassador
Bucking convention, I have decided to reserve the worst of my writing for paid subscribers. I am a vain man, and if I write something good I would rather that as many people see it as possible than be paid for it. For that reason, and because no respectable publication will touch me, I generally publish my writing for free.
My translation
Allow me the distinction between the average Spaniard and the Spanish Mass. That is: el hombre masa