I love Spain. Sometimes I look out over our terrace and I can’t quite believe that I have come to land in such a beautiful spot. Everyday I get to drive up and down the mountain I feel in amongst it and much closer to nature than I ever have before. As I walk through town on a warm spring day I think how lucky I am to live in such a sunny, vibrant place. And then it happens, then I tread in a huge and inglourious pile of dogturd.
Our town is overrun with stray dogs and of course dog shit. I don’t know if this is common throughout the rest of Spain (suspect that it is), and I am not doing a survey, but I find this part of life here hard to understand. There are no penalties* here for letting your dog foul the pavement and who are you going to fine anyway with so many strays? Our town has a great plaza, where kids can run around and play, and grownups can sit around and watch, but one must always be alive to the threat of dogturd.
Or poodog as Bibsey calls it.
I am slightly pathological about the stuff. Can you tell? And it was oh so much worse when Bibsey was really little. You know what kids are like, always scrabbling about in the dirt and transferring it to their cake holes WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY FINE AS LONG AS IT ISN’T SHIT.
Bibs is still very nervous of dogs. I know, she gets it from me as many people, obviously only those with some kind of psychology qualification, helpfully point out. I have transferred my fear onto her. So when we are in the plaza and a pack of apparently free-to-roam hounds lopes towards her she panics. People will tell me that the ‘answer’ would be to get a dog of our own. Hmm, maybe we will one day, but for now, how about get these dogs (some of them the size of horses) off the streets?
Seriously Spain, sort your shit out!
This post title was inspired by Tarantino’s Inglourious Bastards
I am blogging from AtoZ throughout April but feeling a bit ranty and tired tonight. I could go on about dog turd but I should really wrap up some birthday presents for the Bibble Bot and then go to bed to dream dreams of clean streets and polite dogs.
*Mr B has just reminded me that last summer a letter from the Alcalde was distributed asking people to clean up after their dogs and only put their rubbish out at night during the hot months. The message was clear: tourists don’t like smelly rubbish and they sure as shit don’t like inglourious dogturd!
