Wifi & The Watertower

It's raining cats and blogs in Britain, our daughter Arabella tells us on the phone. It's lovely limpid late autumn sunshine here. Our ambitious young lady mayor, Rafi, has pledged that every village in her mayoralty will have broadband by the end of 2007.
A shiny new aerial + radio communications dish has already sprouted as though by magic on top of the rust-stained concrete water-tower which overlooks our end of Las Pinedas village. The pines of Las Pinedas having long gone to build a succession of hapless armadas for the never-to-be accomplished invasion of Britain, the water tower is the one surviving tall growth for miles around. Mains water is nowadays piped in under pressure to our houses so there is no longer any need for the tower to be filled to produce a head to drive water to our taps.. It is a matter for quiet relief that there are not now some 30,000 litres of water poised up there in the cone-and-shallow-cylinder tank like a liquid sword of Damocles, ready to be released over our heads by the first earth-tremor strong enough to snap one of the rusty reinforcing rods visibly exposed to the elements in the surface of the concrete. The tower speaks grimly of the distant days of General Franco's doomed autarky - his attempt after the Civil war to make Spain economically self-sufficient, independent from the outside world for goods and services - meagre design, poor materials, a fatalistic approach to security - even empty of waterr the gaunt structure the height of three houses is yearly getting weaker and will eventually have to come down or (since this is Spain) will maybe simply fall down, crushing the cars and dwelling at is feet.
Meanwhile, for all its ugly enormity, it has somehow weathered into the landscape. Every autumn flocks of departing house-martins spend a day flying obsessively around it and clutching themselves to its surfaces - claws locked into cracks in the vertical concrete - as though fixing it in the collective memory for the return migration next year. What will they make of the space-age construction now glinting in the sunlight up there when they arrive next spring? For that matter what are we to make of it? - Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or is it WiFi? I unhook my computer from a landline and carry it out into the garden, turning on the wireless facility which I last used in my office in Bath. The screen stays blank. If it really is WiFi up there (they call it 'wiffy' in Spain) all I can think is that someone has not yet quite got round to switching it on. But then, even in modern hi-tech Spain, mañana is always another day.

NT: 07/12/2007