Spain Again

SPAIN AGAIN traces the development of a fictional heroine, Sally Sinclair, who travels to Spain during Franco's time to teach english. She finds herself in a different language and world of new smells, colors and people. The characters she meets in the book represent a wide spectrum of the Spanish society mixed with a variety of British teachers.Throughout the tumultuous following years she becomes the managing director of her own company. Left in the lurch by her partners, facing financial ruin in an unknown business environment, she finally achieves her dream of buying a house in the mountains overlooking the city where she lives.
More than being depicted as a skillful or ruthless business woman her success is attributed to a series of chance events and opportunities. She is portrayed as an individual tossed and turned by the winds of Fortune on a stormy background of social change.Her development parallels that of Spain's throughout its years of socio-culturaland economic upheaval as it emerged from forty years of dictatorship. These changes led to Spain's entry into NATO and the European Common Market and caused a massive change in its society. Business boomed on all sides. There was a gold rush! Agricultural companies formed large cooperatives to export produce all over Europe and worldwide. Tourism, and its related businesses, became a major part of the Spanish economy. In one generation Spain awoke from its almost rural slumbers and burst into new worlds and language learning. Everybody needed to speak English! We may all be Fortune's fools on the winds of change, but perhaps some individuals or countries as a whole navigate those winds better than others. Caught up in a whirlwind of opportunities perhaps Sally's success was inevitable, but perhaps she rode the wave she found, she took her chances, but at least she had them! What chance of success in Europe or the world do young Brits have today. Brexit has ruined the freedom of movement and free enterprise which was the road to riches that the new generation of Europeans had. Whatever happened to theirs being the world and everything in it. Britain lives in a nationalistic nightmare where falsity reigns. We have bags of "British carrots", written in large red letters when "grown in Spain" is in small black print on the back. Ice cubes of "British water" and British passports made in France. The British people don't seem to realize the thousands of business in Europe that Brexit has ruined: the thousands of bankruptcies and families split and broken it has caused.
When sally arrived in Spain being British was respected, today it is not. To a great extent the Spain Sally discovered doesn't exist today. The stereotyped image of the clear blue waters along the golden beaches of the Mediterranean coastline has also been ruined. The crystalline Mar Menor where Sally swam with seahorses has become a stagnant polluted lagoon with putrid waters and fish dying through lack of oxygen. Dead fish float and rot along the shoreline. The over populated La Manga Beach, now more like Miami, with its consequent effluents along with those running off the from the fields, fertilizers from the non-stop year round agricultural planting, have long lost beaches of golden sand.What there is, is surrounded by miles of hotels all along the coast.Those field, once so full of Almond Blossom in the spring, are now full of solar panels. Spanish cities are surrounded by ring roads and such heavy traffic that it is hard to see them through the smog.And Ibiza, well, they paved paradise...
At the end of the novel Sally finds herself in another brave new world. She....Ahh. but that would be telling. Follow her romances and love affairs and discover, as she does, that not only all that glitters is not gold but that you should be careful what you wish for. Perhaps it's just another dream, another paradise lost, but here, today, with Spain on fire, it's a reality.