Among some of my more esoteric collections of photo’ albums, is one entitled ‘GrottyDay + TheMingin’Weathers’.* It resides between ‘Masquerade + TheFaces’ and ‘Melodic + TheMusikMak’rs’. It’s not so much a collective of late ‘sixties pop groups as a commentary on past encounters. The former initiated by that thousand-day pandemical interruption, the latter by a piece of Peruvian street art: an indigenous lady planting musical notation in the soil.
“In Spain, the rain falls mainly on the plains”, might once have been the oft quoted mantra of GB Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’, but given the vagaries of today’s climatically divergent patterns, no longer holds true. We’ve traveled the length of those plains, eight weeks, and haven’t needed to resort to serious wet weather kit; that is, until we reach the Atlantic coast.
Inclement weather wandering can be illuminating. Granite cobbles are best photographed when wet, sunlessness removes any intrusive shadows that can bifurcate and despoil a piece of street art, as well as a chance to meditate on a national predilection for umbrella usage.
Of the album’s pictures featuring umbrellas, over half are Spanish in origin, a figure that has to be a fair measure for their ubiquity. For the wet day they are the required uniform.
It’s a somewhat surreal mind memory. A group of ‘kiwi’ travelers are celebrating their new year (time zones place them eighteen hours ahead of the local populace), when I hear him coming down the street. “Parasol…. parasol…. parasol….”. A streetmonger calling his wares, impervious to the revels, selling sun-shading umbrellas in a Guatemalan highlands town, only for a squall of rain to sweep down from the high ground. “Parasol… parasol… paragüas… paragüas”. Such a neat, instant lexical swerve. The day moves on, now it’s the Australians’ turn to count down to ‘the bells’ and the brief shower to pass, only I can’t tell, if at what point his sales banter reverted back to “parasol”. Possibly he had sold out, for a Latin without their umbrella is like a sun shaft without its shadow.
Dressed in black, he’s making his way down the treacherous, slick limestone pavement, both hands grappling with a rebellious umbrella. Gobbets of wash are being hurled off the pantile roofs and rain is being driven down the deep defiles of the narrow street. He turns the corner only to find that the tempest has found another thoroughfare, another angle to assault from, only for the boisterous brolly to have a tantrum and do exactly as you would expect; it disintegrates. In these conditions, I’m at a loss to see the advantage of such apparel, unless it’s land based training for windsurfing.
Further on down the street to find a bin sprouting one wind-wreaked brolly. I’ll score three more similar images by the day’s end.
Many Spanish cities have their own winter artisanal market, temporary wooden booths selling locally crafted jewellery, ceramics, leather and cork work, with always one artisan offering paragüa-sols. Brightly coloured canopies, graphics of summertime, but when the day turns to damp and there’s a need for their deployment, they miraculously turn to somber and gloom. Black brollies are de rigueur.
With that first sign of falling vapour, the street sprouts molluscs of glistening clam shells, congregations of canopies are clustered around the lotto stand whilst the under-prepared visitors, fresh off the cruise boat in their shorts and flip-flops shiver under the town hall’s porticos. It’s then that I see that a dangerous apparition is coming straight towards me. A spiked brolly, held ‘en guard’, propelled by two woollen-clad spindle-shanked legs, towing a shopping cart, ploughing a path down the middle of the street. Everybody and everything gets out of her way, she’s taking no prisoners. Boudicca’s grandmother is going to the store.
She might be passive-aggressive, but she’s not the true danger. It’s the spatially ignorant, who try to skewer your eyeball with the prongs of their umbrella, whom you need to avoid. Strangely, there isn’t a street trader selling safety goggles just when you need them.
It’s now that the cathedrals offer polythene bags for your dribbling bumbershoot, the supermarkets wheel out the carousel of furled gamps and the castor-shod Holstein cow** dons its own rainwear. Prompts for a sale, a sale of umbrellas that come with their own inevitably problematic life expectancies.
Another grand plaza, another pavement plaque, of another wind-wreaked brolly.
Black bowler hat, precision furled umbrella, station platform, the 8.21 up to town. The uniform of an early second Elizabethan Home Counties business gentleman. A graphic metaphor for a past age. With the exception of the golf course and the wedding venue, the umbrella has lost all of its prestige and much of its presence in the UK. Not so Spain.
Sumptuary laws. In the main prescriptions for appropriate clothing materials and their hierarchical colours, ostensibly regulations to control the moral economies, regulate excessive consumption and control trade. Today governments just use taxes, tariffs and the ban on paper straws.
The real reason for these laws were simple; to keep women and the plebeians in their appointed place.
One of the earliest written edicts comes from the early Greeks, which instructs ‘a freed woman to only be abroad with but one slave, unless she be drunk’. From Scots history comes the proclamation for the illegality of kilt wearing after the Jacobite rebellions and in the mid 16th century, the papal decrees restricting umbrella usage to prelates, priests and popes.
Historical references suggest that most of these controlling efforts were either occasionally brutally enforced or more generally just ignored. The plebs arguing that the control of excessive consumption should start with the courts of royalty and so stuck a metaphorical finger up at the elites.
All of which is a preamble to pondering as to why or how the umbrella remained such a prominent part of one culture yet disappeared from another.
Possibly those liturgical restrictions might have had some bearing, more likely is the fact that in all of these historical towns it’s simpler, quicker and easier to walk. In the UK’s instance the motor car with its steel carapace might have supplanted the paragüa, and with its air-con the parasol. In other instances it has not.
*Postscript: The Mingin’Weather album was initiated on a visit to an older Dundee. Plyboard hoardings surrounded the under construction V+A museum, which were adorned with a gallery of picture graphics and strip cartoons. The extended comic-clan of DC Thomson’s publishing world, from Minnie the Minx to Korky the Cat, Pa Broon to Oor Wullie all got an airing, as well as this plea to an older, pre-breathable-waterproof age.
**Postscript 2.0: Ale-Hop retailers, the shops with that black and white cow, are the places to go for the things you know you don’t need. Like a table top ‘poo curling rink’, a pink heart shaped bed for that risqué room in a doll’s house and a rainbow mono-horn on every conceivable animalistic stuffed toy. And umbrellas.
