FRANKLY GENERAL FRANCO

It was a work of utter imagination.

Nevertheless, it was the closest thing that my father could get to a British workers' newspaper in fascist Spain in Torremolinos on a Wednesday morning in 1971 in between two miners' strikes and a change of occupation that would see him move from butcher to bingo caller to bus driver to bricklayer and builder of stone fireplaces in half of the council houses in Walton, Fazakerley, Kirkby and beyond, yet nowhere near third millennium Blade Runner post-Brexit Britain, where the pedestrianized malls of the South East are splayed with Hong Kongese-speaking third-generation Catalan Republicans who can't believe how cheap Primark is, or how the locals can eat that crap that makes them so fat, or why their parents insist that they come to Cambridge to acquire a globalized language that they must embrace as if their livelihoods depended on it, now that the civil war no longer rages on the streets of Barcelona where the newly blonded Messi avoids tackles and taxes, and now that the near-midget Generalissimo's humongous cojones have shrunk to the size of chick peas, pulses that the tourist guiris wouldn't touch with a barge pole, even if deprived of Watney's Red Barrel, bacon & eggs, fish & chips and their page three stunner from Pinner, when Middlesex was just a place outside London and not a gender. 

I was eight. And at eight you can't imagine nearly 40 years of dictated repression because at eight you can't imagine nearly 40 years of anything. Period. So I ordered a 7-Up and a strange banana-shaped sweet bread known as a croissante. Later that afternoon I would binge on American champagne (Coca Cola) and cop hold of the mother of all sun strokes that would restrict me to the recently Poly-fillered quarters of the hotel for days. 

In the bar by the pool, my father opened the popular tabloid that, verbally and pictorially, was to spend the following 40-odd years assaulting his class, his city and his life partner's sex. Ordinarily, he'd have opted for a Daily Mirror or a Liverpool Daily Post, but sun seekers on the Costa del Sol can't be choosers. This wasn't Liverpool 4. This was Torremolinos Fase II.

Though the news was that there was a hotel guest who'd driven all the way to Malaga in his tiny hired SEAT 600 just to get yesterday's Daily Express, in those days a respectable broadsheet where the broads and the nipples were kept under wraps. 

Yet, whether we like it or not, the words and the pictures come out and they do stuff. Then, as now. Sometimes the weapons are words. Sometimes it's just the pictures, the poisonous influence of pictures, even if The British Sun came out two days late in these parts. 

The past was covered, but the future is a dangerous business. It's difficult to look into the future when you're eight and the present is already 48-hours old. These days, 45 years on, I try to face forward, look into the present and inhabit the moment. But lapses into historical record are the living link to the now. And my current past is a 1936 Catalonian anarchy fantasy that escapes the total control fetish that defines the present age where a directionless, uncontrollable brutality bubbles beneath and above the surface of anti-socially mediated realism. 

In Aleppo, this is just so much Western blah blah blah blah, as yet another child is wheeled into an underground hospital with her left foot on her chest and her intestines hanging out for all to see. 

But this kind of talk is censured from within. 

Meanwhile, a 19-year-old from Cumbria with the correct curvaceous corpora, who hoped smiling at the camera while showing off her God-givens to the boys would progress her future, caught the eye of the 28-year-old brickie from North Liverpool, as was its designed intent. She was no booby. The boobies are the boys that ogle and leer and jeer and learn to objectify before they can talk or work or think.

Yet something was amiss with the cheery miss. 

As I swigged at my 7-Up, it became as clear as my continental lemonade that something was up. Had Lieutenant General Jaime Milans del Bosch mobilized his tank divisions on the empty streets of Valencia a dozen years too early? Had tri-cornered-hat-wearing Civil Guard officer, Coronel Antonio Tejero's abortive military putsch been brought forward a decade? Had Arthur Scargill led the British workers to a glorious syndicalist revolution on the promise of a four-day weekend with full terms and conditions, time and a half Saturdays, double time Sundays and half-day closing on a Wednesday for re-education and Yorkshire tea? But what did I know. Nada. I was eight and I knew 7-Up was foreign for pop. That's all I knew.

Though I also knew that if I hunched my right shoulder forward, dragged my left foot behind me and drawled like Charles Laughton in a desperate quandary with Maureen O'Hara the same year that Franco captured Barcelona, I could pass for Quasimodo and earn the validation of my parents. That's all I knew. Page three was a foreign land back then.

Page three, however, had grabbed my father's attention more than usually. What was wrong with cheerful Cheryl from Carlisle, her clear skin and perfectly formed breasts that had caused my father so much fascination and forced the Fascist Catholic hierarchy to act and redact?

The pesetas. The Americanos. The palm trees. The straw donkeys. The sangreeya. The Drifters. The Barcardi and cokes. The cicadas. The flamenco. The senyoritas. The guitaristas. The garlic. The olive oil. Miguel at the bar. The por favors. The mix intoxicated and incapacitated. But this was beyond the palo.

- Pat. Pat. Look at this!

What was going on? He was sharing Page Three with his missus, my mother, the woman who four years later, on the very day that the anti-sexual discrimination legislation came into force to make it legitimate, would waltz into the local Working Men's Conservative Association bar and with almost Hispanic brazenness would order two gin & tonics for her and a friend and down a toast to the end of male bastions of shiny-buttoned, blazered stuffiness under Winston Churchill's portrait 33 years after he committed heinous war crimes on fascist-controlled civilians in another darkly censored reality.

- Wha'? 

- The paper. Look.

- What are you showing me that for?

- Look at her tits!

- You wha'?

- The tits. They're blacked out.

Sure enough. The heavily inked bar across the breasts of the glamorous young miss from Cumberland obliterated nipples in the name of an imposed appropriacy that the clerical military junta dictated as normative, until the day the bastard son of a free-thinking philanderer from Galicia perished and the free Spanish press went topless loco in the name of social democracy and freedom.

- Ooh! said my mother. 'I like this Franco.'

Good quality counter-narrative content comes in many forms. As they say in the Foreign Office.