Since March the whole affair has travelled full circle.

At the end of last week the Government official known as the Secretary of State for the Sea, Juan Carlos Martín Fragueiro, announced in Malaga that no chiringuito would be obliged to move from the sand. I doubt Fragueiro realised just how much of a commotion he was about to cause when back in March he pointed out that his Department was going to make sure that the famous Coasts Law was complied with and that meant that nothing was allowed to be built on the sand.

Did anybody really think that the Costa del Sol’s chiringuitos would all disappear? Wouldn’t it be a little paradoxical to clear everything off the beaches in the name of environment protection when the concrete strip on the other side of the promenade stretches for miles and miles inland, leaving little breathing space for trees and gardens? After all, if people are looking for virgin beaches they know very well not to come to the Costa del Sol for their holidays.

At least this year’s controversy has hopefully served to regularise the concessions, licences and permits granted to the chiringuito owners, who can now settle down to concentrate on serving up their traditional fish dishes to the summer tourists.

Right now I can imagine thousands of holidaymakers enjoying their freshly roasted sardines, many of them blissfully unaware that until very recently the future of the tables and chairs they are sitting on was decidedly shaky.

The news we read and hear every day only emphasises how the place where someone is born and the culture they were brought up in defines their identity. However different the citizens of a country appear to be from each other within that country, once on foreign soil they have much more in common than they thought.

Here on the Costa del Sol where people of different nationalities have been living together for years our countries of origin are still used to define our identities, however “Spanish” our lifestyles and customs have become. If that wasn’t the case “She’s French” or “He’s Argentinian” would not be the first thing we say when describing a new acquaintance.

So this brings me to the tragic death of the man – the British man – following a late night fight outside a bar in Cómpeta earlier this month. However the incident started (the police seem to be getting somewhere at last – two are behind bars) no one has had any doubt that it was a conflict between a group of Spaniards and a group of British residents or holidaymakers. Cómpeta, a town that has always attracted foreigners and where many people of different nationalities happily live side by side, normally without any problems, became a battlefield with two very distinct armies.

The youngsters involved in the scuffle that got way out of hand would probably find they had a lot in common if they sat down together under different circumstances: sports, TV programmes, music, cars, computer games, etc …. But differences caused by nationality, culture and language seem to lead to hostility more easily than to friendship.

About the same time we read about the Bolivian man who lost an arm in a machine while working in a bakery. His boss left him outside the hospital, telling him to say he had simply had an accident, before throwing the severed arm in the rubbish and cleaning the machine in question. The victim, not a legal resident, was working with no contract and making no social security payments. In this case the language and cultural barriers were probably smaller, but the fact that the worker was of a different nationality meant that his bosses thought they could treat him like a second class citizen.

If only there was a way that personality could get through before our impression and treatment of others is influenced by their nationality.

“Abortion worse than abuse, says Spanish Cardinal” reads the headline, whose correctness was disputed in one of the comments. What the Cardinal actually said, after apologising on behalf of the Church for the abuse suffered by 35,000 children in over 200 schools in Ireland, was that what might have happened in a few schools was “not comparable to the millions of lives destroyed by abortion”.

He’s right, the two situations cannot be compared. They are completely separate. So why bring them up in the same breath if it was not to say that physically and psychologically abusing children was nothing compared with having an abortion? And would he have brought the issue up at all if the abortion law reform bill was not currently being debated in Spain’s parliament?

Incidentally another comment by Berry Prinsen said “Amazing that the hierarchy of a two thousand year old club of ageing misogynists still get that much attention in the press for their peculiar beliefs.” These thoughts have often gone through my mind when I have read through pages and pages written as a result of comments made by Catholic leaders. Why do they bother us so much? Because we know that the Catholic Church still has a great influence over much of the Spanish population and too much of an influence over the country’s lawmakers.

Back to abortion, though, ending a pregnancy is difficult decision that only the woman involved can make, preferably with the support of her loved ones. Generalisations should not be made as all the individual circumstances are different. However someone has to do the difficult job of making the laws and setting the goalposts.

The value of an embryo after 12 weeks of gestation is clearly an issue that has been and will be debated by church people, scientists and society in general for a long time to come. When does an embryo start being a human being? When does an embryo start suffering like a human being? We don’t know. How much do young boys suffer when they are raped and psychologically tormented by the only figures of authority they have to turn to? They know. How do they feel when they see the Catholic Church offer an apology in one breath and then trivialise the issue by pointing their fingers at a “much more serious” crime in the next? Perhaps someone should ask them.

On the subject of human beings, Rafael Nadal has really gone out of his way to prove he is one this weekend. A couple of weeks ago I was pleased that he had lost to Federer to show that he was made of flesh and blood and not some unbeatable bionic tennis machine. But that was enough to convince us; we didn’t need him to go so far as to get knocked out even before the quarter-finals of the French Open!

The problem is that since that 2007 Wimbledon final, men’s tennis has started to get plain boring with Nadal winning everything left, right and centre.

The intial pride in a Spaniard doing so well started to wear off as he lifted every single trophy going and then bit into them for the cameras. (One of these days he’s going to break a tooth out of over-enthusiasm, I’m sure of it).

Then came Federer’s tears in Australia in February, making many of us think that the Swiss player’s best tennis days were over. That is why, when I saw that he was Nadal’s opponent in Sunday’s final in Madrid, that I decided that he had to win. Rafa Nadal needs rivals with a serious chance of beating him otherwise we’re all going to lose interest in the tournaments to come.

Maybe this was just a one-off. Maybe Nadal is saving himself for Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Maybe Federer was just lucky that Rafa was tired after his close shave in the semi against Djokovic. Whatever the case now the Mallorca star is no longer unbeatable – perhaps I’ll root for him again next time.

The difference is that we clever human beings invented globalisation, intercontinental travel, high speed transport and massive social gatherings so when we catch one of these ‘flu variations we spread it around the world in no time at all.

The problem now lies with the authorities. If they show concern they are in danger of being labelled alarmist and responsible for mass hysteria when there was really no need. If they tell people there is nothing to worry about they could be responsible for not taking enough precautions and for more people being taken ill. And it’s not just what the Health Minister (in Spain’s case a brand new one) says in a press conference but how she says it; a variation in her tone of voice could be enough to have everyone rushing out to the chemist to buy a mask.

When everyone was worried about mad cow disease the then Health Minister and former Mayor of Malaga, Celia Villalobos, got into trouble (and eventually lost her job) for telling everyone to go out and buy their bones from the butcher and make a good stew.

At the moment the Government is advising us not to travel to Mexico. The now 20 people possibly affected in this country have all returned from that country in the last few days. How much this will cost travel agents, and the Mexican tourism industry, I don’t know.

When cows, birds or swine catch infectious diseases they can be isolated and even destroyed and fellow pigs on the other side of the world, or on the next farm for that matter, are none the wiser. Human beings however can carry infections across the planet in no time. But the news, and the alarm, spreads even faster.

Let’s hope that this scare dies out as quickly as the others did, remaining only as fuel for the opposition to use in their criticism of the government’s action, which will inevitably be either too much or too little.

The decision that has caught everyone’s attention has been the one that has brought Rosa Aguilar, until this week the Izquierda Unida Mayor of Cordoba, into the Junta de Andalucía. In just a few hours Aguilar has broken away from her party and her City Hall to take over the reins of the Public Works Department in Seville. The move has irritated IU: despite her recent differences with the party’s Andalusian leaders, Aguilar was one of the few remaining faces of Izquierda Unida that a majority of ordinary citizens would recognise. It’s clear that just as Griñán has chosen her for her personal qualities rather than her party, the people of Cordoba have been voting for her as their Mayor since 1999 for the same reasons.

Described as a tireless, courageous and committed worker, Rosa Aguilar has managed to keep the city of Cordoba in the hands of Izquierda Unida during a decade in which support for the left wing coalition has been falling away left, right and centre. When the next municipal elections come around it seems unlikely that the new Mayor will have the initials IU after his or her name.

In the mid 1990s Izquierda Unida was Spain’s third political force behind the PP and the PSOE under the leadership of a charismatic Julio Ánguita, who incidentally had also been Mayor of Cordoba. Most students and left-wing leaners I knew back then voted for them and in the 1996 general elections they won 21 seats in the Spanish Congress.

Whether it was the fact that Julio Anguita stepped down as leader, or the idea that a left-wing vote was more useful in the the hands of the Socialists to get rid of the PP, that caused their downfall (or a combination of both) I don’t know, but in 2008 the seats in Congress occupied by the IU initials had dwindled down to a very poor two. Now the departure of Rosa Aguilar, one of their best known representatives, does not bode well for the coaliton.

Meanwhile the skills of the former Mayor of Cordoba will hopefully be put to good use to the benefit of all Andalusians. Let’s see whether she can make the Malaga Metro go a bit faster.

The reshuffle has also seen the exit of the Minister of Development of the last five years, Malaga’s own Magdalena Álvarez.

The local headlines inform us of the records Álvarez has broken: first by being the first woman to be responsible for the Ministry of Development (or Public Works as it used to be called); and then by building more kilometres of high speed railway line and motorway than any of her predecessors. And all without taking her eye off her home land - her ministry has spent no less than 6,000 million euros in the province of Malaga since she took the reins after the general election of 2004.

Meanwhile her known enemy, the President of the region of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre, turned up at the ministerial hand-over ceremony to get in her final attack on Álvarez as Minister, accusing her of  “suffocating” Madrid, of spending zero euros on new projects. For once Malaga feels contented and Madrid deprived when it comes to Government spending. What Magdalena appears to have done is to help relieve the sensation that Malaga has of always playing catch-up behind Spain’s other big cities.

So what’s next for Magdalena?  Rumours are already buzzing around. Chaves’s departure has left vacancies at the Junta de Andalucía, where Álvarez was once responsible for the economy. Others suggest that the planned merger between Unicaja and Cajasol, to create one great Andalusian savings bank, with throw up career opportunities for the now ex-Minister.  Finally the PSOE is still without a clear candidate to stand for Mayor of Malaga in the next municipal election. The question marks are there.

We can be sure that we will be seeing more of Magdalena in Malaga. And as she well knows, her journey home will only take two and a half hours.

What we do know is that this week’s celebrations have a pull powerful enough to make thousands of people, of all ages walk for hours wearing hoods with just two holes cut out for their eyes, or endure the pain, or at least discomfort, of carrying heavy images on their shoulders or backs way into the early hours of the morning – some with bare feet, others with their eyes blindfolded. Religious devotion perhaps but if all these thousands of people were regulars at mass the area’s churches would be overflowing.

However it is clear that the participants in the Semana Santa processions are driven by more than just tradition or culture. No tradition that requires such great effort or suffering would survive without the faith factor. Faith in what? God, Jesús el Cautivo or the Virgen del Rocío? What does it matter? Call it what you like. The important thing is a belief in someone or something to help you through difficult times. The crowds following Malaga’s famous Cautivo or the ‘trono’ bearers with their blindfolds on are either giving thanks for something good that has happened to them, asking for help with a challenge ahead or praying for a sick or troubled friend or relative. A little bit of outside help never goes amiss. Who cares whether others like to argue about whether it is devotion or superstition, folklore or whatever?

The Semana Santa celebrations hold something special that encourages thousands to repeat a ritual year after year with great passion; something, call it what you like, that merits our respect.

Now they seem to have raised so much money that they have enough to spend on another campaign, this time with a more political edge to it. The Government has announced the details of its long-awaited reform to the abortion law in Spain. The Church has reacted by coming up with an eye-catching poster in which we can see a baby crawling alongside a picture of an Iberian lynx.

The lynx enjoys more protection than a human being, it tells us – well not really more than the particular human being in the picture whose umbilical link with his mother was definitely cut more than six months ago. Smaller, at the top of the page we see pictures of the human embryo at different stages of gestation. We have been promised to expect from next week to see the lynx and the baby on billboards, posters and leaflets as well as hearing radio advertisements where, instead of the pictures, we are treated the sounds apparently made by a lynx next to the cries of a baby.

There’s nothing wrong with anti-abortionists campaigning against the reform bill. There’s nothing wrong with the Catholic Church telling its followers its opinion on the issue. However to be constantly asking for funds and then announcing what must be a very expensive advertising campaign against a government legal reform doesn’t seem quite right somehow.

But then the Pope has just told thousands of Africans that condoms do not help prevent the spread of Aids, to the frustration of hundreds of aid workers trying to distribute this life-saving precaution.

The lynx in the poster, which apparently has turned out not to be of the Iberian variety but a Euro-Asian one, has given much of Spain something to chuckle about this week; an anecdote really compared with the irresponsibility of the Pope’s message in Africa.

Demolition has started on the Golf Río Real development, which has received more publicity since it appeared at the top of the illegal construction black list than its promoters could ever have dreamed of when they drew up the plans. We ought to make the most of the scene because it is unlikely to be repeated very often – it looks like this is one of just two illegal developments built during the GIL regime that will end up being flattened. The rest promise to remain standing as resilient symbols of 15 years of abuse by local governments that made up the rules as they went along and, in the main, got away with it.

From the tower blocks of Marbella we move across to the Axarquía, worlds apart but with so much in common. There the changes of the last 15 years have been more discreet; a new white dot appeared on the landscape every so often but the horizon was never blotted out by a continuous line of cranes. However in both Marbella and Alcaucín (and clearly in more Town Halls that inevitably will come to light with time) someone was sitting in an office signing pieces of paper that should never have been signed, in exchange (allegedly, as always) for brown envelopes passed under the table.

Last night I saw on the news that there has been a huge auction to sell off construction machinery – cranes, concrete mixers, diggers, lorries, etc. – in Castellón. The images showed row upon row of machines that just a few years ago would have been working away on building sites all over Spain and have now been left redundant. Many of them were expected to be bought by foreigners and shipped off to new climes, leaving behind them the bricks they have helped to lay as a sign of more prosperous, but somewhat unlawful, times.