San Fermin - Acts of Man

All cultures have their detritus. Some of it left over from less civilised times is filed alongside art, poetry and song under the catch-all term 'tradition'. In Scotland, we managed to get rid of fox-hunting but still allow our moorlands and hills to be ravaged so a few rich folk can come here and shoot some tame birds. We even have a golf club that - bizarrely in the year 2013 - doesn't admit women. Worse still, a course like Muirfield is still selected for a major championship.

Another sick 'tradition' that deserves to be binned is the San Fermin bull run. In the traditional Basque city of Pamplona or Iruñea in the indigenous tongue thousands of locals, Spaniards, Australians, Americans and Brits gather to slaughter and get slaughtered.

That's entertainment.

It's not just the bulls that are treated like lumps of flesh.

The tide seems to be turning against this barbarity though, both in Spain and in the Basque Country.

The 'Antitaurinos'

Protests are imaginative, graphic and multilingual.

Donostia/ San Sebastian

And the music which captures the moronism that surfaces here and in most cultures? The words come from the pen and genius of Scott Hutchison and Frightened Rabbit. Acts of Man:

I am that dickhead in the kitchen
Giving wine to your best girl's glass
I am the amateur pornographer
Unpleasant publisher by hand

Not here, not here, heroic acts of man
Not here, not here, heroic acts of man

I see the stumbling pinstriped trouser
Flecks of sick on an office shoe
Part of the fatty British average
Who lives in the houses around you

Not here, not here, heroic acts of man
Not here, not here, heroic acts of man

Let's all crowd 'round the cowering body
Throw stocky fingers, bricks and stones
Let's promise every girl we marry
We'll always love them when we probably won't

While the knight in shitty armour
Rips the drunk out of her dress
One man tears into another
Hides a coward's heart in a lion's chest

Man, he breeds although he shouldn't
He's breeding just because he comes
Acts the father for a minute
Till the worst instincts return

Not here, not here, heroic acts of man
Not here, not here, heroic acts of man

I have never wanted more, to be your man
And build a house around you
I am just like all the rest of them
Sorry, selfish, trying to improve