Home and Huntingdon

Before we lived in Culebrón home was Huntingdon. My mum still lives there. So, when Maggie had a few days off work we flew back to the UK for a long weekend with my mum.

We had a really good time.

We (that means me) shopped for all those things we either can't get in Spain (Brylcreem, a Dutch hoe) or those things that are so much cheaper in the UK (Yorkshire Tea Bags) whilst Maggie just shopped. She's certain that clothes in the UK are nicer than those in Spain and she wandered around the M&S food section drooling.

Better even than shopping was seeing people and the kindness that people showed to us. My brother in law, John, drove us to and from the airport. John and Claire Morrison took great care of us all weekend and suggested a great money making idea that you may hear about in future. I got plenty of time with my mum and Maggie met with one of her old workmates, Cilla.

On Saturday my sister, Tracey, John and their lads Matthew and James turned up to see us at a local boozer. More surprising and very touching was that the three people I used to work with in St Ives also turned up - Sue, Janine and Tricia - they all looked healthier, younger and trendier than when I last saw them. It just goes to show that leaving work wasn't just a good move for me! In fact everyone in the list (except Cilla) was there.


It was very cold in the UK but it was probably more comfortable than winter has been in Spain. In Culebron it's generally sunnier and warmer during the daytime but at night it's cold and we have difficulty keeping warm. We've also had too many damp days recently. In Huntingdon it was cold outside all the time and I was really chilled to the bone a couple of times but inside it was much more comfy with all those nice thick carpets and heaters.

England was also very,very expensive. It's a good job that everyone bought us beers and fed us or we would have gone very hungry and thirsty!

No doubt about it though that as we got off the aeroplane at Alicante we felt like we were coming home after a holiday rather than landing as exiles and it was good to get back to the house and the cats even if the house was cold and the cats fractious.

Look at "Arthur Askey"

25 years ago (in 1981) there was an attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Spain. 

I've always liked the story about the King going on tele and telling the Guardia and Army to get back to barracks but my favourite character in all this is the balding chap at the bottom right of the photo with his back to us, the one who looks like Arthur Askey. He was called General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado and he was deputy PM at the time. 

When Lt. Colonel Tejero, the man with the patent leather hat and the pistol, told him to get on the floor, unlike nearly all the other MPs, Gutiérrez refused and he told the Lieutenant Colonel, in no uncertain terms where to stick his pistol. He pointed out that he was a General and outranked Tejero to whom he gave the order to surrender. In the end all Tejero could do was to ignore the General. 

 Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado must have been one tough cookie.

Moving Images

My car was broken into in Elche at the tail end of 2004 and, amongst other things they pinched my camera. Since then I've been using Maggie's 2.1 megapixel thingy. Anyway, El Pais, the newspaper, was offering a digital video camera for 99€, or actually 129€ with the memory card, plus fifteen tokens. I collected the tokens and, on Saturday, I collected the camera. Now I wonder if it's possible to load video to this blog?

Small Town Life

I was pottering about Pinoso today for one reason or another.

I had to go and put some money in the bank for my boss. I didn't have an account number but when I went in the bank they just did it, they knew the man, they knew his business and they knew his account number.

Driving down a side street in town I had to give way to a car coming the other way. The car stopped and the driver wound down her window to say hello to me. It was one of the members of the local neighbourhood association.

In the Post Office the postie asked me if I could drop off the mail for our next door neighbour to save him the trip as I would be going there anyway.

I put an advert on the local TV station asking if anyone fancied swapping English conversation for Spanish conversation. I got two replies within half an hour of the advert going on and I met one of the people, Reme, this afternoon. Ah, she said, I've seen your car driving around. It's a very pretty car.

It's all rather nice.

Drains

Our next door neighbours saw us in the street. They onfirmed that the mains drains are coming to our block of houses.

Our next door but one neighbour was out walking his dog. He talked to the farmer at the bottom of the lane. No way in hell you'll get mains drains said the farmer.

No new models here!

There has been a picture on this blog of our "new" cat, Edu. This is a picture of our "old" cat Mary to redress the balance.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that they knew what it was like to be replaced by a younger model. No new model here.

Ain't Life Grand

I was just working away, waxing a bit of furniture, singing along to a tune on the radio and a big smile broke out on my face.

Things are good at the moment for me - it's even bright and sunny outside.

I hope things are going well for you too.

White Vans and Blue Trousers

In order for a man to fit in with rural Spain two things are essential. A white van and bright blue working trousers.

My boss has several vehicles but he keeps a small, white van to maintain his position within the community. You will notice from the pictures that his van has several dents, this is, of course, essential but more importantly it is filthy inside and out. It's an interesting drive too requiring a certain degree of dexterity even to get it started. But once you're out there on the road, along with the other agricultural machinery it just feels absolutely right. As the old Cockburn's ads used to say "One instinctively knows when something is right".

I own a pair of the blue trousers too. 6€ from the agricultural co-op, a bargain as well as a fashion statement!

Villazgo

Pinoso became independent of the larger, nearby town of Monovar on 12 February 1826. To commemorate that event the people of Pinoso, the Pinoseros, celebrate 12 February as the day of the town or Villazgo. We went to have a look.

There were bunches of men playing some sort of traditional game, a bit like horseshoes.


Around the corner there were people dancing on a stage next to men making mosto. At first we thought it was a wine
fountain.





There was a sort of street fair too with people selling or displaying all sorts of things that looked like they had some link with a Spanish, rural, past. Things like sandals woven from esparto grass, bits of lace etc.

The main event though was a food fair. For 7€ it you got a bowl, a wine glass a cardboard tray and ten tickets which you could swap for items prepared by a range of local bodegas, restaurants, cake shops etc. It was dead easy to pig out though it was also quite hard to move at times. We made quite a mess.

Drinking too much?

It's a bit worrying. I drank the bottle of Magno brandy I bought last week from Carrefour within five days. I didn't like it as much as the cheaper Terry Centenario so I bought a bottle of that from our local supermarket this evening. Well it only cost 7.59€

Lovely sunny day today in our bit of Spain. Lunchtime temperatures were around 20ºC

Will we get mains drains or neighbours?

Culebron village "belongs" to the town of Pinoso. We pay the equivalent of rates to Pinoso and our elected councillors sit on the Pinoso Town Council. More properly we are described as a Pedanía. 

The council promised to put in a new mains drainage system for the village. But, when we saw the plans in November there were three batches of houses in the village not on the plans for the new sewerage system. Our house was in one of the three, not to be connected, clumps. The neighbourhood association said they were on the case and I also went to the technical office at the Town Hall and asked if we would be included. I was assured we would be and that it was a simple drafting error. The work has now started and diggers are tearing up a lot of the area and laying big concrete pipes. There are surveyors marks on the road leading towards our house but not on the final 150 metres. I asked our Spanish neighbours if they would do a bit of checking, and if needs be, complaining. Whether we get drains or not seems to be in doubt. 

The other morning, as I set off for work, three cars drew up on the empty land just next to our house. The men who got out of the cars did a lot of pointing. They were just to the right (as you look at it) of the place where Maggie is standing in the photo. That's our house in the background - no, not that one - the first one, the little one. I know there are plans to put in new houses nearer to town, down the main road towards Monóvar (there are lots of public meetings to campaign against that) and there is some sort of draft plan for an industrial estate a couple of kilometres away. I wonder if we can expect someone to start building a modern villa just across from us?

How Many Years?

Living in Culebron has made me more careful about keeping in touch with people back in the UK. Most of it is done by email with the occasional phone call.

Alan Crawford, someone I first bumped into eating digestive biscuits and drinking milk in the Buttery at Hull university in 1972 is coming out for the weekend in a couple of days.

But I got an interesting email from someone I went to school with this evening. I must have first met Bob Filby back in 1965 in the First Form at Hipperholme Grammar School in West Yorkshire. He said he hasn't seen me in the flesh for quite some time and the last time we met I had dark hair. Now he's seen the photos on the blog he knows I have white hair. As revenge I have posted the picture he sent me of himself.

Going for a paper and meeting Winston Churchill

I generally buy a newspaper each morning. I get it from a small shop called Juanjo in Pinoso which sells a whole range of household items as well as the daily press. They are really nice to me in that shop. I think it's partly because I buy a Spanish language newspaper but mostly because they're nice people.

The traditional "costume" for this part of the world is a smock. It looks a lot like a short version of the academic gown worn by university students except that it buttons up at the front. Next week there's a festival in Pinoso that celebrates local traditions, it's called Villazgo. During Villazgo people wear the smock. I thought I might get one too.

This was the sign for the owner of the shop to be even nicer than usual. He sold me a smock. He told me he'd been the Pregonero (the person who delivers the speech to open the festival) back in 2001 and he autographed a copy of the booklet he'd written at that time as his contribution to the fiesta. Then he pointed to the Pinoso coat of arms on the front cover of his booklet and said that it had been painted by a local artist back in the 1940s. This chap had sent one of his paintings, a picture of a bull, to Winston Churchill. Winny had sent a nice thank you note back to the artist and I got to read the note.

This sort of thing didn't happen when I bought a newspaper in Huntingdon!

The Exquisite Pain of a Lingering Death

When I first bought the MG back in 1998 my intention was always to use it as a daily driver. The car wasn’t going to be pampered; no long winters tucked up in a cosy garage followed by frenetic weekend activity over the summer. Right from the start it had to deal with rain, snow, mud, salt on the road, kamikaze drivers and Tesco’s car park.

It wasn’t my first choice as classic transport but, in time, I grew to really care for that car. We were just two characters occupying similar space and time. Every day the car was different, it was almost as if it had a life and a character. We often tussled with each other and I would sometimes yell at it in desperation as it failed to start or broke yet another bit. I tried hard to make the car understand that I’d look after it if it would try its best to look after me.

When I lived in the UK that was fine. My philosophy was that as bits fell off or needed replacing then I would stick them back on or replace them. The UK is full of people who know how to look after MGs and other people keen to sell bits for them. I was happy to employ the mechanics, trimmers and body repairers and ready to buy the parts.

When I moved to Spain there was never any doubt that the car was coming with me. What I hadn’t quite realised was that my life was going to change so drastically that I was not going to be able to offer an appropriate level of care to the car. The big difference is that I have no money, no, that isn’t quite true. What I don’t have in Spain is credit. I never had enough money but when I was in the UK I had a salary that was sufficiently high for any number of banks and credit cards to want to offer me money. I might wince when Alan (my regular mechanic) gave me the £500 bill for the 6000 mile service on the car but I was always able to pay it.

In Spain credit is not an option. Firstly because I don’t have a regular income but secondly because credit here is quite old fashioned. Credit cards either have to be paid off at the end of the month or there is a set payment. You don’t have the flexibility of paying off either a little or all of the debt as you choose. There are annual fees with credit cards too. Bank loans are easily available but only against set items. So you always need a price quote of some sort before a bank will agree a loan.

So, I’m still driving the car every day but it is no longer getting regular checks and care. At the moment it’s doing about 16mpg but a British mechanic said he didn’t know anything about tuning anything with carbs and the Spanish garage told me that it was impossible to sort the carbs as they were worn and had the wrong needles (the carbs are recon and only about 3000 miles old). I might have believed them but because I didn’t specifically ask for a grease up it didn’t get one when I took it in for a service and they overfilled the sump by at least two litres of oil. There may be MG experts in Spain but they’re not just around the corner from where I live anymore.

Worse than trying to care for the car mechanically though is the bodywork. The poor car is gently rotting away. There is hardly a panel without at least some corrosion and the rear wings are dreadful. There is even a hole above the passenger side arch. I’ve had two large pieces of paint and undercoat just drop off leaving bare metal to view and I don’t dare poke around under either front or rear wings for fear of finding there’s no metal left. The mud flaps have dropped off; the alloy wheels are corroded – all in all not a good situation and one I simply can’t afford to put right.

Short of a major cash injection the car is going to fall apart. It’s horrid to watch my old car turning from cared for classic to old banger. Even worse I can imagine a time when it won’t be an option to keep it on the road. It’s quite easy to foresee a time when our last ride together will be to the local scrap yard. Not quite what I had in mind when I handed over the cash for the car all those years ago.

Spam

When I lived in the UK I ate a lot of Spam. I thought it was tasty and it didn't take long to open the can and cut out a chunk to eat with a knife. Easy too to add sauces to the hollow left after the first chunk had been removed to give an infinite range of tastes. There doesn't seem to be a lot of Spam available in Spain. Fortunately the local Consum supermarket was doing a promotion on Mortadela. I'd never heard of it but it turns out to be like a spicy, garlic version of Spam without the large lumps of fat. It is yummy. It may be better than Spam.

Dwarves and Giants Running with Fire

It looked like today was going to be very ordinary. I thought I might tell you something about Edu the cat and his poorly leg. There was even an appealing photo of him snuggling amongst the bedclothes. Fortunately for you and for me the day got more exciting.

We thought we'd pop into town and have a look at the Dwarves and Giants Festival (I think it's Nanos i Gegants in the local Valencian language) postponed from last week because of the snow. The four groups from Elche, Alicante, Villena and Pinoso dressed up as dwarves, and giants to dance whilst their support bands played strange musical instruments. We watched.
This is me looking bemused, outside the Town Hall whilst a couple of Giants strut their stuff.


And as day gave way to night the dancing gave way to another festival called Corre de Foc (I think) - literally running with fire. People wearing red boiler suits and balaclava type masks with pointed ears, so they look like devils, process through the town whirling fireworks above their heads attached to their tridents. Pretty impressive stuff. We braved the sparks. Enough to send us into Majovic's Bar for a stiff one when it was all over.

Nothing to report

Nothing much has happened to me since we got the cat's balls chopped off. Popping into the bodega for another gas bottle, buying some cat food and changing my library book are hardly worthy of note. It has, however, been a lovely sunny day today. It doesn't look like it was so good in the town of Versoix in Switzerland.