The Move

Fine 60s band as I remember and wasn't theirs the first song ever played on Radio 1?

But, yesterday, the cats and I abandoned the house in Culebrón and headed for Maggie, my new job and my new home in the town of Ciudad Rodrigo in the province of Salamanca.

The Mini performed well doing the 740kms in about seven and a quarter hours on less than a tankful of diesel. The cats didn`t do so well. They weren't happy in the big cat carrier together. They howled and screeched. Eduardo had thrown up by the time we left Yecla just 30kms from home. An even stronger odour produced by a different bodily evacuation had been added by the time we reached Almansa with some 50 minutes of journey time gone.

I couldn´t do anything about it. Opening the carrier before we got to our destination was out of the question and the cats and I had to put up with it for the whole journey. When we got into Ciudad Rodrigo the poor beasts had to endure being showered down too. Cats aren't that keen on water.

Relief

I have been packing, ready to go and join Maggie. One of my jobs was to speak to the neighbour. The one with a hole in his wall of our making, the one who went to the Town Hall to try to get the work stopped, the one threatening legal action, the one we've been avoiding for weeks.

"I need to speak to you about this hole in your wall"
"Oh, that's sorted, I had some blokes come and fix it a couple of weeks ago, I had them repair another small hole at the same time, I hope you don't mind"
"You mean it's all done, there's nothing else to be said and we're pals again?"
"We never stopped being pals and yes, everything's back as it should be - the bill's about 170€"

So after all that worry it just went away in about three minutes.

One instinctively knows

The house still isn't finished. The workmen have only been here sporadically over the past week - nobody on Monday, one man on Tuesday though we did have a full team today. If they had been here it may have been done and I could have made a stab at tidying up and finishing off the inevitable Spanish paperwork before having to leave for my new job which begins next Wednesday in Ciudad Rodrigo.

I had, originally, planned to meet my new employers to talk detail and to sign my contract today but, ever hopeful, I put that off in the vain hope that the house would be completed by now. No such luck. Fortunately the owner of the language school where I will be working was understanding, if not exactly overjoyed, by rescheduling that meeting for just 23 hours before I give my first class

Very unsatisfactory having to leave the house in such a state and it will be hard work even finding the things I need to take amongst the piled up furniture. But it will be good to be with Maggie again, good to be back at work with a bit of structure to my life and an income, albeit small. It will be nice to be able to stay relatively clean and live in a place where things like lights just work.

We are completely skint too. As poor as when we first arrived here.

Indulgence

The story of our roof replacement goes on. I'm still living in filthy squalor. We've run out of money completely. But today, when I came home, there had been five men working on the place and, suddenly, it's going back together. It is really scary looking at the damage - smashed tiles, smashed windows, smashed doors, no power in most rooms etc. but there is a faint glimmer that the place might recover with time.

There are pictures in the side bar, "Some of my snaps" or just click the link The Story of Our Roof

Cold and dark

17ºC last night and only 27ºC during the day. Nice and sunny though.

Dark till about 7.20 in the morning and fading light by 8.15 in the evening.

Autumn is definitely on it's way

Was it Lucille Ball and the grapes?

When I lived in Cambridgeshire September was the month for sitting patiently behind the beet lorries as they trundled through the country lanes on their way to the sugar refineries. In Pinoso it's tractors loaded with grapes headed for the bodegas

Geoff, a pal, told me that he'd seen one of this group of pickers wearing buckets on his feet to push the grapes down into the trailer.

To me the Legion!

In a bar I use one of the regular drinkers is a bloke called Angel. You may have met his type in bars in Glasgow or Newcastle. They tell you stories of their past in an inpenetrable accent.

Angel told me today that he was a Sergeant in the Legion, the Spanish Legion originally known as the Spanish Foreign Legion, an army unit first formed in the 1920s. Unlike its French counterpart the foreign bit in its title was not because it was formed of foreigners but because it was put together to fight in foreign lands.  They are in Afghanistan and Lebanon at the moment. Foreigners can currently join the unit though so long as they are Spanish speaking and entitled to residence in Spain.

The Legion is considered to be a crack regiment. Along with colonial troops from Morocco they formed an effective spearhead of the Nationalist armies that took on the legitimate Spanish Government in the Spanish Civil War until they came up against the equally well trained International Brigades. On the other hand they also got their backsides well and truly kicked by irregular untrained troops in Morocco in the late 1950s. Oh, and they shot down a bunch of unarmed demonstators in the 1970s again in Morocco.

The Legion has some funny ways. They can wear beards, leave their shirts open more or less to the waist, their uniforms are plain and they wear tassled kepis. Its members are called Knight (or Dame) Legionnaires, and they call themselves "The bridegrooms of death". When they march in the big military parades they seem to shoot past, swinging their arms high in the air across their bodies at a march step of some 190 steps per minute as against the more usual 90 spm. Their mascot is a fast moving uniformed goat. And when they find themselves in a spot of bother on the battlefield and shout ¡A mi la Legión! (To me the Legion!) anyone within earshot has no option but to lend a hand however great the peril.

Always someone worse off

They were doing a bit of building work in Pinoso next to this house when it fell down. Nobody was hurt but it has been a bit of a talking point.

Doleite

It must be nearly 30 years since I last signed on the dole but I did it today. It wasn't that difficult to be honest. I had to go to Elda which is some 25kms from home. That may have been a bit tricky if I didn't have a car as I think there are two buses a day.

I started at a Social Security office just to ask what the process was, whether it was worth while, how it would affect my health care etc. The woman who dealt with me was very pleasant though she sent me to the wrong office and gave me directions that had me wandering around miles from my final target.

The normal system in "official" Spanish offices is to take a deli counter number and wait till you're called. I did that in the next office, when I finally found it. There is hardly ever an information desk so you take your chance on being in the right place. Fortunately for me the security guard was either bored or inquisitive and asked me what I was up to. He told me I had to start in another office and gave me vague directions.

In office number three I registered as unemployed and I was told my next sign on date - three months away - and then sent, along with the appropriate forms back to the security guard office. He welcomed me as a long lost friend and told me what to do, where to wait etc. The process of applying for the money, about 70% of the average of the last six months pay packet, took about five minutes. And there I was, another statistic in the huge rise in Spanish unemployment figures over the past few months.

The offices were all relatively welcoming, none of the protective screens or fixed chairs I remember from similar offices in the UK, and nobody gave me any indication that they thought I was a scrounging foreigner which I had rather expected. I just hope all goes well with the new job in Ciudad Rodrigo and I never actually get around to receiving any of the money which I know from Maggie's experience, takes a long time to come.

One living room to another

I left Ciudad Rodrigo on Wednesday morning and travelled across Spain by bus. I left behind one living room in Maggie's flat and arrived to another in Culebrón. You have to guess which photo is which location. Oh, and there was no power in most of the Culebrón house so my first evening was spent, romantically, picking my way through rubble by torchlight.

I checked with my ex boss (I picked up my dismissal papers today from the accountant) and current builder as to why there was so little progress on the house and why it was in such a mess. It turns out that his foreman had, quite reasonably, downed tools and gone to his daughter, more or less in the middle of the job, when she was admitted to hospital with a serious case of food poisoning. But to add icing to the cake our neighbour has also gone to the Town Hall to complain about the work being done on our house. He is attempting to have the work stopped.

I've been to the Town Hall too and it seems unlikely he has much of a case but it's quite likely we're in for some pretty serious disruption if he manages to cause any sort of delay.

Clunk Click

One of Maggie's pals gave us a lift into town the other day. I noticed I was the only person who wore a seat belt. After an evening's drinking the same person drove home. I have no idea why I didn't walk.

Different behaviour. Sometimes when I say to a Spaniard about putting on their seat belt they tell me that the police never patrol the road they intend to use. It's the same with alcohol. Not the consequences for themselves or others but the possibility of being caught and fined.

Even more bizarre is their attitude to cars and children. In general Spaniards fuss over children; hair ruffling is a sport. But children standing inside cars, sometimes on the front passenger seat is widespread.