An evening at the theatre

I always enjoyed the Stainland Players. Technically there were usually problems, missed cues, forgotten lines even the occasional falling over but any detail problems were always overcome by the sheer gusto of the performance.

Torre del Rico is significantly smaller than Stainland. I'd seen a poster for a play, Nelo Bacora, being put on there by la Asociación de Mujeres Rurales (the Rural Women's Association) at 8pm this evening so we went along.

The snap was taken at 20.11 hrs. Not quite in full swing by the promised hour. A bit warm to start yet said the MC.

When it did start I have to be honest and say that the Stainland Players would get the better of it on any sort of technical or acting criteria. There were sound problems, prop problems, line problems and a lot of laughing from the cast whilst the passing tractors perfumed the outdoor auditorium with something very rural. Plenty of heart though. Good fun, even moreso because it was short.

I can't pretend I understood more than about 25% of what was said. I missed most of the puns and lots of the detail but we understood the basic plot. The women of Torre del Rico done good. Special praise to the woman wearing the uniform in the blurry snap. Her name is Carole, I delivered a lot of furniture to her a few years ago. She's English and she delivered her lines, in Spanish, really well. The product of several sleepless nights I suspect.

On the dangers of friends

I'm not too keen on having fun, people describe me as stand offish, gruff even.  Fortunately Maggie has a nice, friendly, outgoing, character which means that we have several expat friends around Culebrón. We're due back in Cartagena next week so we've had a rush of invitations to shoehorn in before we go. In fact we haven't cooked at home for the past three days and we've had four meals out in the same period.

A set lunchtime meal with a couple of pals from the next village but eaten on the coast in Santa Pola, an Indian meal with more chums and their visiting family, a barbecue shared with about forty or fifty other people  and an invite for a meal at the house of my old employer and Maggie's Pilates teacher. We enjoyed all of them.

The problem though is that those meals have done more damage to my waistline than a whole week on the cruise ship. Never mind; we'll soon be alone and friendless and then we can get back to our reasonable portion diet and knock off a few kilos more - at least that's what Maggie says is going to happen!

Summer

Summer in Spain is an odd time. Whole towns and cities more or less close down. Rural villages fill up as people move to their country houses often inherited from relatives, now dead, who worked the land. Even the shops and offices that stay open generally change their opening times usually doing just the morning shift rather than re-opening after the long lunch break. All to avoid the heat.

Summer lasts two months, from the first of July to the thirty first of August. The Guardia Civil, who deal with traffic, mount special campaigns because there are so many traffic movements. Madrid, for instance, more or less empties its population to the various coasts and inland resorts. Once upon a time people would take a whole month off, more or less their whole holiday entitlement, but that seems to have become a couple of weeks in summer with the rest spread around the year particularly at Easter and Christmas. Spain is in the midst of a financial crisis so not everyone can get away but even then family visits and time with friends offer some compensation.

Fiestas, the local carnivals, are in full swing. They are everywhere. For instance today we could have gone to the big wine harvest celebration in Jumilla or to the much more modest events in la Romana, Chinorlet or Paredon all of which are only a few kilometres from home. There are lots more.

Our summer has been excellent. Maggie's teacher holidays are two full months and with me not starting work till September first I've been sunning myself too.

Apart from the week and a bit on the boat and the weekend in Castilla la Mancha we've not been away from home overnight but a quick skim of the photos shows that we've spent a lot of time doing this and that and we've seen a lot of friends.

Very nice.

In a place of La Mancha, whose name I would not like to remember...

Don Quixote, el Quijote, usually billed as the greatest book ever written in Spanish, is big tourist business in Castilla la Mancha and this weekend we took a short break based in Campo de Criptana a town where there a number of old style windmills just right for tilting at.

In el Toboso, the village where el Quijote's imaginary lady Dulcinea lived we went to a small museum full of hundreds of copies of the various editions of the book, in every conceivable language, signed by the famous and infamous alike including names like Margaret Thatcher, Benito Mussolini, Nelson Mandela and Carlos Fuentes. On the museum wall a painting showed a thin bloke, lance in hand, riding a skinny horse and by his side a tubby man riding a mule. The four figures are dwarfed by a dazzling azure sky and the parched earth that stretch on and on for ever.

We've crossed through la Mancha several times on our journeys to and from Madrid or up to Albacete. That painting tallied exactly with my impression of the landscape - flat, featureless and dusty - dotted with mean villages and tedious towns. A landscape that I've read has its charms - but only after long acquaintance.

Our weekend started in Campo de Criptana with a tour of a winery, a meal and our hotel. The windmills were there looking as they should and the town gleamed in blue and white. El Toboso village was stone, sun and silence whilst the Ruidera Lakes were a hubbub of hundreds of people shattering the peace and quiet. In Alcaraz's magnificent town square we wondered where the money had come from. We climbed hills and dropped into deep valleys, we drove across kilometres of vineyards, through stands of oak and olive, we passed castles, rivers and streams - a varied and often changing landscape.

Alonso Quixano and his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza must have seen a thing or two as they rode into the heat haze all those years ago

Sixteen tons and a song

One of the chief reasons the Romans invaded Murcia near the present day Cartagena and La Unión was to sieze the silver mines. By 200AD the mines were, apparently, exhausted and fell into disuse but with the new technologies of the late 19th and early 20th Century the lead, silver zinc and iron ores became profitable once again.

Mines need miners; people willing to crawl down dark, dangerous, hot tunnels and hack away at the earth. In La Unión lots of those people came from the depressed rural south, from Andalucia. They brought their singing with them, the style we call Flamenco, and mixed it in with the local song.

They sang about their lives, particularly their lives in the mines.

When the mines closed for good the singing began to disappear so a local enthusiast decided to try to keep the music alive. The competition, el Cante de las Minas, the Song of the Mines, began back in 1961

The modern venue for the competition is one of those big old glass and steel market halls now converted into a performance space. The basic format is a competition for amateurs in three classes, one for singers, one for dancers and one for guitarists. The overall winner gets the Miner's Lamp trophy and, presumably, a crack at fame and fortune on the Flamenco circuit.

As well as the competition there are six days of Flamenco stars - we wondered about going to see Paco de Lucia but baulked at 45€ for the cheap seats. We did pay the 10€ to go to see day two of the competiton though. It was enjoyable in a sort of masochistic way. Three and a half hours of Flamenco without break. Squirming on the hard chairs, aware of aching this and itching that.

Apologies for the photos - long lens, high magnification, low light, moving targets - bad mix.

Wired

The firm we buy our Internet services from, Movistar, is the most expensive broadband provider in the whole of the European Union.

Movistar charge over 70% more for midspeed broadband access (2mgb to 10mgb) than the average price of the other old state monopolies across the European Union. The average is 34€ and Movistar charge 58€

Even the cheapest broadband access in Spain comes out nearly 11% more expensive than the median of the other European offers. So your average European pays 29€ whilst the most savvy Spaniard pays 32€. Goodness knows how much the difference is between the best European offer and what we pay.

Spaniards get overcharged even more on the over 10mgb lines where the cheapest Spanish is 35€ against 30€ European average - over 16% difference.

Apparently one of the big variations is that most of the headline prices on the various Spanish offers do not include the line rental as part of the package.

Just in case you think we are particularly stupid in paying over the odds we don't have much of a choice. Until very recently the only operator who would provide our house with broadband was Movistar. Nobody wants to provide infrastructure to we country bumpkins.

Two fingers of red eye

My old school pal, Bob Filby, commented on the entry I did about our visit to a local bodega. His comment was that there is a much held belief in England that there is no such thing as a decent Spanish wine.

Actually it's quite difficult for us to make a direct comparison because wines from anywhere but Spain are almost totally absent from Spanish supermarket shelves. On top of that I know very little about wine but I've had a quick Google around this morning and it looks to me as though the expert opinion is that the wines from the North of Spain include plenty of varieties that can hold their head up against anything produced anywhere in the World. The wines from the centre (which includes Alicante) are much more ordinary but they are sturdy, inexpensive and intended "to swill down food." What I should have remembered and what I should have fought the Spanish corner for are the brilliant sherries and manzanillas from Jerez and Sanlucar.

Here's an offer Bob, get yourself a bottle of La Gitana manzanilla (they used to keep it in Waitrose), pop it in the fridge till it's nice and cold and if you don't think that's quality stuff then I'll buy it for you.

For lots of Spaniards though, particularly older Spaniards, wine is a staple. Old chaps in bars drink it instead of having a small beer or a coffee, families buy it in recycled five litre water containers to drink along with their evening meal. It's like bread, olive oil, garlic, onions and tomatoes - one of the standards in the larder rather than the sophisticated tipple that it is in the UK. That's why, often, when we go into a slightly trendier bar Maggie finds that she can't get the red wine she wants and has to settle instead for vodka.

Enoturismo

We've always been big supporters of the Spanish wine industry. Maggie maybe a little more so than me. I worry more about the brandy business.

As well as swigging as much of the stuff as we can lay our hands on we've also visited a number of bodegas but we've never before tried to follow one of the wine routes.

The idea of a wine route is to use the wine "peg" to hang any number of touriist activities on. The key element is obviously the wine producers or bodegas but restaurants, bookshops, hotels,specialist bars and shops etc. can all get in on the act with a bit of thought. I've seen some imaginative links over the years - music in amongst the barrels, libraries running lecture series, cultural centres doing wine appreciation sessions etc.

Jumilla has a wine route. Pinoso has been talking about setting one up for years but so far zilch. The tourist office in Jumilla was deadly efficient and within seconds of pushing the leaflet into our hands we were booked in for a tour and tasting session at Casa de la Ermita, a brand of wine we've seen a lot of down in Cartagena. Tour of the vineyards, tour of the bodega, tasting session, shop - pretty standard I suppose but the route and spiel was clearly thought out and nicely executed.

It worked too; we spent some cash.The friendly young woman who showed us around, Micaela, says that the Casa de la Ermita brand is sold in Waitrose and M&S in the UK.

Back in Jumilla we went to one of the restaurants on the list too and they were playing their part offering wines from all the participating bodegas as well as highlighting the route in their menus.

We're thinking of doing a few more very soon!

Sunday afternoon every day?

I only cleaned this little blighter two days ago!

I should like to suggest

Have you ever followed a police patrol car on a UK motorway? They'll be driving at 68mph in a 70mph zone so you can creep past whilst still obeying the law. I have a lot of respect for patrol car drivers - in my estimation they know their stuff and they give a good example in their driving habits.

Here in Spain we have to wear seat belts - a good thing. Amazingly police officers at local and national level and the Guardia Civil (who deal specifically with traffic) must have an exemption - they go around beltless. How odd is that?

So I just emailed the Interior Minister and asked him why. I expect a reply. As Willie Whitelaw once said to me when I, amazingly, got through to him on the phone "Why do you think I have a phone on my desk?" - Señor Rubalcaba has an email address at least.

Always something new

Agost is a town just 40km from Culebrón. We've been there a couple of times but somehow we've managed to miss the thing that it's known for. It's famous for ceramics.

A pal took us to the workshop in the photo where the owner gave us a quick demonstration of his skills at the potter's wheel and a tour of the old Arab style kiln before pressing free gifts into our hands to suck us into buying something. He needn't have worried, I fancied one of the botijas, Maggie was captivated by the bowls and we bought an essential garlic storage jar too.

A botija is an earthenware jar - this one is for water. It's porous so that the heat needed to evaporate the water cools it down. You drink the water by tipping up the botija, the water spurts from the small spout so no worry about passing germs from person to person. Of course it's easy to get a mini shower at the same time.

Gathering dusk

We had to choose our fun tonight between a horse riding demonstration and the local environmental service returning animals to the wild. We chose the horses. There were flies though and apart from women in admirably tight riding breeches it all seemed a bit unwelcoming and disorganised. We moved on.

Up in the natural park on the side of Monte Coto the local environmental service was letting loose some beasts. We had a Kestrel, three Little Owls and a Northern Goshawk. The chief ranger person was pretty good and told us stuff. Did you know, for instance, that owls can't move their pupils which is why their heads are articulated as they are? I also learned that Spaniards say that people have eyes in their backs rather than the back of their heads. Being Spain everyone who wanted to stroke the owls before they were released got to and they were then let loose by children from amongst the thirty strong crowd.

There were toads too. Apparently the Common Toad can live for about 20 years, is pretty big and isn't at all common in this part of Spain partly because it is being slaughtered by a fungus that we carry on our hands. Then there were Natterjacks and finally some tiny Midwife Toads. From the man's imitation of their sound this may well be the beast that makes an electronic beeping noise that we heard whilst we were sitting on a friend's terrace last week.

Just so I can remember the Spanish names after tonight and so any Spanish readers have a chance the animals were cernicalo (kestrel), azor (goshawk), mochuelo común (little owl) , sapo común (common toad), sapo corredor (natterjack toad) and sapo partero (midwife toad.)