Secret Wine Spain

Maggie likes wine. It's no secret. She likes a good Rioja and she likes Ribera del Duero too. But Maggie thinks it's very unfair that so few people recognise the quality of some of our local wine particularly the product from the Jumilla wine region.

Jumilla shares a border with Pinoso so it's very local. We also share a border with Yecla which has a separate quality mark for its wine and, of course, we are in Alicante which produces some excellent wine too. We even have a small bodega in Culebrón village. There are lots of bodegas to visit but some tours and some wine are better than others.

Maggie likes to eat out. She can wax lyrical about some of the local food though she can also be disparaging about the chop and chips menus of so many places. You have to know where to go she says. You need local knowledge.

Maggie says that we have some breathtaking scenery around here. I can't disagree. Sometimes just driving up from La Romana or over to Yecla I just break into a big grin as I watch the landscapes pass. Staying here can be a treat but knowing where is more difficult.

So Maggie had an idea. Maybe she could help people to appreciate our local wine, our local food and our local scenery. So Secret Wine Spain was born. It's a work still in progress as Maggie comes to grips with marketing, website building and blogging but if you fancy a tailor made wine tour in Murcia or Alicante then Maggie's your woman.

Food collection

One of those Christmassy things I do is to buy whatever it is that the "A toy, a dream" - Un juguete una ilusión campaign is selling. For years now it's been a biro but when we first got here I remember it was a spinning top. The idea is you pay over the odds for the thing and the extra money gets turned into toys. In the first place those toys were shipped to poor children in South America and Africa - you know the sort of countries, the ones with names you just about recognise but you'd be hard pressed to point at on a blank map. Places like Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic or Guatemala. Last year, for the first time, toys were also handed out, via the Red Cross, to children in Spain.

The headline is that one of every five people living in Spain lives in the shadow of poverty - in poverty or at risk of poverty. Now I have no idea how somebody has decided what poverty is. Is it getting fewer than so many calories to eat or not having a Play Station? I'm even less convinced about the "at risk" label. I always wondered if people at risk of offending included me. After all it's almost certain that when I take my car out I'll break one or more traffic rules, I will offend, even if only briefly. I'm not, though, a harbinger of the ultimate breakdown of the established order.

Whatever the definition is, however sociologists and politicians argue it and whatever your average bigot says I do know that I see a lot of people digging about with sticks in the rubbish containers in the streets, I know I see people with cart loads of waste cardboard on trailers on the back of their bikes to weigh in and I do know that the stories of ordinary people losing their homes and going hungry are everywhere.

There was an article on the news about the food banks. They collect food from individuals, from producers, from retailers, from supporters of every shape, size and hue. The food is channeled through NGOs to people who need it through food parcels, community canteens and the like.

Maggie noticed the news item. To me it was old news. I gave a lot of rice, pasta, oil and canned stuff away last year - even my pal Carlos tried collecting food in the place he worked. So it was like buying the pen for the toys. Normal. I thought about it though. Maggie was away in Qatar last Christmas so to her it was a new phenomenon in Spain. This is not collecting food principally for homeless people or those living in shelters but for the ordinary working man and woman. Your everyday Joe fallen on hard times with no job, with an inflated mortgage from the building boom, whose dole payments have run out, where the family members who were providing informal support now find themselves hard pressed too after losing their own jobs or with the parental savings exhausted.

So we were in the Mercadona supermarket. There were people there wearing waistcoats to identify them as volunteers collecting food. They were sorting the food into big containers - oil in this one, canned goods here etc. The containers were on palettes. An industrial scale operation. They had plastic bags to hand out for shoppers to collect the stuff in. Our bag was ripped and as Maggie paid the bill I cradled it over to the collectors. Maggie was cross with me. She'd paid but I had handed the goods over.

It would be better if people weren't poor. It would be better if the state looked after its people but in the meantime volunteers in supermarkets it is.

Nothing in particular

It's raining. It's rained quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. We've forgotten all about the drought which lasted from last winter through to a few weeks ago. Usually, though not today, it rains overnight which is very civilised. I can't pretend that it's warm but it isn't cold either - at least not outside. Generally we're into the mid to high teens during the day but with sun and blue skies so it feels pleasantly warm. Overnight we're down at 7ºC or 8ºC maybe. I expect it will turn cold in December, it usually does. The pile of leaves that have just started to clog our drive suggest that Autumn has finally arrived. And its getting dark just after six in the afternoon. Considering it will start to get lighter again just before Christmas that's not too bad. So outside, in the fresh air everything is as it should be. Inside the house of course it's miserable. On the front page of today's Alicante paper there's a headline which says that nearly half of the houses in Alicante province lack any form of insulation against sound, heat or cold. This statistical information is tied in to the introduction of energy efficiency certificates for dwellings a while ago. In our house the little windows, designed to keep out the beating sun of summer make our rooms dismal in winter and the uninsulated house with tiled floors, painted walls and badly fitting doors make it exactly the opposite of cosy. With the log burner alight the living room has been lovely and warm but all the adjoining rooms have a cold, musty feel. Getting into bed is quite unpleasant until you stop shivering.

In the news, corruption stories are everywhere. The health minister resigned this week. She was mentioned by a judge as being the direct recipient of goods bought with her husband's dodgy money. I heard lots of comments that it was like making the poor thing resign for having eaten poached game when she didn't know it was poached. Hmm. The same judge said the ruling PP or Conservative party had benefitted directly from dodgy funding but the health minister's boss, the national president, forgot about that when he stood up in parliament and said that corruption was not endemic. The last three PP party treasurers have all been in court, one is on remand and that one has accused the current president of taking illegal payments. I wouldn't like to give the idea that only the PP have their fingers in the till. Certainly on percentages they come out top but, down in Andalucia, there's a huge corruption deal about suspect redundancy notices which implicates two past PSOE or Socialist party presidents. And the independents don't want to miss out either. In Cataluña an almost mythical ex leader turns out to have a stash in Andorra and there was a case of illegal party funding a while ago that another key political figure somehow seemed to sidestep.

Back to our national president; he's a very strange president. Earlier this month a couple of million Catalans turned out for an illegal referendum on independence - the national president generally ignored that and sent something akin to the Crown Prosecution Service (if it's still called that) after the regional president for running an illegal poll. So much easier than arranging to talk about it. He's behaving the way I do when I need to talk to someone in Spanish on the phone. Anything to avoid a difficult conversation.

There are close on 2000 politicians currently charged with some level of corruption yet none of the promised anti corruption legislation has got past the committee stage. The politicians don't go easily either. None of them behave like people convicted of crimes. No sackcloth and ashes. Most of them spin out the process for ever with iffy legal arguments and expensive lawyers. The few who have been locked up argue about which prison they'd like. An ex president of one of the regions was in the sort of prison regime where you go home for the weekends and only put on your stripey suit every now and again. When people found out they got a bit indignant so a judge decided to withdraw those privileges. The ex politician appealed the decision. Another ex regional president who has been sentenced to four years in chokey still has body guards and an official looking car and has been asking the Central Government for a pardon - a real live get out of gaol for free card.

Yesterday I got a text message from the General Treasury of the Social Security on my phone to tell me that my petition to become a self employed person had been approved. In the past I've complained about the difficulties that people face who want to set up their own business here. People needed to have a hefty amount of cash behind them in the bank or at least some heavyweight backers willing to cough up if the business went pear shaped. Social security payments were high too with even the smallest business subject to a 260€ minimum payment from the first day of trading and before any tax committment. Anyway, for my new job, my new boss suggested that I should be self employed. This only made sense because now there is a sort of reduced charge sliding scale social security payment scheme starting at around 53€ for the first 6 months and then going 130€, 180€ and finally 260€ after two years. I thought it sounded like a good scheme. An incentive to get people to register and run legal businesses from the start rather than to start illegally and register only when the profits justified it. Nonetheless in my case I thought it sounded a bit flaky and there were plenty of disadvantages as well as advantages but the accountant told me that at least it was all legit. He did all the work. All I had to do was to sign on the dole and hand over some basic ID documentation and he did the rest. Then a text message. Nearly as strange as our president.

Care in the community

There is a district of Pinoso called Santa Catalina and today is Santa Catalina's day, Well it's today if you use the Byzantine calendar or tomorrow if you're on the Latin calendar. So Saint Catherine. The day is celebrated here by lighting bonfires in the street and having an associated "picnic". An efigy of the Saint also starts doing the rounds of people's homes.

When we first moved to Pinoso I went to have a look at the bonfires. Unlike this evening, when it was a very pleasant 13ºC, it was cold back in 2005 and I wore a big black overcoat with gloves and a scarf. Unlike tonight Maggie wasn't with me. I was alone.

A couple of years later I was working at a furniture shop and a new co-worker turned up. She recognised me as the man with the long coat and she told me a story. The people who lived in Santa Catalina didn't trust me. I looked shifty. Maybe their children weren't safe with me around. As I strolled amongst the bonfires a person from one group would keep an eye on me. After a couple of hundred metres at most they would pass the task to the next group and so on. Wherever I went I was being watched until I got in my car and drove away.

Tonight we were offered a bit of something to eat as we strolled around. Much better.

Losing my grip

Manuel looks like an ordinary bloke. He lives in a normal sort of flat in a normal looking working class district of Madrid. His local bar is a few minutes walk from his front door. Times are tough in Spain. A few days before when Antonio, the bar owner, asked Manu if he wanted his usual lottery ticket for the Christmas draw he put it off. He didn't really have the 20€ for the tenth part of a ticket. Now it's the day of the draw. In the bar everyone is celebrating. The bar's number has come up and all the locals are richer. Manuel's wife urges her husband to go to the bar, to congratulate everyone. What's done is done. No good brooding on what might have been. Manuel wraps up against the cold, goes to the bar and pushes through the happy crowd to congratulate Antonio on his luck. Manuel turns down a glass of bubbly and asks for his usual coffee. Job done and in no mood to join in the jollity Manuel asks for the bill. The surprise is that the bill is twenty one euros for the one euro coffee. Antonio kept back a twenty euro ticket for his friend - just in case.

Standing by your pals is what you do in tough times. The annual Christmas advert for the state lottery. A message about not losing hope and about sharing. To be honest I hadn't noticed the ad on the telly because advert time is tea making, toilet or email check time. It was Maggie who pointed it out to me. In turn she'd been told about the advert by her intercambio - the person she does half an hour of English in return for half an hour of Spanish with. I searched it out on YouTube to have a look.

Last year the lottery ad featured a handful of singers and was roundly pilloried and parodied. I had a conversation about it with several of my adult students and with my two intercambios of the time. This year there was a bit of the Manuel Antonio ad that I couldn't make out and I was reduced to messaging one of my Cartagena friends for help with the wording.

It's easy enough to keep up to date in a media way with what's happening here but there is a second sort of news - the stuff that people talk about down the pub or send WhatsApp messages about. Until coming back to Culebrón I'd had access to those conversations through workmates, intercambios and students. Things have changed with my new job. Technically it isn't even a job, I'm now self employed and I sell my services to the language school. That aside the real change has been in the profile of the students. Most are now children or teenagers and only one group of adults has sufficient English to maintain an ordinary conversation. Of the two people I normally work alongside one is as English as me and the other is a teenager herself. Keeping up with the informal news has become a little more difficult.

Half Marathon

Whenever I feel the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away. I always  thought the quote was Chesterton's but apparently most people think it was Twain. In all probability it was Paul Terry, founder of Terrytoons. Whoever first said it I've always thought that it embodied a fundamental truth.

There was a Half Marathon in Pinoso today. To be honest it was a bit of a push for me to get there for the ten o clock start. Sunday morning lie in and all that. Once in town I had a bit of difficulty finding the runners. They didn't seem to be where I expected them to be and the town looked strangely empty with several of the main streets cleared of parked cars. 

There were though people, lots of people, walking along the Badén and most of them were wearing fluorescent clothing. I presumed they had some relationship to the race so I followed them for a while. Then I changed my mind and went to where I thought the start was. I was just in time to bump into hundreds of people sprinting down Paseo de la Constitución. You wouldn't think it was easy to hide 500 runners in a small town would you?

There wasn't much to it as an event. People running or walking wearing shorts and vests and all those brightly coloured sports clothes. Lots of them grasped bottles of water. I took a few snaps. I walked round. One thing that struck me about the event was the camaraderie. There were people on the side of the road cheering the runners and walkers on. "You can do it," "Nearly there," "You're doing brilliantly,"  etc., etc. There were the friends running together urging each other to go faster or just to keep going. Then there were the people who had partnered up for the bulk of the distance but who became deadly rivals as they sprinted the last few metres to the finish only to be reunited by a big grin, a pat on the back or a handshake on the other side of the inflatable finishing post. 

I took a liking to the official whose job it was to separate the runners continuing on the half marathon from those finishing the 10 km race. "Straight on for the half marathon, last lap - turn here, turn here for the 10km finish - you're almost there." But alongside the official message, the essential information, there was a little extra for nearly all the runners - some form of personal encouragement. And he seemed to know at least half of the runners personally. "You're flying Enrique," "Looking good Carmen," "Chin up José." A good man for the job I thought.

Small Spanish towns are good at community stuff. People know each other, people say hello, people have time for others but I rather suspect that Mr Terry and I may have missed at least one of the benefits of exercise.

Heel and toe

Maggie had an appointment in Elda today and naturally enough I got to drive. Elda and Petrer are our local  big town.

Some towns are easy to navigate. Somehow you instantly grasp the basic arrangement of the town or city and getting from one place to another is easy. Petrer and Elda are not like that. They are supposed to be two towns with different town halls and each one has street maps that don't show the other so, at times, it's not easy to say whether you are in Elda or Petrer. Elda is where the dole and tax office is whilst Petrer has the long distance bus station and the shopping centres. The hospital is called Elda Hospital but I would have thought it was actually in Petrer. Who knows? Petrer is also called Petrel at times, or it could be the other way around. One of them is predominantly Castilian speaking whilst the other speaks Valencià. Despite visiting them regularly over the past nine or ten years navigation is still a bit less certain than Rosetta putting down Philae on the surface of the singing 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet

I suggested that instead of just going to the appointment we added in a tiny adventure. Tinier than tiny. Elda has a history of shoe making and so it has a shoe museum. I went there years ago when we were still house hunting. I was amused and rattled in equal measure that time when I had to ring a bell and respond to a reasonably detailed interview to gain admittance. My Spanish was even worse then and I was appalled that I couldn't just walk into a museum. The museum visit would be our midweek adventure.

The museum door was open today and we just walked in though old ghosts came back to haunt me when the chap on the desk asked if he could ask us some questions. We said yes. He asked us where we were from. We answered. We passed. I'm sure the entrance exam has got easier over the years. Maybe though other people were asked harder questions because in all the time that we were in the museum we were alone.

On the first floor there were a lot of wooden lasts and a lot of sewing machines. Despite trying to sort it out I still have no idea about the basics of making a shoe. Not the most informative museum I've ever been to.

On the second floor there were loads and loads of glass cases full of shoes, boots, sandals and anything else people put onto their feet. There were some mad designs, some interesting designs, some surprising designs (Venetians in the Middle Ages liked high high platforms) and lots and lots of them. It was pretty interesting in a dull sort of way. It was the same with the rows of portraits of important people from the shoe industry in Elda or old shoes from semi famous people signed over to the museum with love. You'd know you were famous wouldn't you when the shoe museum in Elda asked you for some of your old footwear?

Anyway its over now and I'm in the waiting room with Maggie and we've had enough of a wait for me to write the whole post.

Tap, tap, tapas

As far as I remember the first ever time we got involved in a tapas trail was in Sax which is a small town about 20 km from here. It was probably in 2005 and I remember it well because afterwards we went on to a meal in the village hall organised by the Culebrón Neighbourhood Association. Certain members of our party had had a little too much to drink and they were unable to fully participate in the village AGM afterwards leaving me as the sole speaking British representative.

Tapas trails, rutas de tapas, are a simple idea. Somebody, usually the Chamber of Trade or the local Shopkeeper's Association persuades a number of bars and restaurants in their town to sell a bite sized snack and a drink, usually either beer or wine, for a bargain set price. They persuade other sponsors to cough up a prize. Then they produce a route map cum leaflet and, within the set dates, punters skip from bar to bar eating the tapas and drinking the drink. Each time the participants have something on the trail they get a stamp on their leaflet. The punters have a good time, the bars get more trade and the towns look busier.

In Sax I think each bar gave clues to a puzzle. Solve the puzzle and win a prize. In Cartagena, where we lived the tapas trail was a big deal with about seventy places taking part and thousands and thousands of tapas served. Everyone who handed in a leaflet with at least six stamps got a free entry to one of the city museums and there was a draw for a bigger prize.

Earlier Pinoso trails may have passed me by but, to the best of my knowledge, the first tapas trail here was this summer. It was tied in with the performances of a couple of classical Greek plays. We made a bit of a half hearted attempt to get involved but we hadn't checked the leflet properly and asked for one of the tapas on a Tuesday when the route only ran from Thursday to Sunday. We felt so stupid we threw the leaflets away and skulked at home till it was over.

There is another Pinoso tapas trail running at the moment. It is blessed with a name in Valencià. It started last Thursday and runs for the next three weeks with afternoon and evening sessions from Thursday to Sunday. Top prize is a weekend in a spa hotel and there are meals out to be won too. There are just fourteen bars involved but each one is producing a couple of tapas so the range isn't bad for a town with 8,000 people.

We asked a couple of sets of our British chums if they fancied doing a bit of the route with us. I think it was a new experience for both couples. It was a good evening. They got tapas in four places but, because I had to come from work I was a little later and just did three. The tapas weren't bad but they weren't inspired either. Most were a bit samey, something on a bit of bread, toast or cracker. Maybe I'm being a bit hard because I was denied the more amusing half of the experience as I had to drive home afterwards. Nonetheless it was excellent to be doing something on home turf

We were in good company too. There were lots of gangs of friends and couples with the leaflets doing just the same as us. Which bar next? We kept seeing the same people strolling from one bar to another just as we were.

Shops

We don't have a shop in Culebrón. Not a one. Pinoso has a reasonable range though. Small businesses predominate. The sort of place where the goods are kept in the back, where you have to ask for things, where screws are counted out and where they punch the extra holes into the belt. Window displays are generally utilitarian rather than artistic.

Larger Spanish towns generally have modern, corporate retailing with big out of town shopping centres and recognisable names. But in amongst the town centre chain stores with their modern window dressing, background music, careful lighting and English language slogans there will be any number of small, anachronistic businesses. Maggie summed it up neatly when I mentioned the news story I'd read. "Ah, the corset shops."

There they are. Shops that smell of leather or paper. Shops with a hotch potch of stationery yellowing at the edges and maps showing the Soviet Union. Shops with boxes of ribbons, knicker elastic, needles and buttons. Costume jewellery shops with piles of pearl necklaces and butterfly brooches. Clothes shops with flat caps, overalls, green cord trousers and polyester housecoats next to A line skirts. Ironmongers with wooden pitchforks and galvanized buckets.

I''ve often wondered how they survive. My guess was historic rents, the family living frugally over the shop and running them on long hours and pitiful wages. And that's what it is - at least the first part about rents. Apparently something called the Boyer Law froze rents on a range of shops that had leases before 1985. The freeze was for twenty years. This means that in January 2015 suddenly the rents will have no protection and the prediction is that lots of those little businesses will be unable to stay open. Rent rises of 1000% are predicted on properties in the bigger towns and cities.

It was a common complaint in the UK as I remember. All the towns look the same with the same chain shops in the same street. Maybe it will soon be the same in Spain.

Ghost stories

As I drove home this evening I scanned the countryside for bonfires. I listened for the whistles and bangs of fireworks. There weren't any of course. It may have been Bonfire Night in the UK but there is no celebration here to mark the failiure of the Gunpowder Plot.

From what I understand Guy Fawkes Night has basically died out in the UK anyway. For me, as a boy in West Yorkshire, it was a big event. We spent weeks beforehand collecting wood and sitting around telling ghost stories, eating potatoes charred on the outside and raw inside after their ordeal by makeshift camp fire. There was toffee, bonfire toffee, sticky enough to challenge even the strong young teeth I had then. The Parkin didn't come till later, in the kitchen at home.

The big night on the 5th involved setting off any fieworks we had managed to scrounge together. When they were exhausted the bonfire became the focus of our attention for a while. It's amazing how one side of your body, the part facing the fire, can crackle with heat whilst the other side is lashed by the cold November air. I remember too that when I finally got home the quality of the tungsten light in the kitchen always seemed very stark after being outside in the dark so long. Even odder though was that there was obviously some sort of temporal hiccough. The kitchen clock said it was still only half past seven when we got home yet the evening had lasted ages and ages. How could that be? The long, cold and dark, dark autumnal evenings of my youth were scented with smoke.

A pal in Peterborough sent me an email this evening to say it was 2ºC. Traditional sort of Bonfire Night temperature I thought. Here in Spain I'd commented to Maggie as I came in that it was a bit parky at just 13ºC.

Last week of course it was Halloween. I saw lots of signs of that. Children dressed up parading around the streets, bars covered with cobwebs. It's an event that has passed me by over the years. It hardly existed in my childhood and as I have neither children nor grandchildren I haven't learned how it's done. My knowledge of Halloween comes largely from dodgy horror movies.

I did ask my students what they did on Halloween but as most of them are very young and their English is pretty basic the level of information I got back was scanty. Several were dressed up as mummies, zombies, vampires and witches. The interesting thing was that when I asked what they had done, expecting some sort of description of tricking and treating, the almost universal answer was that they had eaten. Pizza was popular, seafood moreso. Lots told me of prawns and clams.

This is excellent news. No Spanish festivity of any kind is complete without food. Lots of the British people I know complain that Halloween is a US import though I understand that the original celebration began in Ireland and went to the US via those long queues at Ellis Island. It may be a US export but in Spain it seems to have been subverted into yet another opportunity to feast.