The Mercedes

Arturo Perez Reverte is a well known Spanish author. I've read a fair few of his books. Even in Spanish he's easy to read and often there is an informative element to the novels which I like. The last one I read was called Un día de cólera. It was written back in 2007 but it was new to me and I found it fascinating. It was about the 2nd of May street revolt in Madrid in 1808. We're with Napoleon, Trafalgar, Arthur Wellesley and all that. It's one of the few times that Britain and Spain have been on the same side. It's a period we bumped into a lot when Maggie lived in Ciudad Rodrigo because the town had been one of the battle sites as Wellington moved against the French inside Spain.

Intrigued by the Perez Reverte book I hunted around for a book to increase my knowledge of the War of Independence (Peninsula War) without overtaxing my age enfeebled brain. A likely candidate was a book by a chap called Adrian Galsworthy. I think the name's a giveaway. He's not Spanish and I decided it was stupid to read a book translated into Spanish from an original English language source. The clincher was that it was cheaper in English than Spanish.

It was Father's day last week. I got a day off work. Adventurers that we are we went to the MARQ archaeological museum in Alicante to see a temporary exhibition about the frigate Mercedes. The Mercedes was a Spanish sailing ship sunk by the Royal Navy in 1804. The Mercedes, along with the Medea, Fama and Clara, was on it's way back from America to Spain loaded with taxes for the Spanish exchequer, generally in the form of silver pieces of eight. The ships were bound from Montevideo which was, at the time, a part of Spain referred to as the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. Just one day out from home the Spanish ships were intercepted by four British frigates. The British Government knew about the money on the ships and they were keen that it did not eventually find its way into Napoleon's war chest. Europe was involved in persistent warfare at the time with alliances being formed and broken constantly. Despite Britain and Spain being at peace at the time the British ships demanded that the Spanish ships follow them to a British port. The Spanish ships refused and the commander of the British detachment, Sir Graham Moore, opened fire. During the battle the Mercedes exploded with the loss of two hundred and sixty three lives. The British won and the three Spanish ships were all taken to Britain.

Two hundred and three years later a treasure hunting company, Odyssey, found the ship and plundered what was left of the cargo. They didn't take much care about the archaeological merit of the ship and seemed instead to be simply after the treasure. Odyssey were taken to court in the United States and the Spanish Government eventually won the case. Everything found on the remains of the Mercedes was returned to Spain and much of it was used in the exhibition we saw. It wasn't at all bad. Spanish museums have definitely improved in the last ten years (see last post.)

Back in Culebrón with a cup of tea in one hand and the Galsworthy book in the other I read this morning about an attack on Copenhagen by the British in 1807. Apparently the Danes had a nice little fleet. Denmark was neutral in the wars being waged all over Europe but the British Government was concerned that Napoleon would take no notice of that neutrality and go and steal their ships. If he did that the supremacy of the Royal Navy might be threatened. So we British went and nabbed the ships first.

But for living in Spain I don't think I'd ever have known about the tiny footnote of history that is the Mercedes. And what is this about fighting the Danes? Isn't that the place with Lurpak and Carlsberg? Interesting stuff you find in novels and museums.

The dilemma

I need to write something. Not that I have a psychological need or anything but it's about time. Blogs need fuelling.

As I washed the few evening pots before retiring to bed last night and as I weeded the, not as bare as it should be, earth of our garden this morning I've been trying to think of a topic.

I thought I had one. The things that have changed in the time we have been here. Emails and puddings were uppermost in my mind.

There was a time when sending an email to someone in Spain was just a way of putting off the conversation that you didn't want to attempt in Spanish. Nobody ever replied and you had to phone in the end. Nowadays, people seem to check their mail and most respond though not all.

The pudding thing is that the restaurant offer is now so much better than the once ubiquitous flan, ice cream or seasonal fruit choice. I do miss watching people use a knife and fork to peel, section and eat an orange though.

But the topic didn't set my pulse racing. If email and puddings were the top of the list what, apart from dark sociological trends like parking ailing relatives in care homes, was going to be at the bottom?

So that idea got banged on the head.

Luxury

I painted the front door last week. I did an awful job; all runs and dead flies. Maggie and I agreed that it looked better than before though. Anyway it was bucolic, rustic, in keeping with our living situation.

Our electric supply is a bit rural too. When we moved in, we were smart enough to put our cooking and weater heating onto gas. True, we have to lug the gas bottles about but we don't have circuit breakers popping all the time.

The hot water isn't as hot in winter as in summer. Insulation is not common in our part of the world so we were not at all surprised that the water was cooler in the colder months. It had to pass through all that cold earth. We weren't surprised either that the water got hotter more quickly in one bathroom than the others - more cold ground = cooler water for longer.

We've had some lovely weather recently. High 20s and sunny so and I was a bit surprised that the hot water was more like tepid water. Shower time was not a pleasure. Grease stuck obstinately to the cutlery as we washed up. It took us days to decide that it wasn't just rural it was a problem. I tried some home solutions but, eventually, we called Jesús, the plumber. At first he was stumped too. We had water, we had gas, the boiler was lighting up, why was the water not hot enough? He found the fault though, an intermittent fault. He's fixed it now and the water is scalding hot.

It's amazing how luxurious it feels to have hot water.

La Tamborada Nacional

I was a bit of a celebrity in Jumilla last night. Lots of people shouted at me just before they grabbed their friends around the shoulder, smiled broadly and stared in my direction. They wanted me to take their photo. Nowadays photos are everywhere. Every event is a forest of mobile phone cameras. So why the excitement? I can only put the interest down to the stick, the mono-pod, that was attached to the bottom of my camera. They presumably thought I was press or at least a proper photographer.

It didn't help though. Despite having racked the speed on the camera up to ISO 2000 and having the stick to help steady the camera every single one of the photos I took was blurred. Mind you I've still loaded lots of them up to various photo sharing websites because they're sort of friendly.

The information about the tamborada was a bit vague. No, it was a lot vague. A tamborada is a drum event; people walk around beating drums. The name is presumably based on the Spanish word for one sort of drum, un tambor. I've been to one other tamborada, in Hellin in Albacete province. There it's a pretty easy story. During Holy Week the church processions included official drummers. Over the years the drummers escaped the confines of the formal processions and simply wandered around beating drums at Easter time. Nowadays the mayhem of drummers wandering the streets in packs is part of Hellin's culture. They drum for hours on end. In Tobarra, in Albacete again, they drum for 104 hours without stopping from the Wednesday afternoon of Holy Week through to midnight on Easter Sunday. I've heard of tamboradas in Cuenca, in Andorra in Teruel, in San Sebastian. There are tamboradas all over Spain. Most of the tamboradas are associated with Holy Week

So before we went I vaguely assumed that I had simply missed this particular event in Jumilla in previous years. Jumilla is in Murcia but only 35 km from home. I supposed that the tamborada was in some way associated with religion and with Easter. After all the drum association in Jumilla is called Asociación de Tambores Santísimo Cristo de la Sangre, or something like the Holy Blood of Christ Drum Association. It turns out though that this particular drum group was only formed in 2005 and is named for one of the statues in a local monastery. It's strange actually. Spain has a long Catholic tradition but I wouldn't say that it's a particularly religious country nowadays. The Catholic Church has a long history of siding with the oppressor rather than the oppressed (particularly in the last century) yet socialist mayors and leftist politicians in general seem quite content to pop out and kiss the feet of the Virgin or carry the patron saint of the town on their shoulders. Left leaning administrations happily pay out thousands of euros for fiestas which usually have a religious theme at their core. I suppose it's something similar to the way that people who haven't been to church for years are determined to have some sort of cleric officiate their wedding and why I don't kick up too much of a fuss if someone invites me to a Christian funeral or baptism.

Anyway, after going back and forth on a whole range of websites it now seems that the event we were at in Jumilla last night was simply a coming together of the drum associations from all over Spain. It has taken place in other towns with a tradition of drumming in past years. And, despite lots of the drummers having Christian insignia on their tunics and variations on penitent type robes this was nothing more than a celebration of drumming.

Excellent fun. The drum was the main protagonist but, being Jumilla, there was a wine event tacked on. We were getting a glass of wine from the Casa de la Ermita stand and Maggie mentioned her Secret Wine Spain venture and the chap suddenly clicked. He knew her site and he knew Maggie's name. His girlfriend had a drum though. People everywhere were beating drums. Lots were in organised groups, representatives of their towns or their association but there were several families too or just bunches of pals. We left long before we could take the offer of the bargain breakfast at one of the food stalls but my ears are still ringing nonetheless.

Burning certificate

Spain goes on fire a lot. It happens more in summer when fag ends, thrown from moving cars, and seasonal barbecues don't mix with tinder dry pine forests.

There are small scale fires all over the place. We've seen fires on the hillside above Cartagena and even on the little mountain behind our house in Culebrón. In summer there are always a series of big fires. Occasionally people, especially firefighters, die and the inhabitants of rural villages are regularly evacuated. There are people who patrol the countryside trying to limit hazhards and provide early warning. Fire services have fire engines with huge ground clearances, to get them into areas without roads, and helicopters and water tanker planes, designed to drop thousands of gallons of water onto inaccessible forests, seem to be readily available.

Sometimes the fires happen naturally. Sometimes it's things like a dropped bottles that start fires without people being so directly involved. Sometimes it's those fag ends or a little garden bonfire that gets out of control. Lots of times it's done on purpose. A little burning to clear some nice building land, a bit of revenge against a despised neighbour. Country folk complain about the poor state of the firebreaks - badly maintained because of Government budget cuts.

We have some garden waste to get rid of. It will take the palm tree frond decades to compost. Maggie isn't keen on the pile of rotting vegetation at the back of the house. Burning seems like a good option.

I was vaguely aware of the need to get permission to have a bonfire from the local Town Hall so we went to ask. It wasn't hard. The chap gave us a quick rundown of the requirements - not within such and such a distance of trees, times of day, water on hand to extinguish the fire, only when the wind is below 10km per hour and whatnot. One stipulation was that the fire warning level should be below this or that intensity. Amongst the ways to check that was by following a Twitter account for the local emergency control centre. With the rules explained he checked the details of our address and then we signed a form, in triplicate. One for them, one for us and one for the local police. The signed and stamped certificate was emailed to us early the next morning.

I'm often told how Third World or how bureaucratic Spain is. It's not a view I usually share. Certainly, at times, there are things to complain  about, certainly bureaucracy can be overbearing but, wherever you live, I suspect the same is true for you at times too.

Having some control on burning garden cuttings though in a country that seems quite flamable sounds pretty sensible to me.

Cold calling

I usually don't hear my mobile phone ring. So, if you phone the chances are I will miss the call. If I do hear it ring the phone is often in the depths of my bag or I'm using it to play music or I'm wearing gardening gloves. By the time I find the phone, disconnect the earphones or get my hands free the other person is long gone and I am left shouting, uselessly, into dead air. Sometimes I just decide not to answer. If it's a number I don't know or one with the identity withheld then I tend to let them be. The chances are that it will be somebody trying to sell me something or someone who has dialled the wrong number.

I don't get a lot of calls anyway. This morning, unusually, I got two, I heard them both and I answered them too. The wrong number was absolutely certain that I should be his brother even if I wasn't. My insistence that I was called Chris and this was my number seemed to cut no ice with him. No, this is my brother's number, coño, he said.

The other call was from the Red Cross. Now my method, if I do answer either the landline or my mobile to an unknown number, is to be like that Dom Joly chap shouting down the phone and trying to sound as English as possible. This scares many more than half of the cold callers away. Why bother trying to sell something to someone who won't understand when you have a call list of five hundred numbers to go? For the few who persevere a bit of "what?, eh?" does the trick. Spaniards make exactly the same complaints about cold callers and call centre workers as Brits do - the callers have undecipherable accents, the calls come when you're eating or in the shower - so I'm sure that the callers are used to having the phone slammed down on them. Somebody sounding like a half wit must be light relief for them.

Anyway the Red Cross is an acceptable call. I have a lot of time for the Spanish Red Cross. Maggie has been giving them a monthly donation for a while now and I'd decided that the next time they called I would say yes. And I did. The woman on the phone was very pleasant. She understood when I spelled my email address which is often a phone nightmare and I was in a quiet bar and even had my bank details to hand so that, all in all, it was a good call. She did ask me though if I were German.

Now that one's out of the way though I have even less reason to pick up.

Day to day

I remember some adverts at the cinema along the lines of "Which teacher changed your life?" It was a recruiting campaign for teachers; the idea being that teachers could make a real difference. Without the Ms. Williamsons or Mr. Gwizdaks there wouldn't be as many great novels or so many life enriching scientific discoveries. I've never really believed in the concept of inspirational teaching. I do not doubt that some teachers are better than others, that some teachers explain concepts better than others, that some teachers are more empathetic than others but, in the end, I think it's the student that counts. I was an average sort of student and I got average sort of results in a whole bundle of subjects. Who taught me seems to have been irrelevant. Nowadays anyway the very idea of a teacher as the fount of all knowledge seems so Victorian when my phone can tell me much more about chemistry than Messrs Lofthouse, Bottomley and all my other school chemistry teachers put together.

I'm certainly no inspirational teacher myself. I don't particularly care for the job and I do it because I get paid. I'm reasonably organised and I'm reasonably lively so I don't think I'm a bad teacher or anything but I'm certainly nothing out of the ordinary. I've now worked in three different "academies"  which seems to be the accepted translation of the word academia which is usually used to describe a private language school here in Spain.

One of my academies had a flexible learning system built around units of learning but two of the academies, including my present one, use a standard and very simple system which is a bit odd to British eyes. The students pay a fixed fee per month for a set number of classes. The classes are usually graded by ability or by age. So, take an example. In March this year if your classes were on Monday and Tuesday you would get ten classes but, if they were on Wednesday and Thursday you would only get eight. Actually that's not quite true because Father's Day, Thursday March 19th, is a holiday so there will only be seven classes for the Wednesday/Thursday brigade. It's a swings and roundabouts system and most people simply hand over their cash and come every month. You can play the system of course and some people do. December, for instance, is plagued with holidays so lots of students do November, miss December and come back in January.

English is a regular topic of conversation in Spain. There's a belief that without English you cannot succeed. Professionals often need English. Teachers, for example, have to have a high intermediate qualification in English (B2) no matter what subject or area they teach. On the radio there are often pieces complaining about the intrusion of English into the everyday language. It seems to be pretty cool for Spaniards to drop in a few English words to the conversation. The funny thing is that the variations in pronunciation mean that many native English speakers do not recognise the words as English. On top of that many supposedly English words aren't used correctly. Cross and camping for instance are well established, everyday words used by all Spaniards but the first is a cross country race and the second is a campsite. There is camping close to the start of the cross would, I suspect, confound most Brits.

So there is a sizeable market for English language teaching across the age range in Spain. The backbone of the majority of the academies though is children.  Responsible adults want their children to succeed. They send them to do English because either they are doing well at school and want to reinforce the success or because they are doing badly and want to make up the deficit. In reality the level of even the best of the youngsters is excruciatingly bad. I have no idea what's going on with English language teaching in Spanish schools but it isn't working for the youngsters I bump into.

It may be, of course, that for me at least there's no need for younger students to apply themselves. Most of the youngsters would rather be manipulating a games console, kicking a football or chatting with their pals than doing English and as long as they do well, or better, at school their parents will leave them alone. There is no real need for them to try and speak or understand English for me. I can offer neither substantial threats nor incentives. So even the nicest of them, the ones who seem keen, chatter all the time. Spain is a noisy country which means that everyone knows that you need to raise your voice to be heard. The result is that chatter often turns to shouting. Amongst the less interested, on top of the noise, there is fighting. They fight each other and occasionally they fight with me in the sense that they will try to wrest a board marker from my grip or force closed the book that they don't want to study. There is a lot of pinching and kicking amongst them and a fair bit of stabbing each other with pencils. Tearing up worksheets is the norm. I hate English (said in Spanish of course)  and a point blank refusal to participate in the activities are common. Several of the younger children seem to delight in dropping their trousers or throwing snot around. Most endearing. The environment is not one that fosters speedy language learning and one of the real differences between me and a properly trained teacher is that I have no idea about classroom management.

Personally of course I'm still struggling to learn a bit more Spanish, to improve my fluency and what not. So for the past few years the parallels between my own struggles with a language and those of my students have made the whole thing quite interesting. I don't find it quite so aborbing anymore now that I spend most of my time asking people to get off the table or to stop shouting.