Absent minded

Today we took part in the day of the absent Pinosero. 

Pinoseros are people who were born in Pinoso. The idea of the day is that it celebrates the locals who, for one reason or another, no longer live here. Each year some of them make the journey back to Pinoso to meet with friends and family or just to renew acquaintance with the town. Those who will never come back are remembered too.

The day included an official welcome, a presentation about the local salt workings and then a trip, by coach, to the top of Cabezo to have a look the actual installations on the ground before travelling back to town for a quick church service, a group photo and a meal.

Pinoso mines salt, a lot of salt but there's not a mineshaft, pick or shovel to be seen. One of the local topographic features is a rounded, dome like, hill which stands about 320 metres above the general terrain and whose summit is at something like 890 metres above sea level at Alicante. It's a salt dome. Millions and millions of tons of Triassic salt that have squeezed up through the surrounding rocks. Nowadays a mining company injects water into the ground, dissolves out some of the salt and sends it down a 53km gravity fed pipeline to Torrevieja. There the brine is added to the salt lagoons, filled with already salty water from the Mediterranean. The Pinoso brine ups the concentration of salt in the water so, when the water is evaporated away, they are left with tons of salt ready for road gritting, the chemical industry and other industrial uses.

To be honest I've been to much more exciting salt workings where huge trucks work underground or where salty white miners work with picks and wooden wheelbarrows (well in front of tourists they do) but this was interesting because it was on home turf. Something that we'd not done either before.

The meal wasn't bad. Mass catering and a very normal sort of menu but the rabbit stew, the gazpacho, I had was good and Maggie said her rice, rabbit and snail paella, was good enough too. The company was excellent. We had gone with a couple of recently arrived Britons but otherwise we were, obviously enough, surrounded by Spaniards and they seemed more than happy to chat with us. There were a couple of quite impish chaps sitting opposite who must have been studying irony at the University of the Third Age and were  determined to try out some of the things they had learned.

So, about seven hours after we started we came home. Fatter and more knowledgeable about local geography, geology and industry and, rather surprisingly, grasping one of the group photos.

Thick cut marmalade

I met Maggie as she left work today and on the way home we went food shopping. Maggie told me we were saving money because she had some sort of customer loyalty voucher. I suspect we may have saved more by not going in the shop at all though following my plan to its logical conclusion we would starve to death.

Based on a mix of store layout, friendliness, price and choice the shop we went to, Consum, is probably my favourite of the four larger Pinoso supermarkets. Recently I've done more of the food shopping than Maggie so, as we moved around the shop, I was playing the tour guide on new lines and innovations. What I hadn't really noticed, until today, was how many "British" items the shop now carries.

It was around 3pm when we were shopping, a time when most Spanish people are getting their lunch. The only Spaniards in the store were the workers. All of the customers appeared to be Britons. Obviously whoever does the buying for our Consum had noticed this customer profile long before me and that's why Consum sells Cheddar cheese, thick cut marmalade, Sharwoods pastes, chillis, kidney beans, Heinz tomato soup and lots of other Brit familiar produts. I suppose it's why masymas has in store adverts in English too.

Here's a blog entry I thought.

Now as I said there are four biggish supermarkets in Pinoso as well as a couple of local food shops. I thought that if I were going to mention Consum I should do the same for Día, Hiperber and masymas. You might not think so but I try to be reasonably even handed when I write this blog. So I Googled the supermarkets for a bit of background info and I was quite surprised by what I found.

Hiperber is the simplest story. They set up about forty years ago in nearby Elche with a philosophy of larger retail units when other food shops were still pretty small. They tend to be no frills stores and they seem to be doing fine as a small, regional chain.

Día is another no frills business. It runs on a policy of limited product lines and lots of own brands to keep the stores firmly at the cheaper end of the market. I vaguely knew that Día had something to do with the Carrefour chain and that it ran as a franchise operation. It turns out that my Carrefour information is out of date. The businesses separated in 2011 and of the 4,781 Día shops in Spain only around 1,650 are franchises. Día seem to have done alright out of the problems of other food retailers. They bought the ailing Arbol supermarkets for just 1€ in 2014 and, in 2015, they took advantage of the financial problems of the third largest food retailer, Eroski, to buy lots more shops. Eroski had run into problems because of its huge investment in shopping centres at the height of the building boom.

Masymas was a surprise. Más y Más means more and more and I thought that was the name of the shop. Actually the name seems to be masymas - lowercase and just one word. It's not simply one compay either; it's four different companies that have very similar logos and, I think, share some bulk buying, Our local shop is one of fifty seven shops that can trace their roots back to a dried and cured food business that opened in Villajoyosa at the tail end of the 19th Century.

And Consum? Well it's a co-operative with nearly all the workers being partners in the business. Apparently it's the largest co-op in Valencia. They formed in 1975 and were later a founding part of the Eroski group until the two businesses parted ways back in 2004. They also have a franchise arm which trades as Charter supermarkets.

Not knowing what you don't know

I think that we do pretty well at getting out and about. In fact the last few days have been a bit of a culture fest.

Just tonight we were at the Yecla Jazz Festival. On Saturday it was the open doors day in Petrer when we visited the Castle, a Civil War machine gun emplacement and some other stuff. Oh, and earlier on Saturday we went to an animal rescue centre outside Villena that majors in apes and monkeys. On Sunday I popped in to see the Fallas "monuments" in Elda and, spurred on by all this activity, I also got around to booking a couple of events for this season at the Teatro Chapi. And right on our doorstep I signed us up for a visit to the local salt workings. I even got to the cinema twice last week and, if the second film hadn't been so incomprehensible to me, I might have made it three.

I mentioned the Fallas event to a Spanish chap I was talking to this morning. He'd never heard of it. Moors and Christians in Elda he said; didn't even know they had Fallas. I can't say I blame him. I had the full 136 page glossy event magazine and I couldn't find most of the structures they were going to burn. There were times and events and lots of photos of young women in traditional frocks in the programme but it was a bit short on locations. Elda Tourist Office is in receipt of one of my snotty emails.

It was lunctime. I was driving home after buying the ingredients for today's gastronomic delight whilst Maggie was driving back from an appointment in Petrer. We both heard José Miguel López presenting his show on National Radio 3 from the nearby town of Yecla. He was there to host the Yecla Jazz Festival which started today.

So, this evening we popped over to Yecla to hear the free concert by Miyram Latrece. It was excellent stuff. Good crowd, splendid musicians, lovely atmosphere. I think Miryam was a bit carried away by the event; she described Yecla as "lindisma" - really pretty. I like Yecla myself but describing the town as pretty is pushing it a bit.

There are plenty of things we know about that we choose not to do but I often wonder what else me miss simply because we don't know it's there?

I'm wearing a cardi

Last week it rained a lot. Even here in sunny Alicante it rains from time to time. Fortunately it didn't do what it did to lots of Southern Spain, it didn't come down in tremendous sheets, causing floods that destroyed everything in their path. It rained in a very English way. Heavy, persistent rain rarher than a tremendous downpour.

The weather has improved since then. Blue skies from time to time but generally it's been quite grey with the occasional shower. It's stayed relatively warm though - in the high 20s - but I'd be mightily disappointed if I were here on holiday especially with the cool evenings. We've closed  the workroom windows which have been open since we we wedged them that way back in June. We've also taken to closing the front and back doors to stop the cool draught passing through the house.

When I changed the duvet cover yeterday morning I considered substituting a slightly thicker and warmer quilt. The towels in the bathroom are taking hours rather than minutes to dry. There are socks in the laundry. I used the heater in the car, rather than the aircon, a couple of days ago. And the roads are full of tractors pulling trailer loads of grapes.

It's obvious really. It's still a long way from cold but it's beginning to cool down. They know about it on the telly where the season's new programmes have started. They know on the radio where the presenters are back from their summer holidays. It's September and summer finishes as August closes. The nights are drawing in. It will soon be uncomfortably cold in the house. The long, slow slope into autumn and winter has begun and it will be a long time to April when things begin to improve.

In the city

Pinoso doesn't have traffic lights and parking is free. In Culebrón we don't have much tarmac let alone street names.

Yesterday I went for a job interview in Murcia. I hadn't been looking for a new job it's just that a job website I'm signed up to sends me offers matched against keywords. From time to time I apply for something that looks interesting. Like being a tourist guide. But jobs are in short supply in Spain at the moment and I never get any sort of response. There's no effort to applying though, just push a button and my CV wings its way to wherever. I never bother with a covering letter. I'm not expecting to get an interview so I don't put any effort into the process. There was effort in writing the original CV of course and every now and then I update it but it's low maintenance.

So the surprise was that the firm came straight back to me after one of these occasional button pushes. It was for English teaching of course. The only job where my faltering Spanish is not a handicap. The advantage to me in changing jobs is mainly financial. I am, technically, self employed and taking advantage of a reduced rate, for startup businesses, of Seguridad Social which is a lot like the UK's National Insurance. Even then, by UK standards, this reduced rate is startlingly high. It's a fixed minimum and I'm paying 153€ per month at the moment which will go up to around 210€ in November and six months later it will reach its final level of 263€. Quite a whack out of my part time earnings; 30% of my gross and if I add in my tax the total in stoppages is something like 38%. The new job offered a simple, straightforward contract. I would become an employee again.

The interview was fine. They offered me a job. After a lot of indecision and a lot of sums about diesel costs, hours worked and stoppages paid I said yes. The job wasn't actually in Murcia as I expected but in a much smaller town called Cieza. I think I will be working principally as a language assistant to youngsters doing vocational courses which sounds both interesting and organised.

So, back to the point.  I had to go to Murcia. I don't mind driving anywhere but one of the joys of rural Spain, and lots of it is rural, is the roads. They are not busy. But Murcia City isn't rural - it's a real city. The centre is encircled by a giggle gaggle of intersecting motorways and out of town shopping centres. Once onto the ordinary streets it's roundabouts, traffic lights, five lanes of traffic, cars jockeying for position, bus lanes etc. Normal town stuff but always a bit of a change after Pinoso.

The interview was in the centre of town and I parked in an underground car park. When I drove out to come home it was lunchtime. I had the SatNav thingy on which tells me how many metres it is to the next rounadout or junction. It took me 20 minutes to cover the 700 metres that got me onto a relatively free flowing road heading out of town. I have a similar story about Victoria Station to the Wellington Arch but that story involves a Routemaster bus and over an hour.

Anyway, I drove over to Cieza just to have a look. I parked in the main street without any problem and without any payment. The town seemed nicer than I remebered, a bit prettier. The drive home along the N344, bits of the almost deserted A33 motorway and the RM427/CV83 was a pleasure. Not a traffic light or a bus lane in sight.

It was nice in town, the hustle and bustle, all those shops and people. I went to see a temporary Goya exhibition. We don't get a lot of Goya in Pinoso but, on balance, I quite like small town life. And I'm not far from plenty of 200,000 plus cities should the need for a bit of traffic overcome me.

I couldn't give a

I quite like figs. Not that they are likely to replace plums or cherries in my affections but, from time to time, as something a bit different, they're nice. They were the sort of fruit that I would buy, every now and again, in a pack of three or four, when I was in Waitrose.

We have two black fig trees in our garden and one of the smaller trees that gives green figs. They produce thousands and thousands of fruits. Being a bit lazy I'd not raked up the fallen fruit this season and the smell of rotting figs was becoming quite pungent. So yesterday I spent the better part of two hours raking up all the fallen stuff. It's not a pleasant job because the sap from the leaves and what not is a skin irritant and in grovelling around under the fig trees I always bump my head or back against one of the sturdy branches a couple of times. And scraping squashed figs from the soles of your shoes afterwards is quite time consuming and sticky too.

Nonetheless, when I'd finished and wheeled away three barrow loads of fallen fruit it looked nice and tidy. There was a bit of a breeze yesterday afternoon and when I went to re-inspect my handiwork this morning there was quite a lot of fresh fallen fruit. It took about half an hour to rake them up.

You can't really tell from the photo but that capazo thing, the rubber bucket, is about 30cms tall and about 30cms across and it just about holds the fresh fall from the two black fig trees.

And you all feel so superior and expert

One of my little jokes is that I like paying Spanish taxes. I say it gives me the right to complain about Spanish politicians. Now I'm going to argue that after eleven years here I have a right to express an opinion about Spain.

I wrote a little essay for a Spanish class I do and I posted it on this blog. It was no more than a writing exercise for the teacher but when it was done I thought it was a whimsical look at things I noticed in Spain - good coffee, bad tea, uninformative notices - little inconsequential things. Perfect for the blog.

Nobody much comments on my blog but I got one about that article. At first the chap (I think it's a man) was just putting me right. I said there was no good British style tea to be had in Spanish cafés and he told me about the varieties, methods and what not of making a range of teas all of which were available in Spain. Fair enough, not the same point but fair enough. As his reply lengthened though it changed tone. He doesn't seem to be too keen on we Britons. Again, fair enough, if his experience of us is bad then that's his experience. He didn't seem to care for me much either or at least what I write.

He also made a comment on an article I wrote about swearing. My basic premise was that Spaniards swear less forcibly but more frequently than Britons. As you may imagine my post was full of explanations, qualifications and exceptions. Now here we had a different mode of attack. He simply told me that I was wrong. I don't think so. I may have a different experience to him or a different interpretation but I am not wrong. I can see swearing on the television, hear it on the streets and in the bars and I have been unpleasantly surprised by the frequency of swearing amongst my sub teen pupils. It may be true that I notice the use of strong English language swearing by Spaniards more than the home population. After all I know what it means and how forceful its meaning is because I am English but I would not notice it if it were not said.

This chap though did make me wonder about the generalisations that I make in a lot of the posts. We all gather information from around us and extrapolate - all Swedes are blonde, all Ecuadorians are short, all Andalucians are full of the joys of life. All obviuosly untrue but all good healthy stereotypes. So when does extrapolation become stereotyping and when does stereotyping become offensive? When a Spaniard tells me that all the English wear socks with sandals I smile. Everybody knows that's what we Britons do. When I get told we are all drunkards I think of the news stories showing all those Britons in Magaluf paddling and crawling in pools of beer and puke and I smile again. If I were feeling combative I may rise in defence of all the sober Brits, dismiss the sock myth or even argue the merits of socks to avoid scarred feet and stinking sandals.

I was about to start this paragraph with "I like Spain, I like Spaniards" but then I realised that's not absolutely true. There are plenty of things about the behaviour of some Spaniards, things that are common enough for me to rashly declare that "all Spaniards do this or that" that I definitely do not like. I don't like all of Spain either. Some of it, is in my opinion, a blighted wasteland. There are things I think are actively stupid here - penalising private solar electricity generation and the relatively recent "gagging law" spring to mind. Then again I found plenty to complain about in the UK before I left and I could, Peter Green style, keep you amused for hours complaining about the behaviour of some of my compatriots living here. There are lots of bad similarities between the two counties too - the overbearing pride that "we" did this or that in things like history or sport, the rewriting of history and the jingoistic and chauvanistic in general.

In fact, my general view is that the UK and Spain are, nowadays, pretty similar places. It's not a popular view. I voiced it on a forum about what culture shock people could experience coming to live in Spain. I said there were lots of differences, some of them quite wide differences, but that none of them were of the big kind - no general prohibitions on personal freedom, no threats to basic safety or democratic organisation, not even different clothes. Just another European country. I was thinking about big things like education, healthcare, and the visible economic indicators. The flood of posts after mine listed everything from cruelty to animals and much more visible corruption through to slow Internet connections and poor bank services as evidence that Spain would dish out plenty of culture shock. I stick to my opinion.

And what's the point of this rambling? Well it's to say that I have spent something like 18% of my life in Spain and I'm reasonably clued up about the country. I've visited all but one of the provincial capitals, In a Munro sense I'm missing just one of the Balearic Islands and one of the autonomous cities. I may have been a tourist in most of those cities but I'm not a tourist in Spain. I watch Spanish telly, read Spanish press, wear Spanish clothes, drive a Spanish car, work in Spain, eat Spanish food, buy in Spanish shops. I know what's going on. Anyway it's my blog, my experiences of some of the things, the little things, that happen to me and around me. That's what the blog description says. A personal view, a personally biased view, but not an uninformed view.

I did suggest to the commentator, who wrote in a mix of Spanish and English, that if he were still trying to improve his English we could continue the discussion over a couple of pints of whisky or some tepid tea. He turned me down. He said he'd been considering it until he saw my posts.

Now maybe if I'd promised to wear my Union flag shorts!

The title is taken fom one of the comments. It refers to Brits in Spain and probably more specifically to me.