Battening down the hatches

There's not much on Spanish telly on Friday night and so Maggie, who is much more telly aware than I am, often turns over to Gogglebox which I quite like as it doesn't feature baying crowds.

As I weeded the garden I was thinking about the Siddiqui family - well them and the remarkable resilience of weeds. I pondered the Siddiquis speaking English to each other. Without knowing anything about them I presume that they are the second and third or maybe third and fourth generation descendants of someone who would not claim Derby as home.

It is November so it's time for the meal and Annual General Meeting of the Culebrón Neighbourhood Association. It happened this afternoon, in fact it's probably still going on as, for the first time in years, I did a bunk from the AGM. I'm on, or maybe I was on, the management committee so skipping the meeting is probably a hanging, or maybe a garroting,  offence.

When we are complaining to people about our lack of Spanish they often suggest to us that Maggie and I should talk in Spanish at home. Grammatical considerations aside how self conscious and how foolish, do you think I'd feel speaking Spanish to Maggie? You are correct - somewhere off the top of the stupidity scale. A Tsunami of stupidity.

We've lived in Spain for twelve years on the trot now. Maggie can claim 15 years total because of her time in Madrid in the 90s. For me that's close enough to 20% of my life and for Maggie over 27%. Maybe, like the Siddiquis the home language should be the language we use to generally communicate and, like the Siddiquis, our home TV should be our home TV. But it isn't. Why else would I be watching Gogglebox?

I didn't really want to go to the Neighbourhood Association meal this afternoon. It isn't so much the Spanish anymore. I've sort of accepted that my Spanish is bad and always will be. The reason I didn't want to go is because the Association is probably the place where I feel most foreign. Paradoxically that's because, almost certainly, it's the place where I am most warmly greeted. At the last meal there was a lot of kerfuffle about where we were going to sit. We sat somewhere only to be told that such and such was going to sit there and, when we tried again, we got a similar story. Our final destination was the metaphorical seat behind the column. This looking out for your pals obviously happens everywhere, people hold seats and places in queues for latecomers. I suspect though, that if challenged, most seat holders would cede the right to the people who were physically present. Shift the German towel and the sunbed is yours isn't it?

After the Association meals the conversation is never just football, or the weather, or music. If we talk about music we compare and contrast Spanish and "English" music. If it's football, I'm conversationally buggered but, even if I weren't, the conversation would become an analysis of Man U and Barca or Aston Villa and Mallorca. I'm as guilty of this as the Spanish person alongside me but I am marked out as different (and incidentally inferior) because of my nationality. Just once it would be nice to have conversation, flawed as it may be, where we were talking about Stoke and Watford because we are talking English football or Numancia and Rayo Vallecano because were are in Spain or even about PSG, Manchester City and Sevilla because we are in Europe (just).

Out on the blowout

Last Saturday we joined some people from the language exchange group to go on the tapas trail. One of the participants was a bloke from Surrey who has partnered up with a young Spanish woman. He was saying to me that his perception is that whilst we Britons go out for a drink Spaniards go out for an eat. Obviously I agreed with him as it's true. Lots of Spanish life revolves around food.

It depends on your criteria but the Santa Catalina area of Pinoso has been described to me, by Spaniards, as the poorest bit of Pinoso, the most authentic bit of the town and the district with the strongest community identity. There's nothing to stop all three being true.

I've always known the area as Santa Catalina, named for the patron saint of the district, but there is a definite drift to calling it the Barrio de las cuevas - the cave district - where caves are the houses dug into the hillside. Either way I've been up there a couple of times this week to have a look at bits of their fiesta. On Sunday I went to see the first transfer of the image of Santa Catalina to her first overnight stop with a local family and, this evening, as a lead in to the actual Saint's day on the 25th, we popped up to have a look at the hogueras, the little bonfires that families, friends and other social groupings gather around.

We parked the car and walked towards the first little bonfire we saw. Maggie drew in breath through her nose and that was enough for someone to offer her a hunk of bread and one of the local longaniza sausages, cooked in the embers of the fire, with a drop of mulled wine to wash it down. I heard someone there describe me as the Culebrón photographer. I'm not sure whether I liked that or not.

We strolled on, we were offered wine served as a stream of red liquid from the wooden version of a wine skin. We bumped into, and chatted with, some Britons we know who were having a drink outside one of the district bar's. We walked on towards another little fire where I was invited into the patio of the house to take a snap of a small shrine to Santa Catalina. That, of course, led to the irresistible offer of food: first buñuelos which are a bit like doughnuts made with pumpkin, then variations on gachamigas, more longanizas, some unnamed bits of cold and very unpalatable fat and then some broad beans cooked in a ham stock. The wine I had to surreptitiously pass to Maggie as I was driving.

We had only popped in for a quick look see. Very pleasant way to pass a cool November evening; very hospitable and, as Maggie said, November is a great time for a fiesta to add a bit of cheer to the colder and darker nights.

All mod cons

My Auntie Lizzie used to take me to Blackpool when I was a lad. We stayed in B&Bs that advertised hot and cold running water. It was a long time before en suite bathrooms.

In Auntie Lizzie's day people used to say that houses had mod cons - modern conveniences. Our house, the one we live in now, has all those mod cons but they seem to be in open revolt. I told you about the water a while ago.

To sort our water supply we rang the Town Hall. Their people came in a Jeep, wielded a spanner or two, and told me it was all sorted. It wasn't though. Inside the house water flow was still a problem. I called a plumber. He changed a couple of valves and assured me that it was all hunky dory. It wasn't though. I rang our gas contract supplier and asked them to service the boiler. They did, they said it was as right as rain. It wasn't though. They are going to have another stab tomorrow.

A bulb blew. When I took the cover off the lamp I was surprised to find an incandescent bulb. That bulb must have been as old as the room. I thought we had low energy stuff everywhere but, when I checked, I found lots of old style bulbs. I spent a fortune on new ones with really impressive looking energy ratings. I set aside ten minutes, between other jobs, to change the lamps. Changing the light bulbs was a bit like those old shaggy dog jokes - it just went on and on for ever. I even had to replace a couple of fittings.

We have fluorescent tubes in the kitchen. There has always been a delay between flicking the switch, the starters popping and the tubes glowing but the wait had become interminable. It wasn't the first time we'd had the problem. I thought new tubes and starters would get us back to a reasonable response time. In the ironmongers, as I inspected the tubes, Olegario, the owner, interested himself in my purchase. He told me that the tube I had in my hand was LED. Being relatively good at reading I'd worked that out. I picked out a couple of tubes and told him I needed starters too. Olegario knew otherwise and explained that I needed to dump the ballast and starters for the LED tubes to work. Back in our kitchen, with instructions followed, the tubes wouldn't fire up. YouTube told me what Olegario hadn't. The replacement didn't go smoothly but, in the sanitised words of Gordon Hamnet, there was only one winner here and it wasn't the light fitting.

So, changing a few bulbs had taken me several hours.

Over the years we have used various devices to heat our house. Gas stoves - calor gas type heaters - have been our mainstay. After years of faithful service the original batch of three started to do things they shouldn't do. We feared for our lives in an explosion of metal shards from ruptured gas bottles. New gas stoves were purchased. In the meantime Maggie had invested real money in a pellet burner. With the pellet burner as the main heat source and the two newer gas heaters, and the rest, in reserve I thought we had everything covered. Except that the gas heaters have started to mysteriously turn themselves off. Obviously it's some form of safety cut out but our carbon monoxide meter has nothing to say on the matter. Valves and tubes have been changed. Why the heaters turn themselves off is something known only to the Taiwanese or Turks that built the things. Last night, as I got home, the living room radiated coolness. "I can't get either the gas stove or the pellet burner to light," said Maggie. The gas stove was no problem. Maggie just doesn't have the knack but the pellet burner took an hour to sort. Nothing seriously wrong but a pain in the proverbial.

Auntie Lizzie's house only had cold water in the scullery. Her outside toilet was a basically a big pit. The heating was by coal fires. I think she had electric but gas lighting hadn't completely disappeared in my youth so I may be wrong. I'm ever so pleased that things have moved on and we have modern conveniences nowadays.

Mossets it is

Mossets is, apparently, the Valencian language equivalent of tapa, or, in the plural, tapas. I presume that you know about tapas, it's one of those words that is now as English as coup or zeigeist. Tapas are little snacks.

Normally, around these parts we're not big on free tapas. You often get a handful of crisps, a few olives, or some nuts with your beer but it's an optional extra. It's not the same in Andalucia. The last time I was in Guadix I forgot that we had crossed a frontier and I made the typical foreigner abroad mistake of telling the waiter that I hadn't ordered the mini hamburger that he had just put down in front of me. In Andalucia substantial tapas alongside your drink are still dead common.

I think of the town I pay my rates to as being called Pinoso but, just to continue the Valenciano lesson, lots of people refer to it by its Valencian name of el Pinós. And the publicity says El Pinós a Mossets or something like Pinoso out for a bite to eat.

Tapas trails are a bit old hat nowadays. They've been around for ages. A bunch of bars and restaurants sign up to produce a tapa or two for the trail during a set period. Some organisation, like the local town hall or the chamber of trade, puts together a little leaflet or booklet which lists the participating establishments and what they have on offer. Usually it's a set price offer for a drink and a tapa. People do some or all of the route and usually vote for their favourite tapa with a prize draw included.

In my opinion Pinoso has never quite got this right. The first year of the route participants had to go to every bar if they wanted to vote and enter the prize draw. Not only did this make full participation relatively expensive and time consuming but it also meant that there was no real incentive for a bar to be innovative. Good for you if, as a bar, you mixed tastes and traditions in your tapa but punters still had to go to the bar offering a bit of ham on bread if they wanted to vote. It also took no account of personal likes and dislikes - you don't eat fish - tough luck, you're a vegetarian - forget it. A couple of the participating eateries were also out of town which was a bit of a snag if you didn't have transport. Actually living away from town is a disadvantage too. The set price is 2€ and includes a beer or a wine. If you want a soft drink it costs more. I'm sure though that the town hall has no interest in incentivizing drinking  and driving.

Despite my moaning we've been out of course. We've been to half a dozen places so far and one of the major improvements this time is that you "only" need to go to a dozen of the seventeen places participating. It's still too many but it is a step in the right direction.