Energy poverty

There are a lot of people in Spain who have difficulty in paying their energy bills. A nice warm house, when it's cold outside, is one of those symbols of well being and comfort. Just think of any of the filmed versions of A Christmas Carol. Being cold is miserable

I've lived in six different flats in my time in Spain. None of them have had gas, just electricity. Whilst there are plenty of people who have piped gas and many more who use bottled gas when Spaniards talk about energy they are really talking about electric.

That's not our case; in Culebrón we have a gas hob, gas water heater and we generally use gas fires to heat the house. We have a pellet burner too, a device that burns reconstituted wood pellets, but it has been giving us a bit of trouble recently and we have fallen back on the gas fires over Christmas. Because we have been in the house for longer periods and, because we are rich enough and determined enough not to be cold we have bought five gas bottles since the 21st at a cost of close on 70€. Our last electric bill was also the highest that it's ever been. It's not even been a cold autumn or winter so far. The problem for us is that any heat we pour into the house flies out of the poorly insulated building. Our house is old, it was not built with energy saving in mind and, if there was any thought at all about the design of the house it was to keep it cool not warm. After all we live in one of the warmest parts of Spain. As I've said many times on this blog we are much colder here than we ever were in the UK during the late Autumns and Winters.

I've heard it said lots of times that electricity in Spain is amongst the most expensive in Europe. We get a subsidy on our electric supply, the social bonus, because our supply contract is for 2.2kw. This isn't from choice, the infrastructure of the supply company isn't tough enough to give us more power. This social bonus is applied to anyone who has a supply of less than 3kw, the idea being that it is poorer people who have low power supplies. Although my hourly pay rate is around the UK minimum wage we are not exactly poor and the fact that we get the bonus shows that it doesn't, necessarily, offer financial support to the people who most need it.

Doing the crude maths of dividing our last bill by the number of kWh we pay just over 14 cents per kilowatt. Without the social subsidy that would go up to 17 cents which is around 14 pence. Our standing charges are about 27% of the total though in some of the flats we've lived in, particularly the one which had a decent supply of 10 kWh, that rose to nearly 50% of the total. This high percentage of standing charge means that, however hard you try to save power, you only have control over a percentage of the cost. One of the ways people try to reduce their bills is by lowering their supply with the result that circuit breakers trip all the time when you try to pull more power than you are paying for.

This energy poverty isn't just about income. It's a balance between the money coming in and the power that a household needs to consume. In Spain the figures suggest that some 17% of households, or seven and a half million people, have difficulty in maintaining their homes above 18ºC. In countries in the North of Europe the figure is usually quoted at around 2-3%. In Spain too there is more of a problem in the warmer parts of the country because of the build quality. The homes in Asturias are built to keep warm whilst houses in Andalucia are not. Fit, younger adults can get away with colder houses than those that have older people or children.

Apparently this is a Europe wide concern, with the UK being one of the pioneers with laws and regulations designed to help people in a bad way. Here in Spain the politicians have only just really got around to talking about it. A recent case where an 81 year old died in a fire caused by a candle after her power was cut off has given a certain urgency to the matter. Only the other day, a deal was struck between three of the four principal political parties for new regulations.

I have a horrible feeling though that like many Spanish laws, for instance the Freedom of Information law, the new regulations will be more window dressing than substance.

Running for pleasure

I've never been very sporty. Mr Liddington made it clear in end of term reports that he didn't like my approach to rugby, Christopher should not try to hide as far away from the play as possible, to cricket, Christopher would do better if he were not afraid of the ball and to hockey, Christopher does not play hockey well. So, despite my attempts to embrace Spanish customs, I have yet to go to a football match a handball or basketball game or even join a gym.

A couple of years ago I noted a report of the TV news about the San Silvestre Vallecana and indeed about lots of other San Silvestres. I didn't know what they were talking about. I could see runners but the report sort of took it for granted that we all knew what a San Silvestre was. With my usual disregard for things sporty I forgot all about it as soon as the next programme came on.

There is a San Silvestre event in Pinoso tomorrow starting at 5pm so I thought I should find out exactly what one is. From the comfort of the sofa Wikipedia tells me it was the Brazilians, in Sao Paulo, that came up with the idea of a race that started one year and ended the next. The date, 31st December, Saint Sylvester's day, must have made choosing a name easy enough.

I thought it was probably a cross country race, mainly because the Pinoso event has cross in the title, but a bit of Googling suggests that most of them, and there are over 200 run in Spain, are 10km road races. I have no idea why the Pinoso event is on the 30th, if the tradition is the 31st, but there must be some good reason.  It's 5km too rather than 10km but that I fully understand.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry about the event in Madrid it's interesting that the field has always been pretty international with lots of British wins back in the 1970s, a series of Spanish successes in the late 1990s and early noughties but that recently it has been the Ethiopians and Kenyans who have dominated. Actually a British woman called Gemma Steel was the first woman home in the 2014 event. Nearly 40,000 people run the race which is about the same number as run the London Marathon though, clearly, 10 km doesn't compare with 42 and a bit kilometres.

I suppose the majority of the runners in the Spanish events, logically enough, will be Spaniards so they couldn't be doing with a race that took up too much of the evening. Obviously they'll need to get in a quick post race beer with their friends, get back to the family for the evening meal and be ready to pop those twelve grapes int their mouths along with the chimes of the clock in Puerta del Sol at midnight before getting out again for a bit of celebrating.

Mr Liddington made a funny sort of snorting noise when he saw me run but I don't suppose he'd have minded that I'll be spectating tomorrow. He'd probably presume that I'm not going to run because I've got a note from my mum.

The goose is getting fat

I heard something on the radio this morning about a charity, that had been collecting toys for poorer children. The charity had been robbed and the toys stolen. The radio interviewer was sympathetic. "And just two weeks away from handing over the toys." he said.

Now I know that the traditional day for gift giving in Spain isn't until January 6th. Nonetheless it struck me that the interviewer took no account of Santa doing his rounds. Every year, at Christmas time, for years now, I have been teaching English to Spaniards. I tell my students that we eat turkey, I know not all of us do, vegans and vegetarians don't and probably a whole bundle of other people for ethical or religious reasons, but we do. That's me, my family, most of the people I know. We have turkey, we play Monopoly or Scrabble, we eat mince pies and ignore all but one of those "Eat Me" dates which may or may not still exist. James Bond films, the only time of the year when we eat nuts by breaking them free from shells - add whatever you like - those things that make Christmas Christmas.

I ask Spaniards for their equivalents but there seem to be none. Most of my students say they eat sea food but the main course can be anything from lamb to sea bass. If we have Christmas pudding and mince pies they can counter with mantecados, polvorones and especially turrón but there seems to be much less of the shared ritual. Miracle on 34th street, It's a Wonderful Life and Love Actually may well be on the telly but there is no folk history to them. There are plenty of carols but the litany of awful Christmas songs that get dusted off each year isn't anything like the same; there are no home grown versions of Slade and Wizard but neither do spacemen come travelling nor cavalry get halted. The Christmas "classics" like White Christmas and Winter Wonderland are virtually unknown. Santa Claus is now a Christmas personality in Spain but the link to Saint Nicholas is far too tenuous for most of my students. Whilst the French Papa Noël is a well known character, to most Spaniards, his Anglo alter ego, Father Christmas, is not.

This year Christmas day falls on Sunday. As that is a non working day there is no need for it to be a declared as a day not to work. Most regions have decided to make the Monday, the 26th, which has no significance for Spaniards whatsoever, a holiday. Nonetheless I'm sure that there will be lots of Spanish workers who finish work on Friday evening and go back to work on Monday morning without feeling particularly hard done by. Over the weekend they will have eaten and drunk much more than usual, almost certainly with their families, but they aren't being denied anything particularly special. It's just another of the potential non working days that fell on a Sunday. On top of that Christmas is still far from over. New Year and especially Reyes Magos, Three Kings, the principal gift giving time is still to come.

In the streets there are no Salvation Army bands and no carol singers. As I drive to and from work I don't pass houses ablaze with Christmas lights. The school I work in was not buzzing with children handing over gifts to their teachers as term ended. My bosses at one of my workplaces gave me a really nice gift pack with wine and local foods but no other Spanish person I work with has given me a card or handed out the mince pies or roped me in to the Secret Santa circle. There has been no works do and the crackers and hats that go with a do are unknown.

I would not claim that I know how Christmas works for most Spaniards but that's not to say that I don't know a fair bit about the detail of how Christmas is celebrated here. It would be utterly wrong to suggest that Christmas is not an important landmark in the Spanish calendar or that it is not a huge driver of consumer spending but it is not a holiday, nor a time of year, that has the resonance with Spaniards that it has for Britons.

Happy Christmas.

In the dark

One of the things that tourists in Spain often find a little odd is the Spanish working day. Whilst there are as many variations as you can imagine the basic structure is that people work in the morning, have a long break in the middle of the day and go back to work for the evening. A local shop, for instance, would probably open at 10, close at 2, re-open at 5 and close for the day at 8.30. This means that most people have lunch between 2 and 3.30 and have their evening meal after 9.30.

In Portugal it's the same time as in London. In Madrid the London time is advanced by an hour. When people sit down for lunch at 2pm in Madrid it's also lunchtime in London, except that there it's 1pm.

After a conference in 1884, that established the current time zones, Spain slotted in to the same zone as the UK. Then in 1940, apparently in a move designed simply to please Adolf Hitler, Franco changed Spanish time to that of most of the rest of Europe.

There has been talk in Spain, for years, of trying to rationalise the working day. Critics say that the split reduces productivity and increases time spent travelling to and from work. This week the Government said that it was in favour of changing the working day, so that it generally finished at 6pm rather than 8pm, and doing away with the long lunch break.

Fair enough I suppose. Choose your argument. But at the same time all the press reports said that would also mean going back to the "proper" time zone. The argument being that if it gets darker earlier people would be keener to go home (honest, that's what they said).

The time zones fan out from the Greenwich Meridian. Last time I looked Greenwich was reasonably close to the Dover and Newhaven and other places that act as ports for ferries across the Channel to France. People swim the channel so it can't be very wide. Yet, on the beach at Dieppe or Calais it's the same time as in Spain. So is France in the wrong time zone too? And the answer is apparently yes. It's to do with that same bloke Hitler and him capturing France. Oh, I should mention that the Canary Islands which belong to Spain, are on London time. From my reading of a time zone map they should be two hours behind Madrid and an hour behind London.

I would be dead against moving Spanish time back to London time if only for the simple reason that it makes Winter much less miserable. It doesn't get dark here till 6pm even in the depths of December. Equally, in Summer, because we're farther South, we don't get the light nights of Northern Europe and sunset on the longest day is currently around 10pm. I prefer lighter evenings in summer too.

By the way I kept saying London time to avoid the UCT/GMT/BST thing.

Realising you need new windscreen wipers

When Spanish people here in Spain talk to me about the winter weather in England they usually talk about the cold. Obviously it's colder in the UK, in general, than it is in our bit of Spain. I explain that whilst it may be colder outside it's usually much warmer inside. I go on to say that the most depressing thing about the UK in winter is not the cold but the light, or the lack of it, that sort of grey miserableness and the all pervading dampness

Well, for the past, maybe, three weeks, it has been wet and miserable here. It's not quite the same. It's not been cold and we haven't had any of those English type days where a grey dawn turns into a grey morning and then it's night again. Light by 7.30am and not dark till around 6pm. But we haven't had our normal sunny and blue days either.

Our floors have muddy trails across them. Both our front and back doors lead directly to the outside world. The doormats are sodden and dirty footprints (and paw prints) mix with the loosened wet coconut matting fibres just inside the doorsteps. The paw prints are in other places too.

I've had untumbledryerable washing hanging on the line for days - nearly dry before another shower or another downpour lengthens the arms of the pullovers once again. And I'm dead against clothes horses in front of the fire. It looks fine on the B&W version of The Thirty Nine Steps and it serves a purpose in Love Actually but I don't want it in my house. It reminds me of miserable winters and miserable times in England long long ago.

I tried to weed and clear the garden but got as bogged down as the troops at Passchendaele. The carpets of my car are littered with gravel and caked in dried mud. All in all, not nice.

Maggie came in to Alicante airport this morning after a few days of gladdening the hearts of retailers in Liverpool. It was misty and windscreen wiper weather as I left Culebrón but it brightened up as I neared the airport. Re-united we spent a couple of hours wandering along the coast. The sun was shining, my coat remained in the car. There were two people swimming in the sea at Santa Pola.

Perhaps we should move.

1898, films and imaginary yellow car parks

Apparently the bank holiday in Spain today, Immaculate Conception, is to show how much the state believes in the dogma that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born without original sin. Oh, and because a surrounded Spanish army of 5,000 soldiers was able to grab victory from the teeth of defeat after finding a representation of the Immaculate Conception during a battle in the 80 Years War in Flanders. I have no idea when the 80 Years War was but one of the eighty was 1585.

On Tuesday it was Constitution Day, another bank holiday. So this week has been more time off than time at work. Paid time off is one of my favourite things.

It's been a quiet day. The weather hasn't been great, things are closed and Maggie's not here so I basically stayed at home.

I did go to the pictures though. I went to the pictures yesterday too. It's a good thing to do when you're by yourself. I highly recommend Animales nocturnos/Nocturnal Animals. Very striking production all together. Today though it was 1898. Los últimos de Filipinas. This tells the story of the siege of a church in the village of Baler, a church that had been fortified by the Colonial power, Spain, after they'd had a bit of trouble with Filipino Revolutionaries. The siege began in July 1898 and went on for 337 days until June 1899. What the Spanish soldiers didn't know was that Spain had surrendered the Philippines, the very last remnant of its once enormous empire, to the United States in December 1898. The Spaniards at Baler were fighting to defend an empire for six months after it had ceased to exist. Pity they didn't find another painting.

Anyway, as I drove home the roads were strangely quiet. Everyone tucked up at home getting in some sofa time I suppose. But a HiperBer supermarket was open and the cats need to eat. HiperBer isn't one of the upmarket supermarkets. There were a bunch of already drunken blokes laughing, gurgling, back slapping and topping up the drinks cabinet as I shopped. HiperBer boasts a vibrant colour scheme. Very yellow. I thought their car park looked very strange. It reminded me of the style of Animales nocturnos so I took a snap and wrote this entry.

It takes all sorts

A Facebook group that I'm a member of, Spanish International Alicante, advertised a bilingual history evening in the nearby village of la Romana some 16 or 17 km down the hill towards Elche. The title, or at least one of the titles, was Spain's Transition to Democracy.

I turned up. It looked to me as though the room for the meeting had only recently been finished because it was all a bit sparse. There was a decent enough crowd, mainly Spanish and British. A couple of people made a point of greeting me so the welcome was warm enough even if the room was a bit chilly.

We started pretty much on time, maybe fifteen to twenty minutes late, with a welcome from the Deputy Mayor of La Romana. He was young and dressed in a sort of modern teddy boy style. We went to a very strange parade in la Romana once. Maybe alternative is something they cultivate.

The woman who gave the talk was called Anabel Sánchez. She'd given herself quite a task, to cover the years from the proclamation of the Second Republic, in 1931, through to the stable democracy in Spain in 1981. She had an hour and she did everything in English and in Spanish. Fifty years in sixty minutes or thirty minutes for each language. It could never be anything other than a quick and superficial overview but she did a good job in my opinion.

A lot of the talk centred on the Spanish Civil War and the resulting dictatorship because that's the period from 1936 through to 1975. Anabel's viewpoint was openly anti Franco and pro woman. She poked fun at the Francoist view of women's roles. She stressed the repression and the misery of rationing in Francoist Spain which caused some bubbling amongst a couple of members of the audience who pointed out that Britain had also suffered rationing during and after the Second World War.

At the end of the talk people were doing that milling around thing. I heard one of the organisers of the event ask one of the audience what she had thought. I expected the usual sort of "very interesting" answer but, instead, the attendee said she thought that it had been a terrible talk and that the speaker was obviously biased, that her views should be balanced by inviting a more conservative speaker to the group and that the root cause of the turmoil in Spain for all those years was the destruction of political order wrought by the Republic.

Even now it makes me laugh. It's fair enough that people have a range of political views but the idea that someone could even vaguely defend an incompetent and bloodthirsty dictatorship forty years after its demise is so ridiculous that it didn't cross my mind to be angry or repelled.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The photo by the way is a house that was code named Posición Yuste and was the last headquarters of the Republican Government in Spain in the nearby town of Elda