Saturday, January 27, 2018

Knives and forks

It's odd what you stop noticing. Because of her job Maggie talks to lots of people who are new to the area. One of her clients, let's call her Betty, was telling Maggie about an experience in a local restaurant. Betty asked for a red wine to go with her set price meal. She was was pleasantly surprised when the waiter left the bottle on the table. Lots of wine from around here is still not premium product, it's something for drinking, so leaving the bottle with the implicit offer to drink as much of it as you want, is still very common. I wouldn't have noticed.

We went to a couple of posher than our usual style of restaurant last weekend. When I was telling a pal about the restaurants. I described them as "the sort of place where they take your cutlery after each course". I realised that the description presumed a little knowledge of everyday restaurant practice. Nowadays I would never think to leave my knife and fork at attention on the plate when I have finished the first course. I would set them to one side ready for the second course. Our guests from the UK don't and the waiter or waitress has to do it for them.

That was the idea, when I first started the blog, a sort of ooh!, aah!, look how funny that is. Nowadays, when a visiting Briton wants to pay at the bar for the drink as soon as it is served, when visitors find it strange that restaurants are not open midweek in the evening and when they really think that most Spaniards have a bit of a sleep in the afternoon I don't usually say anything.

So many of those things that were strange are now usual and some of the things that were usual are now strange. The strangest thing, for me, is when other long term immigrants still find those things strange after years and years here.

Friday, January 26, 2018

Take me home, country roads

Every now and then I get an email from Abraza la tierra, Embrace the Land. It's usually a business opportunity or a job in some rural part of Spain. They are normally good offers - businesses subsidised by town halls, free accommodation, maybe with tantalising offers for families who have young, school saving, children. It's a while since I've looked at their website but I presume that they are a platform for rural development initiatives. You know the sort of thing - access to infrastructure in the countryside, innovative solutions to the everyday challenges of rural life.

I listened to some programme on the radio about rural development in Spain. One of the interviewees said that he wished Spain were as go ahead as the Scottish Highlands and Islands. I smiled at that because I remembered being in Inchnadamph, in the 1970s, and how impressed I was with the lateral thinking that had replaced the post office van with a minibus that transported both post and people. Well that and the horizontal rainfall. I'm sure there are similar initiatives here but I've never noticed them.

Much of Spain is empty. There are lots of stories of someone, or some organisation, buying up a deserted village in Huesca or Guadalajara to turn it into a religious retreat or an English teaching village. A novel about the last inhabitant of a village in the high Pyrenees became a Spanish best seller and there is, generally, a bit of an industry built around rural nostalgia and family roots in the land. Apparently, of the 8,000 municipalities that make up Spain, over 1200 have fewer than 100 inhabitants on the municipal roll. I bumped into a blog where a chap goes around "bagging" empty, abandoned, villages. His list included one in Alicante and four in Murcia. Of course most Spaniards, something like 80%, live in the big metropolitan areas and along the coast.

We live in the countryside but it's not an isolated countryside. For one thing Alicante apparently has a strange population distribution in relation to most of Spain. The normal model is towns and villages with countryside in between. In Alicante there are the usual towns and the villages but there are also houses dotted all around the countryside. Maggie commented on the number of lights twinkling out as we drove back from Petrer the other night. I was once told that this pattern is to do with the Moors having introduced irrigation into the countryside around here which allowed homesteads to be more scattered. I don't see how that would make any real difference but I thought I'd mention it in case my informant was correct.

In our own case, in Pinoso or Culebrón, the nearest decent sized town is about 25km away. It's actually two towns that are next to each other, next to each other in the sense that there must be streets that are one town on one side and the other on the other. Elda is the 137th largest town, population wise, in Spain and Petrel (Petrer in Valenciano) the 212th most populous. If they were as administratively combined as they are geographically they would have a total population of a bit over 87,000 people and be the 74th largest town in Spain. Similarly sized places in the UK are Burnley and Stevenage which, by comparison, come in as around the 275th largest towns.

The other day one of my Facebook friends posted a video. I suspect he may have just bought a new dash-cam for his motor because the video was of an empty motorway. The near deserted inter urban roads are definitely one of the joys of life in inland Alicante and Murcia. I once managed to come the 35km from Jumilla to Pinoso without passing a single car outside of the town limits.

Just this week we finally got around to buying an Amazon Fire Stick and a Netflix subscription. I'm still not quite sure why. I have more than enough TV available with the traditional broadcasters but, I suppose, some of it is proving that we are still able to adapt to change. It also shows that despite our rural location we're definitely on the digital superhighway!

The morning after we'd installed the Fire Stick I got an email from Abraza la tierra with information about taking over a bar-restaurant and teleclub in Guadalaviar in Teruel. Population 245. Weak as my Spanish is I could translate that. Tele in Spanish is telly in English and club in Spanish is club in English (though beware of the clubs with bright lights outside towns unless you're looking for expensive sparkling wine and female company).

Teleclubs flourished in rural Spain in the 1960s when people were still not rich enough to buy their own set - the teleclubs were often social centres as well and the Francoist State liked them because it was somewhere else where the propagandist NoDo newsreels could be shown. But surely there can't still be people without telly even in darkest, deepest Spain? It turns out of course that they are just a name, a nostalgic name for some, for a communal meeting space. I found mentions of them in Palencia, Lanzarote, Salamanca and, obviously enough, Teruel, without doing more than type the search clue into Google. I remember our pal Pepa told us about the tiendas multiservicios - the multiservice shops around her in Teruel province. The key element there was that a shop offered the basics along with a range of other community things, a bar, maybe a restaurant, post office services, internet access etc., etc.

I wasn't tempted to run the teleclub in Guadalaviar but if you are you have till February 1st to get your offer in.

Friday, January 19, 2018

Gummy bears and milk

My mum doesn't use a lot of milk. The last time I stayed with her the milk she had in was off - very off, lumpy off. She shamelessly offered me almond or soy milk as a substitute. I was appropriately dismissive.

I did once venture to drink some almond milk. I remember it as a sort of grainy vaguely unpleasantly flavoured thick water. I suspect that Maggie thinks of horchata much the same way. Me, well I drink horchata from time to time but mainly as a sort of solidarity gesture with my adopted homeland.

Horchata is made from the chufa, a sort of edible tuber which we apparently call tiger nut - though I've never known anyone who is clear what a tiger nut is - I think the name just sounds sort of comfortable. The chufa is used to make that greyey milky coloured drink that all Valencianos swear is incredibly thirst quenching when it is served cold.

Apparently chufa grows well in North Africa so the Moorish invaders introduced it into Spain when they set up home here for seven centuries or so from the 8th Century. Muslims, and the Moors were Muslims, stay away from the booze and one of their options was the chufa "milk" which is the basis of modern horchata.

All over the Valencian region there are horchaterias, horchata shops. I presume, though I've never thought about it for too long, that each one produces its own version of horchata from the dried tubers. Apparently the nuts are re-hydrated, crushed and sieved to produce a thick liquid which is then mixed with sugar and water to produce the traditional horchata. There are also bottled versions which may be pasteurised, sterilised or given the UHT treatment. Purists say that none of the bottled varieties are as good as the freshly made product. There is even an august body to give the horchata "denominación de origen", the quality mark, to say that it is produced in such and such a way to such and such a standard and so, presumably, to maintain what is considered to be the authentic taste. Like all this traditional food and drink there are recognised centres of excellence and, in the case of horchata, that's the unremarkable town of Alboraya, Alboraia (in Valencian), just outside Valencia city. The area around Alboraia has field after field planted with chufas and people go to the town to drink the horchata "fresh from the fields". Nowadays of course, when anything can be marketed, the local entrepreneurs produce chufa biscuits, chufa flavoured ali oli (a sort of flavoured mayonnaise), chufa chocolate, chufa beer and so on for their foodie tourists.

Yesterday my planning was better than usual. I bought some cheap sweets at the supermarket to take to the cinema later in the day. So far as I could see the 59 cent bag of sweets had no positive nutritional value being coloured and flavoured sugars coated with sugar. I would have a lot of trouble defending my continued consumption of similar products but the bag proudly announced that the sweets contained no fat - that must be good then. Looking for information on horchata I came across a puff piece that described the chufa like this "The chufa is often spoken about as a super-food. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it a nutrient-rich food that is considered especially beneficial to health and well-being. The nutrient-rich tiger nut helps with digestion, it protects the heart, it is an anti-oxidant, it stimulates the immune system, it works as an antacid, and it contains no lactose or gluten. It also plays a leading role in cholesterol control, as its high level of oleic acid (77%) is similar to olive oil."

Whatever its qualities I still don't want horchata, or even chufa milk, in my tea the next time I'm in the UK thanks mum.

Monday, January 15, 2018

The Yecla Amusement Park?

I keep a database of the films I've seen. For complicated and boring reasons one database ran from 1986 to 2009 and a second one from 2010 to present. Thanks to my brother in law the two were, finally, combined into one long list just a few days ago. Apparently I've seen 2,706 films at the cinema between 1986 and today. The busiest year was 1995 when I saw 132 films. The quietest was 2008 when I was living in Ciudad Rodrigo. In 2017 I saw 81.

Ciudad Rodrigo is in Salamanca province in Castilla y León very close to the Portuguese border. It's a clean, safe, friendly, walled town that's lovely to look at. It's a long way from anywhere though and the nearest decent sized supermarket or car dealer or cinema is in Salamanca about 90km away. In fact I'm lying because the nearest cinema or main dealer for the Mini was actually in Guarda and that was only 75kms away. Guarda though is in Portugal where they speak Portuguese and as we don't we tended to stick to Spain. It was too far to pop over to the town to see a film but we did see a couple in the multiplex in Guarda when we were there anyway having done something else. The big advantage, for us, is that the Portuguese show their films in the original language with subtitles, unlike Spain where most films are dubbed. Because it was too far to go to Salamanca or Guarda we generally saw films in the Cine Juventud in Ciudad Rodrigo.

The Juventud was a really old fashioned cinema in some huge stone built building. The admission, the sweets and the popcorn were cheap, the seats were past their best and the sound and projection quality were a bit dodgy too. As I remember it the emergency exit lead out through the gardens of the Bishop's Palace. The huge plus of course was that it was close: we could walk into town, see the film, get a drink and walk home. There was only one show a week and, sometimes, that film wasn't for us which is, I suppose, why we only saw 21 films that year.

This evening we went to see a mentalist type magic show in Pinoso at 6pm and then we hurried off to Yecla to see the 8.15 film. A movie that we missed when it was first released; La librería - The Bookshop. We've never been to the cinema in Yecla before. We've seen posters for films but I've always presumed they were shown in the municipal theatre. In fact there's a cinema, the Cine PYA (Initials for Parque Yeclano de Atracciones - the Yecla Theme Park), which apparently opened in 1952 and "closed for good" in 2013. Google has nothing to say about how or why it reopened. The cinema doesn't have much of a frontage but it does have a big screen and, by modern standards, it is a big theatre with row after row of seats on a traditional theatre stalls type plan rather than the steeply raked seats in a modern multiplex. The ticket was torn from a roll, there were no computers in sight to deal with seat allocation and there were even some red velvet curtains over the multiple entry and exit doors. It was a good sized crowd, our regular cinema, the Cinesmax in Petrer would be glad to have such a big audience, and a surprising number of them chose to sit on the same row as us. I read somewhere, in one of those strange surveys that you see from time to time, that Spaniards are one of the nationalities with the least need for personal space in the world. Spaniards, unlike Britons, like to be up close

I didn't particularly care for the film, a bit television drama, but it was a really good outing.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Old whotsisname

In the dialogues, in Spanish language text books, the characters all have names like Francisco Garcia and Maria Hernandez. It's true there are plenty of Marias and Franciscos in Spain. They are often disguised though. Many of the Marias are, for instance, Maria Luisa or Maria Dolores or Maria Mercedes so that they become Marisa, Lola or Merche whilst Francisco is Paco or Kiko. José Marias are Chemas. Hard going for the novice but not so different from the confusion that is Rob, Bob and Bobby or Chas, Charlie and Chuck. Christopher Marlowe was Kit after all - Kit Thompson anyone?

It may be true that Garcia, Gonzalez, Cueva, Rodríguez and Lopez are the most common Spanish surnames nationwide but it seems to me that nobody, whose name you want to remember, is that easy. To give a random example the authors of the present Spanish Constitution were Gabriel Cisneros, Miguel Herrero y Rodríguez de Miñón, José Pedro Pérez Llorca, Manuel Fraga, Gregorio Peces-Barba, Miguel Roca Junyent and Jordi Solé Tura. The woman who does the gossip show that Maggie watches is called Anne Igartiburu (Basque name) and the Spanish national football coach also has a Basque name, Julen Lopetegui. Other regions have local names too, so a Carlos becomes a Carles in Catalan like the honorary Belgian Carles Puigdemont. Sometimes the names themselves are straightforward enough but they are a bit on the long side. Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría is the vice president of the current conservative government and, in the last socialist government, we had a María Teresa Fernández de la Vega Sanz. Neither of them of them are exactly Antonio Garcia or Maria Carmen González. Antonio and Maria Carmen are the most common first names, at present, amongst the Spanish population and Garcia and González the most popular surnames. By the way the most chosen names for newborns at the moment are Hugo and Lucia.

In Yorkshire, when I was a lad, there were lots of Sykes, Crossleys and Thorntons and around Pinoso we have Deltells, Alberts, Domenechs, Espinosas, Ricos, Miras, Escandells, Brotons and Carbonells as well as many more. When couples marry the children get a surname that is a combination of both surnames. If John Smith married Mary Bown they could choose either Peter Smith Brown or Peter Brown Smith for their son Peter with the Smith Brown order being the more traditional. A walk around the local cemetery reveals a veritable treasure trove of Carbonell Carbonell, Brotons Brotons and Rico Miras.

Monday, January 08, 2018

The January Sales and shop hours in general

We went out to save some money today, more me than Maggie actually. You know how it works, the shops reduce the prices and you go out and buy lots of things you didn't intend to buy. The January Sales or as we say round these here parts Las Rebajas de Enero. I always like to go to Corte Inglés, one of the originators of the first Sales in Spain, to see if they have any designer label clothes for market stall prices. Fat chance. I spent money I didn't have though.

When we first arrived in Spain shopping times, were, pretty much, regulated. Shops, except maybe bakers and paper shops, didn't open on Sundays and The Sales only took place in July and after Kings in January. There were lots of rules about how long they had to last, how the discounts had to relate to the prices on goods which had been available in the shops for weeks beforehand and all sorts of other stuff. Nowadays shops can have Sales whenever they want. But custom and habit are culturally powerful and people still think of, and wait for, the Summer and January Sales

The rules were relaxed in 2013. As well as the changes to The Sales there were lots of changes to the opening hours of shops. For example, weekly opening hours were increased from 72 to 90 hours for shops over 300 square metres, which explains why none of the big supermarkets are open 24 hours, but why there is a boom in the smaller town centre supermarkets. Shops under 150 square metres can open when and as they please - on Sundays, on holidays, 24 hours a day. It's not easy to generalise about the legislation, and I may have some of this wrong because it is all ifs and buts because the Central Government rules can be varied by local rules from the Autonomous Communities. For instance before the changes shops could open 12 times a year on Sundays and holidays but the Regions could reduce that to eight times per year. Now the National limit is sixteen times (for the bigger shops) but the Regions can reduce that to as few as ten times per year if they wish. The National legislation also allowed big shops in important tourist destinations, determined by the figure for overnight stays or the number of cruise ship passengers, to open all year round. That's why, for instance, Cartagena has a lot of Sunday shopping but Murcia city doesn't.

In the area we live, in Valencia, local legislation sets the number of Sunday and holiday openings for big stores to eleven times per year but it also gives "special status" to some areas, the ones with most tourists, like Alborache, L'Alfàs del Pi, Finestrat, Torrevieja y la costa de Benissa, Orihuela y Pilar de la Horadada where the shops can (I think) also open the additional Sundays, and any holidays, between mid June and mid September. The big shops and shopping centres outside those areas - in Alicante and Valencia cities in particular - don't get that extra summer dispensation and the eleven possible days they can open do not include the traditional Sundays on which the Summer and January Sales start, two of the busiest days of the year. So those big shops and centres feel hard done by and have taken the Valencian Government to court to make it comply with Central Government legislation. Of course it takes years for some legal actions to get to court so, in the meantime, the local legislation holds good.

Even if you found that confusing it may explain why some of the "Chinese" shops seem to be open all the time, why big supermarkets aren't and why lots of shops are open on the run up to Christmas.

Thursday, January 04, 2018

La Centenera Hill

I was thoroughly disgusted when the explanation for Flag Fen, the Bronze age site just outside Peterborough, changed from being a series of person made islands, with an economic and defensive function, to being a site of religious significance. Archaeologists say that a site has religious significance when they have no idea. "Look at the way it's constructed with everything facing the one open space - it must be a religious site." "And what does this writing say" -White Hart Lane - obviously a place of worship" (Yes Jim, I know they've pulled it down). Religion, the last refuge of a scoundrel to misquote Samuel Johnson.

I met a bloke who abandoned his work on Navajo burial sites to hitch across the United States, to work his passage on a boat across the Atlantic to dig at Flag Fen when it was first discovered. I bet he's scandalised by the change in emphasis too.

I heard, ages ago, on a TV documentary that the important thing about Stonehenge is not whether it's a calendar or a temple or a spaceship landing pad but that it's there. The point being that a couple of blokes and their half wolf dog couldn't build Stonehenge. It required someone with sufficient clout to get a load of people to work together, it required social order and structure. I could see that.

A while ago I went to see the Antonio Banderas film, Altamira, about the cave paintings in Cantabria. Afterwards, I did a bit of Googling. I was really surprised to find that the oldest paintings are now thought to be maybe 36,000 years old and the newest about 13,000 years old. Yet the paintings are the same in style. I wondered why. After all from the time that Flag Fen was built, about 3,500 years ago, or when the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished, about 4,500 years ago, we've gone from tossing bronze swords into a lake, as a gift to the Gods, or popping vital organs into canopic jars, ready for the journey in the afterlife, to the advanced state represented by Facebook and Instagram. Why didn't the Altamira boys and girls progress from finger painting to hyper realism in 20,000+ years? The answer, or at least the best guess, I understand, goes back to the same reason that there is a Stonehenge. In Altamira there weren't enough people, there wasn't enough organisation to pass on the knowledge about painting. So generation after generation had to reinvent it.

In Pinoso, maybe in Culebrón, we've got some petroglyphs, ancient rock carvings done by human hand. The only dating that I've seen on them is Bronze Age, which seems to be defined by technology rather than years, so that it covers a period from maybe 5,000 years ago to a bit over 2,500 years ago. I've gone looking for the petroglyphs on la Centenera Hill several times and I now know where one obvious one is to the extent that it's one of the places that we take visitors. To be honest petroglyphs aren't that exciting. I remember, as a seventeen year old with a new four wheeler driving licence, setting out to Ilkley Moor to find the cup and ring marks. Hmm. Not that overwhelming. Give me Avebury or Castlerigg stone circle any time. Nonetheless the real power of Avebury isn't its size or obviousness, it's the feeling that invades your soul as you stand in West Kennet Avenue - that unbroken line from them to us. The idea of some Bronze Age shepherd or flint worker sitting on a rock a few millennia ago and looking across from la Centenera Hill to where our house in Culebrón as he or she carved lumps out of the limestone rocks is pretty cool too.

By sheer chance I bumped into a blog that showed some of the Centenera petroglyphs, better ones than I've seen. The blog said they were within a couple of hundred metres of the trig point  (vértice geodésico). I was pretty sure that I knew where that was and sure enough I did. I didn't find the "good" petroglyphs though. I did find something in the rocks that I'm pretty sure was made by human hand. It's the photo at the top of the blog. What do you think?

Wednesday, January 03, 2018

They think it's all over

I spoke to my mum on the phone today. She said that she'd had a good Christmas and New Year but that she was glad to be back to normal. Later I popped in to town. I went to a cake shop that I've only ever been in once before, that time it was to order a birthday cake for Maggie, one with icing and a message and candles. This time it was to order a roscón. I can't remember whether I ordered the custard filling (crema) or the cream filling (nata) but either way I'm expecting better quality than the ones we usually buy from the supermarket. The last time we bought a baker's shop roscón was when we lived it Cartagena. I have a vague and nagging memory that I was shocked at the price then but, hey-ho, Christmas tradition and all that. The sensible eating can start when Christmas is over after the 6th.

I've written about Roscones before, the traditional Roscón de Reyes cake, a bit like a big doughnut that gets eaten on Kings, at Epiphany, on 6th January when the Three Wise Men have delivered the presents to the baby Jesus and to all the good boys and girls. The bad ones get coal so the Kings are obviously more generous than Santa who leaves nothing for bad children!

As I passed the lottery shop I did something else I don't usually do. I went in and bought a lottery ticket for el Niño draw, the Child, the second Christmas lottery. The prizes for el Niño are less than for el Gordo Christmas draw on 22nd December but, I think, there's a better chance of winning the big prize and excellent chances of, at least, getting your money back (1:3). I read that the chances of winning the 200,000€ top prize are something like 1:100,000 which is about the same as the chance of being stung to death by a bee or poisoned to death by a snake. They had a number that had obviously been spurned by Pinoseros in general, there was a caricature promoting the number, it was parodied as el Feo, the Ugly. Obviously enough that's the number I bought.

So, if the roscón does turn out to be really expensive when I pick it up on the 5th I can always hope that just getting the 20€ ticket money back from the draw on the 6th will at least pay for it. Or I can hope that the fine taste of the "home baked" version will be enough to make me forget this last gasp Christmas spending.

Sunday, December 31, 2017

Starsky and Hutch and the like

Everybody knows that Italian men are cool. Everybody knows that Italian men don't wear socks. Before I came here I presumed that Spain was, probably, more or less like Italy - both have wine, olives, sun and the Mediterranean. So, just before I left the UK in 2004 I bought some Timberland loafers. All leather, no problems with sweaty feet. At least that was the hope.

I still have the Timberland shoes, I don't wear them often but they are still in excellent condition and they smell fine. I never have taken to going sockless. Spaniards wear flip flops in summer anyway. The cords that I bought from GAP, when it first opened in Cambridge, which is definitely a long, long time ago, are no longer a baggy fit but I still put them on from time to time. In fact there are lots of things I still wear that I brought from the UK in 2004 which makes them at least 13 years old. Some, like a big Marks ans Sparks Starsky and Hutch inspired cardigan, that I only now dare wear around the house, are much, much older. Some things, the inherited things, that we brought with us, tools for instance, are ancient.

When we were first setting up house in Culebrón we had to spend bucket loads of money. Obscene amounts of money.  Some things we'd brought with us but most of that was personal stuff, books and clothes, rather than household and we certainly didn't have settees, cookers, televisions or even drinks coasters. We had to buy beds too and although the sizes, in centimetres, were slightly different from their UK equivalents they were basically the same. Spanish pillows were usually long bolster type things but we managed to buy more normal, for us, individual pillows, locally. Over the years some of those things have been replaced but others soldier on. Pinned to the sofa by my laptop yesterday evening for a couple of hours I suddenly realised just how pain in the bottom uncomfortable our 12 year old couch has become. Even I am finally beginning to notice that lots of those original things are getting to be very long in the tooth.

The duvet we sleep under came from John Lewis in Peterborough. I bought it for the flat that I lived in there in the 1980s. It's a standard sized double bed duvet. Maybe six or seven years ago we were in IKEA in Murcia, when it first opened. I was quite taken with a duvet cover they had so I bought it, along with pillow cases. It didn't fit - far too big. They didn't fit - far too small. Obviously the Swedes have funny sized duvets and pillows. Primark sells ordinary size duvet covers - I've always thought the Irish were a sensible, level headed bunch -  and when they opened a shop, also in Murcia, we bought another cover. Once out of the packet it did not exude quality. It appeared to be made out of near transparent cloth and looked as though it cost exactly what we paid for it.

By now our original UK duvet covers were definitely showing their age - split seams, missing press studs, old fashioned designs and faded colours. Maggie thought so too and she went Internet shopping. When her purchase turned up neither of us cared for it much - photos are one thing but the actual product is another. There was nothing for it we were going to have to pay Inditex prices. I went to Zara Home and searched through the covers and cases in their funny drawer like shelves.  Quilts are not uncommon in Spain but they're not as common as they are in the UK. I looked at the prices - there were some covers for 40 or 50€ but there were lots more at 60, 70 and 80€. Pillow cases were sometimes 30€+. None of the bed-wear seemed to be close to the 190x190 cm size of our duvet and although I wasn't keen to engage with anyone working in the shop, for fear of being bounced into buying one of the expensive ones, I had no option. The person I spoke to was convinced that I was a stupid foreigner who couldn't speak Spanish properly or at least couldn't measure in centimetres  - 220x220 cm was, she assured me, the size for a double bed cover. It seems that whilst Spanish beds may be more or less the same size as British ones the Spaniards prefer their covers to be bigger - more wiggle room, fewer feet sticking out, which is probably better but we won't think about that just now!

Time plodded on with no new duvet cover. I was on Amazon Spain looking for camera batteries or similar but some strange algorithm showed me duvet covers, at the bottom of the page, as - relacionado con productos que has mirado - related to the products you've looked at. All I can surmise is that Amazon has me completely pegged - either that or they are spying on me in some more traditional way. The duvet covers were a reasonable price, they seemed to be the right sort of size, pillow cases were the right size and price too and everything was in plain colours so that the chance of the photo and the real thing being miles apart were slim. I was so overwhelmed that I even bought the matching colour fitted sheet. And guess what? It was all fine.

But it just goes to show. Things are similar here -no socks-  but different -flip flops not stylish loafers.

Friday, December 29, 2017

Without news

I've just been scanning through a number of other English language blogs looking for inspiration. It's time to write a blog entry and I can't think of anything to write about.

I could do New Year of course but I must have done cava (which is not, by the way, pronounced carver - but more like kavva), red underwear and the twelve grapes about as many years as I've lived here. I've already done a bit of a Christmas piece so I can't do that again even though it's still in full swing with the shopping centres clogged with cars and the telly full of perfume adverts. It's still a week to Kings and I've done Kings so many times that regular readers must be able to imagine what a Roscón tastes like. We haven't done many non British Christmas events but, even if we had, there's not a lot of mileage in living nativity scenes, carol concerts or Christmas story telling. I didn't get caught by any jokes yesterday on "Day of the Innocents" (think of it as Spanish April 1st) nor did I make the well trodden journey to see the egg, flour, fire extinguisher and firework fight in Ibi. 

I wondered if I could do something on the Valenciano language or yet another entry on speaking, or not speaking, Spanish. The thought came to me when I remembered the bit of a language triumph I had in the KFC in Elche the other day dealing with the bastardised Spanish pronunciation of isolated English words. I didn't hesitate once in the twenty question interrogation that is now the routine for ordering the simplest thing from the Good Colonel. Then I remembered that, only a few moments before, it had been exactly the opposite in asking for tickets for Wonder Wheel (the latest and shockingly boring Woody Allen) when I had to resort to mispronouncing the old man's name - Gwuddy Al-in - because my versions of gwanda weal, wander weyl and anything else, all the way back to a well modulated English pronunciation of Wonder Wheel, just left the ticket seller looking blank. I'm still a long way from writing that handy little booklet - "How to pronounce English words like a Spaniard."

The weather is always a good mainstay - Spain has had its second borrasca, or big storm, over the last few days since the new naming regime came into being. Storms of a certain intensity, it seems, now get named alphabetically - like hurricanes. This one was Bruno, we had Ana a while ago. It killed a couple of people across Spain and the snow and coastal storms looked really impressive on the telly. Here in sunny Culebrón though the worst that happened was that I had to get out of bed at 6.25am to secure a few things because the wind was blowing pots and chairs around. Hardly the stuff of a riveting blog.

Something with the students then or something from the news, the television, the radio; a second hand tale? My bosses have a Christmas play-scheme so they've laid me off for a couple of weeks leaving me with no students to talk to. No students, no stories. At home, with it being Christmas, the British TV companies have spent lots of money and Maggie has been watching their special offerings. Nothing there then either. Without the structure of work the routine has gone out of the window so I've not been keeping up with the news as well as usual. Anyway half the journalists are taking a few days off. And in Cataluña, which has more or less monopolised the news for months, it's all very quiet because all the politicians are horse trading, some of them via Skype, after the inconclusive elections. No blog fodder.

No. Another lifetime ago, I was in Saudi Arabia one Christmas. Lots of people I worked with went back to the UK to eat turkey and snooze on the sofa and, when they got back to Wadi Al-Batin, we asked for their Christmas reports. They were like José Moscardó, the bloke in charge of the fascist defence of the Alcázar in Toledo during the Spanish Civil War. The fortress was under siege, Franco sent troops to relieve it and, when they got there the siege was lifted. Moscardó was asked for his report. He said "Nothing new in the Alcázar." I know the feeling.  Nothing new in Culebrón.

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Colder than a well-digger's ass

I have a morning cat feeding routine. The kettle goes on as I run water to wash the cats' bowls. I fire up the portable gas heater. When the water has boiled I put a little of it into our tea mugs and then put the mugs on top of the heater. It's to warm the cups. If we don't warm the cups we end up with lukewarm tea. The kitchen temperature is such that crockery and cutlery come out of the cupboards icy cold.

The minimum temperatures recorded at the Pinoso weather station over the last week are -1.5ºC, -2ºC, -1.1ºC. -2ºC, +1.3ºC, -7.2ºC and -5.3ºC. It's not that they're arctic or anything but neither are they tropical. It has been colder. We had a couple of days last month when there was no morning water because of frozen pipes. Lots of shop and office workers in Pinoso work at their computers wearing coats. Several of our friends wear fleeces inside their houses. We're not for that. We're for banging on the heating. Maggie was so fed up of being cold a couple of years ago that she spent serious money on installing a pellet burner which now blasts 10kw of heat into our living room. We have portable 4kw gas heaters in the kitchen and as a back up in the living room too and there are electric heaters here and there. Since the temperatures began to drop we've bought ten 12kg gas bottles, twenty odd 15kg sacks of pellets and our December electric bill is 50% higher than the one in November.

The problem is that the heat is not background heat. It isn't on all the time. The insulation in our house, and in the majority of the Spanish houses that we know in this area, is so minimal that basically as heat is poured in it flies out. As soon as we turn off the heating the cold re-invades the house and, even when the heating is on in any one room the icy cold chill is waiting behind the door.

We don't leave heating on in the bedroom. The goose down duvet we use is really a set of a thinner and a thicker quilt. The two will fasten together and that's what we do in the depths of winter. It means that we can stay warm in bed. In fact it's a bit too hot and the duvet is uncomfortably heavy. I think we both follow the same routine. We wake up at something a.m. dripping in sweat, far too hot, we stick an arm or a leg out from under the covers till the exposed limb goes numb with cold and then we retreat under the covers and hope that the balance of body temperatures will allow us to get back to sleep.

Outside the daytime temperature is generally quite pleasant. I've thought that it has been colder recently than usual although I have no data to back up that. I'm just going on things like the feeling that I might die of cold as I rode the bike into work the other morning! If I were describing a typical winter's day around here I would describe a sunny day with a bright blue sky so the recent crop of grey days has been a bit out of character.

As I pick up a freezing cold knife from the cutlery drawer or as I gasp with cold on opening the door to the unheated office it's hard to recall those endlessly hot summer days when the cicadas sang all night long. But, what keeps me going is that I know they'll be back!

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Winter solstice

They're voting in Cataluña today.

Today, at 5.28 in the afternoon, Winter begins in Spain.

It's not usual for Spaniards, or even Catalans, to vote on a Thursday - it's usually Sunday, a non working day. There are rules, though, about the timings of elections in Spain. Today was the first possible day for the vote after the central Government dissolved the Catalan Parliament by using Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution following the Independence vote in October.

Although I don't like winter I always think of the solstice as the turning point. I know it's not technically true but I always think that, from today, we start to gain, rather than lose light. Winter may be on the point of starting but, at least, in one sense we've started back on the route towards the better, warmer weather.

And don't forget yesterday's post.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Jingle bells

There's an advert on the telly at the moment for el Corte Inglés, the big Spanish department store, which uses lots of Christmassy images. There are turkeys, there are Christmas trees, there are Santa Claus hats and there's lots of snow. Well I think of them as Christmassy images but that may not be the same for lots and lots of Spaniards.

I can only generalise here but I think that Christmas is an incredibly important time for Britons. Even if it isn't, in fact, much more than a couple of days of family arguments, overeating and snoozing in front of the telly the build up to it, the folklore around it, the customs associated with it, are deeply entrenched in British culture. Put a picture of a robin, in the snow, on the front of a greetings card and it's a Christmas card and Christmas cards are one of the symbols, the rites, of Christmas even if you're going to do it all on Facebook this year. Although Britons eat chocolates all year round most British houses don't have tins of Quality Street and the like except at Christmas time. You may be vegan, you may be going to have Indian food this year, but, if I were to ask Britons what the traditional Christmas lunch consists of, the answer would be turkey with all the trimmings. Holly, mistletoe, houses lit up with lights, the works do, Salvation Army bands, carol concerts, Christmas trees and all the rest are obvious and persistent Christmas symbols.

As we approach Christmas I usually do a bit of English language Christmas vocabulary with my students through songs, stories or quizzes. I wouldn't expect them to know mince pies just as I wouldn't expect most Britons to know about traditional Spanish fare like turrón, mantecados or polvorones. But I'm always surprised when I ask students what colour Santa's clothes are and the answer doesn't appear to be obvious to them. I find it strange that I need to explain that Papá Noel - which is the most common name for Santa here and which I presume comes from the French - is also known as Father Christmas or Santa Claus or Santa. Surely, just like me, they have seen hundreds of soppy Hollywood films loaded with this imagery? I never understand why the question about which animal pulls Santa's sleigh, or what a sleigh is, are more problematic than simply knowing the vocabulary for reno (reindeer) or trineo (sleigh). Explain as I might that the sound that a bell makes is called jingling there is no link, for the majority of Spaniards that I've ever taught, between bells, jingling or not, and Christmas. Even the Christian type questions - why was Jesus born in a stable?, what did the Wise Men follow? - don't seem to have the pat responses learned from an arsenal of memorised Christmas songs.

Some things are the same in both countries, for instance most towns have Christmas lights in their main streets and families get together to eat. Other things are completely different in Spain to the UK but equally widespread. For example nearly all the Spanish bars have raffles for Christmas baskets loaded with food and drink and the big Christmas lottery moves millions of euros. Other things are variations on a similar theme. Santa isn't particularly Spanish for instance, he's a recentish import, but the Spanish do have gift givers, the Three Kings, (Three Wise Men to you and me) and they turn up to hand over their gifts on the evening of the 5th January in big parades the length and breadth of Spain.

As an outsider, an outsider who has seen a lot of Spanish Christmases now, I'd say that there are plenty of Christmassy Spanish things but that they are nowhere near as standardised as they are in the UK. Ask Spaniards what they are going to have for Christmas lunch and the answer will vary from suckling pig or lamb to sea bream and local dishes such as pine nut flavoured meat balls. Putting up the Nativity Scene is a big thing in some Spanish homes and in others it's simply another little seasonal routine. Plenty of houses have trees and many have lights too but if your Christmas house is no lighter and just as treeless as at any other time of the year then nobody would see that as being bah, humbug! In fact, so far as I know, there are no literary equivalents to that Dickensian story. Gift giving, gift exchanging, is nowhere near as widespread here as it is in the UK and if there are Secret Santa type things at work I've never come across them. The expectations of Spanish children for Christmas gifts seem to be far less demanding than their British peers. On the couple of occasions that someone has given me a Christmas gift, associated with my teaching, I've been really surprised. Charitable organisations, like the Red Cross, do produce Christmas cards and, if you know where to look, you can buy them. One year, when Corte Inglés didn't have any cards and I couldn't afford the UNICEF ones at the Post Office, I had the bright spark idea of going to the local office of the Red Cross to buy some. I kept about half a dozen bemused people mildly amused for about five minutes as I tried, in my variation of Spanish, to explain why I might want to buy Christmas cards as a way of donating to their organisation.

Finally, and almost incomprehensibly for most of the Britons I know, Christmas isn't really celebrated at the same time. For Spaniards the evening of Christmas Eve is big - the family gets together and eats. Christmas Day is Christmas Day and the family gets together and eats. The 26th is non event - Boxing Day is only the very routine St Stephen's Day. New Year's Eve is New Year's Eve with grapes and underwear and fizzy wine. Probably the liveliest day of Christmas is the evening of the 5th January when the Three Magic Kings deliver their gifts. The parades and the last minute shopping frenzy give it a feel very similar to Christmas Eve for we Anglos.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Not a dry eye in the house

I was sitting beside an emergency exit, near the stairs to backstage. There was coming and going all the time. Babies were crying, a little girl sitting with her grandad to my left seemed to be practising crossing herself, mobile phones were alight everywhere to video the son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter maybe even the uncle or grandma doing his or her bit. The woman behind me suddenly burst into annoying conversation but I forgave her when a few minutes later she cursed slightly before going on stage to the accolade of the crowd as one of the moving forces behind the event - pre-show nerves I suppose. I was sitting next to a bloke who owns a bar I go in from time to time and I think the singer who sat in front of me when she was done performing was the woman who runs the tobacconist. Everywhere there were pristine frocks, new shoes and shirts with the creases still in them from the packets. I recognised tens of people in the audience or onstage. There were false starts with the same, wrong, music for three different performances and the number of times mics weren't on when they should be or had to be moved, adjusted and adjusted again was legion. The attempts to find the join in the curtains was very Morecambe and Wise. At times the singing left something to be desired but, what it lacked in professionalism, it more than made up for in heart.

But that's what you'd expect from a small town Christmas concert. Proceeds to a local Alzheimer group. I think nearly all of the musical groups from the town were there and both of the primary schools too with their music teachers just hoping that this time it would go as it should.

I used to work for an organisation that had community in its title. If I am ever required to say what I used to do in the UK I talk about work with communities but what was happening around me this evening, in the Teatro Auditorio Emilio Martinez Sáez, in Pinoso, was about as community as community can be. And as the Mayor said, as he did his little bit of wind up at the end, we have a pretty nice little town - a town that does well at being safe yet lively, good at looking after and supporting its people. It was almost like an advert for Christmas - very good will and peace on Earth.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Lovely

Just a bunch of assorted trivia that has tickled my fancy in the last couple of days.

There are a lot of stars in Culebròn. That's probably an incorrect assertion. I suppose there are exactly the same number of stars as there are anywhere but lots of them are easy to see from Culebrón because we get lots of cloudless night skies and there's very little light pollution. That's not quite true either because, at the moment, we have a dazzling Christmas light display which, for the very first time this year, features a spiral of LED rope around the palm tree. The Geminids meteorite shower was flashing across the sky all last night though in an even more dazzling display. Lovely.

We went to the flicks yesterday evening, we often do. We'd been to visit someone and we were a little late away; we went the long way around so we arrived at the cinema a few minutes after the advertised start time. The cinema we often use shows the sort of pictures that don't always attract a lot of advertising. So, sometimes, if the start time is 6.15 the film actually starts at 6.15 but, then again, if it's a bit more Hollywood, the 6.15 film might not start till 6.30 after the trailers and ads. Whilst Maggie waited to buy the tickets I went to have a look at the monitors to see if the film had begun. If it had we had a second choice. The manager, who was on ticket collection, said hello, lots of the staff greet us by name nowadays, and asked me which film we wanted to see. I told him. It was due to start 10 minutes ago he said, but there's nobody in there so I'll start it when you're ready. A private showing and to our timetable. Lovely.

Bad keepers that we are we'd missed the annual update of the vaccinations for the house cats. I took them both in today. I was amazed - apart from the chief vet everyone that I saw in the vet's surgery/office is doing or has done at least a couple of English classes with me. Of course I shouldn't be driving but I thought the 5kms in to town wouldn't hurt. As I drove Bea home she had a bit of an accident, bowel wise. She's not a big fan of car travel. At the exact moment that the stench of her reaction assailed my nostrils the very obvious yellow van of the bloke who looks after my motor went the other way. He flashed his lights in greeting. I would have waved back but a bit of chrome trim chose that exact moment to fly off the front of the car and bounce off the windscreen. I went back to get it later, on the bike, and fastened it back on to the car with duct tape as a temporary repair. Lovely.

And finally, yesterday, we passed the bodega/almazara in Culebrón. There were a stack of cars and vans queuing to hand over their olive crops to be pressed into oil by the almazara, the oil mill. The bodega, the winery, did its stuff back around September time. So I strolled over with the camera to take some snaps. I have no idea what the process was but I liked the small scale nature of it. Little trailers full of olives, plastic bags full of olives, people standing around and chatting waiting to have their crops weighed in. The cars are obviously modern enough but the process is probably as old as the hills. Lovely.