By the Ermita de Fátima

I've just come back from watching the awards ceremony for the 21st Maxi Banegas National Poetry Competition. Maxi was a local teacher and poet.

It's a nice little event. This year it was half way up our "emblematic" salt dome hill near the Fatima chapel in a sort of wooded clearing. Lovely setting. There were some songs from Andreu Valor, and an unnamed musician, as a guitar duo before the awards for a couple of photo and writing competitions and then the big prize for the poetry competition. As I said all very gentle and very pleasant.

There was wine and there were snacks afterwards provided by the local bodega, Bodegas Volver, but I didn't stay. Maggie was watching Liverpool lose the Champions League final so I was alone. There is something pathetic about eating ham and drinking wine alone in a crowd but that was only half the reason for clearing off. There were plenty of people I'd nodded to in the audience. With a glass in hand they may well have tried to speak to me and that would never do. I took a few last snaps of the guitar duo, now augmented to a trio, and headed home.

Nice as it was I have to admit to being a bit cross with the event which is billed as being a National competition. The singers sang in Valenciano, the Mayor spoke in Valenciano. There was a lot of Valenciano. Fair enough I live in Valencia. Good on them that they use their local language. On the other hand it's also very exclusive. Say something in Castellano, the world version of Spanish, and any of the forty odd nationalities that live in Pinoso might have a chance. Speak in Valenciano and it's only for the locals. It even excludes the vast majority of Spaniards.

Quite a lot of the news on the local website and radio station is presented in Valenciano. There's plenty in Castillian too but I think the percentage of Valenciano may be increasing. Anyway I was listening to the radio as I drove into town the other day and I heard the shortlist for the Carnival Queens, in Castillian, for this year's fiestas. All of them were double barrelled, local, Spanish names. Not an Ecuadorian, a Moroccan or a Ukrainian among them.

Chuntering on

I forget where we were but they offered Contessa as afters. The Vienetta of my youth, fancy, if industrial, ice cream cake. There was tiramisu as well. Not many years ago all the puddings on offer in an everyday Spanish restaurant would be crème caramel, ice cream and seasonal fruit. Now you can get chemically flavoured cheesecake and deep frozen profiteroles and suchlike almost everywhere. An example of reasonably recent change.

Last Saturday evening I wasn't sure whether to go and see some flamenco in Villena or go to Jumilla for the Night of the Museums. I like Jumilla but we've done their museums a few times. I was drawn towards the flamenco. It's ages since we've seen a couple of old fat blokes wailing or listened to anyone turn clapping into a fine instrument. The trouble was the information I could garner from the web about Villena wasn't complete. I had a time, a place and a title. No description; Art and Flamenco could have been a learned discourse as easily as a night of sweat and guitars. A few years ago not being able to find any information on the Internet would have been dead usual. I'd have risked it but, as I got to the decisive junction, I turned the car towards the certainty of Jumilla. Until very recently Spaniards were not big on sharing information. The working hypothesis, born as so many things still are in Spain, of forty years of life under a dictatorship, was that what you knew may be to your advantage - so best to keep it quiet. But, nowadays, lots of information is reasonably accessible and that's a big change.

I'm not sure how much of the Catalonia news gets outside of Spain. I would guess that there are sporadic bursts as someone goes to a Belgian, German or Swiss court or when some President is nearly sworn in. The gang of politicians who have the upper hand in Cataluña at the moment are a bunch of pig headed, short sighted, single track thinking fools. The President of Spain, who represents the opposing side for those Catalan politicians, is also a fool, a plodding, vindictive, uninspired fool. There is only one way out of this, the two sides have to talk to each other. The trouble is that both sides only understand playground type rules - "I'll take my bat home" or "I'll get my big brother on to you". It's going to take ages for their feeble minds to come up with anything workable. Mind you I think Spanish history is peppered with examples of Spaniards being unwilling or unable to talk to each other. Co-operation is, in my opinion, not a big thing in Spain.

On a much lighter note, well away from the politics of a repressive regime or two, I don't care for the run up to Christmas. This is because Maggie watches a series of TV shows that shape our weekends. There is the X Factor, the one with the audience reduced to a baying pack of hyenas, which I heartily dislike, and there's also the dancing one which I don't find offensive but which isn't my idea of fun. I'm not sure when MasterChef is on but she likes that too. It's not a programme I particularly care for but I have nothing against it either except that it cuts across the start time for prime time telly which means we miss the first thirty minutes of any film on Spanish TV. Nowadays of course the format for TV programmes is a saleable item. There are Spanish versions of Come Dine With Me, First Dates, Britain's Got Talent, The Voice, Kitchen Nightmares, Big Brother, The X factor, MasterChef and Strictly amongst others. Now if Maggie likes MasterChef and if I want to watch Spanish telly you'd think that we'd have a televisual winner with the Spanish versions. The problem is that the programmes are presented differently. Strictly or Bailando con las estrellas as it's called here, only started last week. We gave it a go. We watched for a while. Maggie complained that the format wasn't as good as the British version but she'd probably have put up with that if the programme hadn't started at 10.30pm and gone on till 12.45am - two and a quarter hours. MasterChef does something similar on Sunday evenings - hours and hours long.

I could go on but it's probably best that I don't as I'm over 700 words. Way past the attention span of most people. A bit like Spanish TV!

Spanish Nobel Laureates

In 1895 the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, left money in his will for the Nobel Prize. The prizes are judged by Swedish and Norwegian institutions to recognise academic, cultural and scientific advances. The first prizes were awarded in 1901 in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics and Physiology or Medicine. The prize in Economics was first awarded in 1969, after a donation from the Swedish National Bank to the Nobel Foundation.

To date there have been just seven Nobel Prizes awarded to Spaniards. So the next time you pass a school or a street named for one of them you can amaze your visitors with your knowledge of Spain. If you can't remember who won what plump for literature and the odds are on your side – five literature and two for medicine.

The Spanish started well with an early win in 1904 for literature. José Echegaray y Eizaguirre was a civil engineer, mathematician, statesman, and one of the leading Spanish dramatists of the 19th century. José Echegaray was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Literature "in recognition of the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner, have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama".

Next up was Santiago Ramón y Cajal in 1906 for medicine or physiology. Ramón y Cajal was a pathologist, histologist and neuroscientist. His pioneering investigations of the microscopic structure of the brain have led to his being called the father of modern neuroscience. His medical artistry was legendary, and hundreds of his drawings are still in use for educational and training purposes. His Nobel citation reads "in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system"

It was quite a while to the next one, 1922 to be precise, to Jacinto Benavente y Martínez for literature. Jacinto Benavente was born in Madrid and became one of the foremost Spanish dramatists of the 20th century. The Nobel Prize citation reads "for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama".

Nothing in the 1930s or 40s but in 1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón picked up the literature prize. Juan Ramón Jiménez was a prolific writer and poet who received the prize "for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistic purity". Although he was mainly a poet his prose work, Platero y yo - Platero and I, a series of gentle stories about a boy and his donkey, is one of those books that children are made to read at school.

Severo Ochoa de Albornoz was a physician and biochemist. Severo Ochoa won the medicine or physiology prize in 1959 by which time he had moved to the USA and taken on American Citizenship. He worked alongside Arthur Kornberg  so the citation reads "for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid"

Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo was born in Seville in 1898. Vicente Aleixandre received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977 "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars". His poetry is generally free verse, very surrealistic and often sad.

The latest winner to date was Camilo José Cela y Trulock, 1st Marquis of Iria Flavia in 1989 for literature. The Trulock part of Camilo José Cela's name comes from an English grandparent though his mum was Spanish. Because he is more recent you may find that his work is better known - titles to remember are La familia de Pascual Duarte and la Colmena (The Hive). He liked to shock with his statements and in an interview on telly he offered to demonstrate his ability to absorb litres of water via his anus. You can see why the Nobel citation is for "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability"

Don John

My Spanish is odd. I know a fair bit. I can talk alright but sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can get really flustered and cock it up completely. Sometimes I can laugh at my mistakes and plough on or I can get angry and sulky. Language, or problems with language are still, by far, the biggest stumbling block to my day to day dealings with Spain.

In the last post I mentioned that the Consumer Office had suggested the only way to sort out our overpaid local taxes was to go to the nearest office of the Land Registry, the Catastro, 60 kilometres away in Alicante city. Nowadays, with most government offices, you need to arrange a prior appointment. That doesn't mean you don't have to queue but it does mean you'll get served. There are lots of systems for making an appointment online and even the most basic website usually offers some sort of email possibility. Not the Catastro though. You can get access to plenty of information online but sorting an appointment has to be done by phone.

I used to live on the phone when I had a real job but, nowadays, I find phone calls to help lines really difficult irrespective of the language. First there are the technical problems; the headsets not set up properly so that the volume is too loud or too low and the VOIP connections with the corresponding clicks or echoes on the line. Then there are those more physical problems like balancing the phone under your chin whilst you search for the reference number that you didn't expect them to ask for. Now add in the Spanish. If talking to people face to face can vary from ordinary and normal to a bit embarrassing talking to people on the phone, for me, tends towards nightmare. There are non of those corporal cues to help - you can't nod or gesticulate or smile - it all depends on the words that you utter and only on the words.

So, I'd put off phoning the Catastro as long as I could. As I pressed the number buttons on the phone I remembered approaching the end of the 10 metre board at the swimming pool in Skipton when I was a boy. The connection was dodgy - a beep on the line every three seconds or so. I listened to the "Please hold we'll be with you in a moment" message for a while with the knot in my stomach getting tighter and tighter. "How can I help you today?" said a cheery voice in Spanish with a nice clear accent. No niceties on my part I just blurted out "I want to arrange an appointment with the Alicante office" with the Spanish steeped in the broadest of Yorkshire accents. Questions and answers; ID numbers, reference numbers, post codes, phone numbers - easy questions. Then there was a question about why I wanted to speak to them, I fluffed and muttered. The man said "Ya". Ya is a multi-use, often confirmatory, word that can mean lots of things. When he said it he said it in a way that I know well, with the vowel sound lengthened and a click at the end, so that it sounds resigned and world weary. I got the appointment though.

As he confirmed the place, date and time he made the mistake, common amongst Spaniards used to their double barrelled surnames, of thinking that my middle name was my surname. Thank you for your call to the Catastro today Don John. As I sniggered I failed to say "adios" properly. Ending on a low note.

Sweet and sour

The Spanish tax year runs from 1st January to 31st December. Sometime around the end of March, or the beginning of April, the tax process begins and people have till June to either put in their claims for reimbursements or pay up what they owe. I still do a bit of part time work and I have some income from a Teacher's Pension so I have tax to pay. For years I did my own tax return by either going to the local tax office or doing it online.

A few years ago it all got a bit more complicated because there were rule changes about the taxation of overseas pension income. Well that and that I'd been evading tax just a little. HM Revenue and Customs dobbed me in to the Spaniards and told them about the 300€ or so I get each year from a tiny AVC pension fund. Pedro, a nice accountant in Molina de Segura sorted it all out for me and I stuck with him the next tax year too. Last year though I went back to doing it myself and ended up with a tax bill of about 1,200€ which was a bit of a shock. That amount represents a bit below four months pay from my very part time. It didn't seem fair or right but, after lots of Googling and questions on expat forums, the evidence suggested it was as it should be. So I gritted my teeth and paid up.

This year I added my pension to the draft tax return form online again and it looked as though I owed around 400€. I decided to ask an accountant, just to be sure. My appointment was this morning. All the sums done the accountant told me the tax people owed me about 50€. This is a good result. It turns out that accountants can do something on the tax returns that private individuals can't so, by not going to an accountant last year, I had doomed myself to overpaying my taxes. I'm taking a positive view of this and being thankful. I am not going to cry over last years spilled milk. There's the sweet.

In February of 2017 we got a huge "rates" demand. Well huge by our standards. Another five months of part time work's worth. With a bit of checking it turned out that there was an error. We are paying the rates for most of our neighbours house!

I put in an appeal with the Land Registry, the Catastro, and waited for something to happen. After about five months I sent an email asking, very politely, if they had any news. They told me they had, by law, up to six months to reply. I asked again after nine months and they told me that the matter was "under consideration". It's now around 15 months and their recent reply was also to wait. Taking on the Land Registry in hand to hand combat is not something I relish. So I booked in for an appointment with the local Consumer Protection Office to see if they could do anything on our behalf. My appointment was this afternoon. Their advice was to go to the Land Registry Office in Alicante and make my case face to face. Not exactly the sort of help I was looking for. Perhaps the most depressing thing was that the chap who suggested this also gave me the address for the local ombudsman rather suggesting that he's not hopeful about the outcome. And that's the sour.

11-M; the 2004 Madrid Train Bombings

On Thursday 11th of March 2004 between 7.0 and 7.15 in the morning, thirteen backpacks, each containing about 10kg of explosive, were loaded onto four trains as they passed through Alcalá de Henares station. About half an hour later, in the two minutes between 7.37 and 7.39, ten of those bombs exploded on crowded commuter trains in the heart of Madrid. 190 people of 17 nationalities died and over 1800 were injured. The bombs, at first reported to be the work of the Basque terrorist organisation ETA, were later ascribed to independent Islamist terrorists.

The explosions occurred during the morning rush hour, targeting a busy commuter rail line into Atocha station from Alcalá. At 7.37 four bombs, planted in different carriages of a single train, exploded inside Atocha station. Two minutes later three bombs exploded on a train held at calle de Téllez by a red signal just 500 metres out of Atocha. The presumption is that the bombs were planned to go off inside Atocha, Madrid's busiest railway station. Meanwhile, at El Pozo station, two more bombs detonated at 7:38 on another train. A single bomb, also at 7.38, killed more at Santa Eugenia station. Four trains and ten bombs. Bomb disposal teams found and detonated two more bombs in controlled explosions on the train at calle de Téllez. Another unexploded device, which was apparently of a different design to all the others, had been on the El Pozo train. It was later discovered, inside Vallecas police station, where it had been taken with other items. One reason given for that bomb not going off was that the timer had been set twelve hours late in a confusion between am and pm.

11-M, the Madrid Atocha bombings, are the worst terrorist attack in modern Spanish history. They wrested that unhappy record from the 1987 attack by ETA on a Hipercor store in Barcelona with 21 dead and 40 injured. In fact the attacks were the deadliest in Europe since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. More people died in the Atocha train bombings than died in Paris in November 2015.

The bombings had an important political effect. Spain was just three days away from a General Election when the bombs went off. Opinion polls at the time were predicting a victory for the ruling Partido Popular led by José María Aznar. Government sources pointed the finger at the Basque terror group, ETA, though they quickly denied any involvement. The suggestion is that Aznar thought that the public would perceive an ETA attack as the death throes of a terrorist organisation throttled by a firm Government. An Islamist attack on the other hand would be seen as the result of him deploying Spanish troops in Iraq. One was good politics, the other bad. That's probably why when, for instance, the police found a stolen van containing detonators and Arabic language materials near Alcalá station and later, as the evidence of an Islamist attack mounted, the PP stubbornly maintained the ETA hypothesis.

Aznar lost the elections. José Luis Zapatero, the victor, fulfilled his promise to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. Nowadays, the view is that the surprise victory had more to do with the public reaction to what was seen as the Government disinformation rather than a direct Iraqi war link.

During the investigation seven men including two suspected ringleaders of the bombings blew themselves up as police closed in on them. The blast killed a policeman. Twenty eight people eventually went to trial in what the original trial judge described as a mixed bag of Islamic extremists. Twenty one of them were convicted but seven were acquitted including one of the alleged masterminds. Four of the sentences were later overturned

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Just a word of warning. In writing this article I came across multiple factual contradictions and differences in what should have been simple information. I tried to steer through but I cannot be certain that there are no errors in the account.

Breathing Space

A pal had to go to accident and emergency yesterday. He was having trouble breathing and he suspected he had something lodged in his windpipe. He asked me to go as a translator. Perhaps his difficulty in breathing had clouded his judgement!

He was seen by a doctor inside about 15 minutes of arrival. He was taken to a cubicle with a bed after that first consultation. There were a couple of routine tests, blood samples, blood pressure, temperature and whatever it is they do when they put electrodes on your chest, hands and legs to get one of those wiggly line graphs. A few minutes later and he got a chest X-ray and then he was shifted onto an observation ward. Somebody came to do the blood pressure and temperature stuff again. This time they were a bit worried about the oxygen levels in his blood so they fastened him up to oxygen administered through one of those clip in the nostril jobs. Then it all slowed to a crawl.

The patient wasn't. He thought they were taking ages and not doing much. Impatient rather than patient. I thought it seemed pretty good. Presumably someone was looking at the various tests and deciding what to do. We'd been there about four hours, a bit less maybe, when I had to go to get to work. Before I went, they told me that my chum would be moved to a room and that they would have a look for the obstruction the next morning. I got a WhatsApp this morning from him to say that they'd taken some food out of his windpipe today.

The lunctime TV news reported that eight out of ten Spaniards are very happy with the service they get from the Spanish health system. Their main complaint is that the waiting times are too long between GP and specialist at around a month. I'd go along with the 80%.

Troughing down

It turns out that I've blogged about the restaurant in Culebrón, Restaurante Eduardo, probably nearly as many times as I've eaten there. So I'll try to keep this short.

Last Sunday Maggie put up less resistance to eating at Eduardo's than usual. There were several possible reasons for the feeble struggle that she put up but I think the main one was that, being Mother's Day, she knew that most restaurants would be awash with diners and Eduardo's is never awash. We had house guests too and I think that Maggie recognises that Eduardo's offers a rich and varied Spanish experience. And so it was. There was the usual reluctance, on the part of the restaurant, to be clear about what there was to eat but, in the end, we got a good meal at a good price. At least I think so. You'd have to ask John and Claire what they thought to get a reasonably unbiased view. Maggie and I have entrenched positions about Eduardo's that are unshakeable before logic or reason.

The thing that did surprise me was that the meal was very Pinoso yet it seemed to be new to our friends. Amongst other things we got entremeses, well generally a selection of local embutidos, sausages, in the way that salami and pastrami and black pudding are sausages, rather than bangers, served as part of the range of food before the main dish. For a main we had been offered gazpacho but Maggie's not a big fan of the local gazpacho. It's not the liquid salad gazpacho of Andalucia but a rabbit stew served with a sort of pancake in the base of the bowl and a dough, based on wheat flour, floating in the stew. The gazpacho rejected we went for rice, for paella.

Now John and Claire are no strangers to Spain so they know what a paella is but the local rice is a bit different to the "generic" paella of the coast. Rice dishes are different all over Spain and the one with seafood or chicken and those flat green beans isn't the one in these here parts. Our rice, still cooked in a paella pan, has rabbit and snails with a dry rice only a few grains thick. It's success depends on the quality of the broth that gives the taste to the rice. Something a bit different for J&C.

Rice over it all looked a bit humdrum - Vienetta, variations on creme caramel, industrial cheesecake etc but there was a final flourish when we got perusas. We call them dust cakes because when you bite into them they melt in your mouth. They disappear. Like dust.

An experience, as always, and, I realised, quite Pinoso.

Fighting for a parking spot

Saturday morning in Pinoso – parking at a premium; nothing in Calle Lepanto, Trafalgar or Bailén. Hmm? Now there's a theme. The streets are named for battles. I did a bit of checking. Nearly 400 battles were listed as important in Spanish history with sixteen as absolutely key. With the limited space available my choice has been a little arbitrary.

Skipping chronologically over Guadalete, Covadonga, Navas de Tolosa and Ceriñola we arrive at the Battle of Otumba in 1520. This was the one where Hernán Cortés crushed the Aztec Empire and opened the way to the conquest of what is now Mexico. He did it with the help of lots of locals but let's pretend, as Spaniards often do, that Hernán, his horses and a few lads from Extremadura did it alone.

So we ignore Pavia and San Quintín and move on to Lepanto in 1571. This was a naval battle between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and an alliance of Christian powers sponsored by the Spanish King. Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote, was there and he was wounded – fortunately in his left hand, not the one he wrote with. Lepanto was fought off the coast of Greece. The Ottomans lost which halted Turkish expansion and established Spain as a naval power.

No space for the Battles of Rocroi or Villaviviciosa but I can't miss out Almansa. After all Almansa is only fifty minutes from home. This was a battle fought in 1707 as part of the Spanish War of Succession between the French backed Bourbons and the Austrian backed Hapsburgs with Spaniards on both sides. In the battle the Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of James II of England serving in the French Army, beat the French Henri de Massue, leading British troops. In fact we Britons backed the losing side, the Hapsburgs, but it was a good war for us. The treaty of Utrecht, signed at the end of the war, gave us Gibraltar.

Next up is Trafalgar and unless you were asleep when they did this at school you know about Nelson taking apart a combined fleet of French and Spanish ships but dying in the process. It was fought off the coast of Cádiz in1805 and basically after Nelson's first onslaught the French ran away leaving the Spanish fleet to be smashed to smithereens. It was the end of Spanish naval power and the battle was hugely influential in the future of Europe and Spain's American possessions.

By the time that the Battle of Bailén was fought in 1809 the Spanish had joined the British against Napoleon's French in what we call the Peninsular War. This was the start of Wellington's campaigns all the way to Waterloo. Completely against the grain a Spanish Army, commanded by General Castaños, beat a French Army in direct battle. It was the first time that Napoleon's Grande Armée had been beaten. By the way it was at this time that the Spaniards invented Guerrilla warfare, attack and run. Guerrilla means little war.

No space for the battle of Ayacucho in Peru in 1824 when the Spanish lost control of mainland America or for the 1898 naval battle of Santiago de Cuba when the Spanish fleet was pulverized by the U.S Navy. The Spanish lost Cuba (and the Philippines) their last American possessions as a result.

The last battle on my list, the 1938 Battle of the Ebro was the bloodiest and longest battle of the Spanish Civil war. The Nationalist victory put paid to the Republic and paved the way for the next 37 years of dictatorial government in Spain.

Missing the boat

I just said goodbye to Maggie and set off to watch people walk up to the repeater; the masts on top of our local hill. I have no idea why but, every year, hundreds of people hike up the hill in the pitch dark and then have a bit of a party. But I didn't go. As I walked to the car I thought it was a bit cold, a bit miserable and a bit dark. In fact I'm sitting on the sofa, with el Intermedio on in the background, well that and lots of perfume ads for Mother's Day on Sunday.

Last Saturday we planned our afternoon carefully - early show at the flicks, back via the supermarket with just enough time to unpack the cereal and canned tomatoes in time for an 8.0 clock concert in the local theatre. It didn't quite pan out though. First we need to master the 24 hour clock so we can tell the difference between 18:00 and 8 o'clock. Fortunately the local press posted their report on the Pinoso website promptly. I was able to read the report before I expected the event to start! So, at least, we didn't get to look foolish by wandering around a closed theatre.

Then there was a message on the village WhatsApp group. It said that the new bell on the little chapel would be inaugurated at 19:00 on the 29th. I copied the event to the diary on my phone for Sunday. We haven't been to a village event for ages. On Saturday, as we were rushing around to get to the, unknown to us, well underway, concert we could hear the bell in the village going potty. "They must be rehearsing for tomorrow," I said. They weren't of course. I'd just got the date wrong.

If it goes on like this I'll  somehow contrive to miss the Festicolors run on Saturday. I just checked the time, in case, and I was reminded that there will be the monthly silent protest outside the Town Hall against gender violence but there is also a star gazing event organised by the "housewives" group that had slipped me by.

It's amazing what goes on in a village of fewer than 8,000 souls but even more amazing is just how little it takes to keep me amused.

Los Indianos

When I was a little boy I wondered why Indians, the ones from India, had the same name as the ones we cowboys didn't care for; the ones with tomahawks and feathers in their headdress. I thought it very confusing having two lots of people with the same name.

So when Colón, that's Columbus to us, persuaded the Spanish Royals to bankroll his expedition he told them he reckoned he could get to the spice rich East Indies by sailing West; the wrong way around the, newly appreciated not to be flat, Earth. Spices meant big money. If Colón were right underwriting his three boats would be a shrewd move for the Spanish Crown. So, when on 12th October 1492, Colón bumped into an island in the Bahamas, he thought he'd got to the Indies. He referred to the locals as Indians and the name stuck.

Thanks to Columbus lots of Spanish adventurers followed his route and went in search of their fortunes. Because of them Spain developed a huge empire and, even when the United States kicked the Spanish out of their last toeholds in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, the link between Spain and South and Central America remained strong.

Spain has a history of people emigrating. Hordes of young Spanish men and women headed off for Cuba, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico to seek their fortunes, particularly those from communities with an Atlantic coastline. Sometimes they went simply for the adventure. Often they left to escape the grinding poverty at home and, in some cases, they went to join other members of their family who had found overseas success. For many Spaniards emigrating, making it big, was a dream rather than a possibility. The Americas were a favourite destination. Into the 19th Century much of South and Central America was Spanish soil, still Spain, and, even as the countries gained independence there was still a shared language. Of course many of the emigrants failed, they left Spain poor and stayed poor in their new homes. They never raised the money for the return ticket and the chance to tell their tale. On the other hand many of those who did prosper, eventually, headed back for Spain. And guess what the collective name for these returnees was? Quite right, they too were Indians, well Indianos which isn't quite the same.

In general this emigration was a phenomenon of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Indianos often became important figures in business and in society. It was these men, and they were nearly all men, who would pay for improvements in their re-found communities by building, schools, hospitals and town halls. The casinos were theirs. They piped in water and introduced electric light. These were the men who bought noble family titles and bought up and restored old palaces or built flash new houses that mixed American and local styles. These Indian Houses, Casas de Indianos. can be seen all over Spain though the majority are in the provinces that provided most emigrants. Nearly all of these houses have palm trees in the garden as a symbol of their owners overseas adventure. 

And how was it that there was so much money to be made? The answer lies in slaving. Many of these men either dealt directly in slaves or bought them to work their land. Gaudi, for instance, the famous Catalan architect of the Sagrada Familia, was sponsored by Eusebi Güell. of Parc Guell fame. Eusebi's dad was an Indiano and almost certainly made his money from slaving.

Choosing sides – cowboys or Indians – isn't quite so straightforward as it once was.

You say you love me

One of the things I've realised about being old is that my reference points are different to those of younger people. I know that very few people go out and buy a printed newspaper nowadays, I don't either, but I still say “I read such and such in the paper” or “the papers say this or that”, even though I actually read the news on my mobile phone. I think of the telly as having times when programmes are on rather than calling them up on Netflix. Mention playing a game and I visualise football or Monopoly before I think of Destiny 2.

I used to watch the Star Trek: Next Generation. I haven't seen an episode for years as Star Trek isn't particularly popular in Spain. Actually it often takes me aback how culturally unaware lots of Spaniards are about US culture. I'd never quite realised how fifty first state we Britons were until I lived here. Anyway in this particular episode, as I remember, maybe inaccurately, the captain of the Enterprise is stranded on a planet with a non human adversary. Slowly the relationship between the two of them improves but communication is difficult because the non human speaks in cultural references. It would be as though a Briton used the date of the Battle of Hastings, 10th October 1066, as a way of saying, total rout, defeat with long lasting consequences or a turning point on history.

One of the big problems for my students is that the exams they have to pass are written by people who know about 1066, people with whom I share a culture. Those exam writers know about raising money for charities, about schools owning minibuses and about young people going clubbing. Spaniards don't. So when the conversation or the recording that my students need to understand is about a jumble sale for money towards a new minibus, for instance, my students have a cultural hill, as well as a linguistic one, to climb.

Yesterday I had a class where only one student turned up. The student is very young but she's good at English and refreshingly keen on learning. Nonetheless two hours is a long class for even the most dedicated single student. I needed a change of pace. I remembered a song that I'd prepared for another class of teenagers and asked her if she fancied doing the song Friends by Anne-Marie, at which point she burst into song. She went on to tell me lots more songs that she "loved" or "adored" often with vocal accompaniment. Obviously enough she asked me if I knew this or that song or artist and my lack of cultural awareness, of things Spanish and also of things young, soon began to show through.

As we talked the young woman was almost tripping over her words with excitement. Music is obviously something important in her life.  It reminded me that I had seen a list, "in the paper", a piece from el País in English, written by someone called Christy Romer.  I've just Googled the name and it's a him and he's based in Cambridge.  The list was called "12 classic songs guaranteed to get any Spanish house party moving." Now when I'd looked at this list I hadn't believed it. For a start the examples that the article gave of British "never fail" dance floor fillers were No Scrubs and Come on Eileen. Hmm? Anyway, giving that I had a young person in front of me, keen to talk about music, the sort of person who wouldn't, if she were British, be old enough to believe that the funniest thing ever seen on telly was the Only Fools and Horses episode with the chandelier, I went through the list with her. I hadn't thought the listing was any good because they were all very old songs and lots of them, from my limited knowledge of the artists, or just guessing from the song titles, were either very bouncy songs with lots of voices doing the chorus or overwrought solo efforts. It's quite hard to think of UK equivalents but maybe The Specials and Too Much Too Young or Viva España or some collaboration between Madness with Chas and Dave for the bouncy style. For the style of song which requires a pained expression on the singer's face, so typical of lots of quite famous Spanish songs, UK examples might be Tom Jones with Delilah, Barry Ryan with Eloise or maybe a bit of Renée and Renato. The fact that the majority of the songs must have been released twenty five years before my student was born made not a jot of difference. She recognised and sang every single one.

Class over and I was on my way home. I talked to my bosses who are both sub 30 I think. Young in my books. I mentioned the list to them. They too knew all the songs, maybe a bit Andalucia, was their comment but it seemed to me that they too recognised the list as being legitimate if not, necessarily, definitive.

Just another lesson in Spanish culture for me. Curiouser and curiouser!

For anyone who cares and for the few Spanish readers this is the list.

Celia Cruz - La vida es un carnaval
Rafaella Carrà - Hay que venir al sur
Las Grecas - Te estoy amando locamente
Los Del Río - Sevilla tiene un color especial
Gipsy Kings - Volare
Alaska - A quién le importa
Los Manolos - Amigos para siempre
Sevillanas - El Adiós
Camilo Sesto - Vivir así es morir de amor
The Refrescos - Aquí no hay playa
Bongo Botrako - Todos los días sale el sol
Raphael - Mi Gran Noche

Chilling

There are fifty provinces in Spain and two autonomous cities on the North African coast. Then there are the islands. Each province and all of the islands have a capital and Ceuta and Melilla have a similar sort of "capital" status. Over the years we've bagged most of those towns so that it's just Palencia and Melilla to go. Until last week we were also missing Ibiza and Formentera. But not now.

It takes only 35 minutes in the air, more or less, from Alicante to Ibiza. Nonetheless, it took us something like six or seven hours to get there. The plane being four hours late didn't help. Then there was a slight hiccough with the pickup minibus to take us to the hire car. Actually the car was quite odd. I'd taken out insurance to cover the 1200€ insurance excess, which cost about 50€, but the car hire itself was flagged as being something less than a euro a day and that proved to be true. There was a bit of a trick though, I'd been expecting something because 87 cents per day is just too good to be true, but it was such a small trick that I happily paid. They charged me for the three quarters full tank of fuel and that was it. Even better they gave me a biggish Nissan Qashqai when I'd only paid for a little Fiat 500.

Maggie doesn't particularly care for my idea of a holiday - go somewhere, look around, move on. She likes to stay still from time to time. In Ibiza we travelled around but in the whole week we only clocked up 500kms which is next to nothing. Driving around wasn't that much fun though. I'm used to long, empty roads. In Ibiza the roads are often narrow, pretty short - the island is just 50kms from end to end - and full of cars. On road parking spaces could be tricky to find, though nearly all the villages had big car parks. We were never away from other traffic. The narrow roads provided for some amusement. Obviously people need to send messages on their phone as they drive - being out of contact for more than a few minutes might have dire consequences. Normally people try to text when they are stopped by lights, in traffic queues etc. In Ibiza the text as you drive drivers were very noticeable because their lack of concentration made them very slow and their sideways drifting made for amusing swerves as they avoided a head on collision or the very hefty looking roadside banks.

I realised when we were unpacking in our hotel that it had never crossed my mind to take anything in case it rained. I had a pullover and a jacket "por si acaso", just in case and I used them but not a thought for a pac-a-mac. I didn't need one of course. Generally the sun shone and it was only chilly in the evening. The season hasn't started yet. In fact the whole island was being painted, scrubbed and generally refitted ready for May when things swing back into gear. It was good for us. There was nobody having multi-partner sex on any of the beaches we visited, no pumping music in the air and still space in those car parks.

The island was lovely. Very green with some beautiful spring flowers. The sea was sparkly and blue or green and, although I know the Med is a cess pit, it looked clear and clean. Beaches varied from sandy to pebbly but lots of the little coves were splendid. The island's not very hilly going up to something under 500 metres which is lower than the contour line that runs past our house. It seemed quite modern too, lots of ecological this and organic that. There were places to charge electric cars all over the place. Towns and villages basically came in two varieties. In one the white church and main square were surrounded by shops selling hand made jewellery and straw hats whilst in others there were rows and rows of souvenir shops, tattoo parlours and cafes selling full English. Not even the tatty places were cheap.

One of the things that I missed, and something that I'm sure exists, was the island identity. The local version of Catalan, Ibicenco, was everywhere but we'll gently sidestep that as a mark of identity. Spanish regions usually have some regional food. We ate out stacks of times but we were very seldom offered anything that wasn't "international" or a sort of generic Spanish. When we were flying home the airport had local beer, local cheese, a local version on the ensaimada pastries, local sausages etc. Actually there was a food thing that may be quite Ibizan; I got cup after cup of terrible coffee. I may be wrong but I think they use the torrefacto coffee where the beans are roasted with sugar. Spain is good for coffee so it was a bit of a shock.

Identity wise it was the same with the architecture. In Valencia the tent like barracas, in Castilla la Mancha the blue and white paintwork and the houses on stilts in Galicia are noticeable. In Ibiza it's true that white paint was predominant, there was a common green or light blue colour and the churches were all low and squat but I would be pushed to say I noticed an architectural style.

There wasn't any pushing of "folk" traditions either - here in Pinoso you can see "traditional" dress several times a year. In Murcia the white shorts for men, zaragüelles, and the rope soled sandals get lots of outings whilst people playing regional musical instruments are on every street corner in every town of Alicante. I'm exaggerating, of course, but tradition is often on show in Spain and it wasn't in Ibiza.

There was one thing that was ever present though and that was music - the sort of chilled Ibiza, dance cum shopping music that works, with slight variations, as the soundtrack for contemplating a sunset, as background music in the hotels or bars and on the local radio stations.

Lots more to say but I've already used too many words so I'll leave it there. Good week though.

A damp squib

We've been to a few music festivals here in Spain - pop festivals, mainly indie bands - generally pretty close to home. I did investigate going to one near Burgos and another near Bilbao this summer but, even months ago, all the hotels were gone and we're far too old for that sleeping under canvas nonsense. A second factor in deciding against was that, when I did the sums and compared it to my monthly income, I decided that the best thing to do with the coming summer is to sit in the garden, perspire gently, listen to the cigarras sing and read books borrowed from the library.

Last century I worked for a youth club charity. We decided to hold a major fundraising event and we even hired an event organiser. She was well out of her depth and the event was destined to be a squalid failure. But the morning of the event dawned stormy and thundery; rain was falling in torrents. The event went ahead because everything was ready and there was no alternative. The dismal event and the financial losses were all put down to the weather.

In the book that we Britons call Don Quixote, often quoted as the masterpiece of Spanish literature, a work of two volumes with 1250 pages there is not a mention of rain. In Spain, if it rains, events are often scrubbed. Usually they are re-arranged but sometimes that's just the end of them. There's always next year.

I like festivals. I like the short sets and the multi stage thing. If one band isn't too good there is another to listen to and if they are no good either then there are vegetable noodles and falafels to buy. The truth is that I'm a bit old for festivals though. If I have to stand up for too long my back aches and my legs really begin to hurt. Maggie has a similar, but much more painful, problem with her hip. My contact lenses are another problem. They're fine till around 11 or maybe till midnight but, after fourteen or so hours in my eyes my blinking becomes non stop. There's another thing about later evening. The bar is now more battle ground like than earlier, the toilets are repulsive and the number of stoned (does one still say stoned for drugged up?) and drunk young people makes for more collisions and spilled drinks which have a negative effect on my good humour.

But I also have a theory. The headline bands at the festivals are probably doing alright. They probably spend their time travelling around the country in a Transit (does one still say a Transit as the generic for a mid sized van?) but they've given up the day job and they have a couple of albums behind them. They are, in a word, successful. And whatever happens tonight isn't going to change that. Their current reputation is made and their future will depend, not on tonight, but on their new songs and future albums.

The same isn't true of the bands at the beginning of the running order. If they do well tonight people might go out and buy their music (does one still buy music or does one simply steal it?) The opinion formers, looking for something to pad out their blogs, video channels and Instagram accounts, might say something nice about them. You can see, too, that the bands themselves get a buzz out of being on a big stage with a lot of kit. They put a lot of effort into doing as well as they can and they often look to be having a hoot of a time. Besides which the toilets are still smelling sweet, the bar is easy access and nobody is crashing into me because their motor control functions have been compromised.

We were going to a small festival in Elche this evening. The bigger bands, like Love of Lesbian and Sidonie, we've seen several times before, others, like Elefantes and Casa Azul, we've seen too but not so many times. Some of the bands on the running order like Kuve, Polos Opuestos, Atientas and Women Beat were all new to me. I was looking forward to it. Then, yesterday, via Facebook, not via the ticket agency that took my money, I find out that the event has been postponed and split in two with one day on the 20 April and another on May 12. We could have booked up lots of other things for this weekend but we didn't because of Elche Live. And why is the event cancelled? Because there is a high probability that it will rain this afternoon. Pathetic.

La Movida y los 80's

A Scottish pal who lives here in Pinoso commented on one of my photos the other day. He said something along the lines that he was beginning to learn some of the ways and customs of Spain but that it would take a lifetime to learn the subtleties that his Spanish neighbours just know innately. Absolutely right. What a person learns about their own culture comes from so many sources, over such a long time, from so many clues and with so much reinforcement that it is difficult to simply learn it. That's why I know about Harold Wilson, his Gannex coats and the fact that he preferred tinned to fresh salmon. It's why I vaguely know who Katie Price is and what Delia Smith does but also why I'd never heard of Los Monaguillosh until today

I was in Elche this morning. Another class had been cancelled, my watch battery had been replaced and I had time to pop in to see the exhibition about la Movida in the MACE (Museu d’art Contemporani d’Elx). I hadn't realised, till I read the leaflet that I picked up after I'd looked around, that there have been other events linked to la Movida in Elche since January, with more things scheduled through to June.

Now my knowledge about la Movida is pretty basic. I think of it as being the time when Franco had been dead long enough for young people in Madrid to start making music and doing those counter cultural things that, pre Instagram, young people did - strange clothes, strange haircuts, writing poetry, publishing funny, short lived magazines and probably using a lot of drugs. A bit like late punk. I know the names of a few of the bands that were successful then, especially the ones that linger on, Alaska, Los Secretos and Mecano, but almost nothing else.

There was nobody else in the gallery - Spaniards call them museums but I'm sure the English word is gallery. The chap on the door said that there was a video to go with the exhibition and that it lasted an hour. He turned it on. A mixture of old age deafness, problems with Spanish and boredom meant that twenty minutes was all I could take of the video. It appeared to be people like the late Antonio Vega talking about how Nacha Pop did this or that and Herminio Molero doing the same about Radio Futura. The TV was in the middle of a lot of sheets of paper which, it slowly dawned, were enlarged pages of a fanzine. If there was an explanation I didn't see it.

I climbed the stairs to the top floor where there were a couple of display cases, one had some shoes in, the other proved my theory about the fanzine. The main thing though was around twenty perfectly decent photos of people standing next to dustbins or in front of peeling paintwork. Some of them wore goggles and lots had very spiky hair. The captions would say things like "Next to the bar La Bobia". I've just Googled the chap, Miguel Trillo. I think I should have been more impressed - he seems to be quite a famous (Spanish) photographer.

I love going to exhibitions. Even when they're not interesting and exciting I still think they are worthwhile. It's exactly like going to the pictures. You never know when you'll bump into something spellbinding. So the exhibition was OK but I just marvelled at the lost opportunity.

Where was the brief description of what la Movida was, where were the examples of writing, of art or at least the names that came out of it? Was the bar la Bobia an important club in the development of la Movida in the same way as The Cavern, The Marquee, Hacienda or The Ministry of Sound were in the UK? And if not la Bobia then where were the influential venues? Was there a Carnaby Street, a Malcolm McLaren, a Vivienne Westwood. This stuff is important, not just the Movida, the stuff that makes up the culture of a country. I don't know enough about it and I don't suppose that the typical Spanish 18 year old knows either. We should both get the opportunity. We may decide not to take it but at least it should be on offer.

Don't you agree David?

Oh, and the apostrophe in the title is theirs. I have a lot of trouble with commas but apostrophes aren't so bad. Castillian doesn't have apostrophes though Valenciano uses them.