Bursting at the seams

Maggie and I got married down in Gibraltar a couple of weeks ago. The chances that I won't blog about that are very slim so we'll leave the details for now. Anyway, after a few days on the Rock, with friends and family, our wedding party dispersed and we newlyweds toddled off to wander around Andalucía. Our first stop was Seville. 

Now I'm not sure how many times I've been to Sevilla but, without trying too hard, I can easily bring eight or nine visits to mind. The very first time I was there I stayed over three weeks and, as historic centres don't change much, I've always felt to know the heart of the city quite well. The terrible thing is that, looking back at my photo albums, it turns out that the last time we stayed there was fifteen years ago. Seville is a great place to visit. It's just full of Spanish clichés, it brims over with history, culture and life. I've had some interesting experiences in Seville over the years, not all of them pleasant and this time the town surprised me yet again. It wasn't the heat, I didn't get lost or have a run in with anyone. The problem was the sheer number of tourists, us among them, oozing from every nook and cranny. There was as much Korean spoken on the streets as Spanish and heavily accented English, spoken by non native speakers, was absolutely everywhere. A couple of days later we were in the relatively humble provincial capital of Huelva on a busy Saturday night where we were just more customers and not the cash cows we had been in Seville. I liked that much more.

I've mentioned Dígame before. It was a BBC Spanish language course with TV programmes, cassette tapes, a textbook etc. in the 1970s. It was based on the town of Cuenca in Castilla la Mancha. Through the BBC programmes students were introduced to the sights in Cuenca, to some local characters. We watched as people had a picnic by the river or bought their Sunday bread and paper. Because of the programme I went to have a look at Cuenca, for the first time, in, I think, 1984. The man driving the bus and the bloke in the tourist office were the people featured in the programme. It might have been 21 years before Google Maps first saw light of day but, from the dialogues in the course book about asking and giving directions, I was able to walk from the bus station to the Hostal Pilar without missing a beat.

Cuenca's relatively close to Culebrón and it's a nice town. I've just checked and we've been there 10 times in the last 20 years. You couldn't say we were regular visitors but I've still been to Cuenca more times than I have to Stoke or Bath. Cuenca has changed a lot in those two decades. The Plaza Mayor in the old town is now just for tourists and it is full of them. None of the shops there sell anything useful unless you need a fan or castanets and none of the "old men's bars" have survived. None of the artists who helped make the place famous are still alive and even the Casas Colgadas (The Hanging Houses which overlook the river ravine) seem to have been renamed in a grammatically correct fashion to become the Casas Colgantes. If you don't want to buy a donkey wearing a straw hat or drink or eat then you'll need to go to the new part of Cuenca where ordinary people live and still buy things in shops.

We've seen it all over and probably you have too; be it in Barcelona or Canterbury. On our first "pensioners holiday" in Catalunya we went on a trip to the Monastery at Montserrat. As we trogged around the place it was heaving with people but only until the coaches took all the visitors off for lunch. Montserrat reminded me of the early morning tourist throng in Karnak - everyone is herded off the boats as dawn breaks, to avoid the heat, but by midday it's completely deserted. In Zaragoza, the magnificent esplanade in front of the cathedral seethes with masses of shorts wearing, backpack toting, water swigging visitors and yet, only a street or two back, the city is still able to absorb the tourists painlessly. It's like that in lots and lots of places nowadays, in fact if you knew about the place beforehand it's more likely that it will be bubbling over with tourists than not. I'm not sure whether it's the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time. If it's a well known spot, from Prague to the Uffizi, from the Alhambra to Atrani I guarantee it will be flooded with people taking selfies. When we went on some Adriatic Cruise a couple of years ago I felt very much like one of the Mongol Hordes - despoiling Eastern Europe - as three cruise ships, ours included, dumped 9,000 passengers onto the the central streets of Kotor - population 13,500.

The Spaniards call it masificación. In Barcelona there are tourist go home posters and graffiti everywhere. Over the last couple of weeks the locals on Mallorca and the Canaries have been protesting about the invasion of tourists. Barcelona, and other cities, have changed several of the rules about tourist apartments to try to limit the numbers. Tourists are swamping the locals out. 

I'm not going to get embroiled in the debate about housing prices but it's pretty obvious that the recent trend to see flats as an investment, particularly as a way to generate money from short term tourist lets, is taking flats out of the ordinary rental market. Many of those flats are being bought outright, cash on the nail as it were,  by institutions with deep pockets. That must help to push up housing prices. The secondary concerns - that younger tourists are often rowdy, party well into the night, drink lots of booze, are disorderly and attract and sustain the dealers of illicit drugs - is additional to these visitors having no interest whatsoever in buying drill bits, or even bread. Their spending habits and needs mean that they change the faces of the neighbourhoods and leave the bleary eyed locals breadless and without ironmongery shops. Even the nice respectable tourists who traipse through cathedrals and museums, the ones who buy buy food in restaurants and take home traditional honey, cause crowding and queues where there were none before. And many of the jobs that tourism provides for the locals are temporary, low paying, unsociable hours type jobs which renders them useless when applying for a mortgage. Some 12% of Spain's GNP comes from tourism but there are both a lot of pros and a lot of cons to that business.

And, if anyone is keen to visit Culebrón Sergio and Blandine stand ready at Restaurante Eduardo and the bodega will be more than happy to sell on locally produced wine and oil.

Rice and paella

Spaniards can happily talk for hours about food. One never-ending topic of conversation is the “best” way to make almost any traditional dish, from fabada to cocido. This piece is about paella, or maybe rice.

For a few years, I have made a rice dish at home that I describe as paella to Maggie. I would never make the mistake of describing it as paella to any Spanish person. I would always describe it as rice with things. That’s because I added things that are “not allowed” – like pepper and onions – and I use pre-prepared caldo, a ready-made broth, to cook it in. However wrong my version was it was a quick and easy meal for me to cook that we both liked. The principal taste came from the broth prepared by a company called Fallera, who ruined the whole thing by discontinuing the broth. Since then, I have tried several other ready-prepared broths and I’ve liked none of them. Next, I worked my way through a couple of varieties of packets of powdered flavourings that can be added to the water as the rice cooks. The most commonly available packet flavouring is called Carmencita which is produced by a firm from the nearby town of Novelda. I don’t like Carmencita and I didn’t like the other flavourings I tried. So, I set out on a round of supermarkets, grocers and butchers looking for different brands of seasoning or any overlooked broths. In most shops, I was able to have a look at what they had, and skip out if they had nothing new to offer. But in one of the butchers the assistant engaged me in conversation. I explained that I was looking for something to add flavour to the water I was cooking my rice in. The woman recommended Carmencita and, when  I said I didn’t care for it, disdain flashed across her face. “It’s what we all use,” she said. My foreigner status was underlined.

Alright, I thought. If I can’t do it the easy way, let’s do it properly. If I can’t make my own bastardised version, how should I really cook an authentic Paella Valenciana? I should stress here that there are all sorts of rice dishes which are perfectly acceptable to even the most picky of Spaniards. That’s why most Spaniards order most rice dishes as exactly that – as arroz, not as paella. Pinoso, for instance, is very proud of the quality of the rice with snails and rabbit that are produced in some of its restaurants. So, as long as you don’t bump into a purist and try to pass it off as Paella Valenciana, you can put exactly what you want in your rice, and some varieties, like arroz a banda, arroz negro, arroz con costra, arroz al horno, arroz del senyoret, arroz de bogavante, arroz de coliflor y bacalao, are all, more or less, standardised. Other regions also produce traditional rice dishes like caldero in Cartagena or arroz meloso in Albacete, of which they are equally proud. But Paella Valenciana is different. This is the one that’s a paella, not a rice.

So, paella has been around since the fifteenth century. The general consensus is that it has its origins in the area around Albufera, the big lake just to the south of Valencia city, where it was a peasant dish made from ingredients readily to hand. It wasn’t until 2011, though, that the Agriculture Ministry of the Valencian Community designed a set of standards to help maintain the authenticity of this product so identified with the region. They set up a D.O., denominación de origen, a sort of quality mark recognised on many Spanish foodstuffs and dishes. The D.O. said that a real paella could only contain these ingredients: rice, chicken, rabbit, bajoqueta or ferradura (types of beans), garrofó (another sort of bean), olive oil, water, saffron, tomato, and salt. Apparently, this was backed up – well, with a couple of provisos – by some research in 266 towns in Valencia when over 400 cooks over the age of 50 were  interviewed. The slight discordance was because a lot of these cooks also included sweet paprika, rosemary and, when in season, artichokes in their recipes, but they were, even then, minor ingredients in comparison to the ten essentials. What was equally revealing was what they never put into a paella. The no-nos are seafood, fish, peas, chorizo and broth.

Bear in mind that all of this is about Paella Valenciana. There are, as I said, lots of other accepted variations and anyone cooking rice at home or using their granny's recipe may well add things that "shouldn't" be there. 

And, finally, here are  some of the list of tips/comments from one of the chef presenters of MasteChef Spain. 

Valencian paella is not cooked with broth, but with water.
The ideal rice for Valencian paella is short-grain, preferably bomba.
The layer of rice should be very thin; that’s why a big, wide pan is used in the first place.
Every good paella should have a bit of socarrat in the pan. Socarrat is dried out, nearly burned, rice that sticks to the bottom of the pan.
The very best paellas are cooked over fires fuelled by wood.
And the reason it’s called paella is that it’s cooked in a pan called a paella. The cook is called a paellera.

Where it's practical the paella is not plated but is eaten directly from the paella pan which is placed in the centre of the table. This is definitely one of the more "flexible" suggestions/commands.

So, first, catch your rabbit.

Paying my income tax, IRPF

Nearly everyone who lives in Spain has to do an IRPF, income tax, return each year; the declaración de la renta. Before Brexit, some Britons argued they paid their taxes in the UK and didn’t need to pay in Spain. While there may be rare exceptions, in general, if you live here, you pay income tax here. Many Britons living in Spain are also taxed in the UK, for example, on Government Pensions (ex-teachers, ex-military and the like). However, thanks to a bilateral tax agreement between Spain and the UK, the income that is taxed in the UK isn't taxed again in Spain.

People, living in Spain, with an income below 22,000€ from just one source, and paying tax on that income, don't need to file a tax return. If the income is below 15,000€ the income can come from two sources but the second income can't be more than about 2,000€. These figures change each year, but they are roughly accurate for now.

So, it’s not easy to avoid doing a declaración. It's not a particularly onerous, difficult or expensive process if the money comes from wages, pensions, investments, rent and the like but it's always a bit of a hassle. Lots of people pay an accountant to avoid the faff.  If you’re self-employed, you’ll almost certainly need an accountant.

I’m not an accountant, so I’ll just talk about my own tax return. When I worked, my employers took tax off my pay each month. At the end of the tax year (31st December), the tax office—Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria, most frequently called Hacienda —starts to do the sums. It takes them a while to sort out the figures but come April they are ready and that's when the declaration period for the last full tax year begins. Declarations have to be submitted by the last day of June. If you miss the deadline, you get fined.

The Spanish tax office creates a borrador, or draft, of your declaración. You need to check it's right and fix any mistakes. When the form is complete, ready to submit, the final page tells you if you owe Hacienda money or if they owe you. For most people most of the info that Hacienda uses to work out the draft comes from the banks, employers, pension providers etc. In the case of we foreigners they rely on us to tell them about overseas sources of income. There are other details that Hacienda may not know about, things like charitable donations (which reduce your tax) or extra income you've had from selling things or winning prizes (which increases your tax). It’s up to you to include everything. If you decide to be naughty then the tax people have four years to catch up with you - after that you're in the clear, at least for that particular year.

If you have overpaid, Hacienda sends the money back quickly. If you owe money, you can pay in one or two instalments—the first at the end of June, the second in November.

I forget how that whole process of raising the borrador to paying money out or getting it back were done the first few years we were here, but it’s been sent via the internet for years now. In those early years I never saw the borrador. I used to make an appointment and go to the tax office. They’d ask me a series of questions. I’d answer, they'd fill in the various boxes for me and hand me a finished version to sign. Nowadays it's much more often submitted electronically but you can still go to the tax office and get Hacienda to fill in the form for you.

When the only money I earned in Spain was taxed at source I did my own tax returns, online. After a few years here I started to get a pension paid in the UK which was worth just £468 per year. To do it right I needed to do something with the tax people in the UK and include the income on my borrador in Spain. To be honest I wasn't quite sure how to do that so I rationalised it as being such a small amount that nobody would care. I was wrong. HMRC (the UK tax office) told Hacienda. He's on the fiddle, they said, and Hacienda came a calling. Luckily, there was an amnesty for overseas pensions, so I was able to sort it out. But they marked my card.

That experience decided me that I needed to use an accountant, especially when another couple of UK pensions kicked in. That didn't stop me having another round with Hacienda.

The second time was much nastier than the first. Right at the end of the four year period Hacienda queried an old declaración. To be honest I was a bit vague about even where I'd been working at the time. For some reason Hacienda had decided that my Teacher’s Pension was not a Government Pension. I asked the accountant, in Molina de Segura, who'd prepared the original documentation, to help me with my "defence". He wasn't at all helpful. Instead I used the accountant I'd been using in Pinoso for a couple of years. 

The accountant suggested, strongly, that the UK tax people should prepare a letter for me to say that the pension was a Government one. I rang them, I asked. But the UK tax people weren't having it; they dug their heels in and said that the Spaniards should get off their fat arses and read their double taxation manual, which covers all the agreements on taxation between the UK and Spain. In the manual every document about the agreement is available in both languages. HMRC also sent me a copy of the page from the manual which listed the Teacher's Pension as a Government one. My accountant, brimming over with national pride, and forgetting that he was working for me, said that the Spanish tax people were better than the British tax people and that the Spaniards would be right. In the middle of this, and completely innocent, I had to pay for all sorts of documents to be translated. I remember being particularly aggrieved that I had to do that for the P60—a certificate which says how much income you’ve got from any particular UK source. The translation had to be done by an official (read expensive) translator. The British tax year runs from April to April so to provide the information for a single, Spanish, calendar, tax year, I had to pay for two P60s to be translated. They had exactly the same words on both, apart from the tax year and the income figure. The accountant might not have been happy to represent me but he raised an invoice quickly enough. A few months later Hacienda came back and said that everything was in order. There was no compensation though for the money or time spent. It just went away.

Now, I don’t worry too much. Every April, my accountant asks for my income. I add it all up, including small things like prizes or vouchers, and send him the figures. He puts them into the borrador and, one day, tells me how much I owe. I always owe, because my income isn’t taxed at source. It's not a day I relish.

Singing, playing and dancing

I know as much about flamenco music as I do about quantum mechanics. That's quite a bit. Sorry, that was a typo - that's almost nothing. So if you know anything about flamenco I apologise now and suggest you read no further.

Nonetheless, for a style of music that tends to make me fidget after listening to about twenty minutes of it, I have seen an awful lot of live flamenco and  I've bought even more recorded stuff. So if you know next to nothing about flamenco you may like to read on.

Long, long ago, when we were new to, and relatively lost, in Spain, we went to the Benicassim Festival and we stumbled across a set by Enrique Morente. The name was new to us but we were entertained as we watched. We later learned that Enrique was a bit of a flamenco legend. A typical bio reads: "Enrique Morente revolutionised flamenco by blending traditional forms with poetry, rock, and jazz. His fearless innovation expanded flamenco’s expressive range and inspired a new generation of artists, making him one of the genre’s most influential figures and a catalyst for its modern evolution". Pretty cool that we saw him then. He died in 2010.

The area around Cartagena, where we lived for a few years is a bit of a hotbed for flamenco. The reason for this is a bit chicken and egg. When La Unión, a few kilometres from Cartagena, was an important mining centre most of the workers came from Andalucia. They brought their flamenco music with them and, in time, developed a style particular to the area. When the mines closed that style of flamenco started to disappear so a competition was set up to promote the style and to maintain the tradition. Nowadays that competition is one of the most prestigious in the world. There are prizes for each of the key elements of flamenco; singing, playing and dancing.

A lot of the performances at the competition are what's called, cante jondo (deep song). I think of that as traditional flamenco. Bear in mind that I have views about quantum physics too. It's not a light and fluffy style. In fact if I'm ever trying to word paint traditional flamenco to anyone I'll describe two older, slightly overweight men sitting on those brightly painted, wicker seat, Andaluz style dining room chairs. One has a guitar, both are sweating before they even start. Overly tight zoot suits are popular. With hands in lap and eyes closed, the one without the guitar will start by letting out a plaintive wail that could only be spelled “aaargghhh”. The flamenco has begun.

It's true that there is a dance element to flamenco, indeed it's a part of the competition in La Unión, but  it's not so much a joyful stamping and twirling in bum-hugging frocks as it is hard graft. I often suspect that when a flamenco event is primarily dancing it's the lighter end of flamenco more suited to tourist venues than to the traditional peñas.

There are different styles of flamenco, palos, with names like la soleá, la bulería, la seguiriya, el fandango, la alegría y la petenera. They are the basis of flamenco music. I know that purists can tell them apart and complain when someone tinkers with the format, though it seems to me that people are always tinkering with the format. I once helped a student prepare for an English language exam and she had decided to talk about flamenco. There was a part in the presentation when she talked about some of those different palos. Each palo has its own set of rhythmic patterns (compáses) and specific and characteristic melodies. My student would clap out a couple of the different structures, a bit Morse Code like, three long, a pause, two short, three more in quick succession etc. and so on to illustrate this or that palo. It was eye opening. It would have been great if I could have remembered any of the styles but, to be honest, if a song sounds a bit waily then I still tend to call it flamenco.

As I intimated earlier flamenco is associated with the region of Andalucía, though various flamenco stars have come from other parts of Spain over the years. The Japanese are, apparently, quite keen too. Andalucia also produces beer and, not surprisingly, at least two of the Andaluz beer companies have used flamenco music in their TV campaigns. In fact it was one of those adverts that gave me the idea for this blog. The telly was on, the sound was turned down but the ad, for Alhambra beer, had subtitles and audio description and I noticed that the audio description said that the music playing was Urban Flamenco. 

Hmm, I thought. Maybe there's a blog here about the wave of current music that isn't flamenco but which incorporates a lot of flamenco elements. In fact we went to see someone last month, María José Llergo, who I would put firmly in that "flamenco roots but not proper flamenco" box. Mind you big, international Spanish stars, like Rosalía, often add flamenco ingredients to the mix.

The trouble was that when I started to look at the Wikipedia type biographies, about the limited number of flamenco performers that I've seen, or whose music I've bought, I found that all of their descriptions used the same sort of language. The suggestion was that flamenco has never been "pure".

About Paco de Lucia I read how "he revolutionised flamenco with his guitar style" or how Camaron de la Isla "pushed the genre’s boundaries by combining the deep emotional tradition of his roots with new rhythms". In the case of the group Triana and particularly their 1975 album, El Patio, it was "groundbreaking and pioneering". Coming a bit more up to date, and dealing only with musicians I've seen live, Niño de Elche "is a key figure in the contemporary transformation of flamenco". Derby Motoreta’s Burrito Kachimba "have energised flamenco's evolution" while Califato ¾ have "created a sound which is both respectful of its roots whilst being radically innovative". Even Soleá Morente, daughter of Enrique, is "boldly eclectic creating a genre crossing contemporary sound" and the mentioned above María José Llergo, "fuses deep Andalucian roots and traditional vocal techniques to create music that defies clichés". 

So, I decided to leave it there. Unfinished as it were. Ah, not quite. I went to have a look at the advertising campaign the Alhambra beer people have put together. I thought that was really interesting and you might too. What they've done is to get together a number of flamenco performers, give them a new palo and ask them to do their stuff using that palo in their particular area of expertise be that cante (singing), baile (dance), or toque (guitar playing).

Going to the back door

I wear contact lenses. Because my eyes are a funny shape they have to be "old fashioned" rigid contact lenses. Little plastic discs that float on the tears in my eyes. They're not a bit like the flexible contact lenses that most people wear. One of the consequences of their characteristics is that the liquids needed to clean and store them are not available at the local supermarket. The liquids generally come from an optician.

There are three opticians, that I know of, in Pinoso, and Maria, the optician for one of them, has the lens solutions I like most for my particular contacts. Maria must have had sex within the last nine months or so because she's quite pregnant at the moment. Someone had mentioned this to me - the pregnancy, not the sex - so I thought I'd stock up on lens solutions. Just in case there was none of that "having the baby behind the tractor before getting on with the ploughing" spirit of the old Soviet, and she closed the shop for a while. 

I got the liquids the other morning. At the time Maria said that, if I needed any more, I should send her a WhatsApp message and she'd ask her dad, who runs the shop next door to hers, to collect the solutions for me and sell them on so that I didn't go without.

Life in a small town has certain advantages.

Every cloud

Antoni Gaudí, was a well known Catalan architect; he's the bloke who drew the original plans for the Sagrada Familia. He's well on the way to being declared a saint; Pope Francis made him a Venerable earlier this year. Gaudí was knocked down by a number 30 tram in Barcelona on his way to his daily confession at Sant Felip Neri church. Apparently he was hit when he stepped back to avoid one tram but reversed into the path of another going in the opposite direction. He didn't actually perish at the scene but was so badly injured that he died three days later. 

As a result of Gaudí's death, a public inquiry was held in Barcelona. One of the people who played a significant role in this inquiry was Mercedes Rodrigo. Mercedes and her sister, María, were a bit like the Bronte sisters in that they achieved individual recognition at a time when women didn't. María was a pioneering Spanish composer, pianist and teacher; she was the first woman to premier an opera in Spain. Meanwhile Mercedes was a prominent Spanish psychologist. At the time psychologists who worked in the field of applied psychology were called psycho technicians - psicotécnico in Spanish. One of the key outcomes of the inquiry was the introduction of mandatory psychotechnical tests for all Barcelona tram drivers. These tests were designed to evaluate essential factors such as vision, hearing, reflexes and personal habits (for example, alcohol consumption) to ensure that only suitable individuals would be deemed fit to drive trams. Later, similar tests were applied throughout Spain to most drivers.

Today, everyone who holds a Spanish driving licence has undergone a modern descendant of the psychotechnical test originally implemented as a result of that inquiry. Interesting to think that a pioneering woman scientist and a visionary architect had a hand in ensuring that modern drivers play a sort of basic computer game keeping a little black sphere on track so that fewer people get knocked down.

Noises off

I typed the first draft of this when the lights were off - all over Spain. What a strange experience that was. We were fine but it did make us think about the number of things that would be difficult or impossible without power. You know the sort of thing - even if it were possible for the staff to get past the supermarket shutters to open up  they would find the the lights, freezers and cold displays off, the price scanners wouldn't work, the tills wouldn't open and even if the customers had cash there would be no way to compute the bill or store the loot. We imagined abandoned electric cars with depleted batteries, abandoned thermal vehicles with empty tanks (no electric to work the fuel pumps) and traffic chaos as all the traffic lights failed. Perhaps one of the oddest things was that, when we got in the car, the radio started up, as it does so often, and we didn't notice that the programming, which told us about the blackout, was being broadcast on what is normally a culture channel. We swap from news and talk radio to music radio all the time but, apparently for lots of youngsters talk radio was a bit of a novelty, never before experienced.

But back to topic. We went to the theatre the other night. We went to see The Mousetrap, the Agatha Christie whodunnit. Of course, being in Spain it wasn't the Mousetrap, it was La Ratonera and it was in Castilian Spanish. When we came out of the theatre, El Principal in Alicante, I turned to Maggie and said, well I understood about 10% of that. Maggie replied that it was because the volume wasn't loud enough. It must have been loud enough for the Spaniards around us though because they giggled or snorted or guffawed in all parts of the theatre including the seats round about us. I didn't think it was loud enough either and I did understand the couple of snippets that, because they were supposed to be a radio broadcast, were louder. But I come back to the fact that the Spaniards around us seemed to have understood it, low volume or not, while we didn't.

The weekend before we'd been over in Yecla for a guided tour of the San Francisco church. The guide was a woman called Alicia. It's not the first tour we've been on with the Yecla Tourist Office where she's been the guide. Her accent is pretty Murciano but she's easy enough to understand. Should I say she's easy enough to understand with a following wind. For instance if she's facing towards me, as she speaks, I find it much easier than if she has her back towards me as she points something out. If we're in the street, or close to the street, she's much more difficult to understand when a vehicle passes. If she bores her tour group or in some way causes them to disengage then it's much more difficult to keep up with what she's saying because of their chattering. That said the Spaniards in the group snigger and snort and guffaw together as she tells her stories while I blame the pesky background noise.

They're two examples but it happens all the time from missing the first few words that the server says to you in a bar to not hearing your name called as you wait in the hospital waiting room. And if someone, let's use Trump, is speaking English on the telly and there is a translator repeating what he's saying in Spanish then I find that I'm half hearing the English and half hearing the Spanish and I can make sense of neither.

Generally, nowadays, my Spanish isn't that bad. I often fluff my first lines or miss the first words and at times I come away from an experience, in Spanish, cursing my inability to master the @#$%ing thing, though, as I said, it's sort of OK. Just give me another twenty years or so and I'll have it cracked.

So is my lack of understanding based solely on my (decreasing) hearing ability? I think not. Put me in a situation where everyone around me is speaking in English but the background noise is high - a party, a sporting event, a concert, a crowded bar - and I can't hear properly either. The damage to my understanding is much less though and, in broad stroke, I can continue to communicate while in Spanish I would be completely lost. I think this is largely because I know the structure and the forms of my own language so well that I can fill in the blank spaces with educated and informed guesses. That's why a British film dubbed into Spanish is easier to understand than a Hollywood film similarly dubbed and both are much easier than a film recorded in Spanish. In the British example the word order, the unspoken cultural reference points and the probable responses to a situation will be much more like mine. I'm pretty well versed in United Statesian English too but less so than the British variety. And, of course, in the Spanish version the responses and attitudes are those of a Spaniard on the Lavapies omnibus which is quite a long way from Clapham.

It may have been that the volume at the theatre really was a bit low but the Spaniards started with an advantage even if I know who did it even before we got going.

Stand your ground

I once shook Desmond Tutu's hand. He didn't really shake mine back -  he was looking the other way and talking to someone over his shoulder but he was also shaking any hand that was thrust towards him, and mine was one of those. Our palms touched so I've always claimed it as a handshake. The truth is, but for that handshake I remember nothing else about that day. I presume Nelson was still locked up, I suppose Queen, and many others, were still playing Sun City. No matter - both Dessie and I thought we should be there that day and we were. Google tells me it was probably 1988.

That may be the last time I was on a big demonstration—the ones where I joined one of the coaches to take protestors to London. I'm sure I did some picket line duty into the 1990s, and I've been a half participant in a couple of things here about worker's and women's rights but my real demonstration days were Cruise Missiles at Molesworth, the Miners' Strike, Ban the Bomb, and the Anti-Apartheid protests of the Eighties rather than the Anti-Capitalist or Environmental themes of more recent times. Daniel Ortega apart, I have no regrets about the placards I waved and slogans I shouted back then.

The other week, I went on a demonstration for the first time in decades. This time it was in Elda/Petrer and it wasn't quite on the same scale as most of the protests I got involved in when my bones still didn't ache. I don't think there were many of us, in Elda, but with one of those wildly unsubstantiated guesses that we all make about numbers, I said to someone who asked on the day that I reckoned there were about a thousand people there. When I checked just now the local paper's estimates were about the same.

We were there to shout for better funding for the state health service, to shout to stop the drift of money from the public sector towards private health care and to shout against the scramble within Europe to spend more money on submarines, tanks, and all the other paraphernalia of war - because a deranged politician tells our governments they should - at the expense of basic services. Odd actually because that's another conversation I had recently, with the Spanish language AI application; all about the cost of tanks and submarines and destroyers and suchlike when cheap and cheerful one-way attack drones and torpedoes can do to them what inexpensive shoulder-launched SAM missiles did to high-tech Soviet Mi-24 and Mi-8 helicopters in Afghanistan. But I digress. 

I was there, in Elda, because I felt guilty when a woman I know, through the book club, was talking about how a coach, that the pensioner's club had arranged to go to an earlier pro health service march, had to be cancelled for lack of interest. She'd been disgusted at the terrible turnout. As she upbraided the population of Pinoso, I felt individually guilty because I'd meant to go that last time but chose a cup of coffee with friends instead. This time I didn't, I went to shout and march. I joined in with the chanting - it was a sort of call and answer system with the loudspeaker equipped car at the front setting go little couplets - Sanidad no se vende and we'd reply with Sanidad, se defiende - Healthcare's not for selling, Healthcare's for defending or Recursos a la pública - No a la privada - Resources to the public system - not to the private.

Spain has a free-to-users health service. Of course, that's not strictly true because the money comes from taxpayers, but it's what we all understand as a free health service. When someone gets ill there's a system to try and fix them up without profit being the driving motive. It's available to anyone within the Social Security system. Just like in the UK, there have been cuts to the service; there are shortages of trained staff; working conditions for the current workforce are criticised; and there is insidious but constant pressure from right-of-centre administrations to send people to private hospitals and clinics for routine tests and procedures rather than investing in the system of public care. It's strange—writing this piece reminded me that when I was teaching English, I had lots of conversations with Spaniards, unaware of the free health care system in the UK, who were quite sure that Britons came to Spain as health tourists to take unfair advantage.

I don't suppose a few hundred people walking down the road from Petrer to Elda in the rain is going to make Carlos Mazón (President of Valencia) suddenly change his mind and dig deep to fund local services but at least this time I didn't go for coffee. And, as I remember it, there are no cruise missiles at Molesworth and Nelson Mandela died a free man.

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The title I remember from a march in favour of the miners during the Miner's Strike. It started from a park in Leeds. The march was led by a brass band. A portly man wrapped in a tuba asked the bandleader - in a broad Yorksher accent. "And Brian, if the' start feetin' - what shud we do?" Brian's answer: "Stand thi ground lad, stand thi ground!"

Go wild, go wild, go wild in the country

The Pinoso Pensioners’ Club has a WhatsApp group. At times I wonder if the the application is totally under the organiser's control but the messages are often interesting. Anyway, a few days ago, there were a few lines on it exhorting me to join in with the upcoming Merienda de Pascua (Easter Picnic) at the Club HQ. The message suggested I pick up my wicker basket, load up on monas, get out my typical apron and headscarf, and come to share my victuals with my friends – to keep alive an old tradition.

Now, I have to say that I don’t like it when I don’t know stuff like this. What aprons? What baskets?

I did know about monas. They’re a version of toñas and a toña is a sort of sweet bread presented as a rounded loaf, some 20 cm across. I understand that one of the odd things about the toña is that it includes potato in the mix. The mona – which would usually translate as a female monkey – is the same sort of bread but with a hard-boiled egg set into it. Often, the eggs are violently coloured.

I had a vague sort of inkling what they were talking about because, a couple of years ago, we went on a walk out of Monóvar (a town that neighbours Pinoso) on a Thursday during Lent. The idea there was to eat the toñas in some country spot. We ended up picnicking on a muddy track underneath the viaduct for the High Speed Train. It wasn't exactly a bucolic idyll.

Also, when we lived in Salamanca, there was a tradition of going down to the river in the city to eat hornazo, a sort of meat pie, on the Monday after Easter. What has, nowadays, become a family picnic in the open air is based on the times when students from the University waited by the river for the return of the prostitutes after their enforced exile on the other bank during Lent and Holy Week.

I needed some Spaniards to ask, but I don’t really know very many. Then I hit on it, just as WhatsApp had started this, it could also provide the answers.

I’m in a book club and that too has a WhatsApp group. No sooner had I asked the question  – what is this “Easter Picnic”? – than the first reply came from Domingo (the only other bloke in the group), just four minutes after posting. He said that the Monday after Easter Sunday (which is still a local holiday), people went out to the countryside with their carts to have a bit of a communal picnic. The specific food he mentioned were the monas.

I responded, asking if it was a bit like the Salamanca tradition I mentioned above. That earned me a slight slap-on-the-wrist response from Loli Mar, who pointed out that Domingo had given me a perfectly good description, and that “Ir de mona” was to go for a picnic in the countryside with family and friends and eat things like fried rabbit, tortilla de patatas, the local broad beans, olives, hard-boiled eggs and longaniza seca – a bit like a very thin, dry salami. For pudding, brazo de gitano, which is quite like Swiss roll but with either a chocolate or creamy filling.

Jacinta came back with a summing-up: in reality, it’s a spring festival that fills the countryside with life, and it’s associated with the end of Easter.

Amalia added that she remembered that, when she was little, the aprons were made in school as a bit of a school project to involve children in the tradition. She also remebered that the mona was something that godparents gave to their godchildren. Later, in the countryside, the hard-boiled egg would be broken on the forehead of a friend!

Conchi joined in and said that the whole point was to spend a day out in the country with family and friends, and Inma repeated more or less the same thing.- neighbourliness and food in a healthy setting. 

Paqui said to me, “I love that you want to know about our customs, which in the post-war decades formed part of our culture. As children, we used to buy our alpargatas (espadrilles) and they would say to us: ‘Let’s see if they are runners…’. And to prove that they were, we would run... that’s how innocent we were... If you go out to the countryside to eat the mona, be careful, because, out of the blue, someone might bop you on the forehead with a hard-boiled egg – Happy Easter 2025.”

Clara, one of the group organisers, said that there had been an article about el Cabezo, which is a salt dome that is very much a symbol of the town of Pinoso, in the programme for the town's fiestas in 2008. She copied that 15-page article to the WhatsApp group because an awful lot of the text and photos centred on the tradition of heading up el Cabezo for this traditional Easter Picnic.

Strangely, that article mentioned that, for a while, as motor cars became more common, lots of people from Pinoso would go to Mahoya to eat the picnic – and Mahoya is some 25 km from Pinoso. The article had pages and pages of photos of local people taking part in the picnic and, not surprisingly, lots of the readers’ club recognised themselves or their friends in the snaps. Oh, and, in the piece, the breaking of hard boiled eggs on someone's head was mentioned as a bit too obvious, and maybe painful, courting technique!

So, I think we all have the idea now.

Caps, wineskins and fans

I was going through my hat collection with a view to throwing a few away. I came across an obvious candidate; a fluorescent Caja Rural baseball cap. It was a pale imitation of the original Caja Rural baseball caps (as in the photo here) that were briefly trendy among urban hipsters as a sort of cipher for their claim to family roots in a bucolic rural past. 

I was thinking about these hats as I talked to my AI Spanish application. Billy-no-mates that I am, I've quite taken to talking to this gadget on my phone. One of the things I like is that, as well as practising my Spanish, the AI is backed by the internet so it knows all sorts of things. It makes for a strangely informed conversation. I asked if it were true about Caja Rural hats and  if there were other things that were everyday and boring but considered to be very typically Spanish. It came up with botijos, porrones, botas de vino and abanicos.

It just so happens that we went to an open day at a pottery museum in Agost a couple of weeks ago and they were singing the praises of botijos suggesting that modern designs of botijos could be an environmentally friendly replacement for cooled water in plastic bottles. A botijo is an earthenware jug or container made from clay fired at low temperature so that it doesn't totally vitrify. This allows water to seep into the interstices of the pot. Once the water reaches the surface, it begins to evaporate, the process draws heat from inside the container and so, the water cools down. The result is that the liquid typically reaches a temperature of about 15°C without needing refrigeration. Obviously enough botijos are suitable for multiple use. The truth is that you don't often see botijos in use, but they are all over the place as decorative items.

Botas de vino are, on the other hand, still very much in use—at least they still get regular outings. They're wineskins, traditionally made from goatskin, used in communal situations. The place where we usually encounter them is at the fiestas in Santa Catalina here in Pinoso, where someone always offers us a drink of wine from one. The advantage, of course, is that the wine comes out as a stream so that the bota itself never touches anyone's lips. Botas also get an outing during romerías (a sort of religious picnic), and rural workers still use them when bringing in the harvest and sometimes for ordinary field work. Indeed they're very much alive and well in rural areas. I have to admit to being a bit hesitant about drinking from a wineskin because I always expect to miss my mouth, but with a confident approach, it's not actually a difficult technique.

Just because the AI told me this, you're going to get instructions on how to prepare a new bota.  First fill your with warm water and leave it for two or three days so that the skin swells and seals any small fissures. Next, you fill it with cheap wine and empty it several times over several days. This removes tannins from the leather and absorbs the taste of pez (a resinous product derived from pine trees traditionally used to seal the interior of botas). The whole process—cleaning the inside with water and then refilling over and over with cheap wine—should take about two weeks. The test, of course, is to put some decent wine into it and taste it; if there’s no difference in flavour, your wineskin is ready to go.

A porrón is basically a glass version of a bota. It has a bulbous glass base that holds wine and a long glass spout that provides a nice, steady flow of wine. Because they’re made of glass, they have the advantage of not adding any taste to the wine but are much more fragile than botas, making them really only suitable for table use.

I thought the AI suggesting fans, abanicos, as being very Spanish was a bit twee. After all, their origin is Japanese. The first thing the AI stressed, rather than the waft of moving air they produce, was a lot of malarkey about the language spoken with them. I rather suspect it's like that symbol that's supposed to be available to women—the one where one hand is held up with the palm facing outward before tucking in the thumb and folding down four fingers over it to form a fist - to show that they are in imminent danger. It's a great idea but only works if both sender and recipient understand its meaning. 

Nonetheless, I have to concede that fans are absolutely commonplace in Spain. Go to any event during summer months, and you’ll see non-stop fluttering fans everywhere. Everyone seems to have one—heaven knows where they’re kept when not in use—but they appear as if by magic when needed! What surprised me was that, supposedly, there are different styles from different regions and that the Valencian Community has important centres of production, which is presumably the reason for there being a fan museum in Aldaia just outside Valencia. It seems that our local fans traditionally have wooden or mother-of-pearl spines with hand-painted cloth featuring countryside scenes; Andalusian fans frequently feature flamenco or floral designs with lace or sequins; Castilian fans tend toward less bright colours with geometric patterns while Catalan fans often showcase Art Nouveau designs. 

Now I thought all modern day fans were made of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene and were mass-produced somewhere like Guangzhou Township in Eastern China. But this new information means I can now add fans, from Valencian manufacturers with a hundred years, or more, of history behind them, like Abanicos Carbonell (1864), Abanicos Folgado (1906) or Abanicos Vibenca (1910), to my list of local and typically Spanish potential gifts. Or, I suppose, I could get a copy of a Caja Rural baseball cap from Amazon and spend less!

It tolls for thee

Villena is a town forty minutes up the road from Pinoso. It's a town I like: there's often something going on there. The theatre is lovely, there's a train station in town and another, the quietest AVE station in Spain, in a field near enough to be called Villena and, of course, it has 22 kilos of Bronze Age gold—the Villena Treasure. And if none of those are enough, then Ferri, the huge ironmongers, is really good for any unreformed men with all those tool belts and strange bits of machinery. I also find the occasional mispronunciation of the name quite amusing; when I think that someone is off to the Austrian capital rather than popping up the road for a new pool pump.

Anyway, I'm listening to Nieves Concostrina doing one of her little history slots on the radio. She's talking about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 with her usual mix of dry humour and anticlerical sarcasm. It's pretty obvious from her description that the two kingdoms that would later go on to be the bulk of present-day Spain—Castile and Aragon—were in a sort of racial and ideological turmoil. The interactions between Muslims, Christians and Jews were labyrinthine and Machiavellian, to say the least. And that's before the Inquisition got its teeth in and began to undermine the power and influence of any socio-religious group that wasn't staunchly Catholic. Remembering that 1492 is a pivotal year: it's when the last Muslim stronghold finally falls in the peninsula, over 700 years after the initial invasion, and it's the year that the world changes forever when Spanish money sent Colón (Columbus) off to find the spice route—and he inadvertently bumped into the continent which would later give us Donald Trump.

Suddenly, in the radio story, there was a little aside about Villena the town and the Marquis named for it. The Marquis of Villena is, like one of those top dog British lords, named for a county, that pepper so many Shakespeare historical plays - "and thee Essex, get thee to Northumberland". Now Juan Pacheco, 1st Duke of Escalona, 1st Marquis of Villena—was an important man at the time of Isabel and Fernando, the Catholic Monarchs. Despite wearing tights, he had castles and land all over the place. He was rich and he was powerful. Later, one of his descendants, Juan Manuel—another Marquis of Villena—would go on to found the Real Academia Española, the organisation that publishes the Spanish dictionary of reference and tries to maintain order within a language spoken worldwide.

When Enrique (Henry if you prefer) IV of Castile died in 1474, there were two claimants to the throne of Castile (by this time Castile was probably about 75% of what's now Spain). The struggle was between supporters of Joanna "la Beltraneja," Henry IV's (probable) daughter, and his half-sister Isabel. Our Marquis, Juan Pacheco, originally sided with Joanna. 

Back in Villena, one of the Marquis's relations—Pedro Pacheco—was the warden of the castle there. He gathered together a bunch of people who had allegiance to the Marquis. The story goes that many of these people had converted from Islam or Judaism to Christianity to hang on to their wealth. They were not well liked by old established Christian families—to keep sides clear I'll call the people in the castle the New Christians. Meanwhile, the general population of Villena, the people in the town, or the Old Christians—had decided to side with Isabel and against Joanna and the Marquis.

As things came to a head, the New Christians planned to attack the Old Christians as they went to Sunday Mass. The plot was discovered as was the agreed signal that would tell the New Christians when to attack—the ringing of a bell five times. When the Old Christians heard that bell they knew what was coming. They were ready and armed to the teeth. There was a pitched battle in the streets of the Villena and nearly all the New Christians were slaughtered. Somehow Juan Pacheco managed to wheedle out of having backed the wrong side when Isabel finally came to power and hung on to his wealth and lands.

And to remember that fateful day the Santa María Church in Villena is unique in Spain in sounding the bell five times for Mass. Apparently it's usually three.

Oh, and the other Marquis of Villena I mentioned—the dictionary-writing one—also initially picked the wrong side when the Spanish crown was up for grabs again during the War of Succession (1701–1714). He supported the Austrian claim rather than the, finally victorious, French one. Like his ancestor though, he somehow sidled out of that disgrace.

As usual with these legends there is a lot of contradictory information. I tried to pick my way through it but do be aware that this account may be complete rubbish.