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.

Chatting with an algorithm

My sister-in-law is, apparently, learning French. She and my sister, who is learning Russian, were talking about Duolingo, the telephone and computer language learning app. I really don't care for Duolingo in Spanish—it's too strict, too dogmatic and often arguably wrong. I was once asked, in a schoolboy quiz, how many sides a threepenny bit had. I was on top of that obvious trick; everyone knew there were 12 sides, but there were two more—the heads and tails—making 14. I showed I'd caught onto their little trick by putting my answer as 12+2=14. "No," said the quiz setter—"12." An injustice that still rankles 62 years later. If that quiz setter were not dead, he'd work for Duolingo.

Lynn—for that's my sister-in-law's name—said that it wasn't the general stuff but the artificial intelligence bit that she actually liked. She said she had conversations and did spoken grammar exercises with Duolingo AI. I've seen the adverts, of course, but I've also seen adverts for penis rings and have never been tempted by those either.

But my sister-in-law does not suffer fools gladly, and if she thought it was alright, it probably was. So I decided to have a look at one of the (several) Spanish AI tutors. I presumed there would be a free version that did the basic stuff and then a paid-for version that would make the tea in the morning. Being of that sort of age where I am constantly reminded of the brecha digital—the digital divide—I asked a couple of everyday AI apps which they reckoned was the best-value AI Spanish tutor. The one I ended up looking at is called Langua, which seems to be related to Langua Talk which is one of those platforms where you can talk to a real tutor using a video call.

Have you ever noticed that on those programmes about the FBI, or in a sci-fi feature film, once something is said it's said. There is no need to repeat anything and there's no hesitation or deviation either. That's what talking to AI is like. It's like talking to a real person but it's very clear and precise. In the Spanish version of Langua you can talk to a man or a woman's voice and that can be in a range of accents and varieties - Mexican, Argentinian, Colombian, Uruguayan or Chilean and, of course, peninsula Spanish. It's the last one that I've been using and I think there are five, or maybe six, different peninsula voices. You can set levels of conversation from beginner to experienced; you can choose set conversation topics or just have a free-form conversation. You can get feedback in the target language or in your native language. I talked with it/her/him about the trials and tribulations of emptying a septic tank, for instance. It’ll do role plays and it produces flashcards (not that I know what they are exactly). You can also do grammar exercises with it. I've been surprised by its flexibility. For instance in the grammar section I asked it to practise the range of past tenses using the vosotros form (which I always forget), and it obliged.

The thing I've found most outstanding about it though is that it understands what I'm saying and even gives me quite a lot of humming and hawing latitude. So when I try to pronounce a word I always trip over, temporizador, for instance, and stumble with two or three attempts, it simply records the word when I get it right or the nearest I get before I give up. If I get a word wrong, it will transcribe the wrong word and then ask me about it later. Unlike a real live tutor, it remembers every word so that it will—if you ask—give you either a general analysis of your conversation or a detailed analysis of an individual phrase.

When you get fed up or completely lost, you can just stop. If you want to start again later, you can do so easily without feeling guilty. If it's time to give up altogether, have a cup of tea and then give it another crack—you can. I've only been using it for a few days and it's still surprising me. I suppose the novelty might wear off eventually but, at the moment, it's amusing, and interesting in equal measure. It's not free though. I chose their cheapest plan which costs about 20€ per month; so far I've never reached the cut-off point they told me was roughly 45 minutes per day. I only paid the money to give it a go because the free trial time was very limited. My original thought was that I'd give it up after a month but now I'm thinking I might keep on with it.

This is not a product recommendation as such—I’m very happy with what I've bought—but remember that my sister-in-law was singing the praises of Duolingo's version too. My guess is there are stacks and stacks of variations—all I'm saying is that I've been astounded by what the AI tutoring system I bought seems capable of doing and I'd wholeheartedly recommend it, or something similar, if you're learning a language.

Les Velles de Sèrra

I don't think I'm unusual in keeping my diary on Google calendar. It reminds me of the repetitive jobs, it reminds me of important appointments and it reminds me of birthdays. In fact it's probably one of the main banes of my life with its constant nag, nag nag. I also use the diary to jot down something interesting that I've missed. In that case I put a note to myself, at some appropriate time in the future, to check the details/dates/blood type of the missed event so that I catch it this time around. 

A reminder turned up a couple of weeks ago that said check Les Velles de Sèrra in Elche. So I did. There were several newspaper articles and bits on websites that talked about reviving this ancient tradition. It turned out to be a bit like the scarecrow competitions in the UK or Día de la Vieja in el Cantón with large dolls or mannequins dotted around the streets. In the case of the Velles these were, apparently, mannequins set in a tableau with some sort of commentary on modern life.

I couldn't find any specific information beforehand on where the mannequins were but, when I left home, some 45 kms from Elche, I was optimistic that they would be in central locations. Luckily for us, as we turned up just after 2pm the tourist office was still open. I asked, in Spanish, if there was any information, specifically a map of locations, for Les Velles de Serra. Now my Valenciano is weak to non existent so I had no idea how to pronounce Velles de Serra and the woman behind the desk obviously thought I was asking about the Valencian Fallas which, in Valenciano, are Falles

"Ah, no", said the woman, "They're in Valencia, not here." "No, what I'm after are these scarecrow type dolls that are in the streets here today" "Ah, Velles, no, those came and went." "I don't think so, I'm pretty sure that they are today, I've read a couple of articles that say they happen today until 5pm." At this point the woman checks her computer, "Quite right, today." (Knowing that this is a stupid question) "Do you have a map or a website address with locations?" "I don't think so but my colleague who is in the bathroom at the moment may know." The colleague, a man, joins us. He tells me that I missed them, the Velles that is. The woman puts him right and tells him that the computer says they are on today. He suddenly remembers that he saw some of the mannequins in a school yard this very morning. "They may be on in the centre, or el Raval," he says. I ask him if there are any repetitive locations. He says no. I ask where el Raval is. The woman draws a circle on the map. Thank you, very kind, I say.

We walked around the centre by the Basilica, by the Town Hall, in the old Flower Market. We walked around the central bits of el Raval. We had a coffee in el Raval, the server had never heard of Les Velles de Serra. As hope faded and we headed back towards the parked car, by a purposely circuitous route, I noticed some mannequins outside a shop. The sign with them started with "Che" which I'm pretty sure is a very common sentence starter in Argentina. Good to see the Argentinians keeping their end up for a bit of ilicitano culture. Only a couple of hundred yards further on we found another mannequin tableau about the recent floods in Valencia and this one had a woman guarding it. She told us there were 36 sets of monigotes spread across the city but she didn't know where they were except that some were in some schools.

A bit of a disaster really then. Or maybe it was a triumph in that we found any. Either way the gap between promotion and information seemed somewhat surprising.

On fish 'n' chips

I went to the UK last weekend. I don't go very often but my mum moved, just before Christmas, into a care home and I felt nosey enough, or bad son guilty enough, to go and have a look at her new digs. A long weekend, Friday through Monday. My mum seemed fine and happy enough, given her 93 years and her circumstances, and it was good to see her. To make it even better I got to see my sister and brother and their partners.

I just asked Maggie how long she considers I've spent in the UK in the last 20 years and she reckoned a month. I think it must be more than that but I'd be amazed if it added up to more than three months. This means the UK is a bit foreign to me. Obviously it's not really strange to me because I'm British and lots of stuff just got coded into my DNA - be that sausage rolls, drinking tea, double decker buses, Boxing Day or the winter sound of cawing crows. Just after we'd arrived in the UK, in the bus on the airport apron, a group of young people, young people wearing sports clothes, with modern haircuts and rings in their noses were were talking about looking forward to a decent cup of tea and ginger nuts, or maybe chocolate digestives. I felt welcomed by that conversation.

One thing I always appreciate in the UK is about being able to speak English. Even if the person I'm talking has a different heritage I'm confident enough of my English to find it easy going. There are always new constructions, new words and new phrases that I've never heard before but it's simple enough to catch on to most and I can always ask if I don't know. I can overhear conversations without listening in and I can gauge whether making a comment on that overheard conversation is appropriate or not. I'm still miles from that confidence with Spanish.

Like all tourists some of my main interactions in the UK are with places selling food and drink and with a different range of prices. Paying upfront before someone pours my tea or prepares my Kurdish breakfast is still a bit surprising even if I've adapted to paying for the smallest item with a card or with my phone. I suspect that I will never adapt to drinking through a plastic lid atop a cardboard cup while crockery still exists. I was also surprised this time that I needed to keep my coat on in so many under heated caffs and pubs presumably as a response to high energy prices.

I talk to a woman called Ana most weeks through a video call. I speak to her in Spanish and I was telling her about my trip. I was saying to her that my Britishness still jars with Spain from time to time. I was mainly thinking about my little verbal asides. For instance, only a week ago I was trying to buy a flat hose. The sort of hose pipes they have rolled up in a wired glass cupboard that say Fire Dry Riser. I went to the two agricultural supply stores that we have in Pinoso. It was pretty obvious, after the response in the first, that they wouldn't have one in the second so, when the woman said, "No, sorry," I wasn't surprised and quipped "What a shame, I so wanted to play at firemen." The woman serving on looked at me like I was a blathering idiot - and it wasn't my Spanish. I've been told that it's nothing to do with Britishness and that it's just that I'm a bit odd in my verbal ad libbing. In my defence I'd give the example that last Monday, when I joined the end of the "Non Priority" queue at Stansted Airport to get on a Ryanair plane, I asked a woman if she were the back of the steerage queue. She understood, she smiled a little, she didn't think I was blathering. 

Ana said she understood the steerage line too. To emphasise the differences I then repeated most of the stuff I've written in the last few lines - drinking through plastic from cardboard cups, paying for the smallest item with a credit card, living off takeaway food and ordering up an Uber. She said that those things were dead normal to her life in the Barcelona area where she lives. Alright I said, and I told her the hosepipe story. She laughed which rather confounded my theory of a different sense of humour. Finally, I said about the insecurity of speaking Spanish as against English and she told me that was nothing to do with my level of language competence but because I was a big baby.

Maybe lots of the difference I think of as a British/Spanish thing are more between the bits of England I visit and the Spain I live in. After all home is an almost unpopulated satellite village of a small town which is still, very much, in a bit of a time warp. 

Just after that video call I was listening to a podcast from a bloke called Ben, who lives in Madrid. He was talking about going out for a menu del día, the cheap lunchtime set menus so typical of Spain. He was talking about how the food was usually traditional offerings. He obviously felt the need to be a bit more precise about that. He went on to say that nowadays Madrid is rapidly losing the traditional places and is full of fast food and restaurants offering cuisine from all over the world - not just the long established Italian and Chinese places but lots of South American, Eastern European, Middle East and Asian restaurants. That's exactly what I'd seen on Mill Road in Cambridge the other day. Then, for good measure he mentioned the "midday pause" the two or three hours that businesses close in large tracts of Spain, and how that too was now very much a thing of the past in the big cities.

Oh well, what do I know.

Ouch!

You may have noticed that the tagline at the top of this blog has changed. It used to say old, fat, white haired. Through absolutely no effort on my part I've lost a fair bit of weight. In fact so much so that there was some doubt about whether my feeding tube could be removed today. Patri, the nutritionist, obviously thinks I'm not making enough effort to pile in those calories. I'd like to think it was my vivid description of what I'd eaten on the tapas trail in Yecla yesterday or the slightly inflated description of the nature of Shepherd's Pie, which swung the balance. Actually it probably wasn't as my Spanish was particularly stumbling and faltering today. 

The nutritionist didn't remove the plumbing herself. She had to call for a doctor. I could see why. It was specialist work. The tube I've had in since August last year looked exactly like that clear plastic stuff that blows bubbles in home aquariums. The tube was about 30 cms long had a junction at the end with a couple of hard plastic screw caps where I connected the bags loaded with liquid food and where I had connected syringes to push clean water into my stomach. At first the water was a way of keeping me hydrated and later it was just to keep the pipework clean. There was a plastic clip halfway up the tube to help make sure my stomach contents didn't leak all over the floor if I forgot to tighten up the plastic caps. Up against my stomach there was a plastic disc about 2 cms across to stop the tube sliding back inside my guts. Apparently inside my stomach there was a smaller plastic disc up against the inner wall. Getting the tube fitted had been a full on affair - pre-ops, general anaesthetic, mob handed operating theatre - the works. I guess they made a hole in my stomach and then pushed the smaller, interior, disc through the hole a bit like a button in a buttonhole. As the wound healed it closed around the tube; I suppose.

So the doctor comes in, says hello, checked I'd not eaten a hearty breakfast and tells me he's going to tug the tube out - it may hurt a bit he quipped. He wrapped the tube around his hand and jerked. Ouch. Ah, it didn't come out. I'll have another go. Jerk. Ouch. Hmm, I think we might have to find another solution. I'll have one last go. Jerk. Ouch. It's out. The nutritionist mopped up the blood from the wound and put a couple of those steri-strips, on to hold it together then a big dressing over the top and, a few moments later, I was on my way. The first time I've not had some sort of plumbing dangling from me in months.

The Town Council in Pinoso

One nice thing about living in a small Spanish town is that it's pretty easy to be on nodding terms with most of the local councillors. Not that it's really such a great thing but at least it means you can appear integrated when you have visitors from the old country. I often think it must be quite difficult for them, the councillors that is, not the visitors, because they have no easy escape. I saw one councillor, for instance, obviously in a hurry and trying to buy a couple of things from a local supermarket yet he was being harangued by someone, most forthrightly, about something. 

There are thirteen councillors in Pinoso. As with all Spanish municipalities the number of councillors is determined by population. The way it's done, in most, is that there are population bands that determine the number of councillors. Pinoso has between 5,001 and 10,000 inhabitants so it gets thirteen councillors just like Banyeres de Mariola with a population of 7,255 people. It's always an uneven number. Madrid has fifty seven, a village with a population under one hundred gets three.

At the moment all of Pinoso's councillors are from political parties with a national presence. In the past some councillors were from local parties. The Socialists, the PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español is in power with eight councillors and a clear majority. The centre right Partido Popular, the Popular Party, has three councillors and the extreme right, VOX, has two councillors. 

The voting system in Spain is based on political parties and lists. Each party puts forward a list with sufficient names to cover all the potential seats up for grabs often with a couple of supplementary names that may provide a bit of extra publicity. At the national level the party will put its "stars" at the head of lists in different locations. At the local level that list of names will be known to a lot of the electorate. At the regional and national level it's very unlikely that most people will know anything about the people on the list with the possible exception of that first, star, name. Only the politically very aware will know anyone further down the list. Who gets elected depends on a complicated mathematical formula that is designed to provide a form of proportional representation based on the votes cast. This means that the voting pattern in the local and national elections can be quite different because people choose to vote for the party nationally and for people they trust locally. For instance, last time around, in 2023, there were local and general elections but at different times. The hypothetical makeup of the Pinoso Town Council, based on the General Election results, would have seen the PP in power with seven seats. PSOE would have got four and VOX, two instead of the actual PSOE majority.

The term of office for a council is four years. The last elections were in 2023 and the next ones will be on Sunday May 23rd 2027. When the councillors have been elected the council meets to elect a mayor. If one party has a clear majority then it will usually elect the mayor. Where no one party is able to govern alone the parties horse trade until they have the necessary majority to elect a mayor and to form the governing council. In Pinoso with the clear PSOE majority the party elected Lázaro Azorín as Mayor. Once the makeup of the council is known then the councillors in the ruling party, or coalition, are given various responsibilities - education, health, employment etc. I've put the list with the current councillors and their responsibilities at the bottom. Some of the responsibilities were difficult to translate into English.

Lázaro, the mayor, has a second job, he's also a PSOE Diputado in the Congreso de los Diputados in Madrid. For we Britons he's the equivalent of an MP. Lázaro was number five on the PSOE's list for the 2019 General Election as a potential diputado from Alicante. The PSOE won sufficient proportion of the votes in the province for them to send four deputies to Madrid. Later, when the head of the list, Pedro Duque, Science Minister and ex astronaut, resigned (for tactical voting reasons in parliament) Lazaro, as next name on the list, became an MP. In the 2023 elections Lazaro was number three on the lists and he was elected on the proportion of the vote won by his party.

It is the council itself that decides on the payment levels, expenses etc. for the various councillors, though there are guidelines to avoid profiteering. I kept a note of the salaries reported after a council meeting in 2023. I wanted to make sure I was fair in mentioning those salaries here but I cannot find any reference to salary on the labyrinthine Pinoso Town Hall website. There's a section on the website called municipal transparency, transparencia municipal, but I find it somewhat less than transparent! Anyway, given that this information will probably have changed over the intervening years, and given that it may never have been correct, you should take this information as potentially inaccurate. I think that four of the councillors get paid a full salary, for a full working week, and four get paid a partial salary, equivalent to working about 10 hours per week. The full time salaries range from a bit above 48,000€ down to a bit below 34,000€ with the partial contracts paying around 11,000€ per year. 

So far as I know Lazaro waived his salary as mayor because he gets paid as a diputado. Actually he gets paid less as an MP than he would as mayor (a diputado gets a bit below 44,000€ a year according to Perplexity.ai) but they also get tax free expenses of around 24,000€ a year if their "constituency" is outside Madrid and quite a few other perks from taxi allowances to travel costs. Again, according to Perplexity.ai most common or garden MPs get paid between 4,000€ and 5,000€ per pay cheque remembering that, in Spain, most workers get 14 payments in a year.

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Pinoso Town Council

Lázaro Azorín Salar: Mayor.

Silvia Verdú Carrillo: Culture and Youth, Staff, Treasury, Education, Waste, Agriculture, Police, Civil Protection and Traffic, Forestry and Quarries

María José Moya Vidal: Social Services, Equality and LGTBI+, Protocol, Health, Pinoso Social and Health Associations, Local Media

César Pérez Cascales: Senior Citizens, Archive and Library, Heritage and Historical Memory, Foreigners, Citizen Participation, Social and Health Care Collectives

Neus Ochoa Rico: Local development, Tourism, Trade and Commerce, Markets and Consumer Affairs, Cleaning of Public Buildings 

José Ángel Pérez Verdú: Parks and Gardens, Outlying Settlements, Roads, Water and Water Resources, New Building, Technology and Street Cleaning

Elisa Santiago Tortosa: Fiestas

Raúl Pérez Albert: Cemetery Industry, Housing, Street Lighting and Urban Development

2024 Population in Pinoso

This was such an obvious blog, but one that had been published on the various Pinoso Town Hall websites, that I decided not to do it. Then, in casual conversation to Maggie I mentioned that it was easy to remember that there are now 345 Dutch and Belgian people in Pinoso (it's a topic of conversation amongst the Brits here, the obvious increase in the numbers of these two nationalities). She replied that she'd seen the article but not really taken it in. So, I decided to take the easy blog.

Pinoso had, at the close of 2024 a population, according to the statistical department of Pinoso Town Hall, of 8,836 people or maybe 8,846 (as the various figures in their article don't quite add up) but we're only talking about 10 people so I've used the higher figure to work out the figures in the next two sentences. Of that population 6,758 are Spanish (76%) and 2,078 people are foreigners (24%). There are 3426 Spanish men, 1039 foreign men, 3342 Spanish women and 1039 foreign women. The figures do not include the possibility of someone choosing not to be classed as male or female. The foreigners include people from 65 nationalities though four countries - Japan, Gambia, Yemen and Zimbabwe - only have a single, I hope not too lonely, representative here.

The biggest group of immigrants is still we Britons (801) followed by Moroccans (235), Dutch (210), Belgians (135), Rumanians (81), Ukrainians (64), Irish (43), Germans (38), Chinese (28), Polish (27), Algerians (25), Bulgarians (22), Italians (21) and Pakistanis (20). 

I think I should mention, because someone said it against one of the Facebook entries, that there are quite a few Canadians!

The last time I did this, at the start of 2022 (so 2021 figures), there were 56 different nationalities living in Pinoso. At that time the UK was way out in front with 835 people or nearly 10% of the population, the next most numerous group were Moroccans with 199 people. There were 71 Dutch, 69 Belgians, 66 Rumanians, 51 Ukrainians and 41 Ecuadorians. 

Atishoo!, atishoo!

On a Tunisian holiday we ate lots of carrots and lots of strawberries. They were in season, they were cheap, they were tasty so the hotels bought barrow loads of them for their guests. It's the same with lots of garden crops. They come in shedloads, all at once. Suddenly you have cherries or plums or green beans coming out of your ears. With us it was only ever figs. We've never done well with our garden - most things are early for the next extinction event. The figs were an exception but most of our garden is either dead or dying. We had three trees: two big ones and a smaller one. The big ones produced two crops a year. I mean, seriously, in the UK I'd occasionally see figs in Waitrose and buy them as a bit of a novelty. It was a novelty that lasted for maybe half a dozen figs over a couple of weeks. What does any individual do with thousands of figs? There are only so many jars of fig jam or fig and cheese starters that any one person can eat and most of the possibilities make little economic sense - fig wine in an area awash with proper wineries? You can't even give them away because everyone else has mounds of figs too that they are fed up of freezing and pairing with cheese.

So most of the figs would fall on the ground and had to be raked up. They overpowered the compost bin. It was the same with the autumn leaves. I know we're not supposed to rake leaves up anymore, pile them around tree roots and what not, leave them to mulch down, but these big trees produced knee deep leaves. And fig trees grow quickly. They produce a lot of new wood each season so they'd have to be pruned and what's to be done with all those lopped branches?

I do most of the graft in the garden but it's Maggie who takes any notice of it. She'll try new plants, new flowers, she'll harvest any crop there is and put it to use. I just prune, weed, rake, dig, hoe, curse and bleed. One day Maggie asked me if I'd noticed the white spots on the fig leaves. I hadn't. It turned out they were Cerosplastes rusci, sometimes called wax scales; here they are known as cochinilla. 

When I looked closely all three of our trees had these parasites on the leaves and bark, sucking away on the sap from the trees. At the local agricultural suppliers I only had to say the word higuera (fig tree) and the bloke was reaching for some sort of chemical to see them off. He told me that the chemicals weren't particularly toxic for humans,  so anyone could use them, but he recommended overalls, a hat, goggles and facemask while I sprayed. Each tree needed about 30 litres of two different chemicals. It was August and it was quite hot inside a boiler suit, a woolly hat, goggles and facemask especially with each backpack full of insecticide weighing in at close on 20 kilos. At the start it wasn't too bad but by the end, determined to finish in one fell swoop, I was swaying gently and on the point of collapse. I was probably quite close to being one of those four line stories on the National TV news, slightly longer on the local radio, about some sixty odd year old dying from heat exhaustion.

For a while the trees seemed to be saved. They recovered, they gave fruit, the leaves stopped dropping off and then, suddenly, one of the trees tree just lost the will to live. It died in a couple of weeks. I lopped off all the really weighty branches and left it as a climbing frame for the cats. Later it became a support for the solar powered fairy lights that Maggie likes to festoon the building with. It wasn't till a couple of seasons later that I noticed cracks in the trunk and branches of the other tree, boreholes and all sorts of signs that the tree was doomed. The destruction wreaked by the tiny parasites is truly incredible.

So the two big fig trees were now dead. Again, with the second one I lopped off lots of branches to leave it looking like one of those John Ford Sonoran cactus. Stark.

There was a bit of wind a couple of weeks ago. As always it blew some chairs over, whirpooled leaves into mounds in certain spots of the garden. The wind also blew the first fig tree down. 

I sawed, I spent ages splitting the trunk with steel wedges to make the remains manageable enough to cart away to a large pile of garden waste that I'm unsure what I'm going to do with. Probably it will go the way of the supposed witch in that Monty Python sketch - well it might when the controls on garden fires are eased up.