Fun for this year

There are lot of strange fiestas in Spain. Every now and then I'll see some article or read a report about this or that event where everyone throws paint at a man dressed as a clown/harlequin for either attempting to steal/failing to steal a religious icon in Guadix and Baeza (Cascamorras), where a man, also dressed as a clown/harlequin, jumps over babies each Corpus Christi in Castrillo de Murcia, in Burgos (El Colacho), where devils capture saints with the intention of burning then to death if they are not sidetracked into climbing onto the balconies of fair maidens with rape in their minds (La Santantonà in Forcall), where six open coffins, with live occupants, are paraded around a church and its cemetery to musical accompaniment in Las Nieves, Galicia (Fiesta de Santa Marta de Ribarteme) or where giant puppets, skeletons and knights Templar parade through the torchlit streets of Soria (Las Ánimas). Once upon a time any list of odd festivals would include the takeover of the town of Ibi and the resulting egg, flour and firework fight (els Farinats) but Health and Safety has turned that into a shadow of its former self.  There are tens if not hundreds more but even I can recognise when a list is getting too long.

Nonetheless, if I come across some fiesta that sounds promising, even if it's kilometres away, I'll log it away in my diary with a note to myself to check out the dates and details closer to the time. My hope is that there'll be something a bit different to take snaps of. The trouble is that I've done most within spitting distance and there is a certain reluctance on behalf of my long suffering partner to spend a fortune on a couple of nights away to see the symbolic bear hunt at La Vijanera in Silió in Cantabria or to see people rafting down the river in Nargó in Lleida. Anyway the years are taking their toll and I'm getting too old or too lazy to drive off to the far corners of Spain to fight crowds of young men to get an out of focus photo of some pagan ritual hijacked by the Catholic Church.

January is a good time for fiestas. Lots of the San Antón festivals are pretty lively and usually involve animals and/or fire. One I went to last year in Vilanova d'Alcolea was a real hoot. It was described as a perfect symbiosis between animals and fire and there was mention of a procession, with horses, passing through all the town's streets, jumping over bonfires along the route. What the description didn't say was that those horses drove the crowd before them in narrow streets ablaze with brushwood in a scene as infernal as any ever envisioned in a doom painting with souls cast into the fiery pit of Hell. At one point I was quite convinced I was going to die in flames. Quite a few of the local San Antón events are much gentler though.

Anyway my diary said I should check an event in Piornal. I had no idea where Piornal was though it turns out that it's in Extremadura, in Caceres, which is a long way from Culebrón. I didn't know what it was about, nor when it was, it's on January 19th and 20th this year and as I'm already booked up for those dates I thought I'd let you know so you could pop over there yourself and maybe get involved if you fancied it.

The fiesta is called Jarramplas and it represents the punishment of a cattle thief who is being driven out of the village. Jarramplas is the name of the character, a man dressed in a coat covered in multi-coloured ribbons, so that he looks like he's wearing one of those rag carpets that were still common in my youth. He wears a conical full face mask with a big nose and two horns sprout from the mask. He parades through the town beating a small drum and people throw things at him; in the past it was any old vegetable but, nowadays, they pelt him with turnips, well small root vegetable called nabos actually. No doubt thanks to the nanny state the 21st Century costume conceals a steel armour undergarment to ensure that Jarramplas isn't killed. You'd think they'd have trouble finding people to take on the role but there are, apparently, enough people willing to brave the volleys of turnips till 2048. Obviously, being Spain, there's a saint, Sebastian, linked to this festival and as well as turnip heaving there are lots of other events in the two days from Saint dressing and foot kissing to a communal meal of migas (we are in Extremadura after all).

No, seriously, Spain really is full of colourful and interesting fiestas and it doesn't take much hunting to find something well worth gawping at. Nearly all the local town halls have Facebook pages where they publicise their fiestas. Now I'm feeling a bit better I'm going to get back into it and see if I can't find something new and fun to point my camera at.

Last year's weather, and some context

The local Medios de Counicación recently published Capito's analysis of the annual data from the weather station in Pinoso for 2024. It's in Valenciano, so I may have got some things wrong. I missed out a couple of details on purpose. I may have missed others by mistake. 

Capi Gonzálvez Poveda, Capito, taught in Pinoso for years and he still runs the local weather stations one of which forms part of the AEMET, the National Weather Service's, network.

So, the maximum temperature was 41°C on 3 July, and the minimum was -2.5°C on 21 December. 

We received 256 litres of rain during the year,  the rainiest day was 11 June, with 41 litres. 

The windiest day was 8 June, when the wind blew at 75 km/h. 

The day with the highest minimum temperature was 16 July, when the temperature didn't drop below 23°C. 

The day with the lowest maximum temperature was 11 December, when the temperature didn't exceed 9.5°C.

There was rain on 55 days, it dropped below freezing on 20 days, there were 29 misty days, no days with hail, and no days with snow; there were thunderstorms on 5 days. 

It was sunny and clear on 152 days, sunny with some cloud on 163 days, cloudy on 42 days, and overcast on 9 days.

They also printed the composite analysis for the 32 years from 1990 to 2021, so here are a few figures for comparison:

The maximum temperature was 44°C on 10 August 2012; the minimum was -11°C on 29 January 2006.

The day with the highest minimum temperature was 18 July 2005, when the temperature didn't drop below 25°C.

The day with the lowest maximum temperature was 28 January 2006, when the temperature didn't exceed 0°C.

Over the 32 years, the averages were rainy on 52 days, sunny and clear on 181 days, sunny with some cloud on 114 days, cloudy on 48 days, and overcast on 22 days.

The same old chestnut

Sometimes I think my Spanish is OK. Other times, I despair. Most of the time, when I have a longer session speaking Spanish, despair is the overriding sensation. 

Right at the beginning, it was verb tables, pronunciation, grammar, trying to understand the structure and learning vocabulary. Even today I try to find a few minutes a day to read through my vocabulary books. Every now and again, as I stumble over some verb tense in a real-world conversation, I go back and have a bit of a read through those verb tables or something on object and subject pronouns because I seem to be a little confused. It amazes me how difficult it is to retain some of the basic grammar, learned vocabulary or phrases after all these years.

My Spanish is miles better than it was when I got here, but it's still terribly pidgin. The only place where I still can fall completely apart is on the phone; but even there I generally manage to scrape through nowadays. In general, in a normal sort of conversation, I do fine. I've had no trouble at all dealing with my cancer treatment and my stays in hospital in Spanish. If someone tries to speak to me in broken English—as they do from time to time—I just plough on in Spanish; giving way simply confirms my inability. Only if the Spaniard I'm talking to turns out to be a fluent English speaker, and very few are, do I yield and speak English.

I went to have a natter with my pal Jesús last week. It was the first time for quite a while and we've been on and off for years now. The original idea was that we'd do a bit of an exchange; an intercambio. We'd talk for a while in English and for a while in Castilian. To be honest, Jesús has never shown much aptitude for English; he finds the sounds almost impossible to imitate, and I don't think it was ever a serious proposition, but we've continued to meet over a coffee for ages now. There have been plenty of missed sessions, and, with being ill recently, I'd more or less given up. When we met this time we spoke not a word of English. We nattered about everything from politics to the cost of the bus fare up to Barcelona. I'm very happy that I can do that, hold a conversation in another language, but to be honest, after 20 years here, I should be able to. I was also, as always, appalled at the deficiencies in my control of the language. As I pound out a spurious version of Spanish I can hear the half-formed sentences, the wrong vocabulary, the mispronunciation and stumbling over certain words, the repeated errors and the strange phrasing.

Recently I've gone back to taking some online classes after a hiatus of a few months. To call them classes is a misnomer. I haven't done a Spanish class for maybe twelve or thirteen years now but I've never stopped slogging away at trying to improve. For instance I've read 45 books this year and thirty-six of them have been in Spanish. I still listen to the Notes in Spanish podcasts/videos and have a few radio programmes which I listen to as catch-up podcasts that cover everything from an "on this day" history programme to an arts magazine and a series of historical, political and topical documentaries. I listen to morning news programme on the radio and it's unusual for us to miss at least one of the TV news bulletins either at 3pm or 9pm. There's more: Spanish is all around us and if it's simply listening to Spanish music or seeing Spanish-language films at the cinema then I'll do that too.

I do a couple of things online too. I use a platform called italki. The basic idea is that I connect with someone via a video call and pay them to talk to me in Spanish. I like to persuade myself that real conversations are my best chance of improving because they are realistic and jump from topic to topic with lots of asides thrown in. Quite unlike those fake sessions about the environment or eating out so beloved by language tutors. I like the online sessions (italki just happens to be the one I bumped into) because it's both impersonal and personal at the same time. I often feel like I'm getting to know a lot about the tutors; they will express political leanings; they will tell you about their family, about things they've done and places they've been but, at the same time, they are just figures on a screen.

The online system makes it very easy to use them for my own ends. Unlike a class where you pay for twelve sessions on a Tuesday at 7:30 in the evening (or whatever), I pay for the sessions as I please and I can shop around for what I consider to be a good price per hour. I try a new tutor; if they're racist, if we don't click, if they talk too much, if I don't like their style or if they want to follow notes or introduce exercises—I simply don't buy another session off them. If I want to change the time or day from this week to next week, I usually can so they have to fit around my schedule rather than me around theirs. It's the same with holidays and the like; if I want to go to the theatre and they only have slots that clash with my theatre visit I forget about them for that week. I don't have to drive anywhere and if the session starts at half past I don't need to think about it till twenty five past. The tutors might have all the disadvantages of the gig economy but not me. I can go to another tutor or forget it for that week. If I want to talk to someone five times in one week or if I want to talk to someone for three hours on the trot or if I want to talk to five different tutors in the same week I can. And if I suddenly stop I don't need to tell them why.

After nearly every online session, I get very angry with myself. In the conversation I had yesterday with Omar, in Galicia, we talked about dubbing films into Spanish and the different ways of dealing with cultural differences in the subtitles and about the markup on cinema popcorn before we wandered onto something about why official Spanish correspondence is so stultifyingly boring. It turns out that he and I have completely different ideas on the need for clear language by the way. That might sound pretty good but I've learned several strategies over the years for making those conversations seem more fluid than they really are. The main one is to lock onto one thing in the affirmations or responses coming from the other person and responding to that. It helps to give the impression that I understood everything when, in fact, I missed most of it. I also have quite a wide vocabulary and that makes me sound more fluent than I am. The truth is though that I'm often reduced to a list of words bound together with inappropriate and random verb tenses while I continually mix genders and almost never use idiomatic expressions be they single-word interjections or those stock phrases that we all pepper our own language with.

As well as the italki I do something similar online with exchange sessions except there the commitment is more regular. I'm not sure whether Manuel found me or if I found him but we met through some online intercambio system. We have a set time and we are pretty strict about half an hour in English and half an hour in Spanish in each section. If we can't make the session then we are pals enough to say so; we simply tell each other via WhatsApp that we have a birthday party or a funeral when we should be nattering so we put it off. I think we've almost become friends and if we were ever actually to meet in person we wouldn't be starting from scratch.

Given all these inputs, I can only think that I must be a bit of a slow learner still having problems—but such is life, I suppose. Some people pick things up easily while others slog away without gaining much traction.

Fit to drive

My Spanish driving licence includes the category to drive small lorries and big vans. I almost never drive small lorries or big vans, the last time was to help a pal move from London to Edinburgh and that was last century. I'm loathe to lose the right though. I justify the expense because my sister and brother in law have a motorhome that requires such a licence. I know their insurance company won't let me anywhere close to it but I self deceive myself that there is some need to keep those classes current. 

In Spain, there is a legal difference between professional and non-professional drivers. Professional drivers, like professional vehicles, are subject to tighter restrictions and more frequent testing than non-professional drivers and vehicles. This means there are differences in the renewal periods for driving licences. In my case, for instance, as an amateur, my car licence lasted 10 years until I became 65 years old, and then, as the curvature of my spine increased, the validity reduced from 10 to 5 years. For the slightly larger vehicle categories on my licence, the renewal period changed from 5 years to 3 years as I passed that milestone birthday. 

A significant UK/Spain difference, unless things have changed in the UK, is that renewing the licence here involves a sort of health check—it's supposed to assess your coordination and your mental and physical aptitude to drive. Once you have passed the initial test (or, as in my case, exchanged a UK licence for a Spanish one), there is no need to retake the practical or theoretical parts of the driving test at licence renewal time but you do have to prove that you are fit to drive by passing a "psychophysical aptitude test". You can go to any licensed CRCs (Centros de Reconocimiento de Conductores), which are dotted around Spain. We have two in Pinoso.

I have never had the least difficulty passing the range of tests for renewing my licence so, when, a couple of weeks ago, the traffic people sent me a message to say that I could renew my licence from such and such a date, I just popped into the office without considering the consequences of my not passing. 

The first thing was, as I went into the building, that I met someone coming out whom I first met years ago in a Spanish class. We were chatting in the doorway of the office. The woman who does the tests understood enough of our overheard conversation in English to pull him back. He'd told me he'd had an eye operation and no longer needed to wear corrective lenses (glasses or contacts). His licence said that he did so, if he'd been stopped by the Guardia Civil, he might have needed to explain why he wasn't wearing specs or lenses. She changed his licence accordingly. She also heard me mention that I'd had cancer, so I was told I needed something from my oncologist to say he saw no reason for the cancer treatment to affect my driving. I had to do that before I could take the actual tests.

I think I've done these tests four, maybe five times now. I've certainly done them in Pinoso at the same place the last three times. The process has never been quite the same; at each visit there are slightly different questions and tests. There are reflex and a coordination tests using computer graphics that make the original Space Invaders (Google it) look sophisticated. When you go "off track," there's a beep to warn you. I could have sworn that the device was on constant beep. Then there was an eye test; the administrator pointed to a line of letters. It was the one below the one I could read easily. "No worries," she said, "that's good enough, but maybe you should go to the optician for a check up." Last time, I'm sure they just asked me to read something on a distant wall. It was similar with the hearing test; I had to sit in a soundproof box, put on headphones, and press a button when I heard a beep. I have no idea what percentage of the beeps I heard, but she said my hearing was okay. I know it has worsened considerably because of cancer treatment. It was only as I listened for the beeps that I suddenly realised that a failure might endanger my "ordinary" car licence, which was valid until 2027 (on the new licence it will be valid till 2030). I also wondered if the C and C1 classes were, maybe, a bit stricter and had been designed for "professional" drivers.

Anyway, after being freed from the soundproof cabin—having answered truthfully that I had not drunk any alcohol for months—all seemed well. She took my photo for the new licence and gave me a bit of paper which allows me to drive in Spain for six months. She also returned my current, plastic licence, even though the computerised application has the effect of instantly cancelling the old licence on the DGT (the traffic authorities) system. As she did so, she mentioned that licences are usually replaced —even in worst-case scenarios—in under three months. 

Because I was writing this I just checked and the application on my mobile phone from the DGT (MiDGT) has already updated so, if I were to be stopped I have both my driving licence and the car documentation on me to prove that everything is legal. 

The State Christmas Lottery

I wasn't going to do this, I've done it so many times before, then I had a conversation. So I thought why not?

If you're going to win the El Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad, the big Christmas State Lottery, el Gordo, on 22 December, an absolutely essential first step to becoming temporarily wealthy, is to get hold of a lottery ticket. If you don't have a ticket your chances of winning are nil. For most people that means buying one. I should qualify that. It's much more likely that you'll buy a tenth of a lottery ticket, a décimo, and with that you have the chance of winning 400,000€. 

If you were to buy a full ticket from one of the State Lottery Outlets, Loterías y Apuestas del Estado (like the one a few doors down from the Consum supermarket in Pinoso) it would cost you 200€. That's why most people don't. Instead they buy a tenth of a ticket for 20€. The big prize, el Gordo, the fat one, is worth 4 million euros for the full ticket or 400,000€ for the typical 20€ stake. Obviously that's before the tax people take their cut. Often you will see decimos on sale in bars and the like. Should you decide to buy your lottery ticket from there you're likely to end up paying 23€. Typically the bar is selling the décimos at 3€ over the odds on behalf of some "worthy" cause.

So each of the décimos has five numbers. The numbers start at 00000 and go on to 99999. There are 193 series of tickets. This means that each number, let's take an example 75045, will be repeated 193 times. 75045 series 1, 75045 series 2 and so on. That's why there are, possibly, 193 winning tickets. Remembering that each ticket is sold in tenths, there are, potentially, 1,930 winning décimos. 

In these days of huge jackpots I suppose that 400,000€ sounds like a mere bagatelle. The big difference is that if all the décimos of a particular number were sold, there would be 1,930 winners and that amounts to a whopping 772 million Euros payout.

There is a tendency amongst groups of Spaniards to buy the same number. The group might be a family - Granny buys two full tickets made up of 20 décimos to hand out to her brothers, sisters, sons, daughters etc. as a bit of a Christmas stocking filler. If the number comes up then each of those relatives will be 400,000€ better off. If it's a factory the car park will soon be full of new BMWs and, if it's a school parent teachers association (AMPA), then the school community will be full of joyful parents and teachers. When the number of the Culebrón village neighbourhood association comes up, on Sunday, we Culebreneros will be splashing the cava around willy nilly. Generally people simply choose from the tickets on display looking for one that ends in their lucky number, includes their birthday etc., but it is possible, online, to see if a particular number, your postcode for instance, is available. 

The tickets are all sold by the different "administraciones", the State Lottery Shops even if they end up with the local pigeon fanciers group or synchronised swimmers fan club. The numbers are allocated randomly to the different administraciones around the country. So the same number may be sold in Alicante, Astorga and Avila or that number may nearly all be sold in some village in Andalucía. 

Certain administraciones have a reputation for being lucky, though actually it's simply a numbers game. If people believe that the Doña Manolita administración, in Madrid, is going to sell the winner, more people will buy their décimos there. The volume of sales means there is a better chance that the winner will come from that administración. It doesn't stop people queuing for hours outside the famous offices though.

How the winning numbers are chosen is also very individual - none of this combining individual digits to get the winning number. There are two enormous "bombos" like those globe-shaped things that you get in a home bingo game to spit out the numbers. In one of the bombos there are all the numbers that are on the individual tickets, that's 100,000 individual numbers. So there is a ball that reads 00000 and another that reads 99999 and there are all the numbers in between. In a smaller bombo alongside there are 1,807 balls each one inscribed with a cash value. Youngsters from the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Madrid stand alongside the two bombos and sing out what it says on the ball disgorged by their bombo. First the number then the prize.

The majority of the little wooden balls, in that smaller bombo, have 1,000€ written on them. This is referred to as the pedrea. For those numbers you'll get 100€ back for your 20€ stake. There is just one ball with the 4 million jackpot and it's the same for the less valuable second and third prizes. There are another ten balls that will produce a win of more than 1,000€. Other prizes are based on having numbers very close to the winners, sharing some of the numbers etc. It's always worth checking your number against any of the dozens of internet sites where the winners are published or going back to the administración to have your number checked. 

Turn on a radio or TV or go into a bar on the 22nd after 9am and you will hear that singing of numbers and amounts, broadcast from the Teatro Real in Madrid all morning, until the prizes are exhausted.

Oh, and if you win some offensive amount of cash as a result of reading this blog don't worry yourself that I'll be offended if you want to offer me large wads of cash as a thank you.

Cautiously optimistic

Just a quick update on my throat cancer. For new readers, during the summer, I got to see an otorrino (Ear Nose and Throat specialist) and, after a few tests he said I had a throat cancer. He passed me to an oncólogo (Cancer specialist). They ordered up a few tests, decided that the cancer was just in my throat and lymph nodes and set me up for a course of 33 sessions of radiotherapy and three of chemotherapy. The radio sessions were in Alicante and the ambulance service took me there for most of the sessions. The chemo was in Elda. Along the way I had a picc port installed in my arm so they could take blood from my veins and put other liquids in. They also put in a PEG tube so I could put "milk shake" type food directly into my stomach when my throat became too inflamed to eat through my mouth. There have been a couple of snags along the way; I ended up on a hospital ward for three or four days because I kept throwing up and the dehydration was damaging my kidneys, but, generally it's been plain sailing.

The last of the sessions of radio or chemo was on 19 October so going on two months now. In the past few days I have seen the oncólogo, the otorrino, nurses in the chemotherapy day centre and a nutritionist. 

The oncólogo didn't really have much to say, but he wasn't worried about me either. He had a good feel of my neck and said he was pretty sure the lymph nodes were no longer swollen. He's going to order a CAT scan and I'm back to see him in about a month. He did say they could remove the picc port from my arm which was taken out by the perpetually cheerful nurses in the chemo day centre. They were also very nice about my Spanish. With the picc gone I was able to have a shower this morning without a plastic sleeve on my arm to protect the dressing for the first time since the beginning of September

The nutritionist said it was about time that I started to eat solid food instead of just feeding through my stomach. She only actually wants me to eat things like rice pudding, custard, creme caramel and the like. I do as I'm told and I've eaten a couple of those things today. They taste odd because my mouth is still slimy but I ate them alright.

The otorrino put his camera up my nose and down my throat and said "I don't see the lesion today that I saw in the Summer". He said my throat was still inflamed from the radio, which I think was to add a bit of caution to his earlier comment. He doesn't want to see me again till March.

And the problems I still have, as an effect from the treatments, are that my mouth is either bone dry or covered in horrible, foul tasting mucus nearly all the time, that I get tired quickly and that I feel dizzy quite often. Not exactly serious concerns. So, not so bad at all.

Paying the premium

When I went to the hole in the wall to get some cash there was a turrón stall in my way. Turrón is a sweet confectionery, associated with the Spanish Christmas, made with almonds, oil, and sugar. In the average supermarket a 250g bar of turrón will cost about 2.50€, most supermarkets carry something slightly better at, maybe 10€ a bar, but most steer away from the handcrafted product because it is breathtakingly expensive. There are all sorts of varieties of turrón, but the traditional ones are the hard and brittle Alicante variety and the soft, oozing oil Jijona style. The varieties of turrón, with chocolate or fruit are really for people who don't like turrón; they aren't much to do with turrón and are trading on the name.

The chances are that if you have some turrón this Christmas, it will be ordinary production line stuff. You might like it; you might not; but it's unlikely to send you into paroxysms of delight. The same is probably true of the majority of foodstuffs that Spaniards tend to rave about and which they buy in truckloads at this time of year. 

For instance angulas, or baby eels, are another Christmas delicacy. I had a quick Google and you can get fresh ones at 118€ per 100g. If that's a little steep the alternative is something called gulas which are made from ground fish reconstituted to look like elvers. A packet of gulas costs a bit less than 3€. This is lumpfish roe as against caviar territory. 

Miguel Angel Revilla, four times president of Cantabria, and well known character, used to always present quality, expensive, anchovies from Cantabria on his official visits. The anchovies I buy for my sandwiches come in triple packs for less than 3€.

It's similar with prawns—what we Britons call prawns. I don't think I'll ever understand the differences in quality when buying the right and wrong type of prawns. Whether gambas blancas, gambas rojas, gambones, carabineros or langostinos are the best and whether the ones from Denia are better than those from Huelva or Garrucha. Not knowing can cost you dear. Six of the better variety in an ordinary restaurant cost me 48€. It still smarts and that was six or seven years ago now.

Faced with such price variations the majority of us tend to plump for something with an everyday cost or, maybe, we push out the boat and buy the next step up. Then, when we taste it, we wonder what all the fuss was about. The problem is that we've bought run-of-the-mill. Spaniards wax lyrical about their air-cured ham. It can be spectacular but you have to be willing to pay for the quality, acorn fed, variety and eat it sliced wafer thin. The ham that most of us get most of the time—in a ham sandwich or as a slice of ham on our breakfast toast—can be anything between average and chewing bacon.

The point I'm trying, so long windedly, to make is that Spaniards often enthuse about certain food products that you may find uninspirational. There are lots of classic dishes, firm Spanish favourites, that often seem very commonplace. Croquetas are a good example; lots have the consistency of wallpaper paste, are served semi heated and taste of nothing much but, if you strike lucky or know where to go they are exceedingly good. Paella is another dish where the difference between a made to order paella cooked with care and the proper ingredients has nothing in common with the bright yellow rice served as part of a set meal in a tourist restaurant. 

Lots of these foods are rolled out at Christmas - mantecados and polvorones, peladillas, roscones, turrón, angulas, gooseneck barnacles (percebes) while other, all-year-round favourites, get a special outing at Christmas—prawns, croquetas, ham, roast lamb, and around here even broth with meatballs (variously named pelotas, relleno or even faseguras). If you get the opportunity go for the quality stuff - it's usually worth the stretch.

I was expecting the Spanish Inquisition

My 'old age' pension is derived partly from the UK and partly from Spain, as I have worked in both countries and accumulated benefits. Every now and again they, the pension people, check to make sure that I'm still breathing and not walled up in some Spanish cemetery. 

Today, was one of those days. There was a letter in our PO box from the UK asking me to confirm that I am still extant. I'm sure they've asked before, and I seem to remember that it was a simple enough process. I signed a form and I got another Briton to witness it. So, today, instead of coming home to read the paperwork, I thought I may as well sort it out then and there where I had access to a post office and at least a couple of people to witness my signature.

Maybe I'd misremembered, something which seems to happen more and more frequently, or perhaps they've beefed up their checks but, when I actually got around to checking the paperwork, they required someone of 'social stature', and with an official stamp, to witness the document. I can't remember who exactly, but the list included people like bank officials, medical staff, town hall employees, the mayor, a solicitor etc. They said I had sixteen weeks to return the form, well minus the two weeks it had taken to get from the UK, so there was no rush, but I like to get these things sorted. The challenge was that I don’t have many contacts who meet the pension authorities' criteria and who wouldn’t baulk at completing an “official” form written in English, which I would need to explain in a world rife with frauds and scams. Then it struck me: my accountant!

In the accountant's office I explained, in Spanish, that I needed someone to witness my signature. 'Ah', said the young woman, 'you want a "fe de vida"'. The meaning was obvious enough, she knew what I wanted but in my Spanish "fe" means faith and the expression I most associate with "fe" comes from the Spanish Inquisition. It's only because I thought to write this blog that I now know that "fe" also has a second translation as ID or certificate.

The Inquisition was supposed to protect the one true faith by searching out heretics - people who practised other religions or didn't accept the absolute truth of the Catholic Church's version of Christianity and its practices. Actually it was about personal vendettas, enriching the church and maintaining its power. The most extreme punishment of the Inquisition was to burn people at the stake and that involved a ritual public penitence before the actual death. That whole process was called, and this is the phrase I knew, an 'auto de fe' or 'act of faith'.

I do this all the time. Someone says 'our David had a puncture' and I see David deflating so I ask if it hurt or if he's OK now. When I try these word associations in Spanish the person I'm talking to generally looks at me as if I'm demented but today when the person in the office said I needed a 'fe de vida' and I said 'thank goodness it's not an auto de fe'. She chuckled. A minor triumph I thought. And I got my form signed.

Burnin' Down the House

It was in the early 80s. I had discovered Spain and was determined to learn Spanish. I didn't know that Andalucía had a reputation for an impenetrable accent, but as I had obviously heard of Seville/Sevilla, a two or three-week language course there seemed like a good idea. I went just after Christmas.

Sevilla has never been kind to me. It's a city where I lose my wallet, get stranded, choose the wrong hotel, or end up in a shoving competition with nuns. That first time I went there, for the course, it was horrible. They put me in a pretty advanced class based on a written exam. Although it was easy enough to fill in a box on a test page with the third person plural of the imperfect as against the preterite, it's quite another matter remembering that as you try to recall vocabulary, word order, gender, as you wrestle with the pronunciation etc. I struggled and struggled with the spoken language. I seem to remember the caretaker found me hiding somewhere, sobbing at my inability to cope with the language, and got me transferred to something more at my level— that may have been the day I thought maybe a little breakfast alcohol would loosen my tongue.

As well as the terror of facing the language, it was cold, and I'm sure that it rained and rained and rained. The "family" I'd been lodged with turned out to be a bloke sloughed in a dark pit of despair because his wife had just left him and whose cooking seemed to include only things made from the intestines of inedible animals or fish that Jacques Cousteau had never met. He did introduce me to lots of things Spanish though because he was stereotypically Spanish—he bought bread three times a day and talked endlessly about the films of Luis Buñuel. His house was dark, damp, and freezing—the sheets, which he didn't offer to change all the time I was there, were damp.

He introduced me to two forms of Spanish heating. The first was the brasero. To use a brasero, you need a round-topped table and a heavy long tablecloth. In his house, the cloth was of green velvet. Underneath the circular table is a shelf, about 15 cm off the floor, which supports a circular heater. The heater in his house had one of those elements that you would get in a one, two, or three-bar electric fire, common until the 1970s and still available, but it was shaped to fit into the space in the near-floor shelf. So the heater was underneath the table; the heavy tablecloth kept the heat in and, so long as you didn't mistakenly rest your feet too close to the heater and set yourself on fire, you could keep your legs warm - though not your upper body. In the olden days, the heat source was actually a metal bowl filled with hot embers. As you can imagine, the potential for post-meal family conversations becoming family conflagrations was significant.

The second form of heating was the Spanish equivalent of a calor gas heater. The heaters have a case that's large enough to house a butane (or propane) cylinder which has a valve connecting to the innards of the heater via a rubber tube. I think even then the heater had a piezoelectric igniter and followed an ignition procedure that can be remarkably recalcitrant at times. The one in Sevilla was in the bathroom—a small room which the heater could warm up in minutes because I think even my host didn't care for naked shivering. The bathroom was the only place I was ever warm inside that house.

Our house can be like a fridge. We stop that by pouring heat into it in an exercise that will hand the planet back to plants and other animals before long. It also causes the people at Iberdrola and petrol companies rub their hands in glee. We have an excuse for the lack of insulation, for the big gaps at the doors, for the high ceilings—it's an old house and our insulation options are strictly limited. Even in modern-built houses in Alicante, insulation is pathetic with the excuse that the Alicantino winter is short and soon gone. It's a total lie. Inside—not outside—our house, and lots of other Spanish properties, are cold from November through to April because hardly anyone pays any attention to insulation. The number of shops and offices where you are dealt with by people wearing outdoor winter clothing is legion. The insulation issue is not true in what are considered to be the colder parts of Spain but here in the South, builders are as optimistic as they are thrifty.

We've never thought to try a brasero and our main heating, when it gets cold, is a pellet burner which produces a very noisy 11 kW of heat so that we have to wear headphones to hear the telly. Nonetheless, in the kitchen, for mornings, and in the space I use as an office and in the living room, we have butane heaters—exactly the same sort of thing I was introduced to all those years ago. These "estufas de butano" produce radiant heat. Sit close and the heat they emit—about 4 kW—makes you think the room is toasty warm when in fact you're simply sitting in a very temporary warm bubble—something you realise every time your bladder forces you to make a temporary move.

At least the butane heaters keep your upper body as warm as your legs.

I'll name that child in three

It often crosses my mind that the micromanagement of the Spanish state in not allowing car number plates to include vowels, because the letters of the plate may end up either being a name or something rude or offensive, is a bit excessive. I can't think of many rude three-letter Spanish words - 'ano' for anus is the one the authorities always quote, along with ETA, the disbanded terrorist organisation. And as for names like Ana and Leo, well, imagine if Swansea couldn't sell those vanity plates - there would be uproar among British-based Range Rover drivers. For years there was something akin in the naming of children.

A little while ago, we were at one of those craft markets. Maggie was very taken with a little knitted cardigan and, for once, she knew a potential recipient - one of the Culebrón villagers was just about to give birth. The child was eventually named Vega, not Bego, the diminutive of Begonia, but Vega which, along with Martina, were the top two girls' names for 2023. Lucas and Hugo for boys. I'd been scratching around for something to blog about and the name reminded me of a puff piece I'd read in a Spanish newspaper.

I'm pretty long in the tooth and I often smirk at the first names for Anglos in the United States where, apparently, River, Gravity, Blue and Busy are considered sensible choices. I have some British pals who, years ago, for their newborn son, chose very different first names and used a last name that had nothing to do with either of the couple's family names. That suggests to me that the rules about naming in the UK are quite permissive. Nowadays, naming is quite liberal in Spain too, though there's a touch of the number plate syndrome in that Spanish law prohibits names which have negative connotations or which violate the child's dignity.

The registering of a birth must be done within 72 hours and the name has to be registered within thirty days of the birth. Lots of the pages I read maintained that the name had to be registered within eight days but I think the time limit has been expanded. In the olden days if the person in the Civil Registry wasn't happy with the name that the parents had chosen, the progenitors were given three more days to come up with an acceptable name. After that, the Justice Ministry could impose a name. That would nearly always be the name of the Saint of the day. Given that lots of Catholic Saints' names are very strange (Nivardo, Faustino, Dimas, Melecio, Hermelando, Evedasto, Agapito, Plausides, Antenor, Antoliano) there must have been several dates to avoid if you didn't want your child to end up as, for example, Ildefonso, Pancracia or Pompilia. The majority of older Spaniards were named for Saints because, when they were born, the alliance between state and Catholic Church was almost absolute. At least most Saints' names are easily adapted to male and female variations by changing the ending: Francisco (male), Francisca (female); Antonio (male), Antonia (female); José (male) and Josefa (female) being common examples.

The registrar would still turn away names like Hitler, Drácula or Stalin, as well as names like Caca (poo) or Loco (crazy) as being likely to cause grief to the child. Similarly with something like Dolores Fuertes Barriga (severe stomach ache). In fact it's the same with any name be it invented, taken from another language, from a book or a film or a TV series. If the registrar considers that it may cause grief to the child in later life then it could be rejected. Nonetheless, apparently names like Arya, Daenerys and Khaleesi (all from Game of Thrones) are now reasonably common. Names of cities used to be prohibited too but names such as Roma, Cairo, París, Dakota, Tennessee and Brooklyn are now being accepted by most registrars. Bear in mind that the rule about the name being prejudicial to the interests of the child might still mean that the registrar will not accept some city names. So, probably no Sodoma Ruiz or Gomorra Romero.

Children cannot be named the same as their brothers or sisters, unless the brother or sister has died, even if the name is a translation - so no Juan and Joan (Catalan, and I suppose Valencian version of Juan, John, Jan, Ivan, etc.). That doesn't stop children being named for their parents which I often think must be confusing within a family.

Compound names are fine but with no more than two names. So while the female María José and the male José María (belt and braces approach to the Christian parents of Jesús) are fine as are Ana Belén, José Carlos etc. - Ana María Carmen or María Isabel Andrea are not. There is an exception where the parents are not Spanish and where the child was born in Spain and there is a tradition in the parent's country for more first names. In that case, multiple names can be accepted by the registrar. Mind you if the child were to go on to naturalise as Spanish, the excess names would be cut from the registered, naturalised name and, of course, any single barreled surname would have to be doubled up.

Surnames, brand names, the full names of famous people and fruit can't be used as first names. So nobody can be called García or Fernández as a first name. Just consider how many personalities would fall foul of those restrictions, from Hunter S. Thompson to Apple Martin. There is a bit of an exception to that rule about not using a famous person's name as a first name. The idea is to stop Rafa Nadal Peréz or Penélope Cruz Hernandez but Nadal and Cruz are both common enough surnames and if that's the family surname and the family Nadal want to call their boy child Rafael and the family Cruz want to call the girl Penelope then the registrar will almost certainly accept the names. But no Gucci Muñoz or Nutella Caballero - no Banana Delgado, no Peaches Geldof.

It's very common to shorten Spanish names: María Dolores to Lola, Yolanda to Yoli, Francisco to Fran, Curro or Paco, and hundreds more. The law used to say that the registry would only accept the full form. Now, if you want to call your child Chema you can but it does seem that the registrars still tend to 'strongly advise' the more traditional, complete name. You can't use just initials either and you still can't use diminutives like Pepita or Juanito.

Yet another prohibition is to put a female name to a male child or vice versa - so no boys named Sue - though this restriction is not usually applied to modern names like Noa and Alex. Basque names are quite trendy at the moment. Some, like Lur or Harri, are traditionally given to both boys and girls, a bit like Julian, Carol or Hilary in the UK. These occasionally cause problems at the time of registration for not identifying the sex of the baby adequately. I suspect that, given the current elasticity around gender identity, this rule may be one of the most polemical prohibitions at the moment.

And now a disclaimer. When Maggie told me about the gift for Vega it reminded me of the article I'd read in 2023 about prohibited names. That article, from The Huffington Post, and another from As were the basis for this post. As I polished the blog (yes, these ramblings are reworked!) I found another article on a 'parents to be' website which highlighted lots of recent changes to the 1957/58 law on naming children and I incorporated those changes as best I could. I couldn't however be absolutely certain that what I was reading was authoritative as articles written in 2024 contradicted what seemed to be more liberal rules reported in 2023. So, while I think the blog is basically accurate there may be tiny, weeny inaccuracies.

A surprising view

Sitting around nattering, putting the world to rights, as one does, on a Saturday morning with friends. We were talking about how people make a living in Pinoso.

The most obvious source of employment is in agriculture, particularly in producing wine grapes and almonds, though there are lots of other crops. Unfortunately, it's also true that there are hectares of good agricultural land lying fallow because of the problem of the "generational replacement". The farmers and winemakers are getting on in years, and their sons and daughters want to be teachers and scientists and influencers and local government officers and not farmers and winemakers.

We'd talked about the salt that is pumped out of the salt dome, El Cabeço, and sent as a brine solution down a pipeline to Torrevieja where it is added to the salt lagoons there to increase the yield. Actually, the technical term for a salt dome, diapiro, also gives its name to a couple of wines produced by the local bodega or winery, as in the photo.

There had been a bit of a mention of the shoes that are still made in Pinoso, though even I knew that the most obvious factory closed a while ago. Apart from seeing the Pinoso'S vans flitting around, apart from smelling the epoxy resin in a little workshop next to the library, and apart from seeing the Jover factory down by the town bodega that makes cambrillones (the reinforcing steel shank set into the soles of most shoes), I'm unaware of any other shoemaking facility. That doesn't mean there isn't any, just that I don't know about it.

And then, of course, we got onto the quarry, Monte Coto. For years it was the golden goose, the largest open-cast marble quarry in Europe - a one-time producer of lots of work and lots of money that provided Pinoso with a spectacular range of services but which has been in marked decline for years.

As we talked about the quarry, I said that I'd seen some relatively recent news that Levantina Stone, the largest producer, were axing between a third and a half of their workforce in Monte Coto, the Pinoso marble quarry, and in the offices over in Novelda. I also said that I know there's a long-running argument between the Regional Government and the Town Hall about both the mining rights in Monte Coto and the costs of putting right the environmental damage of the quarry as parts of it are worked out. The legislative stuff is something that I've never quite worked out because our local sources of media are much more interested in a photo of the mayor shaking hands with someone important from the Regional Government than they are in actually giving informative news.

As we were outside a bar for this conversation and as the bar owner hove into view at exactly the correct moment, I asked him if he knew what the beef was. He told me it was about the rights to the reserves underground. He said that it was crystal clear that the town hall owns, and can exploit, the mountain, but that normally the below-ground mining rights belong to the region.

Now I have to say that I have no idea whether he's right or not; it sounded plausible, but it may, or may not be, true. To him, as a Pinoso native, he was quite sure. I mentioned the layoffs at Levantina and he shrugged them off - at one point that would have been important, when there were hundreds at the quarry, but now the numbers are so low that sacking half of them affects almost nothing. Without any prompting, he went on to say that the town was moribund. He said that Pinoso was now a dormitory town for younger workers who went off to work in the larger towns and cities nearby and that the town's only full-time inhabitants were we geriatric foreigners. There is habitually a coven of us outside his bar on a Saturday morning, and he was quick to point out that he was singularly happy with foreigners spending money in bars and restaurants but that it was hardly a sound industrial base.

I countered by saying that how could a town that had at least seven butchers be a doomed town. "Great example," he said. "Tell me the butchers." So I tried. I mentioned a few. To the first he said, "Closed last month". He went on, "Carlos will retire in three years and he has nobody to take over the business; it'll close." He did that with a couple more before some Dutch person called him over, and that was how the conversation closed.

Now seriously, I have no idea if the town councillors tasked with local development, agriculture, industry and commerce would see it quite the same way, but it is quite strange sometimes how, despite living somewhere, you, one, sees things in a different light to other inhabitants. I can't remember seeing any positive industrial news in the local media for quite a while, but it is true that I can think of several small businesses which have closed in the recent past and going in a way that seems odd to my Northern European way of thinking.

I've seen plenty of local shops, that seemed prosperous enough, just close as their owners retired. A particularly notable example was a local restaurant that was, supposedly, famous all over Spain. Even I had seen it featured on the telly, and the parking spots around the very ordinary-looking restaurant were always awash with ostentatious cars. Last year, it just closed. The owner had got to retirement age, so he shut the business. Recently, a biggish tyre place did the same - one day in business, the next closed tight. I've heard lots of speculation as to why without anyone sounding as though they were 100% sure but, again, I suspect simple retirement.

To be honest, I see Pinoso as typical of lots of small towns. Traditional retail is obviously in difficulty at the moment, but there always seem to be people with new business ventures of one sort or another. Some prosper, some fail. It also seems to me that several of the new batch of incoming foreigners, especially the rich Northern Europeans, are relatively young and still economically active. It could be, though, that mine is an over-rosy view and the bar owner has a point.