Life in Culebrón

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Something Hitchcock never considered for the shower scene

August 16, 2026

A Spanish chap I talk to on the internet, once asked me if I lived in the countryside. I hesitated. It’s obviously rural: we’re surrounded by what you would call fields in the UK, and there are vineyards and olive trees growing within metres of our front door. Still, we’re not that isolated, the town with barbers and bars is just 5km away. We have fibre internet, we’re nearly on a drainage system (just election lies keep us 100 metres from mains sewerage), we have mains water and electricity, and the nearest tarmac is no more than 200 metres away. I can see the municipal tip, or whatever they are called nowadays, from our garden, and there’s a bloody big solar farm not 20 metres from our front door. Nonetheless, if I were to step out of my front door naked around breakfast time, the chances are that I could do that 360 times out of 365 without seeing anyone. And both the back and the front door give directly onto our living space – no vestibules, no boot rooms, no hallways. When it rai...

Summer

August 06, 2026

Spain is, season-wise, a fairly conventional country: it has the usual four seasons, both astronomical and meteorological. There is no monsoon, no wet-and-dry divide, nothing especially hippy or politically suspect. And yet summer is special. Partly because it rather fails to behave itself. For a large part of the population—and institutionally too—summer and August are synonymous . My own experience of the Spanish summer is overwhelmingly Mediterranean, coloured by media coverage that is nearly always Madrid-centric, so my picture may be a little out of kilter for people in the North or in larger inland towns and cities, but, that said, I hope this is a fair reflection of Spain in general. There are all sorts of fixed ideas about August, most of which are no longer true. Maybe they never were, but there are seeds of truth in all the myths. You can tell that summer is on the way when all the adverts on the telly, and before your Amazon Prime film starts, show happy faces eating and dr...

Spanish Cats Only Have Seven Lives

July 30, 2026

Graham, well now he’s Graham, strolled into our lives when he breached the defences of our garden three or four months ago. Maybe it was before then, maybe after; one never remembers when these things happen exactly, because they only become interesting in the light of what happens after. We’ve had a lot of cats since we came to Spain. One, Mary, came with me riding down in an MGB GT. She screamed all the way from Huntingdon to Dover but finally accepted there was no escape and watched France pass by with her paws on the dashboard. She died of heart failure. So far she’s our only cat that has lived out her natural span. Most of the rest have been slaughtered by cars or simply disappeared. We’ve also had a lot of cats just walk into our garden. We have food out for our household cats, and the interlopers recognise a free buffet when they see one. Several of them have been clever enough to work out the cat flap in double-quick time. One, Isabel, who we’d decided to take in, then went and...

Fire and Brimstone

July 24, 2026

The TV news, the radio or just keeping up with social media will tell you that Spain is on fire. It’s not a new story. By 23 July, more than 120,000 hectares had been turned into charred wasteland. Last year, by the same date, the figure was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares. In other words, this year’s fires have already burned four or five times as much land as they had by this stage in 2025, and that’s despite last year eventually becoming Spain’s worst fire season since 1994. Figures measured in hectares don’t really mean much to most of us. A hectare is what you need to put up a house in the campo in Alicante province, but visualising 7,000 of those plots is beyond my imagination. The deadliest fire so far this year, around Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province, destroyed around 7,000 hectares, an area roughly the size of Leicester or Derby. Meanwhile, the huge fires in Zaragoza and Guadalajara have each burned more than 30,000 hectares, making each of them larger...

And I forgot the ones that put coconut milk in coffee

July 17, 2026

There can be a fantastic energy to a typical Spanish bar, especially during the mid-morning when people have their breakfast. The main protagonists are the coffee grinder and the coffee machine—one, obviously enough, produces a fierce grinding sound, and the other hisses like the Mallard letting off steam in Waverley Station. Then, of course, there are the people, who rise to the occasion. As a national characteristic, Spaniards are not quiet, and they do like to talk, sometimes quite loudly. So, with all this grinding and gushing going on, the clientele have to raise their voices a tad. And, in an upward spiral other groups at other tables follow suit, and so it goes on until the bar is as noisy as the engine room of the Titanic. So that is a normal bar: the sort of place you go for a coffee or a beer and some toast, maybe a roll or, if you are in Madrid, churros. It is nothing fancy and just as likely to be on a city street as in a rural village. There was a time, though, when these ...

Something in Spain

July 10, 2026

Normally, Maggie and I get out a fair bit. We might go to anything from an exhibition to some sort of fiesta, and it would be unusual for us to spend a whole weekend – let alone a whole week – at home. Not so recently. Maggie hasn't been too well and hasn't really felt like doing very much. As a result, neither have I. Right at the end of June, she was taken into hospital and operated on for a problem with her pancreas. It was a long and complicated operation, followed by a few days in the intensive care unit. Now she's on an ordinary ward with and the suggestion is that she'll be there for a couple of weeks. While Maggie's life became one of pain, sensors, tubes and wires strapped to her body, mine became one of driving back and forth between Elda Hospital and home. My side of the bargain was easy enough and, despite being one step removed from our usual forays into Spain I realised just how much it was all around. Take the roadworks. Of course, just as it becam...

Staying in tune

July 02, 2026

It's often said said that most people stay faithful to the music they first fell in love with as teenagers. For most of us, those formative tracks are added to as we pass through our twenties and thirties, but that's where it stops. That doesn’t mean we never pick up new bands or singers, but we usually stick to our core favourites from those key decades and just bolt on a few extras later. At every stage, and I would suppose in every culture, life inevitably becomes a series of tasks. Whether it is swotting for exams, braving the daily commute, walking a couple of kilometres to the nearest well, or just tackling the laundry, these chores dominate our time. Even when we try to buy time by paying someone else to lighten the burden, other tasks creep in. Even pleasurable experiences, like going on holiday, can become irksome as you fight airline schedules or some hotel booking site. Our habits may shift over time—trading a Friday night pint at the pub in our youth for a takeaway ...

New Rules for Scooters, Motorbikes, and Overtaking Cyclists

June 23, 2026

I heard this information on a couple of news broadcasts today, and I checked it against several AI sources to list the changes. I have asked one version to check the information provided by another several times but I cannot be certain that every detail is completely accurate. I believe they are, and in broad strokes it definitely is, but if a Guardia Civil officer tells you otherwise, or if the DGT website says otherwise, then they will be right and I will be wrong. The Spanish government has officially approved a major update to the General Traffic Regulations ( Reglamento General de Circulación ). Aimed at protecting what the DGT describes as “vulnerable road users”, the reform introduces significant changes to everyday traffic rules. Before going into the details, it is important to note that although the Council of Ministers approved this legislation today (23rd June 2026), it has not yet been published in the Official State Gazette ( Boletín Oficial del Estado , or BOE). As a res...

Marketing wine

June 19, 2026

We went out the other day with the Amigos del Vino de Pinoso—the Friends of the Wine. We made a full day of it, starting with a mid-morning snack on the picnic tables of a motorway service area and ending with a visit to Guadalest Castle, but the main focus was a trip to the Mar de Vins bodega in La Nucía. Now, Maggie has taken me along to plenty of bodegas over the years, so I’ve seen my fair share of grape destalking machines, stainless steel tanks, thick rubber hoses, and bottling lines. You normally have to endure all that before they let you drink. The tasting itself has its own ritual: sniffing, swirling, angling the glass to inspect the colour. I’m never sure whether knowing a wine smells of blackberries is good or bad, but it’s part of the performance. One place told us to use all five senses when judging wine—though I forget where touch came in, and the sound of pouring is surely a dead giveaway about quality. Or not. Bodegas nearly always offer bits and bobs to snack on, usua...

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