Life in Culebrón

I can’t remember when I went to Avebury. It was a long time ago – before my bones started aching all the time and even before my hair turned white. I went to Castlerigg, near Keswick, around the same time. Both are oneiric memories – fleeting and half-forgotten, yet leaving a lasting impression. In both places I felt a link with the past – nothing academic, nothing to do with dates or history. It was a sense of continuity, not of dogma or rhetoric, but of something that was ours – a shared patrimony. I can hardly claim any shared past with Spain. My dad used to say that he’d sailed with Drake aboard the Pelican when it set off around the world. His proof was the name John Thompson on the muster roll. Obviously he hadn’t, but the idea that one of his forebears – one of mine – might have done so would be easy enough to check. I never have, though. Better a good tale than a refuted fact. Either way, my upbringing and lineage place me firmly on the side of the raiding, piratical English ra...

Nowadays, when I have a conversation in the street with someone, it goes a bit like this: “Hiya, how are you?” “I’m well, thanks, but did you hear about Rupert/Ted/Alison/Indira? She/he had a heart attack/has cancer/had a stroke (and so on)”. Obviously, it’s not always that style of conversation. Sometimes the answer is “Not so good”, because the person I’m talking to has just had a bypass/major surgery/has metastasis (and so on). It can be worse - “Did you hear about Betty? -  she died, you know”. Bearing this in mind, a news item from today may be of interest to lots of us, particularly those of us of a certain age, closer to the “time of reckoning”. As of today, there are new prescription charges. These charges only apply to people with prescriptions from the Spanish state system. If your prescription comes from a private doctor, then the charges will depend on the market price.  The charges apply directly across the state health system, be that in Murcia, Valencia, or anyw...

There’s a typical bread roll in Alcoy that’s called tortilongui or torti y longui; it’s a sandwich of omelette (an omelette, not a tortilla española) and longaniza (a sausage something like a British banger). Before about four o’clock last Sunday afternoon, I didn’t know that.  It happens quite a lot in Spain: you go into a bar or restaurant, they ask what you want, and when you ask what there is, you don’t get an exhaustive list so much as a couple of suggestions. Many places aren’t big on printed menus or blackboards, especially outside the (relatively rigid) lunchtime slot. You order something, and then five minutes later, something much more interesting lands on the next table. Part of the problem is knowing what to ask. If you reach for your phrase book and ask if there is anything to eat—comer—you’ll often be told no. A better question is whether the kitchen is still open. And if it isn’t, you can ask if there’s anything to snack on: tapear, or perhaps picotear.  Anyway,...

Maggie calls them fat pies: coca. Of course, it’s also the Spanish word for cocaine, but provided we’re thinking snack rather than snort, a coca is, to my mind, something like a local version of pizza. There was a time, maybe fifteen to twenty years ago, when it was one of the staples whenever there was free food at an event in Pinoso. No vol-au-vents, no cube of cheese and a silverskin onion on a stick; you got a rectangular piece of coca The best bits were the ones from the middle of the baking trays: a spongy, bread-like base, heavy with olive oil and smeared with grated tomato, usually finished with a salty punch of anchovies or sardines. The corner pieces had too much pastry and not enough topping. Just before Christmas, maybe five years ago the staunch women of Cáritas (the Roman Catholic charity) were running a fundraising breakfast from the community room alongside the parish church. One of the main things on offer was coca. It wasn't what I expected. They had a bowl of dou...

Do you know what a calco is? In Spanish, it means a carbon copy or a direct translation. It’s what happens when you take a phrase in English and translate it word for word into Spanish. Sometimes that works perfectly well, but more often it ends up sounding slightly odd to a Spanish ear—just as it does when the same thing happens the other way round. One I always forget is when, in a shop, someone asks if I need help and I reply with the direct translation of “I’m fine, thanks”. Perfectly acceptable in English, but slightly puzzling for the salesperson in El Corte Inglés, who may wonder why I’ve suddenly decided to comment on my state of health. Another common example is saying “I can’t swim”, at which point the Spaniard you’re with might start wondering why they’d never noticed your prosthetic leg or the tiny breathing apparatus you’ve been discreetly carrying around. If, instead, you said you didn’t know how to swim, it would make perfect sense. And one I hear all the time is “Is it ...

Last week passed without a blog post because, quite simply, I couldn’t think of a thing to write about. It isn’t that we’ve been idle—we’ve been out to concerts, we've done guided walks, watched parades, we've eaten out a lot and joined guided walks—but lately, everything has felt like well-trodden ground. I’ve reached that point where the local scenery is so familiar that I feel I’ve already told its story. The few ideas I did have felt like repetitions of earlier posts. Most of them centred on language learning, which remains my primary concern once the "real" problems of life are out of the way. I am still constantly appalled by my inability to construct an error-free conversation in Spanish; I inevitably notice the mistakes more than the successes. Although I’ve already cancelled my subscription and plan to take a month off from talking to the AI voice—ingeniously named Miguel—that has been my main form of Spanish learning for the past few months. It has begun to ...

I soon get itchy feet if I’ve spent too many days around the house. Fortunately, there’s nearly always something going on close to where we live to cheer me up. One of the advantages—drawn directly from the disadvantage of living a fair way from anywhere—is that we don’t look to just one source for our “what-to-dos”. If I lived in Alicante, Madrid, or Murcia, I’d expect there to be something going on just around the corner or a short bus ride away. Here, where there are no buses and driving to the larger cities requires a real commitment, it’s a matter of picking and choosing from all the towns and villages around us. We often go to concerts, theatre, exhibitions, and various other events, but one of the oddities of Spain, at least for me, is that the place is cram-packed with fiestas. Fiestas are not just "events"; there might be a big music festival or a sporting event, but that is not a fiesta. Now, if you live here, you know full well what a fiesta is, but for those who d...

I normally do a roundup of the Pinoso population whenever the town hall releases the latest padrón figures—the official register of all local residents. This usually happens in late January, but for some reason I missed the publication this year. It only struck me the other day, while chatting about the perceived influx of people from the Netherlands and Belgium, that I’d forgotten my annual “easy blog” post. Like everyone else, I’ve noticed a language that I presume is Dutch (though with my ear for languages it could just as easily be Swedish or Lithuanian). I’ve also heard plenty of chatter about the large, somewhat out‑of‑character houses now peppering the Pinoso countryside. Rumour has it this boom in Dutch immigration is largely down to a single family: the Jelies. I can’t say for certain if it’s true, but Perplexity tells me they were featured in a programme called Familie Jelies: Een Huis Vol Emigreert, and more recently in Jelies & Gnodde: Grote Gezinnen Emigreren. Apparent...

Subsidising my holiday is one thing. I can see the justification. We poor old people need to get out of the house; we need a bit of social integration rather than a life shuffling around in worn slippers and worn out dressing gown among unwashed pots and smelly laundry. It may keep us active and, of course, it keeps people in work when those jobs might otherwise disappear with the ebb and flow of the tourist seasons. But subsidising my alcohol intake is quite another thing. True, the wine wasn’t good—in fact, bad may be the better adjective—but, acidic as it was, it had the inestimable quality of being, to all intents and purposes, free. A bottle with lunch, a bottle with dinner. Just what the doctor ordered—actually, I forget—was it two bottles or two glasses? Indeed, didn’t the spoilsports downgrade that to just two, or even one, glass, and was it only red? Never fear, it's still two bottles, any colour, for we oldies in Spain. It’s the third time we’ve done a holiday with the IM...