Posts

Watching TV

Image
Television is no longer the shared experience it once was. Streaming services have fragmented our viewing habits, and we no longer all gather around the same handful of channels. Social networks and online platforms claim our attention. Yet national television channels — the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK, or RTVE and Telecinco in Spain — still hold a unique place in shaping a nation’s culture. TV may no longer sit at the cutting edge, but whenever a politician, athlete or online star breaks into the public consciousness, they still end up on the box. Even today it provides common reference points for fashion, language and social norms. In short, it helps define the world we live in. Yet after more than two decades in Spain, I find I have never really connected with Spanish television. It is not simply a matter of language or cultural barriers. It comes down to the nature of the programmes themselves, and the bizarre logic of how they are scheduled. British television has always had a sub...
Post a Comment
Read more

From Baird (or Farnsworth) to Bluetooth: How the Telly Left Us Behind

Image
We inherited a telly the other day. Excellent, 4K, big screen, all that sort of stuff. Suddenly I realised we were still children of the 20th century. It was like the last time I bought a laptop and the one-terabyte disc had gone. Obviously, being in Spain, we watch Spanish telly. Except, no, we don't—mainly because most of what's on offer is truly terrible. I think they called it 'Zoo Radio' for a while: that format where an individual DJ playing individual tunes gave way to a group of people talking about how their mum pickled eggs, with the occasional song thrown in. Spaniards aren't big followers of the ping-pong conversational style of us Brits at the best of times; they prefer overlapping conversations, but with a group it just turns into a verbal brawl. And that's the very fuel of Spanish telly. So I don't watch a lot. I try the occasional series, or maybe a programme here or there that looks OK, but basically I watch the news in Spanish and that'...
1 comment
Read more

Passing the salt

Image
Now, anyone who has ever heard of Pinoso will know it is famed for wine (Pinoso’s bodega is the biggest producer of organic wine in the province), marble (we have the largest marble quarry in Europe), shoemaking (now largely a thing of the past), and Mediterranean agricultural products (Frutos Secos Mañán is one of the largest almond producers and processors in Europe). Not much is said about salt. Yet Pinoso is a major salt producer. Unfortunately, the town sees little of that wealth: the salt deposit is owned by the Spanish Treasury (Hacienda), and the profits from working it go to a French company within the Salins Group. We’re friendly with wine. Well, we’re members of the local "Amigos del Vino" here in Pinoso. We usually go on trips out in a charabanc which have some passing association with wine. If possible, we like to drink some. But last week we went on a trip with a different focus. We followed the route of that salt from deep inside our emblematic hill down to the...
Post a Comment
Read more

The English bloke with the camera

Image
I had the very strangest conversation not an hour ago—well, it was an hour ago as I type, but it may be days ago as you read—with a couple of local Pinoso women who I may well know. Not that I recognised them. But one day I'll tell you the story about not recognising my mum in an airport that only handles about five flights a day. So, on the 18th there will be the annual cancer walk. It's against cancer, you understand. I'm not quite sure how that works but, for years, I've bought the T-shirt and once or twice I've walked around the route with a couple of hundred other people. To get hold of the T-shirt you have to go along to the HQ of the local AECC (Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer) and hand over the cash. You can usually do that twice a week between such-and-such and such-and-such a fortnight before the event. So I turned up. Oddly, I'd bumped into a phrase last week that's a variation on "the T-shirts tend to be on the small side"—the idea...
1 comment
Read more

Always a foreigner, never a local

Image
We’ll always be the “English neighbours”, no matter how much local paint I recommend or how many Spanish ministers I can name. That’s fine by me—but it’s not for everyone. A Scots bloke posted a video the other day—someone I’d never come across before—wrestling with his doubts about living in Spain. He was heading back to Scotland for a few weeks to test if it was still the place of his memories before committing to staying or going “home”. Reading between the lines of his eleven-minute video, what he missed was the easy comfort and deep-rooted sense of belonging from his past. Spain was great, but he felt he’d never truly belong. And frankly, I suspect he has a point. I’ve never once doubted our own move here. I’ve bought my funeral plan. I expect to end my days here. We didn’t leave the UK for negative reasons; we came to Spain for positive ones, and lots of those things still amuse me even now. It wasn’t even about chasing the sun—our initial plan in Castilla y León would have invol...
1 comment
Read more

Pedro got there first

Image
I spent most of yesterday morning locked in combat with the IMSERSO booking portal. For those who have not read the multiple blogs I have written about it, IMSERSO is the Spanish state’s subsidised holiday scheme for pensioners—an enterprise designed to keep coastal hotels open and retirees occupied during the off-season. The system won't let you apply a minute before your allotted time. Mine was 09:00 on 17 September. Having done my homework beforehand, I had compiled a tidy list of preferred destinations and target hotels. My initial plan was to head out to the Canary Islands—the offer included Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, or Tenerife. Yet when I finally logged in at two minutes past nine, the digital calendar was already glowing red with ‘full’ dates. Fuerteventura and Lanzarote were completely wiped out, leaving a mere three green blobs on Tenerife, the island we'd chosen, but none of the dates or hotels had any relation to my pre-planned targets. The dearth of space is simple...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bats, Roman slaves and food breaks

Image
It was the bats that made me think of this blog. I had wondered about doing a breakdown of the PISA report on Spanish schooling. Spanish education is a bit outside my area of personal knowledge, though, and maybe a bit dry, so I needed something more mundane. I remember that when I lived in the UK we'd often say, "Shall we go out for a drink?" Maybe it's the plastic chairs, and maybe it's just the state of my liver, but I wouldn't think to suggest that here in Spain. Obviously, given my strict Wesleyan upbringing, I'm happy to drink alcohol, but it's more a situational thing than a desire. We go out to eat, for instance, and, given that I don't have to drive, I'll put away as much of the stuff as I can so that I wobble but don't topple. When I do make one of those forays from the Englishness of home into the outside world of Spain, I'm far more inclined to go out to eat than to drink—and usually for lunch rather than dinner. These days,...
Post a Comment
Read more

The current situation

Image
To be honest, our electricity bill isn’t that eye-watering. It’s dead easy to change supplier in Spain, as I suspect it is in most of Europe. A local distribution company maintains the infrastructure that brings power to the house, but you can buy that electricity from any number of retailers. How they pay each other is no concern of mine. Since we arrived, we’ve usually bought our electricity from a firm called Iberdrola. We’ve had lots of different plans with them – a fixed rate for every hour, three separate tariffs at different times of day, others with high and low-cost periods, and so on. Again, I suspect this sounds similar to anywhere else on the continent. Iberdrola is an electricity producer. It owns nuclear power plants, hydroelectric stations, and wind and solar farms, among other things. There aren’t actually that many power generators in Spain. Once electricity is generated, it can be sold on the wholesale market, directly to large users, or through one of the two domesti...
2 comments
Read more

Getting Well Oiled

Image
There is, in Monóvar, just down the road from us, a restaurant that I rather like. As soon as you are at the table, the server brings a chunk of bread and a serving dish with black olives—on one side, the typical and renowned Empeltre variety from Aragon, and, on the other, a serving of olive oil from one of the well-respected almazaras, or oil mills, with a quality mark. It reminds me of the wide variety of Spanish phrases that suggest that with oil, bread, and wine, one will never go hungry. Born and bred Spaniards that we are, we soon order the wine. It’s a splendid start to the meal, one of those reminders that good food doesn’t have to be fancy food. Though I have to say that what comes after is usually pretty fancy! I suspect that some Spaniards may drink olive oil. In fact, I know that for a fact. At an event in Yecla, the man next to me was doing just that. “Dipping bread into the oil adds a variable,” he said. Olive oil is just a fact in Spain; it’s something that simply happe...
3 comments
Read more

Small Shops, Local Lives

Image
I bought a brush cutter the other week. One of those petrol-driven machines for hacking down long grass. I got it from the ironmongers next to Delia’s Chinese Bazaar in Pinoso, and, while I was there, I plucked up the courage to ask about a very homemade-looking pine wood object that I had noticed on a previous visit. “It’s for splitting olives,” I was told. I know very little about the family who own and run the shop. There was an older man, a woman and a younger man, all of uncertain age, although two of them may have been a couple, as well as a very young girl. I guessed at three generations, but who knows? It was the younger man who unpacked the brush cutter and put fuel in it, just to check that everything worked. He gave me a demonstration of how to start it. I suspect I wouldn’t have received quite the same level of attention at the Leroy Merlin DIY megastore. I’m also fairly sure they wouldn’t have had a machine for splitting olives. I suppose things have changed everywhere in ...
2 comments
Read more