Life in Culebrón

Summer will arrive in Spain at 1.28 this afternoon. I always find the precision of the reports amusing in a country where things don't often run to time. The prediction is for a hot, dry summer. I saw the sun go down on Sunday evening, it dipped below the hills at about 9.50pm. This morning, unfortunately, I was there to see it rise again and that was at 6.10am so, about, seven hours and twenty minutes of darkness at the time of the year when the days are as long as they get.

Petrer, situated beside Mount Cid and alongside the Puça rivulet had been, until well into the 20th Century, a town with a distinctly rural character dedicated, principally, to agriculture. The streets were of compacted earth and the houses still had cat flaps and stables. The success of the wine harvest , or not, was at the grace of "The Virgin of the Remedy." I n the squares and plazas were public fountains where the women filled their water jugs. The markets were held in Dalt Square and in the Altico district were the workshops of the families who earned their living from ceramics and where the shoe makers worked on their porches. Everything had it's season in that town and here, in this museum, we have the tools, instruments, objects and images to stir memories of those times. Yesterday I got a text message on my phone, in the local Valenciano language from Petrer Town Hall to publicise a theatrical walk through the history of Petrer, at least that's what I thi...

Have you ever tried to talk someone through a computer problem down the phone? Always, without fail, there is some difference between your machine and theirs. You're on Explorer 8 they're on 6, you're on Vista, they're on XP; not huge differences but just enough to cause the novice computer user some extra difficulty. The language is difficult too, phrases like click on, push the orangey coloured button, go to the little icon in the top left hand corner just above the navigation bar etc. make perfect sense as they leave your mouth but totally confuse the recipient. I've just had one of those conversations; forty minutes of one of those conversations, with a Sapnish friend who is trying to use a blog I set up for her. On top of the differences in machines and the description of things there was the rather larger language void between English and Spanish. I was hunting for word after word  - to push a button isn't the same as to push a door and in the confusio...

There were hats and hooters and little flags all with the St. George cross. A big screen telly, lots of appropriate decoration and even a temporary bar in the TV room. El Cortijo, one of the local British run places, made a really good job of turning the England v USA game into an event. Pity the team couldn't do the same. There's an interesting discussion on one of the expat computer forums about who people will be rooting for. The majority seem to be for England first with Spain as a backup position.

Every so often in Culebrón a robot voice phones us offering better and cheaper telephone services. Yesterday evening, in a fit of something, I pressed the button for more information and found myself talking to a woman with a very thick South American accent. The sales spiel was all about faster Internet, free National calls, a couple of other useful/useless services and lower prices for the whole lot. As we pay too much and only have a 3Mgb connection I was interested but also cautious. We had a hell of a job getting connected last year because the only company willing or able to put in the line was the old state monopoly company. I think that, by law, they have to pick up on providing the lines that don't make commercial sense. A bit like the Post Office delivering to some remote Highland cottage for the same price as it does to central London. In order to make it worth their while we'd agreed to stay with them for at least 18 months. When it looked like I was going to bu...