Life in Culebrón

There was a haze of steam vapour. The drops of water coalesced into little rivulets and ran down the mirror. Something was different I'd just finished my morning shower and I realised that, for the first time in a couple of months, the temperature difference between shower water and environment was enough for to produce condensation. A tangible change. There was a storm last night; big fat raindrops then a torrential downpour that bounced and shouted for a while. That's not the difference; that's not the change. The difference is the calendar. When Spaniards talk of the summer they seem to mean July and August. There appears to be an almost magical relationship here, at least in my mind, between the date and the weather. It will be September on Thursday - summer will be gone. To put my money where my keyboard is I predict now that the next big change will be on 1 November. Mark it in your diary now and hold me to account. Expect me to complain how autumn has sudde...

There is a huge ironmongers shop in Villena, a town close to us in Alicante, and being the hosts with the mosts that we are, that is where we were taking our houseguests. What man could resist three, or it may be four, floors of tools, fastenings, machinery and gadgets? We thought we may even have a meal in their canteen afterwards. Our plan was foiled when the place was closed. Never mind. We did get to see the town Archaeological Museum. In 1963 a couple of workmen in Villena, found a bracelet in the gravel they were spreading. The foreman hung the bracelet up on the wall so that whoever had dropped it could reclaim it. A bit later one of the workers thought they might just pop it around to the local jeweller to see if it was worth anything. As it was made of half a kilo of 24 carat gold it did have a certain value but the jeweller thought there was something odd about it and suggested showing it to a local archaeologist. In turn this chap recognised it as being 3,000 years ol...

This isn't about Culebrón or our life here.  I wrote it for the TIM magazine and it was published earlier this month. I just thought I'd save it here too. It's long. El Valle de los Caídos is a huge mausoleum and basilica church carved into solid granite and topped off with an enormous cross in the Cuelgamuros Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid. It was built, on the orders of Franco, between 1940 and 1959 with money from the National Lottery. The work was done by as many as 200,000 Republican prisoners of war according to some sources and as few as 2,470 according to others. The prisoners were able to gain remission on their sentences by working on the construction. Some sources suggest the workers were reasonably paid whilst others charge slave labour. The supposed number who died during the building of the the complex varies from 14 to 27,000, depending on whether the source is pro Franco or pro Republican. The monument was consecrated by Pope John XXIII...

We had some Spanish pals here yesterday. Thinking about it this may be only the second time that we've had Spanish guests in the house. It doesn't say much for our integration. Maggie pointed out we don't have many people around at all. That doesn't say much for our friendliness. The food didn't go down too well. The conversation was a bit forced at times and our Spanish may well have been quite comical but it was still a nice day. One of our topics of conversation was about families. That led to kissing. Not the physical act, a conversation about it. When I left the UK people never ended their conversations with family or close friends with "I love you" indeed for the most part I was able to avoid any of that false and ritualised sentimentality. I very seldom hugged the people I met. For colleagues and new acquaintances a firm handshake served very well. For old and dear friends words of greeting sufficed. I approve of handshaking, an ancient and ap...

In summer, with all the politicians on holiday, the magazine type radio programmes fill their time with anything they can. I was just listening to Radio Nacional, the equivalent of BBC Radio 4, to a programme called On Days Like Today , and they were talking about collecting cigarette, tea, bubble gum and similar cards. I had a story so I logged on to Facebook and posted my story on their wall. I did it in English first, for speed, because it had taken me a while to sort out how to send them a message and they'd been running the item for several minutes. Then I did it again in my form of Spanish. They read it out as I was re-reading my post to check the grammar - and they basically used my Spanish. The story, by the way, was that I collected the Beatles Yellow Submarine cards when I was a lad. When we came here in 2004 they were one of the things to be cleared out. We had a go at selling them on eBay. I remember I put a reserve on them of £5 and they sold for several hundre...

Once upon a time we lived in Ciudad Rodrigo in the province of Salamanca more or less on the border with Portugal. It was a lovely spot but it was a long way from home and, to be honest, it was a long way from anywhere. Our nearest hypermarket was about 120kms away in Salamanca City and the nearest Mini dealer was in Portugal. At the time I commented on the difficulty of buying a book in a bookshop in Spain. Since then I have bought and read quite a few books in Spanish and I usually have a list of books that I want to read; I am catching up on a culture after all. The routine now, when I go into a bookshop, is to have a quick look where I think the book may be, and then, when it isn't, summon up my courage and ask. I wanted to take a couple of books on holiday. I'd heard a programme on the radio about an author called Carmen Laforet and one of hers sounded good. We were going to an area in Spain called the Alcarria and there was another book, written in the 1940s ...

The telly has been full of pictures of hordes of young Catholics arriving from all over the World. Stories full of good intention, human interest, willing volunteers and the huge organisational effort but equally about the contoversy surrounding the cost to the taxpayer. It's World Youth day or JMJ in Madrid. Odd sort of day as the inaugral mass is this evening and the closing mass is on Sunday. I should have a day's holiday that long. The Pope is due to fly in on Thursday. When we were up in Teruel the other day there were groups of Scouts in the local supermarket sporting World Youth Day T shirts. In Murcia about a month ago I bought a lottery ticket to win a ham from some young person raising money to get themselves to JMJ Madrid. Today we were picking someone up from Alicante airport and the arrivals area was more crowded than usual because of a group of happy, singing, banner waving Christians. They were waiting to welcome people. Taking my information from the back ...

Peach and Horne were a couple of geologists who made geological maps of the Scottish North West Highlands around the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th Centuries. In the area they worked I was impressed that some bright spark from the Royal Mail had thought to use minibuses to deliver the mail to local Post Offices and so provide a regular and reliable rural bus service at a stroke. As a holidaymaking teenager in the English Lake District I was amused when I realised that the drivers of the Borrowdale Buses provided a grocery delivery service for many people along their route. At Comberton Village College in Cambridgeshire I thought it was clever of the school to offer space for a Building Society branch and even in the Archers, in Ambridge, there is a volunteer run community shop. Ever since agriculture stopped being the key employer in Western Europe and rural areas began to depopulate people have been coming up with clever ideas to maintain rural communities and lifestyles...

A normal looking car park.? I suppose it depends what you expect a car park to look like On a clear night we can watch the aeroplanes spiralling down towards Alicante airport some 55kms from Culebrón. Last night there were four or five, their lights twinkling, waiting their turn to land. It was a warm night, still close to 30ºC at around 10pm and I was sure that the new arrivals would be well pleased as they headed for their hotels or apartments on the coast. Beaches and sun, that's what they'd paid for and that's what they were going to get. We've just been on a bit of a jaunt ourselves. We had a shopping list of things to do. A couple of Royal Palaces, a provincial capital that I'd never visited before and a deep river valley that had won the " Best view in Spain " on a TV programme. Most of our destinations were vaguely within the circle of towns that circle Madrid though we also went a bit further North and East into the province of Soria. We ...