Life in Culebrón

As we waited in the queue to pay, there in the place normally reserved for those last minute temptations - the sweets that have children tugging on their parent's sleeves and the diet breaking choolate bars - was a big box full of habas, broad beans. Maggie, can we have some broad beans Maggie, can we? She said no of course but a touch of petulance and the beans were mine. I always associate raw broad beans with one of the first times that we took the MG out for a run with the Orihuela Seat 600 club. It was a sunny but nippy Sunday morning and the MG was parked up in a school playground along with lots of other classic cars. It was referendum day for the European Constitution and the school was acting as a polling station so there were quite a lot of people about one way and another. The car folk were breathing smoke with the cold air as they chewed on the obligatory breakfast of silver paper wrapped baguettes and canned drinks. From the back of an old Merc I think, but it may ...

One advantage of the English language is that the word banker has an obvious rhyme. The Spaniards share the sentiment but not the rhyme. To the best of my knowledge this is a vastly oversimplified but basically accurate description of the Spanish banking system. Essentially, in recent history, there have been three types of "bank". The first is the standard commercial bank; the bank raises capital and then lends money to people and organisations in order to make a business profit. The second is the Caja de Ahorros, a Savings Bank where the money for loans came from the deposits of the savers. Many of the Savings Banks in Spain originally loaned money against pawned items. The profit from the operation is used to support loans to savers and a certain percentage is diverted to a charitable foundation to support "good causes." The third institution, the Rural Savings Bank, has syndicalist or co-operative roots and was originally developed to promote agriculture i...