Life in Culebrón

The stories of huge water bills in Spain are legion. Not for the cost of the water, which is usually very reasonable, but for undiscovered leaks. Everyone in Spain has a water meter. Leaks on the supply side, before the water meter, are the problem of the supplier but, once past the meter, the problem is yours. The water supply to our house is not sophiticated. A plastic tube is buried in a shallow trench under the dirt road that passes the house and a spur brings water to our meter. Our supply is no more than a thick plastic hose buried only inches under the garden. When it gets cold we often lose water for a while until the pipes unfreeze. Because of this I check the water meter regularly to make sure that the consumption seems reasonable and normal. The past couple of times the reading has been a bit high. Six or seven cubic metres instead of the usual three or four. I didn't worry too much. We've run the irrigation system on the garden a couple of times and there is a...

The people from Expat Blog asked me if I would answer a few questions. I said yes. Here are the questions and answers Why did you choose to expatriate to Spain? We'd been to Spain lots of times on holiday and we were taken by the country, with its habits, customs and with its people. Life in the UK had become one huge round of work with almost no private life and with the sale of our house we were in a position to up sticks and give it a go. What were the procedures to follow for a British national to move there? As European citizens all we needed to do to move to Spain was to cross the border and settle here. Obviously we also needed to go through all the usual processes like getting an NIE and later a “residencia”, signing up to the local padrón, registering with the health services, doing all the things associated with buying or renting a house. We'd brought a car with us which also needed re-registering but as to the actual move that was as easy as deciding...

There have been quite a lot news items recently about a shortage of blood donors in Spain. I heard one such item on a programme I often listen to as I drive to work and so I wrote a comment on their Facebook page. This is what it said:  Oí algo sobre los problemas de donación de sangre en vuestro programa y recientemente hay muchas noticias sobre la falta de sangre en España. La mayoría de los británicos que viven aquí, muchos con una historia de donación en el Reino Unido, no pueden donar por un decreto que tiene algo que ver con las "vacas locas" de los años 90 y la posibilidad de contraer la enfermedad de Creutzfeldt-Jakob - algo que no pasa. Un sencillo cambio de ley y, de repente, tendríamos más donantes. Espero que entiendas mi versión de español Or more or less as a translation;  I've heard something about the problems of blood donation on your programme and recently there have been a lot of news items about the lack of blood in Spain. The majori...

Here are some ramblings from this weekend. Once upon a time Pizza Express used to serve really good pizzas in interesting buildings. The person who launched the restaurant chain was a chap from Peterborough called Peter Boizot. One of his other ventures in the town was to try to restore the old Odeon Cinema to its former glory as a single screen venue. I've not been to Peterborough for ages but I have this vague recollection that the venture failed. People must prefer multi choice cinemas. Spain, like everywhere else, has multiplexes in amongst fast food franchises and out of town shopping centres. The big, single screen cinemas are a thing of the past. Youngish people, twenty somethings, I taught in Cartagena still talked nostalgically of the city centre cinemas so it can't be that long ago that they disappeared. Nowadays the old cinemas are gone, boarded up or used as retail outlets. Years ago, on holiday, I saw my first ever Rus Meyer film in a cinema in central Alic...

Reading is a funny thing. When I worked in the UK I grew to hate reading. I had to wade through so many pages of so much verbiage full of TLAs (three letter acronyms,) where spades were never spades. Nowadays I'm back to reading for pleasure, well pleasure and for the information that reading provides. I try to read novels in Spanish. Sometimes I can't understand the books I choose but nowadays I can read most novels without too much difficulty. That's one of the reasons that I usually read on a Kindle because it allows me a dictionary for those key words I don't know. Obviously I'm reading the read the book because something about it interests me but there is also a part that is about trying to improve my Spanish through the practice, the vocabulary and the language structures. More importantly though I'm trying to get a handle on the culture. Not culture in the Cervantes or Shakespeare sense - culture in the description of how life was or is, the hist...

The other day I wrote an essay for my Spanish class. It was that essay which gave me the idea for the blog about trademarks and names. I got the corrected essay back today and there were few enough mistakes for me to bother to correct them on my original. So here, for my two or three bilingual readers, is my attempt at complaining, hopefully in a light hearted way, about a few things Spanish. Nothing new in the content but waste not, want not, as my old uncle used to say - that was before he was dead of course. Cuando vivía en Ciudad Rodrigo buscaba el lavavajillas en un supermercado pero no puede encontrarlo. -Perdona, ¿dónde esta el lavavajillas, por favor?-pregunté a un reponedor- El mistol está cerca de los congeladores, al fondo -me dijo. Fue la primera vez que escuché este sobrenombre para el lavavajillas. A veces, en Inglaterra lo llamamos Fairy Liquid pero, normalmente, utilizamos un genérico – washing up liquid – detergente para fregar platos. Ya sé que hay muchas cosas qu...

In most Spanish bars the gents is a normal household type toilet. The sort we men leave the seat up on. In some places, like cinemas, shopping centres or motorway service stations there will be stalls and, usually, a row of urinals too. Personally I prefer urinals. Less chance of unintended spillage. My experience though is that Spanish men don't. They choose to use the stalls and a lot of them neglect to lock the door. This can cause a degree of embarrassment from time to time. ¡Uuff; perdón!  I wonder why the preference?

It was a few years ago now. I was in  a small supermarket. The product organisation escaped me. I'd found the washing powders and bath cleaners but the washing up liquid was laying low. Breaking with my usual stubborn silence I asked a shelf stacker where it was. The Mistol is at the back, near the freezers," she said. Just as we Brits use aspirin, escalator, biro, trampoline, thermos, sellotape, catseye, dormobile, durex, bubble wrap, photoshop, stanley knife, armco, JCB, fibre glass and lots more trademarks to describe generic products so do the Spanish. So Mistol is a brand of washing up liquid. I bought it that day, just grateful that I'd found the stuff. It's good stuff, it smells nice, it has lots of flavours. There is a little dodge, a little marketing ploy, with Mistol though. It has a really wide spout in relation to most other brands of washing up liquids. The liquid gushes out and gets used up very quickly. I've decided it's an abusive design...

Only a little while ago one of the chief weather forecasters from the state TV broadcaster came to Pinoso to celebrate the 25 years of weather data collection in the town. She was here to praise the efforts of a local chap called Agapito Gonzálvez better known as Cápito. Because of him Pinoso, which is no more than a village really, has a weather station that provides data for the Spanish equivalent of the Met Office - AEMET or Agencia Estatal de Meteorología . Each month the Town Hall publishes Cápito's summary of the previous month's weather. Here is my summary of his summary. In May we got eighteen days of sunny and cloudless skies and another twelve with sunny spells  - that leaves just one sunless and cloudy day. The highest temperature, of 38ºC, was recorded on the 14th of May - that was one of the seven days when the temperature got above 30ºC. The lowest temperature was 5ºC on the 23rd May which was one of the five days when temperatures dropped below 7ºC. The mea...

Culebrón is a part of Pinoso. Pinoso is a part of the province of Alicante but Pinoso, like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, is a frontier town. There are no adverts for Viagra here but there are different languages and different holidays. Even if it's only with Abanilla, Jumilla and Yecla there is definitely a border, the border with Murcia Region. We have plenty of hills of our own in Alicante. Looking North from our front garden we have the Sierra de Salinas (1238m/4061ft) and the Sierra de Xirivell (810m/2657ft) is to the South. Indeed the garden itself is at about 605m/1984ft but over the border, into Murcia, the Sierra del Carche is higher still at 1372 metres or 4,500 feet. Maggie has tried to get us to the top a couple of times before but today we finally made it. To the very top, to the geodesic point. Admittedly we didn't walk, we went in a little four by four, but we got to the top. It was pretty crowded and very cosmopolitan at the top of el Carche. There was a Swis...