Life in Culebrón

I saw some article or advert about a micro brewery in Novelda a while ago. We don't work on Wednesday afternoon; either of us. "Do you fancy a beer?" I asked Maggie. She said yes. We found the place OK. It looked decidedly closed but there was a bar next door and it seemed logical that the bar would have the local beer. We went in. It wasn't a flash bar. It could probably do with a bit of a refit though the regulars probably like it as it is. There were lots of men, my age, playing dominoes or just sitting there nursing a beer. Fluorescent lights. There was a woman behind the bar and one female customer. We were a bit out of place. The beer, Exulans, was on display, a couple of third of a litre bottles on the bar. "Hello, can we have a couple of bottles of the beer from next door, please." "No. We don't have any." Moment of indecision. "Hang on though, I'll check in the back." The woman wanders off for a while. "No, ...

I wandered in to do my session with 4A, the fourth year is the last year of obligatory secondary school. It was my last lesson with them before my contract ends at the end of May. They're a nice bunch but it's a big class and they tend towards noisy, no let's be honest, loud. I said hello and started whatever it was I was going to do but they weren't paying much attention - their energies were being taken up by an awful lot of fanning and expelling sufficient breath for top lips to oscillate. It's too hot, it's suffocating, we're going to die. The class teacher who makes sure that the noise doesn't turn into a riot, looked up from her computer. A brief conversation and she set the air conditioner going. My guess is that there are guidelines as to the temperature setting for the air-con and the youngsters wanted it lower. With a big grin on my face I set into one of those "When I was a lad air conditioners didn't exist, what a bunch of whiners ...

You will remember we had trouble with a white cat that invaded our garden. The cat was nice enough but it didn't get on with our two. They hid inside, afraid to wander the garden. We were glad when the white cat disappeared. There are colonies of wild and semi wild cats in Culebrón. Some probably get occasional food from humans but others live off what they hunt or can scavenge from the big communal bins. A young female tabby realised that the open door to our kitchen, at times, offered access to free food left over by our satiated cats. She was a persistent little cat, despite the water pistol, despite the occasional hosepipe assault, despite the shouts and clapping hands, she kept coming back. Our cats had no real problem with her, an occasional hissing but nothing profound. We are softies. We gave her food, always away from our house, but we did feed her. An easy if unreliable and sometimes contradictory feeding station. She was also human friendly, happy to be stroked. ...

I used to listen to the Archers. For those of you that don't know the Archers is a long running British radio soap. The reason that I started to listen was that it used to start at 7.05pm. By then I was usually in the car and on the way to a meeting. And, that's because evening meetings in the UK invariably started at 7.30pm. I don't know whether that's still true. I can't really speak for UK habits nowadays but my guess is that things haven't changed. Likewise I would guess that the most popular slots for dinner reservations in restaurants will be 8pm or 8.30pm. Countries have timetables and most people know that Spain's is a little different. Making a sweeping generalisation, as though it were the truth, most Spaniards leave the house with a minimal breakfast around 7.30 or 8am and get to work for the usual sort of times – 8,8.30 or 9am. Shops and lots of offices don't open till 10am. There's a mid morning break for something reasonably substan...

I'm going to talk about going to the cinema. Nearly all of this I've talked about before so, old, in the sense of long standing rather than aged, readers you can save yourself some time and stop now. I've always liked going to the cinema. At the height of it I might go 130 times in a year. When we got to Spain that more or less stopped. Films here are almost universally dubbed into Spanish. There are a few cinemas where it's possible to see films in their original language with subtitles and even a few where you can use a pair of headphones to tune in to an original language version whilst the sound in the cinema is in Spanish. For the main part though, if you go to see a film in Spain it will have a Spanish soundtrack. When our Spanish was worse than it is now we were basically wasting time and money because we couldn't understand much of what was going on. The dubbing causes problems at times where there is some interplay between actors of different national...

Rather surprisingly, considering the recent history of Spain, we don't have a General Election on the horizon. Of course that's not strictly true. The Podemos people are pushing a parliamentary no confidence motion and if that were to prosper then, General Election here we come. But it won't. We do, though, have a bit of a leadership battle in the PSOE, the Socialist Party. You will remember that we had a couple of General Elections in quick succession. The PP, the blues, the conservatives, won both times but they didn't get a majority. To be President /Prime Minister here you need a majority. The orange party, Ciudadanos, wobbled around a bit about who to back - given that there were two General Elections they had two real choices and they used them both. After the second and decisive election they sided with the blues and that's why we have the current Government. The PSOE, the reds, the socialists, were led by a bloke called Pedro Sánchez - he tried to form...

When I turned up for work this morning there was nobody there. The school was closed. Nobody bothered to tell me but it gave me the surprise bonus of being able to get to the Wine Horse Festival, Caballos del Vino, in Caravaca de la Cruz. There are all sorts of Fiestas but if we agree that a Fiesta is some sort of street based celebration open to the general public then I have been to a lot of fiesta type events recently. More specifically in the last week or so. A bit back there was Easter where we saw various processions in Pinoso, Tobarra and in Murcia. Then we went to the Moors and Christians in Banyeres de Mariola, the Romeria to San Pancracio in Sax and more Moors and Christians in Onil. Easter in Spain I described a few posts ago so I'll skip straight to Moors and Christians which is loosely based on the triumph of the Christians over the North African invaders/rulers. In most places, as the name suggests, there are two main bands; The Moors, the North Africans, and the...