Life in Culebrón

The other day, at work, they asked me if I'd be willing to do a quick cramming course for 17 or 18year olds who had had trouble with their final marks in the English test or who were about to do an English paper as a part of their University entrance exam. I had to do a bit of checking around to find out exactly what I might be taking on. I knew that some recent changes in education law, the law called LOMCE,  had made changes to the various exams but it's one thing having a general idea and another knowing the specifics of an exam. So now I know about PAUs and EvAUs and how people still call the whole thing selectividad. I even understand the marking scheme - for English at least. Obviously though I'm at a disadvantage over Spaniards who have gone through the system or who grew with the changes as they affected their children or younger relatives. So whilst I know there was a system with EGB, BUP, COU and now there's a system with ESO and Bachillerato and vocationa...

The Catastro, the Spanish version of the Land Registry, told me that article 18 of the Legislative Royal Decree of the 5th March 2004 (1/2004) says that any dispute must be attended within six months of receipt. I remember those things from when I used to work. We will acknowledge receipt of your communication within 24 hours and respond within 72 hours. Except that, this time, it was six months. I have a bit of a conversation cum reading sheet about drinks that I use with my English learners. The drinks sheet starts with tea. It says Britain is a tea drinking nation. It has variations on "A pint of sheepshagger, please" and it mentions how overpriced coffee has Italian, rather than Spanish or French, names. But it starts with the phrase Britain is a tea drinking nation. Now I have a critic. Every now and then a Spanish bloke, living in the UK, feels incensed enough, on reading my blogs, to put fingers to keyboard and play merry hell. He tells me off for lots of things ...

I've just come back from watching the awards ceremony for the 21st Maxi Banegas National Poetry Competition. Maxi was a local teacher and poet. It's a nice little event. This year it was half way up our "emblematic" salt dome hill near the Fatima chapel in a sort of wooded clearing. Lovely setting. There were some songs from Andreu Valor, and an unnamed musician, as a guitar duo before the awards for a couple of photo and writing competitions and then the big prize for the poetry competition. As I said all very gentle and very pleasant. There was wine and there were snacks afterwards provided by the local bodega, Bodegas Volver, but I didn't stay. Maggie was watching Liverpool lose the Champions League final so I was alone. There is something pathetic about eating ham and drinking wine alone in a crowd but that was only half the reason for clearing off. There were plenty of people I'd nodded to in the audience. With a glass in hand they may well have tr...

I forget where we were but they offered Contessa as afters. The Vienetta of my youth, fancy, if industrial, ice cream cake. There was tiramisu as well. Not many years ago all the puddings on offer in an everyday Spanish restaurant would be crème caramel, ice cream and seasonal fruit. Now you can get chemically flavoured cheesecake and deep frozen profiteroles and suchlike almost everywhere. An example of reasonably recent change. Last Saturday evening I wasn't sure whether to go and see some flamenco in Villena or go to Jumilla for the Night of the Museums. I like Jumilla but we've done their museums a few times. I was drawn towards the flamenco. It's ages since we've seen a couple of old fat blokes wailing or listened to anyone turn clapping into a fine instrument. The trouble was the information I could garner from the web about Villena wasn't complete. I had a time, a place and a title. No description; Art and Flamenco could have been a learned discourse ...

In 1895 the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, left money in his will for the Nobel Prize. The prizes are judged by Swedish and Norwegian institutions to recognise academic, cultural and scientific advances. The first prizes were awarded in 1901 in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics and Physiology or Medicine. The prize in Economics was first awarded in 1969, after a donation from the Swedish National Bank to the Nobel Foundation. To date there have been just seven Nobel Prizes awarded to Spaniards. So the next time you pass a school or a street named for one of them you can amaze your visitors with your knowledge of Spain. If you can't remember who won what plump for literature and the odds are on your side – five literature and two for medicine. The Spanish started well with an early win in 1904 for literature. José Echegaray y Eizaguirre was a civil engineer, mathematician, statesman, and one of the leading Spanish dramatists of the 19th century. José Echegaray...

My Spanish is odd. I know a fair bit. I can talk alright but sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can get really flustered and cock it up completely. Sometimes I can laugh at my mistakes and plough on or I can get angry and sulky. Language, or problems with language are still, by far, the biggest stumbling block to my day to day dealings with Spain. In the last post I mentioned that the Consumer Office had suggested the only way to sort out our overpaid local taxes was to go to the nearest office of the Land Registry, the Catastro, 60 kilometres away in Alicante city. Nowadays, with most government offices, you need to arrange a prior appointment. That doesn't mean you don't have to queue but it does mean you'll get served. There are lots of systems for making an appointment online and even the most basic website usually offers some sort of email possibility. Not the Catastro though. You can get access to plenty of information online but sorting an appointment has to be d...

The Spanish tax year runs from 1st January to 31st December. Sometime around the end of March, or the beginning of April, the tax process begins and people have till June to either put in their claims for reimbursements or pay up what they owe. I still do a bit of part time work and I have some income from a Teacher's Pension so I have tax to pay. For years I did my own tax return by either going to the local tax office or doing it online. A few years ago it all got a bit more complicated because there were rule changes about the taxation of overseas pension income. Well that and that I'd been evading tax just a little. HM Revenue and Customs dobbed me in to the Spaniards and told them about the 300€ or so I get each year from a tiny AVC pension fund. Pedro, a nice accountant in Molina de Segura sorted it all out for me and I stuck with him the next tax year too. Last year though I went back to doing it myself and ended up with a tax bill of about 1,200€ which was a bit of ...

On Thursday 11th of March 2004 between 7.0 and 7.15 in the morning, thirteen backpacks, each containing about 10kg of explosive, were loaded onto four trains as they passed through Alcalá de Henares station. About half an hour later, in the two minutes between 7.37 and 7.39, ten of those bombs exploded on crowded commuter trains in the heart of Madrid. 190 people of 17 nationalities died and over 1800 were injured. The bombs, at first reported to be the work of the Basque terrorist organisation ETA, were later ascribed to independent Islamist terrorists. The explosions occurred during the morning rush hour, targeting a busy commuter rail line into Atocha station from Alcalá. At 7.37 four bombs, planted in different carriages of a single train, exploded inside Atocha station. Two minutes later three bombs exploded on a train held at calle de Téllez by a red signal just 500 metres out of Atocha. The presumption is that the bombs were planned to go off inside Atocha, Madrid's busi...

A pal had to go to accident and emergency yesterday. He was having trouble breathing and he suspected he had something lodged in his windpipe. He asked me to go as a translator. Perhaps his difficulty in breathing had clouded his judgement! He was seen by a doctor inside about 15 minutes of arrival. He was taken to a cubicle with a bed after that first consultation. There were a couple of routine tests, blood samples, blood pressure, temperature and whatever it is they do when they put electrodes on your chest, hands and legs to get one of those wiggly line graphs. A few minutes later and he got a chest X-ray and then he was shifted onto an observation ward. Somebody came to do the blood pressure and temperature stuff again. This time they were a bit worried about the oxygen levels in his blood so they fastened him up to oxygen administered through one of those clip in the nostril jobs. Then it all slowed to a crawl. The patient wasn't. He thought they were taking age...

It turns out that I've blogged about the restaurant in Culebrón, Restaurante Eduardo, probably nearly as many times as I've eaten there. So I'll try to keep this short. Last Sunday Maggie put up less resistance to eating at Eduardo's than usual. There were several possible reasons for the feeble struggle that she put up but I think the main one was that, being Mother's Day, she knew that most restaurants would be awash with diners and Eduardo's is never awash. We had house guests too and I think that Maggie recognises that Eduardo's offers a rich and varied Spanish experience. And so it was. There was the usual reluctance, on the part of the restaurant, to be clear about what there was to eat but, in the end, we got a good meal at a good price. At least I think so. You'd have to ask John and Claire what they thought to get a reasonably unbiased view. Maggie and I have entrenched positions about Eduardo's that are unshakeable before logic or reaso...

Saturday morning in Pinoso – parking at a premium; nothing in Calle Lepanto, Trafalgar or Bailén. Hmm? Now there's a theme. The streets are named for battles. I did a bit of checking. Nearly 400 battles were listed as important in Spanish history with sixteen as absolutely key. With the limited space available my choice has been a little arbitrary. Skipping chronologically over Guadalete, Covadonga , Navas de Tolosa and Ceriñola we arrive at the Battle of Otumba in 1520. This was the one where Hernán Cortés crushed the Aztec Empire and opened the way to the conquest of what is now Mexico. He did it with the help of lots of locals but let's pretend, as Spaniards often do, that Hernán, his horses and a few lads from Extremadura did it alone. So we ignore Pavia and San Quintín and move on to Lepanto in 1571. This was a naval battle between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and an alliance of Christian powers sponsored by the Spanish King. Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote, was t...

I just said goodbye to Maggie and set off to watch people walk up to the repeater; the masts on top of our local hill. I have no idea why but, every year, hundreds of people hike up the hill in the pitch dark and then have a bit of a party. But I didn't go. As I walked to the car I thought it was a bit cold, a bit miserable and a bit dark. In fact I'm sitting on the sofa, with el Intermedio on in the background, well that and lots of perfume ads for Mother's Day on Sunday. Last Saturday we planned our afternoon carefully - early show at the flicks, back via the supermarket with just enough time to unpack the cereal and canned tomatoes in time for an 8.0 clock concert in the local theatre. It didn't quite pan out though. First we need to master the 24 hour clock so we can tell the difference between 18:00 and 8 o'clock. Fortunately the local press posted their report on the Pinoso website promptly. I was able to read the report before I expected the event to star...