Life in Culebrón

Maggie and I may be among the last few people in the world who are awoken by a clock radio alarm. A thirty year old clock radio at that. The wake up programme is Hoy empieza todo on Radio 3, a contemporary culture and music station. We don't listen for long, even if we're very slothful it will only be about twenty minutes though the programme stays on in the background. I change the bedclothes on Friday. As I fought with the duvet cover the main presenter on the programme was talking to the organisers of a "pop" festival that runs in Miranda de Ebro in Burgos about 700km from home. They said that they were giving away a package of two tickets, travel and accommodation for the festival and to enter all you had to do was to make a comment on their Twitter account. Now I've never quite mastered Twitter but, eventually I posted something as to why I wanted to go. I said I was old (and may die before the next one), because I was poor (and I wouldn't ...

There's a shoe museum in Elda. You have to ring a bell to get in. They have some very odd (sic) shoes. Elche has hundreds of shoe factories. Nowadays lots of them have signs with Chinese script characters over the door but the product still carries the label "Made in Spain." If Elda and Elche are the most important centres this area, in general, has a tradition of shoes and leather goods. The tiny village of Chinorlet about 3km from us has a factory that makes handbags. Our next door neighbour has a company that produces bows and buckles and the like to stick on leather goods. Pinoso too has a history of shoe making.  In the middle of town there is a small square dedicated to the shoemakers, (just like there are places dedicated to marble and to wine the other big industries of Pinoso). A local firm, Pinoso's, always has a stand at the celebration of the town's identity, the Villazgo celebrations, where you can don an apron and pose with a shoe last looking ...

We've just had a bit of a debate about where we were going to go this evening. The wine harvest fiesta in Jumilla is in full swing and tonight they have a Queen tribute band. Down in La Romana there's a Moors and Christians parade with music and bull running later. Chinorlet, the nearest village to Culebrón, is also partying for the weekend. Tonight they have a children's parade and then a band. In fact, within 45 minutes maximum travelling time we could go to Elche, Aspe, Cañada del Trigo or Fortuna instead. Oh, I nearly forgot and one of the outlying villages of Pinoso, Paredón, is at it too. In fact August 15th, a bank holiday for the Assumption of Mary, is the day when there are more fiestas in Spain than on any other day, the official count is more than 1,000. Jumilla is probably our first choice but the tribute band are not due on till half past eleven which means a start nearer midnight in reality. My guess is we wouldn't be home till maybe 2.30 and we'...

I don't quite remember when but it was long before we lived here. We were in Spain for a holiday and a couple of friends, Pepa and Jaime, invited us to stay in their flat in Bétera near Valencia. Bétera was having its annual fiesta and we went into town one evening to take part. I think there was a parade, there were stalls and a fair, we ate some tapas, we drank some beer and all sorts of normal fiesta things. The next evening we went back to the fiesta and to the town centre. We didn't park in the same place. We walked much further than we had the night before. I didn't know why. As we walked through the streets in the centre of the town most of the windows were boarded up, there were no cars in the streets. The whole town was odd. Either Jaime and Pepa didn't explain very well or we didn't have enough Spanish to understand what was going on. We waited in the main street with hundreds of other people. At the appointed hour someone lit the blue tou...

I've complained before about our occasional tussles with "authority" here in Spain and how it's quite tricky to complain or fight back. It's not just the language. Some of the processes can be a bit Kafka, a bit Catch 22. You may remember that the tax people questioned my 2014 tax returns. It cost me 118€ to defend myself, not a lot but 118€ that I could have invested much more wisely in, for instance,  throwing the money in the dust and trampling on it. Their final response after a couple of months was "we will take no further action". They didn't say "whoops" or "sorry" or "here are your expenses" and I rather suspect that we will go through the same rigmarole for my 2015 returns in a few months. We also had some trouble with the Land Registry, the Catastro. The Land Registry sets the rateable value of houses and this figure is used by the Local Town Hall as a way of fixing the local taxes which, in the end, pay ...

If I were to ask you whether you'd expect summer in Spain to be warm or cool what would you say? Exactly. I like it warm. I like the unremitting heat of the Alicante summer. Sun every day, no rain for weeks or months, the sound of flip flops on the street and the telly full of people having outdoor parties and frolicking in the sea with orgiastic fiestas in every town and village. So summer here is as mythical as Christmas in England. There it's snow, robins, family camaraderie, goodwill, never ending mince pies and the warm feeling of gift giving. It's sort of true, it can be true but most of it is some sort of aggrandisement of the truth. People of course love to complain. In winter we complain about the cold and in summer we complain about the heat. This always amuses me slightly. Anyone who knows Spain knows that there are bits that are, generally, cool and rainy. The coolest (temperature wise) place I can find for yesterday was Covatilla near Bejar in Salaman...

I've given up not wearing shorts. I don't like them, I think they look stupid (especially on me) and, more than anything, they seem to require that I wear footwear which leaves my feet severely compromised. But shorts are so commonplace that I've decided to stop fighting and to wear them. We went to a barbecue last week at a posh, modern house. It was time to go so I washed my hands and face and combed my hair. I didn't think to change my faded shorts and my rolls of flab displaying t-shirt till Maggie appeared wearing a spotty dress. "Do I have to dress up?," I groaned. I did, so I did. A shirt with a collar and leather shoes. I even shaved. We weren't out of place but I could have got away with the shorts, well maybe. Perhaps I would have needed to iron them first. Most people, even if they were in shorts, looked neat. I cultivate crumpled and scruffy. Like those 1980s Bacardi ads but without the firm flesh. We went to see the opening speeches of...

People keep asking me if I'm bored now that I'm retired. I say no. They ask me what I do and I say I don't know. What I do know is that I'm not getting lots of the things done that I mean to get done because I don't have enough time. Probably the thing is that busy means one thing and another. When I visited the UK a few weeks ago I noticed the immediateness of everything. Buying a beer is a plish plash operation. Ask, get, pay, drink or sometimes ask, pay, get, drink. Table service, the Spanish norm, obviously slows things down anyway but even if I order at the bar before sitting it's a much more leisurely process. The format is based on trust not mistrust. Paying, getting someone to take your money, can actually be a problem at times and I often pay at the bar as I leave to speed things up a bit. I reckon it's digital stuff that makes people want to go faster. To watch Hill Street Blues in my youth I waited for the episode each week. Now people watch...