Life in Culebrón

Given my remarkable range of abilities you will be surprised to learn that, after university, I found some trouble persuading any employer to give me a job. At one point I was placed on a job creation scheme where, among other things, I was interviewed for Woman's Hour on the BBC Radio 4 (or was it still the Home Service?). Anyway, one of the skills I learned, as well as how to hack down Rhododendrons with a billhook or build steps on Great Langdale, was how to piece together one sort of dry stone wall. Should you ever be on the road from Newby Bridge to Graythwaite the wall just by the entrance to YMCA Lakeside is mine. It was still solid the last time I passed. Dry stone walling involves building in stone without mortar or any other materials except maybe a bit of soil. UNESCO has classified it as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland feature on the UNESCO list of places that have examples. The UK,...

We went to a couple of things yesterday. One was reassuringly Spanish but the other followed a disturbing new trend. There was a fundraising event in Novelda. Some local bands, names unknown to us, were playing a mini festival to raise money for victims of the flooding of a few weeks ago. We turned up a bit after, not much after, the advertised start time of 1pm and, as we expected, absolutely nothing was going on. Lots of people with pony tails, black t-shirts and big bellies were faffing around with bits of wire onstage but no bands. Obviously 1pm comes as a surprise every time. Normal, predictable, foreseeable behaviour. The bands kicked off with the normal, predictable and foreseeable twenty minutes to half an hour delay. The bar was another surprise for the organising team. The surprise was that people arriving might want to buy a drink from the bar. The system was predictable enough. You couldn't pay with cash at the bar you had to buy tickets first - this is a common, ...

I presume that you have seen images of the disturbances at Barcelona's el Prat airport or the pictures of Barcelona on fire. As you may imagine it has been big, big news here and it continues to be so.  I presume you know that it started when the Spanish courts handed out long, long prison sentences to the leaders of the Catalan independence drive at the time of the illegal referendum a couple of years ago. Following the ruling I suspect that Spanish judges spend a lot of time reading law books but have very little idea of what's happening amongst ordinary people. The legal arguments the judges made were absolutely sound, the ruling was coherent but it took little account of the context in which it was being issued. When the Catalan politicians made their choices they knew they were acting illegally and they knew they could end up in prison. Nonetheless, if the judges had chosen to pitch the decision at a different level there may have been much less of a backlash. Inste...

Have you seen those geode things at the craft markets? They look a lot like a pebble on the outside but inside they're (sort of) hollow with lots of crystals growing into the space. The crystals that form inside a geode can be all sorts of minerals. I checked on eBay and I could have bought geodes lined with prasiolite, celestine, calcite, pyrite, barytes or chalcedony though far and away the most common is amethyst, the purple coloured quartz. A couple of weeks ago we went to see a geode in the now abandoned Mina Rica, Rich Mine, which is in the municipality of Pulpí just on the border between Murcia and Almeria. Between 1840 and 1960 the mine produced iron, lead and a little silver. This geode is 60 metres underground and it's a little larger than most. In fact it's 8 metres long and just a bit short of 2 metres wide and high. Eight metres is more or less the length of the old London Routemaster RM buses. Inside there are selenite crystals (gypsum to you and me) w...

I didn't sleep particularly well last night. I kept waking up with some half formed Spanish phrase rolling around the empty quarters of my mind before lapsing back into semi unconsciousness. It wasn't the thought of what the Catalans might do after the sentencing of their pro independence politicians today, it was because I was off to the Social Security office. When I was last in that office, just before Christmas, I was told that my old age pension would include a little from Spain and a lot more from Britain. I started to get money from the UK, on time, in May. I expected a top up from Spain last month.  But it didn't come. Worse than that, trying to find out why not, I found, online, that my health care had been downgraded from a constitutional right as a worker to a bit of a dispensation for foreigners. Given that the UK has been a hotbed of political idiocy for a few years the less I have to depend on anything coming from there and the more I can rely on things di...

I remember sport, things sporting, at school with a mix of horror and shame. Rugby was shivering on frost hardened mud with my hands down my shorts waiting to be crushed. On my cricketing skills my report noted that I would do better if I didn't run away from the ball. At university I did a fair bit of sailing and canoeing but they never captivated me nor did I show any particular skill for them. Between then and now I have generally avoided anything that involves wearing shorts, Lycra, oddly shaped sunglasses, vests or neoprene; in fact anything that smacks of sexual fetish or sweat. Yesterday though, for some strange reason I spectated at two sporting events. No neoprene you understand. Street clothes for me and well away from the activity. Just watching. You know that round here there is a local language, a lot like Catalan. I usually call that language Valenciano. The Spanish that the world speaks is called Castellano. It can become a bit odd at times - why do I say...

Spaniards are very ID conscious. They carry ID cards and use them all the time. One of the first tasks of anyone moving here is to get a foreigners identification number, the NIE. It's a bit like your own personal VIN. It will turn up on all sorts of documentation from your tax return to your driving licence. It's not difficult to obtain but it does involve form filling, fee paying and going to an immigration office or National Police station. In the past it meant a lot of queuing but nowadays appointments can be booked beforehand, usually online. Appointment systems are now used by nearly every agency including traffic, social security, land registry, employment and immigration. Europeans from the European Union have more rights in Spain that someone from Senegal or the US. We're also able to sidestep some of the things that we should do from tax registration to driving licence swapping. Brexit will put us on a par with the Senegalese and Americans so there has been a ...