Life in Culebrón

Artemio is a heavy set bloke who works for Pinoso Town Hall. Usually he has a big cigar clamped between his teeth. I'd prefer not to commit to giving him an age. He drives a Jeep which, he says, is much better than the Land Rover he used to have but, as you can see from the snap alongside, the Land Rover is still with the team. Artemio's  voice is raspy and, until the second or third sentence, when I tune in, I find him really difficult to understand. Artemio is the bloke you call if there is a water leak out in the street, or in our case, on the track. It's a 24 hour a day service. Should you ever need it the number is 656978410. If the leak is on the domestic side of the water meter then you need a plumber but if the leak is on the other side of the meter you call Artemio. Or rather you call his number. He's in charge of the team and he's not always the person who turns up. Most people expect that when they click the switch on the wall the electric light will co...

I got my new Brexit inspired ID card a while ago. I'm sure you read the blog entry! A chum asked me if I'd help him get one too. Actually I can't help him much in that they won't let two people go in to the foreigner's offices together for some sort of anti Covid procedure. Filling in those forms and standing in queues is all a bit of a pain in the bum so I wasn't exactly overjoyed by the idea but I said yes anyway. That's what friends are for and other cliches.  Then another pal told me that, yesterday in Murcia, when applying for their new card they'd bumped into an official who said that they needed not one but two appointments. One to apply for the card and one for the taking of fingerprints. I'm pretty sure that's not the procedure but, faced with someone who won't let you pass it doesn't really matter how right you are and how wrong they are. The somebody told me they stood their ground and actually got the card. Another example o...

Spain, the nation, has all the safeguards on personal freedoms and rights that you would expect for a modern European democracy. The problem is that it also has lots of "authorities" too. These authorities impose various rules and regulations. Most are sensible enough. Some are stupid. If it's a stupid rule most people just grin and bear it but, from time to time, someone is unhappy enough to go to court. Despite the judges being, generally, old, rich, white men the decision usually comes out on the side of modern rights, freedoms and values in general. Basically stupid rules and procedures get struck down but it can all take a while. Covid though is testing some of those rights to the limit as authority after authority comes up with some sort of bright spark wheeze. We seem to be getting Covid sick again, lots of us. People are dying too but not in the same numbers as earlier this year. As the numbers go up the rules get added to. A local bar had it's live music ca...

I was determined that I was not going to get sucked into more cleaning or gardening or household tasks today. I was going to do a bit of reading and then pop in to town and have a chat with Jesús - not that one, just an ordinary bloke with a moustache.  I had the bright spark idea that I'd dust the cobwebs off the bike and cycle in. When I went in the garage to get the bike there was a lake of water on the floor. Water was dripping down the Dexion shelving that we have there to store things. The main victims of the leak were boxes and boxes of old photos and photo albums. Soggy boxes are difficult to move. Getting a plumber wasn't as smooth a process as I may have hoped but I did get it fixed relatively quickly and the moist victims are sunbathing still. I should have known. Six or seven hours later and I set about returning the refugee objects to their natural home only to find that there is still a pinprick leak spraying water all over another set of cardboard boxes. I am r...

If you need to go to a bank in Spain think about it taking a good part of your morning. You may be lucky. Correct desk. Person not at breakfast. No wait. No complications. I'm sure it will happen one day but even when it's been a relatively problem free run it has seldom taken me less than twenty to thirty minutes. It doesn't matter where it is, as soon as there's a physical or virtual queue it's going to take time. Obviously the Post Office falls into this category. Yesterday I had a package to post. I went to the Post Office. Because the number of people who can be inside the office is limited the queue was in the street. I stayed for a while but after 20 minutes nobody had gone in and nobody had come out. My mask was getting tacky; I gave up. I popped back twice more in the next two hours. The queue was going nowhere. The main man in our post office isn't the sort of person to get flustered. He doesn't hurry. I thought I may be able to sidestep the que...

My Spanish old age pension is paid by the Seguridad Social. The idea is that I get a proportion of my state pension from the UK and a portion from Spain based on my work history in each country. Yesterday the SS sent me a text message to say that there was a message waiting for me on my account page on their website. The message was quite bald. "Your retirement benefit has been cancelled. You can find more information in gestiones" - I don't know how to translate gestiones for you - maybe something like management or processes. In gestiones it said "No steps have been found". I think it may be an error or it may be an unfortunate use of the Spanish verb cancelar. It means cancelled but it means cancelled in both directions and finance language is a bit strange. It seems to be that the accounting viewpoint always reflects the situation of the payer. I'm hoping that when the SS tells me that they have cancelled my benefit they mean that they have cancelled t...

When Spaniards talk about electricity, in the house, they talk about light or at least they use the word whose principal English/Spanish dictionary translation is light. Or take tyre; there is a Spanish word for tyre but the commonplace word translates as wheel. It's pretty normal that a word we'd use in English has a direct translation into Spanish but the Spanish and English usages are different. Sometimes we have one word - slice for instance - whilst Spaniards have several and sometimes it's the other way round. I was talking about this with my online tutor this morning. We got onto how words change with situations. It's unlikely that you would use the word piss directly with your doctor and equally improbable that, down the boozer, you'd talk about urine, micturition or passing water with your mates, though you might use the last if you were talking about a drive through the Lake District. The tutor said that he always found funerary language difficult. The w...

There are a lot of flies in Culebrón. There are also plenty of wasps. The most common type in Culebrón don't seem to be quite like the one that stung me in Elland when I was at Junior School. I inadvertently squashed the poor beast as I rested my chin on a low wall to marvel at a Mercedes 220 SE "Fintail" passing by. Mr Kemp, the Headteacher, used an onion from the Harvest Festival display to lesson the considerable pain. I've been stung a couple of times here but, to be honest, I've hardly noticed. Obviously British wasps are tougher. National pride and all that. Anyway, as I said there are lots of wasps. One of the common questions on Facebook, amongst the Britons living here, is how to deal with the hordes of them swooping and hovering over swimming pools. Being poor and poolless our wasps have to make do with drinking from the water bowls that we leave for the cats. Recently the wasps have also been feasting on something growing on the leaves of the fig tre...

Years and years and years ago I got off a train in Almeria as twilight became evening. The train station was a long way from the town centre  and it was a very warm, very sweaty evening. The thing I noticed, as I walked, rather than my dampening clothing, was people sitting out in the street. Generally they were on dining room chairs and deckchairs but some had stately armchairs. It was whole families and the neighbours. Often the telly was on the windowsill facing out.  Nowadays of course only old people watch the telly - well in the traditional broadcast telly way - so nobody would drag their telly into the street. Most likely they'll do without telly all together but I suppose the coerced youngsters can always play with their phones. It was always the relative coolness, the chatting, and maybe a few snacks and a drink, that were important anyway.  I did wonder if it still went on. I mean we've all got aircon nowadays. I've seen people outside in Pinoso but Pinoso is ...