Life in Culebrón

This is a post about Covid. First though one of our cats has been missing for nearly three days. Bea, Beatriz, was the cat that I most expected to die of old age; a bit of a homebody, an easy going girl that gets/got on with all of the other cats. We have no idea where she is - gone walkabout for some reason, carried off by an eagle, poisoned by a wicked witch or squashed by a car. Nothing is too theoretically outrageous because we know nothing. Cats can disappear for days and then re-appear, that's what we're hoping for. Generally though ours don't come back. I know very little about Covid 19. I have no idea why it is that Spain has incredibly high case figures and Burundi, the Seychelles and Laos have next to none. I've heard lots of "explanations" as to why we're in such a pickle from regional pride and too much hugging to irresponsible young people and an inability to count. I've read how the Swedes handled it well and how the Swedes got it compl...

Around 1975 I went to my branch of the Midland Bank and asked them for an Access card. Credit cards were pretty uncommon then. My bank turned me down as one of the great unwashed, a person without a job. There was another bank that offered Access at the time, probably the NatWest, and being persistent I went there to ask about getting a card. They suggested I applied for a Barclaycard instead. So I filled in the form, using a Biro, posted it off to somewhere and, several weeks later, got a nice shiny Barclaycard back. 22nd October  2020 and Barclaycard have just closed down that account. I can't use it after today. Not because I'm in debt but because they are cleaning up their European business before the UK finally abandons the Union. I forget what they told me about why they were closing me down. It was something to do with it becoming more expensive of trickier to do business with Europe when they ceased to be a member of the club. I've had a Spanish credit card since ...

This morning I was talking to a Sergio. As we got ready to go he said he was off for his breakfast. Get yourself some toast with avocado I quipped. This is because I've recently become aware that avocado on toast is a trendy Spanish breakfast. Sergio quipped back - with peanut butter and mango eh? One advantage or disadvantage of using Skype to speak to someone is that you see them. I obviously looked confused. Sergio stayed online to say that Social Media Influencers, had been responsible for a huge run on those products in the recent past. He specifically mentioned a 100% peanut peanut butter sold by the Mercadona supermarket chain. I had a look for Sergio's Internet Influencers by searching for peanut butter and I found them. I found several as you might expect but one bloke, Carlos Ríos, who shows 1.4 million followers on his Realfooding Instagram , popped up time and time again. He was quoted in lots of magazine and newspaper articles. Not that I really read any of the a...

I was doing the Spanish conversation thing with Ana, via Skype. We were talking about Culebrón. I could see she had the wrong idea. I wondered if I'd ever written about the place we live in a general sense. I didn't bother to check in case I had. No point in wasting an idea no matter how moderate. We're in the province of Alicante one of the three that make up the Valencian Community. Benidorm is in Alicante to help you locate yourself. Alicante City, our provincial capital, is about 50 minutes away.  Our municipality, Pinoso, is well inland, the last town in Alicante before crossing over the border into the Region of Murcia. Pinoso is nothing like Benidorm.  If you turn left on the main road that runs close to our house you can reach Pinoso town centre in about five minutes, ten minutes and you'll be in the Region of Murcia. Turn right instead and, within fifteen minutes you'll be in Monóvar town centre. Ten more minutes in the distance from Monóvar you can see E...

I read a book last week. In it a young woman has moved to the country, to a small village in the middle of nowhere Spain. She's thinking community and tranquillity. She rents a house and the first thing that she asks her landlord is if he knows someone who might have a dog for her. I was reminded of one of Maggie's stories. Maggie worked with a woman in Madrid who had a Spanish partner. The couple decided to move to the countryside and one of the requisites, one of the first things to do, according to Maggie's friend, was to get a "brute of a dog". In the book the landlord palms the young woman off with one of his own dodgy dogs. Like all good country Spaniards the landlord thinks that it's cruel and unusual to sterilize a pet. The newcomer is from the city though and she takes the dog, for sterilization, to the nearest vet. The description of the vet's office is of a dusty and run down place where the vet is reading his phone and where there are no clie...

As well as the post box, the bodega, and Jason and Patricia's B&B , Culebrón has a restaurant. The restaurant is called Casa Eduardo because it's run by Eduardo with his wife, Maria Luisa, and nowadays, their son Sergio. To be honest the business used to be pretty moribund but it appears to have bounced back from the number of motors I see parked outside. The usual explanation is that the son added a bit of sparkle. I've always liked Eduardo's but Maggie is less of a fan. That said there's absolutely nothing to stop me from popping over for elevenses or even getting an odd beer when Maggie's out working but I don't, at least not frequently enough. Eduardo was talking to me quite a while ago now about Sunday mornings. He told me the restaurant had to be open at some ungodly hour for the hunters to get their breakfasts. Hunting is big in Spain. In season you can hear the shotguns going off from dawn to dusk and the abandonment of the hunting dogs when th...

I've been to Skegness and Morecambe and Rochester several times but if Star Trek's Mr Scott were to transport me to one of them without warning I don't think I'd know where I were. It's exactly the same with Spanish towns and cities. Of the 50 Spanish provinces I've been to 49 of their capitals but the only ones I know well are the local ones. The one I'm missing is Palencia. In order to be a completist though I'm also short of one of the two autonomous cities on the African coast; I've been to Ceuta but not to Melilla. Last week we went on a bit of a jaunt, 1,979 kilometres of mainly motorway plugging passing through 15 or so provinces. The plan was simple enough. Up to a village included in the 20 prettiest villages of Spain list for the first night, a village in Huesca more or less on the French border with views to the snowy Pyrenees. Next a couple of nights in Pamplona, the place where they do the bull running with the red and white clothes a ...

Sixteen years ago today, on 7 October 2004, I parked up in Santa Pola having travelled the 1,349 miles from Huntingdon behind the wheel of a 1977 MGB GT. My travelling companion was a black and white cat called Mary. Our destination was the flat where Maggie had been living for over a month whilst she worked as a teacher in nearby Elche. The journey took two days and cost 200€ in fuel, 120€ in tolls, 55€ for accommodation and just 25€ in food. Now, if anyone had asked, I'd have sworn that on the first full day in Spain I went and signed on the equivalent of the Council Tax Register, the padrón. In fact my diary tells me otherwise. The only interesting thing I did that first day was to go, with Maggie, to a Spanish class that she'd booked us in to. It seems I didn't get around to signing on the padrón till the week after. Even then it wasn't my first bit of officialdom - apparently I'd managed to get a social security number a few hours before. Strange how memories b...