Life in Culebrón

I don't go to doctors much. I don't particularly care for them. Nice enough people I'm sure but I often find that I feel unwell when I talk to them. My habitual worry is that they will tell me that I'm worse than even I imagined. I've been feeling a bit rough recently. Rough enough to go to the doctor. Of course getting to see a doctor at the moment isn't the usual process. The normal routine involves a few key taps on a phone application and then sitting around in a health centre for a long time after your supposed appointment. Not at the moment though, the app only offers phone consultations, so I booked one up.  I think phone appointments with medical people are a good idea. Nobody has to travel, probably the doctors can deal with more people than usual in the same time and, to be honest, I see no reason why the conversational exchange that leads to a diagnosis shouldn't work just as well over the phone as in person. If a show and tell is needed then at ...

The English letter O sounds exactly like you just read it. Oh? Oh! The Spanish letter O sounds completely different - a bit more like the O in otter. It's a simple Spanish sound that we Britons often forget. I live in Pinoso. Now read Pinoso again but this time change the O sound to the one from otter. The coronavirus and Covid both have the letter O in them. I tend to use Covid. Think otter again as you say Covid This word, Covid, is one I learned in Spain. It sounds like the Roman writer Ovid but that only helps if you say Cicero instead of Cicero, or it could be the other way around. Covid is a word I hear on the radio and the TV all the time. So, I'm Skyping to some people in the UK. I say something like "Covid is wreaking havoc with some businesses". The Skypee couple look blank. It was only later that I realised that my pronunciation had, fleetingly, caused confusion. I was aghast. Someone, somewhere on a forum, on Facebook, in Twitter, (but obviously not on Tik...

One of the local, but British, animal charities was collecting food and clothing for the refugees parked on Lesbos. So we popped along with our donation. The same day we went to a Mercadona supermarket in Monóvar where they were also collecting food for the same people. I handed over a few cans of meat and fruit. There's another animal charity in Pinoso. They operate a café to raise money for their work. For a variety of reasons they are in financial difficulties which are principally Covid related. Maggie gave them some cash and we handed over a few things for their second-hand shop. My support for that particular animal charity is somewhat coloured by a training event I went to in the 1990s about funding for charities. A photography project volunteered to be the guinea pigs. The trainer asked what their "mission" was; they were clear and succinct. "To promote good quality photography to the people of Cambridge". We were asked, by the trainer, to suggest ways t...

One of my early blog entries was about Spam . I was probably suffering withdrawal symptoms and I'd just discovered the delights of mortadella. I must like fatty meat products of doubtful provenance because the other day I was attracted to the design on a tin which showed some sort of processed meat. It was called magro and I don't remember having tried it before. Magro is unmistakably similar to Plumrose plopped ham with chalk - if you're old enough you'll remember the TV advert and if you're not your mind will still be nimble enough to work it out. As I sampled the magro I wondered if there was a blog to be written about the Spanish things that had replaced what had been UK staples. Cola-Cao for Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate, Hero bitter orange jam for Robertson's or Frank Cooper's marmalade and so on. No, that wasn't blog material. Far too mundane. Most of it would simply be about trade names. There are some things, the sort of things we occasion...

I don't remember the film title but I do remember the little gasp of horror from the audience as Michael Douglas padded across the room in half light heading for the bathroom. The reason for the concern was that he had a sunken, old man, bottom and, though I haven't dared to look recently, I suppose mine is too. So far as I know I have no chronic illnesses though I know from people around me that your luck can change in seconds. I do often feel old though. Old as I feel the pain in my knees. Old as I realise that I'm gasping for breath after climbing a few stairs. Old as my arms ache after a bit of sawing. My feet hurt all the time, and the tinnitus is really loud. And so on and so forth. I'm getting old. No, let's be right about it, I am old. I know that people around me refer to 45 year olds as middle aged but all I can suppose is that they failed their "O" level sums. Covid, and the responses to it, have kept us all quite hemmed in for a while now. Of...

Today, the 5th, Bonfire Night, has been rainy. Until today, the month had been deep blue skies and temperatures in the high twenties. You don't fool the trees though - it may still be warmer here than most summer days in England but it's Autumn; time for leaves to fall. Raking or sweeping them up has become one of my daily jobs. I collect them in one of the capazos, big, bendy 55 litre buckets. Once they were made of woven esparto grass now they are rubber or plastic. So simple and so useful. There is a lot of fallow land around our house so something as innocuous as fallen leaves are easy to dispose of. Not so with the prunings from our various fruit trees or the mound of fronds left behind after our palm got a long overdue haircut. If I owned a trailer I could haul the prunings to the local tip. Sorry, I shouldn't call it a tip any more. It's an ecopark where they collect, sort and recycle waste. I presume that, at the ecopark, they shred the garden waste for compo...