Life in Culebrón

We were in a restaurant last week. The food was reasonable enough as was the price. At first the service was good but, despite repeated efforts to draw a waiter's attention, it took us around 25 minutes to get the after food coffee. This has happened a lot recently. Waiting table in Spain used to be a well respected profession. That seems to be less so nowadays and, in my opinion, service has worsened over the years. This made me wonder about other things that have changed since we moved here. My guess is that some of the changes have nothing much to do with Spain, just to do with the world. After all in our first rented flat the Internet was dial up - the modem connected to the phone socket and there was a lot of squealing and singing as it connected. It didn't matter much because there were hardly any Spanish websites that functioned properly anyway.  Ringing people in the UK used to be an expensive or relatively difficult process. I remember that nearly all of we immigrants ...

I went to get a flu jab today. Not the trickiest of procedures. The first time I did it here I was in a hospital for something else and there was a bloke giving away free vaccine in the hospital entrance so I stopped and got one. Last year, in the dark days of one of the several waves of Covid, the health centre was in silence and I was severely disinfected and made to follow arrows on the floor which pointed to the young woman with the sharp needle. I've got the jab another couple of times as well and the process has been swift and painless (in both senses). I'd booked up my jab using the health service's mobile phone app. Ten past ten. I rolled up at nine minutes past and asked someone on reception where to go. She waved to the seats where lots of people were waiting. I waited and I waited. I had a bit of a chat with Enrique and a much longer one with Dorothy. It began to get stupid. I went over and collared someone wearing white pyjamas. "No idea," she said, ...

Lots of Spaniards find my name difficult to pronounce and so they tend to Hispanicize it. I'm Crees-toff-air. I know that Ruth gets Root and I know at least one person who generally uses his name in the Spanish form, Ricardo rather than Richard. He says it's easier than repeatedly correcting the mispronunciation.  Sometimes, of course, there is pure racism in the mispronunciation of a name, as in the case of Trump supporters and Kamala Harris or the renaming of someone because their name is "unpronounceable". Suggesting that a name is unsayable is a not too subtle form of belittling people by belittling the culture they come from. Last year's Twitter storm over the University teacher who suggested to Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen that she anglicised her name, because it sounded like an insult in English, comes to mind. Anyway, although the politics of names might be an interesting post let's get back to where I started.  I was doing one of my online italki sessions thi...

In the 1970s I wore cheesecloth shirts and loons. I don't now. Looking back I shouldn't have then. In the film Beau Brummel, the one with Stewart Granger and Elizabeth Taylor, Beau caused a bit of a sensation when he appeared at court wearing full-length trousers rather than knee breeches and stockings. Watching the Pinoso Half Marathon it struck me that the competitors were wearing clothes that would have been outlandish at best, and scandalous at worst, not so long ago. Fashions change as they always have. If not I'd be dressed like Francis Drake or Somerset Maughan and Inditex and Primark would be customerless. Despite this constant change lots and lots of events in Spain feature something that we tend to call traditional dress. I was reminded of this when we went to see the start of a romería in Yecla the other day. There was no traditional costume there but it was something traditional, the repetitive, apparently unchanging ritual of rural, and not so rural, Spain. One...

In time honoured fashion I used to start every English teaching session with questions. You know the sort of thing. What have you done this weekend?, What did you have for breakfast? As an answer to the second question I was surprised how many youngsters told me that, if they had anything and most didn't, they had milk. Then I realised that, when they said milk, they meant chocolate flavoured milk. Nesquik for instance. A Spanish tradition is chocolate with churros. We Brits usually describe churros as being like doughnuts except that they are made with a different dough and have a different taste but it's close enough. It's a typical breakfast in lots of Spain, a popular treat and it's a particular favourite on Sunday mornings. It's also one of those things that young people do at five or six in the morning after a night on the town. The churros are nearly always served with a thick, sugary, chocolate drink. We have an Industrial Estate in Pinoso. It's like tho...