Life in Culebrón

Going to the pictures in Spain is a bit sad at the moment. The cinemas are just so quiet. The reports say 35% down on pre pandemic figures. I suppose that when everyone was locked in their homes they subscribed to Apple TV or Netflix or Filmin. At that time the film makers and distributors thought, well, if anyone is going to see my film then I have to put it on HBO or Amazon Prime or the Disney Channel and the rest. So film making is healthy enough, lots of product, but with many releases going direct to platforms or having very short cinema runs. Although I go to the flicks a lot, I go at unpopular times. Not for me the crush of Saturday evening but, more usually, the peace of Tuesdays. Even then the fall off in numbers is noticeable. I've been in cinemas where, so far as I can tell, there are no other customers in the whole building. Tuesday is favourite because the nearest cinema to Culebrón, the Yelmo in Petrer, does its original language films then. It's become a habit s...

I have my little ways. When the sun's shining and I'm sitting outside a bar I like to drink cold beer. I tend to ask for tercios, the beer bottles which contain a third of a litre, hence the word tercio, a third. I started with bottles because they hold a definite amount, unlike glasses which can vary quite a bit from bar to bar. Especially when driving is on the cards I like to know how much I am drinking. Nowadays there is also much more variety in beer styles in bottles than on draught. I don't care for those smaller bottles, the botellín or quinto. Logically, with quinto meaning a fifth, they hold a fifth of a litre. Neither fish nor fowl. The most usual way to ask for a draught beer is to ask for a caña. One of the reasons for drinking cañas, rather than, say, buying and sharing a litre bottle, is that beer warms up quickly in the Mediterranean sun and most Spaniards like their beer cold, cold, cold. Caña is an imprecise and yet detailed way to describe a specific glas...

I really couldn't think of a topic for this week. So, disconnected jottings. I consider we live in a reasonably rural situation so I was a bit surprised when, this morning, a Guardia Civil car, ablaze with lights and horns, shot past our house. The dirt track peters out another three or four hundred metres up the hill so I went to see where they were going. The car did a left foot/handbrake turn about 200 metres past our gate, sped past the house again, going the other way, and did a sliding turn to the left. Sixty seconds later they were back. They roared off to whatever it was that they didn't know how to find.  It made me ponder the things that pass our house. A couple of weeks ago we had a small lorry, with a hydraulic platform on the back. The driver assured me he wasn't lost. Too early on Sunday morning a very clunky bucket excavator trundled up the track in the thick mist presumably to root out the de-branched apricot trees. Cars and vans, homeowners and their frien...

A couple of chums were talking about buying their weekly Euromillones (EuroMillions) ticket. I asked after their Christmas lottery purchases. They sort of knew what I meant but they sort of didn't. I saw an opening for a blog. Just to be even handed O.N.C.E., the organisation for people with a visual impairment, run a Christmas lottery and there's a State lottery, el Niño, to coincide with Three Kings. I'm sure they are all fine and dandy but the one that counts, the big one, is the fat one - el Gordo - drawn on 22 December. In truth, el Gordo isn't quite so fat. A winning ticket is worth 4 million euros. The thing that most people buy though isn't a ticket, it's a decimo; a tenth of a ticket. If you buy a ticket from one of the State Lottery Administraciones and you pay 20€ for it then you have a decimo.  If you want to have a go you will see the ticket/decimos (I'm going to stop that now) on sale all over the place. As well as in the lottery administration...