Life in Culebrón

I'm sure you know that in the local elections here in Pinoso yesterday (28 May) Lazáro, the current Mayor and his socialist PSOE party, hung on to power with 8 seats. There were 3 seats for the right of centre Partido Popular and 2 seats for  the far right Vox. At the Regional level the Socialists lost control of the Valencian government. In general the PSOE took a pasting, as did the far left Unidas Podemos, with all its many variant names. Today the Spanish President/Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a General Election for July 23rd. Unless you are Spanish or Nationalised Spanish then you won't have a vote. We foreigners generally only get to vote locally. I saw this summing up of the situation on Twitter. It was written, in Twitter like style, by a bloke called Michael Reid. He mentions his book at the end so, given I've pinched his article I left the book plug in. I thought it was pretty good. I might not agree 100% but as a summing up in 450 words or so it's exce...

When, as a student, I had to decide between putting petrol in my car or eating, the answer was obvious. I'd keep going for a while, the car wouldn't. Besides someone might give me food, nobody gave me petrol. The sort of cars I bought were cheap and unreliable. I spent hours messing with bits I didn't really understand. I was expert in stripping threads, drawing blood as I worked and dancing from side to side, dying to go to the toilet, but with oil stained hands determined to finish before the light failed. Those cars had carburettors and points and lots of things to twiddle. It's ages since I've done anything other than check pressures or liquid levels on a car. Nowadays I pay for someone else, someone with a stronger bladder, to do it. My current car tells me when it wants something. In fact it demands. The warnings for the 60,000 km oil change came on 2,000 km before. When I booked the car in they gave me a date three weeks hence. Today was hence. Oil change, a ...

It's local and regional election day next Sunday, the 28th, and the local politicians are doing the rounds. This post came about as a result of one of the meetings I went to. We got the usual sort of presentation from politicians on the hustings - lauding their party's past record and future plans with the occasional disparaging side comment about the meagre offer of the other parties.  My Spanish coherency seems to be on hold at the moment and even my understanding is faltering. I'm hoping for a comeback but the slough has been a long and depressing one. So, as the politicians spoke, I only just kept up with the patter. Then came a comment which gave space for a local question. The meeting turned into a bunfight - claim and counterclaim, suggestion and rejection. Red faces and aggressive body language. I lost the detail completely but the broad stroke of the conversation was easy and it wasn't friendly. In the Anthropocene past I used to run community buildings and my ...

We were in a bar in Alicante the other day and there were newspapers on sticks. The rods slide along the spine of the newspaper which makes them easy to hang from a wall frame. The frame keeps the papers neat and organised. It also makes it more difficult to sidle out, unnoticed, with a stolen newspaper. It was the first one I've seen for years. It made me wonder about other things that have largely disappeared since I first started wandering around Spain. It also made me feel very old as the first time I came to Spain was over forty years ago. To be honest lots of the changes are just universal European changes - the disappearance of things like fax machines, floppy discs, dial telephones and typewriters. Some though are much more Spanish. The first thing that came to mind, and where else but in a bar, was the floor sized waste bin. Bars were places for men. Women wouldn't be idling around in a bar, instead they'd be at home wearing one of those wrap around aprons getting ...

Back in 2017 I was on the cuesta, the slope, in Caravaca, the crowd parted, as it does, to let the horse and handlers through. Peering through the viewfinder of the camera I saw no danger but the bloke behind me yanked me back and let loose a load of verbal abuse about death and injury. The photos were a bit blurred too. So this year I decided to be sensible and I went early enough to bag a spot on the castle wall looking down to where the horses run.  The photos were in focus, the viewpoint was safe and I was able to talk to a family from Llano de Brujas who were leaning on the same wall  But after about ten horses had run past I thought I'd have a bit of a wander and see if I could get some nice, safe, snaps of the horses as they arrived at the top of the hill. It was the first time I'd done that. Interesting. Injured horse handlers, crying horse handlers, girlfriends greeting their hero horse handlers. The horses looked happier too now that nobody was poking them with a sti...

UNESCO produces a list of things of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Flamenco is on the list, so are baguettes.  Dry Stone walling is on the list too - it got there after flamenco but before baguettes. You may think a blog about dry stone walling could be a bit "dry" but if the UN says that dry stone is one of things that makes all our lives richer then I think it's incumbent on us to believe them. Dry stone involves building things with stones that are not bound together with mortar. The things don't fall down because the stones are naturally interlocked or because of the use of load bearing structures. Dry stone techniques use rough, field, stones. So, for instance, Inca temples built without mortar but with dressed stone are not considered to be dry stone structures. Wherever you come from I'm sure you know dry stone structures.  Dry stone is most commonly used to build boundary walls but the technique can be used to construct anything from a way marker to a corra...