Life in Culebrón

I wrote about the Pinoso Book Club, El Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas, only a year ago but that's not going to stop me doing it again. The group is named for a local teacher and poet - well loved and still missed. You may have seen the poetry competition named after her. It also just happens to be her centenary this year. The club is organised by the Pinoso public library, which is housed in the Centro Cultural - the modern building halfway up el Paseo de la Constitución, next to the Indian restaurant. Like the majority of book clubs I've heard of, the plot is simple. The group reads the same book. I don't actually mean that - we have more than one. I thought to change the sentence to read that we all read similar books, but that doesn't work either. So I'll take it that you know what I mean. Anyway, after reading a book, the group comes together and comments on it. We have some, nominal, say about books for inclusion in the next "course," but really, the li...

We went to see the Bob Dylan concert in Alicante yesterday. I'm not a big fan but I have to accept that the man's a living legend, a Nobel Prize winner. How could I not go if he was just down the road? After all, there may not be many more opportunities to see him, given that he's not exactly a spring chicken. Besides, the ticket price wasn't bad. Overall, it seemed like a good idea. I even bought the album for the tour, Rough and Rowdy Ways, so that I'd recognise the songs. So, we saw him. I thought the concert was terrible. It reminded me of another concert we went to back in around 2005. That was Van Morrison, and he was at Terra Mitica just outside Benidorm. In both cases, we were a long way from the stage. In both cases, the artists played their songs and hardly acknowledged the crowd. In both cases, the stage lighting was just so they could see, not so we could see them. There was no sort of light show. In both cases, the audience seemed secondary to the perfo...

I mentioned last week that we tend towards the things that we grew up with. I was thinking about this again when we went to a British shop to buy sausage. I'll explain later. At any traditional till in a Spanish supermarket, particularly in rural areas, you will notice that the person in front, generally, has ingredients and not the finished product. We're not talking extremes. Spaniards buy crisps, not raw potatoes. It's very unlikely though that they would buy a ready made lasagne. They cook from the raw materials. There are nowhere near as many packets, cans and jars of prepared foods as there are in the UK. I've been making the midday meal for a while using a British cookery book. The book often lists a packet of this or a jar of that as one of the ingredients. As those packets and jars are not available I have to buy individual ingredients to simulate the packet or the can that the recipe suggests. Sometimes it simply has to be a substitute because, Jim Lovell and ...

Now when we first arrived here, and ever since, I determined not to be too British. I am British, I will always be British. I'm fine with being British. I understand why Britons living in Spain watch Eastenders, why we still get our news from tried and tested sources "back home," why we continue to eat at "sensible" times. In short why our reference points are the systems we were brought up with. Nonetheless, living in Spain, I thought I should find out about the place and try to merge into the background. Of course, you, one, can't. I don't do socks and sandals but I'm obviously British. If I'd had children here, they would have been a different class of Briton. They'd watch the same TikTok as their contemporaries in school, they'd read the same comics, not see anything strange about pizza carbonara, like the same brands of biscuits and speak the same language as their peers. They might speak my language too and even have a British passp...

I don't know if you were made to read Shakespeare at school. I was. Shakespearean characters drink lots of wine. The wine they drank would be like a wine that is, nowadays, produced in just a handful of bodegas here in Alicante province. It's called Fondillón. I like it. It's price shot up when hordes of pesky wine reviewers discovered it and gave it big points scores so it's a while since I tasted it. In the distant past a standard form of vineyard tenancy agreement lasted as long as the original vines were still in production. Vines produce fewer grapes over time so growers uproot old vines and plant anew. To maintain their lease the growers left some of the original vines in place. These old, tired plants were hardly worth harvesting so, by the time the grapes were cut from the vines, they had withered and were raisin like. Fondillón is made from monastrell grapes. Fondillón has to have at least 16% volume of alcohol. To the casual drinker Fondillón has similarities ...