Life in Culebrón

I'm not too keen on walking for fun. I especially dislike those uphill sections as they make me wheeze and cough. I have no problem at all with walking as a means of transport but I don't think of it as a pastime. Pop me down in a strange town and I'll trot around happily. Now most of my friends and pals don't agree with me. They think walking is healthy, fun and free. They even list it as a hobby; like collecting stamps, singing in a choir or spending hours watching Instagram videos. They buy sticks and specialist clothing and footwear. These people can be persuasive. They offer a destination with beer as an incentive. I am sometimes, very rarely, persuaded. I wonder what the fuss is about. Green and brown colour scheme, lots of pines, a bit of esparto grass maybe some rosemary and the occasional hare or hoopoe. I am impressed by the solidarity of the walkers though. Often, when I've been tricked into walking in the countryside, maybe in a natural park or near some...

Last century, when Windows 98 was cutting-edge technology and when mobiles were big and analogue, I was in Mexico. I'd gone into a locutorio, a place to rent a computer with an internet connection for a few minutes. The Mexican keyboard layout was quite different to the British keyboard I was used to. The QWERTY letters were as they should be but the symbols were in different places. What's more the keyboard had done a fair few miles and lots of the keys were as highly polished as as the stairs of the spiral staircase in a medieval castle. I needed the @ symbol for an email address and I had to resort to Ctrl C and Ctrl V, cut and paste. I was reminded of this the other day when I had to use a computer with a British keyboard layout - I spent ages staring at the strange layout when I wanted a / or a #, but the final nudge to write this blog came when the passport office refused to accept my address as being Caserío Culebrón. They didn't like the tilde, the accent over the i...

Especially in the dark they can seem like little islands of human activity lost in the fastness of the night. They're usually nameless, at least at first. There's probably a bit of confusion as you drop off the motorway because you're not quite sure where to park up and the car controls, that you haven't used much, at least for the past couple of hours, prove a little awkward. You don't know quite where you are even though you know where you've been and where you're going and when you do finally get inside, into the artificial light, it's all a bit bright after hours of only peering into oncoming headlights.  The Spanish call them restaurantes, or bares, de carretera. Like Transport cafés in the UK they have a certain aura of mystique. Sometimes it's for the decor, I remember being told about Casa Pepe at Despeñaperros, famous for its Nationalistic and Francoist decor, but generally the idea is that whilst these places may be a bit rough and ready so...

Anís is an aniseed flavoured alcoholic drink - it's the Spanish equivalent of French pastis, Greek ouzo, Italian sambuca or Turkish raki. Before beer became the Spanish man's drink of choice the typical libation for working men was either wine or anís. Anís is usually taken with water, which means that it's a good summer drink - plenty of alcohol and plenty of volume.  Obviously enough, varying the proportion of water to booze gives you a range of strengths and a range of lengths. With water the clear anís turns cloudy white so the local Spanish name for it, paloma, like a white dove, is reasonably obvious. There's a lemon flavoured, yellow coloured, version of anís too. With water we get a canario. No translation required I suspect. If it's good for summer, it's also good for winter - a splash of anís in your first coffee of the day helps take off that morning chill. Being old and paunchy, I still drink Spanish anís from time to time. I prefer the dry to the sw...