Life in Culebrón

I don't know if you've noticed but Spain can get quite noisy.  There is a sort of noise that is common in social situations. There are a lot of people, everyone is talking, so to be heard above the general din, one needs to talk more loudly. By degrees the noise level increases so that shouting becomes necessary. It happens in places like restaurants all the time. It is often made worse because, especially around here, the buildings are made of materials that have no sound deadening effect whatsoever and buildings tend to be very echoey. Then there is the sort of noise where people are not competing with the general hubbub, they are competing with each other. Even in a general conversation, Spaniards do not follow the British custom of waiting until one person has finished before they wade in with their point of view, anecdote, or counter-argument. Britons do push a little, conversationally speaking, especially when the debate warms up but, basically, we do our best to take it ...

I only remembered this routine because the date to do it popped up in my diary last Sunday. "Six weeks since I sprayed the palm," it said. We didn't have a palm tree in Huntingdon so I think I can safely say it has a Spanish flavour. The single palm tree we have in Culebrón has grown a couple of metres since we moved in. Our garden is a bit like a concentration camp for plants—it houses mainly the dead and the dying—but the palm tree seems relatively well. Of course, it's menaced, like all palm trees, by the picudo rojo, the palm weevil. The picudo lays eggs in palm trees, and the larvae bore into the palms, eventually killing them. When the town hall first warned of this weevil they also offered programmes to remove infested trees (burning them can spread the weevil), they also recommended a person to check the health, or otherwise, of anyone's trees (I keep calling it a tree but I understand that palms aren't technically trees but some sort of grass-like pla...

This is the fifth, and hopefully the last, in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly. As usual I've attempted to add in the Spanish angle. If there is a culture of car washing on Sunday in Spain, I've never noticed it. Most Spanish towns have by-laws to stop people washing their cars in the street. Most Spaniards live in flats anyway, so their access to the water to wash the car is a bit restricted. Instead they take their motors to a car wash. Even though we have space and water I do too. There are tunnel washes in Spain, the ones with the brushes that tear off aerials and wing mirrors from time to time. We have one in Pinoso and it seems popular. The most common type though are the pressure washers available on the majority of filling station forecourts. Box is the word used by Spaniards for pits in motor racing, and for the bays in the emergency area of a hospital. It also seems to be the most popular word to describe the places that you pre...

This is the fourth in the series about the very ordinary things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in the Spanish angle. This one doesn't quite fit into the "job" bracket but, well self imposed rules are easy to break. If you've ever read any of my blogs, or talked to me, you'll know that I jabber on about my hand to hand combat with Castilian Spanish all the time. My joints may ache, my breathing may suggest that the end is nigh but I'm not giving up indeed I'm working on the principle, so clearly outlined in that old Anglican hymn, Christian answer boldly. While I breathe, I pray.  The impetus to learn Spanish came from the difficulty I had in buying a beer the very first time I visited this country. For years, I didn't really put much formal time into that learning - going to a one hour a week evening class in Spanish at the local tech doesn't really add up to much over the year. The real point of those early years i...

This is the third in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in a Spanish angle. We, well the house, has a cesspit. Nothing sophisticated, just a brick-lined hole in the ground. If we were to try and sell the house we'd have to do something about that. Legislation has changed in the years we've lived here. Now we'd either have to put in a decent septic tank or, more likely, dig a big trench to connect our house to the village drain that stops 200 metres from our front door. All the run-off from the washbasins, sink, showers and toilets goes into that cesspit, the black hole, and microorganisms do the rest.  Lots of the toilets in Spanish bars, museums and the like have signs asking you to throw soiled toilet paper into a wastebasket. But, good Lord, we're British - we couldn't do that. What about the stench, what about the flies? No, we whizz the paper down the toilet and flush. On one occasion, that caused ...

This is the second in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to find a Spanish angle. This is a very small job. Wherever you live there will be a local variation on how you dispose of rubbish. In most Spanish towns and cities people take their rubbish down to containers that are placed strategically around the streets. The hope is that people will separate out the stuff that can be recycled so as not to fill up the generalist bins.  The yellow ones get containers like cans and cartons. the blue ones get paper and card and the green ones get glass. The generalist bins are also green. In some places there are brown bins that get organic waste and around here there are a couple of places that have community compost bins though they have not spread as was once promised. The stuff that isn't organic, or container or paper or glass, goes into the ordinary bin. Theses bins are, usually, emptied late at night in the cities and towns. Pinos...

I suppose, wherever you live, life is full of routine. Depending on your luck those routines might be simple and safe or be hard and even life threatening. Mine are the soft routines of a relatively well off Western European. It's stretching a point to say that these routines are conditioned by living in Spain but that's the premise I'm starting from. I'm sure I'd never have noticed if I hadn't been racking my brains for something to blog about. So, this is the first, with more to come, about the most mundane of some of my weekly tasks. Usually, when I make my weekly trip to the post office there is nothing in our PO box. When we first got here, things we knew had been posted to us used to go astray. The delivery to our rural address was haphazard at best and non existent in reality. That's why we rented a post office box, un apartado de correos. Renting the box for a year in 2005 cost less than 50€; the last time I renewed it the price was 85€. We get almos...