Life in Culebrón

I well remember our first ever fiesta in Culebrón. After the Saturday evening meal, under the pines, outside the social centre, the activity shifted to the paved square where there was a stage for the "orquesta," the showband so typical of Spanish small-town fiestas. As soon as we arrived at the square, I headed for the bar to beat the rush. There never was a rush; people went to the bar, but getting some booze down their necks didn't have the same urgency as it seems to have for us Britons. It's the same when a drink is finished; I, or we, go for another, but Spaniards don't worry too much about getting the next one in. They'll get around to it in a while. I presume we Britons still say that Spaniards don't get drunk, or at least that it's very unusual to see them falling-down drunk. Point Britons at free or cheap booze and we will—at least I will—and I've always thought of myself as the person on the Clapham Omnibus, take advantage. I used to com...

My sister said that my nephew reads my blogs. He's just about to set off to Colorado because his new wife has a job there. So here's one to send him and her on their way. Just for those who haven't been keeping up, I have throat cancer. The Spanish healthcare system is looking after me. However, because the Region of Valencia is being run by a very right-wing local government, one of the insidious little side effects seems to be that lots of patients are being passed for care in the private sector. I suppose they natter as they play golf together. Of course, I may be completely wrong. It may be because the private hospitals have more capacity or because they're doing lots of two-for-one offers. The private hospital is for the radiotherapy. The thing where they strap me to a table and direct particle beams at the cancer in my throat and neck. The idea is that the rays damage the bad cancer cells but that my other cells are strong enough to fight back. Or at least that...

I was backing up the computer last week and there wasn't a single new photo to add to the photo album. This is distinctly odd. It means that I didn't go anywhere or do anything away from the daily routine. It's true my life is a bit off kilter at the moment and I wasn't much in the mood for galavanting but nothing? It also set me thinking about some of the things that we have done over the years Tourism accounts for nearly 13% of the Spanish Gross Domestic Product—cars, the main Spanish export, account for about 10%, and agriculture just a tad under 9%. Tourism is becoming a problem in Spain, not really because of the tourists, but because of the people who make the most profit from them. In places like Barcelona, Mallorca, and Málaga, there is so much money to be made out of tourists that investment funds and the like have got in on the act. They buy up a block of flats to let out to tourists—if people have to be evicted in the process, so be it—because they make stack...

I left the last blog when I had done two or three sessions of radiotherapy down in Alicante at the private Perpetuo Socorro hospital. The chemotherapy in Elda still hadn't started because I am, apparently, veinless, and they couldn't find a way to get their chemicals into my blood. On Thursday of last week, they sorted that out by installing more permanent access to my bloodstream via a probe that leads to bigger, better veins in my chest. The same day, they spent four hours, first pumping saline into me, to make sure I was hydrated, and then pumping in some chemicals which, in my layman's understanding, are designed to be powerful enough to kill off nasty cancerous cells but not quite violent enough to kill me. It's all a bit of a faff. Lots of the days have been exceptions for one reason or another, but the process is something like this. I am scheduled for 33 sessions of radiotherapy. There is one session on each working day. I did number five today, so by my reckoni...

So, we left the story with me in hospital, being fed on gruel and camomile tea, having had a stomach tube fitted. The hospital kicked me loose on Monday with only two scheduled appointments for the week at that time: one with a nutritionist and the other with a cancer doctor, an oncologist—both in Elda. Because not everyone has the advantage of living in Culebrón, I should say that our local health centre in Pinoso (5 km away) is linked to Elda Hospital (25 km away), but sometimes, for specialist services, patients are sent all over the place. The hospital I'm going to in Alicante for the radiotherapy, Perpetuo Socorro, is a private hospital about 55 km from home. The nutritionist was a bit of a hoot. She gave us a box with 30 tubes to connect my stomach feeding tube to a pouch full of a Complan type food. That box was bulky but light. She also gave me a scrip for the feeding pouches, and the bloke in the chemist offered me a sack trolley to take those to the car. He also showed me...

For Maggie, my partner's, birthday this year we went for a weekend in the Parador in Sigüenza. A Parador is, basically, a posh hotel. Paradores de Turismo de España, is a state-owned commercial company, its sole shareholder being a government department. Paradores were originally conceived, in the first couple of decades of the last century, as a way of promoting tourism in areas that lacked adequate accommodation. The idea was to open up an area, particularly to well off tourists, with a particular eye on the developing motorist market. The first Parador was built in the Gredos Mountains from scratch, on a site chosen by the then King, Alfonso XIII.  Soon after this first landmark opening some bright spark came up with the idea of converting unused large historic buildings to work as the hotels which would also help maintain the national heritage as well as being attractive to tourists. At the same time, another government committee began the construction of the new Albergues de C...