Life in Culebrón

The Pinoso Pensioners’ Club has a WhatsApp group. At times I wonder if the the application is totally under the organiser's control but the messages are often interesting. Anyway, a few days ago, there were a few lines on it exhorting me to join in with the upcoming Merienda de Pascua (Easter Picnic) at the Club HQ. The message suggested I pick up my wicker basket, load up on monas , get out my typical apron and headscarf, and come to share my victuals with my friends – to keep alive an old tradition. Now, I have to say that I don’t like it when I don’t know stuff like this. What aprons? What baskets? I did know about monas . They’re a version of toñas  and a  toña is a sort of sweet bread presented as a rounded loaf, some 20 cm across. I understand that one of the odd things about the toña is that it includes potato in the mix. The mona – which would usually translate as a female monkey – is the same sort of bread but with a hard-boiled egg set into it. Often, the eggs ...

I was going through my hat collection with a view to throwing a few away. I came across an obvious candidate; a fluorescent Caja Rural baseball cap. It was a pale imitation of the original Caja Rural baseball caps (as in the photo here) that were briefly trendy among urban hipsters as a sort of cipher for their claim to family roots in a bucolic rural past.  I was thinking about these hats as I talked to my AI Spanish application. Billy-no-mates that I am, I've quite taken to talking to this gadget on my phone. One of the things I like is that, as well as practising my Spanish, the AI is backed by the internet so it knows all sorts of things. It makes for a strangely informed conversation. I asked if it were true about Caja Rural hats and  if there were other things that were everyday and boring but considered to be very typically Spanish. It came up with botijos, porrones, botas de vino and abanicos. It just so happens that we went to an open day at a pottery museum in Agost ...

Villena is a town forty minutes up the road from Pinoso. It's a town I like: there's often something going on there. The theatre is lovely, there's a train station in town and another, the quietest AVE station in Spain, in a field near enough to be called Villena and, of course, it has 22 kilos of Bronze Age gold—the Villena Treasure. And if none of those are enough, then Ferri, the huge ironmongers, is really good for any unreformed men with all those tool belts and strange bits of machinery. I also find the occasional mispronunciation of the name quite amusing; when I think that someone is off to the Austrian capital rather than popping up the road for a new pool pump. Anyway, I'm listening to Nieves Concostrina doing one of her little history slots on the radio. She's talking about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 with her usual mix of dry humour and anticlerical sarcasm. It's pretty obvious from her description that the two kingdoms that would la...

My sister-in-law is, apparently, learning French. She and my sister, who is learning Russian, were talking about Duolingo, the telephone and computer language learning app. I really don't care for Duolingo in Spanish—it's too strict, too dogmatic and often arguably wrong. I was once asked, in a schoolboy quiz, how many sides a threepenny bit had. I was on top of that obvious trick; everyone knew there were 12 sides, but there were two more—the heads and tails—making 14. I showed I'd caught onto their little trick by putting my answer as 12+2=14. "No," said the quiz setter—"12." An injustice that still rankles 62 years later. If that quiz setter were not dead, he'd work for Duolingo. Lynn—for that's my sister-in-law's name—said that it wasn't the general stuff but the artificial intelligence bit that she actually liked. She said she had conversations and did spoken grammar exercises with Duolingo AI. I've seen the adverts, of course, b...