Life in Culebrón

I don’t know if you remember—or were even aware, in fact—of the Lake Wobegon series by Garrison Keillor. For me, it was a radio programme about a fictional town in Minnesota where, each week, he began by saying, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.” Pinoso is rather like that—quiet. Life here rarely moves at speed. While a few people always seem to be hurrying off to do something “mightily important”, Pinoso generally takes its time. Last week we went to the Christmas concert given by the town band. When it ended, they played the town’s anthem and everyone stood; if I’d been wearing a hat, I’d have taken it off. Perhaps a hand-on-heart moment was called for. Maggie leaned over and whispered, “It’s the Trumpton theme.” I’m sure she meant it fondly. We spent Christmas Eve with friends who live in the centre of Pinoso. They remarked that most of their neighbours live to a grand old age. There were plenty of stories: “Pilar is 93—and remember so-and-so? She lived to be 106.” The longev...

I've written about Christmas in Spain so many times that I thought I'd never cover it again. But at the moment, next to nobody is reading the blog so I thought, why not? It's an easy to write, and timely. It's done without reference to sources. I can imagine having to defend its content line by line with most Spaniards; it's a personal take. No doubt errors abound. It's begun, of course. The lights are up in the streets, the municipal nativity scenes are in place, Mariah is singing and Lidl Christmas adverts are on the telly. But the festivities haven't really begun yet—if we don't count the work shindigs and the end of course meals for clubs and classes—because, as you know, any Spanish event, to be worthy of its salt, has to involve eating. Go to the beach and you need a picnic with the rolls wrapped in albal silver paper. Go hiking up a mountain and there may be no mention of stout shoes but there will be a three line whip on taking your almuerzo (lat...

I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure there’s been a bit of an upsurge in Valenciano speaking in Pinoso lately. It feels as if more young people are using it as their first language than they did just a few years ago. Of course, it could simply be that I’ve become better at recognising it—or that I’m eavesdropping more now that my leisure-time activities are shrinking along with my physical capacity.   There’s definitely an institutional push, too. The local council has been using Valenciano more and more. Only the other day, Pinoso Town Hall launched a new Facebook page—its title is in Valenciano: Ajuntament del Pinós. I wouldn’t be surprised if before long Pinoso, or El Pinós if you prefer, follows Monòver’s example and goes fully Valenciano. Monòver even changed all its road signs to Valencian versions of village names. To be fair, those were probably the original ones, though that assumes Valenciano speakers named the towns in the first place. In reality, waves of migration ...

A little while ago, I blethered on about how impressed I’d been by one of those online language-learning platforms driven by AI. This post is a bit more on AI tools and learning a language—Spanish in my case. For a while now, I’ve tried to motivate myself to squeeze in just ten minutes of Spanish vocabulary every day. It’s ages since I've sat down in front of a grammar book and ploughed through the unremitting grind of learning verb tables or trying to understand demonstrative pronouns, but I decided that trying to increase my vocabulary was reasonable enough. And I still look up the odd grammar point from time to time. The adverts on Facebook and Insta insist that such things are unnecessary, and, much as I'd like to agree, I can't. Learning a language is, I think, one vast memory exercise. Obviously there are principles to understand, but language learning isn't driven by principles in the way that maths or chemistry is. Language is logical only to a point. There’s no...