Life in Culebrón

My mum, that's really our mum but I often claim ownership, lives in Cambridge. She's 94 years old and she doesn't remember much. Telephone conversations between us are often very, very short and completely non sequitur because she doesn't really know who's talking to her about what. Most of the responsibility for caring for Mum falls on my sister. I'm happy to believe that the main reason for that is because she lives closest but I know that the real reason is because, between the two traditional sexes, just one usually gets lumbered with anything associated with care. The other has a pressing need to pop down the pub. To salve my conscience, and, I suppose, to see my mum, I've taken to popping over to England to visit her every couple of months. Well, that may be being a bit economical with the truth. I think I've done three trips between December and the first week in March and the next one is planned for May. Because of where Mum lives, I can do the w...

I was thinking about oil the other day. When I say oil, of course, I’m not thinking about Castrol EDGE C1; I mean olive oil. In Spain, you can buy other oils—sesame, corn, Castrol, and so on—but oil, for most purposes, really means olive oil. The oil came to mind because I was in our local winery this week. They have a small supermarket there which features a gourmet section devoted to high-price, high-quality local foodstuffs. One of the star products is olive oil. Good olive oil is made by cold-pressing olives to produce extra virgin olive oil. The best olive oils are monovarietal. The comparison with whisky is obvious. Blended whiskies can be very good, but the experienced tippler is likely to prefer a single malt. Equally, with olive oil, some of the blended, or coupage, oils are very tasty, but if you pay your money, you will end up with single oils made from, for instance,  Arbequina, Picual, Hojiblanca, Manzanilla, Cornicabra, Empeltre, Verdial, Lechín, Riquela, or Blanqueta...

I went to see a magic show last Sunday. I’ve never liked performing or being on stage, and it’s obvious that, in a magic show, some punters are going to be pulled out of the audience to become part of the act. With that in mind, I chose where to sit, hoping the magician would hardly notice me, let alone single me out as the person who supplied him or her with a wristwatch to pulverise or magic rings to test as being forged from pure titanium—and it worked. Dylan hadn’t been so careful. I think he said he was eight years old. Among other things, Dylan had to draw a picture of the magician. Just before he did that, he was asked how good he was at plástica. The answer from young Dylan wasn't a description of his abilities but a simple numerical response: 7 or 8. For me, before I came to Spain, both those answers would have seemed odd. For a start, I’d have expected the question to be how good I was at Art—plástica sounds like something for recycling and, as to my abilities, I would ha...