Life in Culebrón

Do you know what a calco is? In Spanish, it means a carbon copy or a direct translation. It’s what happens when you take a phrase in English and translate it word for word into Spanish. Sometimes that works perfectly well, but more often it ends up sounding slightly odd to a Spanish ear—just as it does when the same thing happens the other way round. One I always forget is when, in a shop, someone asks if I need help and I reply with the direct translation of “I’m fine, thanks”. Perfectly acceptable in English, but slightly puzzling for the salesperson in El Corte Inglés, who may wonder why I’ve suddenly decided to comment on my state of health. Another common example is saying “I can’t swim”, at which point the Spaniard you’re with might start wondering why they’d never noticed your prosthetic leg or the tiny breathing apparatus you’ve been discreetly carrying around. If, instead, you said you didn’t know how to swim, it would make perfect sense. And one I hear all the time is “Is it ...

Last week passed without a blog post because, quite simply, I couldn’t think of a thing to write about. It isn’t that we’ve been idle—we’ve been out to concerts, we've done guided walks, watched parades, we've eaten out a lot and joined guided walks—but lately, everything has felt like well-trodden ground. I’ve reached that point where the local scenery is so familiar that I feel I’ve already told its story. The few ideas I did have felt like repetitions of earlier posts. Most of them centred on language learning, which remains my primary concern once the "real" problems of life are out of the way. I am still constantly appalled by my inability to construct an error-free conversation in Spanish; I inevitably notice the mistakes more than the successes. Although I’ve already cancelled my subscription and plan to take a month off from talking to the AI voice—ingeniously named Miguel—that has been my main form of Spanish learning for the past few months. It has begun to ...

I soon get itchy feet if I’ve spent too many days around the house. Fortunately, there’s nearly always something going on close to where we live to cheer me up. One of the advantages—drawn directly from the disadvantage of living a fair way from anywhere—is that we don’t look to just one source for our “what-to-dos”. If I lived in Alicante, Madrid, or Murcia, I’d expect there to be something going on just around the corner or a short bus ride away. Here, where there are no buses and driving to the larger cities requires a real commitment, it’s a matter of picking and choosing from all the towns and villages around us. We often go to concerts, theatre, exhibitions, and various other events, but one of the oddities of Spain, at least for me, is that the place is cram-packed with fiestas. Fiestas are not just "events"; there might be a big music festival or a sporting event, but that is not a fiesta. Now, if you live here, you know full well what a fiesta is, but for those who d...

I normally do a roundup of the Pinoso population whenever the town hall releases the latest padrón figures—the official register of all local residents. This usually happens in late January, but for some reason I missed the publication this year. It only struck me the other day, while chatting about the perceived influx of people from the Netherlands and Belgium, that I’d forgotten my annual “easy blog” post. Like everyone else, I’ve noticed a language that I presume is Dutch (though with my ear for languages it could just as easily be Swedish or Lithuanian). I’ve also heard plenty of chatter about the large, somewhat out‑of‑character houses now peppering the Pinoso countryside. Rumour has it this boom in Dutch immigration is largely down to a single family: the Jelies. I can’t say for certain if it’s true, but Perplexity tells me they were featured in a programme called Familie Jelies: Een Huis Vol Emigreert, and more recently in Jelies & Gnodde: Grote Gezinnen Emigreren. Apparent...