Doing time

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 feel a bit like a task, trying to hit my quota of 75 questions a day, rather than just doing a few minutes and feel satisfied. Anyway, I asked Miguel if he/it had any blog ideas. Unsurprisingly, it served up the usual "old chestnuts": queues, the loudness of public conversation, and the Spanish concept of time. Everyone with a blog or a YouTube channel about Spain has covered those, me included, but I'm going to do it again anyway.

Take the matter of time. It wasn’t long ago that everything in Spain started late. We foreigners often exaggerate this by grumbling about plumbers or electricians who look as though they’ll never arrive, but as I recall, the UK was exactly the same. You’d be told the gas man would arrive between 08:00 and 13:00, so you’d take the morning off and wait, only for him to show up at 14:30.

We haven't had many appointments like that lately, though the doctor's schedule remains notoriously elastic. Generally, however, things are much more precise than they used to be. I’m genuinely surprised now if a theatre performance billed for 20:00 isn’t underway by 20:10. Bands, of course, are the exception. Pop groups have always been late and always will be—it’s part of being young and wild, even if you’re Kim Gordon and technically at the age of cinema pensioner discounts.

Cinema itself starts on time; it always has. It’s funny how many people arrive late, assuming showtimes are merely advisory. One cinema we use even runs the adverts and trailers beforehand so the "big film" starts exactly at the advertised time. This always confuses the popcorn buyers. It’s also a cinema that lacks floor lights to guide you, similar to those guide lights that will illuminate should need to crawl along the smoke filled aisles of  your flaming Boeing 737. The darkness requires a bit of juggling as the latecomers balance overpriced popcorn while fumbling with their phone torches.

This presumption of lateness depends entirely on the event. On a guided walk last week, several people arrived five minutes early and then wandered off, assuming a delay. The guide turned up with three minutes to spare, allowed a two-minute grace period, and we set off. We left the wanderers behind; they had gambled on "Spanish time" and lost. You have to balance past experience with possibility. For many Spanish events for instance one of the organisers will address the assembled audience and explain that the start will be delayed for a few moments as "minutes of courtesy". An odd concept that. Courteous to the uncourteous.

Then there was the electricity situation in Culebrón. People have been struggling with reduced voltage and supply breakers popping constantly, so the local "mayor" was collecting signatures to take to the consumer people to back up his case. The signing period was 20:00 to 21:00. I guessed nobody would show up before 20:30, but when I arrived just after that, the place was already packed. That was a shock—though perhaps not as shocking as turning up at 12:30 for an event with a 12:45 "kick-off," only to find it had already started. To be honest I was staggered. But that was in Sax, so what do you expect?

We’re off to see a covers band this evening. I had 20:00 in my diary, but Maggie checked and the doors opened at 19:00. I couldn’t fathom why anything would start so early, halfway through the afternoon to my Spanish timeclock. It reminded me of a few weeks ago: a lunch appointment at 13:00 and a money raising buffet offered from 12:00 to 14:00. The events were all ones organised to Northern European tastes. That sort of timetable just doesn't feel right anymore. I’ve been conditioned over the last twenty years to expect lunch in the 14:00 to 15:00 slot and an evening meal well after 21:00. Individual bands shouldn’t even consider the stage until 22:00 unless logic dictates otherwise - festivals are a good example where with lots of acts and only a limited number of stages and earlier start and a later finish both make sense.

I’m surprised; I expected to be pushed for words to fill the space, but this is already getting overlong, so the AI's other two topics will be cursorily dismissed. 

The noise level in Spain is incredible sometimes, but I don’t think it’s actually a character trait of the people; I think it’s environmental. One of the words I use to excuse my inability to hear anything is retumba—it’s that specific echo you get in rooms full of hard surfaces, so typical of this area. When you have tiled floors, windows without curtains, and open-plan layouts, a room full of Britons or Netherlanders will shout just as much as the locals because it’s the only way to be heard above the hubbub. The result is a sonic arms race where everyone tries to outshout everyone else. It’s why one of my favourite restaurants at the moment reminds me of Mr. Webster's house in Qatar all those years ago, where the servants went about in socks so as not to be intrusive.

And as for queues? I was in the post office recently for the first time in ages. There were five people milling around, so I performed the usual drill and asked, "Who's last?" Nobody answered. As it turned out, all the customers were foreigners like me, and the question made no sense to them. Fortunately, with only five people, it wasn't too hard to figure out when it was my turn. Another example though of how things become routine but not in the manner of my youth.