Life in Culebrón

I held back a slight snigger when I saw some Britons in the café inside Santa Bárbara Castle ask after their coffee and tea. The Fanta and whatever they were eating had arrived promptly enough but not the hot drinks. The server spoke good English. "Oh, sorry," she said. "I was going to bring them after you'd eaten." No Spaniard would think to have a hot drink alongside food except at breakfast. And when is Spanish breakfast time? When we have house guests, breakfast is the first meal I worry about because there's very little probability that we'll be eating breakfast out. It's not the same for lunch. If we have eggs, bread and cereal, maybe, nowadays, porridge, along with a few extras: yogurt, milk, butter and the like, I reckon we can satisfy most British breakfast demands. For kedgeree and devilled kidneys, our guests will have to arrange something with Lord Emsworth at Blandings, and if our guests want overnight oats with soya milk, I can only pre...

I can’t remember when I went to Avebury. It was a long time ago – before my bones started aching all the time and even before my hair turned white. I went to Castlerigg, near Keswick, around the same time. Both are oneiric memories – fleeting and half-forgotten, yet leaving a lasting impression. In both places I felt a link with the past – nothing academic, nothing to do with dates or history. It was a sense of continuity, not of dogma or rhetoric, but of something that was ours – a shared patrimony. I can hardly claim any shared past with Spain. My dad used to say that he’d sailed with Drake aboard the Pelican when it set off around the world. His proof was the name John Thompson on the muster roll. Obviously he hadn’t, but the idea that one of his forebears – one of mine – might have done so would be easy enough to check. I never have, though. Better a good tale than a refuted fact. Either way, my upbringing and lineage place me firmly on the side of the raiding, piratical English ra...

Nowadays, when I have a conversation in the street with someone, it goes a bit like this: “Hiya, how are you?” “I’m well, thanks, but did you hear about Rupert/Ted/Alison/Indira? She/he had a heart attack/has cancer/had a stroke (and so on)”. Obviously, it’s not always that style of conversation. Sometimes the answer is “Not so good”, because the person I’m talking to has just had a bypass/major surgery/has metastasis (and so on). It can be worse - “Did you hear about Betty? -  she died, you know”. Bearing this in mind, a news item from today may be of interest to lots of us, particularly those of us of a certain age, closer to the “time of reckoning”. As of today, there are new prescription charges. These charges only apply to people with prescriptions from the Spanish state system. If your prescription comes from a private doctor, then the charges will depend on the market price.  The charges apply directly across the state health system, be that in Murcia, Valencia, or anyw...

There’s a typical bread roll in Alcoy that’s called tortilongui or torti y longui; it’s a sandwich of omelette (an omelette, not a tortilla española) and longaniza (a sausage something like a British banger). Before about four o’clock last Sunday afternoon, I didn’t know that.  It happens quite a lot in Spain: you go into a bar or restaurant, they ask what you want, and when you ask what there is, you don’t get an exhaustive list so much as a couple of suggestions. Many places aren’t big on printed menus or blackboards, especially outside the (relatively rigid) lunchtime slot. You order something, and then five minutes later, something much more interesting lands on the next table. Part of the problem is knowing what to ask. If you reach for your phrase book and ask if there is anything to eat—comer—you’ll often be told no. A better question is whether the kitchen is still open. And if it isn’t, you can ask if there’s anything to snack on: tapear, or perhaps picotear.  Anyway,...

Maggie calls them fat pies: coca. Of course, it’s also the Spanish word for cocaine, but provided we’re thinking snack rather than snort, a coca is, to my mind, something like a local version of pizza. There was a time, maybe fifteen to twenty years ago, when it was one of the staples whenever there was free food at an event in Pinoso. No vol-au-vents, no cube of cheese and a silverskin onion on a stick; you got a rectangular piece of coca The best bits were the ones from the middle of the baking trays: a spongy, bread-like base, heavy with olive oil and smeared with grated tomato, usually finished with a salty punch of anchovies or sardines. The corner pieces had too much pastry and not enough topping. Just before Christmas, maybe five years ago the staunch women of Cáritas (the Roman Catholic charity) were running a fundraising breakfast from the community room alongside the parish church. One of the main things on offer was coca. It wasn't what I expected. They had a bowl of dou...