Life in Culebrón

Graham, well now he’s Graham, strolled into our lives when he breached the defences of our garden three or four months ago. Maybe it was before then, maybe after; one never remembers when these things happen exactly, because they only become interesting in the light of what happens after. We’ve had a lot of cats since we came to Spain. One, Mary, came with me riding down in an MGB GT. She screamed all the way from Huntingdon to Dover but finally accepted there was no escape and watched France pass by with her paws on the dashboard. She died of heart failure. So far she’s our only cat that has lived out her natural span. Most of the rest have been slaughtered by cars or simply disappeared. We’ve also had a lot of cats just walk into our garden. We have food out for our household cats, and the interlopers recognise a free buffet when they see one. Several of them have been clever enough to work out the cat flap in double-quick time. One, Isabel, who we’d decided to take in, then went and...

The TV news, the radio or just keeping up with social media will tell you that Spain is on fire. It’s not a new story. By 23 July, more than 120,000 hectares had been turned into charred wasteland. Last year, by the same date, the figure was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares. In other words, this year’s fires have already burned four or five times as much land as they had by this stage in 2025, and that’s despite last year eventually becoming Spain’s worst fire season since 1994. Figures measured in hectares don’t really mean much to most of us. A hectare is what you need to put up a house in the campo in Alicante province, but visualising 7,000 of those plots is beyond my imagination. The deadliest fire so far this year, around Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province, destroyed around 7,000 hectares, an area roughly the size of Leicester or Derby. Meanwhile, the huge fires in Zaragoza and Guadalajara have each burned more than 30,000 hectares, making each of them larger...

There can be a fantastic energy to a typical Spanish bar, especially during the mid-morning when people have their breakfast. The main protagonists are the coffee grinder and the coffee machine—one, obviously enough, produces a fierce grinding sound, and the other hisses like the Mallard letting off steam in Waverley Station. Then, of course, there are the people, who rise to the occasion. As a national characteristic, Spaniards are not quiet, and they do like to talk, sometimes quite loudly. So, with all this grinding and gushing going on, the clientele have to raise their voices a tad. And, in an upward spiral other groups at other tables follow suit, and so it goes on until the bar is as noisy as the engine room of the Titanic. So that is a normal bar: the sort of place you go for a coffee or a beer and some toast, maybe a roll or, if you are in Madrid, churros. It is nothing fancy and just as likely to be on a city street as in a rural village. There was a time, though, when these ...

Normally, Maggie and I get out a fair bit. We might go to anything from an exhibition to some sort of fiesta, and it would be unusual for us to spend a whole weekend – let alone a whole week – at home. Not so recently. Maggie hasn't been too well and hasn't really felt like doing very much. As a result, neither have I. Right at the end of June, she was taken into hospital and operated on for a problem with her pancreas. It was a long and complicated operation, followed by a few days in the intensive care unit. Now she's on an ordinary ward with and the suggestion is that she'll be there for a couple of weeks. While Maggie's life became one of pain, sensors, tubes and wires strapped to her body, mine became one of driving back and forth between Elda Hospital and home. My side of the bargain was easy enough and, despite being one step removed from our usual forays into Spain I realised just how much it was all around. Take the roadworks. Of course, just as it becam...

It's often said said that most people stay faithful to the music they first fell in love with as teenagers. For most of us, those formative tracks are added to as we pass through our twenties and thirties, but that's where it stops. That doesn’t mean we never pick up new bands or singers, but we usually stick to our core favourites from those key decades and just bolt on a few extras later. At every stage, and I would suppose in every culture, life inevitably becomes a series of tasks. Whether it is swotting for exams, braving the daily commute, walking a couple of kilometres to the nearest well, or just tackling the laundry, these chores dominate our time. Even when we try to buy time by paying someone else to lighten the burden, other tasks creep in. Even pleasurable experiences, like going on holiday, can become irksome as you fight airline schedules or some hotel booking site. Our habits may shift over time—trading a Friday night pint at the pub in our youth for a takeaway ...