Life in Culebrón

There is, in Monóvar, just down the road from us, a restaurant that I rather like. As soon as you are at the table, the server brings a chunk of bread and a serving dish with black olives—on one side, the typical and renowned Empeltre variety from Aragon, and, on the other, a serving of olive oil from one of the well-respected almazaras, or oil mills, with a quality mark. It reminds me of the wide variety of Spanish phrases that suggest that with oil, bread, and wine, one will never go hungry. Born and bred Spaniards that we are, we soon order the wine. It’s a splendid start to the meal, one of those reminders that good food doesn’t have to be fancy food. Though I have to say that what comes after is usually pretty fancy! I suspect that some Spaniards may drink olive oil. In fact, I know that for a fact. At an event in Yecla, the man next to me was doing just that. “Dipping bread into the oil adds a variable,” he said. Olive oil is just a fact in Spain; it’s something that simply happe...

I bought a brush cutter the other week. One of those petrol-driven machines for hacking down long grass. I got it from the ironmongers next to Delia’s Chinese Bazaar in Pinoso, and, while I was there, I plucked up the courage to ask about a very homemade-looking pine wood object that I had noticed on a previous visit. “It’s for splitting olives,” I was told. I know very little about the family who own and run the shop. There was an older man, a woman and a younger man, all of uncertain age, although two of them may have been a couple, as well as a very young girl. I guessed at three generations, but who knows? It was the younger man who unpacked the brush cutter and put fuel in it, just to check that everything worked. He gave me a demonstration of how to start it. I suspect I wouldn’t have received quite the same level of attention at the Leroy Merlin DIY megastore. I’m also fairly sure they wouldn’t have had a machine for splitting olives. I suppose things have changed everywhere in ...

A Spanish chap I talk to on the internet, once asked me if I lived in the countryside. I hesitated. It’s obviously rural: we’re surrounded by what you would call fields in the UK, and there are vineyards and olive trees growing within metres of our front door. Still, we’re not that isolated, the town with barbers and bars is just 5km away. We have fibre internet, we’re nearly on a drainage system (just election lies keep us 100 metres from mains sewerage), we have mains water and electricity, and the nearest tarmac is no more than 200 metres away. I can see the municipal tip, or whatever they are called nowadays, from our garden, and there’s a bloody big solar farm not 20 metres from our front door. Nonetheless, if I were to step out of my front door naked around breakfast time, the chances are that I could do that 360 times out of 365 without seeing anyone. And both the back and the front door give directly onto our living space – no vestibules, no boot rooms, no hallways. When it rai...

Spain is, season-wise, a fairly conventional country: it has the usual four seasons, both astronomical and meteorological. There is no monsoon, no wet-and-dry divide, nothing especially hippy or politically suspect. And yet summer is special. Partly because it rather fails to behave itself. For a large part of the population—and institutionally too—summer and August are synonymous . My own experience of the Spanish summer is overwhelmingly Mediterranean, coloured by media coverage that is nearly always Madrid-centric, so my picture may be a little out of kilter for people in the North or in larger inland towns and cities, but, that said, I hope this is a fair reflection of Spain in general. There are all sorts of fixed ideas about August, most of which are no longer true. Maybe they never were, but there are seeds of truth in all the myths. You can tell that summer is on the way when all the adverts on the telly, and before your Amazon Prime film starts, show happy faces eating and dr...