Life in Culebrón

I spent most of yesterday morning locked in combat with the IMSERSO booking portal. For those who have not read the multiple blogs I have written about it, IMSERSO is the Spanish state’s subsidised holiday scheme for pensioners—an enterprise designed to keep coastal hotels open and retirees occupied during the off-season. The system won't let you apply a minute before your allotted time. Mine was 09:00 on 17 September. Having done my homework beforehand, I had compiled a tidy list of preferred destinations and target hotels. My initial plan was to head out to the Canary Islands—the offer included Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, or Tenerife. Yet when I finally logged in at two minutes past nine, the digital calendar was already glowing red with ‘full’ dates. Fuerteventura and Lanzarote were completely wiped out, leaving a mere three green blobs on Tenerife, the island we'd chosen, but none of the dates or hotels had any relation to my pre-planned targets. The dearth of space is simple...

It was the bats that made me think of this blog. I had wondered about doing a breakdown of the PISA report on Spanish schooling. Spanish education is a bit outside my area of personal knowledge, though, and maybe a bit dry, so I needed something more mundane. I remember that when I lived in the UK we'd often say, "Shall we go out for a drink?" Maybe it's the plastic chairs, and maybe it's just the state of my liver, but I wouldn't think to suggest that here in Spain. Obviously, given my strict Wesleyan upbringing, I'm happy to drink alcohol, but it's more a situational thing than a desire. We go out to eat, for instance, and, given that I don't have to drive, I'll put away as much of the stuff as I can so that I wobble but don't topple. When I do make one of those forays from the Englishness of home into the outside world of Spain, I'm far more inclined to go out to eat than to drink—and usually for lunch rather than dinner. These days,...

To be honest, our electricity bill isn’t that eye-watering. It’s dead easy to change supplier in Spain, as I suspect it is in most of Europe. A local distribution company maintains the infrastructure that brings power to the house, but you can buy that electricity from any number of retailers. How they pay each other is no concern of mine. Since we arrived, we’ve usually bought our electricity from a firm called Iberdrola. We’ve had lots of different plans with them – a fixed rate for every hour, three separate tariffs at different times of day, others with high and low-cost periods, and so on. Again, I suspect this sounds similar to anywhere else on the continent. Iberdrola is an electricity producer. It owns nuclear power plants, hydroelectric stations, and wind and solar farms, among other things. There aren’t actually that many power generators in Spain. Once electricity is generated, it can be sold on the wholesale market, directly to large users, or through one of the two domesti...