The English bloke with the camera

I had the very strangest conversation not an hour ago—well, it was an hour ago as I type, but it may be days ago as you read—with a couple of local Pinoso women who I may well know. Not that I recognised them. But one day I'll tell you the story about not recognising my mum in an airport that only handles about five flights a day.

So, on the 18th there will be the annual cancer walk. It's against cancer, you understand. I'm not quite sure how that works but, for years, I've bought the T-shirt and once or twice I've walked around the route with a couple of hundred other people.

To get hold of the T-shirt you have to go along to the HQ of the local AECC (Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer) and hand over the cash. You can usually do that twice a week between such-and-such and such-and-such a fortnight before the event. So I turned up. Oddly, I'd bumped into a phrase last week that's a variation on "the T-shirts tend to be on the small side"—the idea that if you normally need a medium, you may well need a large. Somewhere in the conversation I deployed this new phrase—las tallas tiran a pequeñas, ¿no?. They didn't understand. It wasn't important. Nowadays I always have a way around, but I was fazed that my phrase didn't work. A Spanish person had used it on me!

So I got the T-shirts, then asked, "Oh, while I'm here, can I book up for the meal on the 14th November?" Every year the cancer association has a meal at one of the local restaurants. We went a few times, but we've missed it for years on end through simply not knowing it was on. But this year I had the knowledge.

"Can I book up the meal, on the 14th? There are four of us." "Of course you can." "Oh, one of the four uses a wheelchair, but that's no problem at El Timón." "No, they have a lift." "OK, what do you need—my name, phone number?" "No, that's OK, we have you." "But don't I need to pay or anything?" "No, you can do that later." "Right, surely you need to know something?" "No, it's fine. If you want to, you can phone Mari Reme a couple of weeks beforehand and remind her." "OK, I'll need a phone number or something." "You already have it. You've spoken to her in the past."

That was the kicker. How on earth did they know I had her number? (They were right, of course.)

So we left it there and I came away realising that, while I might not know who I'd been talking to, they "knew" who I was—even if that was "the English bloke with the camera" or whatever.

Spanish small-town life at its very best.