Sweets

I know I shouldn't, and I have the belly to prove it, but I like to eat those sugary sweets from the pick 'n' mix when I go to the pictures. I'd never really thought about where the sweets came from, so I was a bit surprised when I bumped into an article that told me that the Region of Murcia, which begins where Pinoso ends, is one of the main centres of production of Spanish sweets. In fact, one of every three sweets eaten in Spain comes from Murcia. I find it odd that I didn't know. Somehow you can't help but know the importance of Novelda in spices and, at this time of year, you just bump into something about the production of turrón, in Xijona/Jijona (old blog about turrón here) or toys in Ibi. To hear that firms like Vidal, Fini, Dulceplus, Aunón, Jake, and 59 other sweet brands are Murcian-based was a bit of a surprise. 

The Vidal group, for instance, pumps out 75 million sweets a day, and they sold 200,000,000€ worth in 2022. They don't just sell in Spain; they have subsidiary companies in lots of countries, and they distribute to over 90 countries - exports make up 80% of their sales. It's nearly the same story for Fini - big production, lots of distribution, while another company, Jake, based in Molina de Segura, produces 60 million tonnes of sweets per year which sounds like a lot of cola bottles and crunchy strawberries to me. I was equally surprised when I read that kosher and halal sweets, vegan sweets and sweets for gluten intolerant people are a part of nearly all the companies' ranges. From various descriptions I read, there must be rabbis to check the kosher credentials, and imams ensuring that the cow gelatine in the halal sweets really is from halal cows, wandering almost non stop around Murcia, clip boards in hand.

Apparently, Spanish kids eat, on average, 55 grammes of added sugar a day, twice the World Health Organisation recommendation, which probably helps to explain why 23% of Spanish 7 to 12-year-olds are overweight and 17% obese. Obviously enough, sweets are one of the sources of this extra sugar, and that's not really going to come as a big surprise to anyone. High fat and sugar content tend to get frowned on nowadays, so nearly all of the Murcian sweet producers have ranges with natural colours and sugars, ranges that are low in saturated fats and ranges that don't contain allergens. 

The whole thing reminded me of a, near Christmas, visit to a dentist in Cartagena, the second largest city in Murcia. Like so many Spanish businesses at this time of year, there were cakes and sweets laid out for free. "I suppose they're sugar-free," I said, in that British humour totally lost on the Spanish way I have, to the receptionist. "No," she said, "we like our sweets to taste of something."

Offensive language

English, at least inclusive English, doesn't talk about firemen any more - we say fire fighters. To complain about the driver who has just cut you up the complaint is that "they" don't know how to drive rather than that he or she is an imbecile. I suspect that the word imbecile is also a word to be avoided but that's a whole extra thing. This is going to be a bit tricky to do because my blogs about language are never popular, and because it includes some Spanish words. Not all of what I'm going to write it is absolutely true but it's good enough for a blog of this nature.

I've been told by Spaniards that Spanish grammar can be pretty inflexible when compared to English. In English, for instance, we can turn almost any noun (a noun is the name for a thing), into a verb, (a doing word). Well established examples are to to book with the same meaning as to reserve, or to sky as in to sky a ball. Nowadays we TikTok too. Spanish has just three endings for verbs - ar,er, ir - which, I am told, makes it more difficult to plunder and use words as verbs. The other side of the coin though is that the way that a Spanish verb ends tells you who is doing the the thing. Bailo means I dance and baila means she, he or it dances. So she drives badly is exactly the same as he drives badly. In turn that means you need no strategy whatsoever to avoid sexist overtones in lots of situations.

Unfortunately that's not true for Spanish nouns. Nouns. as I said are things: egg, bottle, cow and so on. Having gender means that somewhere, somehow, somebody decided that each noun is either masculine of feminine. So while in English book, list, and rubbish are neutral in Spanish a book is masculine and a list is feminine. Sometimes this can seem a bit odd. El pene, the penis is, logically enough, masculine but lots of the other words for the same thing, verga and polla for instance are feminine. It's the same with la vagina, feminine, but coño and chocho, with the same meaning, are masculine.

Lots of nouns, these thing words, have a feminine and a masculine form when they are used to describe a person. A very common way to do this is simply to change the article (A/AN and THE are articles) before the name of the thing. So un estudiante is a male student, and una estudiante is a female student. 

Another very common way to differentiate between male and female is to change the letters at the  end of the  word. So, un alumno is a male student, una alumna is a female student. Very often, though far from inevitably, the ending is o for masculine and a for feminine. An example is hermana for sister, and hermano for brother. This is where one of the big problems come in modern usage. I, that's me personally, have one brother and one sister. If someone asks me about my family in English I would say I have a sister and a brother. The traditional Spanish answer to the same question with the same family would be that I have two hermanos. The most direct translation of dos hermanos into English is that I am saying I have two brothers. That's because the Spanish grammar rule is that if you have a mix of male and female words then the male version takes precedence. Grammarians say this has nothing to do with men taking precedence over women - it was just a 50/50 chance decision!!!! Modern Spanish people trying to avoid this would follow the English language style and say that they had one hermana and one hermano to make it clear. Nonetheless, someone trying to give me a bit of a Spanish lesson told me that the poster I'd designed inviting girls and boys to come along to Santa's grotto was poor Spanish - they were adamant that by inviting the boys the girls would have known they were welcome too.  Just like we know that Neil Armstrong meant women too when he took his giant leap for mankind. In writing this can be got around by using the at symbol herman@s. As you may imagine this is not a popular option with lots of people; " For the love of Pete it's a symbol - not a letter!!"

Language can be very emotive. I remember heated debates on British Radio 4 about the use of can as against may or how to pronounce envelope. This male precedence gender rule in Spanish is much deeper. The way round it of inviting male friends and female friends, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen seems, to the traditionalists only just marginally less stupid than inventing new words. And we won't even touch on how to include non binary people. Doubling up on words makes sentences more cumbersome but more modern thinkers go for the importance of equality and inclusiveness and don't worry too much about having to say more words or the technicalities of the word itself. They presume that context will explain slightly odd words. Although cartero means a postman cartera has, traditionally been the word for a wallet. It hasn't stopped the person ringing the entryphone to deliver the mail describing themselves as a cartera. It's still not an easy struggle. The lower house of parliament is called the Congress of the (male) Deputies. I suspect it will be a while before the name gets changed.

And the traditionalist have an ally in something called the REA, the Real Academia Española, which is the august body which tries to control the Spanish language and publishes the "definitive" Spanish dictionary. It's actually quite a useful body in trying to coordinate the language through all the counties where Spanish is spoken - so that Mexicans can talk to Equatorial Guineans and Nicaraguans but it is also entrenched in the past and thinks that messing around with hermanos/as is tantamount to wordslaughter. You'll no doubt be super surprised to learn that of the 46 people who currently make up the RAE 38 are men. Four of those eight women were elected in the last two or three years. My guess is that the RAE is not a hotbed of progressive thinking.

I know what I think about trying to make language more inclusive but in conversations with Spaniards (when we're not talking about food) I've found very few who agree. 

Five in the morning or Mantecados and Polvorones

I often wake up around 5 am. Anyone of a certain age will know why. Usually, I find that I don't go back to sleep properly; I doze, and I turn things over in my mind. Typically, the things are of no importance - I remember a job to do, I wonder why my knee is aching, things like that. This morning it was mantecados and polvorones.

Mantecados and polvorones are typical Spanish Christmas biscuit-like cakes. They're supposed to taste different to each other, though I can never remember which is which. A website I just consulted tells me that polvorones tend to crumble more than mantecados and that polvorones have ground almonds in them, while mantecados (which get their name from their high content of manteca or lard) don't. The website says the shapes are different too and then goes on to say that both can be round (!) but that polvorones are square and mantecados are rectangular. On other websites I've read that mantecados have various flavourings while polvorones don't or that the almonds in one are toasted and in the other not - oh, and that polvorones are oval. Trust me, whatever the websites say, they're more or less the same.

So, I was thinking about buying some. My partner is not a fan. She says they are dry and tasteless. I remembered what a Spanish language teacher told me years ago when I was saying how tedious they were. She said the problem was that I bought poor-quality industrial polvorones. I always think that the word 'industrial,' to describe mass-produced cakes and biscuits, is such a good word - it brings to mind Jerusalem's Dark Satanic Mills. I need to find some decent, traditionally made ones.

Now, if you want a roscón for Reyes/Kings, you can buy an industrial one from any supermarket for a few euros, or you can take out a bank loan to order one from a cake shop. It's the same for turrón. All the supermarkets have their own brand, they also sell some varieties which bear no relation whatsoever to real turrón. But, if you want tradition and quality, you pay for it. It's a balance between the stress on your credit card and the list of ingredients on the label. The more natural it is, the better it will taste, and the more it will cost. I wondered, for this is the fevered state of my mind at 5 am, where you might get decent mantecados or polvorones. It's like the questions on the Facebook community pages, the ones about where you can buy a hammer or bread, the ones that cause a smirk.

As soon as I was up, I dashed off a WhatsApp message to a Spanish pal. Her response was, "The original polvorones are from Estepa in Seville. If you get them in a supermarket, look where they were made. And take a look at some online reviews because all that glitters is not gold."

So I did, and this is what I got as the creme de la creme: Mantecados de Felipe II from Vitoria in the Basque Country, Estepa from Estepa in Seville, El Toro from Tordesillas in Valladolid, D. Sancho Melero from Antequera in Málaga, Dos Hermanos from Castuera in Badajoz, and San Telesforo from Toledo in Castilla la Mancha.

I know that I'm going to have to go to a traditional grocer's to get any one of those. It's pretty obvious they are not supermarket fodder.

The ITV

I don't think that British people taking their car for an MOT  (The UK safety inspection) fret too much about it. It's just another job to be done, like deworming the cat. It's exactly the same in Spain. There's a technical inspection, the ITV, for cars and almost anything else that rolls on the road from trailers and caravans to lorries and tractors. The main difference is that the test in Spain can only be done done at specialist centres. If nothing has changed, in the 20 years since I last took a car for an MOT in the UK,  then any approved garage, service centre or workshop can do the MOT test there.

So the Spanish process is simple enough. I'm going to talk about cars. Different vehicles are treated differently with different test periods and different rules but they all use the same test centres. It can be slightly intimidating to be doing the test on a car while running alongside a four metre high 44 ton artic in the next bay along.

For the first three full years a new car is considered to be good to go. No need for a test. On, or a bit before, the fourth birthday the car needs to be tested. After that the test is every couple of years until the car reaches ten and, from then on, every year. 

The process is simple too. You show the vehicle paperwork in the reception office, pay the appropriate fee. Diesel cars cost more than petrol cars, there are differences between cars with and without catalysers and the least expensive test is for electric cars. I paid 44.53€ for the test on my petrol car. The fee paid, you and the car get sent to a sort of assembly line. The process starts at one end of a big shed and the vehicle processes through the shed with everything getting checked as you go.

The first part is all very hands on. Lights, headlamp alignment, horn, windscreen wipers, squirters, seatbelts - anything that the tester person can check with the car standing still. Sometimes the testers are very thorough, buckling up the rear seat belts, checking the quality of the wiper blades, and other times the checking of the smaller things is pretty cursory. It may be different testers, it may different test stations or it may just be the idea that newer cars need less checking. I tend to the latter because I noticed that the same bloke who guided my car through the test was much more thorough with a battered 19 year old Ford Fiesta, that went through a couple of cars before me, than he was with my four year old Arona. With the car still at the very start of the shed there's the emissions and noise check. Again there are different rules for different ages of vehicles. My 1977 MGB GT went through despite the slight blue haze from the exhaust. With the initial checks done you start to move through the shed. The rolling road comes first, to check the brakes. Then to the pit where there's an under car inspection - brake lines, exhaust, suspension joints, general health, bodywork rot and a steering check which involves riving the steering wheel from side to side and some other stuff that I forget.

None of this is particularly tricky. It's a perfectly sensible process and despite the usual moans from my compatriots that the Spanish test is a joke, in comparison to the, obviously, infinitely superior, British test, it's a straightforward process for checking compliance with European construction and use rules.

The funny thing is that, despite what I said at the beginning, for we foreigners it is actually a bit of an event. I know plenty of people who pay a mechanic to take their cars through for them. I know of one test centre that offers to take the car through for we foreigners. I think that, once again, it's the language. Not always though - it is also simply that it's a process that's a bit alien. My car has automatic lights so, in four years I've hardly ever used the light switch. I had to check the handbook to see how to put on sidelights, how the the rear fog light worked etc. Language wise though I have no real problem with conversational Spanish and my car vocabulary is OK too. Even then, sitting in a car with the tester standing outside and saying - left blinker (or turn signal, or trafficator, or indicator), both, brakes, dip, front fog, rear fog etc. - there is forced to be a moment when you either miss what is said or don't have a clue what they mean. The testers have accents, they mumble, they have shortcuts, they presume you know the drill, they've already done this forty times today and they are not at all emotionally involved in the process. This time for instance the tester bloke was much more interested in talking to me about my 20 year old Tag Heuer watch, and the Omega Seamaster that had preceded it, than he was in commenting on the steering castor angle. He was waving the paperwork around, with or without the all important windscreen sticker, as he talked about the beauty of Bulova Accutron watches to the point that I felt I had to interrupt to ask if the car had passed its ITV.

The Neighbourhood Association

Obviously it was going to be easy to "integrate". As soon as I was living amongst Spaniards my dodgy, evening class Spanish would improve by leaps and bounds through simple seepage. There were other things to be done to help that process. Bars, naturally, were an essential asset, as was cinema, watching television, listening to the radio, and reading newspapers (we're back in the days when dinosaurs still ruled the earth). Very soon, I'd be nattering away about football (something I can't do in English), politics or food with the best of them. At least that's what I thought in 2004.

One of the early strategies was to join the village Neighbourhood Association. We had some good times with the worthy citizens of Culebrón - a musical in Madrid, a couple of weekends in Benidorm and a day trip to Guadalest. There were also a couple of village meals each year - one just before the local fiestas, sitting out on the warm summer evenings under the pine trees by the social centre, and another in November inside the same building. After the November meal we had the Annual General Meeting. In my case, this meeting often involved large quantities of whisky, which were sometimes severely detrimental to my health. In drinking whisky and not some spirit with a mixer, I confirmed my foreigner status. 

The emotions stirred by these events were often contradictory - it was great to be in among Spaniards doing something authentic but the thought of maintaining conversations, often for hours on end, and knowing what to do, and when, filled me with dread. I usually wondered if it might not be better to avoid Spain all together and stay at home with cheap booze and satellite telly?

Nearly two decades later, I'd say we are still a long way from being anything other than foreigners who live here. We're settled in, we're comfortable. We don't get confused by Spanish road junctions, we know to push past the crowds of people at the theatre door etc, etc. Nonetheless, to Spaniards, we are, first and foremost, Britons.

As with so many things nowadays I don't quite remember why we left the Neighbourhood Association. I paid the annual fee in 2017 but not for 2018. Not all the events that go on in the village have anything to do with the Neighbourhood Association. Some are organised through the village pedaneo/a (think village mayor or mayoress). The person to do this job is selected by Pinoso Town Hall. There may be community input but the pedaneo/a is not an elected post. My vague recollection is that the activities organised by the Association missed a beat, it seemed moribund, and any local activity was coming through the pedaneo/a. Covid added to the hiatus. Then in September of this year, Maggie joined in a chance conversation, outside our front gate, and found out that the Neighbourhood Association had been organising trips and meals without us! We rejoined and in October of this year just in time to join the coach outing to Cartagena which was a hoot.

A couple of Sundays ago it was a village meal followed by the AGM of the Association. I was mightily impressed how we were received; there were lots of big grins, lots of pumping handshakes, lots of firm hands on shoulders and double kissing. We arrived at vermouth time. We know how we like our vermouth. We were able to say so. We had at least three offers to sit alongside someone as we sat down to eat at the long trestle tables. We didn't need to ask what we were eating; we didn't find anything strange in what we were eating; we knew the process, we knew the drill, we asked for what we needed if it wasn't there. We joined the conversation; we had conversations - there was no need to smile and nod and pretend we understood when we didn't. We had views on the quality of the food; we opened bottles of drink without thinking we needed to ask permission. All very straightforward.

Set three Spaniards to talk, and you get at least four simultaneous conversations. Turn that into thirty or forty Spaniards, who have had a couple of drinks, who are friends, who still have unsaid things to share and it can get quite rowdy. That's how the AGM was. Only a few people keep up with the flow. Most take refuge in the safe havens of optional conversation. To be honest, while it's all very endearing, it's not good if you're actually interested in the meeting. I realised that some of what was being said made it patently clear that there were certain tensions in the village. Tensions which we had been half aware of but which, especially after the meeting, were explained to us in Cinemascope and full Technicolor. 

I avoided the demon whisky. It was good to be back.

Good graffiti in amongst the pines

I'm not too keen on walking for fun. I especially dislike those uphill sections as they make me wheeze and cough. I have no problem at all with walking as a means of transport but I don't think of it as a pastime. Pop me down in a strange town and I'll trot around happily. Now most of my friends and pals don't agree with me. They think walking is healthy, fun and free. They even list it as a hobby; like collecting stamps, singing in a choir or spending hours watching Instagram videos. They buy sticks and specialist clothing and footwear. These people can be persuasive. They offer a destination with beer as an incentive. I am sometimes, very rarely, persuaded. I wonder what the fuss is about. Green and brown colour scheme, lots of pines, a bit of esparto grass maybe some rosemary and the occasional hare or hoopoe.

I am impressed by the solidarity of the walkers though. Often, when I've been tricked into walking in the countryside, maybe in a natural park or near some prehistoric site, there are signs to mark the way. Not necessarily those finger posts that tell you how many kilometres it is to the Bronze Age settlement or the spectacular waterfall but just little painted marks or piles of stones to keep you from walking off and becoming benighted as the wolves howl and the wild pigs attack to protect their young. 

Some of the marks are there because someone, town halls, provinces or regions, has paid for them to be there. They may or may not be maintained. Sometimes they are there because some association or even an individual thinks it's a good idea, a public service. They're the sort of people that love to be in the fresh air and presume that everyone else does. These marks can be really useful but they can also let you down because they are "unofficial".

There are other paths with marks which are homologated, standardised. These are the ones listed by FEDME, Federación española de deportes de montaña y escalada or the Spanish Federation of Mountain Sports and Climbing. These paths are the GR, PR and SL paths. There are homologation criteria for these paths, rules that say what the characteristics should be and how they should be maintained. The idea is that if you follow one of these trails you won't suddenly be abandoned to your own devices half way up some windswept mountain pass.

The three sets of marks that you will see along these paths are painted flashes on surfaces such as rocks, posts and trees . They are sometimes backed up with piles of stones, little cairns called mojones or hitos. They have colour schemes that tell you what sort of path you are following. Red and white markings for the GR, yellow and white markings for the PR and green and white markings for the SL.

The GR routes are at least 50 kms long are marked with a red and a white flash. 

The PR routes are between 10 kms and 50 kms long and are marked with a yellow and a white flash

The SL routes are less than 10 kms long and are marked with a green and a white flash

If the colours are painted as two (or more) parallel flashes the instruction is that you are on the right path and should keep going The marks can be combined: For example a white, red and yellow flash would show that the mid distance route shared the path with a longer route for that part of its length.

If the colours are arranged in a cross it means that you have gone the wrong way and should backtrack till you find the parallel marks. 

There is also a turn sign.

Should you ever, mistakenly, wander away from the safety of the asphalt and concrete, with shop windows to look in and signs of civilisation all around, you may come across these strange markings. But don't forget, as Phil Esterhaus used to say, "Let's be careful out there".

For the want of a nail

Last century, when Windows 98 was cutting-edge technology and when mobiles were big and analogue, I was in Mexico. I'd gone into a locutorio, a place to rent a computer with an internet connection for a few minutes. The Mexican keyboard layout was quite different to the British keyboard I was used to. The QWERTY letters were as they should be but the symbols were in different places. What's more the keyboard had done a fair few miles and lots of the keys were as highly polished as as the stairs of the spiral staircase in a medieval castle. I needed the @ symbol for an email address and I had to resort to Ctrl C and Ctrl V, cut and paste.

I was reminded of this the other day when I had to use a computer with a British keyboard layout - I spent ages staring at the strange layout when I wanted a / or a #, but the final nudge to write this blog came when the passport office refused to accept my address as being Caserío Culebrón. They didn't like the tilde, the accent over the i and o. Nowadays, living in Spain, I'd never consider buying a computer with a British keyboard layout for all the faffing about trying to put tildes and Ñ into words by resorting to tricky keystroke sequences. 

Spanish needs the tildes to show where the stress in a word goes and, sometimes, just to mark the difference between two words that are spelled the same way but have different meanings - tú for you and tu for your for instance. Or cártel for the drugs organization and cartel for a poster. If English used tildes, we'd be able to tell whether "I read the Times" is something we do habitually, present tense, or something we did yesterday, past tense.

When I first started to learn Spanish, the Spanish alphabet had 29 letters - 26 were shared with we British but CH, LL, and Ñ were three extra - 29 in all. By the way I'm just using capitals to make the combinations stand out more. The decision to remove them the CH and LL was taken in 1994 but some websites say that the letters weren't finally retired till 2010. Even with the CH and LL gone that still left 26 letters because of the ñ/Ñ.

Changing LL and CH didn't cause much fuss. They're just two letters together. Nothing really changed except for the way some words were presented in dictionaries and indexing systems. The Ñ is different. If it had been removed from the dictionary, then something like 15,000 words would have had to be spelled differently and the Spaniards (and other Castilian speakers) were dead against that. I'm sure you know the sound maybe because of the very famous Spanish word, mañana, or because of the name of the country, España.

The Ñ didn't appear in the official Spanish dictionary till 1803, but its history, as an independent, and particularly Spanish letter, goes back well over 1,000 years. Latin doesn't have the sound that the Ñ represents so there is no Latin letter like the Ñ. As memories of the Roman Empire faded in memory and as Romance languages like French, Italian and Castilian Spanish developed, so did a guttural, stressed, N sound. A way of writing the sound down had to be found. The French and the Italians eventually chose GN, the Catalans chose NY, and the Portuguese chose NH. At the time I'm talking about the only people who really wrote things were monks. They were responsible for copying and translating texts as these changes were going on. We know that, in Spanish, the Ñ triumphed, but for a long time, there was no standardization, and two or three ways were used to record this sound, sometimes in the same document. One method was to use a double N. The monks weren't just copying things out with a cheap biro - they were carefully crafting each letter on expensive parchment. The double N used both space and time. The monks found a simple solution, they put a little mark over the N to show that the sound should be read as the guttural N.

In the 13th Century, Alfonso X or Alfonso the Wise, the scholar king who is intimately linked to the reconquest of Murcia by Christians, ruled that the Ñ should be used to represent the guttural N sound. And when Antonio de Nebrija published his first grammar of Castilian in 1492, he too included this letter in his alphabet. The same Ñ is used in a couple of other local languages on the Spanish peninsula, in Galician and Asturian, and it was also used when lots of aboriginal South American languages, such as Quechua and Zapoteco, were first written down. We do exactly the same when we're faced with a name written in Arabic or Japanese script and reproduce it using the 26 letters we have at our disposal.

Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the World. Next up, as mother tongue; it's probably Castilian Spanish. More people speak English than Spanish, but for a lot of those people, it's not their first but a second language. Despite this, in the digital age, there was a real threat to the survival of the Ñ. In 1991, the forerunner of the European Union wanted to standardise computer type keyboards, and, because of the dominance of English in the digital world, the suggestion was for the inclusion of just the 26 "English" letters. The Spanish Government was having none of it though. When the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1993, the Ñ was enshrined and protected in this bedrock EU document as a cultural heritage.

It's an important letter. There are lots of Spanish words that change meaning completely if the N is changed for an Ñ. A favourite is año for year and ano for anus - one to bear in mind at Christmas card writing time. Cono for cone is not the same as coño which can be a quite strong word to describe an essential part of female anatomy as well as a good all round sort of curse word. There are lots of less exciting examples like cuña, wedge and cuna for cot/crib or mono for monkey and moño for a hair type bun. It goes on.

I wonder what the passport office would have done if I were a British citizen called Muñoz, Peña, or Zuñiga, all of which are pretty common Spanish surnames - ridden roughshod over my identity I suppose and changed my name. After all Michael Portillo pronounces his name in an English not Spanish way despite its origin.

Beside the road

Especially in the dark they can seem like little islands of human activity lost in the fastness of the night. They're usually nameless, at least at first. There's probably a bit of confusion as you drop off the motorway because you're not quite sure where to park up and the car controls, that you haven't used much, at least for the past couple of hours, prove a little awkward. You don't know quite where you are even though you know where you've been and where you're going and when you do finally get inside, into the artificial light, it's all a bit bright after hours of only peering into oncoming headlights. 

The Spanish call them restaurantes, or bares, de carretera. Like Transport cafés in the UK they have a certain aura of mystique. Sometimes it's for the decor, I remember being told about Casa Pepe at Despeñaperros, famous for its Nationalistic and Francoist decor, but generally the idea is that whilst these places may be a bit rough and ready some of them are culinary gems. This one does the best croquetas, that one has the best paella and the other has the best tortilla de patatas in Spain. Do a bit of Googling and you'll find any number of Spanish newspaper articles suggesting which are the best Restaurantes de Carretera. The newspapers may think they know the score but we all know that these places are really the preserve of long-distance lorry drivers, traffic police and the locals who live nearby.

The other week we were flying out of Barajas, the Madrid airport, Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas if you prefer. The flight check in was at some ungodly hour and the timing made using the train infeasible. We had to drive, to drive overnight. Like most people on a long journey, we decided to stop to take on and to expel liquids. That journey reminded me of the strange world of the late-night cafés and restaurants sprinkled around the major arterial roads and motorways of Spain.

When I'm driving a decent distance I never think to plan where I'm going to stop. It's take pot luck, based on bladder control, my ability to keep my eyes open, and the Área de Servicio signs. Nowadays far too many of the signs take you to a petrol station with a tiny area set aside with a few stools and tables. The fare on offer usually includes such gastronomic delights as sweaty ham and cheese rolls in paper bags, overpriced Coke and coffee from a Nespresso type machine. Sometimes there are just vending machines. The 24hr tag is a cleverly baited trap.

Our first stop this time was at around four in the morning. It was one of those vast barn-like spaces decorated in muddy browns and greens with a huge bar topped with display cases, full of cakes and pastries or anchovies, octopus and Russian salad depending on the time of day. The bar area looked like it hadn't had a refit since 1987 and the lights, although I suppose they are no longer fluorescents, were just as unforgiving and did the job of picking out the sweat stain discolouration under the armpits of the distinctly off-white shirts worn by the serving staff, just as well. There were also other sales areas piled high with overpriced cheese and cold meats and, as we were in Albacete province, boxes full of miguelitos and showcases of Albacete knives presumably aimed at the forgetful traveller returning home to the bosom of their family. It was definitely a type. If there had been a rotating rack with music cassettes left over in the corner I wouldn't have been that surprised.

The clientele were a bedraggled crew. They were generally young men wearing expensive sportswear that still managed to look cheap. They had those shaved side footballer haircuts and a sort of slovenly look. They were almost certainly local. Not at all threatening or menacing but it must require a certain lifestyle to pop out to a not that happening motorway service area at four in the morning for a chat with pals. There were a couple of young women too, a bit on the heavy side and with bomber jackets and ice blue coloured jeans which reminded me, like the decor, of the 1980s. 

On the way back our stop was much earlier. maybe around 11pm. Again we were lucky when the random stop proved to be an eatery popular with locals from a nearby town. The place was brightly lit, had a sort of cafeteria look to it and had that loudness of Spaniards at table. 

Just after we sat down a couple of local police officers turned up joined minutes later by four Guardia Civil traffic officers in two cars. This is a sign of a good choice. The police hovered around the bar presumably swapping stories of derring do but the centre of attention in the main room was a group, probably an extended family group, of at least a dozen people tucking in to a mountain of snack type food, sandwich rolls, burgers, plates of tapas etc. They were finishing off. One lad, as wide as tall, was wearing lots of rapper style gold chains and a silk jacket with a DJ name emblazoned across the shoulders. He was hoovering up the remains of food from everyone's abandoned plates. This place too represented a style; modern, loud, a bit brash but not at all sanitised or internationalised and instantly comprehensible to any passing Spaniard from food to serving style. None of your self service here.

Maybe there's a PhD here for one of our renowned British Hispanists. "The role of roadside bars and restaurants in the formation of modern Spain". Or not.

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As always I've written about this before; when I was on an overnight coach. This is from 16 years ago. I notice it is much more concise! I have become more garrulous with years and kilos.

It's 4 am. The bus is parked up in a service station. The cafeteria area smells faintly of sick and bleach. The man who's been sitting next to me on the bus may well be Ethiopian or Somali - he looks like he's from that bit of Africa - but as he speaks neither English nor Castilian I'll never know. There are Moroccans too - lots of Moroccans - and South Americans, mainly Ecuadorians. In Albacete a man with henna in his beard wearing one of those long shirts and the obligatory nylon anorak got off. A few Spaniards too. No one looks rich. In fact, most look definitely poor. Like the plump woman in the tight ski pants, tight top and high heels to match her yellow accessories. The ensemble screams market stall. Four continents at least - Continental drift. The struggling poor. In the middle of the night, on a bus to Madrid.

Monkeying about in Monóvar

Anís is an aniseed flavoured alcoholic drink - it's the Spanish equivalent of French pastis, Greek ouzo, Italian sambuca or Turkish raki. Before beer became the Spanish man's drink of choice the typical libation for working men was either wine or anís. Anís is usually taken with water, which means that it's a good summer drink - plenty of alcohol and plenty of volume.  Obviously enough, varying the proportion of water to booze gives you a range of strengths and a range of lengths. With water the clear anís turns cloudy white so the local Spanish name for it, paloma, like a white dove, is reasonably obvious. There's a lemon flavoured, yellow coloured, version of anís too. With water we get a canario. No translation required I suspect. If it's good for summer, it's also good for winter - a splash of anís in your first coffee of the day helps take off that morning chill.

Being old and paunchy, I still drink Spanish anís from time to time. I prefer the dry to the sweet version though the one with lemon syrup added is pretty nice too. I don't imagine that it's a popular drink with younger Spanish drinkers - turning up to the Saturday night botellón with a bottle of anís would probably be social suicide. Anís is almost certainly a drink for the older, and more portly, though one of the urban myths about anís is that the sales hold up because lots of women, still shackled to the kitchen, use anís in any number of cake and biscuit recipes and are prone to take the odd nip as they cook.

If you live around here, in Alicante, you'll have bumped into Anís Tenis. It's made nearby in Monforte del Cid and so the drink's makers turn up with a promotional stall at lots of local fiestas. They give away free hats and small glasses of anís. Another local brand is Anís Solis. They have an advert painted on the side of a house on the slip road from the Aspe to Elche road and that's proved very effective in reminding me that I have run out and should buy some more.

On a tour of the winery at Mañan the other week the guide told us that Mañan became a village when five rich families from Monóvar decided to build summer houses there. Mañan is a bit higher than Monóvar so the summer nights are cooler. One of the families, she said, included  the person whose factory produced the original Anís del Mono. When she told us that I didn't really believe her.  After all the Catalan produced, Anís del Mono is a bit of a Spanish institution. It's celebrity is not so much for the drink as for the name, the label and the bottle. 

The brothers, Jose and Vicente Bosch, set up a factory in Badalona, in 1870, to make anis. Fourteen years later, in 1884, a cholera epidemic swept through Spain. Monóvar, the town just down the road from Culebrón, became briefly famous because it didn't have a single case of cholera. By some convoluted thinking, the townspeople decided that this was because they drank the local anís (made by the firm of one of the families who built the houses in Mañan). As an obvious result, sales of the anís shot up. A bit like Trump recommending bleach. When they were asking for this drink the locals saved vocal effort by ordering a "mono", short for Monóvar.

Up in Badalona José Bosch, like lots of other Spaniards, heard this tale and realised that the name Anís del Mono could give his anís a marketing advantage over other brands. It's a bit of a strange name because mono translates as monkey - Monkey's Anís. I suppose it's a bit whimsical, a bit of a talking point. Anyway the Bosches must have liked it because they ordered up a batch of labels, featuring the name, from a French company. Like most foreigners the French proved to be bad spellers in someone else's language. They made a typo in the labels spelling "destillación" with two Ls when, in Spanish, it only has one. Catalans have a reputation for being good at business, and the labels were used, so I suspect there was quite a lot of hard bargaining about the label price. When it came to reprinting Anis del Mono stuck with the print error. There was more fancifulness, another bit of a wheeze for their label. The label features a monkey, but the monkey has a human face. People say it's the face of Charles Darwin who had published his "On the Origin of Species" a few years before. The kerfuffle -  religious, political and social - about whether people shared a heritage with monkeys was still in full swing. The Bosches must have reckoned that if people talked about their label they'd probably take a drink at the same time. And also on the label is a scroll that reads - "La ciencia lo dijo y yo no miento," which is something like "science said it and I don't lie," That could be to do with the supposedly "scientifically proven" merits of mono to stave off cholera or it could be related to Darwin's theories.

Oh, and the bottle features a raised diamond pattern in the glass. Believe it or not this has made the bottle a typical Christmas musical instrument. People rub something against the bottle to produce a sound as they sing their Christmas carols. Bizarre as it may sound it's true. I've seen it more than once.

As Jose and Vicente Bosch might say. "Buy a bottle, check it out".

Smoke signals

There's quite a lot of stuff that I'm aware of because I'm English. Stuff like knowing that Belgravia and Chelsea are rich parts of London, that Trafalgar Square is the (English) place to be for New Year, that Land of Hope and Glory will get a lung bashing the Last Night of the Proms and that haddock is not the usual fish in fish and chips but it was where I grew up. One of the pleasures and pitfalls of living in a place you were not born is that the common knowledge in the new place will be different. I've mentioned this in blogs lots of times before. I find it interesting, otherwise why would I be in the least interested in the story of Suavina lip balm and why would I keep going on about how strange Spaniards find it that we drink hot drinks with food or think that cheese and onion sandwiches are normal?

Last month we stayed over in Alcoy during the weekend of their Modernista Fair. Modernista, modernism is something else that I'd never really heard of till I got here. I thought you might not know either so I went in search of the two-line definition so necessary for the TikTok or Instagram generation we've become. In fact, there wasn't an obvious one. Most of the descriptions were quite long so this is a cobbled-together attempt: Modernism is an international style of art, often referred to by its French name of Art Nouveau. It was popular from the 1890s through to the first decade or so of the 20th Century. Modernism embraced architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It frequently incorporates natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. The style is often asymmetrical and although wood was widely used there was a tendency towards modern, industrial materials like cast iron, glass, ceramics and concrete. If you know any Gaudí stuff he was very Modernista.

So there we are, in Alcoy, amidst a slew of people dressed in "Edwardian" costume demanding the vote for women and dancing very lively dances wearing bowler hats and tailcoats. As we strolled we came across a stall promoting PAY-PAY (pronounced like the pie in pork pie - so it's pie pie) cigarette papers. To be honest I haven't really thought of cigarette papers since my student days when I used to carry around Rizla King Size just in case anyone asked and then felt that sharing was appropriate. I noticed the stall though and wondered if this was another example of "every day is a school day". True enough there's a bit of history.

It says, on the PAY-PAY website that PAY-PAY is the oldest cigarette paper in the world. The papers were first manufactured in 1764 in Alcoy from where they were exported to many countries, especially to Latin America, often in exchange for tobacco. That's why the stand at the Modernista fair in Alcoy. 

The thing is though that on the Rizla website, they say their story begins in 1532 when Pierre Lacroix traded some of his rolling paper in return for a bottle of Perigord champagne. They go on to say that over a hundred years later, after Pierre’s rolling paper had been passed down for generations within his family, high volume production began. For years, for ordinary people, pipes were probably the most common way to smoke tobacco and the most common form of tobacco was the powder that we'd now call snuff. Rich people smoked their tobacco leaf wrapped in other tobacco leaves - cigars. If you didn't have a pipe to hand and the craving came over you then smoking the powder in any old scrap of paper was the way to go. Rizla say that, when they introduced a dedicated, rice based rolling paper in the late 1880s it took the market by storm. 

I found another website too about the history of smoking and cigarette papers. There there were lots of photos of people surrounded by clouds of smoke, quite unlike the gentle fug from Golden Virginia or Samson. That website suggests that Rizla, Raw and Smoking were the first important rolling paper brands. There is no mention of PAY-PAY though the site does say that the original cigarette papers were called Spanish papers. Who knows; were the Spanish there first or was it the French Rizla people? Do we really care?

In fact, having read all the PAY-PAY history it turns out that all that remains of the original company is the name; a bit like the Chinese MG cars. It looked for a while as though PAY-PAY were claiming that they invented the cigarette paper booklet, the interleaved papers of an appropriate size for rolling a ciggy, because they talk about the invention as being that of a Dominican friar from Xátiva, which is very close to Alcoy, in 1815. They give the game away though by saying that the PAY-PAY workshop was just one of several in Alcoy making the interleaved papers and that PAY-PAY was a brand name for the Pascual Ivorra workshop. Apparently this bloke's marketing strategy was to print allegorical engravings, to tell a moralistic or Christian story, on the outside of the packets. Over time the packets were to bear a long series on the history of Spain and others on famous people and on customs, costumes and traditional sayings. If you're as old as me you're now thinking of those little cards that used to come with PG Tips and if you're even older maybe cigarette cards.

At the end of this the only thing worth remembering is that if you get sent for some Rizlas down at the local estanco and there aren't any you have a name in reserve - but remember, pie pie not pay pay.

Visiting a bodega

Some friends asked us if we could organise a visit to a bodega. They didn't really mean me, they meant my partner, Maggie. She likes wine, she likes to visit bodegas. Wine is one of her hobbies, she knows a good deal about the local wineries and their products. I count beer and brandy among my hobbies but the focus is somewhat different.

Spain produces a lot of wine. I wasn't quite sure how much or where the country was in the pecking order of wine producers but I was sure the Internet would know. Like so many times before I found that the information is not so cut and dried as you might expect. 

Where Spain ranks in world wine production fits with what may, or may not, be a Spanish urban myth about Italian olive oil. Spaniards say that the oil produced in Spain is shipped in bulk to Italy where it is put into stylish bottles with Italian labels and passed off as Italian. The Italians have, for a long time,  marketed their oil as a top quality product, much better than the humble Spanish equivalent, so it's easy to sell Italian oil at a premium. Spain almost certainly does the same with Iranian saffron. And, for years, Spaniards have argued that they ship wine harvested and produced in Spain to France where it is mixed with the local plonk to produce something more palatable. Again, French wine has more caché than the Spanish product. The French though, who are the biggest importers of Spanish wine, deny the claim and counter attack by saying that Spanish wine is often a mix of Spanish wine with stuff produced in Latin America. I didn't spend too much time trying to unravel this tangled skein of international wine trade name calling. It wasn't what I'd set out to write about. Let's just say that Italy is the biggest wine producer in the world and either Spain or France comes second. The US, the fourth largest producer, has the honour of being the country that drinks most wine.

Until quite recently most wine, nearly everywhere, was pretty rough. For the "pensioner" generation of Spaniards wine was simply a drink. Something, instead of water, to go with food. It was often rough enough to need mixing with casera type gaseosa to make it palatable. It's only relatively recently that most Spanish producers have got around to producing wine under controllable conditions, bottling their wine up and putting labels on it to claim ownership of a fine product. Although the first steps to produce a better quality product go back to a system introduced in 1932 the first real attempt to up-quality wine began with regulations in 1970 which were upgraded in 1988, amended in 1996 and upgraded again in 2003. The current system for good quality wine (see the diagram at the head of this blog) starts with DO (Denominación de Origen), steps up to DOCa (Denominación de Origen calificada) and reaches the zenith in VP (Vino de pago). There are only 20 VP wines in all Spain. Four of them are from our region, Valencia - Finca El Terrerazo, Pago Vera de Estenas, Los Balagueses and Chozas Carrascal.

Whatever the politics and economics of it all we're in a geographically good spot for wine production. We have three areas with the DO quality mark in the Valencian Community - Alicante (this is the one that includes local bodegas like the co-op in Pinoso and our bodega in Culebrón), Utiel-Requena and Valencia. In fact some of the wines in the Valencia region have the next grade up, DOCa status, as well as the Vinos de pago mentioned above. Across the border in Murcia there are three DOs - Bullas, Yecla and Jumilla. Both Jumilla and Yecla share a border with our hometown, Pinoso.

So now we're back to where I wanted to be. Talking about bodega visits. The friends wanted an afternoon visit. A couple of local bodegas said they might be able to do afternoon visits but there were "special circumstances" that made it impossible this time. Basically if you want to visit a bodega it's going to be a morning visit. Unsurprisingly visits at the weekend are the most popular.

There was a time when you could just show up at a bodega and there was an even chance that they'd have someone who could show you around. It was never particularly common and it's certainly not like that any more. Bodega visits are now a business. You need to book up beforehand. Some bodegas are more organised, more reliable than others. We foreigners are often a bit loathe to use the phone, because of the language difficulty, and we think that an email or a WhatsApp message will be easier. Some bodegas will respond to emails and messages but the simple truth is that a phone call is still the surest way to do it. Or to go in person to book of course.

The cost varies. I seem to remember that when Maggie first started dragging me around bodegas we got a couple of tours for free. Maggie tells me that's because I have a dodgy memory (or because of my beer/brandy hobby) but she agrees that the price was usually a nominal 3 to 5€. The visits cost a lot more now. It's impossible to generalise because there are all sorts of offers and the bodegas keep coming up with new ideas. The typical, basic trip, which comes out at around 12-15€ per person, includes being talked through the process of wine making as you stare at stainless steel tanks or oak barrels, followed by a wine tasting with three or four wines. Usually there's a bit of cheese and ham too. 

That experience is now added to in all sorts of ways from the frivolous, shoes and socks off to tread the grapes, to the more upmarket, where a meal becomes part of the tour, through to the plush, luxury weekends where wine and food are mixed with all sorts of pampering. I suppose that the only limits are the imagination of the people offering the programme and the boundaries imposed by any health and safety requirements. I've seen publicity for picnics among vineyards, courses in wine harvesting, full dining experiences with fancy chefs in impressive surroundings, opportunities to taste the wine before it's strictly ready directly from barrels and storage tanks, a day where you get to be the winemaker, blending various wines to make your own designer product, art exhibitions and concerts in bodegas etc., etc.

If you've not visited a bodega, even if you're not a wine buff, it can be an interesting experience. I've done too many but I still enjoy the way that the different bodegas, all of which vary the way they produce the finished product, insist that their way is the best. That's the spirit!

To start here are links to two of the easiest networks for local bodegas. There are many more only a Google away.

Local Alicante bodegas

Local Jumilla bodegas

But the sea isn't level

Our house is a shade over 600 metres above sea level. If you say that in feet it's just shy of 2,000 feet which, in the UK, would be hilly. The Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge with Pen-y-Ghent at 694 metres, Whernside at 736 metres and Ingleborough at 723 metres are all a bit lower than the humble, but 800 metre high hill, Xirivell, at the back of our house. Just a little further away the Sierra del Carche range, which you can see from Pinoso and which you drive alongside on the way to nearby Jumilla, rises to 1371 metres which is just a few metres up on Ben Nevis at 1345 metres. That said the Grampians, the Lake District or the Machynlleth Hills call for high tech footwear, cuben fibre gear and trekking poles while Xirivell is much more a flip flops and shorts hill. The difference is the height of the surrounding flatland.

The Spanish Ordnance Survey, the National Geographic Institute (IGN from it's initials in Spanish), began work on the first topographic maps in 1857. One of the essentials for making maps which show heights, the topography, is to have reference points. The most basic of these is a base level and it's sea level that is used. The trouble is that the sea level, for all sorts of reasons, varies from place to place on the various seas and oceans. The IGN decided that it would use Alicante as the place to measure sea level to give the basis for heights in Spain. They chose Alicante because it was quite easy to measure sea level there using basic instrumentation. The Mediterranean is relatively calm, the tidal variation is limited and it's a comfortable place to be based. Cádiz or Santander might have been just as comfortable but the Atlantic has much bigger tidal variations and more frequent and violent storms. 

So, between 1870 and 1872 the IGN measured the sea level just by where, nowadays, there is a statue which is called El regreso de Ícaro con su ala de surf - it's the one that I always thought was a surfer until I wrote this piece. Apparently it's a homage to those who try to dream and soar. The IGN used a metal ruler fastened to the wall with divisions every 5 mm and they measured the sea level every three hours between 9 in the morning and six in the evening for a couple of years. The mean variation was 0.43 metres. That gave them their sea level, the mean sea level, Point Zero or Cota cero in Spanish. I'm told there is a metal plaque on the seawall to mark the spot though I've never noticed it myself.

Now the IGN had its baseline they needed a spot on dry land to measure from. They chose the first step of the main staircase in Alicante Town Hall. Heaven knows why. The Town Hall is just 230 metres in a straight line from Point Zero and that first staircase step is 3.4095 metres above mean sea level. This measuring point was given the name NP1. It's still the point from which the height of anywhere in Peninsular Spain is measured. If you're ever in Alicante it's easy to have a look. Anyone can walk in the front door of the Town Hall. The staircase is obvious enough, though you may notice that funny golden Dalí statue before it. You probably won't notice the rather unimpressive bronze plaque, which is NP1, without looking for it. Then again the standard inch, foot, yard etc in Trafalgar Square aren't exactly overwhelming either. 

Once the IGN had something to go on it developed the precision levelling network (Red Española de Nivelación de Alta Precisión) which wasn't completed till 1924. By drawing 92 lines between various places running along more than 16,500 kms of  railway lines and roads they were able to place over 18,000 signs which marked fixed heights. Nearly 2,200 of those marks were principal signs which were placed in public spaces like town halls and railways stations. You will see them from time to time as you wander around Spain. The one in the header photo is from Villena railway station.

It has to be said that in today's world a metal ruler on a seawall isn't as accurate as it gets. The real variations in sea level depend on lots of factors, like the curvature of the earth, the amount of ice held in the polar ice caps, the phases of the moon and the like. Nowadays there are various tide meters dotted around the Spanish coast and satellites also measure sea level - I presume though I don't know - that the two can communicate with each other so that there is accurate information about actual and mean sea levels at any time. Nonetheless, as we look out from our garden to the Salinas de Sierra mountain chain opposite we can say that the Pico de la Capilla is at 1238 metres above sea level at Alicante and that's close enough for us.

And I thought I'd finished paying for the car

Second-hand car prices being what they are in Spain, and because I could, I bought a car from new. I was actually in a situation where I could have paid outright (pension lump sum), but the dealer offered a better price, even with all the interest, on a finance package. The finance period had to be 48 months or more.

When the last instalment left my bank account on September 14 this year I grinned. The car was mine. Or so I thought.

I have an application on my phone called Mi DGT or My DGT (DGT is Dirección General de Transporte - something like The Ministry of Transport ). Apart from being a bit on the clunky side, the phone app's OK. It holds my driving licence and most of the official documentation on the car. At the top of the details about the car, there is a red band and a warning sign. Basically, it says I'm not the owner of the car, VW Finance is. I've been waiting for the red notice to go away since I paid the last instalment, but today, for the first time, I bothered to read the whole of the explanatory note against the warning and not just the first sentence. It said that, once I'd paid for the car, I would need to register it on the Registro de Bienes Muebles. Before I did that, the title of the car would remain with the finance company as they have something called reserva de dominio, and it could "impede" the transfer or sale of the vehicle. The note said that the finance company would give me the certificate so I could go through the process.

I'd never heard of this, I didn't know what it was, and for once, I didn't go to Google for the answer. I was going into Pinoso anyway, so I went to the office of the gestor (sort of half accountant half official paperwork handler) that does my tax return. 

At first, the woman I talked to had no idea what I was talking about but, after a bit of goading, she phoned someone else. He knew. After the call, she said they could process the paperwork for me. Normally, I'd do these things myself. The digital signature, a sort of certificate of identity on my computer, makes carrying out lots of official things pretty easy, but I'd heard about the huge delays in getting a person-to-person appointment with the DGT, and I'd rather dropped myself in it by asking in the office first. It was a case of "sod it", alright then, you do it. Oh, by the way, how much is it? The 100€ answer was a bit of a shock but, in for a penny. I handed over the certificate from the finance company, I handed over copies of the ficha técnica and the permiso de circulación (car logbook and registration type documents), a copy of my personal ID and two crisp 50€ notes. The gestor prefers cash!

Now, I suppose I just wait till either the little warning note goes from the app or the gestor phones me up.

Official mourning - luto

I forget exactly but I think it was when they were burying the old Queen. As the cortege passed, at least on one stretch, people applauded. The British public didn't keep quiet, they didn't hold with the old stiff upper lip rule. No "dignified" silence. They showed their appreciation. They clapped.

Spaniards always applaud at funerals, at celebrity funerals, at funerals for victims, at funerals for heroes. Reverence isn't the way; full voiced appreciation is. Spaniards applauded the health workers every evening for 64 consecutive days during the pandemic. Spaniards applaud under lots of circumstances.

When something bad happens. When women are murdered by their partners. When children are kidnapped, when workers die in industrial accidents, Spaniards go and stand somewhere, together, and make a show of their concern and solidarity. A short period of silence, at noon, followed by applause, outside the town hall is typical.

When something bad happens in a town. When workers die in fires and explosions. When miners are buried alive. When young people die in traffic accidents. When concert goers are crushed to death and when club revellers are let down by unscrupulous club owners and local authorities which may be better at writing rules than enforcing them, then, those same local authorities announce an official period of mourning.

Someone was killed a couple of years ago in Pinoso in the place that people run about taunting bullocks as a part of the town's annual celebration, its fiestas. I seem to remember that the official mourning period was for just one day. Flags at half mast, a sombre TV interview from the mayor. The bullock chasing was only suspended for that day though. Then it was back to business as usual. I wouldn't be cynical enough to suggest that the reason was financial.

Thirteen young people died in a disco fire in Murcia city on Sunday. The local authority, may or may not have failed in its duty to protect those revellers through proper inspections - the town hall claims there was no licence in place, the club owners say there was. The club was obviously unsafe and the young people are dead whichever side manages to dodge the blame. As a consequence of the deaths three days of mourning were declared for the whole of the Region of Murcia.

We were going to a concert in Yecla this evening, Yecla is in Murcia. The concert was cancelled because of that mourning period. So far as I remember that's the first time that we have actually been affected by any of this official outpouring of grief. 

And just in case anybody takes from this that I am moaning about the cancellation, I'm not. It was just that the cancellation reminded me of something that fits with the tagline at the top of this page about what an old, fat, white haired Briton notices around him in Spain.

A walk through Spanish time

We're going to take a stroll through a typical Spanish Archaeological Museum. First though some figures to show just how much of our history is really prehistory. Take my figures with a pinch of salt. The information is generally European and, because there was some variation in the detail, I rounded and massaged the figures. They are fine for a conversation down the pub but not detailed enough to form the basis of your specialist subject on Mastermind.

• About 4,500,000,000 years ago the Earth was formed
• About 3,700,000,000 years ago microbes pop up
• About 500,000,000 years ago jellyfish are doing just fine
• About 2,500,000 years ago and there are eight (and probably more to be unearthed) human species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans kicking about
• About 300,000 years ago we appear - Homo Sapiens. Time will prove that sapiens was a bad choice of name. Total human population about 30,000
• About 73,000 years ago the Toba catastrophe (a volcanic eruption in Indonesia) reduces the human population to below 10,000. We hang on by the skin of our teeth
• About 11,000 years ago, maybe a bit before, we moved out of caves and started to do a bit of farming
• About 5,000 years ago we began to tool up with bronze, we invented ploughs and social organisation. The Egyptians were way out in front. They could organise legions of workers and knew how to build pyramids. They had a system for writing too so that we have names and dates for them
• About 3,300 years ago there are villages and people are forging iron. Maybe 3 million people in the world
• About 250 years ago the Industrial Revolution began. Populations began to increase and we started to impact our environment. 770 million people in the World. About 8 million on the Spanish Peninsula and 9 million in the British Isles.

So, back to that archaeological museum. Almost every one I've been to in Spain is organised so that the rooms represent time periods. The first section will be prehistory. There'll be axe heads and flint arrows and maybe small skeletons, some pots and pictures of people in skins carrying spears and pictures of men with beards and women cooking. Prehistory; the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age with no personalities and no specific history but already with stereotypes.

The next room will be about the Iberos. It's possible that this is a bit of a Valencia/Murcia thing because this bunch turned up and settled this area about 2,600 years ago. They also have a name that sounds Spanish - like the ham and the airline. They left behind plenty of pottery and jewellery and, of course, the famous Dama de Elche bust (like the one in the photo). In this same room the Phoenicians, who were from Lebanon way and had a few trading settlements here and there in Spain, will get a mention. The Celts, who had settled in the North of the peninsula will also get a nod. In fact, at the time, there were lots of groups on the peninsula (Iberians, Celtiberians, Tartessians, Lusitanians, and Vascones) but their populations were so tiny that they are largely forgotten. Like the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians and Greeks had small trading settlements on the Mediterranean coast. Only a couple of hundred years before the start of the modern era (the old BC/AD divide) the Carthaginians came in force from North Africa, and settled in Cartagena. By now the rich and powerful have names and dates for their births and deaths. Battles have dates too.

Passing to the following room we're with the Romans. The Romans were all over large parts of what is now Spain. They took their time about conquering it all, a couple of hundred years in fact, but by twenty years before the modern era they controlled all the peninsula, Portugal included. And they stayed for a long time leaving lots of bridges and mosaics, theatres, statues without heads and forums (fora?). There were also three Roman Emperors who were Spanish (well they were Roman but they were born in Spain, well, what would, one day, be Spain) - Trajan, Hadrian (he of the wall) and Theodosius I. As the Germanic tribes sacked Rome the Roman settlements in Spain were overrun by tribes like Visigoths, Suevi and Vandals. 

The Visigoths were the big winners in the new order in Spain after decline of the Roman Empire but they usually get hardly a mention in the archaeological museums - sometimes they are popped in with the Romans and sometimes they're in the next room. We're now at about year 400. The Visigoths were in charge for a few hundred years. When there was a bit of a problem about the succession to the crown within the ruling Visigothic elite one of the pretenders invited some North African troops over to Spain, to give him a hand. It was a bad move. The Berbers came, liked what they saw and decided to stay. As they were warriors and Muslims they saw it as their duty to conquer the lands for Islam. These are the Moors, los Moros, the ones who have the better costumes in the Moors and Christians celebrations. 

It's the Moors and the Christians who get the next room. From the Moorish Invasion in 711 to the time that they lost their last foothold in Granada in 1492 they were a big part of Spanish history. The years from the invasion to the "reconquest" is the stuff of Spanish legend. The idea is that a few brave (white, Christian) souls, Asturians, led by Pelayo stopped the Moorish armies at Covadonga. The Moors had had very little trouble conquering Spain to that point so the Asturians claim to have stopped the Muslim hordes and so saved Europe. This is the stuff of Spanish myth, the bedraggled Christians fighting back and eventually turfing out those nasty (black, Islamic) invaders. It's not really true of course. Christian propaganda. The Moors were actually stopped, militarily, by Charles Martel (at least that's his British name) at the battle of Tours. But let's not be disloyal, we'll stick with Pelayo at Covadonga. From there there is a gentle but persistent pushing back of the Moors. There is also a lot of living side by side and interbreeding and farming and learning maths and everything else. Mind you, where you get a line of castles, like we have around here in Petrer, Sax, Villena, Castilla etc., it's usually the sign of a long lasting frontier between one side and the other. Again it's a huge oversimplification but it will do for now.

So, it's 1492 and the Catholic Monarchs, an alliance through marriage of the powerful "kingdoms" of Spain, have accepted the surrender the last of the Moorish rulers based in Granada and they're getting on with turfing all the Jewish people out. That's when they turn their eyes to broader horizons and pay Columbus or Colón, or whatever he was called, to go and bring back some spices from the Indies. Along the way, completely lost, he bumped into some Caribbean islands and so began the European invasion of the New World. 

And from then on the individual museum curators seem to do as they wish.

No dance for the single men

We were up in Valencia a little while ago. One of the places we went was a museum called L'Etno. I'd heard on the radio that it had won the 2023 European Museum of the Year Award so, while we were in town, it made sense to go and have a nosey. My 'two and two' skills being what they are, I'd failed to realise that it was an ethnology museum. Ethnology isn't a word I use every day but, in essence, it's a museum about society and its artefacts; old cars, 8 tracks, telephone boxes, rolling pins and fridges. Like everyone else, as we gawped at the exhibits, we reminisced. "We had one of those in our kitchen" or "My mum used to swear by Oxydol."

One of the many things that drew my attention was a photo with the title "El baile de los solteros." The museum people had interpreted that caption into English as "No dance for the single men."

It's a black and white photo. The background music is a chotis, a Madrileño folk dance. In the photo, a few men wearing caps and dark, slightly old-fashioned suits lounge against the wall, looking on, as couples dance in what looks like a typical Saturday night village hall do. With a bit of imagination you can see them moving forward from time to time into the space reserved for the dancing couples before they retreat, abashed, to the wall. All of the unmarried thirty-something men of the village are there. Not one of them is missing. Other men of their age, who are already married, have stopped going to the dance. These unmarried men, these perpetual bachelors, never dance and the day of the photo is no exception. At dances like this these men have nothing to do. The dances are for younger people, for the unmarried. The village dance was the socially acceptable place for the two sexes to mingle without too many restrictions. But our bachelors have already passed their sell-by date, they have missed their chance, they are the male equivalent of old maids. Men and women go to dances to dance but these men will never dance. They will stay until about midnight amidst the noise and the lights of the dance. All night long they will gaze at the inaccessible girls before sloping off home.

The photo is illuminated in such a way that, behind it, from time to time we can see some everyday articles related to this dance without dancing. The cut-throat razor to make sure the men look their best, the essential caps; fashionable headgear, and a cigarette case, to chain smoke the evening away, watching other people dance.

Until 1914, in rural Spain, marriage functioned as an economic transaction, as an operation between two families, not two individuals. The firstborn male would inherit the property and the negotiation was basically about the property, about the redistribution and consolidation of the wealth that the land represented for the two families. The other sons and daughters were left much more to their own devices. They might marry for love, to cover the shame of an unintended pregnancy or any of those other well-established reasons why people choose to get married. The First World War caused a boom in the Spanish economy which started the transfer of wealth from the countryside to the towns and cities. That change continued all through the 20th Century. People left the countryside in droves and the old patterns of marriage began to crumble. The second, third, and fourth-born sons suddenly had the opportunity to make something of themselves in the towns and cities rather than being the labourers on their eldest brother's farm. Minimal as they may seem to us the opportunities of domestic service and factory work also gave opportunities for women to "better" themselves. The firstborn son was no longer the catch he had been for decades and centuries. A woman could do better for herself with a second-born who made good in the city, and a second-born son in the city had better possibilities to choose a wife for pure fancy from a far larger pool of women and for selfishly personal reasons. The firstborn remained tied to the land, in a reversal of fortunes they were now the ones with limited room for manoeuvre, and it was this group that became the sad coterie of permanent bachelors in the photo doomed to celibacy or paid for sex.

Tyred of it all

The tyres on my car were getting towards the dodgy end of the spectrum. There are two obvious tyre retailers in Pinoso - places with pictures of tyres on their signs. I asked them, in person, for prices. I got quotes for tyres made by Aplus, Kummo, Minerva, Roadstone, Firestone and Hankook. I was born in a simpler world. A world where Cadbury was British, not American and Volvo was Swedish, not Chinese. When a Mini had a BMC engine and not a Peugeot one. When tyres were made by Pirelli, Goodyear, Dunlop and Michelin. I'd never heard of most of the brands. The only decision I could make about quality was price. If Firestone cost more than Insa I supposed they were better but then again we all know that sometimes we're paying for a name. The Internet reviews were useless. The tyres were still legal. I decided the choice could wait.

At a routine, prepaid, service on the car SEAT disagreed with me. They said the tyres didn't have enough tread left. They gave me a price to replace the original Hankooks similar to the ones the car came with. Hankook, as a name, always brings to mind the Blood Donor sketch and a sad man. I started to ring around. I got all sorts of prices. Comparing them proved tricky because even if the brand were the same the specifications might vary slightly. How do I know if a 205/55 R17 95V is worth 20€ more than a 205/55 R17 91V? Eventually I gave up ringing around and just searched online. I got even more confused.

Better to support local businesses I thought even though, surprisingly, the quote from the SEAT main dealer was competitive. I messaged the Pinoso workshop and said I'd like to buy a couple of tyres from them. The messaging came about because their prices had been sent by WhatsApp. They couldn't do it, they were closed for a week; holidays. I phoned the main dealer. They couldn't give me an appointment to change tyres (which takes what, thirty minutes?) for over two weeks which would be after the Pinoso people were back from holiday.

The day the Pinoso workshop was open I confirmed the order for a couple of tyres. They suggested I go the next day to have them fitted. I did. The bloke in the overalls, who I could barely understand, knew nothing about me or the car or the tyres. I showed him the messages from his wife because it's her who does the office work. "Bah! Come back tomorrow," he said. Fortunately I was in sniggering rather than affronted mode. I sniggered. I went back the next day and Mr. Overalls had the wheels off before I left to get a cup of coffee. When I went back 50 minutes later the car still had the old boots on. "Sorry," he said, "bit off a cock up on the ordering front. The tyres I thought were yours aren't yours. I was hoping the carrier might turn up at any minute." They didn't. The old tyres went back on the car. The next day it was third time lucky. The tyres were there and now they're on the car.

I had to go back to the SEAT dealer as a follow up to that routine service. They were going to replace a non essential part that had failed but they needed to order it so I had to wait. The woman on the reception recognised me, or more likely, the information held in the SEAT database gave her MI5 type information about me and she asked if I still wanted the tyres. I explained that I'd tried to buy them but that the wait had been too long so I'd gone elsewhere. "Odd," she said, "I'm sure we could have done them anytime. It's a quick job."

Do you ever suspect that some jobs are just fated?