Life in Culebrón

Maggie and I may be among the last few people in the world who are awoken by a clock radio alarm. A thirty year old clock radio at that. The wake up programme is Hoy empieza todo on Radio 3, a contemporary culture and music station. We don't listen for long, even if we're very slothful it will only be about twenty minutes though the programme stays on in the background. I change the bedclothes on Friday. As I fought with the duvet cover the main presenter on the programme was talking to the organisers of a "pop" festival that runs in Miranda de Ebro in Burgos about 700km from home. They said that they were giving away a package of two tickets, travel and accommodation for the festival and to enter all you had to do was to make a comment on their Twitter account. Now I've never quite mastered Twitter but, eventually I posted something as to why I wanted to go. I said I was old (and may die before the next one), because I was poor (and I wouldn't ...

I think that we do pretty well at getting out and about. In fact the last few days have been a bit of a culture fest. Just tonight we were at the Yecla Jazz Festival. On Saturday it was the open doors day in Petrer when we visited the Castle , a Civil War machine gun emplacemen t and some other stuff. Oh, and earlier on Saturday we went to an animal rescue centre outside Villena that majors in apes and monkeys . On Sunday I popped in to see the  Fallas  "monuments" in Elda and, spurred on by all this activity, I also got around to booking a couple of events for this season at the Teatro Chapi. And right on our doorstep I signed us up for a visit to the local salt workings. I even got to the cinema twice last week and, if the second film hadn't been so incomprehensible to me, I might have made it three. I mentioned the Fallas event to a Spanish chap I was talking to this morning. He'd never heard of it. Moors and Christians in Elda he said; didn't even kn...