Life in Culebrón

I like to be active, not climbing hills or doing press-ups active, but doing something out and about. I'm not keen on work as a substitute. I don't need to paint walls or clean the kitchen, prune trees, shop, cook, clean toilets or keep drains clear to keep myself occupied. We're all a bit work obsessed in my opinion. I did a lot of it at one time, the paid sort, and now I look back on it and wonder why I wasted all that time. The pay, obviously, but that doesn't explain its centrality in British society. So here I like to get out and about. We go to fiestas, we go to events, we visit castles, we go to the theatre and concerts and the cinema. We see exhibitions, we go to talks and tramp around forests for stargazing and to hunt out scorpions. Some things are never repetitive, even though you've done them before, because each event is different enough to make it potentially memorable. On the other hand there are some things which are so much of a muchness and start t...

I'm not such a big fan of wine. It's not that I don't drink it but I'd nearly always go for other sorts of booze first. Maggie, my partner, on the other hand, is a bit of an enthusiast. One of the things she often does is to take our visitors on one of the bodega tours. Indeed, years ago, she used to organise tours for tourists as a business venture so we got to know nearly all of the bodegas in Jumilla and Yecla and a good number of the bodegas close to Pinoso that allow visits. Jumilla, Yecla and Alicante all produce wines that have Denominación de Origen Protegida (protected designation of origin) as well as wines more suited to drain unblocking or unarmed combat. Lots of the stuff that isn't D.O.P. is shipped to other countries, particularly France, where it is mixed with local wine and then sold as being from that country. The unloved wine is the sort of wine that you would use for things where any old wine will do - preserving fruits, cooking, turning into vin...

Spaniards don't care for British beer. They don't like it because of the temperature it is served at. Most use the word broth in their comparison. Spaniards like their beer cold. British style bitter beer isn't easily available in Spain because here, like in most places, beer means bottom fermented rather than top fermented product - lager instead of ale. Obviously, when I moved to Spain I wanted to integrate so I embraced Spanish lager wholeheartedly. It wasn't as hard as cracking the subjunctive because, when I was young, drinking Indian Kingfisher, American Rolling Rock, Italian Peroni, Canadian Labatt, Mexican Dos Equis, and so on and so on, was considered eminently cool. I had prior form. To my mind most lagers tend to be quite samey. It's not that they taste the same but the standard light, crisp and gassy lagers, like the majority of the Spanish ones have quite a lot in common. That's presumably why most Spaniards, in Spain, don't specify and simply a...