About a rather special bloke, his crew and their little ship

In Alicante, on the quayside near the hotel, going down to the Casino there's a little bust of Archibald Dickson and a plaque to commemorate him and the crew of the SS Stanbrook. Archie Dickson was of the same stuff as the men and women of the boats patrolling the seas and oceans looking to save the lives of desperate people fleeing for their lives today. Archie knew what was right.

The Stanbrook is small coal fired ship just 70 metres long, 1400 tons and 11 knots top speed. Archibald Dickson is from Cardiff, 47, British Merchant Navy. His ship owners have told him to leave Marseilles and pick up a cargo in Alicante. A Spanish Navy destroyer, controlled by the rebellious forces, which are just about to crush the remnants of the legitimate government, tell Archie not to enter Alicante. He hoists the Red Ensign just a bit higher, grits his teeth, crosses his fingers and takes his ship into Alicante. He doesn't like being told what he can and can't do.

The quayside is heaving with people. They are the routed, the losing side, hoping, desperately hoping, to escape Spain before the fascists come and wreak vengeance. Archibald is supposed to pick up a cargo. Just as he ignored the destroyer's commands he now ignores his fleet operator too. He knows his ship can save lives. At first the loading of the people from the quayside is reasonably ordered; passports are shown, letters of recommendation are checked, International Brigade stragglers are welcomed then it becomes the people at the head of the queue until they can simply squeeze no more people aboard. Alicante is in total blackout. Madrid has fallen to Franco's rebels this morning. The stretch of coast from Alicante to Cartagena and Almería is all that's left of Republican Spain. 

About 10.30 in the late evening of 28 March 1939 the Stanbrook casts off. There are 2,638 people on board bound for Oran in French controlled Algeria. The intended cargo of oranges and saffron left on the quayside in Alicante. As they sail away the Italian air force lays into Alicante with a will. Archie wrote in the ship's log that in his 33 years at sea he had never seen anything like it. People were everywhere on his ship: in the holds, on the deck, on the mess table, in the stairways. Low in the water, terribly overloaded the ship took some steering. The overcrowding kept the doctor busy as people fainted and puked. People crowded around the warmth of the funnel. They got to Oran the evening of the 30th but it took several weeks before the French authorities let everyone off the Stanbrook. Lots of the men were sent to Concentration camps in and ended up working on the Trans-Saharan Railway as forced labour. Many later joined the Free French Forces fighting in Africa and some of them, La Nueve, were the first allied troops to liberate Paris alongside General Leclerc.

Seven months later and there's another war. This time the SS Stanbrook, as part of the British Merchant Navy, is not a neutral vessel. Klaus Korth in command of the submarine U-57, built by the Krupp factory, has ordered the firing of a torpedo packed with 300 kilos of explosive at a small, British ship. The ship has parted in half and all the crew have gone to the bottom. Not a single survivor. The crew will never hear the minute of silence held for them in the camps in Oran.

Do British people still use the term Chelsea Tractor?

Just after lunch a convoy of three tractors passed our front gate. They had the folding umbrella type contraptions on the back that are used to collect almonds. The tractor reverses up to the tree, grabs the tree trunk using some hydraulic thingummy and then fans out the expanse of plastic tarpaulin type material to surround the tree. With the tree grabbed and the material in place the tree is given a good shaking and the almonds fall into the fan of material and roll tractorwards to a collecting chamber. When the collector is full the nuts are usually transferred to a trailer or a lorry and taken off for processing. It just so happens that there is quite a large nut processing factory (I originally wrote processing plant but I thought that may lead to confusion) in Pinoso. On the smaller plots, you'll often see a family group going at an almond or olive tree with sticks with a big sheet or net spread out under the tree to catch the falling fruit. 

The tractor driver I talked to told me that, with the three big tractors, they would clear the bancal in two to three hours. A bancal is what, once upon a time, I'd have called a terrace, it's the level land formed by building two parallel walls on a hillside. Recently someone told me that the retaining walls are called ribazos but the only people I've ever tried to get to confirm that word are a bit too urban to know whether it's correct or not.  So, according to the driver a big tractor costs around 250,000€ and the folding fan thing about 30,000€. I expect that the stick and visqueen sheet method involves substantially less financial outlay but it may take a while longer to collect the fruit. As I said the driver said 2 to 3 hours and there are about 350 trees on the bancal. Lets say that 15 minutes per tree using the hitting the tree with sticks method or about 8 days working non stop for 12 hours a day. Costs and benefits, swings and roundabouts I suppose.

It's pretty obvious that we live in the country. I've said before that we don't have any street or avenue as a part of our address; even our postcode is a bit undecided. This causes people who live in cities no end of problems. They presume that I don't understand or that, being foreign, and consequently stupid, I don't know the correct answer to their simple question about my address. I can't say I know much about agricultural life but I do see the gangs of (usually) blokes collecting the grape harvest from one type of field orientation and the mechanised grape pickers working on fields with a different configuration. I sort of half know what's going on with some of the processes just as I sometimes wonder what that bright green crop is that all those people are picking in some field as we drive past.

Yesterday Maggie and I went to the cinema in Alicante. We took advantage of being in the town to go to see an exhibition, an artistic exhibition, about space debris. It wasn't a particularly good exhibition but it's the sort of thing we do given the opportunity. Parking was surprisingly easy but we had to search around a bit and Maggie, who doesn't parallel park, was quite sure that I couldn't either. Without having any relationship to those Comanche trackers that John Ford always had helping the 7th Cavalry as they rode through Monument Valley, we were able to tell that dogs had been in the same street that we were walking and we avoided there manifold calling cards. We commented on the striking aroma from the communal rubbish bins in the August heat. There may not be any cinemas or exhibition spaces in Culebrón but parking is very easy and we don't have to be too careful about where we walk. Pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages I suppose.

I was thinking about this as I watched a programme in the second series of Valeria on Netflix. It's a series based on the books by Elísabet Benavent. In it four young women, whose main concerns seem to centre about their work, their wardrobe, the people they have sex with and food and drink, do what they do around Madrid. I don't know how real the Madrid, depicted in the series is, but the televisual version looks like a cool and exciting sort of place. They eat Korean, they use "park and ride" type bikes when they aren't using taxis, they sport clothes that I haven't seen in any of the chain stores. The life depicted is of the economically advantaged and domestically unchallenged. It's not much like Culebrón, or even Alicante, but it looks good on Netflix. I don't think that I'd be that keen to swap passing tractors and lots of outside space for exotic food delivered by a bloke on a bike or time share car schemes. Pluses and minuses, for and against I suppose.

I should stress that I watch Valeria not for the sex scenes or because I lust after city life but because of the Spanish. I'm a bit unlikely to use calimochada to describe an impromptu picnic or yembé (a sort of tom tom drum apparently) but the four main protagonists, and their pals, use a lot of slangy type words to show how young and modern they are. I'm interested to hear those words particularly as I don't mix with many real Spanish people. I like to think my Spanish is still improving but if the conversation with the tractor driver is anything to go by then I'm obviously deluding myself. Ah well, you win some, you lose some.

Please wash your hands

We went to a concert by La Habitación Roja last night. When I bought the tickets, only a week or so ago, the event was scheduled for the Teatro Principal in Alicante - all green velvet and gold leaf. Theatres have, obviously, been hit hard by the Covid thing and one of the reasons I bought the tickets was to do my bit for a local institution. A few days later I got an email to tell me that the venue had been changed to the bailey of the Santa Bárbara Castle in Alicante. Safer they said. Fewer viruses in the open air.

The castle in Alicante is on top of a big hill. Although it's a fair drag you can walk (or drive) to the castle on a road that starts from near the Archaeological Museum. On the seaward side you can get to the castle by using a lift that is accessed through a long tunnel. Along with the details for the change of venue the organisers said that the car parks behind the castle would be open and that the lift would be working. Yesterday, a few hours before the concert was due to begin I got a second email to say that the lift and castle car parks were now closed. There would be a minibus shuttle service. Covid certainly keeps organisers and rule makers on their toes.

The message said that it was still possible to drive to the two small car parks half way up the slope to the castle but that the police might close the car parks if there was too much mingling going on there. I suspect that had a bit of a hidden message. Young people in Spain have a fondness for impromptu gatherings which are called botellones (from the word for bottle). Often botellones are linked to parked cars and their music systems. Youngsters take the vodka, gin and mixers to the event in a plastic carrier bag, poorer young people take cartons of wine ready to mix with coke to make the disgusting but knee buckling calimocho. Obviously enough there is no set recipe but basically a botellón is an open air knees up with booze, snacks and music. The talk, amongst we older citizens, is only ever of booze, we never mention anything smokeable or poppable. Botellones, like discos, have been taking a lot of the heat for the recent increase in Covid numbers amongst young people. Well, that and family get togethers.

We have to wear masks all the time when we're in the street and in all public places. Given that eating or drinking whilst wearing a mask is counterproductive we can remove them to eat and drink, for instance outside a bar. We are supposed to pop the mask back into place between sips or whilst we're waiting for the pudding to arrive but most people don't. There are regular stories of police getting physical with someone who says no to mask wearing and the fines can be ludicrously high.

So, on the way to the concert we stop off for a drink. Our route to the terrace is clearly marked. No bar service, just table service. Gel at the entrances, limited access to the toilets following a marked route. A reminder about 40 second hand washing. Variations on a theme but the usual sort of stuff to try and check the spread.

After the bar we join the queue for the minibus shuttle. People aren't exactly careful about keeping 2 metres apart but it's a forgetful rather than defiant proximity and the line is much more widely spaced queue than normal. Nobody kisses, nobody hugs and nobody pumps hand on greeting friends. The minibus is an anomaly though. It smells very strongly of something ready to go hand to hand with viruses and bacteria but, nonetheless, we ride sardine like.

The concert is seated. The chairs are numbered. It's a slow process at the entrance; gel on hands before name and surname, the door keepers find you on the paper list and direct you to the designated seating. I notice that my phone numbers, email and address are alongside my name, presumably in case they need to hunt me down later. Our two chairs are a couple of metres from the four to the left and the five to the right. We are reminded not to wander around during the concert.

And so it goes. I visited someone in hospital yesterday. Masks and gel a go-go. The floor of my pal's room was mopped and his bathroom cleaned twice whilst I was there. There was a reminder from the local town hall about the protocol for funerals after someone died in Pinoso last week. Jumilla, one of our neighbouring towns over the border into Murcia, is sealed off from today because of the increase in cases. Nobody in and nobody out. Procedures and processes everywhere.

2020 is a strange vintage.

Mistaken identity

I went to pick up my new Foreigner's Identity Card this morning. All pretty straightforward. I'm now an immigrant foreigner instead of being identified as a Citizen of the European Union. I've never cared for the glib way we Britons use the term expat. I think that it borders on the racist. It's a semantic dodge to try to make a clear division between immigrants and us. Now there's no doubt about it at all. I'm a foreigner living here with a card to prove it. Just like a Cambodian or Cameroonian.

As I was waiting in the queue a couple of things crossed my mind. I was quite happy to be getting the card and yet I'm dead set against ID cards. They are an obvious and essential means of control. Nobody would try to run a totalitarian Government without first having everyone registered and documented. When Dicky Attenborough and Gordon Jackson were getting on the bus in the Great Escape what were they asked for? Exactly. Documentation. Spain introduced ID cards during the Franco dictatorship and it still maintains them.

And the fingerprints too. The Spanish authorities now have my fingerprints, as well as the fingerprints of anyone who has an identity card. That's nearly everyone in Spain. In Hollywood films, the scene with the mug shot and fingerprints was when the person, guilty or innocent, was branded as criminal. I seem to remember, though I may well be wrong, that, in the UK, fingerprint records are kept only for proven criminals and, of course, immigrants.

There was a small queue outside the Police Station. There was a police officer on the gate. He came and went, he even answered questions. I set out to ask him if we're in the right queue a couple of times but we seemed to work like the same poles of magnets - as I approached he retreated. Maggie and I really knew though, from the general question and answer as people arrived, that everyone in our queue thought we were in the right queue. Once past the gate and into the courtyard of the Government Office it became clearer. There were two queues in the courtyard, one for the people who need to be spaced out in time, people with appointments, people who are renewing cards and the other, quicker queue, for people like us, who are just picking something up that has already been processed and should only take a couple of minutes.

I've often commented that information in Spain tends to be handed out sparingly and not willingly. This morning I messaged our Town Hall to ask what time the team that carries out repairs on the water distribution system considers to be "office hours" and the response was that they did not have that information available - they even used that sort of reasonably formal language - they didn't say, "Sorry, we don't know, you'll have to ask in such and such office," they said "At the current time that information is not available to us. You will need to enquire in such and such office". When we were in Alicante waiting for the card I thought how easy and how useful a couple of notices would be for we dazed and confused.

Inside the office I hand over my passport to prove that I'm me as I collect a document that proves that I'm me. As a secondary check they scan my fingerprints and check them against their records. The computer bleeps and it's access granted. The two women on the desk have a brief conversation about the card I'm collecting. It's a new style card and for one of the two women it's her first sight of one. They laugh that my white hair blends into the background on my photo. That's something else I've often noted about Spanish "officials". Nobody, in all the Government offices I've ever been in has treated me badly. Sometimes the result isn't what I would want but there's never any "I, Daniel Blake", about it.

Put another log on the fire mother

I'm a bit of a softy weatherwise. We get  a lot of extreme weather here  and I don't like it. Well, I don't like most of the extremes. When the sun's beating down in June, July and August that's an extreme I can be doing with. I don't like it though when the wind blows hard. I expect the garden chairs, or something else not firmly anchored, to smash into my parked car. I can visualise the pine trees outside the house toppling over and taking down the roof of the house. I don't like it when it hails. Again I worry about the motor. Cars with hundreds of little craters, in the skyward facing bodywork, are commonplace around here. I don't like it when it rains hard. I am quite sure the drain in the back patio will block and that water will flood into our living room and even if that doesn't happen it's a certainty that the water will gouge deep channels into the track outside our house. I don't like it when the temperature drops either and our water pipes freeze.

As I typed this thunder was booming out. The rain had been coming down in sheets. We've had sleet and snow and there has been a biting cold wind. I can see snow on the hills opposite our house. In fact we've been lucky. Yecla and Villena, which are within 40 kms of here, have had heavy snow; Villena was even isolated for a while. Down on the coast the waves have been going over the top of beach side houses. The TV news has been much more about Borrasca Gloria than it has about Trump losing his few remaining marbles or politicians suggesting direct rule from Madrid of Murcia to stem the homophobia of the far right party Vox.

We've been doing our bit to bring about the next mass global extinction by pouring heat into our house to keep warm the past few days. As we have almost no insulation of any sort, anywhere, the heat just flies out of the doors, windows and roof. I've been looking for figure, that I'm sure I saw a couple of years ago, that said something like 80% or 90% of all new builds in Alicante province had the poorest levels of insulation using that Energy Performance Certificate rating. In the hunt I found that Spain ranks as No. 7 in the most energy efficient countries in the World (Germany No. 1, UK No. 5) which would seem to go against my half remembered fact. There is a difference though. When Spaniards ask me what I least like about Spain I always say the horrid winters. For most of the year we have blue skies and sun outside but in winter, when the midday outside temperature is 12º C, it can be T shirt weather in the garden and mitten weather in the ice box that is our living room. It's dead normal to see people sitting in offices around here wearing coats as they work. Now in the colder parts of Spain, like Burgos and Pamplona, houses and buildings in general are set up to deal with the bad winter weather but in Alicante and Murcia people stubbornly cling to the belief that we only have a couple of cold months. The table below shows the figures for our nearest weather station for 2019. 

I'll leave you to decide but I don't think that 3ºC is very warm, it's when the ice warning pings on my car. There were only 6 months last year when it didn't get that cold overnight on at least one day in the month. On average there were just four months when the mean temperature was 20ºC or more. Bear in mind that the World Health Organisation's standard for comfortable warmth is 18 °C for normal, healthy adults who are appropriately dressed and for the sick, disabled, very old or very young, a minimum of 20°C. Again, just to stress, that there is a lot of difference between the air temperature, the accepted norm, and how you might feel sitting out in full sunshine with the same temperature.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Low	-4,2	-0,7	1,0	3,2	6,9	8,9	15,3	15,3	11,9	6,6	1,4	0,5
High	19,2	24,3	25,1	25,0	31,0	35,0	37,1	39,4	32,8	30,2	23,5	22,4
Med	8,8	9,9	11,4	11,6	16,7	21,2	25,4	25,3	20,0	16,6	11,8	10,4

The photo is of Villena yesterday.

Feeling left out

As I abluted this morning - is it a verb? - I listened to the radio as usual. The, apparently intentional, forest fires in Asturias apart the only news was about the General Election which is taking place today

I don't get to vote of course. Perhaps I should throw some tea into the harbour or something.

So, as I sat looking at the computer screen pondering on the outcome - PP (Consrvatives) to win I suspect with PSOE (Labour) coming a distant second in some places but generally being ousted by Ciudadanos (Liberalish sort of tinge) and Podemos (talk the talk leftist bunch) a disappointing fourth and with a couple of other national parties being annihilated - I wondered who I would be voting for if I were able to vote.

The voting system in Spain is a list of candidates for each party. So, if we were talking something similar in the UK the list would be headed by Cameron with  Osborne second then May, Hammond, Grove, Fallon etc. and for Labour Corbyn, McDonell, Eagle etc. All the names by the way are from UK websites - apart from the top two names I don't know what these people look like.

It wouldn't actually be one list as the constituencies are based on the regional divisions or autonomous communities and the various provinces that make up those communities. To push the comparison there would be a list for London and there would be lists for Regions like the West Midlands or Yorkshire and Humber. The provinces would be similar to divisions such as Herefordshire and Shropshire. So Cameron might be at the top of the London list and Osborne at the top of the Shropshire list with no chance whatsoever of not being elected.

So I thought I'd have a look at the lists for the region of Valencia and the province of Alicante to see if I recognised any of the politicians. There's been a bit of murmuring because Podemos have a black woman at the head of their list in Alicante and she will almost certainly be the first black deputy in the Congress. I had heard nothing about the other candidates. Indeed it actually took me ages to find the lists. There were plenty of press reports mentioning the people heading up the lists but actually finding the full lists with the twelve candidates and three reserves for Alicante took some doing. It just shows how different the named MP system in the UK or the named representatives in the US are to the party system operated here where personalities are much less important.

I thought I recognised three names but, in fact, I was wrong about two of them. The current Foreign Minister heads up the PP list for Alicante and him I recognised. I thought Toni Roma was a defector from UPyD which is a party that, I think, will disappear at these elections but I was mistaking him for Toni Cantó or maybe for the chicken place in Benidorm. I was really surprised to see the name Ana Botella too. The one I know is the ex Mayor of Madrid and the wife of the ex President of Spain José Maria Aznar. Surely she was a member of the PP - why was she on the socialist list? The answer of course is because it's a different Ana Botella.

There are also elections for the Senate today but nobody cares about those except the potential senators and their families.

My prediction, by the way, is that there will  not be a clear cut result and the face of the next Government will depend on the horse trading that goes on over the next few weeks.

Sunday night addition: The votes are nearly all in. It's a PP win with the PSOE second Podemos third and Ciudadanos fourth. Wrong order from me then but the prediction about horse trading as right as right can be. The pundits are drawing little pictures on the telly to show a left right draw. Now the fun begins.

A cinema, a parade and something on words

Here are some ramblings from this weekend.

Once upon a time Pizza Express used to serve really good pizzas in interesting buildings. The person who launched the restaurant chain was a chap from Peterborough called Peter Boizot. One of his other ventures in the town was to try to restore the old Odeon Cinema to its former glory as a single screen venue. I've not been to Peterborough for ages but I have this vague recollection that the venture failed. People must prefer multi choice cinemas.

Spain, like everywhere else, has multiplexes in amongst fast food franchises and out of town shopping centres. The big, single screen cinemas are a thing of the past. Youngish people, twenty somethings, I taught in Cartagena still talked nostalgically of the city centre cinemas so it can't be that long ago that they disappeared. Nowadays the old cinemas are gone, boarded up or used as retail outlets.

Years ago, on holiday, I saw my first ever Rus Meyer film in a cinema in central Alicante. On Saturday as I Googled the films from a restaurant table on my phone I was surprised to find that there was a cinema, Cine Navas, just 400 metres away. And, for once, Google maps wasn't fibbing. It was all pretty run down to be honest but it was still pretty impressive, acres and acres of velvet curtains lined the walls and the floor was raked downwards from the screen so that you naturally looked up to the screen. Quite different to the tiered seating of today. The screen was big enough but the image was a bit dull and the soundtrack less than crisp so I wondered if it actually was a real film. The film by the way was terrible - Viaje a Sils Maria or the Clouds of Sils Maria in English I think.

When we came out of the cinema we could hear music. At the top of the road there was a parade. We went for a nosey. Hundreds of people were walking along the street wearing "traditional" clothes. We presumed, and I later confirmed, that it was an early procession as part of the "Bonfires of St John." Nowadays this big Alicante festival is usually given its Valenciano name of Fogueres de Sant Joan rather than its Spanish or Castellano name of Hogueras de San Juan. It marks the Saint's day on the 23rd but it also turns around the shortest night of the year. Huge statues are burned in the street. I like San Juan, it's a very community festival in lots of places with people lighting little fires to cook food, setting off fireworks, jumping over waves to get pregnant etc. San Juan seems also to be a signal. People go and open up their winter long abandoned beach or country house ready for summer.

We'd been in Alicante on Saturday to collect some visitors for one of Maggie's Secret Wine Spain bodega tours and we'd taken advantage of being there which meant spending money. So Sunday was quieter. Very quiet. Too quiet. I polished the car and, as I did so, I listened to a podcast from the radio about the visit of the Beatles to Spain. The Spanish expert on the Beatles explained that their first single Lips Me hadn't been a big hit. I had to listen three or four times to eventually decide that Lips Me was Please Me. The pronunciation and also the mis-titling of Please Please Me didn't help. Later in the programme I was told that the big break for the Beatles was thanks to Harrison Knight. I thought of the people I could remember as being associated with the Beatles - not Brian Epstein, not Mal Evans nor Neil Aspinall nor that American chap because he was an Alan something. Then it struck me. A Hard Day's Night.

This sort of strange pronunciation of English words is very common here. English is fashionable so using an English word in place of a perfectly good Spanish word is rife. There is also a tendency for the English way of saying something to supplant the more usual Spanish form. Lots of English language sounds are very difficult for many Spaniards, hence the mispronunciation. There is a second problem too. If a Spaniard knows how to pronounce an English word correctly it often isn't recognisable to other Spaniards who haven't studied English. So words are intentionally mispronounced to make them intelligible. Sometimes there is a sort of recognised half way house type pronunciation. I can usually guess at common words but names are a real problem - trying to interpret the names of music artists on the radio is by turns a lot of fun and frustrating.

Tales of turrón

Turrón is made from almonds, honey, egg whites and sugar. It's an Alicante speciality which is now produced all over Spain. Turrón, has no specific English equivalent, though for shorthand I often describe it as nougat. It's not much like the pink and white chewy nougat I knew as a youngster though. Turrón is associated with the town of Jijona which is about 70 km up the road from us. I wrote about it ages ago in a blog.

So we were going back to the UK for Christmas. I'd made a pact with my family about not exchanging gifts. We did, nonetheless, take a few Spanish Christmas goodies - mantecados, polvorones and of course turrón. I'd forgotten that I hadn't made the same pact with Maggie's family who showered me with expensive gifts whilst I had neither socks nor bubble bath in trade - it was terribly embarrassing.

The make of turrón that Maggie bought was called Pico which is a good quality if everyday brand - she bought the hard stuff and the soft one. It's maybe a bit less than half the price of the best brands which can cost as much as 9€ for a 300g bar. It was traditional enough though for me to notice something that I've missed in ten years of wolfing it down. I realised they had different names. The crunchy stuff was called Turrón de Alicante and the sort that oozes almond oil was Turrón de Jijona. Nowadays there are tens of flavours of "turrón" most of which have nothing to do with the original concept. So we have chocolate flavour, milk flavour, crema catalana flavour, strawberry flavour etcetera - the list is nearly endless. It was seeing the two traditional types side by side in matcing packets that made me realise the simple difference.

For some now forgotten reason turrón came up in the conversation with our builders. They sang the praises of a turrón produced by a local factory which processes nuts. It's obvious enough when you think about it. They work with almonds, there is lots of local honey and chickens live everywhere so the raw materials were to hand.

Intrigued I bought some when I went to pick up a gas cylinder (excellent isn't it? - nuts and butane in the same shop) and I notice that it has the quality mark to say that it's made to the standards of some regulatory body. That was news to me too and it explains why some of the most famous brands are made in places like Santander and Gijón which are miles from Alicante.

The trouble is I can't eat it. I gained two and a half kilos in the four days in the UK. It's time for penance - the hair shirt and flagellation of portion control. Mind you Christmas is far from over in Spain and just a little each day couldn't do much harm could it?

Choose your weapon

Well over thirty years ago, closer to forty, I had a job working in the Lake District doing things like building dry stone walls, getting rid of invasive species in woodland and building paths. It was a job creation scheme so we eschewed machinery. Why use a JCB to dig a ditch - better to employ twenty lads with shovels. We had chain saws but I didn't like them. I didn't like the way they jumped in the air at start up or bounced against the wood as you began. Visions of severed limbs danced before my eyes. Better a big axe or a sledge hammer. For some reason a vision of my foot cleaved asunder must be beyond my imagination. I've continued to prefer hand tools. In fact I didn't buy an electric drill (though I've borrowed several) until about two years ago. 

In inland Alicante it gets cold. I've mentioned this before, several times before.  Indeed it is one of our main concerns from December to April. Keeping warm inside. Outside is fine. Pleasant. Inside though it's Hell's freezer.

Rural Spain in winter smells of woodsmoke. Nearly everyone in the countryside has a fireplace though I'm always amazed at the number of Spaniards who seem not to notice that it's freezing and sit around in completely unheated homes apparently out of choice. And in those fireplaces we burn wood. Some houses have open fires and some have wood burners, the ones with doors, the cast iron ones being better than the sheet steel ones. Maybe better heeled residents have the upmarket pellet burners.

We have a woodburner but it had to be small to fit into the fireplace we inherited and we didn't upgrade to a larger model when we got a new fireplace and chimney to complement our new roof. The stove heats the living room nicely but it will only take shortish bits of wood which means that any wood that goes in it has to be the right sort of length and girth. Wood never comes in stove sized chunks even when we pay good money to buy some from a supplier. Some is OK but the majority needs sawing, hacking or smashing to size.

I used an axe when we first got here. This involved a lot of protective clothing as wood splinters and flying bits of wood attempted to gouge out my eyes. I spent the winter covered in bruises lots of them on my forehead. I broke two axes before I decided this was a complete waste of time and went back to calor gas type heaters running off gas bottles. But for some reason this year a small pile of wood that we had at the back of the house attracted Maggie's attention and we had a fire in the woodburner. That supply didn't last long so I cut up lots of other bits of wood that we had around. Old bed bases, wooden palettes. The detritus of country living. But then there were only quite hefty logs left.

In the local ironmongers we asked about hatchets and axes and we were directed to a large sledge hammer with a blade on one side. Brilliant for opening (i.e. splitting) logs said the shop owner. He was a liar. I asked later, in another shop, about an axe but 50€ seemed a bit steep especially as I'd had trouble with the handles breaking in the past so I didn't buy one. The sledge hammer bounced off the logs. Wedges said our pals as we talked wood cutting over Saturday morning coffee. The huge car boot sale organised by the TIM magazine over at Salinas on Sunday provided me with two steel wedges in return for a wedge of cash. Cutting wood seems to be an expensive business.

The wedges and sledge hammer work well. I may well break my back splitting the logs or have a heart attack with the effort but at least I've not been reduced to buying one of those nasty chain saws or even worse ordering some ready cut stuff from the "leña man."

With Nevil Shute and Chris Rea

On the beach that is.

Maggie's Mitsu is nine years old but Miitsubishi Spain phoned us about getting a software update. I suspect that they have come across some sort of fault but when I asked they said it was nothing more than customer support. Anyway we agreed to get it done at a dealer in San Juan which is the next coastal town along from Alicante city.

So we were at the beach. Now I don't care much for the beach. I'm obese so taking off most of my clothes and displaying myself for all and sundry to see in a public place is not something I do willingly. Add to that the fact that beaches are often made of sand. Sand is a powdery substance but the individual grains are usually hard quartz. This sand not only gets into your sandwiches and your hair it sneaks into every nook and crevice of your body no matter how intimate. I was eating sand all the way home. I generally keep out of the water too. I quite like water but as I wear contact lenses I always fear that they will be swept away to sea. Anyway what do you do about the bag with your wallet and mobile phone? Like shrouds there are no pockets in swimwear - well no waterproof ones at least.

Going to the beach though is a Spanish passion. I don't think that Spaniards behave particularly differently on the beach to us or the Germans or anyone else. There are the young ones who turn up with the minimum of equipment - towels, suncream, a book and the mobile phone and the three generational family groups who arrive with a veritable encampment - chairs, sunshades, windbreaks, beach games and an epicurean feast packed into coolboxes. Fat, old men and women queue up early in the morning on the busy beaches waiting for the beach cleaners to finish their work. At the off they head for the waterline and set up chairs and sunshades to bag their spot, which the families will later occupy, before heading back to their summer digs for a leisurely breakfast. Towels and Germans spring to mind.

If we are away from home and we tell Spaniards that we live in Alicante they always presume we live on the coast. They will congratulate us on the quality of the Costa Blanca beaches. Ask my students where they went over the weekend and the answer is to the beach. Question the families of Alicante or Murcia as to whether they have a summer house at the beach and the answer will almost certainly be that someone in their family does. Turn on the TV and go channel hopping and you will find a programme where people are being interviewed about their beach experiences.

The tourist figures are up for Spain. Once again it's tourism that's the motor for the economy. Where are those tourists heading - the landscapes of Galicia and Aragon, the marvellous Andalucian or Salmantino cities? No, they're headed for the beaches of Catalunya, Andalucia and the Islands. The Sunday supplements may be full of the voguish delights of rural tourism but it's on the beaches where it's standing room only.

Tabarca

I couldn't help it. My gaze kept wandering to the man sitting to my right. He was shirtless and his belly was so huge that it was squidged onto the table even though his chair was pushed well back. I also noticed the young women in bikinis in the restaurant but Maggie must never know.

We were in Tabarca. It's an island just off the coast from Santa Pola though we'd travelled over on the boat from Alicante. Considering that the Med. is nothing more than a big lake and given that we were hugging the coast it was remarkably choppy.  The crew were handing out sick bags willy nilly. I expected to succumb but despite the sweat dribbling from my forehead I reached terra firma with breakfast still somewhere in my digestive tract.

The island, it's actually an archipelago, is a place that locals and tourists go to get a bronzy and to eat. In the summer heat the main things you smell in the air are hot cooking oil and sun protection cream. Lots of the home team take everything bar the kitchen sink and set up bedou style, on the beach. They carry army feeding amounts of food. Most people who go there though eat in one of the several restaurants. Menus are principally fish and seafood based. Rice dishes, paellas, are de rigeur.

The island  was used as a base by pirates to raid the coast so, in 1760, Carlos III used a group of shipwrecked Genoese as a garrison on the island. They came from the islet of Tabarka and so the Spanish island, our island, got a new name. The remains of the fortifications, like the church are somewhere to stroll in your flip flops and swimwear before or after eating.

I think I was the only visitor on the island with full length trousers.

Two sheds Jackson and landscapes

I was thinking, as I drove between La Unión and Culebrón, about what I could see out of the car. I decided it was family and friends. You get what you're given. Blood's thicker than water and all that. History and culture from hand to hand and gene to gene over the generations. Alfred and the cakes, 1066, Glorious Goodwood, Cornish cream teas, feet and inches, Ant and Dec. Your friends on the other hand you get to choose. No blood ties, no original shared history. Something you manufacture between yourselves. I watched the dusty, brown grey, scrubby lunar landscape, the almond groves and the vineyards pass by. I looked at the bright blue sky and I thought how lovely it all looked. In the beginning, when I first got to Alicante and Murcia I thought it looked desolate. The sort of place that John Wayne ate beans.

Maggie and I had a great time in my old MGB car driving around the Cotswolds. I thought the Cotswolds were amazing. When we saw Calendar Girls, when it was new and first at the cinema here dubbed into Spanish, I looked at those North Yorkshire landscapes and thought how stunning it all looked

I was reading a piece that turned up on the English language feed to my mobile phone so it was either El País in English or more likely the Spanish pages of the Guardian. The author was a Brit writing from Spain. He said that some survey had shown that expats living in sunny climes were less happy than people living in the British climate. He suggested that British refugees to Spain were likely to be a bit curmudgeonly anyway because most were dissatisfied and were looking for something better. His main thesis though was that what was great as a break for a couple of weeks didn't really match up in the long term. He likened it to some chap who celebrates Christmas every day. I didn't agree with him.

On Sunday evening at about 9.30 I went to get some cash from the bank machine in the main part of town. La Unión is not a pretty town. The chewing gum plastered onto the flagstones looked particularly disgusting and I worried that one of the several footballs being kicked around by small groups of young lads would get me in the head. I turned left into the High Street, I was in shirt sleeves, the town was lively with people. A churros and chocolate van was doing good trade.The comparison with Huntingdon High Street crossed my mind. I often enjoyed a swift pint in the George before the weekend was over during the Huntingdon years. I was rather pleased with myself for being in La Unión.

It's not a comparison. It's a bonus. I got lucky with my family. Some of my friends I've known for over 40 years.

Rhyme and reason

One advantage of the English language is that the word banker has an obvious rhyme. The Spaniards share the sentiment but not the rhyme.

To the best of my knowledge this is a vastly oversimplified but basically accurate description of the Spanish banking system. Essentially, in recent history, there have been three types of "bank".

The first is the standard commercial bank; the bank raises capital and then lends money to people and organisations in order to make a business profit. The second is the Caja de Ahorros, a Savings Bank where the money for loans came from the deposits of the savers. Many of the Savings Banks in Spain originally loaned money against pawned items. The profit from the operation is used to support loans to savers and a certain percentage is diverted to a charitable foundation to support "good causes." The third institution, the Rural Savings Bank, has syndicalist or co-operative roots and was originally developed to promote agriculture in rural areas.

At sometime in their history the Savings Banks were limited to operating within geographical boundaries so that the CajaMurcia, the "Murcia Savings Bank" operated in Murcia and the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo or "Mediterranean Savings Bank" did business in Alicante and Murcia. As the legisltion was relaxed the Cajas began to operate further from home. Somewhere along the way regional politicians got involved in the running of the majority of the Savings Banks often because of the influence they wielded through the charitable foundation of the Caja.

So the history of the Cajas de Ahorro is a familiar story, similar to the UK Building Societies. Local Savings Banks merge to produce larger institutions which look, to anyone without specialist knowledge, almost exactly like banks though their names at least suggest some link to the locality.

There were tens of big and powerful Savings Banks when we first arrived here. Lots or maybe all of the Cajas ploughed money into what is now worthless land, overpriced houses and grandiose and redundant building projects. As the debt burden caught up with them and the regulatory authorities started to investigate the level of bungling, cronyism, mis-selling and straightforward theft started to emerge.

Recent legislation, the demands of Brussels and the European Bank have all helped to change the face of Spanish banking. Unfortunately the system we live in depends on the banks acting as the conduit between lenders and borrowers so we, the taxpayer we, have been forced to bail the bunglers and crooks out. I resent that and I would be very happy to see lots more of the fraudsters go to prison. Fat chance of that though - the old boy network is very alive and well in Spain. Only the other day one of the alleged culprits from one of the biggest failed bank mergers got himself a nice little number as an advisor to the old ex state monopoly telephone company.

Anyway. I understand that only two Savings Banks still exist in Spain. All the rest have become commercial banks. We went to Ontinyent today to have a look at one of them. It looks pretty modest doesn't it? In fact it was the 43rd biggest of the 45 Cajas in Spain but 43 of them have gone. Now the Caja de Ahorros de Ontinyent is the largest survivor. The other the Caja de Ahorros de Pollensa is in Mallorca on the Balearics.

Apparently it's in perfectly good financial shape, it's bosses and workers get reasonable salaries, politicians are not involved in its operations and there is not a whiff of scandal about the way it does or has done business.

Billowing skyward

Nuclear Power Plants always take me a bit by surprise. I remember the first time I saw the one at Heysham when I was catching the ferry to the Isle of Man. It was just there. No more fuss about it than a bus station or an industrial estate.

Today as we passed the Cofrentes Power Station I thought it sobering that alongside the enormous, and picturesque, steam cloud coming from the twin cooling towers, was a nuclear reactor which might, at any time, do a Fukishima or Chernobyl and start killing and polluting for generations to come. On a sunny and crisp December day it just looked tranquil. The cooling towers plonked in the middle of the landscape weren't quite so romantic but the fluffy steam clouds rising to play with the vapour trails left by passing jet planes seemed very peaceful. Much more peaceful than the busy blades of the hundreds of wind turbines in the area. There are windmills dotted along the top of nearly every ridge in the borderlands of Valencia, Castilla la Mancha and Murcia.

Spain currently has eight nuclear reactors running on six sites. Two more reactors are in the process of being dismantled after suffering "incidents." Within the last few weeks the operators of the Santa María de Garoña plant in Burgos have said that they will close that plant down ahead of schedule to avoid paying a new tax which will cost its owners approximately €150 million per year.

The largest percentage - 33% - of electricity production in Spain comes from renewables of one sort of another. Next up is nuclear with around 21% and then come the combined cycle with about 19% of the power generation. I presume that the missing percentages are from the older non combined cycle power stations.

Iberdrola, the people who send us our electric bill, own Cofrentes. It produces 1,110 megawatts. I have no concept of a megawatt fortunately the operators make it clear that this is a lot. They say that Cofrentes could, singlehandedly, provide all of the domestic supply for the three provinces of Valencia. In 2010 the plant ran faultlessly for 365 days without any halt in production and provided nearly 5% of all the electricity used in Spain that year.

The website of the Nuclear Safety Council mentions that all of the reportable events since 2005 at Cofrentes have been Level 0 on the International Scale of Nuclear Events - that is ones which have "no safety significance." However, between 2001 and 2011 Cofrentes made 25 unplanned shutdowns and reported 102 security events three of them at Level 1 which is classified as an anomaly but where there is still significant defence in depth.

The Nuclear Event Scale has three levels of incident and four levels of accident. Chernobyl and Fukishima are way out at the front at the moment on Level 7. The 1957 Winscale Fire was a Level 5 event, on a par with Three Mile Island in 1979. Sellafield has also had five Level 4 accidents between 1955 and 1979. In Spain the biggest incident to date, Level 3, was at  Vandellos in 1989 when a fire destroyed many of the control systems and meant that there were almost no safety systems remaining. Vandellos is one of the two plants that are being decommissioned at the moment.

I don't suppose there are quite the same sort of specific accident and incident scales for bus stations and industrial estates.

Els Enfarinats in Ibi

Els Enfarinats means covered with flour in Valenciano. Ibi is an inland Alicantino town. Each 28th December, the local equivalent to All Fools Day, there is a takeover of local government in the town  by the fourteen els enfarinats. Their battle cry is "New Justice" and that's what they set about imposing on the town. One is the mayor, one the sheriff, one the prosecutor, one the town clerk etc. But it doesn't go smoothly. The old town authorities don't give up easily and there is a pitched battle in the Church Square. It's a battle fought with eggs, flour, talc and 12,000 jumping jacks.

The floury folk win out and they then go around the town raising funds. They check that local shops are using the correct weights and measures - their's - and when they aren't the shops are heavily fined. Punsihment for those who decide not to pay is jail or maybe an eggy and floury punishment. But by 5pm all they can think about is dancing and the new Government gives way to the old.

The taxes levied go to local charities.

Pope time

The telly has been full of pictures of hordes of young Catholics arriving from all over the World. Stories full of good intention, human interest, willing volunteers and the huge organisational effort but equally about the contoversy surrounding the cost to the taxpayer.

It's World Youth day or JMJ in Madrid. Odd sort of day as the inaugral mass is this evening and the closing mass is on Sunday. I should have a day's holiday that long. The Pope is due to fly in on Thursday.

When we were up in Teruel the other day there were groups of Scouts in the local supermarket sporting World Youth Day T shirts. In Murcia about a month ago I bought a lottery ticket to win a ham from some young person raising money to get themselves to JMJ Madrid. Today we were picking someone up from Alicante airport and the arrivals area was more crowded than usual because of a group of happy, singing, banner waving Christians. They were waiting to welcome people. Taking my information from the back of someone's T shirt , which read, Camino Neocatecumenal Alicante Albacete or, in English The Neocatcechumenal Way, and applying a bit of  "elementary my dear Watson" I deduced that this grouping, which is dedicated to deepening the Catholic experience of people already committed to that Church, was welcoming other groups of The Way from all around the World and then they'd be off to Madrid to see the Pope.

You may get the idea or you may already think that Spain is a pretty Catholic country, especially with all this toing and froing of pilgrims, but a survey a couple of days ago found that whilst nearly 73% of Spaniards still consider themselves Catholic only 13% get along to mass on the majority of Sundays. Only 7% of young people under 35 take communion regularly. And, for the first time this year there were more civil than Church weddings in Spain.

A day out

We really haven't done much recently partly through work, partly through sloth and partly because it is relatively unpleasant out when the sun isn't shining. Weekends in Culebrón tend towards tasks of one sort and another or maybe the exact opposite as we take the opportunity to forget about chores and work.

Yesterday though Maggie was keen that we did something other than vegetate. She suggested a trip to the seaside at Santa Pola but I baulked at travelling the 60 or so kilometres each way for no real reason. I was happy to go somewhere but with a bit more purpose. In the end we settled on going to Alicante because there were a number of exhibitions on.

We saw the photos of Alfredo Calíz at the FNAC shop in Alicante (nice use of colour but not many snaps) and later, at MUBAG (Fine Arts Museum) we saw a show that covered the Spanish Avant Garde from the 1960s to the 80s - informalism, abstraction, op art, hyper realism etc. Next it was MACA (Contemporary Art) where there was a show to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an art movement that called itself Arte Normativa (the translation eludes me - Art by Rules maybe) which was a Spanish geometric abstract movement of the 1950s. Just to finish off we went to a remarkably tedious showing of Russian Sacred Art at one of the exhibition spaces run by the charitable arm of a savings bank.

Something I noticed was the staffing. The busiest space was the Savings Bank where there was one security guard at the entrance, in FNAC where the show was in the concourse outside the shop surrounded by coffee bars there was nobody obvious looking out for the exhibit at all. In both MUBAG and MACA only one large space was open for viewing but in both places, which are local authority run museums, there were two people on the welcome desk and two more museum staff keeping an eye on us as we looked around. I think there was also a uniformed security guard in each foyer, there usually is. Quite different staffing levels between the public and private sector then.

Good do though Alicante. Nice to do a bit of culture vulture stuff for a change.