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.

Usually it's green paint and buff coloured stone

The province of Alicante, the one we live in, like all the provinces of Spain, has its own particular characteristics. Unlike lots of Spain Alicante is not choc a bloc with cathedrals, medieval quarters and massive stone built historic town centres. It doesn't even have characteristic colour schemes for the houses (well it does but they are not as eye catching as, for instance, the indigo and white of Ciudad Real or the ochre and white of Seville). We do have plenty of impressive buildings but they tend to get lost in a general unremarkability. Say Alicante to any Spaniard from outside the area and the first thing that comes to mind will be beach. If you've ever had holidays here, in Benidorm or Torrevieja or Calpe or if you live in Elda, Monóvar, Aspe or Sax then I'd be more or less certain that whatever you appreciate about your town it is not the architecture.

That's not to say that I don't like our province. Look in any direction from our house and you see hills and pine covered mountains. Out here in the countryside there are lots of orchards of peach, apricot, almond, stacks of olive trees, grape vines all over and a host of other crops from wheat to artichokes. I know that the first impression of Alicante for Northern Europeans, as they look down from the aeroplane window, is that the landscape is dry and everything a yellowy, orange, dusty sort of colour but here, on the ground, it looks pretty green to me.

I like the unending summer heat here, despite the flies. I like the way the province groans and swelters in the bright, bright sunlight with such tremendously deep skies. And we do have that beach and that flashing blue sea. Something else I like is the strange distribution of houses and hamlets. Alicante is out of kilter with much of Spain because the houses are scattered, higgledy-piggledy, across the countryside. In most of Spain houses are gathered together in villages and towns with hardly any people in between.

Not long ago agriculture was what there was in inland Alicante. People lived close to the land they worked. Then things began to change. Other sectors became the big employers and agriculture now only employs about 4% of the workforce as against around 20% in industry and 75% in services. We have lots and lots of unworked land around here. To oversimplify and overgeneralise the families that worked the land moved away. The blokes, and it is blokes you see, who drive the tractors and still work the land are old and battle scarred. They may still rope in the family at harvest time but basically the farmers are dying in harness and their children prefer to work at a keyboard, in air conditioned shops, factories and offices. The houses the farmers owned in the villages and hamlets often still belong to the families (unless they were sold on to we rich foreigners) but they are only opened up occasionally - maybe for a party or a couple of cheap weeks in the countryside. 

The landscape is criss crossed by a maze of back roads; those lanes are used by tractors and locals by day and by drunk drivers avoiding possible police patrols at night. The roads are usually narrow, twisty and some are pothole scarred but most are perfectly usable. They get narrower in spring and summer as the abundant grass encroaches onto the tarmac. The herds of goats that once kept the verges well mown are now few and far between too. Alongside the roads are little hamlets and clusters of houses. Nowadays most of the houses are deserted or they get that very occasional use. Of the ones that are occupied all the time it's probably true to say that foreigners make up a disproportionate percentage. Spaniards and Northern Europeans have different ideas about the delights of town versus country living.

In one way those villages and hamlets are just a repetitive pattern but they are one of the things I really do like around here. Suddenly, in amongst the vines and the almond trees, there will be a cluster of stone built houses with faded paintwork, abandoned farm implements and the shady spot where generations of locals once sat to tell tales and share their lives.

A touch of nuttiness

For Britons nuts is an easy concept. There is, almost certainly, a scientific description but I think of nuts as having hard shells and an edible bit inside - peanuts, almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, pistachios, brazils, pecans and others I can't remember right now. Spaniards don't share that concept. They use the term frutos secos, dried fruits, and that includes nuts but it also covers what we think of as dried fruit - prunes, dried apricots, raisins, sultanas, currants and the like. It's not all that different really. Just one subdivision more. It is, nonetheless, surprisingly difficult to explain to Spaniards learning English.

I like nuts. This is quite a good thing because I don't much care for water, nor for the sawdust flavoured whole grain cereals. Fruit is OK but you get sticky eating it and it's such a faff - all that peeling and de-seeding and slicing. Vegetables and pulses are generally fine but when I say veg. I mean the standard stuff, nothing too slimy. I'm not too keen on sleeping either, after six hours in bed I'm bored. So, I'd have to say, the World Health Organisation and I don't see eye to eye about my lifestyle. Except for nuts. Nuts I like.

The first time I bought loose, in shell, nuts in Pinoso was this Monday. Until then I had blithely passed them by unaware of their existence. I didn't buy many and I only bought hazelnuts just to check. Sometimes, at Christmas time, I buy kilos of chestnuts to find that half of them are rotten. The hazelnuts were fine so, today, I bought more and a few walnuts as well. Before then the last time I remember buying whole walnuts was a couple of Christmases ago. They came in a string bag along with a little tool to pry the two halves of the shell apart. If it hadn't been a diagram on the label I wouldn't have realised why there was a bit of metal attached to my bag of walnuts. I was amazed how well it worked. I couldn't find that tool today so I just used my penknife to split the shell and reveal the brain shaped nut inside. I pondered. For the first 63 years of my life I shelled walnuts by squeezing them in pliers like nutcrackers. They were always a pain because the splintered shell would mix with the nutty bit. The Spanish way is definitely superior.

September weather

The blogs about the weather are amongst the posts that get most visits. So I've been looking out for the July and August summaries on the Town Hall website. Then a couple of days ago, the September report popped up, leapfrogging the earlier months. Obviously there was no weather to talk of over the summer.

On the same website there were some very seasonal reports. Apparently the grape harvest for the local wine co-op is shaping up nicely. Good grapes and plenty of them. It's the same for the almonds. An abundant crop with decent prices to the farmers. But not everything is sweetness and light. The tractor and trailer combinations that haul the grapes to the co-operative bodega and dried fruit and nuts processor are causing frustration for local car drivers. It is very annoying to get stuck behind the trailers and hemmed in by the very common - do not overtake - solid white lines of Spanish roads. Tractor drivers are being asked to use the route that skirts the town usually used by the heavy lorries. The farmers are also being warned that if they spill the grapes on the road (which soon get churned into a thick blood coloured paste) the local police may well prosecute. How they can be sure who spilled which grapes where I'm not quite sure.

In Cambridgeshire I used to get stuck behind beet lorries. Now it's grapes and almond tractors.

Anyway, September weather. Well the highest temperature was on both the 21st or the 22nd at 32ºC and there were seven days in the month when the temperature was over 30ºC. The lowest temperature was 10ºC overnight between the 28th and 29th. The mean daily high was 26.6ºC and the mean daily low was 10.8ºC which all averages out at 20.2ºC. 

The rain dumped 78.6 litres of water on every square meter in September though one day, the 7th, was responsible for 30 of those litres. 

We had 15 days of clear, sunny skies and another seven with sunny periods. Even with all that rain there were only three days when it was completely overcast.