Life in Culebrón

There was a time when blogs were cutting-edge rather than faintly quaint. I first heard of them in an episode of The West Wing — something about Josh and a gas-guzzler, if I remember rightly. They began to take off around the start of the millennium and, by the time we arrived in Spain in 2004, were still new enough to feel vaguely adventurous. They sounded interesting. I’d kept a diary for years, so that slightly dutiful “captain’s log” approach — more record than invention — was already second nature. The difficulty was not how to write one, but what on earth to write about. No one was going to be gripped by the news that I’d been to the shops or that the car was making an unfamiliar noise. That changed once we began to settle into Spain. Suddenly there was an avalanche of things happening — new customs, new frustrations, small triumphs, daily absurdities. I assumed, with only a mild dose of egocentric bias, that if I found them interesting, someone else might too. Apparently I still...

My first post in this blog, Life in Culerbrón, was on January 5th 2006. The first entry was about me having drunk too much brandy (the more things change the more they stay the same) and the second entry was about stonework falling through our ceiling. The entries are a day apart and neither is long; the first is just three lines and the second about fifteen. The idea of the blog then was simple. We were reasonably new to Spain; we'd been resident about fifteen months and we'd lived in the house in Culebrón for around eight or nine months. Blogging was relatively new and I didn't know what a blog was. Nowadays I don't know why I'd want to load videos to TikTok. The difference is that I started to blog, and I've kept going, whereas I've only ever tikked, or tokked, to see how it works. It was relatively easy to write the blog in the early days. Something new was happening to me all the time and I just wrote about that something. For instance in those last few...

I was trying to think of what to write. I wondered about something on having to wear masks in public. I thought about the slight loosening of restrictions - being able to get a beer outside a bar or go into a shop. Neither smacked of Herodotus nor even of Stephen King. And the message has all been a bit mixed up too; freer movement promised to people living in small towns, announced last weekend, still hasn't been enacted. Next I considered the political argy bargy. I have been thoroughly appalled at the way that the opposition parties have been trying to make political capital out of the continuance, or not, of the state of alarm, the constitutional state which allows for a "unified command". Then it turned out that our President had done a secret deal with a political party that has a dodgy, terrorist, background, and kept it from his colleagues. Bang went the moral high ground. What about the unrest on the streets, the people banging pots and pans to protest abou...

The people from Expat Blog asked me if I would answer a few questions. I said yes. Here are the questions and answers Why did you choose to expatriate to Spain? We'd been to Spain lots of times on holiday and we were taken by the country, with its habits, customs and with its people. Life in the UK had become one huge round of work with almost no private life and with the sale of our house we were in a position to up sticks and give it a go. What were the procedures to follow for a British national to move there? As European citizens all we needed to do to move to Spain was to cross the border and settle here. Obviously we also needed to go through all the usual processes like getting an NIE and later a “residencia”, signing up to the local padrón, registering with the health services, doing all the things associated with buying or renting a house. We'd brought a car with us which also needed re-registering but as to the actual move that was as easy as deciding...