Life in Culebrón

We use quite a lot of bottled gas - specifically butane - and I think we're more or less legal. The original bottles came with a contract, rather than from some car boot sale, and we have the installation tested every five years. Were it all to explode—and an alarming number of collapsing buildings are attributed to gas explosions each year —the insurance companies might just pay out. That is, provided we didn't die in a hailstorm of shards of severed metal. When I think about it that's probably more likely than an insurance company actually paying out. I always hope that the reason there are so many explosions is not that bottled gas is inherently dangerous, but that people are a bit gung ho about it. They buy the bottles secondhand somewhere to avoid the regular checks, don’t worry about the “sell by” dates on the rubber hoses, never replace the valves or worry about their pressure ratings and even tape things together with duct tape. We use gas for the water heater and f...

This is the fifth, and hopefully the last, in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly. As usual I've attempted to add in the Spanish angle. If there is a culture of car washing on Sunday in Spain, I've never noticed it. Most Spanish towns have by-laws to stop people washing their cars in the street. Most Spaniards live in flats anyway, so their access to the water to wash the car is a bit restricted. Instead they take their motors to a car wash. Even though we have space and water I do too. There are tunnel washes in Spain, the ones with the brushes that tear off aerials and wing mirrors from time to time. We have one in Pinoso and it seems popular. The most common type though are the pressure washers available on the majority of filling station forecourts. Box is the word used by Spaniards for pits in motor racing, and for the bays in the emergency area of a hospital. It also seems to be the most popular word to describe the places that you pre...