Life in Culebrón

I really couldn't think of a topic for this week. So, disconnected jottings. I consider we live in a reasonably rural situation so I was a bit surprised when, this morning, a Guardia Civil car, ablaze with lights and horns, shot past our house. The dirt track peters out another three or four hundred metres up the hill so I went to see where they were going. The car did a left foot/handbrake turn about 200 metres past our gate, sped past the house again, going the other way, and did a sliding turn to the left. Sixty seconds later they were back. They roared off to whatever it was that they didn't know how to find.  It made me ponder the things that pass our house. A couple of weeks ago we had a small lorry, with a hydraulic platform on the back. The driver assured me he wasn't lost. Too early on Sunday morning a very clunky bucket excavator trundled up the track in the thick mist presumably to root out the de-branched apricot trees. Cars and vans, homeowners and their frien...

I was talking to someone about older cars the other day. Cars used to come without carpets, without heaters, without synchromesh on first and, sometimes, with just three gears on a column change. The range for any given model was simple. Then the choice widened  - standard, deluxe, maybe a GT or whatever but they were still set packages with set prices. When I bought the Mini, ten plus years ago, the idea had changed. You chose an engine package and then added things at extravagant cost I've been wondering about buying a car and, faced with fawning reviews from most Spanish websites, I resorted to tried and trusted British sources. When Autocar and What Car and Which magazine recommended a car it probably got added to my list. You'd think that the only difference between a Suzuki Vitara sold in the UK and the one sold in Spain would be which side to get into to get hold of the steering wheel. That wasn't the case though. I think that the British Suzuki Vitara 1.0 Boo...

Just a bunch of assorted trivia that has tickled my fancy in the last couple of days. There are a lot of stars in Culebròn. That's probably an incorrect assertion. I suppose there are exactly the same number of stars as there are anywhere but lots of them are easy to see from Culebrón because we get lots of cloudless night skies and there's very little light pollution. That's not quite true either because, at the moment, we have a dazzling Christmas light display which, for the very first time this year, features a spiral of LED rope around the palm tree. The Geminids meteorite shower was flashing across the sky all last night though in an even more dazzling display. Lovely. We went to the flicks yesterday evening, we often do. We'd been to visit someone and we were a little late away; we went the long way around so we arrived at the cinema a few minutes after the advertised start time. The cinema we often use shows the sort of pictures that don't always attract a...

I went to see some old pals in Valencia the other day. They are Britons here in Spain for just a few days. It's Fallas time in Valencia when lots and lots of communities and neighbourhoods construct papier maché type figures (I have no idea what material they actually use) up to maybe 20 metres high (a guess) and then set fire to them. Valencia is the third largest city in Spain and yesterday it was chockablock with people in town for the fiesta. It's quite likely that a lot of the regular inhabitants of Valencia have fled to avoid the disruption that Fallas causes but lots more were dressed up in "traditional" dress. As an aside have you ever wondered why traditional clothes are fixed at some point in the past? Who decided that the quintessential traditional costume in an area was worn in 1876 or 1923? Why not 1976 or 1723? And what if we chose 2016 as the perfect year for a new version of traditional costume? What and how would you choose? Why fix a style anyway...