¡Olé! ¡Qué arte hija! ¡Arsa!

Last Saturday evening, we went over to Yecla to see a pre-selection concert for the Cante de las Minas flamenco competition which takes place in La Unión, near Cartagena.

La Unión, the town, has a strong tradition of Flamenco, the music more usually associated with gypsies and Andalucia. The link came about because La Unión, which mined lead and silver in Roman times, had a resurgence of mining activity in the mid-nineteenth century. With the liberalisation of certain laws and particularly with new technologies, the mines became potentially profitable for the first time in centuries. The mining industry needed workers. Starving peasants from Andalucia, particularly from Almeria province, saw the opportunity to escape the misery they were living in. They should have known better. Poor people always get it in the neck. They simply replaced the misery inflicted on them by the rich and uncaring farmers of Andalucia for more misery and hardship inflicted on them by rich and uncaring mine owners of Murcia. The miners started to sing songs about their woes in the style they knew, flamenco, and so the song type called Minera was born.

Flamenco has lots of different styles. They all sound the same to me, but if you find someone who actually understands the music, they will be able to clap out the different rhythms, the palos, by clapping, dando palmas, to styles with names like fandangos, tangos, bulerias, alegrias, and lots more.

Back in 1961, Esteban Bernal thought that with the decline of the mining industry, the flamenco style invented there was about to be lost forever. He decided to try to maintain the music by organising a competition for young talent. The competition includes the three main elements of flamenco - singing, el cante, playing, el toque, and dancing, el baile. Competitors for the semi-finals are chosen through a series of heats, like the one we went to in Yecla, and the singers, guitarists and dancers go on to perform in La Unión in the old Victorian-style market hall now dubbed la Catedral del Cante, The Cathedral of Song.

The festival Cante de las Minas, the Song of the Mines, takes place at the beginning of August, this year from 3rd to 12th. For the first four or five nights, there are concerts from established stars of flamenco, and then, from Wednesday on, there are three semi-finals with the big final on Saturday night. The big prize is only 6,000€, but there are prizes for the best this and that, so the actual winner may collect a reasonable amount from a variety of prizes. The real prize, though, is the publicity. Win Cante de las Minas or do well, and the offers of recording contracts or performances will almost certainly come rolling in.

We've been to performances by established stars, and we've done the semi-finals three or maybe four times. It's fascinating and boring in equal measure. If you think flamenco is tight spotty frocks and twirling hands to poppety little tunes then you'd probably be quite surprised by the performances and by the people involved. Tickets are best bought online before the night. The semi finals start at 10pm and go on till very late. When we go we try to be there a few minutes beforehand in order to find and settle into our plastic chairs. Despite our promptness the performance will start the habitual fifteen to twenty five minutes late. When it does get underway the singer will sing and the guitarist will play. I'm impressed. Twenty minutes in and I'm a bit bored. I can't understand the words, and the songs sound very similar (to me). We see someone dance, we see some guitarists, maybe there's a flamenco pianist. The hall is very, very hot. There's a lot of movement of people coming and going to their seats. My bum starts to ache, we're 90 minutes in, two hours. I'm bored to tears and in severe pain. We decide we'll stay till 1:00am or some other agreed time. Finally, we muster the courage to rise from our seats - perdona, gracias, permiso. We push past, we're out and the flamenco stops and we can enjoy the cool of the evening. We say how good it all was, we say how bored we were too. In the square outside the hall, the bars are doing a good trade in food and drink. Maybe we have a last drink before setting out on the 90-minute journey home.

Only the last time we were there did we realize that Spaniards get fed up with sitting on hard chairs in sweltering conditions too. They get a pass and pop outside for a beer or a snack then they go back in so they do their viewing and listening in stints. They don't try to tough it out. Even knowing that I suspect it's a bit unlikely that I'll be able to persuade my partner we should give it another try.

If you haven't done it though consider it. The tickets for the stars aren't cheap and the final usually sells out pretty fast but the semi-finals cost a bit under 16€ this year. Who knows you may fall in love with flamenco. They say people do.

Being old and pernickety

We went to see a band at the Mar de Músicas in Cartagena a few days ago. The Mar de Músicas is a series of musical concerts held over a couple of weeks in the Murcian city of Cartagena.

Spain was quick to open up theatres and cinemas and audience venues in general after the total shutdown in the Spring of last year. The venues adapted. Things, generally, had to be booked online beforehand, even for free events. The programmes started much earlier than is normal in Spain. The capacity of venues was drastically reduced and there were all sorts of restrictions about entering and leaving the venue and where you could sit. I have felt much less safe in supermarkets, where the tussle for the unblemished and tasteless tomatoes went on much as before, or in bars and restaurants, where friends and acquaintances greet each other effusively, than I have over the Covid time in a theatre or cinema.

Some of the Covid measures were a nuisance. I don't like giving my phone number and email address away nor having someone check my temperature but, the broader democratic freedoms aside, it wasn't really either onerous or even intrusive. In fact there were definite upsides. The cinemas closed for a while but for months after they'd re-opened they were more or less deserted and nobody crunched popcorn or commented noisily on the action. It's only in the last month or so that I've had to share the film with more than a couple of people. Cleaners roamed in mobs, the hand soap dispensers were filled to the brim, the hand towels were waiting, no sweets, no popcorn and lots and lots of space around the seats. Even in an empty cinema, with just the two of us, people would check that we were still wearing masks. It all felt secure. In fact there have been no outbreaks linked to cinemas.

Theatres have been the same with spare seats between patrons and whole rows of seats left empty to keep people apart. The productions have fewer people on stage than usual and musical performances dropped from full orchestras to quartets and wind ensembles. Even contemporary music concerts were carefully controlled with the audience seated on some pre-numbered chair with lots of space around. Security guards prowled to make sure that you stayed put unless your bladder demanded otherwise. My primary school teachers would have approved.

Now, as I type, lots of us, the old and the not so old, have been vaccinated, immunised maybe. We only have to wear masks inside or outside when we are in crowded spaces. The tables in the bars are closer, waiters are back to wiping down tables with dirty cloths and the lottery as to whether there will be hand soap and paper towels in the toilets is back to normal. We are forgetting very quickly how much effort has gone in to keeping us healthy and the infections, if not the deaths, are showing how blasé we have become about Covid. The TV is full of medical people complaining about full wards, high occupation of intensive care beds and the postponement of routine operations.

Covid has been bad, sometimes terrible, for all sorts of people and for all sorts of organisations. On a small scale I felt quite sorry for young people. Like very old people they only have limited time to enjoy their age. When I was at university I was able to take full advantage of my first taste of independent living. The problems of car loans, mortgages, finding work and all those boring adult things were still to come. It was a time for experimentation and new things. If I'd missed that brief slot it would have been gone forever. That's why I can empathise with the young people who feel aggrieved that they were criminalised for simply wanting to dance or to drink rum and coke with other drunken friends at 4am in the morning. 

It seemed to me that the authorities needed to recognise that this section of the population, in a rich, Western, democratically free country has high expectations. What they want may be trivial on the scale of things but then so are most of the things that most of us want most of the time. Young people's wants should not be less important than other sections of the community just because what they want isn't something particularly deep and meaningful. Nobody seemed to think that families wanting to share time together was valueless nor is there a public outcry when victorious sports people hug each other or when politicians rub shoulders at Very Important Summits. Shutting down the dance clubs might be an easy option but opening the dance clubs and keeping them safe should not be beyond the wit of a rich and well organised Western state.

And that's how we get back to the Mar de Músicas. We'd gone to see Califato ¾ which is a band from Andalucia whose songs mix traditional musical elements, from that region, with other styles from rock and punk to electronic music.

The band came on stage at the appointed time. This is a nearly unknown phenomenon in Spain. It surprised at least half the audience which arrived after the off. Most of the late arrivals seemed to need to pass directly in front of my view of the band. Meanwhile, not in any big way but in an annoyingly consistent way, the tallest man on the mixing desk chose to stand rather than sit. He was just in my line of sight. The beer trolleys and the people with beer packs on their back wandered around. They too seemed determined to pause in my direct line of sight. Lots of the audience moved chairs to be nearer their friends, their mask use was less than consistent and, rather as you would expect, they stood up to dance gripping on to their big plastic beer glasses. 

At a normal concert with normal rules I'd have done what I always do when the off duty basketball player stands in front of me, when the stoned group of mates start to dance and tread on my toes, when the really drunk little man starts to unintentionally fling beer around with his drunken dancing and when I just feel uncomfortable to be wherever I am in the seething crowd. I'd move. But I wasn't supposed to move and being a rule following fuddy duddy I simply stayed put and seethed. Nobody was really doing anything particularly wrong, it just peeved me. 

Actually I didn't care for the antics of one of the band members either; some big fat bloke who seemed to delight in showing off his belly. I suspected that, were we ever to meet in a quieter setting, he and I would have found little to talk about and that he may have relieved the boredom by lighting his farts. Or, of course, he may be erudite and charming man. And, to top it off, I didn't understand a word they said. Again that's hardly surprising as the band's last album made heavy use of a spelling system called EPA (Estándar para el andaluz or, under its own, non official rules, Êttandâ pal andalûh) which is designed specifically to represent the Andalucian dialect in a written form. Not understanding what is said in Spanish always makes me cross.

The terrible thing was that the music was really good but I couldn't both seethe and cheer wildly so I chose to sulk.

Carnaval, Carnaval

In the UK there's Pancake Day, Shrove Tuesday - today. I'm sure there used to be a pancake race between a couple of local mayors where I lived for a while in Huntingdon. Towards the end of the early evening news there'll be school fete type footage of some people somewhere flipping pancakes as they run. Tomorrow you may even see a couple of people with ash crosses on their forehead. Exciting times. Now in Rio on the other hand at carnival time hundreds of scantily clad people dance around the streets.

In Spain it's Carnaval time too. In Pinoso we have nice little parade with hand made costumes. It's one of the few Spanish events that gets shunted to the nearest available weekend rather than taking place on the correct date or day. As far as I knew carnaval (with an a not an i) was a last gasp effort to have a good time before giving up the pleasures of whatever it is that good folk give up for Lent. I'd never thought much more about it before I decided to write this blog.

I was vaguely aware that there are big events in the Canary Islands and in Cadiz but I sort of presumed that they were all mini versions of Rio. Lots of cleavage, lots of sequinned top hats, bright colours, feathers, make-up applied with a trowel and more and more specific gay presence. I suppose I sort of knew that the name came from the word that means meat or flesh and that it was a bit of a celebration of the flesh, a bit carnal, a bit saucy. Nonetheless I was pretty surprised, when we saw our first carnaval processions in Cartagena. Those poor girls were sure to get a chill. Carnaval was big in Cartagena. Ordinary people, the people I worked with, would hire or make complicated fancy dress costumes and set out as gangs of droogs or as all the characters from the Wizard of Oz just to go out for a drink. It's biggish all over. The schools usually have youngsters in fancy dress in the run up to Carnaval.

Nearish to home (the round trip was 325km so it's not that near) the smallish Murcian town of Aguilas has a reputation for putting on a big Carnaval do despite only having a population of 35,000. We went to have a look on Sunday and the parade was brilliant. Band after band of just what we expected. Dancing troupes, groups of people acting out political satire and lots and lots of remarkably ornate floats with very loud music. We watched for over three and a half hours before giving up. My photo taking was somewhat hampered because the only seats we were able to buy, at 12€ a go, were in the branches of a small, ornamental, tree which reduced my field of view considerably. So there are almost no panoramic shots to show the breadth of the participation.

When I did a bit of background checking for the blog I found that the Spanish version of Carnaval owes a lot to a book called El libro de buen amor, the Book of Good Love written by Juan Ruiz who went under the name of el arcipreste de Hita. It's a book of Spanish poetry written around 1330. It's one of those works that unfortunate Spanish schoolchildren are forced to read. In the book there is a battle between don Carnal and doña Cuaresma. So a battle between a sort of  "Lord Lust" and "Lady Lent". Lent wins of course but only for the next forty days after which old lust runs free again. The book provides the basis for most of the Spanish events.

Along the way I found that, in Aguilas, a beast is loosed called the Mussona - a sort of half human, half animal figure which represents the duality of people - half civilised and half wild. If the beast was there when we were I must have blinked or looked the wrong way. Mind you I'm not even sure if the yellow bloke with the exposed (cloth) penis was don Carnal or not. I saw a lot of sequins and lots of feathers though.

Aguilas is in most of the "Top 10" type lists for Carnavales in the Spanish media along with the Canary island and Cadiz. In fact there are lots of competing lists. Ciudad Rodrigo, where we lived for a while, and where the event is characterised by bull running, gets mentioned in several but there are some really odd ones with lots of obviously pagan characters still doing the rounds. In Villanueva a wooden headed cloth and straw figure called El Peropalo is the centre of attention or in Laza in Ourense it's el Peliqueiro who has a big semicircular hat and mask combination with pigtails and flouncy pantaloons. In Tarragona there's a lot of devil burning and in Badajoz all the lists say that nobody goes into the street unless they are in fancy dress.

In fact it looks to me as though we have Carnavales a plenty to keep us in something to do each year for quite a long time yet. Maggie, you have been warned.

Like the dentist's

Maggie wants a mobile phone. Well, actually, she's got a phone but she needs a Spanish SIM card and a contract to make her phone work. It's taken a little while for her to get around to it but this morning she sat at her half functioning computer (the connection is completely unreliable at the moment) and set up a contract to Pepephone, one of the newer and cheaper mobile phone setups in Spain.

Just one problem. The card has to be delivered by carrier and signed for. As we are in and out all the time and then Maggie is off to the UK for a couple of weeks opportunities for delivering or receiving the SIM card are very limited.

Pepephone uses a travel agency as a shop for its services. It just happens that we're in Cartagena for a concert so we thought we could ask if there was the possibility of collecting a SIM card directly.

We have now been waiting for over an hour, we're still waiting. It's nobody's fault the people are doing their jobs but it is a very, very long winded process.

It's a country

I'd been surprised when the door of office number two had opened as I leaned on it. I half stumbled and half leapt into the room on the other side. Two women gawped at me. I gawped back. I stammered out a greeting. 

"Hello, I want to send this to Qatar," I said, holding out a small padded envelope, weight about 20g and similar in size to an iPhone. 

"Qatar in Cantabria?" she asked. 

I pointed to the address printed on the envelope. 

"No, Qatar the country in the Middle East - next door to Saudi Arabia."

"Is that close to Lebanon?"

"Closeish," I said. 

"Is it part of Saudi Arabia?" she asked. 

"No, it's a country."

"Ah, I see; it's an island," she said, staring at the Google entry. 

"More a peninsula," I countered

She rang someone. "It'll be 97€," she said - "same as Lebanon." Back there again. I blanched but handed her my credit card. "We've got no machine," she said. I'm sure it was Gilbert O' Sullivan on the radio. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I asked if this were indeed a business. When I was outside again I couldn't help it. One very long, very crude outpouring at high volume. I went and got the money, I went back to the office, I paid and I left the little envelope with them to lose.

It was a strange office even by Spanish standards. When I'd first arrived I was sure the building was abandoned. Blinds down, litter strewn yard, no vehicles, no opening hours, no sign of life. I don't think they get many personal callers. Hence the gawping. 

Maggie has lost a contact lens. The sort of lens she needs is not available in Qatar. Fortunately she bought her last lenses in Cartagena so I was able to go to a local optician and order up a replacement.

Today was my first opportunity to ship the lens. I got up early to go to a carrier before work.  It was so early I hadn't been able to buy an envelope to put the lens in. I suspected, rightly, that the carriers would sell packaging. The lens was in liquid in a little bottle. The receptionist woman peered at it over her headset.

"You can't send liquids to Qatar," said the woman. 

"Fine, I'll put it in this case without liquid," I said. 

"You can't send contact lenses to Qatar," said the woman. 

I asked "Why not?"

"No idea." 

"Could I put it in something else; disguise it?"

"Not possible, they check everything."

"What can you send to Qatar?" I asked. 

"I can't tell you," said the woman.

"Can you send clothes?" I asked.

"Only with a receipt and a customs declaration," said the bearded man sitting next to her.

I felt we had maybe failed to build the human bridge so necessary for a fulfilling business relationship. Later I bought an envelope. I took the lens out of the liquid and put it into a dry case. That's why it was the second on my list, office number two.

Decisions, decisions

Unless I suddenly flee the country or unless I have a violent argument with my new landlady I expect to become a resident of La Unión next week.

Yesterday I handed over the fee to the estate agent for introducing me to my new flat and next Tuesday I will meet my new landlady and hand over a month's rent and the breakage deposit.

When the agent told me that the landlady wanted to see my wage slips I said that I would like to see her wage slips too and asked that he pass on that message to her. It's obvious enough why she wants to see my wage slips. I'm a risk for her. She lets me into her house and, like all tenants, once I'm in I'm difficult to get out. She doesn't know if I'm the sort of person who will pay my bills or not. She doesn't know if I will smash up her furniture or play loud reggae music at 3am to amuse the neighbours. Wage slips don't actually prove anything of course. Richer people than me like reggae and don't pay bills. Past employment isn't proof of future employment.

I am tempted to be bolshie about it. It's an intrusion into my privacy that I don't like at all. Spaniards don't see it that way at all of course. They are used to handing over identity cards to all and sundry so what does it matter if someone asks your age or how much you earn?

Anyway, provided I don't end up having an argument with my new landlady I will be a resident of La Unión from next Tuesday and I had to decide whether that merited a new blog title or not. The logic was irrefutable. Life in La Unión is now on the tabs at the top of the page or on this link

Exponential

Maggie needed a new mobile phone. She lost her old number as a product of the house move back to Culebrón from Cartagena. We cobbled together a solution but when her HTC phone, which she has never taken to, started to have software problems she decided it was time to get a shiny new phone and  a brand new number.

The range of offers was bewildering. Contract or pay as you go. Real or virtual networks. Household names like Vodafone and Orange or newcomers like Pepephone? Eventually the choice was made about which phone and which set up.

There was a last minute scramble when the device they used in the Yoigo shop to scan identity documents wouldn't take a British passport. The passport was much thicker than the Spanish ID cards the scanner had been designed to cope with. Maggie's Spanish ID was no good as it didn't have a photo. They managed in the end though.

The thing that surprised me was the number. Spanish mobile numbers are nine figures long and begin with 6 whilst Spanish landlines are also nine numbers long and begin with a 9. Well, that's the general wisdom.

The mobile number assigned to Maggie begins with a 7. A new series. In Cartagena our landline number began with an 8. Spaniards often thought I was having a language problem when I gave them the number. "No, fixed lines begin with a 9," they said. One chap went so far as have me phone his mobile to confirm the number. He was very apologetic.

I seem to remember that the number of combinations in a series of numbers is worked out by simple multiplication. So for a nine number sequence it would be 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 or 387,420,489 variations. The initial 6 cuts this down to 43,046,721 choices. That's a lot of numbers. On the other hand there are around 47 million people in Spain and everyone  from the eldest granny to the smallest child has a mobile so, when I think about it, I'm surprised the 6 numbers lasted so long!

The rest is silence

It's quiet in Culebrón. The wildlife makes a noise it's true but the chirping of the birds hardly constitutes noise pollution. On the other hand it's not quiet in the centre of Cartagena where we lived until just two days ago.

Oddly though I've noticed the noise here in Culebrón much more than I did in Cartagena. In town the passing crowds produce a constant background hum. Occasionally there are shouts and bangs but, generally the noise level is pretty consistent and almost unnoticeable.

Culebrón doesn't really have background noise. Culebrón is still and quiet. We haven't got our summer cicadas yet. I was outside the other night enjoying the warm evening air possibly with a brandy and a cigar to hand. Peaceful. Then a car passed, making a right racket, then another. Next the dog at the farm down the way went guau, guua, guau (Spanish dog you understand). An insistent and unpleasant bark. Our neighbours dog answered.

Time to get back inside and watch the telly I thought.

For goodness sake - get a grip

The maximum temperature in Stavanger, yesterday was 16ºC and the minimum was 11ºC. In Kirkwall, on Orkney 14/10ºC. In London 23/13ºC. In Alicante, just down the road, it was 29/20ºC and in Doha in Qatar 45/31ºC. No real surprises there then.

The highest temperature ever recorded in Spain is 47.8ºC in Murcia on 29 July 1976. Murcia is about 50 minutes from here by car.  The highest temperature ever recorded in England is 38.5ºC in Faversham, Kent on 10 August 2003. No big surprise there either.

Over the winter our perception was that Cartagena was warmer than Culebrón. In summer it's just the reverse; warmer by day in Culebrón but still warmer overnight in Cartagena. We think that it's a lot stickier in Cartagena now than in Culebrón. The figures for yesterday bear out our perception. Cartagena max. 29.5ºC, min. 21.2ºC, humidity 65%; Culebrón (Pinoso really) max. 30.3ºC, min. 15.4ºC, humidity 58%.

It's a while since I've been in the UK in summer but, if I were to describe June, July and August in England I would say that it stops being cold, that there will be two or three weeks worth of sunny, warm, dry days but that even when it's not sunny, dry and warm it's perfectly pleasant. That doesn't mean there won't be a couple of days when you'll need a raincoat or a jacket in the evening. You may even need to fire up the heating a couple of days but it's not like January. And yes, I have heard that it has been an exceptionally poor summer so far in the UK. Nonetheless, if you know the UK I'm sure that you would agree that the above description is largely accurate.

In Spain, at least in Alicante and Murcia, I would say that June, July and August will be hot and dry.

So why oh why does everybody I talk to in Spain say, and I paraphrase, "Crikey, it's hot!" Are they surprised?

17 million Spaniards or 63% of the population earn less than 1,000€ gross per month and 4,422,359 are out of work.

As we left Cartagena for Culebrón yesterday evening the Three Wise Men, the Three Magician Kings to Spaniards, were doing their rounds and delivering coal to bad boys and girls or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 or Zombie Dolls to the good ones. We'd seen them. Not the bad children and Zombie Dolls; the Kings. There had been a big procession through the streets in the evening and, all day, they'd been holding court in the old Town Hall in the middle of town.

The atmosphere in the town was amazing. The last minute shoppers were out in hordes buying their Christmas gifts, the hundreds of balloon sellers and other street vendors. The burble of noise coming from the street cafés. Very nice.

In Culebrón all was quiet. We settled down in front of the telly with a cup of tea. My ration of hearing spoken Spanish is quite limited. Maggie isn't a big fan of talk radio and generally we watch English language programmes even on Spanish TV when we're together. That's one of the reasons I quite like adverts. I get to hear some Spanish but they are also a mirror to the society around me. Language wise they are good too because if I lose the thread of an advert then it doesn't matter much because there will be another along in 30 seconds. It's not like losing the thread of a feature film. And I get the chance, very soon, to hear them again and again and again.

The telly has been saturated with mobile phone, perfume and chocolate adverts in the run up to Christmas; to today, By last night it was too late to sell any more perfume or chocolate. Instead we had cleaning products. You can imagine can't you? When the last of the festive prawns and the roscón have been eaten people are going to look around their houses and decide that it's time for a big clean up. The exercise will help with the after Christmas diet too.

¡Save our Cabezo de la Sal!

Escombreras in Cartagena

Salt in Torrevieja

When we got back to Culebrón on Friday there was a flyer in our letterbox; it started: "Our Cabezo de la Sal it is wanted to be filled with Brent Crude!!! it is intended to be transported from Cartagena harbour through a more-than 110km-km-long pipe to store it in the salt wells!!!"


Cabezo de la Sal  is one of the local hills, well if 893 metres or 2,902 feet  high is a hill it is - that's some 624 feet shorter than Snowdon.

I read, and wrote, about this last February but the whole project has come up again as a result of the recent election campaigns. Cabezo de la Sal is a mountain loaded with 500 million tons of salt of which about 120 million tons can be extracted with current technology.

The salt is mined by digging a borehole and then forcing high pressure water down the hole to dissolve the rock salt. The resultant brine is sent, by pipeline, to the salt lagoons at Torrevieja where it is mixed with the sea water so that when the water is evaporated off the yield of salt is much higher.

The wells go down between 600 and 1200 metres before the process is stopped, the borehole is sealed and the miners move on to drill another hole about 150 metres away. The end result is a mountain peppered with subterranean caverns.

Apparently EU legislation requires that each country should have a strategic reserve of crude oil which will last for 92 days "To cover any eventuality in the international market." Spain's current Strategic Reserve is in a lot of oil tanks in the Escombreras Valley in Cartagena. The plan is to bring the crude ashore at the tanker terminal there, build a 110km pipeline and pump up to two million cubic metres of the black gold into the disused caverns in our mountain.

The opponents say that there is a high risk of oil spills, that inhaling the vapour from crude causes cancer, that Pinoso is in an area of high seismic activity for Europe, that Pinoso could become a terrorist target, that land will have to be compulsorily purchased, that there is the chance that Pinoso might have to be evacuated if there were a disaster and that the mountain could become a restricted area.

The proponents say that there is no risk of fire with oil stored more than 500 metres underground because there is no oxygen, that there is no chance of pollution of aquifers or of escape of the crude because the remaining salt is plastic at that depth so naturally self sealing, that only in Hollywood films are mountains split apart by earthquakes, that they love the natural environment as much as any environmentalist, that and will use the best technology to build the pipeline, that the visual effect of the installations will be minimal and that Spain needs safe, cost efficient, effective storage and that this is it.

Personally I'm a bit ambivalent about the whole thing. The corporate response is glib and the Platform for el Cabezo Free From Petroleum's objections range from the reasonable to the bizarre.

Easter

Usha mentioned in the Archers the other day that Alan, the Ambridge vicar, was very busy at Easter. If it's hectic in Borsetshire then it's positively frenetic in Spain with religious processions and events everywhere at Easter time.

We have good Easter processions in Pinoso. There are, I think, eight different groupings five of them with the tall conical hats (the ones the Klu Klux Klan thought scary enough to copy) a Roman Legion and a group of women dressed in black and wearing mantillas. I went out to see a couple of the processions but this year I missed the one that I think is most impressive on Maunday Thursday/Good Friday

The reason I missed it was that I was in Cartagena to see the equivalent procession there. I have to say that the Cartagena processions were incredible. Thousands and thousands of penitents, as many different costumes as anyone could imagine with attention to detail in every facet from perfectly straight marching lines and co-ordinated movements down to matching shoe buckles. Something of the military nature of the town was obvious from the escorts of serving soldiers and sailors marching goose step style in front of and behind the members of the various brotherhoods and their extravagant floats carried on the backs of hundreds of perfectly co-ordinated portapasos (float carriers).

It's not just the event itself either. Last night we had to move from our chosen position because of a mix up over chair reservations. By then it was impossible to get back to the front of the crowd so we wandered the streets. The bars and the streets were full of costumes and small elements of the procession being readied. Tuning instruments, polishing shoes, having that last fag, marshalling the people and sorting out those final details at every glance.

Splendid.
.

The Ides of March

The toilets at Beeston YMCA used to get vandalised a lot in March. My caretaker had a theory. Winter should be over, Spring tantalises us - snowdrops, daffs and the occasional day when the sun shines but then, bang, freezing cold, driving rain - winter all over again. The youngsters didn't think it was fair, they'd been cooped up too long and they took it out on the toilets.

I think that same effect is why I haven't been writing blog pieces. We're waiting for something to change. So this is a rather contrived entry. And it's too long.

Our house is in Culebrón in Alicante and our rented flat is in Cartagena in Murcia. Some 110kms or 90 minutes journey time separates the two. We do the journey frequently coming back to Culebrón as often as we can mainly so the cat can have a bit of a run around and murder smaller animals.

So, down our track and on to the twin carriageway road up to Pinoso hedged in by vines, almonds and solar panels. Into town, into Pinoso. At 7.10 in the morning the bus for Alicante picking up, the Ecuadorian day workers waiting for their lift to work. With a population of just 8,000 it's small so we're soon out of town heading across the rolling countryside and heading for Fortuna. We pass a couple of bodegas where the grapes from the vineyards are turned into the local red wines - usually palatable and strong but hardly masterpieces of the craft. The road winds and drops down into Murcia with the marble quarry that supported the town, until this recession hit, behind our left shoulder. Nothing special about the road, hardly any traffic at any time of the day, maybe a bit busier than usual with the early commuters. As we get on towards the village of Salado Alto the landscape becomes John Wayne like all grey dust, cañons and solitary hills. We've been dropping since we left Pinoso and as we turn and twist on the badly surfaced road that takes us down to Mahoya we're still going downhill. Mahoya is great, it's a non descript village on some back road to nowhere but at whatever time of day or night we pass the two bars there seem to be open and busy. Over the dry river bed and into a couple of roundabouts on the outskirts of Abanilla then right onto the Santomera road. There are orange trees now because we're lower but this road is lined with metal box buildings, galvanisers, tyre places, paving stone manufacturers and big restaurants - the sort used for wedding receptions and communions. Lots of roundabouts and then right onto the A7 motorway, the road that runs in and out of Barcelona and follows the coast of the Med all the way down to the Costa del Sol.

It's light by now as we slip into the traffic and head into the outskirts of Murcia city. Nueva Condomina stadium and shopping centre to the right, Thader shopping centre to the left as we start to juggle with the traffic. The speed restrictions say 80 but the traffic wants to do 100. Take your choice, stay relatively legal and become a traffic hazard or go with the flow. Somewhere in this blur of traffic we've moved onto the A30 and there's the sign that says 50kms to go. It's around 8.10 if we're on time. Past the last dodgy intersection, the final one where cars cut from the outside lane across three lanes to take their turn off. We start to climb. We're only going up to 340 metres but it's a steep hill. We're passing through pine forests now. At the top the view opens up. As we begin to drop the motorway divides and we keep left, heading for the coastal plain. The crops have changed again, some oranges but lots more green stuff, market gardens. The sun coming up from the East is in my eyes but the road's nice - that dark tarmac with new sharp white lines and the traffic has thinned out after the melee of Murcia. It's a straight run, past the old crop sprayer biplane, past the scrap yard with classic cars for sale. Some ten kilometres out of Cartagena we take the turn and end up on an urban dual carriageway surrounded by a motley collection of industrial buildings. As we pass the almost derelict shacks where single light bulbs burn and sad washing hangs on improvised lines we're almost into town. We head into the residential areas with cars parked all over the place, with blind views on right angled junctions and pedestrians happy to assert their rights on the multitude of zebra crossings. There's the school, pull up in the road outside, Maggie collects her things, a quick peck. See you later.

Eddie and I do the last kilometre or so alone, park up on the waste ground and let ourselves in to the block of flats where we live. From Culebrón and the countryside to Barrio Peral and town life.

This is the night mail

One of the few poems I know is Auden's Night Mail - the one that has the clackety clack rhythm.

For we Brits mail and trains go together. Maybe it's no longer a reality (doesn't all the mail go by road or air nowadays?) but we old folk still talk about Mail Trains. I certainly expect a post box at a railway station.

So just now, when I went to collect Maggie from the train as she arrived in Petrer from Cartagena I took a couple of letters to post. A waste of time. Not a letter box in sight, not on the platform nor near the station nor even on the nearest main road. A whole culture to unlearn and relearn still.