Life in Culebrón

Especially in the dark they can seem like little islands of human activity lost in the fastness of the night. They're usually nameless, at least at first. There's probably a bit of confusion as you drop off the motorway because you're not quite sure where to park up and the car controls, that you haven't used much, at least for the past couple of hours, prove a little awkward. You don't know quite where you are even though you know where you've been and where you're going and when you do finally get inside, into the artificial light, it's all a bit bright after hours of only peering into oncoming headlights.  The Spanish call them restaurantes, or bares, de carretera. Like Transport cafés in the UK they have a certain aura of mystique. Sometimes it's for the decor, I remember being told about Casa Pepe at Despeñaperros, famous for its Nationalistic and Francoist decor, but generally the idea is that whilst these places may be a bit rough and ready so...

The sweat was running in a little rivulet down my back. I noticed too that my damp hands had transferred the wood-stain on the handrails on to my beige trousers. The raffia work type chair had been uncomfortable from the start but I found myself wondering if Enver Hoxha's torturers had ever thought of the possibilities of dining chairs. Wearing a surgical mask wasn't helping. The daytime temperature had topped out at 41º C and it was still nice and warm as the performance got under way just after 9pm. Maggie, who was probably the only woman in the theatre without a fan, says she was on the verge of collapse from heat and pain. I suspect a fan may not have helped much! On stage a harpist and three women, all dressed in black, were reciting poetry and singing songs based on the work of women like Santa Teresa de Jesús, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Olivia Sabuco, Ana Caro or María de Zayas. Women who lived and wrote in what is now called the Siglo de Oro (literally Golden Century...

I went to Castilla la Mancha yesterday. Just the bottom bit, the part nearest home, bordering Murcia. I'd intended to go further, to a place called Argamasilla de Alba, one of the villages that claims to be the unnamed village where the Knight of the Sad Countenance lived, the one at the start of the el Quijote book. Then it dawned just how far it was so, when I was just about to join the Albacete bound motorway, I had a look at a paper map that I had in the car and chose a place that was in the middle of a bundle of mountains where the roads looked very wiggly.  The place was called Riópar. I made a bit of a diversion to stop at a reservoir which the sign said was 6kms from the main road. It was actually over 18kms to the dam wall but it was an interesting run nonetheless. It was also the first time in Spain that the "beware deer" sign was telling the truth, at least for me - four deer bounded in front of the car and disappeared into the long grass. Riópar turned...

Avoiding people who aren't looking where they are going because they are glued to their mobile phones is an unremarkable modern day hazard. I was surprised though by a couple of lads riding their bike down the pedestrianised bit of a tree lined avenue in Albacete yesterday. No hands riding for both as they scrutinised their phones with one saying that there was a Pokemon in another fifty metres. The next three groups of lads I passed were also engrossed in the display of their phones, apparently, also in search of Pokemons. Pokemon Go in Albacete? I'd gone on the train for a bit of a lark. It was one of the mid distance trains so I was a bit surprised when the TV monitors revealed that the train was doing just a tad over 160 k/h. My ticket was on my phone. The lad next to me was watching an episode of Vikings on his laptop whilst he whatsapped to his chums and those rolling Manchego plains slipped by. Most of the passengers were doing something with their phone so that the ...

In the end I wore jeans for both days. I'd packed shorts but they're not my favourite wear; I appreciate their functionality but I simply don't like them. I'd decided to go to Ciudad Real in Castilla la Mancha. I chose it because there is a train from our local station to Ciudad Real so, to be awkward, I decided to drive. Castilla la Mancha is Don Quixote, El Quijote, country. A lot of it is a gently undulating plain covered with wheat, maize, sunflowers, vines and olive trees. There are other crops but as I couldn't identify them we'll pretend they don't exist. It's not that far from home, around 350kms. Most of the way I drove along long, arrow straight ribbons of almost empty tar surrounded by yellows, greens and earth redder than Tara. I drove with the windows open and a rebellious strand of hair whipping my face. I like aircon in cars less than I like shorts. I gurgled with delight at the openness of it all and the shimmering heat. I really like...

Everyone knows that Brits in Spain wear socks with sandals, go bright red in the sun and swill beer. One of those conversational topics, designed generally to use comparatives in English, with students is about countries. We always agree that one difference is on the Tube. In London everyone keeps to themselves, reading or simply looking grim faced. In Madrid on the other hand the babble between passengers is drowned out only by the occasional impromptu musical jam session. I was in Madrid the last couple of days and I'm sad to report that everyone on the metro is now glued to their mobile phones. For business suits and skaters alike their thumbs are dancing across screens catching or killing things. Earphones are everywhere to block out the surrounding world. Mobile phones, the great leveller. Madrid looked very green too. Trees all over the place and that's without going anywhere near the Retiro. Busy of course but then, if you lived in Culebrón, most places would seem bu...

Nuclear Power Plants always take me a bit by surprise. I remember the first time I saw the one at Heysham when I was catching the ferry to the Isle of Man. It was just there. No more fuss about it than a bus station or an industrial estate. Today as we passed the Cofrentes Power Station I thought it sobering that alongside the enormous, and picturesque, steam cloud coming from the twin cooling towers, was a nuclear reactor which might, at any time, do a Fukishima or Chernobyl and start killing and polluting for generations to come. On a sunny and crisp December day it just looked tranquil. The cooling towers plonked in the middle of the landscape weren't quite so romantic but the fluffy steam clouds rising to play with the vapour trails left by passing jet planes seemed very peaceful. Much more peaceful than the busy blades of the hundreds of wind turbines in the area. There are windmills dotted along the top of nearly every ridge in the borderlands of Valencia, Castilla l...

A normal looking car park.? I suppose it depends what you expect a car park to look like On a clear night we can watch the aeroplanes spiralling down towards Alicante airport some 55kms from Culebrón. Last night there were four or five, their lights twinkling, waiting their turn to land. It was a warm night, still close to 30ºC at around 10pm and I was sure that the new arrivals would be well pleased as they headed for their hotels or apartments on the coast. Beaches and sun, that's what they'd paid for and that's what they were going to get. We've just been on a bit of a jaunt ourselves. We had a shopping list of things to do. A couple of Royal Palaces, a provincial capital that I'd never visited before and a deep river valley that had won the " Best view in Spain " on a TV programme. Most of our destinations were vaguely within the circle of towns that circle Madrid though we also went a bit further North and East into the province of Soria. We ...

Don Quixote, el Quijote, usually billed as the greatest book ever written in Spanish, is big tourist business in Castilla la Mancha and this weekend we took a short break based in Campo de Criptana a town where there a number of old style windmills just right for tilting at. In el Toboso, the village where el Quijote's imaginary lady Dulcinea lived we went to a small museum full of hundreds of copies of the various editions of the book, in every conceivable language, signed by the famous and infamous alike including names like Margaret Thatcher, Benito Mussolini, Nelson Mandela and Carlos Fuentes. On the museum wall a painting showed a thin bloke, lance in hand, riding a skinny horse and by his side a tubby man riding a mule. The four figures are dwarfed by a dazzling azure sky and the parched earth that stretch on and on for ever. We've crossed through la Mancha several times on our journeys to and from Madrid or up to Albacete. That painting tallied exactly with my impres...