An old, increasingly fatter, red nosed, white haired Briton rambles on, at length, about things Spanish
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Friday, September 22, 2023
No dance for the single men
Monday, September 18, 2023
Tyred of it all
The tyres on my car were getting towards the dodgy end of the spectrum. There are two obvious tyre retailers in Pinoso - places with pictures of tyres on their signs. I asked them, in person, for prices. I got quotes for tyres made by Aplus, Kummo, Minerva, Roadstone, Firestone and Hankook. I was born in a simpler world. A world where Cadbury was British, not American and Volvo was Swedish, not Chinese. When a Mini had a BMC engine and not a Peugeot one. When tyres were made by Pirelli, Goodyear, Dunlop and Michelin. I'd never heard of most of the brands. The only decision I could make about quality was price. If Firestone cost more than Insa I supposed they were better but then again we all know that sometimes we're paying for a name. The Internet reviews were useless. The tyres were still legal. I decided the choice could wait.
At a routine, prepaid, service on the car SEAT disagreed with me. They said the tyres didn't have enough tread left. They gave me a price to replace the original Hankooks similar to the ones the car came with. Hankook, as a name, always brings to mind the Blood Donor sketch and a sad man. I started to ring around. I got all sorts of prices. Comparing them proved tricky because even if the brand were the same the specifications might vary slightly. How do I know if a 205/55 R17 95V is worth 20€ more than a 205/55 R17 91V? Eventually I gave up ringing around and just searched online. I got even more confused.
Better to support local businesses I thought even though, surprisingly, the quote from the SEAT main dealer was competitive. I messaged the Pinoso workshop and said I'd like to buy a couple of tyres from them. The messaging came about because their prices had been sent by WhatsApp. They couldn't do it, they were closed for a week; holidays. I phoned the main dealer. They couldn't give me an appointment to change tyres (which takes what, thirty minutes?) for over two weeks which would be after the Pinoso people were back from holiday.
The day the Pinoso workshop was open I confirmed the order for a couple of tyres. They suggested I go the next day to have them fitted. I did. The bloke in the overalls, who I could barely understand, knew nothing about me or the car or the tyres. I showed him the messages from his wife because it's her who does the office work. "Bah! Come back tomorrow," he said. Fortunately I was in sniggering rather than affronted mode. I sniggered. I went back the next day and Mr. Overalls had the wheels off before I left to get a cup of coffee. When I went back 50 minutes later the car still had the old boots on. "Sorry," he said, "bit off a cock up on the ordering front. The tyres I thought were yours aren't yours. I was hoping the carrier might turn up at any minute." They didn't. The old tyres went back on the car. The next day it was third time lucky. The tyres were there and now they're on the car.
I had to go back to the SEAT dealer as a follow up to that routine service. They were going to replace a non essential part that had failed but they needed to order it so I had to wait. The woman on the reception recognised me, or more likely, the information held in the SEAT database gave her MI5 type information about me and she asked if I still wanted the tyres. I explained that I'd tried to buy them but that the wait had been too long so I'd gone elsewhere. "Odd," she said, "I'm sure we could have done them anytime. It's a quick job."
Do you ever suspect that some jobs are just fated?
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
I'll name that child in three!
It used to be the same for foreign names. I'd want to register on a Spanish webpage. I was asked for both my surnames. As I don't have two surnames, and as it was often a required field, I'd try with an X or a dash. Sometimes that didn't work; I'm still Chris Thompson Nil on a fair few databases. It's a problem that has almost gone away nowadays. There's still space for two surnames but only the first will be compulsory. This is because, as I'm sure you know, most Spaniards have two surnames; one from the mother and the other from the father. The usual order is father's name first, mother's second. So Juan Ortega Perez and Sara Blanes Hidalgo have sex that results in baby Nerea. Traditionally Nerea would be Nerea Ortega Blanes. In everyday circumstances she would be Nerea Ortega. If she wrote a book it would be filed, surname wise, in the Os. However, because her mum is feisty and because her dad wants to be a modern man, they may choose to call her Nerea Blanes Ortega; the law changed to allow that in 2017. When Nerea gets to 18, if she doesn't like the order her parents chose, she has the right to change her surnames around. There are lots of variations on this basic idea but let's keep it simple.
I'd always presumed this double surname thing went back hundreds of years but it turns out that the codification of double surnames is relatively recent. In fact the choice of surnames in Spain has traditionally been a complete free for all. There was a general understanding that the surname couldn't be malicious, so naming your child, toilet brush, for instance, wasn't on. Malicious surnames aside the system was completely random. Usually, the first born adopted the name of the father and the rest of the brothers or sisters adopted other family surnames. This would mean that siblings might have a variety of surnames. There was a tendency for boys to take the surname of their father and for girls to take a surname from the mother or another woman in the family. As you may imagine this could cause a great deal of confusion for anyone trying to keep tabs on the population.
In the distant past Spain was made up of lots of different kingdoms. One of the biggest was Castile. By the 16th Century the rich Castilians had started to use the double surname method. My guess is that they did it mainly for matters of inheritance and property rights. That system was also adopted by the Basques about the same time. It made administration simpler. By 1833 this system of two names was very common so that the first Spanish census, in 1857, had boxes for the paternal and maternal surnames. When the civil registry was established in 1871 they continued the two box custom but it wasn't till 1889, when the first Spanish Civil Code (A civil code is a set of rules and laws about how individuals relate to private and public bodies) was established, that it became compulsory for children to carry the surnames of both parents. This same system of double surnames was largely adopted in Latin America too because of their close links to Spain. Immigrants to Spain who take Spanish nationality are required to register two surnames
As an example of this change in the pattern of surnames I thought I'd use some old examples of famous Spanish names who only had one surname because they were named before the double barreling became the norm. I thought of Cervantes, the author, of Hernán Cortés and of Francisco Pizarro, conquistadores both. I realised that they were all men but I couldn't think of a single historical Spanish woman from the 15th or 16th or 17th Centuries who wasn't either a royal or a religious personality - such is the power of patriarchy. So, men as examples but, when I checked their names, it turned out that their names were not constructed, as I expected, following the John Smith or Akosua Busia model. The author of Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha if you prefer) was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The Mexico man was Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano and the bloke who conquered, what is now largely, Peru was Francisco Pizarro González. None of the simple given name plus family name for them.
So double barrelled may now be the norm but how did the surnames first arise? Bear in mind the thing above about families using several different surnames and the thing below about forming surnames - so the fat one got called Fatty, the healer got called Healer and the one from the valley got called From the Valley etc. Indeed lots of surnames were simply made up and came from nicknames or descriptive features: Rubio, blonde, Calvo, bald and Delgado, thin, for instance.
Surnames that are associated with trades and jobs are common in Spain as they are in English, The Coopers, Archers and Fletchers of the UK become the Zapateros, Herreros, and Pastores - shoemakers, smiths and shepherds of Spain. I always think it's a good thing that surnames are now well established or it we'd all be stuck with things like "Hello Ms. User Experience Designer" or "How do you do Mr. Sustainability Manager?"
Lots of Spanish surnames are patronymic, that is a name derived from the name of a father or ancestor. These sort of names are common all over the world, for instance the Icelanders with surnames formed by adding -son to the father's name for sons - Magnus Magnusson or -dottir for daughters as in Björk Guðmundsdóttir. In Spanish these are the names that end in ez, oz or iz - Muñoz, Sánchez, Martínez or Albéniz. Sancho's lad, Martin's son etc. We Britons do it too, Thompson, Robertson, Davidson.
Then there are the toponymic surnames, that is to say, names that come from a town or other place. Some of those are simply place names - Peñaranda, Catalán, Sevillano and the like exactly as we Britons do with Sarah Lancashire or Jodie Bedford. Then there are lots which use de or del or de la which means of the or from the. So María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, of the water meadow, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, of the castle, Vicente del Bosque, of the wood and Luis de la Fuente, from the fountain.
So, the next time your middle name gets used as your first surname, if you didn't know, well, now you do.
Wednesday, September 06, 2023
Esparto - from shoes to baskets
I have a friend who, often, when we go somewhere new, asks me how people who live or lived in that place make or made a living. Usually I guess that it's web design or selling insurance or running a bar, just like everywhere else but even if I have a better answer it can seem unlikely. We're in some forgotten village in Teruel in front of a gigantic old house, palace-sized and the answer is that all that money came from sheep. Hmm, a likely story. It's true, though; wool generated huge amounts of wealth in lots of Spain for hundreds of years. Surrounded by shipyards or steel furnaces, it's easy to believe they are wealth generators, but not everything is so visible. Were you to stroll the streets of Mountain View, California, could you feel the place wallowing in cash because of Google?
If you live around here, you are not far away from some esparto. It grows all over the place in the countryside. From our house, we'd have to walk all of 200 metres up the track to our nearest biggish patch, but there are probably odd clumps closer. In the past, large areas were given over to esparto growing. It was harvested by wrapping the plant's stalks around a stick and tugging. Damaged stems were discarded at that stage. Next, it was dried in the sun, traditionally for forty days, until it turned a golden straw colour. Oddly, having taken all that time to dry it out, the next step was to wet it again so that it recovered flexibility. There seem to have been two different methods, I presume for different types of products. In the first, the grass was wetted for a couple of days before it was worked. The second method, which seems almost antithetical to me, was to soak the grass in tubs of water for the same count of forty days that it had been left to dry. Apparently, the water smells horrid after a while. The wetted grass was then beaten with a mallet, that looks more like a heavy wooden rolling pin, against a tree trunk in order to separate the fibres of the grass. Like its two-day wetted cousin, this crushed esparto could then be woven into different plaits or braids. The braids, always made of an odd number of strands, usually between three and nineteen, were then sewn together to give the correct shape. As a simple example, imagine a round mat to go under a hot dinner plate to protect the table. A coil of plaited esparto will be coiled around in a single flat form. The capachos or capachetas, which are the mats used in old-style olive presses, were made in much the same way - they're capachetas on the carts in the photo. A current day supplier lists fans, snail collecting baskets, cheese making hoops, targets, all sorts and sizes of baskets, saddlebags, nesting boxes, bottle holders, shoes, cord and string in their product list.Esparto was a big industry around here, a big employer, a big generator of wealth. Unlike the wine or the almonds or even the olive oil, esparto has been overtaken by synthetic materials. There are museums in both Cieza and Jumilla dedicated to esparto. The one in Jumilla, as a part of the wine museum, says that at the height of the industry, between the First and Second World Wars, there were six esparto factories in Jumilla. Nowadays, the use of esparto is much less mainstream and you'll usually only see it in craft markets or during demonstrations in ethnological museums and the like. Mind you, if you need to pack a window or door subframe or you need to hang a suspended ceiling you can still buy bundles of it from the DIY superstore Leroy Merlin.Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Reading a book
In 2004 Spanish bookshops were intimidating places. Berlin Wall like there was nearly always a counter and the books were behind it. They were protected by someone, invariably older, invariably stern, Dickensian even - villainous Dickensian. There were shelves too, sometimes in the Allied Zone, but without apparent order. Lots of the shops were dark and dusty with piles of books. The organisation of the books was a secret known only to that formidable bookshop employee. As well as looking sinister the person behind the counter spoke Spanish. Another big hurdle. But I'd decided early on in my Spanish adventure that reading in Spanish was a good way to tackle the language so these obstacles had to be overcome.
After a couple of bad buys, panicked into buying some Spanish classic with impenetrable prose, I decided to try something I'd already read in English. I'd been told that translated books were often easier to read. Hemingway, and his short sentences seemed like a good place to start. I chose For Whom the Bell Tolls, a story set in Spain. At the time Corte Inglés, the department store, was still a Spanish Institution. Being a department store it was, largely, self service. The book section was a bit more like the UK bookshops I was used to. I wrote the, translated, name of the book and the author on a piece of paper and showed it in Corte Inglés. Their indexing system, their cataloguing system, was so labyrinthine that even a person who worked there wandered from bookcase to bookcase mouthing the title and occasionally re-assuring me that she was sure they had it. If they did she didn't find it. In the end I ordered the book from Juan, one of the local places to buy books in Pinoso, and only four weeks later it was mine. That three to four week delay is still pretty normal if you order a book that isn't on the bestseller list.
Books are expensive in Spain and so, faced with the cost and the difficulty of buying books, I joined the library. At that time speaking in Spanish was traumatic. I'd practice the phrase all the way to the counter encounter and then stumble over every word. In fact the joining process proved dead easy. Librarians, unlike book sellers, seemed pleased to see me and to help. My original library card, with a mugshot from 2005, still works.
These days I usually read e-books. I prefer print books but e-books, well Kindle in my case, have a bundle of advantages.
Price is a big advantage. E-books are half the price of an actual book. In fact when I used to buy from the Amazon UK site the books written in Spanish, available there, were often even cheaper than the same book on the Spanish Amazon website.
Then there is the advantage of electronic browsing before buying. It's possible to download sample pages so you can decide whether you like the style before parting with your hard won wealth. Lots of classic books are free but the language tends to be difficult.
For me though the huge advantage of reading on an e-book, in a foreign language, is that all the devices from dedicated readers to mobile phones, come with dictionaries. Some of the dictionaries come free as part of the software bundle but I also bought the Collins Spanish to English dictionary. That means that getting instant definitions of any essential word in the Spanish book that I'm reading is just a press away.
There are some books that I want to read that are only published in paper. When that's the case I ask one of the local shops to order the book. I usually have a queue of books to read on the e-book so the wait isn't as onerous as it once was. I could get them quicker, and a bit cheaper, online but supporting local business always feels honourable and you can say thanks Juan or Mariló y Susana which makes you feel a bit more like you belong.
The last thing was knowing what to read. The big bookshops all have displays which are easy to wander around, as do the big supermarkets like Eroski, Alcampo or Carrefour. There is a price fixing system in Spain so the big outlets only have a slight price advantage over local bookshops. Local bookshops may or may not have browsable displays but the new stuff is nearly always in the window. I pick up most of my recommendations for new books from an artsy radio podcast I listen to but that's because I like the programme in general. All of the Radio and TV channels have book review programmes and finding book review podcasts and video channels is only a Google away. And, back at the library they have a new acquisitions display which makes it dead easy.
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
Sly and the Family Stone
If Spanish families, nuclear families, are going somewhere to do something then it's very normal for the whole family to go. None of this parking the kids with a babysitter while the adults don their glad rags.
I was reminded of this a couple of times during this month. I went to Aspe to see four bands in a long evening, a mini festival, that the organisers call Aspesuena. I'd gone, particularly, to see a band called Shego who I like a lot. Four feisty young women from Madrid. They came on about 2 a.m. and did a long hour set. I was taking snaps when someone elbowed me in the ribs. It was a man and he had a child, maybe three years old, on his shoulders. He signalled sleep, he signalled the little girl - had she gone to sleep? Being old, and set in my ways, I presumed it was a father and daughter. He'd wanted to see the band so obviously the child would go too. The girl was wide awake which is not so surprising as she was about two metres from a loud rock band even if it were 3 a.m.
This past weekend we went up to the Macizo del Maigmó country park to do a bit of a walk and some stargazing. After everyone had eaten their pack ups (food is an essential part of almost any activity in Spain) we lay on the hard, hard ground, on our backs (we'd been recommended to take one of those yoga/camping mats), looking up at the passing aeroplanes, satellites and stars. A bloke with a laser pointer told us what was what. The walk started at 8.30 in the evening, just as the light began to fade, and finished around midnight. There were lots of young children in the group. As we began to pack up to go we noticed that one of them was fast asleep on her mat. The photo at top left is of the group somewhere in the park.
Being a bit curmudgeonly, when I lived in the UK, I never took kindly to children in pubs but I have to admit that this total inclusion of children in the family activities seems just so natural, and so right, nowadays. I'm sometimes a bit surprised when visitors comment on the children out in the wee small hours - it has become unremarkable to us. It works the other way too. None of the young people dancing along to Shego looked awry at the old, fat, white haired, red nosed bloke out to see a band so obviously nothing to do with his age group. Young and old are equally accepted at all sorts of Spanish events.
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P.S. I was in Spain to see Iniesta bang home the goal for the World Cup win for Spain in South Africa and to see Olga Carmona do the same for Spain in the New Zealand/Australia World Cup this weekend. At least I know two potential answers to two potential questions on the Spanish Nationality exam.
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
The local tax bill
Britons living in Spain often complain about Spanish tax. I can't actually find anything on the internet that directly compares the average tax burden between countries. I suppose, in the end, there are so many variables, from obvious taxes like income tax and VAT/IVA through to the sugar tax on soft drinks, that it's almost impossible to calculate. What there are are official figures, at country level, about how much tax revenues represent, as a percentage of the total budget. For instance in the UK taxes represent 35.5% of the total GDP. In Spain that figure is 38.4%. So, in Spain, a greater percentage of the money that runs the country comes from taxation - that's all forms of taxation from tobacco duty and corporation tax through to inheritance tax. The specific gripe of Britons is that they feel the Spanish Government takes more of their personal wealth than the British one did and I don't know whether they are right or not.
Whatever other Britons might say I still take a sort of guilty pleasure when I get notification of my road tax and it's less than 20€ for the year. Our IBI which is a bit like Council Tax, for the year, in Culebrón, is 97.41€. In Huntingdonshire, the last place we lived in England, I understand the average (mean) council tax is now £1,860 per year. That's a bit of a saving, in fact it's more of a saving than my Spanish income tax bill for the year.
Our Culebrón water bill for the first six months of the current water year is 41.70€. From the detail on the bill it seems that the actual cost of the water is 0.0518636363636364 cents - five hundredths of a cent - per litre. With all the additional costs for renting the water meter and paying towards the upkeep of the system the real cost per litre comes out at a staggering 0.0956363636363636 cents or, rounded up, a tenth of a cent per litre.
That water price reminded me of the furore there was in 2005 or 2006 when the boss of Nestlé argued that water wasn't a right, it was, he said, just another foodstuff best valued and distributed by the free market. The quote was taken out of context and used to beat Nestlé with a stick but, given their reputation for dodgy marketing and exploiting the poor, that's hardly surprising. Anyway if you decided that you wanted to buy bottled, Nestlé brand water from our local supermarket the cheapest you can get works out at 34 cents per litre - 350 times more expensive than our tap water. The cheapest, own brand, bottled water from a local supermarket is only 112 times more expensive than the tap borne equivalent.
Just to make any British readers groan my car tax is 17.39€. The same car would cost £180 in the UK. The other bills we get locally are 60€ a year for rubbish collection and 41€ for drainage. That last one I don't particularly like given that the drains installed in the village fell short of our house by about 300 metres. We're paying for something we don't have, something tangible and real, not a shared community asset like education or road signs and that seems a bit unfair. On the other hand it's only 41€ so I can just about bear it.
______________________________________________-
Here's the, translated, email I got from the Spanish Government/SUMA
THIS EMAIL IS IN RELATION TO A NOTICE OF AN ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION.
Please be informed that a new communication is available for CHRISTOPHER JOHN THOMPSON with NIF/NIE ***935*** as the named person with the following details:
Cardholder CHRISTOPHER JOHN THOMPSON with NIF/NIE: ***935***
Issuing body: O.A. Suma Gestion Tributaria Diputacion de Alicante, with DIR3: LA0004956
Identifier: 743506564db1b955160d
Quality: CSV-2023.2727.6758.4931
Link: This was a webpage address
You can access this communication at the Single Enabled Electronic Address (DEHÚ) of the General Access Point, available at: https://dehu.redsara.es
We provide a direct link to the communication.
Government of Spain
Sunday, August 13, 2023
Hi, I'm calling to sell you something
Since 2009 it's supposed to have been possible to stop these people pestering you by signing up to the Lista Robinson, the Robinson list. I did and it seems reasonably effective but I've heard that, for some call centres, the Robinson list is just another database to plunder. At the end of June 2023 new legislation came into force which is supposed to make it more difficult for these cold callers to keep on pestering us. The general consensus is that the legislation is so full of holes that it won't change anything. Oh, and by the way if you're registered as a business or as self employed the new legislation doesn't cover you. Business cold calling to business is considered legitimate.
The first reason the new legislation is likely to fail is that it doesn't apply if you have given your consent for companies to call you. Not many of us think we give consent but just how often do you read the fine print on that Internet contract or new phone app before you tick the little box? That's where the clause is that gives them permission to call us or even to sell our data on to a third party. And it's often Catch 22; if you don't give your consent then you can't have whatever service is on offer.
The second reason is that the new legislation allows the companies, which have your number, to call you when there is a legitimate interest. What exactly legitimate interest means depends on how much wiggle room a company thinks there is in the legislation. Security, for instance, is a legitimate interest. The company says that it needs to contact you because they are worried that, with a new scam, your account is at risk. So, your bank phones to say that you don't have a backup, just in case of a security breach, phone number. Oh, and while we're on the phone, talking about security, have you ever considered the advantages of our new super gold plus security plan?
But the biggest problem is that the legislation is Spanish and European, not worldwide. The Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) tells Spanish firms it's illegal to use randomly generated phone numbers for cold calling. The AEPD says telemarketing companies are obliged to identify themselves, say that they are trying to sell you something and tell you you can ask to stop receiving calls if you ask. Calls must be recorded so that the recording can be used as proof that the call complied with the law. The fines for not following the protocol can be up to a couple of million euros.
So if some advertiser makes a call from Spain and they don't follow the rules they can get into hot water. But Morocco, Ecuador (and lots of other countries) are not in the European Union. So, a Spanish firm hires a call centre, based in Ecuador or Uruguay, to make the calls on their behalf. Even if the phone number that's shown on your mobile looks like a Spanish one it's quite likely it's not. Nobody in Spain makes the call. The Spanish Consumers Association tried, in March 2022, to identify 210 cold call telephone numbers and they only tracked down about a third of them. It's difficult to chase someone for being naughty if you can't find them.
Cold calling produces a lot of business. We're often a bit fed up with our current phone provider or we wonder if another electric contract wouldn't save us money. If we let the cold caller speak and the deal on the phone sounds good, well, why not? The companies realise that stopping cold calling, obeying the new legislation, could cause a big drop in profits.
The new rules say that the Spanish companies have to behave legally and so they do. The Spanish company signs a contract with, say, a Nicaraguan call centre which stresses that the Nicaraguans will comply with European and Spanish rules when making calls to Spain. The contract is signed in that "foreign" country and it clearly states that the call centre can only call people who have expressly consented to receive calls or where there is a legitimate concern. What doesn't go into the contract is that the call centre and the Spanish company agree, while they're having a cuba libre down the bar, that the call centre can call whoever they want.
Back in Spain, where nobody drinks cuba libres till late at night, Pedro or Pepe, Mariló or Susan complains to the AEPD about unsolicited calls. Maybe the case ends up in court. Let's pretend that this process happens almost instantly and doesn't drag on for years. The telephone company defends itself by showing the contract and saying how disappointed and cross it is with the overseas company for breaching its contract. The AEPD or the judge will not be able to do much to the phone company because any contracts that the phone companies have with the call centres say that they guarantee to only make legitimate calls. The judge can't do much about an Ecuadorian or Peruvian contract because they are outside their jurisdiction. And if the complaints keep coming and the judges begin to suspect some skulduggery then the phone company will throw their hands up in horror and break the call centre contract for not complying with the terms of the agreement. There are lots of call centres looking for business. There may be penalties for breaking contracts, there may even be fines within the EU but the profits will outweigh the losses and so it's more than likely that the system will go blithely on and you, and I, can expect those unwanted phone calls to pepper the day.
Thursday, August 03, 2023
Crumbling pegs
I was just bringing in some washing. Five or six pegs crumbled in my hands. The plastic just gives up the ghost when faced with day after day of bright sunlight and heat. That's why Spaniards park their cars in the shade. If not expect the paint to peel off the bodywork and the headlight lenses to go cloudy in time. Oh, and expect singed skin and lots of oohing! and aahing! getting into the car.
Garden furniture doesn't have a chance. The chairs that have the nylon seats and metal frames have proved to outlast the nice rattan designs, the good looking wooden furniture and even the very basic, very cheap, plastic, stacking chairs. Even then, eventually, the thread fails. You realise it's happening when you hear a faint ripping sound and your bottom begins to sink earthward though, usually, fortunately, there is time to save your drink.
When you start to realise that the Spanish climate makes short work of almost anything left outside you start to look for answers. Surely it can't do anything to a glass and steel table? But the steel will rust as the constant expansion and contraction produces little fissures in the paintwork which let in the moisture and the glass will discolour. Often the repeated expansion and contraction means that the legs end up different lengths too so that the tables start dancing or limping as Spaniards say. Years ago my partner, for whom looking at garden furniture is a bit of a hobby, realised why lots of Spanish gardens have furniture that looks like marble but it actually concrete. It holds up well. We bought a table with benches maybe ten years ago. It still looks fine but close inspection reveals the stresses and strains even there. And it's not that soft, being concrete.
A couple of long weeks ago we had a "reventón seco"? The reventón is a short lived very fast, very hot wind. The explanation is something to do with rain evaporating before it reaches the ground. The mass of air that held the rain continues downwards, hits the ground and flows out leaving a void into which ground level hot air rushes. One of our trees, one of those that doesn't do the bend like a reed thing of the Chinese proverb but prefers the Battle of Little Round Top dictum - Stand Firm Ye Boys from Maine - was swaying quite a lot despite the girth of its trunk. I moved the car in case it fell. I couldn't move the house. The chairs skipped and hopped like the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk.
When the thunder and lightning comes so, sometimes, does the torrential rain. It gouges great trenches in our roadway. In towns and cities it tears down the street carrying cars and containers before it. Fifteen minutes later it's all over and the neighbours start brushing out the mud and quarreling with their insurance company. Sometimes it comes with hailstones, often it comes with hailstones, big hailstones that dent cars, break windscreens and destroy the crops in the field.
Extreme weather is commonplace in Spain. Too hot, too windy, too stormy, too hailstoney, two rainy and, in our living room in winter, even too cold.
Saturday, July 29, 2023
No more worries for a week or two
The first to prepare for the Spanish summer, which lasts from 1 July to 31 August, are the TV advertisers. From the beginning of June happy groups of friends and families will begin to appear on TV screens, sitting around big tables in the garden eating paella or pizza and drinking beer. Most of the rest of Spain begins to prepare for Summer around San Juan, June 23. Those who have a beachside or country property start to ackle it up for the summer. It's amazing how many people have access to a country home or a seaside flat. In both cases the trick is inheritance. The money from the sale of Grandma's house made the flat affordable. The other option is that Grandma's house is where the family now spends Summer. The house gives the family roots, they may live in the big city, they may eat takeaway but this is where they belong. Even if you don't have a flat on the coast or a house in the country you may well have friends who do and who are willing to let you use, or even share, the place with them. If not, well, plenty of places to rent.
Then the schools close so the families have to arrange summer camps or playschemes or just the long suffering grandparents as childcare. A surprising number of people get laid off work for the summer. "Non state" teachers, the ones who work in academies or in private schools, are a good example. They find that their fixed discontinuous contracts come into play. The job will still be there when the new term starts in September/October but, in the meantime it's a case of drawing the dole or finding a summer job or, if that fails, simply hunkering down with the family and spending nothing.
Traditionally lots of Spaniards would take a month's holiday in summer. All of August for instance. Lots of local and government workplaces would close and several still do. The Health Service goes into an, almost, emergency only situation. Lots of businesses change their working hours to be from early morning to early afternoon rather than the traditional split day. Who wants to work and swelter in the summer afternoon heat?
For most people a whole month off is no longer feasible and horizons have broadened. The tendency now is maybe a fortnight at the beach/pueblo keeping some of the holiday back for Christmas and other times of the year. There's also the other possibility that the flat or pueblo house is pretty close by. Lots of Ilicitanos, people from Elche, have places on the coast in El Altet or Gran Alacant or Santa Pola for instance. That distance is commutable so people go back to the coast at the end of the reduced day. If that isn't the case then, unlike the US Marines, Spanish families do leave men behind. At least it used to be men. They were abandoned to tread the melting tarmac of, the almost deserted, Madrid while the family paddled at the coast or gossiped in the country village square. Any man in that situation could explain it quickly with the phrase "estoy de Rodríguez". Nowadays I suppose who stays behind, in the holiday spot, providing the childcare, and who commutes to work or stays in the city depends on individual circumstances. If nobody is left in the summer home to look after the kids then that's what grandparents are for.
There are lots and lots of summer habits to be observed: the beach bar or chiringuito, the silver foil wrapped tortilla sandwich, the 2pm exodus from the beach, the queue at the fountain with water containers or just trying to mimic that particular swooshing slapping sound that Spanish men elicit from their flip flops as they move along the beachside pavement. July and August are just stuffed full of "we've always done it that way" events. The municipal swimming pools as a centre of neighbourhood or small town activity, particularly for young people, the outdoor cinema, the village fiestas with their orquestas or show bands, concerts in the parks etc., etc., etc.
Strangely most Britons won't see a lot of it because so much takes place late at night as the world cools down. A concert that starts at midnight just smacks of summer madness to most of we Brits. For Spaniards of course a late night start just about gives them time to get there after the evening meal. Different rhythms.
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
¡Olé! ¡Qué arte hija! ¡Arsa!
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.
Saturday, July 22, 2023
Chansons d'amour
My favourite performance, in all these years, was one the group did outside the Cultural centre a few years ago. The dancers took to the stage in their (period) underwear and explained their clothing as they added layers: petticoats, corsets, stockings, and eventually the skirts and blouses. The solitary man who dances with the group wasn't there that year!
It's a lovely event. Sometimes the singers don't quite hit the note or th person presenting a song fluffs their lines, but who cares? The people, the songs and the dances belong here. They belong to this area and to Pinoso. The director of the group, I think I'm right in saying, was in a local pop group back in the 80s, Saturday down the Palais when the Palais was, what is now, the Hiperber supermarket on the Badén. Half the audience know half the choir and most of the other half of the audience. Everything just belongs.
We don't belong, of course. Much of the event tends to be in Valenciano, as it should be. That doesn't stop us from being smiled at, occasionally greeted, and always prodded and goaded towards the celebratory after-event horchata and fartones - Valencian products both.
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Road types
Thursday, July 13, 2023
Road Numbers
Friday, July 07, 2023
Not raising a glass but it is a toast
We took the scenic route. We stopped over for the night in Andalucia, in Córdoba, before heading on to Zafra, Mérida, Cáceres, Trujillo and Plasencia. It's a while since we've been so far from home in Spain and it reminded me of something I already knew, but often forget, those small but significant regional differences.
Toast for breakfast. Usual, traditional, commonplace all over Spain. Near to home toast is, usually, half of a smallish breadstick or baguette. Just the half, media or, if you want the whole thing entera. The most basic version comes dry and you self add the oil and salt. The next step up, pricewise, is to add a layer of grated tomato (in Catalonia they usually rub the tomato directly into the bread). Richer people add serrano, cured, ham and even cheese. In trendy spots they offer avocado too.
In Andalucia the differences from home are subtle. There is a tendency to flat slices of bread though "burger bun" molletes are also pretty common. Bread apart, the routine with oil and grated tomato is much of a muchness. Pork dripping, with or without paprika, wasn't on offer. In Sevilla and Cádiz it would have been. The next day, in Zafra, now into Extremadura, the tomato looked completely different. It had been mashed up with garlic and oil and then blitzed with one of those hand blenders. To be honest it looked a bit unpleasant. Our cats have been known to produce something with a similar colour scheme and texture. Fortunately I'd chosen to be radically local and I'd asked for the local paté, cachuela. Adding pork products to toast is big in Extremadura because of the fame of the local, cured ham - it's often quoted as the best in Spain. Maggie was stoic as she chewed on her toast with tomato. Next morning she wondered if they might have the Madrid (and ever so English) variant of butter and jam. In Madrid, where Maggie lived years ago, butter and jam was the norm. Usually in Madrid the bread has the same colour and consistency as a slice of Mother's Pride but three times as thick. Extremadura offered sliced bread too but from far less industrial looking loaves. In Trujillo they even offered brown bread. I wonder if there's a doctorate in this? Varieties of toast on the Iberian Peninsula.
about this thing of trying the local variant I should mention my consternation in not noticing something in Córdoba before I ordered. When in Rome and all that. There lots of people were having pitufos for breakfast. I've only ever used the word pitufo to describe what we Brits call Smurfs but in Córdoba a toasted sandwiches with oil, cooked ham and cheese is a pitufo. I understand that they're more typical of Malaga.
Now moving on to croquetas...
Sunday, July 02, 2023
On the difficulties of knowing what's going on
War in the Social Networks between the Gay idols of Vox and the activist known for his "Txapote would vote for you."
The first paragraph went on to say: The conflict, which is causing furore among streamers from the Extreme Right - the people who produce digital content in social networks - has reached the courts. The lawsuit presented by the YouTubers Carlitos de España (Charlie boy of Spain) and Madame in Spain, two of the gay idols of Vox, against Chema de la Cierva, the activist who menaced a team from TVE by shouting directly on air, Txapote would vote for you Sanchez," has had a trial date set.
The reason for this blog has nothing to do with the actual news story. It's about how difficult it is, sometimes, to have the faintest idea about what's going on around us; just how much information you need to decipher even a simple story.
Some of the basics I knew.
Vox is a far right Spanish political party. It is homophobic, racist, anti immigrant, super conservative and, basically, in my humble opinion, a party of dangerous nutters. They did well in the local regional and local elections and in several towns, cities and regions they hold the balance of power. In those places they have been getting close to book burning. No to LGTBI flags on public buildings, banning plays they don't like, changing the names of departments, cutting budgets and services etc.
Txapote was an ETA terrorist. ETA fought for independence in the Basque region of Spain by killing and maiming lots and lots of people. Txapote was one of ETA's mass murderers.
Sanchez is the current socialist President of Spain, He has pushed through various bits of legislation and maintained his coalition government with backing from, and doing deals with, several small parties with very specific agendas. One of those small parties has historical links with ETA. Think Sinn Féin and the IRA.
TVE is the Spanish State television broadcaster. They are always accused of being pro government by the parties in opposition.
It was easy to guess who Carlitos de España and Madame in Spain were. People who are Gay or Trans or whatever, the sort of people you would expect to be opposed the the policies of a group like Vox, but were, instead, outspoken and public supporters.
I knew the Txapote quote but I had no idea about the person behind it. Until recently Chema de la Cierva was one of the Vox faithful. De la Cierva was producing video blogs to support Vox and to distribute their message among young people. Apparently he got a bit fed up with the "soft line" the party are taking and he now claims that Vox owe him lots and lots of money. He has decided to join the Falange which was Franco's party; basically fascists.
I didn't know about his full outburst on the TVE telly programme Hablando Claro, Speaking Out, which went something like this: "The media at the service of the people....!! Txapote would vote for you, Sánchez! Socialist! Mass murderer! Son of a bitch!" and then he went on to the programme's team "Don't come near me or I'll kill you! Don't come near me, you TV motherfu**er! I'll beat you to death! Get out of my fu**ing town! I'll beat you both to death! You bloodsuckers! You sons of bitches!".
And the court case? Well apparently he had a bit of a go at Carlitos de España and Madame in Spain. "What next?", he asked, "Child abusers on the Right?"
So, now we know.
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This is the actual text rather than my bastardised translations
Guerra en las redes de la extrema derecha: el agitador de 'que te vote Txapote' contra los youtubers LGTBI referentes de Vox
El conflicto que azuzó la atmósfera digital de streamers –creadores de contenido– de extrema derecha ha llegado a los tribunales. La querella presentada por los youtubers Carlitos de España y Madame in Spain, dos de los referentes LGTBI de Vox, contra Chema de la Cierva, el agitador que amenazó a un equipo de TVE y gritó en directo “Que te vote Txapote, Sánchez", ha sido admitida a trámite
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Two kisses and a big hug
The club is organised by the Pinoso public library, which is housed in the Centro Cultural - the modern building halfway up el Paseo de la Constitución, next to the Indian restaurant.
Like the majority of book clubs I've heard of, the plot is simple. The group reads the same book. I don't actually mean that - we have more than one. I thought to change the sentence to read that we all read similar books, but that doesn't work either. So I'll take it that you know what I mean. Anyway, after reading a book, the group comes together and comments on it. We have some, nominal, say about books for inclusion in the next "course," but really, the librarians choose the books using criteria like who's fashionable, mixing international, Latin American and Spanish authors, access to the books through the library system and slightly politicized things like not only choosing male writers.
The organization is pretty slick. We get a spiral-bound, bulky magazine-thickness booklet, which details the members of the group with contact details, dates of meetings, dates of national or international literary events, books that we'll be reading this year with a bio of the authors, a bibliography, the cover notes on the book, and any additional paperwork. It's comprehensive. The librarian and archivist who look after the group must put a fair bit of graft into its production. There are about fifteen of us in the group. I'm the only bloke, but I'm not the only Briton.
So when I joined, and I joined it as a language challenge, something a bit beyond my grasp, with the advantage of being local and with local people, I supposed that the process would be clean and simple. Read a book, in Spanish, turn up at one of the usually three weekly meetings, natter about the book, go home, and repeat the process. It turns out that the group life is much more involved than that. There are quite often book launches from local authors, and the club gets involved in those as well as things like World Women's Day or World Poetry Day. There are sometimes little outings to do with a book that we've read or an author visiting a nearby town. I've found that there have been nearly as many ancillary meetings as scheduled ones. Naturally, being Spain, the group has its own WhatsApp group, and that too can be most amusing.
I taught English in Pinoso for two or three years. In that time, quite a few local people passed through my classes, but it's only very occasionally that I see any of those old students. On the other hand, when I'm out and about in Pinoso, I keep bumping into members of the book club. I don't know why, but the book club people seem to be everywhere. It's rather nice. They're a good bunch, and they've been very kind about my faltering Spanish.
Anyway, at the beginning of this month, as the sort of end-of-course do, the group - well, the librarians - had taken the opportunity to organise a Q&A session with a writer called Elia Barceló. I read something of hers for the session, but before that, I'd never even heard of her. Her Wikipedia entry suggests that I should have. She's both well known and well regarded.
She did her session with us, and then, as we are in Spain, we went to a bar to eat and drink. I wasn't at the same table as the writer, and when the people at my table started to go home, I got ready to leave too. I thought it only good manners to say goodnight to our guest of honour even though I hadn't said a word to her all evening. The writer was effusive when she said goodbye to me. I suspect she was probably impressed by the good humour and bonhomie that the Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas generates and that she'd had a good evening.
Friday, June 16, 2023
Dylan in Alicante
Thursday, June 15, 2023
Porky pies
At any traditional till in a Spanish supermarket, particularly in rural areas, you will notice that the person in front, generally, has ingredients and not the finished product. We're not talking extremes. Spaniards buy crisps, not raw potatoes. It's very unlikely though that they would buy a ready made lasagne. They cook from the raw materials. There are nowhere near as many packets, cans and jars of prepared foods as there are in the UK.
I've been making the midday meal for a while using a British cookery book. The book often lists a packet of this or a jar of that as one of the ingredients. As those packets and jars are not available I have to buy individual ingredients to simulate the packet or the can that the recipe suggests. Sometimes it simply has to be a substitute because, Jim Lovell and Apollo 13 like, if the recipe calls for mangetout, tarragon stalk, pak choi, hoisin sauce, tahini, harissa paste or even chilli flakes (all, obviously as British as jellied eels) then we have a problem. Then there are things that have similar names to a British product but they just won't do for the recipes. They are products designed for a local market. You can buy a jar full or a yellow powder called curry in any Spanish food retailer. The taste is like the curry sauce I used to get on my chips at the chip shop. It's not even a distant cousin to a Sharwood's or Patak's like curry powder that the recipes call for.
One of the key aspects of a capitalist economy is that if there's a market someone will be ready to exploit it. Carrefour, the French chain, is a big player in Spain and all of their stores have an international food section - malta for Ecuadorians, sauerkraut for Germans, dill pickles for Poles, Batchelor's mushy peas for Britons and so on. Even a small Spanish supermarket will usually have a few foreign things if they perceive a market. In Pinoso the local Consum supermarket has Warburton's crumpets, Oxo cubes, Heinz sandwich spread, HP sauce, Tetley's tea, Cathedral Cheddar and lots more. Some of the things we think of as British are readily available but with a different name. Gary Lineker could advertise Lays crisps for instance and Fontaneda digestives still have McVitie's baked into the biscuit. Other things, like Heinz tomato ketchup or Pepsi Cola, and tens of others, are international and thousands of others products are, as you'd expect, from tomatoes and oranges to canned tuna and chickpeas.
As well as the Spanish shops carrying a few foreign items there are occasional "foreign" shops selling food that Spaniards don't, usually, eat. Russian and various South American shops are reasonably common but, in this area, we Britons, even though Brexit is sapping our strength, still have the upper hand. It was curry paste that we needed. Making up a curry paste from scratch is just a bridge too far. Besides which Maggie had complained that the Spanish sausages in one of the recipes were too meaty; we needed the British product, full of rusk and recovered meat. The British shop we went to, like so many others, was a bit odd. These shops nearly always look understocked. I think that's probably because they are not expected to provide the staples. They specialise in those British things that people miss. Pork pies, ploughman's pickle, Bombay mix, Marmite, mango chutney, spaghetti hoops, custard creams, Paxo stuffing, Bird's custard powder, dandelion and burdock pop. Anyone wanting eggs, potatoes, sugar, coffee or apples will go to a normal supermarket. I suppose, understandably, because they are at the end of a long supply chain, with everyone taking their profit, the prices in the British shops tend to be quite high.
I should be fair and say that where there are larger populations of Britons there are supermarkets that look exactly like supermarkets and not like grocer's shops. Iceland for instance is involved in something called Overseas Supermarkets and Tesco has some outlets too. They have lots of stuff in tins and packets. They have piped music, the staff wear uniforms and they sell harissa paste.