Atishoo!, atishoo!

On a Tunisian holiday we ate lots of carrots and lots of strawberries. They were in season, they were cheap, they were tasty so the hotels bought barrow loads of them for their guests. It's the same with lots of garden crops. They come in shedloads, all at once. Suddenly you have cherries or plums or green beans coming out of your ears. With us it was only ever figs. We've never done well with our garden - most things are early for the next extinction event. The figs were an exception but most of our garden is either dead or dying. We had three trees: two big ones and a smaller one. The big ones produced two crops a year. I mean, seriously, in the UK I'd occasionally see figs in Waitrose and buy them as a bit of a novelty. It was a novelty that lasted for maybe half a dozen figs over a couple of weeks. What does any individual do with thousands of figs? There are only so many jars of fig jam or fig and cheese starters that any one person can eat and most of the possibilities make little economic sense - fig wine in an area awash with proper wineries? You can't even give them away because everyone else has mounds of figs too that they are fed up of freezing and pairing with cheese.

So most of the figs would fall on the ground and had to be raked up. They overpowered the compost bin. It was the same with the autumn leaves. I know we're not supposed to rake leaves up anymore, pile them around tree roots and what not, leave them to mulch down, but these big trees produced knee deep leaves. And fig trees grow quickly. They produce a lot of new wood each season so they'd have to be pruned and what's to be done with all those lopped branches?

I do most of the graft in the garden but it's Maggie who takes any notice of it. She'll try new plants, new flowers, she'll harvest any crop there is and put it to use. I just prune, weed, rake, dig, hoe, curse and bleed. One day Maggie asked me if I'd noticed the white spots on the fig leaves. I hadn't. It turned out they were Cerosplastes rusci, sometimes called wax scales; here they are known as cochinilla. 

When I looked closely all three of our trees had these parasites on the leaves and bark, sucking away on the sap from the trees. At the local agricultural suppliers I only had to say the word higuera (fig tree) and the bloke was reaching for some sort of chemical to see them off. He told me that the chemicals weren't particularly toxic for humans,  so anyone could use them, but he recommended overalls, a hat, goggles and facemask while I sprayed. Each tree needed about 30 litres of two different chemicals. It was August and it was quite hot inside a boiler suit, a woolly hat, goggles and facemask especially with each backpack full of insecticide weighing in at close on 20 kilos. At the start it wasn't too bad but by the end, determined to finish in one fell swoop, I was swaying gently and on the point of collapse. I was probably quite close to being one of those four line stories on the National TV news, slightly longer on the local radio, about some sixty odd year old dying from heat exhaustion.

For a while the trees seemed to be saved. They recovered, they gave fruit, the leaves stopped dropping off and then, suddenly, one of the trees tree just lost the will to live. It died in a couple of weeks. I lopped off all the really weighty branches and left it as a climbing frame for the cats. Later it became a support for the solar powered fairy lights that Maggie likes to festoon the building with. It wasn't till a couple of seasons later that I noticed cracks in the trunk and branches of the other tree, boreholes and all sorts of signs that the tree was doomed. The destruction wreaked by the tiny parasites is truly incredible.

So the two big fig trees were now dead. Again, with the second one I lopped off lots of branches to leave it looking like one of those John Ford Sonoran cactus. Stark.

There was a bit of wind a couple of weeks ago. As always it blew some chairs over, whirpooled leaves into mounds in certain spots of the garden. The wind also blew the first fig tree down. 

I sawed, I spent ages splitting the trunk with steel wedges to make the remains manageable enough to cart away to a large pile of garden waste that I'm unsure what I'm going to do with. Probably it will go the way of the supposed witch in that Monty Python sketch - well it might when the controls on garden fires are eased up.

Sharing the joint with young people

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Low Festival in Benidorm. Maggie, my partner, knows that I like festivals. She doesn't. She doesn't like the push and the shove and the constant standing and, generally, the music does nothing for her. She's decided on her favourite musicians now, and she pretty much sticks with them. She doesn't discount newer stuff; it's just that, generally, she finds it falls short of her established preferences.

I'm going to try to do a piece here on the accessibility of music, but I know I'm going to meander and wander around the houses. So, what I want to say is that music is very accessible in Spain. From local concerts by town bands to municipal festivals for pianists or guitarists, through any number of styles and formats of music supported by local town halls for no other reason than that they see it as their job to enrich the cultural life of their populations. In the bigger towns, small, commercial, performance spaces come and go and nearly all the theatres programme inexpensive musical events as an integral part of their offer. There are also an enormous number of, particularly, summer weekend festivals that have different bands each year but where the line-ups for each of the festivals can look remarkably similar.

I like festivals. As far as I'm concerned, they have several advantages. The first thing is that they are relatively cheap. If we'd gone up to Sonorama this year, the weekend pass would have been 85€, and there were over 150 performances (including the DJs) ranging from old-timers, through the established and nearly established bands to the up-and-comers, some of whom will never be heard of again. At a bit under €2 per performance that's a good deal. The second is that there are several bands on at once. As someone who finds listening to an album that lasts 40 minutes a bit of a chore, the concerts done by people like Bruce, Taylor, or the Stones that go on for hours and hours, seem to me, close to a violation of human rights. Spending twenty or thirty minutes watching one band is more than enough and festivals make it easy to do that because if you don't move on you'll miss the other band just around the corner. Finally, especially in the early evening, there will be bands that are hopeful, playing and singing their hearts out, determined to make an impression. If you went to see one of Bob Dylan's concerts last year, think exactly the opposite. He didn't give a toss about his audience or the quality of his performance. The odds are that, eventually, with some of those bands or artists, sometime in the future, you'll be able to say you saw blah de blah long before they were famous. You'll be able to relate how it was just you with friends and relatives of the band members - and look at them now!

There is a downside, of course. The headline bands are often on way past my bedtime. I'm really not up to being jostled by a bunch of drunken, hormone-driven, and drug-fuelled young people at four am. And as for the abusive beer and food prices and all those little tricks to wheedle money out of you, like charging for the non-returnable glasses, I will stay seal lipped. In fact, this time Maggie was only willing to go because the VIP tickets offered less crowded bars, easy access to the headline bands, and places to sit. In fact she suggested it!

To be honest, I've not been to that many festivals while I've lived here. We've done the Low in Benidorm three times, FIB in Benicassim a couple of times, I did the old SOS 4.8 in Murcia two or three times too, and just once at the B-Side in Lorca. We've considered other festivals much further from home but, as I said earlier, the line-ups tend to be very similar and hotel prices in the nearby towns are as abusive as the price for noodles or shawarma inside the festival site.

There are other festivals that don't follow the format of lots and lots of acts crammed into a weekend. Monkey Week down in Andalucia, for instance, or one we've been to four or five different years in Cartagena—the Mar de Músicas. There, the format is individual concerts, with higher prices and numbered seats, spread over a longer period and using two or three venues which sometimes leads to a forced decision about seeing this or that band. There are other festivals that put on a series of bands at the same venue over either days or weeks. Local examples are San Javier Jazz and Yecla Jazz (jazz festivals sometimes include wildly un-jazzlike bands) or like L'Escorxador in Elche which puts on bands over the weekends throughout the summer. And, of course, not all the festivals are "pop" - there are classical and folk as well as specialist performances like the flamenco down in La Unión for Cante de las Minas.

The local town fiestas used to be a rich seam of music. Somewhere as tiny as Pinoso has put on well-known names over the years, from Estopa and Izal through to David Bisbal and Sergio Dalma. In Yecla, I've seen bands like Viva Suecia and Alaska. Jumilla too used to have decent names, as did EMDIV in Elda (the photo at the top of Shinova is an old one from EMDIV though the band were on at the Low this year) or Aspe both for their fiestas and their music festival AspeSuena. We've seen lots of big-name bands, often for free, over the years but that seems to be becoming less and less usual, presumably due to budget cuts. And, of course, there is a constant trickle of decent or interesting acts that are put on by local municipalities for one reason or another. Our most recent concert was Soleá Morente, daughter to the legendary Enrique Morente and part of an important flamenco clan, at a venue with room for no more than a couple of hundred people. It was really good fun, especially at a whopping 8€ per ticket.

I'm not keen on going to see has-been bands that had their creative heyday thirty or forty years ago and are still limping along on their hits. I know most people don't agree and would turn out to see Sting, Madness, or Simply Red in preference to Cristina Len or Rodrigo Cuevas. They wouldn't do it for me; why go to see has-beens when you can go and see the potential bands of the future? There is an exception—I don't mind going to see people who I consider may die on stage—we saw Tom Jones do a fine job last year, just after that abysmal Dylan concert, and we went to see Raphael in Murcia a while ago and his new teeth and dyed hair gleamed just as they always have, even if he had a bit of trouble with some pesky high notes.

I'll name that tune - maybe

I was a bit worried about Spanish music when we first got here. I was worried that I didn't know any. I suspected that "Viva España" didn't count. After all, one grows up with music. It insidiously surrounds you. It comes at you in shops, on adverts, from the telly, and in films. 

I'm bad with music. When the musicians on stage incite the crowd to clap along I'm the only one in the audience out of time. The level of my rhythmic incompetence may be demonstrated by my being barred from using the triangle in my infant school music class; I was relegated to the benches. In secondary school I was beaten when the music teacher, carrying out tests for new members of the school choir, accused me of singing so badly on purpose. I don't remember song lyrics or titles particularly well yet, despite all these failings, I still know hundreds of songs that I never tried to learn. This is perversely opposite to the handful of poems that I've struggled to memorize and repeatedly forgotten over the years. 

It's not that I don't like music. One of my claims to fame is that one of the first bands I saw live was the Beatles. I was so young I remember almost nothing about the event apart from fearing mightily that the underfoot movement of the dress circle at the Odeon meant it was going to collapse. I achieved more appropriate concert-attending age in time for the era of the Stadium bands, usually only in binocular range. I was pleased when the musical fashions changed  and concerts became more intimate even if it did mean I was close enough to Chelsea (the punk band, not the football team) to get spit on by their lead singer. Here in Spain, I've been to at least half a dozen festivals as well as seeing innumerable modern bands. Nowadays I very seldom listen to older music, not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just that there's so much new stuff all the time.

I'm a bit backward in my listening habits. Try as I might, I can't get the TikTok algorithm to do its thing and throw up lots of new bands for me. I still listen to the radio and I still buy music, as mp3s. That last is because I think that the way Spotify pays artists is nothing short of scandalous. It's fine if you're Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift with millions of hits, but absolutely useless if you're some struggling local band. There's also the problem, of selection. The Internet means that if you want to listen to PVA or Axolotes Mexicanos it's easy to find them but the problem remains of knowing what to look for. That was the same problem I faced when I got here. When I'd been in the UK, growing up with music, I'd built up a list of sources I trusted to keep me informed. That might be Whistling Bob (though it wasn't), John Peel, one of the music magazines, a particular radio station, or the fat bloke in the HMV shop who knew absolutely everything about music. In Spain, I had to start from scratch.

The still obvious answer, at the time, was the radio. All I had to do was push some buttons and there were the major broadcasters. Just like in the UK, there is a mix of local and national broadcasters. There are voice broadcasters, some with specializations - sport, news - and there are music channels, again with specialisms from jazz via contemporary to classical. The main broadcasters were easy to work out. For spoken-word radio, the big stations were and are SER, COPE, Onda Cero, and Radio Nacional. The big music stations, the ones that repeat the same weekly playlist over and over, are 40 Principales and Cadena Dial and with the same format, but playing only Spanish language music, there's Cadena Cien.

I don't know if it's simple wilfulness or what, but the least popular of the big broadcasters is Radio Nacional, and that's the one I liked most at the beginning and still do. I spent hours in my first job listening to their news channel, Radio 5, as I worked repairing furniture. Their modern music channel, Radio 3 plays music that isn't exactly mainstream but is nevertheless modern - they now describe their musical style as fighting algorithm-driven radio. At the time, though, their programming strategy was bizarre. They'd have the sort of pop festival, potential up-and-comers and old-time superstar music on one programme, followed by a programme that featured Bulgarian folk music. I mean that literally. For goodness sake they broadcast jazz in a midday slot for five days a week! All I could see in their programming was a lemming like desire for self destruction. That's now changed and I would thoroughly recommend today's Radio 3. Its more mainstream programmes are at popular times and it keeps the niche music for the niche slots. Podcasts, catch-up radio if you prefer, means that whatever style of contemporary music you like, from dance to flamenco, you'll find that Radio 3 will have it covered.

So, in those early days, in Spain, I listened to Radio 3 and 40 Principales, I followed up on the names on festival posters by internet searches to see what the artists sounded like, and I made a determined effort to learn the music scene. If there were modern music programmes on the telly, I watched. I asked my English language learners who I should check out disguising it as a teaching exercise. I got to a sort of level of half-knowing, of being satisfied with what I didn't know. After all, when I heard that Lewis Capaldi had been the best-selling artist in Britain one year I wondered who he was. I'd never heard of him but it didn't seem like the end of the world.

So, when we're eating lunch in front of the telly and waiting for the 3pm news, watching the Spanish version of Wheel of Fortune, and they get to the round where the contestants have to find a song title having been given the artist's name, I don't worry that I never, ever, know the band/group/singer or title. I'm happy to be equally musically half aware in my new, and my old, homes.

Funny ha, ha or funny peculiar?

If Britons, young Britons especially, still drink tea then "Shall I put the kettle on?" must remain a common question in British households. As long as I can remember, in houses where I have lived, one of the potential answers has been "Well, if you think it will suit you". Just in case you are not a native English speaker the English language uses something called phrasal verbs. To put on is one of them and it has several meanings. Two of the common meanings are to cause a device to operate and to wear. This means that "Should I put on the Television?" and "Should I put on a tie?" have the same basic structure, both make perfect sense, yet the meanings are completely different. The answer to the kettle question is a deliberate confusion of two of those meanings. It's not much of a joke though some of us find it weakly humorous.

Strictly Come Dancing is a British TV show. It's a programme where personalities are paired with professional dancers in a dance competition. Two of the names from the show, Anton and Giovanni, a judge and a dancer, have been able to exploit their semi celebrity status to feature in another British TV programme which follows them as they travel around Spain. In one episode they were talking to a Flamenco dancer who we'd been introduced to us as an 80 year old. Anton asked her when she had started dancing. Her answer was since she was 25. Anton countered with - "Ah, about five years ago then?". The woman put him right. "I'm much older than that," she said. The woman didn't pick up on the humour in Anton's comment. He did it again a couple of weeks later "You have six children - really? So that was before you got a telly then?". The person being asked the question didn't see the link about how she filled her leisure time. "No, we had a telly long before."

I can't help it. If a Spanish person tells me, for instance, they have a puncture, I ask them if it hurts. They think I'm daft or that I didn't understand what they said. Sometimes, when there is either the time or inclination to explain or to unpick the exchange we get into a conversation about the peculiarities of British humour. Spaniards know that there is something called British humour, it has a Wikipedia entry.

My partner says that Spanish humour is very slapstick, a bit unrefined. It's absolutely true that several successful Spanish comedy films of the last couple of years feature a lot of things like breakages, excrement and damage to male genitalia. I'm a bit out of touch with British humorists but back in the 20th Century people like Benny Hill, the Only Fools and Horses crew, Mr Bean or Morecambe and Wise were often quite physical and slapstick too. John Cleese hitting Manuel or thrashing his car is hardly subtle. On Spanish telly there was, for a while, a thing called The Comedy Club and, but for the fact that it was in Spanish, the stand-ups there could have been on any British stand-up show. A recent Spanish film was about a Catalan comedian called Eugenio, basically he told jokes in much the same way that I understand Jimmy Carr does and, if that's not right then maybe I could say that Bob Monkhouse or Dave Allen were joke tellers. I don't know much situation comedy on Spanish TV but that said La que se avecina is a popular Spanish sitcom and, for good measure, there's also quite a subtle pun in the title, that's where the subtlety ends.

So, because I quite frequently end up in the aforementioned conversation about British humour I thought there might be meat enough for a blog. The trouble is that when I started to look for differences I had some trouble finding anything that was significantly different, except for maybe a lot more word play. Wikipedia was very little help so I asked one of the artificial intelligence programmes for the difference. This is what it came up with before it started to ramble on about wearing sandals in winter.

"Spanish humour often employs a digressive style, leading listeners through various directions before reaching a conclusion. Physical humour, repetition, hyperbole, and satire resonate well with a Spanish audience while British humour leans toward irony, surprise, and sarcasm. British humour is renowned for its subtlety, wit, dry humour, self-deprecation, clever wordplay and innuendo while humour in Spain reflects the country’s passionate and expressive nature and thrives on absurdity, and exaggerated scenarios".

The first time, and I'm sure not the last, where artificial intelligence provides the words that I can't.

The photo by the way is Gila who used the same gag for years - "Hello, is this the enemy?

Decline and Fall

Besides perfume and cars there are multiple adverts on Spanish telly for food. Particularly for fast food or franchised food chains - Foster's Hollywood, KFC, Domino's - or for quick to eat food - Casa Tarradellas pizzas, Yatekomo noodles. Now I'm not a discerning diner. I was a big fan of Spam, I like crabsticks and I still buy el Pozo meat products despite seeing the stomach turning documentary on TV. But I have to say that the adverts are putting me off a bit. The food is all so shiny and bathed in red or yellow sauce of dubious parentage. Eating with hands squidged over with sauce appears to be a positive thing.

I have a Spanish pal who is very set in his ways. From what I can tell he eats a lot of very traditional Pinoso food. If it's not local then, whether it's at home in a restaurant, he sticks to the tried and tested - grilled meat, stews, rice dishes and the like. I usually meet this friend around 12.30 so, a long hour later, I'm saying goodbye because I have to get home to finish preparing lunch. He occasionally asks what I'm cooking, Chicken and coconut curry I say, or cassoulet or even turkey fajitas and he looks at me as though I'm talking gobbledygook not just remembering what a cook book tells me.

I was telling this friend that we'd had a bit of a disappointment with a restaurant we'd gone to. We'd had some friends visiting who have a house on the coast. We'd planned to go to a local restaurant that does very traditional Pinoso food. Escalivada, pipirrana, fried cheese with tomato jam, bread with ali-oli and grated tomato, local cold sausages and the like to start. The main dish would usually be rice with rabbit and snails (the local paella), a rabbit stew or the big meatballs in broth. As the meal grinds to its inevitable conclusion, after the pudding, they give you mistela, the sweet wine, and perusas, the air filled cakes. Unfortunately the restaurant had a wedding reception that day, no room for us. We chose another restaurant, one we'd meant to try for ages. It was fine. It did lots of straightforward things like Russian salad, broken eggs, croquettes, prawns in garlic, patatas bravas blah, blah as starters. Mains were lots of varieties of fish, pork and beef served grilled or fried and there were also various rice/paella dishes. Nothing wrong with it. Absolutely fine. Eaten and forgotten.

So, back to my friend. I'm telling him about this. He says but surely the traditional food would be nothing new to your visiting friends if they have a house here in the province. I tell him that, on the coast there is plenty of food but that it's, generally, international. In fact I tell him here in Pinoso most of the restaurants serve food that would be equally at home in Brussels, Milwaukee or Nuneaton. He doesn't agree. He says it's easy to get paella on the coast. I know, from past conversations, that he goes to the same handful of restaurants time after time because that's where he can get what he's looking for. A self fulfilling prophecy. I try to explain what I mean. He's thinking of paella made individually, to order. He's not thinking about the stuff that served up in individual portions, microwaved hot as necessary, sold to tourists as the dish before the pork chop and chips.

Not that long ago the set meals, the menús, started with a choice of something like soup (fish, garlic, onion and seafood were favourites), possibly some pasta, maybe a stew like lentejas or cocido, maybe some boiled or grilled veg. The second dish, main course if you prefer, would be meat or fish, a pork chop, a chicken fillet, sardines, a piece of hake, maybe kidneys. The pudding would be ice cream, flan or fruit of the day. The food was hardly haut cuisine but it was something with identifiable ingredients. You could have coffee instead of pudding of course. The red wine was so rough it came with gaseosa (sugary, fizzy water) to make it palatable. White wine was a rarity and beer was beer - that's fizzy lager. The quality wasn't good but it was honest sort of stuff using cheap but straightforward ingredients cooked by someone who was a cook - it often involved using up yesterday's leftovers.

Nowadays the roots of the set meals are still the same but the choice is different. It's difficult to explain in a way but the style has changed, it's less honest. In the past the menú came with cheap ingredients - the cheap cuts of meat, only veg in season or something produced or hunted locally. Nowadays the ingredients are cheap because they are cheapened versions of what would once have been decent quality food - farmed, steroid fed, fish, chicken bred with oversize breasts and veg grown under artificial lighting in huge plastic greenhouses. The food is still rooted in Spain but it's not really Spanish. It's a bit like getting bangers and mash at the local pub in the UK with the sausages made with mechanically separated meat and potato out of a packet. Here it might be rice served with bits of pepper, chorizo and chicken.

It might be the puddings, the afters, the sweets that most highlight this change. The list of puddings after a Spanish menú del día is, no longer, three or four items. You will be offered any number of possibilities and every single one comes out of a packet that has been in the refrigerated display. More choice, less quality.

It's a real shame that those people chose that day to be married but I'd still like to wish them the happiest of lives together!

The train in Spain runs mainly on the plain

This is a piece about days out on the train. As usual I got distracted. If you're not interested in the Spanish railway system skip the next four paragraphs

I was told, ages ago, that, where there are twin tracks, Spanish trains "drive" on the left. That is they use the left hand set of rails in relation to the direction they're travelling. The reason, so said my informant, was that the first railways in Spain were built by British engineers and without giving it a second thought the Britons built the system that way around. It turns out that I was lied to. It's partly true in that the first line on the peninsula did use a British Engineer but his line, from Barcelona to Mataró, opened in 1848, ran trains on the right. 

As the railways boomed the first big Spanish railway company - MZA - Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Zaragoza y Alicante - bought the Barcelona to Mataró line. They bought the direction of travel too. MZAs big competitor in the pioneering days of Spanish rail was the Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte de España and they chose to drive on the left. Nobody nowadays seems to know why, maybe simply to be contrary. To this day the majority of Spanish trains drive on the right though there are parts of the network where that's not the case. Not that it's an ordinary train line but the Madrid underground network goes left for instance. Mind you in Madrid, until 1924, the cars apparently drove on the left too!

It's not quite true but, today, in broad stroke the track, the stations, the signals - the infrastructure - is owned by ADIF and the rolling stock, the trains and coaches and wagons, is owned by RENFE. Recently some low cost operators have moved into Spain and they own trains and rolling stock which runs on the lines owned and operated by ADIF. They only operate on the international gauge lines. Mostly, if you're going to catch a train like train you're going to travel with RENFE.

The width of railway lines, the gauge, can vary from country to country and even from line to line. In Spain there are three types of train gauge - narrow, conventional and high speed. The narrow gauge railways use a metre gauge - for instance the Alicante Tram and the railway from Cartagena to Los Nietos use this gauge. The traditional rail network uses a gauge of 1,668 milímetros and the high speed trains use the gauge which is often called International because it's the most common gauge in the world. It's the one that George Stephenson first used, 1,435 mm, though he thought it was 4' 8½".

The nearest place to catch a train, if you live in Pinoso, is Elda/Petrer near the Elda hospital. At one time, on that same line, there was a station just outside Monóvar which still has the name plaque Monóvar-Pinoso on it. I suppose in much the same way that there is a halt at Sax which was re-opened a few years ago the possibility exists that that station could be reopened but, at the moment, it's just an easy target for graffiti taggers. After Elda/Petrer the next nearest "serious" station, for the traditional network, is in the centre of Villena near the Teatro Chapí. A bit farther afield there are stations at Alicante, Elche, Cieza and Murcia. The nearest High Speed Stations are on the outskirts of Villena and Elche. They are both in quite odd locations. The Elche one is in some village just off the motorway about 12 kms from the town centre but the Villena one is in full countryside down a winding country road. At least it means if you're willing to leave your car on a dirt road you can avoid car park charges travelling from there!

The high speed trains are called AVEs, (it's pronounced a bit like avay) AVANT (high speed trains for mid distance) and ALVIA which are able to use both the high speed lines and the conventional lines. I'm not sure what the speed records are for the AVE trains but I've been on plenty that have clicked along at 300k/h and the fastest I've seen personally is 308k/h.

From Villena you can catch a high speed train to Elche, Orihuela and Murcia in one direction but it's much more likely that you'd want to go the other way - towards Madrid. There is a mid point stop in Albacete and some trains stop in Cuenca. The ALVIAs may stop in other places. There are low cost trains on the route from Alicante to Madrid. RENFE's low cost service is called AVLO and a French firm called Ouigo runs the same route. If one of the cheap trains stops at Villena it's likely that it will be the same price or more expensive than catching the same train from Alicante to Madrid. The cheap trains are usually timetabled so that it's not feasible to go out and back in a day but it's no longer impossible. Parking costs in Alicante obviously add to the price and the cheap trains have all sorts of extra add on charges, big suitcases and the like, similar to the low cost airlines. You can get there and back from Villena in a day with the usual RENFE trains and with a bit of timetable checking you can often find a good price if you're willing to be flexible. RENFE has a very strange policy about when it releases train schedules and often you can't book things up more than six weeks in advance. The RENFE website is notoriously dodgy to use too but at least it's available in English. One of the nice things is that you always get an allocated seat. The RENFE website is worse than useless if you need to change trains and a good alternative may be to use something like Trainline or seek help from The Man in Seat 61. 

For a bit of a day jaunt my favourites would be out of Villena or Elda/Petrer (just different stops on the same line) on the conventional services. I usually use Petrer because you can park outside the station for free and it's closer to Pinoso but there's free parking to find in Villena too. You can go downhill towards Alicante and from Alicante you can go on to Elche, Murcia and Cartagena. After Alicante it's not a quick journey. 

There are, currently, three trains a day that go the full distance from Elda/Petrer or Villena up to Barcelona but there are lots of other trains that use parts of the same line and they're good for a day out. The journey up to Xativa or to Valencia is dead easy. It also used to be dead cheap but I've been a bit shocked by the prices I've noticed as I checked details for this post. Sometimes, to get the best prices, you need to book the tickets as singles because on a return ticket the outward and inward journey need to be on the same class of train. An easier option might be using trainline to make the booking though it will cost a few Euros more. If you go out of Petrer in the other direction, which means you'll go through Villena, you can go to Alcazar de San Juan which is a really interesting day excursion or to Campo de Criptana which is a very dull town except that it does have a lot of Don Quijote type windmills. The same train continues on to Ciudad Real - pleasant enough but hardly breathtaking - though the journey is so long that you'll need a thick book.

I was going to finish off with an old British Rail advertising slogan from the 1970s but then I remembered who did those ads so, not a word. My next thought was that there might be a Michael Portillo quote that would work. Then I realised that my ideas were leading me towards madness. So no clever signing off line.

Saleing away

Let's presume you're in Spain and you want a t-shirt or a bikini or a pair of trainers or a new phone. Even with the upheavals in retailing there are still real physical shops where you can go. Most of them will have the majority of their stock on show for you to browse. Occasionally you might have to talk to someone, to get your size in shoes for instance, but most people can do most of their shopping in, Bershka or Carrefour or MediaMarkt and a whole lot more, without speaking. You might need to make some sort of grunting sounds at the till but that's all.

It was not always so. Not that long ago shopping in Spain required a conversation. There was a counter and behind it there was someone to ask for whatever you wanted. They showed you things that you may or may not want and may or may not like - it could all become quite complicated. Also shops were pretty specialised. When we first needed electric bulbs for our new house I went to an electrical shop but it turned out I needed an ironmonger. And where could I buy inner soles or shoelaces? Sometimes the answer was obvious, bread from a bread shop and drill bits from an ironmonger, but it wasn't always so simple. 

Nowadays if you don't know where to buy something you just go to a Chinese shop - they stock everything but, in the dim distant past the answer, if you were in a big town, was the department store Corte Inglés. That's where I bought those inner soles and that was where you could browse pullovers or swimming trunks without needing an extensive Spanish vocabulary. Corte Inglés was nearly magical. It had things that you needed and things you wanted. It welcomed the well off and the ordinary person and it was swish with smart and helpful salespeople. It was a Spanish institution. I'm not sure what sort of financial shape it's in now but a few years ago Corte Inglés closed lots of stores, axed lots of jobs and tried to catch up with Internet retailing and the modern world. Britons might see parallels with John Lewis.

In that same antediluvian period the sales, the time that shops sold off old stock at reduced prices, were a big event in Spain. The Winter sales started on 7 January, just after the King's holiday (think Boxing Day) and the Summer sales started at the end of June. There were always scenes on the telly of people camping outside the door of big shops, and by that I mean Corte Inglés, and making a mad dash for the washing machine being sold at the price of a transistor radio or the Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada frock at a knockdown price. There were sometimes squabbles over goods, there was always pushing and shoving and a race to be won to get that special bargain.

Even in our time here the sales were still something special. There was no Black Friday, Amazon didn't do Flash Offers, there weren't year round discounts and Outlet Shops were few and far between but there were the sales. I've spent many a frustrating hour in Corte Inglés sorting through the brand names like Gucci, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein,Tommy Hilfiger looking through the jeans or shirts for something that wasn't only left in sizes for someone with a tiny waist or a barrel chest. Every now and then I'd find something, a real bargain, and it all became worthwhile.

This year the January started last Sunday. Shops in most of Spain are still, generally, closed on a Sunday but last Sunday they were allowed to be open. Maggie had been doing her online homework and she wanted something from Corte Inglés so we went down to Elche where our nearest store is. As we passed L'Aljub shopping centre cars were queuing back down the surrounding dual carriageways presumably full of people setting out to find that sale time bargain. Corte Inglés was busy too. I had to go a car park level down to find a space. But the sales don't have that sense and purpose they once had. Instead of the jumble sale like racks of mixed clothing with bargains to be found for the persistent and determined it's now whole ranges marked down with a 40% off price tag. Sometimes they don't even give the sale price, there is a sign to say that the 30%, 40% or 70% will be knocked off at the checkout. Nobody has gone through items marking them down. Someone has given the stock control software a nudge and, when the sales are over, that change can be un-nudged. At least it gave one young lad the opportunity to impress his father with his mental arithmetic skills as he worked out the final prices. 

Corte Inglés has never been a cheap shop. 40% off a Calvin Klein pullover originally priced at 119€ isn't a bad discount but that 71.40€ price tag is still more than four and a bit times the cost of a similar cotton pullover at Primark. For me at least there's no adventure in that sort of pricing. I can probably do an Internet trawl to find something as cheap. The fun was in the hunt.

I really am beginning to sound like my Uncle Harry and his stories of fish and chips for a tanner or taking a girl out for a night on the town for half a crown. I suppose it comes to us all.

Five in the morning or Mantecados and Polvorones

I often wake up around 5 am. Anyone of a certain age will know why. Usually, I find that I don't go back to sleep properly; I doze, and I turn things over in my mind. Typically, the things are of no importance - I remember a job to do, I wonder why my knee is aching, things like that. This morning it was mantecados and polvorones.

Mantecados and polvorones are typical Spanish Christmas biscuit-like cakes. They're supposed to taste different to each other, though I can never remember which is which. A website I just consulted tells me that polvorones tend to crumble more than mantecados and that polvorones have ground almonds in them, while mantecados (which get their name from their high content of manteca or lard) don't. The website says the shapes are different too and then goes on to say that both can be round (!) but that polvorones are square and mantecados are rectangular. On other websites I've read that mantecados have various flavourings while polvorones don't or that the almonds in one are toasted and in the other not - oh, and that polvorones are oval. Trust me, whatever the websites say, they're more or less the same.

So, I was thinking about buying some. My partner is not a fan. She says they are dry and tasteless. I remembered what a Spanish language teacher told me years ago when I was saying how tedious they were. She said the problem was that I bought poor-quality industrial polvorones. I always think that the word 'industrial,' to describe mass-produced cakes and biscuits, is such a good word - it brings to mind Jerusalem's Dark Satanic Mills. I need to find some decent, traditionally made ones.

Now, if you want a roscón for Reyes/Kings, you can buy an industrial one from any supermarket for a few euros, or you can take out a bank loan to order one from a cake shop. It's the same for turrón. All the supermarkets have their own brand, they also sell some varieties which bear no relation whatsoever to real turrón. But, if you want tradition and quality, you pay for it. It's a balance between the stress on your credit card and the list of ingredients on the label. The more natural it is, the better it will taste, and the more it will cost. I wondered, for this is the fevered state of my mind at 5 am, where you might get decent mantecados or polvorones. It's like the questions on the Facebook community pages, the ones about where you can buy a hammer or bread, the ones that cause a smirk.

As soon as I was up, I dashed off a WhatsApp message to a Spanish pal. Her response was, "The original polvorones are from Estepa in Seville. If you get them in a supermarket, look where they were made. And take a look at some online reviews because all that glitters is not gold."

So I did, and this is what I got as the creme de la creme: Mantecados de Felipe II from Vitoria in the Basque Country, Estepa from Estepa in Seville, El Toro from Tordesillas in Valladolid, D. Sancho Melero from Antequera in Málaga, Dos Hermanos from Castuera in Badajoz, and San Telesforo from Toledo in Castilla la Mancha.

I know that I'm going to have to go to a traditional grocer's to get any one of those. It's pretty obvious they are not supermarket fodder.

Smoke signals

There's quite a lot of stuff that I'm aware of because I'm English. Stuff like knowing that Belgravia and Chelsea are rich parts of London, that Trafalgar Square is the (English) place to be for New Year, that Land of Hope and Glory will get a lung bashing the Last Night of the Proms and that haddock is not the usual fish in fish and chips but it was where I grew up. One of the pleasures and pitfalls of living in a place you were not born is that the common knowledge in the new place will be different. I've mentioned this in blogs lots of times before. I find it interesting, otherwise why would I be in the least interested in the story of Suavina lip balm and why would I keep going on about how strange Spaniards find it that we drink hot drinks with food or think that cheese and onion sandwiches are normal?

Last month we stayed over in Alcoy during the weekend of their Modernista Fair. Modernista, modernism is something else that I'd never really heard of till I got here. I thought you might not know either so I went in search of the two-line definition so necessary for the TikTok or Instagram generation we've become. In fact, there wasn't an obvious one. Most of the descriptions were quite long so this is a cobbled-together attempt: Modernism is an international style of art, often referred to by its French name of Art Nouveau. It was popular from the 1890s through to the first decade or so of the 20th Century. Modernism embraced architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It frequently incorporates natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. The style is often asymmetrical and although wood was widely used there was a tendency towards modern, industrial materials like cast iron, glass, ceramics and concrete. If you know any Gaudí stuff he was very Modernista.

So there we are, in Alcoy, amidst a slew of people dressed in "Edwardian" costume demanding the vote for women and dancing very lively dances wearing bowler hats and tailcoats. As we strolled we came across a stall promoting PAY-PAY (pronounced like the pie in pork pie - so it's pie pie) cigarette papers. To be honest I haven't really thought of cigarette papers since my student days when I used to carry around Rizla King Size just in case anyone asked and then felt that sharing was appropriate. I noticed the stall though and wondered if this was another example of "every day is a school day". True enough there's a bit of history.

It says, on the PAY-PAY website that PAY-PAY is the oldest cigarette paper in the world. The papers were first manufactured in 1764 in Alcoy from where they were exported to many countries, especially to Latin America, often in exchange for tobacco. That's why the stand at the Modernista fair in Alcoy. 

The thing is though that on the Rizla website, they say their story begins in 1532 when Pierre Lacroix traded some of his rolling paper in return for a bottle of Perigord champagne. They go on to say that over a hundred years later, after Pierre’s rolling paper had been passed down for generations within his family, high volume production began. For years, for ordinary people, pipes were probably the most common way to smoke tobacco and the most common form of tobacco was the powder that we'd now call snuff. Rich people smoked their tobacco leaf wrapped in other tobacco leaves - cigars. If you didn't have a pipe to hand and the craving came over you then smoking the powder in any old scrap of paper was the way to go. Rizla say that, when they introduced a dedicated, rice based rolling paper in the late 1880s it took the market by storm. 

I found another website too about the history of smoking and cigarette papers. There there were lots of photos of people surrounded by clouds of smoke, quite unlike the gentle fug from Golden Virginia or Samson. That website suggests that Rizla, Raw and Smoking were the first important rolling paper brands. There is no mention of PAY-PAY though the site does say that the original cigarette papers were called Spanish papers. Who knows; were the Spanish there first or was it the French Rizla people? Do we really care?

In fact, having read all the PAY-PAY history it turns out that all that remains of the original company is the name; a bit like the Chinese MG cars. It looked for a while as though PAY-PAY were claiming that they invented the cigarette paper booklet, the interleaved papers of an appropriate size for rolling a ciggy, because they talk about the invention as being that of a Dominican friar from Xátiva, which is very close to Alcoy, in 1815. They give the game away though by saying that the PAY-PAY workshop was just one of several in Alcoy making the interleaved papers and that PAY-PAY was a brand name for the Pascual Ivorra workshop. Apparently this bloke's marketing strategy was to print allegorical engravings, to tell a moralistic or Christian story, on the outside of the packets. Over time the packets were to bear a long series on the history of Spain and others on famous people and on customs, costumes and traditional sayings. If you're as old as me you're now thinking of those little cards that used to come with PG Tips and if you're even older maybe cigarette cards.

At the end of this the only thing worth remembering is that if you get sent for some Rizlas down at the local estanco and there aren't any you have a name in reserve - but remember, pie pie not pay pay.

Bewildered at the person - computer interface

When, as a student, I had to decide between putting petrol in my car or eating, the answer was obvious. I'd keep going for a while, the car wouldn't. Besides someone might give me food, nobody gave me petrol. The sort of cars I bought were cheap and unreliable. I spent hours messing with bits I didn't really understand. I was expert in stripping threads, drawing blood as I worked and dancing from side to side, dying to go to the toilet, but with oil stained hands determined to finish before the light failed. Those cars had carburettors and points and lots of things to twiddle.

It's ages since I've done anything other than check pressures or liquid levels on a car. Nowadays I pay for someone else, someone with a stronger bladder, to do it.

My current car tells me when it wants something. In fact it demands. The warnings for the 60,000 km oil change came on 2,000 km before. When I booked the car in they gave me a date three weeks hence. Today was hence.

Oil change, a couple of filters and plugs they said on the phone. I bought the service contract at the time I bought the car. For the dealer I suspect that one of the main reasons the contracts are good value is that it means you go to see them and that gives them the chance to sell you something else.

It's 2023 and there were no oily rags or overalls to be seen at a garage. Shiny desks, corporate image, computer tablets to sign and piped music instead. As the bloke stared at the computer screen I wondered. Do the bits of software on Spanish computers change the way they look every time? The service reception bloke kept squinting at the screen and looking puzzled. I've seen the same look at the Post Office; a look of surprise, slight bewilderment. They do it at the Post Office even when they're selling you one of those label things that now serves as a a stamp even though they must do that tens of times every day. It's the same in banks with everyday transactions. In government offices the first person calls over a second person to stare at the screen so they can look perplexed together.

“Ah, no, said the workshop man,” (who I presume takes in cars for service and repair every day of his working week), “no plugs this time. It'll be when you come back in August or September, or when you reach 60,000 km.” “But it's a 60k service now,” I said. He re-squinted. He showed me the screen, I pointed to the tick boxes on the screen where it said bujías, filtro de aceite, filtro de polen. “Ah, yes. Correct. New plug and new filters.”

Inconsequential

Spain is, in essence, like the rest of Western Europe. Lots of freedoms, well organised and safe. That doesn't mean it's hard to find things to complain about. People complain in France, in Norway and in the UK. It's dead easy to moan about Spain. On the macro scale watching the continual bickering and backbiting of national level politicians or the point scoring over laws that only paid up members of the KKK could be against in essence (anti rape or protecting animals) is so wearing. On the micro level small, everyday, things like the outrageous banking charges or the scandalous unreliability of official websites seems depressingly inevitable.

On a day to day level though I keep running into tiny things that make me grin from ear to ear. So, this week a bit of positivity and, with a bit of luck, a bit shorter too.

A Sunday morning, nothing planned, my partner busy with something in the house, too busy to come out to play. I popped over to have a look at the cypress tree maze at Onil. It was a nice enough as mazes go. I liked it. The maze was beside one of those places where there are picnic tables, merenderos. It was approaching lunch time so the public barbecues were in full swing. Kids ran around, playing, while their families unpacked food from cold boxes, unwrapped offerings in silver paper. The sun shone. I thought it was sweet.

I asked Google maps to take me home from Onil. It did that stupid thing that it does when it tells you to go South West, and, having no idea which direction is which you go North East. Instead of turning you around Google finds a route. I was taken on an 8 kilometre detour to end up about 200 metres from where I'd started. But the scenery was absolutely brilliant. Hills and pines and mountain passes and cyclists and walkers kitted out in full Decathlon even though they were treading tarmac. More grinning.

We ate with Spanish friends in Elche this last weekend. It's become my habit to take local products from Pinoso - sausage (think salami rather than Wall's bangers), olive oil, cheese, wine, cakes and pastries. This time it was a selection of the sliced sausages, some perusas (the melt in the mouth cakes often served with the sweet mistela wine) and a toña (a sort of sweet bread in a loaf sized loaf) and only one bottle of wine. We talked about the cakes and the sausage for at least 10 minutes before we drifted to the inevitable discussion about paella. What it should and shouldn't contain, which is the most authentic sort of paella and when does paella become rice and things? Jamie Oliver's crime of adding chorizo to something he dared to call paella was still fresh in the Spaniards minds even though it happened in 2016! It is simply outstanding how easy it is to have a conversation with Spaniards about food. Amusing too. 

We went to see a "pop group" called Pinpilinpussies at L'Escorxador. The band is two women; angry young women in the John Osborne sense. Angry about how women are treated and angry about the dominance of Madrid in Spanish life. They were very loud and the sound balance was completely off. I couldn't work out most of their English language lyrics nor their between song patter in Spanish. My partner didn't like the concert at all but I sort of did. I thought it was full of life, it reminded me of my outings to see punk bands in the mid seventies. I like the Escorxador as a venue. I thought seeing a band, who have a certain following, for 3€ per seat was incredible. I just love the easy and cheap access there is to culture in Spain.

For some reason there's some sort of thing about the month of Thursdays before Lent in Alicante. In Monóvar there are walks to celebrate the time honoured tradition of trudging into the countryside for a bit of an afternoon snack. In Aspe they too go out picnicking on the last Thursday before Lent and that has turned into a sort of community based musical review show - las Jiras. The Monóvar picnic was nothing special but I was glad I did it. The Jiras I enjoyed because it was full of that community continuity feeling that pervades so many Spanish events. I suspect that people I know would describe Las Jiras as a bunch of people singing badly in stupid fancy dress. I found it life affirming.

I have more, all from this year. Moors and Christians in Bocairent, Carnaval, the book club, talks by famous writers, the Med sparkling and free art galleries but I promised brevity.

But no popcorn

Going to the pictures in Spain is a bit sad at the moment. The cinemas are just so quiet. The reports say 35% down on pre pandemic figures. I suppose that when everyone was locked in their homes they subscribed to Apple TV or Netflix or Filmin. At that time the film makers and distributors thought, well, if anyone is going to see my film then I have to put it on HBO or Amazon Prime or the Disney Channel and the rest. So film making is healthy enough, lots of product, but with many releases going direct to platforms or having very short cinema runs.

Although I go to the flicks a lot, I go at unpopular times. Not for me the crush of Saturday evening but, more usually, the peace of Tuesdays. Even then the fall off in numbers is noticeable. I've been in cinemas where, so far as I can tell, there are no other customers in the whole building. Tuesday is favourite because the nearest cinema to Culebrón, the Yelmo in Petrer, does its original language films then. It's become a habit so when there's nothing any good in English but something worthwhile in Spanish then Tuesday is still favourite. The exception is when the Yelmo has nothing worth watching. The ABC down in Elche often has a better range and their cheap day is Wednesday so that's when I go. Given the choice I go for the early showings, the ones at 4.30 or 5pm, which isn't a popular time for anything outside the home in Spain. This week we went to the Yelmo in Alicante for the 7.30pm show and the place was quieter - much quieter - than your average Spanish funeral parlour. Bear in mind that lots of the larger tanatorios, the funeral parlours, have 24 hour bar service.

I spent a lot of my early years in a town in West Yorkshire called Elland. There was a chip shop called Kado. I forget the detail but I remember that it was foundering. As it failed the price went down, then up, then there were the strange menu combinations - pineapple fritters with curry sauce - and all sorts of buy one get two free type offers. It's been a bit like that at the Yelmo cinema recently. I've paid as little as 4.50€ and as much as 6.20€ on the same day of the week and with the same pensioner discount. There's always some sort of offer on - this week it was the Black Friday effect. Full price, at the Yelmo, on a Saturday is still only 8.20€ or 8.80€ at the Elche ABC.

I don't really mind the price. I'm pleased to say that a couple of euros isn't a deal breaker and going to the cinema always seems like a cheap night out. Well unless you eat popcorn and drink fizzy pop. Do that and look out for those arms and legs. The Yelmo's "menu" offer, for what I think is the medium sized salty popcorn (sweet costs 50c more) and a 50cl pop, is 9.45€.

Most of the cinemas are part of a shopping centre. I often feel for the cinemas that chose the wrong shopping centre. The Thader Centre in Murcia is a bit of a White Elephant so the Neocine there is a lot less popular than the Cinesa place across the road in the very successful Nueva Condomina. In fact the Regional Murcian chain of Neocines has chosen two other failed shopping centres in Murcia city and Cartagena. The Cinesmax in the Bassa El Moro, now Dynamia, shopping centre in Petrer died along with the centre and the Puertas de Alicante shopping centre in Alicante, where there's a yelmo cinema, is another Mary Celeste type operation. 

All of the shopping centre cinemas are just like multiplex everywhere. They have multiple screens and thin walls and VERY LOUD sound. Most of their theatres are relatively small but they'll have a couple of decent sized theatres for the more popular films. If you've been to the Odeon in Maidenhead or the Showcase in Springdale, Ohio then you will be at home in the Multicines Al-andalus in Cádiz. There are still a few of the older style, one big screen, cinemas left. There's one in Yecla, the PYA, for instance where the seats are raked back at the front of the theatre and raked forward at the back. They still give you tickets torn in half too rather than something you buy online or on the app on your phone. Cines Ana in Alicante is very similar.

Nearly all the films in Spanish cinemas are in Spanish, either as the original soundtrack or with dubbing. Sometimes, when I come out of a cinema having failed to grasp most of the linguistic nuances, I'm more than a tad cross with myself and a bit disappointed. It's not the same at the start of the film. I've seen thousands of pictures but when the lights go down and the film starts there is always that thrill, that moment of anticipation, something I never get watching a film on telly.

Learning Spanish with underwear

I've done Chiruca here before. My advanced years mean that I forget where or when I first heard, or read, the word but someone, on the telly, on the radio, on Twitter, used the word in a phrase. I had no idea what it meant so I asked WordReference and the Diccionario de la Lengua Española and they knew. It turned out to be a brand of walking boots; well, famous as walking boots but nowadays they make all sorts of walking footwear.

So exactly the same idea as when, in the 1980s, I might have said that I had some new Docs or that I was going to get a Barbour or a Burberry (boots, waxed coat or mac(kintosh)). In fact everyone, well I suppose it's everywhere, does this. I watch American films where they say Band Aid and Scotch tape instead of Elastoplast and Sellotape. Unless I'm mistaken Addison Lee is the UK generic for a cars that aren't taxis but are - Cabify here I suppose. Bubble wrap or taser are both trade names too.

The Spanish ones can be useful. One of my favourites is pósit for a post-it but asking for Kleenex, Danone  or Ariel, with Spanish pronunciation, in the supermarket would definitely score points.

I saw another one a while ago, it was on Twitter. The tweet, in Spanish, ran something like "Bella Hadid discovers Abanderado t-shirts". I had to look up both Abanderado, and Bella Hadid, but apparently celebs are wearing underclothes as outerwear on the streets and the Twitter user wasn't overimpressed. Abanderado are a bit like Jockey and Y-fronts - a way of describing a style of underwear. 

The Abanderado firm started in Cataluña in the 1960s and, by showing men in underclothes on Spanish telly, they became very famous here. They were particularly well known for those Marlon Brando style white t-shirts but they didn't forget Bruce Willis style singlets. By the 1980s Abanderado had 37% of the Spanish men's underwear market. When Sara Lee bought the firm out in 1991 they hired Michael Jordan to sport their wares and proclaim their virtues in adverts. Nowadays Abanderado is owned by Hanesbrands who also own other underwear brands like DIM and Playtex.

One for the next time you're having a conversation about Y-fronts in Corte Inglés.

On message

We did a bit of a circular tour last week. Up to Albacete, across to Cuenca and back through Teruel before coming home. 

Along the way we  visited the winery in Fuentealbilla, run by the Iniesta family, (Andrés Iniesta scored the winning goal for Spain in the 2010 World Cup), we looked at the huge 3rd Century AD Roman Mosaic in the tiny village of Noheda and we stayed in Albarracín which has city status even though it's smaller than either Algueña or Salinas. We even visited some old pals in Fuentes de Rubielos in Teruel.

I often think Spanish written information is patchy or poor. I wonder why there is no list of the tapas on offer or why the office doesn't show opening times. I have theories; those theories go from the link between information and power to high levels of illiteracy in the Franco years to the much less fanciful idea that Spaniards simply prefer to talk to a person. There's no doubt that written information here is much better, and more common, than in once was but it can still be woefully lacking.

Raul, who showed us around Albarracín, was a pretty decent guide. He introduced himself, he asked people in the group where they were from, he modulated his voice when telling stories and he spoke louder when someone revved a motorbike or beat a drum within earshot. Nonetheless the information was a bit stodgy - there were a couple of stories but it was still, basically, dates and facts. Years ago, when Maggie worked in Ciudad Rodrigo she helped a couple of young women to prepare for their oposiciones, the official exams for local government and civil service type jobs. Both of them had to be able to present the "official" script, in English, for the cathedral or castle; any deviation from the script was considered an error and would cost them exam marks.

I have another story that ties in with this Spanish idea of memorising things as being good. The first time I came across the Trinity College Speaking exam in English was when I had to help a student prepare for the exam. Her talk was going to be about the first of the Modern Olympic Games. When she'd finished her presentation I asked her a question about it. She replied, in Spanish, that all she needed me to do was to correct the script which she intended to learn and regurgitate. That method was so common in Spain that Trinity changed the exam to ensure that it was a better test of speaking skills.

The tour of the bodega at Fuentealbilla, the introductory welcome to the museum house in Albarracín, the guide who explained the Roman mosaics to us and the volunteer guide who showed us around Albarracín Cathedral were all fine, maybe a bit monotone, a bit emotionless, but fine. There was good information. When the cathedral guide told us that the decoration had been done on the cheap, the marble on the wall was just decorated plaster, the marble columns in the side chapel were painted pine trees, I thought this may lead to a bit of interaction, a bit of story telling. But no. Under such circumstances I often think back to a tour I did around St Peter's in Rome. The story of Michelangelo lying on scaffolding, with Dulux dripping into his eye from painting the Sistine Chapel, swearing at the Pope and complaining that he was a sculptor, not a painter, as he was asked if he could turn his hand to building the biggest dome ever because the tarpaulin draped across the unfinished church was letting in the rain water and giving the Protestants a good laugh. There was a guide who knew how to engage his audience in a tour.

In the Ethnological museum in Cuenca. I was reading one of the "labels" by an exhibit. It was, at least, 500 words long, a side of typed A4 paper. It was full of Spanish words in the style of the English word ashlar. Who ever says ashlar? Isn't dressed stone a bit more accessible? Couldn't they write, ashlar,  finely cut stone, to help out we non architects? I reckon that there was as much reading as in a normal length paperback on the walls of that museum. It takes me a few days to read a novel. Again, all it needs is a bit of thought to do this right. 

At the MARQ, the archaeological museum in Alicante, they do the British newspaper thing of a headline followed by an explanatory paragraph followed by the full story. An example. Let's suppose there are some hats and helmets and other headgear on display. The label title says Visigoth headgear. You can stop there if that's enough for you. Under the title the label says something like: Hats, helmets, scarves and other head coverings were worn by both men and women during the Visigoth rule in Spain (5th to 8th century AD). Whilst most of the headgear had some practical purpose, protection for soldiers, hygienic hair covering for cooks, a sun shade for shepherds etc. the style and decoration also emphasised the importance of the wearer in the social pecking order. Again, stop there if you will but if you're a millinery student looking for inspiration or simply a devout museum goer each exhibit has a longer, explanatory description.

But I would have forgotten all about the guides, and information and museums, if it hadn't been for the TV news yesterday. They said there were a shortage of place in FP courses. Now I happen to know what FP courses are but I wondered why they chose to use initials rather than use the full version. FP=Formación Profesional. The literal translation is Professional Training - it's the sort of training that is more directly work related. I was reminded of my potential blog topic and here it is.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

I remember when we made the decision to move to Spain. It wasn't because there were people with guns in the street, not a sign of religious fanatics demanding that girls stayed covered and away from school. It wasn't even as though we were working in terrible conditions for a pittance. I, we, thought it would be good to move from one prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms to another prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms.

I can hear the guffaws at that last sentence. I've read the Tweets and Facebook entries that suggest Spain is only one step short of being some Banana Republic, where nothing works as it should. I agree with some of the complaining. I'd like to be able to get my ID card without any effort too just like I'd hoped that my British passport wouldn't have a turn around time of four months. I might even prefer not to have to carry any ID. I understand the concerns about the ways that some animals in Spain are treated but the name of the RSPCA suggests the problem is not just Spanish. I wonder why there aren't more complaints about the strange Spanish dichotomy which is quick to introduce same sex marriage legislation (for instance) but still laughs along with the local theatre group as they parody Chinese people in the most grotesque manner. It would be nice if my Internet connection were a bit more stable but my sister says exactly the same about hers in rural Cambridgeshire. I do sometimes fret about the freedom of information in Spain and the clearly unrepresentative election system and over combative politicians but, again, Spain is far from alone and it wouldn't take much time to think of a couple of matching British concerns.

So, Julie Andrews, Sound of Music, Sonrisas y lágrimas in Spain, ringing in my ears I decided to change tack. What is it that are as good as warm woollen mittens and packages tied up with strings? And I'll keep away from the heavier stuff. Just fluff.

The restaurants. One of the things I most like about Spain, and I was reminded of the other week when we ate at Casa Eduardo here in Culebrón, is how the meals progress. My co-diners were obviously unimpressed with the food but we all seemed to be having a good time. I squinted at the pile of debris around us, the spills on the table cloth, the different coloured remnants of all that wine, water, beer and Fondillón in the glasses, the crumbs and crumpled napkins, the remains of the meal. I looked across to the family nearest to us packing up to go; the children getting their mouths wiped. The aftermath. The style of eating, the sharing, is something I approved of long before we moved here. Just as I approve of the meal times, of making the main meal of the day at lunchtime and, in doing so, saying that the essence of life is more important than work. Yep, dining out is always good fun. I like the food too. I know lots of people don't but even if you don't care for the food you must approve of the fact that it obviously didn't come, ready prepared, in a packet. 

The traffic. I know that on the coast, in Madrid and even in Petrer the traffic is just as bad as it is in Peterborough or Brum but I live in Pinoso and all of the roads around here are close to empty. I used to do a daily work trip to Cieza and I was sure that one day I would do the run from the A33 motorway to the Pinoso border without seeing a single car. I never did but two cars in 22kms isn't bad.

Car parking. It's becoming increasingly frustrating to park in Pinoso. What the terraces of the bars haven't swallowed up then the builder's skips have. In truth though there is plenty of free parking here and, even in the bigger towns and cities, you'll find something if you are willing to hunt around.

Cheap booze. I mean, honestly. Even something as recent as the newish explosion of varieties of national and local bottled beers cost less here now than they did when they were first introduced to the UK back in the 1980s. Or a gin and tonic where that description and not tonic and gin may be accurate. If you don't like booze then the price of a coffee is a treat too. Even better if you're on a nice terrace with the sun shining and the world passing by.

The weather. Or maybe not. I really love those days in July and August when the earth creaks with the heat but winter is horrid. Winter inside that is. The violence of the storms also rattles me, I expect the trees to fall as the wind whistles and the car to suffer as the hail batters down. When the sun shines, outside, at any time of the year, it's lovely but in an unheated bathroom on a cold December morning I'm reminded of my life in Britain when Harold Macmillan and Lord Beaverbrook were in charge.

Fiestas. I enjoy the fiestas and romerias and ofrendas and what not. The best ones, to my mind, are the ones where you end up sort of mixed in with the event, rather than the ones where you stand behind a line, real or not, to watch things go past. Nonetheless, even the pure spectator events - like Carnaval or the Cabalgata de Reyes are pretty good. I've long been a fan of pre-historic sites, Avebury is probably my favourite, I like the idea of continuity and sometimes, as the romeria carries the figure of this or that saint past the unfortunately parked Toyota hybrid, that same sense of continuity invades me, even though it's not a past I share. 

Places to visit. If the fiestas sort of come to you then the things to go to, the castles, cave paintings, ancient sites, galleries and museums and what not are everywhere in Spain. It's a long time since I spent much time in the UK but I remember lots of great places there from the Monkwearmouth Railway Station and the Crich Tramway Village through to the Ferens and Walker galleries. There is no denying though that the offer here is full and excellent. There's nearly always an exhibition or a gallery or a church or a castle or a tower or something to be visited in any size of town and mostly the entry is free.

Ironmongers. Shops with a counter and someone to serve you can be a bit intimidating in another language. Easier to browse the shelves in the Chinese Bazaar but if you want some solution to hanging something on a hollow door or the right glue for the job then the ferreterías are an Aladdin's Cave of fun. And, anyway, shops with counters that sell individual buttons or just the right sort of shirt are still an experience. 

The scenery. I mean without going to the Sierra Nevada or the Pyrenees or Guadarrama or the Gredos, the road from Pinoso to Yecla has its moments. Or that bit down from Hondón de los Frailes to Albatera and so on and so on. And what about the Med? It may be a filthy sewer in reality but it often looks spectacular. Mind you I suppose that's a bit unfair. Whether you're in Russia, Costa Rica, Australia or Dorset there is likely to be some great scenery too and it's probably true that lots of the things I like here I've liked in all the other places I've ever lived. Maybe that's a cue to stop listing.

I still think Spain was a good choice though.

Food festival in Pinoso

We had a couple of pals who moved from Pinoso to the coast. One of the reasons they gave for their move was that the food in Pinoso was a bit boring. Its true that if you're after Mexican or Thai or French cuisine then Pinoso isn't the perfect spot. I suppose it's a matter of taste (sic) but I definitely like the local offer. And you'll know, if you've ever got past the most basic conversation with a local, that food is a safe, and always interesting, conversation in Spain. If Brits talk about weather then the Spanish talk about food.

Every area of Spain has its specialities and every region is quite sure that they have the best food. The one thing that all Spaniards agree on is that Spain has the best food in the world. 

There is something very purist about Spanish food. If you're British, and you eat meat, then your Shepherd's Pie is not quite the same as your mum's or your brother's. You add garlic or tomato or mushrooms and they don't. This doesn't seem to be the same with the Spanish. If the recipe for tortilla de patatas says eggs, potatoes, salt and oil then that's what people think should be in it (there's a debate about whether tortilla de patatas should, or should not, have onion). That's why Jamie Oliver was pilloried for adding chorizo to paella. If he'd avoided the name and said I'm going to make rice and things (arroz con cosas) nobody would have batted an eyelid.

Pinoso is proud of its food. As well as things like the rabbit and snail rice, the rabbit stew, the meatballs in broth, the garlic pancakes and the sausages there is a pride too in some of the local biscuits (the rollitos), cakes and pastries (like perusas, toñas and coca). One of the things that often tickles me is that I'll say to some local that I had a particularly good rice, a paella, in this or that restaurant (in the company of lots of Spaniards) and they say they really should invite me around to try the paella made by their gran/mum/aunt because it's better than anything on offer in the overpriced restaurants.

Anyway, each year Pinoso runs something called the Mostra de la Cuina de Pinos. Well it does when some inconvenient virus doesn't make everything very difficult. It's a showcase for the local food. The idea is clever and simple. A certain number of the local restaurants participate. On the same date the main dishes, and a couple of the starters, are the same in all the restaurants but all mark the difference by adding in extra starters. Each restaurant also gets let off the leash a couple of times during the festival when they offer a tasting menu. The more "popular" dishes, the rabbit stew and the rice with rabbit and snails, get a reprise with two outings each.

The participating restaurants this year are Alfonso, el Timón, la Torre, la Vid and el Poli. There is a bit of a variation in price. Alfonso is charging 40€, la Torre 35€ and the rest 30€. The difference in price may be a reflection of the policy of each of the restaurants but it may also be reflected in the style and number of the "extra" starters. 

The main course on 15th February is gachamiga (the garlic and flour pancake), on the 16th it's fasegures or pelotas (the meatballs) on the 17th it's ajos pinoseros con conejo "picat" which is a rabbit and garlic shoots dish. The gazpacho (the rabbit stew with the "pancake") is on the menu for the 18th and 25th and the rabbit and snail paella on the 19th and 26th. All of the restaurants do their tasting menus on the 20th and 27th.

All of the information is on this link. Be careful if you just Google the event as Pinoso Town Hall hasn't updated its website (how unusual) and they are showing the 2019 menus and prices! If you've not done it before, and the prices don't make you blanch, it's well worth the experience but you'll probably need to book up early as it tends to be pretty popular.

2021 Weather Report for Pinoso

Pinoso has a weather station that forms a part of the AEMET network. AEMET is the Spanish Met Office, Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. So far as I know the weather station for AEMET is in the centre of Pinoso, at the Instituto José Marhuenda Prats. I think it's at the school because the bloke who started it all up taught there though that may be wrong. The man is real enough though, Agapito - always called Cápito - Gonzálvez. He's been Mr Weather in Pinoso for over 30 years now. 

If you haven't seen the AEMET site this link should go directly to the observations over the past few days. Click around the site and you'll find forecasts and a whole lot more.

There is another weather station out at Rodriguillo, which was damaged when the reed beds there went on fire in the summer. Capito got it up and running again within 8 days. There's another another on the Yecla road out of Pinoso. These two stations log their recordings on the Valencian Meteorological Association website - AVAMET. According to that website there's a third station in Pinoso at l'Herrada which, I think, is just off the road from Culebrón to Ubeda. 

If you want to have a look at the Valencia website it's on this link though it does tend to be a bit fickle and constantly change from the Castilian version to the Valencian version. If the site plays up you want Alicante Province and mid Vinalopó or in the Territori section Província d'Alacant and El Medio Vinalopó or el Vinalopó Mitjà. You can choose the date for the records too. The button to change between Castilian and Valencian is at the top right but, as I say, it's all a bit wobbly.

Anyway Capito does these roundups for the monthly weather reports. Again they tend to get published in Valenciano so this is my interpretation of his roundup for 2021. 

During 2021 it rained 68 days and there were 15 days when the temperature fell below freezing. On the other hand there were 128 days of full sun and 163 days with sunny spells as against 52 cloudy days and 22 days with full cloud cover. 

There were 162 days with dew, 22 days with mist and 2 days with hail. There was no snow recorded in 2021. There were storms on 6 days.

The hottest day of the year was the 15th August when it got to 42.5ºC and the coldest day was the 6th January when the temperature dropped to -5ºC. 

The mean high was 23ºC and the mean low was 9.7ºC.

Over the whole year 313 litres of water fell on every square metre of Pinoso and the wettest day of the year was 23rd May when we got 44 of them.

There were 808 hours when the temperature was 7ºC or below but just 60 hours when it was below freezing. Those 60 cold hours being spread between 20 different days. 

There were 80 days when the temperature was greater than 30ºC and 7 days when more than 10 litres of rain fell.

The windiest day was 12th February when it blew at 73km/h

The day when the highest recorded temperature was the lowest of the year (get that?) was 8th January, when it only got to 4.5ºC  and the day when the lowest recorded temperature was the highest was the 12th July when it never dropped below 22.5ºC. 

The overall coldest day of the year was 5th January with a mean temperature was just 2.5ºC, and the opposite was the 15th August when the mean temperature was 31.8ºC.

Equivalence

Often, when we encounter something new, we describe it my comparison to something that we recognise. A turnip?- well, it's a bit like a swede. We Britons living in Spain often use this equivalence for things Spanish. Sometimes the idea is spot on; IVA and VAT, the sales tax, is alike in all but name and rate. It doesn't work for lots of things though. The car roadworthiness test for instance, the ITV, isn't really much like the MOT but it's sort of the same and we know what we mean. And MPs are not a bit like Spanish diputados except that they are the rank and file national politicians. After all the blue whale and the field mouse are both mammals, they suckle their live born young, but they're not quite the same. Morning, afternoon and evening are different too. If the plumber says they'll be around in the afternoon then you shouldn't give up on them till about 8.30pm just like 1.30pm is still very much morning. I still get caught by someone saying we must get a drink "por la tarde", I think afternoon and they're thinking just after work.

I have great difficulty in trying to explain about the difference between British style public holidays and Spanish style non working days without misusing the word holiday. The idea I have, entrenched with me since I was a lad, is that non working days are holidays. Easter Monday and May Day are holidays and the couple of weeks in Skeggy in July are holidays too. For Spaniards a holiday is a holiday and a day off work is a "festive" day. Amongst we Britons the idea of a public holiday is that it's a part of our holiday entitlement. So, if Christmas Day and Boxing Day, both of which are UK Public Holidays, fall on a Saturday and Sunday then we will get compensatory days on Monday and Tuesday. The Spanish idea is different. Spaniards have working days and non working days. Their "non working" calendar includes certain days and anniversaries which are national non working days - Constitution Day, All Saints, Good Friday plus some regional non working days decided by each Autonomous Community and, finally, a couple of local non working days which will be different in Pinoso to the local days in say Monóvar or Elda. If the day off falls on a working day, that's Monday through Saturday, then lots of people, won't have to go to work. If the non working day/anniversary falls on a Sunday then people won't have to go to work either. So, to a Spanish legislators way of thinking, the effect is the same. Last year for instance The day of the Valencian Community fell on a Saturday. The day was marked in the calendars as a non working day but, as most working people don't habitually work on Saturdays, it made absolutely no difference to the vast majority of working people in Alicante, Valencia or Castellón. They finished on Friday afternoon and went back to work on Monday morning. It was the same with Christmas day in 2021 and January 1st 2022 was another Saturday. Father's day is a National non working day but, in 2022, it will fall on a Saturday so most people won't really notice the difference - well, except for the meal. That's why neither Mother's Day nor Easter Sunday feature as "holidays" in Spain because Sunday isn't a working day. It also means that the public days off work vary from year to year.

This idea of finding an equivalent struck me the other day when someone asked me about their Suma. Suma is a tax collection agency that was set up by the provincial level government of Alicante back in 1990. It basically assesses, bills, collects and enforces local taxes for the municipalities in Alicante Province. Suma doesn't set the taxes, the local municipalities do. So, Pinoso, our town council, uses Suma to collect Road Tax and so does Sax Town Council but the tax for the same type of cars, the least environmentally friendly, is 154€ in Pinoso and 201€ in Sax. And there you have an example - I said Road Tax but that tax here is qualitatively different to the Motor Duty payable in the UK. The tax we pay here, el impuesto sobre vehículos de tracción mecánica, is a local tax that pays Town Hall wages, the fiesta fireworks and the Christmas lights rather than the upkeep of the nation. That's one of the reasons why, traditionally, there are a lot of toll roads in Spain. Actually with the ending of so many toll road contracts and the bankruptcy of others the National Government is considering ways to raise money for road maintenance from mileage type charges through to a general vehicle duty. 

Now Suma doesn't collect in three of the five municipalities which share a border with Pinoso because they are in Murcia and the person who was talking to me lives in a village that "belongs" to one of those Murciano towns but which, generally, see Pinoso as being their town. It's not surprising that they use the shorthand of saying Suma when they refer to local taxes, "I've not got my Suma bill yet" or "When does the Suma bill come?" because, amongst other things, Suma is much easier to say than alcantillarado or exacciones municipales. Ah!, the joys of foreign living.