Beside the road

Especially in the dark they can seem like little islands of human activity lost in the fastness of the night. They're usually nameless, at least at first. There's probably a bit of confusion as you drop off the motorway because you're not quite sure where to park up and the car controls, that you haven't used much, at least for the past couple of hours, prove a little awkward. You don't know quite where you are even though you know where you've been and where you're going and when you do finally get inside, into the artificial light, it's all a bit bright after hours of only peering into oncoming headlights. 

The Spanish call them restaurantes, or bares, de carretera. Like Transport cafés in the UK they have a certain aura of mystique. Sometimes it's for the decor, I remember being told about Casa Pepe at Despeñaperros, famous for its Nationalistic and Francoist decor, but generally the idea is that whilst these places may be a bit rough and ready some of them are culinary gems. This one does the best croquetas, that one has the best paella and the other has the best tortilla de patatas in Spain. Do a bit of Googling and you'll find any number of Spanish newspaper articles suggesting which are the best Restaurantes de Carretera. The newspapers may think they know the score but we all know that these places are really the preserve of long-distance lorry drivers, traffic police and the locals who live nearby.

The other week we were flying out of Barajas, the Madrid airport, Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas if you prefer. The flight check in was at some ungodly hour and the timing made using the train infeasible. We had to drive, to drive overnight. Like most people on a long journey, we decided to stop to take on and to expel liquids. That journey reminded me of the strange world of the late-night cafés and restaurants sprinkled around the major arterial roads and motorways of Spain.

When I'm driving a decent distance I never think to plan where I'm going to stop. It's take pot luck, based on bladder control, my ability to keep my eyes open, and the Área de Servicio signs. Nowadays far too many of the signs take you to a petrol station with a tiny area set aside with a few stools and tables. The fare on offer usually includes such gastronomic delights as sweaty ham and cheese rolls in paper bags, overpriced Coke and coffee from a Nespresso type machine. Sometimes there are just vending machines. The 24hr tag is a cleverly baited trap.

Our first stop this time was at around four in the morning. It was one of those vast barn-like spaces decorated in muddy browns and greens with a huge bar topped with display cases, full of cakes and pastries or anchovies, octopus and Russian salad depending on the time of day. The bar area looked like it hadn't had a refit since 1987 and the lights, although I suppose they are no longer fluorescents, were just as unforgiving and did the job of picking out the sweat stain discolouration under the armpits of the distinctly off-white shirts worn by the serving staff, just as well. There were also other sales areas piled high with overpriced cheese and cold meats and, as we were in Albacete province, boxes full of miguelitos and showcases of Albacete knives presumably aimed at the forgetful traveller returning home to the bosom of their family. It was definitely a type. If there had been a rotating rack with music cassettes left over in the corner I wouldn't have been that surprised.

The clientele were a bedraggled crew. They were generally young men wearing expensive sportswear that still managed to look cheap. They had those shaved side footballer haircuts and a sort of slovenly look. They were almost certainly local. Not at all threatening or menacing but it must require a certain lifestyle to pop out to a not that happening motorway service area at four in the morning for a chat with pals. There were a couple of young women too, a bit on the heavy side and with bomber jackets and ice blue coloured jeans which reminded me, like the decor, of the 1980s. 

On the way back our stop was much earlier. maybe around 11pm. Again we were lucky when the random stop proved to be an eatery popular with locals from a nearby town. The place was brightly lit, had a sort of cafeteria look to it and had that loudness of Spaniards at table. 

Just after we sat down a couple of local police officers turned up joined minutes later by four Guardia Civil traffic officers in two cars. This is a sign of a good choice. The police hovered around the bar presumably swapping stories of derring do but the centre of attention in the main room was a group, probably an extended family group, of at least a dozen people tucking in to a mountain of snack type food, sandwich rolls, burgers, plates of tapas etc. They were finishing off. One lad, as wide as tall, was wearing lots of rapper style gold chains and a silk jacket with a DJ name emblazoned across the shoulders. He was hoovering up the remains of food from everyone's abandoned plates. This place too represented a style; modern, loud, a bit brash but not at all sanitised or internationalised and instantly comprehensible to any passing Spaniard from food to serving style. None of your self service here.

Maybe there's a PhD here for one of our renowned British Hispanists. "The role of roadside bars and restaurants in the formation of modern Spain". Or not.

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As always I've written about this before; when I was on an overnight coach. This is from 16 years ago. I notice it is much more concise! I have become more garrulous with years and kilos.

It's 4 am. The bus is parked up in a service station. The cafeteria area smells faintly of sick and bleach. The man who's been sitting next to me on the bus may well be Ethiopian or Somali - he looks like he's from that bit of Africa - but as he speaks neither English nor Castilian I'll never know. There are Moroccans too - lots of Moroccans - and South Americans, mainly Ecuadorians. In Albacete a man with henna in his beard wearing one of those long shirts and the obligatory nylon anorak got off. A few Spaniards too. No one looks rich. In fact, most look definitely poor. Like the plump woman in the tight ski pants, tight top and high heels to match her yellow accessories. The ensemble screams market stall. Four continents at least - Continental drift. The struggling poor. In the middle of the night, on a bus to Madrid.

Monkeying about in Monóvar

Anís is an aniseed flavoured alcoholic drink - it's the Spanish equivalent of French pastis, Greek ouzo, Italian sambuca or Turkish raki. Before beer became the Spanish man's drink of choice the typical libation for working men was either wine or anís. Anís is usually taken with water, which means that it's a good summer drink - plenty of alcohol and plenty of volume.  Obviously enough, varying the proportion of water to booze gives you a range of strengths and a range of lengths. With water the clear anís turns cloudy white so the local Spanish name for it, paloma, like a white dove, is reasonably obvious. There's a lemon flavoured, yellow coloured, version of anís too. With water we get a canario. No translation required I suspect. If it's good for summer, it's also good for winter - a splash of anís in your first coffee of the day helps take off that morning chill.

Being old and paunchy, I still drink Spanish anís from time to time. I prefer the dry to the sweet version though the one with lemon syrup added is pretty nice too. I don't imagine that it's a popular drink with younger Spanish drinkers - turning up to the Saturday night botellón with a bottle of anís would probably be social suicide. Anís is almost certainly a drink for the older, and more portly, though one of the urban myths about anís is that the sales hold up because lots of women, still shackled to the kitchen, use anís in any number of cake and biscuit recipes and are prone to take the odd nip as they cook.

If you live around here, in Alicante, you'll have bumped into Anís Tenis. It's made nearby in Monforte del Cid and so the drink's makers turn up with a promotional stall at lots of local fiestas. They give away free hats and small glasses of anís. Another local brand is Anís Solis. They have an advert painted on the side of a house on the slip road from the Aspe to Elche road and that's proved very effective in reminding me that I have run out and should buy some more.

On a tour of the winery at Mañan the other week the guide told us that Mañan became a village when five rich families from Monóvar decided to build summer houses there. Mañan is a bit higher than Monóvar so the summer nights are cooler. One of the families, she said, included  the person whose factory produced the original Anís del Mono. When she told us that I didn't really believe her.  After all the Catalan produced, Anís del Mono is a bit of a Spanish institution. It's celebrity is not so much for the drink as for the name, the label and the bottle. 

The brothers, Jose and Vicente Bosch, set up a factory in Badalona, in 1870, to make anis. Fourteen years later, in 1884, a cholera epidemic swept through Spain. Monóvar, the town just down the road from Culebrón, became briefly famous because it didn't have a single case of cholera. By some convoluted thinking, the townspeople decided that this was because they drank the local anís (made by the firm of one of the families who built the houses in Mañan). As an obvious result, sales of the anís shot up. A bit like Trump recommending bleach. When they were asking for this drink the locals saved vocal effort by ordering a "mono", short for Monóvar.

Up in Badalona José Bosch, like lots of other Spaniards, heard this tale and realised that the name Anís del Mono could give his anís a marketing advantage over other brands. It's a bit of a strange name because mono translates as monkey - Monkey's Anís. I suppose it's a bit whimsical, a bit of a talking point. Anyway the Bosches must have liked it because they ordered up a batch of labels, featuring the name, from a French company. Like most foreigners the French proved to be bad spellers in someone else's language. They made a typo in the labels spelling "destillación" with two Ls when, in Spanish, it only has one. Catalans have a reputation for being good at business, and the labels were used, so I suspect there was quite a lot of hard bargaining about the label price. When it came to reprinting Anis del Mono stuck with the print error. There was more fancifulness, another bit of a wheeze for their label. The label features a monkey, but the monkey has a human face. People say it's the face of Charles Darwin who had published his "On the Origin of Species" a few years before. The kerfuffle -  religious, political and social - about whether people shared a heritage with monkeys was still in full swing. The Bosches must have reckoned that if people talked about their label they'd probably take a drink at the same time. And also on the label is a scroll that reads - "La ciencia lo dijo y yo no miento," which is something like "science said it and I don't lie," That could be to do with the supposedly "scientifically proven" merits of mono to stave off cholera or it could be related to Darwin's theories.

Oh, and the bottle features a raised diamond pattern in the glass. Believe it or not this has made the bottle a typical Christmas musical instrument. People rub something against the bottle to produce a sound as they sing their Christmas carols. Bizarre as it may sound it's true. I've seen it more than once.

As Jose and Vicente Bosch might say. "Buy a bottle, check it out".

But the sea isn't level

Our house is a shade over 600 metres above sea level. If you say that in feet it's just shy of 2,000 feet which, in the UK, would be hilly. The Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge with Pen-y-Ghent at 694 metres, Whernside at 736 metres and Ingleborough at 723 metres are all a bit lower than the humble, but 800 metre high hill, Xirivell, at the back of our house. Just a little further away the Sierra del Carche range, which you can see from Pinoso and which you drive alongside on the way to nearby Jumilla, rises to 1371 metres which is just a few metres up on Ben Nevis at 1345 metres. That said the Grampians, the Lake District or the Machynlleth Hills call for high tech footwear, cuben fibre gear and trekking poles while Xirivell is much more a flip flops and shorts hill. The difference is the height of the surrounding flatland.

The Spanish Ordnance Survey, the National Geographic Institute (IGN from it's initials in Spanish), began work on the first topographic maps in 1857. One of the essentials for making maps which show heights, the topography, is to have reference points. The most basic of these is a base level and it's sea level that is used. The trouble is that the sea level, for all sorts of reasons, varies from place to place on the various seas and oceans. The IGN decided that it would use Alicante as the place to measure sea level to give the basis for heights in Spain. They chose Alicante because it was quite easy to measure sea level there using basic instrumentation. The Mediterranean is relatively calm, the tidal variation is limited and it's a comfortable place to be based. Cádiz or Santander might have been just as comfortable but the Atlantic has much bigger tidal variations and more frequent and violent storms. 

So, between 1870 and 1872 the IGN measured the sea level just by where, nowadays, there is a statue which is called El regreso de Ícaro con su ala de surf - it's the one that I always thought was a surfer until I wrote this piece. Apparently it's a homage to those who try to dream and soar. The IGN used a metal ruler fastened to the wall with divisions every 5 mm and they measured the sea level every three hours between 9 in the morning and six in the evening for a couple of years. The mean variation was 0.43 metres. That gave them their sea level, the mean sea level, Point Zero or Cota cero in Spanish. I'm told there is a metal plaque on the seawall to mark the spot though I've never noticed it myself.

Now the IGN had its baseline they needed a spot on dry land to measure from. They chose the first step of the main staircase in Alicante Town Hall. Heaven knows why. The Town Hall is just 230 metres in a straight line from Point Zero and that first staircase step is 3.4095 metres above mean sea level. This measuring point was given the name NP1. It's still the point from which the height of anywhere in Peninsular Spain is measured. If you're ever in Alicante it's easy to have a look. Anyone can walk in the front door of the Town Hall. The staircase is obvious enough, though you may notice that funny golden Dalí statue before it. You probably won't notice the rather unimpressive bronze plaque, which is NP1, without looking for it. Then again the standard inch, foot, yard etc in Trafalgar Square aren't exactly overwhelming either. 

Once the IGN had something to go on it developed the precision levelling network (Red Española de Nivelación de Alta Precisión) which wasn't completed till 1924. By drawing 92 lines between various places running along more than 16,500 kms of  railway lines and roads they were able to place over 18,000 signs which marked fixed heights. Nearly 2,200 of those marks were principal signs which were placed in public spaces like town halls and railways stations. You will see them from time to time as you wander around Spain. The one in the header photo is from Villena railway station.

It has to be said that in today's world a metal ruler on a seawall isn't as accurate as it gets. The real variations in sea level depend on lots of factors, like the curvature of the earth, the amount of ice held in the polar ice caps, the phases of the moon and the like. Nowadays there are various tide meters dotted around the Spanish coast and satellites also measure sea level - I presume though I don't know - that the two can communicate with each other so that there is accurate information about actual and mean sea levels at any time. Nonetheless, as we look out from our garden to the Salinas de Sierra mountain chain opposite we can say that the Pico de la Capilla is at 1238 metres above sea level at Alicante and that's close enough for us.

And I thought I'd finished paying for the car

Second-hand car prices being what they are in Spain, and because I could, I bought a car from new. I was actually in a situation where I could have paid outright (pension lump sum), but the dealer offered a better price, even with all the interest, on a finance package. The finance period had to be 48 months or more.

When the last instalment left my bank account on September 14 this year I grinned. The car was mine. Or so I thought.

I have an application on my phone called Mi DGT or My DGT (DGT is Dirección General de Transporte - something like The Ministry of Transport ). Apart from being a bit on the clunky side, the phone app's OK. It holds my driving licence and most of the official documentation on the car. At the top of the details about the car, there is a red band and a warning sign. Basically, it says I'm not the owner of the car, VW Finance is. I've been waiting for the red notice to go away since I paid the last instalment, but today, for the first time, I bothered to read the whole of the explanatory note against the warning and not just the first sentence. It said that, once I'd paid for the car, I would need to register it on the Registro de Bienes Muebles. Before I did that, the title of the car would remain with the finance company as they have something called reserva de dominio, and it could "impede" the transfer or sale of the vehicle. The note said that the finance company would give me the certificate so I could go through the process.

I'd never heard of this, I didn't know what it was, and for once, I didn't go to Google for the answer. I was going into Pinoso anyway, so I went to the office of the gestor (sort of half accountant half official paperwork handler) that does my tax return. 

At first, the woman I talked to had no idea what I was talking about but, after a bit of goading, she phoned someone else. He knew. After the call, she said they could process the paperwork for me. Normally, I'd do these things myself. The digital signature, a sort of certificate of identity on my computer, makes carrying out lots of official things pretty easy, but I'd heard about the huge delays in getting a person-to-person appointment with the DGT, and I'd rather dropped myself in it by asking in the office first. It was a case of "sod it", alright then, you do it. Oh, by the way, how much is it? The 100€ answer was a bit of a shock but, in for a penny. I handed over the certificate from the finance company, I handed over copies of the ficha técnica and the permiso de circulación (car logbook and registration type documents), a copy of my personal ID and two crisp 50€ notes. The gestor prefers cash!

Now, I suppose I just wait till either the little warning note goes from the app or the gestor phones me up.

Official mourning - luto

I forget exactly but I think it was when they were burying the old Queen. As the cortege passed, at least on one stretch, people applauded. The British public didn't keep quiet, they didn't hold with the old stiff upper lip rule. No "dignified" silence. They showed their appreciation. They clapped.

Spaniards always applaud at funerals, at celebrity funerals, at funerals for victims, at funerals for heroes. Reverence isn't the way; full voiced appreciation is. Spaniards applauded the health workers every evening for 64 consecutive days during the pandemic. Spaniards applaud under lots of circumstances.

When something bad happens. When women are murdered by their partners. When children are kidnapped, when workers die in industrial accidents, Spaniards go and stand somewhere, together, and make a show of their concern and solidarity. A short period of silence, at noon, followed by applause, outside the town hall is typical.

When something bad happens in a town. When workers die in fires and explosions. When miners are buried alive. When young people die in traffic accidents. When concert goers are crushed to death and when club revellers are let down by unscrupulous club owners and local authorities which may be better at writing rules than enforcing them, then, those same local authorities announce an official period of mourning.

Someone was killed a couple of years ago in Pinoso in the place that people run about taunting bullocks as a part of the town's annual celebration, its fiestas. I seem to remember that the official mourning period was for just one day. Flags at half mast, a sombre TV interview from the mayor. The bullock chasing was only suspended for that day though. Then it was back to business as usual. I wouldn't be cynical enough to suggest that the reason was financial.

Thirteen young people died in a disco fire in Murcia city on Sunday. The local authority, may or may not have failed in its duty to protect those revellers through proper inspections - the town hall claims there was no licence in place, the club owners say there was. The club was obviously unsafe and the young people are dead whichever side manages to dodge the blame. As a consequence of the deaths three days of mourning were declared for the whole of the Region of Murcia.

We were going to a concert in Yecla this evening, Yecla is in Murcia. The concert was cancelled because of that mourning period. So far as I remember that's the first time that we have actually been affected by any of this official outpouring of grief. 

And just in case anybody takes from this that I am moaning about the cancellation, I'm not. It was just that the cancellation reminded me of something that fits with the tagline at the top of this page about what an old, fat, white haired Briton notices around him in Spain.

A walk through Spanish time

We're going to take a stroll through a typical Spanish Archaeological Museum. First though some figures to show just how much of our history is really prehistory. Take my figures with a pinch of salt. The information is generally European and, because there was some variation in the detail, I rounded and massaged the figures. They are fine for a conversation down the pub but not detailed enough to form the basis of your specialist subject on Mastermind.

• About 4,500,000,000 years ago the Earth was formed
• About 3,700,000,000 years ago microbes pop up
• About 500,000,000 years ago jellyfish are doing just fine
• About 2,500,000 years ago and there are eight (and probably more to be unearthed) human species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans kicking about
• About 300,000 years ago we appear - Homo Sapiens. Time will prove that sapiens was a bad choice of name. Total human population about 30,000
• About 73,000 years ago the Toba catastrophe (a volcanic eruption in Indonesia) reduces the human population to below 10,000. We hang on by the skin of our teeth
• About 11,000 years ago, maybe a bit before, we moved out of caves and started to do a bit of farming
• About 5,000 years ago we began to tool up with bronze, we invented ploughs and social organisation. The Egyptians were way out in front. They could organise legions of workers and knew how to build pyramids. They had a system for writing too so that we have names and dates for them
• About 3,300 years ago there are villages and people are forging iron. Maybe 3 million people in the world
• About 250 years ago the Industrial Revolution began. Populations began to increase and we started to impact our environment. 770 million people in the World. About 8 million on the Spanish Peninsula and 9 million in the British Isles.

So, back to that archaeological museum. Almost every one I've been to in Spain is organised so that the rooms represent time periods. The first section will be prehistory. There'll be axe heads and flint arrows and maybe small skeletons, some pots and pictures of people in skins carrying spears and pictures of men with beards and women cooking. Prehistory; the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age with no personalities and no specific history but already with stereotypes.

The next room will be about the Iberos. It's possible that this is a bit of a Valencia/Murcia thing because this bunch turned up and settled this area about 2,600 years ago. They also have a name that sounds Spanish - like the ham and the airline. They left behind plenty of pottery and jewellery and, of course, the famous Dama de Elche bust (like the one in the photo). In this same room the Phoenicians, who were from Lebanon way and had a few trading settlements here and there in Spain, will get a mention. The Celts, who had settled in the North of the peninsula will also get a nod. In fact, at the time, there were lots of groups on the peninsula (Iberians, Celtiberians, Tartessians, Lusitanians, and Vascones) but their populations were so tiny that they are largely forgotten. Like the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians and Greeks had small trading settlements on the Mediterranean coast. Only a couple of hundred years before the start of the modern era (the old BC/AD divide) the Carthaginians came in force from North Africa, and settled in Cartagena. By now the rich and powerful have names and dates for their births and deaths. Battles have dates too.

Passing to the following room we're with the Romans. The Romans were all over large parts of what is now Spain. They took their time about conquering it all, a couple of hundred years in fact, but by twenty years before the modern era they controlled all the peninsula, Portugal included. And they stayed for a long time leaving lots of bridges and mosaics, theatres, statues without heads and forums (fora?). There were also three Roman Emperors who were Spanish (well they were Roman but they were born in Spain, well, what would, one day, be Spain) - Trajan, Hadrian (he of the wall) and Theodosius I. As the Germanic tribes sacked Rome the Roman settlements in Spain were overrun by tribes like Visigoths, Suevi and Vandals. 

The Visigoths were the big winners in the new order in Spain after decline of the Roman Empire but they usually get hardly a mention in the archaeological museums - sometimes they are popped in with the Romans and sometimes they're in the next room. We're now at about year 400. The Visigoths were in charge for a few hundred years. When there was a bit of a problem about the succession to the crown within the ruling Visigothic elite one of the pretenders invited some North African troops over to Spain, to give him a hand. It was a bad move. The Berbers came, liked what they saw and decided to stay. As they were warriors and Muslims they saw it as their duty to conquer the lands for Islam. These are the Moors, los Moros, the ones who have the better costumes in the Moors and Christians celebrations. 

It's the Moors and the Christians who get the next room. From the Moorish Invasion in 711 to the time that they lost their last foothold in Granada in 1492 they were a big part of Spanish history. The years from the invasion to the "reconquest" is the stuff of Spanish legend. The idea is that a few brave (white, Christian) souls, Asturians, led by Pelayo stopped the Moorish armies at Covadonga. The Moors had had very little trouble conquering Spain to that point so the Asturians claim to have stopped the Muslim hordes and so saved Europe. This is the stuff of Spanish myth, the bedraggled Christians fighting back and eventually turfing out those nasty (black, Islamic) invaders. It's not really true of course. Christian propaganda. The Moors were actually stopped, militarily, by Charles Martel (at least that's his British name) at the battle of Tours. But let's not be disloyal, we'll stick with Pelayo at Covadonga. From there there is a gentle but persistent pushing back of the Moors. There is also a lot of living side by side and interbreeding and farming and learning maths and everything else. Mind you, where you get a line of castles, like we have around here in Petrer, Sax, Villena, Castilla etc., it's usually the sign of a long lasting frontier between one side and the other. Again it's a huge oversimplification but it will do for now.

So, it's 1492 and the Catholic Monarchs, an alliance through marriage of the powerful "kingdoms" of Spain, have accepted the surrender the last of the Moorish rulers based in Granada and they're getting on with turfing all the Jewish people out. That's when they turn their eyes to broader horizons and pay Columbus or Colón, or whatever he was called, to go and bring back some spices from the Indies. Along the way, completely lost, he bumped into some Caribbean islands and so began the European invasion of the New World. 

And from then on the individual museum curators seem to do as they wish.

No dance for the single men

We were up in Valencia a little while ago. One of the places we went was a museum called L'Etno. I'd heard on the radio that it had won the 2023 European Museum of the Year Award so, while we were in town, it made sense to go and have a nosey. My 'two and two' skills being what they are, I'd failed to realise that it was an ethnology museum. Ethnology isn't a word I use every day but, in essence, it's a museum about society and its artefacts; old cars, 8 tracks, telephone boxes, rolling pins and fridges. Like everyone else, as we gawped at the exhibits, we reminisced. "We had one of those in our kitchen" or "My mum used to swear by Oxydol."

One of the many things that drew my attention was a photo with the title "El baile de los solteros." The museum people had interpreted that caption into English as "No dance for the single men."

It's a black and white photo. The background music is a chotis, a Madrileño folk dance. In the photo, a few men wearing caps and dark, slightly old-fashioned suits lounge against the wall, looking on, as couples dance in what looks like a typical Saturday night village hall do. With a bit of imagination you can see them moving forward from time to time into the space reserved for the dancing couples before they retreat, abashed, to the wall. All of the unmarried thirty-something men of the village are there. Not one of them is missing. Other men of their age, who are already married, have stopped going to the dance. These unmarried men, these perpetual bachelors, never dance and the day of the photo is no exception. At dances like this these men have nothing to do. The dances are for younger people, for the unmarried. The village dance was the socially acceptable place for the two sexes to mingle without too many restrictions. But our bachelors have already passed their sell-by date, they have missed their chance, they are the male equivalent of old maids. Men and women go to dances to dance but these men will never dance. They will stay until about midnight amidst the noise and the lights of the dance. All night long they will gaze at the inaccessible girls before sloping off home.

The photo is illuminated in such a way that, behind it, from time to time we can see some everyday articles related to this dance without dancing. The cut-throat razor to make sure the men look their best, the essential caps; fashionable headgear, and a cigarette case, to chain smoke the evening away, watching other people dance.

Until 1914, in rural Spain, marriage functioned as an economic transaction, as an operation between two families, not two individuals. The firstborn male would inherit the property and the negotiation was basically about the property, about the redistribution and consolidation of the wealth that the land represented for the two families. The other sons and daughters were left much more to their own devices. They might marry for love, to cover the shame of an unintended pregnancy or any of those other well-established reasons why people choose to get married. The First World War caused a boom in the Spanish economy which started the transfer of wealth from the countryside to the towns and cities. That change continued all through the 20th Century. People left the countryside in droves and the old patterns of marriage began to crumble. The second, third, and fourth-born sons suddenly had the opportunity to make something of themselves in the towns and cities rather than being the labourers on their eldest brother's farm. Minimal as they may seem to us the opportunities of domestic service and factory work also gave opportunities for women to "better" themselves. The firstborn son was no longer the catch he had been for decades and centuries. A woman could do better for herself with a second-born who made good in the city, and a second-born son in the city had better possibilities to choose a wife for pure fancy from a far larger pool of women and for selfishly personal reasons. The firstborn remained tied to the land, in a reversal of fortunes they were now the ones with limited room for manoeuvre, and it was this group that became the sad coterie of permanent bachelors in the photo doomed to celibacy or paid for sex.

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?

I'll name that child in three!

Try telling a Spanish insurance company's price calculator that you've been driving since you were 17. They won't have it. Spaniards can't get a driving licence till they're 18 so the Spaniards believe that everywhere in the world starts driving at 18. The insurance company's database is built around the Spanish way of doing things. It's a good job I'm not from South Dakota.

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.

Esparto - from shoes to baskets

If you've ever seen people in Alicante or Murcia dressed in traditional clothes, you may have noticed that they are wearing rope-soled shoes. Before I moved to Spain, I'd have called them espadrilles. Here, they are called alpargatas. They are made from esparto grass which, like hemp or sisal, can be woven and sewn to make numerous everyday items. Once upon a time ordinary people wore alpargatas all the time for everything form climbing palm trees and working the earth to dancing at fiesta time.

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.

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.

Sly and the Family Stone

I don't know the names of all my cousins. It's not that there are hordes of them nor are we are sworn enemies. I've just never bothered much with them and they've never bothered with me. I'm sure we'd get on fine if we met. To make one of those sweeping, and sometimes inaccurate, generalisations Spaniards aren't like that. Here families are super important. Many Spanish people talk to, and visit, their families all the time. Families do things as families and the idea of family stretches the length of even the most diluted bloodline. 

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.

---------------------------------------------------

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.

The local tax bill

I just got a scary looking email. It was full of number codes and it came from the Government of Spain. My first thought was that it was a fine, the second that it was a scam. In fact it was from SUMA, the local tax collection agency, to tell me that a couple of new household bills were waiting for me on their website. Official Spanish is laced with over complicated and little used words. They really do need to start using plain, everyday language.

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

Hi, I'm calling to sell you something

We all know about spam phone calls. We all have our methods for getting shut. At the end of the call we block the number but the baddies seem to have a limitless supply. Here in Spain we Brits have a ready made get out with the old "Me no speaky foreign strategy". If that doesn't work then rudeness, anger or simply putting the phone down will - at least till the next call. 

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.

Crumbling pegs

It's been sunny and hot for a few days now. Everyone, everywhere is complaining. I'm surprised too. Imagine, hot in Spain, and in August.

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.

No more worries for a week or two

Summer is an interesting time in Spain. When the sun shines the country slows. In August the country treads water. It's not as true as it once was and it's never been 100% true but it's true enough for a blog.

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.

¡Olé! ¡Qué arte hija! ¡Arsa!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chansons d'amour

We went to see Monte de la Sal, one of the local choir, music, and dance groups, doing its annual Cançons a la fresca, canciones a la fresca - something like songs in the cool of the evening. They usually do two concerts with that title in July of each year. In the first, the full choir sings popular tunes. The choir dresses in black and white. In the second concert the focus is on traditional dance with the musicians, singers and dancers all wearing traditional clothing. We've seen them in action several times over the years.

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.

Road types

From trunk roads, main roads, and motorways, through to the tarmac ribbons in the countryside, the different sorts and standards of roads in Spain are owned and looked after by different levels of government.

Most of the roads operated by the national government are the ones that cross provincial and regional boundaries. This includes both motorways and conventional roads. The motorways are divided into two types: autovías and autopistas. There are technical differences between the two types of road (such as the style of junctions, width of carriageways, design speed, and the like), for most Spaniards, autovía is the all-purpose word for motorways, and they reserve autopista for toll motorways. For Brits the distinction might be that autopistas are motorways and autovias are major dual carriageways. Both types have a median separating the carriageways and at least two carriageways in either direction and the generic speed limit of 120 km/h.

The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these autovías and autopistas have a blue background and white lettering. Their road numbers start with an A or AP if it's a toll road. Roads which were toll roads but are now toll-free tend to keep the AP designation. This blog explains more about their numbering.

The toll motorways were usually built as a partnership between public and private funds. The normal deal is that the constructor gets to maintain the road and charge a toll during the period of a temporary contract, typically 25 years. When the contract ends, the road becomes toll-free, and the title of the road falls to the government. Lots of toll roads have had to be bailed out of financial difficulties. During the current election campaign there have been several claims and counter claims that a general toll will be introduced on Spanish motorways from the start of January 2024. There's little doubt that tolls are coming, because Brussels is looking to recover some of the money invested, but the chance of it happening so soon are pretty slim.

The state's conventional roads, two-lane roads, one in each direction, often with a third uphill crawler lane on steeper sections, are traditionally called national roads. The generic maximum speed allowed on national roads is 90 km/h. In the Basque Country and Navarre, these roads are owned by the regional government. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads have a red background with white lettering. The road number will begin with the letter N. The same blog as mentioned above explains the road numbering system.

Outside the Basque Country and Navarre, the regional governments manage the roads that are within their territory. There are three classes or levels.

The first level comprises the most important roads in each autonomous community. They tend to be the busy, longer-distance roads within a region, and they can be either conventional or motorway-style. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads have an orange background and black lettering. The road number will usually start with an identifier for the autonomous community. CV for the Comunitat Valenciana, RM for the Region of Murcia, etc. When one of these first-level roads is a motorway, the signs are sometimes blue, and some regions use a version that starts with A before the regional identifier (e.g., AG-59 in Galicia), but most seem to stick to the orange background and the regional initials.

The second level comprises "intercomarcal" roads, and they tend to connect towns or act as feeder roads to either the first-level roads or the national roads and motorways. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads have a green background with white lettering. The letter (usually) corresponds to the province, and the numbers to the road.

The third level comprises local roads, which are usually short and link nearby localities or go to places of interest. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads have a yellow background and black lettering that identifies the province or locality to which they belong and the number of the road.

Finally, there are the roads maintained by the local municipalities, which are very local roads and country roads within municipal borders. Usually, they don't have any sort of identifier except the signs which give the destination. There are, of course, exceptions. Some municipalities own and manage bigger roads, including motorway-standard roads, which usually have a letter for the municipality followed by a road number, such as the M30 in Madrid or the CT32 in Cartagena, for instance.

To cap off the signs you might see and to make sure that Big Chief I-Spy gives you due recognition, I should mention the European road network. These are the through routes across the continent. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, etc., for these roads add a green panel with white lettering to the existing road name, prefaced by the letter E.

And finally, just for completeness, I wanted to mention the roads which don't fit into this classification, particularly the roads run by the hydrographic confederations. If you drive across the countryside, you will come across these from time to time - usually, they are strange gated roads with dire warning signs set among acres of plastic sheeting or extensive crops. Ports and airports also maintain their own roads.