Life in Culebrón

I didn't understand much of what she said. Well, maybe half. This drives me bonkers. Nearly 20 years, and I still have trouble understanding a tour guide. Maggie said that it was because of her Murciano accent and the residual noise all around us, maybe, but if the guide had been speaking English, I would have understood everything. Well, more than half anyway. We were doing a coach tour of the floración, the flowering, the blossom on the fruit trees in Cieza. Like lots of places with almonds, cherries, peaches, etc., Cieza makes a bit of a thing about it. They have a big programme from country breakfasts and bike rides to photographic exhibitions, music competitions and visits to lots of local places of interest all tied in to the blossom. I have to be honest and say I usually forget until it's too late. For some reason, Cieza, which is only 45 minutes from Culebrón, isn't one of those places I think of as a likely destination. What I should do, as soon as I see some sort ...

Nothing much to write. It's October, you may well have noticed, and the weather is a bit changeable. The usual weather pattern here is blue skies and sunny days all year round with a few days rain particularly in winter and spring. In summer the difference is that it just gets hotter and stays hotter longer. At the moment the maximum temperatures are only getting up to around 26/27ºC and overnight we get down to somewhere below 10ºC. Difficult weather to deal with. You put on a sweater and you swelter. You wear a T shirt and, in the shade, it's a bit nippy. At night it's cool. Only the Northern Europeans are still in shorts. Inside, in front of the telly, our house is distinctly chilly. We've had the gas fires on but not yet wound up the mighty roaring pellet burner. We've had some rain too. The sort of British rain that makes the soil claggy and leaves muddy footprints on the kitchen floor. There's still a fair bit going on round and about in the fiesta ...

I listen to a documentary programme on the radio. I listen because, often, it gives me a bit more insight into Spain. Sometimes the programmes are a bit esoteric. It's fine when it's something like the history of the Galician whale hunters of the 17th Century but less so when the title; is Who was Elena Fortún - the author of Celia? There was a programme a couple of weeks ago about Zenobia Camprubí. It took me a couple of days to get around to listening to the podcast. It didn't sound like the acoustic equivalent of a page turner. In fact it turned out to be a pretty good programme. Zenobia was most famous for being the force behind her husband, a Spanish poet called Juan Ramón Jiménez, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956 just a couple of years before he died. I recognised the name - the Juan Ramón that is - because the school where I work is named after him. I  did a bit of research, well I skimmed the Wikipedia entry about Jimenez. His most famous p...

Last century I passed a fair bit of time in schools. Firstly I had to study in them. My secondary school, between 1965 and 1972, was quite a violent place as I remember. Bullying from other pupils and downright violence from the staff. Later, between 1996 and 2004, I had an office in another school though I couldn't say I really took much notice of my surroundings. I was working in what was called Community Education - adult education, youth work and community development - and it just so happened that our office was there close to the classrooms and other facilities that we used for some of the programme. The only time I remember venturing into a classroom during school hours was to have a word with someone who organised the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for us. She was a teacher at the school and I went to hunt her out in her room. Noisy as I remember it, and much less formal than when I went to school but everyone seemed to be working with purpose. I'm working in a sch...

Now that I work in Cieza my route to work has changed. It's about about 60 kms each way and the journey time - that is the time from when, with seat belt fastened and radio playing I accelerate away from our front gate to the moment I park up outside my workplace - is about 45 minutes. Even with my primitive arithmetical skills I can work out that means I average just 80kph or 50mph. On the way to Cieza from Culebrón the left from our track onto the main CV83 would be an illegal manoeuvre involving crossing a solid white line and hatched areas. Should the car around the corner be Guardia Civil that would be a 300€ fine and goodness knows how many points off the spotless 15 of my licence. Would I do that or would I be more likely to make the legal right turn, cross into the village, turn around in front of Eduardo's and rejoin the CV83 heading out towards Pinoso? The choice, as that voice on Blind Date used to say, is yours. Towards Pinoso then, at the roundabout ju...

Forgive the indulgence of this entry. I started a new job a couple of weeks ago teaching English with a language school based in Murcia city. They didn't give me a job in the city though but asked me to work in a co-operative grant maintained school in Cieza which is a very pleasant but lengthy 60km drive from home. For three mornings a week I work in the school, with classes of youngsters. Their ages range from 12 to 16. I am there to do the authentic English bit - real structure, real vocabulary and real accent. Mainly speaking and listening rather than writing or reading. For four afternoons a week I work in the same school buildings alongside a team of three or four other English speaking Spanish teachers. Indeed I work in the same classrooms, but this time for the academy, the private language school which sells English classes. The age range there is from six year olds up to adults. I'm far from settled. The students seem nice enough and nobody has hit me or a...