Making do, eating and mending

I maintain an impression that our bit of rural Spain is still quite traditional; a society that repairs things. Just check the roads at the moment with the tractors out for harvest. Most of the small ones look nearly as old as the blokes driving them! Whenever I think of this make do and mend culture I think of my sunglasses. In Cambridge, in 1984, I bought my first pair of Ray Ban Aviators. At the time the company was still Bausch & Lomb and their sunglasses were a superior product. So twenty years later we're new to Culebrón and one of the pad arms came loose on the sunglasses. I went to the local optician to see if the specs could be saved. The optician soldered the piece back in place whilst I waited and charged me nothing. Last year I threw the same sunspecs on the floor and trampled on them. The nose pad came away again. I went back to the same optician. This time she sucked on her teeth, suggested I bought new and only grudgingly sent the Aviators away for repair. They took a couple of weeks to come back and cost 15€. Still not a bad result.

A couple of weeks ago we went on a walking tour around Yecla. The historical story telling was complemented by music. Lots of the sites to be visited were in a maze of narrow winding streets. The guide, and the flautists, were repeatedly drowned out by noisy mopeds with pizza delivery boxes strapped behind the saddle. I reckon everybody in Yecla was eating pizza that Saturday. In Pinoso there is a points scheme which eventually earns you a free pizza for returning the empty box. It's obviously to curb the problem of boxes littering the streets.

I'm coming apart at the seams and my feet hurt most of the time. People spoke well of sandals made by a local Ilicitano firm called Pikolinos. I forked out a good number of Euros and bought some. They were fine, comfy and classic, perfect for an old bloke. I'm not easy on shoes though and, disappointingly, after a couple of months the stitching gave way in a key area and the sandals became unwearable. Now Pinoso is a shoe making town so I wondered where I could get them fixed. I didn't know a cobbler and my questioning of quite a few locals about the whereabouts of a shoe repairer drew a blank. I'm still sure there will be somebody but I didn't find them. More than one person laughed at the idea of repairing shoes instead of just buying new. In the end I got them fixed in one of those franchise places alongside a hypermarket.

I quite like the adverts on the telly. I mean, how did they know that I needed something to clean the gunk from the rubber concertina seal on the washing machine? On those TV adverts, amongst the cars and mobile phone networks, there are lots of ads for food. I've mentioned legions of time that Spaniards are deeply interested in food. The adverts on the telly aren't for quality products, they're for the sort of stuff that comes in packets, the food, loaded with sugar and grease, of industrial conglomerates. For instance one of the Spanish MasterChef hosts is currently advertising pasta. He suggests that the perfect complement to the pasta is a Bolognese sauce. Even with the perfect lighting of TV advertising the sauce looks like the sort of stuff blasted by high pressure hoses off the broken bones of nameless animals and reconstituted into meat shaped meat in a factory full of infernal machinery. There are adverts for Just Eat where happy families grin at perfectly shaped hamburgers, colourful salads and pizza slices that seem to make people show off their teeth in Julia Roberts style smiles. Children swoon and whoop with joy before non chocolate eggs and young adults find their enjoyment of video games and sporting competitions greatly enhanced by crisps made from reconstituted potato or instant noodles flavoured with powder from sachets.

It's not the end of the world or anything, though actually it might be a small example of the route there, but we older people notice change more.

The washing machine cleaner doesn't work by the way.