Life in Culebrón

Spain is, season-wise, a fairly conventional country: it has the usual four seasons, both astronomical and meteorological. There is no monsoon, no wet-and-dry divide, nothing especially hippy or politically suspect. And yet summer is special. Partly because it rather fails to behave itself. For a large part of the population—and institutionally too—summer and August are synonymous . My own experience of the Spanish summer is overwhelmingly Mediterranean, coloured by media coverage that is nearly always Madrid-centric, so my picture may be a little out of kilter for people in the North or in larger inland towns and cities, but, that said, I hope this is a fair reflection of Spain in general. There are all sorts of fixed ideas about August, most of which are no longer true. Maybe they never were, but there are seeds of truth in all the myths. You can tell that summer is on the way when all the adverts on the telly, and before your Amazon Prime film starts, show happy faces eating and dr...

Have you noticed that the Spaniards drink their beer cold? I mean cold. Not chilled; cold. If you go into a bar, run by people of other nationalities, in Spain, the difference can be noticeable. That idea of crisp, cool and refreshing is one of the reasons why telly adverts associate friends laughing together, eating together, swimming at the beach and drinking beer together with summer. Beer isn't a traditional Spanish drink, it didn't really take off  till the 1970s and it wasn't till 1982 that beer took over from wine as the biggest selling alcoholic drink.  Spaniards notice when Britons, and other Northern Europeans, put ice in their wine. Odd really considering that Spaniards pour their hot coffee and tea over ice all summer through. When you're out and about, when it's too late at night to drink beer or wine, and we move on to mixed drinks nearly all of them get ice. When the Spanish mix a copa - spirit and mixer type drinks like rum and coke or vodka and lemo...