Life in Culebrón

Over the weekend the wind blew lots of branches off our fig trees and uprooted a two metre high aloe vera plant that I've never much cared for. It took me three trips with the wheelbarrow to haul the remains away. At least the wind means that it's not quite as cold. When we first bought the house one of the few good things about it was the tree lined drive. We still have the trees despite the sport practised by so many visiting vans and lorries of reversing in to them - usually serially. In fact, rather as you would expect, they are somewhat taller now than when we first moved in. I was listening to the two big pointy ones nearest the house creaking in the wind. Culebrón, like Skegness, can be bracing.  The tree alongside the house is at least 10 metres tall, a plumber warned us against it. Roots under the house, blocking up the drains, he threatened. The tree a bit further away, possibly a larch, is even taller and heavier. They probably won't blow over but they might. I c...

If I'm going to blog anything this week it has to be Covid again so if you're fed up with Covid stop now.   Pinoso is a small town. Just under 8,000 inhabitants. Over the time of the Covid alert there have been 68 cases with 40 of them being reported in the 14 days to 14th September. As it's now the 16th the figures are lagging behind the reality. Today, for instance, there is news of a pupil at one of the local junior schools testing positive so that the whole class is now in quarantine. In the week beginning 10th August there were no reported cases in Pinoso, week beginning the 17th August just 2 cases, 24th 6 cases, 31st 17 cases and the 7th to 13th September 39 cases. The progression is obvious enough. The figure that seems to be being used to compare how bad things are is the number of cases per 100,000. My sums convert 68 cases in a population of 7,966 to 853 in 100,000 with that number having increased by 502 in the last fortnight. The town which borders Pinoso ...

We went to a concert by La Habitación Roja last night. When I bought the tickets, only a week or so ago, the event was scheduled for the Teatro Principal in Alicante - all green velvet and gold leaf. Theatres have, obviously, been hit hard by the Covid thing and one of the reasons I bought the tickets was to do my bit for a local institution. A few days later I got an email to tell me that the venue had been changed to the bailey of the Santa Bárbara Castle in Alicante. Safer they said. Fewer viruses in the open air. The castle in Alicante is on top of a big hill. Although it's a fair drag you can walk (or drive) to the castle on a road that starts from near the Archaeological Museum. On the seaward side you can get to the castle by using a lift that is accessed through a long tunnel. Along with the details for the change of venue the organisers said that the car parks behind the castle would be open and that the lift would be working. Yesterday, a few hours before the concert w...

On the last fourteen weeks I've only filled the car with petrol twice, I've read nineteen books though and watched more TV series than you could wave a stick at. I've weeded the garden so often that it is as weed free, and generally tidy, as it has been at any time whilst we've lived in Culebrón. I've even re-painted all but one of the exterior walls. Our area of Spain has been relatively mobile for the last two or three weeks but even then we've generally limited ourselves to a couple of outings to local bars or eateries with just one trip to the coast. We could have gone further, anywhere within the province, but we've chosen not to stray more than 60 kilometres from home. Basically we've done as we were asked, we've stayed at home. Today though it's all more or less over, for us. We can now go where we like - masks, general hygiene, keeping distance and local regulations permitting. It's back to some sort of normal. The State of Alarm h...

I've been thinking about the changes that happen slowly. I'm not talking about the sort of time needed to form the Himalayas or even the period of time that the Chauvet Cave was active. I'm thinking about how Marlon Brando, Dan Aykroyd, William Shatner and Alec Baldwin became so much bigger. Really I'm thinking about seven, going on eight weeks. I'm thinking about why so many people were champing at the bit to get to a haircut when the hairdressers re-opened yesterday. I suppose all those weeks is a big slice of the year. I was doing reasonably well at knocking off weight before I was given detention in March. I'd lost about 11 kilos from Christmas but, this morning as I jelly rolled my stomach the distance between the shower and washbasin, ready to shave, apply brylcreem and brush my teeth I couldn't pretend that I wasn't putting it back on again. I also realised that I wasn't wearing slippers. No need for a bathmat on the floor to protect ...

The number of people dying from Covid19 in Spain is dropping. Time to relax the measures. This week youngsters were allowed back on the streets and from May 2nd older people will be able to go out for a walk or do a bit of sport. This relaxation of the quarantine is a part of the several phases that the Government has come up with to slowly remove the siege constraints. I can imagine the "cabinet meeting" where they were trying to work this out. Deciding on rules that work for places that are, still, being scourged by the virus, as against places that have no extra illness whatsoever. Trying to juggle rules that work for rural areas, where butterflies are more common than people, against blocks of flats where leaving your home potentially involves rubbing shoulders with the unwashed masses. Trying to come up with a scheme that allowed businesses to re-open without causing a new outbreak of people dying with compromised lungs, hearts and livers. "Phases! - that'...

My weekly pilgrimage into our local town this morning. My sixth or seventh so far I think. I asked Maggie if she wanted to do it because she's not been out of the house for 47 days now. She preferred not to. The roads seemed just a tad busier than last week. There was a police control at the crossroads in to Pinoso but he was checking traffic coming from another direction. Plenty of parking space in the town centre car park because nothing much is open and very few people are visibly working. My first stop was the Post Office. It was the first outing, the premiere, for my free (thanks to the Regional Valencian Government) face mask. I'd got gloves too. To be honest I'm a fan of neither but I'm happy to be civic. There was no queue at the Post Office which was a bit of a surprise. There can only be two (or possibly three) people inside so there is usually a patient, spaced out (not in the Seventies way) line of people waiting outside. Not today. Straight in. I only w...

After 39 days of going nowhere and doing nothing there's also nothing to write about but that's not going to stop me. We're not really seeing anyone. Occasionally we exchange distant words with our immediate next door neighbour and the arrival of the bread van causes near crowd control problems as the three of us dance around each other. We don't feel at all isolated though. The outside world flows into our lives, as it almost certainly does into yours, through the Internet. Amazing really. Keeping in touch is so easy - a message to friends, a VOIP telephone call, video calls, Zoom based zumba sessions. Besides the personal stuff the news rolls in in endless torrents through this or that phone or computer application, I have apps that harvest newspaper stories and podcasts. Quite honestly I can't keep up. And the trouble is that newspapers and podcasts lead to recommendations for music or more books. The ordinary broadcast tele and the radio haven't gone a...

There was a little flurry of activity in the village WhatsApp group on Wednesday afternoon. Someone had died, someone with quite an unusual name. Was it the someone with that name from the village? It turned out to be a false alarm, well a false alarm for Culebrón. There was a Covid death but it was a different person from a village a few miles away. There's no doubt though that illness, and maybe death, is lurking around the corner. I've just watched a programme on the tele where reporters followed cleaners, ambulance drivers, doctors on emergency admissions, nurses, the people running the logistics for the hospitals, the pathologists and the UCI staff etc. as they did their various jobs at several hospitals across Spain. It was all a very human experience as people going on shift waited while their names were written in thick marker on their protective clothing so they were recognisable through the disguise, as tired medical staff laughed as they drank coffee in their bre...

I heard a news item that said that someone had died. The name sounded, on first hearing, to be Mujica but in fact it was Múgica. The first, José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica, is an ex Uruguayan president, who has YouTube video after video overflowing with avuncular socialist wisdom and the other is Enrique Múgica Herzog who was, in Francoist times and during the transition, an important Spanish politician. The Uruguayan I knew in the same way as one knows Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs. The Spaniard I didn't know at all. I've mentioned a pal who lives in el Cantón, a small village just over the border into Murcia, a couple of times in the last few blogs. His village seems to be being pretty "solidario" at the moment and they've made a couple of videos ; the together, as a team, we can win sort of videos. One of the clips, the second part of the video, shows people from the village singing along to Resistiré , a song from the 80s which has ...

When it comes to National Identity I'm not a believer. I don't, for instance, see anything to be proud of in having been born in a particular place and I don't think  that the people of one nation are intrinsically different to the people of another. I do believe though that we all learn from our surroundings and that, as such, there are learned, generalised, national traits. One thing that Spaniards like to say about themselves is that they are "solidario". It's not an easy word to translate into English - it's the attitude of being supportive, caring, empathetic, sympathetic and in it together. Whenever there is an earthquake or hurricane somewhere in the world there will be something in the Spanish news about us being solidario and sending this or that team of rescue workers, search dogs, blankets or tents. The truth is that Spain has cut its foreign aid and only spends about 0.14% of it's Gross Domestic Income (GDI) on overseas aid. As a ...

One of the reasons our water heater stopped working was that water was coming down the chimney and soaking the electrics and electronics. We've had lots of torrential rain recently and, the other evening, at around half past midnight the chimney began to drip again. I shimmied up onto the roof and covered the chimney with a plastic bag. The chimney has a hat like cover but it doesn't seem able to keep out the rain when it comes down in bucket-loads. The next morning I was back on the roof to cobble together a wider brimmed hat. I described the repair as Heath Robinson to someone on Twitter. For those of you who don't know William Heath Robinson (1872 – 1944) was an English cartoonist, illustrator and artist, best known for drawings of whimsically elaborate machines to achieve simple objectives. Heath Robinson is a part of my linguistic armoury just like crikey, whoops a daisy and wide boy. Old fashioned words. I've been away from the UK for a while now and Spain...

I thought I might write a blog. Then I realised that nothing has happened to me for days so I couldn't. Later, as I pottered at some unremarkable task or another, it came to me that I knew a story, dated from the year 1305, about a Scottish bloke watching a spider. If that was enough to pique people's interest maybe I could think of something. So, here it is. Yesterday, as I sorted the recycling in the rain, someone papped their horn as they passed the gate. Now horn papping is currently a big event in Culebrón; worthy of investigation. I duly investigated. It was a white van and our next door neighbour was buying something from the driver. I kept my distance but I wondered what he was selling. Instead of asking in person I asked via WhatsApp. First I asked a British family who live on the other side of the main road, the one where they disinfected the streets today, if they knew anything about travelling shops. When the response hadn't come within an hour or so I sent ...

I'm a sucker for gestures. The bit in Casablanca, where Laszlo says "Play the Marseillaise, play it!" and Rick nods, and they do, and they out-sing the baddies always makes me tear up. I was just watching a video of someone called Gustaf Farwell banging out Nessun Dorma from his balcony in Barcelona just like Gavinana Maurizio Marchini did in Florence. Every time I watch the TV news I see health workers applauding patients coming off ventilators, I see the people clapping to cheer on the lorry drivers, health workers and everyone else who is keeping us going. It's good and positive. I even approve of the glossy videos being put together by the banks and supermarkets so that we identify them with the white hats when the time goes back to shopping and opening accounts. Lots of gestures. I'm not so keen on the complaining. Complaints are often justified, I enjoy a good complain myself, I complain a lot, there are plenty of daft buggers in the world and plenty o...

Do you know that Louis XVI wrote Rien, French for nothing, in his diary, on the day the Bastille was stormed? That was 14th July 1789, one of the key days in the French Revolution and one of a series of events that would lead to Louis losing his head. If you do know you'll probably be aware that it was an entry in his hunting diary, to record the number of animals he'd caught, but it's a better story if you miss that bit out. My diary for yesterday could say nada, Spanish for nothing, though without any reference to the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. Well not really nothing. I drank several pints of tea. In fact I'm drinking so much tea at the moment that I've stopped flushing every time because our cess pit only has a capacity of 2,000 litres and we could well fill it really quickly if this quarantine continues. Reading too. Actually the two things go together, drinking tea, sitting close to a gas heater and reading. I nearly always have a book on t...

I've just been into town. There's a video doing the rounds on social media of a woman runner scuffling with a couple of police officers in Madrid. We don't see how it started but the woman is screaming blue murder and shouting for help. The comments on the sound track by the person taking the video and from the neighbours on the adjoining balconies are not supportive of the runner. A loose translation might be something along the lines of "Smart arse, you should have stayed at home - you twat". We're fine in Culebrón. We have space, inside and out, there are only the two of us plus the clowder of cats. Since I went to the supermarket on either Monday or Tuesday I haven't been outside the front gate. The time has passed quickly though and I'm not finding time to do enough reading despite apparently having endless days in front of me. I see on the telly, hear on the radio and read in social media that, in Spain, the place where I live, people are...

I like to get out and about. Anything from a film to a fiesta, a gallery to a concert, the theatre and, occasionally, even sports events. Doing things suits me. On the other hand in the last seventeen years I have had a couple of short stays in hospital - one in the UK and one here. Much to the surprise of those around me I quite enjoyed those brief medical sojourns. So far I'm finding the same with being confined to home. I'm not longing to go for a walk or ride the bike or sit in a bar or even go to the pictures. The situation has changed and I'm being told that the best thing for me, and more particularly for everyone else, is that is that I stay at home; so stay at home it is. That said I did go out today. We needed food. Culebrón itself is festooned with police tape to seal off the public spaces which I noticed as I passed through the village to drop off the recycling. Pinoso, our town, was quiet. Not dead quiet but quiet. I parked without any difficulty outside ...

It's really strange. Nothing much has changed and yet everything is very different. I'm sure you know that Spain is in a "State of Alarm". Basically what that means is that Central Government has taken special powers for itself for the next fortnight at least. In effect Central Government can change the usual rules. Lots of those things would have happened anyway but the response is now more coordinated. For instance where we live the Valencian Government had already decided to close nurseries, schools and universities but with the Central Government now in charge that sort of closure has been made uniform across the country. The general principles of the measures are easy to understand. Close all of the places where there are usually lots of people (day centres, schools, parks, theatres, restaurants, fiestas), tell people to stay at home, try to keep the economy ticking over, keep basic services open (food shops, chemists, petrol stations), limit travel and when ...

The siege is upon us. For at least a fortnight: no nursery, no school, no university, no cinema, no theatre, no fiestas, no bars, no restaurants, no bingo and no church. Maggie will be working  from home next week. Even my accountant has locked his door. We are nearly in a "State of Alarm" which means that tomorrow the Government will more control than it had this morning. The world as we know it is coming to an end. Markets are crashing, we are locked out of several countries. Time to panic buy. Obviously. We went into Pinoso. Lots of traffic for a Friday afternoon and the supermarkets were awash with people. The Indian restaurant seemed to be bursting at the seams and I can only assume that some of my fellow Britons were getting in a last vindaloo before the quarantine (it had to be Britons as no Spaniard would consider eating at 6pm). The thought of two weeks sitting in front of the telly to watch Sálvame Banana and Supervivientes had been enough for me to think only o...