Searching for authentic

There are lots of Western Europeans, other than Spaniards, in Pinoso. In fact there seem, without knowing the figures, to be more and more. Belgian and Dutch voices are much more evident now than they were a little while ago and there is a good smattering of German and French in the supermarket too. Obviously enough there are other nationalities hoping to carve out a better life and, recently, there has been an influx of Ukrainians but those people have different stories. The Belgians, Germans and Swedes are here, generally, by choice. They may or may not be resident. Signed up Europeans, not the ones who rant about secure borders, have rights in Spain. They can come and go more or less at will, so determining who is and who isn't resident can be quite tricky. As it used to be with Britons.

A question I have been asked lots of times by Spaniards is why so many Britons choose to live in Pinoso. I've never been able to think of a good response. I can't now. 

Part of it must be the "introduce a friend factor" the sort of thing that attracts immigrant communities to stick together all over the world. That doesn't explain why Pinoso has such a robust population of Britons while other towns close by don't. Pinoso is a pleasant little town, it's well organised, it's clean, there's plenty going on and it offers a good range of services. Those things are solid positives but they are not the sort of thing that really attract people to an area; they are things you discover after you've moved in. The other day, as I was parking my car someone was parking alongside. The driver turned out to be a retired police officer who I've known for a long time. We were hanging in the car doors, nattering, when a man interrupted our conversation. He explained he was a visitor to the town and he wondered what there was to see. "Not much," said my pal.

Lots of Britons probably choose Alicante province because they have fond memories of getting burned to a crisp on a Costa Blanca beach or a night of sangria fuelled passion in a Benidorm hotel. The weather is an obvious draw but why here, why not somewhere else? I suspect one reason for we Brits, and probably the Belgians and Norwegians too, is that we are looking to move to the real Spain. We're the sort of  Britons, Irish and French who don't think that the coast is authentically Spanish. Real Spain should be full of gnarled widows in black weeds stringing garlic on their doorsteps or wrinkled faced, flat hat wearing horny handed sons of toil driving tractors or, better still, riding donkeys as they drink from wineskins. It should be full of independent shops with dusty window displays of sun faded fans. It should be somewhere that takes a siesta. Even better though if you can have those things but still get a bit of help, in your own language, should the need arise.

I became much more aware of where we lived, how anachronistic our Spain is, when Covid struck. I'd presumed we lived in one of the many possible Spains but what I saw on the telly, what the politicians were legislating for, wasn't where I lived. Every evening for weeks and weeks thousands and thousands of Spaniards crowded onto their balconies at 8pm to applaud the health workers. That outpouring of solidarity brought home to me that most of Spain lives in flats. Most of Spain has very little private exterior space. Most of Spain lives cheek by jowl in places with traffic jams, with no parking spaces, with chain brand shops, with Glovo food delivery, with access to taxis, public transport, with a hospital on the doorstep and with occasional street violence. Those of us living in houses, maybe with a garden, with a bit of space, were a fortunate minority who knew that those urban statistics of cases per 100,000 didn't reflect any real emergency in our rural communities.

So maybe if we did come here looking for the Real Spain we were searching in the wrong place. It isn't an individual country villa with a pool where vapid curtains waft in a gentle breeze while the sunlight streams in from the terrace. It's really a third floor flat with communal washing lines on the roof and the blinds closed tight to keep out the searing heat. In fact, without knowing it, Pinoso may offer a much more lyrical version of Spain than that enjoyed by most Spaniards.

Bottlenecks

Now that I'm old I'm slower. I don't worry so much about getting there, about saving time. I've come to think that a couple of minutes isn't really going to make much difference in the scheme of things - at least most of the time. It hasn't always been like that. I remember speeding down the A14 heading for a meeting, when I still worked in the UK, and suddenly wondering why I was risking my neck, and my licence, to be on time for yet another completely superfluous meeting. So, when I'm driving through Pinoso, I don't usually mind, or get flustered, when the car in front stops to let the passenger out or even when the car stops for nothing more essential than to have a chat with a passing neighbour. In fact I quite like it, a sort of Archer's like everyday tale of country folk. Over the years I've even grown accustomed to the person at the supermarket checkout first having a bit of a chinwag with the cashier and only then starting to pack away their products before the sudden realisation dawns that they might have to pay for their goods which leads to a frenzied, yet apparently fruitless for minutes, hunt for their purse/wallet.

This laissez faire approach does not extend to people who decide to have their conversation in the middle of the entranceway to the supermarket or the health centre. It does not extend to the people who stop on the stairs, as they leave the theatre, to comment on the Madrid Barça game. It does not extend  to the couple who decide to greet their next door neighbour, who they haven't seen for the past hour or so, whilst standing on a pavement hemmed in by a wall on one side and a safety barrier on the other so that everybody else has to ask to pass. There seems to me to be a substantive difference and this sort of incivility makes me cross. With just a little thought for the rest of humankind the group could walk two metres further and avoid causing a bottleneck; to leave the door clear or path clear. I'd like it too if, first, they realised that I was keeping the door open for them, instead of suddenly slowing to a snail's pace, and, second, if they said thanks for my small but generous gesture. Even though I consider it from time to time I still can't bring myself to let the door swing to in their ungrateful faces.

Now I thought this was my Britishness coming through. Hurry, hurry, hurry. After all I saw one of my island brethren (it was a man) beeping at someone crossing, with their trolley, outside the Tesco's in Huntingdon. So far as I can tell their misdemeanour was that they were not walking fast enough. All I could think was that it was maybe a barrister doing the honking and who thought that those 20 seconds were worth a wad of cash. But today, with no idea what to write about for this week's post, I was reading a Spanish novel, when I came across this passage - well the original was in Castilian so this is a loose translation.

"I suppose that we are all irritated by irresponsible people who wander around or go very slowly or who even stop without warning or who occupy the whole width of the pavement or who form groups so that it's impossible to overtake them. Even old and "lame" people irritate us too. Like you, like all of us, I have had to contain the impulse to give them a kick in the arse so they get a move on, or even to stick my little pocket knife in their fat buttocks, not only because they are a pain in the neck but also because of a morbid impulse, the same impulse we all have, from time to time, to destroy something pretty and valuable or to throw ourselves from a great height." - you get the idea, especially from the last phrase, that the man in the book is a bit off his head, but even the maddest have lucid moments. It goes on. "Well, one day, talking about this to a good friend I thought it would be a good idea to invent a horn for pedestrians. Perhaps as an application on our mobile phones with various sounds and noises to be used as a substitute for "excuse me?", "do you mind?" and "could I get past, please?".

I'm expecting the novel's hero will soon have a rant about the door opening scenario too!

Usually it's green paint and buff coloured stone

The province of Alicante, the one we live in, like all the provinces of Spain, has its own particular characteristics. Unlike lots of Spain Alicante is not choc a bloc with cathedrals, medieval quarters and massive stone built historic town centres. It doesn't even have characteristic colour schemes for the houses (well it does but they are not as eye catching as, for instance, the indigo and white of Ciudad Real or the ochre and white of Seville). We do have plenty of impressive buildings but they tend to get lost in a general unremarkability. Say Alicante to any Spaniard from outside the area and the first thing that comes to mind will be beach. If you've ever had holidays here, in Benidorm or Torrevieja or Calpe or if you live in Elda, Monóvar, Aspe or Sax then I'd be more or less certain that whatever you appreciate about your town it is not the architecture.

That's not to say that I don't like our province. Look in any direction from our house and you see hills and pine covered mountains. Out here in the countryside there are lots of orchards of peach, apricot, almond, stacks of olive trees, grape vines all over and a host of other crops from wheat to artichokes. I know that the first impression of Alicante for Northern Europeans, as they look down from the aeroplane window, is that the landscape is dry and everything a yellowy, orange, dusty sort of colour but here, on the ground, it looks pretty green to me.

I like the unending summer heat here, despite the flies. I like the way the province groans and swelters in the bright, bright sunlight with such tremendously deep skies. And we do have that beach and that flashing blue sea. Something else I like is the strange distribution of houses and hamlets. Alicante is out of kilter with much of Spain because the houses are scattered, higgledy-piggledy, across the countryside. In most of Spain houses are gathered together in villages and towns with hardly any people in between.

Not long ago agriculture was what there was in inland Alicante. People lived close to the land they worked. Then things began to change. Other sectors became the big employers and agriculture now only employs about 4% of the workforce as against around 20% in industry and 75% in services. We have lots and lots of unworked land around here. To oversimplify and overgeneralise the families that worked the land moved away. The blokes, and it is blokes you see, who drive the tractors and still work the land are old and battle scarred. They may still rope in the family at harvest time but basically the farmers are dying in harness and their children prefer to work at a keyboard, in air conditioned shops, factories and offices. The houses the farmers owned in the villages and hamlets often still belong to the families (unless they were sold on to we rich foreigners) but they are only opened up occasionally - maybe for a party or a couple of cheap weeks in the countryside. 

The landscape is criss crossed by a maze of back roads; those lanes are used by tractors and locals by day and by drunk drivers avoiding possible police patrols at night. The roads are usually narrow, twisty and some are pothole scarred but most are perfectly usable. They get narrower in spring and summer as the abundant grass encroaches onto the tarmac. The herds of goats that once kept the verges well mown are now few and far between too. Alongside the roads are little hamlets and clusters of houses. Nowadays most of the houses are deserted or they get that very occasional use. Of the ones that are occupied all the time it's probably true to say that foreigners make up a disproportionate percentage. Spaniards and Northern Europeans have different ideas about the delights of town versus country living.

In one way those villages and hamlets are just a repetitive pattern but they are one of the things I really do like around here. Suddenly, in amongst the vines and the almond trees, there will be a cluster of stone built houses with faded paintwork, abandoned farm implements and the shady spot where generations of locals once sat to tell tales and share their lives.

Routine

There was nothing on at the cinema. We often go on Wednesday, its the cheap day, just 4.20€. I'd have gone to see a Spanish film but Maggie wasn't keen so I had a beer, some double hopped Mahou, and settled in for the evening,

Nothing much on the telly either. Not on the Spanish telly anyway. So we were watching Lewis, dependable sort of telly. The adverts came on and I disappeared to find something to eat in the kitchen. I was surprised by how quickly the adverts were over. Shorter and more often on British TV. Seven minutes and we'll be back is standard on Spanish.

There's been a fair bit of UK election coverage on Spanish radio and TV. Britain has featured a lot with the people killed at Borough Market and the Spanish skateboarder not identified for days. On the 3.0 clock news there were shots of the various party leaders making their vote - UKIP, The Greens, LibDems - I didn't know any of them.

I'm working hard hardly working at the moment. I decided I had time to replace my contact lenses. The last set are probably a bit long in the tooth now. I think I got them in Cartagena, in 2012. It must be the fourth or fifth time I've gone through the process of an eye test - mejor, peor, parecido - better, worse, similiar.

I was in Consum, the supermarket, I planned my route through the aisles - bread, tea, cat food, meat, gazpacho, ham, veg, checkout. Not a wrong turn. Critical path analysis.

When I decided on a light lunch and was buying the stuff I bought some of that nice sheep's milk cheese, the cured ham of course, a carton of gazpacho, some olives and oil roasted peanuts in their skins - plenty of other stuff too - I cheaped out on the cold cuts - el Pozo.

Emails back and forth to Iberdrola about our power supply. They're going to put in a smart meter so I need to regularise our position a bit. All of the online calculators tell me I can get away with a miserable 3.75Kw supply which I don't quite believe but, if we can, then it saves getting a new boletín - a certificate to say that our wiring is up to a larger load.

Quiet afternoon. I felt I really should start planning the intensive course for July. Speaking exercises, grammar, a bit of pronunciation, was I going to use a text book? - the PET exams from the 2016 download. I tap, tap tapped it onto my lesson planning form. I've planned a lot of B1 courses.

Watering the garden from the aljibe, the big rainwater tank that we have in the back patio. The submerged electric pump that we inherited with the house is still going strong. I said hello to the neighbour as he threw some stuff into the communal bin just beyond our fence. I took our recyclable stuff to the bins in the village this morning.

The sky has been blue all day and the sun has shone. Just before I typed this we were sitting at the back of the house watching the sun go down. 9.30 ish and it's twilight. Not much traffic on the CV83, very tranquil. Nice view over towards the Sierra de Salinas. The cats were keeping us company.

All very routine, all very ordinary. Very much home.

¡Uff, que calor!

I wandered in to do my session with 4A, the fourth year is the last year of obligatory secondary school. It was my last lesson with them before my contract ends at the end of May. They're a nice bunch but it's a big class and they tend towards noisy, no let's be honest, loud. I said hello and started whatever it was I was going to do but they weren't paying much attention - their energies were being taken up by an awful lot of fanning and expelling sufficient breath for top lips to oscillate. It's too hot, it's suffocating, we're going to die. The class teacher who makes sure that the noise doesn't turn into a riot, looked up from her computer. A brief conversation and she set the air conditioner going. My guess is that there are guidelines as to the temperature setting for the air-con and the youngsters wanted it lower. With a big grin on my face I set into one of those "When I was a lad air conditioners didn't exist, what a bunch of whiners you are etc".

It made me laugh, outside it was probably around 30ºC, not exactly roasting. It was warm but I was perfectly comfortable in my habitual boots, jeans and T shirt. Most of the pupils were in shorts.

in the staff room, after the ritual greeting, the first and main topic of conversation between any two or more teachers was the temperature. I was asked several times what I thought about the heat; unbearable eh? It must be worse for me coming from a country where polar bears and penguins roam. Lots of Spanish people aren't that hot on geography.

There's no doubt that it's warmed up in the last fortnight or so. It's still a long way from being hot but the summer sounds have begun. The spring flowers and green plants have taken on their summer shades of yellows and beige. The cigarras are singing in the garden but wood and metal aren't yet creaking as they expand or contract. The flies are out in annoying numbers. Everything is covered in a fine patina of dust and cars have a rugged he-man sort of dirty look. We haven't used any heating for ages, getting out of bed in the morning involves no more discomfort than creaking bones and heaving lungs. I've turned down the gas flame and upped the water flow on the water heater.

I've been asked three or four times whether I've been to the seaside - this is presumably because my arms, but only to the sleeve line, have got a bit of colour. It's because of the weeding I say. It has even been suggested to me that I may like to abandon long trousers for shorts.

It always amuses me. We Britons often complain about the weather - too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, too still. Spaniards do exactly the same.

Consultation with smiley face clap clap

I think I mentioned that I was "voted" onto the committee of the Neighbourhood Association last November. Nothing serious, no work involved, just an ordinary member. Turn up from time to time.

A little while ago a news item on the town hall website explained that local politicians wanted to talk to the pedanias, the outlying villages. A bit of PR mixed with a, presumably, real wish to serve the local community. A few days or weeks later the WhatsApp group for our local committee burst into life. A councillor wanted to speak to us, as the closest thing to representatives for Culebrón, given that our "mayoress" resigned recently. It was Wednesday and the meeting had to be that weekend.

The WhatsApp messages flew thick and fast. There were little spats. One of the committee members is a friend and colleague of the councillor and that made her position a little awkward at times. She was acting as the intermediary between all the messages and the town hall. Misunderstandings, apologies, jokes. A couple of people made their views pretty clear. I didn't say much. WhatsApp tends not to be the most gramatically correct medium. There are often strange abbreviations and phonetic jokes as well as puns. It's also semi permanent and quite definite so when I did join in the glaring linguistic mistakes in my Spanish were there in black on green for all the world to see. I always wonder why the errors only become obvious after pressing the send button. I did make it clear though that, in my opinion, it wasn't really on for a councillor to dictate meeting dates to us. Nobody took much notice. A meeting date was planned at a time when I couldn't go, because of work, which was a great relief. Spanish meetings often have a certain boisterous quality.

Tonight I sent a message around the group asking if we should suggest things for the agenda as the meeting is next Tuesday. As an aside I wrote that, for futures meetings, I hoped that the councillors would remember to give more notice, offer a range of days and times, give us a reasonable period to respond and contact the group members directly.

There were plenty of responses this time. Some people agreed and some didn't but it made me think back a bit. Once upon a time I was a professional meeting attender. Under circumstances I have been known to be a little obstreperous. At times I waxed lyrical, at times I was forceful. Often nobody agreed with me and, much more often, I was simply tolerated and then ignored. I suspect that if I ever do get to one of these Pinoso councillor and Culebrón meetings I will be at the very outer edge of the gathering hanging on to the gist of the conversation by the thinnest of threads.

Practical chemistry

I think it's Le Chatelier's Principle though I hesitate to look it up - what if it isn't? I've been using the same reasoning, remembered from a chemistry class in the mid nineteen sixties, to limit the amount of housework I've done over the last forty years or so.

So far as I remember the ideas is that if you have a system in equilibrium and you do something to upset that equilibrium then the system does its damnedest to re-establish the balance. The implications are clear. Dust the mantelpiece and you are taking on the Universe. Mop and you are fighting the titanic forces of creation. Heaven knows what moves against you when you do a bit of vaccing. Whatever it is, in no time at all, the dust will be back and the floor full of bits.

Anyway. I don't like cleaning. It's work and I'm not keen on work. It's pointless. Clean the car and either it rains or there is a giant dust storm. Hoover and mop the floor and that same rain and dust cloud undo all your work.

There's no denying though, that for the short time it takes nature to marshal her counter attack it's nice to see the bathroom porcelain shine. To be able to see out of the windows. To not crunch as you walk across the kitchen floor.

I don't like cleaning for a another reason. It generates dirt. Normally I just try to scare a room into being clean by shaking a damp cloth at it but even then dirt has a nasty habit of showing itself. You know the sort of thing. As you put on the laundry you notice the washing machine door seal is full of slime from months of detergent sludge. As you search for the bleach under the sink you see the mould growing underneath those never used cleaning products at the back.

Anyway, what has this to do with living in Spain as distinct from cleaning in Chingford? Not much if the truth be told but I have to write something from time to time. It's turned cool here in the last few days. As I changed the bed today I dug the electric blanket out of storage and put it into place. More to the point the leaves that have fallen from the fig and mulberry trees have been dancing around in the shrill autumn breeze. We have banks of the things outside the front door and filling up the interior patio. I pick them up and dump them but there are always more.

So I cleaned surfaces, I dusted, I brought down cobwebs, I polished, I hoovered and I mopped. And then Le Chatelier kicked in and a quick gust of wind distributed mounds of leaf fragments from the front to the back door and a patina of pale yellow dust on all the horizontal surfaces.

Zas is as nothing against the forces of Nature.

Dogs, bulletins and cats homes

I was reading the news from the local town hall. There was information about the new hunting season. I read, for instance, that from 19 July until 25 December rabbits can be hunted with dogs. No more than eight hunting dogs though and, even if you bring a gang of pals with you to hunt, you can't have more than fifteen dogs all together. Certain breeds of dogs are prohibited and greyhounds can only be used between July and October. Oh, and hunting is only possible from Thursday to Sunday and on Public Holidays. This is pretty detailed stuff. Falconry, firearms and bows come in from the 12th October. There were lots more details about exactly what can be hunted, when and how. The piece ended though with a web address for the Diari Oficial of the Comunitat Valenciana - the official bulletin of the Valencian Community.

All of the regional governments have something similar; a publication where local ordinances, byelaws and official reports are recorded. It's the place where contracts can be put out to tender, where details of bankruptcy are recorded and where all sorts of announcements can be officially made. There is a national equivalent - the Official State Bulletin - where  "parliamentary bills", royal decrees and lots more is published. Once upon a time they were printed on paper now they are published on the Internet. I've read parts of the bulletins from time to time when I've being trying to find something out but, as you may imagine, they make dull and heavy reading.

I occasionally go onto expat forums often looking for a more human, and English language, version of the same sort of information. The information on the forums is unrelaible in the sense that people pass on what they have heard and what they have surmised as well as what they know. It's done with the best of intentions but it can cause confusion.

The thing is you see that although we live in Spain we all, well all of us older people, continue to be Norwegian or Moroccan or, in our case, British. And it's the Norwegian or Morrocan or British experience that we use as the yardstick (yes, it's a pun). Take something like a driving licence or a will (both of which I have had conversations about today). Spanish inheritance legislation is quite different to the British version. We might not know the ins and outs of the British system but we know the broad detail. You can leave what you want to whom you want. In Spain, though, inheritance law generally gives precedence to the children of the deceased. This system seems so, well, foreign, to us and obviously, wrong. I've never asked a Spaniard about it but I suspect that they would think a British will that disinherited sons and daughters was equally bizarre.

Now Maggie needs to change her British driving licence for a Spanish one. Bar room conversations about driving licences are commonplace. It doesn't seem odd to we Britons that, despite living 2000 kms from the UK, we should continue to hold a British driving licence. Anyway Maggie was trying to find out what she needs to do to exchange her licence. She asked Google but Google just pointed her indiscriminately to out of date and wrong web pages as well as to accurate and up to date stuff. She was confused by the contradictory information.

The information on the  DGT or "Ministry of Transport" website was perfectly clear and seemed straightforward but it would also involve at least one trip to Alicante. She decided, for ease, to let an intermediary, the local driving school, handle the process. The chap there told her what paperwork she would need. His list differed from the one on the DGT website but I rather suspect that the intermediary is taking the belt and braces approach. He's working on the assumption that if he has every conceivable piece of paper when he goes to the traffic office then he can't be caught out

One document he asked Maggie to get hold of is something that nearly everyone calls a residencia; residence permit. Of course Europeans don't need a residence permit because we have right of abode, well provided we have sufficient medical cover and money to ensure that we are not going to be a burden on the state, we have right of abode. The document is more accurately something that records or register the fact that an EU citizen is living in Spain. We registered years ago and, anyway, once an EU citizen has lived here continuosly for five years we apparently gain the right to permanent residence (something I learned in my search). But this chap told Maggie she needed a newer version of this certificate in order to exchange her licence.

This didn't sound right to me and I thought I'd check it out. What I think I found was that we British expats are talking about three different systems that have existed in the last ten years and all of which are called residencia by their British holders. The document format has varied from plastic cards to bits of paper and back to plastic cards with a different purpose and design. The renewal period for this documentation has varied from every five years to never. The changes to these "residencia" rules have also affected another document called the NIE - the Foreigners' Identification Number.

Someone recently told me that their NIE had a three month sell by date. I was sure they were wrong. My NIE certificate certainly has no expiry date. They were right though, at least about their documentation. The short lifespan is to ensure that, at the end of the three months, the EU citizen who is going to live in Spain has to tell the authorities. Unless the person swaps their NIE for a "residencia" when the three months are up they will find it difficult to transact lots of everyday business from getting a phone line to picking up a parcel from the post office. It's at that point too that the authorities can check that the person wanting to live here has the financial wherewithall to do so. Consequently whereas I have a white A4 bit of paper for my NIE and a green bit of paper for my registration newer arrivals start with a white bit of A4 paper which they soon have to trade in for a green plastic card.

So my experience, my information, about a key process for we foreigners is now wrong. What we immigrants need is some sort of definitive version of all the rules and regs easily accessible on the Internet. Oh, hang on a minute,. Now if only it were written in English but then we are, as I said, 2000 kms from the UK.

A few things that crossed my mind when I was trying to think of a blog entry

It stopped being cold in our house a few weeks ago now. I forget quite when but suddenly we weren't using the gas heaters, I started to pad around the tiled floors in bare feet as I got up in the morning. Winter was gone and there were flowers in the garden. Last week, I think, it was warm - a few days in the 30ºC bracket. I folded up my pullovers. That turned out to be a bit premature. I've needed a woolly the last couple of days.

I was just about to go to work, Maggie was on her way home after work. We were together. We decided a quick snack was in order. We chose a roadside bar café that we haven't been in for years. It was a mistake. It was scruffy, barn like, dark and a bit dirty. Nonetheless we sat at the bar, ordered a drink and surveyed the tapas in the little glass display cases. Lots of them looked like food left on the plates piled up by the side of the sink after a good meal; perfectly nice when freshly prepared but well past their best now. We ordered a sandwich instead but as I ate and surveyed the sad looking tapas their aspect began to lose ground to their potential taste. I wondered about ordering something. I didn't, but I nearly did.

I work in Fortuna, It's a small forgotten town, or maybe a village, in Murcia. Litter blows around the streets of Fortuna. The traffic misbehaves. Dogs, or dog keepers, misbehave. Our local town is Pinoso. it's a small forgotten town, or maybe a village, in Alicante. I have always thought of Pinoso as just another no mark town, the one I happened to end up in. I now realise we fell lucky. It's a clean, inexpensive, well organised, little place.

The election campaign this time has been odd. Not that odd but not exactly to formula. There have been lots of leaked news stories that have affected big candidates as usual but there are new names all over the place touted as possible victors. The clever money is on the collapse of the two party hegemony. At least two of the "important" high profile politicians don't have a manifesto to speak of. They think it's not important. Policy isn't the thing this time it's who you trust.

In our own local elections I went to an election meeting where they had no manifesto either. It'll be out tomorrow I was told. It's well past tomorrow now but I haven't been able to find one. I have to confess that my search has been a bit half hearted. Working, as I do, till around 9pm I've found it difficult to get to any of the meetings but the publicity about when and where they are taking place has been a bit thin on the ground anyway.

Still on the elections I was surprised to hear a very partisan interview on the town radio yesterday where the interviewer fed one of the candidates the questions he wanted. "Words of wisdom" commented the interviewer after one response. The interviewer is one of the candidates for the same party as the interviewee. I stood up for him in the social media when his candidature was announced.

The elections are on the streets though. We were having a drink. When only one other table was occupied we could hear its occupants making their predictions for the vote. A second table was occupied later. They talked about the elctions too - they had clear views on some of the candidates. "I'm not telling you who I'm voting for," said the female to the male partner, "it's a secret vote."

Apparently it's the fiftieth anniversary of the European flag - the one with the yellow stars on the blue background. I was, as so often, listening to the radio and some chap was talking about the flag's anniversary. We fly the flag a lot in Spain he said, the same in Italy. In Britain they hardly ever fly the European Union flag because of their feelings towards Europe.

It was International Museum Day, IMD, this week. In Cartagena, where we used to live, the Night of the Museums was a huge and joyous family event with the museums open for free till 2am, on a Saturday evening nearest to IMD and all sorts of street events alongside. I wondered if there was anything happening close to Culebrón this year as Cartagena is a fair distance away. There were 138 events listed for Spain and another 295 for the rest of Europe though the nearest to us was some 40km away. Out of curiosity I wondered who was doing what in the UK. At first I couldn't find anyone but, with a bit of probing, I found that the Auckland Castle Museum and the Thackray Medical Museum were doing their bit.

I am reminded of the oft quoted headline, puportedly from the Daily Mirror in 1930. Fog in Channel Continent Cut Off.

The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable

Coming in to Huntingdon, past Samuel Pepys place, alongside Hinchingbrooke I was amazed by the number of bunnies hopping around. Millions of the little blighters. Where we live now is much more rural than Huntingdon but I see far less wildlife. Rabbits and more particularly hares are our most frequent sighting but I'm talking one at a time not hordes of them. Lots of people tell us stories of wild boar and one pal was even attacked by one. I've only ever seen them on a game reserve in Andalucia. Although I know foxes, badgers, snakes, hedgehogs, squirrels, mice, stoats and the like are all there I hardly ever see them except as road kill. We have plenty of birds too but I don't see the soaring birds of prey that were so common in Salamanca or the game birds that were always attempting to commit hari kari under the wheels of my car in the wilds of Cambridgeshire.

Hunting though is enormous in Spain. Some weekends, presumably as hunting season opens on some poor species, the sounds of rifles and shotguns in the hills behind our house is more or less non stop. I know lots of dog owners who complain that their dogs cannot be taken off the lead because they are soon challenged by some angry farmer keen to protect nesting game birds or whatever and so protect their sales of hunting licences. Searching in Google for some information I needed for this post I found hundreds of websites offering hunting holidays particularly for big animals. There were, to me, some really sickening pictures of what seemed to be a succession of overweight red faced blokes with the regulation beige waistcoat grinning from ear to ear as they tugged on the horns of some glassy eyed beast.

Just at the bottom of our track there is a rectangular metal sign divided into black and white triangles by a diagonal line. For years I've known that these signs mark the boundary of a hunting area but that was the limit of my knowledge. The other day, when we were walking by one of the larger signs I noticed, for the first time, that it had a little metal tag attached a bit like the old chassis numbers on cars. I wondered what it was so I asked Google and hence this post. The tag plate apparently refers to the local government licence held by the owners of the hunting rights.

It seems there are all sorts of hunting licences available. For instance there is one called coto social de caza, social hunting grounds, which are not singles clubs but places which are designed  for poorer hunters who can't afford the cost of joining a hunting club with high fees. The licences to hunt are allocated to small groups by ballot and hunting is only allowed in these areas on Sundays and holidays. Cotos locales seem to be hunting grounds operated by farmers associations or other community groups and there are cotos privados too which are private hunting land reserved for members. Fortunately for the beasts, there are a range of areas where some species at least are protected or they are protected under certain circumstances. To be honest I got really bored reading the various rules and regulations and decided to stick with less accurate generalisation.

Those black and white signs are there to warn people. Legislation seems to vary from community to community but basically you have to put up a bigger sign which says what sort of hunting area it is and then smaller repeating signs. The big signs have to be at any obvious access point to hunting land and never more than 600 metres apart whilst the smaller signs have to be repeated at least every 100 metres. The idea is that, standing in front of one of them, you should be able to see the next sign in either direction. The repeating signs can also be painted onto handy things like rock crop outs or fence posts as long as the letters are greater than a specified size.

One thing that struck me, as I waded through the legalese of the placement of these signs, was that, as well as the signs for hunting areas, there were several to control hunting in one form or another. Whilst I realise that anywhere that doesn't have a hunting sign is, by default, a safe place for the wildlife it struck me how few of the reserve type signs I've seen. On the other hand I've seen thousands of the black and white triangle signs that give people the right to exercise their blood lust.

Luxury

I painted the front door last week. I did an awful job; all runs and dead flies. Maggie and I agreed that it looked better than before though. Anyway it was bucolic, rustic, in keeping with our living situation.

Our electric supply is a bit rural too. When we moved in, we were smart enough to put our cooking and weater heating onto gas. True, we have to lug the gas bottles about but we don't have circuit breakers popping all the time.

The hot water isn't as hot in winter as in summer. Insulation is not common in our part of the world so we were not at all surprised that the water was cooler in the colder months. It had to pass through all that cold earth. We weren't surprised either that the water got hotter more quickly in one bathroom than the others - more cold ground = cooler water for longer.

We've had some lovely weather recently. High 20s and sunny so and I was a bit surprised that the hot water was more like tepid water. Shower time was not a pleasure. Grease stuck obstinately to the cutlery as we washed up. It took us days to decide that it wasn't just rural it was a problem. I tried some home solutions but, eventually, we called Jesús, the plumber. At first he was stumped too. We had water, we had gas, the boiler was lighting up, why was the water not hot enough? He found the fault though, an intermittent fault. He's fixed it now and the water is scalding hot.

It's amazing how luxurious it feels to have hot water.

Burning certificate

Spain goes on fire a lot. It happens more in summer when fag ends, thrown from moving cars, and seasonal barbecues don't mix with tinder dry pine forests.

There are small scale fires all over the place. We've seen fires on the hillside above Cartagena and even on the little mountain behind our house in Culebrón. In summer there are always a series of big fires. Occasionally people, especially firefighters, die and the inhabitants of rural villages are regularly evacuated. There are people who patrol the countryside trying to limit hazhards and provide early warning. Fire services have fire engines with huge ground clearances, to get them into areas without roads, and helicopters and water tanker planes, designed to drop thousands of gallons of water onto inaccessible forests, seem to be readily available.

Sometimes the fires happen naturally. Sometimes it's things like a dropped bottles that start fires without people being so directly involved. Sometimes it's those fag ends or a little garden bonfire that gets out of control. Lots of times it's done on purpose. A little burning to clear some nice building land, a bit of revenge against a despised neighbour. Country folk complain about the poor state of the firebreaks - badly maintained because of Government budget cuts.

We have some garden waste to get rid of. It will take the palm tree frond decades to compost. Maggie isn't keen on the pile of rotting vegetation at the back of the house. Burning seems like a good option.

I was vaguely aware of the need to get permission to have a bonfire from the local Town Hall so we went to ask. It wasn't hard. The chap gave us a quick rundown of the requirements - not within such and such a distance of trees, times of day, water on hand to extinguish the fire, only when the wind is below 10km per hour and whatnot. One stipulation was that the fire warning level should be below this or that intensity. Amongst the ways to check that was by following a Twitter account for the local emergency control centre. With the rules explained he checked the details of our address and then we signed a form, in triplicate. One for them, one for us and one for the local police. The signed and stamped certificate was emailed to us early the next morning.

I'm often told how Third World or how bureaucratic Spain is. It's not a view I usually share. Certainly, at times, there are things to complain  about, certainly bureaucracy can be overbearing but, wherever you live, I suspect the same is true for you at times too.

Having some control on burning garden cuttings though in a country that seems quite flamable sounds pretty sensible to me.

Hey Mr Beaver

It was quite early, maybe around eight in the morning, but the newsagent in Chatteris was open. I was on my way to some absolutely essential meeting I'm sure. Chatteris is a town in the Cambridgeshire Fens, stories of incest, potato headedness and child swapping abound. Chatteris was not in the fast lane of the (then) 20th Century. A couple of older women were in front of me, they were buying but chatting. After waiting nearly five minutes I asked if I might just have a packet of Hamlet and be gone. I had the correct change, it would be a quick exchange. The woman behind the counter wasn't having any of it and didn't heistate to chide me for my hurry.

On Monday I was in the library cum youth centre in Sax. Six of us were gathered around a table parked at an edge of the big barn like room. We Brits outnumbered the Spaniards two to one. The idea is that it's a sort of group language exchange - I have no idea why we use a room large enough to stage a concert in. My fellow Brits were expounding on a failing of some Spanish system or another - maybe education, maybe good manners. I forget. We often complain about most things in our adopted home. Then one of the Brits said that she had been told, by a Spaniard, that it wasn't fair to judge Spain by what happens "around here."

I know exactly what she means. It wouldn't be fair to extrapolate an impression of the UK from Chatteris or its somewhat prettier rural cousins alone. If you did, and you worked in the film industry for instance, you may have a population that never took its wellies off or lived in half timbered, thatched roof cottages and shopped at family owned supermarkets all the time. Obviously there are no films like that.

I made a little coment on Facebook about Maggie stopping in the middle of the road to greet someone and used it as an example to prove that she was becoming Spanish. Marilo came back to say that she really was Spanish and she would never stop on a zebra crossing to chat with someone. Forgive us, we're country bumpkin Spaniards I replied - we do folk dances. I don't suppose they do a lot of folk dancing in the Palacio neighbourhood of Madrid either. Only the other day when I wrote the form and function blog entry I was thinking that there are some pretty trendy places in Spain, there are first class restaurants, people buy Audi A7s as well as white vans and Internet connections run at 100 Mb in the big cities. When I talk to telesales people there is often a lot of confusion about our address. Their expectation is a street name, building number and maybe flat details. They do not expect some description of a piece of muddy (winter) or dusty (summer) field.up a farm track.

Fortunately though the blog is called Life in Culebrón not Life in Spain