And Running with Horses

Back in 2017 I was on the cuesta, the slope, in Caravaca, the crowd parted, as it does, to let the horse and handlers through. Peering through the viewfinder of the camera I saw no danger but the bloke behind me yanked me back and let loose a load of verbal abuse about death and injury. The photos were a bit blurred too. So this year I decided to be sensible and I went early enough to bag a spot on the castle wall looking down to where the horses run. 

The photos were in focus, the viewpoint was safe and I was able to talk to a family from Llano de Brujas who were leaning on the same wall  But after about ten horses had run past I thought I'd have a bit of a wander and see if I could get some nice, safe, snaps of the horses as they arrived at the top of the hill. It was the first time I'd done that. Interesting. Injured horse handlers, crying horse handlers, girlfriends greeting their hero horse handlers. The horses looked happier too now that nobody was poking them with a stick and demanding that they run through a red and white coloured mob of shouting people. My personal favourite chant was "It smells of armpits here" - it did.

I had seen enough horses and decided to leave so I had no option but to join the throng of people on the slope as the only route to get to the signed emergency exit, the way back to my parked car. It wasn't so easy pushing my way through hundreds and hundreds of boozed and drugged up young people enjoying themselves with just a tad of danger to spice it up a bit. In fact I found myself caught up in this ebb and flow of bodies long enough for about five horses to pass. I have to be honest, I was glad when I reached the way out. I thought I might be there for the whole event. Some of those snaps with the bits of horse showing above the mass of red and white are in focus.

The Caballos del Vino, the Wine Horses, is something that happens every 2nd May in Caravaca de la Cruz. There are about 70 groups, peñas, and each one has a horse that takes part in three contests over the three days. The 2nd May is the big day though. Like baguettes and dry stone walling this event too is Intangible Cultural Heritage. The story goes that the Castle/Church in Caravaca was under siege by the Muslims, the Moors, in the middle of the 13th Century. Caravaca is called Caravaca de la Cruz because the church there has a piece of the "One True Cross". Not letting the Muslims get their hands on such an important Christian relic was considered to be top priority. The defenders had emptied their water cisterns so a group of Knights Templar decided to run the siege and take them something to drink. They couldn't find any water (!) so they loaded their steeds with wine skins and charged, bat out of hell like, up the slope taking the besiegers by surprise. They made it into the castle and the defenders, being well pleased to have a bit of something to slake their thirst, decorated the horses with flowers and suchlike.

The 2nd of May celebrations are dedicated to the One True Cross. Before the horses start running there is a floral offering taken to the church. Then it's the popular bit. The horses, wearing incredibly intricate embroidered mantles, start from a flat spot below the castle and run up a slope to the castle gates. The horses have four handlers, two on each side, and it's a simple time trial to run from the start to the finish. The starter says such and such horse can run, the four handlers try to get into position before they cross the start line and then horse and handlers run up the hill, it takes a few seconds. Caballo en carrera, racing horse, is the warning to the crowd. If you don't heed the warning four blokes and a horse may trample you to death. If the handlers arrive at the finish line still attached to the horse then the run is valid. Keeping up with the horse can't be easy especially as there are several hundred, possibly several thousand, people in the way who have to move to one side to let the horses pass.

Caravaca is pretty lively on the second of May.

Lots of pictures in the May album

Walking with sheep

UNESCO produces a list of things of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Flamenco is on the list, so are baguettes. 

Dry Stone walling is on the list too - it got there after flamenco but before baguettes. You may think a blog about dry stone walling could be a bit "dry" but if the UN says that dry stone is one of things that makes all our lives richer then I think it's incumbent on us to believe them.

Dry stone involves building things with stones that are not bound together with mortar. The things don't fall down because the stones are naturally interlocked or because of the use of load bearing structures. Dry stone techniques use rough, field, stones. So, for instance, Inca temples built without mortar but with dressed stone are not considered to be dry stone structures. Wherever you come from I'm sure you know dry stone structures. 

Dry stone is most commonly used to build boundary walls but the technique can be used to construct anything from a way marker to a corral or a building. Around here the terraces (bancales in Spanish) are bounded by and held up by dry stone walls called ribazos. It's usually assumed (partly because they were responsible for so many agricultural improvements) that the bancales and ribazos, were built by the descendants of the North Africans, the Moors, who invaded Spain in the 8th Century. The problem is that field terraces use the local earth and field stones so that it's tricky to say whether they were built last year, last century or last millennium. Accurate dating of the terraces requires archaeological excavation. It turns out that the oldest terraces around here are Bronze Age, lots more are Moorish but the majority were actually built in the last three centuries.

The use of the bancales also varies. We logically assume, quite rightly, that terraces make hillsides easier to farm, and reduce the amount of soil carried away during torrential downpours. There are, though, other reasons for levelling the land. For instance, in this province, archaeologists have found that some of the Bronze age terraces were constructed as defensible positions to protect herds and flocks of animals as they were moved from pasture to pasture. This system of moving animals from higher to lower ground, from winter to summer pasture, is called transhumance. 

Transhumance has always been important in Spain, more important in some parts than others. In the 13th Century Alfonso X, the Spanish king, defined a series of tracks and routes and a whole load of rules and regulations to stop conflicts between the nomadic herders and more settled farmers. The rules defined the characteristics of overnight resting places, widths of the tracks etc. It's these ancient rights that still protect these paths as public spaces today. At their height, there were over 125,000 kms of tracks in Spain.

One of the reasons for the importance of transhumance was that, from the 15th to the 19th Century, Spain had a monopoly on merino wool. All that time the wool trade brought enormous wealth to Spain. It's usually the explanation behind huge houses in now almost abandoned villages. The fine merino wool was the best material, at the time, for making high value clothing like underwear and stockings. That monopoly was broken when the Spanish royals gave gifts of herds of sheep to their royal relatives in other countries. Also, around the same time, both the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon recognised the economic potential of the sheep and sent a few home as their armies battled it out in the Spanish Peninsular War. The Australian merino flocks are descended from that looted Spanish stock.

The tracks the animals move along are called vías pecuarias, cañadas and the big wide ones, the ones that have to be 75 metres wide, Cañadas Reales (Royal droves). In this area the big tracks are also called veredas. One of the most important routes that comes through Pinoso is the Vereda de los Serranos which starts up near Cuenca and goes on to Jaen. There are lots of branch tracks (just like our motorways, trunk roads and local roads). Most of the animals passing through Pinoso were headed for the coast around Cartagena.

In this area there is another link between dry stone and transhumance as well as ancient terraces. Field stones were used to build shelters, stone sheds, called cucos. They could be used by farm labourers at busy times to save travelling time and also for shepherds and drovers passing by on those rural rights of way. 

If you're local and you haven't seen them there are lots of cucos to the left of the road that runs from the Yecla Road down to Lel in the area called el Toscar and there are more alongside the road from Lel towards Ubeda - there are others in various places but these are easy to see from the road. Monóvar has the dry stone mapped out on this link and every now and again Pinoso and Jumilla Tourist offices do something about their dry stone.

Visiting Parliament

I've always been relatively interested in politics, not in any deep intellectual way, but in the way of knowing which side I was on in any political argument.

When we first arrived in Spain, when there was hardly any Internet, when news came in newspapers and on TV and radio, keeping up was tricky. I could read the Spanish papers, finger pointingly slowly, but the spoken news was, initially, incomprehensible gabble. I was quite worried that I would turn from informed to stupid. For months I copied down the names, to try to make sense of the weekly political round-up in English in the Costa Blanca News. Nowadays I know, reasonably well, what's going on politically in Spain but I haven't a clue about the UK.

This year there will be a general, local and regional elections in Spain. This May will be our fifth set of local elections here. We're on nodding terms with a few of the local councillors. One of those is the Pinoso Mayor, Lázaro Azorín. Now Lázaro as well as being our mayor is a deputy, an MP, in the national parliament.

The traditional pattern in the UK is that the politicians are affiliated to a political party and elected to a geographical area. Electors may choose to vote for a political party but, sometimes, and especially at the local level, people vote for personalities; for people they know and trust. The same is true of Spanish voting except that the system for candidates is substantially different; it's much more party based. Electors vote for a list of names put forward by a political party to cover the whole town, not wards, or the whole province, not towns.

The Spanish idea is that for any particular area there are so many seats available. For instance, for the Town Hall in Pinoso there are currently 13 councillors. Alicante province, based on population and other weighting factors, returned 12 deputies to the national parliament. For any election the political parties prepare a list of candidates long enough to fill all the available seats plus a couple of "just in case" extras. If one party were to win 100% of the votes then the party's whole list would be elected. In practice, each party gets a number of seats in proportion to the number of votes they capture. If there were just two parties, and each got the same number of votes, then they would both get the same number of seats. In fact it's much more complicated than that but that's the basic scheme.

This list system means that the political heavyweights are secure; there are never shock defeats. It also means that ordinary voters often only know the people at the top of the list. The list system also avoids by-elections. If one of the elected members dies or resigns then there is a ready made successor, waiting in the wings. It does mean though that, if the party you favour ideologically puts forward someone you disapprove of for any reason, you have to decide between person and party.

Lázaro was top of the list for the socialists in Pinoso. In the 2019 elections his party won 10 of the 13 Pinoso seats. Lázaro was also number five on the list of candidates for election to the national government from Alicante province. His party won sufficient votes to return four national deputies to Madrid. So Lázaro just missed getting in. Later the number one on that list, an ex astronaut and government minister, resigned his parliamentary seat. The reasoning was relatively complex but it was to do with ensuring a secure parliamentary vote in a minority coalition government. With that resignation Lazaró, as next in line, became a national deputy. He decided to continue as Mayor of Pinoso but he gave up his local salary.

We know Lázaro a bit. He says hello in the street. I was talking to him a while ago about his dual role and he said that if we were ever in Madrid we should ask him to arrange a visit to the Congreso de los Diputados, the lower house of the national parliament. We had plans to go to Madrid, I asked, and Lázaro was as good as his word. He arranged for us to visit.

We got to sit in the gallery and watch the debate about changing the "Sí es Sí", law, basically anti rape legislation that went wrong because of dodgy legal drafting. Convicted sex offenders have been getting early release on appeal. The resulting political storm has played into the hands of the right of centre parties and stretched the limits of the leftist governing coalition. Maggie and I were sitting in the visitor's gallery, during the debate, political personality spotting. When there was a bit of a break in the voting Lázaro gave us a quick tour of the Congress from committee rooms, offices and underground tunnels to the cafeteria. He left us to our own devices when he went to vote for the final, and in my mind flawed, version of the revised law. After the vote the building emptied and we were able to visit parts of the building that we see all the time on the TV news including the main debating chamber, the hemiciclo.

I should say that it's reasonably easy to get to visit the parliament. There are regular slots for visits and slots can be arranged online but getting the personalised tour was just brilliant.

I ordered up a cup of mud

I thought we might take a look at coffee. At home I drink tea but Spaniards make such terrible tea and such good coffee that, away from home, it's coffee. 

Let's start with the exception. We're in a bar or restaurant. That being the case I have no idea why you would, but, if you wanted an instant coffee, you need to ask for un café de sobre. I suspect that when decaf was first introduced it was only available in instant coffee form so some people got into the habit of asking for un café descafeinado de sobre in which case they'd get a little sachet of decaf coffee and a glass full of warm milk to dissolve it in.

But here we're really talking about coffee from one of those machines that hiss and spurt usually at the precise moment someone talks to you. The noise makes it impossible to hear or understand anything but your native tongue. In the UK and the USA the coffee that issues from those machines seems to have Italian names. Not so in Spain.

The short, strong, thimbleful of coffee is a café solo. 
The short, strong coffee with a drop of warm milk is a café cortado.
The short strong coffee diluted with about the same amount of hot milk is a café con leche. 
The short, strong coffee, diluted with hot water is a café solo largo (but, as foreigners, we can say café americano).

The name americano, for what Spaniards traditionally call café solo largo, for weak black coffee, is the Italian influence. Most Spaniards think we foreigners are strange for watering down good coffee so they are not too concerned about what we call it. It's just another odd thing we foreigners do. Americano never has milk. We are not in Starbucks or Costa Coffee with their funny ways; bucket sized cups and exorbitant prices.

The beans are usually ground alongside the hissing coffee machine. Grinding beans is noisy too. On very rare occasions you may be offered different beans. I can't remember the last time that happened but I have a pal who always asks if the beans are torrefacto, that's roasted with sugar, because she doesn't like torrefacto. They never are. Everywhere, well nearly everywhere, offers decaf beans nowadays. If you want decaf from the hissy machine you have to add descafeinado de máquina to your order - ponme un café solo descafeinado, de máquina, por favor or me pones or un café con leche descafeinado de máquina, por favor etc. 

There are tens and tens of variations which are to do with the presentation and the amounts of water, coffee and milk. Here are just a few. Lots of people ask for their coffee in a glass (en vaso). Foreigners sometimes ask for a big cup (en tazón). Corto de leche means go steady on the milk and corto de cafe means easy on the coffee. If you want a strong coffee you can add, bien cargado de café. I understand that, in the modern world, lots of people don't care for cow's milk so you might need things like leche de soja (soy milk) leche de almendra (almond milk). If cows aren't the problem but fat is you might ask for leche desnatada (skimmed milk). If you want sweetener instead of sugar, which will come by default in sachets, ask for sacarina. Nobody asks for brown sugar. In Summer people pour their coffee over ice. Just add con hielo to your order.

I left this to the end so as not to overcomplicate the simplicity of solo, cortado, con leche and americano which are all that we simple folk require.

The short, strong thimbleful of coffee with a splash of booze added is a carajillo. Typically it comes with brandy but you can ask for a whisky or anis carajillo and nobody will turn a hair.
The short, strong thimbleful of coffee poured into a glass which already contains condensed milk so that it looks like an upside down Guinness is a bombón. This may be a Costa Blanca and Murcia thing.
The short, strong thimbleful of coffee poured into a glass which already contains condensed milk so that it looks like an upside down Guinness and then with a splash of booze added is a Belmonte. Again specify the alcohol of your choice. This too may be something local to this area.

And finally an easy way to make Spaniards snigger, as you sip your coffee, is to repeat what one time Mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, famously said: "There is nothing quite like a relaxing cup of café con leche in Plaza Mayor".

Take the day off

One of the many complaints that Britons level against Spain is that Spaniards have lots and lots of days off, festive days. The implication is clear. In fact there can be up to fourteen days off in Spain. In England, unless there are additions for some particular event, the usual ration is eight days. It's very seldom that Spaniards get all fourteen days though. This year, 2023, there will be 12 and sometimes the number drops to 10. 

That's because there is a slight, but important, difference in the thinking behind public holidays in the two countries. In one the idea is of a holiday entitlement and in the other the idea is that there should be a rest from work on a festive day. In England, each year, you get eight extra days holiday, on top of any work related holiday entitlement. If a public holiday happens to fall on a Saturday or Sunday then you will get the previous or the next working day off as a substitute. In Spain if the festive day falls on Saturday or Sunday then it simply disappears from the annual holiday calendar because work won't get in the way of you celebrating that day.

So, why is it that there seem to be public holidays all the time in Spain if the real difference is just a couple of days? One of the reasons is for the way that the Spanish territory is organised. We need to remember that Spain, the state, is made up of regions and municipalities. All three of those entities affect the holiday calendar. The state can set up to nine days of public holiday, the regions set three and the municipalities, two.

We'll get to the national holidays in a while but let's start with the municipal, the local, days off. Pinoso (the picture is the Pinoso flag) is a good example. It borders five other municipalities (Yecla, Jumilla, Abanilla, Algueña and Monóvar). All six of those municipalities get to choose two local holidays, nearly always based on some local tradition. It's more than likely that when Pinoso has a day off the other five won't. When people hardly ever left their home town this was hardly a problem but, nowadays, we often cross municipal borders to go to work, to use a gym or to do the supermarket run. That being the case you can easily find yourself caught out and come to the conclusion that Spain is always closed.

Now to the regional days off. Three of the municipalities bordering Pinoso are in the Region of Murcia. Each region has a regional day and each one is different. So when Valencia celebrates the anniversary of the taking of Valencia city from the Moors in 1238, on 9 October by Jaume I, Murcia will be hard at work. On June 9 on the other hand the Murcianos may well be wearing alpargatas and zaragüelles to dance in the street to celebrate the adoption of their most recent boundary changes while we Valencianos grind through the daily routine. 

Another regional variation comes from the so called replaceable days. To get to these we need to talk about the national holiday calendar, días no laborables. Central government produces an annual list of public holidays. There can be up to nine. New Year's day, Good Friday, Labour Day (May 1st ), Assumption Day (August 15th), National Day of Spain (October 12th), All Saints Day (November 1st), Constitution Day, (December 6th), Immaculate Conception (December 8th) and Christmas Day (December 25th). If any of those dates falls on a Sunday they will not be included in the list for the year. As well as these days the government publishes, each year, a list of suggested days for public holidays. Remembering that regional governments can set up to three days off the regions may adopt some or all of these replaceable days. If they wish they can make regional substitutions. When different regions make different replacements this causes another variation. To give a concrete example one of the  replaceable days suggested by the national government is the Thursday of Holy Week, Maundy Thursday in old money (see the quip?). The Murcia Region likes that and takes the Thursday. On the other hand the Valencian Community has a tradition of celebrating the Monday of Holy Week instead. Murcia's plan produces a long weekend before Holy Week and Valencia's a long weekend after Holy week, a Monday off that Britons often, wrongly, confuse with the English Easter Monday.

The days on that replaceable or changeable list always include January 6th, Epiphany, the day after the Three Kings bring Christmas gifts for children in Spain, the Thursday before Easter Sunday and San José or Fathers Day on March 19th. There are usually a couple of other suggestions which vary from year to year. None of those days will be a Sunday. That doesn't mean that some Sundays will not be celebrated as festive days. Easter Sunday is, a good example, as is Mother's Day which is always the first Sunday in May. Both are recognised festive days, in the same way as they are in England but none of them need to feature on workday calendars as Sunday is always a day off. 

It's a system that lots of Britons find hard to get to grips with while Spaniards like the way it honours local differences and traditions.

Villages, towns and cities

On 12 February 1826, one of the most deplorable kings that Spain has ever had, Fernando VII, and there have been some duffers, signed the order to make Pinoso a municipality separate from Monóvar. Pinoso became a Villa. From Villa comes Villazgo which is an event in Pinoso to remember and celebrate that independence each February.

Most Spaniards would consider that a villa has much less economic clout, a much smaller population and far fewer services than a city. Strangely the Spanish capital, Madrid, is historically, just like Pinoso, a villa.

The Spanish Constitution divides national territory into three divisions: municipality (e.g. Pinoso, or Yecla), province (e.g. Alicante, or Murcia), autonomous community (e.g. Valencian Community or Region of Murcia). All the other divisions, used by the autonomous communities and in everyday speech, have a certain degree of willy nilliness. So comarcas ( a grouping of locations), mancomunidades (a community or grouping of municipalities), villas (small towns with privileges) and aldeas (villages), aren't quite so easy to differentiate as my English definitions may suggest.

Just as in the United Kingdom, where some places look like towns but are cities (Wells, St Aspath), while some towns, that seem big enough to be cities (Northampton, Reading), are still towns there is some confusion about what is what in Spain. So, here's my unofficial guide.

Aldea: According to the official dictionary, the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, is a centre of sparse population usually, without its own jurisdiction. Aldeas are not a legal entity. Ask a Spaniard what an aldea is and they'll probably say a rural village with very few houses and almost no people.

Pueblo: These are municipalities, with powers, but with a small population. According to the Spanish statistical office and based on a supranational definition, a pueblo has a population of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants with an economy based on things like agriculture, fishing, forestry and mining - the primary sector. To be a bit contrary a Spanish law from 2007 defines a pueblo as a place with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants located in a rural environment with a population density of fewer than 100 people per km².

Villa: Where this blog began. Why is Villazgo, one of Pinoso's biggest tourist draws, called Villazgo? Blame the Romans. A villa was a Roman centre of agricultural production. Originally a villa was a "manor house" with a few buildings and dwellings alongside. As the Empire crumbled, and rule from Rome weakened, some of these villas took on local powers; they developed a form of legal autonomy. Some might build a castle and maintain a small private army, there may be aldermen and mayors to govern and administer justice or maybe a distinguished board to distribute water rights.

Ciudad: In Spain, according to the Statistics Office, a ciudad has to have more than 10,000 inhabitants who are mainly dedicated to economic activities outside the primary sector – that is it's an urban area with a high population density and with economic (commerce, services and industry), political, religious, and a cultural life. With that definition we can understand those traffic signs that point us to the "Centro ciudad" - City Centre - even though we seem to be entering a big village or a small town.

Just to round things off pedanías are centres of population which depend, for governance, on a nearby municipality. Usually they are outlying villages to a town but sometimes they are identifiable centres of population in an urban area. Chinorlet is a pedanía of Monóvar, Raspay is a pedanía of Yecla and Culebrón, Paredón and Ubeda (and a whole lot more) are pedanías of Pinoso. 

The photo, by the way, is of the signature of Fernando VII to say that Pinoso is no longer a pedanía of Monóvar

Local languages

One disadvantage of living in a foreign country is that, often, the country you choose to live in doesn't speak a language you understand. It's one of the reasons why migrants, fleeing some terror regime, don't stop when they get to the first safe place. They keep going heading for somewhere that speaks a language they do.

Most of we rich foreigners who move here want to be good immigrants. We try to learn a bit of Spanish before we arrive. We try to learn more as we live here but, in this area, and in others, we find that a lot of the information is in a different sort of Spanish. In Pinoso, which is in the Valencian Community, it's called Valencian. Although nobody speaks Valencian directly to we foreigners we see and hear it everywhere

The current Spanish constitution says:

1) Castilian is the official language of the State. Every Spaniard has the duty to know it and the right to use it (Castilian is the language that is known worldwide as Spanish)

2) The other Spanish languages will also be official in their respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their statutes

3) The richness of the different linguistic forms of Spain is a cultural heritage that will be the object of special respect and protection.

So Spanish, Castilian is spoken throughout Spain. Catalan is spoken in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community (where the variant is called Valencian). Galician is spoken in Galicia and some areas of Asturias and Castilla y León. Basque is spoken in the Basque Country and Navarre. Aranese (a variety of Occitan which is another Southern European language) is spoken in a specific region of Catalonia.

I fully understand why people speak Valencian. It's a local language, it's the language of the land. My Yorkshire accent shows where I'm from too. But it does make life trickier for we incomers. Often it's easy enough to catch the gist of Valencian if you speak Castilian, but it makes it all harder work. I also wonder sometimes if there is a bit of exclusivity about it. Back in 2010 the Regional Government did a language survey in their territory. They found that nearly 50% of the population speaks Valencian "perfectly" or "quite well" (in some of the Castilian speaking areas that figure was as low as 10%) and about 25% said they write Valencian "perfectly" or "quite well" (6% in the Castilian speaking areas). There are around 50 nationalities living in Pinoso. Only one of them naturally speaks Valencian. 

The strength of feeling behind the various regional languages, Basque, Catalan etc., varies a lot in the different regions. Sometimes it's simply another language, something of local pride and heritage. Sometimes it's considered to be one of the building blocks of an independent nation downtrodden by an uncaring and power crazed Castilian speaking government based in Madrid. This is particularly reflected in schools where classes may have to be taken in the local language. Sometimes opting to take classes in Castilian might disadvantage pupils in other areas of the curriculum. It's all very complicated and the stuff of hundreds of arguments around dinner tables, on bar stools and in WhatsApp groups.

One of the manifestations of this linguistic plurality/chauvinism is in relation to local government workers - from librarians and teachers to surgeons and town hall clerical staff. Where there is a local language a public job profile usually includes a language profile. Even where the local language is not a specific requirement having it will bring quicker promotion and greater opportunity in general. In some communities nearly all the government jobs require the local language but all the communities have ways around this for the times when there are skills shortages. It can still be a huge stumbling block. 

I know someone, a health professional, who has always spoken Valencian at home but couldn't take the promotion offered to her until she had passed the official Valencian exam. As Spanish exams tend to penalise errors rather than reward knowledge, her everyday Valencian cost her points. It took her a lot of studying for her to pass the exam. Recently three Spanish nurses working in Catalonia used TikTok to complain that their careers were stalled by the need for a high level (C1) Catalan language qualification. The nurses used a very common, everyday, swear word which gave the Catalan authorities a good excuse to talk about potential disciplinary and legal action against the nurses. The Health Care chief in Catalonia said "We must guarantee care in our local language". There was no mention of their nursing skills.

If you want to know the time..

You see a lot of police officers in Spain. Google says there are 238,000 of them. By comparison there are around 136,000 police officers in the UK. 

The structure and organisation of the Fuerzas y Cuerpos de Seguridad (Security Forces and Corps) is complex, so take this as a rough and ready guide rather than the definitive truth. I've omitted the blood soaked past and avoided any sort of critique so I apologise now if the post is a bit dry and dusty.

Nationally there are two police forces. The Guardia Civil and the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía (CNP). In very broad stroke the CNP operate in urban areas and the Guardia Civil operate in rural areas. The Guardia Civil use a green and white colour scheme while the CNP uses blue and white. Both add the Spanish flag into their livery. Both these national police forces are controlled by the Interior Ministry but the Guardia is a military unit with responsibilities to the Ministry of Defence. 

In any town with more that 5,000 inhabitants there has to be a police force employed by the local Town Hall, these are Local Police or Policia Local. In Madrid they are called Policía Municipal and, in Barcelona, Guardia Urbana. 

All the police forces do those things that you expect from European police - protecting people, goods and property, maintaining order, preventing crime, investigating offences and collecting intelligence about potential crime. The two national forces have different, but sometimes, overlapping responsibilities.

The CNP (68,000 officers) works in the provincial capitals and in specified urban centres; as a rule of thumb those with more than 30,000 inhabitants.The CNP issues identity documents and passports and has responsibility for combating drug crime, organised crime, cyber crime, gambling and forgery. They also do border control, immigration and human trafficking. They are responsible for coordination with international police forces and they control private security firms. Among the specialist functions the CNP has a bomb squad, a "SWAT" team, the GEOs, and more.  

The Guardia Civil (78,000 officers) deals with traffic on the main roads, looks after the security of things like ports and airports, looks out for environmental crimes, moves prisoners around and issues all the gun and explosives licences. They have specialist units for anti smuggling, for tax related and economic crimes. The Guardia do mountain rescue and they patrol the southernmost frontiers of Europe in Ceuta and Melilla.

The Local Police (66,000 officers) look after the protection of local councillors and council property, deal with urban traffic, are responsible for crowd control at public events (along with Civil Protection), mediate in conflicts between neighbours and cooperate with the other police forces.

Now the exceptions. Because of Spain's almost federal structure there are a regional forces in Catalonia (Mossos d'Esquadra), the Basque Country (Ertzaintza), Navarre (Foruzaingoa) and the Canary Islands (Guanchancha). About 28,000 officers in all. The Basque and Catalan police forces do most of the jobs which are usually associated with the Guardia Civil and CNP within their regions. In Navarre and the Canary Islands the regional police forces are less "powerful" but they still have a very visible presence for day to day policing including serious crimes like murder. In Andalucía, Aragón, Asturias, Galicia and Comunidad Valenciana there are regional police forces that are part of the CNP but have a certain independence. If you live in Alicante you may have noticed the light blue and white police cars of the Valencian Police from time to time.

The title?, it was a song, If you want to know the time ask a policeman.

A bunch of grapes

Around here grapes are grown for eating and for making wine.  Pinoso is a bit too high and a bit too cold, to grow eating grapes, but just down the road in la Romana, Novelda and Aspe they're all over the place. The eating grapes are easy to spot. The most popular variety is called Aledo and it is often grown under plastic, protected from the sun, birds, and other pests by paper bags. The bags slow the grapes’ development and produce a grape that's soft and ripe for picking at the end of the year. How very fortunate that one of Spain's most widespread traditions is that of eating twelve lucky grapes, keeping pace with the midnight chimes of the clock in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, as the old year becomes the new. Nearly all the grapes are from around here and in Murcia.

The grapes in the Pinoso area are for wine. Wine is made from mashed up grapes. Grapes grow in vineyards. They are harvested and taken to a nearby bodega, winery, where they are turned into different types of wine. Red wine, rosé wine and white wine can all be made with red grapes. Green grapes can only, naturally, be used to produce white wine. When people ask for a wine in a bar or buy a bottle in a shop they might ask by grape type or region. There is a sometimes a link between the region and the grape - for example tempranillo grapes are the most common for Rioja wines and Sherry is made with palomino grapes. On the other hand Chardonnay grapes are grown worldwide so a Chardonnay could be a wine from the grape's native Burgundy or from places as diverse as Chile, New Zealand and Sussex. Wine bottles always say what grape type was used to make the wine.

The most common grape variety around Pinoso is monastrell. Lots of other types of grape are grown here but monastrell is the local variety. Monastrell doesn't need a lot of water, it doesn't need decent soil and it can deal with enormous daily temperature variations. The monastrell vines are usually cut back to the bare stump at the end of each season. In the past, to attain a quality mark, the vines had to be planted in a certain pattern. Looking at the vineyards you can see horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines of plants. New regulations allow growers to use different planting patterns and still get the quality mark. It will take years for things to change so you can still show off your local knowledge by pointing out the vineyards, with the traditional pattern. You can, sagely, add that these grapes will be picked by hand so they will be used in better quality wines. Machine picking bruises the fruit. The vines planted so the tendrils can grow up a wire support are for machine picking. The wine made from these machine picked grapes is still largely exported in tanker lorries, usually to France, where it is mixed with the local wine to produce a much more palatable end product.

All over Spain certain types of food and drink are given a quality mark. The scheme is usually called Denominación de Origen Protegida or DOP. The idea is that the quality is kept up by specifying what the ingredients should be, where those ingredients should come from and how those ingredients should be processed. By keeping up the quality of the traditional product it's possible to maintain a premium price. The local denominación is Alicante but just over the border into Murcia we have Jumilla and Yecla too. So, the next time you have visitors make sure you buy at least one bottle with denominación written on the label and you'll have a ready made topic for that awkward conversational lull that happens, every now and then, even with friends.

Blinded and dazzled

There are plans to build a solar farm just around the back of our house. Not eyesore close but close enough. We knew nothing about it. Well, actually that's not quite true. I probably knew but I didn't know that I knew. I remember seeing a piece on the Pinoso Town Hall website a couple of years back (8 September 2021 to be precise) with the snappy title (translated here) of Public information of authorization on undeveloped land for the photovoltaic power plant called "PSF IM2 Jumilla" in the municipality of Pinoso. The website entry mentioned several plots and plot numbers but it didn't give any real clue as to the location, no map, no village name. Obviously there was no purposeful intention to hide the location.

Now the way that things are made public in Spain is that they are published in a sort of official gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Estado or the Official State Bulletin. I suppose it's just published to the Internet nowadays; no paper version. The Boletín, the BOE, is the national version and there are regional versions. We live in the municipality of Pinoso in the province of Alicante. The three provinces that make up the Valencian Community are Alicante, Valencia and Castellón. Anything of municipal, provincial or regional concern is published in a regional version of the boletín called the Diario Oficial de la Generalitat Valenciana. I remember writing an article for the old TIM magazine about how things were officially published in Spain and, in drawing a comparison with the UK. Researching that article at the time I found things out about both systems that I had not known before.

One of our neighbours found out about the plans, I think because he saw some blokes measuring up. It just so happens that, because of his work, he knows how people should be informed about new projects. He's pretty certain that we weren't told what was going to happen as we should have been, that the plans for landscaping the site are inadequate and that, in general, the whole process has been flawed.

Again, to be honest, despite knowing about the BOE and its equivalents I have no idea what the process is for publishing planning permissions. I suppose if a biggish scheme is controversial most of us rely on some sort of interest group kicking up a fuss. If you've passed close to Salinas recently you'll know that's the case there. When that happens we can chain ourselves to trees and face down the bulldozers. I had a quick look at the process is in the UK for planning permissions. Obviously enough there, in the UK, the applicant must be told of the decision as must everyone else who has made a representation to the planning authority or who is an owner of the land or a tenant of an agricultural holding on the land or an adjoining owner or occupier. The UK version adds a caveat which says that the local planning authority should take a flexible approach and make a judgement about whether additional publication of the decision is needed on a case by case basis, weighing up factors such as the level of public interest in the application and the cost of additional notification. 

If Pinoso Town Hall were to follow the same general principles then none of the houses that will have a nice view of the panels owns or rents adjacent land, none of us made any representation to the Town Hall about the project and I don't think that there is much public unrest about the scheme. 

Nonetheless it all just seems a little underhand somehow.

Raising your eyes unto heaven

Novelda and Alcoi both have lots of Modernista or Art Nouveau, buildings. Other Spanish towns boast a different architectural style, mediaeval walls or a castle. Some are littered with stone built palaces. Pinoso has none of that, in fact it has quite a lot of horrid buildings and plenty of buildings which look alright except that they are in the wrong place. Nonetheless, while Pinoso isn't exactly breathtaking in its architectural beauty, it does have lots of detail to notice if your life is not so full of care that you have some time to stand and stare.

For some reason traditional, as in traditional costume, seems to mean 18th or 19th Century. The first Levi's were made in 1853, but I suspect we're unlikely to see the local dance group, Monte de la Sal, in jeans. There's a certain unspoken aesthetic about what classic and traditional mean. Maybe it's the same with houses, traditional implies some sort of fixed time in the past. Apparently Alicantino houses, those from Alicante province, didn't change much in their basic construction or style from the 17th Century through to the beginning of the 20th Century and they're the ones that are tagged traditional.

In these standard Alicantino houses coloured facades are a big thing. If you've been to Villajoyosa you'll know about vivid facades but if you look around the central Pinoso streets, like Perfecto Mira, Maestro Domenech, Sagasta and Maisonnave, you will see that it's the same here but without all the fuss. Those traditional houses are built of mamposteria which is like dry stone walling but with lime mortar. First, you try to fit the stones together, like a jigsaw, and then you fill the spaces between big stones with smaller stones. To finish it off you bind the whole lot together with the mortar. The mamposteria walls are often very thick. When some families became richer they showed off their wealth by rendering the walls and then adding colour wash. In the end nearly all the houses ended up rendered and coloured. You still see houses in the countryside without render because that's where the poor folk lived.

Another feature of these classical houses is that the windows and doors follow the form of the house. Sometimes, often, there is a central axis marked by a big, impressive, solid wooden door. The windows are arranged, symmetrically, around that axis with the same shape and number on each side. The window casements and door surrounds might be picked out in mouldings of a different colour. It's usual for the windows to be tall rather than square or horizontally wide. Exterior decoration frequently picks out the floor lines of the various storeys of the house. The ground floor windows are usually protected with fancy ironwork; the fancier the ironwork the richer the household. It's very common for the upper windows to have small Juliet balconies commonly sporting fancy floor tiles. Sometimes there are decorative tiles under the eaves too.

There are as many exceptions to these "rules" as there are houses. Over time people renovate their homes and these classical features are diluted. Coloured facades dull and peel, someone might to build with dressed stone instead of mamposteria. Sometimes a different need called for a different design, big doors at the end of the building often point to an entrance for animals with carts or carriages for instance. But, if you can. just look up from street level and I'm sure you'll notice that some of these features are there.

Paintings and carvings on Monte Arabí

Monte Arabí is a natural park, about 20 kms out of Yecla, almost into Castilla la Mancha. It has some nice looking, rounded and very young, geologically speaking, Miocene rocks (10-12 million years old) and a bunch of trees and Mediterranean scrub. It's one of those places to wear the trousers you bought from Decathlon and to load a bottle of water, and maybe a bocadillo wrapped in silver paper, in your backpack. Mobile phones are a bit lost in the park - not much of a signal.

I have to admit to not being a fan of most of the walks in this area. Ooh, look, a pine tree and some esparto grass, oh, and there's another pine tree. As Ivor Cutler said of the Scottish countryside - “We were soon well acquainted with the thistle, there are many thistles in Scotland”. I like Monte Arabí though because it's one of those places that has a long history of human settlement and I like the idea of continuity. The first time I was there, in 2011, I clambered up the hillside and peered through the iron grille that protected the pinturas rupestres, the prehistoric, abstract, wall paintings below a rocky overhang which shelters the cliff face. Later, in 2019, we went on an organised tour with the Yecla Tourist Office. The guide had the key for the padlock of the big steel fence behind which there were more prehistoric wall paintings - much more figurative paintings with people and animals. The same guide told us about the wall paintings that I'd seen on my earlier visit and about some petroglyphs in another part of the park. As we didn't see them that day, I went back a couple of weeks later to find them. 

Petroglyphs, are rock carvings. Possibly just a Bronze Age version of “Kilroy was here” possibly something with deeper significance. I didn't find them in 2019 but I did end up on the top of Aribelejo, which is where the only water to be found within the park is and where there was once a Bronze Age settlement. Just while we're on petroglyphs there are some nice ones up on La Centenera Hill in Pinoso.

This visit we started with La Cueva de la Horadada, a collapsed cavern that has left a big hole through solid rock. I kept mumbling on to my partner about how good the wall paintings were and how close you could get but, when we got there, things had changed. There is now a huge steel fence running around the cliff face and the unhindered growth of the vegetation behind the fence means you can no longer see the paintings. I'm all for protecting the site but surely the powers that be could have found a way to protect the paintings and still allow them to be seen? The paintings are only of any interest to people - passing rabbits, wild boar and hedgehogs will be happily oblivious to the paintings importance in human development.  At least we found the petroglyphs this time. In fact they were dead easy to find, just beside the track. and made easier by the full explanation we got from the ranger in the Punto de Información in the old Casa de Guarda. 

The salt of the Earth

There's a hill to the East of Pinoso. It's a rounded, dome like, formation which stands about 320 metres above the surrounding terrain though its summit is 890 metres above sea level. If you know Pinoso it's the hill with a couple of telecoms masts near it's summit and you can see it from almost everywhere in town. It's called Monte Cabeço and it's a sort of visual reference point for most Pinosoeros. Travelling home, with Spaniards, on a coach from Madrid years and years ago the man behind me tapped me on the shoulder when el Cabeço came into view, "Look," he said, "It's our mountain".

One of the wines produced by the local Pinoso Bodega is named for the hill, it's called Diapiro and diapiro is the Spanish equivalent of the technical word, diapir in English, to describe the geological phenomenon where the light, and plastic, salt has been squeezed up through the harder, surrounding rock.

The salt in Monte Cabeço has been mined for years, at least since Roman times. The hill is basically millions and millions of tons of Triassic salt. Salt in its mineral form is called halite. In the past the salt was mined by digging it out with picks and shovels but nowadays the salt is extracted by drilling a borehole, injecting pressurised water into the rock to dissolve the salt and then pumping out the resultant brine. The saltwater solution is sent down a 53 km gravity fed pipeline to Torrevieja. There the solution is added to the salt lagoons, already partially filled with salty water from the Mediterranean. The Pinoso brine increases the concentration of salt in the water so, as the hot sun evaporates the water from the shallow lagoons, it leaves behind tons and tons, 550,000 last year, of salt ready for the chemical industry, for road gritting, for any number of industrial uses and even to add a bit of taste to your food despite what the doctor told you.

International Women's Day

World Toilet day is on the 19th November. World Radio Day is the 13th February. Because I listen to radio I was well aware of one of those days but I remember not a peep about the other. In fact there are 205 UN sanctioned World Days or Weeks each year. Other organisations and counties add days to the list, such as Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, which means that there is nearly always something to celebrate. Obviously enough some of the days attract more attention than others.

In the UK I did some youth and community work and, for several years, World AIDS day was important to us. At the time AIDS was big news, Europeans, Britons, were dying from it and the red ribbons, free condoms and information points were everywhere. Nowadays with Elton John at the edge of retirement and only Sub Saharan Africans much at risk I suspect it doesn't get quite the same publicity.

In Spain some celebratory days are much more visible than others. One of the biggest is the Día Internacional de la Mujer or International Women's Day (IWD) on 8th March. International Women's day dresses in purple - technically it's purple, green and white based on the colours of the flag of the Women's Social and Political Union, the Pankhurst's organisation. The day is about celebrating women's achievements, educating and raising awareness for women's equality, calling for positive changes for the advancement of women and lobbying for gender parity. It's also the day to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women.

On the day itself, the Spanish press, TV, radio and social media is full of IWD related stories. Usually as well there is some sort of Government initiative timed to coincide with the day. This year the announcement has been of a sexual parity law which will guarantee parity in the Government and in the boards of directors of large companies and professional associations. It will also introduce parity in the electoral lists which form the basis of the voting system here. Unfortunately, for the Socialist coalition currently governing in Spain, the differences of opinion between the two major partners of that coalition have also come to a head just in time for IWD. The row is about changes to a newly introduced sexual abuse and rape law which is commonly called "Solo sí es sí". Only Yes is Yes. If the victim doesn't say yes then it means no. There is more argy bargy about a new law affecting transgender people too.

Here in Pinoso the IWD events go on for an extended two weeks. There is, for instance, an exhibition of women painters at the Cultural Centre till the 17th, there was a conference about the co-responsibility of care and equality in everyday life, a film with a feminist theme, a five minute silence to protest violence and killing of women by men (this silent demonstration happens every first Friday of the month throughout the year outside the Town Hall) and there was a play by a local theatre group. On the day itself local community groups introduced their balcony banners which are now on display in the Town Hall Square. One of those banners was from the reader's group that I'm in. For the rest of the period there is something called Seeds of Equality, there is a ceremony to honour women pioneers in business, a walk for equality, a fashion and art show and the opening of a reading point. If your Valenciano is better than mine you may be able to glean more information about those events from the picture alongside this post.

But if that's what's happening in Pinoso, the 901st largest town in Spain, imagine what's going on in places of any size!

Hands numbed by cold, feet frozen and cursing.

We have an aljibe in our house. An aljibe is a sort of water cistern. Ours is about two metres deep so I suppose it's capacity is a bit under 9,000 gallons or 40 cubic metres. It collects the water from the roof gutters on our house. In the past these cisterns, and wells, were the water supply for country houses. Nowadays, we have mains water but the aljibe was useful for summer garden watering. Unfortunately the aljibe started to leak; it would only hold about 15cms of water. The rest went somewhere else. We suspected that the somewhere else was the source of the damp patch on one of our walls. Spanish houses, often damp proof course less, are prone to rising damp but we did think we should put up, at least, a token resistance.

A builder told us it was tree roots punching through the concrete to get to the water. A temporary fix was possible but the roots would be back. We tried and he was right. Someone else told us that fixing aljibes was a specialist job and with the falling demand and the way that older people retire and die there were none of those specialists still working. They suggested we sealed off the cistern.

In the end my solution was very Heath Robinson. I stopped the downpipes feeding into the aljibe and put plastic dustbins to collect the rainwater. I pumped all of the water I could from the aljibe and then bought a dirty water pump that automatically activates with rising water level and put it in one of the dustbins. There are two dustbins and only one pump so if the rain is heavy I have to go and get soaked as I move the pump from one bin to the other. The set up is not at all elegant but we reckoned that if the aljibe were the source of the damp patch that was the lesser of two evils.

We had a hailstorm the other day. The hail was so thick it looked like snow. Then it froze into a sheet of ice. As I passed the dustbins I realised they were full and brimming over. Slip sliding across the ice sheet I tried to get the pump working. It didn't want to. I had to read the manual to fix the problem. My hands were frozen, my feet were wet and numb. I expected to break my neck on the ice sheet. Eventually I pumped out the bins but I could hear water running into the aljibe. I opened the hatch and we were back to the 15cms of water. Enough had seeped in through the hinges on the hatch etc. More fighting with the pump, more icy cold water running onto my back from a dribbling roof gutter. It took ages but I emptied the cistern then I covered all the holes and seepage points. Black plastic sheeting held down with rocks added to the ugliness of the dustbin, trailing hose, water pump and dustbin setup.

I don't think it's a win. I suspect that aljibe has been collecting water for hundreds of years and it will find a way to maintain that tradition!

Buying aspirin

I went to a chemist the other day to get some decongestant for my partner. She has a bad cold. I'm not often in a chemist so, when I am, I stock up on 100 mg aspirin tabs. Years ago some doctor told me they were a good way to reduce the risk of heart attacks. It was a radio doctor, he had a weekly slot on Radio Cambridgeshire. I left Cambridgeshire 18 years ago and I'm pretty sure that I've heard that the general use of low dose aspirin is no longer recommended for people who don't have certain heart conditions. It's just become a routine and, as it doesn't seem to have done me any harm, it may be doing me some good. Santiago Carrillo, the Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party at the time it was legalised, always attributed his long life to taking low dose aspirin and he was a chain smoker.

Years ago a chemist in Yecla told me off for saying "aspirina". He told me that aspirin was a trademark and I should ask for ácido acetilsalicílico, salicylic acid. It took me ages to approximate the pronunciation of that mouthful. But I often do as I'm told and, since then, I've struggled to pronounce the generic name every time I buy the stuff in a pharmacy.

Decongestiante isn't that easy to say either but that went well so I asked for a couple of packs of ácido acetilsalicílico de 100 mg. I was asked if I had a prescription. I said no. The chemist told me no prescription no tabs. I've bought those tablets there, in that very chemist, maybe ten times, and across 100 other counters all over Spain for years now. "Can I buy ordinary dose aspirin without a scrip," I asked. The answer was yes, 500 mg tablets don't need a prescription. By now my Spanish fluency had improved significantly. "So I can buy something five times more powerful but not the low dose equivalent? What sort of stupidity is that? We repeated that sort of call and response type conversation for a while - it turns out I know a lot of words in Spanish that translate as terms like madness, stupidity, ridiculousness, silliness and foolishness.

I paid for the decongestant and went to another pharmacy where I bought my low dose salicylic acid.

In praise of Villena

The first time we went to Villena was in 2006, a few days before Christmas. We were just about to leave when we bumped into a lot of carolers crossing the road. We followed them to a spot outside a chemist where they gave a little concert. It was lovely. I've had a bit of a soft spot for Villena ever since.

Sometime later, goodness knows when, we were by the Town Hall in Villena, next to the Iglesia Arciprestal de Santiago, the main church, just beside the Town Hall and Tourist Office. A woman came over and asked us if we were tourists. We were Brits and that was tourist enough for her. She took us in the church. She told us how the spiral columns were very uncommon in other churches. She told us how the patron saint of Villena and the church in Villena had been set on fire in the Spanish Civil War. When we'd done there she took us to see the Villena Treasure - 90 pieces of 3,000 year old solid gold objects, bowls, bracelets, necklaces and the like, weighing in at nine kilos. 

I thought I knew what there was in Villena. We've been there many times. We've done lots of fiestas and events and guided visits but I'd never heard of a museum, the Museo Escultor Navarro Santafé, until the other day. It's a small museum, very small and it costs a euro to get in. It's on the ground floor of the 19th Century house that once belonged to this Villena born sculptor. It's easy to find because the street is named after him, Navarro Santafé. The exhibition consists of various pieces that the artist brought back from his studio in Madrid: sculptures, parchments, writings, sketches, photographs. In his lifetime (he died in 1983 aged 77) he became relatively famous for his animal sculptures because they were a popular buy among hunters. The thing that surprised us about him though was that one of the most symbolic of all Madrid statues, the Bear and the Strawberry tree, the one in the Puerta del Sol, right in the middle of town, is his.

Oh, and he also did a new version of Nuestra Señora de las Virtudes, the patron saint of Villena. That's to replace the one that the tourist guide had told us about in the once burned out church. 

Blogging

My first post in this blog, Life in Culerbrón, was on January 5th 2006. The first entry was about me having drunk too much brandy (the more things change the more they stay the same) and the second entry was about stonework falling through our ceiling. The entries are a day apart and neither is long; the first is just three lines and the second about fifteen.

The idea of the blog then was simple. We were reasonably new to Spain; we'd been resident about fifteen months and we'd lived in the house in Culebrón for around eight or nine months. Blogging was relatively new and I didn't know what a blog was. Nowadays I don't know why I'd want to load videos to TikTok. The difference is that I started to blog, and I've kept going, whereas I've only ever tikked, or tokked, to see how it works.

It was relatively easy to write the blog in the early days. Something new was happening to me all the time and I just wrote about that something. For instance in those last few days of January 2006, after the ceiling incident, I talked about buying gas bottles, about my car (a 1977 MGB GT) passing the ITV roadworthiness test, the water freezing in the pipes and the snow falling.

Nowadays the blog is different. The pieces are far too long, I have difficulty thinking of new topics and they can get a bit metaphysical. Metaphysical may not be the right word. What I mean is that I don't just say I went to see a dance company who were brilliant (I, we did by the way and if you see Ibérica Danza performing anywhere I recommend them wholeheartedly) I try, by labyrinthine means, to tie that into a much more complex whole. 

So, I've decided that I'm going to rewind to those early blogs and try and do some much shorter entries about things. Let's see how it works. Let's see how long I remember and let's see if the controllers of Pinoso Community, where I often post the blogs, as well as to the homepage, mind.

Inconsequential

Spain is, in essence, like the rest of Western Europe. Lots of freedoms, well organised and safe. That doesn't mean it's hard to find things to complain about. People complain in France, in Norway and in the UK. It's dead easy to moan about Spain. On the macro scale watching the continual bickering and backbiting of national level politicians or the point scoring over laws that only paid up members of the KKK could be against in essence (anti rape or protecting animals) is so wearing. On the micro level small, everyday, things like the outrageous banking charges or the scandalous unreliability of official websites seems depressingly inevitable.

On a day to day level though I keep running into tiny things that make me grin from ear to ear. So, this week a bit of positivity and, with a bit of luck, a bit shorter too.

A Sunday morning, nothing planned, my partner busy with something in the house, too busy to come out to play. I popped over to have a look at the cypress tree maze at Onil. It was a nice enough as mazes go. I liked it. The maze was beside one of those places where there are picnic tables, merenderos. It was approaching lunch time so the public barbecues were in full swing. Kids ran around, playing, while their families unpacked food from cold boxes, unwrapped offerings in silver paper. The sun shone. I thought it was sweet.

I asked Google maps to take me home from Onil. It did that stupid thing that it does when it tells you to go South West, and, having no idea which direction is which you go North East. Instead of turning you around Google finds a route. I was taken on an 8 kilometre detour to end up about 200 metres from where I'd started. But the scenery was absolutely brilliant. Hills and pines and mountain passes and cyclists and walkers kitted out in full Decathlon even though they were treading tarmac. More grinning.

We ate with Spanish friends in Elche this last weekend. It's become my habit to take local products from Pinoso - sausage (think salami rather than Wall's bangers), olive oil, cheese, wine, cakes and pastries. This time it was a selection of the sliced sausages, some perusas (the melt in the mouth cakes often served with the sweet mistela wine) and a toña (a sort of sweet bread in a loaf sized loaf) and only one bottle of wine. We talked about the cakes and the sausage for at least 10 minutes before we drifted to the inevitable discussion about paella. What it should and shouldn't contain, which is the most authentic sort of paella and when does paella become rice and things? Jamie Oliver's crime of adding chorizo to something he dared to call paella was still fresh in the Spaniards minds even though it happened in 2016! It is simply outstanding how easy it is to have a conversation with Spaniards about food. Amusing too. 

We went to see a "pop group" called Pinpilinpussies at L'Escorxador. The band is two women; angry young women in the John Osborne sense. Angry about how women are treated and angry about the dominance of Madrid in Spanish life. They were very loud and the sound balance was completely off. I couldn't work out most of their English language lyrics nor their between song patter in Spanish. My partner didn't like the concert at all but I sort of did. I thought it was full of life, it reminded me of my outings to see punk bands in the mid seventies. I like the Escorxador as a venue. I thought seeing a band, who have a certain following, for 3€ per seat was incredible. I just love the easy and cheap access there is to culture in Spain.

For some reason there's some sort of thing about the month of Thursdays before Lent in Alicante. In Monóvar there are walks to celebrate the time honoured tradition of trudging into the countryside for a bit of an afternoon snack. In Aspe they too go out picnicking on the last Thursday before Lent and that has turned into a sort of community based musical review show - las Jiras. The Monóvar picnic was nothing special but I was glad I did it. The Jiras I enjoyed because it was full of that community continuity feeling that pervades so many Spanish events. I suspect that people I know would describe Las Jiras as a bunch of people singing badly in stupid fancy dress. I found it life affirming.

I have more, all from this year. Moors and Christians in Bocairent, Carnaval, the book club, talks by famous writers, the Med sparkling and free art galleries but I promised brevity.

A long, long grind

I've been trying to learn Spanish since Methuselah was a lad. I remember being well pleased when clay tablets gave way to parchment and quills. Alright, not quite that long ago but it really was a textbook with cassettes and Sunday morning programmes on BBC2.

In my case the catalyst was a trip to Barcelona. At Victoria coach station I bought a ticket for the first bus going to somewhere warm. It was nearly Greece. Barcelona was great. There was no doubt that I was going back. When I had trouble getting a beer in Tarragona my task was clear. My partner of the time thought my plan to learn Spanish was a stupid whim. Back in Blighty, at our local bookshop, she steered me towards the cheapest Spanish textbook; the cheaper the book the less money wasted. She was very surprised when I signed up for evening classes and astounded when I went back after Christmas.

I didn't really learn much Spanish in the classes but I learned a lot of Spanish because of them. I think the classes were a couple of hours long, so, given a ten week term and three terms a year, a full year would be 60 hours of class time with maybe a dozen in the class. The big advantage, for me, of classes, and I've done a lot on and off, has always been that they give a structure and an impetus. I did as my teachers bade. I wrote essays, I ground through vocabulary lists. I repeated and repeated verb tables to learn the tenses. I might not be able to use those verbs in a real sentence but it did mean that I could recite, parrot fashion, all sorts of tenses and all sorts of irregular verbs. Years later, living here, teaching English to earn a crust, I recognised my verb table recitation mirrored in the way that my students knew the alphabet or the numbers. They could recite the 26 letters or count to 100 easily enough but write a random number on the board or ask them to spell their email address and they were up that famous creek and paddleless.

That first flirtation with evening classes only lasted a couple of years. My spanish learning became a bit on and off. A couple of weeks wandering around Extramadura or Christmas and New Year in Mallorca as a holiday rekindled the spark. Sometimes I'd sign on for a course and struggle through a whole academic year, or not. Sometimes I'd just buy a new book and CD course.

I'm still trying to learn Spanish. I've been able to order a beer for a while though I still sometimes, exasperatingly, get that wrinkled brow, pulled up nose look from the servers. I repeatedly have to wage a little battle with the waiter or waitress to continue to speak Spanish as they decide that their English is better than my Spanish. I was once in a restaurant with a woman who lives with a Spanish man, who speaks Spanish to her husband's family all the time, who is more Spanish in manner and custom than British. She found herself confronted with a waitress who was determined to speak to her in English. In a sly way that rather cheered me up, it reassured me that I wasn't alone, but it made her very, very cross.

Unless you're one of those people that has a natural flair for languages take it from me that none of the quick fixes really work. For most of us it's pure graft. Even if you are an intuitive learner you can't order egg and chips without knowing at least three words - probably four in Spanish. In my opinion it's the speaking, being in a conversation, that actually makes the difference. Listening to Spanish, reading Spanish, writing Spanish all help but unless you can talk, listen and respond then you're not really there. If you live with a Spanish speaker or you pass a good part of your day in a place that speaks Spanish (school, office etc) you'll probably get pretty good pretty quickly. For the rest of us, we're not going to get very far when ordering a coffee or turning down the carrier bags in the supermarket is the most practice we get.

The methods are manifold. I sit in a bar and swap English for Spanish. I sit in front of my computer and swap English for Spanish with a bloke who lives in Toledo. I pay good money to sit at my computer and talk at someone in Gandía who occasionally corrects me. I read nearly all my novels in Spanish, I go to a book club, I watch some Spanish telly, I go to some Spanish films at the cinema, I go on walks and visits and to talks which are delivered in Castilian, I listen to several podcasts a week, most of which come from Spanish radio so that I pick up a bit of Spanish life and culture as I grapple with the language. Generally I've given up on textbooks and things designed specifically for learners but, for reasons of loyalty, I still watch the videos, produced by a Spanish woman and her British husband, the couple who first introduced me to podcasts years and years ago. The only text book I still know to find on my bookshelves is Neil Creighton's Spanish Grammar book - Punto por Punto. It's not a good read but it has been useful over and over and over.

When it comes down to it though it's still talking, listening, reading and writing. The videos on YouTube, the WhatsApp messages to the plumber, the podcasts, the online classes, the interactive quizzes, the Zoom or Skype based intercambios, the TikTok grammar lessons and the Deepl language translator are all very shiny but they offer very little fundamentally different from my very first BBC text book backed up by the tapes and the TV programmes. It's the access that has changed. Living in Spain accessing Spanish is dead easy but, even if I were in the UK or in somewhere like Botswana I wouldn't now need to tune in to the exterior service of Radio Moscow on the short wave to listen to Spanish. 

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¡Dígame!, the CD cover in the photo, was the course book, a BBC course book, that went with that first course at Peterborough Regional College. The CD came after the cassette.