Hither and thither

I like to do things, to go places, to get out to Spain. To concerts, to parades, to fairs and fiestas, to restaurants and landmarks, to open days, exhibitions and guided walks. There always seems to be lots going on all over the place. I've never been quite able to decide whether this is because there are a lot of things on offer or because I've got into the habit of hunting them out. It may be a combination of both. It may also be because of where we happen to be based. Pinoso is surrounded by other towns and, as everywhere does things, the cumulative effect is impressive.

When we first got here there were a whole load of new cultural experiences to tap into. A lot of the information came from posters. It was both comical and frustrating that the posters often failed to give basic information - when or where - for instance. That's because the posters were a gentle reminder to a local audience. As the event hadn't changed in years, everyone who mattered, the locals, knew when, where, what, why and how. The posters weren't for bewildered foreigners. This was in the days when I used a bit of paper and a pen to remember the forthcoming events. Now I'm much more likely to take a photo of the poster. More usually though the information bypasses the poster and comes in a different way. Everywhere has a website, an Instagram account, a Facebook page or a WhatsApp channel. I've signed up to lots. Some of them are so prolific that I feel overwhelmed with the amount of information they pump out - Alicantelivemusic, for instance, sent me 12 Telegram messages yesterday. I do read them, well, not always, but generally. The alternative inertia might be an even more alarming alcoholic obesity achieved by never leaving my armchair in front of the telly.

Each week, well most weeks, I do a bit of a search. I have a long list of webpages, and especially Facebook pages, to check. I'm not particularly rigorous about the list; I skip some, I double up on others and there are reams of emails to check from concert promoters, festival organisers and any number of town hall tourist offices. The truth is it's deadly boring. It's painstaking and it's dull. I enter the events on my online Google calendar so they travel with me from laptop to mobile phone. I know, even as I one-fingeredly type the entries into my calendar, that I will never go to the Haydn concert, because it costs 35€ and it's on in Moraira, nor will I go to the new and up-and-coming band because they're on at eleven at night in a noisy club full of people fifty years younger than me. But, despite moaning, constantly, about what a pain it all is, every time I look through my photo albums and see some mad fiesta, the reminder of some guided tour we did, the incredible costumes, the photos of hundreds of people escorting or carrying on their shoulders a sumptuously dressed wooden doll kilometre after kilometre to some hillside chapel then I know that the search is a small price to pay for the experiences.

Just to give you some idea, this is the basic weekly checklist I start with: 

Pinoso, Alicante Telegram, El Buen Vigía Alicante, Trips in Murcia, Fundación Mediterránea, Fundación Paurides, Los secretos de la fachada, La Llotja, Paranimf Alicante, Eventos Murcia, Museo de la Universidad de Alicante, Turismo Región de Murcia, Bancatix Murcia, Teatro Romea, Gran Teatro, Teatro Chapi, Teatro Principal,Teatro Concha Segura, La Romana, Villena, ADDA, Yecla, Cigarreras, Agenda Cultural Alicante, Petrer, Elda, Monóvar, Jumilla, Teatro Vico, Elche, Aspe, Novelda, Alcoy, Sax, L'Escorxador, Facebook in general, and Instant ticket.

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If you don't know what I'm talking about, or you don't believe me, my photo albums are accessible at the top of the page. On PCs and laptops underneath the subheading about an old, fat man. On my Android mobile phone, the albums seem to be listed in a drop-down menu called home. Either way, they are clickable links named for the month and year.

That's entertainment

Over the last few weeks we've been in theatres a little more regularly than usual. We saw Carmina Burana in Alcoy, Totally Tina in the Gran Teatre in Elche, Miguel Poveda down at the ADDA in Alicante and then a classical orchestra at The Chapí in Villena. The last thing I went to here in Pinoso was quite a while ago now though, the Akram Trio, at the tail end of November. While we go to theatres for bands, opera, dance, music, zarzuelas and even magic we usually shy away from plays. Too tricky for our dodgy Spanish. 

As I hope you know Culebrón is a part of Pinoso and Pinoso has a population of about 8,500. In the English countryside Pinoso would be no more than a village but here it's definitely a town - probably because it provides town like services. One of those services is a theatre, the frequently used Auditorio Emilio Martínez Sáez. Settlements even smaller than Pinoso boast a theatre. Nearby Algueña (1300 people) and Salinas (1600) both have theatres and so (obviously) does Abanilla with over 6,000 people. It's something that seems to be almost taken for granted in Spain.

The theatres are all different but I'm optimistically going to see similarities and categories. Pinoso's theatre is a style much like the Teatro Cervantes in Petrer. Reasonably modern with quite a lot of wood panelling and fairly comfy seating. These venues often look as though refurb time is fast approaching. Then there are the theatres that have a bit grander design - stalls, dress circle, boxes and sometimes even gods. Examples here would be the Castelar over in Elda, the Principal in Monóvar or the Wagner down in Aspe. My favourites though are the plush velvet and gold leaf theatres lit with a sumptuous golden light; the ones with ceiling murals, with chandeliers and with the full panoply of stalls, boxes, upper and dress circles. The Chapí in Villena, the Vico in Jumilla, the Concha Segura in Yecla, the Principal in Alicante, the Gran Teatro in Elche and the Romea in Murcia all fall into this class. Strangely the last couple of places we've been to have been new to us and both have been modern. The Calderón in Alcoy was very swish, very modern, very comfy and the ADDA (Auditorio de la Diputación de Alicante) in Alicante was a bit of an eye opener to a country bumpkin like me. Much grander than most of our habitual haunts but all white, all synthetic materials, all wide open spaces. Built in 2011 it reminded me of the Palau de les Arts in the City of Art and Science up in Valencia but, as it wasn't designed by Santiago Calatrava, bits weren't falling off as we sat there!

It's surprisingly easy to book up events in these theatres nowadays. In the past it was often a pain - phone calls, box office pickups and approved agents with tickets. It's still sometimes the case. In the summer I had to go to a book shop in Novelda to buy tickets for a musical in the Cultural Centre in the town and, back in September, we chose to go to Yecla and stand in a queue to get first dibs on the seats for the Jazz Festival. If we'd waited for the Internet sale to open the next day we wouldn't have got the seats we wanted. Generally though the ticket platforms now make it cakelike. For the great majority of the theatres (and other venues around here) Instanticket is the most common platform, though some places use different ticket agencies. Prices vary. In the paraninfo of the University of Alicante (which isn't really a theatre) or in municipal theatres (like Pinoso) the performances are often free or a few Euros. In commercial theatres the  prices reflect the cost of staging the event - opera tickets are more expensive than ones for a string quartet for instance. I expect to pay somewhere in the teens, sometimes in the mid twenties and I baulk at anything over 30 unless I'm dead keen. 

Should you decide to give it a go, and you haven't before, I can't really help with the nomenclature of the bits of a theatre. I thought it was pretty simple, Patio de Butacas for the stalls, the seats lined up on the ground floor facing the stage. Anfiteatro was the first floor circle, again facing the stage but one floor up and with tiered seating. Another floor up, with your head against the ceiling, el Paraiso, the Gods usually called the chicken coop, el gallinero, by we hoi polloi. Along the side walls, so you have to look obliquely to see the stage, are the Palcos, the boxes. There's usually no problem with buying just a couple of seats in a box. I was also told, at the Concha Segura in Yecla, that the boxes that are at the same level as the stage, a little above the stalls, are called plateas but I've just been looking at the Instanticket diagrams of the theatres and every one seems to use variations of the name. It's all very graphic though, on all of the ticketing sites, so it's easy to work out. Knowing that Escenario is the stage  you just decide whether you want to look up to the stage, down to the stage, straight on to the stage or obliquely to the stage then check the availability and the prices. 

When I did the tour of the Wagner in Aspe we were told that they had never sold all the seats for any performance, that there were always unsold seats dotted here and there even for the most popular events. The ticket selling sites may say the theatre is sold out but it's not, apparently, quite true. This is because there is both national and regional legislation about how tickets should be sold. Here in Valencia 5% of tickets have to be held back to be sold at performance time from the box office. 

And if you don't fancy a performance most of the theatres do guided tours from time to time. The Teatro Chapí, named for a Villena born composer of the very traditionally Spanish opera form called zarzuela, for example does a visit one Sunday each month. As with nearly anything that involves a guided tour, from castles and museums to old air raid shelters the tourist offices are the place to ask.

Moving forward together

I'm sure you've heard my theory before that you don't learn popular culture; if you're born somewhere then the culture is yours be that food, music, TV programmes or YouTube influencers. You can't help it. The talk at work, the talk at school, the stuff your parents tell you, the memes and gifs that turn up on your phone, the little snippets you read in the newspaper all help to make sure that you know what's going on. That's how, I suppose, I learned about MOTs, Trooping the Colour, Premium Bonds, the Boat Race, laverbread, the RNLI Lifeboats, Spaghetti Junction, Engelbert Humperdinck, driving on the left and how to make tea. 

Changes in language are similar. Ordinary people are in charge. Words and phrases come and go. Some old academic bloke might argue that there is a perfectly good phrase to describe keeping a safe distance during a pandemic but everyone else is going to say social distancing whether he likes it or not. Somebody once asked me about how you decide that someone is competent in a particular language. What's the threshold for somebody to be able to say that they speak English, Spanish or Swahili? Some people have less education than others, some have learned more vocabulary, some have different ideas about how language should be used but who is to say which form is better than another? What says that the Radio 4 pundit talking about early 20th Century Art speaks better English than the geezer with the barrow having a beer in the Queen Vic? Where is the level? If an ordinary Spaniard doesn't know a word that came from a novel does that make the novelist highbrow or the non word knower lowbrow or are they simply different people?

This does mean that some things that come easily to locals require much more effort from we outsiders. I know a little bit about Spanish history and politics because I've made an effort to do so but it's much more difficult to latch on to everyday things. Consider, for instance, events; things like sports matches, theatre, concerts, guided visits, exhibitions and demonstrations. Sometime, shortly after we got here I had a bit of an email battle with one of the local tourist offices which had published a calendar of events. Most were without dates. Why bother to put dates when Mother's day is always the first Sunday in May and "everybody" knows that or when it's common knowledge that International Book Day is the 23rd April. I suppose that, among Britons, Christmas Day wouldn't necessarily get a date either but it does suppose that everyone shares the same knowledge. There was a time when Ramadan and Diwali would have passed unremarked in the UK but, nowadays, that isn't the case. The argument I made to the tourist office was that they needed to remember that not everyone in their town shared the same, Spanish, Catholic background. 

I was thinking about this yesterday just after I'd spent ages trawling through the Facebook pages and other tourist offices and town halls websites to see what sort of things are happening locally over the summer. Some of those things are repetitive, they turn up regularly  - like Burns Night, The Grand National, the Lewes Bonfire, Trooping the Colour, Turkey and sprouts, Glastonbury or Glyndebourne - whilst other things are one offs - concerts, weddings, race meetings, car rallies, election hustings, break dance competitions and so on. Some are things that you might anticipate and plan for. I don't know when Henley Regatta is or Royal Ascot or the Manx TT but it's relatively easy to find out and plan for them if you fancy getting involved. Here in Spain I might do the same for Holy Week in Malaga or the candle festival in Aledo. The flip side is that the only way to know that Villena tourist office is going to do a guided tour of the village of Zafra is to check their publicity. Checking Villena's website, well that and the other thirty that go along with it, is turning into a right slog.

Mind you finding out about local things isn't always such mind numbing toil. I was in Castilla la Mancha the other day and I went for a set menu in a restaurant. One of the dishes was called Galianos which I'd never heard of but turned out to be a pheasant and rabbit dish. I was pondering Galianos and its position in "the popular database". My guess is that many Spaniards wouldn't know what Galianos is either but I also suppose that the situation would be akin to me eating with my, relatively young, nephews. Imagine bubble and squeak or toad in the hole was on the menu. Ny nephews may never have heard of them, they're old fashioned foods after all. I have though so we could pool our experience. In return I presume they would help me out with what to order in a Korean restaurant on the basis that they have probably eaten Korean when I haven't. 

Some things we just know. Some things we learn. Some things we have to search out.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored

We went to a couple of things yesterday. One was reassuringly Spanish but the other followed a disturbing new trend.

There was a fundraising event in Novelda. Some local bands, names unknown to us, were playing a mini festival to raise money for victims of the flooding of a few weeks ago. We turned up a bit after, not much after, the advertised start time of 1pm and, as we expected, absolutely nothing was going on. Lots of people with pony tails, black t-shirts and big bellies were faffing around with bits of wire onstage but no bands. Obviously 1pm comes as a surprise every time. Normal, predictable, foreseeable behaviour. The bands kicked off with the normal, predictable and foreseeable twenty minutes to half an hour delay.

The bar was another surprise for the organising team. The surprise was that people arriving might want to buy a drink from the bar. The system was predictable enough. You couldn't pay with cash at the bar you had to buy tickets first - this is a common, but not universal, system for events with temporary staff. Someone known and trusted handles the money so that the the volunteers and the temps are not subjected to temptation. Usually, but not always, it's reasonably obvious that you need to buy tickets. This time there was nothing. The price list on the bar had € signs to help maintain the illusion that cash was acceptable right to the end. The woman in front of me in the queue was clutching her purse; you need tickets said the server and then we all knew. The woman and I walked the couple of hundred metres back to the entrance to buy tickets to swap for beer. Predictably there were no tickets. The organising team, taken unawares, by the sudden arrival of 1pm at 1pm, hadn't thought to arm the ticket selling staff with tickets. The tickets arrived in due course and then we were able to buy them to pay for beer. Now this is all pretty usual. Things starting late. Things suddenly happening. As Spanish as tortilla de patatas. It's sort of re-assuring because it's expected.

Later in the day we went to the theatre. We went to the splendid Concha Segura Theatre in Yecla. Always worth the visit just for the building. We'd booked late, the theatre was busy but not full. We'd reserved a couple of places in a box and nobody else joined us so we had a great view and a comfy spot. Curtain up time was advertised as 8pm. We've done a lot of theatre in our time here and I would estimate that twenty minutes delay is the norm. But not last night. No, the turn off your mobile phone the performance is about to begin announcement, was made before ten past. This is a bit worrying. I was at the theatre on Friday night too, in Pinoso, and Javier was up on stage to welcome everyone around ten past ten just ten minutes after advertised start. For West Side Story down in Alicante about three weeks ago that was nearer on time than usual too. I've only just realised but there's a pattern emerging. Spanish theatre times are closing in on the advertised time. I hope I'm not too old to adapt.

How do you say Historical Memory in English?

Spain came up with a novel way to move from the dictatorship of the 40s,50s, 60s and 70s of the last century to the democracy of today. No Truth and Reconciliation Commission here. The people who make the decisions about how things are going to work just decided to forget all about it - the Pacto de olvido - the pact of forgetting. Then, in 2007, the Socialist Government came up with the Historical Memory Law - Ley de Memoria Histórica - which recognised that there were victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, gave rights to the victims and the descendants of victims of the war, and the subsequent Franco dictatorship, and formally condemned the Franco Regime. Now neither Pact of Forgetting nor the Historical Memory sound like good English to me but I hope that you get the idea. The first idea, the pact, is to sweep the mess under the carpet and the second, historical memory, is to get it all out in the open so you can have a fresh start.

The Spanish Partido Popular, the Conservative type party, was against the Historical Memory law. Their argument was that it wasn't good to stir it all up again. The PP was in power between 2011 and 2018 so, in a very Spanish way, the law stayed in place but nobody did very much about it. Mass graves were not opened up so no remains could be handed over to families for reburial, at least not in any systematic or wholesale manner, and simple things like renaming streets dedicated to Francoist heroes or the removal of Francoist symbols was equally half hearted. And Franco himself, or at least his mortal remains, continued at rest in the place of honour inside the gigantic monument that is the Valley of the Fallen - el Valle de los Caídos.

Last night, in Pinoso, I went to one of the events that are "remembering" the Spanish Civil War this week. The events have the snappy title of Jornadas de Memoria Histórica y Democratica de Pinoso - Days of Historical Memory and Democracy of Pinoso - which, once again, you will have to interpret in your own way as I can't think of a decent English language translation. The problem, for me, is that the words represent concepts I don't share so I don't have good language for them.

The event was the showing of a documentary about Miguel Hernández; a poet from Orihuela in Alicante. The documentary is called Las tres heridas de Miguel Hernández and it's on YouTube with subs if you want to have a look. I knew a little about the poet having been to his house a couple of times, listened to radio programmes about him and even read some of his poetry. He stuck with the legitimate government and never renounced his socialist beliefs even when he was captured and locked up after his side had lost the war. He was condemned to death but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he finally died of tuberculosis in a prison in Alicante aged 32.

I enjoyed the documentary. Nicely put together and easy to understand. The people who presented it talked about some of the opposition that there had been to producing the documentary and the passions that Hernández still arouses in his home town of Orihuela. The question and answer session afterwards was really interesting. There were a variety of opinions but there were two obvious strands. The same themes represented in the idea for and against the Historical Memory Law. Sleeping dogs as against washing your dirty laundry in public.