Life in Culebrón

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 ...

It's odd what you stop noticing. Because of her job Maggie talks to lots of people who are new to the area. One of her clients, let's call her Betty, was telling Maggie about an experience in a local restaurant. Betty asked for a red wine to go with her set price meal. She was was pleasantly surprised when the waiter left the bottle on the table. Lots of wine from around here is still not premium product, it's something for drinking, so leaving the bottle with the implicit offer to drink as much of it as you want, is still very common. I wouldn't have noticed. We went to a couple of posher than our usual style of restaurant last weekend. When I was telling a pal about the restaurants. I described them as "the sort of place where they take your cutlery after each course". I realised that the description presumed a little knowledge of everyday restaurant practice. Nowadays I would never think to leave my knife and fork at attention on the plate when I have f...

There's an advert on the telly at the moment for el Corte Inglés, the big Spanish department store, which uses lots of Christmassy images. There are turkeys, there are Christmas trees, there are Santa Claus hats and there's lots of snow. Well I think of them as Christmassy images but that may not be the same for lots and lots of Spaniards. I can only generalise here but I think that Christmas is an incredibly important time for Britons. Even if it isn't, in fact, much more than a couple of days of family arguments, overeating and snoozing in front of the telly the build up to it, the folklore around it, the customs associated with it, are deeply entrenched in British culture. Put a picture of a robin, in the snow, on the front of a greetings card and it's a Christmas card and Christmas cards are one of the symbols, the rites, of Christmas even if you're going to do it all on Facebook this year. Although Britons eat chocolates all year round most British houses d...

I talked to my mum on the phone today. She asked me how my birthday had gone on Wednesday. She apologised for only having sent a card and a Facebook message and for not having phoned. I didn't ring she said because I guessed you would be out for a meal. My mum was wrong, I wasn't out to eat. After work I'd come home and set about a bottle of birthday brandy in front of the telly. As we talked I realised that it had never crossed my mind to go out for an evening meal. In fact we are booked in for a celebratory lunch on Saturday at a well known and well regarded local restaurant. In the dim and distant past when I used to come to Spain on holiday the routine was simple enough. Something light for lunch and then a nice meal in the evening. That's the way my British upbringing told me to do it. The equivalent of the lunchtime sandwich at your desk with something cooked in the evening. Generally though that's not the Spanish case. Obviously Spaniards do celebrate b...

The man on the phone asked me if he was speaking to don Christopher. I told him that he was but whatever he was selling I didn't want it. He didn't need to say anything else. Nobody uses don unless they wear headsets to talk on the phone. He assured me that he was just checking to see if I'd got a particular piece of junk mail. He didn't try to sell me anything so maybe it really was just a check on whoever does their bulk mailing. I don't like being called don. It's supposed to be courteous. It's used with your first name rather than using the surname. It's a bit antique but I simply don't like people deferring to me and I particularly don't like it when it's a sham deference. Usted, unlike don, isn't archaic. If, like me, you were taught French at school, then the Spanish usted is equivalent to the vous form. The polite form of you. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? rather than Je t'aime. The idea is that usted is used for people...

The advert that featured the line Coo-ee Mr Shifter was broadcast in 1971. In the Seventies PG, the tea people, not only abused their plantation workers (allegedly) they also abused animals. Chimps dressed in clothes mimicked human actions in a series of TV adverts. Mr Shifter was a piano mover. The idea of workers, workmen, having tea breaks and being offered tea by the home owners where they are working is a part of British culture. There is a frost on the ground outside our house today as I type. We have two blokes, José Miguel and Manuel his brother, tearing up the old concrete and laying a path between front and back gardens and building a patio. They started work yesterday. It was cold then too. Maggie asked if they wanted a cup of tea, or as they're continentals, a cup of  coffee. They politely turned it down and waved a bottle of water at her as though that were a suitable alternative. When I was a Mr Shifter in the furniture shop here and I delivered stuff to Briti...

It's not a complex idea. When I was a lad braziers were the natural complement to those little striped tents that workmen used to set up over what were then called manhole covers. In Spain they put them under round tables. Braziers or braseros are, at their most basic, simple bowls which fit into a circular support underneath a round table. There are electric ones nowadays of course but the one we were presented with today, when we went for a birthday meal, was more like a wrought iron version of a parrot's cage. Glowing embers are put inside the bowl, the bowl is popped under the table and a heavy tablecloth draped over the table and your knees. The heat captured under the table warms the lower half of your body. A very personal sort of heater. The modern thermostaically controlled electric heaters do the same job and have the advantage over the old fashioned, real fire type. They don't either set fire to their users or poison them with carbon monoxide.

I thought he wasn't going to come. He didn't send me the message he'd promised yesterday and he didn't answer my text messages. When I finally plucked up the courage to phone he said he'd be here by 12.30. I raced from La Unión to be here on time. An hour after the appointed time he still hadn't arrived and I sent another message. After lunch was the reply, around four. He arrived about half past but I must say when he did start the work was impressive. He had something like a billhook cum machete as his only real tool. He sharpened it to start and kept stopping to sharpen it. I think he said it was called a márcola but I may be wrong. He set about the plam tree with a verve slicing off the outer layer with a mixture of brute strength and the sharpened blade. Our ladder would only reach to a certain height so for the top of the tree he strapped himself into a harness, braced himself against the tree and continued to slice off the dead covering and lots of ...

I seem to have started to say uuf! when something goes wrong. This is a difficult word to spell. It's not the same as pah! or oops! It's more like a phew! Spanish cockerels go kiri kiri kiri. Obviously no Spaniard has ever heard a cockerel. If they had they would know that cockerels go cock a doodle doo. It's the same with the strange half words, half grunts that we, and they, use to express surprise, to explain away a small mishap to be sarcastic and the like. PG Wodehouse knew that we Brits made specific noises under specific conditions. I remember the books emphasising HAH!! when the hapless hero was caught out by the stern and  haughty aunt long before his final salvation thanks to Lord Emsworth, the Port and Lemon or Jeeves. It is only in the last few days that I've caught on to the fact that Spaniards emit different non word sounds to us. This explains why one of my colleagues often seems to dismiss most of my humorous comments as mere tomfoolery with a ha...

Sorry to be indelicate but imagine we are in the toilet. No, not we, you or I, separately, apart,  in different but similar toilets. The sit down toilet, not the stand up one. This toilet is in Spain and on the wall there is a notice which says "Do not throw the paper in the toilet" - well it says it in Spanish but the translation is good. Now paper, papel, is a bit of a multi purpose word. For instance the car parking tickets are often papeles and you can use it for receipts and other things made from paper. The very first time I saw it I thought ah, they mean paper towels and the like but no, alongside the stool was a wastebasket full of soiled toilet paper. Now Spain is a country blessed with an interminable supply of flies. Unsurprisingly they are attracted by this copious quantity of food. The original concept of  the waste basket isn't particularly pleasant but add in a cloud of flies and it becomes decidedly nasty. For years I presumed that this wa...