Lunching out

We're going to have takeaway for lunch. I'm almost beside myself with excitement. Well no, not really, but it is a bit of an event. At the moment almost anything at all different is an event. Of course Maggie is going back to work tomorrow so that will be a big change. With the easing of our confinement we could even go and get a beer outside a bar. I'm not sure how keen I am on that. Great to get a beer and to watch the world go past but it's still a world full of masks and latex gloves and having waited eight weeks I don't want to be too previous. Latex, of course, can be quite interesting. I once went to a club in the West End where everyone wore latex. I'm amazed to this day that they let me in wearing my interview suit but I think it was along the same lines as the Sioux not killing the geologist from the wagon train because they considered he was slightly mad grovelling amongst the stones and mumbling to himself. I talked to a bloke in the club, Skin Two, who I initially thought was really fat but then he undid the ankles on his one piece suit and all the sweat ran out and he was much, much thinner. Latex gloves are more reminiscent of internal exams and dentists than a subculture though and I'd prefer that they weren't an everyday part of my life.

So we don't really have to decide about how much advantage we take of the more relaxed movement from tomorrow, with our area being given Phase 1 status, but today we're still pretty much locked in. I can go and get pre-ordered food though perfectly legitimately. It's not takeaway in the same spirit that Madrid chose to look after it's "free school meal" youngsters by sending TelePizza and McDonald's with chicken McNuggets. They eventually stopped that but not before the President of Madrid defended the food saying something like "I'm sure the kids will enjoy pizza and burgers".

No. Eduardo, our local restaurant in the village has a big sign outside to say that they are doing takeaway. And when they're on form I think the food at Eduardo's is good. Anyway I'm all for supporting a local business and you don't get much more local than our restaurant in Culebrón. We're getting croquettes, gachamiga (a sort of doughy, garlicky pancake) and paella with rabbit and snails. I've just realised. The big paella pan will be hot and it could potentially scorch the carpets in the back of the motor so I'd better give up writing and get to lining the boot with cardboard before Eduardo phones.

Enjoy your lunch too.

Tortilla and coffee

Culebrón has a breakfast club. Well sort of. A couple of years ago, it could be even longer, some British chums made me aware of the Wednesday morning group at Eduardo's, our local restaurant, and I started to go along. It was quite a big group, made up of around the same numbers of Britons and Spaniards. I used to go most weeks but I stopped when I started Wednesday morning classes and I never got back into the habit. There used to be a lot of laughing as language failed and gestures and pointing took over so it was good fun as well as an opportunity to catch up on local gossip.  I haven't been for months but, this morning, with nothing better to do I went for a late breakfast and to see who was there. As well as the home team there was Belgian representation. Just me representing the UK and only seven of us.

One of the Spaniards who regularly attends the group spent a lot of her life in the UK and she is hoping to return there in the near future. She's still trying to decide between living near to family or near friends she made here. That set a discussion going about why she wanted to return to a wetter and colder UK and why other ex Breakfast Clubbers had left Spain. I suggested that one of the reasons was that living in Spain, without good Spanish, is quite hard work and that's why lots of older Britons decide they will "go home". In the UK they can, at least, make themselves understood faced with those problems that come with age. I was really surprised with how little sympathy there was for that idea. The group was quite vehement that all that was needed was a little application to learn Spanish and that most Britons are unwilling to make that effort and choose, instead, to live in a British ghetto sidestepping interaction with the locals as much as possible.

Troughing down

It turns out that I've blogged about the restaurant in Culebrón, Restaurante Eduardo, probably nearly as many times as I've eaten there. So I'll try to keep this short.

Last Sunday Maggie put up less resistance to eating at Eduardo's than usual. There were several possible reasons for the feeble struggle that she put up but I think the main one was that, being Mother's Day, she knew that most restaurants would be awash with diners and Eduardo's is never awash. We had house guests too and I think that Maggie recognises that Eduardo's offers a rich and varied Spanish experience. And so it was. There was the usual reluctance, on the part of the restaurant, to be clear about what there was to eat but, in the end, we got a good meal at a good price. At least I think so. You'd have to ask John and Claire what they thought to get a reasonably unbiased view. Maggie and I have entrenched positions about Eduardo's that are unshakeable before logic or reason.

The thing that did surprise me was that the meal was very Pinoso yet it seemed to be new to our friends. Amongst other things we got entremeses, well generally a selection of local embutidos, sausages, in the way that salami and pastrami and black pudding are sausages, rather than bangers, served as part of the range of food before the main dish. For a main we had been offered gazpacho but Maggie's not a big fan of the local gazpacho. It's not the liquid salad gazpacho of Andalucia but a rabbit stew served with a sort of pancake in the base of the bowl and a dough, based on wheat flour, floating in the stew. The gazpacho rejected we went for rice, for paella.

Now John and Claire are no strangers to Spain so they know what a paella is but the local rice is a bit different to the "generic" paella of the coast. Rice dishes are different all over Spain and the one with seafood or chicken and those flat green beans isn't the one in these here parts. Our rice, still cooked in a paella pan, has rabbit and snails with a dry rice only a few grains thick. It's success depends on the quality of the broth that gives the taste to the rice. Something a bit different for J&C.

Rice over it all looked a bit humdrum - Vienetta, variations on creme caramel, industrial cheesecake etc but there was a final flourish when we got perusas. We call them dust cakes because when you bite into them they melt in your mouth. They disappear. Like dust.

An experience, as always, and, I realised, quite Pinoso.

Old familiar ways

I do a Spanish class each Monday. I do it to make sure that I speak at least a little Spanish each week. Otherwise I probably wouldn't. One doesn't need much Spanish in a supermarket or a bar. In my job the expectation is that I speak English. At home Maggie's English is as good as mine and she makes sure that we watch English speaking TV.

Last week the young woman who teaches me Spanish had written a short piece about a local festival. I noticed that it was tagged as level B1. This is one of the levels of the Common European Framework for language learning. The description of level B1 says that someone at this level can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in everyday situations and can deal with most situations likely to arise in an area where the language is spoken. People who do level B1 English courses with me can, in reality, hardly string two words together.

Yesterday we went to see a film called Tarde para la ira which translates as something like Too Late for Anger which is a film that won lots of awards in the Spanish equivalent of the BAFTAs or Oscars. Without the pre film blurb and without the images on the screen I would have had no idea what was happening at all - it was far too hard for me to understand.

Today we went to the village restaurant, Restaurante Eduardo. Restaurants are easy. The language is easy but today I was lost for most of the time. Eduardo is usually a bit vague and the trick is to ask for what you want and see if he has it rather than expect him to tell you what he has. But today I had hardly any idea what he was talking about.

When I was young it would have been an experience that I would have described with the, then, very trendy adjective of surreal. Today, as I wondered what Eduardo was saying the adjective, in English, that sprang to mind after all this time here was pathetic.

Culebrón

Culebrón is one of the satellite villages of the nearby town of Pinoso. Culebrón is an unusual name for a village. Usually the word Culebrón is related to snakes. Big snakes. Or soap operas. Most Spaniards simply presume I'm mispronouncing the name when I tell them where I live. The last headcount said 112 people live here amongst them three British families with a fourth currently rebuilding an old house.

Culebrón is dusty and a browny, beigy, yellow colour. It is not a place where dogs, cats or humans worry too much about traffic - there isn't a lot. It would be wrong to describe Culebrón as pretty but it's not ugly either. There is a complete mix of houses but most tend to be old and look typical for the area - stone built, maybe with concrete facings, blinds and grilles over the windows, various colours of paint jobs. Plenty of oddly shaped concrete and corrugated iron sheds too. There is quite a lot of greenery and trees, mainly pines but with wild figs and pomegranates. The village is surrounded by vineyards, olive and almond groves and lots of crops I don't recognise.

Children are the usual beneficiaries of Spanish wills so houses generally pass to the sons and daughters. Most Spaniards don't like to live in a village so, until we foreigners arrived, country properties were unwanted. In the end the brothers and sisters would agree to keep their inherited house for family use simply to avoid the faff of selling it on. Of course some families live in Culebrón all year round but it really livens up during the summer when people move out of the towns and to the villages where, local wisdom says, it's cooler.

The village is basically cut into two unequal halves by the CV83 road which joins Pinoso to Monóvar. Most of the village is on the North side of the main road but there are a couple of smaller clusters of houses to the South; we're in one of them. Addresses in Culebrón are just numbers. So number 1 is on our side of the village on the slopes of the Sierra del Xirivell. Just on the other side of the main road is Restaurante Eduardo and he's number 17 so my guess is that there are seventeen houses in our little group.

Eduardo's restaurant is one of two businesses that I know of in Culebrón, the other is the Brotons bodega and oil mill. There have been a couple of attempts to make a go of businesses alongside what was the old main road but, like the Bates Motel, moving the road made them untenable. Nowadays, apart from various farmers, the restaurant and the bodega there is no obvious business in Culebrón. There were businesses in the past - for instance a building near to us used to be a shoe factory not so long ago. There are no shops so vans and lorries bring essentials like bread, cheese and bottled gas to some impenetrable timetable. Of course there may be thriving Internet businesses or cottage industries that I don't know about but I rather suspect that the 8Mgb download speed  and the less than 2kw power supply to most houses may be a little limiting.

Services are few and far between. I think a bus stops outside Eduardo's once a day on the run to the hospital down in Elda but that may be old information. The village school which was opposite the little square has long gone, there's a bit of a run down basketball/football area next to the recycling bins, the post box and post delivery is a bit unreliable, the public phone was taken away a while ago but most of the village (not our part) got mains drainage and fire hydrants a few years back. There is also a little chapel, an ermita, used principally during the village fiesta as well as a social centre which is used for community and private events. We do have a Neighbourhood Association which occasionally organises trips and always runs a couple of meals each year.

Our village fiesta is a weekend in July. There is a repetitive programme on the fiesta weekend but it's then when the village is busiest. My guess is that the talking and socialising is infinitely more important than the gachasmigas competition, the chocolate y toña session or even the Saturday evening meal with live music under the pine trees. Mind you for the past three, or maybe four, years there has also been a morning walking and running race organised to coincide with the fiesta and that brings hordes of people to Culebrón.

There's lots more to Culebrón but this piece is already too long so that will have to do. Good place to live, advantages and disadvantages like everywhere, but not too shabby at all.

I am the egg man

We once asked Eduardo if he would sell us a beer. He has a restaurant in the village. He was there, the door was open and the sun was shining but he said no explaining that he didn't run a bar but a restaurant.

That seems to have changed and Eduardo's now has cars parked outside, and presumably customers inside, most mornings. On Wednesday mornings, or at least for the past three Wednesday mornings, we've joined the throng and gone in. We've eaten a late breakfast with some Spanish people from the village and some local, though not Culebronero, Britons. I like going there. I like supporting a local business and I like doing something community.

When we were there today we bought some eggs. One of the expats keeps hens and she has found a ready market for their eggs in our neighbours and in us. A couple of weeks ago Maria was saying that she had been waiting for the man who brings the gas bottles - he hadn't shown up before breakfast time so she'd left the bottles out. He'll just charge me when he catches me in she said - he'll do the same for you she said. The cheese man came today - apparently one of the types he sells is good for deep frying to serve with jam. Next it was the bread man who comes Wednesdays and Fridays  - he'll hang the bread on your gate if you're not in - next to the recharged gas bottles presumably.

This is not earth shattering, It's not even particularly interesting. When I was a boy there were mobile shops everywhere. Moving to this century my sister has ordered all her staple food online from Tesco for years and, as far as I know, if we were about half a kilometre down the road Mercadona would do the same for us here.

The interesting thing is that we have lived here for years and we didn't know. Why didn't we know?

Still in business

Facilities in Culebrón include a post box, a social centre and a dusty basketball cum football area. Business wise we have the bodega and oil mill and rather surprisingly we still have two restaurants. For me these restaurants have the huge advantage that they are only a few hundred metres from our front door. Drinking alcohol with the meal becomes a possibility.

The Nou Culebrón opened in December 2012 and it's still open. Three separate bar restaurants have failed in the same building whilst we've been in the village so congratulations to Amador, the boss, for keeping it going.

The other restaurant Casa Eduardo was open when we arrived in the village and it still is. Eduardo's is best described as singular. The décor, the furniture and the tableware have not, to my knowledge, changed in the nine or so years we've been eating there. My chair was a bit wobbly. The man at the next table tried to find one that wasn't but gave up. The culinary offer is usually local rice or stews but not always.

I quite like going to Eduardo's. The man shows fortitude. I like the idea of supporting a local business. In his way Eduardo is always pleased to see us. He does tend to mumble a bit though and the imprecision of some of his offers along with my faltering language can cause misunderstandings. Maggie is less taken with the place than I am. She remembers the time when we played the inevitable game and she got a sausage.

It usually goes like this. Eduardo lunges; what would you like to eat? We parry; what have you got? For several years it used to get quite vague at this point. Only when you'd not ordered something did you realise that it was available. Mussels, for instance, used to be a regular on the unwritten menu but we were never offered them.  Working on the principle of ask and you shall receive Maggie asked after the availability of the local sausages. Her daring was rewarded with a single sausage served in splendid isolation on a well worn side plate.The last couple of times though the vagueness has gone.  I have been firmly guided towards the correct decision. The answers are restricted to yes or no. "Would you like a nice lamb chop?" I suspect that the kitchen is not overstocked.

Geoff and I went there today. Our meal included the inevitable fried almonds mixed with plain crisps, a basic salad and toasted bread served with sobrasada. Main course was a selection of perfectly good grilled meats with chips. For puddings we were given a choice of two, some hesitation on my part so Eduardo offered both on the same plate. I suppose there may have been very little of either left as we were given very small portions. Coffee too and the whole lot for the two of us was just 20€. Can't complain.

I'm sure Eduardo will still be there when Maggie gets back home in the summer. Something I am sure she is looking forward to