Slightly off

I signed up for a weekly Spanish course yesterday. I haven't quite given up on the language yet - despite what Maggie says, and what I know to be true, that I will never speak Spanish adequately.

I have just finished a blog post. Looking for information I was wading trough official bulletins, where laws and official notices are published. I could understand them but I wouldn't pretend that it's easy reading. It's the same with books, I normally read in Spanish but, at the moment, I'm reading a book written by an Englishman and it seemed perverse to read it in translation. I have to admit that it's much more comfortable reading in English.

We took Maggie's car for an ITV yesterday, the road worthiness check. The tester took the car off us and drove it through the various test bays himself. I have the feeling that he was only doing that with us immigrants. Easier to do it himself than explain the various actions he required of us.

Bank yesterday too to comply with some legislation. No problem really but the odd falter so that I chose to be economical with the truth rather than explain a complicated situation.

I stupidly lost a pair of sunglasses. I went to the three shops that I'd been in to ask if I'd left them there. In two of the three cases I stumbled slightly as I asked. Nothing serious, just a slip of a tense that needed correction or a falter over the pronunciation of a word, not a problem I notice with English.

I wanted an appointment with my accountant. I used WhatsApp to avoid a telephone conversation.

A Spanish friend asked me for my opinion on a service he was considering buying. At the end of my reply, which I rewrote several times before running it through Google translate and a spell checker, I added my usual - I hope you can understand what I meant to say.

Easier to buy the poor supermarket meat than ask (and queue) in a butcher.

And so on.

It's nice living here. It's home. But the truth is that language affects every aspect of everything we do from watching the telly to getting a beer. Anyone who isn't fluent in both the culture and the language will always be a bit out of it.

The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mercedes

Arturo Perez Reverte is a well known Spanish author. I've read a fair few of his books. Even in Spanish he's easy to read and often there is an informative element to the novels which I like. The last one I read was called Un día de cólera. It was written back in 2007 but it was new to me and I found it fascinating. It was about the 2nd of May street revolt in Madrid in 1808. We're with Napoleon, Trafalgar, Arthur Wellesley and all that. It's one of the few times that Britain and Spain have been on the same side. It's a period we bumped into a lot when Maggie lived in Ciudad Rodrigo because the town had been one of the battle sites as Wellington moved against the French inside Spain.

Intrigued by the Perez Reverte book I hunted around for a book to increase my knowledge of the War of Independence (Peninsula War) without overtaxing my age enfeebled brain. A likely candidate was a book by a chap called Adrian Galsworthy. I think the name's a giveaway. He's not Spanish and I decided it was stupid to read a book translated into Spanish from an original English language source. The clincher was that it was cheaper in English than Spanish.

It was Father's day last week. I got a day off work. Adventurers that we are we went to the MARQ archaeological museum in Alicante to see a temporary exhibition about the frigate Mercedes. The Mercedes was a Spanish sailing ship sunk by the Royal Navy in 1804. The Mercedes, along with the Medea, Fama and Clara, was on it's way back from America to Spain loaded with taxes for the Spanish exchequer, generally in the form of silver pieces of eight. The ships were bound from Montevideo which was, at the time, a part of Spain referred to as the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. Just one day out from home the Spanish ships were intercepted by four British frigates. The British Government knew about the money on the ships and they were keen that it did not eventually find its way into Napoleon's war chest. Europe was involved in persistent warfare at the time with alliances being formed and broken constantly. Despite Britain and Spain being at peace at the time the British ships demanded that the Spanish ships follow them to a British port. The Spanish ships refused and the commander of the British detachment, Sir Graham Moore, opened fire. During the battle the Mercedes exploded with the loss of two hundred and sixty three lives. The British won and the three Spanish ships were all taken to Britain.

Two hundred and three years later a treasure hunting company, Odyssey, found the ship and plundered what was left of the cargo. They didn't take much care about the archaeological merit of the ship and seemed instead to be simply after the treasure. Odyssey were taken to court in the United States and the Spanish Government eventually won the case. Everything found on the remains of the Mercedes was returned to Spain and much of it was used in the exhibition we saw. It wasn't at all bad. Spanish museums have definitely improved in the last ten years (see last post.)

Back in Culebrón with a cup of tea in one hand and the Galsworthy book in the other I read this morning about an attack on Copenhagen by the British in 1807. Apparently the Danes had a nice little fleet. Denmark was neutral in the wars being waged all over Europe but the British Government was concerned that Napoleon would take no notice of that neutrality and go and steal their ships. If he did that the supremacy of the Royal Navy might be threatened. So we British went and nabbed the ships first.

But for living in Spain I don't think I'd ever have known about the tiny footnote of history that is the Mercedes. And what is this about fighting the Danes? Isn't that the place with Lurpak and Carlsberg? Interesting stuff you find in novels and museums.

La Tamborada Nacional

I was a bit of a celebrity in Jumilla last night. Lots of people shouted at me just before they grabbed their friends around the shoulder, smiled broadly and stared in my direction. They wanted me to take their photo. Nowadays photos are everywhere. Every event is a forest of mobile phone cameras. So why the excitement? I can only put the interest down to the stick, the mono-pod, that was attached to the bottom of my camera. They presumably thought I was press or at least a proper photographer.

It didn't help though. Despite having racked the speed on the camera up to ISO 2000 and having the stick to help steady the camera every single one of the photos I took was blurred. Mind you I've still loaded lots of them up to various photo sharing websites because they're sort of friendly.

The information about the tamborada was a bit vague. No, it was a lot vague. A tamborada is a drum event; people walk around beating drums. The name is presumably based on the Spanish word for one sort of drum, un tambor. I've been to one other tamborada, in Hellin in Albacete province. There it's a pretty easy story. During Holy Week the church processions included official drummers. Over the years the drummers escaped the confines of the formal processions and simply wandered around beating drums at Easter time. Nowadays the mayhem of drummers wandering the streets in packs is part of Hellin's culture. They drum for hours on end. In Tobarra, in Albacete again, they drum for 104 hours without stopping from the Wednesday afternoon of Holy Week through to midnight on Easter Sunday. I've heard of tamboradas in Cuenca, in Andorra in Teruel, in San Sebastian. There are tamboradas all over Spain. Most of the tamboradas are associated with Holy Week

So before we went I vaguely assumed that I had simply missed this particular event in Jumilla in previous years. Jumilla is in Murcia but only 35 km from home. I supposed that the tamborada was in some way associated with religion and with Easter. After all the drum association in Jumilla is called Asociación de Tambores Santísimo Cristo de la Sangre, or something like the Holy Blood of Christ Drum Association. It turns out though that this particular drum group was only formed in 2005 and is named for one of the statues in a local monastery. It's strange actually. Spain has a long Catholic tradition but I wouldn't say that it's a particularly religious country nowadays. The Catholic Church has a long history of siding with the oppressor rather than the oppressed (particularly in the last century) yet socialist mayors and leftist politicians in general seem quite content to pop out and kiss the feet of the Virgin or carry the patron saint of the town on their shoulders. Left leaning administrations happily pay out thousands of euros for fiestas which usually have a religious theme at their core. I suppose it's something similar to the way that people who haven't been to church for years are determined to have some sort of cleric officiate their wedding and why I don't kick up too much of a fuss if someone invites me to a Christian funeral or baptism.

Anyway, after going back and forth on a whole range of websites it now seems that the event we were at in Jumilla last night was simply a coming together of the drum associations from all over Spain. It has taken place in other towns with a tradition of drumming in past years. And, despite lots of the drummers having Christian insignia on their tunics and variations on penitent type robes this was nothing more than a celebration of drumming.

Excellent fun. The drum was the main protagonist but, being Jumilla, there was a wine event tacked on. We were getting a glass of wine from the Casa de la Ermita stand and Maggie mentioned her Secret Wine Spain venture and the chap suddenly clicked. He knew her site and he knew Maggie's name. His girlfriend had a drum though. People everywhere were beating drums. Lots were in organised groups, representatives of their towns or their association but there were several families too or just bunches of pals. We left long before we could take the offer of the bargain breakfast at one of the food stalls but my ears are still ringing nonetheless.

Cold calling

I usually don't hear my mobile phone ring. So, if you phone the chances are I will miss the call. If I do hear it ring the phone is often in the depths of my bag or I'm using it to play music or I'm wearing gardening gloves. By the time I find the phone, disconnect the earphones or get my hands free the other person is long gone and I am left shouting, uselessly, into dead air. Sometimes I just decide not to answer. If it's a number I don't know or one with the identity withheld then I tend to let them be. The chances are that it will be somebody trying to sell me something or someone who has dialled the wrong number.

I don't get a lot of calls anyway. This morning, unusually, I got two, I heard them both and I answered them too. The wrong number was absolutely certain that I should be his brother even if I wasn't. My insistence that I was called Chris and this was my number seemed to cut no ice with him. No, this is my brother's number, coño, he said.

The other call was from the Red Cross. Now my method, if I do answer either the landline or my mobile to an unknown number, is to be like that Dom Joly chap shouting down the phone and trying to sound as English as possible. This scares many more than half of the cold callers away. Why bother trying to sell something to someone who won't understand when you have a call list of five hundred numbers to go? For the few who persevere a bit of "what?, eh?" does the trick. Spaniards make exactly the same complaints about cold callers and call centre workers as Brits do - the callers have undecipherable accents, the calls come when you're eating or in the shower - so I'm sure that the callers are used to having the phone slammed down on them. Somebody sounding like a half wit must be light relief for them.

Anyway the Red Cross is an acceptable call. I have a lot of time for the Spanish Red Cross. Maggie has been giving them a monthly donation for a while now and I'd decided that the next time they called I would say yes. And I did. The woman on the phone was very pleasant. She understood when I spelled my email address which is often a phone nightmare and I was in a quiet bar and even had my bank details to hand so that, all in all, it was a good call. She did ask me though if I were German.

Now that one's out of the way though I have even less reason to pick up.

Gardening

I don't really have much to tell you about gardening. The problem is that it's over a week since I blogged anything and, as I've spent a lot of those day in the garden doing the sort of damage that is usually reserved for logging companies in the Amazon, it was all I couuld think of to write about.

We have a garden that I think measures about 1,000 square metres. Small by Spanish country standards but big in British terms. We have a lot of fruit trees such as figs, peach, nispero, almonds, plums, apple, pomegranate, cherry and quince; lots of ivy, lots of pine trees, and plenty more. The trouble is that I'm not much of a gardener. I can tell a tulip from a daffodil from a rose but that's my sort of level. Nature, colourwise, always strikes me as a bit monotonous. When a rose blooms, or the almond trees are in blossom (like now) there's a touch of colour in the garden but I consider  the countryside to be lot of shades of green and brown - for most of the year at least. This monotonous colour scheme doesn't help me to decide which of the various green and brown growths are good, nice, desirable plants that I should leave in peace and which are the weeds that apparently deserve to die.

We've spent years living somewhere else as well as Culebrón. After coming back from Salamanca one summer to find the weeds in our garden so thick and high that the chap with the rotavator said he didn't think the machine would cope, we decided it was time to employ a gardener. We asked our friend Geoff to do it. Just a couple of hours each week - to keep the weeds down and the garden tidy.

Now Geoff is British, English in fact. He has a British sensibility about gardens. He likes to see things growing. Maybe some nice veg, something flowering, certainly some variety and things like ground cover to keep the weeds down. He planted things. We had were able to eat homegrown tomatoes and cabbage during the Geoffrey years.

Spanish people very seldom come into our garden. Our friend Pepa came soon after we'd bought the house. She commented on the garden being limpio which means clean. This was because, between the various and obvious plants, there was bare earth where the weeds were being held at bay. Pepa explained to us that this was the Mediterranean way. Bare earth to avoid fires taking hold or spreading.

So, now that we are back in residence, we had the choice. We could build on all the work that Geoff had put in to produce a varied garden or we could slash and burn our way back to cleanliness. I think it was more my decision than Maggie's that we would cut everything back. And basically that's what we started to do in September. At first the jobs were obvious. The Torrevieja weed, which is a groundcovering succulent, was the first to go, then lots of the ivy that was growing beneath the fig trees. Next all the yuccas had to be dug out. We thinned out some of the other plants like cactus and iris and the palm tree and ivy hedge got their regulation trims.

None of it was really gardening. More like navvy work; digging, chopping, ripping and tearing. With the brute force stuff generally out of the way the garden began to look Spanish again. Maggie actually added some new plants and did some gentle pruning - with the help of tutorials from YouTube videos. All I had to contribute was a bit of weeding. That pruning though inspired me. I thought Maggie was being a bit timid about it. I tore up the last patch of decorative ivy over the weekend and, this week, I've been chopping down lots of pine branches.

Vicente, our next door neighbour passed as I hacked the other day. The garden's looking nice he said - very clean. I sniggered. It may be time to put the shears and clippers away, let the compost heap settle a bit and maybe just keep the weeds down. After all, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes "there's a time to plant and a there's a time to prune."

Evading tax

I got a letter from the tax people yesterday. Now letters from the tax people are not written in normal, everyday Spanish. They are Brontesque in style. With the envelope ripped open and the single page scanned it looked bad. There were lots of words I didn't understand but it was clear that the Revenue, Hacienda, were unhappy about the tax I'd paid on my pension. Tax people can be nasty. Tax people take your house and send you to prison when you're naughty. Unless of course you are very, very rich in which case they are extremely nice to you.

I explained my situation last year in a post on Life in La Unión Just a quick recap. Normally, if you are a Spanish resident, your worldwide income is taxed in Spain. However, I have a local government pension from the UK and there is an agreement between Spain and the UK that government pensions are taxed at source, in the UK. So far so good but where I turn into Al Capone is about my additional voluntary contributions. They provide an additional pension of about forty quid a month. Rather than declare that cash in Spain I simply left it in the UK tax regime. I shouldn't have done. I should have declared it in Spain.

The financial year in Spain is the calendar year. Sometime early in the year, March I think, Hacidenda do their sums and decide whether you owe them money or they owe you money. In 2014, for the tax year 2013, they caught up with me. I came clean and paid the unpaid tax. It was about 70€. The tax office said that to sort out the same underpayment for 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 I'd have to go to an accountant. So I did. I just chose an asesor at random in the town where I was living, La Unión and asked for advice. To be honest the accountant didn't exude reliability but he told me that I earned so little in total that it was all straightforward and I didn't need to do anything. No fines, no clink and no public humiliationn coming my way.

So when I got that letter I started to curse the accountant and think bad thoughts about the man from the Prudential who sold me those worthless AVCs too. Ten minutes later though with a more careful reading of the letter, and only needing to look up two words as it turned out, I realised that the tax people were actually offering an amnesty to we foreigners who hadn't paid up on our pensions. They mentioned the special circumstances we are under i.e. we don't understand the lingo or the culture and we have no idea what's going on. We have till June to sort it out.

Now I have an accountant because I am technically self employed. I phoned him. No worry he said. If it wasn't sent registered post it isn't dangerous. We can talk about it when we next meet.

Thinking about it this letter is actually good. It's a general letter. The accountant in La Unión could be right and it could be that I owe no tax. It could also be that the accountant in La Unión was wrong and I do owe some tax. However, with the amnesty there will be no fine and no interest to pay so the worst it could be is four times the amount I handed over last year or thereabouts. But the best thing is that Hacienda has a process for sorting this out and once I've filled in the appropriate forms and paid any debts it will all be nice and starightforward.

And I do value a quiet life now I'm in my dotage.

Funeral in Santa Pola

David Collins died this week. He was cremated today in the Santa Pola Tanatorio. We went along as old friends.

David used to live in Pinoso though he's lived in Catral for years now. I think, because I gave him a hand with his computer, he suggested me as a possible worker to his daughter Julie. At the time she ran a furniture shop called RusticOriginal. I ended up working there and it remains my favourite job of those I've had here in Spain.

It's the first time I've been inside a tanatorio in Spain - the translation in most dictionaries is funeral parlour but a good number of them seem to have the facilities of a crematorium too. I've never quite worked out the system for Spanish funerals and cremations and I decided against doing the research and describing it here. I get the idea though that the tanatorio is where close family stand vigil as it were and receive other family members, friends and colleagues. Someone in Cartagena told me that they often used the bar in the local tanatorio for a late night drink as it is always open.

When we turned up in Santa Pola today I noticed that another family were camped out in one of the side rooms off the main entrance of the building. Some of David's golfing pals were there before us and together we waited. The family turned up at the appointed hour in one of the undertaker's limos. They came with a couple of Spanish friends of David's who had helped the family make all the arrangements for the cremation and the transfer of the ashes back to the UK.

Together we all went into a chapel with David's sealed coffin on a trolley. Two of David's daughters, Julie and Tracy, looked after the proceedings. They arranged some photos on and around the coffin and there were a couple of David's favourite songs on CD. Jules and Tracy read their own tributes and a piece from the other two daughters, who were not able to be there because they live in South Africa and New Zealand. There was no "official" input either lay or religious and I wondered if that were the normal routine at a tanatorio. I have this vague idea that in more routine funerals the priest conducts a service before the body is moved on to the tanatorio but doesn't officiate after that. I could well be wrong though.

With the talking over, a chap, in a blue work coat, wheeled the coffin away. A few moments later we were called to join him. The coffin was now behind a glass screen and the lid was lifted so that we could see David for one last time. The second of David's two songs was given a reprise as the coffin was sealed and then set on an apparatus which slid the casket into the furnace.

I wondered if the last look and such a close up view of the final act had a history behind it as though to prove that there was no last minute skulduggery.

And that was it. Goodbye for ever to David. A little discussion about the paperwork and the choice of urn for the ashes before the family went off in the waiting car.

We went off to have a coffee and stare at the Med.

Shifting money

For years and years I've had a bit of a deal going with some friends who have a holiday home here in Spain. They pay money in sterling into my UK account and I pay Euros into their Spanish account using the FT exchange rate. They get money to pay their direct debit bills and I got enough to service my Amazon habit.

The more usual methods of transferring money can be quite costly. There are all sorts of schemes and methods but most of them make their money by giving below the "money market" exchange rates (the ones that say no commission) or by charging a fee. To give an example for small amounts, say £300, my normal method is to use an account I have with the Nationwide. They charge me £1 per transaction plus 2% of the amount. So that's £7. Actually that's as cash so it's a bit different but the figures are illustrative.

Recently Cliff told me about a scheme that he had heard described as peer to peer. It's what my friends and I have been doing all these years except that the firm charges a commission and I don't. In these schemes the money goes between bank accounts.

I used the company for the first time last weekend. I paid my Pounds into the firm's account in the UK. Somewhere in Spain  a Pedro, Paco or Maria wanted Pounds and they paid Euros into the same firm's Spanish account. The firm pays me with P,P or Ms money, the firm pays Pedro, Paco or Maria with my money and takes a commission from both of us. The commission rate on the same £300 seems to be around £1.50. In effect it's a national rather than an international transaction

If only we'd been smart enough to realise we had a business idea my friends and I could be rich by now!

Strange and bizarre

We'd popped in to town to do some exciting jobs - buy screen wash was one of them. I was also going to bank some money. Take note of the opening sentences and be warned now that this blog is not going to be the usual emotional roller coaster ride of an entry.

My phone rang when I was in the bank queue. It was our next door neighbour to say that Iberdrola, the electricity supply people, wanted to get into our garden. You will remember I talked to Iberdrola about moving some supply cables that were either menacing or being menaced by our palm tree. Nothing has happened for months. The discussion that I'd had with some Iberdrola employed tree trimmers had suggested that we were talking thousands of euros if we got the cables re-routed and I'd quietly let the whole thing slide.

We hurried back from town. I feared the worst. I could imagine the euros flowing out of that bank account to pay for new cables, new installations and a new meter. The three blokes said they wanted access to our garden. The three blokes said they were replacing the uninsulated supply to our house, and those of our neighbours, with a beefier insulated cable. There was no mention of the palm tree, there was no mention of me having asked for the work. So far as I could tell, and I didn't want to ask too many questions, it is a simple, routine upgrade of cables that haven't been changed for thirty or forty years.

We left them to it, in fact I couldn't get away fast enough. When we came back, they had happpily run the new cable through the palm tree branches and left enough slack in the wire for it to be able to deal with a bit of a pumelling from a palm tree thrashing around in the breeze. They are coming back tomorrow to connect it all up. How strange. Provided that there are no last minute hitches it looks as though our palm tree has just been saved and our electricity supply ensured.

I went back to the bank. As I've said in an earlier post I've been driving to the nearest branch of my bank to pay in cash at the start of each of the last few months. Last month though I read an article about the huge differences in fees charged by the different banks. It seemed that a bank with an office in Pinoso would only charge me 2€ in transaction fees. That seemed a lot better deal than driving 30kms to stand in a long queue to pay the cash in at my own bank. It was a short queue in Pinoso but the man wouldn't take my money. He said I couldn't pay the money in to another bank from their office. I was amazed. I explained that I understood there was a fee. No it's just not possible said the man. Why don't you go to the Santander office around the corner?

Now it is true that there's an office in Pinoso that has a Santander Bank sign outside. I'd tried to do some form of banking there a couple of years ago without success. The chap behind the counter told me they only sold financial products and did not offer banking services. Today I poked my head around the door of the empty office but for the man at his desk playing some sort of game on his phone. "Can I pay money in to a Santander account here?," I asked. "You can indeed," he replied. I was pleasantly surprised and handed over a piece of paper with my 20 figure account number on it. "Ah, it's an old Banesto account," he said, "I can't pay into that." I asked him if it were possible to pay into the account from other banks. "No, you have to go to a Santander branch, an old Banesto branch," he said.

Now Banesto had been largely owned by the Santander Bank since the early 90s though both banks continued to have a high street presence till 2012. It was then that the Santander bought up the last of the Banesto shares and combined the two entities closing down various branches of both. The Banesto logos disappeared. Later the websites, account names and everything else took on the Santander name and look. Everywhere that is but for the office in Pinoso where the division was still alive and well. I have to give the man his due he did try to access my account but his computer said no and that was the end of it,

How bizarre. A banking system which won't, apparently, let you pay money in except under very strict conditions. I don't understand. I've done it in the past. It seems crazy if it is no longer possible.

I drove to Monóvar and paid the money in there. "Oh," I asked the teller as I was about to leave, "Can I pay into this account from other banks?" "Course you can," he said. "They usually charge you to do it though."

Aaargh!!

Getting off the stool

A warning: This blog will contain lots of rude and crude words. Do not continue if you are easily offended.

I've not been to the doctor very often whilst I've been in Spain. I did have to go though - years ago - because I had a problem with my waterworks, a certain pain when I urinated. As I walked into the doctor's office I apologised for not knowing the doctor words for certain actions and parts. Consider that I were talking to you about my bathroom habits. The verbs would be shit and piss, I'm sorry. They would not be defecate, micturate and urinate; I would not talk of motions, stools, faeces, movements or waterworks and I find the half way words like pee and pooh (does it have an h?) much more embarrassing than the Anglo Saxon words. At the doctor's though it's all bowels and penis.

Maggie has been pruning trees in our garden, she started with the almonds. She learned how to do it from a range of  YouTube videos. She preferred the one where the demonstrator didn't say that you had to get rid of all the shit in the middle of the tree. Gardeners don't have the same reputation as rappers for bad language so I presume it must be an everyday sort of word for at least one gardener.

We saw a Pat Metheny concert in Cartagena a while back. Maggie loves Pat. We were on the front row and Pat dropped a plectrum within arms length - at least my arm was long enough to requisition it for the good of the people. Someone else tried the same thing later, with another plectrum, and was berated by one of the roadies "Would you like it if I came around your house and stole your shit?" The translation would be nothing more than stuff.

Shit is a multi-purpose word. There are lots like it in Spanish, words that are more or less friendly, vulgar or attacking depending on tone of voice and situation. This includes the direct translation of shit. You can be complaining, you can be being rude, you can be describing a process and you can be no different to a Pat roadie.

The Valencian Community seems to be worried about my shit. More accurately they are worried about the health of my bowels. This is good; at least I think it is. They have a campaign for men and women between the ages of 50 and 69 to check whether we may have bowel cancer or not.  First they sent us a letter and when we sent back the "Yes, we'd love to participate" card they sent us a little stick inside a container. You don't need to be able to read Spanish to understand the instructions in the images above. The black thing is a turd. Once the stick was back inside the sealed container it was off to the collection point in the local health centre. Actually Maggie took it whilst I went for breakfast at Eduardo's. I wonder if it will be a person or a machine that has the job of checking the, presumably, thousands of samples? Whilst most of us will get a standardised "no problem" letter some will get the "please pop into the health centre" version.

Back at Eduardo's everyone wanted to know where Maggie was. When I explained one of the Brits retorted with - !Ah, playing Pooh Sticks." I thought it was clever.

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?

Lancing the cat's boils

Every now and again I write an email to someone. This is like writing a letter in the olden days. Personal communication. Facebook messages, the private ones are as postcards to the email letters.

As those emails and messages go back and forth the fact that I live in Spain is vaguely recognised but largely ignored by most of my chums. A couple of my correspondents, however, never fail to slip in a comment which makes it very clear that they think my decision to abandon the UK was barmy. Ten years on I wouldn't have thought that was much of a talking point.

I called the blog Life in Culebrón. I write the entries partly because I live in Culebrón, in Spain, but moreso because the Internet gave me a method to write in public without effort. I've written a diary every day of my life since I was fourteen. Blogging isn't that different except that nobody gets to read my diaries till I'm dead and even then only if they can read my terrible handwriting.

Because I write the blogs I have to think of a hook. Finding something to write can be difficult because most things I do are so commonplace. Maggie often ridicules the way I stretch and twist the most trivial of incidents into a post. Take the other day. It was a Bank Holiday on the 6th and we went looking for lunch. We hadn't booked of course. We tried Amador's place down in Mañar first - the restaurant was full but as he recognises us and we reckon we know him he turned us away in a flurry of handshakes and kisses. They turned us down at Paco Gandia and Pere i Pepa too but we finally got fed, very well, at el Timón.

Now the point of the story could be eating times, booking things up, the end of the Christmas holidays, the different emphasis of the holidays here, an essay on the fame of the rabbit and snail rice at Paco's, the quality or value of the local food or it could just be to preen because I know the name of at least one Spanish person.

In fact I want to use it to emphasise how ordinary life is for us. Alright I feel a bit uncomfortable with Spanish still and at times it's something much, much stronger than that. Asking about table reservations had me looking vaguely bemused and moving from foot to foot as waiters and waitresses rushed past us with crockery. I'm like that though, I'd be exactly the same in the UK except for needing to speak Spanish. Nonetheless the routine of restaurants, the ordering, the food and how things are presented is all dead ordinary to us. Absolutely normal. More ordinary to me than doing the same thing a couple of weeks ago in the UK. It wasn't a problem in the UK either but it had more novelty value there because I do it less frequently. Just as Tesco's or Boot's is more exotic to me now than Eroski or Mercadona.

So there are seveal reasons why I complain as I blog. One is because everyone complains. I complained when I lived in the UK and I complain now. I've complained wherever I've lived and I will probably complain till the day I die. Another is that I have the right to complain - I can complain about politicians because they spend my taxes and because I voted, I can complain about services because I think they are not working as they should. Yet another reason is that I have the tools, I can type something here and a few people read it. And, of course, I am a miserable sod and complaining suits me. Oh, and there always exists the vaguest possibility that whatever it is I'm bleating on about actually needs exposing, complaining about or changing.

So, if I complain, compare the UK to Spain or just blether on think of it as no more than "O" level essay writing with maybe a little observation of the world about me thrown in. Nothing more. And I promise not to read anything deeply dissident into you complaining about the price of petrol, flip flops being referred to as thongs or trains being late.

Here is the weather for 2014

It's just four kilometres from Pinoso to Culebrón but despite that the weather can be significantly different. Not significant in the sense of Vladivostok to Kingston but a couple of degrees, rainy or dry, windy or breezy.

La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET) is the equivalent of the Met Office - it supplies meteorological services to the state and to the armed forces. I presume Pinoso has a little weather station somewhere because the town features in the list of official daily weather reports. There's no AEMET presence in Culebrón so readings from Pinoso will have to do. I notice in the blurb for these figures that a chap, Agapito Gonzálvez is credited with the data. He may just have compiled the information or maybe he's a local meteorological version of Patrick Moore; an amateur with standing. Anyway.

During last year 214 litres of water fell on every square metre or for those of you raised on inches of rainfall a bit under 9 inches all year. The highest temperature recorded was 37ºC  the same as body temperature or 98.6ºF on the 26th August. The lowest temperature was -5ºC just a few days ago on New Year's Eve. The windiest day was the 2nd March when there were gusts of seventy three kilometres per hour (about 45mph.) The wettest day, almost certainly the one on which you came to see friends who live in the area, was the 28th November with 25 litres per square metre. In fact there were forty six rainy days, five stormy days, seventeen with no visible sun and only one hundred and ninety five without a cloud in the sky.

Tales of turrón

Turrón is made from almonds, honey, egg whites and sugar. It's an Alicante speciality which is now produced all over Spain. Turrón, has no specific English equivalent, though for shorthand I often describe it as nougat. It's not much like the pink and white chewy nougat I knew as a youngster though. Turrón is associated with the town of Jijona which is about 70 km up the road from us. I wrote about it ages ago in a blog.

So we were going back to the UK for Christmas. I'd made a pact with my family about not exchanging gifts. We did, nonetheless, take a few Spanish Christmas goodies - mantecados, polvorones and of course turrón. I'd forgotten that I hadn't made the same pact with Maggie's family who showered me with expensive gifts whilst I had neither socks nor bubble bath in trade - it was terribly embarrassing.

The make of turrón that Maggie bought was called Pico which is a good quality if everyday brand - she bought the hard stuff and the soft one. It's maybe a bit less than half the price of the best brands which can cost as much as 9€ for a 300g bar. It was traditional enough though for me to notice something that I've missed in ten years of wolfing it down. I realised they had different names. The crunchy stuff was called Turrón de Alicante and the sort that oozes almond oil was Turrón de Jijona. Nowadays there are tens of flavours of "turrón" most of which have nothing to do with the original concept. So we have chocolate flavour, milk flavour, crema catalana flavour, strawberry flavour etcetera - the list is nearly endless. It was seeing the two traditional types side by side in matcing packets that made me realise the simple difference.

For some now forgotten reason turrón came up in the conversation with our builders. They sang the praises of a turrón produced by a local factory which processes nuts. It's obvious enough when you think about it. They work with almonds, there is lots of local honey and chickens live everywhere so the raw materials were to hand.

Intrigued I bought some when I went to pick up a gas cylinder (excellent isn't it? - nuts and butane in the same shop) and I notice that it has the quality mark to say that it's made to the standards of some regulatory body. That was news to me too and it explains why some of the most famous brands are made in places like Santander and Gijón which are miles from Alicante.

The trouble is I can't eat it. I gained two and a half kilos in the four days in the UK. It's time for penance - the hair shirt and flagellation of portion control. Mind you Christmas is far from over in Spain and just a little each day couldn't do much harm could it?

Coo-ee, coo-ee, Mr Shifter, Light refreshment?

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 British houses a drink - hot or cold depending on the season - was always the first offer. In Spanish houses it wasn't unusual to be given a drink but it was always at the end of the job as the sweat dripped from me. Water was the normal  offer with beer coming a close second. The purpose was different though. In Spain it is for practical reasons - like thirst. For we Britons it is a social custom too.

Driving home

I work in Fortuna. I live in Culebrón - you my have worked that out from the blog title. It's a drive of only 37km and it's not that interesting. But blogs need feeding no matter how mundane the subject matter.

When I leave work, just after eight, it's dark. This will surprise no-one living in the Northern Hemisphere. Fortuna has Christmas lights. Not bad for such a small place on a tight, building bubble hit, budget. The traffic in Fortuna is pretty mad for a village of just under 10,000 population. Cars and vans, or at least their drivers, behave in erratic and unfathomable ways. I'm always relieved when the car and I clear the last set of traffic lights and drive out of the built up area still in one piece.

Sometimes, just by the lights, the Barinas bus, which comes up from Murcia, is pulling out as I get to the stop. We are going to share the route for a few kilometres. Why there is a bus from Murcia to Barinas (population 946) escapes me.

Baños de Fortuna is the first population after Fortuna, it "belongs" to Fortuna. It has a thermal spring, Victorian style hotels and a modern housing estate full of us foreigners. The street lighting peters out just after Baños. The landscape is pretty barren anyway, desert landforms, a bit lunar even. It's a steady climb up to Salado Alto on a road with an 80 kph limit which nobody sticks to. There are a couple of bars and restaurants in Salado. The posher one isn't open in the evening but the bar is. As I pass I often think that the clientele, who stand out in the lit interior Edward Hopper like, look like Brits. Maybe we have a little outpost there.

More of a climb, quite a steep climb, on a road that snakes to just the right degree to be able to enjoy cutting the apexes of the curves. Soon after cresting the top of the climb there is the Repsol garage on the left just by the junction where the bus will turn right to Barinas. The petrol station is pretty brightly lit but the light always seems a bit feeble set amidst the blackness of the Murcian countryside. There's a bar by the side of the petrol station too. They do a set meal at lunchtime for either 6€ or 7€.

Bit of level running, sharp right hander and climbing again up towards Algorrobo which means Carob tree. It's one of those roads with three lanes so that you can overtake the heavy heaving lorries. To be honest with the amount of traffic that there is on the RM 422 road it's hardly ever necessary.

We're on the level for a while now. In fact I think there's even a touch of downhill just before some incredibly bright street lights and a signpost which says that the single row of houses is called Los Fernandos. Still on the level but then a bit of a hill with Cañada de la Leña off to the right (Firewood Drove) and Cañada del Trigo (Wheat Drove) to the left. On the Trigo turn there's a cement works or gravel processing plant that paints the nearby landscape with dust and shines out in the dark.

Over to the right we can make out the huge lighting rigs that illuminate the largest open cast quarry in Europe at Monte Coto. We're still in Murcia but the quarry is in Alicante. Sometimes when the cloud is low it can look quite demonic. The road is flat and level again before one more hill that crests out by the Volver Bodega. We've just crossed into Alicante and the RM 422 has become the CV 836. The letters show they are regional roads - CV for the Valencian Community and RM for the Region of Murcia

The road drops down from the bodega towards Rodriguillo, one of the villages that makes up Pinoso. A quick zigzag to go through a couple of roundabouts and out past the garden centre and up the slope into Pinoso. Pass the cemetery and now we're in Pinoso proper. 50 kph speed restriction with the Co-operative bodega to the left and the marble and wine museum, tourist office and sports centre to the right. Into town with some splendid Christmas decorations twinkling away for now. There's a new bar to the right too - it opened about a week ago. It's owned by a German chap.

Only a right on the Badén and then out on the Monóvar road to get to our house in Culebrón. Fortuna is at 198 metres above sea level and Pinoso is at 474 so we've only climbed 276 metres or 905 feet but it's usually good for knocking off around 3ºC from the temperature. The car is nice and warm but it's not so warm as I step into the fresh air to open the gate. Good to be home though. Time to get the kettle on.

Choose your weapon

Well over thirty years ago, closer to forty, I had a job working in the Lake District doing things like building dry stone walls, getting rid of invasive species in woodland and building paths. It was a job creation scheme so we eschewed machinery. Why use a JCB to dig a ditch - better to employ twenty lads with shovels. We had chain saws but I didn't like them. I didn't like the way they jumped in the air at start up or bounced against the wood as you began. Visions of severed limbs danced before my eyes. Better a big axe or a sledge hammer. For some reason a vision of my foot cleaved asunder must be beyond my imagination. I've continued to prefer hand tools. In fact I didn't buy an electric drill (though I've borrowed several) until about two years ago. 

In inland Alicante it gets cold. I've mentioned this before, several times before.  Indeed it is one of our main concerns from December to April. Keeping warm inside. Outside is fine. Pleasant. Inside though it's Hell's freezer.

Rural Spain in winter smells of woodsmoke. Nearly everyone in the countryside has a fireplace though I'm always amazed at the number of Spaniards who seem not to notice that it's freezing and sit around in completely unheated homes apparently out of choice. And in those fireplaces we burn wood. Some houses have open fires and some have wood burners, the ones with doors, the cast iron ones being better than the sheet steel ones. Maybe better heeled residents have the upmarket pellet burners.

We have a woodburner but it had to be small to fit into the fireplace we inherited and we didn't upgrade to a larger model when we got a new fireplace and chimney to complement our new roof. The stove heats the living room nicely but it will only take shortish bits of wood which means that any wood that goes in it has to be the right sort of length and girth. Wood never comes in stove sized chunks even when we pay good money to buy some from a supplier. Some is OK but the majority needs sawing, hacking or smashing to size.

I used an axe when we first got here. This involved a lot of protective clothing as wood splinters and flying bits of wood attempted to gouge out my eyes. I spent the winter covered in bruises lots of them on my forehead. I broke two axes before I decided this was a complete waste of time and went back to calor gas type heaters running off gas bottles. But for some reason this year a small pile of wood that we had at the back of the house attracted Maggie's attention and we had a fire in the woodburner. That supply didn't last long so I cut up lots of other bits of wood that we had around. Old bed bases, wooden palettes. The detritus of country living. But then there were only quite hefty logs left.

In the local ironmongers we asked about hatchets and axes and we were directed to a large sledge hammer with a blade on one side. Brilliant for opening (i.e. splitting) logs said the shop owner. He was a liar. I asked later, in another shop, about an axe but 50€ seemed a bit steep especially as I'd had trouble with the handles breaking in the past so I didn't buy one. The sledge hammer bounced off the logs. Wedges said our pals as we talked wood cutting over Saturday morning coffee. The huge car boot sale organised by the TIM magazine over at Salinas on Sunday provided me with two steel wedges in return for a wedge of cash. Cutting wood seems to be an expensive business.

The wedges and sledge hammer work well. I may well break my back splitting the logs or have a heart attack with the effort but at least I've not been reduced to buying one of those nasty chain saws or even worse ordering some ready cut stuff from the "leña man."

Rather reassuring

It's not Christmas in Spain yet. Not by a long chalk. No lights or trees in the streets. But today, in our house, it suddenly became Christmastime. True we've done a couple of subtle things before today but not so as you'd notice. We bought our lottery tickets for el Gordo Christmas lottery, we finished our Christmas cards in the last couple of days and I bought some more figures for our nativity scene a while ago.

This nativity thing is a personal sort of crusade. A couple of years ago I spent a fair bit of cash on some hand crafted figures for our Belén. The idea was to be a little Spanish and start adding to the nativity scene every year. The marginalised poor in the shepherds one year then the kings to represent the different continents, the wealthy and so on. It didn't go to plan because Christmas was cancelled last year by Maggie's absence in Qatar and our consequent meeting in Sri Lanka. It wasn't worth putting up the tree or the lights in Culebrón  as I avoided the perishing cold of interior Alicante for the much milder climate of La Unión. No tree, no lights, no Christmas food and no new figures. This year though Christmas is on so I got down to the Regional Artisan Centre in Murcia city and handed over 90€ for some kings. Poor people, the shepherds, are good but you never go wrong buying the rich.

The cards were interesting, Well sort of dully interesting. We bought some charity cards from Corte Inglés when we were in Murcia weeks ago but we needed more. Not many cards to be had in Pinoso but one of the local tobacconists had two packets. There were maybe fifty cards and we bought thirty of them. The shop owners were amazed. We explained about the old tradition of sending cards to people we hadn't spoken to for years, about sending cards to addresses that we were pretty sure were no longer correct and about sending cards to people who may well be dead. Nice tradition though - with a different quality to Facebook or email. I love getting cards.

But today we buckled down. It was wreath on the door, Chinese shop Westward leading star with a comet like tail of flashing LEDs fastened to the outside of the house and the tree. 

The tree we got in Huntingdon from Woolworths maybe sixteen or seventeen years ago now. It was bought to grow old along with us. Every time we drag it out of the scruffy box and attach the same wesleybobs (glass baubles to you unless you're old and from West Yorkshire) I always think what a good choice it was. Bit of a change with the tree this year through. We had to change its location because of some furniture changes since Christmas 2012. I took the change in my stride though because I was buoyed up by the inevitability of it all. A nice fino sherry to start then whisky (though I can no longer afford a decent Islay and have to do with blended) helped the process along. Nat King Cole roasting chestnuts on an open fire then a choir from Kings. Como siempre - as always. 

It had been the same outside. There were a series of hooks for the lights, the string on the wreath was the right length to hang it dead centre and the correct height on the door. In truth I'm not a big fan of Christmas. Lot of fuss about nothing in my humble but I do find, as my remaining time shortens, that whereas, in the past, I disliked the annual sameness of the process I now value at least one part of the inevitability of it all. And that part was today.

Secret Wine Spain

Maggie likes wine. It's no secret. She likes a good Rioja and she likes Ribera del Duero too. But Maggie thinks it's very unfair that so few people recognise the quality of some of our local wine particularly the product from the Jumilla wine region.

Jumilla shares a border with Pinoso so it's very local. We also share a border with Yecla which has a separate quality mark for its wine and, of course, we are in Alicante which produces some excellent wine too. We even have a small bodega in Culebrón village. There are lots of bodegas to visit but some tours and some wine are better than others.

Maggie likes to eat out. She can wax lyrical about some of the local food though she can also be disparaging about the chop and chips menus of so many places. You have to know where to go she says. You need local knowledge.

Maggie says that we have some breathtaking scenery around here. I can't disagree. Sometimes just driving up from La Romana or over to Yecla I just break into a big grin as I watch the landscapes pass. Staying here can be a treat but knowing where is more difficult.

So Maggie had an idea. Maybe she could help people to appreciate our local wine, our local food and our local scenery. So Secret Wine Spain was born. It's a work still in progress as Maggie comes to grips with marketing, website building and blogging but if you fancy a tailor made wine tour in Murcia or Alicante then Maggie's your woman.