Life in Culebrón

One of my early blog entries was about Spam . I was probably suffering withdrawal symptoms and I'd just discovered the delights of mortadella. I must like fatty meat products of doubtful provenance because the other day I was attracted to the design on a tin which showed some sort of processed meat. It was called magro and I don't remember having tried it before. Magro is unmistakably similar to Plumrose plopped ham with chalk - if you're old enough you'll remember the TV advert and if you're not your mind will still be nimble enough to work it out. As I sampled the magro I wondered if there was a blog to be written about the Spanish things that had replaced what had been UK staples. Cola-Cao for Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate, Hero bitter orange jam for Robertson's or Frank Cooper's marmalade and so on. No, that wasn't blog material. Far too mundane. Most of it would simply be about trade names. There are some things, the sort of things we occasion...

I maintain an impression that our bit of rural Spain is still quite traditional; a society that repairs things. Just check the roads at the moment with the tractors out for harvest. Most of the small ones look nearly as old as the blokes driving them! Whenever I think of this make do and mend culture I think of my sunglasses. In Cambridge, in 1984, I bought my first pair of Ray Ban Aviators. At the time the company was still Bausch & Lomb and their sunglasses were a superior product. So twenty years later we're new to Culebrón and one of the pad arms came loose on the sunglasses. I went to the local optician to see if the specs could be saved. The optician soldered the piece back in place whilst I waited and charged me nothing. Last year I threw the same sunspecs on the floor and trampled on them. The nose pad came away again. I went back to the same optician. This time she sucked on her teeth, suggested I bought new and only grudgingly sent the Aviators away for repair. They...

People, in general, seem to be very interested in food. Spaniards certainly are. I think I've said before that the first time I ever managed to catch the drift of a conversation in Spanish, when I presumed that the discussion would centre on Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or, perhaps, the novels of Kafka it turned out to be an impassioned debate about the pros and cons of adding peas, or not, to some sort of stew. Spanish food tends to plainness. Spicy is, generally, not seen as good. Recipes are often traditional and made from the ingredients to hand. It's permissible to argue about whether tortilla de patatas should have onion or not but basically the recipe is eggs, potatoes, oil, salt and nothing else. Woe betide the TV chef who thinks a clove of garlic or a couple capers might spice it up a bit. That's why Jamie Oliver got so much stick about chorizo in paella. Paella and arroz (rice) are interchangeable words in some situations but paella has fixed versions. If you want to...

It's nice to think that people remember me from time to time. This week two old friends sent me the same article they'd both seen in the Guardian about the slow death of the Spanish "menú del día". The piece said that ordinary working Spaniards no longer had time to eat a big meal at lunchtimes, that diners were looking for different sorts of food and that restaurants were no longer able to work on such low profit returns. Actually I wrote about some of this in ปลาออกจากน้ำ   (Thai for fish out of water) when we were in Madrid. So, I partly agree and I'm sure that the Guardian correspondent is right in suggesting that there is a trend away from the traditional three course meal. Nonetheless, away from the big cities, the menú is very definitely alive and well. Just before we go on something about the pronunciation. Menu, pronounced the English way, is carta in Spanish. Here we're talking about menú, with the accent over the U. This word is pronounced somet...

Patricia and Jason have just opened a new Bed and Breakfast business here in Culebrón - the Sunny Vista Casa Rural . They've done a really nice job on it too. It looks great. As a double celebration, for both the opening and for Patricia's birthday, the owners hosted a party. Never ones to miss out on a knees up Maggie and I turned up at around 3.30 pm, in the middle of Spanish lunchtime, when most locals would be eating at home. Later I was both surprised, and pleased for the Batram's, that so many of the villagers put in an appearance. Forty some years ago I had a Spanish couple stay with me in Peterborough. They flew into Heathrow so I took them for a pub lunch in Windsor. "You'll have to try British beer," I said, to Jaime. He literally spat it out. "It's hot," he said, "like broth." For the rest of the holiday he would only drink lager. He never complained about the taste of that terrible, 1980s, fizzy, British lager but he did...

There aren't many self serve checkouts in Spain. They have them at Ikea, the scan your goods, push in your credit card type and they have some at Corte Inglés though I've never seen them in use. At Carrefour they used to have self serve but they changed to a single queue system - Checkout Number fourrr please. Generally then supermarket queues are stand in line, stuff to the rubber belt, the person at the till scans your items, you put them into a bag and then you pay, maybe scanning your loyalty card in the process. You can still buy plastic bags at the checkout but most people don't. Consum, probably the largest supermarket in Pinoso, works exactly like that. I'd gone for my usual 30-40€ worth of every second day shopping. There were four of the six tills on the go, the deputy manager was on one till, the women from the deli and fish counter were up too. All the tills in use were busy. The days of the ten items or fewer queue are long gone. I stood in a queue....

I have been trying to think of a post for a few days and I couldn't. The rest is just space filler. My bosses at work asked me if I could design a course for people working in "hosteleria" and I said of course. I nearly always say of course unless they ask me if I want to work with biting and dancing on the table aged children. I knew exactly what they meant with hosteleria, waiters and bar staff and suchlike. I see that the dictionary definition says hotel trade. It's quite odd how much difference there is at times between what Spanish people say and what books and dictionaries and text books say they say. The book I'm currently reading is Los ritos del agua. As I read any book, particularly if it's in Spanish, I have to look up a fair few words. One of the great advantages of reading on an electronic book is that it has a built in dictionary so I can find key words without interrupting the flow too much. Anyway I came across a word, vahído, which the d...

Egg and chips is a typical Spanish dish. Egg and chips is a typical English dish too. I wouldn't be surprised if half the world has a similar claim to egg and chips. Of course there can be lots of differences between one plateful of egg and chips and another dependant on the quality of the ingredients and the preparation. I like my bacon sandwiches in white bread with lots of butter and with crispy but cooled bacon. I know people who are appalled at the idea of butter and white bread and pour ketchup or brown sauce on theirs. So preparation, ingredients and personal taste all make a difference when we're talking food. Sometimes Spanish people ask me if I eat British or Spanish food at home. I suppose the question is whether I eat paella or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding because, most of the time, the stuff I cook is probably stateless. I might think it's chilli con carne or biryani but a Mexican (or is that a Texan) and an Indian wouldn't recognise it as such. And...

My mum doesn't use a lot of milk. The last time I stayed with her the milk she had in was off - very off, lumpy off. She shamelessly offered me almond or soy milk as a substitute. I was appropriately dismissive. I did once venture to drink some almond milk. I remember it as a sort of grainy vaguely unpleasantly flavoured thick water. I suspect that Maggie thinks of horchata much the same way. Me, well I drink horchata from time to time but mainly as a sort of solidarity gesture with my adopted homeland. Horchata is made from the chufa, a sort of edible tuber which we apparently call tiger nut - though I've never known anyone who is clear what a tiger nut is - I think the name just sounds sort of comfortable. The chufa is used to make that greyey milky coloured drink that all Valencianos swear is incredibly thirst quenching when it is served cold. Apparently chufa grows well in North Africa so the Moorish invaders introduced it into Spain when they set up home here for s...

I've talked about Spanish supermarkets before. Just as a quick recap. We have four decent sized supermarkets in Pinoso and I use them all. My choice is usually based on geography, wherever the car is parked. Sometimes on product - only two of the four for instance carry English Council House tea. Whilst I'm not at work I've started to use Día more frequently than I used to. This is because it's on our side of town and the car parking is good. Now I'm going to fall into all sorts of problems with stereotyping here so please forgive me. Día is exactly the opposite of the UK's Waitrose or Spain's Corte Inglés supermarket operations in both its products and its customer profile. Día sells some quality products but it is typified by cheap and, sometimes, low quality in the sense of industrially processed food. Día does not, generally, attract well heeled clients in search of premium product. Now you can already see the stress lines in my argument because the ...

The first time I ever caught the sense of a conversation going on around me in Spanish was on a bus in Granada. I'd always thought that Spanish conversations were probably about Goethe or something equally profound but that one was, in fact, about whether peas should or should not be an ingredient of some stew. Food is a topic of conversation close to the hearts of many Spaniards. One of the things that crops up in those food conversations is the Mediterranean diet. If you were to ask me what the Mediterranean diet I'd have to say that I'm not quite sure. I know that it includes more fish than meat, cereals, pulses, nuts, vegetables, fruit, wine and lots of olive oil but I'm a bit hazy on the details. We live pretty close to the Mediterranean. In fact yesterday we were in Santa Pola and if we'd chosen to we could have gone for a paddle, so I should know what the diet is but I don't. One of the confusing things about it is that lots of what seem to be traditi...

For years I didn't own a power drill. I made do with a little hand held job, in fact I often said that I preferred the manual ones. I forget now how it started but, for years, I have been doing online surveys. Sometimes they ask me reasonably sensible things like who I might vote for or how I keep up with news and current affairs. Usually though they ask me annoyingly written and stupid questions about whether I agree more with the statement that a) my bank is friendly, honest and innovative or b) that my bank is chummy, trustworthy and forward thinking. There's no space to say that all banks are equally soulless. money grabbing and intrinsically corrupt. The survey people give me points for doing each survey and I can change the points for things in an online catalogue. The first time I used the points to send pigs to Nicaragua but somewhere along the way I used others to get a power drill. I now know that power drills are better than hand drills. The other day I was a...

Very occasionally I write a piece for the blog which forms a part of the Country Fincas website. Country Fincas is the estate agent that Maggie works for in Pinoso. Having written it specifically for them I thought why not use it myself? So here it is. The English are ironic. The French don't like to wash. Germans are humourless and efficient. Well so they say. But the chances are that it's not actually true. There are some generalisations of course that are generally true. For instance punctuality is important, culturally important, in some countries and completely irrelevant in others. Punctuality doesn't really matter much if someone lives in a place without timepieces or where there are no trains to catch. My guess is that a Nigerian farmer in the middle of the countryside doesn't really care what time they start work so long as the work gets done. Anyway, Spain is very similar, in most ways, to the rest of Europe. There is law and order, traffic is organis...

One of my theories about Spanish food is that lots of the famous stuff is peasant food, made with cheap, locally available ingredients. The reason that it didn't disappear, before that sort of food became fashionable again, is that the Spaniards got richer late. So, whilst in the UK, we started to have more time than money and developed a taste for frozen lasagne, fish fingers and microwaveable chips the Spaniards stuck with piling pulses into stocks and eating rice with rabbit or seafood. One of these traditional dishes is called migas, literally crumbs. Over in Extremadura, which is where I first encountered it, it's old bits of bread fried in olive oil with garlic and the old scrag ends of leftover meat and sometimes vegetables. In fact there are varieties of migas all over the place with lots of different ingredients but, basically, it's a way to make something out of old, stale bread. That said there is a local food here, in Pinoso, called gachamiga which is...

It was a  Bank Holiday weekend (of sorts). You could tell this because the day off, the Saturday, was overcast and cool. We went to Valencia or, to be precise, we stayed in Alfafar. We behaved as tourists should. We went on a boat ride on l'Albufera, the freshwater lagoon, with just a dash of salty sea water, surrounded by lots of rice paddies, to the south of Valencia city. We dutifully ate rice cooked in a paella for lunch. We even tried to find the beach. I'd not booked a room until a couple of days ago so our late choice of hotels, so close to the coast, was a bit limited. I basically took what was left. As the electronic wizadry guided us past IKEA, past Media Markt and past the MN4 shopping centre it dawned that the hotel was in the middle of some gigantic retail zone. So instead of passing our evening wandering the streets of an ancient city centre we strolled the corridors and courtyards of a shopping mall. In fact we went to the flicks, Operación U.N.C.L.E. - passa...