Life in Culebrón

One of the local, but British, animal charities was collecting food and clothing for the refugees parked on Lesbos. So we popped along with our donation. The same day we went to a Mercadona supermarket in Monóvar where they were also collecting food for the same people. I handed over a few cans of meat and fruit. There's another animal charity in Pinoso. They operate a café to raise money for their work. For a variety of reasons they are in financial difficulties which are principally Covid related. Maggie gave them some cash and we handed over a few things for their second-hand shop. My support for that particular animal charity is somewhat coloured by a training event I went to in the 1990s about funding for charities. A photography project volunteered to be the guinea pigs. The trainer asked what their "mission" was; they were clear and succinct. "To promote good quality photography to the people of Cambridge". We were asked, by the trainer, to suggest ways t...

One of those Christmassy things I do is to buy whatever it is that the "A toy, a dream" - Un juguete una ilusión campaign is selling. For years now it's been a biro but when we first got here I remember it was a spinning top. The idea is you pay over the odds for the thing and the extra money gets turned into toys. In the first place those toys were shipped to poor children in South America and Africa - you know the sort of countries, the ones with names you just about recognise but you'd be hard pressed to point at on a blank map. Places like Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic or Guatemala. Last year, for the first time, toys were also handed out, via the Red Cross, to children in Spain. The headline is that one of every five people living in Spain lives in the shadow of poverty - in poverty or at risk of poverty. Now I have no idea how somebody has decided what poverty is. Is it getting fewer than so many calories to eat or not having a ...