Life in Culebrón

I went to see a fiesta in honour of Saint Anthony in Vilanova d'Alcolea last weekend. I've seen some pretty bonkers fiestas in Spain over the years but, so far, this one takes the biscuit. I seriously thought, for a few moments, that I might burst into flames and die in a ball of fire. Castellón province seems to go to town on Saint Anthony celebrations. The events are pretty obviously pagan at root, with a bit of Christian updating. In 2022 we went to the Santantonà in Forcall where a band of devils take two saints, Anthony and Peter, captive, tie them up and drag them around the streets on the way to be burned in a bonfire. Occasionally the devils are distracted from their primary task of immolation when they spy fair maidens watching the proceedings from their balconies. The devils climb to the balconies intent on another of the three tenets of the classic Viking battle plan: burn, pillage and rape. This year, as I said I went to Vilanova d'Alcolea, a village with a popu...

We went up to Castellón for the weekend, the most northerly of the three provinces that make up the Valencian Community. The place we went was called Forcall and we lodged in an old palace. We were there to see a very odd festival where a couple of saints, Anthony and Peter, are harried by demons who try to burn them to death. My guess is that the roots of the festival are maybe older than Christianity! Whilst we were there we wandered around some of the nearby villages, mostly just over the order into Teruel, one of the provinces that makes up Aragón. If you want to see the snaps they're in this album  which is just a part of the January 2022 photo album that you can access from the tabs across the home page, or here Teruel is quite famous in Spain for being the back of beyond. At the last General Election for instance the province elected an "MP" as a member of the party "Teruel Exists". Teruel is always used as an example of España vacciada - emptied Spain. I...

I've recently been in one of those linguistic slumps where I feel that my Spanish is so deficient that self flagellation seems appropriate. These dark moods are brought on when I come away from some film without having understood the plot or when I've no idea what the people in the queue behind me are talking about. It happens too frequently. This time my response was to give up on my one to one online, italki , Spanish lessons. My penance began just before Christmas. It didn't last long though. I've spent years and years trying to speak Spanish and I'll be damned if I'm going to give up now. Well, that's today's position statement anyway. Tomorrow it may be back to deep despair and a retreat to comforting chocolate treats. So, I'm online and nattering to Miriam. On my insistence our sessions don't have any structure. I just wander from this to that topic. It has been suggested to me that my thought patterns are a bit random anyway, which must be...