Life in Culebrón

We were in Shropshire last week for a family wedding. We stayed in Shrewsbury for most of the time. I think the last time I was in Shrewsbury was 47 years ago when I went to hunt for trilobites on Wenlock Edge. Shrewsbury looked rather nice with lots of fashionable, at least for we Spanish country bumpkins, shops and eateries. Maggie pointed out an organic veg shop offering two figs for a pound, £1 that is. She noticed them because we have three fig trees in our garden. One is a small tree with green figs and the other two are larger trees that produce the earlier higos and the later brevas. Just as mares and stallions, geldings and fillies are all horses to me then all the things that grow on the three trees are figs. Now I like figs alright. Often, when we lived in the UK, I'd eat as many as a dozen over the summer. Here, when the fruit is ripe, the birds feast on the ones at the top of the tree and leave us the rest. I think I've eaten three this year. Sometimes other pe...

Maggie told me the other day that she hasn't read my blog for ages. I may be putting words into her mouth but I think the suggestion was that I'd really run out of material. Being pragmatic I wondered if I could start again - talk about the differences in bar or restaurant etiquette or why Spaniards think we're odd drinking coffee with a sandwich. So I started to look back at the early blog entries. I see that, in February 2006, I brought a hoe from the UK to Spain. I took the handle off and just brought the blade part back. I remember I was surprised I didn't get more grief about the hoe head in my bag. On that very trip a jar of marmalade in Maggie's bag was dealt with much more harshly. Being singularly unimaginative I was hard pressed to envisage the damage that a jar of marmalade, even Olde English thick cut, could do to a Boeing 737 but the security staff at the airport seemed to be well aware of the destructive potential of the orange preserve. On the other...

El Jardin de la Seda. The Silk Garden, is an unremarkable public green space in Murcia. It has quite a lot of standard model ducks and some of those red faced Muscovy jobs. Joggers and walkers, some in track suits and others disguised in ordinary street clothes, do their stuff. Dog walkers with dogs large and small, some of them keen on battle. There's even the tall chimney left over from the silk factory that gives its name to the garden. It had been raining. In fact half an hour before we got there it had been pelting down and we had been forced to seek shelter from the storm in a handy bar in the Plaza Circular. I'd even maintained a WhatsApp conversation with Victor, our potential guide, as to whether the walk would go ahead. It's been raining on and off for a couple of weeks now. Last week I posted a photo of a dismal beer festival spoiled by the rain. An old friend in Cambridge saw the photo and commented; "I have made friends with a Spanish woman who now liv...

I quite like figs. Not that they are likely to replace plums or cherries in my affections but, from time to time, as something a bit different, they're nice. They were the sort of fruit that I would buy, every now and again, in a pack of three or four, when I was in Waitrose. We have two black fig trees in our garden and one of the smaller trees that gives green figs. They produce thousands and thousands of fruits. Being a bit lazy I'd not raked up the fallen fruit this season and the smell of rotting figs was becoming quite pungent. So yesterday I spent the better part of two hours raking up all the fallen stuff. It's not a pleasant job because the sap from the leaves and what not is a skin irritant and in grovelling around under the fig trees I always bump my head or back against one of the sturdy branches a couple of times. And scraping squashed figs from the soles of your shoes afterwards is quite time consuming and sticky too. Nonetheless, when I'd finished a...

I have to admit that I was surprised they didn't give me more trouble about the hoe head in my bag. After all a jar of marmalade caused a full scale security alert. Being singularly unimaginative I was hard pressed to envisage the damage that a jar of marmalade, even Olde English thick cut, could do to a Boeing 737. The security staff at Gatwick on the other hand seemed to be well aware of the destructive potential of the orange preserve. Our garden grows a good crop of weeds. Lots of other things grow too but weeds seem to grow much faster than the lilac or the figs. I brought the hoe head back because neither Dutch nor English hoes are on general sale in Spain. Spaniards use something more like a trenching tool to grub out the unwanted greenery. They seem to prefer to pull when we Brits, and those nice Dutch people, like to push. Our burning certificate was for a month. I was not allowed to burn in Holy Week and we had a lot of rain in March which denied me opportunity aft...

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 yea...