Life in Culebrón

Every year, in Pinoso, we have fiestas the first days of August - a mixture of events, a funfair, stalls, parades, taunting young bullocks and temporary discos. It goes on for eight or nine days. Last night was the official opening of the 2015 edition. There is a new councillor in charge of the organisation after the elections back in May. It's still the same party in power but the councillor with the responsibility for the fiestas has changed from Eli to César. The programme, the remarkably glossy, 90 plus page long programme was very late out, just two days before kick off and that caused a bit of grumbling. When we first got to Pinoso the pregonero or pregonera, the person who makes a speech and then officially opens the fiestas, used to deliver their opening address from the balcony of the Town Hall. It's the usual routine for the majority of the small towns and villages acrosss Spain. It's the obvious thing to do. Flanked by the mayor, appropriate councillors t...

I was thinking, as I drove between La Unión and Culebrón, about what I could see out of the car. I decided it was family and friends. You get what you're given. Blood's thicker than water and all that. History and culture from hand to hand and gene to gene over the generations. Alfred and the cakes, 1066, Glorious Goodwood, Cornish cream teas, feet and inches, Ant and Dec. Your friends on the other hand you get to choose. No blood ties, no original shared history. Something you manufacture between yourselves. I watched the dusty, brown grey, scrubby lunar landscape, the almond groves and the vineyards pass by. I looked at the bright blue sky and I thought how lovely it all looked. In the beginning, when I first got to Alicante and Murcia I thought it looked desolate. The sort of place that John Wayne ate beans. Maggie and I had a great time in my old MGB car driving around the Cotswolds. I thought the Cotswolds were amazing. When we saw Calendar Girls, when it was new and f...