Life in Culebrón

Last Friday, November 25, there were demonstrations and events all over Spain for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. As you enter the majority of Spanish towns and cities you will see a purple sign telling you that this town is against gender violence - that's one of Pinoso's on the left. When women in Spain are murdered by their partners or ex partners the murder is always given prominence in the news. There is a well publicised, 016, national helpline against gender violence. In Pinoso every first Friday of the month at 8pm, there are a few minutes of silence to remember the victims of gender violence. Spain was the fourth country in the world to introduce same sex marriage. The Yes is Yes Law that has just come into force, and which is having a stormy introduction for some dodgy legal drafting, is legislation which makes prosecution of rapists and abusers much less difficult and less traumatic for women. A new bit of legislation came into fo...

One of the reasons our water heater stopped working was that water was coming down the chimney and soaking the electrics and electronics. We've had lots of torrential rain recently and, the other evening, at around half past midnight the chimney began to drip again. I shimmied up onto the roof and covered the chimney with a plastic bag. The chimney has a hat like cover but it doesn't seem able to keep out the rain when it comes down in bucket-loads. The next morning I was back on the roof to cobble together a wider brimmed hat. I described the repair as Heath Robinson to someone on Twitter. For those of you who don't know William Heath Robinson (1872 – 1944) was an English cartoonist, illustrator and artist, best known for drawings of whimsically elaborate machines to achieve simple objectives. Heath Robinson is a part of my linguistic armoury just like crikey, whoops a daisy and wide boy. Old fashioned words. I've been away from the UK for a while now and Spain...

On Friday afternoons, in Cartagena, Maggie and I used to go to a Spanish language group organised by one of the local language schools. We paid a couple of euros and the language centre sent a teacher or two to moderate the session. The group was made up of lots of us foreigners - principally Brits and Dutch but with the occasional Czech and Zimbabwean thrown in - and the idea was that we all spoke Spanish to each other. It was organised into largish discussion groups dependant on the number of attendees with some chosen topic of conversation. The numbers dwindled when the language school upped the price to five euros and, eventually, so few people attended that it was knocked on the head. Maggie wondered about doing something similar between Spaniards and English speakers in Pinoso but somebody else beat her to it. Every Wednesday one of the local bars, Cafe Coliseum, acts as the venue. The organiser is an efficient young woman, who I'm sure introduced herself to me but whose ...

I didn't use to notice English much. Maybe it came as a bit of a surprise when the radio alarm burst into life and I hadn't the faintest idea what Brian Redhead or John Humphrys was saying to me for the fleeting seconds of semi consciousness before I woke up. Then that was a long time ago. The fact that there were still clock radio alarms proves it. I'm very aware of language now. For one thing I live in a place where speaking easily isn't, like breathing, just second nature - it's something that has to be striven for. On top of that, my students, well the ones who don't shout all the time, ask me questions about English. They seem to want rules. They want rules of grammar. I'm not a big believer in grammar. A set of rules invented after the fact to make sense of something that is essentially random in my opinion. I don't know a grammar rule without exceptions and, in many cases, the exceptions are much more common, in everyday speech, than the regu...

If you do not like foul or uncouth language do not read this post. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When the radio did it's exploding into life thing this morning the first song on was called A la mierda something like "fuck it!"  or a bit more literally "shit it!" A couple of my pupils, lads about eleven years old express surprise by saying "What the fuck!?" in English. I heard the same phrase used by The Gran Wyoming, a well known TV presenter, who hosts an irreverent daily round up current affairs and news on a TV programme called el Intermedio. Motherfucker, is also a relatively frequent word on Spanish lips. It always catches me unawares. It's a word I would not use lightly. I put it down to a lack of understanding of the violence of these sort of phrases in English. Now I am not the best person to comment on the intricacies of Spanish but this overuse of expletives, foul language and ...

I've been doing a Spanish class recently. Not that I expect it to make me any more understood in the street. I just feel I have a responsibility to try to improve my Spanish somehow. I would have preferred an intercambio - the half an hour of Spanish for half an hour of English language exchange - but, despite a fair bit of effort, I couldn't find one. Well, actually, that's not true. Alvaró and I met a couple of times but then he went off to seek fame and fortune in Guildford. So, unable to get  a bit of Spanish for free, I asked a local academy about paying for a weekly grammar class. It's not that exciting but it's structured practice, of a sort, with correction. My teacher is a pleasant and well organised young woman. "Why not write something for me to correct?" she suggested. So I did. I've done something the last couple of weeks and I was working on this week's piece today. Writing the essay is pretty straightforward. With a biro I can ...

The music festival season is just beginning to warm up in Spain. We usually try to get along to at least one event. It's good to hear a band that goes on to greater things - "Calvin? great musician! First time I saw him he was on the tiny fourth stage just by the latrines at half past six in the evening" It's good to hear new bands in general and I always look forward to those vegetable noodles they serve in the overpriced food areas too. So I was reading an article, in Spanish, from a national newspaper. It was suggesting ways to keep the costs of festival going to a bare minimum. It suggested coachsurfing (sic). Fortunately for me coachsurfing was hyperlinked and when I followed the link there was a little piece about couchsurfing (sic). Taken along with the rest of the article about how nice someone had been to some tourists I decided that it was about an internet method of finding a floor to kip on. Someone who would put you up on their couch for a fraction of...

I signed up for a weekly Spanish course yesterday. I haven't quite given up on the language yet - despite what Maggie says, and what I know to be true, that I will never speak Spanish adequately. I have just finished a blog post. Looking for information I was wading trough official bulletins, where laws and official notices are published. I could understand them but I wouldn't pretend that it's easy reading. It's the same with books, I normally read in Spanish but, at the moment, I'm reading a book written by an Englishman and it seemed perverse to read it in translation. I have to admit that it's much more comfortable reading in English. We took Maggie's car for an ITV yesterday, the road worthiness check. The tester took the car off us and drove it through the various test bays himself. I have the feeling that he was only doing that with us immigrants. Easier to do it himself than explain the various actions he required of us. Bank yesterday too to...

I remember some adverts at the cinema along the lines of "Which teacher changed your life?" It was a recruiting campaign for teachers; the idea being that teachers could make a real difference. Without the Ms. Williamsons or Mr. Gwizdaks there wouldn't be as many great novels or so many life enriching scientific discoveries. I've never really believed in the concept of inspirational teaching. I do not doubt that some teachers are better than others, that some teachers explain concepts better than others, that some teachers are more empathetic than others but, in the end, I think it's the student that counts. I was an average sort of student and I got average sort of results in a whole bundle of subjects. Who taught me seems to have been irrelevant. Nowadays anyway the very idea of a teacher as the fount of all knowledge seems so Victorian when my phone can tell me much more about chemistry than Messrs Lofthouse, Bottomley and all my other school chemistry teache...