5,844 days

Sixteen years ago today, on 7 October 2004, I parked up in Santa Pola having travelled the 1,349 miles from Huntingdon behind the wheel of a 1977 MGB GT. My travelling companion was a black and white cat called Mary. Our destination was the flat where Maggie had been living for over a month whilst she worked as a teacher in nearby Elche. The journey took two days and cost 200€ in fuel, 120€ in tolls, 55€ for accommodation and just 25€ in food.

Now, if anyone had asked, I'd have sworn that on the first full day in Spain I went and signed on the equivalent of the Council Tax Register, the padrón. In fact my diary tells me otherwise. The only interesting thing I did that first day was to go, with Maggie, to a Spanish class that she'd booked us in to. It seems I didn't get around to signing on the padrón till the week after. Even then it wasn't my first bit of officialdom - apparently I'd managed to get a social security number a few hours before. Strange how memories become distorted with time.

Having done a couple of courses of Spanish classes in the UK I spoke some Spanish when I got to Spain. My memory is that we struggled with the language but that, overall, we used to manage OK. Again my diary suggests that I may be misremembering. I obviously felt strongly enough about it at the time to record that I had problems buying dusters and kidney beans one day! I didn't know the Spanish for either and, though I found the dusters easily enough, there were two jars of potential candidates as kidney beans. My solution, at the time, was to go to the international section in the supermarket (we were in Santa Pola after all) where I went through the ingredients on the side of a can of chilli con carne to find the Spanish words I needed. I suspect that the entry is a sign of frustration at feeling lost and adrift with the language. It's a frustration I still often feel.

As well as misremembering there are other early entries in the diary that show just how wrong some first impressions were. We went to Villena that first weekend. In my diary I mention that the town seems nice enough but that it has no "old part". If you've ever been to Villena you'll know just how wrong that is. It also shows too just how lost we were. Nowadays, when we go to a new town we always head for the bit where the town hall and parish church are because that's where the heart of the town will be. Seemingly we didn't know to do that in Villena all those years ago.

The house hunting began nearly straight away. If we could we went out looking at places together. There were a lot of cowboy house sellers at the time and we saw all sorts of junk. We soon became very aware of some of the very dodgy sales techniques of the numerous get rich quick merchants in a market where house prices were rising week by week. On lots of occasions people were simply wasting our time so it became routine for me to talk to agents and sellers and have a look at the places alone so that I could filter out the no hopers. Later Maggie and I would go back to anything that I'd added to the "reasonable" pile. 

Eventually I went to an Estate Agent in Monóvar who showed me, amongst others, the house in Culebrón where we now live. I saw other houses, with a different agent, in the same area, around Pinoso, on the same day. I didn't care for the Culebrón house much and I discounted it but, the next day, on the Saturday, I'd arranged for some second viewings so that Maggie could see my selection. As we passed, what is now, our track I made the short detour to show the house to Maggie. It just happened that the owner had been so appalled by the state of the garden, when he'd shown me around, that he'd come back to do a bit of tidying up. By sheer fluke he was in the garden when we showed up and so he was available to show us around. I still didn't like the house much though the driveway was nice. Maggie hated the other houses I'd lined up but she reckoned the Culebrón house had potential. The truth is that our house hunting was not going well, we didn't have enough money and we seemed to be running out of options. With the help of the estate agent we got a builder to have a look. On a miserable November evening in the light of very low wattage bulbs Maggie invented a plan for the design of our house on the spur of the moment. It was drawn freehand in an old school notebook. A few days later we got the builder's quote back and on the 19th November we made an offer on the house which the owners rejected. We ended up paying the full asking price.

Back in the diary my summing up at the end of the year contained the following - "... and now living in Spain with absolutely no income, no job prospects to talk of and living off Maggie. I've just agreed to spend all the money I have in the world on a damp, shed like house in the middle of bugger all where. I am quite unable to speak the language". 

We didn't complete the purchase till after the Christmas holidays and we didn't move in till April of 2005. I have a photo of Maggie, the photo at the top of this post, unlocking the gate as we took possession and, every time I see that snap, I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach that we had just made the most terrible mistake.

The oddest thing though is that, the other day, I was driving somewhere close by - it could have been the Yecla road or the one down to La Romaneta - and I found myself grinning all over my face for no apparent reason. I was thinking how stunning the countryside looked and congratulating myself on having made the right decision when we upped sticks and moved here.

Oh, and in't seat o'nowt, as we say where I was born or aprovechando que el Pisuerga pasa por Valladolid as we say in the place where I live, there's another entry in my diary about the first weekend after getting here in 2004 which notes that our first meal out was at a local Chinese restaurant and cost a massive 4.96€.

Don't it always go to show

Maggie and I may be among the last few people in the world who are awoken by a clock radio alarm. A thirty year old clock radio at that. The wake up programme is Hoy empieza todo on Radio 3, a contemporary culture and music station. We don't listen for long, even if we're very slothful it will only be about twenty minutes though the programme stays on in the background.

I change the bedclothes on Friday. As I fought with the duvet cover the main presenter on the programme was talking to the organisers of a "pop" festival that runs in Miranda de Ebro in Burgos about 700km from home. They said that they were giving away a package of two tickets, travel and accommodation for the festival and to enter all you had to do was to make a comment on their Twitter account.

Now I've never quite mastered Twitter but, eventually I posted something as to why I wanted to go. I said I was old (and may die before the next one), because I was poor (and I wouldn't be able to afford to go with my own resources) and because I was English so that understanding anything around me was more or less impossible. I added that one of my delights was complaining and that at a festival at two in the morning I could complain mightily about my aching back.

Yesterday evening someone from the programme sent me a message via Twitter and asked whether I would go to the festival if I won. The messages went back and forth in very dodgy Spanish on one side but the last message said "Me das un email y un teléfono para gestionarlo todo?" - can you give me an email address and a telephone number so that I can arrange it all.

I presumed that I had just won something. I broke out the gin that I'd promised myself I wouldn't drink.

This morning, three minutes before the clock radio burst into life, I got another Twitter message. "Lo siento Chris, al final en la última ronda no os ha tocado! Quizás el año que viene." Sorry Chris, in the end, in the last, round you didn't win. Maybe next year.

Very disappointing.

Staying home and keeping warm

It's been a bit miserable for days, nay weeks, now. Tumble dryer rather than washing line, slightly moist bath towels. Dirty boot prints across the kitchen floor. I've been looking for something to do. What about popping up north for the weekend? I don't know why but I thought about Huesca or maybe Sigúenza. Some travel website says I'm talking about five or six hours. Well, if we set off after I finish work on Friday evening we could still be there for a nightcap around midnight. Paradors, Paradores, choose your plural, the upmarket hotel chain, constantly promote their offers. I had a bit of a look. None of it quite fits. Maybe it would work. Why not? Well, the truth is, it looks a bit dear actually. Madrid maybe, Madrid is always good. It always makes me feel less like a yokel when I'm in an art gallery and I'm not the only person there. That's not exactly free either and the deals on the super fast trains don't seem to be quite as stupendous and ubiquitous as the news stories would suggest. I suppose that I need to remember too that the house and car insurance are both due in the next few weeks.

Well then, if not now, I could, at least, think about something for the near or middle future. What about the festival in Benicassim? All the hotels within a ten mile radius seem to be booked already. A local festival then? SOS in Murcia maybe? Same thing. And I think about it, all that effort, all that upheaval. Anyway my back is hurting a lot at the moment and my feet feel funny.

It's not that I haven't had a very pleasant weekend. On Friday evening we went to Monóvar, just 12 km away, for a film in a series to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of a relatively famous local writer whose pen name was Azorín. It was an old black and white Billy Wilder film, dubbed into Spanish, with Jack Lemmon. The audience was pretty select and could have come back to ours for a cup of tea. Yesterday we had coffee with friends. In the evening, we did a Burns Night complete with haggis, piper and men with no underpants. Today we went for a meal as a sort of late birthday celebration with a couple of friends. Not a word of Spanish to worry about as we ate roast beef or sticky toffee pudding. In amongst all this I went to take some snaps of the delayed Saint Anthony, San Antón, festival in Pinoso where the priest blesses people's pets. Not an action packed weekend but a long way from gardening leave or pure catatonia.

It just feels to be passing by though. The last time we were in Sigüenza I'd wished we were staying in that converted castle. Just trogging up a motorway or riding the train makes me feel like we actually live in Spain. It's the same when I hand over the money to see whatever they have on at the Thyssen or think about the free tapas in Guadix. Somehow doing things locally isn't just the same. Maybe when the weather improves in Spring life will pep up a bit? Winter here is just as depressing as it is in Billingham, Brighouse or Bearsden.

Energy poverty

There are a lot of people in Spain who have difficulty in paying their energy bills. A nice warm house, when it's cold outside, is one of those symbols of well being and comfort. Just think of any of the filmed versions of A Christmas Carol. Being cold is miserable

I've lived in six different flats in my time in Spain. None of them have had gas, just electricity. Whilst there are plenty of people who have piped gas and many more who use bottled gas when Spaniards talk about energy they are really talking about electric.

That's not our case; in Culebrón we have a gas hob, gas water heater and we generally use gas fires to heat the house. We have a pellet burner too, a device that burns reconstituted wood pellets, but it has been giving us a bit of trouble recently and we have fallen back on the gas fires over Christmas. Because we have been in the house for longer periods and, because we are rich enough and determined enough not to be cold we have bought five gas bottles since the 21st at a cost of close on 70€. Our last electric bill was also the highest that it's ever been. It's not even been a cold autumn or winter so far. The problem for us is that any heat we pour into the house flies out of the poorly insulated building. Our house is old, it was not built with energy saving in mind and, if there was any thought at all about the design of the house it was to keep it cool not warm. After all we live in one of the warmest parts of Spain. As I've said many times on this blog we are much colder here than we ever were in the UK during the late Autumns and Winters.

I've heard it said lots of times that electricity in Spain is amongst the most expensive in Europe. We get a subsidy on our electric supply, the social bonus, because our supply contract is for 2.2kw. This isn't from choice, the infrastructure of the supply company isn't tough enough to give us more power. This social bonus is applied to anyone who has a supply of less than 3kw, the idea being that it is poorer people who have low power supplies. Although my hourly pay rate is around the UK minimum wage we are not exactly poor and the fact that we get the bonus shows that it doesn't, necessarily, offer financial support to the people who most need it.

Doing the crude maths of dividing our last bill by the number of kWh we pay just over 14 cents per kilowatt. Without the social subsidy that would go up to 17 cents which is around 14 pence. Our standing charges are about 27% of the total though in some of the flats we've lived in, particularly the one which had a decent supply of 10 kWh, that rose to nearly 50% of the total. This high percentage of standing charge means that, however hard you try to save power, you only have control over a percentage of the cost. One of the ways people try to reduce their bills is by lowering their supply with the result that circuit breakers trip all the time when you try to pull more power than you are paying for.

This energy poverty isn't just about income. It's a balance between the money coming in and the power that a household needs to consume. In Spain the figures suggest that some 17% of households, or seven and a half million people, have difficulty in maintaining their homes above 18ºC. In countries in the North of Europe the figure is usually quoted at around 2-3%. In Spain too there is more of a problem in the warmer parts of the country because of the build quality. The homes in Asturias are built to keep warm whilst houses in Andalucia are not. Fit, younger adults can get away with colder houses than those that have older people or children.

Apparently this is a Europe wide concern, with the UK being one of the pioneers with laws and regulations designed to help people in a bad way. Here in Spain the politicians have only just really got around to talking about it. A recent case where an 81 year old died in a fire caused by a candle after her power was cut off has given a certain urgency to the matter. Only the other day, a deal was struck between three of the four principal political parties for new regulations.

I have a horrible feeling though that like many Spanish laws, for instance the Freedom of Information law, the new regulations will be more window dressing than substance.

Running for pleasure

I've never been very sporty. Mr Liddington made it clear in end of term reports that he didn't like my approach to rugby, Christopher should not try to hide as far away from the play as possible, to cricket, Christopher would do better if he were not afraid of the ball and to hockey, Christopher does not play hockey well. So, despite my attempts to embrace Spanish customs, I have yet to go to a football match a handball or basketball game or even join a gym.

A couple of years ago I noted a report of the TV news about the San Silvestre Vallecana and indeed about lots of other San Silvestres. I didn't know what they were talking about. I could see runners but the report sort of took it for granted that we all knew what a San Silvestre was. With my usual disregard for things sporty I forgot all about it as soon as the next programme came on.

There is a San Silvestre event in Pinoso tomorrow starting at 5pm so I thought I should find out exactly what one is. From the comfort of the sofa Wikipedia tells me it was the Brazilians, in Sao Paulo, that came up with the idea of a race that started one year and ended the next. The date, 31st December, Saint Sylvester's day, must have made choosing a name easy enough.

I thought it was probably a cross country race, mainly because the Pinoso event has cross in the title, but a bit of Googling suggests that most of them, and there are over 200 run in Spain, are 10km road races. I have no idea why the Pinoso event is on the 30th, if the tradition is the 31st, but there must be some good reason.  It's 5km too rather than 10km but that I fully understand.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry about the event in Madrid it's interesting that the field has always been pretty international with lots of British wins back in the 1970s, a series of Spanish successes in the late 1990s and early noughties but that recently it has been the Ethiopians and Kenyans who have dominated. Actually a British woman called Gemma Steel was the first woman home in the 2014 event. Nearly 40,000 people run the race which is about the same number as run the London Marathon though, clearly, 10 km doesn't compare with 42 and a bit kilometres.

I suppose the majority of the runners in the Spanish events, logically enough, will be Spaniards so they couldn't be doing with a race that took up too much of the evening. Obviously they'll need to get in a quick post race beer with their friends, get back to the family for the evening meal and be ready to pop those twelve grapes int their mouths along with the chimes of the clock in Puerta del Sol at midnight before getting out again for a bit of celebrating.

Mr Liddington made a funny sort of snorting noise when he saw me run but I don't suppose he'd have minded that I'll be spectating tomorrow. He'd probably presume that I'm not going to run because I've got a note from my mum.

In the dark

One of the things that tourists in Spain often find a little odd is the Spanish working day. Whilst there are as many variations as you can imagine the basic structure is that people work in the morning, have a long break in the middle of the day and go back to work for the evening. A local shop, for instance, would probably open at 10, close at 2, re-open at 5 and close for the day at 8.30. This means that most people have lunch between 2 and 3.30 and have their evening meal after 9.30.

In Portugal it's the same time as in London. In Madrid the London time is advanced by an hour. When people sit down for lunch at 2pm in Madrid it's also lunchtime in London, except that there it's 1pm.

After a conference in 1884, that established the current time zones, Spain slotted in to the same zone as the UK. Then in 1940, apparently in a move designed simply to please Adolf Hitler, Franco changed Spanish time to that of most of the rest of Europe.

There has been talk in Spain, for years, of trying to rationalise the working day. Critics say that the split reduces productivity and increases time spent travelling to and from work. This week the Government said that it was in favour of changing the working day, so that it generally finished at 6pm rather than 8pm, and doing away with the long lunch break.

Fair enough I suppose. Choose your argument. But at the same time all the press reports said that would also mean going back to the "proper" time zone. The argument being that if it gets darker earlier people would be keener to go home (honest, that's what they said).

The time zones fan out from the Greenwich Meridian. Last time I looked Greenwich was reasonably close to the Dover and Newhaven and other places that act as ports for ferries across the Channel to France. People swim the channel so it can't be very wide. Yet, on the beach at Dieppe or Calais it's the same time as in Spain. So is France in the wrong time zone too? And the answer is apparently yes. It's to do with that same bloke Hitler and him capturing France. Oh, I should mention that the Canary Islands which belong to Spain, are on London time. From my reading of a time zone map they should be two hours behind Madrid and an hour behind London.

I would be dead against moving Spanish time back to London time if only for the simple reason that it makes Winter much less miserable. It doesn't get dark here till 6pm even in the depths of December. Equally, in Summer, because we're farther South, we don't get the light nights of Northern Europe and sunset on the longest day is currently around 10pm. I prefer lighter evenings in summer too.

By the way I kept saying London time to avoid the UCT/GMT/BST thing.

Realising you need new windscreen wipers

When Spanish people here in Spain talk to me about the winter weather in England they usually talk about the cold. Obviously it's colder in the UK, in general, than it is in our bit of Spain. I explain that whilst it may be colder outside it's usually much warmer inside. I go on to say that the most depressing thing about the UK in winter is not the cold but the light, or the lack of it, that sort of grey miserableness and the all pervading dampness

Well, for the past, maybe, three weeks, it has been wet and miserable here. It's not quite the same. It's not been cold and we haven't had any of those English type days where a grey dawn turns into a grey morning and then it's night again. Light by 7.30am and not dark till around 6pm. But we haven't had our normal sunny and blue days either.

Our floors have muddy trails across them. Both our front and back doors lead directly to the outside world. The doormats are sodden and dirty footprints (and paw prints) mix with the loosened wet coconut matting fibres just inside the doorsteps. The paw prints are in other places too.

I've had untumbledryerable washing hanging on the line for days - nearly dry before another shower or another downpour lengthens the arms of the pullovers once again. And I'm dead against clothes horses in front of the fire. It looks fine on the B&W version of The Thirty Nine Steps and it serves a purpose in Love Actually but I don't want it in my house. It reminds me of miserable winters and miserable times in England long long ago.

I tried to weed and clear the garden but got as bogged down as the troops at Passchendaele. The carpets of my car are littered with gravel and caked in dried mud. All in all, not nice.

Maggie came in to Alicante airport this morning after a few days of gladdening the hearts of retailers in Liverpool. It was misty and windscreen wiper weather as I left Culebrón but it brightened up as I neared the airport. Re-united we spent a couple of hours wandering along the coast. The sun was shining, my coat remained in the car. There were two people swimming in the sea at Santa Pola.

Perhaps we should move.

Out on the blowout

Last Saturday we joined some people from the language exchange group to go on the tapas trail. One of the participants was a bloke from Surrey who has partnered up with a young Spanish woman. He was saying to me that his perception is that whilst we Britons go out for a drink Spaniards go out for an eat. Obviously I agreed with him as it's true. Lots of Spanish life revolves around food.

It depends on your criteria but the Santa Catalina area of Pinoso has been described to me, by Spaniards, as the poorest bit of Pinoso, the most authentic bit of the town and the district with the strongest community identity. There's nothing to stop all three being true.

I've always known the area as Santa Catalina, named for the patron saint of the district, but there is a definite drift to calling it the Barrio de las cuevas - the cave district - where caves are the houses dug into the hillside. Either way I've been up there a couple of times this week to have a look at bits of their fiesta. On Sunday I went to see the first transfer of the image of Santa Catalina to her first overnight stop with a local family and, this evening, as a lead in to the actual Saint's day on the 25th, we popped up to have a look at the hogueras, the little bonfires that families, friends and other social groupings gather around.

We parked the car and walked towards the first little bonfire we saw. Maggie drew in breath through her nose and that was enough for someone to offer her a hunk of bread and one of the local longaniza sausages, cooked in the embers of the fire, with a drop of mulled wine to wash it down. I heard someone there describe me as the Culebrón photographer. I'm not sure whether I liked that or not.

We strolled on, we were offered wine served as a stream of red liquid from the wooden version of a wine skin. We bumped into, and chatted with, some Britons we know who were having a drink outside one of the district bar's. We walked on towards another little fire where I was invited into the patio of the house to take a snap of a small shrine to Santa Catalina. That, of course, led to the irresistible offer of food: first buñuelos which are a bit like doughnuts made with pumpkin, then variations on gachamigas, more longanizas, some unnamed bits of cold and very unpalatable fat and then some broad beans cooked in a ham stock. The wine I had to surreptitiously pass to Maggie as I was driving.

We had only popped in for a quick look see. Very pleasant way to pass a cool November evening; very hospitable and, as Maggie said, November is a great time for a fiesta to add a bit of cheer to the colder and darker nights.

All mod cons

My Auntie Lizzie used to take me to Blackpool when I was a lad. We stayed in B&Bs that advertised hot and cold running water. It was a long time before en suite bathrooms.

In Auntie Lizzie's day people used to say that houses had mod cons - modern conveniences. Our house, the one we live in now, has all those mod cons but they seem to be in open revolt. I told you about the water a while ago.

To sort our water supply we rang the Town Hall. Their people came in a Jeep, wielded a spanner or two, and told me it was all sorted. It wasn't though. Inside the house water flow was still a problem. I called a plumber. He changed a couple of valves and assured me that it was all hunky dory. It wasn't though. I rang our gas contract supplier and asked them to service the boiler. They did, they said it was as right as rain. It wasn't though. They are going to have another stab tomorrow.

A bulb blew. When I took the cover off the lamp I was surprised to find an incandescent bulb. That bulb must have been as old as the room. I thought we had low energy stuff everywhere but, when I checked, I found lots of old style bulbs. I spent a fortune on new ones with really impressive looking energy ratings. I set aside ten minutes, between other jobs, to change the lamps. Changing the light bulbs was a bit like those old shaggy dog jokes - it just went on and on for ever. I even had to replace a couple of fittings.

We have fluorescent tubes in the kitchen. There has always been a delay between flicking the switch, the starters popping and the tubes glowing but the wait had become interminable. It wasn't the first time we'd had the problem. I thought new tubes and starters would get us back to a reasonable response time. In the ironmongers, as I inspected the tubes, Olegario, the owner, interested himself in my purchase. He told me that the tube I had in my hand was LED. Being relatively good at reading I'd worked that out. I picked out a couple of tubes and told him I needed starters too. Olegario knew otherwise and explained that I needed to dump the ballast and starters for the LED tubes to work. Back in our kitchen, with instructions followed, the tubes wouldn't fire up. YouTube told me what Olegario hadn't. The replacement didn't go smoothly but, in the sanitised words of Gordon Hamnet, there was only one winner here and it wasn't the light fitting.

So, changing a few bulbs had taken me several hours.

Over the years we have used various devices to heat our house. Gas stoves - calor gas type heaters - have been our mainstay. After years of faithful service the original batch of three started to do things they shouldn't do. We feared for our lives in an explosion of metal shards from ruptured gas bottles. New gas stoves were purchased. In the meantime Maggie had invested real money in a pellet burner. With the pellet burner as the main heat source and the two newer gas heaters, and the rest, in reserve I thought we had everything covered. Except that the gas heaters have started to mysteriously turn themselves off. Obviously it's some form of safety cut out but our carbon monoxide meter has nothing to say on the matter. Valves and tubes have been changed. Why the heaters turn themselves off is something known only to the Taiwanese or Turks that built the things. Last night, as I got home, the living room radiated coolness. "I can't get either the gas stove or the pellet burner to light," said Maggie. The gas stove was no problem. Maggie just doesn't have the knack but the pellet burner took an hour to sort. Nothing seriously wrong but a pain in the proverbial.

Auntie Lizzie's house only had cold water in the scullery. Her outside toilet was a basically a big pit. The heating was by coal fires. I think she had electric but gas lighting hadn't completely disappeared in my youth so I may be wrong. I'm ever so pleased that things have moved on and we have modern conveniences nowadays.

Mossets it is

Mossets is, apparently, the Valencian language equivalent of tapa, or, in the plural, tapas. I presume that you know about tapas, it's one of those words that is now as English as coup or zeigeist. Tapas are little snacks.

Normally, around these parts we're not big on free tapas. You often get a handful of crisps, a few olives, or some nuts with your beer but it's an optional extra. It's not the same in Andalucia. The last time I was in Guadix I forgot that we had crossed a frontier and I made the typical foreigner abroad mistake of telling the waiter that I hadn't ordered the mini hamburger that he had just put down in front of me. In Andalucia substantial tapas alongside your drink are still dead common.

I think of the town I pay my rates to as being called Pinoso but, just to continue the Valenciano lesson, lots of people refer to it by its Valencian name of el Pinós. And the publicity says El Pinós a Mossets or something like Pinoso out for a bite to eat.

Tapas trails are a bit old hat nowadays. They've been around for ages. A bunch of bars and restaurants sign up to produce a tapa or two for the trail during a set period. Some organisation, like the local town hall or the chamber of trade, puts together a little leaflet or booklet which lists the participating establishments and what they have on offer. Usually it's a set price offer for a drink and a tapa. People do some or all of the route and usually vote for their favourite tapa with a prize draw included.

In my opinion Pinoso has never quite got this right. The first year of the route participants had to go to every bar if they wanted to vote and enter the prize draw. Not only did this make full participation relatively expensive and time consuming but it also meant that there was no real incentive for a bar to be innovative. Good for you if, as a bar, you mixed tastes and traditions in your tapa but punters still had to go to the bar offering a bit of ham on bread if they wanted to vote. It also took no account of personal likes and dislikes - you don't eat fish - tough luck, you're a vegetarian - forget it. A couple of the participating eateries were also out of town which was a bit of a snag if you didn't have transport. Actually living away from town is a disadvantage too. The set price is 2€ and includes a beer or a wine. If you want a soft drink it costs more. I'm sure though that the town hall has no interest in incentivizing drinking  and driving.

Despite my moaning we've been out of course. We've been to half a dozen places so far and one of the major improvements this time is that you "only" need to go to a dozen of the seventeen places participating. It's still too many but it is a step in the right direction.

The Third Age

You will, no doubt, remember that I joined the Pensioner's Club here in Pinoso last year.

A few days ago I got a letter, in the post, with a stamp and everything. It said that if I didn't hand over my 9€ annual membership fee the Club would, unhappily, have to strike me from their membership register. I haven't actually taken part in a single event or even been in the building since I signed up. They never send me any information and the only way I know to find out what the group is up to is to go to the building and ask someone. I do know though that it's an active club because I often read about their events, after the fact, in the local news. And, like Bellgrove from Gormenghast, as I prefer to be out of it in a group rather than out of it altogether, I hurried over to pay my debts.

To the best of my knowledge the only way to pay is in cash in the club building. I asked if I could pay for next year too whilst I remembered. "No," said the woman who does the group's clerical work. She added, without any prompt from me, that there was no reason as to why I couldn't except that I couldn't.

My membership card is in a fetching fawn colour and it is made of cardboard. In the left hand corner there is a glued on photo. It's a real Polaroid, not a digital photo and it was produced by one of the town's professional photographers. The administrator took the card out of its plastic wallet and used a rubber stamp to print 16 in one of the little boxes on the back. She then found the card's twin stored in a small wooden drawer in a mini filing cabinet and did the same to that. Next she ticked my name off on a printed list. She took my proffered tenner and gave me the change. A fully paid up member once again.

It was so sweet. So brown paper and string. Not much chance of their records being hacked or someone's card being cloned.

Fiesta del cine

I like going to the flicks. I know it's dead old fashioned. I know I should be streaming Netflix from the mobile phone to the telly screen or watching a film on my tablet or something but I quite approve of a four metre head shot and the thirty metre wide panning shot. The faces on my computer screen might get to be 15 centimetres high which isn't quite so impressive. It's good to get off the couch once in a while too.

I think there is a tradition of cinema going amongst Spaniards - it is often grandly referred to as the Seventh Art, but like most places cinema attendances here have been dwindling for years. 

The main reason that Spaniards always give for not going to the pictures is the price. It didn't help when the conservative government moved theatre tickets, and other arty products, on to a higher VAT tariff.

In Madrid, if you go to the wrong cinema at the wrong time, you might pay as much as 9.30€ for a ticket but, even in the capital, it's easy to find a show for 6€. With the Brexit decreased value of the pound making that seem more expensive we're talking less than £8.50 for a couple of hours of entertainment. Back here in Alicante we sometimes go to the outrageously expensive ABC in Elche where, I think, it's 8.10€ but, more usually, we go to a cinema in Petrer where we pay 5.50€. If we go on Wednesday, Spectator's Day, it's even cheaper.

I suppose if you have a bus load of kids it can add up but, then again, if you have a bus load of kids going anywhere, except the park, costs a fortune. The overpriced popcorn and fizzy drinks don't help either. But, per se, I don't see how anyone can class the cinema as being overpriced.

I'm obviously wrong though. Today was the last day of this year's first Fiesta del Cine campaign. During the promotion the cinema entry price drops to just 2.90€ for the three quiet days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I think this is the fourth such event since 2014. On Monday, the first day of the campaign, over 600,000 people turned out to watch a film. That's nearly five times as many people in the cinemas as against the equivalent Monday, the year before, when there was no promotion.

I'm off to Walk the Dog

Booze and fags are pretty cheap in Spain. At least I think they are. I haven't bought either in the UK for quite a while now so I'm just going on what visitors tell me. Certainly booze, in the form of home produced, Spanish, brandy is endangering my already weakened liver and my lungs are as claggy as those pits that trapped the woolly mammoths. That's thanks to ten cigars for the princely sum of 6€. To be fair I haven't actually smoked a cigar for a couple of weeks but my guess is the damage is done and that death by asphyxiation is round the corner.

When I was young pubs were tied houses, The Savile was Websters, The Wellington Bass, the New Inn was Ramsden's or maybe Bentley's Yorkshire Beers. Of course in time all the little breweries became part of huge conglomerates so it was Watney's or Ind Coope or Tetley's who owned the boozers. The last time I was in the UK that system seemed to have largely disappeared and pubs sold a variety of beers with improbable names. In Tesco's and Sainsbury's I presume there are still shelves and shelves of bottled beer from around the world.

Generally, in Spain, beer is beer. Obviously there are taste differences between the brands but, almost without exception, it's a light, alcoholic and fizzy pilsener type lager. Each region tends towards a particular manufacturer though the big brands are always available somewhere. Individual drinkers may have a preference for Mahou or Cruzcampo or Alhambra but, in general, brand is nowhere near as important as temperature. Beer has to be cold. On the two occasions when I have attempted to interest Spaniards in drinking British bitter they have complained loudly about the temperature - it's like broth - without mention of the taste.

There have always been a few, readily available, Spanish beers that have been out of the ordinary though the only two I can instantly bring to mind are Yuste and Voll Damm. Yuste is a beer with its roots back in the time when Spain ruled the Low Countries and is a dark Belgian type ale whilst the Voll Damm is a dark double malt lager. But suddenly, on the counter tops of bars all over Spain, there are lots of bottles of different beers on display. They don't seem to get drunk much but there they are.

Just to prove it to myself I had a look at the Cruzcampo site where there is Cruzcampo Cruzial with 100% selected hops (so the hops in their other beer aren't selected?), Cruzcampo Fresca (the authentic taste of recently brewed beer). On the San Miguel site they have a fresca too: it looks as though it may taste like the Mexican Corona or Sol whilst San Miguel Especial has toasted barley and overtones of licorice which is more or less the same description as San Miguel 1516. At least San Miguel Blu is different because it comes in a blue bottle and includes a touch of vodka. Actually the San Miguel site gives the year when each of these beers were introduced and lots of them have apparently been around for ages. I musn't have been looking! Even the local Murcia brewer, Estrella de Levante, has a beer called Punta Este on their website though there's no description of it, just a photo. Amstel Extra is for the bloke with strong emotions (really, that's how the blog translates) whilst Amstel Oro has the ingredients to be pretentious but prefers to be careful (and I thought education jargon was rubbish). Again, it seems that Amstel Oro, Amstel Gold, was introduced in 1956 so it's nearly as old as me.

And, alongside these bottles with different labels and differently coloured beer inside there are now, reasonably frequently, some local beers brewed in somebody's shed - artisan or craft beers. It's true that the outlet for most of them seems to be in the Mediaeval Markets and other street fairs but some bars do have them. Strangely one of the Spaniards who disliked English Bitter was also my drinking partner for some wheat beer and a pale ale tried over the summer at a Mediaeval Market in Teruel. He said he preferred proper, "industrial," beer.

One of the bodegas that Maggie uses for her wine tours, Casa de la Ermita, now does beer too under the name of Yakka. The last time I visited I tried their IPA. It wasn't that great to be honest but it was a nice change. I'm pretty sure that Yakka was actually started here in Pinoso, in the satellite village of Ubeda, because I tried their stout one cold November evening a couple of years ago at the Mediaeval Fair in Santa Catalina. A beer I sometimes drank when I lived in Cartagena, Icue, still looks to be alive and well too.

Who knows, give it another twenty years or so and it may be dead easy to get something other than industrially produced lager in Spanish bars.

October and nothing to say

Nothing much to write. It's October, you may well have noticed, and the weather is a bit changeable. The usual weather pattern here is blue skies and sunny days all year round with a few days rain particularly in winter and spring. In summer the difference is that it just gets hotter and stays hotter longer. At the moment the maximum temperatures are only getting up to around 26/27ºC and overnight we get down to somewhere below 10ºC. Difficult weather to deal with. You put on a sweater and you swelter. You wear a T shirt and, in the shade, it's a bit nippy. At night it's cool. Only the Northern Europeans are still in shorts. Inside, in front of the telly, our house is distinctly chilly. We've had the gas fires on but not yet wound up the mighty roaring pellet burner. We've had some rain too. The sort of British rain that makes the soil claggy and leaves muddy footprints on the kitchen floor.

There's still a fair bit going on round and about in the fiesta line - hence the photo - but we haven't ventured very far recently. Bit short of cash to be honest. I haven't had any work or any pay for four months. The Brexit vote has destroyed the value of the pound against the euro and, with it, my pension income. If you consider that, as a very broad generalisation, over the last couple of years it has cost about £770 to buy 1,000€ one now needs £910 to do the same. I'm sure you can guess what that means to someone living here and paid their UK pension in sterling.

I'm back at work now though and counting the days to the pay check. Things are a bit different. I'm still with the bunch based in Murcia who sell my work to a state assisted school in Cieza. This year though I'm just working two longish days with them. In the morning I work in the school, with full classes of youngsters doing their compulsory secondary school education and, in the afternoon, I do classes with any age group willing to pay for English classes. My bit, with the school, is to try to make sure the teenagers hear some real English and actually get to speak a bit. It's fair enough. The youngsters are noisy but generally they are nice enough and they don't give me too much grief. They don't like to speak English though. In the afternoon I do the classes for the language school in the same building, in the same rooms but with a mixture of age groups. Fortunately this year I have more adults and fewer children.

A biggish change is that I also have some work with another business, Academia10, based here in Pinoso. I do three adult two hour classes with them. It's nice to be working close to home and with people who are keen to learn. You'd have to ask the learners, rather than me, but I think the classes have been going OK.

Spanish wise, the language side, things go along. I still do a class, in fact I do it at the place I teach myself now. I also go to a language exchange that happens in a local bar. My Spanish isn't bad at some levels but it still drives me to distraction and is the major fly in the ointment of my existence here. I make stacks of mistakes but I can generally maintain a conversation. Then again I sometimes can't speak at all. In one bar last week they brought me a coca cola when I asked for a coffee. Twelve years and I can't get a coffee!

Last night I was surprised when, as I drove up our track, a car followed me right to our gate. It turned out to be some friends who had spotted a couple of sheep wandering on the minor road to their house. They wondered if I knew who the owner might be. I didn't but I said I would call the police on their behalf. I was shocked when the local police number was answered by the emergency 112 call centre. I stumbled and stuttered confusing verb tenses, mispronouncing words etc. I had the usual excuses - poor mobile phone coverage, not being quite sure what the answers were to lots of the questions. If it had been in English though it would have been much easier. The sheep are now safe and sound though.

Just in case you're interested the political stalemate is still completely unresolved. In fact a couple of weekends ago a palace coup saw the leader of the Socialist party unseated. You may remember that the PP, the conservative bunch, won more parliamentary seats than anyone else but they cannot find a partner or partners to give them the majority to form a government. The unseating of the socialist leader was because he has refused, point blank, to support the conservatives. With him out of the way the socialists could now abstain in a parliamentary vote in which case the conservatives get to form a government, albeit a minority one. As you might expect this is causing furore amongst socialist ranks. Three hundred days without a government today. If they don't cobble together something the third general election will be in December.

I'm going to stop there. This is boring even me but it's written, so it's going to get published. I'll be back when I have something interesting to say so, Oates like, that may be some time.

Coming over all nostalgic

I still take a Spanish class. In fact, because of the Spanish class, I have just started to work in the same academy as an English teacher. This week our homework was to write an essay using lots of past tenses. I chose to write about my first ever trip to Spain, to Barcelona, back at the beginning of the eighties.

Writing that essay I was reminded of the places we stayed and the things we did. I remembered the hostel, just off the Rambla in Barcelona that cost 500 pesetas, maybe a couple of quid, per night. There was only cold water in the room and the beds were like cots - they squeaked, they were simple but the sheets were shiny white. To have a hot shower I had to ask for a key and pay a small supplement. The Spain I encountered was a step back in time. The shops were shops where you had to ask for things from the person behind the counter. In the restaurants lots of the food was the sort of cheap, peasant food made from knuckles and offal. If you bought something safer, like a pork chop, you got a pork chop and nothing else on the plate. Puddings were restricted to a sort of custard, a creme caramel or fruit. There were people on every street corner with tiny stalls selling sweets or packets of cigarettes. Lots of the streets were narrow alleyways and, as well as the more modern cars and vans, there were still lots of strange three wheeled put put vehicles and small, smoke belching, lorries.

I was just talking to Maggie about this. She thought I was exaggerating a bit but she agreed that when she got to Spain, in the early nineties, it was still very old fashioned. She mentioned seeing an old woman, in Madrid, dressed in the rigorous black of a widow, pulling a small cart behind her loaded with cardboard and negotiating the city traffic. She remembered Extremadura as a place lost in the past. I remembered Extremadura too, particularly a row of colonnaded shops in Caceres blackened with age, though, as Maggie pointed out, that's a bit unlikely as Extremadura didn't ever really industrialise in the dark satanic mills mode. That journey to Extremadura started, for me, in a bus station in Seville where a couple of nuns shouldered me to one side as I hesitated over which bus to catch when the one I wanted was full. The ticket office was a squalid building with a long queue in front of the tiny ticket office window. My first time in Galicia, as part of some youth worker exchange programme, introduced me to a part of Spain where donkey carts were still a common sight.

This week I celebrated the twelfth anniversary of being here. I drove away from Huntingdon with the last few possessions packed into the MG and Mary the cat besides me on 7^th October 2004. We overnighted in France so I must have arrived in Santa Pola on the 8th

As we settled in to our new home most things were just bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome but I do remember other steps which seemed to be from some sort of Kafka novel. Getting a gas cylinder required so much paperwork that it seemed like an affront to personal freedom.

When I first started to write this blog we had just moved from dial up to an ADSL Internet connection. I often used to rail against the useless Spanish websites and the paucity of easily accessible information. It's not the same nowadays. Some Spanish websites still don't work well but, in general, most do. Shops are usually browse and self serve rather than having to ask for things. Last night as we had a few tapas there were concoctions with curry sauce drizzle, skewered, battered prawns in a sauce and puddings made from mango and white chocolate. The cars, the clothes, the biscuits and the cinemas are much like everywhere else. There may still be narrow streets in places and not all the donkeys are gone but now they are no longer anachronistic, they're a reminder of the past.

I wonder when it all changed?

Doctor, doctor

I know that the NHS, the British healthcare system, is a politically hot topic nowadays and I suspect there have been several changes to it since I left but, for someone who lived in the UK till 2004, the Spanish healthcare system and the British ones are basically similar.

The main difference is that you have to have paid into the Social Security system, or be the dependant of someone who has, if you are to get anything out of the Spanish system. Emergencies are always treated - though I'm not sure whether there might be a corresponding bill afterwards if you haven't contributed. Pensioners from any EU country are covered by the system here but the payment actually comes from the home country.

Dentistry is not included in the Social Security cover and there is a system of charging for prescriptions with various discounts which take account of your age, any disabilities and income but, in general, get sick and paramedics, nurses, doctors and an impressive array of medical hardware will come to your aid.

I've not been a big user of the system. An infection here and an injury there but the last time I spent any time at a doctor was in Cartagena four or five years ago. I have this idea that I can tell when it's something serious and when it isn't so, most times, I just wait for the malady to disappear and, touch wood, up to now there has been nothing serious.

Pinoso, as you know, is a really a village, rather than a town. A few souls short of 8,000. Nonetheless, it has 24 hour emergency medical cover. Our health centre is modern and operates at full swing on weekday mornings and early afternoons and then has a quieter afternoon/evening session. I don't actually know the opening hours but I know the principle well enough.

The last time I went to the doctor was on a Saturday afternoon when there is a just a skeleton, out of hours, staff on call. My stomach had been painful for a long time and the pain didn't seem to be going away and I didn't like it. Finally I was persuaded to go to the doctor in "emergency" hours. The doctor laughed, gave me something akin to imodium and sent me on my way. I felt suitably foolish.

Regular readers will know we have a couple of newish house cats and a visiting street cat  - a big white job. Having tried to scare him away we have now taken to trying to feed him so much that he leaves our two alone. A risky strategy I know. He is grateful for the food though. He goes into a frenzy as the food approaches and chows down in a noisy and very animated way. Tonight as I gave him a handful of the dried food he bit me. Nothing serious, he just mistook me for chicken flavoured biscuits, but he got a clout on his backside in retaliation.

An hour later and my hand was feeling very strange, A sort of pins and needles. I've heard about cat bites. A friend was very close to losing his finger after a bite from the family pet. Once again I rang on the out of hours bell at the health centre. Once again I was treated as a sort of idiotic time waster. They gave me a tetanus jab and told me to go back tomorrow if my hand swells up but basically they were miffed that I'd interrupted whatever it was that they were watching on the telly.

It's excellent that we have the emergency service though. Even if they do laugh at me.

Tealess for hours

A few years ago I used to take photos of houses and write the descriptions for an estate agency here in Spain. Often, if it were a house in the countryside, the sellers would tell me how they had spent loads of money on putting in piped water or connecting the house to the electricity grid. I had to be careful how I told them that all that money was irrecoverable. If they hadn't done it the house would have been worth less – off grid houses or with tanked rather than live water are less popular than the connected ones - but nobody pays extra because a house has electric and water. When you click the switch you expect the current to flow, when you open the tap there should be water. Utilities, like roofs, are things you expect in a house.

There was a little piece on the Town Hall website the other day about improving the water supply to some little hamlet and there was a picture of the pipe. It wasn't a very big pipe maybe 6 or 7cms in diameter. It wasn't very high tech either, just some thickish looking plastic pipe. I suppose that something similar feeds the water to our house. Yesterday though it didn't.

If there is leak on the householder's side of the water meter you call a plumber. If it's on the other side then you call the bloke who drives around in a big white Jeep and works for the Town Hall. He usually comes quickly, digs up the road and patches the leak. It happens from time to time.

I didn't worry too much when the tap was empty. The water pressure has been pathetic for a couple of weeks now and I presumed they were doing some routine maintenance to sort that out. Just to be safe though I sent a text to the Jeep man. I didn't ring because I didn't want to pester a man who might be, almost literally, up to his neck in it

Our Internet and phone connection had gone phut the day before. I suspected a general fault rather than a household problem. I used the WhatsApp group in the village to ask if other people were having problems. The answer was yes, which was both re-assuring and not at the same time. The phone and the internet connection came back. Somebody said a mast had collapsed but I don't know.

I must have been a bit too blasé about the water for Maggie's liking. She wasn't as confident as me. She used the same village WhatsApp group to ask about the water. Yes it was a general problem. A couple of hours later the water came sucking, blowing, popping and gurgling back. It was very cloudy and the pressure was pathetic.

We heat our water with a gas water heater powered by bottled gas. We chose gas because our rural electric supply is a bit on the feeble side. I thought we had the hot water supply secured but, this morning, the water pressure was so feeble that the water heater refused to kick into life. Cold shower or no shower were the options.

Civilization hanging by a thread or the delights of rural life in Spain?

Undressing and covering oneself in fake blood

I'm feeling a bit Sanjay Gandhi today - not because I've won a dodgy car building contract - but because I've been part of an enforced sterilization program. I didn't even offer a free portable radio.

Britons who live here are often very vocal in their complaints about how animals are treated in Spain. On a big scale the bullfights which kill horses and bulls in front of cheering crowds give them obvious ammunition. These sort of things no longer go unnoticed by lots of ordinary Spaniards either. Many Spanish people have no time for these hangovers from bear baiting times. Every time that the people of Tordesillas arm themselves with lances and sit astride their horses ready to cut down a bull they are harried by protestors. It's the same in Coria where the bull is peppered with little darts and then has his balls cut off. They no longer throw a live goat from the church tower in Manganeses de la Polvorosa to be caught in a fire fighter style blanket having bowed to public pressure. In Carpio del Tajo the they have not used live geese in their festival for over thirty years - nowadays the geese that they wrench the heads off, as they ride by on horses, are already well dead. Half naked protestors daubed with fake blood make it less comfortable for the bullfight crowds to get to their seats and so it goes on. Lots of the barbarism has been toned down but there are still plenty of spectacles which, at the very least, use the distress and suffering of animals as a form of supposed entertainment.

On a much smaller scale the expat rural Britons often have stories about puppies abandoned outside their homes, kittens thrown into rubbish bins and hunting dogs abandoned on the road when they are too old to keep up with the hares they are supposed to catch. Hunting, by your everyday Joe, is still very common in the countryside.Then of course there are, from time to time, stories in the British popular press about some donkey being terribly mistreated and most of us have a story about a horse, mule or dog tethered in the midday sun without shade or water.  On the other hand most Britons will add to that a story about other Britons who have abandoned dogs when they return to the UK as a reminder that Spaniards don't have the market cornered in mistreatment of animals.

Despite all of this apparent random cruelty there are lots of animal protection laws in Spain and they were recently beefed up which is probably why it's only in the recent past that people have started to be prosecuted. One of the reasons is that the perpetrators have made it impossible for the offence to be ignored. Post a video on YouTube or WhatsApp of setting fire to a cat and you can be pretty sure it will go viral. Shortly afterwards expect a house call from the Guardia. That was the case with a couple of twentyish year olds who had a whale of a time jumping on piglets and squashing and killing seventy of them in the process.

I remembered the piglet case from the news. There was another one about a bullfighter who had been mistreating a horse and as I Googled for the information I came across lots of newspaper articles along the line - "Guardia Civil shelves cruelty case", "Town Hall drops charges against man who arranged illegal dog fights" and so on. I wrote an article for the TIM magazine about catching song birds to eat and, there again, lots of the articles I read in my research talked about how the authorities turned a blind eye to illegal capture techniques. There is still an awful lot of acceptance of animal mistreatment in Spain though the idea that animals have no "rights" is far less prevalent than it once was.

Around here there are several animal rescue charities - lots are run by Britons. It's probably fair to say that dog rescue is the biggest area but I've been to both a horse and a primate rescue centre close by. Cats are often covered by the dog charities but Spanish thinking on cats is that, generally, they can take care of themselves. So whilst a loose dog will be hauled off to a charity for adoption or to the Town Hall dog pound nobody really takes much notice of the moggies unless they are being mistreated.

I may have mentioned that we took on a couple of cats recently. We got them from an association in Pinoso which is called Gatets sense llar del Pinós. The name is in the local Valencian language but it means something like Pinoso Kittens without a home.

Before we'd got the cats we had an occasional visitor to our garden, a big, mature, white, male cat. He was wary of us but semi approachable so we left out some dried cat food when we remembered. We hadn't seen him for a while but, as soon as we got the two rescue cats, he started to turn up regularly. There was a lot of screaming and bits of fur and cats refusing to come down from trees. The white cat even found a back way into the house so he could eat the food we'd left out for our two. We had a lot of fun with a hosepipe and I invested money in a water pistol. But Maggie had bigger plans. She borrowed a trap from Gatets; one can of Premium cat food and he was captured. And if you go back to the first sentence you will see who it was who got to take him to the vet where the castration was paid for by the local Town Hall via the Charity. I paid for the flea and parasite stuff though. He was obviously pretty sore and very wobbly as he came out of the carry box and made his way gingerly out of our garden.

September

It's pretty hot. Yesterday I went to Villena to have a look at the Moors and Christians parade. The parade started at 4pm and, according to the State Weather Agency, that was the exact time when the day's temperature reached its zenith  of 40.4ºC. Just for my mum that's 104ºF.

It's a bit unusual for it to be so warm in September. September is the month when Spain gets back to normal. The youngsters are going back to school, shops are back on regular opening hours, the Guardia Civil shelves its various traffic campaigns until either Christmas or the next long bank holiday weekend. On the telly the new series are getting under way and, on the radio, the journalists and DJs who have held the fort whilst the better known presenters take their holidays are going back to whatever it is they do when it's not July or August. League football is more or less back into full swing. The courts are about to go back into session too so we can look forward to a revival of all the corruption trials that have been on hold during the sandcastle and siesta season. It's not quite everyone who goes back to normal because there is a bit of a move to taking holidays, amongst groups like pensioners for instance, at the beginning of September when the weather is still good but the prices of accommodation and travel drop.

The politicians haven't had their usual long break. They've been in apocryphal darkened rooms with beer and sandwiches. We've had two General Elections one in December of 2015 and one in June of this year and in both cases the two traditionally big parties have found their number of parliamentary seats reduced because of the emergence of two new parliamentary groups. This means that nobody has a clear majority and the politicians have all been doing the it's my bat, my ball and I'm not playing. First the socialists had a go at forming a government and failed leading to the second General Election and we've just watched as the conservatives failed to form a government too. There's still talking to do and maybe they'll cobble something together but positions are so fixed that it looks unlikely. The general view of politicians, always bad, is at an all time low - the word vergüenza, disgrace or shame, is on everybody's lips. There are a couple of big local elections coming up which may lead to change but generally the pundits are talking about a third General Election. Spain's Constitution lays down a strict timetable for the holding of elections and without a change to the law, which is in the air but which needs all the parties to agree, the next general election will be held on Christmas Day. Can you imagine the turnout?

I'm still on holiday, or rather I'm not working. It's just about now that the various education courses are advertised but the start date of even the earliest courses won't be till the middle of this month and the majority will kick off at the beginning of October. It looks as though I'm going to be back with the same employers as last year which is not exactly a reason for rejoicing but it's an income and I need to earn some money. With a bit of luck I may also have a second little job teaching English at an academy in Pinoso. If it happens, and I have personal experience of the problems of getting new courses off the ground, it will be good to be working in my own community for a change.

Beginners guide to table manners

Very occasionally I write a piece for the blog which forms a part of the Country Fincas website. Country Fincas is the estate agent that Maggie works for in Pinoso.

Having written it specifically for them I thought why not use it myself? So here it is.

The English are ironic. The French don't like to wash. Germans are humourless and efficient. Well so they say. But the chances are that it's not actually true. There are some generalisations of course that are generally true. For instance punctuality is important, culturally important, in some countries and completely irrelevant in others. Punctuality doesn't really matter much if someone lives in a place without timepieces or where there are no trains to catch. My guess is that a Nigerian farmer in the middle of the countryside doesn't really care what time they start work so long as the work gets done.

Anyway, Spain is very similar, in most ways, to the rest of Europe. There is law and order, traffic is organised, water comes from taps, children go to school, supermarkets have lots and lots of food, cows are not sacred, head covering is optional, men can cut their hair as they wish, people only use chopsticks to eat under certain circumstances. In nearly all of the big things Spain is very much like the UK. There are hundreds or thousands of detail differences though and some don't seem so small when you are faced with what seems to be interminable bureaucracy or animal cruelty to give a couple of examples.

We've lived here for a while now and lots of those detail differences now seem so normal to us that we don't really notice them. When friends come to see us from the UK though it's different. They do notice. So here is my guide to eating and drinking. I'm sure that I will miss things out or overgeneralise but it's a good starting point for the tyro.

In a bar or café the server will come to you. It can be a little difficult deciding sometimes whether a place is a restaurant or whether it's a place where you can get a drinks and a snack. Table cloths usually indicate that you are expected to eat. Obviously you can choose to sit at the bar but you do not, usually, need to approach the bar to get served. Sit at your table, either inside or outside (on the terraza), and someone will come to you. If the terraza is deserted or if the bar staff do not have a clear view of the terrace it can be quicker to go to the bar, ask for your drinks, or whatever, and then sit down and wait for them to be brought. You do not need to pay until you are about to go though, if you are only going to make one order, it can be quicker to pay when the things are brought to you. If you pay the bar staff will presume that you do not need more service. In some seaside places or when a bar is crowded because of an event you may be asked to pay at once to avoid people slipping away without paying or to make life easier for the servers.

At events, music festivals, town fiestas etc. where there is a bar a bit like the beer tent at some British event, you may have to queue to get tickets which you then exchange at the bar to get the food or drink. The idea is to avoid the temporary bar staff stealing money by centralising the money taking.

Food is usually served from around 2pm through till 3.30pm for lunch and dinner from around 9pm till maybe 11pm. In tourist areas or where there are a lot of non Spaniards opening times are often earlier. Cold snacks, the famous tapas, are available at any time but anything that requires cooking may only be available when the kitchen is staffed for lunch or dinner. In the big cities food is available around the clock in many establishments. In lots of places there will be a display counter on the bar where you can browse some of the tapas on offer and order by pointing. Spaniards often order a lot of tapas to share rather than ordering a more formal meal.

Whether there will be a list of the things available or not is a bit hit and miss. Again lists and menus are more likely where there are more non Spanish customers. It's very usual for the server to list the things available and, when you ask for the bill, to simply tell you how much you owe without anything being written down.

The main meal of the day for many Spaniards is lunch rather than dinner. One way to eat cheaply and well is to have the menú diario or menú del día - the set meal - where you will usually be offered a range of first courses, second courses and desserts with a drink and bread. We Brits tend to think of the first course as being a starter but that's not usually the case and the first course is often as substantial as the second. The word menú suggests a set meal, the Spanish word for what we think of as a menu is actually carta. If you don't want to take one of the fixed options you can usually choose from the carta. The set meals are usually much, much cheaper. If you are wandering from restaurant to restaurant checking the set meal prices look to see whether the price includes bread (pan), bebida (drink), postre (pudding) and coffee (café). One of the little tricks in tourist areas is to miss those items off the list so that one 10€ menú includes everything whilst the 9€ menú next door charges extra for one or more of the items. It is very common for the menú to list postre o café, pudding or coffee so, if you have both, expect to pay a tad more.

Another little trick for tourists is that you see a blackboard outside a restaurant offering the set meal. Once you sit down you are given the carta and in it there is no mention of the fixed meal. Confused by the situation you then order from the carta and end up paying more than you intended. If there is a board offering a set meal then there is a set meal. Ask for it and you will get it.

Some places do a fixed evening meal too but it is much rarer than the daytime equivalent. Normally you will choose from the carta in the evening. One of those little differences is that if you choose something from the entrantes, starters, the serving staff will presume that it is to share with your fellow diners so the starters will be put in the middle of the table for everyone to have a go at.

I could go on but that's probably enough to digest for now.