Life in Culebrón

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 bottl...

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 comf...

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, f...

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)...

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...

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...

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....

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 doe...

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 eas...

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 w...

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 ...

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, lik...

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...

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 ...

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 bow...

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...

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 organis...

One of my shorter pals had relatives who were horny handed sons of toil. Generation upon generation of farmers. They lived, as I recall, on the edge of the English Lake District. When the Ordnance Survey began to mark scenic viewpoints on their one inch maps (my long term memory is still fine) suddenly lots of cars began to pull up at the top of the farm lane to have a look see. The family turned this to their benefit by setting up a stall selling fresh eggs. We were in Madrid for the weekend. We went on the AVE, the high speed train which, as usual, was on time both there and back. I only saw the indicated speed on the carriage displays once during the journey, a disappointing 296 kph. We stayed in some really nice hotel close to Alonso Martínez underground station. For some reason they gave us a junior suite with two washbasins, two tellies, a sofa and a king sized bed. Straight off the train we dumped the bags and walked across the road to the Reina Sofia Museum - well museo i...

I've mentioned it before, The poster that misses off the where or the when. The poster which tells you that the event is in the usual place. So, last night, with guests, we went down to Elche to experience the Nit de l'Alba - the night of dawn. I didn't need to check the info. It would be like always. Of course because I assumed it would be it wasn't. Basically the Nit de l'Alba is an orgy of fireworks somehow miraculously loosely tethered to something religious. The origins are supposed to be that in the Middle Ages families in the city offered thanks to the Virgin for each of their children by launching one rocket for each child on the holy day designated to her. Nowadays all over the city, fireworks, aerial fireworks, are launched into the night sky in one long session of rolling thunder. I thought it was usually from quarter to midnight but Maggie told me that the city authorities were going to do something new this year in launching six enormous palmeras fr...

I was born in Yorkshire. Summer holidays were short as I remember, a week usually, and our standard destinations were close by - Scarborough, Brid, Cleethorpes, maybe over to Morecambe or even Blackpool. Relatively local with the occasional long haul down to Newquay or maybe away from the beach in the Lakes. Apart from the school trip to Switzerland I didn't get to Europe till I was eighteen and, even then, it was only to Paris. Nowadays my pals back in the UK tell me that they've been to far flung destinations - Bali, New Zealand, Goa, the Maldives, Abu Dabi. To be different you have to give Skyscanner a good workout and head for Kazakhstan or Greenland and even then it's just another destination. Talking to Spanish students about their holiday plans is a reminder of my Scarborough days. They seem perfectly happy to go to the nearest seaside resort, if it's not too far, or otherwise they head for some rural destination equally close to home. It's a mas...