Image control

I have a friend who takes pictures for one of the stock photo libraries. The rules about which photos are acceptable, with exceptions for editorial use, are pretty strict. No logos, no designs that would be recognisable as logos and no recognisable people. I found the rules very difficult to follow especially the people one.

Yesterday I was at the opening ceremony for the fiestas in Pinoso. I got bored of the speeches and wandered off to take some snaps of the funfair. An English chap told me not to take pictures of one of the rides because his kids were on it. I didn't but I was peeved. There was a suggestion that I was taking the photos for some very unpleasant reason. Actually if he'd ever seen any of my after dark shots he wouldn't have been concerned as recognising anyone on them is impossible as they are so blurred!

Anyway I was putting the snaps on Facebook and there was a picture of the ride in question before the chap had said anything. I decided against posting it just to be safe but then I did a bit of Googling. It looks as though taking pictures of people, especially children, without consent in Spain is something you can go to prison for.

I asked the question on a couple of English language forums and one response took me to the source legislation. The law is basically about protecting people's dignity and privacy. Spanish law is not easy reading but, as you would expect, there are no examples with the law, that comes later in the courts. So the law, whilst being specific isn't much use in deciding how to behave.

But then the questions. Imagine we're at the Sagrada Familia or the Alhambra. You would have to work pretty hard to take pictures that didn't feature people. What about the street parades? I think it's reasonably safe to assume that the people dressed up and waving at the crowd expect to have their photo taken so they have given their consent but what about the family on the other side of the street, the ones behind the Walt Disney characters? I asked that specific question, the crowd question, to someone on one of the forums who seemed pretty hard line about this because he said he had taken legal action against the kindergarten his children attend for publishing photos without his consent. Consent that he says he would have withheld. He said, about being photographed in the crowd, "I will take measures to have it removed whether it be direct contact with you or via the platform which you've posted it on"

I don't suppose there is any problem with taking the photos as long as nobody objects at the time. The real problem comes with publishing them. Actually it takes me quite a while to load photos to Facebook and the like so, if I were to stop, it would save me hours. I have to decide now whether to stop doing it but, if I do, it will mean that my mum, sister and even my partner will never see my snaps.

Ah well. One person's security is another person's restriction.

I think the header photo is safe enough though.

Uninformed

I'm sorry but I've been reading again. La familia de Pascual Duarte this time. In it, at one point, the "hero" of the book is wondering about taking a steamer to America. He has to queue. When he finally gets to the front the clerk gives him a list of prices and sailing times. He complains that that isn't what he wanted. He wanted a conversation about the possibilities. To my mind this is a real difference between we Brits and the Spanish. We like to read our information and Spaniards like to talk to someone to get theirs.

With a bit of a push from me, and despite a little opposition, the village now has a couple of WhatsApp groups. I wanted one group but some little territorial dispute apparently made that impossible. So we now have a quick, effective, cheap, reasonably inclusive and only slightly confusing channel for sharing information. It's not helped much though. We had an outdoor film in the village last Friday. Nobody seemed to know what film we were going to see till it started. And on Monday I found out that I should have booked up for the fiesta meal last Friday.

I'm sure that it's just the reading and talking thing and nothing to do with that old Knowledge is power chestnut.

Feeling Big John

It was hard to believe but, when I got up yesterday morning, the sun wasn't shining. In fact it was trying to rain. All day it was dull. Of course half of Spain is similar to the UK for summer rain with lush green meadows and contented cows but not our bit, our bit, not far from the Med, is picture book Spain. I've written about summer before but it's just such a wonderful thing that I can't not mention it again.

I haven't worn socks for weeks. My only real fashion choice is which colour T shirt to choose today. The sound of flip flops on the pavement is a summer sound. Generally the sun just comes on in the morning and goes out in the evening. And the light; it's just lovely - crystalline skies so blue that they're like a child's painting. The air is dry, a sort of dusty yellowy dry, that plays hell with the cleaning and makes the plants wilt but just makes it feel so - well, summery. And there are noises too. Things sort of move with the heat. Lifeless things move, things creak with the warmth. Live things move as well. The damned flies, millions of them. Little lizards often turn up in our living room as do any number of strange creepy crawlies. Nothing untoward, nothing too bity so far, but lots of them. And here, in the country, it's just one long sound concerto. The birds are relentless - chip, chip, chirruping as long as there is any light. Then of course there are the cicadas and the grasshoppers, with their incessant reverberating drumming. The dogs don't care whether it's winter or summer. Country dogs bark and bark and bark and shatter the evening quiet whatever the season.

Beer is always cold in Spain and chilled glasses are as common as muck. In winter that can seem out of place but in summer it's as right as right can be. The drops of water form on the outside of the glass. You have to be careful though - it's so easy to just have a "cervecita",  in the shade, without thinking about it being alcohol. If you have to drive, never mind, the pop is just as chilled but, somehow, it doesn't feel quite so Mediterranean. And if the drinks are chilled so is the food - fruit and salads and things that glisten with summer colour replace those tasty but drab and calorific winter dishes. Lovely.

Alicante summers are simply splendid.

A leisurely time when women wore picture hats

I've read a few books by a Spanish author called Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867 -1928). A couple of the books were about life in Valencia, about the new bourgeoisie, the sort of people who didn't make their money by the sweat of their brow but by playing with money. The sort who despite being in debt need a new carriage to keep up appearances, the sort who would go on to be politicians if only they would stop impregnating the scullery maids. I found the picture the books conjured up of Spanish life at the tail end of the 19th Century fascinating.

We went to Valencia to catch up with one of Maggie's nieces who was in the city for a European Arts Project. Maggie had booked a hotel that was about 3km from the Cathedral, near to the City of Arts and Sciences. It was in a district full of the sort of buildings that conjured up the characters from the Blasco Ibáñez books.  Big impressive buildings with lots of decoration, ample windows, high ceilings and fancy facades. The streets were lined with trees and there were lots of shaded little squares. Just around the corner was the old course of the River Turia. For the Blasco Ibáñez characters the circuit round and round from one side of the river to the other offered the perfect opportunity to show off those new carriages, flaunt that Parisian dress and even to allow appropriate, chaperoned, conversations between young men and women.

Valencia city centre is another showcase for those big turn of the Twentieth Century buildings that are so typical of the centres of many Spanish cities. We don't have anything similar in Culebrón or even in Pinoso. In fact there were quite a few noticeable differences between the Spain that I live in and the one that we visited for a few hours.

Somebody complained about some of the generalisations that I often make on this blog. They told me that I shouldn't draw conclusions about Spain from Pinoso or Cieza or Fortuna, which they referred to, as España profunda, Deep Spain. I took issue with my reader on the grounds that nowhere is particularly isolated nowadays. If you can watch Akshay Kumar and Nimrat Kaur in Bollywood's Airlift as easily as you can watch Kit Harrington in Game of Thrones on your mobile phone, if you can follow the progress of some round the world cyclist as they cross Uzbekistan via their Facebook page and if the drones overflying Afghanistan are controlled from Lincolnshire then it stands to reason that nowhere offers a safe haven from modernity. Even those who want to live in a cave will still find the world chasing them down through old technologies like television and radio. That said there are major differences of course. Living without running water in Havana or being enslaved in Nouakchott, Mauritania bears little comparison to living in Chelsea or the swanky bits of Mumbai. Conversely Pinoso and Valencia are hardly worlds apart.

So we were in Valencia and I thought these houses are nice, I liked the dappled light effect from the sun shining through the trees. I liked the variety and the choice of cakes in the tea shoppy sort of bar we went to. In the central market the stalls were perfectly ordinary but they were selling in an innovative way - micro brewery beers here, oriental vegetables there - a little twist on my everyday. I know a mango smoothie is hardly a hold the front page moment but we are a bit short of smoothie stalls in Pinoso even if you can buy the product in the supermarket. There were hire bikes, the segway groups, the guides showing people around the Old Exchange and the good sounding tour from someone explaining the War of Succession in Estuary English to a bunch of Dutch and French people. All something for we yokels to gawp at. The bars were a bit trendier, the shops were a lot more diverse, there were buses and taxis to take you where you needed to go. On the other hand I was quite sure there was some skulduggery with the addition on our first bill in that tea shoppy bar, the noise of those buses and taxis and bikes and cars pounding down those sun dappled avenues was extremely unpleasant and the interminable hunt for a parking space amongst those leafy squares was exasperating to say the least. The crowds of tourists following the raised umbrella kept bumping into me and spoiling the snaps. There were a lot of people who approached us with outstretched hands or hoped that we would pay to hear them play the bandoneón. It was great, it was interesting, we were surrounded by galleries and great architecture. There were expensive cars and things happening and tourist information and people from all over the world and there were business people doing their thing with suits and posh skirts but it was even better when the motorway quietened down and the countryside opened up and we saw Almansa castle in the distance and the dusty little towns and countryside of Deep Spain spread out before us.

Culebrón

Culebrón is one of the satellite villages of the nearby town of Pinoso. Culebrón is an unusual name for a village. Usually the word Culebrón is related to snakes. Big snakes. Or soap operas. Most Spaniards simply presume I'm mispronouncing the name when I tell them where I live. The last headcount said 112 people live here amongst them three British families with a fourth currently rebuilding an old house.

Culebrón is dusty and a browny, beigy, yellow colour. It is not a place where dogs, cats or humans worry too much about traffic - there isn't a lot. It would be wrong to describe Culebrón as pretty but it's not ugly either. There is a complete mix of houses but most tend to be old and look typical for the area - stone built, maybe with concrete facings, blinds and grilles over the windows, various colours of paint jobs. Plenty of oddly shaped concrete and corrugated iron sheds too. There is quite a lot of greenery and trees, mainly pines but with wild figs and pomegranates. The village is surrounded by vineyards, olive and almond groves and lots of crops I don't recognise.

Children are the usual beneficiaries of Spanish wills so houses generally pass to the sons and daughters. Most Spaniards don't like to live in a village so, until we foreigners arrived, country properties were unwanted. In the end the brothers and sisters would agree to keep their inherited house for family use simply to avoid the faff of selling it on. Of course some families live in Culebrón all year round but it really livens up during the summer when people move out of the towns and to the villages where, local wisdom says, it's cooler.

The village is basically cut into two unequal halves by the CV83 road which joins Pinoso to Monóvar. Most of the village is on the North side of the main road but there are a couple of smaller clusters of houses to the South; we're in one of them. Addresses in Culebrón are just numbers. So number 1 is on our side of the village on the slopes of the Sierra del Xirivell. Just on the other side of the main road is Restaurante Eduardo and he's number 17 so my guess is that there are seventeen houses in our little group.

Eduardo's restaurant is one of two businesses that I know of in Culebrón, the other is the Brotons bodega and oil mill. There have been a couple of attempts to make a go of businesses alongside what was the old main road but, like the Bates Motel, moving the road made them untenable. Nowadays, apart from various farmers, the restaurant and the bodega there is no obvious business in Culebrón. There were businesses in the past - for instance a building near to us used to be a shoe factory not so long ago. There are no shops so vans and lorries bring essentials like bread, cheese and bottled gas to some impenetrable timetable. Of course there may be thriving Internet businesses or cottage industries that I don't know about but I rather suspect that the 8Mgb download speed  and the less than 2kw power supply to most houses may be a little limiting.

Services are few and far between. I think a bus stops outside Eduardo's once a day on the run to the hospital down in Elda but that may be old information. The village school which was opposite the little square has long gone, there's a bit of a run down basketball/football area next to the recycling bins, the post box and post delivery is a bit unreliable, the public phone was taken away a while ago but most of the village (not our part) got mains drainage and fire hydrants a few years back. There is also a little chapel, an ermita, used principally during the village fiesta as well as a social centre which is used for community and private events. We do have a Neighbourhood Association which occasionally organises trips and always runs a couple of meals each year.

Our village fiesta is a weekend in July. There is a repetitive programme on the fiesta weekend but it's then when the village is busiest. My guess is that the talking and socialising is infinitely more important than the gachasmigas competition, the chocolate y toña session or even the Saturday evening meal with live music under the pine trees. Mind you for the past three, or maybe four, years there has also been a morning walking and running race organised to coincide with the fiesta and that brings hordes of people to Culebrón.

There's lots more to Culebrón but this piece is already too long so that will have to do. Good place to live, advantages and disadvantages like everywhere, but not too shabby at all.

Right under your nose

Pinoso, the HQ for Culebrón,  is a village rather than a town. It's nice though. Neat, tidy, rich, safe with lots of facilities and, if you look carefully, it has some interesting corners.

We have a bit of a museum; a museum of marble and wine. If you have 20 short minutes to kill it's well worth a visit. The very first time we went there a couple of the information boards mentioned a Roman road and some Iron Age or Bronze Age petroglyphs, plus a few other bits and bats, of which we knew nothing. We went looking for them with mixed success. We found the silex quarry and the stone shelters for shepherds or cucos and we got to walk around some very pleasant countryside but the things that sounded more spectacular eluded us.

At the Maxi Banegas poetry awards they forced sausages, wine and tourist literature upon us. Maggie actually had a look inside the tourist brochures and noticed that some of the spots we had failed to bag on our earlier expeditions now had latitude and longitude map references. A fairly lengthy session with Google Maps and Earth plus Tom Tom and I knew where to go.

Roman Road yesterday. Boundary marker between Murcia and Alicante and the Iron Age carvings today. The farthest I had to travel was out to Cañada del Trigo which is a massive 14km from home. Remarkable, coming in on twelve years here and still there are new things to see in Pinoso.

Festival time

I see that Adele was on at Glastonbury. I don't imagine that a Spanish festival would think to go for that same sort of mix - Enrique Iglesias alongside Vetusta Morla? Last year, as I remember, Florence inherited the top spot in Somerset, now something like that I can imagine. Indie band turned money spinner alongside the long line of competent but unexceptional bands yes, one time big pop act now reduced to second or third class status, yes, but current big industry acts, no.

I like plenty of Spanish bands but I'd be hard pressed to tout any of them as material for world domination. To date there have been no Spanish Kylies or Abbas or U2s. Luz Casals, Paco de Lucia and Mecano aren't really of the same clay.

We've been to quite a few Spanish festivals like SOS in Murcia, Low in Benidorm and FIB in Benicassim. We've also seen some Spanish big name acts from old timers to plenty of current top forty stuff and tons of indie. We've done hardly any big name international stuff though. Yesterday, more or less by chance, we ended up at a mini festival in the nearby town of Elda. We'd never heard of the festival, EMDIV, but we saw some unneeded tickets for sale on a second hand site and we ended up with them. Small scale stuff indeed. Just one stage, seven bands with DJ sets in between for the roadies to do their work. There were some filler bands, local stuff with a local following like Gimnastica and Varry Brava, but three of the Spanish bands were quality acts, standard festival fodder, Zahara, Sidonie and Supersubmarina. There was a nice enough band from Ireland too, the Delorentos, who seemed to have a really good time.

I was alone for a while whilst one of the DJ sets was on. Lots of young people were jumping up and down and singing along. Even with the music there to listen to I have no idea whether the lyrics were English or Spanish. I have albums by Supersubmarina and Zahara and  I vaguely recognised a couple of tunes but the chances of me singing along (only under my breath of course) are pretty remote. I did sing along to some old Fat Boy Slim stuff though. It's an age thing I suppose. I think it may be too late for me to learn a new repertoire.

It was the same concern when we were trying to decide whether to go for the unknown bands at the start of the day or turn up for the mid order and headline bands. It was pretty obvious that we would not be doing the full fourteen hour stint. My legs won't hold me up for that long, my contact lenses would make my eyes sore and probably I'd just fall asleep anyway. Going early had the advantages for snaps, if there's light the photos tend to be in focus, but, then again, a band on a stage in broad sunlight doesn't look quite right. Early also has space advantages. I like a bit of space around me, I like being able to move around. When it gets to 2am and whether it's the drink, the drugs or the pure exuberance that makes young people jump up and down (fine) and crash in to me (not so fine) I don't like it. I don't like being, to all intents and purposes, a prisoner until the set is over and the crowd moves off to the bars, the food stalls or the toilets.

We went early. We were there to hear the very end of the second band set, we watched three bands over the next four or five hours in relative comfort with good viewing positions, very little vomit or beer spilled on us and the chance to get a drink, go to the toilet and try some of the, always interesting, festival food. By the slightly late running 1am band it was a bit more unpleasant. The brusque passing manoeuvres, the constant dodging to avoid burns from fags or flaring joints and the wobbly neighbours made us retreat to somewhere near the mixing desk, on the edges of the crowd. We watched for a while but it was cocoa time and we were home by around 2.30.

Toodle Pip

I got up early this morning to check the result and, rather as I'd feared, the UK had voted to leave the Union. I wasn't in the least surprised but I was shocked.

To me, on a day to day basis, at the moment it means very little. My only real concern is about the exchange rate. I get a pension paid in sterling. As the pound loses ground against the euro I get fewer euros to spend for the same number of pounds. Of course, when the two years and three months are up, then I suppose I'll have to relearn Fahrenheit and furlongs but at least I will be able to recover my blue passport, rest assured that a cucumber is a vegetable and eat curved bananas till the cows come home.

The concerns of  expats of my age are mainly around health care and pensions. Reciprocal arrangements within the EU mean that pensioners get free medical care in Spain and there is no problem with the UK state pension being paid here with all its rights intact. In all likelihood something reasonable will be hammered out between the UK and Spain over the next couple of years and those of us who have been out of the UK for a while will find we have some sort "grandparent" rights. 

Of course there is nothing to stop the UK Government going the other way and denying we expats all sorts of things that are currently considered as rights. The Spaniards might also be mean to us when we no longer have citizenship. We already lose the right to vote in the UK if we stay away too long so why not take away other benefits? "You've been out of the UK for 10 years? No healthcare for you then my lad - and as for benefits". In 1981 dear old Maggie changed the status of lots of people who had always considered themselves British. There's no reason at all why somebody, in the future, should not do the same to the likes of me. And the Spaniards used to tax Britons more than nationals when, for instance, we sold a house. In a couple of years that could well be back on the books.

If you start to think about the number of things that have a European tinge to them, from the CE safety mark and Erasmus students through set aside for farmers and low priced mobile phone roaming or maybe the blue channels at your holiday destination then, I don't envy the poor sods who have to try to piece it all back together over the next twenty seven months.

It's strange that on the day that expat healthcare in the EU is in doubt  I went to a hospital to visit a British friend. He's had a heart incident. He is in the new hospital down in Elche. I've seen the inside of lots of Spanish hospitals for one reason or another, but it's the first time I've been on the wards. In fact it wasn't a ward, it was a private room with telly and internet (though that cost 4€ per day). In the hour or two we were there two doctors came in to see the patient and both of them spoke English. We had one cleaner and two nursing auxiliary types also pop in to do this or that and all but the cleaner spoke to us in English too. The story of the treatment sounded quick and professional. All in all I suspect that our friend is in safe and professional hands. I should mention that the hospital expects that our friend has somebody at his bedside to deal with those little things all the time. If he needs a crash cart that's the hospital's job but if he needs his pillows fluffing or help getting his slippers on then that's a job for the patient's friends or family. I wonder if the hospital will still be there for me in two years and three months when I have a heart incident?

Oh, and one last thing. If you voted to leave the EU because you had concerns about its structures or funding then fine - I don't agree with you but a reasoned argument is a reasoned argument. On the other hand, if, as I suspect, you voted to leave the EU because of immigration, floods of people coming to take our jobs, classrooms full of children who can't speak English and a terrible strain on the NHS from foreigners then I think you're xenophobic at the least and probably a raging racist bigot.

Legs like jelly

The last time I owned a bike, so far as I remember, was when I was 18. That means we're talking 44 year ago. I've had the use of other people's bikes from time to time but, even then, the last time was in 2007. So, today, was quite momentous - I bought a bike. I bought it second hand and I didn't worry too much about the quality because, chances are, I'll never use it.

I have no illusions about bikes. They're an efficient method of getting around but the motive power is muscle and that means that they require more effort than driving a car. My thinking is that if I actually use it as a way or getting in and out of Pinoso from Culebrón then I can look around for something better later. As it is the cheap Carrefour bike will do. It looked a bit small to me but the inside leg measurement seemed about right, it went, it stopped, what more could I ask? I handed over my cash.

So, I abandoned the car outside the seller's house and saddled up. Casas de Juan Blanco is 7kms from Culebrón. I now know that a stiff headwind blows perpetually from Culebrón to Juan Blanco. I had not realised, before today that all 7 kms is uphill too.  I had to stop several times to pant heavily but I did, at least, ride all the way. When I reached home and got off the bike my legs almost gave way and I flopped in to one of our garden chairs where I spent the next five minutes coughing and breathing like someone denied their inhaler. There was also a bit of a problem in the bottom area.

It's just over an hour later. I'm still breathing stentoriously and my legs aren't right. And Gareth Bale has just put the Welsh ahead! Things are not as they should be.

Ah there's the equaliser from England.

Gachasmigas on the ceiling

One of my theories about Spanish food is that lots of the famous stuff is peasant food, made with cheap, locally available ingredients. The reason that it didn't disappear, before that sort of food became fashionable again, is that the Spaniards got richer late. So, whilst in the UK, we started to have more time than money and developed a taste for frozen lasagne, fish fingers and microwaveable chips the Spaniards stuck with piling pulses into stocks and eating rice with rabbit or seafood.

One of these traditional dishes is called migas, literally crumbs. Over in Extremadura, which is where I first encountered it, it's old bits of bread fried in olive oil with garlic and the old scrag ends of leftover meat and sometimes vegetables. In fact there are varieties of migas all over the place with lots of different ingredients but, basically, it's a way to make something out of old, stale bread.

That said there is a local food here, in Pinoso, called gachamiga which is quite different - it's made with water, oil, salt and garlic - and comes out as a sort of thick pancake. I have asked Spaniards about this but I'm still not clear. Over in Murcia they have something called gachasmigas, the name difference seems to indicate that the main ingredient is flour rather bread, but those Murcian gachamigas still have meaty bits in them. Just to make matters worse there is another Pinoso variety called gachamiga rulera which seem to be another doughy and oniony variety whereas in Castilla la Mancha the ruleras are migas ruleras and they seem to include meat. So, now that I've cleared that up for you to the point of the story.

In all the village fiestas around here there is a gachamigas cooking competition. In fact tasting some that Enrique had cooked in the Culebrón edition - that's him in the photo and those are the gachasmigas in the pan - was the first time that I had eaten the thick pancake variety. I ate my second lot in a restaurant just a couple of weeks ago. So, with the fiestas coming soonish and with a bit of impetus from the restaurant I decided to have a go at cooking some. Who knows, maybe I'd be up for the competition?

A few years ago, at the Villazgo festival, I bought a cookbook from the Associación de Amas de Casa de Pinoso - literally the Pinoso Housewives Association. Page 38 for the gachasmigas recipe. Fry some garlic in half a glassful of olive oil, dump the golden brown garlic, add in some salt and a glassful of flour to the garlic flavoured oil, mix in three glassfuls of water, stir it a lot to make a paste and then cook till it's solid enough to flip over. Cook the other side too and eat.

It didn't quite work. I think maybe it needed longer to cook as it was all a bit doughy. The flipping certainly didn't quite go to plan. I ate some but then whizzed it. Maggie, who had wisely stayed away from this experiment, was given a portion as she worked at the computer. She joined me in the kitchen to throw away about half of her serving.

Maybe I'll just go and spectate at the competition this time to get the idea and leave my entry till 2017.

So you gotta let me know. Should I stay or should I go?

Our voting papers arrived on Friday. That's a good start. Huntingdonshire District Council blithely denied me the right to vote in the last General Election when they failed to get the voting papers to me. "We send out a lot of overseas voting papers, some are forced to get lost", was their pathetic excuse.

Anyway I put the cross in the box, Maggie did likewise and the forms went in the post today.

Just an interesting thing about posting the ballot papers. You can see, if you look at the photo, that the envelope reads No Stamp Required yet, in the "Quick Guide to Postal Voting", which came with the ballot paper, it says, "Seal and post envelope B. If it's posted in the UK, this will be free." When I got to the Post Office I asked for stamps for the envelopes and the woman in the Post Office told me there was no need. I insisted and explained that the instructions were quite clear. I presume that she has said the same thing to lots of other Britons returning their ballot papers. Am I being oversuspicious if I sesnse a touch of skulduggery there?

I don't normally tell anyone how I voted. It's something between me and the ballot box, well me and the ballot box and probably some department that secretly compiles the records of who voted how in case they are ever needed. But in 1972, in 1975 and this time around I'm definitely pro European.

I'm sure that a Spaniard has asked me about the UK leaving the EU but I don't actually remember the conversation. It was certainly no more than a passing comment. There isn't that much interest in what the UK does or doesn't do amongst your average Spaniard as far as I can gauge. It gets reported of course so it's on the radio and TV every now and again. I have had the conversation with a few Britons. Usually in that conversation I get cross because it seems to me that one of the driving forces behind the anti EU movement in the UK is plain and simple racism or at least xenophobia. I've stopped trying to put together a cogent argument. I can't be bothered to argue with racists any more and I no longer hope they will have a road to Damascus moment. Nowadays I've adopted the Dame Helen Mirren approach, you know, the one where she says that she regrets not telling more people to “f*** off” though I usually restrict myself to refuting their idiotic remarks with the single word "bollocks".

It could be interesting times ahead if we Britons here had to do something like the nationality test that other non EU foreigners are submitted to. First of all there is a level test in Spanish, which a lot of us would fail, then there is the series of questions about the country. These are questions one and eighteen from a sample paper:

1. Según la Constitución española, la soberanía nacional reside en el pueblo, del que proceden...
a) las leyes orgánicas del Estado. b) los estatutos de autonomía. c) los poderes del Estado

18. ¿Cuál es la fiesta más famosa en Cádiz y Canarias?
a) El Carnaval. b) La Semana Santa. c) Los Sanfermines.

If you are a Briton living in Spain how did you do?

A place in the sun

At work I noticed that a co-worker had not parked her car in her usual spot. The one she has used for the last eight months. I asked why, expecting a story about people using her bonnet as a bench or somesuch. "It's because the shadow of the building falls across the car in the early evening so it's cooler when I drive away," she said.

I was reminded of the man who started to wave violently at me when I parked outside the building I then worked in in Fortuna. There had been a Circus close by on the waste ground and I presumed he was warning me of the dangers of the lorries bumping into my car as they manouvered away. In the end I parked where he suggested. "It's much better here", he said, "it'll be in the shade when you're finished."

It's been around 30ºC the last few days so, as we close in on summer, parking the motor in the shade makes sense. Like real Spaniards I would always choose a shady spot first but it would never cross my mind to start plotting the movement the sun across the sky as I chose a parking place.

Still a long way to go before I start thinking Spanish.

What that Franklin chappie said

I don't really mind taxes. That doesn't mean that I like handing over my hard earned but I approve of the idea. I'm much keener on the model where we pay the taxes and, with them, our governments attempt to provide healthcare, education, infraestructure and all the rest than I am on the model where everyone looks out for themselves and to hell with the rest.

Anyway. For the past six years or so I've been getting a pension from a final salary pension scheme that I paid into for most of my UK working life. Because that money comes from a quasi government source the agreement between Spain and the UK was that it was exempt of Spanish taxes but taxed, at source, in the UK. Normally Spanish residents have to pay tax on their worldwide income here. In reality my pension is so small that it has never exceeded the personal UK allowance so, although Customs and Revenue send me coding notices and I get P60s and what not, I don't actually pay any tax on it. I also have a pension top up from some secondary UK scheme that I paid in to. That produces about £360 a year. That money is declared and taxed in Spain.

This being taxed in the UK had an advantage. It gave me two lots of personal allowances - one for the UK and one in Spain. Of course the tax people realised this and for the 2015 tax year - the tax year in Spain is a normal calendar year - they closed this "loophole". We are now sorting out the 2015 tax bills. The amount of my UK pension now has to be added to my Spanish earnings. The principal of no double taxation is maintained because any tax paid in the UK would be deducted from my Spanish tax bill.

I had a slightly complicated tax year in 2015 because I was technically self employed for a while. I'm having to use an accountant to sort it out rather than just accepting or amending the online draft tax declaration that the Spanish revenue people sent me back in April.

The accountant I use sent me a WhatsApp the other day to say it looked like I owed a bit less than 400€. This is not good but it's not heartbreaking either. It did make me wonder about the people who have decent pensions from the UK though: the ex police, ex military, time served civil servants etc. I've just had a quick look and it seems that the UK personal allowance is around £11,000 so if that suddenly becomes taxable at a mixture of the starting Spanish rate of 19% plus the portion that goes into a higher bracket charged at 24% (and my arithmetic is correct) then they are going to be facing an extra tax bill of just short of 3,000€.

I suspect that could be a bit of a hammer blow for lots of the pensioners here.

When it was time to go

Just down the road from us, about 5kms away, is a small village called Hondon. In May 1938 a group of Republican soldiers turned up in the village, requisitioned the house next door to the pine tree that gave the best shade and set about building a munitions dump, a couple of machine gun nests, a lookout tower and an aerodrome. Nearly a year later the reasons became clear.

First a bit more background. On July 18th 1936 the Army rebelled against the elected Republican Government of Spain and so the Spanish Civil War began. At first it was a pretty equal contest but slowly but surely the rebels gained territory. On 30th March 1939 Alicante City fell to the rebels and a day later rebel troops entered Murcia, Cartagena and Almeria. The war was officially won, or lost, on 1st April 1939. So the area where we live was the last bit of Spain to fall to, what were by then, Franco's troops. Franco ruled, as a dictator, in Spain until November 1975.

Alicante province was loyal, right to the end, and for that reason the last headquarters of the legitimate government of the day, given the codename Posición Yuste, was in Elda/Petrer which is only about 20km from Culebrón. That must have been one possible contingency plan from the time those troops were sent to Hondon.

Elda/Petrer fell on the 29th March. At the very end there was infighting within the Republican Government as the situation became hopeless. The recently promoted Colonel Casado raised a revolt with the intention of doing a deal with Franco to end the war. In the event the Official Government fled Spain in the early morning of 5th March. Doctor Negrín the President, Dolores Ibarruri or La Pasionaria a Communist Party leader, Rafael Alberti a famous writer of the time, Enrique Lister one of the Republic's top military commanders and several others were among the group that left in two twin engined Douglas planes heading for Oran in Algeria from the aerodrome at Hondon.

I knew most of this before today. I knew about the house that had been used by Republican big wigs near the turn down towards Salinas off the Monóvar road. I knew about the flight from the aerodrome. However, it wasn't until the 85th anniversary of the birth of the Republic the other day that I realised that there were air raid shelters in Hondon. So today I went looking for them.

Whilst I was searching for information on the Internet I came across a walker's itinerary. The particular group had been to Hondon to see the shelter and then walked on to a place called Las Casas de Collado Azorín where the, one time famous, writer Azorín used to spend his summers. Azorín was born in Monóvar, another local town, and was one of several Spanish writers known as the Generation of '98 - the year in which Spain lost the last remnants of its once mighty empire. That turned out to be an interesting little spot too. I can't find out whether the hamlet takes its name from the writer or if the writer, José Augusto Trinidad Martínez Ruiz, took his pen name from the place. The latter seems more likely.

Good to know that there are still new things to be discovered so close to home.

Eine Kleine Nachtwanderung

Cabeço towers above Pinoso. It's a salt dome. There are traces of human habitation there in pre-history and people still live on its slopes today. Plonked right on the top are a series of masts which people refer to as the repetidor, the repeater. It's a while since I've been up there but I think there is a mobile phone mast and I know that the local radio station uses one of the masts too.

Apparently it's become a bit of a local tradition to take a night-time stroll up the 893 metre high hill on one of the days during a week dedicated to promoting sport and a healthy lifestyle in Pinoso. Personally it's the first time I'm ever heard of it so the promotion must be spot on but there you go. This year all the walkers were being asked to contribute a euro with the cash going towards research into rare diseases.

I thought I'd go and see if there were any potential snaps. I had this idea of a really wide angle shot with someone looking suitably rugged putting a large sporty looking trainer in the bottom left of the image with the group behind picked out in the unforgiving light of the flash whilst the repeater twinkled away in the background. I never quite got around to putting the wide angle on the camera and the few snaps I did take are out of focus, boring and blasted with flash light. I have to say though that the whole thing was, and now a word I haven't used often since the 1980s, surreal.

We have quite a flash looking sports centre in Pinoso. Well it looks flash to me though I've no significant experience of sports installations to guarantee that my perception is accurate. I did my best to embrace the digital era but I simply didn't have the capacity to take on all those high tech sports clothes too. It's not even a part of the town I go to often.

When I arrived, just a bit before the 10pm start, there were little knots of people standing around the main entrance to the sports centre but, apart from the local police lounging by the two patrol cars, there was nothing official looking at all. So I followed a group of youngsters who were going up and behind the main building. It would have been a logical place to start a race - on the hillward side of the sports area. I wasn't going to ask anyone what was going on of course. That would have involved Spanish.

As I walked a little farther from the town I was surprised to find that there were quite a lot of houses. Where the small scale football stadium ended so did the town houses and the olive trees and almonds took over. The urban street became a single track rural road but there was still street lighting alongside the agricultural water hydrants. An odd mix. I realised it was quiet too. Quiet like it is near our house surrounded by open land. Not much traffic noise but the damned yap, yap yapping of myriad dogs and, just for tonight, occasional shouts and torch beams shining out from a little up the hill where a few spectators were gathering. There were also occasional voices from somewhere nearer the sports centre. The light was a mix of those yellow and orange and pink shades that various forms of street lighting give off. All this within a five minute walk of one of the main thoroughfares in Pinoso. I was wearing a light jacket and a T shirt and I was over-warm. Just in case you're worried I had shoes and trousers and other stuff on too.

A few people passed me, indeed some people I know vaguely said hello, then the Police car pointed its headlights up the track, turned on the blues and twos and crawled up the road. Behind came 400 people who looked perfectly normal but who had the intention of hiking up a biggish hill on a Thursday evening in the dark. It didn't seem to be a race. I don't know why I'd expected one. I took a few snaps. The people were gone and I walked back to the motor. About a hundred yards from the car park a bloke and a young lad were hurrying up the road. Obviously, despite the start being about fifteen minutes behind time, they'd arrived late. I'm already knackered said the man to the boy.

As I drove away from the town I could see the blue flashing lights crawling up the side of Cabeço. Distinctly odd.

Ho, ho! Sigh.

My draft tax declaration became available online the other day. Because I was self employed for a while in the 2015 tax year I'm going to need an accountant to sort it out but I'm putting off ringing him till my UK tax documentation turns up. Curiosity got the better of me though and I thought I would have a look at the online version to see what the tax office's initial assessment was. Rebate or more to pay?

On the first page, more or less in the first line, I noticed that my name was wrong. Although the effect on the printed form looks fine, which is presumably why I've missed it for the past ten years as have various tax offices and accountants, in fact the surnames and first names are mixed up. So they have my name as Jo and my surname as Christopher Thompson. The Jo is because, when I first registered at the Social Security, their database only had room for a forename fourteen characters long so the Christopher John had to be pruned. Heaven knows what Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso - that's Pablo Picasso to you and me - would have done. I quietly closed down the webpage. I'll let the accountant sort that out too.

The firm I work for sent me an email yesterday afternoon telling me that new legislation is coming into force which means that I will need to do something like the very first police record checks that we did in the UK. There is a pretty obvious question as to why anyone is allowed to work with children without being checked but we'll pass that by. The police, or in this case the Justice Ministry, will produce a form to say whether I have a criminal record or not. I asked my employer when this legislation would come into force. The end of the month was the reply. Good to get plenty of notice. Good that my employer is helping me with the process too.

I had a look online. Amazingly the process can be completed via the Internet. Even more amazingly I have an electronic signature which the Ministry site recognised. The form couldn't have been simpler: name and address type information, place of birth and bank payment details. I filled in the form and pushed send. Please fill in the phone number in the approved format it said. It took me four attempts to get that right. There was no suggested format but the international dialling code, with a plus, not two zeros, did the trick. This time it said that the information on my Foreigners Identification Number (NIE) form didn't match what I'd typed in. That's true because, as it turns out, the NIE, which I have used since 2005, is riddled with errors. It has me living in a street in Pinoso, instead of Culebrón, and the postcode is for Sax, a town about 30kms away. I won't bore you with the detail of the reason behind the particular errors but the underlying fault is quite bizarre.

To use a British example. Let's say I lived at 8 Oak Fold, the fold being an alternative to street or drive or avenue. The person who designed the database had never heard of fold as a street name so they left it out of their drop down lists. They didn't think to include a box for free text entry either. They did, however, make it essential that one of the street type names from the drop down list was included in the address. So, the person who is trying to register me on their database, let's say it's Council Tax, does the best that they can and uses Drove as a near equivalent. The form gets processed. The next time, at Vehicle Registration, the fold option is missing again. This time the form filler in chooses Street because that's the most frequent option. No problem to me. I get registered for Council Tax and Vehicle Registration. The problem arises ten years later when I think I live at 8 Oak Fold but Vehicles think I live at Oak Street and Council Tax think I live at Oak Drove and neither can find me.

I was just having a root around the Justice Ministry website. Google told me that its security certificate couldn 't be trusted but I ploughed ahead anyway. Apparently I can download the form, fill it in with a biro and post it to someone. This is quite an unusual Spanish option but it's a good one from my point of view. Actually, as I typed that I wondered if it were true. Lots of times the forms that require payment are triplicate forms which mean that they have to be picked up in person, filled in, paid for over a bank counter and then taken back to the office. Bit of a problem though. The website tells me that there is an intervención técnica - i.e. the site is being fiddled with - and that I have to wait till midnight which was 51 minutes ago as I type.

Ho, ho! Sigh.

Lost in the mist

I seem to have lost the Pinoso weather station and, like my mini loud speaker, I can't find it.

The state weather service here is called AEMET, La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. The service uses all sorts of mechanisms, including data collected from a series of traditional weather stations dotted around Spain, to build up its records and to make weather predictions. One of the weather stations is, or at least was, in Pinoso. From what I can make out this is because a local teacher, whose nickname is Capito, started to collect basic weather information as a classroom project. With time the project, and the equipment, developed to the point when his data formed a part of the AEMET network.

There was an event in February 2015 to celebrate 25 years of Capito's weather recording in Pinoso.

I check the website on an almost daily basis but, for the past few weeks, the Pinoso data has been missing. I presumed it was a technical problem. Then, a couple of days ago the Pinoso name disappeared from the list of Valencian weather stations.

Something else that has not been in its habitual place for a while is the monthly weather round up. This was a regular feature on the Town Hall website for nearly three years with a monthly round up appearing a few days into each new month. That stopped in June 2015.

So, when the AEMET site changed I went looking for the explanation. The first thing I found was the missing monthly round ups on another local news site. So that wasn't really a mystery at all. Just the Town Hall website not being indexed as before. But I could find no information anywhere on the missing weather station. So, if anyone knows please let me know.

Meanwhile here is the report for March 2016. The highest temperature was 25.5ºC on the 30th March and the lowest temperature was -1.5ºC on the 9th. Although we have a minus figure there is a little note, on the round up, to say that the temperature was below freezing for just two hours during the whole month. We did have 12 days with dew though. The mean temperature in March was a high of 17.6ºC and a low of 4.6ºC. We had 37.7 litres of rainfall per square metre over the month though 15.5 litres of that fell on one day, the 21st, which is probably the one day we had a thunderstorm. In total we had four rainy days against 25 days when the sun shone though 17 of those included cloudy spells. We had just six days where we didn't see the sun because the cloud didn't break.

Parallells where none exist

Sunday and nothing much to do so we went for a bit of a drive around. We went over Zarza way and into the Sierra de la Pila. Maggie suggested a tapas place in Algorrobo for lunch but as we were on single track mountain roads we could either go back via Zarza or round via Fortuna. It was about quarter past three as we rolled into Fortuna so I suggested eating there. Maggie wasn't keen. Fortuna is not her favourite place. A few minutes later we were out of the danger zone and into Baños. Maggie spotted a sign for La Fuente which is a camp site built around a thermal spring.

Now when I think camp sites I think lugging water in big jerry cans, wellis, shower blocks with concrete floors and water that never boils as the flame under the pan dances in the stiff breeze at the door to your, ever so slightly, cramped tent. It's a long time since I've been camping. I presume the experience is very different nowadays but perception and reality are very separate things.

When I worked in Fortuna, I occasionally mentioned camping and camp sites to my English language students. There is a linguistic misunderstanding about the words camping and camp site for Spanish speakers. The problem with my explanation was that for the youngsters of Fortuna their experience of a camp site is not a muddy field with caravan and tent pitches. It is a place with a restaurant where you go for birthday parties and communion meals and where, with suitable weather, you go to use the swimming pool.

La Fuente is a camping, a camp site, but there were no tents. There were hut sized chalets and places to park caravans and motorhomes. There were a lot of motorhomes and lots and lots of them had Dutch and Belgian plates as they so often do. I think there is a sub class of Netherlanders who spend their time sitting outside their motorhomes in Spain. There was bright paintwork, classical Greek style statues and lots of people in bathrobes.

There was also a 12€ menú. Not bad for a Sunday. The look of the  dining room suggested that we were not in for an epicurean feast but there were scores of noisy, constantly moving people so we reckoned it must be OK. We got a table, the waitress scooped up the remains of the previous diners meal in the paper table cloth, Dick Whittington style, and before long we had our drinks, the salad was on the table and the food ordered. The meal was nothing spectacular but we cleared our plates happily enough.

Just like in the UK going for Sunday lunch is a bit of a Spanish ritual. The roast beef and Yorkshire pudding equivalent around here is usually rice with rabbit and snails but at the cheaper end there are lots of chop and chips or fish and chip type set meals - salad, starter, main, pudding, drink, bread and coffee - for between 12 and 15€. Fixed price, set meals aren't so easy to come by on Sundays as they are the rest of the week and they tend to be three or four euros more at the weekend than they are on work days. If you abandon the fixed menu and go for the rice option, or whatever the regional favourite is, then expect it to work out around 25 to 30€ per head.

I was quite taken with the kitschness of la Fuente but, somehow, the photos didn't capture it.

Life in the UK

I've just been back to the UK. Here are a few things I noticed.

Beer. I went in a pub and bought a pint of bitter. I had no idea what to ask for from all the strangely named brews but whatever I bought tasted like proper British beer. I have nothing against the beer I can get in any bar in Spain but the stuff I was buying in England was much more interesting. I had to be sure though so I visited a fair number of pubs.

Heat. It's hot in the UK. It was sometimes a tad cold outside but inside it was roasting. I haven't walked around in shirt sleeves inside in Spain for months. It was horribly dark though. Grey.

Streetfood. From time to time people eat in the street in Spain but, generally, only where there is some sort of event - like a Mediaeval Fair or fiesta. In the UK people were walking down the street eating all sorts of take away food. In Cambridge the woman on the bench next to me polished off a whole tray of sushi using chopsticks whilst the wind blew and the sky drizzled.

Restaurants, takeaways and food outlets were everywhere. We have plenty of bars and restaurants here too but the huge variety of food in the UK was noticeable.

Shops seemed much more adventurous than the shops I have become used to. There are plenty of interesting places in bigger cities here but I was in St Ives and Ely, as much as Cambridge, and even there the breadth of retail was impressive.

Work. Lots of people asked me about my work and I responded by asking about theirs. Work is a long way down the list of conversational topics in Spain: long after family, food, Spanish, the weather etc.

Money. No wonder everyone in the UK waves their credit card at the machine to pay for everything. Things seemed expensive to us though I suppose price bears a direct relationship to income. Nonetheless things do cost a lot of pounds and you would need to carry a lot of cash to keep up. I know young people use credit cards more than older people here in Spain but the terminals are not as obvious and ubiquitous as they are in England.

I was constantly taken unawares by cars driving on the wrong side of the road. More than once I thought a car was out of control simply because it was on the side of the road I am no longer accustomed to.

English. Everyone tells me that the UK is full of people from different countries but it was great to be able to speak freely and competently. Well except in Starbucks where successfully buying a cup of coffee seemed to require passing the specialist subject round on Mastermind.

Police. There weren't any. Short of the vested and impressively armed police at the airport I didn't see a police officer on foot. In Spain the police walk around all the time.

Bags. We still get plastic bags when we buy things in Spain. It struck me as a good thing that they are not given away with gay abandon in the UK but it did leave me struggling with armfuls of small items at times.

Skin. I nearly forgot this. In all seriousness I asked Maggie's niece if there was a fashion for women to wear very white face makeup with bright red lipstick and pronounced eye makeup. The answer was no. Apparently Britons are a fair bit paler skinned than Spaniards.

And a special mention for the guided bus. It's an ordinary bus that can be driven around the streets but, between Cambridge and St Ives the bus runs along the route of the old train lines in a sort of concrete conduit with little guide wheels sticking out to the side. Most impressive.

Custom and Practice

When I first started the  blog it was simple. The idea was to celebrate, or at least note, the diffferences between what I'd always considered to be everyday and what was now ordinary in a new country. So the fact that I ordered neither quantity nor type of beer - I just asked for a beer - gave me material for an entry. Everything from a fiesta to a supermarket visit was grist to the mill.

Nowadays it's different. I don't want to repeat the same entries over and over again and I'm, perhaps, no longer the best person to notice the differences - or so I thought. Strangely though in the last twenty four hours, a couple of tiny incidents have reminded me that I've still not quite caught on.

I do lots of English language exercises that revolve around food. In one drill I have the students do a bit of imaginary food shopping to mark vocabulary like savoury, packet, jar, seafood, game, poultry, herbs etc. They have to produce a meal from their list of savoury ingredients which come in jars and so on. A second is a variation on the TV show Come Dine With Me and there's another on preparing a romantic dinner. In all of them the end product is to produce a meal of starter, main course and pudding. I've always presumed that the minor confusions around starter and main course were simply linguistic ones. Yesterday though when we popped in to a restaurant for a meal something clicked. The eatery, on the outskirts of Fortuna, only had British clients. Maggie and I chose different starters from the set meal but we had the same main. I noticed that the menu, the list of food with prices, didn't use the Spanish equivalents of starter and main. Instead there was a list of first and second courses followed by the dessert. It wasn't something new to me but I suddenly realised that my interpretation wasn't quite right. The difference is subtle. Here we have two courses of equal weight rather than a lighter starter followed by a more substantial main course. If we were going to emulate that in Spain it would be much more usual to share the starters in the centre of the table. So there is an ever so slight difference between the structure of a standard three course "English" meal and a standard three course "Spanish" meal. Just enough of a difference to discombobulate my students.

Someone who works in the school that I work at in Cieza has been suggesting that we should get together. On Thursday he seemed determined to make it this weekend. He said that he thought he was free for Saturday "por la tarde", and he'd be in touch. When he didn't phone this morning I just presumed it was off. A couple of hours ago I noticed a message from him on my phone saying that he was sorry but things had changed and he wasn't free. When he said tarde to me I automatically translated it to my English idea of afternoon. Now, even to we Brits, afternoon is reltively flexible. It may, technically, be bounded by 6pm but I think the interplay between afternoon and evening is much more subtle than that - a combination of daylight, activity and time. It's similar in Spain except that tarde covers both afternoon and what would be relatively late evening for us. My pal's mental picture of having a drink in the "tarde"and mine were poles apart. It wasn't a translation error it was a cultural error.

I know that a couple of Spanish people read this blog from time to time. It's possible that they will dispute my reading of the situation. I would point them to Restaurante and Mesón. Several Spaniards have told me that there is an obvious difference. When pressed though they don't seem to find it so easy describing those differences to me. It all becomes a bit Cockburn's - one instinctively knows. In just in the same way I remember entertaining a couple of Spaniards in the UK who were perplexed as to why this was a pub and that was a bar or why this was a restaurant and that a café. I knew, indeed it was obvious, but I was unable to enumerate those differences in any logical way.