Life in Culebrón

There was a time when blogs were cutting-edge rather than faintly quaint. I first heard of them in an episode of The West Wing — something about Josh and a gas-guzzler, if I remember rightly. They began to take off around the start of the millennium and, by the time we arrived in Spain in 2004, were still new enough to feel vaguely adventurous. They sounded interesting. I’d kept a diary for years, so that slightly dutiful “captain’s log” approach — more record than invention — was already second nature. The difficulty was not how to write one, but what on earth to write about. No one was going to be gripped by the news that I’d been to the shops or that the car was making an unfamiliar noise. That changed once we began to settle into Spain. Suddenly there was an avalanche of things happening — new customs, new frustrations, small triumphs, daily absurdities. I assumed, with only a mild dose of egocentric bias, that if I found them interesting, someone else might too. Apparently I still...

My first post in this blog, Life in Culerbrón, was on January 5th 2006. The first entry was about me having drunk too much brandy (the more things change the more they stay the same) and the second entry was about stonework falling through our ceiling. The entries are a day apart and neither is long; the first is just three lines and the second about fifteen. The idea of the blog then was simple. We were reasonably new to Spain; we'd been resident about fifteen months and we'd lived in the house in Culebrón for around eight or nine months. Blogging was relatively new and I didn't know what a blog was. Nowadays I don't know why I'd want to load videos to TikTok. The difference is that I started to blog, and I've kept going, whereas I've only ever tikked, or tokked, to see how it works. It was relatively easy to write the blog in the early days. Something new was happening to me all the time and I just wrote about that something. For instance in those last few...