Life in Culebrón

Watching the TV news in Spain on Thursday afternoon. Thinking about the untrammelled stupidity of it all. About the actions of men, and it always seems to be men, like Putin and Sergey Lavrov sending people to kill and be killed. Wondering who is making money from this because behind almost every indecent act someone is making money. Back at the news the next item was that the Partido Popular (PP) in Castilla y León had done a deal with VOX to form the regional government. It's not on the same scale but it is on the same spectrum of human wickedness. It's the first time that VOX has actually been in a coalition government. It's the first time since the restoration of democracy in Spain, in the period after Franco died, that the far right has actually been in government. It may be the first but it probably won't be the last. I'm not sure how genned up on Spanish politics you are. I try to keep up but sometimes I despair because, every now and then, there is some even...

You'll remember we had a general election in April and regional and municipal elections at the end of May. The trend was that the socialists, the PSOE, did well, the far left, Podemos, did badly, the traditional right, PP, plummeted and the centrists, Ciudadanos or Cs, did well but not as well as they hoped. The new far right party, Vox, won a substantial number of seats but without the huge surge they were expecting. The municipalities have now been sorted out with their councils constituted, the regional governments are nearly all done but the first attempt at forming the new national government won't start till July 22nd. Greased lightning it is not. Spain, has generally, since the return to democracy, had a two party state. More accurately two big players plus a number of important regional movements and some smaller national parties. Recently the maths had changed. Deciding who might govern a city, a region or a country became some sort of "what if" arithme...

I was once a Geologist. The trick with geology is time. Imagine that if, every year, a stream were to cut a groove 1 millimetre in the ground. In two years the groove would be 2 mm deep and in 10 years it would be a centimetre deep. If the stream were to follow the same line for a million years the groove would be a kilometre deep. Just for my mum make it a sixteenth of an inch a year and the valley would be nearly a mile deep. Now the earth is about four and a half billion years old. Just in case you're never sure what a billion is nowadays that would be 4,500,000,000 years. Obviously it's not possible but if our 1 mm a year stream flowed, non stop, in the same place, from the beginning, the groove would be 4,500 kilometres deep or about 500 times as deep as Mount Everest is high. When I studied geology I found out about graptolites, brachiopods, lamellibranchs, belemnites and all sorts of other fossils large and small. I particularly approved of trilobites. I thought th...

Just in case you're interested the socialists, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), had a good election. They gained 38 seats and now have 123 seats in the lower house of parliament (they also won the upper house). On the other hand the conservative Partido Popular (PP) had a disastrous day. They lost 71 seats down from 137 to 66. Anyone want to give me odds on the survival of their recently elected leader? On the left Unidas Podemos (UP) dropped 29 seats to 42  and on the right Ciudadanos (Cs) gained 25 to 57. To the shame of Spain and Spaniards the ultra right party VOX went from nothing to 24 parliamentary seats. Another eight parties won representation in the lower house. Most of them have a regional flavour - Catalans, Basques, Valencians, Navarrese etc. The biggest of these, with 15 seats in the Congress, is Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC, which is headed up by a politician who is currently in prison for his part in the dodgy Catalan referendum. ...

I don't get a vote in the General Elections here in Spain. Nonetheless I popped out to the three polling stations in Pinoso to have a bit of a nosey. I took the photos as soon as I arrived and I only stayed a few minutes just to see what numbers were like. The polling stations looked busy to me though it was mid morning, a good time, especially as the church had just chucked out. This lot of elections are the thirteenth since democracy was restored in the late 1970s and the fifth set that we've been here for. We've lived under only three of the, so far seven democratic presidents. Anything is possible, results wise, and coalition wise but it's likely, according to the polls, that the socialist Pedro Sanchez will be returned to power as the head of a coalition with left wing Unidas Podemos and possibly some of the Nationalist groups. There is even speculation that the socialists could form a coalition with the right of centre Ciudadanos party. Who knows? It's m...

It's election time in Spain. The local and European elections were on the cards, programmed in on the calendar for May from long ago, but then the Central Government, headed up by Pedro Sanchez, couldn't get its budget through parliament and so was left with little option but to call a General Election. On Monday of this week the President of our region in Valencia decided to bring forward the regional elections and to hold them on the same day as the General Election, April 28th. As I listen to the news there seems to be a qualitative difference between the politics I'm used to and what's happening at the minute. It all seems very personal, very combative. It's more like squaring up for a shouting match or a brawl than a political debate. No actual fisticuffs to date though! You may or may not remember that Spain had two General Elections very close together in late 2015 and mid 2016. In both cases the conservatives gained most seats but they couldn't man...

Rather surprisingly, considering the recent history of Spain, we don't have a General Election on the horizon. Of course that's not strictly true. The Podemos people are pushing a parliamentary no confidence motion and if that were to prosper then, General Election here we come. But it won't. We do, though, have a bit of a leadership battle in the PSOE, the Socialist Party. You will remember that we had a couple of General Elections in quick succession. The PP, the blues, the conservatives, won both times but they didn't get a majority. To be President /Prime Minister here you need a majority. The orange party, Ciudadanos, wobbled around a bit about who to back - given that there were two General Elections they had two real choices and they used them both. After the second and decisive election they sided with the blues and that's why we have the current Government. The PSOE, the reds, the socialists, were led by a bloke called Pedro Sánchez - he tried to form...

I'm finding that I'm shouting at the telly and the radio more often recently. The politicians are talking more nonsense than usual but, more than that, one of them seems to have simply decided that none of it is really anything to do with him. We don't have a proper government at the moment but we do have a Caretaker Government,  a Gobierno en funciones, run by the Partido Popular. Mariano Rajoy is the less than charismatic leader of the PP and Caretaker President. He's one of those blokes who appears to have almost no political personality. From time to time the news programmes show him out for a bit of exercise and he just looks wrong in badly co-ordinated sports clothes. If he abandons his suit for a jacket and trousers the jacket is too blue and the trousers too black. When he doesn't wear a tie he reminds me of that picture of John Major meeting the troops and wearing a ribbed pullover to ride around in a tank - completely out of his element. But to be f...

It's raining. It's rained quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. We've forgotten all about the drought which lasted from last winter through to a few weeks ago. Usually, though not today, it rains overnight which is very civilised. I can't pretend that it's warm but it isn't cold either - at least not outside. Generally we're into the mid to high teens during the day but with sun and blue skies so it feels pleasantly warm. Overnight we're down at 7ºC or 8ºC maybe. I expect it will turn cold in December, it usually does. The pile of leaves that have just started to clog our drive suggest that Autumn has finally arrived. And its getting dark just after six in the afternoon. Considering it will start to get lighter again just before Christmas that's not too bad. So outside, in the fresh air everything is as it should be. Inside the house of course it's miserable. On the front page of today's Alicante paper there's a headline which say...