Atishoo!, atishoo!

On a Tunisian holiday we ate lots of carrots and lots of strawberries. They were in season, they were cheap, they were tasty so the hotels bought barrow loads of them for their guests. It's the same with lots of garden crops. They come in shedloads', all at once. Suddenly you have cherries or plums or green beans coming out of your ears. With us it was only ever figs. We've never done well with our garden - most things are early for the next extinction event. The figs were an exception but most of our garden is either dead or dying. We had three trees: two big ones and a smaller one. The big ones produced two crops a year. I mean, seriously, in the UK I'd occasionally see figs in Waitrose and buy them as a bit of a novelty. It was a novelty that lasted for maybe half a dozen figs over a couple of weeks. What does any individual do with thousands of figs? There are only so many jars of fig jam or fig and cheese starters that any one person can eat and most of the possibilities make little economic sense - fig wine in an area awash with proper wineries? You can't even give them away because everyone else has mounds of figs too that they are fed up of freezing and pairing with cheese.

So most of the figs would fall on the ground and had to be raked up. They overpowered the compost bin. It was the same with the autumn leaves. I know we're not supposed to rake leaves up anymore, pile them around tree roots and what not, leave them to mulch down, but these big trees produced knee deep leaves. And fig trees grow quickly. They produce a lot of new wood each season so they'd have to be pruned and what's to be done with all those lopped branches?

I do most of the graft in the garden but it's Maggie who takes any notice of it. She'll try new plants, new flowers, she'll harvest any crop there is and put it to use. I just prune, weed, rake, dig, hoe, curse and bleed. One day Maggie asked me if I'd noticed the white spots on the fig leaves. I hadn't. It turned out they were Cerosplastes rusci, sometimes called wax scales; here they are known as cochinilla. 

When I looked closely all three of our trees had these parasites on the leaves and bark, sucking away on the sap from the trees. At the local agricultural suppliers I only had to say the word higuera (fig tree) and the bloke was reaching for some sort of chemical to see them off. He told me that the chemicals weren't particularly toxic for humans,  so anyone could use them, but he recommended overalls, a hat, goggles and facemask while I sprayed. Each tree needed about 30 litres of two different chemicals. It was August and it was quite hot inside a boiler suit, a woolly hat, goggles and facemask especially with each backpack full of insecticide weighing in at close on 20 kilos. At the start it wasn't too bad but by the end, determined to finish in one fell swoop, I was swaying gently and on the point of collapse. I was probably quite close to being one of those four line stories on the National TV news, slightly longer on the local radio, about some sixty odd year old dying from heat exhaustion.

For a while the trees seemed to be saved. They recovered, they gave fruit, the leaves stopped dropping off and then, suddenly, one of the trees tree just lost the will to live. It died in a couple of weeks. I lopped off all the really weighty branches and left it as a climbing frame for the cats. Later it became a support for the solar powered fairy lights that Maggie likes to festoon the building with. It wasn't till a couple of seasons later that I noticed cracks in the trunk and branches of the other tree, boreholes and all sorts of signs that the tree was doomed. The destruction wreaked by the tiny parasites is truly incredible.

So the two big fig trees were now dead. Again, with the second one I lopped off lots of branches to leave it looking like one of those John Ford Sonoran cactus. Stark.

There was a bit of wind a couple of weeks ago. As always it blew some chairs over, whirpooled leaves into mounds in certain spots of the garden. The wind also blew the first fig tree down. 

I sawed, I spent ages splitting the trunk with steel wedges to make the remains manageable enough to cart away to a large pile of garden waste that I'm unsure what I'm going to do with. Probably it will go the way of the supposed witch in that Monty Python sketch - well it might when the controls on garden fires are eased up.

Tax and minimum wage - today's news

Something in today's news about income tax completely flummoxed me. I think I've got it worked out now. I may be wrong so don't take my ramblings as gospel but I thought you may be interested too.

The current Spanish Government is a coalition. That coalition can usually garner support from other parties to approve its legislation, but not always. Today, one of the news stories was about a row within the two parties that make up the Government. Yolanda Diaz, from SUMAR, has done a deal with the Unions to put the minimum wage up to 1,184€ per month. Because there are 14 payments in the Spanish year that's a total income of 16,576€ per year. At the moment the minimum wage is 15,876€. Yolanda Diaz also pushed through legislation which dropped the working week from 40 hours to 37.5 hours for the same pay. The majority party in Government, the Socialists or PSOE, argue that, as the minimum wage is now a reasonable income, it should be taxed like other incomes. SUMAR argues that as it is still a low income the workers on it should be offered more protection. In recent years the minimum wage has been exempt of the IRPF or income tax.

This news confused me because I know that Spanish income tax (IRPF) is paid in earnings bands with different percentage rates. The lowest rate, on taxable income between 1€ and 12,450€, is 19%. The next band goes from 12,450€ and 20,200€. The tax on that is 24%. There are other tax bands, the highest is for incomes of 300,000€ or more which are taxed at 47%. If the lowest tax rate was 19%, and that applied from the first euro earned, how could a wage be tax exempt?

I also knew that there were tax allowances. For someone under 65 it's 5,550€, increasing to 6,700€ for over 65s and 8,100€ for the over 75s. There are other tax allowances too, for dependants and for married couples. The bit I didn't know was that if the total taxable income was below the minimum wage then there was no tax to be paid at all. Even now that seems a bit odd as it clashes with the idea of the various tax bands.

And that's the change. Presuming that the legislation goes through, in the tax year 2025 even the people on minimum wage will be taxed. As we are just about to have the pleasure of paying our tax bills for the tax year 2024 the rest of this explanation uses 2024 as an example.

1. Exemption for incomes below the minimum wage

Individuals earning up to the annual minimum wage do not have to pay IRPF. In 2024, this exemption threshold was set at 15,876€, equivalent to the annual minimum wage. So, people on low incomes, particularly those earning at or below the minimum wage, are not subject to income tax.

2. The 19% Tax Band

The first €12,450 of taxable income is subject to a 19% tax rate under Spain's sliding scale tax system. Taxable income is calculated after subtracting personal allowances (the 5,550€ and so on) and other deductions. Because of the personal allowances and the exemption for incomes below the minimum wage, many low-income earners do not reach the taxable income level where this 19% rate applies.

3. How the exemption and the 19% tax band Interact

There is an apparent dichotomy which arises because the 19% tax band starts at €0. In practice, no one pays this rate on their first €12,450 of gross income unless their earnings exceed both the personal allowance and the minimum wage.

For instance: A worker earning €15,876 (the minimum wage in 2024) would subtract their personal allowance (€5,550 for someone under 65), leaving a taxable income of €10,326. Since this taxable income is below the exemption threshold (€15,876), they pay no IRPF.

If their gross income exceeded the exemption threshold, for instance if they earned €16,000, they would begin paying IRPF on their taxable income above €5,550. That would mean they would have 10,450€ of taxable income. That figure falls within the 19% tax band (which goes up to 12,450€) so they would pay 1,985.50€ in taxes. (10,450 x 19%)

You can see that, in this case, a small increase in gross pay produces a significantly increased tax bill.

You can also see that there are two possible arguments about whether people should pay tax on their total income or not. The one that has won, at the moment, the PSOE one, is that the personal allowances and the tax bands provide a fair taxation system without needing any extra protection for those on the lowest wages. The PSOE reckons that only about 20% of the people on minimum wage will pay any tax in 2025 and those will generally be single people without dependants.

Singing along

Much to the amusement of Maggie, my partner, instead of resolving to go to the gym or to stop drinking alcohol in the New Year my resolution was to learn the words to Un beso y una flor. It's a song popularised in Spain by the singer Nino Bravo in 1972. 

I don't know about you but I was forced to learn things by rote in Secondary school on pain of serious bodily harm. 

Latin master to an 11 year old me.
"Alright Thompson;  present tense of to love in Latin"
I try.
"Wrong, lift one leg, stand on just one. Try again. Same verb, same tense."
I try again.
"Wrong, lift the other leg too!" 

Should you be concerned I can still trot out amō, amās, amat, amāmus, amātis, amant even when I'm dead drunk. I can also do "I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high etc.," and "So shaken as we are, so wan with care, find we a time for frighted peace to pant, etc. That seems to be it though. There must have been more but they've gone. 

The Spanish used to say, la letra con sangre entra, literally, the letter enters with blood but which equates to our,  spare the rod and spoil the child. Both come from a time when adults were very happy to use severe violence against youngsters and when rote learning was one of the mainstays of any educational system. 

We do learn by constant repetition though, otherwise I wouldn't know tens, if not hundreds, of songs from the ones sung by adults in my childhood like Don't Dilly Dally on the Way or Daisy, Daisy through to all those pop songs of the 60s, 70s and 80s. I do remember making a bit of an effort to learn the words to Jerusalem too when I was at University having been unable to hide my ignorance as a group of about twenty of us did our best to be patriotic, or socialist, or part of the Women's Institute, from the top of a table in the Union bar.

There's a Spanish song, Mediterráneo by Joan Manuel Serrat, that has been voted as the best song in the history of popular music in Spain. You hear it from time to time but it's rolled out far fewer times than songs like Eres tú by Mocedades or Bailando by Alaska or Rafael's Mi Gran Noche. But the song that I've noticed is the one I'm trying to learn, Un beso y una flor by Nino Bravo.

I'm not much for sport but, during the Euros, I could hear that the England football fans were singing Sweet Caroline. I remember too that my mum complained that, in the place she lived until very recently, the residents often burst into a version of that same song. Somehow the song had moved from mere song to anthem. In exactly the same was I found myself swaying gently from side to side as the drunken crowd, out to cheer on the Wine Horses in Caravaca de la Cruz last year, burst into a spirited rendition of Un beso y una flor. I recognised the song and I mouthed a few of the lines that I remembered but the situation reminded me of that table top Jerusalem recital - lots of da, da, da. Some time later, in Pinoso, the town band played the song as part of a concert and, Rod Stewart like, the band's director handed over to the crowd to sing along - ligero equipaje tum, tum, tan largo viaje, tum tiddly. 

That means that on two separate occasions, twice, the song has cropped up as a sing along. It's not happened with any other song, except the Spanish Happy Birthday, so, every day, for just five minutes, as my resolution, I read through the lyrics. So far and we're now into the second month of the year, not a thing, I can't string two lines together. Absolutely useless. My addled brain seems quite unable to cope. But even back in the 60s with those Latin verbs and ancient poems my method was easy - persistence. Just keep going till Elliot or Chesterton or the future tense (amābō, amābis, amābit, amābimus, amābitis, amābunt) ceded before sheer obstinance.

Un beso y una flor, Canción de Nino Bravo

Dejaré mi tierra por ti

Dejaré mis campos y me iré

Lejos de aquí

Cruzaré llorando el jardín

Y con tus recuerdos partiré

Lejos de aquí

De día viviré

Pensando en tus sonrisas

De noche las estrellas me acompañarán

Serás como una luz

Que alumbre mi camino

Me voy pero te juro que mañana volveré

Al partir un beso y una flor

Un "te quiero", una caricia y un adiós

Es ligero equipaje

Para un tan largo viaje

Las penas pesan en el corazón

Más allá del mar habrá un lugar

Donde el sol cada mañana brille más

Forjarán mi destino

Las piedras del camino

Lo que nos es querido siempre queda atrás

Buscaré un hogar para ti

Donde el cielo se une con el mar

Lejos de aquí

Con mis manos y con tu amor

Lograré encontrar otra ilusión

Lejos de aquí

De día viviré

Pensando en tus sonrisas

De noche las estrellas me acompañarán

Serás como una luz

Que alumbre mi camino

Me voy pero te juro que mañana volveré

Al partir un beso y una flor

Un "te quiero", una caricia y un adiós

Es ligero equipaje

Para un tan largo viaje

Las penas pesan en el corazón

Más allá del mar habrá un lugar

Donde el sol cada mañana brille más

Forjarán mi destino

Las piedras del camino

Lo que nos es querido siempre queda atrás

Al partir un beso y una flor

Un "te quiero", una caricia y un adiós

Es ligero equipaje

Para un tan largo viaje

Las penas pesan en el corazón

Más allá del mar habrá un lugar

Donde el sol cada mañana brille más

Forjarán mi destino

Las piedras del camino

Lo que nos es querido siempre queda atrás

A clean break

Being as how they're in season Walnuts are a common sight in Spanish supermarkets and homes around Christmas time. Apparently Britons and Spaniards open walnuts differently.

In the UK, in my youth, Christmas was about the only time of the year we'd have nuts, in shells, in our house. What joy, a reason to bring the crocodile nutcracker out of it's almost perennial hibernation and set it to task. The tail applied the pressure to the nut placed between the beast's jaws.

Now this, plier like, action, is fine for nuts with hard shells - Brazil nuts, hazelnuts and almonds for instance. It was complete overkill for monkey nuts and problematic for walnuts too. Instead of a nice clean break the intricately constructed walnut shells generally shattered when they suddenly lost their structural strength. The crocodile jaws would smack to producing a mixed pile of pulverized nut and shell fragments.

When you buy a net bag of walnuts in Spain they usually (not always) come with something that looks like a flat key. The idea is that you put the short end of the key into the crack between the two halves of the nut, the seam of the shell, and twist. The shell splits neatly and leaves the brain shaped half of the nut in one piece. I bet that's how Rowntrees got those nicely shaped nuts on top of their walnut whips.

Rise, take up your bed, and walk

Maggie tells me I should be explicit and say that I have been given the cancer all clear. She tells me that a sentence built into the story of the Imserso holiday is not good enough. That all the people who have shown concern need to be told clearly and succinctly. Clearly fine, succinctly - not likely given my style.

On 10 January I saw the oncologist at Elda Hospital after doing a PET -TAC at the Vinalopó Hospital in Elche a couple of days before. The oncologist told me that the results showed that the lesion that had been in my throat, in August, was no longer there - the cancer was gone. Every few months I will have to have another TAC scan and then go to see the oncologist to see whether the cancer has come back. I asked what chance there was of the cancer returning and he said 40%. That puts the odds in my favour.

I thought I was done there but Maggie tells me that I should tell you that I'm still having trouble eating. That, even now, I'm taking most food through a stomach tube but that I have started to eat more ordinary food, especially soft food, by mouth. My throat and mouth are not yet recovered - I have a sore throat all the time and my mouth is sometimes slimy, sometimes dry as a bone. My breath is less fragrant than it was. As my taste buds and saliva glands took a pasting from the radiotherapy (and maybe the chemotherapy) eating and drinking isn't a particularly pleasant experience. The treatment has affected my hearing and I'm quite deaf. There are other things which are not quite as before, including things like my facial hair hardly growing as well as changes to other bodily functions which I'm not going to detail here. Full disclosure only goes so far. Oh, and since the day when I was first told that I had cancer until today I have lost 17.7 kilos or two and three quarter stones. I'm very saggy.

By the way Positron Emission Tomography - Computed Axial Tomography (PET-TAC), is the process where the patient, me in this case, is put inside a big tube which allows the medics to take lots of images, a full body scan, that show the activity and metabolism of the body's organs using a radioactive "dye" which interacts with different types of body cells in different ways. People who know what they are looking at can interpret the images to decide what is happening to certain organs and, specifically in my case, to decide whether there was still cancer in my throat and lymph nodes and whether it has popped up anywhere else in other organs.

Holidays on the State

The food tasted horrid. It may really have been horrid but I think it was probably right enough given that it was mass catering. My recentish bouts of radio and chemotherapy have mashed up my taste buds and almost everything tastes odd. In fact until a couple of weeks ago I hadn't tried eating, by putting anything in my mouth, for a bit over three months but, when the oncologist said there was no sign of cancer, it seemed about time to stop messing around and get back to normal. I'm still taking most of my sustenance through a stomach tube though. Whether the food was foul or not it came as part of the package and so, come hell or high water, I was definitely going to force some of it down my gullet. Anyway I'd also promised the nutritionist I'd try. 

Mealtimes, not eating much, I had the opportunity to look around at my fellow travellers. I felt for the few young people who had, mistakenly, booked into the hotel. It was full of holidaying pensioners. Most of us were overweight and a bit doddery. Many of us were rude or at least a bit selfish and unthinking. I'd watch as someone stopped to chat blocking up the narrow aisles between the tables, I'd watch as someone hogged the coffee machine to make just the right mix of coffee and hot milk in blissful ignorance of the ever extending queue behind them. The coffee had, after all to be just right, the wife had been sent for the coffee, the husband expected it just so and the little woman knew her place (presumably at some subservient time during the last century). At least we were the walking wounded, the ones who are still upright. Ah, the delights of old age.

We've just done one of the IMSERSO (Instituto de Mayores y Servicios Sociales) holidays. Eight days away in a hotel in Roquetas del Mar on the Almeria coast for 228.93€ per person. That includes the coach from Alicante to Roquetas, full board and travel insurance including private health cover. The hotel we stayed at was the Hotel Bahia Serena - one of those enormous four star coastal hotels with pools and gyms and entertainment. The photo is of the interior patio of the hotel. 

The Imserso holidays are, essentially, subsidised holidays for pensioners resident in Spain who are enrolled in the Social Security System - there are other groups of people who are eligible too. If you qualify, but your partner doesn't, because they are too young for the scheme, they can also go along. I thought that to be eligible you had to have a Spanish State Pension but English speakers on the same bus as us to Roquetas assured me that wasn't the case. The people we talked to had registered through a travel agent and then used the same travel agent to book them the holidays. Each year there is a period to register and later there is a period to book the holidays. For this season I think that people can register on the scheme through till May (registration opened in November) but the periods seem to change so it's worth checking the Imserso website for up to date information. There is also information there about who qualifies with a points system based on age, income, levels of ability and the like. If you register now it is unlikely that you will be able to book a holiday this season but your eligibility will roll over into the 2025/2026 season.

There are lots of destinations to choose from divided into three categories - coastal holidays, island holidays and short breaks. In our first year of registration we were not able to book the island holidays. I had to wait till the second year. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't have enough points or if it's a general rule for all participants. The main group, the coastal holidays, are along the Mediterranean coast from Cataluña down through Valencia, Murcia and onto Andalucia. There is always a scramble to book up as the new season opens in Autumn. I booked us up online and didn't worry too much about the race to get to the islands. Once we'd found a place that looked OK we considered the job done. There are plenty of people who are hardened Imsersoers. When the booking period opens they hover by their computers with their options well researched. They target what they consider the best deals in the best hotels in the best locations and book multiple holidays. The next time you need Taylor Swift tickets they may be available as subcontractors!

The principal idea behind the scheme is that it helps to maintain the wellbeing of older people who get to relax, to see a bit of Spain and to decrease their potential isolation by mixing with other pensioners in the participating hotels. Philosophy aside it's also a scheme that supports the tourist industry by offering a steady flow of clients in the low season. I think how it works is that the Government guarantees a certain price, for their services, to the airlines, coach firms, hotels etc. Whether the providers sign up or not is a choice for them and their accountants. If, for instance, a hotel decides that there is enough money in the offer they can keep open without having to temporarily lay off staff. 

This was our second Imserso holiday. Last year we went to Cataluña in May when the resort was back in business for the summer but this time, with going in January, the part of Roquetas where the hotel is was, more or less, closed down for the winter and it was a bit desolate. 

I don't remember it as being a particularly difficult process to sign up though going through a travel agent sounds as if it would have been easier. I suppose that, like the hotels, certain travel agents deal with Imserso holidays and others don't. To be honest, I've forgotten a lot of the detail about exactly how I signed up and applied the first time. Nonetheless, like all bureaucratic processes, I'm sure there are slight changes from year to year. That being the case don't take my word for any of this and have a look at the Imserso website if you want to know the truth.

Fun for this year

There are lot of strange fiestas in Spain. Every now and then I'll see some article or read a report about this or that event where everyone throws paint at a man dressed as a clown/harlequin for either attempting to steal/failing to steal a religious icon in Guadix and Baeza (Cascamorras), where a man, also dressed as a clown/harlequin, jumps over babies each Corpus Christi in Castrillo de Murcia, in Burgos (El Colacho), where devils capture saints with the intention of burning then to death if they are not sidetracked into climbing onto the balconies of fair maidens with rape in their minds (La Santantonà in Forcall), where six open coffins, with live occupants, are paraded around a church and its cemetery to musical accompaniment in Las Nieves, Galicia (Fiesta de Santa Marta de Ribarteme) or where giant puppets, skeletons and knights Templar parade through the torchlit streets of Soria (Las Ánimas). Once upon a time any list of odd festivals would include the takeover of the town of Ibi and the resulting egg, flour and firework fight (els Farinats) but Health and Safety has turned that into a shadow of its former self.  There are tens if not hundreds more but even I can recognise when a list is getting too long.

Nonetheless, if I come across some fiesta that sounds promising, even if it's kilometres away, I'll log it away in my diary with a note to myself to check out the dates and details closer to the time. My hope is that there'll be something a bit different to take snaps of. The trouble is that I've done most within spitting distance and there is a certain reluctance on behalf of my long suffering partner to spend a fortune on a couple of nights away to see the symbolic bear hunt at La Vijanera in Silió in Cantabria or to see people rafting down the river in Nargó in Lleida. Anyway the years are taking their toll and I'm getting too old or too lazy to drive off to the far corners of Spain to fight crowds of young men to get an out of focus photo of some pagan ritual hijacked by the Catholic Church.

January is a good time for fiestas. Lots of the San Antón festivals are pretty lively and usually involve animals and/or fire. One I went to last year in Vilanova d'Alcolea was a real hoot. It was described as a perfect symbiosis between animals and fire and there was mention of a procession, with horses, passing through all the town's streets, jumping over bonfires along the route. What the description didn't say was that those horses drove the crowd before them in narrow streets ablaze with brushwood in a scene as infernal as any ever envisioned in a doom painting with souls cast into the fiery pit of Hell. At one point I was quite convinced I was going to die in flames. Quite a few of the local San Antón events are much gentler though.

Anyway my diary said I should check an event in Piornal. I had no idea where Piornal was though it turns out that it's in Extremadura, in Caceres, which is a long way from Culebrón. I didn't know what it was about, nor when it was, it's on January 19th and 20th this year and as I'm already booked up for those dates I thought I'd let you know so you could pop over there yourself and maybe get involved if you fancied it.

The fiesta is called Jarramplas and it represents the punishment of a cattle thief who is being driven out of the village. Jarramplas is the name of the character, a man dressed in a coat covered in multi-coloured ribbons, so that he looks like he's wearing one of those rag carpets that were still common in my youth. He wears a conical full face mask with a big nose and two horns sprout from the mask. He parades through the town beating a small drum and people throw things at him; in the past it was any old vegetable but, nowadays, they pelt him with turnips, well small root vegetable called nabos actually. No doubt thanks to the nanny state the 21st Century costume conceals a steel armour undergarment to ensure that Jarramplas isn't killed. You'd think they'd have trouble finding people to take on the role but there are, apparently, enough people willing to brave the volleys of turnips till 2048. Obviously, being Spain, there's a saint, Sebastian, linked to this festival and as well as turnip heaving there are lots of other events in the two days from Saint dressing and foot kissing to a communal meal of migas (we are in Extremadura after all).

No, seriously, Spain really is full of colourful and interesting fiestas and it doesn't take much hunting to find something well worth gawping at. Nearly all the local town halls have Facebook pages where they publicise their fiestas. Now I'm feeling a bit better I'm going to get back into it and see if I can't find something new and fun to point my camera at.

Last year's weather, and some context

The local Medios de Counicación recently published Capito's analysis of the annual data from the weather station in Pinoso for 2024. It's in Valenciano, so I may have got some things wrong. I missed out a couple of details on purpose. I may have missed others by mistake. 

Capi Gonzálvez Poveda, Capito, taught in Pinoso for years and he still runs the local weather stations one of which forms part of the AEMET, the National Weather Service's, network.

So, the maximum temperature was 41°C on 3 July, and the minimum was -2.5°C on 21 December. 

We received 256 litres of rain during the year,  the rainiest day was 11 June, with 41 litres. 

The windiest day was 8 June, when the wind blew at 75 km/h. 

The day with the highest minimum temperature was 16 July, when the temperature didn't drop below 23°C. 

The day with the lowest maximum temperature was 11 December, when the temperature didn't exceed 9.5°C.

There was rain on 55 days, it dropped below freezing on 20 days, there were 29 misty days, no days with hail, and no days with snow; there were thunderstorms on 5 days. 

It was sunny and clear on 152 days, sunny with some cloud on 163 days, cloudy on 42 days, and overcast on 9 days.

They also printed the composite analysis for the 32 years from 1990 to 2021, so here are a few figures for comparison:

The maximum temperature was 44°C on 10 August 2012; the minimum was -11°C on 29 January 2006.

The day with the highest minimum temperature was 18 July 2005, when the temperature didn't drop below 25°C.

The day with the lowest maximum temperature was 28 January 2006, when the temperature didn't exceed 0°C.

Over the 32 years, the averages were rainy on 52 days, sunny and clear on 181 days, sunny with some cloud on 114 days, cloudy on 48 days, and overcast on 22 days.

The same old chestnut

Sometimes I think my Spanish is OK. Other times, I despair. Most of the time, when I have a longer session speaking Spanish, despair is the overriding sensation. 

Right at the beginning, it was verb tables, pronunciation, grammar, trying to understand the structure and learning vocabulary. Even today I try to find a few minutes a day to read through my vocabulary books. Every now and again, as I stumble over some verb tense in a real-world conversation, I go back and have a bit of a read through those verb tables or something on object and subject pronouns because I seem to be a little confused. It amazes me how difficult it is to retain some of the basic grammar, learned vocabulary or phrases after all these years.

My Spanish is miles better than it was when I got here, but it's still terribly pidgin. The only place where I still can fall completely apart is on the phone; but even there I generally manage to scrape through nowadays. In general, in a normal sort of conversation, I do fine. I've had no trouble at all dealing with my cancer treatment and my stays in hospital in Spanish. If someone tries to speak to me in broken English—as they do from time to time—I just plough on in Spanish; giving way simply confirms my inability. Only if the Spaniard I'm talking to turns out to be a fluent English speaker, and very few are, do I yield and speak English.

I went to have a natter with my pal Jesús last week. It was the first time for quite a while and we've been on and off for years now. The original idea was that we'd do a bit of an exchange; an intercambio. We'd talk for a while in English and for a while in Castilian. To be honest, Jesús has never shown much aptitude for English; he finds the sounds almost impossible to imitate, and I don't think it was ever a serious proposition, but we've continued to meet over a coffee for ages now. There have been plenty of missed sessions, and, with being ill recently, I'd more or less given up. When we met this time we spoke not a word of English. We nattered about everything from politics to the cost of the bus fare up to Barcelona. I'm very happy that I can do that, hold a conversation in another language, but to be honest, after 20 years here, I should be able to. I was also, as always, appalled at the deficiencies in my control of the language. As I pound out a spurious version of Spanish I can hear the half-formed sentences, the wrong vocabulary, the mispronunciation and stumbling over certain words, the repeated errors and the strange phrasing.

Recently I've gone back to taking some online classes after a hiatus of a few months. To call them classes is a misnomer. I haven't done a Spanish class for maybe twelve or thirteen years now but I've never stopped slogging away at trying to improve. For instance I've read 45 books this year and thirty-six of them have been in Spanish. I still listen to the Notes in Spanish podcasts/videos and have a few radio programmes which I listen to as catch-up podcasts that cover everything from an "on this day" history programme to an arts magazine and a series of historical, political and topical documentaries. I listen to morning news programme on the radio and it's unusual for us to miss at least one of the TV news bulletins either at 3pm or 9pm. There's more: Spanish is all around us and if it's simply listening to Spanish music or seeing Spanish-language films at the cinema then I'll do that too.

I do a couple of things online too. I use a platform called italki. The basic idea is that I connect with someone via a video call and pay them to talk to me in Spanish. I like to persuade myself that real conversations are my best chance of improving because they are realistic and jump from topic to topic with lots of asides thrown in. Quite unlike those fake sessions about the environment or eating out so beloved by language tutors. I like the online sessions (italki just happens to be the one I bumped into) because it's both impersonal and personal at the same time. I often feel like I'm getting to know a lot about the tutors; they will express political leanings; they will tell you about their family, about things they've done and places they've been but, at the same time, they are just figures on a screen.

The online system makes it very easy to use them for my own ends. Unlike a class where you pay for twelve sessions on a Tuesday at 7:30 in the evening (or whatever), I pay for the sessions as I please and I can shop around for what I consider to be a good price per hour. I try a new tutor; if they're racist, if we don't click, if they talk too much, if I don't like their style or if they want to follow notes or introduce exercises—I simply don't buy another session off them. If I want to change the time or day from this week to next week, I usually can so they have to fit around my schedule rather than me around theirs. It's the same with holidays and the like; if I want to go to the theatre and they only have slots that clash with my theatre visit I forget about them for that week. I don't have to drive anywhere and if the session starts at half past I don't need to think about it till twenty five past. The tutors might have all the disadvantages of the gig economy but not me. I can go to another tutor or forget it for that week. If I want to talk to someone five times in one week or if I want to talk to someone for three hours on the trot or if I want to talk to five different tutors in the same week I can. And if I suddenly stop I don't need to tell them why.

After nearly every online session, I get very angry with myself. In the conversation I had yesterday with Omar, in Galicia, we talked about dubbing films into Spanish and the different ways of dealing with cultural differences in the subtitles and about the markup on cinema popcorn before we wandered onto something about why official Spanish correspondence is so stultifyingly boring. It turns out that he and I have completely different ideas on the need for clear language by the way. That might sound pretty good but I've learned several strategies over the years for making those conversations seem more fluid than they really are. The main one is to lock onto one thing in the affirmations or responses coming from the other person and responding to that. It helps to give the impression that I understood everything when, in fact, I missed most of it. I also have quite a wide vocabulary and that makes me sound more fluent than I am. The truth is though that I'm often reduced to a list of words bound together with inappropriate and random verb tenses while I continually mix genders and almost never use idiomatic expressions be they single-word interjections or those stock phrases that we all pepper our own language with.

As well as the italki I do something similar online with exchange sessions except there the commitment is more regular. I'm not sure whether Manuel found me or if I found him but we met through some online intercambio system. We have a set time and we are pretty strict about half an hour in English and half an hour in Spanish in each section. If we can't make the session then we are pals enough to say so; we simply tell each other via WhatsApp that we have a birthday party or a funeral when we should be nattering so we put it off. I think we've almost become friends and if we were ever actually to meet in person we wouldn't be starting from scratch.

Given all these inputs, I can only think that I must be a bit of a slow learner still having problems—but such is life, I suppose. Some people pick things up easily while others slog away without gaining much traction.

Fit to drive

My Spanish driving licence includes the category to drive small lorries and big vans. I almost never drive small lorries or big vans, the last time was to help a pal move from London to Edinburgh and that was last century. I'm loathe to lose the right though. I justify the expense because my sister and brother in law have a motorhome that requires such a licence. I know their insurance company won't let me anywhere close to it but I self deceive myself that there is some need to keep those classes current. 

In Spain, there is a legal difference between professional and non-professional drivers. Professional drivers, like professional vehicles, are subject to tighter restrictions and more frequent testing than non-professional drivers and vehicles. This means there are differences in the renewal periods for driving licences. In my case, for instance, as an amateur, my car licence lasted 10 years until I became 65 years old, and then, as the curvature of my spine increased, the validity reduced from 10 to 5 years. For the slightly larger vehicle categories on my licence, the renewal period changed from 5 years to 3 years as I passed that milestone birthday. 

A significant UK/Spain difference, unless things have changed in the UK, is that renewing the licence here involves a sort of health check—it's supposed to assess your coordination and your mental and physical aptitude to drive. Once you have passed the initial test (or, as in my case, exchanged a UK licence for a Spanish one), there is no need to retake the practical or theoretical parts of the driving test at licence renewal time but you do have to prove that you are fit to drive by passing a "psychophysical aptitude test". You can go to any licensed CRCs (Centros de Reconocimiento de Conductores), which are dotted around Spain. We have two in Pinoso.

I have never had the least difficulty passing the range of tests for renewing my licence so, when, a couple of weeks ago, the traffic people sent me a message to say that I could renew my licence from such and such a date, I just popped into the office without considering the consequences of my not passing. 

The first thing was, as I went into the building, that I met someone coming out whom I first met years ago in a Spanish class. We were chatting in the doorway of the office. The woman who does the tests understood enough of our overheard conversation in English to pull him back. He'd told me he'd had an eye operation and no longer needed to wear corrective lenses (glasses or contacts). His licence said that he did so, if he'd been stopped by the Guardia Civil, he might have needed to explain why he wasn't wearing specs or lenses. She changed his licence accordingly. She also heard me mention that I'd had cancer, so I was told I needed something from my oncologist to say he saw no reason for the cancer treatment to affect my driving. I had to do that before I could take the actual tests.

I think I've done these tests four, maybe five times now. I've certainly done them in Pinoso at the same place the last three times. The process has never been quite the same; at each visit there are slightly different questions and tests. There are reflex and a coordination tests using computer graphics that make the original Space Invaders (Google it) look sophisticated. When you go "off track," there's a beep to warn you. I could have sworn that the device was on constant beep. Then there was an eye test; the administrator pointed to a line of letters. It was the one below the one I could read easily. "No worries," she said, "that's good enough, but maybe you should go to the optician for a check up." Last time, I'm sure they just asked me to read something on a distant wall. It was similar with the hearing test; I had to sit in a soundproof box, put on headphones, and press a button when I heard a beep. I have no idea what percentage of the beeps I heard, but she said my hearing was okay. I know it has worsened considerably because of cancer treatment. It was only as I listened for the beeps that I suddenly realised that a failure might endanger my "ordinary" car licence, which was valid until 2027 (on the new licence it will be valid till 2030). I also wondered if the C and C1 classes were, maybe, a bit stricter and had been designed for "professional" drivers.

Anyway, after being freed from the soundproof cabin—having answered truthfully that I had not drunk any alcohol for months—all seemed well. She took my photo for the new licence and gave me a bit of paper which allows me to drive in Spain for six months. She also returned my current, plastic licence, even though the computerised application has the effect of instantly cancelling the old licence on the DGT (the traffic authorities) system. As she did so, she mentioned that licences are usually replaced —even in worst-case scenarios—in under three months. 

Because I was writing this I just checked and the application on my mobile phone from the DGT (MiDGT) has already updated so, if I were to be stopped I have both my driving licence and the car documentation on me to prove that everything is legal. 

The State Christmas Lottery

I wasn't going to do this, I've done it so many times before, then I had a conversation. So I thought why not?

If you're going to win the El Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad, the big Christmas State Lottery, el Gordo, on 22 December, an absolutely essential first step to becoming temporarily wealthy, is to get hold of a lottery ticket. If you don't have a ticket your chances of winning are nil. For most people that means buying one. I should qualify that. It's much more likely that you'll buy a tenth of a lottery ticket, a décimo, and with that you have the chance of winning 400,000€. 

If you were to buy a full ticket from one of the State Lottery Outlets, Loterías y Apuestas del Estado (like the one a few doors down from the Consum supermarket in Pinoso) it would cost you 200€. That's why most people don't. Instead they buy a tenth of a ticket for 20€. The big prize, el Gordo, the fat one, is worth 4 million euros for the full ticket or 400,000€ for the typical 20€ stake. Obviously that's before the tax people take their cut. Often you will see decimos on sale in bars and the like. Should you decide to buy your lottery ticket from there you're likely to end up paying 23€. Typically the bar is selling the décimos at 3€ over the odds on behalf of some "worthy" cause.

So each of the décimos has five numbers. The numbers start at 00000 and go on to 99999. There are 193 series of tickets. This means that each number, let's take an example 75045, will be repeated 193 times. 75045 series 1, 75045 series 2 and so on. That's why there are, possibly, 193 winning tickets. Remembering that each ticket is sold in tenths, there are, potentially, 1,930 winning décimos. 

In these days of huge jackpots I suppose that 400,000€ sounds like a mere bagatelle. The big difference is that if all the décimos of a particular number were sold, there would be 1,930 winners and that amounts to a whopping 772 million Euros payout.

There is a tendency amongst groups of Spaniards to buy the same number. The group might be a family - Granny buys two full tickets made up of 20 décimos to hand out to her brothers, sisters, sons, daughters etc. as a bit of a Christmas stocking filler. If the number comes up then each of those relatives will be 400,000€ better off. If it's a factory the car park will soon be full of new BMWs and, if it's a school parent teachers association (AMPA), then the school community will be full of joyful parents and teachers. When the number of the Culebrón village neighbourhood association comes up, on Sunday, we Culebreneros will be splashing the cava around willy nilly. Generally people simply choose from the tickets on display looking for one that ends in their lucky number, includes their birthday etc., but it is possible, online, to see if a particular number, your postcode for instance, is available. 

The tickets are all sold by the different "administraciones", the State Lottery Shops even if they end up with the local pigeon fanciers group or synchronised swimmers fan club. The numbers are allocated randomly to the different administraciones around the country. So the same number may be sold in Alicante, Astorga and Avila or that number may nearly all be sold in some village in Andalucía. 

Certain administraciones have a reputation for being lucky, though actually it's simply a numbers game. If people believe that the Doña Manolita administración, in Madrid, is going to sell the winner, more people will buy their décimos there. The volume of sales means there is a better chance that the winner will come from that administración. It doesn't stop people queuing for hours outside the famous offices though.

How the winning numbers are chosen is also very individual - none of this combining individual digits to get the winning number. There are two enormous "bombos" like those globe-shaped things that you get in a home bingo game to spit out the numbers. In one of the bombos there are all the numbers that are on the individual tickets, that's 100,000 individual numbers. So there is a ball that reads 00000 and another that reads 99999 and there are all the numbers in between. In a smaller bombo alongside there are 1,807 balls each one inscribed with a cash value. Youngsters from the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Madrid stand alongside the two bombos and sing out what it says on the ball disgorged by their bombo. First the number then the prize.

The majority of the little wooden balls, in that smaller bombo, have 1,000€ written on them. This is referred to as the pedrea. For those numbers you'll get 100€ back for your 20€ stake. There is just one ball with the 4 million jackpot and it's the same for the less valuable second and third prizes. There are another ten balls that will produce a win of more than 1,000€. Other prizes are based on having numbers very close to the winners, sharing some of the numbers etc. It's always worth checking your number against any of the dozens of internet sites where the winners are published or going back to the administración to have your number checked. 

Turn on a radio or TV or go into a bar on the 22nd after 9am and you will hear that singing of numbers and amounts, broadcast from the Teatro Real in Madrid all morning, until the prizes are exhausted.

Oh, and if you win some offensive amount of cash as a result of reading this blog don't worry yourself that I'll be offended if you want to offer me large wads of cash as a thank you.

Cautiously optimistic

Just a quick update on my throat cancer. For new readers, during the summer, I got to see an otorrino (Ear Nose and Throat specialist) and, after a few tests he said I had a throat cancer. He passed me to an oncólogo (Cancer specialist). They ordered up a few tests, decided that the cancer was just in my throat and lymph nodes and set me up for a course of 33 sessions of radiotherapy and three of chemotherapy. The radio sessions were in Alicante and the ambulance service took me there for most of the sessions. The chemo was in Elda. Along the way I had a picc port installed in my arm so they could take blood from my veins and put other liquids in. They also put in a PEG tube so I could put "milk shake" type food directly into my stomach when my throat became too inflamed to eat through my mouth. There have been a couple of snags along the way; I ended up on a hospital ward for three or four days because I kept throwing up and the dehydration was damaging my kidneys, but, generally it's been plain sailing.

The last of the sessions of radio or chemo was on 19 October so going on two months now. In the past few days I have seen the oncólogo, the otorrino, nurses in the chemotherapy day centre and a nutritionist. 

The oncólogo didn't really have much to say, but he wasn't worried about me either. He had a good feel of my neck and said he was pretty sure the lymph nodes were no longer swollen. He's going to order a CAT scan and I'm back to see him in about a month. He did say they could remove the picc port from my arm which was taken out by the perpetually cheerful nurses in the chemo day centre. They were also very nice about my Spanish. With the picc gone I was able to have a shower this morning without a plastic sleeve on my arm to protect the dressing for the first time since the beginning of September

The nutritionist said it was about time that I started to eat solid food instead of just feeding through my stomach. She only actually wants me to eat things like rice pudding, custard, creme caramel and the like. I do as I'm told and I've eaten a couple of those things today. They taste odd because my mouth is still slimy but I ate them alright.

The otorrino put his camera up my nose and down my throat and said "I don't see the lesion today that I saw in the Summer". He said my throat was still inflamed from the radio, which I think was to add a bit of caution to his earlier comment. He doesn't want to see me again till March.

And the problems I still have, as an effect from the treatments, are that my mouth is either bone dry or covered in horrible, foul tasting mucus nearly all the time, that I get tired quickly and that I feel dizzy quite often. Not exactly serious concerns. So, not so bad at all.

Paying the premium

When I went to the hole in the wall to get some cash there was a turrón stall in my way. Turrón is a sweet confectionery, associated with the Spanish Christmas, made with almonds, oil, and sugar. In the average supermarket a 250g bar of turrón will cost about 2.50€, most supermarkets carry something slightly better at, maybe 10€ a bar, but most steer away from the handcrafted product because it is breathtakingly expensive. There are all sorts of varieties of turrón, but the traditional ones are the hard and brittle Alicante variety and the soft, oozing oil Jijona style. The varieties of turrón, with chocolate or fruit are really for people who don't like turrón; they aren't much to do with turrón and are trading on the name.

The chances are that if you have some turrón this Christmas, it will be ordinary production line stuff. You might like it; you might not; but it's unlikely to send you into paroxysms of delight. The same is probably true of the majority of foodstuffs that Spaniards tend to rave about and which they buy in truckloads at this time of year. 

For instance angulas, or baby eels, are another Christmas delicacy. I had a quick Google and you can get fresh ones at 118€ per 100g. If that's a little steep the alternative is something called gulas which are made from ground fish reconstituted to look like elvers. A packet of gulas costs a bit less than 3€. This is lumpfish roe as against caviar territory. 

Miguel Angel Revilla, four times president of Cantabria, and well known character, used to always present quality, expensive, anchovies from Cantabria on his official visits. The anchovies I buy for my sandwiches come in triple packs for less than 3€.

It's similar with prawns—what we Britons call prawns. I don't think I'll ever understand the differences in quality when buying the right and wrong type of prawns. Whether gambas blancas, gambas rojas, gambones, carabineros or langostinos are the best and whether the ones from Denia are better than those from Huelva or Garrucha. Not knowing can cost you dear. Six of the better variety in an ordinary restaurant cost me 48€. It still smarts and that was six or seven years ago now.

Faced with such price variations the majority of us tend to plump for something with an everyday cost or, maybe, we push out the boat and buy the next step up. Then, when we taste it, we wonder what all the fuss was about. The problem is that we've bought run-of-the-mill. Spaniards wax lyrical about their air-cured ham. It can be spectacular but you have to be willing to pay for the quality, acorn fed, variety and eat it sliced wafer thin. The ham that most of us get most of the time—in a ham sandwich or as a slice of ham on our breakfast toast—can be anything between average and chewing bacon.

The point I'm trying, so long windedly, to make is that Spaniards often enthuse about certain food products that you may find uninspirational. There are lots of classic dishes, firm Spanish favourites, that often seem very commonplace. Croquetas are a good example; lots have the consistency of wallpaper paste, are served semi heated and taste of nothing much but, if you strike lucky or know where to go they are exceedingly good. Paella is another dish where the difference between a made to order paella cooked with care and the proper ingredients has nothing in common with the bright yellow rice served as part of a set meal in a tourist restaurant. 

Lots of these foods are rolled out at Christmas - mantecados and polvorones, peladillas, roscones, turrón, angulas, gooseneck barnacles (percebes) while other, all-year-round favourites, get a special outing at Christmas—prawns, croquetas, ham, roast lamb, and around here even broth with meatballs (variously named pelotas, relleno or even faseguras). If you get the opportunity go for the quality stuff - it's usually worth the stretch.

I was expecting the Spanish Inquisition

My 'old age' pension is derived partly from the UK and partly from Spain, as I have worked in both countries and accumulated benefits. Every now and again they, the pension people, check to make sure that I'm still breathing and not walled up in some Spanish cemetery. 

Today, was one of those days. There was a letter in our PO box from the UK asking me to confirm that I am still extant. I'm sure they've asked before, and I seem to remember that it was a simple enough process. I signed a form and I got another Briton to witness it. So, today, instead of coming home to read the paperwork, I thought I may as well sort it out then and there where I had access to a post office and at least a couple of people to witness my signature.

Maybe I'd misremembered, something which seems to happen more and more frequently, or perhaps they've beefed up their checks but, when I actually got around to checking the paperwork, they required someone of 'social stature', and with an official stamp, to witness the document. I can't remember who exactly, but the list included people like bank officials, medical staff, town hall employees, the mayor, a solicitor etc. They said I had sixteen weeks to return the form, well minus the two weeks it had taken to get from the UK, so there was no rush, but I like to get these things sorted. The challenge was that I don’t have many contacts who meet the pension authorities' criteria and who wouldn’t baulk at completing an “official” form written in English, which I would need to explain in a world rife with frauds and scams. Then it struck me: my accountant!

In the accountant's office I explained, in Spanish, that I needed someone to witness my signature. 'Ah', said the young woman, 'you want a "fe de vida"'. The meaning was obvious enough, she knew what I wanted but in my Spanish "fe" means faith and the expression I most associate with "fe" comes from the Spanish Inquisition. It's only because I thought to write this blog that I now know that "fe" also has a second translation as ID or certificate.

The Inquisition was supposed to protect the one true faith by searching out heretics - people who practised other religions or didn't accept the absolute truth of the Catholic Church's version of Christianity and its practices. Actually it was about personal vendettas, enriching the church and maintaining its power. The most extreme punishment of the Inquisition was to burn people at the stake and that involved a ritual public penitence before the actual death. That whole process was called, and this is the phrase I knew, an 'auto de fe' or 'act of faith'.

I do this all the time. Someone says 'our David had a puncture' and I see David deflating so I ask if it hurt or if he's OK now. When I try these word associations in Spanish the person I'm talking to generally looks at me as if I'm demented but today when the person in the office said I needed a 'fe de vida' and I said 'thank goodness it's not an auto de fe'. She chuckled. A minor triumph I thought. And I got my form signed.

Burnin' Down the House

It was in the early 80s. I had discovered Spain and was determined to learn Spanish. I didn't know that Andalucía had a reputation for an impenetrable accent, but as I had obviously heard of Seville/Sevilla, a two or three-week language course there seemed like a good idea. I went just after Christmas.

Sevilla has never been kind to me. It's a city where I lose my wallet, get stranded, choose the wrong hotel, or end up in a shoving competition with nuns. That first time I went there, for the course, it was horrible. They put me in a pretty advanced class based on a written exam. Although it was easy enough to fill in a box on a test page with the third person plural of the imperfect as against the preterite, it's quite another matter remembering that as you try to recall vocabulary, word order, gender, as you wrestle with the pronunciation etc. I struggled and struggled with the spoken language. I seem to remember the caretaker found me hiding somewhere, sobbing at my inability to cope with the language, and got me transferred to something more at my level— that may have been the day I thought maybe a little breakfast alcohol would loosen my tongue.

As well as the terror of facing the language, it was cold, and I'm sure that it rained and rained and rained. The "family" I'd been lodged with turned out to be a bloke sloughed in a dark pit of despair because his wife had just left him and whose cooking seemed to include only things made from the intestines of inedible animals or fish that Jacques Cousteau had never met. He did introduce me to lots of things Spanish though because he was stereotypically Spanish—he bought bread three times a day and talked endlessly about the films of Luis Buñuel. His house was dark, damp, and freezing—the sheets, which he didn't offer to change all the time I was there, were damp.

He introduced me to two forms of Spanish heating. The first was the brasero. To use a brasero, you need a round-topped table and a heavy long tablecloth. In his house, the cloth was of green velvet. Underneath the circular table is a shelf, about 15 cm off the floor, which supports a circular heater. The heater in his house had one of those elements that you would get in a one, two, or three-bar electric fire, common until the 1970s and still available, but it was shaped to fit into the space in the near-floor shelf. So the heater was underneath the table; the heavy tablecloth kept the heat in and, so long as you didn't mistakenly rest your feet too close to the heater and set yourself on fire, you could keep your legs warm - though not your upper body. In the olden days, the heat source was actually a metal bowl filled with hot embers. As you can imagine, the potential for post-meal family conversations becoming family conflagrations was significant.

The second form of heating was the Spanish equivalent of a calor gas heater. The heaters have a case that's large enough to house a butane (or propane) cylinder which has a valve connecting to the innards of the heater via a rubber tube. I think even then the heater had a piezoelectric igniter and followed an ignition procedure that can be remarkably recalcitrant at times. The one in Sevilla was in the bathroom—a small room which the heater could warm up in minutes because I think even my host didn't care for naked shivering. The bathroom was the only place I was ever warm inside that house.

Our house can be like a fridge. We stop that by pouring heat into it in an exercise that will hand the planet back to plants and other animals before long. It also causes the people at Iberdrola and petrol companies rub their hands in glee. We have an excuse for the lack of insulation, for the big gaps at the doors, for the high ceilings—it's an old house and our insulation options are strictly limited. Even in modern-built houses in Alicante, insulation is pathetic with the excuse that the Alicantino winter is short and soon gone. It's a total lie. Inside—not outside—our house, and lots of other Spanish properties, are cold from November through to April because hardly anyone pays any attention to insulation. The number of shops and offices where you are dealt with by people wearing outdoor winter clothing is legion. The insulation issue is not true in what are considered to be the colder parts of Spain but here in the South, builders are as optimistic as they are thrifty.

We've never thought to try a brasero and our main heating, when it gets cold, is a pellet burner which produces a very noisy 11 kW of heat so that we have to wear headphones to hear the telly. Nonetheless, in the kitchen, for mornings, and in the space I use as an office and in the living room, we have butane heaters—exactly the same sort of thing I was introduced to all those years ago. These "estufas de butano" produce radiant heat. Sit close and the heat they emit—about 4 kW—makes you think the room is toasty warm when in fact you're simply sitting in a very temporary warm bubble—something you realise every time your bladder forces you to make a temporary move.

At least the butane heaters keep your upper body as warm as your legs.

I'll name that child in three

It often crosses my mind that the micromanagement of the Spanish state in not allowing car number plates to include vowels, because the letters of the plate may end up either being a name or something rude or offensive, is a bit excessive. I can't think of many rude three-letter Spanish words - 'ano' for anus is the one the authorities always quote, along with ETA, the disbanded terrorist organisation. And as for names like Ana and Leo, well, imagine if Swansea couldn't sell those vanity plates - there would be uproar among British-based Range Rover drivers. For years there was something akin in the naming of children.

A little while ago, we were at one of those craft markets. Maggie was very taken with a little knitted cardigan and, for once, she knew a potential recipient - one of the Culebrón villagers was just about to give birth. The child was eventually named Vega, not Bego, the diminutive of Begonia, but Vega which, along with Martina, were the top two girls' names for 2023. Lucas and Hugo for boys. I'd been scratching around for something to blog about and the name reminded me of a puff piece I'd read in a Spanish newspaper.

I'm pretty long in the tooth and I often smirk at the first names for Anglos in the United States where, apparently, River, Gravity, Blue and Busy are considered sensible choices. I have some British pals who, years ago, for their newborn son, chose very different first names and used a last name that had nothing to do with either of the couple's family names. That suggests to me that the rules about naming in the UK are quite permissive. Nowadays, naming is quite liberal in Spain too, though there's a touch of the number plate syndrome in that Spanish law prohibits names which have negative connotations or which violate the child's dignity.

The registering of a birth must be done within 72 hours and the name has to be registered within thirty days of the birth. Lots of the pages I read maintained that the name had to be registered within eight days but I think the time limit has been expanded. In the olden days if the person in the Civil Registry wasn't happy with the name that the parents had chosen, the progenitors were given three more days to come up with an acceptable name. After that, the Justice Ministry could impose a name. That would nearly always be the name of the Saint of the day. Given that lots of Catholic Saints' names are very strange (Nivardo, Faustino, Dimas, Melecio, Hermelando, Evedasto, Agapito, Plausides, Antenor, Antoliano) there must have been several dates to avoid if you didn't want your child to end up as, for example, Ildefonso, Pancracia or Pompilia. The majority of older Spaniards were named for Saints because, when they were born, the alliance between state and Catholic Church was almost absolute. At least most Saints' names are easily adapted to male and female variations by changing the ending: Francisco (male), Francisca (female); Antonio (male), Antonia (female); José (male) and Josefa (female) being common examples.

The registrar would still turn away names like Hitler, Drácula or Stalin, as well as names like Caca (poo) or Loco (crazy) as being likely to cause grief to the child. Similarly with something like Dolores Fuertes Barriga (severe stomach ache). In fact it's the same with any name be it invented, taken from another language, from a book or a film or a TV series. If the registrar considers that it may cause grief to the child in later life then it could be rejected. Nonetheless, apparently names like Arya, Daenerys and Khaleesi (all from Game of Thrones) are now reasonably common. Names of cities used to be prohibited too but names such as Roma, Cairo, París, Dakota, Tennessee and Brooklyn are now being accepted by most registrars. Bear in mind that the rule about the name being prejudicial to the interests of the child might still mean that the registrar will not accept some city names. So, probably no Sodoma Ruiz or Gomorra Romero.

Children cannot be named the same as their brothers or sisters, unless the brother or sister has died, even if the name is a translation - so no Juan and Joan (Catalan, and I suppose Valencian version of Juan, John, Jan, Ivan, etc.). That doesn't stop children being named for their parents which I often think must be confusing within a family.

Compound names are fine but with no more than two names. So while the female María José and the male José María (belt and braces approach to the Christian parents of Jesús) are fine as are Ana Belén, José Carlos etc. - Ana María Carmen or María Isabel Andrea are not. There is an exception where the parents are not Spanish and where the child was born in Spain and there is a tradition in the parent's country for more first names. In that case, multiple names can be accepted by the registrar. Mind you if the child were to go on to naturalise as Spanish, the excess names would be cut from the registered, naturalised name and, of course, any single barreled surname would have to be doubled up.

Surnames, brand names, the full names of famous people and fruit can't be used as first names. So nobody can be called García or Fernández as a first name. Just consider how many personalities would fall foul of those restrictions, from Hunter S. Thompson to Apple Martin. There is a bit of an exception to that rule about not using a famous person's name as a first name. The idea is to stop Rafa Nadal Peréz or Penélope Cruz Hernandez but Nadal and Cruz are both common enough surnames and if that's the family surname and the family Nadal want to call their boy child Rafael and the family Cruz want to call the girl Penelope then the registrar will almost certainly accept the names. But no Gucci Muñoz or Nutella Caballero - no Banana Delgado, no Peaches Geldof.

It's very common to shorten Spanish names: María Dolores to Lola, Yolanda to Yoli, Francisco to Fran, Curro or Paco, and hundreds more. The law used to say that the registry would only accept the full form. Now, if you want to call your child Chema you can but it does seem that the registrars still tend to 'strongly advise' the more traditional, complete name. You can't use just initials either and you still can't use diminutives like Pepita or Juanito.

Yet another prohibition is to put a female name to a male child or vice versa - so no boys named Sue - though this restriction is not usually applied to modern names like Noa and Alex. Basque names are quite trendy at the moment. Some, like Lur or Harri, are traditionally given to both boys and girls, a bit like Julian, Carol or Hilary in the UK. These occasionally cause problems at the time of registration for not identifying the sex of the baby adequately. I suspect that, given the current elasticity around gender identity, this rule may be one of the most polemical prohibitions at the moment.

And now a disclaimer. When Maggie told me about the gift for Vega it reminded me of the article I'd read in 2023 about prohibited names. That article, from The Huffington Post, and another from As were the basis for this post. As I polished the blog (yes, these ramblings are reworked!) I found another article on a 'parents to be' website which highlighted lots of recent changes to the 1957/58 law on naming children and I incorporated those changes as best I could. I couldn't however be absolutely certain that what I was reading was authoritative as articles written in 2024 contradicted what seemed to be more liberal rules reported in 2023. So, while I think the blog is basically accurate there may be tiny, weeny inaccuracies.

A surprising view

Sitting around nattering, putting the world to rights, as one does, on a Saturday morning with friends. We were talking about how people make a living in Pinoso.

The most obvious source of employment is in agriculture, particularly in producing wine grapes and almonds, though there are lots of other crops. Unfortunately, it's also true that there are hectares of good agricultural land lying fallow because of the problem of the "generational replacement". The farmers and winemakers are getting on in years, and their sons and daughters want to be teachers and scientists and influencers and local government officers and not farmers and winemakers.

We'd talked about the salt that is pumped out of the salt dome, El Cabeço, and sent as a brine solution down a pipeline to Torrevieja where it is added to the salt lagoons there to increase the yield. Actually, the technical term for a salt dome, diapiro, also gives its name to a couple of wines produced by the local bodega or winery, as in the photo.

There had been a bit of a mention of the shoes that are still made in Pinoso, though even I knew that the most obvious factory closed a while ago. Apart from seeing the Pinoso'S vans flitting around, apart from smelling the epoxy resin in a little workshop next to the library, and apart from seeing the Jover factory down by the town bodega that makes cambrillones (the reinforcing steel shank set into the soles of most shoes), I'm unaware of any other shoemaking facility. That doesn't mean there isn't any, just that I don't know about it.

And then, of course, we got onto the quarry, Monte Coto. For years it was the golden goose, the largest open-cast marble quarry in Europe - a one-time producer of lots of work and lots of money that provided Pinoso with a spectacular range of services but which has been in marked decline for years.

As we talked about the quarry, I said that I'd seen some relatively recent news that Levantina Stone, the largest producer, were axing between a third and a half of their workforce in Monte Coto, the Pinoso marble quarry, and in the offices over in Novelda. I also said that I know there's a long-running argument between the Regional Government and the Town Hall about both the mining rights in Monte Coto and the costs of putting right the environmental damage of the quarry as parts of it are worked out. The legislative stuff is something that I've never quite worked out because our local sources of media are much more interested in a photo of the mayor shaking hands with someone important from the Regional Government than they are in actually giving informative news.

As we were outside a bar for this conversation and as the bar owner hove into view at exactly the correct moment, I asked him if he knew what the beef was. He told me it was about the rights to the reserves underground. He said that it was crystal clear that the town hall owns, and can exploit, the mountain, but that normally the below-ground mining rights belong to the region.

Now I have to say that I have no idea whether he's right or not; it sounded plausible, but it may, or may not be, true. To him, as a Pinoso native, he was quite sure. I mentioned the layoffs at Levantina and he shrugged them off - at one point that would have been important, when there were hundreds at the quarry, but now the numbers are so low that sacking half of them affects almost nothing. Without any prompting, he went on to say that the town was moribund. He said that Pinoso was now a dormitory town for younger workers who went off to work in the larger towns and cities nearby and that the town's only full-time inhabitants were we geriatric foreigners. There is habitually a coven of us outside his bar on a Saturday morning, and he was quick to point out that he was singularly happy with foreigners spending money in bars and restaurants but that it was hardly a sound industrial base.

I countered by saying that how could a town that had at least seven butchers be a doomed town. "Great example," he said. "Tell me the butchers." So I tried. I mentioned a few. To the first he said, "Closed last month". He went on, "Carlos will retire in three years and he has nobody to take over the business; it'll close." He did that with a couple more before some Dutch person called him over, and that was how the conversation closed.

Now seriously, I have no idea if the town councillors tasked with local development, agriculture, industry and commerce would see it quite the same way, but it is quite strange sometimes how, despite living somewhere, you, one, sees things in a different light to other inhabitants. I can't remember seeing any positive industrial news in the local media for quite a while, but it is true that I can think of several small businesses which have closed in the recent past and going in a way that seems odd to my Northern European way of thinking.

I've seen plenty of local shops, that seemed prosperous enough, just close as their owners retired. A particularly notable example was a local restaurant that was, supposedly, famous all over Spain. Even I had seen it featured on the telly, and the parking spots around the very ordinary-looking restaurant were always awash with ostentatious cars. Last year, it just closed. The owner had got to retirement age, so he shut the business. Recently, a biggish tyre place did the same - one day in business, the next closed tight. I've heard lots of speculation as to why without anyone sounding as though they were 100% sure but, again, I suspect simple retirement.

To be honest, I see Pinoso as typical of lots of small towns. Traditional retail is obviously in difficulty at the moment, but there always seem to be people with new business ventures of one sort or another. Some prosper, some fail. It also seems to me that several of the new batch of incoming foreigners, especially the rich Northern Europeans, are relatively young and still economically active. It could be, though, that mine is an over-rosy view and the bar owner has a point.

Gotelé and bowler hats

We form impressions about places. Ask me to describe Morocco and I'd say reds and oranges and hot and noisy with strong aromas. I wouldn't talk about snow and ice even though I know there's plenty of snow and ice in places and at times in Morocco. In just the same way some of those impressions are now dated. The Britain in my childhood was a pretty austere place and while my my contemporaries wore terylene shorts and brown plastic sandals to play out men going to work in offices really did wear bowler hats and carry folded umbrellas. My guess is that you'd have to go some to find a bowler hat in the city nowadays, at least in an everyday context. In Spain a lot of those cliches come from the South, from Andalucia and from the past. Very few people would think bagpipes as typical of Spain (but try going to a festival in Asturias or Galicia and avoiding them) but they might think flouncy frocks and bulls.

I heard a programme on the radio the other day that made me think of some of the things I associate, have associated, with Spain that are now gone or going.

Most Spanish people live in flats. There are entry phone systems designed to keep the riff-raff from getting into the building. This could be a problem for delivery drivers, postal workers, pizza deliverers and even more so for the riff raff hoping to kick down the door and steal the Lladro (there was a time when Lladro pottery was really popular and seen as typically Spanish by Britons) but the work around is easy enough. If there is no answer, push all the doorbells and, if anyone answers, say "postie," "pizza," or "Amazon", but not riff-raff, to get past this basic front door security. In the past, one of the other open sesames was "Circulo".

The Circulo de Lectores, or Readers Circle, was a book club. I'm presuming you're old enough to remember the idea —a sort of magazine/catalogue with a range of books from classics to bird spotting to philosophers to potboilers. You signed up for a minimum period and promised to buy so many books per year as well as getting a tasty introductory officer. I think it was German-owned, but it was a very Spanish institution. Unlike the book clubs in, say, England, which sent things by post once they'd captured their client, the Spanish version worked on a series of reps who had a strong relationship with their clients. The main reason, apart from Spaniards preferring to talk to someone rather than to read something, was that the Spanish Post Office, when the scheme first started, wouldn't deliver anything heavier than 200 grammes in weight. So the rep who signed you up would also bring you the new catalogue, take your order, and deliver the book or books to you—a bit like the man from the Pru of my youth who collected the insurance money each week and might end up as, at least Godfather, to the newborn.

The Circulo changed over the years and by the time I bumped into it, in about 2008, it was no longer the semi magical institution that it once was, helping to build a Spanish middle class, and its catalogues were simply more junk mail pushed into the advertising letterbox outside my block of flats. By then if you did sign up the Post Office would deliver. I never did sign up, but I was close. The Circulo de Lectores no longer exists.

When I heard a radio programme the other week about the Circulo, I was staring at a wall, painted in gotelé, from my hospital bed. The photo is of gotelé—a sort of textured paint that was very popular in Spain a while ago and which you still see from time to time. That's where the idea for this blog, about things that no longer are, came from.

My sister is getting her kitchen cupboards sprayed. Apparently, there are trends in kitchen cupboards; I suppose I knew that because one of the things that crossed my mind when I was thinking about gotelé was floor tiling. There's a sort of composite floor tiling that is basically white but has splotches of red and brown. I don't know exactly when it was popular but my guess is the 60s or 70s of the last Century. By the time we got around to choosing Spanish floor tiles, at the turn of the 21st Century, our choice was, apparently, and happily limited to variations on terracotta. If we'd arrived a bit later we'd have square white tiles and nowadays floor tiles are rectangular and decorated with a wood grain pattern. Maggie tells me our light oak kitchen cabinets look dated too.

Now, obviously, some things just disappear because the technology changes. Like fixed phones and call boxes. In my holidaying middle years Spanish phone boxes were a real challenge. They had a coin slot where the coins rolled down, except that they didn't, or the ones in bars where you had to ask the person behind the bar to give you the phone and they set going some sort of meter that gave the price of the call, or the locutorios, offices with lots of individual cabins - where you were assigned a cabin and paid when you'd finished your calls. The Telefónica locutorios are not to be confused with those those 21st Century locutorios, nearly always run by Latin Americans, where you could use a computer with an internet connection, as well as phone access, or even buy one of the hundreds of phone cards which, by one method or another, gave you access to cheap international calls. I remember whiling away many a happy hour discussing the merits and defects of the various phone cards. And, of course, just like in the UK, long before denationalisation of the phone companies, there were a series of telephones that were iconic to Spaniards just in the same way as I remember that mushroom coloured model that we had on a small carved table in the family home for years and years and years.

The smoke filled bars, their floors littered with napkins and discarded bits of food, were places to make phone calls but their sound was a mixture of the usual and incessant chatter, coffee machine whirring and crockery clattering and the sounds of one of the two models of one arm bandits. I forget one tune but the other played the Tweety Song, incessantly. And mosto. Mosto is just grape juice. It's still very available in supermarkets but it used to be a standard soft drink in bars. I actually asked for a mosto in a bar the other day just to see if it still exists and the pained expression of the twenty plus server proved to me that it's another thing from the past.

Oh, and el paseo. Not the Civil War paseo, the route to the firing squad, the paseo is or was, the evening stroll before eating dinner. It was a thing where bow legged, short, Spanish men dressed up a bit (think sta-prest slacks and Ben Sherman type shirts), linked arms with their floral and bling be-frocked wives and set out to have a bit of a stroll, stopping off at the same series of bars to take the same range of drinks and tapas, all the while stopping to natter with their acquaintances going in the opposite direction on the same circuit. And mopeds, Spain was full of mopeds, not small motorbikes, not scooters, mopeds; and what a racket they made for 49cc engines. There were several funny tricycle type vehicles too. And still lots of working animals, like donkeys and mules pulling carts or goats climbing step ladders while someone with a bandana played the accordion and sent the children round to collect coins from the onlookers. Nuns and priests in the street; as many as in Rome. And tiny, ridiculously low, ticket windows with a Norman arch shape window which would have been good for wheelchair users but were a bit inconvenient for anyone over a metre sixty five, not that there were many people over that height. They were where you went for a bus, theatre or cinema ticket. The person, caged in by the tiny hinged window, would, naturally, be smoking. Actually that just reminded me the number of men missing various limbs were a common site too. And one that may still exist - Sunday morning bread. Again it was the blokes who got to do this - pretending it was a sort of household task. They bought the Sunday morning paper as well as the baguettes and, why not, maybe a glass of wine in one of those stumpy wine glasses on the way home; after all the little woman was at home doing the housework and getting lunch ready. Sunday afternoon was for football matches. And finally one of those things that does still exist but is in decline. The road junction where you turn right to turn left across the road. They are basically roundabouts with the main road through the centre being the one with priority. There's one by Bar Mucho to go to Encebras and another by the Torre del Rico turn but most of them have been replaced by roundabouts or traffic lights.

Obviously this is an easy game for anyone to join in. You can do it with almost anything. We had a conversation about Spangles, Treets, Marathons and Buttersnap a little while ago.