Life in Culebrón

It was in Vilanova d'Alcolea in Castellón that I really thought I was going to be burned alive. I ran faster that evening than I have since I was fourteen when I was being chased around a cross-country course by some deranged PE teacher who beat me with a stick if I tried to slow down. Then again, only last weekend, in Novelda, a group of men and women, dressed as devils, were making as though to set me on fire. Here in the Comunitat Valenciana, from tiny villages in Castellón to the bustling streets of Valencia or on the beaches of Alicante, people like to set things on fire and to set off pyrotechnics—fireworks of all sorts, shapes, and sizes. It's not just the Fallas in Valencia or the Hogueras de San Juan in Alicante; it's absolutely everywhere - even in the streets and villages of Pinoso. Valencianos always seem ready to put another log on the fire or light the blue touch paper and stand well back at the drop of a hat.  I hoped to find an organised and methodical way t...

My theory is simple enough. Spaniards like to talk. A corollary to that may be that Britons prefer to read. I suppose that Spaniards like to interact with other people, whenever possible. I mean, for goodness’ sake, why else would anyone going into a post office, or a hospital waiting room, feel the need to say hello to the room in general? Or why on that quiet woodland stroll does every sport clothes clad passer-by offer a greeting? I know walkers do it everywhere, but this is for the walk from the car park to the neolithic cave, not a trudge along the Pennine Way. It is, I have to say, possibly true that this universal truth is not so universal where the pace is hustle and bustle. It is right for our little corner of the world, but it may be that nobody in Zaragoza says hello as they enter the bank, although I suspect they do. I mean, otherwise how would they queue? We Britons stand in a line. There is a physical marker. No need to communicate. All we have to do is look up from our p...

Often, on the Pinoso Community Facebook page people, who are considering moving to this area, ask - 'What's Pinoso like?' So, as a nice easy blog, I thought I'd give my answer to that question for those people. First off, Pinoso is more a big village than a small town and expectations should reflect that. The town is in the province of Alicante, part of the Comunitat Valenciana, but it's right on the border with the Murcia region. Pinoso, like all of Spain, speaks Castilian Spanish which is the Spanish spoken worldwide. However, because it is a part of the Valencian region it also speaks a local variant of Catalan called Valenciano which is taught in all the local schools. You will hear Valenciano all over the place. Increasingly the town hall produces information primarily in Valenciano. The population of the municipality is a bit short of 9,000 people, and that includes all the people living in the satellite villages or pedanías that surround the town. Culebrón, w...

There was a time when people read magazines printed on paper. One of them,  Cosmopolitan, used to run light-hearted quizzes – Do you have what it takes to be a boss?, Are you a potential serial killer? – that kind of thing. One of the inevitable questions was whether you were a dog or a cat person. Our house is definitely cat, but for many Spanish households that question is about as useful as the outcome of those tests. Lots of Spaniards will tell you they have cats, but they don’t mean that in the same way as they do for dogs, or the same as we do. Our cats sleep on the sofa and they are steadily, and sometimes not so steadily, dismantling the house. Those half on, half off cats might get a name and a bowl of food left out, but little more. Current legislation says that option no longer exists; either people take responsibility for animals in their care or they will get into bother. But rules and reality are often two completely different things. I should add that some Spanish c...

I've never worked out tipping in Spain. Or rather, I have. Usually though I'm with Northern Europeans, and I wouldn't want them to think I learned my economics in the austerity-strapped and vindictive 80s of the last century. So I leave more. When I've asked Spaniards, they usually say you have to be mean, stingy. Don't pick up the shrapnel, that's all. For many Spaniards it's not even a question: why would you worry about tips? The people who serve you are already paid; why would they need your donation and a couple I asked about tipping last weekend said they thought it was dying out, because of credit card payments as much as anything. So, you get a couple of coffees and the bill comes to €3.40. You leave the 60 céntimos and you're a big tipper. If it were €3.80, then the 20 céntimos is more in the normal range. But pick up the change and nobody will bat an eyelid. They'll serve you the next time you're in. I tend to round up, but I sometimes ...

The other day, on the phone, an old friend, due to visit from the UK next month, asked if I wanted her to bring anything — she was thinking teabags, mint imperials, Horlicks, and the like. I did think of something, but my initial reaction was a simple "no." It’s not that we’ve become Spanish — we’ll always be immigrant Britons here; but choosing oil on toast over butter is hardly akin to burning my Union Flag boxers. It's just that so many things have become so normalised and routine that, ironically, it’s the British way that I now find a bit strange. Many still imagine Spain as somewhat "Third World." We notice when our guests try to haggle over the price of things on a market stall or doubt the drinkability of the tap water. It's true that water from a well, a storage tank, or irrigation water is not, necessarily, safe — but that's equally true in rural Cambridgeshire. The mains water in Spain, the stuff that flows from the taps in 98% of urban homes ...

I identify as male. This means that in a piece describing Spanish public toilets I face an obvious problem. I wouldn't usually consider entering about 50% of the facilities on offer. I have had to extrapolate. That said the other day, in a department store, I went into the toilets, said hello to the woman cleaner, and wondered about the absence of urinals. I did what I needed to do, and while washing my hands, the cleaner drew my attention to the door, well to the pictogram on the door. A tiny stick-figure woman, skirt barely discernible. It hadn't clicked, I'd got the wrong room. I apologised. My quips about kilts or zaraguelles - those traditional baggy culotte trousers - fell on deaf ears. Public conveniences in Spain are like oases in the desert. You see one in the distance from time to time but they're often a mirage. Generally public toilets are locked except for special events. There are also a few of those tardis like plastic cabins on street corners, the ones ...

We use quite a lot of bottled gas - specifically butane - and I think we're more or less legal. The original bottles came with a contract, rather than from some car boot sale, and we have the installation tested every five years. Were it all to explode—and an alarming number of collapsing buildings are attributed to gas explosions each year —the insurance companies might just pay out. That is, provided we didn't die in a hailstorm of shards of severed metal. When I think about it that's probably more likely than an insurance company actually paying out. I always hope that the reason there are so many explosions is not that bottled gas is inherently dangerous, but that people are a bit gung ho about it. They buy the bottles secondhand somewhere to avoid the regular checks, don’t worry about the “sell by” dates on the rubber hoses, never replace the valves or worry about their pressure ratings and even tape things together with duct tape. We use gas for the water heater and f...

The title is from a line in a John Betjeman poem about a nightclub. It always makes me think of red velvet and brocades and big casement windows and that, in turn, reminds me of some provincial hotels I knew in the UK and of some of the casinos we know locally. Once elegant, now faded. Once plump sofas, now with springs that poke you in the bottom. And the warped wood and chipped paint of those grand windows that no longer close quite properly. And a slight mustiness in the air. Living in Culebrón, our two nearest, obvious casinos, the one in Monóvar and Novelda, are a bit like that. One welcomes non-members through its doors at all times; the other is still, generally, membership only. Others, like the very grand casino in Murcia, generate income as a tourist attraction—first the cathedral and then the casino. Lots, like the ones in Cartagena, Torrevieja, Alicante and Aspe, make their terrace bar available to the general public to generate income to keep the buildings open for their m...

Do you remember that Guinness advert with a bloke on the surfboard? He waits. I can do that, not the surfing thing but the waiting. I don’t start to get cross or feel I need to check that someone knows I’m there. I just settle back and wait. I always say it’s because I’m a trusting sort of chap. I rely on the kindness of strangers. I expect people to get to me in the end. If I were on a tube train that ground to a halt in the darkness, I wouldn’t be one that decided to get off and walk. I’d expect someone to come and get me—sooner or later. If it were a lift, I’d prop myself up in the corner and wait rather than getting all Bruce Willis. It helps that I expect to be kept waiting. I always take something to do as I wait - usually a book. I’ve covered quite a lot of pages in waiting rooms recently. Health appointments are a bit like rabbits—every one breeds several more. In order to speak to some sort of specialist, there are any number of steps to be taken beforehand. From time immemori...

If news headlines are anything to go by, it seems the UK is battling a real knife crime problem, with over 53,000 incidents last year. Spain isn’t entirely in the clear, there are knife attacks here too, and in some cities, particularly Barcelona, there has been a big jump in stabbings this year. Nonetheless the problem is much less marked here than it is in the UK. It’s a case of one country dealing with a major crisis and the other keeping a cautious eye on a growing trend. I don't think of myself as having criminal tendencies. I might admit to the odd traffic infringement now and again and I probably pinched a few envelopes when I was working but I'm no Samuel Little. The other day though I found myself in a situation that hardly registered at the time but might actually have gone remarkably pear shaped. I went, with a pal, to the Foreigners Office in Alicante to help him with the renewal of his identity card. Before going through the security scanner to get into the buildin...

I'm not that keen on air-conditioning. When Maggie went to the UK for a few days a couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed turning off the aircon in the car and riding around with the windows down. I don't care for that "climate control" icy blast or the more insidious slow freezing of your knuckles. Then again rolling down the windows, with the resultant noise and the buffeting hot wind, isn't that comfy either. My main, anti aircon, gripe isn't temperature related - it's more about shutting the world out. One of the hallmarks of living in Southern Spain is that it’s hot in summer. It seems a bit perverse to come somewhere warm and then struggle to cool spaces to the point that they would be considered cold at other times of the year. Sometimes, it’s a blessed relief to settle back in an air-conditioned space, after getting super hot, but that’s not the same as maintaining a room at Stavanger in December levels with the Spanish summer just beyond the door. If I we...

As I get older and older, I often find myself remembering one thing from another. The link may be tenuous but that doesn't stop me. So, we'd just been to see María Terremoto in concert at the ADDA, and very good she was too. We'd done well; we'd driven through Alicante in both directions without putting a foot wrong, and parking had been dead easy. As we eased back onto the motorway heading for home, I commented on the white lines. They were nice and bright. They reminded me of a trip many years ago when the lines were far from bright. It was 2007, and Maggie had moved for a job in Ciudad Rodrigo. I was going to join her when a building job on the house in Culebron was completed but, for now and for the coming long weekend, I'd got a bus ticket to go over to see her. It's a long way to Ciudad Rodrigo, more or less on the Portuguese border, but I was hoping to get my head down on the bus. I knew the bus station in Elda; I went there for the 2 a.m. bus. It never c...