Life in Culebrón

"You use a lot of continuous tenses in your books. Is there any particular reason for that?". It's an interview on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme, Front Row, some twenty years ago. The author was from the USA, he was pleased. "Being interviewed in England is just so great - you want to talk about my use of grammar!". When we first arrived in Spain I wanted to try reading in Spanish but bookshops used to scare me. They usually had counters and the books were on shelves behind the counter. If you wanted to buy a particular book it was fine. You just asked. In Spanish. Of course they never had the book but you were hooked now, you had to order it, wait two or three weeks and then be shocked by the price. Spanish books are expensive. If you wanted to browse then tough luck. Slowly that changed. Faced by online sellers lots of traditional bookshops went to the wall, despite price protection, and the survivors became more self service. In the newer shops you could...

I bought some books on Sunday. This is not, in itself, such an unusual thing. I usually have a book on the go. The difference was that I bought ten in one fell swoop. Nowadays I can read almost any Spanish book without too much trouble. I've chosen to read more Spanish than English for two main reasons. The first is to improve my Spanish and the second is to bone up on the home culture. It does mean that I have no idea who is hip and cool amongst contemporary British writers but as I don't know the name of the Home Secretary, or the modern way to say hip and cool, you can take it that I've given up on keeping up to date with Britain. One biggish problem is that I often forget the names of the authors I've read. For some reason names like Eva García Sáenz de Urturi just don't stick in the same way as, say, Jessie Greengrass. Anyway I am reading a book called Women of the Post War Period (Mujeres de la posguerra) by a woman called Inmaculada de la Fuente. I am f...