Life in Culebrón

I drove over to Novelda yesterday to see La bajada de la Virgen. I'd never seen this particular procession and I'm always up for a good romería. The idea of a romería is that a saint, well the carved statue that represents a saint, is moved from one place to another in a procession - usually from some sort of chapel to a parish church or vice versa. Normally the saints are carried on the shoulders of the faithful using a stretcher like base but not always, in la Palma for instance the saint rides in a cart. There are all sort of variations. The shrine where this particular saint, Mary Magdalene, came from is on la Mola Hill so she was brought down; bajada implies coming down, subida is when the saint goes up the hill. The style of a romería can vary, some are pretty large scale like San Pancrecio in Sax, San Isidro in Salinas or the Virgen de la Nieves between Aspe and Hondón de la Nieves. Several are much smaller scale including very local ones like moving the Virgen de la Asu...

Easter in Spain is spectacular. Every town has its own Easter. The floats, religious carvings, rolled along, or, much more impressively, borne on the shoulders of men, and nowadays women, along time honoured routes. Some people are in it for the religion, some for the culture, the tradition, or maybe it's just an opportunity to collect bags and bags of sweets. Some of the processions are joyous, some are military, some verge on the bizarre whilst others are organised chaos. I've not seen many, maybe twenty different towns, a few famous ones on the telly and whilst each is similar none is the same. But I'm not out on the streets now. I'm not listening to a plaintiff saeta sung from a balcony or watching mantilla wearing women or bare footed Nazarenos. There will be, almost certainly be no silent and unlit streets and no black hoods as Thursday becomes Friday when death is the order of the day. All because it's raining. There are associations that fund raise and...

There's a certain tendency to euphoria sometimes. It would happen from time to time driving across the fens or maybe with the MGB in the Cotswolds. Just feeling glad to be there, to be passing through. It happens a lot here. As I drive across some Spanish landscape with, maybe, high hills, or never ending plains or, perhaps, just watching that ochre yellow dust trail as a car or van drives along some dirt track I start grinning for no particular reason. Maybe it's my age but nowadays I've got to the point where small pleasures cheer me up quite as easily as things on a grander scale. Maybe it's always been like that. Lots of the films that I've liked most across my lifetime of cinema going have been the ones that are classed as independent film. There are lots and lots of celebrations in Spain. They are everywhere if you look. I wonder if they have a more obvious impact in small towns and villages. The centre of Pinoso is more or less closed off for the eight ...

I think it was Catworth. There was a deconsecrated church and a theatre group called something like Reduced Theatre. Very reduced, just one man. Dressed as an Anglican vicar, he filled time as he waited for this evening's speaker, a speaker who will never arrive. Rural theatre. The ersatz vicar at one point bemoans the heavenly future of someone he knows - a Wesleyan and a Geologist - enough to consign anyone to a fiery eternity. My baptism took place in a Wesleyan church; my degree is in geology. The Cub Scout pack I briefly belonged to met in a Methodist Hall. The Grammar school I went to sang the Winston Churchill preferred version of Who Would True Valour See and we would all troop to the Anglican Church on Ascension Day. But that was closing in on 50 years ago now. Now Easter in the UK, for me at least, was basically about chocolate eggs. I'm told it's also about rabbits now. That and a Bank Holiday for workers or the end of one term for people involved in Educatio...