Life in Culebrón

There have been quite a lot news items recently about a shortage of blood donors in Spain. I heard one such item on a programme I often listen to as I drive to work and so I wrote a comment on their Facebook page. This is what it said:  Oí algo sobre los problemas de donación de sangre en vuestro programa y recientemente hay muchas noticias sobre la falta de sangre en España. La mayoría de los británicos que viven aquí, muchos con una historia de donación en el Reino Unido, no pueden donar por un decreto que tiene algo que ver con las "vacas locas" de los años 90 y la posibilidad de contraer la enfermedad de Creutzfeldt-Jakob - algo que no pasa. Un sencillo cambio de ley y, de repente, tendríamos más donantes. Espero que entiendas mi versión de español Or more or less as a translation;  I've heard something about the problems of blood donation on your programme and recently there have been a lot of news items about the lack of blood in Spain. The majori...

I still watch TV more or less as I did in the 1960s. Not that I stare avidly at Zip Nolan or Mike Nelson in Sea Hunt but I do generally, watch broadcast television at the time that it is broadcast. Every now and then I will use the streaming feeds from a TV company for the missed episode and I have even been known to steal television programmes from one of the torrent sites. I don't really understand torrents though and I am usually mightily disappointed when after downloading something for hours or days the picture keeps macroblocking. I begged a cup off coffee of some pals yesterday. They told me that Sky, or whoever it is that uses whichever satellites to send out whatever British satellite TV signals, has just shifted everything around again. They do this from time to time presumably for technical reasons, possibly to add quality or functionality, and maybe to deny the signal to we expats. It certainly sends ripples through the Brit population who have parabolic dishes th...

   Santiago Alcanda a radio 3 presenter       I have quite a long Christmas break. I fancied getting away from work and the usual alternatives of doing very little and drinking a lot of brandy. I spent hours on the Internet looking at websites in Teruel, Granada and Albacete provinces. I sent a few emails - "Are you running your horse riding/cookery courses/star gazing courses in the period between 26th and 31st December?" I got not a single reply. I'm not surprised. From my experience lots of businesses never look at their email. And whilst there are lots of honourable exceptions the disorganisation in Spanish businesses makes me laugh and cry by turns. Anyway, back in November I got a little annoyed at not being able to find anything but the most banal contemporary music on Spanish radio and I wrote to Radio 3, the state broadcaster which says it champions contemporary music, to ask what their music policy was. They have an Internet form for the purpose...

I like listening to the radio. Getting your news from the radio obviously has it's disadvantages (no pictures) but radio does have the huge plus of portability and not being attention seeking. The Internet and television are nowhere near as compatible with driving, shaving or showering as is the radio. Generally radio here is reasonably good. There are stacks of local stations full of local news and stories. Nationally the news coverage is fine with a range of political views spread amongst the various broadcasters though politicians don't get anything like the cross examination that they are subjected to in the US or UK. News aside speech radio doesn't have anything like the breadth of, for instance, BBC Radio 4 (drama, arts, comedy, documentary reports etc)  but with my "Proud to be British" hat on I suspect that very few radio stations in the world do. Sports coverage is enormously important and takes up hours of air time. Sport is synonomous with football ...

The fail-safe method to determine if the UK is in a state of emergency is the BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme. If it fails to broadcast, as scheduled, three days in a row you'll need to fill the bath with water. At least that's what my brother told me. I don't think Spanish radio is quite as potent a force in everyday life as it is in the UK but it still has plenty of listeners. I'm one of them. This week radio has been in the news because the state broadcaster, RNE , which first broadcast from Salamanca as a propaganda arm of the Francoist forces in the Spanish Civil War, celebrated its 75th anniversary. I tend to listen to Radio 5 which is the news channel of the state broadcaster but I also listen to both their speech channel, Radio Nacional and Radio 3 their music channel.  There are plenty of good talk radio stations though they aren't shy about having a political view. SER, Onda Cero and Punto Radio are some of the bigger national broadcasters. T...

In summer, with all the politicians on holiday, the magazine type radio programmes fill their time with anything they can. I was just listening to Radio Nacional, the equivalent of BBC Radio 4, to a programme called On Days Like Today , and they were talking about collecting cigarette, tea, bubble gum and similar cards. I had a story so I logged on to Facebook and posted my story on their wall. I did it in English first, for speed, because it had taken me a while to sort out how to send them a message and they'd been running the item for several minutes. Then I did it again in my form of Spanish. They read it out as I was re-reading my post to check the grammar - and they basically used my Spanish. The story, by the way, was that I collected the Beatles Yellow Submarine cards when I was a lad. When we came here in 2004 they were one of the things to be cleared out. We had a go at selling them on eBay. I remember I put a reserve on them of £5 and they sold for several hundre...