Life in Culebrón

In 2004 Spanish bookshops were intimidating places. Berlin Wall like there was nearly always a counter and the books were behind it. They were protected by someone, invariably older, invariably stern, Dickensian even - villainous Dickensian. There were shelves too, sometimes in the Allied Zone, but without apparent order. Lots of the shops were dark and dusty with piles of books. The organisation of the books was a secret known only to that formidable bookshop employee. As well as looking sinister the person behind the counter spoke Spanish. Another big hurdle. But I'd decided early on in my Spanish adventure that reading in Spanish was a good way to tackle the language so these obstacles had to be overcome. After a couple of bad buys, panicked into buying some Spanish classic with impenetrable prose, I decided to try something I'd already read in English. I'd been told that translated books were often easier to read. Hemingway, and his short sentences seemed like a good p...

I wrote about the Pinoso Book Club, El Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas, only a year ago but that's not going to stop me doing it again. The group is named for a local teacher and poet - well loved and still missed. You may have seen the poetry competition named after her. It also just happens to be her centenary this year. The club is organised by the Pinoso public library, which is housed in the Centro Cultural - the modern building halfway up el Paseo de la Constitución, next to the Indian restaurant. Like the majority of book clubs I've heard of, the plot is simple. The group reads the same book. I don't actually mean that - we have more than one. I thought to change the sentence to read that we all read similar books, but that doesn't work either. So I'll take it that you know what I mean. Anyway, after reading a book, the group comes together and comments on it. We have some, nominal, say about books for inclusion in the next "course," but really, the li...

I'm a sucker for gestures. The bit in Casablanca, where Laszlo says "Play the Marseillaise, play it!" and Rick nods, and they do, and they out-sing the baddies always makes me tear up. I was just watching a video of someone called Gustaf Farwell banging out Nessun Dorma from his balcony in Barcelona just like Gavinana Maurizio Marchini did in Florence. Every time I watch the TV news I see health workers applauding patients coming off ventilators, I see the people clapping to cheer on the lorry drivers, health workers and everyone else who is keeping us going. It's good and positive. I even approve of the glossy videos being put together by the banks and supermarkets so that we identify them with the white hats when the time goes back to shopping and opening accounts. Lots of gestures. I'm not so keen on the complaining. Complaints are often justified, I enjoy a good complain myself, I complain a lot, there are plenty of daft buggers in the world and plenty o...

Do you know that Louis XVI wrote Rien, French for nothing, in his diary, on the day the Bastille was stormed? That was 14th July 1789, one of the key days in the French Revolution and one of a series of events that would lead to Louis losing his head. If you do know you'll probably be aware that it was an entry in his hunting diary, to record the number of animals he'd caught, but it's a better story if you miss that bit out. My diary for yesterday could say nada, Spanish for nothing, though without any reference to the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. Well not really nothing. I drank several pints of tea. In fact I'm drinking so much tea at the moment that I've stopped flushing every time because our cess pit only has a capacity of 2,000 litres and we could well fill it really quickly if this quarantine continues. Reading too. Actually the two things go together, drinking tea, sitting close to a gas heater and reading. I nearly always have a book on t...

"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...

I don't have any work between the end of June and the beginning of September. No pay either so it's not quite as good as it sounds. And with Maggie working mornings our options about getting out and about have been a little more restricted too. This is one of the reasons that I've got through quite a lot of books over the summer. That and because I prefer short books. Reading ten books with 200 pages is only like reading a couple of big thick books. Anyway I get bored with one style, one set of vocabulary and the same basic theme. Generally I've read books in Spanish - partly to try and improve my language but also so that  I have a bit more local culture under my belt. After all you don't need to have read every Kate Atkinson or Stieg Larsson to be able to have a conversation about their style. Talking about what you have read is a common enough conversation so the more points of reference I have the greater the possibility of maintaining that dialogue. The onl...

I read something, in an electronic newspaper, yesterday that said that our President, Mariano Rajoy, isn't a big reader. It went on to say that the only complete newspaper he has left on his desk, alongside the daily news roundup written by his staff, is a sports newspaper called Marca. I'm not sure whether it's true or not but he doesn't strike me as any sort of intellectual or even a deep thinker so it may well be true. It would certainly be in line with the last survey of the Sociological Investigation Centre - Centro de investigaciones sociológicas - which reports that 34% of Spaniards have not read a book in the last twelve months, that 10% read only one book in the last year and that just 7% read more than a book a month. Maybe this explains why many children are unsure of the name of the capital city of Spain. Talking of books my pal Carlos, writing under the pen name of Carlos Dosel , has just self published a book on Amazon - police story with a Nazi wa...

Reading is a funny thing. When I worked in the UK I grew to hate reading. I had to wade through so many pages of so much verbiage full of TLAs (three letter acronyms,) where spades were never spades. Nowadays I'm back to reading for pleasure, well pleasure and for the information that reading provides. I try to read novels in Spanish. Sometimes I can't understand the books I choose but nowadays I can read most novels without too much difficulty. That's one of the reasons that I usually read on a Kindle because it allows me a dictionary for those key words I don't know. Obviously I'm reading the read the book because something about it interests me but there is also a part that is about trying to improve my Spanish through the practice, the vocabulary and the language structures. More importantly though I'm trying to get a handle on the culture. Not culture in the Cervantes or Shakespeare sense - culture in the description of how life was or is, the hist...