Life in Culebrón

One of the local, but British, animal charities was collecting food and clothing for the refugees parked on Lesbos. So we popped along with our donation. The same day we went to a Mercadona supermarket in Monóvar where they were also collecting food for the same people. I handed over a few cans of meat and fruit. There's another animal charity in Pinoso. They operate a café to raise money for their work. For a variety of reasons they are in financial difficulties which are principally Covid related. Maggie gave them some cash and we handed over a few things for their second-hand shop. My support for that particular animal charity is somewhat coloured by a training event I went to in the 1990s about funding for charities. A photography project volunteered to be the guinea pigs. The trainer asked what their "mission" was; they were clear and succinct. "To promote good quality photography to the people of Cambridge". We were asked, by the trainer, to suggest ways t...

I usually don't hear my mobile phone ring. So, if you phone the chances are I will miss the call. If I do hear it ring the phone is often in the depths of my bag or I'm using it to play music or I'm wearing gardening gloves. By the time I find the phone, disconnect the earphones or get my hands free the other person is long gone and I am left shouting, uselessly, into dead air. Sometimes I just decide not to answer. If it's a number I don't know or one with the identity withheld then I tend to let them be. The chances are that it will be somebody trying to sell me something or someone who has dialled the wrong number. I don't get a lot of calls anyway. This morning, unusually, I got two, I heard them both and I answered them too. The wrong number was absolutely certain that I should be his brother even if I wasn't. My insistence that I was called Chris and this was my number seemed to cut no ice with him. No, this is my brother's number, coño, he said....

One of those Christmassy things I do is to buy whatever it is that the "A toy, a dream" - Un juguete una ilusión campaign is selling. For years now it's been a biro but when we first got here I remember it was a spinning top. The idea is you pay over the odds for the thing and the extra money gets turned into toys. In the first place those toys were shipped to poor children in South America and Africa - you know the sort of countries, the ones with names you just about recognise but you'd be hard pressed to point at on a blank map. Places like Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic or Guatemala. Last year, for the first time, toys were also handed out, via the Red Cross, to children in Spain. The headline is that one of every five people living in Spain lives in the shadow of poverty - in poverty or at risk of poverty. Now I have no idea how somebody has decided what poverty is. Is it getting fewer than so many calories to eat or not having a ...