5: Routines - the odds and ends

This is the fifth, and hopefully the last, in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly. As usual I've attempted to add in the Spanish angle.

If there is a culture of car washing on Sunday in Spain, I've never noticed it. Most Spanish towns have by-laws to stop people washing their cars in the street. Most Spaniards live in flats anyway, so their access to the water to wash the car is a bit restricted. Instead they take their motors to a car wash. Even though we have space and water I do too.

There are tunnel washes in Spain, the ones with the brushes that tear off aerials and wing mirrors from time to time. We have one in Pinoso and it seems popular. The most common type though are the pressure washers available on the majority of filling station forecourts. Box is the word used by Spaniards for pits in motor racing, and for the bays in the emergency area of a hospital. It also seems to be the most popular word to describe the places that you pressure wash a car. 

I try, when possible, to do all my shopping errands on one day. The most time consuming, by far, is the weekly supermarket shop. We have four chain supermarkets in Pinoso and a couple of smaller grocery shops. None of them has one of those self service auto checkouts, so we still wander around the shelves, with a basket or trolley, and then go to a manual checkout where we unload to the belt, wait for the items to be scanned and then reload the trolley or pack everything into bags. Although most people take bags with them you can still buy plastic bags at the checkout in Spain. You may see it as an advantage or a disadvantage that being served at a till in a small town means that there are a lot of check out conversations - it's nice if you're the one having the conversation and not so good if the person in front has a long medical history or family trauma to relate.

If any of the supermarkets have an internet service up and running for Pinoso, I'm not aware of it. The supermarkets are only big enough to be food shops plus a few other household items. The nearest superstore, the sort of place that sells underwear, car tyres and muesli would be the Carrefour in Petrer, some 25km away. Most of the supermarkets have some sort of loyalty card/application, but not all.

Our home cooking too has a Spanish bent. Maggie cooks the lunch for Mondays but I generally cook the lunch the rest of the week. Our rural power supply was 2.2kW when we first bought the house. That should mean that if the 2kW kettle were on when the fridge kicked in, then the main circuit breaker should pop. Luckily, there is a lot of elasticity in the supply, so we had very little trouble. We later increased the supply to the maximum permitted without getting all the wiring rechecked, at 3.45kW. Nonetheless, we knew that the electricity was limited, so we chose a gas water heater and gas hob to reduce the load on the system. The gas comes in bottles or cylinders. Even today, piped gas is not particularly common in Spain. It's much more available than it used to be, but in the seven houses and flats I've lived in, none of them has had piped gas. It's easy enough to get cylinders delivered, but we've never bothered. We just take the empty cylinders back to any of the several places where you can exchange depleted cylinders, and money, for full ones. The blokes (I've not see a woman doing it yet) who deliver the gas are called butaneros and the jokes and witticisms around them are exactly analogous to the milkman stories of the UK.

Tuesday is usually cinema day for two reasons. It's the day when we pensioners get a special price at the cinema, just 2€, and when our closest cinema in Petrer shows films that are subtitled rather than dubbed. If there's an English-language film worth the trouble, then Tuesday is a good day to go. Even if there is only stuff in Spanish, it's a good day to take advantage of the low prices. There are other cinemas and other times to go, but Tuesday is a favourite. Mind you our nearest cinema, next door to the underwear selling Carrefour, so the same 25km away, is showing a more and more restricted range of films. Hollywood pap amd nothing much else which means we often go to the cinema in Elche - a round trip of 8okm.

And that's it. Now I have to think of something else to write about.

4: Routines around Spanish

This is the fourth in the series about the very ordinary things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in the Spanish angle. This one doesn't quite fit into the "job" bracket but, well self imposed rules are easy to break.

If you've ever read any of my blogs, or talked to me, you'll know that I jabber on about my hand to hand combat with Castilian Spanish all the time. My joints may ache, my breathing may suggest that the end is nigh but I'm not giving up indeed I'm working on the principle, so clearly outlined in that old Anglican hymn, Christian answer boldly. While I breathe, I pray. 

The impetus to learn Spanish came from the difficulty I had in buying a beer the very first time I visited this country. For years, I didn't really put much formal time into that learning - going to a one hour a week evening class in Spanish at the local tech doesn't really add up to much over the year. The real point of those early years is that it's when I put in the hours and hours of sheer drudgery that is learning a language as an adult; grinding through unending vocabulary lists, memorising hideously boring verb tables and trying to understand bookfuls of arcane grammar rules. 

As a part of this language struggle one of my regular jobs, that isn't really a job, is that I meet someone in a bar in Pinoso every week. We've been doing it for years now. The original idea was that it would be a language exchange. The truth is that my chum speaks hardly any English and he probably never will. He's never applied himself to it. That should be to my advantage, as we spend most of the time in Spanish, but he isn't really interested in how I speak Spanish. He's much more interested in pursuing whatever we're talking about. I always come away from the sessions cursing my gaffes and errors

As well as the meetings in the bar I pay for a Spanish lesson using the italki platform – one of several networks of online language teachers. I know lots of people are loathe to use online teaching but I see nothing but advantages. It's cheap, it's flexible, you don't have to go out in the cold and rain, you don't have to sign up for anything and you can abandon tutors with complete impunity.

I've never really expected a lesson from the italki people I've talked to. Most of their teachers do offer proper structured courses but I've only ever wanted a bit of conversation. The woman I'm talking to, each week at present, and I don't have the same world view. That does guarantee that we have a pretty realistic conversation that jumps from topic to topic. I'm never happy with the quality of the conversation and I never feel there's an improvement in my level but, at least, it maintains a routine. 

Actually I also speak to someone else online. This time it's an exchange - half an hour of English for half an hour of Spanish. I found this chap through either the conversation exchange or the my language exchange website. I think we click pretty well and I enjoy the sessions. As well as general chit chat he often has particular questions about words and phrases. We never have the least difficulty filling the time. Again I'm often disappointed with my Spanish but it's ameliorated somewhat by the whole thing being more bilingual than the italki session.

3: Routines around water

This is the third in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in a Spanish angle.

We, well the house, has a cesspit. Nothing sophisticated, just a brick-lined hole in the ground. If we were to try and sell the house we'd have to do something about that. Legislation has changed in the years we've lived here. Now we'd either have to put in a decent septic tank or, more likely, dig a big trench to connect our house to the village drain that stops 200 metres from our front door. All the run-off from the washbasins, sink, showers and toilets goes into that cesspit, the black hole, and microorganisms do the rest. 

Lots of the toilets in Spanish bars, museums and the like have signs asking you to throw soiled toilet paper into a wastebasket. But, good Lord, we're British - we couldn't do that. What about the stench, what about the flies? No, we whizz the paper down the toilet and flush. On one occasion, that caused a problem. Basically, all the drains in, say, a bathroom or kitchen go to a central point beneath the floor of the room, the arqueta, and then join a single pipe which goes to the cesspit. In one of the en-suites, that arqueta trapped lots of unspeakable stuff. We found out because we'd had to break through the tiled floor to get to a leaking water inflow tube. With Marigolds, a bit of stretching and a lot of cursing I cleaned that out but, in order to stop the same thing happening again, I took to hurling a couple of bucketfuls of water down each of the toilets each week. 

We also have trouble with the hard water. The scale that builds up does a lot of damage. It blocks the flow reducing filters on the taps, the scale clogs up the inside of shower hoses and shower heads and it coats the heating elements of electrical water heaters with stone. One new kettle furred up so much within a month that it started to leak. I've now incorporated so many small tasks within the routine that what was once simply tipping a couple of bucketfuls now takes me around 40 minutes each week. 

Another water-related job is that I check our water meter every week to make sure that the use is more or less as expected. We've heard far too many stories of a leak on the consumer's side of the water meter that have run undetected for long periods, with resultant big bills. 

At the main stop valve, where the water comes into the house, we have a simple filter to catch at least some of the sediment. I check that every three months and change it as necessary. From that inlet point the water passes through a tube that ran, exposed, along the side of a North facing wall. The water used to freeze up several times over the winter, leaving us less fragrant for the day. When we realised why that was happening I wrapped the tube with insulation and I now check that insulation on a monthly basis, replacing jaded gaffer tape and adding bubble wrap as necessary. We didn't have a single day without water, because of frozen pipes, last winter though I suppose Global Warming may have loaned a helping hand there.

One last thing is that the our clean water supply, on the council owned side of the meter, comes in pipes that are varying depths below ground level. Every now and again a passing tractor or lorry damages the pipe and we lose our supply. There's 24 hour call out service provided by the town hall so it's not such a big deal but it can take a while to get sorted sometimes.

2: Routines around rubbish

This is the second in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to find a Spanish angle.

This is a very small job. Wherever you live there will be a local variation on how you dispose of rubbish. In most Spanish towns and cities people take their rubbish down to containers that are placed strategically around the streets. The hope is that people will separate out the stuff that can be recycled so as not to fill up the generalist bins. 

The yellow ones get containers like cans and cartons. the blue ones get paper and card and the green ones get glass. The generalist bins are also green. In some places there are brown bins that get organic waste and around here there are a couple of places that have community compost bins though they have not spread as was once promised.

The stuff that isn't organic, or container or paper or glass, goes into the ordinary bin. Theses bins are, usually, emptied late at night in the cities and towns. Pinoso has chosen a different approach. Rather than have big lorries go around in the wee small hours here there is a small truck that takes the bags that people leave outside their homes every evening. The reasoning behind not using the standard, big, neighbourhood containers is that people abuse them. They dump building rubble, worn out mattresses, old kitchen units etc either in, or more likely, alongside the bins. This causes the town halls all sorts of problems in collecting the rubbish and paying for its disposal.

In our particular case we have three of the large rubber buckets, capazos, just outside the front door where we collect the stuff for recycling. I take the containers, glass and paper type stuff to the nearest communal recycling bins when the journey ties in with another. We also have a compost bin, supplied by the town hall, in the garden. Our kitchen bin gets very little use with most stuff going for recycling or to compost.

Almost all the municipalities have systems for collecting the larger items that are "legitimate" household waste but which won't go in the community bins. Mattresses, the old dining room chairs, the calor gas heater etc. The difficulty is that people are impatient and they often want that settee out of their house now, this instant, and they find some way to dump it next to the bins. Hence the Pinoso approach. It's  difficult to put your old deckchairs in a bag hanging from your door handle. The people who can't be bothered to take their stuff to one of the ecoparques, modern style non landfill tips, drive it out to the communal sized bins that are dotted in the country areas around the town. We have one of those communal bins a few metres from our house. Luckily it's not visible from the road or it would soon be overflowing. Fly tipping in open countryside still happens but it's nowhere near as common as it once was.

If you have stuff that's difficult to dump, or potentially toxic, there are systems. Battery collection points are all over the place, there are lots of clothes recycling and used cooking oil bins and nearly everything else from the redundant hi-fi to garden cuttings can be taken to the ecoparques. For small items like printer cartridges, fluorescent tubes, small electrical items and what not there is also a mobile ecoparque that sets up shop most Wednesdays in the town centre.

1: Routines around post

I suppose, wherever you live, life is full of routine. Depending on your luck those routines might be simple and safe or be hard and even life threatening. Mine are the soft routines of a relatively well off Western European. It's stretching a point to say that these routines are conditioned by living in Spain but that's the premise I'm starting from. I'm sure I'd never have noticed if I hadn't been racking my brains for something to blog about. So, this is the first, with more to come, about the most mundane of some of my weekly tasks.

Usually, when I make my weekly trip to the post office there is nothing in our PO box. When we first got here, things we knew had been posted to us used to go astray. The delivery to our rural address was haphazard at best and non existent in reality. That's why we rented a post office box, un apartado de correos. Renting the box for a year in 2005 cost less than 50€; the last time I renewed it the price was 85€.

We get almost no mail. If junk mail is a thing in Spain, it's the stuff that gets delivered in armfuls directly to the blocks of flats by repartidores, hand delivery. I've heard lots of explanations about why postal services never became as important here as they were in the UK, from high illiteracy rates and rural isolation through to the way that families tended to stay in the same place from birth to death. Also, and this is my theory, the post offices never got that extra push that the British ones have because they are a sort of outpost of government -  a place to renew car tax, pick up your pension or apply for a passport. That sort of role, to a much lesser degree, was taken here by the estancos, the tobacconists. 

To most Briton's minds the fact that Spanish post offices do not have a posting box verges on the bizarre. In our local office they removed the posting box from the wall and now there is a cardboard box on the floor if you want to post a letter when the office is open. The post office people seem to want you to go in. Getting to the counter in our local post office requires plenty of time and a lot of patience. For reasons too labyrinthine to go in to they are loathe to sell you multiple stamps or even stamps. In order to avoid the queue I go to an estanco, a tobacconist, and buy stamps there. I always try to overstamp the letters and cards I do send, just to be sure, and, if the post office is closed I post them in one of the two (I think) remaining pillar boxes in the town. There are others in the outlying villages but, the last time I used one, the letter took eight weeks to arrive.

Routine

I try to be frugal with toilet paper. One sheet at a time if possible. It's not because I'm particularly mean, it's because toilet paper blocks up Spanish drains. I've never quite been able to bring myself to do that thing you are instructed to do so many times in Spanish "public" toilets, the ones in bars and the like, to put the soiled paper in the wastebasket. It just seems a bit too close to living in a cave and wearing skins.

That primness caught us out once though and we had to have the floor ripped up to clear the blockage. In order for that not to happen again I now go around our three bathrooms each week and tip buckets of water down the toilets, clean the hair from the plugholes and other routine things to avoid a reoccurence. When we have houseguests who use up a couple of toilet rolls in a weekend I'm hard pressed not to reprimand them sternly.

Our house is old but it's a bit like that bucket that has a new handle, a new bottom and a rewelded seam - there's not much of the original left. Almost everything has been rebuilt or altered while we've been here. We don't live in some sort of back to nature existence, we may have a cesspit and our electric supply may lack a bit of oomph, by British standards, but it's perfectly normal herabouts. Sometimes the low power needs to be taken into consideration. The pellet burner ignition system, for instance, seems to need all the power we have to set fire to the fuel so we have to remember not to boil the kettle until the pellets are aflame. Once it's lit though we can boil kettles, run tumble dryers and what not to our hearts content.

Obviously every house needs its routines. Cleaning out that pellet burner or changing the beds or doing the laundry are the sort of repetitive tasks that people do the world over but there are certain things that I do, on a regular basis, because of where and how we live.

For example I clean the leaves and other detritus from the drain in the back patio every month because one time, when the need to do so had never occurred to me, the torrential rain was too much for the semi choked drain and in minutes the yard turned into a paddling pool which lapped into our living room.

I check the water meter every week to make sure that we are using about the same amount and that the meter isn't spinning when we don't have any taps open. It hasn't happened to us but the stories of underground, unseen, tubing splitting and spilling water unchecked for weeks or months are legion. And the resulting water bills are eye watering. 

Whilst we're on pipes our water often used to freeze up when it got cold in Winter. The pipe runs along the side of a North facing wall so I put some foam insulation around the exposed pipe. That seemed to do the trick. No frozen water. But the plastic of the insulation didn't cope well with the weather and it soon split. So I added more insulation and then taped the whole lot up in the time honoured, WD40 or duct tap to fix everything, manner. Every month, I check that the foam and the tape are OK and I usually end up with a happy half hour balancing on a stepladder to rebandage the pipe. 

I'm not sure whether this falls into the same class. This may well be more like checking the tyre pressures and oil on the car or pruning the trees, raking up the leaves and hoeing out the invincible weeds. Just a routine. But our palm tree is under constant threat from the picudo rojo, a beetle type creature, that flies around looking for a place to lay eggs. Once the eggs hatch the larvae feast on palm trees. Every six weeks I strap on a backpack spraying kit and douse the tree.

I discovered a new routine just yesterday. We have a gas water heater for the showers. It started to cut out after a couple of minutes. Naked with soapy hair and freezing water is horrid. I was just about to call out the repair people when I realised that it only happened when I changed from tap to shower. The water here is hard. That's why I clean or change the inlet filters on the water supply every three months to keep the amount of limescale in the system down. If you don't clean out your kettle or use anti-lime tabs in your washing machine then you'll soon notice. Everything furs up. People are always having to change electric water heaters because the elements are, effectively, covered in stone. The problem in the shower was that when the water flow diminished some sort of safety mechanism cut in on the gas heater. All I had to do was clean out the shower head and the taps and it seems to have sorted the problem. I've put that job onto a four week cycle in my diary.

I don't remember doing anything of a like nature when I lived in the UK. Periodic jobs obviously but a routine to avoid potential problems, no.