Do British people still use the term Chelsea Tractor?

Just after lunch a convoy of three tractors passed our front gate. They had the folding umbrella type contraptions on the back that are used to collect almonds. The tractor reverses up to the tree, grabs the tree trunk using some hydraulic thingummy and then fans out the expanse of plastic tarpaulin type material to surround the tree. With the tree grabbed and the material in place the tree is given a good shaking and the almonds fall into the fan of material and roll tractorwards to a collecting chamber. When the collector is full the nuts are usually transferred to a trailer or a lorry and taken off for processing. It just so happens that there is quite a large nut processing factory (I originally wrote processing plant but I thought that may lead to confusion) in Pinoso. On the smaller plots, you'll often see a family group going at an almond or olive tree with sticks with a big sheet or net spread out under the tree to catch the falling fruit. 

The tractor driver I talked to told me that, with the three big tractors, they would clear the bancal in two to three hours. A bancal is what, once upon a time, I'd have called a terrace, it's the level land formed by building two parallel walls on a hillside. Recently someone told me that the retaining walls are called ribazos but the only people I've ever tried to get to confirm that word are a bit too urban to know whether it's correct or not.  So, according to the driver a big tractor costs around 250,000€ and the folding fan thing about 30,000€. I expect that the stick and visqueen sheet method involves substantially less financial outlay but it may take a while longer to collect the fruit. As I said the driver said 2 to 3 hours and there are about 350 trees on the bancal. Lets say that 15 minutes per tree using the hitting the tree with sticks method or about 8 days working non stop for 12 hours a day. Costs and benefits, swings and roundabouts I suppose.

It's pretty obvious that we live in the country. I've said before that we don't have any street or avenue as a part of our address; even our postcode is a bit undecided. This causes people who live in cities no end of problems. They presume that I don't understand or that, being foreign, and consequently stupid, I don't know the correct answer to their simple question about my address. I can't say I know much about agricultural life but I do see the gangs of (usually) blokes collecting the grape harvest from one type of field orientation and the mechanised grape pickers working on fields with a different configuration. I sort of half know what's going on with some of the processes just as I sometimes wonder what that bright green crop is that all those people are picking in some field as we drive past.

Yesterday Maggie and I went to the cinema in Alicante. We took advantage of being in the town to go to see an exhibition, an artistic exhibition, about space debris. It wasn't a particularly good exhibition but it's the sort of thing we do given the opportunity. Parking was surprisingly easy but we had to search around a bit and Maggie, who doesn't parallel park, was quite sure that I couldn't either. Without having any relationship to those Comanche trackers that John Ford always had helping the 7th Cavalry as they rode through Monument Valley, we were able to tell that dogs had been in the same street that we were walking and we avoided there manifold calling cards. We commented on the striking aroma from the communal rubbish bins in the August heat. There may not be any cinemas or exhibition spaces in Culebrón but parking is very easy and we don't have to be too careful about where we walk. Pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages I suppose.

I was thinking about this as I watched a programme in the second series of Valeria on Netflix. It's a series based on the books by Elísabet Benavent. In it four young women, whose main concerns seem to centre about their work, their wardrobe, the people they have sex with and food and drink, do what they do around Madrid. I don't know how real the Madrid, depicted in the series is, but the televisual version looks like a cool and exciting sort of place. They eat Korean, they use "park and ride" type bikes when they aren't using taxis, they sport clothes that I haven't seen in any of the chain stores. The life depicted is of the economically advantaged and domestically unchallenged. It's not much like Culebrón, or even Alicante, but it looks good on Netflix. I don't think that I'd be that keen to swap passing tractors and lots of outside space for exotic food delivered by a bloke on a bike or time share car schemes. Pluses and minuses, for and against I suppose.

I should stress that I watch Valeria not for the sex scenes or because I lust after city life but because of the Spanish. I'm a bit unlikely to use calimochada to describe an impromptu picnic or yembé (a sort of tom tom drum apparently) but the four main protagonists, and their pals, use a lot of slangy type words to show how young and modern they are. I'm interested to hear those words particularly as I don't mix with many real Spanish people. I like to think my Spanish is still improving but if the conversation with the tractor driver is anything to go by then I'm obviously deluding myself. Ah well, you win some, you lose some.

Think Walden Pond

Maggie often comes home and tells me about a house that she's shown or a new house on the books of the estate agency she works for. At the best I'm vaguely interested. The other way around I often start a conversation with "I'm reading this book about ....," and Maggie is just as responsive. So, if I can't tell her I'll tell you. Don't think of it as a book review though, think more of it as a bastardisation of the book alongside my own ramblings.

The book in question was written by a woman called María Sánchez. This is the sort of Spanish name I approve of. It's like one of the names in a Learn Spanish text book. There are plenty of Spanish names that are easy to say like Fernández or García but there seem to be many more which don't exactly trip off the Anglo tongue: Úrsula Corberó, Sandra Sabatés, Lidia Torrent or Isabel Díaz Ayuso for instance. Maria's book title is dead obvious too, at least in Spanish - Tierra de mujeres. It's not quite so easy to translate effectively into English, the idea behind the words isn't quite the same. Land of Women, Women's Land, Soil of Women etc. don't capture the multiple meanings about the ownership, or the place and number of women wedded to the earth, to the soil, to the land. It happens the other way round too. T.S. Eliot's "At the still point of the turning world." can be translated into Spanish as the point that doesn't move or the point that is quiet and peaceful but there is no single word to give the same double meaning as in English.

Anyway, back at the page face. The book is largely about demanding recognition for the significant role that women have always played on the land, in the countryside, as shepherds, herders, planters, collectors, labourers and the like alongside their role as homeworkers. One of her key arguments is that the men get the praise for the horny handed sons of toil role whilst the women are only recognised as the sweepers of floors, the laundresses of overalls and the bakers of bread. There is no mention of Jill Archer or Annie Sugden but, as the author is a vet, James Herriot's Christmas cake baking heroines get a mention.

I've talked about rural Spain in the past. Partly because we have a friend who is politically active about rural issues and lives in a very rustic bit of Teruel and also because of where we live. Pinoso, is hardly urban, Culebrón less so. Here agriculture is important and everyday but where there is other work too and we are close to major centres of population. Part of Maria's argument is that we are all very quick to accept a view, forged by city dwellers, that lots of Spain is empty, a nice place to go for the weekend to relax, a place where we (Spaniards in this case) all came from but where none of us (Spaniards again) would like to stay too long. A place full of country bumpkins, good with their hands maybe, people who know all the gossip about their neighbours as well as being able to name birds, plants and trees the people who live in a place where doors can be left unlocked and where neighbours pop in all the time leaving trays of fruit, veg. and fresh baked pastries but who have been left behind by the modern world. Plenty tractor drivers and very few JavaScript developers.

She suggests that view needs a reappraisal. That rural Spain needs services more than it needs poetic praise and bucolic representation. Spain, lots of Spain, doesn't have much population but that doesn't mean it's empty. Just because it's not built up, or full of people, doesn't mean that it's abandoned. Sometimes the farming is extensive rather than intensive. There are places where the combines and the logging trucks roam, where the monster tractors equipped with tree shakers and catcher nets roar but equally there are places where herds of goats belch and fart overseen by a solitary figure and his or her dog and where families stop for a bucolic lunch with their backs against the olive trees that they have spent all morning beating with sticks to collect the crop. One fills supermarket shelves with cheap and accessible product and the other produces the high value local cheese and specialist olives of more "select" outlets. Both are alive and well, both have their place.

There was lots more too, it was a short book, fewer than 200 pages, but it was interesting given our situation. I suppose less so to someone enjoying the 3am traffic jams in Madrid. Well, according to one of the possible candidates for Mayor of Madrid that's one of the things that Madrileños enjoy.

Horny handed sons and daughters of toil

There are all sizes of tractors. Probably the most common around here are really old, really beaten up and quite small tractors. Think of a tractor the size of a 1950s Massey Ferguson, the sort of tractor Peter Rabbit's Mr. McGregor would have, if he'd had a tractor. They use them in the vineyards where there is just about space for them to manoeuvre, they use them to haul trailers full of grapes to the local bodega, they use them for the almonds and to go to the bar. A couple of days ago four big tractors roared past the front of our house followed by a medium sized tractor hauling a trailer. They were going to pick almonds. I know because the tractors each had one of the umbrella like nets at the back which are fastened around the tree trunk whilst the tree is given a good shaking. Sherlock Holmes wise I could also deduce that they may well be picking almonds because, when I passed the industrial estate the other day, I could hear the machines working and see the mountains of almond shells in the yard. Oh, and when we were eating outside the village hall on Sunday a tractor and trailer rig went by and nearly everybody there shouted encouragement to the farmer. I could see almonds in the trailer.

Pinoso is rural, it's surrounded by lots of small villages and by vineyards, wheat fields, almond and olive groves and goodness knows what else. And that's the thing. Those people in the village, at the meal, who urged the farmer on, knew what he was harvesting and my guess is that they usually know what's been harvested because they have friends or family involved. I don't. Some things are obvious, the grapes for instance, and maybe peaches or cherries but there are plenty of fields with green things in them. They could be artichokes or peas or peppers or melons or potatoes or onions or aubergines. I may be able to tell close up but I can't guess from as I see the workers stooped over, picking by hand, or the tractors going to and fro.

We have farmers as a near neighbours. They have plenty of kit, sometimes though, for things like big combines or the mechanised grape picking, they hire it in. They work all hours. They work the fields under artificial light quite often. Yesterday evening a tractor started ploughing up the field, which has been fallow for three or four years, directly opposite our house. They finished, I think, though to be honest I'd stopped paying much attention to the noise by then, around 10pm. I'd suspect they stopped to go home for the evening meal. They started again well before first light, around 4.30am.

But why have they ploughed up the field and why was it so urgent? I don't like not knowing that sort of thing.

ปลาออกจากน้ำ

There was an advert when we went to the cinema this afternoon for Coca Cola. It is about the people responsible for the success of Coke in Spain over the past 65 years. The funny thing in watching it was just how "Spanish" it looked. There is, for instance, a shot of a door with a polished aluminium door knob. The wood veneer, the colours, everything looks, and is, Spanish. It's the same with the men walking up the road in their fluorescent and grey overalls. I've seen those very same blokes getting the set meal in scores of restaurants in Spain. I've opened that door.

So how did those Coca Cola people make the advert look so Spain? After all we live in Spain but I don't think that anyone could argue that our microcosm represents the totality of Spain.

The very first time I went to Madrid I wasn't that impressed. There didn't seem to be anything notable in the Coliseum or Eiffel Tower "must see" mould. There were plenty of interesting buildings, squares, places and palaces but it was like being in New York and finding that the best they had to offer was the New York Federal Reserve’s Gold Vault. Very nice but hardly the Empire State. It was August to be fair and Madrid used to more or less close down in August. It was hot too. Very hot. I spent a fortune on trying to keep from dying of thirst.

I don't think the same about Madrid nowadays. I find something to stare at on every corner. I know the city a little better, partly because Maggie used to live there at the start of the nineties and, as an inhabitant, she stopped being as interested in just the Prado or the Plaza Mayor and started to know those hidden corners that locals know - the place for the best fried egg sandwiches at 3am, the best free music venues and which metro route to use to avoid long walks as she moved from one line to another. We've also been there a lot of times now but, even then, my knowledge is very superficial. In some ways my knowledge of Madrid is a bit like my knowledge of London - I know Bush House as well as Marble Arch and I can vaguely navigate from Shaftesbury Avenue to the ICA but it's a generalised and incomplete knowledge that sometimes fails spectacularly. "What's that building there?" I asked Maggie. A minute later, when we realised that we were almost in Colón, I knew it was the National Library but to that point I hadn't even recognised Recoletos.

In my youth I had a period living in or close to London. The excitement was tempered by the inconveniences. Travelling the Tube at rush hour and marvelling at people who could read a broadsheet newspaper given the crowds is interesting to someone heading for a job interview but it's a pain in the kidneys when you have to do it day after day surrounded by people with scant regard for personal hygiene. When I go to Madrid I'm usually there for a few days. I'm a tourist who recognises the similarities and the differences to the place I live. The number of people, the hustle and bustle is great, at times, and at others it's suffocating. We were somewhere on Alcalá looking for a gallery that I'd heard about on a radio programme and the number of people, blinded by their mobile phones, who kept crashing into me tried my patience. But there aren't any galleries loaded with Goyas, Tapies and Reubens in Pinoso so I suppose it's a choice; quiet streets or something to see.

There are differences too of a more prosaic nature. We went to a Thai restaurant. One of those that gets an honourable mention in the Michelin guide without getting a star. I don't actually know much about Thai food but I'm pretty sure that Thai is commonplace in the UK. The sort of thing you can get in packets from Tesco's as well as in plenty of high street restaurants. My impression is that it's not the same in Spain. Not that it's scientific or anything but I just Googled Thai restaurants in Murcia city, the seventh largest city in Spain, and Trip Advisor came up with just three. The Madrid restaurant had a table for us even though they were busy. We decided on the tasting menu but lots of people just had a main, or a starter and a main, with a drink and then cleared off. There were other tourists but, if I were guessing, I would say that most of the people eating there were on a lunch break and in a hurry.

A couple of things strike me about my hypotheses. One is that there were sufficient Madrileños in this one district willing and happy to eat Thai food often enough to keep an ordinary sort of restaurant in business - nothing like reluctance to stray away from traditional food common around here. The second was that, if I were right about the lunch break, then the model of a day split in half by a two or three hour break, which is alive and well near us, is losing ground in the city to the intensive day, the "nine to five" with a lunch break, of Swedes, Germans and Britons.

So, we saw the Pat Metheny concert in Madrid, we ate Thai, we went to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, we saw a Brassai exhibition and we rode around on the Metro, we went up the Faro de Moncloa. In Atocha, we caught the train in a station full of smoothie stalls, sushi bars and vegetarian cafes but when a few of us got off the train in Villena, in the gentle warmth of the Alicantino evening, with the aroma of the vineyards wafting around us I thought it was nice to be home.

Take me home, country roads

Every now and then I get an email from Abraza la tierra, Embrace the Land. It's usually a business opportunity or a job in some rural part of Spain. They are normally good offers - businesses subsidised by town halls, free accommodation, maybe with tantalising offers for families who have young, school saving, children. It's a while since I've looked at their website but I presume that they are a platform for rural development initiatives. You know the sort of thing - access to infrastructure in the countryside, innovative solutions to the everyday challenges of rural life.

I listened to some programme on the radio about rural development in Spain. One of the interviewees said that he wished Spain were as go ahead as the Scottish Highlands and Islands. I smiled at that because I remembered being in Inchnadamph, in the 1970s, and how impressed I was with the lateral thinking that had replaced the post office van with a minibus that transported both post and people. Well that and the horizontal rainfall. I'm sure there are similar initiatives here but I've never noticed them.

Much of Spain is empty. There are lots of stories of someone, or some organisation, buying up a deserted village in Huesca or Guadalajara to turn it into a religious retreat or an English teaching village. A novel about the last inhabitant of a village in the high Pyrenees became a Spanish best seller and there is, generally, a bit of an industry built around rural nostalgia and family roots in the land. Apparently, of the 8,000 municipalities that make up Spain, over 1200 have fewer than 100 inhabitants on the municipal roll. I bumped into a blog where a chap goes around "bagging" empty, abandoned, villages. His list included one in Alicante and four in Murcia. Of course most Spaniards, something like 80%, live in the big metropolitan areas and along the coast.

We live in the countryside but it's not an isolated countryside. For one thing Alicante apparently has a strange population distribution in relation to most of Spain. The normal model is towns and villages with countryside in between. In Alicante there are the usual towns and the villages but there are also houses dotted all around the countryside. Maggie commented on the number of lights twinkling out as we drove back from Petrer the other night. I was once told that this pattern is to do with the Moors having introduced irrigation into the countryside around here which allowed homesteads to be more scattered. I don't see how that would make any real difference but I thought I'd mention it in case my informant was correct.

In our own case, in Pinoso or Culebrón, the nearest decent sized town is about 25km away. It's actually two towns that are next to each other, next to each other in the sense that there must be streets that are one town on one side and the other on the other. Elda is the 137th largest town, population wise, in Spain and Petrel (Petrer in Valenciano) the 212th most populous. If they were as administratively combined as they are geographically they would have a total population of a bit over 87,000 people and be the 74th largest town in Spain. Similarly sized places in the UK are Burnley and Stevenage which, by comparison, come in as around the 275th largest towns.

The other day one of my Facebook friends posted a video. I suspect he may have just bought a new dash-cam for his motor because the video was of an empty motorway. The near deserted inter urban roads are definitely one of the joys of life in inland Alicante and Murcia. I once managed to come the 35km from Jumilla to Pinoso without passing a single car outside of the town limits.

Just this week we finally got around to buying an Amazon Fire Stick and a Netflix subscription. I'm still not quite sure why. I have more than enough TV available with the traditional broadcasters but, I suppose, some of it is proving that we are still able to adapt to change. It also shows that despite our rural location we're definitely on the digital superhighway!

The morning after we'd installed the Fire Stick I got an email from Abraza la tierra with information about taking over a bar-restaurant and teleclub in Guadalaviar in Teruel. Population 245. Weak as my Spanish is I could translate that. Tele in Spanish is telly in English and club in Spanish is club in English (though beware of the clubs with bright lights outside towns unless you're looking for expensive sparkling wine and female company).

Teleclubs flourished in rural Spain in the 1960s when people were still not rich enough to buy their own set - the teleclubs were often social centres as well and the Francoist State liked them because it was somewhere else where the propagandist NoDo newsreels could be shown. But surely there can't still be people without telly even in darkest, deepest Spain? It turns out of course that they are just a name, a nostalgic name for some, for a communal meeting space. I found mentions of them in Palencia, Lanzarote, Salamanca and, obviously enough, Teruel, without doing more than type the search clue into Google. I remember our pal Pepa told us about the tiendas multiservicios - the multiservice shops around her in Teruel province. The key element there was that a shop offered the basics along with a range of other community things, a bar, maybe a restaurant, post office services, internet access etc., etc.

I wasn't tempted to run the teleclub in Guadalaviar but if you are you have till February 1st to get your offer in.

Routine

There was nothing on at the cinema. We often go on Wednesday, its the cheap day, just 4.20€. I'd have gone to see a Spanish film but Maggie wasn't keen so I had a beer, some double hopped Mahou, and settled in for the evening,

Nothing much on the telly either. Not on the Spanish telly anyway. So we were watching Lewis, dependable sort of telly. The adverts came on and I disappeared to find something to eat in the kitchen. I was surprised by how quickly the adverts were over. Shorter and more often on British TV. Seven minutes and we'll be back is standard on Spanish.

There's been a fair bit of UK election coverage on Spanish radio and TV. Britain has featured a lot with the people killed at Borough Market and the Spanish skateboarder not identified for days. On the 3.0 clock news there were shots of the various party leaders making their vote - UKIP, The Greens, LibDems - I didn't know any of them.

I'm working hard hardly working at the moment. I decided I had time to replace my contact lenses. The last set are probably a bit long in the tooth now. I think I got them in Cartagena, in 2012. It must be the fourth or fifth time I've gone through the process of an eye test - mejor, peor, parecido - better, worse, similiar.

I was in Consum, the supermarket, I planned my route through the aisles - bread, tea, cat food, meat, gazpacho, ham, veg, checkout. Not a wrong turn. Critical path analysis.

When I decided on a light lunch and was buying the stuff I bought some of that nice sheep's milk cheese, the cured ham of course, a carton of gazpacho, some olives and oil roasted peanuts in their skins - plenty of other stuff too - I cheaped out on the cold cuts - el Pozo.

Emails back and forth to Iberdrola about our power supply. They're going to put in a smart meter so I need to regularise our position a bit. All of the online calculators tell me I can get away with a miserable 3.75Kw supply which I don't quite believe but, if we can, then it saves getting a new boletín - a certificate to say that our wiring is up to a larger load.

Quiet afternoon. I felt I really should start planning the intensive course for July. Speaking exercises, grammar, a bit of pronunciation, was I going to use a text book? - the PET exams from the 2016 download. I tap, tap tapped it onto my lesson planning form. I've planned a lot of B1 courses.

Watering the garden from the aljibe, the big rainwater tank that we have in the back patio. The submerged electric pump that we inherited with the house is still going strong. I said hello to the neighbour as he threw some stuff into the communal bin just beyond our fence. I took our recyclable stuff to the bins in the village this morning.

The sky has been blue all day and the sun has shone. Just before I typed this we were sitting at the back of the house watching the sun go down. 9.30 ish and it's twilight. Not much traffic on the CV83, very tranquil. Nice view over towards the Sierra de Salinas. The cats were keeping us company.

All very routine, all very ordinary. Very much home.

Pine processionary caterpillars

Our visitors often ask us about snakes. We set their minds at rest. A few ask about scorpions and dangerous spiders. We reassure them about those too but nobody has ever asked us the much more pertinent question as to whether we have problems with caterpillars.

Caterpillars are not usually perceived as a threat but processionary ( the English word is actually processional but everyone uses the Spanish word adapted to sound English) caterpillars can cause problems to humans who tangle with them. Dogs, which tend to sniff and paw things they come across can get into big trouble. Cats don't usually have problems with the caterpillars because they are supremely indifferent to any life form that doesn't feed them.

The pine processionary moth usually flies around May to July and only lives for a day or so. On that day the moths have to get busy. They have to mate and the successful females then lay around three hundred tiny eggs usually in the foliage of  pine trees though some firs and cedars are also targets. Just so I don't have to keep repeating tree types we'll pretend they only live in pines. The eggs take about a month to hatch.

Once hatched, the tiny caterpillars start to eat the pine leaves. Over time they pass through five growth stages which are technically referred to as instars. The caterpillars strip the leaves or needles from the trees but usually the foliage grows back. At each instar the beasts moult a skin and increase in size. At the third moult these gregarious little caterpillars build a nest which looks a lot like spun white candyfloss in the branches of the pine trees. At the fifth and last instar, which is usually sometime between February and April, the caterpillars come out of the tree and search for a place to pupate. This year, with the much warmer winter, they are already on the move and there are more of them because fewer have been killed by cold and frost.

When they leave the tree they do so in a long line. A neighbour, who came to warn me that the caterpillars were on the move told me that she'd seen or heard of a line that was five metres long. There are lots of Internet photos of caterpillars which have been easily persuaded to form circles which just go round and round and round. In this processionary stage each caterpillar follows a scent produced in the stomach of the caterpillar in front. None of the websites I read explained what drives the caterpillar at the head of the line! To digress slightly I heard a news story recently which explained that the way the caterpillars maintain a constant speed can be taught to drivers as a way of stopping the formation of traffic jams.

Eventually, when the caterpillars find a good place to dig a burrow underground where they can pupate, the line will disperse. While the beasts are on the move they can be a danger to humans and other animals. It's the hairs on the caterpillars that cause the problems. If the caterpillar feels under threat they can eject both a tiny cloud of toxins and little toxin loaded hairs which are harpoon like and stick to flesh really well.

In humans this toxin usually leads to unpleasant and very painful rashes and eye irritation which can last for several weeks. Dogs sniff the caterpillars, maybe they bat them around with their paw. The frightened caterpillar releases hairs which stick to the dogs nose or tongue. The dog licks at its paw. In turn the dog's tongue will become irritated, sometimes so much so, that they have to be amputated to prevent sepsis and necrosis - infection and gangrene. Some dogs have such a severe reaction to the poisons that they die through kidney failure.

I know that most people around here go hunting for the nests on or near their land, cut them down and burn them. This advice was repeated on several websites but there were lots of warnings that this could go terribly wrong as tossing a nest onto a roaring fire can be an effective way to spread the little hairs around in the smoke and rising air. A couple of websites suggested drenching the nests with water first as even the loose hairs are loaded with the toxin.

There do seem to be lots of methods for dealing with the caterpillars at almost every stage but I suspect that many of them are not particularly effective. One I read about several times was to break the nests particularly in cold spells so that the caterpillars die of cold without the protection of the warming cocoon. Several of those websites suggested that for the out of reach nests a good blast of light shotgun pellets would do the job!

There are pheromone traps to attract the males - the lads go looking for a bit of hanky panky but end up trapped. The girls have to do without. Result no eggs. Then there are several "traditional" insecticides which have to be applied in the autumn. The treatment that seems to be most in line with current thinking and, apparently works well, involves using bacteria. There are a couple of effective processes. One interrupts the life cycle of the caterpillar whilst the other poisons their food.  Oh, I nearly forgot, there's another method that seems eminently sensible. That's to put a physical barrier in the way, the main basic design seems to be like a cone or envelope which the caterpillars walk into but then can't escape from (though I'm not sure why). Another one was simply to put a walled moat around the base of the affected trees using flexible plastic in which the caterpillars drown.

Blue tits and other tits apparently love to eat the caterpillars so a longer term solution my be to attract birds to breed nearby.

The information about who to turn to for help was very contradictory. It seems that some town halls will send people to remove the nests. There were also lots of adverts for commercial firms very happy to remove the nests and caterpillars for you - at a price. I saw it suggested several times that Seprona, the environmental arm of the Guardia Civil, has a statutory responsibility to destroy the nests but there was nothing on the Sepona website that I could find to confirm that. If you want to give it a try the Seprona number is 062.

Otherwise the best advice may be to stay away from pine trees for a while!

In the city

Pinoso doesn't have traffic lights and parking is free. In Culebrón we don't have much tarmac let alone street names.

Yesterday I went for a job interview in Murcia. I hadn't been looking for a new job it's just that a job website I'm signed up to sends me offers matched against keywords. From time to time I apply for something that looks interesting. Like being a tourist guide. But jobs are in short supply in Spain at the moment and I never get any sort of response. There's no effort to applying though, just push a button and my CV wings its way to wherever. I never bother with a covering letter. I'm not expecting to get an interview so I don't put any effort into the process. There was effort in writing the original CV of course and every now and then I update it but it's low maintenance.

So the surprise was that the firm came straight back to me after one of these occasional button pushes. It was for English teaching of course. The only job where my faltering Spanish is not a handicap. The advantage to me in changing jobs is mainly financial. I am, technically, self employed and taking advantage of a reduced rate, for startup businesses, of Seguridad Social which is a lot like the UK's National Insurance. Even then, by UK standards, this reduced rate is startlingly high. It's a fixed minimum and I'm paying 153€ per month at the moment which will go up to around 210€ in November and six months later it will reach its final level of 263€. Quite a whack out of my part time earnings; 30% of my gross and if I add in my tax the total in stoppages is something like 38%. The new job offered a simple, straightforward contract. I would become an employee again.

The interview was fine. They offered me a job. After a lot of indecision and a lot of sums about diesel costs, hours worked and stoppages paid I said yes. The job wasn't actually in Murcia as I expected but in a much smaller town called Cieza. I think I will be working principally as a language assistant to youngsters doing vocational courses which sounds both interesting and organised.

So, back to the point.  I had to go to Murcia. I don't mind driving anywhere but one of the joys of rural Spain, and lots of it is rural, is the roads. They are not busy. But Murcia City isn't rural - it's a real city. The centre is encircled by a giggle gaggle of intersecting motorways and out of town shopping centres. Once onto the ordinary streets it's roundabouts, traffic lights, five lanes of traffic, cars jockeying for position, bus lanes etc. Normal town stuff but always a bit of a change after Pinoso.

The interview was in the centre of town and I parked in an underground car park. When I drove out to come home it was lunchtime. I had the SatNav thingy on which tells me how many metres it is to the next rounadout or junction. It took me 20 minutes to cover the 700 metres that got me onto a relatively free flowing road heading out of town. I have a similar story about Victoria Station to the Wellington Arch but that story involves a Routemaster bus and over an hour.

Anyway, I drove over to Cieza just to have a look. I parked in the main street without any problem and without any payment. The town seemed nicer than I remebered, a bit prettier. The drive home along the N344, bits of the almost deserted A33 motorway and the RM427/CV83 was a pleasure. Not a traffic light or a bus lane in sight.

It was nice in town, the hustle and bustle, all those shops and people. I went to see a temporary Goya exhibition. We don't get a lot of Goya in Pinoso but, on balance, I quite like small town life. And I'm not far from plenty of 200,000 plus cities should the need for a bit of traffic overcome me.

Stone built

Culebrón is a part of Pinoso. Pinoso is a part of the province of Alicante but Pinoso, like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, is a frontier town. There are no adverts for Viagra here but there are different languages and different holidays. Even if it's only with Abanilla, Jumilla and Yecla there is definitely a border, the border with Murcia Region.

We have plenty of hills of our own in Alicante. Looking North from our front garden we have the Sierra de Salinas (1238m/4061ft) and the Sierra de Xirivell (810m/2657ft) is to the South. Indeed the garden itself is at about 605m/1984ft but over the border, into Murcia, the Sierra del Carche is higher still at 1372 metres or 4,500 feet. Maggie has tried to get us to the top a couple of times before but today we finally made it. To the very top, to the geodesic point. Admittedly we didn't walk, we went in a little four by four, but we got to the top.

It was pretty crowded and very cosmopolitan at the top of el Carche. There was a Swiss man with Argentinian, Mexican and Belgian clients for his parascending "course." Down the road a chap, probably Ukranian, was assembling his hang glider before hurling himself into the void. There were two Spanish cyclists and I think the chap on the scrambling bike was Spanish too. Then there were four Britons.

On the way up we stopped off at a Pozo de Nieve, a snow cave built in the XVIIth Century. Before the advent of fridges and ice making machines people built these big holes in the ground, lined them with stone walls, well over a metre thick, and used them to store ice. The one we saw today apparently goes down twelve metres though, as the conical roof has now caved in, it's a little shallower than it was. It sounds as though ice was big business at the end of the XVIIIth Century. For instance, Valencia, the city, used two million kilos of the stuff each year. The ice was used mainly for medical procedures, principally to bring down fevers. Ice was even exported from the port of Alicante to Ibiza and the North of Africa.

The caves worked like this. In Spring, when it was reckoned no more snow would fall on the high mountains, men would climb to the high slopes, dig up the snow and take it to one of the pozos where it was compacted to form ice. It must have been cold, hard work without modern tools or fabrics and wearing esparto sandals! When the well was full they would cover the ice with earth, vegetation and timber. In summer the men would return to the ice wells, cut the ice into blocks and transport it, by night, on the backs of mules and donkeys, to the nearest large town where it was sold.  I heard something on the radio about sthe research done on this commercialisation of ice and snow caves. The researchers explained how, in some places, there were chains of snow caves which allowed the hauliers to work in relays and so move the ice more quickly down to lower ground.

Whilst we are on stone constructions I thought I'd mention cucos which are stone built sheds. They were built principally as shelters for shepherds and herders moving livestock along the cañadas, the drovers pathes, that criss cross Spain. The cañadas were introduced by legislation written in the reign of Alfonso X in the XIIIth Century so the cucos have been around a long time too.

A few things that crossed my mind when I was trying to think of a blog entry

It stopped being cold in our house a few weeks ago now. I forget quite when but suddenly we weren't using the gas heaters, I started to pad around the tiled floors in bare feet as I got up in the morning. Winter was gone and there were flowers in the garden. Last week, I think, it was warm - a few days in the 30ºC bracket. I folded up my pullovers. That turned out to be a bit premature. I've needed a woolly the last couple of days.

I was just about to go to work, Maggie was on her way home after work. We were together. We decided a quick snack was in order. We chose a roadside bar café that we haven't been in for years. It was a mistake. It was scruffy, barn like, dark and a bit dirty. Nonetheless we sat at the bar, ordered a drink and surveyed the tapas in the little glass display cases. Lots of them looked like food left on the plates piled up by the side of the sink after a good meal; perfectly nice when freshly prepared but well past their best now. We ordered a sandwich instead but as I ate and surveyed the sad looking tapas their aspect began to lose ground to their potential taste. I wondered about ordering something. I didn't, but I nearly did.

I work in Fortuna, It's a small forgotten town, or maybe a village, in Murcia. Litter blows around the streets of Fortuna. The traffic misbehaves. Dogs, or dog keepers, misbehave. Our local town is Pinoso. it's a small forgotten town, or maybe a village, in Alicante. I have always thought of Pinoso as just another no mark town, the one I happened to end up in. I now realise we fell lucky. It's a clean, inexpensive, well organised, little place.

The election campaign this time has been odd. Not that odd but not exactly to formula. There have been lots of leaked news stories that have affected big candidates as usual but there are new names all over the place touted as possible victors. The clever money is on the collapse of the two party hegemony. At least two of the "important" high profile politicians don't have a manifesto to speak of. They think it's not important. Policy isn't the thing this time it's who you trust.

In our own local elections I went to an election meeting where they had no manifesto either. It'll be out tomorrow I was told. It's well past tomorrow now but I haven't been able to find one. I have to confess that my search has been a bit half hearted. Working, as I do, till around 9pm I've found it difficult to get to any of the meetings but the publicity about when and where they are taking place has been a bit thin on the ground anyway.

Still on the elections I was surprised to hear a very partisan interview on the town radio yesterday where the interviewer fed one of the candidates the questions he wanted. "Words of wisdom" commented the interviewer after one response. The interviewer is one of the candidates for the same party as the interviewee. I stood up for him in the social media when his candidature was announced.

The elections are on the streets though. We were having a drink. When only one other table was occupied we could hear its occupants making their predictions for the vote. A second table was occupied later. They talked about the elctions too - they had clear views on some of the candidates. "I'm not telling you who I'm voting for," said the female to the male partner, "it's a secret vote."

Apparently it's the fiftieth anniversary of the European flag - the one with the yellow stars on the blue background. I was, as so often, listening to the radio and some chap was talking about the flag's anniversary. We fly the flag a lot in Spain he said, the same in Italy. In Britain they hardly ever fly the European Union flag because of their feelings towards Europe.

It was International Museum Day, IMD, this week. In Cartagena, where we used to live, the Night of the Museums was a huge and joyous family event with the museums open for free till 2am, on a Saturday evening nearest to IMD and all sorts of street events alongside. I wondered if there was anything happening close to Culebrón this year as Cartagena is a fair distance away. There were 138 events listed for Spain and another 295 for the rest of Europe though the nearest to us was some 40km away. Out of curiosity I wondered who was doing what in the UK. At first I couldn't find anyone but, with a bit of probing, I found that the Auckland Castle Museum and the Thackray Medical Museum were doing their bit.

I am reminded of the oft quoted headline, puportedly from the Daily Mirror in 1930. Fog in Channel Continent Cut Off.

The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable

Coming in to Huntingdon, past Samuel Pepys place, alongside Hinchingbrooke I was amazed by the number of bunnies hopping around. Millions of the little blighters. Where we live now is much more rural than Huntingdon but I see far less wildlife. Rabbits and more particularly hares are our most frequent sighting but I'm talking one at a time not hordes of them. Lots of people tell us stories of wild boar and one pal was even attacked by one. I've only ever seen them on a game reserve in Andalucia. Although I know foxes, badgers, snakes, hedgehogs, squirrels, mice, stoats and the like are all there I hardly ever see them except as road kill. We have plenty of birds too but I don't see the soaring birds of prey that were so common in Salamanca or the game birds that were always attempting to commit hari kari under the wheels of my car in the wilds of Cambridgeshire.

Hunting though is enormous in Spain. Some weekends, presumably as hunting season opens on some poor species, the sounds of rifles and shotguns in the hills behind our house is more or less non stop. I know lots of dog owners who complain that their dogs cannot be taken off the lead because they are soon challenged by some angry farmer keen to protect nesting game birds or whatever and so protect their sales of hunting licences. Searching in Google for some information I needed for this post I found hundreds of websites offering hunting holidays particularly for big animals. There were, to me, some really sickening pictures of what seemed to be a succession of overweight red faced blokes with the regulation beige waistcoat grinning from ear to ear as they tugged on the horns of some glassy eyed beast.

Just at the bottom of our track there is a rectangular metal sign divided into black and white triangles by a diagonal line. For years I've known that these signs mark the boundary of a hunting area but that was the limit of my knowledge. The other day, when we were walking by one of the larger signs I noticed, for the first time, that it had a little metal tag attached a bit like the old chassis numbers on cars. I wondered what it was so I asked Google and hence this post. The tag plate apparently refers to the local government licence held by the owners of the hunting rights.

It seems there are all sorts of hunting licences available. For instance there is one called coto social de caza, social hunting grounds, which are not singles clubs but places which are designed  for poorer hunters who can't afford the cost of joining a hunting club with high fees. The licences to hunt are allocated to small groups by ballot and hunting is only allowed in these areas on Sundays and holidays. Cotos locales seem to be hunting grounds operated by farmers associations or other community groups and there are cotos privados too which are private hunting land reserved for members. Fortunately for the beasts, there are a range of areas where some species at least are protected or they are protected under certain circumstances. To be honest I got really bored reading the various rules and regulations and decided to stick with less accurate generalisation.

Those black and white signs are there to warn people. Legislation seems to vary from community to community but basically you have to put up a bigger sign which says what sort of hunting area it is and then smaller repeating signs. The big signs have to be at any obvious access point to hunting land and never more than 600 metres apart whilst the smaller signs have to be repeated at least every 100 metres. The idea is that, standing in front of one of them, you should be able to see the next sign in either direction. The repeating signs can also be painted onto handy things like rock crop outs or fence posts as long as the letters are greater than a specified size.

One thing that struck me, as I waded through the legalese of the placement of these signs, was that, as well as the signs for hunting areas, there were several to control hunting in one form or another. Whilst I realise that anywhere that doesn't have a hunting sign is, by default, a safe place for the wildlife it struck me how few of the reserve type signs I've seen. On the other hand I've seen thousands of the black and white triangle signs that give people the right to exercise their blood lust.

Luxury

I painted the front door last week. I did an awful job; all runs and dead flies. Maggie and I agreed that it looked better than before though. Anyway it was bucolic, rustic, in keeping with our living situation.

Our electric supply is a bit rural too. When we moved in, we were smart enough to put our cooking and weater heating onto gas. True, we have to lug the gas bottles about but we don't have circuit breakers popping all the time.

The hot water isn't as hot in winter as in summer. Insulation is not common in our part of the world so we were not at all surprised that the water was cooler in the colder months. It had to pass through all that cold earth. We weren't surprised either that the water got hotter more quickly in one bathroom than the others - more cold ground = cooler water for longer.

We've had some lovely weather recently. High 20s and sunny so and I was a bit surprised that the hot water was more like tepid water. Shower time was not a pleasure. Grease stuck obstinately to the cutlery as we washed up. It took us days to decide that it wasn't just rural it was a problem. I tried some home solutions but, eventually, we called Jesús, the plumber. At first he was stumped too. We had water, we had gas, the boiler was lighting up, why was the water not hot enough? He found the fault though, an intermittent fault. He's fixed it now and the water is scalding hot.

It's amazing how luxurious it feels to have hot water.

Hey Mr Beaver

It was quite early, maybe around eight in the morning, but the newsagent in Chatteris was open. I was on my way to some absolutely essential meeting I'm sure. Chatteris is a town in the Cambridgeshire Fens, stories of incest, potato headedness and child swapping abound. Chatteris was not in the fast lane of the (then) 20th Century. A couple of older women were in front of me, they were buying but chatting. After waiting nearly five minutes I asked if I might just have a packet of Hamlet and be gone. I had the correct change, it would be a quick exchange. The woman behind the counter wasn't having any of it and didn't heistate to chide me for my hurry.

On Monday I was in the library cum youth centre in Sax. Six of us were gathered around a table parked at an edge of the big barn like room. We Brits outnumbered the Spaniards two to one. The idea is that it's a sort of group language exchange - I have no idea why we use a room large enough to stage a concert in. My fellow Brits were expounding on a failing of some Spanish system or another - maybe education, maybe good manners. I forget. We often complain about most things in our adopted home. Then one of the Brits said that she had been told, by a Spaniard, that it wasn't fair to judge Spain by what happens "around here."

I know exactly what she means. It wouldn't be fair to extrapolate an impression of the UK from Chatteris or its somewhat prettier rural cousins alone. If you did, and you worked in the film industry for instance, you may have a population that never took its wellies off or lived in half timbered, thatched roof cottages and shopped at family owned supermarkets all the time. Obviously there are no films like that.

I made a little coment on Facebook about Maggie stopping in the middle of the road to greet someone and used it as an example to prove that she was becoming Spanish. Marilo came back to say that she really was Spanish and she would never stop on a zebra crossing to chat with someone. Forgive us, we're country bumpkin Spaniards I replied - we do folk dances. I don't suppose they do a lot of folk dancing in the Palacio neighbourhood of Madrid either. Only the other day when I wrote the form and function blog entry I was thinking that there are some pretty trendy places in Spain, there are first class restaurants, people buy Audi A7s as well as white vans and Internet connections run at 100 Mb in the big cities. When I talk to telesales people there is often a lot of confusion about our address. Their expectation is a street name, building number and maybe flat details. They do not expect some description of a piece of muddy (winter) or dusty (summer) field.up a farm track.

Fortunately though the blog is called Life in Culebrón not Life in Spain

Strong Murciano accents, computers, the naming of parts and the solution close to home

Now I've told you about our palm tree several times. When the tree man failed to turn up last time I did the beetle slaughtering patrol myself. It was hard graft. Nonetheless, the basis for my doing the job every six weeks was there. I had the spray gear it's just that the tree is taller than me even with the spray gun wand in hand - I simply needed a longer reach. With a bit of extra kit I could avoid either having to climb a ladder with 16 litres of insecticide on my back or to coax the tree man into coming to the house.

An internet search had revealed an agricultural supplier in La Palma which seemed to have the tubes, connectors and paraphernalia I needed to gain the necessary height.  I wasn't looking forward to explaining what I needed so when I was able to sneak into the big, empty store I was well pleased. I found the section I was looking for and started to connect this to that like some fetishistic horticultural version of Meccano. I would have soon had a solution without the need to explain myself but someone noticed me and sent a sales assistant to help.

The man had a strong, strong Murciano accent. We had a communication problem. He seemed to be a bit clumsy. He snapped at least one of the connectors as he attempted to engineer a solution. Eventually he thought we had it right. I wasn't so sure mainly because his idea of a three metre extension and mine varied by about one and a half metres. I was in no position to argue and we moved to the cash desk. He couldn't get the computer to work out the bill until someone showed him how to do it.

I went to buy petrol in the same town, in La Palma. I needed a receipt. The man in the petrol station had a strong, strong Murciano accent and he couldn't get the computer to work out the bill either until someone showed him how to do it. Sherlock Holmes like I noticed the pattern.

Back in Culebrón I fastened the whole kit and caboodle together and it nearly reached, it nearly worked but it needed fine tuning. A couple of extra bits. Today I went to one of the farm shops in Pinoso. There I found a specially designed 3.2 metre telescopic spray gun extender. It wasn't cheap but it works perfectly. Excellent I thought. Elementary.

Reaching for the thermals

I'm back in Culebrón for the weekend. Before I left La Unión I checked the State Weather Service to see whether I would need a wooly or not. After all Culebrón is at nearly 600 metres. I was a bit undecided - daytime temperatures have been fine, sunny and clear with maximums of around 27º/28ºC most of the week. Minimums though were a little scary. It got as low as 10ºC on Wednesday and it rained. I decided against a jumper though, I have some in Culebrón anyway, and I stuck to packing T shirts. Mind you, around 7pm this evening I decided it was a bit chilly and I dug out an old cardigan and closed the doors.

It's on the cards. The clocks go back this weekend. It'll be dark around 7pm and we can look forward to a gradual worsening until the depths of December when it will be dark by 6pm.

As I was driving to work the other morning I realised that trees were shedding their leaves and as I sat outside a bar the other morning around 9am I wished I'd chosen a long sleeved shirt to start the day. It brightened up of course and got warm as the day progressed but there is no doubt that summer is beginning to fade.

Who knows, maybe it'll rain before long. I haven't seen any yet in my two months in La Unión but the garden here shows signs of that Wednesday rain.

Welcomed into the bosom of our adopted family

I'm not much of a dancer. I don't care for it anyway but then I hurt my hip dancing in 1973 so there was a bit of a hiatus till I tried it again. That must have been the mid 90s. I hurt myself again then though I can't really blame the dancing. I was so drunk that I was a tad unsteady and I cracked my head on the wall when I was in the urinal. I didn't notice at the time but Maggie was apparently put off dancing by the trickle of blood running down my forehead. Anyway I don't dance.

So last night at around 2am I was the only person left seated at the big long table where we'd just eaten. Several people tried to persuade me to dance. I said no, I always say no. Looking at my actions from the outside I must be a bit of a party pooper. I never dance, never sing, never get involved in the hilarious games. Stand offish. I'm better when I've been drinking but I had to drive last night so there was no liquid help to hand.

The events leading up to the non dancing were odd. Last year as we wandered the Pinoso Fiesta we saw hundreds of people having a meal in the car park next to the Town Hall. It looked like good fun. So, this year when I read somewhere that to go to the Cena de Convivencia, something like the Living Together Dinner, you had to register at the Town Hall for a seat that's just what we did. At the time we were told that we had to provide our own food. Fair enough we thought, a late night picnic.

One of the leading lights in the Culebrón village hierarchy is a young woman called Elena. She works on the local radio and, if I understood what she told me correctly, she was reading out, on air, the names of the people going to the Cena and she saw our names there. It turns out, and we didn't understand this at all when we booked up, that the dinner exists principally for the groups that participate in the floral offering which takes place earlier on the same evening.

By sheer chance Elena saw our lone names and invited us to join her and a few other people we knew. At this point we were still under the impression that it was individuals, or groups of chums, taking the meal together. So began a series of WhatsApp messages as I tried to wrest the information from Elena about our part in the jollities. Pretty early we learned that the key element the food was going to come from a local roast chicken takeaway but in lots of ways we were still completely in the dark. When and where exactly would we meet, did we need to take plates and glasses, how was the food being bought, did we need starters, puddings or drinks to accompany the meal? In an English way I wanted full chapter and verse and in a Spanish way it was all in hand because it would be "as always."

It is ages since I have felt quite so confused about what was going on. My WhatsApp messages used lots of words like confused, lost and foreigners.

On the night of course it ran like clockwork. The villagers had everything under control. We were directed to the appropriate seats to make sure we weren't left out of anything. Maggie joined in without any problem. She was grinning, chatting and dancing.

Of course I wasn't dancing, I'm so old that my tenuous grip on the Spanish slipped away as the multidirectional conversation had to be shouted above the noise of the live band providing the dance music. Not much chatting then but I did do my best to grin.

 "Now you don't feel so lost, do you?" said Elena to Maggie.

Coming to get us

I'm that sort of age.The heart attack, the stroke. Despite our best efforts an exploding gas bottle could leave one or both of us bleeding amongst the tattered ruins of the house. Maybe just a flood or a forest fire. Whatever the reason we might need the emergency services.

Now our address is nothing more than a number and the name of the village. As it happens we're on the edge of the village. A bit difficult to find. You just ask any of the courier services who occasionally try to deliver packets to us. We inevitably end up meeting them outside the local restaurant.

Back to that heart attack - time is of the essence. The paramedics going this way and that searching for the house. The house ablaze - the fire crew scanning the countryside for smoke.

The local police had a simple but brilliant idea. They asked anyone who lived anywhere out of the way to register with them. They came to the house and logged the GPS position. What we didn't realise was that as a part of this process they then allocated a simple code to the house. Provided we are able to use a phone all we have to do is ring the emergency number, give them our reference number and they can dispatch the appropriate emergency team to accurate GPS co-ordinates.

We did this ages ago but we weren't around when the majority of the information cards with the code were handed out. In fact it was purely by chance that we found out there were cards. I suppose I thought that simply being on the register was enough.

So today I popped into the local police station to collect our card. We were on the system OK but the officer I talked to didn't know where the actual card was. "Can't I just have the code?" I said. Of course not. I have to go back for the official card.

I hope they can find the house, if the time comes, more effectively than the card.

Venta Viña P

All over Spain, at the side of the road, there are places called ventas. From the outside they just look like restaurants or bars but, as the word venta is related to sales and selling I wondered if, traditionally, they were a bit like roadside inns cum general stores. Ventas get a mention in el Quijote, Don Quixote in English, and in the Richard Ford travel books so they must have been around for quite a while. I imagined farmers buying their seeds and tools there whilst they drank large quantities of rough wine.

My thinking was conditioned by the traditional difference between English inns and taverns. As I recall, technically, an inn is a place to stay, drink and eat whilst a tavern is a place to drink and eat. It's a distiction that's long gone of course. I thought it was probably something similar with ventas. But the definitive Spanish dictionary says simply of ventas: a posada established by the side of the road to put up travellers. For posada it says a place to put up travellers. The only difference then is that a venta is, traditionally, out in the countryside and not in a centre of population.

I went in a venta today for the first time. It was certainly away from a centre of population.

Feeling at home

We went to see our pal Pepa this weekend. She has a Casa Rural up in Teruel in a place called Fuentes de Rubielos.

I never quite know how to translate casa rural - rural house isn't right and although I always tell my students to use country cottage that doesn't really convey the same idea. It's somewhere people rent for a holiday and it's usually in the middle of the countryside. Anyway Pepa owns one. There are tens of them in Fuentes de Rubielos and hundreds in this part of Teruel province, part of the ancient Kingdom of Aragon. I've always thought staying in a casa rural would be the perfect recipe for getting bored in 24 hours - reading is great but it can also become a chore and how many times can you walk up a hill for entertainment? Pepa surprised me by saying that there are all sorts of activities on offer for people who stay in the houses - bird watching, astronomy, furniture making, canyon running and a recent addition - first you hunt out your truffles and then you cook with them. Teruel is famous for ham - I wonder if it's pig and tourist in perfect harmony sniffing out subterranean mushrooms?

Fuentes is called Fuentes because on every corner there is a drinking fountain, horse trough or open air wash house - something powered by water flowing down the hill and all described as fuentes in Spanish. There is also a rather more sophisticated stretch of water which is the municipal swimming pool. Every year the local town hall auctions the right to run the pool for the summer months. For the second year in a row three young woman won the contract. They do a splendid job running a bar alongside the pool. They're a bit alternative - baggy harem pants and tied back hair. They produce snack food which is pretty unusual for Spain - couscous, Greek salad, hummus - light, tasty stuff with enough Spanishness not to put the Spanish off but different enough to be interesting.

I've just been looking for more information about the pool. I expected it to feature on websites because Fuentes is full of people who are a bit "hippy" - felt hats, non standard hairstyles and clothes that don't come from chain stores. My guess is that they are all computer wizards, have an allotment outside the back door of a house powered by a mix of small hydro-electric plants, chicken droppings and photovoltaic panels. They hang around the bar so I presumed they would have done a webpage for their chums at the pool by now. If they have I can't find it. Nice to know that when you don't want to read or walk or hunt for truffles there is still alcohol and food to be had.

We went for a walk of course. We went to see one of the now abandoned masías which is nothing more than a family farm at some distance from the main village. We passed one of the ermitas, hermitage in English, but really a sort of rural chapel that gets occasional use for local religious processions or feast days and maybe the odd wedding. We passed several of the multiservicios - a multi-use community space. There is a multiservicio in Fuentes so that means there are two bars to choose from. We strolled through villages where nothing stirred and the only sounds were of things creaking in the sun. There were people in the bars though and it was noticeable that there were bars. Food smells wafted from open windows.

Sitting in Pepa's house we had several reminders that we weren't in our own home. We couldn't get a decent cup of tea. She had thousands of varieties of fruit teas and infusions but nothing like council house tea. Anyway she had no milk - she had soya milk and an even stranger milk substitute made from oats. It's not the first Spanish house I've been in without milk or tea. Coffee was awkward too. Hot drinks at home are a bit unusual. Different traditions. She did have a frying pan though that she keeps specifically for when she cooks tortilla - the Spanish potato omelette - she says it's a necessary expense to stop the tortilla from sticking. She offered us a burger - I think they may have been bought in specially for us. It was easy to see what a strange food it was for her. She served it without any garnish, with the bread on a side plate and with a side dish of fried spring garlic and broad beans. Very McDonalds

Summer exodus

There's an advert on the telly at the moment. The premise of the ad is that, during the summer, everyone abandons the cities and heads for their village. The village that their family hails from. Some poor souls have no village to go to. They are left alone, orphaned, in the deserted cities. So the advert directs you to a website where inhabitants of the idyllic rural villages can nominate their villages as reception centres for the poor lost souls and where city orphans can seek refuge in an adoptive village.

The idea that cities are deserted for the summer isn't quite as far fetched as you may imagine. There is even a phrase in Spanish for the plight of the men left behind to work whilst the family heads for the cooler mountain or beach air- estar de Rodriguez.

Down in Cartagena I needed to park in a part of the city where parking space is normally at a premium but not on Thursday it wasn't. Oh no, it's after San Juan, the children have broken up from school, the exodus to the beach has begun.  It's the beach in Cartagena but as an awful lot of Spain is a long way from the nearest beach people have to make do with anything rural.

Over the past few weeks nearly all of my students have been preparing their summer homes ready for the 10 or 11 weeks they will spend there until the children are back at school. Sometimes the house is theirs but often it's just someone's in the family. Brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandparents all muck in and somehow manage to find enough sleeping space for everyone.

We're back in Culebrón. Our next door neighbours who usually live in Elda are here too. I noticed a light in one of the houses down by the farm - the last time they were here was the summer of 2011. Culebrón is filling up.