Life in Culebrón

A Spanish chap I talk to on the internet, once asked me if I lived in the countryside. I hesitated. It’s obviously rural: we’re surrounded by what you would call fields in the UK, and there are vineyards and olive trees growing within metres of our front door. Still, we’re not that isolated, the town with barbers and bars is just 5km away. We have fibre internet, we’re nearly on a drainage system (just election lies keep us 100 metres from mains sewerage), we have mains water and electricity, and the nearest tarmac is no more than 200 metres away. I can see the municipal tip, or whatever they are called nowadays, from our garden, and there’s a bloody big solar farm not 20 metres from our front door. Nonetheless, if I were to step out of my front door naked around breakfast time, the chances are that I could do that 360 times out of 365 without seeing anyone. And both the back and the front door give directly onto our living space – no vestibules, no boot rooms, no hallways. When it rai...

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 to...

I read a book last week. In it a young woman has moved to the country, to a small village in the middle of nowhere Spain. She's thinking community and tranquillity. She rents a house and the first thing that she asks her landlord is if he knows someone who might have a dog for her. I was reminded of one of Maggie's stories. Maggie worked with a woman in Madrid who had a Spanish partner. The couple decided to move to the countryside and one of the requisites, one of the first things to do, according to Maggie's friend, was to get a "brute of a dog". In the book the landlord palms the young woman off with one of his own dodgy dogs. Like all good country Spaniards the landlord thinks that it's cruel and unusual to sterilize a pet. The newcomer is from the city though and she takes the dog, for sterilization, to the nearest vet. The description of the vet's office is of a dusty and run down place where the vet is reading his phone and where there are no clie...