On being privileged

Sometimes it's surprising the things you don't know even close to home. A while ago we were watching the telly and there was a featurette about Murcia. The cameras visited the Ricote Valley which is some 65kms from Culebrón. One of the villages in the valley is Blanca. It's a small place of around 6,500 inhabitants. We didn't know, but we learned then, that it had an art gallery, the Pedro Cano Foundation. "We must go and have a look one day," I said to Maggie. Today was the day.

As we walked through the door the woman on the desk greeted us in English "We must look very English," I said, in Spanish. "No, but you're the person who phoned yesterday, aren't you?" Now that was true but my instant reaction was then that either they get so few visitors that they remember every phone call or we must look very, very English just like I'd said.

The gallery was really good. A nice light airy building. Interesting and well executed paintings with different themes well explained on each of three floors. On the third floor, the fourth exhibition space, there was a temporary exhibition of some perfectly nice water colours. Not as good, in my opinion, as the permanent stuff but interesting.

Somewhere as we went around I asked Maggie if she knew whether Pedro Cano were still alive. She said she hoped so as the woman on the desk had said he was coming to do a guided tour at midday. My Spanish is so good that I'd heard the bit about the guided tour but not understood who was doing it. To be honest I was for running away before he showed up. He might say something in Spanish, I would splutter and the whole of our Island race would be found wanting and stupid again.

Too late though. As we got to the front desk that guards the door he was there. We recognised him from a video. He held out a hand. He asked us simple things. He asked us if we painted. Other people arrived to divert the conversation. He turned out to be a lovely, lovely man. He radiated pleasantness. He was passionate about his work and about the foundation. He gave us a completely different perspective on the paintings. I often enjoy exhibitions but I haven't had as much fun in an art gallery since the late 70s when I was a member of Leeds City Art Gallery and bumped into Richard Long and Joseph Beuys under similar circumstances.

Espadas Family "The Musical"

I reckon I was the only person in the audience who wasn't a mother, father, sister brother, uncle or other relative of someone on stage. There were fat girls, thin girls and the occasional boy. There were parents on stage and youngsters with learning and physical difficulties.They danced and sang. They were wired up to headset mics and they did acrobatics too. There was a father in the row in front of me who could hardly contain his enthusiasm every time his daughter appeared on stage. Waving, clapping - close to orgasm.

The poster said The Musical by the Family Espadas. In aid of a not for profit setup that works with youngsters with disabilities. I had no idea what to expect but there was nothing much on at the flicks and the house is freezing so why not something at the local theatre?

It's not the sort of thing I go for really but I had a whale of a time. I laughed and clapped a lot and I even understood a few of the jokes.

My favourite bit of Spanishness was when the elder daughter of the family, the one who wanted to go to Ibiza and live in a commune, was spoken to directly by God. You're looking for peace and love? - then get thee to a nunnery. Next scene up dancing nuns with a fetching line in popsox.

The West End is only a bit of rehearsal time away.

I'll name that tune in one

Many, many years ago I had quite a good collection of salsa, cumbia, son and other Latin American music. A colleague I gave a lift to soon grew tired of my conversation and turned on the tape player to be greeted by Celia Cruz. He wasn't impressed with the Latin sound. "Don't you have anything British?" he said as he shuffled my tapes. Finally, with a little whoop of joy, he found Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. "Now there's some proper music," he said, as he pushed the cassette into the slot and began to hum along. He was an educated chap, I'm pretty sure he knew Beethoven was German but that isn't the point. He was culturally in tune with Beethoven in a way that he wasn't to with Los Van Van.

Pinoso has a nice theatre, the Teatro Auditorio Emilio Martínez Sáez, named for an ex Mayor of the town. The walls of the theatre are lined with light wood panelling and the ceiling slopes gently from the back of the circle to the rear of the stage - you know the sort of place - pretty typical for its 2002 opening date. Tonight, on our way from Culebrón back to Cartagena we stopped off at the Auditorio to see a performance by the Elda Chamber Orchestra.

The programme, in aid of a cancer charity, had lots of titles that we didn't recognise along with lots that we did. When it came to the tunes though we recognised them all. Canon de Pachellbel may be spelled oddly but we were pretty sure what to expect whereas Oh Luz de Dios didn't really give us any clues until the musicians struck up what I recognised as either O Tannenbaum or The Red Flag.

It was an enjoyable little concert, nothing too strenuous, but, all the way through, as an unknown title became a recognisable tune I came back to a thought about a heritage shared across Europe.

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The picture is from the Telepinos Facebook page

People aren't nice about Albacete

My mum reads these blogs so I'm going to be in trouble. If you tell Spanish people, presumably those who aren't from Albacete, that you are going there they trot out a little phrase of advice "Albacete, caga y vete" Albacete: shit and leave. There, I've done it now. No pocket money for weeks. Better not to recount the story of my first ever visit to Albacete on a perishing December night as it involves a porn cinema. I could end up grounded for years.

Maggie is not here so I'm alone. She's not a big fan of Albacete anyway. Personally I like it. On a sizzling August afternoon with the heat haze rippling off the plain I think it's about as Spanish as Spanish can get. Today it was a bit dull and then a bit wet.

The town isn't large. It's small or at least it feels small though apparently it has 170,000 people. We, I was with my pal Geoff, found ourselves wandering in circles because we had no map. I would have liked a map. Indeed we followed the signs to the tourist office so we could get one. The tourist office was closed. It was a particularly splendid example of the art in that it had no sign outside to say it was a tourist office. We had to ask someone where it was although we were standing just 10 metres from it. I presume it was closed because yesterday was a bank holiday and local government employees often get the bridging days to form a long weekend. Lots of Spaniards would have been on holiday today but Albacete isn't a big tourist destination so presumably there wouldn't have been any work for the tourism people anyway. Hang on, do I glimpse a paradox here?

We did stumble across the Cathedral though and opposite was a very green building with an ornate frontage. I took a snap and walked over to see what it was. The sign next to the door said MCA. It wasn't a big sign; think solicitor's office brass plate sort of size. Underneath, in quite small lettering it said Museo Municipal de la Cuchilleria. Albacete is famous for knives. Like Sheffield and Toledo it has a long history of finely crafted blades and here was the local museum dedicated to knives, scissors and all things cutlery. We paid a very reasonable entry fee and went in. I thought it was a good museum. Geoff doesn't really read Spanish and, as all the labelling and notices were monolingual, our pace around the exhibits was more hare than tortoise. The video was in English though so we watched that through. I was impressed enough to buy a couple of books telling the history of knife making in Albacete.

Once we'd eaten a rather ordinary meal we took people's advice, at least the second part.

I love the light

One of my favourite places in Spain is Trujillo, no I mean Santiago, no, no, the Peña de Francia, ooh, or maybe that ride down to Granada over whatjamacallit pass?

Spain is chockablock with eyepopping landscapes and lively, interesting cities but Alicante and Murcia don't feature too highly on my list. Nice enough, some interesting spots but, overall, a bit ordinary.

Tonight we went to an art exhibition mounted by a couple of local British artists at one of the exhibition spaces in Pinoso. Nice show, good space, good little event.

I know one of the artists from when she was a customer in the furniture shop where I worked. In her welcome speech, in Spanish (good job Linda!) she said how the local landscapes and the light inspired her. Later I was talking to her husband, Richard, and he was full of praise for the area too - about the landscapes he rides on his bike and about the general lifestyle though, like me, he's waiting for the flag cracking heat.

Maybe I'm being a bit hard on the place.

A day out

We really haven't done much recently partly through work, partly through sloth and partly because it is relatively unpleasant out when the sun isn't shining. Weekends in Culebrón tend towards tasks of one sort and another or maybe the exact opposite as we take the opportunity to forget about chores and work.

Yesterday though Maggie was keen that we did something other than vegetate. She suggested a trip to the seaside at Santa Pola but I baulked at travelling the 60 or so kilometres each way for no real reason. I was happy to go somewhere but with a bit more purpose. In the end we settled on going to Alicante because there were a number of exhibitions on.

We saw the photos of Alfredo Calíz at the FNAC shop in Alicante (nice use of colour but not many snaps) and later, at MUBAG (Fine Arts Museum) we saw a show that covered the Spanish Avant Garde from the 1960s to the 80s - informalism, abstraction, op art, hyper realism etc. Next it was MACA (Contemporary Art) where there was a show to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an art movement that called itself Arte Normativa (the translation eludes me - Art by Rules maybe) which was a Spanish geometric abstract movement of the 1950s. Just to finish off we went to a remarkably tedious showing of Russian Sacred Art at one of the exhibition spaces run by the charitable arm of a savings bank.

Something I noticed was the staffing. The busiest space was the Savings Bank where there was one security guard at the entrance, in FNAC where the show was in the concourse outside the shop surrounded by coffee bars there was nobody obvious looking out for the exhibit at all. In both MUBAG and MACA only one large space was open for viewing but in both places, which are local authority run museums, there were two people on the welcome desk and two more museum staff keeping an eye on us as we looked around. I think there was also a uniformed security guard in each foyer, there usually is. Quite different staffing levels between the public and private sector then.

Good do though Alicante. Nice to do a bit of culture vulture stuff for a change.