Muak! Muak!

I'm not particularly good with people. I'm not particularly outgoing. I'm terrible at remembering faces (well whole bodies come to that) and I can forget names within a couple of sentences of being introduced. The opening phrases of a greeting are usually banal, sometimes surreal and occasionally bizarre. Greetings take me by surprise. It would probably be better if I stayed at home with a good book.

The other day some people that I do recognise on the streets, members of a Spanish family, had one of the older members die. I didn't know what the form was so I didn't do anything. I wondered about going to the tanatorio, I wondered about the mass but a mix of embarrassment, fear of speaking Spanish and my general diffidence meant that I did nothing. As ill luck would have it I bumped into one of the family a few days later. She greeted me, we did the two cheeks kissing, I failed to understand what she'd said to me, I failed to pass on my condolences and as she walked away I felt completely inadequate and kicked myself for not being up to the situation.

In my grey formative years those foppish French went in for that kissing each other thing. We steadfast Britons on the other hand maintained the creases in our trousers and shook hands. I know - we were all repressed. I am aware that nowadays even handshakes require some sort of hand twisting routine that I have never quite mastered. My dad taught me the basics of 1950s handshaking and Mr. Plant, the local greengrocer, had strong views on my posture, on the firmness of grip and the length of time of hand holding between men which he was happy to share. It didn't dawn on me, for years, that Mr Plant the greengrocer sounds like a made up, Happy Families, name. Nowadays preferring a politician style firm handshake is tantamount to admitting a sordid past and a pressing need to make an appointment with an analyst. My unease at performing a mutual back massage on greeting people whose name I should know and the need to be intimate with everyone down to the postie signals me out as an emotional casualty.

In fact I don't really care if someone I hardly know wants to slap me on the back or give me a bear hug. I probably file it in the hypocritical tosh section of my mental filing system but my facial expression will be tolerant or even approving. I squirm more when people substitute "Love you", for goodbye at the end of a phone call. Nothing like overuse to devalue something. That said I don't care for hugging or being hugged as a greeting or farewell but the reason is practical rather than my lack of sensitivity. I have no idea how I am supposed to do it. As vague acquaintances move into my personal space in their attempt to hug, kiss or exchange bodily fluids with me I usually end up treading on their toes (or having my toes trodden on) bumping foreheads or elbowing them in the kidneys. I've also broken several pairs of the reading specs because they are habitually hanging from a cord around my neck. I think the problem is that, even now, we Britons lack a proper set of instructions. 

Now the French know how to do it and so do the Spanish. Spaniards grew up with a routine probably reinforced by Señor Planta. Men here generally do the hand on the shoulder and handshake goodbye but it's common to see men, close family, saying goodbye with the double cheek kissing thing. Men to women and women to men for greetings and farewells is usually cheek grazing. First go left, touch cheeks then go right and touch cheeks. More contact for more familiarity. Easy as pie. Even I can do it. There's a routine, an understood set of actions. It's not at all false or over emotional it's simply shaking hands with the face. I do it as naturally as I do anything that requires any level of social interaction and I'm sure Mr Plant would be fine with it too.

Contact sport

I'm hypermetropic and astigmatic - long sighted with funny shaped eyes. When I was young my family thought I was stupid because I had problems telling cows from sheep. Maggie still often thinks I'm stupid when I can't tell Ryan Reynolds from Ben Affleck but I suppose that's different. I think they noticed that I couldn't see very well when I went to school. I wore glasses all the time till I was about 25 - not all the time really but you know what I mean. Thick glasses. Opticians told me I couldn't wear lenses but I insisted on trying them and, nearly 40 years, later I'm still wearing them or rather their successors. Because of the astigmatism they are hard lenses, little plastic lenses that float on the tear layer on the surface of my eyes. I presume the technology has changed a little since the first ones I had but they are nothing like the floppy disposable lenses that most lens wearers use.

One of the first bits of advice that I got on putting in and taking out the lenses was to put the plug in the plughole. The little blighters can escape. A few weeks ago, whilst I was putting them in, I dropped one of them. Half blinded I searched around but I couldn't find it. I went looking for an old pair. I found one set so dried up that the lens just snapped when I picked it up and the only serviceable pair were really old and quite painful. Fortunately as I cleaned up the washbasin, blinking hard, I found the missing lens caught on the grid of the plug hole. Time to buy another pair I thought.

My last pair were about five years old, bought in Cartagena. The optician had been painstaking in getting them to fit properly. I thought about going back because finding a good optician is like finding a good dentist. Once you have one you like it's worth a bit of effort to stick with them. But it's a 240 kilometre round trip to Cartagena and I decided to shop local instead.

The optician in Pinoso that I chose seemed a little off hand to be honest. It had none of the white jacket, almost medical, mentality, of the Cartagena place. The Pinoso optician was much more like a hairdresser's - people coming and going, a sort of community atmosphere, the sort of place where you would get called "love" in the UK.  Actually they seemed to delight in my name - Kreest-off-air.

The eyetest was normal enough though there was none of that red and green background with a circle thing nor the little puff of air but they had some impressive looking machine for scanning the shape of my eye. Once they had the prescription and the measurements they asked the manufacturer for a price - it was a reasonable 350€ so I said yes. A while later they phoned me to say they had the lenses. The next time I was in town I popped in to make an appointment to try them.

"We won't do the test now." they said. "They take time to settle in, take them away, wear them a few days and then come back and we'll have a look."
"What about the money?", I said. I wasn't keen on handing over cash till I was sure the lenses were OK.
"Oh, you don't want to pay until you know they're OK".

So they let me walk out of the shop with 350€ worth of lenses without knowing much about me. True enough Pinoso is a small place and everybody knows someone who knows you but it was still my first time with them and I could have been in Pinoso on holiday for all they knew.

It was a good system though. The lenses did definitely settle in but, even then, the left lens wasn't right. It was sitting too low and they've sent it away to be changed. They also sent a video of my eye full of fluorescein, an orange dye which, under UV light, shows how the lenses and the cornea interact, so the manufacturer could get the lens right. I still have the right lens though and I've been wearing it for over a week now. And I still haven't paid.

Small town life. Small town Spanish life.

And the other six dwarves

Thirty one years ago, in the Bar Lennon in Valencia, the barman turned out to be the chatty type. Having to talk in a mixture of mime, tortured Spanish and broken English was no obstacle to his chattiness. He sang the European anthem. He invited us to the beach and, amazingly, we and he turned up the following morning at the appointed time. He and his pals frolicked, stark naked, in the sea whilst we two Brits toasted ourselves to the colour of boiled crabs and ate all the food.

Jaime has been an occasional friend ever since. Time passes. He turned 60 on Thursday. I would be even less impressed to see him in his birthday suit nowadays. Pepa, his long time minder arranged a surprise party in Fuentes de Rubielos​ in Teruel where the two of them have a business renting out a country cottage.

It's 300 kilometres from Culebrón to Fuentes so we had to get up earlier than we would have liked on Saturday morning. We made good time though and we were only 10 minutes late for the agreed 12.30 congregation. The birthday boy wasn't due till around 1.00. When he arrived he looked suitably surprised, he grinned, he pumped hands and he hugged people effusively in appropriate measure.

The venue was a concrete floored, chilly, ill lit storage space underneath the municipal swimming pool. It looked like the sort of place where the tractors and the ride on lawnmowers are parked for the winter. A big square table had been set up in the corner to take advantage of the natural light from the frosted glass windows. There were about 15 or so party goers. We had plastic chairs, a paper table cloth and plastic cutlery.

The guests, included a man we met for the first time probably at Jaime's 50th and who never took off his mountaineering style anorak. The tall German woman I met on that beach at el Saler did a lot of the cooking, Jaime's 86 year old aunt seemed to take a shine to Maggie. A man, who we think deals in frozen seafood, had a great line in card and other magic tricks. Presumably he's available for bhamitzvas and weddings too.

I must say that I felt we were playing at being very Spanish as we sat on plastic chairs in the middle of the sunny street chatting and nibbling on crisps and olives whilst the mountain of meat and various styles of sausages were cooked on the municipal street barbecue.

We ate the meaty feast in the garage. We drank beer and wine and sparkling wine with Happy Birthday sung in three languages and gifts handed over to a suitably appreciative Jaime.

And when the eating was done the crowd started to drift away. A few of us went on to the village bar for a coffee​, maybe with a splash of something. By late evening we were the only guests left.

Road signs

There are a lot of road signs in Spain. Most of them are pretty standard and give orders, warnings or advice in the way that road signs do all across the world. Some of them though, particularly speed restriction signs can be really difficult to work out.

In general there are fixed speed limits on roads which do not need to be signed. They are the default. They vary for different types of vehicles so I'll limit myself to cars. On motorways the speed limit is 120k/h, on roads with a wide hard shoulder it's 100, on standard two lane roads it's 90 and in towns it's 50k/h. All of these speed limits can be amended by the usual round sign with a red border and the black number on a white background. I didn't realise till I was checking details for this post that there is also a general minimum speed limit which is half the maximum. So you could be fined for going faster than 120k/h or slower than 60k/h on a motorway.

There is also an interesting exception to the 90k/h rule. Where there are no signs on a normal two way road you can exceed the speed limit by 20k/h during an overtaking manoeuvre.

Speed limit signs and no overtaking signs are everywhere on Spanish roads. I often wonder if someone powerful has a brother in law who makes road signs because, at times, the proliferation of them seems so excessive. It's very normal for instance to count down from the open road as you approach a town or a hazard such as a roundabout. 80k/h, twenty metres, 70k/h, twenty metres, 40k/h.

One of the key places where there are no overtaking signs and speed restrictions on what would normally be considered "the open road" is around a junction. These signs are usually backed up by changing the central road markings to single continuous white lines. These signs can be odd. Often there will, for instance, be a 60k/h sign a couple of hundred metres before a junction but, after the junction there will be nothing to say that the restriction has been lifted. Sometimes there are signs to mark the end of the no overtaking rule which I always take as showing that you can speed up again but, often, you seem to have to presume that once the hazard has been passed you are back to the general speed limit. In the case of a T junction this can mean that there are different speed limits on the opposite sides of the road because the hazard is only important on the side of the road where the junction is.

Another interseting one is where the sign is more descriptive. For instance there is an 80k/h limit on the way through a wide spot in the road outside Pinoso called Casas Ibañez. A few metres inside the 80 zone is a second sign which says 50k/h in the crossing. A few hundred metres later there is a second 80k/h sign. So I know where the 50k/h restrction ends but I have no idea where it starts.

And then, there are the completely contradictory signs. In the photo at the top of this entry the 20k/h sign is obvious but, on the road, the markings say 30k/h. Actually I understand that the cycle way marked in red is actually at variance with the rules for bikes which says that they should keep as close to the edge of the road as possible and means that cyclists using the track could actually be fined.

Hey, ho!

Hello bed, hello room

There's one of those professional looking videos that does the rounds on Facebook that I rather like. In it a succession of people walk into a bar and greet nobody in particular. Then someone comes in and sits down at the table without saying a word. There are meaningful looks between the waiters and the bar becomes a little less lively. The bar owner goes over to the customer and asks "Is it that we slept together?" The client immediately grasps what is being said and restores calm and good humour to the bar by saying hello to everyone and no-one in particular.

It's absolutely true. Spaniards say hello to the room. Waiting in a bank or post office you get to greet lots of strangers. Maggie and I were in a hospital waiting room yesterday morning and everyone who came in said hello or good morning as they looked for a space to wait and most people said goodbye too as they came out of the consulting rooms and headed off somewhere else.

I know this is the custom. My trepidation over speaking Spanish does not stretch to problems with saying hello - though there is a little linguistic catch. There is not the usual match between a couple of paired words in the morning greeting - it's not buenas días it's buenos días. Spaniards do the opposite of Britons by shortening, for instance, "good evening" to "good" rather than following the English language habit of cutting "good evening" to "evening". The easy thing about this is that I can avoid this potential arror by simply saying "buenas" and, even better, that easy to say word will work at any time of the day.

There's something though that stops me greeting the room. I have no idea why but it doesn't seem to be just me. I was thinking about it this morning and I'm sure that most Britons who live here, Britons who are well aware of the practice, don't generally follow it either though I'm sure there are exceptions.

Very, very grave

Today is All Saints' day in Spain. Well I suppose it's All Saint's all over the Catholic World, maybe farther afield, anywhere in the Christian World. How would I know without asking Google? Anyway, where was I? Oh Yes, so it's the day or at least the period when Spanish families go and clean up the family niches, mausoleums and pantheons.

Yesterday, on Saturday afternoon, the local Town Hall here in Pinoso offered a guided tour of the local cemetery to tie in with the general theme. I thought it was a great idea and I signed up straight away but nearly everyone else I spoke to about it seemed to think it was a bit strange. Indeed Maggie, who I'd signed up for the visit, decided to give it a miss so I went by myself. Amazingly, I was the only Brit in the group. There aren't many things where we aren't represented.

The Mayor and a couple of councillors were there but it was someone called Clara who did the tour. I don't know who she is but I have to say that she did a superb job. Strangely, she started her introductory remarks by saying that some people thought that the idea of a graveyard tour was a bit rocambolesco (bizarre) but she hoped that after we'd done it we wouldn't agree. Maybe she'd talked to some of the same people as me.

Clara started from the entrance way explaining why cypress trees outside (it's yews, tejos, in the UK isn't it?) went on to the reason that the graveyard had been moved from alongside the church and near the town centre as a result of a decree by the provisional government sheltering in Cadiz at the start of the 19th Century and then went on to explain the history of the cemetery in general and some of the specific tombs in particular.

We saw the disused room where autopsies were once performed, we went underground to see the grave of the first person buried there in 1912 - someone who gets free rental of their plot. We saw political rivals buried side by side, we saw Modernist and Gothic style pantheons and someone with the group had a book, a family heirloom passed from eldest son to eldest son, that explained the history and management of her own eighty space family mausoleum. The Mayor did the bit about the ossuary (the place where remains removed from old and abandoned graves and plots are buried together) in Valencià but I got the drift and I knew why Eli, another councillor, laid a floral tribute by the little sculpture there.

The whole thing lasted about an hour. One of the best small scale visits I've done for ages. Whoever thought of that idea deserves a slap on the back.

Having a laugh

Normally, when I go to the theatre or somesuch I put the photos on Picasa or Facebook and that's it but I just have to tell you about the Flamenco performance we went to see last night.

The event was at the Teatro Vico in Jumilla. Getting the tickets booked was a right faff because the box office was only open when I was at work. Jumilla is 35kms from home and they have no Internet presence. Then, to top it all, I kept confusing the performance on Friday with the performance on Saturday in my various messages. By the time I'd finished I reckon I could ask the bloke from the box office to be my best man should I ever get married - I'd have to ask by WhatsApp though.

Our seats were on the front row. Right at the front. Just the orchestra pit between us and the tight flamenco suits and frocks. To get to the seats we had to pass by a very severe looking older couple who seemed as unmovable as Joan Baez. As I squeezed past under their piercing stares the vision of me standing on her foot, stumbling and crashing into him flashed before my eyes. I made it to my seat without incident.

The couple did not move through the whole performance. No applause, almost no asides to each other. The man looked at his watch by grasping the casing with his right hand and staring intently at the time for at least thirty seconds. He was so obvious about it, he did it so often and he was so near the stage that the performers must have noticed him.

As usual the event started late. Spaniards call it courtesy time. It never seems very courteous to me to the people who turn up on time but I suppose that's my funny British sensibility. It wasn't late enough for a couple of people though. We got under way for the 9pm event at around 9.20 but some chap in the third or fourth row of the stalls turned up a few minutes afterwards. He didn't lower his voice at all as he and his partner discussed who should take which of the two seats assigned to them. The seats were at the aisle end of the row. He chose the more interior seat so, ten minutes later, when presumably his bladder betrayed him, there was another full volume conversation and quite a lot of noise as he headed for the toilet.

On row two, behind us there was a conversation that was perfectly audible above the music. The only part of it I caught though was about how and what one of the women was going to eat later. Maggie said that when a phone somewhere behind her rang the woman didn't hesitate to answer it or to have a perfectly normal conversation. All in all it was a very unsettled audience which is a bit unusual for flamenco.

Up on stage the flamenco wasn't bad at all. Four, I think, different acts doing their set. Singing, playing, dancing and even some poetry. It did seem to go on a long time though. The compeering was done by a chap who must have gone to great pains to choose his very light coloured suit. The trousers were long, the jacket was tight across his stomach but a bit big on the shoulders and the cuffs were palm covering. Later we had a cavalcade of local presidents of this association or society to hand out certificates and bottles of wine to the performers. Not one of them wore trousers that were not brushing the ground. One bloke, with a cardigan and flat cap looked like he'd come directly from his allotment. Another had a slightly grubby looking combination of black shoes, blue trousers, pink shirt and green jacket. Choosing that ensemble could not be pure chance.

All in all it was a very enjoyable event and not all of the fun was in the performances or even on the stage.

And you all feel so superior and expert

One of my little jokes is that I like paying Spanish taxes. I say it gives me the right to complain about Spanish politicians. Now I'm going to argue that after eleven years here I have a right to express an opinion about Spain.

I wrote a little essay for a Spanish class I do and I posted it on this blog. It was no more than a writing exercise for the teacher but when it was done I thought it was a whimsical look at things I noticed in Spain - good coffee, bad tea, uninformative notices - little inconsequential things. Perfect for the blog.

Nobody much comments on my blog but I got one about that article. At first the chap (I think it's a man) was just putting me right. I said there was no good British style tea to be had in Spanish cafés and he told me about the varieties, methods and what not of making a range of teas all of which were available in Spain. Fair enough, not the same point but fair enough. As his reply lengthened though it changed tone. He doesn't seem to be too keen on we Britons. Again, fair enough, if his experience of us is bad then that's his experience. He didn't seem to care for me much either or at least what I write.

He also made a comment on an article I wrote about swearing. My basic premise was that Spaniards swear less forcibly but more frequently than Britons. As you may imagine my post was full of explanations, qualifications and exceptions. Now here we had a different mode of attack. He simply told me that I was wrong. I don't think so. I may have a different experience to him or a different interpretation but I am not wrong. I can see swearing on the television, hear it on the streets and in the bars and I have been unpleasantly surprised by the frequency of swearing amongst my sub teen pupils. It may be true that I notice the use of strong English language swearing by Spaniards more than the home population. After all I know what it means and how forceful its meaning is because I am English but I would not notice it if it were not said.

This chap though did make me wonder about the generalisations that I make in a lot of the posts. We all gather information from around us and extrapolate - all Swedes are blonde, all Ecuadorians are short, all Andalucians are full of the joys of life. All obviuosly untrue but all good healthy stereotypes. So when does extrapolation become stereotyping and when does stereotyping become offensive? When a Spaniard tells me that all the English wear socks with sandals I smile. Everybody knows that's what we Britons do. When I get told we are all drunkards I think of the news stories showing all those Britons in Magaluf paddling and crawling in pools of beer and puke and I smile again. If I were feeling combative I may rise in defence of all the sober Brits, dismiss the sock myth or even argue the merits of socks to avoid scarred feet and stinking sandals.

I was about to start this paragraph with "I like Spain, I like Spaniards" but then I realised that's not absolutely true. There are plenty of things about the behaviour of some Spaniards, things that are common enough for me to rashly declare that "all Spaniards do this or that" that I definitely do not like. I don't like all of Spain either. Some of it, is in my opinion, a blighted wasteland. There are things I think are actively stupid here - penalising private solar electricity generation and the relatively recent "gagging law" spring to mind. Then again I found plenty to complain about in the UK before I left and I could, Peter Green style, keep you amused for hours complaining about the behaviour of some of my compatriots living here. There are lots of bad similarities between the two counties too - the overbearing pride that "we" did this or that in things like history or sport, the rewriting of history and the jingoistic and chauvanistic in general.

In fact, my general view is that the UK and Spain are, nowadays, pretty similar places. It's not a popular view. I voiced it on a forum about what culture shock people could experience coming to live in Spain. I said there were lots of differences, some of them quite wide differences, but that none of them were of the big kind - no general prohibitions on personal freedom, no threats to basic safety or democratic organisation, not even different clothes. Just another European country. I was thinking about big things like education, healthcare, and the visible economic indicators. The flood of posts after mine listed everything from cruelty to animals and much more visible corruption through to slow Internet connections and poor bank services as evidence that Spain would dish out plenty of culture shock. I stick to my opinion.

And what's the point of this rambling? Well it's to say that I have spent something like 18% of my life in Spain and I'm reasonably clued up about the country. I've visited all but one of the provincial capitals, In a Munro sense I'm missing just one of the Balearic Islands and one of the autonomous cities. I may have been a tourist in most of those cities but I'm not a tourist in Spain. I watch Spanish telly, read Spanish press, wear Spanish clothes, drive a Spanish car, work in Spain, eat Spanish food, buy in Spanish shops. I know what's going on. Anyway it's my blog, my experiences of some of the things, the little things, that happen to me and around me. That's what the blog description says. A personal view, a personally biased view, but not an uninformed view.

I did suggest to the commentator, who wrote in a mix of Spanish and English, that if he were still trying to improve his English we could continue the discussion over a couple of pints of whisky or some tepid tea. He turned me down. He said he'd been considering it until he saw my posts.

Now maybe if I'd promised to wear my Union flag shorts!

The title is taken fom one of the comments. It refers to Brits in Spain and probably more specifically to me.

In the wind

In most Spanish bars the gents is a normal household type toilet. The sort we men leave the seat up on. In some places, like cinemas, shopping centres or motorway service stations there will be stalls and, usually, a row of urinals too.

Personally I prefer urinals. Less chance of unintended spillage. My experience though is that Spanish men don't. They choose to use the stalls and a lot of them neglect to lock the door. This can cause a degree of embarrassment from time to time. ¡Uuff; perdón! 

I wonder why the preference?

The dilemma

I need to write something. Not that I have a psychological need or anything but it's about time. Blogs need fuelling.

As I washed the few evening pots before retiring to bed last night and as I weeded the, not as bare as it should be, earth of our garden this morning I've been trying to think of a topic.

I thought I had one. The things that have changed in the time we have been here. Emails and puddings were uppermost in my mind.

There was a time when sending an email to someone in Spain was just a way of putting off the conversation that you didn't want to attempt in Spanish. Nobody ever replied and you had to phone in the end. Nowadays, people seem to check their mail and most respond though not all.

The pudding thing is that the restaurant offer is now so much better than the once ubiquitous flan, ice cream or seasonal fruit choice. I do miss watching people use a knife and fork to peel, section and eat an orange though.

But the topic didn't set my pulse racing. If email and puddings were the top of the list what, apart from dark sociological trends like parking ailing relatives in care homes, was going to be at the bottom?

So that idea got banged on the head.

Goodly Sir wouldst be so kind as to render me aid?

The man on the phone asked me if he was speaking to don Christopher. I told him that he was but whatever he was selling I didn't want it. He didn't need to say anything else. Nobody uses don unless they wear headsets to talk on the phone. He assured me that he was just checking to see if I'd got a particular piece of junk mail. He didn't try to sell me anything so maybe it really was just a check on whoever does their bulk mailing.

I don't like being called don. It's supposed to be courteous. It's used with your first name rather than using the surname. It's a bit antique but I simply don't like people deferring to me and I particularly don't like it when it's a sham deference.

Usted, unlike don, isn't archaic. If, like me, you were taught French at school, then the Spanish usted is equivalent to the vous form. The polite form of you. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? rather than Je t'aime. The idea is that usted is used for people you don't know, for people who are a bit older than you or to show a bit of respect. I don't like that either. I don't like it in shops, I don't like it in bars, I don't like it in general.

Spanish people tell me I should use usted - they tell me that I should only use tú when I know people. Tugging one's forelock and doffing one's cap went out even before I was born. I see usted as very similiar. For Latin Americans I don't think there's the same distinction. I think Ecuadorian parents address their children as usted. Some Latin American countries use a different way of saying you all together.

Dealing with everyone the same is fine by me whether it's a formal, Mr Thompson, or more informal, Chris but using the equivalents of sir or esquire. No thanks.

Valencià hasn't used boxed question marks since 1993

Going to the bank on Spain is a pain in the backside. The queues go on for ever. There aren't enough tellers whilst there are far too many bank workers shifting paper around on their desks and waiting to sell some dubious financial product. Lots are at breakfast too.

For a number of reasons, so tedious that even I would hesitate to record them, I've had to go to the bank at the beginning of each month for the past several months. Despite being in the largest bank in Spain there isn't a branch in Pinoso. I have the choice of being charged 6€ to process the payment locally or driving to nearby Monóvar, if 15 kms is near.

Queues in Spain are usually orderly but amorphous. Often the routine is that as you get to the people hanging around to be served you ask who was last there. You take your turn after them. The next person joining the queue after you asks the same question and your place in line is now secure. This system has multiple issues for non Spanish speakers.

The phrase to use is ¿Quien es el último? It's a phrase within my linguistic grasp though I'm usually lazy and simply ask ¿El último? These phrases have a semantic drawback in that Spanish has gender. The word último is masculine so there is a possible charge of sexism. To avoid this people sometimes choose to say ¿Quien es el último o la última? which adds in the feminine possibility even though she always seems to come second. It set me thinking about how difficult it must be to write a phrasebook and how such a simple question, and ones like it, have manifold forms (as they do in English.) I was nearly at the teller and ready to be quizzed about my identity even though I was paying money into my own account when a young woman came in to the bank. "L'últim?"- she asked. It's the same same question but in the local Valencià language.

Ah well, for those of you old enough to remember. Bouncy, bouncy. Drop your panties, Sir William, I cannot wait till lunchtime. My hovercraft is full of eels.

Bread cartel

When I couldn't get a beer in Tarragona many years ago I decided to learn Spanish. I did a few years of those one or two hour a week Spanish classes at the local Adult Education Centre. I also took a lot of holidays in Spain. As a consequence I started to notice things about Spain in newspapers and magazines. Spain speaks Spanish and so do Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica - twenty countries in all as I remember if we don't include the USA. It was all the same to me - they were all interesting, all linked in some way. Spain was first but I bought cumbia, son and salsa music (on cassette), I read books by Garcia Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende and Elena Poniatowska. I drank piscos, canelazos and malbecs. I hunted out Dos Equis beer. I crossed the Atlantic a few times heading for Mexico or Cuba and I still have a hankering to visit Argentina and Chile as a hangover from that interest in the 1980s.

But if I thought that there was a link between Spain and lots of America I don't think it's a view shared by most Spaniards. The only conversations I have had with Spanish people about Latin Americans have usually centred on their strange use of the Spanish language rather than the quality of their beer, food, football or music. The Latin American food section in the international part of Carrefour has no more stock than the British section. There aren't many TV imports from Latin America nor are there lots of celebrity Latin Americans here in Spain - at least so far as I know.

Spain of course has strong trading links with Latin America and there are daily news stories from that part of the world. I've had Argentinian, Venezuelan, Mexican, Peruvian, Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian students in my English classes because they work for Spanish firms here. There are lots of people who look South American out and about in the towns and cities. Surprisingly though there isn't much obvious South American influence in High Street businesses. I'm not saying there is none. At one time there were lots of locutorios - cheap phone, Internet and money order places - which were South American owned though they seem to be disappearing. Otherwise there is a smattering of South American businesses. Every now and again you will see a Venezuelan or a Peruvian craft shop, an Ecuadorian bar or a Mexican restaurant but they are far less noticeable than the range of Chinese ventures for instance. Perhaps it is a sign of the socio economic situation of the majority of the South and Central Americans. They tend to be workers rather than entrepeneurs. Murcia, for instance, has, I understand, the largest Ecuadorian population outside Ecuador but the only Ecuadorian business I know of is a bar that sells intersting food in Jumilla and another bar that failed in Cartagena.

We were in Elda today. I'd gone to sign on for dance classes (it's a long story and I couldn't so you will never know) and as we strolled the streets we noticed a sign that said Colombian bakery. So we went in for a loaf. Inside it was like Greggs, well with a bit more character. Caracol Internacional was on the TV with a story from Venezuela. We decided to get a coffee and the chap behind the bar talked us into eating some sort of chicken and egg pasty and a beef and rice and potato pasty and a cheese and soft dough ball thing. "Hot sauce?" he asked, "Yes, please," I replied. That seemed to surprise him. Spanish people aren't generally keen on spicy so maybe it was an unusual answer. I was tempted by the spongy sweet looking cakey thing but I decided investigation was turning into gluttony so we paid up and left.

It made me think though that we Brits maybe got a better deal from our old Empire than the Spaniards got from theirs.

Not looping the loop

Maggie was most definite in the manner in which she declined to go on the roller coaster that flipped people over and did barrel rolls. She kept reminding me about the Icelander who had died on a similar ride in the same park just a couple of months ago. Later though, by herself - I was too macho to join her - she went on the teen size roller coaster. Emboldened by her experience she agreed to go on the old style big dipper. All Billy Butlin at Skegness. Apparently built of criss crossing wood like the rail bridges in classic cowboy films and with sit up and beg cars. It rattled and shook, it rocked and rolled. Maggie didn't seem to enjoy it much.

She did enjoy the boat ride type roller coasters though and she let me go on one of those bungee jump type rides and the one that spins around a central pivot.

In fact we had a thoroughly enjoyable time at Terra Mitica theme park. The place is based on the motifs of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. The park has an unhappy financial past. It was haemorrhaging money when I last heard. It certainly wasn't exactly bursting at the seams today and, in the afternoon, we hardly had to queue for rides. It's just outside Benidorm so it has a pretty international clientele but all day long we were generally treated in Spanish and served by Spaniards. The themes are pretty loose to be honest - the Lair of the Minotaur was a sort of ghost train and the Nile Falls or some such was the name of one of those boat rides. Maybe the big, old roller coaster was a Titan something or other. Food was expensive but acceptably so and the atmosphere was everything to everyone whoever you were. I'm sure that to the teenagers it seemed designed for them, the same for the families and at least one old codger felt perfectly at home.

It's the first time that I've actually been there when it has been open. I went to a Van Morrison concert (deadly dull) maybe eight or nine years ago but somehow I'd never eaten one of their burgers or drunk their coke since. 

Nice day out.

With Nevil Shute and Chris Rea

On the beach that is.

Maggie's Mitsu is nine years old but Miitsubishi Spain phoned us about getting a software update. I suspect that they have come across some sort of fault but when I asked they said it was nothing more than customer support. Anyway we agreed to get it done at a dealer in San Juan which is the next coastal town along from Alicante city.

So we were at the beach. Now I don't care much for the beach. I'm obese so taking off most of my clothes and displaying myself for all and sundry to see in a public place is not something I do willingly. Add to that the fact that beaches are often made of sand. Sand is a powdery substance but the individual grains are usually hard quartz. This sand not only gets into your sandwiches and your hair it sneaks into every nook and crevice of your body no matter how intimate. I was eating sand all the way home. I generally keep out of the water too. I quite like water but as I wear contact lenses I always fear that they will be swept away to sea. Anyway what do you do about the bag with your wallet and mobile phone? Like shrouds there are no pockets in swimwear - well no waterproof ones at least.

Going to the beach though is a Spanish passion. I don't think that Spaniards behave particularly differently on the beach to us or the Germans or anyone else. There are the young ones who turn up with the minimum of equipment - towels, suncream, a book and the mobile phone and the three generational family groups who arrive with a veritable encampment - chairs, sunshades, windbreaks, beach games and an epicurean feast packed into coolboxes. Fat, old men and women queue up early in the morning on the busy beaches waiting for the beach cleaners to finish their work. At the off they head for the waterline and set up chairs and sunshades to bag their spot, which the families will later occupy, before heading back to their summer digs for a leisurely breakfast. Towels and Germans spring to mind.

If we are away from home and we tell Spaniards that we live in Alicante they always presume we live on the coast. They will congratulate us on the quality of the Costa Blanca beaches. Ask my students where they went over the weekend and the answer is to the beach. Question the families of Alicante or Murcia as to whether they have a summer house at the beach and the answer will almost certainly be that someone in their family does. Turn on the TV and go channel hopping and you will find a programme where people are being interviewed about their beach experiences.

The tourist figures are up for Spain. Once again it's tourism that's the motor for the economy. Where are those tourists heading - the landscapes of Galicia and Aragon, the marvellous Andalucian or Salmantino cities? No, they're headed for the beaches of Catalunya, Andalucia and the Islands. The Sunday supplements may be full of the voguish delights of rural tourism but it's on the beaches where it's standing room only.

Keeping schtum

Everyone knows that Brits in Spain wear socks with sandals, go bright red in the sun and swill beer. One of those conversational topics, designed generally to use comparatives in English, with students is about countries. We always agree that one difference is on the Tube. In London everyone keeps to themselves, reading or simply looking grim faced. In Madrid on the other hand the babble between passengers is drowned out only by the occasional impromptu musical jam session.

I was in Madrid the last couple of days and I'm sad to report that everyone on the metro is now glued to their mobile phones. For business suits and skaters alike their thumbs are dancing across screens catching or killing things. Earphones are everywhere to block out the surrounding world. Mobile phones, the great leveller.

Madrid looked very green too. Trees all over the place and that's without going anywhere near the Retiro. Busy of course but then, if you lived in Culebrón, most places would seem busy to you too. And expensive; it's not that paying 2.20€ or 2.50€ for a bottle of beer or 4€ for a tapa is too bad really but we generally pay about half of that so the final bill can be a bit of a surprise. And exciting - flash motors on the street, odd and stylish characters in equal measure, galleries, museums and events everywhere. And, best of all in the recently renamed Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Maggie popped out of one of the doors with a cartload of luggage which means she gets to eat pork and drink wine and I get my playmate back.

It's a country

I'd been surprised when the door of office number two had opened as I leaned on it. I half stumbled and half leapt into the room on the other side. Two women gawped at me. I gawped back. I stammered out a greeting. 

"Hello, I want to send this to Qatar," I said, holding out a small padded envelope, weight about 20g and similar in size to an iPhone. 

"Qatar in Cantabria?" she asked. 

I pointed to the address printed on the envelope. 

"No, Qatar the country in the Middle East - next door to Saudi Arabia."

"Is that close to Lebanon?"

"Closeish," I said. 

"Is it part of Saudi Arabia?" she asked. 

"No, it's a country."

"Ah, I see; it's an island," she said, staring at the Google entry. 

"More a peninsula," I countered

She rang someone. "It'll be 97€," she said - "same as Lebanon." Back there again. I blanched but handed her my credit card. "We've got no machine," she said. I'm sure it was Gilbert O' Sullivan on the radio. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I asked if this were indeed a business. When I was outside again I couldn't help it. One very long, very crude outpouring at high volume. I went and got the money, I went back to the office, I paid and I left the little envelope with them to lose.

It was a strange office even by Spanish standards. When I'd first arrived I was sure the building was abandoned. Blinds down, litter strewn yard, no vehicles, no opening hours, no sign of life. I don't think they get many personal callers. Hence the gawping. 

Maggie has lost a contact lens. The sort of lens she needs is not available in Qatar. Fortunately she bought her last lenses in Cartagena so I was able to go to a local optician and order up a replacement.

Today was my first opportunity to ship the lens. I got up early to go to a carrier before work.  It was so early I hadn't been able to buy an envelope to put the lens in. I suspected, rightly, that the carriers would sell packaging. The lens was in liquid in a little bottle. The receptionist woman peered at it over her headset.

"You can't send liquids to Qatar," said the woman. 

"Fine, I'll put it in this case without liquid," I said. 

"You can't send contact lenses to Qatar," said the woman. 

I asked "Why not?"

"No idea." 

"Could I put it in something else; disguise it?"

"Not possible, they check everything."

"What can you send to Qatar?" I asked. 

"I can't tell you," said the woman.

"Can you send clothes?" I asked.

"Only with a receipt and a customs declaration," said the bearded man sitting next to her.

I felt we had maybe failed to build the human bridge so necessary for a fulfilling business relationship. Later I bought an envelope. I took the lens out of the liquid and put it into a dry case. That's why it was the second on my list, office number two.

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.

Mr Angry

Recently I have had a bit of a spate of sending Mr Angry letters - well emails - to various organisations in Spain. Generally they have been specific complaints. Problems with the operation of a bank website or some problem with bill payments for instance

I think Barclays, for their Spanish Barclaycard, have an almost foolproof system. I sent an email to ask a general question about the functioning of their redesigned website. They sent me a guffy response telling me that they were unable to respond to an open email for reasons of security and that I should phone customer services. By return I composed a long and snotty email telling them what I thought about their customer service via email. I got exactly the same response as to my initial message. Hmm, I thought. I sent another email wishing them a pleasant day. They told me that they were unable to respond to an open email for reasons of security and that I should phone customer services.

That's a great trick. Give the impression that they can be contacted by email when they can't. That's why there's the rhyming slang for bankers I suppose.

The European Union continues to update me periodically on my bid to be able to vote at regional elections either in my country of residence or in the country where I was born. I think that's jolly nice of them. They do seem to have had a lot of meetings all over Europe to talk about it though.

I collected my mail today and in my PO box there was a letter from the Subsecretary General of the Subsecretariat of the Interior Ministry Department of Human Resources and Inspection Isabel Borrel Roncales. I think it has a real signature. It is a response to an email that I sent to complain about a proposal for a draconian piece of anti democratic legislation. Isabel tells me that it's nothing to do with me and that the equivalent of the Commons in the UK, las Cortes Generales "in which National Sovereignty resides" will make the decision with or without my help thank you very much.

Now this is not a good response. Much better that she had said "Crikey Chris, I showed your email to the President; he clasped his head as he realised what a big mistake he was making and he decided then and there to scrap the legislation. He wants to thank you personally for pointing out the error of his ways."

But it is a response. Well done the Interior Ministry I say. More responsive than Barclays that's for sure.

Braseros

It's not a complex idea. When I was a lad braziers were the natural complement to those little striped tents that workmen used to set up over what were then called manhole covers. In Spain they put them under round tables.

Braziers or braseros are, at their most basic, simple bowls which fit into a circular support underneath a round table. There are electric ones nowadays of course but the one we were presented with today, when we went for a birthday meal, was more like a wrought iron version of a parrot's cage. Glowing embers are put inside the bowl, the bowl is popped under the table and a heavy tablecloth draped over the table and your knees. The heat captured under the table warms the lower half of your body. A very personal sort of heater. The modern thermostaically controlled electric heaters do the same job and have the advantage over the old fashioned, real fire type. They don't either set fire to their users or poison them with carbon monoxide.