'Til the only dry land were at Blackpool

I've been to some cold places in my life. England in January isn't that warm; the Isle of Lewis and Stockholm are often colder but they are not uncomfortable places. Culebrón on the other hand is uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Outside it's about 7ºC and it's midday. The house isn't set up for it. Wind whistles under the doors, through the windows. Marble and tiled surfaces don't help. Built for summer, not for winter. The only warm place in the house is under the shower. Outside, the sky is blue, the sun is shining. Wrapped up, with gloves it's warm enough. But inside the chill soaks through your bones. Down in La Unión I haven't yet started to close the windows at night or use a heater but here. Brrr!

Our local petrol station has no petrol, no diesel and no gas bottles. Everyone says that the owner can't pay his bills so the oil company won't deliver except for cash payments. The next nearest petrol stations are at least 10kms away. The car wash is still in business though. I used it today rather than plunge my hands into a bucket of cold water.

The local bodega on the other hand was doing a roaring trade on Sunday. I think, though I'm not sure, that the farmers who produce the grapes which make the wine, have a running account with the bodega shop. They buy things on tick against the money they are paid for the grapes they harvest. The shop sells groceries, things for around the farm, workwear etc. It's an interesting place.

In the Santa Catalina district of the town, one of the older and possibly poorer parts of Pinoso they are having a fiesta because it's her day on the 25th. I plain forgot to go to see the street bonfires on Friday evening. Yesterday I was going to go and watch the flower offering and have a look at the mediaeval market as I drove back from the cinema but I changed my mind when I noticed that the temperature was hovering around 2ºC and there was a chill wind blowing. What fun in drinking a micro brewery beer or eating a chorizo roll with hands frozen by the cold? I did pop in today though.

There's a circus in town. I half wondered about going. The camel and the strange long horned cow type beast parked outside the big top looked very mangy and very out of place. I arrived to take a few snaps just as the Sunday matinee crowd came out. There wasn't much of an audience.

I'm just back from lunch down in the village hall. It was the Neighbourhood Association AGM. We always have one of the local paellas with rabbit and snails and gazpacho, a sort of rabbit stew with a flat form of dumpling. It's always the same. The meal started late, there was applause when the metre and a half paella pan was brought into the hall from the outside kitchen where it has been cooked over wood. There was plenty of drink and the actual meeting was sparsely attended and very disorganised. For the first time ever, and despite being the only foreigner in the place, I didn't feel too lost. I laughed when I didn't understand and I voted knowing what I was voting for despite the chaos. It looks like we're off to Benidorm again in March. Everybody else was drinking the very fashionable gintonics (gin and tonic) but someone found a bottle of whisky for me. I drained it. My typing may have suffereed.

The title, by the way, is from three ha'pence a foot by Marriott Edgar. Snaps on the Picasa link at the top of the page.

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It rained and it rained for a fortni't, 

And flooded the 'ole countryside. 

It rained and it kept' on raining, 

'Til the Irwell were fifty mile wide.

The 'ouses were soon under water, 

And folks to the roof 'ad to climb. 

They said 'twas the rottenest summer 

That Bury 'ad 'ad for some time. 

The rain showed no sign of abating, 

And water rose hour by hour, 

'Til the only dry land were at Blackpool, 

And that were on top of the Tower.

That special relationship

I write articles for a magazine called TIM. I was writing one this afternoon and I used a quote from the Bogart/Bacall film To Have and Have Not. "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow."

Maybe it's just me but I think that quotes from films are a part of everyday conversation. Do you recognise these? "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," "Show me the money!", "May the Force be with you." Maybe you don't but "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

These quotes are all from foreign films. Movies made by Hollywood. They are not British films made at Ealing or Elstree.

The first time I went to the United States I had great difficulty communicating, the difference between scotch and whisky was the first flashpoint but there were others. It was GBS who said, "The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language" but the truth is much of my cultural heritage comes from the United States. From American authors, photographers, music, TV and places. Show me that tower and we're in Seattle, the red coloured bridge is in San Francisco but the black one is in New York. I know who Babe Ruth was and the NYCs and even the New England Patriots. I hum along to US songs and I watch their TV. I even know some US politicians. I am certain that the main reason is that we share a common language, whatever Shaw thought, and even that language is greatly influenced by the US. When I was a boy they were wagons, they are still lorries to me but I understand and use trucks just as I used movies above.

America - I always find it remarkable  that a country was so certain of itself to choose to use the adjective American to call its citizens - is just a part of my life.

It's not quite the same for Spaniards. When they listen to Bogart doing "Of all the gin joints in all the world" the voice is José Guardiola and it was Constantino Romero who took the voice for Rutger Hauer in the death scene from Bladerunner: "I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion." It's not the same, it's not as strong. The influence of the States just isn't as strong for Spaniards as it is for me and presumably for other Britons.

So I understand that Spaniards don't know about British things like Sheperd's Pie or making tea properly but I'm consistently surprised that Americn authors or TV shows don't figure much in their lives either. I just presumed that the United States was everywhere by giving us all baseball caps, Google and McDonalds but maybe I misunderstood that language was maybe just as powerful in blocking those things.

The first time that Churchill stressed the special realtionship was in the "Iron Curtain Speech" in Fulton Missouri in 1946. "I come to the crux of what I have travelled here to say. Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States."

So you see even Winnie agrees with me about the language.

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.

Diversity

I occasionally see British TV and it is full of people who don't have "Anglo" names. Presumably their families went to the UK from all around the world. They are just there - no fuss, nothing different - getting on with their jobs as reporters, soap actors, presenters and the like. It's so normal, so routine that it's completely unexceptional.

Back home in Pinoso I was reading through the list of entrants and prizewinners in a competition to design a poster for some event a while ago. I was half looking for a British name. The last time I saw any information there were 42 nationalities represented in Pinoso yet, amongst the names of the entrants there was not a single one that didn't have a double barrelled Spanish surname. I may be wrong but I've never noticed anyone in the Carnival Queen competition who isn't Spanish either and whilst I have seen the odd Brit amongst the dance troupes and choirs I haven't noticed Algerians or Senegalese doing anything similar.

I didn't bother to Google my figures and the numbers will have dropped recently but there were something like six million foreign born residents in Spain from a population of some forty seven million. We EU Europeans have a right to live here but lots of nationalities like Ecuadorian, Moroccans, Ukrainians and Chinese have to become nationalised if they wish to remain in Spain. So there are lots of people here with their family roots in other countries who are now full blown Spanish nationals. Lots of them must be well into second or maybe third generation by now.

I don't watch much Spanish TV, the home-grown product that is as distinct from US imports so I am not a reliable source. However, I can only think of two regular TV faces who aren't Spanish. One of them is Michael Robinson the ex Liverpool and QPR footballer who is a football commentator and pundit and, until very recently, there was a young Korean woman called Usun Yoon on a satirical current affairs programme called el Intermedio. There are almost certainly others but I don't know them. Obviously there are all shapes and sizes of people on TV all the time because Spain buys programming from all around the world and because there are celebs and sports stars doing what they do as well as turning up in the adverts. Nonetheless the nationally produced stuff seems remarkably monolithic.

I was at a music festival over the weekend and I was talking about this phenomenon to Maggie. I realised that there were very few black people, Latin Americans etc. among the crowd or even among the musicians.

Maybe it just needs a few more years.

Time

Knowing what time to go to something can be quite tricky. We've been celebrating in the village the last couple of weeks and by arriving about twenty minutes late for the Neighbourhood Association meal for instance we were something like an hour early. This isn't always the case. On sure fire way to make sure that you are late is to presume that the event will start late. It almost certainly will but you can't presume and if you do expect a punctual start. Lots of things do run to time, or at least more or less, but time has an elasticity in Spain that is sometimes surprising to we Brits. I'm still amazed for instance that TV programmes can start both late or early.

Away from punctuality there is a time for things. Like the way that lunchtime starts at around 2pm or evening meals around 9 or 9.30pm. When I'm working this timetable which involves most businesses closing in the mid afternoon and then re-opening for an "evening" stint suits me fine. That's because I run to the same schedule but during the summer break it's dead easy to get up a bit late, set off a bit late and find that the boat ride or museum or whatever is just about to close for lunch as you arrive. Lots of businesses by the way have summer opening hours which means opening earlier than usual but then closing for the day at lunchtime whereas they would normally re-open after a two or three hour break for another three or four hour slot.

During the summer most outdoor events start late simply because it's a bit cooler as well as giving people time to finish their evening meal. We went to a British organised event the other evening that started at 7.30pm. and it felt very early. On the other hand it was a good thing too because we were able to go on to a Spanish organised event at 11pm without having to leave early or worry about a time clash. Meeting people at midnight or later isn't unusual by any means and during the summer Pinoso is much more lively at 2am than it is at 7pm - which, by the way, would be seven in the afternoon and  not seven in the evening to the Spanish way of thinking. Evening, like afternoon is loosely governed by eating times.

We're going to see the Melendi concert, in the picture, just because it's happening in Pinoso. Notice the start time. The tickets are more precise though and say 23.59 just to avoid any doubt about which evening it is!

Preparing to die

We had a will written in the UK years and years ago. A really tall, avuncular chap did it for us. His office was like something from Dickens with big ticking clocks, overstuffed chairs, a leather trimmed desk and legal documents tied with ribbons. Leeds Day in St Ives.

Spanish inheritance law is quite keen on blood. Distant relatives outrank unmarried partners by miles. For years, several years, we have been going to get a Spanish will.

Last week we finally got to a solicitor, un abogado. The chap who talked to us wore jeans and a T shirt and looked significantly younger than some of the clothes I was wearing. There were no ticking clocks. "We're more your juvenle delinquent and petty thief office," said the boy lawyer. "One of our colleagues down in Alicante can come up and help you write a will but why don't you try the noatary? If your will isn't tricky they can do the job faster and cheaper than us."

Notary sounds really old fashioned to me. Like scriveners. Something to do with Guilds and quill pens. Notaries are busy people in Spain though. Their services are used all the time. The notary's office in Pinoso never seems to have sufficient waiting space and people lean against the walls clutching sheaves of paper.

We waded through the waiting throng and spoke above the insistent telephone to get ourselves an appointment. We didn't need the notary apparently. It was the notary's secretary for us. She started by asking for various ID documents. The rest was very strange. I think she described to us, though we may have given her some clues, more or less exactly what we had written down in our notes. We apparently want just about the most basic and straightforward will imaginable.

Our notarial representative said that she'd give us a bell when she had a first draft ready. I have high hopes that all we'll have to do is correct some of the spellings of the names and we will finally be rid of at least one of those recurring summer jobs.

The story of a summer day

It's definitely summer now. I suppose summer is a special time of year around the world but here, on the Mediterranean coast, it seems to have a distinct significance. The expectations for summer are somehow much greater than they were, for instance, in the UK.

And mention of the UK gives me the perfect cue.

We were in the UK last week. I've spent less than a couple of weeks there in the last nine years so, as things change, at times I found myself feeling less like a local and more like a tourist. Interesting place I thought. Full of life, lots of bright ideas all around. Very dynamic. It was also all a bit frenetic. Full and in a hurry. Traffic was incredible, cars everywhere and the poor old TomTom was going mad with beep beeps for radars. I was deeply impressed with being able to wave my credit card at the terminal on the bar and pay for a pint of bitter without codes, PINS or ID. I was a little less impressed with paying three quid for a bottle of water.  It was nice speaking English though sometimes people didn't understand me or I didn't understand them. Even when that happened though I knew that what I was saying was correct and the problem lay elsewhere. I liked the casual - treated as equal - style of the people in bars, hotels and shops though it was sometimes a bit oppressive - as though by being pleasant they had a right to ask personal questions or comment on things that were nothing to do with them. Much less bowler hat and firm handshake than the England I left though well done to that man at passport control who wished me good afternoon as a greeting and a pleasant day as farewell.

So being in England delayed doing what all proper Spaniards do for the summer which is retire to the country or retire to the coast for the months of July and August. Obviously they don't really. They have to go to the office, go to the supermarket, get their cars serviced and fill in time sheets. Not on the telly though. There everyone drinks beer (in moderation) and leans their good looking semi naked body against the good looking semi naked body of a person of the opposite sex as they grin happily surrounded by friends and family engaged in a never ending barbecue or communal meal. The setting is usually on a beach, in a back garden or at a swimming pool. People with mobile phones behave similarly. Yogurt eaters too. Those with indigestion are able to get back to the fun with the help of appropriate medication.

Our summer sees us back in Culebrón. Wage slave work is forgotten for a couple of months though in my case so is a pay packet. The chittering birds and Eddie the squawking cat ensure that there are no long lie ins but who needs to stay in bed when there is no timetable to keep? The sun shines. It really does. It shines every day and when it doesn't there is something very wrong, The colour turns ochre and yellow. There are more village and town fiestas, performances and events than you can shake a stick at. We do all those jobs that we have avoided all year. In the last couple of days I have finally bought that fire extinguisher for the kitchen, given the palm tree a short back and sides practiced a pagan form of topiary on our ivy hedge, done a nonseasonal pruning of the fruit laden fig, peach and almond trees and worn shorts and sandals. I bet George V never wore shorts. I avoided them for years. This summer though I've decided I'm going to look like every other man in Spain and abandon the long trousers. I've drawn the line at flip flops. Even those fun loving Princes surely don't wear flip flops in public? We'll have to visit people as well, maybe buy some new furniture. We have other, serious, jobs to do too. This year we are determined to finally get a Spanish will after trying halfheartedly for the last three or four summers. Yep, lots of important jobs. I hope I can wear long trousers when we go to see the solicitor. I'm not sure shorts are appropriate when negotiating the price of a Welsh dresser either.

But first, as just reward for all that pruning and lopping, digging and dragging, I think a glass or two of local vino is called for.

Oops! Ha, ha!

I seem to have started to say uuf! when something goes wrong. This is a difficult word to spell. It's not the same as pah! or oops! It's more like a phew!

Spanish cockerels go kiri kiri kiri. Obviously no Spaniard has ever heard a cockerel. If they had they would know that cockerels go cock a doodle doo. It's the same with the strange half words, half grunts that we, and they, use to express surprise, to explain away a small mishap to be sarcastic and the like.

PG Wodehouse knew that we Brits made specific noises under specific conditions. I remember the books emphasising HAH!! when the hapless hero was caught out by the stern and  haughty aunt long before his final salvation thanks to Lord Emsworth, the Port and Lemon or Jeeves. It is only in the last few days that I've caught on to the fact that Spaniards emit different non word sounds to us.

This explains why one of my colleagues often seems to dismiss most of my humorous comments as mere tomfoolery with a half mouthed, half nasally blown khah!

Up to now I'd thought it was because she thought I was a fathead.

Lavatorial humour

Sorry to be indelicate but imagine we are in the toilet. No, not we, you or I, separately, apart,  in different but similar toilets. The sit down toilet, not the stand up one.

This toilet is in Spain and on the wall there is a notice which says "Do not throw the paper in the toilet" - well it says it in Spanish but the translation is good. Now paper, papel, is a bit of a multi purpose word. For instance the car parking tickets are often papeles and you can use it for receipts and other things made from paper. The very first time I saw it I thought ah, they mean paper towels and the like but no, alongside the stool was a wastebasket full of soiled toilet paper.

Now Spain is a country blessed with an interminable supply of flies. Unsurprisingly they are attracted by this copious quantity of food. The original concept of  the waste basket isn't particularly pleasant but add in a cloud of flies and it becomes decidedly nasty.

For years I presumed that this was because of dodgy plumbing especially as there are fewer and fewer of the notices nowadays. A few sheets in the pan and the resulting flood could be even more disgusting  than the piles of soiled paper. However, the other day, I was in a high tech building, the sort where the lights are controlled by motion sensors as you walk past yet there was the notice. Surely modern Spanish plumbing can deal with modern toilet paper designed to more or less dissolve in water?

All I can think is that the notice was there because that's how we do it. Not me I hasten to add. 

The Real Spain

We were probably as guilty as anyone. We wanted the Real Spain. That's the one where dark skinned men ride donkeys and raven haired señoritas swirl their skirts. Houses should probably be whitewashed and bougainvillea trimmed. A BMW xD35i would be a cause for young boys to point. Benidorm and Torremolinos would, like Bhopal or Fukushima, be places to avoid.

Not a lot of donkeys in Cartagena.  Though we did get the Friday off work because it was Dolores  - Nuestra Señora de los Dolores - Patron Saint of Cartagena. There were bands marching up and down the street getting ready for the processions, fine tuning their timing for Holy Week. They were surrounded by shoppers. All next week it will be big time Catholic ritual as the brotherhoods, dressed in robes that became the model for the Klan, parade around town carrying huge religious statues. One of my students told me that he dislikes the religious parades but he loves being in Cartagena for Holy Week. The town's alive he says.

On the way home to Culebrón we stopped in the industrial estate between Santomera and Abanilla to go to the restaurant that shares a metal box type industrial building with a sweet manufacturer. Lovely sugary smell as we left. We reckoned the restaurant would have a cheap set meal because there were lots of production line workers sitting at the tables outside having a smoke. We were right; the bar was heaving and the food was cheap. There were maybe five blokes behind the bar and the waiter dealing with our section was actually running between tables. It was as typical a bar as you could possibly want though there wasn't a whiff of bougainvillea.

We've got builders in. There are a couple of blokes plastering as I type. They'd said they'd be here around 10.30 and one of them did show up pretty punctually for a builder at 11.10. Before coming here they'd been to check that the solar powered hot water system they'd installed somewhere else yesterday was working properly. One of them couldn't come straight here after he'd checked that job because he had to take his daughter to her swimming class.

So, you see, we got the real Spain after all.

This is not my beautiful house

Quite a strange experience today. We went for a meal. The odd thing was that it was in somebody's living room. A chap and his wife, who used to run a restaurant in Pinoso until they retired, now do meals to order from their home in the countryside.

A pal booked eight of us in. We ate quite a lot of very decent food for a rock bottom price sitting on green plastic patio chairs. Plenty of booze as well though some of us were driving and stuck to water.

At one point I was outside the chap's house having a cigar and staring at the sun bathed scenery. In the distance was the village of Algueña overshadowed by the huge marble quarry that produces so much of Pinoso's wealth. The man told me he'd worked there for 26 years before setting up his restaurant. He remembered me as an occasional customer from the time I worked in the furniture shop. I asked him if he didn't miss the convenience of town living. He didn't. He'd been to see his grandaughters dancing ballet in Pinoso the evening before and the day before that other members of his family had been to his house. What more could he want - a peaceful existence with friends and family close by?

I talk to a lot of Spanish people because of my job and it's one of the recurring themes. They have plenty of complaints about how things are but, when push comes to shove, the great majority seem very happy with their lot.

Bouncing off the ionosphere

I like listening to the radio. Getting your news from the radio obviously has it's disadvantages (no pictures) but radio does have the huge plus of portability and not being attention seeking. The Internet and television are nowhere near as compatible with driving, shaving or showering as is the radio.

Generally radio here is reasonably good. There are stacks of local stations full of local news and stories. Nationally the news coverage is fine with a range of political views spread amongst the various broadcasters though politicians don't get anything like the cross examination that they are subjected to in the US or UK. News aside speech radio doesn't have anything like the breadth of, for instance, BBC Radio 4 (drama, arts, comedy, documentary reports etc)  but with my "Proud to be British" hat on I suspect that very few radio stations in the world do. Sports coverage is enormously important and takes up hours of air time. Sport is synonomous with football though basketball, tennis, Formula One, cycling and golf get the occasional look in.

We have a classic music channel, Radio Clasica, which is a lot like the BBC Radio 3 of yonks ago - a bit highbrow and a bit tedious. There's nothing like Classic FM

Not knowing how to describe it adequately I'll call it pop music. Pop music gets badly treated here. I've said before that the commercial channels tend to play a limited range of songs over and over again: They play far too much dated music (not so much Beatles as lots of "Hips Don't Lie" Shakira) and the playlists change so slowly that you're sure the programme you listened to today has exactly the same content as a programme you heard six months ago.

The state broadcaster has a pop music channel too - Radio 3. A quick look at their website and you can see that they're a bit staid but, then again, it looks hopeful enough. The very first programme I listened to on Radio 3 was playing modern Spanish indie bands and the next had modern world music. Hopeful I thought. Radio 3 does have some good programmes but it also has far too many presenters who prefer the sound of their own voice to the music and they play far too much really old stuff. It also has minority programming like country and western or jazz at peak times.

Now I realise that young people can access modern music in so many ways that radio is not now the key medium it once was. On the other hand the eclectic nature of radio does mean that it can do some of the sifting for you. The radio is on, in the background, you like something, you check it out on Spotify, YouTube, Internet radio or Facebook and then, if you really like it, you download it to your computer or phone and it's yours.

I've been fretting about this for some time now and this morning when I popped into town and some bloke was droning on about some macrobiotic festival in Madrid instead of playing music I decided to do a bit of complaining. And that's what I've just done. I banged off an email along the lines of asking Radio 3 what sort of music policy it has that allows it to broadcast just three 1950s flamenco tracks per hour at ten in the morning - or something along those lines. Actually I should be honest. I wrote an email and then asked a couple of Spanish pals to correct my grammar so that I didn't come across as a fool. It was interesting that they made very few changes but they chose to make my language much more formal.

The website was opaque of course so sending the message wasn't easy and I don't suppose they'll reply but at least it formalises my right to complain.

Las Lamparillas

The best route home from Cartagena to Culebrón passes close by the town of Fortuna. Alongside the ring road the gaunt skeletons of hundreds of unfinished houses bear witness to the folly of the Spanish building boom. The planned development, built in the bone dry scrubland that surrounds Fortuna, was to be called Fortuna Hill Nature and Residential Golf Resort.

 A key part of the new resort was the Las Lamparillas development. It was aimed at golf playing Britons who weren't quite rich enough to buy a similar place on the coast and was planned to have 3,737 houses when complete. There were other agreements for other developments in Fortuna. If everything had gone as planned Fortuna's population would have increased from 10,000 to 100,000.

A research project carried out by a local university in 2004 gives some idea as to the scale of the building work planned. Across Murcia, a region with just one and a half million inhabitants, there were agreements to build 800,000 houses. The figures never made sense but nobody seemed to notice before everything went pear shaped.

Work on Las Lamaprillas, which was just part of the whole resort, started in 2007. By 2010 the principal developer of the site went bust with debts of some 120,000,000€. The banks that had loaned the money took the valueless site and the part completed houses as payment. Nobody, not the banks, not the courts and certainly not the developers considered doing the decent thing by the people who had paid deposits for the houses or to the merchants who supplied the building materials. Local businesses and house buyers are still owed around 30 million by the developers.

The town mayor says that it's easy to criticise now but that, at the time, everyone was doing well out of the building boom and nobody was complaining then.

Local councils can re-classify former rural land as urban land. On reclassification citrus groves and farm fields become much more valuable as buildiing plots. In the boom years Fortuna town council found itself with nearly 10 million euros extra from the sale of reclassified land and the councillors set about spending the money with gusto. They expected more money to follow and they borrowed against future income. The result now, in the lean years, is that the council has had to jack up taxes and either cut services or charge more for them. Many projects were never completed but the bank loans on them still have to be paid off.

In small towns in Spain everyone knows everyone else. Little networks of friends and relations do favours for other little networks. The money coming in from the developers apparently flowed into lots of those networks. At the time of the local elections in 2003 with so much money swilling around the locals became much more interested in who was in charge whilst the politicians saw the potential in controlling all that lovely money. The ruling PP party set about buying votes. It wasn't until 2011 that the courts found party workers guilty of vote rigging. The mayor, the same man is still the mayor now as then, chose not to resign.

The people of Fortuna will be paying for las Lamparillas for years to come. Spain is paying for lots of similar projects the length and breadth of the country.

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Since writing this article a higher court has confirmed the charges of vote rigging in Fortuna and the Mayor, Matias Carrillo, has resigned. 

Invisible customers

It may be unfair but the UK comparison is Kwik Save. If Tesco's has clean aisles and lots of open tills then Kwik Save has shelf stackers who bump into you and only one, rather reluctant, assistant on the single open till. Most supermarkets in Spain are Kwik Save. Día, Aldi, Lidl, Consum, Árbol, HiperBer, Upper - all the same. A bit messy, a bit small. Not invariably but generally. Mercadona is a bit smarter but even there the shelf stackers and floor sweepers expect you to give way to them. The big stores are Carrefour and Eroski - at least around here.

Only Eroski and Carrefour, to my knowledge, have the 10 items or fewer cash desks. Even they only have a couple of cash desks open in the 2pm-5pm afternoon lull in which case the same problem arises as with smaller stores.

Queues are slow. Time saving strategies like having your cash or card ready, preparing your shopping bags or not having a chat about something of great import are not the Spanish way. So, if you just pop into the local supermarket to get a few items it can take a frustrating while. The seasoned Spanish shopper out for only a few things has a strategy. They buy the main items and park their basket in the queue. They anticipate the slowness of the queue and leave it to inch forward whilst they abandon the basket and finish shopping. Of course those last things always take longer than they expect or the queue moves with unusual swiftness and it is soon the basket's turn with no owner present.

I am always the person who arrives at a cash desk to find the queueing basket. Or maybe competing queueing baskets. The way is symbolically blocked. I could step over and ignore the presumption. I usually though stand dutifully behind fretting over the virtual race between the checkout process and the absent shoppers.

It happened today. The absent owner returned just in time. In reality she was two customers as she divided the contents of her basket into two piles. Now where is that coupon? Oh, I probably need some bags. Money? Oh, yes I probably have my purse here somewhere - now where did I leave it? Terrible about that little girl isn't it? Let me see I may have the coppers somewhere.

The Black Cap is too good for 'em I say.

Boom boom

I began to laugh out loud. My head was ringing. It was about 2am and all around me people dressed in a motley uniform of black robes and red scarves plus any number of personal touches from cigars and sunglasses to multicoloured wigs were walking up and down banging the hell out of drums.

Big drums, little drums, every size of drum. Children, adults, teenagers. bang, bang, bang.

I was in Hellín where they celebrate the Resurrection by banging on drums. They call it a tamborada from tambor the Spanish for a drum. As far as I could see there was no organisation to the event. People turned up with any number of friends or family and banged drums.

I laughed because I suddenly thought how mad it all was.

Not a decent snap all night. The flash ones look horrid and the ambient light ones are all blurred. But you should get the idea.

Toast for breakfast

In Pinoso, in Cartagena and in Culebrón, if there were a bar, a typical breakfast food would be toast. In Alicante and Murcia that usually means a portion of a bread stick (they always ask if you want half or whole when you order) toasted and with something on top. By far and away the most popular are either oil and salt or grated tomato. Adding a slice of ham is optional and not standard but very common.


In Madrid on the other hand if you ask for toast in the morning it's usually a thick Mother's Pride type slice served with butter and jam. Down in Seville the breadstick type toast usually comes along with a three sectioned dish containing grated tomato and various fats (sobrasada and lard are common.) In Catalonia they seem to rub the tomato directly onto the toast rather than grate it first and rubbing the bread with garlic as well as tomato is very common.


So, this morning we were in la Rioja, in Santo Domingo de la Calzada to be precise. "How do you do the toast around here," I asked, "Do you have it with tomato?" The girl leaning on the bar didn't look too sure. Shell shocked by my appalling pronunciation I presumed. Then she asked her mum who was in the kitchen - "Butter and jam," she said,  "Did we want sliced bread or normal bread?"

Interesting little regional variation I thought.

The day we went to Beni

Benidorm has to be one of the oddest towns in Spain. For a start it looks odd. Far too many tall buildings for your average Spanish town. It also seems to lack any sort of cultural life in the theatre and museum sense of the word. I'm sure that isn't true but as an average visitor all I saw were bars, restaurants, poundstretcher type shops and sex clubs. All of them had that sort of seedy, run down look reserved for brash seaside towns.

Benidorm feels oddly foreign too. Obviously the majority of businesses in a Spanish town dedicated to tourism are Spanish but there are so many British, German, Dutch and even Chinese businesses that it would be easy for any of the nationals of those countries to forget that they had left their homelands.

Benidorm was odd in another, much less quirky, way. At one point on Saturday night we were strolling along a pedestrianised street. There were bars on both sides and planted firmly in the middle of the street were muscly, shaven headed men. I presumed that they were under-employed bouncers being used as early evening leafleteers until the bars got going and their bouncerial skills were required. Every bar had some sort of offer - free shots with every beer, bargain pints of vodka and Red Bull, two for one deals etc. We'd been given a couple of leaflets as we strolled though I suppose for most of these places I was too old. They'd have me down as a customer for one of the bars with the other white haired men where María Jesús would be playing her accordion. But there was something wrong with the way the bouncers were standing; with their lack of movement. Maggie noticed it too. There was menace in the air and I'm still not sure whether it was from the bouncers themselves or because of what they were waiting for.

I can't remember the last time I felt threatened walking the streets of a Spanish town. Last night, in Benidorm, surrounded by signs for British Breakfasts, Scottish bars and roast beef dinners I did. A Spanish couple we talked to later commented on the same unease.

We were there, in Benidorm, with the people of Culebrón, with people from the Neighbourhood Association. Elena, who heads up the Association, had found a deal at a Benidorm hotel. For the princely sum of 27€ per person we got the coach ride from Culebrón to Benidorm and full board in one of the big Benidorm chain hotels for twenty four hours. It was the sort of hotel that has a featured dance band in one lounge and a music quizz in another. There was a two for one deal on most drinks too.

To be truthful we didn't do much except eat, drink and stroll for twenty four hours but that would be a majority pastime here. The weather was excellent, the room was good, the food was plentiful and we were made to feel very welcome. I had predicted disaster but I was wrong. It couldn't have gone much better.

Just one last observation. We left Culebrón at 4pm in the afternoon. It seemed odd to our British sensibility. Obviously, if we British are going somewhere we get up at the crack of dawn and try to get there before the shops open. Probably the timings were linked to whatever package the hotel was offering but none of our Spanish travelling companions thought that a late afternoon start was in the least odd. We'll be there in nice time for dinner they said.

Els Enfarinats in Ibi

Els Enfarinats means covered with flour in Valenciano. Ibi is an inland Alicantino town. Each 28th December, the local equivalent to All Fools Day, there is a takeover of local government in the town  by the fourteen els enfarinats. Their battle cry is "New Justice" and that's what they set about imposing on the town. One is the mayor, one the sheriff, one the prosecutor, one the town clerk etc. But it doesn't go smoothly. The old town authorities don't give up easily and there is a pitched battle in the Church Square. It's a battle fought with eggs, flour, talc and 12,000 jumping jacks.

The floury folk win out and they then go around the town raising funds. They check that local shops are using the correct weights and measures - their's - and when they aren't the shops are heavily fined. Punsihment for those who decide not to pay is jail or maybe an eggy and floury punishment. But by 5pm all they can think about is dancing and the new Government gives way to the old.

The taxes levied go to local charities.

The future of the Valley of the Fallen

This isn't about Culebrón or our life here.  I wrote it for the TIM magazine and it was published earlier this month. I just thought I'd save it here too. It's long.

El Valle de los Caídos is a huge mausoleum and basilica church carved into solid granite and topped off with an enormous cross in the Cuelgamuros Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid. It was built, on the orders of Franco, between 1940 and 1959 with money from the National Lottery. The work was done by as many as 200,000 Republican prisoners of war according to some sources and as few as 2,470 according to others. The prisoners were able to gain remission on their sentences by working on the construction. Some sources suggest the workers were reasonably paid whilst others charge slave labour. The supposed number who died during the building of the the complex varies from 14 to 27,000, depending on whether the source is pro Franco or pro Republican. The monument was consecrated by Pope John XXIII in 1960 with care being taken to build a curtain wall within the basilica to ensure that not all of the space was consecrated. By this device the church was kept smaller than Saint Peter's in Rome. Over the main entrance an inscription reads "Fallen for God and Spain!"

The altar of the basilica is directly beneath the tallest cross in the World, all 150 metres of it. On one side of the altar, under a one and a half ton granite slab, lies Franco, el Caudillo, whilst on the other side is José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, the Spanish fascist party. More than 33,832 other victims of the Spanish Civil War keep them company. At least 491 bodies were transferred there illegally, to fill up spare tomb space, from some of the more than 2,000 mass graves dotted the length and breadth of Spain. The monument is easily the largest mass grave in the country. Most of the others are much less grand - roadside ditches and shallow graves usually dug and filled in the dead of night.

When Franco finally died in 1975, after nearly 40 years in power, there was a tacit agreement amongst politicians and society in general to forget the past. No settling of old scores, no mass trials, no national blood-letting. Then in October 2007 the Zapatero Government introduced the Historical Memory Law which recognised and extended the rights of those who suffered persecution or violence because of the Civil War and the dictatorship that followed.

The law directly condemns the Francoist regime, recognises certain rights for victims on either side during and after the war, prohibits political events in the Valley of the Fallen, legislates for the removal of all Francoist symbols from public areas, provides state aid in tracing, identifying and possibly exhuming victims buried in mass graves, annuls laws and some trial court rulings carried out during the dictatorship, grants Spanish nationality to anyone who fought in the International Brigades and gives the right of return to exiles and their descendants.

This law is a bit of a problem for the Valley of the Fallen. How can this monument, built as a symbol of the victory of National Catholicism, be turned into something that doesn't glorify Franco's reign? It's a particularly thorny problem for the Benedictines who live in the Santa Cruz Abbey within the valley and who are technically responsible for the monument. Under the new law they are supposed to ensure that the monument restores the balance between victors and vanquished though they don't seem to have knuckled down to the job so far. Another difficult question is to decide what happens to Franco's body, the only person in the whole complex who isn't a casualty of war. Everyone else, down to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was executed by firing squad in Alicante during November 1936, died a victim.

The Government's answer has been to appoint a commission to work it all out. There were similar failed attempts under the Governments of Adolfo Suárez and Felipe González. The Commission's job is to decide how to tackle the problem of the status of the monument in relation to the new law. They have already had to disappoint Republican family members, who wanted to exhume and re-bury their forebears in places far away from their executioner. Government forensic scientists found that it was impossible to determine who was who in the jumbled and deteriorated piles of bodies.

Views vary as to what the commission will finally decide but the clever money seems to be on Franco's remains being removed from the Valley maybe to rest alongside his wife. Other options include moving Primo de Rivera as well, turning the place into a non religious museum or even converting it into a monument to the victims. There was even talk of dynamiting the giant cross which some have compared to an enormous swastika.

In true Spanish style the monument was suddenly closed in November 2009 for "urgent safety work." A pragmatic if short term solution. The commission is due to report late in 2011 and it looks likely that the safety work will be completed shortly afterwards.

Kiss me, Hardy

We had some Spanish pals here yesterday. Thinking about it this may be only the second time that we've had Spanish guests in the house. It doesn't say much for our integration. Maggie pointed out we don't have many people around at all. That doesn't say much for our friendliness.

The food didn't go down too well. The conversation was a bit forced at times and our Spanish may well have been quite comical but it was still a nice day.

One of our topics of conversation was about families. That led to kissing. Not the physical act, a conversation about it.

When I left the UK people never ended their conversations with family or close friends with "I love you" indeed for the most part I was able to avoid any of that false and ritualised sentimentality. I very seldom hugged the people I met. For colleagues and new acquaintances a firm handshake served very well. For old and dear friends words of greeting sufficed. I approve of handshaking, an ancient and appropriate gesture. I approve of old friends and the shared experiences. When some sophist was determined to give me a hug there was always the possibility of bloodshed, or at least a good nutting, as my forehead crashed into one part or another of the other person's head.

In Spain the greeting has rules too. Between men a handshake, possibly with a hand on shoulder to add warmth. Fine. Between women or between a man and a woman a kiss on each cheek, first  right to right then left to left. Brushing cheek to cheek for first timers or acquaintances, more cheek or even lips to cheek for close friends. I understand the rules. I like the gesture. Bloodshed has been minimal.

My Spanish pal was explaining that close male family members and those solid, friend for life male friends also do the two kisses thing. I can't imagine that would go down too well in the UK even now.

Just a note: After Marilo's comments on Facebook I have changed the English slightly so as not to give the impression that Spanish people go around snogging each other in greeting.