On fish 'n' chips

I went to the UK last weekend. I don't go very often but my mum moved, just before Christmas, into a care home and I felt nosey enough, or bad son guilty enough, to go and have a look at her new digs. A long weekend, Friday through Monday. My mum seemed fine and happy enough, given her 93 years and her circumstances, and it was good to see her. To make it even better I got to see my sister and brother and their partners.

I just asked Maggie how long she considers I've spent in the UK in the last 20 years and she reckoned a month. I think it must be more than that but I'd be amazed if it added up to more than three months. This means the UK is a bit foreign to me. Obviously it's not really strange to me because I'm British and lots of stuff just got coded into my DNA - be that sausage rolls, drinking tea, double decker buses, Boxing Day or the winter sound of cawing crows. Just after we'd arrived in the UK, in the bus on the airport apron, a group of young people, young people wearing sports clothes, with modern haircuts and rings in their noses were were talking about looking forward to a decent cup of tea and ginger nuts, or maybe chocolate digestives. I felt welcomed by that conversation.

One thing I always appreciate in the UK is about being able to speak English. Even if the person I'm talking has a different heritage I'm confident enough of my English to find it easy going. There are always new constructions, new words and new phrases that I've never heard before but it's simple enough to catch on to most and I can always ask if I don't know. I can overhear conversations without listening in and I can gauge whether making a comment on that overheard conversation is appropriate or not. I'm still miles from that confidence with Spanish.

Like all tourists some of my main interactions in the UK are with places selling food and drink and with a different range of prices. Paying upfront before someone pours my tea or prepares my Kurdish breakfast is still a bit surprising even if I've adapted to paying for the smallest item with a card or with my phone. I suspect that I will never adapt to drinking through a plastic lid atop a cardboard cup while crockery still exists. I was also surprised this time that I needed to keep my coat on in so many under heated caffs and pubs presumably as a response to high energy prices.

I talk to a woman called Ana most weeks through a video call. I speak to her in Spanish and I was telling her about my trip. I was saying to her that my Britishness still jars with Spain from time to time. I was mainly thinking about my little verbal asides. For instance, only a week ago I was trying to buy a flat hose. The sort of hose pipes they have rolled up in a wired glass cupboard that say Fire Dry Riser. I went to the two agricultural supply stores that we have in Pinoso. It was pretty obvious, after the response in the first, that they wouldn't have one in the second so, when the woman said, "No, sorry," I wasn't surprised and quipped "What a shame, I so wanted to play at firemen." The woman serving on looked at me like I was a blathering idiot - and it wasn't my Spanish. I've been told that it's nothing to do with Britishness and that it's just that I'm a bit odd in my verbal ad libbing. In my defence I'd give the example that last Monday, when I joined the end of the "Non Priority" queue at Stansted Airport to get on a Ryanair plane, I asked a woman if she were the back of the steerage queue. She understood, she smiled a little, she didn't think I was blathering. 

Ana said she understood the steerage line too. To emphasise the differences I then repeated most of the stuff I've written in the last few lines - drinking through plastic from cardboard cups, paying for the smallest item with a credit card, living off takeaway food and ordering up an Uber. She said that those things were dead normal to her life in the Barcelona area where she lives. Alright I said, and I told her the hosepipe story. She laughed which rather confounded my theory of a different sense of humour. Finally, I said about the insecurity of speaking Spanish as against English and she told me that was nothing to do with my level of language competence but because I was a big baby.

Maybe lots of the difference I think of as a British/Spanish thing are more between the bits of England I visit and the Spain I live in. After all home is an almost unpopulated satellite village of a small town which is still, very much, in a bit of a time warp. 

Just after that video call I was listening to a podcast from a bloke called Ben, who lives in Madrid. He was talking about going out for a menu del día, the cheap lunchtime set menus so typical of Spain. He was talking about how the food was usually traditional offerings. He obviously felt the need to be a bit more precise about that. He went on to say that nowadays Madrid is rapidly losing the traditional places and is full of fast food and restaurants offering cuisine from all over the world - not just the long established Italian and Chinese places but lots of South American, Eastern European, Middle East and Asian restaurants. That's exactly what I'd seen on Mill Road in Cambridge the other day. Then, for good measure he mentioned the "midday pause" the two or three hours that businesses close in large tracts of Spain, and how that too was now very much a thing of the past in the big cities.

Oh well, what do I know.

Being Zen

Shortly after moving into a new flat some pals got an email from one of their neighbours. They ran it through Google translate but, even then, they didn't quite understand. It seemed that the neighbour was asking them to put 100€ into a bank account and they didn't see why. They asked me and I happened to know what it was. The note was from the President of the neighbour's association to say that the building's current account only had 34€ left and that each flat needed to chip in 100€ to top up the fund. Each building, generally blocks of flats, where there are private dwellings and shared areas - like the entrance way and the stairs - has, I think by law, to have a community of owners. In my friend's building it seems they've opted for a kitty system instead of a regular fixed charge. The money is used for the upkeep of the common areas - things like maintaining the fire extinguishers and lift or lighting the hallways and stairs.

When I bought my first car I knew that a key questions to the seller was about the length of time left on the MOT even though I'd never taken a car through an MOT check. When I started my first job I knew I needed my National Insurance Number which had magically arrived in the post a little while before. Those and any number of other similar steps came in their time. Quite how I knew what they were, or why they were important, I don't quite know. My best guess is that they just came via some secret initiation into society. I wanted a summer job as a student and I went to the Labour Exchange. For my first passport I got a form from the Post Office. Probably, in reality, my dad or mum told me or everyone else at school or at college was doing the same thing at the same time. These things come at intervals, they don't usually come in one gigantic torrent though there are times when they do - for instance when you move house.

When we gúiris move to Spain it's a moving house plus. There's that deluge of jobs you'd have in Amersham or Fleetwood but this time it's in a system that hasn't been drip-feeding your consciousness since you were knee high to a grasshopper. Some things you sort of expect, they're just the same, or at least apparently the same, as wherever you came from. Others are a bit of a surprise. I remember the outrage, as well as the confusion, when I went to buy a butane bottle for the gas heater I'd just bought. I couldn't simply buy the gas - I needed all sort of documentation that seemed, at the time, to be bureaucracy gone mad. There's another, much subtler factor at work. You think that you are facing a process you recognise, you think you know what's going on but it turns out that the approach is completely different. For instance, do a British type exam or test and you get rewarded for demonstrating what you know or can do - you gain points to get towards 100% while in a Spanish exam you start with 100% and points are subtracted for errors and omissions to move you towards zero. You won't notice till you have to pass your driving test or want to get the DELE certificate to become a nationalised Spaniard. Another example would be days off work. In the UK your job involves holiday entitlement, in Spain there are days when you are not expected to work. The end result is surprisingly different.

On top of this change of system there's the language. It's quite strange how Spanish responds to an idea of seriousness. So, even if your everyday Spanish is coming along quite nicely the Spanish you encounter in tax letters or dealings with the employment service will be different. Serious matters need serious (read archaic, overblown and needlessly complex) language. You wouldn't think the selection process for the Spanish entry to the Eurovision Song Contest could be classed as serious but certainly a part of it was. The participants and presenters used everyday and modish language but when it came to the results of the vote there was a marked change of tone. The presenter might be wearing a latex frock slashed to the navel but the language for the vote was ritualised and serious. Long and seldom used verbs, instead of common ones, were used - points weren't given they were bestowed (obviously I'm translating here). They used another unusual word to describe the results from a polling sample who get to vote on the songs. The polling sample is chosen to reflect Spanish society as a whole - so many old people, so many men, so many transgender, so many city dwellers etc.  It's the same process that market research people use for their surveys. Would you know that it's called a demoscopic sample? It would have been easy to call it the public vote or even a representative sample but they didn't. No. The demoscopic jury bestowed 40 points on Paloma Blanca. Another simple example might be at fiesta time. Because the bars are often heaving with people the usual rule of paying when you've finished is often replaced by one of paying as you're served. As often as not there are notices behind the bar to tell you this. But they use the verb abonar instead of the usual pagar. So you get something like "Please settle your debt at the time of purchase" rather than "Please pay as you are served". It shows they're not messing about, they're official and the language proves it.

Of course it all gets easier with time, the jobs begin to settle down and you get to know your way around better, both literally and metaphorically. It's not that they go away; you still have to get the car through the roadworthiness test or renew your ID document and do an annual tax return or re-register on the council register but the urgency, the apparently never ending list of jobs does slow.  

Maintaining stereotypes

Everyone knows that Germans don't have a sense of humour. Everyone knows that people from the United States are fat, that Jamaicans have dreads and smoke ganja all the time or that we English are very formal and reserved. And everyone knows that those generalisations are all totally untrue. Jada Pinkett Smith is American, Usain Bolt is Jamaican and all those people vomiting on the payments in Magaluf are British. Bear that idea in mind as you read.

Here are some things that Spaniards do or don't do. The converse is that somebody else typically does do, or doesn't do, these things.

1. Spanish men don't wear shorts once summer is over and until the summer weather comes back. A warm day in February doesn't count.
2. Spaniards don't put butter on the bread - not on sandwiches and not on the plate to go with the bread roll at table. It is true that, in some parts of Spain, Spaniards put butter on toast, with jam.
3. Spaniards do not drink warm drinks - tea, coffee type drinks - with food except with toast or the pastries at breakfast.
4. Spaniards don't put milk in tea. This means getting a standard type British tea is a bit of a struggle - té clásico con una pizca de leche fría.
5. Spaniards do not put pepper on the table to go with the salt, oil and vinegar.
6. Spaniards do say hello as they enter a bar, a bank, a post office or the like. They greet everyone.
7. Spaniards say goodbye as they leave a bar etc.
8. Spaniards tend to speak quite loudly!
9. Spaniards won't have a hissy fit if a stranger comments favourably on a baby, musses up the hair of a four year old or speaks to their child.
10. Spaniards never sing along with their National Anthem. That's a bit of a trick really because the current Spanish National Anthem doesn't have any words. I can't remember what it is but there is some accepted version of tum tey tum, or hmm hmm hmm if a football crowd feels it needs to make a statement.
11. Spaniards never eat paella in the evening; it's just for lunch.
12. Spaniards do not put carpets in bathrooms and they think it's a disgustingly unhygienic thing to do so.
13. Spaniards hardly ever drink anything alcoholic, until late at night, without eating a little of something alongside - nuts, crisps, olives etc.
14. Spanish washbasins, baths and sinks hardly ever have two taps.
15. Spanish queues don't usually involve a line of people. A person joining the virtual queue has to ask who is the last person there so they can take their turn accordingly.
16. Spaniards take a start time as a rough indication of when to be at an appointed place. Punctuality has improved incredibly in the last few years but if the theatre performance is billed to start at 8pm then 8.15/8.20pm would be good going.
17. Spaniards eat to quite a fixed timetable. 2pm to 3.30pm to start the main meal of the day and around 9pm to 10pm for the much less important evening meal.
18. Spaniards would not consider going to a (normal) restaurant before 9pm in the evening. 
19. Spaniards do not care for spicy food.
20. Spaniards do not consider tipping to be any sort of duty. The idea of a fixed percentage is very foreign to them. Spaniards do not tip when service is bad.
21. Spaniards don't wait to be noticed by bar staff at the bar. They make their presence known.
22. Spaniards, in this part of the world at least, do not heat their homes, offices or workplaces adequately. This is becoming less true.
23. Spaniards let their children stay up very late and Spanish parents and carers include their children in lots of late night activities.
24. Spaniards don't eat in the street - that is they don't eat a sandwich or other snack type food as they walk.
25. Spaniards don't (generally) binge drink.
26. Spaniards have power points in bathrooms.
27. Spaniards talk to their families, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents etc. very, very regularly.
28. Spaniards do not drink tepid beer or soft drinks.
29. Spaniards don't, readily, invite people into their homes.
30. Spaniards, when driving, do not, in my experience, acknowledge friendly gestures from other motorists. Let someone into a lane of near stationary traffic and there will be no upraised palm to say "thank you".
31. Spaniards, most Spaniards, don't particularly like flamenco

There are tens more but that will do for now

Typically typical normality

In Spanish shopping centres, like everywhere else, the fronts of shops are, often, open. The idea is obvious enough. The shops want to make sure that there is no barrier to you buying something.

It's not the same in small towns. There shops not only have doors but they are also, often, locked. You have to ring a bell to get in. It's not for security, not in the jeweller's shop sense, but it is because the staff in lots of smaller businesses aren't exactly waiting, poised, for the next customer. It's not just shops. For instance you have to ring the bell to get into the Footwear Museum in Elda.

So I went to buy an inner tube for my bike. The fly curtain covered the front door of the shop. There was a bell. Once upon a time I would have found this odd but I've rung so many bells here that it's just normally normal nowadays. I rang it. Nobody came. I realised there was a note on the door. It said ring the bell. It also said if we don't answer telephone this number. I rang the number. Nobody answered.

I abandoned the bike shop and went to a tyre place. One of those Euromaster type tyre and battery chains. There the barrier at the entrance is of a different nature. The franchise in Pinoso is run by the sort of bloke you meet in a UK boozer when you'd hoped to have a quiet pint and read the paper. One of those blokes who speaks with a Haghill Glasgow or a Byker Newcastle accent and hasn't got his teeth in today. Or he could be a bloke who plays dominoes very loudly. Not that the Pinoso man was from Haghill, Byker, toothless or playing dominoes. I'm trying to paint a word picture to describe a sort of non stockbroker belt sort of person.

He was putting new tyres on someone's car but I'm not quite as British as I once was so I didn't wait till he'd finished to get served. "A question", I said. This is the phrase which is used all over Spain (in Spanish) to queue jump. "Do you sell inner tubes for bikes?". Apparently my pronunciation of inner tube (cámara) and mask (mascarilla) are similar enough for a moment of misunderstanding but I'm not quite as British as I once was so I simply repeated the word more loudly and with more roll on the R. Individual words became the order of the day on his side. Size? Valve? I was still on fuller phrases. Give me two, car type valve, how much? The answer to the latter was 9€. I handed over a ten and he returned the 1€ in a Barnes Wallis style bouncing the coin across the counter. I smiled, he grunted and all three of us said goodbye one to the other.

Later, cooking lunch, my phone rang. I answered. The person on the other end asked who I was. I told the truth and she apologised and hung up. Later I realised it was the bike shop person checking who'd phoned. Do people do that in the UK? Lots of people do it here; phone the missed call number that is.

All unremarkable really but all quite Spanish. 

Just to finish and because this tickled me rather than because it has anything to do with shopping. Today is the last day that you can turn the old Spanish currency, the peseta, into Euros. You've been able to do it whenever you liked for the past twenty years but today was the very last time and people were queuing around the block at the central banks in Murcia and Valencia. Strange behaviour.

Moving forward together

I'm sure you've heard my theory before that you don't learn popular culture; if you're born somewhere then the culture is yours be that food, music, TV programmes or YouTube influencers. You can't help it. The talk at work, the talk at school, the stuff your parents tell you, the memes and gifs that turn up on your phone, the little snippets you read in the newspaper all help to make sure that you know what's going on. That's how, I suppose, I learned about MOTs, Trooping the Colour, Premium Bonds, the Boat Race, laverbread, the RNLI Lifeboats, Spaghetti Junction, Engelbert Humperdinck, driving on the left and how to make tea. 

Changes in language are similar. Ordinary people are in charge. Words and phrases come and go. Some old academic bloke might argue that there is a perfectly good phrase to describe keeping a safe distance during a pandemic but everyone else is going to say social distancing whether he likes it or not. Somebody once asked me about how you decide that someone is competent in a particular language. What's the threshold for somebody to be able to say that they speak English, Spanish or Swahili? Some people have less education than others, some have learned more vocabulary, some have different ideas about how language should be used but who is to say which form is better than another? What says that the Radio 4 pundit talking about early 20th Century Art speaks better English than the geezer with the barrow having a beer in the Queen Vic? Where is the level? If an ordinary Spaniard doesn't know a word that came from a novel does that make the novelist highbrow or the non word knower lowbrow or are they simply different people?

This does mean that some things that come easily to locals require much more effort from we outsiders. I know a little bit about Spanish history and politics because I've made an effort to do so but it's much more difficult to latch on to everyday things. Consider, for instance, events; things like sports matches, theatre, concerts, guided visits, exhibitions and demonstrations. Sometime, shortly after we got here I had a bit of an email battle with one of the local tourist offices which had published a calendar of events. Most were without dates. Why bother to put dates when Mother's day is always the first Sunday in May and "everybody" knows that or when it's common knowledge that International Book Day is the 23rd April. I suppose that, among Britons, Christmas Day wouldn't necessarily get a date either but it does suppose that everyone shares the same knowledge. There was a time when Ramadan and Diwali would have passed unremarked in the UK but, nowadays, that isn't the case. The argument I made to the tourist office was that they needed to remember that not everyone in their town shared the same, Spanish, Catholic background. 

I was thinking about this yesterday just after I'd spent ages trawling through the Facebook pages and other tourist offices and town halls websites to see what sort of things are happening locally over the summer. Some of those things are repetitive, they turn up regularly  - like Burns Night, The Grand National, the Lewes Bonfire, Trooping the Colour, Turkey and sprouts, Glastonbury or Glyndebourne - whilst other things are one offs - concerts, weddings, race meetings, car rallies, election hustings, break dance competitions and so on. Some are things that you might anticipate and plan for. I don't know when Henley Regatta is or Royal Ascot or the Manx TT but it's relatively easy to find out and plan for them if you fancy getting involved. Here in Spain I might do the same for Holy Week in Malaga or the candle festival in Aledo. The flip side is that the only way to know that Villena tourist office is going to do a guided tour of the village of Zafra is to check their publicity. Checking Villena's website, well that and the other thirty that go along with it, is turning into a right slog.

Mind you finding out about local things isn't always such mind numbing toil. I was in Castilla la Mancha the other day and I went for a set menu in a restaurant. One of the dishes was called Galianos which I'd never heard of but turned out to be a pheasant and rabbit dish. I was pondering Galianos and its position in "the popular database". My guess is that many Spaniards wouldn't know what Galianos is either but I also suppose that the situation would be akin to me eating with my, relatively young, nephews. Imagine bubble and squeak or toad in the hole was on the menu. Ny nephews may never have heard of them, they're old fashioned foods after all. I have though so we could pool our experience. In return I presume they would help me out with what to order in a Korean restaurant on the basis that they have probably eaten Korean when I haven't. 

Some things we just know. Some things we learn. Some things we have to search out.

When?

For this post to work you're going to have to pretend that lots of generalisations are true. For instance that a man and a woman living together and caring for a few children is the historically normal family unit or that, through time, women have worked at home while men have worked elsewhere. You can't bridle either at the idea that people in the UK go to work in the morning, have a lunch break and then go home sometime in the early evening; 9 to 5. Likewise, for Spain, we're going to agree that people go to work in the morning, stop work in the early afternoon, start work again in the late afternoon and then go back to work till mid evening. Again, Pitman style, we'll call it 9 to 2 and 5 to 8.30.

So, in this generalised world, Britons have a shortish lunch break during the working week which means that they eat their main meal of the day in the evening. Spaniards on the other hand, with a longer midday break, eat their major meal of the day then. This is not to suggest that dinner is non-existent in Spain but it is, usually, a much less substantial meal than lunch. This can cause British holidaymakers to Spain some distress when they want to follow their habit of eating more in the evening. They wonder why so many restaurants are closed in the evening especially out of season or away from tourist areas.

Remember that we are in some sort of world where Victorian values have been restored. As the man comes home his expectation is that his woman will have his food ready. In the UK we're presuming that workplaces finish around 5pm so, with a bit of travel, the mealtime, set by the man's work schedule, will be sometime a little later, maybe 5.30 or 6pm. In Spain the man leaves work at around 2pm so the food should be on the table around 2.30 or 3pm. Spanish men come home from work twice a day, the second time he'll be home around 8.30 so mealtime will be around 9 or 9.30pm.

Leisure activities tend to fit around the work and meal schedule. As a, going to the pub before going on to the disco to get turned down by any number of young women, youth in the UK in the 1970s I would arrange to meet my chums at maybe 8pm in the bus station. That would give me time to eat whatever my mum had cooked for me before putting on my going out clothes (washed and ironed for me by my mum). If I'd been a Spanish youth, and I was working, I'd still be at there at 8pm and even if I were studying or out of work I'd still have to wait for my evening meal. So a Spanish youth would arrange to meet his or her pals in the estación de autobuses at maybe 11pm. In British and Spanish cases we're meeting our pals a couple of hours after mealtime.

It must have been around 1985. I was staying with some chums in Valencia. They asked me if I wanted to go out for the evening and I said yes. They rang a few friends and suggested meeting in a bar at midnight. I thought this was as hilarious as it was outrageous. What a ridiculous time to meet! Surely midnight was a time for coming home after a skinful not time to go out to get one? Remember that at the time British pubs closed at either 10.30 or 11pm. To be honest the thing I most remember about that meeting was not the time, it was the bar. It was like entering Bedlam. The noise, the smoke, the crush of people and the overwhelming nearness of it was impressive but somehow my pals magicked a table and chairs from the chaos and then waited to be served. Table service and paying the bill at the end seemed strange to me too. 

This time shift takes some learning; some deprogramming. To we Northern Europeans used to a different schedule these timings just seem ludicrous. Nonsensical. We don't understand why the Pinoso town fiesta, for instance, has an opening ceremony at 10pm, why the firework display starts at midnight and why the folk dancers will be on stage sometime around one in the morning. It's the same, but in reverse, for Spaniards at the moment. They are having a lot of difficulty with the idea of a theatre performance at 6.30pm or the last session at the cinema being one at 7pm so that everything can be done and dusted for you to be home before the evening curfew.

Tópicos

The dancer's dark eyes flashed. Arching her back she twisted her lithe body so that her brightly coloured dress, tight at the hips but loose below her knees, swirled around her mimicking the movement of her bright blue wrap. She stamped her feet, she clapped her hands and her olive coloured skin shone with a fine patina of sweat. Spanish cliché time. As real and yet as unreal as Morris Dancers outside the pub on the Village Green.

I've just finished a book by a Spanish author. The basic premise is that her main character moves to London looking for work and ends up working in a bookshop where her life takes a turn for the better. It was an enjoyable, if slight, read, a bit like one of those US Christmas films where the hero rediscovers the joy and warmth of small town life. What struck me most about the book was that it was loaded with Spanish clichés about England and that it repeatedly and wantonly ascribed Spanish habits to Britons.

One of the principle things, that turned up time and time again throughout the book was tea. Gallons of tea. I suppose that's because lots of Spaniards truly believe that England stops for tea and a bun at 4pm. It happened in the book over and over again. The characters drank Earl Grey brewed in fine porcelain teapots and when they were not tucking into cakes they could rely on an unending supply of dainty cucumber sandwiches. The protagonist and her love interest even go to Fortnum and Mason's to drink tea at one point. There is no mention of sitting at your desk, drinking tea from stained mugs with pictures of cats on them and having to squeeze the teabag with your fingers because there are no spoons.

Drake, Sir Francis, not the Canadian musician, and Holmes, Sherlock as in 221b Baker Street, get a few mentions as does New Scotland Yard. For some reason Spaniards know these names. It's a bit like the way that the TV news here always says Boris Johnson's Government but doesn't name Macron when speaking of the French Government. Pirate, by the way, always appears in any sentence that describes Frank Drake. In this book the owners of the pub have the surname Drake and, when they are first introduced, the phrase is that they denied any link to the famous pirate elevated to the knighthood. The pub run by the Drakes is called the Darkness & Shadow which reminded me of the pub in, I think, the Reggie Perrin books, called the Desiccated Kipper. It's a bit different to most English pubs, but a lot like a Spanish bar, in that you order your drinks from the table and people serve them to you. Given my minimal bar presence I must seek it out the next time I'm near Earl's Court.

There are lots of things that we English apparently do that I missed out on when I lived there. It is, of course, possible, that they are common now. For instance, in the book, English shops wrap things bought as presents at Christmas time just as they do in Spain. When the owner of the bookshop closes for the evening he puts down a metal shutter blind. In the UK I only remember those metal roller blinds from areas like Hulme in Manchester though I have no idea if Hulme is still dodgy or not.  The bookshop is in Temple though and last time I was there it bore very little resemblance to the Mancunian badlands. There's a likeable if swotty lad in the book, named Oliver Twist, and his mid afternoon snack is bread stick into which solid lumps of chocolate bar chocolate have been pushed. It's Spanish comfort food but I don't think it's an English staple. Now if he'd had a sugar sandwich! I've heard that Britons are now very outwardly emotional and have embraced touchy feely behaviours but I don't think the smacking lips, air kisses to both cheeks are common yet - they are in the book, just as they are in Spain. Oh and Christmas Eve is when families get together for a big family meal just as they do on New Year's Eve. And so it goes. 

No I can't stop. Here are a couple more to finish. There are a few spelling mistakes, Spaniards find English letter sequences troubling at times just as we Brits stumble over Spanish words. They are going to go to Candem (sic). The best spelling mistake though led to an interesting factlet. It's another Fortnum and Mason mention. The book says that the shop's owners invented Scott eggs (sic again) as easy to eat food for Victorian travellers. Actually there was also mention of an English urban myth that was new to me. It seems that many of us think it is an offence to eat meat pies on Christmas Day. I did read the Wikipedia to check and it seems to have something to do with why mince pies are not meat pies. I forget the details though.

Ah well, I might pop down to the bull ring now or perhaps I'll just have a bit of a siesta. No, I'll do it all mañana.

Hasta la vista, baby.

Washing up

I've never owned or used a dishwasher. I still wash up in the sink and I follow the routine that I read on some poster on the wall of the fifth form classroom I used at school. I got my first ever OAP payment today so fifth form was quite a while ago. The poster advised to rinse as much junk off as I could with cold water then to fill the sink with water as hot as I could stand. A good dose of quality detergent. Glassware first, plates and dishes next - washing the cleanest first - and working through to the pans and oven-ware. Cutlery when I pleased. Use common sense and change the water when it becomes necessary was the only other guidance on the poster. Useful poster I thought. Much better than the Wilkinson Sword one about how to shave. Until technology invented the Gillette Mach 3 a few years ago wet shaving was always a very bloody business for me.

I don't spend a lot of time watching Spaniards wash up and I presume that, nowadays, most of them use dishwashers. They still advertise Fairy Liquid on the telly though and I know from the ads, and from seeing Penélope Cruz washing the murder weapon in the film Volver, that Spaniards probably don't wash up like me. I suspect that they think that washing up in a soup of detergenty food filled water isn't a particularly good idea. They seem to rinse and wash under a running tap using one of those sponge scourers loaded with detergent.

This revelation came to me as I was brushing up the white mulberries from our path using the British pile and shovel method I described in a blog ages ago. Ah, the exoticism of a life abroad!

The car forum

Manuela Carmena is the Mayor of Madrid. For most of her career she was a lawyer and then a judge but in 2015 she entered politics with the left leaning Ahora Madrid. She now leads the city council with the support of the Socialist party. I like Manuela and I think that lots of people, even those who disapprove of her politics, like or at least approve of her too. I wait to be corrected. Actually she broke her ankle a few days ago and she's still laid up so, all the best Manuela.

Each year in the Christmas run up the Madrid council has a bit of a junket for the press. This year one of the presenters was a comedian and media host David Broncano. The event became newsworthy because it ended up as a sort of improvised comedy double act between the two of them. I heard a bit of it. One of the comments from David was that the only script he had was from Forocoches. I had no idea what Forocoches was so I determined to find out.

The story goes that the founder of Forocoches, Alex Marín, bought a Renault Laguna in 2002 and couldn't find an Internet forum that talked about cars. So he decided to create one. He'd been making some money from a series of websites before then and this was just another. Except that it took off in a big way. The forum on car chat soon spread to other areas and it is now a hotbed of political incorrectness, countered with political correctness, with opinions of very colour and hue about anything and everything. It's also like that site which tried to get Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name to be the British Christmas number one or, and they nearly managed this, to get the Royal Navy to name its newest scientific research vessel after a Spanish admiral who defeated a British fleet.

I wasn't at all impressed when I first visited the forum. The site looks dead old fashioned and it is festooned with adverts and banners but that doesn't stop it being massively successful. It took me days to raise the enthusiasm go back for a second peek. I then realised that you needed to be invited to join the forum. You could also buy your way in with bitcoin and the like. There were lots of warnings about code scams. One journalist who'd used the forum to write an article about her online dating experiences paid 20€ for her invitation! Codes are also given away on some of the social media sites so I had a look there but the codes are all gobbled up within minutes of being published. I couldn't be bothered and with looking at the parts that anyone can read, without being a member, I realised that even if I could get in I'd probably not be able to understand what was going on. It is a sort of Internet version of one of those conversations that you see in a film between a bunch of Locs wearing rappers and gangstas dripping in gold and driving around in Cadillac Escalades or Maybach Exeleros. The forum is loaded with street talk, abbreviations, obscure social references. I couldn't even understand the invitations to codes on Twitter without paying attention..

But that wasn't the point. It was that Manuela knew what Forocoches was and the newspapers didn't feel that they needed to explain. The threads that she and Broncano talked about included "Manuela is going to make us walk", (She's introduced traffic and pollution reducing measures in Madrid and tightened up on electric scooters and the like), "Echenique likes Manuela", (Pablo Echenique is an Argentine-born Spanish physicist and left wing politician who rides around in a high tech wheelchair because of his spinal muscular atrophy) and "I spy Stalinism in Manuela", (Maybe because she's short or has webbed feet - it couldn't be because of her politics!)

So, yet another thing I didn't know about Spain despite all these years here.

Oh dear! I shall be too late!

Sleep's a funny thing for we older people. Put me in front of the telly or set me to reading in the garden and I'll soon be snorting away and dribbling onto my shirt. On the other hand staying asleep in bed is a problem. If it's not the bladder or my aching back then I just get bored. So today was quite odd because, when I first looked at my watch it was nearly 10am. That's the day gone I thought.

Getting up late on Sunday isn't a venal sin or anything but it does have a big disadvantage in Spain. It basically knocks out any daytime events.

Most people know that the Spanish tend to eat late - lunch from around two but maybe as late as four and dinner from maybe nine till around ten thirty. Summer times can be later. I remember reading a Blasco Ibañez (1867-1928) book where the family were preparing a grand lunch for friends and they were planning to eat at twelve thirty. I wondered at the time if the more modern, later, meal times were to do with changes in the working day and then promptly forgot all about it. I was reminded of the earlier sittings recently with the debate that has been going on about ending the clock changing that goes on every March and October. In a radio discussion someone was arguing that clock time and schedules were different things. He said that, before the time in Spain and France was moved to coincide with the time in Nazi Germany, Spaniards had always eaten at around one in the afternoon. When you think about it as Spain sets down to eat at 2pm the clocks are chiming one in England. In turn that made me wonder what the UK will do when the rest of the Union stops changing its clocks. Maybe the staunchest of Britons will argue for proper British time, GMT, to go along with blue pàssports and non pink driving licences.

So Spanish morning events almost inevitably finish at around 2pm. Markets and selling events will start to pack away even before that time. If you have an all day event everything will re-open for the evening session anytime after 5 or 6pm but if it's an evening only event it can start anytime from 8pm to midnight even in Autumn. Summer start times for evening events are often around either side of midnight. So, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes this morning and looked at that 10am watch I knew that it was unlikely we'd be going anywhere much today.

Knee high to a grasshopper

Do you think there's a cultural element to how we sweep up?

Just after the tiniest of earthquakes, yesterday evening, we had a bit of a downpour. It didn't last long but there was sufficient rain for our guttering to leak. So today I was on gutter cleaning. The mud from the gutter had to be swilled and swept from the interior patio and, because I was now mud spattered, damp and sweaty I thought, masochistically, to clear away the rotting peaches from under the tree and then to sweep the front yard.

The usual Spanish dustpan is like the one in the photo or maybe a plastic version of it. The way most people I see around me sweep up is to brush with one hand and collect with the other. I don't seem able to do that. I've tried but it  just doesn't seem natural. I prefer to sweep the debris into a pile and then to sweep the pile into the dustpan. It's the way that I've always done it. Learned at my mother's knee.

Knives and forks

It's odd what you stop noticing. Because of her job Maggie talks to lots of people who are new to the area. One of her clients, let's call her Betty, was telling Maggie about an experience in a local restaurant. Betty asked for a red wine to go with her set price meal. She was was pleasantly surprised when the waiter left the bottle on the table. Lots of wine from around here is still not premium product, it's something for drinking, so leaving the bottle with the implicit offer to drink as much of it as you want, is still very common. I wouldn't have noticed.

We went to a couple of posher than our usual style of restaurant last weekend. When I was telling a pal about the restaurants. I described them as "the sort of place where they take your cutlery after each course". I realised that the description presumed a little knowledge of everyday restaurant practice. Nowadays I would never think to leave my knife and fork at attention on the plate when I have finished the first course. I would set them to one side ready for the second course. Our guests from the UK don't and the waiter or waitress has to do it for them.

That was the idea, when I first started the blog, a sort of ooh!, aah!, look how funny that is. Nowadays, when a visiting Briton wants to pay at the bar for the drink as soon as it is served, when visitors find it strange that restaurants are not open midweek in the evening and when they really think that most Spaniards have a bit of a sleep in the afternoon I don't usually say anything.

So many of those things that were strange are now usual and some of the things that were usual are now strange. The strangest thing, for me, is when other long term immigrants still find those things strange after years and years here.

What would you like to drink?

I went last night, as I often do, to the Monday evening intercambio session at the Coliseum bar in Pinoso. The idea is simple enough, an English speaker is paired up with a Spanish speaker and the hour long session is divided in half - the conversation is in English to start, or in Spanish, and then, for the second half, it's the other way around. It's supposed to run from 8.30 to 9.30 but we're always a
little late starting and so a little late finishing. There is no cost but there is the expectation that you will buy a drink or two.

If things go well, if the conversation flows, as it often does, I really enjoy the sessions because they are an extended chat. They add to my cultural briefing on Spain. The exchanges have to go further than "hello, how are you?" and people are expecting linguistic problems so there is none of the feeling of failure if one of the speakers tries an extended discourse. Serpentine as the monologue of one of the speakers may be, however many times there are attempts to reform the phrase so it makes sense, the other person tries to hang on to the sense and to encourage the speaker.

There are some interesting characters; a bloke who doesn't eat anything that's been cooked, another, an Argentinian, with a Uruguayan background who is a rice chef at a classy local restaurant and a professional waitress who has been moving between jobs trying to find something more permanent. Last night I got a man who has sent the last dozen years teaching Spanish in Serbia, in Belgrade, with the Cervantes Institute.

But it wasn't the intercambio that I intended to write about. It was that thing that the only expectation on the attendees is that they buy a drink, or two.

Despite avoiding water I think I drink quite a lot. I drink tea in a pint pot and, when I have the time, I think nothing of drinking a couple of pints on the trot. I drink juice with breakfast, I drink pop, coffee and non alcohol beer in bars. I tend to drink quickly too. I drink wine, brandy and beer at the same sort of speed as Coca Cola which is one of the reasons that I'm trying to have a bit of an alcohol break at the moment. I don't think I'm unusual. Maggie drinks plenty of liquid too and so did my mum's friends when I visited the UK a couple of weeks ago. There aren't many Britons whose first offer to a guest entering their house isn't a drink - tea, coffee, soft or hard depending on the time of day and the circumstances. At any British event the bar is usually pretty crowded.

Spaniards drink too of course but my impression is that they drink less. This isn't a bad or a good thing, it's not comparison of alcohol consumption, it's a comparison of volume and something I think marks a difference. I did look for empirical evidence and I found something from the European Food Safety Authority which listed the UK consumption, per person, as being 1598ml per day as against 820ml for Spaniards but it was a long and learned paper, which I couldn't be bothered to read, so there may be all sorts of provisos against those figures.

In all of the weeks that I've gone to the intercambio I have at least two drinks and sometimes three. We are, after all, sitting at a café table. My Spanish partners don't. Everybody has a drink but they usually stop after the first. Whilst I feel slightly uncomfortable occupying a table with an empty glass or cup in front of me neither the bar staff nor the locals seem at all worried that people are doing just that.

Obviously there are exceptions. Spaniards go out drinking too and they can put plenty away. A good meal is often accompanied by copious quantities of alcohol and the "botellón", a gathering of young people in a public place to socialize and drink alcohol, is very common and is considered, by some, to be a social problem.

Right, that'll do, piece written, I think I'll put the kettle on and get a cup of tea. I deserve it.

Wispy light and more

The first time I ever caught the sense of a conversation going on around me in Spanish was on a bus in Granada. I'd always thought that Spanish conversations were probably about Goethe or something equally profound but that one was, in fact, about whether peas should or should not be an ingredient of some stew. Food is a topic of conversation close to the hearts of many Spaniards.

One of the things that crops up in those food conversations is the Mediterranean diet. If you were to ask me what the Mediterranean diet I'd have to say that I'm not quite sure. I know that it includes more fish than meat, cereals, pulses, nuts, vegetables, fruit, wine and lots of olive oil but I'm a bit hazy on the details. We live pretty close to the Mediterranean. In fact yesterday we were in Santa Pola and if we'd chosen to we could have gone for a paddle, so I should know what the diet is but I don't. One of the confusing things about it is that lots of what seem to be traditional Spanish foods look remarkably unhealthy. Surely things like chorizo, the white bread sticks, the deep fried pescaitos, the peanuts dripping in oil, the cheese, the croquetas and all the rest can't really be part of a healthy diet?

Back in Santa Pola I asked if they had any sangre, blood, to go along with the beer. I'm not sure what sangre contains exactly apart from blood and onions but it looks like liver and it tastes yummy (though Maggie disagrees). It's not so available away from the coast which is why I was taking my opportunity. There wasn't any so I asked for Russian salad instead. Ensaladilla rusa is a staple in lots of Alicante and beyond - a sort of potato, egg, tuna, carrot and pea salad held together with mayonnaise. Tasty certainly but healthy?

Actually, I know exactly what I think of when the Mediterranean diet is mentioned and it has nothing to do with the food. The Mediterranean diet is a bronzed Anthony Quinn peeling and eating fruit directly from his pocket knife, it's him eating, and laughing with his friends as he drinks copious quantities of wine around a sun dappled outdoor table against the azure blue background of the sparkling sea.

I read an article in el País yesterday which seemed to reach a similar conclusion only they made no mention of Quinn nor Jean Reno in the Big Blue who would be my other point of reference.

El País told me that back in 1953 an epidemiologist called Leland G. Allbaugh published a paper about the, then, normal diet on Crete. Cretans ate a very basic diet yet they were healthier than Americans. A medical doctor, Dr. Ancel Keys, saw the research and spent years trying to work out why. He did research in seven countries and, to oversimplify, came up with the  conclusion that saturated fat in diets was a major conditioner of heart disease along with cholesterol and high blood pressure. Whilst he was involved in the early years of the survey Keys and his wife published a book called Eat Well and Stay Well. Later, in 1975, they published a second book called How to Eat Well and Stay Well: The Mediterranean Way. It was, apparently, that book which led to the term Mediterranean diet coming into everyday use. But the “Mediterranean Way” was more than particular foods and cuisines or eating patterns. It involved aspects of lifestyle and the economy, such as walking to and from work in physically active occupations like farming, crafts, fishing and herding, taking the major meal at midday, having an afternoon break from work. In short the food was only a part of the traditional Mediterranean  lifestyle.

In 2011, the European Food Safety Authority published a position document arguing that it could not establish whether the Mediterranean diet was healthy or not because it was unable to find a clear definition of what the diet was. The Authority also noted that the inclusion of quite a lot of wine in all of the versions made it technically unhealthy. The Mediterranean diet though does feature as an intangible cultural heritage on UNESCO's list - just like Flamenco or the Fallas celebrations. The definition is not about the food it's about agriculture and tradition, about sharing food and about cultural identity. The full definition is at the bottom of the page

The newspaper article writer argued that the Mediterranean diet was actually more of a process of four decades of hype than an actual dietary regime. Like I said, Anthony Quinn, the suntan, the cicadas singing, the shared bottle of wine. The laughter. Now that was all around us as we ate the ensaladilla rusa in Santa Pola yesterday.

___________________________________________________________________

UNESCO definition: The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, animal husbandry, conservation, processing, cooking, and particularly the sharing and consumption of food. Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities throughout the Mediterranean basin. It is a moment of social exchange and communication, an affirmation and renewal of family, group or community identity. The Mediterranean diet emphasizes values of hospitality, neighbourliness, intercultural dialogue and creativity, and a way of life guided by respect for diversity. It plays a vital role in cultural spaces, festivals and celebrations, bringing together people of all ages, conditions and social classes. It includes the craftsmanship and production of traditional receptacles for the transport, preservation and consumption of food, including ceramic plates and glasses. Women play an important role in transmitting knowledge of the Mediterranean diet: they safeguard its techniques, respect seasonal rhythms and festive events, and transmit the values of the element to new generations. Markets also play a key role as spaces for cultivating and transmitting the Mediterranean diet during the daily practice of exchange, agreement and mutual respect.

I only have plastic

When I lived in the UK I had a lot of credit cards. I made a hobby of moving non existent money between one account and another to try to keep the interest payments down. When I left the UK I cancelled the majority of my plastic but I hung on to a couple for one reason or another. Nowadays I hardly ever use my British plastic but, every time the banks try to take them away, I obstinately hang on to them "just in case".

Every now and again one of the British card issuers sells or buys my account and changes something or other. Barclaycard recently did just that when they terminated an agreement with AMEX. As an incentive to use the new card they offered me a bracelet so that I could make small, contactless payments by simply waving my forearm at the credit card machine. Something to speed up buying the morning latte. Why not I thought? Well, because I live in Spain! I suspect I will never use it.

I was a Barclaycard customer in Spain too. Barclaycard sold their operation to Banco Popular who renamed the card WiZink. The name sounds OK in Spanish, if a bit corny, but rubbish in English. It took ages for the websites and the cards to change after the purchase and WiZink got around to the rebranding just as Banco Popular went belly up. It was bought by Santander for 1€. Strange really; years ago Santander absorbed the bank where I had my Spanish current account.

I use my credit card a fair bit in Spain but I use it in quite an old fashioned way. I use it for decent sized purchases - at a clothes shop, for the big shops in the supermarket, for diesel, for the posh restaurant and for anything online. Even if there were sandwich shops in Spain, and Spaniards cannot understand why we like to mix so many ingredients between two slices of bread, so there aren't, I wouldn't think to buy a sandwich and a coke with plastic. In Spain I use money. I go to a bank machine and take money out of my current account. I then use those notes (and the coins that they spawn) to buy beer, duct tape and similarly useful articles.

I know that Denmark is now more or less cashless. When we were in Hungary a little while ago we were always asked if we wanted to pay with cash or card even when we'd just had a couple of beers. The last time I visited the UK one of the things that struck me was how the tiniest of purchases were made with plastic. I have seen Spaniards pay small amounts on plastic but my impression is that it's not generalised. So I wondered if it's just me that's old fashioned, if it's another of those rural/urban things, if I should catch up and start paying for coffee with virtual money or if there is a real difference between Spain and some other European countries.

The answer seems to be that it's the way that the banks operate that's different, plus a bit of inertia.

Spanish banks now charge for pulling money out of cashpoints that aren't theirs. There are also fewer cashpoints because of the closure and merger of so many offices within the troubled banking sector. As a result, for the first time last year more money was spent on credit and debit cards than in cash. So there is a real increase in the use of plastic.

On the other hand only 16% of all transactions in Spain are made on plastic as against figures of around 50% in Portugal or France. One reason for that may be that only 40% of all Spanish businesses accept plastic. And in turn it seems likely that this low percentage of acceptance is because, historically, Spanish banks charged high commissions to retailers on plastic card transactions. In fact the Government introduced legislation in 2014 that limited the commission that the banks could charge the businesses for each transaction. That included very low percentages on micro purchases. Despite this there are still lots of businesses with the signs up to say that you can't pay amounts of less than so many euros with plastic. The suggestion, in many of the articles that I read, was that Spanish traders don't pay a lot of notice to the blurb sent to them by plastic card companies. As a consequence many businesses are still under the impression that commission charges on plastic transactions are very high and it will be a while before the message gets home.

I should add that when the banks were faced with the loss of income on the commissions charged to traders they responded by charging customers more to hold the cards. I don't pay anything for the maintenance of my UK cards but I pay 36€ a year for my Spanish bank debit card. There's also an annual charge for my credit card but I never pay that as the charge is refunded so long as I spend more than so much per year. Interestingly though the Spanish cards charge a lot less for "foreign" transactions than the British cards.

So it's not something amongst we yokels nor is it simply my misperception. Spaniards really do use plastic less than a lot of other Europeans.

The goose is getting fat

I heard something on the radio this morning about a charity, that had been collecting toys for poorer children. The charity had been robbed and the toys stolen. The radio interviewer was sympathetic. "And just two weeks away from handing over the toys." he said.

Now I know that the traditional day for gift giving in Spain isn't until January 6th. Nonetheless it struck me that the interviewer took no account of Santa doing his rounds. Every year, at Christmas time, for years now, I have been teaching English to Spaniards. I tell my students that we eat turkey, I know not all of us do, vegans and vegetarians don't and probably a whole bundle of other people for ethical or religious reasons, but we do. That's me, my family, most of the people I know. We have turkey, we play Monopoly or Scrabble, we eat mince pies and ignore all but one of those "Eat Me" dates which may or may not still exist. James Bond films, the only time of the year when we eat nuts by breaking them free from shells - add whatever you like - those things that make Christmas Christmas.

I ask Spaniards for their equivalents but there seem to be none. Most of my students say they eat sea food but the main course can be anything from lamb to sea bass. If we have Christmas pudding and mince pies they can counter with mantecados, polvorones and especially turrón but there seems to be much less of the shared ritual. Miracle on 34th street, It's a Wonderful Life and Love Actually may well be on the telly but there is no folk history to them. There are plenty of carols but the litany of awful Christmas songs that get dusted off each year isn't anything like the same; there are no home grown versions of Slade and Wizard but neither do spacemen come travelling nor cavalry get halted. The Christmas "classics" like White Christmas and Winter Wonderland are virtually unknown. Santa Claus is now a Christmas personality in Spain but the link to Saint Nicholas is far too tenuous for most of my students. Whilst the French Papa Noël is a well known character, to most Spaniards, his Anglo alter ego, Father Christmas, is not.

This year Christmas day falls on Sunday. As that is a non working day there is no need for it to be a declared as a day not to work. Most regions have decided to make the Monday, the 26th, which has no significance for Spaniards whatsoever, a holiday. Nonetheless I'm sure that there will be lots of Spanish workers who finish work on Friday evening and go back to work on Monday morning without feeling particularly hard done by. Over the weekend they will have eaten and drunk much more than usual, almost certainly with their families, but they aren't being denied anything particularly special. It's just another of the potential non working days that fell on a Sunday. On top of that Christmas is still far from over. New Year and especially Reyes Magos, Three Kings, the principal gift giving time is still to come.

In the streets there are no Salvation Army bands and no carol singers. As I drive to and from work I don't pass houses ablaze with Christmas lights. The school I work in was not buzzing with children handing over gifts to their teachers as term ended. My bosses at one of my workplaces gave me a really nice gift pack with wine and local foods but no other Spanish person I work with has given me a card or handed out the mince pies or roped me in to the Secret Santa circle. There has been no works do and the crackers and hats that go with a do are unknown.

I would not claim that I know how Christmas works for most Spaniards but that's not to say that I don't know a fair bit about the detail of how Christmas is celebrated here. It would be utterly wrong to suggest that Christmas is not an important landmark in the Spanish calendar or that it is not a huge driver of consumer spending but it is not a holiday, nor a time of year, that has the resonance with Spaniards that it has for Britons.

Happy Christmas.

Holiday, holiday, holiday time

I was born in Yorkshire. Summer holidays were short as I remember, a week usually, and our standard destinations were close by - Scarborough, Brid, Cleethorpes, maybe over to Morecambe or even Blackpool. Relatively local with the occasional long haul down to Newquay or maybe away from the beach in the Lakes. Apart from the school trip to Switzerland I didn't get to Europe till I was eighteen and, even then, it was only to Paris.

Nowadays my pals back in the UK tell me that they've been to far flung destinations - Bali, New Zealand, Goa, the Maldives, Abu Dabi. To be different you have to give Skyscanner a good workout and head for Kazakhstan or Greenland and even then it's just another destination.

Talking to Spanish students about their holiday plans is a reminder of my Scarborough days. They seem perfectly happy to go to the nearest seaside resort, if it's not too far, or otherwise they head for some rural destination equally close to home. It's a massive generalisation of course but I read something today that backs up my perception.

The Spanish Holiday Habits survey carried out by Madison Market Research for Cerveceros of Spain found that 90% of Spaniards prefer to stay local during the summer holidays. Half of those interviewed, irrespective of their age, said that the beach was favourite though trying new cities and new cuisine was good for about a third of the sample. It's been the same for the past forty years.

The survey did note one change though. The family holiday home is now less popular than staying in a hotel. The other big change is what goes in your luggage. The mobile phone obviously goes but so too do the laptop and the tablet. It's no good simply going on holiday you have to prove it to your pals by posting where you are online. Facebook is the favourite social network followed by WhatsApp and Instagram.

Over four of every ten people said that their favourite holiday drink was beer. First day essentials were going for a beer on a terrace, the space outside the bar, and having a siesta. I suppose that they prove that you are on holiday and not caught up in the usual round of work and domestic tasks. 

Forgetting Lionel Richie

Spain is in full fiesta season. Our local town, Pinoso, has just finished its fiestas or, more accurately, is about to finish in a couple of hours. The fairground has already left town, the barriers will be taken down tomorrow and all those temporary road signs removed. I would say we'll be back to normal but after so many days of non stop action lots of the town's bars and restaurants will be locked fast for a couple of weeks as will a lot of other businesses and we won't be back into the usual routine till September.

When we first got here I was keen to go to most of the various types of fiesta from the tiny village celebrations, where the fun might be a foam party or a bouncy castle, through to Moors and Christians, Semana Santa, Carnaval, Three Kings and all the other big events with thousands of people, late nights, lots of revelry and long, long processions. It would take ages to go through the various types of events we've been to. Maggie got tired of fiestas ages ago. She wasn't, for instance, for bothering with Romans and Carthaginians as long ago as when we lived in Cartagena.

I'm a bit underemployed at the moment. The real problem with not working is not earning. Time rich, cash poor as we used to say in the nineties. Maggie is working - all summer. So, if I do anything it costs money, which I don't have, and I have to do it alone.

I did think that I'd take advantage of the local fiestas this year as a cheap and easy to access form of entertainment. The truth is that my unwillingness to speak Spanish coupled with my increasing churlishness and a good dose of been there, done that means that I simply can't be bothered. I took one look at the children beating each other with the sausage dog shaped balloons at the village fiesta and turned on my heel. I grimly resolved to get involved in the Pinoso celebrations but I took the insinuation that I was some sort of sex offender quite badly and decided that a beer in front of the Spanish version of First Dates on the telly was a much more entertaining option.

I promise I will try to get out and about to a few more fiestas in the three weeks left of summer but I'm not guaranteeing anything.

Spanish stereotypes

In the last post about Albacete I mentioned an exercise I use with my students as a conversation starter. It's not my piece, I took it from a Spanish source and translated it into English.

I disagree with a couple of them, I don't whoeheartedly agree with lots of them and I don't actually know what a couple are getting at. But it's an easy post and I rather suspect that at least one of my readers - that sounds posh doesn't it? - will have a response.

Spain: bulls, guitars and flouncy skirts

This is how tourist guides, written in France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia describe Spain. The old image of bulls and castanets may have disappeared but are these new generalisations any more accurate?

What do you think?

1 Spain is the European country where the fewest number of newspapers are read and where the most popular newspaper deals only with sport.

2 Spain is a desert for vegetarians and a place where ham is considered to be part of a vegetarian diet.

3 Spain isn't all sun but then again everything is conditioned by the sun.

4 It's the place where breakfast in a bar includes a shot of the hard stuff alongside a coffee.

5 Spain is a country where almost nobody gets drunk in public.

6 Where chocolate is sweet and thick.

7 In Spain body hair on women, particularly underarm or on the legs, is socially unacceptable.

8 Where everything, or almost everything, closes down for the afternoon.

9 Where people parade from bar to bar greeting friends and eating tapas before having dinner.

10 RENFE trains are clean and efficient.

11 Where pedestrians are terrorised by motorists at every junction and every zebra crossing.

12 Where life begins as the rest of Europe dons its pyjamas.

13 Where restaurants still sell a bottle of drinkable plonk for 5€.

14 Where crossing yourself and calling on God is still an everyday part of many transactions.

15 It may be Europe but Spaniards aren't Europeans.

16 Where the toilets are clean but never have toilet paper.

17 A country where it's dangerous to get involved in chit chat.

18 Where everyone is criticised - except for the King.

19 A country whose past is marked by hunger and famine.

20 A country that has no cuisine to speak of.

A place in the sun

At work I noticed that a co-worker had not parked her car in her usual spot. The one she has used for the last eight months. I asked why, expecting a story about people using her bonnet as a bench or somesuch. "It's because the shadow of the building falls across the car in the early evening so it's cooler when I drive away," she said.

I was reminded of the man who started to wave violently at me when I parked outside the building I then worked in in Fortuna. There had been a Circus close by on the waste ground and I presumed he was warning me of the dangers of the lorries bumping into my car as they manouvered away. In the end I parked where he suggested. "It's much better here", he said, "it'll be in the shade when you're finished."

It's been around 30ºC the last few days so, as we close in on summer, parking the motor in the shade makes sense. Like real Spaniards I would always choose a shady spot first but it would never cross my mind to start plotting the movement the sun across the sky as I chose a parking place.

Still a long way to go before I start thinking Spanish.