Life in Culebrón

There are a lot of flies in Culebrón. There are also plenty of wasps. The most common type in Culebrón don't seem to be quite like the one that stung me in Elland when I was at Junior School. I inadvertently squashed the poor beast as I rested my chin on a low wall to marvel at a Mercedes 220 SE "Fintail" passing by. Mr Kemp, the Headteacher, used an onion from the Harvest Festival display to lesson the considerable pain. I've been stung a couple of times here but, to be honest, I've hardly noticed. Obviously British wasps are tougher. National pride and all that. Anyway, as I said there are lots of wasps. One of the common questions on Facebook, amongst the Britons living here, is how to deal with the hordes of them swooping and hovering over swimming pools. Being poor and poolless our wasps have to make do with drinking from the water bowls that we leave for the cats. Recently the wasps have also been feasting on something growing on the leaves of the fig tre...

I have pals who are very knowledgeable about birds. Those same people are likely to know about plants and trees too. If I know a few birds, a handful of trees and a couple of constellations, they can wax lyrical. I've wondered about this in the past but it was a conversation about robins that reminded me. I was talking to a couple of students about Christmas cards. Cards are not a standard thing here. I mentioned that there were robins on Christmas cards. I translated robins to petirrojos. Nothing, not a glimmer. You know, like mirlos, gorriones, tordos, alondras, lavanderas. I was just digging a bigger hole; blackbirds, sparrows, thrushes, larks and wagtails were nothing to them. They just presumed my Spanish was as crap as it is. And these were a couple of professional, well travelled students who live in a small town surrounded by countryside. I think that it's true to say that most Britons can recognise a big handful of birds. We know that we can mitigate the bad luck...

There are lots of things that I've done in my life which I regret. Some are big things, which I'm not going to tell you about, and some are small. I admit to wearing leg warmers in the 1980s. Something that causes me psychological grief every now and then is remembering my last leaving do. I rambled on and on for hours. I would be briefer given a second opportunity. My colleagues bought me gifts; amongst other things a Panama hat and a couple of sophisticated deck chairs. There was obviously an expectation that I would be sitting out in the sun. It is true that being outside is one of the pleasures of Life in Culebrón, life in this part of Spain in general. I seem to remember that those chairs also served in our unfurnished living room for a while! We've got a sofa now (though Samuel the demi kitten is making sure that we will need a new one very soon). The Panama lives on, albeit with an extra hole, other than the one for my head. The chairs went the way of all flesh y...

There was an advert when we went to the cinema this afternoon for Coca Cola. It is about the people responsible for the success of Coke in Spain over the past 65 years. The funny thing in watching it was just how "Spanish" it looked. There is, for instance, a shot of a door with a polished aluminium door knob. The wood veneer, the colours, everything looks, and is, Spanish. It's the same with the men walking up the road in their fluorescent and grey overalls. I've seen those very same blokes getting the set meal in scores of restaurants in Spain. I've opened that door. So how did those Coca Cola people make the advert look so Spain? After all we live in Spain but I don't think that anyone could argue that our microcosm represents the totality of Spain. The very first time I went to Madrid I wasn't that impressed. There didn't seem to be anything notable in the Coliseum or Eiffel Tower "must see" mould. There were plenty of interesting b...

Every now and then I get an email from Abraza la tierra, Embrace the Land. It's usually a business opportunity or a job in some rural part of Spain. They are normally good offers - businesses subsidised by town halls, free accommodation, maybe with tantalising offers for families who have young, school saving, children. It's a while since I've looked at their website but I presume that they are a platform for rural development initiatives. You know the sort of thing - access to infrastructure in the countryside, innovative solutions to the everyday challenges of rural life. I listened to some programme on the radio about rural development in Spain. One of the interviewees said that he wished Spain were as go ahead as the Scottish Highlands and Islands. I smiled at that because I remembered being in Inchnadamph, in the 1970s, and how impressed I was with the lateral thinking that had replaced the post office van with a minibus that transported both post and people. Wel...

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 opera...

I've read a few books by a Spanish author called Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867 -1928). A couple of the books were about life in Valencia, about the new bourgeoisie, the sort of people who didn't make their money by the sweat of their brow but by playing with money. The sort who despite being in debt need a new carriage to keep up appearances, the sort who would go on to be politicians if only they would stop impregnating the scullery maids. I found the picture the books conjured up of Spanish life at the tail end of the 19th Century fascinating. We went to Valencia to catch up with one of Maggie's nieces who was in the city for a European Arts Project. Maggie had booked a hotel that was about 3km from the Cathedral, near to the City of Arts and Sciences. It was in a district full of the sort of buildings that conjured up the characters from the Blasco Ibáñez books.  Big impressive buildings with lots of decoration, ample windows, high ceilings and fancy facades. Th...

Our visitors often ask us about snakes. We set their minds at rest. A few ask about scorpions and dangerous spiders. We reassure them about those too but nobody has ever asked us the much more pertinent question as to whether we have problems with caterpillars. Caterpillars are not usually perceived as a threat but processionary ( the English word is actually processional but everyone uses the Spanish word adapted to sound English) caterpillars can cause problems to humans who tangle with them. Dogs, which tend to sniff and paw things they come across can get into big trouble. Cats don't usually have problems with the caterpillars because they are supremely indifferent to any life form that doesn't feed them. The pine processionary moth usually flies around May to July and only lives for a day or so. On that day the moths have to get busy. They have to mate and the successful females then lay around three hundred tiny eggs usually in the foliage of  pine trees though some...

Pinoso doesn't have traffic lights and parking is free. In Culebrón we don't have much tarmac let alone street names. Yesterday I went for a job interview in Murcia. I hadn't been looking for a new job it's just that a job website I'm signed up to sends me offers matched against keywords. From time to time I apply for something that looks interesting. Like being a tourist guide. But jobs are in short supply in Spain at the moment and I never get any sort of response. There's no effort to applying though, just push a button and my CV wings its way to wherever. I never bother with a covering letter. I'm not expecting to get an interview so I don't put any effort into the process. There was effort in writing the original CV of course and every now and then I update it but it's low maintenance. So the surprise was that the firm came straight back to me after one of these occasional button pushes. It was for English teaching of course. The on...

Culebrón is a part of Pinoso. Pinoso is a part of the province of Alicante but Pinoso, like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, is a frontier town. There are no adverts for Viagra here but there are different languages and different holidays. Even if it's only with Abanilla, Jumilla and Yecla there is definitely a border, the border with Murcia Region. We have plenty of hills of our own in Alicante. Looking North from our front garden we have the Sierra de Salinas (1238m/4061ft) and the Sierra de Xirivell (810m/2657ft) is to the South. Indeed the garden itself is at about 605m/1984ft but over the border, into Murcia, the Sierra del Carche is higher still at 1372 metres or 4,500 feet. Maggie has tried to get us to the top a couple of times before but today we finally made it. To the very top, to the geodesic point. Admittedly we didn't walk, we went in a little four by four, but we got to the top. It was pretty crowded and very cosmopolitan at the top of el Carche. There was a Swis...

It stopped being cold in our house a few weeks ago now. I forget quite when but suddenly we weren't using the gas heaters, I started to pad around the tiled floors in bare feet as I got up in the morning. Winter was gone and there were flowers in the garden. Last week, I think, it was warm - a few days in the 30ºC bracket. I folded up my pullovers. That turned out to be a bit premature. I've needed a woolly the last couple of days. I was just about to go to work, Maggie was on her way home after work. We were together. We decided a quick snack was in order. We chose a roadside bar café that we haven't been in for years. It was a mistake. It was scruffy, barn like, dark and a bit dirty. Nonetheless we sat at the bar, ordered a drink and surveyed the tapas in the little glass display cases. Lots of them looked like food left on the plates piled up by the side of the sink after a good meal; perfectly nice when freshly prepared but well past their best now. We ordered a s...

Coming in to Huntingdon, past Samuel Pepys place, alongside Hinchingbrooke I was amazed by the number of bunnies hopping around. Millions of the little blighters. Where we live now is much more rural than Huntingdon but I see far less wildlife. Rabbits and more particularly hares are our most frequent sighting but I'm talking one at a time not hordes of them. Lots of people tell us stories of wild boar and one pal was even attacked by one. I've only ever seen them on a game reserve in Andalucia. Although I know foxes, badgers, snakes, hedgehogs, squirrels, mice, stoats and the like are all there I hardly ever see them except as road kill. We have plenty of birds too but I don't see the soaring birds of prey that were so common in Salamanca or the game birds that were always attempting to commit hari kari under the wheels of my car in the wilds of Cambridgeshire. Hunting though is enormous in Spain. Some weekends, presumably as hunting season opens on some poor species, ...

I painted the front door last week. I did an awful job; all runs and dead flies. Maggie and I agreed that it looked better than before though. Anyway it was bucolic, rustic, in keeping with our living situation. Our electric supply is a bit rural too. When we moved in, we were smart enough to put our cooking and weater heating onto gas. True, we have to lug the gas bottles about but we don't have circuit breakers popping all the time. The hot water isn't as hot in winter as in summer. Insulation is not common in our part of the world so we were not at all surprised that the water was cooler in the colder months. It had to pass through all that cold earth. We weren't surprised either that the water got hotter more quickly in one bathroom than the others - more cold ground = cooler water for longer. We've had some lovely weather recently. High 20s and sunny so and I was a bit surprised that the hot water was more like tepid water. Shower time was not a pleasure....

It was quite early, maybe around eight in the morning, but the newsagent in Chatteris was open. I was on my way to some absolutely essential meeting I'm sure. Chatteris is a town in the Cambridgeshire Fens, stories of incest, potato headedness and child swapping abound. Chatteris was not in the fast lane of the (then) 20th Century. A couple of older women were in front of me, they were buying but chatting. After waiting nearly five minutes I asked if I might just have a packet of Hamlet and be gone. I had the correct change, it would be a quick exchange. The woman behind the counter wasn't having any of it and didn't heistate to chide me for my hurry. On Monday I was in the library cum youth centre in Sax. Six of us were gathered around a table parked at an edge of the big barn like room. We Brits outnumbered the Spaniards two to one. The idea is that it's a sort of group language exchange - I have no idea why we use a room large enough to stage a concert in. My fel...

Now I've told you about our palm tree  several times. When the tree man failed to turn up last time I did the beetle slaughtering patrol myself. It was hard graft. Nonetheless, the basis for my doing the job every six weeks was there. I had the spray gear it's just that the tree is taller than me even with the spray gun wand in hand - I simply needed a longer reach. With a bit of extra kit I could avoid either having to climb a ladder with 16 litres of insecticide on my back or to coax the tree man into coming to the house. An internet search had revealed an agricultural supplier in La Palma which seemed to have the tubes, connectors and paraphernalia I needed to gain the necessary height.  I wasn't looking forward to explaining what I needed so when I was able to sneak into the big, empty store I was well pleased. I found the section I was looking for and started to connect this to that like some fetishistic horticultural version of Meccano. I would have soon ...

It's not a complex idea. When I was a lad braziers were the natural complement to those little striped tents that workmen used to set up over what were then called manhole covers. In Spain they put them under round tables. Braziers or braseros are, at their most basic, simple bowls which fit into a circular support underneath a round table. There are electric ones nowadays of course but the one we were presented with today, when we went for a birthday meal, was more like a wrought iron version of a parrot's cage. Glowing embers are put inside the bowl, the bowl is popped under the table and a heavy tablecloth draped over the table and your knees. The heat captured under the table warms the lower half of your body. A very personal sort of heater. The modern thermostaically controlled electric heaters do the same job and have the advantage over the old fashioned, real fire type. They don't either set fire to their users or poison them with carbon monoxide.

I'm that sort of age.The heart attack, the stroke. Despite our best efforts an exploding gas bottle could leave one or both of us bleeding amongst the tattered ruins of the house. Maybe just a flood or a forest fire. Whatever the reason we might need the emergency services. Now our address is nothing more than a number and the name of the village. As it happens we're on the edge of the village. A bit difficult to find. You just ask any of the courier services who occasionally try to deliver packets to us. We inevitably end up meeting them outside the local restaurant. Back to that heart attack - time is of the essence. The paramedics going this way and that searching for the house. The house ablaze - the fire crew scanning the countryside for smoke. The local police had a simple but brilliant idea. They asked anyone who lived anywhere out of the way to register with them. They came to the house and logged the GPS position. What we didn't realise was that as a part o...

All over Spain, at the side of the road, there are places called ventas. From the outside they just look like restaurants or bars but, as the word venta is related to sales and selling I wondered if, traditionally, they were a bit like roadside inns cum general stores. Ventas get a mention in el Quijote, Don Quixote in English, and in the Richard Ford travel books so they must have been around for quite a while. I imagined farmers buying their seeds and tools there whilst they drank large quantities of rough wine. My thinking was conditioned by the traditional difference between English inns and taverns. As I recall, technically, an inn is a place to stay, drink and eat whilst a tavern is a place to drink and eat. It's a distiction that's long gone of course. I thought it was probably something similar with ventas. But the definitive Spanish dictionary says simply of ventas: a posada established by the side of the road to put up travellers. For posada it says a place to pu...

I may well be wrong. I haven't checked last year's programme against this. Nonetheless it seems to me that the Pinoso Fair and Fiesta has been simplified because there isn't any money. And, in being simplified I think it has been improved. When I wrote about the fiesta  a couple of years ago I made a point that maybe the event had lost some of it's purpose. I suggested that the rich and mobile population of Pinoso could now seek out entertainment and goods whenever it wanted. The Fair and Fiesta had become less relevant. Maybe by changing its focus it can regain that relevance. I've got it into my head that initiative has taken over from cash as the way of making an impact. As Ernest Rutherford said "We've got no money, so we've got to think" Take the opening ceremony. In years past that used to be somebody giving a speech from the Town Hall balcony before the great and the good of the town trooped off, en masse, to stroll around the fair a...

We went to see our pal Pepa this weekend. She has a Casa Rural up in Teruel in a place called Fuentes de Rubielos. I never quite know how to translate casa rural - rural house isn't right and although I always tell my students to use country cottage that doesn't really convey the same idea. It's somewhere people rent for a holiday and it's usually in the middle of the countryside. Anyway Pepa owns one. There are tens of them in Fuentes de Rubielos and hundreds in this part of Teruel province, part of the ancient Kingdom of Aragon. I've always thought staying in a casa rural would be the perfect recipe for getting bored in 24 hours - reading is great but it can also become a chore and how many times can you walk up a hill for entertainment? Pepa surprised me by saying that there are all sorts of activities on offer for people who stay in the houses - bird watching, astronomy, furniture making, canyon running and a recent addition - first you hunt out your t...