Life in Culebrón

Last week passed without a blog post because, quite simply, I couldn’t think of a thing to write about. It isn’t that we’ve been idle—we’ve been out to concerts, we've done guided walks, watched parades, we've eaten out a lot and joined guided walks—but lately, everything has felt like well-trodden ground. I’ve reached that point where the local scenery is so familiar that I feel I’ve already told its story. The few ideas I did have felt like repetitions of earlier posts. Most of them centred on language learning, which remains my primary concern once the "real" problems of life are out of the way. I am still constantly appalled by my inability to construct an error-free conversation in Spanish; I inevitably notice the mistakes more than the successes. Although I’ve already cancelled my subscription and plan to take a month off from talking to the AI voice—ingeniously named Miguel—that has been my main form of Spanish learning for the past few months. It has begun to ...

I hate that old person thing. It's six in the morning; I'm wide awake, it's pretty obvious that I'm not going back to sleep and, eventually, I get up out of sheer boredom. Particularly with the better weather I'm nearly always up quite early though, if I were given the opportunity, and if my body didn't betray me, I'd stay in bed reasonably late. I don't know if you recall the old music hall song  which had a character called Burlington Bertie who rose at 10.30 to walk down the Strand, with his gloves in his hand? Bertie's routine just wouldn't mesh well with the traditionally ordered Spanish day. I think everyone knows that Spain, historically, has a split day. That's changing and modern working hours in larger cities follow all sorts of models very similar to the rest of Europe. The traditional Spanish timetable though is still alive and well. Again there are variations but the split day involves four or five morning working hours throu...