Life in Culebrón

The Pinoso Pensioners’ Club has a WhatsApp group. At times I wonder if the the application is totally under the organiser's control but the messages are often interesting. Anyway, a few days ago, there were a few lines on it exhorting me to join in with the upcoming Merienda de Pascua (Easter Picnic) at the Club HQ. The message suggested I pick up my wicker basket, load up on monas , get out my typical apron and headscarf, and come to share my victuals with my friends – to keep alive an old tradition. Now, I have to say that I don’t like it when I don’t know stuff like this. What aprons? What baskets? I did know about monas . They’re a version of toñas  and a  toña is a sort of sweet bread presented as a rounded loaf, some 20 cm across. I understand that one of the odd things about the toña is that it includes potato in the mix. The mona – which would usually translate as a female monkey – is the same sort of bread but with a hard-boiled egg set into it. Often, the eggs ...

Easter Week, Semana Santa, is huge in Spain. After all Easter is at the very heart of the Christianity and lots of Spanish events are still tied in to the Roman Catholic calendar. Easter Sunday is the culmination of Holy Week when, so the story goes, Jesus Christ rose or was resurrected, from the dead. On Good Friday Jesus was executed by crucifixion and he was put in a guarded tomb. When some of his women followers visited the tomb on Sunday they found the tomb empty. It is an article of faith with Christians that Jesus rose from the dead. Between Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowd, through to his crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday there are lots of other Easter scenes: the trial by Pontius Pilate, Peter, Jesus's follower, denying - three times - that he knew Jesus before the dawn cockerel crowed, Jesus's walk up to Golgotha or Calvary carrying his own cross and the help he received along the way, the crucifixion scene its...

I remember when we made the decision to move to Spain. It wasn't because there were people with guns in the street, not a sign of religious fanatics demanding that girls stayed covered and away from school. It wasn't even as though we were working in terrible conditions for a pittance. I, we, thought it would be good to move from one prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms to another prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms. I can hear the guffaws at that last sentence. I've read the Tweets and Facebook entries that suggest Spain is only one step short of being some Banana Republic, where nothing works as it should. I agree with some of the complaining. I'd like to be able to get my ID card without any effort too just like I'd hoped that my British passport wouldn't have a turn around time of four months. I might even prefer not to have to carry any ID. I understand the concerns about the wa...

We start in the UK. Back in the 1980s Anglepoise lamps became trendy. Of course they weren't real Anglepoises they were just an accessible Ikea copy. For those of you who missed the last century, or who have never been to Ikea, the real Anglepoise lamp is a balanced-arm lamp design in which the joints and spring tension allow the lamp to be moved into a wide range of positions where it will remain without being clamped in position. It was invented by British designer George Carwardine in 1932. The lamps were enormously successful, particularly the 1227 model. Shift of scene to Spain. One Sunday in 1964, so the story goes, Luis Pérez Oliva, a designer and Pedro Martín, a scrap dealer, met in the Rastro flea market in Madrid and fell into conversation. As a direct result of that meeting the men formed a company called Fase (the first two letters from Fabricaciones Seriadas or Serial Fabrications in English) to produce desktop lamps. Fase went on to be a big success with their most fa...

I'm not a particularly sociable type so I don't get a lot of phone calls. When I do it nearly always takes me by surprise and I fumble with the phone controls and miss the call. This time I was half way up a palm tree, cutting off the branches that hadn't done that Confucian thing of bending like a reed and had chosen to break like the mighty oak instead. It was from the bloke who fixes my car. One of his Spanish customers had been complaining about the cost of the photos for his upcoming wedding and Julian, for that's his name, had mentioned to the customer that he knew someone with a decent camera. Now, as you know, I take a lot of snaps. I like to take snaps of things with bright colours and a lot of contrast. I've got lots of pictures of people too but I'm not good at pictures of people. Friends take much nicer people photos than I do. And that was my initial reaction, well that and worrying that I'd somehow cock up taking the photos at all. Rath...

The other week I was driving around, enjoying the sun, when I heard an interview on the radio. The interviewee was called Vicente Calduch and he was talking about Suavina, a lip balm. Back in 1880, in the town of Vila-real in Castellón, the local pharmacist, Vicente's great great grandad or maybe it was great great great grandad, spookily also called Vicente Calduch, created an ointment. He called it Ungüent de Vila-real. His target market were the local citrus farmers who got cracked and chapped lips as they worked on their crops. That first Vicente had four sons, all of them became pharmacists and all of them sold the lip balm. One of them settled in Castellón and, in 1916 he opened a small laboratory to manufacture the ointment and gave it the more catchy name of Dermo-Suavina. Laboratorios Calduch still make the balm. The formula is unchanged from the original but the packaging changed from wood to metal in 1940 and then from metal to plastic in 1965. The packaging lo...

I spoke to my mum on the phone today. She said that she'd had a good Christmas and New Year but that she was glad to be back to normal. Later I popped in to town. I went to a cake shop that I've only ever been in once before, that time it was to order a birthday cake for Maggie, one with icing and a message and candles. This time it was to order a roscón. I can't remember whether I ordered the custard filling (crema) or the cream filling (nata) but either way I'm expecting better quality than the ones we usually buy from the supermarket. The last time we bought a baker's shop roscón was when we lived it Cartagena. I have a vague and nagging memory that I was shocked at the price then but, hey-ho, Christmas tradition and all that. The sensible eating can start when Christmas is over after the 6th. I've written about Roscones before, the traditional Roscón de Reyes cake, a bit like a big doughnut that gets eaten on Kings, at Epiphany, on 6th January when t...

I've just been scanning through a number of other English language blogs looking for inspiration. It's time to write a blog entry and I can't think of anything to write about. I could do New Year of course but I must have done cava (which is not, by the way, pronounced carver - but more like kavva), red underwear and the twelve grapes about as many years as I've lived here. I've already done a bit of a Christmas piece so I can't do that again even though it's still in full swing with the shopping centres clogged with cars and the telly full of perfume adverts. It's still a week to Kings and I've done Kings so many times that regular readers must be able to imagine what a Roscón tastes like. We haven't done many non British Christmas events but, even if we had, there's not a lot of mileage in living nativity scenes, carol concerts or Christmas story telling. I didn't get caught by any jokes yesterday on "Day of the Innocents...

We went into Pinoso on Wednesday to see the Procession of the imprisoned Jesus. He was escorted by the Roman Century and two of the be-hooded brotherhoods plus a couple of groups dedicated to different incarnations of the Virgin. To be honest I have no idea what was actually happening despite having seen this, or processions very similar to it, tens of times in our time here. In fact a British couple newly arrived in Pinoso were asking Maggie which of the long Good Friday programme in Pinoso were the ones not to miss and, when it came down to it, we were guessing. One of the events IN CAPITALS for the Good Friday programme for Pinoso is the encounter between The Verónica and Our Father Jesús. Google tells me that The Verónica, according to the Christian tradition, was the woman who, during the Viacrucis, handed Jesus a cloth to wipe away his sweat and blood, a cloth on which his face was miraculously imprinted. Then I had to Google Viacrucis. It seems to be Jesus's journey fr...

When I first started the  blog it was simple. The idea was to celebrate, or at least note, the diffferences between what I'd always considered to be everyday and what was now ordinary in a new country. So the fact that I ordered neither quantity nor type of beer - I just asked for a beer - gave me material for an entry. Everything from a fiesta to a supermarket visit was grist to the mill. Nowadays it's different. I don't want to repeat the same entries over and over again and I'm, perhaps, no longer the best person to notice the differences - or so I thought. Strangely though in the last twenty four hours, a couple of tiny incidents have reminded me that I've still not quite caught on. I do lots of English language exercises that revolve around food. In one drill I have the students do a bit of imaginary food shopping to mark vocabulary like savoury, packet, jar, seafood, game, poultry, herbs etc. They have to produce a meal from their list of savoury ingredi...

There's one of those professional looking videos that does the rounds on Facebook that I rather like. In it a succession of people walk into a bar and greet nobody in particular. Then someone comes in and sits down at the table without saying a word. There are meaningful looks between the waiters and the bar becomes a little less lively. The bar owner goes over to the customer and asks "Is it that we slept together?" The client immediately grasps what is being said and restores calm and good humour to the bar by saying hello to everyone and no-one in particular. It's absolutely true. Spaniards say hello to the room. Waiting in a bank or post office you get to greet lots of strangers. Maggie and I were in a hospital waiting room yesterday morning and everyone who came in said hello or good morning as they looked for a space to wait and most people said goodbye too as they came out of the consulting rooms and headed off somewhere else. I know this is the custom. M...

I need to write something. Not that I have a psychological need or anything but it's about time. Blogs need fuelling. As I washed the few evening pots before retiring to bed last night and as I weeded the, not as bare as it should be, earth of our garden this morning I've been trying to think of a topic. I thought I had one. The things that have changed in the time we have been here. Emails and puddings were uppermost in my mind. There was a time when sending an email to someone in Spain was just a way of putting off the conversation that you didn't want to attempt in Spanish. Nobody ever replied and you had to phone in the end. Nowadays, people seem to check their mail and most respond though not all. The pudding thing is that the restaurant offer is now so much better than the once ubiquitous flan, ice cream or seasonal fruit choice. I do miss watching people use a knife and fork to peel, section and eat an orange though. But the topic didn't set my pulse ...

We were in Jumilla today for a while. Jumilla is a town just over the border into Murcia. They have "always" produced wine in Jumilla but it just keeps getting better and better. Today we were there for a very small part of their Fiestas de la Vendimia -the wine harvest festival. So wine is a traditional crop in Jumilla just as pelotas and gazpacho are traditional food. We Pinoseros also claim wine and gazpacho as our own but as we are only 35km away I suppose that's fair enough. After all it's Yorkshire Pudding not Barnsley, Ripon or Cleckheaton Pudding though thinking about it we do have Bakewell Tart and Caerphilly Cheese. Anyway. So when do things become traditional? Family names, surnames, generally pass from generation to generation. Surnames like Thompson, son of Tom, are equivalent to the Arabic ibn or bin names whilst the Spanish tend to use -ez endings, as in Dominguez. But why did it stop? My Dad was John so why am I not a Johnson? And if it's Fle...

Elche de la Sierra is a town in Castilla la Mancha. The journey is from Culebríon in Alicante to Murcia and from Murcia to Albacete Province in Castilla la Mancha. The President of the community is a big noise politician in the ruling Partido Popular and I recognised her as she went into church for the Eucharist service. Those of you who know me will realise how remarkable this is. I do some on-line surveys. One of the favourite topics is to ask if I recognise some celebrities and then to say whether I think they would be good stars for TV ads. I usually don't recognise anyone except the most internationally famous. I missed Shakira in the last one for instance until they gave me a clue! So recognising de Cospedal was out of character. We were there to have a look at the sawdust carpets . These are exactly what they sound like. Individual groups are given a bit of street to decorate. Beforehand they make masks which are then placed on the street and coloured sawdust is sifted...

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...

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...

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...

Tonight when the clock (Reloj de la Gobernación) on the old Post Office (Casa de Correos) in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid starts chiming midnight  people all over Spain will start popping grapes into their mouth trying to eat at the rythm of the boings. If you manage to eat all twelve grapes in the alloted time then the idea is that you will have a prosperous year. The tradition appears to have started at the very end of the Nineteenth Century in Madrid but it was popularised all over Spain in 1909 by grape growers from Murcia and Alicante who had a glut of grapes and found a clever way to shift them. The sorry looking white examples in the photo will provide the twenty four grapes for Maggie and me. They have been sitting on the one vine that we have in our garden which grows reasonably well. I think it may be because its roots are very close to our cess pit! We covered the bunches with paper bags back in October to try and keep the grapes relatively fit quite a wh...

Twelve articulated lorries to transport it all, 30,000 watts of sound and light, six kilometres of electric cable and 3,000kg of glass fibre to tell the simple story of a child born in a stable. Nativity scenes, Belenes are a traditional part of the Christmas scene. We have a little Belén in our house, the municipal one here in Pinoso will be opened on Christmas Day, just after Midnight Mass, the one in Cartagena mentioned in a previous post (The Goose is getting Fat) was opened last week and today, in Elche, we went to have a look at the version mounted by one of the Savings Banks. It was extremely good; the figures and backdrops were much more carefully crafted than is usual, each figure made by hand, but they didn't half labour the point. First we had to wait for the one visit every half an hour, then we had to take a seat in front of a screen before somebody, dressed like a bank clerk, raced through her lines with somewhat less modulation in her voice than the speaking cloc...

When I was in Ciudad Rodrigo I read a book that described life in the villages of Salamanca province in the first thirty or forty of the last century. One of the stories was about the knife grinder cum bucket mender who turned up from season to season. Days long gone. We were in Pinoso today. This chap was plying his trade