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 ...

We went to a couple of things yesterday. One was reassuringly Spanish but the other followed a disturbing new trend. There was a fundraising event in Novelda. Some local bands, names unknown to us, were playing a mini festival to raise money for victims of the flooding of a few weeks ago. We turned up a bit after, not much after, the advertised start time of 1pm and, as we expected, absolutely nothing was going on. Lots of people with pony tails, black t-shirts and big bellies were faffing around with bits of wire onstage but no bands. Obviously 1pm comes as a surprise every time. Normal, predictable, foreseeable behaviour. The bands kicked off with the normal, predictable and foreseeable twenty minutes to half an hour delay. The bar was another surprise for the organising team. The surprise was that people arriving might want to buy a drink from the bar. The system was predictable enough. You couldn't pay with cash at the bar you had to buy tickets first - this is a common, ...

I was sitting in front of the computer trying to think of something to blog about. It didn't help that I was playing the MixCloud version of my old pal Harry's community radio programme. I'm more a cotton wool in the ears than Led Zeppelin at full blast if I have maths homework to do sort of person. As inspiration faltered I decided to go and see the dance group cum choir in town. The title of the event was in Valenciano but, from what I could make out, this was the fourth edition of a series of concerts called "Do you remember.....?". This one was called Do you remember .... The Giants. The giants in this case being a couple of three to four metre high wood and cloth figures named after people who were well known in Pinoso at some time in the past and who gave their names to the dancing giants when they were first commissioned twenty years ago. The real people were Constancio Valenzuela y Adela Chinchilla who were known as Uncle Guerra and Aunty Pera or el Tí...