Life in Culebrón

My weekly pilgrimage into our local town this morning. My sixth or seventh so far I think. I asked Maggie if she wanted to do it because she's not been out of the house for 47 days now. She preferred not to. The roads seemed just a tad busier than last week. There was a police control at the crossroads in to Pinoso but he was checking traffic coming from another direction. Plenty of parking space in the town centre car park because nothing much is open and very few people are visibly working. My first stop was the Post Office. It was the first outing, the premiere, for my free (thanks to the Regional Valencian Government) face mask. I'd got gloves too. To be honest I'm a fan of neither but I'm happy to be civic. There was no queue at the Post Office which was a bit of a surprise. There can only be two (or possibly three) people inside so there is usually a patient, spaced out (not in the Seventies way) line of people waiting outside. Not today. Straight in. I only w...

I thought I might write a blog. Then I realised that nothing has happened to me for days so I couldn't. Later, as I pottered at some unremarkable task or another, it came to me that I knew a story, dated from the year 1305, about a Scottish bloke watching a spider. If that was enough to pique people's interest maybe I could think of something. So, here it is. Yesterday, as I sorted the recycling in the rain, someone papped their horn as they passed the gate. Now horn papping is currently a big event in Culebrón; worthy of investigation. I duly investigated. It was a white van and our next door neighbour was buying something from the driver. I kept my distance but I wondered what he was selling. Instead of asking in person I asked via WhatsApp. First I asked a British family who live on the other side of the main road, the one where they disinfected the streets today, if they knew anything about travelling shops. When the response hadn't come within an hour or so I sent ...

I've just been into town. There's a video doing the rounds on social media of a woman runner scuffling with a couple of police officers in Madrid. We don't see how it started but the woman is screaming blue murder and shouting for help. The comments on the sound track by the person taking the video and from the neighbours on the adjoining balconies are not supportive of the runner. A loose translation might be something along the lines of "Smart arse, you should have stayed at home - you twat". We're fine in Culebrón. We have space, inside and out, there are only the two of us plus the clowder of cats. Since I went to the supermarket on either Monday or Tuesday I haven't been outside the front gate. The time has passed quickly though and I'm not finding time to do enough reading despite apparently having endless days in front of me. I see on the telly, hear on the radio and read in social media that, in Spain, the place where I live, people are...

I like to get out and about. Anything from a film to a fiesta, a gallery to a concert, the theatre and, occasionally, even sports events. Doing things suits me. On the other hand in the last seventeen years I have had a couple of short stays in hospital - one in the UK and one here. Much to the surprise of those around me I quite enjoyed those brief medical sojourns. So far I'm finding the same with being confined to home. I'm not longing to go for a walk or ride the bike or sit in a bar or even go to the pictures. The situation has changed and I'm being told that the best thing for me, and more particularly for everyone else, is that is that I stay at home; so stay at home it is. That said I did go out today. We needed food. Culebrón itself is festooned with police tape to seal off the public spaces which I noticed as I passed through the village to drop off the recycling. Pinoso, our town, was quiet. Not dead quiet but quiet. I parked without any difficulty outside ...

When you buy a beer at a bar in Spain they usually give you something to go with it - olives are favourite. In fact olives are everywhere in Spain. They come in salads, they grow in the fields beside the road, they get milled over the road in Culebrón village and we always cook with olive oil as well as using it for dressing on salad. I needed olives and beef for the recipe. We only had black olives in the cupboard so I added green olives to my shopping list. When I got to the shelf with the olives I found black olives, olives stuffed with anchovies, olives stuffed with jalapeño pepper, olives stuffed with red pepper and even a variety made to look like a monster sperm by shoving a small gherkin into the hole where the stone had been drilled out. There were also the manzanilla ones. Now manzanilla is an interesting word. If you're in Sanlucar de Barrameda it's the local dry sherry. I prefer it to the similar fino sherry produced in nearby Jerez de la Frontera though bot...

There used to be an advert with a lad pushing his bike to the top of a steep hill to deliver his Hovis bread. The tagline was "as good today as it's always been". The clear suggestion was of pedigree, that Hovis was real bread, proper bread, the sort of bread that our grandparents ate and that was good for you. Hovis always stressed that their bread was, "made with wheatgerm". I remember being taken aback when I heard that the word wheatgerm was maybe a bit of sleight of hand. It's true, a loaf with added wheatgerm is better, health-wise, than a loaf made from processed white flour but, apparently, Hovis is basically a processed flour bread spiced up with a bit of wheatgerm. The stuff you really want, for all that colon cleansing fibre, is wholemeal where nothing has been removed from the wholewheat grain. For years, in Spain, I thought that bread sticks - the sort of bread that onion toting, beret wearing, stripy T-shirt clad Frenchmen, add flavour ...

There aren't many self serve checkouts in Spain. They have them at Ikea, the scan your goods, push in your credit card type and they have some at Corte Inglés though I've never seen them in use. At Carrefour they used to have self serve but they changed to a single queue system - Checkout Number fourrr please. Generally then supermarket queues are stand in line, stuff to the rubber belt, the person at the till scans your items, you put them into a bag and then you pay, maybe scanning your loyalty card in the process. You can still buy plastic bags at the checkout but most people don't. Consum, probably the largest supermarket in Pinoso, works exactly like that. I'd gone for my usual 30-40€ worth of every second day shopping. There were four of the six tills on the go, the deputy manager was on one till, the women from the deli and fish counter were up too. All the tills in use were busy. The days of the ten items or fewer queue are long gone. I stood in a queue....

It's been a funny old day. I was expecting music in the streets and a bit of exploration near Caravaca de la Cruz in Murcia but the weather has been terrible and I've hardly strayed from the kitchen and living room. My food intake has been a bit odd too. Maggie made an apple pie which I was very happy to help her eat but that was a while ago. I just decided to have a packet of Knorr soup - Thai soup. Whilst I was waiting for it to thicken up I had some peanut butter on bread. My total committent to a healthy, fat and sugar free, diet is almost complete. Spanish people occasionally ask me whether I eat British or Spanish. I suppose I tend to eat British unless I go out but, then again, most of the stuff I eat is probably without nationality. I don't do a lot of rice with rabbit and snails or faseguras but neither do I do a lot of roast beef with Yorkshires or steak and kidney pie. Spaghetti with mushrooms, bacon and onions in a yoghurt and balsamic vinegar sauce is Ita...

I've talked about Spanish supermarkets before. Just as a quick recap. We have four decent sized supermarkets in Pinoso and I use them all. My choice is usually based on geography, wherever the car is parked. Sometimes on product - only two of the four for instance carry English Council House tea. Whilst I'm not at work I've started to use Día more frequently than I used to. This is because it's on our side of town and the car parking is good. Now I'm going to fall into all sorts of problems with stereotyping here so please forgive me. Día is exactly the opposite of the UK's Waitrose or Spain's Corte Inglés supermarket operations in both its products and its customer profile. Día sells some quality products but it is typified by cheap and, sometimes, low quality in the sense of industrially processed food. Día does not, generally, attract well heeled clients in search of premium product. Now you can already see the stress lines in my argument because the ...

I met Maggie as she left work today and on the way home we went food shopping. Maggie told me we were saving money because she had some sort of customer loyalty voucher. I suspect we may have saved more by not going in the shop at all though following my plan to its logical conclusion we would starve to death. Based on a mix of store layout, friendliness, price and choice the shop we went to, Consum, is probably my favourite of the four larger Pinoso supermarkets. Recently I've done more of the food shopping than Maggie so, as we moved around the shop, I was playing the tour guide on new lines and innovations. What I hadn't really noticed, until today, was how many "British" items the shop now carries. It was around 3pm when we were shopping, a time when most Spanish people are getting their lunch. The only Spaniards in the store were the workers. All of the customers appeared to be Britons. Obviously whoever does the buying for our Consum had noticed this custo...

One of those Christmassy things I do is to buy whatever it is that the "A toy, a dream" - Un juguete una ilusión campaign is selling. For years now it's been a biro but when we first got here I remember it was a spinning top. The idea is you pay over the odds for the thing and the extra money gets turned into toys. In the first place those toys were shipped to poor children in South America and Africa - you know the sort of countries, the ones with names you just about recognise but you'd be hard pressed to point at on a blank map. Places like Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic or Guatemala. Last year, for the first time, toys were also handed out, via the Red Cross, to children in Spain. The headline is that one of every five people living in Spain lives in the shadow of poverty - in poverty or at risk of poverty. Now I have no idea how somebody has decided what poverty is. Is it getting fewer than so many calories to eat or not having a ...

As we waited in the queue to pay, there in the place normally reserved for those last minute temptations - the sweets that have children tugging on their parent's sleeves and the diet breaking choolate bars - was a big box full of habas, broad beans. Maggie, can we have some broad beans Maggie, can we? She said no of course but a touch of petulance and the beans were mine. I always associate raw broad beans with one of the first times that we took the MG out for a run with the Orihuela Seat 600 club. It was a sunny but nippy Sunday morning and the MG was parked up in a school playground along with lots of other classic cars. It was referendum day for the European Constitution and the school was acting as a polling station so there were quite a lot of people about one way and another. The car folk were breathing smoke with the cold air as they chewed on the obligatory breakfast of silver paper wrapped baguettes and canned drinks. From the back of an old Merc I think, but it may ...