Life in Culebrón

The music festival season is just beginning to warm up in Spain. We usually try to get along to at least one event. It's good to hear a band that goes on to greater things - "Calvin? great musician! First time I saw him he was on the tiny fourth stage just by the latrines at half past six in the evening" It's good to hear new bands in general and I always look forward to those vegetable noodles they serve in the overpriced food areas too. So I was reading an article, in Spanish, from a national newspaper. It was suggesting ways to keep the costs of festival going to a bare minimum. It suggested coachsurfing (sic). Fortunately for me coachsurfing was hyperlinked and when I followed the link there was a little piece about couchsurfing (sic). Taken along with the rest of the article about how nice someone had been to some tourists I decided that it was about an internet method of finding a floor to kip on. Someone who would put you up on their couch for a fraction of...

I used to use an English language exercise about the difference between must and could. You know the sort of thing; she must be delayed: she could be ill, she could be in traffic. The example went something like " I can see the Eiffel Tower, I can see the River Seine - where am I?" I learned to write the words on the board because my pronunciation never clicked with my Spanish students but it didn't help much. The success rate on "You must be in Paris." was pretty low. Maybe 50% would get the French capital with Rome coming a close second. Another exercise had pictures of the Christ statue in Rio, the Opera House in Sydney, The Coliseum in Rome and The Capitol Building in Washington DC. Hardly anyone could identify anything other than the Coliseum. Now not recognising Sydney Opera House is no sort of crime; no measure of intelligence. I'm dead against lots of rote learning and there is no reason that anyone should know a series of landmarks but I would h...

I still watch TV more or less as I did in the 1960s. Not that I stare avidly at Zip Nolan or Mike Nelson in Sea Hunt but I do generally, watch broadcast television at the time that it is broadcast. Every now and then I will use the streaming feeds from a TV company for the missed episode and I have even been known to steal television programmes from one of the torrent sites. I don't really understand torrents though and I am usually mightily disappointed when after downloading something for hours or days the picture keeps macroblocking. I begged a cup off coffee of some pals yesterday. They told me that Sky, or whoever it is that uses whichever satellites to send out whatever British satellite TV signals, has just shifted everything around again. They do this from time to time presumably for technical reasons, possibly to add quality or functionality, and maybe to deny the signal to we expats. It certainly sends ripples through the Brit population who have parabolic dishes th...

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...