Heat and Dust

Have you seen those photos of the Greek Islands? Blue and white paintwork everywhere and the boats apparently suspended in mid air on a transparent crystal clear sea. It's the light that makes those photos so stunning and it's the same sort of light that we have here. A popular late 19th and early 20th Century Spanish painter, Joaquín Sorolla, is most famous because of the way he captured the Mediterranean light. I often think of Sorolla when anyone comments on the limpid, flawless blue sky in even the most mundane of my snaps.

So, when we first came to Spain I envisaged a house with big French windows, with gauze like curtains moving gently on a whisper of warm breeze making and unmaking pools of light on the tiled floor. Obviously we would wear, white, probably linen, clothes as we Virginia Woolfed our way through the days sipping on ice tinkling lemonade or a more alcoholic gin and tonic. Nobody sweats in those images, we would just luxuriate in the brightness of it all.

Actually of course, nowadays, being good Spaniards, we walk on the shadowed side of the street, we look to park the car in the shade so that the steering wheel will not singe our hands and the seats other parts of our anatomy as we return to it and we would always choose to eat inside, in the air conditioned interior of a restaurant, rather than out with the flies and the dust in the street. It's alright to have a drink in the street but always in the shade. And whilst you're there the most important thing about a beer is it's temperature. That's one of the reasons Spaniards drink small beers and not pints (well that and the metric system). Eating outside we leave to the tourists. We're sometimes taken aback when guests want to sit in the sun or eat outside. We're not really good Spaniards though, or at least I'm not. Maggie would do the Spanish thing and drop all the blinds on the house and leave us in permanent twilight if she had her way. Windows and doors would stay firmly closed until the sun had dipped out of sight or at least until it starts to cool down a bit. I'm still for a through draft and a bit of natural light in the house. We're also lucky that, up here, at 600 metres the evening temperatures drops into the teens which makes it easy to sleep without taking to the old Spanish trick of sleeping on the terrace. Of course it's also the summer heat that means that Spanish events, like theatre or pop bands, don't start till lots of Britons are thinking about whatever the summer equivalent is of cocoa and a bedtime book.

It really is a splendid light and, as I've said before, I like the heat. Yesterday I polished my car and as I collected the various implements with the job done I noticed the fine patina of dust already on the car. I smiled. Just as it snows in Stockholm in winter it's warm and dusty in Culebrón in July.

Red in the face

My mum was unhappy about the heat in St Ives, in Huntingdonshire, unbearable she said. Somebody here in Pinoso was complaining to me about how hot it was too but, because I keep a little record in my diary, I thought I was aware that, so far, both June and July have been a little cooler than usual.

So I did a bit of checking. I was a bit surprised how difficult it was to find full sets of data for past years  and I could only really get fullish sets for 2013, 2014 and most of 2015. All of these results are from the same weather station so any microclimatic differences are evened out. And it seems to be true. Both June and July this year (so far) have had lower maximum temperatures than in the previous quoted years. Mind you the difference isn't really that much and the nightime temperatures are much as usual.

In 2013 in Pinoso the highest June temperature was 35ºC, for 2014 it was 32.5ºC, for 2015 it was 37ºC and for 2018 it was 31.5ºC
In 2013 in Pinoso the highest July temperature was 36.5ºC, for 2014 it was 35ºC, for 2015 the records are missing and for 2018, so far, the highest is 33.5ºC

In 2013 in Pinoso the lowest June temperature was 8ºC, for 2014 it was 7ºC, for 2015 it was 9.5ºC and for 2018 it was 8.5ºC
In 2013 in Pinoso the lowest July temperature was 12ºC, for 2014 it was 11.5ºC, for 2015 the records are missing and for 2018, so far, the lowest is 12ºC

Colder than a well-digger's ass

I have a morning cat feeding routine. The kettle goes on as I run water to wash the cats' bowls. I fire up the portable gas heater. When the water has boiled I put a little of it into our tea mugs and then put the mugs on top of the heater. It's to warm the cups. If we don't warm the cups we end up with lukewarm tea. The kitchen temperature is such that crockery and cutlery come out of the cupboards icy cold.

The minimum temperatures recorded at the Pinoso weather station over the last week are -1.5ºC, -2ºC, -1.1ºC. -2ºC, +1.3ºC, -7.2ºC and -5.3ºC. It's not that they're arctic or anything but neither are they tropical. It has been colder. We had a couple of days last month when there was no morning water because of frozen pipes. Lots of shop and office workers in Pinoso work at their computers wearing coats. Several of our friends wear fleeces inside their houses. We're not for that. We're for banging on the heating. Maggie was so fed up of being cold a couple of years ago that she spent serious money on installing a pellet burner which now blasts 10kw of heat into our living room. We have portable 4kw gas heaters in the kitchen and as a back up in the living room too and there are electric heaters here and there. Since the temperatures began to drop we've bought ten 12kg gas bottles, twenty odd 15kg sacks of pellets and our December electric bill is 50% higher than the one in November.

The problem is that the heat is not background heat. It isn't on all the time. The insulation in our house, and in the majority of the Spanish houses that we know in this area, is so minimal that basically as heat is poured in it flies out. As soon as we turn off the heating the cold re-invades the house and, even when the heating is on in any one room the icy cold chill is waiting behind the door.

We don't leave heating on in the bedroom. The goose down duvet we use is really a set of a thinner and a thicker quilt. The two will fasten together and that's what we do in the depths of winter. It means that we can stay warm in bed. In fact it's a bit too hot and the duvet is uncomfortably heavy. I think we both follow the same routine. We wake up at something a.m. dripping in sweat, far too hot, we stick an arm or a leg out from under the covers till the exposed limb goes numb with cold and then we retreat under the covers and hope that the balance of body temperatures will allow us to get back to sleep.

Outside the daytime temperature is generally quite pleasant. I've thought that it has been colder recently than usual although I have no data to back up that. I'm just going on things like the feeling that I might die of cold as I rode the bike into work the other morning! If I were describing a typical winter's day around here I would describe a sunny day with a bright blue sky so the recent crop of grey days has been a bit out of character.

As I pick up a freezing cold knife from the cutlery drawer or as I gasp with cold on opening the door to the unheated office it's hard to recall those endlessly hot summer days when the cicadas sang all night long. But, what keeps me going is that I know they'll be back!

Microclimates

I've written a diary every day for the last forty six years. For several years now I've put a little footnote to describe the weather - hot and sunny, wet and grey - and, alongside, the maximum and minimum temperatures. I bought a thermometer for the process but, when I lived in La Unión, there was nowhere I could site the thermometer in the shade so I started to use the data from the Spanish equivalent of the Met Office.

The weather, here as everywhere, is a talking point. It's been hot for the past two or three weeks generally in the mid to high thirties. Some parts of Spain have been over forty on occasional days. People often exagerate the weather. They tell me that it was 53ºC in their patio or somesuch so I try to slip into the conversation, gently of course - well, the highest temperature ever recorded in Spain before today has been 47.2ºC in Murcia and, according to the local weather station it only got to 38ºC (or whatever).

But local variations are very noticeable. Spain is the second highest country in Europe and there are mountains all over the place. They affect the microclimate to a remarkable degree. Driving from home in Culebrón to Pinoso just five kilometres away the temperature can rise a couple of degrees whereas Rodriguillo, on the other side of Pinoso towards Fortuna, is often a couple of degrees cooler than Culebrón. Humidity is another startling varaible.

Last year, I think it was last year, hail destroyed rooves, furniture, cars and whatnot in Paredón, another of the villages that encircle Pinoso. In Ubeda, on the same day, the same hail storm but with less intensity smashed the windscreen of a friend's car and put hundreds of little dents into their neighbours car. Just 3km up the road, in Culebrón we got heavy rain but no hail.

Yesterday it rained heavily for the second time this week in Culebrón. When it was over we had large pools all over the garden and I had to mop up in the back bedroom where I'd left a door ajar. I have proof that it rained, I was on the phone to my sister and I made her listen to the noise as the big drops collided with the tin roof.

This morning, when I checked yesterday's temperatures (High 33.6ºC, Low 21.8ºC) I  noticed that the rainfall recorded in Pinoso, where the official weather station is, was zero. In fact none of the weather stations in Valencia, in all three provinces, recorded any rainfall whatsoever.

So was Culebrón the only place it rained yesterday?