Watery stuff

Artemio is a heavy set bloke who works for Pinoso Town Hall. Usually he has a big cigar clamped between his teeth. I'd prefer not to commit to giving him an age. He drives a Jeep which, he says, is much better than the Land Rover he used to have but, as you can see from the snap alongside, the Land Rover is still with the team. Artemio's  voice is raspy and, until the second or third sentence, when I tune in, I find him really difficult to understand. Artemio is the bloke you call if there is a water leak out in the street, or in our case, on the track. It's a 24 hour a day service. Should you ever need it the number is 656978410. If the leak is on the domestic side of the water meter then you need a plumber but if the leak is on the other side of the meter you call Artemio. Or rather you call his number. He's in charge of the team and he's not always the person who turns up.

Most people expect that when they click the switch on the wall the electric light will come on and when they open the tap water will come out. In rural Spain that's not always the case. I suppose in rural Scotland it could well be the same. If you live a long way from power lines or water pipes then you're on your own. We have mains water and mains electric but not everyone in the countryside has. People have water storage tanks which have to be filled up from time to time by tanker lorry and lots of houses run off solar power either for environmental reasons or because they have no economic option.

Piped water around here comes as two variants. The stuff we have is drinking tap water. It comes filtered and treated. There is another network of water supply organised locally by S.A.T. Aguas de Pinoso, la Sociedad Agraria de Transformación. That network is designed for crop irrigation but, because it runs in places where the drinking water network doesn't some people use it as their primary water source. I think that it is basically filtered but I don't think it's suitable for drinking. That said I've made tea with it presuming that the boiled water would be safe. I wrote that section without checking the detail. I think it's correct but if it isn't I apologise now.

So, the last time I called Artemio was because I'd cut through a thinnish water pipe when I was hacking out weeds alongside our track. It turned out that it was a pipe our neighbour had laid himself to water his almond trees so I had to ring Artemio back and cancel. The time before that it was the public water supply and the water bubbling up through the soil was in the same place that it has bubbled up time and time again. "It's 30 year old pipe," said Artemio, "what do you expect? It goes time after time and we patch it up time after time too".

Interesting that about the pipe. We had a leak on our side of the water meter the other day. We got the original leak fixed and then the pipe, which is sort of semi rigid rubber, not quite the Durapipe type but not as flexible as hosepipe, sprang a pinhole leak. When I tried a temporary repair with some potty putty type epoxy resin the pipe sprang another leak. When the plumber finally got around to visiting he said that the pipe lasts for so long and then starts to fail; as if it had a sell by date. He also said that the piping which had failed, the stuff he was replacing, was thin walled agricultural pipe rather than the thicker walled domestic supply pipe. From the outside they would look identical if it were not for the blue pinstripe on the domestic stuff. He thought that we may have the thinner walled pipe from the meter to the stopcock in the house. He cheerily suggested that if it were beginning to go it may have reached the end of it's useful life. "Keep an eye on your meter." he said. 

I do check the water meter every week. I've heard far too many stories about unrecognised leaks leading to huge bills. I also pondered the pleasures of house ownership.

Of no known address

Some fathead at the HSBC bank seems to think that I may have been lying about my address for the past thirteen years and about my identity for the past forty five years. They want me to prove who I am and where I live. So they sent me some sort of half baked questionnaire. Good job I wasn't lying about my address or I'd never have received it!!

Nowadays we rich folk live in an interconnected world. Instead of completing the form IN BLACK INK AND IN CAPITALS I can use a webcam application which begins with the letter J and is amusingly named to stop it from being too daunting. So I can use the software called Jumbo, Jumio or Juliet (I forget which) to prove that I'm me and that I live where I say I live. The explanatory leaflet tells me that I can supply the information they need in just six minutes. In reality It took me longer than that to read the instructions never mind the time I wasted in finding and scanning paperwork. One possible form of documentation, to prove where I live, is to send a utility bill. Given the unreasonableness of their basic request that seemed reasonable. The application Jumanji or Jamiroquai told me though that the bill needed to be in English. Ah, of course. Spanish utility companies produce all their bills in English in deference to the domination of English as THE World language. Actually though, with the wonders of the Internet, I can get the bill in a version of English. That may have saved me the translation fee which appears to be the alternative if the bill happens to be in some funny foreign language. Though tell me - what exactly is the translation of an address? What is the English for Alicante. Do they really want Culebrón translated as big snake?

There is, though, another stumbling block. My home address isn't exactly the same on the electricity bill as it is on, well almost any other proof of address, that I can muster. I've explained this before. Basically the problem boils down to terrible Spanish database design. Instead of using a free field for the box on the form where you would be expected to put street, avenue or close, some idiot, who presumably worked for the HSBC before moving to Spain, made a long list of all of the street synonyms they could think of. So if I live in Pedanía Culebrón or Partida Culebrón or Caserío Culebrón and pedania, partida and caserío are not on the database someone has to choose whatever they consider to be the nearest equivalent - drove might become drive and gate might become close or street or avenue.

Add in a bit of post code confusion. Postcodes in Spain cover areas, a whole town will share a postcode. Technically our postcode is 03658 but the town we belong to has the post code 03650 so, like everyone else who lives near Pinoso, and acting on the advice of people in the Post Office, we use 03650. But Mr Database designer (it could only be a man) never spoke to the people in our Post Office and his database links the village to the wrong postcode. So I may think my address is Culebrón Hamlet, 03650 Pinoso Alicante but the closest we can get on database A is Culebrón Street, 03650 Pinoso, Alicante whilst on database B we might find Culebrón Village, 03658 Culebrón, Alicante. The number of variations on the same basic information is really remarkable.

Now who can say. Application Jiminy Cricket may be backed up by a person who sees the photo of me holding up my passport, who sees the uploaded copies of my driving licence or electricity bill and realises that they are all basically similar and in the same name (It won't help that my name is actually misspelled on at least one of the documents) and nods the information through as true. Somehow though I suspect that won't happen. What will actually happen is that some piece of visual recognition software will check my  passport photo against the webcam picture and there will be a cursory check of my driving licence number against some European database. I'll get bounced by both and we'll be back to square one.

Locked out

It must have been the 1964 general election. I walked on to the Town Hall Square in Elland to see Harold Macmillan speak. I would have been ten at the time. I've always been strangely drawn to political meetings.

Shortly after democracy was restored to Spain in 1977 the pattern soon settled into the usual two party - leftish, rightish - seesaw. The last time, in 2011, it was the turn of the right. There are several regional parties which have strong representation in the national parliament but their power base is in their home regions. Otherwise there were really just a couple of smaller national parties. A harder left party has, traditionally, been the third largest national party and, in 2007, a breakaway socialist politician formed a new centrist party. To put that into figures at the last general elections it was 185 seats to the PP (conservatives), 110 to the PSOE (socialists), 11 to the Left, 5 to the Centrists, 21 to Catalan and Basque groups and 18 to the rest

Then suddenly, last year, there was a group called Podemos which is often described as an anti austerity party though they are clearly hardish left. They surprised everyone by picking up five European seats just three months after their official launch. Current "intention to vote" polls have them neck and neck with the big two but, after relentless media pressure, they seem to be losing some of their gleam. Almost as suddenly there was another party, Ciudadadanos, on the scene. They come from a regional party formed in Catalonia in 2006 which went national in 2013 and got a couple of MEPs last year. They seemed to be just another small party but then suddenly their name was cropping up everywhere. Their politics are hard to pin down, they're definitely not for Catalan Independence, they suggest they are a bit left though lots of commentators place them to the right. The polls have Ciudadanos in a close fourth place. So from a two horse race less than a year ago we now have four and a half serious contenders.

I vote for the European Parliament through a Spanish ballot box. At the national level I get to vote in England. At regional level I am denied a vote in either my own or my adopted country and at the local level I vote in Spain.

The Spanish Town Hall Elections are on May 24th. The official campaign season hasn't started yet but the various parties are presenting their lists of candidates now. Our current council has the socialist PSOE in charge in coalition with a local party called the PSD. The opposition is made up of the conservative PP, a local party called UCL and BLOC d'el Pinos which is a local branch of a Valencian Nationalist group.

For 2015 the choice is a bit different. We have the same PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the same PP, Partido Popular, a renamed version of BLOC now in a wider coalition called BLOC Comprmís, the Partido Democrata Pinoso Independiente, PDPI, which appears to be a renaming of the local PSD and then Ciudadanos, the relatively new national grouping mentioned above.

I couldn't get to either the PSOE or PDPI candidate presentations. Tonight it was the turn of the PP. Their meeting was advertised for 8.30pm and as I don't finish teaching my last class till 8pm in a town some 30km away from Pinoso it was going to be a bit tight. Spanish events tend to start late though so when I rolled up outside the building at 8.45 I reckoned I would be fine. The car park looked a bit quiet though, there was nobody milling about, the door was firmly locked. I gave up and came home.

I notice from the reports on the Town Hall website that the PP meeting took place in the Auditorium not the Interpretation Centre as billed. I'm sure the change was advertised somewhere.

Now I can't pretend I put a lot of effort into my planning for the event. All I did was to add the dates and places to my diary that came with a leaflet called Municipal Elections 2015 produced by the Municipal Means of Communication but I do hope that the rest of my election campaign goes just a little more smoothly.

Scotty, beam me up!

I went to vote. I hunted through the thirty nine piles of candidate lists till I found the one I wanted, pushed it in the envelope, had fun with the spelling of my name at the voting table and that was my part played in the democratic process for another couple of years.

There was though another envelope and another ballot box for the consulta popular - a sort of referendum organised by the local town hall. More fun, more democracy.

The first question was whether we wanted to make Pinoso a Slow City giving priority to bikes and pedestrians and limiting motor vehicles to 30 kph. The second question asked us to prioritise upgrading a road to a local shrine, constructing a walking and running route around the town or building bike lanes between the town centre and the outlying villages.

Fair enough. I wondered why those particular schemes but I thought it was relatively clever to use the election turnout to canvas opinion. Afterwards though I considered what a cumbersome process traditional voting is. It would certinly slow down declaring the Eurovision winner if the system relied on polling stations.

One of the election manifestos I read yesterday, published only on the party's website, said that it cost about two million euros for an election mailshot to every voter in Spain. There must be lots of similar costs with all the palaver of voting slips and their counting not to mention the cost to individuals of travelling to a central location to vote. It can't be long before some much less cumbersome system takes over from the sort of systems that I have experienced all my adult life, can it?

Then of course they'll be able to ask us if we want the road up to Fatima tarmacking at the cost of the cycle ways or the exercise track whenever they want.

Maxi Banegas

Pinoso is definitely going all out for the tourist trade. Back in February we got the new street furniture and today we got the Maxi Banegas route. Veritably a seething cauldron of tourist activity.

But who, you ask yourself, is Maxi Banegas? Well, a couple of years ago, I asked that same question and I drew a blank. But tonight I got a clear answer.

Maximina Banegas Carbonell was born on September 15th, 1923. She grew up in her father's barber's shop at Monóvar street, in a warm and family atmosphere, humble but educated, surrounded by books and newspapers, ideal for Maxi's formation and imagination.

Her family's sacrifice and her desire for bettering herself, in spite of the difficult times during and after the Civil War, bore fruit on September 29th, 1951, when she graduated as a Primary School Teacher. She taught in Bacares (Almería), Monóvar, different municipal districts from Pinoso, and finally at San Antón School, where she stayed until her retirement in 1999.

Her nearly 40 years of teaching career left an imprint on the people from Pinoso. As a sign of this, the 'Maxi Banegas' Poetry Contest was created in 1997, currently nationwide. Moreover, in May 1999, Pinoso's Public Library was given her name, and a year later this garden was dedicated to her.

She died on March 27th, 2002, after spending her whole life next to her beloved sister Conchi. Her teaching and her poetry were her legacy.

During her life she wrote eloquent lines, some of which are compiled in her book ‘Entre Pinares’ (Among the Pine Trees) (1999). In her poetry predominates sincerity and the simplicity of her figures, personal feelings and everyday characters from our village, remembering its festivities and devotions, the landscape, her dreams and hopes, which reflect the woman and the teacher.

So now you know as much about Maxi Banegas as I do.

The route, which I went to see opened this evening, is marked by a series of lecterns which explain details of various spots in Pinoso. Each stop also features a few lines of Maxi's poetry about the place. There were seven stops along the route. Each lectern carries a QR code so, if your phone has the right app, you not only get the information in Castillian, Valenciano and English but also the route shown on Google maps so you can't get lost. Pretty go ahead I thought. The text above is the English page for the board in the Maxi Banegas garden.

I'm sure the busloads of tourists will be with us very shortly.

Las Lamparillas

The best route home from Cartagena to Culebrón passes close by the town of Fortuna. Alongside the ring road the gaunt skeletons of hundreds of unfinished houses bear witness to the folly of the Spanish building boom. The planned development, built in the bone dry scrubland that surrounds Fortuna, was to be called Fortuna Hill Nature and Residential Golf Resort.

 A key part of the new resort was the Las Lamparillas development. It was aimed at golf playing Britons who weren't quite rich enough to buy a similar place on the coast and was planned to have 3,737 houses when complete. There were other agreements for other developments in Fortuna. If everything had gone as planned Fortuna's population would have increased from 10,000 to 100,000.

A research project carried out by a local university in 2004 gives some idea as to the scale of the building work planned. Across Murcia, a region with just one and a half million inhabitants, there were agreements to build 800,000 houses. The figures never made sense but nobody seemed to notice before everything went pear shaped.

Work on Las Lamaprillas, which was just part of the whole resort, started in 2007. By 2010 the principal developer of the site went bust with debts of some 120,000,000€. The banks that had loaned the money took the valueless site and the part completed houses as payment. Nobody, not the banks, not the courts and certainly not the developers considered doing the decent thing by the people who had paid deposits for the houses or to the merchants who supplied the building materials. Local businesses and house buyers are still owed around 30 million by the developers.

The town mayor says that it's easy to criticise now but that, at the time, everyone was doing well out of the building boom and nobody was complaining then.

Local councils can re-classify former rural land as urban land. On reclassification citrus groves and farm fields become much more valuable as buildiing plots. In the boom years Fortuna town council found itself with nearly 10 million euros extra from the sale of reclassified land and the councillors set about spending the money with gusto. They expected more money to follow and they borrowed against future income. The result now, in the lean years, is that the council has had to jack up taxes and either cut services or charge more for them. Many projects were never completed but the bank loans on them still have to be paid off.

In small towns in Spain everyone knows everyone else. Little networks of friends and relations do favours for other little networks. The money coming in from the developers apparently flowed into lots of those networks. At the time of the local elections in 2003 with so much money swilling around the locals became much more interested in who was in charge whilst the politicians saw the potential in controlling all that lovely money. The ruling PP party set about buying votes. It wasn't until 2011 that the courts found party workers guilty of vote rigging. The mayor, the same man is still the mayor now as then, chose not to resign.

The people of Fortuna will be paying for las Lamparillas for years to come. Spain is paying for lots of similar projects the length and breadth of the country.

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Since writing this article a higher court has confirmed the charges of vote rigging in Fortuna and the Mayor, Matias Carrillo, has resigned.