Another drive to work

First of all it was the journey to Cartagena, then to Fortuna and to Cieza. Places I have worked or lived. Easy blogs to write and also ones that were well read. Next Monday is the last day of my current work contract. I don't think there will be another. My Spanish retirement date is 30th April, my UK old age pension kicks in from May 7th. If I have my way I will never work again.

There are only two sessions left. I will only drive to work twice more. This is nearly my last opportunity to repeat the details of home to work journey so here is the story of that 6.3 kilometre route.

Dirt track to start. Not too chewed up at the moment. One good thunder storm and the ride can be very bumpety bump through the ruts. A right turn onto the tar to make a legal, rather than the more obvious, illegal turn across the cross hatching in the centre of the road. It's a bad junction. There have been a couple of crashes in the last year. People take no notice of the 60 km/h signs on the main road so taking the right, going into Culebrón village proper and swinging around near to Eduardo's Restaurant to make another legal turn in the direction of Pinoso makes good sense, even if it does add a bit of time and distance to the journey.

The fields to the immediate left are green with cereal shoots, to the right, and very quickly to the left too, the much more traditional landscape of vineyards. Do you know, I'm trying to visualise it now, and I'm not sure whether there are olive trees as well. I can say with some certainty that there are but that's only because they are everywhere around here but it's mostly vines. If the vine stocks are laid out in slanted rows to form rhombus shapes on the ground then it's almost certainly monastrell grapes planted for use in the D.O. wines, wine with a quality mark. Nowadays there are quite a lot of vines laid out on trellis wires to grow higher which can be harvested by machine rather than by hand as in the D.O stuff.

On the right the old tip now converted into one of those recycling areas with areas for everything from fluorescent tubes and used olive oil to garden waste and builders rubble. Just by the turn to the "Ecoparque" there are a bundle of solar panels. The last PP Government put the kibosh on solar electrical generation by withdrawing subsidies and raising taxes on the production. I'm not quite sure whether the short lived Socialist Government had time to reverse most of those decisions. They said they were going to but lots of their legislative plans ran out of time. Oh, there's a very old sign too to mark the new Industrial Park that never was. Spanish building bubble and all that.

To the left there are a couple of tracks. On one of them there is a very faded board which tells of an experiment to attempt to reduce bird deaths from collisions with power cables. I went to have a look once. I expected markers on the wires and suchlike but, as a non expert, all the wires just looked normal to me.

There are horse stables to the right, and actually some way over to the left on the other side of the valley, just by what I understand is a control station of some kind for the natural gas line that runs along the valley floor, there is another livery stable and riding school. One is too far away to see horses and the other very seldom has any beasts outside. 

Time to slow down now. There's a left turn to Encebras and, in the days when there was plenty of money, there often used to be a Guardia Civil speed check there. I understand that spending cuts mean fewer Guardia. It's a bit like that housing estate planned for the left side of the valley just a couple of hundred metres up which never got beyond drawings, and maybe models, before the building bubble burst. Just on that turn, there is a building. When I worked for Rustic Original back in 2005/2006 they owned that building. Nowadays it seems to have been transformed into an organised parking space with facilities for motorhomes. It's also been the site for a car boot sale and a couple of bar/restaurants in our time here. As we are gazing leftward we can see the back of our marble quarry, one of the largest open quarries in Europe. Whilst we're looking in that direction and talking about Pinoso's industries there is Monte Cabeço, our salt dome, our "emblematic" hill. The salty brine pumped out of there goes down to Torrevieja to be mixed with the sea salt in the lagoons before it ends up either on our tables or, as road grit.

Past the Iberdrola power station. Big diesel generators I think; always a blaze of light at night. Over the crest of the hill. The one time go-kart course and buffet type bar to our left as abandoned as the bar on the right. Down the hill towards the roundabout. On the right the power station built to burn almond shells that the town council closed down. The resultant court case eventually cost the town three million euros in compensation.

The roundabout boasts a big sort of statue type thing with the coat of arms of Pinoso on it. It took me years of driving past that roundabout to realise that the three trees growing on the traffic island are like the ones on the coat of arms.

We're beginning to get built up now. The nut processing factory to the right is a marker for the industrial estate with all those metal box buildings and lots of badly parked cars and manoeuvring lorries. Onwards, dodge to the left by the first obvious bar in town and then another kink to the right just past the Red Cross buildings. We're running along an avenue of tall pine trees now with a concrete channel in the centre designed as a storm drain. I have pictures of cars afloat in it when we get those storms that dig trenches into our track. Businesses and houses to the right and left. One of the restaurants regularly wins prizes for the best rice, paella to you and me, in Spain.

Another small roundabout at the end of the storm drain, the Badén, and left up Constitución one of the principal streets in Pinoso lined with bars and shops and businesses and with plenty of pretty lime trees too. That's Constitución at the top of this post, taken, I think, in the 1970s, when it was still compacted earth. I was told, years ago, by a Spaniard, that there wasn't a lot of tarmac in Pinoso to the 1980s but that seems a bit unlikely to me. To be honest I'm a bit dubious about the 70s tag for the photo. Not a single car?

To park for work I have to take the service road that runs parallel to Constitución the turn is just before our relatively new Cultural Centre that houses our town library amongst other things. Now I'm looking for a parking space and then the last few metres to work on foot.

A spaceman went visiting

I think it started with the chappie on passport control at Stansted. The notices around him requested that we please do this or that. No use of the imperative. No demands. He said hello. I greeted him back. The rest of the exchange was equally pleasant. Maggie and I were in England for a few days over Christmas and the welcome at the border was a change from my last couple of experiences and a good start to our trip.

I don't go to the UK that often and when I do I find myself noticing it much more than I did when I lived there. For instance, when we were staying with Maggie's family in Bedford I went for a stroll around the area they live. Lots of well established family homes, normal, average sort of homes built anytime between maybe the 1930s and the present. I took snaps; I found them intriguing. I'm sure the people who saw me wondered what I was doing and why. One chap even asked me. He'd been in his home since 1955 when it was a new build. 

In England people were generally very nice to me. A lot of my conversation with strangers has been in commercial premises. I thought I noticed a very direct approach. It struck me as an egalitarian approach; an exchange between equals  Sometimes in a queue or at a bar I also appreciated the very clear instructions or requests that preceded those exchanges. Some of it may well have been scripted by the HR department but I have no complaints about their work. Good English and a good approach I thought.

I really do notice the language. I often turn as I hear someone speaking English. I listen for new phrases, new idioms. I felt to do OK in the few conversations I had. I'm always slightly concerned when I go back that I'll sound like some Dickensian character speaking an archaic form of English mired in the past. There were a few minor blips but I thought everything was fine.

It was cold. It didn't look cold from behind the double or triple glazing in the kitchen with the central heating doing its stuff. The robins, magpies, tits, finches, spuggies and other birds that I recognised on the bird feeders which festooned the gardens of both houses we stayed in looked warm enough. In fact wearing a couple of layers of coats, gloves, a scarf and thick socks it didn't even feel cold outdoors for the first ten minutes but then the heat would seep through those socks and out of my feet. After twenty minutes my ears had crisped up and my runny nose was red. I could feel the blood vessels in my cheeks bursting. England is decidedly cooler than Spain.

It's a different colour too. At least where we've been in Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire it's a sort of muddy brown with green splodges and a leaden grey sky. To be fair though on Christmas Day and part of Christmas Eve it was cold, crisp and clear till it got dark - dark at four for pity's sake!. That lack of light was so depressing. There was a mournful sound that seemed to go with the flat even lighting. I'd never really thought of it before but it's a sound instantly associated with so many British winters. It's the call that crows make from the sharp edged, leafless winter trees.

The last time I was in the UK for Christmas was about ten years ago. If my memory serves there are now fewer Christmas trees in windows than there were then. The lights on houses were lovely though with the LEDs sparkling away outside countless houses. Light fighting back against the darkness as it were - very poetic. Spain would be better with more private lights in my opinion.

We got vegan food in one of the three houses we visited. Vegan is hardly traditional fare but, even then, surrounded by Christmas crackers and Santa shaped salt shakers the meal ws not only tasty but it felt traditional enough. Food in the other two houses followed well trodden paths - mulled wine, turkey, sprouts, mince pies Christmas cake or Marks and Sparks nibbles. Brilliant - comfortable, time honoured food. Nonetheless I noticed the variations in the food cupboard as I searched for Branston to put on my wholemeal breakfast toast. Decaff tea seemed so common as to be normal. If the food wasn't reduced fat or reduced sugar then it was enriched in fibre. The idea of a healthier lifestyle seemed to be everywhere and it extended to the different coloured recycling bins parked outside the houses and to the solar panels on rooftops. We have all those things in Spain too but they are all, in my petrified English terms, a bit "Good Life" or brogues and good thick cardigans with cod liver oil at breakfast rather than the norm.

I started this piece before leaving the UK but the phrasing was so bad (I blame having to type on the tiny Android keyboards) that it had to have a serious rewrite. I'm home now trying to keep comfortably warm inside the house in Culebrón. It was great to be with family and their families. We ate, talked and drank to excess. They gave us sumptuous gifts and we replied with bath salts and woolly gloves but it was lovely to relive one of those Christmases which eventually slows to a crawl as everyone dozes in front of the totally ignored telly in an alcoholic haze or turkey coma. Of course it wasn't even real gogglebox as it came from Netflix but the continuity was there.

I have to be honest though. Great place to visit but I'm glad to be home.