Life in Culebrón

There was a time when people read magazines printed on paper. One of them,  Cosmopolitan, used to run light-hearted quizzes – Do you have what it takes to be a boss?, Are you a potential serial killer? – that kind of thing. One of the inevitable questions was whether you were a dog or a cat person. Our house is definitely cat, but for many Spanish households that question is about as useful as the outcome of those tests. Lots of Spaniards will tell you they have cats, but they don’t mean that in the same way as they do for dogs, or the same as we do. Our cats sleep on the sofa and they are steadily, and sometimes not so steadily, dismantling the house. Those half on, half off cats might get a name and a bowl of food left out, but little more. Current legislation says that option no longer exists; either people take responsibility for animals in their care or they will get into bother. But rules and reality are often two completely different things. I should add that some Spanish c...

I read a book last week. In it a young woman has moved to the country, to a small village in the middle of nowhere Spain. She's thinking community and tranquillity. She rents a house and the first thing that she asks her landlord is if he knows someone who might have a dog for her. I was reminded of one of Maggie's stories. Maggie worked with a woman in Madrid who had a Spanish partner. The couple decided to move to the countryside and one of the requisites, one of the first things to do, according to Maggie's friend, was to get a "brute of a dog". In the book the landlord palms the young woman off with one of his own dodgy dogs. Like all good country Spaniards the landlord thinks that it's cruel and unusual to sterilize a pet. The newcomer is from the city though and she takes the dog, for sterilization, to the nearest vet. The description of the vet's office is of a dusty and run down place where the vet is reading his phone and where there are no clie...