Life in Culebrón

It was the bats that made me think of this blog. I had wondered about doing a breakdown of the PISA report on Spanish schooling. Spanish education is a bit outside my area of personal knowledge, though, and maybe a bit dry, so I needed something more mundane. I remember that when I lived in the UK we'd often say, "Shall we go out for a drink?" Maybe it's the plastic chairs, and maybe it's just the state of my liver, but I wouldn't think to suggest that here in Spain. Obviously, given my strict Wesleyan upbringing, I'm happy to drink alcohol, but it's more a situational thing than a desire. We go out to eat, for instance, and, given that I don't have to drive, I'll put away as much of the stuff as I can so that I wobble but don't topple. When I do make one of those forays from the Englishness of home into the outside world of Spain, I'm far more inclined to go out to eat than to drink—and usually for lunch rather than dinner. These days,...

I always say that it's a part of my cultural education to get out and about in Spain a bit. Getting out and about has several levels. If you consider that our house is a little island of Britishness then going to a bar and getting a coffee is a journey to Spain. It doesn't really matter whether the out and aboutness is big or small. Memorable things happen on the doorstep just as much as hundreds of kilometres away though, obviously, the reverse is also true! Out and about can be villages and towns and cities and parks and castles and museums and hills and churches and, even if they fail you, your luck may be better in a restaurant with something that you've never heard of on the menu. Out and about can be fiestas. Most countries have theatres, cinemas, museums, concerts, coastline, woodland, prehistoric sites and so on and most places have fiestas too. The Tar barl festival in Allendale in Northumberland, the one with the burning tar barrels on the head, is as barmy as any...

Maggie once helped some people, preparing to be official tourist guides, to get ready for the part of the exam they had to do in English. To be honest I've forgotten the details, then again I forgot why I'd gone back into the kitchen a while ago and I'll probably have to re-read this sentence to see where I'm heading, so that's nothing new. The point, though, was that these people had a scripts to learn for each of the places they were going to show. Word for word scripts. Now there's nothing wrong with "This cathedral is a milestone in the development of the Gothic, marking a symbiosis of technique and aesthetic that characterises so many other great churches built before the onset of the Renaissance".  I have no idea what it means but that's probably because I'd bunked off school or had a note from my mum that day. This morning though we had to get up early to get to Novelda for nine in the morning. Novelda is about 25 kilometres from C...

All the time we've been here and we've never been in Sax Castle before. It's only just down the road too, maybe 30 kilometres. We remedied that today with a theatralized visit. I saw the poster somewhere, sent an email and I was told to email back on a specific day as the visits were always oversubscribed. I did as I was told and got a couple of places. The story the players acted out was about the second Marquis of Villena taking possession of the lands around Sax Castle. When they were telling the story I realised that this particular Marqués de Villena was the one who lost the family the lands around Villena, another local town. He backed the wrong side at the time of the famous (in Spain) Catholic Monarchs, the ones who sent Columbus off to find some spices. There is still a Marqués de Villena, the twenty first. The eighth one set up an institution to protect the purity of the Spanish language which now produces the Spanish dictionary of reference. The Villenas are a ...