Life in Culebrón

This is the third in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in a Spanish angle. We, well the house, has a cesspit. Nothing sophisticated, just a brick-lined hole in the ground. If we were to try and sell the house we'd have to do something about that. Legislation has changed in the years we've lived here. Now we'd either have to put in a decent septic tank or, more likely, dig a big trench to connect our house to the village drain that stops 200 metres from our front door. All the run-off from the washbasins, sink, showers and toilets goes into that cesspit, the black hole, and microorganisms do the rest.  Lots of the toilets in Spanish bars, museums and the like have signs asking you to throw soiled toilet paper into a wastebasket. But, good Lord, we're British - we couldn't do that. What about the stench, what about the flies? No, we whizz the paper down the toilet and flush. On one occasion, that caused ...

We have an aljibe in our house. An aljibe is a sort of water cistern. Ours is about two metres deep so I suppose it's capacity is a bit under 9,000 gallons or 40 cubic metres. It collects the water from the roof gutters on our house. In the past these cisterns, and wells, were the water supply for country houses. Nowadays, we have mains water but the aljibe was useful for summer garden watering. Unfortunately the aljibe started to leak; it would only hold about 15cms of water. The rest went somewhere else. We suspected that the somewhere else was the source of the damp patch on one of our walls. Spanish houses, often damp proof course less, are prone to rising damp but we did think we should put up, at least, a token resistance. A builder told us it was tree roots punching through the concrete to get to the water. A temporary fix was possible but the roots would be back. We tried and he was right. Someone else told us that fixing aljibes was a specialist job and with the falling d...

I try to be frugal with toilet paper. One sheet at a time if possible. It's not because I'm particularly mean, it's because toilet paper blocks up Spanish drains. I've never quite been able to bring myself to do that thing you are instructed to do so many times in Spanish "public" toilets, the ones in bars and the like, to put the soiled paper in the wastebasket. It just seems a bit too close to living in a cave and wearing skins. That primness caught us out once though and we had to have the floor ripped up to clear the blockage. In order for that not to happen again I now go around our three bathrooms each week and tip buckets of water down the toilets, clean the hair from the plugholes and other routine things to avoid a reoccurence. When we have houseguests who use up a couple of toilet rolls in a weekend I'm hard pressed not to reprimand them sternly. Our house is old but it's a bit like that bucket that has a new handle, a new bottom and a reweld...

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 co...

When I was a schoolboy I was told how the Vikings, the Saxons and the Normans were responsible for lots of English place names; things like  -thorpe from the Norse for a village, as in Mablethorpe, and  -ham is from the Saxon for the same thing, as in Birmingham. In 711AD North Africans invaded what is now Spain and they controlled at least part of the peninsula for the next 700 plus years. Obviously enough, during that time, they made their mark on the land and its people. In the Spanish language lots of words begin with "a" or "al". That's because the Arabic for "the" is "a" or "al".  Over times  the sound sort of fused - like the old advert,  Drinka Pinta Milka Day, or how, when I've finished this, I'll get a cuppa. If you know Spanish you'll be able to think of myriad words that begin in "a" like azúcar, almohada, albahaca or almirante. If you don't know Spanish think of some of the place names tha...

I mentioned a few posts ago that it hasn't rained a lot recently around here. Whenever if does rain someone always says -"Well, we need it," and that is about as true a truism as anyone could want. Spain is in the middle of a prolonged drought. Drought occurs when, over an extended period, rainfall is lower than normal. Eventually, despite reservoirs, desalination plants, water recovery and the like, this results in a hydrological drought or lack of water resources. When this water scarcity affects agricultural, industrial and other economic activity we get to a socio-economic drought which is when your average Joe starts to notice. That's about where we are. For some reason, presumably to do with the normal pattern of rainfall in Spain, the hydrographic year here runs from the start of October to the end of September. Between 1980 and 2010 the average rainfall in Spain was about 650 litres on every square metre. In the last hydrographic year the figure was 550...

A few years ago I used to take photos of houses and write the descriptions for an estate agency here in Spain. Often, if it were a house in the countryside, the sellers would tell me how they had spent loads of money on putting in piped water or connecting the house to the electricity grid. I had to be careful how I told them that all that money was irrecoverable. If they hadn't done it the house would have been worth less – off grid houses or with tanked rather than live water are less popular than the connected ones - but nobody pays extra because a house has electric and water. When you click the switch you expect the current to flow, when you open the tap there should be water. Utilities, like roofs, are things you expect in a house. There was a little piece on the Town Hall website the other day about improving the water supply to some little hamlet and there was a picture of the pipe. It wasn't a very big pipe maybe 6 or 7cms in diameter. It wasn't very high tech ...

The stories of huge water bills in Spain are legion. Not for the cost of the water, which is usually very reasonable, but for undiscovered leaks. Everyone in Spain has a water meter. Leaks on the supply side, before the water meter, are the problem of the supplier but, once past the meter, the problem is yours. The water supply to our house is not sophiticated. A plastic tube is buried in a shallow trench under the dirt road that passes the house and a spur brings water to our meter. Our supply is no more than a thick plastic hose buried only inches under the garden. When it gets cold we often lose water for a while until the pipes unfreeze. Because of this I check the water meter regularly to make sure that the consumption seems reasonable and normal. The past couple of times the reading has been a bit high. Six or seven cubic metres instead of the usual three or four. I didn't worry too much. We've run the irrigation system on the garden a couple of times and there is a...

I painted the front door last week. I did an awful job; all runs and dead flies. Maggie and I agreed that it looked better than before though. Anyway it was bucolic, rustic, in keeping with our living situation. Our electric supply is a bit rural too. When we moved in, we were smart enough to put our cooking and weater heating onto gas. True, we have to lug the gas bottles about but we don't have circuit breakers popping all the time. The hot water isn't as hot in winter as in summer. Insulation is not common in our part of the world so we were not at all surprised that the water was cooler in the colder months. It had to pass through all that cold earth. We weren't surprised either that the water got hotter more quickly in one bathroom than the others - more cold ground = cooler water for longer. We've had some lovely weather recently. High 20s and sunny so and I was a bit surprised that the hot water was more like tepid water. Shower time was not a pleasure....

When I put the clocks back later tonight I'm going to retune the telly. The way the frequencies are divided up between mobile phone services and TV networks is being changed so it's either a laborious retune (splendid design Samsung people!) or lose channels. TV is one of the few things we generally get as well here as anywhere in Spain. My phone provider sent me one of those super offers the other day. For just two euros more per month I could have 40 new TV channels, increase the ADSL speed to a maximum of 100 Mb and get double the number of download gigs on my mobile phone. I tried to sign up. None of the advantages were available here in Culebrón - no 4G, no fibre, not even the TV channels. That's what you get for living in the countryside. ADSL at 3 Mb maximum and a dodgy mobile signal. When I worked at the furniture shop my boss had a go at house selling. I used to take the pictures and write the blurb for the sales sheets. Lots of people who lived up some unm...

Spain has the highest number of reservoirs per inhabitant in the world. At least that's what it says on Wikipedia. I am always wary of these superlatives. I remember hearing in the UK that NHS Blood and Transplant was the best service in the world and I wondered what their criteria were for that statement. My mum is also the best mum in the world. I bet you, mistakenly, thought yours was. My unchecked and unverified perception is that it is generally pretty sunny in Spain in summer. It is especially sunny along the Mediterranean coast. I hear it even stops raining in Galicia and the rest of Northern Spain in summer. You might think that a hot dry country like Spain would have water supply problems. Whilst we have lived here there were, a few years ago, some restrictions on the agricultural use of water. It wasn't a big thing though - we were on the verge of trouble rather than in trouble. The last big problems that I can find reference to were down in Andalucia in the mid...