Life in Culebrón

The title is from a line in a John Betjeman poem about a nightclub. It always makes me think of red velvet and brocades and big casement windows and that, in turn, reminds me of some provincial hotels I knew in the UK and of some of the casinos we know locally. Once elegant, now faded. Once plump sofas, now with springs that poke you in the bottom. And the warped wood and chipped paint of those grand windows that no longer close quite properly. And a slight mustiness in the air. Living in Culebrón, our two nearest, obvious casinos, the one in Monóvar and Novelda, are a bit like that. One welcomes non-members through its doors at all times; the other is still, generally, membership only. Others, like the very grand casino in Murcia, generate income as a tourist attraction—first the cathedral and then the casino. Lots, like the ones in Cartagena, Torrevieja, Alicante and Aspe, make their terrace bar available to the general public to generate income to keep the buildings open for their m...

October 9th, is Valencia day, a regional Spanish  "bank holiday" to celebrate the day that King Jaume I entered the captured city of Valencia to bring it under the reign of the Kingdom of Aragon in 1238.  In 2006 my friend Pepa told me, that on Valencia Day, one of the typical things to do was for lovers to give each other little handkerchief-wrapped bundles of marzipan sweets in the shapes of fruit, piulets, and tronadors (even having seen pictures, I don't know how to translate those words into English). So, on that first 9th October in Pinoso, I sneaked out to buy some from a local bakery, as a bit of a surprise for Maggie. I found all the shops were fast shut. It may be the tradition in the Valencia province of the Valencian Community, but it isn't here in Alicante. It's like paella. Up in Valencia, they have that bright yellow stuff with big prawns in it and round here we have a muddy brown-green paella with rabbit and snails. Ours is much better. I get most ...

For Maggie, my partner's, birthday this year we went for a weekend in the Parador in Sigüenza. A Parador is, basically, a posh hotel. Paradores de Turismo de España, is a state-owned commercial company, its sole shareholder being a government department. Paradores were originally conceived, in the first couple of decades of the last century, as a way of promoting tourism in areas that lacked adequate accommodation. The idea was to open up an area, particularly to well off tourists, with a particular eye on the developing motorist market. The first Parador was built in the Gredos Mountains from scratch, on a site chosen by the then King, Alfonso XIII.  Soon after this first landmark opening some bright spark came up with the idea of converting unused large historic buildings to work as the hotels which would also help maintain the national heritage as well as being attractive to tourists. At the same time, another government committee began the construction of the new Albergues de C...

My name's a bit tricky for a lot of Spaniards. My mum calls me Christopher, most other people use Chris. Cristofer exists as a Spanish name, as does the more traditional Cristobal. There are a lot of Cristiáns and Cristinas who use Cris as the shortened version. Nonetheless, Chris, said with an English lilt, is usually too much for most Spaniards, at first pass and, often, I have to revert to pronouncing my name a bit like Kreees or Kreeestoffair for it to be understood. If I'm only booking a table or something it's not really a problem, any old name will do, but lots of people are surprisingly picky about how it's spelled. My middle name is John. This is a clear misspelling for most Spaniards because the H isn't in the right place. I'm not sure that there is a way to spell this, my middle name, using Spanish spelling rules. The usual best try is to spell it as Jhon. On any number of official documents I am Jhon.  John also comes after my first name - Christophe...

This is the second part of a blog about Moors and Christians or Moros y Cristianos. The first part is called Moors and Christians: the real thing and it gives the history behind this event. This blog is about putting on funny costumes and parading through the streets. The Moors and Christians festivals in all the towns have their own peculiarities. The costumes can be of varying styles, the individual events that make up the whole can be different, there can be different names for something more or less the same, the scale can vary enormously, the duration can also vary, the historical setting for the events may be different and even the type of music the accompanying bands play can have a local dimension. Nonetheless, most have essentially the same principal events. That said please bear in mind that this account has to be generalised and so is not always strictly accurate. The event is, in essence the re-enactment of a fight between two ideologies, Muslim and Christian, so the st...

A friend asked me a very simple question about Moors and Christians, the Moros y Cristianos festivals. What I thought would be a quick and easy blog now stretches over two parts. My usual disclaimer. This is not an academic piece so it is not 100% accurate. Moor is a slightly derogatory term for someone from North Africa. The term Moor doesn't really include Arabs, who come from the Arabian Peninsula, but most Spaniards don't let a little technicality like that get in the way and Moor gets used indiscriminately to include Arabs and, sometimes, with the wider significance of Muslim. Christians means Roman Catholics. It's relatively common for Spaniards to think that Methodists Episcopalians, Calvinists etc. aren't Christian.  Moors and Christians are parades and events that take part in several Spanish regions, Murcia, Castilla la Mancha, Andalucia and Extremadura, but they are particularly associated with the Valencian Community and the area in which we live. They are a...

Let's presume you're in Spain and you want a t-shirt or a bikini or a pair of trainers or a new phone. Even with the upheavals in retailing there are still real physical shops where you can go. Most of them will have the majority of their stock on show for you to browse. Occasionally you might have to talk to someone, to get your size in shoes for instance, but most people can do most of their shopping in, Bershka or Carrefour or MediaMarkt and a whole lot more, without speaking. You might need to make some sort of grunting sounds at the till but that's all. It was not always so. Not that long ago shopping in Spain required a conversation. There was a counter and behind it there was someone to ask for whatever you wanted. They showed you things that you may or may not want and may or may not like - it could all become quite complicated. Also shops were pretty specialised. When we first needed electric bulbs for our new house I went to an electrical shop but it turned out I ...

Last century, when Windows 98 was cutting-edge technology and when mobiles were big and analogue, I was in Mexico. I'd gone into a locutorio, a place to rent a computer with an internet connection for a few minutes. The Mexican keyboard layout was quite different to the British keyboard I was used to. The QWERTY letters were as they should be but the symbols were in different places. What's more the keyboard had done a fair few miles and lots of the keys were as highly polished as as the stairs of the spiral staircase in a medieval castle. I needed the @ symbol for an email address and I had to resort to Ctrl C and Ctrl V, cut and paste. I was reminded of this the other day when I had to use a computer with a British keyboard layout - I spent ages staring at the strange layout when I wanted a / or a #, but the final nudge to write this blog came when the passport office refused to accept my address as being Caserío Culebrón. They didn't like the tilde, the accent over the i...

There's quite a lot of stuff that I'm aware of because I'm English. Stuff like knowing that Belgravia and Chelsea are rich parts of London, that Trafalgar Square is the (English) place to be for New Year, that Land of Hope and Glory will get a lung bashing the Last Night of the Proms and that haddock is not the usual fish in fish and chips but it was where I grew up. One of the pleasures and pitfalls of living in a place you were not born is that the common knowledge in the new place will be different. I've mentioned this in blogs lots of times before. I find it interesting, otherwise why would I be in the least interested in the story of Suavina lip balm  and why would I keep going on about how strange Spaniards find it that we drink hot drinks with food or think that cheese and onion sandwiches are normal? Last month we stayed over in Alcoy during the weekend of their Modernista Fair. Modernista, modernism is something else that I'd never really heard of till I go...

UNESCO produces a list of things of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Flamenco is on the list, so are baguettes.  Dry Stone walling is on the list too - it got there after flamenco but before baguettes. You may think a blog about dry stone walling could be a bit "dry" but if the UN says that dry stone is one of things that makes all our lives richer then I think it's incumbent on us to believe them. Dry stone involves building things with stones that are not bound together with mortar. The things don't fall down because the stones are naturally interlocked or because of the use of load bearing structures. Dry stone techniques use rough, field, stones. So, for instance, Inca temples built without mortar but with dressed stone are not considered to be dry stone structures. Wherever you come from I'm sure you know dry stone structures.  Dry stone is most commonly used to build boundary walls but the technique can be used to construct anything from a way marker to a corra...

Watching the TV news in Spain on Thursday afternoon. Thinking about the untrammelled stupidity of it all. About the actions of men, and it always seems to be men, like Putin and Sergey Lavrov sending people to kill and be killed. Wondering who is making money from this because behind almost every indecent act someone is making money. Back at the news the next item was that the Partido Popular (PP) in Castilla y León had done a deal with VOX to form the regional government. It's not on the same scale but it is on the same spectrum of human wickedness. It's the first time that VOX has actually been in a coalition government. It's the first time since the restoration of democracy in Spain, in the period after Franco died, that the far right has actually been in government. It may be the first but it probably won't be the last. I'm not sure how genned up on Spanish politics you are. I try to keep up but sometimes I despair because, every now and then, there is some even...

I haven't spent Christmas in the UK for umpteen years, so I may not be as expert on British customs as I think. Nonetheless, unless things have changed drastically, the first tentative signs of Christmas show up in the shops in September. By November the telly is full of Christmas ads full of good cheer, bonhomie and cute robins. Cities, towns and villages start to turn on lights from mid-December and even with online shopping I'm sure that shopping centres, supermarkets and places like restaurants and pubs get busier and busier through December, all building up to the big day. Finally, it's Christmas Day. You do your best to look pleased with the illuminated pullover and the novelty underwear and you console yourself by setting about the mountains of food. Boxing Day you might stay at home to and eat and drink more, or it may be that you have to visit relatives. Maybe, instead, you might thirst for action after so much slouching around and go for a bracing walk or head out...

First my habitual opening diversion. Over the years there has been a fair bit of controversy from time to time about the skin colour of the actors who interpret Othello in the Shakespeare play. You probably know that the full title is The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice . Moor, from Blackamoor is an outdated and offensive term to describe a Black African or other person with dark skin. In Spain the word moro is the direct equivalent of moor. It's used to describe dark skinned people, usually people from North Africa: Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Sahrawis. As with other, similar, words its use can be racist or not. Generally though, for most Spaniards, moro is just a descriptor, like the use of Eastern European, Whilst the media shy away from the word ordinary people don't. I haven't heard many suggestions of a name change for the Moros y Cristianos events though there are plenty of concerns about white people blacking up during those, and other, events. Over i...

The current Spanish Government is a coalition between a slightly left of centre political party, the PSOE, and a much smaller and much further left party, Unidas Podemos. The other week the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, a Government Vice President, said, a couple of times, that the democracy in Spain was flawed. As you may imagine this caused a bit of a fuss. Then, a couple of days later, a talentless rap artist was sent to jail for suggesting in his songs that terrorists were jolly nice and our King was jolly nasty. People protesting the incarceration took to the streets and did a bit of burning and looting whilst they were there. Podemos was mealy mouthed in its condemnation of the street violence.  My own opinion is that Spain has a bit of a problem with some aspects of democracy. For instance a woman, who tweeted some old jokes about about ETA, the Basque terrorists, blowing up the admiral Carrero Blanco in 1973, was sentenced to a year in prison (time that she would never...