Life in Culebrón

I went to vote. I hunted through the thirty nine piles of candidate lists till I found the one I wanted, pushed it in the envelope, had fun with the spelling of my name at the voting table and that was my part played in the democratic process for another couple of years. There was though another envelope and another ballot box for the consulta popular - a sort of referendum organised by the local town hall. More fun, more democracy. The first question was whether we wanted to make Pinoso a Slow City giving priority to bikes and pedestrians and limiting motor vehicles to 30 kph. The second question asked us to prioritise upgrading a road to a local shrine, constructing a walking and running route around the town or building bike lanes between the town centre and the outlying villages. Fair enough. I wondered why those particular schemes but I thought it was relatively clever to use the election turnout to canvas opinion. Afterwards though I considered what a cumbersome process ...

I'm cool with a romería and with Elena gone on to her birthday party it was up to me to save the vermouth session. Last night we had the annual village meeting to plan the summer fiesta. I forget the reason. Actually I've got a bit of a bad head this morning because I popped into Amador's bar on my walk home and that sort of set me on the path of wrongdoing and amnaesia. I've just remebered a conversation with Eduardo outside his restaurant which was faltering, as always, but this time because of alcohol rather than more general stupidity. Anyway, whatever the reason everything got changed around a bit this year. So on Friday instead of the vermouth session to kick off the village fiesta we're going to have a catered meal followed by the music and dancing. Cost cutting was the order of the day because the grant from the Town Hall will be 900€ again this year and lottery ticket sales haven't been very healthy either. There was talk of not having live music....

I'd been surprised when the door of office number two had opened as I leaned on it. I half stumbled and half leapt into the room on the other side. Two women gawped at me. I gawped back. I stammered out a greeting.  "Hello, I want to send this to Qatar," I said, holding out a small padded envelope, weight about 20g and similar in size to an iPhone.  "Qatar in Cantabria?" she asked.  I pointed to the address printed on the envelope.  "No, Qatar the country in the Middle East - next door to Saudi Arabia." "Is that close to Lebanon?" "Closeish," I said.  "Is it part of Saudi Arabia?" she asked.  "No, it's a country." "Ah, I see; it's an island," she said, staring at the Google entry.  "More a peninsula," I countered She rang someone. "It'll be 97€," she said - "same as Lebanon." Back there again. I blanched but handed her my credit card...

Facilities in Culebrón include a post box, a social centre and a dusty basketball cum football area. Business wise we have the bodega and oil mill and rather surprisingly we still have two restaurants. For me these restaurants have the huge advantage that they are only a few hundred metres from our front door. Drinking alcohol with the meal becomes a possibility. The Nou Culebrón opened in December 2012 and it's still open. Three separate bar restaurants have failed in the same building whilst we've been in the village so congratulations to Amador, the boss, for keeping it going. The other restaurant Casa Eduardo was open when we arrived in the village and it still is. Eduardo's is best described as singular. The décor, the furniture and the tableware have not, to my knowledge, changed in the nine or so years we've been eating there. My chair was a bit wobbly. The man at the next table tried to find one that wasn't but gave up. The culinary offer is usually lo...

I was thinking, as I drove between La Unión and Culebrón, about what I could see out of the car. I decided it was family and friends. You get what you're given. Blood's thicker than water and all that. History and culture from hand to hand and gene to gene over the generations. Alfred and the cakes, 1066, Glorious Goodwood, Cornish cream teas, feet and inches, Ant and Dec. Your friends on the other hand you get to choose. No blood ties, no original shared history. Something you manufacture between yourselves. I watched the dusty, brown grey, scrubby lunar landscape, the almond groves and the vineyards pass by. I looked at the bright blue sky and I thought how lovely it all looked. In the beginning, when I first got to Alicante and Murcia I thought it looked desolate. The sort of place that John Wayne ate beans. Maggie and I had a great time in my old MGB car driving around the Cotswolds. I thought the Cotswolds were amazing. When we saw Calendar Girls, when it was new and f...

Now I've told you about our palm tree  several times. When the tree man failed to turn up last time I did the beetle slaughtering patrol myself. It was hard graft. Nonetheless, the basis for my doing the job every six weeks was there. I had the spray gear it's just that the tree is taller than me even with the spray gun wand in hand - I simply needed a longer reach. With a bit of extra kit I could avoid either having to climb a ladder with 16 litres of insecticide on my back or to coax the tree man into coming to the house. An internet search had revealed an agricultural supplier in La Palma which seemed to have the tubes, connectors and paraphernalia I needed to gain the necessary height.  I wasn't looking forward to explaining what I needed so when I was able to sneak into the big, empty store I was well pleased. I found the section I was looking for and started to connect this to that like some fetishistic horticultural version of Meccano. I would have soon ...

I was going to say that we had a famous restaurant in Pinoso then I thought about it. Obama is famous and Shakira too but I don't think that even restaurants as well known as el Celler de Can Roca are really famous. Well known maybe? So there's a restaurant in Pinoso that's quite famous and it's famous for the local rice dish. I worked for a couple of years in a street very close to the restaurant. Time after time some big Audi or Porsche or Bentley would pull up alongside me, roll down the window and ask politely for the restaurant. My reply was word perfect I'd done it so often This well known Pinoso restaurant is renowned amongst the locals for the unpleasantness of its owner and the outrageous price of its food. After all it's just rice. I've heard that said by Britons and Spaniards alike. I've never been. Too expensive for my wallet. I need to take a moment here to make sure you're OK on this rice/arroz concept. Paella and rice are virtu...

When I used to work in the furniture shop I often delivered furniture to cave houses. There are quite a few in the Pinoso area. In fact there are lots of cave houses all over Spain. It was often a bit of a struggle to get bed frames or sofas to go around corners and into the designated rooms. I was in Rojales, Alicante last weekend where lots of the caves have been turned into craft workshops. Yesterday I was in Guadix, Granada where there are supposed to be over 2,000 caves used as homes. Indeed in the museum there, dedicated to cave dwelling, to troglodytism, there was an information board to say that in 2002 there were 5,838 caves in Granada province which were the principal home for just short of 15,000 people. It's not a complicated idea. You find some rock that's easy to dig. Usually that's clay. You start with a vertical cut to produce the façade of the house. In the centre of that façade you cut the arched door and from that door you excavate the first room gene...

There's nothing going on. A pretty typical Saturday but, lost for anything to write, I hatched a cunning plan. I'd talk about nothing. This plan came to me just after I'd collected the mail and as I washed the car, Maggie's car to be precise. We have a post box on the house but deliveries in the countryside are a bit haphazard. Safer a PO box in the town Post Office. We also have water and space to wash a car at our house in Culebrón. Today I was just being lazy. For many Spaniards though the Sunday morning car wash ritual, beloved of so much of suburban Britain, is unrealisable. Most people here, after all, live in flats, not everybody, but the majority. So getting a bucket of water to your car isn't easy. Anyway several towns have local bye-laws prohibiting street car washing. Pinnoso being a typical example. This means that there are lots of car washing bays in petrol stations all over Spain. In contrast to the UK where I remember that the tunnel wash with...

To mark International Women's Day a local group - Pinoso against gender violence - organised a showing of a film,  La fuente de las mujeres,  which is about a group of North African women who, fed up of having to slog up a difficult path to collect water whilst their men folk sit around drinking tea, go on a sex strike until they get the water piped to the village. The projector was one of those things you use to do a Power Point presentation so the image was small, very dark and affected by stray light. The sound wasn't great either so, although it seemed like a decent enough film, my understanding of the details of everything, apart from the main plot, was pretty rudimentary. It used to happen to me as I wandered home up Huntingdon High Street and it happened to me tonight. Some sort of fat lust would draw me, inexorably, towards Bunter's. I fancied a kebab or kepab as we Spaniards usually say. I'm not often in Pinoso at 11.30 on a Friday evening so I was a bi...