Life in Culebrón

I quite like figs. Not a staple in my diet but, every now and again, one of those little packs of three from Waitrose. The question though is what to do with thousands of the little blighters. We have three fig trees and they are all very fecund, we have green figs and the dark purply brown ones. There are thousands of them. The windfalls make a right mess of the bottom of your shoes. The birds swarm in the tree tops. It's not the same with the cherries, plums, pomegranates, peaches, quinces, nisperos, grapes, tomatoes and apples that grow in our garden. Those crops are manageable or non existent; we usually get plenty of peaches for instance but each one has a resident beast which makes them inedible whilst the birds always get to the cherries before we do. The figs though just come and come.

Plodding tractor and trailer rigs on the road suggest that it's grape harvest at the moment though I think the main wine crop is still on the vines. It was almonds in the trailers a little while ago but it looks as though we're right at the tail end of that crop now The almonds end up drying in big piles outside the local processing plant. Shelling the nuts makes the crop more valuable and cheaper to transport. It also leaves tons of almond shells to dispose of. I've heard that before we got here someone had the bright idea of burning the shells (they're loaded with oil, burn well and produce stacks of heat) to provide the fuel for a power station. So a power station was built. Unfortunately the burning shells produce a thick black smoke and the locals weren't too keen on the layer of soot that settled on their houses. It didn't help that someone had forgotten to get the proper permissions to build the power station in the first place. So it stands empty. ...

Have you ever read Ulysses, Tristram Shandy or Moby Dick? I've managed to get through a couple of these literary classics but, more usually, I grind through the first twenty or so pages, skip a few pages, try a few more chapters and eventually give up. Classics they may be but the style is so ponderous or distant that they just don't do it for me. After our trip to Castilla la Mancha I was reminded of Don Quixote which I did read when I was young. I can still remember that dread almost of ploughing through it, a few pages each evening until boredom set in. I still have the same copy, pages browned at the edges now but useable enough. 940 pages including the introductions. And I read it, and what's more I enjoyed it. I was amazed. My dad once commented on my liking for the bitter lemon sweets. "You won't like those when you're older, your tastes will change." He was wrong about the sweets, they're still one of my favourites but maybe he would have...

With the long summer break over it's likely that Life in Cartagena will be busier than this blog for a while.

I always enjoyed the Stainland Players. Technically there were usually problems, missed cues, forgotten lines even the occasional falling over but any detail problems were always overcome by the sheer gusto of the performance. Torre del Rico is significantly smaller than Stainland. I'd seen a poster for a play, Nelo Bacora, being put on there by la Asociación de Mujeres Rurales (the Rural Women's Association) at 8pm this evening so we went along. The snap was taken at 20.11 hrs. Not quite in full swing by the promised hour. A bit warm to start yet said the MC. When it did start I have to be honest and say that the Stainland Players would get the better of it on any sort of technical or acting criteria. There were sound problems, prop problems, line problems and a lot of laughing from the cast whilst the passing tractors perfumed the outdoor auditorium with something very rural. Plenty of heart though. Good fun, even moreso because it was short. I can't pretend I u...

I'm not too keen on having fun, people describe me as stand offish, gruff even.  Fortunately Maggie has a nice, friendly, outgoing, character which means that we have several expat friends around Culebrón. We're due back in Cartagena next week so we've had a rush of invitations to shoehorn in before we go. In fact we haven't cooked at home for the past three days and we've had four meals out in the same period. A set lunchtime meal with a couple of pals from the next village but eaten on the coast in Santa Pola, an Indian meal with more chums and their visiting family, a barbecue shared with about forty or fifty other people  and an invite for a meal at the house of my old employer and Maggie's Pilates teacher. We enjoyed all of them. The problem though is that those meals have done more damage to my waistline than a whole week on the cruise ship. Never mind; we'll soon be alone and friendless and then we can get back to our reasonable portion diet and k...

Summer in Spain is an odd time. Whole towns and cities more or less close down. Rural villages fill up as people move to their country houses often inherited from relatives, now dead, who worked the land. Even the shops and offices that stay open generally change their opening times usually doing just the morning shift rather than re-opening after the long lunch break. All to avoid the heat. Summer lasts two months, from the first of July to the thirty first of August. The Guardia Civil, who deal with traffic, mount special campaigns because there are so many traffic movements. Madrid, for instance, more or less empties its population to the various coasts and inland resorts. Once upon a time people would take a whole month off, more or less their whole holiday entitlement, but that seems to have become a couple of weeks in summer with the rest spread around the year particularly at Easter and Christmas. Spain is in the midst of a financial crisis so not everyone can get away but eve...

Don Quixote, el Quijote, usually billed as the greatest book ever written in Spanish, is big tourist business in Castilla la Mancha and this weekend we took a short break based in Campo de Criptana a town where there a number of old style windmills just right for tilting at. In el Toboso, the village where el Quijote's imaginary lady Dulcinea lived we went to a small museum full of hundreds of copies of the various editions of the book, in every conceivable language, signed by the famous and infamous alike including names like Margaret Thatcher, Benito Mussolini, Nelson Mandela and Carlos Fuentes. On the museum wall a painting showed a thin bloke, lance in hand, riding a skinny horse and by his side a tubby man riding a mule. The four figures are dwarfed by a dazzling azure sky and the parched earth that stretch on and on for ever. We've crossed through la Mancha several times on our journeys to and from Madrid or up to Albacete. That painting tallied exactly with my impres...

One of the chief reasons the Romans invaded Murcia near the present day Cartagena and La Unión was to sieze the silver mines. By 200AD the mines were, apparently, exhausted and fell into disuse but with the new technologies of the late 19th and early 20th Century the lead, silver zinc and iron ores became profitable once again. Mines need miners; people willing to crawl down dark, dangerous, hot tunnels and hack away at the earth. In La Unión lots of those people came from the depressed rural south, from Andalucia. They brought their singing with them, the style we call Flamenco, and mixed it in with the local song. They sang about their lives, particularly their lives in the mines. When the mines closed for good the singing began to disappear so a local enthusiast decided to try to keep the music alive. The competition, el Cante de las Minas, the Song of the Mines, began back in 1961 The modern venue for the competition is one of those big old glass and steel market halls now ...

The firm we buy our Internet services from, Movistar, is the most expensive broadband provider in the whole of the European Union. Movistar charge over 70% more for midspeed broadband access (2mgb to 10mgb) than the average price of the other old state monopolies across the European Union. The average is 34€ and Movistar charge 58€ Even the cheapest broadband access in Spain comes out nearly 11% more expensive than the median of the other European offers. So your average European pays 29€ whilst the most savvy Spaniard pays 32€. Goodness knows how much the difference is between the best European offer and what we pay. Spaniards get overcharged even more on the over 10mgb lines where the cheapest Spanish is 35€ against 30€ European average - over 16% difference. Apparently one of the big variations is that most of the headline prices on the various Spanish offers do not include the line rental as part of the package. Just in case you think we are particularly stupid in paying ...