Life in Culebrón

There's an advert on the telly at the moment. The premise of the ad is that, during the summer, everyone abandons the cities and heads for their village. The village that their family hails from. Some poor souls have no village to go to. They are left alone, orphaned, in the deserted cities. So the advert directs you to a website where inhabitants of the idyllic rural villages can nominate their villages as reception centres for the poor lost souls and where city orphans can seek refuge in an adoptive village. The idea that cities are deserted for the summer isn't quite as far fetched as you may imagine. There is even a phrase in Spanish for the plight of the men left behind to work whilst the family heads for the cooler mountain or beach air- estar de Rodriguez. Down in Cartagena I needed to park in a part of the city where parking space is normally at a premium but not on Thursday it wasn't. Oh no, it's after San Juan, the children have broken up from school...

Across the top of the page there are some tabs for the three Life ins but there is also one called The TIM articles. Nobody ever looks at it. I understand.

It's not that nothing is happening. The footie is a huge media and bar event. I sit, drinking coffee, and watch the world go by in bars and log away little incidents and forms of behaviour. At work I get lots of stories from my students that give me an insight into life here. I listen to stories from friends and acquaintances of redundancy, closures, cutbacks. I feel the collective holding of breath as we await the collapse of the old continent, overseen by a group of uncomprehending and powerless politicians, whilst everything continues with its usual banality. Not much to report in Culebrón though. The big events of our weekends here are collecting the post or having a coffee with some British pals. I would be happy to write about the delights of our visit to Consum yesterday if the most exciting thing hadn't been that we bought boquerones but decided against the red peppers as they were a little soft. I could tell you about Carlos's book, of which I read the first ...

Culebrón doesn't offer a wide range of Saturday night entertainment. We drank brandy, well at least half of us did, and watched the Eurovision song contest. We were flipping between the BBC and RTVE channels. The Spanish was deadpan, the British, or should that be Irish, was tongue in cheek. The Spanish commentator was sympathetic to Englebert and the British song. The Portuguese didn't let us down. And the Irish? Where were the traditional 12 points for the neighbouring country? The Turks did it for Greece. Everyone else did it for everyone else. Graham wondered if we expats would do our stuff in Spain but we must have all been out having a beer. The large Romanian population in Spain obviously had nothing better to do with their Saturday nights. Well at least the Swedes can afford to host next years competition.

I don't like washing up. I don't like chopping and dicing either. It always seems to me that the time necessary to prepare a meal and clean up after it is disproportionate to the five to ten minutes required to eat it. On the other hand I resent paying proper restaurant prices. I hum and hah about spending 100€ on a pair of jeans or a bit for the camera and then happily spend half that amount on food that will be costing me money in sewage charges only hours later. Maggie likes restaurants though and I enjoy the experience of abandoning our English speaking existence for a couple of hours. I'm a big fan of the cheap set meals - the menú del día - available all over Spain. Between 8€ and 12€ for three or four courses with the booze and coffee thrown in. Set meals, though tend to be formulaic. Similar starters, mains and puddings the length and breadth of the land. There are a growing number of slightly better but more expensive set meals but when the quality of the food ...

It may be unfair but the UK comparison is Kwik Save. If Tesco's has clean aisles and lots of open tills then Kwik Save has shelf stackers who bump into you and only one, rather reluctant, assistant on the single open till. Most supermarkets in Spain are Kwik Save. Día, Aldi, Lidl, Consum, Árbol, HiperBer, Upper - all the same. A bit messy, a bit small. Not invariably but generally. Mercadona is a bit smarter but even there the shelf stackers and floor sweepers expect you to give way to them. The big stores are Carrefour and Eroski - at least around here. Only Eroski and Carrefour, to my knowledge, have the 10 items or fewer cash desks. Even they only have a couple of cash desks open in the 2pm-5pm afternoon lull in which case the same problem arises as with smaller stores. Queues are slow. Time saving strategies like having your cash or card ready, preparing your shopping bags or not having a chat about something of great import are not the Spanish way. So, if you just pop i...

I have never quite understood why this blog - Life in Culebrón - is much more popular than my Life in Cartagena blog. Not many people look at either to be honest but there is a marked difference in the number of visitors to each. I have just discovered a tool on the Blogger design page that allows me to combine the various blogs I still write - Cartagena and Culebrón - with the now moribund Ciudad Rodrigo. I have also added a tab for some articles I have written in a local magazine. So, by just clicking on the tabs at the top of this page, you can quickly navigate between all three Life Ins and the magazine articles.

I used to own a 1977 MGB GT. It came to Spain and it was beautiful. But poor insurance and a shortage of money turned it into a battered jalopy. I sold it on four years ago. When we first arrived I had a five year plan. To be a local councillor. I expected my Spanish to improve and being a councillor would indulge an interest in politics and an idea of becoming a part of my new community. Part of the plan was to join a classic car club following Richard Vaughan's advice to join a group where a shared interest would make it easier to practice my Spanish. I joined the Orihuela SEAT 600 Club but somehow it never worked out. There were other Brits in the group and the Spanish, keen to make us feel at home, always coralled us into a little group together. I never had the courage to break away. Even though I've been without a classic car for four years the secretary of the club continues to send me information about their activities so I knew that today they were out in Pinos...

I began to laugh out loud. My head was ringing. It was about 2am and all around me people dressed in a motley uniform of black robes and red scarves plus any number of personal touches from cigars and sunglasses to multicoloured wigs were walking up and down banging the hell out of drums. Big drums, little drums, every size of drum. Children, adults, teenagers. bang, bang, bang. I was in Hellín where they celebrate the Resurrection by banging on drums. They call it a tamborada from tambor the Spanish for a drum. As far as I could see there was no organisation to the event. People turned up with any number of friends or family and banged drums. I laughed because I suddenly thought how mad it all was. Not a decent snap all night. The flash ones look horrid and the ambient light ones are all blurred. But you should get the idea.

We have to pay for drains that we don't have in Culebrón. Fair enough really. We don't have children either but we're happy to pay tax towards the schools. So we have a pit. I've never known whether it's a pure cess pit or a septic tank. I don't really know what the difference is, apart from having the vague notion that a septic tank produces clean water to drain away. It would be easy to find out. Google knows everything but I have different things to do with my time. The bathroom off our bedroom smells a bit. As we used to say in the 60s it pongs. Then again the two flats in Santa Pola and the one in Ciudad Rodrigo whiffed a bit at times too. I've been told that it's something to do with Spanish toilets having a different, and less efficient, trap design than their UK equivalents. So sligtly more aromatic toilets are a fact of life in Spain. Maggie had some sort of concern about our tank because the shower she uses isn't draining as well as i...