Life in Culebrón

The best route home from Cartagena to Culebrón passes close by the town of Fortuna. Alongside the ring road the gaunt skeletons of hundreds of unfinished houses bear witness to the folly of the Spanish building boom. The planned development, built in the bone dry scrubland that surrounds Fortuna, was to be called Fortuna Hill Nature and Residential Golf Resort.  A key part of the new resort was the Las Lamparillas development. It was aimed at golf playing Britons who weren't quite rich enough to buy a similar place on the coast and was planned to have 3,737 houses when complete. There were other agreements for other developments in Fortuna. If everything had gone as planned Fortuna's population would have increased from 10,000 to 100,000. A research project carried out by a local university in 2004 gives some idea as to the scale of the building work planned. Across Murcia, a region with just one and a half million inhabitants, there were agreements to build 800,000 house...

We're just back from the cinema in Petrer. Maggie persuaded me to see something with Meryl and Tommie Lee Jones. Big mistake as a film but always good to get out to the cinema. Spanish cinemas are just like modern cinemas everywhere.* Ten, twelve, fourteen screens built alongside some shopping centre. Worldwide the building design is similar. Always the ticket office is placed so that people standing in the queue to pay get tangled up with the people grasping their tickets and those milling around the foyer looking for friends or returning from the outrageously overpriced drink, popcorn and pic 'n' mix stand. I suppose the new trend to combine the sales of tickets and snacks at the same counter will either exacerbate or improve that situation depending on your view. There are still a few cinemas that are single screens with a slightly musty smell and two week old films. They're usually in small towns - we used to go to a great on in Ciudad Rodrigo - they're ch...

When we are in Culebrón we don't do much. We avoid the cleaning. Eddie goes out to slaughter small animals but still demands lots of Whiskas. We usually catch up with our British pals and we luxuriate in a comfy sofa to watch the telly. The Saturday morning ritual includes going into Pinoso where the one key job is checking our PO box at the the Post Office. We've done that today - Post Office, newsagent, supermarket, greengrocer and Chinese shop. About as ordinary and as boring as ordinary and boring could be. Tasks done, arm stretching carrier bags dumped in the boot of the car we set out to get a cup of coffee. On the way we bumped into a couple of acquaintances who dance in one of the local folk groups - the Spanish may be halting but we nattered about cutbacks in medical services, incompetent politicians and life. Two hundred metres later it was Ernesto, the ex lorry driver, he supports Arsenal and asked, as he always does, for Maggie's football alleigances. She...

These are the official weather figures for Pinoso in August. The hottest day was the 10th of August when the temperature reached 44ºC. The coldest night was on the 5th when the temperature dropped to 14.5ªC. Averaging out daytime highs and nightime lows the average temperature across the month was 27.6ºC. There were 28 cloudless days and it only rained on the 30th when we got 19 litres per square metre. Just a little post script. We're back in Cartagena now and the maximum minimum thermometer I left here shows a high of 32ºC and a low of 24ºC for all the days from early July to the end of August. That's quite different to Culebrón.

Barcelona was the first place I ever visited in Spain. I loved Barcelona. So vibrant, so exotic, so exciting. It's because of Barcelona, and Maggie, that I now live in Spain. My brother, Garry, had arranged a short break in the Catalan capital along with his wife and sons. He suggested that we meet him there. It was all a bit fraught partly because we were just back from Egypt but moreso because it was an 1100km journey along toll motorways operated by bandits. We did it though and I'm glad we did. We haven't been to Barcelona for maybe 10 years, certainly before we lived in Spain. The last time we were there we were made to feel very unwelcome by people determined to give us a bad time for trying to speak Castillian. The rivalry between Catalans and Spain is legendary. This time that wasn't so much of a problem. Written informatin was generally in Catalan but we were foreign so we were spoken to in English. It seems to me that English is becoming omnipresent. W...

We've been on holiday. Away from both Culebrón and Cartagena; in Egypt in fact.  Now, being a citizen of the world I have access to money in both pounds sterling and euros. Nothing in Egyptian pounds though. Holes in the wall provided us with the local cash. I used both British and Spanish bank cards. Both were current accounts and the amount I withdrew each time was the same. My British bank charged around £2 and my Spanish bank 6€ which is well over twice as much for exactly the same service and presumably with similar costs to them. Spanish banking can be remarkably expensive - charges and comissions everywhere.

All over Spain, at the side of the road, there are places called ventas. From the outside they just look like restaurants or bars but, as the word venta is related to sales and selling I wondered if, traditionally, they were a bit like roadside inns cum general stores. Ventas get a mention in el Quijote, Don Quixote in English, and in the Richard Ford travel books so they must have been around for quite a while. I imagined farmers buying their seeds and tools there whilst they drank large quantities of rough wine. My thinking was conditioned by the traditional difference between English inns and taverns. As I recall, technically, an inn is a place to stay, drink and eat whilst a tavern is a place to drink and eat. It's a distiction that's long gone of course. I thought it was probably something similar with ventas. But the definitive Spanish dictionary says simply of ventas: a posada established by the side of the road to put up travellers. For posada it says a place to pu...

I've moaned about it before. I'll moan about it again. We went to buy diarrhoea potions this morning. And paikillers, plasters and some other things that may or may not have begun with a p. The conversation was a disaster. We got the stuff but we were like blind people in a sighted world. I came away cursing, belittled. I'm reading a book by a bloke called Eloy Moreno. It's a cracking book. Best I've read for ages. I was just reading the chapterlet where the fat man, having abandoned his job, bank accounts and family, makes it to the top of the hill and down to the hostel. I was sobbing with emotion. The book is just so well written. How is it that I can read a book but not ask for a beer?

Sitting in the garden, reading. There's a breeze, hair dryer warm. The air sort of crackles. Things crack and jump with the heat. The traffic on the main road makes a whooshing sound. Bare metal burns. The principal colour is bright. The principal sound is the song of the cicadas. The air is alive with the sound. It's been like that for weeks And then the Spanish neighbours came; with friends. Maybe for the weekend, maybe for the August fortnight and now the cicadas have competition. The difference is that the Spaniards never stop.

I may well be wrong. I haven't checked last year's programme against this. Nonetheless it seems to me that the Pinoso Fair and Fiesta has been simplified because there isn't any money. And, in being simplified I think it has been improved. When I wrote about the fiesta  a couple of years ago I made a point that maybe the event had lost some of it's purpose. I suggested that the rich and mobile population of Pinoso could now seek out entertainment and goods whenever it wanted. The Fair and Fiesta had become less relevant. Maybe by changing its focus it can regain that relevance. I've got it into my head that initiative has taken over from cash as the way of making an impact. As Ernest Rutherford said "We've got no money, so we've got to think" Take the opening ceremony. In years past that used to be somebody giving a speech from the Town Hall balcony before the great and the good of the town trooped off, en masse, to stroll around the fair a...