Life in Culebrón

Arturo Perez Reverte is a well known Spanish author. I've read a fair few of his books. Even in Spanish he's easy to read and often there is an informative element to the novels which I like. The last one I read was called Un día de cólera. It was written back in 2007 but it was new to me and I found it fascinating. It was about the 2nd of May street revolt in Madrid in 1808. We're with Napoleon, Trafalgar, Arthur Wellesley and all that. It's one of the few times that Britain and Spain have been on the same side. It's a period we bumped into a lot when Maggie lived in Ciudad Rodrigo because the town had been one of the battle sites as Wellington moved against the French inside Spain. Intrigued by the Perez Reverte book I hunted around for a book to increase my knowledge of the War of Independence (Peninsula War) without overtaxing my age enfeebled brain. A likely candidate was a book by a chap called Adrian Galsworthy. I think the name's a giveaway. He's...

I need to write something. Not that I have a psychological need or anything but it's about time. Blogs need fuelling. As I washed the few evening pots before retiring to bed last night and as I weeded the, not as bare as it should be, earth of our garden this morning I've been trying to think of a topic. I thought I had one. The things that have changed in the time we have been here. Emails and puddings were uppermost in my mind. There was a time when sending an email to someone in Spain was just a way of putting off the conversation that you didn't want to attempt in Spanish. Nobody ever replied and you had to phone in the end. Nowadays, people seem to check their mail and most respond though not all. The pudding thing is that the restaurant offer is now so much better than the once ubiquitous flan, ice cream or seasonal fruit choice. I do miss watching people use a knife and fork to peel, section and eat an orange though. But the topic didn't set my pulse ...

I painted the front door last week. I did an awful job; all runs and dead flies. Maggie and I agreed that it looked better than before though. Anyway it was bucolic, rustic, in keeping with our living situation. Our electric supply is a bit rural too. When we moved in, we were smart enough to put our cooking and weater heating onto gas. True, we have to lug the gas bottles about but we don't have circuit breakers popping all the time. The hot water isn't as hot in winter as in summer. Insulation is not common in our part of the world so we were not at all surprised that the water was cooler in the colder months. It had to pass through all that cold earth. We weren't surprised either that the water got hotter more quickly in one bathroom than the others - more cold ground = cooler water for longer. We've had some lovely weather recently. High 20s and sunny so and I was a bit surprised that the hot water was more like tepid water. Shower time was not a pleasure....

I was a bit of a celebrity in Jumilla last night. Lots of people shouted at me just before they grabbed their friends around the shoulder, smiled broadly and stared in my direction. They wanted me to take their photo. Nowadays photos are everywhere. Every event is a forest of mobile phone cameras. So why the excitement? I can only put the interest down to the stick, the mono-pod, that was attached to the bottom of my camera. They presumably thought I was press or at least a proper photographer. It didn't help though. Despite having racked the speed on the camera up to ISO 2000 and having the stick to help steady the camera every single one of the photos I took was blurred. Mind you I've still loaded lots of them up to various photo sharing websites because they're sort of friendly. The information about the tamborada was a bit vague. No, it was a lot vague. A tamborada is a drum event; people walk around beating drums. The name is presumably based on the Spanish wo...

Spain goes on fire a lot. It happens more in summer when fag ends, thrown from moving cars, and seasonal barbecues don't mix with tinder dry pine forests. There are small scale fires all over the place. We've seen fires on the hillside above Cartagena and even on the little mountain behind our house in Culebrón. In summer there are always a series of big fires. Occasionally people, especially firefighters, die and the inhabitants of rural villages are regularly evacuated. There are people who patrol the countryside trying to limit hazhards and provide early warning. Fire services have fire engines with huge ground clearances, to get them into areas without roads, and helicopters and water tanker planes, designed to drop thousands of gallons of water onto inaccessible forests, seem to be readily available. Sometimes the fires happen naturally. Sometimes it's things like a dropped bottles that start fires without people being so directly involved. Sometimes it...

I usually don't hear my mobile phone ring. So, if you phone the chances are I will miss the call. If I do hear it ring the phone is often in the depths of my bag or I'm using it to play music or I'm wearing gardening gloves. By the time I find the phone, disconnect the earphones or get my hands free the other person is long gone and I am left shouting, uselessly, into dead air. Sometimes I just decide not to answer. If it's a number I don't know or one with the identity withheld then I tend to let them be. The chances are that it will be somebody trying to sell me something or someone who has dialled the wrong number. I don't get a lot of calls anyway. This morning, unusually, I got two, I heard them both and I answered them too. The wrong number was absolutely certain that I should be his brother even if I wasn't. My insistence that I was called Chris and this was my number seemed to cut no ice with him. No, this is my brother's number, coño, he said....

I remember some adverts at the cinema along the lines of "Which teacher changed your life?" It was a recruiting campaign for teachers; the idea being that teachers could make a real difference. Without the Ms. Williamsons or Mr. Gwizdaks there wouldn't be as many great novels or so many life enriching scientific discoveries. I've never really believed in the concept of inspirational teaching. I do not doubt that some teachers are better than others, that some teachers explain concepts better than others, that some teachers are more empathetic than others but, in the end, I think it's the student that counts. I was an average sort of student and I got average sort of results in a whole bundle of subjects. Who taught me seems to have been irrelevant. Nowadays anyway the very idea of a teacher as the fount of all knowledge seems so Victorian when my phone can tell me much more about chemistry than Messrs Lofthouse, Bottomley and all my other school chemistry teache...

I don't really have much to tell you about gardening. The problem is that it's over a week since I blogged anything and, as I've spent a lot of those day in the garden doing the sort of damage that is usually reserved for logging companies in the Amazon, it was all I couuld think of to write about. We have a garden that I think measures about 1,000 square metres. Small by Spanish country standards but big in British terms. We have a lot of fruit trees such as figs, peach, nispero, almonds, plums, apple, pomegranate, cherry and quince; lots of ivy, lots of pine trees, and plenty more. The trouble is that I'm not much of a gardener. I can tell a tulip from a daffodil from a rose but that's my sort of level. Nature, colourwise, always strikes me as a bit monotonous. When a rose blooms, or the almond trees are in blossom (like now) there's a touch of colour in the garden but I consider  the countryside to be lot of shades of green and brown - for most of the yea...

I got a letter from the tax people yesterday. Now letters from the tax people are not written in normal, everyday Spanish. They are Brontesque in style. With the envelope ripped open and the single page scanned it looked bad. There were lots of words I didn't understand but it was clear that the Revenue, Hacienda, were unhappy about the tax I'd paid on my pension. Tax people can be nasty. Tax people take your house and send you to prison when you're naughty. Unless of course you are very, very rich in which case they are extremely nice to you. I explained my situation last year in a post on Life in La Unión  Just a quick recap. Normally, if you are a Spanish resident, your worldwide income is taxed in Spain. However, I have a local government pension from the UK and there is an agreement between Spain and the UK that government pensions are taxed at source, in the UK. So far so good but where I turn into Al Capone is about my additional voluntary contributions. They pr...

David Collins died this week. He was cremated today in the Santa Pola Tanatorio. We went along as old friends. David used to live in Pinoso though he's lived in Catral for years now. I think, because I gave him a hand with his computer, he suggested me as a possible worker to his daughter Julie. At the time she ran a furniture shop called RusticOriginal. I ended up working there and it remains my favourite job of those I've had here in Spain. It's the first time I've been inside a tanatorio in Spain - the translation in most dictionaries is funeral parlour but a good number of them seem to have the facilities of a crematorium too. I've never quite worked out the system for Spanish funerals and cremations and I decided against doing the research and describing it here. I get the idea though that the tanatorio is where close family stand vigil as it were and receive other family members, friends and colleagues. Someone in Cartagena told me that they often used t...