Life in Culebrón

The music festival season is just beginning to warm up in Spain. We usually try to get along to at least one event. It's good to hear a band that goes on to greater things - "Calvin? great musician! First time I saw him he was on the tiny fourth stage just by the latrines at half past six in the evening" It's good to hear new bands in general and I always look forward to those vegetable noodles they serve in the overpriced food areas too. So I was reading an article, in Spanish, from a national newspaper. It was suggesting ways to keep the costs of festival going to a bare minimum. It suggested coachsurfing (sic). Fortunately for me coachsurfing was hyperlinked and when I followed the link there was a little piece about couchsurfing (sic). Taken along with the rest of the article about how nice someone had been to some tourists I decided that it was about an internet method of finding a floor to kip on. Someone who would put you up on their couch for a fraction of...

It must have been the 1964 general election. I walked on to the Town Hall Square in Elland to see Harold Macmillan speak. I would have been ten at the time. I've always been strangely drawn to political meetings. Shortly after democracy was restored to Spain in 1977 the pattern soon settled into the usual two party - leftish, rightish - seesaw. The last time, in 2011, it was the turn of the right. There are several regional parties which have strong representation in the national parliament but their power base is in their home regions. Otherwise there were really just a couple of smaller national parties. A harder left party has, traditionally, been the third largest national party and, in 2007, a breakaway socialist politician formed a new centrist party. To put that into figures at the last general elections it was 185 seats to the PP (conservatives), 110 to the PSOE (socialists), 11 to the Left, 5 to the Centrists, 21 to Catalan and Basque groups and 18 to the rest Then s...

I used to use an English language exercise about the difference between must and could. You know the sort of thing; she must be delayed: she could be ill, she could be in traffic. The example went something like " I can see the Eiffel Tower, I can see the River Seine - where am I?" I learned to write the words on the board because my pronunciation never clicked with my Spanish students but it didn't help much. The success rate on "You must be in Paris." was pretty low. Maybe 50% would get the French capital with Rome coming a close second. Another exercise had pictures of the Christ statue in Rio, the Opera House in Sydney, The Coliseum in Rome and The Capitol Building in Washington DC. Hardly anyone could identify anything other than the Coliseum. Now not recognising Sydney Opera House is no sort of crime; no measure of intelligence. I'm dead against lots of rote learning and there is no reason that anyone should know a series of landmarks but I would h...

I have to admit that I was surprised they didn't give me more trouble about the hoe head in my bag. After all a jar of marmalade caused a full scale security alert. Being singularly unimaginative I was hard pressed to envisage the damage that a jar of marmalade, even Olde English thick cut, could do to a Boeing 737. The security staff at Gatwick on the other hand seemed to be well aware of the destructive potential of the orange preserve. Our garden grows a good crop of weeds. Lots of other things grow too but weeds seem to grow much faster than the lilac or the figs. I brought the hoe head back because neither Dutch nor English hoes are on general sale in Spain. Spaniards use something more like a trenching tool to grub out the unwanted greenery. They seem to prefer to pull when we Brits, and those nice Dutch people, like to push. Our burning certificate was for a month. I was not allowed to burn in Holy Week and we had a lot of rain in March which denied me opportunity aft...

I signed up for a weekly Spanish course yesterday. I haven't quite given up on the language yet - despite what Maggie says, and what I know to be true, that I will never speak Spanish adequately. I have just finished a blog post. Looking for information I was wading trough official bulletins, where laws and official notices are published. I could understand them but I wouldn't pretend that it's easy reading. It's the same with books, I normally read in Spanish but, at the moment, I'm reading a book written by an Englishman and it seemed perverse to read it in translation. I have to admit that it's much more comfortable reading in English. We took Maggie's car for an ITV yesterday, the road worthiness check. The tester took the car off us and drove it through the various test bays himself. I have the feeling that he was only doing that with us immigrants. Easier to do it himself than explain the various actions he required of us. Bank yesterday too to...

Coming in to Huntingdon, past Samuel Pepys place, alongside Hinchingbrooke I was amazed by the number of bunnies hopping around. Millions of the little blighters. Where we live now is much more rural than Huntingdon but I see far less wildlife. Rabbits and more particularly hares are our most frequent sighting but I'm talking one at a time not hordes of them. Lots of people tell us stories of wild boar and one pal was even attacked by one. I've only ever seen them on a game reserve in Andalucia. Although I know foxes, badgers, snakes, hedgehogs, squirrels, mice, stoats and the like are all there I hardly ever see them except as road kill. We have plenty of birds too but I don't see the soaring birds of prey that were so common in Salamanca or the game birds that were always attempting to commit hari kari under the wheels of my car in the wilds of Cambridgeshire. Hunting though is enormous in Spain. Some weekends, presumably as hunting season opens on some poor species, ...

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...