Life in Culebrón

I've been doing a Spanish class recently. Not that I expect it to make me any more understood in the street. I just feel I have a responsibility to try to improve my Spanish somehow. I would have preferred an intercambio - the half an hour of Spanish for half an hour of English language exchange - but, despite a fair bit of effort, I couldn't find one. Well, actually, that's not true. Alvaró and I met a couple of times but then he went off to seek fame and fortune in Guildford. So, unable to get  a bit of Spanish for free, I asked a local academy about paying for a weekly grammar class. It's not that exciting but it's structured practice, of a sort, with correction. My teacher is a pleasant and well organised young woman. "Why not write something for me to correct?" she suggested. So I did. I've done something the last couple of weeks and I was working on this week's piece today. Writing the essay is pretty straightforward. With a biro I can ...

I've described this process somewhere else, in the past, but as it doesn't happen very often even my most trusty reader may have forgotten - so. There are two elections going on today. The first is for the majority of the Autonomous Communities, the Regions, which deal with the powers not held by Central Government in areas like health and education. Our region is the Comunitat Valenciana which is made up of three provinces, Valencia, Castellon and Alicante. We are in Alicante and that's where we should vote except that European legislation denies me a vote at this level. I cannot vote regionally either in the UK or in Spain. The second elections are for the local Town Halls. These people decide how much our water and car tax cost, what we pay for rubbish collection, how to organise the local fiestas and lots of the day to day decisions that affect our lives. I do, at least, get to vote at the Town Hall level. My polling station is in one of the schools in the local t...

It stopped being cold in our house a few weeks ago now. I forget quite when but suddenly we weren't using the gas heaters, I started to pad around the tiled floors in bare feet as I got up in the morning. Winter was gone and there were flowers in the garden. Last week, I think, it was warm - a few days in the 30ºC bracket. I folded up my pullovers. That turned out to be a bit premature. I've needed a woolly the last couple of days. I was just about to go to work, Maggie was on her way home after work. We were together. We decided a quick snack was in order. We chose a roadside bar café that we haven't been in for years. It was a mistake. It was scruffy, barn like, dark and a bit dirty. Nonetheless we sat at the bar, ordered a drink and surveyed the tapas in the little glass display cases. Lots of them looked like food left on the plates piled up by the side of the sink after a good meal; perfectly nice when freshly prepared but well past their best now. We ordered a s...

On the second day I lived here, that is the day after the MGB, Mary the cat and I arrived in Spain to join Maggie, I went to the Town Hall in Santa Pola to register on the padrón. The padrón is a local register of inhabitants. Town Hall's like to have people on their padrón because it increases their funding from national and regional sources. Without being on the padrón it's difficult to access some services. There were some problems with the paperwork; some tiny little defects. The Town Hall needed the landlord's signature. She was in Switzerland. They needed Maggie's signature. She was at work. I went to the Estate Agent, who had rented us the flat, and asked for advice. She forged the absent landlady's signature. Back at the Town Hall I forged Maggie's signature. As I wrote it with a pen borrowed from the clerk it wasn't much of a forgery. "Ah, the landlady and your wife came back unexpectedly." said the clerk as he stamped our padrón and w...

It's probably some sort of jingoism on my part but I can't say I'm that impressed by the professionals that we have occasionally used here. By professionals I don't mean doctors or mechanics or plumbers or builders. They seem fine or at least just normally inept. No, I'm talking about the sort of people who work from offices and should wear suits - architects, lawyers, accountants, bank workers and the like. A friend of ours was going through a divorce. The lawyer forgot to tell her that the divorce had been granted. Right on the ball then? When we first got here we hired a lawyer to sort out our residence papers. We thought we could do it ourselves but to avoid hassle we paid a professional. Unfortunately the lawyer was completely unaware that the legislation was changing. He went through the tried and tested process but, by the time we went to collect the documentation, it no longer existed. We'd paid upfront. There was no talk of a refund. We did...

Murcia City has changed a lot over the years. It feels citylike now - it hustles and bustles. The first time I went there I thought it was a dusty hole. If I tell you I arrived in a friend's Lada Niva you'll realise just how long ago that was. We were there yesterday and we wanted something to eat. The place is alive with tapas bars and trendy looking eateries. I quite fancied a place called Tiquismiquis (which means something like fusspot) or maybe Moshi Moshi (I don't speak Japanese so I don't know what that means) but by the time I'd found a bank machine we'd passed those places by and we were footsore so we went to a Lizarran instead. Lizarran is a franchise. They have little tapas, generally bread mounted snacks, stored inside cooled display cases. each tapa has a toothpick driven through it. You bung a few tapa on your plate and when you're settled a server asks you about drinks. When the place is realtively busy they usually come around with add...

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...