Life in Culebrón

I once worked with someone who was keen on illicit drugs. He came from Huddersfield but we were working near Newcastle and he was having trouble finding a local supplier. He picked up what we used to call a sexually transmitted disease and ended up at the local GUM clinic. He told me later that finding a supplier in the clinic was the work of minutes and he wondered why he'd never thought of it before. If you want to find Britons in Spain the Post Office would be fertile territory. In the Pinoso office at least we usually outnumber Spaniards. I've been told, by a Spaniard, that this is because, until recently at least, there had not been a big tradition of reading and writing in Spain so the Post Office never became important to ordinary people. I have to say that I thought the analysis lacked academic rigour. Today I was reading the local news over a lunchtime coffee. There was a piece to say that Pinoso had twenty one restaurants featured on a website called gastr...

Our palm tree is fit and well. You will remember that I was alternately worried about it bringing down power cables or being eaten by beetles. Well everything sort of miraculously self resolved. All I do now is spray it with some deadly chemical every six weeks and that's it. Just another routine job. I bought the pesticide from the bodega. In their shop they sell all sorts of things for we horny handed sons of toil. Much later I was checking information that I'd heard on the local radio about the the beetle plague with the local environment office. I mentioned my spraying regime. The Park Ranger I was talking to, you could tell she was a ranger because she had those trousers that are baggy behind the knee and have lots of unexplained and apparently useless flaps, asked me if I had a certificate for handling pesticides. I don't of course. No problem she said. Nobody is going to bother you about it but really you should either do the course on how to spray safely or get...

Forgive the indulgence of this entry. I started a new job a couple of weeks ago teaching English with a language school based in Murcia city. They didn't give me a job in the city though but asked me to work in a co-operative grant maintained school in Cieza which is a very pleasant but lengthy 60km drive from home. For three mornings a week I work in the school, with classes of youngsters. Their ages range from 12 to 16. I am there to do the authentic English bit - real structure, real vocabulary and real accent. Mainly speaking and listening rather than writing or reading. For four afternoons a week I work in the same school buildings alongside a team of three or four other English speaking Spanish teachers. Indeed I work in the same classrooms, but this time for the academy, the private language school which sells English classes. The age range there is from six year olds up to adults. I'm far from settled. The students seem nice enough and nobody has hit me or a...

I heard a loud crash in the kitchen and a louder curse from Maggie. She'd dropped a mug which we got free with some Fontaneda digestive biscuits (McVities to you and me) when we lived in Santa Pola. That would be about eleven years ago now. "It was nearly an antique," she said, sadly. A little while ago one of my nephews got married. Originally I intended to go to the wedding but airlines and bosses conspired against me to make it more or less impossible or at least impractical. Looking through the wedding list I siezed on sending a canteen of cutlery. I remember the myriad times that my mum would comment on a tea caddy spoon, a vase or some other trivial household object and say - "That was a wedding present from Uncle So and So." I rather like the idea of permanancy amidst the never ending change. We have quite a few chipped tiles on the floor and lots of things that were new when we moved in here in 2005 are definitely looking a bit tired now - then aga...

The blogs about the weather are amongst the posts that get most visits. So I've been looking out for the July and August summaries on the Town Hall website. Then a couple of days ago, the September report popped up, leapfrogging the earlier months. Obviously there was no weather to talk of over the summer. On the same website there were some very seasonal reports. Apparently the grape harvest for the local wine co-op is shaping up nicely. Good grapes and plenty of them. It's the same for the almonds. An abundant crop with decent prices to the farmers. But not everything is sweetness and light. The tractor and trailer combinations that haul the grapes to the co-operative bodega and dried fruit and nuts processor are causing frustration for local car drivers. It is very annoying to get stuck behind the trailers and hemmed in by the very common - do not overtake - solid white lines of Spanish roads. Tractor drivers are being asked to use the route that skirts the town usu...

I was trying to decide whether there was enough material for a post or not. I went on a tram. I parked outside of town and rode in on the tram to save car parking fees. That's it. That's the nub of it, the kernel. I don't think it's enough. It doesn't have the lurid appeal of "I Married an Alien" nor the biting, if misplaced, immediacy of "Gotcha" Maybe I could pad it out? Details about the Murcia City tram system: length of line, stuff like that but just reading the information was boring enough - test line in 2007, opened 2011, only one of the four lines built, 21kms in length etc. What about a trip down memory lane? Illuminated trams in Blackpool dresseed as rockets, Lisbon trams scraping past walls or Huddersfield trolley buses passing through Elland on the way to the terminus in West Vale. Hardly appropriate for Life in Culebrón. Something on the organisation of public transport perhaps? The Alicante to Jumilla bus that stops in ...

Today we took part in the day of the absent Pinosero.  Pinoseros are people who were born in Pinoso. The idea of the day is that it celebrates the locals who, for one reason or another, no longer live here. Each year some of them make the journey back to Pinoso to meet with friends and family or just to renew acquaintance with the town. Those who will never come back are remembered too. The day included an official welcome, a presentation about the local salt workings and then a trip, by coach, to the top of Cabezo to have a look the actual installations on the ground before travelling back to town for a quick church service, a group photo and a meal. Pinoso mines salt, a lot of salt but there's not a mineshaft, pick or shovel to be seen. One of the local topographic features is a rounded, dome like, hill which stands about 320 metres above the general terrain and whose summit is at something like 890 metres above sea level at Alicante. It's a salt dome. Mill...

I met Maggie as she left work today and on the way home we went food shopping. Maggie told me we were saving money because she had some sort of customer loyalty voucher. I suspect we may have saved more by not going in the shop at all though following my plan to its logical conclusion we would starve to death. Based on a mix of store layout, friendliness, price and choice the shop we went to, Consum, is probably my favourite of the four larger Pinoso supermarkets. Recently I've done more of the food shopping than Maggie so, as we moved around the shop, I was playing the tour guide on new lines and innovations. What I hadn't really noticed, until today, was how many "British" items the shop now carries. It was around 3pm when we were shopping, a time when most Spanish people are getting their lunch. The only Spaniards in the store were the workers. All of the customers appeared to be Britons. Obviously whoever does the buying for our Consum had noticed this custo...

I think that we do pretty well at getting out and about. In fact the last few days have been a bit of a culture fest. Just tonight we were at the Yecla Jazz Festival. On Saturday it was the open doors day in Petrer when we visited the Castle , a Civil War machine gun emplacemen t and some other stuff. Oh, and earlier on Saturday we went to an animal rescue centre outside Villena that majors in apes and monkeys . On Sunday I popped in to see the  Fallas  "monuments" in Elda and, spurred on by all this activity, I also got around to booking a couple of events for this season at the Teatro Chapi. And right on our doorstep I signed us up for a visit to the local salt workings. I even got to the cinema twice last week and, if the second film hadn't been so incomprehensible to me, I might have made it three. I mentioned the Fallas event to a Spanish chap I was talking to this morning. He'd never heard of it. Moors and Christians in Elda he said; didn't even kn...

Last week it rained a lot. Even here in sunny Alicante it rains from time to time. Fortunately it didn't do what it did to lots of Southern Spain, it didn't come down in tremendous sheets, causing floods that destroyed everything in their path. It rained in a very English way. Heavy, persistent rain rarher than a tremendous downpour. The weather has improved since then. Blue skies from time to time but generally it's been quite grey with the occasional shower. It's stayed relatively warm though - in the high 20s - but I'd be mightily disappointed if I were here on holiday especially with the cool evenings. We've closed  the workroom windows which have been open since we we wedged them that way back in June. We've also taken to closing the front and back doors to stop the cool draught passing through the house. When I changed the duvet cover yeterday morning I considered substituting a slightly thicker and warmer quilt. The towels in the bathroom a...