Life in Culebrón

We've just got back from a few days in Berlin. Like Passepartout I left the gas fire on all the time we were away! Comparing Culebrón to Berlin would be a little unfair. One is the capital city of of one of the most powerful nations of the last two centuries with a population of three and a half million and the other has a postbox. I wouldn't presume to compare two countries either. I have around a hundred hours recent experience of Germany, glimpsed through the distorting mirror of a capital city, against eleven years in Spain. So these are no more than personal impressions of limited interactions in a strange language at an odd time of year. People in Germany don't like serving other people. We've had some very abrupt service indeed and, with two notable exceptions, very little helpful, friendly or even indifferent service. Indifference would be how I would pigeon hole Spanish service. The waiter, the person in the shop, the doctor says hello, asks what y...

As I abluted this morning - is it a verb? - I listened to the radio as usual. The, apparently intentional, forest fires in Asturias apart the only news was about the General Election which is taking place today I don't get to vote of course. Perhaps I should throw some tea into the harbour or something. So, as I sat looking at the computer screen pondering on the outcome - PP (Consrvatives) to win I suspect with PSOE (Labour) coming a distant second in some places but generally being ousted by Ciudadanos (Liberalish sort of tinge) and Podemos (talk the talk leftist bunch) a disappointing fourth and with a couple of other national parties being annihilated - I wondered who I would be voting for if I were able to vote. The voting system in Spain is a list of candidates for each party. So, if we were talking something similar in the UK the list would be headed by Cameron with  Osborne second then May, Hammond, Grove, Fallon etc. and for Labour Corbyn, McDonell, Eagle etc....

I went to the Post Office to buy some stamps for my Christmas cards but there was a big queue. Now it can take fifteen minutes for Enrique, the guy on the Post Office counter, to shift two people so five or six people and I thought maybe I should carry food. Alternatively I could go to a tobacconist and buy the stamps there. I chose the second option. In Spain there is a price for normal mail and a different price for what must be classed as abnormal mail. I mentioned this to the woman selling me the stamps in the tobacconist. She thought it was so much nonsense and limited herself to selling me stamps at 42c for national delivery and 90c for stuff to the rest of Europe. The other side of the world cost just 10c more. I wrote my cards but before I stuck on the stamps I checked what constituted normal and abnormal mail. The price differential was substantial and most of my cards were definitely abnormal. Being an honest sort of bloke I thought the best bet was to explain myself to...

I had a bit of a problem with an email group the other day. I'd never seen one before and it took me a few minutes to work it out. The person who'd set up the email also put together a group on WhatsApp before mistakenly deleting themself from the group. I bacame the group administrator by random asignation. Again it took me a few minutes to work out what was going on and reinstate him. Crikey I thought. I'm getting old. Losing touch with the technology. We have a general Election on 20 December. I was listening to some pundit, presumably from a party that hadn't done well out of a newspaper poll, saying that polls were no longer a fair reflection of the voting population. His argument was that, because the pollsters telephoned people randomly on fixed phones, the sample was self selecting as only old people have fixed phones now. I bristled. That's not true I thought defensively. It's true that even I access the Internet more often from a tablet or my p...

When I went to the pictures yesterday, and today come to that, the shopping centre in Petrer, where the multiplex is, was heaving. This is unusual. There aren't many shops in the shopping centre and I've always presumed that it's one of those that got it wrong. But not today, or yesterday. I like this particular cinema because the staff are friendly and because it's not busy. Unlike all the other cinemas, which only show Hollywood, Spanish or worldwide hits, this cinema shows anything they can get hold of. One of the reasons being that in a few of the screens they still had film projectors so they were still showing film or, as a half way measure, they showed Blu Ray stuff. It's not exactly arts cinema, and all of it is dubbed, but I've seen some really offbeat stuff. They have just digitalized the last few screens so I suppose that will change. The reason for this heavingosity in the car park, the hordes of shoppers in the centre and the queues in the cin...

I think it's Le Chatelier's Principle though I hesitate to look it up - what if it isn't? I've been using the same reasoning, remembered from a chemistry class in the mid nineteen sixties, to limit the amount of housework I've done over the last forty years or so. So far as I remember the ideas is that if you have a system in equilibrium and you do something to upset that equilibrium then the system does its damnedest to re-establish the balance. The implications are clear. Dust the mantelpiece and you are taking on the Universe. Mop and you are fighting the titanic forces of creation. Heaven knows what moves against you when you do a bit of vaccing. Whatever it is, in no time at all, the dust will be back and the floor full of bits. Anyway. I don't like cleaning. It's work and I'm not keen on work. It's pointless. Clean the car and either it rains or there is a giant dust storm. Hoover and mop the floor and that same rain and dust cloud undo...

My hair was getting a bit long, a bit difficult to brush through. I don't work Fridays and I wondered if Alfredo the barber had a spare slot. He told me I could come in at 9.20 in the evening if I wanted. I presumed he was extending his working day for me as shops generally close at 8.30 or maybe 9pm. As I was sitting in the chair I suggested he was working a little late. Normal sort of day he said. From time to time Maggie still meets up with the people she first worked with when we arrived in Spain. One of her ex teaching colleagues has recently decided to return to the UK. In fact he's been there for a while but he is in Spain at the moment with a van to collect his stuff. We agreed to meet for lunch in Gran Alacant one of those developments on the coast where Spaniards are outnumbered by Northern Europeans. We chose an Indian restaurant with an English name, a set meal written in English and staff who looked as though their grandparents came from South Asia but that the...

Last century I passed a fair bit of time in schools. Firstly I had to study in them. My secondary school, between 1965 and 1972, was quite a violent place as I remember. Bullying from other pupils and downright violence from the staff. Later, between 1996 and 2004, I had an office in another school though I couldn't say I really took much notice of my surroundings. I was working in what was called Community Education - adult education, youth work and community development - and it just so happened that our office was there close to the classrooms and other facilities that we used for some of the programme. The only time I remember venturing into a classroom during school hours was to have a word with someone who organised the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for us. She was a teacher at the school and I went to hunt her out in her room. Noisy as I remember it, and much less formal than when I went to school but everyone seemed to be working with purpose. I'm working in a sch...

Now that I work in Cieza my route to work has changed. It's about about 60 kms each way and the journey time - that is the time from when, with seat belt fastened and radio playing I accelerate away from our front gate to the moment I park up outside my workplace - is about 45 minutes. Even with my primitive arithmetical skills I can work out that means I average just 80kph or 50mph. On the way to Cieza from Culebrón the left from our track onto the main CV83 would be an illegal manoeuvre involving crossing a solid white line and hatched areas. Should the car around the corner be Guardia Civil that would be a 300€ fine and goodness knows how many points off the spotless 15 of my licence. Would I do that or would I be more likely to make the legal right turn, cross into the village, turn around in front of Eduardo's and rejoin the CV83 heading out towards Pinoso? The choice, as that voice on Blind Date used to say, is yours. Towards Pinoso then, at the roundabout ju...

Here's the October weather report for Pinoso prepared by Agapito Gonzálvez. The highest temperature was on the 5th when it got to 28ºC.and the lowest temperature was 4ºC overnight on the 22nd. The mean daily high was 22.2ºC and the mean daily low was 10.3ºC which all averages out at 16.2ºC. The rain was just 9.4 litres of water on every square meter in October and a third of that came down on the 20th. We only had nine days of clear, sunny skies and another fourteen with sunny periods. Less to my taste we had four days when the sun didn't come out at all and it rained on seven days. Everyone tells me that this is good for the olives. Personally I prefer the searing heat of August.