Life in Culebrón

I've just been back to the UK. Here are a few things I noticed. Beer. I went in a pub and bought a pint of bitter. I had no idea what to ask for from all the strangely named brews but whatever I bought tasted like proper British beer. I have nothing against the beer I can get in any bar in Spain but the stuff I was buying in England was much more interesting. I had to be sure though so I visited a fair number of pubs. Heat. It's hot in the UK. It was sometimes a tad cold outside but inside it was roasting. I haven't walked around in shirt sleeves inside in Spain for months. It was horribly dark though. Grey. Streetfood. From time to time people eat in the street in Spain but, generally, only where there is some sort of event - like a Mediaeval Fair or fiesta. In the UK people were walking down the street eating all sorts of take away food. In Cambridge the woman on the bench next to me polished off a whole tray of sushi using chopsticks whilst the wind blew and the sk...

The last time that the people of Pinoso voted, in the December General election, they went, overwhelmingly, for the Partido Popular - the conservative side. The time before that they voted just as definitely for the PSOE - the socialist side; well yes and no. That time, in the Local Elections they voted for Lazaro and Silvia and Paco and César and the reat of the list. They voted for people they knew and a group that had a track record, of which they approved, in the town. The Mayor of Pinoso is my Facebook friend. I don't think this means that much. I'm sure if you asked he would say yes to you too. I knew one of his councillors pretty well at one time in the past though nowadays we don't even always nod and say hello in the street. When there were only really two political parties in Spain I tried to join the PSOE a couple of times without success. A few years ago I went to a couple of   Agenda 21 meetings here in Pinoso. The meeting I remember involved a  bunch ...

Don't eat sunflower seeds. It was a little notice on the wall of what is now the Centre for Associations in Pinoso. It made me laugh. I'd popped into town to see one of the events built up around International Women's Day "Sarah y Nora toman el  té de las cinco" - Sarah and Nora take afternoon tea. It's a play about the personal and professional rivalry between Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. In all the publicity Bernhardt is spelled as Bernhard. Spaniards don't take long to Spanishise anything they don't like the spelling of. I was reading a book the other day and it took me a while to equate taper with tupper taken from the trademarked plastic containers Tupperware which is used as the generic for plastic food containers. It's a word I know and use but I'd never thought how it was written. The misspelling, nonetheless, made me laugh. The Director is, I think, a Spanish bloke but the company is Mexican, from Durango. I turned up at ...

There are a lot of road signs in Spain. Most of them are pretty standard and give orders, warnings or advice in the way that road signs do all across the world. Some of them though, particularly speed restriction signs can be really difficult to work out. In general there are fixed speed limits on roads which do not need to be signed. They are the default. They vary for different types of vehicles so I'll limit myself to cars. On motorways the speed limit is 120k/h, on roads with a wide hard shoulder it's 100, on standard two lane roads it's 90 and in towns it's 50k/h. All of these speed limits can be amended by the usual round sign with a red border and the black number on a white background. I didn't realise till I was checking details for this post that there is also a general minimum speed limit which is half the maximum. So you could be fined for going faster than 120k/h or slower than 60k/h on a motorway. There is also an interesting exception to the 90k...

When I first started the  blog it was simple. The idea was to celebrate, or at least note, the diffferences between what I'd always considered to be everyday and what was now ordinary in a new country. So the fact that I ordered neither quantity nor type of beer - I just asked for a beer - gave me material for an entry. Everything from a fiesta to a supermarket visit was grist to the mill. Nowadays it's different. I don't want to repeat the same entries over and over again and I'm, perhaps, no longer the best person to notice the differences - or so I thought. Strangely though in the last twenty four hours, a couple of tiny incidents have reminded me that I've still not quite caught on. I do lots of English language exercises that revolve around food. In one drill I have the students do a bit of imaginary food shopping to mark vocabulary like savoury, packet, jar, seafood, game, poultry, herbs etc. They have to produce a meal from their list of savoury ingredi...

Corruption isn't really news in Spain any more. I don't mean that literally. Corruption is always in the news. Its just so commonplace that it has lost its impact. I just had a look to see how many politicians are facing charges at the minute and the information is a bit confusing. One of the problems in getting a figure is that there is no specific charge called corruption. So the figure depends a bit on what you count. The other thing is that lots of the corruption involves people at the edge of politics. The husband of a princess isn't a politician but the charges around him are clearly political. And someone who used to be a vice president and went on to manage the International Monetary Fund and then one of the big banks isn't a politician any more. So let's just say that the number is on the top side of 2,000. Most of the political corruption belongs to the PP, the conservative side. The last three party treasurers are all in trouble. There are eleven o...

When I came home that May afternoon back in May 2008 a bit of the roof had fallen in. The immediate cause was a combination of heavy rain and the heavy boots of Iberdrola workmen walking on our roof. The underlying, and uninsured, cause was rotten cedar wood beams. The roof couldn't be patched and, at one point, the house was no more than four scarred and unsteady walls with the floor piled high with debris. When we first moved in to the Culebrón house back in 2005 we had some serious work done. The sort that knocks down walls, digs trenches in the floor and leaves bundles of electrical cables sprouting flower like from the gouged walls.  On the other side of an interior patio we have a bedroom separate from the main part of the house. Two or three years ago we had the roof on that replaced and we had a serious remodelling of the interior space done at the same time. Paying for work and living in dust seems to have been one of the hallmarks of our time in Culebrón...

I went to a meeting of the junta directiva, or mangement committee, of the village neighbourhood association this afternoon. I was worried beforehand that I would stutter and stumble so much that I would make a complete fool of myself. In the end I thought I did alright. I wasn't exactly Lincoln at Gettysburg but I managed to respond to what was going on around me and, even, to initiate topics and ideas in a reasonably coherent way. It's amazing how the right and better verb, adjective or noun repeatedly came to mind fractions of second after I loosed my second rate and simplistic phrase into the room. Some of the committee members had met with the town mayor and a councillor earlier this week. They were reporting back to the couple of us who hadn't been there and looking for a decision. I'm not quite sure how much of what I heard is confidential and how much is public domain but, as it's not very interesting to anyone outside the village, I won't go into...

There's one of those professional looking videos that does the rounds on Facebook that I rather like. In it a succession of people walk into a bar and greet nobody in particular. Then someone comes in and sits down at the table without saying a word. There are meaningful looks between the waiters and the bar becomes a little less lively. The bar owner goes over to the customer and asks "Is it that we slept together?" The client immediately grasps what is being said and restores calm and good humour to the bar by saying hello to everyone and no-one in particular. It's absolutely true. Spaniards say hello to the room. Waiting in a bank or post office you get to greet lots of strangers. Maggie and I were in a hospital waiting room yesterday morning and everyone who came in said hello or good morning as they looked for a space to wait and most people said goodbye too as they came out of the consulting rooms and headed off somewhere else. I know this is the custom. M...

I think I mentioned that I was "voted" onto the committee of the Neighbourhood Association last November. Nothing serious, no work involved, just an ordinary member. Turn up from time to time. A little while ago a news item on the town hall website explained that local politicians wanted to talk to the pedanias, the outlying villages. A bit of PR mixed with a, presumably, real wish to serve the local community. A few days or weeks later the WhatsApp group for our local committee burst into life. A councillor wanted to speak to us, as the closest thing to representatives for Culebrón, given that our "mayoress" resigned recently. It was Wednesday and the meeting had to be that weekend. The WhatsApp messages flew thick and fast. There were little spats. One of the committee members is a friend and colleague of the councillor and that made her position a little awkward at times. She was acting as the intermediary between all the messages and the town hall. Misunde...