Life in Culebrón

Cabeço towers above Pinoso. It's a salt dome. There are traces of human habitation there in pre-history and people still live on its slopes today. Plonked right on the top are a series of masts which people refer to as the repetidor, the repeater. It's a while since I've been up there but I think there is a mobile phone mast and I know that the local radio station uses one of the masts too. Apparently it's become a bit of a local tradition to take a night-time stroll up the 893 metre high hill on one of the days during a week dedicated to promoting sport and a healthy lifestyle in Pinoso. Personally it's the first time I'm ever heard of it so the promotion must be spot on but there you go. This year all the walkers were being asked to contribute a euro with the cash going towards research into rare diseases. I thought I'd go and see if there were any potential snaps. I had this idea of a really wide angle shot with someone looking suitably rugged putti...

On Friday afternoons, in Cartagena, Maggie and I used to go to a Spanish language group organised by one of the local language schools. We paid a couple of euros and the language centre sent a teacher or two to moderate the session. The group was made up of lots of us foreigners - principally Brits and Dutch but with the occasional Czech and Zimbabwean thrown in - and the idea was that we all spoke Spanish to each other. It was organised into largish discussion groups dependant on the number of attendees with some chosen topic of conversation. The numbers dwindled when the language school upped the price to five euros and, eventually, so few people attended that it was knocked on the head. Maggie wondered about doing something similar between Spaniards and English speakers in Pinoso but somebody else beat her to it. Every Wednesday one of the local bars, Cafe Coliseum, acts as the venue. The organiser is an efficient young woman, who I'm sure introduced herself to me but whose ...

My draft tax declaration became available online the other day. Because I was self employed for a while in the 2015 tax year I'm going to need an accountant to sort it out but I'm putting off ringing him till my UK tax documentation turns up. Curiosity got the better of me though and I thought I would have a look at the online version to see what the tax office's initial assessment was. Rebate or more to pay? On the first page, more or less in the first line, I noticed that my name was wrong. Although the effect on the printed form looks fine, which is presumably why I've missed it for the past ten years as have various tax offices and accountants, in fact the surnames and first names are mixed up. So they have my name as Jo and my surname as Christopher Thompson. The Jo is because, when I first registered at the Social Security, their database only had room for a forename fourteen characters long so the Christopher John had to be pruned. Heaven knows what Pablo Die...

I seem to have lost the Pinoso weather station and, like my mini loud speaker, I can't find it. The state weather service here is called AEMET, La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. The service uses all sorts of mechanisms, including data collected from a series of traditional weather stations dotted around Spain, to build up its records and to make weather predictions. One of the weather stations is, or at least was, in Pinoso. From what I can make out this is because a local teacher, whose nickname is Capito, started to collect basic weather information as a classroom project. With time the project, and the equipment, developed to the point when his data formed a part of the AEMET network. There was an event in February 2015 to celebrate 25 years of Capito's weather recording in Pinoso. I check the website on an almost daily basis but, for the past few weeks, the Pinoso data has been missing. I presumed it was a technical problem. Then, a couple of days ago the Pinoso n...

Sunday and nothing much to do so we went for a bit of a drive around. We went over Zarza way and into the Sierra de la Pila. Maggie suggested a tapas place in Algorrobo for lunch but as we were on single track mountain roads we could either go back via Zarza or round via Fortuna. It was about quarter past three as we rolled into Fortuna so I suggested eating there. Maggie wasn't keen. Fortuna is not her favourite place. A few minutes later we were out of the danger zone and into Baños. Maggie spotted a sign for La Fuente which is a camp site built around a thermal spring. Now when I think camp sites I think lugging water in big jerry cans, wellis, shower blocks with concrete floors and water that never boils as the flame under the pan dances in the stiff breeze at the door to your, ever so slightly, cramped tent. It's a long time since I've been camping. I presume the experience is very different nowadays but perception and reality are very separate things. When I wor...

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...