Life in Culebrón

Pinoso, the HQ for Culebrón,  is a village rather than a town. It's nice though. Neat, tidy, rich, safe with lots of facilities and, if you look carefully, it has some interesting corners. We have a bit of a museum; a museum of marble and wine. If you have 20 short minutes to kill it's well worth a visit. The very first time we went there a couple of the information boards mentioned a Roman road and some Iron Age or Bronze Age petroglyphs, plus a few other bits and bats, of which we knew nothing. We went looking for them with mixed success. We found the silex quarry and the stone shelters for shepherds or cucos and we got to walk around some very pleasant countryside but the things that sounded more spectacular eluded us. At the Maxi Banegas poetry awards they forced sausages, wine and tourist literature upon us. Maggie actually had a look inside the tourist brochures and noticed that some of the spots we had failed to bag on our earlier expeditions now had latitude and l...

I see that Adele was on at Glastonbury. I don't imagine that a Spanish festival would think to go for that same sort of mix - Enrique Iglesias alongside Vetusta Morla? Last year, as I remember, Florence inherited the top spot in Somerset, now something like that I can imagine. Indie band turned money spinner alongside the long line of competent but unexceptional bands yes, one time big pop act now reduced to second or third class status, yes, but current big industry acts, no. I like plenty of Spanish bands but I'd be hard pressed to tout any of them as material for world domination. To date there have been no Spanish Kylies or Abbas or U2s. Luz Casals, Paco de Lucia and Mecano aren't really of the same clay. We've been to quite a few Spanish festivals like SOS in Murcia, Low in Benidorm and FIB in Benicassim. We've also seen some Spanish big name acts from old timers to plenty of current top forty stuff and tons of indie. We've done hardly any big name in...

General election today in Spain. I'm sure you know. The fact that polling day is Sunday here and Thursday in the UK piqued my interest. Do you know that the UK and India are the only countries in the world where the vote is on a Thursday? Worldwide, Sunday is by far the most popular day. We had elections back in December. The old party duopoly that has existed more or less since the return to Democracy here collapsed. The Partido Popular, the most right wing of the big parties, won most seats in the parliament but they didn't have anything like a majority. Their leader is a bloke called Mariano Rajoy. He looks a bit doddery and he's got a beard. One of his favourite tactics is to wait and see. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the standard left wing party that stopped being left wing years ago came second but only just. The lowest vote for them in their recent history. It was the first election for their newish leader called Pedro Sanchez. He looks pretty dynamic, ...

I got up early this morning to check the result and, rather as I'd feared, the UK had voted to leave the Union. I wasn't in the least surprised but I was shocked. To me, on a day to day basis, at the moment it means very little. My only real concern is about the exchange rate. I get a pension paid in sterling. As the pound loses ground against the euro I get fewer euros to spend for the same number of pounds. Of course, when the two years and three months are up, then I suppose I'll have to relearn Fahrenheit and furlongs but at least I will be able to recover my blue passport, rest assured that a cucumber is a vegetable and eat curved bananas till the cows come home. The concerns of  expats of my age are mainly around health care and pensions. Reciprocal arrangements within the EU mean that pensioners get free medical care in Spain and there is no problem with the UK state pension being paid here with all its rights intact. In all likelihood something reasonable...

The last time I owned a bike, so far as I remember, was when I was 18. That means we're talking 44 year ago. I've had the use of other people's bikes from time to time but, even then, the last time was in 2007. So, today, was quite momentous - I bought a bike. I bought it second hand and I didn't worry too much about the quality because, chances are, I'll never use it. I have no illusions about bikes. They're an efficient method of getting around but the motive power is muscle and that means that they require more effort than driving a car. My thinking is that if I actually use it as a way or getting in and out of Pinoso from Culebrón then I can look around for something better later. As it is the cheap Carrefour bike will do. It looked a bit small to me but the inside leg measurement seemed about right, it went, it stopped, what more could I ask? I handed over my cash. So, I abandoned the car outside the seller's house and saddled up. Casas de Ju...

One of my theories about Spanish food is that lots of the famous stuff is peasant food, made with cheap, locally available ingredients. The reason that it didn't disappear, before that sort of food became fashionable again, is that the Spaniards got richer late. So, whilst in the UK, we started to have more time than money and developed a taste for frozen lasagne, fish fingers and microwaveable chips the Spaniards stuck with piling pulses into stocks and eating rice with rabbit or seafood. One of these traditional dishes is called migas, literally crumbs. Over in Extremadura, which is where I first encountered it, it's old bits of bread fried in olive oil with garlic and the old scrag ends of leftover meat and sometimes vegetables. In fact there are varieties of migas all over the place with lots of different ingredients but, basically, it's a way to make something out of old, stale bread. That said there is a local food here, in Pinoso, called gachamiga which is...

Our voting papers arrived on Friday. That's a good start. Huntingdonshire District Council blithely denied me the right to vote in the last General Election when they failed to get the voting papers to me. "We send out a lot of overseas voting papers, some are forced to get lost", was their pathetic excuse. Anyway I put the cross in the box, Maggie did likewise and the forms went in the post today. Just an interesting thing about posting the ballot papers. You can see, if you look at the photo, that the envelope reads No Stamp Required yet, in the "Quick Guide to Postal Voting", which came with the ballot paper, it says, "Seal and post envelope B. If it's posted in the UK, this will be free." When I got to the Post Office I asked for stamps for the envelopes and the woman in the Post Office told me there was no need. I insisted and explained that the instructions were quite clear. I presume that she has said the same thing to lots of other Br...

At work I noticed that a co-worker had not parked her car in her usual spot. The one she has used for the last eight months. I asked why, expecting a story about people using her bonnet as a bench or somesuch. "It's because the shadow of the building falls across the car in the early evening so it's cooler when I drive away," she said. I was reminded of the man who started to wave violently at me when I parked outside the building I then worked in in Fortuna. There had been a Circus close by on the waste ground and I presumed he was warning me of the dangers of the lorries bumping into my car as they manouvered away. In the end I parked where he suggested. "It's much better here", he said, "it'll be in the shade when you're finished." It's been around 30ºC the last few days so, as we close in on summer, parking the motor in the shade makes sense. Like real Spaniards I would always choose a shady spot first but it would never c...

In the 70s, when much of South and Central America were in political turmoil, I read an impressive book about the violation of human rights there. The book was full of torture stories. I was most impressed by the way that ordinary people didn't buckle under but I also pondered where the torturers came from. One Sunday you have a nice civilised country but by Monday morning there are people connecting electric wires to mens' testicles and stubbing out their fag ends on the soles of peoples' feet. What's the selection process, what skills and qualities are on the job description? At the time when the IRA and UFF and everyone else in Northern Ireland was going at it I heard some bloke, who'd served in the British Army, describing a common technique for obtaining information from prisoners. They put a plastic bucket over their victim's head and then beat the bucket with a mop handle. It made me realise just how easy torture can be and I still, sometimes, thin...

I don't really mind taxes. That doesn't mean that I like handing over my hard earned but I approve of the idea. I'm much keener on the model where we pay the taxes and, with them, our governments attempt to provide healthcare, education, infraestructure and all the rest than I am on the model where everyone looks out for themselves and to hell with the rest. Anyway. For the past six years or so I've been getting a pension from a final salary pension scheme that I paid into for most of my UK working life. Because that money comes from a quasi government source the agreement between Spain and the UK was that it was exempt of Spanish taxes but taxed, at source, in the UK. Normally Spanish residents have to pay tax on their worldwide income here. In reality my pension is so small that it has never exceeded the personal UK allowance so, although Customs and Revenue send me coding notices and I get P60s and what not, I don't actually pay any tax on it. I also have a p...