Life in Culebrón

We just did a little walk around the Pinoso town archives. It was really interesting in a slight sort of way. Not in the manner of seeing the Pyramids at Giza but good. We were shown the census records, births and deaths stuff, details of the charges for cutting wood or esparto grass on the land owned by the town, details of the charter that set the town apart from what had been the more important town of Monóvar in 1826 and lots more besides. There was a broader history reflected in the paperwork - the way that the town was governed under the Constitution of 1812, the change when Fernando VII was reinstated and then when he was forced to accept the 1812 Constitution between 1820 and 1823. The broad stroke of history reflected in the fine detail. I particularly liked those little details. For instance we were shown the minutes of the council meetings. During the Republican period in the early 1930s the paper was very official, with a watermark and a letterhead, good quali...

Anyone who has followed this blog for any time will know that we have a piddling electrical supply of just 2.2 kW or some 10 amps. Not technically sufficient to run the kettle and the iron at the same time. Nonetheless because of the tolerances of the system we get by. Things change though and we recently got a letter to say that our power supplier, Iberdrola, is on the verge of fitting a smart meter with a built in cut-out. We decided that we couldn't be sure that more modern kit would be as elastic as our ancient equipment so I started an email correspondence with Iberdrola to see if we could up the power. The last time I asked I was told that 3.45kW was as high as we could go. This time, because Iberdrola replaced the supply cables a little while ago, we were told that we could have up to 15kW. There was a snag though. The boletín, the thing that shows that we have wiring to such and such a standard, would only allow us to have 3.45kW unless we got an electrician...

On the after lunch news Rajoy was chatting to Theresa May. I don't think our President speaks English and I'm pretty sure that May doesn't speak Spanish. Just behind them was a chap with grey curly hair and one of those "access all area" passes. I presume he was their interpreter. On the Wordreference.com forum pages I sometimes have a go at helping people to translate things. I tend to go the Spanish English way rather than write in Spanish as I am very aware of the manifold slips that I make when writing in Spanish. Wordreference is a wonderful dictionary cum language resource if you don't know it. For quite a while now I've listened to the Spanish podcasts by Alex occasionally assisted by Vanesa on the cunningly named Spanishpodcast.net . A while ago they started to push their YouTube channel as well but it took me a while to getting around to having a look. On the videos Alex didn't look at all like I expected from having heard his voice ...

There was nothing on at the cinema. We often go on Wednesday, its the cheap day, just 4.20€. I'd have gone to see a Spanish film but Maggie wasn't keen so I had a beer, some double hopped Mahou, and settled in for the evening, Nothing much on the telly either. Not on the Spanish telly anyway. So we were watching Lewis, dependable sort of telly. The adverts came on and I disappeared to find something to eat in the kitchen. I was surprised by how quickly the adverts were over. Shorter and more often on British TV. Seven minutes and we'll be back is standard on Spanish. There's been a fair bit of UK election coverage on Spanish radio and TV. Britain has featured a lot with the people killed at Borough Market and the Spanish skateboarder not identified for days. On the 3.0 clock news there were shots of the various party leaders making their vote - UKIP, The Greens, LibDems - I didn't know any of them. I'm working hard hardly working at the moment. I decided...

I work in a school. Well, actually, as my contract ended on the last day of May I don't. But I expect to again. Sometime last year my boss told me that I should get a document equivalent to what I still think of as a Police Check or if I'm being just a little more modern a CRB check. Apparently it's now called a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check in the UK. The certificate that says the authorities are not aware of any reason someone should not work with children. I applied for the Spanish equivalent in April last year. I tried to do it online but failed. Eventually I found the appropriate form on the Internet, downloaded it, filled it in, paid the small fee in a bank and took the appropriately stamped form to the Justice Ministry Office in Murcia. I was in the office fewer than ten minutes before emerging with a piece of A4 paper that said I had no criminal record. A reasonably complicated and time consuming process but hardly overwhelming. Nobody has ever ...

I saw some article or advert about a micro brewery in Novelda a while ago. We don't work on Wednesday afternoon; either of us. "Do you fancy a beer?" I asked Maggie. She said yes. We found the place OK. It looked decidedly closed but there was a bar next door and it seemed logical that the bar would have the local beer. We went in. It wasn't a flash bar. It could probably do with a bit of a refit though the regulars probably like it as it is. There were lots of men, my age, playing dominoes or just sitting there nursing a beer. Fluorescent lights. There was a woman behind the bar and one female customer. We were a bit out of place. The beer, Exulans, was on display, a couple of third of a litre bottles on the bar. "Hello, can we have a couple of bottles of the beer from next door, please." "No. We don't have any." Moment of indecision. "Hang on though, I'll check in the back." The woman wanders off for a while. "No, ...

I wandered in to do my session with 4A, the fourth year is the last year of obligatory secondary school. It was my last lesson with them before my contract ends at the end of May. They're a nice bunch but it's a big class and they tend towards noisy, no let's be honest, loud. I said hello and started whatever it was I was going to do but they weren't paying much attention - their energies were being taken up by an awful lot of fanning and expelling sufficient breath for top lips to oscillate. It's too hot, it's suffocating, we're going to die. The class teacher who makes sure that the noise doesn't turn into a riot, looked up from her computer. A brief conversation and she set the air conditioner going. My guess is that there are guidelines as to the temperature setting for the air-con and the youngsters wanted it lower. With a big grin on my face I set into one of those "When I was a lad air conditioners didn't exist, what a bunch of whiners ...

You will remember we had trouble with a white cat that invaded our garden. The cat was nice enough but it didn't get on with our two. They hid inside, afraid to wander the garden. We were glad when the white cat disappeared. There are colonies of wild and semi wild cats in Culebrón. Some probably get occasional food from humans but others live off what they hunt or can scavenge from the big communal bins. A young female tabby realised that the open door to our kitchen, at times, offered access to free food left over by our satiated cats. She was a persistent little cat, despite the water pistol, despite the occasional hosepipe assault, despite the shouts and clapping hands, she kept coming back. Our cats had no real problem with her, an occasional hissing but nothing profound. We are softies. We gave her food, always away from our house, but we did feed her. An easy if unreliable and sometimes contradictory feeding station. She was also human friendly, happy to be stroked. ...

I used to listen to the Archers. For those of you that don't know the Archers is a long running British radio soap. The reason that I started to listen was that it used to start at 7.05pm. By then I was usually in the car and on the way to a meeting. And, that's because evening meetings in the UK invariably started at 7.30pm. I don't know whether that's still true. I can't really speak for UK habits nowadays but my guess is that things haven't changed. Likewise I would guess that the most popular slots for dinner reservations in restaurants will be 8pm or 8.30pm. Countries have timetables and most people know that Spain's is a little different. Making a sweeping generalisation, as though it were the truth, most Spaniards leave the house with a minimal breakfast around 7.30 or 8am and get to work for the usual sort of times – 8,8.30 or 9am. Shops and lots of offices don't open till 10am. There's a mid morning break for something reasonably substan...

I'm going to talk about going to the cinema. Nearly all of this I've talked about before so, old, in the sense of long standing rather than aged, readers you can save yourself some time and stop now. I've always liked going to the cinema. At the height of it I might go 130 times in a year. When we got to Spain that more or less stopped. Films here are almost universally dubbed into Spanish. There are a few cinemas where it's possible to see films in their original language with subtitles and even a few where you can use a pair of headphones to tune in to an original language version whilst the sound in the cinema is in Spanish. For the main part though, if you go to see a film in Spain it will have a Spanish soundtrack. When our Spanish was worse than it is now we were basically wasting time and money because we couldn't understand much of what was going on. The dubbing causes problems at times where there is some interplay between actors of different national...