Life in Culebrón

I was once a Geologist. The trick with geology is time. Imagine that if, every year, a stream were to cut a groove 1 millimetre in the ground. In two years the groove would be 2 mm deep and in 10 years it would be a centimetre deep. If the stream were to follow the same line for a million years the groove would be a kilometre deep. Just for my mum make it a sixteenth of an inch a year and the valley would be nearly a mile deep. Now the earth is about four and a half billion years old. Just in case you're never sure what a billion is nowadays that would be 4,500,000,000 years. Obviously it's not possible but if our 1 mm a year stream flowed, non stop, in the same place, from the beginning, the groove would be 4,500 kilometres deep or about 500 times as deep as Mount Everest is high. When I studied geology I found out about graptolites, brachiopods, lamellibranchs, belemnites and all sorts of other fossils large and small. I particularly approved of trilobites. I thought th...

There's a strangeness about being home and yet being a foreigner. Last week I asked the lad who served me coffee how his birthday celebrations had gone. He'd told me his plans the last time I was in. I got the full story. Later, in the same bar and in the same session a different, and new to me, waiter asked me if I wanted another coffee. He asked in broken English - to him I was just another foreigner. There were a lot of political meetings running up to the local elections. I went to one of them and the prospective, now elected, candidates were lined up against the wall in a show of solidarity at a political rally. A couple of them greeted me by name. We knew each other because I'd taught them a bit of English. I'd actually worked alongside another of them several years ago. Alfredo, the barber, nods through the window - he cuts my hair and I didn't get his daughter through her B1 English exam. And so it goes on and on with example after example of knowing...

I've never owned or used a dishwasher. I still wash up in the sink and I follow the routine that I read on some poster on the wall of the fifth form classroom I used at school. I got my first ever OAP payment today so fifth form was quite a while ago. The poster advised to rinse as much junk off as I could with cold water then to fill the sink with water as hot as I could stand. A good dose of quality detergent. Glassware first, plates and dishes next - washing the cleanest first - and working through to the pans and oven-ware. Cutlery when I pleased. Use common sense and change the water when it becomes necessary was the only other guidance on the poster. Useful poster I thought. Much better than the Wilkinson Sword one about how to shave. Until technology invented the Gillette Mach 3 a few years ago wet shaving was always a very bloody business for me. I don't spend a lot of time watching Spaniards wash up and I presume that, nowadays, most of them use dishwashers. The...

We've just had a few days in Tangier. I'm sure that, in my youth, when Simon Templar went there, we used to say Tangiers. Anyway whatever it's called the city we went to is the one in Morocco, just opposite the southernmost tip of Spain at Tarifa. Between 1923 and 1945, it was a city jointly administered by Britain, France and Spain as an International City. I'd had a vague hankering to go there since I read a Spanish novel which was set in Tanger (Spanish name). So, when I saw a flight from Valencia for 12.99€ one way (even after all the usual Ryanair tricks and ruses it still only cost 40€ there and back) it was a done deal. One of the several things we noted wandering around Tangiers were the cats. There were hundreds of them. Some were skinny, some were clearly unwell, some looked like cared for pets. Whatever their status they were left to their own devices. It's not the same in Spain. Spanish street cats stay well away from people whom they don't trust a...

Patricia and Jason have just opened a new Bed and Breakfast business here in Culebrón - the Sunny Vista Casa Rural . They've done a really nice job on it too. It looks great. As a double celebration, for both the opening and for Patricia's birthday, the owners hosted a party. Never ones to miss out on a knees up Maggie and I turned up at around 3.30 pm, in the middle of Spanish lunchtime, when most locals would be eating at home. Later I was both surprised, and pleased for the Batram's, that so many of the villagers put in an appearance. Forty some years ago I had a Spanish couple stay with me in Peterborough. They flew into Heathrow so I took them for a pub lunch in Windsor. "You'll have to try British beer," I said, to Jaime. He literally spat it out. "It's hot," he said, "like broth." For the rest of the holiday he would only drink lager. He never complained about the taste of that terrible, 1980s, fizzy, British lager but he did...

Ages ago quite a famous teacher of English here was being interviewed on the radio. The reporter asked him how long it took to become bilingual. His answer was the sort of answer you don't want to hear, particularly if you've just bought one of those "Learn Arabic in three months" or "Swahili in ten minutes a day", type courses. He reckoned about 3,000 hours or about four hours a day, Monday to Friday, for nearly four years. As he stressed that was study type study not just listening to the radio or reading magazines. He did have faster methods which, surprisingly, involved spending money on his courses, materials and schools. The interviewer went on to ask how many of this bloke's students had become bilingual. To be honest my neuron deficient brain doesn't recall exactly what he said but it was some hideously low number - 10, 20, maybe 100 - out of about 25,000 students. He did go on to say that only about 2,000 had crashed and burned; absolute...

I was grumbling about being chased by the tax office here who say I didn't pay enough tax in 2014. I was particularly galled that I had paid an accountant to do the original tax return and now I'm having to pay a second accountant to sort out the job that the first one did. Sometimes the label professional doesn't seem the most adequate for the people we buy services from, like architects and lawyers, or for the civil servants/local government officers who process the documentation supplied by those so called experts. Anyway the accountant bloke who's trying to sort this out for me went to the tax office. The tax office were unwilling to accept my P60s in English. They had to be translated by an officially qualified translator. Figures vary but of the, roughly, 300,000 Britons resident in Spain about one third live in Alicante province. So what chance do you think there is that the P60 is an unknown document in an Alicante tax office? And a P60, it's not a word...

Just in case you're interested the socialists, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), had a good election. They gained 38 seats and now have 123 seats in the lower house of parliament (they also won the upper house). On the other hand the conservative Partido Popular (PP) had a disastrous day. They lost 71 seats down from 137 to 66. Anyone want to give me odds on the survival of their recently elected leader? On the left Unidas Podemos (UP) dropped 29 seats to 42  and on the right Ciudadanos (Cs) gained 25 to 57. To the shame of Spain and Spaniards the ultra right party VOX went from nothing to 24 parliamentary seats. Another eight parties won representation in the lower house. Most of them have a regional flavour - Catalans, Basques, Valencians, Navarrese etc. The biggest of these, with 15 seats in the Congress, is Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC, which is headed up by a politician who is currently in prison for his part in the dodgy Catalan referendum. ...

I don't get a vote in the General Elections here in Spain. Nonetheless I popped out to the three polling stations in Pinoso to have a bit of a nosey. I took the photos as soon as I arrived and I only stayed a few minutes just to see what numbers were like. The polling stations looked busy to me though it was mid morning, a good time, especially as the church had just chucked out. This lot of elections are the thirteenth since democracy was restored in the late 1970s and the fifth set that we've been here for. We've lived under only three of the, so far seven democratic presidents. Anything is possible, results wise, and coalition wise but it's likely, according to the polls, that the socialist Pedro Sanchez will be returned to power as the head of a coalition with left wing Unidas Podemos and possibly some of the Nationalist groups. There is even speculation that the socialists could form a coalition with the right of centre Ciudadanos party. Who knows? It's m...

Spain is full of fiestas. Fiesta is an idea that we foreigners living here begin to get a glimmer of but which most of us never quite understand fully. It's not just a street party or a carnival. A proper fiesta is based on traditions, sometimes traditions based on beliefs. Fiestas are a collective expression of a community; it's not about somebody organising something and other people watching. Fiestas are commonplace, often nearly ignored by locals yet usually loaded with symbolism in the clothes, dances, music, songs or other manifestations such as language and bonfires. Recognising, and altering, those symbols is something often passed from generation to generation. Fiestas are periodic and repetitive - with the same basic things happening year after year. There are, within towns and cities, fiestas and fiestas. Some are only fiestas in name because they were designed by tourist boards or trade associations. They don't fit the spirit of the definition above. They can ...