Life in Culebrón

Valencia, the region we live in, has had less severe Covid restrictions than some other regions. Bars and restaurants, cinemas and theatres, shops and hairdressers have been open, with varying restrictions, since May of 2020. We've been confined to our region and there has been a curfew from ten in the evening for months and months but, overall, we've got off pretty lightly. On May 9th the State of Emergency will end and, when it does, heaven knows what will happen. The Spanish Constitution outlines rights and duties and free movement is one of the rights. I'm interested to see how things go as the regional governments try to enforce restrictions that will be challenged as unconstitutional in the courts. Spain hasn't yet reaped many of the apparent benefits of mass immunisation because the vaccination programme has been very slow. At first the organisation was a bit slapdash but now the main problem seems to be the supply of the various vaccines. The regional health aut...

For this post to work you're going to have to pretend that lots of generalisations are true. For instance that a man and a woman living together and caring for a few children is the historically normal family unit or that, through time, women have worked at home while men have worked elsewhere. You can't bridle either at the idea that people in the UK go to work in the morning, have a lunch break and then go home sometime in the early evening; 9 to 5. Likewise, for Spain, we're going to agree that people go to work in the morning, stop work in the early afternoon, start work again in the late afternoon and then go back to work till mid evening. Again, Pitman style, we'll call it 9 to 2 and 5 to 8.30. So, in this generalised world, Britons have a shortish lunch break during the working week which means that they eat their main meal of the day in the evening. Spaniards on the other hand, with a longer midday break, eat their major meal of the day then. This is not to sugg...

When I used to teach English to Spanish speakers we had a lot of fun with Good Morning and Good Afternoon. I'd stress with the students that we Brits are often pedantic about the time. At 11:59 it's morning but at 12:01 it's afternoon. Evening is vaguer. Does it really begin at six and run to midnight? In summer surely the evening starts a bit later than on a dismal cold grey day in December? And what about greetings? Spaniards use Good Night when they meet people whilst we Britons don't. In my shebeen going days I used to prove my sobriety to the bouncers at four in the morning (at night?) with a cheery Good Evening. If I'd been a baker or a morning show radio presenter going to work at the same four in the morning I'd probably have greeted my work colleagues with a Good Morning instead. The word "tarde" is used here to describe both, what Britons call, afternoon and early evening. Most people learning Spanish usually thinks of tarde as translating ...

We went to a wedding at the beginning of this month. It was only my second in Spain. The last one was back in 2017. That time it was a civil ceremony but it was a full scale event with both the bride and groom turned out in traditional style  - white frock for her and a suit with a waistcoat for him. The setting for the ceremony was dignified, we threw things at the newly married couple, they drove away in a classic limousine and the do at a hotel afterwards was posh and tasteful. There was copious and excellent food, lots of drink, smart clothes, little presents from the bride and groom, speeches and modern touches like a "photo booth"; the full works. Spanish weddings are very recognisable to Britons, there's no best man and the language is different but otherwise it's all very much to format.  We did get to go to a wedding in the UK in 2019. That time the setting was a country castle with an oak panelled bar where the Lagavulin flowed. The ceremony was in the open ...

First my habitual opening diversion. Over the years there has been a fair bit of controversy from time to time about the skin colour of the actors who interpret Othello in the Shakespeare play. You probably know that the full title is The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice . Moor, from Blackamoor is an outdated and offensive term to describe a Black African or other person with dark skin. In Spain the word moro is the direct equivalent of moor. It's used to describe dark skinned people, usually people from North Africa: Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Sahrawis. As with other, similar, words its use can be racist or not. Generally though, for most Spaniards, moro is just a descriptor, like the use of Eastern European, Whilst the media shy away from the word ordinary people don't. I haven't heard many suggestions of a name change for the Moros y Cristianos events though there are plenty of concerns about white people blacking up during those, and other, events. Over i...

Emilio Martínez Sáez. One time mayor of Pinoso who gave his name to our local theatre When we lived in Cambridgeshire there used to be lots of "jokes" about Fen dwellers, in particular about Chatteris. Jokes to to do with interbreeding and the idea that, at birth, if a family had a surfeit of boys and a lack of girls then you found a family who were baby boy poor and baby girl rich and traded. I presume that Spaniards say, or at least said, something similar about country folk. As I'm sure you know Spaniards have two family names. Usually that's one from the dad and one from the mum. Be warned if you decide to adopt Spanish nationality and you're surname deficient you will need to choose an extra.  So you don't need to be a Royal and marry your brother/sister or even your cousin to end up with two surnames which are the same. All you need is to stay off Tinder and stay around the same area for a while.  I'm reading a book about Pinoso written by a local b...

The world being connected, as it is nowadays, it would be quite possible to live our life here more or less isolated from things Spanish; we could behave as though home were still Huntingdon. We try not to but we could. With time things change and so de we. As an easy example the food we eat and the way we buy things has changed radically. Ordering takeaway food to eat at home via my personal phone, without making a call, and having someone deliver it on a bike would have seemed incredible in my youth. Clothes change, habits change, tastes change, everything changes down to the way we speak. Although I've kept my distance and even stayed at home recently I have never shielded or social distanced but I know people who have. I'm not that interested in keeping up with the UK. I tell my sister that I don't know the names of British politicians. She doesn't believe me. She's partially right in that I do half recognise maybe four or five current British political names bu...

It's an old photo. December 2007 I left the bathroom wearing just a t-shirt. Well, jeans and shoes and stuff too. My intention was to put on the hoodie that was hanging on the kitchen door but, as so often nowadays, I was distracted by something else and I forgot. It wasn't till I began to feel chilly that I remembered my original plan.  My overcoat was also hanging from the same hook as the hoodie. Time for that to go into storage I thought. The overcoat, a long dark overcoat, is probably my favourite coat. It came with me from England. It was two or three years old when we got here so it must be closing in on 20 years old now. The lining's a mess and if you look at it closely it's got that sheen on some of the seams to bear witness to its longevity. March is the month when the weather starts to take a turn for the better here in Alicante.  The t-shirt incident and the coat reminded me of a story I'd read, as a youth, about a civil servant and an overcoat - Dostoye...

I have innumerable stories about going to the cinema. I started young and I'm still adding to the store. As an eleven year old I marvelled as my Auntie Lizzie sobbed while watching The Sound of Music. When I was fourteen my dad insisted that we went to a bigger cinema in Leeds to get the full Cinerama effect of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was well over 30 when I tried some sort of gruel that Poles prefer to popcorn as I watched a Swedish film with French subtitles in a Warsaw cinema. In Banjul I wondered if the running and shouting antics of the audience for a Kung Fu film would turn violent. As a student in the 1970s I recall scraping together enough loose change to see Last Tango in Paris with someone who really thought it was about dancing. In Madrid, in the early 80s, I sat, rifle-less, on a grassy knoll one August evening for cinema in the park. Hooking the speakers over the wound down car windows at a drive-in in Pennsylvania. Delighting in seeing season after season of black an...

I got my hair cut last week. As I'm sure you know I go to Alfredo . One of the tiny pluses of Covid 19 is that Alfredo has cut down the number of appointments he takes in an hour. If it used to be one every 15 minutes it's now one every 20 minutes and if it was one every 20 minutes it's now one every half an hour. This is to give him time to disinfect things and to make sure that there are not too many people waiting or sitting together. It also means, that for most of an appointment, there's just me and him in the room; so nobody extra to smirk at my Spanish. I said good morning and Alfredo said, "Do you know there are 54 Nationalities living in Pinoso?". I had to say that I didn't. The last time I'd seen the figure it was "only" 42. "I wonder why?," he asked. Being an immigrant myself I had answers. I likened it to the Bengali population settling in Brick Lane or Spaniards congregating in West London - friends tell friends that a...